Therion T. Thief (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bolderfell) wrote2019-08-16 11:29 am
bolderfell) wrote2019-08-16 11:29 am
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daybreakacademy
PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Asher
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
asherdashery
OTHER CHARACTER(S) IN GAME: N/A
CANON INFORMATION
CHARACTER NAME: Therion
CANON: Octopath Traveler
HISTORY: "Your name is Therion, and you are a thief."
STRENGTHS:
🍎 CLEVER 🍎
In the lawless, dog-eat-dog world of crime, thinking on your feet is vital when you don't have the size or power to take what you want by force. Therion's quick to take in situations--note important personalities, mark exits, find likely spots for ambush, sniff out valuables, and so on--and juggle all said factors into a fast and flexible plan. When things go wrong, he knows his own strengths and weaknesses well enough to adapt on the fly. His ability to assess and then play to weak points extends to people as well as environments; after observing someone a bit, he'll adjust his demeanor towards them, or even put on a full-out character act in order to put himself in the best possible position to get what he wants. In short, he's observant, aware, and fast on the uptake, and he doesn't hesitate to use what he learns to his advantage.
🍎 TENACIOUS 🍎
Therion straight-up refuses to lie down and say die. While he doesn't seek out challenges beyond his abilities, once he has committed to something, he'll push himself through every obstacle in his path, no matter how hard or painful the going gets. After all, if he doesn't ensure his own survival, who will?
🍎 INDEPENDENT 🍎
All his life, he's either had no one to rely on or had his trust thrown back in his face. Obviously, the solution is never to depend on anyone else for anything. Everything Therion needs, he provides for himself, by hook or by crook. ...Mostly by crook. In any case, he's both self-motivated and self-maintaining, requiring (and requesting) little to nothing in the way of guidance or care. In fact, he finds such kindnesses insulting, usually, and certainly ill-advised.
FLAWS:
🍏 MISTRUSTFUL 🍏
Once bitten, twice shy. Once shoved off a cliff by the only person you ever trusted with everything... you get the picture. The flipside to Therion's powerful self-sufficiency is an absolute distrust in other people, especially people who take any sort of positive interest in him. Kindness tends to get his hackles up, and he may even end up sabotaging budding relationships, hurting feelings and cutting himself off from potential avenues of support. Even among people he likes, Therion's always got his exit strategy in the back of his mind, ready to jump ship whenever it feels like they're getting too close.
The truth is, it's not well-reasoned caution causing him to hold back with people, but an overpowering, irrational terror of leaving himself open to be hurt again. He won't trust anyone with his back because he's afraid he'll get a knife in it; he won't let himself need anyone, because what if, one day, they're not there to fill that need? Therion's kept himself wandering for years so faces never get familiar, so he never falls into the trap of relying on anything to stay the same.
In his mind, this is his most powerful defense. It keeps him safe, reminds him he's too smart to be fooled again. But really, it keeps him small and weak and prevents him from healthy personal growth.
🍏 SHORT-SIGHTED 🍏
Therion also has a tendency to live and act in the now. For all his planning, he never really thinks beyond the next mark, the next shelter, the next step he needs to take to keep on keeping on. In the long term, it leaves his life free but directionless. In the short term, he doesn't always see what's going on beneath the surface of things, leaving him vulnerable to mistaken assumptions and traps.
🍏 SENTIMENTAL 🍏
And perhaps the reason he doesn't look too deeply, the reason he slips away while the going's good, is that he understands how easily, and how desperately, he gets attached to the littlest scrap of likability. For all he avoids believing in honor, kindness, and good intentions, he's moved whenever he sees it in others--and it's worth noting that when Therion makes his own promises, he always follows through. He finds himself drawn to help good people in need, despite himself, and offers advice and gifts to those he likes. And when he's hurt, it's always, inescapably personal. No matter how time passes, no matter how he comes to understand what happened and why, he can't let the pain go, and it comes to inform everything he does in the future.
In fact, the only way to avoid having an overwhelming amount of Feelings about individuals present and future is not to get close to them at all; otherwise, Therion's a laconic, snide, teasing, at times vengeful, but unequivocal sap.
CANON ABILITIES: "Time to steal the show."
