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OOC Information:
Name: Kait
Are you over 15? y!
Contact: fenerkulesi

IC Information:
Name: Vayne Carudas Solidor | Iskender Guenesi
Canon and medium: Final Fantasy XII | Video game
Age: 27
Preincarnation Species: Human
Preincarnation Appearance: Character model, Vayne in HD, Vayne Novus, The Undying
Any differences: None, save the shift to a 2014 American upper class fashion sense. If using a PB counts here, I’ll be using Tarkan Tevetoğlu.
Preincarnated History: Final Fantasy Wiki.

Once, in the city of Rabanastre, there was a young noble named Raithwall. The gods favored him, and gave him a sword, which he used to cut three shards off of the Sun-Cryst, a huge crystal that rests at the top of a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. Armed with the sword and the shards, which in practice were more or less magic nukes, at the behest of the gods he united first his home continent of Valendia, and from there, all of Ivalice. Once he had done this, the gods gave Raithwall the title of “Dynast-King.”

Fast-forward (roughly) 1100 years.

Rabanastre is still a prosperous city, the capital of the nation of Dalmasca, ruled over by Raithwall’s descendant King Raminas. Dalmasca is closely allied to its bordering nation Nabradia, an alliance cemented with the marriage of Raminas’ daughter and heir Princess Ashe to Nabradia’s Prince Rasler. Unfortunately, this marriage was not to last, as shortly thereafter the Archadian Empire invaded Nabradia, and Rasler was killed. Raminas surrendered to Archadia to stave off further bloodshed, but is killed after he signs the treaty, leading to Archadia’s control of Dalmasca. The audience sees Vayne in the cutscene, and his identity is revealed shortly (in game-time) afterward. In the manga, it’s shown that he largely if not completely orchestrated the plot to assassinate Raminas.

Fast-forward another two years.

Since their conquest of Dalmasca, the Empire has been sending Consuls to rule it. The latest of these is Vayne Solidor, third son of, and heir to, Emperor Gramis. When he becomes Consul, there’s a big party in the Royal Palace, and that night the anti-Imperial insurgence (or resistance, depending on what side you’re on) attempts to storm the Palace and take his life. He puts down the attack and life goes on. Unfortunately, Vayne’s tenure as Consul is short-lived, as the Imperial Senate recalls him back to Archades, the Empire’s capital. Gramis is ill and presumably dying of this illness, as the main reason Vayne is called back is because the Imperial Senate and Gramis would rather have his younger brother Larsa rule.

Why the Senate wants Larsa to rule ultimately isn’t important, but Gramis’ reason is. Since the rise of Archades as a nation in the Galtean Alliance, the years immediately following Raithwall’s rule, it was ruled by the Senate as a republic. However, 200 years before the series begins, House Solidor was a noble house with a seat on the Senate. It found itself in a struggle with the military, and, emerging on top, used the military to come to power as the new Imperial House. As they did this, they instituted the system of Judges that the Empire still uses during and after the game. Even though Gramis gave the okay to invade Nabradia, he’s grown tired of the use of military force to keep power, and favors Larsa because Larsa would use diplomacy and negotiations instead.

When Vayne returns to Archadia, he has one goal, in one aspect a direct result of why he’s the third son and the heir. Ten years before the game starts, his father had Vayne kill his two older brothers, presumably for treason, and it’s implied that he had to be forced to do so. He kills his father and blames it on the Senate, thus enabling him to disband the Senate and begin an autocratic rule. Now that he has nobody to answer to, he’s free to use Archadia’s military to bring his real goal out of the shadows, that being to be the new Dynast-King. When one of the Judges Magister tries to oppose him, he has her executed right there, telling another to deal the final blow as a test of his loyalty.

From here on, Vayne largely disappears from the game until the final dungeon, but it’s made clear he’s not just sitting around doing nothing. The Archadian fleet is mobilizing, with Vayne at its helm. It isn’t long before the Sun-Cryst is shattered, releasing the necessary energy to power the great Sky Fortress Bahamut, pinnacle of Archadian engineering. Vayne leads the Archadian fleet over Rabanastre, where it stands at a stalemate with the fleets of the Resistance and Archadia’s rival, the Rozzarian Empire.

