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Username/Nickname: Amy
AIM/IM/EMAIL: derp
Other characters: Chuck Shuriken
Character Name: Lucifer
Series/Movie: SPN
Age: + 9000
Duplicate: Uh. She doesn’t remember this place? Different Lu pretty much yeah.
AU: At some point in Season Five, Nick went boom and Lu, lacking any other Plan Bs, dug up Jessica (surprise: they were cousins) and totally didn’t coerce her into saying yes. Since Lu is taken from right after Sam’s body is lifted, he defaults to being Jessifer here. Don’t ask. It makes sense. Shh. Also, she remembers Uriah, although there was a slightly different story there- Lu was kicked to the curb right before Uriah was, and only remembers that he was making supportive noises and got beat up some. She didn’t specifically see him get booted, since she couldn’t really see much out of her cage. She sort of remembers the part where Uriah sat outside the cage for a few thousand years, but didn’t hear him all the time and sort of thought she was going crazy (which happened incidentally) and came out of the cage with the “baww my whole family abandoned me and I was SO ALONE AND UNLOVED” complex from canon very much intact. She’ll be happy to see Uriah, but her current impression is that he supported her but was most likely put through Bible camp. What REALLY happened in her time is that, yeah- he sat outside the gates for a really long time, talking to her and generally keeping her company, even when she assumed she was going batshit from it. After he left to go wander Earth, he was eventually kidnapped, gutted, and chained in a dungeon in Heaven where he rotted through all of SPN canon events, leaving Lucifer alone in her little one-man crusade.
Uhhhhhhh this hasn’t been worked out with Uriah’s mun, but since she’s reading this right now I assume you’ll talk to me if you have problems with it, brosef. I’m futzing with this so she’ll have some good memories of him and still be appropriately ~touched when she learns that no, Virginia, that wasn’t the voices in your head keeping you company and preventing you from going totally apeshit all those years. So yeah.
Timeline: Immediately after Sam’s body is stolen from the Cage by Crowley.
Personality:
There is a certain formulaic dependability to the shadow trope; the mythic figure in the dark, the villain archetype. Most classically he lurks in the wings or in the back, overshadowing every event with his raw hugeness and the magnitude of his wrongdoing, acting as a pure arbiter of unfiltered evil. He is badness incarnate, and any sympathetic or good qualities he may ever have had are so forgotten or overshadowed as to never be explored and, indeed, never thought about- he is irredeemable.
There again he is oft also a more nuanced creature, the kinder, gentler Baddie presented to us as a character equal to the protagonists in layers and characterization. He has a heart, a soul, he prays. He has a conscience, a mother, a pet cat, and a tragic childhood or past that have made him from a gentle soul into the twisted so-called monster we see before us today. Presented first as a categorical villain meant to be hated, the work first gives us a shocking glimpse of the person within, leading into a slow, gradual deconstruction of what truly makes the person bad or good. In the end we see a redeemed (or still-fallen) soul, so thoroughly characterized and taken apart, so strongly have our heartstrings and sympathies been played that we have no choice but to cry as hard for his death as we would for any protagonist.
Lucifer is none of these things, and both of them. Her deconstruction seems to unfold in reverse. Though she doesn’t physically appear in the show until season 5, she is foreshadowed all the way back in season three. We first hear her name early in season three, on the lips of an unusually considerate and sympathetic demon, as a deity in demonic religious stories. “Did you know the name means Light-Bringer? Look it up.” The moniker “devil” is rebuffed by the demon, instead describing Lucifer as the most beautiful of all God’s angels. Her great crime was not hate or disobedience at all in this version of events. Rather, it’s framed as a very understandable refusal to kowtow to inferior beings, evidence only of principles and not of hubris or malice. The story leaves us with a feeling of anticipation for an almost Messianic figure, who the demon rhapsodizes will return some day as their much-beloved creator. This specific scene isn’t about Lucifer herself, either- it’s a device used to humanize the demon, and make the protagonist wonder if maybe they aren’t so different after all. It’s only the first time out of many that Lucifer will be presented as a softened, gentle character who almost comes off as relatable. Later, however, the foreshadowing is far different- Lucifer stands silent in the background, a boogeyman whose very existence inspires dread and relieves rational characters of their ability to think straight. She is painted very clearly as unimaginable horror, sealed evil in a can, the very worst thing that could ever happen to the world who will bring destruction and untold suffering on a scale our minds simply cannot fathom. Her name isn’t even a name anymore, but a symbol of every nightmare you have ever had and every monster and villain to ever spread pain in an already angst-ridden show.
The first time we actually see Lucifer, it’s a surprisingly emotional entrance to the show. She’s in the guise of a soft-spoken, watery-eyed, incredibly honest woman, trying only to convey a truth to a broken man as gently as she can. It stands in stark contrast to the mind-breaking horrors that the man has witnessed previously, and even as we know that Lucifer caused them with the specific intention to hurt the man, we can’t help but feel a little when she earnestly entreats him to listen to her. There’s none of the lies or deceit we expect- she is perfectly open, immediately letting him know that despite her appearance, she is not his wife, and immediately tells him her real name and what she needs him for. What stands out is how she frames her argument.
“Do you know my crime? My real crime? I loved god too much.”
