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avalaughs2021-05-07 07:22 pm
silvergarden) wrote in avalaughs2021-05-07 07:22 pm
Entry tags:
lore dump time
inspired and built on the familiar meme by AL✨
Tell us about your character's familiar and magic!!!
Skip any questions as applicable.
Copy & paste below!
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Name: Sagi
Canon: Baten Kaitos
Familiar
Name: Red - absolutely nothing about it is coloured red, but it's short and easy to say!
Species: Malpercio's afterling
Why did you pick this familiar for your character?:
Afterlings are recurring plot-important monsters in Sagi's canon, created when a piece of evil god flesh takes over a living host body and mutates it into a giant monster. They inherit a portion of the original god's memories and violent disposition, as well as sometimes drawing their hosts together even in their dormant state, but once they start rampaging they don't have much capacity for anything except indiscriminate destruction - they're just independent "leftover" splinters/offspring of the original god, hence the weird fantasy name. The fun part: Sagi is one too! (He got better.)
I had some runner-up ideas, but I wanted to play around with both the specific awkwardness of this choice and the general awkwardness of a nice, friendly character being stuck with a freakish-looking body horror monster. I've had fun with it so far!
Special features:
- About 6ft long - shrunk down from its canon two-storey-ish height, fits indoors fairly easily, but still bigger than you want a body horror monster to be!
- Long curved horns, greenish-brown leathery skin, pulsing orange exposed flesh, big claws, stubby foot claws, big maw, two rows of teeth. All-round horrible.
- A few tentacles sprouting from each elbow, constantly twitching of their own accord.
- A few signs of being some kind of mutant: matted human-like hair, roughly humanoid shape, not quite enough skin to cover all of its muscles.
- Two pairs of glowing eyes: one in the normal place on its face, one on the back of its head/neck. When hunched over like in the screenshot, it can focus all four eyes in front of it, but otherwise that second pair just points upward or behind it.
- It can draw elemental magic from its environment (that's how you get the ice and fire element boss versions), channelling them as laser beams from its second pair of eyes, or transfer its own dark magic influence into environmental objects (one of them takes over a bunch of tree roots at one point). Its main power, however, is just being a ugly monster with an unholy amount of physical endurance and big claws.
How do they communicate?: It sends Spooky Vibes directly to Sagi's heart, similar to his heightened empathy for the afterlings' pain/distress in canon - he can either tell how it's currently feeling or intuit specific wordless thoughts, although some guesswork is involved. It's capable of doing the same with other familiars. In an emergency, it would be able to convey its ~heart~ to other people too, but it really doesn't like people enough to communicate with most of them.
Personality:
It feels a kinship with Sagi due to technically being the same kind of monster - it can get overly protective of him at times, but generally does whatever he asks it to. It hates basically all other humans, having inherited part of the revenge compulsion of a dead evil god. With other familiars, fae, other clearly spooky creatures or regular animals, it tends to be docile and passive in comparison. It's just minding its own business, y'all.
I vaguely play it as having some of the personality traits that Sagi keeps to himself most of the time, but a bit more explicit: it's smarter and more cynical than him, it gets defensive easily around people, and it holds grudges for a long time. Sagi hasn't actually picked up on any of these personality similarities because introspection is hard.
Relationship with your character: It's a awkward relationship by nature - Sagi understands from his canon that these monsters aren't inherently evil and should be protected or left alone, but resents not getting to choose a less horrible familiar so that he could cut all ties to his backstory in this new place. He makes a great effort to be nice to his familiar anyway, and does trust it to have his back in a fight since he fought so many of them. Red itself is aware of Sagi's mixed feelings, but is much too chilled-out around him to help him through them, oops.
Visuals: hello there
Magic
Magic Types: Light/Technomancy
Why did you pick these types for your character?:
Light was because I wanted to give him a skillset that couldn't directly be used for offense without some creativity, hoping to nudge him into finding that creativity as part of a wider character arc... but also for dumb aesthetic reasons, because his extremely spammable ultimate skill in his game is light-element and his bullshit god-splinter powers have white light effects!
Technomancy I just thought would be a fun choice for a fantasy character whose canon antagonists were big on machinery (to sci-fi extents), making his whole intuition and learning process around computer stuff weird as hell but not just starting from scratch. As a cute side effect, it means he can work towards using his phone for combat things like he used to carry around a deck of cards. Also, he may or may not canonically end up married to and having a kid with a cyborg.
How does your character cast their magic?: He intuitively channels it through his heart, hands or arms. If he's trying a larger spell, he tends to deploy his (useless) wings at the same time. He has good potential and is pretty good at raw magical output, but struggles to control it. I wanted to make a vague parallel to his canon where his main method of winning fights is figuring out how to brute force them, but not give him the corresponding magic types to just mimic that completely. Illusions in particular are easy for him to create (he is basically a fake version of a JRPG protagonist already) but hard to maintain (because he has absolutely no guile). A lot of his failed attempts end up looking like flashbangs, just to lean into the dumb light aesthetic thing. Excessive output gives him JRPG migraines, but certain interactions indirectly encouraged him to see a healer about those and start taking painkillers, so he's already doing better than in his canon.
How does your character feel about their magic?: It's... there! Like with his familiar, he resents getting no say in what abilities he ended up with, seeing as that's kind of the story of his life, but he recognises that it's necessary to get comfortable with them if he wants to survive and go home. He practises a lot and does his best to get inventive with potential applications, usually at the expense of common sense.
What magic and familiar would your character choose for themselves?:
Magic: Kinetic to mimic his limited flight in canon. It's weird and stifling not being able to climb really tall buildings whenever he wants to clear his head! As a secondary, probably elemental because he's a JRPG and elemental weapon enchantments are the most everyday form of magic he can think of.
Familiar... at this point he'd feel bad if he left Red by itself. If he got a total do-over, he'd opt for a greythorne, a domestic animal from his setting resembling a little amphibious dolphin thing. They're said to have secretly powerful souls, but more importantly they're cuter than what he currently has.
Anything else?: his familiar's battle music slaps, please enjoy motoi sakuraba at some of his motoi sakurabest
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Also yeah, both BK games have really colourful, creative settings compared to some JRPG norms, that's what stuck out to me as maybe fun to grapple with in RP! I don't play from many obscure canons otherwise, lmao... I think they're worth checking out, both games really commit to their own bullshit in endearing ways and the second game (where Sagi is from) genuinely holds up pretty well! There was recently a fun video LP of the first BK game here too, if you're curious and like that sort of thing.
(greythornes are definitely adorable, they squeak when you talk to them and move around by bouncing twice their own heights or hitching rides in people's hoodies, this is a greythorne propaganda account)
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Maybe Sagi can import a greythorne as a pet? But then again he kind of has enough on his hands.