![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
savetheearth application.
OOC Information:
Name: Sam
Are you over 15? Yes.
Contact:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dekaja / ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
estamir / PMs are always fine
IC Information:
Name: Luca Trulyworth (reincarnation: Lucy Taylor)
Canon: Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica
Age: 19 (reincarnation: 24)
Preincarnation Appearance: Image here. Less apparent from the picture, but still worth noting, is that Luca is pretty short; her official height is 5'2".
Any differences: Her height and build will remain similar. Her eyes are still brown, but her hair in reincarnated form is a dark brown/near-black, rather than purple, and her sense of fashion is much more subdued.
Preincarnated History: First, some necessary background: AT2 takes place in Metafalss, a crumbling land located around the Second Tower, the domain of the goddess Frelia. Metafalss is small and continuing to slowly die off due to the goddess's insufficient power to maintain it. The people have a legend of a green paradise, Metafalica, that will someday be created to save everyone; the last attempt to create it, four hundred years before the game begins, was a failure. The song requires two Maidens to sing the hymn to create it, one of whom is connected to the Ar Tonelico song server and one of whom is connected to Infel Phira server, and also requires the synchronization of the hearts and emotions of a great many people in order to shape the land properly. After the failure, Frelia wouldn't allow the hymn to be attempted again.
(Reyvateils are the girls and women who are able to connect to any of the song servers and cast song magic. Music, magic, and computer programming are intrinsically linked in this canon. It's a little weird and a lot complicated.)
Without plunging too deeply into the politics of what goes on during the game - because the factions and allegiances shift around and it gets complicated - there are two schemes by which various groups intend to save the people of Metafalss. There are those who would rebel against the goddess and attempt to create Metafalica anyway, although the conditions have been lost in the mists of time and so they're hampered by not realizing they need two halves of the hymn (few people still realize there were once two Maidens in the first place). And there are those who, since rebelling against the goddess would remove her from keeping what little land is left afloat, instead work with her to execute a plan called Ascension, which intends to sublimate the souls of the people, freeing them from their bodies and letting them exist as completely spiritual, independent beings that don't need contact or cooperation with each other to survive.
Both groups are in their own way acting at the expense of the so-called IPD Reyvateils, who are connected to Infel Phira; the Metafalica faction is collecting and imprisoning them so that they can use the stronger connectivity between them to use against the goddess, while the Ascension faction would rewrite Infel Phira to provide space for all those sublimated souls, which would basically wipe the minds of all of the IPDs to create that space.
Luca Trulyworth was actually born Cloche Leythal Pastalia, the Holy Maiden of Pastalia. Her mother, the previous Holy Maiden, was assassinated when she was two years old, and she was placed in the care of Batz and Reisha Trulyworth, and taken from the palace to keep her safe. They raised her as their own, calling her Luca, and Reisha also gave birth to a daughter named Leyka. Their attempts at having a happy, normal family life were interrupted when Leyka manifested the symptoms of IPD, and the government sent knights to collect her; Batz died fighting them and Leyka was taken. Reisha and Luca escaped, and continued living in hiding - in deep poverty, and with Reisha eventually growing more detached to try and spare them both the pain of separation someday, which Luca took as evidence of her mother hating her for some reason, which left her with deep insecurities.
Luca began to plan her entire life around finding her sister. At the youngest age allowable, she began training as a Dive Therapist - dangerous work, since it entailed bringing clients into her own soulspace, but it paid well, and she needed the money to reach the capital. She also took advantage of her childhood friend and eventual boyfriend Croix, who went off to train as a knight in the capital - she maintained a shallow relationship with him so he would eventually bring her to live with him and she would have better access to the knights.
However, around the time that was beginning to finally come together, unrest in the government sent Croix back out her way, with another girl in tow - Cloche Leythal Pastalia, the Holy Maiden, who unbeknown to any of them was actually Leyka, who had been picked from the captive IPDs to be raised as a replacement and figurehead.
The plot goes through a lot of backflips and backstabs, all revolving around the various factions' attempts at executing their plans, the reveal of Luca and Cloche's true heritage, and the ways people to try to use the two of them to get their own plans to happen; Luca and Cloche also have a lot of fights and misunderstandings along the way before they come to form an unshakeable bond in the Infelsphere, a shared soulspace. The party manages to win over the support of many of their old enemies, and throughout the course of things creates the incomplete and flawed Metafalica, prevents the Ascension plan, and defeats the last obstacle - the spirits of the Maidens from 400 years before, who believe people incapable of the unity of spirit necessary to succeed - before bringing the people together and creating the true Metafalica.