Many, upon first meeting her, find it hard not to relate to her, to sympathize with the gentle creature she appears to be, who apologizes every other sentence and seems to cradle her psychological victims like injured baby birds. Her next appearance is almost as soft- until we realize that she has been posing as Jessica in Sam’s dreams and feeding on his darkest fears and insecurities. To his face, though, Lucifer is perfectly soft-spoken, almost contrite about the campaign of psychological destruction he is about to wage against Sam. Even as he calmly confirms Sam’s deepest fears about himself, he apologizes repeatedly and even extends a hand in sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Sam,” he says. “My heart breaks for you.” One sometimes leaves an encounter with the Devil thinking that, despite being a harbinger of destruction, Lucifer is a fallen angel with a real heart and redemptive possibility, and genuinely cares about the people he talks to, in a perversely gentle kind of way.
After so candidly exposing real feeling and vulnerability in his first appearances, every subsequent encounter with Lucifer seems to pull back the camera, revealing more and more layers of who this person truly is. We see him slaughter an entire town with his bare hands, and flippantly dismiss the horror of it with a casual, “Oh, I know it’s terrible, but these horsemen are so demanding.” Then as a sacrifice he kills several dozen demons, and that almost hits closer to home than the many human deaths- that Lucifer would casually murder his own loving worshipers to meet his own selfish ends. When Sam gapes at him in horror, Lucifer just raises an eyebrow. “What? They’re just demons.” This is what the Light Bringer thinks of his own hand-crafted creations, the little creatures who look at him like a father, and suddenly we realize that in spite of the angel’s sentimentality and gentle touch, that he is something new and strange and terrifyingly cold. Evil has a face, and we have seen it. It brings out a true appreciation for the term “Prince of Lies.” Despite Lucifer’s gentle promise to never lie to Sam, and never to trick him, and his repeatedly demonstration commitment to honesty, the fact that he was so able to pass himself off as a compassionate individual suddenly seems stunning, her professed sentiments revealed as so many mind games.
So duplicitous is he that he will freely embrace and tenderly caress the cheek of a demon, address her as “child,” and behave as if he actually cares about her. His intensely violent loathing of most of the things around him only seems to come out in glimpses and flashes, and is like a short sharp shock amidst the earnest sentimentality and convincing gentility that is the face she wears for the world. Because she is evil, and she does take a certain pleasure in hurting people, and is vicious, malicious, nasty, fine with committing horrible atrocities. To you, one is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic. To Lucifer, a million is just one hundred thousand individual tragedies, and she will look every single one of them in the face and feel nothing.
You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen. We don’t need him!
Lucifer is very, very good at being an angel: head-tilts, little eyebrow furrows at your strange human emotions, an ego big enough to block out the sun. Her professed motivations and driving factors are what we think of as deeply religious in nature, and she is every bit the dangerous zealot that her Heavenly brethren are. With every word spoken and action taken she presumes her will to be law, wrapping threats in pretty words and backhanded promises. She has a certain detached sensibility that seems to elevate her above the level of those around her, but she is no stranger to doing her own dirty work- for rituals and sacrifices, she can be seen doing her own manual labor, as a testament of her dedication to her craft, such as it is. Seeing her covered in dirt and so undeniably base can be quite a shock, as she usually gives the intangible impression of purity and being utterly pristine.
In her view, she often has no choice, as evidenced by statements like “Brother... please don’t make me do this.” There’s a sense of compulsion to what she does at times, as if she has always been destined to come to you, destroy your family, torch your life, and force herself into your ruined psyche. Until, of course, her seemingly limitless patience comes to its end. When she’s pushed to her limit of tolerance, the façade of serenity crumbles and she bears down on her unfortunate victim with the wrath of the very bowels of Hell, any surface-level mercy utterly forgotten in favor of unrelenting brutality. Prepare to feel the snap of your own bones if she gets angry, and pray that’s the least that happens to you.
But that all falls in line with classic angel behavior- the air of a shady politician from planet Vulcan, with a frighteningly furious temper once sufficiently provoked. She also shares something else with them- she reacts very badly if thwarted or frustrated. Sometimes Lucifer even comes off as something of a kid, and for those who see through her facade tends to remind them strongly of a child throwing a temper tantrum. All she wants is Daddy’s attention- he was mean to her, so she’s determined to break all his toys. There’s a certain immaturity about her, and she can be very whiny and petulant when hurt or frustrated. If you’re patient or (un)lucky enough, you can break down the faux classiness to see the falling-apart, whiny-ass spoiled brat that she really, truly is.
LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
Although Lucifer spreads wanton destruction with her very being, and smugly inflicts unimaginable pain on people she takes pleasure in squashing like bugs, she seems to have little of the gleeful, twisted delight that her demonic children seem to take in sadism. She apparently appreciates it the way one appreciates fine art and fine wine, watching her inflicted devastation unfold with stoic satisfaction- a sharp reminder that she has never been demon, but is ultimately an angel. After slitting a throat or snapping a neck, she simply looks down at her victim with a resigned little ‘hm,’ utterly unaffected by it. It fits in nicely with her “sympathy for the devil” shtick, that her sadism unfolds but slowly, never belying the depth of her raw, scathing, searing loathing.
