Alphonse Elric (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unerasable) wrote2013-07-02 01:33 am
unerasable) wrote2013-07-02 01:33 am
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revenance_rpg app
[OOC Information]
Name: skarme
Age: 20
AIM/Plurk/Dreamwidth/Email:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
blitzente
What characters do you already play here, if any? N/A
How did you hear about the game? ATP ads, plus some hearsay from players on my Plurk timeline :>
[IC Information]
Character Name: Alphonse Elric
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003 anime)
Gender: Male
Age: 17, but physically 13.
Species: Human
Appearance: Al is a fairly ordinary European-looking boy, on the tall end of average for a thirteen-year-old and somewhat stockily built, with dark blond hair (parted on his left, long enough to wear in a ponytail) and wide grey eyes, or a very dark gold in a certain light. Despite hailing from the early 20th century on a parallel Earth, he's generally seen in contemporary-looking casual clothes, emphasising t-shirts and collar shirts and slightly biased towards cooler colours like blue or green; however, at this canon point, he's taken to wearing his older brother's trademark outfit, which is largely black and white plus a long and striking red coat.
Personality:
In a cast brimming with traumatic pasts and badly-concealed issues, Alphonse manages to stand out by being, all things considered, pretty well-adjusted. More than that, he's genuinely sweet. He's thoughtful, amiable, highly empathetic and almost unfailingly polite. All of these traits, in conjunction with a natural aversion to conflict, make him a born mediator - not to mention an experienced one, given how used he is to intervening on his more hotheaded older brother's behalf. But that isn't to say he's a pushover; he does have a temper, even if it's slow-burning, and although he may not be inclined to fight on his own behalf except as a last resort, he'll readily rise to the defense of other people.
On the other hand, his niceness isn't always necessarily a positive trait either. In fact, the same characteristics that let him get along with others so well can and do work against him. His capacity for empathy inclines him to be trusting to a fault, and his dislike of conflict means he's willing to let the people he cares about get away with a lot, whether or not he'd otherwise have good reason to object. These tendencies don't generally make him gullible or naive as such - he's too intelligent for that - but they nevertheless leave him rather vulnerable to manipulation.
Manipulation of his actions or emotions, that is - his core beliefs are much less shakable. Al has a strongly codified moral sense, occasionally to the point of being judgmental. Given a choice, he'll always opt for what he thinks is right over what would benefit him personally. This makes him a foil to his brother in another sense; he doesn't just keep both of them together emotionally, he's also the one who makes sure neither of them loses sight of the bigger picture. Again, though, he can sometimes let his idealism get the better of him and neglect practical considerations altogether; this is a problem exacerbated by his amnesia, since he's forgotten most of his development and can't remember the consequences that similar decisions have had in the past. Moreover, he certainly isn't immune to his own moralising, which gives him a significant guilt complex - he's often alarmingly quick to beat himself up over his failings, perceived or actual. He isn't vocal about it, and it's not entirely negative in that it ensures he takes all of his responsibilities very seriously, but it easily leads to him all but breaking down if he's left to his own devices for too long without emotional support. Funnily enough, for someone who can keep other people figuratively anchored so reliably, he isn't great at doing it to himself at times.
On the whole, he's a friendly, mature kid and remarkably grounded considering what he's lived through. All the same, without his memories of the past five years, he is still only a kid, and that can be taken advantage of.
Abilities:
Al's most obvious special skill is that he's an alchemist. In his canon, this refers to someone capable of reshaping matter on the atomic level more or less at will through the application of funky-looking circular patterns called transmutation circles or arrays. Circles generally have to be prepared in advance, most often being drawn on the spot, but it's possible to speed up the process by having them pre-drawn on hands or clothing such as gloves, and a sufficiently skilled alchemist (like Al) can circumvent this method's relative lack of flexibility by mentally filling in extra details of the circle just as they activate it. Although this kind of alchemy is treated as a rigorous and difficult science by most people, Al has enough experience with it that his transmutations are really only limited by his creativity, the materials he has on hand, and the principle of equivalent exchange: basically, he can't create matter out of nowhere or change it into something completely different structurally, but whatever else he can do with it is fair game. The energy required for these reactions is pulled from the souls of the dead streaming in from 1920s Earth, with the excess given off as light and sound.
A minor side-effect of studying alchemy is that he's used to memorising complex geometrical shapes and patterns. Not only that, he can draw them extremely quickly without sacrificing accuracy.
Complementing his alchemy, he has an extensive amount of martial arts training. His fighting style, like many of the things he does, tends to be careful and methodical.
