character info

Information

⦿ name Velin Qestir	⦿ gender Male
⦿ canon Final Fantasy XIV	⦿ age 25...ish
⦿ canon point 6.0	⦿ species Miqo'te (Keeper of the Moon)
⦿ primary job "Dragoon"	⦿ backup jobs CUL, SGE
⦿ Open to creating multiple-WoL AUs!

First Impressions

Mint green catboy. Wiry build, slightly above average height for a Miqo'te (which still means shorter than the average human - roughly 5'4, or 160cm). Rather long and emotive ears, a dark-tipped, short-furred tail, and noticeably pointy canines.

There's a dark green stripe (tattooed) across his nose and under his eyes, and his face has two light scars - one under his right eye, one on his left cheek. There are various other scars scattered over his body, especially on his arms. His left shoulderblade also has an eye-like tattoo.

His default outfit unless otherwise noted is ~~dungeon casual~~ a hooded purple vest with Steppe patterns embroidered on it, dark pants, and armoured feet/legs. He's functionally always wearing something covering his eyes, regardless of other attire. (It's always something possible to see through - his eyes are just especially sensitive to light.)

His demeanor is usually relaxed, but he is very emotive despite the eye-covering; it's not exaggerated but he is incredibly easy to read. When speaking, he's juuust short of sounding fluent - someone paying attention will notice him putting a bit of effort into sounding words out properly. When he's comfortable with someone he will speed up slightly and, as a consequence, occasionally mangle pronunciation.

Personality

Cat got your tongue

When it comes down to it, Velin is an extrovert! He's happiest when around others, he's quick to get lonely, and in the end he really just wants people to like him.

That's not to say he's going to be the loudest or most talkative person in the room. As compared to the stereotypical extrovert, Velin is on the quieter end. One on one or in a small group, he's cheerful, friendly, and even a little bit cheeky. (Or a lot cheeky.) In a larger party, he's easily drowned out, and he'll end up receding to the background to listen to other people.

Velin is very expressive, wearing his heart on his sleeve. It's almost all unintentional: when your family - your entire tribe - communicates solely through facial expressions and body language rather than words, you grow up emoting just as strongly back. Even now that Velin talks, the habit is impossible to break; because of this, he's terrible at lying.

With that said, Velin doesn't exaggerate his emotions, and he's decent at processing them maturely. Just because he doesn't hide what he feels doesn't mean he has to act on it; he won't lash out instantly at an insult, or break down crying at a moment's notice when upset.

What Velin isn't is the type to express feelings directly through words. Because of his upbringing, doing that feels cheap, like you're telling rather than showing - even if it's accompanied by actions. Indirectly is fine - friends will be lovingly teased, enemies will get the cold shoulder - but he'll never out and out say explicitly that he cares for someone. (If you can't pick it up from his actions, he's not trying hard enough... right?)

Because he spent a good deal of his childhood with the nagging feeling that he was an outsider, and because he so easily becomes lonely, Velin is more easily hurt than he likes to admit if he feels excluded. On the flipside, while he does want to be liked, Velin is less comfortable with real fame. Being surrounded only by people putting you on a pedestal is equally isolating.

Herding cats

In life, Velin mostly goes with the flow. He's happy to follow a sudden whim or impulse, whether his own or someone else's, and very adaptable to almost any situation he finds himself in. The downside is that he's not the best at being self-motivated: he's reactive, not proactive.

That's not to say Velin will just lie about all day if left alone - if he sees that something needs to be done and nobody's doing it, he'll absolutely take action. What he's not good at is long-term planning, and it means he's very easily roped into someone else's ideas. They know what they're going to be doing at a point in the future longer than a week or two away. On top of that, he finds it hard to say 'no' to things - he's easily guilt-tripped into feeling responsible for someone else's well-being, or he just legitimately wants to leave someone happy. (See also, above: he wants people to like him!)

In short: Velin finds his long term motivations in something external, not internal, and he relies on other people to make that "long term" part happen.

Going with the flow also doesn't mean that Velin will never choose to fight or be stubborn. Most of the time, he'll avoid conflict - someone who's rude will be brushed off and forgotten, someone who's fucking up on a small scale will just be cleaned up after without comment, and Velin's temper has a very, very long fuse. But he's dedicated to any causes he picks up, and he has a sense that some things are just right and others are just wrong. In those cases when Velin sets his mind on something, he plants his feet and absolutely refuses to budge.

As for fighting, it's, well - kind of what he does. When a problem is political or arcane, you fetch one of the other Scions. When it's something big and scary that needs to be beaten up? That's Velin. So if there's a conflict he thinks it's impossible to resolve, brute force is what he falls back on.

Curiousity killed the cat

Velin will be the first one to tell you that he's the brawn, not the brains, of any group he's in. But he's being self-deprecating - it's not that he doesn't value brains, just that Velin doesn't think of himself as smart. Raised as he was, Velin didn't have any traditional schooling, and he feels particularly inadequate when surrounded by people like Cid and Y'shtola.

In reality, Velin just doesn't have knowledge. He's no genius, but as long as he has all the necessary pieces to put something together he can generally figure it out - and sometimes he'll have sparks of serious insight. And he enjoys learning! But he's very much a street-smarts - or even more accurately, steppe-smarts - rather than a book-smarts kind of person.

Velin's curiosity extends to being perfectly willing to take risks - or straight up recklessness. He's not one to run from danger unless it's likely to involve other people. This is especially true now that he's so often relied upon to take said risks; he's come out of it with the feeling that whatever happens, he'll survive.

(At the same time, he subconsciously thinks that in the future, someday, something will get to him - he can't picture himself in old age. Velin lives very much in the moment!)

History

Velin was born to a tiny community of Keeper of the Moon Miqo'te, traveling in the Azim Steppe as part of a merchant caravan. While "Vehn"* was not an unwanted child, the merchant caravan was going through a run of tough luck and very lean times in the last couple of months before he was born. His mother was soon forced to admit they didn't have the resources to raise a child right now - even without him, it was very questionable whether they'd be able to keep feeding themselves.

The caravan's next stop was Reunion, and the Qestir tribe soon found an abandoned young Miqo'te on one of their doorsteps, with a note saying not much more than his name. Vehn - soon Velin, due to the vagaries of writing, pronunciation, and not that many people knowing Eorzean well in the Far East - was adopted by a pair of Qestiri with an adolescent daughter, and raised semi-communally like most of the Qestir tribe's children.

While there was no lack of love in Velin's childhood, particularly from his adoptive family, it wasn't an easy one. By custom, the Xaela of the Qestir tribe never speak and rarely write, believing that all words are lies and that actions speak more truly than words. This usually serves them well enough - a surprising amount can be communicated through simple emotions and gestures, especially when you know each other very well. But when your cat-eared son starts wondering why he doesn't look like any of the dragon-scaled tribe surrounding him, it gets harder and harder to explain. When he learns to talk from other Steppe tribes in an effort to communicate, he ends up feeling more and more excluded by his own.

Velin's family put forth their best efforts to make sure he always felt like one of them, but while the undercurrent of love never left, their day-to-day relationship became more strained by the year. The one family member who Velin still looked up to was his older sister, Sarnai. She was stubborn, feisty, never seemed to care when he did something taboo like talking aloud, and wanted to leave the Steppe - she, too, felt a little like an outsider. The two spent a good portion of his early teenage years wandering the Steppe together with their parents' permission, planning to travel the world once they grew up.

Unfortunately, Sarnai was older than Velin by almost six years, and she always assumed he knew she wouldn't wait that long. As soon as she hit adulthood she headed forth from the Steppe. Perhaps she meant to come back for him once he also hit adulthood - Velin, barely thirteen, only knew he felt betrayed.

Despite everything, Velin resolved to travel once he was able to head out on his own. His immediate reaction was starting to volunteer, repeatedly, to hunt or to guard Reunion. While he was too young and green to be allowed, it did lead to some Qestiri noting his interest and taking it upon themselves to give him training. The routine gave him momentum and, eventually, exposure to other tribes' fighting styles - as a Qestiri, Velin was never expected to participate in Nadaam, and was therefore treated as an interesting novelty rather than competition. All of this prepared him well for Bardam's Mettle, which he conquered at roughly the same age Sarnai had.

With his yol obtained and his self-sufficiency proven, six years down the line from his half-forgotten plan, Velin could easily have been convinced to stay in the Azim Steppe. But his "graduation" led to the tribe reminiscing about his sister, and that reminded him of his original goal. The Miqo'te had nothing in particular keeping him at home - Reunion was in good shape, his family was doing well, and while he'd had some young romantic entanglements, none had lasted for long. Almost on a whim, Velin decided once more that he was going to travel the world - more specifically, to try to find Sarnai.

He set out within a week, going first south and then west - and discovered very quickly that he loved being on the road. Traveling in turns by air (on his yol), on foot, and sometimes by hitching rides, Velin made his way through land controlled by the Garlean Empire. He found that the imperials as a whole had... mixed reactions to a non-Garlean national, especially an "uncivilized" one that sometimes had difficulty speaking. This led to him sticking primarily to remote and rural areas, and picking up more central/western habits and dress, trying to fit in. To stave off loneliness, the Miqo'te stopped with nearly every small town, traveling group, and more-tolerant Garlean outpost he saw. He often did little errands in exchange for some cash (or for food less easily obtained in the wild).

Over a year of traveling, Velin made his way slowly to Eorzea, finally flying over Baelsar's Wall in the dead of night. It was there that the story of FFXIV picked up, most of which is summarized here (with the assumption that each of the below took about a year, give or take a few months):

Six years have passed since Velin left home; until after Endwalker, his duties as Warrior of Light kept him from actively searching for his sister, though he did keep an eye and ear out for news of her.

Of note to the canon familiar: no class/job quests are canon for Velin except Sage. Despite being a Dragoon by game mechanic standards, Velin is not a second Azure Dragoon - the majority of his skills were self-taught as he practiced attacking from the back of his yol, with a little bit of dragoon training given to him in Ishgard only after the events of Heavensward. This can definitely be noticed by anyone who would be familiar with dragoon techniques - his battle style looks different to the trained eye, and he doesn't draw on the First Brood.

Additionally, during the events at the Azim Steppe during Stormblood, Velin did not claim the title of khagan. He obtained permission from his tribe to participate on behalf of the Mol, but would never even consider going for the title - instead, he made sure Cirina was the one who claimed the ovoo.

As a Sage, he's unusually physical and constantly in motion, relying on his nouliths to fling him around to give him nearly the mobility of a dragoon. He wards and heals through a combo of memorization and instincts granted by the job stone - Velin is not the one to come to if you want to develop something new! He doesn't have the background for it. He's quite good at using what he has memorized to react in the moment, though.

*Of note on Velin's gender: Velin is trans. This should not generally come up unless someone is getting into his pants - by all other indications he should read as cis male, and it's not an identity issue he struggles with like he does his adoption. (I am particularly uninterested in it being a source of angst for him.)

I headcanon/handwave that multiple Steppe tribes are accepting of gender variations and quirks (see: the Dotharl), with different approaches to how they conceptualize this. I haven't quite decided what the Qestiri approach is - they may think of Velin as another gender separate from male or female - but as far as anywhere outside his tribe is concerned, he finds it easier to be considered a trans man. Either way, Velin was treated with a permanent, magical version of hormone therapy early in life (people in FFXIV can straight up transform into frogs, magic HRT is entirely plausible).