Rita Mordio (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
blahblahblah) wrote2014-12-18 11:31 pm
blahblahblah) wrote2014-12-18 11:31 pm
Entry tags:
Application: Drama Drama Duck
Writing apps goes a lot faster when you can just cannibalize old ones, huh? Everything's done, I just need to throw this in. Rita is heading back to ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dramadramaduck.
Player nickname: MaxSalsa
Player DW:maxsalsa
Way to contact you:
Plurk:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
MaxSalsa
Are you at least 15?: Aye.
Current Characters: Not anymore...? This might not be my only app this month, though.
Character: Rita Mordio
Fandom: Tales of Vesperia
Character Notes:
Canon Point: Rita is coming back at the end of her canon, and with her memories from the first time she was in DDD - she's not being reset, just advanced. Rita's history, then, is going to look funky, because she spent a few months derailed and that needs to resolve itself before I can get her back to actual normal stuff. I am going to be lifting some things frommuch later-written apps for her, mostly her app for Holly Heights.
History: I'm going to start with Rita's and the game's pages on Aselia, the Tales wiki; these are a little light on Rita herself, though, so I'm going to ramble a bit more.
Rita has two general roles in the party in Tales of Vesperia: to be the violence-minded comic relief, and to teach Yuri things about blastia, the magitechnology of Terca Lumireis. Blastia themselves are various kinds of objects that can serve any number of functions; Yuri's slum in the capital has an aque blastia that purifies water, most large cities have barrier blastia that keep monsters out, ships have ceres blastia that make them operable... and perhaps most notably, adventurers carry bodhi blastia that let them manifest artes, special abilities running the gamut from sword beams to fireballs to physically-impossible instant movement. Rita herself works for the imperial blastia research laboratory at Aspio, where she lives, and where she is the top researcher at the young age of fourteen.
Rita originally leaves Aspio in the first place to clear her name with Yuri, who believes she stole the core from the aque blastia in the lower quarter of Zaphias. Their travels unveil a much larger problem, however, and she sticks with Yuri through discovery after threat after danger, because she's learning things she didn't know before - about the world, about the things she studies, and about herself. Perhaps the largest of these is her gradual discovery that blastia, and their ability to absorb aer to manifest strike and magic artes, is dangerous to the world. It starts out as a few small clues and hints that are easy to miss, and then is changed by a few big reveals into a major issue that must be addressed, especially when Estelle turns out to be a poison to the world because of how her body absorbs aer. This discovery goes on to create lots and lots of research for Rita to perform to find the true nature of blastia.
Eventually, she finds that blastia are created from crystals called apatheia, which are themselves the inert form of creates called entelexeia, powerful beings with great powers. They have the ability to affect the balance of aer in the world, and as her research develops further, she realizes that she could convert the souls of the entelexeia into a new kind of being: a spirit. Through the power of the Child of the Full Moon, whose abilities tie into the world itself - and who happens to be Estelle - and a lot of luck and math, Rita is able to convert the four remaining entelexeia into spirits, and starts to work out how to shift the existing magic artes she uses now, powered by aer, to tap into the spirits' power and convert aer in the atmosphere into mana, a much safer alternative. Once she realizes the power of the spirits, she comes up with a final gambit to free their world from the terror of a massive calamity called the Adephagos: converting all the world's blastia into spirits, and using their combined power to destroy the Adephagos once and for all, instead of sealing it away for some future generation to deal with. While it takes some diplomacy and a lot of work, Rita is able to bring together the formula into a small device she dubs "Vesperia No. 1", and deploys it after a final battle against a foe that insists the only way forward is to sacrifice all human life to power a massive weapon to destroy the Adephagos himself. Instead, through the power of all the world's blastia, Rita and the others are able to defeat the Adephagos and restore peace to Terca Lumireis.
Personality: Rita is a little bit of an odd duck in canon. She starts out as an isolated, horribly snarky teen that seems to want nothing more than to get her job done so she can go back to her hut and ignore the world. She's been burned by people before, too; she states on at least one occasion that she prefers the company of the blastia she researches, as "blastia will never betray me". It takes a long time for Yuri, Estelle, and the others to get close enough to her for her to really let them in; it takes basically the entirety of Act 1 before Rita (accidentally) calls Estelle by her nickname rather than her stuffy given name. She also has a bad habit of being a little bit of a troll, especially to Karol. When she can't really express herself aloud, she tends to resort to violence, again mostly with Karol.
As time passes, Rita starts to mellow a little bit and her true feelings come to the front a little more often. Though she'll never admit it out loud (and especially not to Yuri), she doesn't want to go home. Nobody and nothing is waiting for her, and once she's gotten close to the party, it would kill her to be alone again. Her tendencies have made her a little unstable; she's a horrible tsundere once she's had some time to open up, and she's also a little bit crazy in her interactions, bordering on mild sociopathy. Her personal motto seems to be "shoot first, ask questions after shooting some more"; in almost any cutscene where a given NPC is resisting, her contribution is to call up a few fireballs as an open threat.
Once she's really started to bond with someone, Rita is an invaluable ally - she will happily follow you to the ends of the earth, and put herself in harm's way to make sure you'll be okay. She may deny it later, but in the heat of the moment, it's all she's concerned with. Over the course of the game, Estelle moves from a curiosity, to a friend, to a worrisome situation that Rita wants to solve before it kills the girl, and possibly into something more serious between the two of them down the line. Her relationship with Yuri changes over the course of the game too; she initially resents him for suspecting her of stealing the lower quarter's aque blastia core, but once that's recovered and Yuri doesn't blame her for it any longer, he starts to worry about her, and she begins to return that in kind, starting to honestly worry about him when he goes off on his usual suicide missions and dangerous tangents, and being horrified on his behalf when she starts to realize some of the things he's done to keep them all safe and to protect the Empire (and by extension, Flynn).
With more normal folk, Rita is a little bit snarky, but she isn't above calm, reasonable conversation. That said, though, she's also dangerously quick to anger, and isn't afraid to show it. Approach with caution. She'll also immediately perk up at mention of magical inconsistencies or danger to civilians. On a quest, Rita is all business, and focused on getting everything done without any problems. And if problems come up... well, when all you have is a fist, everything starts to look like a face. And by "fist", I of course mean "fireballs everywhere".
To that end, when she's working on research, either you're helping, out of the way, or in the way. She tends to charge headfirst into trouble, and through sheer stubbornness manages not to get herself killed, though occasionally she needs a little bit of help. Anything foolish enough to get in her way is likely to be burned to a crisp, unless she's feeling particularly charitable, in which case you'll experience something new that will probably make you wish you'd just stayed in bed today.
First Person:Hey, remember when I played in this game before? Rita's last post before I dropped her the last time... right about a year ago. I LIED, that's not long enough. Here's Rita's original sample again.
(video, poorly locked from Vesperia cast)
I just want to make sure everyone knows, I'm starting to get really pissed off. We just got back from this ghost ship, I think it was called the Atherum. While we were there... [There's a pause. Rita sounds spooked... which is weird.] I let Yuri go off with the others, and I stayed behind with Estellise and Karol to watch the ship in case the blastia fixed itself, and...
[She's being quiet all of a sudden...] And there was a loud crash, and I got worried about Yuri... not that anything can ever really hurt him, but it was bad all the same. And then Estellise got the bright idea that we needed to go in after him... Oh, I hated that, but there was no way I could let her go alone, and Karol doesn't count, so I went with them. I was scared out of my mind the whole time - ghosts? Seriously? I normally could care less about the supernatural, but it's hard to not care when things are happening and you don't know why! I tried not to panic too much, but I think Estellise noticed. I can never tell with Karol. [Sarcasm there, but she's back to being quiet in a moment.]
And then we found Yuri, and we fought through the rest of the ship, and we had to fight this... y'know what, I'm just going to not talk about that. Anyway, we found this red box with a crystal inside, but I can't get it open, and I've been blasting it with spells for half an hour now trying to force it. Nothing's working. And now I think Estellise is looking at me weird, like she's worried about me. I...
[Rita is silent for a moment, before she's back to her usual tone.] Ugh! I'm gonna go wait for an excuse to hit Karol to let some tension out. That, or keep blasting the box. Our ship's moving again, so I'll look at this later and see if anyone bothered to talk to me. Oh, and do not tell any of them about this! Or I'll find you! [She sounds serious... and seriously embarassed at the thought.]
Third Person:
Her first thought was, 'that shouldn't be there.' Her second was 'how the hell did that happen?'
She wasn't just following them back to Halure because she had agreed to go with them to clear her name, not anymore. It was clear something had happened, and that something was directly related to these four. Yuri, Estellise, the dog, and that brat Karol. Whatever they'd done, the tree was blooming early, and more than ever before, and she knew - knew, she was a scholar! - the tree blastia was dying in the first place. That knight earlier, Flynn, had wanted her help on it, but she'd gotten rid of him easily enough. Honestly, that work would have been below her at the time, and she wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. Why start something you already know you can't finish? Waste of time, both his, and her own.
But no, now that she was standing here drowning in luluria petals and getting a good look, she knew she couldn't just be following them. There were things to study that couldn't be found in her lab down in Aspio. She knew that on some level, before. But this proved it beyond all doubt. She was going to travel with Yuri and the others, and she was going to find answers. Sure, she'd tell them it was to finish the Rizomata Formula. She'd tell them it was to clear her name. But those were just excuses, and she knew it. Yuri would probably realize it too; he seemed pretty sharp with people.
