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[lovesthepain]

Out-of-Character Information

Name: Snap
Are you over 15?: so very over 15
Time Zone: +5 GMT? I think???
Personal Journal: I don't... really have one anymore...
Reliable Method of Contact: plurp, please!
Other characters in the game: Char (das it)
Link to slot request if 6th, 7th slot: N/A

Tegaki: Not required.
Anything Else?: Time constraints, English isn't first language, preferred method of contact, ect.

In-Character Information

Name: Sage Harpuia
Game/Series: Megaman Zero
Teacher/Student/Other:
Canon Point: Shortly before his death in MMZ3.
Age: Never actually made clear in canon? Decades?? CENTURIES? NOBODY KNOWS. He functions at the intellectual and emotional level of an adult, though.
Grade Level/Class Taught/Job: Truancy Officer
Dorm or Living Arrangement: Dorm

Personality:

"Sage" is not a name but a title, and one that Harpuia lives up to well. He's known for being the wisest of Neo Arcadia's Guardians. Though originally not built for combat purposes, Harpuia has a mind that works with military precision and organization, keeping focused and level even in crisis situations. There are precious few things that can rattle Harpuia's composure enough to distract him from the big picture. A leadership role often means making difficult decisions -- ones that can mean lives being lost, either through carelessness or through a sacrifice deemed unfortunate but unavoidable -- and Harpuia is the hardened, steely type who is ready and able to shoulder those sorts of burdens. Harpuia does not necessarily believe that all lives lost are taken justly, nor that death is necessarily an unavoidable part of pursuing justice, but if he has to cut reploids down to keep the peace for humanity, then woe betide anyone who dares to cross Neo Arcadia; he is a loyal and ruthless soldier, when it's demanded of him.

Being one of the Guardian reploids built from X's DNA data, it's probably not especially surprising that he takes after his heroic super fighting robot "dad" (??) in a lot of ways. His ironclad sense of justice is probably chief among these; Harpuia is very much a stickler for doing what he thinks is the right thing. He's certainly not naive or idealistic about those lofty ideals of his, either: Harpuia knows that sometimes acting for the sake of the greater good involves great personal sacrifice or doing things you might find unpleasant. It's that sense of duty that guides him to do what he does more than personal glory or benefit. When he assumes governmental control, he does so in secret, believing the peaceful status quo more important to uphold than a boost in his own prestige -- and he just as quickly throws all that prestige away to commit treason when he believes humanity's safety requires it.

That dutiful nature can make him seem noble, but it can just as easily make him seem stubborn and haughty. While he's not a person with evil intentions, and will occasionally show a surprisingly merciful side, he can dig in his heels when it comes to compromising. This inflexibility can often get in his way and make him come across as too uptight or pretentious; he's sometimes prone to teasing from the other Guardians because of how seriously he takes himself. It's not that he's got a stick up his butt (he's totally got a stick up his butt), he just defines himself almost exclusively by his responsibility to his ideals, which means he takes his work very, very seriously. Woe betide you if you gum up his plans or ignore your orders. Harpuia likes it much, much better when everything goes according to plan. And there always is a plan, of course. Making sure things run smoothly is all part and parcel of upholding your duty. Is it any surprise that it was him who stepped in and took up the reins of Neo Arcadia instead of Fefnir or Leviathan?

Don't mistake that to mean he doesn't have a proud side at all, though. Harpuia absolutely does have more than a little pride, and it can come back to bite him in the ass or get in the way every so often. Elpizo, for instance, might never have been allowed to do as much damage as he did if Harpuia had taken him seriously from the get-go, instead of dismissing him. He may have been able to do much more against Weil and Omega, as well, if he had been willing to put his pride on the shelf and join sides with the Resistance, but he has his limits. For someone who defines himself so heavily by the duty he's been assigned, being stripped of that role felt like being stripped of his usefulness.

It may well be his responsible nature, but it may also be a healthy dose of pragmatism: in the world Harpuia comes from, the worth of a reploid's life amounts to their ability to do their intended role. But having spent so much of his life on such deeply important tasks, whether intentional or not, has not exactly taught Harpuia to carry himself with humility. He's used to being preoccupied with an important burden, and therefore being important by proxy, and this hasn't given him much patience at all for people who waste his time or behave in ways he considers foolish or irritating.

It's no surprise that being so businesslike can make a reploid come across as a little intimidating; as one of Neo Arcadia's Guardians, he was feared and respected by all. His dedication to his work doesn't exactly leave him a lot of room for having fun or goofing off, either, so there might be something to that "no fun allowed" aura of his. Even so, he's not quite as flat as Zero; he was never meant to be a soldier, having originally been built to take part in Earth restoration, and he's actually quite passionate when he allows his emotions to take foot. While you may not necessarily think it by looking at him, underneath that efficient, steely attitude beats the robo-heart of a bit of an adrenaline junkie. Challenges tend to be few and hard to come by for a soldier with a rank as high as his, and situations where he can let go and set his constant long-term planning and analysis aside and simply be in the moment are even rarer. On the occasions when they do happen into his life, Harpuia gets a little... uh, extreme.

