Empatheias App

[gather_ye_rosebuds]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Litha
Contact: sister_midnight
Age: 37
Current Characters: None


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Lacie Baskerville
Age: 25
Canon: Pandora Hearts
Canon Point: post-death, Chapter 69

Background: Lacie's life is a circle of sorts.

She is the sister of Glen (Oswald) Baskerville. Her red eyes mark her as a Child of Misfortune. In the society she lives in, people believe this means she carries a curse. Children of Misfortune have been known to be beaten on sight, abandoned by their parents, bought and sold, displayed in freak shows, and killed, simply because of of their red eyes and the superstitions that surround them. It is explained by Glen (Levi) Baskerville that Misfortunate Children are distortions caused by the Abyss' influence on this world, and due to that connection (and the fact that it gives them powers that only the head of the Baskervilles is supposed to have--namely the ability to travel into the Abyss at will and make contact with its Core, thereby being able to petition it to re-write reality), they must be sacrificed in a ritual where they are consumed utterly, obliterated from the centennial cycle of death and rebirth which most other people of their world are a part of.

(The truth of the matter is later revealed: the real reason the erroneously-named Children of Misfortune are killed is because of their potential for saving the world, as they are beyond the control of unearthly beings known as Jurors, who amuse themselves by watching the world and determining the most interesting end for it. Glen Baskerville, as it turns out, serves as their unwitting pawn, put on the earth to eventually bring about its end.)

As small children, Lacie and her older brother Oswald roamed from place to place, (possibly runaways, possibly orphans) without a home. One day, while Lacie was waiting for her brother to return from finding a place to sleep for the night, she was approached by a young man, a sword raised in his hand. To her eyes, able to see through time, he would have appeared to be a man-within-a-man, the older of the two looking like an adult version of her brother. Unafraid, she'd smiled at him, and he'd dropped the sword, falling to his knees. A moment later, her brother returned, scolding her for running off and leading her away. She spared the strange man a parting wave, then disappeared into the woods.

Some time later, the siblings were taken in by the Baskerville family. (Though it is the most powerful noble family in Sablier, it is a family in name only, for the most part. Its members are bound together by their duty to protect the balance between the world and the Abyss, not by blood.) The very same day, she discovers that, because of her status as a Child of Misfortune, she will one day be killed. She was very young. (Though the exact age isn't given, she looks to be around 5 or 6.) Her brother, on the other hand, was meant to be the heir to the estate. He would also become the next vessel for the souls of each person who had been the heir, leading back to the first. (This is why each heir takes the name Glen Baskerville, upon inheriting the estate.) She would later figure out that, not only would she be sacrificed, but her own brother was the one who would kill her.

Though she was forbidden from doing so, Lacie would frequently play in the Abyss, as a child, even going so far as to leave a plush rabbit (one of a matched pair) for the strange, silent consciousness she encountered at its core, to keep it company. Her Chain is shaped after the rabbit toy... provided rabbits are large, hulking, humanoid things with glowing red eyes, gnashy pointy teeth, razor sharp claws, a scythe, and bladed chains that can zip out and cut a person to bits.

While she was still a child, Lacie was approached by Glen (Levi), who proposed that she partake in an "experiment" with him. He believed that, if she carried an unborn child into the Abyss when she was sacrificed, the baby would not be devoured with the rest of her, but cradled at the Abyss' core. He proposed this experiment because he hoped it would provide the Core with a body to inhabit, thus making it easier to communicate with and control. Lacie, who believed the entity at the Core to be lonely, agreed because she hoped the child and the Core might be friends and keep one another company.

As a teen (roughly seventeen,) Lacie ran away from home (which she did many times, we later learn) and befriended the bastard son of a nobleman, who was living on the streets. His name was Jack. She stole food to feed him, offered him a new outlook on life, and killed to protect him, all quite cheerfully. In this way, she won his undying devotion and fanatical loyalty before the Baskervilles found her and returned her to her semi-imprisonment on the Baskerville estate. She gave him one of her earrings as a memento before being taken away.

In the eight years that followed, Jack searched for her with single-minded determination, climbing up the social ladder by whatever means necessary until he was accepted into his illegitimate father's family, thereby gaining access to the same echelons of society the Baskervilles belonged to. By ingratiating himself with another of the more powerful families, he was able to disguise himself as a musician and sneak onto the Baskerville estate to reunite with Lacie...

... only to find that she had forgotten him. However, the earring (which he wore) jogged her memory, and after retreating to her tower and retrieving the matching one, she returned to pull him out of the room where he was being questioned by the other Baskervilles. In doing so, she may have saved his life. They spoke together for some time, and she gave him what comfort she could. As Jack turned to leave, Glen (Levi) popped up, inviting Jack to visit the estate whenever he liked. (He had been intrigued and amused by him.)

