ABOUT YOU
Name: TealDeer
Are you 18 or over?: Yes
Other characters played: None
CHARACTER
Name: Ienzo
Canon: Kingdom Hearts
Age: 19
History: His life before he lost his heart, and after he regained itThe life of his Nobody, ZexionPoint in canon: After Lea gets his keyblade and returns to Radiant Garden
Window Location: Way down in the Dungeon of Radiant Garden, a seldom-used, difficult to navigate area. The area is currently flooded with shin-deep water. Thanks to the TRON security system, Heartless are no longer a problem here. It is possible that a character might get stuck in this area if they can't figure out the sluice-switch-gate system.
Universe: The GameI... am going to assume that since there have already been at least three Kingdom Hearts characters in this game at various times, that the mods are at least semi-familiar with this universe. Lea and Ienzo will be creating a link to a new "instance," but their version is identical to canon up until the current point in time. The point of divergence is that after Lea gets his keyblade and returns to Radiant Garden after the events of Dream Drop Distance finish; there, Lea enters into the portal.
Some notes, however, on how I think the mechanics of the Kingdom Hearts universe will interact with the larger universe, since I think it's important:
* Hearts in the Kingdom Hearts universe occupy a roughly similar position to Daemons in His Dark Materials. Nobodies, thus, would not have Daemons, as they've explicitly lost their hearts. Heartless wouldn't either, but Heartless aren't exactly sentient. Heartless would read to citizens of the larger universe as a cross between severed and corrupted daemons and Spectres.
* Heartless, if encountered, will attack the Daemon first, much like a Spectre would.
* In the Kingdom Hearts universe and ONLY the Kingdom Hearts universe, it is possible to survive having your daemon destroyed by a Heartless, since it is your heart. If a Heartless devours your daemon, your daemon becomes a heartless itself, and you become a Nobody if your will is strong enough to keep you alive. If both your Heartless and Nobody are destroyed, your original self re-appears along with your daemon.
* This process, much like venturing into the land of the Dead in canon or into dead areas of the world allows one's daemon to wander much further than normal. It is, however, extremely traumatic and time-consuming, moreso than even walking into a dead zone.
* By this logic, Kingdom Hearts itself is a ridiculous motherlode of Dust, since it's where all Hearts come from and the place to which all Hearts return.
* If a person's heart becomes corrupted by Darkness using the usual Kingdom Hearts logic, their daemon will show the effects, becoming darker in colour and more sinister/unnatural in appearance. They will begin to resemble a Heartless. If an individual manages to accumulate enough Darkness, their daemon will
become a Heartless, turning them into a Nobody.
* Obviously, this process IS different than true severance! Since it takes killing both Heartless and Nobody to restore a person, one presumes some small, tenuous connection remains, hence why this actually
works, why the distance limit gets removed, and why Nobodies retain actual motivation and personality.
* Don't even ask me how the hell this works with Sora, because by the above logic the kid has like three other people's daemons following him around by now :| That'll be up to Sora's player to figure out if we get a Sora.
GODSPEED, HYPOTHETICAL SORA PLAYER Abilities: OH JAYSUS. Because Kingdom Hearts is
ridiculous, I've linked Ienzo's full ability list and some TL;DR explanations
on this separate page here To sum up: Ienzo is an exceptionally powerful spellcaster, probably one of the most powerful mages in the Kingdom Hearts universe, and certainly one of the most powerful spellcasters of those who were in Organization XIII. His main shtick is illusions, status effects, and Blue Magic (a la Final Fantasy, ie, Enemy Skill use) though he has a smattering of knowledge about other spells.
Possessions: The Book of Retribution: This was Zexion's signature weapon; like all Nobody weapons, it is tied in some fashion to his soul, and stayed with him after he got his heart back. Ienzo can summon and dismiss his book at will from a nondimensional subspace somewhere. The book itself can also hold a small subspace pocket, and Ienzo often uses it as his inventory, storing things in each page. The book has an infinite number of pages, and when pages are torn out they regenerate. Ienzo always opens the book to the page he's looking for, even if he doesn't know what he's looking for. Written in it is the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the Reports section of a Kingdom Hearts game: Ienzo's history, observations he's made about the world, lists of things he's collected, records of experiments he's done... and a few sections of short stories, poetry, and personal essays. If taken from him, Ienzo can just summon it back to his hands.
Ienzo fights primarily by bashing people with the book, though as he gains abilities he'll be able to control it with minor telekinesis (it'll have a maximum range of no more than five feet though).
