Yuna - Final Fantasy X-2
OOC:
Name: Zoki
Are you over 16?: 20, so yes.
Personal LJ: azora_mysta
Email: bluezoki[at]gmail[dot]com
Timezone: EST (GMT -5)
Other contact: AIM: zokiblue
Characters already in the game: None!
How did you find us?: Various advertisements (dear_mun, app_this_plz and such)
IC:
Character name: Yuna
Fandom: Final Fantasy X series
Timeline: Post FFX-2, normal ending (so no reunion with blitzer boy :( )
Age: 19
~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths: Dresspheres, which are job classes accessed through magical transformations. Yuna carries a device on her belt called a Garment Grid that is the size of a tablet. Slotted in it are the dresspheres, magical spheres formed of solid memory that are slightly smaller than a baseball. The memories recorded in them can be extracted by the user and given power, giving the user a new costume and some special abilities! I'm limiting her to these three, but I can cut it down to one if necessary:
Gunner: She wields two small pistols, wears her default costume, and runs and jumps with decent speed. They're both rapid-fire pistols, and some special bullets can cast status effects (decreased physical accuracy, draining mana) on the target.
Songstress: As a bard, Yuna can perform songs to boost her teammates' stats (boosting strength or speed) or afflict her enemy (slowing them down, disabling their magic). She wears Lenne's costume, and during the storyline she is sometimes taken over by Lenne's feelings during emotional moments. This can prompt Yuna to sing or dance.
White Mage: This one's pretty basic. She can cast curing and revival spells. She wears classic white mage robes.
There are many more dresspheres, but I don't need Yunie too overpowered. Gunner and Songstress are the only dresspheres she uses during the storyline, but I'd also like to keep White Mage since that was her class in Final Fantasy X. She can only be in one mode at a time, and changing takes a few seconds. The vast majority of her time on the Thor will see her in Gunner mode.
How would they use their abilities?: Definitely not by abusing them! Yunie's compelled to give to everyone who needs a helping hand, even if she isn't quite as docile about it as she was two years ago. She'll mostly be attempting to break up fights or cure injuries, but she won't hesitate to defend if someone's in trouble.
Appearance: In all modes, Yuna is a young Spiran woman of average sexy-video-game-girl build. Her notable head features include flipped-out brown hair, heterochromia (one green eye, one blue eye), and a single hanging bead-and-feather earring in greens and blues. Hanging from her hair is an impossible-to-grow-in-two-years-without-magic thin knee-length ponytail bound in a braided red cover.
Her three dresspheres each have distinct appearances. The default outfit, Gunner, is a Yuna-style reference to her lost love. She wears a pink hood attached to her white tube top by thin strings, yellow bracers around her upper arms, tiny Daisy Duke jorts, an ankle-length side-skirt, and knee-high black boots. The top itself is split down the middle, the skin between her breasts trivially covered by the Zanarkand Abes symbol that both her boyfriend and his father had worn. At least she's not showing as much cleavage as they did!
The Songstress costume consists of a purple top with silver frills coming down the middle and sides, the frills parting to expose her bellybutton and cascading down one side to mid-thigh while remaining trimmed to the shirt on the other. Below this is a lacy black skirt that barely covers her, and further below are brown boots that must be made of Dingo-skin. As later events in the game reveal, this is the same outfit the summoner Lenne wore in Zanarkand 1002 years before FFX-2. Spiran fashion apparently does not progress as quickly as Earth fashion because this flashy stage outfit is still stylish!
There's not much to say about the White Mage dressphere. It consists of a white suit with white gloves and boots overthrown with a white knee-length hooded robe. Red trim decorates it where appropriate in the very traditional costume of white mages in the Final Fantasy games.
Background/Personality: It all began when I saw your slack-jawed face in the temple...
Yuna was born in the recently-razed world of Spira, where an enormous flying monstrosity in the vague shape of a whale called Sin had been terrorizing the people for nearly a thousand years, attacking cities seemingly at random. For most of Spira, this meant a short life full of uncertainty. Looking for a rock to cling to, they found the conveniently-available religion of Yevon, which taught that Sin was the result of the Spirans' impurity---their selfishness, their use of machina, their overindulgence. If all the Spirans atoned for their sins (ha ha), Sin would be gone forever.
Unfortunately, by the time Spirans managed to accomplish this, all life would long be wiped out. So the people needed an alternative way to fight Sin. Luckily, Yevon provided this too! Certain Spirans were changed into eternally-dreaming statues called fayth, and the fayth answered the prayers of spiritually inclined Yevonites who trained as summoners with magnificent beasts known as Aeons, convenient for slaying the fiends in a summoner's path. An ultra-powerful fayth called the Final Aeon would be earned after a summoner completed a dangerous pilgrimage across the land, and calling this aeon would temporarily defeat Sin, bringing a time period known as the Calm where Sin did not attack. Each time, the people hoped the spiral of death would end forever, but Sin always came back.
