Full Name - Arna Jaeger Callsign - Eagle-1 Age - 26 (b. 2562) Birthplace - Lone Star Pilot Type - Assault -
P S Y C H E
"Never Tell Me The Odds!" Arna is...well. A polite way to phrase it would be "not easily cowed," perhaps? She's an adrenaline junkie with a daredevil streak a mile wide, always at risk of going completely off the rails and ending up in places that she doesn't have any business being, doing things that are really bad ideas.
"You Lookin' For A Fight?" Like, for example, starting fights. Loud, brash, and abrasive, she's one of those people that somehow find a way to get in a fight regardless of whether or not doing so will actually get her anywhere. That's not to say she's overly bellicose or combative; she doesn't intentionally go looking for fights. But because of the kind of person she is, she also won't shrink from them. At ALL.
*Fingerguns* All that being said, though, that completely ignores how much fun she's having. Yes, she's loud, brash, and abrasive; but that also means she's totally unafraid to laugh as long and loud as she wants. Always ready to poke fun—but never out of malice!—both at others and at herself, she's a wild, unconstrained woman who takes an equally wild and unconstrained joy out of life.
Though she is dubiously blessed with an awful sense of humor.
G E A R
Peacekeeper MP1k1 Arna's personal armament, the Lone Star-manufactured Peacekeeper is a compact automatic pistol that she keeps snugly holstered at her side at all times. Matte black with her image—a plane beneath a skull—stenciled on the side, this powerful machine pistol shoots holds up to thirty rounds in its long stick magazine, and fires at a blistering 1100 rounds per minute. She prefers not to use it if possible, but if necessary she's more than capable of defending herself.
Hip Flask (Did You Really Expect Anything Else?) On the opposite hip from her pistol is a plain silver hip flask, dented in a number of places. Her initials, A.J., are scratched on to it on the outside by what looks like a knife, along with E-1. On the inside, kept by her side, are the initials J.B., and F-4. It's kept full, usually of either bourbon or vodka.
Worn Photo Kept on her person at all times is a wallet-sized photo of her and a man of similar age, laughing so hard together they look like they can't breathe. One of the few times she cools down instead of being so gunpowder all the time is when she's looking at it, or when she's asked about it.
N E U R A L C O M B A T A N T
Armor Eagle-1 is a superlight assault NC, jet black and accented with lines of bright magenta-red, with her previously mentioned trademark image—the plane and skull—emblazoned on the right shoulder. Her extremely powerful propulsion system means that she's always on the move, so she relies on mobility, not armor, to keep out of harm's way. Thus, she's only very lightly plated, though through the virtue of ceramo-metallic tungsten, it remains durable enough to take one or two shots before she's scratched out of the fight..
Hands And now we get into the meat of what Eagle-1 does, and why it can afford to be so lightly armored. In so many words? It's a walking airstrike. Held in her hands is the Dragon PFC, a custom-tooled firearm brought all the way from the insane minds of Lone Star: a handheld flak cannon. Firing fragmentation shells with a proximity sensor in the noses, it allows her to blanket whole swathes of the battlefield with desolation at a time. One shell individually might not be enough to take an NC out of the fight, but she can put so many of them downrange, and they spread over such a large area, that one of them will EVENTUALLY get there. A surgical strike, she's not.
Back As previously mentioned, mobility is the core of what Arna does, and there's nowhere better to see this than her back. It plays host to a TREMENDOUSLY powerful propulsion system, capable of catapulting her a hundred feet in any direction with frankly concerning speed. Such is the reason she wears the outfit she does: a g-suit from her days as a pilot that serves to lessen the effect of the sudden g-force changes. Overclocking her propulsion at fullsync enables something almost unique to Eagle-1: flight. Limited flight, of course, and only if she's willing to commit: it takes a LOT of her NC's power to maintain it for even the shortest length of time. But she does pull that trigger and cross that threshold, the maneuverability and firepower that comes with it are difficult to overstate.