In the four months that passed, after that, Jack visited nearly every day. He, Lacie, and Oswald, became something of a inseparable trio, often wandering the grounds of the estate together and listening to Lacie sing. Though she denied Jack's importance to her when speaking to Glen (Levi) (who had, by then, impregnated her as per their agreement), Lacie came to care for Jack, possibly even love him in her way. A few days before the ritual at which she would be sacrificed, Lacie lied to Jack (who had been kept in the dark about her impending fate), persuading him to stay away from the estate until days after her death. Though her brother suggested that Jack might take her away from the estate and try to save her, Lacie had accepted her path and was already carrying Glen (Levi)'s child (though Oswald knew nothing of the pregnancy). There was no going back.

At the ritual, though her brother hesitated, Lacie coaxed him through the final words, smiling as the chains rose from the Abyss to drag her down to her death. As she was pulled down, she witnessed the young man with a sword she'd seen as a small girl, recognizing Oswald's spirit within him. Understanding that he was traveling into the past to try to kill her, and that he would fail, she called out an apology to him, before the Abyss finally swallowed her.

Personality: To the average person, Lacie can generally come off as a bit of a hurricane. She waltzes into people's lives, makes things... interesting for a while, then waltzes right back out. Despite the fact that she's the sort of person who tries to live to the bone (owing to the fact that she knew her life would be short) she also has a tendency toward emotional distance, even with the people that she likes. She's good at covering it. She can appear to be warm and engaging (if a little intimidating), but at the end of the day, even when she has killed for your sake and called you her favorite, she can let you go again without a backward glance.

This emotional distance is caused in part by the fact that she's been an outcast her entire life, reviled and dehumanized by society because of something as stupid and superficial as the color of her eyes. (The thing that saves her from self-loathing is that she's smart enough to realize that it's a stupid, superficial reason. She's perceptive, very much the sort of person who sees things just the way they are. It's kind of a defense mechanism, much the same as her emotional distance is.) She largely treats people the way she has to treat life: something to be grasped, enjoyed, and then let go of.

Her kind streak (which is kind of remarkable in its existence, given her life) springs largely from an empathy she feels with others who are, like herself, on the edges of society for one reason or another. She doesn't like seeing the weak picked on, and will move to defend others more quickly than she will defend herself. Similarly, while she's fairly good at reading other people, she's pretty rubbish at recognizing her own emotions. For example, from the moment of her first, childhood encounter with the being at the Core of the Abyss, she recognizes its loneliness. However, it takes her years, right up until a day or two before she dies, to recognize how lonely she herself has been.

She's bad at reading her own emotions because she bottles them. Though outwardly she tends to be fairly cheerful, somewhat flippant and rather cynical, anger and fear lurk, quiet and constant, beneath the mask. Deep down, she resents that she has to die. For all Levi!Glen talks about the danger she could present to the world, nobody seems to care about whether she would. To a free-thinker like Lacie, free will would be an important thing that should matter. She represses this anger because, what would it change? Her situation is essentially written in stone, and with a foreshortened life, she's got more important things to do with her time than dwell on it. Like with many bottlers, her anger presents itself in quick (sometimes violent) flashes, only to dissipate just as quickly. To the average observer, it might even seem like an overreaction. It all makes sense to her, but she's not the sort of person who usually bothers explaining herself to people.

Her more tender emotions make her vulnerable, and so, while she doesn't necessarily see them as weaknesses, they are also something she has not really been able to allow herself the luxury of feeling too deeply. So, she doesn't always completely recognize when they happen. When she lies to Levi about her feelings (or lack thereof) for Jack, she seems to half believe herself. However, that very same night, when she's on her own, she realizes just how much his presence in her life has come to mean to her.

Her fear is something she also keeps hidden, at all costs. In point of fact, quite a bit of it is probably subconscious. This would have at least partially grown from her status as a lifelong pariah. When people are needlessly cruel to you, you don't want to give them anything--especially not fear. Bullies like fear. However, I think another big influence in this is being raised by Levi!Glen. He was very much the kind of person who would push a person's buttons just to see what would happen. (Hell, he put the whole world in danger just to see what would happen, with his "experiment".) He was the closest thing she had to a father, and he was (superficially) her lover, but he was also something of an adversary, for her; she hid her emotions from him above all others, and even outright lied about them.

