Rachel Wylite

Rachel Wylite is a character in QUIETUS.

Description:
Rachel Wylite looks worn, a used husk of a human being. She wears a straitjacket torn open into a rough sort of dress, wrapped around a metal shell that covers her torso. Crude wires are bolted from this array down the length of her arms, terminating in ports that seem designed to accommodate a variety of jacks. Her shoulder-length brown hair hangs limply and unhealthily from her scalp, interspersed with blonde strands that glitter in sunlight. Her tired, bloodshot eyes are the same shade of brown, flecked with gold. Her clothes hang loosely on her tall 5’8” frame, her face draws on the edge of gaunt, her slender figure bordering on starved – since she doesn’t eat. Or breathe.

The progenitor of those oddities lie underneath the metal shell housing her upper body, which contains a miniature but fully-fledged G-type main-sequence star, quietly fusing hydrogen from the air and the occasional hydrocarbon for sport – the product of being in the wrong place (mad scientist lair) at the wrong time (generally all the time when it comes to being in a mad scientist lair). In return for destroying her respiratory systems, digestive functions and practically everything fleshy around it, the sun provides her with the energy she would normally require by doing things like breathing and eating…and then some more.

Her psychological state matches closely her physical, being tied into her energy levels. When they are low, Rachel generally exists in a state of being panicked out of her mind and hysterically wondering where her life went so wrong. As they rise, her demeanor changes: fear is replaced with anger, and hysteria becomes subsumed with sociopathy. In other words, her propensity to cause destruction is directly proportional to her capability to destroy.

She’s a little frightened of herself.

Items/Abilities:
The ports on Rachel’s hands are universal power outlets, capable of charging any electrically-powered device with the prodigious power of her sun. This comes at the cost of depleting her internal energy, which in turn has its psychological effects. If she were sufficiently charged herself, she could likely weaponize those ports on their own or power complex machinery. While the amount of energy she can output is theoretically astronomical (hehe), there is a limit to how much her body can stand. At the optimum balance between a runaway chain reaction and sub-optimal power generation, she could probably replace a nuclear power plant as long as she manages to devote all her attention to the balancing act.

Biography:
Deep, down below the skies, under the earth and dirt…

''Darkness reigned in the musty corridors of the facility, interrupted only by the occasional fluorescence of a ceiling tube mustering its last electrons. The stale air hung unfiltered and unrecycled, tasting of suffocation and a long-decayed, dusty death. Here and there lay piles of bones, some human, some rodent and animal – some intermixed and showing where one had eaten the other, or vice versa.''

''In a sequestered corner of an undistinguished office space lay a desk, with dust carpeting its patina finish. A skeleton, gnawed clean by the work of a thousand mice and rats – themselves now dead – lay back in the frame of a rotted leather chair, slowly decomposing into dust and slurry. Slowly, in the dead air, barely-aerobic bacteria chewed away at the metal of a pistol, nested in the decaying fabric and foam where the skeleton’s lap would have been.''

''On the desk a notebook lay open, its pages preserved in the oxygen-starved air. In a spidery, shaky hand was scrawled the last thoughts of a dying man, meandering over lines and margins:''

We shouldn’t have done that.

We shouldn’t have given them labels like 78 and 510, shouldn’t have put them through what we did, the forced labor, the utilization… They were – are – human, we lost sight of that. We lost sight of that.

No wonder 413…I don’t even know her name – stopped powering the facility. The air, the water – gone. Fuck. Knew there would be no lifts, no life support, no communications. No wonder she did that to us. Torturing us, to die. Big facility, but ten thousand personnel. Less now.

But

No matter what we did to them, it couldn’t have been worse than what that mad scientist did to them

Right? Right?

Heard talk that the team sent down there didn’t find anything. Anything at all. No 413, just an empty set of chains. Nowhere to go, just…disappeared. I don’t think we captured any teleporting experiments. We’d know. Have known.

break.

I went out and found the file on 413. It’s not my clearance, but the overseers are dead. Rachel Wylite…her name was is Rachel. Nice name.

Second year, Bachelor’s in Physics. Astrophysics major. Oh, the irony. Unattached at the time of abduction, according to the good doctors notes

Psychological evaluation?

FUCK paper cut

illegible

Burnt Rachel’s file. No one should have to read about that never again The match wouldn’t catch can you believe it? its the air

damn air there’s no air in this air air air air

I won’t die like this

We shouldn’t have done that

''A tiny breeze, a last gasp in a still, dank tableau, rustles the edge of the page where the writing trails off. Inexorably, the words grow ever more illegible: the last fragment of life in a dead world, dying, decaying deep down…''