prompt 14: validation

Sometimes,
Shinju wondered if she’d made the right decision. Limsa Lominsa was
halfway around the world, sitting
above the waves rather than under them; its people and accents and
food were all so strange.
She hadn’t realized Spoken came with furry ears and tails, or grown
matrons less than three fulms tall. Seafood was seafood wherever you
went, but the rest of it—the green things, the pastries, the red
meat—was still to be eyed with suspicion until she’d tried it
enough times. (Some of it had made her sick, and she’d feared she
was dying until she’d heard, for the first time, the word
allergies.)
And the clothes…well. As much as she did love the clothes, it was
hard to marvel over frilly dresses or lacy socks when she swore she
could hear her mother’s disapproving voice at every moment.
Surface-dweller clothing wasn’t made for the deep sea.

Sometimes,
she wondered if she should go home. Go back to Sui-no-Sato, marry
Haruto, run the jewelry shop. It would be easy.
She would be dutiful.

The
carbuncle-shaped alarm she’d bought chimed insistently, and she
sighed. There would be time for introspection later, after her shift
at the Gate. Remembering that today would be another day of
lessons—advanced aetherochemistry, followed by the elective on
applied biochemistry she’d been looking forward to all
week—provided the extra push she needed to leave her suddenly far
too comfortable futon. (Try as she might, she couldn’t get used to
Eorzean beds; the softness of them made it impossible to keep a
headrest in place, and she always
woke up with sore horns.) By
now she’d developed an ironclad routine, one which required no
conscious input.

Clean
teeth. Wash face and hands. Put on her uniform, grateful that miqo’te
tailors had the same anatomical issues she faced in regards to tails
and trousers. She
carried a grimoire, but it was mostly for form’s sake; she far
preferred her scrolls in their waxed carrying case. Outside her
dormitory room, the other trainees were stirring.

She
paused with one hand on the door and took a deep breath. Downstairs,
there would be coffee. (Haruto, she thought with no small degree of
satisfaction, would probably be horrified.) Downstairs would be her
friends eating breakfast, saving her a spot at the long tables. There
would be no stiff formality, no era’s unyielding weight of
tradition.

She
was still grinning by the time she stepped into the cafeteria. This
job was wonderful.

Yes, she thought. She’d made a fine choice after all.

so thanks to @dragons-bones I’m finally actually writing up my ACN and SMN’s character lore bullshit (because they’re the only characters of mine who regularly do more than what comes with the basic job description and/or interact with the job lore*) ENJOY UR TEXT WALLS

