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[lifepulse]

"Then, I'll be going now. I'll come back when it's all over."

▲ OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION

Name: ariel

Username: witchbaby

Current characters in Juncture: gramarye

▲ IN-CHARACTER INFORMATION

Character Name: Aeris Gainsborough

Username: lifepulse

Original Character, Canon, or Alternate Universe: Canon, Final Fantasy 7, pre-Temple of the Ancients (and thus pre-death.) I am strictly going by the canon of the original game here, I'm not going to use any alternate sources like Kingdom Hearts, Crisis Core, Advent Children, etc, so, maybe that makes her AU, watch how many fucks I give.

Played By: Erika Toda.

Concept: Flower girl from the slums turns out to be the last of an ancient race of mystics and space messiahs.

Physical Description: Aeris is a young humanoid from a planet called Gaia otherwise mostly populated by humans. She's from a race of aliens called the Cetra or the Ancients, though she is indistinguishable physically from other human beings. She also happens to be the last one - she's half-human. She's 22 years old, 5' 3" tall, and slender. Physically, she's pretty fit - she engages in battle and does a ton of running around, she's not exactly as delicate as she looks, although she is a petite young woman and thus, yeah, sometimes she has to get people to help her open jars, it's just how things go. She has absurdly long brown hair that she usually wears in a long braid with bangs that frame her face and curls on the sides. She's reasonably fair-skinned and has green eyes. She has a soft voice and probably a very weird accent since she's from a non-Earth planet.

Aeris arrives in Juncture with six pieces of materia (see below for an explanation), her clothes, and her Princess Guard, a long, decorated staff with materia slots. She is wearing a long pink sheath dress that buttons up the front, a red bolero with metal caps on the sleeves, metal bracelets, hiking boots, and a thin leather necklace. In terms of clothes, she leans heavily towards the colours pink, red, and white, and wears a lot of flowy, ultra-feminine dresses and skirts, though she tends to pair them with practical shoes. (She spends the entire game in a pair of old hiking boots.)

History: Here's a wiki summary. She's canon up until a few days before her death.

World: The world of FF7 is strongly sci-fi and fantasy-based, set on a planet (questionably) called Gaia and largely based around the metropolis of Midgar, where the game begins. Gaia is itself its own living organism and is composed both of its physical form and also its spiritual form - it possesses what's called the lifestream, the sum total of all spiritual energy on the planet. Every living being on Gaia possesses its own spiritual force - obviously the more sentient a being the more of this they have - that the planet re-absorbs along with the physical body after that being's death in an unending cycle of birth, decay, and rebirth. As the planet uses the nutrients of decaying dead things to nourish itself, so too does the lifestream absorb the spiritual essence of living things after death. This lifestream sometimes pools on the surface of the planet in areas and crystallizes, creating materia, which can then be harvested by humans in order to enable them to perform magical feats. The use of magic is widespread and a completely mundane, accepted fact of life, although how much of what characters do in battle translates into the real world is questionable. Obviously phoenix down, an item in game that raises a dead character to life, does not function the same way outside of battle or else, you know, everyone would be immortal.

Years before the game begins, a company called Shinra discovered a way to harvest the planet's lifestream in order to create an energy source the called mako. For a long time mako was cheap, effective and abundant as a source of power, but the greedy Shinra corporation started taking mako at an unsustainable rate, sucking the planet dry and causing devastating ecological consequences. The game initially revolves around Cloud, a young man who used to be a member of Shinra's military organisation SOLDIER, as he takes a mercenery job with the ecological terrorist group AVALANCHE in trying to destroy the mako reactors at Midgar and halt or slow Shinra's resource drain on the planet, and evolves into the struggle between Cloud and his team and Sephiroth, a legendary warrior who was created by Shinra using Cetra DNA to create a human with Cetra powers with the intention of harnessing those powers for military gain. Sephiroth learns the truth about himself, goes mad, and decides to wipe out all the humans by blowing up the world. Great!

Aeris is actually an alien - the Cetra are not indigenous to Gaia at all, they're a race of space-faring diasporic peoples who come to troubled planets, nourish them, and then move on. (There is some debate in the fandom about whether the Cetra are native to Gaia based on a comment Sephiroth makes at one point during the game - he definitely strongly implies that they're aliens but it could have been a translation error and later games seem to retcon that anyway. I choose to go with aliens because yay aliens.) The Cetra who arrived on Gaia lived in harmony with the planet for a long time but an alien invader nearly rendered them extinct about 2,000 years before the events of FF7, except for a few survivors - the last of which was Ifalna, Aeris' mother. The Cetra are deeply spiritual by nature and have an intrinsic connection to the planet they live on, including the ability to communicate directly with it - in Gaia's case that means they're able to connect to the lifestream and thus every living being on the planet. Aeris mentions early in the game that she can actually hear the voices of people on the planet like a constant whisper in the back of her head, though as a child she denied this and tried to hide it.