So far, so unremarkable for the setting. However, due to his backstory, Al's soul is only loosely tethered to his body, and as a result he has the unique ability to alchemically bind parts of it to inanimate objects. Pretty much anything solid that he can touch or draw a transmutation circle around will work, but it's only useful if it has moving parts - legs, wheels, whatever. He normally uses this to create independently-acting golems, and can control a large number of such golems simultaneously while he goes off to do other things. The ability also allows him to "possess" a single object which then temporarily acts as his body, allowing him to move it, see out of it and speak remotely, but this kind of connection doesn't last for long, and is even harder to maintain while his actual body is awake.
Finally, he's really good at locating stray cats... but that probably won't come up.
Items: Just the clothes on his back: a white-trimmed black jacket, a red duster, a pair of white gloves with a transmutation circle embroidered on each palm, a shirt, and black trousers with a leather water bottle and a wallet containing a small amount of Amestrian cash in the pockets.
History:
The year is 1910 in the heavily militarised steampunk country of Amestris, and a pair of precociously talented young alchemy students, Edward and Alphonse Elric, have managed to set up an ambitious experiment hidden away in their rural town home - they're going to bring back their mother, their only other family since their father left them, who succumbed to a chronic illness about a year ago. Human transmutation is a taboo topic in their society, but they've undergone months of grueling training under an unforgiving instructor for their abilities to reach this point, Ed at least is confident in their theories, and they have all the materials they need; they're as ready as they'll ever be.
They're not ready enough, though. Partway through the transmutation of what's supposed to be their mother's new, living body, the reaction turns uncontrollably violent, the rebound laying waste to the room they're in before rounding on the brothers. Terrified, Al clings to consciousness just long enough to see Ed's left leg being systematically broken down into a bloody stump -
- and that's the last thing he remembers before waking up five years later in the buried ruins of a grand mansion far beneath the city of Central, many miles from his hometown, with no trace of his older brother to be found.
How he got there is a long and complicated story that he's still decidedly hazy on two years down the line, but it boils down to one thing: alchemy's most fundamental law, the principle of equivalent exchange, requires that nothing can be gained without sacrificing something of equal value in return, and the price of trying to resurrect the dead in defiance of the cycle of nature is steep. Where Ed got away with losing "only" a leg, Al lost his entire body to the rebound, and would have died right there if Ed hadn't immediately traded one of his arms as well to retrieve Al's soul and alchemically bind it to a nearby suit of armour, giving him a replacement. Once the two of them had spent some months recovering from the ordeal, Ed in rehabilitation after having prosthetic limbs fitted and Al adjusting to an approximation of life in a body that wasn't meant for him, they burned down their old house and left on a quest to get their original bodies back - only for their first couple of real leads, the resources of the Amestrian state military and the legend of the Philosopher's Stone, to pull both of them through trauma after trauma to the heart of a centuries-spanning conspiracy, one lurking closer to home than either of them could have imagined.
But for Al, all of that is in the past, the one he has little to no memory of. What he does know after being brought to the surface and taken home is that the country is slowly edging back towards democracy after a period of upheaval, that relatedly or not Edward has been missing in action ever since he woke up, and - based solely on a series of recurring dreams Al starts to have where he's a sickly teenager studying engineering alongside Ed in a strange world where alchemy as he recognises it doesn't exist, but known all the same - that although Ed is missing, he's alive. Determined to hunt for clues to his disappearance and bring him home at last, Al returns to their old alchemy teacher, this time alone, to hone his abilities and martial arts skills. He trains with her for over a year, in the process discovering (and proving remarkably unfazed by) the oddities about the way his soul is tethered to his body these days, but when her already poor health finally gives out, he sets off again on a journey across Amestris to locate Ed himself.
Eventually, his search brings him to Liore, a desert town he apparently visited a few times in his travels with his brother, rebuilding in the aftermath of a gruesome civil war... coincidentally just as a gaping eldritch portal opens up in the middle of it. It spits out a horde of zombie-like armoured soldiers, who disappear back through the otherworldly gate (or, strictly speaking, Gate) they emerged from a short while after all of them are defeated. Al, who was never the pessimist of the pair, decides to take this as evidence that passage to and from the world Ed is currently stuck in might be possible after all. A mutual friend of theirs stops him from impulsively flinging himself through the portal before it closes, but he does manage to temporarily embed part of his soul into one of the suits of armour first - and it pays off when, one bumpy ride through the Gate later, the armour he's possessing lands right in front of the now eighteen-year-old Ed in the flesh.
His connection to the armour and so the Elrics' emotional reunion is all too fleeting, and Ed seems to be dealing with problems of his own on the other side, but unquestionable confirmation of the fact that there's a way through is a dream come true as far as Al is concerned. Armed with an empowering newfound certainty and a few vague hints from a kid called Wrath who seems to want to help, he heads out on what he's sure will be his last trip before he can see his brother again for real, back to whatever's left of the place where he woke up - and, halfway there, gets pulled into this game instead.
