For explorationzero

[escapedpandora]

Name: Shamera
Contact Information: AIM: kl0tho, skype: shameraklotho
Age: 26
Other Characters: n/a!

Character Name: Hope Estheim
Canon: Final Fantasy XIII
Canon Point: after crystallization, with previous game memories.
Age: 14
Why do you feel this character would be appropriate for this setting?:

Despite being young and generally naive, Hope is a survivor. While he may falter in the face of adversity, he always ends up getting back up and growing stronger for it. He uses whatever he has to in order to survive, even if that emotion is anger and his goal is vengeance. Hope is smart and brings in a lot of ideas that may be outside the box with the way he thinks; partially because of his age and partially because he really is that smart. And while he takes cues from other people, Hope is also very good at motivating others to continue on as well. What he needs is to learn how to channel that charisma and motivation beyond being the child that adults might fight for. In canon, Hope grows up to be a great leader from facing great adversity, and this is something I'd like to play out in this game.

Background/History: Wikia is the best?
Previous Game History: (optional)

Yes! From the old LJ Hellpointe game, and I really hope I can just link to my CR list from there: over here.

Yeah, it's a long list, and they were all important to Hope, who stayed there (Bell Pointe) for about 80 days and experienced a kind of community that he never had before. He grew up in a big city with little more than his mother to rely upon, and then had to run for his life as the world tried to hunt him and a handful of other people down. Bell Pointe was a haven compared to what he had experienced (albeit a haven with monsters and cannibals), with people who helped each other and never let him down.

(Granted, he was being manipulating by Wesker, but Hope never knew that.)

Hope managed to loosen up and grow more trusting in Bell Pointe, as each ordeal the town went through only reinforced his belief that people could be good and join together in times of adversity. Shortage of food? There would be phone calls all over town volunteering previously hidden stashes or to hunt so that no one would starve. Monsters in the mist? No one went out alone. A giant flood? Just about everyone went out and tried to help when Hope suggested some people could relocate to the lighthouse.

(That was a very defining point for him, to know that people would take him seriously and not dismiss his thoughts. Hope was not a very confident kid, but that event gave him new confidence to speak up and meet new strangers. It was that memory, even if the lighthouse turned out to be a bust, that gave him the courage to meet even the strangest of new people because he started believing that everyone in town must be good, even if they might act mean or distant.)

His time in Bell Pointe may have changed him into something... a bit too trusting, much to the exasperation of people who cared about him.

On a personal level, Hope thought the town was a form of in-between, maybe a place between the living and the dead, because there were so many people claiming to have died who arrived there. Even if it was a sort of Purgatory with monsters lurking everywhere, though, he didn't want to go back home to a dying world and people who would forever see him as a monster. He was happy in Bell Pointe, as much as he thought he could ever be; happy to have been reunited with the people who were important to him from back home, happy to have the chance to make new friends and experience things he never did before.

He learned how to make pancakes without blowing up a kitchen with Deadpool, learned how to play soccer with Jaime (Blue Beetle), tried his very best not to destroy Wesker's lab while helping him (he may have had a case of hero worship ever since Wesker helped Lisa Garland, because he didn't know about any of the manipulations), started learning anatomy and basic healing with Hanataro, rescued a puppy from a well, and had a snow fight with Travis, Cousland, Snow, and Chris Redfield.

Thanks to multiple interactions with Claire, Elaine, Lady, and Quorra, Hope is very open with the people he meets, now unafraid to show his magic should he have need to because of a) Quorra's openness and honesty about being a computer program when they first met (and the subsequent panic he had that she would short-circut in the flood), b) Elaine's wings and her bravery to open a coffee shop and man it even on days when monsters would lurk not ten feet away in the fog, just so there would be a beacon to anyone who got lost in town and needed a safe haven, as well as her insistence on helping when Hope suggested they paint directions into the streets so people wouldn't get lost. C) Lady's blunt honesty and refusal to back down when she knew she was in the right, even if that meant her words would piss off a lot of people bigger and stronger than her, contrasted with how she would stick up for Hope, and d) Claire's soft insistence taking care of him, providing hugs and scolding him when he did something wrong.

