capeandcowl app - Squall Leonhart
Mar. 19th, 2011 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joiedecombat[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Abby
JOURNAL:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
joiedecombat
IM: Joie de Combat
E-MAIL: abbykat at hotmail dot com
RETURNING: Yes, two.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Squall Leonhart
FANDOM: Final Fantasy VIII / Dissidia
CHRONOLOGY: He went from the middle of the FFVIII end FMV to Dissidia 012 duodecim, all the way through the end of the "Confessions of the Creator" bonus story, although since his memory is a mess he only remembers bits and pieces of Dissidia's events. Anything after his fight with the Warrior of Light in Destiny Odyssey is fragmented at best.
CLASS: Hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: None.
ALTER EGO: None.
BACKGROUND:
Squall's world is a mishmash of the modern, the futuristic, and the fantastic. Its moon is a world of monsters and every few centuries it dumps an enormous torrent of them onto the earth in a phenomenon called the Lunar Cry, destructive enough to wipe out civilizations. Or at least one of them, called Centra. The main result of this is that the countryside is full of the monsters typical of any Final Fantasy setting.
More significant to the storyline are the sorceresses. The most recently historically significant sorceress at the time of Squall's birth was Sorceress Adel, a tyrant who ruled the nation of Esthar and had a habit of sending her soldiers rampaging around other nations kidnapping little girls, ostensibly to find a successor - a woman who has the potential to become a sorceress does so by inheriting the powers of a previous sorceress. Study of sorceress magic eventually allowed the development of the para-magic used by most militaries, and the practice of junctioning Guardian Forces (FFVIII's summons) to allow the use of stronger magic. Junctioning Guardian Forces proved to have the side effect of eroding the memory of the user, which is why it's not a common practice in most of the world.
FFVIII uses the "stable time loop" model of time travel, meaning that the way that things play out is the way things always played out, and it's possible to affect the past, but not change it, since whatever you're going to do is, ultimately, what you did. It's probably best not to think about this too hard.
Squall Leonhart was born in the small country town of Winhill, in the south of Galbadia. His mother, Raine, was a local woman; his father, Laguna Loire, was a Galbadian soldier-cum-freelance journalist-cum unexpected hero and President of Esthar, and but for a twist of fate Squall might have grown up into a life of privilege in his world's most powerful nation, or as a small-town boy of no particular distinction.
But Raine died soon after Squall's birth, and Laguna was long absent, not even aware at the time that he had a child. Squall and Raine's adopted daughter Ellone were given into the care of the sorceress Edea Kramer, who with her husband Cid kept an orphanage in remote Centra. Squall spent the first four years of his life there, growing up amongst orphans of the first Sorceress War, with Ellone as his big sister.
He experienced loss for the first time at the age of four. Ellone disappeared without warning or explanation, leaving Squall crushed and bewildered by her departure. In truth, the Kramers had sent Ellone away to protect her from forces greater than their little orphanage could oppose, but it was nothing that anyone could explain to Squall in terms a four-year-old would understand. As children sometimes do, he became convinced that it was somehow his fault that the most important person in his life had left him without saying goodbye.
Soon after, Edea also left, and Cid began emptying the orphanage, adopting the children away until only two remained: Squall and one other boy, Seifer Almasy. He took the two of them with him to the island of Balamb, where he founded Garden and SeeD, inspired by Edea's premonitions of the looming threat of a future sorceress - premonitions in which Squall would play a key role.
Squall knew nothing of this. Five years old at the time he was enrolled in the new Balamb Garden, all Squall knew was that nearly everything familiar and safe in his life had been taken away, and the people around him were telling him he had to be strong. He became determined that to keep from being hurt any more, he would have to remain alone, and never let anyone else close enough to him that he might begin to depend on them.
Given time, he might have learned to cope with loss... but Garden gave him a Guardian Force to junction, to erode his memories of his life before. As he forgot about Ellone and his reasons for remaining isolated, he lost the ability to rethink his conviction, unable to remember a time that it hadn't simply been the truth, or that SeeD had ever been anything but an elite mercenary company, or that he and Seifer had ever been more friends than rivals. He grew up isolated and withdrawn, cultivating a cold and unfriendly demeanor and focusing his efforts toward becoming as strong as possible.
At Garden, Squall learned skills befitting special forces - combat and tactics, paramagic and junction theory, field medicine and survival. He took up the gunblade, the most challenging weapon Garden had to offer, as his specialization, and by the time he was seventeen he'd gained something of a reputation around Garden, in spite of his antisocial behavior, as one of the best in his class - rivaled only by Seifer, with whom he fought regularly.
