Post by Axel on Jul 27, 2012 14:05:14 GMT -5
Our Solemn Hour
[/font]In my darkest hours I could not forsee[/font]
x
“Think I’ll pass. My heart just wouldn’t be in it, y’know?”
Name: Axel (a.k.a. Lea, Number VIII, the Flurry of Dancing Flames, Flamesilocks)
Age: 25
Which game are you from: Kingdom Hearts (CoM, II, Days)
The tide could turn so fast to this degree[/font]
History: Lea grew up in Radiant Garden with his best friend, Isa. On a day out, they met this kid Ventus, who was moping around with a wooden Keyblade. Lea decided this merited a fight and they sparred, shmoozed, carried on, and went home happy. That is, until a bunch of scientists got cocky and screwed everything up for a select few Nobodies. The accused decided to rely on strength in numbers and banded together, and Isa and Lea joined not long after to become present-day Saïx and Axel. Their relationship went right down the tubes after that, because the loss of a heart changed them both, and where Axel mostly kept his old personality and faked a lot of his emotions Saïx didn’t seem to see the point. The gap between them only widened when Axel got mixed up with Roxas, the newest recruit and Keybearing ace in the hole for Xemnas, since Axel started sharing his tradition of “icing on the cake” with the kid up on Twilight Town’s clock tower. Sora interrupted this by reaching Castle Oblivion, where the Organization intended to use Naminé to manipulate him. Axel, as part of the force against Sora, abruptly bid adieu to Roxas and got the order from Saïx to eliminate any traitors he found in Oblivion’s residents.
Naminé called to Sora’s heart and Marluxia finished the job, bringing Sora right through the front doors and beginning the process of dismissing all his KH1-era memories. About a floor later, Axel and his total disregard for anonymity showed up in order to snark and test out the new punching bag. Sora beat him, but Axel was only seeing how he did anyway, and maybe because he saw so much Roxas in Sora he offered to help him figure out Oblivion. Though, it also could’ve been to muddy the waters, as generally when one wants to manipulate a Keybearer with no beginning or end to his trust, one doesn’t do it by playing the villain. Even Maleficent knew that much. At any rate, Sora refused, preferring to leave it to his own abilities and possibly because Axel had just, y’know, tried to kill him. So Axel vanished back up to what amounted to Oblivion’s observatory, where Larxene noticed that he’d taken an interest in the Keybearer. Axel claimed it was because he’d gone Heartless and back, but we all know there was some Roxas in there too. He also made the bold move of suggesting he was a traitor in order to force Larxene’s own admission, which worked, and put him in good standing with the real ringleader’s right hand.
Larxene was up next to bat Sora around, and her tactic wasn’t an extended hand but a twisted knife, but Sora got through it anyway and she returned to Axel just so he could jab at her already wounded pride. Just as she started to throw a tantrum, Vexen showed up to complain about wasting so much time on Sora because he must have briefly forgotten the plot of Kingdom Hearts. Axel suggested he go show them how it’s done, and Vexen called on his valet—sorry, Replica—in order to dump a metric ton of salt into Sora’s wounds. This worked until the Replica kept running away (a fact that was in no way Axel’s fault or responsibility), and after a brief mathematical discrepancy Marluxia sent Vexen to deal with Sora instead as a test of his mettle and pride. Axel pointed out that Vexen was probably going to kill Sora at that rate, and Marluxia shot back with a slightly more flowery version of “I knew that, idiot,” and pointed out that Axel might want to get rid of Vexen and his chilly resolve before both endangered their plot to take over the Organization. Well, it was Marluxia’s idea, but Axel was kind of going with it for the moment.
So Vexen fought Sora and that sucked, and then Vexen fought Sora again and that sucked more, but Sora won anyway both times and Vexen decided to start blabbing everything Marluxia and Naminé and memories and lol you have a Nobody. That stuff simply was not cool with Axel, so he interjected for just a second to send that little loose end up in smoke and vanished to let Sora carry on. He didn’t seem initially affected by the event itself, and in fact seemed to relish taking Vexen out of the game, but after Sora’s visceral reaction to the sight he seemed as annoyed with Marluxia as if he’d been ordered to kill someone in front of Roxas. In fact, he was so annoyed that he single-handedly undermined their entire operation by letting Naminé run off while she was under his watch. But then, that might’ve been his plan all along. Who knows with Axel, seriously. Larxene complained about it, too, but it was really too late since Sora got rid of her after she broke the Replica and smacked Naminé around.
