Profile

Player Information
Name: Ri
Timezone: EST
Personal Journal: [Unknown site tag]
Players Contact/AIM/MSN/YAHOO: diamonde_dragoness@hotmail.com (MSN)/JoyBringer5002 (AIM)
Email Address: cheetah1090@yahoo.com
Former/Other Characters in the RP: Touya Hikari, Gilbert Beilschmidt
How did you hear about us?: :D I’ve been here a while.

Character Information
Name: William “Billy” Harris
Canon Origin/Series: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
School Year: 5th
Gender: Male
Age: 15
Out of school living location: Liverpool, England
Blood status: Half-blood (muggleborn mother, muggle father)

(Page at the SH Wiki)
(Old LJ account/Previous entries/Permissions)

Personality: In Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Billy is a thirty-something aspiring supervillain (30 even, if the show takes place in 2008) who wants nothing more than to join the Evil League of Evil. More than that, Billy is a shy man who wears unassuming earth tones, hides himself in oversized hoodies, and has to do his laundry at the Coin Laundry down the street. He’s socially awkward to a fault, as well as shy. He wishes that he could be more assertive, however, which is why he invents the Ray in the first place, is to freeze time so that he can work up the nerve to talk to her.

He seems to have the attitudes of a teenager more than a thirty-year-old. He’s idealistic (granted, his ideals revolve around being a supervillain, but he still has the lofty goal of changing the world), awkward, and a little bit stalkerish. He’s cocky, and he doesn’t have very good priorities. But despite how socially stunted he can seem at first, he is intensely devoted to things that he cares about.

After Penny falls in love with Captain Hammer, Billy becomes increasingly bitter and desperate in his actions. His stalkerish tendencies increase, extending to following Penny on her dates with Captain Hammer. At the same time, however, now that the ice is broken and the formal introduction made between Billy and Penny, he finds it much easier to talk to her. They seem to genuinely enjoy one another’s company. Beneath the shy, awkward loner, Billy is actually a pretty good friend. He listens to Penny, tries to give her advice, and sure, it’s all couched in the fact that he wants her desperately, but it’s obvious that, unlike Hammer, Billy genuinely cares about Penny.

There is one thing that remains the same about Billy (up until the end of Act II): even though he aspires to be a supervillain, he firmly believes that murder is neither “elegant” nor “creative.” More than merely aesthetically displeasing, Billy finds something morally wrong about murder.

This attitude seems to change drastically when Captain Hammer pulls Billy aside and tells him that he’s basically just using Penny because he knows that Billy loves her. Billy immediately begins construction on a Death Ray so that he can exact his revenge on Captain Hammer (and save Penny from him, as well). Nonetheless, when the time arrives and he actually has Hammer at his mercy and the Death Ray at Hammer’s head, he has to take a moment to give himself a pep talk before he can go through with it.

He repeats a phrase that Penny used to him earlier (“Head up Billy-buddy”), implying that he’s doing this for Penny, too, to save her from “Mr. Cheesy-on-the-outside”. This shows an intense dedication to causes that he believes in – he’s ready to break his cardinal rule and do something that he considers beneath him if it means ensuring the well-being of his best friend and the love of his life.

In-game, Billy isn’t physically imposing, and while he has an impressive mind and impressive vocabulary, he also has all the social skill of a sea cucumber. He’s never gotten along with children his own age in school and he’s an only child, so he doesn’t know what to do now that he has to live with them on a regular basis for most of the year. He’s much more likely to respond by withdrawing into himself and minding his own business than he is to even attempt to be outgoing with his fellow students. He is also very, very difficult to manipulate, primarily because he’s naturally suspicious of people and because he’s so intellectual and spends so much time inside his own head.

In addition to being an insufferable little prodigy, Billy will also try to use what he likes to mentally refer to as his PhD in Adorableness to get his way with female professors and other adults. With girls in his peer group, he’s painfully shy and quiet, preferring to fade into the background rather than be noticed for any reason. He can’t treat girls the same way that he treats boys, so he just resorts to silence and, if he actually likes a girl, perhaps a bit of stalking as well.

He’s more likely to take a big-brotherly stance when it comes to younger students. Usually, this limits itself to protecting them from the shadows – if he sees someone start to pick on a student who is younger or weaker than they are, he’ll jump in to defend them without needing to be asked. He would be more than willing to help out a younger student or a female student with their homework but, because of his shyness and his social awkwardness, they would have to approach him for help. A male student who asked for help would be considered indebted to him, and he would likely call on this debt later when he needed something.

