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cosmographia
Player:
Name: Holo
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hologramblue
Other Characters?: n/a
Character
Character Name: Walter
Canon: Shin Megami Tensei IV | Ryslig CRAU
Canon Point: From his drop from Ryslig
Type: CRAU
Age: 20
History/Key Points: Right, so! For eighteen years of Walter's life, he was a profoundly normal guy from a....profoundly abnormal world. The Eastern Kingdom of Mikado is a bizarre fusion of Japanese language, ecology, and diet with medieval European architecture and a culture built around an Abrahamic religion that's kind of like medieval Catholicism if Catholicism had happened...without...Jesus.
Megaten!
Tl;dr feudal caste system, Walter came from an outlying fishing village. And hated it. He alludes in canon to having felt a "gloom" all his life, born out of frustration with his lack of agency as a DIRTY PEASANT, because Walter thrives on agency. Which is why, when he takes the mandatory Gauntlet Rite some time between his 18th and 19th birthdays and, to general surprise, passes and becomes a member of the military Samurai caste, it is basically the Best Day Ever for him.
He meets the rest of the protag crew, numbered five, and gloms onto the player character Flynn because he's the only other ex-peasant around. They train. Flynn kicks ass. Walter is not too shabby. One of their fellows, born a Luxuror, gets his pants in a twist and teams up with some of their classist superiors to pull a very dangerous prank on the ex-peasants during a training exercise. It backfires on him and five trainees become four. Their first real mission is to the burning wreckage of Flynn's home village, where some contraband books distributed by Flynn's lifelong friend somehow turned everyone into angry revolutionary demons. Nobody is happy.
The kingdom's religious authority, the Monastery, starts bullying the Samurai into going after a mysterious "Black Samurai" figure who apparently has been handing out these demon books and teaching peasants to read. Led by Flynn, Walter's group of trainee friends manages to lead the charge into the fabled underground country of demons she escaped to. SURPRISE it's actually post-apocalyptic underground Tokyo but for obvious reasons Walter and his friends do not grasp the significance of this.
Things ensue. Flynn and company are wary of the people of Tokyo because they might be demon allies or something. Yakuza are baffled. Foul-smelling monsters are beheaded. Kelpies are appeased. Walter is pretty hyped about all this. The Monastery is overbearing. He's less hyped about that. At some point they run into a girl named Hikaru who acts really shady and bubbly and Walter wants to hit that? The yakuza keeps doing things.
They go to find the Black Samurai, but she's holed up in a city that is currently ruled by a demon. A woman named Kaga gets eaten but then kills it from the inside. Walter is super impressed. They corner the Black Samurai in a bookstore. She gets caught way too easily. She gets publicly executed while gloating about how she's won and she'll come back. Nobody is happy. The Monastery keeps taking credit for everything and Walter gets told off for talking back to its leader and he's in a piss-poor mood.
Flynn and company get sent back into Tokyo on a bizarre errand for the Monastery and Walter is pissed both at the whole idea and the fact that nobody is explaining anything. The errand happens. Somewhere in here, the Black Samurai's corpse just kind of gets up and walks away. Then the yakuza's leader takes a Samurai hostage because he's mad Flynn has been making the yakuza look like fools, so the protag team goes there.
He tells them to kill a woman who leads a cult the yakuza has been feuding with. It turns out to be the cult Kaga was from. Walter is intrigued. They try to infiltrate and get caught and get asked a lot of weird philosophical questions by Karen Strassman. The woman they're looking for turns out to be the Black Samurai and also Lilith and she tells them she's not the real evil. Walter gives her the benefit of the doubt and runs off. Hikaru appears out of nowhere and points him to a cafe in Shinjuku. The party catches up to him there. They meet a guy who points them to another place.
