Ottoline Bellamy

"*If I don't get out of here, everyone left will wish I had.*"
―Ottoline Bellamy
**Ottoline Bellamy** was a participant in the Fourth Nonary Game.

## Appearance

Standing at 5’7”, Ottoline has blue eyes and short blonde hair, cut messily enough to indicate she did it herself. She has a few freckles spread around her nose and cheeks, with an otherwise featureless face save for the dark circles set beneath her eyes. Ottoline perpetually wears a blank expression on her face, her gaze seeming to pierce straight through you. Her clothes are baggy and mismatched, a grey pullover jumper and a white skirt that ends just below her knees.

## Personality

Ottoline suffers from what previously would have been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, so she experiences things such as auditory and visual hallucinations. For her, auditory hallucinations are much more common than visual hallucinations, which are rare in her case. She also suffers heavily from paranoid delusions, most of which align with her beliefs outlined above, that people inherently enjoy hurting others and so she becomes paranoid over her own perceptions of others motives. When the stress levels rise, her thoughts and speech pattern will likely become disorganised and nonsensical. At the beginning of the Nonary Game, she only experienced mild symptoms and appeared as a withdrawn, albeit unusual, girl.

Through being exposed to lifelong neglect and abuse Ottoline believes that all humans are inherently violent, domineering, selfish creatures. People only pretend to care about each other because that’s what society expects of them but if they weren’t kept in check by others then they’d become no better than animals. She rationalises her own violent thoughts as being something that all humans have and that all humans want to act on. So when she acts on them she’ll justify it to herself as something others would have done to her if they didn’t feel the social pressure of other people.

Ottoline prefers to distance herself from other people, in accordance with how she believes they think. The further she can stay away from others, the less likely she is to be a target to them. Another reason she has to distance herself from people is due to her upbringing and early life -- she has little in common with the average person and any small talk about her circumstances could tip someone off to something being wrong with her or the fact that she killed her father. She can see almost no practical reason for interacting with people when not entirely necessary. When she does have to interact with people, she’s usually soft-spoken and talks with a voice shaking with nervous energy. She does her best to end the conversation as quickly and cleanly as possible without sounding too abnormal, although it’s not easy for her to come off as a normal person she does her best.

She does not have a lot that is particularly important in her life. She believed that once she was free of her father her life would be turned around and she’d be independent to take control of herself, to make something of herself. Although she was relieved to have killed him, she was not instantly happy like she had always thought she would be. She always thought “with this man gone there’ll be nothing to stop me becoming whatever I want.” Unfortunately for her all it made her feel was a brief pensive emptiness followed by a tidal wave of paranoia. Now all she cares about is not being caught -- she can’t have had it all be for nothing. Ottoline believes the world owes her happiness for what it has done to her, and she’ll take it if she has to.

## Backstory

Ottoline Bellamy was born on New Year's Day, January 1st 2004, to unmarried parents Michael Bellamy and Mary Dellamore in the city of Livingston, Montana. Her parents had not been meaning to have a child and were not at all in the right financial or emotional circumstances to raise her. Ottoline’s mother, however, was strongly against having an abortion and believed that they should take a chance with the young life. As the years went on, the relationship between her parents only became more strained with the addition of Ottoline to the family -- with her father’s resentment towards his now-wife growing by the day, as he blamed her unwillingness to abort the baby for the circumstances they now found themselves in. They were never a particularly well off household, but the new member and her sickly disposition fast became a drain on their already lacking resources. Michael stopped seeing his friends, became more hostile at home, and began heavily drinking as a way to escape from the downward spiral he saw his life as.

This excessive alcohol consumption led to an addiction, which only hemorrhaged more money and made life for all of them much worse. By the time Bellamy was old enough to think for herself, the household environment was very abusive. Both physically and mentally, Michael took his impotent rage out on his daughter. Growing up in such conditions was obscenely unhealthy for someone, especially a child of her impressionable age, and throughout the course of her earliest years she developed several perceptions and behaviours that would be symptomatic of schizophrenia -- though she would never be officially assessed or diagnosed. Her mindset that all people are inherently violent, selfish and domineering began shortly after she started attending school. Bellamy was victimised by her peers for her odd mannerisms and scruffy appearance. Every day after being bullied at school, she reluctantly returned home to her alcoholic father who made her run errands inappropriate for someone of her age and who would verbally and physically abuse her at the slightest inconvenience to him. Her mother, on the other hand, was passive to what was going on in the house. She never intervened to stop what anyone was doing to the young girl. In Ottoline’s mind, it was because her mother was weak and selfish. Voices that only she could hear told her that her mother didn’t want to make herself the target of anyone, so she kept quiet and kept to herself. That she wasn’t willing to inconvenience herself to benefit anyone else. It was one of the most defining experiences in molding Bellamy’s perception of other people, that not even her mother would defend her because of her own cowardice.

A few days after Ottoline’s eighteenth birthday she awoke to find her father in a state more furious than ever before, as well as no sign of her mother -- only evidence of her absence. Mary had packed her belongings during the night and abandoned her life -- never to be seen again by either Ottoline or her father. In truth, she had waited this long out of a hope that Ottoline would be able to leave for herself after she came of age, but in reality the abuse only got that much worse after her departure that Ottoline found it impossible to even leave the house without her father’s express permission any longer. During this time, over a period of many years, hatred began to bubble up from within Ottoline. She had always felt these emotions, deeper down inside her, but with the escalation of her situation they became more prevalent and even harder to control. Her hallucinations worsened, hearing whispered voices urging her to kill her father. The idea bore fruit and became an obsession inside her. She’d spend much of her time fantasizing about killing him and freeing herself, and how amazing she’d feel once she was finally free of him - how liberated she’d be. It was 2027 when the mere thought was not longer enough and, after a request to fetch him a beer from the fridge, she retrieved a large kitchen knife and stabbed him over fifty times in the chest and neck. Hours passed in perfect silence, the blood had stopped weeping from his wounds long ago as Bellamy watched in awe at the stillness of his body. She felt nothing. The overwhelming joy and freedom had turned to ashes in her mouth and all that remained was paranoia and fear of being caught and taken somewhere even worse. She stripped off her bloody clothes and awkwardly cut her hair with a pair of scissors in front of the mirror. Ottoline knew she couldn’t stay in the house, and so began her journey as a fugitive. A week had barely passed by when she was abducted and placed into the facility as a participant in the Nonary Game. There was only one option available to her now -- survive. Survive so that it meant something. Survive so that it wasn’t all for nothing. You have nothing to lose, and an entire life to gain.

## Trivia

* Bellamy is the only participant to have physically killed another during the course of a Nonary Game.
* She was inspired and based on the album 'Kid A' by Radiohead.