#this is an Ostercat post

[osterby]

This the look of a boy with a Myspace account.

I hadn't paired the Shire boots with the maid dress before because they just didn't look right with all the white.

And now...... :DDDD

[osterby]

Ostercat refused from the start. Aside from "screw your social conventions, you're not the boss of me and I'm a real person", he was very uncomfortable with the idea that they're made out of living butterflies (he's comfortable with leather from dead animals, but he watched Hyth transmute a live animal into a garment right in front of him and it skeeved him out).

Alivion tried very hard to fit in at first, but the robes were itchy and he kept tripping over them, and after the first couple of quests he just went with his usual jeans and no shirt (he's an Ala Mhigan, he can't help it).

So I have an odd little question for the FFXIV players out there, as a few of my friends have independently done it

(Reblog with the color you dyed them if so!)

[osterby]

One thing I like to think about with my WoLs is jobs and classes that they learned not as combat skills or professions, but as part of a childhood education.

Ostercat grew up in Gridania, the youngest (and spoiled) son of a comfortably middle class family. He was taught the basics of conjury alongside harpisichord, history, and mathematics.

Alivion's childhood was spent in pre-plot-point Ala Mhigo. He learned a non-combat version of Monk that was taught a spiritual practice and dance form.

Indil'li is non-Gridanian Shroud Miqo'te. He was bowhunting quite literally before he could walk (Miqittens learn to climb long before they're walking on two feet), it's as natural to him as eating with a fork is to you. Bard was a new discipline, but walked into that guild as probably a lvl 90 archer.

[osterby]

This might just be the greatest item in the entire game. If only it were a consumable or furniture item.

Ostercat is making these for himself, G'raha, Y'shtola, and X'rhun (Y'shtola's comes in discreet packaging that isn't opened until the non-Miqote scions are out for the day).

[osterby]

[eyes emoji] nr 6 from the ask game for your pals in the critically acclaimed mmo?

"How easily could your OC be convinced to do something that goes against their moral compass?"

Going for the throat, I see.

Ostercat will balk at nearly anything, but caves in to peer pressure pretty easily. If two people he likes and trusts were to ask him twice each, he'd do it, doesn't matter what it is. He'll fuss about it the entire time, and try to back out a few times along the way, but he doesn't really have a rigid sense of morality that will make him not do something just because. He believes very strongly in being kind and helpful and caring, and in not hurting people if at all possible, but his willingness to do what's expected of him is just a little bit stronger.

________

Alivion will very easily toe the line of his own morality for what he believes to be a good cause, but nothing will ever make him actually cross that line. He has considered it -- twenty years in the Ala Mhigan Resistance will bring out the desperation in someone -- but he never did and he never actually would, and the idea that he could scares him. He's had moments where he has worried that he's one bad day away from turning into Ilberd, but that final straw never actually comes, he's always managed to keep himself just on this side of the line, bad day after bad day.

Ultimately, that's the difference between him and Ilberd. Betraying one's own is something Alivion believes should never be done under any circumstances; no matter how important the intended result, the end cannot justify that means for him.

When Ilberd headed off to Baelsar's Wall with most of Ala Mhigo's surviving soldiers, Alivion didn't try to stop him. Alivion believed that operation would be yet another skirmish with a high body count. But after the fact, he sometimes thinks about what he would have done if he'd known. If he had known that Ilberd was going to sacrifice fellow Ala Mhigans to summon a primal, and that the plot would ultimately work and force the Eorzean Alliance to finally do something about Garlemald, would he have tried to stop him? Alivion himself doesn't know, but I know that even then he would have stayed firmly on this side of his uncrossable line.

[osterby]

Alivion had a father who was executed by Theodoric for Rhalgrite reasons, and a mother who was executed by Gaius for running a spy network for the Resistance. That was all he had. Alivion was a late teen and young adult for this; some of his mother's friends from the Resistence were there for him when he needed them, but he was done being raised and does not consider them family per se)

***

Ostercat's father and nephew to died in the Calamity. The rest of his family (mother, three much older siblings, a couple of inlaws, and a whole gaggle of nieces and nephews close to his age) are alive and well and he's been in sporadic contact with some of them since he started getting his memories back during the Stormblood patches. He was on good terms with all of them when he lost his memories circa Calamity, but he's a great big chicken about this entire situation and tends to solve problems by hiding under the sofa.