It was during Squall's final field exam that the truth first began to unravel, albeit in a way that wouldn't be recognized until much later. He graduated into SeeD and with two other new members, Zell Dincht and Selphie Tilmitt, was immediately sent out on his first mission.
That was when he first met Rinoa Heartilly.
What was intended as a simple mission - assist Rinoa and her resistance faction in their efforts to liberate the city of Timber from Galbadian occupation - quickly spiraled out of control, beginning with Seifer's attack on the President of Galbadia and the emergence of Galbadia's new "ambassador" - Sorceress Edea, much changed, of whom Squall no longer had any memory.
With Rinoa alongside them, Squall and his team - joined by former SeeD instructor Quistis Trepe and Galbadia Garden sniper trainee Irvine Kinneas - found themselves pitted against the sorceress in an escalating series of battles and hardship and strange dreams in which Squall experienced scenes from Laguna's life without any idea who the man was.
Somehow, along the way, Rinoa gradually but surely found her way into Squall's heart.
Eventually the whole story was made clear - that Edea had been possessed by Ultimecia, a sorceress from the future; that she was the Matron who had cared for Squall, Seifer, Quistis, Zell, Selphie, and Irvine at her orphanage; that Squall's dreams were being caused by Ellone, part of her efforts to change the past; that Ultimecia was searching for Ellone in order to make use of her power and compress time; that Edea and Cid had founded SeeD for the very purpose of thwarting Ultimecia's plans. By the time the truth was revealed, however, a great deal of damage had already been done. Seifer was manipulated into serving Ultimecia. Trabia Garden was all but destroyed in a missile strike. Squall was nearly tortured to death in a Galbadian prison. And Edea's sorceress powers were passed on to Rinoa, making her vulnerable to Ultimecia's influence.
Command of Garden and SeeD fell on Squall's shoulders, but it was to save Rinoa more than to save the world that Squall was driven to Esthar, to finally meet his father for the first time in seventeen years. Ultimately, he and his friends ventured into time compression to face down and defeat the sorceress--
--and that's when everything came apart.
After defeating Ultimecia, instead of making it back to his own place and time as planned, Squall became lost in time compression. He briefly visited his own past, watching Edea inherit the dying Ultimecia's power and providing her with the inspiration for SeeD and the knowledge of his own role in it. But for all his best efforts, he couldn't find his way back to his own present; instead he wandered an empty, broken world, isolation and fear taking its toll on his sanity until he finally slipped into hallucinations and collapsed.
From this state, his consciousness was pulled into another world entirely, summoned by Cosmos, the goddess of harmony, to serve as one of her soldiers in her perpetual war against Chaos, god of disorder. With most of his memories of his life up to that point lost, Squall fought for Cosmos against the warriors of Chaos, including Ultimecia, who was summoned to fight for the god of discord. The war ran in cycles; as they fought, the warriors gradually regained their memories of who they were and where they had come from, but once one side or another won, the fallen warriors were revived by their deity - or sometimes by the opposing deity - to start the conflict over with no memory of the previous cycle. Squall fought by turns alongside and against Ultimecia, and alongside and against Laguna, never fully understanding his connection to either for very long.
By the twelfth cycle, another factor threatened to upset the balance of the conflict. A rift opened and poured out countless manikins, soulless crystalline puppets mimicking the forms of the warriors of both sides. The warriors of Chaos quickly took advantage, taking control of the manikins to use them as shock troopers against the forces of Cosmos. In the process they discovered that warriors killed by manikins were removed from the conflict for good, beyond either deity's ability to revive.
The twelfth cycle went badly for the warriors of Cosmos. Faced with overwhelming numbers of manikins, they were worn down gradually until one of them, Kain Highwind, concluded that the only chance they had of even surviving was to give up the fight until the next cycle. With the agreement of Cosmos's champion, the Warrior of Light, Kain set out to fell his own allies in order to make sure they would make it to the next cycle instead of being killed by the manikins.
Squall and most of the other warriors of Cosmos fell to Kain's surprise attacks, "sleeping" until the next cycle could begin. From this state, Squall's consciousness once more followed Laguna as he and Kain and the handful of remaining warriors launched a suicide mission to close the rift and cut off the unlimited influx of manikins into the world. The mission succeeded, but Laguna and the others were killed by the manikins; Cosmos diverted her divine power from maintaining the stability of the world in order to save the Warrior of Light, and the war entered its thirteenth cycle with the world crumbling to pieces around it.
Weakened, Cosmos took a gamble and divided her powers into a crystal for each of her ten remaining warriors. This left her vulnerable, but when Chaos took advantage of her weakened state to kill her, the crystals sustained her warriors even after her death, giving them the opportunity to rally and launch a final assault on Chaos, defeating him and claiming the victory for Cosmos's side even in her absence.
