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P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Tiffany
OOC Journal: kinetic
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: 23
Email + IM: same as on contact page
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Emma Swan, Ruby

C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Lydia Martin
Canon: Teen Wolf
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: 4x12
Number: 116

Setting:

Teen Wolf takes place in the modern-day, fictional town of Beacon Hills, California. In the world of Teen Wolf, supernatural creatures are a well-kept secret to most of the world, and thus far they include: werewolves, druids, darachs, kanimas, naguals, oni, kitsune, nogitsune, and banshees. After the events of season 3A, the town became a hub for the mystical and supernatural courtesy of the nemeton acting as a beacon (hence the town name) that created a kind of psychic pull for them.

History:

Lydia Martin was a mean girl once. She pretended to be stupid and manipulated her peers in order to elbow her way to the top of the high school food chain. That's how she wound up dating Jackson Whittemore, captain of the lacrosse team, always hiding how brilliant she really was. They were a power couple until he, in ab out of strange behavior, broke her heart.

Then at winter formal her sophomore year, she was bitten by Peter Hale, and everything changed. She began experiencing severe hallucinations following his death, and went into a fugue state that drove her into the woods for two days. Eventually, she began to hallucinate Peter himself, who threatened and gaslighted her into serving his purposes and helping resurrect him. He told Lydia all about how the friends she'd made had been lying to her, hiding secrets, and that she'd stop tripping balls all over the place if she dosed her friends at her birthday party with wolfsbane and kidnapped Derek Hale.

So she did.

After resurrecting Peter, the hallucinations stop, and her mind becomes clear enough to recognize something was really wrong with Jackson. She searches Stiles out for help, and disappointed with his reaction, sets out on her own. They arrive in time to watch Jackson die, but Lydia's love helps him come back—he shifts from being the homicidal lizard he'd become after Derek's bite into a real werewolf, having rediscovered his identity by anchoring himself on Lydia's love. They reconciled, got back together, and he ... promptly moved to London. Swell.

She goes through a slew of hook-ups to put Jackson behind her, including Aiden. It's not until after she's begun hooking up with him that her friends clue her in that he's part of the Alpha pack that's arrived in Beacon Hills. When Aiden helps kill Boyd, it changes her: the death being someone she actually knew, someone in her social circle, makes her realize that she doesn't want to keep chasing the bad boys like Jackson and Aiden.

This little moment of personal growth comes alongside a greater kind of growth. Lydia's hallucinations come back, but in a new form. She sleepwalks again, and finds herself drawn in a fugue state towards a string of dead bodies that they discover to be human sacrifices—part of some ancient druid ritual of power. Jennifer Blake tries to murder Lydia to cover her trail, and when she tries to strangle her, Blake identifies her for what she is: a banshee. Following this realization, Lydia begins trying to understand and embrace her powers, hoping that she might be able to find people before they die instead of stumbling across the bodies.

In order to stop Ms. Blake in her war against the Alpha Pack by finding her friends' kidnapped parents, Lydia participates in a ritual run by Deaton, the Hale pack's old emissary and a veterinarian, proving the bond she has formed with Stiles (in friendship) as he continually supports and helps her with her banshee weirdness and their co-detective work by pulling him back from the ritual.

Stiles continues to help Lydia as she explores her powers in the offing, and after she helps them find Kira in time to save her from Barrow, she gets the opportunity to return the favor. After the side effects of the Nemeton ritual have worn off for Allison and Scott, Stiles continues to experience lapses in time, and he eventually goes missing. Lydia's banshee powers mislead her to the basement of Eichen House, and they discover Stiles miles away in Malia's cave.

When the Nogitsune takes over Stiles entirely, Lydia makes a deal with Peter Hale to get him back: she reads his dead sister's memories to find what had been taken from him, and he helps her and Scott get into Stiles' head to free him. Lydia discovers that Peter is Malia's birth father, and taunts him with the information, but reveals it after he makes good on his promise to use his ex-Alpha knowledge to get her and Scott into Stiles' mind. They successfully separate him from the Nogitsune, but it kidnaps Lydia and drags her to Oak Creek Internment Camp, torturing her and feeding off of her. Her banshee powers help her foresee Allison's death, and though she tries to warn the others off of saving her to prevent it, that prediction still comes true when Allison falls on an Oni's sword. In the final battle with the Nogitsune and Noshiko's stolen Oni, Aiden also sacrifices himself in an attempt to prove he's not a bad guy to Lydia.

