Post by Griever on Jun 4, 2012 1:04:29 GMT -5
Name: Cineris
Nicknames/Alias: None
FF: VII
Age: Much older than she appears. Cineris was born in the time of the ancient Cetra.
Height/build: 5'6"/thin
DoB: --
Race: Cetra
Weapon: If she has to fight, Cineris uses only her magic and Lifestream-based abilities.
Level: 94
Strength: --
Special Skills:
Magic:
Summon: None
Appearance:
Personality:
History:
Nicknames/Alias: None
FF: VII
Age: Much older than she appears. Cineris was born in the time of the ancient Cetra.
Height/build: 5'6"/thin
DoB: --
Race: Cetra
Weapon: If she has to fight, Cineris uses only her magic and Lifestream-based abilities.
Level: 94
Strength: --
Physical: --
Magical: --
Agility: --
Special Skills:
Telepathy:
Cineris is able to communicate with the other Cetra both at close- and long-range via telepathy. As an extension, unless they deliberately shut her out, she can find them wherever they are. This only works between herself and the others of her kind.
Transportation:
In its simplest form, this allows Cineris to move from one place to another in an instant. However, it is much less strenuous to move only her image - an incorporeal form that she may send out to observe and communicate on the most basic level, but not directly interact. On a much larger scale, this ability to transport herself could be used to pass through the barriers between worlds, though to do so physically takes considerable effort. As a result, she would more often send her image than move her entire being.
Planet Communing:
All Cetra are born with the ability to communicate with the Planet, though the meaning of it is much greater in the true Cetra than what lingers for their descendants. They can draw knowledge and information from the Lifestream at will, and sense disturbances in the Planet. The ability is strongest with their own world and its lands, but extends to the others, to a lesser degree.
Lifestream Manipulation:
Cineris may pull lifestream up through the earth and use it as she wishes. This is what allowed the ancient Cetra to cultivate land, though there are other uses for it.
Soul Capturing:
Most effective when used on those from her world, Cineris draws on the current of lifestream running within a living being. From there, she may manipulate its flow or outright remove it. This usually can't kill, as it leaves just enough to keep the target alive, but can temporarily cripple until the body has a chance to restore it, leaving them in a near-comatose state. Highly dependent on the target's resistance (or compliance, as the case may be).
Sensory Alteration:
An ability unique to Cineris, allowing her to show an individual anything she may want to. Unlike simple illusions, this reaches into and alters the target's perceptions, so that the imagery Cineris creates looks and even feels completely real. She may work in a small scale, changing or adding only minor details, or create environments around her target, detailing every aspect from the terrain underfoot to the wind. By extension, she may also remove things from her target's ability to perceive it.
Cineris can see the images she works - though simultaneously, she sees the reality underneath, allowing her to interact with both her false world and the real one at the same time. Because of this, she may apply this ability to groups of people by working on an individual level, using the image she has created as a basis to ensure that each person sees the same thing. This becomes exponentially more difficult with larger groups, as she must create and simultaneously maintain images equal to the amount of people within her influence. Similarly, manipulating even a group isn't difficult for her if she is only doing small things - creating a false monster to scare people away, for example - but working in whole environments is substantially more difficult, requiring more effort and more concentration.
Though it isn't easy, Cineris is capable of creating separate environments for different targets simultaneously; however, this is particularly draining on her, and requires more concentration. Notably, if she wants her target to be unaware that she has changed their environment, she may work from the subconscious level outwards.
Memory Reading:
Developed as an extension of both her telepathy and her ability to alter perceptions, Cineris may read the memories of an individual in detail, allowing her to recreate events and locations from their past.
Magic:
Magic Channeling:
Whereas materia acts as a channel to produce magic by drawing power through it from the lifestream, as a Cetra, Cineris can draw from the lifestream itself, effectively producing any spell that a regular materia could replicate, but at a higher level than what the stones can offer.
Holy:
Drawing its name and concept from the White Materia, Holy calls forth the energy of the Planet itself. However, when used by the Cetra on an individual level, it is nowhere near as powerful as the Holy that stopped Meteor from destroying the planet. The strength of their Holy can be enhanced when the Cetra combine their efforts and use it together.
Summon: None
Appearance:
Cineris is a relatively tall woman appearing in perhaps her mid-twenties, if that, marked by an almost excessive thinness that exaggerates her height and the length of her limbs. Her slight curves are typically covered by simple, loose clothing in pale shades, and ash-grey hair reaches to the small of her back; the locks have only the faintest hint of color to them, a slight trace of brown visible when the light touches them a certain way. Overall her small frame and pale coloring present a surreal, almost ghostlike effect, offset only by the brilliant green of her eyes, a shade mimicking that of the Lifestream.
