WIP

OOC INFORMATION

Player Name: Quix
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact: quixocalypse / Quix#8093
Other Characters in Game: N/A

IC INFORMATION

Character Name: Estinien Wyrmblood
Canon: Final Fantasy 14
Canon Point: After "Death Unto Dawn" Part 1
Background: Wiki Link

Suitability: Coming from a realm not unlike Abraxas, this is the exact sort of setting he's accustomed to. Nations warring over ancient power, magical technology, gods walking the earth, horror both psychological and physical - it's all familiar enough that he'll know how to move within it, but different enough to keep him guessing. He has his own preconceptions formed around these ideas, of course, but he is open to new information, and the conflict will be fun to play out. His entire worldview has been changed by new circumstances more than once, and having grown up in a wartorn country, he is the type to adapt and survive.

Beyond that, while I don't yet know what faction he'll end up serving, he is a character that works well as a supporting figure for other character's stories, whether that be endorsing an NPC leader or a player one. He's a powerful warrior, but one that requires the guiding presence of others to bring him to his fullest potential. On his own he is an aimless wanderer, but with the leadership of another, he can truly make a difference. I'd love for him to find an existing cause to back in this way. In his canon narrative, he's been taking intentional steps towards being a more active force for the good of his world, in particular by officially joining the story's heroes, the Scions. He'll try to do the same here, it's just a matter of who ends up recruiting him. He's extremely loyal to those that have earned his trust, and is concerned with the plight of the 'little people' caught up on the throes of war.

He'll easily fight and die for the sake of his home and the people he loves, having spent most of his life as a soldier and having a shaky identity outside of that. He also has a complicated relationship with the concept of revenge - he spent his entire life pursuing his own revenge, and everything he did as an adult was for the sake of pursuing it. With the enemy he pursued for so long dead, he's become aware of the futility of vengeance... but it's also something carved deeply into his heart. He is absolutely the sort that would pursue those that have wronged him, especially if it seems to be for the sake of the greater good - in his mind, at least. Hunting down that NPC that was horrible to him is absolutely something he would do, and with him starting off imprisoned, he's already sworn vengeance against Thorne, threatening to become the danger they accuse him of being. This feeling could be assuaged, depending on future circumstances, but any further cruelty from them could also serve to make it much worse.

Powers: As a general note to all of Estinien's powers, they are rooted in the concept of "aether" which is the life energy that literally everything in his universe is made out of. Magic, souls, plants, humans, rocks, technology, memories - all of it is made by aether, and warriors also use their aether in a manner similar to the concept of "chi" to empower their techniques to supernatural heights. There are eight elemental forms of aether that have different properties, and members of mankind are meant to have a perfect balance of them in their natural state. Estinien is not any kind of mage, but he has honed his abilities as a dragoon, which involves reaching these supernatural levels of prowess by tapping into his own natural aether.

Additionally, he has learned how to channel the unique aether belonging to dragons - he used to do this by manipulating a stolen dragon eye, the wellspring of a dragon's strength, but then later he is fused with the soul (and the eyes) of one of the most powerful dragons of his world. The dragon's spirit is eventually exorcised and its eyes are destroyed, but Estinien has inherited a significant amount of dragon aether from the experience and retains dragon abilities even though said dragon (the Great Wyrm Nidhogg) is dead. Estinien considers Nidhogg to be "a part of him", and retains some of his memories and emotions. He can also do things as a result that are considered absurdly powerful even by the standards of his high fantasy universe.

DRAGOON LEAPS AND DIVES: The signature move of the combat style Estinien has mastered, dragoons are able to leap to great heights and control the trajectory of their movements while airborne. They harness this ability for enhanced mobility against flying opponents, as well as delivering punishing attacks to those on the ground - mostly in form of hurling themself at their opponents, striking with the full force of their body placed behind their lance. While it isn't quite like flying as Estinien cannot stay in the air indefinitely, he can leap so high and far that the difference may not be apparent to those on the ground. He's been shown leaping into the clouds and then diving all the way back down to the ground without sustaining any damage. The game never outlines how these techniques are mastered but based on the extended Final Fantasy 14 canon, it's probably from manipulating wind aether.