The losses both hit Lydia hard, but when they hear news that Derek has been kidnapped by the Calavera hunter family to Mexico, she doesn't hesitate to help them retrieve him. She and Stiles try to make a deal to pay for his release, only to discover him in an old Inca temple, de-aged. She watches over him overnight before finding herself drawn to the murder site of Kate's victims. She continues to find a slew of dead bodies, including a basement full of frozen corpses, until they eventually learn about the source: a dead pool, a bounty put on the head of every supernatural creature in Beacon Hills.

Lydia spends weeks trying to crack the ciphers of the dead pool with her banshee abilities, closing herself off in a soundproof room in her grandmother's lake house. She learns that her grandmother Lorraine was also a banshee, committed to Eichen House and believed insane for her ravings. She tries to investigate Eichen House with Stiles, but winds up kidnapped by Brunski, an orderly, who tries to kill them both on the benefactor's orders. They discover Meredith, another banshee girl, is behind the whole thing, and asserts that Peter Hale told her to do it via telepathy while he was in the hospital recovering from the burns that Kate Argent inflicted on him.

After that, Derek's name breaks the cipher for the last list, indicating that he may be dead soon, a concern confirmed when Lydia shows up screaming at his doorstep, given her unique talents. Rather than die, though, he revives with the ability to shift into a full wolf when the gang goes down to Mexico to fight Kate. Peter keeps Lydia away from Mexico by having Kate send a Berserker after her to distract her so that she won't sense Scott's death, as both Peter and Kate try to kill Scott—Kate for revenge, blaming Scott for Allison's death; Peter to steal his Alpha power.

Personality:

Lydia Martin has many good qualities, but in addition to all of them are some that make her a little prickly and tough to get close to. She's vain; not only does she like fashion, but she likes indulging in her own appearance, and she puts high value on these things because she uses it as a weapon and a defense - she also highly values attractiveness in other people. She's critical and snidely sarcastic, even with the people that she deeply values. And she's deflective and defensive, withholding parts of herself rather than invite people to get to know her or see something genuine in her, because she packs her weakness (see: feelings) away to present something flawless to the outside.

But her good qualities are great. Lydia is brilliant; and not just book-smart to a level of genius, but she's also tactically and practically clever. She can adapt a situation to her advantage - not only socially, but in life-or-death scenarios, she's the girl you want in your foxhole. She can make a self-igniting molotov cocktail in a chemistry room, she realizes that there's a reason Jennifer Blake was alarmed by her banshee status and that there's something she can do to help, she catches on that the coach's whistle had dosed them all with wolfsbane; Lydia is often the one who's observant enough to figure out a problem's source, and start the road to a solution. She reads about thermodynamics and learned Archaic Latin for fun, and she's also expressed aspirations of a Field's Medal.

Math and book-learning aren't the only aspects of her life that Lydia has high ambitions regarding. She's doggedly pursuant of the things she wants, from pushing Jackson to be better so they could remain a power couple where both of them were socially worthy of one another, to trying to rope Scott McCall for herself. She sees social power, and she wants to grab it. Her strong ambition ties into a desire for power and control, particularly in a social setting, where Lydia has spent a great deal of time learning how to navigate and manipulate situations to her benefit. She's a political animal, ready to throw herself into something and take charge of it.

In this way, Lydia is a natural leader. She treats her high school life like a political career, doing whatever she has to in order to stay at the top of the food chain - most notably, hiding any sense of weakness behind her considerable beauty and charm. She isn't afraid to play dumb in order for people to be less aware that she's playing them, either, and she's perfectly fine doing it because she knows the truth of her intelligence. She holds back any emotions or reactions that may make her appear weak, disguising the vulnerability with make-up, gloves, and a smile. She uses a mask of her very real confidence and her very real talents and hides anything messy or weak behind them. Even injuries, from the alpha and from herself, get disguised.

When she can't hide behind that anymore, and her weakness does become apparent through her acute PTSD and her fugue state getting out, she doesn't stop trying. In fact, she tries harder, demands more of those around her, and fights more to build herself back up because she knows that she deserves to be at the top because she knows how good she is.

However, that slip of control and the glimpse of vulnerability also creates a self-perpetuating cycle. She feels like she's lost her grip because people are seeing past her mask at the very genuinely vulnerable, genuinely emotional teenage girl within, and it makes her more frightened and desperate because she relies on that to hide behind and it's scary to think someone might see her as she is; as a teenage girl, just as much ruled by her emotions as any other.

