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APPLICATION
NAME: alex.
AGE: 25+
CONTACT: PM to this journal, please!.
CHARACTER(S): Rufus Shinra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unionized) and Penelope Eckhart (hersatz)
INVITED BY: N/A, current player.
NAME: Thancred Waters
AGE: 30
CANON: Final Fantasy XIV
CANON POINT: Dawntrail, Patch 7.25
CRAU: None!
OTHER: Please see the abilities section for more information on this, but I'm wondering if it would be possible for other characters in the resort (if capable) to attempt to fix Thancred's aether! It's totally fine if not but I think it would be an interesting long-term CR arc for him, to work with others and eventually find relief from this condition that's been his burden to carry for so long.
SUITABILITY: In canon, Thancred is the Scions' information-gathering and espionage expert; he received his Archon designation (which is essentially FFXIV's version of a ph.d.) in this study, and accordingly he is recognized as one of the foremost experts at Being Sneaky in the whole of the world. As an aspect of this expertise, canon confirms that Thancred has spent a great deal of time in taverns "becoming every drunk's best friend" as a way of gathering information; he is also very much recognized as a playboy, both from his incorrigible tendency to flirt and the fact that fellow Scion Urianger is apparently able to embarrass him by "listing off the names of all his conquests". He also claims to be something of a bard, and is used to the idea of being an entertainer of the masses when it benefits him to play that role.
In short, Thancred is someone well-suited to a setting like Golden Peacock because he is perfectly willing to leverage sex, charisma, and interpersonal relations in pursuit of his goals. Additionally, he does have a significant personal wish that could be granted by winning Game 52, and no real reason not to roll the dice and play it. If he wins and the House keeps its word, he gains something he dearly wants (to see his daughter Ryne again), but if they don't, he hasn't really lost anything but the time he spent playing, since the terms of the game aren't anything new to him.
HISTORY: Final Fantasy XIV takes place primarily on a world called Etheirys, so named for its abundant resources of "aether" — a sort of combination soul-magic and life force. Millennia ago, the world suffered an apocalypse called the Final Days, which resulted in the world being "sundered" into fourteen fractions of itself. A conflict thus ensues between the followers of Zodiark, the Ascians, who want to recombine the fourteen shards back into a single whole world, and the followers of Hydaelyn, who want things to stay as-is because recombining a shard involves killing everyone who populates it.
Thancred is a member of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, the protagonist group who are foremost in the struggle against the Ascians. However, the Ascians can rarely be fought directly; they work from the shadows, sowing strife across the world by corrupting world leaders, starting wars, and breeding chaos, all in the service of priming Etheirys for its next shard rejoining. Thus, Thancred and his companions adventure all across Etheirys, saving the world one nation at a time in their ongoing fight to stop the Ascians.
The Ascian storyline lasted five expansions and spanned ten years of gameplay; the latest expansion, Dawntrail, promises to be the start of a new story arc, but it is not yet known what the overarching story will be. Accordingly, Dawntrail serves as a sort of "vacation epilogue", where Thancred and his friends travel to the nation of Tural to assist in a rite of succession, and help stop an imperialist invasion while they're there.
That's a "vacation" for the Scions. Really.
ABILITIES:
SPYCRAFT AND SURVIVAL - Thancred is an Archon, which is an in-universe title given to "a person who has excelled in a specific field of study, gone above and beyond by contributing greatly to that field, and [who has] demonstrated their exceptional knowledge in their chosen subject". Mastery alone isn't sufficient; Archons are the GOATs of their field of choice. As if that wasn't wild enough, canon indicates that he had achieved his Archon status by the age of seventeen. In canon Thancred is shown to be capable of surviving alone in a dragon-infested wilderness while completely naked (and even successfully fighting a bear, unarmed, in that state), and his capacity for infiltration is so advanced that he is capable of temporarily turning invisible by forcing his aether to go still. This, however, comes with physical consequences; because Thancred's aether is his life-force, holding prolonged invisibility damages his heart and can easily prove fatal if he maintains it too long.
GUNBREAKER/ROGUE - Thancred is proficient in two fighting styles: the dual-wield daggers and acrobatic flourishes of a rogue, and the heavy-hitting tanking of a gunbreaker. In practice this means that he is capable of fast gymnastic movements while also able to take body blows and stay standing. Being a rogue in particular also means knowing a full complement of thief's skills (with some added Limsa Lominsan pirate's flair), so he is adept in things like lockpicking, breaking and entering, ropework, and so on.
BARD - The entertainment sort, not FFXIV's canon-specific job class sort. Thancred is a self-described "grizzled old bard" whose information-gathering efforts frequently demanded he make himself the life of the party in taverns. He is canonically highly charismatic and extremely popular with women (sometimes seen enjoying the company of several at a time). Additionally, he is able to pick up languages very easily (as in the case of learning the language of the pixies from Il Mheg), and has an ear for music.
AETHER - As a result of a few too many dips in the Lifestream, Thancred's personal aether has been corrupted such that he is no longer able to use magic or teleport. He also spent a significant length of time being possessed by the Ascian Lahabrea, which overrode his control of his own body and suppressed his soul beneath Lahabrea's. As a result, magic sometimes doesn't work on him, or behaves in unusual ways when it does. I would be interested in playing with this in the resort, as well as — assuming he could find CR willing to do it — requesting the possibility that someone might attempt to fix his aether in-game, and thus restore some of his capacity for working magic to him.
VICES:
STRESS - Canonically, Thancred handles stress by bottling it up inside himself and overworking to the point of exhaustion, which is what led to his malevolent possession by Lahabrea. He is the type of person who vehemently dislikes "burdening" other people with his problems, and will generally default to bottling up his issues rather than confronting and working through them. This can make him broody and defensive, particularly if someone tries to engage him about his emotions before he's willing to do so — as in the case of Ryne, when in Shadowbringers Y'shtola harassed him about his conflicted issues over desperately wanting "his Minfilia" back (but being unwilling to sacrifice the life of an innocent girl to do it), and his subsequent frustration at being unable to reach an outcome that would save Minfilia without killing Ryne. Despite being longtime friends, Y'shtola called him out on his poor treatment of Ryne, prompting Thancred to snap back at Y'shtola with a petty shot of his own and immediately shut down the conversation, leaving to "patrol" rather than discuss it any further.
GUILT - A protector type through and through, Thancred takes every one of his perceived failures personally and lets them haunt him like ghosts. In A Realm Reborn, Thancred is seen frequently chastising himself for not working hard enough at hunting down the Ascians, lamenting that he needs to be "stronger" because he's failing his old mentor Louisoix otherwise. (Fun fact: this obsession actually makes him careless enough that he gets possessed by an Ascian and becomes the unwilling villain of the expansion, which in turn results in the deaths of a bunch of his comrades.) He blames himself for the death of Minfilia's father Warburton simply because he thinks he could have prevented the accident that killed him in retrospect. In Thancred's own words, he has "fought tooth and nail for the people [he] hold[s] dear— done everything in [his] power to save them... and [he has] failed", leaving him with no recourse but to "[l]earn to live with it".
ISOLATION - Thancred has largely lived his life believing that the people he loves are better off when he himself keeps a wide berth from them, and frequently undervalues his importance in their lives. He laments after the fact that he was too busy becoming "every drunk's best friend" during Minfilia's formative years in Ul'dah, only watching her from afar when she would have welcomed his company. He holds Ryne at arm's length because he is afraid of influencing her decision whether or not to give up her life to bring Minfilia back, and his frequent coldness toward her convinces Ryne that he hates her when in fact his feelings are anything but. The more Thancred cares about someone, the more difficult it is for him to convince himself that he's worth being close to them; thus, he frequently isolates himself and finds fleeting comfort in the superficial, while instinctively hovering on the sidelines of his own meaningful relationships.