Beginning with the thirteenth cycle, Cosmos's warriors won every cycle of the conflict. The constant, repeated defeats drove Chaos into madness; in the eighteenth cycle he snapped and went completely feral, slaughtering the remaining warriors of both sides. By the twentieth cycle, Cosmos no longer had the power to summon warriors; Cid of the Lufaine protected her by sealing her away and used the last of his power to summon back Squall and four other warriors himself, in order to put Chaos out of his misery for good.
(There's some more backstory to Dissidia in regards to Cid of the Lufaine, the origins of Chaos, and a giant space dragon named Shinryu, but honestly it's not relevant to Squall's character in any way and he isn't aware of any of it, and this summary is long enough already.)
Eventually, Squall will return to the time-compressed world he got lost in after killing Ultimecia, and Rinoa will find him and bring him back to his proper place and time. In the meantime, though, he's ended up in the City and his memory of the events during and since time compression began are, to put it mildly, a great big mess.
PERSONALITY:
At first glance, Squall usually comes across as aloof and unemotional, even unfriendly. He's a blunt person who rarely bothers with social pleasantries and doesn't like to waste words. In fact, a lot of Squall's behavior is a complicated set of defense mechanisms designed to keep anyone from getting close to him, something that he's only recently begun to move beyond. Beneath his rigid stoicism, he's a surprisingly insecure person who constantly worries about how others see him and fears their rejection. He spent most of his life convinced that it was better not to let anyone close to him, that being alone all the time was better than suffering the inevitable pain of loss when they left; he cultivated the image of a cold, unfriendly loner to keep people at arm's length, and he finds it very difficult to express his thoughts and feelings to others. He still copes with loss poorly, having never learned much by way of emotional moderation: when he comes to care about someone, he cares very strongly.
Squall is a pessimist and poorly-versed in social graces, partly a result of and partly a contributing factor to his isolation. He doesn't understand or see the point of the many little social rituals that most other people take for granted. He's tactlessly honest and about as blunt as a thrown brick, and although he's an extremely loyal and devoted friend once his trust is won, he's very bad at expressing it in words, which can get confusing for the other people involved. Even when he does care about and trust someone, he often finds it easier to remain aloof from them. As with Bartz and Zidane, if he feels that they're strong enough and competent enough to look out for themselves, he prefers to go his own way and support them from a distance rather than take on the burden of trying to protect them directly, even if it means he doesn't have anyone with him to watch his own back.
He's a thoughtful, analytical person who doesn't often act without thinking and spends a lot of time either trying to prepare for what's ahead or mentally evaluating what's happened in the past; it's in his nature to consider the consequences and ramifications of his actions, and if anything he thinks too much. He's at his worst when he has nothing to do, since that's when he gets trapped in downward spirals of worry or doubt - he's a highly goal-oriented person who takes his responsibilities very seriously, even those he never asked for or wanted. Once he sets a goal or a course of action for himself, he pursues it with relentless determination: this is a man who walked half the width of an ocean and then some, carrying Rinoa on his back the whole way, on the slim chance that it might get him to a place where there might be someone who could help revive her. That sense of duty takes the place of what in someone else might be a sense of morality. Raised as a mercenary, Squall doesn't really believe in "good" and "evil," accepting that the sides of any given conflict are as much a matter of perspective as anything else. His code of conduct is built almost entirely around protecting the people he cares about and fulfilling whatever responsibilities he's been handed.
Also, as previously mentioned: Squall's memory is a damn mess. He has very few memories from when he was younger than about fifteen, and his memory is only really clear from roughly his field exam to the trip into space. Especially once it reaches time compression, things get kind of confused. At this point he's not entirely sure he actually saved Rinoa in space after all - although he does remember that he promised to meet her in the field outside the old orphanage, and will remember that promise no matter what happens to the rest of his memory... which isn't likely to improve so long as he's got a Guardian Force junctioned.
POWER:
Squall's metahuman abilities are tied to his ability to junction supernatural Guardian Forces to himself, an act which both augments his physical abilities and allows him to draw and cast magic. The Guardian Forces he'd junctioned up until the battle with Ultimecia were mostly lost in Time Compression, and the 'Porter wasn't able to bring the remaining ones in with him, so she did the next best thing - she gave him a new one, created from his mental image of the strongest and most powerful Guardian Force in existence: Griever.