Her emotional response really only comes forward in full force in reference to Jackson - the cracks in her armor begin as he starts to behave on the borderline of abusive with her, and when he dumps her there's a glimpse of genuine hurt. But as season 2 wears on and Lydia feels a greater loss of control as Peter Hale controls her and she spends half the season tripping out, and she becomes aware that Jackson is hurt and in danger, she full-on loses it and goes into hysterics. She admits she should hate him, but that she doesn't, because love isn't something she gets to have control over and it's something that makes her weak. In 2.12, she accepts that whether she wants to or not, she still loves him, and those emotions are a part of her rather than spurning them; her love for Jackson is as much a part of her as all of her strength and bravado.

This starts the road to a loss of identity in Lydia Martin. If she can't be the girl who keeps it together, and she starts to be able to hide her emotional response less and less as she needs to express it in order to cope with each additional body she finds, then who is she? The answer becomes apparent as she relies less on that mask. Though she's always been direct, she becomes even more direct about emotional situations - telling Allison that she loves her, welcoming Allison to discuss her feelings, and expressing how freaked out she is by all of it to Stiles as the bodies continue to stack. She's not just frank with her demands and criticisms, anymore, but with who Lydia Martin is and how she's feeling.

At the same time, she overcompensates in other areas. While she'll be more emotional and direct with those she considers friends (whether she'd say it out loud or not), she also buries any feelings of loss over Jackson moving to London, and spurns any chance of feelings developing in other areas. She seeks out purely sexual relationships with a variety of her classmates to fill the gap Jackson left, and refuses to let them move past that because she doesn't want to be in that position again - or feel that loss again, or let anyone treat her like that again. She brazenly uses her sexual relationship with Aiden in order to gain information about the alpha pack for Scott and the others, demonstrating a total lack of sentiment for him, and when she kisses Stiles out of his panic attack, she dodges by saying she'd just heard it would work somewhere and had nothing to do with actual concern, trying to deflect talking about it as an actual kiss and framing it as "making him hold his breath." While things with Aiden appear to almost become meaningful, she aggressively cuts herself off from the sentiment the moment she realizes that he's bad news (Boyd's death seems to trigger this decision).

As season 3 progresses, Lydia develops a better sense of identity, more heavily reliant on her honest self, emotional response and all, than on setting up a mask. She still does the latter with the general population, and she still does it well, but she's managed to develop actual friends instead of friends that serve her purposes, and with them, she can self-express. This comes primarily out of her embracing of her status as a banshee, which is also what built into her loss of identity. She had no idea what she was, only that she was 'something,' and it represented her uncertainty and sense of loss. As she learned to embrace it, and try to welcome that in so she could try to be useful and find the bodies before it happened, as she fought back against Jennifer Blake and found pride in her ability to survive rather than something to disguise under make-up like her previous injuries, and as she got a name for it, she learned who Lydia Martin had become, and that it was okay to express the whole of herself around her friends - shrieking terror over bodies found and all.

While she comes into herself, it allows her to grow out of herself so to speak. Going along with her focus becoming less self-centered, she becomes more invested in her friends. Once they're finally honest with her, and the feeling of betrayal and being excluded wears off as they stop lying to her and hiding things from her, Lydia is able to invest herself in her friends. Their opinions become important, they gain access to new parts of her, and she is willing to commit herself to them. She takes an interest in welcoming Allison to talk about her problems, she directly points out that she loves her, and most notably, Allison believing her in Motel California is monumentally important to Lydia because she's so uncertain of herself, and she's being told by someone who had left her out of the loop for so long that Allison believes her, has faith and trust in her. Lydia's base of support, loyalty, and love expands from where she'd previously only shown genuine emotional investment in Jackson.

It's something that couldn't have mattered the same way before Lydia began to open herself up and grow. Similarly, the way she grows to rely on Stiles when she finds the bodies shows an ability to open herself up to him, and a trust she places in him that she's never really had in others because prior to S3 she was so stunningly self-reliant. Lydia discovers that there's a new, different kind of strength to be found not just in surviving and masking the damage, but in being able to rely on other people and let them in - and in exchange, diving into them. She doesn't blink at the thought of helping Stiles and Scott however she can once she starts to try and take possession of her banshee abilities, and she even confronts Peter Hale for the first time since his invasion of her mind to do it, showing she's developed more bravery as a result of her support system too.

Her closer relationship with Scott, Allison and Stiles also appears to spur on her moral development, as she goes from self-serving and desperate to have Peter release his hold on her and willing to harm people to free herself, to being willing to put herself in the situation where she finds the bodies and traumatizes herself, welcoming in her banshee abilities in the hopes that she might be able to find them before they're killed - and she expresses considerably increased self-efficacy at the positive results of this shift. Scott in particular seems to be the one who pushes this shift in her, because she's shown growing to depend on him as a protective figure as she becomes considered part of his pack, as well as communicating her interest in accepting her abilities in order to do some good with them and searching for support from him in that (likely because she knows he's had similar experiences).

