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[Sep. 21st, 2010|01:35 pm] |
all about you
name/alias: Kel
18+?: oh yes.
Time Zone: EST
Contact: (AIM or OOC dropbox) havocdogsofwar
all about them
Name: Steven Vincent Price
PB: Geoffrey Rush
Character Age: 45
Source Material: House On Haunted Hill (remake)
FOR PATIENTS:
Diagnoses: Adjustment Disorder following a nervous breakdown; delusional disorder (mixed with occult leanings); hypomanic personality
Room Number & Roommate: second floor, no roommate, isolated at the end of the hallway.
Personality:
A hypomanic personality, Steven is often highly energetic. Before his breakdown, this was channeled into his work but since the break, the energy is unfocused and sometimes causes jitters. He is privately cynical and publicly witty, though he prefers his own company. He is unnaturally interested in the sexual exploits of others, to the point where he had his wife followed for the sole reason of being able to know of and vicariously observe her infidelity.
History:
Steven Price has come from a long line of affluent men. His grandfather, Thomas Steven Price, was an electrotherapist at the famed Vannacutt Sanitarium. However, Thomas was not simply a medical professional, but a slightly off-kilter sadist who aided Dr. Vannacutt in multiple vivisections, electrocutions, and other grisly procedures at the Sanitarium.
In 1931, a riot broke out in the sanitarium, and Thomas was one of the six survivors who had managed to escape both the rioting patients and the fire that consumed most of the building by hiding in the basement. Thomas and his wife moved briefly out of the city, but returned nearly twenty years later, with two children in tow. Richard Thomas Price was the eldest, and he followed in Thomas' footsteps, becoming a psychiatrist and marrying an RN by the name of Ellen Flagg.
Richard and Ellen had one son, Steven Vincent Price. Steven inherited a rather sizeable fortune at the age of twenty five, when Richard and Ellen died in a car crash. Neither Richard nor Ellen had ever told their son about his grandfather, or his involvement in the Vannacutt riots, or that Thomas was diagnosed with mental illnesses in his later life.
It was Steven who created Price Amusement Parks, combining a childhood fascination with scary adrenaline highs and the thrills of a roller-coaster based amusement park. The first Price Amusement Park opened in 1979, and Steven quickly built an entire empire on his "thrill parks."
He married at age thirty, to Miss Evelyn Stockard, a young but unpolished "country girl" from Kansas. He met her while on a location scout, searching for a large tract of land to become the next Price Amusement Park. It was a whirlwind courtship, and Steven had proposed within six months; they were married within the year.
Steven quickly turned the large family inheritance into a multi-million dollar net worth, and lavished his wife with gifts, nearly unlimited spending power, and yearly themed birthday parties; the Son of Sam hunt was Evelyn's favorite. However, as Evelyn gained more and more sophistication and more entry into the world of Steven's peers, their marriage quickly soured. Though they did love each other, Evelyn began to despise her husband, having infidelity after infidelity. Steven's well-polished manner and good breeding won him nothing but more spite from his wife as she accused him endlessly of being homosexual.
Over the years, the civil tolerance they had for one another had eroded as Evelyn began poorly disguised attempts on Steven's life, inciting in him a kind of paranoia and he began to have her followed. After two failed attempts--poisoned Kool-Aid, and a stabbing--Evelyn began to use her opportunities more carefully.
In 1999, Steven found out that Evelyn had been carrying on a long-standing affair with Dr. Donald W. Blackburn, which did nothing but push his paranoia closer and closer to the surface. When Evelyn's birthday rolled around that year, she demanded her birthday party be held at the Vannacutt Mansion, the rebuilt site of the Vannacutt Sanitarium.
Though neither Steven nor Evelyn knew, they were both descendants of Vannacutt survivors; Evelyn's grandmother, Ruth-Ann Stockard, had been a nurse at the same facility. However, when Steven looked into buying the facility for the weekend, he found out the whole sordid story. He shredded the two hundred names that Evelyn had sent him as a guest list, and instead, invited the living descendants of the fire survivors; himself and Evelyn, Jennifer Jenzen (descended from Adolphus Jenzen, electroshock therapist), Eddie Baker (descended from pathologist Franklin Baker), and Melissa Marr (descended from Vannacutt's surgeon, Jasper Marr.) Also included on the guest list was his wife's lover, Donald Blackburn.
With paranoia in high gear, Steven began the preparations for the party. He installed one of his amusement park technicians in the house, to control several cameras and scare-tactic mechanics; automatically closing doors, a film projector that would project gruesome and/or disturbing "ghosts" into various rooms, and a control bank to control the "faulty" flickering lights throughout the majority of the house.
