Okay, tackling another DMC universe character. I don't know what happened, but I think I had a 'Lucia' brain fart…yes, this is a serious look at the worst DMC game and its leading heroine character, feather brained Lucia. On the world tour map, I decided that Lucia wasn't really anywhere permanent, so she's en rout to somewhere…on a train, I guess…Hell let's say she's in Europe, on a train. So, for all you lost little copies out there, here's a fragment of Lucia's story.
Lucia
Mother hen with her little chicks. The fierce one with eagle eyes. Her nails, when not painted over were a yellowish color. They were harder than porcelain though softer than cement, if that was a combination that warranted any consolation. She'd been able to gouge holes through a chalk board once, the screaming sound of slate was something her ears were still trying to forget. If left to their own, her nails became harder-hard enough to scratch cement. They curved as well, similar to a sloth's coiled scimitars but different yet. They were curved not in a useful way-they'd puncture her palms if left unattended for too long. No, they were curved in a feral primal way, gnarled hooks that could scalp and score delicate human flesh mistakenly. Right now they were painted a deep purple color and filed down to a barely visible shape in the same style most humans wore their nails. She hated to look at her hands any more than she had to.
Leaning forward Lucia gently touched the mirror, tracing her dark lips with index and middle fingers on the reflective glass. Green eyes flickered over every aspect, attribute and flaw, taking in the full picture. Her hair smelled of fresh die, the bitter stench carrying to her nose, making it wrinkle in disgust. Black dyed bangs falling into one eye, lips painted over into a saucy non-existent smirk that lingered.
Leaning back, her hands found their way to the color of her jacket, smoothing the collar down, buttoning buttons, striating sleeves, hiding anything to suggest there was an individual. The black pants-though not the skin tight ones of her sistren, fell in breezy folds over her black business boots. Her maker had shaped her body well enough, he'd had years to envision his creations, tearing out the aspects he wanted from magazines and patchworking the images together with what he combinations of raw DNA he'd had at hand. Eyes from one woman, an arm from another, hair from another, and if there were flaws with the product, black was always an ally, hiding anything to suggest a difference. Black reduced and minimized, taxing desired attributes and highlighting them to overshadow the slight crippling faults.
It was a perfect copy machine. One after another perfecting and synthesizing and fashioning more corrections in order to further refine perfection, he had built an army with miniscule flaws. And through these means, the sistren was born. Lucia exhaled deeply, bobbing her head to the left and then to the right, cracking joints in an attempt to expel the stress knotting the space between her shoulder blades. For a moment, out of sheer wariness, she closed her eyes.
Flame red hair, freakish human eyes. Perfection or anomaly? Copy number ten of god knew how many. Had he used every letter in the alphabet before switching over to numbers, figuring it would be easy to work with a periodical system that was infinite? An army of flawed perfection and lucky number 10 was as flawed as only inbreeding could lead to. It was every manic pig's dream, a disposable army-brothel willing and ready to do one's bidding. Was it too much synthesized bird DNA? Was it the fact that the bastard had raped generation after generation of his 'perfect' copies, impregnating each with his 'blessed seed'? Was it the fact that, as she entered this world, one too many copies had died? Had one too many of the sistren held their silence as another voice of the morning chorus was forever removed from the violent mixture of harmonious servitude and melodious-if not mundane-exploitation? Was that why…in the sea, not the air had she been found and reborn…and had there been a rebellion…she didn't want to think that the blood of her sistren stretched so far into her past as to stain her hands as an infant as well as it did now.
And who was the source of it all anyways? Who was the mother hen? Was it one of the sistren who had born her? Some sistren who had flirted with something more interesting than the godlike image of her 'father'? Or had Arious simply used DNA from some homeowner's souped-up pet demon, Mr. Jingles the cockatoo? Or was there something more than that? Of course there was something more than that, but what? Was each copy a layer of something new? Was it the perfection of the same archetype? Or was it simply the perfection of the original, descending down a line of perfect failures until it reached a perfect anomaly? If so, how had perfection created a perfect anomaly then? She snorted, disgusted. Really what is perfection? And if there was anything close to perfection in this world, Arius had been nothing more than the polar opposite of it.
Opening her eyes, Lucia stared at the water stained mirror watching the flat expressionless face that glared back at her. Had each of the sistren merely been a slice of Arious? His form and face, his ideal of perfection, created for nothing more than a chauvinistic desire of a living breathing mirror of oneself in the opposite sex? Could there have been anyone more in love with themselves?
Eyes slitted, Lucia clenched a hand. A stranger, a lie, looked back at her from the mirror, as furious if not more so at the pathetic lie and platter existence had served up. Leaning forward once again, her hands squeezed the sink ledge. The white porcelain basin was still tinged black and littered with the worm like tendrils of dead hair. One hand went to the back of her hair, fluffing the shortened, drying spikes there. Dropping her hand, Lucia gave the mirror a moment more. Knuckles cracking, she thrust a fist forward. The epitome of perfection crackled, shattering and tinkling as it gracelessly fell into the sink to join the dye and hair trimmings.
Turning, her hand found the doorknob, throwing open the bathroom door. Light flooded the small cubical that passed as a bathroom. Passengers subconsciously shifted their attention away from her as she strode down the main walk way of the train, as defiant as she was self-loathing. Behind her, the door slammed shut, leaving the dye and glass and hair slivers to molder together. Meanwhile the little chick took her seat, patient enough to wait for her chance.