Because that’s it. Under the gentility, the false (or simply shallow) concern, the almost classy panache she puts into everything she does, there is a stunning depth of hate that is beyond what you or I could easily fathom. If she meets you, she probably hates you more than language is capable of adequately expressing, no matter how gently she puts her hand on your shoulder and tells you she’s sorry that you made her kill your family. For thousands of years she rotted in the deepest bowels of Hell, with nothing but the pain of Hellfire and long march of time spent completely and utterly alone, and in those untold aeons her resentment and dislike festered into seething hatred that motivates her every action. Don’t be fooled by her soft-spoken tenderness; she will quietly relish the look in your eyes when her hand closes around your liver and pulls. Disregard and disdain are the names of the game, with her only ever setting aside a moment of honest concern for fellow angels who she think may serve her needs- and even then, the instant they lose their value to her, she once again quietly accepts that she will personally murder them some day, and regret nothing.
The sole exceptions to this have only ever been her brothers- and not brothers in the sense that all angels are brothers, but in her three archangel brethren. Lucifer may know full well that the battle with Michael is inevitable, or that Gabriel has left her with no choice in a fight, but hurting those few closest to her makes her genuinely unhappy. They are the only people she has ever tried to back out of a fight with- but when push comes to shove, she will default to brutality over compassion every time. In a fight with Gabriel, her baby brother whom she taught everything, he made a very obvious slip-up that let her know clearly that she was about to be stabbed in the back- in such a way that he clearly made her aware on purpose. He gave her the chance to rethink her decision to kill him and to choose love over violence, and she repaid him by turning around and driving a knife through his chest, and destroying any chance of redemptive possibility. It’s in her nature to take windows of opportunity and shows of kindness, and take relentless advantage of them; she does not know the meaning of mercy, and almost certainly never will.
Though she clearly lamented killing her little brother, and actually cried over his body (in one of her only unquestionably genuine shows of emotion), she didn’t seem to regret it in the slightest. Her love for her brothers is great, but always gives way to driving hatred and selfishness. In her mind, the ends always justify the means, and her ends are the only ends.
“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
By all logic and reason, Lucifer has nothing to gain by accomplishing her grand ambition of destroying the earth and razing Heaven. It is pointed out to her repeatedly that it’s a useless exercise in petulance, destroying all of Daddy’s toys because he was mean to her. Furthermore, crossing this item off her bucket list would require slaughtering all of her brothers, and destroying those last remnants of the only family she’s ever had or will ever care about. Indeed, the angels are her kin, creatures she once identified with so strongly that she ripped apart her own reality rather than admit that they could be inferior to something. Every single angel would have to die, and then what? Life as the only angel in Creation, however victorious, is an impossibly lonely one. One may well wonder why, and what she truly has to gain by destroying the very world that she herself terms stunning and the last perfect work of god.
Her actions give no clue, no hint whatsoever as to her underlying motivation. The stories point to the same things- revenge, pride, heedless hate, but Lucifer is underneath it all a son and a brother, not simply a Jungian archetype. Once upon a time, she was a being who looked up to her big brother, Michael, the one who essentially raised her and shaped her whole world- he was her brother, surrogate father, rock of Gibraltar, and in a very real sense the love of her life, and the moment when he denied her and first raised a hand to hurt her still stands clearly as the worst moment of her extremely long life. After so many years, she held out hope that if only they saw each other again, that they could work it out- that they could walk off their father’s chess board together, and be brothers again, but on some level she always knew that he would say no. Lucifer simply cannot tolerate that. She can find nothing worth saving about a world in which Michael is capable of looking into her eyes and still wanting to kill her. She would rather burn the world down and drag everyone into the darkness with her than tolerate anybody else having one single iota of happiness in a universe where the only thing she ever wanted is so utterly lost to her. Only people who have known her from the beginning and know her extremely well could tell you what really makes her tick. Only Gabriel, Raphael, and possibly Michael really know what a fundamentally unhappy creature she really is, or how miserable slaughtering the angels would make her.
Not that she has any idea of this, of course. To her twisted and deformed mind, she hurts and destroys people because they deserve it, and because it is her right. She lives with no regrets, but many grudges, and would sooner cut out your tongue than say she’s sorry.
History: Boom.
I understand that Michael and Lucifer had their apocalyptic fight in this game, but my Lucifer is not taken from that. She’s mostly canon and taken from the Pit, when Sam’s body is freed from Hell. She won’t have any memory at all of events in SJ simply because bitch wasn’t there.
Abilities/Powers:
Lucifer shares the abilities of all angels and archangels in the Supernatural canon- ie, reality warping, raising the dead, teleportation, weather manipulation, invulnerability, super-strength, some psychic ability, telekinesis, and time travel.
Reality warping is probably her most useful (and god-moding) power; she can create things from thin air that are as real as anything else, and make them vanish just as easily. Archangels less powerful than her have been seen creating pocket dimensions, alternate realities, and extended Groundhog Day-style time loops. She can alter her form to appear to be anybody, and can affect the bodies of others- for example, an angel in the show was seen causing a person’s lungs to vanish from their bodies with a thought, and giving them stomach cancer on a whim. She is capable of raising the dead, and it’s implied that she can bring angels back to life.
Teleportation is a fairly simple one. When she wants to be somewhere, she just thinks about it and it happens. By a similar token, when she wants to find somebody, she can do so unless they’re specifically trying to hide from her. There are various ways to hide from angels, including protective magic, Enochian sigils, and various other methods not explored in the shows but to which I am very open. Lucifer’s disappearances and re-appearances are accompanied by thunderclaps and flashes of lightning. This plays into her ability of weather manipulation, which is often involuntary or at the very least unintentional. Her very presence somewhere can be enough to cause a few city blocks to drop ten degrees in temperature, while the rest of the city stays normal, and her presence can also cause thunderstorms, rain, and general end of the world weather. She is fully capable of bringing down hurricanes, tornados, and forest fires.
