APPLICATION.

[versorecto]

⏵ player information
name and pronouns: Caleb (aka Rocket), he/they
age: 21++
contact: Journal PM / dragonpunch

⏵ character information
name: Verso
canon: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
age: > 100 years, probably

ENDGAME SPOILERS for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 beyond this point.
CONENT WARNING: Verso (and the canon in general) deals with themes of suicidal ideation, depersonalization, derealization,
torture and subsequent trauma.

canon point: End-game, the "A Life to Paint" (AKA Maelle's) ending, right after he loses the final duel to Maelle.

history: Wiki.

abilities:

IMMORTALITY* AND REGENERATION. Verso's body itself will not allow him to die and he heals seamlessly and automatically from even fatal injuries. He is able to control the regeneration to a limited extent, choosing to keep specific scars on his body rather than let them heal, but he is unable to turn it off in any real way.

DISMEMBERMENT???. I have no idea what to call this. As an extension of his immortality, Verso is able to survive literally cutting himself in half and can still control his disparate halves, and even somehow?? project his voice from his lower-half, with exactly how that works being left as an exercise to the audience. He doesn't really use this ability in any functional way, but he will be able to survive severe dismemberment, and would totally cut off his hand and let it crawl over to someone to wave at them as an ill-considered joke.

CHROMA. Chroma is the "life-force" of the canvas, everything in it is made of chroma and that energy can be harvested and manipulated to perform supernatural feats. The average chroma user is able to do things like use chroma as rope or grappling hooks for traversal, or to conjure a hand-held light source. Verso is more experienced and capable with chroma than most, but he typically uses it to enhance and augment his physical combat abilities than on its own. When he does use it in a more direct capacity, its usually in the form of elemental Light energy. Verso is also capable of drawing on significant amounts of chroma to perform very powerful Gradient Attacks, a skill he is able to teach to the rest of the party.

PICTOS. Pictographs that allows the channeling of chroma to specific functions; in gameplay this takes the form of bestowing specific skills and attacks on characters depending on equipped pictos. Most relevantly for roleplay purposes, pictos allow characters to seamlessly store and summon objects into and from hammerspace. The more typical usages are for things like summoning weapons in combat, but Verso also uses it to store and carry around a whole-ass grand piano.

COMBAT AND WEAPONS TRAINING. Verso is an extremely capable combatant who wields a duelist-style sword-and-dagger combo. He's strong and very physically agile, with many of his combat maneuvers being very flashy and acrobatic and his most powerful lategame attacks involving some near-teleportation speeds. His game mechanics revolve around a Perfection meter that ranks up the longer he goes without taking damage, and I'm interpreting this as his combat style revolving around agility and maintaining momentum. He also has some supportive team abilities, most notably some that allow him to directly take negative effects from them onto himself. It's also notable that even with his proficiency for chroma, a majority of his attacks deal physical damage: he generally prefers just smacking things with a sword really good.

SURVIVAL SKILLS. Verso has been living alone as a wild man for decades and is a capable survivalist, though some of these skills are a little tempered by the fact that it doesn't matter if he eats poison mushrooms or something because he literally can't die. He still knows how to live off the land and construct shelter (even if it may be real ugly), and is a proficient tracker and hunter.

* Note: I'm willing to discuss what might work best in terms of limiting his immortality for game balance purposes, but I'd want to keep at least some element of it since Immortality Angst is a pretty key element of his personality!

personality:

Verso Dessendre, the perfect brother and beloved son, is dead -- he died heroically and tragically saving his younger sister from a house fire, a result of malicious politically-motivated arson. The Verso we know is, however, painfully alive. Verso remembers a happy and idyllic life with his family in the city of Lumiere, caring deeply for his family and especially protective of his sister, whom he managed to save from a fire when she was sixteen. When the world fell apart due to the apocalyptic event known as the Fracture, so too did Verso's own sense of self, as he was finally made aware of the truth of his world and his own painted existence: he was created as by his mother in a pale imitation of a man he never met, a way for a grieving mother to deny the reality of her son's death. His subsequent decades-long existential crisis, as well as his struggle to both live up to the man he was supposed to be while trying to defy fate and define himself as his own person, is core to who Verso is.

