- Custom: Full
Character Name: Malikai Dorran
Race: Orderite
Gender: Male ♂
Class: Warrior
Appearance:
- Physical
- - As an apprentice, Malikai is a stout boy: full, and round. Though not quite "fat," he definitely carries around a good saddling of excess pounds. This is mostly thanks to his mother running a bakery and his family fretting about letting him out and about to be as active as he might like, given the character of his leg. He has a smooth, round face to go with his figure, a bright, puffy carrot top of orange hair, shaved beneath the ears save for a rat tail in the back, and a seafoam green complexion save for a dotting of bright orange freckles in a line across the bridge of his nose and upper rise of his cheeks.
His wings, as an apprentice, are small and puffy - giving the impression of being slightly underdeveloped for his age - many of the feathers more like the soft, fuzzy down of a baby bird as opposed to fully fledged, "proper" feathers. He receives a healthy amount of teasing for this and as such, tends to keep his wings in their tattoos most of the time, unless he's in familiar company. His apprentice wings are useless for flight.
- As an adept Malikai, through hard work and persistence, begins to work off his childhood chub and replace it with a layer of muscle. In his teenage years, his parents begin to relax their control, his father consents to giving him some swordplay lessons, and Malik dedicates himself to them wholeheartedly. He is passionate about wanting to be a soldier, not a civilian as his parents would have preferred, and is determined to make up for his deficiencies for working twice as hard as everyone else if he has to in order to catch up. He is never 'lean,' but he trims down to a healthy weight for a teenage boy and continues to add strength to his repertoire throughout his teen years and into young adulthood.
His wings also experience unprecedented growth in his teenage years, rapidly sprouting until they look unnaturally large and overbearing, dwarfing his teen body and making him look comical — again — in the opposite fashion. He tends to keep them tucked away, again, at this stage, for the same reason, but reversed: they still make him look silly. At least, however, they're fairly competent at flight, but being larger and unweildly, grossly out of proportion to what he's used to, he's still a clumsy flier.
- As an expert Malikai's drinking problem has begun to manifest into more than a youthful divergence and cements him as a genuine alcoholic. It shows in his body type. Though he maintains - and even continues to build on - his younger muscle, the alcohol weight builds up around his waist, in his arms and cheeks, 'smoothing over' a fitter figure, erasing definition, and making him heavier all around again.
Malikai has finally grown into his wings. They're large, and strong, and he's fairly proud of them, for all the issues they've put him through in the past.
Dress
- - Malikai is a practical boy from a poor/lower-middleclass family. Other than his mechanical leg, which is absolutely required, he doesn't have a set dress set-up other than 'poor boy steampunk'. Later, he will carry his sword on him.
Personality:
- Simple
- honest, genuine, hard-working (when motivated)
slow on the uptake (not terribly bright), slow in general (likes to take life as it comes)
good-natured, friendly, self-conscious
adventurous, gullible, hopeful
optimistic, diligent, (can be) cowardly (but may rise to the challenge, depending)
big hearted, romantic, lacks confidence
squeamish (bad trait, for a wanna be soldier), empathetic, self-pitying
Detailed
- As a child, Malikai tends towards being about as soft as his belly, and it's a personality trait that — though it becomes burdened and buried by other things over time — sticks with him to a degree for most of his life. Raised by a well-meaning but grossly alcoholic father, drunk as much off of his nostalgia for the past as his liquor in the present, Malikai is destined for, eventually, a similar path, feeling the need for 'help' with the hurdles in his life which seem to high to pass. Despite being a driven and earnest worker when he's set to a task, Malikai has a tendency for ambling towards escapism, easier paths, and minimal conflict when he can.
Malikai is not especially intelligent, but neither is he stupid. His mind can be slow on the uptake, but he works things through in his own time. The accent he retains from the poorer areas of town in which he grew up does nothing to improve base assumptions, though, that he might be lacking upstairs. Despite all, however, Malik is generally good-natured, positive, and outgoing — at least to the extent that he can get over his uncertainties. His self-consciousness is born not of natural instinct, but something learned over time, thanks in greater part to the teasing of various sorts he received as a child, and on up through much of his teen years, though it slacked off then.
Malikai's heart is, metaphorically speaking, twice the size of his brain. When inspired (which is often, in regards to chasing passions regarding other people) he can be a hopeless romantic, going to exhausting lengths to please others (namely: girls) in all the traditional ways — bad attempts at poetry, flowers he thinks they might think are pretty, pastries — and whatever other excess and less-traditional ways they might specifically ask for. In this way (as well as others) he can be terribly gullible and is easy to lead on, and does tend to get lead on. Often.
Malikai is also, unfortunately for him, squeamish. Not terribly so — he manages not to faint at the sight of blood, thankfully — but enough that wounds do tend to make him more sick to his stomach and dizzy than most, and he prefers not to deal with pain, blood, or gore hands on. He is especially sensitive to witnessing the suffering of just about anything and doesn't tend to cope very well.
