Player Information

Player: Ramey
Contact: discord: expositionavenue / PM
Invitation: Jen
Are you over 18?: Yes!


Character Information

Character: Emet-Selch (Hades)
Canon: Final Fantasy XIV / Post-Endwalker, after vanishing from Ultima Thule
Age: 12,000+
History: Wiki page
Possessions: The clothes on his back, including his mask, and his Convocation crystal – a purple crystal containing his memories.
Weapon: N/A

Powers/Abilities:

• Immortal: Emet-Selch is ageless and ancient, and fully able to shed his physical body to escape death. He can still be permanently killed, though it takes a lot of power and special circumstances to pull it off, and has already died for real before coming to the game. As a result, he’s been stuck back in his original body from before the Sundering, but this just kind of puts him back at square one. If someone or something manages to kill him, they will basically only kill his body. He can simply hop into another one, effectively taking it over and molding it to whatever form best suits his needs. He’s a creature of habit and will very likely just make it look like himself again – this is annoying and exhausting, but he will do it if he must. Unless something is plotted out beforehand, he won’t ever oust the consciousness of another PC. I am happy to plot with this if it ever comes up! He will not be keen to test his luck, though.


• Soul Sight: Emet-Selch has very keen vision and can see beyond the physical – right down to a person’s soul. Souls usually appear as a color to his eyes, and he can use his vision to spot a person at a distance or even in the afterlife. I have an OOC permissions post for this. He can also see aether, which is basically the life-force of the world and the source of magic. I figure all the anomalies probably play havoc with what he’s able to see, so this will range from inconsistent to “what the fuck is that” depending on the situation.


• Connection with the Lifestream: As arbiter of the underworld, he has a connection with the Lifestream, the place souls go when they die and wait to be reborn again. He can feel disturbances in the Lifestream and even pluck a soul from its waters if he wants. Given the nature of Diadem, this connection will be spotty and feel extremely distant, like he’s going through a tunnel with a cell phone.


• The Echo: You can think of this as a walking memshare prompt. He can resonate with the aether around him, or with the soul of another person, to be able to see into the past. With the anomalies making the ambient aether so wonky, there may not be much he can glean from it. For diving into the past of a person, he very likely won’t do this without asking and I will communicate OOCly as well. The Echo also allows him to understand others and be understood regardless of language barriers.


• Creation Magic: All Ancients are adept in the art of creation, from objects to creatures, but Emet-Selch is in a league of his own. Usually, he can bring forth anything from a weapon to a creature to use as a mount to a full-scale replica of a long-lost city (complete with inhabitants) with hardly any effort at all. His creation abilities will be susceptible to a high failure rate, so nothing he creates will be permanent, nor any bigger than can fit in a room. Smaller, inconsequential things might last a bit longer, like a day or two at most, but there will be literally no way to tell when something might vanish. This will pretty quickly deter him from making modifications to his vehicle or manifesting weapons, since real objects will be much more reliable.


• Offensive Magic & Tanking: Emet-Selch is shown wielding shadow and elemental magic to create projectiles, conjure shields, and more. He also seems to be able to lean on just raw magical power to blast people with force. As with his creation abilities, he’s shown to be quite powerful and exceptionally gifted.
  
  His powers mostly seem to be focused on dealing damage, and when slotted into a dungeon alongside the player, he can fill the role of either a DPS (functionally a Black Mage) or a tank (Dark Knight). He is never seen using healing magic, and seems to function with the mindset that the enemy can’t hurt you if you kill them first. Emet-Selch is not a typical Black Mage or Dark Knight, either, and employs several other kinds of spells, such as the wall of spectral spears seen in his boss fight.
  
  As with all tanks in FFXIV, he has an invulnerability move. Emet-Selch’s is called “Katabasis,” and is functionally identical to Dark Knight’s Living Dead: it allows him to survive a fatal hit, but he must be healed afterwards within a short period of time or he will simply collapse. During this period, he can siphon life from his opponents to heal himself.
  
  Functionally, what all this will look like in the game is that he’s an exceptionally powerful mage, and though his talents are varied, he will mostly employ summoned projectiles (spectral spears, motes of light) and some elemental spells (fire, mostly) in battle. He can conjure a barrier to protect himself or others, and can also withstand a fatal blow but will need healing immediately afterwards – if he has his way, hopefully it won’t come to that. He is not above siphoning life from his enemies to help the healing process along, but can only do so if he has effectively used Katabasis. All of this accompanied by sassy finger snaps because that’s how he is.
  
  Of note, he also has the ability Anabasis, which can revive someone from KO.


• Transformation: Ancients can shed their more human forms in favor of something a bit more monstrous or eldritch-looking. These forms are more powerful. However, transforming without reason is considered the same as getting naked in public – it’s taboo. This isn’t something he’d do unless the situation was dire. This form is quite big (like 20 feet tall) so if it needs to be shrunk down, let me know.


• Teleportation: He can teleport, either by himself or bringing other people with him. Usually he can go anywhere, across the globe or even to the moon. In game, this power will also be subject to a high failure rate. Most of his attempts will land him only a few feet from where he started in a random direction. This is incredibly embarrassing for him and very funny for me. Eventually, he will be more reliably able to teleport to places he’s been before so long as he knows where he’s going and that place is within like a mile of him. Nightcrawler rules, basically.


• Flight: Just what it says on the tin. He can fly/levitate, though he doesn’t do it often. As with his teleportation, this will be spotty. Sometimes he won’t even get off the ground – again, embarrassing for him and funny for me. A bit of levitation or floating up a couple of stories will mostly be fine, but if he tries for much more than that, things get shaky and he could just drop like a rock.

Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?
Emet-Selch owes a lot to his friend, Azem. Even though we don’t know a whole lot about Azem, since they’re the unsundered counterpart of the player character and can therefore be anybody, the game still makes it quite clear just how much their presence has affected the people around them – Emet-Selch chief of all.

Azem is a wanderer and a troublemaker, with a habit of getting in over their head. When they would want for help, they would call on Emet-Selch, back when he was still simply Hades, and he would always appear to lend his not inconsiderable talents to help. It’s because of this that Hades began to gain a reputation of someone who used his talents for the good of the star, and in turn this reputation is what helped him to land his seat on the Convocation of Fourteen, commended by people the world over.

Without Azem and their (what Emet-Selch would no doubt classify as) meddling, there wouldn’t be anyone in the world who knew of him and his talents. Emet gives off such big “introvert adopted by an extrovert” vibes that it’s safe to assume he probably would have kept to himself. I truly think the thing that defines Emet-Selch the most is his loyalty, and it’s his loyalty to Azem in particular that set a lot of things in motion for him. Everything he is, the good and the very very bad, all began because this one guy could not keep out of trouble, and Emet-Selch is far too loyal and caring to turn his back, no matter how tsundere he acts about it.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?
Well there’s a loaded question. In short, yes, but no.

If Emet-Selch were able to go back, specifically knowing what he knows now, then there is a lot he could do differently. Everything leading up to the Final Days and the Sundering would simply not happen because he would have the means to prevent it. Sure, a lot of the driving force behind the things he did in service to bringing back his world was in part driven by Zodiark’s influence, but there is still a large part of him that genuinely grieved and despaired for what they lost. His friends, his family, his loved ones. If given the chance to set it right without all the needless sacrifice, he has every reason to take it.

But… he did leave the star in the care of the Warrior of Light, and that that alone is some kind of acknowledgement that the world as it is is worth preserving and fighting for, too.

Ultimately, he’s a man who doesn’t regret much, doesn’t believe that the things he did were wrong, and has made his peace with how things turned out. By the end, he didn’t even want to win anymore. He just wanted to rest, and rest easy knowing that he left the star in the hands of someone capable. So while there’s a lot he could do to change the course of his own or his world’s fate, I don’t think he would. That fight is over now, and he has accepted his loss with grace.

Now if he could go back to gently floating in the Aetherial Sea, that would be great.

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting?
Honestly, Emet-Selch is pretty adaptable, so his biggest hurdle is going to be a much more personal one. Having been denied his final rest, he is now going to have to really deal with the things he has done over the course of his very long life. With Zodiark’s influence on him removed and the star in the care of someone else, what does that mean for him? Especially with a cast, he’s going to be forced to confront a lot. Even if he has no regrets, there’s no denying that his actions had far-reaching effects. He will be sharing a space with people who felt those effects.

And even if not directly from his cast, he will be seeing similar stories come from the other fluxdrifts. He’ll be getting it from all angles, so there will be no escaping the fact that he will have to somehow reconcile the man he was with the one he became, and the new-old person he is now.

The Horrors will probably totally definitely help with that.

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?
As mentioned above, Emet-Selch is extremely adaptable. He’s lived for a very, very long time, been to different worlds (even if they are technically shards of the same world) and seen all manner of civilizations with all levels of technology rise and fall. There’s not going to be too much about the basics of the setting that will be strange to him. He will settle quickly and be able to help others adapt – and he does understand that it would be foolish not to help others, if only because favors go a long way in this new world.


Samples

Sample: TDM toplevel, musebox