for Vildiur
While reading the app, enjoy Lezard's short playlist.
OOC:
Name: gazebo
Personal LJ: violentgazebo but I don't use it for anything
Email: gazebomail at gmail dot com
Timezone: GMT -5 / Eastern
AIM/MSN/YIM: AIM: violentgazebo ; no MSN ; no YIM
IC:
Character name: Lezard Valeth
Character Journal(s): arrogantmage
Fandom: Valkyrie Profile
Point of Origin: From the end of VP2, unless there are objections. This way he isn't interrupted in seeing his grand scheme through, and is easier to keep grounded.
Appearance: Lezard is a tall, gangling nerdboy whose apparent physical age falls somewhere in his early twenties. Closer inspection, if anyone got close enough to inspect, would reveal he's not altogether the unprepossessing mortal he seems. He doesn't sweat, despite being constantly swathed in multiple layers of clothing; he doesn't need to shave, though he's obviously no castrato. Yet as nods to nature, his (sandy-brown) hair is too long and his eyes (hazel, surely) are shielded by what appear to be corrective lenses. (The truth, of course, is that these features are so integral to his self-image, he can't help but retain them. He could do without the glasses, but then he'd embarrass himself pushing up frames that are no longer there.) He wears traveling attire in earth tones of brown and green, leather boots and well-worn cloak. He is never without leather gloves on his hands; these gloves too are well-worn, but thin and closely tailored as the proverbial kid gloves might be. They have to be, since he does all sorts of delicate work while wearing them, and never removes them in company. Lezard's speaking voice is a cultured and smooth tenor - a lyric tenor in range and color, though he hasn't been heard to sing.
Background: A child prodigy in ars magica, Lezard Valeth won a place at Midgard's premier (if not only) institution for the training of sorcerers, the Flenceburg academy. There this wunderkind promptly blossomed into an enfant terrible. His difficulties among his peers and classmates went well beyond the usual wedding of academic aptitude with social ineptitude. He wasn't antisocial. Indeed, he would have liked to bask in the presence of kindred spirits, as perhaps the child had hoped Flenceburg would afford him.
Alas, Lezard simply could not relate to the priorities and scruples of others. He outpaced his peers, then the postgraduates, then most of his teachers. This was unfortunate; the confidence that came naturally with such raw and unchallenged talent developed into unchecked hubris. The only teacher from whom Lezard felt he had much to learn, the headmistress, a sorceress named Lorenta, was also the teacher who rejected him utterly.
We are never given the specific reason for Lezard's expulsion from Flenceburg. It's hinted that he went too far, somehow; that he offended Lorenta's sensibilities; that, whatever he did, it was at once unthinkable and completely characteristic of Lezard. Judging from his later work, it may well have involved a violation of bioethical standards in regard to experimental subjects. Whatever happened, we know that Lezard left Flenceburg in his teens, and that in his time there the only personal relationship he forged that could be called friendship was a sort of bantering rivalry with a postgraduate sorceress by the name of Mystina.
From Flenceburg, Lezard passes into legend. Over the ensuing handful of years, he sought and found the Philosopher's Stone, which he described later as less a stone than a billion-page codex. The Stone apparently contained reams of lore, not all of it goetic, some of it theological and touching upon the evolution of gods. He mastered abstruse manipulations of space, dimensional shifts that allowed him to accomplish otherwise-impossible feats of engineering and architecture. Significantly, it was at this time he constructed his first Tower and transported it to a location not far outside Flenceburg. This choice of location, like the choices of design manifest in the tower itself (studded with his beloved windmills), can be taken as indicative of a fundamentally retrogressive aspect to Lezard's personality. Like the eyeglasses he no longer needed yet retained, these quirks of geography, this skyline, were things Lezard somehow did not choose to leave behind.
It was also within these years that he first laid eyes on Lenneth Valkyrie, one of three demigoddesses who served their creator and svengali Odin as choosers of the slain. (The source for this supposition is outside the video games; there is a manga which relates this story.) For Lezard, it was love at first sight. For Lenneth, nothing could have been further from her mind.
