don't treat me like i am something that happened to you
1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Kay
Current characters in Bete Noire: rosalaurel, thisredheart.
2. Character Information
Name: Lyla Tzigano
Livejournal Username: satrinah
Fandom: World of Darkness (canon character)
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/105979653/15257503
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Lyla is slender, and very tall, just about 5'9"; she's still in the age range where this manifests as coltishness paired with about a million miles of leg, so she does look a bit waif-like. She's recently eighteen, with long, straight dark brown hair, deep blue eyes, and fair skin, dusted with the occasional freckle. She dresses either in boring, cheap clothes, or delightfully trashy cheap clothes, along the lines of "fishnets, tiny shorts, and huge boots". She has a small birthmark in the shape of a crescent moon on the back of her right shoulder, and wears a lot of black; it is not uncommon for her to get compliments on her appearance, though she also frequently gets "you'd be so beautiful if you just stopped wearing all that stuff on your face." Her tongue and navel are pierced, because punching holes in yourself is a time-honored teenage pastime.
History: No wiki link, because she is ridonk obscure, and I've had to fill in some canonical holes regarding location, and what happens after the set-up in Fair Is Foul. Being a World of Darkness canon character means she was originally a fairly fleshed-out NPC that I co-opted for roleplay purposes as a PC; therefore, a few liberties have been taken for the purpose of making the character have a more coherent, complete backstory, though the skeleton and the reasons for her decision to run away are all canon.
There is also triggering material in this app, as a warning. THANKS, CANON.
Lyla is the daughter of a Romanian immigrant of Romani heritage and a vampire drifter; she was born just outside of Nashville, TN. Vampires in her world aren't supposed to be able to have babies, except for the fifteenth generation, or the generation of vampires prophesied to be a sign of the end of the world, as their blood is so weak and they are so close to human they can sire children with mortals. Lyla, specifically, is fated to be the Last Daughter of Eve, denoted by the aforementioned birthmark; her actions will directly influence the Gehenna scenario of which she is a part ("Fair Is Foul"). Nothing in her life is coincidental, and there are entire cults dedicated to her existence.
As far as Lyla knows, though, she's just some girl unlucky enough to have been born a dhampir and have attracted Lilith's attention.
Lyla's biological mother was, to put it mildly, inattentive, with several stints in rehab. She did not particularly want a child, especially since the child's father was gone before Lyla was even born. She had a lot of boyfriends, and some of them were worse than others; the worst of them happened to be a rapist. When Lyla was ten, she finally snapped, or rather she snapped his neck, manifesting her dhampir powers for the first time. Correctly deducing that no one would believe her about any of this, including the idea that a little girl could break a grown man's neck, she panicked and ran away, hitch-hiking up to Nashville. Once she was there, she had difficulty surviving due to being even younger than the average runaway, but was assisted by a kind, dark-haired woman who offered her a drink. Since she was practically dying of thirst, Lyla gratefully accepted.
Problem was, the woman was Lilith in disguise, and her blood was mixed in with the juice. This sealed a bond between Lilith and Lyla, permitting Lilith to get her hooks into her newest vessel/avatar, who was perfect for her designs: destined to grow up beautiful, distrustful of men, and incredibly vulnerable. Lyla spent the next seven years on the streets, though she had it better than some--the common perception of homeless youth is that they're filth-covered and constantly starving, like orphan waifs in Victorian literature, but Lyla even occasionally got to sleep indoors, if she knew someone who had a spare floor or couch. A rule of the streets is that if you are a young female, especially a pretty one, you find yourself a boyfriend for protection--this is why many girls got into the neo-nazi lifestyle, because their boyfriends were, or the gang lifestyle, because, again, their boyfriends were. Lyla never fell into either category (she's half-Romani and her dad was from South America, so she's not exactly eligible for the former), but she did have an ongoing series of drug dealers who drifted in and out of her life. She was also somewhat protected by some of Lilith's underlings, a group of vampires posing as other transients. She didn't see Lilith again until strange things started happening locally, like massacres of humans. Eventually, one of the vampires (the one she was closest with, Malachai, who was a Malkavian beset by madness) exposed her abilities to Lyla, and in turn, she discovered a good three fourths of her entire legacy.
