Veloce Visrin
A quiet, solitary hunter who calls the wilds home, traveling the world in pursuit of powerful hunt marks.
Character
Combat
Weapon Combat Hand Combat Equipment Combat Ethics
Chocobo
Attachment Expertise Riding Combat Other
Voidsent / Undead
Reaction cause
Name: Veloce Visrin
Birth Name: Unknown
Childhood Name: Veloh'sae Amariyo
Race & Clan: Miqo'te Seeker of the Sun, ♂
Height & Build: 5'9, lean muscular
Pronouns: he/him
Orientation: Pansexual
Birthplace: Dravania
Adopted Namesday: 6th Sun of the 1st Astral Moon
Age: 22 at the start of ARR
Profession: Adventurer, mark hunter
Combat: RDM (PLD/DRK/VPR)
Guardian Deity: Halone, the Fury
Appearance: Very pale skin, lighter than usual Miqo'te face marks, forearms and hands always covered with small scars and bandages, big scar over his heart
Disposition: Succinct, silent, reserved, watchful, still; flat language with little emotional weight or tone
Veloce is a fearsome fighter who expresses this skill as a hunter of all manner of beasts, though circumstances sometimes force him to fight people as well. He is often found traveling the world at a leisurely pace, living a nomadic life in the wilds in search of powerful hunt marks.
Veloce has the Echo, which manifests as the ability to feel, perceive, and sometimes relive powerful emotions and experiences of others.
[I think of Veloce as the WoL in my MSQ/gameplay writing, but for the purpose of this page, he is just a normal person with the Echo, so I can have an easier time thinking about him in the presence of other players' characters regardless of their WoL status.]
Veloce is a skilled fighter. He is occasionally mentored by others, but for the most part has taught himself in an improvisatory manner with his unusually keen observation for the movement of others, sometimes aided by his Echo. As such, his technique often deviates from convention, for better or for worse, but will always adhere to his preference of ferocious close-ranged combat.
Weapon Combat
Veloce prefers to fight with a sword, sometimes wielding a second weapon or augment with his offhand. He fights as a RDM, his skills and spells expressing the heavy influences of his combat history as PLD, DRK, and his upbringing as a game hunter.
Veloce fights in an aggressive, swift, and reckless way, backed by his high stamina. Though forceful, the efficacy of his strikes varies based on his opponent due to his stature and build. His combat style revolves around sustaining the onslaught—sometimes with increasing intensity—over a long period of time, outpacing and outlasting his opponents. His preference for speed and aggression makes him prone to giving away openings in a fight, and against opponents who are more perceptive and can keep up with him, that vulnerability is easily and frequently punished.
RDM gives him the choice between spells and close-ranged attacks, and his background as a PLD and his hunting style gives him a preference for the latter as he tends to stay close to his opponent and use longer chains of enchanted sword attacks, the magic causing his slashes to pierce through armour and barriers and leave burning bleeds and wounds. He builds up and amplifies most of this mana through physical movement rather than spell casts.
If driven to a frenzy in an emotionally staked battle, he will subconsciously enchant his physical attacks with stronger magic as the battle wears on, the magic's impact growing to a state where he effectively switches to a longer range fighting style as his attacks start to comprise of mainly destructive spells. He does not do this knowingly and it is very difficult for him to force himself to consciously fight like this.
Aggression and evasion are his strengths, and defense is his weakness.
Veloce is left-handed, and reverses all weapon wielding conventions to match his dominant hand.
Hand Combat
Veloce is not experienced in hand-to-hand combat, and avoids it if he can. He can throw punches if needed, but if pit against an experienced pugilist or more, he will rely much more on magic.
Without a focus or his armour, the magic he is capable of casting becomes diminished, and he will tend to fight towards the goal of escaping, or obtaining a weapon to reengage the fight with.
Equipment
For combat, Veloce has three sets of weapons: a sword, a set of rapier and focus, and a pair of dual blades. Against easier opponents and hunt marks, he tends to fight with blades alone with little magic nor aid from magic enhancing equipment.
