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[crimsonsnow]

Player Information

Name: rar
Age: 24
Contact details: rarsneezes, dm for discord if u need it
Other characters: n/a

Character Information

Name: Jade (no last name in this canon, but if he has to pick one, he’ll pick Caesar)
Canon: Tales of the Abyss, shifted several miles left with crossover tossed in for flavor (YWKON)
Canon Point: 3 months post 1000/2 Days
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: AU
Age: Physically in the ballpark of 35. Has been around for about 100 years.

World Information: On a separate post here. (Thank you Nael.)

Personal History:

Content warnings: Abusive relationships. Memory loss. Murder. Deaths.

(collapsable sections GO)

On Citan, and Mythra

Imagine you are a blade, and you are an hour old. You have been reawoken after having died midway through helping your driver with some top-secret government project. In your room, you find a note you left to yourself claiming that your driver has killed you three times before and would gladly do it again to wipe your memories if he thought you were going to cause him problems.

Your name is Jade and you need to figure out how to survive this lifetime.

Jade’s driver is one Dr. Citan Uzuki, who despite being a civilian (as far as Jade knows), landed himself a high-paying job in the Tethe’allan military overseeing research, primarily on artificial blades. (If they’ve worked on other research before this, Jade has forgotten it and Citan isn’t telling.) Jade is a glorified secretary, doing all of Citan’s paperwork and every errand that Citan cannot be assed to do himself, which is almost all of them. Unlike a human secretary, he doesn’t get paid. Unlike a human secretary, he cannot quit the job. The only blessing is that it could be worse.

Could be worse, as if he isn’t bound to a man who thinks him more tool than person. Could be worse, as if he isn’t living every day trying to avoid getting killed, again.

(Were Jade another blade, another man, perhaps killing Citan day one and being done with it would have occurred to him. But blades are built to love their drivers, and Jade would sooner freeze in place than take action.)

Three years later, the project shifts from artificial blades to artificial Aegises, and goes from one researcher to four. Myyah, who was working on the project before this, (they might have been friends, before he died, but now it’s awkward); Klaus and Galea, who successfully created an artificial blade for a grad student project and were hired immediately; and Anna, who had personal ties to Myyah and was something of an expert in blade memory. With them is Mythra, the artificial blade Klaus and Galea created, currently in resonance with Galea.

The first artificial Aegis prototype they produce is a bust; not wanting the technology to fall into Sylvarant hands, Citan kills her.

Everyone disliked that.

Unfortunately for the science crew, they are now on house arrest. Unfortunately for Jade, it’s his job to do something about Mythra after she tries to break her family out. Imagine you are a blade, and you have to kill one of the few people you consider your friend, because your driver thinks blades are disposable, and you can’t tell him no because then he’ll kill you too.

Fortunately, in a weird, broken way, the project stalls without Mythra. Galea insists they need to reference her source code if they have any chance at creating an artificial blade, so Citan agrees to reawaken her, on one stipulation: he drives her.

When Mythra wakes back up, she remembers, having been given a patch that would record her memories between deaths. This is great, except for the fact that if Citan finds out, Mythra will be surely shattered. And so begins Jade and Mythra’s long con—keep Citan from discovering the truth, figure out how to get them all out of here.

Mythra ends up being the force that gets Jade moving, after five years of being frozen with fear. Mythra is what keeps Jade sane, when Citan starts breathing down their necks. Mythra is the first person Jade can be completely honest with. There is no possible way to overstate Mythra’s significance to him, for what she did for him then, what she kept doing for him for the rest of their lives after. A light in the darkness. A clear in the storm. Someone perfectly willing to tell him to get his head out of his goddamn ass and make a move already—not only because they’ll both die if he doesn’t, but because he deserves better than this, fullstop.

And so Jade pulls his head out of his ass.

The plan is as so: Klaus and Galea create two more artificial blades to provide a little extra muscle in the “breaking out of a high security military base” thing, and until that’s complete, everyone stalls. Unfortunately for them, not only is Citan good at reading all of Jade’s tells, Myyah sells them out, because she’d been plugging along on actual artificial Aegis research the whole time, despite everyone else agreeing to drop it. (After all, Tethe’alla only wanted an Aegis to power their war weapon.) Klaus and Galea complete the blades, Mythra’s siblings – Malos and Pyra – but don’t get to resonate with them. Citan confiscates them, sends them to a different military base, promotes Myyah to another department, and kills Mythra.

Safe to say Jade doesn’t take this well. Without Mythra to anchor him, he’s left to wade Citan’s bullshit all on his own, while Citan cracks down on him. More work. Less time to breathe. He manages to smuggle Anna to freedom, but then Citan attempts to murder him. To make himself look blameless, he goes with starting a goddamn fire that destroys about a quarter of the base. Jade survives, but it destroyed all the failsafes he had to tell himself what was going on if he ever forgot again, excepting one. And like a horrible cherry on top, Citan finds that one, so! Citan officially knows Jade knows about the murder. Jade is fucking panicking.

But his fear response is to freeze, and he can’t very well get three noncombatants out of a high security military base on his own. Especially not when he is constantly losing hours, days, weeks at a time, simply to his grief. Had the base’s resident healer blade Hubert not stepped in, Jade might never have gotten unstuck. Not that Hubert’s any Mythra, because he certainly isn’t, but it’s still nice being reminded other people do care about you, even if your driver doesn’t. The fact that Hubert’s driver Flynn also thought this was rightly fucked and they were both willing to help Jade and the scientist crew break out certainly helped as well. Someone else could do the legwork, when Jade was too frozen to do anything.

What actually gets Jade moving is that Citan suggests they take a trip off-base to investigate something, just the two of them, which Jade rightly reads as a thinly veiled excuse to hide what was definitely going to be murder. Jade manages to talk his way out of going with, but that means he has to move, and he has to move now.

Hubert and Klaus and Galea already had most of a plan: create a significant distraction, slip out in the chaos, with Hubert and Flynn and one more artificial blade they created (Alvis) to cover them. Jade’s part in this is to collect Myyah, but more importantly, collect Mythra’s core crystal from storage. Citan’s meant to be gone three days, so they intend to leave that night, after most of the base has gone to sleep, and after Citan has put sufficient distance between him and them. That would get the scientist crew out, and leave Jade to hunt Citan down afterwards (not too hard of a task, since driver and blade can tell the exact location of each other no matter the distance). There is exactly one way out of resonance that doesn’t involve dying and losing his memories, and though becoming a flesh eater is strict taboo, Jade doesn’t really have another choice.

The only problem is that Citan is more familiar with Jade’s tactics than Jade himself is, so halfway into the night he starts heading back, hoping to catch Jade in the process of whatever the hell he’s plotting. Jade manages to realize with sufficient time to get them on the move, but they’re cutting it really close. Really, really close.

Citan intercepts them before Jade can pass Klaus and Galea off to Hubert and Flynn. Jade sends them off on their own, with Alvis to guard them, and makes his stand.

There is exactly one way to get out of resonance and survive after your driver is dead. The battle is blessedly quick, and after he’s killed Citan, all Jade has to do is eat* the man’s heart. (*"Eat" is a colloquial term. What he actually did was perform surgery on himself. While dying.) Effectively in resonance with himself, now, Jade’s a free man.

Well, provided he gets out of here, but the hard part is over. Myyah elects to stay behind, because her children, the artificial Aegises, are complete and have been stolen from her. Jade’s not risking his life or his freedom dealing with that mess, so he lets her stay and goes to find Mythra instead.

The plan was to let Mythra resonate with Galea again. What actually happens is Jade resonates with her.

She’s happy to see him, mad she didn’t get to help with the murdering Citan thing, eager to get the hell out of here. Hubert and the rest have already cleared a path, and procured transport, so getting out isn’t hard at all.

And just like that, they’re really, truly free.

