VT app

[oncedriven]

Player Information

Name: Nael
Age: 28
Contact details: starcrossedsky and Starcrossedsky#0506 @ the disco
Other characters: Ghost [Prey 2017 AU]

Character Information

Name: Asch
Canon: Tales of the Abyss but extreme AU (YWKON)
Canon Point: Post 1001/2 Days by about three months
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: AU as AU gets
Age: Nael's character type is that there's no easy answer for this. Both "about a year and a half" and "slightly over a thousand years" depending on how you count.

World Information: Here on a separate post.

Personal History: Content warnings for abusive relationships (supernatural with no 1:1 equivalent on Earth but most closely 'parental'), suicide-by-murder.

-> ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO...

A thousand years - almost exactly - before the system rewrite, there was a blade named Asch.

But first we have to rewind a little bit. Seven years before the lifetime of the blade Asch is now, there was a series of experiments attempting to create an artificial Aegis. As the Aegises were dormant in this period and their abilities not known in detail, this line of research was pretty much doomed to failure. (The successful artificial Aegises, Zelos and Colette, wouldn't be born for another nine hundred years.)

But that doesn't mean that the experiments didn't produce something. Under the thinking that Aegises were just superblades, the experimenters fused existing, powerful blades into a new whole - yes, this was exactly as horrible as it sounds, so we'll skip the details. The resulting blades were not Aegises, but they were something close in terms of raw power, and thus were called Aegisites. The original Aegisites were too powerful for a human to drive, so they were split back into halves, creating two pairs of perfectly matched blades - the only true identical twin blades in existence.

Asch is the "elder" of one of these pairs, the project codenamed Lorelei. But he had to figure this out from bits and pieces, because when he first awoke, no one really told him anything. There wouldn't be a point.

You see, for all their power, the Aegisites were bound to the same restrictions as normal blades - they didn't remember their previous lives. And Asch's driver, a man named Van, had no compunctions about killing his blade if Asch seemed like he knew too much. Asch found this out from a human named Guy, who he had known in his previous life - several of his previous lives, actually. Guy had been raised a significant part by Van, and his blade, Tear, was Van's sister, but the two of them had broken from Van because of how he mistreated Asch and generally disagreeing with his methods. However, like many people seeing a loved one being abused, they didn't know how to get Asch out of that situation, and so sat somewhat helplessly on the sidelines.

(It wouldn't have mattered how much they did or didn't tell Asch, though. He distrusted Van from his first breath without knowing why, and as he steadily comes to realize, his intuition is never wrong, not where it counts.)

With further investigation, Asch was able to confirm that he had died at least seven times - courtesy of a researcher called Dist, who was studying blade memory in an attempt to rekindle the memories of a blade named Jade who had been his childhood mentor's before her death. Asch "tested" Dist's code patch attempts at making it so that blades would remember their lives after their deaths; as of that seventh visit, Dist hadn't been successful yet. There, Asch also encountered the blade Jade of the Crimson Snow - at the time, the Imperial Blade of the Malkuth Empire, driven by and directly serving the Emperor himself. Jade offered to take Asch away from the situation entirely, to find him a better driver (admittedly, not a high bar).

Naturally, Asch was pissed about his circumstances, about all the lives he'd already lost, the number of times he'd died. But what could he do? Become a flesh eater? Ha. That option was out of his reach as well - because while he passed for a human well enough, Van was in fact a flesh eater, and it isn't as though a used heart would help Asch any. He might have taken the offer Jade made, to go somewhere else and be someone else's blade, and forget everything that happened with Van, except for one thing.

Van was looking for his brother, his other half. Van wanted Luke, the only Aegisite that he didn't have control over, and for better or for worse, Asch was too responsible a person to abandon another blade - any other blade, really, but especially his twin - to what Van was doing to him.

So he stayed, a little helpless in that way that emotional abuse makes you, until Van actually did get his hands on Luke, partially due to the actions of Asch himself. If it hadn't been him, it would have been Van himself, and at least this way, he was able to get some answers out of the researcher who still had Luke in his possession, about how they were made.

Van awakened Luke, when they returned to town. Asch had the most intense mixed feelings about it it was possible to have. On the one hand, it was Luke, his twin, and blades being blades he couldn't not love him. On the other, it was Van, and he couldn't, couldn't let Van do to Luke what he'd been doing to Asch himself - no matter what the cost was. Maybe especially, knowing what the cost had to be. Van himself always set things up so that Asch 'died' in the wilderness, where no one would question it, rather than in town.

Meanwhile, with the first phase of his plan put together, Van set his sights on finding the Aegises (only Mithos and Martel existed at that time). There, Asch saw an opportunity, and he took it. Convincing Guy and Tear to take care of Luke in the aftermath of what he was planning to do, Asch put together a plan to lure Van into the wilderness and kill him. He faked using his intuition to locate the Aegis by pointing blindly at a map (or rather, he blindly pointed at a map and discovered where Mithos had been hidden without realizing it until he and Van were almost there), and set off fully intending to murder his driver in cold blood.

