On a roll 
Post by Arcadia Freefall on Aug 12, 2013 11:44:34 GMT -5
Arcadia Freefall
Character Name: Arcadia Freefall
Age: 30
Height: 5 foot 6 inches
Weight: 134 lbs
Gender: Female
Appearance:
Arcadia stands at 5 foot 6 inches, weighs 134lbs with an athletic frame and dark tanned skin. In her earlier life she possessed purple hair which has now become white due to magical influences on her body. She has yellow feline-like eyes which enable her to see more accurately than a normal human being and she also possesses a set of white cat-like fangs. It is said that Arcadia is a descendant of cats, though there is no DNA evidence to prove such a thing. Since her younger days Arcadia has abandoned her former outfit which consisted of either black shinobi robes or black leggings, with an orange top and beige scarf. She now can be seen wandering the land dressed in a blue hooded cape, midnight blue pauldrons and gauntlets on her shoulders and forearms, a similar coloured bustier with a frilled white trim, a black mini-skirt with slits down the side and thigh high armored high-heeled boots in the same style as her pauldrons and gauntlets. Having formerly carried throwing knives as her weapon of choice Arcadia has now taken up using a polearm as her primary weapon due to a dramatic change in her fighting style.
Personality:
Arcadia's personality is of a provocative sort and has been for much of her adult life. If she is ever in a corner she will try and provoke her opponent into attacking madly with anger so that they do not fight properly due to a lapse in foresight and judgement. This appears to come naturally to her as she can be quite a mouthy and occasionally rude person. In most cases, Arcadia is able to remain calm enough to dispatch of her opponent when she has provoked them, however it is still possible to agitate her and her more serious demeanor in combat can be broken if she herself is provoked by certain comments or challenges. In this way, her strength is her weakness and her weakness is her strength.
She has always enjoyed drinking in taverns and tends to use them as her base of operations when traveling and being a wandering mage, she is often seen as quite mysterious when she enters a new town. Far from being the loner skulking in the corner of a grotty pub though, Arcadia is normally found in the nicest of taverns, starting sing-a-longs with the local patrons and generally being the life and soul of the party. She is therefore also an attention-seeker of sorts. Arcadia also prides herself on her charm and can often be quite flirtatious with people, usually in some attempt to get her own way with something. She takes pride in her appearance and tries to use it to her advantage and get what she wants from people, hence why she uses flirting as a means of obtaining things occasionally - if that fails, threatening violence is usually her second port of call. Arcadia is a lesbian, though she does still flirt with men as she knows they will still be interested in her appearance regardless - she uses this tactic in order to exploit men into getting them to do things for her or obtaining things she wants. Her more serious flirting is used on women, who she may also try to exploit, but due to her libido will not exactly say no to any bonus sexual encounters with a female bed-fellow.
According to rumor and hearsay from the places she has visited, she is a descendant of or actually is some kind of cat-goddess as she possesses feline features and can perform magic - though this particular rumor is categorically false. Arcadia's good sense of humor often sees her sometimes trying to fan the flames of certain rumors, such as being a cat goddess, for her own amusement. Her own flirtatious manner of talking to people is also parodied, as she sometimes refers to herself as "The Cougar" in reference to her age and feline-like features for fun.
In summary, Arcadia is a provocative and flirtatious woman with rather a lot of confidence which manifests itself in a somewhat egotistical fashion. She enjoys being the center of attention and having fun - which can sometimes equate to being lazy. At times she can be quite rude, loud and obnoxious - especially when challenged or provoked. She has a good sense of humor and in her own way is quite charming. In battle she is a cool and collected as she can be, but can often lose her temper if she is provoked.
Alignment: Neutral
Weapon: Pole-arm
Element/Magic: Lightning
Class: Rogue Mage
Limit Breaks:
Limit Break 1: Electrocute
Limit Break 2: Ray Bomb (Unlocked at LVL 15)
Limit Break 3: Shockwave Pulsar (Unlocked at Lvl 30)
Character History:
Arcadia grew up without a mother figure in her life and so she was taught everything by her father. Due to the fact they lived in near isolation, her father attempted to toughen her up by getting her to play sports with boys of her age as he deemed them to be more competitive - as is the nature of the wild and the forest in which they lived. The boys were often much rougher when playing games like football and basketball and so after a while of getting used to this, she was able to improve her stamina and speed a lot by playing with them. As a result of this character building process, many of Arcadia's friends growing up had been male. This meant that she was quite a tomboy in her youth.
