Frankie Harvest

User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW: vibishan
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: shipoftheseus
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Jedao Two, Kahl

Character Name: Frankie Harvest
Series: Weavers (Comic, 2017, by Simon Spurrier)
Age: Early 30s
From When?: Sometime after the end of the miniseries, Frankie's bids to centralize power - including keeping more of the spiders to herself - prompt the Web/Weaver hive entity to decide she is a liability, and it prompts the remaining weavers to declare her a traitor and kill her.

Inmate Justification: OH BOY. Frankie has been brought up in an Eldritch gangster family, on the periphery of the inner circle despite her father - the leader - holding her largely in contempt. She's completely blasé about murder, running drugs, etc.

But that's only the surface. Frankie is the host for an eldritch spider that gives her the power to 'nudge' - either to make someone see/believe something that isn't there in order to prompt them into doing something, or to push them over the edge of something they might have done anyway. She's had this power since she was 10, and it's the only thing that's given her much agency, as well as shaped her whole worldview.

She's not a cold-hearted person - she's clearly distressed when she rushes Pneema to the hospital, and she genuinely likes Sid despite ruthlessly exploiting him - but she is completely cavalier about other people's autonomy. She has no hesitation whatsoever about messing with someone else's mind and/or body if she decides it's for the best. She's often outwardly chill and friendly, but she can also be a slick liar and hugely manipulative, and because of her internal spider pushing her to always do what's good for the Web, on some level she has to buy her own shit as a matter of survival.

Arrival: Scooped up without permission!

Abilities/Powers: Frankie contains 2 superpower-granting eldritch spiders in her body, and has access to three more that she's got in jars at the end of the comic, some of which she could have swallowed before her death.

The ones she definitely has inside her:

1) the 'nudge': this is the one she's had most of her life, and she has tons of practice with subtly employing it. She can push someone into doing something they were on the brink of doing anyway, even if they probably wouldn't have. When she was a kid, she accidentally 'nudged' her abused, trapped, and deeply suicidal mother into stepping in front of a bus. But she can also do little things that mess with people's perceptions/beliefs about their surroundings - make someone believe for 2 seconds that the person at the door is giving out free candy so that they open it, for example.

She can also mess with people's memories on a deeper level, both erasing and planting, if the person is weak-willed enough (we see her do this most extensively to heroin addicts). She can also 'nudge' on a physiological level, making something that might happen be definitely happening right now. She makes a federal agent in a bar suddenly need to go to the bathroom real bad in order to catch him alone.

2) her father's spider, which she swallows after he dies. this gives her fire powers to basically incinerate things at will. it also makes her feel hot, all the time - her father's office is in a frozen meat locker, where he spends most of his time naked and steaming, and as soon as she swallows his spder she starts wearing way fewer layers.

The ones either inside her or in a jar:

3) Beatrice/Sid's spider: gives the power to turn one's arm into a giant eldritch murder tentacle at will

4) Ketter's spider: gives the ability to fly, move very quickly, and have insanely sharp blades extend from the elbows. We see Ketter slice a skull fully in half with these in one strike.

5) Damien's spider: more eldritch murder tentacles, now with lots of eyes


The Weavers explicitly run drugs and brothels and engage in gang wars. Frankie can recognize a fed at a glance based on the shitty suit; she knows where to go to get a bomb made or an untraceable car acquired, and while she doesn't specialize in those things, she has some background knowledge. She's shown to be basically proficient with firearms.

Inmate Information:
- became part of an eldritch spider-themed quasi-hivemind criminal gang at the age of 10
- superpower to 'nudge', including fucking with people's memories, impulses, perceptions, and physiological functions
- treated as inferior for having a 'weak' power by her abusive father/eldritch gang boss
- maybe-accidentally maybe-nudged her abused and miserable mother to suicide
- grew up isolated, desensitized to crime and violence, and with assumptions/rationalizations built around surviving the Web's influences
- absolutely doesn't think for a second about the consequences of her family's gang activities, which to her feel completely inevitable and not a moral choice for her at all
- schemes to kill and usurp her father
- manipulates him into killing her aunt beatrice
- which also kills a lot of other innocent people
- completely rewrote a dude's memories, including giving him a fake dead family member who always took care of him and died for him, in order to make him her patsy and motivate him to doing her dirty work
- doesn't really see anything wrong with any of this. values 'power' as the prime virtue just as much as her father, in a way, but with an appreciation for the power of subtlety
- casually fucks with people's perceptions to get them to do what she wants all the time, from little things to big things
- immediately burns Ketter alive as soon as she has the power of her father's fire spider, which speaks to some long-repressed violent rage. that said,
- not malicious or sadistic or sociopathic. she has feelings. she's hurt when Sid abandons her, even though she was using him; she's clearly panicked when driving Pneema to the hospital after her suicide attempt. she feels a lot of old guilt and pain and bitterness over what happened to her mother, whether or not it was really her fault. she enjoys chatting and bantering with sid. she likes wine and ice cream! she's got a sense of humor. she could be a good friend, for real, if she weren't a poisonous puppetmaster underneath.
- she's a liar, a hedonist, a casual monster who's never known or really imagined another life. she's so tangled in the web that she hasn't even considered there might be choices other than 'trapped' or 'the one in the center pulling the strings'.

