#✧˖°.« 𝙼𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚊𝚟𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚊𝚗 𝙱𝚊𝚌𝚑 » Headcanon

[aetherceuse]

I got the complete version of my Lusamine commission from @thehungreecat back and I am sooo happy, she is so beautiful! And the artist did amazing! ❤️

Highly recommend!

[aetherceuse]

❝ Oh, I know very well how the secrets beckon so sweetly. . . Only an honest death will cure you now. Liberate you from your wild curiosity. ❞

Endlessly obsessed with the way Gio brings my vision™️ to life.

commission for @aetherceuse!!! ty rex ♥

girlboss

[aetherceuse]

Gladion purposely hating sci-fi because his mom likes it. He's on Reddit every day talking about how Lord of the Rings is the superior movie trilogy. He's a Star Wars hater.

[aetherceuse]

Sighs. Stares into space. Will you guys judge me if I change Lusamine's voiceclaim for a 500th time????? Because Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica in Dune really works, really well. She matches the manipulative, creepy cadence I imagine Lusamine speaks in.

Sigh. She even has the same commanding, flat look in her eyes.

[aetherceuse]

Lusamine taking her first day off in like 20 years and it's just her sitting in her room, playing Tetris for 9 hours straight. Sometimes the autism comes to get her and she has to sort shapes.

[aetherceuse]

THIS is the most underrated song on the Sun & Moon OST, we only got it for one short cutscene. Lusamine and Aether as a whole has so many good soundtracks in this game, but this one really amplified the unnerving factor. The dialogue is so unhinged. I mean:

I know it's a popular headcanon that she is only behaving like this because of the neurotoxin (which canonically causes psychosis and other psychological effects), but, this is absolutely how she is by default. She's awful. She's self-serving. She discards people once they're no longer useful to her. This is why she got rid of Mohn and was fine with discarding Guzma the moment she got what she wanted out of him. And even though she has gradually developed more awareness of the importance of one of her children on this blog, it still doesn't erase the fact that this is how she is.

What the hell. Game Freak, I'll never forgive you for going this hardcore with your first female antagonist, only to then retcon it in every other piece of media that Lusamine appears in.

[aetherceuse]

Can we all be honest with ourselves about how fucking weird it is that the Aether House exists? Like. Why does this woman own an orphanage? Out of everything that Lusamine is involved with, having an Aether funded orphanage is probably the weirdest subset of her organization. Its so out of left field.

I wonder what the "orphan living at the Aether House" to "employee living and working at the Aether Paradise" pipeline looks like??? Because the beta leaks confirmed that people who work for Lusamine live on the artificial island. Is this why her associates are all so weirdly protective and loyal towards her???? Because some of them grew up indirectly under her care and hold her in such high regard???

Weird. Unhinged.

[aetherceuse]

Gladion is a very angry teenager, as I'm sure you've all noticed by now. He's not quick to trust, he's even more hesitant to accept help from people. And, much like his mother Lusamine, he's blunt and upfront with his thoughts, which can be interpreted as rude. At 14 years old and lacking vital healthy connections, he has very little issue with lashing out and hurting people if he doesn't feel safe. He's reckless, otherwise he wouldn't have joined a street gang.

I'm bringing this up because he is not going to react positively to acts of warmth and service. These aren't things that he trusts. And frankly, Gladion is spoiled; he was raised in a wealthy family. Most of the time, if he wanted something, he got it. Lusamine's lack of maternal instinct and strong disconnect from her son manifested in the form of giving him material things in order to appease him. This means that gift giving isn't an easy way in either.

Those who want to have a positive dynamic with Gladion, are going to have to work extremely hard and be prepared to backslide a lot. You're going to be pushed away. You're going to get a mouthful from him. He's not going to be buddy-buddy. He will come around on his own terms, if that is something that he wants. The world is overwhelming, and the mind is difficult to navigate when you're 14. Put a dysfunctional family dynamic in the mix and a potential mood disorder, and it shouldn't come to any surprise why he acts the way he does.