AU INFORMATION
AU CHARACTER NAME: Therion
AGE: 19
GRADE: Undergraduate
AU BACKSTORY: Therion doesn't remember his parents, nor does he care to. His early childhood is a blur of sneaking out of orphanages and buddying up with various packs of unruly, under-watched children in the streets of Istanbul.
He began manifesting Fey-like powers at age eleven or twelve, which helped him nab what he needed without getting caught. While trying to harness those powers consciously would cause unpredictable and often harrowing results, Therion found, when he was in a pinch, he could just let the magic--if that's even what it was--happen as it would. Alarms would fail to trigger, guard dogs would merely wuffle in their sleep, angry gazes would pass right over him and let him melt into a crowd; over time and repeated use, he and the magic understood each other well enough that he could slip his hand unnoticed into any pocket and pop just about any lock. Sometimes, it was like he could just blink through things, just a little, and always in subtle enough ways it might have been luck or skill.
Around the time his powers started cropping up, he fell in with another street kid who became his sole long-term partner in crime: Darius. Things got better and better for a while, with Therion's gifts giving them an edge over the police, gangs, and any manner of trouble they stumbled into. They began to make excursions outside Istanbul and even to neighboring countries. All the while, though, Darius grew progressively more jealous of his talents.
About three years before now, the two drew enough ire that someone in the grown-up crime world decided to nip trouble in the bud, one way or another. Darius was made an offer he couldn't refuse, and all he was asked in return was to bump Therion off. By that point, he was more than happy to get rid of him in any case. Darius got his chance on a trip to Greece, where he let Therion know he always hated him and, with unnecessary theatrics, shoved him over a cliff in the Meteora.
Probably the only way Therion survived was through the unthinking use of his powers, partially blinking through the stone crags he hit on the way down and lightening some of the impact. Still, his body was pretty hecked up by the time he hit bottom, far beneath the mist. As he lay there, torn up and broken, flickering in and out of consciousness, he also ended up flickering in and out of the Outland Mists. After an agonized eternity wavering between Earth and the Outlands as much as between life and death, Therion pulled through. As a side effect of the otherworldly experience, his ability to pass part of his body through solid matter stabilized. While his powers were and still remain limited--only part of him can flicker through, and only for a blink of a second--
Jump-cut to today: Therion's actively thieving once more, though he strictly goes it alone. He bites off more than he can chew in Germany, where he attempts to rob the C.H. Postal Company--run by and for magic types--of some valuable deliverables. Instead of making off with the goods, he's physically outmatched by a prim little delivery girl named Violet Evergarden.
The package's rightful owner, Dietfried Bougainvillea, happens to be the eldest son of an old family of mages and Hunters, and he'd like nothing more than to punish Therion like the beast he is. Violet's employer-slash-guardian intercedes, however, and instead, Dietfried clamps a spelled shackle around Therion's wrist. No matter how he tries, Therion can't slip out of it or unlock it--not until he properly masters the powers he's been using tobe gay and do crimes and uses them for their intended purpose--stopping the Nightfall.
Hence, he's reluctantly been enrolled in Daybreak Academy. Because as he sees it, he has one of two choices if he wants his freedom: learn to fight like they want, or die trying. Or at least learn enough to pop the lock off his chains and jet.
How nice of them to send Violet along with him to make sure he does his homework.
(Dietfried has probably warned the administration about Therion's criminal history, but Therion is presenting himself to students and faculty as an untrained Candle without much knowledge of the supernatural. It's mostly true.)
AU PERSONALITY DEVIATION:
💍 Because Daybreak Therion is a bit younger than canon Therion (19 vs. 22), he's a little more insecure and reactive. He doesn't have as many years of surviving and excelling on his own, so he can't be quite as sure that he alone is enough.
💍 As a child of the communication age, Therion gathers just as much of his rumors and information from digital venues as he does eavesdropping at bars and social events. He always has access to a smartphone. Granted, it might not be his phone...
RACE: As far as Therion knows, he's human, but I'm gonna make an executive decision here and state for the record that he's fully half-Fey.
