(no subject)
Mun
Name: Tai
Livejournal Username: auraunda
E-mail: lai_nyan@yahoo.com
AIM/MSN: veridis tre
Current Characters at Luceti: N/A
Character
Name: Quistis Trepe
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Time Period: Post-game
Wing Color: Peach-pink (or, same color as her normal out-of-uniform outfit - there's some debate about what the true color is)
History: (Sure I could be nice and give you a link but since this canon is ridiculously non-specific you get the history I wrote for her at fifty percent off! Don't you feel lucky?!)
(I have been threatened with having my liver and other unspecified body parts removed without benefit of anesthesia if I inflict my Wall o' Text o' History upon you, so if you want to see it, just ask - I'll be hiding in the corner from the rusty handsaws.)
Personality Wall o' Text o' Personality: Quistis is, for the most part, calm, collected, and intelligent, blessed with both book smarts and common sense. To those who don’t know her well, there doesn’t seem to really be anything she can’t do, but Quistis herself has run up against her own personal barriers on many occasions.
She is truly intelligent and a gifted SeeD, learning lessons quickly and following the meaning of the law and not just the letter. During her quick rise in the ranks of the SeeD, she was labeled a child prodigy and constantly encouraged to expand her knowledge horizons. Even years later she still has a love of reading and music that was formed during her months with her foster family and her early years at Garden. The problem with all that was that her quick learning and early entry into Garden placed her in a social group with students several years older - and proportionally stronger and with more life experience - than she had, and most of her ties to students her own age were severed. She grew up trying to be older than she really was, more responsible than she had to be in order to impress the adults and continue to earn their admiration (the closest thing to love she really knew after awhile), and it worked at the cost of the life she should have had. She had a few close friends, but almost no real social experience before the quest to defeat Ultimecia.
A logical and normally cool thinker, Quistis is somewhat self-sacrificing and tends to put others before herself. She had a bad habit of starting things - never SeeD things, but emotional and social things - and giving up halfway through, such as trying to draw Squall out. Essentially, she lacked true confidence in herself and her ability to support both herself and others, having never really been able to do it in her lifetime. Since the regaining of her memories, she’s begun to accept this part of her and, in a way, to change it: she’s begun adapting to fit her abilities. Failure with Squall not withstanding, Quistis is a good and caring listener who will actually pay attention to what a person is saying, and she’s begun exercising that more. She just picked the worst person in Garden possible for her first attempt.
The thing she is best at now, in almost any facet of her life, is support. She’s not meant to be on top, and unfortunately she all but set herself up for the fall when she lost her instructor license from having driven herself to succeed so outstandingly all those years. In becoming one of Squall’s aides during the fight with Ultimecia, Quistis finally found a place where her type of leadership could be put to good use. She is close to everyone in the group and has a peculiar kind of understanding from having seen it all before them that allows her to be the person most of them lean on emotionally. And she’s finding she doesn’t really mind that at all; she’s finally become the big sister she always wanted to be.
She lacks true leadership ability because she doesn’t have the ability to make the really tough decisions and leave them alone. She can - and will - make a decision, but then she begins thinking about all the other options she had and if it was really the best one and she can’t just let it rest. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens frequently enough that she’ll never be left in full charge of anything without prior directions. She has more than enough common sense to make logical choices in the heat of battle and to work well with children in most times, but other than that she makes a much better “leader support” than a leader.
With all of that, though, Quistis can’t stand to see herself fail. There was almost nothing she couldn’t do in childhood and through training, so she grew used to reaching for near-impossible goals and succeeding. It made the loss of her license that much worse for her because she never really had failed at anything - as far as she could remember at the time - before in her life. It was something that not only was expected of her by others, but that she expected of herself. When she fails to reach those goals she begins berating herself and can turn inward on a masochistic binge unless she’s pulled out and made to see reason.
