Lumina app for Ruby City.
Mar. 8th, 2014 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaoticwhimsyPLAYER
Name: Dalrint
Age:31
Personal Journal:dalrint
E-mail: use Dreamwidth messages
AIM/MSN/etc: AIM: farobservr, plurk: Dalrint
CHARACTER
Name: Lumina
Canon: Final fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns
Age: 150ish / appears to be about 13.
Timeline: Day 7, after Lightning has finished the main storyline parts of LR, but halfway till the thirteen days are over.
Personality:
Lumina is the embodiment of all of the emotions that Lightning tossed away when she was young, everything she thought she had to abandon in order to protect Serah after their parents died. Childishness, playfulness, whimsy, these all went to the back burner in favor of focusing on her strength and determination and anger.
So Lumina is very much the outcome of all of those childlike things crammed into a twelve-year old body, given chaos powers, and set loose on an undying world. She’s clever, manipulative, whimsical and prone to fits of giggles. She’s a serious prankster, she’ll trick people into doing foolish and ridiculous things without a thought to it, and laugh the whole while when they fall on their face because of it.
But she’s not evil. The things she does aren’t generally cruel, or anything a person won’t recover from, and often times result in people discovering things about themselves they didn’t know they needed to learn. This is obvious in the fact that, despite having lived around the survivors for over a century, none of them hate her. They think she’s trouble, they’re amused by her or frustrated with her, but they don’t see her as a specter or a monster. Snow refers to her as a ‘demon’, but not in a nasty way, it almost sounds like the way an adult would complain about an unruly child.
She does good things almost as often as mischievous ones, from trying to help Sazh save his son to befriending and spending time with Vanille.
At one point tricks a boy into becoming a cat, but in the end its to teach him that he needs to let go of the past. (At least, that’s the lesson he learns. Whether or not that was her explicit intent is a whole different matter.) Because in the end Lumina is very much a little troll. She’ll taunt people with information rather than telling them straight out, in fact getting a genuinely straight answer out of her is a significant challenge. She asks leading questions, she alludes to answers, she urges people on to find their own, but she’s not going to just tell you. That’s boring! And Lumina does hate to be bored.
In the end though, despite her ‘age’, she’s still very much a child. She’s giggly and huggy around her best friend (Vanille), hugging her and holding her hand, and her expressions of distaste towards things like Snow being overly noble and sacrificing himself or her sorrow at what has happened to Sazh and his son are open and honest and young. She’s good at hiding her information, at dancing around a subject, but her emotions are almost always right on her face.
Even her actions express this. While many of the characters tend to be stoic and still, Lumina is always moving, always gesturing and walking and shifting as she talks, she’s almost never still unless she is discussing something that genuinely hurts her, like Sazh and his son, or Noel’s past. She’s full of energy and life and happiness and ridiculousness, all the things Lightning threw away.
Background: Here.
Some more details: Lumina is a construct of Lightning. When Lightning decided that she could never have time for emotions, for childishness and silliness, she locked all of those things away deep inside her, which allowed her to be the hard, focused soldier that she is in the first and second games. At the end of XIII-2, she locks herself up in a crystal sleep with Serah’s soul hidden inside of her for safe keeping.
One hundred and fifty years before Lightning Returns (or so. It’s vague, but implied to happen around the same time as when Hope is taken) the god Bhunivelze draws Serah’s soul out of Lightning and throws it away into the Chaos. Somehow, at that point, the Chaos also drew all of those long-dormant emotions and feelings and drives, Lightning’s ‘Heart’ essentially, and formed them into a vessel to safeguard Serah’s soul.
The side effect was Lumina, a girl of about twelve who bore a frightening resemblance to Serah at that age, but who was happy and childlike and whimsical and all of the things Lightning had tried so hard not to be. But since no one ages anymore, she’s remained that child ever since.