Thanks to Bell Pointe, though, Hope's previous notions of manners and propriety may have been blown wide open. He barely reacts to strangers, but has learned to observe how confident they are when he first meets them. Even if they look like a monster, if they also look lost and confused, Hope will approach them with an offer to guide them to people who might know more about the town. He's gotten used to the idea of 'weird', especially after finding out that the town was being cleaned by zombies in the dead of night, and then being part of the (failed) night watch to try and figure out where they disappeared to in the morning.

If anything, Hope's gotten used to being babied again. He really notice it because he kept himself so busy around town wanting to be helpful and turn the place into something like home. His biggest fear there had been that everyone else would return home and leave him in town all alone, or that he would suddenly find himself back in a home world seconds before it died, and never be able to see the people whom he had grown to care deeply for ever again.

He also understands the concept of different worlds now, because so many people from Bell Pointe claim to have been at somewhere else that wasn't home before they arrived in town as well. He just didn't expect something like that could happen to him.

...I'd like for him to remember Bell Pointe, but for the memories to be a little distant, like a dream or a memory from years ago.

What are they bringing? (limit 3)

1. His boomerang! Yes, it's his weapon. Yes, it seems very childish to have a boomerang as a weapon. Yes, it's actually pretty kick ass. In fact, if anyone's seen it, Nue ★ is made of metal and nearly as big as Hope is when it's open. It helps him channel his magic and can tend to hit someonething up to six times before it returns to him. If it's more than one target, it can hit a large group before returning to Hope.
2. The Grav-Com Unit that he gets in chapter 12 when everyone in the party manages to go skydiving into enemy territory. It's basically a minor anti-gravity device that allows people to fall from great heights and not be hurt. It doesn't allow people to fly or even float, but creates an anti-grav bubble where they're going to land that majorly slows their descent.
3. His mom's necklace. Mostly because of sentimental value. It doesn't actually do anything, but it's an important link to where he comes from and why he's fighting as well.

Abilities/Powers:

Hope is brilliant. He’s a child strategist and an exceptionally quick learner. He’s inventive, thinks outside the box, and skips steps to come up with an answer. He’s good with machines in that he managed to hack a military weapon by accident (the first time it was funny, the second time you start to realize that yeah he’s really good at this), and I’m putting likeable in his abilities section because that’s honestly a part of how he survived. He’s persistent and determined, and has great intuition in that he usually manages to feel that something’s wrong before something bad happens. (Happened twice in canon: once could be explained as him being a child and having a higher hearing range, and the other... how in the world did he know that?)

He's not exactly the most sportsy person and doesn't play any musical instruments, but he has a knack for sciences and maths and can cook in the sense that he's watched his mother and helped her with it a thousand times (doesn't mean he can actually do it here until he learns the differences in appliances and technology, though), and isn't messy. Despite being more of an introvert, Hope is very good with people because he likes to put himself in their shoes (What would they do? How would they feel?) and tends to go along with what other people say.

In-game, Hope wields a boomerang that with a single toss can hit up to 8 targets (not sure if more because 8 was the max amount of enemies in one confrontation without further summoning), and he never misses— not even before he became a l’Cie when his senses weren’t sharpened by an supernatural force. That says a little about not only his aim, but the quick mental calculations before each throw.

