Candide Durant

Name: Candide Durant
Class: Performer Trainee > Bard > Lore Master
Character Skill: Center
Affinity:

Personal Flaw: J’ai Pensé Que J’avais Perdu Tout/I Thought That I Had Lost It All: Whenever Candide is not within 3 spaces of a character he has a support with, he has -15 Hit and -15 Evasion.
Personal Skill: Mais Peut-Être J’ai Pu Tomber Plus/Perhaps I Had Further to Fall: Candide gains +2 DR when under 50% HP.
Preferred Stats: Lck, Speed
Weapon Proficiency: Lyrics [E], Performance [E]

Level: 1
Total Level: 1
Progression Spent: 330%/330%

HP: 17 (70%)
STR: 2 (50%) (+2)
MAG: 2 (40%)
SKL: 2 (10%)
LCK: 5 (30%)
DEF: 1 (60%)
RES: 3 (40%)
SPD: 5 (30%)
MOV: 4
CON: 3 (+2)
AID: 2


	Candide Durant was born in Arne, a kingdom in the continent off of which Tameloc lies. He was a son of a landless side branch of a noble family, the Durant family, the main branch of which owned a couple of counties in the kingdom and which was regionally notable but not an overall major player in Arne. Candide’s particular position meant that he was not in line to inherit any land, or notable positions, and thusly his life was spent preparing for a knight, and ultimately becoming one, a role to which Candide took easily, and which naturally defined his life and his role in the world.
	During the early years of his knight service, though Candide was in fact fairly notable, his duty wasn’t. He was devoted to his work, and it showed, the man developing martial prowess and a solid physique due to his dedication, even if the work he was doing was, in peacetime for the duke whose court he was at, the Duke of Lorne, simply hunting down and dealing with brigands. As his martial prowess grew, so did other talents – he became an avid reader of poetry whenever he could afford to purchase compilations of it, and he began to practice its creation as well, growing more and more skilled until he had become a veritable warrior poet, just as he had sought to be.
	He spent three or so years in this realized state, having attained most of the goals he had sought to attain – being the warrior-poet, becoming close to an ideal knight, skilled with the sword, but learned and lyrical when it was not being swung. He lived by the pen and the sword, but his success saw him being far less careful about this balance. After all, he was becoming complacent; simple brigands had ceased to pose a serious threat, and as wrapped up as he was in his own narrative, his concern for his own self-preservation in combat began to drop. He focused more on his form, both in combat and in poetry, than he did on practicality.
	And though this had suited him well enough when all he had to deal with was brigands, he eventually had something much more difficult to deal with than mere banditry. Three years ago, a war broke out between two of the dukes of Arne – a localized conflict. Even if it was one that caught the attention of many in Arne, it did not ultimately embroil the whole country, for it was not a civil war so much as ducal power conflict over a border territory. So began a relatively brief but bloody war, with ducal and county levies smashing into each other in charges and counter-charges and pike lines and skirmishes that left many dead.
	Candide the Poet-Knight was among the warriors involved in the conflict, of course, and time and time again with his then-characteristic enthusiasm he helped to lead the charge on multiple occasions. He gained some level of renown, riding or walking in to battle without hesitation, and this renown only encouraged his oft-foolhardy bravery, causing him more and more often to take the riskier tasks in battle. He leaned to the sword, and he leaned into his perceived role as a noble wielder of the sword, and he let his martial role become his end-all and be-all, settling firmly mentally into the role of he who fights and dies for his country for two years…
…and it all backfired greatly when he rode into an attack against a particularly battle-hardened group of enemy knights. Non-knight footmen, and even some greener knights, were foes that Candide could handle, but veterans of genuine conflicts were a different situation altogether, and in that battle an expertly aimed swipe of a sword passed into the single slit of his visor and reduced his eyes into a bloody mess of torn flesh. He fell from his mount, which disappeared, and though he was treated and lived he was rendered unfit for combat and refused from the battlefield thereafter.
To say that Candide was crushed would be an almost absurd understatement. He had built an entire identity, by then, over valor in combat and over duty in war towards the duke – he was supposed to be the one always on the battlefields, fighting and dying. But he hadn’t died. Instead he had been left maimed and useless. It was a shock to his system, and there was no longer a place for Candide. What is a blind knight to do, in the middle of a war – a war not desperate enough or large enough to open up strange roles?
So, Candide simply wasted away for a year or so. He did not completely shrivel up, as sometimes exercises practiced literally blindly into the air were his only reprieve, but he certainly did not remain at his physical peak. But mentally, he thought of himself as a shell that had lost it all. It was torture. He had been meant to die on the battlefield, or survive through the war as a gallant hero, not to waste away more and more in his own home, impotent and without purpose. This was the worst fate he could imagine, in that sense, and he had not imagined it before. Months later, he received the news that his duchy, Lorne, had won the conflict, but he found it difficult to summon up much enthusiasm for the news.
One thing that did muster up more enthusiasm, though, somewhat twistedly, was the tidings of upcoming brutal civil war in the nearby island of Tameloc. The rule of a rightful queen, as Candide understood it, was being challenged by a brigand who had noble backing from prominent houses who likely saw an opportunity to increase their power further. Candide hated brigands, and he HATED power-conflict-starting nobles, so this seemed like about as valorous a cause as there was to devote himself towards… and with the likely size of the war, it seemed to Candide that they would be desperate enough to accept an equally desperate one. Those in Arne had not looked favorably upon the idea of Candide somehow leveraging his talents with the pen rather than the sword for battle, but maybe the queen would have to.
That way he could die like he was supposed to, on the battlefield, and finally end his wasting away.