There are minor one-off skirmishes until Princess Ashe and her allies are able to infiltrate the Bahamut. After they fight one round against Vayne, Larsa uses a piece of manufacted nethicite to try to stop him. Instead, its energy causes Vayne to more or less Hulk out, becoming Vayne Novus. Gabranth and Vaan give him mortal wounds, and he flees, telling the Occurian Venat that he wasn’t strong enough, and she should go find someone who can carry out her plans. Instead, she chooses to die along with him so he won’t have to die alone, and she gives him her power, merging the two of them together and with parts from the Bahamut to create the Undying, and by “merging,” she’s “drafting them directly onto his skin.” Just like with Vayne Novus, it’s implied to be a very painful transformation. When the Undying is defeated, it explodes into a cloud of Mist.

Reincarnated History: Iskender was born to an upper-class Locke City family, with his parents having immigrated from Istanbul before he was born. He’s an only child, and while he’s met his extended family, he’s not particularly close to them. His mother died in an accident when he was still a baby, and as his father never really talked about her very much, he rarely if ever thinks about her.

When he was growing up, he would spend all his time in the nonfiction section of the library, and went seamlessly into a career in academia. He doesn’t have any close friends, but he’s okay with that. He never really did, and the little office socialization he gets at Locke City University is enough for him. As of when he’d get his first echo, he’s almost done earning a Ph.D., though God knows how long that’s going to take him now, focusing on military and political history.

First Echo: Iskender’s first Echo when his father died from an illness, and it had been a long time coming. Iskender wasn’t particularly close to his father, but he didn’t have a bad relationship with him either. When he watched the monitors, instead of feeling the rush of adrenaline that he has to do something all he could do was sit there and watch, with a feeling of satisfaction that should have scared him, perhaps, but it didn’t. He could feel a vial in his hand, and he looked down but his hand was empty. He wasn’t in a hospital room, instead in an… he would have called it a huge office but that would be understating it. He can’t mourn for his father like he would have expected to.

Instead, he’s just left with a sense of coldness and pragmatism, willing to do whatever he must, no matter how ruthless. It sits with him seamlessly, much better than he might have thought.

Preincarnation Personality:

Note: Since I used italics for emphasis in this section, headcanon is in red. I hope that’s okay!

One of Vayne’s most dominant traits is that he doesn’t care what people think of him, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of his goals. He has no problem talking to Venat when he knows other people can’t see her, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goals. When he gives the order to test the nethicite on Nabudis, he wants to be sure it’ll work, and while he realizes that it wasn’t the most smartest plan, it was still the best one, saying that if they had “more time we might have availed ourselves of more prudent measures.”

It’s too easy to say that Vayne is power-hungry, ruthless, and manipulative, not hesitating to get his hands as dirty as he has to, and leave it at that.

Vayne wants to be the new Dynast-King, yes, but not because of the power that would be his if he’s successful. The Dynast-King is chosen by the Occuria, the gods, and is manipulated by them to put Ivalice’s history back onto what they feel is its proper course. The average Ivalician, however, knows nothing of the Occuria’s involvement, and to them, the title Dynast-King was indicative of power. If Vayne were to call himself the Dynast-King, he would have that power, but the important part, to him, is that he would not have been chosen by the Occuria.

Vayne isn’t moving to be the Dynast-King because he wants to. Taking over the world is a nice bonus, but that isn’t his main motivation, to the point where, since he doesn’t mention it after he becomes Vayne Novus and the audience gets his last motive rant, he doesn’t care about that at all. Instead, he’s doing it because he’s the only person in Ivalice with the means - Archadia’s military and Dr. Cid’s weapons - to give him the best chance to be successful. It’s not about his power, but rather that of humanity as a whole.

