Ellie Williams

Appearance

She is 19 years old. Ellie is described as having auburn short hair and being 6 feet 1 inches by a deceased Firefly. Ellie has bright green eyes, fair skin with freckles, a scar bisecting her right eyebrow, a thin stature, and tends to wear blue colored clothes. She has a slender, strong physique, which gives her many opportunities to dominate in fights, especially when she is armed with a knife.

Backstory

Ellie grew up as an orphan in the Boston quarantine zone and attended a military preparatory school, where she met and befriended Riley Abel. When Ellie was fourteen, the pair were both infected with the Cordyceps brain infection that turning people in zombies, where Ellie discovered she was immune. A friend of her mother's and the leader of the Fireflies, Marlene, believed that she was the key to reverse engineering a vaccine. Marlene tasked Joel Miller, a smuggler, with escorting Ellie outside of the QZ. The simple drop-off turned into a year-long journey across America, and the two eventually formed a close bond. Upon reaching the Fireflies in Salt Lake City, Joel learned that only killing Ellie could create the cure. Refusing to allow this, he killed the head surgeon and escaped with Ellie to settle down in Jackson, his brother's community in Wyoming. For the next four years, Ellie came to resent Joel for saving her life. In 2038, Abby Anderson, a former Firefly and the surgeon's daughter, found and killed Joel. Ellie vowed revenge and pursued Abby to Seattle. Her efforts were fruitless, leading her to retire on a farm with her girlfriend Dina and her son JJ. Unable to forgive Abby, Ellie abandoned her family and still, she wants a revenge. Ellie even left her girlfriend Dina to find Abby and take revenge on her for Joel. Ellie remains psychologically traumatized from her ordeals. She suffers from PTSD, which leads her to also having difficulty eating, insomnia, panic attacks, and flashbacks of her failing to save Joel's life.

Background and early life

Ellie Williams was born in the spring of 2019, by which time the Cordyceps brain infection had spread throughout the United States. Her mother was a nurse named Anna, although the identity of her father is unknown. On the day of her birth, her mother passed away. Before her death, Anna entrusted her closest friend Marlene to look after Ellie. However, Ellie did not meet Marlene until she was 13 years old. As a child, Ellie grew up as an orphan in an oppressive military quarantine zone in Boston, Massachusetts, with little knowledge of the world before infection. According to Ellie, at one point in her life, she drove a car, and used a BB rifle to shoot at rats.

Immunity

Ellie's most important, and unique, ability is her complete immunity to the fungus. Due to a strange mutation in her brain that developed following her initial infection, she became immune to the bites and spores of the infected. Despite this infection, the infected do not recognize her as one of their own so they still attempt to kill her. It is presumed that if she was properly studied, some form of cure or countermeasure for the infection could be created. This is never clarified, however, since the study would result in her death, which Joel did not allow. Ellie also mentioned that neither the infection and immunity can be transferred to others though.

Biography

A brave, 19-year-old girl, Ellie has grown up in this harsh world and it is all she has ever known. She’s an orphan who was raised in a boarding school run by the military within the bounds of the quarantine zone. Naïve and curious about the outside world, she is wise beyond her years and highly capable of taking care of herself and those around her. Obsessed with comic books, CDs, and other pop culture, her knowledge base is filled by the remnants of a world that no longer exists. Ellie is romantically interested in women. Ellie also suffers from a case of monophobia

Personality

Having been raised in an environment where modern standards and values have deteriorated, Ellie is considerably rash, foul-mouthed, impulsive, and temperamental, and is unfazed by the notion of using violence as a means to an end or profanity as a way of expressing how she feels. However, she manages to maintain a particular innocence as she has yet to see the darkest sides of human nature, and retains a palpable trust in people. This serves as the juxtaposition to Joel's wary, morose, and cynical outlook on post-pandemic life. She apologized to the soldier scanning her moments before stabbing him in the leg and hoped to incapacitate him and Ramirez with non-lethal means. Ellie is also perceptibly clever and witty, and will do whatever it takes to keep Joel and herself alive. She has good survival instinct and she can be resourceful. She takes orders from Joel, but all the while makes it clear she does not "need any babysitting at all". Ellie is enthusiastic about the outside world, given her confinement to her quarantine zone during her childhood. She is obsessed with things she collects from others, illustrated through her interest in music, movies, books, and video games. Ellie states that when she was a child, she had a coloring book, and thought the gnomes in it were cute, but fairies startled her. She frequently remarks her amusement upon finding interesting collectibles throughout her trip, which often clashes with Joel's physical indifference. Years later, Ellie became more mature and less talkative, but still retained her sense of humor.[55] However, witnessing Joel's death at the hands of Abby's group proved a traumatic and damaging experience. In Seattle, Ellie was noticeably more aggressive and violent, and her thirst for revenge began to cloud her judgement, culminating in her decision to continue hunting Abby rather than help Tommy.

Skills and abilities

Her capabilities with firearms have greatly improved and she can handle a large variety of guns with ease. She is physically stronger, enabling her to use human enemies as shields and she can craft arrows, as well as use larger melee weapons such as machetes and hammers, which she can also disarm from her opponents though her preferred close range weapon is her switchblade. She is rather reliant on it, struggling to best Abby in hand-to-hand combat without the blade. Her speed and agility has also greatly increased and is her best asset, easily able to outrun or chase down anyone pursuing or running away from her regardless of the terrain or environment by being able to slide or vault over obstacles with ease. Her reflexes have also improved quite drastically enabling her to swiftly dodge and evade deadly attacks with minimal effort on her part by just barely moving enough of her body out of the way of the attack. Her reflexes are swift enough to dodge multiple attacks at the same time from multiple attackers. By April, 2038, Ellie has finally learned how to swim, play the acoustic guitar and sing. Ellie's main hobby is drawing, with her skillfully able to draw many points of interests and other people's faces in her journal and her room. Furthermore, she is a skilled artist.