On Malik (and Mythra again)

Starting a new life is a lot harder than simply killing your abusive driver and getting the hell out of dodge, though. Fortunately for Jade and Mythra, within a month they land themselves in a tavern owned by one Malik Caesar, a flesh eater who has been providing a halfway house for other blades in Jade and Mythra’s situation for the past couple of centuries. The intention is that Jade and Mythra would only stay for a few months while they figured things out. The reality is that they never move out.

The thing about flesh eaters is that they can live forever, provided they aren’t killed. And blades in resonance with a driver who won’t die of old age functionally live forever, too. Jade and Mythra have all the time in the world to work through their trauma, at least, which safe to say there is A Lot of.

There's a bit of a rough start (thanks to the trauma) which almost breaks Jade and Mythra up, but they were mostly being stupid, and afterwards come out not only better but even more ride or die. Emotional support bastards! Platonic! Life! Partners!! They aren't giving up on each other! The fact they are going to spend the next hundred years in resonance only deepens their bond. Once again, there is no possible way to overstate what Mythra means to Jade.

In the next hundred years they do things like: illegally attend college, work out a way to patch other blades to keep memories between lifetimes as Mythra can, reunite with one of Mythra's three siblings, and briefly meet Citan's daughter Midori, which was weird, if enlightening. They also adopt an artificial Aegis prototype named Sophie that Sylvarant created 50 years after Tethe’alla completed theirs. Malik is driving her, Jade and Mythra love her. They would kill for her. Yes, literally.

Speaking of Malik, yes, he and Jade got married somewhere in there. No, Jade is not going to elaborate on this to anyone. Yes, he is going to insist it’s for tax purposes only. (Mythra is suffering.)

Since Malik is prone to adopting strays, they eventually have to build their own village from the ground up to hold all these lightly traumatized flesh eaters. It sure is a good thing Jade stole a significant portion of Citan's money in the wake of the man's death to fund this kind of thing.

About 15 years prior to the events of YWKON itself, the village is obliterated by an Aegis canon (war machine powered by a living Aegis). Jade and his immediate family (Mythra, Malik, Sophie) were out of town at the time, and come home to-- nothing, just a circle of black glass scarring the earth. They could only assume everyone else was dead. They move elsewhere. Rebuild elsewhere. Malik adopts strays again, because that's what he's always going to do, but it's still... hard. None of them cope with the grief well. (There is, in fact, about a year where if Jade and Mythra aren't sharing a room - if not a bed - sleeping is extremely difficult.)

Finding out some of their family, namely Mythra's brother Malos and his driver-slash-adopted-daughter Anna (reincarnation may be involved), were alive and just not telling anyone is a particularly bad time for Jade and Mythra. Like, they're extremely glad Malos in particular isn't dead, but like. Ghosting them for 15 years? Rude, Anna. Safe to say they haven't forgiven Anna yet and might never. But... there are more important things to worry about.

Asch (Asch)

A hundred years after they escape Citan, a boy named Lloyd (tangentially Jade's great-nephew because this family tree is a fucking nightmare) and the artificial Aegises Zelos and Colette (who the project Jade worked on was directly responsible for), rewrite the whole blade system. Resonance is now a choice and blades can walk away from abusive drivers whenever they damn well please without having to eat any hearts or risk losing their memories.

Not that that really changes what Malik’s doing, or anything. Blades still need a place to stay while they readjust to things! Not only are there blades getting the hell away from bad drivers, there are also the blades that have spent several years, decades, centuries asleep, waking now that the system rewrite allows them to wake without a driver.

One of these blades is Asch, someone who’s spent the past thousand years asleep. He wouldn’t be noteworthy, except for three things.

One: he knew Jade, a thousand years ago.

Two: he remembers his life, a thousand years ago.

Three: his driver was killing him the same way Citan was killing Jade.