Path to Redemption: Frankie needs a couple of big resets. First and foremost, she needs to develop some minimum baseline ethics for using her powers on people. She may or may not actually give up her spider like Sid did, but if she chooses to keep it, she'll probably never be someone who 100% respects perfect autonomy and consent. She'll always be a bit manipulative. But she should develop some sense of what's a actually a minor thing or reasonably justified in a good cause, what she should definitely only do with permission, and what is a huge, gross violation that she shouldn't do ever.

She also really does need to choose, one way or the other. For all that she messes with other people's heads, the spiders also mess with her head. She needs to get some sense of self as an independent agent outside of her place in the Web, outside of someone who is bound by it to put up with her father's abusive controlling tendencies, or someone who is entitled to take his crown and use others, with so many sins justified because she can't escape the Web and has to live within it. Right now, the fact of the Web is something that's been with her almost as long as she can remember, and bending herself to its demands and negotiating her own choices under the weight of its pressures is something she takes completely for granted. She needs to realize that she does have a choice, that it is a choice for her now, to accept the Web's influence in exchange for power, or not, and that she is ultimately responsible for that choice if decides to keep it.

When she first arrives on the barge, she will feel kind of at sea without the web, deprived of her birthright, of something that's been a part of her for 20 years. She won't think of herself as "free" by the barge's nerfs and disconnection from the rest of the Web members at all, although that novel experience will be important to her in the long term. She will immediately be scheming to set-up a mini-web with the spiders she has, to acquire Web-enforced loyalty and power, because that's all she knows, and it's bound up in her identity and her way of moving through the word. She might ultimately decide to walk away or to keep her spider and try to build a better web with people who want to be on that kind of team, but she has to acknowledge that it's her decision to go back to it/maintain it if she does so.

Connected to this, her toxic relationship to power and trust and rationalization definitely needs a shake-up. As far as we can tell, Frankie doesn't have any friends or anyone she's ever confided in. How could she? Anyone inside the Weavers would be pushed to betray her to the others, and anyone outside the weavers would be at risk of being hunted down and murdered by the Weavers. Her father's disdain isolates her inside the group (who wants to be chummy with the boss's daughter that he doesn't like) and her position as a Weaver isolates her from everyone else.

She's friendly with Sid, easygoing, teases him and gives him advice, helps him acclimate to the world he's now in, and even thinks of herself as genuinely doing him a favor, elevating him from a junkie on death's door to someone of power and importance. She likes him! She thinks he's cute! She sees absolutely no problem with feeling this way at the same time that she lies to, manipulates, re-wires, and uses him. She's had to maintain so many rationalizations and so much doublethink to keep her secrets private from the Web that she 100% buys her own justifications.

She needs to experience some emotional honesty without layers of lies and memory modification. She needs to trust and value someone beyond surface-level teamwork and banter, and also know that if she hurts or exploits someone who trusts her, there will be actual consequences for that relationship, that she can't just paper over by changing their memories. She needs to realize that there is a point to relationships you don't have complete control over. That real friendship is actually better than having cute custom-made pawns. That it's possible for someone to be on her side without being psychically forced into it, either by Frankie herself or the Web as a whole, and that this is more reliable and fulfilling.

Lastly it would be cool if she considered any life path outside of 'gangsters are cool and I never had any other possible future.' There are a lot of possibilities there besides just being power-hungry parasites. She could pick literally any of them!

History: Weavers is a deliberate riff on spider-man - "What if, instead of Peter Parker, a bunch of regular-to-terrible people got weird spider powers instead?" There are some 20+ spiders whose origin is waved off as unimportant. Maybe they came from a lab. Maybe they spun themselves funnelwebs from a different plane of reality. It doesn't matter! The point is, 20-ish years ago, these spiders arrived in A City, and crawled inside 26 different people in some bad neighborhoods.

Frankie Harvest was one of those people. So was her father, and her Aunt Beatrice, but not her mother. Frankie was also 10 years old. Her father - never a kind man - values her mother even less, when she is 'less' than him, useless, for not having a power. He physically abuses her and emotionally grinds her down, until she's profoundly depressed and possibility suicidal. One day, while Frankie is still a child and still figuring out what her own power does, they are waiting to cross the train tracks. As Frankie tells the story (which may or may not be totally honest) she saw the desire to step forward in her mother's eyes, and - maybe accidentally - gives her a nudge.

