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| “ | "12 September 1997 – It was all my fault..." "11 January 1998 – I accepted this job at the lighthouse, I can stay alone here. I miss them...." "20 March 1998 – Edward told me about this doctor, her name is Christine Willard. I will try to call her" "23 March 1998 – The doctor said she can bring them back, I'm puzzled but I have no choice" "30 June 1998 – She did it! I don't know how but they are... alive." "11 July 1998 – There is something wrong with them..." |
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| ~ Illusory notes about the tragedy that befell the protagonist's beloved family and how things went downhill from there. |
An individual only known as the Protagonist is the villanous character from the indie horror game The Body, the first volume of the series titled Real Stories from the Grave.
Biography[]
Without any introduction or preposition, the player assumes the role of an undisclosed stranger, carrying a bagged corpse in the middle of the night. He passes through the dark alley towards his car, loads the body into its trunk and drives off.
Later, he stops at the gas station to refuel his vehicle. He's understandably nervous, which doesn't elude the station owner's attention, who watches the hero refill his car while sitting on a chair outside. After paying the owner and getting a friendly advice from him to be careful, he gets back into the car to resume his arduous trip.
Once he arrives near his destination, the hero parks his vehicle near the entrance into the pitch-black woods, grabs the body from the trunk and continues on foot. As the trees get rarer and the noise of the moving water gets closer, the hero steps on a wooden dock with a small boat already waiting for him. He places the body into the vessel and proceeds to row towards the lighthouse in the distance.
Just as the hero is about to reach the remote island that the lighthouse is stationed upon, the bag suddenly gains an unexpected and terrifying quality - it begins thrashing around and faint moans escape its confines. Whoever is in there, they are still alive. However, as if he was aware of it all along, the protagonist isn't detered by this new chilling development, so he picks it up and ascends the stairs leading to the lighthouse entrance.
Regardless of the victim's attempts at resisting, the protagonist puts the body on the table near the entrance and ventures to the upper floor of the lighthouse to retrieve a key. With the said key, he unlocks the door to the basement, not forgetting about his unwilling companion and descends.
As he goes down the long stairs, he notices the notes sticking to the walls around him - figments of his imagination, or a reminder of his purpose. They briefly mention the death of his relatives, the guilt he felt for their demise, how he accepted the job at the lighthouse to isolate himself from the society, whilst still missing them, and a certain doctor by the name of Christine Willard that he heard about from his friend, who promised the hero to "bring them back". As the protagonist gets closer to the bottom, wet munching and swallowing sounds invade his mind. The next notes talk about his family being finally resurrected by unknown means and the hero's worries about something being "wrong" with them...
Right as the player enters the basement room, he's met with a macabre scene of two contorted, barely human creatures ravenously devouring a pile of gore on the ground. The room itself is filled to the brim with shelves packed with canned food, boxes and the bodies, hanging upside-down from the ceiling hooks. To his right is a plain table with a framed photo of a happy family of three, a rope and the final note. Dated almost eight years after the first one, it clearly shows that the hero's planning on abandoning his "job" for good, but also mentions something that needs to be done beforehand.
Only when the body is hanged from the hook, its identity is revealed for the player. All this time he's been carrying Christine Willard herself, an enigmatic genius doctor who had helped him get the hero's family back, but didn't warn him about the "side effects", and now she was hung from that hook as a "payback" for her services, waiting to be feast upon.
With his mission being thoroughly finished, the protagonist grabs the rope from the table, throws a final apologetic glance at his "family", ties it to the ceiling, making a noose, and stands on a chair in the center. He meets his end, accompanied by the rope's creaking and the wet munching noises.
Appearance[]
Since the protagonist is never shown during the gameplay, his appearance can be only observed on the game's cover. On it, he's looks like a man of an unidentifiable age wearing a gray jacket and has short black hair.
Personality[]
| “ | "12 July 1995 – I can't do this anymore... I won't feed them again. But there is one last thing I need to do..." | „ |
| ~ The protagonist's final note. |
Overall, the protagonist is a grief-stricken, remorseful human being who resorted to murder exclusively for the sake of his family, who he continued to value and care for unconditionally, even if there was very little left of their original selves. His crimes were not sadistic or malicious in nature, until he decided to take revenge on the doctor who had turned his wife and child into monsters, forcing him to apply radical measures. Either out of simple apathy or an extensive desire to make her punishment more severe, he didn't kill her, but rather left her to be slowly eaten alive by her own creations while still conscious. He's shown to be prone to visibly give out his stress and inner struggle while carrying out his deeds, as the gas station owner remarked how pale he looked when the protagonist was refueling his car, although he was able to keep his composure enough to appear harmless to the owner.
In the end, the hero was too emotionally devastated by the anguish that the life brought down upon him, including the accident that snuffed out his family in the first place and the guilt he felt for being unable to prevent it, ultimately culminating in the protagonist's suicide, with him feeling sorry for both the people he has been feeding to his family members and the fact that they were going to have to starve without him.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The protagonist's estimated body count is 9 people, including Christine Willard, although the pile of flesh on the ground and a long period of time the protagonist has been doing this for suggest that there might have been a lot more, considering also that the previous victims could have been fully cannibalized by his family members.