The backstory to the Espers, FF12’s summons, is “In vainglory they arose, shouting challenges at the gods. But prevail they did not, and their doom it was to walk the mist until time’s end.” They’re banished to the remote corners of Ivalice, only to be freed when they’re bested in battle, and as of the game they’ve been sealed away for millennia. The same thing wouldn’t happen to Vayne, Cid, and Venat; a human isn’t as powerful as an Esper and Venat (as presumably one of their creators) is much more so. What would happen to them if they failed would most likely be scaled accordingly. Venat (presumably) helped seal them away, Cid controls one in battle, and doubtless they told Vayne exactly what’s going on, if he didn’t already know. The Esper’s fates are a punishment to them, and a warning to anyone else who might attempt what they did. Venat, Cid, and Vayne evidently decide that whatever’s going to happen if they fail is going to be a terrible fate, but completely worth it.

That’s not to say that he’s just misunderstood. Vayne is cold and calculating, and willing to do whatever he has to in order to complete his goals. The attack on Rabanastre is intended as a preemptive strike - as far as he knows there’s nothing stopping Ashe from using nethicite (which, again, is more or less a magic nuke) to completely wipe Archadia off the map. In moving to take Rabanastre, both the actual attack and building the resources to carry it out, he’s not just condemning himself, but potentially everyone in the empire. He’s well aware of this, yet he chooses to move forward anyway.

This even extends to his fighting style. He hits hard, but by necessity he has to get his hands dirty. The reason he doesn’t use a sword is because that’s how he killed his brothers, and right afterward he couldn’t use swords without seeing himself killing them again. As of the game, he wouldn’t, but he wouldn’t want to find out for sure, not to mention he’d be out of practice. Monks in Final Fantasy have connotations with personal discipline and humility, both of which fit Vayne.

Vayne doesn’t show himself as willing or wanting to talk to people. He’s very charismatic, as more than one character remarks on, but at the same time he only says as little as he has to, when in public. After the speech in Rabanastre, he gives a little smile. It’s not a “nailed it” smile and I didn’t even notice it the first few times I watched the scene. It’s almost shy, and while I’m (more than) a little hesitant to flat-out call him shy, he’s definitely introverted. After he killed his brothers, he shut himself off. It’s most likely how he found out about the nethicite.

When Vayne sees his father when he gets back to Archades, Gramis asks him if he’s there for revenge. Vayne looks livid when Gramis brings it up, the only time he looks that angry. Revenge for what isn’t explicitly spelled out, but the audience finds out that he killed his brothers before then, at Gramis’ order. It suggests that he had to be forced to do it, and, needless to say, it’s still very much a sore spot. He still feels guilty that he didn’t do more to try and stop it, or didn’t straight-up refuse, rationally or not, since we don’t know the methods Gramis used to force him. He killed Gramis out of revenge, but also the timing is after he finds out about the Dawn Shard. Now that his enemies are working with the power of the gods he disdains, he has to speed things along.

Because of his prior experiences with fratricide, Vayne isn’t as close to Larsa as he would like to be, because he wouldn’t put it past Gramis to order that again. Vayne tells Larsa that he should find the strength to oppose him, and when Larsa does, Vayne doesn’t look surprised or betrayed, just impressed with a little bit of amused.

He knows a lot about Ivalice’s history and culture, being able to recognize the Rabanastre cathedral as an example of Galtean architecture. To be able recognize it as such is to be expected from someone with an upbringing in a noble house, but he’s also able to say that the cathedral is a good example and why, to an Archadian soldier who most likely really doesn’t care. There’s no point in his being facetious or saying it for manipulative points, because as far as he knows, the only person listening to him is that aforementioned soldier. I think he’s genuinely interested in it.

That the final boss is called the “Undying” suggests that it’s mostly Venat in charge, as the audience has seen her possess people before, and in the game, the term “undying” is exclusively - with the exception of Dr. Cid - used by the Occuria, to refer to each other. When she fuses with him to become the Undying, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that the process, because of what it entails, most likely kills him, but whether it’s mostly Vayne or Venat, or equal parts of both the Undying’s motivation is basically “if I attack them, they’ll attack me back enough times and kill me”. If the Undying is mostly Venat, then the last time the audience sees Vayne as himself is when he fails as Vayne Novus. His last words are to Venat. They’re not “no, I failed, how could this be,” they’re “I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough,” and he tells her to go find someone who could fulfill her plans. As he’s dying, it’s not “I,” it’s “you.” In his last moments he’s not thinking about himself, because it was never about him.

