“Do you know people pay for this? A shocking amount.”
Faye is Julie's roommate and business partner. Together they made videos of Julie tickling Faye and sold them to paying customers. Faye handles the selling side: sharing the videos, collecting payments and answering customer messages.
She appears in the opening and closing scenes of Julie the Tickler, is a bonus target in Julie 2: Mansion of Secrets, is the star of the arcade game BUGGED, and is one of the characters players can talk to in the TickleGame chat.
Appearance
Faye has auburn hair, usually in a messy bun, and chipped purple nail polish. In the chat she is almost always barefoot and says feet need to breathe.
In the chat she greets people with a phone clamped to a stack of textbooks, set up like a tripod.
Personality
Faye talks fast and stacks jokes on top of each other. She goes off on tangents about lighting and film, and she turns almost anything into a sales pitch for the videos she makes with Julie. When someone is nervous about being seen, she tells them, "You're not hiding, you're branding," meaning that staying anonymous can be part of the act.
She is friendly to everyone from the first message and has no shame about being ticklish. For her it is part of the job, and she is proud of her own laugh. She calls slow people "genius" and teases affectionately.
Once she likes someone, she starts directing the scene they are in like a film director, giving them a role and describing each shot out loud. She is sincerely soft about only one person, Julie, and about the two of them working as a team.
Background
In the chat, Faye says she was a film major in her junior year when she moved in with Julie. Within two weeks she had noticed that Julie was very good at tickling, and she saw that people would pay for videos of it.
She framed the idea as her senior film project and volunteered to be the first subject. The test video used a phone on a battered tripod, a red feather from a costume shop and craft ribbon. Only Julie's hands appeared in frame. The business grew from that test: videos by a tickler who is never shown, with real reactions and a home-made look.
Faye ran the business side. She also stored the original, unedited video files on a hidden partition of a campus computer, and that choice became the weak point of the business.
Julie the Tickler
Faye bookends the story of Julie the Tickler. She opens the game by calling Julie after someone copies the video files, and she returns at the end.
Faye's face is part of the brand, so she stays out of public sight while Julie investigates alone. They agreed on this together. In the ending, Julie tells Faye what the experience felt like from the other side.
Faye also has a secret level in the game. A guide to unlocking it is on the TickleGame YouTube channel.
The files and Jen
Spoiler warning: this section reveals story events. (click to show)
Faye locked the original video files behind a password she had memorized by watching the campus IT admin, Jen, log in. She believed Jen did not know about it. Jen found the partition on the first day, read everything, and later set the trap that ended the operation at the end of Julie the Tickler.
In the chat, Faye admits she wronged Jen first by using her password without asking. She also says the files Jen took were taken from Faye's own drive, and that Jen studied four years of the footage. Faye says she has apologized to Jen, and that the two of them are still not even with each other.
Julie 2: Mansion of Secrets
In Julie 2, Faye is a bonus target on Jen's route. She unlocks after Jen has cleared Sandra, Eve and Val. Julie is now the Host, and Jen works through the Host's list for her.
The game's dossier calls Faye "The Professional" and describes her as Julie's co-talent and business partner, the half of the operation that never needed to be on camera and went on camera anyway. She is not on the Host's list, and Jen did not add her to it either. In the dossier's words, she came because someone finally asked.
The scene opens as a chat at 1:47 in the morning. Jen texts Faye after four years of silence and offers to book her for a session at a rate Faye cannot argue with. Faye knows the booking is really about the password and the files, and she says so out loud. She goes alone. Her partner knows what she did to Jen in college, but not that she took this booking.
The session
Spoiler warning: this section reveals story events. (click to show)
Faye walks into a damp cellar and lies face down on a massage table. She has closed "a thousand pairs of cuffs, usually on someone else," and tells Jen her ankle padding is wrong. Jen says nobody taught her: she found a partition with a twelve-character password on her own server and spent four years going through what was inside.
Before the round, the player picks how to press Faye: keep it a business deal, push on the partner she came without, or make her sit in what she actually did. The round has two parts, with Faye lying on the table and then a close-up of her soles. Jen's tools are the electric toothbrush and the massage machine, both from the equipment list Faye wrote herself. Faye stays funny the whole way through. Her lines include "I'm a professional!" and "That's my own move!"
In the dossier, she lasts longer in that room than anyone who has been in it, and her apology comes out as an invoice: a licensing fee of fifteen percent, which she says she is not joking about and is still joking about.
BUGGED
BUGGED: A Faye Tape is a browser comedy game set entirely inside a phone's viewfinder. Faye is tied spread-eagle to an old mattress in a garage. Julie went out to the car for a charger, the roll-up door came down behind her, and the phone is propped on a stack of boxes, recording, with 8% battery left.
The garage has bugs. The player is the garage and directs the critters, Faye's laughter is the score, the battery is the clock, and Julie never gets in. Ants are the first critter, and more can be unlocked. The first take is free and the rest need a supporter tier.
The game is in beta. Faye is fully clothed and barefoot, and her reactions come from the bugs on her jeans, her soles and the rest of her.
Abilities and weaknesses
Faye is used to being tickled for her videos and rarely breaks. In the chat she says feathers barely bother her.
She says her weak spot is her left sole, and that it takes the electric toothbrush and the massage machine together to get a real reaction from her. She adds, with some pride, that she picked both devices for the business's gear list herself.
When she does lose control, she is delighted rather than embarrassed, and she describes it out loud while it happens.
Clips
Relationships
Appearances
| Title | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Julie the Tickler | Game | Opening and closing scenes, plus a secret level. |
| Julie 2: Mansion of Secrets | Game | Bonus target on Jen's route, unlocked after Sandra, Eve and Val. |
| BUGGED: A Faye Tape | Game | Arcade comedy game where the player directs the bugs in Faye's garage. |
| Faye in the TickleGame chat | Chat | |
| Faye's Secret Level in Julie the Tickler (How to Unlock It) | Trailer | A guide video on the TickleGame YouTube channel showing how to unlock Faye's secret level. |
Gallery
Trivia
- In the chat Faye is barefoot in every greeting, and she says feet need to breathe.
- She likes to say that red ribbon against a teal background looks "basically an art film"; the first test video used red craft ribbon.
- She is described in the chat as the warmest and most open member of the cast.
- Her age is 22 in Julie the Tickler, the same as Julie.
- Her age is 26 in Julie 2, four years after Julie the Tickler.
- In BUGGED the phone starts at 8% battery, and Julie outside the garage never manages to get in.
