[OOC] Kenos Info

[youngprodigy]

Cid Garlond

Final Fantasy XIV CANON 37 AGE Zenith FACTION Tier 2 HARMONIZATION LEVEL

Post-Endwalker CANON POINT Male (he/him) GENDER Savant ASPECT Tier 0 DISCORD LEVEL

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

At a glance, it’s easy to tell that Cid has been through some shit. He doesn’t do much to hide the distinctive scarring on his arms that look way too close to the pattern ceramics or glass makes upon being shattered. He’s a stout, muscular man, standing at 5’6” (167 cm) tall. This makes him incredibly short for a Garlean, though he doesn’t seem the least bit bothered by his height. Cid’s voice is rather deep, and like all Final Fantasy XIV characters, he speaks with a British accent.

Cid also has an unfortunate tendency to wear clothing that leaves his chest exposed. He’s blissfully unaware of how distracting other people might find his style of dress, and generally doesn’t appear too worried about defending himself to begin with. Maybe that’s because he has a tendency to be incredibly easy-going, and it shows in his general demeanor.

SHARD

Cid's shard is small, around two inches (5 cm) across, located below his collar bone on his sternum. The shard is a pale blue crystal, roughly in the shape of the Garlean flag. Down the middle is a hairline fracture, noticeable only if someone is looking closely at it.

ASPECT TATTOO

Cid’s aspect tattoo is a small Savant symbol in bluish-black ink on the inside of his right wrist, no larger than a square centimeter. It has flourishes around it reminiscent of the Garlond Ironworks logo.

PERSONALITY

At his core, Cid is a man who cares deeply about others. Though gaining greater knowledge is certainly a goal of his, Cid sticks to his creed of “freedom through technology”, using Garlean magitek to make lives easier and better for people as opposed to using it to conquer. His first thought upon fleeing to a foreign country was to give away state secrets so Eorzeans could have freer access to travel, after all. Cid is a pacifist, wanting to avoid bloodshed at all costs. Though he avoids fighting, he is aware that more needs to be done to ensure actual change.

Though he is an altruistic man, that doesn’t mean that he isn’t incredibly clueless about things. Growing up unimaginably wealthy means that Cid doesn’t understand the value of money, and he has a tendency to vastly under-estimate how much things cost, though he is grateful even in those situations. He’s at least aware that he’s a clueless rich kid, and doesn’t get offended when it’s pointed out to him.

Most of the time Cid is easy-going and gets along with people. Though friendly, he can come across as a little awkward at times, but not so much in a “machines are better than people” way. Cid can best be summed up as someone who loves people, but doesn’t always understand them.

While usually cheerful, Cid is capable of being sarcastic. It takes a lot to actually anger him, and cause him to lose his temper. The most angry he gets tends to be because Nero knows what to say to set him off. Too bad Cid doesn’t seem to realize that Nero does this to get a reaction from him. There are definitely people he can’t stand, among them are those who commit violence acts and those who betray others. He hates tyranny above all else, and isn’t shy about showing it. This is about the only way to get him to want to fight.

Though Cid wouldn’t talk about it, and would indeed try to hide it, there is a large part of him full of self-loathing. He blames himself for the Seventh Umbral Calamity, believing that his research lead to the horrific massacre on the battlefield in Carteneau.

BACKGROUND

Cid is the only child of Midas nan Garlond, the highest-ranking Magitek engineer in Garlemald, and head of the Magitek Academy. He was accepted into the Academy, the foremost institute for weapons development in Garlemald, at age of twelve. There, he met a peasant boy from the provinces, Nero Scaeva. To say the two didn’t get along well is putting it mildly, but as the youngest students of the Academy they were inseparable.

At some point in Cid’s stay in the Academy, his father, once loving, began to grow distant, focused instead on his latest project, the Dalamud transmitter in the city-state of Bozja— Project Meteor. Though young, Cid was aware of his father’s work on harnessing the power within the lesser moon. In this time, his father’s close personal friend, legatus of the XIVth legion, Gaius van Baelsar, became his guardian. As a result of his father’s distance, and Gaius’ interest in his life, Cid came to see his adoptive father as his only parental figure.

Upon his graduation, Gaius was able to get Cid a job as a magitek engineer, eventually resulting in Cid gaining the title of nan, Chief Magitek Engineer. It was this position as second highest-ranking engineer that lead Cid to be able to research into the project his father had been working on for all that time, and he learned that the power within Dalamud couldn’t possibly be harnessed by the transmitter. Unknown to Cid, his father’s change in personality had been a result of his enslavement by the primal— a god summoned by people— imprisoned inside of it, Bahamut. Midas shot Cid in the stomach for questioning him, and the trauma over the situation left Cid will little clear memory of what truly happened.