He’s not strong, and he doesn’t have high endurance. In fact, Hope has the lowest health points in-game and the lowest strength stats as well. That means he can’t take a lot of hits, and can barely deal physical damage at all... but for what he lacks in strength and endurance, he makes for in spades with magic (and smarts. If there's a roundabout way to defeat enemies...). He has three starting roles with the ability to develop into all other roles as well, but let's just describe the three he gets when you first get to play his character after being turned into a l'Cie:

Hope is the only one on his team to have only one offensive class: ravager is the magic attack role, which uses elemental spells which increase in power each tier. Lower tiers include Fire (Fira), Blizzard (Blizzara), Water (Watera), Thunder (Thundarra), and Aero (Aerora). First spells are basic, second with the -ra is much more powerful. In the higher tiers, they become area-of-effect spells (Firaga, Blizzaga, Thunderga, Waterga, Aeroga). This means at the low levels, he'd be tossing a magical fireball at an enemy, and at the high level, it'd be a small firestorm. Singular to Hope was an ability called Last Resort, which was a purely magical and non elemental based large scale AoE attack that could cut through all defenses to deal high damage.

The synergist class is based on buffing characters: it’s a support class. The spells include Protect and Shell (shields against physical and magical damage respectively), and Bravery and Faith (spells to increase physical and magical damage done to enemies), along with Haste to speed up attacks or casting. The rest of the spells in this class are ones to create resistance to elemental attacks (Barfire, Barfrost, Barthunder, Barwater) and ones to give an additional elemental damage to an ally’s weapon (Enfire, Enthunder, Enfrost, Enwater). The last spell in that class is Veil, which is protection against enemy debuffs.

His last and most important class is medic. As the title would suggest, that’s the healing role, which Hope quite excels at. Those spells include the basic Cure and then Cura (which is area of effect) as well as Esuna (which negates poisons and debuffs). Curasa and Curaja are the more powerful versions of the cure spell, able to heal more the more injured a character is. Last and most powerful of them all is Raise, which is able to resurrect a recently dead character and heal a portion of their wounds as well. This, I gather, is a little like non-magical resurrection in that there is a very limited time for it to work. The fun thing with magic in this canon is that it seems to work on everything-- you can as easily Raise a machine or a person, it really doesn't matter.

What is perhaps the most powerful ability he has is to summon his Eidolon, Alexander, who in contrast to Hope uses physical attacks and acts as sentinel while in the battlefield to ensure that he draws the fire away from Hope. Alexander may have the highest stats of all the Eidolons, but he also moves very slowly and is the only character in the entire game with access to Holy spells. Eidolons are quite protective of their summoners (such as Alexander using sentinel abilities purely to draw fire and keep Hope safe), and make sure to leave the battlefield with their summoners (plus the rest of the team) in full health, no matter how bad it had been before they were summoned. Alexander is also the only Eidolon who can not just carry his summoner away to safety; instead, he transforms into a fortress to defend against enemies so can also potentially be a blockade to protect a group of persons or area.

On the same vein as the ability to summon Eidolons is his one earth-based spell: Quake. It creates a small, localized earthquake that doesn't so much damage enemies as it does stagger them, and is a spell he can't use very often unlike his other spells (it's connected on the same bar that needs to refill when summoning).

Last but not least, though, is Hope’s actual inability to control his magic fully. He is the only character in-game who loses control of his magic because of his emotions— not once, but twice, so this may be quite a problem. Once, his magic reacted almost as a shockwave when he was upset, blasting everything away from him violently enough that Snow (6’7 mass of muscle) was shoved hard enough he actually broke through the metal railing behind him. The second time was detrimental only to Hope, when his despair reacted with his magic and he ended up in a near coma for a day.

Personality:

If anything, Hope is more than a bit awkward around people. He’s a teenage boy who grew up in the background and never really had a direction for himself even though everyone else seemed to know who and what they wanted to be when they grew up. He was a child content with what he had and without the ambition to be better in any way, despite the fact that he had so much potential. He's a good child— doesn’t cuss, doesn’t cause trouble, doesn’t go out of his way to make a fuss, doesn’t hang out with the bad crowd, and does his work quietly and efficiently. Hope’s world as a kid revolved around his mother, whom he doted on and clung to with the fervor of a child who had a hard time making friends and had a hard time fitting in. He had two friends in elementary school, both of whom moved away and lost contact with him during middle school. He was an extremely sheltered child; an only child with a government worker as a father and a full time mom. What has to be understood is that Cocoon is an extremely sheltered world, and Hope was sheltered even in Cocoon standards. He's never so much as stepped in mud before he was eight years old (and that was only because of a school field trip that took the kids out of their comfort zones. The kids thought dirt and plants smelled funny because they had never encountered so much of it before, coming from the city). He was the type who preferred playing inside rather than outside; preferred staying with his mother and washing vegetables for her despite not understanding why she was so fascinated with grown food when the food created by the fal’Cie provided the sufficient nutrition. He was the child who once adored his father, but then grew up biting down on venomous comments regarding how his dad was never there so that he wouldn’t upset his mother, and then worked hard to distract her from her loneliness. (It didn't always work, since his sullen silence around his father worried her a lot as well.)

Hope is a bit shy and extremely polite (better illustrated in the Japanese version as he speaks keigo (the formal and polite manner) to everyone with the exception of one character) with a very blunt manner of speaking: he uses simple words and is able to twist them enough to get his point across in a rather eloquent manner when he’s serious, contrasted with stammers and general ducked head and slouching when he’s uncertain (which is a lot). Hope tends to take promises very seriously because of certain events in his childhood, and be very childish in his physical mannerisms: he reaches out and grabs onto someone’s hand or shirt if he wants their attention, and swings his arms rocking on his feet when he’s waiting for something to happen. He wrings his hands when he's nervous and covers his face when he laughs or cries. Most of those are generally physical quirks that would be seen in children much younger than he is, but then, Hope’s lack of friends and other teenage influences in his life, along with his dependence on his mother, would explain the lack of development there.

This gives a better understanding on just how lost he became after his mom's death— after being suddenly rounded up at gunpoint by soldiers while they were on vacation and herded on a train that would take them to “Hell”. That day was the first day Hope had ever been in any real danger, and spun his life around from being the same content child who was just waiting for his problems to pass without any insight to his future, to watching a massacre conducted by the very government that was supposed to protect him; and being stripped of his mother, home, past, future, freedom, and humanity when he was turned into a l’Cie: a monster straight from nightmares and horror stories. He lost everything that he had relied on in one day, and wasn't ready for that loss, not like the other characters of the game who had all known what they were getting into.

The events of the game is a giant ride of character development for Hope. He had to learn, and learn quick, in order to survive. The thing is, though: Hope is resourceful. He is quick-witted and sharp and so very brilliant that sometimes his deductions seem rather disconnected from the game because he manages to make connections from A to Z while skipping the rest of the alphabet. He’s logical and eventually becomes the team strategist, revealing the very beginning of what is an exceptional mind (which is taken much, much further in the second game) of a teenager who could potentially become... anything he wanted to be. He’s good with machines, good with deducing situations as well as people, charismatic when he’s self confident enough, and powerful. He’s got fantastic aim and learns very, very quickly.

But along with all of that... Hope isn’t self-confident. He may have all that potential and all that power, but he’s hesitant and uncertain in his own thoughts, never sure if he’s good enough to do something. Despite all his potential, Hope is still limited by his age and his inexperience as well as his mental and emotional trauma from the events of the game that needs time to heal. Hope’s the type who clings to people because despite his maturity and his understandings, he still has a child’s mentality and instinct to trust and depend. He tends to duck his head when he talks (a habit he never grows out of), and turn statements into questions if he’s in the slightest bit unsure of things. His mood is usually dependent on the mood of people around him as he’s very easily influenced— he draws his confidence from those around him and their approval.

Hope isn't your typical video game hero who has something tragic happen to them and suddenly they're willing to fight for what's right... he behaves much more like a normal, albeit broken, kid: he whines, he sulks, he grieves, he throws tantrums, and he struggles to learn and grow up. He can be a real brat. He can hold terrible grudges and feel like wanting to kill someone. He's very much a pushover, even. But at the core of it all, Hope is a very kind teen who doesn't like causing trouble or even drawing attention to himself. He oscillates between wanting to stay a child and not believing that he's good enough at... anything, really, since he compares himself to his (exceptional and experienced) teammates, and wanting so hard to be seen as grown up and believe that he really can take a stand and make a difference even when it looked like all was lost. He misses the security he once had, but is determined that he’s an adult now because he refuses to be left behind in the way children are left behind when people go off to fight.

