Player Information

Name: Psi
Age: antediluvian
Contact Info: PsiYamaneko
Other Characters:
Haurchefant Greystone | Final Fantasy XIV | silverfuller
The Joker | DC Comics | harlequinofhate

Character Information

Name: Zidane Tribal
Canon: Final Fantasy IX
Age: 16
Gender: Male
Canon Point: After throwing himself over Kuja in the Iifa Tree
Background Link: Wiki
Inventory:

His clothing consisting of
-sleeveless vest
-sleeveless shirt
-jodhpur pants
-boots
-gloves
-belt
-and a leather harness strapped around his shoulders with a scabbard that now has nothing in it.

And a deck of Tetra Master cards.

Personality:

"You don't need a reason to help people"

Zidane is a capricious, impish young rogue with an obvious zest for life. He is carefree, friendly and always willing to lend a hand to those in need. On the surface he is a laid back scoundrel who loves adventure and women. His face is known in various bars and there are plenty of people who role their eyes at his antics. He is a thief who steals both to feed himself and for the sheer adventurous joy of it. While he can respect the value of a fine bauble, he sees more sport in the searching and the lifestyle itself. To him it represents freedom. He does not actually care much for material wealth. Rich people bore him; he finds their food unsatisfying, their homes ostentatious and he generally has no interest in being one of them.

To strangers he is a mercurial and curious person. Since he follows his heart and not his head, emotion usually dictates his actions and he can do some bizarre things on the whim of the moment. He's event made friends thanks to this. Amarant, for example, decided to follow Zidane just to see what made him tick and why he would spare Amarant's life after beating him in armed combat. Zidane welcomed his company.

And why not?

Zidane can see when someone is genuinely sinister and when someone is trying to get by in a bad situation or is just doing their job. Because of this, he will sometimes reach out a hand of friendship even to enemies, if he sees good in them. Friendly as he is one would expect him to have the patience to match but he does not. His wells of patience can run dry fairly quickly. If someone annoys him enough he will shut them out, sometimes sooner rather than later. People who try to push him around and tell him what to do are particularly likely to end up on his more disgruntled side, even if they are generally good people otherwise.

Though good, Zidane himself is not always terribly nice. He'll mouth off at people, steal from people, cheat, lie, and resort to violence when he has to. While he doesn't usually kill guards, he is not above beating them unconscious and taking their gear to disguise himself while he wanders around whatever castle they were stationed at. His temper can also flare up especially if he feels like he is losing control of a situation or if something has gotten between him and his friends.

Living by the motto "You don't need a reason to help people", Zidane spends a lot of energy offering a shoulder for his friends and companions to lean on. He has a sympathetic ear when someone needs to share their feelings, he is quick with a pep talk to help those who are feeling down in their spirits, and his constant smiling and upbeat attitude has a way of winning people over. To Garnet he is emotional support, helping her find strength in the face of a war her mother started. To his old associate Freya he is a source of optimism as she faces her grief over losing her love and her home. To Vivi he is both a big brother and a guidepost for finding a sense of purpose. Zidane loves his friends and will willingly place himself in harm's way to protect them. He can be pragmatic about this philosophy. Anyone in need is someone he'll try to help but if his friends are under threat as well they're the ones he'll focus on. Many of his companions change and find new strength as they revolve around him while he remains a pillar, at least outwardly.

Some of his eagerness to help others is to distract himself from thinking about his own problems. While not a miserable person by any means he does have questions and concerns about himself and his place in the world around him. He doesn't give himself the time to let these questions bubble to the surface very often which means he does not tend to be very inwardly focused. This lack of introspection can lead him in to trouble as he can be a bit obnoxious without realizing it. He only cut back on his over the top flirting when he met a little girl who hit on him in the same way and it made him uncomfortable. It also means lacks the conventional wisdom to fully think things through. He has plenty of street smarts but that won't stop him from knocking himself unconscious for days trying to rescue someone.

Despite how apparently friendly and charming he is in his demeanor he actually offers very little of himself to the people around him. Having been raised by thieving actors, he's learned to be quite a thespian and has mastered the art of showing the world what he wants it to see of him which is a man with many talents and few worries or cares. He's definitely shut off more than he lets on and he sometimes has trouble really understanding people at the deepest, most empathic level. When he does really understand someone's situation it is usually because he sees some of himself in it. He recognizes Vivi's desire to find a home, for example, because he went through something similar. He returns to the Iifa Tree to save Kuja, despite Kuja having nearly destroyed the world, because he believes he could have done the same had his circumstances been different(more on why below). This mindset can work to his advantage a lot of the time. Since he often finds himself leading people or bolstering morale he finds he can't afford to voice his insecurities. It's safer to keep them concealed beneath an armor of bravado and impetuosity. Pragmatism is not his only motivation for keeping people at arm's length, however: He has problems letting people in, since he is convinced that they won't truly understand him. What he has to learn to see over his adventures is that they do understand him and can see through his tough guy act when he is suffering. They know him better than he knows himself.

But his tendency to not share himself emotionally is understandable. His whole life he's had a vague sense of not belonging. He does have people he considers friends, of course, and he thinks of the Tantalus theater group as his family but he never knew where he came from until very recently. Growing up this way he created a slight rift between himself and the rest of the world. He engages the world most of the time but when under intense emotional strain he tends to push people away and prefers to keep to himself. This makes him something of a hypocrite. He does not practice the same advice he likes to give to the people around him. He tells someone at one point that it is okay to cry if she feels like she has to, but he would never let anyone see him doing the same.

Some of Zidane's unwillingness to let people close is starting to change thanks to recent events. As it turns out, the world he's lived on most of his life was not the one he is originally from. He is a powerful Terran Genome, created and conceived for the purpose of disrupting the cycle of souls through violence. He was supposed to annihilate all living things on Gaia. Thinking that he might be an enemy to the people he'd grown to love almost literally destroyed him (he was losing his soul at the time as well) and it was only through that experience that he really started to open up to people and let them carry his burdens as he was always eager to carry theirs. It's a lesson he's still learning to put to practice.

Flavor Abilities:

Zidane is lithe and agile, able to leap far and do acrobatic flips. His acrobatic prowess will be nerfed down to be within human limits which for him means he won't be able to jump quite as high.

He also has a prehensile tail, but it won't be able to hold his weight anymore.

Suitability:

Zidane is a character who can do well with friends or in isolation. He enjoys making friends and will cheerfully engage people he comes across, but he also spent time when he was thirteen traveling alone so being by himself is not unfamiliar to him.

Cunning and resourceful, he has skills that will help him survive. He will probably be a source of morale to characters who need it but he will also need to learn how to lean on others when he needs them. This will require him to learn to trust people around him. If he doesn't learn to trust people he will probably withdraw more and more into himself.

In terms of how he interacts with the environment his focus will be on survival if he is by himself or his companions if he has any. He is clever enough that he will also dip into puzzle solving but Mister Body-Check-The-Wall is unlikely to ever be the best puzzle solver in a room. His world is medieval fantasy with steampunk airships so he won't know what computers are or what a tablet is. Luckily, he will manage to figure it out fairly quickly thanks to his innate curiosity.

What will probably be the biggest upset to him is how Norfinbury can mess with his senses. He's always been confident in his own judgment and rarely second guesses himself. The reality that his own eyes and ears will lie to him sometimes will frustrate him.

RP Samples:

TDM: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4