[aetherceuse]

Need people to understand that Lusamine's lack of emotional expression means that: if she's sharing her space with you and isn't talking to you like an employee, that means she tolerates you. That's about as much as you're going to get. If you get her to smile for 0.005 seconds, congratulations, she likes you.

If she responds to your messages off the clock? Go play the lottery because you're a lucky as hell person.

[aetherceuse]

Brief notes on Beast!Lusamine (as Sappy has lovingly labeled her):

Shares physical traits with Nihilego. (NOT the Mother Beast design though, that is an entirely different concept.)

Flexible glass carapace encasing her torso, It's incredibly durable, perhaps a step or two below bullet proof glass, but not easy to shatter. Similar exoskeleton on her limbs.

The same glass is already naturally occurring in her hair. (It's the shiny bits you see in her art!)

If injured, the glass shatters, but will gradually regenerate, similar to a slime mold.

Cerebrospinal fluid flowing through her spinal cord is full of the same neurotoxin found in Nihilego.

Sprouts tendrils identical to Nihilego's from all parts of her body, made from the same glassy material.

The tendrils that sprout from her spinal column have stingers at the end of them, capable of injecting neurotoxin into a target. Tendrils attached to any other part of the body cannot deliver the neurotoxin, but are still able to leave burns.

She is able to retract the tendrils at will, and prefers to keep them hidden.

Lusamine's connection with the Nihilego swarm allows her to communicate with them and call for aid when in distress.

Her beasthood abilities are still underdeveloped; Lusamine has kept this part of herself hidden for the majority of her life. She does whatever she can to keep it a secret, going as far as making witnesses of her true form disappear.

If she were to train and focus on growing stronger, she would develop more abilities in line with what Nihilego are capable of-- namely, the ability to cloak themselves with invisibility, altering human memories, and hijacking nervous systems.

She can use Poison Jab and Venoshock!

Like other Ultra Space denizens with strong genetic connections to their Ultra Beast ancestors, Lusamine is able to pass through the wormholes without suffering amnesia and the other effects that Fallers are left with.

Manifestation of the tendrils and stingers is agonizing and painful if done so by force-- either by cracking her carapace or pushing her into a defensive position where she has no other choice but to attack.

During her upbringing as a child at the hands of a pair of Silph Co. scientists, various experiments were done to force Lusamine to show her alien traits for the sake of research. This resulted in her disdain for being touched, her lack of trust in people, and her sense of isolation in the world. Countless lab assistants and researchers were fatally stung, which lead to Lusamine's caretakers assigning people to escort and supervise her in public, and at home, to prevent incidents outside of the lab.

This was also the very first documented case of a fatal encounter with an Ultra Beast.

You can, technically scan her with a Pokedex, but you cannot capture her. Scanning her results in logging a dex entry for Nihilego.

Can you use held items on her??? Maybe. She hasn't tried.

She is not just a Nihilego taking on a humanoid form; while UB-Symbiont is capable of disguising themselves as humans, and using illusions to appear as different creatures, this is not the case with Lusamine. The evolutionary tree of Ultra Beasts and Ultra Humans is not as divergent as the one that humans and Pokémon branch off from. (You know how humans irl can still have neanderthal DNA? Think of it like that. Except this is a much more dramatic and science fiction-y ordeal)

[aetherceuse]

Something something, thoughts about Ultra Humans having the subtle traits of the Ultra Beasts that they descend from, and those traits only become more noticeable and defined as they become symbiotic with their ancestral beasts. I'm talking Ultra Humans that affect the power grid because they are derived from Xurkitree. Ultra Humans with the ability to create combustion, with colorful physical features like Blacephalon. Etc etc. I've already spoken a bit about Lusamine's more subtle traits taken from Nihilego, the glass skin, the spinal column full of neurotoxin. What about the ones who descend from Guzzlord and are corrosive to gravity and matter itself???

[aetherceuse]

Random brain worm that I'm rotating:

Generally, I don't like giving my muses a legendary Pokémon encounter unless it ABSOLUTELY makes sense, and will contribute to the narrative. Especially if they already have a canonical connection to a different legendary. For me, it just seems overdone and tired plotwise.