Talents/Abilities:
MAGIC
With materia- 7/10
Without materia- 1/10
Magic in Final Fantasy VII works with a specific system through the use of small crystals called materia. Materia is what you get when the planet's lifestream (also called mako) pools in one area and naturally crystallizes. It can then be harvested by humans. Materia is usually sold and used in its refined form, cut into uniform ball shapes that fit into slots on weapons, jewelry, clothing, and armour, and thus all materia is interchangeable and can be equipped by anyone. It can also be used simply by holding it in some way (Aeris wears Holy tied in a ribbon in her hair) but inserting it into a slot in a wearable item is much more convenient than learning to juggle whilst in combat. Materia is probably fairly expensive since not everyone has access to it or knows how to use it.

Anybody can use magic through materia, but some people are more naturally adept at it than others, and acquire greater mastery of materia faster. Aeris is a natural; she's the single character in game with the best growth in her magic stat. (I could nerd about this but just trust me on this one, it's a significant difference from other characters.) As one of the Ancients, she has enormous magical potential beyond what humans on Midgar are capable of because she's naturally in tune with the planet. I believe that as an Ancient she also has magical potential without materia, but she's never had any reason to explore this, so she'd require tutelage, thus the 1/10 rating. Also, her Cetra powers are said to be not as powerful as her mother's, hence Aeris relying much more on materia.

Her reliance on materia is also what knocks her score down, because she can only cast a limited number of specific spells. Aeris arrives in Juncture with the following materia: Restore, Fire, Lightning, Poison, Barrier, Time, and White Materia (which has no purpose off of Gaia.) Given the point she's at in the game, she can cast the following spells:

• Cure and Cure 2 (heals wounds and fatigue)
  
• Regen (temporarily imbues the target with a Wolverine-esque healing factor)
  
• Fire and Fire 2 (summons small-to-medium sized fires)
  
• Bolt and Bolt 2 (shoots electrical bolts of various voltages)
  
• Bio and Bio 2 (inflicts a poison on the target that saps their strength until they pass out and/or die)
  
• Barrier and Magic Barrier (creates a shield around the target that temporarily protects them from physical harm or stops magic from affecting them - including her own)
  
• Haste (speeds the target up, effectively giving them temporary superspeed)
  
• Slow (opposite effect)

(White Materia enables Aeris to summon Holy, which is a normal offensive spell in other Final Fantasy games but only has one specific function in FF7 that will never come up in Juncture unless we get a Sephiroth.) She can "level up" these materia through practise, skill, and concentration. She has a limited number of times she can cast spells before she runs out of energy and needs to stop and rest for a while. I can come up with an exact number if needed but I'll do it the fucking nerdy way by averaging out MP costs in battle.

PLANETARY CONNECTION 3/10
Ordinarily this would rate much higher but Aeris is not able to connect to Al Kanuz the way she is with Gaia, partially because Gaia is in fact a living organism but also because Aeris is native there and has had like thousands of years of her people developing and strengthening their connection to that planet. My headcanon is that the Cetra are able to make this connection to any planet, it's just initially a weaker connection that gets stronger the more generations are born on that planet. Aeris is in tune with the planet's pain and is able to sense life and decay - she feels it as sort of a hunch, like "oh, this place feels kind of off to me" and it turns out it's like infested with chemical pollution or radiation or something. Not super useful except in conjuncture with...

GREEN THUMB 9/10
Aeris is a great gardener - she was able to make flowers bloom in a city so infested with pollution that there was literally no natural greenery anywhere within like a ten+ mile radius. Growing things in a desert shouldn't be an issue for her, particularly as she comes to understand the native flora. You should definitely come to her for your weed.

FIRST AID 9/10
She can patch minor wounds up without magic, but I mean, it's first aid, not rocket science.

COMBAT 3/10
Aeris can hold her own in a fight. Physically, she is quite weak, though she's capable of whacking people upside the head with her staff and using it (and magic) to defend herself long enough to get to a safe space or buddy up with someone more inclined towards physical combat. She's reasonably quick and coordinated and has experience fighting and running from people and monsters. With magic she's significantly more useful.

PERSUASION 5/10
Aeris is shown in canon talking people into doing things they initially object to or otherwise exerting her charisma on others. She's generally the party member that strangers respond to the best - she has a warm, comforting demeanor that makes people tend to trust what she says, and since she's a pretty good liar and actress, she can use that charisma to her advantage.

