Application for EMP

[chaoticwhimsy]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Dalrint
Contact: dalrint
Age: Painfully old.
Current Characters: None.


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Lumina
Age: Physically 12, chronologically around 150
Canon: Final Fantasy 13: Lightning Returns
Canon Point: On Day thirteen, watching the last of the world die to the chaos, while waiting for Lightning to appear.

Background:

Lumina on the FF wiki.

Some more details: Lumina is a construct of Lightning Farron. 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 her sister 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 human 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.

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, they don’t run from her or try to chase her away. 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, unpredictable 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 the lonely Vanille. It can be said that most of the things she does that might be seen as terrible (and some of them could be) have a way of working out towards something good in the end.

At one point she 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.

Despite her exterior, she is far more lonely than she ever really lets on, evidenced on the last day, where she desperately tries to keep Lightning from leaving to go fight God, because she believes she is going to be left behind when everyone else is taken to the new world. And it terrifies her. She’s spent the last hundred and fifty years finding ways to be the center of people’s attention, and the last ten with Vanille as her best friend, keeping an eye on her, and suddenly she’s going to be completely alone.

But that’s not to say that what she does is just a façade to hide her loneliness, because it really isn’t. That’s more of a side effect, because she does genuinely enjoy being her little trickster self, and has no intention of stopping any time soon.

Abilities:

Chaos - Lumina is a manifestation of the Unseen Chaos, the driving darkness that has swallowed up the world of Gran 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’), seeping into the air much like a cloud. However, she is mostly 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, even she doesn't know if she has one.)

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. Normal humans are barely able to function within the chaos, and exposure causes short periods of heightened emotions. Generally, unless she is actively trying to use it, the chaos is going to fade into nothing moments after leaving her body.
- 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. It doesn’t seem to have a ‘maximum distance’ as she uses it to move amongst the four islands of Nova Crystallis seemingly at a whim. It’s her primary means of travel!
- Monster Summoning – Lumina manifests creatures out of her Chaos, both beasts native to what remains of Pulse and creatures formed of the Chaos itself. These creatures appear to be created by the chaos itself, as the species being ‘extinct’ does not prevent her from summoning one. The creatures generally appear to do as Lumina orders. A list of these creatures can be found here.
- Red Lightning – Lumina can create bursts of destructive red lightning. She has pinpoint control of this, and uses it to shatter the blade of Lightning’s sword at one point without actually touching it, and later destroys a large chandelier with it. It doesn't seem to function like electrical lightning, it is almost like physical 'crack' of energy that breaks and shatters rather than shocks.

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.


Alignment: Daimonia - In spite of her insecurity and loneliness, at her core Lumina is actually a pretty happy kid. She's always laughing and pranking and playing and helping people. She's kind of like a walking bright spot...that tends to lie and trick people.

Other:


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Remember that we ask for samples that show 1) core character portrayal and 2) some use of emotions, such as environmental effect. You can also use the same sample source for both, just make sure to directly link or quote the emotion portion. We highly encourage using the Test Drive, and you can use prompts from the Test Drives, Intro Logs, and the Task board if you need them. Refer to the main application page for links and more suggestions.

General Sample: A log from an old game.

Emotion Sample:

Lumina let out a little 'hup' as her teleportation deposited her a few inches above the grass in a field a few miles outside of the city of Verens, taking a few quick steps forward to catch her balance. She'd spotted the field (well, she'd spotted fields) from a perch back in the city, and decided some time away from the strange, massive place would probably be a good idea. Just to clear her head a bit and take stock and…

Well. Test something.

It had been about a few hours since she'd found herself in this bizarre new world, long enough to be sure that it wasn't the new world that Lightning had been planning for. But if that was true, then...what did it mean for her? Why was she actually here? Had some force in the universe decided to take pity on her before the chaos swallowed up the last little bit of Gran Pulse?

Probably not. But it was a nice thought.

But did that mean she was it? Had the world gone poof and she was the only one left? It was a lot to process. And it left so many questions...but at least she could try to answer one of them.

Her steps carried her to the middle of the field, looking around in a long, slow circle at all the grass before she picked a spot a few feet in front of her. Okay. She drew her hand up to her chest, balled into a loose fist, and concentrated. Around her feet the chaos suddenly swirled up, whirling around her, mixed with a shimmer of crystalline light that seemed to seep out from her hand and chest. She sucked in a breath, concentrating as the two mixed, and gestured.

The swirling shimmer of darkness and light shot forward to burst into a tiny nova, and for a few seconds, maybe five, nothing happened...and then this lovely fellow burst out of it, claws tearing into the dirt as darted away from the void that had spawned him, sniffing and growling at the air. Finally he turned to Lumina, regarding her for several seconds before he trotted over to plop down on the ground by her feet.

The pink-haired girl let out a breath she hadn't even realized she'd been holding, that came out more like a relieved laugh than actual air. It wasn't just her. Or it was but...but she'd brought a part of it with her? She'd never actually thought she'd cared that much but...but she knew that had always just been a lie.

"I guess it's not just me after all, huh boy?" She said as she leaned down to give him a scratch on the nose, which earned her a brief tail wag and a sniff at her fingers, which she yanked back before he could actually lick them. She let out a giggle that was almost a full laugh as she straightened back up and-

"Oh!" All around her, flowers had begun to bloom in the grass, had been doing so for a good thirty seconds or so and she hadn't noticed. Right from when she had felt that wave of relief and happiness at seeing her bizarre dog. She reached down to pluck one up, sniffing it, and then let out a slow breath, turning to watch more flowers springing up around her. So that's what they meant…


Questions: They never really touch on it in the game because time never actually passes, but once Lumina is in another world where time does move, I was hoping to have her age? Just at a normal human rate, but finally stop being twelve, if possible? Maybe someday she can even be thirteen? Haha.