Characters / Science and Sorcery

Main Entities

Voidwalker Lana:

• Blind Without 'Em: While Lana was able to adapt well enough to life without her glasses, she has a hard time making out precise details. By the time she finds some, she finally realizes that she had somehow lost a shoe at some point.
• Broken Bird: A textbook case, having lost her home and family at a very young age, by voidwalker standards.
• But Your Wings Are Beautiful: Lana doesn't care much for her Khraaya-S'rraen-grown wings (largely because they're excruciatingly painful coming in), but Tapp finds them fascinating.
• Compliment Backfire: Lana commonly responds to compliments with threats of violence, such as Kurias deducing that she was once a princess, or her threatening Tapp with shoving Sheol where the sun don't shine if he says anything about her pretty eyes.
• Composite Character: Lana shares at least one character trait from each member of her Redeemer family: Kahad's aggression and bluntness, Sierra's bravery and laid back attitude, M'yaka's motherly compassion, and Matthias' sense of justice.
• Curtains Match the Window
• Fallen Princess: Cyrus refers to Lana as "a bona fide princess", though she clearly isn't one anymore. Kurias further implies that Lana's zk'tu name could imply royalty.
• The Glasses Come Off: Once she wields Khraaya-S'rraen, it heals her otherwise terrible eyes, which makes her glasses suddenly highly disorienting.
• Hot Blade: Sheol. In contrast to its otherwise identical twin, Gehenna.
• Insult of Endearment: Lana calling Tapp a "jackass", along with various other Tapp-directed insults.
• It Was a Gift: Her red jacket, supposedly custom-made for her by Matthias.
• Lady Swears-A-Lot: So much that Tapp and Kurias start picking it up.
  • At one point, Angel quoted an outburst that Lana made.
    Cyrus: "F-ing?"
    Angel: "I'm paraphrasing a bit."
• Memetic Outfit: Her red jacket.
• Men Don't Cry: A rare female example, but played out the same way.
• My Nayme Is: A zk'tu version. As a child, Lana couldn't pronounce her zk'tu name of Iyaa'na, instead calling herself "Lana" until it stuck.
• Only Sane Man: Tapp recounts Lana making speeches to this effect:
  "When Lana was around, even as much of a pain as Angel was, and even as much as Lana admitted to this, she would still stick up for Angel when she cried, all while wondering quite publicly what kind of monster he was for supposedly causing such an infantile outburst, only to then question whose outburst was actually the more infantile, followed by an extended rant on being the sole proprietor of sanity on the Infinity Bridge, after which he would summarily ignore her until she settled down or made a relevant strategic observation."
  —Science and Sorcery: Fish in a Barrel
• Really 17 Years Old: For a voidwalker as adult as Lana appears, she's only about half a century old. By voidwalkers' standards, this makes her the effective age of a four-year-old.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: The reason Lana ultimately chooses to follow Tapp by the end of Redeemer. When Matthias confronts her about this, Lana tells him that he taught her to fight for what she believed in.
• 10-Minute Retirement: Between Fish in a Barrel and Redeemer.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Lana doesn't even want the reader to catch her crying.
  "Lana gasped in shock and shook her head in disbelief, sure. Maybe even smiled a little. Anybody would. But she didn’t suddenly start welling up waterworks and sobbing with joy like she had just found the favorite toy she never owned stashed away in a closet like a birthday present with a “from” label implicating the giver as the most aloof, detached, uncaring jackass of a parental figure you could possibly imagine, whose approval she had been pining for since forever and never received, reducing her to the antisocial sack of bitch and misanthropy she had become at this very moment. No she most certainly did not. That would be clichéd and lame. And if you know what’s good for you, you didn’t see anything either."