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re-re-redline · 6 months ago

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Constantine XI Alter (Saber)

>Spoilers for Constantine’s Interlude<

Foreword: This was supposed to be a sketch, I swear. But on another note, I am alive! Just slowly working up to writing after a few hectic weeks. But the train is moving, just very slowly which I imagine is nothing new. One thing I HAVE been getting up to is my painting of portraits of my blorbos for their birthdays. I suck at drawing anything festive, so I hope the quality of the piece makes up for it, hehe… I have Constantine’s done and I am extremely proud of it.

Buuut that’s in February, so let’s get into my explanation and thoughts on this hypothetical of my boi! Starting off with…why he looks like this.

(I would also like to note that I haven’t ran this through TTS yet so there probably is some grammatical errors and for that I will apologize in advance, I will iron them out soon.)

Fixed it! And I added a few more lines just to explain things further.

On the Subject of Appearance:

Alright, obvious and iconic Alter color palette aside, what’s up with the vast amounts of white? That’s because… Our guy wears black mostly in his first ascension and then dies it down in his second by adding a LOT of red, so it’d make sense that his alternative would be set apart by having him wear and have the color white. Plus it illustrates just how DIFFERENT he is compared to Micheal, how opposite or perhaps opposing he is. But more on that later.

I also tried making his hair look significantly messier than Constantine’s to set him apart and make him look more scary with his wild hair, especially in his third ascension. I looked at a panel of Yhwach from Bleach to see how I could do that since his hair looks so COOL but I couldn’t quite get it to how I wanted it thanks to the pencil I was using admittedly not being the best for that sort of thing. Now if I had used monoline instead then maybe it could’ve came out better…

(Also I was planning on this being just a sketch so I wasn’t really thinking of coloring anything until his second ascension when I realized I would have to in order to communicate how different he is from Constantine and it kinda snowballed from there. Oops… You might be able to tell, but I was looking at Saber Alter’s sprite from Stay Night for ideas on how to color him. Now. I just noticed that I forgot his crown for 3rd ascension and I did try adding one recently but it looked kinda bad… So we’ll just leave him without it for now. I could justify its absence by saying that it broke when he was altered and it basically signals his now ironically unholy nature, but I had to speak truthfully first.)

Now, about the cracks on his skin. THAT is marble. Sections of Alter’s body are petrified marble with a few dry cracks in the skin. Why? Because of the legend circulating after his death of him being a marble statue. It’s like how Hans has mermaid scales and how Okita will forever have tuberculosis, Alter’s body along with several other things were affected by how people saw him. I’ll get into it more later.

But! There are some cool things, or not cool rather, to note about the marble patches on his body. Like how a lot of pain he’d feel is nullified by it thanks to lack of, y’know, nerves. This also goes for sensations in general as he wouldn’t know if you were tapping him on the shoulder or were pouring boiling water on that spot. Sections of his body cannot feel but can still move just fine. It doesn’t impede his movement at all. It just…cracks a lot.

If you ever see him stretch and pop his spine, you will not only hear the snapping of bones but also stone splitting. Don’t worry, it’ll fix itself so you don’t have to worry about him sustaining major damage from just moving around. It’ll just take some getting used to on your end.

Now. You may have noticed that the marble patches grow more the further into his ascensions he is, to the point where his armor receives patches of marble on it too. Now this wouldn’t even be something to mention if not for the fact that I’d like to think that anything new he wears in his 2nd and 3rd ascension starts petrifying slowly over time. Not all the way but enough to the point where it gets to be a chore doing laundry. Just a neat addition to what is already there.

But yeah, that’s all I got for his design so far. On to the next!

On The Subject of Class and Gameplay:

If you play JP or have Clairvoyance then you already know why its not the obvious choice. Because his legend mentions specifically that the angel who wakes him up will give him the sword he used on his final day. So it’d make sense that his class would change to Saber.

