Deer Country Application

[returncoat]

Character Base

• Character Name: Alfred Vint "Alvin" Svent
• Age: 26
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: Tales of Xillia (2011)/Just after the final battle

• Items Coming Along:
1. Golden Gun: His late father's heirloom pistol, secured in its holster. Mostly ornamental.
2. The Gun He Uses, Actually: The gun he uses, actually.
3. Broadsword: I have a sword, and it's sharp!
4. Scarf: A black scarf trimmed in orange.

• Content Warnings for Character: Alvin's story heavily involves child endangerment and abuse, manipulation, and themes of displacement/homelessness. Tales of Xillia as a canon touches on genocide, fantasy racism, magical subjugation, and plenty of killing and violence. Episodes of Alvin's backstory with particular characters also deserve additional warnings:

• Leticia and Gilandor: Dubious sexual consent, abuse (and later, murder) of the mentally/physically ill, blackmail
• Presa/Mink/Jill: Torture, specifically of a woman
• Elize: Human/child experimentation, human/child trafficking




Character Background


• History: Broad strokes from the Tales of Translations Tumblr, and then game events a little more clearly since the Tumblr post kind of glosses over them and his Wikia page is incomplete:

Alvin was born into a world called Elympios--a place not unlike our own, teeming with technology not unlike modern-day Earth's, but powered by devices called spyrix. Like Earth, the Elympios Alvin knew was struggling with unsustainable climate change, killing much of its flora and fauna. When he was six years old, Alvin, his parents, and his uncle Gilandor Yul Svent boarded a cruise-class airship, the E.S.S. Zenethra, which fell through a freak rift in the fabric of the world and fell into a world called Rieze Maxia, whose human inhabitants lived far more in sync with the spirits that brought forth all natural life. The Elympian survivors of the crash, now stranded in this vibrantly magical world, saw the Rieze Maxians as monsters with supernatural capabilities. Unable to use those same abilities, those survivors went into hiding as best they could among the Rieze Maxians. Most had difficulty coping and pledged their loyalty to Exodus, a group led by Alvin's uncle Gilandor, which was devoted to returning to Elympios by any means necessary. Now fatherless, frightened, and worried about his unwell mother, of course little Alvin fell in and became one of his uncle's agents, too.

The opening of Tales of Xillia finds Alvin twenty years later in the kingdom of Rashugal, spying on the military's development of a superweapon called the Lance of Kresnik--a superweapon that Exodus is deeply interested in, as it embodies their hope of getting home. He witnesses Milla Maxwell and the Four Great Spirits infiltrate the R&D laboratory housing the Lance. Milla's aim is to destroy it, but she and the random medical student she picks up along the way, Jude Mathis are interrupted by a third party: an elite agent of Rashugal's enemy kingdom, Auj Oule. The agent activates the Lance, which absorbs huge amounts of mana from those nearby and captures the Four Great Spirits. As the seriously weakened Milla and Jude flee, Alvin steps in to help them escape the country. He presents himself to them as a mercenary happy to trade a helping hand for the promise of coin, while his true aim is to retrieve the Lance of Kresnik's activation key from Milla, who took it.

As the party travels Rieze Maxia in search of a way to restore Milla's powers and free the Four, Alvin continues to inform on them, not only to Exodus, but to both Rashugal and Auj Oule. While he plays all three political sides to ensure himself a place with the winners, he simultaneously grows fond of the growing, ragtag group of do-gooders around him. Though a couple members of the party catch on that he's acting against them and several of his betrayals come to light at different points in their journey, the group continues to keep him around. He winds up risking his life--and his schemes--for them on multiple occasions as well.

At the same time, Alvin's mother's health declines and eventually sputters out, and his dedication to getting home wavers. While he still betrays the party utterly at the Battle of Fezebel Marsh, allowing the Lance of Kresnik to fire and temporarily dispel the schism separating Rieze Maxia and Elympios, he also ultimately sides with them against Gilandor. When Milla sacrifices her life to save the rest of the party, he winds up as lost and self-destructive as the worst of them. He takes a contract to kill his surviving friends, botches it (but severely wounds someone he didn't mean to), falls in with the antiheroes of Auj Oule, betrays them to protect Jude's party, and sticks with them through the end of the game. Knowing he will never earn forgiveness, he still seeks some kind of redemption for himself, and ultimately helps reunite the two worlds and prevent the deaths of millions.


• Core Relationships:

1. LETICIA SVENT: Alvin's mother, a physically and mentally frail woman who lost her home and husband when the Zenethra crashed into Rieze Maxia. Cut off from the advanced medical care available in Elympios, Leticia's condition worsens year after year, trapping her mind in a more comfortable past until she can no longer recognize her growing son. The need to keep her alive and get her back home to Elympios fuels every decision Alvin makes. He learns to lie to comfort her, telling her that "Alfred" is away at boarding school and sending her frequent letters to shore up the deception. When his mother forgets who he is, he loses one of the core anchors of his identity. By the time he's twelve, their roles as parent and child are reversed; Alvin is the one taking care of her physical needs, and she cannot provide him the stability and support he needs. He winds up with an immature understanding of what he owes fellow human beings, always running away from consequences rather than sticking it out to make things better. She's also the reason he gets into the dangerous and morally damaging work of espionage and mercenary work, strengthening a protective streak in him and also giving him a reason to resent her and the uncaring world who put him in his impossible situation. When her death ends that easy justification for acting the way he does, Alvin goes completely off the rails until he realizes that he has to find his own grounding, give to others as well as take, and be the present, consistent someone in life that Leticia couldn't be for him.