That’s not the kind of similarity you can turn away from, not the kind that Jade can shove under the rug, even if he hates acknowledging he was anyone else before this lifetime, because that requires acknowledging all the things he forgot. But this? This is the one thing that Mythra and her memory patch could never understand. The being reset back to zero, by a driver who thought your memories disposable.

And so Asch very quickly joins the short list of people Jade would trust with literally all of his secrets.

Personality:

Jade is, first and foremost, a truth blade that was forced to spend the first five years of his life lying in order to survive. Not that truth blades are honest to a fault, but it does create a sense of doublespeak around Jade; deflecting on habit, but choosing to be more honest than he might be in another lifetime, in defiance of all the times he couldn’t. He doesn’t want to lie about who he is or what he knows, not anymore. And he certainly isn’t going to lie just to spare your feelings. Being lied to upsets him just as much, though he understands why anyone might choose to do it, and why some things just aren't any of his business. Just because he's honest doesn't mean he's going to tell you every little thing about his past, after all. In fact, the less he has to tell you about it, the better. There's no sense dwelling on old memories, things that happened a hundred years ago. Those are for him, and for him alone. (Well, and for Mythra, but that's given.)

So to a stranger, Jade can read as somewhat of a bastard at first pass. This is somewhat intentional - provided they don't have a blatantly wrong idea about him (cons of being a truth blade; being picky about being misinterpreted), he doesn't care much what other people think of him. They certainly don't have to like him. The fact Mythra does is plenty for him. After all, when you are a hundred years old, and your past is very, very complicated, it's easier to simply not open up to new people. He doesn't expect anyone new will be in his life for long, to be honest, and is used to working on a scale of "you only find out my deepest secrets after it's been fifty years, no sooner".

However, this is not to say he is completely flippant with everything, because he isn't. He regards every matter with exactly the levity and respect it deserves. When it matters, it matters. Further, though a stranger would not be remiss to peg him as an insufferable know-it-all who seems rather full of himself, and is perhaps a bit of an annoying prick... He does genuinely care about giving other's the space to voice their opinions, and trying to take those opinions into consideration. He would hate to be seen as apathetic, and knows nothing is more frustrating than feeling like you are not allowed a say in matters... Though once again, if he thinks what you've said is stupid, he will tell you as such.

And if you do end up getting close to Jade, you will find that when he cares, he cares. He may not be very good at showing it, at expressing his affection or his trust, but that's mostly just a matter of knowing how to read him. Which... well, the only people truly good at reading him are people who have known him for upwards of twenty years, but that's besides the point. It's not his fault he doesn't process emotions or affection quite the same way anyone else does. You just have to get used to Jade saying things without really saying them, and reading between the lines.

Of course, he is also used to having Mythra play translator for him, because he hasn't been without her for long in the past hundred years. And after a hundred years of being Jade&Mythra, sometimes it's difficult knowing how to function while being Just Jade. Not that he's completely incapable of functioning without her! But some things are harder. Especially since most of his ways of coping with his trauma triggers being stepped on involve Mythra anchoring him in some fashion. Whoops!

Speaking of Mythra, perhaps the fastest way to piss Jade off would be to insult her or harm her in some fashion. He especially despises the insinuation that you can boil their relationship down to solely being blade and driver - further, the notion that blades are just tools for their drivers greatly upsets him, and will similarly incur his anger. He knows the blade system is - was - unbalanced, he is intimately aware of that, but to imply that he would ever treat Mythra the way Citan treated him--

Speaking of Citan, the less he has to think about their similarities, the better. It’s difficult, though, when their baseline personalities had so much overlap, especially in the humor department. Whether Jade was always like that or just influenced so thoroughly by a man who was reportedly living in his head for twenty years, he will never know, and that haunts him. Because of this, he refuses to act in any way Citan did, which includes him rarely pawning his own work off onto other people. Thankfully, after a hundred years, he rarely channels his last driver on accident – though it’s still extremely uncomfortable for him if he ever feels like he did.

He doesn’t hate himself, but he does hate all the parts of him that were tainted by Citan. But there’s only so much he can cut, excise, discard. The rest he has to live with, just like the heart in his chest.


