| You may also be looking for her SMG4 counterpart. |
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You'd be surprised what people would do to be number 1... |
” | —Belle Fontiere | ||
Belle Fontiere is a major character in the Glitch Productions Science-Fiction webseries Meta Runner.
The champion tournament gamer of TAS Corp., Belle is Lucks' second-in-command. Upon meeting the Meta Runner named Tari, she witnesses her ability to warp into video games, as well as to bring the Ultra Jump Mania virtual character Theo to the outside world. This catches the attention of TAS Corp., making Tari and Theo targets after they escaped.
She later discovers that Tari is seemingly involved with the presumed death of her lover and best friend Lucinia Porter, ultimately resulting in Belle holding a grudge on her, but later discovered Lucks lied about her friend's death. She intercepted MD-5's plan to expose TAS Corp.'s secrets. TAS Corp. holds Theo hostage and Tari is forced to join as a member and prisoner.
Belle becomes Tari's reluctant partner in gaming matches, and at the same time, she is trying to unlock the tablet of Sofia Porter. She later sides with MD-5.
She is voiced by Jessica Fallico, who reprises the role later for the SMG4 series.
History[]
Season 1[]
She became a representative of TAS Corp. at an unknown point of time, alongside her girlfriend Lucinia Porter. She has been described as a stubborn and "snappy, in-your-face" girl.
As seen in video footage and flashbacks, Belle was happy when Lucinia was around. Masa Shimamoto was also team captain of the TAS Corp. Meta Runners during the time.
One year prior to the events of Wrong Warp, Lucinia, and Dr. Sheridan mysteriously disappeared, leaving Belle greatly worried. Masa had begun hacking into Lucks' files, believing the incident was his doing, which later got him caught and decommissioned.
One year later, after she failed the SpeedRunners championship for Ultra Jump Mania, she heard Tari playing said video game while on her phone. When Tari warps herself into the game, Belle alerts Lucks and although gets taunted about her disappointing performance, managed to bring his attention to her. Lucks calls in the TAS Corp. scientists.
Later on in META RUNNER - Season 1 Episode 2: Out Of Bounds, while telling the remaining customers to leave the building due to Lucks needing the place for his scientists to work on Tari, she saw an old video feed of her and Lucinia. Outraged over such an outdated feed, she scolded the Bot Boy in charge of the shop for it. She was present when Lucks tortured her and saw Theo outside his game.
She later finds the pair at a cyber cafe called The Hive. She and other mercenaries succeed in capturing Tari. The two enemies have an argument in the Transport Van, with Tari noting that she's being kidnapped, and Belle telling how she had been through worse in order to become the best, due to the prevalence of video games.
Tari was saved by Theo, who partnered up Lamar Williams. A car chase is initiated, with Belle and Lucks witnessing Tari's ability to evade the mercenaries.
Belle was later sent to the Research Facility, where she was instructed to find evidence relating to Tari in the Project Blue room. She gets frustrated when searching until she finds a hard drive consisting of footage for Project Blue. She finds out that Lucinia and Dr. Sheridan might've died in an explosion, leaving her in further distraught.
Lucks hacks into Theo's eyes and finds out about MD-5's plan to play an underground competition hosted by TAS Corp. servers and hack through their systems prior to META RUNNER - Season 1 Episode 8: One Shot. With this knowledge, he tells Belle to intercept Tari during the competition.
During the competition, Belle and a set of other Meta Runners fight against Tari and her friends in Tempest. She reveals Masa's relationship with TAS Corp. to Tari before killing him in-game. Believing Tari to be the killer of her best friend, she attempts to torture her, initiating the "final" fight.
Tari succeeds in the glitch, only to be backfired. Lucks corners the group and shoots off Masa's meta runner arm. Sofia Porter was forced to hand in her tablet in exchange for Masa's life. Belle breaks the depressing news to Sofia, which leaves her in tears. Tari offers herself to become a member of TAS Corp. in exchange for her friends' freedom. Lucks captures Theo as a hostage and recruits Tari, much to Belle's dismay.
She later found a tablet that is backing up the data from Sofia's phone. She sees Sofia being escorted to the van, and after Sofia motions to the phone, she realizes it was left there intentionally. She stores the phone away once Lucks arrives, and then goes to the van transporting Masa, Lamar, and Sofia back to their base.