Griever is a giant winged lion, and so long as Squall has him junctioned he mostly occupies a space in Squall's brain, where his present isn't immediately evident to others unless they're sensitive to such things. (This is why junctioning a Guardian Force erodes one's memory; the part of the brain the junction occupies is the part related to long-term memory.) The junction augments Squall's physical capabilities; it makes him stronger and more durable, makes his reflexes quicker, increases his endurance and speeds up his healing rate. The junction also enables Squall to use magic, and to draw it from sources of natural magical power. As Squall is primarily a front-line melee combatant, any high-end spells are reserved to boost his physical abilities through his junction, but he can cast the standard fire/ice/thunder/cure set, and he can also imbue his physical attacks with elemental magic.
Junctioning Griever also means that Squall can summon him, which is pretty much what it sounds like: giant winged lion attack! How long it takes to call Griever out, and how long Griever remains in a corporeal form before returning to his space in Squall's brain, mostly depends on how much Griever likes Squall at the moment, which in turn depends partly on how much Squall has called on Griever's help recently and mostly on Griever's own inscrutable cat reasons; while Squall is in the process of summoning, Griever absorbs anything that would injure Squall, but too much of that interrupts the summoning and leaves Griever resting and inaccessible for at least a day until he's recovered.
In addition to his junction, Squall has come into the City with his upgraded gunblade, the Lionheart. The name notwithstanding, the gunblades of Squall's world aren't projectile weapons; the "gun" mechanism built into the gunblade's grip fires a blank charge which gives an extra kick to the blade's impact, and using the weapon effectively means incorporating the recoil into one's fighting style. The other noteworthy part of the Lionheart is its blade, which is made of a crystalline material which easily absorbs and conducts magical energy in addition to being highly durable and keeping a sharp edge very well.
(If this constitutes one too many power slots, let me know and I'll drop the casting ability - I wasn't sure if the physical augmentation, casting, and summoning could reasonably be lumped together in any fashion under the general heading of the junction, or if they'll have to be considered completely separate power slots.)
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[video]
[Someone is still figuring out how to use the communicator. The video begins with a skewed-angle shot of a carpeted floor and the toes of a pair of black boots; it jumps wildly about as whoever's holding the device turns it in their hands, fiddles with it a little, and actually taps the side of it a couple times with their fingers. Finally, though, it straightens out, focusing on the scarred face of a serious-looking young man.]
This isn't where I'm supposed to be.
[For a moment or two he doesn't say anything else, just looks off to the side uncomfortably.]
I need some information. I know there's no point in asking how to go home or anything like that, but - we were brought here for a reason, right?
[The look on his face is determined, almost fierce.]
I need to know what my mission here is. Who's in charge.
[He's quiet a moment longer, and when he looks away again, it's with a trace of deep weariness. His last words before he shuts off the feed seem mostly meant for himself:]
...how many times is it going to be for this kind of thing?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
This isn't where I'm supposed to be.
Squall kept coming back to that thought. Never mind that there was nothing he could do about it, that he was stuck here, that - once again - he was caught up helplessly in something beyond his control and expected to deal with it whether he liked it or not. This was not where he was supposed to be. He already had responsibilities, a promise he had to keep.
...didn't he?
Alone in the apartment he'd claimed for himself at what he'd already mentally filed as this place's answer to Garden's dorms, he tried to pull his thoughts together. He had to get home somehow... but thinking the word "home" didn't really bring any images to mind. When he tried to think of his room at Garden, he couldn't really remember what it looked like; thinking of Garden at all was mostly an impression of large, open spaces and running water.
It felt like it had been years. Maybe it had. How long had he fought for Cosmos, anyhow? He didn't think it had been that long, but when he tried to think back to when he'd first come to Sanctuary, he couldn't remember it. Just the battles, one after the other, as though without end--
--he remembered hearing Laguna's cheerful nattering, but it didn't make any sense, because the Laguna he remembered couldn't have been more than ten years older than himself--
--he remembered being Laguna, facing down a horde of manikins with the others, so maybe it was all just another of Ellone's dreams?
Maybe he was still dreaming now. Or maybe it was his life before that was the dream. It was getting hard to tell. If he thought hard, he could remember some details - Zell's tattoo, Irvine's hat, Selphie's hair - but for everything he remembered, he felt like there was more that was eluding him.
Rinoa, at least, had been real. That, he was still sure of, but he couldn't remember what her face looked like any more...
I have to get back.
Before he forgot any more - before he forgot that there was someplace to go back to--
No! He shook his head fiercely, gritting his teeth. He wouldn't think like that. He'd made a promise; no matter what, no matter how long it took, he was going to keep it. Even if he forgot everything else, that much he'd still remember.
He just had to keep moving forward, and survive until he could reach that place again.
I'll be there. He'd have liked to think that the thought could reach her somehow, but it seemed impossible. Just... wait for me a little longer.