FIRE EMPOWERED ATTACKS: Estinien can empower lance blows with fire aether to essentially cause a destructive explosion at the location he hits with a dive. This was something he could do before his fusion with Nidhogg, but its power has been enhanced by it, namely through a technique called "Stardiver" which is inherited from Nidhogg directly. While the game doesn't go into more specifics, destructive fire magic is generally within his wheelhouse, though specifically in the context of his existing dragoon techniques. He doesn't breathe fire or throw fireballs. (That we know of. See "Nidhogg Wild Card" below.)

NIDHOGG DESTRUCTION MAGIC: There are other magical abilities he's inherited from Nidhogg that are not specifically fire, and seem to instead be unaspected (corresponding to no particular element) destruction. This includes techniques like Nastrond (a blast of destructive energy following the line of a spear thrust), Ala Morn (a magically empowered lance strike), and Horrid Roar (a psychic/sonic wave emitted from his body that basically destroys everything around him, canonically shown to blow up a room full of small robots). Darkdragon Dive is his most ultimate attack, creates his biggest explosion, and can only be used once when he's already on battle high. (AKA, a Limit Break, for those familiar with Final Fantasy.)

Many of these abilities are primarily used when he is in a powered-up state, calling upon the spirit of Nidhogg to destroy their enemies. He's been shown blowing up giant robots and decimating large portions of machinery/architecture by doing this, neither of which seemed to tax him that severely. Of course, he also seems to only use this state as a last resort, and so it can be assumed there is a limit to how much he can exert himself in a single conflict.

NIDHOGG WILD CARD: While this list covers the major beats of what we've seen him do in-game, recent canon has indicated that when Estinien enters his state of enhanced communion with Nidhogg's aether, he may end up pulling techniques from Nidhogg's repertoire that he has never performed before. Most of these abilities are just variations on the stuff I've mentioned above (different animations for similar effects, as it were) but in this particular instance, he spontaneously reproduced a move where Nidhogg split himself into six temporary copies to deliver a total of seven simultaneous attacks. These clones can't do anything besides this and have no utility purpose outside of delivering an attack and disappearing immediately afterward.

PERSONALITY QUESTIONS

Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Without question, the defining moment of Estinien's life is the day he lost his family and entire rural community to a dragon attack lead by their leader, the great wyrm Nidhogg. He was twelve years old at the time, and spared only because he had been in the hills tending to his family's small flock of sheep when it happened. He saw the dragons in the sky and knew what it meant - he ran as fast as he could back to his village, but by the time he arrived, it was already consumed by fire. He found the bodies of his family inside his collapsed house, buried in rubble and covered in ash. His deceased little brother stuck out to him in particular, his young face oddly pristine among the carnage, almost looking as if he would someday wake up. He never did.

A terrible battle between Nidhogg and the then Azure Dragoon, Alberic Bale, had taken place that day. Alberic had fought Nidhogg for three consecutive days as the wyrm rampaged across Coerthas, but was ultimately unable to stop his horde from destroying his final stop, Estinien's home. The Azure Dragoon is an elite rank and the most powerful dragon-slaying champion of their nation, drawing strength from Nidhogg's own stolen eye. In the end, Alberic did end up driving off Nidhogg, but not before the damage was done and he had been forced to relinquish the power of Nidhogg's eye to avoid being consumed by it. No longer the Azure Dragoon, Alberic took Estinien, the only survivor of the massacre, into his home.

In the aftermath, Estinien could think only of revenge. Though still so young, he began training under Alberic as a dragoon, determined to become the next Azure Dragoon and kill Nidhogg himself, in the way Alberic had failed to. Consumed by guilt for his failure, Alberic did not refuse him. This began a twenty-year-long obsession for Estinien, where his every action was for the sake of eventually claiming the mantle of Azure Dragoon and taking his revenge. He spurned social contact and maintained absolutely no hobbies, focusing only on training and getting stronger. The effect on him as a person was profound, so consumed by his thirst that he never really took the chance to heal or properly mourn. It's only now, in his thirties, with Nidhogg dead and his nation saved from its endless war, that he's been able to truly begin his recovery.

If Estinien had never lost his family or sworn revenge against Nidhogg, he would be a completely different person. These days, his biggest challenge is figuring out who he is now that the Dragonsong War is over.

Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
While I would consider Estinien to have a "normal person" level of empathy and concern for the struggles of others, it doesn't seem that he's ever felt particularly empowered to make the world better or to stand up for his beliefs. Instead, he has historically behaved more as a neutral tool of destruction - ultimately, he's fought to save Ishgard from what destruction he could, but early in canon he says himself that his quest for revenge and his duty to protect Ishgard are one and the same to him. He would fight to save lives, but it was not what was primarily on his mind when going through life, his passion directed towards retribution more than rehabilitation. He doesn't consider himself a hero and, for much of his life, he hasn't tried to be. Any time another character tried to compliment his character, he would shrug it off or deny it. He doesn't want credit where he doesn't believe it is due.

In more recent times, however, he has started trying to live by the standards of the people he admires (which is gone into more detail in the question below) and to fight for a better future. Still, he conceptualizes himself more like the "bad cop" to the hero's "good cop" - he's not all that concerned about killing people who are the enemy and his morals are a bit lukewarm. He's against the standard things, like harming innocents and civilians, but is so accustomed to violence that he doesn't spend all that much thought on it if it's for the good of the realm and the other party was an active aggressor. He's become more empathetic towards his "enemies" with time, but he's wary of offering compassion to those that don't deserve it. Ultimately, he'd rather just stab the villain and be done with it.

Estinien has spent so much time with tunnel vision centered on his revenge against Nidhogg that he really hasn't had much time to develop a strong personal code of his own. In that sense, he is still working himself out and tends to rely on the vision and leadership of others on moral matters.

What quality or qualities do they admire most?
While Estinien sees himself as a realist and comes across as cynical with regard to the state of the world, he truthfully finds himself drawn to those with the will to dream of and work towards a better future. There's an odd separation in his perspective on this - while he doesn't see himself capable of being a dreamer, personally, he admires other people's ability to do so. You can see this reflected in his choice of most respected comrades: his lifelong friend Aymeric de Borel, a visionary leader of their shared nation of Ishgard, Alphinaud Leveilleur, the young Scion determined to save the world and who risked everything to save Estinien's life, and the Warrior of Light, the world's greatest hero and hope. He has come to believe in people who believe in a better future, even if he can't quite believe in it himself. He respects compassion, even if he is unfamiliar with giving it.

Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Primarily, he dislikes his own participation in the circle of violence that plagued his homeland for hundreds of years. While he was growing up, Ishgard was locked in an ages-old feud with a Nidhogg'd brood of dragons - a conflict which ultimately turned out to be unjust on both sides, but was started by Ishgard's ancestors. Having lost his family to those dragons as a child, Estinien swore his revenge, and spent most of his life obsessively training to one day kill Nidhogg, their leader. He did this at the exception of everything else, having no hobbies and spurning most social matters until the age of thirty-two. He killed many dragons along the way, and now that he has seen the mutual pain caused by the war, he regrets his part in it. He's come to understand that him and Nidhogg were alike in their thirst for vengeance, inflicting death and destruction upon the other side. He understands this aspect of himself, now, but I don't think he likes it. He's working to change and to fight for something better.

What is their sign, and why?
The Hermit. If you ask just about anyone who knows Estinien, they will tell you that he prefers his own company and finding his own way. He spent his early days in the military avoiding socializing in favour of obsessive training, making only a single friend in over a decade of service, whom had been both patient and understanding enough to win Estinien's affections. Once he earned a high enough rank for the upper crust to desire his company, he spurned so many invitations and social gatherings that they stopped sending them to him altogether. Even for those he loves most, his presence cannot be relied upon - he's prone to going on missions in a solo capacity, wandering off for months at a time only to return just as mysteriously.

He has wound up with a handful of friends that he cares deeply for, but part of that is in accepting his tendency towards isolation. In recent years, his solitude has taken on a more introspective bend, with him journeying around the land on his own, trying to discover himself in the aftermath of a war that had consumed his entire life. He's not opposed to working with others if the situation demands it, willingly joining teams for the purpose of important missions or even if they are just insistent enough, but even then, the siren call of privacy and wandering will come for him eventually. He is learning to be closer to others, but he will always value his alone time.

SAMPLES & ARRIVAL

Samples:
TDM Toplevel
Canon Setting PSL Thread

Arrival Scenario: Imprisoned