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morethanasuperstarCW discussion of mental illness, self-destruction, drug use, murder
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Laura Wilson (Previously Persephone)
CHARACTER AGE: 18 (plus ~2 years in game would make 20)
SERIES: The Wicked + The Divine
CHRONOLOGY: end of issue 42
CLASS: “hero” in that she is doing her best to be A Good Person
HOUSING: Nonah #004, maybe
BACKGROUND: Every ninety years, twelve gods return as young people. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are all dead. It's happening now. It's happening again.”
Or so goes our introductory blurb to “WicDiv.” In a world very much like our own, there is one very extraordinary difference, commonly referred to as the “Recurrence”. During this two-year period, exactly twelve young people (think preteens to mid twenties) will receive what seems to be divine power and inspiration. These twelve will form a group that calls itself the Pantheon, and claim to be ancient gods living in extremely mortal flesh. They perform miracles, and drive the masses into frenzies with their words and art. Then, within two years, they will all be dead. Most will die violently. This time around, obviously, they are all fucking rock stars.
Like you might expect, not everyone feels the same way about the recurrence. Many scholars dispute anything “godly” about the Pantheon. Some doubt that the phenomenon even really happens (this is, after all, be the first Recurrence that will be publicly documented to such an extent). Others have believed that the Millennial generation is lacking so far as to not deserve the Recurrence.
Laura Wilson thinks all those people are morons who should shut up. She had full faith in the Pantheon before the first of them debuted. Even as a kid she was drawn to and inspired by the stories surrounding the Recurrence. She’s attended lectures and conventions for and by adults who may have even done their graduate work on Recurrence-related literature. In her mind, her destiny was always to be entangled with the Pantheon, whether she was one of the chosen few, or fated to just be their single most dedicated groupie, her faith is absolute.
When the Recurrence begins, her faith seems well-placed. Each concert she attends, she can feel the divinity of the Gods’ songs. As she follows and all-but-worships them, she feels like she is coming closer to divinity herself. But as one god after another is revealed, Laura begins to confront the truth that maybe she is just a normal teen girl.
And by “confront” I mean “not confront at all and get as deeply involved in divine melodrama as possible.” When Pantheon member Lucifer is framed for murder, it’s Laura who reaches out to her. But the attempted rescue goes badly. Luci’s dead badly. (Don’t worry, she gets better.)
After Lucifer’s death, Laura spirals into a traumatized depression. She does not commune with the gods, she pulls as far away from the fandom as she can. Just seeing Lucifer’s name is enough to make her sick with flashbacks.
It’s during this depression that she’s approached by Inanna, another member of the Pantheon that knew her (and was impressed!) back from the fandom before the Recurrence. Inanna, like Laura, suspects that Lucifer was set up. Laura’s position as an outside to the Pantheon, but very knowledgeable and connected in their following, puts her in a unique position to unravel whatever conspiracy ended Lucifer’s life. This new purpose, along with Inanna’s gentle patience, optimism, and love helps Laura start to come back to herself from her paralyzing grief over Lucifer’s death.
Inanna finds it was all set up by the keeper of the pantheon itself, Ananke. Said goddess visits Laura to name her the Secret Thirteenth God, Persephone. Anake’s plan was to resurrect and re-murder Persephone all at once. But she’s interrupted by Inanna, and the confrontation leads to not just Inanna’s death, but the deaths of Laura’s entire family as well, thereby wiping out everyone she loves in one night. (One of these people will get better).
Persephone retreats to the underground, where her grief makes her near-catatonic for weeks. She only really gets her shit together to take her bloody revenge on Ananke. Standing among Ananke’s shredded viscera, and covered in her blood, our heroine declares that the Pantheon can now do “whatever we want.”
Doing whatever they want seems all well and good, but when your hero, best friend, and entire family have been murdered, seeking your joy gets a little bit impossible. Persephone is initially taken in by major hunk and former one-night-stand, Baal, but he does not (and perhaps can not) give her the safe place of healing and stability she needs. To be fair, he had a lot of his own shit going on.