Reincarnated History Lucy's life, in comparison, has been ridiculously normal. She was raised by her single mother, comfortably middle class, and grew up fairly well-adjusted, well-liked, and did well in school. Her personal relationships have all been fairly comfortable, although she's never made it past a third date - she's generally smart enough to recognize when things aren't really going anywhere, and she doesn't see any point in dragging things out.
School is what brought her to Locke City - she earned scholarships to LCU, which made going elsewhere and facing student debt an unattractive prospect. Once there, she majored in psychology, finishing her undergraduate studies with honors and moving on to grad school. Currently she's a TA for a couple of lower level psych courses and has a good internship; she lives in a small apartment by herself and is finishing up her masters.
First Echo: Triggered by the destruction of the statue in the Dead District, and the resulting pink flash in the sky; she'll remember the hymn EXEC_METAFALICA/. This will be the hymn alone; she won't remember what it does, what the words mean, or when and why she sang it in her past life. Although she also won't remember that it's only one half of the true hymn to create Metafalica, she will have an instinctual sense that something is missing from it - she just won't know what.
Preincarnation Personality: Luca comes across, on the surface, as a total sweetheart - she's well-liked in her hometown and the area she commutes to work in, and seems to be on a friendly basis with everyone; she's sweet, cheerful, and although she can seem a little insecure or easily flustered by some things, she comes across as very comfortable in her world, comfortable with the people around her, and kind to others.
Luca, when canon begins, is also a pathological liar.
It's through her Cosmosphere and Infelsphere sequences that we begin to see the real Luca. She's lonely, bitter, and selfishly fixated on her own goals to the point where everything she's done has been in pursuit of getting her sister back, from her career to her relationship with Croix. When Cloche is given the chance, in the Infelsphere, to live through a day in Luca's world, Cloche misjudges everything, and it paints a picture of how things really are for Luca - her popularity among the locals is very carefully maintained, because they're quick to turn on her if she behaves contrary to expectations or appears to be thinking too much of herself rather than everyone else; the people Cloche keeps assuming are safe and trusting without reservation easily con her, take her money, and step on her for their own advantage. And from this, it's shown that although Luca seems friendly with everyone, those friendships she has are very shallow; she holds everyone at a careful, safe distance for fear of being burned and taken advantage of again.
The truth is that Luca's life is in many ways exhausting; she works hard, lives frugally, and often goes hungry or runs out of money for the train and has to walk four hours to get home. Her mother treats her coldly out of a mistaken belief that it will make separating easier someday when those who put Luca in hiding return to claim her, and Luca has built up a lot of walls around herself and a lot of masks to hide the parts of her that she doesn't think people will like - because she desperately wants to be liked and is afraid of letting anyone see parts of her that they might not approve of.
There are a lot of contradictions in Luca's feelings; when Croix attempts to dive into her Cosmosphere, she starts by taking him into the part of her soulspace that's walled off and blocked from her inner self, because she's afraid to let him see her true self - but then she forces herself to Paradigm Shift (normally triggered by an emotional understanding, and not something that can be forced) because she thinks he'll be unhappy with her if she doesn't; her Cosmosphere is full of different aspects of herself outright fighting and trying to sabotage one another as some parts of her try to open up to him and trust him and other parts of her reject him and want to keep him from seeing anything more, and some aspects of her try to save him and care for him while others outright try to kill him before he can see her true self.
One of the last obstacles before Croix is able to reach the deepest level of Luca's self is when he faces the many aspects of her at once, and although every one of them is rooted in something negative, he's able to point out the positive sides of each of them and help her to finally subconsciously accept all those sides of her: the cowardly Luca who didn't accept anyone and isolated herself is responsible for protecting her heart; the people pleaser who only has shallow relationships is nonetheless necessary to lay the groundwork for those relationships to become closer, and is the reason she's well loved by others; the Luca who gives up on everything before speaking her own mind makes her generous and able to hear out others sympathetically and understand their pain; the manipulative Luca who took advantage of the feelings of others is necessary to her work as a therapist and her ability to understand others well enough to heal their minds; the Luca who is actually willing to admit hurtful things is the honest one, and thus important for her to be able to connect to others.
Luca is able to mature far beyond her insecurities and her selfishness throughout the course of the game; she and Cloche come to understand each other deeply despite their many differences and the ways they're both deeply envious of each other - Cloche envying Luca's freedom and social connections, Luca envying Cloche's wealth and privileged existence. They both see each others' behavior as being horrible - Luca doesn't know how to step up and take responsibility; Cloche claims to be thinking of the welfare of everyone without truly understanding what life is like for those at the bottom - but they're both able to eventually come to understand each others' views, and it's largely through experiencing Cloche's life in the Infelsphere and understanding her isolation and the heavy burdens of her responsibility that Luca is able to step forward and move past her own pain to really become the cheerful, friendly girl who everyone loves instead of just faking being that person.
Any differences: The primary difference between Luca and Lucy is simply one of depth. Luca puts on masks, fakes cheerfulness and makes shallow social connections and hides a lot of very dark feelings behind her smile. Lucy, on the other hand, lacks the trauma and suffering that her previous incarnation took for granted, and so while her surface behavior is similar in many ways - she's cheerful, friendly, can seem a little insecure at times but generally very comfortable in her world - that behavior coming from Lucy is much more genuine, and not born out of coping mechanisms the way it was for Luca.
Lucy's relationships are much more healthy, additionally; she's never really had a close romantic relationship, but nor has she had a shallow relationship that she spun as being closer than it was - she's been smart about recognizing when connections aren't there and when her heart isn't really in it, and letting things down gently before things were serious enough for feelings to really be hurt. She and her mother are reasonably close; she calls her regularly since moving to Locke City, and they have long phone conversations and keep each other up to date on their lives and act like friends, not just relatives. Her social relationships in general aren't always close, but even the shallower ones have a more genuine feel to them, as she isn't holding people back at a distance from fear that they'll hurt her.
In general, Lucy is much more well-adjusted and reasonably well in tune with her feelings; she doesn't have the heaps of coping mechanisms and buried trauma that Luca does to get in her way and complicate her behavior, and her cheerful exterior reflects genuine, uncomplicated optimism.
Abilities: As a Reyvateil, Luca is able to use song magic. Magic in Ar Tonelico gets stupidly complicated, so I'm attempting to simplify a lot here, but the basic idea is that magic, music, and computer programming are one and the same; magic comes from Reyvateils using songs to interface with and draw power from the song magic servers in the world's towers. Luca draws her power from the Ar Tonelico server, via its relay station of Sol Marta. Essentially, the server supplies the raw power, and the Reyvateil gives that power form to result in the magic. (Thus, to use her magic in-game, she'll need to find a power source, as discussed here.)
Battle songs are divided into two families: Red Magic and Blue Magic. Red Magic is offensive, and charges up with increasing power the longer Luca continues singing until she releases it. Luca's Red spells are divided into four families; the lower level spells charge into stronger versions when certain conditions are met. Blue Magic is defensive, and acts continuously as long as Luca continues singing. Her Blue spells are split into two families, one that heals and one that buffs, and can also charge into stronger versions when conditions are met. (I'm assuming for Echo purposes that the powered up version of each spell would be another Echo to be accessible, in addition to needing to have the battle condition met for it to actually be used in any given fight.)
There's a chart showing the individual spells here. Since I'm assuming Cloche route, some of these spells will be inaccessible, as Luca's Cosmosphere is only accessible through level 4 in that route. It does also mean that if anyone ever apped Cloche, Luca would be able to participate in a few of Cloche's synchronity chain spells from this chart, though.
Aside from the synchronity chain spells (which require Luca and Cloche to sing together), the other requirements, if one ignores the game-specific jargon, have to do with how well Luca and whoever she is fighting alongside have attuned their emotions in combat.
Battle songs are created through having a trusted partner Dive into a Reyvateil's soul space and help them sort through and understand their emotions in order to create spells. I believe this would eventually be possible to do in-game given sufficient Echoes to get the appropriate equipment and a certain degree of recklessness in trusting someone else to operate it, so it's possible that the spells I don't have accessible could be recreated that way, but it's nothing I plan on thinking about anytime soon (if ever). It's also possible to create song magic in the real world (it was seen once in the first game), but only if the emotion necessary to make it happen is very strong and very pure, so that's also something that, while theoretically possible, I don't anticipate happening anytime soon if at all.
