#Gerry Keay {Burn It Down} {ETC Verse}

[chaosmultiverse]

 “What’s your favorite scary movie?” (Dealer’s choice)

☆I got Blair Witch Project☆

Gerard had heard that there were odd things within the woods of this small town, so he had booked a motel, checked out the town a bit and then had headed out in the evening to investigate.

He had been walking though the woods for a hour and a bit, using a night-camrea to get a better lay of the land around him. It was when he heard a noise that he turned without a second thought and noticed Dwight even without the camera.

"Why are you out here?" To Dwight Gerard juat looked like a random birtish goth man with poorly dyed blsck hair, likely in over his head.

[bookburnt]

finally did a writeup of some deets of gerry’s alive and well verse!  oh dear

Gerry still got sick while traveling with Gertrude, but it didn’t kill him.  In this AU, Gertrude asked him to “help out” with reading statements when she noticed him getting ill.  Once he started reading statements, the symptoms started to fade, and he’s doing fine now ... as long as he doesn’t go for too long without a statement.

He’s aware that this is not a good sign for his humanity, but he still tries to help people out wherever he can, and he doesn’t take statements from anyone who hasn’t come in to give one.

He was separated from Gertrude at the time of her death.  She had sent him to Ny-Ålesund at the time of the Dark’s ritual to make it look like she was taking it seriously, hoping that doing so would throw Elias off while she burned down the Institute.  No dice; Elias still copped what she was up to and shot her down.

Despite everything, Gerry misses her and feels guilty over her death.  Although he still never fully trusted her, in this AU he never had to realize the full extent of how cruel she was willing to be, as she never bound him into the book.

He knows that both Gertrude and he were fully aware of the risks of their existence, and that Gertrude was completely willing to die for her cause.  He’s not exactly out for vengeance, though the idea is very tempting to him.  Still, given that the last time he went out for vengeance he nearly joined the Hunt permanently, he tries to be more careful with his anger these days.  With that in mind, he’s lowkey trying to figure out what Gertrude was up to and finish it for her.

After Gertrude’s death, Elias transferred Gerry (who was technically already an Institute employee via his work with Gertrude) to the Archives.

He’s aware that Gertrude never wanted him to work in the Archives proper. Sometimes, under the void of grief, it hurts to know that he’s still a disappointment, but she’s dead and he has no other options.

He's somewhat distant from the other Archives staff as of the start of s1, partly because he has no shared history with anyone else in there, and partly because everyone knows the big scary goth flayed his own mother, which is ... not a great foundation to be building office friendships on.

Gerry does not like his job at the Archives, he does not like the Institute, he does not like Elias, and he does not initially like Jon.  That last one is less about Jon as a person- I do see them as having the potential to work well as friends and/or partners once they’ve both gotten past some shit, and I’m always down to plot that out with players of Jons.  Gerry’s initial animosity towards Jon in this verse is more about Gerry’s own issues with Archivists and with the idea of Gertrude being replaced by someone so inept.  In Sasharchivist verses, while he may not trust Sasha immediately, there’s much less animosity.

Despite all that bitterness, though, he’s still surprisingly kind under his crunchy goth shell.

Keeps very irregular hours, and is often off doing “research work” that no one else really knows anything about.  Is probably the most competent person on s1 Archives staff, given all his experience dealing with this shit, but also the most useless to the actual Institute, because FUCK being useful to the Magnus Institute.

He knows that his dad found a way to quit somehow, but he doesn’t know how.  He wants out, but in the meantime, it’s all he can do to keep looking out for others.

Whenever a statement mentions a weird goth with tattoos, he just kind of walks backwards out of the room.  Can’t have been him who talked to that girl in Italy; he’s never been there.  Can’t have been him who bought that dude’s spooky book; he doesn’t even know how to read.  Can’t have been him who got brought into the hospital covered in burns (that happen to line up with his current burn scars) with a passport identifying him as “Gerard Keay” and then vaporized a man; he medically doesn’t exist.  Etc, etc, etc.

Office gossip about Gerry ranges from “yeah I’m pretty sure I saw him trying to get blood out of his shirt in the men's room” to “he dumped the entire thing of sugar in the break room into his coffee and then there was none left to put in my tea.”

