singillatim app.

[faa]

CONTENT ADVISORY.

This character and the story in his info deals with themes of societal and internalized fatphobia, diabetes stigma, low self-esteem, bulimia and what it does to the body over time, unwanted/accidental children, and US intervention in the Middle East. He was an active participant in the "Global War on Terror" and a combatant in the Battle of Mosul. Freddie's opinions on weight, health, the military, and global politics do not reflect my own.

Bulimia and self-shaming are far from his entire personality or the focus of every single tag, but he is a person dealing with severe mental illness, and that mental illness is apparent in the narrative. If you're uncomfortable with any of this and don't want me to ask, opt out.

PLAYER INFO

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Player Name: Yasmine!
• Player Contact: PM or ping on discord at #redmaresociety, or PP (but do not friendrequest) bluehellgazette!
• Player Age: 28
• Permissions: Here - after content warnings.


CHARACTER INFO

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• Character Name: Frédéric "Freddie" Ian Lavoie
• Character Age: 33.
• Character Canon: Original Character. He's from a 1:1 replication of our word, other than me taking some liberties with what military units/aircraft were involved in specific skirmishes.
• Canon Point: Late spring 2025. He's been out of the military for a year and bulimic for 4 months.

• Character History: "Wiki" Link - history at bottom of page.

• Character Personality:

 — Positive Trait: Sociable.  Despite everything that lurks below, and for all of Freddie's issues forging deeper, more intimate connections with others—or, more aptly, keeping himself from fleeing once he realizes he is beginning to do so—Freddie gets along well with most people and finds it easy to strike up conversations and to relate to other people. He's not overly loud or rowdy, but he's a fun guy to go out with; he's kind and charming when he wants to be, with wit and a good sense of humor: there's a reason he has a lot of success on Tinder and got on well with his comrades in the military. He made friends easily when he first joined, and he's maintained those friendships even after getting out, though it does bear mentioning that none of these friends are people he can confide deeply personal things in.

 — Positive Trait: Intelligent.  Intelligence can be defined in a variety of different ways; in this instance, Freddie is both knowledgeable and a quick and willing learner. He did well in a difficult course of study at a rigorous school—physics—and had to pass numerous tests and learn a tremendous amount of new information to be accepted into the Air Force as a pilot and subsequently be allowed to fly. He's good at memorization and figuring out how machines work; engineering-type information like how the systems on a plane work is very intuitive to him. He's just very good at figuring things out and processing and contextualizing information so that he's able to use it to troubleshoot; Freddie is talented in applying his technical knowledge to specific situations.

 — Positive Trait: Reassuring.  Even despite all of his own issues, Freddie gives the practiced impression of someone who is confident and in control. He's spent years as Pilot-in-Command on various crafts, and he commanded crews when he was in the military. He's able to keep an even keel, shut down his own fear, and focus on reassuring the people around him in disaster situations in which he is the one expected to stay calm above all else. He's very practiced at comforting people who are afraid of flying, for instance, and was able to keep his crew from panicking during one in-flight emergency in which a landing had to be made with two engines on fire (not entirely unheard of). Having been an officer, and a Captain or higher for the latter half of his Air Force tenure, he's comfortable being the one other people look to for guidance and knows how to fill that role in a way that inspires confidence.

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 — Negative Trait: Perceptions of Inadequacy.  Despite the air of confidence and comfort in his own skin that he projects, Freddie is haunted by persistent feelings of inadequacy in the back of his mind that tend to surface without warning, a man like a picturesque Florida neighborhood built atop hollow limestone caverns, ready to be swallowed by a sinkhole at the slightest tectonic shift a blow to his confidence would offer.

But it's not particularly remarkable that Freddie's self esteem is built on a shaky foundation. His background has, from a very young age, conditioned him to believe that he's just not enough—it's fairly common for parents of children, especially young children and especially Catholic parents, to stay in unhappy marriages until their offspring move out "for the child's sake", but Freddie's parents only stayed together until he was 7, leaving him to wonder once he learned that this was not the norm why he hadn't been good enough to stay together for like most other kids. Growing up before and after the divorce, his parents didn't make him feel unwanted, but they weren't over-the-top loving and didn't frequently emphasize how happy they were to have him; his father was particularly aloof—and sometimes he still wonders if there was anything he could have been or done as a child to make them like him more, ultimately concluding that he was inadequate in the face of the child his parents 'needed'.