The right-hand vampire man, Lucian, was swift to take her under his wing, whether she liked it or not. Lucian looked like he wasn't much older than her, only in his mid-twenties, but he was thousands of years old in actuality, and Lilith's first disciple. He and Lyla engaged in many power struggles, over the next few months, as he tried via psychic and physical means to force her to capitulate to Lilith's will--as Lilith wanted Lyla to serve a role in the genocide of humanity and vampires alike. Thousands of years ago, before even the First City that housed Cain (the original vampire), Cain came to Lilith after being thrown from the garden of Eden, seeking her teachings in magic. When he demanded to learn arts she refused to teach him, he assaulted her and destroyed her children. She and her husband, Lucifer, separated after that, and ever since then, Lilith has been nursing a serious grudge. Lyla, as it turns out, is necessary because she is Lilith's tie to the physical realm, being mostly human and just supernaturally gifted enough to not be destroyed by Lilith's power. Lilith is not just the first bride of Satan and Adam in WoD; she was also supposedly God's first consort that later became a deity in her own right, but one that has had a tendency to demonstrate her power in subtle ways....'til recently, anyway. Lilith is a plotty world-ending Machiavellian jerk that way.
Lyla eventually met a group of adventurers looking to stop the genocide, and decided she'd try to help them, persuaded by a gargoyle-vampire who was trying to look out for her. She'd initially intended to do so as an oracle and inside man, but Lucian cottoned on to this imminent betrayal, and seemed genuinely hurt that she was going to turn on both her mother and him. Lyla ended up diablerizing him (AKA: eating his blood and absorbing his power om nom nom), which is roughly where I take her from.
Personality: Lyla is basically a sweet, caring person who has never been permitted to hit some fairly significant developmental milestones, such as "having a safe place to live, ever." She has a tough, trashy exterior, deliberately cultivating the image of a streetwise hood rat with heavy eyeliner and cigarettes. She has boyfriends, but they are typically functional, not emotional. Her life has primarily been about survival, with no goal besides getting to one day or the next. Her compassion is still strongly present, though, probably because she sees herself in the underdogs and oppressed, and as she gets older she continues to sketch out and refine her sense of ethics, struggling to make sense of a world that gives her conflicting messages about what is right and who she is supposed to want to be. She is, like a lot of street kids, very old for her age in many ways: she takes care of herself, and is keenly aware of potential predators or untrustworthy individuals, though she's not perfectly attuned and will occasionally make missteps or distrust someone who is genuinely trying to help her. Naivete is not something she affords herself. Her trust is hard-won and easily broken, and when injured, she often lashes out, using her emotional intelligence to wound the other party where blows cannot. If that fails, she runs and hides, and starts all over again.
In other ways, though, just like many street kids, she's very young. Much of her emotional development is a bit frozen; she does not know what healthy relationships look like, though she can spot what they aren't. A lot of her own pain and trauma is so deeply buried she's not even completely cognizant of how deeply affecting it really is, and struggles with naming and claiming her own emotions before they overtake her. While she is genuinely intelligent, her education is sparse, garnered from books she's read and no concrete background, and thus this intelligence manifests more often as cunning; she thinks of herself as intellectually not very bright, but socially savvy, and is learning the art of manipulation. To other street kids at home, she often seems very at ease, probably because she's been homeless for markedly longer than almost anyone else; her charisma is currency, and she likes to give advice, to seem like she's the girl who never gets her heart broken and already knows everything that's going on. She's not always hugely respectful of social mores and doesn't mind seeming strange, as long as it's not at a time when she needs to run and hide, though if someone else is at risk, she'd typically stay to defend them. Despite her cynical exterior, she likes fairy tales and happy endings in media, if only because it's good to see them somewhere.
