Cynbel Lightfoot (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
changeably) wrote2014-09-05 12:36 pm
changeably) wrote2014-09-05 12:36 pm
Entry tags:
Cerealia App
Applicant Info
◎ Name: Loki
◎ Journal:quetzalcoatl
◎ Contact: Plurk: helbindi, AIM: candystarcannon
Character Info
◎ Character's Name: Cynbel Lightfoot
◎ Character's Canon: Original character.
◎ Character's Age: Chronologically, he’s 27, but he’s about the equivalent of age 15 for his species.
◎ Character's PB: Original art commissioned by me, examples here and here.
He has long red hair down to his waist, usually worn half-up in ponytails with gold pins. His ears are very long, pointed, and stick out even under all that thick hair. His eyes are a dark gold color, and they’re very big in his face, making him look like a surprised child a lot of the time. He’ll probably never pass 3 feet tall, which is where he's at now, even after reaching full adulthood.
He tends to have a soft of wide smile on his face almost all the time, even when he’s annoyed, with his eyes half-lidded and lizard-like. This is partially a conscious decision on his part, to hide how large and strange-looking his are, compared to other species, due to their size. When he really loses his cool, he drops the smile, and his sharp little needle teeth get shown as he yells.
◎ Canon Point: During his travels through neighboring villages.
◎ Background/History: Imagine a world much like the ones told in stories in legends, filled with all different sorts of people, from humans to elves to dragons, where forest remain standing and difficult to pass through, even on a good day. That is the sort of world Cynbel Lightfoot is from.
Though it bears many similarities to our own world during the Age of Enlightenment (with many major social strides forward keeping the momentum from this period going), it hasn’t moved much past that, technologically-wise. Industrialism never took hold, largely in part because of the fairies that helped to populate it. Their allergic reactions to iron, the metal that was considered for widespread use, sent them into a rage, and they spend significant amounts of time sabotaging any attempts to ingrain it into everyday use with new machines or replacing old ones. Though many understood their reasons for it, it still gained them an awful reputation. Combined with their already bad habit of killing those they had grudges against or tricking others into becoming part of their world, which didn’t always match up to the rest of the planet’s time or morals, and a rift between the fairies and the other races was born.
With this new fight to occupy them, the in-fighting among the many different kinds of fairies took a back seat, and this allowed the race of changelings to thrive. Changelings had never been well-liked by most other fairies, as they hold no fairy court allegiance, because they have no blood lines. This is because they are born from jewels called “fairy stone”, and unlike other fairies born of natural elements, changelings aren’t born of something already alive that they can be considered “related to”.
Changelings were often targets of aggression by other fairy species, so older changelings homed the infants with non-fairy families to hide them better, which sometimes resulted in “stealing children” stories, even when there are no children taken away. After all, how else would these babies appear out of thin air? They had to come from somewhere, so the rumor went. This rumor was aided by the fact that growing changelings often begin to test their natural ability to shift their form. They have a tendency to mimic the species of the race they were around most often at birth as a natural form of defense against more aggressive species looking for them, but the conscious effort to change themselves and reveal their natural form usually comes later in their childhood.
Some decades after these things became the usual way of the world, Cynbel was given as a stone to his father, a halfling named Tristan, by a wandering changeling knight he’d come to know during some small skirmishes against other fairies attacking villages in the area over their use of iron farming tools, sold to them by the residents of the nearby dwarven kingdom. They became fast friends, along with many of the dwarves who came to protect their customers and product, and the knight thought that the stone would make a great way to pay Tristan back for the help he’d given in the fights. Tristan didn’t know what it was until he woke up to a baby crying in place of a gemstone, though he took to fatherhood rather well. (The knight later claimed that fairy stone in its original state can become anything the person in possession of it desires, so Cynbel’s father must have wanted a baby.) Despite the rough start, Cynbel’s father really did love and consider Cynbel to be his true child, and he raised him as best he could on his own.
While growing up, Cynbel was often around the fairy knight who gave his stone to Tristan, and due to his “godfather’s” presence, he knew his natural form early on. With the terrible reputation fairies had by this point, he was viewed with suspicion and some degree of fear by many of the people in their village. No one ever laid a hand on him, but Cynbel grew up as a frustrated, defensive boy for his first few years because of this, anyway.
