Player Name: Lauren
Player Contact: bluehellgazette
Character(s) in Game: Irwin Wade

Character Name: Maj. Elisha James Harper
Age: 34
Canon: Original Character

World Description: Elisha's a surgeon from our world in the October of 1864. He died in Georgia during Sherman's March.

History
Elisha was born in Harrisburg, PA to educated middle-class parents as the eldest child and only son of three siblings. His father, James, was a doctor until his passing in 1857; his mother, Lucretia, wrote a women's column in the local paper that transformed into a women's political newsletter as the succession movement gained more traction down south. Elisha's interactions with James were very typical for his era and social class; his father was from the beginning very reserved and normally only saw him and his sisters for a few hours before they were returned to the nursery. Once he was about nine years old, Elisha was expected to help around the clinic and a fair part of his upbringing was turned over to his father both for vocational reasons and because of gender politics of his time.

Elisha spent most of his adolescence hanging around his father's clinic, assisting in routine procedures in the roles a nurse or medical assistant would be assigned today - and, starting around the age of 17, abortions performed in secret as well. He was privileged enough to attend a 4-year medical college overseas - Cambridge - where he received more "hands on" experience and exposure to current ideas than he would have at an American school. He learned German during that time to keep up with the latest advances in medicine, most of which were happening on the other side of the English Channel, but his speaking skills have faded with disuse.

Elisha mustered in with the 29^th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the summer of 1861 under the impression that the war would be a brief, one-battle suppression situation. Despite his education, he, like everyone else, was utterly unprepared for the level of carnage the war would bring - although he'd dissected cadavers, Elisha entered the military with virtually no prior surgical experience at all, and when he received his officer's commission a month after the attack on Fort Sumter, he'd never even seen an amputation or shrapnel wound in his life.

The war, however, didn't seem to care. In the hectic period before some semblance of organization was brought to the medical sector of the U.S. Army, he and his fellow medical personnel learned most of the procedures they actually needed to know by experience. He adapted quickly, slightly faster than the physicians who had been educated in America, but for the first few months of the war, Elisha still voluntarily (and gratefully) took the back seat to the career surgeons who had during peacetime occupied a lower socioeconomic tier than he and his fellow physicians. Although he has a strong stomach, some of the things that would ultimately become a routine sight for him were at the time more horrifying than he could have ever imagined at that point in his life, necessitating on three separate occasions that he leave the operating theatre to vomit.

The Battle of Fredericksburg, which happened mid-December in 1862, was notable because Elisha first experienced impossible-to-ignore signs of mental disturbance during that time. He had been awake and operating for 18 hours during this brief lapse in compartmentalization; his patient wouldn't stop screaming and sobbing Elisha was struck with the strong intrusive image of putting a hand on the young man's mouth and suffocating him to death - as well as an intense, frightening urge to do so out of desperation and overwhelmedness. He didn't, of course, and it subsided after the finished the operation and found a moment to collect himself.

Two weeks later, Elisha contracted typhus and nearly died of it during a campwide outbreak. The memory of being so sure he would die that he requested last rites and so sick he could barely lift his head has stayed with him; that and the level of agony he's witnessed have left him with a very "grit your teeth and bear it" attitude toward minor injuries and disdain for people who make a big deal over things like pulled muscles.

In 1863, Elisha was promoted to Brigade Surgeon following the Battle of Gettysburg, which was the worst and most harrowing experience of his life; until his death he maintained that the field hospital there and the aftermath were the closest thing to the concept of hell, which he no longer believed in by this point, that could ever be found on earth.

He accompanied Sherman's men into Georgia in 1864; by this time, the vague moral and religious opposition to slavery he harbored before the war had already grown into vehement abolitionist sentiment. Before joining the army Elisha hadn't actually seen slavery or had a real conversation with anyone who had been enslaved, so the severity of it wasn't as "real" to him - it was abstract, something that could be pushed to the back of his mind; that ceased to be the case once he set foot in Virginia. By that time he still treated Confederate wounded, which he felt was his duty as a doctor, but he'd ceased to view the war as 'Brother against Brother' and and instead sees it as a conflict with an enemy that should be made to pay for what it's done; Elisha was a vocal advocate of unconditional surrender on the part of the Confederacy, to include imprisonment of high-ranking officers, and saw anything less as unjust.

Proceeding through Georgia and seeing the civilians who did not evacuate when ordered to—as well as having to leave people who had just been freed behind—dramatically added to Elisha's repressed anger and resentment. This was the point at which he began to see Southern civilians as being less than soldiers but more than noncombatants after seeing the level of aid they provided and resistance they put up - as far as he's concerned, there was blood on their hands, too, just less of it.

By the time of his death in the fall of 1864, Elisha Harper is tired of being a surgeon, he's tired of being an officer, he's tired of having the responsibility of running the "shitshow" of an under-supplied army hospital, and he's tired of being at war.