Quistis has finally found what she wanted all along and didn’t realize she wanted: a family. While her relationships before were mostly with people much older than her and by necessity there were barriers between her and them that she didn’t realize were there, she has friends now who treat her as a full equal, just Quistis, and that’s plenty good enough for them. With their unconscious help, she’s become more confident in herself and her place in life, and she will not take kindly to anyone - or anything - that tries to harm that.
Strengths: She has determination and willpower to spare, once she puts her entire heart into something. She lives with the idea of “there is nothing you can’t do if you put your mind to it.” Though she hasn’t always lived up to it in practice, it's getting much more frequent that once she has made up her mind to do something there is no stopping her, especially as she’s found a growing confidence in herself. It shows up most often in fights or in the Grand Quests that seem to keep coming Garden’s way, but more and more it’s showing up in everyday life as well.(Emotional)
She is a formidable fighter. While the whip is her favored weapon, she is trained in the use of sword, gun, and various other implements of destruction, up to and including makeshift weapons of anything lying around. She has a lot of endurance and can last a long time in a fight and is a strong blue mage, able to learn the techniques of fiends and use them against other monsters. (Physical)
She is also probably the most organized person to ever be in Garden. Her room is never messy and she is never missing any paperwork; it’s a sign of her collected mind more than anything and shows how logical she is. That logic has served her very well; it’s probably the tool she uses the most in her life, both in battle plans and emotions, though at times she can overuse it. (Mental)
Weaknesses: Quistis’s main weakness is undeniably her unfortunate habit of letting her emotions take charge of her at unpredictable times. Sometimes the trait is beneficial, such as when she berated Squall about him letting Rinoa go to the Sorceress Memorial, but mostly the effects are harmful. It was letting her emotions get involved with Squall and Seifer on a level beyond student-teacher that led to the revocation of her teaching license, and her explosion - and subsequent guilt - over Rinoa nearly doomed the assassination attempt during the festival. Even after the defeat of Ultimecia, Quistis still has more than her share of those moments, though they are starting to retreat. It’s the last real vestige of her lack of confidence. (Emotional)
She also never had much of a life, so she never had much of a chance to develop socially. As a student she had a few - a very few - close friends, and during the fight with Ultimecia she once again grew close to the Orphanage Gang, but outside of those groups she has had very little time to just sit back and be a young woman. Few outside of what numbers maybe ten people really see her as anything other than Instructor Trepe; some don’t even see her as really human. What with the fact that what time isn’t spent in helping Squall in some way is usually spent with the children or Dr. Kadowaki, Quistis hasn’t had much chance to learn to be herself in public. She can come off as reserved and too controlled, which can put people off and make her seem even more unreachable. (Mental)
Though she is an accomplished fighter both in physical and magical combat, Quistis is at a great disadvantage when it comes to close-quarters combat. Though she learned all the basic lessons about swords, hand-to-hand, and various escapes, she never excelled in them the way she did in ranged combat. As a SeeD, she has endurance, but fighters such as Squall and Seifer - close-combat specialists, especially ones using heavy weapons - can bring her to her knees very quickly unless she can escape somehow. She is capable of using her whip as something of a maleable "shield," but it's a delaying tactic at best.
Quistis also lacks just about every form of creativity possible. While she has a good ear for music and highly appreciates art and literature, she could no more create anything like that than she could change gravity. Selphie’s Festival concert being the only exception, she has never been on stage or working in an art studio, and she never will be. She's also ridiculously ticklish though only one person knows. (Physical [mostly])
Samples
First Person: I have no idea what's going on. I have to sit down and think about this in a logical manner or... No. No, I can't think about that, panicking has never helped in the past and won't help now, so I will not panic. Looking at this piece by piece will help me understand what's going on.
I'm in a forest. I was not in the forest when I fell asleep, and I can't for the life of me find any trace of Garden. My whip is gone, and it only makes it more eerie that apparently I don't need it right now since there aren't any monsters - every single forest I've ever been in has been inhabited with monsters. Either this is some strange anomaly, the local monster hunters of wherever-this-is have actually succeeded at their jobs, or there's third and fourth options I cannot allow myself to contemplate.
