Brave New World application
Dec. 16th, 2013 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
comparative_insanityPLAYER INFO
Name: Emi
Contact Information: alienGirlscout on AIM, sweetjerry on plurk
Time Zone: GMT+1
Characters Played: N/A
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Fai Flourite
Character Canon: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle / (Shiritsu Horitsuba Gakuen - The reason I mention this, it being a canon AU, is that it is very useful for basing his AU personality on, seeing as how the Brave New World version of him won’t have suffered the absolutely ridiculous amount of trauma that his TRC iteration has.)
History: The "Background" and "Story" sections here.
AU History: Fai is born to a noble family of Enlightened, like many others claiming to be direct descendants of the Savior. On his father's side, every Enlightened has been of the Psychic/Fairy type, and they have all married after type to produce new Psychic/Fairy children, who traditionally have all bonded with a Ralts as their first pokemon. They almost always have only one child per generation, at the most two, being fearful of "diluting" their noble blood, something that has led them to be viewed as snobbish and elitist – which, to be fair, is exactly what they are. It has also meant that the family has never managed to grow very big, and their father and his brother were indeed the last living descendants of their generation. Since their uncle can't father children due to an accident in his youth, the responsibility of passing on the family tradition was left to the younger brother.
But then, alack alay, Fai and his twin brother Yuui were born, one as a psychic/flying and the other as a fairy/ghost, breaking hundreds of years of breeding. Most of the blame was assigned to their mother, who while seemingly being a perfectly acceptable Fairy/Psychic, must've clearly had some impurity in her to produce such useless offspring - especially since she after that was unable to bear any more children.
Fai and Yuui have therefore not been very kindly treated by their father’s side of the family – which would include their grandparents, their great grandparents, and some more distant relatives, but most particularly their uncle. That side of the family has treated them as flawed goods, while their mother’s side of the family, being bigger but less influential, treated them like a huge embarrassment, since their birth had resulted in the public questioning of the legitimacy of their mother’s heritage. Their parents most likely try to be fair, but their father has grown up with all these expectations and demands from a young age, and their mother is constantly treated as a pariah by association – that’s the kind of thing that tends to affect you, and deeply too. And so parental disapproval was added to the mix.
Fai, having always been the more rebellious of the two, the one who was always less likely to fold and accept this kind of treatment, reached his breaking point when he entered puberty. It wasn’t just the constant disapproval, but also simply the fact that he was rather ill equipped to conform to what was expected of him. While Yuui was quiet, thoughtful, often cautious, and in many ways a model son, and Fai was in a lot of ways his opposite. He was talkative, easily distracted and impulsive, and he wasn’t very good at understanding or even noticing unspoken social rules, which frequently led to embarrassment on his family’s part. At first it wasn’t intentional at all; he truly did his best to make his family proud of him, but more often than not failed miserably. With time, he started getting more and more exasperated with apparently being unable to do anything right, and eventually, the seed of dissent was sown.
Possibly what really set it off was the thing with his fiancée. Both he and Yuui had been betrothed to suitable girls – which hopefully would put right the family breeding program – at a very early age. Fai was always very fond of his fiancée, thinking she was a sweet and fun girl to be around, and loving her like a sister. Once he started noticing girls and boys properly as puberty hit, he also subsequently realized why this was a problem. Thinking about being married to her was like trying to imagine being married to Yuui. That was to say, he absolutely had no interest in that whatsoever. And while he of course didn’t want to humiliate her by eloping and publicly denouncing her, that was when he reached the point where he’d had enough. Meaning a full-out teenage rebellion, with all the silliness that those usually entail.
He’d always been fond of putting on girl clothes, simply because they were pretty, but had never done so in public before for fear of aggravating his family even more. Now he started to do frequently, and didn’t even try not to make a spectacle of himself in any given social situation. He frequently snuck out to go to parties and – once he got older – less reputable places of entertainment. And once he turned eighteen properly, he decided to flaunt his status as a Flying type Enlightened by tattooing a great damn bird on his back, vaguely based on an old illustration of one of the Gods. Basically his equivalent of “Only God can judge me”.
