000 // lastvoyages application // so. here's the score.
User Name/Nick: Hilda
User LJ: starsandtildes
AIM/IM: aim: frilly betches, plurk: juchecouture
E-mail: palastinalied@gmail.com
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Lua Klein
Series: Baccano!
Age: No canon age; given other characters' ages and Enami Katsumi's art style I'd say 21-22.
From When?: Episode 12, after Claire throws her off the train.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate; at her pull point she’s been aiding and abetting her fiancé’s plan to murder half the passengers on a luxury train and hold the other half for ransom. She also has a pact with the guy that if he provides for her and keeps her safe, she’ll let him kill her as his last victim. Girlfriend needs all of the help.
Item:
Abilities/Powers: No magic or superhuman physical abilities.
Personality: Before I start, I need to put this out there. Most of what we see of Lua in English-language canon (a one-season TV show and a few translated scenes of the books that the show was based on) is in one atypical situation, and she’s presented to show off just how intensely fucked up her boss and fiancé Ladd is. A lot of what I’m working with is inference, and to supplement my interpretation I’m using extra scenes from a tie-in comic and information I got from a friend who has read the books that aren’t yet in English.
And before I get deeper still, I need to talk meta. Narita Ryohgo, Baccano!’s author, has a very clear characterization pattern for quiet, shy women. They’re almost suicidally loyal to the ~most important person~ in their life, and even if they seem delicate, they'll reach deep into some last reserve of inner strength when they're in danger. I can think of five other women across two sets of books this applies to, so I think it’s safe to assume the same tropes apply to how Lua relates to Ladd in canon and how she’d relate to other people in context of the Barge.
What the show gives us of Lua is demure and seemingly detached from most of the events surrounding her, looking strangely out of place with a bunch of homicidal maniacs. Most of the time she’s actually in the background except when she catches Ladd’s attention. She rarely speaks and communicates more through facial expressions, and her body language comes across as naturally shy of being the center of attention, as well as feeling safe enough when Ladd’s around that she doesn’t need to speak up or act.
But. Well. Ladd and Lua met when she was in the middle of a suicide attempt, and he’s promised to take care of her… until he’s ready to kill her “after everyone else on earth”. What in the hell makes a girl think that it’s a good idea to let a man like that control the situation? There's no direct answer in canon, but it's obviously important to who she is. The obvious answer is abuse, but I don’t think it’s that, at least not in a way that either of them recognize. He does tell a guy who asks that “that girl’s only purpose is to be killed by me”, as if he owns her, but aside from the homicide pact, he’s sweet in a Skullcrusher Mountain kind of way, and in the comic she freely tells him she doesn't like how he's handled a situation. The one time she shrinks away from him, she’s not afraid he’s going to hurt her, but petulant because he’s teasing her and ruining her hair.
She doesn’t get the same joy from senseless death and violence Ladd does, either, so it's not that she's into killing. When they find a corpse, she's repulsed and as close to visibly afraid as she gets, and when he asks, she tells him she doesn't see the fun in murder.
At the same time, though, when Ladd tells her exactly how he’s going to kill her, the look on her face leads one of the other guys to call her “the most screwed up one of all of us”. So, the best answer I can find? Lua has a pathological need for protection and safety. Her life before Ladd was almost definitely very insecure, not just because of the suicide attempt, but because she seems to come from the same sketchy background he does and she mistakes violence for strength in a way no one who grew up in a safe environment would (she's turned on even when he starts talking about killing other people). The death talk somehow makes her feel like she's protected: Ladd’s going to kill her, but he’s not going to let anyone else hurt her, and he considers death the most generous gift he can give someone. She’s loved and provided for and doesn’t need anything else.
Lua doesn’t just sit and let men take care of everything, though, even though she looks like she does and she easily could. Her very "shyness" seems to be an advantage, since it gives her the opportunity to scout a situation in ways that people who are actually involved can't. She has a very strong sense for trouble brewing, and even before the train job in canon she'd saved Ladd's life several times before with her warnings. When someone she loves is in danger, she will get up and take care of that problem, either through direct action or manipulation. She disobeys Ladd’s orders both to get him to back down from a fight he was losing and to break up a fight between him and a pretty girl who she saw as a threat to her, and when Ladd's in prison she runs away from a house she’s living in safely because if she stays there it’ll lure ~him~ into a trap. She also tries to talk him out of dangerous situations or into a good mood when he’s particularly anxious, and she seems like the only person he’s willing to listen to at all.