Rita ran up the hill to the Great Tree of Halure with one purpose in her mind: to learn about this new thing she didn't understand, because it fascinated her, and when something got her attention she didn't let it go until she'd spent as long as physically possible analyzing it; until she understood, or died trying.
dramadramaduck. Player nickname: MaxSalsa
Player DW:
maxsalsaWay to contact you:
Plurk:
Are you at least 15?: Aye.
Current Characters: Not anymore...? This might not be my only app this month, though.
Character: Rita Mordio
Fandom: Tales of Vesperia
Character Notes:
Canon Point: Rita is coming back at the end of her canon, and with her memories from the first time she was in DDD - she's not being reset, just advanced. Rita's history, then, is going to look funky, because she spent a few months derailed and that needs to resolve itself before I can get her back to actual normal stuff. I am going to be lifting some things from
History: I'm going to start with Rita's and the game's pages on Aselia, the Tales wiki; these are a little light on Rita herself, though, so I'm going to ramble a bit more.
Rita has two general roles in the party in Tales of Vesperia: to be the violence-minded comic relief, and to teach Yuri things about blastia, the magitechnology of Terca Lumireis. Blastia themselves are various kinds of objects that can serve any number of functions; Yuri's slum in the capital has an aque blastia that purifies water, most large cities have barrier blastia that keep monsters out, ships have ceres blastia that make them operable... and perhaps most notably, adventurers carry bodhi blastia that let them manifest artes, special abilities running the gamut from sword beams to fireballs to physically-impossible instant movement. Rita herself works for the imperial blastia research laboratory at Aspio, where she lives, and where she is the top researcher at the young age of fourteen.
Rita originally leaves Aspio in the first place to clear her name with Yuri, who believes she stole the core from the aque blastia in the lower quarter of Zaphias. Their travels unveil a much larger problem, however, and she sticks with Yuri through discovery after threat after danger, because she's learning things she didn't know before - about the world, about the things she studies, and about herself. Perhaps the largest of these is her gradual discovery that blastia, and their ability to absorb aer to manifest strike and magic artes, is dangerous to the world. It starts out as a few small clues and hints that are easy to miss, and then is changed by a few big reveals into a major issue that must be addressed, especially when Estelle turns out to be a poison to the world because of how her body absorbs aer. This discovery goes on to create lots and lots of research for Rita to perform to find the true nature of blastia.
Eventually, she finds that blastia are created from crystals called apatheia, which are themselves the inert form of creates called entelexeia, powerful beings with great powers. They have the ability to affect the balance of aer in the world, and as her research develops further, she realizes that she could convert the souls of the entelexeia into a new kind of being: a spirit. Through the power of the Child of the Full Moon, whose abilities tie into the world itself - and who happens to be Estelle - and a lot of luck and math, Rita is able to convert the four remaining entelexeia into spirits, and starts to work out how to shift the existing magic artes she uses now, powered by aer, to tap into the spirits' power and convert aer in the atmosphere into mana, a much safer alternative. Once she realizes the power of the spirits, she comes up with a final gambit to free their world from the terror of a massive calamity called the Adephagos: converting all the world's blastia into spirits, and using their combined power to destroy the Adephagos once and for all, instead of sealing it away for some future generation to deal with. While it takes some diplomacy and a lot of work, Rita is able to bring together the formula into a small device she dubs "Vesperia No. 1", and deploys it after a final battle against a foe that insists the only way forward is to sacrifice all human life to power a massive weapon to destroy the Adephagos himself. Instead, through the power of all the world's blastia, Rita and the others are able to defeat the Adephagos and restore peace to Terca Lumireis.
Personality: Rita is a little bit of an odd duck in canon. She starts out as an isolated, horribly snarky teen that seems to want nothing more than to get her job done so she can go back to her hut and ignore the world. She's been burned by people before, too; she states on at least one occasion that she prefers the company of the blastia she researches, as "blastia will never betray me". It takes a long time for Yuri, Estelle, and the others to get close enough to her for her to really let them in; it takes basically the entirety of Act 1 before Rita (accidentally) calls Estelle by her nickname rather than her stuffy given name. She also has a bad habit of being a little bit of a troll, especially to Karol. When she can't really express herself aloud, she tends to resort to violence, again mostly with Karol.
As time passes, Rita starts to mellow a little bit and her true feelings come to the front a little more often. Though she'll never admit it out loud (and especially not to Yuri), she doesn't want to go home. Nobody and nothing is waiting for her, and once she's gotten close to the party, it would kill her to be alone again. Her tendencies have made her a little unstable; she's a horrible tsundere once she's had some time to open up, and she's also a little bit crazy in her interactions, bordering on mild sociopathy. Her personal motto seems to be "shoot first, ask questions after shooting some more"; in almost any cutscene where a given NPC is resisting, her contribution is to call up a few fireballs as an open threat.
