Player Info:
Nickname: Inky
Age: 22
Personal LJ: inkblotmeringue
Method of Contact: AIM: inkblotmeringue plurk: inkblotmeringue
Characters Played: none

Character Info:
Name: Lord El-Melloi II (Waver Velvet)
Age: 29
Canon: Fate/Stay night
Pull Point: post-Heaven’s Feel

Background Info:
History: Type-Moon Wiki entry Character Material entry

In the world that Waver was born into, a magus’ worth was determined by the number of Magic Circuits in his body and the quality of his lineage. An older family with a longer magical heritage has greater research and knowledge at their disposal along with a better developed thaumaturgical crest to pass on to its heirs.

The Velvet family has a recognized magical heritage of only three generations; in the eyes of the Mages’ Association, Waver was a magus of inferior breeding and some considered him barely worth allowing into the Clock Tower to study magecraft at all. Despite his less than impressive pedigree, Waver was admitted into the Clock Tower on a scholarship due to his extensive knowledge of magecraft that he learned on his own; through hard work and his own natural inclination for learning, he rose to the top of his class and became one of the best students in the institution.

For three years, Waver developed a theory that magical abilities were not solely dependent upon breeding and the amount of magical circuits a magus has; he believed that knowledge and experience could bridge the gap between the naturally gifted and those who were less so. After a year of writing, he presented his thesis to his professor, Lord Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi, confident that he would see the inherent logic of his paper and find his evidence irrefutable. After glancing through it once, however, Lord El-Melloi tore the paper to pieces in front of his student’s eyes and told him that he was being foolish.

He was furious that all of his work had been dismissed and destroyed right before him; he knew that his ideas were good and he knew that he was right, but no one would take him seriously. It wasn’t fair that he should have no way to prove himself, that every path he tried to take would be blocked by dogmatic traditionalists who refused to see reason when it was right in front of them.
He got a lucky break when he discovered that Lord El-Melloi was preparing to fight a war somewhere in the East. He got an even luckier one when the artifact that his teacher was going to use for that war was given to him to deliver.

Waver took the artifact himself and was on the next flight out to Japan.

When the time was right, he used that artifact to summon a Heroic Spirit to serve him during the Holy Grail War—and the man he summoned was none other than the King of Conquerors, Alexander the Great, also known as the Servant Rider.

It was about at that point that things stopped being relatively KEIKAKU DOORI for Waver and turned into one long GDIT RIDER.

During the few weeks that the war lasted, Waver formed a bond of friendship with his Servant, and came to respect and admire his nobility, beliefs and honor, and Rider taught him to overcome fear and self-doubt. In the end, before his final battle with the Servant Archer, Rider asked Waver to be his servant, and Waver agreed—Rider was his king, and they were bros for life. And it was awesome.

Rider did not survive the battle with Archer.

After his Servant was killed, Archer confronted Waver and asked him if he was Rider’s Master—Waver answered that he was not and that he was, in fact, Rider’s follower. Out of respect for Rider’s last command to the young magus—that he should live no matter what—Gilgamesh spared Waver’s life.

After the War, Waver remained in Japan for a period of time, traveling a little and learning more about the world before he returned to the Clock Tower. While he had been gone, the Archibald family, which had lost its head after the death of Lord Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi during the War, had fallen into disarray and chaos due to in-fighting between various branches of the family. Upon his return, Waver agreed to aid the Archibalds in calming the war of succession; with his help, the family recovered and was saved from destruction.

The person who was supposed to become the head of the family, however, was a young girl; she was too young and inexperienced to take that position, and thus Waver was given the title ‘Lord El-Melloi II’ and became the family’s head in her place.

For nearly a decade, Lord El-Melloi II has been a top lecturer and researcher at the Clock Tower. He is highly regarded for the quality of his work and, after the fifth Holy Grail War, was the person tasked with dismantling Fuyuki’s Holy Grail. For some reason, he is also known as ‘Professor Charisma’ and is widely considered by the female population of the school to be the hottest professor around, and he really just is half-bemused, half annoyed by it. He also sponsored Rin Tohsaka, though part of the terms of his sponsorship was that he refused to give her any personal instruction; he did, however, write letters of recommendation for her.


Personality: When Lord El-Melloi II was young—and still thought of himself as only Waver Velvet—he was a stingy, irritable, easily flustered boy with a hair-trigger temper, a festering inferiority complex and some really prominent tsundere tendencies. After the events of Fate/zero, when he returned to the Clock Tower to finish his education and aid the floundering Archibald family in its succession problem (of which he was partly to blame, due to his part in the death of the family’s head), he changed. Part of his transformation was due to the influence of his Servant, Rider, who taught him how to live like a man and how to stand proudly before those who had previously tried to break his spirit. Part of it was because, upon deciding to help the Archibalds, he was thrust rather abruptly into the noble families’ aggressive power struggles. And when the dust finally cleared and the legitimate heir to the family name was found, the girl was too young to actually take the responsibilities of the head of the household. Instead, Waver was bequeathed the title ‘Lord El-Melloi II’ and became the head in her place.

This was an incredible amount of responsibility to place on his narrow shoulders.

