devils see app

[ifs]

P L A Y E R

☓ Name: Christy
☓ Personal journal: swagu
☓ Age: 21
☓ Other characters in The Devils See: n/a
☓ Email: evybay[at]gmail[dot]com
☓ AIM/MSN/Yahoo! Messenger: swagu. I'm also swag_sauce (see a theme?) on AIM, but I only get on if someone tells me to, so.

C H A R A C T E R

☓ Name: Arcueid Brunestud
☓ Series: Tsukihime
☓ Reference: Wiki
☓ Canon point: Arcueid Route, post True End
☓ Age: Old as balls. Nah, she's ~800 years old though she looks to be and acts like a young adult.

☓ Previous TDS memories? n/a
☓ Personality:
“Really? I like 'What ifs.'
Not knowing how things will turn out, yet
still having hope at least for that moment.”

Arcueid is really one of the most cheerful, optimistic and friendly people you could ever meet. She seems to have a great interest and passion for the normal things in life, and takes great joy in things as simple as eating a hamburger or going to see a movie. In fact, it almost feels like she's living every moment like it's her last, so every moment is full of joy and hope. And, of course, as it goes for fictional characters, in a way, she is.

Arcueid isn't your typical vampire for a lot of reasons besides her bubbly personality. She's the princess of the vampires, and yet not, because in reality, Arcueid is a being created by the rest of the vampires to exterminate their kin who had fallen and been unable to suppress their desire to feed on humans. She existed solely as a weapon and had no thoughts or desires, since every time she was awoken to perform her duty as executioner, her memories of each time were destroyed before she again went to sleep. This continued for a while until a human seeking immortality tricked Arcueid into drinking his blood, which not only made him a very powerful vampire, but also awakened the vampiric impulse that had been dormant in Arcueid before. After slaughtering many vampires in a berserk mode, she opted to sleep again until her duty needed to be performed once more.

So during the course of Tsukihime, Arcueid is tracking down the now-vampire that fed her his blood, but happens to run into a young man who can see death manifested as lines and dots on everything. But of course, as luck would have it, he's also got a healthy dose of crazy and ends up being able to kill Arcueid and significantly weaken her. It's by this odd team-up of a vampire and the person that killed her that Arcueid is able to become more than a weapon, because through having to work with Shiki, she's exposed to many things that she otherwise would have had no interest or need to look into.

Since she doesn't have much experience with the world, she tends to come off as rather naive and childish. Experiences like movies are an enthralling and unique experience that she gets totally caught up in, or on the other hand, if someone is a bit rude to her, she might call them something as childish as a "meanie." It's an interesting and often noted contradiction, since this is a woman with great and terrible power, yet she takes the greatest pleasure in simple and normal things in life.

And as such, we come to that quote at the top. This is the quote that I think embodies how Arcueid is and views the world. It's an optimistic and hopeful sentiment, but also very bittersweet. Even though she takes such joy in the normalcies of human life, she's also caught in the "what ifs." Even though she enjoys them so much, she also believes they're fundamentally something she can't have. She can't have a normal and fun life because it was never meant to be, and she even goes as far in this belief as to deny herself of the chance once it's presented to her. To Arcueid, that kind of happiness simply isn't possible for her. It's ultimately just a "what if."

This is the ultimate tragedy of Arcueid, and it's one that she keeps very well hidden. She's torn between her duty as the weapon of the True Ancestors and her desire to simply live. She doesn't complain about her burden at all, since she feels that it's something that she deserves or is simply her fate, but still longs for something else. So this tragedy is why Arcueid really presents as so bubbly, curious and cheerful. Every interaction and experience she has is something temporary and fleeting, so she wants to learn and enjoy as much as she can before she loses it once she returns to sleep.

But of course, it's hard to pull that out of her. Arcueid is the kind of person to keep up that cheerful and friendly facade until her death, because she doesn't want to burden other people with her problems. Even when she does reveal her feelings of loneliness and the hardship she's dealt with, she has a habit of sugarcoating it. She might say that it's "not so bad" with a smile, but of course, she's really just trying to diminish the impact it has. She has gotten a bit better at learning to share her feelings since meeting Shiki, but it's still not something she will easily admit to.

But overall, Arcueid is a strange, whimsical person. One moment she might be seriously explaining how to confront a situation, but at one comment may laugh with a bright smile and instead branch off to something else. She may not quite understand the general social norms (though she's getting better!!), but it somehow makes her very charming despite her mistakes. Yet these traits don't negate her inclination as a living weapon, so she's hardly to be underestimated as an enemy, which makes her a valuable friend and ally. But most of all, her greatest strength is to look in the face of an impossible circumstance with a smile and wonder "what if," and hope for what the future may hold, even if it's almost impossible.

☓ Abilities:
So, as a brief summar, Arcueid is a special True Ancestor, which means she has a ton of abilities. And, well, the fact that she exists in TYPE-MOON... Which, as a general note, Arcueid is considered one of the most powerful beings in her universe even at a highly reduced state of power, so. She's hella strong. Pretty much all of her abilities are supernatural in nature, but I've broken them down by what's common to all/most True Ancestors and what's unique to Arcueid.

True Ancestor Abilities

• Vampire Claws: Arcueid is able to transform her hands slightly to be more suited for RIPPIN AND TEARIN, aka more claw-like. There's not a good picture of this in action in Tsukihime, but this (crappy) screenshot from Fate/Extra will at least give a general gist of it.
  