This is his adoptive family and the only one he counts as family. He never met his birth parents.

Feel free to elaborate in notes, reblogs, etc!

For the purposes of this poll, "family of origin" means any family who raised them at any point in childhood, including adoptive family.

[osterby]

Ostercat's opinion of the entire Pandaemonium raid is that all the critters there are sad because they're trapped in a dungeon, and if he let them all out into the main part of Elpis they would he happy and everything would be OK. He's kinda scared of that fire chicken, but he'll just use a stick to undo the latch without getting too close, and that should be fine, right?

Elpis scares him, he still believes that everyone there wants to dissect him and is lying about everything. He's convinced himself that every "ferocious" creature there feels the same way he does, and that letting everything out would be the only way to solve the problems. And if the Sewer Horse eats a few Ancients, they had it coming.

[osterby]

Ostercat didn't change much between Crystal Tower and Shadowbringers. He got some of his memories back, and acquired both new trauma and new stability, but he didn't really change. For someone who knew him in the CT era, meeting him again at the start of ShB wouldn't really inspire thoughts of the person he's become, they'd just be like "oh hey, it's Ostercat". G'raha, however, did change. A lot. In the hundred years of lived experience since he last saw Ostercat, he founded a city, became a parent, and developed an entire new role for himself as a staid and wise leader, with a persona to match.

And in the several hundred years of erased divergent timeline, Ostercat's story changed. What had been embellished and romanticised reports of the Scions' actual doings in Ostercat's lifetime turned into improbable tales of the Warrior of Light. And G'raha had a full century to read those tales and let them warp his memories of Ostercat.

When G'raha finally saw Ostercat, after a hundred years of waiting for him, it wasn't Ostercat he saw, it was a hero out of a myth. G'raha shocked himself repeatedly throughout Shadowbringers with his own memories of Ostercat as merely fellow Miqo'te. He was surprised less by how Ostercat had changed over time, and more by how his own expectations had ran away with themselves.

What he expected of the Warrior of Light was not the guy he'd ran Crystal Tower raids with, but a hero of legend who had never existed in the first place. A hundred years of wistfully re-reading the same legends over and over made him forget who his idol actually was.

G'raha wasn't disappointed by the reality, though. Every time Ostercat did something that reminded him that he was just a guy, G'raha simply saw past it to the hero he was sure Ostercat could be. Which didn't do Ostercat any favours, in the long run. Shadowbringers was rough on him, and being pushed to be a hero he never was, to live up to a legend that was even greater than the stories he ignored back home on the Source, just made him feel smaller by comparison.

[osterby]

BEHOLD! An HD catboy!

I have wanted to dress him up in black frills since literally day one. I remember hitting levelcap in HW and getting the Shire gear and being overjoyed because it was the closest to loligoth I could get for him. Look how far we've come.

[osterby]

LotRO Alivion knows better than to mess with that stuff. He a bit overconfident and is sure he could resist it and just throw it away with only a bit of reluctance, but he's old enough to know better than to put that to the test. He would never touch it the thing and find out, which is for the best because in reality he'd be more likely to go Dark Lord on us with it.

FFXIV Alivion would be the most resilient of the lot, despite having the most to tempt him with. He could carry the thing to Mount Doom and huck it in the fire himself; he'd struggle every step of the way, but he'd make it in the end.

FFXIV Ostercat is an odd one, and it would depend on where you catch him in his timeline and how much of his weird magic transfers into a setting with the Ring. In his early timeline and/or without his weird magic, he'd be functionally identical to an average hobbit, and therefore able to throw away the ring with help. At other points in his storyline, he'd be either particularily susceptible and go Gollum on us within an hour of seeing the thing, or particularily resistant and able to carry it and lay it aside with no ill effects, but this would be his magic interacting with the Ring's magic, and not anything about his actual will or personality.

LotRO Osterbree would be painfully average: he'd probably try to use the Ring for something small and not for himself, like keeping a few friends in the Shire safe or hauling a Ranger out a dungeon somewhere (Rangers have hauled him out of dungeons on more than one occasion, why not return the favour?), but the guy is painfully human and not even a strong willed one, so he'd end up in thrall to the Ring pretty quickly.

Would your OC be able to throw away The One Ring? Would they struggle to do it?