His burning interest and talent when it comes to science has finally convinced him that what he really wants to do in his life is to be a researcher – he certainly doesn’t want to work at Council Hall like his family expects. The school system being what it is in Union, and Fai happily lacking all aptitude for learning about laws and economics and things in that vein, that is also how his education has been angled. And now he is itching to leave Union and brave the wilderness, only really held back so far by misgivings about dragging Yuui along and also because he doesn’t want it to seem like he’s running out on his fiancée. But that won’t last for long…
Canon Personality: Fai at first at first to be very agreeable, cheerful, nonchalant, and quite often rather annoying. And in a way, that is exactly what he is. Both this persona and the cold and distant one he displays when attempting to put a distance between himself and others seem to be parts of his personality that he enhances and uses as a sort of shield. From what you see of his personality both before and after he actually needs to keep up such a façade, he actually seems to be a merry and playful person at heart, even if that is not all there is to him.
He has an eccentric sense of humor, a flamboyant way of expressing himself and interacting with people, and several strange quirks, one being that he doesn't quite seem to be able to grasp the concept of personal space. He can be courteous to a fault, but at the same time also acts a bit too intimately with some people right off the bat, as if immediately assuming that they're a friend. With the people he likes he always pushes and prods and teases a bit, either trying to provoke reactions or simply as his own way of expressing affection. He doesn't always seem to know when he steps over the line for unacceptable or just kind of rude behavior, and either doesn't notice or care when people become outraged or, more frequently, embarrassed.
Bubbleheaded and manic behavior aside, anyone who spends even a short amount of times with Fai will notice that despite this tendency towards fakery - or perhaps because of it - he is very perceptive, and very sensitive to the emotions of the people around him. That is, unless they pertain to him in person, where he seems to have a huge blind spot. He is highly intelligent and possesses a deep wisdom and understanding of events around him, along with an uncanny knack for guessing the outcome of said events based on what he observes. This is something he usually masks by acting as if he’s merely making wild guesses without substance.
Due to a very painful past fraught with loss and guilt, he has troubles letting people get too close, and sees it as his obligation to keep people at arm’s length lest he hurt them. He believes he is always going to be the cause of unhappiness in others, and it is very obvious that he hates himself for it, and regards his own life as not worth very much at all. He only really seems to care about the outcome of any fight or dangerous situation if someone else’s fate hinges on it. So he tries to keep people from getting to know too much by presenting himself as a cheerful, illusive nature, seemingly without much substance or depth.
However, despite his best efforts, Fai is a very affectionate person, and seems to attach himself to others very strongly and care very deeply for those that manage to get under his skin. He also genuinely seems to be concerned with the troubles of strangers, and he will unselfishly lend them a hand without being too concerned with what kind of discomfort this might bring him. However, Fai doesn’t see himself as kind (“I have never been kindhearted. All I’ve ever been is weak.”) and it is true that he is quite capable of lying repeatedly to his friends and through omission and passivity put them in harm’s way if that means achieving what he truly desires. He seems to think that the fact that he cares about the people he deceives only makes him a worse person, and it could be argued that he has a point.
Since Fai has been a very lonely person all of his life, it is not strange that he is extremely protective – sometimes unhealthily so – of the people he cares about, and seems to suffer from rather severe abandonment issues, having great troubles letting go and letting others take care of themselves. His habit of distancing himself from others can be seen as an extension of this: He doesn’t believe that other people are capable of judging what is best for them - and specifically that he is bad for them - and so he makes the choice for them.
If someone gets too close, he will do this by either trying simply to deflect the question or change the subject completely, or on rare occasions when caught off guard, by revealing a small slice of the truth before quickly clamming up again, possibly in an attempt to confuse and deter further probing. At the point when he feels that he has become too important to someone, he will try to drive them off by becoming cold and heavily passive-aggressive, and by trying to do as much emotional harm as possible in an attempt to drive the person off. For their own good, of course.
He's very stubborn, and once he's decided on a course of action which he believes to be the best, it will take quite a lot to shake some sense into him when he's wrong. For all that he is a fractured and broken person, he possesses great determination and strength, and once he can be convinced to not turn a lot of this upon himself, he is most definitely a force to be reckoned with. And for all that he can seem frighteningly cold-blooded when there is something he feels he needs to do, in the end the thing that motivates and drives him is always love - love that he will go to any lengths to protect and fight for.
AU Deviation: Since Fai hasn't been subject to even a fraction of the massively crippling trauma which he has in canon, he will be a lot less prone to self-loathing and self-blame, and won't be convinced that he is directly the cause of misery in everyone that gets close to him. He will instead have a rather fragile self-image, and will affect a lot more confidence than he actually has in himself. From his point of view, him rebelling against his family is less a sign of him standing up for himself, and more an inevitable consequence of simply being unable to fit in despite his efforts.
Instead of being treated as a horrible calamity and the embodiment of sin, he has simply been treated as a vexing mistake and an imperfection, and also as a nuisance and chore. Constant comparisons to his twin, and the fact that Yuui has frequently had to pick up his mess and cover for him when he messes up has convinced him that most people find him bothersome and tiring, and that he'll always cause extra work for the people who are close to him. Letting on exactly how insecure he is, however, would be causing people to worry even more for his sake, and that is where his habit of faking smiles and pretending that he's fine stems from, rather than a desperate need to cover up a whole damn ocean of pain and guilt.
As dysfunctional as his relationship with his family is at times, he has nonetheless been brought up in a severely privileged household, neck-deep in old money, and that has left its marks. He is more than a little spoiled, used to being able to get what he wants in life, with no greater consequences for his actions than harsh scoldings and the effects they have on his social life. Growing up surrounded by firmly set views and being brought up by rather narrow-minded people has also left its marks whether he wants it to or not, and he can be a bit of a snob, and some prejudices are hard for him to shake.
And well, above all things, he's a teenager, rather than someone who grew up very fast and very hard and then has lived untold hundreds of years, and that will be reflected in how he acts as well.
Canon Abilities: Fai’s canon abilities are rather loosely defined, to say the least. The only thing he’s explicitly stated to be unable to do with magic is healing. Apart from that, he seems capable of just about anything, including repeated dimensional travel and the creation of a sentient being, and even halved and then powerfully reduced, his magic is still sufficiently powerful enough that when released by a curse, it causes an entire world to collapse and cease to exist. So even at a high level, that is very clearly going to have to be heavily nerfed. But abilities shown include energy blasts, forcefields, detecting magic power and psychokinesis.
It is referenced rather heavily in canon that each member of their traveling party is assigned their own element, both by powers granted to them in one world and by repeated hints over time. That is what I’m basing the second half of his Enlightened ability on, since Fai has wind, and a lot of the imagery also strongly associated him with phoenixes in particular.
Enlightened Abilities: Psychic/Flying, Analyst (To match the whole detecting magic thing)
To reflect the emphasis on offensive magic in Fai's canon abilities (in his own words, he is "only good at things that hurt people"), Fai's psychic abilities will mostly be the more physical/destructive kind, apart from such things as Barrier and the like which are similar to his protective force fields. And his Flying will tie into that to make him rather apt at Telekinesis as well. When it comes to those, it will be pretty straightforward, starting out with weaker moves on the level of Confusion and Heart Stamp and gradually gaining power as he gains levels/evolves.
Much of his Flying abilities will be very limited to being able to sense air currents and pressure and maybe moving around a little bit until he grows wings with later evolutions, meaning he'll more or less be limited to Gust and nothing else. At his second evolution he will gain more bird-like anatomy - lighter bones and greater agility, more or less, along with embarrassing feather growth - and will be capable of abilities like Bounce, Acrobatics and Chatter, but he still won't be able to fly. That won't happen until his third evolution, when he will finally sprout wings and will be given access to abilities more associated with actual flight along the lines of Sky Drop, Sky Attack and Oblivion Wing.
As it is now, the only physical signs of his Enlightened nature is a round stone in his forehead in the exact same shade of blue as his eyes, giving the somewhat disconcerting impression of an extra eye, and a very faint glow to his skin that is only ever noticeable in darkness.
The Analyst ability is chosen simply because Fai has a very analytical mind and is often able to figure out present events - or even events to come - way before anyone else does.
Starter Pokémon: Flabébé (blue flower)
SAMPLES
First-Person: Actionspam!
Third-Person: Fai hadn't really snuck away from his parents as much as gotten himself purposefully lost in the hectic bustle of the holiday sales, taking some time to stroll around at a more leisurely pace and chatting happily with mildly frazzled store owners and employees. It was one of those days when it wasn't snowing, but little flakes of ice seemed to hover in the air, catching the sun whenever it peeked out between two clouds and making the whole world glitter. A flock of happily chirping Vannilite flew past, bringing a cold breeze with them, and Fai pulled up the collar of his coat with a small shiver and a laugh. It was a pretty good day to be "lost".
He was just wandering aimlessly in a small park, when he suddenly heard a small whimpering sound from somewhere on the ground, and he stopped to search for the source. Eventually he found it beneath a shrubbery, a flash of blue and green against the black soil and grubby snow. A shivering Flabébé was cradling as much as it could of its flower and trying to wipe away the frost that covered the petals. She didn't look very happy at all, and Fai wondered how on earth she had ended up outside in this kind of weather - she hardly seemed well-equipped to handle it.
"Hello there, little one," he sing-songed, trying to keep his voice as soft as possible. She looked up with narrowed eyes, a vine extending from the flower and promising a stinging lash in case he was planning to attack her. Fai laughed, shaking his head. "I'm not going to hurt you. Look," he removed one glove from his hand, extending it toward the small creature, "why don't you hop in here where it's warm?" With his still gloved hand, he took the liberty of activating his newly aquired Warp Band. He wasn't Yuui, and he didn't have the gift of effortless communication like he did, but a little friendliness went a long way, didn't it?
And since he had to start as a trainer somewhere, helping out someone who had been left out in the cold seemed like a good place.
APPLICATION REVISION
Additional History: Staying true to his rebellious streak, both Fai and Yuui indeed took the plunge and ran away from home - or rather, Fai was impulsive and Yuui followed to keep an eye on him. Perhaps their rebellion might have been a tad more effective if they hadn't still been perfectly happy to accept pocket money from their family, and tapping liberally into the huge account set aside for them, but... well, the fact of the matter was that they had always been materially spoiled and privileged young men, and they were used to a certain standard of living. It was thrilling to run into the wilderness and explore, fighting pokémon and getting in trouble, but it was also nice to be able to return home to the kind of comforts they were used to. They simply got their own little flat and more or less continued life as they had before.
The true break-away was a bit more gradual, but a lot more significant in its own right. Firstly, Fai's fiancée also decided that she'd had enough, and had a bit more guts than her intended, meaning she actually told him that she wanted to cut the whole awkward engagement short. Relieved, Fai was only too happy to go along with it. And then, on top of this, Fai met Feliks. The only way he could have fallen in love with someone more wrong would've been if it had been a completely ordinary commoner, but that really wasn't necessary. Feliks only had half of the sought-after typing, was from a not entirely acceptable part of a noble family, and more to the point, was male. No chance of descendants there. At this point, Fai was officially cut off from his family fortune as well as the rest of his heritage.
That's when Yuui had enough. He'd been playing along as the 'good son' to make matters easier for everyone, but mostly he'd been doing it to take pressure away from Fai. As soon as his parents inadvertently removed his main reason for playing nice, and on top of that publicly shamed and rejected Fai, Yuui put his foot down. He cut ties as well - and the Flourites were suddenly without viable heirs.
Fai was genuinely happy, though. He might not be able to afford the luxuries he was used to, and actually had to work for his food, but he didn't really mind. He was young, he was free, he was in love. Not even the political rumblings that were starting could truly bother him for long. Life was good.
And then, one morning, he woke up to find Yuui gone. He couldn't get in contact with him via the Warp Bands, couldn't find him when he went looking, and neither could his pokémon - and Yuui's pokémon were in turn gone. It was as if he'd disappeared off the face of the earth. Now, the sensible thing to do would be to contact friends and loved ones and ask for help and support. Unfortunately Fai, feeling as if someone had just physically ripped out his other half, wasn't very sensible in that moment at all. As a matter of fact, something in him simply broke. Freeing most of his pokémon apart from those that he was closest to, he shut off his warp band, left everything else behind and disappeared as well.
It's been almost a year, now. Fai hasn't given up, but perhaps he's finally caught up with himself and surveyed his progress so far. His progress so far, to put it bluntly, barely exists. He's covered a lot of ground, but he has found nothing. And at this point, he's also come to the realization that he can't survive this way. If he keeps up this aimless trekking through the wilderness all alone, he's going to die - and if he dies, will there be anyone left to look for Yuui? Not to mention... it has finally dawned on him how deeply, inexcusably selfish it was of him to just leave with no word. He has - or at least he had - people who cared about him in Union. He had unfinished business there. And so, he returns.
(I've asked and gotten the okay from the previous Yuui-mun to say that he disappeared first.)
Name: Emi
Contact Information: alienGirlscout on AIM, sweetjerry on plurk
Time Zone: GMT+1
Characters Played: N/A
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Fai Flourite
Character Canon: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle / (Shiritsu Horitsuba Gakuen - The reason I mention this, it being a canon AU, is that it is very useful for basing his AU personality on, seeing as how the Brave New World version of him won’t have suffered the absolutely ridiculous amount of trauma that his TRC iteration has.)
History: The "Background" and "Story" sections here.
AU History: Fai is born to a noble family of Enlightened, like many others claiming to be direct descendants of the Savior. On his father's side, every Enlightened has been of the Psychic/Fairy type, and they have all married after type to produce new Psychic/Fairy children, who traditionally have all bonded with a Ralts as their first pokemon. They almost always have only one child per generation, at the most two, being fearful of "diluting" their noble blood, something that has led them to be viewed as snobbish and elitist – which, to be fair, is exactly what they are. It has also meant that the family has never managed to grow very big, and their father and his brother were indeed the last living descendants of their generation. Since their uncle can't father children due to an accident in his youth, the responsibility of passing on the family tradition was left to the younger brother.
But then, alack alay, Fai and his twin brother Yuui were born, one as a psychic/flying and the other as a fairy/ghost, breaking hundreds of years of breeding. Most of the blame was assigned to their mother, who while seemingly being a perfectly acceptable Fairy/Psychic, must've clearly had some impurity in her to produce such useless offspring - especially since she after that was unable to bear any more children.
Fai and Yuui have therefore not been very kindly treated by their father’s side of the family – which would include their grandparents, their great grandparents, and some more distant relatives, but most particularly their uncle. That side of the family has treated them as flawed goods, while their mother’s side of the family, being bigger but less influential, treated them like a huge embarrassment, since their birth had resulted in the public questioning of the legitimacy of their mother’s heritage. Their parents most likely try to be fair, but their father has grown up with all these expectations and demands from a young age, and their mother is constantly treated as a pariah by association – that’s the kind of thing that tends to affect you, and deeply too. And so parental disapproval was added to the mix.
Fai, having always been the more rebellious of the two, the one who was always less likely to fold and accept this kind of treatment, reached his breaking point when he entered puberty. It wasn’t just the constant disapproval, but also simply the fact that he was rather ill equipped to conform to what was expected of him. While Yuui was quiet, thoughtful, often cautious, and in many ways a model son, and Fai was in a lot of ways his opposite. He was talkative, easily distracted and impulsive, and he wasn’t very good at understanding or even noticing unspoken social rules, which frequently led to embarrassment on his family’s part. At first it wasn’t intentional at all; he truly did his best to make his family proud of him, but more often than not failed miserably. With time, he started getting more and more exasperated with apparently being unable to do anything right, and eventually, the seed of dissent was sown.
Possibly what really set it off was the thing with his fiancée. Both he and Yuui had been betrothed to suitable girls – which hopefully would put right the family breeding program – at a very early age. Fai was always very fond of his fiancée, thinking she was a sweet and fun girl to be around, and loving her like a sister. Once he started noticing girls and boys properly as puberty hit, he also subsequently realized why this was a problem. Thinking about being married to her was like trying to imagine being married to Yuui. That was to say, he absolutely had no interest in that whatsoever. And while he of course didn’t want to humiliate her by eloping and publicly denouncing her, that was when he reached the point where he’d had enough. Meaning a full-out teenage rebellion, with all the silliness that those usually entail.
He’d always been fond of putting on girl clothes, simply because they were pretty, but had never done so in public before for fear of aggravating his family even more. Now he started to do frequently, and didn’t even try not to make a spectacle of himself in any given social situation. He frequently snuck out to go to parties and – once he got older – less reputable places of entertainment. And once he turned eighteen properly, he decided to flaunt his status as a Flying type Enlightened by tattooing a great damn bird on his back, vaguely based on an old illustration of one of the Gods. Basically his equivalent of “Only God can judge me”.
His burning interest and talent when it comes to science has finally convinced him that what he really wants to do in his life is to be a researcher – he certainly doesn’t want to work at Council Hall like his family expects. The school system being what it is in Union, and Fai happily lacking all aptitude for learning about laws and economics and things in that vein, that is also how his education has been angled. And now he is itching to leave Union and brave the wilderness, only really held back so far by misgivings about dragging Yuui along and also because he doesn’t want it to seem like he’s running out on his fiancée. But that won’t last for long…
Canon Personality: Fai at first at first to be very agreeable, cheerful, nonchalant, and quite often rather annoying. And in a way, that is exactly what he is. Both this persona and the cold and distant one he displays when attempting to put a distance between himself and others seem to be parts of his personality that he enhances and uses as a sort of shield. From what you see of his personality both before and after he actually needs to keep up such a façade, he actually seems to be a merry and playful person at heart, even if that is not all there is to him.
He has an eccentric sense of humor, a flamboyant way of expressing himself and interacting with people, and several strange quirks, one being that he doesn't quite seem to be able to grasp the concept of personal space. He can be courteous to a fault, but at the same time also acts a bit too intimately with some people right off the bat, as if immediately assuming that they're a friend. With the people he likes he always pushes and prods and teases a bit, either trying to provoke reactions or simply as his own way of expressing affection. He doesn't always seem to know when he steps over the line for unacceptable or just kind of rude behavior, and either doesn't notice or care when people become outraged or, more frequently, embarrassed.
Bubbleheaded and manic behavior aside, anyone who spends even a short amount of times with Fai will notice that despite this tendency towards fakery - or perhaps because of it - he is very perceptive, and very sensitive to the emotions of the people around him. That is, unless they pertain to him in person, where he seems to have a huge blind spot. He is highly intelligent and possesses a deep wisdom and understanding of events around him, along with an uncanny knack for guessing the outcome of said events based on what he observes. This is something he usually masks by acting as if he’s merely making wild guesses without substance.
Due to a very painful past fraught with loss and guilt, he has troubles letting people get too close, and sees it as his obligation to keep people at arm’s length lest he hurt them. He believes he is always going to be the cause of unhappiness in others, and it is very obvious that he hates himself for it, and regards his own life as not worth very much at all. He only really seems to care about the outcome of any fight or dangerous situation if someone else’s fate hinges on it. So he tries to keep people from getting to know too much by presenting himself as a cheerful, illusive nature, seemingly without much substance or depth.
However, despite his best efforts, Fai is a very affectionate person, and seems to attach himself to others very strongly and care very deeply for those that manage to get under his skin. He also genuinely seems to be concerned with the troubles of strangers, and he will unselfishly lend them a hand without being too concerned with what kind of discomfort this might bring him. However, Fai doesn’t see himself as kind (“I have never been kindhearted. All I’ve ever been is weak.”) and it is true that he is quite capable of lying repeatedly to his friends and through omission and passivity put them in harm’s way if that means achieving what he truly desires. He seems to think that the fact that he cares about the people he deceives only makes him a worse person, and it could be argued that he has a point.
Since Fai has been a very lonely person all of his life, it is not strange that he is extremely protective – sometimes unhealthily so – of the people he cares about, and seems to suffer from rather severe abandonment issues, having great troubles letting go and letting others take care of themselves. His habit of distancing himself from others can be seen as an extension of this: He doesn’t believe that other people are capable of judging what is best for them - and specifically that he is bad for them - and so he makes the choice for them.
If someone gets too close, he will do this by either trying simply to deflect the question or change the subject completely, or on rare occasions when caught off guard, by revealing a small slice of the truth before quickly clamming up again, possibly in an attempt to confuse and deter further probing. At the point when he feels that he has become too important to someone, he will try to drive them off by becoming cold and heavily passive-aggressive, and by trying to do as much emotional harm as possible in an attempt to drive the person off. For their own good, of course.
He's very stubborn, and once he's decided on a course of action which he believes to be the best, it will take quite a lot to shake some sense into him when he's wrong. For all that he is a fractured and broken person, he possesses great determination and strength, and once he can be convinced to not turn a lot of this upon himself, he is most definitely a force to be reckoned with. And for all that he can seem frighteningly cold-blooded when there is something he feels he needs to do, in the end the thing that motivates and drives him is always love - love that he will go to any lengths to protect and fight for.
AU Deviation: Since Fai hasn't been subject to even a fraction of the massively crippling trauma which he has in canon, he will be a lot less prone to self-loathing and self-blame, and won't be convinced that he is directly the cause of misery in everyone that gets close to him. He will instead have a rather fragile self-image, and will affect a lot more confidence than he actually has in himself. From his point of view, him rebelling against his family is less a sign of him standing up for himself, and more an inevitable consequence of simply being unable to fit in despite his efforts.
Instead of being treated as a horrible calamity and the embodiment of sin, he has simply been treated as a vexing mistake and an imperfection, and also as a nuisance and chore. Constant comparisons to his twin, and the fact that Yuui has frequently had to pick up his mess and cover for him when he messes up has convinced him that most people find him bothersome and tiring, and that he'll always cause extra work for the people who are close to him. Letting on exactly how insecure he is, however, would be causing people to worry even more for his sake, and that is where his habit of faking smiles and pretending that he's fine stems from, rather than a desperate need to cover up a whole damn ocean of pain and guilt.
As dysfunctional as his relationship with his family is at times, he has nonetheless been brought up in a severely privileged household, neck-deep in old money, and that has left its marks. He is more than a little spoiled, used to being able to get what he wants in life, with no greater consequences for his actions than harsh scoldings and the effects they have on his social life. Growing up surrounded by firmly set views and being brought up by rather narrow-minded people has also left its marks whether he wants it to or not, and he can be a bit of a snob, and some prejudices are hard for him to shake.
And well, above all things, he's a teenager, rather than someone who grew up very fast and very hard and then has lived untold hundreds of years, and that will be reflected in how he acts as well.
Canon Abilities: Fai’s canon abilities are rather loosely defined, to say the least. The only thing he’s explicitly stated to be unable to do with magic is healing. Apart from that, he seems capable of just about anything, including repeated dimensional travel and the creation of a sentient being, and even halved and then powerfully reduced, his magic is still sufficiently powerful enough that when released by a curse, it causes an entire world to collapse and cease to exist. So even at a high level, that is very clearly going to have to be heavily nerfed. But abilities shown include energy blasts, forcefields, detecting magic power and psychokinesis.
It is referenced rather heavily in canon that each member of their traveling party is assigned their own element, both by powers granted to them in one world and by repeated hints over time. That is what I’m basing the second half of his Enlightened ability on, since Fai has wind, and a lot of the imagery also strongly associated him with phoenixes in particular.
Enlightened Abilities: Psychic/Flying, Analyst (To match the whole detecting magic thing)
To reflect the emphasis on offensive magic in Fai's canon abilities (in his own words, he is "only good at things that hurt people"), Fai's psychic abilities will mostly be the more physical/destructive kind, apart from such things as Barrier and the like which are similar to his protective force fields. And his Flying will tie into that to make him rather apt at Telekinesis as well. When it comes to those, it will be pretty straightforward, starting out with weaker moves on the level of Confusion and Heart Stamp and gradually gaining power as he gains levels/evolves.
Much of his Flying abilities will be very limited to being able to sense air currents and pressure and maybe moving around a little bit until he grows wings with later evolutions, meaning he'll more or less be limited to Gust and nothing else. At his second evolution he will gain more bird-like anatomy - lighter bones and greater agility, more or less, along with embarrassing feather growth - and will be capable of abilities like Bounce, Acrobatics and Chatter, but he still won't be able to fly. That won't happen until his third evolution, when he will finally sprout wings and will be given access to abilities more associated with actual flight along the lines of Sky Drop, Sky Attack and Oblivion Wing.
As it is now, the only physical signs of his Enlightened nature is a round stone in his forehead in the exact same shade of blue as his eyes, giving the somewhat disconcerting impression of an extra eye, and a very faint glow to his skin that is only ever noticeable in darkness.
The Analyst ability is chosen simply because Fai has a very analytical mind and is often able to figure out present events - or even events to come - way before anyone else does.
Starter Pokémon: Flabébé (blue flower)
SAMPLES
First-Person: Actionspam!
Third-Person: Fai hadn't really snuck away from his parents as much as gotten himself purposefully lost in the hectic bustle of the holiday sales, taking some time to stroll around at a more leisurely pace and chatting happily with mildly frazzled store owners and employees. It was one of those days when it wasn't snowing, but little flakes of ice seemed to hover in the air, catching the sun whenever it peeked out between two clouds and making the whole world glitter. A flock of happily chirping Vannilite flew past, bringing a cold breeze with them, and Fai pulled up the collar of his coat with a small shiver and a laugh. It was a pretty good day to be "lost".
He was just wandering aimlessly in a small park, when he suddenly heard a small whimpering sound from somewhere on the ground, and he stopped to search for the source. Eventually he found it beneath a shrubbery, a flash of blue and green against the black soil and grubby snow. A shivering Flabébé was cradling as much as it could of its flower and trying to wipe away the frost that covered the petals. She didn't look very happy at all, and Fai wondered how on earth she had ended up outside in this kind of weather - she hardly seemed well-equipped to handle it.
"Hello there, little one," he sing-songed, trying to keep his voice as soft as possible. She looked up with narrowed eyes, a vine extending from the flower and promising a stinging lash in case he was planning to attack her. Fai laughed, shaking his head. "I'm not going to hurt you. Look," he removed one glove from his hand, extending it toward the small creature, "why don't you hop in here where it's warm?" With his still gloved hand, he took the liberty of activating his newly aquired Warp Band. He wasn't Yuui, and he didn't have the gift of effortless communication like he did, but a little friendliness went a long way, didn't it?
And since he had to start as a trainer somewhere, helping out someone who had been left out in the cold seemed like a good place.
APPLICATION REVISION
Additional History: Staying true to his rebellious streak, both Fai and Yuui indeed took the plunge and ran away from home - or rather, Fai was impulsive and Yuui followed to keep an eye on him. Perhaps their rebellion might have been a tad more effective if they hadn't still been perfectly happy to accept pocket money from their family, and tapping liberally into the huge account set aside for them, but... well, the fact of the matter was that they had always been materially spoiled and privileged young men, and they were used to a certain standard of living. It was thrilling to run into the wilderness and explore, fighting pokémon and getting in trouble, but it was also nice to be able to return home to the kind of comforts they were used to. They simply got their own little flat and more or less continued life as they had before.
The true break-away was a bit more gradual, but a lot more significant in its own right. Firstly, Fai's fiancée also decided that she'd had enough, and had a bit more guts than her intended, meaning she actually told him that she wanted to cut the whole awkward engagement short. Relieved, Fai was only too happy to go along with it. And then, on top of this, Fai met Feliks. The only way he could have fallen in love with someone more wrong would've been if it had been a completely ordinary commoner, but that really wasn't necessary. Feliks only had half of the sought-after typing, was from a not entirely acceptable part of a noble family, and more to the point, was male. No chance of descendants there. At this point, Fai was officially cut off from his family fortune as well as the rest of his heritage.
That's when Yuui had enough. He'd been playing along as the 'good son' to make matters easier for everyone, but mostly he'd been doing it to take pressure away from Fai. As soon as his parents inadvertently removed his main reason for playing nice, and on top of that publicly shamed and rejected Fai, Yuui put his foot down. He cut ties as well - and the Flourites were suddenly without viable heirs.
Fai was genuinely happy, though. He might not be able to afford the luxuries he was used to, and actually had to work for his food, but he didn't really mind. He was young, he was free, he was in love. Not even the political rumblings that were starting could truly bother him for long. Life was good.
And then, one morning, he woke up to find Yuui gone. He couldn't get in contact with him via the Warp Bands, couldn't find him when he went looking, and neither could his pokémon - and Yuui's pokémon were in turn gone. It was as if he'd disappeared off the face of the earth. Now, the sensible thing to do would be to contact friends and loved ones and ask for help and support. Unfortunately Fai, feeling as if someone had just physically ripped out his other half, wasn't very sensible in that moment at all. As a matter of fact, something in him simply broke. Freeing most of his pokémon apart from those that he was closest to, he shut off his warp band, left everything else behind and disappeared as well.
It's been almost a year, now. Fai hasn't given up, but perhaps he's finally caught up with himself and surveyed his progress so far. His progress so far, to put it bluntly, barely exists. He's covered a lot of ground, but he has found nothing. And at this point, he's also come to the realization that he can't survive this way. If he keeps up this aimless trekking through the wilderness all alone, he's going to die - and if he dies, will there be anyone left to look for Yuui? Not to mention... it has finally dawned on him how deeply, inexcusably selfish it was of him to just leave with no word. He has - or at least he had - people who cared about him in Union. He had unfinished business there. And so, he returns.
(I've asked and gotten the okay from the previous Yuui-mun to say that he disappeared first.)