Somewhere in there, buried not-too-deep, Verso is ultimately a well-intentioned man who loves his family and his world. It causes him real pain to see his mother lose herself in the canvas instead of trying to move on with her life, and despite his difficult relationship with his painted family he never once hesitates to refer to Alicia as his sister, and demonstrates deep care for her. It hurts him deeply to see the ways in which the Dessendres are hurting themselves over the original Verso's death, and it also pains him to see the ways in which their grief and pain has echoed into the lives of everyone in the canvas in ways that they don't deserve. The only way for all this to end is for the cycle to stop, and Verso has made it his personal goal to end the cycle and stop his mother from drowning herself in her grief.

It is, however, far from a purely noble and selfless goal. Decades of immortality in a world defined by cycles of grief and loss has warped him and broken him down, and Verso is also tired. He's tired of fighting and trying to make sense of the mess of the existence he's been given, tired of the pain and grief that runs through his entire world, and he'd like it all to stop, for him to finally embrace the death that has been robbed from him. Unfortunately, his mother and the body he's been painted into will literally not let him die, and so the only way for all of it to stop is to put an end to everything -- including the canvas and everyone in it, a price that he's decided he's willing to pay.

Achieving this goal means working alongside the Expeditions that keep throwing themselves helplessly to their deaths year after year, but also never letting them know what his true goals are. To this effect Verso has hardened himself and learned to be a capable manipulator -- he's charming and resourceful, and knows how to earn trust and position himself to get what he wants and needs out of people. While he's a capable performer, his actual lies aren't the most robust. His actual plans and machinations also don't extend that many steps ahead, and he tends to be more impulsive and opportunistic than anything else. This means he often missteps in his plans and can even slip in his lies, especially in emotionally intense moments, but somehow he's generally able to hold the web of lies together.

Verso has a bigger weakness: he craves connection and wants desperately to see himself as a real person capable of life and love outside of his original's shadow. Try as he might to act like a lone wolf and distance himself from the Expeditions he works with, he finds himself getting deeply and personally attached to people -- something we see happen with Expedition 33, and is strongly implied to be a repeating pattern. Inwardly Verso justifies his monstrosity out of necessity of love for his family, but it's also an extension of how he views himself as fake and disposable, which therefore means everyone in the canvas is the same: meaningless things that can be sacrificed for a greater good. But he doesn't really want to believe that, and so oscillates wildly between those two viewpoints at any given moment. Decades of compounding trauma and his own imperfect decision-making around these circumstances have led to a real deep-seated self-loathing, and the imperfect pattern he's settled into is one where he utterly hates himself for his lies and ruthlessness, but will simply continue doing it, completely resigned to this being his miserable contradictory existence until he finally earns release by ending everything.

Between all of that heavy trauma, the rest of Verso's personality sparks through in moments of quiet: he's playful, sarcastic, and a bit of a dork. He likes trains, likes showing off for the ladies, and is willing to put himself through significant embarrassment if it means it makes his little sister laugh. He's a bit reckless, a quality that's only gotten worse in decades of immortality and self-loathing, careless about his own physical and emotional well-being and a bit too ready to sacrifice himself in place of others. He loves music, and the one time we see him genuinely happy it's in front of his piano next to someone he views as a sister, making her smile. And even through all of this, he questions himself and wonders: is any of this him, or is it all Verso?

From his ending canonpoint, Verso has seen the painful consequences of his decisions play out, the entirety of Lumiere gommaged all at once. He's had a lot of time to try and decide if it was worth it, and to be honest, he still isn't sure. He wanted to believe that Maelle could find a real compromise, and he makes one last attempt to persuade her to move on before Maelle draws her sword on him and he realizes that its too late. He makes one last-ditch attempt, putting everything on the line to force the issue and oust her from the canvas in an emotionally fraught duel.

This version of Verso finds that final effort ultimately failing, reduced to begging for at least some personal release, knowing that Maelle would never grant it to him. In Etraya, he's not going to know what to do with himself: he wasn't supposed to still be here. But he is, and he's going to have to learn to live with that, as painful as it is, as painful as it's always been.

samples:

- TDM with Gustave, an example of his mental state and volatility given his current canon point.
- PSL with Renoir, a look at his dynamic with his father at a previous point in canon.
- Meme with Maelle, his general dynamic with Maelle.