[Application for Siren's Pull]
Player Information
Name: Lee
Age: 21
AIM SN: Fractal Dawn
email: fractaldawn@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Yes
Currrently Played Characters: None! I’m new.
Conditional: Activity Check Link:
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Smallville
Canon Format: Television
Character's Name: Lois Joanne Lane
Character's Age: 24
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played. N/A
What form will your character's NV take? Approximately a slightly-souped-up Android phone, to allow it to do the video and holographic functions. Her phone is more or less her lifeline to the world, so it makes sense that her NV would take that form.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: No technically superhuman ones. She does, however, come with a few skills.
Lois has a third-degree black belt in karate; she actually can handle herself in basic combat and is versed in self-defense, even if she’s no deadly-ninja-chick or anything like that. She also has a basic familiarity and proficiency with firearms, and could in fact be deadly with them. She doesn’t particularly like guns, though, and so rarely touches them. Lois also has passing familiarity with military tactics and some of the codeword lingo of the military, intelligence services, and government (i.e., she recognizes certain phrases in broadcasts as code for different kinds of military action).
She is also very, very good at doing her research. She’s not necessarily a great hacker--maybe a very low-level filter she could hack if she really, really wanted to--but she’s not a hacker so much as an experienced and dogged researcher. She will also break into places physically to get to them. On that note: while she may not be a hacker, she does have experience picking locks. Again, she’s no Catwoman-level world class thief, but if you want to keep Lois out of something, you’d damn well better ramp up the security on it--because if she really, really wants to get in, she will do the research to find a way in.
Again, canonically, Lois has no superhuman powers, or genius-level abilities. She is, however, a decent jack-of-all-trades and quick to learn.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? By preference, I would leave her ability dormant, because for philosophical, plot, and symbolic reasons her baseline humanity is kind of a cornerstone of who she is and the role she plays. That said? Truthsensing. She would be able to tell whether someone was deliberately lying or deliberately telling a partial truth--though they can give incorrect information if they believe it to be true. She would not, however, be capable of forcing someone to tell the truth. Nor would she be capable of telling what the truth is, except by deduction from the validity of the statement she heard. Similarly, the full lies of ‘The sky is pink’ and ‘I am your mother reincarnated into a robot’ would register equally as false. Partial lies would register as being partial, but give her no indication beyond what she could deduce independently as to which part of the statement was false. For example, if it were a rainy mid-afternoon, the misleading statement ‘It is a rainy night’ would register as a partial lie, but if Lois were underground with no idea of the time or weather, she would have no way of telling which part of that was false. With practice and honing it might grow to encompassing gestures or manners rather than actual spoken word, or even to handling some form of unintended untruths, but I hope to never have to think about that. I assume that any contests with 'perfect lying' abilities or 'be unreadable' abilities or characters would be worked out on a case-by-case basis; the tabletop system ability I had in mind would use a roll-off of dice to determine the winner. I am open to the argument that it is already active and that her investigative instinct is somewhat rooted in this, although again I frankly prefer to leave it dormant in her and not even use it in play.
Weapons: She crossed universes with mace and a pocket-knife on her. Just what she had in her pockets that night, unfortunately.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: Here.
- More specifically: [note: confirmed to work with Clark’s player] Clark passed out as he fell from the building after fighting with Zod, and is unaware that he did hit the ground below. Lois reached him shortly thereafter and pulled out the blue Kryptonite knife (canonical), but between the Book of Rao still being active and the Core interfering, both of them as well as the knife got yanked to Siren’s Port instead. Thanks to the Core being broken and full of fail, Lois was separated from the knife and from Clark, and for some reason didn’t turn up for a couple months afterwards.
Point in Canon: End of season 9/first few minutes of 10x01 (Lazarus)
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: None relevant
Character Personality: If there’s a single word to describe Lois, the best might be ‘contradictory.’ She has several layers of personality, one of which seems straightforward enough, one which muddies that until you see the logic behind her thoughts. It’s not always very good or well-justified logic, but it’s there nonetheless.
At a glance, Lois is describable within a few simple words: bitchy, loud, impatient, arrogant, thoughtless, foolhardy, stubborn, controlling, temperamental, and so tactless her photo deserves to be in the dictionary next to the definition of faux-pas. She makes no secret of the fact that she doesn’t suffer fools lightly. Her voice has a way of carrying, especially when angry, and she frequently ignores other people’s advice or arguments when she’s fired up. Lois sometimes tosses random pop-culture references into her speech, usually when making a bizarre analogy. There is even the occasional slightly more geekish reference, but those are rare. Still, her familiarity with media means she does sometimes recognize when she’s in something that usually only happens in, say, horror or adventure movies.
