INFO POST
character name: Asellus
Fandom: SaGa Frontier
Timeline: About sixty years after the half-mystic ending of the game...
character's age: ...making her about 98, though she retains an 18-year-old's appearance.
canon powers, skills, pets and equipment:
Skills: Asellus is a relatively good swordswoman, as well as something of a diplomatic entity-- she's very good at talking to people, especially due to her powers (to be discussed separately). She's got some skill at stateswomanship, though I don't really expect that will come to be too useful here.
Weapons: She carries with her the red blade Asura, a moderately magicked sword she traded some of her lifeforce for when she first left her home, waaaaaay before the meat of the game took effect. She also has what are known as the Mystic Weapons-- spirit-shaped weaponry that has a chance of drawing the soul of its target in, gaining some of their powers. She tends towards the Mystic Glove more than aught else. Though in this setting, I think the Mystic Glove will become unavailable to her.
Powers: Asellus was the heir and recipient of the tyrant Charm Lord Orlouge; as such, she's got a very strong attractive force around her-- by no means one that can't be fought, just something that she can control that tends to make her seem more attractive in one way or another. Something like a magical pheromone, really. It's pretty powerful when she aims it, but she considers that both rude and also cheating, so she doesn't often bother. She can teleport, which will bring her to Anatole. She's got a strong passive resistance to illusions, being a Mystic (who live on such things, like the Sidhe courts of Faerie). Aside from that, she's got the ABILITY to use Mystic Magic... but she doesn't really have the temperament/aptitude for magic. In the end, she only knows one spell-- the Glass Shield spell, which forms a glassy shell that shatters and sends shattered glass at her attacker. In this setting, she maintains that one spell, and the attractive force becomes something linked to her emotions-- and thus, a lot less under her control. Her teleportation is gone entirely.
2/3
[info]persephonics
2009-11-29 09:31 am UTC (link) DeleteTrack This
canon history: Asellus was on an errand for her aunt in Shrike when she was hit and killed by a carriage, drawn by nightmares. The carriage was the vehicle of the Charm Lord Orlouge, out looking for his escaped first Princess, Rei-- but upon seeing the dying girl, bleeding out red on the road, he became entranced with the beauty of her blood and her dying breath, and right then and there transplanted some of his blue Mystic blood into the girl and took her to his home in Facinaturu, where she lay unconscious for twelve years in his castle, the Chateau Aiguille. She woke up without knowing she'd been out for so long, and immediately began exploring the place she was trapped in, making her way to a garden filled with white roses. From behind her, a blonde man stabbed her shoulder with a blade, and her blood flowed purple from the wound, staining the roses. Above, from his balcony, Orlouge watched and smiled.
When she woke up in the flowerbed, no wound in sight and her skin and clothing still sticky with blood, she marched straight to the throne room and demanded to know what was going on. Waiting there for her were the Charm Lord himself, and three of his knights-- Black Wing Prince Ildon, Pluto Knight Rastaban, and Bat Knight Ciato, who had previously attacked her in the flower room. Orlouge found her bossy nature and total disregard of etiquette amusing, and assigned Ildon to teach her Mystic laws and ways to defend herself, as well as get her dressed in an appropriate manner. Ildon took her to the dressmaker's, where Asellus met the man's assistant, Gina, who had been creating clothing for the Heir for centuries, one a year. Gina was surprised to find Asellus a woman, but was smitten immediately.
To teach her manners, he awoke the Princess White Rose, a gentle and beautiful woman who took Asellus under her wing. Wandering alone through the palace later, Ciato told Asellus of a way out of the Mystic realm-- via a human trader. In order to get the money to pay for the transportation, she went to White Rose and begged for it-- and White Rose gave her four gold ingots on the condition that she come with her.
They escaped to Owmi, and were informed upon landing that there was a Water Mystic missing. They found a local nobleman had fallen in love with and trapped the mermaid, and they freed her from him by taking her to the lowest levels of the man's mansion, where there was a grotto. Mesarthim, the mermaid, swore her undying loyalty to the Lady Asellus, and went home.