Telekinesis is a powerful ability. She can utterly destroy an angel by making them explode with a simple snap of her fingers, and can kill with her mind. In addition to this, she can pin powerful beings and humans alike to the wall with her mind, and use her abilities to fight.
Her invulnerability and super-strength are part of what make her so dangerous. She is unkillable by most means- fighting or force from other angels can hurt her, a bullet from the Colt can bring her down for about a minute, and certain weapons designed to kill angels can harm her, but in the show only an archangel’s blade is shown to be dangerous enough to actually kill her permanently. She can be blasted forcefully out of her vessel’s body with an Enochian sigil. So far, she hasn’t found a human-made weapon that can hurt her, but it’s a wide world, and full of strange things. Her super strength is simple- her true voice can destroy buildings, her true form tends to burn the eyes from peoples’ heads, and she can lift and throw people far physically bigger and heavier than her without breaking a sweat.
Sample Journal Entry: http://community.livejournal.com/amusebox/22366.html?thread=2103134#t2103134
Sample RP:
In North Reading, Massachusetts, a teenage girl paced the length of her room over and over, pounding a trodden path into the carpeted floor. She was supposed to be studying for a Spanish final, but her concentration was derailed; she's been muttering to herself for some twenty minutes now. Periodically she turned on her heel to face the mirror above her desk, looking into it as if seeking to divine the mysteries of the universe in reflective glass. Here she leaned over, now she stared into reflected eyes, there she spoke impassioned words to the other-self gazing back. Kristen MacDonald was carrying on a one-way conversation with herself, and any listener would think she had the Devil himself locked in that bedroom with her.
Kristen practiced that conversation almost every night when she was alone. Every night she looked into the mirror, gave herself her motivation, and got into character to rehearse her lines. Because you didn't care, did you? You've never cared about anybody else but yourself for a second in your whole fucking life. It's fucking pathetic. How dare you try to look me in the eyes and tell me this is my fault? It was your responsibility, and you-
It was a conversation that will never happen. Kristen would never get the chance to sit her father down and tell him exactly what she thought about him. The words she really wanted to say never quite came out; they talked instead of sports teams and shallow things. They would probably go the rest of their lives without a single word of honesty to each other, and still Kristen practiced the rant every night. Maybe some day she'd get that chance; maybe some day the stars would align (with her blood alcohol level) and she'd scream every word of built-up hate from the entirety of her childhood at him, and he'd be forced to sit and listen in a daze. On some level, Kristen almost knew that actually carrying out that fantasy would leave her feeling empty and hollow, worse off than before.
***
In hunting for a new second-string vessel, Lucifer left no stone unturned. A yogi in Kashmir spurned her to the point of death, whereupon he went to an afterlife that Lucifer couldn't drag him back from- a lesson in staying to her own faith for mining souls. One little African boy killed himself after his third dream about her, rightly believing her to be a dangerous spirit trying to destroy him. Three, four, ten possibilities all lost, denied, burned through, or stolen from her by the crafty angels, leaving only one choice on Earth. So she found herself in the corner of a dark bedroom one evening, invisible and ineffable in her vessel-less form, the silent observer. Lucifer didn't know what she was waiting for, only that she could know it when she saw it and that taking this vessel would be easy. Kristen was just a girl.
Lucifer watched the girl for three days and two nights, and found nothing worth saving. Nothing at all- until some small change happened, some parent or another returned home from a business trip, something Lucifer couldn't care about if she tried. But her silent vigil was soon enough broken by the door crashing open and a little child running in, hitting the light switch and slamming the door closed behind him. The little boy, no more than nine or ten, threw himself at his bed and started crying. Within seconds he was followed in by Kristen herself, who ran to the boy's side and picked him up, drawing her brother closer to her by the shoulders.
"Shhhhh," Kristen cooed, one finger stroking feather-light over a bruise blossoming on the little boy's face. "It'll be okay."
The boy, clearly her little brother, looked up at her tearfully. "Why- why doesn't he love us?" he choked out, plainly hurt and confused.
Kristen herself looked utterly lost, and completely heartbroken. "I don't know, honey." She gripped him tight, holding the little boy to her chest like a mother cradling her child, and held him through almost ten minutes of little-boy tears. She kept stopping to whisper sweet, faint things into her brother's hair, and stopping to revel in any tiny hint of a smile she could draw out of him.
It was a pity, really. Lucifer knew Kristen would have made a fine vessel- but somehow, ultimately, Lucifer couldn't bring herself to destroy this girl. Not when her eyes kept falling on the little human boy, so desperate for love and eager to curl up in his big sister's arms. Lucifer could find another vessel.
When Kristen MacDonald went to bed that night, she almost brained herself on the thick thorns of a mysterious long-stemmed wild rose she found there. Even as she picked it up and ran delicate hands along its stem, she got the feeling that she knew it before, or had always found herself in this room, smelling the roses at eleven thirty at night. Somehow, when she breathed the delicate scent in deeply, the yawning sound of her little brother's sleepless nights became easier to bear, and she could find peace. It comforted her to think she had her own personal guardian angel.
