Well, I read 'Where Angels Dare to Tread' and got ambushed by an idea bunny - a character design for an Angel. Since I don't know nearly enough about Angelic Layer to write a fic of my own, I thought I'd just turn it over to Drakensis for him to use or not as he likes.
Okay, start with the mental image: she's fairly tall, proportionally speaking - just an 'inch' or so short of 'six feet' - and, ahem, statuesque, with facial features to match... I'm picturing something halfway between Setsuna Meiou and Jennifer Connelly circa The Rocketeer, for reference. Her hair is... dark, shade uncertain, with long arcing 'only in anime' bangs that frame her face like Full Metal Panic's Kaname's, only moreso. Iria fans will recognize the source of the several long forelocks strung with beads just in front of her left ear, and the rest is pulled back in an extremely long Braid a la Maxwell, which is held by a ribbon that trails off in streamers rather than a bow or anything.
Her clothes are
not oriented at providing fanservice; although they do do that, that feature only developed secondarily rather than being intrinsically part of her concept. The outfit's underlayer consists of a pair of fingerless gloves with padded knuckles, a pair of what look like armored all-stars, a racerback one-piece swimsuit, and... that's it. Like I said, service. The rest of the outfit is a floor-length European-style cloak with hood, something like
this. The reason for the abbreviation of the rest of the outfit was to minimize the amount of weight spent on her actual outfit, so as to free that allowance up for adding to the hemline of the cloak.
The rules forbid weapons, but allow clothes. They do not prevent something which is - in theory - primarily the latter from serving as the former.
So, after a suitably showy entrance - I picture her Deus balancing her on their fingertip then just letting her tip forward and fall towards the layer before flipping midfall and landing in your classic 'down on one knee with hand spread for balance' pose as the cloak settles around her - she stands up and is completely hidden except for the braid, which she has flipped forward over one shoulder, the beads, and the bottom half of her face - everything else is covered by the cloak or its hood. Then, to get ready to actually fight, she pushes the hood back, slings the cloak back off of her left shoulder, and tosses her head to flip the braid back onto her back and out of the way before reaching behind her with her right arm to slip a couple of fingers through the loops sewn into the cloak's lining and swing it up to wrap around that arm.
In a fight the cloak can serve as an entangling weapon, to foul her opponent's moves, a brickbat, increasing reach and striking power at the expense of control and speed, a padded shield, adding to defense, or a sort of mutant knuckleduster, amplifying hitting power. Assuming that the cloak's fabric and the rest of her outfit and fittings come to a total of 'two kilograms', the other 'eight kilos' are divided evenly between about a dozen weights sewn into the hem.
BTW, the rules were altered to forbid this sort of exploit after hers and a couple of other cases. She remains tournament legal out of a combination of grandfather clausing and the fact that her strategy requires a significant amount of skill to pull off - IOW, she wasn't abusive enough to be unbalancing. The fact that her Deus is a likable good-sportsman type who's more interested in the quality of the play than in winning doubtless helps. In terms of statistical abilities, she's fairly balanced, with average speed and an emphasis on durability over striking power.
No, I'm not certain what her color scheme is, although I do know that it's dark colors and probably cool ones (as opposed to warm).
No, I don't know her name.
No, I don't know anything else about her player.
Ja, -n
===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri...
Bang!"
... and no, I don't mean a guy calling himself Rokubungi and his Angel 'Rei'. Although it't be amusing.
Still, I'm a fanboy, and it'd be a shame to strain my cortex _too_ much.
So ... I'll shamelessly rip stuff off.
A borderline medium frame, inky-black hair down to the chin in a mostly straight, but somewhat wild manner. Amber eyes with two accentuating strips of blood-red facepaint running underneath them.
She wears a black bodyglove that looks like it's made from some sort of leather, with armored knees and elbows - the armoring is gunmetal grey with blood-red trim, bowl shaped, and has holes to reduce air resistance - the lower legs and arms are wrapped in strips of cloth bandages.
If you've not figured it out quite yet, simply think Gally. Or Alita. Whichever.
Stats distribution could have gone two ways, but while the Deus admits to any and all who ask that, yes, he was on a Gunnm kick when making the initial design, despite the frame being too tall and lanky to make a straight conversion, he didn't want to make it a speed/power setup - there were plenty of those around already.
Instead, she's focused almost wholly on speed and reaction time. It would have worked better on a smaller frame, but she's fast enough to keep up with most of the Angels out there, and the other two characteristics are balanced out evenly, despite this giving her only barely average scores on resilience, and slighty below that on strength.
That's more than alright with her Deus, though. His intention, you see, was to make her one of the very few 'soft-style' using Angels in the Layer.
Her tactics are centered around counters, evasion, redirection, all the while keeping the enemy on guard with the occasional knee or elbow to make them impatient.
Her Deus has been found to joke about needing to add some flair to the basics, and was recently seen frowning at a volume of Naruto manga and fiddling with his Angel's bandages. What this could mean is anyone's guess.
As for the name and catchphrase?
A crow mocking the bodies of the broken. Morrigan, fall in!
The Deus' name is Killy McIntyre - a pleasant enough fellow, despite his dour dress sense and Kakashi-esque habit of collecting ecchi manga.
Ahem.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
Okay, you guys got me going now... Only here, I'll just tottally rip one off for the sheer jaw-dropping factor.
"Defender of Honor and Justice, your master calls upon you - Samurai Jack!"
Black Aeronaut Technologies Group, LLC
Aerospace Solutions for the discerning spacer
What!? Were you expecitng something witty?
this is actually very helpful for me because there will be a lot of angels turning up for their moment of fame before certain Angel/Deus teams crush them on the way to their meeting with certain rather famous Angels
D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
No problem. Coming up with these things is actually fun.
Killy had never been certain just how he'd managed to get into this particular manner of competition.
An acquaintance of his who was into cosplay in a big way had said something about it once, and dragged him to watch a competition. She'd been fairly enthusiastic about it too, and he guessed he could see the appeal ...
... truth be told, he'd never gotten into fighting games. This, though, had appeared to be on an entirely new level altogether.
Despite some silliness and an almost overwhelmingly female player base ... or was that latter bit a pro instead of a con? He'd never been able to make up his mind about that one. Anyway, despite those, he'd spent the better part of the whole thing actually paying more attention to the fighting than to reacquainting himself with an longtime favorite selection of reading material.
Afterwards, he and Cass had gone their respective ways, but he'd continued on in a muddle throughout the week, then the next.
It had been like living with his head stuck in a barrel of molasses ... a disquieting sensation that only broke when, waking up in the middle of the night on a morning of the third week, he tripped on his way out of the room to get something to drink and sprawled with his face on top of a Battle Angel Alita volume.
That seemed to be a catalyst of sorts, since next day he was blowing the graphic novel money he had saved and alloted for said month on a small winged egg and accessories.
A day lated he could honestly say he'd never fault Cass for dragging him in when she needed an extra pair of hands to work on sewing an outfit together. True, the scale was much smaller in this case, but the skills he'd been browbeaten into learning were finally looked to be paying off and proving useful for something other than darning a pair of socks.
***
"Walking on the wild side! Spitfire, fall in!"
"A crow mocking the bodies of the broken. Morrigan, fall in!"
The entry was done with the usual sort of minimalism Killy used when not going against a new opponent. There was little point in the old game of smoke and mirrors when the people already there knew how you fought.
Morrigan touched down with a slight bending of the knees before she straightened and her Deus had her run though what looked like a brief stretching routine. Relatively primitive as a way of checking if something wasn't amiss with the Angel's range of motion, but it had become almost reflex. After all, when you depended as heavily as Morrigan and he did on her flexibility, it paid to make doubly sure before every match, mock or no.
"Well, if it isn't the Bastard King," the other Deus greeted him after he'd settled in, her Angel bouncing on the balls of its feet.
"I snark in your general direction," he deadpanned back.
Seemingly ignoring the byplay, the two Angels bowed to one-another, before taking up stances ...
Thankfully, it was still relatively early in the day, so they didn't need to reserve a Layer for a one-on-one match like they'd have had to by the time the afternoon came about.
The other angel was shorter than Morrigan, dressed in what looked like a pair of biking shorts, a sleeveless top, gloves that went nearly the whole length of her arms, and sported both armored knuckle and knee guards. Likewise, the ankle boots' front and heel were reinforced, though these were far lighter than the usually clunky knee-length armored boots that most players tended to go for.
All that aside, though, the most prominent feature of Morrigan's current opponent was her hair. It was short and spiky - it hadn't always been, but Killy played dirty more often than not and long hair was too convenient a handhold to pass up for Morrigan's fighting style - and a shocking day-glo orange in color.