Death: Elisha was hit by shrapnel from a Confederate artillery misfire while going to report casualties and check for missed wounded. Despite countless punctures to the chest and abdomen, his situation wasn't immediately fatal; once he realized that he'd sustained multiple wounds to the intestines and would therefore really die hours later from sepsis, he begged the nurse who had accompanied him to kill him with a single shot to the forehead so that he wouldn't have to do so himself. She had moral and religious objections to euthanasia and killing him would put her in very real danger of being hanged for murder, but ultimately he won out by appealing to their friendship and telling her that he didn't want his mother to have to see his body and know that he'd committed suicide. Upon his arrival at Beacon, Elisha knows that the real reason he begged her to do it instead of asking her to make it look like enemy fire after he did it himself was that he was too afraid of dying to pull the trigger on his own even in the face of the much worse death awaiting him. What he doesn't know is that she didn't need to be appealed to, and would have done so anyway.

What are your plans for this character in-game? Once he rallies, he'll be useful around the clinic and will want to learn what he can; a lot of Elisha's action early on will likely be simply reacting to the environment around him and gradually leaving his state of compassion fatigue.

What aspects of this game and/or its setting are you most interested in having this character engage with? Being around unfamiliar people from a wide variety of backgrounds in a location that's not a combat zone but also not 100% safe. The eternal darkness is going to get to him pretty quickly, too.

How does your character generally get along with other people? How Elisha interacts with others is very situation-dependent. He tends to be pretty indifferent to strangers and doesn't go out of his way to make people feel liked or welcome. By this point he's used to being the person in command, and it shows - he tends to state requests as orders (ex. "hand me that" vs "could you hand me that?", "go do x" instead of "would you mind doing x?") and expects people who he outranks literally or in experience to do what he says when he says it without objection. When people show resistance, he doesn't back down unless he sincerely believes he's in the wrong and tends to respond with "this is not a negotiation" either verbatim or implied. If Elisha sees someone as outranking himself, however, he tends to return the favor - having grown up in a household that was very much a "shut up and do what you're told"/"because we're your parents, that's why" sort of environment, he believes that you should question authority but do what they say regardless of your own misgivings.

Prejudices are also going to play a role in how he initially interacts with some of Beacon's residents - having come straight out of a combat zone in which he was tasked with handling the suffering and death caused by an army that Southern civilians were aiding, and having spent four years dealing with the ugliest part of any war, Elisha's not fond of Southern people, to put it lightly. This manifests in both hypervigilance and predetermined negative emotions - he's going to be a lot warier of people from that region because he's been thoroughly conditioned to see them as enemies who want to kill him and kill the people he's close to in the Union army. Pretty much by the time he's off the ferry he understands on a conscious level that modern Southern people do not have it out for him, but his emotions haven't caught up with that yet.

What is your character's mental state upon entering the game? Tired. He's fresh out of four consecutive years in a very extreme environment edging on a foreign land, and that's shaped his personality and the way he perceives external information into what's needed to survive longterm in that situation. However, he's essentially going to be returning to the civilian world by dying and coming to Beacon, so it'll be a rough adjustment period - Elisha was transformed into a square peg to survive in a war zone and is now going to be suddenly expected to fit back into the round hole of civilian life.

His looming fear as the war went on, second only to dying, was having to face normal human society and his family again. Before he realizes that he's effectively doing just that in Beacon, Elisha's going to have to ultimately acknowledge that that he was so unhappy that he's relieved to be dead. And then face his number one worst case postwar scenario in trying to relate to normal, healthy people who haven't come out of a war zone.

Expect Elisha to treat the early days of his stay in Beacon as a chance to get some sleep, take a bath, attend to his basic needs, etc. - he's going to be easing into feeling like a human being again and won't be too keen on continuing to offer medical services unless it's an absolute emergency.

Skills & Abilities: Era-appropriate medical knowledge - can clamp arteries, remove bullets, treat a punctured lung, etc; excellent fine motor skills/hand-eye coordination; gun handling; rusty ability to read/write German; fluent Latin; horsemanship; survival, but not to the same extent as a modern soldier would know; endurance - Elisha's not strong, but he is able to walk/stand/ride for hours on end without hitting exhaustion.

Flaws/Weaknesses:

Elisha has a lot of unresolved trauma and grief which manifest as C-PTSD - and anger/resentment. He wants to know that the south 'paid for what it did' because he's searching for closure in revenge. He's also extremely desensitized and therefore minimally reactive to violence/gore, which can be a little disturbing for people who have a normal response to these things to see. It's worth noting that he hates screaming - if your character yells and they don't have a very, very good reason for it, Elisha's going to snap at them. He still reacts to loud sounds like explosions - expect him to reflexively duck and freeze at things like a heavy book being dropped on the floor, a balloon being popped, that sort of thing.

