Laura (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thanks_satan) wrote2016-05-13 11:24 am
thanks_satan) wrote2016-05-13 11:24 am
THE APP
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Lady!
AGE: 28
JOURNAL: N/A
IM / EMAIL: true.wutai.style@gmail.com
PLURK: somarysueme
RETURNING: yes! Current Winry player.
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Laura Wilson
CHARACTER AGE: 17 3/4
SERIES: The Wicked + The Divine
CHRONOLOGY: End of issue 10, after Baphomet attacks the Norns, and she comforts Urdr through her shit.
CLASS: Dumb Teenager - while she’s definitely not evil, Laura is drawn towards chaotic figures and does a lot to excuse the misbehavior of the Pantheon members. She does not, for example, seem terribly concerned with them murdering cops.
HOUSING: Any is fine!
BACKGROUND: “Every ninety years, twelve gods return as young people. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are all dead. It's happening now. It's happening again.”
Or so goes our introductory blurb to “WicDiv.” In a world very, very much like our own (down to having much of the identical history and pop culture), there is one very extraordinary difference, commonly referred to as the “Recurrence”. During this two-year period, exactly twelve young people (think preteens to mid twenties) will receive what seems to be divine power and inspiration. These twelve will form a group that calls itself the Pantheon, and claim to be ancient gods living in extremely mortal flesh. They perform miracles, and drive the masses into frenzies with their words and songs. Then, within two years, they will all be dead. Most will die violently. The 1920s saw them fan the flames of the jazz age. This time around, obviously, they are all fucking rock stars.
Like you might expect, not everyone feels the same way about the recurrence. Many scholars dispute anything “godly” about the Pantheon. Some doubt that the phenomenon even really happens (this is, after all, be the first Recurrence that will be publicly documented to such an extent). Others have believed that the Millennial generation is lacking so far as to not deserve the Recurrence.
Laura Wilson thinks all those people are morons who should shut up. She had full faith in the Pantheon before the first of them debuted. Even as young as a kid she was drawn to and inspired by the stories surrounding the Recurrence. She’s attended lectures and conventions for and by adults who may have even done their graduate work on Recurrence-related literature. In her mind, her destiny was always to be entangled with the Pantheon, whether she was one of the chosen few, or fated to just be their single most dedicated groupie, her faith is absolute.
When the Recurrence begins, her faith seems well-placed. Each concert she attends, she can feel the divinity of the Gods’ songs. As she follows and all-but-worships them, she feels like she is coming closer to divinity herself. But as one god after another is revealed, Laura begins to confront the truth that maybe she is just a normal teen girl.
And by “confront” I mean “not confront at all and get as involved as possible.” When the Lucifer is framed for the head explodey of a judge, and left to rot in jail by the rest of the Pantheon, it’s Laura who reaches out to her. Whhhhich is how it comes to pass that Lucifer tweets her final message to her devoted from Laura’s account, ensuring that Laura is tied into all this horse shit, inextricably. Thanks, Satan.
But that is 100% not sarcastic what Laura wanted. What Laura didn’t want was for her attempt at rescuing Lucifer to end with her clutching Luci’s headless corpse on national television.
After Lucifer’s death, Laura spirals into a traumatized depression. She does not commune with the gods, she pulls as far away from the fandom as she can. Just seeing Lucifer’s name is enough to make her sick with flashbacks.
It’s during this depression that she’s approached by Inanna, another member of the Pantheon that knew (and was impressed with) back from the fandom before the Recurrence. Inanna, like Laura, suspects that Lucifer was set up. Laura’s position as an outside to the Pantheon, but very knowledgeable and connected in their following puts her in a unique position to unravel whatever conspiracy ended Lucifer’s life.
And unravel she does, somewhat. Unfortunately there’s still a whole lot of questions unanswered. Because over the course of like four pages she is told she is she is the laws-of-the-world breaking 13th god Persephone, and then she gets burned to death and her house exploded along with her parents.
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Then Persephone shows up not burned to death, like a million issues later.