The place turns out to be the yakuza's, uh, people farm, because people brains make the demon food the yakuza use to keep everything under control. They get caught again. Walter is unhappy. They get summoned to the surface. Angels ousted the king, started executing all dissidents, and took over the kingdom. Walter says "well fuck that" and goes to help Lilith ~liberate~ Tokyo according to a really questionable plan. Flynn comes with. They kill a bunch of the yakuza boss' demons and turn on this experimental military physics machine thing, which compresses two timelines where Flynn made different choices and tosses Walter, Flynn, and Walter's law-alignment counterpart into the SEA OF SOULS BASICALLY LYNSEY YOU'RE AT LEAST HALF A MEGATEN I'M NOT EXPLAINING THIS TOO I'M ALREADY AT EIGHT HUNDRED WORDS ON CANON HISTORY ALONE
The Megaten embodiments of despair monologue at them for a bit and then send them on a tour of a couple of different alternate timelines to show how the world always sucks, which doesn't work at all. At this point Walter detaches from Flynn's ass because it is murder time for naughty alignment children. He wakes up at the physics machine thing, being loomed over by Hikaru, who is LUCIFER HOLY SHIT WOW WHO EVER WOULD HAVE GUESSED anyways she explains that the angels are getting ready to genocide the fuck out of Tokyo and he's like fuck no so he lets her eat him or something and they fuse into a single Lucifer being and sit around in a dimensional palace getting the gossip on what Flynn is doing from demon minions.
Flynn kills the head honcho angel after doing some other plot-related things, then storms the fancy schmansy dimensional palace. Walter/Lucifer talks to him a little in Walter form, then turns into ugly bald Lucifer, then Flynn kills him, then he turns into bigger less ugly Lucifer that is wielding Walter as a hand puppet, then Flynn kills him harder and that is his original canon point.
Personality: People who've talked to Walter would probably identify him as confident, companionable, and boisterous, sharp-tongued in his impatience but generous in his camaraderie; a troublemaker who gives voice to whatever opinion or thought crosses his mind, regardless of how it'll be received, and prefers the company of people as honest as he is. He's generally friendly unless provoked, rarely an aggressor but more than willing to end the fight on the level it came to him. Socialization comes naturally to him, whether it's effective or not - tact isn't his strong point, but shame doesn't come too easily to him either. His superiors quickly learn that he's not easy to keep under control unless his respect or agreement has been won, and he points out foolishness wherever he sees it, usually with a wry comment that cuts straight to the point. Though emotionally driven and often impulsive overall, he's used to not having the freedom to physically act out, and he expresses his impulsiveness mostly through his words and long-term decisions - Walter is something of a thrill-seeker, but has no trouble reining himself in in the short term for the sake of accomplishing a goal or keeping others safe.
As a Samurai, Walter had to live in Mikado Castle amongst Luxurors, and it's in that environment that his values become clearer through contrast. Where the high-born are delicate speakers and used to speaking around a subject, Walter has little patience for indirectness and seeks honest conversation and concrete resolution of problems. He's more willing to speak openly and emotionally, but also doesn't engage with other people's angst as a routine matter, preferring to give them space to deal with their own problems instead of approaching with polite comforts - a gesture of respect for their dignity that can come off as insensitive from, admittedly, a lot of viewpoints. He puts practicality and raw empathy before rules of morality or taboos, preferring to dirty his hands with a mercy-kill if the alternative is leaving someone to suffer as they die, and tending to make situational moral judgments rather than holding onto firm rules about what is good or evil.
His lack of hard moral stance only became more pronounced after he became a Samurai. Walter isn't unintelligent, but he's extremely uneducated, his knowledge base restricted to what he's personally experienced in life. Having come from a "low" place himself, rather than being repulsed by the reality of underground life in the fallen city, he quickly began to sympathize with the individuals struggling to eke out a life there, and was the first in the player's party to acknowledge that they were just as human as the people of Mikado. His acceptance of unpleasant realities and unorthodox viewpoints extends even to some demons, granting him sympathy for the forgotten earth god Kuebiko and trust in the heretical Lilith.
Walter's journey through the underground affected him deeply - though his core values never changed, his concept of where he stood in the world rapidly evolved. As the political situation in both Tokyo and Mikado grew dire, he and everyone around him were forced to choose their sides in a war for the future of humankind. His tendency to empathize with the people of Tokyo led him to adopt subversive beliefs - that no god or authority could assign worth or the lack of it to people, that freedom of the individual is something worth fighting to the death for, and that humanity would best flourish in a world returned to anarchy so that truly strong leaders could naturally rise to power. Though Walter's beliefs are genuine, he's swayed in ways he doesn't realize. The apocalyptic situation demanded extreme choices from him - stay quiet and be swept along with the will of Mikado's rulers, or break away from Mikado entirely to assert his own beliefs. He never wanted to do anything that would harm people, but when push came to shove, his spite against the system that had denied him a voice for so long won out, driving him to the most extreme end of his beliefs and pinning him there so he could justify to himself the actions he'd taken. Under stress, Walter will always take the "chaotic" path, often to fault - but when in full control of himself, and when he isn't forced to champion ideology, he still values human life and tends to a more moderate path.
Recently in Walter's memory, as the conflict and his life come to an end, he's decided that he doesn't want to grow old and sentimental enough to renege on his extreme decisions - he wants to "die now, while his life is at its peak", as he puts it in the chaos route ending. The shift in his attitude towards life happened after he met and fought someone who had once championed similar ideas to his own, but had become power-hungry and tyrannical after those ideas had been realized. In a supreme twist of irony, that person is one of several past reincarnations of a "great spirit of spite" that now resides in Walter himself. Though he's not aware of that fact, that he saw the flaws in Kenji and immediately feared those flaws surfacing in himself is a strong indication that he regrets having gone to such extreme ends despite not seeing any other option. In the neutral route (my original canonpoint), Walterdies is destroyed as a person (THANKS ATLUS) not long after the encounter with Kenji, but he expresses similar sentiments - asking the protagonist not to waste his life fighting him, saying he'd weep over his death, not fully prepared for the negative consequences of his actions but ultimately resigned to the path he's set himself on and the future he envisions for mankind.
Through it all, Walter was an eighteen-year-old trying to affirm his identity, in the face of a society that wanted to stamp out individualism and a quickly-descending war that left him no choice but to choose one of two very frightening futures for humankind as he knew it. He made decisions that look horrific when viewed from the outside, with the luxury of seeing the third option, but which were motivated by fear of what seemed the only alternative and driven by no amount of cruelty. He knows exactly how appalling his values can seem, too, but chooses to follow his own best judgment anyways, because he dreads losing his newly-found freedom of the mind far more than he fears pain, injury, or death. His journey is over, his mission failed, and he's now dead or worse for it - but he doesn't regret a thing, because he was finally able to fight for what he believed in, and that's what mattered (and will continue to matter) most to him.
(and on that note, a crau ensues.)
(CR)AU Information
AU Personality Changes:
...Well, technically, he still doesn't regret anything, because regretting involves thinking of a better alternative in retrospect.
But over his nearly-a-year stay in Ryslig, Walter came face to face with what he'd already secretly suspected about his values - that they weren't something he could achieve, and that that fact scared him. Ryslig being a kind of terrible place in general did not help at all - the feeling of powerlessness that came to him over and over again with the fog god's torments was deeply discouraging for someone who idolizes the concept of agency. The idealism he gained in canon was stripped away, and his anarchic philosophy devolved into nihilism as he became convinced that whatever power or significance he thought humans held could mean nothing if it was so easily snatched away by untouchable gods.
At the same time, he thinks his own beliefs are utterly pathetic and repulsive and probably more of a personal failing than an actual truth, and he harbors a decent amount of self-loathing that most of the time he just refuses to think about. The whole Lucifer situation doesn't help with this. Walter's relationship with Lucifer is a little hard to pin down; while back home the entity that resulted from their fusion was one that understood itself to be Lucifer, but having taken Walter's body and memories into itself, the meddling of the fog god tamped down the fallen angel's influence. Walter is Walter now, but he's also Lucifer, possessing the demon's sense of self beside his own. Lucifer itself has had many different lives and stories which are all equally true, and that facet of demonic existence makes the matter simple for Walter to accept (but nigh impossible to explain).
Part of being Lucifer is believing that there is a point to resistance, and playing the role knowing that someday the game will bear fruit, and this both keeps Walter going and makes him deeply frustrated and unsatisfied with himself.
On top of all this, there's plenty of plain old trauma to deal with because Ryslig is terrible. Walter's body count is somewhere creeping up on thirty, and a not insignificant number of those were killed very deliberately. His experiences with having to hunt human beings for sustenance was a major contributor to his creeping nihilism - his method of justifying his kills was to conclude that his kills were equivalent to any other for any reason and there was no significance to human life beyond what it was assigned by the people around it. He frequently pushed people to throw away their morals and do what they needed to do to sustain themselves, and argued bitterly with those who tried to qualify certain kinds of kills as more acceptable than others, considering them hypocrites. That stance eroded what used to be his general concern for the welfare of humanity, and by the end of his stay in Ryslig he found it hard to empathize with people he wasn't personally connected to.