He idly wondered if there was a Messerschmitt currently being playtested in Germany somewhere.
There was no more smalltalk exchanged, as the smaller Angel shot forward with a burst of speed that Morrigan never had been quite able to match, the smaller combatant having a slight advantage despite being a power/speed built where Morrigan was a purely speed one.
That wasn't the point though, Killy had decided when designing his Angel.
Spitfire came in directly, telegraphing a punch and reacting to Morrigan's hands raising to intercept with coming down to the deck, planting _her_ hands, and swinging her whole body around in a powerful leg sweep.
Morrigan shifted her stance, lifted her leg, and the the blow pass underneath before stomping down onto the Layer - her opponent had gone with the momentum and rolled to the side to avoid the blow.
Long practice had Spitfire's Deus launch her forward immediately, taking a chance and hoping to capitalize, only to have Morrigan intercept with a forearm angled just enough to deflect before ducking beneath the spin-kick and planting an armored elbow in her gut.
It didn't do a lot of damage, but it did enough. Morrigan waited for her opponent to pick herself back up, as opposed to where she'd have been going after the downed Angel in an actual match.
"That was a new one," Killy's opponent commented. "Looked like one of mine."
"The elbow finisher was. Nice sweep," the boy responded as the Angels faced off again.
"Picked that off you, really. Not as effective as I would have thought."
"Well, Morrigan gets more reach and impact on hers because of the mass. Got anymore, Erin?"
"Sure," his opponent grinned, just before Spitfire launched herself forward once more. "Let's play."
***
"Alright, hand them over, then you can go in," the girl 'manning' the reception desk said in a tone that carried a fair bit of exasperation.
"Hmm? Wha?" currently standing in front of said desk, the lanky teenager frowned in confusion. "I'm not sure what you mean."
"Killy, you've been coming here for months, don't play dumb. It stopped being cute the ... well, no. It's never been cute."
"Oh, for the love of ... I didn't _bring_ any this time, just so you know," he grumbled. Yeesh. Bring one mildly ecchi comic to pass the time and get branded for life. Sometimes, things just weren't fair. After all, he'd just wanted something to pass the time with before the matches.
"Look, you know the rule. I'm gonna have to ask you to empty your pockets. C'mon, there's kids present. Wouldn't want you corrupting them with inappropriate material, right?"
Alright, so maybe it had been more than once. But it hadn't been anything really explicit ... well, no more than you'd see in a convenience store's magazine stand at least. How that constituted 'corruption', he had no idea. After all, nowadays the news and various other sources did that well enough on their own that they hardly needed his disgruntled help.
Unfortunately, he wasn't going to get in with that justification, true as it may have been. He'd tried reason already. As usual, it hadn't worked.
He set Morrigan down carefully, then began extricating ... keyring, wallet, pack of peppermint gum, roll of bandages, the rest of Morrigan's 'kit', a manga ...
"Aha!"
The girl snatched said booklet open with a triumphant expression and started paging through it to ...
"Oh ickickickickICK!" she squeaked, tossing it to the table almost convulsively. "That was _disgusting_! What the hell?!"
"Language, Kat. There are children present, you know," he smirked, retrieving the Battle Royale volume and gathering up the rest of his things immediately after. "Wouldn't want you corrupting them, now would we? Or the management, for that matter."
Just a bit of fleshing out, a bit of fighting, and another bit of fleshing out.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
Been chewing on this one for a bit, and I think it's ready to toss into the mix. Also, I'm afraid that if I keep hanging on to it, it'll get *longer*. No one wants *that*.
Enduring as the stones themselves! Chibi-Kanae! Fall in!
