ShadowSeeker

Lucilla hates being told she’s under Urbanshades control in anyway. Majority of her life, her father controlled her singing carrier because he became monkey hungry, and Lucilla couldn’t do much about this since he made a shared account between them, and threatens at times to set her up for some sort of crime. Lucilla was only able to use a limited amount of money, and put it towards helping her mom with her cancer. Her mom was the only person who actually loved her since she couldn’t make any current friends with her dad being so controlling. Unfortunately her mother passed away, leaving her father to be the only person in her life. So she drank to ignore her current state of life, which barely helped. The fake job application Lucilla found from Urbanshade felt like a chance to escape everything and for once be independent. But she just became another persons pawn, and directly designed after someone else.

With all this information, there’s a few things that caused a major effect on Lucilla’s desperation to feel like she’s not being controlled by anyone. One, her father controlling every aspect of her life to the point she hated the only talent she had (singing). Two, Urbanshade taking control of her life after making her think she was going to be free. Three, her body being designed directly after Sebastian but for the purpose of being able to overpower him and other experiments.

The two first reasons have similar concepts, they both affect her desire to want to have control over her life, the third one is similar, but affects her in a slightly more different aspect. Once she found out her body was experimented on with the thought of it being to be more powerful than another asset makes her hate seeing herself for many reasons, and hate Sebastian as well. She barely had any control over her life as a human, now she doesn’t even have a body that’s just for herself, but based after something else but to be better. Sebastian’s design was planned with its own original concept, not after anyone else, hers on the other hand was designed after him. All of this makes her feel like she was never born to be herself but just for the next person to exploit her or to be for someone else. She yearns for control.

Now that we know all of this, we can get an idea of why Lucilla is violent and hostile. Lucilla is always trying to gain control, to always end up at the top for her own self-worth, she despises the idea of doing something for someone else, because then she was still under someone else’s command. If she ever is told to do something, she does it in the most annoying way possible just so she feels like she can control the situation still, this is why she annoys Sebastian, because she doesn’t want him to gain the entire control over the alliance. The alliance also makes her feel like she has control over Urbanshade even if they don’t realize it, because she’s working behind their back and not doing what they want her to do, which is to assassinate Sebastian. Her yearn for control makes her think the simplest requests from someone else would make her loose everything she’s gradually gained while being in the Hadal Blacksite and working alongside Sebastian.

Now, why does Lucilla act hostile towards others and constantly try to shut everyone out? (As if anyone try’s to be a shoulder to lean on for her, so I guess this would be more of her trying to avoid any mention of her past or being vulnerable) this would probably be an obvious answer for the first part, but Lucilla hates being vulnerable, it feels wierd after 5 years of being experimented on and put through tests to make her more better with battle, so the concept of being herself feels uncomfortable now. Trying to force her to be vulnerable and pushing her for it will do nothing, she’ll just snap and try to crush your head. As shown in the Lucbastian short story, Lucilla and Sebastian never leaned on each other, they’ve always had a back and forth conflict. The reason why Lucilla even opened up in that moment was because they were both in a similar situation and had similar motives. She had someone she could relate to and could understand her to some extent. With that, it had caused her to breakdown for a few minutes, because she felt understood in some way.

(For some development in Lucbastian dynamic) After that, Lucilla still tried to keep distance between them, though it was harder when he didn’t even shut her down when she was venting to him. So she decided to lessen on how harsh she was towards him. In some way, she almost felt guilty if she continued to be a complete asshole to him after being so vulnerable. She’ll do kind gestures, but always make up the excuse it was because she was tired of his whining.

Another thing with Lucilla is that she feels different from the other assets. She was designed and experimented on in a different facility for more defined experiments, while a majority of the rest were in the Hadal Blacksite, this makes her believe her own trauma is invalid, not just because she’s scared of being controlled by being vulnerable, but also because she hates being pointed out for trying to terminate Sebastian in the first month of being sent down. She was never there in the facility with Sebastian or painter. It’s complicating to explain exactly how this makes her feel, but to put it simply, it’s like being the new kid to a school and struggling to fit in. Which adds onto her belief of needing to be completely independent, because if she suddenly showed all her true emotions, she’d imagine she’d be berated or something along those lines.

This part contains a form of self-harm. Lucilla doesn’t just attack all the assets in the facility for fun, she goes after anyone she can find to fight, but this isn’t due to her entirely enjoying it. She does it in the hopes of not being the perfect assassin for Urbanshade like they designed her to be. Even if it seems minor, not surviving a battle would make her feel like her own person by not being how Urbanshade wanted her to be. Yes Lucilla could just get rid of herself on her own, but she finds it to be a pathetic way to go out and would rather go out being violent.

Lucilla can act very animalistic, with how she prefers to use brutal force over any weapons. This is mostly due to her being trained without weapons, so she had to learn how to battle with her own strength, and she’d prefer that over using any weapon.