Ritanelle “Soleil,” summoner

• did start out as an arcanist, but quickly found herself dissatisfied with the scope of her powers. sure, Bio and Miasma and Virus are cool, but where’s the raw destructive power? she should have stayed at the thaumaturge’s guild and lived off stale bread
• and then she joined the Scions
• turns out the Echo has some uses beyond giving her nauseous migraines
• her egis are pretty standard in terms of their toolkit, but she’s really leaned into the “primal” part; instead of relying on raw equations coded into her carbuncle summoning arrays, she’s bolstered their power (and personalities) with incantations in their devotees’ tongues (Enkindle, yo)
• this involved becoming semi-fluent in those tongues, mostly from the beast tribe daily questgivers (she is a Sister of Ash and adores her pet drake)
• despite her affinity for earth-aspected aether, titan was the hardest egi for her to enkindle because Kobold is a tonal language and she kept hecking it up
• did u know garuda has dance steps? no? now u do. good thing rita enjoys dancing
• her actual favorite part of tinkering with her egi arrays isn’t with their gemstones or their rune circles, it’s their appearances
• you know how Ifrit is compared to a demon? That’s exactly what she makes Ifrit-egi up as when she wanders the Shroud
• if you’re a good and kind and decent wood wailer, your shift will be untroubled by demons. if you’re not? winds will rip at your clothing, the earth will shift under your feet…and a horrible fiery thing will stalk you through the Shroud until you repent**
• entirely unrelated, she likes giving Titan-egi legs and making him a bit rounder and friend-shaped
• WHAT I REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT THOUGH ARE TRANCES
• Dreadwyrm Trance: great for cosmic destructive power (and I giggle to myself every time I see a Deathflare go out) but not so great for…uh, anything else. (in addition, she’d had some trouble adjusting, as bahamut’s aether attunes so strongly with her own that when she falls into the trance she sometimes sprouts aetherial wings/scales/claws)
• as an active Scion, Rita runs into “anything else” a lot, so she adapted. Heavily. these are also good for when she’s caught without her grimoire, as she only needs a few moments’ meditation to drop into one
• Ifrit Trance: fire claws! fast! good for punching and close-quarter combat, since she’s basically igniting the aether around herself. bad for defending. usually employed when she’s just seen a seedkin and panicked. if I could stand to level MNK again I’d make her one for this trance.
• Titan Trance: no shield? no problem! the earth is now her shield (and fists, and feet). good at defense and taking hits but very very slow, also useful for if she’s about to collide with the ground very hard. she uses this when for whatever reason she needs to win a physical contest
• Garuda Trance: what is this “falling damage” you speak of? it’s no flight, but when she pops this trance she can glide for long enough to avoid horrible splattering death. enemies seem to find her slightly harder to hit, as well. bad for actual combat, very good at running away
• at this point, the only remnants of her base class are her DoTs (which she is deeply, deeply fond of) and the tendency to summon her old carbies when she wants something to cuddle and make dumb noises at. her egis tend to be offended if she does that to them
• oh
• and her reaction to demi-bahamut was just giggling

Shinju Toyotama, arcanist

• is just an arcanist, no special powers to speak of, except…
• when you grow up in a village under the Ruby Sea and get really excited about heading topside only to discover you are allergic to nearly everything cute and fluffy, you get really attached to carbuncles
• her carbies have been custom-coded, possibly building off of other published arrays, for maximum cuteness, personalities (calm, but distinctly Them), and fluffiness. soft fur and big bright expressive eyes are a must
• being that she does spend a lot of time in and around the water, they also have webbed toes and sleek, waterproof fur like otters
• and very sharp teeth, also like otters
• they are very round and exceedingly spoiled
• …they also need names, which I will get around to some day
• she keeps her head down, studies hard (she has an eye to majoring in aetherochemistry, though her modifications to her squishy carb-buddies probably qualify her for aetherophysics) and tries not to get into trouble, but the first time someone she was assessing picked a fight with her sniffer carby, she Tri-Bound him into a tide pool full of crabs
• Do Not Touch The ‘Buncles
• instead of grimoires, she prefers scrolls and usually has at least one on her person at all times. calling this clunky or old-fashioned is a good way to get on her bad side
• you don’t want to get on her bad side; she enjoys tinkering with biochemistry-based spells for extra credit, drawing on disease and poison symptoms from her native oceans
• she’s prone to excitedly going on about the effects of lionfish venom or cone snail toxins at great length, usually over dinner
• the general consensus among her fellow underclassmen is that she’s greatly broadening their potential array of damaging effects–but gods, at what cost?

*Rrisya: just a lancer, though it’s possible she made a deal with some sort of forest spirit to do The Big Jumps
Portia: is garlean. punches things Real Good. no aether whatsoever.
Q’sevet: incredibly lazy (and spoony) bard
Evrard: your bog-standard RDM, though he’s prone to busting out a Verblizzard instead of a Verfire
Gantsetseg: possibly the only thing that departs from the MCH toolkit is her fondness for different sorts of turrets to control the battlefield, other than that she just does the flippy shooty thing (and insists on calling Stephanivian “Steff”)

**And if you don’t repent…well. Perhaps the last thing you’ll ever see will be a bone-tipped spear and a Miqo’te hunting screech.