NAME: Abby
JOURNAL:
joiedecombatIM: Joie de Combat
E-MAIL: abbykat at hotmail dot com
RETURNING: Yes, two.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Squall Leonhart
FANDOM: Final Fantasy VIII / Dissidia
CHRONOLOGY: He went from the middle of the FFVIII end FMV to Dissidia 012 duodecim, all the way through the end of the "Confessions of the Creator" bonus story, although since his memory is a mess he only remembers bits and pieces of Dissidia's events. Anything after his fight with the Warrior of Light in Destiny Odyssey is fragmented at best.
CLASS: Hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: None.
ALTER EGO: None.
BACKGROUND:
Squall's world is a mishmash of the modern, the futuristic, and the fantastic. Its moon is a world of monsters and every few centuries it dumps an enormous torrent of them onto the earth in a phenomenon called the Lunar Cry, destructive enough to wipe out civilizations. Or at least one of them, called Centra. The main result of this is that the countryside is full of the monsters typical of any Final Fantasy setting.
More significant to the storyline are the sorceresses. The most recently historically significant sorceress at the time of Squall's birth was Sorceress Adel, a tyrant who ruled the nation of Esthar and had a habit of sending her soldiers rampaging around other nations kidnapping little girls, ostensibly to find a successor - a woman who has the potential to become a sorceress does so by inheriting the powers of a previous sorceress. Study of sorceress magic eventually allowed the development of the para-magic used by most militaries, and the practice of junctioning Guardian Forces (FFVIII's summons) to allow the use of stronger magic. Junctioning Guardian Forces proved to have the side effect of eroding the memory of the user, which is why it's not a common practice in most of the world.
FFVIII uses the "stable time loop" model of time travel, meaning that the way that things play out is the way things always played out, and it's possible to affect the past, but not change it, since whatever you're going to do is, ultimately, what you did. It's probably best not to think about this too hard.
Squall Leonhart was born in the small country town of Winhill, in the south of Galbadia. His mother, Raine, was a local woman; his father, Laguna Loire, was a Galbadian soldier-cum-freelance journalist-cum unexpected hero and President of Esthar, and but for a twist of fate Squall might have grown up into a life of privilege in his world's most powerful nation, or as a small-town boy of no particular distinction.
But Raine died soon after Squall's birth, and Laguna was long absent, not even aware at the time that he had a child. Squall and Raine's adopted daughter Ellone were given into the care of the sorceress Edea Kramer, who with her husband Cid kept an orphanage in remote Centra. Squall spent the first four years of his life there, growing up amongst orphans of the first Sorceress War, with Ellone as his big sister.
He experienced loss for the first time at the age of four. Ellone disappeared without warning or explanation, leaving Squall crushed and bewildered by her departure. In truth, the Kramers had sent Ellone away to protect her from forces greater than their little orphanage could oppose, but it was nothing that anyone could explain to Squall in terms a four-year-old would understand. As children sometimes do, he became convinced that it was somehow his fault that the most important person in his life had left him without saying goodbye.
Soon after, Edea also left, and Cid began emptying the orphanage, adopting the children away until only two remained: Squall and one other boy, Seifer Almasy. He took the two of them with him to the island of Balamb, where he founded Garden and SeeD, inspired by Edea's premonitions of the looming threat of a future sorceress - premonitions in which Squall would play a key role.
Squall knew nothing of this. Five years old at the time he was enrolled in the new Balamb Garden, all Squall knew was that nearly everything familiar and safe in his life had been taken away, and the people around him were telling him he had to be strong. He became determined that to keep from being hurt any more, he would have to remain alone, and never let anyone else close enough to him that he might begin to depend on them.
Given time, he might have learned to cope with loss... but Garden gave him a Guardian Force to junction, to erode his memories of his life before. As he forgot about Ellone and his reasons for remaining isolated, he lost the ability to rethink his conviction, unable to remember a time that it hadn't simply been the truth, or that SeeD had ever been anything but an elite mercenary company, or that he and Seifer had ever been more friends than rivals. He grew up isolated and withdrawn, cultivating a cold and unfriendly demeanor and focusing his efforts toward becoming as strong as possible.
At Garden, Squall learned skills befitting special forces - combat and tactics, paramagic and junction theory, field medicine and survival. He took up the gunblade, the most challenging weapon Garden had to offer, as his specialization, and by the time he was seventeen he'd gained something of a reputation around Garden, in spite of his antisocial behavior, as one of the best in his class - rivaled only by Seifer, with whom he fought regularly.
