application ( forest covered )

[gitanes]

( PLAYER INFORMATION )

Name: Anne
Contact: passiones
Are you over 17?: Yes!
Characters in Forest Covered: Jolyne Cujoh (superstringtheory)

( CHARACTER INFORMATION )

Name/Work Name: Lila Zacharov ( "Nyx" )
Canon: Curse Workers
Canon Point: After the first scene in Black Heart
AU/CRAU: N
Age: 17
History:

In the world of Curse Workers, magic has existed since the dawn of human civilization. Magic workers have been known throughout the ages as theurgists, dab hands, workers, hyperbathygammic (HBG) individuals - or colloquially, people with heebeegeebies. "Work," as these skills are most commonly called, is genetic rather than learned and comes in seven varieties: dream work, physical work, memory work, luck work, death work, emotion work, and the rarest, transformation work. It's only since the beginning of the 20th century that non-workers have attempted to legislate and control workers, an attempt that has largely failed. Anti-worker laws went into effect at the same time that Prohibition was written into law, and while Prohibition was eventually lifted, curse work was not decriminalized. In fact, workers were put into work camps during the 1930s, and it was during those years that the worker crime families came into being - and that the worker family mentality came into being. Watch out for the family, take care of the family, screw the other guy. Everything that would later define the Zacharovs and the Sharpes began in those camps.

Fast-forward several decades and the Zacharovs are one of the preeminent worker crime families on the East Coast, with the Sharpes working as the Zacharovs' right hands - advisers, bodyguards, assassins, and so on. Lila Zacharov is the family's heir apparent, introduced through the youngest Sharpe brother's point of view - and Cassel is infatuated with her, so all you see initially is that she's a dream worker, rich, spoiled, savage, and vicious, seeing the world as something owed to her, ready and willing to hurt anyone who gets in her way. This remains more or less true . . . until Lila stumbles across the two elder Sharpe brothers and her cousin Anton conspiring to assassinate her father, tries to stop them, is almost killed herself, and then "rescued" by Cassel, who proceeds to turn her into a cat because - surprise! - he's a transformation worker, the only one in the world, a fact his family has been keeping from him allegedly for his own good. In the end, Lila is caught by Philip and Barron Sharpe and kept in a cage in cat form for three years, from the ages of 13 to 17.

It's here that the series actually picks up: with Lila having escaped at last from her inhumane imprisonment and come to wreak vengeance on a memory-wiped Cassel. He had no idea that she was this weird white cat he kept seeing, but he was drawn to her all the same, and the closer he got to her, the more strange dreams he started to have and the more new memories started coming back to him of things he'd done under his brothers' and mother's influence. Once he figured out what was really going on - that he was the transformation worker and Lila was not dead, but a cat - he transformed her back and she told him that he had been used as an assassin every night by his brothers and Anton, then memory wiped before they let him go back to sleep. Together with two of Cassel's friends, he and Lila came up with a plan to double-cross Barron, Philip, and Anton, and they succeeded with the help of Cassel's grandfather, Desi. Lila reunited with her father, who kept Barron and Philip in his employ rather than killing them outright out of gratitude to Cassel and Desi - but unfortunately, Cassel's mother Shandra worked Lila to love Cassel, so he ran from Lila, allegedly in order to keep him safe.

The summer passed, and Cassel came back after vacation only to find that Lila had transferred to his school to be closer to him, because despite her knowledge of the love curse, she couldn't stand to stay away. She attempted to move on as best she could, since Cassel kept distancing himself from her, but when she got involved with other people he got defensive and angry. Eventually, despite his insistence that he had to do the right thing and stay away from her, he kissed her and would have gone further if he hadn't been interrupted. After this, he asked his friend Daneca to "fix" the problem by working Lila to feel nothing for him. Then he told her that he loved her in preparation for when her memory would theoretically be erased, because that totally made sense.