Axel popped down to the basement where Vexen’s cohorts used to hang out before Lexaeus died at Riku’s hand, all in order to have a friendly bet with Zexion over who was going to die next. Axel figured Marluxia, and Zexion figured Axel, and then Zexion went off to get rid of Riku since it didn’t look like he was going to be necessary. It sucks for Zexion that he wasn’t right, because once Marluxia died and Sora joined Naminé and the Replica ran off in a butthurt mess, Axel took Vexen’s old doll down to tie things up right by eliminating Zexion. And that was the end of everything Oblivion.
Axel took his sweet time coming back, too. Maybe he had to lie low while Sora was nodding off and DiZ was sniffing around, or maybe it was to make a dramatic entrance, but he was gone long enough for Roxas to get worried. The Keybearer had made friends with Xion in Axel’s absence, and kept hearing dire reports from Oblivion that someone had died—opp, someone else died—hey, y’know, everyone at Oblivion pretty much died just the other day—until it seemed completely ridiculous to assume Axel was still alive. He was, though, and showed up during one of Roxas’s missions out, indulging in their icy, cakey pastime before hitting the castle because he was in no hurry to get to the part where Saïx chewed him out. Thing was, Vexen and Zexion were people in Saïx’s way in the hierarchy, so in addition to knocking out the traitors Xemnas knew about Axel had no qualms with getting rid of those two as well. Icky jobs didn’t faze him.
As punishment for taking such a stupid long time, he got assigned to his next mission with Roxas, because the Organization obviously doesn’t understand how to shot punish. They were out in search of Xion, who’d gone missing during a mission the other day. After a bunch of asking around and Pence being a smartaleck, the two of them tracked her down in front of Twilight Town’s mansion, trying to fight an invisible thing that she’d spent a day and a half looking for. Once she was rescued, the newly established trinity took their habit to the clock tower and did that crap for days. And then a problem arose, because Xion had this run-in with an Organization imposter that sent her into a coma. All this could have been avoided if she wasn’t sent after the imposter, since admittedly that makes absolutely no sense in the first place. The guy wasn’t a Heartless, and even if it had to be a Keybearer because the Organization was worried another two or three of them might get wiped out, Roxas had more experience between them. Xemnas probably sent her and not a team of lances and chakrams and water clones because he knew she was repairable and replaceable, but in that single gesture he unwittingly jeopardized his own plans to the point of irretrievability. Peachy.
At any rate, while she was out Roxas flew like a bird at Neverland and asked Axel to ask Saïx just what the hell was up with Xion. Axel did and got no answers, it sucked. She woke to a mission happening between Roxas and Axel, and Axel wheedled Saïx into making it the most awesome trinity mission that ever awesome’d. And at the end of it Xion conked again and Axel carried her bridal style back to the castle and it was fabulous. Saïx got derisive again, and then Xion suddenly found out she couldn’t use the Keyblade. Axel devised a plot to keep the busted Keybearer with the properly functioning one, so all they had to do was make Roxas work double duty to keep Xion alive. Saïx didn’t like any of this right from the get-go, but apparently he and Axel were still close enough that wheedling worked wonders, so things went well up to a point. Fortunately enough, on what was to be their last dual mission together, Xion rediscovered her ability to summon the Keyblade. The Keyblade showed up on the clock tower for the first time ever and Xion dedicated its summoning to Roxas and Axel in a move so cute a kitten blew up.
Then things went right back to normal, except for the fact that they didn’t. Xion got interested in Castle Oblivion and Axel tried to diffuse that interest, but she still ended up running over there when he just happened to be cleaning out the castle. She got into some stuff she shouldn’t have—stuff he’d already discovered—and when Axel got back to see Roxas he couldn’t bring himself to say so. Then she started seeing this blindfolded guy, and worst shot straight to worst when she eloped with him. When he was sighted at Oblivion, Roxas wanted to run over there, and Axel got Saïx to allow it with the two of them. Except Roxas passed out just past the threshold so that little dealio didn’t work.
Axel popped over to Twilight Town with the comatose Roxas, who shouted Riku’s name when he awoke, and apparently that worked like a summon because Riku and Xion showed briefly before tearing off again. Saïx sent them both out to Twilight Town, Roxas to deal with the imposter and Axel to bring Xion in bondage style. Roxas started chasing the imposter only to find out it was Xion, and he tried to convince her to come back with him, but she was clearly too disillusioned to do so. Axel knew it, too, so they engaged in a little scuffle, but when Roxas shouted for them to stop Xion actually did and Axel knocked her out in order to bring her back. This really, really ticked Roxas off, like damn did it tick him off, and Axel knew it did, but still mostly acted normal in spite of things. His arguments with Saïx didn’t illuminate anything except that he was going to have to choose between them, a fact that was growing more and more obvious, although for a little while it looked like Xemnas was going to choose for him.