It was during Squall's final field exam that the truth first began to unravel, albeit in a way that wouldn't be recognized until much later. He graduated into SeeD and with two other new members, Zell Dincht and Selphie Tilmitt, was immediately sent out on his first mission.
That was when he first met Rinoa Heartilly.
What was intended as a simple mission - assist Rinoa and her resistance faction in their efforts to liberate the city of Timber from Galbadian occupation - quickly spiraled out of control, beginning with Seifer's attack on the President of Galbadia and the emergence of Galbadia's new "ambassador" - Sorceress Edea, much changed, of whom Squall no longer had any memory.
With Rinoa alongside them, Squall and his team - joined by former SeeD instructor Quistis Trepe and Galbadia Garden sniper trainee Irvine Kinneas - found themselves pitted against the sorceress in an escalating series of battles and hardship and strange dreams in which Squall experienced scenes from Laguna's life without any idea who the man was.
Somehow, along the way, Rinoa gradually but surely found her way into Squall's heart.
Eventually the whole story was made clear - that Edea had been possessed by Ultimecia, a sorceress from the future; that she was the Matron who had cared for Squall, Seifer, Quistis, Zell, Selphie, and Irvine at her orphanage; that Squall's dreams were being caused by Ellone, part of her efforts to change the past; that Ultimecia was searching for Ellone in order to make use of her power and compress time; that Edea and Cid had founded SeeD for the very purpose of thwarting Ultimecia's plans. By the time the truth was revealed, however, a great deal of damage had already been done. Seifer was manipulated into serving Ultimecia. Trabia Garden was all but destroyed in a missile strike. Squall was nearly tortured to death in a Galbadian prison. And Edea's sorceress powers were passed on to Rinoa, making her vulnerable to Ultimecia's influence.
Command of Garden and SeeD fell on Squall's shoulders, but it was to save Rinoa more than to save the world that Squall was driven to Esthar, to finally meet his father for the first time in seventeen years. Ultimately, he and his friends ventured into time compression to face down and defeat the sorceress--
--and that's when everything came apart.
After defeating Ultimecia, instead of making it back to his own place and time as planned, Squall became lost in time compression. He briefly visited his own past, watching Edea inherit the dying Ultimecia's power and providing her with the inspiration for SeeD and the knowledge of his own role in it. But for all his best efforts, he couldn't find his way back to his own present; instead he wandered an empty, broken world, isolation and fear taking its toll on his sanity until he finally slipped into hallucinations and collapsed.
From this state, his consciousness was pulled into another world entirely, summoned by Cosmos, the goddess of harmony, to serve as one of her soldiers in her perpetual war against Chaos, god of disorder. With most of his memories of his life up to that point lost, Squall fought for Cosmos against the warriors of Chaos, including Ultimecia, who was summoned to fight for the god of discord. The war ran in cycles; as they fought, the warriors gradually regained their memories of who they were and where they had come from, but once one side or another won, the fallen warriors were revived by their deity - or sometimes by the opposing deity - to start the conflict over with no memory of the previous cycle. Squall fought by turns alongside and against Ultimecia, and alongside and against Laguna, never fully understanding his connection to either for very long.
By the twelfth cycle, another factor threatened to upset the balance of the conflict. A rift opened and poured out countless manikins, soulless crystalline puppets mimicking the forms of the warriors of both sides. The warriors of Chaos quickly took advantage, taking control of the manikins to use them as shock troopers against the forces of Cosmos. In the process they discovered that warriors killed by manikins were removed from the conflict for good, beyond either deity's ability to revive.
The twelfth cycle went badly for the warriors of Cosmos. Faced with overwhelming numbers of manikins, they were worn down gradually until one of them, Kain Highwind, concluded that the only chance they had of even surviving was to give up the fight until the next cycle. With the agreement of Cosmos's champion, the Warrior of Light, Kain set out to fell his own allies in order to make sure they would make it to the next cycle instead of being killed by the manikins.
Squall and most of the other warriors of Cosmos fell to Kain's surprise attacks, "sleeping" until the next cycle could begin. From this state, Squall's consciousness once more followed Laguna as he and Kain and the handful of remaining warriors launched a suicide mission to close the rift and cut off the unlimited influx of manikins into the world. The mission succeeded, but Laguna and the others were killed by the manikins; Cosmos diverted her divine power from maintaining the stability of the world in order to save the Warrior of Light, and the war entered its thirteenth cycle with the world crumbling to pieces around it.
Weakened, Cosmos took a gamble and divided her powers into a crystal for each of her ten remaining warriors. This left her vulnerable, but when Chaos took advantage of her weakened state to kill her, the crystals sustained her warriors even after her death, giving them the opportunity to rally and launch a final assault on Chaos, defeating him and claiming the victory for Cosmos's side even in her absence.
