ROUTE 29 APPLICATION
Player
Name: Ran
Livejournal Username: random_prophet
E-mail: randomprophet@gmail.com
AIM/MSN: TungstenSamurai
Timezone: MSK (Moscow Standard Time)
Current Characters in Route: N/A
Character
Name: King Bradley/Wrath/what the hell do you need a name for anyway
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist (manga and Brotherhood)
Timeline: After his death in 105
Canon Resource Links:FMA Wiki: King Bradley>
FMA Wiki: Wrath
Personality: The personality Bradley presents to the outside world is… one you wouldn’t really expect from a man of his station. He seems cheerful and friendly, though… admittedly, somewhat eccentric. He occasionally offers melons to people seemingly at random, frequently jokes around (even about extremely important matters), and routinely escapes from work through the window… much to the detriment of his secretary. He even has a Hawaiian shirt specifically used for when he's being a tourist. Nevertheless, even with his somewhat carefree, jovial attitude towards his job and life in general, he seems to give off the feeling that he cares about his duties as Fuhrer of Amestris and the people living in the country, and that he takes his job seriously. He even attempts to personally face down problem individuals who threaten the common good. He does have a tendency to get rather scary when something’s threatening it, but… he can’t be that bad, right?
…you’d be pretty wrong if you thought that, actually. All of the above is a lie constructed to make him much seem like a sympathetic, fatherly authority figure to the public, except for the part about him taking his job seriously and his tendency to be extremely self-reliant. While he’s very good at appearing to be normal (or, at least, an eccentric of a very harmless variety), those who are either in the top brass, have had experience with how he ran things during the Ishbal Rebellion, or those who have delved too deep into Amestris’s deepest secrets know him to be very serious, cold, and absolutely ruthless-which, given that he’s considered the embodiment of the feeling of Wrath, isn’t very surprising.
As a Homunculus, he tends to view almost every human as being on the same level as animals, and their tendency to act irrationally by continuing to fight even when they can’t win infuriates him. He is deeply cynical and has a tendency to mock self-sacrifice and idealized concepts, particularly in regards to leadership and religion. He is almost entirely remorseless about anything he’s done. Despite this, if one finds out about his darkest parts of his history, he never seems as angry on the surface as one would think he would be. It’s not that he isn’t angry… rather, it’s that rather than manifesting as a series of explosive outbursts, his anger is a constant, controlled, slow burn. He’s very calm-there is very little that shocks him-and speaks in a relatively civil manner, with the only hint of his underlying anger being his disgust at most human tendencies. He routinely carries out serious discussions with the main characters about the unfortunate things that will come to pass if they don't cooperate over nice cups of tea. Occasionally, he will admit that he’s angry, but he usually looks quite calm when he does so. This even comes when he’s fighting-he rarely displays any emotion other than a controlled sort of calmness unless things are really serious, he's really enjoying himself, or if you're not killing him hard enough.
However… there are a few contradictions in his nature. Despite the fact that he claims to despise regular humans, he does seem to have some sort of attachment to his wife-at least, to the point that the only meaningful choice he ever made on his own was the choice to marry her rather than letting the conspiracy running Amestris’s government choose a wife for him. Of course, his attachment to her wasn’t exactly developed in the most normal of ways-he asked her out on their first date after she managed to bypass his Ultimate Eye and gave him… quite a slap. What he did to provoke this is unknown (and probably left up to the reader to decide because it’s funnier that way), but it does convey that he has… interesting standards of attraction. Furthermore, while he has never expressed anything but compliance to the fact that his entire life has been lived according to a set plan, he seems to find certain amusement in people disrupting it in unexpected ways, even if he never goes against it himself. Indeed, when Mustang and Hawkeye learn about his true nature, he's incredibly honest with them, making one wonder if he's simply relishing the idea of getting to be his true self for once. Indeed, one has to wonder if he could function well without having Father’s plan to give him some sort of direction, given that he’s never actually lived on his own terms. When his role ends in canon, he ends up seeking out someone actually capable of killing him-though it’s difficult to determine if this is what he’d had planned or if he was just intent on having a fantastic fight to the death because he was already severely wounded. He was very happy with the situation, though.
