Robert Lutece (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
uncertainrelation) wrote2017-02-22 06:43 pm
uncertainrelation) wrote2017-02-22 06:43 pm
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rubycity_rp
PLAYER
Name: Alex
Age: 18+
Personal Journal:alexclusive
E-mail: gloriousrikkaidai (at) hotmail (dot) com
AIM/etc: AIM: GloriousRikkaidai
CHARACTER
Name: Robert Lutece
Canon:Bioschaque Bioshock: Infinite
Age: 38 or thereabouts, the same as his parallel universe counterpart, Rosalind.
Timeline: After the end of the main game!
Items with character at canon point: Tragically, he will be showing up with nothing but the clothes on his back, his Affable Voice™, and a fresh set of guns* from a whole hell of a lot of rowing that he had to do ALL BY HIMSELF because SOME PEOPLE yes right okay anyway.
*of the bicep variety
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: Not applicable!
Personality:
Robert Lutece is someone who once likely had the whole world at his fingertips, which is why it's rather curious that his priorities ultimately led him to abandon it wholesale in favor of joining his parallel universe counterpart in hers, instead.
The central conflict in Bioshock: Infinite revolves around a single particular event: the trade of a girl for a debt. Though the protagonist of the game — and by extension, the player — spends a great deal of time in the dark about what precisely this talisman phrase actually means, we ultimately come to find out that it succinctly describes an exchange made approximately seventeen years before the events of the series, in which Booker Dewitt (a gambler, drunk, and general ne'er-do-well) agreed to surrender his baby daughter, Anna, to have his personal debts and sins "washed away" by the prophet Zachary Hale Comstock.
However, what goes somewhat more understated about this central conflict is that more people than just Booker and Comstock stood to gain — or lose — something through the satisfaction of that exchange. As a matter of fact, Robert and his counterpart, Rosalind, had a great deal riding on it, as well — a matter that, to them, was worth going to any length and making veritably any sacrifice, because in the event that they succeeded, the two of them would finally be able to be together. With the trade between Booker and Comstock complete, Robert Lutece could finally cross over into Rosalind Lutece’s version of reality: the one goal the two Luteces had chased after for years upon years.
While the game itself doesn’t expand phenomenal amounts on Robert, there’s a great deal to be extrapolated both from the choice he makes to join Rosalind, and also from comparisons to Rosalind herself — who, it should be stressed, is Robert genetically, and whose differences from Robert arise more out of subtle environmental differences in their growth and upbringing than anything else.
For example: while Robert is undoubtedly a brilliant physicist, a prodigy in academics, and a pioneer in the area of quantum mechanics specifically, it’s Rosalind who actually develops and perfects the technology that allows them to create the Tear in reality that stands to let them be together. It’s Rosalind who effectively cuts a deal with the devil in order to fund this ambition, trading both the fruits of her work and her professional allegiance to a religious fanatic in exchange for the patronage necessary to keep trying to reach Robert. And in many ways, it’s Rosalind who tends to take the realistic approach to any situation, believing that what’s done is done and that sometimes hope is a fool’s errand and a futile endeavor.
So what does this say about Robert by extension? Well, for starters, it’s fairly likely that Rosalind outpaces Robert in ambition simply because Robert has always had the advantages of privilege that meant he simply didn’t have to work as hard or sacrifice as much to achieve the relatively same outcomes. Robert enjoys the benefits of being a man whose interests run to a traditionally male field; it’s likely he didn’t face nearly the same barriers to furthering his education or pursuing his academic interests that Rosalind did. And indeed, this can sometimes be a double-edged sword; where the benefits of Robert’s privilege have certainly left him more room to cultivate and maintain a more optimistic outlook on the world, it also means that sometimes his optimism can stem from a certain degree of naivete, or even the belief that things will work out the way that he wants them to simply because he wants them to. As Rosalind comments at one point, Robert is the type to see “an empty page”, where Rosalind sees only “King Lear” — or, in short, that Rosalind is more equipped to take a fatalistic view of a given series of events, while Robert will want to put his faith in the possibility of the best possible outcome, regardless of how likely that outcome might be.
