Cornelius Hickey

angelo & hickey • late july, mutineers' hill • arrival
angelo & hickey • early august, temporary camp • chatting in the tent
angelo & hickey • late august, terror camp • spotting the ships
angelo & hickey • sept 1, ice floe camp • tuunbaq attack
angelo & hickey • early sept, hms terror • boarding terror (fellas it's gay)
angelo & tozer • early sept, forecastle • dog to dog communication
angelo & hickey • early sept, on deck • bark bark bark
angelo & hickey • early sept, angelo's cabin • coat!
angelo & hickey • early sept, hickey's cabin • 🌶️
angelo & tozer • mid sept, cargo hold • the dogs are unionizing
angelo & hickey • mid sept, greatroom • tozer stuff and captain stuff
angelo, hickey, & tozer • early oct, terror bay • discovering the camp (little rescue mission)
angelo & hickey • early oct, hickey's cabin • decompressing after the horrors
hodgson & tozer • early oct, sick bay • npc uprising
angelo & hickey • early nov, forecastle • IDK YET I'LL UPDATE THIS LATER

comments

spotsalone @ 2030-04-09T16:23:00

2025-04-09T20:27:36Z

credit

comments

rubilykskoye info;

2025-04-05T02:28:31Z

ABOUT

PREFS

MONSTER

CODE CREDIT

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

CWS & OPT OUT

CWS

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.

OPT OUT

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HISTORY

CWS & FULL HISTORY

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.

FORMATIVE EVENTS

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.

SKILLS & IMMORTALITY

SKILLS

Manipulation: Hickey is a master of identifying weak spots in others and using them as leverage to further his own agenda. He's charismatic and confident enough to get away with some frankly ridiculous lies, and he knows how to deploy measured doses of compassion and tenderness to really secure his hold on others. He's so practiced at manipulation that it's become a cornerstone of his personality; he can't turn it off.

Adaptability: Hickey is a scrappy opportunist. He thrives in chaos, can read situations very quickly, and can pretty much always find a way to twist a situation to his advantage, even if only through his own perspective. He's always on the lookout for opportunities and has total confidence in his own ability to come out ahead in the end.

Strategic Thinking: His adaptability allows him to roll with the punches, but Hickey is also always thinking ahead. He's able to quickly create long-term plans while still allowing for flexibility should his situation change unexpectedly. He knows when to act and when to hold back.

Leadership: Through a combination of the above skills, Hickey is a natural leader. He's confident and able to juggle the various moving parts of commanding a team through executing a plan, but he's also able to hold their attention long-term by playing to their strengths and appealing to their weaknesses. He also will let any form of leadership go to his head, but in some ways that just makes him all the more powerful. He's got the cult leader thing locked in.

Self Control: Hickey lives and dies by practicality, and thus is very rarely driven by his emotions. He can keep his eyes on his goals and suffer through a significant amount of emotional or physical discomfort to achieve them. Internally, he's very honest with himself, so he's able to stay grounded through most challenges sent his way.

IMMORTALITY Hickey is just a normal guy in canon, but in Bellelurette, he was killed and then revived, making him immortal in the process. He's a tsukumogami, and for the purposes of Belle, that means his soul is now housed in an inanimate object (a cigarette case) and he can only be permanently killed if his object is destroyed beyond repair. Since he can't come into the game with anything on him, he'll be arriving as a disembodied soul that will need to possess another object before he can animate his body.

What this means in Rubi:

He doesn't age, and he doesn't need to eat or drink to stay alive (although he does need to sleep).

He's stronger, faster, and more durable than the average human (not so much superhuman as the absolute peak of what would be realistically possible).

When his human body takes damage, his possessed object mirrors that damage, and he can heal his wounds by repairing his object. He can still be "killed" enough to require revival in-game if he's injured badly enough to render him incapable of fixing his object (although someone else could repair it for him).

Too much damage to his possessed object may have psychological effects, such as memory loss.

He has heightened sensitivity to the supernatural, meaning he can see ghosts and other souls, as well as generally sense the supernatural (which I'm defining as "ghost stuff" rather than magic in general).

When he's possessing a cigarette case, he can semi-infinitely replenish the supply of cigarettes inside.

He can theoretically extract his soul from one object and house it in another, but the process is very exhausting and probably painful, not unlike resurrection in game. While he's a free-floating soul, he can talk and move around at will, but his body is rendered catatonic. Spending too much time as a pure soul will eventually cause him to fade and die permanently. Gotta stay grounded, bro.

He can take control of his possessed object to move it around poltergeist-style and speak through it. The object can only skitter along at the pace of a brisk walk (it can't float/fly). While in "object mode", his body stays conscious and vaguely aware of his surroundings (he might hear someone speaking to him but not be able to make out exactly what they're saying, for example). He can't "pilot" both his body and his object at the same time. It gets more difficult to maintain this connection as the distance between them increases, and if he gets too far away (or something breaks his concentration abruptly) he might snap out of his body completely and wind up stuck in his object until he closes the distance again.

PERMISSIONS

Y TOUCHING Y KISSING Y SEX Y - let's talk first for anything major POWERS USE Y - let's talk first for anything major but otherwise he very much deserves it INJURY Y - let's talk first but tbh i'll probably be down death M - extended fight scenes are not my jam but i'm down for quick ones, or summarizing/handwaving FIGHT SCENES

Y - but hey uh love yourself why do you want this??? SHIPPING M - don't tell him he's fictional but PLEASE bring up the real-world Franklin Expedition if your character knows about it FOURTH-WALLING Y - very down, i am slow :') BACKTAGGING M - open to it for public network threads, but please don't tag in on a tag that hasn't yet been responded to by either myself or my thread partner THREADJACKING see kinklist for hard nos, otherwise open to discussing most things! OOC HARD LIMITS

PREFERENCES

SMUT full kinklist
(i cribbed this from harlan's sheet so WIP THIS IS NOT ICLY ACCURATE but i'm leaving it for now) knifeplay
bloodplay
aphro/sex pollen
clothed sex
dirty talk
marking/claiming
possessiveness/jealousy
edging
praise lol
dubcon
cnc

HORROR psychological horror
uncanny horror
survival/environmental horror
existential horror
comedy horror :D
torture/gore
ghosts!
abusive/toxic relationships
mind control
self sacrifice
trauma/tragic backstories
necessary evil

MONSTER

appearance

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.

POWER LIST

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!)

behavior

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.

comments

hwylryn; pc catchall

2025-03-17T00:54:23Z

i'll make this look nice later!!!!!!!!!!!!!

comments

angelo; pc catchall

2025-03-16T02:30:09Z

i'll make this look nice later~~~

comments

shiv; pc catchall

2025-03-16T02:05:16Z

i'll make this look nice later

comments

sariel; pc catchall

2025-03-11T19:58:54Z