Gray Nightingale (Aiya) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
experiencepoints) wrote2016-08-12 10:25 pm
experiencepoints) wrote2016-08-12 10:25 pm
drift fleet application!
Character name: Aiya/"Gray Nightingale"
Character journal: experiencepoints
Series name: Original Character
Canon notes: From a past game, Kyriakos, taken from the realm change event.
Species: Human! Has previously been turned into many things, though.
History: Okay, I'm going to compress this as much as I can, but it's still going to go long, so please forgive that.
Aiya's canon is best described as a shoujo manga in disguise as an RPG. Her world follows the rules and logic of an SNES-era JRPG like Final Fantasy or Secret of Mana. People have stats and levels and inventories that can store anything, monsters will attack at random, dungeons happen, people fight evil gods, people come back from dying at save points. It is not a game, it's a real world, it just follows those rules. It's set in a very slightly future time, too. Think Dream Zanarkand for a reference of the tech levels.
In this world, Aiya was born to young parents, a genius archmage and a powerful knight. She displayed a talent for magic early on, officially changing class to mage when she was only five years old, which is kind of crazy. Her parents were initially supportive and happy for her! But they also expected the world of her, demanding nothing less than perfection in everything she did. And being a good child, she naturally wanted to. She studied and learned and didn't have time to make any friends.
She eventually did make a friend, though- a Beast Tribe girl named Yura. (Beast Tribe are people with animal features, essentially.) Yura reached out to her, not being turned away by how shy and awkward Aiya was, and the two of them became fast friends. However, this also brought about the first sign of greater problems- When Yura encouraged Aiya to relax and have fun, Aiya's parents demanded that she not see Yura anymore, saying that she couldn't be friends with a Beast Tribe girl, that she would be a bad influence. Aiya totally refused them, having already formed a close bond with Yura, but this led to things getting worse.
As time went on, Aiya was every inch the model student- Perfect grades, willing to help anyone with anything, class representative. She formed a party with herself, Yura, and a friend they met in junior high, an elf named Araj. They were highly successful in the school elective dungeon runs, and everything looked like Aiya was a perfect student. But, at home, her parents were becoming steadily more controlling and abusive. Anything less than 100% on schoolwork was deemed a failure, and she was punished. Similarly, too much time spent with her friends would meet the same. (All two of them, she had never properly been able to connect with people besides Yura and Araj.) Though the abuse was never physical, they piled unreasonable expectations and impossible demands on her and caused her to feel like a failure when she couldn't.
She hid it well, but she fell into a deep depression, and by the time she was in college, she had totally lost the ability to feel anything, dropping out, and being made to believe she was even more of a failure for that. Even so, when her parents finally went too far for her, she managed to escape, running away and moving in with Yura, who was in love with her, and determined to try to bring Aiya's happiness back.
And that was the point where she was apped to a previous game, still incapable of feeling there. She woke up in a strange realm called Kyriakos with no memories whatsoever, and told these strange people she was with were her team, to help her get back her world, which had been destroyed. Without memory of her own name, they gave her a name to match the theme they had already come up with: "Gray Nightingale". Naturally, she thought everyone else was totally insane, and hated most of them, keeping to herself for the most part, doing nothing to help her team, just lying around and getting drunk.
But it wasn't so easy for her. Her team and her team's friends, nosy and good people all, tried to pull her out of her shell. She reacted badly at first- in some events, she allowed her team to die, in one other instance, she personally held her teammate down to force her to endure half an hour of mental torture- but after a couple of months of constant effort, they had begun to pull her out, and see what she was really like under her cranky, prickly shell.
This development got jumpstarted when she saw her teammate Sparrow, who she saw as a little sister, get taken and held hostage, sure to be killed by the powerful being hosting that game. When she failed to protect her, and Sparrow died, to at least make it painless, Nightingale took on a hallucination of her worst fear- that worst fear being the friends she had made in Kyr, the people who had finally cared about her, finally realizing she wasn't good enough, and leaving her alone again.
