[OOC] Character info
This is pretty much copy/pasted from her application to queenofheartsrp, although she's no longer in that game. >>
Name: Maria Traydor
Source Canon: Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (game)
Age: 19
Role In Canon: Mandatory party member, which would make her one of the protagonists; has a big impact on the storyline as soon as she appears about one-third of the way through the game.
History: Here's her page on the SO wikia, while Wikipedia's article on SO3 has a fairly decent plot synopsis for the game. I'll be taking Maria from after the events on Moonbase, but before the party arrives at Arkives; in other words, while there's been some important plot developments, the infamous twist hasn't happened yet.
Personality: Maria is earnest, strong-willed, confident and assertive - qualities that make her very well-suited for her role as the leader of Quark, an anti-Federation group that aims at using mediation to bring together planets that desire independence from what is seen as an oppressive government. She was orphaned at the age of twelve, was rescued and raised by the founders of Quark after that and became the group's leader at sixteen - mostly thanks to managing to pull off a live-saving miracle - which all means she's had to do a lot of growing up very quickly. She's an intelligent and resourceful young woman who assesses situations calmly and generally serves as a voice of reason... although that's not to say she's entirely above bemoaning a ridiculous set of circumstances.
One thing that people will quickly realise when interacting with this lady is that she's blunt with her words. Very blunt. She doesn't hesitate to say exactly what she thinks, and if she reckons that something you've said is stupid, she will tell it like it is no matter who you are. This makes her come off as rude and snooty at times, but she doesn't really go out of her way to insult people; she's just brutally honest, and she's certainly not the type to take crap from anybody.
There are some kinds of people she likes, mind you. Intelligent people, for starters. She likes the rest of Quark, too; Cliff and Mirage in particular are almost like family to her, though she nevertheless doesn't hesitate to call Cliff out on his more meatheaded moments. She's supportive of her allies, appreciates any and all aid they give her when she needs it, and will happily congratulate them on a job well done; meanwhile, her charisma and integrity ensure that she has her organisation's full respect.
Then there's Fayt Leingod, the game's main character. Maria obviously feels a great affinity for the boy, even though they've come from very different walks of life for the most part; it's largely down to what they do have in common, which is the fact that Fayt was involved in the same genetic experiments that she'd been subjected to. She opens up to him a great deal, particularly when it comes to telling him her life story, and if one manages to get their paired ending, she even seems to reveal a romantic interest in him.
One of Maria's biggest character flaws is that she can be rather insensitive. Since she was raised in a culture that values self-reliance for a good part of her life, she has little patience for those who mope around or otherwise waste time. It's not like she's incapable of kindness (her organisation basically exists to help people, after all) but she does expect people to be able to pull their own weight and to use whatever angst they have productively - as she does, since she's certainly been through her share of tragedy.
She's a very driven person; in a way, much of her life since being orphaned has been about seeking answers, whether it's finding out who her real parents were (although it seems as far as she's concerned, Richard and Jessie Traydor were her parents regardless of not being related by blood) or demanding to know why Fayt's parents manipulated her DNA (they had to grant her, Fayt and Sophia special powers for the sake of the universe's survival, which Maria was hesitant to believe at first; even when she found out it really was true, it still didn't sit well with her, because the fact remained that they'd modified her body without her consent). She pursues her goals stubbornly, rarely allowing herself much in the way of emotional distraction; but her paired ending with Fayt indicates that, once everything's all over, she ultimately just wants to be able to live a normal, peaceful life - ideally alongside someone special to her.
While some of her big motivations seem self-centred, she also works for the greater good - like saving the universe, for one thing. She's a big believer in the idea that people should be able to live their lives according to their own free will, and she won't forgive anyone who tries to deny them that right - especially not anyone who fancies him/herself as God.
All in all, while she's not always amazingly pleasant, Maria is definitely a good person on the whole.
