Application for Empatheias

[holysapling]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Dal
Contact: InstantEternity
Age: 29
Current Characters:
Zolf J Kimbley | Fullmetal Alchemist | alchemicals
Shuu Tsukiyama | Tokyo Ghoul | preybeforemeals
Mettaton | Undertale | ratingspoint


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Farina
Age: 17 (no canon age given)
Canon: Magical Starsign
Canon Point: Shortly after the Wood Millennium Gummy is created.

Background: Canon resources for Magical Starsign are really scarce and difficult to find, unfortunately. While there's a page on Wikipedia, which has a fairly decent basic overview of the plot of the game as a whole, it doesn't get into the individual missions on each of the planets (or the characters encountered therein); as Farina's plot involvement is almost entirely confined to the Gren missions, it isn't explored at all on the Wikipedia page. Farina's page on the game's wiki explains her deal in...exceedingly basic detail, but not nearly enough to be sufficient. So I'm presenting both links for the sake of verifying that this game and this character are both things that exist, and I've typed up a history section for her here that explains her portion of the plot and mentions a few key figures in her life, like her father, Durum, and her best friend/servant, Semolina.

Personality: Farina tends to come off as a difficult person to read, at least at first. Her social actions tend to seem childish and almost alarmingly unfocused; while she does pay attention to what's happening around her, she's the sort of person that will seem to completely ignore strategy talks and discussions of things she finds uninteresting, choosing instead to play with the frogs and other wildlife. She does love plants, no one can deny that, and she does her best to take care of them, but more often than not she ends up just sitting in front of them and staring at them, completely oblivious to the world around her for literally hours. She also has no sense of boundaries or personal space; her first reaction upon meeting new people seems to be the immediate desire to get all up in their face, tilting her head at them and generally studying them from approximately three inches away while she tries to work out what she thinks of them, before she wanders off to go back to doing...whatever it was she was doing before the new person showed up.

She won't offer any explanation if asked what she thinks she's doing, either – Farina is almost entirely nonverbal. As a general rule, she won't make any sort of spoken sound at all: she doesn't talk, she doesn't scream when she's in danger, all of the spells she's capable of using don't require her to speak out loud when she's casting, and if she's angry she's more prone to hitting people to express her displeasure than she is to vocalize it. There are exceptions – if a situation is particularly dire, she'll talk, but her words are very stunted and simple, and she tends to be slow in enunciating them and seems to have trouble forming sentences properly. The thoughts are definitely there when she tries, she just doesn't communicate very well.

Aside from that, however, Farina is a surprisingly competent force to be reckoned with; namely, she's a powerful magician. "Magicians" in the Magical Starsign universe are more or less miracle-workers, people who cast elemental spells to protect or destroy; she specializes in fire magic strong enough to destroy enemies that are otherwise unkillable. Magic like that tends to take a lot of practice and a lot of experience to wield at all, much less well, and her control is exceptional; it's never outright stated, but it's extremely likely that she's a prodigy, given that magic hasn't been permitted in her hometown of Tropica for quite some time now and so she couldn't really practice her skills out in the open.

Tropica itself is a small town located in the middle of the jungle and forests on the planet Gren; the technology is all very backwards compared to the other worlds in the galaxy where Magical Starsign takes place – while the other planets have mastered space travel, the Felins of Tropica still fight with spears and rocks. They aren't unaware of technology and they aren't unwilling to do trade with other worlds (their currency is the bira, like everywhere else in that particular universe), but they do choose to not utilize it, instead focusing more on their connection with nature and their world tree Yggsalad (...yes, I know) and occasionally on slightly more spiritually-based things like fortune-telling. Due to this upbringing, Farina has been largely sheltered from the worlds outside of Gren; rather than being afraid of technology, however, she's largely fascinated with it – she'll often disregard the entirely rational fear that something might hurt her in favor of going over to explore things, regardless of what her father or her best friend, Semolina, might have to say about it.

And she does have a tendency to completely disregard anything they might have to say – Farina is noted for being strangely dismissive of people, as well as the notion that anyone other than her has feelings and a life. The only time she really feels bad for doing anything that she wanted to do is when she's given direct evidence that it's hurt someone; this tends to result in her servant (the aforementioned best friend) taking all of her punishments for her, because Farina doesn't understand or doesn't care why what she did was wrong and her father is unwilling to teach her or rein her in at all. So he takes everything out on Semolina, and while Farina does often try to apologize to Semolina after she's been hurt, it's very obvious that she's not genuinely sorry for what she did, just that there were consequences for it.

Farina does love Semolina very much, though, and she'll listen to what she has to say as long as it doesn't interfere with what Farina wants to do; Semolina is the one who taught her how to care for plants, after all, and Farina took everything she said very seriously in that regard. Namely, Semolina told her to bury dead things beneath plants...so Farina went out and killed a bunch of things and buried them, because of goddamn course she did. (...Yeah, Farina's arc is about the point in the Magical Starsign storyline where everything kind of takes a turn.) That course of action seems terrible, naturally, but it falls in line with Farina's usual line of thinking, the thoughts that she doesn't vocalize: in Farina's little world, everything has a direct cause and effect. In her head, everyone always gets exactly what they deserve; if they aren't getting it naturally, she'll help ensure that they do to keep the balance.

Some people were kind to Semolina, so she'll be kind to them.

Other people hurt her, so she'll hurt them right back.

Her village has been terrorized by pirates, so they deserve to know terror, too.

People have been kidnapping others that are close to her, so she'll kidnap them.

Plants need things to die for them to live, and she wants them to live, so other things need to die.

That last one feeds directly into the previous few; Farina is in charge of a murderous plant called the Holy Sapling, you see, something that she believes to be central to keeping her world alive - and the best way she knows how to feed it and ensure that it lives is by burying things for it to eat. So she makes a point of kidnapping people that were cruel to her, or cruel to Semolina, or cruel to the protagonists that helped both of them, and she buries them up to their necks in soil and lets the Sapling feed on them, because that's exactly what they deserve as far as she's concerned. She doesn't spare anyone from this particular judgment, either; she buries her father at one point, as well.

...It probably goes without saying that Farina's got a lot of issues.

However, that isn't to say that she's completely unable to have sense slapped into her; she's fiercely loyal to the people she cares about (in her own way, anyway, that comes back to people getting what she believes they deserve) and is willing to do literally anything for them if they need her to. At her current canonpoint, she's also just received a major shock to her system with regards to Semolina (who committed suicide after all of the abuse she'd taken, from Farina's father and otherwise) and so she'll be a bit more likely to listen to anyone who tries to get through to her.

Assuming, that is, that anyone can break through the bizarre behavior and poverty of speech; if not...well, she'll learn the hard way one day. Again. Maybe it'll stick this time.

Abilities: First of all, in terms of reasonably straightforward physical capabilities, Farina is very physically strong; she manages to kidnap and bury grown men twice her size – and even if one argues that they might have been unconscious while she did that, there are twenty of them buried and that's a lot of dead weight to lug around by herself either way. When it comes to how she handles definitely conscious opponents, she's never battled by the protagonists but she's heavily implied to be capable of fighting and defeating large numbers of the aforementioned grown men twice her size; late in the game, it's revealed that she either killed or otherwise subdued the entire crew of a pirate ship in order to commandeer it. The only help she had in doing this was her father, who is for all intents and purposes a noncombatant, and she managed to do this without blowing up or heavily damaging the ship, so it was likely not due to her magical abilities alone.

And now that we're talking about the uncanny abilities – like a good amount of the Magical Starsign cast, Farina has abilities that are based around elemental magic. Her powers are vaguely-defined, even when she's seen using them in canon, but they seem to be fire-based; her specialty seems to be pinpointing a target and summoning a large amount of magical energy into their vicinity, causing it to detonate on impact with the target and resulting in a large, fiery explosion. She's strong enough to completely obliterate monsters in one strike, including powerful enemies that the party can't kill even with all of them wailing on it; she also sets her entire (very small) planet on fire by sheer force of will and strategically targeted fiery blasts. (For reference, Gren appears to be a floating chunk of heavily-wooded rock approximately the size of Empatheias itself, assuming Empatheias to be a bit smaller than Long Island as stated in the FAQ.)

In order to make Farina's powers a little more reasonable (and also to make her a little less likely to just rain fiery hell down on everyone as soon as she decides she's mad enough), I intend to utilize the setting of Empatheias itself as something of a cap on her powers – for one thing, the emotional effects will likely override her ability to cast magic well in the first place until she learns how to control them a bit better, serving as a distraction and ensuring that she can't go at full force for a while; for another, she's also going to be relying on emotional energy instead of her world's mana points, and as such negative emotions will burn through and drain her points to keep her in check. It won't completely nerf her powers, but it's going to ensure that she can't cast her more powerful, city-destroying spells at all when she's not emotionally stable. Since she's pretty mellow and not willing to be game-breaking when she's not angry or scared, she effectively won't be a threat most of the time; the concern is pretty much only when her emotions go deeply negative, so hopefully this will be acceptable in putting a reasonable damper on it.

Beyond that, her abilities are going to be limited to line of sight (ie, she has to be able to actually see her target), and she's going to have to be able to get the whole incantation out in order to use them (so something like...I don't know, straight-up tackling her mid-incantation is totally fair game for aborting the spell entirely). Most of her incantations are mental rather than verbal, but there are obvious physical indications that she's casting; it also takes her several seconds to get them out and in the heat of battle it's definitely enough time to either get her down, hit her with something, distract her, or otherwise make her stop.

If the proposed restrictions on Farina's powers are not sufficient, please feel free to let me know, as I am totally willing to work with you guys in order to make things less...completely stupid.

Alignment: Thras. Farina is naturally a very curious individual, often tending to walk directly up to things that can (and probably will) try to kill her in the name of satisfying this curiosity rather than reacting with fear or wariness toward the possible threat. Her fearlessness is often reckless, but her acts of courage are often genuinely so – she's willing to do things that would be considered high-risk without a second thought, up to and including the abovementioned act of dragging her father on board a heavily-guarded pirate ship she doesn't know how to fly for the sake of commandeering it.

Other: Farina will be arriving with the clothes on her back and...literally nothing else; she doesn't have any weapons or power-boosting items.

Since Farina is, as was mentioned above, almost completely nonverbal, she'll be using the crystal to communicate with people when she gives up on charades – and she can do charades for a damn long time in person, but she'll be using the network sometimes with an acceptable degree of fluency. Her thoughts are all right and generally lucid, it's mostly verbal communication itself that's the problem.


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample:
Core character portrayal/test drive thread - assisting a vampire in getting nail polish off by way of...not actually assisting at all.

Emotional effect/test drive top-level - creating vines by way of being really delighted to experience glowing sheep.

Questions: None at the moment!