application
[ Player Name ] : Lauren
[ Personal LJ ] : laverinth
[ Age ] : 28
[ Timezone ] : central US
[ Other Characters ] : none
[ Character's Name ] : Cielo
[ Character's Age ] : about five (appears and acts 19)
[ Series ] : Digital Devil Saga
[ Canon Point ] : death
[ History ] :
I have links to all the game cutscenes here, if interested.
I have yet to find a wiki containing all the information I'd like, so here we go:
The Digital Devil Saga story encompasses two games. Rather than a single game and its sequel, they're two parts of the same tale - almost like a question and an answer in the way they're presented. In the first game, we find the characters in a barren warzone called the Junkyard, where there is constant rain but no life aside from the men and women engaged in combat. The people are divided into six tribes - the Vanguards, the Maribel, the Solids, the Wolves, the Brutes, and the Embryon. Each is represented by a different color - green, red, yellow, white, blue, and orange respectively. The laws, given out by the Dissemination Machine in the Karma Temple, state that the tribes must fight and conquer each other. The tribe that comes out on top will then be allowed passage to Nirvana.
At the start of the game, the Embryon are locked in a standstill with the Vanguards. An egg-like object has appeared on the border between their two territories and each suspects the other of having placed it. When neither do anything to move it, a fight breaks out. In the midst of this, the egg erupts in a burst of bright light. Beams of this light scatter and run through the bodies of those present. Everyone there then starts transforming - the battlefield dissolving into chaos. After blacking out for a while, the Embryon wake up to discover the Vanguards have vanished. In a crater left by the explosion, they find a young woman. To them, as they all have brightly colored hair, her black hair is unusual. As they all feel an odd attachment to her, they take her back to the base.
Each of them now bares an odd tattoo - a black marking with the design being different for all of them. Curious as to what happened at the site, Serph (the Embryon leader), Heat (the red-headed second in command), and Argilla (their female sniper) go to the Vanguards' territory and question their leader, Harley, about it. They find the base far emptier than expected, and when they finally run into Harley, the man is terrified of them.
It should be noted that up until this point all the people in the Junkyard had dull, gray, pupiless eyes and lack much emotion (noticeable in their voices). A change in color from this to the color of their hair signifies the awakening of their personalities. Serph, as the protagonist, awakes immediately, though it might be harder to tell since his hair is silver and we never hear him speak. His eyes are now brighter, with pupils.
As Harley relates what happened at the site (referred to by the game as Ground Zero) he starts out with a partially dulled tone even in his fear, then his eyes go orange like his hair and he's practically screaming. They'd turned into monsters there, he claimed, and the Embryon had devoured his men. Argilla refuses to believe this, and she shoots the men hiding with Harley. They then begin to transform into demons themselves, and Harley flees. As Argilla denies that she could have eaten anyone, she awakens as well. The three of them are then overcome by the need to transform. Heat is happy to do so, in fact, smiling as his mark glows. They defeat the others easily, and though Heat insists that they devour their fallen enemies, Argilla refuses. After chasing the frightened Vanguard leader around the base, they finally manage to corner him. When they can't get the information they want out of Harley, they fight and devour him.
Argilla is getting weaker from not sating her demonic hunger. As they're returning her to the base, they hear the sound of gunfire and find Gale, their tactician, transformed and attacking Cielo, a blue-haired officer and youngest looking of their group. Heat leaps between them, looking hopeful for a fight, but everything comes to a halt as the girl comes out of their base singing. It's the first time they've ever heard a song and it calms them. Gale transforms back and Argilla regains her strength.
The group meets back up inside the base afterwards and the girl is questioned. Unfortunately, she has no memory of who she is or why she's there apart from that she wanted to help them. During the meeting, they receive a message from the Karma Temple summoning all tribe leaders. The rules have changed slightly. They're still ordered to defeat each other ("Rend, slaughter, devour your enemies.") but now they are also to claim the girl, Seraphita, and bring her to the temple. As the Embryon already have her in their possession, they're a bit ahead. When Serph returns, they discuss how to go about making their way through the other tribes. As they're low on manpower, Gale suggests joining up with the Maribel against their rival tribe, the Solids. The idea is then to crush them afterward, but this doesn't sit well with Argilla.
