Character Information

[eightdead]

name: Gayle Conner ("Octavo")
height: 5'7"
occupation: Accountant / Research Lawyer
iq: Genius
age: 26

APPEARANCE.

Octavo is a pretty woman who appears to be in her early twenties due to good genetics. Her hair is light brown and usually a little longer than shoulder-length, and her eyes are blue-grey. She wears makeup if she's planning on leaving the house at all, though it's usually very light. The clothes that she wears to work are dainty, and designed to give her an overly feminine air, favoring light shades in color along with shoes that have heels. Around the house, she wears jeans, tank-tops and stompy steel-toed boots. To clubs, she wears gothic and elegant outfits with leather and vinyl. Sunglasses are a constant for her, as she lives in the desert, and she wears the expensive models. For those who know what one sounds like, she has a Californian accent (for those who don't, it's just American).

PERSONALITY.

There are two sides to Octavo. One is the face that she puts on for other people, and one is the face underneath it. Most people would call Octavo a sociopath (and she agrees with that unofficial diagnosis, mostly). She doesn't seek out social contact unless it's for a gratification of some kind, usually physical. People are strange, abhorrent, and downright stupid to her. She finds herself unable to form traditional attachments to them -- no matter how hard she tries. However, since it's important to make a good impression on her bosses, and since people generally frown on sociopathic behavior, Octavo has become adept at lying to people. She lies with the ease that other people say the obvious.

This inability to properly connect to the world has more than a few side effects. The largest is her frustration at having to deal with people she finds offensively stupid, every day. It's a frustration that builds and builds until it finally feels like she'll explode, and the only reliable way she knows to decrease this stress once it's reached this level is to fulfill her fantasies of killing the stupid people she's angry about. Not exactly those people -- Octavo will find someone society won't miss and brutally murder them. Afterward, she feels what she thinks other people call 'normal' for a while, before the pressure starts to build again. Octavo is an exceptionally clever serial killer who covers her tracks well, taking a whole list of precautions when she does the deed.

Being violent and manipulative is nothing new for her. Octavo was a bully as a child. But she hides her darker impulses as an adult, pretending to be a laid back and kind woman to her coworkers and bosses. To them, she's a delicate and relaxed part of the office. But Octavo has a black sense of humor which she only lets out at home or in her head. Her home is tastefully decorated and spartan, while her basement (her 'real' home, in her mind) is rough and dark. She pretends to enjoy the same shows and hobbies as her coworkers, to further endear herself to them, while, in reality, she spends most of her time drinking beer and playing video games.

To Octavo, other people are an evil to be tolerated.

HISTORY.

Octavo's childhood problems, namely her bullying of other children, went largely unnoticed due to the absence of her parents in her life. Her mother was an executive in a movie company, her father a storyboard artist with late hours. Even though her acting out did very little (other than traumatize fellow classmates), she continued it anyway, because that was how life was up to that point. But her bullying was caught when she was in the second grade, after she went after a little girl who screamed for the teacher immediately. The teachers, who had long been suspicious, complained to Octavo's parents (she had other problems, too, like paying attention in class). Her mother's response was to hire several tutors to get her past a few troublesome grades, and Octavo grew used to not having to deal with other people. She also, at the suggestion of her father, began to learn a musical instrument (the viola), because he claimed it would round out her education. She discovered that playing it, usually for hours at a time, made her feel less frustrated with her life -- and herself. She was only beginning to notice her problems, however.

Her tutors noticed, due to the direct nature of their work, that Octavo wasn't quite like other children. She was having behavioral problems that her teachers hadn't addressed. She cared little for rules, or structure, and paid absolutely no respect to her tutors, treating them like the children that she could bully. One particularly tenacious (and broke) tutor stayed, but the others quit -- telling her parents that she needed a therapist. Her mother was offended, because she didn't spend enough time with Octavo to know that they were right. She and Octavo's father made a trip every weekend, somewhere special, whenever they could, but those trips began to happen less and less as Octavo grew older. And then, when Octavo was thirteen, her father died. Her mother was beside herself, requiring grief counseling because of an already unstable nature. But Octavo felt absolutely nothing for his death -- only confusion when people asked how she was "handling" it.

That was about the time that her tutoring stopped, and she was put back in public school. Octavo hadn't dealt with other children directly in many years (just children who were kids of her mother's friends), and she was, at first, unprepared for the bullying and taunting that was aimed her way. She was good at making friends, but couldn't maintain the friendships and couldn't understand what other children were getting out of them. In the end her extreme frustration meant that any kid who tried to bully her ended up with her fist, or foot, in their face. She spewed advanced adult language at anyone who objected to this, and used blackmailing to keep it away from teachers. Within a year every kid at her school was scared of her, and she had dirt on all of them in a special notebook she kept at home.