Abilities: Maria has been engineered with the "Alteration" gene, which basically gives her the ability to manipulate the structure of matter; in canon, she demonstrates this to Fayt by using it on a vase, which then remains undamaged even when she shoots two other vases to smithereens. When her power first awakened when she was sixteen, she managed to literally delete an attacking enemy spaceship from existence, but she hasn't been able to do anything quite like that since. (So no, she certainly won't be deleting anything in the Gardens. I'm assuming the Alteration ability she can use only works on fairly small objects.) She's not a big fan of this power anyway, given that she has it because she'd been experimented on.
The real nature of her Alteration power is a bit more complicated than that. Since it only comes up in specific in-canon circumstances, going into it in detail here is a bit of a moot point, but I'll sum it up for completion's sake anyway: essentially, it converts the "coding" that makes up the characters in order to allow them to exist in... another plane of reality, shall we say. It won't come up in the Gardens at all, in any case.
She's also able to use symbology (basically magic with a technobabble explanation) to a certain extent. Specifically, she's naturally capable of using a handful of support spells to temporarily boost her allies' performance in battle. These spells are: Protection, which improves physical defence; Power Up, which increases attack power; Reflection, which bolsters resistence to magic attacks; and Angel Feather, which gives a slight boost to everything.
As for things that don't involve technobabble magic or traumatic experiments, Maria has great skill with using phase guns and is fairly proficient at hand-to-hand combat. In the game, she can use a number of "battle skills" that utilise these talents, but since there's a bit of fridge logic involved in the way they work (mostly when one thinks of how other, non-magic-oriented party members can summon blasts of energy and stuff when using their own skills) I'm not going to be taking those too literally. Her main weaknesses in battle are that she has a lightweight constitution and that she can't run very fast.
She's not actually a fighter by nature, by her own admission; she's certainly not the type to go around picking fights for no reason. Nevertheless, she won't turn down a challenge if faced with one, she doesn't hesitate to kick people's asses if they deserve it, and she's very confident in battle.
If you have any questions about Maria, feel free to ask them here.
Name: Maria Traydor
Source Canon: Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (game)
Age: 19
Role In Canon: Mandatory party member, which would make her one of the protagonists; has a big impact on the storyline as soon as she appears about one-third of the way through the game.
History: Here's her page on the SO wikia, while Wikipedia's article on SO3 has a fairly decent plot synopsis for the game. I'll be taking Maria from after the events on Moonbase, but before the party arrives at Arkives; in other words, while there's been some important plot developments, the infamous twist hasn't happened yet.
Personality: Maria is earnest, strong-willed, confident and assertive - qualities that make her very well-suited for her role as the leader of Quark, an anti-Federation group that aims at using mediation to bring together planets that desire independence from what is seen as an oppressive government. She was orphaned at the age of twelve, was rescued and raised by the founders of Quark after that and became the group's leader at sixteen - mostly thanks to managing to pull off a live-saving miracle - which all means she's had to do a lot of growing up very quickly. She's an intelligent and resourceful young woman who assesses situations calmly and generally serves as a voice of reason... although that's not to say she's entirely above bemoaning a ridiculous set of circumstances.
One thing that people will quickly realise when interacting with this lady is that she's blunt with her words. Very blunt. She doesn't hesitate to say exactly what she thinks, and if she reckons that something you've said is stupid, she will tell it like it is no matter who you are. This makes her come off as rude and snooty at times, but she doesn't really go out of her way to insult people; she's just brutally honest, and she's certainly not the type to take crap from anybody.
There are some kinds of people she likes, mind you. Intelligent people, for starters. She likes the rest of Quark, too; Cliff and Mirage in particular are almost like family to her, though she nevertheless doesn't hesitate to call Cliff out on his more meatheaded moments. She's supportive of her allies, appreciates any and all aid they give her when she needs it, and will happily congratulate them on a job well done; meanwhile, her charisma and integrity ensure that she has her organisation's full respect.
