Jade Curtiss (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenuousmorality) wrote2018-06-03 11:01 pm
tenuousmorality) wrote2018-06-03 11:01 pm
Hadriel Application
PLAYER
Player name: Kitten
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Grimmkitty, Kittenfais#8561
Characters currently in-game: Mettaton
CHARACTER
Character Name: Jade Curtiss
Character Age: About...37? By the end of the game anyway
Canon: Tales of the Abyss
Canon Point: Post-game, but before the final scene.
History: Wiki!
Personality: Colonel Jade Curtiss, Third Division, Malkuth Imperial forces. That's how Jade introduces himself in almost every situation. By any first impression, he is the perfect picture of a high-ranking military officer--strict bearing, diplomatic, articulate, and a fine representation of his nation.
If only it weren't for that sarcastic wit of his...
As Jade is a high-ranking officer in the military of one of Auldrant's two reigning sovereignties, he generally behaves like it and treats most diplomats and higher ranking officials from any nation with respect. In addition, if a person has earned his respect, he will often express it through formal speak and what constitutes positive attention coming from him. This is demonstrated in the way he treats former Field Marshal McGovern; he still addresses the man by title although McGovern is retired. Jade also knows when to be on his best behavior; when he is meant to address the king of rivaling nation Kimlasca-Lanvaldear, his country’s stigma does not paint an ill picture in Jade’s mind of the king, and therefore he is able to properly communicate and address Ingobert cordially. This is also how he communicates with other important political figures, including Astor, the merchant king of Chesedonia.
However, this formality is only one side of the Colonel, eclipsed entirely by the way he behaves around the in-game party members, as well as his closest friend, Emperor Peony Upala Malkuth IX. When not fully burdened with the formality of his title and in front of his men, Jade is known to be extremely sarcastic, somewhat impish, and when the occasion calls for it, brutally honest. For example, when he was asking Luke fon Fabre to assist with his division’s safe passage into Kimlascan territory, he took the young noble’s sneering insistence that he ought to bow when asking for a favor most seriously, taking a knee to beg for help. Afterwards, he sarcastically addresses the boy as “Master” when told not to. While most individuals cannot deal with his jeering and flippant personality appropriately, Emperor Peony displays a deep understanding of Jade’s inner workings, and employs similarly devilish tactics to get his “friend” to play along. In truth, while Jade outwardly seems to find his Emperor a burden, he is shown to have been Peony’s friend in youth, and both express their mutual respect and trust for each other often.
Jade is known throughout the entire journey for being a sarcastic and seemingly insincere individual whose true intentions are hard to figure out, and it’s very clear he has a lot to hide with the way he reacts to things as the story progresses. This includes his violent outburst when realizing the true enemy has utilized fomicry—the copying of organic things—in order to clone humans, which he banned for posing ethical and technical problems. In fact, it is one of the few times that Jade expresses his anger. Fomicry, and the misuse of it, is one of the Colonel’s hot buttons, because he created it, and thus was the first to try and cheat death.
It began with a desperate attempt to esurrect his beloved teacher (a horrid failure which led to an unstable, monstrous creation), followed by many more attempts to get it right. He forbade it for a reason, and anytime it’s mentioned, he’ll be driven to anger, whether it’s enraged shouting or icy glares. Usually, he will slip back into either flippant, or serious mannerisms though, and attempt to hide his investment in the matter.
Which brings light to the fact that whenever Jade is questioned on something he doesn’t want to answer, including anything from his childhood or adolescent years, he will typically change the subject to something that’s often more immediately pressing than whatever anyone wants to ask about him. He may even attempt to spin it into an amusing tidbit. It's easy, because Jade is almost constantly smiling, even when matters are deathly serious. He doesn’t want to let anyone in, especially not into certain parts of his life, such as his sordid past, where he was unable to empathize with others or even non-sentient beings, and thus had no value for life and death. While he still struggles with the concept as an adult, having made friends out of the in-game party while attempting to save the world several times has given him an appreciation for their lives; he wouldn’t have wanted them to die for the sake of their missions, and he seems to have some form of empathy with individuals like Luke, who have committed atrocities in the past but are attempting to get past them. He too, has his own demons to deal with, even if he’d rather keep them in the dark.