One of the tallest angels on the layer. Quite possibly the toughest angel on the layer. Almost certainly the slowest angel on the layer. Staring with a frame that was already both taller and more massive than nearly all of her potential opponents, her deus built her for endurance first, and strength second, with speed a distant third. She can't really dodge. She could block, if her Deus was good enough to be able to predict attacks before they were thrown, but that's not going to happen for a good while yet. That's okay, though. She isn't designed to avoid blows. She's designed to take hits, over and over as long as it takes until she can actually catch her opponent, take her to the ground, and grapple her into submission. It's a waiting game. Her fighting style has flaws, to be sure - as long as her enemies are fast enough to strike and away without getting caught, there's not much she can do about them except wait for them to make a mistake. or become fatigued. She does have one ace in the hole special move if it looks like neither of these is going to happen, but it, too has flaws. Essentially, she pulls her stance in a little, sets down a bit further to the ground, waits until her opponent is in range, and then suddenly lunges at her opponent, reaching out to full extension. For the span of that lunge, she's moving about as fast as an average to slightly below-average speed build. She doesn't have quite the accuracy to match, and she cant correct in midblow, so it is quite dodgeable, but this is usually coming towards the end of a long fight where she wasn't moving nearly that fast, and where she hasn't been *using* all of her reach advantage (keeping her limbs in close actually makes her style more effective) let alone lunging like that, and she can often catch her opponents by surprise. Of corse, this is generally towards the end of her rather impressive endurance, and it leaves her *badly* overextended if it fails, so if it doesn't work, that's usually the game. She's also pretty dependant on the fact that most Deuses don't know how to grapple - if she runs into someone who's good enough to wriggle free, things become *much* more difficult.
She makes a good match for about the third round of a large single-elimination tournament. Her strategy is strong enough to plausibly win more often than it loses, and interesting enough to make for a good fight scene, with the hero suddenly having to reevaluate their tactical priorities, but she is definately beatable, particularly if you've had some warning.
Her look is very simple. She's large, tanned, and muscular, with short, wavy blond hair. Her stance is a fairly traditional wrestler's stance, with legs somewhat bent, hands up and open, and somewhat curved posture. She's barefoot, for better control and balance. (She isn't fast enough to hop over trip attempts, so she has to be ready to quickly regain her feet. Footstomps would be a problem, but sh's normally in a stance that makes those difficult.) She wears a yellow vest and shorts over a white T-shirt. The T-shirt has the eyes and smile of the traditional smiley-face covering the front. Her Deus *likes* smiley-faces. Less obviously, the shirt, vest, and shorts take up all of her weight allowance, being as thick and protective as she can get them. She's not worried about strikes to her arms or legs, and she figures with her height she might be able to block headshots, so torso armor is the priority.
Her Deus is a really little, mostly shy girl, who likes books, and generally wants to think well of everyone, and who turns into a *really* happy bouncy type once she gets past her shyness. She also has a serious case of hero-worship going on for her older sister, who is quite tall, really quite muscular, and named Kanae. Her sister is *also* a wrestler, in her first year of college, and already the rising star of her school's (newly co-ed) wrestling team. She gave the little kid (who I don't really have a name for) the egg as a going away present, to give her something to have near, when Kanae was away (and also give her a reason to actually go out and be a little more social.) Entirely unsurprisingly, sheproceeded to model the angel as closely as she possibly could off of said older sister, and carry her everywhere. She got involved in a few local tournaments, every one of which she lost, badly, in the first round. She became sad. She wrote to her sister that she was a horrible Deus and would never get it right, and that the kids at the local Layer made fun of her for her build. Her sister came home that weekend, went with her to the local layer, and proceeded (with the benefits of her actual skill at wrestling) to utterly demolish every one of the kids there, while giving her little sister tips on how to actually *use* the rather odd Angel she had made, followed by more tips in the ice crea parlor afterwards, on the way home, and, every once in a while, over email in the weeks following. Her Deus has, by now, mostly integrated the tips her sister gave her, which is enough to make the fighting style actually work, and to utterly dominate almost any grappling encounter she gets in, but she's still somewhat lacking in skill of her own, which means that she tends to telegraph her moves a bit, can't read the moves of others very well, and occasionally has problems with accuracy and precision. If she runs into a new trick and doesn't stumble into an efective way to deal with it almost immediately, she's not necessarily going to be able to figure one out that day. On the other hand, through the wonders of email, she'll have an answer for it the *next* time she sits down to face it. It's okay, really. She's learning.
Rough skill comparison: by this point, the normal Deus can pretty consistently get to the second or third round of local tournaments. Her older sister, if she cared enough about it and took the time to practice a bit with the interface, could probably take the same angel to the second or third round of the nationals. She wouldn't make the Final Four on anything but a total fluke, but the sweet sixteen wouldn't be unthinkable.
So...useful?
Feel free to use as much or as little as you like.
Side note: to be honest, I wasn't thinking of the "CAST IN THE NAME..." line so much for a regular chapter as an omake. Not so much for the angel as for the (mega) Deus.