Wheatley (Portal 2)

[machinavellian]

✖ PLAYER:
Name & LJ: Xel; xelias
Birthdate & Age: 2/18/1987; 25
Characters played in Zodion: Zevran (Dragon Age) and Ethan (Heavy Rain)

✖ CHARACTER:
Name: Wheatley
Canon: Portal 2

PB/Image:

Welp, normally Wheatley's a little metal sphere. Like so: http://portal.biringa.com/images/9/94/Wheatley.png Clearly this will not do in Zodion, so we're stuffing him into a human body. His PB will be Stephen Merchant (http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmar607pkJ1qj1upu.jpg), who not only possesses the optimal combination of cute/average/awkward required of a Wheatley PB, he's also his voice actor. C:

Info links: http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Wheatley
Canon Point: Post-game.
Gender: Male
Age: Unknown; he's an AI, so it's difficult to say for certain. Best guess is anywhere between a couple decades and a couple centuries.

Birthdate/Sign:

July 23 (not canon). This date plants him squarely on the Leo end of the Cancer-Leo cusp, which suits him incredibly well. Generally speaking, Wheatley certainly is a Leo from top to bottom: when we first meet him, he's charming, positive, highly social, and does his best to put on an air of confidence even when he has little to be confident about. He's friendly as all get out, has a lot of pride, is quick to boast of his accomplishments, and benevolently patronizes Chell from time to time as they travel together. On the flip side, he shows himself to be insecure, arrogant, prone to impulsive fits of anger, and incredibly self-indulgent. He is highly pleasure-seeking and will go to great lengths to receive the gratification he wants. He's more sensitive than he lets on, and it's obvious that he nurses slights and holds grudges—nurtures them, even, to the point of distorting the actual truth. He falls into the leader (or, well, dictator) role with incredible zeal as soon as he's gotten a taste of power. Not a particularly good leader, mind you, but an enthusiastic one nonetheless.

sources:
http://astrology-online.com/leo.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20100102222916/http://novareinna.com/constellation/leodecans.html
http://www.alwaysastrology.com/cancer-leo-cusp.html

Tattoo: Left shoulder/chest, small (maybe an inch), below his collarbone.

Suitability:

I don't know if this is necessary, but just to cover my bases... Wheatley's not human, is the thing. He's also, let's not mince words here, dumb as hell. There's a little bit of a naive quality there, but most of Wheatley's simplicity comes from his preprogrammed inability to make smart decisions. But so while his understanding of sex is gonna be quite limited as he comes in, finding himself suddenly not a little metal sphere, I'm confident in his ability to hack it. At the very least, he's no stranger to the concept of pleasure; his responses to the test euphoria are pretty unambiguously sexual. He's also been known to use or at least be aware of a little bit of innuendo, like when he tells Chell that he knows it sounds rude, but she needs to "stick [him] in" a plug on the wall. So while he'll likely completely lack the sexual mores and reservations that most people have in the face of his own pleasure, I don't anticipate it being more than he can handle.

This is doubly true now that he's returning after already spending some time in Zodion; he's not terribly emotionally mature, but he's better off than he was before.

Power:

He hasn't got any powers to speak of that could carry over, so hey. Let's give Wheatley the ability to manipulate fire. That cannot possibly go wrong.

Personality:

Wheatley is—how should I put this—not very smart. It's not his fault, really, it's just the way he was designed. Wheatley is an Intelligence Dampening Sphere; he was created for the express purpose of attaching to GLaDOS and interfering with her mental processes with a constant stream of terrible ideas, thereby rendering her less dangerous. So it makes sense that, in his natural state, Wheatley is benign and somewhat meek. When we first meet him, he's really quite friendly and helpful, or tries to be, anyway. Due to his aforementioned tendency to make the worst decisions, his thought processes are highly scattered and he usually ends up making things worse. As you'd probably expect of an entity for whom this is hardwired, he's not very self-aware about it. On the contrary, actually, he's rather overly assured of his own competence despite a steady history of making catastrophic mistakes. He'll be contrite and apologize for making them, sure, but each idea appears just as clever to him as the last up until the moment it goes pear-shaped.

So maybe it's less apt to say Wheatley is stupid and more accurate to say that he's simply designed to do stupid things. This is just splitting hairs, semantics, maybe. But Wheatley would probably argue that there's a world of difference, if he understood himself well enough, but he clearly finds the revelation about his own programming deeply upsetting and is quick to deny it. He doesn't believe he's a moron. Or at least, he really doesn't want to be thought of as a moron. And once he's gotten a taste of something beyond his inborn powerlessness, calling him a moron triggers violent rage. One gets the sense that he's really insecure about the way others feel about him—being plugged into GLaDOS' chassis corrupted him, sure, but the way he recounts interactions with Chell from earlier in the game shows that he has a very distorted account that is positively steeped in insecurity. He accuses Chell of silently judging him throughout their escape, using him for her own purposes from the start, secretly being BFFs with GLaDOS the entire time, and consistently misjudging his intelligence. He doesn't understand why she couldn't just be happy for him and his new rise to power; he doesn't understand why she can't just let him have the pleasure that he seeks from testing. Surely she's really just an awful person who has betrayed him, and has been all along. Wheatley is kind to Chell in the beginning and appears to like her, though his attitude toward her can often be characterized as gently condescending. We get the sense that he doesn't regard humans very highly and holds the opinion that they're generally less capable than robots are (the irony is not lost).