Deflection, as mentioned, is one of Jade’s fortes. Even when he’s not deflecting from his past, he will often do things such as push physical labor onto more “able-bodied” individuals, or foist the lengthy explanations onto his later-comrade, Guy. Whenever he cannot simply force an individual to do something for philanthropic reasons, he will become more aggressive, using guilt when necessary. After all, he didn’t get to be a Colonel without being ruthless at the same time. And ruthless he is; as a child, he would seek out and carelessly murder monsters for the sake of testing his powers. As an adult, his assertive nature is one of the reasons why he’s achieved so much at what some individuals consider a young age. As well, it’s likely one of the reasons Peony confides in him so much to get the job done. His drive to succeed and ambitious nature, as well as the subjects he’d studied when younger (fomicry to bring back the dead), led to the rumors that the Third Division would steal corpses from the battlefield for him, and he has gained the infamous title of “Jade the Necromancer,“ which is how most characters identify him.
As part of his deflection, Jade is constantly seen wearing a smile, and takes most situations with an eerie sort of ease. His tone is usually laden with haughty sarcasm, or insincerity, while his posture is perpetually one of similar relaxation with one or both hands in the pockets of his uniform. It’s hard to know whether to be afraid or not when he’s smiling, so it’s easier to read his words, which he insists are “always serious.” This can be believed even more, of course, when Jade’s smile is wiped clean off of his face. These are the times when he’s being the most honest, and the Colonel’s brand of honesty can be almost cruel to the ears. For example, he is the one who is instantly willing to kill Arietta the Wild (a soldier, but still a child) when she’s unconscious, to prevent any further problems from her. Further, he’s the one who, while he does care deeply for the main character Luke, state that it would be most prudent for the young noble to sacrifice himself in order to cleanse the world of a poisonous miasma seeping from the core of the planet.
For whatever negative traits Jade possesses, and the coldness he can show towards individuals through his deflective nature, he does have positive links with people. As stated previously, he has been friends with Emperor Peony since childhood, and while their friendship is…unique, it is honest, and he will do whatever the ruler asks of him, not just because he’s part of the Malkuth military. In fact, it was partly Peony’s intervention that stops Jade from continuing to resurrect their dead teacher with fomicry; he couldn’t bear to see the state of almost-lethal injury that his friend had put himself in during an attempt, and outright punches some sense into Jade. Aside from the Emperor, Jade expresses familial attachment to his sister. He asks her how she’s doing when the party visits Keterburg, and when they were younger, his first practical use of fomicry was to fix her broken doll. These are initially the only ties he has, but as he travels with Luke and the others, he develops an attachment to them. Luke in particular is an almost constant reminder of Jade’s past sins concerning fomicry, but he ends up caring for the boy enough to scold him for hiding that he was experiencing negative effects after the incident at the Tower of Rem, and also enough to wish that Luke would return after freeing Lorelei at the conclusion of the game. Although he wouldn’t typically want to waste his time attempting to change the mind of someone inconsequential, he does eventually find Luke to be worth spending the words on, after all the time that they'd shared trying to stop Van.
For better or for worse, one of Jade’s strengths is his intelligence. He was the one who theorized the troublesome but revolutionary process of fomicry, which he worked alongside his former friend Saphir to put it to practice. He’s also got an amazingly sharp wit, and can pick up on whatever anyone else is trying to hide (ironic, since he is the master of hiding his true feelings). He often uses the more mundane information he gleans from his travelmates to pick on them, (for example, Guy’s gynophobia). Because he is more intelligent and worldly than most, if not all of the individuals he travels with, he also prefers to allow them to draw their own conclusions, despite likely having figured the puzzle out himself long before.