Beginning with the thirteenth cycle, Cosmos's warriors won every cycle of the conflict. The constant, repeated defeats drove Chaos into madness; in the eighteenth cycle he snapped and went completely feral, slaughtering the remaining warriors of both sides. By the twentieth cycle, Cosmos no longer had the power to summon warriors; Cid of the Lufaine protected her by sealing her away and used the last of his power to summon back Squall and four other warriors himself, in order to put Chaos out of his misery for good.
(There's some more backstory to Dissidia in regards to Cid of the Lufaine, the origins of Chaos, and a giant space dragon named Shinryu, but honestly it's not relevant to Squall's character in any way and he isn't aware of any of it, and this summary is long enough already.)
Eventually, Squall will return to the time-compressed world he got lost in after killing Ultimecia, and Rinoa will find him and bring him back to his proper place and time. In the meantime, though, he's ended up in the City and his memory of the events during and since time compression began are, to put it mildly, a great big mess.
PERSONALITY:
At first glance, Squall usually comes across as aloof and unemotional, even unfriendly. He's a blunt person who rarely bothers with social pleasantries and doesn't like to waste words. In fact, a lot of Squall's behavior is a complicated set of defense mechanisms designed to keep anyone from getting close to him, something that he's only recently begun to move beyond. Beneath his rigid stoicism, he's a surprisingly insecure person who constantly worries about how others see him and fears their rejection. He spent most of his life convinced that it was better not to let anyone close to him, that being alone all the time was better than suffering the inevitable pain of loss when they left; he cultivated the image of a cold, unfriendly loner to keep people at arm's length, and he finds it very difficult to express his thoughts and feelings to others. He still copes with loss poorly, having never learned much by way of emotional moderation: when he comes to care about someone, he cares very strongly.
Squall is a pessimist and poorly-versed in social graces, partly a result of and partly a contributing factor to his isolation. He doesn't understand or see the point of the many little social rituals that most other people take for granted. He's tactlessly honest and about as blunt as a thrown brick, and although he's an extremely loyal and devoted friend once his trust is won, he's very bad at expressing it in words, which can get confusing for the other people involved. Even when he does care about and trust someone, he often finds it easier to remain aloof from them. As with Bartz and Zidane, if he feels that they're strong enough and competent enough to look out for themselves, he prefers to go his own way and support them from a distance rather than take on the burden of trying to protect them directly, even if it means he doesn't have anyone with him to watch his own back.
He's a thoughtful, analytical person who doesn't often act without thinking and spends a lot of time either trying to prepare for what's ahead or mentally evaluating what's happened in the past; it's in his nature to consider the consequences and ramifications of his actions, and if anything he thinks too much. He's at his worst when he has nothing to do, since that's when he gets trapped in downward spirals of worry or doubt - he's a highly goal-oriented person who takes his responsibilities very seriously, even those he never asked for or wanted. Once he sets a goal or a course of action for himself, he pursues it with relentless determination: this is a man who walked half the width of an ocean and then some, carrying Rinoa on his back the whole way, on the slim chance that it might get him to a place where there might be someone who could help revive her. That sense of duty takes the place of what in someone else might be a sense of morality. Raised as a mercenary, Squall doesn't really believe in "good" and "evil," accepting that the sides of any given conflict are as much a matter of perspective as anything else. His code of conduct is built almost entirely around protecting the people he cares about and fulfilling whatever responsibilities he's been handed.
Also, as previously mentioned: Squall's memory is a damn mess. He has very few memories from when he was younger than about fifteen, and his memory is only really clear from roughly his field exam to the trip into space. Especially once it reaches time compression, things get kind of confused. At this point he's not entirely sure he actually saved Rinoa in space after all - although he does remember that he promised to meet her in the field outside the old orphanage, and will remember that promise no matter what happens to the rest of his memory... which isn't likely to improve so long as he's got a Guardian Force junctioned.
POWER:
Squall's metahuman abilities are tied to his ability to junction supernatural Guardian Forces to himself, an act which both augments his physical abilities and allows him to draw and cast magic. The Guardian Forces he'd junctioned up until the battle with Ultimecia were mostly lost in Time Compression, and the 'Porter wasn't able to bring the remaining ones in with him, so she did the next best thing - she gave him a new one, created from his mental image of the strongest and most powerful Guardian Force in existence: Griever.
