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[of_no_consequence]

User Name/Nick: Danii
User DW: yarnzipan
AIM/IM: yarnzipan
E-mail: gamenotifications @ gmail
Other Characters: Clark Luthor, Chloe O'Dwyer, Alan Scott

Character Name: Ardyn Izunia
Series: Final Fantasy XV
Age: Thousands of years old
From When?: The very end of the game when he (finally) dies.

Inmate/Warden: INMATE. With a capital I. Ardyn's list of crimes is pretty extensive and extremely messed up, even for a JRPG world. Starting off, he went to a power-hungry empire looking to crush it's enemies and sold them the technology for magitek armor in order to gain political power. Now, that wouldn't sound so bad maybe if you didn't know that magitek armor is powered by daemons. Even that wouldn't be so bad if you didn't know that daemons are people who've been irrevocably twisted and demented by what's called the Starscourge, which Ardyn not only did to village after village to feed the war effort, but eventually did to the entire capital city. Add onto that the fact that he helped mastermind an assassination plot that attacked a rival nation while in the midst of peace talks, stabbed a pacifist Oracle to death, and basically covered the world in 10 years of darkness and ruin without sunlight, absolutely decimating the population of the world and doing irrevocable damage to it...

Yeah. Not a nice guy.

Now, you might ask why he'd do all this. Love, money, a lust for power, the loss of a loved one?

Nope.

Spite. The whole thing was done out of spite, against the gods, against the line of Lucis (said country where he helped assassinate the king), against humanity itself. He did everything he did out of spite for the way that all of them had treated him, for the fate that was left to him, and because he lost his shit over several millennia due to the fact that he literally keeps getting ejected out of the afterlife for not being pure enough. Because THAT, of course, is the thing. He didn't start OUT this way. Not at all. Not even a little bit. He started out as literally the kindest, most giving, brightest soul in his world.

But we'll get to that.

Arrival: VERY much against his will, and he's coming here after his final death. It could be argued that his main ambition was to die triumphant in his success, which is going to make coming here one hell of an irritation to him. Though it's not the first time that a semi-omnipotent being has decided to fuck him over so there's that at least...

Abilities/Powers: Canonically, Ardyn has several supernatural abilities aside from his natural talents at scheming, manipulation, and diplomacy. First, even aside from what he'll be dealing with from the Barge, he's actually immortal and anything that kills him only does so for a few moments. Second, he has the ability to manipulate time. In canon, this is shown to be stopping time, slowing time down, speeding time up, and using memories of other times to create illusions and manipulate people's senses. Usually this takes the form of appearing to look like someone completely different or making other people look/sound/etc like someone they're not.

Last, but definitely not least, as a former king of Lucis, he has access to magic and the King's Armiger, a set of 13 spiritual weapons which he can summon to protect him and which, when summoned en masse, give him supernatural speed, strength, and flight in times of great need (it's a video game, there's a build up meter, think 'limit break'). The weapons can be summoned individually for his use like a normal weapon which only gives him the ability to warp (travel instantly between one place and another via sightline) but continual use of them will eventually weaken him. He also gets access to elemental magic (specifically ice, lightning, and fire) which he first needs to draw from a natural source before being able to shape them into a proper spell.

This isn't so much a power as it is a curse, though I figure I should mention it here: he is the vessel containing a huge amount of darkness and corruption of the Starscourge from his world which transforms people into daemons. He can infect people with the Starscourge at will, twisting them into any number of strange daemons (aka final fantasy monsters).

...also millenia worth of experience with battle and a healing ability, as both were a part of his original calling.

Reduced for the Barge, I would say that he can only stop or slow time within a single room for about a minute. His illusions only work on one person at a time with the same time limit. No access to his weapons or the Armiger form, very very limited warping (it's an MP bar ability, so let's say his MP bar is super small, good for like one jump in a fight), and of course, he's only Barge immortal same as everyone else.

