#oc: vespera

[gallusneve]

This is cheesy and corny but here's my Shadow Dragons Rook, Vespera Mercar. I've put some of her "personality" on this paper lmao. I've tried replicating some of the tweets Bioware put out with the little messages. She's a messy coffee addict sweetheart.

Extra special thank you to the template maker, @riessene, for allowing full editing of their template! (x)

[friend-of-giants]

WIP Whenever

I've been tagged by @sheirukitriesfandom and @saltymaplesyrup to post some WIP goodies. No writing, but have some art!

Tagging @boethiahspillowbook @wildhexe @elfinismsarts @katastronoot @v1ctory-or-sovngarde and anyone else who wants to participate - consider yourself tagged.

A sketch of the lovely and feisty Vespera, who belongs to @boethiahspillowbook! I'm having fun working with her! Just wait til she has some color 👀

[orbees]

Re: that ace attorney post i just reblogged that is so vino and vespera... similar mannerisms/sprite animations. Vino emulating Vespy on a subconscious level... dork

[vershl]

your fankid looks alot like Emthim's fankid Steller... did you copy her?

@emthimofnight Sorry for tagging you in this fuckassery, but I drew Stellar. <3 To answer the ask:

TLDR; I didn't copy Emthim, these color palettes and markings are everywhere in the fankid community. I love her and her art, and I will eat both her fankids and my tiny one.

--- ---

No. I did not copy Stellar. Vespera's colors and markings were purely coinflipped (aside from the star, that was already going to happen because of Shadow's nickname 'starlight' for her).

Many fankids share similar color palettes AND markings AND backstories. Vespera shares the same origin story with Stellar and many, many other fankids. The whole test tube baby created by Eggman stealing DNA from Shadow and Sonic is a popular one, and mine does have differences.

The only thing Emthim gave me, was the aggressive urge to make my own fankid. Her art and posts of Stellar and her other fankids were attacking my feed while I was out of town in another state, the post of my Dadow and Vespera I drew the same day I got home from an 8 hour drive LOL.

[koukouture]

"In your darkest hour, in your blackest night... think of me... and I will be with you. Always. For where else could I go? Who else could I love but you?"

Dark Knight my beloved <3 Never thought I'd play a tank in this game but man DRK got me...

[gaybravado]

More doodles of Reborn EK Ami for new game feat. his brother, Rune. I want to get better at drawing backs and arms so I got rid of his sleeves.

[s-milesart]

The Night Watchwoman of The Abbey - Sister Vespera.

ooh, even some lighting and glasses tests!

[foxybatty]

The wheel spoketh!! Babies upon ye The gorl on the right is @vershl 's oc baby Vespera <3

[kale-of-the-forbidden-cities]

Vespera Folend Lore Dump <3

[Vespera Folend Lore Dump]

tw: murder, death, sexual assault, child abuse, adult/minor stuff, mentions of suicide/attempted suicide(?), self harm

[tw: murder, death, sexual assault, child abuse, adult/minor stuff, mentions of suicide/attempted suicide(?), self harm]

none of the above is depicted in a positive light. i do not support any of it i'm just doing what i do best, giving trauma to fictional characters

it's vespera. of course it's not a walk in the park.

Vespera had a sister named Zyti, who was five years older than her. As a child, Vespera was not talkative. Like, at all. She didn't speak at birth like most elves do, and her parents made no effort to teach her to speak. The only one who did was Zyti.

When Vespera was four (and Zyti was nine), their parents left them outside the human/elvin city of Atlantis. They were told to wait for them to come back, but they never did. The two sisters stayed there together all night, until they were found in the morning by a half human, half elf who took them into his home.

He told them to call him Father, and he provided them with shelter, food, all the basic needs. But... he wasn't a good father. He reminded them that they were in debt to him, because he'd saved them from the streets and what would certainly have been their death. And because of that... they had to do whatever he said.

Father physically, emotionally, and even sexually abused them. He punished them for doing anything he didn't like - including normal child things, like playing around, or crying. It became safer for them to just do nothing at all. Suppress how they really feel. Now, Father spoke both the Enlightened Language and a human language that is long since extinct. The only ones who know it are Vespera and a handful of other ancients who may have lived in Atlantis before it sunk. But Vespera lost the little progress she had made in speaking when Father adopted her, and only became fully fluent at seven years old. It's also part of what contributes to some of her speaking habits she still has today - while some of that can be contributed to her being ancient and locked away for thousands of years, she does tend to not use contractions as much, for example.