Her self-esteem is pretty bad. She struggles with not interpreting compliments as pressure to keep being a certain way, or with not interpreting hidden intentions in innocent comments. Sometimes she is self-destructive in the form of drug and alcohol use, and can be very frustrating for people who do want to help her, because now she not only has the 'fucked up teenage girl' issues, she has the 'I am a fucking monster' issues; she's concerned she'll damage good people, and thus tries to surround herself with the bad. People who seem too good or wholesome are alternately too difficult to trust or too far away to be real. Ideally, she would surround herself with other freaks who still try to be kind, people who don't reinforce her otherness, but she does, one day, want to fit in and have a real life that isn't based around running, fighting, and hiding.
If she demonstrates a different personality with traits that are aggressively sexually confident, manipulative, hedonistic, or otherwise associated with demonic behavior, Lyla is not driving the car. That would be her mother--the adoptive one. Being Lilith's protege and adoptive daughter means that (as detailed in the powers section) she functions as Lilith's avatar, meaning sometimes she is possessed by her own adoptive mother's nature--not, specifically, her mother's mind, but just her personality and larger-than-life nature. Lyla hates it. Lilith is everything she is afraid to be, but sometimes privately wishes she could try her hand at: sometimes cruel, desirous, a grown woman in charge of her life and maybe a few other people's, too. Lilith is the epitome of powerful, and that kind of power is intimidating, but it feels good, too, to be the one in control, and the one other people are afraid of, for a change. What concerns her is that it could also be addictive, and then she'd lose herself entirely to what Lilith wants for her.
Her kindness is real, and it's not the Pollyanna sort; she's just the truest kind of cynic, one whose idealism has been injured. Beneath that, though, she does have a secret desire to be like Lilith: remorseless, monstrous, and terrifying. It's something that shames her deeply, though, because Lilith is a genocidal lunatic who treated Lyla like a prized possession and not a daughter, but it's not unusual to daydream about using power to get what you want. It's just slightly more unusual to have the possibility as close at hand as Lyla does, but she endeavors to keep those thoughts at bay. She is aware of her capacity for being overly intense, and tries instead to keep her sense of humor intact.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Trigger city, again. :(
Sex is not, by itself, a guiding part of Lyla's life--or it wouldn't be, if she didn't have the triple-whammy of being young, female, and homeless. She oscillates between being aggressively and sometimes inappropriately flirtatious, as a way of feeling as though she has some control over her sexuality, and shutting down completely, to the point where attempts to push her past her comfort level trigger hysteria, which is sometimes a violent frenzy. She does not generally enjoy sex very much and it's something she only did at home to pacify a boyfriend whose protection she absolutely needed, so only once in a while. It is, however, important to her that she give the impression of being rather promiscuous and in-control, which in juxtaposition with her age is often just completely alarming--she dresses in a fairly provocative fashion, knows all the euphemisms and jokes, and saunters like she thinks she's grown, which all equates to being kind of like a toddler behind the wheel of a ferrari; it's a damn flashy car (and act), but that's meaningless if you can't even keep it from crashing. If someone is generally astute, acquainted with the nuances of survivors, and has the time to observe the behavior of child survivors (because it's worth noting here that although she is eighteen, when it comes to intimate relationships and sexuality she's not at all mature enough to be relating on an adult level), it's basically incredibly blatant she's been through some stuff; given that she was homeless for almost half her life, this is probably not shocking.
I do not see sex being a driving aspect of her goings-on in BN, mostly due to her age and issues, but it's not that she doesn't have the drives--it's just that her own desires are something she doesn't know how to deal with just yet. She's had crushes on a couple of boys over the years, but was always disinclined to pursue them.
Powers:
- Auspex: Lyla has enough points in Auspex to be able to heighten one sense at a time to superhuman levels, learn things about people by examining their auras, learn details about an artist's mind from a piece of art they have made, and learn something about an object and its owner from the "resonance" it leaves behind.
