User Profile

This is a role-playing journal for jardin_du_ciel maintained by firebird_88. Sparda is copyright Capcom.

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Character's Name: Sparda / “Legendary Dark Knight”
Series/Fandom: OC (technically Devil May Cry)
Original/Alternate: Original

Age: 3000+ (Looks to be around his late 30’s.)
Gender: Male
Species: Demon/”Devil (A rare and vaguely humanoid demon from “Hell”, the parallel ‘dark’ world to the human’s ‘light’ world. Also see appearance and abilities.)
Appearance: Sparda has two main forms, a human form and his natural, demonic form.

In the form of a human, he is a very tall, powerfully-built man with short, smooth, slicked-back white hair and pale blue eyes. He prefers to dress in the Victorian style clothing, usually with a large jewel around his neck, a long coat and a fancy cravat that hands over his sternum. His favorite attire consists of a long violet coat and matching pants with a red underjacket, red cuffs and elaborate gold linings. He wears this outfit only during formal occassions, and when in private and away from other people, he prefers to wear a simple poet’s shirt, a simpler crava and black slacks. Also, though he has perfect vision, he always wears a round monocle over his left eye. He also wears white gloves so he can keep physical touches to a minimum, being that he was not raised in a world that believes a touch is a good thing. (Also see abilities.)

As a demon, Sparda looks like stuff that nightmares are made of. Though tiny by demon standards (about the size of a large man), he has two pairs of insect-like wings, hooved feet and clawed hands that could easily rip a human from limb to limb. Humanoid in shape only, Sparda is covered by overlapping purple and brown scales and has a collar of gold armor growing around his neck. He has massive, spiraling, ram-like horns that curl out and over his shoulders, each one tipped in brilliant red. A jewel of the same color grows between vertically his eyes, looking like a third eye as it reflects the natural scarlet glow of Sparda’s slit-like eyes. He has gold skulls growing out of his knee caps, though it is uncertain if these are actually part of his body or armor he had picked up along the course of his long lifetime. Most of the time, Sparda has a distinct purple aura around him when he is in his demon form, though the exact shade of this glow can change color with his mood.

Personality: Outwardly, Sparda is tolerant and kind to strangers and friends alike, but there is a sense of reserve around him that both commands attention and baffles those who attempt to get closer to him. Cunning and observant, he doesn’t speak more than he has to and prefers to observe the world around him in relative quiet. He keeps others at an arm’s distance mainly for their own good --after all, he cannot die, and any relationships, friendship or otherwise, that he develops with mortals is bound for doom. Extremely reluctant to develop real attachments to anyone save for his immediate blood relations, Sparda is used to being alone. It saddens him that he has lived so many generations amongst men and has seen so many great friends fall around him, but he understands that many mortals cannot fathom the burden of his immortality. He often spends his time surrounded by books and a nice cup of tea because he has an insatiable curiosity about the human world that makes him constantly want to learn more. This often leads people to believe that he is bookish and rather unathletic. (He also has a habit of cleaning his monocle when deep in thought or distressed. If he is extremely distressed, he may not show it through his face but may accidentally shatter the monocle while cleaning it.)

On the other hand, he is fiercely loyal to those he deems worthy of his attention. Though he did not have children until very recently, he is --like many demon parents-- an extremely protective father that is willing to sacrifice life and limb for his nestlings. It is an uncontrollable urge of his that comes from the fact that in Hell, demons openly eat other demons and any nestling without overprotective parents will, without fail, die. His children are also his greatest weaknesses, since he is willing to do anything --absolutely anything-- to protect them.

Unlike most demons, however, Sparda is unique in that he is a gentleman. Impeccably polite and honorable to a fault, he is both courageous and fair, believing that even the underdog deserves a chance. He feels drawn to the weak and deems it his responsibility to protect them if need be. He is also surprisingly humble in that he cares nothing for his own reputation and is willing to risk everything to do what he believes is right and just. (See history.) Due to this humility, he cares very little about what others think of him and does not actively go out to change anyone’s opinion on himself, as wrong or misguided as they may be.

Sparda’s pet peeves mainly involve any disruption to peace around him. Thousands of years of living in both the demon and the human world have also made him very wise and he rarely loses his temper, but he greatly dislikes bickering and needless bloodshed and will use everything in his power to avert them if need be. This is one of the few situations where he is willing to use force (or to raise his voice) if necessary.

Of course, he has a darker side as well. He does his best to hold the typical demonic instincts of destruction and death at bay, but if caught up in the bloodlust of battle, his instincts may get the better of him. This is especially true if his family is threatened, but at the moment, he remembers none of that. Most of the time, he controls these urges by through his iron self-control.

