Val Verdin

about

• Aliases: Val (no last name); Valtin Faulkner to clients

• Age: Mid-20s

• Race: Miqo’te

• Pronouns: he/him

• Sexuality: Pansexual

• Build: Tall for a Miqo'te, lanky, wiry build, bony, very little ass

• Notable Traits: Pale blue - almost white - eyes, fangs, bullet hole on the edge of his right ear, stunted aethersense (needs to touch living creatures, can't sense ambient aether at all), unnaturally cold to the touch, slow pulse

• Likes: flying, fighting, the Verdin, spicy/oily foods, ten-gil smut novels, well-cited research papers, long baths

• Dislikes: inconsiderate people, emotional vulnerability, chocobos, cold

AT A GLANCE

Intelligent / Perceptive / Irreverent

BENEATH THE SURFACE

Thrill-seeking / Self-loathing / Kind

APPEARANCE
Val is tall for a Miqo'te, and lanky, with what looks like just enough muscle to lift the rifle he carries on his back. He dresses in fairly nice clothes, favoring looser, flowing garments for his day-to-day wear - they tend to give him the look of a nicely-dressed librarian, instead of someone suited for the courier and adventuring work that he actually takes on. His dark hair is imprecisely styled, enough to show that he cares for his appearance - though his lion's tail is typically immaculately brushed.TEMPERAMENT
A studious healer-turned-monster-turned-sky-pirate-turned-"freelancer", Val uses small, mocking smiles, sharp words, and emotional walls a malm high to bury his profoundly compassionate and sympathetic heart as deep as it will go. Though well-spoken and cordial when approached, Val does his best to keep his distance from others; his smiles often feel just a little fake, or like he's laughing at some private joke, regardless of the actual contents of his words. In truth, Val has simply become used to being reviled and unwanted, and is always, on some level, simply waiting for the other shoe to drop. His apparent lack of sincerity sometimes gets him in trouble though, and, unfortunately, Val is terrible at backing down, but excellent at escalation. There's an unnerving edge to him that shows itself in dangerous, risky situations like these, in the sharpness of his teeth when he smiles - something a little more beast than man.Despite his antagonistc nature, however, Val is, at his core, a healer: someone whose calling is to help others, to soothe hurts where he can. Spend enough time with him, and the cracks in his armor become obvious to see; he looks out for his companions, he gives gifts, and though he may use his silver tongue to cover his embarrassment (and, to an extent, disbelief) at acts of kindness towards him, his ears and tail will always give him away.CAREER
Professionally (when there's work to be found at all), Val offers his services as a courier and smuggler, transporting goods and passengers alike across Etheirys on his pride and joy, the Verdin - a diminuitive airship so loaded down with custom work it's somewhat of a miracle that she flies at all. But fly she does, and fast, and so Val’s promptness and discretion have earned him a loyal, if small pool of semi-regular clients.In between trips, he scrapes together enough to pay his bribes, debts, and living expenses with whatever other odd, less savory jobs come his way: bounty hunting, guard service, getaway driving, petty delivery, you name it. If it pays, he's for it - cat's gotta eat.

background

Val started life with a name he refuses to recall, in a tiny hamlet in the Shroud. Taken in as a babe by an Ishgardian outcast and raised in her ailing chocobo breeding stables, Val discovered both his talent for conjury and his (mutual) hatred of chocobos at a young age, and grew up shirking his feeding, stable mucking, and chocobo running chores to instead learn how to smooth scratches, set bones, and close stitches, for the nights when his mother went out with her greatsword instead of a feed bag. She would have been more proud of his budding skills, save that they came at such detriment to the quality of his work in the stables: Val was an unenthusiastic stable hand to begin with, but his forays into conjury often left him too drained to put in even the token effort he managed for the birds on a good day.Val taught himself conjury by draining his own aetherial reserves, pulling power from his very soul - and learned quickly that it was easier, took less out of him, if he had the knowledge to direct the aether where it needed to go. Instead of blindly pushing his aether into the injury and hoping the patient's body could do the rest, he studied muscles, bones, needled visiting chirurgeons and spent long hours with his staff out in the forest, where he could shirk his chores in peace. Occasionally, he got into fights with local kids over his bookishness, or his family, which were great for healing practice. And as he came of age, his mother finally, reluctantly, gave up on the idea of Val succeeding as heir to the stables, and released him to pursue a proper education in the art of conjury.He stepped foot in the Conjurer's Guild as the shadow of Dalamud fell over Eorzea, and by then Val - self-taught, prodigious, and accustomed to spending his own aether to heal - was too entrenched in his habits to really understand how drawing from the "ambient aether" was supposed to even work. The Guild's instructors couldn't help him; his aethersense was too dull, his self-taught technique too ingrained, and they didn't have the time or resources to correct a single stubborn student in the face of oncoming war.Val tried to enlist, of course, determined to prove his worth as a healer. Neither the Guild nor the Adders would have him; too inexperienced, too young. So instead his genuine talent for healing and irrepressible stubborn belief that he could help led him to the Carteneau Flats as the new, and only healer in a Free Company assisting in the assault against the VIIth.He died, of course.It was only then - bloodied, broken, aether-deprived and already nearly unconscious beneath the bodies of his fellows - that he saw, finally, the aether all around him that his instructors had described: pinpricks of unbearably bright flame shining against the dark of his closed eyes. They were - familiar. Accessible. Val, with the last of his breath, gripped his staff and focused on, what he realized only too late, were souls.Val, the most talented healer of his hamlet, and the dumbest conjurer in the world, cast Raise on himself, and pulled; the lives and memories of every Carteneau survivor in a half-malm radius of him roared to his spell, took up his puny, delicate consciousness, and drowned him beneath them.