On the other end, he died and was revived in Ryslig twice, was mentally affected by events many times, and survived one event that was....particularly physically unpleasant, nobody was happy. He gained a pretty cavalier attitude about his own well-being, and feels occasionally as though his body is more an external thing he inhabits than the part of his own self he always understood it to be before, since it was so often and so easily changed by unfriendly forces when before he had always been pretty strong and confident and on good terms with everything about his body.
The silverish lining on this very big black cloud hanging over Walter is that he has settled down a little and allowed himself to appreciate mundane things and ~mushy feelings~. The silver is then tarnished a little by the fact that that appreciation is born out of a general despair with any higher aspirations and the desperation to continue feeling pleasant things by retreating into worldly things like friends and family and material goods. Walter finds it hard now to approach wider topics, and throws most of his emotional energy into a very close ring of Things He Cares About, which he feels he can get invested in without crossing the murky sea of deciding how to feel about distant things based on values and morals, since those things have been thoroughly stepped on.
AU History Changes: Walter arrived in Ryslig in August, having just fused with Lucifer and taken on Flynn back home. Being pulled there expelled the presence of Lucifer from his body/soul/sense of self/etc; he made contact with Jonathan (his law-alignment counterpart in canon) and the two forged an uneasy peace over their familiarity with each other in a very strange world. Suspicious of the entire situation, they set up camp outside the town of their arrival, spending days working with the natives and nights sleeping away from them.
Not long into their stay, they took in Xion and Roxas, who were similarly suspicious of the town and without a source of income.
From here on out I'm doing bullets because full explanations will get really really tl;dr and when you cut out the obscene detail each event becomes super short.
Other AU Changes: So, uh, Walter is now a merman! Ryslig's version of a merman, at least, which is a rather gross and unpleasant take on the whole deal. This makes his default appearance different, and....other than that is mostly irrelevant power-wise because Cosmographia nulls all of that in one way or another. The only relevant part is a mild treasure-hoarding/possessive instinct, and the psychological effects from having experienced the rest of it which I covered in above sections anyways.
Also, thanks to canon fuckery, Walter is technically also Lucifer? I sort of explained this in AU personality changes but if you need more detail hmu. The deal there wouldn't qualify as a gem fusion even if that was a thing you could do in this app.
....oh yeah also he knows how to talk like a halfway modern person now, he just generally doesn't bother.
Gem: Diaboleite, because painfully bad and mean jokes about Lucifer nourish me.
Power Considerations:
Extra: nah
Writing Sample: baboom
Name: Holo
Contact Details:
Other Characters?: n/a
Character
Character Name: Walter
Canon: Shin Megami Tensei IV | Ryslig CRAU
Canon Point: From his drop from Ryslig
Type: CRAU
Age: 20
History/Key Points: Right, so! For eighteen years of Walter's life, he was a profoundly normal guy from a....profoundly abnormal world. The Eastern Kingdom of Mikado is a bizarre fusion of Japanese language, ecology, and diet with medieval European architecture and a culture built around an Abrahamic religion that's kind of like medieval Catholicism if Catholicism had happened...without...Jesus.
Megaten!
Tl;dr feudal caste system, Walter came from an outlying fishing village. And hated it. He alludes in canon to having felt a "gloom" all his life, born out of frustration with his lack of agency as a DIRTY PEASANT, because Walter thrives on agency. Which is why, when he takes the mandatory Gauntlet Rite some time between his 18th and 19th birthdays and, to general surprise, passes and becomes a member of the military Samurai caste, it is basically the Best Day Ever for him.
He meets the rest of the protag crew, numbered five, and gloms onto the player character Flynn because he's the only other ex-peasant around. They train. Flynn kicks ass. Walter is not too shabby. One of their fellows, born a Luxuror, gets his pants in a twist and teams up with some of their classist superiors to pull a very dangerous prank on the ex-peasants during a training exercise. It backfires on him and five trainees become four. Their first real mission is to the burning wreckage of Flynn's home village, where some contraband books distributed by Flynn's lifelong friend somehow turned everyone into angry revolutionary demons. Nobody is happy.
The kingdom's religious authority, the Monastery, starts bullying the Samurai into going after a mysterious "Black Samurai" figure who apparently has been handing out these demon books and teaching peasants to read. Led by Flynn, Walter's group of trainee friends manages to lead the charge into the fabled underground country of demons she escaped to. SURPRISE it's actually post-apocalyptic underground Tokyo but for obvious reasons Walter and his friends do not grasp the significance of this.
