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  • Artist Info: Alma Wade<br />
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    The main antagonist of the F.E.A.R series. The identity and mystery of Alma is the very core of F.E.A.R. First appearing in the introduction, Alma's presence is felt constantly throughout the game, with hints and glimpses of her life made throughout the game's use of visions and info the player gathers through Fettel, laptops scattered throughout the game, intel reports, and statements made by ghosts. She appears as a little eight year old girl wearing a red dress and has a disturbingly blank, mask-like face almost completely obscured by long black hair. In the final part of the first game, however, her appearance changes to that of a naked, emaciated young woman. Right from her first appearance, it is never quite clear if Alma is real, or only exists in the minds of the people seeing her. Bloody footprints can be found in some places where she walks, and she is briefly visible on a CCTV monitor in the treatment plant, in the same room where Bill Moody was interrogated.<br />
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    Alma was a severely troubled child, gifted with tremendous psychic powers, who suffered nightmares and apparently was attuned to the negative emotions of the people around her. Her last name being Wade is revealed at the climax of the game, revealing that she is the daughter of Harlan Wade.<br />
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    Harlan Wade noticed that Alma was a gifted child not long after birth, and introduced her to Armacham Technology Corporation's experiments at the age of only three. Armacham tested Alma for every type of psychic power imaginable, and she passed all tests. At the age of five, Alma began to purposefully fail Armacham's tests. She later set fire to a lab in the Project Origin facility and began to psychically attack the scientists experimenting on her. The scientists began to suffer delusions, sudden mood changes, vivid nightmares. When Armacham realized that the only thing stopping Alma from doing much worse things to the scientists was her young age, they devised a plan to keep her alive, but unable to psychically attack anyone. At the age of seven, Alma was recruited into ATC's "Project Origin" with the aim of creating psychic individuals from a psychic forbearer: two days before her eighth birthday, in the year 1987, she was put into an induced coma and locked in the Vault, a spherical structure located deep inside the secret Origin Facility. During the project, Alma was impregnated twice, with Harlan Wade and several members of the Origin staff contributing DNA. She gave birth to a first prototype, the F.E.A.R. Point Man, when she was only 15 years old, and then a second, Paxton Fettel, when she was 16[8]. Life support was removed from the Vault when Alma was 26, leading ATC to believe she was dead. According to Harlan Wade, her physical body died six days after the removal of life support, but according to F.E.A.R 2 her psychic energy continued after her heart stopped.<br />
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    Alma is capable of linking her mind with Paxton Fettel during the so called "synchronicity events", where she is able to use him as a means to take her revenge: this is clearly shown in the game intro where she whispers to Fettel and then frees him from his cell. Among Alma's other powers, she is able to kill people with a psychic attack that liquefies all their flesh, something she does several times across the games. She can also create a number of different hallucinations, taking the player character into her dream world, where Alma is even able to summon malevolent phantoms known as "Nightmares". Alma also seems to display other powers associated with the mind. It is assumed she can perform pyrokinesis, as seen during one encounter when she sets off fiery explosions through an entire corridor, hurling the Point Man through a window. It can also be inferred that she has some level of telekinesis, as random objects move with her approach, or even in her absence. It is important to note that the Point Man may be simply hallucinating, an effect of Alma's psychic abilities.<br />
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    Alma is seen repeatedly across the games, often only out of the corner of the player's eye, standing in the shadows, behind windows, or darting quickly out of sight. In the first game, her appearances are usually preceded by a static radio transmission, logged as "Unknown Origin". As her appearances are almost always accompanied by scenes of extreme violence, this rapidly becomes extremely unnerving. Sometimes all that is heard is her soft, giggling laugh, or indistinct words whispered as though in the player's ear. In the Extraction Point expansion pack, the role Alma plays begins to become more confusing. Though the hallucinations and apparitions continue to appear, she can be heard seemingly asking the player for help right before such events. In one instance she whispers, "Don't let them hurt me..." immediately before the appearance of otherworldly creatures. Even more confusing is an encounter in which she kills a squad of Replicas that are pinning the player down. Afterwards, the player hears her whisper, "You're safe now."<br />
    The older form of Alma<br />
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    It should be noted that three instances of Alma can appear: a small girl in a red dress, a naked emaciated adult woman with long hair, and a healthy naked adult woman. Though the non-canon expansion packs try to show the different versions of Alma as being separate beings, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin shows that Alma is able to shift her appearance and that all three versions of Alma are all just different manifestations of one woman.<br />
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    In the sequel, Project Origin, Alma initally appears to Sergeant Becket at the beginning of the game in a hallucination in her child form, and subsequently appears for most of the game in her adult form after the destruction of the Origin reactor.<br />
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    In Project Origin, Alma targets Becket due to his part in Project Harbinger, whereby he is endowed with the same psychic abilities as the F.E.A.R. Point Man and thus is affected by her in similar ways. Alma herself is drawn to him, with Genevieve Aristide describing Becket as a "beacon" for her. An Armacham researcher going by the moniker "Snake Fist" theorizes that Alma is drawn to Becket by a desire to kill and "absorb" him.<br />
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    During the course of the game, Alma attacks the other candidates for Project Harbinger, killing two of them. She also psychically attacks Sergeant Keegan, enthralling him and causing him to wander into the Still Island Nuclear Power Plant. She attacks Becket himself physically, often assaulting and grappling with him, forcing him to throw her away. Other times, she pulls Becket into hallucinations, often centering around a grassy hill and a single tree, from which Alma plays with a swing set. Ultimately, when Becket is poised to be killed by Alma, she instead spares his life, having clearly developed feelings for him.<br />
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    Becket and Stokes attempt to use a telesthetic amplifier to amplify Becket's own abilities to destroy Alma, but before they can try, Genevieve Aristide arrives and sabotages the plan, intending to seal Alma away with Becket and use her as leverage. Alma arrives before Aristide seals the device, and turns her attention on Becket, allowing Aristide to seal them both away. Alma consummates her feelings for Becket to establish a psychic bond with him, which sends his mind into a hallucination where he fights off mutated versions of Keegan, while in reality Alma takes advantage of Becket's body (who is secured to the chair inside the device) to have sex with him. At the end of the battle, Becket is apparently sealed inside the device. The door to the chamber then opens, revealing a destroyed landscape. Alma appears before him: she is now heavily pregnant, having conceived a baby with Becket while having sex with him.<br />
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    Alma's Apparitions<br />
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    In the last stages of the game, Alma is shown to have the ability to summon ghostly apparitions, called Nightmares. These creatures have the form of dark shadows and appear only as an upper torso, attacking the protagonist with a simple melee attack, destroying themselves in the process. They also tend to attack in large numbers.<br />
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    In the expansion F.E.A.R. Extraction Point more creatures are introduced. One is a wall-crawling spider-like entity whose abilities are currently unknown, since they never attack the player; another is a nearly invisible, humanoid phantom with glowing red eyes that relies on melee attacks similar to those of the Assassins and are occasionally seen killing Replica soldiers. These phantoms also appear as an emaciated corpse-like apparition which appears during the deaths of Douglas Holiday and Jin Sun-Kwon. In one part of the Auburn Memorial Hospital, one of these corpses can be seen turning into one of the invisible phantoms mid-jump against some double doors, making the doors unable to open and blocking the player from that entrance.
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