Season 2[]
Six months later, she is still trying to hack into Sofia's phone to no avail. During a training session for the Hidden Heroes tournament, Belle meets Theo in the servers and was surprised of how he got in.
She then snuck into Sheridan's lab and managed to convince Theo (who only remembers her as the "angry shouty lady") into finding the Project Blue file and bringing it to her in exchange for breaking Theo out of his containment chamber. But she regrettably left Theo behind while he was caught by a TAScorp scientist.
Belle opens the file and learns that Lucks lied about Lucinia's death and sought to join MD-5 on their plan to take down TAScorp. Belle then goes back to the lab to rescue Theo. She explains to him that once Ultra Jump Mania is done, the game will clear its memory cache and eject Theo out. Then, he can ride the link on Sofia's phone to get back to MD-5.
She manages to get Theo far into the game, but got stuck at a point where a glitched wall appeared in the middle of a gap, preventing Theo from crossing. However, after Theo experienced a strange vision, he learned a glitch that allowed him to clip through the wall and crossed the pit. When Belle asked how Theo figured it out, he simply replied that it was "just a feeling". Theo then finally refers to Belle by her real name as he thanked her for "being there even though she didn't want to be there", making Belle happy.
Unfortunately, TAS-Corp guards later caught her in the lab and captured her off-screen, and thus leaving Theo stuck in the middle of the game. She meets Masa in the back of a TAS-Corp van where they were being held hostage. When being asked by Lucks when Belle started believing Masa, she revealed the footage of Lucks finding Lucinia's body, which Lucks correctly assumes that Theo helped her get it.. Almost crying, Belle apologizes to Masa for not just failing to save Theo, but for not believing Masa when he became suspicious of Tas-Corp in the first place. After Masa forgives her, they recall the day before Lucinia disappeared...
Lucinia is shown teaching Belle a speedrunning glitch, which turns out to be the same one that Theo would use in the present day. Just before Belle could try it out, Masa comes in, who turned out to be more cheerful than his present day counterpart. He came in to tell Belle that Lucks had called in Belle to participate in a press conference, but since they all hated attending those, Masa came in to hide out and pretend that he couldn't find her. As they're having a good laugh, talking about their current lives, Lucks called telling Masa that he was starting to get impatient waiting for the Meta Runners, forcing Belle to tell Lucks that she was coming. When Belle asked if Lucinia could come, Lucks refused. After Belle left, Masa stayed behind to talk to Lucinia, reassuring her that she was still important, and Lucinia talked about how she wanted to help out some scientist. When Masa finally left, he told Lucinia that he'll "see her tommorow", not knowing about the tragedy that would soon occur.
After the flashback, Masa told Belle that as the head of TAS-Corp, whether Lucks killed Lucinia intentionally or out of neligence, he'll be the one responsible for Lucinia's disappearance.
Not long afterward, Lucks received a call from Sofia Porter, threatening to release the server data that they managed to steal if anything happened to her friends. After Lucks tracked down Sofia and took away "the cartridge with the server data" and subsequently realizing too late that it was a trap allowing Tari to enter the server, he threw Sofia in with Masa and Belle, the latter warmly greeting her and asking how things were on the outside. Sofia then announced Tari's plan to save Theo by beating Theo's game to the two inmates, only for Masa to point out one flaw: the part where everyone else are still hostages. Having everyone troubled, Sofia attempts to reassure the two by telling them to hope that Tari knows what she's doing.
As time passed, Belle became increasingly concerned, wondering when Tari was going to beat the game, with Sofia constantly trying to reassure her friends that everything was fine.
Suddenly, Lucks seemed to panic, unsure what to order his employees to do when suddenly Lamar's car crashes into TAS-Corp's van with Tari, Theo, and Lamar himself in the latter's car. Lucks then aimed his gun at Masa, threatening to kill him. Belle and Sofia beg Lucks not to do so, only for him to tell the two to shut up. He demands Tari to surrender the cartridge containing the server only to realize that his threats were all in vain, as the data had already been released long before the crash happened. Masa flips the tables by snatching Lucks' gun and threatening to shoot if the TAS-Corp employees tried to intervene. Belle, standing alongside Masa and Tari, stood defiantly in front of the criminal boss of TAS-Corp. Masa tells Lucks the aftermath of his actions, only for Lucks to laugh as he finally tells them the truth: Lucinia isn't dead.