Things ensue. Flynn and company are wary of the people of Tokyo because they might be demon allies or something. Yakuza are baffled. Foul-smelling monsters are beheaded. Kelpies are appeased. Walter is pretty hyped about all this. The Monastery is overbearing. He's less hyped about that. At some point they run into a girl named Hikaru who acts really shady and bubbly and Walter wants to hit that? The yakuza keeps doing things.
They go to find the Black Samurai, but she's holed up in a city that is currently ruled by a demon. A woman named Kaga gets eaten but then kills it from the inside. Walter is super impressed. They corner the Black Samurai in a bookstore. She gets caught way too easily. She gets publicly executed while gloating about how she's won and she'll come back. Nobody is happy. The Monastery keeps taking credit for everything and Walter gets told off for talking back to its leader and he's in a piss-poor mood.
Flynn and company get sent back into Tokyo on a bizarre errand for the Monastery and Walter is pissed both at the whole idea and the fact that nobody is explaining anything. The errand happens. Somewhere in here, the Black Samurai's corpse just kind of gets up and walks away. Then the yakuza's leader takes a Samurai hostage because he's mad Flynn has been making the yakuza look like fools, so the protag team goes there.
He tells them to kill a woman who leads a cult the yakuza has been feuding with. It turns out to be the cult Kaga was from. Walter is intrigued. They try to infiltrate and get caught and get asked a lot of weird philosophical questions by Karen Strassman. The woman they're looking for turns out to be the Black Samurai and also Lilith and she tells them she's not the real evil. Walter gives her the benefit of the doubt and runs off. Hikaru appears out of nowhere and points him to a cafe in Shinjuku. The party catches up to him there. They meet a guy who points them to another place.
The place turns out to be the yakuza's, uh, people farm, because people brains make the demon food the yakuza use to keep everything under control. They get caught again. Walter is unhappy. They get summoned to the surface. Angels ousted the king, started executing all dissidents, and took over the kingdom. Walter says "well fuck that" and goes to help Lilith ~liberate~ Tokyo according to a really questionable plan. Flynn comes with. They kill a bunch of the yakuza boss' demons and turn on this experimental military physics machine thing, which compresses two timelines where Flynn made different choices and tosses Walter, Flynn, and Walter's law-alignment counterpart into the SEA OF SOULS BASICALLY LYNSEY YOU'RE AT LEAST HALF A MEGATEN I'M NOT EXPLAINING THIS TOO I'M ALREADY AT EIGHT HUNDRED WORDS ON CANON HISTORY ALONE
The Megaten embodiments of despair monologue at them for a bit and then send them on a tour of a couple of different alternate timelines to show how the world always sucks, which doesn't work at all. At this point Walter detaches from Flynn's ass because it is murder time for naughty alignment children. He wakes up at the physics machine thing, being loomed over by Hikaru, who is LUCIFER HOLY SHIT WOW WHO EVER WOULD HAVE GUESSED anyways she explains that the angels are getting ready to genocide the fuck out of Tokyo and he's like fuck no so he lets her eat him or something and they fuse into a single Lucifer being and sit around in a dimensional palace getting the gossip on what Flynn is doing from demon minions.
Flynn kills the head honcho angel after doing some other plot-related things, then storms the fancy schmansy dimensional palace. Walter/Lucifer talks to him a little in Walter form, then turns into ugly bald Lucifer, then Flynn kills him, then he turns into bigger less ugly Lucifer that is wielding Walter as a hand puppet, then Flynn kills him harder and that is his original canon point.
Personality: People who've talked to Walter would probably identify him as confident, companionable, and boisterous, sharp-tongued in his impatience but generous in his camaraderie; a troublemaker who gives voice to whatever opinion or thought crosses his mind, regardless of how it'll be received, and prefers the company of people as honest as he is. He's generally friendly unless provoked, rarely an aggressor but more than willing to end the fight on the level it came to him. Socialization comes naturally to him, whether it's effective or not - tact isn't his strong point, but shame doesn't come too easily to him either. His superiors quickly learn that he's not easy to keep under control unless his respect or agreement has been won, and he points out foolishness wherever he sees it, usually with a wry comment that cuts straight to the point. Though emotionally driven and often impulsive overall, he's used to not having the freedom to physically act out, and he expresses his impulsiveness mostly through his words and long-term decisions - Walter is something of a thrill-seeker, but has no trouble reining himself in in the short term for the sake of accomplishing a goal or keeping others safe.