Now. In this hypothetical where I’m the one designing him as a unit. I’d imagine his gameplay to be like so:

2 Buster Cards with 5 hits, 2 Arts Cards with 4 hits, and 1 Quick card with 3 hits. Five hit Extra Attack because he’s cool like that. Same card numbers but different hits on most.

His NP would be an Offensive Buster NP whose description looks something like this:

Legend of The Marble Emperor (EX):

Increase Buster Card Effectiveness for 3 Turns, Increase ATK for 1 Turn, Inflict Curse, Deal Major defense ignoring damage to one/all enemies, Restore HP by 2,000 (effect increases with Overcharge), Apply Resistance to Death by 5000% for 1 time (non-stackable) and Apply a stackable Guts for 5 turns that restores half of Constantine XI Alter (Saber)’s HP upon Death.

That is one hell of an NP that not only hits hard but also provides major survivability which is what Constantine is all about. Now, I could quite decide if he should be a Single Target or an AOE but I do imagine his gameplay to be your awesome clutch soloist unit for CQ’s, Advanced Quests or boss fights. Is this really cool hypothetical NP a showing of my massive bias? …Maybe. But that’s not important, onto the skills!

Skill 1: The Ends Justify The Means (A) [Cooldown at LV.10 is 6 Turns]

Increase Buster Card Effectiveness for 3 Turns, Increase ATK for 3 turns for All Party Members and Apply Target Focus to All Party Members Excluding Constantine XI Alter (Saber) for 3 Turns.

Skill 2: Demise Privilege (Alternative) (C) [Cooldown at LV.10 is 7 Turns]

Increase NP Gauge for Self by 50%, Gain crit.stars per turn for 3 turns, Remove 2,000 HP from all Non-Roman Party Members and Restore HP by 3,000 to self, Apply Guts to self for 3 Turns.

Skill 3: The People’s Wish (Alternative) (EX) [Cooldown at LV.10 is 6 Turns]

Apply a State Where Upon Hitting an Enemy, Inflict Curse (1,000 DMG) and Disastrous Curse for 3 Turns, Apply Special ATK to enemies with Curse.

As you can see, Alter is a very selfish DPS that drains HP from his non-Roman allies to keep himself alive along with inflicting curse stacks for damage over time. He’s be a nice pair up with Van Gogh for that last thing. And much like his NP, he really wants to live and it’s going to be difficult to kill him. So yes! Soloist in the form of a Saber.

Is his kit too cracked? …Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll let you all tell me what’s what.

On the Subject of Composition:

Constantine XI Alter is a Saber class servant comprised of three parts.

The first and the largest portion—the base, if you will—is Constantine’s ideal self, dreamed up during his final years of life in the late 1400s. As we are aware, Constantine utterly despises how weak he thinks he is. He hates the fact that he feels like he wants to breakdown and cry so much, he hates the fact that he’s terrified of dying, and most of all he hates that he isn’t strong enough to take the current crisis in stride like he believed his idols would have. Thus, Constantine saw his ideal self as a man who would not feel fear in times of crisis, would not cry when he was losing, and would not break under pressure. A truly stoic and strong leader that can handle any sort of disaster, that is to say: an emperor who wins for his people and survives.

The second part that makes up this servant are the wishes of the people of Constantinople. After Constantine’s death, a rumor floated around that the emperor had not died. He was rescued by an angel at the brink of death and turned into a statue. He would then sleep in a hidden cave underneath the Golden Gate of Constantinople awaiting the call of an angel who would restore his form and give him the sword he used in the final battle. It was a lovely thing to hope for and believe in, thus that rumor turned into a legend backed by the hopes and dreams of the people. It is this that would have completed this variation of Constantine had it not been for…

