Carmen

This section contains spoilers related to the story of Lobotomy Corporation. Read ahead with caution if you want to experience the story for yourself.

> *"No matter what I may become, please finish what I started."*
> - Carmen
>
>

**Carmen**, or **C**, the head researcher of The Seed of Light project, the main catalyst of the unfolding events at the Cogito Research Facility, the Lobotomy Corporation Wing, The City, and later, The Library.

She has fair skin, long dark brown hair, and red eyes. She is often depicted to have hair combed into a ponytail, pinned in place by a red bear hair pin, while wearing a lab coat, a brown suit, a skirt, and dark shoes.

## Personality

Carmen is one-of-a-kind when compared to the denizens of The City. Unlike most entities in The City, who are nihilistic, corrupt and/or eccentric, Carmen stands out as highly enthusiastic, altruistic, and ambitious person, guided solely by a desire to overturn The City's state as a corporate dystopia that feeds on carnage and human suffering. She is perceptive and charismatic, easily predisposing people to herself, gaining their trust with no effort.

She has a great research ability, as she discovered the substance that is Cogito that allowed her to start her experimentation and project to attempt to achieve "The Seed of Light". She values human lives as her goal was to bring the end of all suffering in the City but also the value of a person's will and their bravery to face adversity, and only at the severe mistake of failure, it manages to break her composure.

After Enoch's death, Carmen fell into a state of depression that took away her own beliefs and faith in what she working for, as the cost of failure outweighed any positive outcome of knowing the result, as a human death, specially of a child used for an experimentation; was something that she couldn't turn away from. She remained in this state until her own suicide attempt.

## Relationships

### A

She was a colleague and mentor of A. They had a common goal, but the paths to it were different. Carmen was not able to take into account the "collateral damage" and to sacrifice someone for the sake of achieving a result, unlike A. Despite this, Carmen was quite open with him and could just lie with him on the grass to discuss sometimes strange ideas and thoughts that came to her mind. In the end, she was confident that it was A who would be able to complete her project. No matter how cruel this world became, Carmen knew that he would endure and not retreat from the chosen path.

## History

Carmen was a young woman who had the inspiration and will to change the lives of the City. She was born in a Nest and was recognized for her charismatic and compelling speeches that she gave out in the open like in the Backstreets. However, she had complete sincerity and commitment to her own beliefs and that there was a way to change the life in the City from the senseless death and suffering, which attracted various interested members allured by her ideas.

Noblemen and a legendary Color Fixer are compelled by her speeches and join her research lab. Carmen's fiery speeches made others follow her and work for her small company, rather than for other Wings. Carmen managed to secure the trust earned from her company's employees and her inner circle, and she holds tight to her goal of undoing The City's current state until the very end.

Carmen's objective was to return the extinguished light to the souls of people with a project known as "The Seed of Light". It is said that once the project completes itself, the City's current state as a dystopia where people are forced to live on human suffering, carnage and monetary matters will be undone, and humanity will return to the way they were. For such a grandiose goal, Carmen really meant it, no matter how unrealistic it would be.

Carmen opposed the need to become a Wing, since "what is the point of having Wings if you can't fly to reach the sky?", and the idea of creating a long stalk to reach the above was put into practice as the Seed of Light. For her initial speeches, Ayin was presumably the first to be attracted by her speech as he became a close person to her, and Benjamin followed Ayin's steps. Elijah, Gabriel, Giovanni, and Michelle joined soon after. Kali and Daniel were brought to the project for protection and management, and two kids, Lisa and Enoch; were rescued from the Backstreets by Carmen and Ayin and brought with them. They have settled a laboratory in the Outskirts to avoid The Head's eyes from interfering in their project.

Their main substance to draw out the "Light" was Cogito, an unique chemical substance that was extracted from human's minds through experimentation. Being unstable and having unknown side effects on humans (Turning them into Abnormalities, drawing negative energy as Ordeals), they required more funding and new methods to achieve the goal soon without much casualties and risks.

However, issues started to show up, as the research still didn't bear any result of what they wanted to achieve. One major step was to attempt to use the experimentation of Cogito on a human, where Carmen was the fittest of all candidates, but Enoch began to show more interest in finding meaning to life and join the experimentation of Cogito. Lisa was against it but was something that he wanted to do and Carmen had to approve such decision, which she did after some long time thinking. Michelle was concerned by this as well and took notes of the events.

When Enoch died due to a failed experiment, Carmen lost faith in herself. Lisa's accusation was the final straw, pointing that she should have died instead of him while crying. Carmen was heavily impacted by her words and her whole natural stance shattered. She slowly fell into a deep depression, as her tone of speech became unnaturally cold and her eyes, formerly brimmed with confidence, dulled. Her behavior also became noticeably erratic, cycling between crying and laughing and wandered around the facility listlessly with dull eyes. The facility continued to work but the morale lowered among the employees.

A few days later, Carmen broke down and decided to kill herself out of guilt by cutting off her wrists with a knife in a bathtub. The suicide was unsuccessful, and Carmen was found alive, but unconscious. Ayin managed to salvage her body and immerse her in a cryogenic chamber. However, this state allowed the decision of using Carmen as a key part of the project that failed before. Ayin removed Carmen's nervous system from her body and placed it in a reservoir where she began to produce Cogito for continuous experimentation on the "Well". In this state, she is technically alive still.

Ayin took control of the project but he wasn't moved by the same enthusiasm as Carmen, but more like a matter of conserving her will and finish what she started because she also believed in him. Time went on, and soon Elijah got a fragment of Cogito for testing to show her will to help, but took a toll on her as she died in front of Ayin. Gabriel suffered a mental trauma that related to his own exposure of his skin and died. To continue the research on Cogito, Ayin persuaded others with the idea of bringing Carmen and the others back, when in reality wanted to find the proper usage of Cogito, and Giovanni offered himself to be used for this test, but the experimentation caused his death. Michelle couldn't hold the information back for too long and told the Head about the facility, which soon took action by attacking the facility with the Arbiter, Garion. She released the Abnormalities within the place and manages to kill both Lisa and Daniel. Kali decides to face Garion and attempt to protect the ones left. The battle finishes with Kali dead and Garion severely damaged, and the survivors being Ayin and Benjamin, who used Garion to extract her brain and uncover certain secrets, as well making her the first Sephirah and put her under this torture, while gaining the information to become a Wing. Michelle commits suicide after learning what happened in the facility.

After enough preparations, as product of Benjamin's actions, a war was coming up to take down the current L Corp so they would become a Wing. Named the "Smoke War", a conflict between various groups and the previous L Corp, it ended opening a new path to create Lobotomy Corporation and become a Wing with their own singularity, while producing energy and making their research to finish the project of The Seed of Light.

Being almost the end of the road, Ayin decided to violate one of the rules of the City by creating an Android AI, Angela, from the basis of Carmen to resemble her, but the creation did not resemble Carmen at all. The AI retained some of Carmen's memories, but was completely different in character from her. When Ayin realized this, he forsaken her and barely treated her as a person, not even bothering to give her a proper name or look at her. Benjamin tried to give her the support he could and explained that was programmed to react faster to the facility's emergencies and that she perceives time 100 times slower for this purpose, while handing her the "Script" which was the actions she needed to do to finish the process of the facility and complete the project. After a contract with T Corp, a time corporation, they used it to create Loops of time with new Managers. Across the time, Ayin gave up and his memories were traspassed to other Managers of the same facility to make a new replica of himself for the future loops, something that Angela controlled. Benjamin tried to warn him about the actions and consequences, but Angela managed to kill him before it. However, the loop has the messages of Benjamin implanted in them as a failsafe or warning to new Managers before the memory implant.

This whole process left Angela to withstand a millennia of suffering and horror from the loops, degenerating her into the cold, pragmatic and ruthless AI, forsaken for being a different person that she was supposed to be.

Carmen is still alive as "The Bucket" of the facility, and her final moments in the Endings, are always the end of the facility in either destruction or the project being finished, while vanishing along the light.

## Gallery

Carmen's face (according to Ayin's memories)Carmen's nervous system.