Vespera and Zyti were not let out of the house, until Zyti was a teenager, and was allowed to run errands and such. While out, she met a human named Achim, who was... a generally violent guy. He was an adult, while Zyti was around fourteen.

While not quite numb yet, Vespera had been emotionally shut off since she was a child. She was extremely apathetic, living through the days just for the sake of it, enduring everything from Father, and when she was allowed out under supervision, she mostly just observed people. All kinds of people.

Light leaping hadn't been invented yet, and Atlantis was one of the most diverse places, species-wise. It was mostly humans, as they had founded the city, and elves settled with them, being the most similar in appearance, and even creating some human/elf hybrids like Father. (when atlantis was later sunk, those hybrids were cast out with the humans, meaning there are humans today with small bits of elf DNA. humans didn't used to have blue eyes before mixing with elves.) You'd also see a few other intelligent species passing through, there was a section of town where a few families of ogres lived, since they didn't really have one big land yet, and the world was less divided by species at the time.

Vespera could sit in one place for hours, so still that a bird landed on her once and she didn't even move. She observed everyone she saw. It was her only hobby. She was more invested in these people's lives than she'd ever been in her own - she would watch the same people come to the same places and learn about them, she'd know their habits and tendencies, she could make elaborate assumptions all without even knowing their names.

Zyti had begun to see how messed up everything with Father was, and frequently got into fights with him, insisting she was leaving forever and never coming back, and Father let her go, because he knew. He knew that every time her guilt would have her coming back after a few days at most. She couldn't leave.

Now, Zyti usually stayed with Achim during these days she left, but occasionally she would find someone else to stay with when Achim was away. One of these people was an elf who coaxed her into doing things she didn't want to. I won't go into detail, obviously, but... the result was, Zyti got pregnant. She was only sixteen, and she knew she couldn't hide it from Father forever. She felt like she owed it to him for him to know. Besides, while she hadn't meant to get pregnant, she cared about this unborn child. She didn't want anything that Father did to hurt the baby.

Vespera was in the room when Zyti told Father, and needless to say... it didn't go well. She kept her arms wrapped around her middle to do what she could to protect the child, and that night, she ran away to stay with Achim again, and when she explained the situation and what had happened, he was livid.

After three days of Zyti not coming back, Father took it out on Vespera. She took it all in silence, not once uttering a cry of pain or discomfort, she closed her eyes and imagined she was dying.

At the time, Vespera was eleven. She didn't cry. She wasn't truly there, in her mind. She had completely shut off.

That is, until, a few weeks later, Vespera heard a commotion downstairs. She slipped out of bed and watched as Achim, who had broken into the house with Zyti's help, brutally murdered Father. Father fought back, but Achim overpowered him. Zyti was the one to bring the blade to his throat when Achim had him pinned down. She was the one who took his life.

Vespera approached them, and they stopped. Zyti dropped the knife and backed away, fumbling to explain that they were finally free, he couldn't hurt them anymore. Achim insisted he'd deserved it. But Vespera wasn't listening to either of them. She kneeled by Father's body and began hitting him as hard as she could. Just punching his open wounds, returning a fraction of the hurt he had caused. Then she reached for the knife and stabbed him a couple times. After that, she began to cut off his hands. Like some way of making sure he couldn't ever hurt anyone ever again.

Zyti and Achim could only watch, until Vespera raised the knife to stab herself and end it all. Zyti grabbed her arms and easily wrestled it away from her, tossing it to the side. Vespera didn't react, and her sister helped her up. They began to walk further into the city to go to Achim's house.

On the way, Vespera suddenly started to cry. She couldn't take it anymore, she stopped walking and collapsed, she was crying that hard. It was tears built up over years and years of being disconnected from everything, it all hit her like a... well, trucks didn't exist back then but you get it. Achim picked her up and carried her from there.

When people eventually found the scene of Father's death weeks later, it was clearly a crime, but there wasn't much they could do about it. Father, Vespera, and Zyti had lived just on the outskirts of the city, and nobody really knew to connect them at all, and nobody could connect them to Father's murder. Not that anyone really missed him.

Months later, Zyti ended up having her baby, but she was barely making it through. The only reason she'd been holding on was for her child, but after it was born, she gave in and her mind broke from the guilt of killing the man who raised her. There was nothing Vespera or Achim could do. Vespera tried so many times to wake her sister up, but nothing worked. It was the most grief she'd ever felt and ever will feel.