Eventually, Ienzo will be able to trap people inside his book, but for now the space inside is too small.
Some Potions and Ethers: POTIONS AND ETHERS
Gear System: A touch-screen like magitechnology device that was standard issue in the Organization. Allows for the organization and focusing of spells and special attacks. Though many of Ienzo's abilities are inherent (his ties to illusion, his spellcasting, the Book), the Gear System lets him organize and power up those abilities (focusing them, basically). Unlike the Book, the Gear System CAN be stolen. Without it, Ienzo can only cast the most minor of spells. As such, Ienzo usually keeps it INSIDE the book. Someone with spellcasting ability who stole Ienzo's Gear System could probably use the spells inside, but only after significant study. The Gear System also only allows seven commands to be in one's active "deck" at once; the rest would be unavailable until they are switched in, and commands cannot be switched in the heat of battle. Conceptually, the Gear System used by Lea and Ienzo is a combination of the Gear System used in KH: 365/2 Days and the Command systems found in Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance.
Or, a simpler version: a Gear System is a bit like a wand in Harry Potter. Wizards are inherently magical without their wands, and can even work some minor magic, but the magic is unpredictable and often very basic. The wand is a focusing device. Same deal with a Gear System.
Personality: First, the stuff we absolutely know to be true from canon: Ienzo is an extremely intelligent individual with a passionate thirst for knowledge of all types, as well as a love of words. He prefers to observe before he acts, gathering as much information as he can before making any major decisions.
Though when Ienzo was very young, he tended to observe without speaking, since he's regained his heart he's become much more talkative. Ienzo is quite knowledgeable, and eager to show it, as evidenced by the somewhat large infodump he gives Lea in Dream Drop Distance. In contrast to his nobody, Zexion, Ienzo is genuinely helpful and seems more openly honest and less prone to sarcasm or scheming (though doubtless his sense of humor and snark are intact).
In addition, Ienzo is a patient individual, willing to carefully instruct others, and to make sure they understand the whole of an issue. That being said, he cannot tolerate laziness.
It remains to be seen how Ienzo feels about the actions of his nobody, Zexion, though given that Lea remembers his time as Axel it's a given that Ienzo likely remembers his time as Zexion.
Now, stuff we can extrapolate:
Ienzo lost his heart at the age of only about eight years old. In a sense, he grew up as Zexion, convinced utterly that he had no emotions and no heart. While he's recovering from this time and he is absolutely
Ienzo now, he still has some difficulty with reading other people's emotion and even recognizing his own feelings. At times, he can seem rather naive and childlike when it comes to matters of personal interaction and matters of the heart, because he didn't experience those during his teenage years. This isn't to say he's child
ish: even at eight years old, Ienzo was fairly mature and even reserved. It's more that he's inexperienced in certain matters. Literally half of his existence was stolen from him.
I wager that while he seldom shows it and prefers not to speak of it, Ienzo is deeply troubled by his actions as a child and as Zexion. He is partially responsible for the destruction of his entire homeworld and the torture and deaths of hundreds of people (including Lea and Isa). It was he who convinced Ansem the Wise, his adopted father, to build the secret lab under Hollow Bastion, and though only a child he participated in the experiments with the rest. He psychologically tortured Riku and sets Heartless on countless worlds while part of Organization XIII.
Though Ienzo thinks of the actions of Zexion as having been done, in a sense, by another person whose memories he happens to share, the actions of Ienzo the child are all on his conscience. He seldom shows it, but this deeply troubles him.
Thread Sample: HereProse Sample: He wakes to sleeping, and takes his waking slow. There's stiffness, and pain, and he breathes just to feel the air fill his lungs. The floor is cold and metal, and...
familiar.Home?He breathes, slowly. He feels the cold metal against his cheek, the smell of dust and the faint chemical odor of the lab, the slightest note of ozone on the air. And -- people. He can see Aeleus across from him.
What do I remember?Twin memories. They seem equidistant, somehow
both the last thing he remembers. He is young, barely reaching nine years old, and there is pain, and betrayal, and suffering. He is older, eighteen, and he has been so empty for so long that he has forgotten what fear is like, and to feel it again, flickering through him like an electric current, that's another kind of pain.
But more. What is this? He feels it against the floor of the room, he feels it in the subtle rhythm and he feels it warm and safe. He hears a familiar voice across the room --
"We're people again."
He pushes himself to his feet, but Aeleus is already there, helping him up.
