Character Name: Lacie Baskerville Canon: Pandora Hearts Canon Point: Chapter 69 (coming to the game post-death) Background/History:
Spoilers forever, ahead.
Lacie's life is a circle of sorts.
She is the sister of Glen (Oswald) Baskerville. Her red eyes mark her as a Child of Misfortune. In the society she lives in, people believe this means she carries a curse. Children of Misfortune have been known to be beaten on sight, abandoned by their parents, bought and sold, displayed in freak shows, and killed, simply because of of their red eyes and the superstitions that surround them. It is explained by Glen (Levi) Baskerville that Misfortunate Children are distortions caused by the Abyss' influence on this world, and due to that connection (and the fact that it gives them powers that only the head of the Baskervilles is supposed to have--namely the ability to travel into the Abyss at will and make contact with its Core, thereby being able to petition it to re-write reality), they must be sacrificed in a ritual where they are consumed utterly, obliterated from the centennial cycle of death and rebirth which most other people of their world are a part of.
(The truth of the matter is later revealed: the real reason the erroneously-named Children of Misfortune are killed is because of their potential for saving the world, as they are beyond the control of unearthly beings known as Jurors, who amuse themselves by watching the world and determining the most interesting end for it. Glen Baskerville, as it turns out, serves as their unwitting pawn, put on the earth to eventually bring about its end.)
As small children, Lacie and her older brother Oswald roamed from place to place, (possible runaways, possibly orphans) without a home. One day, while Lacie was waiting for her brother to return from finding a place to sleep for the night, she was approached by a young man, a sword raised in his hand. To her eyes, able to see through time, he would have appeared to be a man-within-a-man, the older of the two looking like an adult version of her brother. Unafraid, she'd smiled at him, and he'd dropped the sword, falling to his knees. A moment later, her brother returned, scolding her for running off and leading her away. She spared the strange man a parting wave, then disappeared into the woods.
Some time later, the siblings were taken in by the Baskerville family. (Though it is the most powerful noble family in Sablier, it is a family in name only, for the most part. Its members are bound together by their duty to protect the balance between the world and the Abyss, not by blood.) The very same day, she discovers that, because of her status as a Child of Misfortune, she will one day be killed. She was very young. (Though the exact age isn't given, she looks to be around 5 or 6.) Her brother, on the other hand, was meant to be the heir to the estate. He would also become the next vessel for the souls of each person who had been the heir, leading back to the first. (This is why each heir takes the name Glen Baskerville, upon inheriting the estate.) She would later figure out that, not only would she be sacrificed, but her own brother was the one who would kill her.
Though she was forbidden from doing so, Lacie would frequently play in the Abyss, as a child, even going so far as to leave a plush rabbit (one of a matched pair) for the strange, silent consciousness she encountered at its core, to keep it company. Her Chain (Chains being demon-like creatures born in the Abyss, most of which are modeled after characters in Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, in some way, i.e. The Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Cheshire Cat) is shaped after the rabbit toy... provided rabbits are large, hulking, humanoid things with glowing red eyes, gnashy pointy teeth, razor sharp claws, a scythe, and bladed chains that can zip out and cut a person to bits.
(While it hasn't been stated definitively, and some speculate that her Chain might be The White Rabbit, I tend to headcanon her Chain being either an earlier version of B-Rabbit--from before it gained it's real consciousness--or possibly a twin to it. Things between Lacie and the Abyss seem to come in twos. The two plush rabbits, the twin daughters she carried into it. It makes sense for her chain to be a mirror-image as well. For the sake of having something to call it, I tend to call it The Black Rabbit, to differentiate between it and B-Rabbit. As a Baskerville, Lacie's Contract is a partnership of equals, and has no time limit.)
While she was still a child, Lacie was approached by Glen (Levi), who proposed that she partake in an "experiment" with him. He believed that, if she carried an unborn child into the Abyss when she was sacrificed, the baby would not be devoured with the rest of her, but cradled at the Abyss' core. He proposed this experiment because he hoped it would provide the Core with a body to inhabit, thus making it easier to communicate with and control. Lacie, who believed the entity at the Core to be lonely, agreed because she hoped the child and the Core might be friends and keep one another company.
