see things as they are

🦋 OOC Information

Name: Jesse
Contact: cherto | PM | pactoris @ disco
Age: 35+
Other Characters: Vanessa Ives
Invitation: Current player!
Permissions: Here!

🦋 IC Information

Character Name: Verso
Age: Over 100
Canon: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Canon Point: Act 2, just before reaching the Monolith.
Character History: Wiki link!
Canon Abilities:

✦ As part of Aline's Painted family, Verso is immortal, which he loathes. He can live forever, surviving poison or even being cut in twain (something he's learned to use with dark humor).
✦ Lore-wise, he is meant to be stronger and faster than most humans, able to hold his own against Renoir solo, and fell powerful Nevrons to make Expedition 33's traversal easier.
✦ Verso fights with two blades he can summon, a sword and dagger, wielding Chromatic energy up close and from afar. He fights very acrobatically, with lots of jumping, spinning, and nonstop movement in the battlefield.
✦ His abilities revolve around gaining ranks to achieve 'Perfection', reflecting that in his own eyes he is never quite 'good enough' until he can maneuver every act of his into something deemed perfect.
✦ His abilities also involve a certain amount of sacrificial acts, either through intentionally becoming injured or taking on the ailments of others, mirroring the self-sacrifice that he carries on from the real Verso, while also showcasing how little regard he has for his own life.
✦ Like P!Alicia and P!Renoir, he may have other powers that set him apart from 'normal' humans, but they are never expanded upon so those can stay vague and hidden just the way he likes.

Inventory: Grubby Expeditioner clothing, and a letter from his sister. Technically can summon a sword and dagger, and...a piano bc you know priorities.

🦋 Personality

DEAD

Verso knows death more intimately than he knows life.

Not only the clean kind—the narrative kind—but the slow undoing of meaning. The real Verso died in fire, rescuing Alicia. That death meant something. Now, he’s been denied that sort of meaning, of purpose, of rest, unless he can once again save his family.

Painted Verso is the afterimage of a boy who burned for love. His mother’s grief resurrected him as pigment, and made him immortal—not in a sacred way, but in a way that denies everyone closure. He exists in a world of ghosts made flesh, caught in a performance of family, each gesture haunted by the knowledge that it was never real.

He lives as though he is already dead: detached, quietly sardonic, but not without ache. The knowledge of what he is—a facsimile in someone else’s mourning—unmoors him. Once he learned the truth, that ache turned to guilt, and guilt into rot. His existence is the prolonging of someone else's denial. He cannot call that life. It’s make-believe, and he’s tired of it all.

And yet, there is still that old flicker—some instinctive tenderness, some reflex to reach out, especially when he sees someone else circling despair. He encourages autonomy in others because he envies it. Their hope, their forward motion. He remembers what it felt like to believe in living, whether or not that was ever real.

To friends, he can seem encouraging. Nearly hopeful, even. But inside, there is only longing for an ending that matters. He wants to die—not out of spite, but out of weariness. Not because he doesn’t value what was, but because he values what could be for those in the real world. Because to finally die would mean peace—for himself, yes, but also for everyone else.

GLASS

Since learning the truth, Verso has lived behind glass.

Not just a pane, but a prism—splintering his identity into angles he can no longer reconcile. For much of his existence, since learning the truth, he watches the world like a man on the other side of something sacred. Not part of it, only proximate. There is Maelle through the window, Alicia through the mirror. The Expeditions framed in motion. His mother’s grief reflected back in a world she refused to let die.

He is always watching, never stepping fully into view. Sometimes, it is out of guilt. Other times, it is preservation. The truth has fractured him: he is no longer the original, but a series of mirrored traits curated from love, memory, and desperation. When he looks at himself, he cannot tell how much is Verso Dessendre and how much is a painted imitation of someone else's loss.

Still, he moves. He speaks. He intervenes. He lies. From just off-center, he guides. The cracks in him are artfully veiled, but they are there. A mirror can reflect clarity, but it can also shatter you with your own image. In his most honest moments, he cannot look at himself without a flicker of revulsion—at what he’s done, what he is, and the truth he conceals in the name of mercy.

Yet there is something strangely hopeful about glass, too. It separates, but it also allows light in. He can still see them—his sister, Maelle, the Expedition—still feel drawn to them, even if the connection is filtered. Even if he knows that any warmth they may feel toward him is for someone he can only mimic.

He would give anything to step through the glass and mean it. But he knows what happens to illusions when they touch reality. They break.

FRIENDLY

Verso is friendly the way a mask is smiling.