VIRTUES:
RESILIENT - Thancred Waters is truly the Chumbawamba of Etheirys: no matter how many times you knock him down, he gets back up again. He has been outright killed at least twice (once when Y'shtola's Flow spell threw them into the Lifestream, once when Meteion vaporized him at the end of the universe) and had his soul separated from his body once, which it turns out is a different thing altogether. He has been possessed by a malevolent entity in a manner which normally smothers its hosts. He has stopped his own heart for the sake of winning a battle against an otherwise unbeatable foe. He has tanked the closest thing Etheirys has to God. Whether a challenge is physical or emotional, Thancred is never one to lie down and die about it, but instead will continue to persevere for the sake of the people he loves. Most noteworthy is when, in Ultima Thule, the very fact that the zone becomes habitable is because Thancred's fervent wish for his friends to survive overrode Meteion's desire to kill them — and that wish continued to hold on against a tidal wave of despair throughout the entirety of the zone, though Thancred himself had no conscious knowledge that his efforts meant anything at all. He is extremely hard to kill, and even harder to stop!
PREPARED - Where most of the Scions are theorycrafters and idealists, Thancred is the down-to-earth realist. He is quick to assess situations, identify danger, and is often the first to respond when events take a sudden turn for the worst. His origins as a former wharf rat pickpocketing marks on the docks of Limsa Lominsa have given him a grounded perspective that many of the other, more sheltered Scions lack; he is also the only known Archon whose marks derive from practical skills rather than scholarly studies. As a result, Thancred is something of the Batman in the Scions' figurative Justice League, and his narrative role often demonstrates it: he is the one always prepared with some gadget or tool in his bag to accomplish a quest task, or is able to provide the necessary skill at a critical juncture to facilitate the Scions' actions. He is the guy who Drives The Car. He is the guy who Saves You From Drowning. He is the guy who has the See In The Dark Eyedrops when you need to find things in a dark cave. He's that guy.
GENUINE - Despite what one might think of a man who has devoted his life to becoming an expert in spycraft, Thancred is in many ways the most authentic and genuine of the Scions. He deeply loves his friends and would give his life in an instant to protect them; he devotes himself to making their dreams a reality and will stop at nothing to help achieve them. When someone he cares for is in trouble — be it Y'shtola being threatened by Ran'jit in the Rak'tika Greatwood or Urianger trying to walk on water and failing — Thancred is the first to leap to their rescue, often already moving even while those around him are still just reacting. When Ryne screams in horror for Thancred to stop Vauthry with no additional context, he heeds her instantly, trusting her judgment and acting without hesitation to comply. Far from the scoundrel he claims to be, Thancred is in fact a loyal, genuine comrade to those he cares deeply for.
SUIT REQUESTS:
FIRST CHOICE: CLUBS — My primary preference would be for clubs, as Thancred is a character very much governed by his own self-control, and therefore clubs would serve well to override his rationality in favor of impulsive, reckless decisions. Specifically, the compulsions to confess secrets and be truthful would cause him to share things about himself that he might otherwise hide, and the mirroring of many of the symptoms he already recognizes as being from overworking and stress (headaches, insomnia, nightmares) would force him to relax and unwind, and actually let other people take care of him for a change.
SECOND CHOICE: HEARTS — My second choice would be for hearts, as again, Thancred is not often someone willing to let his emotions show. In keeping with my goals of having him relax and learn to prioritize himself while in the resort, hearts would push Thancred's often-hidden emotions to the forefront, allowing him to show his genuine feelings for others in ways that he otherwise wouldn't be likely to indulge.
RANK REQUESTS: I would request either very low or very high for Thancred's rank — he would personally be more comfortable with a very low rank because of the low level of attention they would draw (which would enable him to sneak around the resort and take stock of things without being remarked on much), and would likewise be extremely uncomfortable with being recognized and catered to everywhere he goes because of how antithetical it would be to his attempts at covertly gathering information about his new circumstances.
SAMPLES:
SAMPLE ONE - Thancred's top-level on thepeacockstop July TDM
SAMPLE TWO - A thread with Keita on thepeacockstop July TDM.
SAMPLE THREE - A thread with Thanatos on thepeacockstop July TDM.
