Fractus Zhantom

Fractus Zhantom is a Flydevin general who well known for her mastery of the Mineral Winds division of Wind Arts and for her general strength - perhaps being the strongest Flydevin. She has two daughters, Duster Zhantom and Nimbus Zhantom, though she has clear favoritism for the later. She is a major character in Kicking Dust, a statue of her even appearing on its promotional poster. Although the marketing presented her as a more neutral force, if not outright a force for good, the series's episodes slowly revealed that Fractus was actually the series's antagonist.
==Backstory==
Prior to Kicking Dust, Fractus Zhantom was already a well-known Flydevin Warrior, employed under Halcyate Morluda, the prior Flydevin monarch. Her skills were so great she was eventually promoted to general. She had a boyfriend, Diamond Hallion, who was also a Flydevin Warrior, although rather than being strong and tough, he was swift and precise. However, he eventually fell in a battle, which cemented Fractus's path as a general - to take revenge on those she perceived as being responsible for his death. Ironically, however, it was actually a war Fractus started herself that led to Diamond's death. She began trying to cling to higher power to do so, to the point she fatally poisoned Halcyate using her Smoke Winds and was doing the same to Gilderoyde Morluda over time. 
Fractus for a while waged more wars on nearby Flydevin tribes with the claimed goal of "unity" - forcibly assimilating every Flydevin group. Rumors spread that Fractus was able to use "Dark Magic" during this period - when it was in fact simply Smoke Winds, a Wind Art that was concealed by the Flydevin monarchy. She raised Duster and Nimbus, her two children, during this period, treating Nimbus relatively well while often leaving Duster in the dust. Effectively, whereas Duster was conceived in order to create a powerful child combining her and Diamond's best combat attributes, Nimbus was not created for combat purposes, and Fractus effectively believes Diamond lives on through Nimbus, but not Duster, seeing as Diamond is an ice sculptor much like Nimbus. In addition, Fractus saw Duster as an inadequate heir since she didn't actually inherit much of either parent's combat advantages in the end.
During Kicking Dust, tensions grew between Duster and Fractus after the former witnessed one of the later's wars, specifically the one on Markrose Hortica's tribe. Duster was traumatized by the experience, but rather than being comforted by her mother, Fractus merely expressed disappointment. This culminated in Duster confronting Fractus about her needless violence. Duster eventually brought up the topic of Nimbus, and told Fractus that Nimbus was not happy with what she had to do. After Duster pointed out it got Nimbus to say "Screw you, Diamond Hallion!" over a misunderstanding, Fractus got so enraged she started hitting Duster. This anger only escalated further when Duster claimed Nimbus would be happier if Fractus "kept our father alive", which made her go berserk, while disowning Duster, telling her to leave the city and not come back.
Nimbus was terrified of Fractus afterwards, although Fractus had the saving grace that Nimbus was only overhearing the conversation. She claimed she had to defend herself, which explained the violence she heard, and lied to her that Duster was at the hospital now. Fractus would later explain to Nimbus what kind of person her father was. Shortly after, however, she had to deal with Gampa Pararain, who publicly exposed Fractus's misdeeds and the existence of Smoke Winds after Duster told them about them. During this time, Duster took the distraction to reunite with Nimbus and flee with her. Fractus, however, didn't take long to notice her disappearance, and quickly went on a search, to the point she shirked her general duties temporarily.
After some investigation, Fractus eventually found Duster, Nimbus and Gampa in a makeshift house in the desert. She fought with Duster and Gampa, winning easily due to the gap in strength and skill between the two and her. However, Nimbus then tried to attack Fractus - and while it didn't affect her much, Fractus was so shocked by the idea of Nimbus attacking her that she fled, mentally denying to herself that the events actually happened.
Fractus came back to her hometown's population booing her and Gilderoyde telling her they needed to talk. Gilderoyde then confronted Fractus about her excessive violence, having consulted the community after protests were made about said violence. Fractus then declared the populace are fools, Gilderoyde retorting that her mother told her to serve the population, not herself. Then, Fractus, to the monarch's shock, declared it didn't lead her mother anywhere, and then explained her philosophy that one needs strength and power to rule a population, before claiming Gilderoyde was obsessed with being a perfect ruler. Gilderoyde, however, rejected this, and then stripped Fractus of her title, aiming to end the wars Fractus caused as the population asked.