.

[osterby]

I love Ostercat's little house so much.

The Namazu seance corner is, of course, the highlight, but I just really like what I've done with the place overall.

He's got a cozy and functional kitchen

A bedroom that I guess I can't call unfinished anymore (but which could still use some extra stuff)

The Plant Room, which was initially meant to be a bathroom and then I just kept throwing plants in there until it turned into a profusion of verdancy. There are even fish in a pond for Ostercat to chase around!

The upstairs is actually unfinished (and will probably stay that was into perpetuity), but features a cheesehenge that I built in some kind of fit during the Ishgard crafter rankings, and also some frogs and a fish called a Corpse-eater. This is normal.

The yard is nice, too. It's got a huggable ghost and a picnic spot that's hard to screenshot because the dense foliage makes the camera clip

[osterby]

WIP game!

Tagged by @ladyswillmart :D

Rules:

Make a new post

Embolden the themes that appear in your WIP

Italicise those that are loosely covered

Tag people

So I've got two WIPs (under the working titles of "Ostercat Dismembers Zenos" and "Unsupervised Catboy" (which is the one where Indil'li kinda sorta does necromany to get the Elementals to give Wilred back) and I'm just going to lump them both together for this

addiction | beauty | betrayal | change vs. tradition | chaos vs. order | circle of life | coming of age | communication | convention vs. rebellion | corruption | courage | crime and law | dangers of ignorance | darkness and light | death | desire to escape | desperation | dreams | displacement | empowerment | facing darkness | facing reality | faith vs. doubt | fall from grace | fame and fortune | (found) family | fate | fear | fear of failure | free will | fight vs compromise | friendship | fulfillment | good vs. bad | government | greed | guilt and forgiveness | hard work | heroism | hierarchy | honesty | hope | identity crisis | immortality | independence | individual vs. society | inner vs. outer strength | innocence | injustice | isolation | knowledge vs. ignorance | life | loneliness | lost love | love | man vs. nature | manipulation | materialism | motherhood | nature | nature vs. nurture | oppression | optimism | peer pressure | poverty | power | power of words | prejudice | pride | progress | quest | racism | rebirth | relationships | religion | responsibility | revenge | sacrifice | secrets | self-awareness | self-preservation | self-reliance | sexuality | social class structure | survival | technology | temptation and destruction | time | totalitarianism | weakness | vanity | war | wealth | wisdom of experience | youth

[osterby]

My main job when I'm on Ostercat is White Mage, and that's close enough to canon that it's the short answer for his main job.

The not unshort answer is that he's a spooky blood magic reskin of White Mage, tanks via Ardbert's WAR jobstone which lives in his soul, and carries a sack of jobstones with him everywhere to equip as needed (and before Ardbert, he was helpless without that bag of rocks).

The long answer is as follows: Ostercat learned the basics of Conjury and magic theory as a schoolboy in Gridania. At one point (as a young adult, around the same time as the Calamity), he got hold of a Necromancer's job stone which mind-controlled him until a memory wipe from a mindflayer broke the connection. The Necromancy enmeshed itself with the Conjury, both disciplines dealing directly with the aether of life, and the Necromancer in the job stone also used very unseemly blood magic that would probably get you hanged in Gridania.

The memory wipe made Ostercat forget the formal education and theory and terminology of Conjury, and also the experience of being ridden by a Necromancer stone, but he didn't lose how to actually do the spells. This left him able to cast cast an amalgamation of Cure I and blood magic, but unable to tell the disciplines apart or to talk shop with other casters.

He gets around the issue of White Magic drawing too much aether from the world by simply converting his own blood into mana. This is unsafe and very frowned up, but most people wouldn't be able to see that that's what he's doing without special aether-measuring equipment. A skilled caster like Urianger can sense that there's something unusual about his use of aether, but can't pick up enough specifics to know what he's actually doingand just puts it down to a different school of magic. Y'shtola, however, can see exactly what he's up to with her special eyes, and his blood magic is their little secret. He didn't even know it was dangerous or socially unacceptable until she told him to please stop nearly bleeding out every time they ran into a new primal; he thought it was just how magic worked because it's how he always remembers doing it (cf the memory wipe). He just uses his own blood to make more mana to restore the blood he used to make the mana in a never ending loop, and didn't stop to consider you can't actually use the infinite chocolate hack in your own veins.

The White Mage class quest isn't canon, but he canonically has access to blood magic fueled versions of that full set of abilities. The blood lily is, indeed, bloody.

The wings WHM gets at lvl 80 (Temperance) happened because after spending all of Shadowbringers overbrimming with Light, he understood that element more intimately and was able to channel and use it productively once he was dealing with it in manageable quantities again.

Stone I through IV is closer to telekinises than anything (though it does involve directly manipulating wind), with him progressively being able to throw larger rocks and clods of dirt, but the rocks are never quite as big as the in-game animation would suggest; stone IV is a fist-sized lump of whatever is to hand (indoors, Stone might pick up candelsticks or crockery; anything made of mineral). Aero I and II is similar but with sand instead of dirt clods and somewhat lower effort.

Replacing Stone and Aero with with Glare and Dia is a result of the Light he absorbed in ShB; in the early stages of being a Light sponge, before it got debilitating, he figured out that he could manipulate the Light outside of himself and that this was more effective than throwing dirt at things. Afterwards, he realised that this works everywhere except the Void and is generally easier than turning blood into mana and using that manage to move the air into wind and using that wind to pick up a rock.

There is no Glare II or Holy II because he learned III directly from Venat in Elpis and skipped the systematic progression that a normal White Mage with more academics and less time travel would have done.

--

His definitely totally normal White Mage abilities are primarily restorative, and what little offensive skills he has are best at long range; this is not well suited to the whole Warrior of Light thing, and he uses jobstones to make up for it. He is also easily frightened and responds to threats by trying to hide behind the nearest big strong friend. Up through Stormblood, he was practically useless in combat without a jobstone.

All jobs are canon-ish for Ostercat, since he is very good with job stones and can just pick one up and let it take over in combat. He's stronger now than he was during the whole Necromancer thing (and legitimate job stones are designed to be equipped and uneqipped and shared, and not created by Necromancers trying to gain immortality through a jobstone and who dodn't care about the wellbeing of subsequent users), and can turn jobstones on and off at will.

--

Hien tried to teach Ostercat the basics of Samurai so he could at the very least have a chance of defending himself if he was caught without his bag of jobstones (something that very much did happen a few times). The result is that Ostercat knows how to hold a katana properly and can sometimes land a half-decent blow if he is very careful and the target is holding very still. Hien considers this an embarrasing failure, Ostercat is delighted with his progress. (This reflects the fact that I-the-player enjoyed playing Samurai during StB but am very bad at DPS in general and melee DPS in particular).

--

Warrior is also canon for Ostercat, and also not in a normal way. The part of Ardbert that merged with Ostercat is the part that would have gone into Ardbert's own job stone, so Ostercat has access to a full lvl 80 Warrior skill set when he sits back and lets Ardbert take over. Bloodwhetting, the lvl 82 leech heal, is Ostercat's own addition to the kit; it's just plain blood magic that he uses while Ardbert is doing all the tanking.

WoL/FFXIV OC Question(s)!

What is your WoL/OC's main class/job and why? Are they good at multiple roles? Are there any they're really bad at?

[osterby]

Ostercat keeps things more or less tidy. Clutter piles up a bit, but his spaces are always scrupulously clean and the furniture has to be in exactly the right place (cat reasons).

Alivion's spaces look organized yet grimy to the casual observer, but the truth is less that he's organized and more than he never unpacked. He is always prepared to pick up everything and move camp at a moment's notice.

wolqotd

Living spaces. Is your WoL tidy and organized, or are they the type to casually create mess and chaos around them?

[osterby]

I voted other, 'cause both my WoLs use names other than those given to them at birth, but didn't necessarily choose those names for themselves.

Alivion Skadisson's birth name is Alaric (just Alaric, no family name, I headcanon this as being not uncommon among Ala Mhigan Highlanders). The name Alivion was given to him by a friend of his mother's, without too much thought or reason; he needed a pseudonym quick and she blurted one out and it stuck for the next twenty years. Skadisson is a matronym which he took to remind himself, and anyone who knew his mother, why he fights. The Scions found out that "Alivion" is non de guerre when he told them he didn't need to think of a byname for the Night's Blessed because he was already using one.