We don’t get to see the exact arc of the relationship, but by the time the narrative cuts back in, Persephone is now a careless force of self-destruction. She is convinced that all she does to Baal is hurt him, so she calls off even that and moves into a barely-furnished underground squat. While down there in her allegorical hell she tries to numb the pain with drugs, anonymous sex, even motorcycle crashes. The only thing that helps a little is her budding relationship with the most dangerous member of the Pantheon, Sakhmet.
So of course Sakhmet then goes on a killing spree, and then makes herself comfortable in Persephone’s squat to hide out. Persephone doesn’t want to give Sakhmet’s location away to Baal, knowing that he intends to kill her to protect the Pantheon’s reputation. But when Sakhmet kills the Pantheon member who came to talk her down, Persephone has no choice but to betray her lover. This goes even worse than anticipated, and Persephone is down another loved one. (Outlook Not So Good on Sakhmet getting better.)
After being accessory to yet another lovers-quarrel-to-the-death, and learning just how fucked and fucked up some other Pantheon members really are, she comes to the conclusion that godhood isn’t all its cracked up to be, and abdicates from her Queen of Hell schtick and goes back to just being plain ol Laura Wilson.
Now that she lacks her “divine” powers, she can better harness the subtle power of her own that she’s secretly had all along. She’s done with drugs and meaningless sex, and unplanned pregnancy. Laura Wilson is ready to be the leader the Pantheon has always lacked, and sets out with the surviving memebers to end the tragedy of the Recurrence, once and for all.
PERSONALITY: At the start of the story, Laura is a sort of Millennial Every Teen. She obsesses over pop stars and follower counts. She fights with her parents for no particular reason. She thinks most baby boomers should probably shut up. She can absolutely be short sighted, selfish, and immature. At the same time, her faith in her generation and pseudo-religious poptimism are driven by ideals she is truly dedicated to, and backed up by courage and loyalty. She’s a stalwart friend and faithful ally to those that give her a reason to be so. That said, she has a hard time seeing anything good about herself. She thinks her life can only have meaning if it’s embroiled with the Pantheon, which leads to a lot of completely undeserved self-loathing when it seems like it won’t be.
Laura had always been drawn to the mythos of the Recurrence. But it’s not just spiritual faith (though that is a factor)- Laura has faith that her generation will rise up with the inspiration of the gods, and she has faith that the gods themselves have something important to offer. She has faith that Lucifer is innocent, even and especially after her seemed execution. Even when suffering from depression, Laura never becomes truly jaded or disillusioned.
But! This is not to say that she’s all heroic piety (or. Even slightly pious and heroic). Laura can absolutely be short sighted and selfish as anyone else. It is no secret from herself or anyone else that she wanted the fame and adoration that Pantheon members receive. When the twelfth member is revealed to not be her she is devastated. Laura is way more interested in being famous and cool and inspiring for a few months than living to see twenty. And even if she’s not one of the Pantheon herself, she drops out of school so that she can further embroil herself in their affairs.
She’s also brave to the point of foolhardiness. Girl is seriously made of condensed YOLO and absolutely all about sneaking into jail to hang out with Lucifer. While the violence of Lucifer’s death traumatizes her, it obviously does not scare her away from the gods. There’s also something to be said here about a self-destructive (or at least self-disregarding) streak that has always been there, just waiting to be exacerbated by the trauma she suffers.
Because, at her core, she also has a lot of depression and self-loathing to work through. Up to her ascension and the murder of her family, Laura truly thinks she deserves any hard times that befall her, and that she’s totally worthless if she doesn’t achieve some arbitrary goal she’s set for herself. This too, of course, is made worse with trauma. As mentioned above, for a long time after Lucifer’s death, she simply withdraws into herself, unable to face the world at all.
As she spends time with the boundlessly supportive and kind Inanna, opens up to her parents, and has a lot of REALLY GOOD therapy, she begins to come out of the darkness she’d fallen into with Lucifer’s death. She starts to see the gods as real people in a horrible situation, rather than the distant heroes she’s worshipped. She comes to respect and even befriend her philosophical opposite.
That all goes right out the fucking window when she loses her family. Persephone considers herself a separate person from Laura-- moreso than anyone else we’ve seen in the Pantheon. To her, Laura Wilson is dead- fell deep enough into the darkness that something else entirely clawed its way back up.
Persephone inherited Laura’s bravery and steadfast faith, but that self-destructive and short-sightedness are now turned up to 11. She’s also now has wrathful, selfish and dishonest streaks to add to the mix. She might still hate herself, but she hates a lot of things now- just about everything, probably. In a world where no one gets what they deserve, why not just take whatever she wants? She sleeps with a guy who is ostensibly trying not to fuck up his monogamous relationship. She lies to her allies in storming Ananke’s stronghold: telling them it’s a rescue mission when her true goal is revenge. She tortures a guy!
There’s still glimpses of the sweet, gutsy girl she used to be, but by and large the world is dealing with an angry and deeply lost young woman with way more power than she knows how to deal with, and not a lot of time left to learn.
And then we reach The Final Laura. This is the Laura who’s been to Hell and back twice now, and didn’t come out unscathed. She’s been wounded in ways that may not ever quite heal, and even if they do, are sure to leave nasty scars. She will always have to live with knowing that seeking divinity (and death) cost her life and family.
She’s now tired of letting anyone else tell her what she’s supposed to be. She may not know what she is but she sure knows what she’s not: and that’s an object of worship. And accepting that hurt like hell, but she’s learning to work with her broken sense of self, rather than try to run away from it. She’s much far less confrontational and brash. The interpersonal intelligence that she’s always had is now at the forefront of her decision making. And while, yes, she has gotten a touch manipulative, she is only doing it to protect lives in the best way she can.
Put simply: in giving up on trying to be super, Laura is finding her way to being an actual hero.
Just also kind of a hero who spends a lot of her day crying.
Reapp considerations: Laura’s time in Mask or Menace the first time around wasn’t all that great. She had Inanna to keep her stable, but without the purpose of investigating Lucifer’s death she simply drifted, got clingier to him and disinterested in this world that should have been a really cool detour. (A HUGE pantheon, none of them with death sentences? Really honestly would have been a dream come true for a slightly less traumatized Laura.) The only good CR she made was with Lucifer, who was gone by the time she came back.
But her second time around! This time she came back knowing that Ananke had been preying on and murdering “the children” with impunity. She was ready to rage against this world, and what she saw as a culture of naive uncaring. You know, regular edgy teen shit.
But shortly after her arrival, she met a number of parties who would not let her collapse in on herself the same way she ended up doing in canon. First was a reunion with patient and kind Inanna. At about the same time, she met Nico D’Angelo, a boy who was the literal son of the real Hades, and who had more than a little experience in mourning family and discounting his own safety. Then came John Constantine seeing how much money he could make on a girl like her, and Batman encouraging her to find something good to make out of her darkness. Luci showed up and they fell into bed pretty much immediately.
All this resulted in her embracing the role of “Persephone” far more than she ever does in canon. As fucked up as her world is, the world of Mask or Menace is much moreso. Imports and natives both benefited from the release of her concert in a way that did really make her feel like “Persephone” had real meaning, and that she was doing real good.
And then when she was spiraling a bit, her friends held an intervention. They forced her to admit to and then confront just how terrible her losses had been for her stability. Luci left for a while, which sucked, but when she came back they started a far more serious relationship.
All of this resulted in healing and growth that she never had a chance for in canon. She still needed to identify as Persephone in order to avoid the full brunt of her pain, but after enough time and safety, even that she handled better. The name “Persephone” became a stage name, in her personal life she was happier being Laura Wilson.
Too bad she forgot all that and went to go suffer through six months of failure and humiliation and death!
When she gets back to MoM, her first challenge will be reconciling her two very different paths to Laura Wilson. Since her canon memories will be much more recent, and since she is always prone to being as unkind to herself as possible, she will identify much more with the failure-and-death rout rather than the safety-and-success-and-friendship path she took in MoM. Lucky she still has a few friends here to help her out!
POWER:
Glitter in the Dark Laura’s canon powers- seemingly ones she has just for being herself, which she has gained better control over, having abdicated from the role of Persephone.
A Spark: Laura can make small but self-sustaining fires (ie, can hover in the air without any apparent fuel)
Underworld Affinity: she can no longer bust through the ground with her vines, so she has to seek a real path to The Underground, which could be a subway, or a basement, or maintenance access. When she does find such an entrance, she can string together a magical path through various underground passages that gets her wherever she wants to go, but only in the urban spaces where such underground exists. While she’s under the earth, both mundane and magical tracking of her will be much more difficult, and it’s implied that she just has a general overall Home Turf Advantage.