He pulled it off, putting his sword straight through Van's back, through the heart in his chest and his core crystal to be absolutely sure that the man wasn't getting back up. They both faded away - Van forever, and Asch thinking that forever sleeping wasn't so different. And in the wilds, a core crystal slept for a thousand years, history passing it by.

-> ...AND TODAY

...But history moves on. A group of people - blades and humans, Aegises and flesh eaters - changed things.

And so, one day, Asch woke up.

And, most damningly of all, he remembered that last life, a thousand years ago. Against all expectations, Dist's modifications worked.

It was a little late to tell him that, though.

For lack of anything better to do, Asch travelled back to where he'd lived in the past, and found there not the bustle of the city of Daath, but instead only a small settlement, home to those who had changed the system and their assorted extended family. It was the artificial Aegis Colette who convinced Asch to actually meet with the strange family, but she's not the one who really grabbed Asch's attention.

That honor goes to a man he met a very long time in the past - Jade, once a normal blade and now a flesh eater about a century in age. Of course he didn't recognize Asch - Asch, on second reaction, realizes that it would be absurd to expect him to - but Jade's reaction to someone he doesn't know knowing him is a bit of a metldown. Because, you see, Jade's last driver - Jade's last driver - did the same kind of 'kill your blade to reset their memory' horror as Van had.

And even if Jade had quite reasonably killed him (turnabout is fair play), when you don't forget your last driver, you don't forget them. And Jade's reaction to the trigger of someone remembering him who objectively shouldn't - especially now, a hundred years a flesh eater, and comfortable in the fact that that shouldn't happen anymore because any humans who might have known the Jades before would be dead of age, and their blades with them, comfortable in the idea that none of those blades would remember him - was to turn the rainy weather into a hailstorm from the sheer force of his leaking ether. Mythra pulls Jade out of the room in a panic, leaving Asch with the Artificial Aegises, their driver, and their assorted extended family.

After getting a better grasp on recent history, the artificial Aegises, and also getting prodded by Mythra, the artificial blade Jade has been in resonance with for the last century (they're emotional support bastards), Asch settles in a bit more, in spite of the scare he gets when Lloyd spots his ether lines and compliments them, in turn drawing Kratos' attention (which makes Asch uncomfortable purely on the fact that Kratos, like Van, is a light-element flesh eater who presents as an adult male mostly-human). It's not until late that night, closer to to dawn than midnight, that Asch is mostly settled, and at that point he spots Jade and Mythra below his borrowed bedroom's balcony on a late-night walk.

After a brief exchange, Jade invites Asch down to talk, and Asch goes with them to a smaller section of the ruins of Daath. With a bitter laugh, Asch explains that it is, in fact, the very same building in which he met Jade the first time, now worn down to nothing but the foundation stones and half-toppled walls. Asch tells Jade, how they met, what they were both doing at that time, who they both were a thousand years past. They trade stories, enough to know that the stories are the same in enough strokes to get along with each other, enough to recognize that there's things there that the rest of the people around them aren't ever going to understand, not even Mythra. (Because as close as Mythra is to Jade, and they're virtually inseparable even by blade and driver standards, it wasn't her hand on the weapon. She wasn't even there.)

And with that weight off his chest, Asch settles in. His priority, for the time being, is to find Luke, or find out what happened to him, and also to help with the transformation of society following the system rewrite, at least as much as he can. But aside from that, he's just learning to live without fear looming over his shoulder all the time.

Personality: Outwardly, Asch is reserved to sometimes the point of seeming than awkward; he tends to fluster when a social interaction winds up in a place he didn't expect it to be through the actions of the other person. Doubly so when it's because the other person acts more comfortable around him than he expects; Asch is slow to warm and settle into a relationship with someone, and like many blades, is uncomfortable around people who are too-familiar because it's a reminder of how blade memories used to work, even if he knows logically that no random stranger could have known his past lives.

He also tends to get prickly easily when he's pushed - although not as inclined towards open shows of temper as his canon counterpart, Asch doesn't really have much more healthy socialization, and will very much dump an interaction that's making him uncomfortable if at all possible. If he can't, he gets tense, terse, and testy. Unless you're someone he actually enjoys being around, his inclination is to make interactions as efficient as possible, rather than wasting words on being social. He's firm and confident and not mean about it, and certainly he'll be more gentle towards someone he can tell is upset, but he's not good at socializing, really.