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PERSONALITY:
Laura is, primarily, a sort of Millennial Every Teen. She obsesses over pop stars and twitter followers. She fights with her parents for no particular reason. She thinks most baby boomers should probably shut up. She can absolutely be short sighted, selfish, and immature. At the same time, her faith in her generation and pseudo-religious poptimism are driven by ideals she is truly dedicated to, and backed up by courage and loyalty.
Let’s talk about her faith first! Laura had always been drawn to the mythos of the Recurrence. She had been attending lectures in her spare time before it ever began. When it does, she is one of the rare people who can commune with all the gods, and experience their divinity. But it’s not just spiritual faith- Laura has faith that her generation will rise up with the inspiration of the gods, and faith that the gods themselves have something important to offer. She has faith that Lucifer is innocent. Even when suffering from depression, Laura never becomes jaded or disillusioned.
She’s also brave to the point of foolhardiness. Girl is seriously made of condensed Yolo and absolutely all about sneaking into jail to hang out with Lucifer. While the violence of Lucifer’s death traumatizes her, she doesn’t stay away from the gods.
But! This is not to say that she’s all heroic piety (or. Even slightly pious and heroic). Laura can absolutely be short sighted and selfish as anyone else. It is no secret from herself or anyone else that she wanted more than anything to be a member of the pantheon herself, and when the twelfth member is revealed to not be her she is devastated. Laura is way more interested in being famous and cool and inspiring for a few months than living to see twenty. And even if she’s not one of the Pantheon herself, she drops out of school so that she can further embroil herself in their affairs.
That all said, she does put her heart where her mouth is about belief in the Pantheon. As mentioned above, she wants to be involved with them one way or another, and the way she finds to be involved with them is to be emotional support to young people who are doomed to die soon and violently. When her Best Frienemy is revealed to be a god, Laura provides her with with the same support and understanding she does to every other God.
Finally, she likes saying “uh-huh.” She likes it a lot.
POWER:
MERGED WITH HER SMARTPHONE: laura can do anything current Android technology can do. This includes:
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: Test Drive!
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: (from directly after the end of the Lucifer thread in the test drive meme)
Lucifer, huh? A Lucifer. A different Lucifer. Laura sat back down on the park bench, now damp with rain. Lucifer, Lucifer, Lucifer. Memories of the faint scent of tobacco smoke sulfur and the sound of great wings beating played around in her head pointlessly over and over as the rainwater slowly soaked through to her legs.
Laura held out a cigarette and clicked her fingers. As always, the gesture did nothing. Because Laura did not have magical snapping cigarette lighting powers.
Lucifer had never even been her favorite. But after everything that had happened, Lucifer would be the one she’d remember until her dying day. What were the odds that another incarnation of her would walk right up on day one?
For a moment, she thought about whether it was fate, or coincidence, or orchestrated. Then she snapped her fingers at her cigarette again, just to confirm for the five hundred thousandth time today that she didn’t have cigarette lighting snap powers, and decided that it didn’t even remotely matter how they’d met because now they had. And he’d offered to help her. Offer to help her get oriented.
Laura’s Luci’d introduced herself as the Lord of Lies, and professed her own dishonestly quite often. That was, ironically, one of very few lies she ever told Laura. Satisfied, finally, that she could still definitely not light cigarettes with magic, Laura pulled out her lighter.
Using her import power, Laura drafted up another text to Inanna, “Nevermind. Date went OK.”
FINAL NOTES: I am apping Laura with the intention to eventually update her to Persephone. Like the others in the pantheon, Persephone retain’s Laura’s memories and much of her personality (and in fact doesn’t correct people who still call her Laura), while still becoming “more” than just Laura.
However I’m apping Laura without Persephone now for two reasons. The first is that I’m just not sure we’ve seen enough of her as Persephone for me to feel comfortable playing that, and there are also way too many unanswered questions about her timeline that I’d feel that just about any assumption I made would be likely to get Jossed. The second is because I’m hoping to entice more people in the game to read WicDiv before dropping a big ol spoiler on your taken page, and I would rather people not know about the Persephone thing because that’s such a baller moment on the page.