Characters / Legends of Empyria

Lyribeth Arcanta (usually just "Lyri") is a grad student at Valefar Academy, studying elemental spellcrafting. She's trying her best to get over her withdrawn and awkward nature so she can make something of herself. She also happens to be the third scion of the House of Arcanta, an incredibly influential family of Orlisian nobles, but for various reasons she would really rather you forget about that. In battle, she's a tanky caster who uses wands and maces.

• Affectionate Nickname: Lyri. Remy was the one who originally gave it to her because he could never remember the rest of her name, and it stuck. Most of her friends call her this, but she's consistently Lyribeth to her family.
• Apologises a Lot: As part of her anxiety disorder, Lyri apologizes reflexively for getting things wrong, awkward silences, just disagreeing with someone... She gets better about it as her character development progresses.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She's not exactly a jerk, but she is much more sarcastic and judgemental than she acts.
• Did You Think I Can't Feel?: Sonorie assumes Lyri is studying magic just to imitate her, and finds it childish and annoying. Lyri, being shy and conflict-averse, can't bring herself to refute this and just went along with it for years. She finally gets up the courage to say something about it after Sonorie's boss fight.
• Extracurricular Enthusiast: During her early Academy years, Lyri signed up for a ridiculous number of academic clubs, including a brief disastrous stint in the debate team, in an attempt to impress her parents.
• Extreme Doormat: At first. She slowly grows out of it.
• Heroic BSoD: After she finally manages to tell Sonorie how she feels in an epic tirade, her anxiety kicks back in and she stuffs herself into a corner for three hours.
• Her Own Worst Enemy: As Iris point out, Lyri has good instincts when she actually listens to herself. Unfortunately she's a bit of a doormat, and tends to defer to everyone else's judgement.
• Horned Humanoid: Less so than the rest of her family, but it's there. She usually hides them under her Nice Hat.
• The Leader: Although she's rarely at the front and center of the action, she supplies the party with plans and decisions.
• Little Miss Snarker: She's surprisingly sarcastic when she's comfortable enough to show it, especially after character development kicks in.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Growing up, her parents pretty much saw her as a backup heir who probably wasn't going to see any use, and she was raised by a rotating cast of maids and tutors. Remy was her only real friend for years.
• Non-Uniform Uniform: Her default costume is a Valefar Academy uniform. We see other characters wear the same shirt and pants, but her hat and jacket are unique. One skit reveals the jacket was an award for graduating at the top of her class.
• Opinion Flip-Flop: Lyri reflexively does this when anyone asks for her opinion to avoid conflict.
• Picky Eater: She dislikes fish, coffee, tomatoes, any sort of pickled vegetable... it's probably a result of her sheltered upbringing.
• Proper Lady: She was raised to be one, and is well-mannered and almost excessively polite no matter the situation. In front of strangers, at least.
• School Uniforms Are the New Black: Justified. She wears it outside of school as an excuse not to dress up in her family's house colors.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: Although she does her best to avert this by reading up on current issues, she often misunderstands other people's problems due to lack of context.
• Shy Finger Twiddling: It's her signature Character Tic.
• Successful Sibling Syndrome: Her sisters are a governor and a war hero. They don't even see her as a rival because the distance between them is so huge. It's part of what motivates her to prove herself.
• Sweet Tooth: Her favourite dishes are all desserts.
• Third-Person Person: In Japanese, she usually uses the hyper-formal watakushi, but occasionally slips into the cutesy version of this trope to show the audience she's hiding a childish personality under her refined manner. In the English version, this is largely Lost in Translation.
• The Un-Favourite: Lyri is very academically accomplished, but can't hold a candle to her ridiculously overachieving sisters, so her parents barely remember she exists most of the time. It's fueled some resentment, to say the least.

Lyri's childhood friend and fellow Valefar Academy student in the summoner track. Although an insanely talented summoner who can control hundreds of monsters at once, he prefers to make friends with them and feed them little snacks rather than make them fight. He's taken years off his professors' lifespans. Rather unusually for the male lead, Remy is a support caster and healer, channeling his magic through paper tags.