The third and final part is less of a ‘part’ per se and more of a distortion of what already existed. A wild, vengeful anger and grief corrupted what would have been the lovely culmination of the ideal self of Constantine plus the people’s hopes and dreams and twisted it into a cold automaton hellbent on continuing the existence of Rome as he knew it no matter the cost. These intense negative emotions came from the one and only Constantinople herself. When our favorite emperor perished and the Ottomans took over, there was no one as thoroughly stricken by grief—if we ignore George and Constantine’s remaining family—as Constantinople. It was pure agony to watch her people be murdered, enslaved and violated for days with the subsequent rebuild and installation of new buildings hurting too. But the most painful thing of all was watching her subjects slowly disappear one by one: people she watched grow up and live life for centuries on end vanishing never to return until all that was left was a large group of strangers who now occupied that space. It was maddening to say the least. The result was a lot of time passing and the events of Constantine’s interlude (yes, I read a summary of it and it could not come sooner for me.) While Constantinople WAS forced into slumber through the battle, much like the emperor she is so deeply connected with, Constantinople made a final last ditch effort to have her and Constantine’s wish come true. Thus the creation of an Alter of Constantine XI as well as a new singularity set shortly after the death of the real Constantine came to be.

On The Subject of Personality:

Alter is barely like the man we are familiar with, he would be practically unrecognizable if his face and voice were different. The most glaring difference is the lack of any expression on this man’s face. The muscles on his face only move for three reasons: he’s speaking, blinking, or the boiling rage underneath his skin has erupted upon the mention or appearance of the Ottomans. He just carries that same deadpan expression no matter what happens, good or bad. This is due to Constantine’s wishes to be a truly stoic man down to his core. Though, thanks to the distortion caused by Constantinople, most of his other emotions have been muted to make room for the, and I quote: “Boiling Rage™ that is 100% necessary and important to the restoration and maintenance of the Byzantine Empire. Yup, totally required. Why? Because screw you that’s why!”— Constantinople, circa Right Now. I kid, I kid. But really. Alter is either having tiny tinges of emotion flittering around in his skull sometimes—you know like the alleged to exist fruity taste of La Croix—or pure and absolute anger, no in between. Thankfully, for masters, the percentages of the anger are incredibly low unless for some odd reason you have Ottoman Turks appearing left and right in your area.

Unlike our friend Micheal, or any sapient being really, Alter doesn’t really…have opinions. He’s just neutral about most things in the world and mostly shrugs at whatever he’s interacting with. Good weather? Okay. Great food? Okay. Amazing friends? Okay. The milk went bad and the store’s closed right now? Okay. You stepped on the corner of five different Lego blocks on your way to the bathroom? Okay. Your pillow is scorching hot and you can’t sleep? Okay. Several hundred people just died in utter agony? O—you get the point. I’m sure you know one exception that Alter has, but allow me to provide you with one more and we’ll get into another in the next section.

The red earrings on his ears, cracked beyond belief yet still hanging just fine… Yes, Alter likes those. That’s why he hasn’t taken them off or let them shatter. Why? Well… He vaguely recalls someone important to him gifting him these. That man, after helping Constantine put his on, took out another similar pair and placed them on his own ears. He then said: “Now we match! Plus, I’ll be able to pick you out in even the most dense of crowds, my lord, as these earrings are one of a kind.”

(Yes, I headcanon that George gifted Constantine his iconic red earrings and has a matching blue pair for himself so that they both kinda match but hold their individuality all the same. A nice little thought that warms my heart.)

On The Subject of Speech:

The way this man talks is so dry and bland that one would think that Alter is bored out of his skull by simply existing. His voice is so flat and borderline monotone, no effort to emphasize anything or even to make digesting the info any easier. And to make matters perhaps worse he doesn’t talk much and tends to make what little he does say compact. It’s a flavorless way of communication that only changes when, you know, the Boiling Rage™ surfaces.

You know how in Constantine’s Bond Profile #1 it states that he “sometimes speaks more roughly in times of duress?” (Or “a more crude tone” if we’re reading the fan translation.) Yeah, well that’s no longer a sometimes. He still doesn’t talk much but man is he swearing and being rude as hell when he is pissed. The imperial decorum that our Micheal lives by has gone out of the window and will not be seen again until Alter calms down. No, he won’t apologize to anyone. Don’t bother, it’s a fruitless endeavor.