[bookburnt]

a primer course on T.MA for my mutuals who followed me from other blogs and would like to know what the fuck i’m talking about!  (hi, guys.  love you.)  GONNA BE SPOILER-HEAVY IN HERE.

First off, big ups to the T.MA wiki, which you can consult on anything here, but this post is intended to serve as a very basic overview of the concepts relevant to this blog without forcing y'all to go into wiki levels of detail.  The first part of this post is some general TMA terms and concepts, and the second part is some characters who have been relevant to Gerry's story specifically.  If you're here for a better understanding of Gerry’s arc and don't care so much about the worldbuilding, scroll down to where I start talking about “who’s...?” and that should help you out.

what’s a “Leitner?”  A Leitner is a book but spooky.  They make bad things happen and, optionally, give you weird powers.  They're usually tied to one of the fourteen(ish) Entities, which I will get into in a bit.  Gerard hates these goddamn books, and has a knack for finding them and destroying them.  His mother, Mary Keay, ran an antique bookstore that did serious business in them.

what’s an “avatar?” An avatar is a (former?) human working closely with one of the Entities. Over time, the influence of their Entity changes them, often granting them certain powers in exchange for a psychological and physiological need to serve their Entity.

what are these “Entities?” / what’s this “Hunt?”  Put as simply as possible, the Entities are, like... fear elementals.  There are roughly 14 different entities, though the boundaries between them aren’t clearly drawn in all circumstances.  As follows, a quick overview:

The Eye. Fear of being surveiled.  The need to know the answers to questions that may destroy you.  The Eye is tied to the Magnus Institute. Its avatars can have the ability to magically Know things, understand all languages, and compel others to answer any questions they ask.  Gerry was tied to the Eye and had some capacity for Knowing stuff, but wasn’t fully its avatar - or if he was, he refused to feed it, which must have hastened his death.

The Desolation.  Fire, but without the warm fuzzy bits.  Pure unhinged destruction.  Desolation avatars can and will set you on fire with their minds.  Gerry’s extensive burn scars are the result of fucking around with a Desolation cultist and finding out.   (The cultist also fucked around with Gerry and found out.  He’s not around anymore.)  

The Hunt.  Being tracked by something that won't stop until it kills you.  The thrill of the chase.  Hunt avatars are capable of killing other avatars, even those who would otherwise be unkillable.  The possibility of Gerry being tied to the Hunt is never discussed in canon, but I’ve got my theories.  (That last phrase is a link to a post discussing those theories, it just isn't showing up like a link on desktop for some reason.)

The End.  Death and dying.  Manifestations of the End often involve disruptions of the natural processes of life and death.  For instance, the fucked-up necromancy book that Gerry got trapped in after dying was an outcropping of the End.

The Corruption.  Bugs, disease, rot, etc.  The Corruption's avatars may spread disease wherever they go, or they might just be chock full of worms.  Potential of controlling a worm army.

The Flesh.  The inherent weirdness of existing in a body.  Cannibalism. Flesh avatars may be hulking, twisted parodies of the human form.  They might steal your bones, turn you inside out, eat you, or all of the above.

The Distortion.  The inherent weirdness of existing in a mind.  Doors that shouldn't be there.  Getting lost.  Being unable to trust your own thoughts.  Distortion avatars look, well, distorted when seen in reflections or through glass.  Will probably try to get you to go through a door that wasn't there before.  You won't like what's on the other side.

The Slaughter.  War.  Violence.  Man's inhumanity to man.  The Slaughter often manifests in groups as well as in individuals, so you could get an episode of mass hysteria where an entire small town turns to butchering one another, or you could get an office assistant who just aches to do murder.

The Web.  Spiders.  Being controlled by external forces.  Can operate in extremely subtle ways.  Can also just be an unkillable spider who wants you to have a bad time.

The Vast.  Really big things.  Heights.  Your own terrifying insignificance on the cosmic scale.

The Buried.  Claustrophobia.  Being buried alive.

The Lonely.  Being completely alone.  Like, completely alone, and never coming back.