Personality:
Cineris wears a mask of unbroken calm and patience, tempered by her long years of dedication and focus. She views the world with an impartial neutrality, caring little if at all for the affairs of humans, whose lives pass so quickly to her eyes, and tends to make decisions with the long-term effects in mind, with her goal of unification of the Lifestream taking precedence over all else, no matter what anyone else may think of it.
Very little causes her to react with or display emotion, even subtly; under the surface, however, lies a deep sorrow and regret for the mistakes she's made. However she may try to bury it, she is still shaken, even damaged, by her failures and the consequences that have resulted.
History:
Cineris was born in a different age, a time when the Cetra lived and thrived across the Planet, nurturing the land and communicating freely with the Lifestream. These gifts were inherent in all of their race, but among them there were those who were particularly gifted - those who could go farther, who could see and reach other worlds and spread their guiding influence there. The pioneers, the Guides, the Searchers, travelers who went to unfamiliar places and learned of them, their cultures, their people, everything they could. Appointed to the task at a relatively young age, Cineris was among them, and what she saw captivated her.
Civilizations nothing like her own, people both strange and somehow familiar, worlds that, like hers, could speak to her and tell their own stories. Whatever distant places she walked, a thread of familiarity connected them - something she found more in the feel of the land itself and the voice of the planet within than in human contact. Away from home for long periods as she was, often isolated but for the company of the others who shared her work, she found a singular comfort in her connection with the Planet, wherever that happened to be.
It was through that connection, and the extended communication that resulted, that she began to notice it. The thread of familiarity that connected the worlds wasn't just in the superficial, the presence of people or of trees or water, it was in the very core of the worlds, a shared undercurrent that pulsed beneath whatever differences separated them. In the place called Spira, they sent their dead to the Farplane, the river of souls that coursed through the earth. It was different, of course, and yet...so like the Lifestream, so filled with knowledge and warmth.
The similarity was undeniable, and in every world she visited, Cineris confirmed the presence of the same feeling. The beginnings of an idea had started to spring up in her head, only a half-formed question, perhaps, but something she had to return home with and bring to the attention of the others.
Home, however, wasn't what she had been expecting.
Her absence had been longer than usual, though not unprecedented; she was expecting surprise and questions, at most, not the utter loss she found when she returned. In her absence, the calamity from the sky descended, poisoning her people, maddening them, destroying them. Jenova. The few remaining survivors were scattered, and when she found them, many only cursed her absence, damning her for not being there to fight or for not suffering as the rest of them had.
Those who were born with her gifts were different. They received respect and praise, but in a way, they were isolated among the Cetra, never quite connected because of the long periods spent away, and because they could perceive the world - the worlds - in ways the others couldn't begin to understand. Never before had it been so clear to her. The decimation of her people seemed to finalize the rift between them, even as it brought it to light.
There was no changing what had happened, and no returning to the way things had been, so Cineris closed herself off from the other Cetra, turning her absolute attention toward the questions that had spurred her return. Over the long years that followed, her only companions were the other Cetra who had been given the same task as her, Cael and Creon, and she told both of them of all of her discoveries - the similarity between the flow within the worlds, the realization that it was so like their own Lifestream, and later, the idea that had started to take shape almost from the start of her investigations: that they were all connected, whatever their distance and differences, and that their Lifestream was only one fragment of a whole, incomplete.
The Lifestream was often spoken of as their Promised Land, but with her unique perspective came the realization that that couldn't be true unless it was complete. There had to be a way to connect it with the others, somehow, a task which became her drive, occupying her mind for centuries. Unconcerned with the dwindling Cetra and the humans that rose up in their place, her dedication to her cause became her purpose, a far-reaching goal that saw her through the long passage of time and kept away the smaller attachments that would have made it difficult or unbearable. In that time, she seldom spoke to anyone but Cael and Creon, the only real constants as the worlds changed around her.
With time and study came knowledge and understanding, and little by little, a plan for unification started to form. At first, they weren't strong enough for it to be more than an idea, but their capabilities grew over time, and once she was finally certain that she knew beyond doubt what needed to be done, they were ready.
Once they were adequately prepared, they brought the worlds together, exhausting themselves to the limits of their physical capability. It seemed to be going as planned, but before their work could be completed, it proved to be too much even for them - something went wrong. Where there should have been seamless unity came chaos. The worlds - the world, as it now was - shuddered with the convalescence of magical energy, shifting and pulling apart and reshaping in ways that couldn't be fully perceived by those with less power. When it finally settled, completed, it became all too clear that the world they had created was not the one she had envisioned. And then she slept.
They had failed. She had failed. The Promised Land she had sought to create was, now that it had become a reality, not a place of tranquil wholeness, but of violence, where the separate streams of souls fought and surged against each other in conflicting disarray. Souls of the dead were thrown out into life once again, and when she listened to the Planet, it was crying. There was no shutting out that sound, even if she wanted to.
Shaken by the weight of her mistake, she turned her attention to the only thing she could: finding a way to complete what she had started, to calm and unify the massed energy within the merged world.