Right Auxiliary Not merely satisfied with a flak cannon, Arna requires more powerful ordnance on occasion. Such is the reason for her right auxiliary: a rocket pod containing fifteen guided rockets linked to a targeting system in her HUD. Not only that, these aren't ordinary rockets: rather, to fit with her theme of widespread devastation, they are cluster munitions, allowing her to hail down explosions from on high like the hammer of god. These can be fired one at a time, and they usually are to conserve them. But if the situations calls, she can unleash them all in a storm of fire that leaves the ground before her a sea of blasted craters.
Left Auxiliary In a departure from the insanity that are her weapons, her left auxiliary is much more pedestrian. Because of her superlight armor, she sprung for the best projector she could get. She's ABSURDLY vulnerable to ion weaponry: not only does it disable her shields, but it can also short out her propulsion system and leave her little more than a sitting duck. But as long as ion weaponry isn't overly prominent on a particularly battlefield, it makes Eagle-1 much more durable than it may at first appear.
R E L A T I O N S
Jacob Brake The subject of the photo, the other name on the flask. Jacob Brake is the love of Arna's life. Though he remains in Lone Star while she lives now in LH, she still thinks about him often. She can't send him messages or anything; a civilian (these days) line sending messages into the military is a pretty futile idea to think about. So instead every so often—there's no schedule, just when she feels like it—she'll write him an unsent letter and save it for the future, when she can show him all the letters she never sent.
Colonel Andrew Barlowe Arna's loooong-suffering CO in the LSAF, Colonel Barlowe is a straight-laced, no-nonsense officer that expects a certain level of decorum from pilots under his command when addressing him.
You can probably imagine that he and Arna did not, in fact, get along.
Delia St. Seine Delia St. Seine has been referred to as many things over her 18 year life. People have called her a prodigy. A genius. A menace. A disaster. A symbol of the problems inherent in the system.
Quinn calls her a sister.
After her parents' untimely demise when she was very young, she was taken care of by a family friend for several years. During this time, she demonstrated an amazing aptitude for engineering, and Rebecca Darroux took notice of that and took her under her wing, begin teaching her all about the process of weaponmaking. As she learned from Rebecca, Delia heard rumors that she had an adoptive daughter, which of course, Rebecca mercilessly crushed down, and so Delia didn't really put much stock into them. Until one day when she was eleven, when she--completely by accident, when she was looking for Rebecca--ran across a shy, quiet girl, must've been eight or nine years old, with a long black and yellow braid and wide, apprehensive yellow eyes. Or...eye. The right one was gone.
To make a long story short, the two of them eventually grew close to each other, and Delia to Becca. And when Delia's adoptive father Mendez died, she was (informally) adopted by Quinn and taken into their family.
Now, though...she's been missing for a few months now, with no word at all. And both Becca and Quinn are getting very, very worried.
Physical Details ◢
Quinn is a shortish girl, no more than 5'3" in height, with an extremely ordinary build. Despite that, she is extremely recognizable whenever she walks into the room thanks to a few very specific and unusual pieces of her appearance. And first and foremost is her hair. While dark gray streaked with yellow isn't exactly impossible, is is highly unusual. But moreso is the sheer volume of said hair. When tied up in a tight (if large) braid, it ends up going down to her upper thighs. Untied, it goes all the way halfway down her calves. Needless to say, she keeps it braided near permanently to avoid tripping over her own hair. She's reasonably athletic, another piece of her that is fairly average; but that average is applied to the average of a teenage girl, so she's not going to be running a marathon any time soon.
Next are her eyes. Or, well, her eye, singular. Only her left eye is intact, and it is a bright, sharp, violent yellow, wide and expressive, roving around with constant curiosity. By contrast, the other side of her face displays a black eyepatch, dyed here and there with goldenrod yellow. Faint echoes of scar tissue peek out from underneath, barely hinting at the mangled, mutilated mess that sits where her eye socket used to.
For the most part, she wears functional clothing; not out of any real desperate need, but simply because it's her taste. She's never really liked super restrictive fancy clothing. As a general rule, she likes duller, darker shades much more over bright colors or pastels. When asked for a reason, she simply claims that dull colors set off against her eye and hair a bit better, and that anything else would look weird.