- Dementation: Three points in this discipline allows Lyla to amplify or dull emotions present in a victim, inflict maddening visions on a victim, and gain insight into the world around her through seemingly random patterns. This gifts her with some talent in reading signs and auguring, should she ever give it a go.
- Obsfucate: Two points in this discipline permit Lyla to remain hidden in shadow as long as she does not do anything to attract attention to herself and remains silent. It's awesome for sneaking up on people, but is commonly employed when Lyla is in trouble and in hiding.
- Ogham: Lyla, like Lilith before her, is able to practice magic; however, she is almost completely uneducated in the arts, and is only capable of using Ogham, an ancient discipline originated by the Lhiannon clan. She has five points in Ogham, permitting her to awaken plant life to work in her defense ("consecrate the grove"), inscribing runes on herself that give her power over the Beast ("crimson woad"), inscribing a victim's name on her body which curses them when they see it ("inscribe the curse"), binding herself to the spirit of the moon and sun, and drinking the magical power of a mystical site of energy.
- Potence: Three points in this discipline give Lyla the ability to channel much greater strength, especially in moments of heightened emotion, such as fear and rage--this is the trick she's found most handy, over the years. She has slightly increased speed as well, but this is not tied to her emotional state.
- Resistance: Lyla cannot be dominated by mental command or hypnotism; Lilith's blood grants her a means of bypassing generational hierarchy.
- Oracular ability: Lyla's most annoying power (if you ask her) manifests as either speaking in tongues, accompanied by visions, or seizure-like fits, accompanied by visions. She goes into fugue states when these occur, and will frequently end up somewhere unfamiliar with no memory of how she got there in the first place.
- Dhampir: Lyla is half-vampire, albeit one who is more comfortable with humans. She does not need to drink blood, but she is capable of doing so, and does have a blood pool from which she can expend points to try to heal herself if she is badly injured, though her young age and inexperience mean this is a small pool and if she suffers a mortal wound in which death is instantaneous, she's just...dead. Like anyone else. She is also prone to vampiric frenzy in extreme fight-or-flight situations.
Lyla the person thinks of herself as entirely separate from magical stuff. It's just this thing that keeps happening to her, not her identity. Somewhat horribly, BN would actually be less traumatic for her than home, where everyone wants to use her as a weapon or abuse her. While there would be a lot of action, she'd possibly get to meet people who would let her unravel some of her issues and stay in one place for longer than a week. Her maturity is all out of whack in regards to balance: in some respects she desperately needs the room to be a kid again, but in others she's behind in class, and I would like to use Bete Noire to give her the room to try that out...and because look, hanging out with WoD vampires is not going to help anybody mature sanely. Lyla is at the right spot for a coming-of-age story, and BN seems like an awesome place to tell that tale.
Her age and experiences are also part of why I'd like to play her; I used to play almost entirely Teenagers With Issues, and then segued into adults, but someone who is sort of getting to the cusp of adulthood would allow me to play a little bit in both worlds. Lyla is a terribly in-between person, not really human or vampire, child or grown-up, and she's going to have to make those decisions about who she wants to be, soon. Young adult brains are just kind of fascinating to me, and young people who have struggled with poverty, homelessness, and living on the fringe of society more so, partly because they are often very marginalized and stereotyped, thus feeding into their problems with authority. Lyla meets some of those stereotypes, but is a complete person at the same time, so while she might not completely defy the idea that all teenage runaways are drug-using delinquents, she can transcend that notion by also being a good friend, vivacious party girl, and someone who struggles with boundaries and identity.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: What kind of world is your character from? This part can be short, but it must focus on the particular character's context. What was their world like, from their point of view?
Character History: Let us have a summary of the highlights, the turning points of your character's history. What was it that made them who they are?
5. Samples
First-Person: So today's my eighteenth birthday.
I don't know why I'm bothering to write this down when I'll have to get rid of it anyway. I'll leave it in a gas station somewhere and whoever reads it can know I exist.