Humans are actually a relatively complicated point for him. He was originally one, and he’s not sure whether he retains his original human soul or if he has one of the souls in the Philosopher’s Stone that was used to make him into a Homunculus; however, he certainly takes pride in being a Homunculus and has no desire to find some sort of way to return to being a normal human, so it’s rather safe to say that he fully identifies as a Homunculus. However, even with this, he doesn’t seem to consider either “King Bradley” or “Wrath” to be his true name, given that when his role ends in canon, he seems to enjoy the idea of a fight between nameless warriors (with the other being Scar, who renounced his name for religious reasons). He knows how humans work and is capable of hitting their emotional weak points-for example, he attempts to keep Roy Mustang under control by splitting up his team and by placing Riza Hawkeye as his personal secretary, with the implication that if Roy went out of line, something fairly unfortunate would happen. He did something similar with Edward. Of course, neither of these attempts actually worked, but that says more about Ed and Roy’s mental fortitude than Bradley’s skills.
In any case, despite his skill at manipulating emotional attachments (or, perhaps, because of it), he has a very low opinion of human relationships. At one point, he expressed annoyance at people grieving the death of a well-loved soldier because, in his view, they should have known he was probably going to be gunned down anyway. Indeed, compassion and empathy are not his strong suits; he was irritated to the point of rage by the aforementioned dead soldier’s daughter crying at his funeral. Despite his disdain for such emotional irrationalities and… well… everything about humans, he actually finds them quite interesting-humans accomplishing things that he didn't quite expect them to generally causes him to feel a mixture of a modicum of respect and a great deal of rage. His disdain for humans doesn’t automatically mean he automatically likes nonhumans better-for example, despite the chimera that worked for Greed having similar lab rat backgrounds to him, he shows no real objection to slaughtering them all. Granted, in a situation where he isn’t required to slaughter everything that moves he might find non-humans who have similar mindsets to his own easier to deal with than humans themselves.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Strengths
Bradley is much faster than the average human, having superb reflexes and being able to use up to five swords in very quick succession. Part of this is from being raised as a supersoldier, and part of it is from the ability he gained from becoming a Homunculus: the Ultimate Eye. The Ultimate Eye (which is a bit of a misnomer in that it applies to both eyes and not just the one that has the Orobourous on it) functions somewhat like a computer that takes in all possible information from his surroundings (such as miniscule muscle movements) and formulates the best possible plan of attack. He’ll probably just have a normal eye there in Route because lol he’s a ‘normal’ human being now, but he’s still quite capable of doing many things a man his age just should not be able to do.
Like taking out a tank with a sword and a grenade while being shot at, effectively fighting for extended periods of time while using five swords at once, almost effortlessly defeating another Homunculus with the ability to regenerate and with the ability to alter the carbon in his skin so it's as hard as diamonds, and doing a bunch of other insane parkour bullshit that would be difficult for someone half his age to pull off. Why does he keep complaining about his age, again…?
Aside from that, he’s pretty psychologically resilient as well (save for possible issues that may come up because of things that will be discussed when I get to his weaknesses). He is practically fearless, though he isn’t really dumb about it; it’s more confidence than anything. Also, despite having a general disdain for humans, he’s rather good at understanding how they work. He’s an intelligent man, and is very book smart when it comes to a wide variety of subjects, such as political philosophy and the humanities. He is skilled in a variety of combat doctrines, and while he is best with a cavalry sword, he is also well versed in hand-to-hand. While he was trained in firearms, he never uses one over the course of the series, so one could possibly assume that he’s rather rusty.
Weaknesses
Bradley is pretty hax, but he does have his weaknesses. He relies on sight more than any other sense, so if his vision somehow goes he’ll have a severe handicap. His Ultimate Eye won’t be available to him, so he’ll probably have some difficulty adjusting to that. At the end of the day, he is just a man-a man who is incredibly hard to kill, certainly, but cause him to lose enough blood or fatally wound him and he’ll die, and it’s a lot easier to fatally stab someone when they’re trying very hard to deal with having worse perception than they used to.
In terms of personality, Bradley is a gigantic douchebag, which probably isn’t going to endear him to many people once they figure out what he’s actually like, and he has a tendency to provoke others by saying incredibly douchey things. This doesn’t backfire too often given that he usually acts fairly genial and, when he’s in douche mode, he rarely comes up against anything that’s actually a threat to him in canon, but on a panfandom level he’s more likely to run into someone who can take him down, so it’s more likely to cause him trouble somewhere down the line.
There’s also the problem of him always having played some sort of role in someone else’s plans for his entire life-once his roles end in canon, he essentially decides to fight Scar to the death and enjoys getting to die without any sort of bullshit attached to their awesome fight, so dealing with the relative freedom offered by the lack of Father’s presence or (almost) anything related to Father’s plans may leave him a bit… overwhelmed.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Skarmory. It’s a bird. Made of swords.