In the end, while Jade is a serious, intelligent, and often cruel person who can appear to be on a level higher than the rest of the world, he’s very much human, and by the end of the game more earnestly expresses himself. He’s never rid of the sass, and if he ever let it go, then he just wouldn’t be Jade Curtiss. But running around with a bunch of children (one of them a replica) helped him reconcile the issues he had with fomicry, to the point that he’s able to research it again, and to the point that when Luke returns on the day of his Coming of Age, he can truly smile.
Inventory:
Clothes - Yep, the clothes on his back, which would be his military uniform.
Glasses - His glasses are less to correct vision and more for keeping his Fonic Sight in check. More on that below, but functionally, let's pretend they're just a regular pair of specs!
Spear - You'd never see it until it was too late. Jade makes use of an ability known as the Contamination Effect to break down his spear into its base fonons and particles and layer them onto his arm for easy storage.
Abilities:
Fonist: In Tales of the Abyss, a fonist is the game's version of a spellcaster, except that in his canon, he uses fonons to cast them, all based on one of six elements he can harness. And Jade's pretty much considered the best of the best, even being introduced to the party at level 45 when the other two are around 5-10. This is eventually nerfed in game to accomodate the leveling curve, but hey. He started off better than everyone else. He is gifted with the ability to use the first six Fonons (darkness, ground, wind/lightning, water, fire, and light) and has augmented these abilities further with Fonic Sight.
The way it works, as explained in canon, is to harness ambient fonons in the air by drawing them into your body's fon slots, then use an incantation to power the move. So...using fonic artes is spellcasting.
(Note: if it's amenable to the mods, I'd like him to be able to cast his spells in Hadriel with the same ease as he'd be able to in his canon, except the rules are spellcaster rules.)
Fonic Sight: When he was about 9, Jade did really irresponsible things. One of those irresponsible things was to augment his abilities to a ridiculous level relative to his age by applying fonic glyphs to his eyes. Because obviously that's what you do when your biggest fon slot is your eyes and you intend to make yourself functionally overpowered in the name of science. Fonic Sight causes the user's eyes to turn red, and due to the unstable nature of such a thing, Jade needed to create a limiter--his glasses. Although he's been shown to take his glasses off for short periods of time, the implication is that if he didn't have them, there would be a chance of the Fonic Sight going out of control and blinding or killing him.
Spear/Contamination Effect: In addition to being a powerful fonist, Jade is also an experienced spear user. He was able to lay down one of the Six God-Generals (subordinates of the big bad) with his artes sealed by thinking fast and stabbing him in the chest. This makes him a little more well-rounded on the field, as most spellcasters are at the mercy of their melee fighters to defend them while casting. In addition, Jade makes use of what is called the Contamination Effect to store his spear out of sight. Basically, the idea is to use another dangerous arte to break apart the spear into its base elements and store them in a thin layer along his right arm. Reforming them seems simple, as he's able to summon his spear almost immediately when the situation calls for it.
Genius: Jade is scary smart. As a child, he was able to theorize and put to practice fomicry--the ability to clone--and he was capable of casting high-level fonic artes that even adults struggled with. His intelligence was what got him adopted into the Curtiss military family in the first place and enabled him to continue his pursuit of knowledge. Within the context of the game, it means that Jade is able to explain things that a group of kids/young adults wouldn't be able to understand on their own (fomicry, Van Grants' plans, helping to fix the planet core, etc). As a result, he's often privy to information that the main characters haven't deduced yet, which helps him in being a shrewd tactician. Jade's only real weaknesses have been fon machines (his childhood friend and former research partner Saphir had a closer affinity) and empathy. Other than that, he's able to think swiftly, creatively, and express the most logical and correct action for any situation, whether it requires empathy or not.
