#anyway. lucy 🫶 i think hes neat and i can’t wait to watch her get worse

[verdemoth]

ok the promised Lucy Lore Post. a messy assemblage of details with various degrees of relevance to each other

~ Ulysses is bigender but not genderfluid, he’s always in a state of being both man and lady simultaneously in a way that doesn’t tend to shift, and you can use binary gendered pronouns/terms interchangeably for her at any moment. but also the ‘femme socialite’ persona is a mostly separate identity for Spy Purposes and uses a pseudonym (that i haven’t come up with yet), and as this persona she’s mostly just presenting as a woman, in order to further distinguish this persona from her preferred masc style in daily life. She has Some Fun with the manipulations of the social game, while also having a simmering animosity for all the irksome gentlepersons she’s got to rub elbows with and the stifling act of civility she must maintain to get any use out of the endeavour.

~ Ulysses’s background is still pretty flexible, but the current baseline is: She grew up well-off in Edinburgh, her family comfortably middle-class and financially secure. But one day in her youth, her immediate family (two parents and an older brother I think) just vanished without a trace, leaving Ulysses with no indication as to whether this was the result of a mysterious demise or an intentional relocation. He feels Weird about it. He wasn’t particularly close with any of them and doesn’t think he grieves them, and this is not a Nemesis situation where he’s looking for revenge, but… it was a significant and distressing event and there is that lingering need to know Why. Why did it happen, and why was he left behind, alone? He did use the event as an opportunity to shed his old identity; she could go missing, too. He began to present as masc and claimed himself to be a relative of the family. He managed to secure some of his inheritance, and got into Edinburgh medical school (He wasn’t Cognizant that he was trans at the time but slowly worked it out via the euphoria of presenting as a guy, then he let himself get more flexible w his gender in the Neath upon realizing attitudes about these things were so lax down below). In the meanwhile, he was connecting the pieces that his family had in some way been involved in the Great Game, and that involvement may have been the cause of whatever had transpired that night. So when she found herself tumbling into the Neath, those connections are how she’s gotten tangled up in the Game herself. It is in part a need to resolve and finally put to rest that youthhood trauma, and in part a desire for the thrill of partaking in these treacherous clandestine machinations, learning how to play and to pull the strings (though… he’s not very aware of how many have been discreetly tied to him in the process…)

~ Ulysses’s relationship with the practice of medicine is like. She’s definitely passionate about it. This is a career she Chose and is invested in, she very much wanted to be a doctor and is very satisfied with the work. But he’s kinda weird abt it…… Lady is obsessed with the workings of the human body and all the ways it can break. He romanticizes and venerates flesh and arteries and organs, and injury and disease and rot like it’s all something divine and holy and beautiful.

~ Lucy’s already inherently a lil fucked up from the start but it’s more buried, and he only gets Worse. She presents herself as a respectable gentleman and a charming socialite, but just beneath the surface she is full of such horrible barely restrained ruthless ferocity. Girlrage. Deeply fucked up in ways that only really become apparent in the right situation, then very conflicted in how she feels abt knowingly having this capacity for great violence but also understanding herself well enough to realize she’s always gonna make the same decisions and it’s easier to strangle the remorse than subdue the aggression.

~ the Ulysses & Rajendra dynamic isn’t fully 100% solidified but they definitely have some weird fucked up Thing going on between them and they match each other’s freak <3 they were friends at some point in their childhood before losing contact with each other, and then reconnected recently as they’re both in the Neath. to my pal Sky i’ve described Lucy’s side as having an undoubtedly genuine respect and admiration for Raj, but also a very very intense “I want you to know me wholly and completely like no one else can, if there is anything left to know of me behind my masks, and I want to know you just as intimately” + “I’m certain one of us will extinguish the other one day and I would find contentment in either role” + that figs and wasps tumblr post:

(and maybe even some “you’d look hot covered in blood (and it can be mine) 💕”) so yeah they’re totally normal

also here’s his playlist for funzies ✨ arranged in a general downward spiral

And the last of my Flondon PCs, making her tumblr debut, my guy Dr. Narramore! Lucy to his friends. He's a freak and he sucks <3 she exists because I did want to experience the Seeking storyline but I'd never put Mel or Knoll through all that. So, Ulysses is designed to be locked in the torment nexus and experience the horrors and she can only get worse from here! But actually I'm yet to get to any of the Seeking stuff since I haven't been super focused on building up his account yet.

He's also an excuse to explore the Great Game content, and that gives me some direction to take his character. Speaking of characters, Darling Lark (mentioned on this sheet) belongs to my friend @skies-seas ! Also a character belonging to Sky is the one and only person in the world who Ulysses considers indispensable: childhood friend and mad scientist Rajendra Narod, also a Seeking PC who Sky made so we can do our favourite activity of making Fucked Up Guys together <3 <3 <3

Also yeah Horticulture Hell! I was brainstorming what my Seeking character should be like for months in advance, and I had the idea that instead of going through New-Newgate he'd start off in a different Menace location (fucking dying lol). Then Horticulture Hell happened and the idea of being new to the Neath while all that was going on was so funny to me, so that's when I made the account :]

i have some more notes on his character than I can share, but I'll do so in a reblog probably so this isn't TOO long. Transcripts to follow under the readmore

Text Transcripts:

In the top left are some quick details. Lucy's full name and title is Doctor Ulysses B. Narramore. In the style of other Fallen London characters, Lucy's epithet is 'the Mercurial Pawn'. Lucy uses both she/her and he/him pronouns interchangeably, he's 31 years old and 5 feet 8 inches tall. She resides in a handsome townhouse around Ladybones Road. Her profession is as a physician but she's also a spy in the making, and the faction she's closest to is The Great Game.

Next to these are some notable player attributes. Of the main attributes, Lucy has high Persuasive and Dangerous, but low Watchful. Of the quirks, she has high Ruthless, Heartless, Forceful, and Subtle, but low Magnanimous and Steadfast. He also has another notable quality: that he's Seeking the Name.

In the top right is this note: "Ulysses wasn't (knowingly) a Player in the Great Game before arriving in the Neath. He was inducted by a woman named Darling Lark, operator of a local speakeasy and go-between for spy and criminal activities."

Paired with the art of Lucy covered in blood are these notes: "Though lacking in training, discipline, and real practical experience, Lucy is a formidably aggressive foe. He doesn't fight gracefully and he doesn't fight fair. She won't shy away from blood, and isn't above kicking someone who's already down. ...He might be a bit too into bloodshed. The cane is also for stability, Ulysses has been having weak spells with a bit of a fall risk. But mostly it's a convenient, socially acceptable way to have a good bludgeoning weapon on hand."

With the last illustration of Lucy climbing from a well are these notes: "It is the case that many new residents of London come by way of New-Newgate, but Lucy's arrival was rather more dramatic. Amidst what is occasionally, by some individuals, still referred to as the London Horticultural Show, he found himself tumbling into the Neath through a weak bit of roof. She died, of course, and was in for quite the shock when she'd recovered."

End of text transcripts.