I don't really mind the dress, but I want my clothing back. And a hairclip. If I was going crazy, would I imagine my hair getting in my face so much?
And why... why are there these things on my back? I can't see them, but they make my shoulders itch. I can barely reach them, but they feel... strange. I don't know if I want to see them.
Am I going insane?
Third Person: It was the silence that woke her more than anything, really. Silence at Garden was highly uncommon and usually to be feared; there was always the sound of the engines and the wind, or a cadet talking to a friend, or an announcement over the PA to mask the quiet. This place... while it wasn't silent, none of the noises were what she associated with Garden - with home. The birds alone told her that much; the only "birds" that ever entered Garden were fried or frozen.
Quistis opened her eyes after several moments of trying to gain her bearings and utterly failing. If this is some sort of joke... It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that Zell - or probably Irvine - would play some sort of joke on her, but this seemed entirely too random for a prank. Not to mention, she was outside, and hadn't Garden been over the water...?
The forest she saw was pretty and peaceful, to be sure: not too warm, nor too cool, with a gentle breeze blowing across her face. But it wasn't where she'd fallen asleep, and she suddenly realized that she wasn't wearing her nightshirt either. Quistis could feel the blood draining from her face as she slowly glanced down at the new clothing, realizing that her hair was no longer braided - and feeling small, matching pains at each of her shoulder blades. Half-frozen with shock, she reached behind her and nearly jumped when her fingers brushed something soft and feathery that certainly hadn't been there before. When she tried to tug on the... thing... it wouldn't come away in her hand and the pain increased sharply, making her wince and abandon that as a lost cause, for now.
Whatever was going on was strange... too strange for her to understand. Quistis raised a hand to her face, shaking her head slightly as she tried to connect all the dots and not finding an answer that made sense - not one that she liked, anyway.
"What... is happening to me?"
And, much more importantly, was there a way to reverse it?
Name: Tai
Livejournal Username: auraunda
E-mail: lai_nyan@yahoo.com
AIM/MSN: veridis tre
Current Characters at Luceti: N/A
Character
Name: Quistis Trepe
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Time Period: Post-game
Wing Color: Peach-pink (or, same color as her normal out-of-uniform outfit - there's some debate about what the true color is)
History: (Sure I could be nice and give you a link but since this canon is ridiculously non-specific you get the history I wrote for her at fifty percent off! Don't you feel lucky?!)
(I have been threatened with having my liver and other unspecified body parts removed without benefit of anesthesia if I inflict my Wall o' Text o' History upon you, so if you want to see it, just ask - I'll be hiding in the corner from the rusty handsaws.)
Personality Wall o' Text o' Personality: Quistis is, for the most part, calm, collected, and intelligent, blessed with both book smarts and common sense. To those who don’t know her well, there doesn’t seem to really be anything she can’t do, but Quistis herself has run up against her own personal barriers on many occasions.
She is truly intelligent and a gifted SeeD, learning lessons quickly and following the meaning of the law and not just the letter. During her quick rise in the ranks of the SeeD, she was labeled a child prodigy and constantly encouraged to expand her knowledge horizons. Even years later she still has a love of reading and music that was formed during her months with her foster family and her early years at Garden. The problem with all that was that her quick learning and early entry into Garden placed her in a social group with students several years older - and proportionally stronger and with more life experience - than she had, and most of her ties to students her own age were severed. She grew up trying to be older than she really was, more responsible than she had to be in order to impress the adults and continue to earn their admiration (the closest thing to love she really knew after awhile), and it worked at the cost of the life she should have had. She had a few close friends, but almost no real social experience before the quest to defeat Ultimecia.
