Application: multiversal

[eventheskylooksdifferent]

In-Character Information
Character Name: Lena Duchannes
Username: eventheskylooksdifferent
Fandom: The Caster Chronicles (AU)
Played By: Stephanie Leonidas

Canon Character Section

Physical Description: Lena is eighteen years old. She stands five feet, six inches, and she has a slender build and long, thick, wavy dark brown hair. She has a faint birthmark on her cheekbone under her left eye that resembles a crescent moon, and deep green eyes, though the left one has a decided gold tint to it. (Roll with me here, she comes from a young adult supernatural fantasy novel, okay.)

She's somewhere between a tiny!goth and a quirky artsy sort, and she reflects that in the way she dresses: nearly always jeans, either with Converse tennis shoes she's drawn on with Sharpies and t-shirts or pullovers, or with short dresses or long tunics and boots; sometimes longer dresses with tights; nearly always black or dark hues; many of the things she wears have a decidedly vintage feel to them.

There are three pieces of jewelry Lena always wears: the first is a silver bracelet that belonged to her late mother, the second is a ring that belonged to Ethan's late mother, on a chain; and the third is a longer chain that has a huge, noisy collection of things attached to it, everything from legitimate charms and lockets to a soda can tab, a piece of ribbon, and other random items one wouldn't generally wear on a necklace--this serves as Lena's scrapbook of sorts, full of tiny mementoes of her life, the places she's been, and the memories she's built.

She's soft-spoken and her speech is tinged with a hint of a southern accent; she hails from South Carolina but she moved around a lot before returning two and a half years ago.

Sexuality: Lena is heterosexual. In the books she only shows interest in and attraction to the opposite sex, namely, in Ethan Wate, though there is a brief time when they're separated and she seems to be enjoying the company of another Caster boy. She was utterly devoted to him, and insanely jealous at times when it seemed another girl might want or had gotten some of his attention, which is tied, deep down, to her fear of abandonment.

Ethan was both her first serious boyfriend, and the love of her life. They loved each other deeply and without condition, and both believed they were meant to find each other and meant to be together. She's spent the time since his death working to bring him back or reverse what happened to him because her devotion to him, coupled with her guilt at feeling responsible for his death, is so complete that she is willing to bargain at any cost to get him back.

It's highly unlikely she'll form any sort of lasting romantic bond with anyone else, because even in death, Ethan remains her everything, and it would be difficult for her to get past that. She's never been physically intimate with anyone, not even Ethan, though not for lack of wanting to; Casters and Mortals (regular people, like Ethan) can't consummate their relationships due to the energy created between them by sustained physical contact, and that kind of intimacy could seriously harm or kill the Mortal. Ethan and Lena hadn't figured out a way around that issue, and I doubt she would bother finding a way around it with anyone who wasn't him.

History: For Lena's canon history, please see this link: http://thecasterchronicles.wikia.com/wiki/Lena_Duchannes

One major plot point that is not mentioned in that wiki article is that Lena Duchannes and Ethan Wate are also either reincarnations or otherwise strongly linked to two of their ancestors from the Civil War era, Genevieve Duchannes and Ethan Carter Wate. They were star-crossed lovers, and when the first Ethan was killed, Genevieve made a bargain with the Book of Moons, a powerful Caster spell book, to bring him back. The cost of that bargain was that the Duchannes family was cursed from then on: where other Casters can choose whether they are Light or Dark when they turn sixteen, any Duchannes Caster does not have that choice, but has it spontaneously manifest when the time comes.

Lena departs from canon following Ethan's death in the third book. I wanted to hold her for a while in the position she finds herself in following those events: without Ethan, left to fend for herself, prepared to bargain and do whatever it takes to try to get him back. I know from details released about the upcoming finale to the series she and Ethan get their happy ending, but I'm interested in playing her without that bond, in a place where she's forced to try to take control of her life on her own. My AU finds her in the March following Ethan's death in December, having passed her 18th birthday, delved deep into research and exploring to try to figure out the best bargain to strike to get Ethan back from the dead, and laden with guilt over his death and over creating the situation that necessitated his sacrifice.

Powers: Casters are people who are born with innate supernatural talents and abilities, anything from being able to heal others, see through time, speak to the dead, or being able to manipulate light, or fire. Some of them are even born supernatural creatures, such as incubi or shapeshifters. In addition to their supernatural powers or state of being, they are capable of spell casting and rituals.

Lena is a particularly rare and powerful type of Caster known as a Natural. Her innate powers are weather and fire manipulation, but with much stronger influence than most Casters are capable of. She has also stopped time twice, in very serious situations. Because she's a Natural, her spells and rituals are much more easily cast and have greater effect.

She's still young, so she has trouble controlling her abilities at times. At the start of the series the weather tended to shift with her stronger emotions; she's gained more control over that by this time, though a strong, deep, powerful emotional reaction might still trigger a very localized shift in the weather (higher winds if she's angry, rain if she's crying, things like that). She has a little less grasp of her fire manipulation; it's a running gag in the books that she sometimes accidentally sets things on fire, also usually tied to an emotional reaction.

