27. Lucy/Nyuu (Elfen Lied)
Lucy is a teenage diclonius girl (approximately 18 years old), a mutant subrace of humans born with telekinetic powers. These telekinetic powers take the form of invisible "arms" termed "vectors" that extend out of her back, which she can use to lift objects many times her own weight, or slice humans beings in half with. She has 4 vectors (many more in the manga) with a limited range of two meters. However, she can be swift and lethal within that range, and will also use any nearby inanimate objects as high velocity projectiles to kill at a greater distance. She is also capable of stopping or deflecting most standard ammunition when she concentrates on the task.
Lucy hates humans mainly because of how she was treated by her human peers as a child. Lucy was abandoned as an infant and placed in an orphanage, where the other children bullied her mercilessly because of her horns and she had no one who cared about her. When she was about ten years old, Lucy found a stray puppy and began taking care of it, but the other children eventually found out about it and forced Lucy to watch as they bludgeoned it to death with a vase for no other reason than to make Lucy cry. In this moment of great stress, Lucy's inborn diclonius powers awoke and she ripped the other children apart with her vectors.
Lucy then buried her puppy where she first found it, whereupon she first met Kouta, who was in town visiting relatives. Unlike all humans Lucy had previously known, Kouta pitied Lucy because she seemed sad and wanted to be her friend. Kouta took Lucy on a trip to a zoo and spent a whole day playing with her. Kohta was the first person to ever treat Lucy with affection and like she was wanted, and Lucy fell in love with him. However, fearing that Lucy would become upset if she found out that the cousin he was visiting was a girl, Kohta lied and said his cousin was a boy. When later that night at a festival Lucy discovered that Yuka was in fact a girl and Kohta cared about her as well, Lucy panicked and jumped to the conclusion that Kohta had been lying about everything, and like the children in her orphanage was just pretending to be nice to her in order to tease her. Falling into a mental fugue, the stress of "losing" Kohta broke Lucy emotionally and she came to the conclusion that the only way for her to survive would be to kill off the human race. Lucy proceeded to go on a rampage killing several people at the festival. Soon afterwards, she intercepted Kohta as he was leaving at the train station and killed his sister Kanae and his father, and planned to kill Yuka. However, Kohta tackled her to the ground and demanded that she stop, and Kohta's horrified reaction made Lucy realize for the first time she had done something awful that she could never undo, and guilt over what she had done to Kohta would follow her the rest of her life.
Lucy proceeded to live the next 5 years as a runaway, alternatively keeping a low profile and when pressed, sneaking into residential homes and killing the families inside in order to obtain a place to stay (and also partially as revenge at not being able to have a normal life herself). Three years before the series begins, Lucy met Aiko Takada, her only true friend besides Kohta. Aiko's father had become cruel and would beat Aiko after he was re-married to a drunkard. Aiko's father tried to stab her with a knife but she pushed his arm back, causing him to slash his own throat. Lucy and Aiko then went to find Aiko's true mother (who was a very talented artist). At the same time, Kurama began searching for Lucy and followed her to the museum where Aiko's mom worked. While inside, Aiko pushed Lucy out of the way of a bullet headed towards her. Lucy agreed to go with Kurama if he promised to save Aiko. Lucy was then captured by Kurama, and imprisoned in the diclonius research institute where she was subjected to inhumane medical experiments. By the time Lucy escapes from the research base in the first episode of the series, what little is left of her sanity is hardened into boundless hatred against all humans.
In the first episode's infamous 7 minute opening action scene, Lucy fights her way out of the diclonius research institute's island base, slaughtering two dozen guards in the process. After she has escaped the base and is about to flee into the sea, Director Kurama has a sniper try to kill her with an armor-piercing .50 caliber anti-tank round, which is heavy enough that her vectors cannot fully block it. However, while the sniper aims for her the back of her skull, a combination of Lucy's head moving at the last moment, partial deflection with her vectors, and the metal helmet restraint she was wearing cause the bullet to not kill Lucy, but instead knock her unconscious and into the sea. She also suffered brain damage from the round that split her mind between her homicidal "Lucy" personality and a new infantile "Nyu" personality.
Lucy then washes up on a nearby beach in Kamakura, where she is found by Kohta and Yuka. Having no memory of who she is and the mind of a baby, Kouta and Yuka take her back to the former inn where they live, the Kaede Inn (Maple Inn). Because the only word she can say is the nonsense word "Nyu" they dub her "Nyu".
When Lucy flees to the beach again after making Kohta angry, Lucy is attacked by special forces SAT soldiers including Bando, but kills them and maims Bando by cutting off his right arm, breaking his left, and destroying his eyes.
After this, Nyu trips and hits her head, restroing her original "Lucy" personality, but instead of hurting Kohta and Yuka she runs away. At the same time, Kurama sends the Silpelit-Diclonius Nana to find Lucy. Nana finds Lucy and tries to talk her into coming back, which she refuses. Lucy originally says that she does not want to kill Nana because she has never actually killed "a person" before, revealing that she does not consider non-diclonius to be actual people. However they soon start fighting, and engage in a massive telekinetic battle in a nearby cemetery. Just as Nana gains the upper hand, she stops when Mayu arrives rather than risk injuring her, giving Lucy an opening: Lucy process to rip all of Nana's arms and legs off, and would have finished her off had not Kurama then arrived. However, Lucy then flees to the inn and reverts back to Nyu.
