[ INFO. ]

[aasimarr]

NICHOLAES "NICO". DISPLACED, DEFECTIVE HALF-CELESTIAL.
BASIC NAME: Full name "Nicholaes", only ever goes by "Nico". CANON: Baldur's Gate 3 (Tav) AGE: 37 DOB: Unknown GENDER: He/him, AMAB SPECIES: Aasimar, with wood elf blood. CONTACT: PM	APPEARANCE VISUAL: Masked, unmasked. Camp outfit. He's a giant. HEIGHT: 6'3" BUILD: Stocky, square, big. HAIR: Black, with white streaks. EYES: Fog-white. Makes him look perpetually wide-eyed in certain lighting. FEATURES: Prominent scarring on the left side of his face, extending down to his clavicle. Fissure-like marks all over his body. Glowing fingers. DRESS: Almost always fully-covered, even out of armor. Prefers layers and dark colors. VOICE: In-game voice 1, soft and slightly playful.	PERMISSIONS BACKTAGGING: ✔ FOURTHWALLING: ✘ ROMANCE: ✔ MINDREADING: ✔ MANIPULATION: ✔ INJURY: ✔ FIGHTING: ✔ KILLING: ✔ ship-wise, open to anything with no particular preferences. cross-canon adored! my default is no-romance unless otherwise discussed in advance. feel free to PM me to work anything out, i'm very easy.
BACKGROUND/MORE INFO: BACKGROUND Bulletpoint list of notable history (one day I'll actually write in this writing hobby): ・his human parent was killed in a goblin raid when he was still an infant, and his celestial parent remains completely unknown; consequently, he has no recollection or knowledge of his ancestry or heritage. ・predictably and unluckily, he was the sole survivor of said raid, and similarly predictably, was subsequently treated like a cursed child. ・led a half-feral childhood until he was eventually taken in by an old female soldier living on the outskirts of a neighboring village. ・learned swordplay and herbalism. ・started growing into his aasimar traits after hitting puberty, but also started developing troubling symptoms of it, aka his fissures and his weird glowing hands. ・told to fuck off (affectionately) and see the world, to feel more connected with it. maybe he'd find fellow aasimars who could help him in ways that, his adoptive mother says, she couldn't. ・he fucked off. ・fucking off turns out not to be the solution to his answers; he is still different by every metric, and he's either treated like a blessing (weird) or a blight (easier to understand), depending on the village he happens upon. ・he does good deeds, because he likes to think he's not horrible. he moves into the lower city of baldur's gate to do odd mercenary-style work, but lbr, the flaming fists are kind of assholes, and the cards are stacked against a weird aasimar. ・the blade of frontiers seems to have things under control, though. what a cool guy, wonder what he's like. ・he takes to roaming, wandering up and down along the chionthar when he's not looking for jobs in baldur's gate. this is what most people would call a Midlife Crisis. ・the illithids find him. PERSONALITY chaotic good, lonely, curious, shy, operates on instinct and intuition. wry sense of humor, but always at his own expense. good at avoiding traps. can hit things hard. passes most surroundings-based perception checks but is severely lacking in wisdom. charisma is on-off, depending on the circumstances. occasionally graceless, talks to himself a lot. became a paladin because it was easy (he realized that people expect certain things from aasimars), but honestly, he can take or leave the religious element of it. he kind of thinks that he'd like being a ranger more. rootless and restless. he was born with the marring on his face, remnants of what might be a spellscar (it is a spellscar). he's shy about it, so he hides whatever of it he can with his wing-mask. he's shy about himself in general. he's either covering his face with his wings, or he's bare-faced with his stupid halo hovering over his head; it'll take a bit before he feels comfortable enough to go long periods of time in front of someone without the mask on. inclined to do what feels morally correct in the situation, but is not a pacifist. less inclined to let do-badders go with just a slap on the wrist, but can also be easily convinced that certain individuals are capable of being reformed if given the chance. example: would genuinely not have lost sleep over killing kagha, but he read her mind and called her out and... that apparently was... enough to snap her out of it.......? he still thinks that that was whack, but she sided with him against the dark druids, so he considers it even. still thinks she's a nutcase, though. unambitious. being the hero isn't a priority, but helping individuals is. carrying the fate of the world and changing the course of its history is too daunting to contemplate; he prefers to regard his current parasite-related adventure as "aiding his comrades" rather than "saving faerûn". not a big-pictures guy despite his outer-planar ancestry. takes great joy in helping people with things like "i misplaced my hat, can you help me find it". honestly felt really weird during the whole liberation of the emerald grove thing, even if he thought it was for the best. (felt really good about reuniting halsin with his bear, though. that was nice.) frequently mistakes doing important things for leaning too hard into being an aasimar (insecure baby detected). setting aside the part where he may or may not become a mindflayer, the illithid tadpole's constant push for him to assert authority is, to him, the worst part of the experience. he feels his celestial ties in the same way that you relate to a language that you academically understand, but never speak. his outer-planar identity is too distant for him to embrace, but too intrinsic to deny. distance makes it feel idyllic, but the distance also makes it alien. he's pining for something he has, and something he lost. mostly, he just wants to feel okay with where he's at. ABILITIES please save me, i hate the abilities section, we all hate the abilities section EXTRA hey what's up with the scar? ・nico's scar is actually a spellscar. nico's had zero training to mitigate it, and is only kind of aware of the spellplague and its consequences (read a book, dumbass). ・the spellscar can be activated under the right conditions. the specific ability allocated to him by fate allows him to become a portal! cool in theory, pretty uncool in practice. he literally opens up like a black hole, the body horror of it all; only someone with a good connection to the Weave/is a good spellcaster in general can kickstart his powers into action. using this power too many times will turn nico into a plaguechanged/aberration, though. yikes! ・someone with a good connection to the Weave/a capable spellcaster can probably also feel that there's something not quite right about nico－ that he seems unbalanced, that his energy seems to always be expanding and constricting. ・things were not actually alarming pre-tadpole, but the tadpole clashing with his residual spellplague has made things considerably worse. ・the party probably finds out about his residual spellplague after someone uses their magic to do something fun during a party and nico starts semi-imploding. literally what the fuck dude ・how it works: you (presumably someone with a good handle on Weave energy/someone who is proficient at spellcasting) can rip nico open from where his spellscar ends at his clavicle. a nice diagonal tear that makes way for a cosmic void under his skin. you think about where you want to go, close your eyes, and stick your hand in said void. voila! you are transported to your destination, after a weird (and unpleasant) few seconds of what feels like intense freefall. nico shows up next to you wherever you've jumped, for the return trip. ・for the record, nico has no idea that this is how his powers work. figuring it out might be a fun (citation needed) bonding experience. ・tl;dr- he's a defective magical artefact with a limited number of uses (there and back counts as one use). rule of three says it's probably three times until things blow up in his face, but who knows. ・his parents were likely also infected with spellplague. companion quest ideas: ・eliminate the last of the traces of spellplague in nico by finding an artefact that corrects the corrupted magic still living under nico's skin. his personal quest is purging himself of grief: the cosmic horror he nurses in his body is his last obvious tie to the celestial parent he never knew. expunge it, and let him move on. ・or don't. use the spellscar power to claim dominion over some arcane power available in the astral dimension. there's bound to be someone out there who will offer you something exorbitantly useful in exchange for some rare item in another plane of existence. the bad end is anything ranging from becoming a sentient aberration (succumbing to spellplague) as a result of being taken advantage of, or surviving the astral jumps and miraculously embracing his own latent power as a planeshopper, but also slowly going insane (creeping madness) as a side-effect. ・there's probably also a not-so-happy ending where he leans really hard into being an aasimar, and becomes super boring as a result.