Maison de Portes app

[spare_parts]

Player's Name: Dana
Contact info: pillbug OR scientifLc at AIM
DW: spare_parts

Character: Saphir Wyon Gneiss/Dist the Reaper
Canon: Tales of the Abyss
Version: Gameverse, with manga prequels as supplement
Canon Point: Postgame, pre-timeskip
Age: 35
Gender: Male



History: http://aselia.wikia.com/wiki/Dist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_the_Abyss#Plot
This is Dist's Tales of Wiki entry, as well as a short summary of the game's plot via Wikipedia. Abyss is kind of Confusing as a canon; it took me a couple playthroughs to get most of it down, so if more info is needed I'm happy to provide.

Personality: Dist is a little bit complicated. As far as most people in canon think about him, he is a flamboyant, erratic genius, whose brilliance is unfortunately offset by social awkwardness, jealousy, and impatience. He's generally regarded as 'weird' and frustrating to be around, so few to none bother, associating with him only when something is needed. He's very lonely because of this, going out of his way to eat with the common soldiers(nobody sits with him) and repay any kindness he is shown, usually disproportionate to the sympathy. When a young girl sat and talked with him over dinner a few times and lost one of her dolls, he took it and fixed it, as well as turning it into a powerful fighting robot that can grow in size enough to be a formidable weapon, in order to help her stand up to older girls who were bullying her.

Speaking of bullying, he is very sensitive to it, reacting strongly to negativity and violence shown to him. His childhood... acquaintances, we'll say, because they were absolutely not friends even if he did pretend they were, teased him mercilessly and used him as bait for soldiers and monsters when they had to either sneak into forbidden areas or practice fighting and spellcasting, respectively. Even as an adult, his 'friend' Jade disregarded him, left him in the snow long enough to get close to frostbite, beat him to get information, and taunted him at every opportunity. Dist is very tenacious by nature and generally tried to pretend these things didn't affect him, but it's impossible for a person not to experience some internal fallout from abuse like that. It's conditioned him to accept very poor treatment in exchange for companionship.

His childhood wasn't all bad, though. His schoolteacher was a former soldier named Professor Gelda Nebilim, and she showed him more kindness and love than almost anybody else. (Given how much she looks like him and how much he loved her I tend to headcanon her as his actual mother; it's common for professionals with titles like that to keep their own names after marriage. However, he calls her 'professor' rather than 'mother' so it really could go either way. If he ever refers to her in game, he will call her the professor, so it probably won't come up, but I felt it was relevant enough to share.) He was devastated when she was killed by one of Jade's childhood experiments (trying to use magic he had no ability to access) and the two of them vowed to revive her by any means necessary, specifically by a replication process designed by Jade called fomicry. The first attempt produced a crazed monster that went on a killing spree and had to be sealed away in a mountain, and none of the work they did throughout their education and adulthood produced any replicas with the memories of their original. They got pretty okay at producing viable replicas of other experimental subjects, though.

Even after Jade banned the practice of fomicry for just being way, way too unethical(they killed a lot of people, both original and replica), Dist wouldn't give up, fleeing the country and continuing his work in secret. He has a stubborn inability to let go of the past; his happiest memories are from his childhood, and while it's possible he could have had a good life after fomicry, his tunnel vision prevented him from seeing that and only focused his obsession. After his final attempt to finish his work by confronting the first replica, the monster Nebilim who did have memories, literally blew up in his face, he was forced to confront the fact that it had always been impossible and that his life's work had been for nothing. He was arrested shortly after and had very little to do except stew.

If a person pays enough attention to him, they can see that he's very twitchy, nervous, unsure how to behave around people, and prone to babbling when he's afraid in social situations. He denies needing companionship but actively seeks it out when it's offered and becomes attached to people very quickly if they seem like they'll take pity on him or treat him kindly. These traits imply that much of his loud flamboyance is a mask, to protect him from people seeking to hurt him like his friends did. After all, if someone hates a persona, it's not like they hate the real you, right?

Not all of it is an act, though. He's vain, referring to himself as beautiful and dressing in loud, flashy clothing, riding a floating chair of his own design and loudly objecting when he is ignored or disregarded. Image is important to him; he wears makeup, keeps his hair and clothing neat, and probably bathes until the hot water literally runs out. He made up titles for his fellow god-generals to make them, and himself, sound more impressive and emphasize their presence both in rank and in person; examples are Sync the Tempest, Largo the Black Lion, and Asch the Bloody. For himself he tries to go by Dist the Rose, but because of his involvement in fomicry and mad science his colleagues refer to him as Dist the Reaper, which he considers barbaric and unacceptable.

So, in general, Dist is a person who is brilliant but socially impotent, vain and self-centered but twitchy and erratic, traumatized and sensitive but trying to appear strong. He is driven, easy to manipulate but hard to dissuade, very needy, temperamental, and scared of being abandoned. He is desperate for companionship but tries his best not to show it for fear of being hurt again. He loved Jade and up until very recently he would have done anything for his attention and approval; the only thing that really changed that was getting almost killed and Jade making it very clear that they were never going to have the relationship they'd had in the past and that the Professor was never coming back. Dist has never forgiven him and likely never will.

For the record, much of my personal understanding of Dist's psyche comes from an official gaiden manga focusing on his friendship with the girl mentioned above. The game is rather vague in regards to his inner world, so the manga is almost the only insight we get. I have linked the full thing below as well as a few pertinent pages to show how I've come to the conclusions I have. It's a short read, but if I've done my job right it isn't necessary; I've only included it for completion's sake, not as a substitute for a fleshed-out personality section.

http://mangapark.me/manga/tales-of-the-abyss-another-story/s2/v4/c0/e2/1
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/11.jpg
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/15.jpg (as an example of his bad reputation among his peers and how they avoid him at all costs)
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/17.jpg (hiding social fear behind affected vanity and feigned aloofness, desperation for companionship and covering for it poorly)
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/18.jpg (more of the above)
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/25.jpg (deviating from engrained behavior, babbling when nervous)
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/26.jpg (acknowledged as a "sad" person)
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/35.jpg (bully stuff)
http://2.p.mpcdn.net/17837/276670/42.jpg (repayment of kindness, denial of wanting to do nice things for his friends)

Fears: Dist likes to insist that HE FEARS NOTHING, but we all know that isn't true. The most notable is a big ball of anxiety composed of fear of abandonment, fear of being alone, and fear of being forgotten. When he was imprisoned at the end of the game, it was like all three of them coming together at once, which sent him into a pretty significant depression that will take time to let up, even after his time in Maison begins. Closely related is fear of failure and a need to please; said need to please is typically limited to people he genuinely admires, so many don't know it's there, but when it comes to those few he hates to let them down. He's afraid that Jade abandoned their work simply because Dist wasn't good enough, which is exacerbated by the fact that Jade never really explained beyond 'it's wrong.'

More mild are a distant fear of fire and slight-to-moderate claustrophobia.

Weaknesses: The most obvious is that Dist is made of noodles. He's got very little endurance or physical strength, and isn't trained with any kind of normal weapons. In canon he does all his fighting from inside huge robots. He also wears glasses(nearsighted) and is mildly lactose intolerant.

His weaknesses of personality are many. He projects bravado outwardly to hide insecurity, which tends to alienate him from others. He craves acknowledgement and praise and will often demand these things, insisting he deserves them while inside fearing that he really doesn't. He doesn't make friends easily, partially because of trust issues and partially because he's just irritating, which leaves him without a support network unless he can provide something useful enough to override his personality.

Dist is very difficult to dissuade from a wrong course of action if he thinks it's a right one. One of the causes of this, besides a frustrating tenacity, is that he is pretty aimless when he doesn't have windmills to tilt at; if he's not living for a cause or a person, he has trouble finding purpose.

While diagnosing fictional characters is always subjective and requires reading into a character deeper than is possibly intended by the writer, Dist displays a lot of the classic symptoms of borderline personality disorder - rapidly fluctuating emotions, over-attachment and fearing loss or abandonment, and intense idolization and devaluation of others(which swing wildly depending on what said other person has done that day; see: his varying behavior towards Jade). His behavior and self-image are always shifting and can be affected by the smallest things; he can sometimes pick up on tone and social cues, and when he does he'll over-analyze, especially if said cues are positive towards him(shown on the comic pages above). He thinks in extremes - either something is perfect or wretched, and this colors his interactions with people. He will emote accordingly, with rage, irritability, shocked silence, or extreme attachment depending on the trigger, and he will feel and internalize them for a long time(see: revenge journal, grudges held for years). He will have to confront who he feels he is in the context of himself, not when compared to others or relating to his current position, project, or function(i kind of infer this, bc ingame Dist is never encountered outside the context of fomicry somehow and it's all he talks about, so if he has a strong sense of self otherwise we never get to see it). This will take a lot of introspection and he won't have an answer for a long time.

The above is placed in weakness not because i consider it a personality flaw, but because it makes his life harder.

He's very proud as well, avoiding things he considers 'beneath him' even if it makes life way more difficult than if he'd just have gone along with it to start with.

Mundane Strengths/Abilities: Dist is a rightfully acknowledged mechanical genius. He has invented many things that are unique to him, and was one of the leading developers of a replication process called fomicry. When it comes to problem solving he is both very thorough and able to think outside the box for strange solutions, even if they do tend to be pretty convoluted; he's just as likely to put together an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine as he is to build a straightforward, functional device.

As for the things he builds, they tend to be robots, designed to either function independently or be piloted from the inside. He can figure out just about anything, though, provided it runs on a power source and has moving parts. Machines make a lot of sense to him in a way that people generally don't. His most prominent creations are his Kaiser mechs, large spherical robots decked out with guns, buzzsaws, and clamps that he pilots from a cockpit on the inside.

When it comes to more mundane skills, Dist is creative, considering invention to be an art as well as a science. He has small, dextrous hands and can manipulate small objects with a good amount of skill, including being decent and things like lockpicking and minor sleight of hand. He is a quick study with few moral qualms, and can still function under a significant amount of pain(even if he really doesn't like to). He can also sew, as shown by a scene in his gaiden above.

The weirdest 'ability' he has is his canon-acknowledged tendency to just not die. He's not immortal, but he survives things he should never be able to live through, the most egregious example being one of the Kaiser mechs he was piloting and inside exploding to the point of almost no visible debris. This is not technically a power, but it is a fact, and will play into what he is and is not capable of doing.

Sensitivity/Magical Ability: The only noteworthy supernatural ability Dist has is being able to tell when his blood fonons are being wonky. He's not a spellcaster or a healer, and the most he can do when it comes to 'magic' is maybe a flash of light or something similar. Nothing useful, really.

Supply List: Boring prison clothes, a short stack of books(mostly cook books, scientific periodicals, things like that - inoffensive reading), a small assortment of machine parts including a half-finished music box, a screwdriver and set of needle-nose pliers, pencils, and a sheaf of papers with everything on them from cogent blueprints to assorted scribblings of everybody he knows being messily killed.

Game Transfers: n/a

Sample RP post:

http://portesooc.dreamwidth.org/276809.html?thread=2947913#cmt2947913