More time passed, and the Dalamud transmitter is activated, resulting in the complete annihilation of the Bozja citadel, and the death of everyone inside of the city itself. The event became known as the “Bozja Incident”, and resulted in Cid defecting from Garlemald under the cover of night with his shop hands, Biggs and Wedge.

Upon his defection, he arrived in Eorzea, the realm that Garlemald had spent significant time trying to conquer in the recent past. He gave the leaders of the city-states of Eorzea the secret of Garlean engineering— airships. With a company in Ul’dah that had already begun research into creating airships of their own, Cid was able to create cost-effective airships for the Eorzean people constructed from locally sourced materials. It was these actions that gained him the trust of the leaders of the Eorzean Grand Companies, and lead him to found the Garlond Ironworks, a company of engineers, many defectors themselves.

Some five years before the start of A Real Reborn, in the 1.0 content of the game no longer accessible, Cid was tasked by the Eorzea Alliance to look into the rumblings of the re-started Project Meteor, now helmed by the legatus of the VIIth legion, a man named Nael van Darnus. As Cid’s research was the reason van Darnus was able to think about using the transmitter to weaponize Dalamud, he felt personally responsible for Garlemald’s latest attempt at subjugating Eorzea, this time seemingly by massacring a large portion of the populace.

Since large parts of the original version of Final Fantasy XIV are no longer remembered by characters, there’s only a couple of parts that really matter as far as Cid goes. The first is that he sees Gaius for the first time in several years, and accuses him of losing his morals due to him going along with his plan to kill the people of Eorzea. This results in Cid once again getting shot at by a father figure, and leaves him permanently disillusioned with Gaius.

The other part is the end goal of van Darnus’ for Project Meteor, bringing the lesser moon itself to the Eorzean battlefield of Carteneau to massacre the troops fighting there. Cid is present on the battlefield, and sees Bahamut emerge from the lesser moon, now clearly an artificial satellite created by the Allagans, an ancient Eorzean nation, to seal away the summoned god of the dragons. Though a man named Louisoix is present and able to use magic of his own to protect as many people as possible, thousands die in the ensuing battle, and the destruction felt by the entire realm spreads further than the no man’s land of Carteneau, becoming known as the Seventh Umbral Calamity.

During the chaos, Cid vanishes, and his airship is seen aimlessly floating away. He’s found barely alive and amnesiac by a priest named Iliud, and is taken to a church in Thanalan a ways from his first Eorzean home of Ul’dah. It’s there he lives for five years under the name of “Marques” until he’s found by the Warrior of Light and their surviving Scions of Seventh Dawn ally, Alphinaud, grandson of Louisoix. As one of the only people living in the church, it’s heavily implied that Cid is the one to bury the Warrior’s allies, though the game moves on so quickly from this it’s difficult to see Cid having time to process everything that’s happened.

With the help of the Warrior and Alphinaud, Cid is able to recover his memories and his airship. Though, at this point, he still doesn’t remember who truly assaulted him in the Bozja Citadel. He quickly realizes that the only person who could have gotten the Ultima Weapon, a device Gaius is using to once again attempt to conquer Eorzea, is Nero, but there’s nothing he can do about it so he chooses instead to work with the Scions. Eventually, things culminate with Cid storming Gaius’ stronghold of the Praetorium. There, Gaius asks Cid to return to Garlemald, which Cid flatly refuses.

To make matters worse, he and Nero have an incredibly awkward conversation while the Warrior of Light listens in. Nero escapes the Praetorium, and with the Garlean Empire once again pushed back with the apparent death of Gaius van Baelsar, he heads towards Mor Dhona on behalf of the group Saint Coinach’s Find, intent on getting inside of the newly-uncovered Allagan Crystal Tower. There, he constructs several keys to unlock the barriers preventing entry, and with the Warrior of Light’s help, is able to explore the first level of the structure. Here, Nero reveals that he too is interested in the tower, and Cid begrudgingly accepts his help.

This comes to a head when Nero manages to get himself dragged inside of the World of Darkness, the Allagan term for a place known as the Void, a place where nasty creatures called Voidsent reside. Prolonged exposure to the Void is certain death, if one doesn’t become a Voidsent themselves first. It’s Cid himself who pulls Nero out of the Void, at great risk to both of them. After this, the two part ways and don’t encounter each other again for quite some time.

As the Scions settle down for a banquet in their honor, they are instead framed for an assassination, and in the chaos, most of the Scions go missing, leaving the Warrior of Light and Alphinaud alone to try to flee to the isolationist nation of Ishgard. He doesn’t see the pair again for a long while, until the Warrior needs access to an airship to slay a primal, making this the second time he’s willingly piloted something in order to attack a primal for the Warrior of Light, despite having no protection against them.

