Ikrie

Tba

NAME: Gwiggs
CONTACT: McGwiggles
OTHER CHARACTERS IN THE PINES: None!



NAME: Ikrie
CANON: Horizon Zero Dawn (specifically the DLC, Into the Frozen Wilds)
CANON-POINT: After the events of the game.



HISTORY:

Born in the far-flung future of Earth, where the entirety of human culture as we know it has been all but forgotten, and robotic creatures of all shapes and sizes roam the landscape, Ikrie was abandoned as an infant, and grew up in the frozen homeland of the Banuk people, known as Ban-Ur.

The Banuk believe that the hardships of the world are challenges to be overcome. To accept these challenges and to prevail and survive in the face of them is something that is revered more than anything else.

By and large, the Banuk see themselves as a tribe of survivors - and this survivor mentality was used as a justification for Ikrie’s abandonment. An infant means two fewer hands to hunt with, after all.

Despite this, Ikrie grew up well enough. She was taken care of by other members of her tribe - at least well enough to grow up healthy - and she even had a few friends throughout her childhood. Rather than a tale of woe, she saw her parentless upbringing as a challenge to overcome, and used it as motivation to push herself forward.

Banuk culture is largely a meritocracy, with a heavy emphasis put on feats of (often physical) skill to prove one’s worth. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that a parentless child with something to prove would find herself drawn to hunting the mechanical beasts that inhabit her world. Felling an armored robot with nothing but a bow and arrow is no simple task, after all, and the people who are especially good at it become legends among her people.

So, alongside her closest friend, a girl by the name of Mailen, Ikrie trained to be a hunter - mastering the bow and spear and various other tools to be used in slaying the various robotic beasts of their world.

Ikrie was content to the capable hunter she had become. Like many Banuk, she wouldn’t turn down a challenge, of course, and she was always seeking to better herself - but she didn’t need the approval of anyone but Mailen.

Mailen, on the other hand, was not content to just be a hunter. She wanted to join the White Teeth - one of the most renowned weraks in Ban-Ur (a werak being a smaller group within the tribe). The White Teeth were a powerful and brutal group - thought to be one of the last great weraks of the Banuk - and they accepted only the strongest and most capable machine hunters and warriors into their ranks.

Mailen sought to join their ranks. And while Ikrie was somewhat indifferent to the White Teeth, she followed her friend’s lead.

And so, Ikrie and Mailen tried out for the White Teeth werak. The terms of the ordeal was that they were supposed to survive alone on a glacier for four days and four nights without any help - not from even from each other.

The point of this trial was to prove that one could survive even the most harsh situations without need for anyone else - and, amongst the Banuk, the sort of person who would accept this challenge would sooner die than accept help from someone and admit defeat.

That was fine, though - or at least, it would have been. Ikrie and Mailen were both skilled hunters, and trained in surviving in some of the more harsh conditions that Ban-Ur had to provide. They were both confident in their abilities, set to succeed this challenge and make names for themselves amongst the White Teeth.

….until Mailen lost her footing.

It happened quickly. One slip, and Mailen’s leg was broken. Stranded on a glacier that had been stocked with machines to challenge her - and the others who were auditioning had been forbidden to provide her any aid. She was probably going to die on that mountain.

Ikrie didn’t care about the rules - she would rather accept defeat and help her friend than leave Mailen to die.

Mailen would rather die than fail the initiation.

And so they remained on the glacier, at an impasse. Ikrie wanting to help, but Mailen not letting her get close enough to provide any real aid.

Four days passed, and they didn’t come down. Then the fifth day passed, and then the sixth. The White Teeth assumed them both to be dead.

Their assumed fate was mentioned to a passing traveler - a red headed young woman by the name of Aloy. Aloy was from a different tribe - the Nora - and didn’t care for Banuk customs, and when she heard that the two initiates were assumed (but not confirmed) dead, she set up the mountain to try and find them.

There she met Ikrie, who explained the situation to her. With Aloy’s help, Ikrie was able to destroy the machines that surrounded Mailen, function a splint out of robot parts, and apply it to Mailen (who, at this point, was feverish and prone to passing out due to pain and infection).