AIM/IM/EMAIL: derp
Other characters: Chuck Shuriken
Character Name: Lucifer
Series/Movie: SPN
Age: + 9000
Duplicate: Uh. She doesn’t remember this place? Different Lu pretty much yeah.
AU: At some point in Season Five, Nick went boom and Lu, lacking any other Plan Bs, dug up Jessica (surprise: they were cousins) and totally didn’t coerce her into saying yes. Since Lu is taken from right after Sam’s body is lifted, he defaults to being Jessifer here. Don’t ask. It makes sense. Shh. Also, she remembers Uriah, although there was a slightly different story there- Lu was kicked to the curb right before Uriah was, and only remembers that he was making supportive noises and got beat up some. She didn’t specifically see him get booted, since she couldn’t really see much out of her cage. She sort of remembers the part where Uriah sat outside the cage for a few thousand years, but didn’t hear him all the time and sort of thought she was going crazy (which happened incidentally) and came out of the cage with the “baww my whole family abandoned me and I was SO ALONE AND UNLOVED” complex from canon very much intact. She’ll be happy to see Uriah, but her current impression is that he supported her but was most likely put through Bible camp. What REALLY happened in her time is that, yeah- he sat outside the gates for a really long time, talking to her and generally keeping her company, even when she assumed she was going batshit from it. After he left to go wander Earth, he was eventually kidnapped, gutted, and chained in a dungeon in Heaven where he rotted through all of SPN canon events, leaving Lucifer alone in her little one-man crusade.
Uhhhhhhh this hasn’t been worked out with Uriah’s mun, but since she’s reading this right now I assume you’ll talk to me if you have problems with it, brosef. I’m futzing with this so she’ll have some good memories of him and still be appropriately ~touched when she learns that no, Virginia, that wasn’t the voices in your head keeping you company and preventing you from going totally apeshit all those years. So yeah.
Timeline: Immediately after Sam’s body is stolen from the Cage by Crowley.
Personality:
There is a certain formulaic dependability to the shadow trope; the mythic figure in the dark, the villain archetype. Most classically he lurks in the wings or in the back, overshadowing every event with his raw hugeness and the magnitude of his wrongdoing, acting as a pure arbiter of unfiltered evil. He is badness incarnate, and any sympathetic or good qualities he may ever have had are so forgotten or overshadowed as to never be explored and, indeed, never thought about- he is irredeemable.
There again he is oft also a more nuanced creature, the kinder, gentler Baddie presented to us as a character equal to the protagonists in layers and characterization. He has a heart, a soul, he prays. He has a conscience, a mother, a pet cat, and a tragic childhood or past that have made him from a gentle soul into the twisted so-called monster we see before us today. Presented first as a categorical villain meant to be hated, the work first gives us a shocking glimpse of the person within, leading into a slow, gradual deconstruction of what truly makes the person bad or good. In the end we see a redeemed (or still-fallen) soul, so thoroughly characterized and taken apart, so strongly have our heartstrings and sympathies been played that we have no choice but to cry as hard for his death as we would for any protagonist.
Lucifer is none of these things, and both of them. Her deconstruction seems to unfold in reverse. Though she doesn’t physically appear in the show until season 5, she is foreshadowed all the way back in season three. We first hear her name early in season three, on the lips of an unusually considerate and sympathetic demon, as a deity in demonic religious stories. “Did you know the name means Light-Bringer? Look it up.” The moniker “devil” is rebuffed by the demon, instead describing Lucifer as the most beautiful of all God’s angels. Her great crime was not hate or disobedience at all in this version of events. Rather, it’s framed as a very understandable refusal to kowtow to inferior beings, evidence only of principles and not of hubris or malice. The story leaves us with a feeling of anticipation for an almost Messianic figure, who the demon rhapsodizes will return some day as their much-beloved creator. This specific scene isn’t about Lucifer herself, either- it’s a device used to humanize the demon, and make the protagonist wonder if maybe they aren’t so different after all. It’s only the first time out of many that Lucifer will be presented as a softened, gentle character who almost comes off as relatable. Later, however, the foreshadowing is far different- Lucifer stands silent in the background, a boogeyman whose very existence inspires dread and relieves rational characters of their ability to think straight. She is painted very clearly as unimaginable horror, sealed evil in a can, the very worst thing that could ever happen to the world who will bring destruction and untold suffering on a scale our minds simply cannot fathom. Her name isn’t even a name anymore, but a symbol of every nightmare you have ever had and every monster and villain to ever spread pain in an already angst-ridden show.
The first time we actually see Lucifer, it’s a surprisingly emotional entrance to the show. She’s in the guise of a soft-spoken, watery-eyed, incredibly honest woman, trying only to convey a truth to a broken man as gently as she can. It stands in stark contrast to the mind-breaking horrors that the man has witnessed previously, and even as we know that Lucifer caused them with the specific intention to hurt the man, we can’t help but feel a little when she earnestly entreats him to listen to her. There’s none of the lies or deceit we expect- she is perfectly open, immediately letting him know that despite her appearance, she is not his wife, and immediately tells him her real name and what she needs him for. What stands out is how she frames her argument.
“Do you know my crime? My real crime? I loved god too much.”