When left to her own resources, like in the books that take place after her pull point, her main defense is her femininity. When she herself is in danger, her reaction is often to freeze both out of panic and in the way animals play dead, but once she can get herself together, that's only an act. She’s non-threatening and cautious, acting girly enough to inspire trust and seem easily taken advantage of, but is only compliant as a way to bide time before getting her plans in motion. She’s living with Ladd’s uncle as a sort of hostage while he’s in prison, and instead of resigning herself to it, she uses a little girl she's friends with to get ahold of Ladd’s friend Graham, and then, well, she and Graham make a plan to get out. She seems to deal best with people younger than her and child-like people: her only healthy relationship is with that little girl, and she’s at her most competent with unpredictable, impulsive guys. Ladd values her because she’s soft and nurturing and can calm him down, and since Graham looks at her as a big sister even though he has a lot of reasons to dislike her (and is unstable enough that he wouldn’t need a reason), it’s probably not just love talking there.
On the Barge, Lua wouldn't at first have the security she needs. Ladd’s not there, and she’s already dead, so, even though she’d be in denial about it at first, she didn’t keep her promise: she died despite him being there, and in a way because she doubted him, since if she’d kept herself locked up safe like he said to she wouldn’t have been killed. She'd stay quiet and try to keep out of the way, wanting to integrate and keep out of trouble, and since her only way off of this boat is graduation, she’d be a little too cooperative until she realized just how much she’d have to change.
Also, living in her old room is going to tear her up once she realizes it’s just her room now. She’s used to always having someone near her, and her need for safety and issues with being loved make me think that she’d try to find a man to be the protector and guide she wants. I do know that she won’t consider this guy, whether he’s her warden or another inmate, a “replacement” for Ladd, but he’ll still fill up the place in her where her sense of herself is supposed to be. She needs someone else to back her up and show her that she has value on her own, and won’t care about graduation unless she found someone else who could give her that first push into becoming a better person and finding out who she is.
Path to Redemption: Lua’s not really a terrible person. She’s an accessory to so many felonies I don’t know how she avoided prison time probably because she was a pretty girl and Ladd committed all the perjury, but she doesn’t actually like death and violence. She just wants to make sure the one person she cares about is happy and successful, and if that means federal crimes, that’s what it means. As long as they love her, it doesn’t matter what she has to do or who she has to be. It will take her a very long time to get rid of Ladd’s ghost in her head, even if she has someone else filling that place in her life on the Barge, and even when he’s gone, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
She’s let loyalty dominate her psyche at the expense of every other virtue and needs to learn that just because someone she cares about wants her to do something, it doesn’t mean she should. She needs to grow into herself, and even if she doesn’t become particularly assertive, to at least know she has a will that should be respected like anyone else’s and to learn to not be as manipulative as she is. I want to get her to the point where she can decide for herself whether she wants to stay on or go home after graduation, rather than do what her warden would recommend.
There’s an even bigger problem, though, wrapped up in how she’s sublimated herself. Lua also has a death wish that canon only postponed her carrying out: if she doesn’t have anyone to give her life meaning, she doesn’t care if she lives or dies. “That girl only exists to be killed by me”, remember? She needs something to turn her energies towards instead of living through another person, and someone who can learn who she is well enough to help her find that.
Really, she needs someone who can be a “good influence” on her and keep her away from the kind of people who feed her issues long enough to get her standing on her own. Someone who can be kind, but still push her away when she starts to latch on and treat them as her new anchor, and whose relationship with and attitude towards her doesn’t change no matter how well or poorly she’s doing. She’d only really change through negative reinforcement, I think. In fact, if she thinks cooperation’s going to please someone, that becomes her motivation and it’s all pointless. Manipulation doesn’t work well, either. She manipulates others enough to recognize when someone else is trying to use it against her. Instead, she needs to be told what isn’t acceptable, and from there, expected to find the good on her own.