His warmth seems effortless, his charm disarming—an invitation into ease that belies the complexity underneath. He knows how to make others feel seen, how to use sincerity with uncanny precision. A survival trait refined through years of not being able to tell people who—or what—he really is. It’s not always deception. Sometimes it’s instinct. He isn’t heartless. Just the opposite. Verso puts his heart into everything he does, whether that means being cruel or friendly…or both.

He keeps a deliberate distance behind the friendliness, careful never to offer too much of himself. It’s not out of coldness. It’s fear. Intimacy requires honesty, and honesty reveals rot. He knows how quickly admiration can curdle into horror when people learn what he’s done in order to reach this point, and what he has yet to do to reach the end.

Still, there’s a softness that lingers beneath the practiced demeanor, a flicker of the man who once loved playing piano just to make his little sister smile. Someone who can jest without menace. The man who once thought life was something that could be beautiful, spontaneous, true. His charm is not entirely an act—it’s a vestige. And when he chooses to wield it as a weapon, to guide others toward what he believes is mercy through half-truths and smiles, he tells himself it’s for their sake as much as his.

He walks a tightrope between comfort and control. To some, he is a friend, a protector, a guide. To a select few, he is something more complicated—an echo of someone they loved, a painful lesson given form.

He teases so others won’t look too closely at his silence.

DANCE

There was a time when dancing was something he did with joy, not strategy. Back before knowledge collapsed the illusion of his life, movement meant something different. His body remembered rhythm not as manipulation, but as elegant expression. He could close his eyes and lose himself in both dance and the music that guided it—waltzes and slow turns, or fingers trailing over keys. Piano, too, had been part of that grace: a way to bring beauty into a room without needing to speak.

But that version of himself is as gone as the boy he was meant to replace. What remains is someone who moves through life like a dancer still—carefully, deliberately, every step calculated not to stumble, every gesture meant to charm. The music now is silence; the applause, suspicion. He doesn’t dance to be one with life, anymore. He dances to survive just long enough to reach the end of the song.

This careful choreography runs through everything: how he guides the Expedition, how he withholds and reveals just enough truth to shape their path, how he performs sincerity with a tilt of his head and a softened voice. The elegance never left him, but it curdled. What once connected him to others now distances him from them.

Still, the ache for those lost rhythms never fully leaves. In rare moments, soft moments, he’ll remember a melody on his piano or recall the echo of a half-step turn, and something old in him stirs—a part that once believed in joy for its own sake, in the connections that it could create for himself and others. Something in him will always miss that life, the one he lived and the one he didn’t, but that, too, passes. He can only move forward with well-choreographed steps.

SIN

Sin isn't a word Verso uses, but he does carry it. He wouldn’t call what he’s done evil. Necessary, perhaps. Ugly, certainly. But sin implies a choice made freely. He no longer believes he has a choice. Not once he learned what he was, and then how others refused to accept that reality.

Still, there is regret. Julie. Gustave. Aline. Alicia, his Alicia. …Maelle. Each a different kind of betrayal. He killed Julie with his own hands—because he was cornered, because she wouldn’t stop. He let Gustave die because it made Maelle easier to guide. He lied to her. He withholds his sister’s letter, the truth, knowing it might soften the Expedition’s resolve against the Paintress. He can't afford that.

His love is tainted by strategy. His morality, by grief. Every time he tries to protect someone, it ends in manipulation. And yet he still wants to be a protector. Still wants to save what’s left of his family—even if that means dooming their copies, even if that means playing the villain to ensure the real ones survive. He may resent Aline for creating him, pity her and Renoir for breaking the world in their sorrow, but he can’t stop loving her or any of them, not really. Even the pain of what they’ve done binds him to them, as he betrays his painted family and friends.

His sin is not just what he’s done—it’s that he understands it all, and does it anyway. It’s that he will continue to do it. It’s that he can smile while lying, comfort while deceiving, kill while weeping. The painted Verso wasn’t meant to carry such burdens, but it’s a part of his nature that he can’t deny.

🦋 Fae Court

✦ Dark Court
✦ Day Court
✦ Dawn Court

Ability: Do you want your character to gain the ability of their court?
3) Yes, but they will buy their court's ability on credit.
↳ (Technically he could offer to trade his immortality, but I refuse to let him get off that easily so maybe he's just got a moment of dumb and doesn't even consider that an option, or I'd get extra laughs at his expense if the Fae refuse it for a trade.)

🦋 RP Samples

✦ TDM Toplevel
✦ Maelle, Clea, Renoir