Veloce historically equips himself lightly for ease of travel, often donning no more than a loose, comfortable shirt, durable pants and boots, topped with a few small arm and shoulder guards and belts for satchels and blades. Against more formidable threat, however, Veloce makes use of a set of RDM armour to act as a conduit and focus for his magic, as he is still not proficient in harbouring and manipulating large amounts of magic without help. The armour is adorned with gold metal which act as aether/mana conductors that enhance his control and channel speed of magic. The embroidery in his cape allows him to infuse it with magic to act as a magic barrier. The conductivity of the metal can also absorb magic attacks, but he must anticipate it and weave a path with his own magic to connect the impact to the metal to absorb it. If successful, he can turn the absorbed energy into a counterattack, but due to his fighting style, he rarely exercises this technique.
Combat ethics
To some extent, honour does not matter to Veloce. A fight is a fight; he does not care whether his opponent plays dirty or clean to secure victory, nor would he entertain an opponent's demands should they try to restrict him in battle in the name of honour, privilege, and prejudice. He fights for the thrill of battle, victory is but a byproduct, so unless it is for survival, he himself will not resort to underhanded tactics for the sake of victory. He does not care for power balance in the matchup and would not dismiss opponents or himself on the grounds of worthiness.
However, he also does not find joy in suffering and torture, and frowns upon those who deliberately manipulate a battle to prolong pain and suffering. Should his opponents torture him, he will likely view it as a product of his own incompetence to be solved by bettering himself; but should he witness it happen to others, he will step in to put an end to the conflict.
Attachment
Veloce has a strong attachment to chocobos, stemming from his short time in Tailfeather as a toddler where a black baby chocobo hatched and imprinted on him, and later followed and grew up with him as his companion and steed.
Veloce's distance from people is contrasted by his closeness to chocobos, as though he understood them better than people, especially when he was young. When he wanted company, he often went to his chocobo rather than people, although this changed slightly as his horizons expanded dramatically through his travels and he met more people.
Expertise
Veloce was closer to his chocobo than anything or anyone else, and in spending his time and attention with the chocobo, he has become knowledgeable in their behaviour and care such as grooming, training, and treating injuries and strain. His expertise is not obvious and sometimes incorrect, because he deduced them through experience alone and thus lacks the vocabulary and deep understanding to communicate it to others. Usually only those with ailing chocobos are aware of his expertise through watching him work.
Riding
Veloce did not learn to ride until he was 16, a year before he embarked on his travels. He is skilled enough to not be troubled by riding, but he is not a master of it despite the sheer amount of time he spends with the bird.
Veloce doesn’t know much about chocobo racing, but dislikes the concept.
Combat
Veloce does not treat his chocobo as a combat partner and does not train him for combat, although he does not bar him from joining combat as long as he feels he will not be in danger. His journey is treacherous, but as he grows into a formidable fighter himself, his presence alone is often enough to deter aggressors and keep the bird in relative safety. When he knows he is venturing into peril, he often leaves his chocobo somewhere safe and goes alone on foot.
Veloce's chocobo is only capable of basic attacks such as kicks and pecks, and is incapable of specialized skills such as healing, defensive/offensive buffs, and crowd control.
Other
Veloce's chocobo is of the black chocobo lineage capable of flight, much like Haurchefant's, though Veloce almost never rides it for flight. The shared passion for their birds was the catalyst for Veloce and Haurchefant's immediate connection and quick friendship shortly after they met.
Veloce's chocobo inexplicably enjoys biting Veloce's forearms for fun, leaving them perpetually covered in nicks and scratches. The chocobo appears unhappy when Veloce protects his arms with arm guards, so eventually Veloce simply accepted the fate of being the bird's chew toy. Most people mistake these scars to be caused by battle or craftwork.
Veloce thinks little of chocobo pedigree, and thinks the idea of raising the perfect animal for a specific purpose—such as racing—is asinine. He believes each animal needs different support and upbringing to reach their own unique potential.
Veloce does not go into towns often, nor stay for long, because of his distaste for crowded places, but also because he dislikes keeping his chocobo in a stable outside of rest hours, preferring to let the bird roam free as much as he can. He favours inns at the edges of town where the stable can be closer by him, and they need only stay for the duration of their rest overnight.
Veloce has an irrational fear of animated bodies of the deceased, such as the undead, and by extension, the types of voidsent that manifest via possession of the deceased, as well as people tempered by primals. As he ages, he is better able to remain composed through this fear, but the change in his demeanor is usually still stark and telling.
