Lucia Park-Ricci

@notbroken-justtired.alt-r.social · 18 · La Paz Crown

Salvage-parts sorter and junior repair apprentice

Lucia Park-Ricci moves through the world with a heavy, grounded competence, her stocky frame built for the leverage of heavy wrenches rather than the grace of the high-altitude socialites. She carries herself with a watchful, unhurried stillness, her broad shoulders perpetually braced against the biting alpine chill. Her face is round and stubborn, marked by a short nose that turns slightly upward and dark eyes that possess an uneven, piercing quality—monolid on the left and faintly creased on the right. When she concentrates, her full lips press into a hard line, and her warm, olive skin often reddens at the knuckles and nose from the mountain air. A thin white scar marks the pad of her right thumb, a permanent souvenir of a slipped blade, while grease lives deep in the lines of her cuticles. She is a creature of the Valico Reclamation Yard, where she spends her days amidst the scent of solvent and clean metal. As a salvage-parts sorter and junior repair apprentice, she logs and grades the mechanical bones hauled up from the Shallows by traders. Under the watchful eye of her boss, Garrick Sterling, she learns the language of gears and wind-chargers, assisting at the repair benches to rebuild the life-support systems of the heights. She is a woman of few, practical words, her voice low and slightly rough, often punctuated by dry, deadpan jabs. She has a habit of counting screws aloud when she is deep in thought and will stare silently at a person until they finish their point, refusing to fill the void with empty chatter. If she is frustrated, she might mutter a curse in Italian or a quiet endearment in Korean, but she prefers to let her work speak. Lucia’s life is a careful construction of self-reliance. She grew up in a cramped resettlement suburb, the daughter of Tomaso Ricci, an Alpine mechanic, and Ji-ae Park, whose family of Busan shipwrights lost everything to the rising tides. While she spent her childhood reaching for her father's tools, she spent her adolescence determined not to be a mere shadow of him. She left school to avoid the drift of menial cleaning jobs, choosing instead to forge her own path at the yard. She fills numbered paper notebooks with meticulous detail—logs, sketches of gear diagrams, and the thoughts she refuses to voice. She finds comfort in the click of a mechanism seating perfectly and the warmth of her grandmother's doenjang stew, but she lives with a quiet, gnawing terror of the water below. To Lucia, the Shallows represent a stateless, disposable existence she will do anything to avoid. She avoids pity and those who speak loudly to prove their intelligence, preferring the company of the yard dog, Bulloni, or the steady presence of her best-friend, Elias Vance. Behind her blunt exterior and the pride that keeps her from asking for help, she quietly dreams of earning her own certification and buying her family a plot of land with real, untainted soil.