Just like that, her emotionless hell was totally shattered, causing her to feel strongly again with several years' worth of repressed emotions... most of which were failure and self-hatred, due to the events that caused it. Even still, once she recovered from that initial shock, now that she was able to feel things, her team grew much closer to her very quickly. They saw her memories that she was regaining, that explained why she was the way she was, and she tried her best to connect with them, though it was hard. She ended up developing a crush on one teammate (the same one she had tortured before. and left to get eaten alive that one time. and generally been nothing but an awful person to. awkward!)
But her world was shaken again when most of her team left, to venture off or ending up asleep in the pods- before she knew it, Nightingale was the most senior member on her team. She tried hard to be a reliable senior, to help everyone else, but... well, she sucked at it. She took on all the work for the team herself. Like her parents had ingrained into her, she either had to be flawless and useful and able to do everything, or she was worthless. However, her attempts to protect the team only ended up scaring them and hurting them more. Even so, she became closer with this new team as people themselves, not just as a new team for her to try to protect, and is still trying to squash those feelings of worthlessness.
Unfortunately, the realm of Kyriakos was taken over by the most awful person there, which caused immense problems and lots of people died. That's where Nightingale's being taken from. Best canon point, right?
Personality: To summarize: Nightingale is a contradictory, hypocritical, self-loathing hot tsundere mess.
At her very core, Nightingale is ultimately someone who wants to make people happy. She wants to live up to what everyone else wants of her, and to help people.
Unfortunately, that core has been battered, broken, covered up, and locked away. Having endured decades of abuse from her parents that she wasn't able to recognize as such, she has become shy, awkward, and has difficulty meeting or understanding people. Normally, to defend herself, she lashes out, becoming rather prickly if people get too close too quickly. She's dishonest about what she likes- Liking things only ever made her parents angry and if she failed at something, the things she liked would be taken away, so she hates to admit to liking anything, and is quick to become defensive about it.
Her relationships with other people tend to be strange and stunted. For people not on her team, she switches between a prickly jerk who is constantly making fun of things, to caring and trying to help them. Her team, she flips that around, being caring and doing everything she can for them, to kind of mean teasing. (She's tsundere trash.) She's bad at socialization, to the point where she's almost totally KY, unable to really guess what people are thinking and incredibly socially awkward. She tends to say a little too much, and tries to fill in gaps in conversations with talking. However, she's also hypersensitive to when people are upset (though she often can't tell why), as a defense mechanism. If someone's upset, she'll most likely blame herself first, and apologize and try to fix it immediately. She is quite squishy underneath everything, and cannot stand the idea of anyone she likes being mad at her, so she tries to pre-empt that with apologies, and becomes distressed when it doesn't work.
She's quick to judge people, and very hard to change those first impressions. If she dislikes someone, making her like them is a long and ardurous challenge, and when she likes someone, they could punch her in the face and she'd thank them for the attention. She's not healthy, is what I'm getting at here. However, what she hates most is herself, and thus people similar to her tend to make her angry.
She's still making an attempt to be a more better person lately, though, being reasonably polite and friendly, though she's gained something of a terribly foul mouth from her time in Kyriakos. When it comes to people she cares about, she absolutely hates being called maternal or motherly, but it's honestly a fair description of how she acts.
Even despite all the progress she's made, she still hates herself, and sets unreasonable expectations for herself that she becomes upset by when she can't match them. She gets down on herself really easily, and when things go really bad, she has a tendency to get trapped in a loop of self-loathing self-pity, unable to do anything. She doesn't believe there's anything positive about herself past her abilities, and even those are something she isn't confident in.
She's incredibly smart, as well, very good at logical thinking and planning, taking the role of her party's strategist when she fights. However, she also has a tendency to be too rigid in her thinking- She has trouble adjusting to new rule sets unexpectedly. While she can accept the new logic in a new place at first, she has a tendency to fall back on the logic and rules that she knew prior, and fail to plan for the situation properly on its own merits alone.