HOWEVER,

I think Deoxys suits the Aether trio. I could see them having an excuse to encounter Deoxys. It's three forms even correlate with the group pretty nicely. I would assign the Attack Forme to Faba, Defense Forme to Wicke, and Speed Forme to Lusamine.

It makes good enough sense and matches up with the extraterrestrial nonsense happening with Aether.

[aetherceuse]

If Lusamine gifts you a Nihilego, it should be regarded as an extremely high honor. Any Nihilego in her possession are a part of her 'network' that she is connected to, and they all communicate with Lusamine and the rest of the swarm. Nihilego gather knowledge through fusion and by latching onto hosts, which means all of those thoughts, those memories, that information that they absorb--? It is all accessible by the entire swarm, and by Lusamine.

Essentially, she is handing over a literal part of herself, trusting you with it, and inviting you into the collective by proxy.

This is not an honor she has bestowed upon anybody yet. (Except, dubiously, Guzma, but that is up for interpretation, since that Nihilego tried to eat him.)

All Nihilego exist in hive minded swarms, but not all of them are connected to Lusamine's network. That being said, she does not have access to every single member of the species by default-- but the 'queen' or 'king' of a network can pull a Nihilego into a swarm very easily. They simply 'sync up', so to speak.

That being said, Lusamine would not attempt to absorb another trainer's Nihilego into her network. Not unless she had an exceptionally good reason to.

[aetherceuse]

Assigning you a celestial entity...

Satellite ✧˖°.

You are an intuitive and analytical person, capable of translating the unfathomable into the comprehensible. You seek knowledge and experience and are willing to venture to attain it.

Satellites make space into something concrete that can be shared and interpreted by those who will never see it. You are able to make sense of that which is frightening or abstract. You know how to make something not fit for consumption digestible. You’re the one willing to do the nitty gritty work—to get up close and personal until you understand how something works. You’re not afraid to ask why? The way your mind works is an enigma—calculated yet open to all the different possibilities. You notice the small details that slip by most.

You are the feeling of discovering the mistake you made in a math problem then finally managing to get it right. The feeling of someone remembering your preferences even if you only mentioned them once. The feeling when something finally clicks in your brain and it all comes together. You have a tendency to investigate, just for the sake of making sense of things.

People like to be understood and that is one of the things you’re best at. You’re good at making people feel seen. Not just in what they say or do, but who they are.* You are orderly and logical, but still benevolent. Grounded in reality but still able to see beyond. You don’t care what people think about you—you’re too focused on your goals. People are astounded when you manage to accomplish what was previously considered impossible. They can count on you to see things through even if you are a bit of a perfectionist and procrastinator.

You’re striving to be great and know that, that in itself means something. Your accomplishments aren’t the only thing that make you worthy. Sometimes it’s enough just to show up and be there.

Make sure you’re taking care of yourself and don’t let your ambitions consume you. Progress is progress, no matter the speed and it's important to recognize how far you’ve come. Your strong sense of self and attention to detail make you a stable object in a ever-shifting universe. I hope all your hard work pays off and that you’re proud of yourself.

*Interesting that the woman who makes you feel seen, makes you feel TOO seen. Because she sees right through people. Everyone is a subject for her to study.

[aetherceuse]

It's funny because in most scenarios, the son of the regional antagonist would be just as bad as his parent, but, nope. Gladion wants nothing to do with any of this. He thinks outer space is stupid and cringes whenever Lusamine is hanging out with the villain club. Ambitions to save the world from his mother's bullshit? Nope. He wants to be as uninteresting as possible and as unappealing to his mother's opponents and enemies as he can be. He actually has no idea what he's doing with his life to begin with, but, no teenager at his age does.

[aetherceuse]

The Sun & Moon anime is the absolute worst thing in the world in terms of the Aether storyline. However, I did enjoy some of the smaller details, like the fact that they show Mohn teaching Gladion how to play piano. Which means this kid probably can't stand to sit at one or even hear one, due to the trauma from losing his father.

It's still a blog canon secret that Lusamine purposely made Mohn disappear. Gladion and Lillie have no idea that their mother is responsible for their father's absence.