She tells this story to Sid, whom she's telling several layers of lies, in the context of "I have something on you, here's something you can have on me to keep it even" when they are very much not an even playing field. However, I do think, in the broad strokes at least, that the story is basically true. "I killed my mother" is a huge, horrible secret for a child to carry. It's a huge moral injury, and it very much contributes, I think, to how Frankie has simply not engaged in any reflection about the moral dimension of her powers or the Weaver's activities at all. It also means that she's lost the only adult in her life who isn't fully committed to the gang's activities.

One key element of the spiders is that all of them are connected into one Web, one psychic entity. Having a spider slowly erodes one's own will to defy the Web, makes them loyal to the group. But who decides what counts as "for the good of the group?" For most of her life, that was her father, Don Harvest. He was a blunt, domineering, violent man who used the collected powers of the Weavers to build up a major gangster power base. It might not be fair to hold Frankie solely responsible for her actions on behalf of the Weavers - she's ultimately compelled to be loyal. We see more than once that the Weavers' preferred method of dealing with enemies who actually manage to kill one of their own is to feed the spider (which emerges from the dead weaver's body) to the highest member of their rivals, thus suborning them. A major player from a rival gang becomes a (furious, hateful, but still) loyal Weaver, as does the pakhan of the Russian Bratva. If Frankie tried to go against her father, the spider inside her would increase the psychic pressure until she cracked.

Except...Frankie does go against her father. Growing up with the Web, Frankie knows how to deal with it: not with defiance, but with slippery perspective. Normally loyalty would force her to confess any secrets to the group. But if she can convince the Web - which is sort-of to say, convince herself - that it wouldn't be good for the group for her to tell, then she can keep the secret. If she fucked something up, but learned her lesson, would it help the Weavers to upset the ringleaders and cause unhappiness and division? No, of course not! It's better for the Web if she just smoothes it over.

And she's good at smoothing things over. Her power of 'nudging' is flexible and insidious, but her father, who only respects strength, has only contempt and denigration for it, and for Frankie by extension. She understandably hates him - but as long as he's protected by the Web, she can't touch him. So, she makes a plan, slowly setting up dominos for other people to knock over, all while telling the Web/herself that if Don can be destabilized, then he isn't a good leader who makes them strong after all, then he isn't good for the group, so it's good for the group for her to pursue a plan to get rid of him.

Frankie's Aunt Beatrice is secretly having a lesbian affair with Pneema, who is the newest victim of Don's partner abuse. Pneema, like Frankie, is a Weaver with a non-violent power, who is bound to the Web but who gets no respect inside it. At the same time, the Russian Bratva is starting to move in on Weaver territory, and Aunt Bea sets up a meeting between herself, Don, and the pakhan, while planning to excuse themselves from the meeting early due to an emergency and then blow up the bar with a bomb under the table. However, while Beatrice is waiting for the pakhan to arrive - and Don is waiting with his thumb on the button of the bomb, outside - Frankie is there, too.

She gives Beatrice a little nudge - and the built-up flood of bitterness and resentment that Beatrice must have been carrying for her brother all comes out. Beatrice calls him and tells him everything, torments him with the truth that "his" girl has been fucking his sister for years. Jealousy makes Don furious and crazy - something Frankie has known about him for years, something she has made Beatrice momentarily forget, or ignore. Don, who normally couldn't kill another Weaver, pushes the button in a fit of rage. After all, hadn't Beatrice betrayed him? Wasn't she a traitor? Wasn't it his right to execute her, "For The Good of the Group?"

(Astute readers may wonder how Beatrice and Pneema were squaring their relationship with the demands of the Web; the possibilities are many. It's better if Don doesn't know; it's better if Pneema has a spot of happiness in her life to keep her going, so that Don has what he needs. The Web is strong. That's the important thing. And when Frankie nudges Beatrice the other way, off the razor's edge she's been walking - confess, confess, confess. No secrets from the Web!)

But then Don has committed treason by murdering Bea, and Frankie has more latitude to move against him. To oust him, self-centered and egotistical and possessive to the detriment of the group. But she doesn't have the firepower to do it herself. Fortunately, Beatrice was one of the Weaver's heavy hitters, capable of manifesting a giant eldritch murder tentacle at will. And when she dies in the bomb blast, her spider comes crawling out of her in the wreckage, searching for a new host.