Deep down, Freddie also still believes that being cheated on was, in some way, in his control - that there was something he could have done to make himself good enough to be the only one she needed. Maybe if he'd called her more than once a week, or was better in bed, or was a better romantic partner, he could have been good enough to not cheat on—a very false logic that doesn't account for the fact that sometimes people just do bad things.

These feelings really came to a head during his second deployment, after he was mildly injured by a mortar blast—it's standard procedure to put anyone who gets injured while engaging with the enemy, regardless of the severity, in for the Purple Heart, a medal the US gives to soldiers injured in combat. The injury simply has to be a direct result of enemy action and serious enough to require medical attention, and the piece of shrapnel that became shallowly embedded in his calf after the blast fit both of those criteria. However, it's up to the individual whether or not they want to choose to accept the medal, which comes with several benefits in healthcare, employment, and financial status. Freddie didn't feel that he had done enough to get it, or that he deserved it, because he felt inadequate compared to the other recipients - people who had been much more severely injured - and had to be talked out of making the mistake of declining free healthcare for life simply because he felt like he didn't "do enough."

These feelings of inadequacy also crop up when he's speaking to other veterans, and he usually stays out of conversations with people who have been deployed during wartime because of them; it's kept him from being able to form bonds over it and talk about the things he did see. Again, he feels like he didn't "do enough", despite having very much engaged in real combat for three years, because he didn't engage in any fighting up close, or endure the sort of trauma that he's heard ground forces describe—in Freddie's mind, to be adequate enough to join in these conversations, he'd have to be able to match their specific kind of experience, and the level of violence and up-close gore in them.

 — Negative Trait: Affirmation-Seeking.  Freddie has a very intense need for external validation that started in childhood, during which time he didn't get the validation and attention he needed from his parents. He wears his uniform instead of changing after work because he likes the respect he gets; he sleeps around to an almost pathological degree because he needs near-constant reassurance that other people find him attractive and likeable. When a person chooses to go out on a date with him, or have sex with him, it's a temporary hit of affirmation and validation because they're choosing to spend their time with him alone instead of somebody else. But it's a shallow, fleeting feeling compared to the validation of being prioritized in a relationship, and his need for affirmation is a yawning void - hence why he repeats the same behavior over and over. Another, more benign example of this tendency at play in his daily life: Freddie's fond of sending dates uniformed selfies because he wants to be told that he looks good in it to counter his own insecurities, which insist the opposite every time he gets dressed.

 — Negative Trait: Commitaphobic.  Between his parents’ divorce when he was age seven, which set his first and most intimate impression of marriage as an institution, and then being cheated on in a two year relationship with his last girlfriend some 10 years ago, Freddie avoids commitment and tells himself he doesn't want to settle down or date seriously. He’s very active on dating apps, goes out on dates, has flings–but he dodges attempts to hang out too many times, tries not to go on too many dates with the same people in a row, and ghosts people if he feels like they're getting uncomfortably close to him or the conversations are getting too deep. Most of his liaisons usually only last 2-3 dates/hookups, and when they end, his partners are usually left bewildered, wondering what went wrong when they seemed to be having a genuinely good time before that.

But if Freddie lets them get close to him, they can hurt him like Sarah did; if they fall in love, they'll undoubtedly just fall out of love and come to hate each other like his parents did. It's better this way, or at least less scary.

But deep down, despite his refusal to acknowledge it, Freddie longs for closeness with another person and and craves intimacy with others, which is why he sleeps around to the degree that he does, constantly chasing fleeting glimmers of connection - but his self-sabotaging behaviors around dating make that impossible to actually achieve because he always cuts things off prematurely, even if he doesn't want it to end yet—a defense mechanism to avoid ever having to repeat the pain of being cheated on at the cost of depriving himself of a basic human need. He's been starving himself of this sort of human closeness for the past ten years because of the level of fear and anxiety he has over commitment and connection, and he lives with an omnipresent feeling of alienation and solitude because of it.