As a teen (roughly seventeen,) Lacie ran away from home (which she did many times, we later learn) and befriended the bastard son of a nobleman, who was living on the streets. His name was Jack. She stole food to feed him, offered him a new outlook on life, and killed to protect him, all quite cheerfully. In this way, she won his undying devotion and fanatical loyalty before the Baskervilles found her and returned her to her semi-imprisonment on the Baskerville estate. She gave him one of her earrings as a memento before being taken away.
In the eight years that followed, Jack searched for her with single-minded determination, climbing up the social ladder by whatever means necessary until he was accepted into his illegitimate father's family, thereby gaining access to the same echelons of society the Baskervilles belonged to. By ingratiating himself with another of the more powerful families, he was able to disguise himself as a musician and sneak onto the Baskerville estate to reunite with Lacie...
... only to find that she had forgotten him. However, the earring (which he wore) jogged her memory, and after retreating to her tower and retrieving the matching one, she returned to pull him out of the room where he was being questioned by the other Baskervilles. In doing so, she may have saved his life. They spoke together for some time, and she gave him what comfort she could. As Jack turned to leave, Glen (Levi) popped up, inviting Jack to visit the estate whenever he liked. (He had been intrigued and amused by him.)
In the four months that passed, after that, Jack visited nearly every day. He, Lacie, and Oswald, became something of a inseparable trio, often wandering the grounds of the estate together and listening to Lacie sing. Though she denied Jack's importance to her when speaking to Glen (Levi) (who had, by then, impregnated her as per their agreement), Lacie came to care for Jack, possibly even love him in her way. A few days before the ritual at which she would be sacrificed, Lacie lied to Jack (who had been kept in the dark about her impending fate), persuading him to stay away from the estate until days after her death. Though her brother suggested that Jack might take her away from the estate and try to save her, Lacie had accepted her path and was already carrying Glen (Levi)'s child (though Oswald knew nothing of the pregnancy). There was no going back.
At the ritual, though her brother hesitated, Lacie coaxed him through the final words, smiling as the chains rose from the Abyss to drag her down to her death. As she was pulled down, she witnessed the young man with a sword she'd seen as a small girl, recognizing Oswald's spirit within him. Understanding that he was traveling into the past to try to kill her, and that he would fail, she called out an apology to him, before the Abyss finally swallowed her.
Personality: The weight of knowing that her life would be short led to a tendency for impatience and capriciousness, in Lacie. "I don't have time for this" was probably something of a mantra in her head, when it came to things that bored her or stood in her way. There's canon art depicting Levi's frustration with her untidiness (who has time to clean? It'll just be messy again, tomorrow), she is blunt and straightforward in her opinions. (Life's too short to pussyfoot around a subject!) When she goes in to claim Jack from the room where he's being questioned, she doesn't spare anyone else in the room so much as a word of explanation, simply walking in, grabbing his arm and pulling him out.
Forming deep attachments in general, I think, freaked her out a bit, since the knowledge that she would die young would've constantly been looming in her thoughts. (And she'd probably started on the tendency for emotional distance, even before her death was certain. Simply being a Child of Misfortune in that era would have perpetually put her on the outside looking in.) Aside from Jack, she probably never really let anyone close but Oswald, preferring to waltz into a person's life, make things interesting, and then waltz back out again. Levi informs Jack of pretty much just this, saying she often adopted a random person for a day, on her escapes. Before Jack, her friendships had been about as long-lived as mayflies.
She tends to maintain a somewhat tough exterior. (She shrugged off her impending death as if it meant nothing more than once, though she never stopped having nightmares of the day she learned she would die, and when Jack said he had no will to live despite being free and having a full life ahead of him, she experienced such a flash of anger that she cut his ear with a pair of scissors). She is cynical, amoral and pragmatic. (She tells Jack, the day they meet: "If you're broke, steal. If you're hungry, eat. You have a lovely face, Jack, so you could always sell your body, too, if you like.") She is proud and has a temper that's quick to flair and just as quick to ebb away. (She literally flipped a table and ran away from home, one day, just because her brother let her win at chess, which she saw as patronizing. However, the moment an apology was delivered she returned home cheerfully.)