Despite her tactlessness and tendency to put her foot in her mouth more often than not, Lois is a reporter, and is damn good at it. She is unrelenting in her pursuit of a story, and it is this trait (rather than simply bad luck or being a Damsel) that gets her into so much trouble it takes a superhero bodyguard to keep her alive most days. She will also be completely straightforward and actually tell a story as she sees it--she has her biases, but unless it’s for ethical or sentimental reasons, she rarely softens her words. However, she always obeys her own code of ethics and strong sense of justice, and tries to avoid hurting innocent people or those who aren’t culpable in hurting the world around them.
As previously mentioned, it’s possible that falling bricks sometimes have more tact and subtlety than Lois does on her bad days, and she knows it. Not only that, but she tends to exhibit little concept of personal space, frequently getting right up in people’s faces and sometimes initiating physical contact with no real warning, particularly with people she likes. This lack of concern for personal space extends to belongings: she has no compunctions in stealing food, coffee, odds and ends, and even the occasional item of clothing. In some rare cases it might be a lack of respect sparking that kind of treatment, but usually, it’s an obscure way to mark her territory. Despite her prying and curiosity and tactlessness, she does have a sense for someone’s private life, especially when a story isn’t involved and sometimes even when it is. She honestly does sometimes recognize when a person needs space, and gives it without question (though maybe with a snarky comment). Similarly, she hates gossip purely for the sake of gossip.
While Lois usually acts unbearably impatient and impulsive, she has an enormous tolerance for the strange events which happen around her, and for the way that those closest to her sometimes cut her out and have their own agendas and lives. She has her breaking point, usually when two people she loves have conflicting needs or secrets, but again, her openness helps keep some of her deeper-running emotions hidden.
Not only is she good at using her bluntness to cover her real feelings, she can even do this to herself. Lois is uniquely capable of living in absolute and vehement denial over a subject for a nearly indefinite period. She will willfully ignore signs in front of her on the theory that, somehow, so long as she refuses to acknowledge something is true, reality will comply. This tends to be especially true with Lois and love of all forms-platonic, familial, and romantic, partly due to long-held abandonment issues. With romance, Lois distinguishes between love and being in love, and until recently, she has honestly never felt both for someone simultaneously. The closest she got was with Oliver Queen, who hit all her buttons for being a hero (something which really makes her tick) but, sadly, not the ones of being a man who would come home at the end of the day, in heart if not in deed. He was just the last of many relationships of different types which convinced her that being with her either holds someone back or is always going to take back seat to everything else more important.
She knows her own personality faults well enough, and as a result has a definite insecure streak that makes her wonder why anyone would want to stay with her, though she almost never admits that even to herself. This is contrasted with her own projected arrogance and honest self-assurance: she knows she’s attractive, intelligent, and good at what she does; she does not necessarily believe this is good enough, however. Oliver remains unique in that she still trusts him as a friend and hero these days, and loves him as such without entertaining any interest in him romantically. Still, Lois has honestly wondered when she’ll find the one who will stay, and discovered after meeting Arthur Curry that even more than just wanting someone she feels safe trusting her heart to, she has a serious weakness for guys who want to save the world--who give themselves to something larger. The problem is these two are in her experience more or less mutually incompatible.
As has been implied, there is a definite dichotomy between Lois’ apparent attitude and her real one. She tends to speak with a lot of sarcasm and cynicism, be brusque and even rude, and generally brush off most things, and to an extent this is a fairly honest treatment of the world. On the other hand, it implies a lack of empathy which could not be further from the truth. Lois is actually deeply passionate and compassionate, and part of her drive in investigative reporting is to make the world more fair and just to those in bad circumstances. And, with her fierce protectiveness towards her nearest and dearest, she’s definitely a lot more caring and perceptive than her tactlessness would imply. She also has a well-hidden tendency to care for and about the lost, lonely, and broken. She learned young, though, that it is easier for her to be callous and bluntly honest, and to hope that the lack of concern for anyone’s reaction to her honesty would cover up any vulnerability she might feel. Frankly, she has her father to thank for that tendency.
