[HALLOWEEN TOWN - APP]

[oneandmikleonly]

✷ Player Information ✷
Your Name: Seth
How can we get a hold of you: brightwinged / dranachronisms at gmail dot com
Are you a current member?: Nope!
Character you play if yes: --

✷ Character Information ✷
Full Name: Mikleo. His true full name is Luzrov Rulay, or "Mikleo the Enforcer."
Canon: Tales of Zestiria
Age: 18
Point in Canon: Before the revealed memories at Lohgrin, which contain spoilery and depressing details about Mikleo's backstory.

✷ History:

The wiki should just about cover it!

✷ Personality:

Mikleo normally comes off as the straight man in the Zestiria group. He’s grown up balancing out his important best friend and rival Sorey, and their personalities complement each other. Sorey’s more impulsive, trusting of others, and drags them recklessly into new experiences; Mikleo is more reserved, always wants to know more about a situation before leaping in, and cautions Sorey about possible traps and dangers. He’s calmly levelheaded, logical and reliable under pressure, even when fighting monsters or falling down a pit into uncharted dungeons.

Mikleo tends to be very focused on Sorey and his other important people, rather than on chasing individual and separate goals of his own. Sorey’s stated life dream in-game is to go off and explore ruins all over the world; while Mikleo has developed an enthusiastic interest in ruins, exploration, and historical academia in his own right, it’s also implied heavily that his life dream is to go off and explore all over the world with Sorey. Sorey's other dream is for humans and seraphim to be able to perceive and understand each other; Mikleo wants this too, but he tends to frame his wishes in terms of wanting other people around who understand Sorey and see the same things he does. He’s not unaware of or insensitive to the problems in the world, but he’s the guy who gets dragged in and concentrates on watching the heroes’ backs while they change things, rather than trying to be a hero himself.

His drive and focus might be narrow, but he’s dedicated to it and hugely stubborn. He won’t hold people back from making big decisions on their own if the stakes are high enough, even if it upsets his own life (Sorey leaves home and Mikleo follows, Sorey upends all their plans to go on a world-saving quest and Mikleo lets him, etc. etc.) However, he won't tolerate their trying to leave him behind in the process. Mikleo hates not being there for his important people, constantly strives to improve his abilities and gain more power because he wants to be a more effective protector, and grows angry if someone implies he's a liability. He also tends to put aside his own feelings if he has other people and bigger events to focus on: faced with personally impactive revelations like his own origins or an important person's death, he just shelves them, keeps going because there’s an endboss battle to think of at the time, and waits for a better time to unpack that personal stress.

Despite initially coming off as aloof, Mikleo can be pretty warm and concerned if he sees someone in genuine distress, and will try to reach out to them if they need it. We see him be annoyed at Alisha, the first human Sorey meets, because he’s left out and literally invisible while Sorey pays attention to her...but he still comes along to try and save her life, and winds up admiring her as a person and having a personal stake in her welfare. He also tries to seriously bond with another party member, Rose, actively comforting and reassuring her when she’s terrified out of her mind of the seraphim and believes they’re ghosts. Throughout the game he's seen worrying about people’s health and the ways they push themselves, though he tends to air these concerns quietly and privately to others, rather than directly to their faces.

He is still very much a kid, too, and he’s not super serious and reserved all the time, especially as he gets more familiar with people. He mutually teases various members of the party, is gently bullied into making food for everyone sometimes, gets into stupid public ticklefights and nerd debates with Sorey, and is not above dry, sarcastically joking commentary in general. He also gets defensive and shouty about sensitive topics like his height or people's many nicknames for him (Meebo, Mickey, Touchy-Feeleo, etc.), and tends to get embarrassed and deflective when people compliment him seriously. He's also overanalytical to the point of reading ridiculously too much meaning into things sometimes – he tries at one point to make a set of nesting dolls fit a theory about human and seraphim relations as depicted in art, when they’re really just a bunch of dolls.

✷ Magical Powers:

Mikleo is a seraph, an elemental/supernatural being with several passive abilities: lack of need to eat or sleep, immortality in the unaging sense, and sensitivity to malevolence (spiritual impurity generated by sentient beings, capable of mutating things into monsters or dragons). Seraphim can also possess and reside intangibly inside a chosen vessel; vessels can range from anything from a jug of sacred water to a human soul, but must be pure.

Regular humans without spiritual sensitivity also can’t perceive seraphim properly. Anything a seraph does looks like weird ghost activity/accidents/natural disasters, depending on its scale: pick up an object? It'll look like it's floating. Cast a spell? A human will see a jet of water come out of nowhere. Bodily contact? It'll be like they bounced off oddly solid air.