Many, upon first meeting her, find it hard not to relate to her, to sympathize with the gentle creature she appears to be, who apologizes every other sentence and seems to cradle her psychological victims like injured baby birds. Her next appearance is almost as soft- until we realize that she has been posing as Jessica in Sam’s dreams and feeding on his darkest fears and insecurities. To his face, though, Lucifer is perfectly soft-spoken, almost contrite about the campaign of psychological destruction he is about to wage against Sam. Even as he calmly confirms Sam’s deepest fears about himself, he apologizes repeatedly and even extends a hand in sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Sam,” he says. “My heart breaks for you.” One sometimes leaves an encounter with the Devil thinking that, despite being a harbinger of destruction, Lucifer is a fallen angel with a real heart and redemptive possibility, and genuinely cares about the people he talks to, in a perversely gentle kind of way.
After so candidly exposing real feeling and vulnerability in his first appearances, every subsequent encounter with Lucifer seems to pull back the camera, revealing more and more layers of who this person truly is. We see him slaughter an entire town with his bare hands, and flippantly dismiss the horror of it with a casual, “Oh, I know it’s terrible, but these horsemen are so demanding.” Then as a sacrifice he kills several dozen demons, and that almost hits closer to home than the many human deaths- that Lucifer would casually murder his own loving worshipers to meet his own selfish ends. When Sam gapes at him in horror, Lucifer just raises an eyebrow. “What? They’re just demons.” This is what the Light Bringer thinks of his own hand-crafted creations, the little creatures who look at him like a father, and suddenly we realize that in spite of the angel’s sentimentality and gentle touch, that he is something new and strange and terrifyingly cold. Evil has a face, and we have seen it. It brings out a true appreciation for the term “Prince of Lies.” Despite Lucifer’s gentle promise to never lie to Sam, and never to trick him, and his repeatedly demonstration commitment to honesty, the fact that he was so able to pass himself off as a compassionate individual suddenly seems stunning, her professed sentiments revealed as so many mind games.
So duplicitous is he that he will freely embrace and tenderly caress the cheek of a demon, address her as “child,” and behave as if he actually cares about her. His intensely violent loathing of most of the things around him only seems to come out in glimpses and flashes, and is like a short sharp shock amidst the earnest sentimentality and convincing gentility that is the face she wears for the world. Because she is evil, and she does take a certain pleasure in hurting people, and is vicious, malicious, nasty, fine with committing horrible atrocities. To you, one is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic. To Lucifer, a million is just one hundred thousand individual tragedies, and she will look every single one of them in the face and feel nothing.
You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen. We don’t need him!
Lucifer is very, very good at being an angel: head-tilts, little eyebrow furrows at your strange human emotions, an ego big enough to block out the sun. Her professed motivations and driving factors are what we think of as deeply religious in nature, and she is every bit the dangerous zealot that her Heavenly brethren are. With every word spoken and action taken she presumes her will to be law, wrapping threats in pretty words and backhanded promises. She has a certain detached sensibility that seems to elevate her above the level of those around her, but she is no stranger to doing her own dirty work- for rituals and sacrifices, she can be seen doing her own manual labor, as a testament of her dedication to her craft, such as it is. Seeing her covered in dirt and so undeniably base can be quite a shock, as she usually gives the intangible impression of purity and being utterly pristine.
In her view, she often has no choice, as evidenced by statements like “Brother... please don’t make me do this.” There’s a sense of compulsion to what she does at times, as if she has always been destined to come to you, destroy your family, torch your life, and force herself into your ruined psyche. Until, of course, her seemingly limitless patience comes to its end. When she’s pushed to her limit of tolerance, the façade of serenity crumbles and she bears down on her unfortunate victim with the wrath of the very bowels of Hell, any surface-level mercy utterly forgotten in favor of unrelenting brutality. Prepare to feel the snap of your own bones if she gets angry, and pray that’s the least that happens to you.
But that all falls in line with classic angel behavior- the air of a shady politician from planet Vulcan, with a frighteningly furious temper once sufficiently provoked. She also shares something else with them- she reacts very badly if thwarted or frustrated. Sometimes Lucifer even comes off as something of a kid, and for those who see through her facade tends to remind them strongly of a child throwing a temper tantrum. All she wants is Daddy’s attention- he was mean to her, so she’s determined to break all his toys. There’s a certain immaturity about her, and she can be very whiny and petulant when hurt or frustrated. If you’re patient or (un)lucky enough, you can break down the faux classiness to see the falling-apart, whiny-ass spoiled brat that she really, truly is.
LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
Although Lucifer spreads wanton destruction with her very being, and smugly inflicts unimaginable pain on people she takes pleasure in squashing like bugs, she seems to have little of the gleeful, twisted delight that her demonic children seem to take in sadism. She apparently appreciates it the way one appreciates fine art and fine wine, watching her inflicted devastation unfold with stoic satisfaction- a sharp reminder that she has never been demon, but is ultimately an angel. After slitting a throat or snapping a neck, she simply looks down at her victim with a resigned little ‘hm,’ utterly unaffected by it. It fits in nicely with her “sympathy for the devil” shtick, that her sadism unfolds but slowly, never belying the depth of her raw, scathing, searing loathing.