Password: Taco Bell
Samples
First Person Sample: (8 sentences) [Well, there’s definitely some kind of fiddling going on here from someone who doesn’t seem to know how to operate these things… but hey, it focused eventually, right? Well, anyway, right now there’s a rather imposing looking man standing on Route 29, who seems… completely unfazed.
There is also a bird made of swords chilling in the background, holy shit.]
This device seems to be working, so let me cut to the chase. I’ve spoken to several people who seem to live here, and they seem to be quite capable of telling me about this place-and it’s definitely one hell of a place they’ve got here, I’ll grant them that!
[Well, hey, at least someone’s taking this well! He does serious up a bit for the next bit of conversation, though.]
However, I’m not entirely clear on why I’m here, although I do have some ideas. I suppose at least one of you will be able to give me a decent explanation without eventually starting to repeat everything that they just said.
Third Person Sample: (300 words) Something about this place was really grating on King Bradley. At least, more than things usually grated on him.
It wasn’t the general concept behind the place. Indeed, there was something to be said for a place where practically everything revolved around fighting. There were a few things about it that kept it from being perfect, of course-despite having been a military leader, fighting by proxy wasn’t quite his thing and fights to the death seemed impossible if these chimera-esque animals were any indication-but those things weren’t as annoying to him as they could have been, particularly after learning that his new pet-slash-weapon’s feathers could serve as functional swords. That endeared her to him rather quickly, even if he had no intention of naming her at any point.
The irony was not lost on him that, upon dying, he’d ended up in an afterlife that appealed to him on some level, despite the fact that he’d never had any sort of belief in an afterlife and had done practically everything possible that could potentially alienate most kinds of gods.
However, with that came… a great deal of oddities, and despite the fact that Bradley had a very high threshold for that sort of thing, a lot of them were difficult to get accustomed to. His introduction to this place had been highly surreal-first it had been waking up in the first place, with both arms attached and no sign that he’d ever been wounded at all recently, and then it had been looking into the mirror and noticing that both his eyes looked the same, and then it had been meeting a woman who claimed to be his mother despite being at least twenty years younger than him…
…and then there was the fact that there were more humans out there like her, who seemed as though they were only capable of predictable patterns. He’d thought that humans acting outside of his expectations were infuriating, but… as it turned out, humans that acted on set patterns were even worse.
At least the former were actually interesting.
Name: Ran
Livejournal Username: random_prophet
E-mail: randomprophet@gmail.com
AIM/MSN: TungstenSamurai
Timezone: MSK (Moscow Standard Time)
Current Characters in Route: N/A
Character
Name: King Bradley/Wrath/what the hell do you need a name for anyway
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist (manga and Brotherhood)
Timeline: After his death in 105
Canon Resource Links:FMA Wiki: King Bradley>
FMA Wiki: Wrath
Personality: The personality Bradley presents to the outside world is… one you wouldn’t really expect from a man of his station. He seems cheerful and friendly, though… admittedly, somewhat eccentric. He occasionally offers melons to people seemingly at random, frequently jokes around (even about extremely important matters), and routinely escapes from work through the window… much to the detriment of his secretary. He even has a Hawaiian shirt specifically used for when he's being a tourist. Nevertheless, even with his somewhat carefree, jovial attitude towards his job and life in general, he seems to give off the feeling that he cares about his duties as Fuhrer of Amestris and the people living in the country, and that he takes his job seriously. He even attempts to personally face down problem individuals who threaten the common good. He does have a tendency to get rather scary when something’s threatening it, but… he can’t be that bad, right?
…you’d be pretty wrong if you thought that, actually. All of the above is a lie constructed to make him much seem like a sympathetic, fatherly authority figure to the public, except for the part about him taking his job seriously and his tendency to be extremely self-reliant. While he’s very good at appearing to be normal (or, at least, an eccentric of a very harmless variety), those who are either in the top brass, have had experience with how he ran things during the Ishbal Rebellion, or those who have delved too deep into Amestris’s deepest secrets know him to be very serious, cold, and absolutely ruthless-which, given that he’s considered the embodiment of the feeling of Wrath, isn’t very surprising.