Diplomacy: Although he is hardly the leader of the party (way too much work for those old bones), Jade often presents the diplomatic front. He is the one who keeps his head and reminds the other main characters of the situation, and he's the one who often puts together the communications between the royal families. Of course, when he has to bluff, he'll do it, such as when he expressed to King Ingobert of Kimlasca that he had a contingency plan should the king not see things their way. Abject horse hockey; he had nothing planned at all. Just a good poker face.
Secretive/Deflective: This is a skill all on its own. Jade is extremely guarded, and it makes him a good keeper of state secrets, as well as important information that other characters wouldn't want to disperse. For example, he kept Luke's worsening condition around endgame from the party, and kept his childhood past so far removed that it takes other characters spilling the beans for it to ever reach a main character.
Flaws: Where to start? As a child, Jade had a very obvious disregard for the lives of other sentient or non-sentient creatures, and effectively committed manslaughter by killing his childhood professor, Gelda Nebilim, out of ambition to use all seven fonons. Although he has improved in the way he treats others, Jade is still shown to be manipulative and heartless even when serving his own country, and has often treated others coldly.
Even into his adolescence, Jade was making choices that endangered others and himself, in the pursuit of knowledge to cheat death and resurrect his teacher so that he might selfishly beg her forgiveness. He's done a lot of unconscionable things in pursuit of that goal, though he has long since abandoned it and forbid fomicry (for what good that actually did).
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: ((Sample based off of "Kill or Be Killed." Older samples are in the comments of this post if you would prefer more!))
It's been ages since Jade's been this angry. No one's gotten this much of a rise out of him since Van's attempts to functionally kill off the world and renew it with copies of the population.
Nonetheless, his anger remains cold and tapered to a bleeding edge as he walks through Hadriel, arms behind his back. He doesn't need to keep them front to do anything harmful. And hey! For all you know, fellow Hadrielites, he isn't looking for trouble.
Maybe he's just doing a good job of hiding his fear. After all, Jade doesn't wear his emotions even remotely on his sleeve. Maybe there's no reason to be frightened. But just in case the first person he comes across is...
...Perhaps that smile is just a little more malicious than first thought.
"Well, well. Isn't it a little late to be out? I'm certainly in no position to enforce curfew or dole punishments out, seeing as I am not a military official here," he muses more to himself than to the person he has come across. One hand reaches forward to nudge his glasses up a little.
"That being said, I think I would enjoy running a little test."
The smile on his face widens.
"How quickly can you run? And do you think you would be able to escape unscathed?"
A glowing glyph appears beneath him. No spearwork today. He's going to enjoy using his artes on a living person. They've done something wrong, and he's going to punish them regardless of any petty words he may have masked his intentions in.
"Let's begin."
Player name: Kitten
Contact:
Characters currently in-game: Mettaton
CHARACTER
Character Name: Jade Curtiss
Character Age: About...37? By the end of the game anyway
Canon: Tales of the Abyss
Canon Point: Post-game, but before the final scene.
History: Wiki!
Personality: Colonel Jade Curtiss, Third Division, Malkuth Imperial forces. That's how Jade introduces himself in almost every situation. By any first impression, he is the perfect picture of a high-ranking military officer--strict bearing, diplomatic, articulate, and a fine representation of his nation.
If only it weren't for that sarcastic wit of his...
As Jade is a high-ranking officer in the military of one of Auldrant's two reigning sovereignties, he generally behaves like it and treats most diplomats and higher ranking officials from any nation with respect. In addition, if a person has earned his respect, he will often express it through formal speak and what constitutes positive attention coming from him. This is demonstrated in the way he treats former Field Marshal McGovern; he still addresses the man by title although McGovern is retired. Jade also knows when to be on his best behavior; when he is meant to address the king of rivaling nation Kimlasca-Lanvaldear, his country’s stigma does not paint an ill picture in Jade’s mind of the king, and therefore he is able to properly communicate and address Ingobert cordially. This is also how he communicates with other important political figures, including Astor, the merchant king of Chesedonia.
