Cidappfus

Player Information

Player: Sra
Contact: TheMightySra @ plurk or disco
Invitation OR characters played: Currently playing Adrian Silverleaf
Are you over 18?: Every day of my life


Character Information

Character: Cid Telamon
Canon: FFXVI - post death at Drake's Head
Age: 44 but he talks like he's 95
History: Link
Possessions: He's only possessed by one guy -- no jk uhh just clothes and stolen pocket change.
Weapon: Just a regular sword! While he does have combat magic, Cid typically channels his abilities in conjunction with using his sword since the use of his magic is slowly killing him. He also tends to avoid using his abilities in public if he can help it, though he may relax about that particular point, it doesn't negate the rest of it.

Since he's given his Eikon to Clive, access to his magical abilities will probably start off pretty limited.

Powers/Abilities: Cid's status as a Dominant means that he can manipulate and summon lightning (often called levin in canon) and transform himself into the eikon Ramuh. In his regular ol' human state, Cid can summon enough levin to knock down a few regular humans. However, Dominants can "semi-prime" and "prime", which allows them to draw on vastly greater power by summoning their eikons and either partially or fully transforming into them.

When semi-primed, Cid has enough power to take out large monsters. He gains superhuman speed, strength, and durability. When fully primed, he transforms into Ramuh, a giant... old man... with a staff that allows him to temporarily manipulate the clouds above and draw lightning down from them as well. Ramuh can also fly (hovering in place and not sustained/distance flight) and teleport short distances, or at least move fast enough that he appears to do so.

Since he gave Ramuh to Clive in his final moments, Cid doesn't have easy access to his powers anymore. He can still access them to a more limited degree, as other Dominants are shown to do this after Clive takes their eikon, but trying to do anything that requires him to prime or semi-prime would be far more difficult for him, and fully priming runs a high risk of him losing control of Ramuh. There is a chance of it happening against his will if he's in enough distress but Cid is overall extremely even-keel so it's hard to imagine this would be a likely situation.

While he might still semi-prime if pressed, he tends to use that very sparingly.

In addition, Cid can only prime or semi-prime for a few minutes at a time at most. There are massive drawbacks to priming or using his power with any kind of regularity. At best, he'll be coughing up blood for a while after he returns to normal. At worst, parts of Cid's body have already begun turning to stone, and he runs the risk of furthering that process as his body is drained of aether. If he uses too much power, he gets a slow, disabling, and painful death.

Luckily for him, Cid isn't just a pretty face without Ramuh. As Waloed's former Lord Commander and leader of the Hideaway, Cid is well trained in both combat and strategy. He's spent the vast majority of his life as a sailor and a soldier, working as a mercenary even before he joined Waloed. Suffice to say, he's good with a sword, but he's primarily a leader with a head for strategy (debatable) and logistics, a lot of charisma, and a keen eye towards the future.

By his world's standards, Cid is a real "man of tomorrow." He's developed advanced non-magical technology to aid people in living without depending on magic for their every need. While Cid IS an extremely competent inventor, everything he builds serves the primary goal of helping and protecting people.


Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around? I think the easy answer is his daughter, Midadol. Cid loves Mid more than anyone else in the world and did his best to care for her since she was a baby, despite his obligations as Lord Commander.

I think her impact on him is less about potentially changing any of the choices he made - even without Midadol, Cid would still adopt every sad little waif he came across and would still largely be the same person - and more about the fact that Mid is clearly such a bright point in his life. He's proud of her! She's smart and curious and everything he could ever hope she'd be! If you asked him, he'd say she did it all on her own, but he's glad he didn't get in the way too much.

They don't get to interact in the game because we were robbed, but other people remark on how much more cheerful Cid is when he receives a letter from her, or how excited he was when she built the Orchestrion player. His letters TO her are blunt but full of affection in a way he doesn't offer to anyone else, often calling her "my dearest Midadol" or leaving her riddles because he knows she likes them.

I think that without her, Cid would lose one of the great joys of his life, and frankly he doesn't get to have a lot of those. He's fighting for a future that he knows he'll never get to see, and yeah it's primarily because it's the right thing to do, but it's also his daughter's future and the world he's leaving behind for her.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why? Probably the way he handled Benedikta. A lot of what happened between them is left up for interpretation — we know that Cid rescued her at 15, and Benedikta was desperate to be loved. It's implied that she developed a romantic interest in Cid, which he didn't reciprocate, but he saw her as his protege and supported her ambition to be free. Cid left Waloed at some point and Benedikta felt bitterly abandoned by him leaving.

This leads her eventually dying at Clive's hands, after spending much of her life being treated as little more than a pawn by Barnabas. Cid thought he could save her and didn't succeed. In the end, he blamed himself for what happened to her.

Benna of course made her own choices, but I don't think Cid can let go of the idea that he could have done something different.

Cid is endlessly trying to have some control of the future, trying to fix people, trying to help them... and I think in general his failures haunt him whether or not he could have ultimately done anything different.

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting? How might this impact their ability to adapt and in what ways will they confront this challenge? Diadem is, in some ways, all of Cid's hopes and fears fully realized. It's a world that doesn't depend on magic even if magic is present and, at least in theory, doesn't enslave people based on arbitrary circumstances of their birth (except for when it does).

Yet, despite being "better" in some ways, it's also a world that's STILL rife with hardship and inequity, just of a different kind. I don't think Cid expected that the world would become a peaceful utopia if Mothercrystals and Bearers didn't exist, but I think he expected it to (eventually) be better overall, and he's going to be disappointed that the needle hasn't moved all that far. If anything, the needle is just wearing a new suit and a fun hat. He might question his ability to really affect any change that matters, when he can't really change fundamental human nature.

That said, there are obviously wildly different circumstances in Diadem with the fluxdrifts and the storms. I think he'll still do his best to help those in need and he'll want to investigate the storms and their effects on the world, but in a lot of ways he'll have to accept that this isn't the kind of world that he can fundamentally change or "fix" by blowing stuff up (...unless?) He will also be pretty interested in the Sanctum specifically, and how it might be feeding off of the scarcity and exploitation that exists within Panorama.

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting? Technology! He's going to LOVE all of the interesting new tech he can tinker with. While it's going to be unfamiliar at first, I think Cid is more than capable of catching up pretty quickly. He should get plenty of enrichment taking things apart to understand how they work.

He'll probably end up working at the Scrapyard along with helping out with various charitable endeavours. Cid likes to keep himself very busy so I think he'll be able to make himself pretty useful.

Also, for better or worse, people are people everywhere and this isn't going to be the first time he's had to start from nothing. I think he'll probably start building up a network pretty quickly.


Samples

Sample: Link