Personality: Aeris is sometimes typefied as the typical damsel in distress. There are points in the game where, yes, she is a damsel who, yes, is in distress, and she sometimes requires rescue - she's kidnapped, held hostage by mad scientists, chased by soldiers, etc. But she reverses the trope in a lot of ways - firstly by her independence and secondly by her vivacious personality. Aeris is not a quiet shrinking violet and not a delicate flower either, despite the way she looks or the way people tend to stereotype her. She has a lot of spunk under those big shiny doe-eyes. She's adventurous, exuberant, and enormously stubborn - her foster mother Elmyra remarks at one point that once Aeris makes her mind up about something, there's no talking her out of it. Cloud tries to sneak out of her house and abandon her because he thinks it's too dangerous, but she was already two steps ahead of him and waiting for him outside. Nobody can ever tell Aeris that anything is too dangerous for her, she refuses to be held back that way. She makes her own choices on her own time, and if other people don't like it, well, sorry, but they're just gonna have to get used to it. If Aeris sometimes needs a lot of help or needs to be rescued, that's because she's only human (well... sort of) and not actually Wonder Woman. She can't do everything on her own. She's hardly Princess Peach either, though.

Aeris is stubborn, but cheerful. Her personality is frequently described as "joyful." She's very playful, open to experimentation and new ideas - she'll try anything once and she always wants to be involved in where the action is. She has a strong sense of joie-de-vivre and seems to live by a carpe diem philosophy. She's a warm, caring person who seems to always see the good in people, even people others would have given up on long before - but that doesn't mean she's a pushover or naive, there are absolutely people whom she will acknowledge are just shitty, evil people. Like Hojo and Sephiroth - they're not woobies who need to be coddled until all their emotional problems are fixed. Though Aeris will try to avoid conflict wherever she can, that's only because she sees anger and violence as largely unnecessary crutches people turn to when they're unable or unwilling to look for other, potentially more difficult solutions to problems. That said, she recognises the occasional practicality in violence, conflict, and force - when Cloud, Tifa, and Aeris are in Wall Street interrogating the slumlord Don Corneo, Aeris threatens to rip off his balls to get him to talk. (She was probably bluffing.)

Being the last of her race is an enormous burden on her - she feels incredible pressure as the last Cetra to save the planet, and she is pretty much the only person who can, since she's the only one who can cast Holy, which is the only thing that can cancel out Sephiroth's Meteor. That's a lot of pressure to put on the shoulders of a twenty-something woman who never asked for this to begin with. She accepts her destiny with remarkable poise, but Aeris is still clearly shown to be overwhelmed with feelings of isolation. She loves her friends, but they don't really understand what it's like to be the last of your race, to be utterly alone in the universe - because she's just not-human enough that she doesn't entirely fit in with human beings. She is always consciously aware that she's different from them in ways they can't or won't understand, and it's frustrating to her that she has so many questions about herself and what she can do and there is literally no one who can answer them for her or teach her what she needs to know. She's alone; she has to do it by herself.

People tend to like Aeris - she's difficult to hate, because while she has that perky, mischievous kind of personality, she's not stupid, and she doesn't indulge in cutesiness for its own sake. She never seems like she's putting on a persona, which would make her a hypocrite, she just lives life the way she is without being self-conscious. Her confidence is genuine. What people think of her just doesn't really matter that much, and that frees her up in a way that a lot of other young girls don't get to experience until they're in their 30's. She lists towards being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl - at one point in the game Cloud remarks that a plane is "so cool" and Aeris immediately jokes that they should steal it. It sort of seems like she was only half-joking.

Aeris is also a girl who likes other girls. It's notable that despite being in a love triangle with Cloud and Tifa, she and Tifa are never shown as rivals. They're not at odds with each other. In fact at times they team up together against Cloud, particularly against his macho bullshit they both see right through, and they're shown to be very good friends. That's the kind of person Aeris is - she doesn't project on other people, she doesn't hold grudges, and she doesn't assume the worst of anyone. She doesn't tend to make assumptions about other people's motives. She'd rather ask and learn.

That said, it is definitely possible to find her annoying. Aeris tends not to take things as seriously as she should. When it absolutely counts - like, say, saving the world - then yes, sure, she's serious, but there are several points in the game where she makes little jokes at inappropriate times. She likes to tease people, and she's not always able to judge when to stop. She is prone to jealousy and clinginess, a tendency she recognises in herself and takes measures to stop before it gets too bad, and her tendency to avoid conflict can make her passive-aggressive.