History: The Baccano! wiki is rather thin and has headcanon from roleplayers pasted into character pages as canon info, so a written-out history is more reliable.
We don't know anything at all about Lua until about a year or two before the events of the 1931 story arc I’m taking her from. She has the gangster movie accent most of the show’s “grew up on the streets” Mafia cast has, though in a more subdued form, and her body language seems self-conscious about looking as well-dressed as she is in 1931, both of which suggest to me that the luxury isn’t natural to her. She probably started out as a nice enough girl totally alone and working to live in some line where all you need is a level head and a pretty smile, not striking enough for those one-in-a-million chances you dream of when all you have is you, living in a bad town (and Chicago in the 1920s was the worst)... from the beginning it’s clear the story won't end prettily. The first thing I know for sure is that she attempted suicide sometime in 1930 or 1931. There’s no motive given in canon, and while it could have been almost anything, based on the rest of her personality I think she lost someone who wasn’t only important to her emotionally, but was keeping her off the streets.
The only thing definite about the incident: Ladd Russo talked her down. One of the few things we know about Ladd’s backstory is that the only serious girlfriend he had before Lua died in an accident he was partly responsible for, and while he was a thug with a short fuse before that, afterwards he started to want to kill everyone around him at some point. If they die, it’s on his terms rather than theirs! So, I think it went down something like this. In whatever situation he found her, Ladd was charmed by the pretty girl taking her imminent death so calmly (especially since she was nothing like his dead girlfriend) and came out with an offer that was half an order, similar to one he gave his now-best-friend when they met in a similar situation a few years before. She could stick with him, and he’d make sure to personally kill her, but until he was ready to do that, he’d keep her safe. Either way, he wasn’t going to kill her right then, because she wanted to die, and it was no fun to kill someone who wanted it.
… she obviously went with it.
Most of what’s indisputably canon takes place over one night late in 1931. Holding a train for ransom and killing passengers for fun is Ladd's idea of a vacation. It also seems to have been the start of an independent career for him, so he brought along Lua and about ten other guys to announce to his uncle Placido, the family head, that he was going off on his own, and by announce I mean giddily show up, kill two mooks who are complaining about their job being too hard, introduce his uncle to his new girlfriend, and then threaten dear uncle with a shotgun because it’s fun to tease him. Placido… didn’t take it well. While Lua’s only words in the scene are a “pleased to meet you, mister”, there’s an extra (though possibly not entirely canon) scene where after that meeting she tries to persuade Ladd to kill him because he’ll be a threat later on. Whether she did or not, I think she could tell that no matter how the train job went down, both of them were going to be in danger from his family later on.* Her job was to hold the engineer hostage and make sure the train kept going no matter what, but a group of terrorists that was also trying to take the train hostage caught her and the guy who was helping her out and tied them up in the baggage car. Ladd found them before too long, and since someone not him had put his girl in danger, and they kept finding their buddies' mutilated corpses around the train, he insisted she keep herself locked up the rest of the trip.
* She’s right.
Instead of listening, she disobeyed him - doubly risky, since he was both the boss and, well, ~Ladd~ - and climbed up to the roof of the train, where Ladd was fighting off the psychotic train conductor who'd been picking off their friends. The timing of her appearance makes me think that she had mixed motives, even though once she got up there and saw Ladd covered in his own blood, all she cared about was his safety (she originally headed up there while Ladd was throwing creepy sexually charged taunts at a female terrorist he found there). The conductor, having about as few limits as Ladd, saw an opportunity to get Ladd out of the way and overpowered her, wrapped a rope around her neck and made a makeshift gallows out of a passing signal. In canon, Ladd leapt off to rescue her, since he'd promised no one else was going to kill her, and she survived. Here, he wasn’t quite close enough, but she knows he went after her.