He rose - changed.

He had become something foul. Tainted. A wound in the world. What memories he managed to grasp were disparate, nonsensical. He took the name Val from an overheard conversation, and wandered Eorzea, learning to live all over again. Looking for himself. Failing.He fell into the role of an enigmatic adventurer, floating from town to town: someone pleasant enough to talk to, but who was constantly accompanied by an unnerving, skin-crawling aura and strange misfortune and accidents - an effect of his tainted aether that made it impossible to settle down or land any kind of steady work.The only way he knew how to manage it was to stay moving, and try not to get involved with others. His appearance, at least, he managed to hide with thick cloaks, hoods, masks, as he chased the echos of memories bouncing around his skull. Sometimes, despite everything, he made friends. Most times, he was forced to slip away quietly in the night after too many unfortunate accidents, too many untimely monster attacks, too many jangled nerves.It took being Raised a second time for his memories to properly return - and then. Then the recollection of what he had done snapped into focus: Carteneau, the Raise, and the flood of memories and souls pulled forcibly from their still-breathing bodies to feed his own resurrection. It almost made him laugh: only a monster could have done what he had done, and a monster he had become. It was only just.His memories returned, Val wandered, and spiraled, down into what turned out to be arguably one of the worst decisions of his life: he signed on with a crew of sky pirates, and met Erasmus Lothaire.

Val learned much of what he now knows during this time; how to use a gun, how to ward his aether, how to never trust again. Erasmus had recruited him with full knowledge of his "condition", so as the Endymion's resident "tame monster" and Erasmus's personal charge: Val fought; he stole; he killed.And then, after a certain job - he left.Better said: he murdered their client, tipped off all their enemies, left the crew to die, seized and scrapped the airship for parts, used the funds to build his own vessel, and ran.Val now takes his airship, the Verdin, all over Etheirys, both chasing and running from the smoking wreckage of his past.

VAL'S AETHERThe larger effects of Val's tainted aether will never come up in casual rp! Val is, despite appearances, very careful about his wards. I will not spring this on you unless we have discussed it thoroughly out of character first!Val suffers from a befoulment of his aether (it's the Taint from the WHM quests. Yes, I know): the result of a Raise spell cast by himself, on himself, that drained the lives and aether of any would-be survivors around him - including him - on the Carteneau Flats. He's a baffling cocktail of tainted and untainted aether now, and not even he knows fully how his body operates, but he's at least managed to develop wards to temporarily contain the naturally miasmatic effect he has on creatures around him. Here's how it all works:Unwarded
Val's default state. Without his wards up, the taint turns his skin faintly translucent, and stains it a deep, iridescent indigo; his scars shine a dark, oil slick black. He's unnaturally strong and agile, with sharp claws and teeth and a whip-like tail, and he emits an unsettling, skin-crawling aura that makes most people irritable and paranoid, and most monsters either flee - or fight. He's more sensitive to aether like this; he still can't sense normal, ambient aether, but he's much more keyed in to the signatures of living creatures around him, and tries not to touch people; Val is much, much hungrier, all the time, without his wards up. He can siphon aether from other living creatures, but in doing so he has a chance of bringing forth memories from the victim, which both he and they then experience - which is one of the many reasons Val tries to avoid siphoning from Spoken races whenever possible now.Warded
Val's heart rate is unnaturally low, he's always cold, and he's always hungry. His wards help with dulling his aethersense, but touching others with bare skin is still a risky business: depending on the person, he gets aetheric bleedthrough even when they're activated, and so tends towards more conservative clothing and gloves. The rare exception is if he's attempting any chirurgeonly work; then, the insight he gets from a patient's aether is usually more valuable than the risk of tempting his hunger.While Val is capable of using conjury on his own small injuries without straining his wards, attempts to fully heal anything worse than a broken nose are currently too much for them to handle without failing. For others, healing Val with conjury is difficult if they are unaware of the state of his corruption. Val does not use conjury on others, warded or unwarded. He has learned from experience.The Wards
The wards themselves are hand-sized arcane circles, scarified onto his body. There's one on his back, between his shoulder blades, and one on his torso, on top of his bottom left rib; both circles ring the entry and exit scars from the blade he'd nearly died on at Carteneau. The one on his back he received most of from another person, then completed himself. The ward at his ribs interacts with it, and it's this one that he works towards improving - not least because he can at least see it properly in a mirror.His wards function by actively targeting and drawing (most of) his tainted aether into the circle and keeping it there; they maintain an oily black, blue-rimmed appearance even when active. They take aether to activate, and stay active for as long as Val can maintain, usually around two to three weeks - which he does mainly by eating whenever he can. Even with constant snacking though, they drain his aether faster than he can replenish it, and so once he can no longer take the hunger, he is typically forced to go full aether chupacabra on monsters to replenish, and then begin the next cycle of steadily building hunger, tamped down as best as he can manage by his wards. Siphoning directly from a creature currently breaks the wards entirely.In either state, Val cannot truly die. Val has talent and experience as a conjurer, and thus the skills to heal his own wounds, but his body does not regenerate itself while he's "alive". He can be shot, or stabbed, and will "die" - but as long as his body stays undisturbed after, it will draw in aether on its own, corrupt it, and then knit itself back together over the course of a day. He suspects that every "death" furthers the state of his corruption, but it's nothing more than a hunch right now. He has no idea if he would survive dismemberment or burning, and has no current interest in finding out.

hooks

COMMON

RARE (LET'S CHAT OOC!)

gallery