22. At the peak of their fury, do they tend to be destructive? If so, how?
@jateshi also asked this!
Gonna talk about this OOC since Etienne will not readily admit to feeling most human emotions. 8)
Due to their own tendency to mute their emotions, Etienne rarely experiences a “peak” of any kind, whether in happiness, anger or otherwise. (Sex joke here)
Etienne does not really lose their temper. It takes some failed willpower rolls for them to do anything extreme. One of Etienne’s ongoing character traits/struggles is their struggle between their secret desire to be open and vulnerable with others, and the 110% of everything in their life that has told them that is the worst idea ever. Even anger is a passion, and passion is what leads people to ruin. I’d ramble on about all of their justifications for that viewpoint, but it’s come up a few times in my #FFXIVWrites prompts and also we’d be here all day.
For the most part, Etienne’s anger turns inward, characterized by a menacing, strict and oppressive form of self-talk that fuels their struggles with alcoholism and depression. The angrier they get, the more they crawl into their own head and can’t get out.
The one time Etienne truly lost their temper (and even raising their voice is extremely unusual, like it happened twice in my entire history of playing them and once was a case of “I’ve told you I need you to leave so I can calm down now GTFO”) they cast a black magic spell without a soulstone, which could have very easily killed them. This caused a permanent injury to their aether pool, which builds extremely slowly, drains more easily than most people’s and has never filled to capacity since then. They once had a vast potential that was essentially quashed by this hubris.
One interesting side effect of the injury is that Etienne does not always feel aether correctly - their ability to sense their own level of power is numbed. They don’t know if they’re casting within their actual capacity or potentially drawing from their own vitality on accident. This makes casting dangerous and they tend to stick with more basic, low-level spells. Casting a limit-break level spell resulted in days-long sickness.
One frightening thing about this is they can occasionally influence the aether around them unconsciously. This almost always results in the air growing colder around them, but once in awhile it aspects as heat. That deep and simmering anger has burned meals on the stove, boiled tea over and caused candles and lamps to flare all while Etienne still maintained a semblance of calm.
It’s hard to imagine Etienne truly reaching the point where they lost complete control, but if they did, they would likely burn through themself like a firework. I picture a disc of black glass a la the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet in the The Adventure Zone. Just melting everything.
Etienne doesn’t get angry. When they do, people have the good sense to be extremely worried.