When Cynbel was still a toddler, his father’s first cousin, Fintan, came to live with them. His parents had passed away, and he’d been shuffled around between many family members in the years since. Everyone came to the conclusion that even if he was a bachelor, having one child meant he could handle two. Tristan felt bad for the boy, so they all began to live together. Cynbel became attached to his “older brother” fairly quickly, though he tended to be the leader in the games anyway, and he often lead the both of them in games of raiding the pantry and climbing trees in the nearby forest. He was a terrible influence and a troublemaker, which didn’t help his reputation, but he meant well. He was still defensive and stubborn, but he had a friend and plenty of games to distract him now.
During his later adolescence, Fintan made the mistake of suggesting the idea of getting Tristan a wonderful birthday gift by reuniting him with his old friends from the fairy battles. Cynbel thought this was a brilliant idea, and though being in the dwarven kingdom was very hard for Cynbel, because it was surrounded by numerous iron mines, he went and did his best to talk those family friends into it. When he failed to convince them thoroughly enough for his liking, he decided to kidnap his father’s old dwarf friends, because he’s terribly shortsighted and sometimes really stupid, especially when he’s feeling ill and nervous from being in an iron filled with the single substance that could reliably due him severe damage. He put them into a covered wagon and used fairy paths to make the trip within a few days. His father was incredibly angry, as were the dwarves, but Cynbel turned on his friendly charm and was quickly forgiven, due to his young age. Cynbel didn’t quite get the problem, but he was happy it went well.
This incident lead to Cynbel being sent to live for a week or two at a time in the villages of men, dwarves, elves, and changelings, to force him to gain better socialization skills and realize what is and is not acceptable to do to other people, hopefully through learned empathy. He was always to come home after the weeks were up, and he was escorted by his godfather most times, to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble along the way. This only did so much for his emotional growth, but he did learn much of the world from this, and he did make quite a few friends, and he grew into a young man during these years. What he’ll do with himself after he’s fully grown, only heaven knows, but he (and everyone else) hopes he’ll be something to make his father proud.
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? He’s not a hacker, since his world doesn’t have that level of technology, but he does have a low-grade sixth sense. It’s mostly tuned to magic and not general supernatural things, so he can see through glamours that are purely illusion but not through magic that has made someone physically change (i.e., he wouldn’t be able to see through a werewolf’s transformation), though he’d recognize they were using some sort of spell.
◎ Personality: Cynbel Lightfoot was raised to be a polite, charming boy that would never think to cause any trouble in his entire life. His father managed the first half decently enough, but as for the rest… That didn’t end up sticking, despite Cynbel’s efforts to do as he’s told.
You might not realize it immediately, but Cynbel can be very calculating. He generally means well, but he can easily weigh lives and futures against one another and make a judgment on which he thinks is more “deserving” of continuing to exist, particularly if one side has his affection and the other does not. At one point, for example, he goes so far as to travel to a neighboring kingdom to kidnap a troupe of old family friends and drag them home, solely because he thinks it would make a perfect birthday present for his father. He doesn’t dislike those family friends, but his family is more important to him, so he justifies it in his mind as a “forceful invitation” and that they won’t mind it later on. He’s not at all unbiased, but that doesn’t stop him from using his own emotionally compromised logic to do things like deliver sensitive information to someone he thinks will target the person he doesn’t care for and protect his family. In short: he’s selfish, somewhat short-sighted and only bothers to protect the people he likes, and he’ll go out of his way to protect them, even if it means doing awful things behind their backs.
That’s not to say he’s some chess master or anything like that. He’s not a very good judge of character, and considering that he himself bends the ethics he was taught whenever he finds it convenient to his ends, that shouldn’t be very surprising. He makes no judgments based on appearance aside from the idle thought on whether he’d like to ask where they bought their accessories, and he has no qualms about approaching strangers. He can get along as easily with a murderous tyrant who knows all the right words to say as the lady next door that gives him treats and scoldings, so long as they come across as well-meaning and no threat to himself.
He has a nasty temper, the kind that's fiercely overprotective and can be set of easily, especially when his family members are trying to hide things from him or deal with things on their own. This mostly shows itself through harsh words said with a smile, but if he’s riled up enough, he’ll drop it and yell like anyone else would. He hates getting this way, because he knows it shows the worst part of himself, and he’s afraid of losing his temper and genuinely causing someone physical harm the way other Changelings are rumored to do to the people who raise them. He tries to hold it back as much as possible, but this sometimes results in passive aggressive remarks in return when he knows he can’t get away with saying something outright rude, but he can’t resist saying something, anyway.