Cielo is once again not a part of this, remaining behind at the base to watch Sera. They make their way there, where the leader, Jinana, and her second in command, Bat, test them out. Their final fight is against Bat. When they defeat him, Heat is prepared to devour him right there, but is stopped by Argilla and Serph. When Jinana hears from Argilla that they don't want needless killing, she agrees to have her tribe ally with theirs. Bat is enraged by this. When the tribes go to take on the Solids, he betrays them all to them. As they're facing Mick the Slug, the Solids' leader, they find out Jinana has never devoured anyone. Because of this, she loses control and becomes fully demon. They're forced to fight and kill her. As she's dying, Bat overhears her tearful request for her to come and meet Sera, so when they return to the Maribel base, there's a trap waiting for them.
When they get back to their own base, they find it trashed. Heat is angrily addressing a half-dead Cielo on how he could have let them take Sera. When Gale calls him out on not even knowing why he's so interested in her, he threatens to kill him. The others stop him, and Cielo tells them where she'd been taken - Coordinate 136. After hearing this, Heat rushes off once again. Cielo, overcome with the desire to help make up for his failure, awakens to his true personality at this point (gaining an odd Jamaican accent in the process). Despite his wishes, the others leave him behind once more to recover from his injuries.
Coordinate 136 is what appears to be an abandoned theme park, a bit out of place in the Junkyard environment. (The Embryon are unaware of what it is, though it seems familiar to some.) As they make their way to the top, they solve puzzles and hear a tale over a crackly intercom about a princess and two princes. (The princess in the paintings looks remarkably like Sera.) Though this place may seem a bit silly at first, it will become a lot more meaningful in the second game. Bat and Mick have Sera at the top of the building. Bat attempts to turn Heat against Serph and Heat plays along in order to give them a chance to rescue Sera. Before this can happen, Sera attempts escape herself by jumping from the building. Bat catches her and, as Mick starts to cheer him on, reveals that he's going to betray the Solids and join the Brutes. Cielo then appears, having snuck out of their base and transformed into his flying demon form, and rescues her. He'd managed to get out of the base on his own and had been led to their location by an odd cat that had been appearing around the group from time to time. (The attack he uses against Bat here, almost like a white laser, is a plot device not seen again though he does mention it in the end game.) It's at this point that Cielo finally joins the party.
With Sera back with them, they begin to prepare a trap for Bat and the Brutes. Sera and Heat stay back in the base, while Argilla disguises as Sera in order to lure their enemies into the remains of a large ship (once again, no one is sure where this has come from). Their trap is successful and many of the Brutes, but Bat most importantly, are killed in the explosion that follows. Cielo is able to fly the others to safety, but carrying that many full-grown people is obviously difficult.
They receive word that the Wolves have been overrun with the Brutes and that the leader of the Wolves, Lupa, wants to meet with them. Apparently Varin, the Brutes' leader, had defeated most of the Wolves on his own. Lupa reveals a waterway beneath the Junkyard that will allow them to sneak into the Brutes' base. As with Jinana, Gale forms a quick bond with Lupa. Also like Jinana, they're forced to kill him as he looses himself to his hunger. Gale is left with the task of telling Lupa's child to be honorable (if they ever find him) and is then finally the last of the Embryon to awaken.
Making their way through the Brutes' base, they at last encounter Varin. What comes as a surprise is that he recognizes all of them except for Gale, and speaks of events they don't remember. He claims that Argilla was devoured by Serph, and he focuses on Heat in particular, asking him how many times he needs to die for Sera. None of them have any idea what he's talking about. He has a technique that causes Heat to almost become overcome with hunger before Sera steps in and calms him. After they fight and defeat him, he reveals that they were all humans who died "in that same Nirvana you're all so desperate to reach." The girl, he claims, will destroy the world. His words seem to spark memories in Sera, and she leaves while they're still questioning him.