In their grief, the Spirans would always seek a scapegoat, and Yevon's teachings provided one: the Al Bhed, a race of desert-dwelling people who opposed the spiritual approach of Yevon and built the machina that had supposedly caused Sin to keep returning. Mutual hatred and distrust between the Al Bhed and the Yevonites would proceed for a thousand years.
Yuna was born to Summoner Braska of Yevon and no name given her Al Bhed mother in this depressing world, and this one event had implications for the course of her life: as the child of a forbidden marriage, Yuna would follow her parents' example and eventually test the boundaries.
Shortly after young Yuna was born, her mother embarked on a voyage to the Al Bhed's home to attempt to reconnect with her relatives, but Sin's attack killed the passengers. A motherless Yuna was raised by her father alone until she was seven years old, when her father became a summoner and completed the pilgrimage with his trusted friends Auron and Jecht. Unfortunately, summoning the Final Aeon always ended a summoner's life, so the little orphaned Yuna was brought to the lush Besaid Island on the southernmost end of Spira and raised by the villagers there. It was here that she bonded with simple blitzer Wakka, sisterly mage Lulu, and powerful beast Kimahri as her core guardians. All of them were parentless, forced to form their own family among themselves. Yuna clung to them, vowing to bring them the happiness they had been deprived of someday.
As she grew up, Yuna learned that she had inherited her father's talent for summoning. Much to the horror of her friends, she had also inherited her father's compassion and desire to end Spira's suffering, if only for a little while. Yuna was overly concerned herself with everyone else's problems, always seeking to avoid a fight between the people she loved, both close and distant. With Sin looming above, it wasn't truly worth the energy to quarrel, especially if the person you argued with could very well be killed by Sin at any time. And since she was going to die young if she faced Sin, she wanted to see as much of the world's beauty as possible. Yuna didn't have time to stop and consider her own wishes. She would meet Spira's expectations, follow in her father's footsteps, and bring a Calm.
Finally, when Yuna was seventeen, she was sufficiently trained to become a full-fledged summoner and obtain her first aeon with Wakka, Lulu, and Kimahri at her side as guardians. But a brash blond-haired blitzer claiming to come from the long-dead city of Zanarkand in the north stumbled his way into the temple, beginning the course of events that would eventually steer her away from the traditional summoner's path.
Believing that the poor young man was ill, Yuna took pity on him and made it her personal mission to see that he would get well. At first, he only traveled with them temporarily, but intervention from a reappearing Auron soon bound Tidus to accompany Yuna all the way to the ruins of Zanarkand. All the while, he responded to her melancholy goodbyes and sad observations with naïve optimism: he had no idea that summoning the Final Aeon would kill her, and as a result he tended to describe all the wonderful things they could do together when Sin was gone. It made her happy, but only wistfully so. There was no way she could survive, was there?
A second driving force pushing to find a way for Yuna to live arrived in the form of Rikku, an Al Bhed teenager who was Yuna's maternal cousin. When the party first met Rikku, she was attempting to kidnap her Yunie away from the pilgrimage and save her life. So maybe this was why Yevon hated the Al Bhed. Interfering with a pilgrimage was a violation of the sacred, but Yuna didn't mind. She appreciated their attempts to save her life, but nothing would stop her from completing her pilgrimage.
So the quest continued, leaving Rikku to join the guardians and attempt to stop Yuna along the way. Yuna's sense of duty was next tested when Seymour, a powerful maester (roughly an archbishop) of Yevon, proposed to marry her to unite Spira around a happy event. Despite her personal reaction to Seymour being complete disgust and unease, she strongly considered marrying him to keep Spira happy. If they would smile, to her, it was worth it.
Yuna's resolve was strengthened when the guardians learned that Seymour had murdered his own father and started enacting plans to destroy Spira, 'liberating' the land from the cycle of death that had caused so much pain. Yuna believed that the way to stop Seymour was to marry him, but Tidus was completely opposed to this plan. Why couldn't Yuna marry him for love? Yuna longed to, but she knew she couldn't live.
After a first attempt to confront Seymour that ended in his death, the guardians' struggles were just beginning. As it would turn out, Seymour wasn't quite dead: he was an Unsent, someone with a strong enough will to hold their soul in a body after their death. Seymour's entourage then kidnapped Yuna to the wedding, excommunicated the group from the Yevon church, and banished them. During their banishment in the desert, Tidus finally learned that summoners die when they call the Final Aeon. Distraught, he swore to himself that he would find a way to save her. And that he would tell her that he loved her. Love would find a way, right?
With a little luck and determination the guardians caught up with Yuna at the wedding, and on the altar she finally revealed her full plan: to either get Seymour to confess to his crimes or to send his tortured soul to rest. Of course Seymour chose neither and attempted to kill them. They fled to the nearby Macalania Woods and Tidus and Yuna finally had their moment of true love in a sparkling crystal lake. Would she stop her pilgrimage and run away with him? Definitely not, even though her heart desperately wished to. Too many years of her life had been spent preparing for this and too many people were counting on her. Yuna couldn't give that up to fulfill her own desires. Tidus and Rikku would have to find another way to save their summoner.