This fundamental difference in the perspectives of the twins is perhaps no better illustrated than in their ultimate response to the aforementioned girl-for-the-debt exchange that they help to orchestrate. For their own personal gain, and the chance to be together at last, Robert and Rosalind facilitate the effective kidnapping of an infant girl and surrender her into the custody of a man they know is a racist, fundamentalist fanatic. They make themselves complicit in the ordeals that girl faces after her kidnapping, when a bitter conflict between Comstock and his wife over the circumstances of the baby’s birth results in the girl being literally locked in a tower and isolated for her entire life. They teach her, which is all well and good; they also study her without her realizing it, which is...less so. They innovate technology and build machinery that will help to cut off the girl’s powers and subdue her abilities, which is...questionable. And of course, they never actually tell her who she is or where she comes from (or how it is she lost the tip of her little finger), or the fact that the very reason the two of them got to be together at all is because Elizabeth Comstock, effectively, bought it for them with her own existence.
The difference is, Robert is the one who ends up guilty about it — so profoundly guilty, in fact, that he ends up deciding he can’t go on without doing something to try to set things right somehow. And when Rosalind doesn’t share his perspective on the issue or his compulsion to intervene in the matter, Robert proves that he is in fact a fairly ruthless bastard in his own right when he wants to be, and threatens Rosalind into conceding by using the one thing he knows she’ll cave about: himself.
“Help me, or I’ll leave you,” is the ultimatum that Robert effectively delivers, and so of course Rosalind gives in, because there is nothing in any universe more important to her than Robert — and quite possibly, that’s something Robert was both fully aware of and fully willing to take advantage of in order to get the outcome he wanted.
(Not that he would have liked it, of course; remember, Robert is also the one who originally gave up his entire universe and everything he was in it for the sake of leaping into Rosalind’s. A certain degree of obsessiveness about their counterpart is a trait that Robert and Rosalind share, not one they diverge on.)
Thus, in a sense, Robert is effectively twofold responsible for the events of Bioshock: Infinite — firstly, because he and Rosalind helped orchestrate the girl-for-the-debt trade for his ultimate benefit, and secondly because it’s his idea and his insistence on “setting things right” that prompts the Luteces to start trying to assist an ongoing series of parallel universe Bookers in the ultimate retrieval of their daughter.
However, just because Robert is the more conscience-oriented of the two Luteces doesn’t inherently mean he’s not frequently an asshole in his own right. Indeed, his appearances in the game are generally characterized by two main traits, which boil down to “being a needlessly cryptic overdramatic loser for the funsies” and “being generally more focused on bickering about minutiae with Rosalind than actually, you know, contributing anything helpful.” Now, granted, it’s debatable how much more forthcoming with information the Luteces actually could’ve been without inadvertently altering the very set of circumstances they were trying so hard to set right; that said, they certainly didn’t have to be that big of dicks about it, but boy, they sure were.
Another way that Robert and Rosalind differ (and, coincidentally, that Robert and the protagonist ultimately turn out to be similar) is in the fact that only Robert has firsthand experienced the inherent physical and psychological trauma that Bioshock establishes as naturally following a jump between universes. As it turns out, the human mind is not altogether equipped to handle something like the transfer between one parallel reality and another — and particularly not when another version of yourself already exists in it. In that situation, the transferred mind will start attempting to perceive, experience, and “remember” both sets of memories at once; generally speaking, the mind usually isn’t able to reconcile the two, resulting in disorientation, confusion, weakness, and a whole lot of hemorrhaging.
Thus, Robert Lutece is someone who’s been through the experience of abandoning his own reality to insert himself like an uninvited parasite into another, and all of the detriments that have come with it. Leaving his own world didn’t just mean surrendering his privilege. It also meant surrendering his family, his friends, all of his social connections, his life’s work, his reputation and recognition, and — as we come to find out — his physical and mental health, temporarily. He was a pioneer not only in the field of physics, but also in how physics might take their toll on a worldhopper, and he really paid the price for it: in the form of delirium, incapacity, and (but for Rosalind’s intervention) what could have been his own death.
In that respect, he is also the case study for how the mind adapts to world-hopping of that nature. Late in the game he and Rosalind are overheard referencing a theory he’d posited, in which in order to reconcile the conflicts between an old universe’s memories and the new ones a world-hopper is confronted with upon arrival, the world-hopper’s mind will actually manufacture new memories out of his own ones that bring the two differing sets of memories into alignment and create something that the mind can actually handle, technically false though it may be. In Robert’s case, this was presumably identifying himself as Rosalind’s “twin brother”, even though the two of them are fully aware that they share no actual familial relation whatsoever.
