[ here's to you and your temper. ]

[zehel]

If I knew what I was doing with a character, they wouldn't be as fun to play. Always looking for advice and ways to improve—pitch in, send help, etc. IP logging is off, anonymous is on, and comment screening is always available per request.

Thank you for any feedback you provide! ♥

[nick / name]: Thorn
[personal LJ name]: thornsmoke
[other characters currently played]:

Kazu Mikura | aettir | Air Gear
Alan Ryves | veritaphobia | The Demon's Lexicon

[e-mail]: obliviomancy on gmail
[AIM / messenger]: k north some @ AIM

[series]: 07-Ghost
[character]: Frau
[character history / background]: How a sky pirate's cabin boy found religion after death.
[character abilities]: It's the scythe that matters.
[character personality]:

When it comes to the award for Worst Bishop of All Time—well, they'll probably need to wade through all the crusaders, madmen and traitors for their winner. But an honorary mention will certainly go to the guy who redesigned his crucifix into a lighter and brings skin mags as an offering to an archbishop's funeral. Frau tosses off defiance after petty defiance wherever he goes: hiding a vast porn collection in the ecclesiastical archives, hitting on nuns, beating coworkers with (literal!) holy staffs, racing hovercraft on church grounds. While there's no malice in his irreverence, the fact remains that he seems an ill fit to be a man of the cloth. Frau comes off as a thrill-chaser who's never quite caught up to his years, the kind who's always lived to be a delinquent.

All true, of course—with one catch: he's been dead for years.

In light of his circumstances, Frau's posturing assumes an air of just that—pretending, because he hasn't the temperance (or the faith, depending on how you look at it) to live only as a vessel for the Church's seventh sacred Ghost and Verloren's living scythe. Of the three Ghosts really given screentime, Frau is perhaps the most invested in humanity. It's a contrast to keep him on edge. He takes comfort in little living gestures: drinking, ridiculously hot showers, presumably making use of his magazine collection. He's stubborn and brash, reckless and arrogant; he picks on brats, irritates his fellow bishops for irritating him in turn, plays the gentleman to the younger ladies and the rogue to the legal ones. (Note: rate of canonical success in picking up ladies — zero.) Anything to wring out a second more of human warmth.

It's a half-life that toes the line of denial without quite crossing it. Though he's aware that he's nowhere near mortal, Frau exhibits neither regret nor resentment for the living. Peculiarly, he's almost apathetic on the subject, resigned to a fate of fading under Zehel and someday passing the Ghost to a new vessel. He has no particular desire to die—but nor does he have illusions about the inevitability. Better to be executed by a convenient time and hand than burn out on Verloren's madness. Meanwhile, nothing supercedes his duties as Zehel's embodiment. Frau knows his place, knows what's required of him—and, of most consequence, he knows that cutting down corrupted souls is the only way to purify them. Ultimately, he fufills his role for neither faith nor justice. Maybe he does believe in God, but at the end of the day, the old bastard can still pack up his scriptures and crawl right back to the Heaven from which he crept. Instead, it's an odd sympathy that drives him. Frau appreciates humanity, the romantic enough at heart (blame it on his honorable sky pirate childhood) to want to save and protect the innocent.

But he isn't human in spite of all his efforts. His impressions of people are often more than a little colored by Verloren's instinct, which by nature recognises pure souls—and craves them to eat. The living he meets thus fall within two spheres (with frequent overlap): the few to whom Frau can relate (largely children and fellow punks-in-training) and the rest awaiting judgment. It follows that he avoids interfering in any purely human conflicts. Their outcomes and the consequences to the souls involved are a Ghost's jurisdiction, but the movements themselves are not. This isn't to say that he won't protect an innocent or someone in his charge, but that only proves what's been obvious from the start: if the two responsibilities fail to overlap, Frau will always prioritise his human sympathies above any kind of fairness.

Mercy is the final thin standard of humanity to which he holds. Humans define their nature through their actions and beliefs—but, after years with a monstrous remnant whispering temptation between his thoughts, his own reason seems oddly untrustworthy. Instead, he's pinned his humanity on the few relationships that have managed to catch hold of him—this process made only somewhat difficult by his friendship with Verloren's idea of the perfect dessert. But, in a sense, it's made matters that much clearer too. What's to distinguish him from Verloren's instrument, after all, if he can prey on the innocent? As such, Teito Klein has almost become Frau's measure for humanity; eat his soul and it's game over.

