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Lace | (Maleficent's) Sword | Riful / CARDINAL ([personal profile] prettygirlsmakegraves) wrote2020-03-12 06:01 pm
Entry tags:

stats and powers.

Character Name: Lace | Sword/Riful
Unit: Cardinal

Age: Looks 14. No official age provided.
Height: No official height provided.
Weight: Heavier than she looks. Much, much heavier. No official weight provided.
Eyes: Brown.
Hair: Multihued, tropical colors (orange, red, yellow, green).
Appearance: Has shoulder-length multihued "feathers" for hair, laying mostly straight, with overgrown, shaggy bangs. Missing one ear; the skin is visibly puckered and shiny like a new scar around the earhole. One keloid scar on her shoulder, slightly ratty and indented in its center, like a bullet wound. Very flat facial affect; body language more reliably expressive than her face. Gangly tweenage proportions because that's how Yagi draws characters, but likely shorter than modern tweeny heights due to contextual diet/a youth full of malnutrition/general hard living and also very leanly muscled. In Aather I went with her being very short in stature - only a little over four feet - here I'm going to leave it up to other players to judge, based on that description.

Description of powers: Can become a mass of feathered, razor-sharp, ribbon-like tentacles in a riot of bright colors that seemingly culminates in a human "body" (with empty sockets for eyes and a mouth) at their apex; possesses superhuman strength, speed, and agility and proportionate response time; has an overdriven healing factor; can utilize and sense "yoki", a form of energy specific to her world that she inherited from draconic organ donors; is a highly skilled swordfighter and tactician. She also has a nonhuman digestive system, which expresses itself as rows of sharklike teeth and an extended jaw and wider mouth when she eats.
Strength/Extent of powers: Claymore ch. 126 spelled out exactly how a yoma like Riful came to be: she is a genetically modified human created by taking a child and surgically implanting her with an alchemical mixture of organs taken from a captive dragon and a humanoid evolutionary descendant of said dragon.

The process left her body integrity unstable and with the potential for explosive transformation, but afterwards also left her capable of feats of increased strength &c. Eventually her body destabilized completely and she "Awakened", becoming what her world calls a "yoma", leaving her capable of assuming a monstrous form at will and severely accelerated healing abilities but with the catastrophic drawback of each transformation potentially consuming her body's stores of energy and flesh/fat at a life-threatening rate; by instinctive necessity she developed a craving for human flesh to replenish her body. Luckily she also has a set of teeth and jaws that make chowing down on raw flesh as painless as eating a piece of meat pie.

She is one of the strongest creatures in her world, in a class of strength and danger second only to the dragons whose flesh helped make her. When she unleashes her full power, the ground itself buckles under her tread. She is fast enough and skilled enough and clever enough and controlled enough that other characters with highly developed yoki senses and hair-trigger paranoia don't see her coming. It's said that creatures like her have a hunger so ravenous and strength so great she could eat an entire town without anyone being able to stop her. And when she unspools herself into the mass of razor-edged ribbons that she would consider her true face, her touch can span the length of a town square - or, in modern equivalents, a full city block, probably.

But there are stronger yoma than her in that class, and she died at the hands of one of them. She's not the final boss; if you're strong enough to take on the final boss you can beat her easily. But - at least at home, where there is no powercap - she is That One Boss.
Innate: Yes.
Memory related: Yes.
Relation to memory: Though there is a certain portion of it that has been so effectively internalized it comes as a muscle memory for her, utilizing her innate strength/speed/agility/yoki sensing & suppressing skills effectively/efficiently requires her remembering the training that taught her how to do so; likewise her swordsmanship. Her comprehension of strategy and playing dirty, on the other hand, she'll have to learn from scratch until she remembers how to do it properly.

Also, terribly, she doesn't know how much she needs to eat.
Effect of the powercap: Riful will be down to about the equivalent strength of an un-Awakened #2-ranked Claymore - plenty strong enough to go solo on an aggro'd mob of monsters on her own and come out alive on the other side, but she'll need a recovery period afterwards and unlike, say, a #1 she won't come out of it unscathed when she does it. She will still be stronger, faster, more responsive than the average human and/or bear and she can heal from most non-fatal or non-dismembering wounds and it might take her some time to hit a plateau only expressing her powers to that extent, but hit a plateau she will.

There's just no way and no how she'll be able to reach the several-stories-high heights of her Awakened form in its native environment; for one thing, there's not enough food around to replenish her if she tried, for another thing, there isn't enough room, and finally, that would just not make things very sporting for her comrades in memory/skill loss. She will be able to get about ten feet high. That's about it. Like any of her skills, though, provided she doesn't get up to too much strenuous activity while a tentacle monster, she can stay that way for a while. So, say, relaxing in an unraveled puddle of tentacles in the Cardinal portrait area is no great agony; trying to (potentially; so far as I know this isn't actually an option) thumbwrestle a giant squid is gonna prove much more of a physical strain and likely require backup.

Trying to push matters - on any and all fronts - will rapidly exhaust her internal stores of energy - and unlike other characters in the game, Riful can't just sleep that shit off; she's gotta eat. Then she can sleep it off, while her body digests it all. It's true that in Aather the crippling physical dependency upon human flesh was removed by Maleficent in her Good End, but the physical dependency on intense overconsumption to fuel any expressions of awesome power remains. Without a truly excessive amount of food intake to support her particular skillset, she will be profoundly curtailed in any actions she might take in relation to her surroundings. There's only so much food to go around, and even without the dependency being an issue it's quite possible none of it's going to seem quite as helpful as a good old meal of long pig ...

And no matter what she eats, there's nothing capping those teeth. Om nom nom.

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