Outside of battle songs, there are also the hymns: these are spells that directly interface with and control the towers, so I don't expect them to have much utility unless the towers get Echoed in (and even then, their utility is...debatable). Luca has several of these: EXEC_SOL=FAGE/. awakens her powers as the Maiden of Homura and lets her use Frelia's hymn code, which lets her use songs that only the tower administrator should be able to execute. EXEC_METAFALICA/. creates the promised land of Metafalica, but is actually only half of the song required; on its own, it creates a chaotic and unstable land that is formed according to the feelings of the person that sings it. EXEC_VIENA/. lifts the camoflage that keeps the tower of Sol Marta hidden from the human eye.
As a Dive Therapist, Luca is an expert on the equipment and procedures used in her world to allow someone to enter a Reyvateil's soulspace, and she is also very adept at creating pockets of space with strong barriers in her own, to allow someone in without letting them interact with her innermost self. (Her expertise in this also allows her to stay fully cognizant of someone's presence and what's going on while she's holding them to that area; in a "true" dive to the unprotected areas of the mind, the Reyvateil's projection of themselves that interacts with the diver doesn't necessarily recognize that it's a thing that's going on, and the Reyvateil doesn't remember anything that happened there once they resurface.) She's skilled enough to also host proxy dives (diveception, basically - letting two people dive into her mind and then within it, one dives into another - something done to protect the one diving from harm if they're violently rejected from the other's soulspace).
She knows the Hymmnos language, in which all song magic is performed, although only the standard dialect.
All third-generation Reyvateils have an installer port, through which they need to have diquility crystals installed every few months or they fall ill and die.
Roleplay Sample – Third Person:
It had been a longer day than usual, between a couple at her internship who had been getting particularly intense in their arguments - though thankfully Lucy hadn't had to deal with that beyond listening to them on the way in and then back out - and then a group of enterprising freshman interrupting the quiz she was trying to give them with a spontaneous (and rather well choreographed, she had to admit) musical number. Still, as she dropped her purse on the counter and made her way to the fridge to pull out the pitcher and pour herself a glass of iced tea, Lucy had to admit that she didn't mind, exactly.
She was tired, but it was the good kind of tired, and the classroom incident, at least, would make for a pretty good story when she made the weekly call home - which would be any minute, once she got a few other things out of the way.
Like kicking her shoes off (cute, but not the most comfortable), turning the oven on to preheat, and taking the messages off the phone. (None of which, today, were actually important. Which was fine.)
With everything else taken care of, she wasted no time in curling up at the end of the couch, glass at her side and phone in her hand. Time for one of the most treasured parts of her week. Calling -
- she stopped with the number halfway dialed, frowning at the phone in her hand. That wasn't her mother's number.
She'd had these numbers rolling around in her head for a bit, yes, but this was starting to get a little ridiculous. She hung up, gave it a moment to be sure it was cleared, and then started dialing again.
Maybe that would make a good story to tell her mother - if there was only a punchline, and not just "hey, I saw this pink light and now I have weird numbers stuck in my head and a song in a language I'm not sure exists." Maybe there was something wrong with her. Maybe she should ask her boss, since she knew better than to think she was going to come up with a valid and unbiased assessment of her own mind by sitting down for an evening and flipping through the DSM -
- and maybe she should worry about that later, because she wasn't going to let anything ruin her weekly chat with Mom. Anything.
"Hi, Mom, guess who?" she said brightly, kicking her feet up on the coffee table, the smile on her face as bright as the lilt in her voice. "Mmhmm, my week's been good, how about yours?"
Roleplay Sample - Network:
[The visual is foggy, at first - it's hard to make out anything, just blurs of color. Dark, light - moving, and eventually something cuts through - just a single line being drawn, looping in nonsensical patterns, its trail remaining as a small area of sharper focus.
And there's a voice, that of someone singing to herself, quietly, under her breath, in words that don't sound like they come from any earthly language.]
Rrha ki ra echcrra jouee, rrha ki ra chs hymmnos mea...
[The line continues, sometimes doubling back on itself, bringing more and more of the image into focus; eventually, if one looks closely, they might be able to tell that someone is idly drawing on her fogged bathroom mirror, not really thinking about it.
(Someone is also, as logically follows, still wearing just a towel.)]
Fayra en kapa, weak en sheak-
[And then she stops for a moment, staring into the mirror - or maybe staring through it. Her eyes narrow for a moment.
And then widen.]
Oh my god, what the-
[If you're very quick, you might notice her face turning bright red as she ducks below line of sight.]
This isn't happening!
Any Questions? I...don't think I have any!
Name: Sam
Are you over 15? Yes.
Contact:
dekaja / IC Information:
Name: Luca Trulyworth (reincarnation: Lucy Taylor)
Canon: Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica
Age: 19 (reincarnation: 24)
Preincarnation Appearance: Image here. Less apparent from the picture, but still worth noting, is that Luca is pretty short; her official height is 5'2".
Any differences: Her height and build will remain similar. Her eyes are still brown, but her hair in reincarnated form is a dark brown/near-black, rather than purple, and her sense of fashion is much more subdued.
Preincarnated History: First, some necessary background: AT2 takes place in Metafalss, a crumbling land located around the Second Tower, the domain of the goddess Frelia. Metafalss is small and continuing to slowly die off due to the goddess's insufficient power to maintain it. The people have a legend of a green paradise, Metafalica, that will someday be created to save everyone; the last attempt to create it, four hundred years before the game begins, was a failure. The song requires two Maidens to sing the hymn to create it, one of whom is connected to the Ar Tonelico song server and one of whom is connected to Infel Phira server, and also requires the synchronization of the hearts and emotions of a great many people in order to shape the land properly. After the failure, Frelia wouldn't allow the hymn to be attempted again.
(Reyvateils are the girls and women who are able to connect to any of the song servers and cast song magic. Music, magic, and computer programming are intrinsically linked in this canon. It's a little weird and a lot complicated.)
Without plunging too deeply into the politics of what goes on during the game - because the factions and allegiances shift around and it gets complicated - there are two schemes by which various groups intend to save the people of Metafalss. There are those who would rebel against the goddess and attempt to create Metafalica anyway, although the conditions have been lost in the mists of time and so they're hampered by not realizing they need two halves of the hymn (few people still realize there were once two Maidens in the first place). And there are those who, since rebelling against the goddess would remove her from keeping what little land is left afloat, instead work with her to execute a plan called Ascension, which intends to sublimate the souls of the people, freeing them from their bodies and letting them exist as completely spiritual, independent beings that don't need contact or cooperation with each other to survive.
Both groups are in their own way acting at the expense of the so-called IPD Reyvateils, who are connected to Infel Phira; the Metafalica faction is collecting and imprisoning them so that they can use the stronger connectivity between them to use against the goddess, while the Ascension faction would rewrite Infel Phira to provide space for all those sublimated souls, which would basically wipe the minds of all of the IPDs to create that space.
Luca Trulyworth was actually born Cloche Leythal Pastalia, the Holy Maiden of Pastalia. Her mother, the previous Holy Maiden, was assassinated when she was two years old, and she was placed in the care of Batz and Reisha Trulyworth, and taken from the palace to keep her safe. They raised her as their own, calling her Luca, and Reisha also gave birth to a daughter named Leyka. Their attempts at having a happy, normal family life were interrupted when Leyka manifested the symptoms of IPD, and the government sent knights to collect her; Batz died fighting them and Leyka was taken. Reisha and Luca escaped, and continued living in hiding - in deep poverty, and with Reisha eventually growing more detached to try and spare them both the pain of separation someday, which Luca took as evidence of her mother hating her for some reason, which left her with deep insecurities.
Luca began to plan her entire life around finding her sister. At the youngest age allowable, she began training as a Dive Therapist - dangerous work, since it entailed bringing clients into her own soulspace, but it paid well, and she needed the money to reach the capital. She also took advantage of her childhood friend and eventual boyfriend Croix, who went off to train as a knight in the capital - she maintained a shallow relationship with him so he would eventually bring her to live with him and she would have better access to the knights.
However, around the time that was beginning to finally come together, unrest in the government sent Croix back out her way, with another girl in tow - Cloche Leythal Pastalia, the Holy Maiden, who unbeknown to any of them was actually Leyka, who had been picked from the captive IPDs to be raised as a replacement and figurehead.
The plot goes through a lot of backflips and backstabs, all revolving around the various factions' attempts at executing their plans, the reveal of Luca and Cloche's true heritage, and the ways people to try to use the two of them to get their own plans to happen; Luca and Cloche also have a lot of fights and misunderstandings along the way before they come to form an unshakeable bond in the Infelsphere, a shared soulspace. The party manages to win over the support of many of their old enemies, and throughout the course of things creates the incomplete and flawed Metafalica, prevents the Ascension plan, and defeats the last obstacle - the spirits of the Maidens from 400 years before, who believe people incapable of the unity of spirit necessary to succeed - before bringing the people together and creating the true Metafalica.
Reincarnated History Lucy's life, in comparison, has been ridiculously normal. She was raised by her single mother, comfortably middle class, and grew up fairly well-adjusted, well-liked, and did well in school. Her personal relationships have all been fairly comfortable, although she's never made it past a third date - she's generally smart enough to recognize when things aren't really going anywhere, and she doesn't see any point in dragging things out.
School is what brought her to Locke City - she earned scholarships to LCU, which made going elsewhere and facing student debt an unattractive prospect. Once there, she majored in psychology, finishing her undergraduate studies with honors and moving on to grad school. Currently she's a TA for a couple of lower level psych courses and has a good internship; she lives in a small apartment by herself and is finishing up her masters.
First Echo: Triggered by the destruction of the statue in the Dead District, and the resulting pink flash in the sky; she'll remember the hymn EXEC_METAFALICA/. This will be the hymn alone; she won't remember what it does, what the words mean, or when and why she sang it in her past life. Although she also won't remember that it's only one half of the true hymn to create Metafalica, she will have an instinctual sense that something is missing from it - she just won't know what.
Preincarnation Personality: Luca comes across, on the surface, as a total sweetheart - she's well-liked in her hometown and the area she commutes to work in, and seems to be on a friendly basis with everyone; she's sweet, cheerful, and although she can seem a little insecure or easily flustered by some things, she comes across as very comfortable in her world, comfortable with the people around her, and kind to others.
Luca, when canon begins, is also a pathological liar.
It's through her Cosmosphere and Infelsphere sequences that we begin to see the real Luca. She's lonely, bitter, and selfishly fixated on her own goals to the point where everything she's done has been in pursuit of getting her sister back, from her career to her relationship with Croix. When Cloche is given the chance, in the Infelsphere, to live through a day in Luca's world, Cloche misjudges everything, and it paints a picture of how things really are for Luca - her popularity among the locals is very carefully maintained, because they're quick to turn on her if she behaves contrary to expectations or appears to be thinking too much of herself rather than everyone else; the people Cloche keeps assuming are safe and trusting without reservation easily con her, take her money, and step on her for their own advantage. And from this, it's shown that although Luca seems friendly with everyone, those friendships she has are very shallow; she holds everyone at a careful, safe distance for fear of being burned and taken advantage of again.
The truth is that Luca's life is in many ways exhausting; she works hard, lives frugally, and often goes hungry or runs out of money for the train and has to walk four hours to get home. Her mother treats her coldly out of a mistaken belief that it will make separating easier someday when those who put Luca in hiding return to claim her, and Luca has built up a lot of walls around herself and a lot of masks to hide the parts of her that she doesn't think people will like - because she desperately wants to be liked and is afraid of letting anyone see parts of her that they might not approve of.
There are a lot of contradictions in Luca's feelings; when Croix attempts to dive into her Cosmosphere, she starts by taking him into the part of her soulspace that's walled off and blocked from her inner self, because she's afraid to let him see her true self - but then she forces herself to Paradigm Shift (normally triggered by an emotional understanding, and not something that can be forced) because she thinks he'll be unhappy with her if she doesn't; her Cosmosphere is full of different aspects of herself outright fighting and trying to sabotage one another as some parts of her try to open up to him and trust him and other parts of her reject him and want to keep him from seeing anything more, and some aspects of her try to save him and care for him while others outright try to kill him before he can see her true self.
One of the last obstacles before Croix is able to reach the deepest level of Luca's self is when he faces the many aspects of her at once, and although every one of them is rooted in something negative, he's able to point out the positive sides of each of them and help her to finally subconsciously accept all those sides of her: the cowardly Luca who didn't accept anyone and isolated herself is responsible for protecting her heart; the people pleaser who only has shallow relationships is nonetheless necessary to lay the groundwork for those relationships to become closer, and is the reason she's well loved by others; the Luca who gives up on everything before speaking her own mind makes her generous and able to hear out others sympathetically and understand their pain; the manipulative Luca who took advantage of the feelings of others is necessary to her work as a therapist and her ability to understand others well enough to heal their minds; the Luca who is actually willing to admit hurtful things is the honest one, and thus important for her to be able to connect to others.
