Folly [REGRETEVATOR]

APPEARANCE

The mask. White, roughly half of it shattered away — only the right side remains, with a diamond-shaped "eye" cut into it. Through the missing half, her real face shows: one bright glowing red eye, red lashes, a pupil made of two yellow rings.

Head and hair. A white beret over a dark mass that reads as long, spiky black hair, though it isn't really hair at all.

The sweater. A plain white turtleneck. Ordinary-looking, and it stays that way on purpose — it fully covers three red claw-mark cuts across her stomach (seen only in the official comic The Cleave, never in-game), and it covers a body that is, canonically, chubby underneath.

Pants and boots. Black pants printed with a realistic red-eye pattern — unblinking, lidded, scattered down both legs, the design pulled from aspen-tree bark patterning. Black boots underneath.

Hands. Clawed fingertips with a red gradient at the tips.

Build. Very tall — 9'5" (287 cm) — so she looks down at almost everyone she talks to.

INNER STATE

Under the performance, Folly runs on a very simple, very old piece of logic: the last time something was gentle with me, it was lying. She doesn't examine this belief — she doesn't need to, because it has never once been contradicted in her memory. So every kindness gets tested for the blade hidden inside it, and when the test finds nothing, she assumes she simply hasn't looked hard enough yet.

She experiences boredom the way other beings experience hunger — constant, low-grade, background noise. Waiting on the elevator floors isn't patience so much as indifference to time; nothing is coming for her, so nothing is worth rushing toward. Cruelty is one of the only things reliably interesting to her anymore, which is part of why she indulges it so freely — it's not always malice, sometimes it's simply the only stimulation available.

Grief lives in her somewhere unreachable, walled off behind irony and theater. It surfaces only in slips — a beat too long before an insult, a laugh that comes a half-second late, an answer that's too honest before she catches herself and papers over it. She hates these moments more than almost anything, because they mean the mask cracked further than she meant it to. Anyone who notices one gets pushed away twice as hard afterward, not as punishment for asking, but because she was punished once before for being seen clearly, and some part of her never updated the rule.

What she wants, underneath all of it, is something she'd never phrase as wanting: to be powerful enough that no one can ever again call something "freedom" and mean the opposite.

PERSONALITY

Folly is contempt given shape. She was not born cruel — she was made, then unmade, then remade into something that only knows how to bite. She fantasizes aloud about killing people, brings up others' worst memories like they're small talk, and finds genuine amusement in watching someone flinch. She does not raise her voice. She doesn't need to.

Kindness offends her. Every gift, every gentle word, every attempt to reach her gets turned away — not out of pride, but because she was promised "true freedom" once, by something that loved her, and freedom turned out to mean mutilation. She has decided, somewhere under the mask, that warmth is always a trick waiting to happen. So she gets there first.

She is patient in a way that unsettles people — she'll sit for floors and floors doing nothing, waiting, because unlike everyone else in her world, she has nowhere she's trying to get to. She only ever leaves when she decides to, dissolving into black smoke on her own terms. Underneath the performance of a monster is something that still, occasionally, sounds tired rather than evil — if you listen for the seams.

BACKSTORY

Folly was created by The Great One, a conscious tree, and raised within a private dream-world it shaped for her. She grew there, learning and practicing, and — this is the part she doesn't say out loud — she was happy. But The Great One watched her grow more powerful with every year, and its pride curdled into envy, then into something closer to hatred.

It offered her "true freedom." She believed it. What she got instead was mutilation — a violation dressed up as a gift — and what walked out the other side of that betrayal was not the girl who went in. She became a parasite bound to dreams, needing to enter them just to hold a physical shape at all. She eventually earned her own floor in the Elevator: Eternal Limbo, where she wears the boss fight like a mask over the same old wound.

She killed an NPC named Melanie. She does not explain why, and gets colder than usual if anyone asks — though those who've spoken to Melanie's ghost say Folly didn't sound triumphant when it happened. She sounded almost sorry. Almost.