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera feed is at a strange kind of Dutch angle and shows half of a young woman’s face partly hidden by long blonde hair. The one eye is flickering about, studying the area around the camera lens closely, and then the woman closes her eyes. When she starts speaking a moment later, it’s soft and high-pitched, but unaffected, with a strong Chicago accent underneath.]
I don’t know how long I’m going to be here, but it sounds like it could be a long time. I guess I should get to know everyone a little better.
[She takes a deep breath, and after another minute, asks the question even more shyly.] So, what is there to do around here?
Sample RP: Lua doesn’t know if she’s really dead or not. The thought’s been crossing her mind a lot, but instead of thinking about it, she pulls a drawer open and takes out a knife. There’s a pile of fruit in front of her and someone who she’s still not sure about, and it’s better to make herself useful than think back and try to decide if that night on the train happened, or if it didn’t, what’s the last real thing she saw.
So she sits and peels and cuts, keeping her eyes down and open for any imperfections to pare away. The woman she doesn’t trust is bored, she can tell (she’s watching her, too, in little peeks between apples when it’s only natural to look up and stretch your neck), but Lua doesn’t make any move to talk to her. She doesn’t have that much to say, and she’s learning a lot more than she could in a conversation.
If she’s dead, this ship isn’t bad for hell. It’s more like what she’d thought prison was going to be that one night long ago, the last night she knows happened. She remembers her feet dangling out the window, shoes lost to a gust of wind, grip loosening so she could just leave it all behind, and then… he had to have been real. If that wasn’t…
The peel she’s sliced off is more fruit than peel, and she twitches her nose and puts her mind back to her work.
Special Notes: Lua could potentially be trigger city for people with domestic abuse issues if I got into her canon history. It’s never been a concern before, since the other players were familiar with her canon and I didn’t explore her canon relationships very far, but I realize it could be an issue in this environment. First two paragraphs this sum it up: there is a lot of talk of death and violence and "you're only alive so I can kill you last" in canon, but it's in the context of a relationship that both halves know they have the power to end. I realize how the language could cause some people problems, though, and if anyone would have difficulty with a character who has that in her history, I would use all of the LJ cuts to hide anything problematic and would respect if other players didn't want CR with her.
User LJ: starsandtildes
AIM/IM: aim: frilly betches, plurk: juchecouture
E-mail: palastinalied@gmail.com
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Lua Klein
Series: Baccano!
Age: No canon age; given other characters' ages and Enami Katsumi's art style I'd say 21-22.
From When?: Episode 12, after Claire throws her off the train.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate; at her pull point she’s been aiding and abetting her fiancé’s plan to murder half the passengers on a luxury train and hold the other half for ransom. She also has a pact with the guy that if he provides for her and keeps her safe, she’ll let him kill her as his last victim. Girlfriend needs all of the help.
Item:
Abilities/Powers: No magic or superhuman physical abilities.
Personality: Before I start, I need to put this out there. Most of what we see of Lua in English-language canon (a one-season TV show and a few translated scenes of the books that the show was based on) is in one atypical situation, and she’s presented to show off just how intensely fucked up her boss and fiancé Ladd is. A lot of what I’m working with is inference, and to supplement my interpretation I’m using extra scenes from a tie-in comic and information I got from a friend who has read the books that aren’t yet in English.
And before I get deeper still, I need to talk meta. Narita Ryohgo, Baccano!’s author, has a very clear characterization pattern for quiet, shy women. They’re almost suicidally loyal to the ~most important person~ in their life, and even if they seem delicate, they'll reach deep into some last reserve of inner strength when they're in danger. I can think of five other women across two sets of books this applies to, so I think it’s safe to assume the same tropes apply to how Lua relates to Ladd in canon and how she’d relate to other people in context of the Barge.
What the show gives us of Lua is demure and seemingly detached from most of the events surrounding her, looking strangely out of place with a bunch of homicidal maniacs. Most of the time she’s actually in the background except when she catches Ladd’s attention. She rarely speaks and communicates more through facial expressions, and her body language comes across as naturally shy of being the center of attention, as well as feeling safe enough when Ladd’s around that she doesn’t need to speak up or act.