Family is absolutely critically important to Lois’ world, despite her insistence that she was raised to be independent and self-sufficient. As true as that is, her family--both blood and by adoption--has done more to shape her than just about anything else. In some ways, Lois still does and always will idealize her mother Ella, who died too young from lung cancer (developed from smoking by the time she was fifteen). Lois pretends to be a realist about her deceased parent, acknowledging her stupidity in smoking and occasional failings, but in reality, Ella is still very much the standard to which she holds herself: a woman who was fiercely strong, faced her death with dignity and courage, and who put up with a man who put his country before his family and loved him for it. Despite this, though neither of them admit it, but Lois is very much Daddy’s Little Girl. Lois will always be convinced that Sam wanted a son (not entirely without basis) and that she was in some sense raised to be the replacement for that boy. More often than not she calls him simply ‘the General,’ when speaking about him, and to his face he tends to be ‘daddy.’ He was always her hero growing up, and she frankly wanted nothing more than to please him, especially after her mom died.
Lois also has a severe case of Big Sister Syndrome due to her status as the oldest of the three children of the family, the other two being Chloe--barely younger but so much smaller and more in need of protection, in her cousin’s eyes--and Lucy, the baby of the family. Chloe she’s had to learn to let go of and trust that she does know what she’s doing; Lucy she’s had to learn to let go of with the knowledge that, frankly, nothing she does will ever change her younger sister. She’s far closer to Chloe than to Lucy, but at the same time, she’s aware Chloe keeps a lot more secrets from her and is better at doing so. In some ways, it makes her quite the outsider in her own family.
For all that her blood family is critical to her and her world view, her adopted family is at least as important, if not moreso. Both Perry and Chloe’s first husband Jimmy gained this status eventually for having faith in her. As central to her heart as if she’d been born to them, though, are Jonathan and Martha Kent. Jonathan was everything as a father she wished Sam had been, and to her shock gently stepped in to be a mentor for her as well, without hesitation or reservation. He was, in general, very much a guide for many of the young people who orbited Clark’s strange life, but for Lois he was particularly soothing as the first paternal figure to stop and listen, and to believe in her. Lois returned that faith with stellar performance inch for inch. As for Martha, well, in some ways she’s even more important to Lois. So long without a mother, Lois was surprised when Martha even gave her the kind of care she did--and Martha’s genuine fondness for her grew into treating Lois as the daughter she never had. After years of being starved for that kind of warmth, Lois quickly grew to look up to Martha as what a woman should be: intelligent, educated, competent, loving, successful in every possible interpretation of the word, graceful with the capacity for solitary independence but choosing to keep a warm home around her without losing her strength.
Even more than all of that, the Kents opened their home and their lives and their kitchen and on occasion their son’s bedroom and closet to Lois, and it changed from being The Right Thing to being a pleasure on their part, and it made the Kent farm home even during the years she lived at the Talon. Lois will never, ever stop loving them for that. But then again, as wonderful as Jonathan and Martha Kent are, they were not the ones who made the offer originally, and consciously or not Lois has never quite forgotten.
Frankly, Lois has loved Clark for a very long time. Clark was the one who first offered his home to her; Clark was the one she manipulated into letting her stay longer. Clark was the one she ran her first investigations with, the one who lets her play with the dog she refuses to admit is partly hers, the one who promised her she’d find someone more special than her first hero crush and the one who held her when she cried over Oliver. She admires his sense of honor, despite teasing him constantly, and is rather painfully aware that he’s the handsomest man she’s ever known. He is in every way the kind of guy she expects to find a nice girl, get married, settle down, and have a couple kids and a dog. She never, however, considered that she might be the kind of person he’d want, not until he actually made a move. She’s considered him a little flighty and emotionally withholding, and it’s held her back from giving everything she has when they did start dating at last. Nonetheless, she was willing to take things slow--both physically and later with her own work--to stay with him and make it work.
However, side by side with her growing relationship, someone else had begun to put a lot of faith in Lois, and it affected her rather deeply. A little over a year ago, she started talking on the phone with semi-regularity with Metropolis’ highly camera-shy superhero the Blur--a name she gave him due to his tendency to only show up as such on camera. While Clark was AWOL, he was her closest confidante, and she got to be able to read his mood a little even through the voice-changer he used. Even though she didn’t realize that, at some point, the clone of long-dead Major Zod of Kandor had started impersonating the actual Blur, by that time Lois was already just a little bit in love with the hero. She never regarded him as the kind of person who has a relationship, but she was always willing to take risks for him and trusted him absolutely, and has wanted nothing more than to meet him and see his face, to know him completely. She’s also been willing to shield him from anything and anyone, up to and including her occasionally-wayward boyfriend Clark Kent.