2. GILANDOR YUL SVENT: Alvin's uncle, a younger brother of his father. [cw: dubcon, child endangerment, genocide] This guy is a real piece of work. When he took over the Exodus organization, he turned it from a support hub for the stranded Elympians to help one another into a cabal of spies actively manipulating and stealing from the governments of Rashugal and Auj Oule to develop the technology needed to punch through the schism--and if that weren't bad enough, he did it not out of longing for home, but made it part of a power grab. After all, if he could solve Elympios's energy problem by draining all of Rieze Maxia of mana, why wouldn't that set him up to be one of the most powerful players back home? He'd take over the Svent family, have all the money and influence he'd always envied Alvin's father, and feel no compunctions about the lives he had to end and ruin to get there. Alvin's and Leticia's lives are just two of those. Gilandor takes advantage of Leticia's weakness and deteriorating mental health to sleep with her and flaunts that fact in twelve-year-old Alvin's face, while simultaneously employing Alvin--again, still a child--as a spy, having him infiltrate labs, military outfits, the homes of dangerous nobles, and so on. From working closely with Gilandor, Alvin learns to be mistrusting, self-serving, and a liar to survive. While he hates his uncle, he also feels tied to him, both as blood kin and as the only two people who actually know everything about each other.

3. PRESA/MINK/JILL LEWIN: A few years before the events of Tales of Xillia, when Alvin is around twenty-one years old, he has a chance encounter with a young woman calling herself Mink. They hit it off, as young folks do, and quickly become lovers. At the time, Alvin is serving in the intelligence branch of the kingdom of Rashugal's military (while, of course, still working as an Exodus agent for Gilandor); Mink is a receptionist at a prominent medical school in Rashugal's capital. However, she ends up confessing to Alvin that she is an Auj Oule spy named Jill Lewin. Alvin turns her in to the Rashugal authorities, who torture her for information on her employers before she finally escapes. During the events of Tales of Xillia, the party meets her as an antagonist and sometime comrade under her new name, Presa. Whatever her name, she is the person who came closest to being Alvin's equal and partner, someone he grew close to naturally, not on an infiltration order from Exodus. The fact that he still betrayed her to further his single, desperate goal of returning home really underlines how selfish he is. He deeply regrets what he did to her and his later failure to prevent her death, especially when he knows she still cares deeply for him.

4. JUDE MATHIS AND MILLA MAXWELL: The dual protagonists of Tales of Xillia, and very much a unit in many ways. Alvin buddies up with them on a pretense, wanting only to retrieve the activation key for the Lance of Kresnik and perhaps kill Milla, since he believes her death would dispel the schism. However, he soon comes to admire both of them for the strength of their convictions. Xillia's character developers designed Alvin as "who Jude could have become if he didn't grow up;" it stands to reason that Alvin sees who he could have been in Jude, too, which both frustrates and motivates him to be a better, less cowardly man. He finds Milla's strength of conviction far less attainable, but he's surprised to discover that she understands him better than Jude does. She accepts his selfish, traitorous truth and keeps it from the more tender-hearted members of the party, and for that, she's the closest thing he has in-game to a confidant--even if he does think killing her would solve his problems. In the end, they're the two to whom Alvin gives his real loyalty and the inspiration for him to finally grow up.

5. ELIZE LUTUS: A Rieze Maxian girl with an unnatural talent for channeling spirits. [cw: human experimentation on children] Besides Jude and Milla, Alvin's other foil in the party is Elize, a twelve-year-old girl possessed of incredible channeling talent, thanks to her being sold to an Auj Oule human testing facility for mana-boosting technology. Alvin swings between a mercenary interest in her power and fond protectiveness over her, perhaps seeing some of the lonely boy he was (and is) in her. (He also happened to infiltrate the lab she was in when they were younger and might feel guilty for having left her there.) Elize voices some of the loudest rejections of Alvin after his multiple betrayals, but also offers him the first true forgiveness when he finally returns to their side for good. He treasures her friendship.



Character Personality Through Key Moments


I'm bringing the negative experiences in first, because, for the most part, they take place earlier in Alvin's life. I also will hopefully not spend too long on each one since for the most part, I'm repeating things that came up in the character background section.