Personality:

Ardyn is a man in layers, layers that have built up over centuries and centuries into the man you see before you today. As mentioned above, he is motivated, driven to unholy heights as a matter of fact, by spite. Revenge. He feels so greatly wronged, so momentously abused, and whether it was something that was born in that moment of rejection or something that's festered with eons of daemon corruption under his skin, it's something that's become a raging fire ready to destroy literally anyone and anything in his path. Sometimes, even things that aren't in his path. He gives literally no shits for anyone or anything outside of himself, figuring that the universe at large owes him due to the suffering that he's been put through and the great sacrifices he made for the people of his world. He won't justify himself or claim that what he's doing is justice, necessarily, but he doesn't CARE. He wants to burn down the world to the cinders for what it did to him and anyone caught in the flames, well, that's their problem. They can come back from the dead and do something about it if they want- OH DAMN, SHUCKS. By which I mean, he's entirely lacking in empathy or sympathy for other people's suffering. In fact, he kind of delights in it.

And yet, that's not what he shows on the surface. Generally, he's very genial and he likes playing little nonsense games, telling stories, chattering amiably. He's grandiose in his movements and his gestures, expressive and flamboyant, and very much the kind of person who draws you in even if something in the back of your head is ringing warning bells that there's something wrong here or that the smile isn't entirely reaching his eyes (or if it is, it's a worrying kind of smile). He loves poetry and old legends, happy to retell them for any willing audience, and being the center of attention is definitely his aim in any situation. And yet, he's very smooth and unassuming when he wants to be, his body language more jaunty than stately even while acting in his position as the chancellor of the greatest military power in his own world. That's the mask, though.

Once the mask is removed, or rather, when he chooses to remove it, THAT's when you see his real nature. He is angry and he is bitter, sadistic and cruel, and he hates literally everyone. Even the people who try to show him kindness, the one person who tried to heal him, he not only stabbed her but backhanded her for it because he hates so much and with such unending passion that he only sees that compassion as weakness that he can exploit or, on a more personal level perhaps, that will be exploited and he refuses to play into the whole thing. He likes causing pain, very personal pain, to people even when there's no purpose to it in the course of what he's doing. It just makes him feel better, making other people hurt, and his favorite thing to do is play mindgames with people via expectations. Noctis, your main character in the game, has a lot of things hit him, but the one that just dropkicks him past being able to deal with it is when Ardyn, using a bit of illusion, makes Noctis's best friend, Prompto, look like himself while he takes on the appearance of Prompto. At which point, of course, Noctis literally kicks 'Ardyn' off the train only to discover that he just sent his best friend flying. Here's a visual if it's hard to compute.

Which he of course uses again both to mess with Noctis and to mess with Prompto to again mess with Noctis. You can't really tell who's seeing what with him and he likes it that way, likes keeping people off balance and untrusting. Think that movie Oculus, only as a person.

As you might have guessed from some of the other sections, Ardyn is a player of the proverbial long game and he enjoys watching the pieces move on the chessboard almost as much as he likes swooping in at just the right moment to enjoy the results for himself. He very much believes in using the right tool for the job, carefully measuring his resources and his actions to get exactly what he wants. He's a fan of the Xanatos gambit especially, and frequently 'helps' the good guys to basically do exactly what he wants them to do. He has a lot of different powers and abilities and yet for most of the game, you watch him use almost none of them. Instead, he likes making people do his dirty work, likes to watch things play out like an especially sadistic fractal butterfly who has but to flap his wing to engulf everything in a tsunami.

Bizarrely enough, he doesn't actually enjoy ostentation for the most part. He doesn't wear terribly fancy clothing; in fact, he kind of looks like a vagabond in a series of layers, a fedora hat, and frequently carrying an umbrella. He prefers to conduct business on a very personal level, ignoring protocol and traveling around like anyone else without much of a fanfare or honor guard. In a game where one of the major components is a car and that car is very much a status symbol, he has a NICER car, but nothing even in the same league as the sort of vehicle that your main character rides around. The whole thing gives an impression, in some ways, that he's just as disdainful of societal expectations as he is about anything else.

