Power: C
Speed: A
Range: C
Persistence: C
Precision: C
Potential: C

Name: Jason Valenovich Etalin (Джейсон валенович эталин)
Age: 24
Appearance: 6’1”, 190 lbs and perpetually youthful. His black hair matches the permanent dark circles under his eyes. Wears a red plague doctor mask on field assignments to hide his facial expressions and make it harder to trace his identity, since both could potentially be used against him in accordance with his ongoing personality disorder.
Nationality: Russian

Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Razlyubit, a black wedding band that Jason typically manifests on his index finger.

Noble Arm Rank: A

Noble Arm Type, Element, and Range: A versatile Noble Arm whose main abilities necessitate close range and thus a Melee fighting style. Based on Blood, Life, Emotions, and Promises.

Noble Arm Abilities:

Superhuman - Jason possesses a heavily augmented physiology. He is mostly ageless, having stopped and even partially "undone" senescence, and possesses physical speed and strength beyond that of an olympian athlete. His top running speed is approximately 30 mph and he can deadlift a few thousand pounds without too much effort. Could lift several thousand pounds overhead with exertion.

• Thick Skin - Jason’s skin and flesh are relatively sturdy, able to stop most bullets and mundane weapons from causing deep wounds and/or heavy damage. Noble Arms with mostly mundane properties will similarly struggle to do significant damage.
• Pain Immunity - Jason feels absolutely no pain, able to sense the sensation and where it comes from, but not feeling it as pleasant nor unpleasant.
• Regeneration - The ability with the greatest power among Jason’s abilities, Jason’s healing factor is fast-acting and very difficult to counter even without his Thick Skin protecting him. It renders him immune to most forms of toxins and illnesses, including radiation and, surprisingly, cancer. He is capable of surviving otherwise fatal wounds to the heart and brain, as well as extreme loss of body mass via dismemberment. He can replenish his blood rapidly and regrow limbs and organs as if from nothing, though extended use of this ability without caloric intake will cause its effects to gradually slow down. That being said, even starving, his regeneration will never completely stop unless he is dead, and no wound or injury is permanent. It is capable of pushing bullets and other foreign objects out of the body, and could theoretically be directed to grow out Jason’s hair or nails on command. (It doesn’t by default as a sort of customizable parameter) With enough recovery time, (~6 hours under ideal circumstances) Jason could theoretically survive a beheading, his Noble Arms repositioning to the greatest remaining chunk of his body and working on autopilot as long as it has enough of a physical basis for his soul to cling to. Destruction of his body and severe damage to the disembodied head or vice versa would likely finish him off for good. The same goes for full-body burns to the fourth degree or being atomized, and tossing his body into a freezer after severe damage would slow the healing process enough that he’d never realistically become a problem again, assuming the damage is extensive enough and the freezer cold and reliable enough.

Hemokinesis - Jason can exert weak telekinetic force over blood in a short range. Despite being his longest-range ability, his blood control is limited to several dozen meters, and he can only move the blood around with speed and force if it’s within about ten meters. He is incapable of generating blood ex nihilo nor exerting significant force on blood in a foreign body without near touch range and concentration. He is incapable of shaping blood with particular precision, and without his other abilities, his ability to throw blood around is largely harmless. His ability to move around objects that are covered in blood is slightly more dangerous, but loses effectiveness at greater ranges.

• Universality - Jason can modify blood for compatibility and adaptability as well as clean and rejuvenate it, functioning much like a dialysis machine as well as a blood oxygenator. This makes Jason and any blood he gains control over viable for universal donation, even without knowledge of who the recipient is.
• Viral Blood - Jason’s blood, without modification, (as well as foreign blood modified to match) hosts a functionally autonomous supernatural virus that, upon entering into a foreign body, will quickly begin to accelerate their heart rate. Major symptoms begin to manifest approximately one minute after blood to skin contact, and can manifest in seconds if he gets blood into the mouth or mucus membranes. Secondary infection via body fluids (e.g. the sweat of the infected) can manifest after five to ten minutes through skin contact. By default, infection will inhibit the victim’s emotions and conscious thought processes, putting them into a dazed trance that puts greater emphasis on their baser instincts. (The infected seldom make use of their Noble Arms) The infection causes hallucinations and a chronic craving for raw meat, though, notably, the infected do not react aggressively towards each other. Left unchecked, the virus can spread into a typical zombie hoard. Jason has no fine control over the zombies, nor the virus, though the infected ignore him by default considering the virus is already in his blood. With concentration, Jason can cause those nearby to be excluded by the zombies, albeit only while they remain within a few dozen meters of him, and he requires line of sight to establish the exclusion. Infection typically lasts three days, petering out right as severe dehydration begins to set in, though it can last longer if Jason is able to manually refresh the virus through further exposure. The virus has no mundane cure, and its dynamic nature means one cannot realistically be developed, but it can nonetheless be countered by specialized Noble Arm abilities.
  
  • Emotion Control - By modifying the virus, Jason can alter its symptoms. The only unifying symptom is the initially accelerated heart rate. While the zombie virus iteration is generally the best for incapacitation and infectivity, he can instead make the virus induce:
    
    • Crippling fear, an effect compounded by hallucinations. This version robs the victim of the ability to distinguish friend from foe, and makes the victim a danger to themselves and others. This version often induces fight or flight reactions and involuntary crying. Infection from this version is largely limited to bodily fluids and their inability to distinguish friend from foe means that they are liable to attack Jason as well.
    • Crippling loneliness, accompanied by pervasive paranoia. Victims will typically exhibit uncharacteristically clingy behaviors, getting touchy with if not directly latching onto the nearest uninfected (not including Jason) in an attempt to soothe their symptoms. In the absence thereof, their symptoms gradually get worse, causing them to suffer panic attacks, mild hallucinations, and potentially cardiac arrest. Often more infectious than even the zombie virus, though it does not immediately incapacitate an enemy. Through concentration, Jason can make the infected identify him as uninfected. If left alone long enough, their symptoms will gradually become bad enough to mistake Jason for an ally, though Jason personally hates dealing with victims afterwards, since pushing them away can snap them out of it.
    • Crippling apathy, often in the form of catatonia. Victims will generally give up on whatever they were doing immediately, and may struggle to respond to basic questions or even stand under their own power.
    • Seething anger, an all-consuming need for immediate violence against anything and everything within reach. While infected, victims become rash and beyond reasoning. Although the victim is still able to prioritize the direction of their anger, their ability to do so deteriorates as time goes on, and even the smallest non-justifications become worth spilling blood over while in this state. Tends to burn out quicker than the other variants, lasting only one or two days, though it also tends to have a greater toll on the body.
• Panacea - Jason is capable of modifying his blood into a cure for the virus as well as certain minor illnesses such as colds or hangovers. It can maintain its potency away from him for much the same duration ordinary blood would - eight hours at room temperature, a week in cold storage.

Knife Manifestation - Jason can materialize mundane knives made of Iron, to his specifications, albeit they must conform to his conception of what a knife is. He is only capable of materializing them stabbed somewhere into his back.

Miscellaneous Abilities: In addition to his extensive medical knowledge and largely abandoned capabilities as an OPL practitioner, Jason is an excellent cook, a force to be reckoned with at Darts and Billiards, and fancies himself a master tactician based solely on his prowess in games of online chess.

Personality: Silent, serious, pragmatic, and almost robotic in nature. He obeys orders, keeps to himself, and at times seems as if he has the patience of a saint. He's unflappably stoic, calm and detached, except sometimes he can't seem to help but break character, as if without thinking. An illogically friendly gesture, a snarky comeback that accomplishes nothing. It's there one moment and gone the next, and he'll either pretend it didn't happen or apologize for it and expect everyone to move on. He wears no facades, yet his control over himself isn't always the best, and he seldom understands the way he acts at those times himself.

Strong emotional stimulus tends to cause his higher thought processes to stall until he calms down, entering a state of fight or flight, without the flight, acting like a cornered animal regardless of whether he's trapped or not. If left alone, he'll likely snap out of it soon enough, though his ability to accurately gauge threats becomes exceptionally poor while in this state.

His personality disorders are theorized to be due to conflicts between his OPL code and Noble Arm functionality, possibly each defining different ideal states for his regeneration to leave his brain chemistry in. Since the two have apparently become part of the same whole, the accuracy of this theory is debatable.

Likes: Peace and quiet
Dislikes: Lies, cigarettes
Fears: That there is no solution. No cure, no way of coping, this is his life now.

Bio: When Jason was born, it was unto a single mother who, for all her life, never once fully understood Jason, right up until her death four years ago. Jason, in turn, never fully understood all her quirks and logically inconsistent behaviors, just as he seldom understood those of seemingly everyone else. Lying is wrong, except when it isn’t. Duress justifies anything, except when it doesn’t. Killing animals is wrong, except when you eat them, and even then, arbitrary lines in the sand are drawn about which animals and why. Jason was surrounded on all sides by rules upon rules that seem to bend and twist based on convenience, culture, or irrational cowardice. If his absentee mother, overworked and underpaid, ever noticed the ways in which he was different from other kids, she never made mention of it, much less did anything to address it.

Jason, growing up, had always been an intelligent child. Even without the support of his mother, once he found out that skipping a grade was less about personal capability and more about learning the next year’s lessons in advance, he began climbing an extra grade every other year through nothing but personal study, give or take adjustments to new schools. His only regret lay in how long it took him to realize that, but he still managed to graduate at the young age of 15 wherein he immediately began his college studies majoring in Biology. He slowed down a bit compared to his previous schooling in an attempt to learn Occult Programming Language at the same time through illegal channels. Both seemed necessary for his long-term goals.

There at college, he went on to meet the woman who would later become his wife, Lena. His relationship with Lena was like his relationship with any other person who decided to insert themselves into his life: complicated. She cared for him, for some inane reason he could never fathom and she could never explain, in ways not even his mother had, and yet, she was wrapped in all the frustrations that seemed to follow that mother and everyone else. It was not all pleasant for either of them - they almost broke up when Lena found out that Jason was younger than her, for despite being larger than her since the day that they met, he was still only 17 then, a fact he did not feel pertinent to mention the night they decided to get intimate. Perhaps it was his reaction to her confrontation that made it an issue rather than the act itself - after all, why would he mention it? She never asked, and there would never be any benefit to turning her over to the police. For some reason, such reassurances only seemed to make her angry, even though it was one of his most blatant declarations of affection; an admission that nothing would be worth losing her. If she couldn’t understand him, then it wasn’t his fault… right?

After graduation, Jason was scouted for Government Occult Research and Development thanks to his, at the time, frankly pitiful grasp of OPL and useful degree in Biology. For the first few years, he did nothing but learn from them, which, top-secret facilities aside, made it not particularly unlike his regular schooling, which he pursued in parallel. It was there at medical school that he met up with Lena again. They ignored each other at first, but seeing each other day in and day out, they eventually had to acknowledge each others’ presence again and it… wasn’t awful. They gradually fell back into familiar patterns. When Lena had trouble with something, she’d come to Jason, and when Jason had to miss a class, he went to Lena. Eventually they made up one afternoon, mending their relationship through a series of back-and-forth blunt admissions that only spurred on more and more of them. Just like that, they were a couple again.

On his 22nd birthday, Lena took him out for drinks after hearing him mention that he's never had alcohol before. After not 'getting it' after the first two glasses and Lena suggesting that he try drinking more, Jason ended up drunk off his ass and offhandedly proposed to her. She didn’t take it seriously, but after coming back to his senses, Jason didn’t forget, and he did take it seriously, at least after the fact. No matter what, he never wanted to lie to her, to confuse the one person who knew what kind of person he was and accepted him anyway. Thus, only days afterward, he presented her with a modest engagement ring, and she answered his question with a yes.

The wedding itself was a small, intimate affair. His mother had died the year before, and the only person on his side of the family to attend had been his aunt, a woman he had barely interacted with up until that point. She was friendly enough, he supposed. Lena’s family on the other hand, were a whirlwind he could never fully grasp, from her brother’s strange threats to her mother’s suspicious flirting. When he brought it up with Lena, she would just laugh it off, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do when your family makes death threats to and tries to seduce your husband.

It didn’t really matter in the end. Lena became his, and they were both better off for it. She even got him to admit it, out loud. He never did use the L word. He refused to willingly lie to her, even if he had no way of knowing if it was a lie. He had to be sure, even if he never thought he would be.

They both graduated from medical school around the same time Jason graduated from his position as an intern in OPL R&D. By then, Jason was 23, and he soon began to work on occult bioaugmentation research proper, funded by the Russian military. Lena had always pursued her career as a doctor out of her desire to save lives, but Jason never had the same inexplicable passion about philanthropy that she did.

From the start, Jason had pursued such a career path because of his fascination with the rules underlying life, death, and reality itself. From many angles, it seemed orderly, but once you peeled away the skin and dug deep into the flesh and viscera, you could catch a glimpse of the roiling chaos below. Occult Programming Language was much the same, operating on specific, predictable rules, yet the irreconcilable deficiencies compared to Noble Arms and glaring flaws that led to the latter’s existence in the first place begs the question of how much any of it could be trusted. The Noble Arms themselves were the worst of all, each individually finding new, unique ways of spitting in the face of comprehension just for the sake of doing so. Through Noble Arms, death could become a triviality, and thus the basis underpinning so many rules of society would crumble to dust with the wave of a hand.

Don’t even get him started on the concept of love. He’s pretty sure that bullshit’s somewhere in the OPL code too.

In order to get more answers, above all, what Jason needed was time. Time that he didn’t have. Time that no one he knew of had. He needed immortality, or at least some functional approximation of it. It wasn't for some grand ideal like advancing human progress, but rather for simple and selfish reasons. Life is short, and nothing short of government funding with minimal ethical oversight would suffice for the progress he needed. Now that all the distractions and obstructions were finally out of the way, he doggedly pursued a proverbial elixir of life, because every year he spent approaching entropy was a year he may never get back. Lena wasn’t pleased with her husband growing more and more distant with her, but Jason knew that her youth if not her life was on the line too.

With all of his drive and intelligence fully leveraged, he thought it could take him his whole life to barely complete something usable. Instead, barely a year after he started working under the government, he had a working prototype of OPL code that could render lab rats mostly immortal, capable of regenerating towards an idealized form regardless of whether it had the physical means to do so or not. Not wanting to waste a second more, he broke protocol, lying about the code in order to get the necessary collective use of OPL running. It was supposedly just another experiment, but the caged rat they brought along was never the designated target.

Just as he began to feel the OPL influence his body, his magnum opus made manifest, his life’s work coming to fruition, Jason began to form a Noble Arm that blended and mixed with his hitherto human-untested code. A simple black wedding band had appeared over his ring finger, next to his actual wedding band, and from then on, Jason was never the same.

He remembers having a splitting headache thereafter, like two sets of instructions were competing over which way to rewrite his brain. He felt things he had never felt before; anger, fear, and a bizarrely painful fluttering in his heart that reminded him of Lena. He was delirious, barely cognizant, and so it took him until he was shown a video feed of the test chamber to realize he had killed all the other OPL practitioners there using nothing but his bare hands.