Once she's really started to bond with someone, Rita is an invaluable ally - she will happily follow you to the ends of the earth, and put herself in harm's way to make sure you'll be okay. She may deny it later, but in the heat of the moment, it's all she's concerned with. Over the course of the game, Estelle moves from a curiosity, to a friend, to a worrisome situation that Rita wants to solve before it kills the girl, and possibly into something more serious between the two of them down the line. Her relationship with Yuri changes over the course of the game too; she initially resents him for suspecting her of stealing the lower quarter's aque blastia core, but once that's recovered and Yuri doesn't blame her for it any longer, he starts to worry about her, and she begins to return that in kind, starting to honestly worry about him when he goes off on his usual suicide missions and dangerous tangents, and being horrified on his behalf when she starts to realize some of the things he's done to keep them all safe and to protect the Empire (and by extension, Flynn).
With more normal folk, Rita is a little bit snarky, but she isn't above calm, reasonable conversation. That said, though, she's also dangerously quick to anger, and isn't afraid to show it. Approach with caution. She'll also immediately perk up at mention of magical inconsistencies or danger to civilians. On a quest, Rita is all business, and focused on getting everything done without any problems. And if problems come up... well, when all you have is a fist, everything starts to look like a face. And by "fist", I of course mean "fireballs everywhere".
To that end, when she's working on research, either you're helping, out of the way, or in the way. She tends to charge headfirst into trouble, and through sheer stubbornness manages not to get herself killed, though occasionally she needs a little bit of help. Anything foolish enough to get in her way is likely to be burned to a crisp, unless she's feeling particularly charitable, in which case you'll experience something new that will probably make you wish you'd just stayed in bed today.
First Person:
(video, poorly locked from Vesperia cast)
I just want to make sure everyone knows, I'm starting to get really pissed off. We just got back from this ghost ship, I think it was called the Atherum. While we were there... [There's a pause. Rita sounds spooked... which is weird.] I let Yuri go off with the others, and I stayed behind with Estellise and Karol to watch the ship in case the blastia fixed itself, and...
[She's being quiet all of a sudden...] And there was a loud crash, and I got worried about Yuri... not that anything can ever really hurt him, but it was bad all the same. And then Estellise got the bright idea that we needed to go in after him... Oh, I hated that, but there was no way I could let her go alone, and Karol doesn't count, so I went with them. I was scared out of my mind the whole time - ghosts? Seriously? I normally could care less about the supernatural, but it's hard to not care when things are happening and you don't know why! I tried not to panic too much, but I think Estellise noticed. I can never tell with Karol. [Sarcasm there, but she's back to being quiet in a moment.]
And then we found Yuri, and we fought through the rest of the ship, and we had to fight this... y'know what, I'm just going to not talk about that. Anyway, we found this red box with a crystal inside, but I can't get it open, and I've been blasting it with spells for half an hour now trying to force it. Nothing's working. And now I think Estellise is looking at me weird, like she's worried about me. I...
[Rita is silent for a moment, before she's back to her usual tone.] Ugh! I'm gonna go wait for an excuse to hit Karol to let some tension out. That, or keep blasting the box. Our ship's moving again, so I'll look at this later and see if anyone bothered to talk to me. Oh, and do not tell any of them about this! Or I'll find you! [She sounds serious... and seriously embarassed at the thought.]
Third Person:
Her first thought was, 'that shouldn't be there.' Her second was 'how the hell did that happen?'
She wasn't just following them back to Halure because she had agreed to go with them to clear her name, not anymore. It was clear something had happened, and that something was directly related to these four. Yuri, Estellise, the dog, and that brat Karol. Whatever they'd done, the tree was blooming early, and more than ever before, and she knew - knew, she was a scholar! - the tree blastia was dying in the first place. That knight earlier, Flynn, had wanted her help on it, but she'd gotten rid of him easily enough. Honestly, that work would have been below her at the time, and she wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. Why start something you already know you can't finish? Waste of time, both his, and her own.
But no, now that she was standing here drowning in luluria petals and getting a good look, she knew she couldn't just be following them. There were things to study that couldn't be found in her lab down in Aspio. She knew that on some level, before. But this proved it beyond all doubt. She was going to travel with Yuri and the others, and she was going to find answers. Sure, she'd tell them it was to finish the Rizomata Formula. She'd tell them it was to clear her name. But those were just excuses, and she knew it. Yuri would probably realize it too; he seemed pretty sharp with people.
Rita ran up the hill to the Great Tree of Halure with one purpose in her mind: to learn about this new thing she didn't understand, because it fascinated her, and when something got her attention she didn't let it go until she'd spent as long as physically possible analyzing it; until she understood, or died trying.