• Character Skills:

—  Firearms.  Handguns, modern rifles, and machine guns. He's been trained in marksmanship, cleaning, firing, assembly, etc.
—  Military SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training.  Like all pilots in the USAF, Freddie had to attend intensive SERE School as well as Water Survival Course and Desert Survival Course training in case of being downed or captured (or both). The S component of SERE, Survival, is particularly relevant. He's been trained in fieldcraft/bushcraft: things like making emergency shelter/fire including concealment of fire, dealing with hypothermia, hunting and skinning things/preparing wild food, securing clean water, etc. Similarly, the Evasion element may also come up here - he's been trained in ways to evade pursuit, escape physical entrapment in things like a downed aircraft, etc. SERE also covers isolation training, navigating/orienteering, and similar topics.

Freddie's technically been trained to resist torture, but he has a low pain tolerance, so it's a mixed bag. It's also important to note that while he still remembers and knows how to do these things, he was in a much better physical state when trained than he is now, so some of the skills taught would be much more difficult for him to execute in his first few months ingame due to the loss of strength and stamina from his medical issues.
—  Ground Combat and Tactics.  Freddie was a pilot, but he still would have received instruction and practice for ground tactics as well as combat (urban focus) and hand-to-hand.
—  Battlefield first aid , but not at an EMT’s level.
—  Piloting.  Small bushcraft, military aircraft, and passenger jets
—  Technical knowledge.  He's highly knowledgeable where physics is concerned, especially aeronautics, and can apply that knowledge to construction to a limited extent. He's not an engineer by any means, but he's informed enough to be like "that's a seriously bad idea/that's not going to work for xyz reason" if characters are constructing something.

• Character Inventory:

— ITEM ONE: Handgun — SIG Sauer M18 pistol, standard Air Force sidearm.
— ITEM TWO: Non-rechargeable, coin battery operated glucose meter.
— ITEM THREE: Canadian passport.

• Important Notes:

Per mod answers earlier in the month, the plan for Freddie's medical limitations in the game is as follows:

— his insulin resistance stabilizes and doesn't get worse or become health-harming because of the Aurora, eventually getting much better because of the limited dietary options in the setting. Insulin resistance isn't the same thing as diabetes, though it's a characteristic of it - he basically gets insane cravings and drinks a shitload of water because his body doesn't handle glucose correctly. His low blood sugar episodes would be affected by the Aurora to an extent that they aren't severe or life-threatening; he'd just feel tired/weak and kind of scrunkly until he could get something to eat. Vis-a-vis the insulin resistance gradually getting better, I'm looking at a model like how several players from The Terror have dealt with receding lead poisoning.

— I'd be apping him right after having his dental work finished, and the Aurora pauses dental decay given that there's no way to really treat cavities in Milton and surrounding areas and cavities can progress to abscesses if untreated, which are life-threatening given proximity to the brain.

— The idea is very much that his behavior around food is not sustainable, both in the modern world and especially in a survival setting where it's a limited and precious resource - I have zero intention of trying to undermine the scarcity element of the setting and that's part of the appeal of Sing for him because that is part of what is going to force him to start doing something to break the cycle and stop. The other half is that he's been at this for four months and as I see his situation he's a couple of weeks ingame away from a wake-up-call, "this is going to kill me if I do not stop" health scare - I'm planning on heart palpitations/arrhythmia - which I'm looking at as the beginning of a recovery arc.

— Weighing out the scarcity element vs the prevalence of diabetes in the Canadian population, I'm hoping to have him arrive with a battery operated meter/strips, and maybe be able to scrounge a pack or two if he B&Es a lot of abandoned houses, but because he checks four times a day for anxiety reasons, he is going to either have to strictly ration them and work through those feelings or very rapidly run out. With the aurora pause, this would no longer be necessary for him to do and he would know that; effectively it is a self-soothing behavior that serves no pragmatic purpose and one that he is going to have to quickly wean himself off of because the setting can't sustain it.

• Writing Samples:

— SAMPLE ONE: Here - TDM, seeking out Fitzjames
— SAMPLE TWO: Here - TDM, meeting Irving. First post in the thread is in the toplevel as starter #1!