Afterward, he had stumbled towards his lab space, destroying all traces of his utter failure, desperately hoping that ridding the world of the source would make the pounding in his head stop. His coworkers were alarmed, but he fought them off, leaving trails on the walls as he steadied himself on them by his bloodied hands.

He… he needed to see her, to know if what he was feeling was what he had been trying so desperately to understand. He drove like a madman, getting tailed by the police almost immediately, but he ignored them, going straight home and bursting through the doors, only to find Lena in bed with another man.

After that, all he can remember is seeing red and feeling no pain.

His body count that day had nearly reached the triple digits before he was apprehended by a Noble Arms user. He was tied up and sedated, more animal than man at that point, and taken in for containment and confinement by the Russian government.

When he next woke up, he didn’t feel quite the same, like a mixture of the new and old. He could feel the sensation of his head aching, but not the ache itself, and his memories felt fuzzy and unclear. He was restrained, and, upon waking, quickly taken around to interrogation. Not comprehending his current situation, he stuck by his policy of honesty, though his inability to remember crucial details frustrated his interrogators. It didn’t particularly bother him, since he couldn’t feel the torture in the slightest. It was kind of funny seeing some of their tools fail to break his skin. They wanted him to surrender the OPL code he had destroyed, but he couldn’t remember most of it. They wanted him to explain how the code worked, but he only remembered the broad strokes. They discussed the events that led up to his arrest, from his psychotic break at the research facility to his mad drive home and the eventual murder of his wife, Lena. Lena… Lena, Lena, Lena…

His breathing quickened, and the words the interrogators spoke didn’t mean anything to him anymore. He could feel the sensation of a headache, and very pointedly noticed the way it kept him from thinking clearly. He decided to wait it out, until someone - an enemy, tried to zap him again for insubordination. He lunged forward within his restraints, biting the man, and there was just so much blood. It spilled out, floating around him in circles like a protective blanket. That’s right, he had a Noble Arms now, right? He should…

…He couldn’t finish that thought. It was like being underwater, hearing but deaf, even to his own thoughts. The interrogators left, and he just sat there within his restraints and breathed, in and out, as the imaginary pain in his head gradually faded away.

Why was he circling blood around himself exactly?

He tried using the blood to get out of his restraints, but he didn’t have very good fine control over it, just feeling like he was making a mess. It was rather annoying, so when a Noble Arms user entered the room, he greeted them amiably. They demanded he put down the blood, so he asked them where he should put it, since it was likely to leave stains. When they just told him to drop it again, he somehow found himself inexplicably understanding, apologizing to them out of politeness and complying.

It took the Russian Government a while to determine the extent of his abilities and the quirks of his condition. His powers seemed to remain on permanently, even while asleep. When Razlyubit is pried off his unconscious fingers, it simply returns there as if nothing happened. They had always known about his sociopathy, but he was showing signs to the contrary now, and strong emotions seemed to cause his higher thought processes to stall until he calmed down, becoming a creature of nothing but instincts and aggressive self-defense measures. It was, in his opinion, dreadful, and he’s come to hate the new emotions he’s been saddled with. The new humanity he’s forced to feel. The OPL code that started this whole mess, the idea of such a cursed form of immortality. Even after his memories came back, only lost in the first place because of a bullet wound to the brain apparently, he feigned ignorance on the matter, refusing to let anyone else suffer through his own personal hell. It was cold comfort, since, from the start, he’s the only one he knows to have ever been outside of that hell. The human condition was maddening, but at least the few others like him would be safe from it.

Even after discovery, or rather, development, of his Viral Blood ability, and despite his usefulness as a willing soldier deployed against Ukraine, (After all, it's not like he could go back to his old life) Jason remained a problem child; a thorn in Russia’s side. What good was a soldier that would just go unresponsive for minutes at a time in the heat of battle? What good was his zombie virus when it was so easy to end up with friendly fire? Although he was a known quantity and proved himself a loyal soldier, rising up the ranks in spite of his shortcomings, he was eventually traded off with China, since they claimed they could make better use of him. There, he was assigned Ai Chen as his handler. She would tell him where to go and what to do, and in turn when her hands wandered down his chest he would simply remind her of his chronic inability to respond to compromising situations appropriately. Didn’t stop her from trying, and the resulting fight earned her a reprimand from Ren Huo, so despite taking one of her plasma arrows to the gut and gaining a temporary hole in his stomach, it took her longer to recover from the punch he gave her to the same spot, and in the end their working relationship ended up pretty cordial.

Current Goal: Find or develop a cure or improvement to his current condition, with the development of his Noble Arm being viewed as the most promising avenue.

Military Rank: Lieutenant General

Power: C
Speed: A
Range: C
Persistence: B
Precision: E
Potential: C

Name: Ridley Alvarus
Nicknames: King, Varus, brother, boss man, big cheese, his majesty, his royal multitudinousness
Age: 21
Appearance: 5'9", brown hair, turquoise eyes, and a prominent pair of facial scars. Perfectly comfortable in formal attire. Prefers button-ups and flannels for casual wear.
Nationality: American

Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Hexad Anamnesis, a shapeshifting Noble Arm that changes its appearance and abilities to match its wielder. In this form, it takes the shape of an ornate revolver.

Personal Noble Arm Rank: D (subject to increases based on Noble Arm development, outlined under planned abilities)

Noble Arm Type, Element, and Range: Hexad Anamnesis' abilities are broken up across six forms, with four of them only accessible through the King or Pawn's transformation abilities. Theoretically speaking, it is plausible that the Hexad Anamnesis is not one Noble Arm, but six, connected through reality via King Ridley’s Noble Arm. Ridley Alvarus’ Noble Arm is the basis for the presence of his other iterations, and lends itself to a ranged fighting style. The Noble Arm’s abilities are dimensional in nature, possibly tapping into alternate universes, though all six iterations of Ridley insist that there's a chess theme.

Noble Arm Abilities:

Intuitive Operation - In its revolver form, Ridley is capable of rotating and reloading the cylinder, as well as rearranging the bullets within, using nothing but a thought. In essence, it never runs out of ammo unless Ridley wants it to, and will always fire the bullet (or lack thereof) of his choice, without any outwardly visible indication of his manipulation of the bullets. Ridley can load the Hexad Anamnesis with six different types of bullets: Pawn, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Queen, and King bullets.

King Bullets - King bullets behave as perfectly normal bullets, with the added benefit that Ridley can change their properties to mimic those of various types of mundane handgun bullets.

Pawn Bullets - Ridley can cause Pawn bullets to rapidly expand into his Pawn form, Ridley Castillo, complete with all the memories of King Ridley and whatever clothing he was wearing when he last died. Technically speaking, he can do this while the bullet is still mid-flight, though the rapid increase in drag and the soft-bodied projectile generally causes this to be worse than firing a King bullet in all but stopping power. Activating this ability while the Pawn bullet is lodged inside of someone is likely to be devastating. Once summoned, assuming he is not crushed to death by the aftermath of his summon location, (though he will likely emerge from a human victim unharmed) Pawn Ridley is fully autonomous, and does not require King Ridley's Noble Arm to remain manifested in order to persist indefinitely. King Ridley gains all of Pawn Ridley's memories upon Pawn Ridley’s death. While another Ridley is summoned and alive, the Pawn bullet cannot expand into another Pawn Ridley. If another Pawn is summoned after Pawn Ridley is clinically dead, the original will remain braindead even if resuscitated.

Henshin Invoker - When Ridley shoots himself (not Pawn Ridley) with the Pawn, Bishop, Knight, Rook or Queen bullets, they will fail to harm him. Instead, they will phase right into him, and he will transform into the corresponding Ridley iteration in a flash of light, with his personality and the Hexad Anamnesis changing to match. Transformation is apparently instant - if you shoot into the light, it will hit Ridley's new form, though functionally, it takes a few seconds for him to regain his faculties, and leaves him vulnerable in a head to head fight. If Ridley dies while transformed, he will revert to King Ridley in a flash of light, returning to the physical state he was in before transformation. Dying in anything but Pawn form will result in a backlash, locking King Ridley out of transforming for an hour and locking him from using the same form for 24 hours. Penalties are 1.5x higher for dying in Rook form and 3x higher for dying in Queen form. Dying in Pawn form does not result in any penalties, in theory, though it requires much more effort to transform into a Pawn for a minute after transforming back. Transformations can last indefinitely, even while his Noble Arm is unmanifested, and while each form has its own "persistence economy", general strain and fatigue carry over through transformations. Queen bullets will be absorbed without any transformation if Pawn Ridley has already transformed into Queen Ridley. Despite transformations resulting in a change of personality, Ridley’s memories and stream of consciousness is preserved, and they can maybe, possibly, be thought of as the same person.

Currently, the Bishop, Knight, Rook and Queen bullets behave as ordinary bullets when used against anyone other than King Ridley.

Miscellaneous Abilities: Ridley is a talented Orator, can play the piano well, and is a surprisingly good singer. He knows way more about forensics and hacking than he should considering his foundational knowledge is from Rook Ridley. He's pretty good at chess, though you'd expect him to be better at it given his Noble Arm. In addition to all of the languages of his iterations, he's gone out of his way to learn Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. He is currently learning Hindi, Portuguese and Arabic.

Personality: Ridley Alvarus is a bleeding heart idealist, though you wouldn't know it from first impressions, and certainly not from appearances. Although he's a bit of a control freak and has no qualms about playing dirty for the sake of the greater good, he is compassionate, and thinks that every person has the potential for good within them. Socially, he tends to show a courteous, professional demeanor, and is shockingly out of touch with those in his own age group. As a matter of fact, he is terrible at dealing with emotions, both his own and those of others, and tends to compartmentalize his personal problems, seeking to address them with cold, unfeeling rationality, if at all. Prefers addressing his other iterations with their Chess designations, except for Pawn Ridley, whom he calls his (little) brother/bro.

Likes: Cinnamon Rolls, Tea, instrumental music, classical literature, learning new languages
Dislikes: Acting off of insufficient information, child abusers
Fears: His own capacity to go too far, to lose sight of where the line is

Bio: Ridley Alvarus is a rich kid who, at 17, had graduated high school and was set to go off to college majoring in political science. His parents both had relatively successful political careers and, at first, he wanted to follow in their footsteps and change his country for the better. It's no secret the U.S. government has its fair share of rot - his own parents were good (but thankfully not great) examples. Ultimately, however, he never attended college. He and his parents were going on vacation in Australia, coinciding with his 18th birthday, when their plane got caught in a storm and struck by lightning. It was forced to crash land in the pacific, though the pilot managed to keep it airborne long enough to reach a desert island. Better to crash on land than water, after all.

Although no one drowned, the landing was not ideal by any means. Only a few passengers died in the crash, but several were injured, including his mother. Ridley received the first and smaller of his two scars during the crash - a piece of shrapnel cut a gash above his left eye, right before his head was slammed against something, either another seat or the roof. He lost consciousness, and was later told by his father that there had been a lot of blood. Combined with the way he passed out, his father had thought that he would end up losing his entire family. It caused his father to manifest his own Noble Arm; some type of sword with yet-unknown powers. He had been keeping it a secret from the other passengers, afraid of becoming a scapegoat for their hysteria. It turned out that his mother's injury wasn't life-threatening, and Ridley got off with nothing but a scar and a concussion. Compared to some of the other passengers, he considers himself lucky.

Ridley gained his Noble Arm either within the crash or while unconscious. He hadn't even noticed it until his father asked him where he got a gun from. To this day, Ridley doesn't know whether it was obtained via Formation or Inheritance.

Agreeing with his father's decision, he also kept his Noble Arm hidden from the other passengers, though unlike his father, who appeared to be content with figuring out the nature of his Noble Arm at a later date, Ridley couldn't pass up the potential opportunity to help get them all off the island. There were injured whose lives were at risk the longer it took for help to arrive, so, when he got the chance, he wandered off, away from the rest of the group, and began muffling the sound of his gunshots by firing underwater on the far end of the island. For the most part, it worked, and he was able to confirm that his gunshots did absolutely nothing special without his input. He could intuit that there were six different bullets, and was able to get a handle on the reloading and bullet shuffling mechanics. However, he could only feel his ability's potential in two of the bullets. The first, he could modify seemingly however he wanted. It had to stick to practical constraints, but rubber bullets, hollow points, and even small armor-piercing bullets were all available. He could even turn it into weirder types; ones that could create a brief flash or a little bit of smoke. They weren't too practical even without the dubious testing conditions he was operating in, but at least the options were available to him.

The second bullet, he knew, could expand. Even without activating the effect, it was obvious to him, just like the Noble Arms' unnecessarily flowery name. He felt he could do it even without firing it from a gun, but he didn't know how much it would expand, nor if he could undo the effect, and he didn't want a giant bullet laying around on the beach for all to see. He decided to do a live test, firing it underwater, into the ocean, and expanding it. He didn't know what to expect, but turning into a drowning child certainly wasn't it.

After bringing the boy to shore and letting him cough up a ton of seawater and half a lung, the boy introduced himself as Ridley Castillo, who was born 9 years after he was and raised in the Philippines by people with the same names as his parents, but different surnames, occupations, and personalities. The boy said they didn't even look like Ridley's parents, and when he asked how the boy knew, the boy said it was because he had gained all of his memories. "All of them?" He asked. "All of them." The boy responded.

While Ridley was still processing that information, the boy's face scrunched up and he made a cupping shape with his hand before moving it up and down.

All of them.

He was suddenly very, very uncomfortable with his new Noble Arm. The boy could tell, and barreled on before it could get too awkward - said he knew he had to be the one to explain, because he knew Ridley didn't know what was going on. That being said, he didn't know what was going on either. From his perspective, his home had been destroyed in a war between China and the ASEAN. He and his parents were going to stay with their family in the states. The names were familiar, but they lived in Florida - not the state Ridley lived in (New York) nor where they were supposed to live in. (Ottawa, Canada) They were set to arrive in time to celebrate his 9th birthday there, but they never made it, going through a similar plane crash over the Pacific, except Ridley Castillo woke up from it here, underwater, with no plane in sight.

It was a lot to digest for the both of them, so they spent most of the day away from the group, just talking to each other about the differences between their worlds. Ridley Castillo seemingly knew everything about him, but he knew nothing about the young Ridley. It was strange, like looking into a distorted mirror - so much was the same, and yet so much was different. It helped that young Ridley knew exactly what those differences were, though he didn't know enough about U.S. history to give too many details. He was able to confirm the current president in his world was different, at least. Meanwhile, he couldn't get over instantly learning how to speak English, and asked if he could skip school since he apparently learned everything the older Ridley had. He knew the younger Ridley could get a GED, but thought to mention how schools are meant to help develop social skills before the younger Ridley pointed out that he learned all of that from older Ridley too, and also that older Ridley had learned basically nothing useful, making way too few friends over the years. He then brought up an ex-girlfriend and started making fun of him for the absolute disaster it ended in (largely his own fault) and he groaned, embarrassed beyond words.

