Phineas Gale Gartley

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First name: Phineas

Middle Name: Gale

Last Name: Hartley

Name meaning: 

“Oracle of the jovial hart field” // 

“One with fear and foresight in a field of joyful creatures”

Age: 32 in 1959

Gender: Male

Pronouns: He/him

Species: Human // Spider splicer

Date of birth: May 30, 1928

Zodiac Sign: ♊️

Sexuality: Asexual Aromantic

Profession/job: Stage actor

Birthplace: Louisiana

Current home: Fort Frolic, Rapture, holed up in an abandoned clothing boutique

Wealth status: Low-middle class, though he mingled with higher-class people at Cohen’s behest

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〚 Bio 〛

”Go on an’ show those city slickers how to light up that stage. Just remember… if this acting thing don’t work out the way you planned, there ain’t never any shame in comin’ home.

”Knock ‘em dead, kiddo. We love you.”

Phineas grew up on a farm in Louisiana for the duration of his early life, spending his childhood tending fields and caring for livestock with little else to do on their isolated property. As he aged he found himself inexplicably drawn to the theater, and began harboring dreams of becoming a famous actor. These aspirations only grew along with him as the years went by, and once he reached adulthood he wished his family the best and left for New York to make himself a star. He was the first of his siblings to leave the house, breaking a long tradition of humble farming lives that tore a rift between him and his family; while his departure was more bitter than sweet, his parents still gave him what they could so that he’d have the best shot at surviving in the big city, even if they didn’t necessarily approve of his choice.

The acting business, he soon found, was slow-going. Few theaters were even in season upon his arrival, and those that were hosting shows had no work to offer him. Left with no other options, he found a job in a café across the street from his favorite theater and spent two months waiting tables with his lifelong dream just a sheet of glass away. After awhile, his longing stares through the café window caught the attention of a certain eccentric playwright, whose original musical had just arrived in town. 

Endeared by the young man’s rapturous dedication to the arts, the playwright introduced himself as Sander Cohen and offered him a seat at the evening showing. Tremendously thankful, Phineas agreed, and while the play itself was a bit too garish for his liking, Cohen’s charity had bought his loyalty hook, line, and sinker. He took him under his wing as a protege — as the artist would come to do often in Rapture — and offered him work backstage with the promise of eventually climbing the ranks all the way to the stage. Phineas did not get the chance to see if this would come to pass, however, as not long afterwards an old friend named Andrew Ryan came knocking on Cohen’s door with a preposition that he could not refuse.

”Mister Hartley, I sense a fire in you — yes, a passion for the stage! It is a yearning that you and I both share. The spirit of the artist demands creation, freedom…! A dead end job like this will only snuff yours out. But... if you are interested in seeing it grow, then I might have just the proposition for you…”

Phineas was invited to Rapture by Cohen on the condition that he continued to work for him, a deal to which he agreed almost instantaneously. There was little thought or deliberation involved in his decision to follow his mentor to the underwater city; the moving process was a blur of excitement and star-spangled promises, and by the time the smoke had cleared enough to really consider what had just happened, he was already standing on the balcony of the performance hall with Cohen’s three other protégés, watching the Welcoming Show with sea salt in his lungs.

The first few months of his life in Rapture were like a dream — which is to say that they were fast-paced, nonsensical, and more than a little disorienting upon awakening on the other side. Cohen’s mentorship was exhausting, even with most of the artist’s attention being focused on his other three protégés. As Phineas didn’t quite have their level of experience, he was set to work as a stage hand while Cohen ’trained’ him to be a performer. This training encompassed not only his acting career but his personal life as well, teaching him how to think, speak, and behave like the other Fort Frolic personalities. He attended Cohen’s high-class parties, socialized only with Cohen-approved names, and spent hours backstage making sure that every Cohen performance went off without a hitch. He lived and breathed Fort Frolic, and while anyone else might have recognized this sort of identity-shaping process as manipulative and invasive, Phineas was as new to Rapture as he was to independent life, and he trusted Sander Cohen — the man who’d plucked him from his life on the surface and given him the dream he’d always wanted — to guide him through them both. This trust, he would too-soon learn, was deeply misplaced.

”I don’t really get outta Fort Frolic much, but Mister Cohen says I’m gettin’ — sorry, getting — real close to my first real casting! After that, there’s nowhere I can’t go.”

As Sander had expected, Phineas performed well in his first few roles and, after of several years of climbing up to a more prominent casting, rose quickly to fame. His popularity was helped along by the narrative of him being the ideal underdog — a poor southern kid climbing the ranks and becoming a star — and some clever marketing helped to push this image to the forefront of his public identity. Ryan (who’d made a habit of seeing at least one Cohen production a month to spare himself the passive-aggressive nagging that would ensue if he missed too many) approved of the message this sent, further encouraging the characterization. 

All at once, each and every aspect of his life was carefully coordinated to maximize his fame, and he felt less in control than he’d ever been. However “prepared” he’d been, this change was overwhelming for Phineas, and his social presence began to suffer as a result. He started to take solace in the other protégés, Kyle Fitzpatrick, Silas Cobb, Martin Finnegan, and Hector Rodriguez, who were surprisingly receptive to him despite the fact that he’d drawn away much of their spotlight. Life continued this way for two long years, and despite how well he’d been trained to put on a show for the crowd, he couldn’t keep up the act forever.

His exhaustion and unease eventually caught up to him and started to reflect poorly in his work; this earned him a great deal of criticism from Cohen, who only worked him harder in response. Having learned to trust his mentor’s word at the expense of all else, he took his disapproval to heart and poured all he had into keeping the artist happy. Phineas was desperate not to disappoint the man who’d given him everything, but the more he worked, the worse his health became, and the harsher Cohen reprimanded him.

”I just gotta… Got to give it one more try. I promise, Mr. Cohen, I’ll do it right this time…”

Around this time, plasmids were beginning to rapidly dominate Rapture’s society, and Fort Frolic was one of the places that was hit hardest by the sudden explosion of ADAM use. The world changed almost overnight, and as with any other trend, the most prominent faces were expected to be at the forefront of its development. Phineas resisted for as long as he could — he’d grown up during the arsenic pesticide scare and now hesitated to trust chemical technologies — but eventually the pressure became too much and, at a party one night, he started using Incinerate! recreationally. Due to the plasmid’s unintended bonus effect of making him “brighter” —  bold, animated, and more awake in spite of his chronic exhaustion — this casual usage quickly spiraled into addiction.

His stardom came to an end when Cohen, having begun his descent off of the deep end due to his own plasmid use, scripted and directed a play that reflected his increasingly-unsettled mental state and cast Phineas in the starring role. The play, predictably, was a flop, and not even the profound efforts of a desperate-for-work cast and a drug-elated Phineas could save it from being a career-ruining failure. Phineas naturally blamed himself and was crushed by its scathing reception, but Cohen, fueled by either manic self-confidence or his last shred of self-awareness, attributed its lack of success to the “doubters” and assured the distraught performer that he had done everything right. Still, though, he was pulled from subsequent shows to save face while Cohen once again took it upon himself to “prepare him for his blazing comeback!”. This meant further lessons and the promise of writing him back into the spotlight with a production that would “make all those doubters choke on their nerve.”

“You’ll burn them all to cinders, boy. Then they’ll see the light…”

Phineas wasn’t convinced, but by this point there was not much that he could do. Cohen’s mental state was growing worse by the day, and he himself wasn’t doing much better — the copious amounts of Incinerate! that he’d consumed just to keep up with his previous schedule were starting to take their toll on him, causing lesions and growths on his skin as well as worsening his preexisting psychological insecurity. His condition was noticed by Cohen, who recommend that he visit Doctor Lamb to sort himself out. He started seeing her infrequently, though his reluctance to discuss Cohen in a negative light made it hard for her to make much progress with him. 

However unhelpful the appointments themselves, though, being directly confronted with just how terrified he was of his mentor’s disapproval was enough to get him thinking a bit more critically about his situation. This dilemma came to a head after Cohen eventually did lose it, revealing his more homicidal endeavors to a shell-shocked Fitzpatrick, who was able to warn Phineas of their boss’s intentions before he could get drawn in like he himself had.

Phineas fled Fort Frolic in 1956 and went into hiding until the civil war ultimately left him stranded in a shopping district near Market Street. He resided in an abandoned women’s clothing boutique with his survival partner, former mercenary Harvey Gunter, until his eventual death in 1959.

”Take a bow, Mr. Hartley. Your show is at an end.”

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〚 Appearance 〛

 Phineas has light brown eyes, small, sunken features, and sallow skin. His short, honey-blonde hair is usually brushed to sweep over his left eye, which is also covered by a bandage that wraps around the top of his head. He wears a white dress shirt underneath a striped brown vest with matching slacks. His arms and legs are visibly swathed in bandages, small patches of blood speckling the places where he has bled through. Without them on, it is clear that they are hiding the previous locations of Adam-induced growths, which — if the clusters of uneven incisions that frame the blotches of scar tissue is anything to go by — have since been crudely removed only to never fully heal. His skin is is covered in the remnants of these growths, clouds of reddened, blistering flesh mottling his body like mold on bread. His frame is thin and wiry, muscles perpetually tense as if he were angry or stressed. Half of the time, he is visibly restless — eyes darting rapidly about, limbs twitching uneasily as if preemptively reacting to something, shifting his weight and fidgeting anxiously, rarely ever still. The other half is spent in an almost opposite state — sagging shoulders, unkempt clothes, sunken, exhausted eyes, and an even more pronounced thinness that almost borders on skeletal; he is either agitated and panic-stricken or shell-shocked and forlorn with almost no in-between. All in all, you get the feeling that the guy’s either the least-subtle Persephone escapee this side of the Atlantic or somebody spiked his fifteen cups of coffee with every drug known to man. When you make eye contact, though, the lucidity suggested by his expression is startlingly genuine, and it leaves you unsettled for the rest of the evening.

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〚 Personality 〛

Phineas, naturally, is a highly anxious person. A people pleaser to the end, he always seems to be hyper-conscious of how others perceive him and while he is usually able to resist the temptation to worry over them, he still struggles to do so interpersonally and often finds himself impulsively policing his behavior to accommodate whoever he is with. He is motivated by the desire to make something good of himself despite the terrible situation he and the other residents of Rapture have found themselves in, though his neurotic way of dealing with this problem often does him more harm than good. He suffers from sudden and intense mood swings — one moment he will be even-tempered, sedate, and fairly levelheaded, the next he’ll be either neck-deep in a depressive stupor or huffy and hotheaded with mania. 

While most of this can be accredited to long-term plasmid (ab)use, some of these instabilities stem from undiagnosed mental health issues that he was never able to properly address; many of his symptoms overlap with Bipolar Depression and it is likely that he also suffers from complex PTSD due to the prolonged psychological stress of working under Cohen from such a young age. He doesn’t like to address these issues head-on, as the possibility of having something like that scares him — however much he agonizes over them, his failures are far easier to think about when they are HIS mistakes rather than the fault of a disorder that he can’t control — so he avoids talking about them as much as he can. 

Phineas is a fairly private person who dislikes confronting problems directly and ignores whichever ones he can. He understands how difficult he can be to be around and tries not to “inflict” himself on other people, though he genuinely does enjoy spending time with others and — save for a few bristly moments or two — can be a reliable and dedicated friend who always seeks to help in whatever ways he can. Cautiously optimistic by nature, though he’d never admit it out loud.

