Welcome to the Dollhouse

[omggirlonthenet]

THE DOLLHOUSE AU MEME

The Dollhouse. It's luxurious. It's beautiful. Enough so to remind any visitor of a spa: there are little ponds, arranged rocks, sliding doors that disguise massage facilities, gyms.

But the Dollhouse isn't a vacation spot. It's a twisted, high-brow brothel.

Inside, the Actives, blank, erased, and docile. Their handlers, charged with protecting the Dollhouse's assets. The programmers, who create whole new personalities to imprint on their blank slates.

And outside: the clients, ready to pay for people made to their exact specifications.


THE ROLES
1) Active - For some reason, you have signed away years of your life to be someone else's fantasy. Paying debts? Running away from something? Or were you forced into this life?
2) Handler - It's your job to keep the Actives healthy and happy. Their life and their well being rests in your hands, and they're more helpless than a child before you.
3) Head of the Dollhouse - You keep the whole thing running. Negotiate with the clients, approve the jobs, and make sure all the financial items stack up.
4) Client - You're here to have your fantasy come true, or to buy the perfect tool for the job.
5) Doctor, programmer, attendant, security or other Dollhouse personnel - Your job is secrecy, or it's to heal the Actives when they come back from their engagements, or it's to pick out costumes and props or create the imprints themselves or work on technology.
6) Other - maybe you're the hero charging in to the rescue, or the detective investigating rumors of this underground slave house. Maybe you're something completely different - this one's a wild card!

THE SITUATIONS
1) In the Dollhouse - a yoga class, a carefully prepared meal, a massage, arts and crafts time, or heading down to sleep. Maybe they're coming back from an engagement or heading out on one. Maybe they're new here.

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Security breach! Everyone go into lockdown, we have intruders.
- Staffing problems: Maybe a handler's abusing the actives, or there's a mole in the Dollhouse. Either way, someone's going to get fired.
- Injury: Someone got wounded on their last engagement.
- Bleedthrough: Perhaps two Dolls remember each other, despite having their minds wiped. Perhaps a Doll is speaking of things that happened to them before they were here. Either way, there's a problem.
- Nightmares: They should feel safe in the sleeping pods, but sometimes the subconscious has other ideas. Hopefully there's another Doll or a handler there to comfort them.

2) On an engagement. The Active's been imprinted, and it's time to take them to the client.

TYPE OF ENGAGEMENT:
- A romantic engagement: Who are you - a student, a rich prince, a motorcycle enthusiast, a dominatrix?
- An illegal engagement: The perfect burglar, or assassin, or thug.
- An altruistic engagement: You're there to read books to kids in a hospital, or to assist the Red Cross, or to reform a soup kitchen.
- Other: Could be a chef, or a wedding planner, or a security consultant. Maybe a doctor or midwife. Maybe something truly off-the-wall, like an ancient barbarian or a specific historical figure. Sky's the limit!

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Disaster: the Active is lost/kidnapped/trapped.
- Programming Flaw: an unforeseen personality trait surfaces, or the programmed life has some unexpected drawbacks.
- Successfully completed: the Active now needs to come away, relax, and get taken back to the Dollhouse.
- That was NOT according to plan!: the Active goes off-book.
- Who's watching?: The handler is killed or incapacitated. What happens to the Active?

3) Becoming a Doll - Someone's selling away five years of their life. Why? What happens?

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Forced: It's not your choice. You have to sign away your life.
- Willing: All you want to do is escape.
- Last moments: What do you do with your last few moments as yourself?
- The grand tour: What do you think of all those empty Dolls everywhere?

4) Returning to civilian life - Your tenure as a Dollhouse Active is over. You've lost five years of your life. What's next?

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Do you meet another doll? Do you recognize them?
- Memories begin to surface. Memories that aren't yours.
- Someone on the street recognizes you, but you don't know who they are.

5) Apocalypse - Everything is Jossed all to hell. Dollhouse technology is loose and it's destroyed the mind as we know it. Only the Actives are safe.

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Same brain, new body: You've transferred yourself to a new body, so as to live longer.
- Mindless: One of your friends has become mindless and feral.
- Sanctuary: You've built a town in the midst of the ruins.
- Reset Button: Time to put everyone's mind back the way it was - but at a price. No one will be able to remember what happened since the apocalypse. Is it worth it?

6) Other - Wild card! Any other situation you'd like to explore.

Comments

Eliot Spencer | Leverage | OTA

[90minutesofsleep]

[Active or Handler, probably, but could also be former-Active, now support staff, he can cook after all.]

Techie | Dredd | OTA

[clan_techie]

[Lots of options, Active that's been transferred/rescued from a House that was a bad scene, local Programmer, maybe even a client with some kind of agoraphobia, hit me, I'll run with it.]