Ultimately Xion was saved on a technicality: the fact that she was preventing Sora from waking. But things got worse from there. She wasn’t just sapping memories from Roxas, she was sapping his strength as well, and Axel told her so when she finally asked. Roxas grew more fragile and Axel and Xion were both delicate around him, but Roxas didn’t see any reason to stop pushing himself and neither did Saïx. In a particularly underhanded bit of manipulation, Roxas and Xion were assigned to the same Heartless, only they were each deluded to believe that the other one was the Heartless. Axel got between them at the critical moment, “meddling again,” and they had their last day on the clock tower together. Axel finally mentioned to them that they might wanna check their ice cream sticks for the chance at being a WINNER!, and Roxas recalled just then that he’d gotten one, but didn’t say so. It didn’t really matter, because Axel didn’t know what the WINNER! thing meant, anyway.
The next day meant a mission for Axel, Xigbar, and Xion, and Roxas ran solo to Twilight Town. Tensions exploded in Wonderland for the trio, though, and Xion took on Ventus’s image to Xigbar’s eyes. She took him out and told Axel that she didn’t have any more time, revealing to him that she now (most likely) looked exactly like Sora. Axel let her go, and then got chewed out for it by both Saïx and Roxas when he tried to explain to Roxas what Xion really was. While Axel got his orders to bring Xion back, Roxas went out and placed a device that the Organization didn’t see fit to explain to him, and then when he couldn’t get anything else out of Axel, he lost it, left behind his WINNER! stick, beat Saïx into putty, and ran away from the Organization, passing Axel in his fateful walk out. Xion got to Naminé, but then Axel crashed the party, spilling all his frustrations to her in a final rant born of being clotheslined back and forth between responsibility and kinda-sorta-maybe-I-hope-genuine friendship, and the fight ended in his favor. Beaten to the point of collapse, he got all the way to the castle before he did and Xemnas took Xion to be fixed again. Alone in his room later, with Xion dead at Roxas’s hand and Roxas comatose at Riku’s, Axel found the WINNER! stick and tried to figure out how everything had turned out so wrong.
It didn’t end there, either. Like Xion before him, whose memory started disappearing from the moment of her death, Roxas became Axel’s target. He’d been uploaded into a false Twilight Town, given a new personality and a new set of false friends to lose, and Axel discovered the hard way that Xion’s wasn’t the only memory erased from Roxas’s mind. He faced the kid during the Struggle tournament, but DiZ interfered. Xemnas gave the order to eliminate Roxas totally, apparently preferring to have Sora awake and assembling Kingdom Hearts at half-potential or just out of being such a sore loser, but Axel had to be convinced through force. So a few days later he took Roxas on outside of the usual spot—but DiZ interfered. Finally, with the computer smashed and Roxas about to rejoin Sora, Axel tore into him in the basement of the mansion and lost. Inevitably, horribly.
He fell into DiZ’s hands with Naminé, and Riku was ordered to get rid of them both, but instead he let them go. Naminé still wanted to see Kairi and Axel still wanted to see Roxas. So they compromised, and Axel went to collect Kairi. However, he wasn’t honest with her about who he wanted her to see, and even if he was she probably wouldn’t have trusted him. King Mickey obviously didn’t like any of it anyway and sent a portal to Kairi’s aid, which led her to the real Twilight Town where Sora had already met up with the real Hayner, Pence, and Olette after waking. Axel followed and took her from there, but in the process of bringing her to Naminé he was intercepted by Saïx. The Organization took her into custody, and Axel encountered Sora at Hollow Bastion, where he explained Xemnas’s goal and apologized for getting Kairi involved. Saïx cut that one short, too, and Axel spent the next rest of Sora’s adventure fleeing from Nobody ambush after Nobody ambush, culminating in the Dusk armada that separated Sora from the World That Never Was. Axel was no longer the example of speed and strength he used to be, and cleared the way in a final firework. The truth was, in tracking down Sora, he’d been trying to see Roxas. But Sora made him feel the same way, which had been the truth even a year ago when he held out a hand to the Keybearer at Oblivion. His death brought out Roxas in a battle with Sora, and their consciousnesses met for just a frozen moment in time on the clock tower, ephemeral as a tear.
Weapons:
Chakrams: A pair of fire-resistant wheels, resembling Chinese wind and fire wheels, with eight spikes around the ends of each. They boomerang back to Axel’s hand when thrown.
Magic:
Fire: Axel has dominion over fire in general, but he has specific habits. He works through a combination of long and short-range attacks, but if he feels the opponent is getting too close he can dissuade them with a series of chakram attacks, a fierce barrage of fireballs, or an upward-slicing line of flaming pillars. This can also serve to knock them back into the circle of flames, if he’s using it at the time.