(Coincidentally, the preceding sentence almost invoked the phrase “no actual blood relation” — but no, they do very much share their blood, and have, repeatedly, toward the aforementioned end of keeping Robert alive after his jump.)
But who, you might ask, is Robert Lutece on a day to day basis? Well, he’s definitely a guy who’s willing to take time out for lighthearted things, regardless of how Rosalind might roll her eyes at him — for example, when the two of them can be witnessed from a distance and Robert is inexplicably juggling while Rosalind hovers nearby in exasperation. He’s also generally the more sociable of the two, and tends to both get along better with people and has more tolerance for empathizing with people than Rosalind does. He’s absolutely the one of the twins who gets saddled doing all the heavy lifting over the course of the one hundred and twenty-three (no shit) times he and Rosalind run their experiment and try to produce a scenario in which Booker Dewitt actually succeeds in saving his daughter — whether it be singlehandedly rowing the boat that takes them to the lighthouse docks in the beginning of the game, or wearing the signboard of tally marks while Rosalind gets to just pose like Vanna White with the silver coin and platter. And he is, without a doubt, an overly-theatrical loser who’s not afraid to make life fun for himself along the way, whether it be from doing his best rendition of bartender mimicry for no other reason than that he happens to be standing behind a bar, or literally digging his own grave because won’t that look appropriately mysterious and spooky while contributing literally nothing to actually helping Booker on his journey.
But it’s equally important to remember that Robert Lutece is someone whose life has been in many ways defined by the trades that he’s made, and that he’s already proven his willingness to trade literally everything he has for the sake of what he wants. He has traded his world for Rosalind’s, his conscience for his ticket to get there, his everything for the chance to assuage his guilt and try to make things right again. He’s not just willing to believe in the impossible, but willing to put his faith in it; he’s willing to leap and trust that he’ll fly instead of plummeting to earth like a stone. He is, quite possibly, someone who wants to subscribe to the notion that there really are happily-ever-afters, and that it’s only a matter of time and technique in order to achieve them.
Indeed, his story is one that could quite easily be initiated with a “Once upon a time, there lived a boy named Robert Lutece, who lived a normal and happy life until one day everything changed,” and fantastic though it might be, it would also be entirely true.
And as far as Robert perceives it, the next page is always blank.
What only remains to be seen is what his existence will write on it next.
Background:
▶ Robert's Bio on the Bioshock Wiki!
▶ Bioshock: Infinite on the Bioshock Wiki!
▶ R. Lutece at TVTropes, which discusses both Robert and Rosalind together, frequently with comparisons and contrasts of the two.
Abilities:
Well, for one thing he's an accomplished quantum physicist with a genius-level intellect who has literally assisted in the creation of a device capable of ripping open the fabric that separates universes! Which suggests that he's not only capable of some pretty hefty scientific discoveries given enough research and thought, but he can presumably execute those discoveries via a fair amount of technological aptitude as well.
Outside of that, he's presumably well-educated in all the standard subjects for an attendee of Cambridge in his time period; canonically we also know that he knows how to play the piano, paint, dance, and juggle. Additionally, he's presumably fairly fit and athletic, given that he's usually the one doing the physical labor between the Luteces on the adventure, including but not limited to rowing 123 iterations of Booker's dumb ass across an ocean with his bare manly arms.
As to the part about being quantumly displaced and therefore functionally immortal and technically by some rights a god of sorts, I know that our Rosalind has opted out of that particular aspect of his "skill set" but I figure I should report it here anyway just for the sake of seeing how, if at all, the modteam would like that to be handled if it ever were to come up. Practically speaking I imagine it'd effectively boil down to the aforementioned functional immortality plus potentially the ability to teleport around the jamjar, with the omniscience presumably nerfed because that's just gamebreaky. But there it is also, for your review and discretion!
Network/Actionspam Sample:
▶ Robert on the Ruby City Fourth Wall!
Prose Log Sample:
The truth of the matter is, it's awfully hard to see this strange and unprecedented bout of multiversal kidnapping as anything but a blessing in disguise, really.
The rundown, post-apocalyptic look of the buildings is a little bit dismal, of course, but the architecture is reasonably familiar enough that it still resonates with memories of home — real memories, that is, and not just the manufactured ones he'd been forced to come up with by necessity in order to survive the aftermath of his leap through their fateful Lutece Tear all those years ago. Things have the look of home, and amid the crumbling brick and the broken-down storefronts, there are still little patches of clean bright renovation that add to the character of the landscape and make this place an interesting, thought-provoking place to live out a day.