Mikleo's elemental alignment is with water. He is able to manipulate it, sense it, produce the fresh form of it, freeze it, and cast a bevy of water and ice-based combat/healing spells in a small area. His field ability, Spectral Cloak, allows him to form a bubble shield around people to make them undetectable for a very short period of time. He also has no issues with being wet or cold.

If his pacted Shepherd/vessel Sorey is present, he's able to purify malevolence, hide inside Sorey's soul, fuse with him for combat to combine their powers, and wield a magic water-element bow while fused.

I'd like to nix two of his passive skills in Halloween Town if possible for ease of gameplay and CR building: human inability to see him (justifiable by canon standards anyway, since no one would be fully human anymore after taking the potion and nonhumans can see him just fine), and his ability to sense malevolence in individuals (since it's a headache to translate that canon mechanic to a land full of monsters with psychological changes ongoing).

✷ Skills and Weapons:

Mikleo fights with a long staff; he uses it to channel his spells, but he's also adept at purely physical combat with it. His bow also counts as a weapon, but it's really only usable in his fusion form with Sorey -- outside of that it's a purely ceremonial tool, and we don't see him demonstrate archery skills on his own.

He's also a good maker of cold foods and desserts (though not hot ones; anything involving him heating things will turn out erratic, though usually still edible). He can identify herbs, and can make medicines with the right ingredients. He also has a lot of experience with exploring rough terrain and ruins, archeological cataloging, old languages, and preserving artifacts.

✷ Inventory:

His staff and ceremonial bow, a few healing gels, and the ingredients to make a few more gels + a couple of cold dishes/desserts. Also a couple of changes of clothes, and the circlet he's always wearing.

✷ Monster:

1. LAKE CREATURE - The thematically appropriate choice, as he's a water elemental -- but the effects of the transformation also cause an inversion from his canon situation that I think would be fun to explore. In canon, Mikleo can command water but isn't beholden to it; he doesn't have to live in it or depend on it, doesn't feel thirst, and doesn't feel actively drawn to it. This is one of the monster changes that will cause him to start pervasively thinking more over time about himself and his needs in a way that resonates with more lightly-explored canon elements, and knock him hard out of his psychological comfort zone.

On a lighter note, I also just really like this because the potential for fish pun nicknames, tub forts, and boombox playing to make him yell is amazing.

2. LYCANTHROPE (great blue heron predator form; tree frog prey form; cat form) - Transformation is a big thing in ToZ, in a way which the lycanthrope reflects most closely -- people in that canon can be literally twisted into inhuman form by being unable to deal with their spiritual impurity or reconcile their negative desires. The lycan transformation would be a way to probe into a more visceral, less high-stakes portrayal of that physically, and I'd like to explore the psychological moodiness and how it affects his relationships.

3. SPIRIT - Perception and ability to affect the world is also a big thing in ToZ! Mikleo already has to deal with most people being unable to see or properly interact with him normally. Having his existing paradigm shaken up so he's dealing with the world in a similarly limited scope but with differing rules and implications would also be a thing I'd like to explore in a game.

✷ What caused your character to drink the potion?

Sorey drank his potion first because Sorey has poor impulse control and was curious; Mikleo metaphorically banged his head against a wall a few times, tried to gather a few supplies together, and then drank his potion to follow after Sorey and make sure he was all right.

✷ First Person Sample:

[There's trepidation on Mikleo's face at the start of the video; he handles the Jack-O-Laptop carefully but gingerly, like he's half-expecting it to blow up under his hands. His expression clears and calms as he taps something offscreen and there's a whisper of feedback, though.]

Oh, there we go, it actually works. Good evening; I hope everyone's settling in all right and there haven't been too many undue mishaps with the residents. I seem to have run into one myself, unfortunately -- or, ah, not me, but --

[Someone mutters something like get on with it in the background, and he turns his head to scowl at them before looking back at the screen.]

I have a distressed individual here who's losing their skin at rather an alarming rate; I understand brains help to fix this problem, for some of you, for some reason I'm not clear on. Does anyone know where we can find some easily? Preferably...you know, not in people's heads; that's unhelpful.

...I hope you can all actually see and hear me on this thing, or this is going to look stranger than it already is.

✷ Third Person Sample:

TDM sample + Subnautica sample.

---

Why do you want to join Halloween Town: It looks fun! I like the premise and setting scope, and I really like the idea of playing with the monster body and psyche transformation elements without the surrounding environment being too dark all the time.

Do you have any questions?: I noted it up in skills as well, but considering the game's premise and environment, I'm hoping it's all right to nix a couple of Mikleo's seraph skills to make gameplay less complicated. Namely, human inability to see him (justifiable by canon standards anyway, since no one would be fully human anymore after taking the potion and nonhumans can see him just fine), and his ability to sense malevolence in individuals (since it's a headache to translate that canon mechanic to a land full of monsters with psychological changes ongoing).