On a less supernatural-teen-drama front, Lila helped Cassel to solve the murder of his brother Philip, while also doing her level best to keep him from being recruited by a shady government agency seeking to use the world's single transformation worker for their own purposes. It turned out that the murderer was Philip's ex-wife Maura, on the run from Philip's abusive behavior with their child. Lila subsequently helped Cassel frame someone else for Philip's murder.

However, that success wasn't enough to overcome the effects of his betrayal: Lila figured out Daneca was trying to work her and made her confess what Cassel told her to do, realized Cassel was a jackass and thought he had been stringing her along the whole time she was cursed, got her Zacharov necklace (the chain of scars on the neck that marked her as an official member of the Zacharov family), and told Cassel to basically fuck off and die.

Personality:

The first, most formative thing to know about Lila is that she was born to lead. As heir to one of the leading crime families in the United States, she has known from her very first conscious moment that she's set to inherit his legacy, and that knowledge has shaped her actions and experiences for her entire life. Furthermore, it has shaped the way other people react to her, changing the way she reacts to them - her existence a cycle of expectations, assumptions, and displays of power.

"Ambition" is the word voted most likely to have Lila's face next to it in the dictionary. While, yes, she can conceive of other routes her life could take besides being head of the Zacharov family, none of them have the same sense of pride and family, and therefore none of them could ever be as worthy of her pursuit as rising in the ranks of the family. Not only does she intend to get to the top and lead the men her father leads, on some level she also clearly intends to surpass him. To build on his legacy, but also to make her name more memorable and more infamous.

Part of this is out of necessity. Another thing Lila has always known is that she would be a woman doing what is traditionally a man's job, leading men, needing to inspire men. Besides which, her father, while repeatedly showing that he has faith in her ability to lead, seems to also be instinctively protective of her, trying to shelter from the messier nature of mob life in the way that he may have sheltered her mother. Certainly he treats her as younger and more vulnerable than she is, which only fuels Lila's ambition to be bigger, stronger, more than her father ever was. She resents him, too, for treating her like she can't be exactly like him, even though on some level she logically understands his reasoning.

Her drive to go above and beyond often translates into ruthlessness. She's learned cruelty and hard-heartedness from her father, and she takes advantage of every opportunity to practice them. Like anyone who is successful in a crime family, Lila is used to violence and death; she doesn't flinch at death or pain and is accustomed to torture and assassination. When she learns that she or her father is a target, she doesn't blink, she reacts, compartmentalizing her emotional reaction in favor of making a plan. In this way, she is an exceptional leader, refusing to allow enemies to rattle her in most situations.

Most. She's not always logical. Lila operates on the principle of an eye for an eye. In fact, when she's personally wronged and especially when she feels trapped, she is capable of moving past ruthlessness and into pure murderousness. After her imprisonment at the hands of the Sharpes, she's ready and willing to walk Cassel off a roof and rip the rest of the family apart with her bare hands if she has to. She repeatedly expresses her frustration that she can't do this, especially towards Barron and Philip, and is still incredibly (justifiably) bitter towards Cassel despite the fact that he has no memories of the incident.

Bloodthirstiness aside, Lila could easily be termed a sadist. It should be noted that, torture and horrific murder and assassination aside, she seems to be a consensual sadist - she takes pleasure in other people's pain, but only if they are also taking pleasure in it. She also derives pleasure from being deferred to; this runs the gamut from people paying her due deference as Zacharov's daughter to people who will jump when she says jump, stop breathing when she says stop breathing, jump off a roof when she says jump off a roof. The clearest example of this tendency is Lila's relationship with Cassel, which is admittedly complicated by the fact that he ruined her life and then his mother worked her to love him. Even when they were very young, though, a significant portion of the basis of their relationship came from his blind obedience to her and her ability to inflict pain on him without feeling a twinge of conscience.