OOC
NAME: alex.
AGE: 25+
CONTACT: PM to this journal, please!.
CHARACTER(S): Rufus Shinra (
unionized) and Penelope Eckhart (hersatz)INVITED BY: N/A, current player.
IC
NAME: Thancred Waters
AGE: 30
CANON: Final Fantasy XIV
CANON POINT: Dawntrail, Patch 7.25
CRAU: None!
OTHER: Please see the abilities section for more information on this, but I'm wondering if it would be possible for other characters in the resort (if capable) to attempt to fix Thancred's aether! It's totally fine if not but I think it would be an interesting long-term CR arc for him, to work with others and eventually find relief from this condition that's been his burden to carry for so long.
SUITABILITY: In canon, Thancred is the Scions' information-gathering and espionage expert; he received his Archon designation (which is essentially FFXIV's version of a ph.d.) in this study, and accordingly he is recognized as one of the foremost experts at Being Sneaky in the whole of the world. As an aspect of this expertise, canon confirms that Thancred has spent a great deal of time in taverns "becoming every drunk's best friend" as a way of gathering information; he is also very much recognized as a playboy, both from his incorrigible tendency to flirt and the fact that fellow Scion Urianger is apparently able to embarrass him by "listing off the names of all his conquests". He also claims to be something of a bard, and is used to the idea of being an entertainer of the masses when it benefits him to play that role.
In short, Thancred is someone well-suited to a setting like Golden Peacock because he is perfectly willing to leverage sex, charisma, and interpersonal relations in pursuit of his goals. Additionally, he does have a significant personal wish that could be granted by winning Game 52, and no real reason not to roll the dice and play it. If he wins and the House keeps its word, he gains something he dearly wants (to see his daughter Ryne again), but if they don't, he hasn't really lost anything but the time he spent playing, since the terms of the game aren't anything new to him.
HISTORY: Final Fantasy XIV takes place primarily on a world called Etheirys, so named for its abundant resources of "aether" — a sort of combination soul-magic and life force. Millennia ago, the world suffered an apocalypse called the Final Days, which resulted in the world being "sundered" into fourteen fractions of itself. A conflict thus ensues between the followers of Zodiark, the Ascians, who want to recombine the fourteen shards back into a single whole world, and the followers of Hydaelyn, who want things to stay as-is because recombining a shard involves killing everyone who populates it.
Thancred is a member of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, the protagonist group who are foremost in the struggle against the Ascians. However, the Ascians can rarely be fought directly; they work from the shadows, sowing strife across the world by corrupting world leaders, starting wars, and breeding chaos, all in the service of priming Etheirys for its next shard rejoining. Thus, Thancred and his companions adventure all across Etheirys, saving the world one nation at a time in their ongoing fight to stop the Ascians.
The Ascian storyline lasted five expansions and spanned ten years of gameplay; the latest expansion, Dawntrail, promises to be the start of a new story arc, but it is not yet known what the overarching story will be. Accordingly, Dawntrail serves as a sort of "vacation epilogue", where Thancred and his friends travel to the nation of Tural to assist in a rite of succession, and help stop an imperialist invasion while they're there.
That's a "vacation" for the Scions. Really.
ABILITIES:
SPYCRAFT AND SURVIVAL - Thancred is an Archon, which is an in-universe title given to "a person who has excelled in a specific field of study, gone above and beyond by contributing greatly to that field, and [who has] demonstrated their exceptional knowledge in their chosen subject". Mastery alone isn't sufficient; Archons are the GOATs of their field of choice. As if that wasn't wild enough, canon indicates that he had achieved his Archon status by the age of seventeen. In canon Thancred is shown to be capable of surviving alone in a dragon-infested wilderness while completely naked (and even successfully fighting a bear, unarmed, in that state), and his capacity for infiltration is so advanced that he is capable of temporarily turning invisible by forcing his aether to go still. This, however, comes with physical consequences; because Thancred's aether is his life-force, holding prolonged invisibility damages his heart and can easily prove fatal if he maintains it too long.
