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[enthunder]

Player Information

Name: Elle
Age: 30
Contact details: Elle#2335 on Discord/evildoers on Plurk
Other characters: N/A

Character Information

Name: Claire 'Lightning' Farron
Canon: Final Fantasy XIII/Dissidia Duodecim
Canon Point: The end of Dissidia, as her team disappear from the realm of battle.
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU (I'm putting her Dissidia personality changes in the CRAU section for ease of locating)
Age: 21 (ish)

World Information: Lightning grew up in Cocoon, and on Gran Pulse briefly. After being summoned by Cosmos to fight against Chaos, she lived in World B, a replica of the world of Final Fantasy I used almost exclusively as a battleground between the two gods.

Personal History: Her FFXIII wiki entry and her Dissidia wiki entry for convenience.

Personality: Her sister once said that Lightning was named properly - the soldier is surrounded by a static electrical current, invisible until you reach out and it stings you. Lightning is, basically, bad at interacting with people. She is brittle and stubborn, and comes across as both arrogant and easy to put on the defensive. She'll argue for the sake of it, and cut you down with jibes and biting remarks if you aren't being straightforward enough for her tastes.

She doesn't make it easy for herself. Lightning is tough on people and unforgiving in the case of a bad first impression, which make her relationships slow to start. Even with close friends, her pride can get in the way of asking for help or admitting a problem; she is just as hard on herself as she is on other people, and she is slow to change. This carries across to all aspects of her life. Lightning works best when focused on a single goal, and she will pursue that goal with a determination not so much bordering on stubbornness as parked on its front lawn, until it is accomplished or someone - in a herculean attempt at distraction - manages to divert her onto something else. And until you do, she will sulk that the job isn't being done quickly enough.

On the other hand, her bark and bite hide a nurturing and careful leader, however reluctant she can be to admit that. Her utmost goal is to keep everyone around her alive (often despite themselves, in her opinion), and although she's gruff when it comes to her teamwork, she is capable of inspiring loyalty and affection in any group she leads. Her faults are obvious, and therefore easier to accept in the face of her reliability and quiet cameraderie. She's compassionate to those close to her, and is easily capable of deep loyalty, even if this can occasionally manifest as stubborn, prickly overprotectiveness. Her suspicion lasts for a long time, but her trust once given is complete and sacrosanct. Break it, and you'll have a tough time getting it back.

Used to working alone before becoming a l'Cie, she's direct and often sarcastic when it comes to giving her opinion. Her type of sarcasm isn't so much witty as it is impatient and abrasive, though often cutting into the meat of a problem. This even applies to her comments to herself, and her self-doubt is a deep, dark sea under the layer of ice that is her outward personality. She hates to admit weakness, but she'll do it - although it might hurt her pride, she will admit when she's wrong or when a plan needs to be changed. If she believes someone else is in the wrong, she will be just as quick to pass judgement or deal with them however she sees fit, which generally leads to violence if one of the non-military members of the group doesn't step in first. As a note, this easy physicality only extends to a fight. Unless she's entirely comfortable with someone, she finds unnecessary touch awkward and often reacts defensively to it.

CRAU developments:
Summoned to the world of Dissidia, her essential personality remains the same. She remembers only bits and pieces from before her summoning - mostly reflexive, unconscious things like words or movements. For example, she can make a flippant remark about a 'Primarch', showing that even though she doesn't remember anything about a specific, plot-related Primarch, the basic concept of a theocratic government remains. Likewise the feeling of being hunted and forced into a fate she cannot control, and the subsequent rebellion and hatred of any role she hasn't decided on herself. Her philosophy - 'if there's no hope, you keep looking until you find some' - has carried through, and so have her frustrations. Lightning is one of the least happy with the endless cycle of arbitrary battles the warriors find themselves thrust into, and her helplessness to change it leads to her ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to break the neverending conflict in the only way left to her. This frustration is pretty much the only thing she retains through the cycles; as the memories of the losing side are purged at the end of each loop, she has been subject to repeated memory cleansings and no longer trusts anything in her older memories. That does, however, mean that her ability to work together with near-strangers has been forced to develop back to something resembling functionality.

Key themes: Choosing your own fate, admitting your mistakes and fixing them, protecting what's important.

Main Motivation: Her freedom ranks just below her companions, whether new or old.

Skills: Lightning is a trained soldier, and although she cannot remember the particulars of her training, her body remembers. She has little trouble using most weapon types available to the military up to and including rocket launchers, and she's familiar with the styles of her fellow warriors of Cosmos to the point that she could feasibly fight with a variety of blades, spears, staffs and quite a few otherworld guns too. Her standard weapon is one canonically acknowledged to be ridiculously complicated to master - a gunblade, able to change between rifle and sabre modes with a flick of her wrist. Since that's not coming with her to the train, though, she's going to have to learn to use something else for now.

Her main point is her versatility. Even ignoring her original weapon's different forms, Lightning is a l'Cie, a human branded with crystalline magic, and thus has the power to shift her abilities between three distinct styles - paradigms - and thus fit a number of roles. Her magical and physical abilities are even and high, although not as high as someone dedicated exclusively to one or the other.

As a Commando her weapon is the focus, but she can also throw small, explosively-charged magical spheres with a limited homing ability. These can be easily dodged, and take a relatively long time to cast.

As a Ravager, she has access to elemental magic - ice, fire, water, air and her namesake, lightning. The latter is her most powerful and therefore most favoured of the elements, and she can augment a weapon with any of them to increase the power of her strikes.

Her final paradigm is the Medic. Whilst this role has no offensive power whatsoever, it harnesses her magic to allow her to heal herself and her comrades. Whilst she isn't a specialist, she is gifted enough to heal most non-lethal injuries, though more severe wounds can take time. She can also, with a little more concentration, cleanse a person of illness, toxins or poison. This role necessitates that she sacrifice all fighting ability, and as she is ultimately a pragmatist, it is only usable in an emergency or if she has allies to pick up her slack. Or in a non-combat situation, obviously.

Item: Her Survival Knife

Sample: Old third-person and old first-person threads.

Notes: N/A