Welcome to Gaia! ::

[table of contents]

Hobbies:
so hard not to dance when you have headphones on walking by yourself (Dance): Mind you, he hasn’t had reason to dance since Chaos invaded his world, but before that happened, Lilitu was an avid student of dance in all forms. He tends to personally prefer a more freeform dance style, just kind of making things up in time to the music. However, he does still remember several of the more formal and popular folk dances from both his own homeworld and the worlds of other senshi that he visited during the Silver Millennium. He’s thinking about trying some Terran dance classes, since it seems he is going to be living here for quite some time, but so many of the classes that he’s seen listings for have been for children, and being in a class full of tiny, rambunctious six-year-olds doesn’t sound like a particularly enjoyable experience.

paint me like one of your studio ghibli background sceneries (Drawing & Painting): These days, on Earth, he still enjoys learning about different artistic movements and styles, using what he learns to inspire his own work, etc. If he isn’t knitting or working on one of his textile projects at any given moment, you have a very good chance to find him with a sketchbook in hand, or maybe set up somewhere with some paints and an easel. At present, he knows exactly nothing about drawing tablets or digital art, which are simply Not A Thing he has ever encountered before. He would, however, be very interested to learn about them, if the chance should ever present itself.

my aesthetic is the kid on the playground who tells all the other kids that “ring around the rosie” is about the black plague (Tragedy, Horror, All This Terran “Gothic” Stuff): This is a very new hobby, only discovered since coming to Earth, but Lilitu is increasingly finding himself drawn towards horror stories and Gothic fiction. His homeworld had similarly heightened and emotionally intense forms of storytelling, but nothing quite the same as Frankenstein, Dracula, Wuthering Heights, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Carmilla, all these books by these Anne Rice and Stephen King people, the assorted horror series by this Mike Flanagan guy, the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe, the films of Guillermo del Toro, and Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. While he’s still very new to Terran horror and Gothic stories, Lilitu finds all the skin-crawling scares quite exiting, he adores all the ridiculous swooning that some of the protagonists get up to, and he is extremely intrigued by all the vastly different approaches to writing these tales.

Pretty please give him suggestions for what to read or watch next? Maybe talk to him about all the echoes of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak? He thinks these stories are neat and he wants to share them with someone.

i wish you a very pleasant not ripping out all your previous stitches (Textile Arts): Things like knitting/crochet, quilting, and embroidery/cross-stitch were, back on Arcalís-That-Was, considered dignified and sophisticated hobbies for members of Lilitu’s gender and social class, and he very much enjoys keeping in practice. There’s something so meditative and calming about following a knitting or cross-stitch pattern, going through all the repetitive little motions with their cute little sounds, and getting to see a beautiful finished product in the end. It soothes Lilitu’s nerves, and he can usually be found with one of his projects or his knitting needles on-hand, so he can work on something if he wants to. Making nice things for his friends is a beloved pastime, but his deepest passion, as regards the textile arts, is passive-aggressive cross-stitch, whether his projects express his political opinions (as they often did back on his homeworld) or his dissatisfaction with someone eating his food out of the fridge.

heller — to hella / je helle, tu helles, il/elle helle / nous hellons, vous hellez, ils/elles hellent / passé composé: (avec avoir) hellé (Languages): Back on Arcalís-That-Was, a huge part of the senshi’s duties was serving as a diplomat to other worlds. Lilitu has always taken that seriously, and he learned through this work that learning others’ languages was very important. You may not become completely fluent, but people tended to take it as a sign of you coming to them in good faith if you tried to learn at least some of their language—it showed that you’d respect them enough to meet them on their own terms instead of forcing them to deal only on yours—and in the event that people weren’t meeting you in good faith, learning how to recognize such could help you avoid being played a fool or taken advantage of.

Even now that he’s no longer serving as an interstellar diplomat, Lilitu adores languages and learning them. There’s so much you can learn about people and their cultures based on their languages, and he finds it all quite fascinating. The Duolingo app on his civilian phone never needs to harass him to do his daily exercises, and he’s looking to take more formal classes as well, if/when he can.


Virtues:
explicit descriptions of love and other disgusting emotions (Sensitive): Lilitu just has a lot of feelings and he’s very in touch with them. More than that, though, he’s very highly attuned to the feelings of others. It’s nowhere near accurate enough to be “a sixth sense” or any such thing—ultimately, he is relying on his own intuition and interpretations of people’s behaviors and vibes more than anything else—but Lilitu nevertheless tries to pay attention to people, to how they’re acting, and how they seem to be feeling. He takes the ideas of community and mutual care very seriously, and tries to live out those ideas by being mindful of others’ well-being and trying to show them kindness with a “Do no harm, but take no s**t” sort of attitude.

