InsaneJournal

NAME: Madison McKenna
NICKNAMES: Mads
AGE: 30
DATE OF BIRTH: April 1

MARITAL STATUS: Single
SEXUALITY: Straight, into some kinky stuff

OCCUPATION: Customer Service (call center)
HOMETOWN: Vancouver, Canada - relocated to Boston, MA
PARENTS: Mother: Sophie McKenna, deceased // Father: Pete McKenna, estranged
OTHER FAMILY: Stepmother: Felicia McKenna, estranged // Stepbrother: Pete McKenna II (Pete Jr.), deceased

ARCHETYPE: The Criminal
AFFINITY: Lying – acting, to be precise. For survival purposes, Madison has learnt to act exactly like how her doctors and the orderlies at the mental hospital expected a sane person to act. From then, it escalated to her acting like the person she thought others would most like to see, or at least expect her to be. Basically, she acts well-adjusted and perfectly average even though she’s anything but. She doesn’t feel how “normal people” should feel on certain occasions, but she can certainly fake it.
BIGGEST FEAR: Blood. Blood gets a reaction out of Madison that is very much one of blind panic, not to mention when she has flashbacks to her mother’s death. No amount of therapy ever got rid of that. She is also scared - but less so - of people in white lab coats. They set her nerves on edge and she can’t help but mistrust them or think they’re about to hurt her.
SPECIAL SKILLS/TALENTS: If setting fire to things is a skill, then she has it. She is also good at hiding things about herself and deflecting attention from herself. Madison knows her way around a house, she’s lived on her own since she was eighteen. She’s also very handy at beating the shit out of someone with whatever she has around her, just not her actual body. Finally, she is very adaptable as long as her circumstances aren’t extreme.



NAME: Diana
AGE: 28
CONTACT: dropbox
TIME ZONE: GMT

Madison’s personality was shaped up by the events in her life and her need to survive them and come out the other side unscathed about as much as it is shaped by her mood disorder. By default she keeps her cards close to her chest and isn’t above deflecting attention to someone else – whether positive or negative – if it gets eyes off of herself. She finds strength in other people’s weaknesses and for that she is always noticing them, or attempting to. Not a lot makes her happier than schadenfreude. Due to her mood disorder she has violent mood swings that usually go from a state of euphoria, cheerfulness, optimism and over-inflated self-esteem (or even extreme irritability and aggressiveness) to periods where she is sad, depressed, apathetic, unmotivated and has poor memory. She also suffers from insomnia during these periods and it is heightened due to her night terrors. Her manic periods, on the other hand, tend to make her need a lot less sleep.

Beneath the surface, however, there is always a degree of malice and mischief and a lack of empathy or compassion towards others. She is in anything for herself, so others don’t really count. She has never felt love or deep affection, although if people make her feel good then they can stay. Also, she enjoys freaking people out and laughing at their expense that way - and boy she’s learned some things in the loony bin. In order to make sure it doesn’t came back to bite her, though, she is trying to get good at the Machiavellian method of stirring shit up then sitting back to watch the show. But truth be told she doesn’t have it in her to care enough about anything to get good at it. In that way, she is drifting, nothing really grabs her, and she bores easily.

STRENGTHS
Adaptability - Despite all her issues, one thing Madison has no issue with is eventually getting comfortable wherever she is. It wasn’t always this way but after spending most of your life in a mental facility, everywhere else is just sort of easy to get used to.

WEAKNESSES
Her Past - It’s something that is absolutely not up for discussion. Madison hides it with all her strength and when people ask questions about anything regarding a time before they met her she gets nervous, acts evasive and might even become angry if they’re insistent. She is not comfortable with it at all, not just because she killed a baby but also because she spent most of her life at a mental hospital. It never gives off a good image and it makes people suspicious, which Madison doesn’t want at all. So far, nobody suspects anything but it becomes harder and harder to string together all her lies the longer someone knows her.

Cyclothymia - The less severe disorder of the bipolar spectrum. Basically, Madison experiences periods of euphoria and high irritability as well as periods of depression. This being a disorder that allows people to remain somewhat functional, Madison’s life isn’t as affected by it as if she actually suffered from Bipolar Disorder, but let’s just say that she used to be medicated and now...isn’t. She just bailed on it. The problem here is how quick she can go from one to the other - with long periods of in-between, truth be told - that may throw people off. She’s hardly in the same mood you saw her last and can, in fact, be the exact opposite. Obviously it’s also the fact that when she’s high, she’s on the extreme end of high and when she’s low, she’s really, really low.

Night Terrors - She has had them since her mother’s death and they have only gotten worse. They involve blood, fire and death, and you could say that it’s Madison’s traumas and guilt manifesting, but she just thinks it’s bullshit. As it is her custom, however, she takes no medication for it. She just doesn’t care.

