 Lucy Profile Lucy captured, 1058 (A) / (B) / (C) / (D) / (E) / (F) / (G) Lucy in time tunnel/totem (A) / (B) / (sketch) Lucy's clothing (931) 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 Lucy reunited with Jack, 1067 (A) / (B) Queen Lucy, 1067 (A) / (B) / (C) Queen Lucy poster |
The beautiful, sultry, telepathic Lucy Flathead was one of the female descendants of Lucille Flathead who had been living in The Dark, apart from the rest of the Empire, following the Curse of Megaboz. In every generation there had appeared to be one daughter who was a telepath. Lucy Flathead, who was the one of that generation (circa 989 GUE), was born into Middle Magic, and given her True Name through the power of the Old Tongue upon the third day following her birth. She would become one of the only known Flatheads in all of Zork.
Yet for one so gifted in the reading of minds, Lucy had no such skill with the reading of hearts. Like all of the descendents of Lucrezia before her, Lucy had inherited her general mistrust of all men. Lucy would grow up to be cold, dismissive of emotions, generally, because they tended to cloud her readings of minds—like static, or poor reception on a telephone line. She was dismissive of emotions, personally, because she had never had any of the nicer varieties. The Dark was not, ultimately, a wonderful place to raise a child.
Lucy's powers, and her sphere of knowledge, were basically governed by the recognized laws of telepathy. However, her status as a baffling Flathead, and the enchanted blood of some sort of wizard intertwined with her family lineage, made her powers somewhat more vague. Her powers were the powers of Middle Magic, which is to say, Mental Magic. She was a lower-ranking telepaht, able to glimpse visions of the future, glimpse visions of the past, hear unheard sounds, see the invisible (doors, creatures, objects), and read minds (though not of animals. She could, however, sometimes subdue animals who were willing or educated enough to listen to reason).
In 1048, following the death of Syovar III at the hands of Mir Yannick, Lucy Flathead stared, transfixed, at the slain Vice Regent’s photo in the New Zork Times that lay on her desk at the Port Foozle Psychic Friends Bureau, beneath the headline “Syovar Assassinated; Who Will Succeed?” She was getting a migraine, an awful migraine. She tried even harder to ignore the picture that was taking shape in her mind. It had something to do with the death of the Regent, but it hurt too much to see it. And she did not particularly care for whatever it was. She was not, by nature, a political person. She believed that people were weak and foolish; that horrible things either had or would befall them; that fate was cruel and purposeless. She knew the first of these precepts best illustrated by her own frivolous ancestry; the second from glimpsing into the grim minds of her clientele; and the last, from her own dark life. So what did she care if one more fat politician got his due?
She turned her attention to the distractingly lewd observances blaring out from the mind of the customer that sat across from her. His was the most dismal sort, a petty gambler looking to hedge his odds in the windcat races. It was precisely the sort of client that made her wonder if her Gift were really a Gift at all. This was her fourth job as a Psychic Counselor; in an age devoid of magic, a whole market for bogus carpetbaggers had sprung up in its place. She had never let on to the others at the Bureau that she was an actual telepath, partly out of a kind of professional courtesy (because, according to her, they were scalawags and scams and she did want them to feel badly that she was not) and partly because she was embarrassed. Once people knew she knew what they were thinking, they had a tendency to become rather embarrassed themselves. Especially the men. With her telepathic abilities came a checkered lineage of which she was publicly quite defensive, and privately quite ashamed. Though she wore an ill-fitting headpiece to try to hide it, Lucy’s head was absolutely flat; she was one of the last surviving descendents of the House of Flathead.
When the pain became so unbearable that she could no longer listen to the blather in the customer’s head, Lucy had no choice but to let it out. She threw back her head, surprising the customer, and allowed the strange violet light to flow out of her eyes, flooding the room. Her coworkers stared at her with amazement, as her seemingly lifeless form floated a few feet above the ground. In her trance, Lucy saw in a few harsh stills the death of Syovar at the hand of the Grand Inquisitor. She saw the death of the Dungeon Master, as well, and startled when she saw him from the grave look her in the eye, imploring “Tell Them.” And with that, Lucy fell to the ground. She had no choice. The Dungeon Master had sent her the vision, and she had to do something because of it. Lucy left the Bureau immediately, never to return. She made her way to the Magistrate, and took her own deposition, sealing it in a file at the Magistrate’s Office. She gave it to the Magistrate, and panicking, got out of town.
In 1058, Lucy Flathead was waiting to board the ferry to Accardi-by-the-Sea when the Grand Inquisitor’s men caught her defacing Inquisition propaganda. She was placed under arrest for anti-Inquisition political activism and employing telepathic abilities, and bound over to trial for High Treason Against the Empire. The Magistrate had broken the seal on her file, and alerted Yannick immediately. Implicating Yannick—the only remaining authority that held the temporary government of the Empire together, in the time of flux and chaos following the death of the Vice Regent—rapidly earned Lucy a sentence of death. The fact that the Grand Inquisitor was the presiding official of the court did not help matters much, but it did somewhat speed up the deliberations. Though she fully expected to die, the Grand Inquisitor had other plans for her.
When Yannick discovered that her bloodline traced directly back to the Flathead Dynasty, and she was thus the rightful heir to the empire, the horrid man enjoyed not only the pleasurable surge of power that lay in giving her the sentence, but yet another in commuting it. Now that he had the attention of the population, he determined to make an example of Lucy, and brought her to the Totemizer. Though she would not give him the satisfaction of showing her fear, the Totemizer was truly a hideous machine. Lucy would lose her visionary powers when she lost her True Name within. She would become captive in a disk of base metal without substance, a lifeless totem of her magical self.
In the final moments that Lucy stood atop this giant mechanical spectacle, she became something of a folk hero to the crowd at its base. Yannick, who was more taken with the vision of her body than her visionary mind, offered her a last chance at clemency if she were to subject herself to an inquisition of a more personal nature. To this she only spat out “Murderer.”
Then, her eyes began to radiate the same strange purple light, and up she floated, straining against the ropes that bound her to the platform of the machine. She began to speak in a low monotone, warning the Grand Inquisitor of his doom in a strange vision. There would be only one, one who could call the Great Lady down from the Planes of Atrii, through the Last Door. She would come for Yannick, and a great sacrifice and a brave heart would destroy him. The frightened Grand Inquisitor could bear no more of such nonsense, and slapped her… hard. In whipping her head to the side, her hair seemed to move, and then the top of her headdress sailed cleanly off-revealing her truer, flatter nature. The crowd hushed, shocked. Lucy was a flathead! There were still flatheads living in the Empire? How could this be? But Lucy herself, just smiled defiantly. When her ropes were loosened, she laughed at the Grand Inquisitor, and threw herself into the machine.
A passing mercenary stared at her, transfixed. Antharia Jack fought his way to the front of the crowd, desperate for one last glimpse at the woman that had captured his heart so long ago. But a small explosion sent him reeling back, followed by a great whirl, then sparks and smoke, and he could just make out where something passed through the tubes, spiraling downward, around and around. An iron totem fell to the stone floor with a clatter. Lucy was no more and her totem was put on display in the headquarters’ main exhibit hall.
On Frobuary 34th, 1067, AFGNCAAP, who would shortly be appointed Fourth Dungeon Master by Lucy Flathead herself, soon met up with three other traveling companions who wished to join the quest. All three were one-time magical creatures who had been stripped of their magical faculties and imprisoned within totems. The three were none other than the beautiful and telepath Lucy Flathead (within the Steppinthrax Monastery), the thick-fitted, all-brawn no-brain brogmoid Brog (within the gates of Hades), and the whiny, neurotic griff (at the Secret Entrance to the Underground), who suffered a dragon inferiority complex and wanted desperately to avoid physical pain. Together, they formed an unlikely band of adventurers who joined forced to recover the three lost relics, destroy the Grand Inquisitor, and finally return magic to its rightful place in the Empire.
The group dynamic was interesting, to say the least; Dalboz was hungry and bitter and betrayed, skeptical as to whether the Grand Inquisitor could even be stopped, and in as foul a mood as any fellow stuffed in a lantern of that size was likely to be. Dalboz oversaw the posse with what limited respect a bodiless voice could command. Lucy, for herself, was not accustomed to taking orders from a man, and found the arcane nature of Dalboz’s magical knowledge, when combined with the insane nature of his utilitarian uselessness, somewhat aggravating. She was logical, intelligent, witty, scathing, and a bit defensive. She thought she was always right and usually was. The Dungeon Master thought she was an incessant annoyance and she usually was. The griff liked nothing better than to order about Brog, duping him into performing his own share of the work and more, and then blaming Brog when these suggestions backfired. Brog did not mind; he simply liked to talk with the twittering birds and the chirping insects, and instinctively find his way throughout the Underground, as he had since he was a pup. He was content just to look at Lucy, though more than anything he wished he could touch her.
To retrieve the three artifacts, it was necessary to send the spirits of the three totemized victims through three time tunnels, which had been erected back in the days of Dimwit Flathead for the very purpose of restoring magic to Zork. The griff went back in time and recovered the Coconut of Quendor straight from the mouth of the Watchdragon. Brog returned to the White House shortly before 966 GUE, where he descended into the grue breeding ground to retrieve the Skull of Yoruk. Lucy Flathead was sent to Port Foozle in the year 931, where she won one of the Cubes of Foundation from Antharia Jack in a game of Strip Grue, Fire, and Water. Despite her iron will, she fell in love with Jack, finding him to be cute, "too cute" as she put it. Lucy fled the casino in the bowels of a walking castle, but Antharia Jack would never forget her charm.
On the following day (1067-02-35), after escaping from the Inquisition Prison in Port Foozle with the totems in tow, AFGNCAAP headed for the Flathead Mesa to halt Yannick from unleashing Inquizivision. With the three relics placed in the radio tower, AFGNCAAP quickly cast MAXOV upon the tower to bind the energies. The resultant blast threw AFGNCAAP, the totems, and the Grand Inquisitor from the tower while sending a shockwave of magic across the land. Exposed to the burst of magic energies, the totems sprung back to life. Lucy was caught by Jack. The burst of magic diffused all of Yannick’s technology—the monitors and the rest of his Inquisivision system, and even the Grand Inquisitor “I am the boss of you” posters supernaturally altered to “Queen Lucy the Levelheaded.” Jack and Lucy confessed their love to one another with a passionate kiss.
With magic returned and the Grand Inquisitor's tyranny ended, Lucy Flathead declared herself the rightful heir to the throne. Her first act was to declare the Great Underground Empire open and magic free to all those who desired it. Her second was to name the unknown PermaSuck salesperson as Dalboz's successor, the Fourth Dungeon Master of Zork. Her third act was to privately explain time travel to Jack.
TRIVIA
Like all Flatheads, Lucy is not a swimmer.