Breakout: Gabriela Silva

Character: Gabriela Silva
Game: Chill 3rd Edition
Episodes: 1
Theme Song: Lucifernandis by Boogarins
Keywords: Stubborn, reactive, commanding

I got to play one game at Breakout, and I had decided it would be Chill. Chill is a game I continue to support but have never played. I wanted to see this horror baby in action, and see how Matt ran it, but mostly I choose Chill because I wanted play a game with him. I have all the bits to Chill. Dice, tokens, books, etc. I love games that have societies, and Chill has SAVE.

In this game, we got to play members of SAVE. I chose Gabriela Silva, partly because I was at a table full of men, and partly because she was a cop, and I didn't want to play an emotionally laboured woman. In her little write up, Gabriela is described as a second generation SAVE member, whose mother was a member and has since gone missing, so Gabriela and her girlfriend joined SAVE to try to find her mum.

Before then, she was a cop in her hometown in Brazil. She went down this road because she knew, eventually, she'd join SAVE and wanted a practical skill set to bring with her. Or, at least, that's the assumption I made on her behalf. Her one paragraph blurb didn't tell me her motivations. I decided them as we were preparing to play and I was exhausted and had little steam for making stuff up.

The guy beside me was from Brazil, and we got in a conversation about the language used in Brazil. One of my best friends is from Brazil and has told me, repeatedly, that Brazilian, while it is Portuguese, there are distinct differences that make it more like a bit of a dialect of Portuguese. The gentleman beside me disagreed, saying it was just Portuguese, and said he was Brazilian so therefore his experience was more correct than my friend's experience who is also Brazilian from Brazil. It wasn't worth arguing and it wasn't fair to say he was wrong and get into a long discussion about language, as it's his country and his language.

This was the start of the game for me and I was already tired of people. So I struggled to really get into Gabriela's head. Mostly, because I'm a white girl from Canada who isn't from Brazil, and there was a man there who was from Brazil I had already managed to offend. So I focused on the things I could understand. She had a girlfriend. I decided she was a lesbian, and her girlfriend was working in a SAVE office somewhere. Sure, it had been rocky, but they were close and she wasn't concerned.

Just like she wasn't concerned about her mom. I felt Gabriela surrounded herself with confident, competent women and didn't worry for them as much as she probably should have. There was a quiet independence and confidence about her that I really enjoyed. While others wanted to talk to people, she was more interested in the practical. How do I kill it? How do I end this? What's the fastest way to resolve this? She didn't like knowing the why. She just wanted to know how to stop it.

This made her somewhat difficult to communicate with, because she found the task of talking to people about what was happening a little unimportant compared to the task of just stopping the thing. Research hadn't turned up much, so her idea was to simply go down there and make it work, however she had to. When they went down this crack in the earth to stop the creature, the creature offered the bargain of travelling in one of them so it would stop poisoning the village.

Gabriela considered it. If only because she was confident in her strength and her girlfriend to make herself better. It was fascinating playing someone who believed in themselves so resolutely that they thought they could hold a demon in their body at bay. I found the thought process really interesting, and the last time I played someone that confident, they had been a man.

It was probably the first time I had been that confident. Robin had similar confidence, but only because she didn't give a fuck about what happened to her. She knew her number had been pulled and it was only a matter of time. Gabriela firmly believed, however, she'd be fine. They'd figure it out, this would buy them time, and they would be fine.

However, another SAVE envoy stepped forward. Now, she's just plotting how to kill that envoy when it becomes necessary. And it will become necessary. Because that envoy was weak. It was a great ending to the game, and I really enjoyed a lot of what was happening with Chill. I'd be interested in trying it again, and making my own envoy instead of playing a pre-gen. I will say all the pre-gens were very diverse and inclusive. I really dug that. And I dug Gabriela. I dug her story. I dug what she was about.