Not that Lila is a sociopath. She very much is not. It's more like she's got all the same morals as an ordinary person shoved slightly sideways. What she has been taught from a very young age is that in order to survive, she and her family must be superior, they must rule; the government is the enemy, as are ordinary non-worker citizens, when they're not people to be fleeced and taken advantage of. Even other workers are almost always subordinates. In truth, the Zacharovs are worker royalty, and Lila has always been a princess.

So, yes, Lila is spoiled. In her early years, before she underwent the worst, cattiest puberty ever and got serious about her calling as a mafia queen, she utilized her wealth and privilege much more as a weapon against her peers than as a tool for success. Nowadays, she is still used to the finer things in life and she's still entitled to some extent, but she also uses her access to said finer things as a means of comporting herself as she and her family ought to be represented. She dresses well, drives expensive cars, and goes to an exclusive school, but if she did any less she wouldn't be a Zacharov. It's half about ambition, once again, and half about boosting confidence.

Which Lila does not have nearly as much of as she'd like you to think. Here's the problem: when the brothers of the boy you have a crush on try to get him to assassinate you, then he turns you into a cat, and you're kept in a tiny cage that's rarely cleaned for three years, only let out once in a while to work people - you go a little crazy. Or, to be more specific: you lose all sense of self for a while there. Lila specifically states that she tried to tell herself stories, fairy tales, to keep herself stable and grounded, but eventually they ran out. She had nothing more to remind herself that she was human; she lost time; she became something not quite herself, until she finally found a way to get Cassel to set her free again.

Anybody who is that powerless for that length of time is going to have serious post-traumatic reactions, but for Lila, whose entire self-image was built on her own power, it shattered her. When she came back to herself, she was still, in essence, a thirteen-year-old in a seventeen-year-old's body, and as immature as that implies. She had to - is having to - grow up incredibly quickly, and to compensate for her lost time she has become more ruthless, more sadistic, and more willing to sublimate her own emotional stability for the sake of success. More than that, she's furious. Her life was taken away from her and she was only able to get partial revenge. Her solution to this unresolvable emotional dilemma is: climb higher, climb faster, climb harder, take down everyone in my way.

It's as impossible to omit the Sharpes from this section as it would be to omit the Zacharovs. The Sharpes have shaped the Zacharovs' fates for decades, ever since Cassel's grandfather first started working for Lila's father. They have specifically had a huge, almost entirely negative influence on Lila. In quick sum: older brothers Barron and Philip made an alliance with her cousin Anton to kill Lila and put Anton next in line to take over the family; Cassel, who was obsessively crushing on her as a young teenager, turned her into a cat and then had his memory wiped so he couldn't change her back; Barron kept her in a cage for three years without taking any measure of care of her; after Cassel changed her back and Lila was just starting to get her life back to normal, Cassel's mother Shandra emotion-worked her to love him; Cassel dicked around with her emotions as a result and ultimately almost raped her while she was under the influence of the emotion work. The conclusion here being that Lila blames the Sharpes for everything bad that has ever happened her, while also having Cassel as a very specific complicating factor. He's responsible for a lot of awful things, true, but she also always liked him - that and now she has to like him. Even though the emotion work has mostly worn off, her feelings are and will continue to be all tangled up in that curse until and unless someone can take if off her. So she loves him, but hates him, and hates him for being someone she loves. Just as Cassel will never fully get over her, she will never fully get over Cassel. Even though she wants to kill everyone genetically related to him. That's another thing she'll never get over.

Debt: The death of the Sharpe family, the expulsion of all emotion work from her system, and permanent immunity to emotion, memory, and transformation work.

Previous Game Info: N/A

Inventory:

☛ one small, Russian-made 5-bullet revolver
☛ one stiletto blade, concealed in:
☛ black Louboutin boots
☛ one black dress with red accents
☛ a black purse with cards, cash, makeup

Abilities:

Lila's world is almost identical to ours except for the inclusion and influence of what are colloquially referred to as workers: people with genetically-influenced quasi-magical abilities. There are seven different kinds of work: dream, physical, memory, luck, death, emotion, and transformation.