He would prefer not to have to associate too much with male students, because of the long history of bullying that has been heaped upon his head. Far and beyond it is most likely male students who he will respond to by being a cheeky little smartass, because even though he has an intense desire to avoid conflict, he isn’t very good at, you know, actually doing so. His desire to avoid conflict isn’t as intense as it is in his canon, because as long as he has his wand, Billy feels like he will be perfectly capable of defending himself if an argument comes to blows.

With male professors, Billy becomes a much more instinctual creature. Every professor who he deems as getting in the way of his education and goals basically becomes a target for his Daddy Issues Ray. With professors he likes, however, he’s different. He is the absolute model student, and he overachieves in his instinctual search for fatherly attention.

Billy has an unhealthy interest in the Dark Arts. At the moment, it’s entirely academic – he wants to study it purely because he isn’t allowed to study it in any of his classes. His interest in the Dark Arts combines poorly with his social awkwardness. If he meets anyone he deems like-minded, he will go on tirades about how death is so ugly, and why would any wannabe dictator choose to leave a swath of death behind as his modus operandi when there are surely a million more interesting and creative ways to deal with unruly followers without resorting to death. This thinking isn’t likely to make him many friends, which is why these ideas are very rarely expressed.

Canon Background: Billy, the boy who would later become Dr. Horrible, was born in 1978. As a child, Billy idolized the hero Justice Joe. By the time that he was eight years old, he was in the sixth grade. His intelligence and advanced grade combined with his tendency to mouth off like a little smartass when cornered made him a frequent target for bullies. In the official comic backstory, he’s picked on by an older kid for playing with action figures, and he gets smart with the bully when he’s referred to as ‘Einstein’.

After school on the day that the aforementioned ‘Einstein’ incident occurred, Billy got an opportunity to see his hero in action. As he watched, Justice Joe taunted the villain and, in the course of the taunting, sardonically referred to him as ‘Einstein’. That coincidence, along with his still-smarting black eye, was what started to lead Billy to the revelation that heroes were nothing more than grown-up bullies in costume. Then Mister Maniacal hit Justice Joe with a weakening ray, proving brains to be mightier than brawn. That moment in time was Billy’s start of darkness.

Twenty years later, Billy has a PhD in Horribleness, and he’s trying to make it big on the streets. He gets all a-twitter when Captain Hammer recognizes him as a villain and takes the time to beat him up before he has to go do battle with Bad Horse.

At some point around this time, Billy also starts a video blog as Dr. Horrible. In the opening feed of Act One of the original web musical, Billy tells all about his ideology (“It’s not about making money, it’s about taking money. Destroying the status quo, because the status is not quo. The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it.”). He also introduces the viewer to his nemesis (“Captain Hammer, Corporate Tool”). Billy/Dr. Horrible aspires to be in the Evil League of Evil, which is run by the incomparably wicked Bad Horse.

And then there is Penny, the pretty redhead who he stalks knows from the Laundromat, but doesn’t have the nerve to actually talk to. On the day that Billy is about to pull off a major heist, Penny is out getting signatures for the homeless shelter that she volunteers for. When Billy uses an iPhone app to take over the van, his nemesis shows up and ruins the entire thing, destroying the transmitter. Adding insult to injury, Penny proceeds to fall for Captain Hammer right in front of Billy’s eyes, and he makes off with the Wonderfluonium, bitter and hurt.

Billy and Penny do start getting to know one another at the Laundromat, however, and they become close friends. One day with Penny at the Laundromat, Captain Hammer comes to pick her up. He pulls Billy aside and tells him that he’s basically only with Penny because he knows that Billy wants her. He expresses his less-than-honourable intentions toward her, which makes Billy’s decision painfully clear – he’s going to kill Captain Hammer.

Long story short, Dr. Horrible crashes the opening ceremony for Penny’s new homeless shelter and uses his Freeze Ray on Captain Hammer. He spends too much time gloating before he fires up his Death Ray, and Hammer becomes unfrozen. Hammer sends Dr. Horrible sprawling, and he picks up the dangerously sparking Death Ray and aims it at him. Dr. Horrible tries to warn him not to fire it, but Captain Hammer pulls the trigger and the Death Ray explodes. Hammer, mildly hurt, runs away crying. Dr. Horrible gets up, unharmed, and surveys the damage. Penny, however, was gouged with shrapnel and dies with her last words to Billy being “Captain Hammer will save us...”

Dr. Horrible is accepted into the Evil League of Evil, but with Penny dead he becomes emotionally deadened. All of the horrible things (pun intended) that he does, adorned in his new blood red coat and black gloves, are brought to a head with the last words in the musical being him, back in his Billy outfit, looking lost and alone and dead inside, singing “And I won’t feel...a thing.”