As a Samurai, Walter had to live in Mikado Castle amongst Luxurors, and it's in that environment that his values become clearer through contrast. Where the high-born are delicate speakers and used to speaking around a subject, Walter has little patience for indirectness and seeks honest conversation and concrete resolution of problems. He's more willing to speak openly and emotionally, but also doesn't engage with other people's angst as a routine matter, preferring to give them space to deal with their own problems instead of approaching with polite comforts - a gesture of respect for their dignity that can come off as insensitive from, admittedly, a lot of viewpoints. He puts practicality and raw empathy before rules of morality or taboos, preferring to dirty his hands with a mercy-kill if the alternative is leaving someone to suffer as they die, and tending to make situational moral judgments rather than holding onto firm rules about what is good or evil.
His lack of hard moral stance only became more pronounced after he became a Samurai. Walter isn't unintelligent, but he's extremely uneducated, his knowledge base restricted to what he's personally experienced in life. Having come from a "low" place himself, rather than being repulsed by the reality of underground life in the fallen city, he quickly began to sympathize with the individuals struggling to eke out a life there, and was the first in the player's party to acknowledge that they were just as human as the people of Mikado. His acceptance of unpleasant realities and unorthodox viewpoints extends even to some demons, granting him sympathy for the forgotten earth god Kuebiko and trust in the heretical Lilith.
Walter's journey through the underground affected him deeply - though his core values never changed, his concept of where he stood in the world rapidly evolved. As the political situation in both Tokyo and Mikado grew dire, he and everyone around him were forced to choose their sides in a war for the future of humankind. His tendency to empathize with the people of Tokyo led him to adopt subversive beliefs - that no god or authority could assign worth or the lack of it to people, that freedom of the individual is something worth fighting to the death for, and that humanity would best flourish in a world returned to anarchy so that truly strong leaders could naturally rise to power. Though Walter's beliefs are genuine, he's swayed in ways he doesn't realize. The apocalyptic situation demanded extreme choices from him - stay quiet and be swept along with the will of Mikado's rulers, or break away from Mikado entirely to assert his own beliefs. He never wanted to do anything that would harm people, but when push came to shove, his spite against the system that had denied him a voice for so long won out, driving him to the most extreme end of his beliefs and pinning him there so he could justify to himself the actions he'd taken. Under stress, Walter will always take the "chaotic" path, often to fault - but when in full control of himself, and when he isn't forced to champion ideology, he still values human life and tends to a more moderate path.
Recently in Walter's memory, as the conflict and his life come to an end, he's decided that he doesn't want to grow old and sentimental enough to renege on his extreme decisions - he wants to "die now, while his life is at its peak", as he puts it in the chaos route ending. The shift in his attitude towards life happened after he met and fought someone who had once championed similar ideas to his own, but had become power-hungry and tyrannical after those ideas had been realized. In a supreme twist of irony, that person is one of several past reincarnations of a "great spirit of spite" that now resides in Walter himself. Though he's not aware of that fact, that he saw the flaws in Kenji and immediately feared those flaws surfacing in himself is a strong indication that he regrets having gone to such extreme ends despite not seeing any other option. In the neutral route (my original canonpoint), Walter
Through it all, Walter was an eighteen-year-old trying to affirm his identity, in the face of a society that wanted to stamp out individualism and a quickly-descending war that left him no choice but to choose one of two very frightening futures for humankind as he knew it. He made decisions that look horrific when viewed from the outside, with the luxury of seeing the third option, but which were motivated by fear of what seemed the only alternative and driven by no amount of cruelty. He knows exactly how appalling his values can seem, too, but chooses to follow his own best judgment anyways, because he dreads losing his newly-found freedom of the mind far more than he fears pain, injury, or death. His journey is over, his mission failed, and he's now dead or worse for it - but he doesn't regret a thing, because he was finally able to fight for what he believed in, and that's what mattered (and will continue to matter) most to him.
(and on that note, a crau ensues.)
(CR)AU Information
AU Personality Changes:
...Well, technically, he still doesn't regret anything, because regretting involves thinking of a better alternative in retrospect.