The younger Ridley theorized that they were the same person "from alternate universes or timelines or whatever", and while he found the idea plausible, the older Ridley started seeing him as a younger brother regardless. Sharing the same name was getting old fast and the younger Ridley was in the middle of a tirade about how the older Ridley needed to loosen up, so he told the younger Ridley he'd call him his brother from then on, or "bro" for short. The word "bro" coming out of his mouth was apparently enough to make the younger Ridley burst out laughing. He just sighed and shook his head.

He had been in the middle of Noble Arm testing, so he cut through the giggling by asking the younger Ridley what would happen when he unmanifested his Noble Arm. That got the younger Ridley switching from laughter to panic real fast. He tried to calm the boy down, said he didn't think there'd be any problem keeping his Noble Arm manifested, but the idea that his existence was tied to the older Ridley's Noble Arm finally made the existential dread sink in, and the older Ridley was ill-equipped to handle the younger, alternate universe version of himself crying about potentially never going home, not that his home in the Philippines was even there anymore. All Ridley could do was hug the boy and watch the sun set as he cried it out.

Eventually, the younger Ridley calmed down, reached out towards that sunset, and manifested his own Noble Arm - a gun just like the older Ridley's. It was startling, but the younger Ridley reasoned that, if the older version of him got a Noble Arm from the plane crash, why wouldn't he?

Strangely, it had the same name. It made sense in a way. Self-duplicating Noble Arms weren't unheard of, and he was already making copies of himself in a bizarre way, so why not? Except, when asked, they realized that the cylinder couldn't be opened, and no bullets could be taken out. The gun could be opened up, but only to reveal the artifice: it was a fake. Not a fake Noble Arm, as it turns out, but a fake gun. Specifically, a cap gun; the inside had a roll of caps that could be ignited with the trigger to produce smoke and noise. The younger Ridley needed to know that it was a real Noble Arm, because that would mean he had his own soul, right? The older Ridley didn't have the heart to turn him down, and he agreed to let it be tested underwater, since stealth was still a concern. Perhaps a bigger concern than before, given the implication that he could be responsible for at least one plane crash, in a cosmic sort of way.

Surprisingly, the cap gun functioned underwater without issue, even firing a strange, see-through bullet. The bullet kept disappearing into the sand or ocean however, which was weird, but the older Ridley took it to mean the bullet was harmless. Wanting to know more, he volunteered to let it graze him, but still, nothing happened. Even a direct shot passed did nothing, passing through him harmlessly. He could intuit the functions of his own bullets, but the younger Ridley didn't feel anything going on no matter what he did. The younger Ridley commented that maybe it had been a fake after all. The older Ridley wondered how his Noble Arm was supposed to interact with his summoned copy, and offered the younger Ridley his bullets, but it's not like they could be fired from a cap gun, and the younger Ridley couldn't discern what to do with any of them. Ultimately they decided to call it a day and returned back to the camp around the plane wreckage. It was surprisingly easy to sneak the younger Ridley in, considering the plane had around a hundred passengers in total. He introduced the younger Ridley to his father, saying he was a passenger who had lost his parents, and that they shared a name. His father was nice enough, dubbing him Junior, but it was apparent that anything like adoption was out of the question. He was grateful he didn't need to explain his parents' tics to the younger Ridley, though the rejection of the closest thing he had to parents in this world evidently hurt him. He invited the younger Ridley to sleep in the chair next to him and his dad inside the plane for the night - even after the crash, it was still the best shelter for the majority of the passengers, and his mother had been brought out of the plane and into a small shelter they put together in a day that was currently serving as a medical center.

Days passed. The plane staff estimated two or three days before rescue, which came and went without fanfare. They built more shelters - just enough so no one would have to sleep on the plane, whose interior was still partially exposed to the elements. The plane's supplies began to dwindle, and they started having to ration it out. Some of the other passengers, his father among them, managed to take charge, keeping everyone relatively productive. The survival incompetent were at least tasked with keeping the fires going so that they could extract fresh water from sea water, though demand was far outpacing supply. Ridley and Ridley alleged to be spearfishing during their Noble Arm testing sessions, and while they did sharpen sticks and give it a genuine try, it quickly became clear that the older Ridley's Noble Arm was the only way they'd ever get a fish on a spear. Hydrodynamic bullets certainly helped. Apparently he didn't need to know how it worked to make it. Though, even with the bullets, they usually ended up with only 2-4 each day. There were plenty of guppies, but fish worth eating after taking a bullet? Even modestly sized fish were disappointingly uncommon.

Through their testing, they discovered that the older Ridley couldn't casually create an army of little brothers, and that not even a headshot from the cap gun's imaginary bullet would do anything to the older Ridley. Younger Ridley theorizes that it's some kind of failsafe that exists because of the connection between their Noble Arms, (whatever that connection actually is) and that he probably needs to test it on other people. It didn't even work on the fish, so it might be human-only, which wasn't unusual for a Noble Arm. Older Ridley tries to remind him how bad of an idea that is, and younger Ridley insists that he wasn't actually going to do it. Finding out that a bullet does something when you fire it from a gun and it hits someone is probably not going to be a good thing when you don't mean them harm. All they really could do was focus on surviving. Older Ridley taught younger Ridley how to swim, and the latter had even managed to spear a fish, all on his own.

It happened without any real warning, while they were testing their Noble Arms in slightly deeper water. The younger Ridley let out a yelp, stopped, and began swimming back to shore. The older Ridley followed him back to ask what happened, and, bent down, breathing through clenched teeth, he answered, "stung, I think."

Fighting back his own panic, the older Ridley asked, "by what?" The younger Ridley simply shook his head. "Don't know."

Grimacing, the older Ridley took the spears and helped the younger Ridley up, supporting his weight. They began walking back to camp like that for maybe a minute or less before the younger Ridley almost fell over, letting out a whimper. His breathing was already becoming ragged and his eyes were wet with tears. It became clear, then, that the sting was bad. A stingray or a Jellyfish maybe, and so the older Ridley dropped the spears and picked the younger Ridley up, hurriedly carrying him the rest of the way.

They weren't even in sight of the camp when the older Ridley heard his younger brother's breath hitch, then stop. He went limp in his arms, and a rush of memories not his own flooded into his mind. He could remember growing up in the Philippines, with two familiar yet alien parents, in a quaint house he's never seen before that reminded him of his own. He remembered waking up, drowning, and being pulled ashore by someone with his own face. He remembers crying into his own embrace, realizing that there was a good chance he'd never be able to return home.

Ridley ignored it. He ignored it all. He wouldn't allow himself to feel just yet. They were out of sight of the camp, but definitely not out of hearing range, so he drew his Noble Arm and fired a King bullet at the sea. The gunshot was louder than usual, just like he intended.

He pocketed his Noble Arm, laid the young Ridley out, and began CPR. Chest compressions, thirty in a row, in time to the beat of staying alive. He isn't breathing. Hold his nose and form a seal over his mouth to force the air into his lungs. Thirty more compressions, effectively a substitute heart beat. He feels a rib break under his ministrations and winces. He forces his own breathing to deepen. A broken rib isn't unusual for CPR. Still no beat. He continues. Some other passengers finally, finally arrive. They stand around staring like dumbasses. He doesn't have time to pay them any attention. He shouts for antivenom without taking his eyes off his brother. The sight goes a bit blurry, but he doesn't stop. The chance that specific antivenoms could be found in an airplane medical kit were nil, but maybe they'd have something else that could help. Another breath, another thirty compressions. Another breath, another thirty compressions. Another breath, another thirty compressions.

No one else came forward. Not with drugs, not to help perform CPR, not to ask where the gunshot came from. They just stood by and stared blankly as Ridley slowly unraveled. No one else had come forward - until his father pulled him off, sweating and shaking, after what felt like hours later. His arms ached. His throat was dry. He felt like he was going to pass out, but he still shot his father the most venomous glare he could muster. His father wasn't a doctor. He had no right to declare his brother dead. He's read stories about successful resuscitation after over an hour of CPR, and there's no specific point in time where it's officially futile. Before he could say anything, however, his father put his arms around him, and suddenly he couldn't keep it together, feeling just like the younger Ridley did in his memories.

It was the worst day of his life.

The rest of it went by in a blur. Either out of respect for his loss or fear from the glares his father shot them, nobody approached him to ask about the gunshot, for which he was grateful.

When he woke up the next day, the other survivors avoided him, sending him sheepish looks. It took a while before he realized they buried his brother without him - a small cairn over a small mound where the sand met the tree line. It took him longer still to realize what they had done, when a woman approached him holding his brother's red hoodie, folded up neatly. Her words were, "We're sorry. The others were just so..." She mouthed something. A 'huh-' sound, maybe, from reading her lips, but no sound came out, and she shook her head. She met his gaze and told him, "I didn't." Then she pushed the hoodie into his hands and briskly walked away.

Idly, he remembered that his Noble Arm was still manifested in his pocket. He reached into his pocket with one hand, gripping it tightly. The other held his brother's red hoodie. He stared at it, wondering if it and everything else about him would just disappear if he let his Noble Arm do the same.

The thought of him in pieces in their stomachs made his own turn, so he did it, letting his Noble Arm disappear from his grasp. The hoodie remained, and he didn't know if that was better or worse.

His thoughts became stormy, but he didn't let it show as he grabbed his rations for the day and left.

He went back, passing by the two spears he had left on the sand, but didn't bother picking them up. He was too busy clutching the hoodie to his chest anyway. He returned to the beach where it happened, reached out with one hand, and his Noble Arm materialized within it at his command. He opened the cylinder, pulled out an expanding bullet, and willed it, desperately, to bring him back.

And it worked.

Like it never even happened, like the red hoodie in his arms was a fake, like all the pain he had gone through in the last 24 hours had been completely pointless, he was back. When his knees gave out, he found himself on the receiving end of a hug, and he clutched his brother back, as if he'd disappear if he let go.

Things were different now. He knew how the memory sharing worked - it was like he had lived it himself. Having his life upended by the war was bad enough, but actually dying? It wasn't something he could forget. He could still feel the burning, prickling sensation crawling up his leg. He had put it out of his mind at the time, but he really had all his memories of dying, didn't he?

He was prepared to keep hugging his brother all day long, but eventually the younger Ridley pulled back, saying, "alright, so I know you're still fucked up about it all but we really gotta talk about your Noble Arm."

It was clear now that the younger Ridley was immortal as long as the older was there to bring him back. The older Ridley tried to argue that it might not work that way every time, but it was pointless trying to argue with someone who knew his whole life front to back. He was grasping and the younger Ridley knew it. He just didn't want to think about what the younger Ridley was hinting at, but he eventually had no choice but to acknowledge it when the younger Ridley came out and said it.

"You guys need food."

"No."

He just gave the older Ridley an unimpressed look.

The older Ridley continued, "we're getting by off the fish, coconuts, and remaining airplane food. We're not the only ones out fishing every day, you know?"

"Every day everyone gets thinner. Some of the passengers are too lethargic to move anymore. We get more fish meat than the others, mostly because we bring more back, because we're cheating, but the others only get some when it's their turn. Half the injured are already dead, and we still don't know when we'll be rescued."

"Just because we can doesn't mean you should have to!"

"I should have to? Bro, I'm trying to psych you up. I don't know about you but I'm pretty jazzed about being immortal."

"You're not immortal. I'm not immortal, therefore, you're not immortal."

"You know what I mean. Besides, you've got your Noble Arm. Pretty sure a bullet to the head hurts less-"

"No."

"Fine, what do you want me to say? I'm hungry and I hate it here. I hate having to go spearfishing every day, eating half a meal and going to bed damp and shivering next to a campfire with a bunch of strangers I've never met. I want a hamburger, and this is unironically the closest I'm gonna get."

He stared at his younger self in horror, who just stared back, unperturbed.

"I know you're still angry about those guys eating the body-"

"Your body."

"-my body, and yeah, it was a lil' rude, but I'm not going to hold it against them when they're all starving to death here."

"What if I want to hold it against them?"

"You won't."

He raised a challenging glare at his younger self. He definitely could.

"...You shouldn't. At least let me eat, dammit."

"Yourself?" He said, incredulous.

"Yeah, bro. I'm arguably the most ethically sourced meat out there. USDA-certified 100% cruelty-free"

"Pretty sure lab meat is more ethical than putting a bullet into a 9-year old. Doesn't sound cruelty-free to me."

"Eh, I've got your memories, I'm basically 18 already."

"Brother."

"Honestly, you should think of me as 27, we've both got 27 years of life in our heads now. Crazy how you get mine too when I die. I'd argue you should be able to drink in America now. You're already legal in the Philippines anyway."

"Bro."

He smirks, but shakes his head, trying to seem serious. "It's okay. Really. It's like blinking and waking up on the other side. I just want you to be fine with it too. You're the one who has to do all the hard work. Corpses don't butcher themselves."

He pinches the bridge of his nose. "I think I'm gonna be sick."

"Not as sick as you'll be on an empty stomach."

"Shut the fuck up you zombie gremlin."

He laughs. Fuck, that laugh. It didn't belong on such a wretched island.

The older Ridley tilts his head back, staring up at the clouds. He knew more about the younger Ridley now. Enough to know that he'd probably get himself killed anyway if he didn't agree. Relatively painless suicide on a desert island was difficult, and if he didn't feel responsible for his younger brother before, he definitely does now that he brought him back from the dead. He can't knowingly let him suffer, and it'd just be self-satisfactory to keep his brother restrained all the time. He'd hate it. Would maybe throw a tantrum - would definitely, before having gained his memories. Might hurt himself just out of spite, with the knowledge that it won't matter if he dies. Fuck, that can't be good for a growing child's mental health. None of this is.

"Fine, but I refuse to eat human meat while there's perfectly good fish here."

After talking out the details, they decided it would be best to keep his Noble Arm abilities secret. Even if the other survivors figure out he owns a gun, they don't need to know where he got the meat from. It'd just make everyone uncomfortable anyway. This also meant the younger Ridley wouldn't be able to return to camp, though he didn't seem to mind spending nights dead.

With a plan sorted out, the younger Ridley reminded him that he'll still need time for butchery, and sent him back to camp for a knife, something to carry the meat back with, and something to help him dig a hole to toss the bones and inedible viscera into. He returned with a steak knife, a tarp, and a piece of metal from the airplane tied to a stick.

When it came time to do the deed, he hesitated. It was a disturbing sight; his gun pressed against his brother's forehead. He was seriously considering calling the whole thing off when his brother grabbed the barrel, holding it steady, and said "you don't have to look, when... it's done."

Small mercies.

He looked away, towards the horizon, where a rescue never came, and held his finger against the trigger, still hesitating. Then, he felt his brother press against his index and all too fast, the gunshot rang out, accompanied by the flood of memories that get transferred to him upon his brother's death. The redundant parts were filtered out, either automatically or without much thought, and so he was left with just the span between his brother's first death in this world and his second.