But when he's no longer connected to GLaDOS's chassis, he does express genuine remorse for the way he treated her. He acknowledges that he was "bossy" and "monstrous," which is selling his murderous rampage a little short, but he doesn't try to excuse his behavior in any particular way. It's possible that he doesn't even realize the effect his link with GLaDOS' system had on him, but it's also the case that a large part of the problem was that he's incredibly selfish. In other words, it wasn't just GLaDOS' influence, he brought plenty of his own shit to the table as well. GLaDOS' system just gave it a destructive outlet.

I should mention that while he'll always be, well, Wheatley, it's realistic to think that enough time being human may improve his cognition a bit. The human brain has a lot more intrinsic plasticity and adaptability than an AI's neural network would—particularly a network that was demonstratively and most probably constructed with the minimum adaptability necessary for functioning in his role. (Wheatley was not a being that learned terribly much from his mistakes. Interestingly, though, he does study Chell's fight with GLaDOS and learns from it once he's plugged into her system, suggesting that the connection endowed him with more than just an addiction to testing and homicidal megalomania. He occasionally proves himself capable of fluke clever feats before he's corrupted, but there's a drastic improvement once he's become all-powerful.) But it is Wheatley, so this can only amount to so much.

He has done a little maturing in his time already spent in Zodion, at least, even if it is a slow climb. So far it's only showed itself in little ways: greater complexity of emotion, the sprouting ability to empathize with people, that sort of thing.

✖ SAMPLES:

"Zodion" First-Person Network Entry:

[There's a crash.]

All right—!

[Projecting:]

All right there! I'm all right. Bloody thing's got too many limbs—

[Judging from his voice, this man is entirely too close to the device for the first half of the following greeting, whereupon he pulls back to a saner, less fuzzy volume.]

Now. Important question, start us off: are you, in fact, a murderous robot or robots? Multiple robots. If so, while flattered, I think I'd prefer it if I could just go on my way. Have had quite enough. Of the murderous robot thing. For one lifetime. Too many complications.

Oh, um, second question, in the same line roughly as the first—are you an animal-king? Or sentient cloud. They said this might happen. I wasn't up there for very long, but you're moving much faster in orbit, so it's possible that thousands of years have passed relative to Earth time. That's the theory of relativity, right there. Look it up. Fairly simple, fairly quick read. For me. Anyway.

[He is very confident about this.]

But if you are not a murderous robot, animal-king, or sentient cloud, you've come to the right place, and I am happy to offer my services. Not to blow my own horn, but I am something of an expert. [A faint shuffle.] And anyway, it's only fair. You did get me down, after all. Not a perfect job, mind. Not—not stellar... in the accuracy department... I should say. Physical accuracy. Anatomical. But, uh, minor detail, minor detail just for the moment.

"Zodionlogs" Third-Person Prose Entry:

So, turns out, the end really is the end. Of space, anyway. Of his simple little mate, too, but actually that's no particular loss, is it. In fact, thinking on it, Wheatley's happy if he never has to hear the word space again. He can hear the word space in his head when he reflects on how he'd never like to hear the word space again, but that's fine, he's made the intention, all he has to do is stop thinking of space and it'll all be fine. Space.

Space space. And all right, that's all he can think about now, is bloody space, so that's just brilliant. Moving on.

He's on the floor, is the thing. There had been a fraction of a second there where he was actually quite a bit higher, yes, but his first awareness of his less gravitationally-challenged new location is the unmistakable sensation of falling (she really hadn't caught him, had she, and yeah, it's true, mistakes were made, but thinking on it still hurts) followed by pain in a great many different places he didn't even know he had. Probably because he didn't have them. Not before right now.

It takes him several minutes to truly understand that the hands he's staring down at are his own. They're his hands, he's controlling them. Or he's trying, anyway, but this thing is impossible to operate. Nothing obeys anything, and there's something really, really wrong with his visual processes. And oh. Ohhh no. There's water everywhere.

Robot hell is real.

He can taste it, the water, taste it in the air. You're not supposed to be able to taste water, it just is. All theoretically life-sustaining, potentially deadly (they said if he ever got wet, he would die; he thinks there's a chance they might be right about that one)... But really. Being entirely serious now. Coming back in now, to the point. He is suddenly... very heavy. And very much in pain. Particularly in and around the, uh, elbow-thorax region. (Isn't that a lark, he's got elbows.)

It is with great effort and forceful concentration that he spends an indeterminate length of time learning how to use his legs (bloody hell, the legs on this one—himself? himself) to remain upright. He spends even longer not approaching the Luminar's prerequisite podium, because my god, man, there's water there! An innocent onlooker poking their head in anytime over the next while would find nothing but an exceedingly tall and unwieldy man just standing nudely about, occasionally wandering while braced against things to keep balanced, investigating everything but the intended destination.

Seven hours later, Wheatley is flailing his way away from his erstwhile water-cage, fingers worrying by pure instinct the hot sting of the mark he can see on his skin now. Which doesn't make a lick of sense, since his reflection had been very clear that his own body had been affected—his real body—all suspended above ground but most definitely not in space, and Wheatley only able to watch the Aperture insignia on his chassis be overwritten with something new. Some symbol. He doesn't recognize it. He tries to maybe look it up (they said not to access more information than he needed or he would die, but then they were lying about everything else before... except the water, probably) but he's got no databanks to speak of, does he. He can't hear himself think, his thoughts are all chaos. Although... he's not sure, actually, whether that's more or less than usual.

One thing's for sure. There is absolutely a letter—clutched, now, in his hand, and quite successfully if he may say so—and what this letter states is that he's been called to perform a task of the utmost importance, vital importance, and it cannot be done without the power of his "inflexible intellect." And there it is. Says it right there, he is inflexibly intellectual. Right there on the page. In. Tell. Ec. T. Crystal.

Marvelous.