SECRET SOCIETY: While not willingly part of any groups, magic or otherwise, Therion is currently entrapped by the Bougainvillea family and beholden to the C.H. Postal Company. They're the ones who have sent him to Daybreak Academy to train and fight, rather than punishing him otherwise for his attempted theft; he considers them captors and wardens, not comrades. Dietfried Bougainvillea likewise considers him expendable trash at best and a criminal to remove at worst, while the C.H. Postal Company's opinion of him is thankfully more clement.
As pershiritai's pending app, the Bougainvillea family is a clan of German Hunters and mages, while the C.H. Postal Company works for power-users delivering sensitive correspondence that might need careful, and/or magical, handling.
Therion's ex-partner, Darius, has also risen to a leadership position among criminals specializing in stealing and selling powerful, and usually dangerous, magic items. While Therion isn't involved in that at all, and actually doesn't even know what Darius is up to, those who keep tabs on that sort of thing might notice similarities between Therion's work and crimes attributed to Darius.
POWERS:
🗡️ FEYCRAFT 🗡️
While Therion is, technically, a Candle, his power presents itself more as small-scale, specialized Feycraft than anything else. He can't summon it well when he focuses consciously and/or tries things outside his sneakthiefy field, so deliberate classroom settings don't usually do it for him. When he does manage to call it up in those conditions, it tends to be sputtery and unpredictable, manifesting as anything from raw elemental magic to random status effects. It's also anyone's guess who or what it'll target.
In practice, however, Therion's very good at the things he does. While he's not the Candle you want fighting on the front lines either physically or magically, when it comes to stealth, infiltration, locked doors, item extraction, or any sort of DnD rogue-like action, Therion's got you covered. It's also worth noting that most of Therion's powers work best as part of a mundane, physical effort on his part; magical lock-picking is accomplished through normal use of lockpicks, he needs a costume to help disguise himself, and so on.
The following items are uses of power he can pull off skillfully and consistently, as opposed to being otherwise a magic toddler with a grab-bag of firecrackers. They are listed from strongest/most reliable to weakest/least predictable.
🗡️ LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT... 🗡️
Therion's most practiced, most useful, most obviously supernatural gift is an ability to literally slip part of himself through solid objects undetected. It mostly works in motion--i.e., sweeping his hand through a glass display to grab a necklace, or ducking through a blow as part of his move to dodge--and he can't maintain it or stay intangible. He can't walk through walls or anything, he's not a ghost. The word he thinks of to describe this is 'blinking,' which is pretty much what it looks like, rather than phasing or ghosting or anything more sustained.
Still, even if poofing through locked doors is off the table, Therion can feel out pretty much any lock and pop it open with a combination of his tools and his gift. This extends to electronic locks and some locks enhanced by magic--he's not as practiced with those, but with proper training, he'd pick the knack up quickly--but not to computer passwords or encryption or anything. He's a thief, not a hacker.
🗡️ SO GLAMOROUS 🗡️
Any thief worth his salt keeps the arts of misdirection, disguise, and performance in his toolbox, and Therion is no exception. In fact, a little bit of Fey glamor gives him an edge here. While putting on an act is still mostly a project of observation and mundane stagecraft, once Therion's put on a costume, a character accent, or whatever, his gift kicks in to pull attention towards his show and away from whatever trick he happens to be playing.
🗡️ ARCANE RECOVERY 🗡️
Canon Therion is able to employ two battle recovery skills: HP Thief and Steal SP. Rather than translate those more directly from the game, I'd like Therion to be able, when badly injured or drained, to pull emergency energy from the Outland Mists. This energy doesn't technically heal any injuries Therion has nor serve as a seamless replacement for his natural power, but merely keeps him going for long enough to escape--or, in the worst case scenario, for his body to repair itself at its normal healing pace. It's the magical equivalent of downing a dangerous amount of 5-Hour Energies after a bunch of all-nighters and feels even worse, like his blood is on fire.
This skill only works in high densities of the Outland Mists. If he's badly hurt in a perfectly mundane location or somewhere where the supernatural is nullified, Therion is hecked.
🗡️ WILDFIRE 🗡️
The only element Therion has any affinity for is fire, and he can only summon it with enough force to, like, light the kindling in a campfire. Useful for burning evidence or setting off fire alarms in a pinch, not really a reliable battle weapon.
HOUSING: No preference. Randomize me, Cap'n.