Madison is a tiny, slim girl, with red hair and brown eyes. She is partial to rounded skirts and tends to gravitate towards “cutesy” fashion a lot while at the same time keeping the accessorizing, makeup and hair styling to the bare minimum. Where some people have resting bitchface, Madison has resting mocking face – it always looks like she’s mocking someone inwardly, even when she isn’t.

01. Digs.
02. Wardrobe.
03. Date of arrival: Day 15.
04. Mother was originally from Madison, Wisconsin.
05. Takes Lamictal (Lamotrigine), 200mg/day.

Burn It Down [Awolnation]

Pyro [Kings of Leon]

Disco Inferno [The Trammps]

The Roof is on Fire [Bloodhound Gang]

Ring Of Fire [Johnny Cash]

Teeth [Lady Gaga]

Criminal [Fiona Apple]

Humans Are Such Easy Prey [Perturbator]

Danger! High Voltage [Electric Six]

Kill of the Night [Gin Wingmore]

Madison was born in Vancouver, Canada, thirty years ago. Her parents, Sophie and Pete, met in college and were fairly young when she was born, but they tried to make it work and for a while, they did. While they tried their best to provide Madison with a healthy childhood, the fact that her mother suffered from depression - which only got worse after the baby was born - always put a dampener on the healthy part of things. While Sophie cried, self-harmed and became withdrawn, Pete had a hard time understanding what she was going through, and especially the fact that she adamantly refused to get help.

Madison grew up to the sound of fights and crying fits; it was really scary to hear her mommy say she wanted to disappear, die and all those variations. Her father got frustrated and then angry, or he would ignore and then remove himself completely from the situation – which was as helpful to a clinically depressed person as anyone can probably guess it to be. When Madison was six years-old she woke up one morning with her mother screaming as her father packed his things up. No amount of screaming could deter Pete, however. He knelt down in front of Madison and told her he needed to go away so he wouldn’t get sick like mom, but he couldn’t take her away with him because he couldn’t take her away from her mom. So, while Pete left, Madison was left wondering what to do to soothe her inconsolable mother.

From then on Madison would spend days where her mother wouldn’t even leave her bed, and Madison learned to do the bare minimum to take care of herself. Of course sometimes she would miss school for a few days, and they got a few visits from Child Services, but it never went anywhere.

One day, when Madison was eight, she came back from school to deathly silence in her home. She called for her mother, and called, going to her bedroom when there was no answer. But Sophie wasn’t there. Madison finally found her mother in the bathtub, lifeless and pale as a ghost. There was blood everywhere, and when Madison ran to her mother to try and wake her up she saw that Sophie hadn’t just slit her wrists, but also her throat, not to mention the number of slits across her chest and face. It was a horrifying sight, and Madison doesn’t remember much of what happened between then and when she was found lying on the blood hours later by a neighbor.

A few days later social services managed to track down Madison’s father, and she went to live with him. In the two years since he had left he had met someone, and years later, when Madison was ten, her dad married the woman he had been dating. Life with them wasn’t so bad, except that Pete travelled a lot for work and Madison never appreciated how he left her with her step-mother, who tried hard but never bothered to really connect with her. When, two years later, they had a baby, Pete started having even less time for Madison. She was growing up disconnected from anyone, but surrounded by a lot of people who asked how she was doing more because they had to than because they wanted to know. At school, Madison was the girl whose mom had killed herself in a really bloody way – news travels fast after all. Madison was learning to understand that if she deflected attention from herself to somebody else, people would stop asking her questions and talking about her, and that was when she first started dedicating herself to finding the weak spots in other people, point them out, and laugh about them. It worked, to some extent.

At home, however, it was the exact opposite. She wasn’t getting the attention she wanted and as far as she could tell her father wasn’t sick like her mother had been, he could try harder. He should try harder. On her thirteenth birthday her father, who was supposed to take her out to the lake in a father-daughter kind of thing, came home from wherever he had been just to tell her he would have to leave again in a little while. Madison was furious.

In a rage, Madison went to the garage, where her father kept spare petrol in case of an emergency, and dumped the petrol she could over the car and around it. Then she simply lit a match. The car caught fire as she watched, and when her father and step-mother came outside screaming unintelligible things Madison was pulled inside by her step-mother as her father ran towards the car. Whatever he wanted to do, he didn’t have time to. The car exploded, throwing him back a few miles and damaging the house. The biggest damage of all? Twenty months old Jamie, her little half-brother, had been in the car, strapped to the appropriate infant seat.