I guess I just want someone to know I'm sick of my mother and her great big plans. Which is like, the most cliche thing? But most people's mothers aren't like this. I barely see her, and when I do, she's sweet to me for about five seconds before she starts telling me what to do, like she can rattle a vision out of me. Like it works if she just puts the fear of her into me. Lucian tells me I'm so ungrateful cause I could be out on the streets again, but even when I was on the street it was just this big trick anyway. I thought I was free, but she owned me the whole time. Gotta wonder what my resale value is by this point, I've been through so many different homes over the years. But maybe Lucian's got a point. She kept me alive when nobody else would. That's got to say something.
Also, seriously, I've said this 500 times since the guy picked me up, but what kind of fucking pretentious-ass name is "Lucian"?
Third-Person: It's not yet dawn when Lyla realizes something has gone very, very wrong. She is a thin teenaged girl with dark hair, heavy shadow on her blue eyes, and a generally tousled appearance, stirring into consciousness on a bench just outside of some big building with boarded-up windows. The sky is getting that funny indigo tinge toward the edge, and she knows it's very early morning with the first cold breath she takes; she can always tell the feeling of her favorite time of day.
The quiet is normally kind of nice. This situation isn't exactly normal, though.
There are still a few people out, which surprises her, though not as much as the fact that she can't remember getting here, and nothing looks familiar. It's not uncommon for fugue states to overcome her when she has her visions or speaks in tongues, but this is the first time she's walked all the way to a different neighborhood. Lyla rises gingerly from her perch, tugging her cheap pleather jacket more firmly around herself to fend off the cold. The remnants of last night prove to her that she's not dreaming: the holes in the fishnets and the dried blood on her boots are still there, and her hair and heavy eyeliner are both a bit askew. She squints at her surroundings as though expecting them to change to suit her memory of the evening prior, but nothing happens. By now, she knows Nashville by heart, and this isn't even close.
She wonders where everyone she knows is. It's probably best they aren't here, considering she's sporting a heavy purple contusion on one cheekbone and up to her temple, as a souvenir from her fight with Lucian. At least there's no more blood on her face--cleaning it up is about the last thing she remembers before waking.
When she starts walking, her footsteps are a little unsteady. She weaves by two men with dark slicked back hair and sunken eyes.
One of them says something like, "how much?" and it takes her a second to twig to what he means, but when she does, her lips tighten into a thin line. It's an unpleasant feeling, but it's also not the first time someone's made that mistake--this time, though, given how unsteady she already is, her reaction is more viscerally upset than it might ordinarily be. She doesn't even think he's genuinely inquiring if she's up for sale, just commenting for the sake of making her uncomfortable. Fucking iceheads.
"I'm not a hooker," she snaps, "fuck off."
They just laugh. She rolls her eyes and stalks, boots noisy against the pavement, toward the nearest convenience store, which has burnt-out letters in places, suggesting that instead of JOE'S QUICK MARKET its name is JOE'S QUIK MARK. She steps inside with more certainty than she feels, pressing up against the counter and offering the young, heavily tattooed night clerk a lazy, dissolute smile, as if to say what, I might look a mess, but you don't mind, do you?
"Caaan I get a pack of whatever's cheapest? Thanks."
He cards her, seeming only minimally swayed by her smile, probably because he thinks she seems screamingly underage. He'd have been right if she'd shown up less than a week ago, so it's fair scrutiny, and regardless: the ID she gives him is fake. They don't hand out a lot of driver's licenses to delinquents with no home address where she's from, unfortunately. Lyla sways her way out of the convenience store and sits down on the curb, legs sprawled in front of her, examining those holes in her fishnets. She can't tell if she likes the way they look or not; either way, those, plus the cigarette she sparks up with an inexpensive pink lighter, do not create the impression of healthy living.
She breathes out smoke, and waits to watch the sun come up over the city. Maybe once it's light out, she can figure out where the hell she is.