However, this formality is only one side of the Colonel, eclipsed entirely by the way he behaves around the in-game party members, as well as his closest friend, Emperor Peony Upala Malkuth IX. When not fully burdened with the formality of his title and in front of his men, Jade is known to be extremely sarcastic, somewhat impish, and when the occasion calls for it, brutally honest. For example, when he was asking Luke fon Fabre to assist with his division’s safe passage into Kimlascan territory, he took the young noble’s sneering insistence that he ought to bow when asking for a favor most seriously, taking a knee to beg for help. Afterwards, he sarcastically addresses the boy as “Master” when told not to. While most individuals cannot deal with his jeering and flippant personality appropriately, Emperor Peony displays a deep understanding of Jade’s inner workings, and employs similarly devilish tactics to get his “friend” to play along. In truth, while Jade outwardly seems to find his Emperor a burden, he is shown to have been Peony’s friend in youth, and both express their mutual respect and trust for each other often.
Jade is known throughout the entire journey for being a sarcastic and seemingly insincere individual whose true intentions are hard to figure out, and it’s very clear he has a lot to hide with the way he reacts to things as the story progresses. This includes his violent outburst when realizing the true enemy has utilized fomicry—the copying of organic things—in order to clone humans, which he banned for posing ethical and technical problems. In fact, it is one of the few times that Jade expresses his anger. Fomicry, and the misuse of it, is one of the Colonel’s hot buttons, because he created it, and thus was the first to try and cheat death.
It began with a desperate attempt to esurrect his beloved teacher (a horrid failure which led to an unstable, monstrous creation), followed by many more attempts to get it right. He forbade it for a reason, and anytime it’s mentioned, he’ll be driven to anger, whether it’s enraged shouting or icy glares. Usually, he will slip back into either flippant, or serious mannerisms though, and attempt to hide his investment in the matter.
Which brings light to the fact that whenever Jade is questioned on something he doesn’t want to answer, including anything from his childhood or adolescent years, he will typically change the subject to something that’s often more immediately pressing than whatever anyone wants to ask about him. He may even attempt to spin it into an amusing tidbit. It's easy, because Jade is almost constantly smiling, even when matters are deathly serious. He doesn’t want to let anyone in, especially not into certain parts of his life, such as his sordid past, where he was unable to empathize with others or even non-sentient beings, and thus had no value for life and death. While he still struggles with the concept as an adult, having made friends out of the in-game party while attempting to save the world several times has given him an appreciation for their lives; he wouldn’t have wanted them to die for the sake of their missions, and he seems to have some form of empathy with individuals like Luke, who have committed atrocities in the past but are attempting to get past them. He too, has his own demons to deal with, even if he’d rather keep them in the dark.
Deflection, as mentioned, is one of Jade’s fortes. Even when he’s not deflecting from his past, he will often do things such as push physical labor onto more “able-bodied” individuals, or foist the lengthy explanations onto his later-comrade, Guy. Whenever he cannot simply force an individual to do something for philanthropic reasons, he will become more aggressive, using guilt when necessary. After all, he didn’t get to be a Colonel without being ruthless at the same time. And ruthless he is; as a child, he would seek out and carelessly murder monsters for the sake of testing his powers. As an adult, his assertive nature is one of the reasons why he’s achieved so much at what some individuals consider a young age. As well, it’s likely one of the reasons Peony confides in him so much to get the job done. His drive to succeed and ambitious nature, as well as the subjects he’d studied when younger (fomicry to bring back the dead), led to the rumors that the Third Division would steal corpses from the battlefield for him, and he has gained the infamous title of “Jade the Necromancer,“ which is how most characters identify him.
