Warrior Of Light Lore - Tumblr Posts
4: Is the city associated with your WoL/OC's starting class the place where their journey actually began? Did they actually come to it from outside as shown in the game, or were they born there? Do they feel welcomed or alienated by the city and its culture?
So, there's uh. A lot to cover here for each WoL so, more under the cut.
Xander: He's from Ul'dah, originally, and comes with a chunk of Gladitorial training under his belt. He took up the study of arcanima while he was on the road from Ul'dah to Vesper Bay, and from there, purchased a ship bound towards Limsa, where he began his studies in earnest in the Arcanist's Guild.
That is where his journey as the actual WoL began, but he has a lot of history in Ul'dah under both his birth name and his arena title in the Bloodsands. History that he would sooner see buried, thank you very much, so as far as he's concerned, Limsa is where he's from if anyone asks. And Ishgard is his home.
The culture is admittedly strange to him, but it's such a diverse group of seafaring folk there that he doesn't feel too put out by not fitting in all that much. His fellows in the Arcanist's Guild were his main companions at first, but he's grown comfortable with the Maelstrom's top brass and the more straightforward way that a lot of the piratey types handle things.
Celeste: As a bastard child of House Dzemael whose mother couldn't well enough keep quiet about her origins, she's more used to the cold and stone of the Brume and the unforgiving stone walls of Ishgard proper than the quiescent forestscapes of The Black Shroud. She came a bit sooner to Gridania than the starting point of the game would have you believe, pursuing the Conjurer's art that she'd learned the rudimentary elements of back home.
As a Duskwight, she naturally met with a lot of suspicion and discrimination from the forest-dwellers at first. However, with a winning smile and patience that should frankly have earned her canonization for Halonic Sainthood, she was able to start forging bonds with the locals. Bonds that admittedly meant next to nothing when push came to shove in the aftermath of the Bloody Banquet, but still. She's carved out a niche and is intent to stay in it.
M'hana: Her story is by far the most bizarre of the Dawnbreakers. She's originally from Ala Mhigo, a proud daughter of the M tribe who crossed the border to see if there was anyone across the border in Gridania who might be convinced to aid in the efforts of Ala Mhigan liberation. It was the Sixth Astral Era, and she bent her skill with a bow towards the Bardic arts as well, following whispers of rumors to the Circle of Knowing and the Path of the Twelve. She got wrapped up in the leadup to the Calamity, and then...
...Well, Carteneau happened. She was thrown through time and spent moons after arriving in the (Realm Reborn) present wandering about in search of her old comrades, only to find that people either didn't know who she was talking about or knew that they had perished. Her trip through time and the Lifestream had leached her hair silver and her wanderings gave her skin a more golden tone than they'd had when she hid beneath the bows of the forest. Unable to bring herself to continue on her old class paths, she instead threw herself into the Thaumaturgical arts her former husband refused to teach her and thus took herself to Ul'dah to improve her abilities. She's intimately familiar with Ul'dah's culture and is none too pleased dealing with it, but once she got used to people simply not remembering her as the hero she was, she started to have fun interacting with the city-states anew.
Iori: A proud former samurai of Doma, he was sent ahead to the West in search of allies to aid in a potential uprising against their Imperial overlords by Lord Kaien. He arrived to the shores of Vylbrand some few moons before the starting point of ARR, and spent most of that time gaining mastery of the language and practicing his skills both martial and non.
He had to sell his specially-commissioned blade to buy his passage, so all he had on him when he came to Limsa was a commoner's hatchet. He made connections with the Marauder's guild, and from there was assigned to protect an Arcanist for one of their basic jobs. The art intrigued him, and math is math, so arcanima and its mathematic glyphs came naturally to him. This allowed him to establish a niche in the Arcanist's Guild as well, where he came to know (and strongly dislike) Xander after his arrival.
Iori was raised in a much more genteel, disciplined sort of environment, so Limsa's crude, rough and tumble can disagree with him on many occasions. However, he can respect their plainspoken nature and the fact that none of them are too inclined to ask too much about his origins.