#particularly the 'secret' which applies to every timeline :3c

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

*points* you've been talking a lot about ruju lately so let's do fear, guilt, hunt, and secret for him (for that ask meme) >:)

oc asks: not-so-nice edition

Ty so much for giving me an excuse to talk about The Rat™ even if this is very, VERY late... And long. Whoops. This is going under a cut, I think all of your dashes will thank me for that later.

I'll stick to just his Commander verse for this batch!

fear: What is your OC's greatest fear? What do they do when confronted with it? Are they open with their fear, or do they hide it away?

At his core, what Ruju fears most is feeling helpless.

There aren't a lot of times in the present that he's truly cornered, but in his youth it was a lot more obvious; he learned early on just how cruel his peers could be, and how eager they were to circle even the smallest hint of blood in the water. So he stopped showing the world he was scared. He buried it all deep, deep down and put on the air of confidence and aggression worn by so many Inquest because, well, nobody dares to mess with THEM, right? Better to blend in with the sharks than wind up as chum for the real deal.

But helplessness is more complicated than just being cornered in a fight. He's afraid of so much more than that; that his choices won't matter, that everything he's done will be for nothing, that forces he can't control will steamroll it all no matter what he does, that he just plain isn't enough for the role he's trying to fill. That fear only grew more and more as each dragon fell, the next picking up more and more new powers from each one he's taken down. What if he's just making it worse? What if that monstrous version of himself from the Infinity Ball was right-- what if the future really is unavoidable?

What if the one obstacle he'll never be able to surpass is himself?

Ruju doesn't let anyone see the deeper layers of his motivation, though. He pushes harder, fights fiercer, burns brighter. He won't let anyone see him falter. At its worst, it creates a vicious cycle of intense impulsiveness and aggressive independence, rushing past everyone else to reduce the number of variables and just deal with it. His solutions are direct and violent; as long as it works, he doesn't really care what the consequences are. And more importantly, it gives an outlet to his burning need to do something.

It takes a long time and a lot of work for Ruju to start trusting and leaning on others more instead. Even then, though, his most natural instinct is still to bristle like a cornered animal-- and if you jam your hand where it shouldn't be, he might not pause long enough to consider whether you're a friend or a foe. Watch your fingers, he bites.

guilt: What is your OC guilty about? How do they handle their guilt? Do they try to avoid guilt, or do they accept it?

While there's lots of little things-- rude remarks, losing his temper, impulsive choices, and so on-- those he usually apologizes for shortly after. He hates leaving things to fester. Ruju knows himself well enough to recognize that if he doesn't deal with it right then, he'll default to option 2 which isn't particularly great for anybody.

By far Ruju's heaviest guilt is the knowledge he bears of the future, and what he might become for reasons not even he understands. The only person who knows prior to EoD is Zojja-- and he had no more contact with her than anybody else by that point. While he wants to believe that he's fighting to make the world better, there's always a part of him that's afraid the 'Sovereign' was right and the path he's following is going to doom the entirety of Tyria. Ruju hopes that he's making better choices this time, but how can he know for sure?

What if he's just leading all these people right to their doom?

But he handles that just about as well as he handles his guilt about being a notorious college bully: avoidance. He just tries not to think about it, focusing on the future and keeping himself busy and hoping it never comes up again. It doesn't work particularly well, though, once the void finally shows itself-- and at that point he cracks.

Ruju has something that his other, doomed version didn't, though.

When he falters, he has people who care enough to catch him.

And once everything is out in the open, he does confront it; it's a complicated conversation (and one not even Taimi dares to make more than a single jab about) but it does lead to Ruju becoming much more honest moving forward. After all it's not like he can get any worse than THAT, right? 'Possibly causing the apocalypse' is a bit hard to beat.

hunt: Who or what is your OC hunted by? A person, a feeling, a past mistake? Is your OC able to let their guard down, or are they constantly alert?

The shadow looming over Ruju's shoulder has always been his own-- his past and his future. He never really felt its weight until the Infinity Ball showed him one of his potential futures in all its grisly, self-destructive glory, but knowing what he does now? Ruju is keenly aware of his own impulsiveness and is in a constant fight to choose a better path; in more ways than one he really is his own worst enemy.

And if not that, there's his unstable magic to worry about, too. His fiery disposition isn't just in personality; Ruju's power is destructive, and at times it can be a genuine challenge to keep it in check.

But as time progressed and he gained meaningful bonds of trust, learning to lean on his friends and allies... He's gradually come to realize that the best way to keep himself in check is to rely on people who can catch him when he stumbles. Ruju has found exactly the support network that his doomed timeline never had-- and together they ensure that the future he witnessed will never come to pass.

The Doomed Sovereign was wrong; there may be no delaying the future, but that doesn't mean you can't choose how it goes.

By the time the Dragon Cycle ends, he finally knows they've won.

secret: What's one secret your OC never wants anyone to know about them?

There's actually a reason Ruju's magic is so potent and unstable.

His parents worked at the Crucible of Eternity, with his mother being a high-ranking researcher working directly under Kudu. As a refresher crash course: Kudu's whole deal was controlling and weaponizing dragon corruption, with him even applying Branded corruption to HIMSELF so that he could control powerful dragon minions.

His mother wanted to be home more, but her position also required long hours-- so she took to bringing some research materials to her home lab, continuing her studies right under their roof. While she was out, Ruju got into her lab and tried to 'assist' with her research; after all, if all her work was done then she'd have more time to spend with her family, right? But, well, he didn't exactly know what any of this stuff was, or just how dangerous it could be.

The ensuing lab accident destroyed basically all the records they had so far, along with making him deathly ill from exposure to multiple heavily altered strains of dragon corruption. They didn't expect him to survive, let alone make a full recovery seemingly unscathed.

But when he did recover, while Ruju didn't show any obviously visible signs of dragon corruption... He did develop some extremely unusual qualities that they couldn't quite explain. A lot of the top secret research that the asura kept under wraps about dragon minions? They confirmed it from secretly studying him. The biggest breakthroughs were confirmations of dragon minions absorbing magic-- something they directly observed from him accidentally draining nearby power sources and reacting to ambient magic-- and being able to stabilize strains enough for Kudu to weaponize.

Ruju never knew about this until he got into the records at the Crucible of Eternity, though. Zojja saw it too, but they never really talked about it; after all, what was there to say?

And after seeing how the world felt about the sylvari... He decided that there was no way he could EVER tell anyone what he was.

If they couldn't even handle the comparatively stable liberated minions of a dragon, they definitely wouldn't be able to handle a medically inexplicable volatile freak like him. Most running theories in the present are that it has to do with being the Champion of Aurene, and he's certainly not about to tell them otherwise.