When Mailen awoke to discover that her leg had been tended to against her will, she was furious. But in the end she accepted the splint, understanding that she wasn’t going to be able to make it down the glacier without it. And even then, she was insistent upon climbing down by herself, splinted leg or no splinted leg.

When they parted, Ikrie asked Mailen to forgive her. Mailen declined.

In the end, Mailen made it back down to the White Teeth in one piece. She received the medical aid she needed and was accepted into the werak (if only because when she finally did receive aid, it was long after the 4 days had passed).

Ikrie, however, didn’t feel like she could ever belong with them. She only auditioned because of Mailen, and the White Teeth would have had her leave Mailen to die. Not to mention that Mailen was now furious with her, and unlikely to ever forgive her for what (among their people) was an intense insult.

She asked Aloy the outlander to tell the werak that she had perished up on the glacier. From there, Ikrie sought her own place in the world, unsure if she would head back deeper into Ban-Ur or leave it entirely.

This is where canon pretty much ends for her. She meets up with Aloy once more at a Hunting Grounds, makes up a challenge for them to face together, and talks about how she’s unsure about her future, but she doesn’t participate any further in the main storyline.


WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S STRENGTHS?:

- Knowledge. Simply put, Ikrie knows how to handle herself in dangerous situations. Not only does she know how to cook for herself, build a shelter, craft ammunition on the fly, and accomplish other tasks one would expect from a wilderness survivor, but she's also skilled at picking up on weaknesses of larger foes. It isn't easy to kill a robotic dinosaur using only a bow and arrow, but Ikrie knows how to do it.
- Drive. When Ikrie sets her mind to something, she does whatever she can to make sure it gets done. She doesn't give up easy.
- Compassion. Ikrie feels for the plight of her fellow human beings, particularly those who are made helpless by circumstance, and will lend a hand to others when she can.
- Reliability. Ikrie is a woman of her word. When push comes to shove, the people she cares about know that they can count on her to lend a hand (whether they want her to or not, in Mailen's case).
- Bravery. As a machine hunter, Ikrie is no stranger to risking her life. How dangerous or scary a situation might seem isn't much of a deterrent for her.

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S WEAKNESSES?:

- Stubbornness. This goes hand in hand with drive. Once Ikrie has set her mind to something, it's pretty difficult to talk her out of it - particularly when the stakes are high.
- Competitiveness. Ikrie loves to compete - even against herself at time. She can recognize when something is actually impossible, for the most part, but if it just seems extremely difficult then she's that much more excited to figure out how to do it. And then she'll do it a second time, to try and do it even faster.
- A tendency toward co-dependence. Ikrie has spent the majority of her life working in tandem with her best friend Mailen. Her fighting style is the kind where she's used to fighting back to back with someone equally capable as her. She's still getting used to not having that in her life, and she's going to have to relearn some things.
- Some minor abandonment issues. This isn't at the forefront of her mind or anything, but Ikrie's parents didn't want her and her best friend (whom she had held onto so tightly - too tightly in Mailen's opinion) is furious at her. Both of those things sucked, and Ikrie is little reluctant to make new attachments, out of fear that something like that will happen again.

WHAT EVENTS OR CIRCUMSTANCES IN YOUR CHARACTER'S PAST HAVE IMPACTED THEM THE MOST?:

So the three big things in her life are as follows:

1. Growing up knowing that her parents abandoned her. Obviously she wasn't expected to go out and hunt her own food as an infant - she was raised communally by a werak that her parents left her with. But she was almost certainly expected to help work and to start carrying her own weight much at a much younger age than kids who had nurturing parents. There wasn't a whole lot of hand-holding going on.

Despite this, Ikrie doesn't necessarily think she had a terrible childhood. But it really drove home how her people feel about survival, and influenced the kind of person she grew up to be (ie one who became very good at survival, but who'd refuse to abandon those close to her).

2. Mailen's friendship. The two grew up together and were very close. They even learned to hunt together. With no parents to speak of, Mailen was Ikrie's primary human connection. The two were so inseparable that Ikrie risked her life in an initiation for a werak she didn't care about, because it was what Mailen wanted to do and she wanted to see Mailen succeed.