For Hope, the duration of the game was a real eye-opener. Within the week (canon says the events of the game took a week. I propose closer to a month with the amount of things that happened), he's had his entire life re-written. He's not just some helpless child without a sense of direction anymore. All of a sudden, he's got real power and the realization that those in charge can be wrong. They can be the bad guys. He's had it revealed that the core of everything he had been told as a child (and that the rest of his world had been told) was a complete lie, and that the dangerous and feared monsters the government protected them from... was actually just what the government turned ordinary people into. He's been shot at, clawed, fallen from dangerous heights, poisoned, and so much more in that week. He's learned how to kill to survive.

But what makes him special, and a hero, is how he retained his heart and his belief in people. Hope honestly believes that people are good despite being chased out of his own home city by a mob who had probably watched him grow up, and the government announcing that they wanted to publicly execute him, and everything that happened to him. Despite the tragedies he's had to face (or perhaps because of), he's starting to learn to trust in himself, and starting to understand that people can be manipulated easily. That it's easy to believe in lies because people generally want the easier path. That he's not going to do that anymore, because he wants to judge things for himself rather than be told what to believe in. He may be naive and believe in others too much, but he has exceptionally clear insight in that no matter what he does, no matter what seems to blindsight him, he does understand his own motivations and what he needs to do in order to continue. Hope can lie to himself, but he'll always know that it's a lie.

In the beginning of the game, he actively scrambled away from things he was scared of— he clung to Vanille and hid behind Sazh when soldiers came. Along the way, though, he slowly learned and actually managed to convinced Lightning to teach him how to survive. By chapter seven, he was brave enough to confront Snow about his mother’s death. By chapter eleven, he choked back his own fears and asked his team to leave him behind if he slowed them down. By the end, he stood to defend Vanille despite barely being able to stand at all. Hope grew up in that aspect. He’s not the type to run from danger, not anymore, not when there’s a chance that he can protect someone else. He's not scared of monsters anymore, because he's had to face all the monsters his world (and the world he thought was Hell) could throw at him and because he knows that he has a worse monster inside himself. What he's scared of now is being left alone, but more than that is the fear that eventually he would be the demise of everyone he cares about.

And while he may be very mature mentally, he's still missing real life experiences. Some things need practice, after all.

Happiest Memory:

Almost all of his childhood memories were happy ones. Hope grew up as a content and coddled child, and before he was a teenager, he had a loving mother and father and good friends who had siblings he could dote on. He had everything he could want or need, and looked up to his parents and everything they were. Headcanon, I'm going to go with his eighth birthday when his mom threw him a surprise birthday party and his dad took the day off from work to take him and his friends to Nautilus where he got to press his face against the window of the submarine glass and stay up late for the hologram parade and then got the day off school the next day to spend exclusively with his parents.

Worst Memory:

Tied in to his worst fear, since his fear is something that he actually experienced. It would have to be the lead up on the Purge train, to know that he was getting shipped off to Pulse (aka "Hell") and then watching people die as they were shot down by soldiers just for taking a stand. Watching his mother die taking a stand to protect him, and then further in the day becoming a Pulse l'Cie and losing everything that he might have once upon a time had.