And really, that's what it is. It's a place to live. He is here, and Rosalind is here, and they're living. They're sharing a home and they've managed to get their hands on most of the relevant bits of their lab and it's actually a little bit disgusting how reasonably easy it's been to fall into domesticity, but ever since he's stepped off the train and into this dimension where she'd been already waiting for him, their lives have evolved into a simple, peaceful, pleasant routine.
It's what they'd always dreamed of, isn't it? What they'd longed for since back before they'd even seen each other's faces, back when their only source of contact was a series of makeshift dots and dashes as rendered by the movements of a single atom. They'd longed to be together, and so they'd figured out how to do it, and then they'd contrived to do it, and then —
...And then his conscience had gotten the better of him, and there'd still been no peace between them. Not until they'd taken their steps to assuage it.
But he's got the time now to atone for that, just as they've managed to atone for the machinations they'd effected to reach each other in the first place. They may be trapped unexpectedly in a nonsensical city themed around a massive ruby obelisk at its center, rather than free to explore the multiverse as they see fit, but — well, it bothers him considerably less than it does Rosalind, he suspects, and neither one of them tends to be particularly bothered at all, provided there's one singular stipulation being met, and it's that they needs must be together.
And they are. Together.
...Well. They are, in the grand sense, at least. At the moment he's in the grocery staring at a can of peas, trying to remember if they need peas for the pantry shelf, and additionally if they ever actually eat peas, to begin with. Who would have thought that a single can of peas could provoke such deep philosophical contemplations? And yet here he is, ruminating over them anyway.
Still. He won't dally here too long, certainly not. The pressing matter of the peas will resolve itself in one way or another (either with the can ending up in his basket, or with it remaining on the shelf; perhaps he'll flip a coin, or he would if there were any currency here to speak of to begin with), and then he'll be off, carrying his bags and whistling merrily the whole way home to the residence that he and his quite literal other half have come to call their own.
Domesticity. It's something they've never, not ever, been afforded the chance to indulge in before this.
So. Are they birds, or are they caged?
Whatever the answer, he's finding it awfully hard to mind their involuntary stay here, in the face of a silver lining like that.
Name: Alex
Age: 18+
Personal Journal:
alexclusiveE-mail: gloriousrikkaidai (at) hotmail (dot) com
AIM/etc: AIM: GloriousRikkaidai
CHARACTER
Name: Robert Lutece
Canon:
Age: 38 or thereabouts, the same as his parallel universe counterpart, Rosalind.
Timeline: After the end of the main game!
Items with character at canon point: Tragically, he will be showing up with nothing but the clothes on his back, his Affable Voice™, and a fresh set of guns* from a whole hell of a lot of rowing that he had to do ALL BY HIMSELF because SOME PEOPLE yes right okay anyway.
*of the bicep variety
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: Not applicable!
Personality:
Robert Lutece is someone who once likely had the whole world at his fingertips, which is why it's rather curious that his priorities ultimately led him to abandon it wholesale in favor of joining his parallel universe counterpart in hers, instead.
The central conflict in Bioshock: Infinite revolves around a single particular event: the trade of a girl for a debt. Though the protagonist of the game — and by extension, the player — spends a great deal of time in the dark about what precisely this talisman phrase actually means, we ultimately come to find out that it succinctly describes an exchange made approximately seventeen years before the events of the series, in which Booker Dewitt (a gambler, drunk, and general ne'er-do-well) agreed to surrender his baby daughter, Anna, to have his personal debts and sins "washed away" by the prophet Zachary Hale Comstock.
However, what goes somewhat more understated about this central conflict is that more people than just Booker and Comstock stood to gain — or lose — something through the satisfaction of that exchange. As a matter of fact, Robert and his counterpart, Rosalind, had a great deal riding on it, as well — a matter that, to them, was worth going to any length and making veritably any sacrifice, because in the event that they succeeded, the two of them would finally be able to be together. With the trade between Booker and Comstock complete, Robert Lutece could finally cross over into Rosalind Lutece’s version of reality: the one goal the two Luteces had chased after for years upon years.