Skills and Abilities: As a demon from Hell, Sparda is immortal. His demonic blood gives him supernatural strength and stamina, and he has extremely fast healing abilities that keep him from suffering any fatal injuries. Thus, he cannot die unless there is an extreme circumstance that prevents him from healing or has zapped him of all his strength. His fighting skills are --literally-- legendary, but most of the time he prefers to use his speed, his wit and his magic to defeat enemies much larger than he is (which are, unfortunately, most of the demons in Hell.)

His senses are also hypersensitive, but his strongest sense is smell. Demons come from a world filled with darkness and bizarre lighting, so smell, not sight, is the preferred way of recognition. (Since many demons have shape-shifting abilities, he is not inclined to believe what he sees.) Even in human form, he tends to recognize others through their individual scent and not by physical appearance.

He also comes with a long list of demonic powers, but he has become famous for his ability to perform extremely powerful magic. He has created massive, ancient spells --especially those over the gates that cross between Hell and the human world-- that no demon or human has, so far, managed to break. (It is yet unknown whether Sparda himself knows how to break them, though it’s more likely that he simply doesn’t want to.) He also has a love of working with jewels, using them to trap parts of his own power inside to aid the strength of another individual or one of his own spells. However, these jewels can be a certain point of weakness if they are missing or destroyed, especially if they are necessary for him to complete a spell or to activate a weapon.

Also notable is, of course, his ability to change shapes. He can technically morph into any living creature and imitate its ways, but he doesn’t like to do it often since his powers are greatly limited outside of his demon form. Though he adopts his human façade often to ‘fit in’, the human body limits his strength and his magic abilities to a fraction of what they should be.

Like the monsters from fairy tales, Sparda’s true form chills the air in the immediate vicinity to what his demonic body considers a ‘comfortable’ temperature. This is a uncontrollable part of being a demon and he hides it decently well in his human form, though anyone who touches his skin will notice that his body temperature is not nearly as high as that of a human’s. (This is another reason why he wears gloves.)

Not truly a ‘power’, but his long life also has gifted Sparda with an excellent grasp of human languages. Having lived amongst many different civilizations throughout the years, he remembers multiple modern languages and even long-dead languages like Latin and Egyptian, but in jardin_du_ciel, he is incapable of remembering why he can read and speak such languages and simply knows that he can.

History: (partially based on the games/manga and partially made up)
Born in Hell like any other demon, Sparda was an ambitious creature who left the nest as soon as he could to forces with the reigning lord of Hell, a three-eyed, massive demon called Mundus. As Mundus’s right hand, Sparda learned everything a demon lord needed to know --magic, tactics, brutality, bloodlust, destruction and the pain of humiliation.

Then, when he began to oversee Mundus’s plans to overtake the human world, the demon found his curiousity piqued and made secret trips to the human world to learn about the creatures that Mundus so despised. Strangely, Sparda found himself drawn to them. They were, for the most part, peaceful, helpless creatures that valued unfamiliar things like love and friendship above any sort of magic or brute strength. He grew to appreciate their art and their ways, to appreciate the way they sang and danced and wrote books for the fun of it and not for any ulterior motive. Best of all, humans knew something that demons did not --natural death. Death made things in human life so much more valuable and so much more beautiful in their own eyes. It was an appreciation for life that demons lacked and that Sparda appreciated.

All in all, humans were silly little things, but Sparda grew to love them. He wanted to protect them. It was Sparda who, when the war was launched from the dark world of Hell into the light world of the humans around two thousand years ago, turned his back on his own people and fought to save the human race. It was he who defeated countless demon lords and locked up the countless gates that connected the two worlds. It was he who became a hero amongst the humans and, in return, was banished and hated by all of demon kind.

However, he seemed to have deemed the sacrifice necessary since he believed saving the humans was the right thing to do. After spending centuries protecting the spells that he had weaved and leading human armies against Mundus and his furious armies, Sparda eventually drifted away from the spotlight and wandered the human world, learning as much as he could about this place that he now was forced to call home. He lived amongst the ancients for quite some time, learning the human ways and the human language from strangers that were kind enough to teach it to them. He learned art and poetry from the Romans and the Greeks and then learned human martial arts from the ancient Chinese and Japanese. Along the way, he met whole towns and groups followers that looked up to him as a leader, most of them descendants of demons even older than he was who had long traveled to the demon world and fell in love with humans. These people are usually credited as the ones that kept his legend alive and passed it on to other people who wanted to know Sparda’s story.

In modern times, Sparda fell in love with and married a beautiful blond woman by the name of Eva. Against all odds, they had half-demon children, a pair of twins. Fathering children was the last thing Sparda was known to do --after that, the legends are silent. Most agreed that he died in one last fight against Mundus, sacrificing himself to seal off the gates between Hell and the human world to keep his children and the rest of humankind safe from the likes of demons. Some, however, especially amongst his followers, believe that he was simply trapped in captivity in the demon world and was simply biding his time to escape and help his sons make the world safe.

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