Fractus, however, said that Gilderoyde was unable to do that, explaining that there's nothing Gilderoyde can actually do to stop her. Fractus then began assaulting Gilderoyde, attempting a coup. During this battle, Fractus revealed to the monarch that she was the one who poisoned the prior monarch and that she was doing the same to her. She then proceeded to defeat Gilderoyde, and nearly finished off before being hit by Duster, who had recovered from her injuries and done some training.
Duster, at first, attempted to stop Fractus from fighting her by revealing Nimbus was watched. Fractus's simple solution was to grab Duster and force her to fight inside of the palace, where Nimbus couldn't see. However, Duster soon got assistance from her two best friends, Trida Kyrjan and Beruli Tei, as well as Gampa Pararain. After a long, violent fight, Duster eventually prevailed thanks to her Smoke Wind Bombs - Fractus having never had to deal with another Smoke Wind user. Nimbus then confronted Fractus about her beliefs, attempting to understand what led Fractus on this path. Fractus explained to her that she fights for her sake and in order to get revenge for Diamond's death. However, Nimbus rejected this and then left, Fractus being unable to stop this. Duster then made sure Fractus would be brought to jail for the rest of her life for her crimes, which is where she currently is.
Fractus's influence over Flydevin society being gone is generally believed to have improved it, seeing as there was significantly less push for war, although there are still Flydevins loyal to Fractus in society, who believe that she should be freed from jail. In addition, the sudden end of the wars caused many Flydevins employed in the army to be out of a job.
==Appearance==
Fractus is a muscular 47-years old woman with pale skin. She is very tall, at 6'1, and is generally considered to be imposing. She has grayish lilac hair that wraps around her head, forming two “tips” on each side of her head as well as tips to the sides of her face. Her body is covered in scars, proving she has participated in many battles.
Fractus generally walks around wearing protective metal armor, along with rock “wings”, which are traditionally worn to denote high status in Flydevin culture. The armor she wears casually exposes her arms and some of her legs, though her actual battle armor covers these parts also wearing an helmet with two horns. Electricity absorbers are concealed within said horns.
==Personality==
Fractus is a strict no-nonsense person as a result of her status as a general. She does not smile a lot and generally keeps an intimidating facade in order to keep others into submission. She is heavily patriotic when it comes to her culture and sees her actions as a general as protecting and expanding it. However, she is heavily conservative and tends to be opposed to changes to the culture, regardless of whether it would be beneficial or not. She has a very entitled attitude and orders respect wherever she goes - and she is not afraid to use intimidation to force it. She has a tendency to show respect to those on the same level as power as her, especially if they respect her back. While she is satisfied with her current power, she would be glad to get even stronger should the opportunity arise.
Fractus appeared to be quite concerned with having a heir, and was highly disappointed in the way Duster ended up being. This resulted in her slowly beginning to hate her own daughter, until a confrontation between the two ended up having her callously reveal her true opinions on her daughter, insulting her stature and her weakness in combat. She eventually grew so upset she used brute force on her, and kicked her out of her house. She does appear to have a much softer spot for her other daughter Nimbus, however.
The later episodes of Kicking Dust revealed more about Fractus's backstory, explaining how she became this way. Fractus as a child failed to see much purpose in herself, aside from a love of fighting. Therefore, when she got the opportunity to join wars, she gladly focused all of her mind towards battling, even if it meant hurting and even killing other Flydevins.
At one point, Fractus met Diamond. They became good friends, with Diamond thinking he could change Fractus's overly violent ways. However, Diamond was no saint, also thinking of fighting as a natural thing, and the two originally conceived Duster with the intent of creating a powerful child combining their strengths. However, Nimbus was conceived out of a genuine and healthy relationship, which explains Fractus's fixation on her.
==Powers and Abilities==
Fractus is very powerful person, fitting her role as a general. Even just in physicals, she is very muscular to the point her raw strength is enough to win some fights. She isn’t exactly slow either, and can take quite a few hits. When she’s armored, weaker attacks generally don’t even make her flinch, though she’s not exactly invulnerable to stronger attacks. She is also a smart battler, having fought in plenty of battles. She generally prefers to fight at a close range when possible, but is not afraid to fight at longer, safer ranges against tougher foes.
Fractus is an expert in Wind Arts, an innate ability to Flydevins like her. She has mastered the Mineral Winds sub-division of these arts, allowing her to create large quantities of rock from dust in the winds.
Some notable abilities include:
*Meteor Fall: One of Fractus's signature attacks, Fractus creates a massive rock in the air which then crashes towards her target at high speeds. This is a highly devastating attack when it lands, and even when it misses the shockwave from the crash can still be dangerous.
*Menhir: Fractus can create a large "club" out of stone, allowing her to deal heavy damage to her foes when combined with her strength. However, it's somewhat sluggish, so she doesn't use it against faster foes.
*Smoke Winds: Fractus can create dark poisonous clouds that seem to quickly paralyze her targets if ingested. For outsiders, it does not correspond to any Wind Art, and most Flydevins have no experience dealing with it, causing it to be a highly effective trump card that is usually dubbed "Dark Magic". However, it was eventually revealed it is actually one of several Wind Arts kept hidden by Flydevin royalty as a result of its sheer dangerousness and its lack of practical applications outside of combat. It should be noted, however, that Fractus has no experience with the art beyond creating jets of smokes as she has never had to use the art in any other manner.
*Stone Strike: Fractus can coat her limbs in rocks in order to enhance the power of her strikes. She generally adds a push of wind in order to make her strikes hit even harder.
*Terra Shield: Fractus can create rocks in order to block attacks coming towards her, which is especially useful when she needs to approach foes that fight from a distance.
*Flight: Fractus can use her winds to fly. She’s equally strong in the air than on land as well.
*Wind Agility: Fractus can also use her winds to increase her mobility in general. She can run faster with them, perform high jumps, slow down her falls, or even just throw herself directly at foes.
*Weight Throw: When Fractus needs to attack foes at a distance, she can simply create rocks and launch them at the foe. Compared to Duster’s version of the move, she can create bigger rocks, and can launch them faster and more accurately than her.
*Petrification: Somewhat of a misleading name, Fractus can straight up encase her foes in stone, leaving them vulnerable to her high strength and preventing them from moving.
*Dirty Tricks: Although she generally prefers to not use these, especially during more friendly spars and competition, Fractus’s mineral winds enable her to pull off plenty of cheap moves. She can create and throw dust at people’s eyes to blind them, for example, or she can create rocks around their joints to weight them down and making it harder for them to move.
Also worth noting is that Fractus's helmet has concealed electricity absorbers, which makes most electric attacks completely ineffective against her. It was shown, however, that these could be destroyed, although Fractus remains quite resistant to electricity.
==Relationships==
===Diamond Hallion===
Fractus and Diamond met during fighting, and admired each other for their respective contrasting skills. They eventually got close enough to produce a child, Duster, with the goal of creating a Flydevin combining Fractus's overwhelming toughness with Diamond's swift precision. Their relationship would only grow, eventually leading to a second child, Nimbus. Diamond felt that Fractus was overly violent, but believed he could steer Fractus on a less violent path. However, Diamond was killed in battle while Fractus was pregnant with their second child. Diamond's death is one of Fractus's main internal justifications for her current violence, and it is clear that she genuinely cared about him despite her usual self-centered nature.
===Duster Zhantom===
Duster ended up being shorter than even Diamond, making her laughably short for a Flydevin woman and putting her at an inherent physical disadvantage. Duster is also not that skilled of a fighter despite heavy training, often losing tournament battles despite her wishes to prove her strength to her mother. This led to Fractus seeing her as little more than a disappointment. This caused tensions between the two to grow, to the point Fractus eventually disowned Duster - after Diamond's death, she never really saw her as someone to genuinely care for and only provided the minimum she needed to live. Fractus's contempt for Duster is such that she's tried to kill her on multiple occasions, first when she disowned her and later during their subsequent encounters.
===Nimbus Zhantom===
In stark contrast with the way she sees Duster, Fractus heavily cares for Nimbus and has gone great lengths to ensure her safety. In fact, one of her internal justifications for her wars is to ensure Nimbus's protection. Fractus effectively believes Diamond lives on through Nimbus, as both are ice sculptors and she was conceived out of genuine love rather than out of eugenics. Nimbus, in return, respected Fractus. However, Duster then told Nimbus about how violent of a person Fractus was, and after a violent confrontation between Fractus and Duster, Nimbus became terrified of Fractus, although Fractus lied about what happened in the confrontation to reassure her. When Nimbus was missing, she went out of her way to locate her herself. When she later attacked her to protect Duster and Gampa, Fractus was so shocked that she rain away and repeatedly tried to deny to herself that it actually happened, not willing to believe Nimbus would actually attack her.