Fearing simply leaving Nyu unattended at home, Yuka and Kohta take her with them to their university class, where Prof. Kakuzawa finds her. Kakuzawa claims that she is his niece and that they should leave her with him, which they do despite Nyu's apparent aggitation. In fact, Kakuzawa is the son of Director Kakuzawa, who runs the diclonius research base that Lucy escaped from, and it is Prof. Kakuzawa that released the locks in Lucy's prison, allowing her to escape. Prof. Kakuzawa sedates Nyu and prepares to rape her, but then "Lucy" wakes up. Kakuzawa reveals to her that he is in fact half-diclonius (watered down through years of inbreeding with humans to the point of having no vector-powers) and wants to use her to father a new race of diclonii that will kill off the entire human race. However, rather than take up his offer, Lucy simply decapitates him.
Eventually, Nana (having been freed from the research base and on the run herself) arrives at the inn, almost sparking another fight with Lucy, but Lucy reverts to Nyu and her new family grows in number by one.
However, the research base finally sends in Mariko, the strongest diclonius ever, to retrieve Lucy, and she confronts Mariko rather than try to hide and end up getting anyone else involved again. Lucy slaughters several dozen more SAT soldiers sent after her, and Kohta remembers their true past together. Lucy is ultimately beaten to a pulp by Mariko, and one of her horns gets knocked off. However, Mariko is self-destructed by her father Kurama, who also dies in the blast. Lucy then saves Nana from being shot, and tells her to live a happy life in the inn that Lucy herself could not. Lucy is able to talk to Kohta again and finally tell him that she is sorry for killing his father and sister, and that the only reason she kept on living through her nightmarish life was in the hope that she could one day apologize to him. Kohta says that he still cares about her and they share a kiss, however, she then walks off to fight the remaining squads of SAT soldiers from the research base. This may or may not have resulted in her death as the fight is not shown, however it did knock her other horn off. The ending, which has the Kohta's music box ending and the clock beginning to tick, gives a strong hint that Lucy has died but Nyu is still there. The clock being Nyu's favorite thing to fix in the anime series, and the music box being Lucy's favorite object in the series.
Nyuu is a split personality of Lucy, possibly created from brain damage caused by a .50 BMG round ricocheting off her head (due to a metallic helmet). Nyuu has a child-like personality and infantile knowledge of the world, and lacks spoken language skills. Nyuu is lovable, innocent and incapable of violent acts, a foil to the normal Lucy; she is the manifestation of her 'good side'. When Nyuu is attacked violently (or hit on the head), she will regress into Lucy; likewise, when Lucy is treated with love and kindness, she will uncontrollably switch back into Nyuu, showing a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde complex.
One example of this is when Lucy's presence surfaces when Nyuu sees a picture of Kohta's little sister Kanae, whom Lucy had encountered eight years before. At the same moment, Nyuu starts to cry and eventually tells Kohta that she's sorry. While she does so, she starts to remember something, and suddenly grabs her head as if in pain (much like Lucy had done when she switched back to Nyuu as she tortured Bandou). Kohta embraces her, and the Lucy side of her settles. Both Lucy and Nyuu are in love with Kohta.
Initially, Nyuu is totally infantile: she has no idea how to feed or clothe herself, and urinates on the floor because she doesn't understand what this signifies. Living with Kohta and Yuka, Nyu soon learns basic skills, etc. Still, Nyu's spoken language skills are mostly just limited to "Nyuu" (which is a nonsense word in both English and the original Japanese), but over time she gradually learns more words like "Kohta" and "yes", and by late in the series she is able to string together basic sentences. As Nyuu, Lucy cannot be sensed by other Diclonius and Silpelits. Nyuu never uses her vectors when she is the dominant personality, even for benign tasks such as moving household objects, etc.
Kohta chooses not to take "Nyu" to the police as a missing person, because the night Kohta found her SAT soldiers trying to recaptured her attacked both of them and sent him to the hospital with a mild concussion. Police detectives trying to debrief Kohta seemed ominously shifty and clearly knew more than they were saying, which convinced Kohta that they could not be trusted and he could not turn to the police. Similarly, Kohta realized that the police were staking out local hospitals for someone matching Nyuu's description, and fearing that they would hurt her, he didn't try to take her for medical attention.
In the anime, it is suggested that Lucy partially manufactured the Nyuu personality. She explains to Kohta (as Lucy) that having to face him terrified her, due to her compounding guilt about killing his family in a jealous fit. She wasn't able to find a way to apologize, so she instead became Nyuu. It's worth noting that the Nyuu personality seems to have disappeared after Kohta regains his memory.
An open question in the anime is if "Nyuu" was partially a psychological by-product of Lucy's guilt and emotional trauma, at exactly which point this happens: certainly, Nyuu was originally created by brain damage Lucy suffered in the first episode from the ricocheting sniper's bullet. It would seem that this gradually shifts to the point that her brain physically recovers, but psychologically she still has the split personality because she cannot stand the guilt of being "Lucy" while she is with Kohta. Exactly when this shift happens is not clear.