Arena of fire: At his command, fire will leap up in a circle around Axel’s opponent and himself and the floor will turn to magma. He can keep this up on the short or long term unless a counterattack obliterates it, and as long as his opponent is trapped inside Axel can leap through the flames to recover on the other side and attack from any angle.
Teleportation: If Axel is working with an arena of fire, this technique is unnecessary, as he can just leap through the flames to escape attack. But if he’s in a wide-open area, he can disappear briefly into a combination of flames and darkness and reappear several feet away. This is not comparable to his Organization standard ability to open Corridors of Darkness, as it’s much faster and only works over a short distance.
Explosion: If Axel is already in dire straits, a more severe form of this attack will also harm him and weaken him to the point of imminent death. But the usual form is milder, manifesting in a charging period followed by a debilitating explosion with a small radius. However, the floor catches fire in a much larger radius around him and makes the Glide ability extremely useful for the attack’s duration.
Summons:
Assassins: Axel can summon Assassin Heartless, which attack from the ground in punishing strokes and block all attacks until the victim counters. They can also float and attack from the air, and in a dire situation they will run into their opponent and explode in a kamikaze attack.
Can't believe my eyes how can you be so blind[/font]
Role Play Sample:
Light woke him.
It filtered through the window in a column, patiently warming the fingers curled by his lips and the cheek marked purple by a tear he'd never cried. He was numb to it for hours, finally twitching out of some dream and squinting reproachfully at life. "Fghn." Rustle of sheets and the limp waterfall of red took his place, but only for so long. Once he realized this wasn't his room back--could he call it home?--nor the inn at Twilight Town, he seemed shocked into movement in a spring upward.
The burns were gone.
Thank heaven for that, too. They would have been a pain to deal with today, but the liberally applied Potions must have taken care of it while they were lulling him into sleep. Part of him had been (scared wasn't the word) concerned that maybe his fingers had been damaged, and his hands wouldn't be as dexterous with his weapons as they always had anymore. It had been such a destructive fire and he hadn't cared for a second. But a quick rundown on all ten proved they danced equally fast as always--double-jointed as they were--and he dropped back against the mattress in something like relief, letting the sheet settle back against his bare hips and the back of one hand rest over his eye.
For just a moment, the fire cooled to embers. Axel seemed to stop dead and let the other eyelid drift closed, thinking distantly of the work to be done. The steps to be taken. It seemed far from this morning, and in this little moment of peace, couldn't he say he was glad to be alive again?
Jade snapped open, flint striking with a spark--and the phoenix born in his own ashes rekindled.
-
Downstairs the redhead from the other day was gone, Axel wasn't sure where and didn't linger on it. Sure, Reno had made him think of Lea, but it wasn't like his Somebody could share the same space with him. That was Roxas's angle, not his.
Not that he minded wishing.
Crap breakfast collected from the barista and Axel sallied on outside with one blackened finger still hooked around a donut, grumbling inwardly about the toughness and not bothering for a second to put his hood up. Sure, he had to resort to that before, and he still didn't like that he'd had to. But that had been after waking, heartless and charred, from the bonfire.
Sora's friends would be pushing their luck to come and mess with him now.
At some point he'd have to straighten that out, but it wasn't a priority. If he was back, he had to consider the possibility that he wasn't the only one. It'd been a year since Oblivion so he could pretty much rest assured all those bastards had stayed good and dead like he left them, so that left the ones Sora had cleaned up--supposing Sora had indeed gone and cleaned up the remaining Xemnas, Xigbar, Saix, annnnd...Luxord? Had Luxord been left? Axel didn't really remember or care, he wouldn't have been much of a challenge for someone who had already taken down individuals like Marluxia and Xaldin. The cloaked figure who left Namine in Axel's hands meant that Sora wasn't the only one on the playing field, so he could safely assume that Saix and Xigbar had been taken out by one or the other.
Hell. The thought that Saix could be gone for good. Funny how his memories still manipulated his impressions there.
Anyway, that meant Xemnas was the only true threat.
So on a whim, Axel turned his footsteps in the direction of the old castle; perhaps if the attack had gone awry, Xemnas with his background in the Heartless sciences would retreat here. It would kill some time while he postponed opening a Corridor to Darkness, lest he got instantly tracked, and he could always run into someone with more information before he had to take off.
How did you find us: Advertisement
Custom title:
[color=FF3000]Flurry of Dancing Flames[/color]Codeword: Time Gate
-----------------------------
Template made by Pandalotus, DO NOT STEAL![/center][/size]
