Within the cell, a young woman waited.

Her frame was lithe, her long pink hair and her red eyes hidden under an overly stifling helmet, her skin was deathly pale from being kept underground for most of her life. She was bound in a straight jacket and she also heavily strapped onto a table standing straight up and was completely bound to the table by leather bands.

It was during her imprisonment within the facility that she gained the moniker "Lucy,"courtesy of the researchers. But in all honesty, she didn't care WHAT she was called. A name was more or less an empty thing to her...

As she was, movement was beyond her. Restrained and locked away in the dark, what else could she do but think. And where her thoughts took her was a dark road of memories she loathed to call her own.

And yet, she remembered...

Both parents had abandoned her, leaving her naked in a field to die as an infant...the act had left her to harbor a deep resentment, and even murderous urges, towards them. It was after this she was taken in by an orphanage, where she was avoided and neglected by the staff, frequently bullied and referred to as an "Ox" (due to her horns), and told by the other kids that she should live outside.

Lucy eventually discovered a stray dog in the woods around the orphanage, whom she thought of as her first friend. Feeding the puppy on breadcrumbs left him still hungry, so she felt forced to give most of her dinner to it. When a boy named Tomoo threw milk all over her bag, a young girl saw and shouted for a teacher. Thinking of her as a new friend, Lucy, needing more food for the dog, told the girl about the puppy. However, although promising to keep it a secret, the girl soon told the boys about the puppy and its significance, and the bullies took it from the woods.

After confronting Lucy in the classroom, the bullies brought in the puppy and began violently bludgeoning it to death. The girl came in to intervene, admitting to telling them about the dog, as Tomoo casually revealed. Despite her apologies and protests that she hadn't known the puppy would be hurt, she was seen by Lucy smiling behind her supposedly covered eyes and hands. Feeling betrayed and enraged, Lucy unleashed her vectors for the first time, killing all of her tormentors in a swift, brutal manner. She then buried the dog, apologizing for not being able to protect it, and decided to go on the run.

During the nights immediately after this, she went along with the urgings of her Diclonius instincts and slaughtered entire families to stay in their houses. The murders became more and more publicized, and she found it harder to stay at a house for very long. At odd moments, the horror of what she was doing would strike her, but her pain and need reasserted themselves in short order.

It was that way a while, until one day while she stood at the puppy's grave, a young boy arrived and noticed her horns. Thinking he would just harm or deceive her further, she prepared to kill him. However, he, surprisingly, found her horns to be 'cool' and immediately wanted to befriend her. She thought he was attempting to deceive her and tried to leave, but Kouta persisted, promising that he would be there the same time tomorrow. In a sad touch of irony, Kouta's father did not let him out, because of the homicides happening in Kamakura caused by Lucy.

Even believing that Kouta would never come, she hoped against hope and went to the place of the meeting, staying there until night, regretting what she saw as her foolishness in the rain. Kouta, loyal to his promise, snuck out during the evening and went to meet her, giving her a hat upon his arrival. The hat not only hid her horns but was the first actual gift she'd most likely ever received. They agree to play together the next day. Kouta only came three days later, because of his father's fear of having a serial killer in the neighborhood. Since it was the final day of vacation and there had been no more murders in the past three days, his father acquiesced and let him go out.

Because it was the last day that he could stay with her, Kouta decided to take Lucy to the zoo and spend all day with her. Her fascination with the animals she'd never seen before and even something as simple as a flavored ice treat surprised Kouta, and he took delight in her joy. After their trip to the zoo, they visited a nearby river to play in the cool water since the day's heat was bearing down.

During the bus ride back to town, she felt regret that she couldn't spend time with Kouta anymore. When she learned he was going to a nearby festival for the last day of his visit, she begged to go with him, but he said that he promised to go with his cousin. A voice inside her head said to her that Kouta must be going to the festival with another girl, and said she would better off killing him now, so as to avoid suffering later. As Lucy internally challenged the voice, she awoke to find herself choking Kouta, and stopped, terrified of her actions. She begged a puzzled Kouta to kill her if she ever ended up killing lots of people, but brushed the topic aside when he asked her what she meant. Before parting ways, Lucy cautiously asked Kouta whether his cousin was a boy or a girl. Kouta said his cousin was male, and she, relieved, thought to herself that she would probably have killed him if he said his cousin was a girl.

After Kouta had gone back to where he was staying, Lucy decided to visit the festival anyway so she could confess her feelings toward him before he left, as she was sure to regret it if she didn't. While there, she saw an upset Yuka hugging Kouta and begging him not to leave. Shocked he lied to her, Lucy fell into a mental breakdown and was tormented by hallucinations. One such illusion was Kouta saying that he could never be friends with a "weirdo" like her and that he had only been nice to her because he adores strange animals. As she broke down further, she saw her orphanage tormentors as horrific specters, also saying there was no place for someone like her, and that lying to her wasn't the same as lying to a real human being. The Voice of her Diclonii instincts took the mental image of Lucy herself, first covered in bandages. As the bandages fell away, the specter smiled at her with a cold and psychotic expression, saying she couldn't coexist with humans. The Voice proposed she join her, as with her powers, they could make a place in the world all of their own. Overcome with despair, Lucy accepted her other self's offer, sealing her fate by performing a proverbial "deal with the devil."