It was all quite a tangled situation for Lois, of course-loving the hero for his purity and ideals and what he did with them, and the farm boy for his heart and mind and steadiness and looks. Or it was until the Blur kissed her in a dark alley, where she couldn’t see his face. As if that matters when she’d know Clark’s kiss anywhere. Now she just doesn’t know what to do with that information.
Above all else, Lois is quintessentially human: contradictory, often irrational, screwed up at times, strongly ethical, frequently arrogant, determined, good at heart, vibrant, and intensely passionate.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: N/A
Character Plans: As with Clark, Lois will almost inevitably be recognized by people in Siren’s Port--by name, if not on sight (her image has varied so much over the years). She will doubtless flail around for a while trying to find her place, until she lands a reporting job (as it truly is her passion these days)--and it is almost guaranteed that she will end up pissing off both SERO and AGI seriously. She’s too likely to delve into both of their operations, and be loyal to neither. The canonical support for this is her attitude towards both LexCorp and Intergang, and history of breaking stories about corrupt corporations and human trafficking circles and the like. It’s just what she Does. So that’ll be all kinds of interesting.
Appearance/PB: Lois is about 5’8”, about 145 to 150lbs, and very much in shape. Her hair is a dark chestnut brown with bangs in front, and she usually wear it pinned up these days. Her eyes are hazel. At work she wears a lot of business power suits, usually with skirts, though sometimes slacks. Skirts make it easier to flash a little leg-perfect for distracting poor, defenseless, unsuspecting males, just before she kicks them in the face. Outside of work she’ll wear comfortable old jeans and tank tops. Oh yeah, she also has a tendency to sleep in plaid shirts stolen from Clark Kent’s closet.
For further reference.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The brunette on the video sports quite a few cuts and bruises; it looks like someone didn’t take her first night out seriously enough. From the scene behind her, she’s in the shelter-dugout, for those who would recognize it. ] Okay, newsflash of the hour: humans totally have parental instincts coded into them, and it sucks.
Have to say, the welcoming committee here is pretty thorough, but seriously, a week of horror movie screenings should probably be mandatory basic training. Unless someone’s trying to get us all killed, of course. Is someone? ‘Cause I think right about now I’d love an answer to that.
But now that we’ve gotten past the part where the doomed girl goes to aid the deceptively adorable small child, and past the running-like-hell, I guess this is where I ask if there’s any rhyme or reason to who’s here and who isn’t. Usually this is where I’d be getting the information first hand--believe half of what you see and none of what you hear, and all that--but... uh, that plan’s on hold for the night.
[ For a moment she looks sheepish and almost afraid, touching a light cut on her cheek, then running a hand through her hair. ] Anyway, happy to take in more and sundry info--I’ll assume the rest of you know how to get in touch with new people. Apparently, I’ll be here all night.
This has been Lois Lane, calling in from the edge of the Darkness.
Third Person Sample
Whatever else, Lois reflected as she towelled off her hair, the one convenient thing about even sketchily free living space was the shower.
Sure, she was stuck with the same clothes she’d been wearing, at least for now--and her mind was already drawing up a list of the practical concerns she had lying on her plate, of clothes and food and living supplies--but still, after her last day and night and this completely off-the-wall-crazy day? A long, hot shower was entirely what the doctor ordered. Or rather, what she’d ordered for herself after getting the hell away from the creepy, over-zealous doctors.
Running a hand through her hair before pulling it back into a ponytail, Lois glanced outside the window. It was getting late, she noted--nearing dusk. All those notices, the information she was given, implied that something about the night--Darkness-with-a-capital-D--was particularly chilling here. But this was unfamiliar territory. This time, the adage about believing half of what she saw and none of what she heard was the directive of the hour.
Besides which, she had questions, and in her experience the best way to get answers in a creepy-as-hell town was to go out and find them, and damn the consequences. And maybe some would be at that baseball field--the longer she left it, the colder the trail would get.
(And she had to find Clark--she had no idea what had happened to him, and hadn’t dared ask anyone directly.)
After a moment, Lois threw the towel into a chair with determination, grabbed her jacket, and stalked out the door, slamming it behind her. A few people were in the lobby downstairs, and a couple gave her concerned looks. “Hey,” one guy called, started towards her, “are you sure you shou--”
“Just going to the store,” she called back over her shoulder in an easy lie. “I’ll be back before anyone even notices it’s sundown.”
She broke into a trot as soon as she was outside. The paranoia about sundown was starting to get to her, even if she told herself that after surviving Smallville, there was nothing this town could throw at her worse than that.
