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Scientific Records
by Dr. Jade Balfour
Created on 2007-05-18 09:06:13 (#12969710), never updated
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Basic Info| Name: | Colonel Jade Curtiss |
|---|
BioCharacter Name: Jade Curtiss (formerly Jade Balfour)
Series: Tales of the Abyss
Age: 35
Physical Description: Jade is a tall and rather thin man; between his slender build and his small oval glasses, he very much looks the part of the intellectual and/or scholar, which he is. He's rarely seen wearing anything other than his officer's uniform, a formal affair in blue, black, and gold. His light brown hair is slightly past shoulder length and straight, with the bangs swept to the right, and his eyes are a rather alarming shade of red that may or may not be a product of an experiment he once did on himself. He tends to stand with his hands folded behind his back or tucked into the hip pockets of his uniform. When he's tired, exasperated, or pensive, he tends to push his glasses up on his nose.
Personality: Jade is, even to his closest friends, anoften annoying enigma. He's usually smiling, no matter what his mood, so it's difficult to tell what he's feeling or thinking at any given moment. He's also very rarely straightforward; he'll frequently confuse or irritate even his closest companions with his idiosyncrasies, although when said companions are confusing and irritating each other he just as often steps in to silence them and remind them of their goals. In a way, Jade tends to have the opposing effect on any given atmosphere; into a chaotic and emotionally charged situation, he'll bring order and level-headed logic, but give him a calm discussion and he'll turn it into a fiasco of bafflement and aggravation.
This is largely because Jade is, without embellishment, a genius. He was a child prodigy and his talents and intelligence haven't dimmed in the least with age; in fact, they're still so prodigious that he has yet to grow into them and they remain exceptional. With an intellect like his, he tends to grow bored easily...and, having a somewhat free and loose view on whether or not it's morally justified to aggravate people simply because it's funny, he's quite happy to annoy those around him to keep himself entertained in the dull moments. Although this isn't exactly a popular character trait, it's all relatively harmless...although it does tend to make his allies eye him askance. He's never gone beyond mocking or irritating his companions with words, or the occasional failure to intervene to prevent something amusingly unfortunate from happening to them.
Jade is capable of being entirely serious, but these are usually in crisis moments. Either something Very Bad is happening, or Jade is confronting one of the mistakes of his mysterious past. Those mistakes are such that he's occasionally pensive without offering any explanation as to why, usually when something reminds him of those mistakes or - as has begun to happen more frequently - he suspects that people are using his research for unethical ends.
Jade has always had some difficulty empathizing with other people; in fact, he's well-known for it. He'll readily admit that he doesn't really grasp the significance of death as most other people understand it, nor does he seem to connect with people emotionally in a normal fashion(although this isn't to say he doesn't like and dislike people the same as anyone else - it just means he has rather dysfunctional ways of expressing those preferences).
Note that Jade usually speaks quite formally, and sounds (and is) well-educated.
Abilities/Strengths/Weaponry: In terms of natural ability, what Jade has most going for him is his intellect. He's remarkably intelligent and tends to catch onto things before other people do - or things that other people don't catch at all. He also has good instincts which serve him equally well. Add to that his ability to be utterly dispassionate and logical - he's usually the one to point out when morality and emotion will hinder the greater good; for instance, leaving behind someone too weak or useless to be of help in achieving their goal, or the logic behind killing one person to save thousands - and you can usually bet on Jade's plans being the best possible course of action anyone is going to be able to come up with. As a colonel, he's also well-versed in battle strategies.
When it comes to physical ability, Jade is strong - for his build, anyway - and capable enough when it comes to combat. He's not a particularly heavy hitter, but his blows can get the job done. He's also quite fast and agile, more so even than one might expect of someone who's had formal naval training. His ability to strike quickly, and thus be in position before his opponents can react, tends to serve him far better than direct combat - putting a blade at the enemy commander's throat is far quicker and simpler than wading through all the subordinates to get to them, after all. Jade is mentally prepared to kill when he has to, and when he sees potential for not killing someone to come back to haunt him later should he show mercy, but he also sees the wisdom in taking hostages. Further, he's not completely insensible to the arguments of the softer-hearted should he be asked to show someone mercy, although he tends to lean more towards not leaving anyone alive who might hinder him later.
Although it's a somewhat unusual preference, Jade's weapon of choice is a spear. It gives him a degree of reach far beyond that of almost any other kind of striking weapon; it's not much use against pistols, but Jade's opinion of that is that no weapon could preempt a pistol aside from another pistol, and even then it would come down to whoever drew first, so the risk would be roughly the same either way if he's up against a gun.
Weaknesses: Jade has a noted lack of patience for explaining things to people. Whenever he can, he'll foist off the responsibility of explaining something to someone else, even if he was the one asked to do the explaining. However, if he's the only one at the moment qualified to speak on a subject, quite often he'll simply elect not to explain at all, which sometimes has serious drawbacks; a failure to explain why something cannot be done, for instance, might prompt a person to try anyway and grave consequences to come about as a result. This is partially due to Jade's not wanting to bore himself explaining something he already knows and partly sheer laziness. This laziness also occasionally manifests in making other people do grunt work(usually while he excuses himself as being too old - "when you get to be my age, all your joints ache...", etcetera.)
Jade is, as noted, slender and not terribly built physically. He's strong enough, but he can be out-muscled. Also, as mentioned, his weapon isn't much use against guns.
Jade also tends to fall under suspicion for strange things due to his odd behavior around even his friends. (On at least one occasion in his canon, his appearing unbothered by the heat while wandering the interior of an active volcano caused his allies to gang up on him and strip him, believing he had some secret way of keeping cool that he wasn't sharing.) Further, his smiling denials - even when he's speaking in all seriousness - fail to convince anyone of his sincerity.
Finally, Jade has something of a reputation. No one is quite certain of his past, and not even every detail of his present is entirely concrete; there are rumors that circulate of inhumane experiments Jade runs on human subjects, both living and dead, that have earned him the title 'Jade the Necromancer'. Even Jade's own men tend to regard Jade a little leerily due to this, even though there's never been a single shred of proof that any of these rumors are true. It doesn't help that Jade never actively denies them.
History: Jade Balfour was born in Ephesus to a privileged family, although he didn't have very long to enjoy that privilege. His mother died in childbirth, and his father of grief and stress within the same year. He was quickly shunted into a well-maintained orphanage, where he was raised relatively well...however, not having parents for the first few years of his life may well have stunted his social skills, as he spent nearly all of his time alone with books from the moment he could read. By the age of six he was reading high school-level books, and by eight he was not only reading college-level science manuals and biology texts, but comprehending and expanding upon the theories therein. His strange disposition up until that point had turned off most potential families, but as his prodigious intellect became more and more apparent so too did his prospects as an adopted child, and he was adopted by the wealthy and well-connected Curtiss family shortly after his eighth birthday.
Now Jade Curtiss, the young boy found himself with the funds, researchers, and support necessary to actually put into practice the theories he'd concocted on paper. His first experiment, aimed at an issue he'd been aware of from his earliest years, was how to replicate a human being. Having concluded that death could not be prevented, Jade instead wished to be able to create living replicas of those who died, circumventing it instead. Convincing the child next door to donate some blood to his cause, and then adding a bit of his own, Jade soon had enough genetic material to begin the slow process of growing a human being from scratch. It was a tribute to Jade's genius that the process, up until that point theoretical, nevertheless worked without a hitch; by the time he was fourteen, Jade had a living, breathing, and in all noticeable ways normal baby boy on his hands.
However, actually seeing the project he had been working on now in the form of a human being awoke Jade's conscience; having seen that it could be done, Jade finally found himself asking himself whether it ought to have been done. He had essentially brought a child into the world with no family - something he himself understood on a personal level - destined to never have a normal life, but to live as a scientific experiment. Within days of the child's having emerged as a fully fledged human being, Jade had made his decision - presenting his theoretical findings to the scientific community at large, he called for a worldwide ban of the study or practice of replication on the grounds of its being unethical, while within his own laboratory quietly demanding all his research and findings be destroyed - along with the infant. He was well aware that it was a cruel fate for a child that would, after all, have never existed at all if not for his experiments, but he felt it was probably more humane than the life that awaited such an infant. Within a week, all of his work for the last five years had been liquified(or so he believed), and within the year the scientific community as a whole had pored over his theories and agreed that there was at present no justifiable or humane reason why human replication should ever be put into practice. But even though attention was drawn to Jade's theories largely through their being banned at the behest of their originator, this first brought to light Jade's genius to the larger community, and the name of Jade Balfour, genius scientist, began to become significantly well-known.
Having gone as far as he had in the study and practice of a science he'd come to feel was something that never should have been done, and responsible for the creation and death of an innocent child, Jade turned away from science to focus instead on other things. The Curtisses, being an old naval family, naturally pushed him towards the navy as a worthwhile pursuit in the absence of science; Jade, who loved his adoptive family in a distant way(largely due to his inability to express his affection properly), agreed readily enough, and began attending officers' school almost immediately. He proved to excel as an officer nearly as much as a scholar, his body proving to be just as capable a tool as his mind, and by the time he was twenty years old he'd already been made a colonel.
There was, in fact, an ulterior motive behind his meteoric rise in the ranks. Truthfully Jade's rank meant little to him; however, there was one particular privilege that colonels were granted that he had begun to feel a more and more pressing need to make use of. Viasti Hojo, a prodigy child much like himself who had worked on the human replication project with him, had been raising suspicions with Jade; there was nothing actually overt, but over the years since the termination of Jade's project Jade had begun to feel more and more than the project was not as dead as he'd like, that someone - Hojo in particular - might have continued to pursue the research he'd given up. Certainly Hojo had raised some of the bitterest objections to Jade's more conscientious musings, before Jade had made up his mind once and for all to end their study. Only someone of colonel rank or higher within the navy could order a raid upon someone's home on suspicion of wrongdoing; one of Jade's first acts as colonel was to order one upon the home of his old schoolmate. However, nothing was found, and while Jade was personally not satisfied he had to be contented with his lack of findings and, between Hojo and himself, declare no hard feelings.
No longer interested in his rank or needing anything more in particular out of the navy, Jade continued on as a colonel, serving his country excellently and, more or less, doing his family proud(the unsettling rumors that began to float around about him might have been a minor source of concern). However, despite numerous offers of promotions - after one or two particularly well-known battles, even one that would have made him a general - Jade turned them all down, preferring his status as it was. He was, however, made captain of his own ship, the Albiore, and given a crew to command. As his honors grew, so did the stories about him, until the names and genuine accomplishments of Jade Balfour and Jade Curtiss were both eclipsed by the unsubstantiated rumors of Jade the Necromancer - a smiling, enigmatic figure as intelligent as he was dangerous and more amoral than he was either.
Series: Tales of the Abyss
Age: 35
Physical Description: Jade is a tall and rather thin man; between his slender build and his small oval glasses, he very much looks the part of the intellectual and/or scholar, which he is. He's rarely seen wearing anything other than his officer's uniform, a formal affair in blue, black, and gold. His light brown hair is slightly past shoulder length and straight, with the bangs swept to the right, and his eyes are a rather alarming shade of red that may or may not be a product of an experiment he once did on himself. He tends to stand with his hands folded behind his back or tucked into the hip pockets of his uniform. When he's tired, exasperated, or pensive, he tends to push his glasses up on his nose.
Personality: Jade is, even to his closest friends, an
This is largely because Jade is, without embellishment, a genius. He was a child prodigy and his talents and intelligence haven't dimmed in the least with age; in fact, they're still so prodigious that he has yet to grow into them and they remain exceptional. With an intellect like his, he tends to grow bored easily...and, having a somewhat free and loose view on whether or not it's morally justified to aggravate people simply because it's funny, he's quite happy to annoy those around him to keep himself entertained in the dull moments. Although this isn't exactly a popular character trait, it's all relatively harmless...although it does tend to make his allies eye him askance. He's never gone beyond mocking or irritating his companions with words, or the occasional failure to intervene to prevent something amusingly unfortunate from happening to them.
Jade is capable of being entirely serious, but these are usually in crisis moments. Either something Very Bad is happening, or Jade is confronting one of the mistakes of his mysterious past. Those mistakes are such that he's occasionally pensive without offering any explanation as to why, usually when something reminds him of those mistakes or - as has begun to happen more frequently - he suspects that people are using his research for unethical ends.
Jade has always had some difficulty empathizing with other people; in fact, he's well-known for it. He'll readily admit that he doesn't really grasp the significance of death as most other people understand it, nor does he seem to connect with people emotionally in a normal fashion(although this isn't to say he doesn't like and dislike people the same as anyone else - it just means he has rather dysfunctional ways of expressing those preferences).
Note that Jade usually speaks quite formally, and sounds (and is) well-educated.
Abilities/Strengths/Weaponry: In terms of natural ability, what Jade has most going for him is his intellect. He's remarkably intelligent and tends to catch onto things before other people do - or things that other people don't catch at all. He also has good instincts which serve him equally well. Add to that his ability to be utterly dispassionate and logical - he's usually the one to point out when morality and emotion will hinder the greater good; for instance, leaving behind someone too weak or useless to be of help in achieving their goal, or the logic behind killing one person to save thousands - and you can usually bet on Jade's plans being the best possible course of action anyone is going to be able to come up with. As a colonel, he's also well-versed in battle strategies.
When it comes to physical ability, Jade is strong - for his build, anyway - and capable enough when it comes to combat. He's not a particularly heavy hitter, but his blows can get the job done. He's also quite fast and agile, more so even than one might expect of someone who's had formal naval training. His ability to strike quickly, and thus be in position before his opponents can react, tends to serve him far better than direct combat - putting a blade at the enemy commander's throat is far quicker and simpler than wading through all the subordinates to get to them, after all. Jade is mentally prepared to kill when he has to, and when he sees potential for not killing someone to come back to haunt him later should he show mercy, but he also sees the wisdom in taking hostages. Further, he's not completely insensible to the arguments of the softer-hearted should he be asked to show someone mercy, although he tends to lean more towards not leaving anyone alive who might hinder him later.
Although it's a somewhat unusual preference, Jade's weapon of choice is a spear. It gives him a degree of reach far beyond that of almost any other kind of striking weapon; it's not much use against pistols, but Jade's opinion of that is that no weapon could preempt a pistol aside from another pistol, and even then it would come down to whoever drew first, so the risk would be roughly the same either way if he's up against a gun.
Weaknesses: Jade has a noted lack of patience for explaining things to people. Whenever he can, he'll foist off the responsibility of explaining something to someone else, even if he was the one asked to do the explaining. However, if he's the only one at the moment qualified to speak on a subject, quite often he'll simply elect not to explain at all, which sometimes has serious drawbacks; a failure to explain why something cannot be done, for instance, might prompt a person to try anyway and grave consequences to come about as a result. This is partially due to Jade's not wanting to bore himself explaining something he already knows and partly sheer laziness. This laziness also occasionally manifests in making other people do grunt work(usually while he excuses himself as being too old - "when you get to be my age, all your joints ache...", etcetera.)
Jade is, as noted, slender and not terribly built physically. He's strong enough, but he can be out-muscled. Also, as mentioned, his weapon isn't much use against guns.
Jade also tends to fall under suspicion for strange things due to his odd behavior around even his friends. (On at least one occasion in his canon, his appearing unbothered by the heat while wandering the interior of an active volcano caused his allies to gang up on him and strip him, believing he had some secret way of keeping cool that he wasn't sharing.) Further, his smiling denials - even when he's speaking in all seriousness - fail to convince anyone of his sincerity.
Finally, Jade has something of a reputation. No one is quite certain of his past, and not even every detail of his present is entirely concrete; there are rumors that circulate of inhumane experiments Jade runs on human subjects, both living and dead, that have earned him the title 'Jade the Necromancer'. Even Jade's own men tend to regard Jade a little leerily due to this, even though there's never been a single shred of proof that any of these rumors are true. It doesn't help that Jade never actively denies them.
History: Jade Balfour was born in Ephesus to a privileged family, although he didn't have very long to enjoy that privilege. His mother died in childbirth, and his father of grief and stress within the same year. He was quickly shunted into a well-maintained orphanage, where he was raised relatively well...however, not having parents for the first few years of his life may well have stunted his social skills, as he spent nearly all of his time alone with books from the moment he could read. By the age of six he was reading high school-level books, and by eight he was not only reading college-level science manuals and biology texts, but comprehending and expanding upon the theories therein. His strange disposition up until that point had turned off most potential families, but as his prodigious intellect became more and more apparent so too did his prospects as an adopted child, and he was adopted by the wealthy and well-connected Curtiss family shortly after his eighth birthday.
Now Jade Curtiss, the young boy found himself with the funds, researchers, and support necessary to actually put into practice the theories he'd concocted on paper. His first experiment, aimed at an issue he'd been aware of from his earliest years, was how to replicate a human being. Having concluded that death could not be prevented, Jade instead wished to be able to create living replicas of those who died, circumventing it instead. Convincing the child next door to donate some blood to his cause, and then adding a bit of his own, Jade soon had enough genetic material to begin the slow process of growing a human being from scratch. It was a tribute to Jade's genius that the process, up until that point theoretical, nevertheless worked without a hitch; by the time he was fourteen, Jade had a living, breathing, and in all noticeable ways normal baby boy on his hands.
However, actually seeing the project he had been working on now in the form of a human being awoke Jade's conscience; having seen that it could be done, Jade finally found himself asking himself whether it ought to have been done. He had essentially brought a child into the world with no family - something he himself understood on a personal level - destined to never have a normal life, but to live as a scientific experiment. Within days of the child's having emerged as a fully fledged human being, Jade had made his decision - presenting his theoretical findings to the scientific community at large, he called for a worldwide ban of the study or practice of replication on the grounds of its being unethical, while within his own laboratory quietly demanding all his research and findings be destroyed - along with the infant. He was well aware that it was a cruel fate for a child that would, after all, have never existed at all if not for his experiments, but he felt it was probably more humane than the life that awaited such an infant. Within a week, all of his work for the last five years had been liquified(or so he believed), and within the year the scientific community as a whole had pored over his theories and agreed that there was at present no justifiable or humane reason why human replication should ever be put into practice. But even though attention was drawn to Jade's theories largely through their being banned at the behest of their originator, this first brought to light Jade's genius to the larger community, and the name of Jade Balfour, genius scientist, began to become significantly well-known.
Having gone as far as he had in the study and practice of a science he'd come to feel was something that never should have been done, and responsible for the creation and death of an innocent child, Jade turned away from science to focus instead on other things. The Curtisses, being an old naval family, naturally pushed him towards the navy as a worthwhile pursuit in the absence of science; Jade, who loved his adoptive family in a distant way(largely due to his inability to express his affection properly), agreed readily enough, and began attending officers' school almost immediately. He proved to excel as an officer nearly as much as a scholar, his body proving to be just as capable a tool as his mind, and by the time he was twenty years old he'd already been made a colonel.
There was, in fact, an ulterior motive behind his meteoric rise in the ranks. Truthfully Jade's rank meant little to him; however, there was one particular privilege that colonels were granted that he had begun to feel a more and more pressing need to make use of. Viasti Hojo, a prodigy child much like himself who had worked on the human replication project with him, had been raising suspicions with Jade; there was nothing actually overt, but over the years since the termination of Jade's project Jade had begun to feel more and more than the project was not as dead as he'd like, that someone - Hojo in particular - might have continued to pursue the research he'd given up. Certainly Hojo had raised some of the bitterest objections to Jade's more conscientious musings, before Jade had made up his mind once and for all to end their study. Only someone of colonel rank or higher within the navy could order a raid upon someone's home on suspicion of wrongdoing; one of Jade's first acts as colonel was to order one upon the home of his old schoolmate. However, nothing was found, and while Jade was personally not satisfied he had to be contented with his lack of findings and, between Hojo and himself, declare no hard feelings.
No longer interested in his rank or needing anything more in particular out of the navy, Jade continued on as a colonel, serving his country excellently and, more or less, doing his family proud(the unsettling rumors that began to float around about him might have been a minor source of concern). However, despite numerous offers of promotions - after one or two particularly well-known battles, even one that would have made him a general - Jade turned them all down, preferring his status as it was. He was, however, made captain of his own ship, the Albiore, and given a crew to command. As his honors grew, so did the stories about him, until the names and genuine accomplishments of Jade Balfour and Jade Curtiss were both eclipsed by the unsubstantiated rumors of Jade the Necromancer - a smiling, enigmatic figure as intelligent as he was dangerous and more amoral than he was either.
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