Delphinnia jen Cassius DELPHINA SNOW
THE BACKSTORY
aka: so she's actually Garlean, folks...
Third eye and everything! At least… she used to have a third- Wait! That’s not relevant to this section! Wait for the next one. You’re the kind of person who skips to the end of books, aren’t you?It isn’t particularly hard to believe, even without seeing the third eye. She’s 5’10” tall, in spite of a frequent slouch or other such attempt to be smaller and less seen. Though quite thin and seemingly not as sturdy as some of her countrymen with a frighteningly pale complexion, she could maybe be recovering from being sick or something, and her attempts to mask the accent aren’t amazing, especially if you’re trained to see through that kind of thing.Delphina will be quick to assure you, if you’re someone who comes upon this information, that she has no love for the Empire. She’s not like to talk about it without some prompting, but her own family subjected her to experiments meant to further their biological and magiteknical advancements in the field of creating “magitek knights” or something similarly named. Delphina doesn’t remember. Or she doesn’t want to talk about it. And she’ll say that much sometimes, especially to other people who have suffered similar fates at the hands of the Empire. And she’ll apologize! She’s usually very apologetic, even though she herself eventually fell victim as well.But she doesn’t hide her hatred for those still loyal to the old ways. In fact she can become downright frigid heehee about the subject.
deeper investigation - for plot purposes!
Those with access to remaining Garlean records or perhaps with access to a particular set of the capital city’s ruins could possibly uncover that Delphina is actually Delphinnia jen Cassius. Well, she was. According to most records, she died accompanying an undercover mission into Eorzea many turns prior to Garlemald’s fall. Missing in action.That’s what the records say.The Cassius family that Delphinnia hailed from had the unique gift of being able to manipulate aether and use magic. Existing as a family trait that surfaced ages before Garlemald became a united empire, the trait was isolated and eventually produced as a serum that would ensure it to be passed on to any of the recipient’s offspring. Though able to cast a variety of spells, they had a proclivity for fire magic. With ever-insatiable appetites, their scientists and researchers had been bioengineering their own concept of Magitek Knights, a term referenced in the closely-guarded and largely secret family records though by no means one used exclusively by their family. They saw themselves as ever-evolving Knights seeking to perfect the concept, nebulous though it might’ve been even then.But even engineering the feat at all comes to this day at a dark cost. Members of the Cassius family are eerily similar in appearance, to the point where it’s hard to distinguish between those born of the family at a glance. Though not exact clones or even identical twins in appearance, it’s nonetheless a somewhat eerie trait: alabaster skin, blood red eyes and jade green hair with the same sharp, angular features.And that eeriness isn’t the end of it. In fact it’s somewhat tame in comparison to the truth.In the most secret levels of the family’s laboratories and warehouses, those members of the family not useful or skilled to the standards they set for their offspring are, as the Cassius family refers to them, “harvested to serve in all ways that they were inept.”Thus are the weak or unmotivated sent to the laboratories for mundane medical reasons, never to return until their death is reported. For the records, of course. An illness, perhaps. Or a casualty of war. It isn’t hard to explain it away.Delphinnia jen Cassius was gifted but lacked the motivation or the killer instinct to serve the family to which she had been born. She was rendered unconscious for years on end, awakened only for physical reports and to determine how much life was left in her body before it died and would need to be discarded. It was during these experiments that her third eye was removed surgically, the hole it left widened and framed with magitek circuitry surrounding a dull lens. She was to be an attempt at making a knight skilled in a magic the Cassius clan did not have a strong talent for: ice. Her somewhat muted appearance marks her as distinct from other members of her family, a side effect of the experiments.When the chaos of the end time came to Garlemald, Delphinnia’s “luck” would have her in the process of being roused for annual vital checks. It was during this time and chaos that she made her escape from the facility, though there APPEAR to be no remaining recordings of the facility from which she fled, leaving the how something of a mystery……to which the woman now called Delphina Snow is not speaking. She was rescued by a member of the Ishgardian envoy at Camp Broken Glass and taken in by an older knight of Ishgard and his wife, who retired after the conflict there lessened.