3. The loss of Mailen's friendship. This one is, admittedly, a fairly recent development in Ikrie's life, but it's no doubt an important one and kind of a new chapter in Ikrie's life. Rather than joining the werak with her life-long friend like she'd thought, Ikrie is going off on her own - not sure what she's going to do yet, but it's certainly going to be different without her other half.

Ikrie went so far as to say that she was used to fighting back-to-back with someone that she trusted, and she was worried that her skills would disappear when she didn't have that. It's clear that she's going to have to re-learn some things without that co-dependency.


WHAT MOTIVATES YOUR CHARACTER?:

As one would expect from someone who grew up in a society like the Banuk, Ikrie also holds these values up as well. She’s motivated by difficult tasks (both in the world, and those she comes up with for herself) that she sees as challenges to overcome.

Likewise, her own survival is also a huge motivating factor. Like most people, Ikrie isn’t exactly eager to die, but its more than that. Among her people, surviving in the face of hard times is an almost…. holy thing. They are survivors above all else, and this is something that Ikrie reveres as well.

Unlike some Banuk, however, Ikrie holds the well-being of the people she cares about to be more important than her own survival - for example, during the White Teeth initiation she stayed up on that glacier and risked her life against the cold and against the dangerous machines because she couldn’t bear to leave her friend up there.

WHAT IMPRESSION DO OTHERS TEND TO HAVE OF YOUR CHARACTER?:

When people first meet Ikrie, they tend to get the impression that she’s confident in her abilities and driven toward whatever her current goal is. Additionally, I think this confidence, combined with the fact that she tends to accept challenges and rush headfirst into them, can be pretty easily be construed as arrogance and possibly even recklessness.

IN WHAT WAYS DOES THAT IMPRESSION DIFFER FROM WHO YOUR CHARACTER REALLY IS?:

Ikrie has a pretty realistic view of how skilled she really is - she just really is quite skilled.

The fact that she tends to go after big challenges isn’t a symptom of arrogance, but rather she thinks of the challenge itself as virtuous. Any goal she doesn’t live up to, or challenge she doesn’t overcome on the first try, is a means to learn from her mistakes and improve herself. That forward drive can be easily perceived as recklessness, but at the core of it I don’t think that’s what it is.

HOW DOES YOUR CHARACTER HANDLE CRISIS OR ADVERSITY?:

Like many of her people, Ikrie believes that adversity is core to life itself. The challenges one is presented with can either be overcome or they can overcome you - accepting these challenges and surviving them is a sacred write that everyone must face.

WHICH 5 THINGS WILL YOUR CHARACTER REMEMBER UPON ARRIVAL, AND WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THEM?:

- The fact that her parents abandoned her as an infant. This is something Ikrie thinks of as her first challenge in life, and it’s a big part of what shaped her.
- Mailen’s face, but not her name. For pretty much Ikrie’s entire life, Mailen was the most important person in the world to her. She’s a pretty significant figure.
- The fact that Mailen is angry at her, and she isn’t likely to be forgiven. Again, Mailen was a pretty significant figure in her life. The loss of that figure from Ikrie’s life is also significant.
- Memories of spending most of her life living in temporary, tipi-like structures in the frozen mountains. I think this will provide a nice contrast from the suburban buildings of Wayward Pines and make them feel kind of wrong to her.
- The appearance of various machines throughout her homeland, and the dangers associated with them. Mostly I just think this one will confuse her. What do you mean there aren’t robot T-Rexes running around outside the fence?

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU FEEL WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER?:

I can’t think of anything right now!


SKILLS, ABILITIES, & PHYSICAL WEAKNESSES:

Ikrie iis, primarily, a skilled hunter and survivalist.
This means that she knows how to track, she knows how to shoot a bow, use a spear, and various other weapons, she can find water and she knows how to purify it, she can hunt wild game, and she knows how to clean, prepare and cook said game.

INVENTORY:

Warm, banuk-made clothing
Hunter’s Bow (a compound bow made of robot parts) & arrows
Blast Sling (Basically a big slingshot that launches hand-made bombs) & ammunition.
Spear



PROSE-HEAVY:
Example 1

DIALOGUE-HEAVY:
Example 2