As a Homunculus, he tends to view almost every human as being on the same level as animals, and their tendency to act irrationally by continuing to fight even when they can’t win infuriates him. He is deeply cynical and has a tendency to mock self-sacrifice and idealized concepts, particularly in regards to leadership and religion. He is almost entirely remorseless about anything he’s done. Despite this, if one finds out about his darkest parts of his history, he never seems as angry on the surface as one would think he would be. It’s not that he isn’t angry… rather, it’s that rather than manifesting as a series of explosive outbursts, his anger is a constant, controlled, slow burn. He’s very calm-there is very little that shocks him-and speaks in a relatively civil manner, with the only hint of his underlying anger being his disgust at most human tendencies. He routinely carries out serious discussions with the main characters about the unfortunate things that will come to pass if they don't cooperate over nice cups of tea. Occasionally, he will admit that he’s angry, but he usually looks quite calm when he does so. This even comes when he’s fighting-he rarely displays any emotion other than a controlled sort of calmness unless things are really serious, he's really enjoying himself, or if you're not killing him hard enough.
However… there are a few contradictions in his nature. Despite the fact that he claims to despise regular humans, he does seem to have some sort of attachment to his wife-at least, to the point that the only meaningful choice he ever made on his own was the choice to marry her rather than letting the conspiracy running Amestris’s government choose a wife for him. Of course, his attachment to her wasn’t exactly developed in the most normal of ways-he asked her out on their first date after she managed to bypass his Ultimate Eye and gave him… quite a slap. What he did to provoke this is unknown (and probably left up to the reader to decide because it’s funnier that way), but it does convey that he has… interesting standards of attraction. Furthermore, while he has never expressed anything but compliance to the fact that his entire life has been lived according to a set plan, he seems to find certain amusement in people disrupting it in unexpected ways, even if he never goes against it himself. Indeed, when Mustang and Hawkeye learn about his true nature, he's incredibly honest with them, making one wonder if he's simply relishing the idea of getting to be his true self for once. Indeed, one has to wonder if he could function well without having Father’s plan to give him some sort of direction, given that he’s never actually lived on his own terms. When his role ends in canon, he ends up seeking out someone actually capable of killing him-though it’s difficult to determine if this is what he’d had planned or if he was just intent on having a fantastic fight to the death because he was already severely wounded. He was very happy with the situation, though.
Humans are actually a relatively complicated point for him. He was originally one, and he’s not sure whether he retains his original human soul or if he has one of the souls in the Philosopher’s Stone that was used to make him into a Homunculus; however, he certainly takes pride in being a Homunculus and has no desire to find some sort of way to return to being a normal human, so it’s rather safe to say that he fully identifies as a Homunculus. However, even with this, he doesn’t seem to consider either “King Bradley” or “Wrath” to be his true name, given that when his role ends in canon, he seems to enjoy the idea of a fight between nameless warriors (with the other being Scar, who renounced his name for religious reasons). He knows how humans work and is capable of hitting their emotional weak points-for example, he attempts to keep Roy Mustang under control by splitting up his team and by placing Riza Hawkeye as his personal secretary, with the implication that if Roy went out of line, something fairly unfortunate would happen. He did something similar with Edward. Of course, neither of these attempts actually worked, but that says more about Ed and Roy’s mental fortitude than Bradley’s skills.
In any case, despite his skill at manipulating emotional attachments (or, perhaps, because of it), he has a very low opinion of human relationships. At one point, he expressed annoyance at people grieving the death of a well-loved soldier because, in his view, they should have known he was probably going to be gunned down anyway. Indeed, compassion and empathy are not his strong suits; he was irritated to the point of rage by the aforementioned dead soldier’s daughter crying at his funeral. Despite his disdain for such emotional irrationalities and… well… everything about humans, he actually finds them quite interesting-humans accomplishing things that he didn't quite expect them to generally causes him to feel a mixture of a modicum of respect and a great deal of rage. His disdain for humans doesn’t automatically mean he automatically likes nonhumans better-for example, despite the chimera that worked for Greed having similar lab rat backgrounds to him, he shows no real objection to slaughtering them all. Granted, in a situation where he isn’t required to slaughter everything that moves he might find non-humans who have similar mindsets to his own easier to deal with than humans themselves.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Strengths
Bradley is much faster than the average human, having superb reflexes and being able to use up to five swords in very quick succession. Part of this is from being raised as a supersoldier, and part of it is from the ability he gained from becoming a Homunculus: the Ultimate Eye. The Ultimate Eye (which is a bit of a misnomer in that it applies to both eyes and not just the one that has the Orobourous on it) functions somewhat like a computer that takes in all possible information from his surroundings (such as miniscule muscle movements) and formulates the best possible plan of attack. He’ll probably just have a normal eye there in Route because lol he’s a ‘normal’ human being now, but he’s still quite capable of doing many things a man his age just should not be able to do.