He’s a fussy sort of boy, especially in the sense that he doesn’t really like getting dirty and loves beautiful things, such as jewelry and flower crowns. He’d go shirtless and wear airy togas and kilts all the time, if he thought he could get away with it. They’re also easier to climb roofs and trees in, so he can get out of the way of the rougher children and the ruder members of the town, which he prefers to do over fighting with them directly. Since he can’t, he settles for tunics without any leggings and refusing to cut his hair, which borders on scandalous in his village. He’s stubborn and vain enough to ignore his neighbor’s near-constant comments on it, however.
Despite all that, he’s a very cheerful and friendly boy. He smiles often, usually genuinely, and he won’t drop it when upset unless it’s borderline earth-shattering levels of emotion. This is partly done to hide his eyes and teeth, since he is somewhat insecure about how they make him stand out in a strange way, and partly because he was raised to believe that smiling is a very basic tenet of being polite, unless someone’s died. He considers being polite and showing off how truly good he is through action is the best way to get people to be kind to him in return, and that is the face he shows most often.
In all, Cynbel is a friendly, happy boy with somewhat malleable morals, but he’s one of the best friends you could ever have, if you let him get close.
◎ Powers/Abilities: Cynbel has an ability to manipulate his body and change it, as every member of his species does. He can change his physical features, such as shape of throat to change voice or ability to speak certain non-human languages, shape of ears, pupil shape to see better in the dark, hair color, etc. etc. Because he was raised without using this ability very much, he doesn’t have very good control over it, and he can only maintain the changes for short amounts of time (an hour or two, at most), and he automatically reverts to his normal form if he’s knocked unconscious or is otherwise made unable to concentrate on it.
The only thing he really cannot change is his body’s allergic reaction to iron; this is a constant, and prolonged exposure will knock him out due to the level of pain it inflicts, reverting any other changes he’s made to his body back to normal.
Being a kind of fairy, Cynbel was born with the ability to see through glamours and illusions made by magic, a fairy’s most often-used tool, though he can’t see through another changeling’s alterations to their body, due to it being more of a physical change and not a true illusion. He naturally grows long, sharp claws that his father insists he keep trimmed and filed, so that he doesn’t accidentally gut someone with them, as well. If left untrimmed, they can grow very strong and allows a Changeling to use them as humans use knives.
His most useful skill is his ability to use “fairy paths”, which are usually shortcuts that fairies use to go to their own lands. They’re really slight rips in the fabric of reality, and moving through them lets you move through spaces that you otherwise couldn’t (such as heavily guarded castles) or normal places in half the time it’d take you walking normally. People outside the paths have a difficult time seeing or touching anything inside of them without some inborn sixth sense of their own, so Cynbel usually uses them to escape from fights. He’s much more practiced at this than his changing ability, since he uses it more often, but he still can’t be in them for long. There’s the risk of running into less kind fairies in the paths, and being in them for more than a few hours has a tendency to make people sick if they’re not fairies or they’ve eaten food from outside the fairy lands recently (which Cynbel does often).
◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory:
─ Clothing (1 green tunic, assorted underthings, a pair of gold-colored sandals).
─ 2 butterfly-shaped gold hairpins.
─ 1 painting (1 foot long) of himself, his father and his older cousin.
CEREALIA-Specific
◎ Element: Earth.
◎ Sense: Sight. Cynbel’s ability to protect himself relies heavily on recognizing danger through sight. He also is very fond of looking at beautiful and interesting things, so it’s the sense he relies on the most.
◎ Seven Character Traits: (Friendly, Loyal, Proactive) | (Temperamental, Amoral, Dishonest) + Easily fooled by appearances.
Samples
◎ First-Person Sample: Test drive meme thread and musebox voicetesting.
◎ Third-Person Sample: He should have expected trouble in this new, human-populated town, as close as it is to home. It happened everywhere he went, and every time, he was blinded by the shine of a new place with new things to see. He was starting to reconsider whether it was worth putting a sign on his chest that read “Do Not Disturb”, just to see if it would deter the more annoying offenders.
The problem was not, strangely enough, how long Cynbel's ears were, how long his hair was, or how sharp his teeth were, despite those usually causing stares and whispers. (He made sure to be careful not to show those much more than usual, considering how many strangers were around. He didn't want to cause a ruckus over that, no thank you.)
