application ( balance )

[gitanes]

	Lila Zacharov: Changing is what people do when they have no options left.
	APP HMD DRUID ANNE

Player Name: Anne
Age: 28
Contact: passiones
Timezone: EST
Other character currently in game: Guido Mista protegge

Character name: Lila Zacharov
Age: 17
Canon: Curse Workers
Canon point: The beginning of Black Heart, after her keloid scar has healed
History:

Contains discussion of animal neglect/abuse & dubiously consensual relationships.

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. The story geographically bounces between areas of New Jersey and New York City.

Because Lila is introduced from the point of view of a boy who's infatuated with her, 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 her "safe" from him.

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 she never wanted to see him again.

Three key adjectives: paranoid • prideful • ambitious

Influential Events:

GET THE HEEBEEGEEBIES

The moment when any individual in a cursed lineage feels their curse awaken is a special one — for a lot of reasons. The reader never sees this moment in Lila's childhood, but the ripples of it reverberate through the rest of her life. She would have been quite young, somewhere between 4 and 7 or so. Her curse would have activated by accident, but her parents would have known to expect it, since she was coming from a prestigious worker crime family. In Lila's case, it manifested as an unexpected dream given to someone close to her, maybe a family member or someone working for her father — and when her father found out, they celebrated. It was made clear to her that this was a big deal, a very good thing.

The moment when Lila goes from suspected to confirmed curse worker changed her life, even though she was too young to know exactly what all the excitement was about. The messages she received from the very start were that her dream work made her special: unique, powerful, and dangerous. Her power drew her further into the very exclusive brotherhood of criminal workers, in part because it proved she belonged without question and in part because it branded her as a de facto criminal. By using her curse, even accidentally, Lila had committed a federal crime. The line was drawn in the sand. Pride and power and belonging and safety lay with a life of crime. Being a law-abiding citizen was, as far as Lila knew, no longer possible. From this point forward, Lila was fully committed to being an outsider in society.

THE LESSON SHE LEARNED WAS DIFFERENT

There is a moment that sticks in Lila's memory, the first time she distinctly remembers her father threatening someone — whether he meant to or not. It was during her first summer in Paris, late at night; she was on a walk with her father and told him she wanted to eat at a particular cafe, which had just closed. Her father persuaded the cafe's owner to stay open just a little while longer by opening his jacket to reveal a sizeable amount of cash . . . and his gun.

Her father claims that he intended only a bribe, not a threat. Regardless, there is a moment before the owner acquiesces and opens the cafe again that Lila sees fear in his eyes. This certainly isn't the first time she's seen an interaction like this between her father and another person, but it's the first time it consciously registers to her that fear is not only a tool, but a potential weapon. Her father tells her that "money will buy you anything in the world," but to Lila fear is the greatest currency from that moment forward. After that summer, she uses fear as a crowbar to pry her way into anything and everything that she wants — because she knows exactly how well it works.

WHITE CAT

No matter how well-adjusted someone starts out, spending three years trapped in the wrong body in a too-small cage getting unreliably fed and watered, being forced to sleep in your own filth, is going to fuck a gal up. Lila, of course, didn't start out well-adjusted. Lila has no time to process the trauma of suddenly learning that there is a literal conspiracy against her claim to the Zacharov family as well as her life, nor the fact that her best (only) friend Cassel has been part of that conspiracy with or without his consent. All there is, is the shock, the incredibly painful change, three years in an animal's body, and the loss of three years of her childhood.

There's no question that her time as a cat exacerbated every negative trait Lila has. She was violent before, but combined with the impulsivity she grew used to in her cat form, she's all the more likely to become violent post-change. There's an undeniable increase in cruelty after her time as a cat; she plays with her food, so to speak, after she comes back to her body, becoming more vindictive and nasty to anyone who wrongs her. Combine the poor socialization of a heavily-guarded teenage heir to the criminal elite with the mentality of a feral cat and you get Lila on the other side of this ordeal. She struggles with claustrophobia, breaking down in a panic attack when she's put in a jail cell at one point. Plenty of other post-traumatic symptoms surface in her, too; Lila is pretty much a poster child for hypervigilance.

Most significantly, Lila quite literally loses her mind while she's in the cat's body. The combination of social isolation, neglect, and animal instincts combined to completely shake her loose from reality. She spends a long time — even she doesn't know how long — "try[ing] to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up." After some time, the only thing that kept Lila even remotely attached to her human identity was a fixation on getting revenge — on Cassel and the Sharpes, on Anton, on anyone she could get her hands on. Her identity was distilled to vengeance alone. It would take a monumental effort to let all of that, the anger and desire to get back at those who've hurt her, go entirely. Quite frankly, at this point, she's got no desire to let it go.