Masochistic, even, but let's maybe not talk about that in polite company.

Backstory: Wiki link

Harpuia actually arrived in Final Destination City at the same time Fefnir did, but at a different location inside the city proper. As damaged as he was by the explosion of Omega's death, he was actually knocked offline. So while the wild wizard magic that pulls people into Final Destination City did save Harpuia from being utterly obliterated by Omega's death, it did also unceremoniously dump him off in a remote corner of the Mountains of Convenience, meaning he's been lying there for a while. The good news: autorepair comes standard on many reploids, and though it can't do half as much as a Cyber Elf or a good subtank, it has restored enough fried circuitry that he should be coming back online any day now!

Anything Else?:

- beep boop robot. He doesn't eat, and "sleeping" generally is only part of a recharge cycle, if it happens at all.
- He can flyyyy. He's strong enough to carry a reploid of about equal size and weight to himself, but he probably can't whoosh around with anything much bigger than that.
- Fights with a pair of bubblegum-pink beam sabers and wields wind/electricity, but is extremely vulnerable to ice. Always use Ice Beam on Flying-types, kids.
- He has a sparkly ~Transformers~ alt mode called an Armed Phenomenon that looks like a pointy-headed bird-plane. This is not a thing he really ever uses, however; the one time it showed up in the games, it had to be dragged out of him by magical sparkly Baby Elf mind control.


In-Character 1st person sample:

[Harpuia blips onto the screen, looking mildly annoyed. As he more or less always does.]

I would like to remind the student body that as a truancy officer, my duty is to ensure your attendance at school. If I am to find you cutting class, then the standard protocol is to issue disciplinary action. That means, in most cases, detention or a trip to the Headmaster's office.

If I find you, however, that does not mean that I have to fly you to class. The rules don't work like that. There are plenty of alternative means of flight at your disposal if you wish to try them, and none of them involve cutting class. I sincerely encourage you to look into those instead.

Those of you encouraging these unfounded rumours that I am some sort of piggybacking service, Fefnir, would do well to focus their attention on doing their jobs instead of wasting time on this. Don't expect me to organize your workload for you every time, because I refuse to do it.

[...He's probably still gonna do it.]

In-Character 3rd person sample:

There were a lot of unexpected things happening this morning, on this cold and solitary stretch of mountainside.

The first among these was waking up. That was not a thing Harpuia expected to do. At first, consciousness came slowly, lagged by damage and chugging to recover after forced shutdown. Memory crept back in fragmented and corrupted pieces, but it didn't take long for the realization to hit hard once one word snapped into place: Omega!

The second unexpected thing came after Harpuia opened his eyes and sat up, the effort sending an errant spray of sparks from the exposed wiring on his side -- he was injured, but apparently alive, but this wasn't the surprising part. The surprising part was that this burst of sparks seemed to have startled a trio of mountain goats that had been scoping him out, debating if his green armor was anything edible. The goats, not expecting an ambush, sprang away across an alarmingly narrow mountain ledge. A lovely display of the famous sure-footedness of mountain goats, sure... but Harpuia was certain that they had been extinct since the Elf Wars. Had an isolated population somehow survived the desertification of the earth...?

Harpuia stood up, ignoring the damage to his body; autorepair seemed to have recovered his software just fine, but there would be nothing he could do about the hardware until he found a repair facility. He seemed to be up somewhere high. He gauged it to be sometime in the very early morning hours; the sky was tinged the strange, muted pink that comes before the sun comes up, and the air was cold enough that the breath rose in clouds from the retreating mountain goats. No sign of anyone other than him around: no Omega, no Fefnir or Leviathan, no Zero. Some sort of transporter malfunction, perhaps...?

No, that had to be impossible. Even as dim as the light was, being this high up afforded a nice view, and there was no mistaking that this mountain overlooked some very impossible things. First among these: the steady incandescent glow of city lights. Neo Arcadia was the last city on the planet, everything else having been wiped out in the Elf Wars, and this was assuredly not Neo Arcadia. No civilization could have been established under his watchful eye without being noticed, and certainly not one this big. But even more impossible was the verdant sea of foliage bordering the city. Though the forest perhaps looked a little starker than usual in the early spring chill, to Harpuia's eyes, it looked breathtakingly full of life. None of the earth outside of their careful nurturing had been able to sustain life like this. He had never known trees to grow on their own, let alone as tall or as plentiful as these.

This defied everything he knew, but it was also very telling. Trees didn't grow to that size overnight, nor did cities get built in hours. However he'd gotten here, it was clear he had been offline for a long time. How long, he couldn't say; he couldn't access Neo Arcadia's network, nor were his communication channels functional. Carefully, Harpuia tested his flight system, found it to be functional enough to support his weight. If he couldn't request a teleport or contact anyone, then he would have to do his reconnaissance the old-fashioned way.