No, the problem was that everyone else was so much taller, with the bulk and weight that comes with such a thing. He’s not used to spending so much time among humans, though he’s never minded them before, and the contrast between himself and everyone around him makes him more self-conscious. He's never been quite so aware of his size before, and this helps hammer in just how child-like he must seem to everyone else. Even halflings and dwarves get more respect than this, but they have the benefit of earning wrinkles and hair on their faces as they age, unlike changelings.
Really, he wouldn't even be thinking so much about it, with so many people smiling at him on the street and giving him sweet things. Who complains about nice things like that, when they're given freely? No one who enjoys the finer things in life would turn them away, certainly. It's only that he'd rather they not give him those things like they're payment or a bribe, so that he won't kick up a fuss when they grab at his cheeks and pull, making the sort of cooing noises that he was sure were reserved for the tiniest of babies. No amount of gentle correction does much to change it, either, for even if one person accepts it, there's a half-dozen more behind them who refuse to believe him at all.
The worst of it all is the occasional overly-concerned citizen who thinks he's lost and in need of firm help, whether he wants it or not. The first time he'd been grabbed by the hand, it was by an older woman who clearly had never met a fairy in her life, or she wouldn't have dared to be so rude. Any other member of his race, even the less polite changelings, would likely have clawed the offending hand deeply for such an offense. If he didn’t think of the scolding, worried voice of his father when he thought of such things, Cynbel might be tempted to do the same.
He'd tried to explain, "Really, ma'am, I'm perfectly fine by myself! I know exactly where I am, you see, and--," but she wouldn't to hear a word of it. He was nearly dragged down the street before he lost his temper, pulling himself out of her grip and scalding his wrist on the iron bracelet. He'd find it in himself to judge the ugliness of such a piece, if he wasn't so busy trying to rein his anger in.
Well, now he’d gone and done it. He bit out a short apology, holding his wound with his uninjured hand, and turned away, moving down the street before he knew exactly where it was he was headed. Perhaps he could find a healer of some kind, or at least a shop that sold bandages to wrap it in.
Maybe next time, he’ll have the bandages on hand before he wanders the streets. These things happen much too often in new places, after all.
◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories? No.
◎ Name: Loki
◎ Journal:
quetzalcoatl◎ Contact: Plurk: helbindi, AIM: candystarcannon
Character Info
◎ Character's Name: Cynbel Lightfoot
◎ Character's Canon: Original character.
◎ Character's Age: Chronologically, he’s 27, but he’s about the equivalent of age 15 for his species.
◎ Character's PB: Original art commissioned by me, examples here and here.
He has long red hair down to his waist, usually worn half-up in ponytails with gold pins. His ears are very long, pointed, and stick out even under all that thick hair. His eyes are a dark gold color, and they’re very big in his face, making him look like a surprised child a lot of the time. He’ll probably never pass 3 feet tall, which is where he's at now, even after reaching full adulthood.
He tends to have a soft of wide smile on his face almost all the time, even when he’s annoyed, with his eyes half-lidded and lizard-like. This is partially a conscious decision on his part, to hide how large and strange-looking his are, compared to other species, due to their size. When he really loses his cool, he drops the smile, and his sharp little needle teeth get shown as he yells.
◎ Canon Point: During his travels through neighboring villages.
◎ Background/History: Imagine a world much like the ones told in stories in legends, filled with all different sorts of people, from humans to elves to dragons, where forest remain standing and difficult to pass through, even on a good day. That is the sort of world Cynbel Lightfoot is from.
Though it bears many similarities to our own world during the Age of Enlightenment (with many major social strides forward keeping the momentum from this period going), it hasn’t moved much past that, technologically-wise. Industrialism never took hold, largely in part because of the fairies that helped to populate it. Their allergic reactions to iron, the metal that was considered for widespread use, sent them into a rage, and they spend significant amounts of time sabotaging any attempts to ingrain it into everyday use with new machines or replacing old ones. Though many understood their reasons for it, it still gained them an awful reputation. Combined with their already bad habit of killing those they had grudges against or tricking others into becoming part of their world, which didn’t always match up to the rest of the planet’s time or morals, and a rift between the fairies and the other races was born.