LOVE HURTS

So, Cassel. He was her first and only friend, her "summer friend," someone she wasn't supposed to be friends with but who made her feel normal. She developed feelings for him at some point, a stupid little-kid crush. She wanted to kill him for a while, too. But after she killed Anton, there was an opportunity to have an actual relationship with him — until Cassel's mother, an emotion worker, worked her to love him.

Love work is not like real love. It's overly simplistic and incredibly painful, to the point that even being apart for a short time can cause huge mood swings and any denial of the feeling just makes it worse. Lila, who had only within the last couple of weeks regained her human form and some semblance of autonomy, was suddenly deprived of her agency once again. She resisted, of course, because no matter what she felt for Cassel before she'd hate herself for succumbing to artificial feelings. Given Cassel's self-loathing avoidance spiral, she was left to deal with the repercussions of the curse almost entirely on her own, waiting for it to wear off — but before it did, she found out that Cassel had asked a friend of his to work her again, to feel nothing for him this time.

This was essentially the last straw for Lila. After being worked twice already in horrifying ways, to find out that the one person she most wanted to depend on was planning to work her without her permission again showed her that she really couldn't trust anyone. There was nobody in the world to trust but herself. She pushed all of her human connections away and left what little civilian life she had developed entirely behind. From this point forward, Lila lived for herself and only herself.

ASH NECKLACE

Despite the fact that she was the heir to her father's criminal dynasty, Lila had always felt smothered by him, treated as less capable even if in subtler ways than her cousin Anton had, just because she was a girl instead of a boy. Lila's final hurdle was to prove to her father that she was just as capable of an heir to the Zacharov name as a son would have been. To do this, she did what any grunt in the organization would do: started at the bottom and worked her way up. The first step in this process was getting her ash necklace.

This initation rite sounds a lot nicer than it is. Lila had to cut her own throat and pack it tight with ash so that as it healed, it would form a dark raised scar. This was the mark of the Zacharovs, a very obvious sign of loyalty to a criminal organization. After this, there was no going back. Lila, of course, went into it fearlessly. She cut her throat, packed it repeatedly with ash as it healed, and once she was well enough to start work, headed out with a vengeance. Her goal was to demonstrate her commitment and her tenacity, which she did — but more than that, this was one more way for Lila to spit on her old life and the people who had burned her in the past. Regardless of how many people had tried to take her down, she was going to make her way as a Zacharov one way or another and accept help from no one. No matter how much pain she goes through, she will always consider it worthwhile.

Link to Samples: Link to Sample 1; Link to Sample 2;

Chosen path: Druid
5 Abilities:

○ Wild Shape (Cat).
○ Goodberry.
○ Create Bonfire.
○ Thorn Whip.
○ Canon Power. Dream work. Essentially, dream magic. 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. She is also able to control people's behavior while they sleep to some extent, such as by influencing them into sleepwalking; she canonically walks someone onto a roof while he's asleep. 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.

Regarding nerfs in Balance, I would like to nix controlling people's behaviors/movements entirely. There is already a set repercussion for dream work called blowback: whenever she influences someone's dreams, Lila experiences negative effects on her own sleep, most often manifesting in night terrors and extreme insomnia. For additional nerfs, I would be fine with something along the lines of: Lila can only affect one person's dream per week, and it causes severe fatigue when used for a day or two after use. Obviously I would put up an opt-out/permissions post and communicate OOCly at all stages were this ever to be used on PCs. My goal is to angle Lila into a healthier relationship with her powers rather than her continuing to use them in an aggressive and self-destructive manner, so I'm totally open to additional nerfs as necessary, since that will probably help my character development goals in the long run.

Why this path?:

So: Lila will be a really shitty druid. Pretty much everything about the druid ethos runs counter to the person she strives to be. She's neither nurturing nor in tune with nature, and she doesn't have faith in anything but herself. She'd really love to claim mastery over anything and everything!

This is not to say she's incapable of becoming a successful druid, only that she'll be resistant to it. Used to being manipulated, she hates the thought of changing herself in any way, but there is a lot of potential benefit for her in learning that self-directed change and even (gasp) empathy and altruistic actions can be positive for her. Further, the real irony of this is that Lila is an extension of "nature's resilience, cunning, and fury." Use of Wild Shape will allow her to work through the trauma of years-long loss of her body on her own terms. Basically, I love Lila having agency but also grouchily suffering. 👍

blurb code by photosynthesis