Being the head of the Archibald family meant that Waver was thrust even further into the politics of the Clock Tower. And the ruthlessness of its power struggles meant that the other families would tear him apart if he showed any signs of weakness; Waver was smart enough to know that if he wanted to survive, he would have to play the political game better than everyone else. They would not want to listen to him because he not born into a noble family and had no great magical talent to demand respect; he would have to use cunning, force of will and a good deal of Xanatos speed chess in order to get anything done. He had to be perfect—speak perfectly, act perfectly, never falter, never (ha) waver, never hesitate. He had to be vigilant, careful and trust no one.

The face of Lord El-Melloi II was built out of necessity, to hide all the weaknesses that would have gotten Waver Velvet killed or used or worse. After ten years of wearing the mask, Waver finds it difficult to be anyone but Lord El-Melloi anymore.

Specifically, Lord El-Melloi is a cool and calm man who stays collected in almost any situation. Even when something is surprising to him, he doesn’t let it show on his face; almost nothing can disrupt his expression of cool annoyance. He is meticulous and careful, almost to the point where it would be a bit paranoid of him, except that people really are trying to kill him. He no longer even bats an eye at death threats or having a weapon pointed at him—it’s happened often enough that he gets more concerned if someone goes too long without trying to kill him.

He is cunning and sharp and years of dangerous political maneuvering has made him an excellent improviser; his practicality ensured that he never got bogged down in extravagancy. Lord El-Melloi has no use for the frivolous or the needless—this doesn’t make him the life of the party, obviously, and he is a very serious sort of man who would rather spend a quiet evening at home than go out. Granted, this could partly be because quiet evenings are so difficult to come by.

He does not trust easily; there were plenty of people, especially when he was just settling into his new position, who wanted to use or manipulate him for their own gain. Once burned, twice shy, and he knows very well that in the Clock Tower, trust is something far too valuable and vulnerable to give readily. This, obviously, also makes it very difficult for him to make friends, though the highly competitive nature of the institution doesn’t exactly encourage friendships to begin with. Then again, neither does Waver’s stand-offish personality, cynicism, and sarcasm. He is not an approachable man, and almost anyone who tries to speak with him will be greeted with the impression that they are frivolously wasting his valuable time.

As much as he seems like all-work-and-no-play (or a giant stick in the mud), Waver has a bit of a secret—a hobby of his that he hides from everyone else. While he dislikes most of Japanese culture, he enjoys playing the video games that they produce, specifically the Admiral’s Great Tactics series. He picked this up from his Servant, Rider; he even still has the shirt that Rider wore, which has the AGT logo on it and is about six sizes too big for him. He only wears it while he plays video games and drinks beer in his boxers. In private, Waver is forever a bachelor.



Game Specific:
Arcana: Hierophant
Justification: The Hierophant is associated with education, knowledge, conservatism, tradition, and power; Waver identifies very much with all of these characteristics. He is well acquainted with power, considering his position as the head of a noble family, and he is firmly entrenched in academia and the traditions of magecraft.

Samples:

First Person Sample:


They are interesting creatures, these Shadows.

[The voice over the cell phone is calm, cool, and analytical; by the way he is speaking, it seems as though he is merely looking at an intellectual curiosity rather than something that is trying to kill him.]

Their body structure appears to be varied and diverse, ranging from mostly-amorphous to avian to insectoid to humanoid. The only constant feature between them seems to be their masks, though even those appear to vary in color and shape between… for lack of a better term… ‘species’ of these creatures. A little deeper understanding about what we are fighting against might prove to be valuable in the long run.

[A sharp exhalation can be heard, accompanied by the quick, short sound of steel moving through a slightly unyielding mass.]

[A few moments later, his voice is tinged with a hint of annoyance.] It’s bloody difficult to study something that dissolves when it dies, though.

Well. [He huffs out a short sigh.] That was a delightful waste of time.

Third Person Sample:


“Good morning, class.”

A chorus of ‘good morning’s greeted him, almost all of the voices female; for some reason, his class was made up practically entirely of girls. And during the time that he had been teaching English literature at the community college, he had started to notice a trend: shorts and skirts had decreased in length, and shirts had become increasingly low-cut. The sheer amount of cleavage in his classroom was staggering.

He only had one thought on the matter:

Why does this keep happening?

It was the same trend that he’d seen in his students at the Clock Tower, and it was just as baffling to him now as it had been then. And in this community college, without his title of ‘lord’ to indicate that perhaps a little propriety was in order, his students seemed to think that it was perfectly reasonable to find him during his office hours to ask him some trivial thing and lean over his desk in a manner that was terribly distracting and certainly inappropriate. Whenever he was present, the number of items dropped seemed to sharply increase, seemingly for the sole purpose of bending over in a small skirt in front of him to retrieve it. It was getting to the point where he was starting to wonder if he’d recognize his students by their faces or their asses.

And what made the entire situation completely unfathomable was the fact that he did nothing—not the slightly word or gesture—to encourage it. He was cold, irritable, and otherwise entirely unpleasant to deal with, and it didn’t seem to faze them at all. In fact, they seemed to regard it as part of his ‘charm’, which apparently was a strange, mutant creature that persisted despite all attempts at taking it out behind the shed and shooting it.

Students. He would never understand them, and he was quite certain that he didn’t really want to try.