application for empatheias

[goldneedles]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: chesca
Contact: oglops @ plurk, chocographs @ skype, JUNK #8483 @ discord
Age: Over 13
Current Characters: Firion, Final Fantasy II


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Porom
Age: 6
Canon: Final Fantasy IV (Specifically, Final Fantasy IV: Interlude)
Canon Point: Interlude, following the reveal of Rosa’s pregnancy.

Background: The spell has no effect.

Personality: Did you need something (her first spoken line, setting the tone for literally everything about her for the next two and a half games)? Porom is here! Porom will help! Porom will do everything in her power to get you to say that she is helpful and did a good job! Polite and kind, she has an immense capacity for trust, compassion and forgiveness - meeting Cecil, a man responsible for an attack on her home that led to both deaths and the taking of prisoners, she is immediately good-mannered and helpful, going as far as to say she’s grateful for the opportunity to help him atone for his past deeds. She feels empathy for near everyone she meets, mourning the fates of people who were trying to murder her only a moment ago (later in her life, she ends up extending this sympathy even to trains. She doesn’t even know what a train is, but she wants it to be happy and is sad that it isn’t).

Both she and her brother are introduced as geniuses. Though both claim to still be only apprentices, both are able to learn every skill of their respective schools of magic at the age of five (in comparison another child character, Rydia, who is herself implied to be very skilled even at a young age, has the spells she can learn sharply limited at the age of seven). She’s shown to be very intelligent as well as being skilled with magic, she and her brother are capable of seeing through a number of traps that the adult characters miss. Porom is also the first character in the game (with the possible exception of the Elder and maybe Cecil himself - the thought bubbles don’t really give the clearest answer here) to figure out the identity of Cecil’s father.

But while she tries to remain mature and composed at all times she’s still a child, genius or not, and no matter how hard she tries to be aloof for the sake of politeness she wears her heart on her sleeve. When happy or excited she’ll jump up and down in joy, when sad or afraid she’s quick to show it (one of her actual abilities is ‘cry at the scary thing’). She doesn’t like it when people argue around her and will try to stop this - the one time she tries to correct the behaviour of someone she considers ‘above’ her is when Tellah and Cid are arguing and she asks them not to. She also warms to people incredibly quickly, and by the end of the short time she spends with Cecil she considers him an older brother despite his actions in the past. She can be more willing to trust those she is close to than she ought to be, sometimes, and she’ll ignore her instincts for the sake of that trust (something which causes problems in Interlude when she acknowledges how odd ‘Rydia’ is acting, something that in similar situations has led her to call a liar out, and chooses to ignore it because she trusts her friend). While she’s quick to catch out trickery when not emotionally invested, her stubborn determination to believe the best of those she loves makes her easier to trick than she ought to be.

Her beliefs about her place in the world and the places of those around her are very strict (specifically has a strongly held belief, illustrated in flashback scenes to this point in her life in the after years, that she and her brother ought to act as servants to everyone else and act solely for the sake of others), and as a result, some of her behaviour is worryingly unchildlike. She is willing to act as a spy to ensure that Cecil either returns from Mount Ordeals as a paladin or not at all. She is willing to die, and to allow her brother to die, for Cecil’s sake. Her response to deaths - deaths of people, not monsters, and deaths that she has had a hand in even if the party was only fighting to protect themselves - is only sorrow, not horror.

Abilities: Porom is an incredibly powerful white mage (healer) by the standards of adults in her canon, more so when her age is taken into consideration. Stat-wise, she’s her canon’s absolute most capable healer (if unfortunately very over-specialised in a game that rewards character versatility and near-incapable of doing much other than healing). Spell list (wiki).

She has a telepathic link of sorts with her brother. But, you know, he’s not here and everyone can do that with the amulets. More notably, she’s shown to be an empath, feeling the emotions of both allies and enemies in her ‘thought bubbles’ in IV.

Gravity is optional. Her official art and FMV appearances show her getting around by floating from place to place (this could be the use of the float spell, though her brother who cannot use that spell appears to be capable of the same thing).

She’s also really, REALLY good at crying. Obviously the details of this would be up to the character dealing with her, but it’s canon that she can convince pretty much anything to be a little bit kinder to her by crying at it a lot. She regularly inspires pity and empathy in zombies. (In game this has had a range of actual effects over the course of the games, ranging from halving defense to causing confusion, but consistently makes escaping from battle easier.)

And she has the ability to combine her own magic with that used by others to massively amplify its effects. While she can only do this with her brother at her current canon point, After Years’ treatment of this as part of the Band system and the mechanics of how Twincast works when given to other characters in the 3D version imply that she should be capable of pulling this trick off with anyone who she is sufficiently close to.

Alignment: Aiada. While it doesn’t come up in IV itself, flashbacks in the sequel, After Years, show that her arc from that game (which deals with envying her brother’s freedom and trying to force herself to be happy with what she has) has already begun even this early in her life.

Other:


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉

General Sample: Thread from a little while ago.

Emotion Sample:
Cecil is having a baby. She has to remember that. She’s alone and afraid, suddenly in a strange place where for the first time in her short life, she can’t feel her brother’s presence. But somewhere far away, in a place where she isn’t anymore, Rosa is with child. Cecil is having a baby. She’s going to be an aunt.

The gloom that had surrounded the space around her - the dust, the cobwebs, the darkness even in the most well lit of corners, the objects with shadows in the shapes of things with far too many teeth, everything that had come to appear when she realised how quiet her mind had fallen - all of it is swept away. Cobwebs are blown aside. The shadows retreat. In its place is warmth, the distant sound of bells and laughter, the smell of something sweet, a pair of tiny sets of muddy footsteps flanking a larger set. The dust remains, but it’s streaked by small handprints, flowers and figures drawn into it with a finger.

It’s not perfect - it isn’t supposed to be. It’s imperfect in all the right ways, all the ways that could be proof of someone living there happily, even if she knows in her mind it was all conjured from her own feelings. It feels like home, like being loved, and if she just remembers that somewhere far away, Cecil must be happy- if she just remembers that, she knows things can be like this for as long as she needs it.

Questions: