Chryssy

'''Chryssy is one of the main characters of Tales of Concordia. She is a spirit magic user and a professional shrine priestess.'''

Backstory
Chrysanthemum was born on June 16th 14 years ago on an uncharted island. She was named after the flower of optimism and joy but was nicknamed “Chryssy” for short.

Premonitions
Her home island consisted of primitive Magus who had no contact with the outside world. Since they did not comprehend magic, they lived in a hunter gatherer society where children as young as 5 were trained to kill animals. Even as a toddler, Chryssy felt that her culture was unnecessarily violent and lacked guidance. She loved animals to the point of claiming to hear their thoughts. She would even find creatures that were stuck in traps and set them free. She was criticized for this, but she sensed the island would be in danger if they kept killing animals. Her omen would be ignored until it came to fruition.

A Plague to a Saint
As the years went by, the island’s plants began to wilt and natural disasters like earthquakes and floods started occurring almost daily. Crops went to waste and many people suffered from injuries as well as unprecedented illnesses that couldn’t be cured with medicine. Subsequently, the island was visited by Relief Missionaries from Sanctus, East Concordia. Their job is to detect spiritual disturbances in faraway lands and promote Humanitarianism accordingly. They told the islanders that the land was being ravaged by the animal spirits responding negatively to their brutal slaughtering. The only way to fix it was to have a spirit magic user cleanse the land; and the missionaries sensed the only person on the island who had the otherworldly power within her was Chryssy. Her sympathy and alleged psychic connection to animals was confirmed to be a result of her spirit magic. She was promptly trained by the missionaries to perform a cleansing dance ritual that would reverse the effects of the damage and appease the spirits. When the time came, she performed the ceremony flawlessly and the terrain was magically restored to its former glory.

You Have Been Chosen
By the time Chryssy was 14, the entire island had been converted to Humanitarianism and she was bestowed as the head shrine maiden. She helped maintain the balance between her people and the spirits to ensure bountiful crops and the preservation of sacred land. She loved what her home had become and took great pride in being a Humanitarian. But one day, Chryssy was informed that she would be leaving her island to apply her skills elsewhere. She was to become a traveling disciple who seeks out people in need of guidance to turn their lives around. Though she was reluctant to leave her family, she proudly accepted her duty and boarded a boat to Pacis intent on spreading the word of Humanitarianism to those who have lost their way.

Personality
Chryssy is devout, compassionate, and selfless. She is both a follower of the Humanitarian faith and a shrine maiden. She’s always trying her best to honor her beliefs by being the best person she can be whether that means offering a helping hand or protecting someone from harm. However her altruistic intentions often come into conflict with her naivety. She hails from an island where Humanitarianism solved every problem and everyone there abided by its rules. She came to East Concordia with this same mentality only to have her expectations dashed. Chryssy has come across complicated problems that she had no idea existed such as racism, family abuse, and organized crime. She ends up coming face to face with issues that her scriptures don’t provide answers for and she ends up having to learn that humanity isn’t as pleasant as she thought it was.

But Chryssy's most prominent trait is her almost child like innocence. She displays some rather silly mannerisms such as rocking back and forth on the heels of her feet, skipping and swinging her arms while walking, and mispronouncing certain words. And despite being a teenager, she seems to be totally oblivious to things like sexual attraction or even the process of reproduction. She believes that babies magically appear in women's stomachs when they fall in love since she's seen pregnant females but doesn't know what sex is. This untainted personality of hers often leads to comical moments that make her more self-aware friends feel awkward. She also has little experience when it comes to tasks such as money management or dressing herself since her island had no form of currency and servants would tie her kimono for her.

Chryssy is a very spiritual person to the point of her specialization actually being Spirit Magic. She loves people, animals, and nature as she believes that harm to any of these things should be avoided at all costs. She’s so sensitive to the world around her that she can actually talk to animals. This strong and natural connection to all living things is what allows her to use spirit magic so proficiently. She was trained by the Relief Missionaries to use her powers to cleanse the land of impurities which resulted in the restoration of their once crumbling society. Back on her island, Chryssy is the only person who knows how to use magic and she is treated with the utmost respect from her people as the high priestess. Her duties included leading the island in daily prayer, magically enhancing the crops, performing ritualistic dances to keep hostile spirits at bay, and providing spiritual counselling to quell any interpersonal strife that could lead to another bout of plagues.

She isn’t just an endlessly cheerful little girl that will let anything slide though. Something interesting to note is that although she’s easily fooled and taken advantage of, this is not something she takes sitting down. Her expressions of kindness are in the interest of her faith. When someone takes that for granted they aren’t just insulting her, they’re insulting everything she believes in. When this happens she will hold a grudge and openly express anger towards whoever used her in stark contrast to her usually sweet demeanor. She makes it clear that their actions have hurt her and that they have to earn her forgiveness and trust back.

Powers and Abilities
Spirit Summoning: Chryssy’s most common use of magic. She tends to summon animal spirits to fight for her since she's reluctant to use violence by her own hands. Eventually she will learn how to summon the souls of dead human beings as well and this will come in handy should anyone require testimony from a deceased party. She casts with an ancient magical fan through Nihon Buyō style dances.

Spiritual Shield/Barrier: Chryssy’s second most common use of magic. She can create shields in different shapes and sizes to protect herself, her friends, civilians, or buildings. They can be used as platforms and footholds as well. The strength of the shields can also be altered to either absorb shock damage or reflect anything that hits them. She can also make the barriers invisible to trap enemies.

Spiritual Cleansing/Exorcisms: Chryssy has the ability to purify areas or people of all negative magic. She saved her island from environmental degradation by performing a dance that allowed her magic to bring life back to the plants and appease the animal spirits. And once given the proper purifying spell, she uses this ability to take the dark magic out of the Obscuras and turn them back into their original animal forms.

Omnilingualism/Zoolingualism: Spirit magic has been known to affect Magus in different ways and give them abilities that don't usually occur in humans. In Chryssy's case, her sense of empathy is so attuned that language barriers simply do not exist to her. While her ability to speak to and understand animals is the most prominent example of this, she will also instantaneously become fluent in any unfamiliar language she hears regardless of how complicated or obscure it is. This also extends to written text as she can translate ancient dead languages in her religious scriptures.

Soul Reading: This ability is much more subdued than Chryssy's other powers since it's more or less a sixth sense. She can feel the amount of malice or evil intentions within a person's soul or overwhelming amounts of spiritual malevolence in the air. When a spiritually disturbed person gets near her, she will get a physical chill and shiver. It's worth noting that this power cannot distinguish lies since good people can also deceive others. This only happens in the presence of deep spiritual discord. She used this ability to sense the malice of the animal spirits and predict the downfall of her island.