Towards people he's more comfortable with, however, Asch tends to relax a lot more. His sense of humor - snarky, ironic, edging into fatalistic and dark - comes out, as does the warmer side of his reserved personality. Asch isn't much for overt shows of affection, and can seem cold even towards people he likes (when he isn't bantering with them) because actively choosing to spend time with them is in itself a display of how much he cares about them. He'll deliver supportive words and sometimes even physical comfort if he thinks they're needed, but is perfectly happy to engage in catlike 'we are bonding by sitting in the same room doing separate things' if the other person doesn't initiate other conversation or other activities.

That isn't to say that the extent to which he cares about people is in any way shallow or reserved. Asch isn't expressive of it; that doesn't mean he isn't exactly as inclined to ride-or-die as any other blade, perhaps even more so than most. He is absolutely ride or die for the few people he gets truly attached to, and that attachment can be sudden and inexplicable to an outsider looking in. For the people he cares about, Asch will gladly light himself on fire for their warmth without regrets.

And he really does tend towards such extremes of action - a holdover from his first driver being Van, who was of course twenty extremist impulses and a beating human heart in a trenchcoat. A driver's mindset influences their blade, and that's the most severe holdover from Van. That, and Asch's tendency towards fatalism and a 'it either will happen or it won't' mindset. He's not exactly either protactive, reactive, or passive, but what actions he takes will tend to be single severe courses of action rather than more moderate ones that might have an effect over time. This tendency will get less bad as he gets more emotional distance from what happened with Van and Van's influence, but probably never entirely disappear.

And Asch is deeply affected by Van, and the actions he took to get rid of the bastard, still. For him, the thousand years since it happened were akin to no time at all; accordingly, it's been only three and a half months or so since he murdered his driver in cold blood. And Asch doesn't regret that in the slightest. What he regrets is the extremes he went to to ensure that he wouldn't have another driver again, that he'd never have another experience like Van. What he regrets is leaving his brother alone afterwards, and the thousand years of history he missed, and now has to come to terms with while he adjusts to a completely different world.

And he is adjusting, steadily. Slowly, he's pulling himself out of the well Van left him in, and turning his attention to - The way Van probably got to him, when he bothered to be convincing at all, Asch thinks, must have been to base everything on his desire to improve the lot of blades in life. Because their lot in life was shitty, is in a lot of ways still shitty, and Asch too has the desire to change it. He wants to make a better world, a world where no one is treated like garbage because of what they are - human or blade, because unlike a lot of the more extremist anti-human blades, Asch is acutely aware that humans can be the only thing you've got going for you in the world and blades can be unrepentantly awful. Those are the goggles that he looks through to see the future, and it's a perspective that he's very aware that others in the little community he's found himself in can lack - especially the second part. There's more humans than blades in the world; therefore, there's more good humans than awful blades.

He wants to go find out what happened to his twin. Not even just Luke, but also Ion and Sync, the other Aegisites - he wants to know all of the history he's missed. But Asch is patient, in terms of being able to put off his own gratification basically infinitely as long as there's something he thinks of of a higher priority. He has many aspects, but he presents as a dark blade, and justice is formative in him - not black and white, trial-before-jury justice (that's light blades), but justice that's dark and personal, justice best served cold. What he wants doesn't tend to matter much in the end, anyway, so it's not exactly a skill he possesses, going out and seizing it.

But he's not giving up, either. Not again, not ever again - he'll persist, and persist, and persist in moving forward, inch by damnable inch, and eventually get to the answers he's looking for and the world he wants, even if he doesn't yet have a clear image of what that world is.

Key themes: Recovery from abuse, and specifically the time that is lost to recovering from abuse, the opportunities and experiences that pass you by and that you can't make up later because they've already happened. Justice, especially complicated personal justice.

Main Motivation: Currently? Finding out what happened in the thousand years he was napping, especially in regards to his Luke.

Skills: SECTION BREAKDOWN TIME ONCE AGAIN

Blade shit, general

-> Baseline strength and speed superior to a human's, in the "clearly supernatural but not specifically superspeed or superstrength" category
-> Regenerates quickly from most non-lethal injuries (flesh wounds, broken bones)
-> If "killed," returns to core crystal to regenerate for three days
-> He WILL remember after dying instead of getting hard reset
-> Permadeath requires damage/destruction of core crystal
-> Bleeds ether (shimmering red) that disperses into the air instead of blood
-> Reliant on ether/magical energy to survive (ambient energy in any living world should be fine)
-> Can sense ether (other blades or ambient) and similar elemental magical energy called by different names in other people's canons
-> Formerly reliant on resonance; can still resonate at will but can choose not to/choose to break resonance now
-> In resonance, can share the majority of ether abilities with his driver
-> Can use all the weapons he can summon competently, and generally knows his way around a fight reflexively/by muscle memory
-> He glows from the core crystal and ether lines. He just does that, and can't turn it off, only cover it up.
-> basically everything in the world info section EXCEEEEEEEPT...