But over his nearly-a-year stay in Ryslig, Walter came face to face with what he'd already secretly suspected about his values - that they weren't something he could achieve, and that that fact scared him. Ryslig being a kind of terrible place in general did not help at all - the feeling of powerlessness that came to him over and over again with the fog god's torments was deeply discouraging for someone who idolizes the concept of agency. The idealism he gained in canon was stripped away, and his anarchic philosophy devolved into nihilism as he became convinced that whatever power or significance he thought humans held could mean nothing if it was so easily snatched away by untouchable gods.
At the same time, he thinks his own beliefs are utterly pathetic and repulsive and probably more of a personal failing than an actual truth, and he harbors a decent amount of self-loathing that most of the time he just refuses to think about. The whole Lucifer situation doesn't help with this. Walter's relationship with Lucifer is a little hard to pin down; while back home the entity that resulted from their fusion was one that understood itself to be Lucifer, but having taken Walter's body and memories into itself, the meddling of the fog god tamped down the fallen angel's influence. Walter is Walter now, but he's also Lucifer, possessing the demon's sense of self beside his own. Lucifer itself has had many different lives and stories which are all equally true, and that facet of demonic existence makes the matter simple for Walter to accept (but nigh impossible to explain).
Part of being Lucifer is believing that there is a point to resistance, and playing the role knowing that someday the game will bear fruit, and this both keeps Walter going and makes him deeply frustrated and unsatisfied with himself.
On top of all this, there's plenty of plain old trauma to deal with because Ryslig is terrible. Walter's body count is somewhere creeping up on thirty, and a not insignificant number of those were killed very deliberately. His experiences with having to hunt human beings for sustenance was a major contributor to his creeping nihilism - his method of justifying his kills was to conclude that his kills were equivalent to any other for any reason and there was no significance to human life beyond what it was assigned by the people around it. He frequently pushed people to throw away their morals and do what they needed to do to sustain themselves, and argued bitterly with those who tried to qualify certain kinds of kills as more acceptable than others, considering them hypocrites. That stance eroded what used to be his general concern for the welfare of humanity, and by the end of his stay in Ryslig he found it hard to empathize with people he wasn't personally connected to.
On the other end, he died and was revived in Ryslig twice, was mentally affected by events many times, and survived one event that was....particularly physically unpleasant, nobody was happy. He gained a pretty cavalier attitude about his own well-being, and feels occasionally as though his body is more an external thing he inhabits than the part of his own self he always understood it to be before, since it was so often and so easily changed by unfriendly forces when before he had always been pretty strong and confident and on good terms with everything about his body.
The silverish lining on this very big black cloud hanging over Walter is that he has settled down a little and allowed himself to appreciate mundane things and ~mushy feelings~. The silver is then tarnished a little by the fact that that appreciation is born out of a general despair with any higher aspirations and the desperation to continue feeling pleasant things by retreating into worldly things like friends and family and material goods. Walter finds it hard now to approach wider topics, and throws most of his emotional energy into a very close ring of Things He Cares About, which he feels he can get invested in without crossing the murky sea of deciding how to feel about distant things based on values and morals, since those things have been thoroughly stepped on.
AU History Changes: Walter arrived in Ryslig in August, having just fused with Lucifer and taken on Flynn back home. Being pulled there expelled the presence of Lucifer from his body/soul/sense of self/etc; he made contact with Jonathan (his law-alignment counterpart in canon) and the two forged an uneasy peace over their familiarity with each other in a very strange world. Suspicious of the entire situation, they set up camp outside the town of their arrival, spending days working with the natives and nights sleeping away from them.
Not long into their stay, they took in Xion and Roxas, who were similarly suspicious of the town and without a source of income.
From here on out I'm doing bullets because full explanations will get really really tl;dr and when you cut out the obscene detail each event becomes super short.
- Mayor of Vandare sends arrivals on a mission, understates the danger, bad times are had. Walter is not happy.
- People start turning into monsters. Walter's changes start slow; he sees new friends very abruptly and violently change, some of them vanishing completely afterwards.
- The backlash from Vandare's population pushes many people to move to the larger city, Bavan. Walter, Jonathan, Xion, and Roxas move camp to the edge of the nearby Lake Dala, a popular leisure spot for Bavanites.
- Walter's first major change is the drowning instinct, and he kills a native at a party.
- Jonathan and Roxas vanish, leaving Walter and Xion alone in the camp. They've bonded over time to some extent.
- In the midst of a second wave of arrivals, the fog comes down again and inflicts strong mental effects. Walter kills a young girl while under its influence, and buries her after returning to lucidity.