With this new fight to occupy them, the in-fighting among the many different kinds of fairies took a back seat, and this allowed the race of changelings to thrive. Changelings had never been well-liked by most other fairies, as they hold no fairy court allegiance, because they have no blood lines. This is because they are born from jewels called “fairy stone”, and unlike other fairies born of natural elements, changelings aren’t born of something already alive that they can be considered “related to”.
Changelings were often targets of aggression by other fairy species, so older changelings homed the infants with non-fairy families to hide them better, which sometimes resulted in “stealing children” stories, even when there are no children taken away. After all, how else would these babies appear out of thin air? They had to come from somewhere, so the rumor went. This rumor was aided by the fact that growing changelings often begin to test their natural ability to shift their form. They have a tendency to mimic the species of the race they were around most often at birth as a natural form of defense against more aggressive species looking for them, but the conscious effort to change themselves and reveal their natural form usually comes later in their childhood.
Some decades after these things became the usual way of the world, Cynbel was given as a stone to his father, a halfling named Tristan, by a wandering changeling knight he’d come to know during some small skirmishes against other fairies attacking villages in the area over their use of iron farming tools, sold to them by the residents of the nearby dwarven kingdom. They became fast friends, along with many of the dwarves who came to protect their customers and product, and the knight thought that the stone would make a great way to pay Tristan back for the help he’d given in the fights. Tristan didn’t know what it was until he woke up to a baby crying in place of a gemstone, though he took to fatherhood rather well. (The knight later claimed that fairy stone in its original state can become anything the person in possession of it desires, so Cynbel’s father must have wanted a baby.) Despite the rough start, Cynbel’s father really did love and consider Cynbel to be his true child, and he raised him as best he could on his own.
While growing up, Cynbel was often around the fairy knight who gave his stone to Tristan, and due to his “godfather’s” presence, he knew his natural form early on. With the terrible reputation fairies had by this point, he was viewed with suspicion and some degree of fear by many of the people in their village. No one ever laid a hand on him, but Cynbel grew up as a frustrated, defensive boy for his first few years because of this, anyway.
When Cynbel was still a toddler, his father’s first cousin, Fintan, came to live with them. His parents had passed away, and he’d been shuffled around between many family members in the years since. Everyone came to the conclusion that even if he was a bachelor, having one child meant he could handle two. Tristan felt bad for the boy, so they all began to live together. Cynbel became attached to his “older brother” fairly quickly, though he tended to be the leader in the games anyway, and he often lead the both of them in games of raiding the pantry and climbing trees in the nearby forest. He was a terrible influence and a troublemaker, which didn’t help his reputation, but he meant well. He was still defensive and stubborn, but he had a friend and plenty of games to distract him now.
During his later adolescence, Fintan made the mistake of suggesting the idea of getting Tristan a wonderful birthday gift by reuniting him with his old friends from the fairy battles. Cynbel thought this was a brilliant idea, and though being in the dwarven kingdom was very hard for Cynbel, because it was surrounded by numerous iron mines, he went and did his best to talk those family friends into it. When he failed to convince them thoroughly enough for his liking, he decided to kidnap his father’s old dwarf friends, because he’s terribly shortsighted and sometimes really stupid, especially when he’s feeling ill and nervous from being in an iron filled with the single substance that could reliably due him severe damage. He put them into a covered wagon and used fairy paths to make the trip within a few days. His father was incredibly angry, as were the dwarves, but Cynbel turned on his friendly charm and was quickly forgiven, due to his young age. Cynbel didn’t quite get the problem, but he was happy it went well.
This incident lead to Cynbel being sent to live for a week or two at a time in the villages of men, dwarves, elves, and changelings, to force him to gain better socialization skills and realize what is and is not acceptable to do to other people, hopefully through learned empathy. He was always to come home after the weeks were up, and he was escorted by his godfather most times, to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble along the way. This only did so much for his emotional growth, but he did learn much of the world from this, and he did make quite a few friends, and he grew into a young man during these years. What he’ll do with himself after he’s fully grown, only heaven knows, but he (and everyone else) hopes he’ll be something to make his father proud.
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? He’s not a hacker, since his world doesn’t have that level of technology, but he does have a low-grade sixth sense. It’s mostly tuned to magic and not general supernatural things, so he can see through glamours that are purely illusion but not through magic that has made someone physically change (i.e., he wouldn’t be able to see through a werewolf’s transformation), though he’d recognize they were using some sort of spell.
◎ Personality: Cynbel Lightfoot was raised to be a polite, charming boy that would never think to cause any trouble in his entire life. His father managed the first half decently enough, but as for the rest… That didn’t end up sticking, despite Cynbel’s efforts to do as he’s told.
You might not realize it immediately, but Cynbel can be very calculating. He generally means well, but he can easily weigh lives and futures against one another and make a judgment on which he thinks is more “deserving” of continuing to exist, particularly if one side has his affection and the other does not. At one point, for example, he goes so far as to travel to a neighboring kingdom to kidnap a troupe of old family friends and drag them home, solely because he thinks it would make a perfect birthday present for his father. He doesn’t dislike those family friends, but his family is more important to him, so he justifies it in his mind as a “forceful invitation” and that they won’t mind it later on. He’s not at all unbiased, but that doesn’t stop him from using his own emotionally compromised logic to do things like deliver sensitive information to someone he thinks will target the person he doesn’t care for and protect his family. In short: he’s selfish, somewhat short-sighted and only bothers to protect the people he likes, and he’ll go out of his way to protect them, even if it means doing awful things behind their backs.
That’s not to say he’s some chess master or anything like that. He’s not a very good judge of character, and considering that he himself bends the ethics he was taught whenever he finds it convenient to his ends, that shouldn’t be very surprising. He makes no judgments based on appearance aside from the idle thought on whether he’d like to ask where they bought their accessories, and he has no qualms about approaching strangers. He can get along as easily with a murderous tyrant who knows all the right words to say as the lady next door that gives him treats and scoldings, so long as they come across as well-meaning and no threat to himself.
He has a nasty temper, the kind that's fiercely overprotective and can be set of easily, especially when his family members are trying to hide things from him or deal with things on their own. This mostly shows itself through harsh words said with a smile, but if he’s riled up enough, he’ll drop it and yell like anyone else would. He hates getting this way, because he knows it shows the worst part of himself, and he’s afraid of losing his temper and genuinely causing someone physical harm the way other Changelings are rumored to do to the people who raise them. He tries to hold it back as much as possible, but this sometimes results in passive aggressive remarks in return when he knows he can’t get away with saying something outright rude, but he can’t resist saying something, anyway.
He’s a fussy sort of boy, especially in the sense that he doesn’t really like getting dirty and loves beautiful things, such as jewelry and flower crowns. He’d go shirtless and wear airy togas and kilts all the time, if he thought he could get away with it. They’re also easier to climb roofs and trees in, so he can get out of the way of the rougher children and the ruder members of the town, which he prefers to do over fighting with them directly. Since he can’t, he settles for tunics without any leggings and refusing to cut his hair, which borders on scandalous in his village. He’s stubborn and vain enough to ignore his neighbor’s near-constant comments on it, however.
Despite all that, he’s a very cheerful and friendly boy. He smiles often, usually genuinely, and he won’t drop it when upset unless it’s borderline earth-shattering levels of emotion. This is partly done to hide his eyes and teeth, since he is somewhat insecure about how they make him stand out in a strange way, and partly because he was raised to believe that smiling is a very basic tenet of being polite, unless someone’s died. He considers being polite and showing off how truly good he is through action is the best way to get people to be kind to him in return, and that is the face he shows most often.
In all, Cynbel is a friendly, happy boy with somewhat malleable morals, but he’s one of the best friends you could ever have, if you let him get close.
◎ Powers/Abilities: Cynbel has an ability to manipulate his body and change it, as every member of his species does. He can change his physical features, such as shape of throat to change voice or ability to speak certain non-human languages, shape of ears, pupil shape to see better in the dark, hair color, etc. etc. Because he was raised without using this ability very much, he doesn’t have very good control over it, and he can only maintain the changes for short amounts of time (an hour or two, at most), and he automatically reverts to his normal form if he’s knocked unconscious or is otherwise made unable to concentrate on it.
The only thing he really cannot change is his body’s allergic reaction to iron; this is a constant, and prolonged exposure will knock him out due to the level of pain it inflicts, reverting any other changes he’s made to his body back to normal.
Being a kind of fairy, Cynbel was born with the ability to see through glamours and illusions made by magic, a fairy’s most often-used tool, though he can’t see through another changeling’s alterations to their body, due to it being more of a physical change and not a true illusion. He naturally grows long, sharp claws that his father insists he keep trimmed and filed, so that he doesn’t accidentally gut someone with them, as well. If left untrimmed, they can grow very strong and allows a Changeling to use them as humans use knives.
