application (den)

[comic_relief]

Player Information
Player name: Shira
Contact:
• E-Mail: stitchmymouth[at]hotmail[dot]com
• IM: shira syndrome
• Plurk: whatinthefuck
Are you over 18: Yes!
Characters in the game already: Anders (circlejerked)
Proof of Reserve: /slaps down

Character Information
Character Name: Jack
Canon: Final Fantasy Type-0
Canon Point: Post-game.
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: Dead.

History:

General history and Jack's history. He's taken from the good canon ending.

Personality:

On the surface, Jack is the very definition of a class clown--cheerful, optimistic, insufferably devoted to jokes and smiling his way through life. No matter whether you're meeting him for the first time or you're someone he's lived with for ten years as in the case of Class Zero, the impression you're left with is that he's a doofus for the most part. A well-meaning one who's constantly trying to keep things light-hearted, but a doofus all the same. He has to be, or how else could a kid act so flippantly in the middle of a war?

And honestly? That's just how he likes to be seen.

Dig a little deeper, and what you find isn't a light-hearted kid, but someone who wants you to feel light-hearted. If he smiles and makes your day a bit brighter, or if he makes a joke and you laugh, then he's done his job. Being the class clown is exactly that to Jack--a job, a role, a conscious choice he's made in order to keep others' moods up. In a way, he's more of a cheerleader for his class than just its resident jokester; he's always ready and waiting to relieve tension or set an example by thinking positively, and he's so good at being the comic relief that people often forget there might be more going on beneath the surface, convinced he's immature by nature.

Even the other members of Class Zero are sometimes surprised when more serious aspects of his personality shine through. In one of the novels, Deuce describes meeting Jack for the first time and being taken aback that a boy who acted so carefreely could talk about people's deaths like it was nothing. While growing up together, she sees an irreconcilable contradiction between the Jack who's always happy and the Jack who "says cold-hearted statements sometimes." Seven, the most empathetic member of Class Zero, is able to see through his behavior a bit more clearly. She recognizes that Jack is, in her own words, somebody who is "always smiling on the outside but never on the inside," something Jack confirms when he believes someone finally understands him as a person.

He believes behaving in this way is better for Class Zero--and Class Zero's well-being is his priority. He's crowned himself the class clown in order to keep their morale up, but it's clear that if Jack had nobody left to inspire and entertain, he'd be a much different person. His inner stoicism is evident in his considerable discipline and fortitude as a swordsman, as well as in canny remarks he tends to make despite a reputation for never taking things seriously. Jack will often provide shrewd observations (jokingly, of course), like pointing out the Milites Empire's hypocrisy in denouncing Rubrum for being too dependent on their Crystal when Milites society is dependent on theirs, too, and in laughing off the need to tighten security in case beautiful spies steal their secrets (one of their female instructors was, in fact, later revealed as a spy.)

However, Jack's personality is ultimately defined by what he is more than who he is.

Having two faces that he shows to the world is only half of the story. Before anything else, Jack is an Agito cadet and one of Arecia's twelve "children," and those things mark out his identity in deep-seated ways. He's a tool of war, raised for combat from a young age to believe that his skills as a soldier are what should matter most and what make him special--that is essentially the foundation of his character.

Who would bother raising a teen as a super soldier? Well, it all ties back to Arecia, a divine entity in Type-0 canon.

Long story short, Orience is a world embroiled in a war between nations, in part thanks to Arecia. Her goal has been to breed human souls strong enough to open a gateway between the mortal plane and the Unseen Realm, and to do this the deities decided to incite never-ending conflict in Orience. She helped create the four Crystals that would later form the four nations, ensuring that the Crystals would wipe memories of the dead from people's minds so that they would never be chained down by regrets. She also sought to train a handful of humans, making them participate in this conflict until they became strong enough to reach "Agito" status. However, the humans in this experiment are never able to survive their final battle and die before their task is complete. Every time they fail, the deities destroy the world and start over, resetting Orience's history and waiting until the Agito candidates are born once more.

In earlier cycles of history, Arecia tried making her candidate a single person, but finding that didn't work, she split this person into sixteen "constellations" or human qualities embodied in sixteen individual people. Eventually, she removed four of these souls (fear, love, age, and suffering) from the experiment, leaving twelve, and these remaining twelve make up the members of Class Zero. Unbeknownst to the children, everything about their lives from their births to their being orphaned and adopted by Arecia was pre-decided. In each cycle, she appears as a mortal woman, taking them under her care to groom them for combat all over again.

As one of the twelve constellations, Jack represents the physical manifestation of ignorance. This isn't ignorance in the general sense of being unintelligent or uninformed, but what I've already outlined above--his power to put a smile on in any situation, keeping his head up and willfully ignoring even the most dismal odds. After being brought up to view his life as expendable by an entity capable of reviving him from fatal wounds, the end result is a person who can charge headlong into battle with a smile on his face.