This fear does not extend to voidsent resembling creatures of other kingdoms in bestiary, even creatures with monstrous appearances.
Reaction
Veloce is disciplined and controlled in his reaction to a situation. However, when encountering such fiends, he becomes uncharacteristically hostile and vicious, his decision making clearly becomes impulsive, brash, sometimes illogical. His fear drives him to antagonize by default, and to answer in defensive aggression much earlier than usual, whether in the manner of his speech, the shift in his normally unchanging expression, or the choice to engage in combat. Even should he be convinced of the harmlessness or friendly intentions of the fiend for whatever reason, he will still remain on edge for as long as it is present, an effect any irrational fear would have on its victim.
Cause
This fear stemmed from uncertainty of his adoptive family's fate after the Seventh Umbral Calamity, where upon his return to his family home, he found it abandoned with no trace of anyone's whereabouts. As he searched the Twelveswood for some time, his encounters with the ashkins of Haukke Manor and the Tam-Tara Deep Croft left him a dreadful fear of the worst. These bodies move with a will not of their own, but their appearance compels him to see them as the people they once were, and he began to see the faces of those he knew in these monstrocities. With no guardian figure to give him answers for the phenomenon at the time and no closure to reassure him of his family's fate, the unnatural and unknown nature of these abominations left such a deep mark in his psyche that even though he now makes easy work of them with his martial prowess, the sight of them continues to instill a deep sense of fear in him.
Basic Skills
Veloce is a self-sufficient individual capable of living comfortably away from civilization most of the time. Skills pertaining to survival are his forte. In contrast, skills pertaining to living in civilization—such as interpersonal skills and adhering to social norms—are his weakness.
Veloce is a hands-on person, and learned almost everything he knew through experience and application, out of personal necessity and sometimes interest. His knowledgeability is rarely apparent, as while his adoptive mother was a well-read alchemist, he showed no interest in literacy in her brief attempts to teach him, and thus he lacks the vocabulary necessary to communicate with others about these subjects.
After Veloce set out on his travels, he honed his reading and writing skills slightly more frequently, and learned nomenclature and terminology as he needed the knowledge to earn a living. He can read well enough to get by, but writing continues to be overwhelmingly effortful and challenging.
Veloce is a meticulous crafter, but only for the few, specific things needed for his lifestyle and profession. For things he has no expert knowledge in stemming from personal necessity, even if he is under guidance, he finds it difficult to understand and master the creation, and generally cannot produce anything of more than mediocre quality.
Veloce is unusually skilled at mimicking many wildlife's calls, and especially chocobo chirps, owing to the sheer amount of time he spends in the wild and with his bird. He does this purely for fun and does not use this skill for hunting, though sometimes it comes in handy for unexpected situations. In contrast, he is musically tone-deaf and cannot sing at all.
Constitution
Veloce has a strong constitution, rarely falling ill or succumbing to fatigue. His reckless aggression in battle often leaves him laden with wounds and bruises, but he heals from them quickly and his scars fade unnaturally completely. His reserved and still demeanor belies his unusually high reserve of energy, with some believing him to be unsuitable for physical labour at a glance; mostly those who watch him work tirelessly for unreasonable lengths of time will notice his remarkable strength and stamina.
Senses
Veloce has strong and keen external senses and is acutely aware of his surroundings, though he is unable to communicate it well to others. This allows him to detect and track presences, aiding him greatly in his hunts. This ability becomes a liability in chaos, as he can be blinded by overwhelming noise, visuals, and smell. Through his travels, he has learned to block out such sensory overload and focus on his opponents, though sometimes this leads to blind spots.
Veloce has a delicate sensitivity to pain, but tolerates it exceptionally well. He tends to keep it to himself by staying quiet, the only tells being his tenseness and unusual irritation and hostility.
Veloce's core runs hot, and he prefers a cool environment, but despises the sting of cold. Like pain, he also has a high tolerance for heat, such as with his hands if he has to hold hot objects for a while, developed through his self-sufficient, hands-on lifestyle in the wild.