Sexuality: There's not actually a lot of canon evidence for Aeris' sexuality - she has an ex-boyfriend, the relationship was pretty serious, and she flirts with Cloud a lot, goes on a few dates with him, and exhibits mild jealousy when he talks to and about other girls, but that's about it. Her relationship with Cloud is usually depicted as being more serious or romantic by fandom than it actually appears in canon - Cloud is visibly distraught over her death, yes, but not because she was the love of his life but because she died violently and tragically and she was his very good friend before she was ever his girlfriend. She really likes him and has a big crush on him, but the two of them are too busy trying to save the world to deal with whatever feelings they have for each other, so it never really goes anywhere. They both clearly figure they have plenty of time to figure it out later. (That, and Cloud is pretty oblivious.)

That said, Aeris is not the virginal ingenue the fandom (and later FF7 canon material) often portrays her as. She's a lively, flirtatious young woman who clearly has control over her own sexuality and is comfortable with it. She is probably straight, but given her inquisitive, impulsive, seize-the-day personality, experimentation is absolutely not out of the question. She's a pretty normal person in regards to sex - she likes it, she engages in it, but typically only in the context of a committed relationship. She's not going to apologise for enjoying sex and neither does she act as if waiting until she's in a relationship with someone legitimises it or makes her better than people who enjoy casual sex, she just chooses to wait because it's her preference. That's all. For her sex is a way of showing the depth of her feelings for someone and it involves a degree of emotional attachment and trust that she wouldn't feel outside of a committed relationship.

Reason for playing: Choosing a favourite FF7 character is really hard for me, but I've always been drawn to Aeris ever since I first played this stupid game when I was like ten years old - I remember being really shocked and distraught by her death, she was the character I liked enough that I even bought an action figure of her, etc. But I hate what fandom often does with her, the complete rewriting of her personality that has no basis in canon; I really want to write her and attempt to portray her as she actually appears in the script of the game. I like her for Juncture because she's a friendly, outgoing, independent person who is also very action-adventure oriented, which makes her good for plots involving exploration and combat, and CR with her should be reasonably simple since she's a lot more confident and extroverted than poor Wolfgang.

Object: Something innocuous and light would be nice since she is very much not a horrors character, though a little creepiness is totes fine with me. Just, you know. Not a postman uniform that erodes your sanity. Also, something with a difficult-to-complete quest would be nice, since if she completed hers and was given the option to go home, she would leave immediately. She's got a planet to save, yo.

▲ WRITING SAMPLES

"Aeris?"

Aeris rubbed her damp face and glanced up, her shoulders tensing instantly at the sound of another voice - and then relaxing once she head the slight gravelly growl, distinctive to Red XIII's animal throat. They all had questions about how exactly he managed to speak with a face, tongue, and throat built along the lines of a large cat, but since his speech made things so much easier for everyone, nobody was about to complain about it. Sometimes in between battles out on the field, Aeris would glance over at Red afterwards and look for any sign of - she wasn't certain. Guilt? How did he feel, fighting creatures more or less the same as himself, just lacking the ability to speak the way humans did?

The way she did?

"Hi," she said instead of asking once again. They didn't know each other that well, though there was an undeniable connection to them - the only two people in their rag-tag party who knew what it felt like to be the last of their race. "What are you doing still up?"

Red snorted and lashed his tail as his paws carried him the short distance down to where she was sitting, her knees up to her chest and her bare feet pressed into the soft, clean spring dirt under her. "I guess none of us can sleep." The flame of his tail illuminated the tiny clearing in which they sat, Aeris' face wavering between light and shadow in its dim glow. "Your face is wet," he said. "Are you hurt?"

"No." She smiled. When they'd met him, Red told them that he was forty-eight years old, and while it was true, his grandfather had later added that his species was especially long-lived. Red was closer to fifteen in human years; just a kid, really. Aeris wiped harder at her face until her fingers left pink trails on her cheeks. "It's just something we do sometimes, when we're happy or when we're sad."

Red laid down next to her, his paws crossed over one another. "Which one is it?" She knew eventually he'd list further and further onto his side until he was laying belly-up, subtly asking to be petted in as dignified a way as he could manage. It was something he only really did for her.

"I'm not sure," she said, her hand reaching to span the gap between them, fingers curling into his short orange fur. He was so warm and her hand felt so cold. She was so cold, lately, cold like the planet was becoming. She wasn't sure what that meant. "Sometimes it's hard to tell. Being human is hard."

"But you're not," Red commented, passively allowing her to run her hand along his back. "Human, I mean."

Aeris paused, glancing back to where she knew the rest of their party were camped out for the night, curled up in cheap tents or on the ground, probably few of them sleeping either. Her heart hurt. It felt like a fist wrapping its fingers around it and squeezing gently. "Just half," she murmured, and turned back around.

---

Dear Mun commentspam

▲ TICKY BOXES

Are you over the age of eighteen? ✔

Are you aware of the skillcheck system and comfortable with the fact that while your character cannot die without your express permission, they may get into some serious trouble? ✔

Are you ready to rumble? ✔✔✔