To say that Lezard became obsessed with Lenneth would not be an exaggeration. His subsequent exploits were undertaken as part of a grand design to win her attention and secure her affections for himself. These exploits comprise a significant plot arc in Valkyrie Profile I and drive the entire plot of Valkyrie Profile II. His first gambit was simplicity itself: since Lenneth's function was to retrieve the souls of those slain who might be useful to Odin at Ragnarok, Lezard arranged for the tragic death of a valuable mage. This mage being none other than Lezard's former teacher Lorenta, the murder brought Lezard back into the sphere of Flenceburg academia he'd once left, although he revealed his involvement only to Mystina. It gave him a prime opportunity to show off for an audience capable of appreciating exactly how much he'd accomplished. Of course, once he'd finished showing off, Mystina knew too much, so he had to kill her too. As he'd also killed himself at some point prior (unspecified, but likeliest after obtaining the Philosopher's Stone), Lezard did not see Mystina's death as an insurmountable obstacle to continued friendship. Freedom from the limitations of a mortal body constituted the optimal condition for magework at the highest levels, it would seem.
Then Ragnarok happened, throwing a wrench into Lezard's romantic machinations. Woe. In order to survive Ragnarok, Lezard had to sacrifice the Philosopher's Stone, and he couldn't very well pick up where he'd left off with the obdurate Lenneth. Being Lezard, he decided it would be much more feasible to travel back in time a few hundred years and wreak havoc with the fabric of the universe, such that Lenneth would be obliged to hunt him down.
His plan worked, up to a point. He certainly enjoyed being hunted down. He also got to travel around with a whole party of warriors and mages, which was the closest thing to an extracurricular club Lezard ever had. For that, he endured the inconvenience of pretending to need sleep, food, and curative tonics. When he kidnapped one of Lenneth's sisters, turned her into a big blue battery, tapped her power to augment his own and then went off to devour the god Odin's divine power in a bizarre cut-scene conflagration of videogame logic, Lezard even offered his warrior and mage tour-group an invitation to live with him in the new world he used his power to create. He seemed genuinely hurt by their refusal.
Such was the downfall of Lezard Valeth, a man who never learned to deal with rejection. He got pwned by a party of heroes. As he was already dead, he couldn't very well be killed, so some mumbo-jumbo about taking him out of the cycle of rebirth ensued. On the bright side, the mumbo-jumbo entailed Lezard getting the undivided attention of three valkyries. He dissolved into a blissful haze of blue particles.
Who's to say the blue particles didn't coalesce and reconstitute in another world entirely?
Personality:
The VP1 in-game character description for Lezard tells us that he is "an accomplished Alchemist as well as a practicioner [sic] of the dark art of Necromancy". It also informs us that "Behind his placid facade lies a mad genius who feels that all others are merely pawns". While all this stuff about mad genius and necromancy catches the eye, the key words here are really placid facade. Lezard is extraordinarily mild-mannered, for a maniac. The word facade here is both useful and misleading: useful in that Lezard has deliberately constructed and shaped his self-presentation, a Prufrockian "face to meet the faces that you meet"; misleading in that it suggests his artifice is without truth. In fact, Lezard really does prefer to be courteous and generous, and his lapses into shrieking evil-overlord invective are not the revelation of a true self, only another facet of himself. If he seeks to hide the latter facet, it's because he seeks to shield his vulnerability. The urbane and charming Lezard we meet in Dipan Castle is no less true a face, and the rescue he offers is no less generous a deed for its strategic value. There is often more than one motive for Lezard's actions. He does not consider this self-contradictory; he considers it elegant.
