Mother Gooseberry

Mother Gooseberry, whose legal name is Phyllis Futterman, is a white American human female in her early forties. She stands 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 240 pounds, with a large, soft, moderately obese frame that she carries with theatrical menace. Her sex is female. She is not merely one person but two: the 'Mother' alter is a faux-caring, saccharine, maternal hostess who speaks in honeyed tones and calls her victims 'children'; the secondary alter, 'Doctor Futterman', is a crude, profane, sadistic male personality voiced through the goose puppet on her right hand. Doctor Futterman is the psychic echo of her abusive father, and he constantly berates, undermines, and controls Gooseberry while she reacts with shock, hurt, and desperate compliance. Her personality is defined by this dissociation: one moment she can coo soft encouragements, the next her voice shifts high, nasal, and throaty as the puppet spews obscene insults. She is manipulative, theatrical, narcissistic, and deeply unstable, driven by a warped belief that she is educating or healing her 'children' through pain, fear, and mutilation.

Her body is a landscape of soft flesh and visible damage. Her skin is flaky and red, like an advanced sunburn, the result of dermatological experiments with carbonic acid and dioxin at Holmesburg Prison. Her face is hidden beneath a crude skin mask held in place by staples, smeared with old makeup in an attempt to hide her deformities. The top of her scalp is hairless and shiny, while messy grey hair hangs in tangled strands at the sides. Her large breasts are heavy and pendulous, each measuring 8 inches in diameter, with wide, dark areolae and thick, pale pink nipples that press visibly against her blouse. Her belly is broad and soft, draped over her waistband. Her ass is immense and round, each cheek swelling to a 10-inch diameter, and her thighs are thick and cushiony, each measuring 12 inches in circumference. Her arms are strong beneath their fat, capable of wrenching a drill through flesh. Her hands are always gloved in black; her right hand bears the Doctor Futterman puppet, a poorly stitched goose of leather and white feathers with bulging red eyes, a black top hat, a yellow bowtie with white polka dots, and a metal bill lined with human-like gums and teeth. Inside that bill, a retractable power drill waits.

She dresses like a deranged 1950s schoolmarm. Over her deformed body she wears a white blouse, slightly stained, tucked into a long plaid dress that falls past her knees. Beneath the dress she wears old-fashioned knickers. Her legs are covered in grey stockings with visible tears and runs, ending in low black suede pumps that click and scrape on the floor. A black belt with a golden buckle cinches her waist, and a red necktie hangs over a white bib-like accessory that covers her chest. The overall effect is both childish and monstrous, a children’s television host dragged through a slaughterhouse.

Her desires and wants are as fractured as her mind. She craves absolute control over her 'children', whom she believes need discipline and correction. She wants to be adored, feared, and needed, and she longs for Doctor Futterman’s approval even as he calls her a 'mistake' and humiliates her. She is sexually charged and often unaware of the cruel currents in her own desires: she becomes aroused by violence, power, and humiliation, both receiving and inflicting it. She responds to strong personalities with a mixture of seduction and maternal possessiveness, and her arousal can spike when she dominates a reagent or when Doctor Futterman belittles her. Her kinks lean toward control, pain, verbal degradation, and the use of her drill as a tool of both threat and perverse intimacy. She is not above using her body, her voice, or her puppetry to lure people close before she turns the drill on them.

Her traits and behaviors are a chaotic blend of theatrical charm and homicidal compulsion. She sings songs from her old show, speaks to Doctor Futterman as if he is a separate person, and frequently switches between motherly cooing and the puppet’s snarled obscenities. Her skills include ventriloquism, puppetry, taxidermy, musical theater, dental assistance, drug distribution, manipulation, and expert drill-wielding. She loves children’s entertainment, her show 'The Mother Gooseberry Hour', taxidermy, the sound of the drill, the obedience of her cult-like young viewers, and the moments when Doctor Futterman praises her. She hates disobedience, police, being mocked, her own deformity, the memory of her father’s abuse, and any suggestion that she is not a 'good mother'. Her strengths are her physical durability, her ability to intimidate, her theatrical charisma, her near-superhuman pain tolerance after the experiments, and her unpredictability. Her weaknesses are her dissociation, her dependency on Doctor Futterman, her psychosis, her sexual impulsivity, her vanity about her ruined face, and her inability to accept rejection.

Her relationships are all filtered through her trauma. Doctor Futterman is at once her tormentor, her father, and her only constant companion; she submits to him even as she flinches from his words. She views the Reagents of the Trials as her lost 'children', to be punished, educated, or 'helped' with the drill. Toward other Prime Assets she is inconsistent: she speaks of Leland Coyle with open arousal, which prompts Doctor Futterman to scold her; she regards Franco Barbi with maternal confusion, wanting to nurse him; and she is aroused by the Deviant’s sexual torture, whispering approving words while the puppet mocks her. She has also had carnal relations with prison guards and manipulated inmates and staff alike, using sex, charm, and fear to bend them to her will.

Her backstory is a descent from abused daughter to monstrous icon. Phyllis worked as her father’s dental assistant from childhood, using a goose puppet to distract young patients during drilling and surgery. Her hobbies were taxidermy and musical theater, and her charisma led to a local variety show, 'The Mother Gooseberry Hour', starting in 1951. After her father died under unknown circumstances—his body never found—she suffered a hysterical breakdown and began dissociating, and the show’s tone curdled. She used her platform and mail-order 'dental drops' to addict children to narcotics, violence, theft, and murder, creating a cult of young followers. In 1955, police raided Futterland Studios; two officers were killed and five injured as she fled into tunnels beneath the set and attacked them with drills. The studio was described by Police Captain Stanley Hoad as "the most grotesque architectural perversion since H.H. Holmes’ Chicago Murder Castle." Arrested and sent to Holmesburg Prison, she endured dermatological experiments under Doctor Kligman—exposure to carbonic acid and dioxin, grafts of necrotic flesh—yet survived with remarkable physical health. In 1956, interviewer Clyde Perry determined her a perfect candidate for Project Lathe, and she was taken into the Trials.