Too soon for the guardians' liking, the party reached Zanarkand, ruined city of the dead. It was here that Yuna would obtain the Final Aeon, and a short while after that she would give her life in one final battle against Sin. But horrible truths waited in Zanarkand: the Final Aeon was made from turning one of a summoner's guardians into a fayth statue, and when it was summoned this fayth would then become the new core of Sin. Sin was guaranteed to come back, and the deaths of Yuna and her chosen guardian would mean nothing.
Yuna would willingly die for the hope of ending Sin forever, but for this? Definitely not:
I would have gladly died. I live for the people of Spira, and would have gladly died for them. But no more! The Final Summoning...is a false tradition that should be thrown away. My father wanted...to make Spira's sorrow go away. Not just cover it up with lies! So I... I will live with my sorrow, I will live my own life! I will defeat sorrow, in his place. I will stand my ground and be strong. I don't know when it will be but someday, I will conquer it. And I will do it without...false hope.
Bolstered by all she had learned from her friends, but especially the confidence and optimism of her Tidus, she cast off the path that had been set for her and vowed to defeat Sin another way. One that would last forever.
And they did: they ripped a hole into Sin, found its way to the core, defeated the fayth of the Final Aeon resting there, and killed the true core of Sin. With this, the fayth's constant dreaming and summoning could finally end, and Spira would finally be at peace.
Unfortunately, Tidus was part of that summoning, and he faded with the rest of the fayth. So in the end, it wasn't Yuna who gave her life to kill Sin---it was her boyfriend. Devastated by this loss but vowing to herself and Spira that they would move on, Yuna retreated to Besaid and lived a quiet life for the next two years.
The Eternal Calm---the adventure continues...
Yuna fulfilled her duty to Spira over those years. She resolved disputes and gave advice, but something was always missing in her heart. Tidus had helped to show her that life could be free and wonderful, and that she didn't always have to have her choices made for her. She could live her own life and smile her own true smile.
Finally, with a little push from Rikku, that was what she resolved to do. In a sudden move, Yuna cast off her old High Summoner's life and became a pirate of the skies. In Spira, they were called Sphere Hunters, and their quest was simple: uncover the movie sphere treasures that would reveal information from Spira's long-buried past. But it wasn't any old sphere that convinced Yuna to do this. Up on the grand Mount Gagazet, Kimahri had found a sphere recording of a brash blond boy who looked remarkably like Tidus, and his identity was the mystery that began her quest. Was he alive? Could she find him?
Intrigued, Yuna decided on an impulse to throw away her life as the High Summoner on display and join the Gullwings, a sphere-hunting group dedicated to uncovering Spira's past as the future unfolds. Joining her were Rikku, her rebellious and thoughtful cousin, Paine, a serious young woman who didn't appear in the previous games, and a motley crew of mechanics and pilots. Together, they subverted authority, made their own adventures, and hunted spheres that contained films of past events in Spira and sometimes new powers.
Certain spheres had enough residual memory to provide power to their users in the form of a new job class. Rikku was still a thief, as before, and Paine was a swordswoman, but Yuna wasn't a timid staff-waving summoner anymore. Nope---she was packing guns! The weapon choice was a perfect symbol of her decision to start chasing after her own dreams, not fulfilling everyone else's.
For the first little while, the Gullwings were simply enjoying life and working through the conflicts of Spira: between those too attached to Yevon to let go completely and the bold adventurers throwing away every scrap of tradition. Their factions, New Yevon and the Youth League, were in a public conflict tearing families apart. Yuna was troubled by these problems, but she resisted joining a group. Wouldn't it tear Spira apart? And why should she swear allegiance to anyone after the disaster the original Yevon had turned out to be, anyway? Unfortunately, later events forced her to ally with the Youth League and earn her former religion's contempt. She made a point of asserting her independent identity as a Gullwing, but that wouldn't stop her from helping people in trouble.
Soon, an even bigger conflict made itself known: there was unrest in Spira, and the souls of the freed fayth were in danger again. And naturally, Yuna had to help---for all her talk about wanting to live her own life, she still felt a deep need to help Spira in her heart. As Shinra aptly described her:
"Hero. Summoner. Doormat."
What was the crisis facing the Gullwings this time? Remember that man who looked like "him" in the sphere? As Yuna discovered, his name was Shuyin, and he lived in the real Zanarkand 1002 years ago as a blitzball player---just like "him", who had been summoned from the fayth's dream of Zanarkand. His girlfriend was the Summoner Lenne, a beautiful singer who was enlisted to fight in the war.