Third-Person #2: Lyla is sometimes friends with a girl named Monique. She's pretty sure Monique is not the other girl's real name, just like she's pretty sure no one's hair is naturally that shade of blood red, but these are unimportant details in the scheme of knowing a guy who knows a guy who can get them drugs and quite possibly a warm place to sleep for the next three or four days. At ten PM, both girls turn up to an apartment in a seedy neighborhood, hand-in-hand, wearing each other's cheap lipgloss, like they're best friends. It's not a real, functional friendship with that sort of depth, but rather one borne from circumstance. Monique is a little further into the realm of having a genuine drug problem in lieu of playing with fire, as Lyla is, which means they'll only get further apart. Still: for now, it suffices.
Monique goes in the back with a guy who calls himself Spider, with whom the both of them are well-acquainted. Lyla is more reluctant about playing this game, so she stays in the front, staring at the ceiling, pretending she doesn't hear the steady slam of the headboard into the wall. She rests her chin in her hand and her sharp elbows on her bare knees, rolling her eyes. When she was little, she'd have to wait for her mom in doctor's waiting rooms sometimes, bored out of her mind. This feels similar, but less clean.
The slams stop.
Monique starts screaming. Spider starts shouting. The next slam sounds more like a body being thrown into a dresser.
Lyla is through the door in seconds, ponytail swinging behind her. Spider's pants are half-undone, shirt off to show his collection of half-done tattoos, and he's cussing at Monique; the condom came off, she got upset, he didn't think she had the right to complain. There's blood on Monique's face, and even though she's scared, she swears back at him: "It's not my fucking fault your matchstick can't keep a Trojan on, honey!"
He moves forward, and Lyla follows. She frames him from behind, digging her small hand into his shaggy hair, pressing his face flat against the dusty dresser he's got positioned to the sheetless bed. She pulls his face up, just once, and slams his head down hard against the wooden dresser. Sometimes being as tall as she is comes in handy; she's so girlishly skinny otherwise that people think she couldn't do a thing, but sometimes, her adrenaline does her special favors.
Like now, when Spider's bigger body slides to the floor. Now there's blood on his face. Lyla and Monique stare at each other, pale and silent.
"Is he dead?" It's Monique who speaks first. Lyla's not surprised.
She kneels down next to the man she might have killed, and cautiously touches her fingertips to the side of his neck, like they do in movies (she's pretty sure that's where the pulse is supposed to be, anyway), some part of her afraid he'll spring up like Michael Myers and drag her to the ground. It takes her a second of examination before she feels his heartbeat, ba-bum, ba-bum, the blood in his veins still working, his heart still pumping. For a second, that simple experience is so visceral that she imagines what it would look and feel like if she dug her nails in and ripped his throat open, but it's only a second, and when it passes her shudder is easily explained by relief.
She doesn't feel relief, though. It would have been so easy to kill him, and then he never would have bothered either of them again.
"No. Let's bail."
She starts toward the door, but Monique stops, lifting a baggie from one of the dresser drawers.
"Don't," Lyla chastens, "he's gonna be after us anyway--"
"--then you just do your kung fu shit again! That was amazing. Come on."
Lyla thinks about it, and decides they've earned it, though she forces herself to hide her less-than-positive reaction in regards to her 'kung fu' moves; she doesn't think of it quite in the same way. She stashes the baggie in her bra, underneath her t-shirt and jacket, and Monique fixes her own clothes as they hurry down the hall. When they pass by a handsome, if slightly skeletal-looking young man with pale hair and pale eyes, he watches Lyla instead of the redhead whose shirt is still halfway unbuttoned. Lyla steadily meets his gaze until they pass by one another, and she doesn't smile or speak a word, but her eyes are very alive, almost too much so. Unlike his.
"Who was that?" Monique asks, as they hustle their way into the empty elevator. They're careful not to touch the walls.
Lucian, Lyla thinks.
"Nobody," she says, and the elevator door closes in front of them, "just like us."