Performance: she can’t create the same profound and complex performances as Persephone, but she can stun and mildy manipulate people with her voice.
Pomegranate generation: now with little to no control over it, because that’s a great joke.
Persephone, the Destroyer:
(Note: I want to keep her with these powers, but sort of “locked.” She doesn’t know she has them and would avoid using them even if she did know. This is so that if I run out of ideas for using them, I can force the issue with character plot, which I usually find more satisfying.)
Super strength/speed/stamina/durability etc seem pretty standard to the Pantheon. Persephone is a brutal brawler- her own strength and durability seem above and beyond the rest of the pantheon, though she seems towards the back of the pack as far as speed goes. Her main weapon are vines that she summons from the earth. They can be used as whips, shields, tentacles, battering rams, projectiles- at one point she makes a construct out of them the size of a multi-story building, other times we see them taking out walls easily.
As a Chthonic god, she has everything mentioned above for Underworld Affinity, and then some. Now she can travel straight through the earth very quickly (though not in fact instantly) using her vines. Nor does she need to find an entrance, as she can just make her own.
Then there’s her Performance, far more powerful and complex than Laura’s. When she sings, people lose their shit. For a few people, it sounds like nothing. For most people, it’s the most intensely awesome rock concert conceivable. Just. Fucking. Awesome. For many people, her meaning will be clear even though the lyrics are entirely in tongues- this is left mostly ambiguous in canon, but I infer that the themes are about grief, depression, but also hope, about living in hell, but still living. And with that, will feel like a huge hit of whatever shit they are most into. For people prone to hearing this sort of thing, there may be some loss of personal control in their reaction- crying, fainting, smashing objects, etc.
Also she seems to have an infinite supply of pomegranates, that she can access in the most dramatic way possible.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: responding to a traumatic timeloop by inviting everyone to her cave for a Pajama Party.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: TDM Log! thread with ambasciatore has the most introspection
automated pom-spanker
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Laura Wilson (Previously Persephone)
CHARACTER AGE: 18 (plus ~2 years in game would make 20)
SERIES: The Wicked + The Divine
CHRONOLOGY: end of issue 42
CLASS: “hero” in that she is doing her best to be A Good Person
HOUSING: Nonah #004, maybe
BACKGROUND: Every ninety years, twelve gods return as young people. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are all dead. It's happening now. It's happening again.”
Or so goes our introductory blurb to “WicDiv.” In a world very much like our own, there is one very extraordinary difference, commonly referred to as the “Recurrence”. During this two-year period, exactly twelve young people (think preteens to mid twenties) will receive what seems to be divine power and inspiration. These twelve will form a group that calls itself the Pantheon, and claim to be ancient gods living in extremely mortal flesh. They perform miracles, and drive the masses into frenzies with their words and art. Then, within two years, they will all be dead. Most will die violently. This time around, obviously, they are all fucking rock stars.
Like you might expect, not everyone feels the same way about the recurrence. Many scholars dispute anything “godly” about the Pantheon. Some doubt that the phenomenon even really happens (this is, after all, be the first Recurrence that will be publicly documented to such an extent). Others have believed that the Millennial generation is lacking so far as to not deserve the Recurrence.
Laura Wilson thinks all those people are morons who should shut up. She had full faith in the Pantheon before the first of them debuted. Even as a kid she was drawn to and inspired by the stories surrounding the Recurrence. She’s attended lectures and conventions for and by adults who may have even done their graduate work on Recurrence-related literature. In her mind, her destiny was always to be entangled with the Pantheon, whether she was one of the chosen few, or fated to just be their single most dedicated groupie, her faith is absolute.
When the Recurrence begins, her faith seems well-placed. Each concert she attends, she can feel the divinity of the Gods’ songs. As she follows and all-but-worships them, she feels like she is coming closer to divinity herself. But as one god after another is revealed, Laura begins to confront the truth that maybe she is just a normal teen girl.