General Happiness: 5

Social Level: 4

Introvert/Extrovert: Introvert

General Personality type: INFP

Likes: 

💛 Warmth and firelight💛

❤️ Old books❤️

💚 Quiet 💚

💙 Hearing people humming or doing other calm, leisurely activities💙

💜 Trust💜

Dislikes:

❌ Cold environments (except for snowy/mildly chilly weather, which were common on his farm growing up and remembers very fondly) ❌

❌ Long, shrill noises or overlapping voices ❌

❌ Garish parties, expensive food, or other overt displays of wealth (participating in them makes him feel uncomfortable)  ❌

❌ Talking about himself ❌

❌ Being pried for personal information (feeling out-of-control of the conversation) ❌

Good Traits: 

✅ Dedicated, hardworking ✅

✅ Quick to adapt  ✅

✅ Sensitive to others’ emotions  ✅

✅ Compassionate ✅

✅ Has a genuine desire to do good and improve himself  ✅

✅ Idealistic, persistent  ✅

✅ Prioritizes others’ well-being over his own, especially in interpersonal relationships  ✅

Bad Traits: 

💢 Heavily emotional with poor emotional control 💢

💢 Reclusive, reticent, and passive-aggressive 💢

💢 Tends to seek out the victim position through excessive self-deprecation rather than recognize his mistakes as conscious choices 💢

💢 Makes selfish decisions if he feels as if they can be justified. 💢

💢 Internalizes his feelings until they make him miserable 💢

💢 Takes things personally, responds poorly to negative feedback 💢

💢Self-deprecating 💢

💢 Addicted to Incinerate! and suffers from mood instabilities that heighten his preexisting anxiety and depressive tendencies. As a result, he is prone to outbursts of anger or hostility and has sporadic, unpredictable emotional states that manifest most often as irritability and inconsistent behaviors and motivations. 💢

Fears: 

❗️Losing control

❗️Becoming physically mutated by plasmids

❗️Losing those closest to him

❗️Being betrayed or misled

❗️Cohen finding him

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"Sometimes I miss sunsets. You forget how much those scarce few minutes of calm mean to you until you look outside at the end of the day and it’s all just... blue.”

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〚 Skills & Abilities 〛

Weapons: A half-functional pistol that he is reluctant to use and two removable hay baling hooks (traditional spider splicer hooks)

Plasmids: Incinerate!

Combat style: Jittery and uncoordinated, more focused on distracting the enemy long enough to flee rather than inflicting any real damage. He’s easily outmatched physically, so he has to seek the upperhand in tactics, agility, and surprise attacks.

Weaknesses:

🥀 Easily overwhelmed

🥀 Physically weak

🥀 Tends to push people away

🥀 Loses most of his self-awareness while upset, often saying or doing things that he regrets

🥀 Aggressive and stubborn

Strengths: 

⭐️ Kindhearted and sincere with those he trusts, helping them in any way he can

⭐️ Exceedingly loyal to the people he loves

⭐️ Empathetic and protective

⭐️ Wants to be a good person and is always willing to correct his mistakes

⭐️ Good singing voice

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Other: 

💠 Speaks with a slight Southern accent that is more prominent when he’s aggressive or exhausted. He took vocal lessons while under Cohen to try and get rid of it, but it never completely left him.  💠

💠 Likes scotch and cider. Doesn’t really enjoy most other kinds of alcohol.  💠

💠 Has a big sweet tooth, but he doesn’t like the taste of most expensive candies like you find in Rapture.  💠

💠 Did not know that he was growing up during the Great Depression until the crisis ended. His parents put so much effort into trying to give him a proper childhood in spite of their financial difficulty that he started to accept the devastating environment around him as normal — he understood more about the situation than they thought he did, so when they tried to hide the truth with indirect answers and vague assurances that everything was fine, he just learned not to question it when the people he trusted lied to him. It was all for his sake, right?  💠

💠 Is deeply put off by the presence of Little Sisters due to Cohen’s involvement in their abduction and abuse. He’s got nothing against them, but is too unnerved by their presence to offer any kind of help unless seriously pushed to do so. The fact that he’s got absolutely no chance of taking down a Big Daddy doesn’t help either.  💠

Character Theme Song: Icarus — Bastille

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