He fell to his knees, spilling the contents of his stomach onto the sand. He had lied. His brother, his younger iteration, had lied.

He said it was okay, that it didn't bother him, but the memories were as vivid as if he had lived them himself, and the fear was undeniably real. Not even a bullet to the frontal lobe was completely devoid of pain, and it had been all his fault. His brother had tricked him, knowing full well that it was a line that, once crossed, he couldn't come back from. The kid genuinely believed he would get used to dying, but there's no way to know if he was right, and now they would be stuck like this. He had already killed his brother when he didn't want to die, just because his brother said it was okay. What's to stop him from doing it again? The mistrust would forever be there, but he couldn't stay mad, because he had lived it, had practically made the decision himself, and he knows he'd do it again - knows he would do the same were the roles were reversed. They really are the same person, which is why he knows they'll find themselves in the same situation, threatening suicide for the greater good, and he knows he'll kill his brother again, because maybe this time, he'll actually have meant it when he says it's okay.

He dry heaves, having already emptied his stomach's meager contents. Then he stands back up and prepares the tarp and the body. If Ridley Alvarus is one thing, it's pragmatic, and he's not about to let his little brother die for nothing. He has to remove all the skin and bone to keep it at least slightly subtle, and the blood ends up getting everywhere.

When they ask him what type of meat he's brought back, he's reminded of something he's read on the internet - supposedly, human flesh tastes like pork. He tells them it's sea pig meat and goes to bed, not giving a single solitary shit how believable it sounds.

When he wakes up, he finds all the meat gone and most of the camp in higher spirits. It feels... wrong.

In addition to his rations and butchering tools, he takes some sticks, douses half of one in sea water, and lights the other end before leaving this time. He has to transfer the fire to another stick when the torch diminishes, wetting the handles as he goes along, but otherwise has no trouble bringing it towards the shore where he buried his brother, most of the stuff wrapped up in the tarp. He finally picks up the spears along the way, bringing them over, and begins setting up a campfire when he gets there, just for himself and his brother to eat fish with.

He doesn't bother trying to be subtle, and shooting fish turns out to be much easier when you don't have to keep the gun underwater while you do it. The island is big, but not that big, and his modifiable bullets can't keep the sound of the gunshot quiet. Doesn't matter. He has four fish within only an hour, a lucky haul, and begins cooking them up for himself and his brother. He hadn't eaten at all yesterday, so he doesn't even bother talking to his brother when the fish are cooked, simply tossing the bullet, expanding it into the younger Ridley, and digging in.

His brother follows suit, and while so much food just for the two of them is a luxury, his brother is frowning as he eats, no doubt from his older brothers' memories. His brother apologizes, and the older Ridley nods in acknowledgement.

After they wash the meal down with the meager water ration split two ways, the older Ridley draws his Noble Arm, walks over, and gives his brother a tight hug. Pointing it as his brother, between the eyebrows. He gently asks, "Are you sure it's okay?"

He answers, "I'm sure."

He doesn't look away when he pulls the trigger himself, this time. Maybe he wanted to make it harder on himself, but it still feels easier the second time.

He hates that it's easier the second time.

The next day feels like a repeat of the previous. The day after that, the same. His brother tries to make light of the situation, talks about how he's really getting used to it, and he knows his brother isn't lying, but that doesn't make him feel better about it.

It's on the fifth day, while they're eating fish, that his father approaches them, blade drawn.

"You need to get away from that child."

He turns to see his father's sword crackling and frowns. "I think this is a misunderstanding."

His father raises his voice. "Oh? Is it a misunderstanding that you've been bringing this child back with your Noble Arm and slaughtering him over and over!?"

The older Ridley inhales sharply, not having a good response. His brother rises in his defense. "Hey, it was my idea, and so far it's been working out great!"

His father spoke in a low tone, a dangerous edge to his voice. "And who made it your idea?"

His father had always been the stubborn type. That was true no matter what world they were in. When he's like this, he won't listen to reason, and he won't believe any convenient explanation. Like everything else, things were different now. He's never been above anger-driven corporal punishment, but he's been too old for a spanking for years now. A Noble Arm between the both of them changes the stakes of "discipline", and he knows from experience he can't trust his father to be the responsible one. He's heard stories of Noble Arm users surviving gunshot wounds to the head. Ironic anecdote, given the circumstances, but having that sword in his head was not something he liked imagining. Definitely not while on a desert island.

"I think having his body eaten the first time was the inspiration."

"You...!"

His father might have misunderstood, but he didn't care. It wasn't important right now. His father came at him, and he would have to answer. He switched to a third bullet type, hoping for some kind of effect against a human target, and fired towards his father's legs. He simply missed from the movements of his father's stride. The man closed the gap and slammed the flat end of the blade into the side of his head, knocking the older Ridley onto the sand and making his head ring like a bell. He stomped down on his son's gun hand, pinning it in place while pointing his sword at his son's throat like some kind of stereotypical manhua villain. He'd laugh if the situation weren't so infuriating.

"Shooting at your own father!? Have you lost your mind!?"

Funny, coming from you. He gingerly reaches up with his free hand to feel the wetness coming from his head. Blood, of course.

Then a gunshot rings out, not from his own Noble Arm, but from his brothers. The noise is almost identical above water. The gun smoke is excessive for a gunshot but nice and flashy. It does nothing but draw his father's attention, which, considering the sword at his throat, the foot on his hand, and his lack of particular gymnastic ability, doesn't help much, but his blood freezes when his father says his next words.

"A Noble Arm of your own, eh, kid?"

No.

"You know, these things really do make for problem children. I don't know what you're trying to pull here kid, but I ain't gonna let it happen."

"No."

They don't acknowledge him.

"I usually don't like overstepping my bounds as a parent, but, as I've been told, you've lost yours. Someone needs to teach you some Noble Arm trigger discipline, and out here, it's not going to be the foster care system."

"Don't."

His father looks down at him with a disgusted look. "You're one to talk." He swings his Noble Arm, hitting the older Ridley in the head with the flat end again.

The younger Ridley speaks up. "Stop it!"

His father shakes his head. "Don't worry, kid. I'll make sure you're free at the end of this, no matter what."

The younger Ridley brings his cap gun up again and fires, but the invisible bullets do nothing. His father sighs, kicks the older Ridley's Noble Arm out of his hand, then charges at the younger Ridley, sword raised.

His father clearly hasn't thought Noble Arms through. He dematerializes his Noble Arm and brings it back to his hand, aiming it at his fathers arm and firing just as he's about to swing at the younger Ridley. The bullet finds its mark, his father's arm jerks mid-swing, and suddenly there's a lot of blood.

The older Ridley grits his teeth as the younger Ridley drops to the ground. His father turns back to him and gives him hard look. "What are you upset about? You can bring him back, can't you?"

His blood boils. He aims towards his father's head and shoots, but it's blocked by his father's sword, somehow. He's about to take aim again when, suddenly, memories of dying flash through his mind. He wants to scream, but his father is on him, too fast, and he practically falls backwards to avoid the sharp end of a blade swinging for his head as he raises his own Noble Arm and fires, point-blank.

Blood leaks over him, blinding his left eye. Air stings at the wound that stretches across his face. He's fallen onto his back, with his father on top of him, bleeding profusely from the head.

He shuts both eyes. His father may be obstinate and self-righteous, but he was right about him. Hypocrite that he is, thinking his father was the one who couldn't be trusted to act responsibly.

He grabs the Hexad Anamnesis, probably so named because of its six bullets, and mentally loads an expanding bullet into the chamber. He aims the barrel towards the roof of his mouth. It'll expand right after being fired, hopefully only achieving full expansion after exiting his skull. He can't imagine his brother would appreciate being covered in his gray matter.

He sighs, then pulls the trigger.

Instead of something matching his memories, instead of a repeat of the five bullets he's taken to the head, the bullet goes right into him, and a blinding light erupts, enveloping him.

When the light penetrating his eyelids is no longer blinding, he hazards opening his eyes. The same blue sky he's always seen greets him. His father feels so much heavier, and his clothes, so much softer.

Then he realizes he's wearing the same red hoodie his brother always wore. The same red hoodie he had kept five of, not wanting to bury them with the remains. This made six, and, sitting up, spotting his brother's newest dead body, seven, if he dared.

He didn't.

Suddenly finding himself in his brother's body, scared and confused in a way he doesn't normally allow himself to feel, he pulls himself out from under his father before noticing the man is still breathing. God. He almost killed himself over the guilt of something he didn't do. Fucking Noble Arms. Fucking big Ridley and his big dumb emotional constipation.

Not letting himself stop to cry, he drags his father's body onto the tarp with great difficulty before slowly pulling the man back to camp.

...Then what?

It takes easily thrice as long as the trip usually does, but when he does make it, he leaves his father at the edge of camp, manifests his Noble Arm, and opens fire on the first survivor he sees. They scream, they panic, but just like the fight against his father - older Ridley's father, nothing happens when the bullets pass through, and they don't seem to notice it. Maybe they assume he's missing every shot. Unlike with Ridley's father, he doesn't feel anything. He had finally been on the cusp of understanding his Noble Arm, only to die before any progress could be made. No more.

Eventually some of the survivors realize the lack of a threat he poses and approach him with fishing spears. He nails the first one to do so right in the head and feels his power surge. In what way, he doesn't understand. The man flinches, but when it becomes obvious that nothing happens, lowers his spear. They start talking at him but he tunes them out, not interested in talking. Maybe this is a tantrum. Maybe he's finally lost his shit. He shoots another man and feels some kind of power available to him. It doesn't seem actively usable, so he shoots another person, and it goes away as quick as it came. It's frustrating.

The first man he shot steps forward again and he points his cap gun at him and shoots. No change. He takes aim at another person, and it counts this time. He's close. He's not sure what he's close to, but all he needs is one more shot -

He hears something behind him and spins around, shooting the man as they lunge at him. It does nothing to stop the man, but the man passes right through him as light once more envelops him.

He feels he needs to make a choice, right now, but he doesn't know what each of the choices mean. He takes the first option, and alongside the two lives he remembers living, a third joins them. Seventeen, going on eighteen in time with the plane crash. Probably the same age as the older Ridley. Er... the American Ridley. This one was born and raised in Paris, France. He - no, she, emerges from the flash of light, having to mentally reconcile the sudden acquisition of twenty seven years of memories while dealing with an angry mob of her own making.

She should have her own Noble Arm, just like them, shouldn't she?

She extends a manicured hand and vines of gold alight around a spire of silver. A Halberd huh? Doesn't really fit the pattern, but it does look pretty sick.

She gives it a twirl with one hand, then slams the ground with the butt-end. "You guys ever fight someone with a Noble Arm?"

The crowd looked at each other, probably wondering if any among them would dare to claim they have.

"Yeah, can't say I recommend it."

She turned back towards the spot she left her father at. Er... the American version's world's version of her father at. That guy. Yeah. She walks over to him, simply ignoring the crowd fanned out around her. A couple of confrontational stragglers follow, probably, but she can't be bothered about some spectators.

She's not sure why the other two were having such a rough time of it. Grasping the abilities of one's Noble Arm should be simple. She can feel the man's damaged... uh... existence, for lack of better term. Okay, maybe not that simple, but it doesn't take rocket science to figure out she has healing powers now.

She looks down at the man, wondering just how much she should heal him, lest he wake up and ask annoying questions, when the sound of a boat horn erupts from behind her. She turns to see a rather large ship approaching in the distance, and the survivors who aren't keeping an eye on her are waving and making noise. Huh. Took them long enough.

He points her Halberd at the man at her feet and gives him the best recovery she can without him regaining consciousness. Hopefully she can avoid him on the boat. Based on the memories, the guy can be really annoying. Dad really is the same no matter what universe, huh.

She decides to ride out some of the aftermath. Heal whatever passengers she can from among those left. 'I dunno man, I just got here' works surprisingly well, and she has a bunch of witnesses to keep her from having to explain much else to both the other survivors and the rescue team when the boat arrives. The whole alternate universe thing would be annoying, so she keeps it under wraps, pretending to be just some French, no, British girl. Makes her English fluency less strange. Her dad is American, that's why she has an American accent. Yep, definitely.

Kinda pointless making up a cover story when she's just gonna shove all the work back on the American Ridley. The OG Ridley? Kinda sucks to be seen as an alternate but them's the breaks when another iteration of you is native to the world you're living in. Based on little Ridley's memories, you don't go back when you die, though since little Ridley can apparently become her, she gets in on the functional immortality too, right? Assuming the actual little Ridley can transform into her, and not just American Ridley transformed into little Ridley transformed into French Ridley. Honestly, if American Ridley can become little Ridley, then he should be able to transform into her directly, shouldn't he?

Grasping your own abilities shouldn't be this hard. At the least, it isn't for her, so she knows already that she has the ability to revert. She just has to hold her Noble Arm by the pointy end and pull it towards her. Morbid symbolism, but eh, better than the bullet to the head. Come to think of it, shooting himself in the head and not the body or limbs wasn't even necessary to transform, was it?

She waits until she gets some privacy on the surprisingly spacious ship. Her Americanized mother's going to be waking up soon, and she is absolutely not dealing with that. With a flourish, she stabs the tip of the Noble Arm into herself. It's time to get her little brother back.

As the unnecessary lightshow fades, his face is back to stinging with a fresh, profusely bleeding slash wound. He ignores it, pulling an expanding bullet out of the cylinder and willing it to become his little brother.

Then he hugs him, lets himself feel the emotions he's been pushing aside, lets himself be vulnerable, because things are finally, finally getting better.

Current Goal: End the China-ASEAN war and help those whose lives were negatively affected by it.

Military Rank: Private First Class (Volunteer)

Name: Ridley Castillo
Nicknames: (little) Bro(ther), little Ridley, short stuff, shrimp
Age: 12
Appearance: 4'11", brown hair, black eyes, never goes outside without a hoodie even in mid-summer heat.
Nationality: Filipino

Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Hexad Anamnesis - in this form, it takes on an appearance similar to King Ridley’s revolver, though upon closer inspection, one would notice that the cylinder does not rotate and the hammer cannot be pulled back. Simply put, it’s a cap gun, producing noise and smoke to simulate a real gun, but not firing any physical projectiles. Lacks the orange tip of modern toy guns and could pass as a real gun.

Personal Noble Arm Rank: E

Noble Arm Type and Range: Ridley Castillo’s iteration of the Hexad Anamnesis isn’t particularly capable by itself, and is mainly geared towards transforming into his other iterations. However, his method of doing so resembles a ranged fighting style.

Noble Arm Abilities:

Infinite Ammo - Pawn Ridley’s cap gun never runs out of ammo.