Outraged over Lenne's fate, Shuyin traveled to Bevelle and attempted to activate Vegnagun, Bevelle's ultimate machina weapon hidden a thousand years ago. Its power would have destroyed Spira, but at least he and Lenne would have been free. They were killed before he could enact this sucky plan, but 1002 years later, Shuyin's spirit is back and ready for revenge.
Shuyin's plan this time? Possess a living Spiran and have them activate Vegnagun. He eventually chose Baralai, the praetor of the New Yevon faction and a former comrade of Paine's. Having overcome their previous conflict, Paine's former leader, Nooj, formed a plan to rescue Baralai. Shoot Baralai, trick Shuyin into possessing Nooj instead, and then kill Nooj with explosives rigged to his body.
Yuna objected strongly to the idea that sacrificing loved ones was the only way:
I don't like your plan. It sucks.
Your plan is awful. Think about it. It’s no different than what we did two years ago. We destroyed our own allies. We destroyed the aeons who had fought together with us, at our sides. We didn’t have a choice then. We believed that was the only way we could save Spira. Do you know what it felt like to watch them die? Right before my eyes? It was the only thing we could do. It was the only choice we had. I gave in, I accepted, I believed. I allowed it to be true. I thought I’d be able to go through with it without ever doubting myself. But I... It hurts so much....
“We had no choice.” Always “we had no choice.” Those are our magic words. We repeat them to ourselves again and again. But you know... The magic never worked! The only thing we’re left with is regret...I don’t want friends to die or fade away. I don’t want battles where we have to lose in order to win.
So the Gullwings had another plan: Yuna knew that her Songstress dressphere contains Lenne's spirit, and because Yuna and Lenne had such similar stories, Yuna looked almost identical to Lenne while wearing the Songstress costume. She used this trick to attempt to calm Shuyin in the Farplane, but it failed---and the battle against him started.
Finally, after a long battle, Lenne's spirit emerged from Yuna and reunites with Shuyin at last. Spira was (temporarily) saved, and the Gullwings were free to embark on their own adventures. This is where Yuna is now: flying high, finally free of Spira's past and her own woes.
It's delightfully tragic that Spira's about to go boom, isn't it?
Have you read up on how the game works: Aye! The journaling program is called the FlamingFerret, and characters can earn money by completing missions, eventually running their own business, or pilfering gil stealing.
1st person sample:
[Suddenly, the door of the tiny room opens, admitting a bedraggled Yuna. She shucks off her boots, wipes her brow, and smiles wearily at the camera]
Whew! These missions are harder than I expected them to be. Honestly, who would think to make slight marks on each of his fifty pairs of socks and then expect me to match them? It doesn't really help him at all!
[She gestures vaguely at her own pile of socks. Most are clean, but their weariness varies by sock.]
Oh, he could be watching, couldn't he? [Crud. She smiles awkwardly, pushing her socks behind her and looking apologetic.
I shouldn't be so rude---I'm sorry! It makes you feel organized to have all your socks in order, doesn't it? I was honored to help! That's what a friendly neighborhood Gullwing does!
3rd person sample:
"I don't believe it...no, thank you. I'll go to the room next."
As someone coming from a land sometimes called the home of the 'spiral of death', Yuna thought she shouldn't have been so affected by the implications of the worlds' destruction. People had died in horrific tragedies for at least a thousand years, hadn't they?
But those words still reverberated throughout her head, making her feel almost sick. Spira is no more. You're an active refugee, working here until you can buy another planet. Good luck!
It was almost comforting to know that everyone was suffering as she was, but her heart still ached. The peoples' deaths stung most of all, of course, but there were other considerations. The towns full of history, the spheres full of memories, and the Farplane full of the souls of the departed had also perished. She would never see her parents' ghostly smiles again. She would never see him again.
Yuna slid down against the wall upon reaching her room, whispering to a phantom who wasn't there. Who never would be there again. "I'm supposed to be a strong summoner and smile, right?" Always comfort the grieving, tell them that it's going to be all right. Do what you can to ease their pain, but never share in it.
She considered this for a moment, then picked up the nearest pillow and curled around it. Oh, who needs the rules? No one who could enforce them was around anymore, and her first duty was to herself. Her guardians had taught her that much. Fate had spared her life for some incomprehensible reason, and her opinion was the only one from Spira that truly mattered anymore.
Still, her heart called for her friends. It wasn't quite the same as before, when she had been responsible for holding herself together for the sake of holding them together. Now, she wanted their smiles for herself. It was selfish but true---and like Rikku had said once or twice, she had earned the right to be selfish after everything that had happened.
Smiling faintly at the memories that rushed into her head, she allowed herself to weep for them.
"I'll never forget you."
Would her tears hurt anyone if no one was watching?
Questions?: ...do I lose points for forgetting to unscreen this post when I first linked to it? I'm sorry! I had two app posts and screened the wrong one. And then accidentally deleting my first and third person samples when I revised? Sorry, fixing again!
