CIVILIAN . TIFIEL, EILIA

FEMALE

BISEXUAL

EIGHTEEN

JANUARY 28TH, 1994

AMERICAN

ENGLISH

TIF

0.60

Civilian

n/a

FAMILY PENDANT

9/8/13 by Jess

REITGERTE

DARRIN "MOOSE" MOORE
LUCIEN MARGAUX
KEIJIRO WATANABE
MIKHAIL USENKO

MEDIUM

HANJI ZOE FROM SHINGEKI NO KYOJIN

Eilia has recently moved to LA and is doing her best to establish herself there. She's renting a room in another house from a friend of her aunts. Really, that means she just has the one room on her own, but she does have access to a bathroom, kitchen, and all the required amenities. At the moment her room is fairly barren, and she's not at all eager to fill it up. She hopes to get her own apartment with her own money which would let her have some degree of freedom, as she's fairly sure the family she's renting from have been tasked by her aunt to keep an eye on her. She feels like an outsider in the house, and while they do treat her nicely, it's also fairly obvious they're not used to having someone else around.

The only furniture in her room is a bed, a desk, and a dresser. The bed is kept neat and tidy, always made if she's not in it. Her desk has a laptop, a single photo of her family, and then a shelf for books she doesn't even own. Her dresser contains a fairly small amount of clothes, and it's on her to-do list to get some more. She keeps the room more or less spotless at all times.

As far as money goes, Eilia is in an uncomfortable position. She's currently living off a decently large fund set up by her father, which he pays into each year until she turns twenty-one. However, she dislikes living off it exclusively, and since the whole thing is done through third parties with secrecy agreements, she has no idea how much is actually in it at any given time. She gets a set allowance per month, and any expenditure past that she has to ask the trustee. If he approves, he'll wire it to her account. She knows it'll go away soon enough, so she's looking for a job and is investing at least some of her money each month into a savings account.

At the moment, she's entirely unemployed, but she's also only been in LA for a month. She's made up a resume (as unimpressive as it is), and is job hunting in earnest. She's also attending night classes to complete her GED, her learning having been fairly sub-par throughout her teenage years.

Most teenagers have a list of possessions so long that if you tried to get them to count it all, they'd lose track. Eilia is a much different story, and the entirety of her possessions can be packed in a single duffle bag. Ignoring her clothing, which is minimal itself, she possesses only four things.

Cellphone: Her cell phone is new and high-tech, but has only two numbers in it--one for the accountant that handles her funds, and one to her psychiatry team. While it has a good plan and she could use it at any moment at all, she almost never does. She simply doesn't have the need for it. She does occasionally check in on her email and things through her phone, but prefers to do such things on the computer instead.

Laptop: Her laptop is only three months old, and while not intended to be a gaming laptop, it is a powerhouse. It'll do whatever she wants it to, and it does so while being lightweight. If she wanted to, she could reasonably take it with her everywhere, but she rarely does.

Pendant: A small silver pendant Eilia inherited from her mother. She has fond memories of playing with it as a child, and her mother always having it on. After her release, the pendant was turned over to her to keep. She wears it absolutely everywhere under her shirt, and never goes without it. The pendant itself is made of silver with a black gemstone in the middle, held between four arches. In the crystal is a symbol, although the importance of said symbol is unknown to her.

Wallet: Her wallet is small and made of black leather, and carries very little in it. She always keeps a bit of cash on her, as well as having a debit card, her ID, and a medical alert card in case anything happens.

Eilia looks average in almost every way, and if asked to describe her, most people would probably struggle. Her skin is neither tanned nor pale, and her hair and eyes are both a rather bland shade of brown. She's more or less average height at 5'5", and weighs 130 lb. Perhaps the only thing even slightly distinct about her is the fact that she wears glasses the majority of the time, small black frames that make no fashion statements.

Even her clothes are astoundingly average--the sort of wardrobe picked by someone just wanting to fit in. She wears shorts, capris, or jeans depending on the weather, and prefers to avoid dresses and skirts. Most of the time she can be found wearing a t-shirt, although none of them advertise anything or show an affinity towards any product. The only thing distinct about her is her mother's necklace, which she wears under her shirt. It's rarely visible to passerby.