She's also a little bit of a troll. (The day Jack met her, she was wearing a summer dress in winter, in the hope of catching a cold to make her brother feel guilty about making her angry enough to run away. It doesn't get much better, in later years: she would often do things like give Oswald food she knew he hated, knowing that he would agonize over it and eat it anyway because he couldn't stand to let it go to waste. When Jack is pained or embarrassed she comments on how wonderful the look on his face is.)
Despite all of the above, she also views the world as being full of great beauty, and can, when she wants, be gentle, protective and loving. Though she picks on her brother, they have a bond that stayed strong until the day she died, to the point that she comforted him in her last days, right up until the Abyss swallowed her. Having been mistreated all her life by superstitious townspeople, she does not like to see the weak picked on. (She accepts being roughed up by two men with experienced stoicism, but when they turn on Jack, she kills them and dances in their blood.) She is also an adamant free-thinker who believes a person should come to their own conclusions about things, rather than simply believing whatever they're told. Despite all of the things in her life that could have easily turned her into a victim, she is very much not one. She sees the full spectrum of life, and finds it miraculous.
Abilities/Powers: When one is chosen to be a member of the Baskerville family, the power of the Abyss infuses them until they're nearly as much Chain as they are human. This gives them remarkable regenerative abilities, to the point that one can be shot in the head and sit right back up, a short time later. Short of getting chucked into the Abyss again or running into a Chain powerful enough to kill other Chains (like the Mad Hatter), she's probably going to be pretty hard to kill.
Lacie also has a Contract with the Black Rabbit, which she will be bringing with her. A Chain is a creature born of the Abyss, and by forming a bond with it (aka a Contract), a person is able to summon it to do battle on their behalf or borrow the Chain's power to use, themselves. The Rabbit itself will be about 10 feet tall, pretty physically strong, and armed with the same bladed chains and scythe. Lacie is able to bring out the bladed chains to use herself. They seem to more or less be guided by thought, and can coil and strike like snakes.
Beyond that, she has a broad, sharp mind, even if she generally relies more on impulse and intuition than strategy. I also headcanon that she's a decent thief and pickpocket, and knows her way around a knife reasonably well, though she prefers to use her Chain, when it comes to serious fighting.
Though in her canon Lacie was able to walk into the Abyss and re-write reality to her liking, I will not be bringing that ability with her. (And honestly, even if she could, she wouldn't. She had 25 years to try that and didn't. I think she loved the world too much to want to risk messing it up with even the smallest change.)
Items/Weapons: The gown on her back, her Chain, and a knife strapped to her thigh.
Sample Entry Two: Somehow, she'd been brought to a cruel world.
… So what else was new?
Its cruelty didn't interest her. It certainly didn't intimidate her. The world she'd come from had been prettier. It had been richer, more full of color and variety. It had had fine estates and green grass, instead of the brown and gray of barren soil and rubble. But kinder?
Well...
Not to her kind.
For that alone, she found some strange gentleness in this place. Nobody cared about her eyes. There were no thrown words or stones. They were all too busy surviving. She remembered what that was like. She and her brother had had their time as scavengers, before the Old Duke had taken them in. For the first time in her life, she was treated just like anyone else.
"In Haven," the billboard said, "we are all safe... together."
It was an alien sentiment.
She'd never really been an “we”, before. (Well, not until Jack found her, again. Then, for four precious months, the two of them and her brother had been an “we” of sorts, for all the silence and secrets between the three of them.) Nor had she really ever been a “them”. (For all the Baskervilles had been her family, she'd felt no more a part of it than a sacrificial lamb could feel like part of its killer's household. And there was only ever one Child of Misfortune in a generation, so she'd never met another person like herself.) She'd only ever been a her. (And perhaps, when she had spoken of the Core of the Abyss' loneliness, that day, she'd also been speaking of her own.)
It was strange, walking down the broken streets of this place. It was new. And it was beautiful. Her life was supposed to be over. Now, it looked like she had simply dropped through the darkness and into a new one, instead.
She was ready to take it with both hands. This one, she would not let go of so easily.