• Invulnerability: Most True Ancestors are essentially invulnerable to damage from normal weapons, and if they are injured, have heightened and extreme regeneration. Arcueid is a step above even this and very few magical weapons can harm her. At night and during the full moon, her strength and regeneration are heightened.
  
• Mystic Eyes: She's able to exert limited control over others (like planting suggestions) through eye contact, though this is a fairly easy effect to avoid once you know about it.

Arcueid's Abilities
Well. Arcueid's individual abilities are where shit gets crazy since TYPE-MOON loves to be insanely detailed and focused on power-levels, so I'm giving a basic overview. Trust me, they're more complex than this, and mostly don't even apply to anything in the game. Such is TYPE-MOON.

• Marble Phantasm: This is a power with a lot of rules, so here's a wiki link, but is unlikely that she would be able to manifest it in game. Essentially, Marble Phantasm is a power that allows Arcueid to "overwrite" reality and reshape it according to a vision of the world. In her case, it's by manifesting the Millennium Castle Brunestud, the one home of the True Ancestors. In simple terms, if Arcueid were to invoke this power against pretty much anything, she would absolutely annihilate it.
  
• Crimson Moon: Arcueid is actually intrinsically connected to the planet, and can actually receive a power-up from the planet if she "asks" for it. This is actually crazy powerful too, since it allows her to outrank her enemy by one, since the planet will provide her with extra power to just enough to outrank her enemy. It's very... odd how this works and relies on a lot of in-universe lore, but if there's any special interest, I can provide it. But really, this won't come into play in any game anyways, since I'd say that any RP setting would be cutting her off from the planet's power...

☓ Weaknesses:
Canon pretty much says in a long, roundabout way that 99.9% of the time, she doesn't have any, and the actual series is focused on that 0.1% of the time where she's kind of fucked. But. One of Arcueid's main weaknesses is that she has to use a large amount of her power to suppress her vampiric impulse. This takes a huge amount of her willpower, and when weakened, it gets more difficult for her to do so. If she were to give in to her vampiric impulse, it would return some of her power, but essentially at the cost of her sanity, since she goes berserk. So she tries very hard to avoid this, to the point of sealing herself and going back to sleep again.

Otherwise, she gets really sick when she eats garlic.

In terms of mental and emotional weaknesses, Arcueid is very naive! She's pretty gullible and rather easily led to believe things that are obviously (to everyone else) not true. This is especially true of social situations, since she tends to just assume that someone is right, since she doesn't have any clue. She's also very trusting, which is not a good quality to have with the former.

☓ Strengths:
Well, I'll leave out the physical ones, since that was already a pretty big section, but on the mental/emotional spectrum, Arcueid is a very bright and optimistic personality. Even in the face of despair and horror she's able to find something good to look forward to while still treating the situation with the seriousness it deserves. And though she may not be good at social norms and can be pretty airheaded, when it comes to fighting awful, horrible abominations? She's got this shit.

She's very experienced with fighting monsters of many kinds, and can approach intense situations with clarity and decisiveness. She's hardly a tactician, but she's able to formulate good plans of action and utilize the skills of others effectively.

☓ Intranet post sample:
keov fjdlc'gkkej

so pressing buttons makes things show up? this is really neat! humans make such interesting things.

so i think these things are used for communication so i might as well try. do you introduce yourself first? or is that weird since you don't know who you're talking to?

but i guess that's not that important actually. if someone manages to see this would you mind explaining what's going on? i was kind of supposed to be somewhere else so i'm pretty surprised to be here. who created this reality marble? i'm actually pretty impressed if that's what it's supposed to be.

i guess regardless i'm wondering what is this place?

☓ Log post sample:
She can feel the chains.

It's strange, she thinks, because she can so often feel their weight. They're chains that can't be broken, because they chain the sleeping princess to her throne, so their weight is never truly forgot. And as she drifts downward into the blackness of the sea, she doesn't think for a moment to struggle against it. Those chains pull her ever downward, and she accepts it without struggle, even as water fills her lungs painfully.

It doesn't occur to her that this might be a punishment for her sins, but she does wonder, as a darkness starts to take her, if this was something ironic that the universe had chosen for her. Because even this, she knows, won't really kill her. Whether it's a dream or not, this is something that will come to pass, and she will continue to live on in her regrets.

As the darkness starts to cloud her vision, she reaches out, because she thinks of that person's hand, wondering how things would be different. If she had taken it, then...?

But the thought isn't completed, because the darkness overwhelms her.

The passage of time is imperceptible, but she awakes with a severe jerk and cough, and the salt of the seawater lingers in her mouth. And... wait, there was something else. So she spits in a daze, a piece of seaweed popping out of her mouth only to land with a splat on her chest.

Ah, gross...

Arcueid sits up in the sand to look around. Her dress was soaked, which was almost the only confirmation she had that she had been in the sea. It felt like it had been a dream and this was real. But that couldn't possibly be. She lifts her arms lightly, making a thoughtful sound at their lightness, since there's certainly no weight of chains there to bind there.

If this was a dream... It was definitely a strange one.

She takes a deep breath to ground herself, smelling the ocean before her, but as she looks up at the sky, she feels it, in a way she can't quite describe. There's a void there, because something that had always been with her was missing. She couldn't put it into words, but it was something missing that had been just as much a part of her as her own physical self.

That makes her stand with caution, her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she looks toward the town on the horizon. The "backup" was gone, but she was sure that it wasn't a dream barrier. And even a reality marble would be...

"What kind of place is this?" she murmurs thoughtfully to herself, but she immediately starts to walk briskly towards the town. Somehow, staying put didn't feel safe.