Background (AU!Canon; HP): Crimson William Harris spent the first few years of his life in Sunburst, Montana, with his father Henry and his mother Rebecca. His father was a normal man, a science teacher at the local high school. Born and raised in Sunburst, with its population of 332 people, Henry had gotten into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

William’s mother, Rebecca, was radically different from her husband. She was, in fact, a Muggleborn witch from Connecticut who had been educated at the Salem Witches’ Academy. She and Henry met in a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry’s friends had dragged him, and Rebecca had gone looking for work. It was love at first sight.

Six months after their wedding, William was born, a healthy, full-term seven-pound baby boy. Shortly thereafter, the couple and their new baby moved back to Sunburst. From the beginning, it was obvious that little Billy, as William immediately was known, had inherited his father’s smarts. He said his first word at seven months, and by the time he was a year old he could articulate to his parents, between words and gestures, what he wanted or needed.

While Henry was at work teaching Chemistry to high schoolers, Becky was the one who noticed that strange happenings started to follow her little Billy-boy. One day, all of the greens in the refrigerator were suddenly purple. The next, she found her shoes sitting on the ceiling as easily as if it were the floor. Her son had inherited one important thing from her, something that she had never told her husband about. Her little Billy-boy was a wizard. For some reason, he never had any major little ‘accidents’ when his father was home, and if Henry noticed one night that Billy’s eyes had been green all day instead of blue then he chalked it up to the boy’s eye colour not necessarily settling yet, or a trick of the light.

Billy started preschool, as most children do, at the age of four. He was reading at a fifth-grade level, and he could sound out, if not truly understand, college-level textbooks. The only way that he didn’t shine at school was with regard to the other children. He didn’t make friends easily. He never put forth the effort to seem particularly approachable or friendly, and his classmates never, in turn, put forth the effort to see him as anything other than a know-it-all smartass.

When he was six, he was just starting second grade. He was tiny for his age, and slim, which didn’t help him in a class where his peers were already older than he was. His teacher wouldn’t let him sit inside and read during recess – hardly believed that he could read as well as he claimed at all.

A popular comic book came out a few months before Billy’s sixth birthday: The Adventures of Captain Hammer. Billy read these comics at school, and even though he was young and easily entertained by the Saturday Morning triumph of good over evil, Billy came to admire Dr. Horrible, the villain. He couldn’t relate to Hammer’s brawn and physical might, but Dr. Horrible was a brilliant inventor, like Billy wanted to be when he grew up.

Billy used the money his grandmother gave him for his birthday to buy a Dr. Horrible action figure. The other children, in that eternal cruelty that only children possess, latched onto the similarity between child and toy and took to calling him ‘little Billy Horrible’ at recess when the teacher wasn’t looking.

One day, near the end of the year, a bully came up to Billy and tried to take his action figure during recess. Billy said no. The older boy persisted. Billy told him to shut up and leave him alone. The bully came at him again for the action figure, and Billy turned around and yelled at him to “SHUT! UP!”

Almost immediately, terrible groaning and choking noises were coming from the bully’s throat. Billy watched in horror as the older boy’s eyes bulged out, red and watery, and his face turned first red, then purple, then blue. He watched as the boy who had been trying to take away his toy just moments before collapsed to the ground and, with a long, rattling groan, went still.

Billy just sat there in shocked silence. His little knuckles were white around the hard plastic of Dr. Horrible’s lab coat-clad body. The end of recess came and went, and the teacher came outside to find Billy and the other boy, only to find the other boy lying dead on the grass in a far corner of the playground, Billy even further in the corner looking almost as ashen as the corpse but with a wild, living terror in his eyes. When the teacher said his name, it was like a spell had been broken. He started screaming and sobbing, and he would not be consoled until his mother came to the school to get him.

After Billy stopped screaming, he became completely catatonic. Even though he didn’t know how he had done it, little Billy knew that he was the one responsible for the bully’s death. That night, after Billy had fallen asleep once again clutching his Dr. Horrible action figure, Becky told Henry about the magic that she had passed to their son, she said that when he got a little older, there were special schools he could go to in order to learn to control his powers.

But Henry’s was a world that had no room for magic. In Henry’s world, science was magic. Technology was magic. Waving around a wand and praying for a miracle was for children and storytellers. Rather than accept that his six-year-old son, on whom he had already started to rest his hopes, was a murderer (albeit accidental)...Henry left. He stormed off into the night without even saying goodbye to his son.

When Becky went to Billy’s room the next morning, Billy knew exactly what had happened. His dad, his hero, was gone. He had left because of Billy, because of what Billy had done. Believing that what she was doing was best, his mother modified his memory without his consent so that he wouldn’t blame himself for the death of that other boy. Nonetheless, the memory of the death itself remained, in the dark corners of Billy’s subconscious. It sprang forward in the middle of the night, the choking, purple face of the boy, and it made him wake screaming. Becky kept Billy out of school until she decided to take her son far away from Sunburst.