RP SAMPLE
TDM THREADS: Therion charming current students for intel and being sullen to his anti-crime sitter, Violet Evergarden.
NAME: Asher
CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTER(S) IN GAME: N/A
CANON INFORMATION
CHARACTER NAME: Therion
CANON: Octopath Traveler
HISTORY: "Your name is Therion, and you are a thief."
STRENGTHS:
🍎 CLEVER 🍎
In the lawless, dog-eat-dog world of crime, thinking on your feet is vital when you don't have the size or power to take what you want by force. Therion's quick to take in situations--note important personalities, mark exits, find likely spots for ambush, sniff out valuables, and so on--and juggle all said factors into a fast and flexible plan. When things go wrong, he knows his own strengths and weaknesses well enough to adapt on the fly. His ability to assess and then play to weak points extends to people as well as environments; after observing someone a bit, he'll adjust his demeanor towards them, or even put on a full-out character act in order to put himself in the best possible position to get what he wants. In short, he's observant, aware, and fast on the uptake, and he doesn't hesitate to use what he learns to his advantage.
🍎 TENACIOUS 🍎
Therion straight-up refuses to lie down and say die. While he doesn't seek out challenges beyond his abilities, once he has committed to something, he'll push himself through every obstacle in his path, no matter how hard or painful the going gets. After all, if he doesn't ensure his own survival, who will?
🍎 INDEPENDENT 🍎
All his life, he's either had no one to rely on or had his trust thrown back in his face. Obviously, the solution is never to depend on anyone else for anything. Everything Therion needs, he provides for himself, by hook or by crook. ...Mostly by crook. In any case, he's both self-motivated and self-maintaining, requiring (and requesting) little to nothing in the way of guidance or care. In fact, he finds such kindnesses insulting, usually, and certainly ill-advised.
FLAWS:
🍏 MISTRUSTFUL 🍏
Once bitten, twice shy. Once shoved off a cliff by the only person you ever trusted with everything... you get the picture. The flipside to Therion's powerful self-sufficiency is an absolute distrust in other people, especially people who take any sort of positive interest in him. Kindness tends to get his hackles up, and he may even end up sabotaging budding relationships, hurting feelings and cutting himself off from potential avenues of support. Even among people he likes, Therion's always got his exit strategy in the back of his mind, ready to jump ship whenever it feels like they're getting too close.
The truth is, it's not well-reasoned caution causing him to hold back with people, but an overpowering, irrational terror of leaving himself open to be hurt again. He won't trust anyone with his back because he's afraid he'll get a knife in it; he won't let himself need anyone, because what if, one day, they're not there to fill that need? Therion's kept himself wandering for years so faces never get familiar, so he never falls into the trap of relying on anything to stay the same.
In his mind, this is his most powerful defense. It keeps him safe, reminds him he's too smart to be fooled again. But really, it keeps him small and weak and prevents him from healthy personal growth.
🍏 SHORT-SIGHTED 🍏
Therion also has a tendency to live and act in the now. For all his planning, he never really thinks beyond the next mark, the next shelter, the next step he needs to take to keep on keeping on. In the long term, it leaves his life free but directionless. In the short term, he doesn't always see what's going on beneath the surface of things, leaving him vulnerable to mistaken assumptions and traps.
🍏 SENTIMENTAL 🍏
And perhaps the reason he doesn't look too deeply, the reason he slips away while the going's good, is that he understands how easily, and how desperately, he gets attached to the littlest scrap of likability. For all he avoids believing in honor, kindness, and good intentions, he's moved whenever he sees it in others--and it's worth noting that when Therion makes his own promises, he always follows through. He finds himself drawn to help good people in need, despite himself, and offers advice and gifts to those he likes. And when he's hurt, it's always, inescapably personal. No matter how time passes, no matter how he comes to understand what happened and why, he can't let the pain go, and it comes to inform everything he does in the future.
In fact, the only way to avoid having an overwhelming amount of Feelings about individuals present and future is not to get close to them at all; otherwise, Therion's a laconic, snide, teasing, at times vengeful, but unequivocal sap.
CANON ABILITIES: "Time to steal the show."
AU INFORMATION
AU CHARACTER NAME: Therion
AGE: 19
GRADE: Undergraduate
AU BACKSTORY: Therion doesn't remember his parents, nor does he care to. His early childhood is a blur of sneaking out of orphanages and buddying up with various packs of unruly, under-watched children in the streets of Istanbul.
He began manifesting Fey-like powers at age eleven or twelve, which helped him nab what he needed without getting caught. While trying to harness those powers consciously would cause unpredictable and often harrowing results, Therion found, when he was in a pinch, he could just let the magic--if that's even what it was--happen as it would. Alarms would fail to trigger, guard dogs would merely wuffle in their sleep, angry gazes would pass right over him and let him melt into a crowd; over time and repeated use, he and the magic understood each other well enough that he could slip his hand unnoticed into any pocket and pop just about any lock. Sometimes, it was like he could just blink through things, just a little, and always in subtle enough ways it might have been luck or skill.
Around the time his powers started cropping up, he fell in with another street kid who became his sole long-term partner in crime: Darius. Things got better and better for a while, with Therion's gifts giving them an edge over the police, gangs, and any manner of trouble they stumbled into. They began to make excursions outside Istanbul and even to neighboring countries. All the while, though, Darius grew progressively more jealous of his talents.
About three years before now, the two drew enough ire that someone in the grown-up crime world decided to nip trouble in the bud, one way or another. Darius was made an offer he couldn't refuse, and all he was asked in return was to bump Therion off. By that point, he was more than happy to get rid of him in any case. Darius got his chance on a trip to Greece, where he let Therion know he always hated him and, with unnecessary theatrics, shoved him over a cliff in the Meteora.
Probably the only way Therion survived was through the unthinking use of his powers, partially blinking through the stone crags he hit on the way down and lightening some of the impact. Still, his body was pretty hecked up by the time he hit bottom, far beneath the mist. As he lay there, torn up and broken, flickering in and out of consciousness, he also ended up flickering in and out of the Outland Mists. After an agonized eternity wavering between Earth and the Outlands as much as between life and death, Therion pulled through. As a side effect of the otherworldly experience, his ability to pass part of his body through solid matter stabilized. While his powers were and still remain limited--only part of him can flicker through, and only for a blink of a second--
Jump-cut to today: Therion's actively thieving once more, though he strictly goes it alone. He bites off more than he can chew in Germany, where he attempts to rob the C.H. Postal Company--run by and for magic types--of some valuable deliverables. Instead of making off with the goods, he's physically outmatched by a prim little delivery girl named Violet Evergarden.
The package's rightful owner, Dietfried Bougainvillea, happens to be the eldest son of an old family of mages and Hunters, and he'd like nothing more than to punish Therion like the beast he is. Violet's employer-slash-guardian intercedes, however, and instead, Dietfried clamps a spelled shackle around Therion's wrist. No matter how he tries, Therion can't slip out of it or unlock it--not until he properly masters the powers he's been using to
Hence, he's reluctantly been enrolled in Daybreak Academy. Because as he sees it, he has one of two choices if he wants his freedom: learn to fight like they want, or die trying. Or at least learn enough to pop the lock off his chains and jet.
How nice of them to send Violet along with him to make sure he does his homework.
(Dietfried has probably warned the administration about Therion's criminal history, but Therion is presenting himself to students and faculty as an untrained Candle without much knowledge of the supernatural. It's mostly true.)
AU PERSONALITY DEVIATION:
💍 Because Daybreak Therion is a bit younger than canon Therion (19 vs. 22), he's a little more insecure and reactive. He doesn't have as many years of surviving and excelling on his own, so he can't be quite as sure that he alone is enough.
💍 As a child of the communication age, Therion gathers just as much of his rumors and information from digital venues as he does eavesdropping at bars and social events. He always has access to a smartphone. Granted, it might not be his phone...
RACE: As far as Therion knows, he's human, but I'm gonna make an executive decision here and state for the record that he's fully half-Fey.
SECRET SOCIETY: While not willingly part of any groups, magic or otherwise, Therion is currently entrapped by the Bougainvillea family and beholden to the C.H. Postal Company. They're the ones who have sent him to Daybreak Academy to train and fight, rather than punishing him otherwise for his attempted theft; he considers them captors and wardens, not comrades. Dietfried Bougainvillea likewise considers him expendable trash at best and a criminal to remove at worst, while the C.H. Postal Company's opinion of him is thankfully more clement.