Eating, Sleep, and Hygiene
Veloce hunts, gathers, and cooks his own food as he did when he was young, sometimes adding to it with bread and juice bought from nearby markets. He has a big appetite due to his active lifestyle, but usually only eats when he is hungry.
Veloce has a simple palate, preferring familiar foods and their natural flvaours, although he has grown fond of certain light spices he came across in his travels. His favourites are roasted meat and hearty stews, and though he has gathered and eaten a much wider variety of meat, fruits, and vegetables than the average person, he usually finds new exotic food options unpleasant. He handles spiciness poorly and it causes him pain.
Veloce is easily inebriated, and he becomes emotional, impulsive, and aggressive. He has caused great damage at an inn once under the influence, and has since then abstained from alcohol, thankfully not a difficult task as he dislikes its taste.
Veloce is very alert and sleeps lightly; it is difficult for him to fall asleep and stay asleep if his environment is not free of disturbances. He values the days where he could find somewhere quiet and safe to pass out for tens of hours to catch up on sleep debt.
Veloce does not like indoors bathing amenities, preferring to bathe in large bodies of waters such as rivers or lakes as he had growing up in the Twelveswood. He generally only bathes when he feels dirty from a tumultuous battle or a difficult journey, and in his travels through arid climes, it is not unusual for him to go a long time without bathing.
In the right weather, he enjoys lazing in a cool lake or a hotspring for relief.
When he has the means to keep himself free of the stench of battle, he smells like the environment in which he spends most of his time: earth, water, trees, camp fire smoke, and chocobo.
Wealth
Veloce is mostly self-sufficient and has low expenses, and his battle prowess makes him enough gil for it to rarely be a concern for him. He can be wealthier than he is, but he often undersells his loot due to his simple desire to be relieved of needless possessions.
If he is short on gil, he will turn to hunts or temporary manual labour to earn what he needs. If he is weighed down by coin, he often spends it to buy expensive treats for his chocobo, masterful maintenance for his gear, and indulgent services such as massages and grooming for himself.
It may be easy to interest him in a scam due to his propensity to take people at their word, but he usually quickly identifies details of alarm and stops the attempt.
Hunting
Veloce spent a lot of his childhood hunting game in the woods alone with no guidance from others. As such, "hunting" describes little more than the objective of the activity, as the way he hunts gives the impression that hunting is just a means for him to pursue something else—his love for battle.
When he was young, he found it difficult to conceal himself from prey as his light appearance stands out amidst the dark, lush boughs of the Twelveswood. Without having seen real hunters at work, it also never crossed his mind to use tools to make prey easier to catch. From the start, every hunt was a contest of speed and stamina, a challenge he happened to gladly accept because he loved the feeling of exertion.
Though his methods are violent and forceful, Veloce does not derive pleasure from suffering. In hunting for game, as he improved his skill, he generally tires his prey before aiming for a quick and lethal blow. Later, in more dangerous hunt marks he finds his match and is more able to enjoy the thrill of battle.
Veloce usually hunts alone as it allows him to enjoy his opponent's full attention in battle. If it is a bill from the board that he sees others are interested in or gathering forces for, he will forgo it in lieu of a less sought after target. Occasionally, he encounters other hunters after the same target and is forced to battle together. He sometimes irritates other hunters as he takes little to no care in efficiently defeating the target, his fighting style often provoking and enraging the target, which grants him more riveting combat while putting others in more danger than he realizes.
Reputation
Veloce is a specialist whose renown is limited due to the combination of his low profile and juxtaposition between his skill expression and disposition. Those few who know him for his craft often sing high praises of him, but those who hear of him second hand are seldom able to put his name or deed to the person due to his ordinary appearance. He has a bad reputation among some hunters for his reckless fighting style, though it rarely becomes an issue as he goes out of his way to avoid hunting with others.
Where Veloce's battle prowess is concerned against human opponents, his figure is often described with great exaggeration as a result of the flare of his fighting style. The disconnect from reality is so great that folk rarely associate him with tales of him, sometimes even those who have faced him in battle do not recognize him in plain clothes at an inn or market later on.
Children
Children are like small animals to Veloce. He's very good at taking care of them, but in a dutiful way. The children would be fed, cleaned, watched over, and protected, but he cannot raise them as people like a good parent can. Veloce also dislikes children because unlike animals, children talk a lot, make no sense, and exhausts him mentally. His care style results from the lack of example from his own distant upbringing.