As part of his deflection, Jade is constantly seen wearing a smile, and takes most situations with an eerie sort of ease. His tone is usually laden with haughty sarcasm, or insincerity, while his posture is perpetually one of similar relaxation with one or both hands in the pockets of his uniform. It’s hard to know whether to be afraid or not when he’s smiling, so it’s easier to read his words, which he insists are “always serious.” This can be believed even more, of course, when Jade’s smile is wiped clean off of his face. These are the times when he’s being the most honest, and the Colonel’s brand of honesty can be almost cruel to the ears. For example, he is the one who is instantly willing to kill Arietta the Wild (a soldier, but still a child) when she’s unconscious, to prevent any further problems from her. Further, he’s the one who, while he does care deeply for the main character Luke, state that it would be most prudent for the young noble to sacrifice himself in order to cleanse the world of a poisonous miasma seeping from the core of the planet.
For whatever negative traits Jade possesses, and the coldness he can show towards individuals through his deflective nature, he does have positive links with people. As stated previously, he has been friends with Emperor Peony since childhood, and while their friendship is…unique, it is honest, and he will do whatever the ruler asks of him, not just because he’s part of the Malkuth military. In fact, it was partly Peony’s intervention that stops Jade from continuing to resurrect their dead teacher with fomicry; he couldn’t bear to see the state of almost-lethal injury that his friend had put himself in during an attempt, and outright punches some sense into Jade. Aside from the Emperor, Jade expresses familial attachment to his sister. He asks her how she’s doing when the party visits Keterburg, and when they were younger, his first practical use of fomicry was to fix her broken doll. These are initially the only ties he has, but as he travels with Luke and the others, he develops an attachment to them. Luke in particular is an almost constant reminder of Jade’s past sins concerning fomicry, but he ends up caring for the boy enough to scold him for hiding that he was experiencing negative effects after the incident at the Tower of Rem, and also enough to wish that Luke would return after freeing Lorelei at the conclusion of the game. Although he wouldn’t typically want to waste his time attempting to change the mind of someone inconsequential, he does eventually find Luke to be worth spending the words on, after all the time that they'd shared trying to stop Van.
For better or for worse, one of Jade’s strengths is his intelligence. He was the one who theorized the troublesome but revolutionary process of fomicry, which he worked alongside his former friend Saphir to put it to practice. He’s also got an amazingly sharp wit, and can pick up on whatever anyone else is trying to hide (ironic, since he is the master of hiding his true feelings). He often uses the more mundane information he gleans from his travelmates to pick on them, (for example, Guy’s gynophobia). Because he is more intelligent and worldly than most, if not all of the individuals he travels with, he also prefers to allow them to draw their own conclusions, despite likely having figured the puzzle out himself long before.
In the end, while Jade is a serious, intelligent, and often cruel person who can appear to be on a level higher than the rest of the world, he’s very much human, and by the end of the game more earnestly expresses himself. He’s never rid of the sass, and if he ever let it go, then he just wouldn’t be Jade Curtiss. But running around with a bunch of children (one of them a replica) helped him reconcile the issues he had with fomicry, to the point that he’s able to research it again, and to the point that when Luke returns on the day of his Coming of Age, he can truly smile.
Inventory:
Clothes - Yep, the clothes on his back, which would be his military uniform.
Glasses - His glasses are less to correct vision and more for keeping his Fonic Sight in check. More on that below, but functionally, let's pretend they're just a regular pair of specs!
Spear - You'd never see it until it was too late. Jade makes use of an ability known as the Contamination Effect to break down his spear into its base fonons and particles and layer them onto his arm for easy storage.
Abilities:
Fonist: In Tales of the Abyss, a fonist is the game's version of a spellcaster, except that in his canon, he uses fonons to cast them, all based on one of six elements he can harness. And Jade's pretty much considered the best of the best, even being introduced to the party at level 45 when the other two are around 5-10. This is eventually nerfed in game to accomodate the leveling curve, but hey. He started off better than everyone else. He is gifted with the ability to use the first six Fonons (darkness, ground, wind/lightning, water, fire, and light) and has augmented these abilities further with Fonic Sight.