But. Well. Ladd and Lua met when she was in the middle of a suicide attempt, and he’s promised to take care of her… until he’s ready to kill her “after everyone else on earth”. What in the hell makes a girl think that it’s a good idea to let a man like that control the situation? There's no direct answer in canon, but it's obviously important to who she is. The obvious answer is abuse, but I don’t think it’s that, at least not in a way that either of them recognize. He does tell a guy who asks that “that girl’s only purpose is to be killed by me”, as if he owns her, but aside from the homicide pact, he’s sweet in a Skullcrusher Mountain kind of way, and in the comic she freely tells him she doesn't like how he's handled a situation. The one time she shrinks away from him, she’s not afraid he’s going to hurt her, but petulant because he’s teasing her and ruining her hair.
She doesn’t get the same joy from senseless death and violence Ladd does, either, so it's not that she's into killing. When they find a corpse, she's repulsed and as close to visibly afraid as she gets, and when he asks, she tells him she doesn't see the fun in murder.
At the same time, though, when Ladd tells her exactly how he’s going to kill her, the look on her face leads one of the other guys to call her “the most screwed up one of all of us”. So, the best answer I can find? Lua has a pathological need for protection and safety. Her life before Ladd was almost definitely very insecure, not just because of the suicide attempt, but because she seems to come from the same sketchy background he does and she mistakes violence for strength in a way no one who grew up in a safe environment would (she's turned on even when he starts talking about killing other people). The death talk somehow makes her feel like she's protected: Ladd’s going to kill her, but he’s not going to let anyone else hurt her, and he considers death the most generous gift he can give someone. She’s loved and provided for and doesn’t need anything else.
Lua doesn’t just sit and let men take care of everything, though, even though she looks like she does and she easily could. Her very "shyness" seems to be an advantage, since it gives her the opportunity to scout a situation in ways that people who are actually involved can't. She has a very strong sense for trouble brewing, and even before the train job in canon she'd saved Ladd's life several times before with her warnings. When someone she loves is in danger, she will get up and take care of that problem, either through direct action or manipulation. She disobeys Ladd’s orders both to get him to back down from a fight he was losing and to break up a fight between him and a pretty girl who she saw as a threat to her, and when Ladd's in prison she runs away from a house she’s living in safely because if she stays there it’ll lure ~him~ into a trap. She also tries to talk him out of dangerous situations or into a good mood when he’s particularly anxious, and she seems like the only person he’s willing to listen to at all.
When left to her own resources, like in the books that take place after her pull point, her main defense is her femininity. When she herself is in danger, her reaction is often to freeze both out of panic and in the way animals play dead, but once she can get herself together, that's only an act. She’s non-threatening and cautious, acting girly enough to inspire trust and seem easily taken advantage of, but is only compliant as a way to bide time before getting her plans in motion. She’s living with Ladd’s uncle as a sort of hostage while he’s in prison, and instead of resigning herself to it, she uses a little girl she's friends with to get ahold of Ladd’s friend Graham, and then, well, she and Graham make a plan to get out. She seems to deal best with people younger than her and child-like people: her only healthy relationship is with that little girl, and she’s at her most competent with unpredictable, impulsive guys. Ladd values her because she’s soft and nurturing and can calm him down, and since Graham looks at her as a big sister even though he has a lot of reasons to dislike her (and is unstable enough that he wouldn’t need a reason), it’s probably not just love talking there.
On the Barge, Lua wouldn't at first have the security she needs. Ladd’s not there, and she’s already dead, so, even though she’d be in denial about it at first, she didn’t keep her promise: she died despite him being there, and in a way because she doubted him, since if she’d kept herself locked up safe like he said to she wouldn’t have been killed. She'd stay quiet and try to keep out of the way, wanting to integrate and keep out of trouble, and since her only way off of this boat is graduation, she’d be a little too cooperative until she realized just how much she’d have to change.
Also, living in her old room is going to tear her up once she realizes it’s just her room now. She’s used to always having someone near her, and her need for safety and issues with being loved make me think that she’d try to find a man to be the protector and guide she wants. I do know that she won’t consider this guy, whether he’s her warden or another inmate, a “replacement” for Ladd, but he’ll still fill up the place in her where her sense of herself is supposed to be. She needs someone else to back her up and show her that she has value on her own, and won’t care about graduation unless she found someone else who could give her that first push into becoming a better person and finding out who she is.