Abilities:
Chaos - Lumina is basically a manifestation of the Unseen Chaos, the driving darkness that has swallowed up the world of Pulse, and as such all of her powers are derived from the Chaos itself. She generates it constantly, it leaks from her body whenever she allows it to (though she can stop this if she wishes to, and does so to ‘blend in’ on occasion), seeping into the air much like a cloud. However, she is human, despite her strange origins, the Chaos is just a…side effect of everything else. She does not seem to suffer any of the adverse effects that a normal human would experience from being trapped within the darkness, nor does she appear to lose her soul the way others do. (Although the nature of Lumina’s soul is of some debate.)
Because of this chaos, she has several different powers.
- Chaos – Lumina creates Chaos simply by existing. It is stored within her, it bleeds out of her, she can create clouds of it and fill rooms with it, and manipulate it to her whim. It is dangerous to others, some even are said to lose their souls to it, but Lumina is completely immune to any negative effects.
- Teleportation – Lumina teleports by creating a bubble of chaos and light energy that swallows her up and deposits her somewhere else. This act doesn’t appear to drain her at all, and does not require an overt physical gesture to trigger it. She simply gets swallowed up in the circle and reappears somewhere else.
- Monster Summoning – Lumina draws creatures out of the Chaos, both beasts native to what remains of Pulse and creatures formed of the Chaos itself. These creatures are seemingly indifferent to Lumina herself, but will attack the targets she designates. A list of these creatures can be found here. (For the purposes of Ruby City, Lumina would not be summoning the larger creatures at all until a player plot sometime after she arrives.)
- Red Lightning – Lumina can create bursts of destructive red lightning from her fingertips, but does not do so often. She has pinpoint control of this, and uses it to shatter the blade of Lightning’s sword at one point without actually touching it.
Her powers are essentially manipulative and defensive. She’ll summon a creature to distract someone, or teleport so that they can’t actually hurt her. She is never seen to fight directly.
First Person:
[Video]
Hmm.
[The screen clicks on to show the high stocks and short black skirt of a Lolita dress, swinging back and forth as the watch’s new owner strolls through one of the streets in Ruby City. She’s humming softly to herself, and there’s a skip in her step as she goes, but after a moment she comes to a hopping-stop and lifts the watch up to her face, revealing a young girl of twelve or thirteen years old with rose-colored hair and hard blue/grey eyes. For anyone familiar with Lightning Ferron or her sister, there is a striking resemblance.]
Hey there.
[She offers a coy sort of grin to the watch then reaches out with her gloved hand to give it a flick, sending the screen whirling round and round until she catches it again, and this time it’s pointed up at one of the nearby buildings, the image moving as she resumes her stroll down the street.]
So the sign said this is ‘Ruby City,’ huh? Can’t say this was where I was expecting to be…but it’s nice enough so far. A lot less crowded than Lucerion at least. And hopefully less gloomy.
Not that that’s all that hard, right?
[She talks as if the person listening should know what she’s saying, half because that’s just how she is, and the other because she’s never met a person that wouldn’t! There’s the edge of a giggle in her voice too, as if she’s constantly amused at a joke no one else noticed.]
[Suddenly the screen is enveloped in white light, and when it fades, the view has shifted to high above the streets, from the top of the church steeple, pointed out at the city itself. She pans the camera around absently before she twirls the watch again, this time catching it facing herself.]
[She gives the screen an amused little finger wave, leaning back against the wall behind her as she perches on the edge of the tower.]
So what’s it like here, anyway? Is this place getting destroyed in a week too? Or did I somehow get the fast track to the brave new world? Wouldn’t that make god just furious. [She giggles again as if this is the most hilarious thing, covering her mouth with her gloved hand. When the giggles pass, her coy little smile is back.]
Anyway. I’m Lumina. I’m assuming somebody is listening to this, so you might well speak up.
Third Person:
Lumina clicked the strange little watch closed and let it drop from her hand, catching the chain at the last moment and swinging it slowly around her fingers. It had been hanging from her belt when she'd found herself on the train, and part of her could admit it was probably too important to break, but she wasn't going to let that stop her from playing with it. If whoever brought her here desperately wanted her to talk to whomever else was in this weird city, they could give her another when she eventually dropped this one.
Still. She let the watch whirl around her hand until it slapped against her palm, then carefully clipped it back onto her belt as she stood up, letting her gaze drift out over the nearby rooftops, to the park and further on, the edge of the city, the...wilderness beyond. No Chaos between them, no ancient and broken roads long since cut off from the population. Just...distance.
