thediadem application.

[savante]

Player Information

Player: Julie
Contact: quadrille & quadrille on discord
Invitation OR characters played: Invited by Dee!
Are you over 18?: Yep.


Character Information

Character: Lune
Canon: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Act 2, after defeating the axons but before the end-of-act battle at the Monolith)
Age: 32
History: Link
Possessions: Her black-and-gold Expedition outfit. A battered backpack containing some leatherbound journals, dip pens and ink, her bedroll, and some food supplies. No boots, which is instantly a problem in Diadem winter.
Weapon: None, just her powers.

Powers/Abilities:

SCIENTIST: Canon is vague on what this entails, but I’ll say it’s mostly a grab-bag of engineering, biology, cartography, and mixing technology with magic. Lune was enough of a workaholic that she dipped into any kind of study which might give her Expedition an edge for fighting a goddess and saving the world.

MAGIC: She can cast magic thanks to the golden pictos tattooed into her skin. (Hypothetically, if they were to be marred or removed, she would lose these capabilities.)

• Elemental magic (fire, water/ice, lightning, and earth). All of the spells have an offensive bent, and she’s accustomed to using them in combat: setting enemies ablaze, throwing ice lances, slamming a group with earth, washing them away with a tidal wave out of nowhere, etc, on top of casual everyday uses like lighting a campfire. She can also shoot small blasts of damaging energy from her hands, equivalent to her teammates’ small pistol shots. The bigger the magic, the more exhausting it is, so she’d need to rest or scale down after a particularly dramatic display.


• Healing. It’s your typical JRPG healing, but to keep it grounded, I’m happy to say that she can’t resurrect people, she can’t heal grievous injuries like a detached limb, and that healing in general drains her more than her other spells. I envision it mostly being used for things like stopping bleeding, sealing up cuts, and helping re-set broken bones.


• Minor levitation. Not full flight, but just floating along a few inches off the ground. Since she’s usually barefoot in canon, she often floats instead of walking, and it doesn’t seem to tire her. Being barefoot is for a purpose: it helps her cast magic, since her feet are also tattooed. With boots on, she has to work a little harder to cast the same spells.

MISCELLANEOUS SKILLS: A bit of sailing and wilderness survival. She’s very good at playing the guitar, although she downplays this.

Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn’t been around?

Her parents (and more specifically, her mother Brigitte). Lune modeled her entire life on her parents’ career and goals until she can barely tell where they ended and she began; they treated her more like a research assistant and an extension of their own ambitions, rather than a daughter and a person in her own right. She was discouraged from doing anything which didn’t further their profession and the eventual goal of the Expedition, and she carried a heavy responsibility to finish their work, especially since her two older siblings didn’t follow in the family footsteps. (Unbeknownst to her, even her mother’s literal dying words were about how Lune would carry on their work and finish what they started.)

All of it was a lot to put on a child’s shoulders, considering she started working for them as early as age four. That constant determination and their pushing made her excel, but also left lasting damage: she’s never known how to do anything silly or frivolous or purely for herself, and she both looked down on her older siblings for their selfishness and resented and envied them for being able to go off and do whatever they wanted, while she was left holding the burden. Even to this day, she’d still argue that it was necessary; because who knows how far the Expedition might’ve gotten without her, and if her parents hadn’t turned her into such a single-minded machine?

So: If she’d been orphaned earlier and raised by someone else, she might’ve learned a healthier work-life balance and been able to enjoy herself, have hobbies, and not become such a serious and obsessive workaholic. She might’ve known how to give and receive familial affection like a normal person. Ironically, it’s finding herself in Diadem which will finally give Lune the freedom to find out who she is, who she wants to be, and how she wants to spend her time now that she has it, without the metaphorical ghost of her parents and their expectations haunting her narrative.

Is there an event in your character’s life that they’d do differently? How so and why?

Choosing to land Expedition 33 at the specific beach site she selected. She was the person who researched past routes and wound up selecting this one. It technically worked, in that the survivors have subsequently gotten further than anyone else did, but their Expedition still encountered immediate disaster and almost everyone was slaughtered the moment they stepped foot on the Continent: only four people survived. Their entire venture almost ended right there, and it still feels calamitous whenever she looks back on it; they lost their leader, and Lune also lost her friend Tristan, the last person she’d grown up with since the age of six.