She took him to Liverpool, England. Billy had to take a test to see what year of school he would be in, because Billy hadn’t finished the school year in America, and his mother wasn’t at all surprised when he tested into Year four. By the time that his eleventh birthday rolled around and he received his Hogwarts letter, Billy was already in Year ten.

At Hogwarts, Billy had just about the same issue making friends as he always had. Also as he predicted, he wasn’t allowed to skip years. The only thing at all good or interesting about this new world that he was now a part of was that he felt, for once, actually physically talented at something. There was so much more to learning at Hogwarts than just sitting at a desk and writing or reading that he felt like he was actually doing something with his education instead of just reading from a book. Another huge bonus was that there were a lot more possibilities for solitude at the boarding school than there were at public school.

When he was a first-year, he fell off of his broom during flying class. In third year, when he got to start picking electives, he picked up Ancient Runes and Arithmancy, skipping over Care of Magical Creatures and Divination because he thought that that was not a good use of his brain power. (And, in the case of CoMC, he did not particularly want to get mauled, and repeat his first-year experience with the hospital wing.)

He did miss his mother at first, while he was away at school. It was the first time in his life that he hadn’t come home every day from school and seen her face. When he was thirteen, however, his mother took him to a quidditch match for his birthday, thinking that it would be good to immerse him in wizarding culture. She met a man there, Horatio, who flirted outrageously with her no matter how belligerently and passive-aggressively Billy expressed his displeasure. Horatio wasn’t a bad man or a mean person – he genuinely loved Rebecca and he wanted to make her happy. The problem was that Billy was at the age where he was very against any sort of change, and so when Horatio started trying to get Rebecca’s son to like him, Billy dug in his heels and refused on principle.

The summer Billy turned fourteen, his mother got married to Horatio. He grew slightly less belligerent toward Horatio over the summer holiday between his fourth and fifth years, in part because Horatio was willing to cede Becky to him for the most part over the holidays, that being the only time out of the entire year that Billy got to see his mother.

Clover

How would your character fit in to each House?
Gryffindor: Billy’s not particularly courageous, and he doesn’t really have a code of honour. He opposes dark arts users not based on some subjective matrix of good and evil or anything of the sort, but because he thinks that they’re squandering the potential of the dark arts. He’s a master at conflict avoidance, even if he’s also a smartass. He knows when it’s in his best interest to get involved, and when he should just stay out of a conflict. As for chivalry, Billy tends to go completely stunned and mute around girls, and he isn’t particularly one to jump to the defence of any cause unless it affects something or someone that he considers important.

Hufflepuff: Billy is incredibly loyal to any cause that he believes in. He will follow through his plans to the bitter end, no ifs, ands, or buts. He works very hard to achieve what he wants. However, he doesn’t have a very strong sense of fair play. Growing up being bullied by older children, without age or size on his side, he learned to use whatever resources that he had to his advantage (primarily his intellect). He also has a very, very low tolerance for stupidity. Slightly higher in the game than in his canon, because in his canon he actually was societally forced to become a supervillain solely because he was intelligent. In the game, he simply has a low tolerance for stupidity because, well, it’s stupid.

Ravenclaw: If there’s one thing that Billy Harris has beyond measure, it’s wit and brains. He was at the top of his class constantly throughout his school years before Hogwarts, despite the fact that he was at least one, if not more, years younger than his peers. The fact that the age gap steadily grew, not shrank, is another testament to the fact that this is one boy who will never let anything get in the way of his education. Part of the reason why he is so eager to learn about the dark arts is simply because so far all of his professors have told him that he isn’t allowed to. He knows all about the three Unforgivables (the Imperius is his favourite – so many possibilities...), but he also knows that there’s a whole world beyond just those three and he desperately wants to learn as much as he can about it. You know. To further his education.

Slytherin: Aside from his nearly unhealthy interest in the dark arts, Billy is about as resourceful as he can be. Most of it is a subconscious holdover from the days when he would watch his father invent things in their garage – he knows his way around machinery and electronics like nobody’s business. When he first joined the wizarding world and went to Hogwarts, he decided rather promptly that he wanted to be the Minister for Magic. As he grew up, however, and realized more and more just how slowly the wheels of bureaucracy turn in the real world, he began to see the flaws inherent in the system. For all intents and purposes, he still wants to be Minister for Magic, but he wants to then go beyond being Minister for Magic. He wants to reinvent the position, make it a more powerful position.