Did you put your characters name and fandom in the subject: Aye!
Name: Zoki
Are you over 16?: 20, so yes.
Personal LJ: azora_mysta
Email: bluezoki[at]gmail[dot]com
Timezone: EST (GMT -5)
Other contact: AIM: zokiblue
Characters already in the game: None!
How did you find us?: Various advertisements (dear_mun, app_this_plz and such)
IC:
Character name: Yuna
Fandom: Final Fantasy X series
Timeline: Post FFX-2, normal ending (so no reunion with blitzer boy :( )
Age: 19
~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths: Dresspheres, which are job classes accessed through magical transformations. Yuna carries a device on her belt called a Garment Grid that is the size of a tablet. Slotted in it are the dresspheres, magical spheres formed of solid memory that are slightly smaller than a baseball. The memories recorded in them can be extracted by the user and given power, giving the user a new costume and some special abilities! I'm limiting her to these three, but I can cut it down to one if necessary:
Gunner: She wields two small pistols, wears her default costume, and runs and jumps with decent speed. They're both rapid-fire pistols, and some special bullets can cast status effects (decreased physical accuracy, draining mana) on the target.
Songstress: As a bard, Yuna can perform songs to boost her teammates' stats (boosting strength or speed) or afflict her enemy (slowing them down, disabling their magic). She wears Lenne's costume, and during the storyline she is sometimes taken over by Lenne's feelings during emotional moments. This can prompt Yuna to sing or dance.
White Mage: This one's pretty basic. She can cast curing and revival spells. She wears classic white mage robes.
There are many more dresspheres, but I don't need Yunie too overpowered. Gunner and Songstress are the only dresspheres she uses during the storyline, but I'd also like to keep White Mage since that was her class in Final Fantasy X. She can only be in one mode at a time, and changing takes a few seconds. The vast majority of her time on the Thor will see her in Gunner mode.
How would they use their abilities?: Definitely not by abusing them! Yunie's compelled to give to everyone who needs a helping hand, even if she isn't quite as docile about it as she was two years ago. She'll mostly be attempting to break up fights or cure injuries, but she won't hesitate to defend if someone's in trouble.
Appearance: In all modes, Yuna is a young Spiran woman of average sexy-video-game-girl build. Her notable head features include flipped-out brown hair, heterochromia (one green eye, one blue eye), and a single hanging bead-and-feather earring in greens and blues. Hanging from her hair is an impossible-to-grow-in-two-years-without-magic thin knee-length ponytail bound in a braided red cover.
Her three dresspheres each have distinct appearances. The default outfit, Gunner, is a Yuna-style reference to her lost love. She wears a pink hood attached to her white tube top by thin strings, yellow bracers around her upper arms, tiny Daisy Duke jorts, an ankle-length side-skirt, and knee-high black boots. The top itself is split down the middle, the skin between her breasts trivially covered by the Zanarkand Abes symbol that both her boyfriend and his father had worn. At least she's not showing as much cleavage as they did!
The Songstress costume consists of a purple top with silver frills coming down the middle and sides, the frills parting to expose her bellybutton and cascading down one side to mid-thigh while remaining trimmed to the shirt on the other. Below this is a lacy black skirt that barely covers her, and further below are brown boots that must be made of Dingo-skin. As later events in the game reveal, this is the same outfit the summoner Lenne wore in Zanarkand 1002 years before FFX-2. Spiran fashion apparently does not progress as quickly as Earth fashion because this flashy stage outfit is still stylish!
There's not much to say about the White Mage dressphere. It consists of a white suit with white gloves and boots overthrown with a white knee-length hooded robe. Red trim decorates it where appropriate in the very traditional costume of white mages in the Final Fantasy games.
Background/Personality: It all began when I saw your slack-jawed face in the temple...
Yuna was born in the recently-razed world of Spira, where an enormous flying monstrosity in the vague shape of a whale called Sin had been terrorizing the people for nearly a thousand years, attacking cities seemingly at random. For most of Spira, this meant a short life full of uncertainty. Looking for a rock to cling to, they found the conveniently-available religion of Yevon, which taught that Sin was the result of the Spirans' impurity---their selfishness, their use of machina, their overindulgence. If all the Spirans atoned for their sins (ha ha), Sin would be gone forever.
Unfortunately, by the time Spirans managed to accomplish this, all life would long be wiped out. So the people needed an alternative way to fight Sin. Luckily, Yevon provided this too! Certain Spirans were changed into eternally-dreaming statues called fayth, and the fayth answered the prayers of spiritually inclined Yevonites who trained as summoners with magnificent beasts known as Aeons, convenient for slaying the fiends in a summoner's path. An ultra-powerful fayth called the Final Aeon would be earned after a summoner completed a dangerous pilgrimage across the land, and calling this aeon would temporarily defeat Sin, bringing a time period known as the Calm where Sin did not attack. Each time, the people hoped the spiral of death would end forever, but Sin always came back.
In their grief, the Spirans would always seek a scapegoat, and Yevon's teachings provided one: the Al Bhed, a race of desert-dwelling people who opposed the spiritual approach of Yevon and built the machina that had supposedly caused Sin to keep returning. Mutual hatred and distrust between the Al Bhed and the Yevonites would proceed for a thousand years.
Yuna was born to Summoner Braska of Yevon and no name given her Al Bhed mother in this depressing world, and this one event had implications for the course of her life: as the child of a forbidden marriage, Yuna would follow her parents' example and eventually test the boundaries.
Shortly after young Yuna was born, her mother embarked on a voyage to the Al Bhed's home to attempt to reconnect with her relatives, but Sin's attack killed the passengers. A motherless Yuna was raised by her father alone until she was seven years old, when her father became a summoner and completed the pilgrimage with his trusted friends Auron and Jecht. Unfortunately, summoning the Final Aeon always ended a summoner's life, so the little orphaned Yuna was brought to the lush Besaid Island on the southernmost end of Spira and raised by the villagers there. It was here that she bonded with simple blitzer Wakka, sisterly mage Lulu, and powerful beast Kimahri as her core guardians. All of them were parentless, forced to form their own family among themselves. Yuna clung to them, vowing to bring them the happiness they had been deprived of someday.
As she grew up, Yuna learned that she had inherited her father's talent for summoning. Much to the horror of her friends, she had also inherited her father's compassion and desire to end Spira's suffering, if only for a little while. Yuna was overly concerned herself with everyone else's problems, always seeking to avoid a fight between the people she loved, both close and distant. With Sin looming above, it wasn't truly worth the energy to quarrel, especially if the person you argued with could very well be killed by Sin at any time. And since she was going to die young if she faced Sin, she wanted to see as much of the world's beauty as possible. Yuna didn't have time to stop and consider her own wishes. She would meet Spira's expectations, follow in her father's footsteps, and bring a Calm.
Finally, when Yuna was seventeen, she was sufficiently trained to become a full-fledged summoner and obtain her first aeon with Wakka, Lulu, and Kimahri at her side as guardians. But a brash blond-haired blitzer claiming to come from the long-dead city of Zanarkand in the north stumbled his way into the temple, beginning the course of events that would eventually steer her away from the traditional summoner's path.
Believing that the poor young man was ill, Yuna took pity on him and made it her personal mission to see that he would get well. At first, he only traveled with them temporarily, but intervention from a reappearing Auron soon bound Tidus to accompany Yuna all the way to the ruins of Zanarkand. All the while, he responded to her melancholy goodbyes and sad observations with naïve optimism: he had no idea that summoning the Final Aeon would kill her, and as a result he tended to describe all the wonderful things they could do together when Sin was gone. It made her happy, but only wistfully so. There was no way she could survive, was there?
A second driving force pushing to find a way for Yuna to live arrived in the form of Rikku, an Al Bhed teenager who was Yuna's maternal cousin. When the party first met Rikku, she was attempting to kidnap her Yunie away from the pilgrimage and save her life. So maybe this was why Yevon hated the Al Bhed. Interfering with a pilgrimage was a violation of the sacred, but Yuna didn't mind. She appreciated their attempts to save her life, but nothing would stop her from completing her pilgrimage.
So the quest continued, leaving Rikku to join the guardians and attempt to stop Yuna along the way. Yuna's sense of duty was next tested when Seymour, a powerful maester (roughly an archbishop) of Yevon, proposed to marry her to unite Spira around a happy event. Despite her personal reaction to Seymour being complete disgust and unease, she strongly considered marrying him to keep Spira happy. If they would smile, to her, it was worth it.
Yuna's resolve was strengthened when the guardians learned that Seymour had murdered his own father and started enacting plans to destroy Spira, 'liberating' the land from the cycle of death that had caused so much pain. Yuna believed that the way to stop Seymour was to marry him, but Tidus was completely opposed to this plan. Why couldn't Yuna marry him for love? Yuna longed to, but she knew she couldn't live.
After a first attempt to confront Seymour that ended in his death, the guardians' struggles were just beginning. As it would turn out, Seymour wasn't quite dead: he was an Unsent, someone with a strong enough will to hold their soul in a body after their death. Seymour's entourage then kidnapped Yuna to the wedding, excommunicated the group from the Yevon church, and banished them. During their banishment in the desert, Tidus finally learned that summoners die when they call the Final Aeon. Distraught, he swore to himself that he would find a way to save her. And that he would tell her that he loved her. Love would find a way, right?
With a little luck and determination the guardians caught up with Yuna at the wedding, and on the altar she finally revealed her full plan: to either get Seymour to confess to his crimes or to send his tortured soul to rest. Of course Seymour chose neither and attempted to kill them. They fled to the nearby Macalania Woods and Tidus and Yuna finally had their moment of true love in a sparkling crystal lake. Would she stop her pilgrimage and run away with him? Definitely not, even though her heart desperately wished to. Too many years of her life had been spent preparing for this and too many people were counting on her. Yuna couldn't give that up to fulfill her own desires. Tidus and Rikku would have to find another way to save their summoner.
Too soon for the guardians' liking, the party reached Zanarkand, ruined city of the dead. It was here that Yuna would obtain the Final Aeon, and a short while after that she would give her life in one final battle against Sin. But horrible truths waited in Zanarkand: the Final Aeon was made from turning one of a summoner's guardians into a fayth statue, and when it was summoned this fayth would then become the new core of Sin. Sin was guaranteed to come back, and the deaths of Yuna and her chosen guardian would mean nothing.
Yuna would willingly die for the hope of ending Sin forever, but for this? Definitely not:
I would have gladly died. I live for the people of Spira, and would have gladly died for them. But no more! The Final Summoning...is a false tradition that should be thrown away. My father wanted...to make Spira's sorrow go away. Not just cover it up with lies! So I... I will live with my sorrow, I will live my own life! I will defeat sorrow, in his place. I will stand my ground and be strong. I don't know when it will be but someday, I will conquer it. And I will do it without...false hope.
Bolstered by all she had learned from her friends, but especially the confidence and optimism of her Tidus, she cast off the path that had been set for her and vowed to defeat Sin another way. One that would last forever.
And they did: they ripped a hole into Sin, found its way to the core, defeated the fayth of the Final Aeon resting there, and killed the true core of Sin. With this, the fayth's constant dreaming and summoning could finally end, and Spira would finally be at peace.
Unfortunately, Tidus was part of that summoning, and he faded with the rest of the fayth. So in the end, it wasn't Yuna who gave her life to kill Sin---it was her boyfriend. Devastated by this loss but vowing to herself and Spira that they would move on, Yuna retreated to Besaid and lived a quiet life for the next two years.
The Eternal Calm---the adventure continues...
Yuna fulfilled her duty to Spira over those years. She resolved disputes and gave advice, but something was always missing in her heart. Tidus had helped to show her that life could be free and wonderful, and that she didn't always have to have her choices made for her. She could live her own life and smile her own true smile.
Finally, with a little push from Rikku, that was what she resolved to do. In a sudden move, Yuna cast off her old High Summoner's life and became a pirate of the skies. In Spira, they were called Sphere Hunters, and their quest was simple: uncover the movie sphere treasures that would reveal information from Spira's long-buried past. But it wasn't any old sphere that convinced Yuna to do this. Up on the grand Mount Gagazet, Kimahri had found a sphere recording of a brash blond boy who looked remarkably like Tidus, and his identity was the mystery that began her quest. Was he alive? Could she find him?
Intrigued, Yuna decided on an impulse to throw away her life as the High Summoner on display and join the Gullwings, a sphere-hunting group dedicated to uncovering Spira's past as the future unfolds. Joining her were Rikku, her rebellious and thoughtful cousin, Paine, a serious young woman who didn't appear in the previous games, and a motley crew of mechanics and pilots. Together, they subverted authority, made their own adventures, and hunted spheres that contained films of past events in Spira and sometimes new powers.
Certain spheres had enough residual memory to provide power to their users in the form of a new job class. Rikku was still a thief, as before, and Paine was a swordswoman, but Yuna wasn't a timid staff-waving summoner anymore. Nope---she was packing guns! The weapon choice was a perfect symbol of her decision to start chasing after her own dreams, not fulfilling everyone else's.
For the first little while, the Gullwings were simply enjoying life and working through the conflicts of Spira: between those too attached to Yevon to let go completely and the bold adventurers throwing away every scrap of tradition. Their factions, New Yevon and the Youth League, were in a public conflict tearing families apart. Yuna was troubled by these problems, but she resisted joining a group. Wouldn't it tear Spira apart? And why should she swear allegiance to anyone after the disaster the original Yevon had turned out to be, anyway? Unfortunately, later events forced her to ally with the Youth League and earn her former religion's contempt. She made a point of asserting her independent identity as a Gullwing, but that wouldn't stop her from helping people in trouble.
Soon, an even bigger conflict made itself known: there was unrest in Spira, and the souls of the freed fayth were in danger again. And naturally, Yuna had to help---for all her talk about wanting to live her own life, she still felt a deep need to help Spira in her heart. As Shinra aptly described her:
"Hero. Summoner. Doormat."
What was the crisis facing the Gullwings this time? Remember that man who looked like "him" in the sphere? As Yuna discovered, his name was Shuyin, and he lived in the real Zanarkand 1002 years ago as a blitzball player---just like "him", who had been summoned from the fayth's dream of Zanarkand. His girlfriend was the Summoner Lenne, a beautiful singer who was enlisted to fight in the war.