Step Counter - Every time Pawn Ridley fires his Hexad Anamnesis, an imaginary (harmless) bullet is shot, discernible to (any iteration of) Ridley but otherwise physically nonexistent. When the bullet hits a living human (clinical death doesn’t count if they’re still moving) that Pawn Ridley identifies as an enemy, (gaming the counter only works if he’s convinced his target intends him real harm) an imaginary counter increments. The counter cannot increment on the same target twice in a row, nor increment by shooting any iteration of Ridley. When Pawn Ridley shoots himself with the imaginary bullet, the counter is reset. Since the bullet is imaginary, Pawn Ridley needs to be aware of any obstruction between himself and the target for it to actually obstruct the bullet. As such, he can fire through bulletproof windows and invisible shields up until he notices a real bullet failing to penetrate them.

Double Move - If the step counter is at 0 and Pawn Ridley lands a headshot against an appropriate target, the Step Counter increments by 2 instead of 1.

En Passant - When the step counter is at exactly 3, Pawn Ridley will automatically parry the next attack made against him that he is unable to dodge, exhibiting involuntary, apparently prescient superhuman reaction speed to accomplish doing so and the ability to deflect or erase any incoming attack using his imaginary bullets. Threats are assessed subconsciously and while it won’t activate from a forceful pat on the back, he cannot deliberately save the effect when he would perceive the end result as an attack. If the attack is physical, the imaginary bullet will cause it to simply stop dead, violating Newton’s 1st law, with the controller/target (if any) not entirely understanding how or why they suddenly stopped. If the attack is energy-based, it will simply halt and likely dissipate harmlessly, as if erased. This ability can only be used once without resetting the step counter, and does not stop anyone from redoing the attack, if possible. Successfully landing a shot on any threat with this ability will increment the step counter, provided the attack's origin is not any iteration of Ridley, nor the last target to have incremented the counter. Repeated use through resetting the step counter will eventually tire Ridley out.

Promotion - When the step counter reaches 6, Pawn Ridley must transform into his Bishop, Knight, Rook or Queen iterations in a flash of light. Transformation into Queen Ridley is not possible if King Ridley has already transformed into Queen Ridley. Unlike King Ridley's Henshin Invoker ability or the Revert ability of his other iterations, Pawn Ridley becomes completely intangible during the flash of light, and will always emerge unscathed after a few seconds. If King Ridley attempts to bypass the cooldown of his own transformation ability through this, he will simply revert to King Ridley. Transformations can last indefinitely. Pawn Ridley does not revert upon death, simply dying, though if King Ridley transforms using this ability, he will revert back to King Ridley upon death, with the same cooldowns as his Henshin Invoker ability. Strain and fatigue carry over between transformations.

Miscellaneous Abilities: Pretty good at acting, skateboarding, and handling animals. He is secretly the one true god of chess, and at least some of that infinite talent transfers over to checkers and other strategy games.

Personality: Ridley Castillo is mature for his age. It'd be stranger if he wasn't, given the shared memories, but he never asked to grow up so fast. As he is, he hesitates to express or indulge his childish side, and tends to feel like he should be able to take care of himself. Because of King Ridley's abilities, he views himself as expendable, and is brave enough to push to be the first sacrifice even when he's scared out of his mind. In general, his demeanor is fairly chill. He tries to make light of his deaths with jokes so people feel less bad about them. It works for himself, at least. Addresses King Ridley as his brother, Bishop Ridley as his sister, Knight by his chess designation, Rook by his surname, and Queen Ridley as just Ridley, since it makes her happy.

Likes: Meat, video games, tabletop games, hoodies
Dislikes: Being treated like a child, having to wait around with nothing to do
Fears: Torture, drowning, venomous animals, losing his brother

Bio: Ridley was born and raised in the Philippines, and for the most part, his life had been pretty ordinary. Unfortunately, that only lasted until the day China made an attack on the town he called his home. He and his parents evacuated successfully, but when they were finally allowed to return home, they found that their house was destroyed, charred to cinders and marred by gaping holes in the walls. Ridley wasn't even allowed to look at what remained of his room because of the risk of the second story collapsing beneath him. They had packed the essentials, but there was only so much of his life he could fit in one briefcase.

It didn't matter anyway. Soon enough he'd lose even that.

They didn't have a lot of options within the Philippines, so his parents decided to stay with their family - his aunt, who lived in the U.S. They never made it. Their plane got caught in a storm and struck by lightning. It was forced to crash land in the pacific, though he can't remember the details. He remembers bracing himself for a rough landing, then suddenly, he was underwater, too far underwater, unable to tell which way was up. He had no breath in his lungs, and could only thrash, unable to swim, unable to think, unable to breathe, unable to scream.

He barely registered someone dragging him above water and towards the shore, and though he was coughing and spluttering even after he had all four limbs on (relatively) solid ground, finally being able to breathe let him turn his attention to the sudden, disorienting influx of memories of someone else's life. It was a life that bore many superficial resemblances to his own, but had too many differences to count, and was, as far as he could tell, exactly twice as long.

He knew, from the start, that the man - the older version of himself? The older, Caucasian version of himself? He knew that they knew even less than he did, so he decided to start with an introduction. They share a first name, after all.

The older Ridley had gotten to see the plane crash through to its conclusion. They, and now he, were stranded on a desert island, and while surviving it hadn't been easy, help eventually arrived.

The scars left by their time on that island, both physical and mental, were large. It was especially bad for his older brother. His mother - the bizarro American version of his mother, arranged therapy sessions for the both of them. She was nice, just like his mom. Neither he nor his older brother have been on speaking terms with their dad since they got off the island. He's thought of trying to bridge the gap, since their conflict was based on a misunderstanding, but he's not sure explaining it would work on his own version of his father, and he can't deny the American version with a magic sword scares him. His new mom, who seems to adore him, has taken it upon herself to clear things up, though he's not sure if it actually works or not.

He meets the other iterations of Ridley using his older brother's Noble Arm, and they exchange memories with his older brother in the process. Eventually he starts feeling left out, but they have to jump through hoops to use his Promotion ability because his brother forbid him from committing suicide, and he doesn't want to upset his brother.

It's him, Ridley Castillo, that makes the chess connection - "I mean, I was thinking this since we met Park, and after becoming him and gaining that ability, I became sure. Why can he switch places with you and nobody else? Just look at our Noble Arm powers, they perfectly match chess archetypes. Plus, we're basically all expendable unless you die, especially me, just like a King and a Pawn in real chess."

He got a lecture about calling himself and the others expendable afterwards, but his brother had to agree that there was a chess theme. So did the other iterations when they were eventually asked. Queen Ridley hated the theory, but she agreed it was likely true.

Eventually, with a greater grasp on his Noble Arm, his brother decided that he wanted to join the China-ASEAN war, on the side of the ASEAN. He had already consulted with himself while transformed, and none of the others outright rejected the idea, having his memories and no one to argue their misgivings against. It was obvious he was doing it because of the way his younger brother had lost his home, and Pawn Ridley insisted that he didn't have to fight just for his sake, for a country that wasn't even his own. His brother was set to have a successful career in politics in his own country, even only accounting for his own merits. He could make a difference in the world without putting himself at risk. His brother simply shook his head, saying that he wanted to pursue politics to make the world a better place. He likely couldn't become the president before the war was over, and anything less than that wouldn't have any meaningful impact on it. People were out there, dying to protect their homes from others dying in service to their country because some greedy assholes demanded it. He wanted to do something about it, and he couldn't do so as something like the governor of New York.

So, Pawn Ridley demanded to come too.

He had a Noble Arm all his own, even if it may or may not have been an extension of his brother's. Times were desperate enough that child soldiers were on the table, and he was possibly the most qualified child in the world given his (supposed) mental age. He was functionally immortal and made up the majority of his King form's personal power. He was joining the war alongside his brother or neither of them would. That was his ultimatum. Unspoken was the threat that he was willing to wait out the war, dead.

His brother sagged in his chair, let out a long-suffering sigh, and decided to delay his plans to join the war. They had the memories, but not the personal experience nor the muscle memory of actual combat, and Knight and Rook were perfectly capable of training them all. Bishop, who he began thinking of as a big sister, took to it like a fish to water. Queen Ridley, less so, but then, she probably needed it the least considering her Noble Arm, and she could still beat King and Pawn Ridley in hand-to-hand any day. For the two of them, a lot of time was spent on training aim and maneuvering within a firefight. They had to build themselves up from scratch, and the physical conditioning Knight Ridley put them all through was torture.

Around a year after the training started, his brother finally announced that they were going to the Philippines. The sights, away from the war, were nostalgic, but it wasn't home anymore. For as long as he was in this world, his home was with his brother, wherever that took him.

Current Goal: Help his brother accomplish his goals.

Military Rank: Private First Class (Volunteer)

Name: Ridley Destrier
Nicknames: Bishop, Dez, (big) sis(ter)
Age: 21
Appearance: 5'6", blond hair, violet eyes. Prefers comfortable clothing. Less graceful in heels than any other iteration of Ridley.
Nationality: French

Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Hexad Anamnesis - in this form, it takes the shape of an ornate Halberd, with a bright and sparkly golden blade patterned with shiny silver swirl designs. The blade’s edges have the same silver color, and the gold-silver pattern is inverted along the handle, being primarily silver with swirly golden designs.

Personal Noble Arm Rank: C

Noble Arm Type and Range: Ridley Destrier’s iteration of the Hexad Anamnesis mainly lends itself towards support, though it can be used on herself to supplement a melee fighting style.

Noble Arm Abilities:

Abilities in gray subject to rework/replacement; WIP

Metaphysical Healing - Ridley is capable of healing pretty much any kind of physical wound or disease, up to and including death, though her ability to do so is inversely proportional to the number of people who know about the damage. Her method of doing so is by tapping into an alternate universe where it didn’t happen, where the wound or disease or malfunctioning serotonin receptors aren’t there, and grafting it onto our reality as if selectively rewriting history or causality. Physical damage reflects onto the metaphysical self, and the more people that know about the damage and the longer it has been around, the more it becomes an inherent fixture of the metaphysical self, and thus beyond her ability to heal. The metaphysical damage acts as a catalyst to this ability, thus she cannot use this ability without someone hurt to heal, she cannot reach for realities with apparent differences beyond the relevant damage, and she cannot use it for anything but healing. Remember kids, removal of stress-induced brain damage is no substitute for therapy.

In practical terms, Ridley's ability to heal is relatively uninhibited. No one looks at a gunshot wound and says "yeah that's just Greg's bullet wound, that's supposed to be there." Unless the wound or illness is highly publicized, she can probably heal it. Even if a lot of people know about the wound/ailment, she can probably do at least a partial rewrite. The wound/ailment as well as the identity of the victim would have to disseminate into the cultural zeitgeist at a rapid pace for the issue to be completely beyond her purview. The main shortcomings of her ability are with trying to heal permanent disabilities and death. As previously stated, her ability to heal is inversely proportional to the number of people who know about the damage, and so is the time limit. Her ability behaves as if "a tree falling in the middle of the woods without anyone around to hear it" is the same as it not having happened at all; death isn't fully "real" until it is discovered by a human, no matter what state the body is in or what prediction humans may have possessed of its inevitable fall, and she could theoretically revive someone years after their death (up to 7) if she is the first to discover the body, if their soul has not yet passed on.

More realistically, she can only guarantee resurrection if she is able to heal the body within 13 hours of their death, if she is the first to uncover the body. In most cases, the victim does not count, but the killer does, and the killer (if any) knowing of the death further cuts the time limit down to 7 hours. If even one other person knows of the death, the time limit takes another nosedive down to 64 minutes. From there the time penalties flatten out, continuing downward at an irregular rate. Two others reduces it to 32 minutes. Three other people reduces it to 26 minutes, then 22 min, 18 min, 14 min, 13 min, 11 min, 9 min, and finally 7 minutes when 10 people not including herself, the victim or the killer know of the death. From there, the time limit no longer decreases. Other iterations of Ridley do not count as separate people for the purpose of the time limit.

Permanent disabilities have longer and more inconsistent time limits. The uncertainty of whether recovery is possible combined with the existence of Noble Arm-based limb regeneration (and thus a perception that such injuries are not permanent) seems to ambiguously lower the number of people who count against the time limits, or perhaps how much they count against it, and the actual time limits are several times longer. She's never seen limbs she couldn't regrow within the same day of receiving the injury, though that may have just been luck.

Ridley requires a body (or what’s left of it) to heal someone. While it theoretically doesn’t matter how small the pieces are, (a speck of dust or strand of hair is situationally enough) she can only heal the "greatest remaining whole" - the core of a being. By default, it is the brain, though in the absence of such, it becomes the heart and then usually the biggest chunk of the body that remains.

Metaphysical Tracking - Ridley is capable of tracking the aforementioned metaphysical core of a being through any individual piece of that person, as long as she is holding the latter and the former is within her range.

Reraise - Ridley can prepare an "undo" to put on someone in advance, automatically reviving them upon death. This requires her Noble Arm to be within melee range of the target laterally, or within √98 m (9.9 m/32.5 ft) directly above their head. When she does so, the effect manifests as a glowing halo that floats just above the target’s head. The halo is semi-tangible, (cannot be moved much, nor used as a weapon) lasts for 64 minutes, and requires a fair bit of effort to make, whether it is used or not. Haloes do not stack, only refresh, and go away after revival. While haloes fully restore physical condition, they do not heal fatigue, Noble Arm strain, or mental trauma, and coming back from death is a bit taxing. This Ability has a cooldown of 90 minutes, and the cooldown increases by 30 minutes if the halo activates.

Revert - By stabbing herself with the tip of the Hexad Anamnesis, Ridley can return to her original King or Pawn form in a flash of light. Doing so does not cause Ridley any harm nor incur a cooldown, though it takes the same amount of time as King Ridley's Henshin Invoker transformation.

Miscellaneous Abilities: Despite previously living a civilian life, she's a natural at close quarters combat, and is regarded as the best at hand-to-hand among all of Ridley's iterations, at least in terms of technique. (Rook Ridley is too swole) She's the best at poker and has the most common sense and emotional intelligence of any of Ridley's iterations by far. She can play the acoustic and bass guitar well, is a talented artist, and is far more athletic than she may appear.

Personality: Flippant, casual, and utterly unflappable. Ridley Destrier tends to have an air about her that loudly proclaims that she does not give a shit. She's quick to offload responsibility and doesn't like putting up with messy situations. When push comes to shove, however, she's not afraid to take charge and deal with things thoroughly. She's realistic, pragmatic, and just a bit sarcastic. Likes to tease people with various nicknames. Refers to Pawn Ridley as her little brother (sometimes) and everyone else by nicknames. Secretly terrible at remembering names, not that she forgot the ones she has years of memories for.

Likes: Ice cream, Chinese food, horror movies
Dislikes: Cooking, standing on ceremony
Fears: Becoming a wanted criminal or otherwise getting hunted down because of the actions of her other iterations; knowing no peace.

Bio: Ridley Destrier comes from a world with no Noble Arms, or at least, none originating from an occult programming virus. Her world has magic - has always had magic, though few were capable of even rudimentary spellcasting. She was among those that were, and while her magical capacity had never been outstanding, there were few among her peers who could compete with her in technique and control.