Then there's Fayt Leingod, the game's main character. Maria obviously feels a great affinity for the boy, even though they've come from very different walks of life for the most part; it's largely down to what they do have in common, which is the fact that Fayt was involved in the same genetic experiments that she'd been subjected to. She opens up to him a great deal, particularly when it comes to telling him her life story, and if one manages to get their paired ending, she even seems to reveal a romantic interest in him.
One of Maria's biggest character flaws is that she can be rather insensitive. Since she was raised in a culture that values self-reliance for a good part of her life, she has little patience for those who mope around or otherwise waste time. It's not like she's incapable of kindness (her organisation basically exists to help people, after all) but she does expect people to be able to pull their own weight and to use whatever angst they have productively - as she does, since she's certainly been through her share of tragedy.
She's a very driven person; in a way, much of her life since being orphaned has been about seeking answers, whether it's finding out who her real parents were (although it seems as far as she's concerned, Richard and Jessie Traydor were her parents regardless of not being related by blood) or demanding to know why Fayt's parents manipulated her DNA (they had to grant her, Fayt and Sophia special powers for the sake of the universe's survival, which Maria was hesitant to believe at first; even when she found out it really was true, it still didn't sit well with her, because the fact remained that they'd modified her body without her consent). She pursues her goals stubbornly, rarely allowing herself much in the way of emotional distraction; but her paired ending with Fayt indicates that, once everything's all over, she ultimately just wants to be able to live a normal, peaceful life - ideally alongside someone special to her.
While some of her big motivations seem self-centred, she also works for the greater good - like saving the universe, for one thing. She's a big believer in the idea that people should be able to live their lives according to their own free will, and she won't forgive anyone who tries to deny them that right - especially not anyone who fancies him/herself as God.
All in all, while she's not always amazingly pleasant, Maria is definitely a good person on the whole.
Abilities: Maria has been engineered with the "Alteration" gene, which basically gives her the ability to manipulate the structure of matter; in canon, she demonstrates this to Fayt by using it on a vase, which then remains undamaged even when she shoots two other vases to smithereens. When her power first awakened when she was sixteen, she managed to literally delete an attacking enemy spaceship from existence, but she hasn't been able to do anything quite like that since. (So no, she certainly won't be deleting anything in the Gardens. I'm assuming the Alteration ability she can use only works on fairly small objects.) She's not a big fan of this power anyway, given that she has it because she'd been experimented on.
The real nature of her Alteration power is a bit more complicated than that. Since it only comes up in specific in-canon circumstances, going into it in detail here is a bit of a moot point, but I'll sum it up for completion's sake anyway: essentially, it converts the "coding" that makes up the characters in order to allow them to exist in... another plane of reality, shall we say. It won't come up in the Gardens at all, in any case.
She's also able to use symbology (basically magic with a technobabble explanation) to a certain extent. Specifically, she's naturally capable of using a handful of support spells to temporarily boost her allies' performance in battle. These spells are: Protection, which improves physical defence; Power Up, which increases attack power; Reflection, which bolsters resistence to magic attacks; and Angel Feather, which gives a slight boost to everything.
As for things that don't involve technobabble magic or traumatic experiments, Maria has great skill with using phase guns and is fairly proficient at hand-to-hand combat. In the game, she can use a number of "battle skills" that utilise these talents, but since there's a bit of fridge logic involved in the way they work (mostly when one thinks of how other, non-magic-oriented party members can summon blasts of energy and stuff when using their own skills) I'm not going to be taking those too literally. Her main weaknesses in battle are that she has a lightweight constitution and that she can't run very fast.
She's not actually a fighter by nature, by her own admission; she's certainly not the type to go around picking fights for no reason. Nevertheless, she won't turn down a challenge if faced with one, she doesn't hesitate to kick people's asses if they deserve it, and she's very confident in battle.
If you have any questions about Maria, feel free to ask them here.