The group searches for her, but she's gone from the base. Cielo then once again sees that cat that's been following them and suddenly comes to the realization that he'd never seen a cat before it, and yet knew what it was. This is the same for other terms, like children and parents. The revelation that they might have been someone else before they came to the Junkyard is disturbing, but it's Heat that is the most adamant about this not mattering in the end. They're all comrades now. Agreeing on this, they all go off to find Sera. The rain has stopped, and the gates to Nirvana have opened in the Karma Temple. They know that's where they'll find her.
After an arduous trek to the top of the tower, they find her confronting a strange woman. Gale knows her from flashes of memory - Jenna Angel. She's asking Sera to come back with her. Sera asks that her friends not be deleted if she does. (The rest of the Junkyard was in the process of being destroyed as they reached her.) When the party arrives to try and rescue her, she causes them all to freeze in their tracks. Serph and Heat look like they might be able to break out of it, but when she does it again Heat is left struggling on his knees while Serph continues onward. Jenna remarks on demons and how they epitomize karma, taunts him a bit, and then releases them all to face her in battle.
When they defeat her, the world around them begins to crumble. They make their way towards the gate to Nirvana, Gale even grabbing Jenna along the way, but the world explodes around them before they reach it. Everyone is separated in the process, but instead of being deleted they all manage to arrive in the real world. Not Nirvana, as they expected, but the real world. The second game starts here.
As Serph, Gale, Argilla, and Cielo learn, the world they lived in before was a computer program. They were designed as combat A.I.s, but the program also involved wisdom stolen from God. The souls of people who died in the real world found their way to the A.I. bodies and were awakened when the demon virus was introduced into the program. The real world was a wasteland, where the sun had become blackened and corrupted and merely stepping out into it, if you weren't a demon, would turn you to stone. Karma City, the place they'd arrived in, was run by the Karma Society. The heads of the society were Madame Margot Cuvier and Jenna Angel. The people had been divided. Some lived well off above ground, protected by the soldiers, while other "less worthy" ones were forced into hiding - hunted down by soldiers that had been turned into demons like the A.I.s. The resistance group formed to fight the Society was known as the Lokapala. Most of the Embryon joined up with its leader, Roland, and a boy named Fred (the son of Greg, the Lokapala's previous leader who would become Lupa in the Junkyard). Cielo had originally been found by the Lokapala, who had assumed he was one of the Karma City soldiers and had grilled him for answers. Though he states at one point that he wasn't treated well while in their care originally, he doesn't seem bothered by it when he rejoins the party.
Heat, on the other hand, had been found by the Society. Cuvier knew who and what he was, and she related to him the story of his previous life. This caused him to have great anger towards Serph. He joined up with her in order to better protect Sera. When the others came for her, he fought them, much to their dismay. He was defeated the first time, but as they freed Sera from the EGG device she'd been kept in to perform her duties for the society, Heat comes running at Serph, who stands his ground and takes Heat's clawed arm through his midsection. Not understanding why Serph hadn't done anything to defend himself, he does nothing to stop his leader from pulling them both down into the bowels of the EGG. Sera, seeing this, has a flashback to events of the past and becomes utterly distraught. "God" reacts to her sorrow and starts slowly absorbing the planet. The rest of the Embryon flee with her, and do their best to try and stop this destruction. Sera remains completely out of it.
They try the power plant, but shutting this down doesn't stop it and they lose Roland and Argilla in the process. Sera comes to her senses finally, however, and after receiving Serph's demonic abilities through his love and that of her comrades, she tells them to return to the EGG so that she can speak to "God" herself. Cielo gets a fair amount of development here, as we're allowed to see the more mature sides of his personality. He insists on being part of a fight against an enemy who'd devoured his own comrades in order to become stronger, and we see him more than once stop someone from running off on their own in their anger. Making their way back to the EGG, they find the whole building corrupted by "God's" data and the whole place is filled with loud, mournful wailing. They're the sort of cries that make you want to find any way to help the one making them... and they belong to Heat.
