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Character info

Character name: Emerald Sustrai
Canon: RWBY
Canon point & release date: Post-volume 8, March 2021
Powers (no more than 150 words): Emerald can project hallucinations into people's minds to make them see what she wants them to see. She's used this to create a bunch of decoys of oncoming combatants to confuse the person she was fighting against, to project images of other people entirely, and to hide herself by vanishing in thin air. It can also be tied to her emotional state, like when a panic attack manifested as a massive projection of the big bad of RWBY.

Personality

What is your character most afraid of? How are they defined by this fear? (100-300 words) Emerald fears a lot of things: The dangerous women who run her life, the idea of letting her true self shine through, the unending terror of love. But it all comes down to the fear of being left alone. Everything that Emerald does is a bid to get other people to like her, to be what she thinks they want her to be, and it's been going on for so long that she's occasionally worried she's lost sight of herself. And in one of her most vulnerable moments, where she decided to reveal she had doubts to her friend Mercury who's been with her this whole time, he yelled at her, kicked her ass, and called her an idiot for still believing that Cinder cared about her for even a second.

She's given up most of her identity to just be "Cinder's henchwoman", but that's better than being whatever Emerald Sustrai actually is. If she were to look in a mirror, she might not recognize the person staring back at her. She would do anything to be someone who people care about, someone who people love, someone who people want to keep around. If she's not that, she's nobody.

What is your character's greatest desire? How are they defined by this desire? (100-300 words) Everything Emerald does to her own identity is in service of being loved. She wants somebody who will see her and not reject her, somebody who will take her in and care for her and make sure she never has to hurt again. And as good as she is at using her powers to change what people see in her, the thing she wants more than anything else is to be loved for who she really is.

She's shown that she's uncomfortable with Cinder's plan to kill entire schools full of people, and that she's terrified of Salem's power and the way that it can be used against her if she steps out of line even once. The situation she's in is not and never has been one that actually fits her; she's fundamentally, or at least she would like to think, a decent person who doesn't really like killing people or ruling by fear or anything like that. She wants friends; she wants a life where she's not scared all the time. And she keeps looking for it in all the wrong places, and it gets her in far, far too deep over her head. It's only at the end of volume 8, when she splits away from Cinder and Salem to join the good guys, that she realizes she might actually have a future on their side instead.

They're kind, they're forgiving, they're—still not immediately ready to embrace her, no, not after the people she's helped murder. But they're willing to see the diamond in the rough and polish it to a beautiful gem, and that's enough to give Emerald real hope that things are going to be better.

How will not having memories change your character? What core personality traits, if any, will change? How? (200-300 words) Without her memories, Emerald won't really know that she's done all of the things that I've gone over above or why she did them in the first place. She won't know just how dark and miserable the world can be and why she needed somebody to save her from it so desperately. She won't know about her Semblance, and she won't know that she's used it almost exclusively to change who she is as a person. She won't have any of that context behind Cinder being a terrible, uncaring person, or about Salem controlling her through fear, or (unfortunately) about getting out of a bad situation before it got even worse.

Without this constant desire to change what other people see her as, she'll be allowed to be herself. The rough will fall away like so much sand, and she'll be there sparkling all her own. She won't have all the guilt associated with tricking Pyrrha into murdering Penny, nor the internal conflict of putting what other people want far, far above her own needs. Instead, she can be the kind person that it took eight seasons for the show to get to: She wants to stop others from suffering needlessly, she wants to protect people, and she wants to put good into the world. She might not feel this quite so intensely, since she won't know that she has a lot to make up for, but it's still a major part of who she really is.

Memories

You have 10 memory points. How will you use them?
Major memory: 2 points.
Emerald grew up on the backstreets of Vacuo, which informed a lot of the cynical views she can sometimes hold towards greater society. She knows that things don't usually come for free (but doesn't necessarily agree with it) and can be mistrusting of handouts, but without having that constantly reinforced it's not as much of a core part of her worldview.

Major memory: 2 points.
Cinder Fall is the one who gripped her tight and raised her from perdition. She offered her a clear path upward, out of the backstreets, and even if it seemed too good to be true, Emerald was desperate to take it. Surely it could only mean good things for her future.

Relationship core: 2 points.
The relationship core for Salem, the evil witch and primary antagonist of RWBY. This would involve a lot of feelings of terror and self-doubt, a begrudging desire to do well and force herself to fit Salem's mold, and hints of betrayal as Emerald knows that Salem could never have her full loyalty.

Major memory: 2 points.
Knowledge that she no longer works for the person who was making her feel the way she did in the previous relationship core, and that she was rescued by somebody. She doesn't know who, but she knows she was saved and that the feelings she has towards Salem can be put in the past—and probably safely.

Skill: 2 points.
Emerald is a solid marksman, though she wouldn't find the weapons she prefers to use here in Well, probably. Her twin automatic pistols unfold into chains with weighted sickle blades on the end (kusarigama); she can bind opponents or use the chains for traversal, and she's not afraid to use them as handheld scythes either. She's been training with these weapons her whole life and considers herself pretty skilled with them. I think it would be fun for her to have this suite of skills, but to only really know that she's good with guns, because who would combine weapons like that? That would just be silly.

Points remaining: 0

Player info

Name: cel
Pronouns: she/they
Age: 18+
Contact: samielherbei#1336
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