And by “confront” I mean “not confront at all and get as deeply involved in divine melodrama as possible.” When Pantheon member Lucifer is framed for murder, it’s Laura who reaches out to her. But the attempted rescue goes badly. Luci’s dead badly. (Don’t worry, she gets better.)
After Lucifer’s death, Laura spirals into a traumatized depression. She does not commune with the gods, she pulls as far away from the fandom as she can. Just seeing Lucifer’s name is enough to make her sick with flashbacks.
It’s during this depression that she’s approached by Inanna, another member of the Pantheon that knew her (and was impressed!) back from the fandom before the Recurrence. Inanna, like Laura, suspects that Lucifer was set up. Laura’s position as an outside to the Pantheon, but very knowledgeable and connected in their following, puts her in a unique position to unravel whatever conspiracy ended Lucifer’s life. This new purpose, along with Inanna’s gentle patience, optimism, and love helps Laura start to come back to herself from her paralyzing grief over Lucifer’s death.
Inanna finds it was all set up by the keeper of the pantheon itself, Ananke. Said goddess visits Laura to name her the Secret Thirteenth God, Persephone. Anake’s plan was to resurrect and re-murder Persephone all at once. But she’s interrupted by Inanna, and the confrontation leads to not just Inanna’s death, but the deaths of Laura’s entire family as well, thereby wiping out everyone she loves in one night. (One of these people will get better).
Persephone retreats to the underground, where her grief makes her near-catatonic for weeks. She only really gets her shit together to take her bloody revenge on Ananke. Standing among Ananke’s shredded viscera, and covered in her blood, our heroine declares that the Pantheon can now do “whatever we want.”
Doing whatever they want seems all well and good, but when your hero, best friend, and entire family have been murdered, seeking your joy gets a little bit impossible. Persephone is initially taken in by major hunk and former one-night-stand, Baal, but he does not (and perhaps can not) give her the safe place of healing and stability she needs. To be fair, he had a lot of his own shit going on.
We don’t get to see the exact arc of the relationship, but by the time the narrative cuts back in, Persephone is now a careless force of self-destruction. She is convinced that all she does to Baal is hurt him, so she calls off even that and moves into a barely-furnished underground squat. While down there in her allegorical hell she tries to numb the pain with drugs, anonymous sex, even motorcycle crashes. The only thing that helps a little is her budding relationship with the most dangerous member of the Pantheon, Sakhmet.
So of course Sakhmet then goes on a killing spree, and then makes herself comfortable in Persephone’s squat to hide out. Persephone doesn’t want to give Sakhmet’s location away to Baal, knowing that he intends to kill her to protect the Pantheon’s reputation. But when Sakhmet kills the Pantheon member who came to talk her down, Persephone has no choice but to betray her lover. This goes even worse than anticipated, and Persephone is down another loved one. (Outlook Not So Good on Sakhmet getting better.)
After being accessory to yet another lovers-quarrel-to-the-death, and learning just how fucked and fucked up some other Pantheon members really are, she comes to the conclusion that godhood isn’t all its cracked up to be, and abdicates from her Queen of Hell schtick and goes back to just being plain ol Laura Wilson.
Now that she lacks her “divine” powers, she can better harness the subtle power of her own that she’s secretly had all along. She’s done with drugs and meaningless sex, and unplanned pregnancy. Laura Wilson is ready to be the leader the Pantheon has always lacked, and sets out with the surviving memebers to end the tragedy of the Recurrence, once and for all.
PERSONALITY: At the start of the story, Laura is a sort of Millennial Every Teen. She obsesses over pop stars and follower counts. She fights with her parents for no particular reason. She thinks most baby boomers should probably shut up. She can absolutely be short sighted, selfish, and immature. At the same time, her faith in her generation and pseudo-religious poptimism are driven by ideals she is truly dedicated to, and backed up by courage and loyalty. She’s a stalwart friend and faithful ally to those that give her a reason to be so. That said, she has a hard time seeing anything good about herself. She thinks her life can only have meaning if it’s embroiled with the Pantheon, which leads to a lot of completely undeserved self-loathing when it seems like it won’t be.