And Frankie has one prepared. Before the bombing of the Blarney Bar, she picks up Sid Thyme, a junkie with no one to miss him. She gets him clean and fucks heavily with his memories, making him believe he had a gruff old neighbor who kept trying to saving him - with the face of a random stranger in the bar. She places Sid in the bar for the meeting, far enough away from Bea's table to survive, close enough to see the bomb kill not only Beatrice, but his "uncle" who "never gave up on him". And then she nudges the spider into Sid, who becomes the newest member of the Weavers, with Bea's powerset, not yet fully under the Web's sway and able to suspect/investigate a possible inside job, and a powerful, driving urge to find out the real culprit behind his "uncle's" murder.

As Sid navigates his new circumstances, either by coincidence or by nudge, he ends up hesitating on his first violent mission out, despite being eager before then to learn more about the Weavers. Under suspicion of being some kind of mole, Sid gets sent with Frankie, his black sheep babysitter, to confront a federal agent about whether they were involved in the bombing. After they interrogate him and confirm that the feds weren't involved, Frankie gets a call from her father, in which she tells him about Sid's reaction to learning the man they were questioning was fed. As a test of loyalty, Don - through Frankie - orders Sid to kill the agent anyway, which he does.

Meanwhile, the group as a whole settles on the Russians as the 'obvious' culprit for Bea's murder, and they go to war, working their way up from low-level enforcers to the higher ranked members to the pahkan himself. Sid is ordered to take the lead on this mission, and Frankie accompanies him. Sid threatens and kills numerous bratva, but when they reach leaders who can't be intimidated into submission, it's Frankie's turn. At one point she hands a high ranking bratva leader a restaurant menu, but nudges his mind so that instead of a menu, what he sees is pictures of his boss, the pakhan, sexually abusing his daughter - and he promptly gives up the man's location in a burst of outrage.

After confirming that nothing of Beatrice remains in Sid, Pneema tries to commit suicide. Sid finds her in his hotel room bathtub, and calls Frankie in a panic. They both rush Pneema to the hospital, and she lives; Frankie explains how to keep secrets as a Weaver - will it help to tell Don about this? Obviously not. This also, of course, gives Sid the tools he needs to keep investigating the possibility that the bomb was an inside job. Because he was there, he remembers a piece of shrapnel from a children's lunch box that was used as a bomb casing (or at least, thinks he remembers - for all we know, Frankie implanted this as well). When Sid and Frankie go to the Weaver's go-to bomb maker, he sees stacks of the same lunchbox amid her supplies, and remains suspicious that someone in the weavers is a traitor.

Eventually, Sid figures it out and confronts Don, declaring him a traitor. Don leverages his own familiarity with the Web and his own forceful will, pushing Sid to just give in Because Don is strong, and he makes the Weavers strong. In that moment, Frankie nudges Sid again: fight it. And Sid does. He fights back against the pressure to submit to the Web's influence, and kills Don Harvest in one terrible manifestation of his power.

As Don's spider (and another one that he had taken on more recently after one of their members was killed by the bratva) skitters away. Frankie scoops them up and swallows her father's fire-spider for herself. With the power to incinerate anyone, she immediately murders Mrs. Ketter, one of the most sociopathic of the Weavers, who Frankie has clearly feared and hated for years, as soon as Ketter moves against Sid. Frankie makes herself the new leader of the Weavers, and sleeps with Sid.

However, because of her last nudge to him to "fight it", something inside Sid is a little bit broken, no longer under the influence of the Web. He puts together more inconsistencies between his investigation and his memories, and little things Frankie mentioned, finally putting it together that she was behind it all. When he accuses her of killing his uncle, she laughs and reveals that he never had an uncle at all. Sid rejects her, rejects the power, and rejects the Web, coughing up his spider and walking away, while Frankie scrambles in confusion. They won. Doesn't he want to stay, to have the power, to be on top of the underworld with her (under her)?

This is the end of the comic, which is theoretically Sid's story. To get her to a barge death, I am headcanoning that after his "betrayal" and abandonment of her, Frankie gets increasingly paranoid and power-hungry, reserving more and more of the spiders for herself. Ultimately, the Web's strength comes from being spread out, distributed, and suborning many hosts, and it eventually decides that Frankie's power hoarding is a threat to the Web itself, and the remaining Weavers turn on her and take her down.

Sample Network Entry: starts as a network post, then switches to prose, another like that

Sample RP: all prose

Special Notes: The spiders themselves are weirdly in between being "powers" and "weapons". I'd love for her to keep the spiders but be unable to access any of the abilities they give her. At the end of the comic, she has two spiders in her body and three in a jar. If they count as weapons outside of her, I think it'd be reasonable for her to have swallowed the additional three in my headcanon'ed death ending. If you'd rather I not have them inside her without canon basis, I'd like them to count as weapons for "a temporary warden could request them" purposes (although she still wouldn't be able to use them herself, she could potentially give them to others). I have a lot of schemes I'd love her to get a chance to try, and I'm happy to chat out the ramifications so that we can figure out the best way to respect the barge's strictures on new inmates.