Because that’s it. Under the gentility, the false (or simply shallow) concern, the almost classy panache she puts into everything she does, there is a stunning depth of hate that is beyond what you or I could easily fathom. If she meets you, she probably hates you more than language is capable of adequately expressing, no matter how gently she puts her hand on your shoulder and tells you she’s sorry that you made her kill your family. For thousands of years she rotted in the deepest bowels of Hell, with nothing but the pain of Hellfire and long march of time spent completely and utterly alone, and in those untold aeons her resentment and dislike festered into seething hatred that motivates her every action. Don’t be fooled by her soft-spoken tenderness; she will quietly relish the look in your eyes when her hand closes around your liver and pulls. Disregard and disdain are the names of the game, with her only ever setting aside a moment of honest concern for fellow angels who she think may serve her needs- and even then, the instant they lose their value to her, she once again quietly accepts that she will personally murder them some day, and regret nothing.
The sole exceptions to this have only ever been her brothers- and not brothers in the sense that all angels are brothers, but in her three archangel brethren. Lucifer may know full well that the battle with Michael is inevitable, or that Gabriel has left her with no choice in a fight, but hurting those few closest to her makes her genuinely unhappy. They are the only people she has ever tried to back out of a fight with- but when push comes to shove, she will default to brutality over compassion every time. In a fight with Gabriel, her baby brother whom she taught everything, he made a very obvious slip-up that let her know clearly that she was about to be stabbed in the back- in such a way that he clearly made her aware on purpose. He gave her the chance to rethink her decision to kill him and to choose love over violence, and she repaid him by turning around and driving a knife through his chest, and destroying any chance of redemptive possibility. It’s in her nature to take windows of opportunity and shows of kindness, and take relentless advantage of them; she does not know the meaning of mercy, and almost certainly never will.
Though she clearly lamented killing her little brother, and actually cried over his body (in one of her only unquestionably genuine shows of emotion), she didn’t seem to regret it in the slightest. Her love for her brothers is great, but always gives way to driving hatred and selfishness. In her mind, the ends always justify the means, and her ends are the only ends.
“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
By all logic and reason, Lucifer has nothing to gain by accomplishing her grand ambition of destroying the earth and razing Heaven. It is pointed out to her repeatedly that it’s a useless exercise in petulance, destroying all of Daddy’s toys because he was mean to her. Furthermore, crossing this item off her bucket list would require slaughtering all of her brothers, and destroying those last remnants of the only family she’s ever had or will ever care about. Indeed, the angels are her kin, creatures she once identified with so strongly that she ripped apart her own reality rather than admit that they could be inferior to something. Every single angel would have to die, and then what? Life as the only angel in Creation, however victorious, is an impossibly lonely one. One may well wonder why, and what she truly has to gain by destroying the very world that she herself terms stunning and the last perfect work of god.
Her actions give no clue, no hint whatsoever as to her underlying motivation. The stories point to the same things- revenge, pride, heedless hate, but Lucifer is underneath it all a son and a brother, not simply a Jungian archetype. Once upon a time, she was a being who looked up to her big brother, Michael, the one who essentially raised her and shaped her whole world- he was her brother, surrogate father, rock of Gibraltar, and in a very real sense the love of her life, and the moment when he denied her and first raised a hand to hurt her still stands clearly as the worst moment of her extremely long life. After so many years, she held out hope that if only they saw each other again, that they could work it out- that they could walk off their father’s chess board together, and be brothers again, but on some level she always knew that he would say no. Lucifer simply cannot tolerate that. She can find nothing worth saving about a world in which Michael is capable of looking into her eyes and still wanting to kill her. She would rather burn the world down and drag everyone into the darkness with her than tolerate anybody else having one single iota of happiness in a universe where the only thing she ever wanted is so utterly lost to her. Only people who have known her from the beginning and know her extremely well could tell you what really makes her tick. Only Gabriel, Raphael, and possibly Michael really know what a fundamentally unhappy creature she really is, or how miserable slaughtering the angels would make her.
Not that she has any idea of this, of course. To her twisted and deformed mind, she hurts and destroys people because they deserve it, and because it is her right. She lives with no regrets, but many grudges, and would sooner cut out your tongue than say she’s sorry.
History: Boom.
I understand that Michael and Lucifer had their apocalyptic fight in this game, but my Lucifer is not taken from that. She’s mostly canon and taken from the Pit, when Sam’s body is freed from Hell. She won’t have any memory at all of events in SJ simply because bitch wasn’t there.
Abilities/Powers:
Lucifer shares the abilities of all angels and archangels in the Supernatural canon- ie, reality warping, raising the dead, teleportation, weather manipulation, invulnerability, super-strength, some psychic ability, telekinesis, and time travel.
Reality warping is probably her most useful (and god-moding) power; she can create things from thin air that are as real as anything else, and make them vanish just as easily. Archangels less powerful than her have been seen creating pocket dimensions, alternate realities, and extended Groundhog Day-style time loops. She can alter her form to appear to be anybody, and can affect the bodies of others- for example, an angel in the show was seen causing a person’s lungs to vanish from their bodies with a thought, and giving them stomach cancer on a whim. She is capable of raising the dead, and it’s implied that she can bring angels back to life.
Teleportation is a fairly simple one. When she wants to be somewhere, she just thinks about it and it happens. By a similar token, when she wants to find somebody, she can do so unless they’re specifically trying to hide from her. There are various ways to hide from angels, including protective magic, Enochian sigils, and various other methods not explored in the shows but to which I am very open. Lucifer’s disappearances and re-appearances are accompanied by thunderclaps and flashes of lightning. This plays into her ability of weather manipulation, which is often involuntary or at the very least unintentional. Her very presence somewhere can be enough to cause a few city blocks to drop ten degrees in temperature, while the rest of the city stays normal, and her presence can also cause thunderstorms, rain, and general end of the world weather. She is fully capable of bringing down hurricanes, tornados, and forest fires.