Name: skarme
Age: 20
AIM/Plurk/Dreamwidth/Email:
What characters do you already play here, if any? N/A
How did you hear about the game? ATP ads, plus some hearsay from players on my Plurk timeline :>
[IC Information]
Character Name: Alphonse Elric
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003 anime)
Gender: Male
Age: 17, but physically 13.
Species: Human
Appearance: Al is a fairly ordinary European-looking boy, on the tall end of average for a thirteen-year-old and somewhat stockily built, with dark blond hair (parted on his left, long enough to wear in a ponytail) and wide grey eyes, or a very dark gold in a certain light. Despite hailing from the early 20th century on a parallel Earth, he's generally seen in contemporary-looking casual clothes, emphasising t-shirts and collar shirts and slightly biased towards cooler colours like blue or green; however, at this canon point, he's taken to wearing his older brother's trademark outfit, which is largely black and white plus a long and striking red coat.
Personality:
In a cast brimming with traumatic pasts and badly-concealed issues, Alphonse manages to stand out by being, all things considered, pretty well-adjusted. More than that, he's genuinely sweet. He's thoughtful, amiable, highly empathetic and almost unfailingly polite. All of these traits, in conjunction with a natural aversion to conflict, make him a born mediator - not to mention an experienced one, given how used he is to intervening on his more hotheaded older brother's behalf. But that isn't to say he's a pushover; he does have a temper, even if it's slow-burning, and although he may not be inclined to fight on his own behalf except as a last resort, he'll readily rise to the defense of other people.
On the other hand, his niceness isn't always necessarily a positive trait either. In fact, the same characteristics that let him get along with others so well can and do work against him. His capacity for empathy inclines him to be trusting to a fault, and his dislike of conflict means he's willing to let the people he cares about get away with a lot, whether or not he'd otherwise have good reason to object. These tendencies don't generally make him gullible or naive as such - he's too intelligent for that - but they nevertheless leave him rather vulnerable to manipulation.
Manipulation of his actions or emotions, that is - his core beliefs are much less shakable. Al has a strongly codified moral sense, occasionally to the point of being judgmental. Given a choice, he'll always opt for what he thinks is right over what would benefit him personally. This makes him a foil to his brother in another sense; he doesn't just keep both of them together emotionally, he's also the one who makes sure neither of them loses sight of the bigger picture. Again, though, he can sometimes let his idealism get the better of him and neglect practical considerations altogether; this is a problem exacerbated by his amnesia, since he's forgotten most of his development and can't remember the consequences that similar decisions have had in the past. Moreover, he certainly isn't immune to his own moralising, which gives him a significant guilt complex - he's often alarmingly quick to beat himself up over his failings, perceived or actual. He isn't vocal about it, and it's not entirely negative in that it ensures he takes all of his responsibilities very seriously, but it easily leads to him all but breaking down if he's left to his own devices for too long without emotional support. Funnily enough, for someone who can keep other people figuratively anchored so reliably, he isn't great at doing it to himself at times.
On the whole, he's a friendly, mature kid and remarkably grounded considering what he's lived through. All the same, without his memories of the past five years, he is still only a kid, and that can be taken advantage of.
Abilities:
Al's most obvious special skill is that he's an alchemist. In his canon, this refers to someone capable of reshaping matter on the atomic level more or less at will through the application of funky-looking circular patterns called transmutation circles or arrays. Circles generally have to be prepared in advance, most often being drawn on the spot, but it's possible to speed up the process by having them pre-drawn on hands or clothing such as gloves, and a sufficiently skilled alchemist (like Al) can circumvent this method's relative lack of flexibility by mentally filling in extra details of the circle just as they activate it. Although this kind of alchemy is treated as a rigorous and difficult science by most people, Al has enough experience with it that his transmutations are really only limited by his creativity, the materials he has on hand, and the principle of equivalent exchange: basically, he can't create matter out of nowhere or change it into something completely different structurally, but whatever else he can do with it is fair game. The energy required for these reactions is pulled from the souls of the dead streaming in from 1920s Earth, with the excess given off as light and sound.
A minor side-effect of studying alchemy is that he's used to memorising complex geometrical shapes and patterns. Not only that, he can draw them extremely quickly without sacrificing accuracy.
Complementing his alchemy, he has an extensive amount of martial arts training. His fighting style, like many of the things he does, tends to be careful and methodical.