In Madison’s defense she hadn’t noticed, but that did not change the fact that neither her father nor her step-mother wanted to look in her face again if they could help it. Madison’s lack of response - she had gone into shock after learning of the baby’s fate - as well as her past life, the problems with her mother and the readjustment to a new home helped her out in court in that while she was condemned to five years for arson and involuntary manslaughter, she did her time at a psychiatric hospital instead of a penitentiary institution.

Unlike what the well-intentioned people of the Canadian justice system thought, however, Madison’s stay in that hospital only helped turn her into a more twisted individual than she already was. In there she learned various tricks from various of her “roommates”, from manipulating less ware wardens into doing their bidding to pretending to take their medication and then saving it for when they wanted to get high off their rocker. Amongst other things, of course. Madison’s penchant for deflecting attention from herself by making sure someone else was on the spot only worsened, as did her lack of respect for adults and other people in general - the moment they displeased her in any way. While therapy did help her get to know herself better it did not change her behavior, only made her more self-aware and therefore better able to shape herself into who she needed to be to survive.

Somewhere along the way what she did was so drilled into her mind that Madison gained some kind of intimate fascination with fire. In her own twisted way, although she had to be committed for it, she got what she wanted - her dad stopped traveling so much. So eventually she began thinking that fire was a safe way to get what she wanted. It was also discovered that she suffered from a mood disorder, which she began taking medication for.

Spending all those years at the hospital, Madison ended up understanding what the doctors wanted her to act like, what they looked for in terms of what a completely reformed person would be like. And so Madison became that - at least when they or anyone influential was around. It wasn’t as though Madison was mistreated at the hospital, but after years of that she got tired of the place and the people. She wanted a real life in the outside world like everybody else. Well, everybody normal, anyway. On her seventeenth birthday, she got it. Not only had she served her time but the doctors were also convinced that she was mostly recovered mentally, and able to live on her own. The process was long, and it took her a year to be prepared for “release” - because the outside world had changed and she had grown up extremely sheltered, but on her eighteenth birthday Madison was finally allowed to leave. Despite Madison’s refusal to see her father and step-mother during her time at the hospital her father had set up a bank account for her to use when she was released. While Madison really did not want to use it, she had to, for it was the only source of income she had. The meeting was tense and painful all around – even Madison didn’t want to be around them any longer than necessary for the banking business to be taken care of. Her father – who came alone to the meeting – promised to keep in touch but they both knew that wasn’t going to happen. Madison didn’t care.

Madison was supposed to stay around the Vancouver area and see a psychiatrist in an out-patient clinic in order to monitor her adaptation to the world at large as well as her mood disorder, not to mention get prescribed her medication. However, Madison only hung around for about six months, and during this time she did not seek out her father or any of her family, not even to thank him for the money. With six months gone Madison bought a car, filled it up and packed up what little she had on her. She was going to America where nobody even knew who she was. Before leaving, however, she paid one last visit to her mother’s house, hers by right but abandoned for years, and set it on fire by throwing a couple of Cocktail Molotovs through the ground floor windows. The truth was that this was a kind of catharsis for Madison, who blamed everything that had ever happened to her on her mother’s death. The house reminded her of it, and so burning it would make her feel like she was burning the memories off of her mind.

Things don’t work like that, but she didn’t know that at the time.

Madison drove around the United States for a good while, feeling the effects of quitting her medication cold-turkey for a while, then trading cars here and there until whatever trail she had left got so tangled up that it would be impossible to follow. She met a few colorful characters on the way - as you do on any good road trip - but only ever settled in Boston. If you ask her why she won’t know how to answer you, but it felt like home. At nineteen she rented a studio apartment in the meatpacking district and set to look for a job, having the normal life everybody else had too. Madison worked at meatpacking plants and other factories before finding a job at an Irish pub, which was sort of the dream (anything else becomes the dream when you work at a meatpacking plant for long enough). She had been there for four years and was good at her job, but then something happened.

One of her co-workers, a sleazy dude named O’Shea, had been hounding her for months – sometimes bullying, sometimes sexually harassing her. Naturally, the boss never saw any of it, and Madison wasn’t the kind to “report” things, so she never did. Instead, one day while they were prepping for the night ahead, Madison saw a chance to make him change his behaviour while he lobbed the empty beer barrels down to the basement and got full ones. She let him tap two, and on the third, while O’Shea was climbing the rickety old staircase back up to the bar, Madison stood in front of him at the top, smiled, and pushed. She had to push hard, but the beer barrel did its job and toppled him backwards down the stairs. O’Shea died at some point, probably when the beer barrel hit him in the head after he fell, because after Madison ran to call the ambulance and act appropriately panicky and they came, they pronounced him dead on the spot. It was very traumatizing and awful and sad and all of those things. She will say so if anyone asks, anyway. There was a brief investigation but ultimately, seeing as no one made a lot of noise over the death of another douchebag, it was ruled an accident given the overwhelming evidence pointing to that explanation. Really it was almost ruled his fault because he wasn’t supposed to haul the barrels in front of him, apparently, and neither should the owners have that system – for obvious reasons. The pub went under not a year later, when Madison had just turned 27, and she was out of a job for a few months. While all this was happening, her illness had reared its ugly head something fierce again, and had only been getting worse. While she had managed to keep the really low episodes from interfering with her job and the really high ones coinciding with minimal friendly connections, it was by a very little margin that she did so.