While this was going on, Orlouge had discovered his missing Princess and heir. While he'd previously found Asellus' headstrong nature to be amusing, the same way one finds a puppy who chews shoes to be a little cute, he couldn't let her disobey him like this-- much less take one of his Princesses. So he had Ciato send three Elemental Knights-- the Fire, Water, and Green Sages-- to retrieve the two.
The Fire Sage found Asellus at her aunt's house in Shrike, where she found herself rejected by her aunt as a monster. She'd been missing for twelve years, and assumed dead. This began Asellus' shaky view of herself as a monster; this would come up again and again as they fled the Sages. The Water and Green Sages were defeated as they worked to stay under the radar, picking up teammates and help in the form of the Kingdom Mage Rouge, the bard Lute, his brother Thunder, and the rogue Mystic Zozma. At some point White Rose and Asellus were captured by a member of the corrupt government, Trinity-- a man named Yaruto-- and rescued by Zozma. She also stumbled upon the Biolab in Shrike, where experiments were being performed upon Mystics-- and here, she realized that for all the fairytales about Mystics hurting Humans, Humans were equally capable of cruelty and evil against Mystics.
Upon hearing of Ciato's sages' failure to capture the Princess and Asellus, Orlouge sent White Rose's sister, Golden Lion, to do the job they couldn't. It was a hard battle, but Golden Lion was defeated and saw her sister and Asellus' courage and unbending nature and was humbled by it. She let the two go and retreated to recover.
Soon after, Orlouge sent Ciato himself, who was promptly defeated. Finding that he was tiring of this game, Orlouge released the power of the Dark Labyrinth to trap them. White Rose knew the nature of the place-- that one person must stay, even if the exit was found-- and kept it to herself, trapping herself as sacrifice to let Asellus go free. This... essentially shut Asellus down entirely, and for a long while she was catatonic, grieving for the loss of her best friend and mentor. It was at this time that the Black Wing Prince, on request of his lover Rastaban, found her and decided to help her in her (inevitable) quest to defeat Orlouge in revenge for White Rose. They went to the Ring Lord, a compatriot of Orlouge, who found the whole thing quite amusing and transported the whole group to Facinaturu and the Chateau Aiguille, where she discovered that Gina had been abducted, though by whom was up in the air. Assuming it was Orlouge's doing, Asellus climbed the tower of Facinaturu, where she discovered a Griffin trapped in a secret room-- the Griffin was guarding Gina, and upon defeating it, Gina was safe. But Asellus continued up the tower, fighting and defeating Ciato, Golden Rose, and Rastaban (who may have engineered his own defeat so that Asellus would continue her ascent; he had been working to create a coup d'grace for a long while). When she approached Orlouge, she told him that she had come to stop him from abducting anyone else. Orlouge was finally enraged by her outright rejection of what he had considered a gift, and challenged her to defeat him.
This is an RPG. Of course she managed it.
Asellus was then set up as Facinaturu's new ruler, much more sane than her predecessor-- she freed his hundreds of Princesses, in memory of White Rose. She comes to Anatole after her teleportation led her awry, some sixty years after assuming the role of Charm Lord.
personality: Asellus is still mentally something of a young adult, despite her age-- she's playful, flirtatious, and cocky to a fault, with an infectious grin and a generally teasing nature. This is mostly to cover up the fact that she cannot stand herself. There's a self-hatred that's almost all-consuming, and a shaky sense of self that means that she's forever craving acceptance and love, and then finding that her high position and its hangers-on will forever disappoint her on that front. She's derided for her human blood among Mystics, feared for her Mystic blood among Humans, and forever, her court followers want something from her, rather than wanting her herself. This leads to a disillusionment with the expectations of people and people themselves; she's very acutely aware of the cruelty other beings can inflict upon one another and it's made a very solid impression on her. It's not a trust issue, though she's got her fair share of those; it's a genuine inability to believe that other people are good at heart. She's very much one to protect the weaker, though-- a sense of noblesse oblige that isn't common among Mystics. She roots for the underdog and is just impulsive enough to leap into a battle for them; she's also tenacious enough to continue that fight until such time as it seems stupid. And then she keeps on going anyway because a thing worth doing is a thing worth doing completely.