Mm. A desire to write a Summer sheet, an experiment in this month's Contest prompt, and a capstone to a sheet that I hold near and dear to my heart... A bit of all three, I suppose?
It didn't turn out like I expected, perhaps, but sometimes that's fine and well too.
RIDER OF SUMMER WISHES
Class: Rider
True Name: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Alignment: Neutral Summer
Gender: Female
Birthday: December 10, 1830
Height/Weight: 152 cm / 61 kg
Birthplace: Massachusetts, North America
Blood Type: B
Personal Traits
Forte: Correspondence, inspiration
Weakness: Meeting people in person
Likes: People, summer, flowers
Dislikes: Seeing people, loss
Natural Enemy: Gray
Image Color: White
Voice: Takamori Natsumi
Theme: Yamashita Tatsuro - Bokura no Natsu no Yume
Parameters
STR: E
AGI: D
END: E
MGI: C
LCK: E
NP: C
Source:
https://twitter.com/_tamomoko/status...165954/photo/1
“...The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring.
But ah, you see…
Forever is only ever right now.”
Background
A woman born in Massachusetts in the early 19th century, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born to a prominent family, raised well with deep ties to the community and educated at prestigious academies and seminary schools. A well-behaved, conscientious student, she studied fields ranging from botany and geology to arithmetic, Latin, and history. She was well-regarded by her parents and peers, bright and friendly, and an exemplary, enthusiastic scholar.
However, beginning at the age of fourteen, she began to be haunted by what she would later call the "deepening menace" of death, starting with the demise of her beloved second cousin, Sophia Howard. Sophia's death shocked Emily so much she had to be sent home from boarding school to recover, returning to school only after marshaling her spirit and chasing away her own melancholy.
A series of deaths among her family, friends, and even beloved mentors and teachers continued to impact her, sending her into a spiral which would lead her to hide herself away in her room for decades. Once she did so, her newfound agoraphobia continued to worsen, until she decided she would never leave her room again. She began to refuse to see visitors altogether, carrying out cordial and warm conversations from behind her closed door. The few times she was seen outside, generally only for private walks or to tend to the Dickinson family garden, she was always dressed in white, developing a local reputation as a ghostly, mysterious "Woman in White."
Unknown to most, this disposition was not merely the result of childhood trauma, or social anxiety, or anything of the sort - but it was the result of Emily’s deepening awareness of her own psychic ability to perceive death. First awakening with Sophia’s passing, Emily couldn’t help but see mortality and its winding pathways in every person, animal, or life she encountered, until she could not stand to look at them.
So she hid, and she wrote, and by the time she passed away her poems numbered nearly 1800, shocking her family and friends. Regarded posthumously as a beautiful and brilliant poet, many of her poems dealt with death and the subject of immortality, revealing a deep-seated obsession with the concept that had hung over her entire life.
In another class, she would be summoned in her early twenties, during the days in which she first secluded herself from the world after the deaths of her beloved cousin and teacher. At that age, the idea of even stepping outside would have been anathema to Emily. However, as a Rider, Emily is manifest at a later age in her life, where she still secluded herself but occasionally ventured outside, and had the confidence to begin to contemplate what her condition had taught her, rather than only what it led her to do.
As a Summer servant, she has resolved to step outside, and she’s most interested in enjoying this summer to the absolute fullest!
Personality
While deeply shy and reclusive through much of her life, Rider was never actually introverted in the least. She had many dearly held friendships and treasured all of them, communicating through letters and mail, sending them her thoughts, her verse, and flowers from her garden. She had always been quick to befriend and to love, warmly accepting others and thinking of them constantly.
Social and expressive, her seclusion was not the result of a lack of desire for contact with others, but a decision she made in her youth due to her own condition and the knowledge it bestowed upon her. Yet while she would embrace this seclusion as an Assassin, as a Rider, she strides out into the warm summer and forces her way through her fears to assert herself as an extroverted, energetic individual eager to enjoy herself and make memories for herself and her Master.
She is quick to check on others’ well-being, to play with children and friends, to run out for food or drinks… She eagerly soaks up the experiences she would have otherwise abstained from in the past and delights in experiencing the beach, and nature, and even the strange or bizarre alongside those she cares about.
This summer, Emily has decided, she shall hold nothing back, and she shall venture outside with her head held proud and her back straight. She still flinches when she looks upon her Master, or their friends, or any allied Servants - but she does not falter, and she keeps what she sees to herself, holding tightly onto her Master’s hand for support.
“I once said it was shelter to speak with you.
I meant it, and truly it is.
But more than merely shelter…
I’d like to make that shelter a house,
with all the winding paths of home.”
Class Abilities
Riding
Rank: D
Other than riding as a passenger in carriages and trains, there are no anecdotes of Emily Dickinson actively riding horses or piloting vehicles. At this rank, she is compensated with this skill only due to her Class container, and by its nature, she may only utilize her mount as a Rider a single time.