• Alliterative Name: Remy Reynard.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: His parents seem to have an endless supply of anecdotes about Remy's youth and how cute his ears were, but Remy actually doesn't mind at all and enthusiastically goes along with it.
• Animal Motifs: Foxes. His name's Reynard, his parents resemble foxes, and he has a DLC costume with a kitsune mask.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Downplayed. Since the age of majority is 20 in Empyria, Remy's technically the only child in the party - and he certainly acts like it. The rest of the party tends to humour his shenanigans more than they would for each other, though they still take his contributions seriously.
• Boys Like Creepy Critters: Remy genuinely finds all monsters adorable, including the ones that look like oversized murderous bugs or lizards.
• Bully Magnet: He was a bit of one as a kid, due to his general weirdness and the fact that his parents are a subspecies rarely seem in Valefar. He didn't let it get to him, thouogh.
• Childhood Friends: With Lyri. They met when they were both around 10 and have since become best friends.
• Dark-Skinned Blond: White hair and dark skin. Interestingly, one of his parents has white fur and both of them seem to have brown skin from what little we can see of it, so this might be a genetic thing that just isn't obvious in other people with Furtur ancestry because they're, uh, big humanoid wolves.
• Expert in Underwater Basket Weaving: Remy has picked up a bunch of random skills out of boredom. Some of these come in handy on the adventure, but most (flower arranging, ping pong, origami...) are absolutely useless.
• Fleeting Passionate Hobbies: This is a core part of Remy's character. He's not sure what he wants to do with his life, so every few weeks to months he picks up a new hobby, gets really good at it, then decides it's boring and drops it.
• Fluffy Tamer: Unlike other summoners, he genuinely loves his monsters and dotes on them like they're precious pets instead of just using mana to control them. Even the fleshy abominations and the inexplicable floating cubes.
• Good Parents: Uncommonly for the genre, Remy's parents are both loving and alive. You can even visit and do favours for them in certain sidequests.
• Innocently Insensitive: Remy doesn't know how to take a hint, and he often goes overboard with his shenanigans and makes people uncomfortable. He's actually more aware of this than he seems, but he actively chooses to prioritize himself first since he doesn't truly trust anyone else.
• Keet: Not small, but definitely hyperactive, annoying, and loveable.
• The Lancer: The goofy and straightforward idiot hero to Lyri's more uptight and thoughtful approach. The two of them are best friends and inspire each other with their opposing philosophies.
• Multicolored Hair: He has white hair that fades to grey-brown at the tips.
• Pointy Ears: The signature feature of humans born in Valefar, though his seem to be somewhat longer and more expressive than most other Valefar characters we see.
• Raised by Wolves: Sort of. He's an unusual kid with an affinity for nature and his parents are big wolflike creatures, but due to the weirdness of the setting they are human and his birth parents. Some of Lyri's friends call him "wolf boy" in reference to this trope.
• Skipping School: He did this a lot even before he decided to tag along on Lyri's research trip without school approval. If you go to the Academy before leaving Valefar and talk to his teachers, Remy will let them know what he's doing, and they just respond with bored resignation.
• Stock Shōnen Hero: Although not the main character, as a big-hearted and straightforward kid with a rare special ability who is shockingly clever when he puts his mind to it, he was almost certainly intended to fit this archetype. Deconstructed somewhat - his heroic stubbornness stems from a selfish streak and alienates him from other people.
• Summon Magic: He's a summoner by blood. He doesn't use his summons to fight, though; instead, they just wander around the world and bring him items as part of an idle minigame.
• Super Gullible: Falls into this at times. Aster especially enjoys seeing how many of their ridiculous lies they can get him to believe.
• The Watson: Although he's also an Academy student, he has a habit of skipping class and not paying attention, allowing Lyri to explain the intricacies of the magic system to him and the audience.
• You Didn't Ask: Being an easygoing and spacey guy with a lot of random talents, Remy is prone to this, usually following it up with a "oh, haven't I mentioned it before?". He turns out to be the best cook in the party, for one thing.