Heat, having absorbed the EGG and much of the corrupt data, has taken on the demonic form of Vritra - a huge monstrosity with several large, gaping mouths and tentacled arms like hammers. He's been waiting for them and they're forced to fight him again. As they finish the fight, we're shown a scene inside the EGG inhibitor. Serph is there, floating in the fluid. It's kept him alive. The same cat that they'd been seeing around the Junkyard appears before him, and we're shown the events of the past.
Sera is the Cyber Shaman, one of many children used in experiments to try and converse with "God," a being on the sun that appears to control much of the Earth and its environment. Two doctors, Serph Sheffield and Heat O'Brien, were in charge of her mental and physical health respectively. Heat cared strongly for her. (It's not mentioned in the game but in his bio elsewhere that she reminded him of his younger sister, who had been lost to the Cuvier Syndrome - the disease that, at this point, slowly turned people to stone.) He believed that Serph pressed her too hard in their experiments. Serph would do things such as tell Sera he'd take her on a boat if she could talk with God for a certain amount of time - always speaking kindly, so the girl adored him. Heat, on the other hand, always seemed upset because he knew Serph actually cared very little for her. This anger scared Sera.
Unknown to the others for a while, Sera had developed her own personal A.I. program with A.I. versions of people she knew in real life - Serph, Heat, Argilla (who was the nurse that took care of her), and Cielo (who had been a previous shaman candidate, but had been driven mad and died from the experiments). They play together happily on a sunlit beach.
Learning of her ability to do this, those running the program press for her to begin work on a larger project. Heat protests, pointing out that she's already growing at a faster rate than normal. When Serph is asked about this, he tells them not to worry. At last Heat gets fed up with this. One day, when they're pressing Sera especially hard, Heat pulls a gun on Serph and tells him enough is enough. Having expected something like this eventually, Serph has been seducing Argilla. Seeing the gun pulled on Serph, she fires her own, killing Heat. Sera's health isn't important, he taunts, because if she dies they can just find another child - as many times as they need to. He wants to reach god-like status himself with this program. Unfortunately for him, the video feed had accidentally been turned on during the chaos this caused and Sera had witnessed the whole thing. Her sadness angered God, turning the sun black and bringing down demons upon the world. Serph became a demon himself, devouring those around him until he was destroyed.
This story had been told back at Coordinate 136 in the Junkyard, though in fairy tale form, but the meaning of it wasn't apparent until now.
Back in the present, Serph is devastated to hear this story. He is approached by the ghost of the original Heat, who tells him that Sera spent the next five years here, sealing her heart away and working on the Junkyard program - Asura Project, stage 1. (Sera will later tell them that she had been asked to delete the original A.I.s she'd created, but she couldn't bring herself to do it and instead added them to the Junkyard.) He brings out the ghost of the original Serph, who he'd trapped there, and that of Serph's first A.I. form. They fight their demon forms together in order to free the current Serph from those of the past. Once they're defeated, Serph rips his way free of Vritra, leaving the current Heat mortally wounded when he transforms back. Heat demands one final confrontation in the command center where it all began. When Serph goes up to meet him, however, he finds him almost dead - bleeding to death from the wound Serph created. He wants to make sure Serph understands his actions, and he leaves his leader in charge of taking care of Sera.
The group isn't angry with Heat for any of this - exactly the opposite, in fact, as they are devastated by the loss. Cielo cries as Serph carries Heat's body away. He swallows back the sadness in order to be strong for those that remain, and is even able to joke with Gale soon after about who will be better at convincing God to help them. It's not long after this, however, that Gale stays behind to take out Jenna Angel. He dies along with her.