While the game itself doesn’t expand phenomenal amounts on Robert, there’s a great deal to be extrapolated both from the choice he makes to join Rosalind, and also from comparisons to Rosalind herself — who, it should be stressed, is Robert genetically, and whose differences from Robert arise more out of subtle environmental differences in their growth and upbringing than anything else.
For example: while Robert is undoubtedly a brilliant physicist, a prodigy in academics, and a pioneer in the area of quantum mechanics specifically, it’s Rosalind who actually develops and perfects the technology that allows them to create the Tear in reality that stands to let them be together. It’s Rosalind who effectively cuts a deal with the devil in order to fund this ambition, trading both the fruits of her work and her professional allegiance to a religious fanatic in exchange for the patronage necessary to keep trying to reach Robert. And in many ways, it’s Rosalind who tends to take the realistic approach to any situation, believing that what’s done is done and that sometimes hope is a fool’s errand and a futile endeavor.
So what does this say about Robert by extension? Well, for starters, it’s fairly likely that Rosalind outpaces Robert in ambition simply because Robert has always had the advantages of privilege that meant he simply didn’t have to work as hard or sacrifice as much to achieve the relatively same outcomes. Robert enjoys the benefits of being a man whose interests run to a traditionally male field; it’s likely he didn’t face nearly the same barriers to furthering his education or pursuing his academic interests that Rosalind did. And indeed, this can sometimes be a double-edged sword; where the benefits of Robert’s privilege have certainly left him more room to cultivate and maintain a more optimistic outlook on the world, it also means that sometimes his optimism can stem from a certain degree of naivete, or even the belief that things will work out the way that he wants them to simply because he wants them to. As Rosalind comments at one point, Robert is the type to see “an empty page”, where Rosalind sees only “King Lear” — or, in short, that Rosalind is more equipped to take a fatalistic view of a given series of events, while Robert will want to put his faith in the possibility of the best possible outcome, regardless of how likely that outcome might be.
This fundamental difference in the perspectives of the twins is perhaps no better illustrated than in their ultimate response to the aforementioned girl-for-the-debt exchange that they help to orchestrate. For their own personal gain, and the chance to be together at last, Robert and Rosalind facilitate the effective kidnapping of an infant girl and surrender her into the custody of a man they know is a racist, fundamentalist fanatic. They make themselves complicit in the ordeals that girl faces after her kidnapping, when a bitter conflict between Comstock and his wife over the circumstances of the baby’s birth results in the girl being literally locked in a tower and isolated for her entire life. They teach her, which is all well and good; they also study her without her realizing it, which is...less so. They innovate technology and build machinery that will help to cut off the girl’s powers and subdue her abilities, which is...questionable. And of course, they never actually tell her who she is or where she comes from (or how it is she lost the tip of her little finger), or the fact that the very reason the two of them got to be together at all is because Elizabeth Comstock, effectively, bought it for them with her own existence.
The difference is, Robert is the one who ends up guilty about it — so profoundly guilty, in fact, that he ends up deciding he can’t go on without doing something to try to set things right somehow. And when Rosalind doesn’t share his perspective on the issue or his compulsion to intervene in the matter, Robert proves that he is in fact a fairly ruthless bastard in his own right when he wants to be, and threatens Rosalind into conceding by using the one thing he knows she’ll cave about: himself.
“Help me, or I’ll leave you,” is the ultimatum that Robert effectively delivers, and so of course Rosalind gives in, because there is nothing in any universe more important to her than Robert — and quite possibly, that’s something Robert was both fully aware of and fully willing to take advantage of in order to get the outcome he wanted.
(Not that he would have liked it, of course; remember, Robert is also the one who originally gave up his entire universe and everything he was in it for the sake of leaping into Rosalind’s. A certain degree of obsessiveness about their counterpart is a trait that Robert and Rosalind share, not one they diverge on.)
Thus, in a sense, Robert is effectively twofold responsible for the events of Bioshock: Infinite — firstly, because he and Rosalind helped orchestrate the girl-for-the-debt trade for his ultimate benefit, and secondly because it’s his idea and his insistence on “setting things right” that prompts the Luteces to start trying to assist an ongoing series of parallel universe Bookers in the ultimate retrieval of their daughter.