Achim was almost just as devastated, and didn't cope with it well. He and Zyti had sort of maybe been dating, well, they had something, despite the age difference. He coped with this by sexually assaulting Vespera on multiple occasions, and she just took it. She accepted it. She hated all of it, her head was filled with such horrible thoughts, but she'd grown up to never say no to something like this, especially from the man responsible for keeping her sheltered and alive. After three years, however, when Vespera was fourteen, she snapped and shoved him out a window on one of the upper floors.

Zyti's son was somehow still alive, and how the baby managed to survive 3 years in the care of a violent human and a violent traumatized elvin preteen/teenager is beyond me, but he did somehow. Feeling incredibly Nothing, Vespera left him on the side of the road at night, not unlike what her parents did with her and Zyti.

He was later taken in by a different elvin family, who cared for him and raised him in a good way. At least someone gets a happy ending. He is still alive today, and knows nothing of his dark past and connection to Vespera, despite their resemblence. He is actually the [some amount of greats] grandfather to Councillor Oralie, making Sophie Foster and Vespera Folend very, very distantly related.

Vespera tried to build her own life, but she didn't know where to start. She lived in Achim's house, and when questioned, she told every single one of them that he had committed suicide. at least that got her their pity. but she never connected with any of them. She would sit on the very windowsill she'd told Achim to lean out of and watch the people going about their lives from a bird's eye view. She was notoriously "creepy." And when people passing by glanced up and saw her, they hurried away, not wanting to witness it if one day she followed what they assumed Achim had done.

Vespera also preferred to cover up as much skin as she could, ever since she killed Achim, she started only wearing sleeves up to her wrists, gloves, collars or cloaks that covered her neck, and skirts that reached the ground. sometimes she even went as far as to wear a veil, not only because of her aversion to touch, but also because it made her feel like she had no identity- which, she didn't. She felt more like a ghost, and she often wished she was one. The extra fabric also helped her to not become overwhelmed when she manifested as an Empath, which was a conflicting experience for her. Sometimes, she would hate to touch anyone at all, but in rare occasions, she would go out to pretend to bump into someone, just to get a brief feeling of something.

After a few years, she became less strict with herself by ditching the veil and the gloves, for the most part, and began slowly trying to ground herself by journaling instead of cutting or bruising herself (which she had been doing for years). She wrote about people she saw. she wrote about Father and Zyti. She wondered how Father and Achim could have been so violent while her sister broke under it all. Speculation about the potential strength of human minds, the seeds for what would later become a full on facility.

Things began to change very rapidly, with the invention of light leaping, elves Vespera had never seen before were popping up out of nowhere and settling here. And there was talk of a king? Well, she knew that a lot of the other species had rulers, but humans and elves both either had smaller leaders for different places, or just self-governed areas. But that was to change very soon.

One of the newcomers to Atlantis was Fintan Pyren, who she encountered when he was trying to push open a pull door. She hadn't laughed, like, ever, but it did make her smile. She might have even been amused. They began talking, and Vespera wondered if she was forming some sort of connection. they talked almost every day, he reminded her to take care of herself (that wasn't her strong suit), and she did what she does best- she sat in silence. But it turned out quietly writing with someone is much better than quietly writing alone.

However, the friendship she had with Fintan was nothing compared to what she had with Vespera. She began to open up to her, to genuinely trust her, prior to going numb. Luzia was truly enamoured of her, and Vespera had no idea if she truly felt the same, or if it was just her Empathy. And while they never fully undressed in front of each other, Vespera felt comfortable enough to show her arms and legs, which was huge for her. But then Luzia went and ratted her out to the council and stole her illusions and got her sent to prison.

the end <3

[sanctuary-101]

Zenos loves his pocket sized ball of trauma and rage

[gallusneve]

If I may suggest -- nevspera?