Speaking of when she was still in training and in the different facility. Lucilla isn’t a cannibal by choice. Urbanshade was realizing fish weren’t enough to feed her, so that’s when they started feeding her expendables. The first expendable was her father. She refused to eat him due to that being a human but also her family. Urbanshade left the two of them in there for two days where they both slowly starved. In this time, Lucilla started to loose sight with who she was. She tried to explain to him that she was his daughter, but he kept saying his daughter wasn’t a monster, but a singer who made lots of money. She never snapped in this time, she got frustrated, had meltdowns, but she never snapped at him because she wanted to believe he loved her somehow, because if he didn’t, then no one loved her, and she didn’t know how she could live with that, knowing no one else personally loved or cared for her. On the second day, her starvation, conflicting emotions, and her father’s words didn’t mix well. This resulted her eating him in the hunger of the moment, not being able to think straight. Once she finally got back to her senses, she broke down, crying in the corner or begging him to get up, trying to convince herself she didn’t do it. Urbanshade took the remains away while she disassociated. After that, she didn’t believe she was the same person anymore.

This leads to a new set of beliefs for her. She was convinced in some confusing way that the real her when she was still human existed, but a monster had eaten her. She refuses to entirely accept she did those actions by her own will. This eventually created her animalistic and violent persona to cope with the events, which led her to much more easily eating the other expendables, and continuing with trying to eat the other creatures she find in the Hadal Blacksite.

Now, depending on how you view Lucilla and from all previously stated information, this may be hard to believe. Lucilla craves love. She doesn’t care if it’s platonic or romantic, she wants to feel loved. The only person who gave her that was her mother, but it still wasn’t much when she was still growing up and learning. She as of now, try’s to ignore this need, believing she doesn’t need it, but lacking love can affect the brain along with social interactions. From what I’ve read, the things it can do to a person aligns perfectly with her. It Emotionally Impacts her: her father made her feel useless if she wasn’t making money, and blames herself for her mother’s passing. And after she gets experimented on, we see more of her emotional withdrawal: Lucilla doesn’t feel loved by anyone in the facility really, which causes her to avoid many social interactions that may be positive, she prefers violent, hostile, or threatening interactions, or just an argument with Sebastian, because they give her some adrenaline to momentarily forget about how lonely she feels. She prefers to be alone also because hearing Sebastian and Painter talk makes her jealous of their bond, something she hasn’t experienced and wants to experience, but doesn’t feel worthy to experience it, or feels like she’s gone too far down her path of choice to turn back.

Now for what Lucilla fears. As previously stated, she fears being vulnerable, but the biggest thing she fears is loosing people who are extremely important to her. This stems from her mom passing, it made her feel like anything good was going to eventually be taken away. Though she never realizes it until it’s too late, she deeply cares for Painter and Sebastian the longer she grew to knew them. She never realized this since she always tried to do something to ignore any feelings that she thought would make her vulnerable, again relating to getting an adrenaline rush. If anything, she had mistaken her caring for them as just growing excitement for when she would betray him, but she started to question herself after she vented to Sebastian if it really was only that, which made her anxious. Lucilla would then have two conflicting fears: the fear of being open and vulnerable to let people in, and the fear of loosing people close to her. This gives her a conflicting mind set, and often causes her to act out and get aggressive.

In a comic I posted (on my TikTok) Lucilla finds out Sebastian cares for her, she shows to be upset, snapping at him, but before snapping, she is in disbelief. In this moment, she is processing how Sebastian could care for her despite everything she has done, and she almost wants to let this be an exception, but her mindset of 5 years she had not felt love or care from another person conflicts with that. She would’ve just left, scoffing and calling him an idiot or laughing at him, but instead she snaps at him, since now she is in a conflicting state where she was already once vulnerable with him and hadn’t been put down by him, so the idea of letting it happen again was more than tempting for her, but her fear prevented her from letting herself get like that. In this moment, Lucilla had started to realize she actually cares for him, which is what causes her to leave and not want to stay any longer. She is genuinely terrified she cares for the person she lost her body to, and this made her frustrated because for the longest time she hated him for being the core inspiration for how Urbanshade was going to experiment on her body.

SIDE NOTE ON ONE OF LUCILLA’S TRUAMA: Lucilla might get a panic attack at just hearing the noise of a turret, though she doesn’t openly show it, she may freak out and you could see her panic trying to get out of the room as quick as possible. She will deliberately find any other way around a room that has turrets. Even though she knows they won’t shoot her because Sebastian informed Painter not to, and Lucilla’s body is regenerative and her scales are bullet proof (Urbanshade had to modify the DNA a lot for it to work). She freaks out from bullets because a recurring test she went through was the turret test, where she was put in a room with turrets to be shot so her regeneration and slow growth in becoming bullet proof could develop. These experiments were extremely painful for her and she dreaded them every single time. She was even more disturbed when seeing her skin push the bullets out so it could regenerate.