In this sense, Jack's earned the nickname "red demon" along with the other eleven children. There are no limits to how far he's willing to go, and this can make him both extremely dangerous and extremely cold to those looking on from the outside. Human sacrifice is a necessary evil to him; he is quite capable of killing without batting an eyelash, and on the flip side, he is willing to carry out a mission to the end no matter the cost, even if it's his own life. Though not a malicious person, Jack is highly driven, able to compartmentalize the effects of war and some of the more grim mission assignments to carry out orders unquestioningly. Even if his own classmates are dying, the mission--and Arecia's approval--always come first, and it doesn't matter who he has to go through to see it succeed.

How many times Arecia chose Jack to be a potential Agito is unclear, but between the game and the novels, we know she tried the experiment over six hundred million times, and that though the people caught in the cycles may lose their memories with each rebirth, their souls remember their past lives, evident by Class Zero having strange dreams, flashes of deja vu, etc. The real reason he can act so flippantly in the middle of a war is that his soul "remembers" its cycles, and in all that time he's simply never been taught the value of his own life beyond war. Agito candidates have never not been soldiers, and like the rest of Orience they've never had a chance to live peacefully. At no time has Jack ever lived his own life, or had real freedom to make choices. It's integral to understand the consequences of Arecia's influence in order to understand just how much Jack's (and the rest of Class Zero's) self-worth is tied up in making their Mother proud and achieving some grand destiny by becoming Agito. It's something that's been going on for millions of lifetimes.

At the end of the day, Jack is a soldier, a goofball, and one of Arecia's experiments. That's all he's really had an opportunity to be so far.

Items on your character at canon point:

• Katana (summonable weapon)
• Cadet uniform
• Belt/sword holster
• Probably a few basic battle supplies like potions and ethers

Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses:

Swordsmanship

Since Class Zero adopts the same weapon in each of their lives, in a way, Jack was born for the katana, his primary weapon in battle. Extensive training coupled with impressive physical strength makes Jack the heavy hitter of the group--he is able to kill or disable most threats with one strike. His specialty is reading opponents' movements until an opportunity arises to cause maximum damage, using techniques like Reflex and Tranquility (counter-slashes), as well as Deliverance (a strike causing instant death). He also has a move called Transience that involves channelling his own life energy into his sword to critically damage enemies, turning it red with his blood and exhausting his health.

However, because his style of fighting requires strength and precision, in this area Jack's weakness is a lack of speed. Being a "slow and steady" kind of combatant, he has the greatest difficult with quick opponents who don't give him a chance to dodge or ready his attacks.

Magic

All members of Class Zero have gone through equally rigorous magic training that comprises both offensive and defensive magic.

Offensive includes fire, ice, and thunder magic that ranges in type from explosions around the caster to elemental projectiles. Jack also has the means to perform advanced magic, in the case of special attack spells (i.e. Ultima, Death, Bio Quake, Tornado, Holy, and Meteor), all techniques that require greater magical expenditure.

Defensive includes healing magic that restores strength, heals ailments, protects against damage, and revives fallen allies. This also includes Wall, a spell that creates a magic barrier that blocks attacks until destroyed.

Eidolon summoning

A more advanced form of magic is the ability to summon Eidolons ("war gods"), powerful monsters that can fight on the summoner's behalf. Jack is capable of calling on Eidolons from six categories:

• Ifrit class
• Golem class
• Shiva class
• Odin class
• Diabolos class
• Bahamut class

Each class has its strengths and weaknesses, but there are some restrictions to their use. Eidolons can only be summoned one at a time and they can only remain in the physical world for a short time before disappearing. Most importantly, Eidolons can't be summoned unless the summoner gives up their life to do--meaning to call an Eidolon for a few minutes, he'd have to die. Fun. :'D

Phantoma harvesting

HUMAN DEMENTOR. There's no 100% clear explanation of the process, but Jack has been the taught how to extract the life essence from life forms, what would roughly equate to a thing's soul. In FF Type-0 they call this "phantoma." When he kills an opponent, he can draw their phantoma (what looks like red orbs of light, or orbs of other colors) out of their body and absorb it into his own. Doing so will increase his power and replenish some of his magic.

Weaknesses

Being an accomplished fighter at such young age comes with other drawbacks, a major one being that Jack simply hasn't had a purpose besides taking marching orders. Not only is his education in areas beyond combat and magic sorely lacking, he's lived a very sheltered life, experience-wise. Codependency is an issue. Jack has never formed an identity separate from Arecia and Class Zero, so like the other children, Jack struggles with the idea of being his own person outside of a combat setting.

With this naivety toward other walks of life comes a limited appreciation for them, too. Jack has since learned to value his own life and the lives of others more than he would have a year ago, but even so, being raised to put the mission first can lead him to act recklessly, even immorally, if he has a goal to accomplish. Seeing people as expendable in the name of the greater good is a hard habit to break, and this narrow-minded view can be problematic.