Veloce has no desire to have children of his own.
Trust
Veloce is inherently trusting. His intuition for the character of others generally protects him from being deceived, although the compounding complexity of his experiences in his travels have left him burned on several occasions for his good faith. He has since learned to withhold his trust, but the sheer effort required to be wary of others means he is seldom able to keep it up.
Justice, Morals, and Conflict
Justice and fairness matters to Veloce, but he is not one to be confined by justice defined by man. Veloce does not go out of his way to break rules, but he is willing to ignore rules if he can tell rules pose others a great hindrance. Most of the time he is not even aware of the rules in place and operates intuitively to the relative best interest of those involved.
Veloce has a simple world view and has a hard time processing complex, morally grey issues. If he must act upon an issue, he will gauge which party is unfairly treated, and if there is something he can do to somewhat restore the balance, he contributes. He will rarely strive for larger changes than that, such as to the status quo.
Veloce dislikes conflict and will not instigate any, but he is not conflict avoidant either. If someone picks a fight with him, he will neither strive to escalate nor deescalate the situation, only to stand his ground and defend himself, countering and returning what is being sent at him to maintain a sense of balance and fairness in his mind.
Emotions
Though Veloce is stoic, he is not immune to strong emotions and sentimentality. A long time spent with things, people, and places leaves marks upon his soul, but he does not know how to show that sentimentality, nor is he resilient enough to withstand strong emotions, especially those of others imposed on him by his Echo. He sometimes becomes so inundated that he cannot maintain his composure and has to leave to cry in solitude, being incapable of leaning on others in times of need. He perceives it as helplessness and weakness that he must overcome alone, even though this belief is the reason he has so much trouble handling emotions.
Much like his difficulty handling his own emotions, Veloce is perceptive of people and the environment, and good at assessing the situation by identifying dangers, mood shifts, and nuances from minor clues, but does not know how to properly communicate that information with others or mitigate its effect.
Boundaries
While Veloce appears guarded and reserved, he does not have strict physical boundaries. He is not averse to physical closeness or contact, but because it is not his social language, it would not occur to him to invite or offer gestures such as handshakes or hugs, even though he has no problem receiving and accepting them. Intimacy does not fluster him, even with strangers; he is unfazed by being seen undressed or being in such close proximity that the average person would feel uncomfortable, for example, if a situation necessitates it, true to his practical nature. He does not embarrass easily, owing to his cluelessness to social stigma.
Veloce enjoys grooming himself, like brushing his hair, ears, and tail. He sometimes allows others to brush and pet him, if they are close friends, innocent children, or simply overeager people who he could tell genuinely bear no ill will.
Veloce does not share his emotional burdens with others out of sheer incompetence in communication. He is easily impacted by the emotional burdens of others because of his Echo, and tries to do what he can to withstand it if they come to him for support. As he aged, he learned some simple ways to respond socially appropriately, but he is incapable of offering true comfort and consolation beyond being there for the individual while keeping himself together under the stress.
Death
Death is not a stranger to Veloce, but he finds some aspects difficult to reconcile with. The death and departure of a loved one wounds him deeply and stays with him for a long time, the thought looming over his future interactions with others he cherishes, unable to feel closure nor accept the inevitability of it reoccuring. The desecration of the dead also disturbs him; in his fear of undeads, he is unnerved by the autonomy of the dead being taken from them so easily—their bodies made a tool—and his inability to separate the outside force that drives it from the person the body once belonged to. Life is sacred to him, whether or not he realizes it, and his simple view of life makes it difficult for him to accept the robbed time and identity of people and creatures alike. As a result, he often blocks it out of his mind if he can help it.
In Veloce's childhood, he was faced with sudden deaths and unexplained departures, with no opportunity to process them or find closure. He was found abandoned as a toddler, and he never found his adoptive family again after the calamity fell upon the realm shortly after he struck out on his own, his only sense of continuity came from those on the other side of death, in the form of ashkins. After he embarked on his travels, his increased exposure of rites for the departed and respectful burials allowed him to better process his grief, and he slowly learns to come to terms with this difficult fact of life.