She attended Avenir Academy, a prestigious mage school that all but guaranteed future success for its graduates. Those in power had ways of staying in power, and it was no secret that many world leaders had at least rudimentary magical capability. Hell, some consider it an important quality, since those with magic likely have personally verifiable means to defend themselves against magical coercion. Wouldn't want a repeat of World War IV, would we?

Ridley Destrier is the only adult iteration to never have graduated. She's the same age as the others, but Avenir Academy's school year didn't quite line up. Rather, it was during a school trip that their plane was struck by lightning and crashed into the pacific. Half the school trip had already been a success - they first flew to Rio de Janeiro where they would study the impact of large-scale magic beacons, and were going to continue on towards New Zealand for a lesson on the magical application of antipodes, but they never made it. No one believed the sudden appearance of a thunderstorm was a coincidence, but they didn't have time to find out who, if anyone, did it. Now, stuck in another world, she likely never will.

She's given up on going back. Wouldn't want to even if she could. It'd be nice to get some independence from boss man and everyone's favorite shrimp, but her Noble Arm is more powerful and more useful, if a bit narrower in scope, than what she ever had as a mage. Power like that's valuable, and she can't imagine things being harder here in the long run than it would be for her to navigate the political bullshit of her original world. She doesn't even have to actually give up her parents - the ones here are pretty much exactly the same as her own.

Maybe her motives are a bit selfish, running from her personal problems and leaving the people that would miss her in her own world behind, but as long as she does good in this world, it balances out, right?

Current Goal: Make sure her other iterations don't get themselves killed. Find better work-life balance.

Former Civilian Rank: Member of the student council at Avenir Academy, which technically makes her a civilian, though it comes with a considerable level of indirect international sociopolitical influence.

Name: Ridley Miyashiro
Nicknames: Knight, Shiro, Naruto, Sasuke, future Hokage, senpai
Age: 21
Appearance: 5'8", black hair, dark blue eyes, dark and plain wardrobe, really likes leather/pleather jackets.
Nationality: Japanese

Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Hexad Anamnesis - in this form, it takes the form of a straight, single-edged sword with a dark blue sheen. The blunt side is patterned with swirls, and the blade’s edge lights up in a bright electric blue while it is being moved under the effect of his Designate Warpath ability.

Personal Noble Arm Rank: C

Noble Arm Type and Range: Ridley Miyashiro’s iteration of the Hexad Anamnesis lends itself towards a highly mobile melee fighting style

Noble Arm Abilities:

Teleportation - Ridley can teleport precisely √5 m (2.24 m/7.34 ft) in any direction. He is able to do so rapidly and repeatedly, only incurring strain through excessive use. He can change his orientation through teleports, allowing him to redirect momentum, (and thus "fly" by launching himself upwards) though he cannot change the distance of the teleport. Teleporting into solid matter of non-insignificant size (a dustcloud is fine) will immediately shunt him and the object out of each other harmlessly, through the path of least resistance. This happens nigh-instantaneously, and does not appear to apply the force necessary to launch anything.

Designate Warpath - Ridley can designate a path for the Hexad Anamnesis to take, imagining a moving two-dimensional line in front of him for the blade to travel along. Once the path is set, Ridley can execute it, gaining the superhuman speed, agility, reflexes, relevant durability, and just enough of the processing speed required for moving the blade along at speeds comparable to a speeding bullet. While on a warpath, the Hexad Anamnesis can cut through just about anything, and if Ridley has the forethought to plan around it, he can take advantage of the physical enhancements for close-quarters combat. There is no specific range limit to the imagined path, though Ridley must visualize it before execution and remain within range of the Hexad Anamnesis throughout it (e.g. no throwing the Anamnesis more than a few meters away) or he will be unable to carry out the designated path, causing it to abort. Ridley can intuit the exact distance of his teleports and include them in his trajected warpaths, though continued teleportation-based travel at such speeds falls under the excessive levels of overuse needed to eventually tire him out.

Once the trajectory is set, Ridley cannot modify it, and he becomes somewhat helpless to the path he has designated. His control over his body’s positioning throughout the warpath is tenuous at best, he cannot compensate for enemy movements, and his only real recourse towards stopping himself from running into a mid-flight bullet or other hazard is to abort the warpath entirely. Doing this has a short delay, though at such speeds, the damage to himself can be devastating. Naturally, ending the warpath also means losing all of his physical enhancements, though it usually does not preclude him from teleporting away from the incoming danger.

There isn’t a specific minimum length for the warpath, though unlike his ability to reactively teleport, warpaths require conscious thought to set up. A straight line isn’t hard to imagine, but doing so is less than instant.

Revert - By impaling himself with the Hexad Anamnesis, Ridley can return to his original King or Pawn form in a flash of light. Doing so does not cause Ridley any harm nor incur a cooldown, though it takes the same amount of time as King Ridley's Henshin Invoker transformation.

Miscellaneous Abilities: Ridley is highly adept at stealth, infiltration, and creating disguises. He can fool a lie detector, fly small planes and helicopters, operate just about any kind of firearm, and has enough medical knowledge to stitch his own wounds up if he needs to. He's a great cook and mechanic, and is the iteration the other Ridleys turn to when they need a rip sewn up. Shockingly good at playing the electric guitar.

Personality: Ridley is polite and stoic. He has a matter-of-fact way of speaking and prefers when things are simple and straightforward. He has a bit of a resting bitch face and doesn't smile much; he looks like he's constantly glaring, though if you were to ask him why, he'd simply state that he isn't. He's not particularly sociable, though he's hard to make angry, and will likely do any favor asked of him, no question. He's the type to do nice things without comment regardless, and it's not hard to get him to participate even when he looks like he'd rather be literally anywhere else. He's a bit of a neat freak, and is liable to clean everything if he is left alone with nothing to do. Refers to the other iterations of Ridley by their full, unabbreviated surnames. Used to call them by their chess designations, but none of his other iterations like it when he calls Pawn Ridley "Pawn", and he doesn't like making an incongruous exception.

Likes: Seafood, candy, water (over other beverages)
Dislikes: Bitter things, garish clothing
Fears: Ridley Destrier's wrath

Bio: Ridley Miyashiro was born in Japan, but grew up all over the world. He was raised under his mother as a child assassin within an international paramilitary group known as the guild of shadows. It specialized in espionage, assassination, and ninjutsu development. Rather than Noble Arms, the people of Knight Ridley's world could achieve supernatural feats through the control of life energy, typically referred to as ki, though the name differed by country and culture. The practice originated with the martial artists of China, was revolutionized by the ninjas of Japan, and gradually spread across the world. Superhuman feats, breathing fire, walking on water, blending in with the shadows, duplication and substitution techniques - it had become a standard part of warfare.

Ridley's mother headed the guild, and his father was chosen for intangible genetic reasons. They were both talented ninjutsu practitioners, and there was always some kind of attraction between them, but their relationship was never quite like it is for Ridley's other iterations, and they did not live together, much less marry.

As Ridley grew, both in age and capability, he eventually became his mother's right hand, an agent of death. He was a talented ninja, and the guild of shadows grew into something more than just an assassin's guild.

It wasn't actually his mother who founded the circle of demons, though their goal of making the world a better place through subversive means matched his mother's ideals. They had approached the guild of shadows aiming to recruit him, and his mother insisted that she join as well, leveraging the considerable resources at her disposal for an offer they couldn't refuse. Not without setbacks, at least. From there, she partially co-opted the circle of demons, using it much like an elite extension of the guild of shadows, albeit without the for-profit homicide.

It was on a mission for the circle that his plane crashed. He had been flying to Los Angeles on a mission to assassinate the newest U.S. supreme court justice when his plane got caught in a storm, struck by lightning, and was forced to crash land in the pacific. He had opened the emergency door to the plane, but it was a stormy night, with no moonlight to illuminate the sea. He had jumped out, into the endless black abyss and pouring icy rain, only to never land. Instead, he found himself standing in the interior of a boat, still drenched, staring at a kid who was staring back with wide, awe-struck eyes. Those idiots didn't even bother waiting to return to land before they had invited another potential enemy into their midst.

At the time, he was confused, robbed of his ninjutsu entirely and still processing the absolute mess that was the memories of three lives in his head. He think it was justified, given the circumstances, to have pointed his Noble Arm at Castillo, and since they got his memories too, they understood, though none of his other iterations ever let him live it down.

He didn't revert until well after they returned to land, though Castillo had to serve as an intermediary so that the rescue team would let him go and so that he wouldn't cut the rescue team into pieces for holding him captive. Castillo followed him out, trying to figure out what he was doing, but all he wanted was to confirm that he really had crossed worlds. His memories basically did it for him already, but he couldn't trust those just yet. He went to a local internet cafe, downloaded a dark web browser, set up proxies and began to research in earnest, but it didn't take long to know that the guild of shadows, the circle of demons, the hand of god, the nine curses, the brotherhood of blood, the Kodoku clan, the Hōkai no hi - none of them existed in this world. Some groups bore a resemblance, but he was well and truly in a world with no ninjutsu, martials arts without ki, and nothing but OPL and the mysterious magical weaponry known as Noble Arms in their place.

After covering his tracks, he left, letting the nervous boy follow behind him.

There... wasn't any apparent way back to his own world. It was... hard to accept, that his previous missions and all they were leading up to didn't matter anymore, at least for him. When he returned to his parents, finding the hotel the survivors were being lodged at, he came upon them having an animated discussion about the other form of Ridley. His mother doted on him, trying to get his father to make up with his son, and while he wasn't having it after being shot in the head - and healed by him, his mother reminded, except not, his father retorted - maybe, he relented, because that was some other girl who showed up out of nowhere, ostensibly because of Ridley, possibly, but also it was his fault to begin with, he says.

It was... nice. Charmingly domestic. Nothing at all like his own parents. When he walked in - through the balcony, of course, he simply greeted them and introduced himself. "Hello mother. Hello father. I am Ridley."

After a moment of stunned silence, his father drew his blade as he approached, but as a politician who had never seen real battle, it was trivially easy to disarm him and point his Noble Arm at his father's throat. His mother started freaking out - very different from his own mother, until they heard a knock at the door.

Deeming his father no threat, he simply sheathed his Noble Arm and began walking towards it, saying, "I'll get it."

He paid his parents' bafflement no mind, opening the door to reveal Castillo, who was breathing heavily from sprinting over after being left behind. He supposes most kids can't follow someone when they start climbing up the outside of the building. He turned to let the boy in without a word, and he did so, sighing in relief when he saw that Ridley's parents were unharmed.

His father asked what was going on, his mother was shaking like a leaf, and Castillo was crossing his arms and giving him a disappointed look.

"I simply came to inform Mr. and Mrs. Alvarus of the nature of their son's Noble Arm."

Castillo eyed his father's Noble Arm, left embedded into the wall. "And this is informing them?"

"Yes."

Castillo gave him a strange look, and he stared back at him, not understanding why he would ask such a self-evident question.

Then, his mother's soft, shaky voice: "Please, is my son... okay?"

The phrasing pushes one of Alvarus' memories to the front of his mind and his brow twitches involuntarily.

"No. The slash wound on his face has been patched up, but he has not yet recovered from the events that took place on the island."

His mother stopped breathing, and at that, Castillo tried to slap his arm. It would have been mostly ineffective, and he knew the properties of Castillo's Noble Arm were unrelated, though he chose to dodge it anyway. Since Castillo didn't continue, he judged that it wasn't an attack attempt, though Castillo raised an eyebrow, as if his actions were somehow strange in this situation.

"Don't make it sound like he's in a coma or something. He's fine. Fucked up, emotionally, and has been hiding it as if he's trying to hide a dead body, but fine."

His mother let out a choked sob, probably out of relief, but his father simply shot them both a death glare for making Ridley's mother cry. Ridley simply stared back, unperturbed.

Castillo makes a hand gesture indicating that he should get on with the explanation, so he explains Alvarus' ability to summon Castillo, and their apparent shared ability to transform into Destrier. By all likelihood, they shared the ability to transform into four others, including himself, each owning their own version of what may or may not be the same Noble Arm. All of them shared the same first name - Ridley, and the name of their Noble Arm - the Hexad Anamnesis. Alvarus originally theorized that the Hexad Anamnesis' name referenced his six types of bullets, but it was rather obvious by now that, considering the second word in its name, it's referencing their six parallel lives. There weren't too many similarities between their lives, or even their personalities, but they all had similar parents with the same names, and they all ended up in a plane crashing over the Pacific more or less corresponding with their 18th birthday, or 9th, in Castillo's case. None of the other versions of Ridley got to wake up in the wreckage, instead coming out only when Ridley aims his gun at himself.

His mother gasped, and his father, silent, seemed to come to accept the story that his mother had been telling him all along. Except - "How do we know this isn't a load of bull? No offense, but neither of you look anything like our son."

He personally disagreed - it was their eyes. Not the same color, but the same look. The four of them all had it - even Destrier.

Regardless, his father wanted to see proof, and proof he could provide. He drew his blade, ignored their surprise, and gave harakiri a try.

Current Goal: Get Ridley Alvarus into a more substantial position of power so that all iterations of Ridley may better effect change.

Former Civilian Rank: Jōnin Special assassin and heir of the guild of shadows, member of the circle of demons.

Name: Ridley Park
Nicknames: Rook, big guy, freight train, 16-wheeler
Age: 21
Appearance: 6'2", black hair, brown eyes, and a horrible fashion sense. King Ridley (with agreement from Pawn Ridley) throws out most of the clothes he gets for himself to avoid ending up in them. He finds King Ridley's clothes too uncomfortable though, so most of his wardrobe is bland, picked out by Knight Ridley. Bishop Ridley could do a better job but neither iteration cares enough to do something about it. Doesn’t like long sleeves because of his Noble Arm.

Nationality: Korean

Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Hexad Anamnesis - in this form, it takes the form of a sleek black utility armguard. It utilizes hammerspace to store a number of accessories that can fold up and collapse into the armguard in an implausible manner. When fully collapsed, it appears to be nothing more than an armguard made of Kevlar. It's not even particularly thick. Noble Arm disabling effects can prevent the deployment of its various attachments, but it cannot get rid of attachments that have already been deployed. Accessories include a wrist-mounted crossbow, a hidden spring-loaded push dagger, (above the wrist, underneath the crossbow) detachable throwing knives (above the wrist, on either side of the crossbow and push dagger) a spring-loaded grappling hook and line, (under the wrist) a pair of spring-loaded ballistic knives (on either side of the grappling hook) and a pair of extendable "wings" (on either side of the armguard) that can unfold into an ‘S’-shaped shield, with the armguard making up the middle. The wings can be detached from the armguard and used as blunt throwing weapons. Part of the crossbow can also be attached and united with the wings to form a functioning longbow, with the Noble Arm magically restringing around the longer limbs in the time it takes to combine the pieces.

Personal Noble Arm Rank: B

Noble Arm Type and Range: Ridley Miyashiro’s iteration of the Hexad Anamnesis lends itself towards a highly mobile and adaptable style

Noble Arm Abilities:

Magic Trick - Ridley can instantly move the Hexad Anamnesis from one arm to the other by tapping his forearms together.