Path to Redemption: Lua’s not really a terrible person. She’s an accessory to so many felonies I don’t know how she avoided prison time probably because she was a pretty girl and Ladd committed all the perjury, but she doesn’t actually like death and violence. She just wants to make sure the one person she cares about is happy and successful, and if that means federal crimes, that’s what it means. As long as they love her, it doesn’t matter what she has to do or who she has to be. It will take her a very long time to get rid of Ladd’s ghost in her head, even if she has someone else filling that place in her life on the Barge, and even when he’s gone, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
She’s let loyalty dominate her psyche at the expense of every other virtue and needs to learn that just because someone she cares about wants her to do something, it doesn’t mean she should. She needs to grow into herself, and even if she doesn’t become particularly assertive, to at least know she has a will that should be respected like anyone else’s and to learn to not be as manipulative as she is. I want to get her to the point where she can decide for herself whether she wants to stay on or go home after graduation, rather than do what her warden would recommend.
There’s an even bigger problem, though, wrapped up in how she’s sublimated herself. Lua also has a death wish that canon only postponed her carrying out: if she doesn’t have anyone to give her life meaning, she doesn’t care if she lives or dies. “That girl only exists to be killed by me”, remember? She needs something to turn her energies towards instead of living through another person, and someone who can learn who she is well enough to help her find that.
Really, she needs someone who can be a “good influence” on her and keep her away from the kind of people who feed her issues long enough to get her standing on her own. Someone who can be kind, but still push her away when she starts to latch on and treat them as her new anchor, and whose relationship with and attitude towards her doesn’t change no matter how well or poorly she’s doing. She’d only really change through negative reinforcement, I think. In fact, if she thinks cooperation’s going to please someone, that becomes her motivation and it’s all pointless. Manipulation doesn’t work well, either. She manipulates others enough to recognize when someone else is trying to use it against her. Instead, she needs to be told what isn’t acceptable, and from there, expected to find the good on her own.
History: The Baccano! wiki is rather thin and has headcanon from roleplayers pasted into character pages as canon info, so a written-out history is more reliable.
We don't know anything at all about Lua until about a year or two before the events of the 1931 story arc I’m taking her from. She has the gangster movie accent most of the show’s “grew up on the streets” Mafia cast has, though in a more subdued form, and her body language seems self-conscious about looking as well-dressed as she is in 1931, both of which suggest to me that the luxury isn’t natural to her. She probably started out as a nice enough girl totally alone and working to live in some line where all you need is a level head and a pretty smile, not striking enough for those one-in-a-million chances you dream of when all you have is you, living in a bad town (and Chicago in the 1920s was the worst)... from the beginning it’s clear the story won't end prettily. The first thing I know for sure is that she attempted suicide sometime in 1930 or 1931. There’s no motive given in canon, and while it could have been almost anything, based on the rest of her personality I think she lost someone who wasn’t only important to her emotionally, but was keeping her off the streets.
The only thing definite about the incident: Ladd Russo talked her down. One of the few things we know about Ladd’s backstory is that the only serious girlfriend he had before Lua died in an accident he was partly responsible for, and while he was a thug with a short fuse before that, afterwards he started to want to kill everyone around him at some point. If they die, it’s on his terms rather than theirs! So, I think it went down something like this. In whatever situation he found her, Ladd was charmed by the pretty girl taking her imminent death so calmly (especially since she was nothing like his dead girlfriend) and came out with an offer that was half an order, similar to one he gave his now-best-friend when they met in a similar situation a few years before. She could stick with him, and he’d make sure to personally kill her, but until he was ready to do that, he’d keep her safe. Either way, he wasn’t going to kill her right then, because she wanted to die, and it was no fun to kill someone who wanted it.
… she obviously went with it.
