application ( mask or menace )

[damasks]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Anne
AGE: 26
JOURNAL: fataler
IM / EMAIL: tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
PLURK: passiones
RETURNING: New!

► ► ► tw for discussion child sexual abuse, attempted sexual assault, sex trafficking, forced pregnancy, torture

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Lucy Steel
CHARACTER AGE: 14
SERIES: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run
CHRONOLOGY: After beheading Diego Brando (but he was already dead anyway so it's fine?), just before Stars & Stripes: Outro
CLASS: Hero! Tiny, nervous hero.
HOUSING: I would love randomized housing, please!

BACKGROUND:

Lucy's background at the Jojowiki. I believe that this is a comprehensive enough explanation of Lucy's role in the wider story as per the guidelines on the apps page, but please let me know if you'd like anything expanded upon! I'd be happy to do so.

PERSONALITY:

If she'd been born in a different time period and into a different family, Lucy Steel might have lived a normal life. Unfortunately, she was born in rural Oklahoma in a time of familial and national economic turmoil. Moreover, she was born to a father whose solution to poverty and a debt to the mafia was to sell his young daughter into prostitution. Lucy has always lived with two things: people seeing her as inherently less valuable because she's a girl, and irresponsible adults who force her to take on more than a child should. Lucy's father was the first of these adults, but certainly not the last.

Because of the nature of her situation, Lucy has always kept her dreams quiet--but that doesn't mean she doesn't have them. There are whispers of ambition in Lucy that, by some miracle, haven't been entirely crushed by her life experience. One of the most notable things we learn about Lucy is that she is able to bring people up from their lowest lows, which speaks to her empathy. Much of the time, the way she does this is by dreaming big and sharing those dreams with the right people. It was Lucy who inspired the Steel Ball Run race, who envisioned it as a grand history-making thing, a race that "should be across the entire American continent . . . real dreams should be that big."

There's a wistful quality to Lucy's desire to inspire those around her; it seems clear from the way she speaks that she doesn't believe she can ever make her dreams come true. As a result, she almost never speaks of them. When she does, she essentially uses her husband as a mouthpiece for her dreams--an incredibly canny move, especially for someone so young. Lucy is resigned to the fact that she doesn't have the personal power and respect as a girl to make her dreams come true; however, it's implied that she is well aware of the fact that her husband can make his dreams come true. So if Lucy's dreams become Stephen's . . . well. If Lucy can see her dreams come true even disguised as someone else's dreams, it's still a victory of sorts for her. As imperfect as it is, she sees being Mrs. Stephen Steel as an opportunity to push her own agenda.

Clearly, Lucy has an incredible amount of intelligence and skill under her belt for such a young girl. Her practical skills are accompanied with a quick wit, common sense, and the ability to problem-solve on the fly in a way that very few teenagers can. Her status as the oldest daughter in a family of six kids along with her mother's untimely death and the family's financial struggles meant that she was drafted to help in the household with just about everything. Even beyond being the eldest daughter and assigned caretaker in her family, Lucy grew up dirt-poor in a very rural setting; she had very few resources at her disposal and a massive number of problems to solve. To succeed, she learned to be creative. In her marriage to Stephen Steel, she appears to have essentially run the household; Stephen was ostensibly the creative power and she was the behind-the-scenes executor, as well as being the person who made sure Stephen walked out of the house with pants on, pulled up, and zipped. Lucy has always needed these skills, as the eldest daughter, as the female head of household, as Stephen's wife and caretaker, and later as the girl trying to save his life.

The downside of Lucy's skills and talents is that Lucy takes far too much responsibility on herself. She served the role of "solution" in her family; she was going to quite literally be her family's meal ticket, the sale of her body and services leading to their salvation. When people around her are in trouble, rather than talking to them or seeking others for help, she throws herself headlong into danger. Lucy does this regardless of negative consequences to herself, which are inevitably steep given that she's constantly surrounded by manipulative, even predatory individuals. No matter how bad things get, though, she doesn't back down. It's clear from her actions that she sees her own value in terms of what she can do for other people and nothing else. In Lucy's mind, if she isn't able to save her husband from President Valentine, what's the point? Because she's been told over and over that the value of her personhood as a young girl is far less than the value of a man like Stephen's, she sees putting her life on the line for Stephen as not only logical but a great deal. She doesn't want to die, but if she dies and Stephen lives, that's a net positive for the universe.

Given Lucy's low opinion of her own societal and moral value, it's no surprise that she has very little comprehension of the fact that what's been done to her is wrong. It's likely that her father always treated her as less valuable than her brothers. Therefore, her worth was always somewhat conditional on how well she did woman's work and how effective a caretaker she could be. What is certain is that her father's attempt to sell her to the mafia as a child prostitute came to light and made it clear to Lucy that her value to adults, especially men, was based in large part in her sexual value. As such, her repeated attempts to seduce the Valentines in her desperation to kill the president and then simply to survive make an unfortunate amount of sense. She has no fighting skill, little physical strength, no powers that she knows of. The only tactics she has to fall back on are her wits and this one thing she knows she can do: be a girl with a body that can be used.