Lila is a dream worker. With a touch, she can directly influence and control others' dreams. All canonical evidence shows that she can either touch people while they're awake and influence their dreams the next time they sleep, or she can touch them while they're already sleeping and alter/control their dreams that way. There seem to be no limits to how much or for how long Lila can control dreams, but contact must be hands-to-bare-skin for it to be effective.

Additionally, after every work Lila will experience blowback. This essentially means that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and the more she changes someone's dreams the worse her own night terrors become.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

+ STRATEGIC.

Lila's ability to be strategic is something that evolved after her change into cat form and which continues to develop throughout the end of canon, both before and after the canon point I am taking her from. Essentially, while she began her life as a very spoiled and wealthy only child, she has always known that she'd take up her father's role as the head of the Zacharov family and as such has always studied his ability to strategize and that of the people around him. Her strategic strengths tend to come up most obviously in times of crisis or in times when she is capable of taking her time to plan. In the case of the former, the most obvious example is when she's trapped in cat form and is planning her revenge on Cassel; some of her escape certainly required luck, but her plan to disorient him enough that he'd walk himself off a roof was very strategic, even if desperate. In the case of the latter, she finds herself able to utilize the resources available to her in a very effective way, as when she utilizes a death worker who is in debt to the family and whose blowback is relatively low, gaining his trust so that he will feel comfortable working for her over an extended period of time during her process of proving herself as a worthy potential leader.

+ RESILIENT.

Lila is one of those people who simply refuses to give up, no matter what life throws at her--and it's thrown a lot against her. Despite her own issues with self-image and the fact that people tend to underestimate her based on her gender and relatively young age, she was determined from a young age to succeed her father as the head of the Zacharov family. Despite her years-long imprisonment by a forgetful Barron Sharpe and her very literal psychotic break, despite the fact that she did give up for a little while there, it wasn't enough to keep her down for good. Even the emotional manipulation she suffers at the hands of the Sharpes doesn't crush her spirit. She has no real healthy coping mechanisms, but even working with basically the scraps of her own mental health, she pushes herself forward once she's out of Cassel's grasp and charges towards her ambitions guns blazing.

+ STUBBORN.

Part of what makes Lila such a resilient person is her stubbornness. She's quite simply unwilling to let anyone beat her. This can, of course, manifest in a negative way, but given her history and environment, it tends to provide her with strength. She stubbornly refuses to stop believing in herself, even when nobody else does, and always trusts her instincts even when she's told that they aren't worth trusting. It's a remarkable trait for someone so young and with so little life experience, but one good thing she was taught by her father was that she was clever enough and had good enough instincts that trusting them was never the wrong move. She clings to that certainty when things go wrong, even if everyone around her chooses to believe in her own incompetence.

+/- SELF-SUFFICIENT.

While Lila has been spoiled in a materialistic way for most of her life, she has had to be very emotionally self-sufficient. Her mother was emotionally abusive and tended to either patronize her or put too much responsibility on her; her father, while he did care about her, was never a very emotionally open person, and he was also not available a lot of the time due to his line of work. As such, Lila had to learn to deconstruct and navigate her emotions on her own. This can be both a positive and a negative quality--positive, in that it allows her to compartmentalize and function during a crisis; negative, because she never had a good example, so a lot of her coping skills are frankly very awful and unhealthy. Lila, however, sees this as a wholly positive trait and refuses at this point in her life to accept help from or open up to anyone.

- PARANOID.