Not that Lumina couldn't feel chaos here. Or something like it, something...off. Normally she would have reached out to it, there was nothing to be afraid of in the darkness, not for her, but this...hrm.
She pushed the thought aside with a small huff and stepped off the steeple, letting the swirling bubble of magic catch her up, and a moment later she was safely deposited on the ground just beyond the edge of the city. She could hear the distant sounds of creatures out there, monsters she wasn't familiar with, and she let the Chaos swirl out of her, not enough to be bothered with, just what she hoped would dissuade the local wildlife from taking an interest. Most animals were smart enough to stay out of it, she'd discovered.
A few steps further out of the city and she stopped, a frown settling on her face as she eyed the trees around her. She'd known as soon as she arrived that this wasn't Nova Crystalia. She knew every inch of those four broken lands, could tell where she was in her sleep, and this was just...wrong. She'd made that snide little remark about it being the new world, but she was pretty sure that wasn't right either. This was something else.
"So where am I?" She asked herself aloud, frustration obvious in her voice. It had been so long since she'd felt genuinely off-balance that she wasn't really sure what to do about it. But she certainly didn't like it. At all.
"Not that it matters," she decided after a minute, though she wasn't sure if she was lying to herself. "Anywhere is better than a world about to die, right? Or being surrounded by a bunch of religious nuts with plans for genocide."
Of course, it meant Vanille wasn't here. Or any of her other friends. Or anyone she knew.
And then she spun around, turning back towards the city. She could make new friends. It had been a while, really, and some of them would probably get all worked up about her when she decided to have some fun, but there were always a few people that looked past it. And if she wound up here, couldn't the rest of them?
Maybe this really was the new world. Maybe the whole thing was God's practical joke and they were being sent from one half-dead planet to another.
If that were true, she'd almost respect him for it. But she was pretty sure he didn't actually have a sense of humor.
"Not gonna figure it out standing around here," she muttered to herself, and then took another step and vanished into a swirl of light and shadow again. Time to have a look around...
Name: Dalrint
Age:31
Personal Journal:
dalrintE-mail: use Dreamwidth messages
AIM/MSN/etc: AIM: farobservr, plurk: Dalrint
CHARACTER
Name: Lumina
Canon: Final fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns
Age: 150ish / appears to be about 13.
Timeline: Day 7, after Lightning has finished the main storyline parts of LR, but halfway till the thirteen days are over.
Personality:
Lumina is the embodiment of all of the emotions that Lightning tossed away when she was young, everything she thought she had to abandon in order to protect Serah after their parents died. Childishness, playfulness, whimsy, these all went to the back burner in favor of focusing on her strength and determination and anger.
So Lumina is very much the outcome of all of those childlike things crammed into a twelve-year old body, given chaos powers, and set loose on an undying world. She’s clever, manipulative, whimsical and prone to fits of giggles. She’s a serious prankster, she’ll trick people into doing foolish and ridiculous things without a thought to it, and laugh the whole while when they fall on their face because of it.
But she’s not evil. The things she does aren’t generally cruel, or anything a person won’t recover from, and often times result in people discovering things about themselves they didn’t know they needed to learn. This is obvious in the fact that, despite having lived around the survivors for over a century, none of them hate her. They think she’s trouble, they’re amused by her or frustrated with her, but they don’t see her as a specter or a monster. Snow refers to her as a ‘demon’, but not in a nasty way, it almost sounds like the way an adult would complain about an unruly child.
She does good things almost as often as mischievous ones, from trying to help Sazh save his son to befriending and spending time with Vanille.
At one point tricks a boy into becoming a cat, but in the end its to teach him that he needs to let go of the past. (At least, that’s the lesson he learns. Whether or not that was her explicit intent is a whole different matter.) Because in the end Lumina is very much a little troll. She’ll taunt people with information rather than telling them straight out, in fact getting a genuinely straight answer out of her is a significant challenge. She asks leading questions, she alludes to answers, she urges people on to find their own, but she’s not going to just tell you. That’s boring! And Lumina does hate to be bored.