The way it works, as explained in canon, is to harness ambient fonons in the air by drawing them into your body's fon slots, then use an incantation to power the move. So...using fonic artes is spellcasting.
(Note: if it's amenable to the mods, I'd like him to be able to cast his spells in Hadriel with the same ease as he'd be able to in his canon, except the rules are spellcaster rules.)
Fonic Sight: When he was about 9, Jade did really irresponsible things. One of those irresponsible things was to augment his abilities to a ridiculous level relative to his age by applying fonic glyphs to his eyes. Because obviously that's what you do when your biggest fon slot is your eyes and you intend to make yourself functionally overpowered in the name of science. Fonic Sight causes the user's eyes to turn red, and due to the unstable nature of such a thing, Jade needed to create a limiter--his glasses. Although he's been shown to take his glasses off for short periods of time, the implication is that if he didn't have them, there would be a chance of the Fonic Sight going out of control and blinding or killing him.
Spear/Contamination Effect: In addition to being a powerful fonist, Jade is also an experienced spear user. He was able to lay down one of the Six God-Generals (subordinates of the big bad) with his artes sealed by thinking fast and stabbing him in the chest. This makes him a little more well-rounded on the field, as most spellcasters are at the mercy of their melee fighters to defend them while casting. In addition, Jade makes use of what is called the Contamination Effect to store his spear out of sight. Basically, the idea is to use another dangerous arte to break apart the spear into its base elements and store them in a thin layer along his right arm. Reforming them seems simple, as he's able to summon his spear almost immediately when the situation calls for it.
Genius: Jade is scary smart. As a child, he was able to theorize and put to practice fomicry--the ability to clone--and he was capable of casting high-level fonic artes that even adults struggled with. His intelligence was what got him adopted into the Curtiss military family in the first place and enabled him to continue his pursuit of knowledge. Within the context of the game, it means that Jade is able to explain things that a group of kids/young adults wouldn't be able to understand on their own (fomicry, Van Grants' plans, helping to fix the planet core, etc). As a result, he's often privy to information that the main characters haven't deduced yet, which helps him in being a shrewd tactician. Jade's only real weaknesses have been fon machines (his childhood friend and former research partner Saphir had a closer affinity) and empathy. Other than that, he's able to think swiftly, creatively, and express the most logical and correct action for any situation, whether it requires empathy or not.
Diplomacy: Although he is hardly the leader of the party (way too much work for those old bones), Jade often presents the diplomatic front. He is the one who keeps his head and reminds the other main characters of the situation, and he's the one who often puts together the communications between the royal families. Of course, when he has to bluff, he'll do it, such as when he expressed to King Ingobert of Kimlasca that he had a contingency plan should the king not see things their way. Abject horse hockey; he had nothing planned at all. Just a good poker face.
Secretive/Deflective: This is a skill all on its own. Jade is extremely guarded, and it makes him a good keeper of state secrets, as well as important information that other characters wouldn't want to disperse. For example, he kept Luke's worsening condition around endgame from the party, and kept his childhood past so far removed that it takes other characters spilling the beans for it to ever reach a main character.
Flaws: Where to start? As a child, Jade had a very obvious disregard for the lives of other sentient or non-sentient creatures, and effectively committed manslaughter by killing his childhood professor, Gelda Nebilim, out of ambition to use all seven fonons. Although he has improved in the way he treats others, Jade is still shown to be manipulative and heartless even when serving his own country, and has often treated others coldly.
Even into his adolescence, Jade was making choices that endangered others and himself, in the pursuit of knowledge to cheat death and resurrect his teacher so that he might selfishly beg her forgiveness. He's done a lot of unconscionable things in pursuit of that goal, though he has long since abandoned it and forbid fomicry (for what good that actually did).
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: ((Sample based off of "Kill or Be Killed." Older samples are in the comments of this post if you would prefer more!))