She can also telepathically communicate with other Casters, and she could with Ethan (who turned out to be a pretty special kind of Mortal, usually it's not possible with Mortals). Casters call it "kelting"; I'd be open to her being able to do it with other magic-users in the city if that's something that's usually within their abilities too.

Talents/Abilities:: ...well-versed in poetry and writes some herself? A pretty mean hand with a Sharpie and her bedroom walls or her shoes? Otherwise, no.

Personality: Outwardly, Lena is that kind of odd loner kid everyone knew in high school, the one who sat by herself at lunch and was always writing and doodling in notebooks and never really had many friends. She's quiet and aloof, awkward with other people and taking a long time to warm up to them. She's given to a lot of introspection--and a lot of moping, too, a lot of living inside her own head and dwelling on her own emotions.

When she does grow comfortable with and fond of someone, Lena is a loyal friend, compassionate and concerned with their well-being, and willing to defend and protect them. She's more relaxed, more willing to display her sometimes sly sense of humor. She tends to show affection by gentle teasing, but she's serious and supportive when the situation calls for it.

It's difficult for Lena to form close relationships. Her mother turned Dark at sixteen and fought it for many years, but she wound up killing Lena's father and nearly killing Lena when Lena was a baby. Lena's family moved her around a lot, trying to keep her safe from her mother, but Lena got tossed from some of those schools when her powers got out of hand. She wasn't brought home to the family homestead in Gatlin, SC, until the beginning of the book series. Wherever she went, she was picked on in school or ostracized for being different; the same happened when she arrived at Jackson High in Gatlin.

As a result of all this, Lena doesn't feel any sense of permanence in relationships with people. She's reluctant to grow close to anyone because her experience has always been that people will leave, or she'll have to go, so nothing lasts. Even with Ethan, when he first tried to befriend her and get close to her, she spent a lot of time trying to drive him away and refusing his affection.

She has a deep-seated fear of abandonment, and I think this fuels her nearly obsessive attachment to Ethan. He's the first boy she's loved, the first long-term relationship she's had. She genuinely loves him, and he loved her, but I think her jealousy where he was concerned and her drive, now, to get him back from death, is because she absolutely cannot abide the idea of having gambled on loving someone and then winding up losing him.

Lena also feels a great deal of responsibility for events and for the well-being of people around her. She knows how different she is, even within her own world of Casters; she's powerful and her coming was foretold. Her Claiming was meant to be a significant and destructive event; as part of the curse Genevieve brought down on the Duchannes family generations ago, if a Natural was born to the family, when she was claimed, the opposite side in her family would be destroyed--if she was claimed Light, the Dark Casters in her family would die, and vice versa. She spent most of the time leading up to her sixteenth birthday in a panic over wiping out family members, or the fear that she'd turn out Dark like her mother before her. She wound up eventually solving the problem by Claiming herself for both sides, Light and Dark, using her power to resist the curse.

But she feels like everything she does comes at a great price, no matter how good her intentions were. Ethan died once in the first book, and like her ancestor Genevieve, Lena made a bargain with the Book of Moons to get him back. The price was her beloved uncle's life (though he later returned--look, Caster families are high-drama, okay). She saved her family and took control of her own fate by resisting the family curse and claiming herself both Light and Dark, but the result was a breakdown of the world around her; Gatlin suffered plagues like those foretold to be coming at the End Times, the Caster world was off-balance, and, finally, Ethan sacrificed his life to restore order.

Lena was already a pessimist, a glass-half-empty-and-what's-in-it-is-probably-sour-anyway kind of girl. With all these events, and all the responsibility she feels, being a Natural and defying the curse often feels like a burden, a new curse of its own. Her moments of triumph are often answered with terrible consequences, her friends and family have suffered in trying to help and protect her, and though he did it to save her and everyone they knew, she lost Ethan, he had to sacrifice himself, to her thinking, to fix the mess she made.

That's pretty much where she is in this AU--trying to fix the mess she made. She's had months to brood over how she (in her perception) failed Ethan and caused his death, months to obsess over needing him back and being willing to get him back at any cost. Their happy ending isn't guaranteed here, and being without him and feeling like she failed so badly has made her pull away from people even more, worried about the effect she might have on them. She's grown hyper-responsible for the well-being of the people she loves; she's willing to do whatever it takes to get Ethan back, but personally, she hasn't shared any of her plans with anyone and she will not involve anyone else. No one else needs to pay any price for what she's done and is willing to do.

Lena's a good kid at heart, polite, respectful, heeds her elders though she visibly chafes at people exercising authority to take advantage of others, or at unjust situations. She's strong, jumping into situations and doing what needs to be done even when her tendency toward pessimism tells her there's no way it will work, she'll fail, everything will go wrong. She always tries to do right by people, and she's a responsible and compassionate person. And right now, she's consumed by grief, and trying to channel that into figuring out how to get Ethan back rather than giving into that grief and accepting he's gone.