His traits, also spelled out in a handy VP1 menu (albeit in clumsy adjectival form), are: Egotistical; Narcissistic; Beautiful; Dense; Wise; and Covetous. Egotism and narcissism we need not unpack. Covetousness, likewise, is somewhat self-explanatory: Lezard has a tendency to fixate on objects of desire, and to pursue them singlemindedly until he has made them his own. The Philosopher's Stone was the first and chiefest object of his desire. Only after he acquired the Stone and exploited it thoroughly did his focus shift to a new obsession, the acquisition of Lenneth Valkyrie, a fantasy he refuses to relinquish. Tellingly, in the extended bonus dungeon of VP2, Lezard carries around small Lenneth figurines made of precious metals: he has literally objectified her, in comic exaggeration of the actual objectification his actions and attitude consistently betray. Lenneth's sentience is to Lezard an added feature, not a categorical difference between herself and any other thing he might wish to acquire. He is, after all, officially dense, even after the Philosopher's Stone has made him profoundly wise.
That he should be dubbed beautiful is not completely unthinkable, though it is at odds with the reactions of characters within the game. His attractions are subtle and rarefied; he could be, perhaps, an acquired taste. Physically his type is not valorized in Midgard, land of berserkers, where even the mages tend to be musclebound. Consequently, Lezard's self-image is that of a person whose charms are unappreciated, a pearl cast before swine. His narcissism is deep-seated, but there is about it a whiff of overcompensation.
Skills/Powers:
GREAT MAGIC! Seriously, Lezard is a kickass sorcerer, in a quasi-medieval, quasi-Renaissance world where alchemy is what passes for science (and this is videogame alchemy, at that, comprising a blend of biochem with metallurgy and general explodey badness). Essentially, he's his world's equivalent of a mad scientist.
Over the course of his short career, Lezard literally achieves godhood; outside a crack game, it's unlikely he can be permitted to keep his full measure of powers without breaking the game or irritating other players. Since he undergoes a potentially transformative event at the end of VP2, it can be conjectured that whatever act of reconstitution brings him into Vildiur's gameworld has not reconstituted him in full godly form. Rather, while he may retain the book-knowledge he gleaned from the Philosopher's Stone (so that he can continue to play walking-encyclopedia, and because it'd be irritating to wipe his memory), this resurrected Lezard lacks the raw power to use the truly powerful magics he learned from the Stone. Certainly he no longer holds any of Odin's power. Lezard will be irritated to find that he now is the mere mage he pretended for a time to be.
It's also likely easiest to stick him in a mortal body and trap him there, though the possibilities of his post-suicidal state of being are intriguing. (The latter, it's suggested in VP1, has to do with the integrity of the astral form; I conjecture that when Lezard takes on physical materiality, he does so using ambient molecules/matter, and that his appearance is not mutable by whim. Hence his eternal glasses, for example: he sees himself this way, the way he looked at the time of his self-willed death; even free of the shackles of matter, he can't will himself to resemble an Arngrim-like hulk or a Lucien-like prettyboy. Fortunately, his narcissism makes this no great punishment. The fact that Lenneth finds Lucien attractive does not make Lezard wish to look like Lucien. It simply makes him that much more determined to demonstrate his own superiority.)
What is your character bringing to the table?:
Crazytime! Sorcerous and scientific acumen. Encyclopedic tidbits and trivia from his memory of the Philosopher's Stone, when it's useful for plot purposes or general survival. Lezard is not a leader, preferring a role on the periphery, contributing his expertise when he feels it would be most useful. He likes to be the voice of reason. He also likes to save the day.
Gear:
His equipment: Monster Manifesto (a wand which is also a book; a book which is also a wand); Dark Cleric Robes; Magic Boots; Magic Gloves; also, some sort of medieval man-purse for toting around small useful items like herbs and runecarving implements.
How will you be bringing your character into the game?: For maximum drama, let's say he materializes here after his final scene in VP2.
If you're joining with or because of a friend, do you plan to import CR?: n/a
Third Person Writing Sample:
For a writing sample, have some fic?
For your entertainment, here is an RP of Lezard nearly falling into a trap.