Ooooh that could be their shorthand ship name thank you! I was thinking of a quote or a line that represents both of them but I need the game to release stat 😭

[prntrink]

pov ur watching Igora debate Sorcerer's rights

[orbees]

Vespera definitely has transfem swag

[vershl]

...I made one. I'm very normal about them--

bites knuckles while sobbing

[koukouture]

I will forever think about this now because yeah this applies to an astounding amount of characters in ffxiv whom you could see their friendship with WoL as more of a convenience and how they use WoL as a tool. I think Aymeric is obviously guilty of it (bc of the above image) but I also think to some extent the Crystal Exarch is guilty of this (yeah ik it's not for HIS benefit but he still did kinda use WoL and he would not have taken it well if WoL stopped being a hero)

So many characters that are "friends" with WoL kind of only see them for what they can do. I think to some extent even the Scions are like that. Actually come to think of it, the Scions are the most egregious case of this because WoL is their champion. After we killed Ifrit that solidified WoL as something to be used and thrown at any danger that came at the world.

A lot of characters The Exarch included only know WoL as the hero. For what they can do for everyone else and it makes me insaaaannnneee. Likes yes OBVIOUSLY Exarch/G'raha admires the WoL as a hero and sure he got to know us for a time- but he just thinks that we are the hero from the books. WoL is inspiring; they give people hope and they give people the strength to push on but that's all he knows them for. Listen, I'm still on post Shadowbringers, but so far Exarch has done nothing but sing our praises as hero and yeah I'm sure he has good intentions but it's still a little dehumanizing that to him that's all WoL is. Everyone is free to make their WoL's relationships with the other characters whatever the hell they want ofc, but I kinda read a lot of the characters this way just because it's so easy to water down one person for only cherry picked parts of their whole personality. Celebrities are the best example of this but we also to this to the people around us every single day.

I think Aymeric and WoL's relationship has also sort of been put into question with this moment (for me at least) because now I'm thinking "Oh my god, Aymeric did extend his friendship to WoL for either his own gain or for that of Ishgard's" and it's not a rag on him I love Aymeric but he is a politician. I don't doubt he admires WoL for all they've done for Ishgard, but I also don't think that if Aymeric hadn't pushed us we wouldn't have ended the Dragonsong war. I wouldn't say he manipulated us, but he didn't exactly have any qualms about making us battle on the Steps of Faith for Ishgard- yk, the closed off nation that's pretty hostile to outsiders- despite not knowing us for super long at that point. He thought that we could get it done and was like "Sure. You can fight for my country" and yeah I think Alphinaud's handling of the whole thing was also to blame- but Aymeric being okay with letting an outsider deal with things that should be handled by the Temple Knights is kinda sus to me now lmao. Like you are in charge of Ishgard's military shouldn't YOU have dealt with this???? Okay lol.

Listen, obviously I still love Aymeric and Exarch/G'raha but I think the potential that they only see WoL for their deeds is great and would make for an interesting hurdle to get over in a relationship. Actually, you can literally just slap this onto almost any character you want to ship with your WoL and it will be an interesting point of tension. The possibility that they only love WoL for being the hero and not in spite of it.

Anyways I need to thibk about this more bc I just finished the little Elidibus plot of Shadowbringers which is sort of about how heroes are remembered and how history can easily twisted and/or forgotten so uh yeah. I have lots of thoughts and I am very normal.

[beckstbosas]

Hello everyone! I was the anon that sent in the ask about Felix and Livia and my ocs: Vespera and Xanthos to @persephoneprice

So...without further adieu, let me introduce them!

--

Vespera Maris Cardew Ravinstill

I see you as you see yourself through all the books you read

Overwhelmed with guilt and realizing the disease

Felix and Livia's daughter, Maris, is exactly like her parents. She's as witty as Felix and as beautiful as Livia. She is considered the it girl of her generation.

She is Xanthos' younger twin and the two are close to one another.

Maris, doesn't have much friends. By that, I mean true friends. Most people are only 'friends' with Maris because of her status and popularity.

To most people, she might seem mean, calculated, and cold. But, she's actually also very fragile. She often keeps all her emotions bottled up.

--

Xanthos Orion Cardew Ravinstill

So take it all

The city's yours

Worth fighting for

It's all mine

Felix and Livia's son, Xanthos, is exactly like his parents. As charming as Felix, and as protective as Livia. He is considered the heartthrob of his generation.

He and his sister aren't exactly similar. For instance, Maris is considered calculated, whereas Xanthos is considered reckless to their peers.

Unlike Maris, he's not technically worried whether they're only friends with him because of his status or whatnot, as long as he has friends.

His personality is described as protective, fierce, and cocky.

--

I headcanon that Felix Ravinstill and Livia Cardew died at some point when Maris and Xanthos were young because of Coriolanus' rise to power. Seven or eight, perhaps?

Their death caused Maris and Xanthos to turn out the way they are.