She just kept repeating that to herself.
Name: Lee
Age: 21
AIM SN: Fractal Dawn
email: fractaldawn@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Yes
Currrently Played Characters: None! I’m new.
Conditional: Activity Check Link:
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Smallville
Canon Format: Television
Character's Name: Lois Joanne Lane
Character's Age: 24
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played. N/A
What form will your character's NV take? Approximately a slightly-souped-up Android phone, to allow it to do the video and holographic functions. Her phone is more or less her lifeline to the world, so it makes sense that her NV would take that form.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: No technically superhuman ones. She does, however, come with a few skills.
Lois has a third-degree black belt in karate; she actually can handle herself in basic combat and is versed in self-defense, even if she’s no deadly-ninja-chick or anything like that. She also has a basic familiarity and proficiency with firearms, and could in fact be deadly with them. She doesn’t particularly like guns, though, and so rarely touches them. Lois also has passing familiarity with military tactics and some of the codeword lingo of the military, intelligence services, and government (i.e., she recognizes certain phrases in broadcasts as code for different kinds of military action).
She is also very, very good at doing her research. She’s not necessarily a great hacker--maybe a very low-level filter she could hack if she really, really wanted to--but she’s not a hacker so much as an experienced and dogged researcher. She will also break into places physically to get to them. On that note: while she may not be a hacker, she does have experience picking locks. Again, she’s no Catwoman-level world class thief, but if you want to keep Lois out of something, you’d damn well better ramp up the security on it--because if she really, really wants to get in, she will do the research to find a way in.
Again, canonically, Lois has no superhuman powers, or genius-level abilities. She is, however, a decent jack-of-all-trades and quick to learn.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? By preference, I would leave her ability dormant, because for philosophical, plot, and symbolic reasons her baseline humanity is kind of a cornerstone of who she is and the role she plays. That said? Truthsensing. She would be able to tell whether someone was deliberately lying or deliberately telling a partial truth--though they can give incorrect information if they believe it to be true. She would not, however, be capable of forcing someone to tell the truth. Nor would she be capable of telling what the truth is, except by deduction from the validity of the statement she heard. Similarly, the full lies of ‘The sky is pink’ and ‘I am your mother reincarnated into a robot’ would register equally as false. Partial lies would register as being partial, but give her no indication beyond what she could deduce independently as to which part of the statement was false. For example, if it were a rainy mid-afternoon, the misleading statement ‘It is a rainy night’ would register as a partial lie, but if Lois were underground with no idea of the time or weather, she would have no way of telling which part of that was false. With practice and honing it might grow to encompassing gestures or manners rather than actual spoken word, or even to handling some form of unintended untruths, but I hope to never have to think about that. I assume that any contests with 'perfect lying' abilities or 'be unreadable' abilities or characters would be worked out on a case-by-case basis; the tabletop system ability I had in mind would use a roll-off of dice to determine the winner. I am open to the argument that it is already active and that her investigative instinct is somewhat rooted in this, although again I frankly prefer to leave it dormant in her and not even use it in play.
Weapons: She crossed universes with mace and a pocket-knife on her. Just what she had in her pockets that night, unfortunately.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: Here.
- More specifically: [note: confirmed to work with Clark’s player] Clark passed out as he fell from the building after fighting with Zod, and is unaware that he did hit the ground below. Lois reached him shortly thereafter and pulled out the blue Kryptonite knife (canonical), but between the Book of Rao still being active and the Core interfering, both of them as well as the knife got yanked to Siren’s Port instead. Thanks to the Core being broken and full of fail, Lois was separated from the knife and from Clark, and for some reason didn’t turn up for a couple months afterwards.
Point in Canon: End of season 9/first few minutes of 10x01 (Lazarus)
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: None relevant
Character Personality: If there’s a single word to describe Lois, the best might be ‘contradictory.’ She has several layers of personality, one of which seems straightforward enough, one which muddies that until you see the logic behind her thoughts. It’s not always very good or well-justified logic, but it’s there nonetheless.
At a glance, Lois is describable within a few simple words: bitchy, loud, impatient, arrogant, thoughtless, foolhardy, stubborn, controlling, temperamental, and so tactless her photo deserves to be in the dictionary next to the definition of faux-pas. She makes no secret of the fact that she doesn’t suffer fools lightly. Her voice has a way of carrying, especially when angry, and she frequently ignores other people’s advice or arguments when she’s fired up. Lois sometimes tosses random pop-culture references into her speech, usually when making a bizarre analogy. There is even the occasional slightly more geekish reference, but those are rare. Still, her familiarity with media means she does sometimes recognize when she’s in something that usually only happens in, say, horror or adventure movies.