Barge Reactions: Ardyn's outer reaction and inner reaction are going to be two very very different things. Outwardly, he's going to be curious and amused and rather resigned to all the oddities of the Barge and the different people. It's not entirely fake; after all, he's been around for thousands of years. He's seen plenty of weirdness and when you've fought monsters and dealt with gods... *shrug* Inwardly, he's going to be flames-on-the-side-of-my-face angry that the Admiral snatched him from his final rest to bring him someplace where everyone has the same affliction he does (no death) only worse. He's going to play diplomat and be very charming and sweet but that will cover a flaming hatred of this whole thing and a desire to tear it down from the roots that may or may not come to fruition depending on how interaction with others goes. He's a long-game player, after all. The big thing though is that discussing who and what he is is just not going to happen, at least not without Admirally/Flood interference; he's had plenty of time to get used to just his own company when it comes to anything at all personal so he'll definitely be on the slow shifting side of things.

Path to Redemption: Ardyn USED to be a very good, very giving person. He was, in fact, chosen by the gods themselves to walk among the people and give them hope, burn away the darkness from them. And he took this mission to heart; he didn't just heal the people of the Starscourge, but he took that darkness into himself to do so. It's what happened afterwards that twisted him into who and what he is now. Here's the story.

And the thing is that his anger is FAIR: the gods dicked him over and while there IS some logic to not being okay with a guy filled with daemons sitting the throne it's... still pretty awful to someone who served faithfully and only did his duty. But what he needs to do is recognize that what was done to him, as unfortunate as it was, doesn't make his choice to hurt other people *right*. It doesn't mean that people literally millenia later should have to pay for it, especially the common folk who never had anything to do with what happened to him and who lauded him as a hero way back when. That a young prince shouldn't have to lose everything, against his will, only to also give up his life too just to kick Ardyn's ancient ass through the goalposts. And, to some extent, that just because you do a good thing, *no one is obliged to appreciate it*. The good deed should be it's own reward. And passing on the pain and suffering doesn't make you 'just', it makes you an asshole. Especially when, well, there are things he could have done with his immortality that could have been useful and good.

Because he didn't just hate the line of Lucis (aka, his own family) and the gods at large; he got to hate humanity too. Enough so that they weren't even a consequence; they were just a stepping stone. Enough so that a god who doesn't like humanity actually decided to work with him against the rest of the gods when Ardyn was responsible for 'slaying' most of the rest of them. His faith in people or their decency or their importance to him got utterly destroyed and he needs to gain that back. Needs to be able to empathize and sympathize again instead of simply deciding that his fate was the absolute worst and fuck you very much. He needs to find value in people again instead of just as fodder or interesting pieces for him to move around in pursuit of his goals.

Basically, he needs to get over himself rediscover the man who gave up his own throne to take the evils of the world on his own shoulders because it's the right thing to do when you can do it.

History: Ardyn @ Villains Wiki | @ Final Fantasy Wiki

Sample Journal Entry:
I admit that I have never found myself much in the mood to write my thoughts or my feelings before now. After all, given what I am, they are as much a part of me as my feet or my hands, and almost as solid within my mind. No one else is going to read them, or should read them; I have no desire to share them, really. And I have no need for an audience for it despite my usual theatricality.

Theater is not the place for truths, after all. But for illusions and fairytales. Legends and stories. We come not to be enlightened but to be entertained, even if the price is to have our purses cut while our minds are elsewhere. Such is the world.

But I digress. I suppose the metaphors quite ran away with me.

And yet, I find myself in a place well beyond even my imagination: beyond those judgmental gods, beyond the people of Eos, far beyond the House of Lucis and in some ways, beyond the Beyond itself. Here, others share my affliction and yet it is hard to hold my tongue every time one of them complains of it. Oh, you don't care to be brought back again and again against your wishes? Oh, how very sad, you've lived this way for how long? THREE WHOLE MONTHS, oh, isn't that just a tragedy? My heart bleeds.

And yet, can't I sympathize with the hatred some of them hold in their hearts for the Admiral who has stolen us from our rest? Perhaps I should, but it would be a lie to say that I do. Instead, perhaps, I will put these seething hatreds to work. Ridiculous as they are, these levers will still do what they always do. Which, I suppose, is where I leave you, oh journal mine. As there is work to do and this musing, while surprisingly delightful, is at it's heart unnecessary and a touch indulgent.

One can never be too careful, after all.

Sample RP: TDM Thread

Special Notes: