Lyca Raffles

Name: Autolyca Jonquil Raffles

Nicknames: Lyca, A. J.

Age: 17

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Ace

Personality: Lyca is rash, overproud, and an absolute virtuoso at neatly avoiding responsibility. She does care about her few friends, but will nevertheless almost always put her own needs ahead of theirs and manipulate them to get what she wants, albeit not consciously. The best thing that can honestly be said for Lyca as a person is that she has a gentle soul: she goes out of her way to avoid injuries from her crimes, and has in fact never committed a genuine act of violence against another person. The ethical  honesty of this is debatable, however, when taking into consideration the lives that have been doubtless ruined by her burglaries. While she does donate some of her considerable takings to charity, the majority of it stays in her own pockets, and she’s hardly the type of half-blood, who, seeing an innocent in danger, rushes immediately to their defense. She is immensely creative, but generally only applies that gift to crime.

Looks: Lyca is willowy and of medium height, about 5’6, with reddish auburn hair that hangs to her neck, hazel eyes, and a light spray of freckles across her pale skin. Her face is oval in shape, with full cheeks, a thin, pointing nose, a delicate mouth, and gorgeous dimples. She keeps her nails clipped short, and usually wears a gloves, a featureless black spandex mask, and a black, hooded jumpsuit when working.

Divine Parent: Hermes

Powers: Although Lyca has no powers of her own beyond the gilded tongue and light fingers typical of her parentage, she does possess several magical artifacts that grant her abilities. The first of these are her bright red winged track shoes, which she refers to as her ruby slippers, or, more commonly, the backup plan, as she usually ends up needing them when some scheme or other has gone to shit. The shoes allow her to fly, or, ground-bound, to run at superhuman speeds.

Lyca’s second treasure, the Ring of Gyges, is far more powerful, if in a more subtle way. By twisting the ring on her finger, Lyca can become completely undetectable. She is impossible to see, hear, smell, or, theoretically, taste, and while she can still be touched, anyone doing so will still be unable to feel her. While wearing the ring, cannot be detected by monsters, and magical divinations cannot locate her, including those of the gods themselves; only oracular prophecies and theoretically the attentions of similarly-powered beings, such as Moros and Ananke, could find her magically. The gods, naturally, are none too thrilled by this. This, however, has the unfortunate side effect of making it impossible for Lyca to receive Iris messages while wearing the ring, as the goddess is unable to locate her; she cans still send one, but if she wants someone to be able to call her, she has to take the ring off.

Backstory:

This prophecy, uttered by the Oracle at the precise moment of Lyca’s birth, was briefly a cause of great consternation at Camp Half-Blood, but as it became apparent that the verses had no immediate relevance, and didn’t seem to foretell anything too terribly apocalyptic for the future, the whole thing was largely forgotten soon. Meanwhile, in not-too-distant Atlantic City, New Jersey, the future greatest thief in the world plotted her first heist, the theft of her older brother’s toy train collection.

From the beginning, Lyca was fully aware of her half-blood nature, and the knowledge went somewhat to her head. This, perhaps, is why, when she was first brought to Camp Half-Blood for the summer at the age of eight, she was absolutely miserable. Before, she had been special; now she was just one of many, both in the camp and in Hermes Cabin, and didn’t feel particularly special at all. This, perhaps, is why, in the summer of her twelfth year on Earth, Lyca ran away from camp.

For the first few weeks, Lyca did well for herself, living in New York City off of what she pickpocketed or conned from tourists. Things began to go bad when Lyca found herself hunted by the vampiric, child-eating spirit Mormo. After a week-long game of cat and mouse through the tunnels under the city, Lyca managed to defeat Mormo, and in the process met Hunter Mistilteinn, a rare mortal boy near her own age—just a couple of years older—capable of seeing through the Mist. As Hunter was a runaway like herself, the two quickly fell in together, making a living off of Lyca’s prodigious criminal talents and dodging the inevitable monsters.

Eventually, Lyca and Hunter left the States and made their way to Paris, hoping that there would be fewer monsters away from the gods’ current center of power on earth. In Paris, the pair met the shapeshifting thirteen-year-old demigod Valentine Close, who was also in hiding, and became a trio. Together, the three young thieves took the City of Lights by storm. Lyca’s daring burglaries quickly attracted attention in the press, which dubbed her Lupin, after the literary master criminal of the early 20th century, for her habit of sending polite notes to her victims before stealing from them, asking them to please simply give her what she wanted before she took it anyway.

Val, Lyca, and Hunter continued in this way for three years, until Lyca was nearly 16, when, after successfully liberating some small considerations from the Louvre—as well as taping a note to the Mona Lisa’s frame, just to prove that she could have taken it if she’d wanted to take the trouble—she realized to her shock that she was bored. Thwarting mortal security had been an enjoyable challenge for a time, but lately it had become redundant. She needed something more. Thus it was that Lyca set her sights on Hades, richest of all the gods, and her next target.

The hardest part of stealing from Hades was, by necessity, getting in the door. Any living soul entering Hades would almost certainly be noticed, especially if they were stupid enough to try the vault. Therefore, the only way Lyca could even get close to Hades’ horde was if she were, in fact, dead.