In a rage, and corrupted by her inner voice, Lucy began brutally and indiscriminately murdering many people at the festival. This slaughter was reported later as a bomb attack, though Kouta's little sister, Kanae, who possibly had the extraordinary gift to see her vectors, ran away and told her family that she saw people killed by a horned girl. Kouta immediately thought of his friend, but he didn't believe in his sister's story. With summer and their visit over, Kouta and his family boarded the train for Hokkaido and said goodbye to Yuka and her mother. Lucy watched with contempt as Kouta comforted a tearful Yuka. On the train, Kanae insisted her story was true even as Lucy strolled into their car on the moving train. Kouta angrily denied Kanae's account that Lucy could be responsible and slapped her, reducing his little sister to tears when he said he hated her. Lucy then ripped Kanae in half and beheaded Kouta's father, telling the horrified boy Yuka was next as she turned to leave. In a grief-borne rage, Kouta tackled her and shook her senseless, begging and screaming at her to stop killing. Lucy came to realize that her actions had not brought Kouta closer to her but instead hurt him immeasurably. By her actions against him, Lucy lost herself any chance of earning his affection. Shaken to her core, Lucy ran away, leaving a broken and sobbing Kouta in the train with his massacred family.

For the next five years, Lucy did her best to avoid drawing attention to herself. In her efforts to survive, she naturally killed many people but avoided sudden violent outbursts. The majority of her victims would suffer heart attacks after her vectors damaged their blood vessels. She would then use the crowds that gathered around the fallen to infect males with the Diclonius birth virus. As these murders and the instance ofSilpelit births multiplied throughout Kamakura during this time,Kurama and Kakuzawa pieced the information together with the Festival and orphanage murders she also caused, realizing the murderer in the latter must surely be the source of the Silpelit infestation. This suspicion solidified when they found a picture of a horned child, Lucy, who was noted to be missing since the time of the massacre in the orphanage.

Lucy befriended a young girl named Aiko Takada who liked to draw. Aiko too, was lonely, dealing with an abusive father and hoping to reunite with the mother who abandoned her. When Aiko accidentally killed (or at least felt she had) her enraged father, the two were accused of murder and ran away from the scene, hoping that the girl could see her mother, who was having an art show at the nearby museum, once again. After hiding in the hall, Kurama found them two and ordered the forces with him to open fire. Aiko jumped in the way of the gunfire to save Lucy's life. In exchange for a promise of immediate medical attention for Aiko, Lucy surrendered to Kurama. After being imprisoned within the Diclonius Research Institute, Kurama informed Lucy that Aiko had died from her wounds, also asserting that she could have lived had they simply given up and that Humans only wanted the Dicloniusrace to co-exist with them. Lucy refutes this, stating that nothing Humans did indicate wanting co-existence. As vengeance for Aiko's death, Lucy promised Kurama she would make him suffer like she did, that she would make his world fall apart around him the same way he did to her.

As an individual whom was difficult to pin down by any standard of "good" or "evil" societal mores. She was both ruthlessly tormented and was also a sadistic tormentor to others, driven to a mental breakdown at an early age by the cruelty that surrounded her. She never expected to receive any form of love and acceptance from others.

She honestly felt she had nothing left to give her a reason to want to keep on living.

Wait...there was one thing: the one emotion she had ever really known.

Anger.

She felt she had nothing left...nothing but anger. Anger at Kurama, anger at her parents, anger at the world, anger at humanity, and anger at herself.

As the fury burned deeper, as it had for three years now, she waited. Waited for a chance to escape and wreak vengeance and retaliatory pain upon those whom she hated...oh, how she longed for a self-given crimson baptism to the sounds of their dying screams...

No sooner had that malevolent wish crossed her mind than a shrill, high-pitched shriek filled the air and a sudden, harsh red light appeared in her cell. Lucy looked up.

A red beam descended straight towards the captive girl. As she stared at the oncoming object, the light itself bent and began randomly orbiting the Diclonious Queen. The light eventually dimmed down and Lucy could see something come down to her.

As it dimmed further, she could see that the object coming to her was a ring. When it was floating right in front of her, she could make out a strange symbol on it.

She tsked, not ever caring how the tip of the beam contained the ring inside it.

And then it spoke in an automatic and computer-like voice.

"You have great rage in your heart."Just as the rough echo dissipated, the ring flew and slid straight onto the horned girl's right middle finger. Then the energy of the ring flowed through her and she felt the power of it.

BaBUM

"GUWAAAAAAAAGH!" A blazing pulse of pure agony coursed through Lucy, who screamed as she had never done before as her entire body burned from the inside out. The red ring seared itself onto her flesh and covered her in a brilliant crimson aura. "GUH! G... BLURGH!" As much as her constraints allowed, she hunched over and vomited her own blood. An acrid, sulfuric smell overwhelmed her composure, which caused her to heave more blood. The pain intensified, and her vision blurred into a red haze.

Yet, the scent of burning metal joined the rest as his spoiled blood ate through the full-face helmet she wore.

BaBUM BaBUM

The agony grew, and yet it no longer caused her suffering. She released the last of her tainted blood, and her heart stopped after one final beat of roaring fury. Her veins throbbed with liquid flame, and she was suddenly wearing a skin-tight suit was mostly black save for crimson wrists, boots, central torso and back. And in a black circle on her chest, a symbol of a hollow circle within two vertically bent lines that somewhat resembled a capital H, emblazoned the center of the uniform's torso. The same symbol that was on the ring.

BaBUM BaBUM BaBUM

Lucy strained and gazed at her restraints, seeing they were burning and eroding. There was no more pain, no more control, no more restraint. What remained was rage.

Rage, and power!

The restraints on her were torn away as they burnt from coming into contact with the blood the dribbled down her front. She savagely used that to her advantage and freed herself. As soon as she was standing by her own power and triumphantly ripped the helmet's remains off of her; the ring acted up again.

Shock waves of rage pulsed through her body. And then the ring was pulling her and she suddenly shot into the sky. Through the atmosphere. The light shot her through the stars, towards the planet of the ring's origin.

And she heard the ring speak again.

"You belong to the Red Lantern Corps."