Belle initially refused to believe his claim, thinking that he was lying again, but Lucks to continue to point out evidence that Lucinia wasn't dead. After all, while all the uncovered footage revealed the lab, the explosion, and Lucinia's voice, none of the footage revealed a body. Turns out that Lucinia's body was healed, but she herself never woke up, as if something was missing. Lucks revealed his theory on how when the explosion occured, Lucinia's consciousness was blown apart, with fragments of it being stolen by Sheridan's A.I. If they could find that A.I., they could extract the fragments and give them back to Lucinia, which would revive her. When Belle asked why they haven't found the A.I. yet, Lucks revealed that she was standing right by her and Masa.
Tari revealed what she learned about Lucinia and herself, with Lucinia's mind fragments blown into both the server and Tari's program, which is in fact Tari herself. Despite learning all of this, instead of getting mad at Tari (as she probably would've back then, considering her earlier assumption that Tari played a part in Lucinia's disappearance), she was the one to speak up against Lucks, telling him that he was a big liar and that none of the trouble that he put everyone and himself through would've happened if he had just come clean from the start.
After everyone reassured Tari that she was still their friend, they prepared to flee, due to the fact that the MD-5 had broken a few laws themselves trying to take down TAS-Corp. However, Masa is still fed up with Lucks and is still pointing the gun at Lucks, waiting for him to screw up one last time. The good news: Belle and the others managed to convince Masa not to threaten Lucks anymore. The bad news: Masa's arm was hijacked and he shot Lucks anyways. Horrified by what he had done, Masa dropped the gun and couldn't move from shock. Belle decided to stay behind to help Masa deal with the police, since she considered herself guilty for briefly helping TAS-Corp fight the MD-5 in the first season. Belle is last seen turning herself in to the cops while the rest of the MD-5, excluding Masa, flee the crime scene.
Season 3[]
Appearance[]
Belle has rather tanned but fair skin and carmine colored hair with orange streaks in a messy ponytail with burgundy eyes. Her right arm is replaced by a bionic Meta Runner arm to amplify her gaming performance, with red circuitry and a metallic blue chassis, with white plating along it's forearm and fingers, alongside red circuitry lines and a node on the back of the hand, with it a tattoo-esque decal of a red phoenix. She wears a short-sleeved white jacket with blue threads and a black undershirt, black pants with a white belt, and black boots.
In Season 2, she starts wearing a necklace, her eyebrows are closer to her maroon color and her eyes are more brown then maroon. Her hair also appears to be more orange.
Personality[]
Belle is shown to be both laid-back yet immensely competitive. When it comes to her profession of competition, Belle treats it with absolute seriousness. After Lucinia's disappearance, she becomes tragic, cold, and bitter. It can also be noted that she could look down upon those who aren't as good as her, and might see herself as the best, as when Tari asks to be taught Ultra Jump Mania in Episode 1, Belle replies snidely. After discovering Lucinia's "death", she jumps to conclusions and starts to believe that Tari was responsible. After getting suspicious of Lucks' motives, she seems to have grown more understanding, as she purposefully allowed Tari to steal an online dating sim knowing very well that Tari would use it to contact MD-5.
Trivia[]
- Like Tari, Belle has a thick, broad Australian accent.
- According to the Lerdwichagul Bros. and Jasmine Yang, Belle's character design was modeled after her voice actress Jessica Fallico.
- She is the second Meta Runner character to also appear in SMG4, after Tari herself, and the first to appear after Meta Runner's premiere, not including Theo's cameo in SMG4: The Big Bad Bully.
- In Season 1, she heavily antagonized Tari due to an assumption that she had something to do with Lucinia's disappearance. Ironically, when she learned the truth about Tari at the end of Season 2 (in which she was somewhat involved in Lucinia's disappearance after all), she stops antagonizing Tari afterwards.
- Belle may have been inspired by Desti, due to their similar personalities as tough, competitive girls with antagonistic relationships with their respective rivals, Meggy and Tari. And they both are reformed later on.
- Belle and Tari are the only characters to have appeared in every Meta Runner episode.
- Unreal Engines is the only episode where Belle has a minor appearance.
- Belle is also the only character of the two to not die.
- Belle is the only character to be all three alignments - Bad, Neutral, and Good, in this series.
- Belle and Lucinia both kiss when they reunite, implying Belle is a lesbian. This further makes sense which Belle's hair bears similarities to the colors of the Lesbian flag.
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