What Steven didn't prepare for was the failure of the old lock-down mechanism, which dropped foot-thick lead plates over every door and window in the building. Locked in until the following morning, when the clean-up crew would come in to clean up the remains of the party, all attendees of the party became more than a little edgy, Steven included.
At his wife's goading, he revealed his stash of "party favors," guns loaded with blanks which had the clips welded shut. Unknown to him, Evelyn had replaced the blanks with genuine bullets, with the ultimate hope that someone would either kill Steven that night, or someone else would be killed and she could frame Steven for that murder. Either way, she didn't care.
The electronics worked to Evelyn's advantage; everything that happened made the entire party more jumpy. The flickering ghosts unsettled the women, the noises and thuds and creaks made everyone so uneasy that they decided to explore the house. Breaking up into pairs, Steven followed his wife into one of the bedrooms, confronting her about the intention of the party. Evelyn accused him of wanting to murder her, while he accused her of the same thing, bringing the past indiscretions to life.
Melissa Marr was the first casualty; Blackburn got rid of her and dropped her body into the darkened basement, blocked off for construction and remodeling. He returned alone, telling the others that he and Melissa had gotten separated, and he'd heard her screaming.
Everyone turned on Price, wanting to know what he'd done with her, believing the screams to be part of Price's scare tactics. To prove his innocence, he led them to the control room where he'd set his tricks up, only to find that the employee he'd left in charge had been murdered as well.
Almost as soon as they found the body, the lights in the building started flickering, and one of the hidden cameras Steven had had placed in the rooms showed that Evelyn was being electrocuted by one of the old machines that had not yet been removed. Blackburn and the others found her, pronounced her dead, and blamed Steven, even though he had been with the others when Evelyn was found.
The others returned to the main hallway, trying to force one of the metal plates away from the window so they could escape. Blackburn, meanwhile, resurrected Evelyn, who had only been "playing" dead in an induced chemical coma. Confessing that she'd only married Steven for his money, Evelyn murders Blackburn, saying that she needs a bigger body count to convince the police that Steven was the killer.
When Blackburn's body is found, the others accused Steven of murdering Evelyn and Blackburn both, because Evelyn had been having an affair with Blackburn. Paranoia mounting, panic closing in, Steven tried to convince the other survivors that he had not been responsible for it.
Evelyn appeared, in the same bloodstained nightgown she'd died in, saying that Steven had been the one to put her on the table, then disappeared from the room again like a ghost. Price charged after her, and during the scuffle to restrain him, he was shot.
The next thing Steven remembered was coming to with a sore chest. The bulletproof vest he'd worn under his shirt had paid off, and he was determined to actually commit the murder that everyone believed him guilty of anyway. He was now 100% certain that every other person in the house was out to get him, that they'd conspired with Evelyn to force him into a frame-up.
Heading to the attic, Steven intended to destroy the lock-down mechanism, making sure they were all trapped in the house with him and could not get away. Instead, he found the others already there, trying to spring the master switch. The woman who shot him had screamed, believing him to be a ghost as well, and swore that she hadn't meant to hurt him. Price did not listen, and massacred all three remaining survivors.
At the gunshots, Evelyn raced up the stairs, hoping to reveal herself to the survivors and say that her death had all been set up as a joke to scare the scare master himself, but instead came face to face with Steven. Seeing her there in front of him, Steven shoved her down the flight of stairs leading up to the attic, and he clearly heard her neck snap as she landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
Price was found the next morning, bloodstained and laughing hysterically with an empty gun in his lap.
A court-ordered psychiatric screening reported that Steven had had a moderately severe psychotic break when he believed his wife was dead, and that his increasingly manic behavior was due to that breakdown. He also demonstrated a clean break with reality, insisting that the deaths had been due to the ghosts of Vannacutt and his patients, all the while describing in minute detail the "ghosts" on his film projector. He had insisted that the guns had been loaded with blanks, though forensic checks had proven them to be real bullets, and identification checks had proven that Jennifer Jenzen was actually Sara Wolfe, who had intercepted Jenzen's invite, and that Eddie Baker had been adopted.
Despite all the evidence presented to him, Steven still could not comprehend what had happened in the Vannacutt House, and he was pronounced unfit to stand trial. Instead, he was shuffled into a state hospital, then when his estate was released from escrow, the lawyers had him moved to private facilities, ending with Meadowsweet. |
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