Background Information ◢
Quinn Loughvein's background is a bit mysterious, all told. With the exception of her parents, nobody really knows much about it, especially her. And she certainly doesn't want to spend much time around her parents. What can be loosely speculated is that she was born in Denver-Vegas in the summer of 2662, upon which her parents immediately tested her for NC compatibility. And upon discovering she was neurally compatible, they began feeding her and pumping her with a staggering array of neurochemicals and other morally dubious drugs in an effort to crank her neural compatibility up: to turn her into the ultimate NC pilot. She was steered away from ever leaving their sight; and so never being exposed to the world.
Unfortunately for her parents, working where they did meant working reasonably closely to Rebecca Darroux, the poster child of the jerk with a heart of gold. And, on top of that...canny. She noticed that there were some things wrong with the Loughveins; they were exceptionally cagey, so it took more or less eight years. But when she did notice, she decided to tail them with a drone to figure out exactly what was going on.
She did.
She called them in the next day and reamed them, tearing them apart for their mistreatment and giving them an ultimatum: either they give child up and forfeit parental rights, or she'd see them in court. With all the evidence she needed from the drone footage.
Of course, it was obvious to everyone that 'court' was a sham in a city like this. But Becca had a bit more cachet and notoriety; and thus, she made the rules.
It took a bit for parental rights to be ceded; and during the process, Becca decided to spend some time with the child to avoid leaving her alone with her parents. She didn't know exactly what had cause her to have an eyepatch at eight, but whatever it was, it was not good, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know. But then...something interesting happened: She got attached.
Quinn's life changed unbelievably quickly as soon as she found herself adopted by Becca. She chose to keep the name Loughvein; it just felt wrong to leave it behind. She was a child, after all. And her life going forward was...nice. Sure, Becca had her share of detractors. But she'd never been anything but wonderful to Quinn, and as time went on, to Delia as well.
Rebecca hoped that she could keep Quinn out of the NCs permanently; completely disregarding that pilots typically didn't live very long, she didn't know the full range of effects that the drugs that Luke and Shannon had given her had. But it was fruitless, because Quinn gravitated to them in the end; and at 15, she became one of the younger pilots out there. The notably sensitive Quinn didn't fare too well on the battlefield, but she was a pretty skilled pilot, and DV probably wasn't going to let her go easy.
To make a long story short, Becca eventually bought her out of the military. It wasn't exactly cheap, and it wasn't exactly easy; but Quinn was much, much happier. But still...she loved piloting, but didn't want to be in the military. So...what?
It was then that Becca put in her head the idea--the contract was free now--to leave DV, and go freelancing.
So she did.
She's been doing so for a little while now, and has happened across Lost Hope.
(She still calls Becca every night).
Polaris Shift ◢
Quinn's a little bit of a special case in the way she thinks about her Shift. Not only does it not bother her overly much, but...she actually likes it.
Quinn's Shift manifests as a voice inside her head. As far as anybody can tell, it's got nothing to do with personality drift regarding any old pilots of Ablaze, it has nothing to do with anybody else at all. More likely it's just a kind of persistent psychosis. But whatever the cause, the manifestation remains the same: there's another person inside of Quinn's head, or at least that's how she puts it.
This personality--who she says also wants to be called Quinn and so she that's what Quinn calls her--as far as can be gleaned, is rather different from the Quinn that most people know. That bouncy positivity is markedly absent. In the fragments of conversations that can be observed, she seems much more cynical and aggressive. But regardless, Quinn seems to put a great deal of stock into the other Quinn's opinions and thoughts. And not only that. Quinn has...
...She's made friends with it.
A small side effect of her Shift and this bizarre situation is that Quinn can sometimes have difficulty in knowing whether she's talking to her internal Quinn through thoughts, or spoken out loud. Sometimes she'll cut in and out of a conversation, bits and pieces of it out loud and the rest remaining unspoken. It can be someone disconcerting at times.
Personal Mission ◢
Above all else, Sirona wants desperately to be safe.
Trapped for so long in so many ways, literally or figuratively, Sirona feels constantly exposed. Like she's always being watched, always been watched, and always deeply unsafe. Her past is full of shadows—the doctors from L1, the military of Fairbanks, the last look that she took at her sleeping sister—that loom over her like so many swords of Damocles. So her ultimate goal, even if she doesn't quite know it, is to lift those swords away, one by one. She may never be able to rid herself of them all. She may never feel completely comfortable. The past may always haunt her through her nightmares.
