character bios
Thoughtful, analytical, and tenacious, Gilly is the resilient little usul girl hailing from a humble home on the outskirts of Neopia Central. She is an only child, daughter to an Usul and a Techo. In an act of curious hubris, Gilly becomes lost, alone, in the Haunted Woods. Seeking help, she approaches a lonely dilapidated mansion set among the trees. Unfortunately, as the doors swing shut behind her, she becomes Thade's prisoner, subjected to his malicious attention and obsession with puzzles.
This is a situation many Neopians have found themselves in; but Gilly is the first Neopian to ever survive more than a few horrifying minutes in Thade's manor. She has a strange prediliction towards unfortunate circumstances, a trait which has, over time, honed her survival strategies into a sharp point. Gilly is not as unprepared as the average Neopian stumbling into this manor, even if it was an accident all the same.
Gilly uses her quick thinking to stay alive, trying to bide her time until she can escape. She is very careful navigating interactions with Thade; his strange, unpredictable temperament requires very calculated responses. Gilly is perceptive to where others have failed, and where she must not.
There wasn't much to Gilly's life before she got lost in the Haunted Woods. She mostly kept to herself, and was a sort of bookish girl, learning and observing whatever she could. She didn't favor playing with other children, but instead liked to give herself little personal challenges, like climbing to the tops of trees, or memorizing every local petpet and their accompanying petpetpets. Life near Neopia Central did not offer too much variety, but she made the best of it. Other children never really took her attention-- they were sort of boring and simple, to her, to be honest-- so she explored and kept to observational hobbies, nose in a book most afternoons.
This penchant for learning and investigating is what gets her into trouble, but she can't seem to give it up.
Gilly is very protective about the image she projects, not wanting to seem helpless or immature; she dreads being treated "like a kid" and belittled as such. She chooses her words carefully and does her best to preserve a sense of integrity.
While Gilly feels rather estranged from the cultural ideal of an Usul (as a preening, vain thing), she does represent these self-obsessive traits, in her own way. She is rather precious about this integrity she cultivates, at times to stubborn, or reductive degrees.
Gilly is smart enough to not take Thade at face value-- a mistake other prisoners have made. Thade's image as a monster is something he has crafted. She knows she is not a point laying on a treasure hoarde, nor a petpet fallen into turmaculous maw. She is a captive to a particular type of person who has chosen to enclose her. This fact gives her a lot of faith in her power to escape with cunning, and not with brute force.
Volatile, egotistical, and reclusive, Eliv Thade is the ghost kacheek that haunts the remains of his dilapidated mansion. Once a well-known professional puzzle maker and solver, Thade now torments all those who walk through his doors. Life has no meaning to him; his anagrams are a cruel test for Neopians to "prove their worth".
Gilly is the only Neopian he has spared, and taken interest in.
In fact, Thade finds Gilly so interesting that he decides to "keep" her; trapping her by raising the fencing around his manor and making it unclimbable. He subjects her to many puzzles and roughly handles her, all to enjoy the thrill of scaring her. It is VERY novel for him to feel as though someone's reactions are fun to elicit. That is so new!
There is little Gilly can do to physically stop him, as Thade has an assortment of abilities — actually, he is unusually powerful, even for a ghost. He is capable of:
-
telekinesis: able to delicately manipulate a teacup in midair, or violently rip apart iron fencing.
-
distortion: can warp, manipulate, and contort the qualities of objects; sharpening metal, melding splintering wood together.
-
tangibility: able to control how "corporeal" his form is, and adjust his weight distribution; light as a feather, heavy as a boulder, or entirely weightless and untouchable.
-
invisibility: can become completely invisible, and also can make specific parts of his body invisible.
For all of Thade's physical control, he has NO ability to manage his own emotions, and struggles to identify what he is even feeling. He often feels easily overwhelmed, humiliated, and frustrated over the smallest interactions that he perceives as having "failed", and expresses himself with house-shaking tantrums.
He cannot even control how much his obsession with puzzle and anagrams has altered how he speaks; he unconsciously scrambles words midsentence. His speech is already difficult to understand due to a speech impediment; he slurs and struggles through words, delivering them with inconsistent clarity.
As such, he is very unprepared for how much he comes to like, respect, and even admire Gilly as an individual. This has never happened before, in life or death...! He doesn't know what to do now that he cares about what someone thinks. What's worse,
the more precious he finds Gilly, the more incapable he is of letting her go.
__________________________
When alive, Thade was a part of a large nuclear household, residing in a sparsely populated village on Roo Island. His family owned modest cabin, and was fairly "average" for the most part. Unfortunately, Thade's parents did not know what to do with their very un-average son.
Thade was born with a large, yellow left eye, and large teeth, leaving him with vision complications and a heavy speech impediment. In general, his build was rather tall for a kacheek, having taken after his mother: a distinctly tall Kyrii. This was all that he inherited; his eye and large teeth were seemingly from nowhere. His two kacheek siblings, an older and younger brother, were more 'typical'.
Not only was Thade's appearance strange, but so was how he acted. His interest in puzzles was from a very young age, much preferring to solve the backs of cereal boxes than playing outside. Thade was always more prone to being quiet and withdrawn. Over time, he became widely ignored by his family, and left to his own devices. His asocial nature meant that he continued to focus on puzzles, uninterrupted, never stopping to make friends.
Eventually, Thade's puzzle solving prowess proved to be very lucrative; he could easily make money at the local game parlors, and soon became something of a puzzle prodigy. The money meant that he no longer needed to be reliant on his family and, eventually, as a young adult he bought an abandoned mansion in the Haunted Woods.
The mansion came bundled with a cleaning staff and many bourgeoise furniture accommodations. It mattered little to Thade; he simply wanted to live far away from other Neopians. As the years passed, he only grew more misanthropic and recluse, spending most of his time solving and inventing puzzles. People came from far and wide to test Thade, but they never set foot within the house; their puzzles were given to the chia and meerca servants who answered the doors, then delivered to his study.
Left to his own devices, Thade took poor care of himself, eventually forgoing eating more than plain crackers and water to get by. The malnutrition and isolation eventually lead to his mental health deteriorating further, producing delusions, both
auditory and visual. Eventually, Thade became so unstable that he would throw tantrums, breaking his belongings and demanding he be left alone, increasing the boundaries between him and his servants. Eventually, they all are fired,
leaving Thade to spend his final years losing his sanity alone, before dying on his desk.
Thade has oversimplified his life, and death, the same way the rest of Neopia has; he "went insane" and "died because of a puzzle".
REFERENCES
I futzed with editing some audio of the character Francis Dolarhyde in NBC Hannibal (2013) to approximate what Thade's voice could sound like. Accounting for the speech impediment, slurring, and ah, severe manner of speaking... just a little something for flavor~