A professor at Valefar Academy and an endless source of gossip for the students. They're absurdly young for a professor, nobody's ever heard of them before their academy work, they never give straight answers to questions about themself... the list goes on. Lyri asked them to supervise her research project on a whim, and it quickly becomes apparent that whatever they're hiding is deeply related to the mysterious goings-on. A tinkerer and magitech expert, they use a magitech rifle of their own invention in battle.

• Absent-Minded Professor: A textbook example. They get so absorbed in their work that Iris has to regularly remind them to eat.
• Ambiguous Gender: In the original game, they're never referred to with gendered pronouns one way or the other. The Barnett restoration sidequest line features an NPC from their hometown who calls them a girl, and they respond with uncomfortable silence; the general implication seems to be that they're DFAB nonbinary, or possibly a trans man. The Fan Translation uses they/them pronouns for them.
• Constantly Changing Name: "Aster" is at least their third name, considering they went by Valerian at the secret lab and have confirmed that's not their birth name either. Sometimes they joke about changing it again, especially after Abel tracks them down.
  Aster: I suppose I shouldn't. We'll run out of flowers at this rate.
• Creepy Monotone: Part of the reason most students are too intimidated to talk to them is that they sound unsettlingly monotone at all times. It's not an affectation or anything; they're just like that.
• Exotic Eye Designs: Their left eye's iris has a magic circle inscribed in it. It's a mark they got at the secret lab that serves as a password to certain identity-confirming magitech devices, like their guns.
• Fake Defector: When Aster disappears after a confrontation with Abel, Iris claims they were kidnapped and Lyri privately wonders if they'd willingly changed sides, but it turns out to be this trope.
• Family Theme Naming / Floral Theme Naming: With Iris. Intentional in-universe, as both of them are trans and coordinated names.
• The Gadfly: Their naturally deadpan demeanor makes everything they say sound serious, and they have a lot of fun seeing how much they can get people to believe with it.
• Gadgeteer Genius: They pioneered an entire field of mana theory that led to an explosion of new magitech. Downplayed compared to most examples, though, in that even though they've built a few things for their own use or to serve as proof of concept, they're more of a theoretical scientist and are content to leave the actual inventing to engineers.
• Hiding Behind Your Bangs: Of the scheming and shy varieties. It also literally conceals a Magical Eye.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: They've always been interested in magic since they were a kid, but the spells they came up with were so high-concept and complicated that nobody else could understand or cast them. Even in the present, they still have a hard time relating to other people and rarely find anyone else they can really discuss their interests with. They attribute it more to their mental illness, though, and believe their intelligence wouldn't have been a barrier if they'd known how to talk to people.
• Lack of Empathy: They struggle to see most other people as people. It's led to some events they're not proud of and they do their best to keep it in check.
• Mad Mathematician: Although their field of study is technically a physical science, it's basically a magic version of combinatorics and cryptography, and they definitely approach it from a mathematician's mindset.
• Mage Marksman: Their rifle is a magitech device that fires spells.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Since Aster has no mana reserves of their own, their mana bar represents the mana stored in their gun cartridges instead. It can't be filled with consumable items, but refills slowly on its own, and can be charged quickly by standing in/near a spell's area of effect.
• Muggle with a Degree in Magic: Literally. It's in theoretical arcane interactions, to be specific.
• No Social Skills: Has a hard time with social cues. They've learned to be better about it than when they were little, but they're just following the rules they've sussed out and have very little intuitive understanding of others' feelings.
• One-Man Industrial Revolution: Downplayed. They discovered some very important theory that was crucial for the invention of much of the present magitech, but other people used it to actually invent the things.
• Regenerating Mana: Since their mana meter represents their rifle's charge, it cannot be restored by consumable items but slowly recharges on its own.
• Ultimate Job Security: Aster is brilliant, but a terrible teacher. They have a hard time remembering which things normal people know and which things they have to teach, and get easily distracted and go on long tangents when a student asks them a question. They were banned from teaching classes after their first attempt, but the Academy keeps them on as a research professor because of their considerable research and development talents.
• Un-Sorcerer: Has a rare Fictional Disability that basically amounts to this. They can't sense or manipulate magic at all.
• Disability Immunity: Downplayed in that they can still be hurt by magical attacks, but since they can't sense magic, they don't feel the crushing magical pressure of major spirits. When the party meets Sylph and everyone else is stunned by their aura, Aster skips right up to ask some questions about the structure of the tower.

