HYPERSONIC music club Character File 03: LANYA words: patrick macias, art: hiroyuki-mitsume takahash

HYPERSONIC music club Character File 03: LANYA

words: patrick macias, art: hiroyuki-mitsume takahashi

How do you know when a machine is deliberately messing with yo ur mind? When it doesn’t work right out of the box? When it breaks down just when you need it the most? When it fails on a big scale and millions die screaming? Tough question under the best of circumstances, I know… but how do you figure when a machine is messing with you only 50% of the time?

I ask because LANYA has modified herself to the point where she is half human and half mechanical, so you could just go up to her point blank and say, “I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not” but she’d probably just coldly smile and reply, “I don’t know…what do you think?” in a vaguely sarcastic tone that would leave you no wiser. And that (in a nutshell that was more like a couple of paragraphs) is LANYA: a world class cynic and half-toaster with nice long hair and a very big hat.

LANYA is complicated, but here are the facts: Her family comes from massive weapons money made for the last couple of wars before the big crash that lead to the rise of SYSTEM. Everyone lost their fortunes in the colossal fail that followed (and no one in the world of X85X is getting rich), but access to resources and the whiff of old moneyed status remained.

Dealing with emotions – both hers and others – was never really something that LANYA was especially good at. She grew up as an only child in the High Towers of What Was Left, largely ignored by her formerly rich, now shell-shocked, always-bickering parents. Being raised by nursing robots and learning devices probably didn’t help LANYA’s social skills much, but she liked be alone a lot and draw things, so it could have been a worse had she not had some considerable talent in that area.

Unfortunately, when she was entering her teens, LANYA had a terrible accident of some sort and literally has never talked about it, ever. The only thing her friends – the other members of music club know – is that it was physically debilitating enough to the point where LANYA needed extensive limbic cyborg reconstruction in order to survive.

That was fine with LANYA. In fact, the more of her body became mechanical, the happier she became, which was strange since machines don’t normally feel a heck of a lot of happiness in the first place, but hey, that’s LANYA…

Rather than stay with her super dysfunctional family unit in the opulent gloom of the High Towers, LANYA ran away one night and willingly became a ward of a disreputable rundown SYSTEM school run by MIS NYXX. Her motivation? The meager student allowance that SYSTEM provided could be used as exchange for further cyborg modifications, which was more than mom and dad were willing to offer. She wouldn’t miss them (both her parents and her biological parts) and would be fast to adapt.

LANYA would have been content to sit there in that boring desk day after day from 9am to 9pm listening to lectures on ancient history that didn’t matter anymore, buying a new robotic hand every couple of months for a 2% performance upgrade in her drawing and design abilities, had it not been…for music club.

VAL noticed LANYA constantly designing cool stuff in the margins of her class papers and on her tiny pink laptop (she was literally becoming a drawing machine). Needing someone to create cool flyers for the secret parties she was planning, VAL figured it was worth taking a risk to say hi to VAL’s tall, and imposing figure, to see if she would be willing to help out.

The gamble paid off: LANYA became a founding member of music club. She and VAL became tight friends and confidants, but she wound up becoming closest to COSIMA, whom she spent the most time with, secretly envying her wholly mechanical body. AND… I don’t know if you knew this already but VAL and BYRD also began secretly going out soon after music club was founded, but she broke it off after about 3 months. Why? He was too emotional. She was not emotional enough. You know how those things work out sometimes…

Even so, while LANYA’s mix of humanity, humor, mechanical parts, aloofness, and stubborn inner strength might have made her a hard ride for others at times, it all added up to something special that would pay off big time once music club accidently activated the Mystery Frequency and the Extra Dimensional Monster Girls invaded our reality.

Or at least that’s what she sometimes told herself.

Or maybe she was just messing with our minds.