A logical and normally cool thinker, Quistis is somewhat self-sacrificing and tends to put others before herself. She had a bad habit of starting things - never SeeD things, but emotional and social things - and giving up halfway through, such as trying to draw Squall out. Essentially, she lacked true confidence in herself and her ability to support both herself and others, having never really been able to do it in her lifetime. Since the regaining of her memories, she’s begun to accept this part of her and, in a way, to change it: she’s begun adapting to fit her abilities. Failure with Squall not withstanding, Quistis is a good and caring listener who will actually pay attention to what a person is saying, and she’s begun exercising that more. She just picked the worst person in Garden possible for her first attempt.
The thing she is best at now, in almost any facet of her life, is support. She’s not meant to be on top, and unfortunately she all but set herself up for the fall when she lost her instructor license from having driven herself to succeed so outstandingly all those years. In becoming one of Squall’s aides during the fight with Ultimecia, Quistis finally found a place where her type of leadership could be put to good use. She is close to everyone in the group and has a peculiar kind of understanding from having seen it all before them that allows her to be the person most of them lean on emotionally. And she’s finding she doesn’t really mind that at all; she’s finally become the big sister she always wanted to be.
She lacks true leadership ability because she doesn’t have the ability to make the really tough decisions and leave them alone. She can - and will - make a decision, but then she begins thinking about all the other options she had and if it was really the best one and she can’t just let it rest. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens frequently enough that she’ll never be left in full charge of anything without prior directions. She has more than enough common sense to make logical choices in the heat of battle and to work well with children in most times, but other than that she makes a much better “leader support” than a leader.
With all of that, though, Quistis can’t stand to see herself fail. There was almost nothing she couldn’t do in childhood and through training, so she grew used to reaching for near-impossible goals and succeeding. It made the loss of her license that much worse for her because she never really had failed at anything - as far as she could remember at the time - before in her life. It was something that not only was expected of her by others, but that she expected of herself. When she fails to reach those goals she begins berating herself and can turn inward on a masochistic binge unless she’s pulled out and made to see reason.
Quistis has finally found what she wanted all along and didn’t realize she wanted: a family. While her relationships before were mostly with people much older than her and by necessity there were barriers between her and them that she didn’t realize were there, she has friends now who treat her as a full equal, just Quistis, and that’s plenty good enough for them. With their unconscious help, she’s become more confident in herself and her place in life, and she will not take kindly to anyone - or anything - that tries to harm that.
Strengths: She has determination and willpower to spare, once she puts her entire heart into something. She lives with the idea of “there is nothing you can’t do if you put your mind to it.” Though she hasn’t always lived up to it in practice, it's getting much more frequent that once she has made up her mind to do something there is no stopping her, especially as she’s found a growing confidence in herself. It shows up most often in fights or in the Grand Quests that seem to keep coming Garden’s way, but more and more it’s showing up in everyday life as well.(Emotional)
She is a formidable fighter. While the whip is her favored weapon, she is trained in the use of sword, gun, and various other implements of destruction, up to and including makeshift weapons of anything lying around. She has a lot of endurance and can last a long time in a fight and is a strong blue mage, able to learn the techniques of fiends and use them against other monsters. (Physical)
She is also probably the most organized person to ever be in Garden. Her room is never messy and she is never missing any paperwork; it’s a sign of her collected mind more than anything and shows how logical she is. That logic has served her very well; it’s probably the tool she uses the most in her life, both in battle plans and emotions, though at times she can overuse it. (Mental)
Weaknesses: Quistis’s main weakness is undeniably her unfortunate habit of letting her emotions take charge of her at unpredictable times. Sometimes the trait is beneficial, such as when she berated Squall about him letting Rinoa go to the Sorceress Memorial, but mostly the effects are harmful. It was letting her emotions get involved with Squall and Seifer on a level beyond student-teacher that led to the revocation of her teaching license, and her explosion - and subsequent guilt - over Rinoa nearly doomed the assassination attempt during the festival. Even after the defeat of Ultimecia, Quistis still has more than her share of those moments, though they are starting to retreat. It’s the last real vestige of her lack of confidence. (Emotional)
She also never had much of a life, so she never had much of a chance to develop socially. As a student she had a few - a very few - close friends, and during the fight with Ultimecia she once again grew close to the Orphanage Gang, but outside of those groups she has had very little time to just sit back and be a young woman. Few outside of what numbers maybe ten people really see her as anything other than Instructor Trepe; some don’t even see her as really human. What with the fact that what time isn’t spent in helping Squall in some way is usually spent with the children or Dr. Kadowaki, Quistis hasn’t had much chance to learn to be herself in public. She can come off as reserved and too controlled, which can put people off and make her seem even more unreachable. (Mental)
Though she is an accomplished fighter both in physical and magical combat, Quistis is at a great disadvantage when it comes to close-quarters combat. Though she learned all the basic lessons about swords, hand-to-hand, and various escapes, she never excelled in them the way she did in ranged combat. As a SeeD, she has endurance, but fighters such as Squall and Seifer - close-combat specialists, especially ones using heavy weapons - can bring her to her knees very quickly unless she can escape somehow. She is capable of using her whip as something of a maleable "shield," but it's a delaying tactic at best.