Cid’s next appearance is a while later, upon the appearance of a mechanical primal known as Alexander in the Dravanian hinterlands. Between him, the Warrior of Light, goblins from the local settlement of Idyllshire, and an Au Ra explorer named Mide, they are able to prevent a group of goblin anarchists called the Illuminati (yes really) from using Alexander’s properties of time travel to destroy the world.

Much later on, Cid is among the people in a meeting on what to do about the currently-imprisoned, but not for much longer, primal that was summoned by a man named Ilberd out of rage and pure hatred for Garlemald in a bid to free his nation of Ala Mhigo from tyranny. Unfortunately, the primal itself is on par with that of Bahamut, and given nearly all in the meeting were present for the Calamity that Bahamut triggered, they’re keen to avoid a second one, aware of the cost. It’s then that Nero shows up once more, having somehow learned about the meeting. He gives what he calls the “obvious solution”: use the Allagan weapon known as Omega that imprisoned Bahamut inside of Dalamud in the first place. Cid begrudgingly agrees.

After the weapon is released and battles with the primal, the Ironworks moves its headquarters to the neutral area of Rhalgr’s Reach, and Cid begins the task of tracking down Omega’s location.

At some point after the liberation of Ala Mhigo from Imperial rule, Nero returns, hired on as a consultant for the Ironworks by Cid’s second-in-command, a woman named Jessie. Nero is absolutely thrilled by the endless opportunity to harass Cid. Cid is, obviously, less than thrilled. The argument is fortunately cut short by them locating Omega. Before confronting it, Midgardsormr, father of all dragons, reveals something important: Omega wasn’t created by the Allagans. Rather, it was a weapon created by an alien race determined to kill off other lifeforms, including the dragon homeworld (yep, dragons are aliens).

Omega, in its bid to become stronger and stronger, pits the Warrior of Light against enemies it creates. Cid and Nero, as engineers, both work as support. Omega makes it clear that it’s a considerable thread when it attacks and severely injures Biggs and Wedge, leaving Cid and Nero as the only two who can possibly help the Warrior. This works out fine until Nero, in his stubbornness, declines to return to the Reach with the rest of the group. As a result, he’s attacked by Omega and left in a bad way he disguises until the pain becomes too much and he collapses. Cid is able to get the Warrior to come to his aide, but it results with Nero being bedridden.

One evening, when Cid has figured out what he needs to do to permanently destroy Omega, Nero escapes from his bed to give Cid advice. The two have a heart-to-heart, though Nero is himself about the whole thing, so as a result it’s laced with sarcasm on his part. But Cid, knowing the man better than anyone, sees through the behavior for what it really is: Nero wants Cid to succeed and is encouraging him to go on. The two depart on good terms…… which makes things all the more aggravating when Nero leaves upon Omega’s defeat, having given himself an enormous paycheck (on top of what he was already paid). Cid is, naturally, enraged.

Elsewhere, a friend of his, a fellow defector of Garlemald, asked Cid for help with a task involving looking for a legendary city. As Cid was too busy with the Omega situation to directly assist him, he instead sent in the Warrior of Light and a woman named Mikoto, an expert in auracite and memory crystals.

It’s not clear what Cid was doing when the Warrior and their allies were on the First, but upon their return, the Ironworks was tasked with helping to formulate the cure for tempering, something that Cid readily accepted. He was told by G’raha Tia that in an alternate timeline, he and Nero figured out not only the key to time-travel, but also to travel across the Rift between reflections. Somehow, the Ironworks was able to track Nero down, who seems interested in staying near Cid for the time being.

At some point afterwards, Cid was asked to assist in recalling what the legendary weapons inside of the Bozja Citadel looked like. As he had no clear memory of events leading up to the Bozja Incident, Mikoto was called in to use her knowledge of memory crystals to enable her to literally look around in Cid’s memories, revealing that Cid has a deep trauma associated with the event. It’s only then that he remembers his father was the one to shoot him, and that Midas had been tempered when the shooting occurred.

Cid is seen again after the Final Days start for a second time upon the death of Zodiark. The council of Sharlayan makes the choice to use the ship called the Ragnarok to send the Warrior and Scions to the edge of the universe in order to stop the Endsinger from destroying the entire universe. The Ironworks are among the many people sent for, and as a result Cid spends much time in helping get the ship in working order. He’s among those who watch the Ragnarok sail to Ultima Thule, and is once again present for the return journey.

