▼ OVERVIEW ▼

"Me? A simpler soul you'll never meet. Straightforward as a blade and twice as sharp."

▶ A fiery young son of Garlemald was shipped off to war with a cocksure grin and a thirst for glory, brash naivete and sly propaganda fuelling a hundred heroic daydreams. Against odds and expectation, he survived that crucible, though his dreams were long reduced to kindling and the taste of ashes lingered fresh on his tongue. But at least the grin remained.A thorn in the side of both enemies and commanding officers alike, Cyras wears his contradictions on his sleeves: a dedicated officer with a roguish swagger. A decorated loyalist with a disdain for authority. An affable warmonger fresh out of wars to fight. For all his well-groomed military bearing and straight-shooting candor, a wildness dances behind his eyes; reckless bravado and pugnacious pride howling for the next kick of adrenaline.▶ Likes: Piloting, duelling, magitek, personal grooming, cooking, opera, intensive workouts, conflict.▶ Dislikes: Waiting, superstition, the Contingent, Eorzean pizza, bureaucracy, overbearing COs.

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▼ SPECIFICATION ▼

"Not saying I'm the best machina jockey in the Empire, but you'll be hard-pressed to find better."

Training & Expertise:
▶ Lantaeva's service records, should such a thing have survived the fall of Garlemald, paint him as one of the Empire's foremost warmachina pilots — though he'd consider that a modest assessment of his capabilities. Egomania aside, his dogfighting prowess is second-to-none. He was selected as a test pilot for a Ist Legion iteration of the Gabriel. Lacking the more advanced IVth-make neural interface and hypertuned physiology, he compensated with lightning reflexes, reckless audacity and sheer grit.▶ Lantaeva has demonstrated advanced capabilities in unarmed combat and fencing — mostly in formal duels, brawls and sparring practice, though it should be stressed his actual field experience outside the cockpit is limited.▶ While hardly learned in the subject and somewhat intellectually lazy besides, Lantaeva boasts a vague understanding of magitek engineering, and can be relied upon to conduct basic maintenance unsupervised.

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▼ HISTORY ▼

"There's only one difference between heroes and madmen: whether they win or lose."

▶ Third son of a disgraced noble house, Cyras pyr Lantaeva learned to fight the hard way, spending much of his tempestuous youth wearing the scrapes and bruises from the latest effort to defend his family's name from schoolyard critique. This trend followed him through adolescence -- all the way into the Academy, where a the accidental maiming of a fellow student in a sanctioned duel led to his summary expulsion. It seemed the seventeen year old would be forced to forfeit his dreams of glory and recognition, but he was offered an unlikely second chance by a clandestine Ist Legion program, having demonstrated the desired aptitude, temperament, desperation and -- most importantly -- expendability.Project Myrmidon was envisaged as an anti-Eikon task force comprised of (at the time) prototype Helldiver warmachina and chemically-enhanced pilots, responding decisively to threats across the Empire's embattled frontiers. Unfortunately, owing to the harmful -- often deadly -- side-effects stemming from performance-boosting 'Overclocking' experiments, few candidates ever made it past the trial phase, leaving the project with a small selection of fresh-faced young warriors chomping at the bit to prove their mettle.They soon had their opportunity, though each felled Eikon demanded a harsh toll in blood and sanity. And while skill an technology could see a determined pilot through a gruelling battle, there was little proven defense against tempering. Aetheric dampeners, neural implants, mental conditioning, pharmaceutical cocktails... for all the Medica's efforts, too often all that awaited an unlucky pilot at the end of a sortie was an executioner's bullet.Though the squadron eventually received a measure of stardom, earning themselves the moniker 'Godhounds', the breakthroughs enjoyed by the competing Weapon Project threatened to diminish their role into something largely ceremonial.

(Note: Minor Endwalker spoilers below)▶ Recent: The Civil War at once saved the Godhounds from looming obsolescence and sundered them entirely. House Lantaeva, desperate for influence and political favour, threw their financial support behind Nerva's bid and in doing so forced a devil's choice upon their son -- to betray his blood, or his comrades-in-arms. Cyras begrudgingly chose the latter and defected to the IIIrd, where he was assigned to a small fleet of mothballed airships hastily brought back into service to harry reinforcements at the border.This spared them the fate that befell the rest of the IIIrd, but their outlook was no less bleak: cut off from the capital, forced into a desperate struggle against first the Telophoroi and then the Blasphemies. In the end, all that remained was a handful of bloodied survivors aboard a single battered vessel, drifting back to Garlemald only to find the capital in ruin and under foreign occupation.Following tense negotiations, the crew were permitted to retain their airship should certain concessions be made. Stripped of their firepower but not their resolve, they were folded into the Centuria XII Exploratores, a special mobile expeditionary unit pledged to scour the Ilsabardian frontier of emergent threats.

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