Iris is technically a private investigator, but her strict moral standards mean she ends up doing charity work far too often for her own good. Although she's easygoing and helpful, take advantage of her at your own peril; she has no patience for that sort of thing and can punch clean through a brick wall. She's sticking with the party so her baby sibling Aster doesn't forget to eat and die out there. Uses both a greatsword and magic in a unique self-taught style.

• Beware the Nice Ones: She can be very scary when she wants to, as people who try to take advantage of her will quickly learn.
• The Big Guy: She's the largest member of the party by far, and the one with the highest physical attack.
• Big Sister Instinct / Knight Templar Big Sister: Big time. Threatening Aster in her presence is a great way to net a one-way ticket to hell. Her character arc actually deconstructs this trope; it stems from her fear of losing Aster rather than any real need for protection, and she goes so overboard with it that it smothers them and makes both of their lives worse. After this comes to a head during the secret lab arc, the siblings have a long discussion and she starts to work through it.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Iris goes so out of her way to help people that she rarely ever takes any paying jobs as a detective, instead spending most of her time doing nice things around the community for chump change or promises for a favor. Aster comments that as much as they forget to eat, Iris can be even worse about keeping her priorities straight.
• Coat Cape: In her default outfit.
• Cool Big Sis: To Aster. Later ends up serving this role to Lyri as well, in contrast to Lyri's actual sisters who are terrible to her.
• Declaration of Protection: Toward Aster, about eight years before the start of the plot. Aster is less than thrilled that she still treats them like a kid, even though they can hold their own in combat now.
• Effortless Amazonian Lift: When they need to move fast, Iris will scoop Aster up and haul them over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
• Excellent Judge of Character: When it comes to discerning people's intentions, her instincts are almost supernatural. The party quickly learns to trust her first impression of everyone they meet.
• The Face: She's usually the one to take the lead in conversations, since she has good intuition and almost always knows what to say.
• Family Theme Naming / Floral Theme Naming: With Aster. Intentional in-universe, as both of them are trans and coordinated names. Appropriately, the iris signifies hope and good news in hanakotoba.
• I Will Find You: Iris's first adventure as a detective was when she left home to find Aster and get them back from the secret lab.
• Magic Knight: Iris has access to melee attacks, offensive magic, and healing magic. She traveled by herself when she started out as an adventurer, so she had to learn to be a one-man adventuring party.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: She introduces herself as a private investigator, but NPCs in Valefar comment that she hasn't actually been out on a case in months. Turns out it's because she only takes morally sound requests and those are hard to come by as a PI.
• The Pollyanna: Despite having some pretty depressing stuff in her past, Iris is unfailingly cheerful and still tends to put others' needs ahead of her own. Part of it is she feels obligated to put on a brave face for Aster's sake, but mostly it's just how she genuinely is.
• Self-Care Epiphany: Has one of these after the secret lab arc.
• Smack on the Back: Fond of doling these out, and she slaps hard. Aster tends to pitch straight forward into the dirt if they're not expecting it.
• The Social Expert: A nice variant. She has the best people skills out of the entire party, and uses them to make friends and put people at ease.
• Took a Level in Cheerfulness: Lyri is shocked to learn that Iris was actually very shy and reclusive as a kid. It's implied this is why she takes such an interest in Lyri in the first place: she reminds her of herself when she was younger.
• Tragic Keepsake: Her Infinity +1 Sword Daybreaker is the only thing left of her hometown, but she sold it before the story began for adventuring funds. There's a lategame sidequest where you can buy it back for her.