Though it's not something normal to her homeworld, her development in Kyriakos has given her many new fears, including dying. In her home, if someone is killed, they resurrect right away at their save point, a little weaker but otherwise undamaged. But having seen permanent death in other worlds, and responsible for it for someone she cares about (even if it was undone), she's gained an intense fear of it, dying or having people close to her die. Specifically, she also particularly fears drowning and poison, as those are the ways she's been killed in Kyriakos. But then, despite all of these, her absolute worst fear? Is not being good enough, and ending up alone again.
Abilities: Most of Nightingale's abilities are derived from the rules of her world, which she keeps. She has the ability to change classes, which reallocates her stats to suit the new class, and she also has the ability to unlock more classes. (Currently, she's limited to Mage, Healer, and Lancer classes, though Healer and Lancer are both extremely low-level.) She also has a basic instinctual awareness of her own stats, the state of her party members, and the like. She also has an inventory- when picking up an item, it can simply vanish into her inventory until later use, with a limit of 256 items (same item stacks up to 99 without taking a new slot).
Many of her skills are still locked due to being lost and never regained in Kyriakos, but her spell list includes: Fire 1, Fire 2, Fire 3, Ice 1, Lightning 1, Sleep, Scan, and Wind, and in Healer she simply has access to basic Cure. (Switching classes causes her to lose access to all of the other class's spells while she's on that class.)
(Wind in particular is utility magic, meaning it's functionally aerokinesis, mostly just used to be lazy and move stuff around so she doesn't have to get up. Has no combat abilities, and in fact, cannot be used at all while she's in combat.)
(And of course, without equipment bonuses, her magic will all be fairly weak until she can get a proper robe and staff.)
Magic and RPG bullshit aside, she's very smart and has a near-perfect memory (due to constantly going over what she does in order to figure out all of her mistakes and obsess over them). She's an excellent cook, as well, and has a ridiculously high alcohol tolerance for someone so small.
Augment Skillset: Civilian augment- Cook
Sample: Nightingale attempts to teach a young teammate to demand respect with fire.
Character journal: experiencepoints
Series name: Original Character
Canon notes: From a past game, Kyriakos, taken from the realm change event.
Species: Human! Has previously been turned into many things, though.
History: Okay, I'm going to compress this as much as I can, but it's still going to go long, so please forgive that.
Aiya's canon is best described as a shoujo manga in disguise as an RPG. Her world follows the rules and logic of an SNES-era JRPG like Final Fantasy or Secret of Mana. People have stats and levels and inventories that can store anything, monsters will attack at random, dungeons happen, people fight evil gods, people come back from dying at save points. It is not a game, it's a real world, it just follows those rules. It's set in a very slightly future time, too. Think Dream Zanarkand for a reference of the tech levels.
In this world, Aiya was born to young parents, a genius archmage and a powerful knight. She displayed a talent for magic early on, officially changing class to mage when she was only five years old, which is kind of crazy. Her parents were initially supportive and happy for her! But they also expected the world of her, demanding nothing less than perfection in everything she did. And being a good child, she naturally wanted to. She studied and learned and didn't have time to make any friends.
She eventually did make a friend, though- a Beast Tribe girl named Yura. (Beast Tribe are people with animal features, essentially.) Yura reached out to her, not being turned away by how shy and awkward Aiya was, and the two of them became fast friends. However, this also brought about the first sign of greater problems- When Yura encouraged Aiya to relax and have fun, Aiya's parents demanded that she not see Yura anymore, saying that she couldn't be friends with a Beast Tribe girl, that she would be a bad influence. Aiya totally refused them, having already formed a close bond with Yura, but this led to things getting worse.