It's been ages since Jade's been this angry. No one's gotten this much of a rise out of him since Van's attempts to functionally kill off the world and renew it with copies of the population.
Nonetheless, his anger remains cold and tapered to a bleeding edge as he walks through Hadriel, arms behind his back. He doesn't need to keep them front to do anything harmful. And hey! For all you know, fellow Hadrielites, he isn't looking for trouble.
Maybe he's just doing a good job of hiding his fear. After all, Jade doesn't wear his emotions even remotely on his sleeve. Maybe there's no reason to be frightened. But just in case the first person he comes across is...
...Perhaps that smile is just a little more malicious than first thought.
"Well, well. Isn't it a little late to be out? I'm certainly in no position to enforce curfew or dole punishments out, seeing as I am not a military official here," he muses more to himself than to the person he has come across. One hand reaches forward to nudge his glasses up a little.
"That being said, I think I would enjoy running a little test."
The smile on his face widens.
"How quickly can you run? And do you think you would be able to escape unscathed?"
A glowing glyph appears beneath him. No spearwork today. He's going to enjoy using his artes on a living person. They've done something wrong, and he's going to punish them regardless of any petty words he may have masked his intentions in.
"Let's begin."
New Sample, if needed!
Old Sample
It had been a very long time since Jade had felt helpless in anything, but...ever since he'd shown up in this strange place, he'd found himself rather lacking in a few things. Things that he hadn't realized he'd lost in the first place.
But after an uncertain (if short) while wandering through the place, he'd come to two rather obvious conclusions--one, this was not Auldrant or anywhere related, and two, the land was even more barren of fonic activity than he had ever experienced. He couldn't even muster a simple Energy Blast, or summon his spear. Personally, he didn't find it very funny. But adversity had never stopped Jade before, and so he'd kept himself busy, stopped in a public place or two to ask a few questions and get a better hold of the situation.
From what he understood...the locals were undergoing some unpleasant effects bestowed upon them by their "Gods." In particular, they were robbed of something important to them; something that could be one of their five senses, or maybe an entire limb? He'd even encountered some who had apparently lost nerve function in their lower bodies, rendering them paraplegic.
Needless to say, he was on his own.
And now, a day or so later, he had come to realize that was a good thing. Because Jade hadn't been spared the machinations of these Gods after all.
Perfect vision had begun to blur, slowly at first. But then it worsened over time, to the point where he could only assume the worst--at the time, anyway. Losing his vision was inconvenient indeed...
Except he hadn't just lost his vision. The headache building behind his stinging eyes revealed that much to him, and the tingling discomfort in his right arm all but confirmed it. There wasn't any lack of fonons here. In fact...the one lacking was him. Ever since he'd stepped foot in the place known as Hadriel, he'd lost his ability to control or sense fonic artes. A true problem for a prodigy whose abilities all centered on perfect control, aided by a limiting pair of glasses that couldn't even help him see at this point.
Jade quietly made his way to the outskirts of the town. Perhaps he'd learned something valuable from his journey with Luke and the others after all, or at least that was the thought that seized him as his vision began to fade to black, the burning intensifying to the point where, although his hands stayed in his pockets and his body seemed relaxed from any vantage from the font...it still caused him to wince and squint.
Yes. He'd learned that when faced with a choice to save lives at the expense of your own, then there is no question as to what you should do. Even if it means you'll be dying alone, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Once properly distanced, Jade closes his eyes, as if to somehow relieve the pressure. So this was how it felt to be helpless. This was what it felt to have the power of an arte you can't control overtake your body. How pathetic, really. All that work, ruined by fate. He can't help it.
Jade smiles beyond the pain, standing still and alone, waiting for the final light to go out. Waiting to die, perhaps?
If death had the courage, of course.
No God would feed from this man's fear. He was too stubborn, too set in his ways. And not the least bit sorry.