Quistis also lacks just about every form of creativity possible. While she has a good ear for music and highly appreciates art and literature, she could no more create anything like that than she could change gravity. Selphie’s Festival concert being the only exception, she has never been on stage or working in an art studio, and she never will be. She's also ridiculously ticklish though only one person knows. (Physical [mostly])
Samples
First Person: I have no idea what's going on. I have to sit down and think about this in a logical manner or... No. No, I can't think about that, panicking has never helped in the past and won't help now, so I will not panic. Looking at this piece by piece will help me understand what's going on.
I'm in a forest. I was not in the forest when I fell asleep, and I can't for the life of me find any trace of Garden. My whip is gone, and it only makes it more eerie that apparently I don't need it right now since there aren't any monsters - every single forest I've ever been in has been inhabited with monsters. Either this is some strange anomaly, the local monster hunters of wherever-this-is have actually succeeded at their jobs, or there's third and fourth options I cannot allow myself to contemplate.
I don't really mind the dress, but I want my clothing back. And a hairclip. If I was going crazy, would I imagine my hair getting in my face so much?
And why... why are there these things on my back? I can't see them, but they make my shoulders itch. I can barely reach them, but they feel... strange. I don't know if I want to see them.
Am I going insane?
Third Person: It was the silence that woke her more than anything, really. Silence at Garden was highly uncommon and usually to be feared; there was always the sound of the engines and the wind, or a cadet talking to a friend, or an announcement over the PA to mask the quiet. This place... while it wasn't silent, none of the noises were what she associated with Garden - with home. The birds alone told her that much; the only "birds" that ever entered Garden were fried or frozen.
Quistis opened her eyes after several moments of trying to gain her bearings and utterly failing. If this is some sort of joke... It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that Zell - or probably Irvine - would play some sort of joke on her, but this seemed entirely too random for a prank. Not to mention, she was outside, and hadn't Garden been over the water...?
The forest she saw was pretty and peaceful, to be sure: not too warm, nor too cool, with a gentle breeze blowing across her face. But it wasn't where she'd fallen asleep, and she suddenly realized that she wasn't wearing her nightshirt either. Quistis could feel the blood draining from her face as she slowly glanced down at the new clothing, realizing that her hair was no longer braided - and feeling small, matching pains at each of her shoulder blades. Half-frozen with shock, she reached behind her and nearly jumped when her fingers brushed something soft and feathery that certainly hadn't been there before. When she tried to tug on the... thing... it wouldn't come away in her hand and the pain increased sharply, making her wince and abandon that as a lost cause, for now.
Whatever was going on was strange... too strange for her to understand. Quistis raised a hand to her face, shaking her head slightly as she tried to connect all the dots and not finding an answer that made sense - not one that she liked, anyway.
"What... is happening to me?"
And, much more importantly, was there a way to reverse it?