So far, so unremarkable for the setting. However, due to his backstory, Al's soul is only loosely tethered to his body, and as a result he has the unique ability to alchemically bind parts of it to inanimate objects. Pretty much anything solid that he can touch or draw a transmutation circle around will work, but it's only useful if it has moving parts - legs, wheels, whatever. He normally uses this to create independently-acting golems, and can control a large number of such golems simultaneously while he goes off to do other things. The ability also allows him to "possess" a single object which then temporarily acts as his body, allowing him to move it, see out of it and speak remotely, but this kind of connection doesn't last for long, and is even harder to maintain while his actual body is awake.
Finally, he's really good at locating stray cats... but that probably won't come up.
Items: Just the clothes on his back: a white-trimmed black jacket, a red duster, a pair of white gloves with a transmutation circle embroidered on each palm, a shirt, and black trousers with a leather water bottle and a wallet containing a small amount of Amestrian cash in the pockets.
History:
The year is 1910 in the heavily militarised steampunk country of Amestris, and a pair of precociously talented young alchemy students, Edward and Alphonse Elric, have managed to set up an ambitious experiment hidden away in their rural town home - they're going to bring back their mother, their only other family since their father left them, who succumbed to a chronic illness about a year ago. Human transmutation is a taboo topic in their society, but they've undergone months of grueling training under an unforgiving instructor for their abilities to reach this point, Ed at least is confident in their theories, and they have all the materials they need; they're as ready as they'll ever be.
They're not ready enough, though. Partway through the transmutation of what's supposed to be their mother's new, living body, the reaction turns uncontrollably violent, the rebound laying waste to the room they're in before rounding on the brothers. Terrified, Al clings to consciousness just long enough to see Ed's left leg being systematically broken down into a bloody stump -
- and that's the last thing he remembers before waking up five years later in the buried ruins of a grand mansion far beneath the city of Central, many miles from his hometown, with no trace of his older brother to be found.
How he got there is a long and complicated story that he's still decidedly hazy on two years down the line, but it boils down to one thing: alchemy's most fundamental law, the principle of equivalent exchange, requires that nothing can be gained without sacrificing something of equal value in return, and the price of trying to resurrect the dead in defiance of the cycle of nature is steep. Where Ed got away with losing "only" a leg, Al lost his entire body to the rebound, and would have died right there if Ed hadn't immediately traded one of his arms as well to retrieve Al's soul and alchemically bind it to a nearby suit of armour, giving him a replacement. Once the two of them had spent some months recovering from the ordeal, Ed in rehabilitation after having prosthetic limbs fitted and Al adjusting to an approximation of life in a body that wasn't meant for him, they burned down their old house and left on a quest to get their original bodies back - only for their first couple of real leads, the resources of the Amestrian state military and the legend of the Philosopher's Stone, to pull both of them through trauma after trauma to the heart of a centuries-spanning conspiracy, one lurking closer to home than either of them could have imagined.
But for Al, all of that is in the past, the one he has little to no memory of. What he does know after being brought to the surface and taken home is that the country is slowly edging back towards democracy after a period of upheaval, that relatedly or not Edward has been missing in action ever since he woke up, and - based solely on a series of recurring dreams Al starts to have where he's a sickly teenager studying engineering alongside Ed in a strange world where alchemy as he recognises it doesn't exist, but known all the same - that although Ed is missing, he's alive. Determined to hunt for clues to his disappearance and bring him home at last, Al returns to their old alchemy teacher, this time alone, to hone his abilities and martial arts skills. He trains with her for over a year, in the process discovering (and proving remarkably unfazed by) the oddities about the way his soul is tethered to his body these days, but when her already poor health finally gives out, he sets off again on a journey across Amestris to locate Ed himself.
Eventually, his search brings him to Liore, a desert town he apparently visited a few times in his travels with his brother, rebuilding in the aftermath of a gruesome civil war... coincidentally just as a gaping eldritch portal opens up in the middle of it. It spits out a horde of zombie-like armoured soldiers, who disappear back through the otherworldly gate (or, strictly speaking, Gate) they emerged from a short while after all of them are defeated. Al, who was never the pessimist of the pair, decides to take this as evidence that passage to and from the world Ed is currently stuck in might be possible after all. A mutual friend of theirs stops him from impulsively flinging himself through the portal before it closes, but he does manage to temporarily embed part of his soul into one of the suits of armour first - and it pays off when, one bumpy ride through the Gate later, the armour he's possessing lands right in front of the now eighteen-year-old Ed in the flesh.
His connection to the armour and so the Elrics' emotional reunion is all too fleeting, and Ed seems to be dealing with problems of his own on the other side, but unquestionable confirmation of the fact that there's a way through is a dream come true as far as Al is concerned. Armed with an empowering newfound certainty and a few vague hints from a kid called Wrath who seems to want to help, he heads out on what he's sure will be his last trip before he can see his brother again for real, back to whatever's left of the place where he woke up - and, halfway there, gets pulled into this game instead.