Lacie Baskerville | Pandora Hearts | Reserved
Contact Info: plurk--sister_midnight
Other Characters Played: N/A
Requested apartment: 10.2
Character Name: Lacie Baskerville
Canon: Pandora Hearts
Canon Point: Chapter 69 (coming to the game post-death)
Background/History:
Spoilers forever, ahead.
Lacie's life is a circle of sorts.
She is the sister of Glen (Oswald) Baskerville. Her red eyes mark her as a Child of Misfortune. In the society she lives in, people believe this means she carries a curse. Children of Misfortune have been known to be beaten on sight, abandoned by their parents, bought and sold, displayed in freak shows, and killed, simply because of of their red eyes and the superstitions that surround them. It is explained by Glen (Levi) Baskerville that Misfortunate Children are distortions caused by the Abyss' influence on this world, and due to that connection (and the fact that it gives them powers that only the head of the Baskervilles is supposed to have--namely the ability to travel into the Abyss at will and make contact with its Core, thereby being able to petition it to re-write reality), they must be sacrificed in a ritual where they are consumed utterly, obliterated from the centennial cycle of death and rebirth which most other people of their world are a part of.
(The truth of the matter is later revealed: the real reason the erroneously-named Children of Misfortune are killed is because of their potential for saving the world, as they are beyond the control of unearthly beings known as Jurors, who amuse themselves by watching the world and determining the most interesting end for it. Glen Baskerville, as it turns out, serves as their unwitting pawn, put on the earth to eventually bring about its end.)
As small children, Lacie and her older brother Oswald roamed from place to place, (possible runaways, possibly orphans) without a home. One day, while Lacie was waiting for her brother to return from finding a place to sleep for the night, she was approached by a young man, a sword raised in his hand. To her eyes, able to see through time, he would have appeared to be a man-within-a-man, the older of the two looking like an adult version of her brother. Unafraid, she'd smiled at him, and he'd dropped the sword, falling to his knees. A moment later, her brother returned, scolding her for running off and leading her away. She spared the strange man a parting wave, then disappeared into the woods.
Some time later, the siblings were taken in by the Baskerville family. (Though it is the most powerful noble family in Sablier, it is a family in name only, for the most part. Its members are bound together by their duty to protect the balance between the world and the Abyss, not by blood.) The very same day, she discovers that, because of her status as a Child of Misfortune, she will one day be killed. She was very young. (Though the exact age isn't given, she looks to be around 5 or 6.) Her brother, on the other hand, was meant to be the heir to the estate. He would also become the next vessel for the souls of each person who had been the heir, leading back to the first. (This is why each heir takes the name Glen Baskerville, upon inheriting the estate.) She would later figure out that, not only would she be sacrificed, but her own brother was the one who would kill her.
Though she was forbidden from doing so, Lacie would frequently play in the Abyss, as a child, even going so far as to leave a plush rabbit (one of a matched pair) for the strange, silent consciousness she encountered at its core, to keep it company. Her Chain (Chains being demon-like creatures born in the Abyss, most of which are modeled after characters in Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, in some way, i.e. The Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Cheshire Cat) is shaped after the rabbit toy... provided rabbits are large, hulking, humanoid things with glowing red eyes, gnashy pointy teeth, razor sharp claws, a scythe, and bladed chains that can zip out and cut a person to bits.
(While it hasn't been stated definitively, and some speculate that her Chain might be The White Rabbit, I tend to headcanon her Chain being either an earlier version of B-Rabbit--from before it gained it's real consciousness--or possibly a twin to it. Things between Lacie and the Abyss seem to come in twos. The two plush rabbits, the twin daughters she carried into it. It makes sense for her chain to be a mirror-image as well. For the sake of having something to call it, I tend to call it The Black Rabbit, to differentiate between it and B-Rabbit. As a Baskerville, Lacie's Contract is a partnership of equals, and has no time limit.)
While she was still a child, Lacie was approached by Glen (Levi), who proposed that she partake in an "experiment" with him. He believed that, if she carried an unborn child into the Abyss when she was sacrificed, the baby would not be devoured with the rest of her, but cradled at the Abyss' core. He proposed this experiment because he hoped it would provide the Core with a body to inhabit, thus making it easier to communicate with and control. Lacie, who believed the entity at the Core to be lonely, agreed because she hoped the child and the Core might be friends and keep one another company.