Biography/Background:
- Born in a lower district of Ashen city, where the smoke and grit of the grinding machinery gathers in a semi-permanent, dusky smog on their windows and on bad days smears the streets half-black with soot, Malikai was raised well loved, but not well off. His parents, an ex-soldier of relatively low rank and a baker and part-time seamstress, always did their best for Malik — their third child — but still often struggled to put pennies together, sometimes even for more basic necessities. Malikai's oldest brother died in a skirmish on Eowyn's southern edge fighting off oblivionites around the Maralan project before Malikai was old enough to walk. His second brother, also a soldier, is rarely home, but makes a point to encourage Malikai when he does visit, and Malik looks up to him with all the wonder little brothers do.
When he was six years old, playing in the streets outside his home with a group of slightly older children, a game of dares came up where each of the others would dare another to leap from the highest thing they could while still catching themselves and landing safely with their wings. Malikai — young at the time, and with especially underdeveloped wings even for his age — wanted desperately to keep up with the others and earn their approval, always being the roundest and slowest of the bunch anyway, and after too much belittling, resolved to prove that he could keep up, with disastrous results. After climbing too high, up onto the roof of a neighboring shop, he jumped, fell too fast for his wings to do much of anything but embarrass himself, and landed poorly, breaking his left leg in a messy, ripping fashion that shattered multiple bones.
His parents afforded him the best healer that their coin could purchase, but between the poor break, the mud and soot of the street working their way early into the wound, and the limited capabilities of the healer assigned to him, Malikai soon fell ill. His leg developed a spreading disease, and by the time they could scrape the coin together for another healing session, half of his leg was beyond saving. It was severed just below the knee to stop the spread of disease, and after several years of crutches, on his tenth birthday, Malikai was gifted a prosthetic leg. Though unweildly, bare, and openly mechanical, the prosthetic is a combination of both steampunk mechanics and a splash of orderite spellwork, designed to at least roughly mimic the responses of a real leg. It is highly imperfect, but moves and responds to his body motions far more than a simple peg leg would.
Thoughts on the Great Engagement:
- His father was a soldier in the great war; his two older brothers both served in Aevah's army, one giving his life to it. Malikai grew up watching his father deteriorate around a bottle as he reminisced about the grandeur of days past, the 'heroism' of what it 'used' to be like, and Malikai is conflicted. As a young boy, fighting for the orderites, for the glory and honor they deserve as people is a golden standard. A supreme goal for which he will work tirelessly toward. It's worth pushing his leg, fighting his weight, struggling to prove himself and make himself strong so that he can be more than a baker in his mother's wake or a part-time mechanic in the sooty, lower streets of Ashen city.
When he grows older, however, primarily in his mid-twenties, he will see more of the world for himself, as it actually is, not as it is in the stories his father tells of it. It's messy, and complicated, with hurt people everywhere. Death isn't glorious. War isn't heroic. Bloodshed, disease, hurt, and complexity all just begin to look like life, and he isn't sure any longer how he feels about anything. It's part of what turns him ever-more to rely on the bottle himself. Drinking makes it easier to look at how hurt everyone is and not feel sick to his stomach. It makes it easier to let boundaries blur and shift into a warm nothingness as opposed to the brittle, messy reality around him.
Thoughts on the Magescian Races:
- Orderites, the children of Seren, are just and good. Oblivionites, the shadows of Soudana, are the enemy: heartless, soulless monsters who sully the name of what it means to be a Magescian. Dovaa are a wild, strange people, full of themselves thinking they can bring 'peace' to a world not built for them, to a war they don't understand that has nothing to do with them; they are foreigners and, while some might be useful on the field of battle if they are intelligent enough to realize which side is right, most are foolish and blind. Hybrids are a disgrace.
These are the opinions Malikai grew up with. These are the words he heard, over, and over, and over from his father's mouth, so loud and so frequent he could recite them in his sleep. He believes them. Until he can't, anymore.
Malikai will be very steadfast in his opinions for as long as he has no information to challenge them. When he grows older and experiences the world himself, lines will blur messily. He has a very difficult time hating much of anything, and watching the 'enemy' suffer just as much genuine pain as his 'allies' doesn't help to make him any more vengeful. Quite the opposite. Malikai will learn gradually over time, the hard way, that he was not cut out to hurt people, and war is not his ideal playing field.
Eventually, his natural inclination will still be to be wary of oblivionites — many would happily kill him, after all, even if he isn't set out to kill them — and to be somewhat disappointed in his own people. They are not the glorious heroes of righteousness he once thought, but instead just as messy and flawed as everyone else. He will grow more curious about the dovaa, wondering if perhaps, despite being from a different world and a different god, they don't actually have the right idea about things. Wouldn't peace just be…easier? Hybrids will always be somewhat of an anomaly to Malikai, but he feels that he, too, is part broken, so perhaps he is not so much better than them, in the end.
Thoughts on the Dragons and Khehora:
- Dragons are scary, but one day, he'll be brave and strong enough to take them on! Hopefully. (He will, though he will likely only fight them when necessary and not go out of his way to find trouble. Dragon slaying is so much work, and painful, to boot.) Khehora make great bondeds. That's what they were designed for, after all. He's not entirely sure what this business of 'feral' khehora is all about. They were created to be bondeds, and bondeds are amazing, helpful, and powerful. Don't khehora just die if they don't have a bonded…? (These questions will eventually be cleared up in time, but Malik will always consider feral khehora, particularly Khehorians, to be especially…odd.)
Statistics:
- INT: 2
ATK: 2
DEF: 6