Eilia always seems to be smiling, and is in good humor the vast majority of the time. She's quick to laugh at jokes, even if they're not that funny. She does her best to be active in any conversation, and generally comes off as outgoing and friendly, even to the point where it can be a bit too much. She's that one person in the conversation who is way too into it almost all the time.

Around new people (which most people are, since she's new to the area), she's a good deal more reserved. It's fairly obvious on any first meeting that she's nervous, and no amount of effort on her part can hide it with any degree of effectiveness. After the first few minutes or so, the awkwardness fades away and she opens up, going right back to her usual chatty self.

Eilia is a fidgeter, and seems to always have something to do with her fingers. She twirls pens, picks at things, and is constantly finding something to do, even if it's just tapping her fingers. Some might assume that her actions are signs of nervousness, but it's simply a habit for her. What is a sign of anxiety is when she adjusts her glasses--it's something she almost exclusively does when agitated, whether it be because of the situation or because she's lying.

By herself, Eilia is a much different person, and far more true to herself. Much of how she acts with people is a put on show, trying to make herself look happier and more confident than she actually is. In reality, she's well aware that with no friends and being new to the area, she lacks the support structure most people have. She's desperate to not drive people off, and will do almost anything to make people like her. She's desperate to have a connection with anyone.

She's haunted by her own memories, and those memories often come to her in the form of nightmares. Her sleep is most often restless, and it's for that reason she's become a night owl. She stays up extremely late, often only falling asleep when she can't stay up any longer. It's only then that she sleeps peacefully. It's not uncommon to see her online at 4AM in the morning.

Aside from a daily run every morning to keep her weight down, most of her spare time is spent online. Surfing the internet was something she could do the past few years, and it lets her do what she wants without being judged for it. Browsing the internet is really her only hobby, and she finds plenty of things to do on there. She browses news sites, runs through tumblr, and generally enjoys herself, even if she's not particularly attached to any one community.

That lack of community is one of the reasons she chose to move to LA. Having grown up in a small town, she's used to everyone knowing each other already. If she had stayed, people would have recognized her--known her story and judged her based on it. Moving was her only option as far as she was concerned, and moving to another small town would simply mean being the outsider. To her, moving to a big city felt like the only option--large enough that no one would think of her as 'the newcomer', and yet still providing plenty of communities for her to attempt to integrate herself into.

Most people would probably think of Eilia as 'fearless' despite her nervousness, because when it comes to conventional things like heights or the dark, she shows no fear. This is just another part of her carefully chosen public persona however, as she actually has a fear far greater than the average person. Her fear is monsters, and it can swing into full blown trigger territory depending on the situation. She doesn't like monsters at all, no matter how kid friendly they might be intended to be. Something as simple as a cutesy cartoon zombie is enough to make her squirm, and she'll refuse to look at it if at all possible. Horror movies are absolutely out of the question for her, and if she accidentally catches a chunk of one, even something as simple as a trailer, it's enough to leave her curled up in bed hiding. That's one of the many reasons that she's started avoiding television entirely, preferring the internet where she can filter what she does and doesn't see.

Tied into that are people speaking when she can't see where their voice is coming from. This can be anything from a voice over an intercom she's not aware of, to someone speaking from behind her when she didn't know they were there. Depending on what the voice says, this can cause anything from extreme discomfort to a full blown panic attack.

When it comes to monsters in real life, Eilia goes into full blown panic attacks. The month of October is more or less her personal hell on earth. Most people might see someone in a bad vampire costume and move on with their lives. For Eilia, it's not so simple. Every single possible monster might really be a sign of her own impending mental break, and seeing a monster in real life is enough to cause a breakdown. For the entire month of October she has to be extremely careful, and at the end of the month she opts to stay inside almost twenty four hours. October 31st is her own worst nightmare.

Eilia has gone through several medications through her life, the majority of which have been antipsychotics, or medications to control the side effects of the antipsychotics. After several years and a new therapy team, she's being slowly eased off her current medication, which is Risperdal. While previously she was on a fairly high dosage, the medication left her gaining weight, lacking motivation, and generally emotionless. After being released and moving to LA, her new therapy team took charge, lowering the dose slowly and forcing Eilia into regular exercise in an attempt to get her moving. It worked, and as her dosage became lower and lower, she opened up more. The weight she'd gained has mostly been burned off with regular running, and while she certainly suffers from some anxiety issues and motivation loss, she's doing surprisingly well.

