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Entry tags:
Empatheias App
Player: Vil
Contact: plurk @vilyasage
Age: 29
Current Characters: None!
Character: Crowe Altius
Age: Lateish 20s; younger than Nyx, so ~26-30 range.
Canon: Final Fantast XV - Kingsglaive
Canon Point: After she has been shot, but she isn't quite through dying yet.
Background:
Crowe grew up on her own, orphaned at a young age and driven from her village. Fending for herself from that point on left her hardened and friendless, not to mention scruffy and hungry. At some point after the formation of the Kingsglaive fifteen years prior, Crowe was among the refugees found to have particular strength with the magic of Lucis and signed on. Military training may have given her a better sense of when to stand at attention and follow orders, but she never lost the intensity in her eyes, the scrappy outer shell, or the certainty that she could and should handle things on her own.
What she gained in joining the Kingsglaive was a kind of family, a set of friends bound by duty and the hardships of being the front line defense in a war. We don't know specifically how long she has been with the Kingsglaive, but it is long enough to have the implicit trust of her brothers in arms, and a large dose of big-brother affection from Nyx and Libertus in particular.
If Nyx's living quarters are anything to go by, members of the Kingsglaive live in sparse barracks - concrete walls, metal doors, barred windows - with minimal furniture and little in the way of creature comforts.
Being a Glaive does nothing to help the way refugees are treated by citizens in Insomnia. If anything, it makes it worse, as outsiders are already second-class and now have the gall to be better at defending the people and able to 'borrow' magic, and must think so highly of themselves to boot. ("We don't need any of you immigrants jumping around playing war hero.") Even the bartender where Crowe and her bros go for a drink has a fight to pick about The Way It's Done Here. It makes for a daily life of keeping her back straight and sticking to her fellow Glaives.
Three days before the peace treaty with Niflheim is due to be signed, Crowe is selected for an infiltration mission: get to Tenebrae and escort Princess Lunafreya out of a difficult situation. When she arrives at some designated location, rather than head off on the rest of her mission she meets firsthand the betrayal of those of the Kingsglaive who are no longer loyal to Regis or Lucis, who have fallen in with the Empire instead. She dies on the outskirts, shot (with hollow-point bullets) by one of her own
Personality:
Crowe's usual and visible attitude has a capital A; she takes you to task and takes none of your shit, either. Very much a self-sufficient soul and proud of it, Crowe does not take well to the insinuation that she might need help or otherwise not be up to the task, even if phrased as "be safe" style warnings of care. She takes her work seriously, presenting a solid at-attention readiness under the watch of their captain. Like the rest of the Kingsglaive, she knows very well she only has these abilities and this position because she is a useful, effective tool, and the chances of death in the line of duty are high.
Paramount among her cares are the lives of her companions - specifically, the named Glaives we see working most closely with her, the party she fights and drinks and attends briefings with. When Nyx disobeys orders and heads back into the fight (to grab Libertus, but it's not clear she knows this) she starts yelling his name, clearly intending that he should hear her and not do that. Pelna has to yank her away from staying there to watch or possibly go right after him, and it takes a lot of tugging, and she doesn't stop looking after where Nyx has gone. She sticks beside Libertus's stretcher with a hand on him until they load him into a van and she can't follow. Later, the crew is out for drinks and starts up a conversation about Being Heroes and all that comes with it; she lets it go for two whole comments before rolling her eyes and then demanding they stop that kind of talk while they're drinking.
None of her crew responds with anything but return jabs or acceptance to the harsh tone there or thereafter, or bristles at her sharp dressing-down of both Nyx and Libertus when they arrive at the bar. This is how Crowe shows affection to her most trusted: she's neither letting you get away with anything nor letting you go. In return she expects the same treatment, rough but well-meant, and that the Kingsglaive ought to be loyal to one another and their duty is understood. She won't hear talk of deadly heroics. Regular life is plenty deadly enough. She is at her most comfortable and casual among these brothers of hers, to the point where she drops her at-attention pose immediately upon Captain Drautos leaving the room, shifting her weight to one hip and her concentration to nonverbal sass.
All that said, she really doesn't want to hear anymore about how she's like a little sister to a couple of big brother Glaives. Crowe's survival to adulthood depended upon her being just fine on her own, better than fine, and as far as she's concerned that's still true. She goes into the mission to Tenebrae almost certainly expecting some kind of Imperial resistance, and that she is chosen to carry it out on her own is as much a testament to her competence as it is out of necessity for stealth. As she takes for a given the trust amongst the Kingsglaive, it is unthinkable that one of her own would bring her down; you can see it beginning to dawn on her in her last moments alive, a slow growing uncertainty in what really approaches her.
Despite her rough temperament and tendency to punctuate her affection with force and intensity, she keeps a more even disposition over political matters than some of her cohort, placing duty before most of her personal biases. In making her opinion known before the treaty briefing - "All that fighting we did, all for nothing" - instead of angry she sounds almost resigned. When Libertus is ready to tear Luche a new one for his judgment of the peace treaty, Crowe helps hold him back, but looks just as intensely at Luche in expectation that he'll defend what he said. The infighting goes against their brotherhood (as far as she knows), but Luche damn well better have a good reason to say what he says, and he'll get only that one chance to make some kind of sense. They're to be there for each other, for the goal they share as refugees, and for the end of the war, not for taking out personal grudges.
It's inconclusive whether she is the only lady Glaive (some others are seen at the start but they fall down and no word on whether they get back up again), but she acts and is received by the named other Glaives as "one of the guys" when they aren't trying to big-brother her. She is just as loud, brash, coarse, and uncensored with them as they are with her and one another.
Abilities:
As granted to all the Kingsglaive by their king, Crowe has access to the magic abilities inherent in the royal line of Lucis. In the big and busy onscreen clash with Niflheim she stands with a group of other mages, joining magic and focus to call down a massive cyclone of fire (there are a few smaller such twisters around as well); one of the mages collapses and it seems Crowe is able to pick up the slack, so to speak, as the working doesn't waver and they complete it shortly thereafter. That she is chosen specifically for her mage abilities (and wears the altered uniform to match) speaks to the capacity for "big" spells in ice and lightning magic as well, though something so grand as the flame tornado would still require multiple people. She does not seem to suffer from the dizziness or nausea that some Glaives have after using magic, and she holds out much longer than any of the other mages she works with atop the wall at the start.
With membership in the Kingsglaive also comes combat training of all stripes, as one must be prepared when engaging with airships and soldiers of steel. Crowe is wiry and would be no good in a contest of pure strength. She carries the same knife as the other Glaives, though, and presumably can hold her own in a fight using it.
Alignment: Piphron (trust/distrust)
From a young age, Crowe needed trust in herself in order to survive, and likely learned the many harsh lessons inherent in any attempts to place trust in the world around her. As a Glaive, trust in her squad (for lack of better term) is essential, as is being able to return that dependability, yet she retains a core of knowing she alone is ultimately responsible for herself; it is disloyalty, which she doesn't tolerate, couldn't see, and wasn't invited to engage in, that leads to her death.
Other:
She can drive a motorbike at least, and probably also a car, as several other members of the Kingsglaive are seen driving. One of her few possessions is a cell phone with a morbol charm hanging from it, which I find oddly adorable, because either she thinks they're cute or it speaks to her because of how dangerous morbols are.
General Sample:
Test Drive top-level
Emotion Sample:
speaking of distrust (from one of the test drive threads)
Questions: