Finally finished! Sorry about the history, it got away from me again.
Name: Locke Cole
Age 25
Gender: Male
Species: Human
Position:
Thief TREASURE HUNTER, thank you.
Skills, Abilities, and Powers:
Locke can pickpocket, steal, mug (it’s called Capture), and lockpick, and he’s really good at sneaking and hiding and bluffing his was out of things.
Seriously. Not a thief.
But he’s good enough that he can get the stuff out of your pocket, steal your pocket, and steal all your clothes without you noticing until you feel the draft. And he can steal from monsters that don’t have pockets.
Locke can use a wide variety of spells as a result of carrying various magicite for months on their quest to save the world from war and destruction and Kefka:
He has Fire and Fire 2 and Drain, Bolt, Cure and Cure 2, Regen, Antdot(antidote), Sleep, Mute, Slow, Muddle, Ice and Ice2, Rasp, Rflect(reflect), Haste, Shell, Bserk(berserk), Bio, and Dispes(dispel)
They aren’t immensely powerful, and take a lot of effort and concentration - he’s not a mage by nature. The Fire spells and Drain are easiest to use, because Locke has the esper Ifrit with him. It is possible for him to summon Ifrit, but pretty draining.
Weapons:
Locke mostly has knives - a whole gamut of them running from a two-foot longknife that’s almost a sword in its own right, to a collection of tiny paper-thin blades. He also has a long-bladed saber, a Full Moon throwing discus.
Picturewww.rpgamer.com/games/ff/ff6/graphics/people/locke.jpgAppearance:
Lock is tall and lanky, at 5’9”, and about 147lb. He has a fine-boned face and intense dark eyes, and the ends of his pale-sand hair curl rakishly from under a brightly multicolored scarf. He wears bright red gems in his earlobes.
His costume tends to be a black high collared jacket with bright embroidered patches, with sleeves that end at the elbow and the hem at the bottom of his ribs, worn open over a plain shirt with black pants, soft boots, and dark gloves.
Personality:
“Treasure hunter and trail-worn traveler, searching the world over for relics of the past…”
-Final Fantasy VI“The great treasure hunter, Locke, doesn’t mind breaking a few locks in his search for fortune and fame. Nevertheless, he’d rather be called a hero then a thief. Locke’s strong will and cunning make him a good ally.”
- Square Enix's Official Final Fantasy VI websiteLocke is…. Locke is exuberant and upbeat, cunning and charismatic. He cares about appearances, and so he does tend to put a spin things, and to grandstand. He very much plays to the audience, and puts his heart into the act.
But it’s only sort of an act. He cares about other things more - people and truth and revolution and peace and things like that. Lock is idealistic, and inclined to deal generously with the world. He is sure of his abilities, and not afraid of much. He is also no stranger to heartbreak and self-blame, having done some spectacularly stupid things and gotten people he cared about hurt. He hangs on to the past with a self-destructive tenacity, but he is slowly -- very slowly -- learning that it’s not the end of the world (even when, technically, it is.)
Lately, it’s most been the self-destructive side.
Original World: Aeolus (FF VI)
Current Residing World: Destiny Islands
History:
Lock grew up in the town of Koholigen. His parent’s weren’t bad, but they didn’t really know what to do with him, and so they tended to leave him to his own devices. As a result he tended to run fairly wild.
Rachel was his best friend and the girl he loved. Together they ranged over much of the lands surrounding the town, although her parents had things like rules and curfews, that they actually enforced. So Locke would find things and take her to see them.
Until the day Rachel fell. It was Locke’s fault, he had brought her down to the caves to show her and tried to cross the bridge and it wasn’t strong enough, and it broke under his weight. Rachel saved him, shoved him off the bridge and onto solid ground with on thought for her own safety. The bridge broke as she did, and she fell. Locke leaped after her with no thought of his own safety, finding her laying at the bottom of the chasm, uncoces but alive. He carried her back up and back to her home, and stayed by her side until she woke up.
When she did, she didn’t remember him.
Her parents, who had never entirely approved of him, told him not to come back, it was going to be hard enough for their daughter to re-learn everything without him there. Then she told him to leave, he was upsetting her parents….
So Locke left home. There wasn’t much to hold him there. Over the next few years he learned a lot about how to survive, how to steal and sneak. He found he had a survival instinct that would keep him going though almost anything, whether he thought he wanted to or not.
Then the Empire marched over Koholigen. Locke rushed back, to find that the one person he cared for the most - still - she was dead. They said she had remembered at the end, and died with his name on her lips.