Despite her tactlessness and tendency to put her foot in her mouth more often than not, Lois is a reporter, and is damn good at it. She is unrelenting in her pursuit of a story, and it is this trait (rather than simply bad luck or being a Damsel) that gets her into so much trouble it takes a superhero bodyguard to keep her alive most days. She will also be completely straightforward and actually tell a story as she sees it--she has her biases, but unless it’s for ethical or sentimental reasons, she rarely softens her words. However, she always obeys her own code of ethics and strong sense of justice, and tries to avoid hurting innocent people or those who aren’t culpable in hurting the world around them.
As previously mentioned, it’s possible that falling bricks sometimes have more tact and subtlety than Lois does on her bad days, and she knows it. Not only that, but she tends to exhibit little concept of personal space, frequently getting right up in people’s faces and sometimes initiating physical contact with no real warning, particularly with people she likes. This lack of concern for personal space extends to belongings: she has no compunctions in stealing food, coffee, odds and ends, and even the occasional item of clothing. In some rare cases it might be a lack of respect sparking that kind of treatment, but usually, it’s an obscure way to mark her territory. Despite her prying and curiosity and tactlessness, she does have a sense for someone’s private life, especially when a story isn’t involved and sometimes even when it is. She honestly does sometimes recognize when a person needs space, and gives it without question (though maybe with a snarky comment). Similarly, she hates gossip purely for the sake of gossip.
While Lois usually acts unbearably impatient and impulsive, she has an enormous tolerance for the strange events which happen around her, and for the way that those closest to her sometimes cut her out and have their own agendas and lives. She has her breaking point, usually when two people she loves have conflicting needs or secrets, but again, her openness helps keep some of her deeper-running emotions hidden.
Not only is she good at using her bluntness to cover her real feelings, she can even do this to herself. Lois is uniquely capable of living in absolute and vehement denial over a subject for a nearly indefinite period. She will willfully ignore signs in front of her on the theory that, somehow, so long as she refuses to acknowledge something is true, reality will comply. This tends to be especially true with Lois and love of all forms-platonic, familial, and romantic, partly due to long-held abandonment issues. With romance, Lois distinguishes between love and being in love, and until recently, she has honestly never felt both for someone simultaneously. The closest she got was with Oliver Queen, who hit all her buttons for being a hero (something which really makes her tick) but, sadly, not the ones of being a man who would come home at the end of the day, in heart if not in deed. He was just the last of many relationships of different types which convinced her that being with her either holds someone back or is always going to take back seat to everything else more important.
She knows her own personality faults well enough, and as a result has a definite insecure streak that makes her wonder why anyone would want to stay with her, though she almost never admits that even to herself. This is contrasted with her own projected arrogance and honest self-assurance: she knows she’s attractive, intelligent, and good at what she does; she does not necessarily believe this is good enough, however. Oliver remains unique in that she still trusts him as a friend and hero these days, and loves him as such without entertaining any interest in him romantically. Still, Lois has honestly wondered when she’ll find the one who will stay, and discovered after meeting Arthur Curry that even more than just wanting someone she feels safe trusting her heart to, she has a serious weakness for guys who want to save the world--who give themselves to something larger. The problem is these two are in her experience more or less mutually incompatible.
As has been implied, there is a definite dichotomy between Lois’ apparent attitude and her real one. She tends to speak with a lot of sarcasm and cynicism, be brusque and even rude, and generally brush off most things, and to an extent this is a fairly honest treatment of the world. On the other hand, it implies a lack of empathy which could not be further from the truth. Lois is actually deeply passionate and compassionate, and part of her drive in investigative reporting is to make the world more fair and just to those in bad circumstances. And, with her fierce protectiveness towards her nearest and dearest, she’s definitely a lot more caring and perceptive than her tactlessness would imply. She also has a well-hidden tendency to care for and about the lost, lonely, and broken. She learned young, though, that it is easier for her to be callous and bluntly honest, and to hope that the lack of concern for anyone’s reaction to her honesty would cover up any vulnerability she might feel. Frankly, she has her father to thank for that tendency.