As a teen (roughly seventeen,) Lacie ran away from home (which she did many times, we later learn) and befriended the bastard son of a nobleman, who was living on the streets. His name was Jack. She stole food to feed him, offered him a new outlook on life, and killed to protect him, all quite cheerfully. In this way, she won his undying devotion and fanatical loyalty before the Baskervilles found her and returned her to her semi-imprisonment on the Baskerville estate. She gave him one of her earrings as a memento before being taken away.
In the eight years that followed, Jack searched for her with single-minded determination, climbing up the social ladder by whatever means necessary until he was accepted into his illegitimate father's family, thereby gaining access to the same echelons of society the Baskervilles belonged to. By ingratiating himself with another of the more powerful families, he was able to disguise himself as a musician and sneak onto the Baskerville estate to reunite with Lacie...
... only to find that she had forgotten him. However, the earring (which he wore) jogged her memory, and after retreating to her tower and retrieving the matching one, she returned to pull him out of the room where he was being questioned by the other Baskervilles. In doing so, she may have saved his life. They spoke together for some time, and she gave him what comfort she could. As Jack turned to leave, Glen (Levi) popped up, inviting Jack to visit the estate whenever he liked. (He had been intrigued and amused by him.)
In the four months that passed, after that, Jack visited nearly every day. He, Lacie, and Oswald, became something of a inseparable trio, often wandering the grounds of the estate together and listening to Lacie sing. Though she denied Jack's importance to her when speaking to Glen (Levi) (who had, by then, impregnated her as per their agreement), Lacie came to care for Jack, possibly even love him in her way. A few days before the ritual at which she would be sacrificed, Lacie lied to Jack (who had been kept in the dark about her impending fate), persuading him to stay away from the estate until days after her death. Though her brother suggested that Jack might take her away from the estate and try to save her, Lacie had accepted her path and was already carrying Glen (Levi)'s child (though Oswald knew nothing of the pregnancy). There was no going back.
At the ritual, though her brother hesitated, Lacie coaxed him through the final words, smiling as the chains rose from the Abyss to drag her down to her death. As she was pulled down, she witnessed the young man with a sword she'd seen as a small girl, recognizing Oswald's spirit within him. Understanding that he was traveling into the past to try to kill her, and that he would fail, she called out an apology to him, before the Abyss finally swallowed her.
Personality: The weight of knowing that her life would be short led to a tendency for impatience and capriciousness, in Lacie. "I don't have time for this" was probably something of a mantra in her head, when it came to things that bored her or stood in her way. There's canon art depicting Levi's frustration with her untidiness (who has time to clean? It'll just be messy again, tomorrow), she is blunt and straightforward in her opinions. (Life's too short to pussyfoot around a subject!) When she goes in to claim Jack from the room where he's being questioned, she doesn't spare anyone else in the room so much as a word of explanation, simply walking in, grabbing his arm and pulling him out.
Forming deep attachments in general, I think, freaked her out a bit, since the knowledge that she would die young would've constantly been looming in her thoughts. (And she'd probably started on the tendency for emotional distance, even before her death was certain. Simply being a Child of Misfortune in that era would have perpetually put her on the outside looking in.) Aside from Jack, she probably never really let anyone close but Oswald, preferring to waltz into a person's life, make things interesting, and then waltz back out again. Levi informs Jack of pretty much just this, saying she often adopted a random person for a day, on her escapes. Before Jack, her friendships had been about as long-lived as mayflies.
She tends to maintain a somewhat tough exterior. (She shrugged off her impending death as if it meant nothing more than once, though she never stopped having nightmares of the day she learned she would die, and when Jack said he had no will to live despite being free and having a full life ahead of him, she experienced such a flash of anger that she cut his ear with a pair of scissors). She is cynical, amoral and pragmatic. (She tells Jack, the day they meet: "If you're broke, steal. If you're hungry, eat. You have a lovely face, Jack, so you could always sell your body, too, if you like.") She is proud and has a temper that's quick to flair and just as quick to ebb away. (She literally flipped a table and ran away from home, one day, just because her brother let her win at chess, which she saw as patronizing. However, the moment an apology was delivered she returned home cheerfully.)