Laura had always been drawn to the mythos of the Recurrence. But it’s not just spiritual faith (though that is a factor)- Laura has faith that her generation will rise up with the inspiration of the gods, and she has faith that the gods themselves have something important to offer. She has faith that Lucifer is innocent, even and especially after her seemed execution. Even when suffering from depression, Laura never becomes truly jaded or disillusioned.
But! This is not to say that she’s all heroic piety (or. Even slightly pious and heroic). Laura can absolutely be short sighted and selfish as anyone else. It is no secret from herself or anyone else that she wanted the fame and adoration that Pantheon members receive. When the twelfth member is revealed to not be her she is devastated. Laura is way more interested in being famous and cool and inspiring for a few months than living to see twenty. And even if she’s not one of the Pantheon herself, she drops out of school so that she can further embroil herself in their affairs.
She’s also brave to the point of foolhardiness. Girl is seriously made of condensed YOLO and absolutely all about sneaking into jail to hang out with Lucifer. While the violence of Lucifer’s death traumatizes her, it obviously does not scare her away from the gods. There’s also something to be said here about a self-destructive (or at least self-disregarding) streak that has always been there, just waiting to be exacerbated by the trauma she suffers.
Because, at her core, she also has a lot of depression and self-loathing to work through. Up to her ascension and the murder of her family, Laura truly thinks she deserves any hard times that befall her, and that she’s totally worthless if she doesn’t achieve some arbitrary goal she’s set for herself. This too, of course, is made worse with trauma. As mentioned above, for a long time after Lucifer’s death, she simply withdraws into herself, unable to face the world at all.
As she spends time with the boundlessly supportive and kind Inanna, opens up to her parents, and has a lot of REALLY GOOD therapy, she begins to come out of the darkness she’d fallen into with Lucifer’s death. She starts to see the gods as real people in a horrible situation, rather than the distant heroes she’s worshipped. She comes to respect and even befriend her philosophical opposite.
That all goes right out the fucking window when she loses her family. Persephone considers herself a separate person from Laura-- moreso than anyone else we’ve seen in the Pantheon. To her, Laura Wilson is dead- fell deep enough into the darkness that something else entirely clawed its way back up.
Persephone inherited Laura’s bravery and steadfast faith, but that self-destructive and short-sightedness are now turned up to 11. She’s also now has wrathful, selfish and dishonest streaks to add to the mix. She might still hate herself, but she hates a lot of things now- just about everything, probably. In a world where no one gets what they deserve, why not just take whatever she wants? She sleeps with a guy who is ostensibly trying not to fuck up his monogamous relationship. She lies to her allies in storming Ananke’s stronghold: telling them it’s a rescue mission when her true goal is revenge. She tortures a guy!
There’s still glimpses of the sweet, gutsy girl she used to be, but by and large the world is dealing with an angry and deeply lost young woman with way more power than she knows how to deal with, and not a lot of time left to learn.
And then we reach The Final Laura. This is the Laura who’s been to Hell and back twice now, and didn’t come out unscathed. She’s been wounded in ways that may not ever quite heal, and even if they do, are sure to leave nasty scars. She will always have to live with knowing that seeking divinity (and death) cost her life and family.
She’s now tired of letting anyone else tell her what she’s supposed to be. She may not know what she is but she sure knows what she’s not: and that’s an object of worship. And accepting that hurt like hell, but she’s learning to work with her broken sense of self, rather than try to run away from it. She’s much far less confrontational and brash. The interpersonal intelligence that she’s always had is now at the forefront of her decision making. And while, yes, she has gotten a touch manipulative, she is only doing it to protect lives in the best way she can.
Put simply: in giving up on trying to be super, Laura is finding her way to being an actual hero.
Just also kind of a hero who spends a lot of her day crying.
Reapp considerations: Laura’s time in Mask or Menace the first time around wasn’t all that great. She had Inanna to keep her stable, but without the purpose of investigating Lucifer’s death she simply drifted, got clingier to him and disinterested in this world that should have been a really cool detour. (A HUGE pantheon, none of them with death sentences? Really honestly would have been a dream come true for a slightly less traumatized Laura.) The only good CR she made was with Lucifer, who was gone by the time she came back.
But her second time around! This time she came back knowing that Ananke had been preying on and murdering “the children” with impunity. She was ready to rage against this world, and what she saw as a culture of naive uncaring. You know, regular edgy teen shit.