When Arcadia was 12 years old, she left to go towards a lake to wash her face after playing a game with her friends. When she knelt near the water she saw another girl across the water. This was the first other girl she had seen her whole life seeing as her father lived quite away out of the nearest village and her friends walked out to meet her and play games. The girl she saw was so beautiful that Arcadia felt something she hadn't felt before. She went away from the lake and back home thinking constantly of the girl, not telling anybody about her.
When she reached the age of 15 her father was killed. He had gone out hunting and had been killed by the beast he was trying to catch. She was fairly upset about this and decided that she would live in her father's house, alone, with no visitors until she was strong enough to hunt and kill 20 of the beasts that had slain her father. It took her 3 years of training everyday for hours and hours before she hunted and successfully killed 20 of the beasts. During her training in isolation she had become an expert knife thrower and she could handle a sword extremely well for someone self taught. She had used a carved wooden sword to hunt the beasts but had left it behind when she moved. She still used her throwing knives and trained at home everyday before going out in the evenings.
At the age of 18 she had killed the beasts and finished up her life at her father's old house. Her old friends from her childhood had grown apart from her due to her self-inflicted isolation and mourning of her father's death. She became bored without her father and friends anymore and so she decided to travel. The girl she had seen by the lake when she was 12 still stood vivid in her memory and that thought had stayed with her for years, through the hardship of her father's death and her 3 year exile from social life. Arcadia left her father's home with the aims of finding the girl she had seen by the lake as she was the one thing left living that she felt strongly about. Not before long she found herself moving to a large town where she resided for about 6 years. During this time she had blossomed into a young woman, still retaining many of the boyish traits she had acquired in her childhood, but gaining much appreciation for being feminine and a strong independent young woman. She would spend most of her days going out and having fun, attempting to get attention from people that she had been so starved of in the 3 years she spent trying to avenge her father. It did work, and she was very happy in her new home but she had yet to stumble upon the girl she had wanted to find.
Once she hit 24 however, she had started to long for adventure. She had put off searching for the beautiful girl for too long already and so she set off to find her once more. A number of incidents occurred (referring to the RPs from the old forum here) which lead Arcadia into meeting Seifer Almasy and Estrella Divina. She got into many scrapes, fighting and defending herself and her companions on their travels against bandits and warriors that blocked their way to wherever it was they decided they would go to next. She developed a friendship with Estrella, a strong independent woman who could kick some serious ass - someone that Arcadia felt was like her, someone she felt she could depend on.
After many adventures, an incident occurred that would take Arcadia away from her companions. The three adventurers had entered an area of land that was regularly raided by bandits, though this was never taken into account by Arcadia and company as they had not visited the area before. It was night time and the three of them were just about ready to go to sleep - the camp fire was getting low and just as they were about to rest the bandits attacked. The group ambushed their small camp, attacking the three adventurers who did their best to fight back with all they could muster. They were by no means a weak group but the bandits were too many. A raging battle ensued and the fire that had once been on the verge of dying out for the night was now a scorching blaze around them. Seifer and Estrella both lay battered and bruised, unable to fight anymore, but Arcadia was gone - lost into the night along with the bandits.
As it turned out, Arcadia was captured. The bandits saw her as valuable, though not valued in terms of equality, but as a valuable asset - a possession. Because of her feline-like features, such as her eyes and sight, her agility on her feet and flexibility and even her cat-like teeth they saw her as perfect material to con and trick people. Dressing her up in particular dresses with certain jewels, they would escort her by leash into near by towns and declare that the cat-goddess demanded tributes in the form of food, money and any other valuable items that they had. In some cases they even demanded that they take custody of the town mayor, who was then taken back to the bandit camp and killed, so that the bandits could return the next day and claim that the bandits ruled the town in the name of the cat-goddess.
Despite being known in the region as the cat-goddess by a great many people, the bandits had made the whole thing up. They were just opportunists that had spotted Arcadia with her friends and decided to enslave her for their own gain. She was never treated by a goddess by the bandits, quite the opposite, she was really a slave. She was usually chained up to a post and ordered to wash clothes, cook meals or generally clean up the bandit camp whenever she wasn't being paraded around as a phony cat-goddess and forced into tricking innocent people into parting with their worldly possessions and limited wealth. Arcadia hated it, but if she refused to do anything for the bandits, she was often beaten, whipped or slapped across the face and shouted at - although as the cat-goddess, the leash around her neck would usually be pulled, almost like a choker to stop her from giving the game away.