In fact, she's doing well enough that her therapy team is starting to suspect she's been overdosed consistently--or even that she might not be schizophrenic at all. Aside from one extremely severe delusion and hallucination, she shows very few of the symptoms that would confirm her diagnosis. Those she does have could have easily been environmental--things like bad short term memory and social isolation. For the moment, the team is working on monitoring her while lowering her medication, but Risperdal and other atypical antipsychotics aren't things you simply stop. Instead, you have to be weaned off it in order to ease the symptoms. Her team is preferring to take things as slow as possible in order to reduce possible withdrawal symptoms, and as such her symptoms tend to be minor.

Eilia remembers little of her childhood. Her therapist tells her that it's simple repression--it hurts to remember, so her brain helps her out by simply forgetting. She knows she was born in a small town in Wisconsin, and that she had no siblings, only her two parents. She had an aunt on her father's side, although she saw her only rarely, and had no cousins to speak of. If her Mother had any family, she'd never spoken of them. The town they lived in was small and rural, and Eilia's backyard was massive and backed up against the forest. She remembers being warned plenty of times not to go in the forest, and she never did. She went to a local school, which was small and old, and made plenty of friends, even if she barely remembers them. It's mostly the experience she remembers--the feeling of being happy and running around with other people her age. Her parents were quiet and preferred their solitude, so it was rare to have a friend over.

Her schooling was uneventful, and by and large she got by without incident. Her grades were average, her parents were proud, and things seemed astoundingly normal until one night when she was twelve. The house had always been on the large side for a family of three, with two stories and a basement, and Eilia's room was at the end of the hallway on the second floor. Even so, she still heard the voices--an argument loud enough to wake her from her sleep in the earliest hours of the morning. As far as she recalls, there was only one voice at the time, but considering how far she was from the argument, she simply assumed that her parents were fighting and one of them was simply speaking at normal volume rather than yelling. Even years later she can recall her first thought--a fear that her parents were going to fight and divorce like the parents of one of her friends.

From that point onward, what she remembers and what she's been told happened are two different things. She remembers going down the stairs slowly as the argument escalated, recognizing her mothers voice. By the time she followed the voice to the kitchen her mother was downright screaming, and almost all of it was stuff that Eilia didn't understand. She doesn't even remember what was said, but when she entered the kitchen expecting to find her parents in the midst of a pre-divorce argument, she found something else entirely. Instead she found her mother, and a monster with a knife.

As foggy as Eilia's memories are, the monster at least is clear. It's a mental image that will never leave her, a constant reminder burned into her memories. Her first impression was that it was a very, very pale man in dark clothes. It was only after a few seconds that the details came together--that whatever it was, it wasn't a man at all. It's skin was waxy and inhumanely pale, drawn tight against it's bones like a corpse. Its mouth wasn't so much a mouth as a hole--inhuman in nature, and with sharp teeth instead of normal teeth. It was hairless and clothed in what looked like a black robe. In one hand was a knife--large and ornate, and unlike anything she'd ever seen before.

It was the eyes that she remembers most--not eyes at all, but little mouths where the eyes should have been.

She remembered the shocked scream she let out when she saw it, when she realized what it was--that it was a monster in the kitchen, some inhumane thing that her mother was yelling at. She remembers it looking at her, and then moving forward with the knife up, stabbing her mother in the chest.

She doesn't remember much after that.

What she remembers is much different from what went on the report, however. She didn't even find out what went on the report until years later. The report was brief and grim--there was no one in the house but Eilia, her mother, and her sleeping father. For reasons unknown, Eilia and her mother were in the kitchen when Eilia retrieved a kitchen knife and stabbed her mother repeatedly. When her father woke the next morning, he found Eilia holding onto her mother, the bloody knife beside her, and her mother long dead. The evidence was clear--there was no sign of forced entry, the knife was covered in blood, and Eilia's mother showed no signs of resistance.