Most of what’s indisputably canon takes place over one night late in 1931. Holding a train for ransom and killing passengers for fun is Ladd's idea of a vacation. It also seems to have been the start of an independent career for him, so he brought along Lua and about ten other guys to announce to his uncle Placido, the family head, that he was going off on his own, and by announce I mean giddily show up, kill two mooks who are complaining about their job being too hard, introduce his uncle to his new girlfriend, and then threaten dear uncle with a shotgun because it’s fun to tease him. Placido… didn’t take it well. While Lua’s only words in the scene are a “pleased to meet you, mister”, there’s an extra (though possibly not entirely canon) scene where after that meeting she tries to persuade Ladd to kill him because he’ll be a threat later on. Whether she did or not, I think she could tell that no matter how the train job went down, both of them were going to be in danger from his family later on.* Her job was to hold the engineer hostage and make sure the train kept going no matter what, but a group of terrorists that was also trying to take the train hostage caught her and the guy who was helping her out and tied them up in the baggage car. Ladd found them before too long, and since someone not him had put his girl in danger, and they kept finding their buddies' mutilated corpses around the train, he insisted she keep herself locked up the rest of the trip.
* She’s right.
Instead of listening, she disobeyed him - doubly risky, since he was both the boss and, well, ~Ladd~ - and climbed up to the roof of the train, where Ladd was fighting off the psychotic train conductor who'd been picking off their friends. The timing of her appearance makes me think that she had mixed motives, even though once she got up there and saw Ladd covered in his own blood, all she cared about was his safety (she originally headed up there while Ladd was throwing creepy sexually charged taunts at a female terrorist he found there). The conductor, having about as few limits as Ladd, saw an opportunity to get Ladd out of the way and overpowered her, wrapped a rope around her neck and made a makeshift gallows out of a passing signal. In canon, Ladd leapt off to rescue her, since he'd promised no one else was going to kill her, and she survived. Here, he wasn’t quite close enough, but she knows he went after her.
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera feed is at a strange kind of Dutch angle and shows half of a young woman’s face partly hidden by long blonde hair. The one eye is flickering about, studying the area around the camera lens closely, and then the woman closes her eyes. When she starts speaking a moment later, it’s soft and high-pitched, but unaffected, with a strong Chicago accent underneath.]
I don’t know how long I’m going to be here, but it sounds like it could be a long time. I guess I should get to know everyone a little better.
[She takes a deep breath, and after another minute, asks the question even more shyly.] So, what is there to do around here?
Sample RP: Lua doesn’t know if she’s really dead or not. The thought’s been crossing her mind a lot, but instead of thinking about it, she pulls a drawer open and takes out a knife. There’s a pile of fruit in front of her and someone who she’s still not sure about, and it’s better to make herself useful than think back and try to decide if that night on the train happened, or if it didn’t, what’s the last real thing she saw.
So she sits and peels and cuts, keeping her eyes down and open for any imperfections to pare away. The woman she doesn’t trust is bored, she can tell (she’s watching her, too, in little peeks between apples when it’s only natural to look up and stretch your neck), but Lua doesn’t make any move to talk to her. She doesn’t have that much to say, and she’s learning a lot more than she could in a conversation.
If she’s dead, this ship isn’t bad for hell. It’s more like what she’d thought prison was going to be that one night long ago, the last night she knows happened. She remembers her feet dangling out the window, shoes lost to a gust of wind, grip loosening so she could just leave it all behind, and then… he had to have been real. If that wasn’t…
The peel she’s sliced off is more fruit than peel, and she twitches her nose and puts her mind back to her work.
Special Notes: Lua could potentially be trigger city for people with domestic abuse issues if I got into her canon history. It’s never been a concern before, since the other players were familiar with her canon and I didn’t explore her canon relationships very far, but I realize it could be an issue in this environment. First two paragraphs this sum it up: there is a lot of talk of death and violence and "you're only alive so I can kill you last" in canon, but it's in the context of a relationship that both halves know they have the power to end. I realize how the language could cause some people problems, though, and if anyone would have difficulty with a character who has that in her history, I would use all of the LJ cuts to hide anything problematic and would respect if other players didn't want CR with her.