Griever is a giant winged lion, and so long as Squall has him junctioned he mostly occupies a space in Squall's brain, where his present isn't immediately evident to others unless they're sensitive to such things. (This is why junctioning a Guardian Force erodes one's memory; the part of the brain the junction occupies is the part related to long-term memory.) The junction augments Squall's physical capabilities; it makes him stronger and more durable, makes his reflexes quicker, increases his endurance and speeds up his healing rate. The junction also enables Squall to use magic, and to draw it from sources of natural magical power. As Squall is primarily a front-line melee combatant, any high-end spells are reserved to boost his physical abilities through his junction, but he can cast the standard fire/ice/thunder/cure set, and he can also imbue his physical attacks with elemental magic.
Junctioning Griever also means that Squall can summon him, which is pretty much what it sounds like: giant winged lion attack! How long it takes to call Griever out, and how long Griever remains in a corporeal form before returning to his space in Squall's brain, mostly depends on how much Griever likes Squall at the moment, which in turn depends partly on how much Squall has called on Griever's help recently and mostly on Griever's own inscrutable cat reasons; while Squall is in the process of summoning, Griever absorbs anything that would injure Squall, but too much of that interrupts the summoning and leaves Griever resting and inaccessible for at least a day until he's recovered.
In addition to his junction, Squall has come into the City with his upgraded gunblade, the Lionheart. The name notwithstanding, the gunblades of Squall's world aren't projectile weapons; the "gun" mechanism built into the gunblade's grip fires a blank charge which gives an extra kick to the blade's impact, and using the weapon effectively means incorporating the recoil into one's fighting style. The other noteworthy part of the Lionheart is its blade, which is made of a crystalline material which easily absorbs and conducts magical energy in addition to being highly durable and keeping a sharp edge very well.
(If this constitutes one too many power slots, let me know and I'll drop the casting ability - I wasn't sure if the physical augmentation, casting, and summoning could reasonably be lumped together in any fashion under the general heading of the junction, or if they'll have to be considered completely separate power slots.)
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[video]
[Someone is still figuring out how to use the communicator. The video begins with a skewed-angle shot of a carpeted floor and the toes of a pair of black boots; it jumps wildly about as whoever's holding the device turns it in their hands, fiddles with it a little, and actually taps the side of it a couple times with their fingers. Finally, though, it straightens out, focusing on the scarred face of a serious-looking young man.]
This isn't where I'm supposed to be.
[For a moment or two he doesn't say anything else, just looks off to the side uncomfortably.]
I need some information. I know there's no point in asking how to go home or anything like that, but - we were brought here for a reason, right?
[The look on his face is determined, almost fierce.]
I need to know what my mission here is. Who's in charge.
[He's quiet a moment longer, and when he looks away again, it's with a trace of deep weariness. His last words before he shuts off the feed seem mostly meant for himself:]
...how many times is it going to be for this kind of thing?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
This isn't where I'm supposed to be.
Squall kept coming back to that thought. Never mind that there was nothing he could do about it, that he was stuck here, that - once again - he was caught up helplessly in something beyond his control and expected to deal with it whether he liked it or not. This was not where he was supposed to be. He already had responsibilities, a promise he had to keep.
...didn't he?
Alone in the apartment he'd claimed for himself at what he'd already mentally filed as this place's answer to Garden's dorms, he tried to pull his thoughts together. He had to get home somehow... but thinking the word "home" didn't really bring any images to mind. When he tried to think of his room at Garden, he couldn't really remember what it looked like; thinking of Garden at all was mostly an impression of large, open spaces and running water.
It felt like it had been years. Maybe it had. How long had he fought for Cosmos, anyhow? He didn't think it had been that long, but when he tried to think back to when he'd first come to Sanctuary, he couldn't remember it. Just the battles, one after the other, as though without end--
--he remembered hearing Laguna's cheerful nattering, but it didn't make any sense, because the Laguna he remembered couldn't have been more than ten years older than himself--
--he remembered being Laguna, facing down a horde of manikins with the others, so maybe it was all just another of Ellone's dreams?
Maybe he was still dreaming now. Or maybe it was his life before that was the dream. It was getting hard to tell. If he thought hard, he could remember some details - Zell's tattoo, Irvine's hat, Selphie's hair - but for everything he remembered, he felt like there was more that was eluding him.
Rinoa, at least, had been real. That, he was still sure of, but he couldn't remember what her face looked like any more...
I have to get back.
Before he forgot any more - before he forgot that there was someplace to go back to--
No! He shook his head fiercely, gritting his teeth. He wouldn't think like that. He'd made a promise; no matter what, no matter how long it took, he was going to keep it. Even if he forgot everything else, that much he'd still remember.
He just had to keep moving forward, and survive until he could reach that place again.
I'll be there. He'd have liked to think that the thought could reach her somehow, but it seemed impossible. Just... wait for me a little longer.