Magic Resistance
Rank: E
A skill that grants protection against magical effects. As she never had any abilities that could resist Magecraft and sequestered herself from ever coming into contact with a mage, Rider’s Magic Resistance remains at the minimum level. She can avoid most direct attack spells indirectly by way of her ESP, but she cannot neutralize spells in any way.
Personal Skills:
Future Vision
Rank: EX
The psychic ability that haunted Emily Dickinson all her life - beginning with only a dim affinity, the shock of each death in her life gradually awakened her psychic channel, until they could no longer be turned off or in any way ignored, leading to her inevitable seclusion from the vision that plagued her whenever she looked at another living being. Emily cannot help but see life as a flowing stream around everyone and everything, and she can clearly discern both its ebb and its flow.
By tracing the immediate path of their life, Rider is able to predict their short-term future, spotting death flags and dangers without fail, as well as visualizing the equivalent of their health and "HP" to the utmost detail.
While these vision may be used offensively, they do not directly interact with or actualize death, but are rather limited to showing where to directly damage or annihilate someone's life force, focusing on the "places connecting to the source of life" and the "parts which keeps things alive," inflicting critical damage on someone's life force that leads to their death.
After a number of traumatic experiences in her youth, and one moment in particular, Rider is loath to use this for anything other than support, and ordinarily limits the exercise of this skill to prediction and forecasting.
Midsummer Journal
Rank: C++
An offshoot of the false Item Creation she exercised as an Assassin, Emily retains her ability to enchant words and phrases even as a Rider, carrying her poems and doodles in a small, battered diary she never lets go of. She still writes whenever the mood strikes her, bestowing them with magical energy to enact a variety of buffs and blessings, including but not limited to reinforcement of parameters, healing, invisibility, and other supportive effects.
Unlike Assassin, she is more confident in sharing the text of her poems, rather than merely snippets or individual lines, delighting in honest criticism and discourse.
After a certain time, however, she will no longer show her work, and this skill may be sealed without explanation.
Summer Correspondence Courses
Rank: C+
An unusual variation on Rider’s Correspondence skill as an Assassin. In its original form, Correspondence was a skill that displays one's enthusiasm and eloquence in written communication with others, giving Emily Dickinson an advantageous network of friends and followers to aid her in data collection and dissemination. In this form, that network has been repurposed, and rather than collecting information to act as a navigator, Rider is collecting knowledge and skill in a variety of fields from her friends and confidants, striving to better herself each day.
Skills from a variety of sources may be exercised at C-D rank, including Eye for Art, Mathematics, Presence Detection, Subversive Activities, and others. Rather than innate skills, these are skills obtained after her summoning, and she frequently checks her phone to obtain updates and review new lessons in her downtime during the summer. It is not uncommon for Rider to stay up all night, her face lit up by her phone, discussing matters with a wise friend in another time zone, both caught up for hours by her probing questions and charm.
Noble Phantasm:
The Chariot - Because I Could Not Stop for Death, He Kindly Stopped for Me
Type: Anti-Unit
Rank: C
A Noble Phantasm derived from one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems, the one that represented the conclusion of her decades of musing on death and mortality. The answer that she reached after hiding away for so long, when she could no longer ignore the only death she could not look away from - her own, writ clear as day in the flowing currents of life that she saw through the warped channels of her perception.
A poem of farewell, setting aside one’s fears, regrets, and all of one’s uncertainties. Upon activation, Rider releases her hold on her Saint Graph and fully unlocks the restraints she unconsciously placed upon her psychic ability, allowing her to look upon death in all of its facets. In essence, the effect is the death of Emily Dickinson.
This is not the enforcement of instantaneous death or a curse of degradation -- but rather, it is a death that knows no haste, gently letting go of all that remains over the course of a single day. Once Emily Dickinson has invoked the true name of this Noble Phantasm, she obtains the absolute certainty that in one day, she shall cease to exist as a Servant in the present and shall return to the embrace of eternity, no matter what forces may attempt to intervene.
During this time, Rider is constantly shedding shards of her Saint Graph and essence as a Heroic Spirit, like feathers falling from a bird in flight, and this energy may be put to whatever use she desires. Whether it is healing wounds or recreating a beating heart, taking flight or going anywhere she can picture, or any other miracle that may be enacted through the expenditure of vast stocks of magical energy, during the period of this Noble Phantasm precious little is completely beyond her reach.
She may even attempt to hold onto that energy in her journal, sequestering it away for her final moments, and in one shining moment convert the small, battered notebook she holds dear into the equal of a true wish-granting device - but at the end of that day, the time shall come for her to put away her labor and her leisure, and resume that gentle ride towards the end that awaits all things. At that time, the Woman in White knows even without seeing it, she shall board her carriage with a smile.
“Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity…
And all the while, I’m ever grateful,
For this one summer’s precious verities.”
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Originally Posted by Sandstorm77
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