Hardison | Leverage | OTA

[gdi_hardison]

[Probably programmer or support staff, but maybe an Active]

Capricorn | OC | OTA

[goatcanfly]

[Probably an Active, working with a small group of other actives as a team for whoever needs mercenaries.]

Merlin | Kingsman | OTA

[grumpytechwizard]

[Programmer, Handler, chief of security, probably a former Active himself.]

Phoebe | American Ultra | OTA

[imthetree]

[Handler for sure.]

Eggsy 'Mordred' Unwin | Kingsman | OTA

[kingsmansmordred]

[Probably an Active, but maybe a client.]

Alanna Calrissian | Star Wars OC | OTA

[lady_calrissian]

[Former Active, still sometime Handler, but mostly head of her own small House.]

Cal Leandros | Leandros Brothers novels | OTA

[last_auphe]

[Super-glitchy Active, prone to violent outbursts and memory-bleed.]

Bodhi Rook | Rogue One | OTA

[lookpasttheuniform]

[Active who signed up to forget his military service, or at the very least his last mission.]

Gabreel King | OC | OTA

[malecompanion]

[Active, usually sent out on companionship missions.]

Claire Temple | Marvel TV | OTA

[night_nurse]

[Resident medic, and she's seen it all.]

Rabbit | OC | OTA

[the_rabbit]

[Active, maybe handler, member of a small team of Actives for whoever needs mercenaries.]

Leia Organa | Star Wars | OTA

[vadersotherheir]

[Former handler, now head of house.]

Agent Whiskey | Kingsman: Golden Circle | OTA

[whiskey_ginger]

[Active, handler, medic, there's a few options for her.]

hank anderson / detroit: become human

[crags]

[ handler with a healthy dose of self-hatred. ]

Let me know if you want something changed!

[plasticdick]

['Connor' is well known in local detective circles. For some unknown reason, he consistently worked well as a temporary detective, easily pulled in and out of the Dollhouse to help them on more difficult cases or cases they work off the books. They can try imprinting the same personality on other Actives, but it never quite 'takes' as well--their attention to detail not quite up to par, their deductive reasoning not quite as good as it needs to be. So more often than not, they want this particular Active imprinted with a detective's personality and they request him specifically. What else may happen on those engagements besides their stated purpose is the clients' business, of course. Sometimes Connor comes back clearly upset and disturbed, but it's nothing that a good mind wipe can't fix. Usually.

However, this time, something obviously went wrong. In the middle of the night, Connor arrives days earlier from his engagement than he should, pounding the door of the Dollhouse and holding his free hand to his stomach where blood is spreading from a knife stuck deep in his gut.]

Help! I need help!

Shinichi Okazaki || Nana || OTA

[bass_instincts]

[Probably an active, but he could have been pushed into being a handler.]

Cipher Nine | Star Wars: Old Republic

[orbitalstrike]

[Active or Active turned handler]

Billy Russo | The Punisher (Netflix)

[pluscachange]

[Active or security]

Credence Barebone | Fantastic Beasts etc. | OTA

[credere]

[Active. Almost certainly signed up to get away from his shit family. May have some programming quirks.]

Phasma | Star Wars

[chromeplated]

[Could be anything, I am wide open to ideas! HMU.]

[empires_heir]

[How do you feel about her being handler/security for an Active who doesn't know he's an Active? Like some kind of sleeper agent deal.]

Elektra Natchios | Marvel Netflix

[tamethatfire]

[involuntary active]

[journalizes]

[heyyy, every involuntary Active needs a plucky outsider (journalist in this case of course) to investigate and fight for them, yeah?]

Soubi Agatsuma | Loveless

[spellbattle]

[Active, it's canon!]

Jemma Simmons | Agents of SHIELD

[biochemistry]

[ota with f/f preference for shipping; she's Dr. Saunders. Period.]

[clan_techie]

Techie was a rescue, an Active from a house that had been disbanded for multiple violations. Most of the Actives had been given their old lives back, re-identified and released and paid in full even though for most of their contracts weren't up.

Techie was one of the few whose original identity files had been lost or otherwise unrecoverable, which wasn't a surprise, given the sort of clients Madrigal House took, and some of the people they accepted as handlers.

The new house had done the best they could by him, altruistic, low-stress engagements only, but those were few and far between, and for the most part he stayed at the House. Except that the past week had been plagued by nightmares that not even a non-engagement treatment -that mental reset- had helped with.

Which was why, somewhere after two in the morning, Techie was brought into medical by the overnight handlers, because they'd learned after the second night that it was the only room in the House that didn't immediately send him into a panic looking for the smallest place to fold himself up in to hide, but even then only barely.

Daenerys Targaryen | GOT/ASOIAF (modern)

[noncandescent]

[ota; definitely an Active, but not of her own volition (she's basically Echo tbh)]