GUNBREAKER/ROGUE - Thancred is proficient in two fighting styles: the dual-wield daggers and acrobatic flourishes of a rogue, and the heavy-hitting tanking of a gunbreaker. In practice this means that he is capable of fast gymnastic movements while also able to take body blows and stay standing. Being a rogue in particular also means knowing a full complement of thief's skills (with some added Limsa Lominsan pirate's flair), so he is adept in things like lockpicking, breaking and entering, ropework, and so on.
BARD - The entertainment sort, not FFXIV's canon-specific job class sort. Thancred is a self-described "grizzled old bard" whose information-gathering efforts frequently demanded he make himself the life of the party in taverns. He is canonically highly charismatic and extremely popular with women (sometimes seen enjoying the company of several at a time). Additionally, he is able to pick up languages very easily (as in the case of learning the language of the pixies from Il Mheg), and has an ear for music.
AETHER - As a result of a few too many dips in the Lifestream, Thancred's personal aether has been corrupted such that he is no longer able to use magic or teleport. He also spent a significant length of time being possessed by the Ascian Lahabrea, which overrode his control of his own body and suppressed his soul beneath Lahabrea's. As a result, magic sometimes doesn't work on him, or behaves in unusual ways when it does. I would be interested in playing with this in the resort, as well as — assuming he could find CR willing to do it — requesting the possibility that someone might attempt to fix his aether in-game, and thus restore some of his capacity for working magic to him.
VICES:
STRESS - Canonically, Thancred handles stress by bottling it up inside himself and overworking to the point of exhaustion, which is what led to his malevolent possession by Lahabrea. He is the type of person who vehemently dislikes "burdening" other people with his problems, and will generally default to bottling up his issues rather than confronting and working through them. This can make him broody and defensive, particularly if someone tries to engage him about his emotions before he's willing to do so — as in the case of Ryne, when in Shadowbringers Y'shtola harassed him about his conflicted issues over desperately wanting "his Minfilia" back (but being unwilling to sacrifice the life of an innocent girl to do it), and his subsequent frustration at being unable to reach an outcome that would save Minfilia without killing Ryne. Despite being longtime friends, Y'shtola called him out on his poor treatment of Ryne, prompting Thancred to snap back at Y'shtola with a petty shot of his own and immediately shut down the conversation, leaving to "patrol" rather than discuss it any further.
GUILT - A protector type through and through, Thancred takes every one of his perceived failures personally and lets them haunt him like ghosts. In A Realm Reborn, Thancred is seen frequently chastising himself for not working hard enough at hunting down the Ascians, lamenting that he needs to be "stronger" because he's failing his old mentor Louisoix otherwise. (Fun fact: this obsession actually makes him careless enough that he gets possessed by an Ascian and becomes the unwilling villain of the expansion, which in turn results in the deaths of a bunch of his comrades.) He blames himself for the death of Minfilia's father Warburton simply because he thinks he could have prevented the accident that killed him in retrospect. In Thancred's own words, he has "fought tooth and nail for the people [he] hold[s] dear— done everything in [his] power to save them... and [he has] failed", leaving him with no recourse but to "[l]earn to live with it".
ISOLATION - Thancred has largely lived his life believing that the people he loves are better off when he himself keeps a wide berth from them, and frequently undervalues his importance in their lives. He laments after the fact that he was too busy becoming "every drunk's best friend" during Minfilia's formative years in Ul'dah, only watching her from afar when she would have welcomed his company. He holds Ryne at arm's length because he is afraid of influencing her decision whether or not to give up her life to bring Minfilia back, and his frequent coldness toward her convinces Ryne that he hates her when in fact his feelings are anything but. The more Thancred cares about someone, the more difficult it is for him to convince himself that he's worth being close to them; thus, he frequently isolates himself and finds fleeting comfort in the superficial, while instinctively hovering on the sidelines of his own meaningful relationships.