However, just because Robert is the more conscience-oriented of the two Luteces doesn’t inherently mean he’s not frequently an asshole in his own right. Indeed, his appearances in the game are generally characterized by two main traits, which boil down to “being a needlessly cryptic overdramatic loser for the funsies” and “being generally more focused on bickering about minutiae with Rosalind than actually, you know, contributing anything helpful.” Now, granted, it’s debatable how much more forthcoming with information the Luteces actually could’ve been without inadvertently altering the very set of circumstances they were trying so hard to set right; that said, they certainly didn’t have to be that big of dicks about it, but boy, they sure were.
Another way that Robert and Rosalind differ (and, coincidentally, that Robert and the protagonist ultimately turn out to be similar) is in the fact that only Robert has firsthand experienced the inherent physical and psychological trauma that Bioshock establishes as naturally following a jump between universes. As it turns out, the human mind is not altogether equipped to handle something like the transfer between one parallel reality and another — and particularly not when another version of yourself already exists in it. In that situation, the transferred mind will start attempting to perceive, experience, and “remember” both sets of memories at once; generally speaking, the mind usually isn’t able to reconcile the two, resulting in disorientation, confusion, weakness, and a whole lot of hemorrhaging.
Thus, Robert Lutece is someone who’s been through the experience of abandoning his own reality to insert himself like an uninvited parasite into another, and all of the detriments that have come with it. Leaving his own world didn’t just mean surrendering his privilege. It also meant surrendering his family, his friends, all of his social connections, his life’s work, his reputation and recognition, and — as we come to find out — his physical and mental health, temporarily. He was a pioneer not only in the field of physics, but also in how physics might take their toll on a worldhopper, and he really paid the price for it: in the form of delirium, incapacity, and (but for Rosalind’s intervention) what could have been his own death.
In that respect, he is also the case study for how the mind adapts to world-hopping of that nature. Late in the game he and Rosalind are overheard referencing a theory he’d posited, in which in order to reconcile the conflicts between an old universe’s memories and the new ones a world-hopper is confronted with upon arrival, the world-hopper’s mind will actually manufacture new memories out of his own ones that bring the two differing sets of memories into alignment and create something that the mind can actually handle, technically false though it may be. In Robert’s case, this was presumably identifying himself as Rosalind’s “twin brother”, even though the two of them are fully aware that they share no actual familial relation whatsoever.
(Coincidentally, the preceding sentence almost invoked the phrase “no actual blood relation” — but no, they do very much share their blood, and have, repeatedly, toward the aforementioned end of keeping Robert alive after his jump.)
But who, you might ask, is Robert Lutece on a day to day basis? Well, he’s definitely a guy who’s willing to take time out for lighthearted things, regardless of how Rosalind might roll her eyes at him — for example, when the two of them can be witnessed from a distance and Robert is inexplicably juggling while Rosalind hovers nearby in exasperation. He’s also generally the more sociable of the two, and tends to both get along better with people and has more tolerance for empathizing with people than Rosalind does. He’s absolutely the one of the twins who gets saddled doing all the heavy lifting over the course of the one hundred and twenty-three (no shit) times he and Rosalind run their experiment and try to produce a scenario in which Booker Dewitt actually succeeds in saving his daughter — whether it be singlehandedly rowing the boat that takes them to the lighthouse docks in the beginning of the game, or wearing the signboard of tally marks while Rosalind gets to just pose like Vanna White with the silver coin and platter. And he is, without a doubt, an overly-theatrical loser who’s not afraid to make life fun for himself along the way, whether it be from doing his best rendition of bartender mimicry for no other reason than that he happens to be standing behind a bar, or literally digging his own grave because won’t that look appropriately mysterious and spooky while contributing literally nothing to actually helping Booker on his journey.
But it’s equally important to remember that Robert Lutece is someone whose life has been in many ways defined by the trades that he’s made, and that he’s already proven his willingness to trade literally everything he has for the sake of what he wants. He has traded his world for Rosalind’s, his conscience for his ticket to get there, his everything for the chance to assuage his guilt and try to make things right again. He’s not just willing to believe in the impossible, but willing to put his faith in it; he’s willing to leap and trust that he’ll fly instead of plummeting to earth like a stone. He is, quite possibly, someone who wants to subscribe to the notion that there really are happily-ever-afters, and that it’s only a matter of time and technique in order to achieve them.
Indeed, his story is one that could quite easily be initiated with a “Once upon a time, there lived a boy named Robert Lutece, who lived a normal and happy life until one day everything changed,” and fantastic though it might be, it would also be entirely true.
And as far as Robert perceives it, the next page is always blank.
What only remains to be seen is what his existence will write on it next.