Osterby Aster, as a Keeper of the Moon, would have been born with a name no matter if someone gave him one or not, but he's a foundling and no one ever knew what that name would have been. His parents gave him his name when they adopted him, and he's never used anything else.

[osterby]

Most of the job quests aren't canon for my WoLs, but of the few that are....

Ostercat is good friends with and had a wee bit of a crush on X'rhun Tia. He is easily impressed by men larger and stronger than himself (the bar is low) and X'rhun ticks all the boxes. But it was just a fleeting crush that nothing would come of, I don't think X'rhun noticed it, and current their relationship is past mentor/student turned friends and equals. Ostercat calls him Rhun.

Sometimes Ostercat invents some ungodly new "White" Magic and X'rhun is eager to incorporate it into the patchwork nonsense that is Red Magic, while Y'shtola looks on all "what the hell are you guys doing? That's not how it works, that's not how any of this works!"

Now if the guy would just deign to reenter the plot....

__

Ostercat was tutored in Conjury by E-Sumi-Yan. The class quest isn't canon for him, he learned the basics of CNJ in his teens as part of a classical education. This got memory wiped along with the rest of his pre-MSQ life, but when he did know E-Sumi-Yan it was as a teacher who assigned him slightly less boring homework.

The ARR WHM quest is more or less canon with some tweaks, and he sees Raya-O-Senna and A-Ruhn-Senna as colleagues. He knows them professionally but not personally, which is probably for the best because if they found out that his White Magic is actually fuelled by blood magic and has some straight up necromancy mixed in they'd be very concerned.

****

Alivion's MSQ started with him waking up at the Limsa aetheryte after being thrown out of the lifestream when Hydaelyn rezzed him (I needed a quick way to get him out of a mass grave in Ala Mhigo and into the canon starting areas). Jacke was the first to find him, assumed he'd had a few too many at the Drowning Wench, and pulled him off the street. They ended up taking a liking to one another, and Alivion stuck around the Rogue's Guild for a time while he found his feet.

When Alivion did get back into combat, he appreciated having some new skills that kept him out of the spotlight. It wasn't until Shadowbringers and Ardbert that he was comfortable tanking again. (Warrior and Gunbreaker are canon classes for him, but neither of the class quests are -- he picked them up in Ala Mhigo before MSQ. Rogue is canon but Ninja isn't, though he does know the Ninja NPCs as friends of Jacke's)

They've drifted apart since then -- Alivion has been busy, to put it mildly -- but when they do cross paths they always spend time catching up over a few drinks.

__

Alivion learned a non-combat version of Monk as a boy growing up in Ala Mhigo, so by the time he meets the Monk NPCs he already knows the discipline. Even without that, the Monk quests as written just plain don't work with his timeline and background.

He recognises Widargelt as the kind of overeager idiot who fills the ranks of the dead back home; he humoured him but intentionally did not get too involved. Alivion sees a lot of his past self in Widargelt, but not nessecarily in a good way. Had Alivion met Widargelt about two to five years into the Garlean occupation, when it had become clear that this was not going to be a quickly resolved issue but before Alivion had really settled in for the long haul, Alivion would have been all for Widargelt's stupid plan and when he went "I have to kill you to level up" Alivion would have just been like "does it work better if I fight back?". Another 15 years in the trenches changed how Alivion approached things, and by the time MSQ starts he's very much against self sacrifice because he's seen too much of it and already done it himself.

Despite all that, Alivion would absolutely not object to putting Widargelt on the throne. He's a bit of a romantic deep down.

(hilariously enough,while I was leveling Monk through the HW levels, I went rambling at a friend about some loose threads in the Stormblood plot, "They never actually asked the Ala Mhigans if they're actually done with monarchy, I'm sure most are but of course they won't all be of the same mind. Surely they've got a Bonnie Prince Charlie out there somewhere, and if they don't the situation is ripe for someone to produce one" and my friend just went "uhuh, uhuh". Like a week later I did the Stormblood Monk quests and was in her DM's all "HOW DID YOU JUST SIT ON THAT SPOILER?!")

Alivion hates Erik with a burning passion, and finding out the guy was Ala Mhigan only made it worse (I'm headcanoning that Erik deliberately lost the accent and other regional mannerisms, otherwise it'd have been obvious to Alivion from the first 30 seconds).

11/27/24

What is your wol(oc)’s relationship with their job mentor like?