Cornelius Hickey

Cornelius Hickey NAME
Male SEX/GENDER
28 AGE
5'8, slim but fit, red/blonde hair, blue eyes, beard. PHYSICAL
??? OCCUPATION
AMC's The Terror CANON
End of ep. 9, after Tozer tells him about the Tuunbaq; (CRAU) Bellelurette endgame CANONPOINT
Mippins, EST, mippins, ask for Discord OOC INFO

The Terror is a very bleak historical drama/horror show about the real-life Franklin expedition, which set out to complete the Northwest Passage in the mid-1800s, but the two ships vanished and their crews were never heard from again. Though the show is heavily fictionalized, as you can imagine, things do not go well for Hickey and his crewmates!

Some topics likely to come up in threads with Hickey include: starvation, serious illness like scurvy/lead poisoning, imperialism/colonialism, flogging, hanging, self-immolation/burning to death, corpse mutilation, cannibalism, racism against Inuit people, and general old timey views on gender/sexuality/sex that may verge on bigoted. He himself is gay, but he's also from the 1840s.

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Hickey's formative events and history contain CWs as mentioned above, notably flogging, corpse mutilation, and cannibalism. Also, big spoilers for The Terror from here on out!

Click for full history (including a LOT of headcanon)

Canon: See his wiki if you want the full blow by blow, but most importantly: This little twerp is not Cornelius Hickey at all. E.C., the man we only ever know by his initials, needed to get out of London and thus killed the real Cornelius Hickey to take his place on the expedition. His grand villainous scheme was to hitchhike on the ship until they got through the Northwest Passage and... stopped in Hawaii to recoup after the journey. Dude just really wants to go to Maui.

...And that is all we know for certain! So:

Headcanon: Despite the lack of real information about E.C., we do get some hints throughout canon: He likely grew up very poor, yet he's well-spoken and intelligent; he spent most of his life in Liverpool and Manchester but was residing in London before the expedition; he's a practiced killer, manipulator, and thief; and he's gotten himself into some kind of trouble, the scale of which is large enough that he resorts to fleeing the country.

This backstory likely won't be complete for a while. I'm fully making it up as I go, trying my best to flesh out the details of E.C.'s life pre-expedition in a way that makes sense for his character. I'm also not going to add anything here until it comes up ICly in game.

• FIRST EVENT: Here's the thing: Hickey is an imposter. His real "name" is E.C., and all we know about E.C. is that he needed to get the hell out of London (presumably for crime reasons). He met the real Cornelius Hickey somehow, and real!Hickey told E.C. all about the Franklin Expedition he'd signed up with. A year in the polar sea, out the other side, and then the crew would stop in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) for a reprieve before heading back to England. E.C. killed real!Hickey and took his place on the ship, with the intention of bailing once the ships got to Hawaii. Imposter!Hickey is not a sailor, does not even try to pretend he's real!Hickey, and most of all, does not respect the hierarchy on the ship.


• SECOND EVENT: About a year into the voyage, the ships are trapped in pack ice and forced to overwinter on the frozen sea. There, they are hunted by the Tuunbaq, a Netsilik spirit that looks like a polar bear with a human face. The crew suspects that the Tuunbaq is being controlled by a Netsilik woman they've encountered, Lady Silence. One night after an attack, Hickey recruits some pals to venture out onto the ice to kidnap Lady Silence and bring her back to the ships for Captain Crozier to question. At this point, Hickey feels that he's bonded with the captain, and he expects to be congratulated for his efforts to save everyone from the Tuunbaq. Instead, Crozier is angry that Hickey went against orders. Hickey argues, and Crozier eventually sentences him to being flogged "as a boy" - meaning on the ass for extra humiliation. Hickey is stripped naked and lashed in front of the crew, which he takes as an immense betrayal from the captain. This experience unlocks the dark potential Hickey had inside of him; Crozier has made a dangerous enemy.


• THIRD EVENT: After two winters trapped out on the ice, Crozier finally gives the order to abandon both ships and try to walk out. It's an 800 mile journey across a desolate landscape, and the crew is plagued by scurvy and lead poisoning from their rations. As the ships are leaving, Hickey and his pals (namely Gibson and Tozer) decide to mutiny once the crew makes it to land. Once a land camp is established, Hickey takes advantage of an opportunity to kill two crewmates to frame a Netsilik family they encountered, riling up the crew to believe they're going to be attacked by a Netsilik army, which will allow the mutiny to unfold. Instead, Crozier figures out that Hickey was the true murderer. He sentences both Hickey and Tozer to be hanged for mutiny, but before this can happen, the camp is attacked by the Tuunbaq. Hickey and his men seize the opportunity to steal supplies (and a few men) and abandon the rest of the crew. Hickey takes over the gang of mutineers, acting as their leader as they attempted to make their own way out of the arctic.


• FOURTH EVENT: Hickey pretty much immediately starts peer pressuring his men into cannibalism. Gibson falls ill with scurvy and Hickey kills him (btw Hickey and Gibson were in a situationship earlier in the show but they got caught fucking in the hold and Gibson dumped him, it's a whole thing but I'm trying to keep this concise) and has his body butchered to provide food for the rest of the men. Tozer, former sergeant of the Marines, is now Hickey's second in command. Tozer discovers that the Tuunbaq is still pursuing both their group and Crozier's, and he begs Hickey to turn around to head north instead, to make it back to the ships and away from the creature. In doing so, he reveals to Hickey that he saw the Tuunbaq consume a man's soul during its attack on the camp. Hickey realizes that the Tuunbaq is even more of a supernatural thing than he first thought, so he comes up with a private plan to try and take control of the Tuunbaq for himself to escape their situation. In doing so, he would likely get the rest of his crew killed.


• FIFTH EVENT: But then OOPS, before Hickey can carry out this plan, he's yanked into Bellelurette. The basic premise: A witch named Ish kidnapped a bunch of characters and threw them into a French palace to systematically kill each other because he needed deaths to complete a spell to revive his mother. Hickey was actually in this world for much longer than he remembers (how long is unclear; a year maybe?) but the dimension was trapped in a time loop, so he was reset to "fresh" each week - until the game started, when characters began to remember each week. In his memory, he spent a month in this game. Ish promised to grant a wish to anyone who murdered, so in his third week, Hickey killed a woman named Andrew, but was caught and sentenced to death at the subsequent trial. In death, he lived on as a spirit in the graveyard, where he and the other dead made a deal with Ish: they would resolve the time loop for him, and he would bring them all back to life. Long story short, both parties upheld their end, so Hickey was resurrected - but PLOT STUFF happened and all the dead were brought back as tsukumogami. Hickey's soul is bound to a cigarette case, making him immortal and giving him some minor spirit-related powers. The only way to kill him now is to permanently destroy his cigarette case, so... After all that, this motherfucker won the lottery.

Hickey's monster is haunted pocket sand a riff on an obscurus from Fantastic Beasts. He disintegrates into an Evil Mist that can change shape at will and "explode" into shockwaves like an angry little thunderstorm.

Thought Contagion | When the mist envelopes a person, it can infect their mind with varying flavors of psychological horror (causing hallucinations, hijacking their mind for nefarious purposes, memory sharing nonsense... pick your poison!)

Where Hickey himself is quietly insidious, the mist is much more volatile, prone to reacting on impulse and causing chaos just for the sake of wielding power. He is normally very controlled and calculating, so his monster is what happens when his darkest impulses and urges become untethered.