Outraged over Lenne's fate, Shuyin traveled to Bevelle and attempted to activate Vegnagun, Bevelle's ultimate machina weapon hidden a thousand years ago. Its power would have destroyed Spira, but at least he and Lenne would have been free. They were killed before he could enact this sucky plan, but 1002 years later, Shuyin's spirit is back and ready for revenge.
Shuyin's plan this time? Possess a living Spiran and have them activate Vegnagun. He eventually chose Baralai, the praetor of the New Yevon faction and a former comrade of Paine's. Having overcome their previous conflict, Paine's former leader, Nooj, formed a plan to rescue Baralai. Shoot Baralai, trick Shuyin into possessing Nooj instead, and then kill Nooj with explosives rigged to his body.
Yuna objected strongly to the idea that sacrificing loved ones was the only way:
I don't like your plan. It sucks.
Your plan is awful. Think about it. It’s no different than what we did two years ago. We destroyed our own allies. We destroyed the aeons who had fought together with us, at our sides. We didn’t have a choice then. We believed that was the only way we could save Spira. Do you know what it felt like to watch them die? Right before my eyes? It was the only thing we could do. It was the only choice we had. I gave in, I accepted, I believed. I allowed it to be true. I thought I’d be able to go through with it without ever doubting myself. But I... It hurts so much....
“We had no choice.” Always “we had no choice.” Those are our magic words. We repeat them to ourselves again and again. But you know... The magic never worked! The only thing we’re left with is regret...I don’t want friends to die or fade away. I don’t want battles where we have to lose in order to win.
So the Gullwings had another plan: Yuna knew that her Songstress dressphere contains Lenne's spirit, and because Yuna and Lenne had such similar stories, Yuna looked almost identical to Lenne while wearing the Songstress costume. She used this trick to attempt to calm Shuyin in the Farplane, but it failed---and the battle against him started.
Finally, after a long battle, Lenne's spirit emerged from Yuna and reunites with Shuyin at last. Spira was (temporarily) saved, and the Gullwings were free to embark on their own adventures. This is where Yuna is now: flying high, finally free of Spira's past and her own woes.
It's delightfully tragic that Spira's about to go boom, isn't it?
Have you read up on how the game works: Aye! The journaling program is called the FlamingFerret, and characters can earn money by completing missions, eventually running their own business, or pilfering gil stealing.
1st person sample:
[Suddenly, the door of the tiny room opens, admitting a bedraggled Yuna. She shucks off her boots, wipes her brow, and smiles wearily at the camera]
Whew! These missions are harder than I expected them to be. Honestly, who would think to make slight marks on each of his fifty pairs of socks and then expect me to match them? It doesn't really help him at all!
[She gestures vaguely at her own pile of socks. Most are clean, but their weariness varies by sock.]
Oh, he could be watching, couldn't he? [Crud. She smiles awkwardly, pushing her socks behind her and looking apologetic.
I shouldn't be so rude---I'm sorry! It makes you feel organized to have all your socks in order, doesn't it? I was honored to help! That's what a friendly neighborhood Gullwing does!
3rd person sample:
"I don't believe it...no, thank you. I'll go to the room next."
As someone coming from a land sometimes called the home of the 'spiral of death', Yuna thought she shouldn't have been so affected by the implications of the worlds' destruction. People had died in horrific tragedies for at least a thousand years, hadn't they?
But those words still reverberated throughout her head, making her feel almost sick. Spira is no more. You're an active refugee, working here until you can buy another planet. Good luck!
It was almost comforting to know that everyone was suffering as she was, but her heart still ached. The peoples' deaths stung most of all, of course, but there were other considerations. The towns full of history, the spheres full of memories, and the Farplane full of the souls of the departed had also perished. She would never see her parents' ghostly smiles again. She would never see him again.
Yuna slid down against the wall upon reaching her room, whispering to a phantom who wasn't there. Who never would be there again. "I'm supposed to be a strong summoner and smile, right?" Always comfort the grieving, tell them that it's going to be all right. Do what you can to ease their pain, but never share in it.
She considered this for a moment, then picked up the nearest pillow and curled around it. Oh, who needs the rules? No one who could enforce them was around anymore, and her first duty was to herself. Her guardians had taught her that much. Fate had spared her life for some incomprehensible reason, and her opinion was the only one from Spira that truly mattered anymore.
Still, her heart called for her friends. It wasn't quite the same as before, when she had been responsible for holding herself together for the sake of holding them together. Now, she wanted their smiles for herself. It was selfish but true---and like Rikku had said once or twice, she had earned the right to be selfish after everything that had happened.
Smiling faintly at the memories that rushed into her head, she allowed herself to weep for them.
"I'll never forget you."
Would her tears hurt anyone if no one was watching?
Questions?: ...do I lose points for forgetting to unscreen this post when I first linked to it? I'm sorry! I had two app posts and screened the wrong one. And then accidentally deleting my first and third person samples when I revised? Sorry, fixing again!
Did you put your characters name and fandom in the subject: Aye!