"Lea --" he says, but the red-haired man is already leaving, running out of the door. No one else speaks.
He looks at Aeleus. What's there to say? Apologies? There's so many things to apologize
for. Wrongs committed, failures made, mistakes, where to even begin? He opens his mouth to speak, but Aeleus interrupts him.
"They're not waking up," he says, nodding towards Dilan and Even. "We should get them to the infirmary."
Ienzo shuts his mouth and nods. "Right," he says. "You'll need to carry them, I'm afraid. I'll go find the medical supplies."
"They should be right where we left them," Aeleus says.
Ienzo smirks, just a little. "Well, yes, unless our intrepid Keyblade Master raided the cabinet," he says. "Not that I begrudge our hero their use, but it will make everything a bit inconvenient..."
He walks to the medical supply, and, sure enough, it's been opened, everything taken out. He flicks his fingers to see if he can at least cast
something. The magic's still there, all right (and even his Gear System is still stored safely away), but he can tell that the shock of waking up again has scrambled everything inside him. Great. He turns to walk back down the stairs, trying to remember how to even get to the infirmary. The way the castle's been damaged by its fall to Darkness has the corridors all turned around.
"Aeleus?" he asks, poking his head in once he's finally found the place. "I was right; Sora--or Riku, or someone--took all our Potions and Panaceas. Do we have any munny? I have a little, but we should probably stock up..."
Aeleus wordlessly hands him a bag of munny, and turns back to the work of monitoring Dilan and Even. Ienzo takes it with a small word of thanks, then turns to go, pausing at the door.
It's overwhelming, just a little. His emotions hit now like breaking waves: sadness, guilt, fear, joy, passion, ambition, a whirling tumult. He keeps it locked down, not showing a thing on his face, but the guilt, especially... that guilt. He grips the bag in his hand, trying to focus on the task at hand.
Get medical supplies. Maybe buy some basic food. A loaf of bread. Don't think too hard on the past. Look to the future.Look to the future. That was the key. What was done was done...
Plans: Ienzo will be EXTREMELY interested in daemons, Dust, and research in general. In his own homeworld, he studied the way the heart works extensively, and he'd be interested in expanding his knowledge on the subject, as well as figuring out how the mechanics of his own universe interact with the larger world.
Notes:DÆMON
Name: Sesheta
Sex: Female
Form: Nebelung cat; though Sesheta is more saturated in color (closer to Ienzo's hair color), sports a rather nasty scar across her chest over her heart, and is polydactyl. She also tends to shimmer faintly when Ienzo uses magic.
Additional notes: Given that Ienzo has already been forcibly separated from his daemon in a sense in canon by losing his heart, then re-united with her by regaining it, I'd like to say that Ienzo has the same distance limitation as Lyra, Will, and the Witches do in His Dark Materials (ie, much further than most humans), that the forced separation and rejoining of his heart works much like the separation by going to the land of the Dead, or to dead areas.
I'd like it also if Sesheta could use / share some of Ienzo's magic. Spells he cast that affect him (like Vanish) would affect both of them; it'd be neat if Seshata could also use all of his non-damaging spells on herself (Vanish, blurr, Disguise, etc), and that as Ienzo gains in power if she could gain more powerful illusion abilities (perhaps a bit like a Cheshire cat, the ability to just make parts of her body vanish, or appear to be in different places).
Why this form: I know, I know: cat. how boring! I did consider a number of more exotic animals, including a grey crowned crane, but the cat, particularly the nebelung, fit Ienzo the best.
Nebelung cats are said to be mysterious; they are often very reserved, though they will bond with a few close individuals. They are highly intelligent animals as well. More than that, though, Ienzo prefers not getting his hands dirty. While not lazy, per se, he uses his own talents to his advantage and avoids combat, letting others do the dirty work... much as cats have latched on to humans as a way to get food, shelter, and protection. A cat is still playful at times, and a cat can still hunt its own food, but cats rely on others for their protection in the end. They are also sly and the traditional companions of both witches and writers, which Ienzo is sort of both.
The name, Sesheta, is a reference to the Egyptian goddess of both writing and science, things Ienzo is also associated with. Sesheta, like many Eyptian goddesses, is ALSO associated with cats.
Finally, we have the slight connection to the cheshire cat, a cat who can turn invisible and speaks in riddles that hold some truth. In the same way, Ienzo will often speak cryptically with clever wordplay, and he is an illusionist... though Sesheta isn't much of a smiler.
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