Luca is able to mature far beyond her insecurities and her selfishness throughout the course of the game; she and Cloche come to understand each other deeply despite their many differences and the ways they're both deeply envious of each other - Cloche envying Luca's freedom and social connections, Luca envying Cloche's wealth and privileged existence. They both see each others' behavior as being horrible - Luca doesn't know how to step up and take responsibility; Cloche claims to be thinking of the welfare of everyone without truly understanding what life is like for those at the bottom - but they're both able to eventually come to understand each others' views, and it's largely through experiencing Cloche's life in the Infelsphere and understanding her isolation and the heavy burdens of her responsibility that Luca is able to step forward and move past her own pain to really become the cheerful, friendly girl who everyone loves instead of just faking being that person.
Any differences: The primary difference between Luca and Lucy is simply one of depth. Luca puts on masks, fakes cheerfulness and makes shallow social connections and hides a lot of very dark feelings behind her smile. Lucy, on the other hand, lacks the trauma and suffering that her previous incarnation took for granted, and so while her surface behavior is similar in many ways - she's cheerful, friendly, can seem a little insecure at times but generally very comfortable in her world - that behavior coming from Lucy is much more genuine, and not born out of coping mechanisms the way it was for Luca.
Lucy's relationships are much more healthy, additionally; she's never really had a close romantic relationship, but nor has she had a shallow relationship that she spun as being closer than it was - she's been smart about recognizing when connections aren't there and when her heart isn't really in it, and letting things down gently before things were serious enough for feelings to really be hurt. She and her mother are reasonably close; she calls her regularly since moving to Locke City, and they have long phone conversations and keep each other up to date on their lives and act like friends, not just relatives. Her social relationships in general aren't always close, but even the shallower ones have a more genuine feel to them, as she isn't holding people back at a distance from fear that they'll hurt her.
In general, Lucy is much more well-adjusted and reasonably well in tune with her feelings; she doesn't have the heaps of coping mechanisms and buried trauma that Luca does to get in her way and complicate her behavior, and her cheerful exterior reflects genuine, uncomplicated optimism.
Abilities: As a Reyvateil, Luca is able to use song magic. Magic in Ar Tonelico gets stupidly complicated, so I'm attempting to simplify a lot here, but the basic idea is that magic, music, and computer programming are one and the same; magic comes from Reyvateils using songs to interface with and draw power from the song magic servers in the world's towers. Luca draws her power from the Ar Tonelico server, via its relay station of Sol Marta. Essentially, the server supplies the raw power, and the Reyvateil gives that power form to result in the magic. (Thus, to use her magic in-game, she'll need to find a power source, as discussed here.)
Battle songs are divided into two families: Red Magic and Blue Magic. Red Magic is offensive, and charges up with increasing power the longer Luca continues singing until she releases it. Luca's Red spells are divided into four families; the lower level spells charge into stronger versions when certain conditions are met. Blue Magic is defensive, and acts continuously as long as Luca continues singing. Her Blue spells are split into two families, one that heals and one that buffs, and can also charge into stronger versions when conditions are met. (I'm assuming for Echo purposes that the powered up version of each spell would be another Echo to be accessible, in addition to needing to have the battle condition met for it to actually be used in any given fight.)
There's a chart showing the individual spells here. Since I'm assuming Cloche route, some of these spells will be inaccessible, as Luca's Cosmosphere is only accessible through level 4 in that route. It does also mean that if anyone ever apped Cloche, Luca would be able to participate in a few of Cloche's synchronity chain spells from this chart, though.
Aside from the synchronity chain spells (which require Luca and Cloche to sing together), the other requirements, if one ignores the game-specific jargon, have to do with how well Luca and whoever she is fighting alongside have attuned their emotions in combat.
Battle songs are created through having a trusted partner Dive into a Reyvateil's soul space and help them sort through and understand their emotions in order to create spells. I believe this would eventually be possible to do in-game given sufficient Echoes to get the appropriate equipment and a certain degree of recklessness in trusting someone else to operate it, so it's possible that the spells I don't have accessible could be recreated that way, but it's nothing I plan on thinking about anytime soon (if ever). It's also possible to create song magic in the real world (it was seen once in the first game), but only if the emotion necessary to make it happen is very strong and very pure, so that's also something that, while theoretically possible, I don't anticipate happening anytime soon if at all.
Outside of battle songs, there are also the hymns: these are spells that directly interface with and control the towers, so I don't expect them to have much utility unless the towers get Echoed in (and even then, their utility is...debatable). Luca has several of these: EXEC_SOL=FAGE/. awakens her powers as the Maiden of Homura and lets her use Frelia's hymn code, which lets her use songs that only the tower administrator should be able to execute. EXEC_METAFALICA/. creates the promised land of Metafalica, but is actually only half of the song required; on its own, it creates a chaotic and unstable land that is formed according to the feelings of the person that sings it. EXEC_VIENA/. lifts the camoflage that keeps the tower of Sol Marta hidden from the human eye.
As a Dive Therapist, Luca is an expert on the equipment and procedures used in her world to allow someone to enter a Reyvateil's soulspace, and she is also very adept at creating pockets of space with strong barriers in her own, to allow someone in without letting them interact with her innermost self. (Her expertise in this also allows her to stay fully cognizant of someone's presence and what's going on while she's holding them to that area; in a "true" dive to the unprotected areas of the mind, the Reyvateil's projection of themselves that interacts with the diver doesn't necessarily recognize that it's a thing that's going on, and the Reyvateil doesn't remember anything that happened there once they resurface.) She's skilled enough to also host proxy dives (diveception, basically - letting two people dive into her mind and then within it, one dives into another - something done to protect the one diving from harm if they're violently rejected from the other's soulspace).
She knows the Hymmnos language, in which all song magic is performed, although only the standard dialect.
All third-generation Reyvateils have an installer port, through which they need to have diquility crystals installed every few months or they fall ill and die.
Roleplay Sample – Third Person:
It had been a longer day than usual, between a couple at her internship who had been getting particularly intense in their arguments - though thankfully Lucy hadn't had to deal with that beyond listening to them on the way in and then back out - and then a group of enterprising freshman interrupting the quiz she was trying to give them with a spontaneous (and rather well choreographed, she had to admit) musical number. Still, as she dropped her purse on the counter and made her way to the fridge to pull out the pitcher and pour herself a glass of iced tea, Lucy had to admit that she didn't mind, exactly.
She was tired, but it was the good kind of tired, and the classroom incident, at least, would make for a pretty good story when she made the weekly call home - which would be any minute, once she got a few other things out of the way.
Like kicking her shoes off (cute, but not the most comfortable), turning the oven on to preheat, and taking the messages off the phone. (None of which, today, were actually important. Which was fine.)
With everything else taken care of, she wasted no time in curling up at the end of the couch, glass at her side and phone in her hand. Time for one of the most treasured parts of her week. Calling -
- she stopped with the number halfway dialed, frowning at the phone in her hand. That wasn't her mother's number.
She'd had these numbers rolling around in her head for a bit, yes, but this was starting to get a little ridiculous. She hung up, gave it a moment to be sure it was cleared, and then started dialing again.
Maybe that would make a good story to tell her mother - if there was only a punchline, and not just "hey, I saw this pink light and now I have weird numbers stuck in my head and a song in a language I'm not sure exists." Maybe there was something wrong with her. Maybe she should ask her boss, since she knew better than to think she was going to come up with a valid and unbiased assessment of her own mind by sitting down for an evening and flipping through the DSM -
- and maybe she should worry about that later, because she wasn't going to let anything ruin her weekly chat with Mom. Anything.
"Hi, Mom, guess who?" she said brightly, kicking her feet up on the coffee table, the smile on her face as bright as the lilt in her voice. "Mmhmm, my week's been good, how about yours?"
Roleplay Sample - Network:
[The visual is foggy, at first - it's hard to make out anything, just blurs of color. Dark, light - moving, and eventually something cuts through - just a single line being drawn, looping in nonsensical patterns, its trail remaining as a small area of sharper focus.
And there's a voice, that of someone singing to herself, quietly, under her breath, in words that don't sound like they come from any earthly language.]
Rrha ki ra echcrra jouee, rrha ki ra chs hymmnos mea...
[The line continues, sometimes doubling back on itself, bringing more and more of the image into focus; eventually, if one looks closely, they might be able to tell that someone is idly drawing on her fogged bathroom mirror, not really thinking about it.
(Someone is also, as logically follows, still wearing just a towel.)]
Fayra en kapa, weak en sheak-
[And then she stops for a moment, staring into the mirror - or maybe staring through it. Her eyes narrow for a moment.
And then widen.]
Oh my god, what the-
[If you're very quick, you might notice her face turning bright red as she ducks below line of sight.]
This isn't happening!
Any Questions? I...don't think I have any!