She's also a little bit of a troll. (The day Jack met her, she was wearing a summer dress in winter, in the hope of catching a cold to make her brother feel guilty about making her angry enough to run away. It doesn't get much better, in later years: she would often do things like give Oswald food she knew he hated, knowing that he would agonize over it and eat it anyway because he couldn't stand to let it go to waste. When Jack is pained or embarrassed she comments on how wonderful the look on his face is.)
Despite all of the above, she also views the world as being full of great beauty, and can, when she wants, be gentle, protective and loving. Though she picks on her brother, they have a bond that stayed strong until the day she died, to the point that she comforted him in her last days, right up until the Abyss swallowed her. Having been mistreated all her life by superstitious townspeople, she does not like to see the weak picked on. (She accepts being roughed up by two men with experienced stoicism, but when they turn on Jack, she kills them and dances in their blood.) She is also an adamant free-thinker who believes a person should come to their own conclusions about things, rather than simply believing whatever they're told. Despite all of the things in her life that could have easily turned her into a victim, she is very much not one. She sees the full spectrum of life, and finds it miraculous.
Abilities/Powers:
When one is chosen to be a member of the Baskerville family, the power of the Abyss infuses them until they're nearly as much Chain as they are human. This gives them remarkable regenerative abilities, to the point that one can be shot in the head and sit right back up, a short time later. Short of getting chucked into the Abyss again or running into a Chain powerful enough to kill other Chains (like the Mad Hatter), she's probably going to be pretty hard to kill.
Lacie also has a Contract with the Black Rabbit, which she will be bringing with her. A Chain is a creature born of the Abyss, and by forming a bond with it (aka a Contract), a person is able to summon it to do battle on their behalf or borrow the Chain's power to use, themselves. The Rabbit itself will be about 10 feet tall, pretty physically strong, and armed with the same bladed chains and scythe. Lacie is able to bring out the bladed chains to use herself. They seem to more or less be guided by thought, and can coil and strike like snakes.
Beyond that, she has a broad, sharp mind, even if she generally relies more on impulse and intuition than strategy. I also headcanon that she's a decent thief and pickpocket, and knows her way around a knife reasonably well, though she prefers to use her Chain, when it comes to serious fighting.
Though in her canon Lacie was able to walk into the Abyss and re-write reality to her liking, I will not be bringing that ability with her. (And honestly, even if she could, she wouldn't. She had 25 years to try that and didn't. I think she loved the world too much to want to risk messing it up with even the smallest change.)
Items/Weapons: The gown on her back, her Chain, and a knife strapped to her thigh.
Sample Entry: Test Drive meme thread
Sample Entry Two: Somehow, she'd been brought to a cruel world.
… So what else was new?
Its cruelty didn't interest her. It certainly didn't intimidate her. The world she'd come from had been prettier. It had been richer, more full of color and variety. It had had fine estates and green grass, instead of the brown and gray of barren soil and rubble. But kinder?
Well...
Not to her kind.
For that alone, she found some strange gentleness in this place. Nobody cared about her eyes. There were no thrown words or stones. They were all too busy surviving. She remembered what that was like. She and her brother had had their time as scavengers, before the Old Duke had taken them in. For the first time in her life, she was treated just like anyone else.
"In Haven," the billboard said, "we are all safe... together."
It was an alien sentiment.
She'd never really been an “we”, before. (Well, not until Jack found her, again. Then, for four precious months, the two of them and her brother had been an “we” of sorts, for all the silence and secrets between the three of them.) Nor had she really ever been a “them”. (For all the Baskervilles had been her family, she'd felt no more a part of it than a sacrificial lamb could feel like part of its killer's household. And there was only ever one Child of Misfortune in a generation, so she'd never met another person like herself.) She'd only ever been a her. (And perhaps, when she had spoken of the Core of the Abyss' loneliness, that day, she'd also been speaking of her own.)
It was strange, walking down the broken streets of this place. It was new. And it was beautiful. Her life was supposed to be over. Now, it looked like she had simply dropped through the darkness and into a new one, instead.
She was ready to take it with both hands. This one, she would not let go of so easily.