Connected to her fear, there's evidence that she is not comfortable, when aspects of her life are taken out of her control. As a child she finds out she's going to be killed over the color of her eyes, and it's something she can't change and has no control over. So, I think she made up her mind not to let anyone control her any more than that, if she could help it. With that most important part of her life completely out of her hands, she otherwise does what she wants when she wants, and fuck you if you don't like it. She will touch, but doesn't like when people take the liberty of touching her. She makes an attempt to seduce Jack to see what he'll do, all the while conscious of the fact that, if he tries to take control of the situation, she will push him away. She blatantly flouts Baskerville rules, such as not being allowed to leave the estate unattended, and not being allowed to use her Chain's powers in public. I think on some level, lack of control over herself = death, to her.

Needless to say, given her relationship with Levi, she's not precisely a "traditional values" kind of person. Give her a box and she'll likely find a way to think outside it. You could even go so far as to say that she's not altogether sane. Then again, you can't live the life she's lived without cracking just a little. (And frankly, we can count the number of entirely-sane characters in this manga on one hand.) Despite her great capacity for kindness, she has an equally great capacity for cruelty. She barely bats an eye when she kills, even going so far as dancing in her victims' blood. Guilt and remorse are (mostly) things that happen to other people. A person has to mean something to her on a deep and personal level, before she'd feel bad about much of anything she did to, with, or around them.

For all that, she's actually comparatively well-adjusted. It would have been only too easy for her to snap and do something exactly like what Jack did. She didn't have anything like his obstacles. On a whim, she could have walked into the Abyss, made the sky green, the grass blue, and given everyone red eyes just out of spite. Yet, she didn't. Instead, she tried to befriend the very thing that was going to devour her. She went out and pulled friends (even if only for a day) out of the society that hated her. She loved the brother that was going to kill her (twice). She made a lover of the man whose only reason for taking her in was because it was convenient to keep her around until the time she would serve as a human sacrifice. Instead of breaking, she grew stronger. Instead of going under, she overcame.

Abilities: When one is chosen to be a member of the Baskerville family, the power of the Abyss infuses them until they're nearly as much Chain as they are human. This gives them remarkable regenerative abilities, to the point that one can be shot in the head and sit right back up, a short time later. Short of getting chucked into the Abyss again, being entirely dismembered, or running into a Chain powerful enough to kill other Chains (like the Mad Hatter), she's going to be pretty hard to kill.

Lacie also has a Contract with the Black Rabbit, which she will be bringing with her. A Chain is a demon-like creature born of the Abyss (most of which are modeled after characters in Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland in some way, i.e. The Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Cheshire Cat). By forming a bond with it (aka a Contract), a person is able to summon it to do battle on their behalf, or borrow some of the Chain's power to use, themselves. (Canon never clearly states whether this Chain is an earlier incarnation of Oz, or is simply identical to his chain-form, which is also possible. I don't really like to assume either way, but if pressed, I lean toward the latter. To differentiate between Lacie's Chain and Oz, I tend to call it the Black Rabbit, as opposed to B-Rabbit.) The Rabbit itself will be about 12 feet tall and fairly physically strong. It is armed with bladed chains and a big, wicked-looking scythe. Lacie is able to bring out the bladed chains to use herself. They seem to be guided by thought, and can coil and strike like snakes. Unlike with illegal contractors, as a Baskerville, Lacie's Contract is a partnership of equals, does not need the mirror pendant Pandora's Contractors use, and has no time limit.

Among her more mundane abilities: Lacie has a broad, sharp mind, and can be calculating when she wants to be, even if she usually relies on impulse and intuition much more than strategy. She is shown in canon to be fond of singing, and it is commented that she has a beautiful voice. Given the era and her noble upbringing, it's logical to assume she's had some classical training, and can probably belt out an aria when she feels like it. She is also shown in canon to be a competent thief.

Though in her canon Lacie was able to walk into the Abyss and re-write reality to her liking, I will not be bringing that ability with her. I assume it wouldn't even be possible, given that this is a different world with no obvious connection to the Abyss. (And honestly, even if she could, she wouldn't. She had 25 years to try that and chose to use the Abyss as a personal getaway of sorts, instead. I think she loved the world too much to want to risk messing it up.)

Alignment: Elios, of hate and love. For one thing, Lacie tends to be a person of extremes, and those are the most extreme emotions there are. For another, given the life she lived, she had every reason to be a total villain and wallow in hate. People wallow in hate all the time, for less reason than she had. Instead, she chose love. Even in her last days, with death looking over her shoulder, she told her brother she loved the world and spoke of its beauty.

Other:
Lacie has a phobia of creepy-crawlies, specifically things like centipedes and worms.

⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample: Not the whole thread, but the fun part


Questions:
None spring to mind!