application ( el nysa )

[gitanes]

OOC

Handle: Anne
Contact: passiones
Over 18? 26
Characters Played: None; also apping Marquis de Carabas (todeceive)

THE CHARACTER

Character Name: Lila Zacharov
Series: Curse Workers
Canon Point: Post-canon
Character Age: 17
Background:

Curse Workers is set in a world where magic, or "work", has long been part of humanity, passed down genetically. Workers have historically been marginalized, and as a result many workers join organized crime families. The Zacharovs are one of the preeminent worker crime families on the East Coast of the USA, with the Sharpes working as their right hands. Lila is the family's heir apparent, and Cassel, the youngest Sharpe brother, is infatuated with her. When Lila stumbles across the two elder Sharpe brothers and her cousin Anton conspiring to assassinate her father, she's kidnapped and transformed by Cassel into a cat to make way for Anton, the next in line in the Zacharov family.

Lila is imprisoned for three years before escaping and coming to wreak vengeance on a memory-wiped Cassel. Once he figures out what happened, Cassel transforms her back. She tells him that he'd 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 come up with a plan to double-cross Barron, Philip, and Anton, and they succeed with the help of Cassel's grandfather, Desi. Lila reunites with her father, who keeps Barron and Philip in his employ rather than killing them outright. Unfortunately, Cassel's mother Shandra works Lila to love Cassel, so he runs from Lila.

Cassel comes back after summer vacation only to find that Lila's transferred to his school to be closer to him. She attempts to move on as best she can, but when she gets involved with other people Cassel gets defensive and angry. Eventually, despite his insistence that he has to do the right thing and stay away from her, he kisses her. After this, he asks his friend Daneca to "fix" the problem by working Lila to feel nothing for him.

Meanwhile, Lila helps 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. The murderer is Philip's ex-wife Maura, on the run from Philip's abusive behavior. Lila then helps Cassel frame someone else for Philip's murder.

However, when Lila figures out Daneca was trying to work her, she thinks he's been stringing her along the whole time. She rejects Cassel and officially joins the Zacharov family as a full member.

Personality:

The first 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 this 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, 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.

Powers/Abilities:

☛ CAREER CRIMINAL. Includes skills in use of weapons, some hand-to-hand combat (mostly self-defense), con artistry, torture.

☛ DREAM WORK. With a touch, Lila 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.

Power Nerfs (if applicable): N/A

Inventory:

☛ one pair of black leather gloves
☛ one small, Russian-made 5-bullet revolver (if permitted; no extra ammunition)
☛ one stiletto blade, concealed in:
☛ black Louboutin boots
☛ one black dress with red accents
☛ a black purse with cards, cash, makeup

Incentives: Money, weapons, and Shandra Singer's head on a platter are all winning options, but what Lila would ask for if she had a choice would be for the Orbiters to take Cassel's transformation work away from him and give it to her along with her own dream work.

SAMPLES

➥ prose; TDM; diana prince
➥ text; musebox; asha greyjoy
➥ prose; TDM; vanessa ives