Family is absolutely critically important to Lois’ world, despite her insistence that she was raised to be independent and self-sufficient. As true as that is, her family--both blood and by adoption--has done more to shape her than just about anything else. In some ways, Lois still does and always will idealize her mother Ella, who died too young from lung cancer (developed from smoking by the time she was fifteen). Lois pretends to be a realist about her deceased parent, acknowledging her stupidity in smoking and occasional failings, but in reality, Ella is still very much the standard to which she holds herself: a woman who was fiercely strong, faced her death with dignity and courage, and who put up with a man who put his country before his family and loved him for it. Despite this, though neither of them admit it, but Lois is very much Daddy’s Little Girl. Lois will always be convinced that Sam wanted a son (not entirely without basis) and that she was in some sense raised to be the replacement for that boy. More often than not she calls him simply ‘the General,’ when speaking about him, and to his face he tends to be ‘daddy.’ He was always her hero growing up, and she frankly wanted nothing more than to please him, especially after her mom died.
Lois also has a severe case of Big Sister Syndrome due to her status as the oldest of the three children of the family, the other two being Chloe--barely younger but so much smaller and more in need of protection, in her cousin’s eyes--and Lucy, the baby of the family. Chloe she’s had to learn to let go of and trust that she does know what she’s doing; Lucy she’s had to learn to let go of with the knowledge that, frankly, nothing she does will ever change her younger sister. She’s far closer to Chloe than to Lucy, but at the same time, she’s aware Chloe keeps a lot more secrets from her and is better at doing so. In some ways, it makes her quite the outsider in her own family.
For all that her blood family is critical to her and her world view, her adopted family is at least as important, if not moreso. Both Perry and Chloe’s first husband Jimmy gained this status eventually for having faith in her. As central to her heart as if she’d been born to them, though, are Jonathan and Martha Kent. Jonathan was everything as a father she wished Sam had been, and to her shock gently stepped in to be a mentor for her as well, without hesitation or reservation. He was, in general, very much a guide for many of the young people who orbited Clark’s strange life, but for Lois he was particularly soothing as the first paternal figure to stop and listen, and to believe in her. Lois returned that faith with stellar performance inch for inch. As for Martha, well, in some ways she’s even more important to Lois. So long without a mother, Lois was surprised when Martha even gave her the kind of care she did--and Martha’s genuine fondness for her grew into treating Lois as the daughter she never had. After years of being starved for that kind of warmth, Lois quickly grew to look up to Martha as what a woman should be: intelligent, educated, competent, loving, successful in every possible interpretation of the word, graceful with the capacity for solitary independence but choosing to keep a warm home around her without losing her strength.
Even more than all of that, the Kents opened their home and their lives and their kitchen and on occasion their son’s bedroom and closet to Lois, and it changed from being The Right Thing to being a pleasure on their part, and it made the Kent farm home even during the years she lived at the Talon. Lois will never, ever stop loving them for that. But then again, as wonderful as Jonathan and Martha Kent are, they were not the ones who made the offer originally, and consciously or not Lois has never quite forgotten.
Frankly, Lois has loved Clark for a very long time. Clark was the one who first offered his home to her; Clark was the one she manipulated into letting her stay longer. Clark was the one she ran her first investigations with, the one who lets her play with the dog she refuses to admit is partly hers, the one who promised her she’d find someone more special than her first hero crush and the one who held her when she cried over Oliver. She admires his sense of honor, despite teasing him constantly, and is rather painfully aware that he’s the handsomest man she’s ever known. He is in every way the kind of guy she expects to find a nice girl, get married, settle down, and have a couple kids and a dog. She never, however, considered that she might be the kind of person he’d want, not until he actually made a move. She’s considered him a little flighty and emotionally withholding, and it’s held her back from giving everything she has when they did start dating at last. Nonetheless, she was willing to take things slow--both physically and later with her own work--to stay with him and make it work.
However, side by side with her growing relationship, someone else had begun to put a lot of faith in Lois, and it affected her rather deeply. A little over a year ago, she started talking on the phone with semi-regularity with Metropolis’ highly camera-shy superhero the Blur--a name she gave him due to his tendency to only show up as such on camera. While Clark was AWOL, he was her closest confidante, and she got to be able to read his mood a little even through the voice-changer he used. Even though she didn’t realize that, at some point, the clone of long-dead Major Zod of Kandor had started impersonating the actual Blur, by that time Lois was already just a little bit in love with the hero. She never regarded him as the kind of person who has a relationship, but she was always willing to take risks for him and trusted him absolutely, and has wanted nothing more than to meet him and see his face, to know him completely. She’s also been willing to shield him from anything and anyone, up to and including her occasionally-wayward boyfriend Clark Kent.