Background:
▶ Robert's Bio on the Bioshock Wiki!
▶ Bioshock: Infinite on the Bioshock Wiki!
▶ R. Lutece at TVTropes, which discusses both Robert and Rosalind together, frequently with comparisons and contrasts of the two.
Abilities:
Well, for one thing he's an accomplished quantum physicist with a genius-level intellect who has literally assisted in the creation of a device capable of ripping open the fabric that separates universes! Which suggests that he's not only capable of some pretty hefty scientific discoveries given enough research and thought, but he can presumably execute those discoveries via a fair amount of technological aptitude as well.
Outside of that, he's presumably well-educated in all the standard subjects for an attendee of Cambridge in his time period; canonically we also know that he knows how to play the piano, paint, dance, and juggle. Additionally, he's presumably fairly fit and athletic, given that he's usually the one doing the physical labor between the Luteces on the adventure, including but not limited to rowing 123 iterations of Booker's dumb ass across an ocean with his bare manly arms.
As to the part about being quantumly displaced and therefore functionally immortal and technically by some rights a god of sorts, I know that our Rosalind has opted out of that particular aspect of his "skill set" but I figure I should report it here anyway just for the sake of seeing how, if at all, the modteam would like that to be handled if it ever were to come up. Practically speaking I imagine it'd effectively boil down to the aforementioned functional immortality plus potentially the ability to teleport around the jamjar, with the omniscience presumably nerfed because that's just gamebreaky. But there it is also, for your review and discretion!
Network/Actionspam Sample:
▶ Robert on the Ruby City Fourth Wall!
Prose Log Sample:
The truth of the matter is, it's awfully hard to see this strange and unprecedented bout of multiversal kidnapping as anything but a blessing in disguise, really.
The rundown, post-apocalyptic look of the buildings is a little bit dismal, of course, but the architecture is reasonably familiar enough that it still resonates with memories of home — real memories, that is, and not just the manufactured ones he'd been forced to come up with by necessity in order to survive the aftermath of his leap through their fateful Lutece Tear all those years ago. Things have the look of home, and amid the crumbling brick and the broken-down storefronts, there are still little patches of clean bright renovation that add to the character of the landscape and make this place an interesting, thought-provoking place to live out a day.
And really, that's what it is. It's a place to live. He is here, and Rosalind is here, and they're living. They're sharing a home and they've managed to get their hands on most of the relevant bits of their lab and it's actually a little bit disgusting how reasonably easy it's been to fall into domesticity, but ever since he's stepped off the train and into this dimension where she'd been already waiting for him, their lives have evolved into a simple, peaceful, pleasant routine.
It's what they'd always dreamed of, isn't it? What they'd longed for since back before they'd even seen each other's faces, back when their only source of contact was a series of makeshift dots and dashes as rendered by the movements of a single atom. They'd longed to be together, and so they'd figured out how to do it, and then they'd contrived to do it, and then —
...And then his conscience had gotten the better of him, and there'd still been no peace between them. Not until they'd taken their steps to assuage it.
But he's got the time now to atone for that, just as they've managed to atone for the machinations they'd effected to reach each other in the first place. They may be trapped unexpectedly in a nonsensical city themed around a massive ruby obelisk at its center, rather than free to explore the multiverse as they see fit, but — well, it bothers him considerably less than it does Rosalind, he suspects, and neither one of them tends to be particularly bothered at all, provided there's one singular stipulation being met, and it's that they needs must be together.
And they are. Together.
...Well. They are, in the grand sense, at least. At the moment he's in the grocery staring at a can of peas, trying to remember if they need peas for the pantry shelf, and additionally if they ever actually eat peas, to begin with. Who would have thought that a single can of peas could provoke such deep philosophical contemplations? And yet here he is, ruminating over them anyway.
Still. He won't dally here too long, certainly not. The pressing matter of the peas will resolve itself in one way or another (either with the can ending up in his basket, or with it remaining on the shelf; perhaps he'll flip a coin, or he would if there were any currency here to speak of to begin with), and then he'll be off, carrying his bags and whistling merrily the whole way home to the residence that he and his quite literal other half have come to call their own.
Domesticity. It's something they've never, not ever, been afforded the chance to indulge in before this.
So. Are they birds, or are they caged?
Whatever the answer, he's finding it awfully hard to mind their involuntary stay here, in the face of a silver lining like that.