- A fourth god makes its presence known; Walter half-heartedly offers his allegiance to it, on the premise that it is in conflict with the fog god responsible for their transformation.
- Walter's changes fully kick in with the next fog, and he has a Really Bad Time, sacrificing his dignity on the altar of getting someone to carry him to water so he doesn't die of dehydration. On top of this, Naoto Shirogane, who is a dragon, then tries to eat him.
- The next day he has kind of a breakdown at Personacast's crib about how he's lost whatever control over his life and surroundings he had gained back home. Kanji improves the situation.
- The breakdown + previous kills wear his morality down past a significant milestone; when Xion reaches the point of needing to eat human, Walter drowns someone for himself and provides her with the meat. Nobody is happy. A conversation with the person who carried him to water during his Really Bad Time solidifies his new, pessimistic outlook on their changes.
- AND THEN THE FOG GOD DECIDES TO BE A REAL DICK and do one of those "au where you lived here all along and your life was perfect" things. Walter is cast as Xion's older brother. Everyone is happy, until the illusion breaks, and then no one is happy but Walter's standing fondness for Xion becomes an undeniable attachment.
- Some time passes; he meets Vietnam (Hetalia) (referred to as Sen after this) over her quest to make pants that are suited to the whole merperson problem thing.
- Someone kills Xion; Walter buries her, lets the hunting instinct take hold a little too much, kills several people, and then watches her kinda wander back into camp like nothing happened. Together they have an entire sadfeel.
- The deep of winter passes rather uneventfully, but then an event happens at the end of January that gives people weird parasitic sentient growth things on their body and NOBODY IS HAPPY. Walter experiences his first death in Ryslig, deepening his pessimism about their prospects with the fog god and his apathy towards his own well-being.
- February had a bunch of CR-building stuff where he soothes his apathy by getting attached to other people. Also an event about virgin sacrifice in which he sort of realizes killing ought to bother him more but he's also glad it doesn't because practicality.
- March is a bizarre month in which on one hand he participates in a "cure" that works for about three days and then turns him into a tortured chimera of multiple different people also Lucifer before a friend mercy-kills him, but on the other hand he and Sen finally get together, completing his dark descent into replacing all hope for escape with schmoopy feelings.
- Things are relatively uneventful for a while, except Walter has issues with caring about things that he deals with by caring mostly about Xion and Sen. He starts working at Enjolras' bookstore.
- And then the natives finally manage to "strike back" by kidnapping and basically torturing a bunch of monsters in the hopes of ritually killing them for good. It backfires. Nobody is happy.
- The rest of Walter's time in Ryslig is spent not really engaging with the attempts to fight back against the fog god - traumatized by the whole monster abduction episode, he retreats into his home and the bookstore where he works, caring for a close circle of CR and apathetic towards most of what's outside.
- An event in which people are compelled to speak and act according to what they believe to be true makes Walter burn down a building and clarifies for him some of his (negative) feelings about his own behavior.
- But other than that, and other than the drownings now and then, all is quiet.
Other AU Changes: So, uh, Walter is now a merman! Ryslig's version of a merman, at least, which is a rather gross and unpleasant take on the whole deal. This makes his default appearance different, and....other than that is mostly irrelevant power-wise because Cosmographia nulls all of that in one way or another. The only relevant part is a mild treasure-hoarding/possessive instinct, and the psychological effects from having experienced the rest of it which I covered in above sections anyways.
Also, thanks to canon fuckery, Walter is technically also Lucifer? I sort of explained this in AU personality changes but if you need more detail hmu. The deal there wouldn't qualify as a gem fusion even if that was a thing you could do in this app.
....oh yeah also he knows how to talk like a halfway modern person now, he just generally doesn't bother.
Gem: Diaboleite, because painfully bad and mean jokes about Lucifer nourish me.
Power Considerations:
- Mini Stars: Disclaimer, not actually stars. The ability to create and manipulate little blobs of luminescence that....produce light, and that's about it. Blobs are fist-sized and produce about as much light as your average lamp. Only one can be created at a time; making a second causes the first to fizzle out. They can move through the air freely within about thirty feet of Walter.
- Impression: One-way telepathy, sort of. Speaking with intent and strong emotion can cause a vivid image of whatever's being described or explained to appear in the listener's head, making the attempt at communication doubly effective. No ability to influence emotions or belief, just to make Walter's intended message very clear.
- Summon Throne: summon throne
Extra: nah
Writing Sample: baboom