Her teachers, unaware of what was going on (she'd decided not to make the same mistakes this time), were extremely pleased by her work, but her grades weren't that good. Octavo had a brilliant mind, but couldn't ever apply it long enough to make it go anywhere. She aced classes but only did the minimum amount of work required. Her teachers wrote letters to her mother -- praise mingled with pleas that she obviously needed testing for a few disorders -- but her mother was so disconnected from her life that all Octavo got from her was spending money and a roof above her head.

Octavo, for her part, spent those years mostly on the computer, thriving in an online environment. She didn't have to lie at all. She could be as mean as she wanted, and all they could do was ban her from a specific website. And she was good at the technology, and programming, though she would later drop the skill as "unnecessary." But for those years, she forged and hacked her way through, pulling pranks that people attributed to jokesters much older. She was helped by the fact that her mother was wealthy and could afford to get her the best in the latest computer gear, as though this would buy her daughter's affections. Octavo had already realized that she didn't love her mother like other daughters loved theirs. She didn't love anyone at all, and couldn't no matter how hard she tried.

Upon graduating high school, she went directly into college and put herself at the mercy of counselors to help her determine where she should spend her energies. Most of them were adamant that she go into the sciences and realize her potential. But to Octavo, that smacked of caring about other people and how the future would unfold. So, in rebellion, she declared her major as Accounting/Business. (Her mother was simply relieved that she hadn't chosen an Art major.) Her flippant, eccentric nature was quick to win her admirers among her peers, not that she noticed -- at first. She made permanent contacts in college, people who wanted to succeed at any price. One of those was a man named Vladimir Pike who, like her, had no natural empathy for other people. They were quick to bond over this fact, though the arrangement was more political than friendships usually are.

Octavo graduated easily and with honors, now that she was fully applying herself (as best she could), and then went to Boston University for a second degree in Business. This was mostly so that she could get away from her mother, and everything familiar that was making her feel more and more stifled and out of control. That's what she thought, anyway. Halfway through her degree, she had a falling-out with a roommate and ended up smashing them over the head with a metal bar in a fit of rage. The wound ended up being fatal within a few minutes, and Octavo had to dispose of the body (it was never, to her relief, found). Her anger felt much better afterward, more easily controlled; she began to crave the feeling that taking a life had given her, a sense of complete power. She already had a pattern of going out and finding new people to do less than moral things with, so occasionally the evening would just end a little worse for them than it did for her. The police, and press, labeled these as the work of a serial killer, giving her the nickname of the Bleak Killer. She always sterilized the bodies as best as possible, kept them a few days, put new marks on them, made them truly look like a decimated corpse before she dropped them. Her signature was cutting a gash in their lower lip. The police thought long and hard about why someone would do that, but in truth, Octavo just thought it made them look "used and pretty," and that was as much thought as she put into it.

About the time 'she' was becoming truly famous in Massachusetts, her degree wrapped up and she packed up to return to California. She was as alien and distant to her mother as ever, and stayed just long enough at home to get a job and move out. Octavo went to work for a law firm named Wilkinson & Schmidt, as one of their accountants, a job which didn't pay much at first. But Octavo had a knack for knowing how to suck up in the right ways, and how to make others look bad without personally incriminating them. Within a year she was the #2 accountant. And that wasn't everything -- she cashed in her chips with her college contacts. They all had need for a person who was good with numbers, who could wriggle them out of bad situations, and some of them were prepared to pay handsomely for it. (The others who couldn't were, more or less, immediately discarded.)

Within two years, Octavo had a very nice home and could pay other people to keep it clean and stocked. She had enough money that nothing was really a problem anymore, and if she needed more she could just put out her feelers for people who needed someone lacking morals. Her killing started again, too, though it took a while for her to feel the same impatient urges. Now that she had a proper home base equipped with sound-proofing, she could afford to keep them alive longer, and her neighbors -- all wealthy and uncaring about each other -- never asked any questions. She was careful not to use any of her methods from Boston, and disposed of the bodies much more carefully.

Troubled by appearing too suspiciously quiet, Octavo got herself a few dogs. She had always despised animals, and had killed several when she'd been a child, but thought that having them would make her seem more normal still. Pleasantly, she discovered that she quite liked having the big fuzzy oafs around, as they put people off their guard and made them think of her as a happy and normal "animal person." They also didn't mind when she gave them fleshy "scraps" that were troublesome to dispose of. She named them after the three Fates of Greek mythology: Clotho (a German Shepherd), Lachesis (a Rottweiler) and Atropos (a Norwegian Elkhound). But she also hired someone to take care of them -- feed them, take them out on walks -- when she didn't want to, so that she wouldn't feel weighed down by their presence.