During 3b, Lydia experiences some payoff from this new lease she takes. She gets the opportunity to help save someone's life (Kira, in the power station) by using her abilities and she realizes just how fulfilling it can be to be a hero. Lydia always seemed somewhat disenchanted and dissatisfied with her life before she became a part of Scott's pack, feigning stupidity in order to placate others into giving her what she wanted. Heroics, on the other hand, give her an opportunity to use her full potential and really make something of all her talents. She begins to understand Scott's altruism a little better, and becomes genuinely supportive of her friends (while still delivering that support wrapped in sass).

This also impacts her self-worth overall, and her ability to self-actualize. She realizes that she has a tendency to fall for the "bad boys" and decides that isn't what she wants anymore. She tells Aiden, effectively breaking up with him, that he's a bad guy, and she wants better than that for herself now. Unfortunately, not all of her development has been development she's happy about: in addition to gaining better perspective and experience, Lydia also loses her best friend. Allison was the one who believed in and supported Lydia, opening her eyes to being strong, real, and fearless. Lydia didn't just lose her: she tried her best to stop it from happening, and Allison died anyway while trying to save Lydia. She feels a measure of guilt because of that, but mostly she feels the overwhelming sense of loss that leaves her regressing to a slightly disconnected state with the newer members of the pack (Kira and Malia); she's friendly with them, but less open than she ever was with Allison.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

In addition to being a total screaming genius with an IQ of roughly 170, Lydia is a banshee. She acts like something of a psychic harbinger of death, who screams when she feels it coming and always manages to be the one to turn up the bodies because she's subconsciously drawn to them, and she's also uniquely immune to the bite of an alpha werewolf. She doesn't turn, but she also doesn't show any of the nasty side effects of a rejected bite. Her banshee scream seems to affect supernatural individuals to a greater degree, though it's unclear if this is a feature of the scream or a side-effect of their enhanced hearing. When she focuses, she begins to develop the ability to sense when death is drawing near, and discern a location from hints that are given to her (subliminal, but eventually verbal/auditory hallucinations). Peter Hale teaches her more about her power, showing her that she can even (in some capacity) connect with dead spirits if she has a totem—she uses this ability to learn the identity of Peter's daughter from his dead sister.

Inventory:

2 mini skirts
2 button-up blouses
3 pairs high heels
1 pea coat
1 make-up bag (lipstick, foundation, bobby pins, etc.)
1 hot pink prada bag
1 smartphone with an attached camera lens
1 cassette player
1 tape recording of her grandmother's death :')
1 case domestic beer
various notebooks and pens

Appearance:

Unacceptably beautiful. Lydia makes the most of her beauty with high fashion and makeup that she applies like warpaint. Stiles describes her as 5'3", green eyes, strawberry blonde hair (which reaches her waist). Her skin is porcelain white, and it has never been made clear if she has scars from Peter's bite or not.

Age: 16 (possibly 17 now; who knows if S4 included her birthday)
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:

From the moment she set foot on the ship, she'd never truly felt alone. The same anxious pressure burned in the back of her mind that she'd felt in Glen Capri. While no one's shot themselves in the room next door yet, she can't deny there's a certain fear in her bones any time someone considers the dark corridors, or the crew quarters.

Eventually, it can't be avoided. Her arm itches where her tattoo is when the doors slide open to let her into the crew quarters, SCI glowing blue. She crosses the threshold into the crew quarters, and nausea floods her. The voices don't start until she's walking through the hallway, passing doorways and common areas. Her comms device offers a faint light, but it's not as much as she'd like for the dark corners.

She knows there's no blood there on the ground, and yet it feels drenched. Squeezing her eyes shut, she shakes it off, wills the noise to quiet, and pushes it all back. Steadying herself, she moves into the community room, tongue pressing between her lips to wet them so she can call out, "Charlotte?"

She must be down here. They all know she's around somewhere: she pops back up every jump, and vanishes before too long after. As long as medical had held her, they'd never gotten anything out of her. Lydia's determined to reach her, to ask the right questions, so she pushes further into the room.

Comms Sample:

My name's Lydia Martin, and I've been told that I was here before. Don't worry. This isn't anything so pedestrian as interest in how you knew me. By all means, enlighten me if you feel so inclined, but I'm more interested in knowing who else those of you who've been here for a year or more have met from my world, specifically from Beacon Hills. I'd hoped someone might have been tracking what worlds and cultures people have been coming and going from, but it seems like it's never occurred to any of you to search out some kind of pattern in how we're selected. Given how personally :) knows some of us, and many of us reappearing, you can't honestly believe it's random.