VIRTUES:
RESILIENT - Thancred Waters is truly the Chumbawamba of Etheirys: no matter how many times you knock him down, he gets back up again. He has been outright killed at least twice (once when Y'shtola's Flow spell threw them into the Lifestream, once when Meteion vaporized him at the end of the universe) and had his soul separated from his body once, which it turns out is a different thing altogether. He has been possessed by a malevolent entity in a manner which normally smothers its hosts. He has stopped his own heart for the sake of winning a battle against an otherwise unbeatable foe. He has tanked the closest thing Etheirys has to God. Whether a challenge is physical or emotional, Thancred is never one to lie down and die about it, but instead will continue to persevere for the sake of the people he loves. Most noteworthy is when, in Ultima Thule, the very fact that the zone becomes habitable is because Thancred's fervent wish for his friends to survive overrode Meteion's desire to kill them — and that wish continued to hold on against a tidal wave of despair throughout the entirety of the zone, though Thancred himself had no conscious knowledge that his efforts meant anything at all. He is extremely hard to kill, and even harder to stop!
PREPARED - Where most of the Scions are theorycrafters and idealists, Thancred is the down-to-earth realist. He is quick to assess situations, identify danger, and is often the first to respond when events take a sudden turn for the worst. His origins as a former wharf rat pickpocketing marks on the docks of Limsa Lominsa have given him a grounded perspective that many of the other, more sheltered Scions lack; he is also the only known Archon whose marks derive from practical skills rather than scholarly studies. As a result, Thancred is something of the Batman in the Scions' figurative Justice League, and his narrative role often demonstrates it: he is the one always prepared with some gadget or tool in his bag to accomplish a quest task, or is able to provide the necessary skill at a critical juncture to facilitate the Scions' actions. He is the guy who Drives The Car. He is the guy who Saves You From Drowning. He is the guy who has the See In The Dark Eyedrops when you need to find things in a dark cave. He's that guy.
GENUINE - Despite what one might think of a man who has devoted his life to becoming an expert in spycraft, Thancred is in many ways the most authentic and genuine of the Scions. He deeply loves his friends and would give his life in an instant to protect them; he devotes himself to making their dreams a reality and will stop at nothing to help achieve them. When someone he cares for is in trouble — be it Y'shtola being threatened by Ran'jit in the Rak'tika Greatwood or Urianger trying to walk on water and failing — Thancred is the first to leap to their rescue, often already moving even while those around him are still just reacting. When Ryne screams in horror for Thancred to stop Vauthry with no additional context, he heeds her instantly, trusting her judgment and acting without hesitation to comply. Far from the scoundrel he claims to be, Thancred is in fact a loyal, genuine comrade to those he cares deeply for.
SUIT REQUESTS:
FIRST CHOICE: CLUBS — My primary preference would be for clubs, as Thancred is a character very much governed by his own self-control, and therefore clubs would serve well to override his rationality in favor of impulsive, reckless decisions. Specifically, the compulsions to confess secrets and be truthful would cause him to share things about himself that he might otherwise hide, and the mirroring of many of the symptoms he already recognizes as being from overworking and stress (headaches, insomnia, nightmares) would force him to relax and unwind, and actually let other people take care of him for a change.
SECOND CHOICE: HEARTS — My second choice would be for hearts, as again, Thancred is not often someone willing to let his emotions show. In keeping with my goals of having him relax and learn to prioritize himself while in the resort, hearts would push Thancred's often-hidden emotions to the forefront, allowing him to show his genuine feelings for others in ways that he otherwise wouldn't be likely to indulge.
RANK REQUESTS: I would request either very low or very high for Thancred's rank — he would personally be more comfortable with a very low rank because of the low level of attention they would draw (which would enable him to sneak around the resort and take stock of things without being remarked on much), and would likewise be extremely uncomfortable with being recognized and catered to everywhere he goes because of how antithetical it would be to his attempts at covertly gathering information about his new circumstances.
SAMPLES:
SAMPLE ONE - Thancred's top-level on the
peacockstop July TDMSAMPLE TWO - A thread with Keita on the
peacockstop July TDM.SAMPLE THREE - A thread with Thanatos on the
peacockstop July TDM.