some blurbs/excerpts from a big write-up i am working on of all my thoughts and headcanons on strategists
Sadako Hayashi
Sadako is the kindest Strategist you'll ever meet. Don't let that cloud your judgement when interacting with her, because she's just as dangerous as any other Strategist.
She runs a sort of half-way house for people in bad situations. She tells you she can wipe away your painful memories. She extracts them and binds them into a glass marble that she keeps in a cabinet in her bedroom, and she uses the glass beads to take control of people, to make them do her bidding.
She's a glass-maker. She makes incredible things, and binds her emptiness into them, empowering them to help her bring an end to things.
She can't walk, and she's constantly in pain. Some days it's better than others, but some days it's worse. Her injuries never truly heal. She is dying of detachment from the world. Her pain pulls her away from everything everything nearby. Her pain sets her apart from everyone else. They live in a world of beauty and wonder, and all that she knows when things get bad – and they're almost always bad for her – is pain and suffering. After a while, she feels so far away from everything, so disconnected from everything that her soul leaves her body and her body dies. Her soul flees to a soft and shadowed empty place, and there she rebuilds her body from glass threads woven of her own emptiness.
Her Vice is obsession. She fixates upon things obsessively, to the point of total distraction. She uses these things to cling to the world for a little while longer than she sometimes should be able to.
Key Game Traits:
Treasure 2 (The Rider's House)
The World-Breaker's Hand
Memory Extraction and Manipulation
Emmony Leath
This Strategist is above all things elegant. She hides her wrongness this way, or at least she tries to. Despite it all, it still shows.
She is dying of a hole through her stomach. Her internal organs are always fighting to get out. She holds them in with bandages, and for a while this works. Over time though, her organs start to rot and she starts to get sicker. Her body gets cold as death starts to set in over the course of a few months. Eventually, her pain and sickness become so overpowering that she requires assistance with even the simplest of tasks. And then, she dies. Her soul travels beyond the world, and she slowly claws her way back to her body, which heals itself in her absence. Without assistance, this can take her months. It's difficult and painful work.
Emmony knows things. There are few things in Creation that she cannot know, and even then, she's proven people wrong before when they claimed she couldn't know something.
She can see through things. She can see the sickness and rot inside of things. The first time she met Sadako Hayashi, she frightened her by killing a fish that she could see was dying of cancer. She used it as a lesson: Things are not always as they seem. Beautiful things too can be rotten inside. To kill something is not always an injustice.
Emmony will teach you, if you let her. She will teach you her way of seeing the world. She will teach you a fractured, broken, sickly way of looking at the world, but she will never tell you a lie, even when you wish she would.
Her vice is sentimentality. When she cares about something, she cares about it deeply, and she cannot do it harm. If something she cares about requires her to protect the world, she will do it. The things she care about change her.
However, Emmony's sentimentality is extremely rare. There is but one thing she truly loves in and out of the world, and her name is Sadako Hayashi.
Key Game Traits:
Treasure 5 (Sadako Hayashi)
The World-Breaker's Hand
Boundary-Breaking Knowledge
Elisabeth Montaigne
This Strategist is too broken to even fight the world. She was born of desire to end her life, and now she is cursed to fail again and again. It hurts her, and she wrestles with it. It distracts her so much that the war against the world is a far-off dream to her. She must expend most of her mental energy contending with the war inside her head.
She is dying of suicide. When things get too bad for her, she attempts to take her own life. Beyond the world, the emptiness weaves itself into her and forces her back to her body. When she wakes up each time, she cries at the realization that again she has failed.
She rarely leaves her place beyond the world. She rarely has the energy to even try to venture beyond its boundaries. When she manages it, she tries desperately to disprove her own wrongness. She acts as the leader of a group of vigilante-heroes. She believes that if she could only help people, she could rewrite her own wrongness into something right, and finally she could die. As one would think, this is impossible. Her vice is this false hope. She makes her own suffering worse through getting her hopes up time and time again instead of resigning herself to what she is, what her purpose is.
Key Game Traits:
Treasure 1 (Rare Friends)
The World-Breaker's Hand