florian & the lost

[rikoren]

Player Name: Kestrel
Player Contact: rikoren

Character Name: Florian
Canon: Tales of the Abyss
Game Transplant: Luceti
Original App: here
Game Summary: A group called the Malnosso is trapping people in a barrier-enclosed village, grafting wings on their backs, and conducting random experiments on the population once or twice a month. At least, that's what things seemed like at first; all sorts of things have been coming to light in the past year or three, including the fact that everyone - the Malnosso included - has wings, and that the barrier is apparently protecting the residents from whatever is lurking outside. The Malnosso are now also fighting a war against another group called the Third Party, which has led to them offering incentives to their captives to fight for them. Plot (and experiments) aside, though, basically everyone's stuck in a village with electricity and running water, where everything - from food to clothes to homes to toys to weapons - is totally free. It's pretty peaceful in the lulls between events.

How long was your character in Game: 14 months
History of Character in their Game: Florian's arrival in Luceti was kind of confusing, because Ion had been there for two years by then - leading to everyone he met mistaking him for his fellow replica. (People were still making that mistake near the end of his stay, too.) Scared, lost, and confused, the constant mistakes were almost a comfort in their familiarity. Ion found him almost immediately though, and soon enough he was living under the same roof with the Fon Master and various other familiar faces from home. Given his previous situation as the only child living in a church that was otherwise full of priests (all of which gave him strange looks for being a replica of Ion), he took to his new home incredibly quickly. He much preferred being able to stay with all his friends over being stuck back at the church; the only downside was that Anise, his hero, the one who named him, was from a point in time before they'd ever met. Unsure how to voice his problems with this, he decided to ignore it instead, and spent his first month getting to know all the other residents.

The start of the next month came with an experiment, of course: many residents suddenly became AU versions of themselves, and a good number of his housemates were included in that number. Suddenly seeing Ion calling himself by a new name with a new background and everything, Florian's worries about his own name rose back up again. Those worries were quickly assuaged by a good number of the unaffected population though, as well as his unspoken sadness at Anise not remembering him. Because it's not that she doesn't remember him, it's that she's going to meet him in the future! Which sounds a lot better than not knowing him at all, even if it means the same thing.

The next big event came a month later, when Guy (who Florian didn't know very well, aside from his being a good friend of the others) came back from a Malnosso kidnapping with a brand new curse slot attached. Sync took advantage of the situation by activating his curse slot, leading Guy to attack Luke and Asch - again, Florian only really knew Luke, but Asch was killed in the ensuing fight, and so all his friends were noticeably subdued for a good while after that. Florian was the only one unaffected by the situation, having been inured to death since his early days in the volcano, and so the only thing that weighed on him was the gloom covering the house. His answer to this was to draw someone that had scared him back on Auldrant, and then add flowers and a sun and things to make it less scary. Surprisingly it worked, and a few people chatted with him over the pictures, though only Ion bothered to come out of his room to chat in person.

The next event technically started a week later, but it was the changes at the beginning of the next month that really affected him: the Luceti Valley event was a village-wide AU where he, Ion, and Sync were siblings instead of fellow replicas, and Nephry and Peony were their parents. While it didn't last long, Florian came out of this with the feeling that calling them family wasn't so bad. And with other people in the village often calling them twins anyway (people rarely saw Sync, so he was generally left out) he started to embrace the idea, and from this point on started thinking of everyone in the house as his family. (This actually didn't change anything except his own feelings towards things, funnily enough.)

Luke died the next month, from...something. Florian hadn't seen him in the past few weeks, and only found out when one of Luke's friends made the announcement. But death in Luceti isn't permanent, and so Florian - as unfazed as ever - could do nothing but wish for people to cheer up again. Things went back to normal after he came back though, as far as Florian could tell, and so time passed peacefully until the Malnosso kidnapped Ion a few months later. What came out of this was Ion steadily losing all feeling in his legs until, one day, he was unable to stand at all. Florian wasn't sure what was wrong with him (people rarely told him anything of any importance), but he was happy to keep his brother company, occasionally pushing him around in a wheelchair or helping him with other little things. It was around this time that Sync came back (though he'd made himself so scarce that few people had noticed he'd left), breaking Ion's wheelchair out of...a sort of malicious need to make Ion's life difficult, I guess. Which reminded Florian that he'd wanted to learn how to fight, as many of the residents of Luceti were seasoned fighters and being able to protect his loved ones seemed like a cool thing to be able to do. And he did get a promise of self-defense lessons from someone named Cliff (with Nephry's permission), as well as a warning or two about staying away from Sync.

Ion managed to recover a week or two afterwards, and so everything seemed to be going well again. Anise left the next month, but she was soon replaced by Peony (who'd previously been there just long enough for the Luceti Valley event), whose energetic personality kept Florian from feeling as sad as he otherwise might have. Funnily enough, the first half of the next month was a sort of extreme version of Luceti Valley, in which Ion was yet again the child of Nephry and Peony - but this time Sync and Ion were orphans. They were quickly caught in an attempt to mug Peony, and when revealed as Ion's brothers (left at an orphanage which they had since run away from), they were taken in by the couple as their new sons. Florian was pretty happy for the rest of that event, weird ending aside, but the same moment the village turned back to normal, he left Luceti.

How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?) Florian was originally somewhat emotionally stunted due to his experience in the volcano, but his time in Luceti led him to place more importance on friends and family than he ever did before. Instead of viewing them with a sort of basic desire for company, he's learned that he likes to make others happy, in part because of the fact that his household was constantly getting involved in depressing situations. He's also become less shy than he used to be, having met a good number of kind people in Luceti, and is less likely to want to hide than he was back in Daath.

He's matured a little, too; his want to learn to fight was born from seeing the strength of all the people around him, watching them train and fight or even just talk, and realizing his own helplessness when people got hurt or sad. He's still not bothered at all by the concept of death, but he understands now that other people are, and that preventing it is something important which - again - he himself is unable to help with.

The only other real change is that he's grown to be afraid of losing people. Death is fine, death you can come back from (unless you don't have a name, then you'll fade away forever), but when people left Luceti, it was unexpected and random and you never knew if they'd ever come back. It was the unpredictability of it that bothered him most. If they left and never came back he'd get over it soon enough, but so many people coming and going and sometimes but not always coming back (Anise especially) left a sort of mental scar. But a worry like that isn't something you can fix, as nobody could predict or prevent a person's disappearance, so it's the one single problem he hasn't told to anyone. This has led to his finally fearing loss, in a sort of roundabout way, and he's taken to drawing pictures of everyone he cares about as a sort of assurance that he'll still have something to remind him of them if they leave. Sadly, all his pictures were left behind when he left Luceti himself.
How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?): As a former Luceti resident he's got little wings, too small for flight but 100% functional. He's grown physically stronger as well, not only through constantly running around but also through occasional training with Cliff. He's grown a couple inches over the course of the year, and his hair's longer (Rapunzel got it into his head that having long hair was cool, so he's been avoiding cutting it). Aside from that, he never sustained any injuries big enough to leave scars.
Powers: Florian is capable of casting Daathic Artes, or artes in general, though he lacks the MP strength to cast very much. He can also read the Score, which may also be considered something of a Daathic Arte.
Possessions: A large stick, a paper headdress decorated with Original Ion's feathers, a forbidden verse stone, a seashell, a creepy staff called the Heart of Chaos, and a box of crayons.

Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context:
Sample One: Florian questions whether it's okay to keep his name when the person who named him doesn't remember doing so.
Sample Two: Making wind chimes with Ginji! And wondering how old he is.
Sample Three: You've got to smile for the dead.

Notes: Anything else?