As much as the trauma Lucy experiences affects her, she doesn't have the luxury of time or energy to process it. She also doesn't feel safe enough to let her pain show. Her priority is on moving forward, on accomplishing her goal. When she is put in a traumatic situation, she doesn't allow herself to experience that trauma. There are innumerable panels where Lucy simply checks out: before she feels forced to do something horrible in order to protect Stephen and after horrible things have happened to her. She removes herself emotionally from the situation in order to get done what needs to get done, which makes her seem unfeeling and callous — but if anything, it's the opposite. She's constantly tormented by the choices she has to make, terrified for Stephen, and guilty for the pain she has to dish out, even when it's utterly warranted. After being repeatedly sexually assaulted, brutally tortured, and ultimately almost killed by Scarlet Valentine, Lucy has to kill Scarlet in self-defense, and she's wrecked about it. When she's preparing to kill President Valentine, a man who's plotted to kill her husband and tried to rape her, a man she's determined is "a Stand user and the devil", she's in tears of guilt and shock as she prepares to stab him. She hates hurting others, even when she absolutely has to. But she'd rather it be her than someone else because, again: her value is and has always been conditional on what she's been able to do for others, and most especially for men.

Family, society, and circumstance have told Lucy that, as a young girl, she was a vessel to be used. Even her Stand was, in the end, confirmation of this message. Because of this, Lucy has a tendency to downplay or even outright ignore her positive qualities. She has dreams, but feels unable to openly acknowledge or pursue them, as ambition is unseemly in a girl of her station. She's clever and intuitive and skilled, but feels pressured to use those qualities in service to the men in power over her. There is a lot of work to be done with Lucy before she can start to see herself as someone of inherent value, but being away from home is absolutely going to be the best first step.

POWER:

While Lucy does have canonical powers, they are given to her temporarily by an external artifact (the Holy Corpse or Saint's Corpse, which is almost certainly the corpse of Jesus Christ). The "power" granted to her briefly in canon (referred to as Ticket to Ride) is essentially to be an incubator or womb for the reborn Corpse, so that President Valentine can use it to protect the United States. This power immobilizes her, covers her body in a hard shell, and eventually starts to kill her. By the time of Lucy's pull point, the Corpse has been sealed away and Lucy is no longer subject to that power. As a result, I would like to provide her with new powers that are tangentially related but not the same.

There are two aspects of Lucy's Stand that are largely self-protective, and these are the aspects I'd like to emulate in her MoM powerset, as follows:

1. Invulnerability: Similar to the final stage of Ticket to Ride, when Lucy is physically threatened or experiences an adrenal response to a psychological threat, the outer layer of her skin will turn into a hard, metallic substance. Think Colossus, but not permanent and not as huge or buff. Lucy will not have control over when this happens, as it will be a physiological response to heightened adrenal activity.

2. Blade Tears: During the first stage of Ticket to Ride, Lucy's tears turn into blades, which when used start a sequence of events that bring terrible luck to the person they're used against. For Lucy's MoM powers, I'd like to simplify this and just say her tears turn into normal old knives. Just Regular Knives.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉

COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

Um. Excuse me, I hope this isn't too intrusive a question, but--

[Goodness, she sounds vexed. What on earth could have happened to Lucy Steel today to upset her so much?]

How do you get the smell of burnt popcorn out of the microwave?

[Oh. Well then.]

It really shouldn't be this difficult. I've cleaned it with everything I know to clean it with, all things that should work! And also-- [She mumbles to herself, trying to remember the word, and then gives up. There's the sound of rummaging briefly, before:] Clorox! I didn't use Windex, because that's for windows, that's easy to remember . . .

It smells really terrible, though, please tell me how to fix it. I don't want to have to throw this box away and get a new one, especially since I think this one might be glued into the fan above the stove. [SHE JUST WANTED A CRUNCHY SNACK, TECHNOLOGY, WHY YOU GOTTA DO THIS TO A GAL.]

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

[Lucy is not a traditional hero by any rubric one might care to apply. Sure, she's got a heart of gold underneath all that nervousness, but she's not particularly strong and she doesn't have a lot of experience saving orphans or puppies.]

[She does have experience with farm animals, though. Which is why she was more than happy to assist with the clone roundup endeavor. Admittedly she stays away from the alpacas, because she's never seen an alpaca before now and she's got deep existential uncertainty about them on pretty much every level. The sheep, though, she finds pretty easy to handle.]

Come on now.

[She whacks one of the sheep gently on its hindquarters. When it looks back at her in confusion, she shrugs and gently whacks it again.]

Shoo. I don't want to disintegrate you, please.

[Which seems to work? The sheep bleats and begins to amble back towards the petting zoo. As they go, she keeps patting its hindquarters every little while, more companionably than anything else. As usual, a no-nonsense attitude is the best way to get something stubborn and stupid to do what you want.]

[This isn't at all what Lucy expected she'd be doing when she got here, but she's starting to think that maybe it's for the best. She doesn't know that she's cut out for saving people, based on her track record. But saving sheep? She can deal with that. The stakes are pretty low.]

[At least that's what she thinks before she and her sheep turn a corner and run directly into a scene of clone carnage: a collection of people milling around a crowd of sheep, methodically tipping them over one by one. Lucy's mouth forms an O of horror. They're disintegrating. You can't just disintegrate sheep.]

[All of a sudden she's running into the crowd, yelling--not at the top of her lungs, but definitely yelling in a more obtrusive way than she usually likes to enter a conversation.]

Hey! Stop that! I can take them away, don't kill them!

[Admittedly the stakes are still just sheep, but this is really gross to watch. She's pretty sure there's a commandment about not disintegrating sheep, and if she's the one who has to enforce it, so be it. A hero's life is sometimes a trying one.]

FINAL NOTES: I have a permissions post set up for Lucy so people can opt out of discussion of darker content with her if they prefer to.