The absolute limit for being resuscitated successfully without brain damage is about fifteen minutes, given proper refrigeration of the corpse. The first problem in any plan, therefore, was time. Actually dying was very simple: a high-voltage electrical current should stop Lyca’s heart quite admirably. After that, she would only have a quarter of an hour to get in and lift whatever she could before Hunter resuscitated her. This problem was solved with a pair of speed-enhancing flying shoes, stolen by Lyca from her father, Hermes, as well as a hefty bribe of golden drachmas for Charon to ensure the fastest possible speed across the Styx.

The second problem was actually being able to take anything; once she entered the Underworld, Lyca would start becoming insubstantial. While this would allow her to enter Hades’ vault with relative ease, it would also keep her from picking anything up once she was inside. The answer was a sacrifice of lamb’s blood on Lyca’s “tomb”—the high end refrigeration unit where her corpse would be waiting for her to return to it. Performed at the 10-minute mark, this would strengthen Lyca’s shade, causing it to solidify, and allowing her five minutes to load as much treasure as possible into her sacks before her spirit was pulled, as though by a massive bungee cord, back to her reviving body, dragging the stolen treasure with it.

The plan went off without a hitch. Lyca returned to life, bringing with her almost half a billion dollars in stolen underworld diamonds as well as a single gold finger ring. After a week in bed and copious amounts of ambrosia, she was back on her feet, and the celebrations began.

The golden ring, better known as the legendary Ring of Gyges, was the solution to the third and final problem of robbing Hades: getting away with it. Hades, Lyca knew, would never be able to stand the insult of the robbery, and would hunt her to the ends of the Earth to make her pay—if he could find her, and while she wore the Ring, taken from his vault along with all the other ill-gotten gains, he had as much chance of doing that as a fish did of learning to tap dance.

Naturally, he found her.

It was nearly a year after the big heist; Lyca and her friends had finally managed to fence the last of the diamonds, and between that and their takings from earlier jobs, each one of them was sitting on about $200 million scattered across a variety of equities and Swiss bank accounts. Life was good—except for Val.

Since before he had even met Lyca and Hunter, Val had been on the run, hiding from his uncle. He never spoke of what he had done to cause offence to the god, but he obviously had, and hiding from that one was nearly impossible; sooner or later, unless Val did something drastic, he would be caught. Lyca planned to deal with that when it became her problem, but never really gave it much thought. When he learned what the Ring of Gyges could do, Val took matters into his own hands. Originally, he simply planned to steal the ring, but Lyca never took it off. Eventually, growing desperate, Val betrayed Lyca to Hades in exchange for a promise of the god’s protection and permanent asylum in Hades’ palace in the Underworld.

As an ordinary mortal, Hades didn’t expect Hunter to see him coming, which gave him the chance to escape. Lyca wasn’t so lucky. The next few months in Hades’ care were, to put it mildly, unpleasant. Eventually, however, Hades offered her a deal. He recognized her talents and, more importantly, as she was not actually dead anymore, her father had formally objected to her continuing to be held in the Underworld. Therefore, he would let her go free, and in exchange, she would do three tasks for him at some point in the future. If she refused… Well, the box would always be there. Lyca agreed hastily, and was released. Hades gave her back the Ring of Gyges, as well as a stygian iron dagger, telling her to use them as her tools in his service. He had also left her money alone; having been completely converted to mortal currency, it was no longer of much interest to him, and what she had taken was only a small fraction of his wealth.

Now Lyca is being forcibly returned to Camp Half-Blood, where she is to remain until she receives further instructions from Hades about her first task.

Like she’s actually going to stay there. Yeah, right.

Strengths:

• Under the name Lupin, Lyca is recognized as one of the greatest burglars in the world, if not actually the greatest.
  
• Lying or telling the truth, Lyca is incredibly convincing.
  
• While Lyca’s plans are, for the most part, completely insane, they have a surprisingly high success rate, even if they are unusually prone to unexpected excitement.
  
• She’s also worth about $200 million, every cent of it stolen, so there’s that.
  

Weaknesses:

• Everything Lyca does is fantastic in scale, including her cock-ups. Her eventual death, for example, is apparently going to so spectacular that the powers of Fate saw fit to warn of it nearly two decades early, presumably so people could start selling tickets.
  
• Lyca is an extremely difficult person to get along with for an extended period, which is generally fine, because she’s a terrible, manipulative asshole of a friend anyway.
  
• Lyca's fatal flaw is Recklessness; she tends to spend more time trying to avoid the consequences of her actions than thinking about them or dealing with them.
  
• Oh, and she still owes three favors to the Lord of the Underworld, and if she doesn’t do them, she’s in deep shit.
  

Weapon: Lyca wields a stygian iron dagger, given to her by Hades to use in the course of her new “job.” It looks like a laser pointer most of the time.

Other: Lyca’s mother named her after Autolycus from Xena: Warrior Princess; Lyca has no idea what possessed the woman to give her her hated middle name.

Since her time imprisoned by Hades, Lyca has a deep-set fear of dark, enclosed places.