Sera needs to reach a place where she can send their data to God and get him to stop the destruction. They manage to get a plane from the airport, and Cielo flies alongside them. Unfortunately, they are followed by three fighter planes that then begin firing on them. In a heartbreaking scene, Cielo dies after managing to take out all three.
Serph and Sera eventually manage to get somewhere their data can be sent, but die in the process. As they make their way to the sun, the two of them merge into one. The souls/solar data of their comrades join them as they fly into it, waiting for them when they arrive in the center and they face God together. The Cielo at Vatheon would not be aware of this.
[ Personality ] :
Out of every member of the Embryon, Cielo was the most changed as he awakened to his true emotions. He's the happy-go-lucky member of the group, keeping up the spirits of some of the more serious party members. Though he serves as the comic relief a lot of the time, he's not a joke character. He develops the same as the others, showing a sense of honor similar to Gale's, in his own way.
He's the youngest and smallest of the group (save for perhaps Sera, and if you don't count Fred), but probably has the biggest heart. He's very big on looking out for his comrades, and when Heat betrays them he's the one who expresses most of the group's anger verbally, crying and throwing a bit of a fit. Out of everyone, he seems to have the most empathy with others. When they're about to blow up the ruins of the ship in the junkyard in order to take out some of their enemies, he can tell that Sera's unhappy with the idea and tries in vain to get the others to change their minds. Several times he's responsible for holding his friends back from rushing into danger - with Argilla, when she tried to attack Angel, with Fred, when he tried to run to Roland in the power plant, and with Sera as she tried to stop Serph confronting Heat a last time, tears in his eyes.
There's a certain sense of maturity about him that's unexpected from the joker of the group. He doesn't rush headlong into danger and he knows when it's best to let someone go. He's also one of the first to understand when someone is going off to their death, rather than the last as one might expect, and he handles those situations with a certain pained resignedness rather than attempting to keep his comrades from doing what he knows has to be done.
He's the compassionate one, the most forgiving, capable of anger but not dwelling on it. In the first game hes seems almost out of place at times among the serious faces of his comrades, and before Gale fully awakens to his emotions he remarks that Bat would have been a more useful teammate. By the second game, however, Gale does a complete 180 in saying that Cielo is far better than one of the enemies they're facing.
Cielo speaks with a Jamaican accent, though he himself never lived there. He tends to refer to a lot of people as "bro" (or little bro) or "brudda".
[ Strengths/Weaknesses ] :
Cielo is an AI, originally created for combat. When Sera came to the virtual world of the Junkyard, all of the AI gained emotions and egos. They also gained the demon virus. This gave them the ability to turn into demons, making them incredibly powerful but also leaving them with an insatiable hunger for the flesh of others. In order to survive, they had to devour those of their kind.
Cielo's demon is that of Dyaus, the only one out of their group that can fly. It has an affinity for the lightning element (zio spells) and no elemental weaknesses. It is instead weak to all status effects. Stat-wise, he has high agility and magic, making him one of the main support characters (aside from Argilla). You can give any character any skills, but generally Cielo becomes one of my primary healers and spellcasters just because of the aforementioned stats.
He would be capable of casting all spells used in DDS, while not being nearly as physically strong as his companions. It's possible to get an ability later that removes his weakness to status effects, but he won't have that at Vatheon.
[ Other Important Facts ] :
In canon, the demons must devour the flesh of their own kind in order to survive. If they don't, they become weakened and eventually lose themselves to their hunger. When this happens, they become uncontrollable and must killed to stop their rampage. Having played DDS characters in other games, there are many ways this can be handled. I'm not sure how it was handled before.
1) a supplement could be supplied that has the same effect as demon flesh
2) if there are any unnatural creatures around, they can be hunted for food instead
3) this need can just be removed completely
4) he will have to visit the coral more often as a substitute energy supply
Or something else. In most of these cases, devouring an actual demon would still work better for him than anything.
[ Sample ] :
from when I played him at Marina Asylum
[ Questions? Comments? Concerns? ] :
none at the moment, aside from what I mentioned above