List of fears:

Let's talk worst. This is a complicated one, seeing as Hope continually faces what he thinks at the time would be his greatest fear: going to Pulse, losing his mom, people hating him, the soldiers targeting him, becoming a Pulse l’Cie, and even (what he thinks) the destruction of his home world. He has two huge fears now, both of those revolving around losing the small support group he’s built up for himself. One is turning Cie’th suddenly— to become a monster filled only with grief and sorrow and anger at an unfulfilled Focus, prone to attacking everything around it friend and foe alike. He fears turning into that monster and then going around killing his friends because he’s just lost all control and they might not fight back if they knew it was him. The second... the second fear is a more selfish one, because he fears going back home and having to deal with the aftermath of his journey as a l’Cie: to find out that everyone else was already dead, that his planet had crashed onto the surface of Gran Pulse and there would be corpses littering the landscape and even the world of Pulse would be destroyed by the catastrophe. He’d be alone with nothing but his guilt and the ghosts of everyone’s he’s killed as a result of his actions, unable even to turn Cie’th and escape that knowledge that he did this.

Regrets:

Not being brave enough to step up and protect people during the Purge, leaving his mom to volunteer in his stead in order to protect him. He had cowered then, and refused to take a gun because he couldn’t imagine fighting... and because of that, he hadn’t been close enough to save his mom... only close enough to watch her die.

1st Person Sample Entry:

[The video starts up before Hope is actually ready, which means there's a surprised expression before he moves the camera out of the way to focus on the ground instead, and the edge of his sneakers. The floor is black and indistinguishable... done on purpose.]

...I know there are people here always looking for alcohol. I just wanted to say that I think it's a bad idea to drink here, especially when weird things keep happening all the time and we need to make sure we're ready for whatever this house throws at us.

[There's a pause, and he shuffles his feet awkwardly.]

I guess I get it, though. This place kind of sucks, doesn't it? So, uh...

[The camera pans up and, surprise! There's a large stash of booze in the room with him. The mother lode of all mother lodes. ]

So everyone has to promise to drink reponsiblely before I tell you where this is.

3rd Person Sample Entry:

Ten minutes. Right. He just had to wait there for ten minutes and no wander off, right?

...Hope didn't understand why people kept thinking he'd wander off into trouble or something. He wasn't stupid. He knew what not to do, but that didn't mean that trouble didn't find him. He didn't exactly go looking for it, not when there were strange things everywhere and even the floor was creaky and unstable. He could stay in one spot and the wood might give out from under him, and that wouldn't be him going to look for trouble. It was somewhat insulting, actually, that people thought he always went looking for trouble. Everyone got into trouble here, not just him. In fact, he thought he had been doing a very good job at keeping out of trouble.

He leaned against the wall and slid down, feeling the wood scrape against the back of his clothes as he sighed explosively. Don't wander off, yeah, sure. It wasn't as if he couldn't take care of himself if something did happen. There wasn't anything that he couldn't--

A glint behind a table in the hallway caught his attention, halting his thought process as he felt a gaze on him. Was someone there--?

He moved forward just a tab to see better, and no. It was just an old discarded mask that had probably fallen off the wall behind the table long ago. It was dirty and worn, just peeking out from behind the wooden table legs at a slant like a gruesome looking face, revealing half of just one eye. It was the eye that had caught the glint of light, looking like it was made from some type of jewel.

Creepy, Hope thought as he leaned back against the wall. But then, everything in the house was. As long as he didn't touch it...

But now that he had noticed the mask, he couldn't seem to unsee it. It was just... staring at him. He shifted awkwardly, and then decided that he'd move just a few steps to the other side of the table so he wouldn't have to see it. It was vaguely disturbing somehow, and he scrambled to his feet to move, feeling the glinting eyes follow his movement. It shouldn't look like it was staring at him anymore, since he was much higher up than he had been while sitting on the ground.

And yet...

Hope shuddered, then grit his teeth. He wasn't going to let some inanimate object creep him out! He'd just-- stay out of it's way.

It only took two steps to get to the other side of the table, and this time Hope remained standing, leaning against the wall and keeping an eye on the area where he had seen the mask. There was just something unsettling about it--

He looked over to the other side of the table just a moment and froze to realize that the mask seemed to have moved. It was now peeking out of the other side of the table, slanted the other way to look like a face that was appearing from behind the wooden legs.

And this time, he could see the grinning mouth.

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