In the end though, despite her ‘age’, she’s still very much a child. She’s giggly and huggy around her best friend (Vanille), hugging her and holding her hand, and her expressions of distaste towards things like Snow being overly noble and sacrificing himself or her sorrow at what has happened to Sazh and his son are open and honest and young. She’s good at hiding her information, at dancing around a subject, but her emotions are almost always right on her face.
Even her actions express this. While many of the characters tend to be stoic and still, Lumina is always moving, always gesturing and walking and shifting as she talks, she’s almost never still unless she is discussing something that genuinely hurts her, like Sazh and his son, or Noel’s past. She’s full of energy and life and happiness and ridiculousness, all the things Lightning threw away.
Background: Here.
Some more details: Lumina is a construct of Lightning. When Lightning decided that she could never have time for emotions, for childishness and silliness, she locked all of those things away deep inside her, which allowed her to be the hard, focused soldier that she is in the first and second games. At the end of XIII-2, she locks herself up in a crystal sleep with Serah’s soul hidden inside of her for safe keeping.
One hundred and fifty years before Lightning Returns (or so. It’s vague, but implied to happen around the same time as when Hope is taken) the god Bhunivelze draws Serah’s soul out of Lightning and throws it away into the Chaos. Somehow, at that point, the Chaos also drew all of those long-dormant emotions and feelings and drives, Lightning’s ‘Heart’ essentially, and formed them into a vessel to safeguard Serah’s soul.
The side effect was Lumina, a girl of about twelve who bore a frightening resemblance to Serah at that age, but who was happy and childlike and whimsical and all of the things Lightning had tried so hard not to be. But since no one ages anymore, she’s remained that child ever since.
Abilities:
Chaos - Lumina is basically a manifestation of the Unseen Chaos, the driving darkness that has swallowed up the world of Pulse, and as such all of her powers are derived from the Chaos itself. She generates it constantly, it leaks from her body whenever she allows it to (though she can stop this if she wishes to, and does so to ‘blend in’ on occasion), seeping into the air much like a cloud. However, she is human, despite her strange origins, the Chaos is just a…side effect of everything else. She does not seem to suffer any of the adverse effects that a normal human would experience from being trapped within the darkness, nor does she appear to lose her soul the way others do. (Although the nature of Lumina’s soul is of some debate.)
Because of this chaos, she has several different powers.
- Chaos – Lumina creates Chaos simply by existing. It is stored within her, it bleeds out of her, she can create clouds of it and fill rooms with it, and manipulate it to her whim. It is dangerous to others, some even are said to lose their souls to it, but Lumina is completely immune to any negative effects.
- Teleportation – Lumina teleports by creating a bubble of chaos and light energy that swallows her up and deposits her somewhere else. This act doesn’t appear to drain her at all, and does not require an overt physical gesture to trigger it. She simply gets swallowed up in the circle and reappears somewhere else.
- Monster Summoning – Lumina draws creatures out of the Chaos, both beasts native to what remains of Pulse and creatures formed of the Chaos itself. These creatures are seemingly indifferent to Lumina herself, but will attack the targets she designates. A list of these creatures can be found here. (For the purposes of Ruby City, Lumina would not be summoning the larger creatures at all until a player plot sometime after she arrives.)
- Red Lightning – Lumina can create bursts of destructive red lightning from her fingertips, but does not do so often. She has pinpoint control of this, and uses it to shatter the blade of Lightning’s sword at one point without actually touching it.
Her powers are essentially manipulative and defensive. She’ll summon a creature to distract someone, or teleport so that they can’t actually hurt her. She is never seen to fight directly.
First Person:
[Video]
Hmm.
[The screen clicks on to show the high stocks and short black skirt of a Lolita dress, swinging back and forth as the watch’s new owner strolls through one of the streets in Ruby City. She’s humming softly to herself, and there’s a skip in her step as she goes, but after a moment she comes to a hopping-stop and lifts the watch up to her face, revealing a young girl of twelve or thirteen years old with rose-colored hair and hard blue/grey eyes. For anyone familiar with Lightning Ferron or her sister, there is a striking resemblance.]