His most useful skill is his ability to use “fairy paths”, which are usually shortcuts that fairies use to go to their own lands. They’re really slight rips in the fabric of reality, and moving through them lets you move through spaces that you otherwise couldn’t (such as heavily guarded castles) or normal places in half the time it’d take you walking normally. People outside the paths have a difficult time seeing or touching anything inside of them without some inborn sixth sense of their own, so Cynbel usually uses them to escape from fights. He’s much more practiced at this than his changing ability, since he uses it more often, but he still can’t be in them for long. There’s the risk of running into less kind fairies in the paths, and being in them for more than a few hours has a tendency to make people sick if they’re not fairies or they’ve eaten food from outside the fairy lands recently (which Cynbel does often).
◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory:
─ Clothing (1 green tunic, assorted underthings, a pair of gold-colored sandals).
─ 2 butterfly-shaped gold hairpins.
─ 1 painting (1 foot long) of himself, his father and his older cousin.
CEREALIA-Specific
◎ Element: Earth.
◎ Sense: Sight. Cynbel’s ability to protect himself relies heavily on recognizing danger through sight. He also is very fond of looking at beautiful and interesting things, so it’s the sense he relies on the most.
◎ Seven Character Traits: (Friendly, Loyal, Proactive) | (Temperamental, Amoral, Dishonest) + Easily fooled by appearances.
Samples
◎ First-Person Sample: Test drive meme thread and musebox voicetesting.
◎ Third-Person Sample: He should have expected trouble in this new, human-populated town, as close as it is to home. It happened everywhere he went, and every time, he was blinded by the shine of a new place with new things to see. He was starting to reconsider whether it was worth putting a sign on his chest that read “Do Not Disturb”, just to see if it would deter the more annoying offenders.
The problem was not, strangely enough, how long Cynbel's ears were, how long his hair was, or how sharp his teeth were, despite those usually causing stares and whispers. (He made sure to be careful not to show those much more than usual, considering how many strangers were around. He didn't want to cause a ruckus over that, no thank you.)
No, the problem was that everyone else was so much taller, with the bulk and weight that comes with such a thing. He’s not used to spending so much time among humans, though he’s never minded them before, and the contrast between himself and everyone around him makes him more self-conscious. He's never been quite so aware of his size before, and this helps hammer in just how child-like he must seem to everyone else. Even halflings and dwarves get more respect than this, but they have the benefit of earning wrinkles and hair on their faces as they age, unlike changelings.
Really, he wouldn't even be thinking so much about it, with so many people smiling at him on the street and giving him sweet things. Who complains about nice things like that, when they're given freely? No one who enjoys the finer things in life would turn them away, certainly. It's only that he'd rather they not give him those things like they're payment or a bribe, so that he won't kick up a fuss when they grab at his cheeks and pull, making the sort of cooing noises that he was sure were reserved for the tiniest of babies. No amount of gentle correction does much to change it, either, for even if one person accepts it, there's a half-dozen more behind them who refuse to believe him at all.
The worst of it all is the occasional overly-concerned citizen who thinks he's lost and in need of firm help, whether he wants it or not. The first time he'd been grabbed by the hand, it was by an older woman who clearly had never met a fairy in her life, or she wouldn't have dared to be so rude. Any other member of his race, even the less polite changelings, would likely have clawed the offending hand deeply for such an offense. If he didn’t think of the scolding, worried voice of his father when he thought of such things, Cynbel might be tempted to do the same.
He'd tried to explain, "Really, ma'am, I'm perfectly fine by myself! I know exactly where I am, you see, and--," but she wouldn't to hear a word of it. He was nearly dragged down the street before he lost his temper, pulling himself out of her grip and scalding his wrist on the iron bracelet. He'd find it in himself to judge the ugliness of such a piece, if he wasn't so busy trying to rein his anger in.
Well, now he’d gone and done it. He bit out a short apology, holding his wound with his uninjured hand, and turned away, moving down the street before he knew exactly where it was he was headed. Perhaps he could find a healer of some kind, or at least a shop that sold bandages to wrap it in.
Maybe next time, he’ll have the bandages on hand before he wanders the streets. These things happen much too often in new places, after all.
◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories? No.