Like taking out a tank with a sword and a grenade while being shot at, effectively fighting for extended periods of time while using five swords at once, almost effortlessly defeating another Homunculus with the ability to regenerate and with the ability to alter the carbon in his skin so it's as hard as diamonds, and doing a bunch of other insane parkour bullshit that would be difficult for someone half his age to pull off. Why does he keep complaining about his age, again…?
Aside from that, he’s pretty psychologically resilient as well (save for possible issues that may come up because of things that will be discussed when I get to his weaknesses). He is practically fearless, though he isn’t really dumb about it; it’s more confidence than anything. Also, despite having a general disdain for humans, he’s rather good at understanding how they work. He’s an intelligent man, and is very book smart when it comes to a wide variety of subjects, such as political philosophy and the humanities. He is skilled in a variety of combat doctrines, and while he is best with a cavalry sword, he is also well versed in hand-to-hand. While he was trained in firearms, he never uses one over the course of the series, so one could possibly assume that he’s rather rusty.
Weaknesses
Bradley is pretty hax, but he does have his weaknesses. He relies on sight more than any other sense, so if his vision somehow goes he’ll have a severe handicap. His Ultimate Eye won’t be available to him, so he’ll probably have some difficulty adjusting to that. At the end of the day, he is just a man-a man who is incredibly hard to kill, certainly, but cause him to lose enough blood or fatally wound him and he’ll die, and it’s a lot easier to fatally stab someone when they’re trying very hard to deal with having worse perception than they used to.
In terms of personality, Bradley is a gigantic douchebag, which probably isn’t going to endear him to many people once they figure out what he’s actually like, and he has a tendency to provoke others by saying incredibly douchey things. This doesn’t backfire too often given that he usually acts fairly genial and, when he’s in douche mode, he rarely comes up against anything that’s actually a threat to him in canon, but on a panfandom level he’s more likely to run into someone who can take him down, so it’s more likely to cause him trouble somewhere down the line.
There’s also the problem of him always having played some sort of role in someone else’s plans for his entire life-once his roles end in canon, he essentially decides to fight Scar to the death and enjoys getting to die without any sort of bullshit attached to their awesome fight, so dealing with the relative freedom offered by the lack of Father’s presence or (almost) anything related to Father’s plans may leave him a bit… overwhelmed.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Skarmory. It’s a bird. Made of swords.
Password: Taco Bell
Samples
First Person Sample: (8 sentences) [Well, there’s definitely some kind of fiddling going on here from someone who doesn’t seem to know how to operate these things… but hey, it focused eventually, right? Well, anyway, right now there’s a rather imposing looking man standing on Route 29, who seems… completely unfazed.
There is also a bird made of swords chilling in the background, holy shit.]
This device seems to be working, so let me cut to the chase. I’ve spoken to several people who seem to live here, and they seem to be quite capable of telling me about this place-and it’s definitely one hell of a place they’ve got here, I’ll grant them that!
[Well, hey, at least someone’s taking this well! He does serious up a bit for the next bit of conversation, though.]
However, I’m not entirely clear on why I’m here, although I do have some ideas. I suppose at least one of you will be able to give me a decent explanation without eventually starting to repeat everything that they just said.
Third Person Sample: (300 words) Something about this place was really grating on King Bradley. At least, more than things usually grated on him.
It wasn’t the general concept behind the place. Indeed, there was something to be said for a place where practically everything revolved around fighting. There were a few things about it that kept it from being perfect, of course-despite having been a military leader, fighting by proxy wasn’t quite his thing and fights to the death seemed impossible if these chimera-esque animals were any indication-but those things weren’t as annoying to him as they could have been, particularly after learning that his new pet-slash-weapon’s feathers could serve as functional swords. That endeared her to him rather quickly, even if he had no intention of naming her at any point.
The irony was not lost on him that, upon dying, he’d ended up in an afterlife that appealed to him on some level, despite the fact that he’d never had any sort of belief in an afterlife and had done practically everything possible that could potentially alienate most kinds of gods.
However, with that came… a great deal of oddities, and despite the fact that Bradley had a very high threshold for that sort of thing, a lot of them were difficult to get accustomed to. His introduction to this place had been highly surreal-first it had been waking up in the first place, with both arms attached and no sign that he’d ever been wounded at all recently, and then it had been looking into the mirror and noticing that both his eyes looked the same, and then it had been meeting a woman who claimed to be his mother despite being at least twenty years younger than him…
…and then there was the fact that there were more humans out there like her, who seemed as though they were only capable of predictable patterns. He’d thought that humans acting outside of his expectations were infuriating, but… as it turned out, humans that acted on set patterns were even worse.
At least the former were actually interesting.