Arcadia had not only lost her friends but she had lost her freedom. It had been a long time since she had been free and it must have been a few years that she spent as a slave to the bandits who went from an opportunistic bunch of criminals to actually ruling the region within a few months of their cat-goddess scheme putting the fear of the gods into the innocent civilians that lived in the towns near by. It was a terrible place to live and a terrible existence for Arcadia who hated being an accessory to this evil mini-empire. Fortunately that came to an end, sort of.
Having taken control of the region through fear, the bandits had caught some unwanted attention from an organisation known as Limitless. They felt that the bandits had been causing trouble for long enough and decided to shut them down for good, as it was bad business to have them causing havoc on their doorstep. What caught their eye the most were the rumors of the Cat-Goddess - an unnamed being that had somehow single-handedly made a region of the land fall to it's knees in fear that was some how in league with a group of bandits. The Limitless soldiers came looking and when they did, it wasn't pretty. They slaughtered the bandits and discovered Arcadia in their main camp. She had been unable to get away because she had been tied to a post outside the head bandit's tent. She was relatively shaken up by the brutality of the Limitless soldiers but somewhat thankful that they had killed her former captors. The only problem now was that she was at their mercy.
Limitless now had obtained the cat-goddess. The trouble was, there was no evident power emanating from her that would suggest she was capable of granting Limitless with anything extraordinary. It was then that they too, decided to keep her, but this time she was not a slave, she was an experiment. Limitless were going to experiment on her until she did show signs of power. It was true, she looked somewhat feline in appearance but they wanted more out of her. They spent months rigging her up to machines, super-charging her, injecting her with things, probing her and ignoring all the pain she felt in the process. The only things stopping her from going insane were the memories of Estrella and Seifer, and the girl she had seen by the lake when she was 12. Those were the only good memories she had anymore. Everything else was gone. Her freedom was gone, her father had been taken from her long before that, she didn't even have any dignity any more. One fateful day this all came to a head and Arcadia snapped. She was in the middle of being experimented on yet again, her hair had gone from a deep, colourful purple to pure white, she felt dizzy, weak, alone and angry. Limitless' mistake was that in tormenting Arcadia like this, trying to get their Cat-Goddess to become reality, they had fueled a fire that would now burn them. They had given Arcadia the power to escape.
During the experiment, Arcadia was having magical energy pumped through her body. She had receptors on her hands, feet, underarms, stomach, chest, cheeks, forehead and even her backside and the magic was being absorbed. Arcadia absorbed so much of it that whilst she was thinking about how angry she was and how hurt she was that she was still here being held captive that she exploded in a fit of rage, sending energy back from her body, into the machines causing them to explode. The guards tried to contain her and keep her captive but she used the magical abilities she had just been granted against them and fought in hand-to-hand combat with a long piece of metal piping, killing anybody that got in her way as she tried to escape. After grabbing a lab coat to better cover up her modesty having usually been given no privacy during her time as a lab rat, she escaped from the Limitless HQ and became a vagrant.
Her mind and body had been pushed to it's limits inside Limitless HQ and she was almost a shell of what she once was. Her own sense of accomplishment and freedom after 6 years of being held captive by many different people was the only thing stopping her from losing her sense of identity. Despite looking different and feeling different, she tried to continue her life as best she could, to try and become herself again and to try and get used to and hone her new found abilities. As a fighter, she incorporated magic into her fighting style, and despite still having her knowledge of using throwing knives locked in the recesses of her addled mind, she turned to fighting using an ornate polearm to represent the metal piping she had used as a weapon during her escape to freedom. It also served to compliment her new image and life as a wandering mage.
Writing sample: (Canon: 200 words Non-Canon: 150 words)
Arcadia wandered into the town, draped only in the lab coat she had managed to snatch on her escape from the Limitless headquarters. She was tired, broken and hunched over, using a piece of metal piping as a walking stick. Her head with her now white, colourless hair was sticking out of the top of the white coat, making her almost look like an elderly woman despite her true age being 30. Her time as a slave and as a human guinea-pig in the Limitless laboratories had taken her from her friends and had pretty much left her devoid of a life. Spending six years as a captive was a long time and Arcadia had almost forgotten who she really was, especially after the torment she was subjected to as a lab-rat under the control of the Limitless organisation. Now she had her freedom, there was only really one thing she could do; keep living. She had to find herself again. That was the only way she would ever truly be reunited with her friends.