Full Name -藤本 蝶 - Fujimoto Chou Age - 22 Place of Origin - Kanazawa, Japan Occupation - Florist Zodiac Signs - Pisces, Sheep Blood Type - O+
A V A T A R
Character's Name - パピ四 - Papiyon Pathos Affiliation - Drox Role - Evasive melee DPS Profession - Florist Weapon of Choice - Nagamaki Domains - Darkness; Enhancement, Illusion -
P E R S O N A L I T Y
Larkspur The most evident of Chou's character traits, both IRL and in Pariah, is how kind she is. Kind and sweet. Whether it's helping someone find their lost cat, getting a ball from out of a tree for a kid (she loves kids), or patiently talking a friend through a bad breakup, she's a genuinely kind person that only loses her temper once in a few blue moons, and takes a simple joy from watching other people smile.
Heather And she plans to protect those smiles. Perhaps not in a combative way; being the kind of role she is in combat, there's only so much she can really do to protect someone. No, her general protectiveness comes more as a psychological deal. She seems to have some kind of 'upset radar,' she's so apt at telling whether someone is lost, or sad, or angry; and when they are, she'll always do her best to make sure they feel like they're not alone, and they can always talk to her. Perhaps it'll blow up in her face. God knows it's done that before now and then. She's not perfect. But she will keep trying.
Hydrangea But what use is trying that hard to get people to open up if she's not going to respond in kind? Chou is, as a rule, emotionally open to a startling level. Though she's surprisingly good at hiding how she's feeling (it's a talent), she just doesn't. She wears her heart on her sleeve, not by nature but by choice. Just as she's always willing to talk to other people about what's upsetting them, if they want to know how she's feeling, she'll talk about it openly and honestly. After all, what's the point of trying to protect peoples' hearts if they trust you so little, they've closed them off already?
B E N C H M A R K S
Flittering Wing Papiyon's magic is split almost evenly between enhancement and illusion, vanishing in a blur of phantasmal butterflies, appearing behind the assailant, and slashing them with armor-shearing attacks that the eye can't fully follow. She's extremely evasive, able to 'blink' around and relying heavily on that for her combat style. Because she is fully minmaxed into offense. She has no way of sustaining herself, and she wears very light armor to keep her mobility maximized. It's rather hard to hit her; however, if you do hit her, she's going to feel it, and feel it hard.
Whirling Sting But you need to survive her assault first. She is frankly scary with her long-handled nagamaki, dealing enormous burst or sustained damage depending on how she chooses to fight. Though, there is one major pitfall to her combat strategy: because it's almost entirely centered around mobility and her weapon, there's very little she has to deal with multiple enemies. Hence, she tends to leave them be and go for priority targets, which can potentially leave others vulnerable to the crowd.
Dancing Petals As you might guess from her IRL occupation, Chou loves flowers, and this carries quite well over into Papiyon as well. Yeah, the job of a florist in Pariah is less about what's pretty and often much more about what's useful for things such as alchemy. But, she reasons as she arranges the herbs and flowers in her cart, there's no good reason it can't be both.
Obscuring Mist I've talked about how she fights with respect to her mobility and heavy emphasis into damage. But we shouldn't forget that illusion affinity as well. Often, the pure mobility might not be enough; in which case, she combines it with a variety of illusions designed to bewilder and distract while she does her work. Perhaps she creates a cloud of illusory butterflies, darting in and out so quickly the foe can't see her, let alone strike her. Perhaps she leaves afterimages behind her, blinking around the target so quickly that by the time the image disappears, she's already striking again. Whatever the technique, it makes her playstyle all the more effective in the end.
Physical Description
Fujimoto Chou doesn't have a ton that sets her apart from any other young Japanese woman. Straight black hair, a slender build, a height of only about 5'1"; if one word could be used to describe her, it would be typical. Perhaps the only thing that really sets her apart is a single wisteria-purple streak that runs top to bottom in her hair, framing her face on the left side. Much of what makes Chou unique isn't her appearance, but her personality, and strange idiosyncrasies, such as her habitual tendency to speak nearly exclusively in extremely polite kenjougo keigo, regardless of the situation. She wears largely typical clothing, though she does have a particular penchant for wearing long coats when it's chilly out.
Papiyon, on the other hand, is very different in appearance, given that as a Pariah avatar, it stands as a manifestation of how Chou wishes she could be, an ideal version of herself. The single streak spread out into flowing pink hair that frames a pair of wide, kind violet eyes. A more buxom build. Significantly increased height: about 5'1" no longer, now reaching upwards of 5'7". Flawless skin. She thinks she looks SO cool. Instead of her skirts, blouses, and coats, she wears a close-fitting white leather-backed vest with gilt fastenings that trails off into long coattails that flow behind her. Enough to deflect a blow or two, though leather can only do so much. And finally, her weapon: a long-handled nagamaki, wrapped in fabric the same color as her hair. The blade is fine steel, and the handguard is fashioned after a butterfly.
...It took her SO long to save up for it.
Character Conceptualization
Vizera probably doesn't like you.
Or, well, that's what she lets on. Which might make you wonder why she spends time around you, because she sticks around for some weird reason. And it probably confuses you for quite some time, since she seems to...well, she doesn't seem to have the energy to hate your guts, but she seems like she would if she did.
But then you realize a couple days in when you're on a dangerous dungeon delve that gives you literally no loot and Vizera insists on accompanying you--and you can see her resisting being closer to you when you're moving through the dungeon--that Vizera probably doesn't dislike you. Or, well, she doesn't dislike you as much as she can not dislike anybody. No, what you end up realizing halfway through this lootless dungeon after Vizera stays close to you instead of wandering off searching for whatever someone might have missed is that, past her layers of irritability, annoyance, and bullshit, Vizera is desperately lonely.
And yet--in a seeming contradiction that might leave you confused if you don't understand what's led her to that point--she really seems to hate it when attention is on it. To DESPISE it in a truly fantastical way. She'll nose into your life, sure, but if you ask her a single thing about herself, either in game or IRL, she clamps her mouth closed in record speed and moves on. The insane pressure that has been placed on Cecilia for most of her life, and certainly all of her adult life, gives her an intense aversion to being the center of attention, and this carries through into Vizera just as strongly. She's done things that some would balk at to avoid being known; she monitors her position on the DPS leaderboard OBSESSIVELY, and whenever it breaks into the top five thousand slots she goes on a rampage of terrible group dungeoneering, throwing herself into hordes of enemies without building up her Heat and barely making it out in time to be healed. She throws entire dungeon raids into the garbage for the sole purpose of making as few waves in Pariah's overall community as she possible can. After all, better to be 'that one shitty DPS that ruined our raid' than a celebrity here too; one that will inevitably burn out once again.
She also seems to be online a lot more than most people are. She'll log time into Pariah for over ten hours a day, and that's part of the reason that she's managed such a specialized build and such a high level, despite only playing for a couple months at this point.
Recently, she's found another way to avoid notice; despite her trash position on the boards, she's managed to finagle her way into a guild called the Gloro Inquisitors with a couple well-done raids, and remains near the very bottom of the guild. After all, goes her rationale, who are paid less attention than the worst members of a good guild?
Other Information
Fever Drive - Vizera's main DPS ability. Ignites her swords in fire, extending her attack range by almost double and massively empowering her movement speed, attack speed, and damage. Every enemy she kills during the duration replenishes some of her Heat. She can't cancel this ability; it continues until her Heat runs out.
Burn The Sky - A channeled ability that unleashes a huge beam of intense fire wherever Vizera directs with her hands, dealing huge fire DPS. Lasts a maximum of six seconds.
Flamebreak - The only hard CC that Vizera has access to in her kit. It has two functions: the first drains a small amount of Heat to place a Break Rune on the target, stacking up to ten runes. These last until she detonates them. The second detonates all the runes on a specific target, dealing damage--from relatively minor to the most burst damage she can pack at once--based on the amount of runes on the target, and stuns them for around a second. Best used if it's too dangerous to either go into melee range for Fever Drive, or to stay still for Burn The Sky.
Firefly - Expends Heat per second to give Vizera unrestricted flight. If she runs out of Heat during the duration, the wings immediately die, leaving her fairly vulnerable to fall damage if she's not paying close attention to her Heat.
