Valentin

Valentin is a boy with a lot of aspirations and no conceivable means of achieving them. While he’s generally inexperienced in most things, he learns quickly, and is naturally gifted at picking up skills. Though he’s quite sharp, he’s not particularly eloquent, and comes across as antisocial and rude. He’s quick to anger, and even quicker to steal something that doesn’t belong to him (but feels like it should belong to him). Valentin is convinced that he deserves the title of ‘King’ and that he will claim it as his own. He also hopes to improve his magic skills, bitter that he was barred from learning more than he did at magic school.

Currently, he has picked up the new outrageous goal of being a massive nerd and discovering the source of all magic.

The street
Valentin was born as the typical gutter rat. No family to speak of that he remembers, no name that he remembers, and constant squalor and starvation. While he’d occasionally steal to survive, he managed to drift between charitable strangers and gangs of other orphaned kids without an outrageous amount of trouble. When he was around ten or eleven, he was arrested for stealing something from the Crown Guard, despite not having anything to do with the event. The guardsman who brought him in ended up coercing a confession out, explaining between bouts of “interrogation” that if he plead guilty, he would not be executed. During the process of filling out the “paperwork” of who did the crime, the guardsman realized that the ‘criminal’ in question had no name to write down, and just wrote down the name of his dog, “Valentin,” thus granting the child a name. Valentin agreed to lie about committing the crime, but the next day, he was brought to the gallows anyways. Though an outside party had already decided to take Valentin off of the prison’s hands, he stood for ten minutes with a noose around his neck for a crime he didn’t commit.

School
Eventually the guardsman was bored of taunting the kid, and sent him off with that “third party,” who was collecting kids to teach magic to, since the current king was not as good at magic as people were led to believe. Valentin spent the next few years learning the fundamentals of magic, realizing that he had quite the knack for it. While he excelled in the material, the same couldn’t be said for his social prowess. He mostly kept to himself, and was far too straightforward and hostile for most of the other kids (who were mostly middle class and well-bred, so to speak) to actually approach him after a while. He made a friend in the extroverted Xavier Durand who was a couple years older and attempted to take Valentin under his wing socially, which helped Valentin actually learn how to hold a conversation if not anything else. Despite this, the unstable political atmosphere and Valentin’s rough attitude led to his eventual expulsion (though the whole program seemed to be a bust either way. That's what he tells himself.) He moved in with Xavier following the fallout and decided he wouldn’t be a pawn any longer, and instead take control of the chessboard.

Appearance
Valentin is a lanky and disheveled young adult, standing at about 5’8”. Despite not being a particularly special person, he’s quite physically distinguishable. He has the typical features of a Gallican, face usually twisted into a scowl. While on the whole he is not particularly cleaned-up, his hair is intentionally messy (in a very calculated “just woke up like this” kind of way), platinum blonde with two black streaks that frame his face in a striking manner. As a child, his hair was all black, but it began to grow in mostly colorless after joining #shittyhogwarts for some reason. His eyes are also two colors, one an icy blue and the other black, though those colors have always been the case. He has a crescent shaped scar along the right side of his face from when he was “interrogated,” and has a collection of other small scars that were mostly from superficial wounds that just didn’t heal particularly nicely. When his hands aren’t wrapped with cloth (creating faux-fingerless-gloves), his magic runes are visible on his hands and arms. Unlike most sorcerers who have theirs inked, most of his are carved directly into his flesh from after he no longer had access to the resources necessary to get them tattooed.

Pirate Arc
After two years, while he's only grown about a half an inch, Valentin definitely looks a bit older. His hair is shorter in the back to make up for the heat, while his frame while still lanky is a bit more filled out from training in swordplay and working on a ship for a year. He's finally managed to get some new clothes (though he still wears his old coat in the colder moments), consisting of a loose white shirt and a long scarf (which also works as a hood) stitched with magical symbols and such. Most of the time, nestled in the scarf is a honey colored rat named Bee, who enjoys curling up at his neck.



Personality
Valentin is extremely straightforward. He doesn’t really have the capability to act outside of how he feels, which is usually incredibly frustrated or angry. He usually doesn’t talk unless he sees it as something he needs to say, and has no time or patience for small talk (especially because he often doesn’t know what to talk about, and feels inadequate due to this). Valentin’s immaturity comes through in multiple ways, both in his rashness and naiveté. Though Valentin is not unfamiliar with the cruelty in the world, his ambition and inability to keep his head down often gets him into particularly troublesome situations, and he ends up in over his head quite a bit.