As time went on, Aiya was every inch the model student- Perfect grades, willing to help anyone with anything, class representative. She formed a party with herself, Yura, and a friend they met in junior high, an elf named Araj. They were highly successful in the school elective dungeon runs, and everything looked like Aiya was a perfect student. But, at home, her parents were becoming steadily more controlling and abusive. Anything less than 100% on schoolwork was deemed a failure, and she was punished. Similarly, too much time spent with her friends would meet the same. (All two of them, she had never properly been able to connect with people besides Yura and Araj.) Though the abuse was never physical, they piled unreasonable expectations and impossible demands on her and caused her to feel like a failure when she couldn't.
She hid it well, but she fell into a deep depression, and by the time she was in college, she had totally lost the ability to feel anything, dropping out, and being made to believe she was even more of a failure for that. Even so, when her parents finally went too far for her, she managed to escape, running away and moving in with Yura, who was in love with her, and determined to try to bring Aiya's happiness back.
And that was the point where she was apped to a previous game, still incapable of feeling there. She woke up in a strange realm called Kyriakos with no memories whatsoever, and told these strange people she was with were her team, to help her get back her world, which had been destroyed. Without memory of her own name, they gave her a name to match the theme they had already come up with: "Gray Nightingale". Naturally, she thought everyone else was totally insane, and hated most of them, keeping to herself for the most part, doing nothing to help her team, just lying around and getting drunk.
But it wasn't so easy for her. Her team and her team's friends, nosy and good people all, tried to pull her out of her shell. She reacted badly at first- in some events, she allowed her team to die, in one other instance, she personally held her teammate down to force her to endure half an hour of mental torture- but after a couple of months of constant effort, they had begun to pull her out, and see what she was really like under her cranky, prickly shell.
This development got jumpstarted when she saw her teammate Sparrow, who she saw as a little sister, get taken and held hostage, sure to be killed by the powerful being hosting that game. When she failed to protect her, and Sparrow died, to at least make it painless, Nightingale took on a hallucination of her worst fear- that worst fear being the friends she had made in Kyr, the people who had finally cared about her, finally realizing she wasn't good enough, and leaving her alone again.
Just like that, her emotionless hell was totally shattered, causing her to feel strongly again with several years' worth of repressed emotions... most of which were failure and self-hatred, due to the events that caused it. Even still, once she recovered from that initial shock, now that she was able to feel things, her team grew much closer to her very quickly. They saw her memories that she was regaining, that explained why she was the way she was, and she tried her best to connect with them, though it was hard. She ended up developing a crush on one teammate (the same one she had tortured before. and left to get eaten alive that one time. and generally been nothing but an awful person to. awkward!)
But her world was shaken again when most of her team left, to venture off or ending up asleep in the pods- before she knew it, Nightingale was the most senior member on her team. She tried hard to be a reliable senior, to help everyone else, but... well, she sucked at it. She took on all the work for the team herself. Like her parents had ingrained into her, she either had to be flawless and useful and able to do everything, or she was worthless. However, her attempts to protect the team only ended up scaring them and hurting them more. Even so, she became closer with this new team as people themselves, not just as a new team for her to try to protect, and is still trying to squash those feelings of worthlessness.
Unfortunately, the realm of Kyriakos was taken over by the most awful person there, which caused immense problems and lots of people died. That's where Nightingale's being taken from. Best canon point, right?
Personality: To summarize: Nightingale is a contradictory, hypocritical, self-loathing hot tsundere mess.
At her very core, Nightingale is ultimately someone who wants to make people happy. She wants to live up to what everyone else wants of her, and to help people.
Unfortunately, that core has been battered, broken, covered up, and locked away. Having endured decades of abuse from her parents that she wasn't able to recognize as such, she has become shy, awkward, and has difficulty meeting or understanding people. Normally, to defend herself, she lashes out, becoming rather prickly if people get too close too quickly. She's dishonest about what she likes- Liking things only ever made her parents angry and if she failed at something, the things she liked would be taken away, so she hates to admit to liking anything, and is quick to become defensive about it.