It was all quite a tangled situation for Lois, of course-loving the hero for his purity and ideals and what he did with them, and the farm boy for his heart and mind and steadiness and looks. Or it was until the Blur kissed her in a dark alley, where she couldn’t see his face. As if that matters when she’d know Clark’s kiss anywhere. Now she just doesn’t know what to do with that information.
Above all else, Lois is quintessentially human: contradictory, often irrational, screwed up at times, strongly ethical, frequently arrogant, determined, good at heart, vibrant, and intensely passionate.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: N/A
Character Plans: As with Clark, Lois will almost inevitably be recognized by people in Siren’s Port--by name, if not on sight (her image has varied so much over the years). She will doubtless flail around for a while trying to find her place, until she lands a reporting job (as it truly is her passion these days)--and it is almost guaranteed that she will end up pissing off both SERO and AGI seriously. She’s too likely to delve into both of their operations, and be loyal to neither. The canonical support for this is her attitude towards both LexCorp and Intergang, and history of breaking stories about corrupt corporations and human trafficking circles and the like. It’s just what she Does. So that’ll be all kinds of interesting.
Appearance/PB: Lois is about 5’8”, about 145 to 150lbs, and very much in shape. Her hair is a dark chestnut brown with bangs in front, and she usually wear it pinned up these days. Her eyes are hazel. At work she wears a lot of business power suits, usually with skirts, though sometimes slacks. Skirts make it easier to flash a little leg-perfect for distracting poor, defenseless, unsuspecting males, just before she kicks them in the face. Outside of work she’ll wear comfortable old jeans and tank tops. Oh yeah, she also has a tendency to sleep in plaid shirts stolen from Clark Kent’s closet.
For further reference.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The brunette on the video sports quite a few cuts and bruises; it looks like someone didn’t take her first night out seriously enough. From the scene behind her, she’s in the shelter-dugout, for those who would recognize it. ] Okay, newsflash of the hour: humans totally have parental instincts coded into them, and it sucks.
Have to say, the welcoming committee here is pretty thorough, but seriously, a week of horror movie screenings should probably be mandatory basic training. Unless someone’s trying to get us all killed, of course. Is someone? ‘Cause I think right about now I’d love an answer to that.
But now that we’ve gotten past the part where the doomed girl goes to aid the deceptively adorable small child, and past the running-like-hell, I guess this is where I ask if there’s any rhyme or reason to who’s here and who isn’t. Usually this is where I’d be getting the information first hand--believe half of what you see and none of what you hear, and all that--but... uh, that plan’s on hold for the night.
[ For a moment she looks sheepish and almost afraid, touching a light cut on her cheek, then running a hand through her hair. ] Anyway, happy to take in more and sundry info--I’ll assume the rest of you know how to get in touch with new people. Apparently, I’ll be here all night.
This has been Lois Lane, calling in from the edge of the Darkness.
Third Person Sample
Whatever else, Lois reflected as she towelled off her hair, the one convenient thing about even sketchily free living space was the shower.
Sure, she was stuck with the same clothes she’d been wearing, at least for now--and her mind was already drawing up a list of the practical concerns she had lying on her plate, of clothes and food and living supplies--but still, after her last day and night and this completely off-the-wall-crazy day? A long, hot shower was entirely what the doctor ordered. Or rather, what she’d ordered for herself after getting the hell away from the creepy, over-zealous doctors.
Running a hand through her hair before pulling it back into a ponytail, Lois glanced outside the window. It was getting late, she noted--nearing dusk. All those notices, the information she was given, implied that something about the night--Darkness-with-a-capital-D--was particularly chilling here. But this was unfamiliar territory. This time, the adage about believing half of what she saw and none of what she heard was the directive of the hour.
Besides which, she had questions, and in her experience the best way to get answers in a creepy-as-hell town was to go out and find them, and damn the consequences. And maybe some would be at that baseball field--the longer she left it, the colder the trail would get.
(And she had to find Clark--she had no idea what had happened to him, and hadn’t dared ask anyone directly.)
After a moment, Lois threw the towel into a chair with determination, grabbed her jacket, and stalked out the door, slamming it behind her. A few people were in the lobby downstairs, and a couple gave her concerned looks. “Hey,” one guy called, started towards her, “are you sure you shou--”
“Just going to the store,” she called back over her shoulder in an easy lie. “I’ll be back before anyone even notices it’s sundown.”
She broke into a trot as soon as she was outside. The paranoia about sundown was starting to get to her, even if she told herself that after surviving Smallville, there was nothing this town could throw at her worse than that.
She just kept repeating that to herself.