Object: The Book of Moons, a powerful Caster spell book.

Reason for playing: I loved the world the authors built in The Caster Chronicles. It's this mix of quirky Southern Gothic and magic users and supernatural powers and beings. I loved that among Casters, power and family names pass down along maternal lines--no matter who they marry, the Duchannes and other Caster ladies keep their last names, and while there are male Casters, the women are the most notable and powerful. And I loved the characters, especially Lena.

I love playing characters that have a great burden, or some quality or ability that sets them apart from other people, and exploring how that impacts them and how they learn to live with it. And I love playing younger or rebooted versions of big-name canon characters, so I can explore how they got started and play with their youth and their mistakes and how they grow into their older canon selves. With Lena I have kind of a mix of those two ideas; she's the most powerful Caster her already powerful family has ever seen, but she's still so young; she feels so much responsibility, loss, and grief, but she is determined to carry on; and she's just at the start of being an adult, and figuring out what that means to her and how to deal with everything she can do and everything she's been through.

My original plan for apping Lena into the game was to wait for the final book in the series to come out later this fall, so I would know the end of her story and so she would pass her 18th birthday (she's two months shy of it at the end of the last book) and meet the game's age requirement. But the more I read about the upcoming book, the more hints were dropped that Lena and Ethan would get their happy ending, which is nice, but removes a lot of conflict for Lena. I decided to AU her to several months after the end of the last book to keep her in this spot where that happy ending isn't a given, where she hasn't gotten Ethan back and doesn't know if she will or can ever fix what happened.

Lena is a strong person in her own right, but in the books she always had Ethan to rely on and always had her family to help her. Ethan's death in canon and removing any guarantee of getting him back in AUing her takes away her biggest source of support; bringing her to Baedal takes away the rest of it, her family. I want to see how she'll develop without their influence. She loves them, to be sure, and they love her, and they've all always been there for each other, but at the same time, her family is very high-drama and events linked to them have been emotionally taxing. People have died and then come back, people have died and then started appearing in visions, Lena's mother has returned twice to try to kill or convince her to join the dark side at her great-uncle's behest, Lena's mother and great-uncle also tried to unleash hell on earth, relatives have lost or shifted their powers, her boyfriend's dead mother keeps leaving her clues, it just goes on and on. Being away from them means losing their support, but it also frees her of that sense of Things Always Happening Oh God.

Putting Lena in Baedal means making her stand entirely on her own two feet for the first time, and empowers her to make a lot of decisions for herself. Will she choose mentors and teachers? She can, rather than automatically having her family and others associated with the Caster world to turn to. What will she do about her goal to bring Ethan back? She's no longer in Gatlin, she can't see what happens there. Will she do it anyway, hoping to fix things for him and the people who loved him? Will she be afraid to try, not knowing the outcome, but then feel guilty for abandoning him? What kind of Caster will she become, having chosen neither side for herself? What kind of person will she become, growing older, having crossed the abritrary but traditional threshold to adulthood? Who will she be and what will she do when she's on her own?

I would love for her to meet, befriend, learn from and with other magic-users in the city. She's powerful, but young and in need of guidance; that could also open her up to bad influences. She also has a very narrowly-defined view of what magic-users are like and are supposed to be and do, because the Caster world is so self-contained.

Gods: Shada would seem the obvious choice, because Lena is a magic-user and that fits right in with Shada's influences and interests. But I think Haneul would actually be a better fit for Lena. Her innate supernatural ability is weather manipulation, and the fact that she sometimes loses her grasp on it when highly emotional makes her temper interesting, just as his is said to be. She has learned a lot from visions of the past, and has been visited by loved ones in dreams--in fact, she dreamt of Ethan and shared dreams with him for years before they finally met in person. And she's also young, compared to the rest of the cohort, where he appears young compared to the rest of the Gods.


Writing Samples

First-Person Network Post: http://herohigh.dreamwidth.org/33052.html
http://herohigh.dreamwidth.org/23236.html?thread=1316036#cmt1316036

Third-Person Arrival Post:

[The feed comes on, showing a dark-haired, wide-eyed young lady. Her face is pale and splotchy; it looks like she's been crying but she sure as hell won't confirm that for you. She summons the best polite smile she can manage right now, addressing her CiD.]

Um. Hi.

I'm... in the room? Where you arrive, I guess. And there was someone at the door, he works here or whatever, but even though it was one of the times where they're supposed to let you out he wouldn't let me out because of the fire. It wasn't my fault, my brochure caught on fire, it was just a little one but he wouldn't let me out anyway.

[And there's a slow inhalation because she's scared she might sniffle, oh, god, no sniffling, please...]

It's out. The fire. I promise it's safe. I was wondering if someone was out there who could come open the door for me? I don't want to wait until whatever the next official time or whatever is.

Thank you.

Third-Person Action Post: http://herohigh.dreamwidth.org/66906.html?thread=3179866#cmt3179866
http://approximately.dreamwidth.org/1380.html?thread=9572#cmt9572