As per
shiritai's pending app, the Bougainvillea family is a clan of German Hunters and mages, while the C.H. Postal Company works for power-users delivering sensitive correspondence that might need careful, and/or magical, handling.Therion's ex-partner, Darius, has also risen to a leadership position among criminals specializing in stealing and selling powerful, and usually dangerous, magic items. While Therion isn't involved in that at all, and actually doesn't even know what Darius is up to, those who keep tabs on that sort of thing might notice similarities between Therion's work and crimes attributed to Darius.
POWERS:
🗡️ FEYCRAFT 🗡️
While Therion is, technically, a Candle, his power presents itself more as small-scale, specialized Feycraft than anything else. He can't summon it well when he focuses consciously and/or tries things outside his sneakthiefy field, so deliberate classroom settings don't usually do it for him. When he does manage to call it up in those conditions, it tends to be sputtery and unpredictable, manifesting as anything from raw elemental magic to random status effects. It's also anyone's guess who or what it'll target.
In practice, however, Therion's very good at the things he does. While he's not the Candle you want fighting on the front lines either physically or magically, when it comes to stealth, infiltration, locked doors, item extraction, or any sort of DnD rogue-like action, Therion's got you covered. It's also worth noting that most of Therion's powers work best as part of a mundane, physical effort on his part; magical lock-picking is accomplished through normal use of lockpicks, he needs a costume to help disguise himself, and so on.
The following items are uses of power he can pull off skillfully and consistently, as opposed to being otherwise a magic toddler with a grab-bag of firecrackers. They are listed from strongest/most reliable to weakest/least predictable.
🗡️ LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT... 🗡️
Therion's most practiced, most useful, most obviously supernatural gift is an ability to literally slip part of himself through solid objects undetected. It mostly works in motion--i.e., sweeping his hand through a glass display to grab a necklace, or ducking through a blow as part of his move to dodge--and he can't maintain it or stay intangible. He can't walk through walls or anything, he's not a ghost. The word he thinks of to describe this is 'blinking,' which is pretty much what it looks like, rather than phasing or ghosting or anything more sustained.
Still, even if poofing through locked doors is off the table, Therion can feel out pretty much any lock and pop it open with a combination of his tools and his gift. This extends to electronic locks and some locks enhanced by magic--he's not as practiced with those, but with proper training, he'd pick the knack up quickly--but not to computer passwords or encryption or anything. He's a thief, not a hacker.
🗡️ SO GLAMOROUS 🗡️
Any thief worth his salt keeps the arts of misdirection, disguise, and performance in his toolbox, and Therion is no exception. In fact, a little bit of Fey glamor gives him an edge here. While putting on an act is still mostly a project of observation and mundane stagecraft, once Therion's put on a costume, a character accent, or whatever, his gift kicks in to pull attention towards his show and away from whatever trick he happens to be playing.
🗡️ ARCANE RECOVERY 🗡️
Canon Therion is able to employ two battle recovery skills: HP Thief and Steal SP. Rather than translate those more directly from the game, I'd like Therion to be able, when badly injured or drained, to pull emergency energy from the Outland Mists. This energy doesn't technically heal any injuries Therion has nor serve as a seamless replacement for his natural power, but merely keeps him going for long enough to escape--or, in the worst case scenario, for his body to repair itself at its normal healing pace. It's the magical equivalent of downing a dangerous amount of 5-Hour Energies after a bunch of all-nighters and feels even worse, like his blood is on fire.
This skill only works in high densities of the Outland Mists. If he's badly hurt in a perfectly mundane location or somewhere where the supernatural is nullified, Therion is hecked.
🗡️ WILDFIRE 🗡️
The only element Therion has any affinity for is fire, and he can only summon it with enough force to, like, light the kindling in a campfire. Useful for burning evidence or setting off fire alarms in a pinch, not really a reliable battle weapon.
HOUSING: No preference. Randomize me, Cap'n.
RP SAMPLE
TDM THREADS: Therion charming current students for intel and being sullen to his anti-crime sitter, Violet Evergarden.