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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.
Answering More WoL Questions
6. Has your WoL/OC ever canonically fantasia'd to another species? Have they considered doing so? If so, what made them choose that species? How does that affect their relationships with those who were born as the species they changed into?
So, this answer is a tad complicated. Read beneath the cut and I’ll elaborate more.
Falling comatose
Xander is, thus far, the only member of the Dawnbreakers to have canonically Fantasia’d himself. However, as a point of clarification, there are two kinds of Fantasia that exist in my headcanon. The first, where you simply fall asleep and wake up as something else, is both A) prohibitively expensive for most people, even adventurers, and B) functions more like a complex glamour prism where it doesn’t actually change you, yourself, personally. It just provides the illusion of a different look and species. Since perception sort of dominates and determines reality, people react accordingly. (And it’s like. Rude to point out that someone’s clothes are mismatched beneath their glamour. Same principle applies here.)
The second is a much more in-depth process and effectively reshapes the body’s corporeal aether, molding it into something else on a permanent basis. Unlike any sort of glamour, it poses no risk of shattering or breaking under combat or some other strenuous circumstances. However, there are risks to doing things this way, including but not limited to:
Losing the ability to manipulate aether due to malfunctions in rewiring the aetheric connections of the body
Distraction during the lucid dreaming required for the process causing the transformation to not take at all, or worse, to alter the body into something unintended or monstrous (more on that later)
As with any medical or pseudo-medical procedure, in rare cases, death
It still took him some few further years of perfecting his craft of alchemy and study of aetherology to settle upon a formula that would actually work to serve his purposes. However, theory is no substitute for practice, and he knew before he ‘went under’, as it were, that there was a decent percent chance that it could fail. But it was worth it, to him, and so he forged ahead.
Now, most folks would balk at the risks inherent to the second method, for obvious reasons. Especially if all they wanted was to see what the world looked like from a Lalafellin perspective for a few moons. But for Xander, that was insufficient for his purposes. He saw a chance to remake himself not with a close-enough approximation of the anatomy of his desired sex, but the fully-functioning systems.
For a long time, Xander held the thought of a so-called ‘True Fantasia’ in contempt, thinking it an impossible dream. The purview of desperate fools or scam artists seeking to prey on them. And then he helped Severian realize his mad fool’s dream to resurrect the literal dead as part of his studies of alchemy, and nothing seemed impossible anymore.
Now, remember earlier when I mentioned that becoming distracted posed a risk to the dreamer during the Fantasia-ing process? For all his planning and foresight, Xander couldn’t help his thoughts wandering to the First and all the time spent with Lyna especially. She left a positive impression on him, so thinking of Viera, knowing male Viera had to exist, and obviously focusing on the body reshaping to a more AMAB design ended up with him awaking in the form of a male Viera.
An unintentional species shift, but one that he welcomed, especially with the new height and body type it gave him. Interestingly enough, he did also manage to gain a Viera’s lengthy lifespan, based on all tests he’s had performed since. He has no clue why, exactly, this happened, though he has a sneaking suspicion that it is, in part, due to him being 8 times Rejoined, and that if any other tried the process wouldn’t work quite the same way.
Knowing from the success of Xander’s method that it’s possible, his friend Celeste, who really wants kids of her own one day, is eyeing following in his footsteps or asking him to prepare another phial. But that’s a thought for another time.
So, how did people take to his shift?
Well, when he returned to the First, the people were a touch confused at first by this strange viis introducing himself by Xander’s name. However, they came to realize he was telling the truth and accept the new him. The viis of Rak’tika were a bit- a lot- more aggressive at first, as men of their kind were not welcome in their sanctum except for, well, the obvious season and reason. However, when he presented the Seal of Ronka and told them who he was, their reactions shifted from violent rejection to a certain level of appreciation.
Most Viera/viis he encounters now don’t question him or ask too much about his origins. Given that he’s clearly already out of his home woods, from their perspective, he’s not too attached to the perceived culture of his birth. If asked, he’ll admit that it’s a recent development and go into what he accomplished via alchemy, as he is quite proud of the feat. But it’s no one’s business but his own unless someone wants to know.
He might. MIGHT. Have informed Erenville by now, expecting a certain level of rejection or resistance. Erenville is just, shrugs all around about the whole thing. Nonplussed perhaps by the fact that such a profound alteration came from a momentary distraction, as to his eyes, Xander seemed like any other Veena Male.
The viis in the First, at least the main 3 in Rak’tika, take amusement more than offense in his lack of knowledge of their culture once his identity is made clear. Like, if you wanted to be one of us this badly, how silly of you not to have studied more thoroughly!
Xander is making an effort to study what he can find of Male Veena Viera culture, which isn’t all that much, if only to ensure that he isn’t completely lost if someone who’s truly attached to the culture comes upon him. He struggles a bit with feeling as though it’s not his culture to take or learn. (Which, by birth, it really isn’t.) But he still feels that it’s important that he at the least knows about it.