But shortly after her arrival, she met a number of parties who would not let her collapse in on herself the same way she ended up doing in canon. First was a reunion with patient and kind Inanna. At about the same time, she met Nico D’Angelo, a boy who was the literal son of the real Hades, and who had more than a little experience in mourning family and discounting his own safety. Then came John Constantine seeing how much money he could make on a girl like her, and Batman encouraging her to find something good to make out of her darkness. Luci showed up and they fell into bed pretty much immediately.
All this resulted in her embracing the role of “Persephone” far more than she ever does in canon. As fucked up as her world is, the world of Mask or Menace is much moreso. Imports and natives both benefited from the release of her concert in a way that did really make her feel like “Persephone” had real meaning, and that she was doing real good.
And then when she was spiraling a bit, her friends held an intervention. They forced her to admit to and then confront just how terrible her losses had been for her stability. Luci left for a while, which sucked, but when she came back they started a far more serious relationship.
All of this resulted in healing and growth that she never had a chance for in canon. She still needed to identify as Persephone in order to avoid the full brunt of her pain, but after enough time and safety, even that she handled better. The name “Persephone” became a stage name, in her personal life she was happier being Laura Wilson.
Too bad she forgot all that and went to go suffer through six months of failure and humiliation and death!
When she gets back to MoM, her first challenge will be reconciling her two very different paths to Laura Wilson. Since her canon memories will be much more recent, and since she is always prone to being as unkind to herself as possible, she will identify much more with the failure-and-death rout rather than the safety-and-success-and-friendship path she took in MoM. Lucky she still has a few friends here to help her out!
POWER:
Glitter in the Dark Laura’s canon powers- seemingly ones she has just for being herself, which she has gained better control over, having abdicated from the role of Persephone.
A Spark: Laura can make small but self-sustaining fires (ie, can hover in the air without any apparent fuel)
Underworld Affinity: she can no longer bust through the ground with her vines, so she has to seek a real path to The Underground, which could be a subway, or a basement, or maintenance access. When she does find such an entrance, she can string together a magical path through various underground passages that gets her wherever she wants to go, but only in the urban spaces where such underground exists. While she’s under the earth, both mundane and magical tracking of her will be much more difficult, and it’s implied that she just has a general overall Home Turf Advantage.
Performance: she can’t create the same profound and complex performances as Persephone, but she can stun and mildy manipulate people with her voice.
Pomegranate generation: now with little to no control over it, because that’s a great joke.
Persephone, the Destroyer:
(Note: I want to keep her with these powers, but sort of “locked.” She doesn’t know she has them and would avoid using them even if she did know. This is so that if I run out of ideas for using them, I can force the issue with character plot, which I usually find more satisfying.)
Super strength/speed/stamina/durability etc seem pretty standard to the Pantheon. Persephone is a brutal brawler- her own strength and durability seem above and beyond the rest of the pantheon, though she seems towards the back of the pack as far as speed goes. Her main weapon are vines that she summons from the earth. They can be used as whips, shields, tentacles, battering rams, projectiles- at one point she makes a construct out of them the size of a multi-story building, other times we see them taking out walls easily.
As a Chthonic god, she has everything mentioned above for Underworld Affinity, and then some. Now she can travel straight through the earth very quickly (though not in fact instantly) using her vines. Nor does she need to find an entrance, as she can just make her own.
Then there’s her Performance, far more powerful and complex than Laura’s. When she sings, people lose their shit. For a few people, it sounds like nothing. For most people, it’s the most intensely awesome rock concert conceivable. Just. Fucking. Awesome. For many people, her meaning will be clear even though the lyrics are entirely in tongues- this is left mostly ambiguous in canon, but I infer that the themes are about grief, depression, but also hope, about living in hell, but still living. And with that, will feel like a huge hit of whatever shit they are most into. For people prone to hearing this sort of thing, there may be some loss of personal control in their reaction- crying, fainting, smashing objects, etc.
Also she seems to have an infinite supply of pomegranates, that she can access in the most dramatic way possible.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: responding to a traumatic timeloop by inviting everyone to her cave for a Pajama Party.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: TDM Log! thread with ambasciatore has the most introspection
automated pom-spanker