Luckily, a coffee shop opened not too long after and, armed with her experienced at the pub, a cute skirt and shirt, and a completely fabricated overly helpful cutesy personality, Madison applied for a job as a waitress and got said job. The problem was, keeping up the saccharine attitude all day every day took its toll, especially with a manager who spoke to the employees like they were really stupid and wastes of space, screamed at already stressed staff in order to, in Madison’s opinion, stress them out more because it pleased her…the list went on. If the shop itself looked like something straight out of one of Zooey Deschanel’s wet dream, in reality the environment was the worst. Dealing with it as an adjusted human being is hard, and Madison wasn’t that, being so long without taking her medication. In order to keep safe, Madison was managing to have outbursts of fury, anger and stress alone in the bathroom, but very soon she realized it wasn’t enough, nor was it warranted. She had been feeling very low for far too long now, and felt lucky to still be able to discern that this wasn’t her fault, it was someone else making it worse. The key here was to remove the problem, and the manager, Caitlyn, was the problem – no one should have to deal with that type of person, much less Madison herself. Pretty soon, the coffee shop became a symbol of everything terrible and stressful and negative, and it needed to be removed – or the manager did.

It was by accident that, almost a year after getting the job, Madison overheard a co-worker whispering about how she had returned to the shop at night to get her laptop case, and found the manager on the counter with her legs around Tristan, the owner who, of course, was married. In an uncharacteristic move, instead of setting fire to the place with them still inside Madison called Jen, the owner and wife of the guy currently ramming into the manager by the espresso machine saying that she had left her keys in the shop and couldn’t reach either Caitlyn or Tristan. Immediately Jen offered to come by the shop and let her in. Madison waited patiently outside the shop for Jen to arrive and even asked her to help look for the keys, which she had previously left in the seating area proper so as to allow for the act to be caught in full view by the wife.

And it was. Madison reacted accordingly, gasping and leaning against the wall to minimize herself, but didn’t leave as things unfolded and crying, yelling, accusing and apologizing followed. It turned out that Caitlyn was a mutual friend, and Jen went through with her threats to burn her for family and friends for ages to come. Along with Tristan of course. Within two months, she was out of a job again as the divorce went underway and the coffee shop closed, but at least so was Caitlyn. Caitlyn who, due to Madison believing humiliation had not been enough, was marked as someone to put down. However, things like where her next pay check would be coming from became more important and so Madison focused on looking for a new job. The day she got one, at a call center for a phone company, Madison drove by the old coffee shop at night and, making sure she was well gloved, well covered and seen by no one, broke the front glass and threw two molotov cocktails into the premises. As you do.

As for Caitlyn, Madison found her at a nightclub months later, drunk off her tits, and decided to try her luck. After an infernal night of “partying” and hearing Caitlyn excuse herself from being a homewrecking demon amongst other types of demon, Madison managed to convince her to cross the busy street and get them food from the burger place right in front. Caitlyn walked right into traffic while Madison timed her scream of “Caitlyn no!” perfectly. She doesn’t know what happened to her, doesn’t care, and hasn’t been back to visit. All she knows is an ambulance came, and she told the police that they had worked together and had met one another by chance that night, but weren’t even friends. And that was that.

Things at the call center are annoying, sure, but not having to pretend further than a pleasant tone of voice is refreshing. Madison was finally back to her state of being permanently unfazed. The mood swings, well, she had so far been able to keep them more or less in check and the fact that she was a redhead and her last name was McKenna let her get away with what people think is an Irish bad temper thing. When she was overly cheerful, well, she’d just gotten laid.

All these years without medication have taken a toll, however. Not a year ago Madison has finally felt that her illness was beginning to really impede her living, stop her from thinking coherently for as long as she needed to, and has taken the plunge and gone to the doctor. She has been back on mood stabilizers – though not religiously, and not with any kind of real commitment - for a few months, but refuses to go to therapy still. It was at the underground parking lot of the building where her doctor’s office is located that she got kidnapped, right as she put the key in the door to unlock her car. DAY 15
morning.Greeted by Lennon
morning.First network post
afternoon.Town walk findings post

DAY 16
morning.Greeting Jim
morning.Greeting Jim in person
afternoon.Videogames w/ Tobias
evening.Group dinner


DAY 17
morning.Greeting Bea

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