Telekinesis is a powerful ability. She can utterly destroy an angel by making them explode with a simple snap of her fingers, and can kill with her mind. In addition to this, she can pin powerful beings and humans alike to the wall with her mind, and use her abilities to fight.
Her invulnerability and super-strength are part of what make her so dangerous. She is unkillable by most means- fighting or force from other angels can hurt her, a bullet from the Colt can bring her down for about a minute, and certain weapons designed to kill angels can harm her, but in the show only an archangel’s blade is shown to be dangerous enough to actually kill her permanently. She can be blasted forcefully out of her vessel’s body with an Enochian sigil. So far, she hasn’t found a human-made weapon that can hurt her, but it’s a wide world, and full of strange things. Her super strength is simple- her true voice can destroy buildings, her true form tends to burn the eyes from peoples’ heads, and she can lift and throw people far physically bigger and heavier than her without breaking a sweat.
Sample Journal Entry: http://community.livejournal.com/amusebox/22366.html?thread=2103134#t2103134
Sample RP:
In North Reading, Massachusetts, a teenage girl paced the length of her room over and over, pounding a trodden path into the carpeted floor. She was supposed to be studying for a Spanish final, but her concentration was derailed; she's been muttering to herself for some twenty minutes now. Periodically she turned on her heel to face the mirror above her desk, looking into it as if seeking to divine the mysteries of the universe in reflective glass. Here she leaned over, now she stared into reflected eyes, there she spoke impassioned words to the other-self gazing back. Kristen MacDonald was carrying on a one-way conversation with herself, and any listener would think she had the Devil himself locked in that bedroom with her.
Kristen practiced that conversation almost every night when she was alone. Every night she looked into the mirror, gave herself her motivation, and got into character to rehearse her lines. Because you didn't care, did you? You've never cared about anybody else but yourself for a second in your whole fucking life. It's fucking pathetic. How dare you try to look me in the eyes and tell me this is my fault? It was your responsibility, and you-
It was a conversation that will never happen. Kristen would never get the chance to sit her father down and tell him exactly what she thought about him. The words she really wanted to say never quite came out; they talked instead of sports teams and shallow things. They would probably go the rest of their lives without a single word of honesty to each other, and still Kristen practiced the rant every night. Maybe some day she'd get that chance; maybe some day the stars would align (with her blood alcohol level) and she'd scream every word of built-up hate from the entirety of her childhood at him, and he'd be forced to sit and listen in a daze. On some level, Kristen almost knew that actually carrying out that fantasy would leave her feeling empty and hollow, worse off than before.
***
In hunting for a new second-string vessel, Lucifer left no stone unturned. A yogi in Kashmir spurned her to the point of death, whereupon he went to an afterlife that Lucifer couldn't drag him back from- a lesson in staying to her own faith for mining souls. One little African boy killed himself after his third dream about her, rightly believing her to be a dangerous spirit trying to destroy him. Three, four, ten possibilities all lost, denied, burned through, or stolen from her by the crafty angels, leaving only one choice on Earth. So she found herself in the corner of a dark bedroom one evening, invisible and ineffable in her vessel-less form, the silent observer. Lucifer didn't know what she was waiting for, only that she could know it when she saw it and that taking this vessel would be easy. Kristen was just a girl.
Lucifer watched the girl for three days and two nights, and found nothing worth saving. Nothing at all- until some small change happened, some parent or another returned home from a business trip, something Lucifer couldn't care about if she tried. But her silent vigil was soon enough broken by the door crashing open and a little child running in, hitting the light switch and slamming the door closed behind him. The little boy, no more than nine or ten, threw himself at his bed and started crying. Within seconds he was followed in by Kristen herself, who ran to the boy's side and picked him up, drawing her brother closer to her by the shoulders.
"Shhhhh," Kristen cooed, one finger stroking feather-light over a bruise blossoming on the little boy's face. "It'll be okay."
The boy, clearly her little brother, looked up at her tearfully. "Why- why doesn't he love us?" he choked out, plainly hurt and confused.
Kristen herself looked utterly lost, and completely heartbroken. "I don't know, honey." She gripped him tight, holding the little boy to her chest like a mother cradling her child, and held him through almost ten minutes of little-boy tears. She kept stopping to whisper sweet, faint things into her brother's hair, and stopping to revel in any tiny hint of a smile she could draw out of him.
It was a pity, really. Lucifer knew Kristen would have made a fine vessel- but somehow, ultimately, Lucifer couldn't bring herself to destroy this girl. Not when her eyes kept falling on the little human boy, so desperate for love and eager to curl up in his big sister's arms. Lucifer could find another vessel.
When Kristen MacDonald went to bed that night, she almost brained herself on the thick thorns of a mysterious long-stemmed wild rose she found there. Even as she picked it up and ran delicate hands along its stem, she got the feeling that she knew it before, or had always found herself in this room, smelling the roses at eleven thirty at night. Somehow, when she breathed the delicate scent in deeply, the yawning sound of her little brother's sleepless nights became easier to bear, and she could find peace. It comforted her to think she had her own personal guardian angel.