In desperation, Locke asked the local rather creepy old man with the very odd garden if he could do anything. The old man allowed as how they were in luck, she was still only mostly dead, and his special herbs could, while not bring her back, keep her stable.
Locke had gained some ties to the rebel group the Returners. He had been indignant over the injustices off the Empire. Now, he was an active member. He honed his skill and put it to use, ended up as the main contact with Figaro, and came to care for the cause for it’s own sake.
And then he met Terra. And Kefka tried to burn down Castle Figaro. Which didn’t work very well, but did get Figaro to quit pretended to ally with the Empire.
Locke went on his own to the occupied town of South Figaro. There was information to deliver. There he met Celes. He really hadn’t been looking to find a general of the Imperial army chained in a basement - having been arrested for treason, no less. But, well, he couldn’t just
leave her there. So he rescued her.
They regrouped in Narshe, the Returners’ base. And there Terra met the frozen Esper, and turned pink and glowy and flew away.
So they went and found her, following where people said they had seen a streak of light in the sky. They finally found her in Zozo, (which was a singularly weird town) and Rahmu explained a lot, even if he was cryptic about parts.
Rahmu was an Esper. And so was Terra. Sort of, only not really.
So then they had to convince the owner of the world’s one and only airship, Setzer, to help them. Which involved an extremely complicated plan that hinged on the fact that Celes looked exactly like the Opera House’s primma donna.
Celes was a very lovely Maria.
It should be mentioned that it took months, all this traveling all over the globe. It takes a while to get all the way across a continent on foot, and when you keep getting attacked by monsters on the way, that doesn’t make it any faster.
And you would think that an Empire could make an accurate map, but nooo…..
Because it was totally the map’s fault.
Really.
But they finally made it to Vector, where they found a whole lot of espers, who all gave themselves to be magicite. Including Maduin, who was Terra’s father.
Then Kefka showed up. And Locke accused Celes of betraying them. He would regret this forever, but for that moment it seemed likely, even inevitable.
And so they lost Celes, but got Terra back.
The Empire was using espers, capturing and killing them, so the next step was to see if they couldn’t gain the espers’ aid, now that they had someone who could talk to them. So it was off to the mysterious and foreboding sealed cave that had been the bridge between the worlds, to talk to the Espers and see if they couldn’t get them to fight the empire.
Something went wrong. The espers broke through and rampaged.
They hurried back to Vector. Gestal wanted to end the war, said that he was weary and wish for peace and regretted what he had done. He pulled all the troops from South Figaro in a show of good faith. First, if we wanted peace, we had to stop the espers rampaging. So off they went to Crescent Isle with two generals of the empire’s army. One was General Leo, who turned out to be very much the good man rumor had held him to be, and the other was… Well, the other was Celes.
Celes and Locke spent the whole time avoiding each other. When one was not being to angry and proud, the other was.
They found the espers - it wasn’t difficult - and the espers felt horrible about what they’d done and apologized right off. So everyone was apologizing and making up and it was all going so well.
Locke would think later that they should have know it wouldn’t last.
Kefka showed up. They’d left him rotting in a dungeon, but here he was. He knocked them all out, and he killed Leo. And then he turned the espers to magicite and took them away with him, giggling the whole time. And
then he took the chunk of land with the Sealed Gate and made it float. In the air.
They chased him. Gestal was with him - they’d been had, Gestal had never wanted peace and had been lying the whole time, which probably shouldn’t have surprised anyone. There were these statues there, of the three goddesses, in which the goddesses had invested a great deal of power to keep the world balanced. Kefka killed Gastal - which
really shouldn’t have surprised him - and moved the statues out of alignment.
The world burned and its foundations shook, and something got in through the cracks.
They all ran - the whole floating piece of land was crumbling. The airship was struck, and broke, and they fell from the sky and were scattered.
And things got worse from there.
The things that had come in through the cracks spread, and as terrible and mad as Kefka was, it was the Heartless that took the world away.
Locke fled to Koholigen to protect Rachel.
The old man died by the Heartless, and without his help, she didn’t last long. He clung to her and the last scraps of her life, but she faded and withered and died, even as he carried her through the dark and out into a new place. He’s spent the last three years hiding in the darkest corners he can find on Destiny Islands - not an easy thing to do. He lives in a tiny apartment in the biggest town he could find, and keeps to himself, and drinks more than he should. He curses his survival instinct.