On the Subject of His Knowledge:

Alright, what does Alter know about himself? He knows that he was crafted by Constantine to be the ideal version of him. He knows about the legend surrounding his death and that being the reason for the petrification on his body. And he knows about Constantinople messing with his Spirit Origin and his current reason for existing and the objective that comes with it. …That’s it. That is all he knows.

Nothing about his personal life or his family or his best friend who had his back throughout it all, nothing. In its place are vague and fuzzy vignettes of familiar people he can’t put a name or face to that appear in his mind’s eye from time to time.

Now, as for his opinions on what he knows… Uh, I’ll just get the one with the least words on it out of the way first. The petrification thing? Yeah, he could not care less. The patches of marble on his body don’t limit his mobility any and yeah, the petrifying of his clothes is kind of annoying but it’s slow enough to where it’s not that big of a deal. It’s whatever for him.

Now. As for his creation—that being Constantinople messing with him and him being Constantine’s ideal self—he has a…not very good opinion on the two. And by that I mean he absolutely hates them both.

He hates Constantinople for twisting his already good spirit origin into what it is now and placing within him an undying anger. He also hates her for basically using him as a tool to get what she wants all because the ‘real’ Constantine rejected her wishes, essentially using him as a replacement. A simple means to an end… Yeah, even someone as dry as Alter isn’t happy with her one bit and immediately rebelled against her the moment she turned her back on him.

He hates Constantine for cursing him with the ridiculous traits of being stoic down to his core as well being the ‘perfect’ emperor for his people, the one who wins and survives. Because of that, not only does he not FEEL anything at all but he also has this immense pressure in his very soul that he MUST have Rome survive at all costs and that he must solely devote himself to that cause with every fiber of his being. Yes, the severity of those traits were caused by Constantinople’s anger and grief distorting him but the base traits were all on Constantine.

Now, in Constantine’s defense (because I am a Constantine defender), he had no idea that this would happen let alone that an Alter of himself based on what he saw as his ideal self, the emperor his people deserved and would suit them best, even existed in the first place. It was a dream to him. A dream of a man who was much better than he was, doing way better than he is and winning all at once. That is all that Alter was to him then and what he was to Constantine before the singularity. And upon seeing the cursed man before him, he could not feel worse about himself if he tried.

Endnote: Whew… That was a lot! But I think that was I’ve got on Alter. As you can see, I’d been doin’ a big think on him and he was a very fun character to design both artistically and in writing.

Whew… That was a lot! But I think that was I’ve got on Alter. As you can see, I’d been doin’ a big think on him and he was a very fun character to design both artistically and in writing. I hope you don’t mind the crumminess in the piece, if you can even call it that. I wasn’t joking when I said it was supposed to be a sketch hence the noticeable climb in effort across the ascensions.

In other more exciting news… I have 10 followers! Ten whole people! That’s enough to get one of those long tables at the fancy restaurants with!

It’s quite the milestone, one I was not expecting. So, to celebrate, I’m going to bypass the order of things I WANTED to get through with before I did this sort of thing—since I didn’t think I’d get 10 followers, honestly. But, I will be dropping a poll sometime soon—before the day’s end Nope, way too sleepy right now.—of a few headcanons you guys can choose from for me to do next! And not JUST for Constantine, Mehmed, or Sannan—no, no. I will also be tacking on my two other blorbos that I have neglected to mention, them being Hajime-chan (my strongest Saber) and Izou (my strongest Assassin.) So it’ll be Multi-Core Headcanons (haha), five people in one list. And don’t you worry, it won’t be like, one paragraph long or anything half-assed. That shit will be long, like 4k minimum per person which would—if I strictly hang around that number—would be a 20k long HC list.

So case in point! It’ll be a celebration and I implore you to vote.

But yeah. That’s all for this post. I’ll also be posting something else shortly after that is NOT the poll but a nice occurrence for lil’ ol’ me. If you have questions, comments, a desire for elaboration or a keyboard smash of your thoughts, let me know! And I’d like to thank you all for indulging my delusions today and before today and I hope you all have a great day.

—Redline, over and out!

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