Others
Because he lacked any family or friends in his formative years, Valentin has a hard time forming relationships with people, or even enjoying the company of other people. Ever since he lied and plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit, he feels that no matter what people will view him in a way they want to view him, and that there’s not much point in pretending to be something that he’s not. The closest to socially content he gets is when he is alone, because he can just focus on the areas where he excels and not on trying to make people like him. However, that does not mean he is not eager to form connections with people. He knows that his goals require allies, however once he has found them, he doesn’t quite know what to do with them. Back at school, he was happy just absorbing the material and applying it, and enjoyed keeping his lessons as far away from the other students as possible. Despite all this, he’s not necessarily un-empathetic towards other people; his issues mainly stem from his own feelings contradicting with that empathy. If he had a more stable upbringing, he would probably be quite sensitive of other people. Instead, he’s just sensitive when it comes to himself.

Self
Though Valentin is straightforward and doesn’t hide his intentions, there is a wall between himself and his emotions. When the emotions hit that wall, they come out the other side as impulsive behavior. Behind that wall is a lot of fear, a deep loneliness, and feelings of inadequacy. Because he was born with nothing, ownership is very important to him. Possession of any object, no matter how trivial, is very much a way in which he measures his existence. Usually he doesn’t care for practicality, and instead will pick things solely based on the control they’d give him.

Worldview
Because his survival has depended solely on his stubborn ambition to get to the top, his ambition basically runs his entire existence and worldview. He believes that hewill become King, because it’s what he’s meant to do. He wants to prove those that looked down on him throughout his life wrong, and be in complete, absolute control over them. Though he wants to spite those people, he doesn’t want to “punish” them. He wants to prove them wrong by actually being a good king, by rejecting the world that has frustrated him as long as it has.

Surprisingly Honest

When Valentin plead guilty for something he didn’t do, and was punished for it anyways, he realized that there was a possibility that he would die for absolutely nothing. He decided that while lying could be useful to get out of trouble, he would much rather be killed because he earned that death than die on a lie. This seed eventually sprouted into a full epiphany, impacting the rest of his goals and behavior. Valentin’s desire for power doesn’t stem as much from wanting-to-do-something with it as it does from the sentiment of earning it, despite the odds stacked against him. He believes that power built upon lies is not true power, because the foundations are hollow. Though it’s substantially harder to build any sort of power in his position without lies or platitudes, it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. When (if) he gets to the top, he wants to firmly know that it was because he proved the entire world and system wrong, and if he took advantage of falsehoods along the way, he will only have proved it right. In the same way that he would rather die because of the truth than because of a lie, failing is better than cheating to succeed. Valentin believes that he deserves the power he seeks, and that he will eventually get there, so it doesn’t matter when plans fall through; there will always be other chances, and eventually he will find the right chance. For example, while getting removed from the executive council was frustrating, it merely proved to him that it was not a system that was fit for his goals. If he doesn’t lie, it’s also much easier to find the people that are actually willing to help him, since he’s quite upfront with his goals and beliefs. The people that brush that off aren’t worth his time, and those that do humor him are people to remember. Being honest provides challenges that he believes he will overcome, while also making social situations less frustrating to partake in.

Stealing

If there’s one thing that people remember about Valentin, it’s that he’s a massive kleptomaniac. This habit stems from two primary things. Often, Valentin will see an object and feel as if it already belongs to him. If he manages to steal it and keep it, it means that he deserves to have it, and that it was fated to be his. It’s a microcosm of how he views his main goal of becoming king. While he justifies his habits with this train of thought, the actual impulse comes from something much deeper. He definitely feels quite empty, and often just wants to get things because he has never really had anything that actually belongs to him. Even his name wasn’t really truly his. Most of the things that he’s gained have easily been taken away by other people, whether it’s his schooling or the various places he’s stayed. Furthermore, because he was arrested for stealing something he didn’t steal, he just assumes that people are going to blame him for things he didn’t do either way, so there’s not much of a point in keeping himself from taking things that he feels he deserves. Ever since he plead guilty, he sees himself as guilty. It’s a self-destructive coping mechanism that he uses to try and justify almost dying on a lie.

He thinks that people should take what they want, especially since their lives have been stolen by their circumstances.

He also really, really likes shiny things.

He's managed to get a hold on his kleptomania since leaving Galicia. This is due to a mix of growing up, meeting the Roden, and being a pirate. The Roden showed Valentin a society of gifts and generosity which puzzled his kleptomaniac tendencies, and being a pirate has allowed him to exert that rebellious and impulsive hatred towards the world into his general occupation. He's still a fucking hoarder though.

Class

After bouncing between lower and middle class throughout his formative years, Valentin quite isolated from any particular social group. While this provides issues in terms of personal connections, his experience with both groups has solidified his view on society as a whole. He believes that people are inherently selfish and individualistic, and are always going to act in their best interest, and exploit whoever or whatever they can on their way to their goals. Though he sees people in such a negative light, he doesn’t think that the world or society is beyond saving. In a better world, people being selfish could be a good thing. In fact, his bid for king is a selfish pursuit, but he sees it as definitively good. To Valentin, every person has things that they “deserve” to achieve, but that some circumstances encourage people cheat in achieving those things, while others prevent any achievement whatsoever. His middle-class acquaintances were full of shit, while the people he knew in the gutter were hopeless and had lost true ambition. If everyone had access to the necessary tools to pursue their goals, more goals would be pursued and more goals would be achieved, and the world would be much more bearable.

While Valentin is quite sure of this view of class and society, shaping society is not necessarily a priority until he actually achieves his own goal and becomes King.

All Cops Are Bad

Valentin thinks that law enforcement sucks, since he’s never been in its good graces. He thinks that people in power usually prioritize efficiency over justice.

Religion (Galician Revolution Arc)

Valentin isn’t necessarily one of those “teenage atheist” sorts, but also isn’t religious. He understands that there are forces outside of human understanding, and is interested in them. His worldview is sort of predicated on vague ideas of fate and the “self,” but he thinks that faith can be used as an excuse not to take action. If you’re more obsessed with what’s happening in some unreachable “heavens” than the world around you, it’s not particularly useful. He also thinks that any God who exists is kind of shitty since he sees no way to justify the world around him. People are always going to be selfish, belief in God just hides that, which he doesn’t like because he doesn’t like hidden intentions. Additionally, he doesn’t like being told what to do and what not to do. Labelling desires as sinful contradicts his conclusion that desire is the most important part of being human. So even if God does exist and is something he could get down with, “religion” itself is not something he has any interest in. Something that he has thought a lot about is the fact that he didn’t die that day on the gallows, which he has rationalized was because of his “fate” to be king, but he has wondered whether it was a divine intervention.

Religion (Current)
Since learning of the alternate dimensions and growing interested in the workings of magic, Valentin's view of faith and religions has changed drastically. He considers himself a holistically religious person, because he doesn't worship anything, but believes in most things. He thinks that if there's a body of magic surrounding something, it has to get something right, and that studying and understanding all religions are the way to get closer to the actually correct answer of the universe. He thinks that blindly worshipping anything is a waste of time and is bad and dumb. But overall, he finds himself more intrigued and receptive to religious practices than he ever was before the Roden. Perhaps he grew slightly sensitive to the feelings of others and the importance of faith on the psyche. Most likely, however, it's because of his dumb nerd shit.

That Dumb Nerd Shit
As he's grown older and more self aware, Valentin has slowly disconnected from the idea of becoming king. He has accepted that the goal is far too unrealistic. Which is why he's replaced it with the far more reasonable task of discovering the root source of all magic and alternate dimensions, and tapping into it directly for himself. A lot of his searches for magic initially were in response to his ambition, but over the course of planeswalking and being the primary sorcerous expert on the Capricious, he's found that he prefers power in knowledge rather than in influence. When approaching a spell or a body of magic, Valentin will approach it as something that needs an extraordinary amount of attention, being just as intrigued with a magical shit-rock as he is with a sword full of demons. He enjoys figuring out HOW things work, because he's realized that it pisses him off how much people just rely on things to work without understanding the minutia of them.

Valentin has a theory currently, that has not yet been disproven, that all magic comes from the same source. Whether that source is a specific chemical reaction, an alternate dimension, a god of some sorts, or a specific fuel— either way, he's convinced that every body of thought concerning magic, while on the surface seem vastly different from one another, are related in some ways. This has been only proven as he gets closer and closer to different magical ideas. Magic, in valentin's eyes, is behind some sort of door, and every form of magic is a different "key" to open it. Prayer knocks on the door, Sorcery unlocks it, Death art picks the lock— whatever metaphorical nonsense you want to ascribe to it, the point is that they're all connected. This was only further proven by the existence of the Skull of Humyry, and the things that Ka'ai taught Valentin about Kaha sorcery, which seems to make use of spells similar to Galician sorcery, enchantment similar to that of the Tarowak spirit binders, and fuel akin to Bellatoan Death Art.