Key themes: Wanting to survive, remember, live. Healing even though emotional scars always dig much deeper than physical scars do. The necessity of bringing those abusing power over you to justice vs the difficulty of actually procuring that justice.

Main Motivation: He holds his memories above all else, excepting only his family. Truth is his second main motivator, with justice only a step behind. In fact, he can become completely obsessed with discovering the truth, especially if the truth has been obfuscated in some fashion.


Skills/Abilities:

WEAPON: All blades, including Jade, can summon a weapon unique to them at will. Jade’s weapon is a spear, which of course, he is proficient in combat with. The spear is constructed of pure ether, making it more difficult to break than a regular weapon. And even if it does break, Jade can simply construct a new one. (Most adjacent to Kingdom Hearts Keyblades.)

ELEMENT (ICE): Blades are also attuned to one element in particular; Jade’s element is ice. All of his spells are based in ice magic, and he can manipulate and summon ice at will. He has no control over water in its liquid state, but he can freeze water (or… any liquid) instantly solid, which would then grant him control over it. He usually doesn’t bother with standing liquid, though, because he simply generates so much ice magic that he can pull from his own reserves of ether rather than relying on his environment.

A more subtle application of his ice abilities are that he is unaffected by the cold, can pass without a trace through snow, and frozen lakes will never break under his weight. He also can chill any drink he touches, which is technically just an ice blade thing, but also…

LEAKY BUCKET: Upon becoming a flesh eater, Jade received a significant boost to his already powerful ether levels. The drawback is that he doesn’t stop producing ether, leaking it all over the place. He’s mostly able to keep it under control so that the worst he does is lower the temperature around him by a few degrees (and make him permanently cold to the touch), but how much he’s outputting is directly tied to how stressed he is. Under significant duress he has accidentally caused a blizzard before, but generally it never gets more drastic than “made that brewing snowstorm finally start” or “turned it from rain to hail”, which… is still pretty drastic, but. Indoor snowfalls localized directly over his head also aren’t unheard of, for him. The most common thing he does, though, is simply freeze the surface of whatever he’s in contact with.

He has an extremely hard time getting a drink that isn’t cold due to this. You wanted hot chocolate? Warm tea? Tough luck!

THAT’S A FUN WAY TO MURDER: Jade can technically freeze someone’s blood solid (if, they run on blood, or some other water-based liquid), which would surely kill them! He’ll only do that if given a reason: usually sufficiently pissed off or sufficiently short on time. It’s a messy way to kill, but also the fastest that doesn’t require getting close.

#JUST BLADE THINGS: Blades are known for accelerated healing and the capacity to recover from any non-fatal wound, if given time and sufficient ether. Jade is not one of those blades, because he is a flesh eater. Enough of him is human that his healing has been significantly nerfed. He might heal faster than a human does, but not by much.

He retains his blade strength and agility though, which are generally better than a human's, though not quite the "superstrength" or "superspeed" categories. Can also stick landings with no damage on falls greater than a human could. (For specificity, let's go no more than twice greater, if that.)

Like other blades, somewhat reliant on ether/magical energy to survive (any ambient energy in any living world should be fine). Unlike other blades, between being a flesh eater and a leaky bucket, he can survive longer in no-ether zones, though his spells etc. will be significantly nerfed, if he can use them at all.

ETHER SENSE: Can sense ether or other elemental magical equivalent called by a different name. This applies to both people and ambient energy.

GENERAL: Can cook/clean etc. as much as generally necessary to get by. Does being good at paperwork count as a skill? He's good at that, unfortunately. Accounting is the only stuff he can look at without hating his life.


Item: A diary, half full.

Sample: Soup!!

Notes: Mods, please put him in a room with Asch if possible. Jade’s stress reaction is to freeze things and without Asch to anchor him he is bound to piss other roommates off by, you know, constantly freezing the room over and/or dunking the room to subzero temperatures...