ABILITIES & SKILLS

Garlean Third Eye

Cid possess a trait unique to Garleans: a third eye made of keratin in the center of his forehead. Usually, he keeps it covered under a specially-made pair of goggles, likely because of the prejudice he could otherwise face as a result of his country’s actions against their surrounding nations and beyond. This third eye really does just function as an extra eye (though he can’t see through it); it doesn’t grant him any special knowledge or preternatural abilities.

Brilliant Engineer

Cid is one of the best engineers in Garlemald. He was accepted into the Magitek Academy at twelve years old (along with Nero), and easily went on to be one of the best engineers in the country. He was eventually given the title of “nan”, which translates to “Chief Magitek Engineer”.

This is a great summary of his skillset— Cid is a genius engineer, and is incredibly capable of coming up with solutions to difficult problems, so long as they can be solved with technology. It’s too bad he’s terrible with money and has a tendency to vastly underestimate how much something should cost.

Animal Friendship

This spell lets Cid convince a beast that he means it no harm. Choose a beast that he can see within 30 feet/9 meters. It must see and hear him. If the beast is sapient/sentient, the spell fails. Otherwise, the beast is friendly. If Cid or one of his companions harms the target, the spell ends.

Cure Wounds

A creature Cid touches instantly heals from up to surface-level wounds (i.e., those that would be treated with bandaids and not much else). This spell has no effect on undead or constructs.

Find Familiar

Cid gains the service of a familiar. No matter what he does, it always takes on the form of a miniature Omega. It also has the personality and mannerisms of Omega when it speaks, though as Cid’s familiar, it only possesses knowledge Cid does.

The familiar acts independently of him, but it always obeys his commands, making it clear that however it acts, it’s not truly Omega. If the familiar is attacked in a way that would destroy the toy Omega, it disappears, leaving behind no physical form. It reappears after Cid casts this spell again, though it cannot be cast for one full day after the familiar disappears. Cid can temporarily dismiss the familiar, and can also dismiss it forever. While it is temporarily dismissed, he can cause it to reappear in any unoccupied space within 30 feet/9 meters of him. Whenever the familiar disappears or is dismissed, it leaves behind in its space anything it was wearing or carrying.

While the familiar is within 100 feet/30.5 meters of him, he can communicate with it telepathically. Additionally, Cid can see through his familiar's eyes and hear what it hears for ten seconds, gaining the benefits of any special senses that the familiar has. During this time, he is deaf and blind with regard to his own senses.

Shield

An invisible barrier of magical force appears and protects Cid for one minute. The shield will protect him from one attack, at which point it immediately shatters and cannot be cast again for ten minutes.

Continual Flame

A flame, equivalent in brightness to a torch, springs forth from an object that you touch. The effect looks like a regular flame, but it creates no heat and doesn't use oxygen. A continual flame can be covered or hidden but not smothered or quenched.

Pass Without Trace

A veil of shadows and silence radiates from Cid, masking him and his companions from detection. For the duration, each creature he chooses within 30 feet/9 meters of him (including Cid) is much stealthier and can't be tracked except by magical means. A creature that receives this bonus leaves behind no tracks or other traces of its passage.

Healing Word

A creature Cid can see within 60 feet/18 meters instantly heals wounds up to broken bones in severity. This spell has no effect on undead or constructs.

PERMISSIONS

PLAYER INFO

Played By: Nin

Contact Info: kamex / kamextoise#0699

OUT OF CHARACTER

Writing Style: I like prose, but I’m flexible and will adapt to brackets if needed.

Backtagging: I’ll backtag forever!

Threadhopping: Sure, I don’t mind.

Offensive Subjects: I can’t think of anything. If we accidentally stumble into something, I’ll say something, but I don’t expect anything to come up.

IN CHARACTER

Physical Violence: Short answer is I’m fine with it, but let’s plot it out ahead of time if it looks like it’s going to involve serious injuries.

Death/Dissipation: I’m open to it; let’s plot out any dissipation ahead of time, though!

Physical Affection: Hugs and the like will either get him to be standoffish or receptive, depending on the person and how well they know each other. He’ll be awkward about physical affection for people who know him, though. If it gets to kissing he’ll probably shut it down strongly.

Shipping/Sex: I play Cid as gay, owing to his obliviousness towards Mikoto’s feelings for him, and his general one-track mind when it comes to Nero. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Cid is painfully monogamous and while not even being in physical relationship with Nero, he isn’t really interested in someone else.

Mental/Communion: His first instinct won’t be to shut anyone out, at least not at first, so go ahead!

Offensive Subjects: Though the game likes to remind people of it before immediately moving on from the subject, Cid has massive PTSD over a handful of related subjects. Cid is deeply traumatized about things that involve Bahamut and the Calamity that nearly ended the world, but he’s very unlikely to ever bring it up unprompted. If you’d rather he never talk about his PTSD just let me know and I’ll avoid it.

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