Hey there.
[She offers a coy sort of grin to the watch then reaches out with her gloved hand to give it a flick, sending the screen whirling round and round until she catches it again, and this time it’s pointed up at one of the nearby buildings, the image moving as she resumes her stroll down the street.]
So the sign said this is ‘Ruby City,’ huh? Can’t say this was where I was expecting to be…but it’s nice enough so far. A lot less crowded than Lucerion at least. And hopefully less gloomy.
Not that that’s all that hard, right?
[She talks as if the person listening should know what she’s saying, half because that’s just how she is, and the other because she’s never met a person that wouldn’t! There’s the edge of a giggle in her voice too, as if she’s constantly amused at a joke no one else noticed.]
[Suddenly the screen is enveloped in white light, and when it fades, the view has shifted to high above the streets, from the top of the church steeple, pointed out at the city itself. She pans the camera around absently before she twirls the watch again, this time catching it facing herself.]
[She gives the screen an amused little finger wave, leaning back against the wall behind her as she perches on the edge of the tower.]
So what’s it like here, anyway? Is this place getting destroyed in a week too? Or did I somehow get the fast track to the brave new world? Wouldn’t that make god just furious. [She giggles again as if this is the most hilarious thing, covering her mouth with her gloved hand. When the giggles pass, her coy little smile is back.]
Anyway. I’m Lumina. I’m assuming somebody is listening to this, so you might well speak up.
Third Person:
Lumina clicked the strange little watch closed and let it drop from her hand, catching the chain at the last moment and swinging it slowly around her fingers. It had been hanging from her belt when she'd found herself on the train, and part of her could admit it was probably too important to break, but she wasn't going to let that stop her from playing with it. If whoever brought her here desperately wanted her to talk to whomever else was in this weird city, they could give her another when she eventually dropped this one.
Still. She let the watch whirl around her hand until it slapped against her palm, then carefully clipped it back onto her belt as she stood up, letting her gaze drift out over the nearby rooftops, to the park and further on, the edge of the city, the...wilderness beyond. No Chaos between them, no ancient and broken roads long since cut off from the population. Just...distance.
Not that Lumina couldn't feel chaos here. Or something like it, something...off. Normally she would have reached out to it, there was nothing to be afraid of in the darkness, not for her, but this...hrm.
She pushed the thought aside with a small huff and stepped off the steeple, letting the swirling bubble of magic catch her up, and a moment later she was safely deposited on the ground just beyond the edge of the city. She could hear the distant sounds of creatures out there, monsters she wasn't familiar with, and she let the Chaos swirl out of her, not enough to be bothered with, just what she hoped would dissuade the local wildlife from taking an interest. Most animals were smart enough to stay out of it, she'd discovered.
A few steps further out of the city and she stopped, a frown settling on her face as she eyed the trees around her. She'd known as soon as she arrived that this wasn't Nova Crystalia. She knew every inch of those four broken lands, could tell where she was in her sleep, and this was just...wrong. She'd made that snide little remark about it being the new world, but she was pretty sure that wasn't right either. This was something else.
"So where am I?" She asked herself aloud, frustration obvious in her voice. It had been so long since she'd felt genuinely off-balance that she wasn't really sure what to do about it. But she certainly didn't like it. At all.
"Not that it matters," she decided after a minute, though she wasn't sure if she was lying to herself. "Anywhere is better than a world about to die, right? Or being surrounded by a bunch of religious nuts with plans for genocide."
Of course, it meant Vanille wasn't here. Or any of her other friends. Or anyone she knew.
And then she spun around, turning back towards the city. She could make new friends. It had been a while, really, and some of them would probably get all worked up about her when she decided to have some fun, but there were always a few people that looked past it. And if she wound up here, couldn't the rest of them?
Maybe this really was the new world. Maybe the whole thing was God's practical joke and they were being sent from one half-dead planet to another.
If that were true, she'd almost respect him for it. But she was pretty sure he didn't actually have a sense of humor.
"Not gonna figure it out standing around here," she muttered to herself, and then took another step and vanished into a swirl of light and shadow again. Time to have a look around...