my seduction style is genuinely caring about your life and wanting you to be happy (Generous): Lilitu cares about people and he genuinely wants to be a force for good in their lives. On top of that, he has long seen his position as Sailor Arcalís as a duty and a responsibility more than anything else, one that was defined not by the magical power and social capital he had, but by his ability to help others and his dedication to doing so. He often volunteers to help people with no expectation of being paid back personally, only a smile and a bright hope that people might pay his kindness forward by helping someone else in turn. Likewise, he’s ready to share whatever he has if someone else is in need. Oh, you’re hungry? Do you like spinach? He has a spinach salad and you can have some, if you want. Oh, you’re cold? His body naturally runs pretty warm on its own; you can borrow his sweater if you’d like. Oh, you don’t have money? Well……he probably doesn’t either, he’s still learning his way around the financial systems of 21st-century Earth? But maybe he can help you find a way to get the money you need?

i do not “spew” profanities, i enunciate them clearly like a ******** lady (Diplomatic): In his heart of hearts, Lilitu wants the universe to be a better place for people to live and he wants to be someone who helps improve the universe for everyone. He has learned, with no small amount of struggle on the parts of those who taught him, that sometimes, the best way to make things better is by negotiating. In addition to being attuned to other people’s feelings, he tries to stay up on other people’s cultures and the differences between them, to learn their customs and usual ways of conducting oneself, and to account for these things when dealing with them. Keeping with this, when dealing with difficult situations, he tries to phrase things in ways that might express difficult sentiments more constructively, to look for places where people can or might be willing to compromise, and to mediate in a way that sees all the problems at-hand addressed but also doesn’t end in violence. He also tries to keep an eye out for other people’s needs and desires, or things that might benefit them, both because he genuinely wants to help and because they can strengthen his bargaining power, allowing him to make any potential negotiations more fruitful, helping both whomever Lilitu most immediately wants to help and the other party.

my whole life consists of wondering whether or not to make the bitchy comment (Scrupulous): It’s not entirely accurate to say that Lilitu never wants to hurt anybody, because sometimes, he very much does. However, when he does hurt somebody, he wants it to be both intentional and purposeful—e.g., making an ice-cold, incisive comment that makes somebody reflect on their shitty choices and feel bad, or pushing back against someone who is using their power to harm others and finding a way to make them stop. He generally regrets it quite a lot when he finds out that he’s hurt someone unintentionally, so most of the time, Lilitu makes an effort to avoid doing that. He may fall short of the mark (especially when he’s stressed out, exhausted, or otherwise falling back on instincts that are currently more attuned to survival under horrific conditions than to dealing with other people). Nevertheless, Lilitu generally at least attempts to pay close attention to the atmosphere of any given room, the tone or character of any given conversation, and the nuances of any given situation, so that he can hopefully avoid causing unintentional harm to people.


Flaws:
for all intents and purposes, i am a gothic protagonist descending into madness (Too Many Feelings, Have You Considered Putting Some Back): Lilitu just has a lot of feelings, and unfortunately for everyone around him, they’re going to find out about this, probably sooner rather than later. He’s always been an emotional and deeply sensitive person, but everything Lilitu’s gone through since Chaos came to his world has seriously exacerbated this (especially because Arcalians are not equipped to handle isolation and loneliness like Lilitu has been living with for far too long). The trauma that he has endured for the past thousand years has made his emotions burn hotter and made it harder for him to control them as much as he would like. Even though he usually tries to be mindful of them and of how he treats others, it is very easy to tell how he’s really feeling, and if he isn’t getting some relief for his overly strong emotions (e.g., letting them out by beating up Chaos), they’re very likely to explode.

your love will always be rooted deeper than any grave (Self-Sacrificing/Martyr Complex): Lilitu has always been very strongly inclined toward generosity. He comes from a scholarly family, who raised him to always think about how he could help others (this was part of the role that scholars filled in Arcalian culture). On top of that, he Awakened as the senshi very young, and was taught to see his power as a responsibility and his position as one of duty and service to his people. He takes these ideas very seriously, which sounds great on paper, but in practice, often leads to Lilitu over-extending himself, neglecting his own needs, being willing to throw himself headlong into harm’s way with little regard for what happens after, and generally treating himself like he doesn’t matter. When he still had people to whom he felt connected, Lilitu had an easier time keeping a handle on these tendencies of his, but……well. Everyone’s been gone for centuries; it’s just been him and the Chaos that infected his world, and blowing himself up to take out said Chaos has only not appealed as a strategy because Lilitu has had no guarantee that it would work. If he had been able to guarantee that, though, he would’ve done it in a heartbeat because it has been that damn long since he felt like he actually mattered as a person.

*puts my hand on your shoulder* listen. i *DID* mean to make you upset and i *DO* think your opinions are s**t (Argumentative): Lilitu understands that there is an appropriate time and a place for every hypothetical conversation, yes. He is, however, very much of the mind that a lot of the correct places are “right here, a*****e” and a lot of the correct times are “right the ******** now.” Just because he uses perfectly crisp enunciation and a well-schooled vocabulary while calling you a dumb b***h with bad opinions does not change the fact that he is calling you a dumb b***h with bad opinions. Likewise, knowing his way around etiquette and social maneuvering doesn’t change the fact that he may have reached this conclusion about you because he does not personally agree with you, regardless of whether or not your opinions are actually bad. Someone may have a perfectly valid and rational set of points to be made, but if Lilitu finds the central hot take underlying those points disagreeable, he will bang on someone’s metaphorical door to tell them right to their busted face that he thinks their opinions suck, and then lay out at least three counter-arguments that literally no one asked for.

self care is drinking 5 gatorades and supercharging your electrolytes to fight god in a walmart bathroom (Unhinged): To the surprise of probably no one, it turns out that fighting Chaos on his own for several centuries has been bad for Lilitu’s emotional health. He’s always been a passionate person who has needed to work hard in order to have a semblance of self-control, but many of the fetters that he used to have well practiced have fallen away by necessity (or so it felt to him) as he tried and failed to bash the Chaos off his planet by any means necessary. In addition to his emotions being fairly explosive under pressure, Lilitu is quicker than he should be to abandon things like reason and rationality when he gets stressed, and to rush straight into fighting (whether verbally, physically, or magically).

Backstory/History: The people of Arcalís strongly valued community and solidarity, which was all well and fine. By the time Chrysanthos Samara was born, though, his people had already spent several centuries using “community and solidarity” to justify a colonialist occupation of their paired world, Madriu. According to the Arcalian senate’s propaganda, the Madriuans were violent, backwards, and suffering. Clearly, they needed their Arcalian neighbors to bring them the light of civilization and save them from themselves.

Said propaganda didn’t convince everyone, though Chrysanthos’s family very loudly opposed the Arcalian domination of Madriu from the beginning. When he first awakened as Sailor Arcalís, several senators groaned in preemptive exhaustion. Privately, some even described the young senshi’s awakening as a sign from their gods, using an Arcalian word best translated as “a promise that is also a threat.”

Chrysanthos started getting on the senate’s collective nerves early, especially about how the Arcalians treated Sailor Madriu. Lex Wysten had Awakened shortly before Chrysanthos. In Chrysanthos’s mind, they were meant to be equal partners as senshi, working together for the benefit of both their worlds. What he found when getting to know Lex, was that his own people had effectively kidnapped him. Now, they held Lex as a political prisoner.

Shortly after meeting Lex, Chrysanthos started agitating the senate to get Lex treated better, given more freedoms, trips home to Madriu to see his siblings and grandparents, etc. As they got older, this evolved into Chrysanthos fighting the senate for all the Madriuans. Even having been taught at home that how the Arcalians treated the people of Madriu was wrong, there were many things that he still hadn’t learned the full truth of, or hadn’t learned at all. The more Chrysanthos learned, the more passionately he fought, trying to use his power as Sailor Arcalís to actually help people.

Chaos came to Arcalís while Lex was back on Madriu, attempting to resolve a crisis. Things started getting weird after a large meteor crashed in northern Arcalís, landing in the courtyard of their greatest temple: winter came to the northern hemisphere like normal, but winter in the southern hemisphere didn’t end. Aside from that obvious symptom—which distracted the senshi and civilian leaders alike as they tried to address the resulting crises—the Chaos on Arcalís spread slowly.

When it started directly affecting people, it initially worked on single individuals, causing feelings of fear, suspicion, and unease. These progressed into paranoia, alienation, and despair as the Chaos’s influence over an individual grew greater. Victims reacted to the Chaos’s psychoactive effects differently, though, and many turned to violence. The Chaos didn’t directly cause the violence, but people died all the same.

Because the seasons had stopped in winter when the meteor crashed, Chrysanthos decided to investigate it. Desperate to find a solution, he tried everything he could think of to test the meteor, figure out its alleged magical properties (aside from physical resilience, it didn’t have any), and destroy it (he never managed this). However, the meteor had no connection to the Chaos; all these efforts were in vain.

(Although Chrysanthos didn’t know it and still doesn’t, he was at least looking for the Chaos in the right general area. The meteor hadn’t brought the Chaos to Arcalís, but Mauritz Yurak, a senator with whom Chrysanthos had been intimately entangled, had. Around the same time as the meteor crash, Mauritz had returned from an excursion off-world with a wealth of mysterious black stone with a powerful energy signature. Mistaking its energy for some sort of spiritual power, Mauritz gifted the strange black stone to the temple where the meteor had landed, and local artisans had fashioned it into statues and a new altar.)

While Chrysanthos was distracted, the Chaos grew stronger, manifesting illusions inspired by people’s greatest sources of pain, fear, and adversity. Cities collapsed, becoming ghost towns. People died, whether from the Chaos itself or from other people’s desperation. As more survivors evacuated north, seeking refuge with their senshi, Chrysanthos left the temple and tried to fight the Chaos more directly. Unfortunately, in the end, he couldn’t protect them.

Feeling responsible for the destruction of his world, Chrysanthos rechristened himself Lilitu and fought on for so long that he stopped keeping track. He expected to die sooner or later, but he never did.

Instead, he felt something calling him off-world.

[lmao, this is usually the slot reserved for past life stuff, which he does not have to worry about in the slightest]

[relationships!]

[ic inventory]

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