Hammerspace - Ridley’s armguard has pockets along its length through which hammerspace can be accessed. One of the hammerspace pockets is available for storage, with an internal volume roughly equivalent to Ridley’s entire body. Objects need to fit within the pocket to be stored, and it does not freeze or preserve the contents. Objects stored in Hammerspace can be retrieved even if Rook Ridley dies by transforming into Rook Ridley again. The other pockets hold an unlimited supply of appropriately sized arrows, crossbow bolts, throwing knives, ballistic knives, and replacement grappling hooks. Any time his wrist-mounted crossbow or the wing compartments on either side of the armguard are collapsed without their detachable parts, the removed parts are automatically replaced while out of sight. Other forms of reloading must be done manually.

Castle Walls - Ridley can project an invisible barrier around him made up of 1 m² square segments. Ridley and those he designates are capable of perceiving the segments. The segments connect at an angle, forming a cylinder-like prism around Ridley with a height up to 4.4x higher than the base of the prism’s inradius (getting as close to it using 1 m² segments as possible without going over) before terminating in a roof. He’d have to crouch down to fit in a triangular prism barrier, a square prism would be 2 segments tall, a pentagonal prism 3 segments, a hexagonal and heptagonal prism 4 segments, an octagonal prism 5 segments, and to capture an opponent ten meters away, it’d have to be a 63-sided prism that extended 44 segments upwards)

The maximum size for Ridley’s barrier would be a 308-sided prism extending 215 segments upwards. The circumradius (and thus the maximum distance he can instantly “capture” targets within) is about 49 m. Rook Ridley’s barriers always point straight up, and can extend infinitely downwards while on uneven ground - height is measured from the ground Ridley stands on. The barrier does not extend underground more than necessary, (extends anywhere from 0 to 1 segment below ground, depending on how uneven the surface is) so it is theoretically possible to dig a tunnel underneath Ridley’s barriers, or escape the barrier if it overlaps a tunnel below Rook Ridley’s ground level. (e.g. Sewers, subways) The barrier will extend downward into liquids.

Despite the number of segments, creating large barriers is not particularly more draining on him than creating small ones. Although he cannot resize existing barriers, create multiple barriers at once, or replace segments in existing barriers, he can rather easily discard the existing barrier and create a new, undamaged one of a different size, and it would take less than a full second to do so. If anything, it is the breaking of segments that tires him out, even if he does not replace them. He would fail to keep his Noble Arm manifested well before all 66,221 segments of his largest possible barrier were broken, assuming the segments were destroyed in a timely manner.

Created barriers follow Ridley’s lateral (but not vertical) movements, keeping Ridley the centerpoint of the prism at all times. When pushing up against solid objects that cannot be moved gently, it possesses an elastic quality, where the pushing force will build the closer Ridley gets to the prism’s walls. Larger barriers can therefore exert greater possible force. The barrier can potentially demolish buildings in this manner, since the barrier and the upper end of its elastic force tends to be stronger than reinforced concrete.

The barrier can overlap with physical objects without damaging them, and can be set to include or exclude certain materials, animals, elements, or people from its effects by default. (motionless objects are generally excluded by default) It requires some concentration to designate who or what to add to the blacklist or whitelist, though projectile attacks that don’t come from a Ridley are blacklisted by default. Once designated, it no longer requires conscious thought to keep it that way for the target, and he can designate targets about as fast as he can mentally count, but it can take some time to work through large crowds.

Upon creation, the barrier will automatically push those that are in the way to either side of the shield according to the way Rook Ridley prefers. This process can crush people if there isn’t enough space on the chosen side. Resisting this push (and crushing force) is possible, but would necessitate breaking the manifesting segment using nothing but compression force. It’s doable with sufficient strength when being crushed (albeit probably more likely to break whatever they’re being pushed against) though the noble arm would have to be quite specialized to deal with the lack of traction when being pushed into empty space.

Segments have somewhat glass-like properties, and while they have considerable durability, sufficient damage will destroy the entire segment. Since they are energy constructs, they will self-repair any minor damage; they need to be broken in one go through overwhelming force, rather than through accumulated damage. Breaking a segment will leave a momentary hole in the barrier, during which passage is possible, though the shield segments in that column of the barrier will quickly lower to seal the hole, exerting the same pushing force on anything it comes to overlap. When this happens, the roof will lower as well to rest atop the lowest column, causing all remaining columns to extend past it. Despite its considerable size, the roof is fundamentally just a particularly large segment, and will break about as easily as any other segment. When broken, the roof will not be replaced automatically; a new barrier has to be formed.

Even when all segments in a column are destroyed, the roof will not lower any further when it is 2 segments above the ground or lower.

Castling - Rook Ridley can switch places with King Ridley, teleporting both of them (as well as the barriers from Rook Ridley’s Castle Wall ability) to each other’s location, with no distance limit beyond their ability to separate from each other. Rook Ridley cannot switch places with any other iteration of Ridley. If his greater size causes him overlap objects, he will be shunted out of them in the same manner as Knight Ridley's teleports. This ability has a 90 minute cooldown.

It’s Over, I Have the High Ground - Ridley can create a single loose 1 m² square shield segment parallel to the ground and move it telekinetically. It can only go up and down. Could potentially be made to rotate or move in other directions with extensive training. Would take further training to be able to switch which axis it is able to move along without creating a new one. Will never be able to move diagonally. Acceleration and top speed comparable to your grandmother’s old Toyota.

Revert - By shooting or stabbing himself with the Hexad Anamnesis, (Any attachment is valid) Ridley can return to his original King or Pawn form in a flash of light. Doing so does not cause Ridley any harm nor incur a cooldown, though it takes the same amount of time as King Ridley's Henshin Invoker transformation.

Miscellaneous Abilities: Ridley is an expert in the art of nonlethal takedown, having extensive anatomical knowledge and experience in practical combat applications of it against both baseline and enhanced humans. He's a competent medic, could put most acrobats to shame, is a master of urban parkour and has the aim of an olympic sharpshooter. He has training in hacking and investigative work, although King Ridley has proven more adept in those fields. He's also great on the drums, and is easily the best among his iterations at dancing.

Personality: Ridley is generally warm and friendly. He's a hugger, he likes making people get along, and if he catches you hurting his friends or family he'll seriously consider breaking every bone in your body. Moreso than the other iterations, Ridley Park has stronger emotions, and while he can control them fairly well, he's the most likely to punch a wall out of frustration. He's highly empathic, and can't help but meddle in affairs that don't concern him in pursuit of happy resolutions. Except for Pawn Ridley, which he calls little Ridley, he refers to his other iterations by their abbreviated surnames: Varus, Dez, Shiro and Frieda.

Likes: Cheesy food, (especially pizza) trampolines, rollercoasters, hugs
Dislikes: Killing people, gallows humor, pineapple on pizza
Fears: Mind control, not being good enough to protect the people he cares about

Bio: Ridley Park lost both of his parents at a young age. They both came home, were shot on their doorstep, and fell into the house, coughing up blood before eventually dying. He was taken in by a Good Samaritan - a man the other iterations of Ridley have never heard of - who happened to see it as it happened. At first it was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but Ridley's only other family was halfway across the globe and didn't want to take him in. He confided that he didn't want to go into foster care, and the man, perhaps taking pity on him, decided to adopt him, raising him like his own son.

Of course, when his adoptive father came home one night, not long after adoption, bleeding profusely, barely able to stand, he could no longer hide his night job as the Black Dragoon, a famous vigilante - one of the few in the business who did it (and did it well) in spite of not having any powers. It was probably the reason why he had been around on the night his parents were murdered in the first place.

Once the cat was out of the bag, Ridley would not leave it alone. Even after having to patch the man up by googling how to do stitches while he lay unconscious, it wasn't even 24 hours before his father intended to go out again on patrol. Ridley swore, then, that if he left, Ridley wouldn't let him go out there alone. He'd put on a domino mask and follow after him, and when he was told he couldn't if he tried. (an accurate assessment given Black Dragoon's grappling hook and cape glider) He said that he'd wander the city alone then, at night, through dark alleys and gang territory. He was bound to find his father eventually, and he had to, because he might find him bleeding to death just like he had last night.

That shut his father up, at least for a moment. Then his father got angry, but unlike his biological father, Black Dragoon didn't believe in corporal punishment, and he wasn't going to budge. He yelled, said Ridley was being stupid, but ultimately went back to bed with a frustrated grunt.

The same scenario played out the next day, and on the third, the Black Dragoon tried calling his bluff, except he wasn't bluffing. His father lost him almost immediately, and he chased after, in the same direction, but admittedly without any guarantee it was the right one. No matter how far or how fast he went in the same direction, he never caught up, and eventually, he realized that he was being followed. He was still just a child at the time, and given that pretending everything was fine was just shortening the gap between them, he didn't have much options but to try to run. The man was, of course, faster, so he tried to lose him around corners and narrow alleyways. It didn't work, and eventually he found himself at a dead end, facing the man.

The man had a knife, and despite having no fighting experience whatsoever, Ridley raised his fists, not prepared to go down without a fight. He didn't have to, since Black Dragoon had been following him since he disappeared, knocking the man out, tying him up, and sending a message to the police. He said he wanted to show Ridley how dangerous it was, probably thinking it'd scare him enough to keep him at home. It had the opposite effect. He told his father that he wasn't going to lose him too, no matter what. His father argued that he was fine - he was basically fully healed already, and he responded by saying that he'd start following him around even after he was healed. His father let out a strangled noise and went back to yelling. "Do you want to end up like your parents!? Is that what you're trying to do!?"

Ridley stayed silent throughout the lecture wearing a stubborn, unflinching frown.

Eventually his father let out a loud groan, carried Ridley back home via grappling hook, and said that his training would begin tomorrow before going to sleep.

Ridley hadn't actually planned on becoming a vigilante. Didn't really have a goal in mind, when he followed Black Dragoon out. He supposes he was trying to get him to quit, so that he'd stay safe, but he knew he couldn't really ask that of him.

Although the training was actually quite grueling and the diet was even worse, he still insisted he would try to follow Black Dragoon out at night, even if he was too sore to actually make it past the sidewalk in front of their house. His father sighed and agreed to take a break from Vigilante work to focus on his training, but he could only stay away for so long. The days passed by in a blur, but it was maybe only a month before he made his debut as Black Dragoon's sidekick. He still didn't have an alter ego or a costume after his first proposal was rejected with great prejudice, so he just went out in black clothes, wearing a domino mask. Technically speaking, he wasn't allowed to actually participate in the crime fighting yet, just get used to grappling hook-based urban parkour and observe. He watched Black Dragoon stop a mugging, prevent what appeared to be an attempted rape, then scare off some teenagers with spray cans. Nothing bad happened, and they returned home just before midnight. They fell into a routine - school and training during the day, then patrol during the night. He eventually found himself in positions to intervene, either when Black Dragoon was busy or appeared to be distracted. He never was - the man had eyes in the back of his head, but it felt good to be making a tangible difference in people's lives.

Eventually, one night, he messed up - took a bullet to the leg while trying to keep an old lady safe. Black Dragoon disarmed the shooter, probably using a bit more force than necessary, before dragging him back home, rambling on about how it was too soon, that he didn't have enough training, that he wasn't supposed to be participating in the first place, and so on and so forth. He couldn't think of anything to say in his defense.

He was benched from patrol, and while he protested, there wasn't really anything he could do about it on one leg, and he had time to think through what it would mean to ask Black Dragoon not to go out at all. That's why, ultimately, he let his father go out without him. He couldn't spend his entire life following his father around. He still couldn't stand the first night, beside himself with rational and irrational worry.

When his leg finally healed, his father redoubled his training, not letting him rejoin patrols until he was back in shape. Another month passed. When he started insisting on going out again, his father challenged him to a proper spar, then proceeded to wipe the floor with him. He told Ridley that he would let him out again when he could properly defend himself. He continued doing this every time he asked. Looking back on it, he probably wanted Ridley to give up on the vigilante life, perhaps thinking that letting him out at all had been a mistake.

Still, he persisted. another month passed, and he started doing better in their spars. Not even close to winning, but better. They started sparring more often than just for the sake of testing whether he was ready for patrol or not. Eventually, his father told him that he needed a proper hero identity, and that he had to come up with one. This proved perhaps even harder than trying to win a spar, because his first ten or so ideas were immediately shot down. "What are these colors?" "Are you trying to make yourself a target?" "Why is the neckline so low?" "This cape is going to get you killed."

Eventually he settled on calling himself Shadow Guard, or just Shadow for short, since all he's been doing from the start is following Black Dragoon around like his shadow, trying to guard his life. He's since found that he wants to guard others, too, though mainly he chose the name because his father rejected any of the names he came up with that were less edgy.

As for the costume, he kept trying. Capes were out - he gave up on trying to avoid looking like a Black Dragoon ripoff when all his other cape ideas were shot down, either failing spectacularly as a glider or being long enough that they'd drag along the ground. He didn't want to gank his style, so he went with a scarf of ass-kicking. It may not have been the most practical choice possible, but hey, it functioned as a second utility belt, and more options in the field were always useful. His father frowned deeply at his choice of color, but didn't object, nor should he have. There's absolutely nothing conspicuous about periwinkle. To prevent another rejection, he mostly stuck to black with the rest of the costume, slapped on a domino mask and called it done. Surprisingly, it worked. He approved the costume. He later tried to get him to change the scarf color but Ridley wasn't about to let him go back on his approval. Thus, Shadow Guard was born.

They worked a number of cases together, fought a colorful gallery of villains, and eventually joined Sine Avaritia, a global organization of superheroes that unite to handle greater threats to the world and its people. Years went by, and eventually, at 16, his father deemed him competent enough to go on patrols by himself. They split up the city and patrolled separately, radioing in anything big. By 17, he was recognized as a hero in his own right, not just a sidekick.

His plane crash happened not long after graduating high school, on the eve of his 18th birthday. (crime doesn't wait) He was tracking an arms deal back to Cuba when his plane got caught in a storm and struck by lightning. It was forced to crash land in the pacific, but when he braced for impact, in never came. Rather, he was flooded with a deluge of memories, and when he opened his eyes he found himself in an unfamiliar room, standing in front of some kid, who immediately began an honest-to-god poster board presentation explaining the situation.

He admits he was suspicious at first - sleeper agents and mind control was a reoccurring problem for Sine Avaritia, and suddenly gaining a ton of memories that aren't your own is... really rather disconcerting, especially considering how awful a lot of it was.

It was over and done with though. They had safely returned to the states, This world's Ridley and the little Ridley in front of him were being forced into therapy by his... still living, still breathing mother. He has to see her, and he has to do it yesterday, but first, he walks over to the little Ridley and does what he does best: wrap the kid in a big, warm hug. This poor, poor, sputtering child has been through way too much.

Little Ridley goes along with it, but eventually tries to push him away, saying "alright, alright, no more pity hugs." The older Ridley just smiles and asks, rhetorically, "so regular hugs are still on the table?" Then he hugs the kid again, because fuck, he really is everyone's little brother, isn't he?