Any differences: The biggest difference between Vayne and Iskender would be his drive and ambition. Iskender has no desire to take over the world, for any reason, and as there's nobody handing out magic nukes, there's no need for him to be a villain. He’s content to do his research, and instead of having a strong opinion about the gods either way, he just straight-up doesn’t care. He’d find Vayne’s vitriol on that subject rather jarring, to say the least.

He'd be a lot more openly friendly, though still introverted and distant. Vayne doesn’t go out of his way to befriend people, and while Iskender wouldn’t either, he’d still be more social and less guarded. He doesn’t have Vayne’s resentment or goals keeping him from going out and just talking to people.

Lastly, he’d be horrified once he got the Echoes for Vayne’s excesses. He isn’t anywhere near as ruthless as Vayne is, and he has no desire to get power. His first one would start that - after he felt satisfaction at seeing his father die, he wouldn’t get the Echo that said why. He’s not a pacifist per se but definitely not as violent or as willing to fight.

Abilities: Vayne is a skilled military strategist, capable of having more than one big plan going at once. He’s able to come up with plans that take years to go off, and in the end he’s still successful. Even his enemies recognize this, with the sole Rozzarian representative as much as saying that that is exactly why they fear him so much - not only does he have so much power, he knows how to use it.

We can’t say how good of a ruler he’d be in peacetime. From what little we do see, he’s at least competent, making things in Rabanastre run smoother than the previous Consul(s), noticeably and quickly. It bears mentioning, though, that while some - if not most - NPCs in Rabanastre talk about how things are improving, there are also those that say it needs more time, and they can’t expect things to change overnight.

In battle, he uses his fists, fighting like a member of the Monk class. Given that he’s the only human character shown fighting to completely forgo any kind of weapon, it’s not unreasonable to infer that his fighting style is largely self-taught. Since any serious opponent he would have, owing to his position, would most likely be covered in armor, he has to be able to hit very hard for that style to be effective at all. His special attacks aren’t particularly special, being an energy-charged punch and a punch barrage, respectively, suggesting that he doesn’t have much aptitude for magic.

Note: I don’t think what he can do as Vayne Novus and the Undying are relevant, since both of those are a result of extremely specific circumstances that I think it’s safe to say will not get replicated here.

Roleplay Sample - Third Person:

Iskender ran his finger along the shelf, not quite sure what specific book he was looking for. He’d know it when he found it. It wasn’t the way he usually did things - he liked to know exactly what he was looking for when he went in, otherwise it often ended up being a complete waste of time - but today he only had an idea in mind. Usually the university library was quite helpful, but today he didn't think it would be up to task. He could carry on just fine without finding anything today, really, but it would make his life that much easier if he could just get that one source now.

He shivered. The library was always cold, and he probably should have worn a heavier jacket, even though the weather was warming up and the library was just across the parking lot from where his office was. No matter. Either he'd find what he needed or he wouldn't, and he'd spent enough time in the stacks browsing so that he was (probably) almost done. He's reminded why he doesn't like to use the card catalog - some of these had seemed promising, but actually looking through them? No. It was, actually, much more prudent to just go there and do it the old-fashioned way.

Finally his finger lands on one that unlike anything on the last three shelves just might have what he'd come in here for. He pulls it out, looking at the table of contents and flipping through it. After reading a few pages, he doesn't let himself smile, but yes. This should work. It's not what he'd had in mind - at least, he doesn't think it is - but it's sufficient. He can make do. It wouldn't be the first time.

Roleplay Sample - Network:

[He needs to take a break in his work, so why not spend it doing this? He doesn’t know what to expect, but he’s not nervous or hesitant at all. That surprises him.]

I see I’m not the only one this is happening to. [No point in specifying what “this” is, after all.]

My apologies, as I’m sure you get lots of people asking this same question, but would you be so kind as to tell me what is going on? I’m not expecting stunning alacrity, but a minimum would be more than helpful.

Any Questions? If you need to clear up any lingering questions or concerns, here's the place to do it.