He also carries some of the common prejudices of his time: Elisha was in some ways progressive for the era in his views on women, as he believed that they should have equal access to education, that they could be as intelligent and skilled as men, etc., and sees abortion as a right, but in other ways, not so much - for instance, he sees sex workers as "lowering themselves", and while he isn't naive enough to believe that all women actually wait until marriage to have sex, he does think less of women who have more than a few sexual partners before marrying. Elisha's casual anti-Irish sentiments were mostly wiped out by 1864 thanks to actually being around Irish and Irish-American people in large numbers and hearing about their experiences, bonding with some of them, etc., but although he doesn't harbor malice toward anyone for race/ethnicity, he still buys into some racial stereotypes and cultural myths about many other groups.

Physically, he's not that strong and has mild hearing loss about equally in both ears - it isn't pitch-specific, but in terms of volume, Elisha can't pick up sounds like a mosquito's high pitched buzzing when it's right next to a person's ear or a dry leaf landing on the ground. Genuine whispers are very difficult for him to hear. To be technical: he has what the WHO identifies as Grade 1 hearing loss, meaning that he can't hear anything under 25 dB and struggles to hear things from 25-35 dB.

Elisha is going to be bringing pretty substantial shame and guilt with him when he arrives in Beacon because he pressured the woman who shot him into doing so at the risk of her own life. He knew that by mercy killing him she'd be taking a huge risk and potentially condemning herself to execution for murder, but he was overwhelmed with pain and fear to a degree that he knew it but didn't care. Now that he's not staring down the barrel of a drawn-out death by sepsis, he's deeply grateful, but doesn't think it was right to beg her to violate her own moral and religious beliefs and sacrifice her own emotional wellbeing because he was too afraid to pull the trigger himself. He's going to see the uncertainty of never having an answer as to whether or not she was accused of murder as his punishment.

Personality: Elisha's introverted, straightforward, and decisive. He tends to assume a leadership role by default in social situations and doesn't like being challenged; he's quick to shut people down on that front. He doesn't make friends easily in part because he doesn't make an active effort to seek out people he would like to get to know better, but once he does consider someone to be his friend, he's very loyal. Elisha's intelligent and learns quickly; he likes to read and retains new information well. He'll be genuinely interested in hearing about the experiences of other people from different times and places.

Elisha is simultaneously capable of being more compassionate than most people have the capacity for and suffering from severe compassion fatigue — he doesn't react as strongly to very upsetting/empathy-triggering situations as most people would and sometimes finds it very difficult to empathize with other people despite doing his best to help them anyway. This will likely fade over time now that he's out of a war zone, but it's going to be a process.

To the very end, however, Elisha remained kind to animals, and he can't bear to see them in pain. His ideas on animal welfare and what constitutes abuse were notably ahead of the curve; some of the very common and normalized practices of his time, such as whipping draft animals and the use of checkrains, were things he found deeply distressing. It's for this reason that the chaplain who administered his last rites entrusted his horse (who, granted, wasn't a priceless war mount at 22 years old) to Elisha after he died of the same disease that had led to their meeting.

It's important to note that Elisha's acutely aware of the ways in which he's changed and deeply troubled by them - he knows he's worn out and desensitized to horrendous things; he doesn't like being full of anger and grief but also doesn't see himself as being 'fixable' in that regard because he can't un-experience everything that made him this way and thinks of the scale of destruction he witnessed as being something nobody could ever come to terms with.

Items: Surgeon's Field Companion - a blocklike leather case worn as a satchel. Contains the following: 6½ oz. bottle of chloroform - .75 oz remaining, 2 oz. fluid extract of ipecacuanha (an emetic) - .5 oz remaining,. 2 oz. fluid extract of ginger. 2 oz. solution of persulphate of iron, 24 oz. of whiskey - 9 oz. remaining, 2 oz. tincture of opium - .4 oz remaining, 19/144 compound cathartic pills, 84/144 colocynth and ipecacuanha pills, 45/144 sulphate of quinine pills, 19/144 opium pills, 1 yard isinglass plaster, a medicine cup, scissors, teaspoon, pins, thread, 4 oz. lint, a towel, 17 bandages, muslin, and corks. He also died carrying his pocket case, which contained: 2 scalpels, 3 bistouries, 1 tenotome, 1 thumb lancets, 1 small razor, 1 artery forceps, 1 dressing forceps, 1 artery needle, 4 surgeon's needles, 1 exploring needle, 1 tenaculum, 1 pair of scissors, 1 director, 3 probes, 1 caustic holder, 1 silver compound catheter, 2.1 yards of iron suture wire, 1/8 oz. ligature silk, and 1/16 oz. wax. Aside from his medical equipment, he also has a Colt 1860 Army revolver with three bullets, a piece of hardtack, ad his canteen. And clothes which are worse for wear.

Log Sample: dumping out his purse on the doormat
Network Sample: what is this, runescape?