Aegisite-specific shit

As an Aegisite, Asch is technically a fusion of seven blades, rather than a naturally occuring one. (There's no distinct chunks of the previous blades, he's a smoothie, not a salad.) However, this means that unlike natural blades, he has access to seven out of eight elements (missing ice), multiple weapons, and is just overall more powerful. (His ether output is equivalent to 3.5 moderate-to-strong blades, so he's in a weight class between normal blades and the Aegises.)

Technically, his full list of weapons is 1) comicly oversized anime greatsword, 2) genshin-impact style hovering magic doodad, 3) regular size sword, 4) rapier, 5) bow (requires no arrows), 6) narrow pointed spear longer than he is tall 7) a pair of sharp-edged cicular chakrams, but he only uses the swords and maybe the magic focus most of the time. (He's never even summoned the bow, spear, or chakrams, they're just There for completion of this app.) These weapons are ether manifestations, so they don't physically exist unless he actively uses them (they're more 'Kingdom Hearts weapons' rather than being hammerspaced). He can only manifest one at a time (discounting that the chakrams count as a pair).

He can also use elemental spells of these elements (we've got fairly typical JRPG standard fare there), though unusually for a blade, Asch prefers to get in the thick of things rather than stand back and manipulate ether. He can also use a variety of "blade tricks," as follows:

-> Dark: Sees perfectly well in dim lighting (if there's any light at all, he can see). Can sort of shrug off attention and be semi-unnoticable in a way that makes the eye drift past him.
-> Light: Can conjure a small floating light (red/pink/white). Can attract attention, not in any identifiable way so much as having a metaphorical spotlight.
-> Fire: Can conjure small flames and heat things. Can shrug off higher temperatures than a human or another blade without getting heatstroke/exhaustion/etc.
-> Water: Can repel small amounts of water (eg waterbender umbrella trick). Can stand on still or mostly-still water surfaces (not highly active ones like the ocean, however).
-> Wind: Can generate small air currents. Hair/clothes absolutely still in even high winds if he so chooses.
-> Earth: Can always find north (or equivalent). Can pass without trace in sand, mud, and other kinds of loose earth, and won't sink in them.
-> Lightning: Immune to ambient static and can at-will generate small shocks of the "rub your socks across the floor and touch a doorknob" type. Can anticipate lightning strikes (wholly separate from other intuition bullshit) and electrical surges.

Being a work of "adjust the lore on the fly for the plot" rather than strict actual jrpg mechanics, ywkon uses a lot of eyeballing, but anything too far outside this list I'll bring up with the mods before I do it.

Asch-specific: Healing & Hyperintuition

Easy stuff first: Technically two of Asch's component blades were healing blades. Thus, he can heal with fire-ether or earth-ether type artes, depending on the situation. The earth ones are better for internal damage and broken bones, while the fire ones are better for flesh wounds. Neither is super powerful - Asch could probably save a single person who was actively bleeding out and dying, but it would be stress-inducing and push him to his limits. He's decently familiar with human anatomy, but doesn't have much formal medical training beyond regular first aid and field medicine; his main options with big injuries are "stop the bleeding" and "dump more power into it."

The more complicated one: One of Asch's component blades was precognitive to the point of prophetic. Asch doesn't have nearly that level of power. What he has instead is a super-desaturated version referred to as "hyperintuition," which is pretty much what it sounds like on the tin. He doesn't get visions or anything of the sort so much as it is "his gut feeling is almost always right" and "he gets stray thoughts that are right on the money without realizing how precisely laser-focused they are." (An example from fic canon is that he told a dying character extremely prone to reincarnation "Better luck next time." She did, in fact, have better luck the next time they met, a thousand years later.)

Asch is aware of his hyperintuition, and tends to use it for blind decision-making (he'll almost never lose a coin flip or rock-paper-scissors), but it's still possible for him to second-guess himself over it and be wrong. (You know the test-taker's regret where you get a multiple choice test back and it's like "oh, my first pick was correct, I'm a dumbass"? Asch lives in that feeling.) It also gives him a particularly odd strain of foot-in-mouth disease where he makes comments that leave people going 'wait, how the hell did he know that?' incredibly often. (The answer is he doesn't. His intuition does. There's a difference.)

Outside of his abilities as a blade, Asch is competent in infiltration operations, wilderness survival and overground travel, and building-climbing and similar types of parkour-like skills. He's not an especially talented homemaker, but can cook and sew well enough to get by, and so on.

Item: A pair of black leather gloves.

Sample: SOUP

Notes: Please mods I beg of you - assuming rar also gets their app in, put Asch and Jade together. They'll be forming a resonance link at the platform although they're not coming in with one, and Jade will have a bad time if he's constantly waking up without an anchor at hand.