Her relationships with other people tend to be strange and stunted. For people not on her team, she switches between a prickly jerk who is constantly making fun of things, to caring and trying to help them. Her team, she flips that around, being caring and doing everything she can for them, to kind of mean teasing. (She's tsundere trash.) She's bad at socialization, to the point where she's almost totally KY, unable to really guess what people are thinking and incredibly socially awkward. She tends to say a little too much, and tries to fill in gaps in conversations with talking. However, she's also hypersensitive to when people are upset (though she often can't tell why), as a defense mechanism. If someone's upset, she'll most likely blame herself first, and apologize and try to fix it immediately. She is quite squishy underneath everything, and cannot stand the idea of anyone she likes being mad at her, so she tries to pre-empt that with apologies, and becomes distressed when it doesn't work.
She's quick to judge people, and very hard to change those first impressions. If she dislikes someone, making her like them is a long and ardurous challenge, and when she likes someone, they could punch her in the face and she'd thank them for the attention. She's not healthy, is what I'm getting at here. However, what she hates most is herself, and thus people similar to her tend to make her angry.
She's still making an attempt to be a more better person lately, though, being reasonably polite and friendly, though she's gained something of a terribly foul mouth from her time in Kyriakos. When it comes to people she cares about, she absolutely hates being called maternal or motherly, but it's honestly a fair description of how she acts.
Even despite all the progress she's made, she still hates herself, and sets unreasonable expectations for herself that she becomes upset by when she can't match them. She gets down on herself really easily, and when things go really bad, she has a tendency to get trapped in a loop of self-loathing self-pity, unable to do anything. She doesn't believe there's anything positive about herself past her abilities, and even those are something she isn't confident in.
She's incredibly smart, as well, very good at logical thinking and planning, taking the role of her party's strategist when she fights. However, she also has a tendency to be too rigid in her thinking- She has trouble adjusting to new rule sets unexpectedly. While she can accept the new logic in a new place at first, she has a tendency to fall back on the logic and rules that she knew prior, and fail to plan for the situation properly on its own merits alone.
Though it's not something normal to her homeworld, her development in Kyriakos has given her many new fears, including dying. In her home, if someone is killed, they resurrect right away at their save point, a little weaker but otherwise undamaged. But having seen permanent death in other worlds, and responsible for it for someone she cares about (even if it was undone), she's gained an intense fear of it, dying or having people close to her die. Specifically, she also particularly fears drowning and poison, as those are the ways she's been killed in Kyriakos. But then, despite all of these, her absolute worst fear? Is not being good enough, and ending up alone again.
Abilities: Most of Nightingale's abilities are derived from the rules of her world, which she keeps. She has the ability to change classes, which reallocates her stats to suit the new class, and she also has the ability to unlock more classes. (Currently, she's limited to Mage, Healer, and Lancer classes, though Healer and Lancer are both extremely low-level.) She also has a basic instinctual awareness of her own stats, the state of her party members, and the like. She also has an inventory- when picking up an item, it can simply vanish into her inventory until later use, with a limit of 256 items (same item stacks up to 99 without taking a new slot).
Many of her skills are still locked due to being lost and never regained in Kyriakos, but her spell list includes: Fire 1, Fire 2, Fire 3, Ice 1, Lightning 1, Sleep, Scan, and Wind, and in Healer she simply has access to basic Cure. (Switching classes causes her to lose access to all of the other class's spells while she's on that class.)
(Wind in particular is utility magic, meaning it's functionally aerokinesis, mostly just used to be lazy and move stuff around so she doesn't have to get up. Has no combat abilities, and in fact, cannot be used at all while she's in combat.)
(And of course, without equipment bonuses, her magic will all be fairly weak until she can get a proper robe and staff.)
Magic and RPG bullshit aside, she's very smart and has a near-perfect memory (due to constantly going over what she does in order to figure out all of her mistakes and obsess over them). She's an excellent cook, as well, and has a ridiculously high alcohol tolerance for someone so small.
Augment Skillset: Civilian augment- Cook
Sample: Nightingale attempts to teach a young teammate to demand respect with fire.