That still left the question of why Eilia would do such a thing. There was no bad blood between them, and at the time she was only twelve--certainly not old enough to be plotting murder. When she was coherent enough to make a statement, what she said was nonsensical--filled with monsters and ornate knives, an argument that had woken her but failed to wake her father. No one wanted to believe it, but every single piece of evidence pointed towards the simple fact that Eilia had killed her own mother.

The 'why' came together later. There was a family history of schizophrenia, and as Eilia continued to insist that it had been a monster, things began to click into place. As Eilia became more socially withdrawn, she began to fit the pattern for schizophrenia more obviously. A psychiatrist looking at it critically might have accepted that whatever was wrong with Eilia, it wasn't schizophrenia, but in a small town shocked by a horrific murder by a young girl, the dots simply had to be connected.

She passed the trial in a haze, unable to understand what was happening to her. It went without saying that she would be found not guilty by reason of mental defect. Unable to be named due to child protection laws, the coverage of her case quickly fizzled out, and she was left alone when she was finally sent to New York for treatment.

Her treatment was long, hard, and isolated. Her father attempted to visit twice early on in her stay, but neither visit lasted very long. After the second, he simply stopped coming back, unable to deal with the situation. She was given plenty of therapy, trying to help her remember what had happened, but her memory of the monster that had killed her mother remained. She was watched constantly, kept in constant high security for fear that she might snap again.

She was medicated consistently, with the mental health team always trying to find the best possible medication. Her social isolation worsened, and by and large it was blamed on her schizophrenia, as opposed to the fact that she was struggling to deal with what she had seen. Without the backdrop of what had happened, she likely wouldn't have been diagnosed at all, but with such an extreme hallucination at such a young age with a family history, it was considered prudent to nip it in the bud as soon as possible in an attempt to allow her the best chance at a normal life.

Her sessions with her therapist took up most of her time, leaving her with little to spare. When she was fifteen, still with minor symptoms, she was allowed to use the computer for the first time, initially just for schoolwork. She loved it, and took to it like a fish to water. It was an escape from the reality she'd been forced into, and she spent every available second on the internet, even if it was heavily filtered. She showed slow progress through the years, even without outside help. When she turned eighteen, the director of the facility officially filed a report recommending her discharge. Despite what had happened, he saw no reason she couldn't manage to live a normal life under the eyes of a mental health team. That was the only condition to her release, and one month after her eighteenth birthday, she was returned to the world.

As sad as it was, almost no one was waiting for her. She might have been legally an adult and capable of doing her own thing, but she was an adult who had little experience in the real world, no GED, no money, and no place to go. The last one at least was taken care of when her spinster aunt arrived. Despite having not visited Eilia during her time in the hospital, she had been keeping an eye on her progress. She reassured Eilia that she didn't blame her for what had happened, and took her in. She gave her a place to sleep and safety she hadn't known, and while Eilia knew there was no way she would be staying, she was thankful for it anyway.

She made no attempt to hide her plans from her aunt--she wanted a fresh start in a new place, one where no one knew her. It would be difficult, but she wanted to at least try, and her aunt was supportive, even if a bit nervous about the idea. They worked together, drawing up a list of places and working through them to find the best one. Eventually, they settled on Los Angeles, and began to prepare Eilia for her move.

It was around that time that the man representing her father arrived. He knew nothing of the whereabouts of Eilia's father, but he did know that he'd invested a large portion of his money into a fund that would be used to see to Eilia's needs. The financial burden was no longer on her aunt, and it eased the move significantly to have money she could count on. Within a month her finances and medical health records had been moved to LA, and her aunt had contacted a friend of a friend who was willing to rent a room. As apprehensive as Eilia was starting to feel about the move, it was coming--her one big chance.

The move went off without a hitch, and Eilia finally touched down in early April. For the first few days she simply remained in her new room, setting things up and trying to get used to it all. When the week was over, it was off to meet her new psychiatric team, and then to get control of her financials. Her new therapy team seemed sympathetic, if a bit confused--outside of the single incident, her symptoms were nearly non-existent, while her medication seemed set up for an extreme case. They worked on easing her off of it, lowering the dosage bit by bit and monitoring the changes.