The Dark. What it says on the tin.

The Stranger.  Something that's not quite right.  A joke that you're not in on.  Clowns and/or mannequins that might kill you and take your skin.

BONUS: The Extinction. While the other 14 fears have been established for a while (the most recent is the Flesh, which only really came into its own with the advent of mass meat farming), the Extinction is a nascent entity born of anxiety around the idea of the human race destroying itself, and/or being replaced by something else. The boundaries of what constitutes an Extinction manifestation, rather than just a warping of one of the other fears, are unclear.

what’s a “ritual?”  Rituals are ways the Entities’ followers and avatars try to influence the world, usually with the end goal of making our world somewhere their Entity can live and feast full-time instead of just sporadically popping in.

what’s the “fearpocalypse?”  The only successful ritual to date, as of the end of S4.  Possibly the only successful ritual ever, given that it ended the world as we know it and let all 14 fears fully through the gate to fuck everything all the way up.  The sky is full of eyeballs now and that's not even the biggest problem.  This happened a while after Gerry’s death, but I have a verse where, due to his previous ties to the End and the general befuckening, Gerry is brought back to have a bad time with everyone else.

who’s Mary Keay?  Gerard's mother, founder and proprietor of Pinhole Books.  Had ambitions of starting a dynasty of supernatural power, starting with her only son Gerard, who ended up having other ideas.  Flayed herself in a ritual to make herself “beyond death” via the fucked-up necromancy book mentioned earlier.  Gerard was primed to take the fall for her seeming murder, but was let go after the book disappeared from evidence and several key witnesses retracted their testimony.  Despite the ritual being incomplete, Mary remained tethered to the world of the living for five years before Gertrude Robinson finally wrapped that up.

who’s Gertrude Robinson?  Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, and a stone-cold BAMF with a habit of sacrificing those close to her for (her idea of) the greater good.  The late Eric Delano asked her to look after his son Gerry, so naturally she let him live in torment with his abuser’s revenant for five fucking years, then swooped in when he was truly desperate.  She got rid of Mary Keay for good, and got Gerard to travel the world with her attempting to prevent various apocalyptic rituals.  The two would often pose as mother and son to strangers.         Being tied to the Eye, Gertrude seemed to be aware of Gerard’s impending death.  After he passed away, she bound him into that fucked-up necromancy book and left him behind.  (More on that here.) Gertrude was shot to death about a year later while trying to burn the Magnus Institute down and thereby prevent its head, Elias Bouchard, from doing anything apocalyptic.  (Tragically, she did not succeed.  SEE:  “fearpocalypse.”)

who’s Eric Delano?  Gerry’s father.  Died too early to ever really get to know Gerry, despite the sacrifices he made to restructure his life for fatherhood.  (We don’t need to go into the why of it here, but he did have to gouge his eyes out to try to be a stay-at-home dad.  And he did it.  We stan.)  Unfortunately, he’d fallen in love with Mary Keay, who used him to produce an heir for her planned empire, then murdered him with a pair of garden shears and bound him into that fucked-up necromancy book.  She later passed his page off to Gertrude Robinson, who spoke with him.  In that conversation, he asked her to look after Gerry and begged her to burn his page, as being bound into the book was a world of suffering. 

who’s Jurgen Leitner?  A rich, reclusive Norwegian who thought it would be cool and smart to start a library explicitly for corralling forces beyond human comprehension.  (He was wrong, and also stupid.)  Collected spooky books and put his name in them, giving them their common name.  Gerard hates this guy, associating him with the books that dominated his mother’s mind and indirectly ruined his life.  He hunted Leitner down and nearly beat him to death for personal reasons.  Upon meeting Leitner, he came away with the impression that this was just a scared old man, and couldn’t possibly be actually responsible for Jurgen Leitner’s library.  Ultimately, he chose to spare Leitner's life.  Unless we're talking about my canon-divergent Hunter!Gerry au, in which case he did not.

        Anyways, hope this has been helpful.  There's... a lot going on in TMA, but hopefully I've hit the parts that are most relevant to my writing here.  If you have any questions about canon, please feel free to ask!