Still, such seriousness rarely surfaces from day to day. Frau deals via denial when he can and flippancy when honesty can't be eluded. Being a living Ghost? He marks it by sleeping in a coffin with a bunny-girl alarm clock on it. Finding himself increasingly tempted to devour the soul of his lynchpin to sanity? He tells the boy just that—in tones of indignant outrage at not having his valiant efforts acknowledged. Despite, or more likely because of, his underlying inhumanity, Frau preserves an image of irreverence. Outwardly he remains a consistent blend of casual and sociable, alternately callous and flirtatious to provoke better reactions ... and always just ridiculous enough to keep the majority of his acquaintances at a comfortable arm's length without losing human contact.

It's exactly that which makes Frau the greatest liability among the Ghosts.

Where the others have resigned themselves to duty without attachment, Frau views his humanity as still under siege. Having something yet to lose, he's the most likely of them to be lost. There is no mercy for that.

[point in timeline you're picking your character from]:

chapter 57, some time after having left Capella. I'd also like to ask permission for him to bring the hawkzile (snowmobile/hovercraft combo) he's riding with him if possible!

[journal post]:

Hoooh. This ain't bad for a place of worship. Advertise the sights a little more, maybe you'd even get willing people through once in a while.

[ As if cued: giggles flurry in passing. After they fade into distant footfalls, there's a sigh that stretches into a yawn. ]

Might as well get the boring part over with. Two orders of business: one, I've got a vehicle that needs keeping. Empty stable or shed for preference, but as long as it's clean and not packed with animals, anything'll do fine.

Two, there's a brat around here who could use some keeping too. Stupid face, probably off hissing like a cat right now—you can't miss him. If a pretty girl wants to show him how one of these [ tap tap ] works, he'll be grateful.

[ His voice deepens. With the utmost suave charm— ] We'll both be.

[third person / log sample]:

They haven't let him deliver a sermon in a long time.

In part it's maybe because the last time he tried it, the speech happened to stray from the glory of God to the glory of serving God by expanding the Church's library with "better reading material". (The heavily ironic quotes were supplied afterwards by one four-eyed bishop with a doll fetish, along with an accurate crack at his nose; Castor had not been impressed.) On the whole, Frau figures it's just as well. If people don't know how to live their days without being told, they're not going to get anything out of his flinging bible quotes. After all, life boiled down's pretty simple: be kind. Laugh when you get the chance. Love those you find. Don't make stupid wishes that'll lure a kor to corrupt your soul.

No more, no less, quick and easy. Every soul for itself.

Now, Bastien had been the speech-giver—sure of God's laws and God's justice, so full of faith that he could have lit the congregation with a touch. Frau remembers—not the sermons, which were always the perfect length for a morning doze—but the times Bastien had read the Barsburg Bible in to a kid and a candle in the dark, and the words had seemed to drag light from the flame, God brightness enough to illuminate the sky. Bastien, who'd wanted humanity to be good. Who had conjured and murdered for justice. Who'd had kindness enough, in the end, to make forgiveness unnecessary.

—why do you stay your hand? A god must not hesitate. Please kill me quickly.

Through the hours when he's too tired to give a damn about being more brat than a god, Frau thinks, in the shadow of a thought even Verloren's scythe hasn't reached, that he'd never wished for this. For a flat heart and bones never quite warm, for bitter iron seething inside his arm, for souls warped and twisted and crying their greetings to something him-and-not-him — how much longer, Zehel? How much longer before you fly back to your master's hand to serve and rend and feast as we do?

(The souls of the damned, having no dignity left to lose, always jaw like idiots.)

It doesn't last—not the thought, not the shadow. They were human once, after all. They've earned the right to rest. And so, Frau crushes down the scythe's hungry whine, swallows the soured temptation on his tongue every time. He knows his limits, remembers Bastien. An executioner running loose makes just one more murderer, right?

None of that's material to build a sermon on. Still something in it, though, maybe. Not exactly an idea to overthink—the best kind of truth is the kind that holds its own. What Frau knows is this much: the direction from which the sun rises in each district, how to gun a hawkzile's engine and kick its throttle high, the pitch of a brat's offended yells when he find that he's been chained to his cot to stop him doing something stupid in the dark again. They're facts enough for now. Verloren can wait until the continents crack. Zehel has a two-fold duty, and Frau—well. Frau's got the sky.

He knows what he owes. Like he needs more than those anyway.

Everything else in God's own time.