Paranoia is, in a sense, an adaptive trait for workers in this canon. Workers are by definition wanted criminals, and those that choose to align themselves with worker crime families are especially in danger, both from the law and from hate crimes by the general populace. Lila is more paranoid even than most, however, due to a number of factors. For one, she has been taken advantage of by the vast majority of the important people in her life (examples: Cassel, Barron, and Philip Sharpe; Shandra Singer; Anton Zacharov; her father), and as such she has an extremely hard time trusting others. For another, she has witnessed a number of attempts on her own life as well as the lives of those she cares about (examples: Anton's attempt on her father's life, the Sharpes' attempt on her own life). Altogether, this manifests in a general inability for Lila to trust other people, as exemplified best in her difficulty meshing with what might arguably be called "normal" people. Daneca Wasserman attempts to befriend her and help her with the schoolwork that she's behind on, but Lila's attempts to reciprocate are notably awkward and uncertain, in large part because she's trying to figure out what exactly the catch is.

- INSECURE.

Lila's insecurity stems in large part from the abovementioned paranoia and often manifests in a similar way - in suspicion rather than an open expression of that insecurity or a request for help. Other times, it doesn't manifest at all; she chooses to mask it entirely rather than let anyone else see her weakness. The truth of the matter is that, while Lila used to be quite secure in herself and is still very aware of her strengths, she is also hyper-aware of her weaknesses, many of which have been taken advantage of in the past and thus made more significant in her mind. She also has a tendency to overcompensate for what she perceives as her weaknesses; a good example of this is when she was locked up for three years in cat form and tried to sustain herself on her secretly fairly romantic worldview, only to realize eventually that she couldn't trust her story to have a happy ending, and she especially couldn't trust her friends and family to come and save her. This is essentially how she copes with insecurity - by squashing it, or pretending it doesn't exist, or trying to bluster her way through it. Also, let's be real, she's a seventeen-year-old girl, she has the normal seventeen-year-old girl insecurities even if she won't admit it. Examples of her insecurity abound, but in largely subtle ways. She tends to either lash out or shut down when she's in a situation she doesn't know how to handle, as when confronted with large social groups at school. In addition, she actually allows herself to be openly insecure with Cassel on one or two occasions, going so far as to speak more slowly and quietly and even tear up, although she still tries her best to maintain a strong front whenever she can.

- OBSESSIVE.

When Lila decides that she needs to do something, she gets it done - but her drive to accomplish her goals moves a little past determination and into dangerously obsessive territory, especially considering the fact that sometimes her goals are along the lines of "utterly ruin this family" or "assassinate that guy". Obsession has been part of her since a young age; she has always known she'd be her father's successor and that she'd have to work harder than a man would in order to achieve the respect required to do her job right. Her tendency to obsess was magnified significantly by her time spent imprisoned as a cat, because thinking was all she was capable of doing - her cage was too small to move, she was nonverbal, and most of the time Barron (who was keeping her) didn't even remember she was there, so she had no human interaction. As such, even now that she's back in human form, she tends to ruminate on things that are bothering her to the extent that she works herself up into a frenzy, and solves the discomfort this causes by exhaustively laying out plans. Especially revenge plans. The best example of this is, of course, her obsession with the Sharpe family. While she does allow them to live in the end, she's unable to leave them alone, especially Cassel, because of what they did to her. Sometimes she tries to move past her vengeful obsessions, and she does still bear some positive feelings towards Cassel, but ultimately she comes back to the suffering they've caused her and her family, and as such she will never be able to forgive them entirely - not even Cassel.

- VIOLENT.

This one is honestly pretty straightforward. Lila grew up in a subculture in which violence was not only normalized but expected. If someone gets out of line, it's natural for her to resort to violence to bring them back in line. Not only that, but to a certain extent her natural glee at expressing her own dominance and her desire for vengeance combine to leave her taking a little too much pleasure in exacting violence on the people she thinks deserve it. It's important to recognize that Lila doesn't see this as anything unusual--it's just part of how her world works, and in the underworld of worker crime families, her behavior isn't too unusual. Among civilians, though, it would definitely and immediately be read as out of line.

( SAMPLE )

Characterization Sample: one | two