Negative Experiences:

1. Disappearance of the E.S.S. Zenethra: Obviously, this is the event that defined who and what Alvin would become for the rest of his life. A terrifying, traumatic accident killed his father, stranded him and his delicate mother in another world, and stripped him utterly of the comfortable future he thought he'd have. Because the Zenethra crashed, Alvin became Alvin, not Alfred--a quick-thinking, friendly, shallowly-connected mercenary rather than the shy, sensitive child his mother remembers. He grew up unmoored from his world, always made aware by the structure of Rieze Maxian life that he didn't belong, a drifter who couldn't make real bonds with others because he was always acting out a role, not inhabiting the interaction. As he says in the game, he thought he could always just disappear when things went badly for him, and his experience of literally disappearing from his world is at the heart of that. Hence his penchant for burning bridges and running away from consequences. For twenty years, Alvin learned to do whatever didn't hurt him, because what was the point of sticking it out when he was never meant to be anywhere he was?

2. Gilandor and Exodus: [cw: child endangerment, threat of CSA] During his (life)time as an Exodus agent from childhood up till now, Alvin saw a lot of brutality. He went on missions to battlefields, at least one of which left him the sole survivor; he was also sent to infiltrate a particular noble house at 14 because one of its members had a thing for youths of that age. Since his uncle had promised him they would take care of his mother and get her back home--and that was Alvin's sole life mission--he took part in reprehensible acts against his own friends in Exodus, allowing Gilandor to secure leadership of the organization. To protect himself, Alvin simply had to stop caring about anyone but himself and his mother, so there's little wonder he wound up selfish and consequence-avoidant now. Granted, his work in Exodus granted him skills like lying, being charming in the short term, long- and short-range combat, survival, and Rieze Maxian world trivia, but it also killed his soul, so, you know. Probably not worth it.

3. Leticia's Decline: Alvin might have made fewer horrendous mistakes if he could have relied on his mother rather than the other way around. Her illness, combined with a lack of trustworthy adult figures in his life who could have steered him better, allowed Alvin to justify decades of hurting and tricking others. Her mind's regression to more comfortable times, when Alvin's father was still alive and Alvin himself was a sweet little boy, effectively erased the Alvin of the present from her world. Since he existed as himself in so few others' worlds, it's hard to overestimate the damage that must have done to his self-understanding and identity.

Positive Experiences:

1. "Mink": By all accounts, his meeting Mink (a.k.a. Jill Lewin, a.k.a. Presa) was a random act of chance, not engineered for either of them by their respective secret agencies. Though they were both living their own lies, their affection for each other was no calculated event, but rather a happy accident--something true for both of them. They genuinely liked each other, genuinely cared, and if Alvin was the one to knife that relationship in the back, it was still one of the most important experiences of his life. In another world, he would have married her. In another world, they would have built each other a home. While overall a positive experience, Alvin's betrayal saddled him with a hell of a lot of guilt and trapped him more solidly on his path of self- and relationship-destructive treachery.

2. Finding His Place: In this world, though, Alvin's home is the one Milla, Jude, and the others lead him to. He finds a new mission for himself fighting at their side, even if he doesn't quite share their shiny, clean convictions, even if he's betrayed them too many times for his misdeeds to ever truly be forgiven and forgotten. It's important, really, that they are not--that he be held accountable, reminded to work hard and be better than what he was. They're good friends who do that for him, who support him as he tries to turn his life around. Eventually, Tales of Xillia 2 shows that he goes from mercenary to merchant, from inter-world terrorist to a voice for tolerance and understanding across the two worlds of Rieze Maxia and Elympios. He can't do any of that without a place to belong, without somewhere stable he can finally take off his masks and rest.



Deer Country Attributes


• Canon Powers: While Alvin is a strong, fast, and clever fighter, he does not possess anything we would consider "powers" without an accessory called a Lillium Orb, which I am not giving him here.
• Blood Type: Coldblood
• Omen: A sylphjay: A bird native to Rieze Maxia, known for its spirit-enhanced ability to fly long distances and unerringly locate individuals. Popularly used to carry messages, particularly in the military. Basically, it's a vaguely magical pigeon.
• Blessed Day: October 2nd, the day the Elympion investigation into the Zenethra's disappearance concluded, and thus the day Alvin and the other passengers were officially considered lost.
• Patron Pthumerian: Cloverfield
• Blood Power Manifestation: What I'd like is to replace the enhanced strength and durability the Lillium Orb gave him in canon with the general Sleeper blood advantages, and then express his Coldblood gifts mainly as elemental weapon enhancements through his sword and gun--ice bullets, flame blade, that sort of thing. He won't be very good at extracting blood magic from himself at first; he isn't used to thinking of himself as inherently magical, since he wasn't born with the ability to generate mana like his Rieze Maxian friends were. So he'll experiment for a long time with just his own weapons and likely won't be offering it to others, unless and until he feels he's getting the hang of it.




Writing Samples


One: Deer Country TDM: Flynn Scifo
Two: Deer Country TDM: Hayato Ichimonji



The Player


• Player Name: Asher
• Player Age: 32
• Player Contact: asherdashery; Discord: asherdashery#5061
• Permissions: Here.