Lune can’t help but feel that if she’d chosen somewhere else, perhaps Renoir wouldn’t have been waiting for them and he wouldn’t have been able to kill everyone; or if they’d prepared better or approached with a better plan, maybe they’d have been able to fight back properly, and more of them could’ve made it. She tends to (somewhat naïvely) believe that almost every problem can be anticipated with rigorous training, practice, and meticulous preparation, and so part of her will never stop kicking herself about what happened and wondering if there was a way it could’ve gone differently.

Now that she’s in a new setting, out of her comfort zone and with a chance to breathe, it’ll make her more indecisive than she used to be; hesitant to make decisions which might affect a larger group of people; and even more prone to checking and double-checking her work and wanting to do as much prepwork as possible, in order to try to minimise the danger for others. She can still take risks for herself just fine, but she doesn’t want to be responsible for others dying again.

What’s the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting? How might this impact their ability to adapt and in what ways will they confront this challenge?

Despite it being ultimately a good thing, Lune being robbed of her goal in defeating the Paintress and stopping the Gommage will feel like having the rug pulled out from under her: despairing at Lumière being left behind and her work unfinished, worrying about whether her home world’s dying without her. If you’ve devoted your entire existence to one singular task above all else, what do you do when that purpose is abruptly taken away from you? She’ll hit a sudden loss of momentum, finding herself loose and adrift and lost, and she’ll be reeling. Likely with a period of being depressed in her PJs, and constantly waking up in a panic feeling like she’s wasting valuable time.

Coming from the equivalent of a very strange post-apocalyptic 1905 France, she’ll also be unaccustomed to basic things like working for a daily wage, exchanging money for goods and services (what do you mean, everyone doesn’t just pitch in and contribute for the greater good??), and the radical notion that child labour is maybe a bad thing. Being more on the prim and uptight side, she’ll also need to relax around looser social mores and catching a scandalous glimpse of strangers in modern undress once in a while. And since all of the older generations in her world were steadily exterminated over time — at 32 years old, she’s currently one of the oldest people in Lumière — she’s not even used to seeing anyone middle-aged, so the sight of grey or white hair will freak her out at first. Clair Obscur is a weird setting.

Lune will be very unfamiliar with electronics and more advanced technology and unsure how to operate it, although she’s also so mechanically-minded that she’ll want to take it all apart to learn how it works. In the end, she’s such a pragmatic person that she’ll knuckle down again and try to find something new to devote herself to, likely with a lot of trips to any existing libraries and bookshops in the hopes that she can study her way into adjustment. She’s a little too prone to relying on booksmarts and procedure and theory more than on-the-fly improvisation, so she’ll reach for any documentation and quizzing other fluxdrifts for their prior experience as much as possible; doggedly rolling up her sleeves to get involved, understand her new situation, and attempt to make life better here for those who come after, too.

What’s the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?

The bizarre landscape and the monsters, oddly enough! Lune spent her entire life training and preparing for tackling an unfamiliar Continent, with unpredictable threats and monstrous creatures called Nevrons, and where the geography doesn’t fit together in coherent ways. So roaming the diffusion zone will remind her so much of home, in a way that’ll be strangely comforting: it’s the closest thing to what she thought she’d be doing with her time, and close to what she was doing right before she came here.

In general, she’ll be interested in pretty much every angle of research here: technological, since she worked with Gustave on the Lumina Converter, a machine which converted magical energy to their benefit; and also biological, since her own body has been enhanced with tattoos which permanently altered her capabilities. She’ll be so interested in the cosmic storms and will be champing at the bit to join the storm chasers or at least learn from them. Back home, their magical technology also manipulated a life-force called chroma, and now there’s a new mysterious substance called chroma on the Diadem?? Meant to be, tbh.

All of which, admittedly, might turn to another unhealthy fixation, as she latches onto these compelling mysteries, wanting to sink her teeth into it and take it all apart to find out how it works— but at least it’ll give her some projects to turn her ferociously curious mind towards.

Samples

Sample: Diadem TDM top-level, and some tag-outs for good measure.