They eventually go to meet Ridley's mom, and he can't stop himself from crying. She's so nice and gentle, it's a heart-wrenching reminder of what he's lost. He hugs the shit out of her, and then he does the same with Ridley's dad, because fuck his bewilderment, he can't believe he's seeing them again. Little Ridley eventually had to drag him away to do Noble Arm testing before he made Ridley's father too uncomfortable, but they promised they'd be back for dinner.

It was funny. With all the new information and dramatic reunions, he barely processed the situation he was in. There didn't seem to be any way back to his own world, and, by all likelihood, he would never see his adoptive father again. To make matters worse, as far as they could tell, they had no say in whether they would spend their lives as themselves or not, other than taking their shared body hostage. It was... depressing. The only solution to such fears is to become a hypocrite, but as far as he can tell, none of them want that. At least none of the five of them.

little Ridley noticed the downturn of his mood, and asked him if he was okay. Fuck, those words. The memories were intimately his, like he had lived them himself, and he found himself already feeling reluctant to try to return to his own world, and isn't that such a betrayal? After everything his father has done for him?

He pulls little Ridley into his arms again. What can he say? This kid is huggable as hell.

Current Goal: Become the hero this world needs.

Former Civilian Rank: Independent Vigilante, member of Sine Avaritia

Name: Ridley Friedrich
Nicknames: Queen, Frieda, Queenie, her highness
Age: 21
Appearance: 5’4", blond hair, golden eyes. Shares King Ridley's appreciation for business casual clothing.
Nationality: German

Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Although her Noble Arm’s official name is the Hexad Anamnesis, she has taken to calling her version of it “Albion” to distance herself from her other iterations. It’s named after a fictional Rapier from an old myth about vampires, and its name is itself based on the Latin word for white. Fittingly, in Ridley’s Queen form, it takes on the shape of an ornate white Rapier.

Personal Noble Arm Rank: B

Noble Arm Type and Range: Albion seems to lend itself towards a melee fighting style, at least in theory. In practice, however, she is most effective at a distance.

Noble Arm Abilities:

Abilities in gray subject to rework/replacement; WIP

Shock and Awe - By gathering energy within the palm of her hand, Ridley can create a small, tennis ball-sized sphere of floating light. Its color is customizable, but she prefers making it bright white-yellow, like staring into the sun. The light is capable of ignoring gravity, strong winds, and all but particularly dense gel, passing through them as if they don’t exist. Ridley is capable of physically snuffing out the light as well as telekinetically manipulating the ball of light freely while it is within √98 m (9.9 m/32.5 ft) of her. She can move the ball of light at blistering speeds of about 9.9 kph/6.2 mi per hour with all the agility of a remarkably graceful sea turtle. She can also send it out beyond that, wherein she will lose control of it, but since it behaves as if in a vacuum, it will continue moving in a straight line until it hits something or fizzles out. Ridley can only have one ball of light (in any form) at a time; creating more causes her to lose her grasp on the first, making it fizzle out. Balls of light can last up to 90 minutes while within Ridley’s area of control, but once they leave it, they only have a lifespan of 30 seconds, and thus sending it out telekinetically gives her a maximum range of 82.5 m. Realistically, however, Ridley is better off grabbing the ball of light and throwing it, or better yet, hitting it with her rapier like a baseball bat. Both lead to significant decreases in accuracy, the latter especially, but it allows her to achieve a maximum range of about 708 m/2323 ft. The accuracy at such ranges is laughable, but she can pitch with relatively decent accuracy to reach distances up to 583 m/1914 ft.

The ball will detonate on the first thing it touches besides Ridley and her Noble Arm, causing a continuous but contained explosion, as if in slow-motion. Explosions expand to their maximum size over the course of 8 seconds (it can be avoided fairly easily) and have a blast radius of about 10.5 m. Explosions continue to linger for 64 seconds, immolating everything inside at full speed. Although the blast does not advance fast enough to push much out of it, it is possible for even ordinary humans to survive getting caught within, provided they escape the area of effect swiftly and receive medical attention. A bunker capable of surviving an entire minute of continuous bombing would be able to survive the blast, although temperature control may become an issue. Mainly, it’s there to be loud, flashy, and take up space.

Obliteration - By crushing the ball of light within the palm of her hand, Ridley can condense it down into a tiny sphere of floating light, which has all of the same projectile properties as the original ball. Excluding any Noble Arm and Queen Ridley herself, (they cannot be designated as targets to disarm the ball) the first target the light physically touches will self-destruct in a violent but largely self-contained implosion. It is virtually impossible to survive, and leaves nothing but inert dust behind. The effect can apply to objects as well, albeit with a size limit of up to 21 m³. Larger objects (e.g. buildings) will suffer partial destruction, as if an 21 m³ cube of it was removed, cleanly cut out of the structure. Because the area is centered on the point of contact, and Ridley can modify the cube’s orientation, damage can penetrate up to half the solid diagonal of the cube. (18.2 m) It is possible for people and objects caught inside the area of effect to escape and survive if they are not the primary target, so long as they are not pulled into the implosion. Queen Ridley’s cognition determines what counts as part of the primary target, and thus hitting clothes or body armor will generally designate the person wearing it as the target. Although multiple casualties are possible, only a single person can be considered a primary target, and the sphere of light will disappear after its effect is activated.

Dandelion Grenade - By holding the ball of light within her hand and blowing on it, Ridley can break up a ball of light, scattering numerous small explosions over an area, with blast radii similar to mundane grenades, albeit with less shrapnel fallout. Unlike her Shock and Awe ability, the explosions caused by this do not exhibit unusual properties, other than their inability to detonate while Queen Ridley is within the blast radius. Because blowing them out is required, their speed and thus range is relatively limited. Attempting to grab the small bombs and throw them manually results in them fizzling out harmlessly just outside of her range of control.

Getsuga Tenshou Heaven Cutter - By slashing through the ball of light with her Noble Arm, Ridley can essentially create an explosive sword beam. The sword beam doesn’t need to tear up the ground as it travels, but will likely be made to do so. Sword beams do not have a lifespan, and will travel up to 64 m before dissipating. Getting hit with one is like getting hit by a bomb filled with razor blades that all cut in a single direction.

Blast Wall - By flattening a ball of light between the palms of her hands, or between a hand and her Noble Arm, Ridley can create a semitransparent wall of light which she can expand into a square with an area of up to 74 in²/~1.9 m². The wall will fizzle out when fully leaving her area of control but can otherwise move in the same way as her balls of light. The first attack or object to make contact with the wall of light will cause the wall to violently explode outwards, towards whatever made contact with it. It will fail to do so if Queen Ridley is in the blast zone. The outward explosion can reach up to √98 m (9.9 m/32.5 ft) away, which, of course, means that if the wall is put at the end of her zone of control, the explosion can reach twice that distance from Ridley. Although the offending projectile will be blasted away with great force, it is possible to penetrate the explosion. An ordinary bullet (or salvo of bullets) will be knocked away with great prejudice, though sufficiently powerful Noble Arm projectiles can potentially endure and overpower the blast, making the Blast Wall unreliable as a shield against them.

Decoy - Ridley can create a decoy ball of light, which can be manipulated, colored, crushed, flattened, or blown on in the same manner as a real ball of light, but will never actually explode or cause things to implode. It can be cut in two with her Noble Arm, but no sword beam will emerge. It is significantly easier to make than a real ball of light, and does not count against her one ball of light limit, though she also has a one decoy limit.

Revert - By stabbing herself with the Hexad Anamnesis, Ridley can return to her original King or Pawn form in a flash of light. Doing so does not cause Ridley any harm nor incur a cooldown, though it takes the same amount of time as King Ridley's Henshin Invoker transformation.

Miscellaneous Abilities: Ridley is a talented writer, she's great at playing the violin, and she's an excellent singer. She's pretty good at chess, though she's prone to using high-risk high-reward strategies. She was into baseball and softball well before gaining her Noble Arm, and is probably the only one who can compete with Rook Ridley at darts.

Personality: To some, Ridley Friedrich may come off as cold and distant, she's a bit shy and terrible at expressing herself directly, both verbally and facially. Despite that, she does have her subtle cues once you get to know her, and she tends to get along even with those of a more prickly disposition. She's the type that like to try new things, loves horrendous puns, and could go off about tropes for hours on end. She is the most unhappy with being tied to King Ridley's Noble Arm, and doesn't like being seen as the same person as her other iterations. She acknowledges the practical purpose of nicknames, but she doesn't like how they diminish her identity, and prefers to address all of her other iterations as Ridley, extending them the courtesy that she wants, even if it gets confusing. If she really needs to differentiate, she'll go by Rook's manner of address, since it feels the most sensible to her.

Likes: Cake, poetry, fantasy novels, professional wrestling
Dislikes: Not being treated as her own person, utilitarian judgments of her worth
Fears: Never being able to come back after a revert

Bio: Ridley Friedrich was born and raised in a world without Noble Arms, without magic, without ninjutsu, without vigilante superheroes, without ki, without aliens, and without eldritch abominations. She had two loving, financially thriving parents, had promising academic prospects, and made several lasting friendships throughout her school years unlike every single other iteration of Ridley. (wow)

Her world wasn't perfect by any means. There were wars and ongoing disputes over certain territories, magic or not. That being said, she definitely never felt the desire to leave her world like some kind of isekai protagonist. Sure, a jaunt through fantasyland sounds like fun, until you realize you'll likely be without most modern comforts even if that world has electricity. If the world you end up in is more realistic than a work of fiction would probably care to detail, then anything vaguely medieval is probably full of people that bathe once a month and throw literal shit out on the streets.

The standard convention was to get hit by truck-kun, but instead, while on a flight to Hawaii for a vacation coinciding with her 18th birthday, their plane got caught in a storm and struck by lightning. It was forced to crash land in the pacific, but the landing never came. Instead, in the blink of an eye, she found herself staring at a small child holding a telescopic pointer stick, using it to gesture at a poster board presentation explaining the sudden influx of memories she was bombarded with. Five lives, only one of which wasn't just as long as her own, if not longer. It was a cumulative 81 years of memories - not perfect memories by any means, but vivid, from a first-person perspective, and just as real as any of her own memories.

This world wasn't medieval, but it had relatively exclusive magic that drove social divides, escalated the stakes of military conflict, and emboldened certain countries into war. It... wasn't a strictly worse world, per se. In fact, it had all of the magic and none of the logistical pains typical of the genre. Still, it wasn't her world. She had no friends here. The man and woman with the same names as her parents had different faces and their personalities weren't quite the same. Also, she was apparently sharing an existential timeshare with, minimum, two others. Two bodies divided by six people meant she'd be getting four months out of every year. Two-thirds of her life, just... not hers, anymore. She didn't have papers - no ID, no citizenship, no high school diploma that she JUST finished earning. She probably won't even be considered a legally distinct entity. Maybe she could fight for it, but what'd be the point? Making their taxes harder?

Hah. Haha. What kind of sick joke is this?

How is she supposed to get a job? Get a relationship? Grow old with someone? "Goodnight dear, see you in two fucking days!?" Is she expected to just be lumped in with the other iterations? "Sorry, but if you marry me, you marry all six of us, including the kid." God, why is one of the iterations a kid!? "Yeah, by the way, if we get together, they'll all eventually know every detail of what we get up to, hope that's not a dealbreaker." She's already shuddering to think about how nothing will be private anymore the moment she transforms back, just like how nothing is for the other five whose lives are laid bare before her.

She finds herself breathing heavily, staring down at the clenched fists in her lap. A rapier - her noble arm, the Hexad Anamnesis, potentially the selfsame Noble Arm responsible for her misfortune, materializes. In her other hand, a gentle sensation of warmth, and when she unclenches her fist, she finds a tiny speck of light floating within.

She raises it up - gently, tentatively, still not used to her new powers, before looking back at the kid's stupid poster board about why she's supposed to be okay with this situation. She wills the ball forward and, ever so gently, it floats across the space between them, past the boy, and into the poster board. The poster crumples into itself before making a strange muffled boom, and then there's nothing but dust littering the table it was set up on.

She blinks.

The boy blinks.

She looks back down at her Rapier for a second, then decides she should probably put it away. She marvels at how she can simply intuit doing so and watch it dematerialize - she can't deny that magic has its novelty, but it didn't exactly make up for the situation, and having power like hers seemed like it had the potential to get her in trouble.

Like it had the potential to cause Ridley Alvarus to see her as dangerous.

She shuddered, then stood up. "I'm sorry, Ridley, but I haven't been listening."

He frowns. No, pouts. He pouts like a kicked puppy.

"The memories alone were... are... a lot. I think I'd like to spend some time alone."

"Oh. Okay. I'll be here, if you want to talk about it?"

She leaves without answering, unable to manage so much as a nod. She slips into Ridley's huge bedroom and collapses into the bed's soft white sheets.

What is she supposed to do with her life now, going forward? There's really nothing she can do, is there? Even if scouring the world for an interdimensional Noble Arm to send her back was on the table, would she have any guarantee the Hexad Anamnesis wouldn't pull her right back the moment Ridley made a mistake? even trying to find something like that would have to go to vote by a council of Ridleys, and one of them - not her - will undoubtedly have the final say.

She looks around her, surrounded by mementos of an unfamiliar life she's lived. It... it wasn't anything like her own room, even disregarding the size and cost.

She eventually cries herself to sleep, not caring about the time of day.

When she wakes up, she finds she can't bring herself to get out of bed. Ridley eventually comes in, trying to wake her up at first and eventually trying to talk to her about how "cool" her Noble Arm is when he realizes she's already awake. It feels awful and fake for him to be so familiar, even though they've just met. She knows he's just trying to take her mind off of the situation, but it's just having the opposite effect.

He leaves pauses in between topics, giving her an opportunity to respond, but she can't think of what to say. He pouts again, sighs, and says he'll be right back. It actually takes him a while to return, and she almost drifts back to sleep in the interim, but he eventually returns, holding a tray of breakfast food whose smell makes her mouth water.

"Bacon and Eggs! I made them myself."

And so, this saintly child hands her breakfast in bed like it's nothing. She finds herself struck dumb with awe. It was maybe the most thoughtful thing that anyone has ever done for her.

She gingerly accepts the tray, laying it on the bed next to her, and gives Ridley what she thinks passes for a smile. "Thank you. It... means a lot."

Then, she began digging in. Airline food was terrible and she was hungry. The bacon was slightly burnt around the edges and the eggs were a little runny, but she wouldn't trade this breakfast for even a meal cooked by the greatest chef in the world. Not even a magic chef in a magic world.

When she was done, she got out of bed, deciding to do the dishes for little Ridley. She was going to need time; just the idea of relinquishing her autonomy and reverting filled her with anxiety, but whether it was fair or not, it was just something she was going to have to live with.

At least she'd have little Ridley with her. Silver linings.

Current Goal: Decouple herself from Ridley Alvarus' Noble Arm, maybe go home to her own reality.

Former Military Rank: Civilian