===Gilderoyde Morluda===
Although Fractus pretended to be loyal to Gilderoyde, she was not afraid to betray her as soon as Gilderoyde turned against Fractus. Fractus had actually poisoned Gilderoyde's mother, and was even slowly poisoning Gilderoyde using her Smoke Winds. Fractus only followed Gilderoyde because Gilderoyde could take care of other aspects of Flydevin society besides war, and she was not afraid to tell Gilderoyde that she believed she was obsessed with perfection while not putting enough importance on strength. After Gilderoyde stripped her of her general title, she nearly killed her as part of an attempted coup.
===Gampa Pararain===
Fractus has not met often with Gampa Pararain, but they quickly became enemies after Gampa started exposing Fractus's worse actions and began taunting her. Fractus has therefore tried to punish or even kill them several times, managing to knock them unconscious twice and only sparring them due to having worse problems to deal with at the time.
===Teliru Tei===
While Teliru didn't elaborate much on it, Teliru actually knew Fractus when she was younger, and was aware of the path she took that led her to her current ways, telling Duster about it in the epilogue. Teliru served under Fractus while the latter was still a general, although she heavily regrets the violence she's complicit in.
==Development==
Fractus was originally designed for ColdR, another project by her creator. She was initially concepted as a pro wrestler going by the title “The Zephyr”, and was a rival of other pro wrestler characters in the game - mainly "Urchin Nothyp", but also major characters "Ophiur Nothyp" and "Anemone Clua". She would’ve used a “wind blaster” to attack her rivals without them realizing where the attacks came from or from who, or even that they were under attack at all, explaining her family name. She was already quite villainous, and even killed Ophiur at one point, who was originally a less important character that mainly existed to be Anemone's posthumous girlfriend - however, she became a much more important character and was thus made alive in later versions of the story. At this point, Fractus wore a very different outfit, considering of a purple generic pro wrestler outfit. She didn't have any scars, and was shorter, being around 5'6, but her hairstyle and light skin was already present, as well as her general scowl. Her first known mention was in early February 2020, making her the earliest Kicking Dust character to be designed.
The element of her caring for a child despite her terrible attributes was already present - though this child was originally not Nimbus or Duster, but rather a scrapped character, Stratus Zhantom. Contrasting with her imposing muscular appearance, Stratus Zhantom was a shy, short and very thin boy with a passion for dancing. However, Fractus respected his passion and even encouraged him to pursue it, humanizing her as a character. Stratus was intended to be the love interest of "Coralde Clua", another ColdR character, and he is in fact the original father of Nimbus (and Duster, who was designed later).
Eventually, in a roleplay, Fractus was repurposed as a high-ranking "Valkyrie", which was the earlier name for Flydevins. She has a different outfit, which gave her armor, including armored wings. The armor, however, was less "menacing" than Fractus's current armor and had a subtle purple and green tint rather than a subtle brown tint. She still lacked the scars, and at the time was going to specialize purely in Twister Winds rather than Mineral Winds.
Fractus was then redesigned for another roleplay, from which her "less armored" design was directly taken from. Valkyries had been renamed into Flydevins by then. It was at this point that Fractus became the actual mother of Duster and Nimbus, and many of her current traits are taken from this roleplay, such as her relation with Duster and Nimbus. However, she did have some differences - Fractus had moved to another region, having retired from being a commander - rather than a general, in order to not make Fractus seem "too important". Fractus was made a general in Kicking Dust since "overimportance" was not a concern for the story. Fractus's justifications for moving were to give Nimbus more opportunities to develop her ice sculpting skills and to spread Flydevin culture to other places. It's implied, however, that she also moved to tear Duster away from her friends, seeing them as a bad influence and proving that she already hated her.
Fractus, for Kicking Dust, was given a different set of armor that was more threatening and serious. At one point, Fractus was going to have a bird-themed helmet, but all attempts at making a bird helmet either looked bad, overly silly or just unfitting. She was upgraded from Commander to General, and was no longer retired. Fractus's motivations for disliking Duster while favoring Nimbus were fleshed out, as well - which led to the creation of Diamond Hallion and the idea of Fractus seeing Diamond in Nimbus.
==Trivia==
*Fractus’s name comes from Fractus clouds. This cloud in particular was chosen due to its similarity to the french verb “fracasser”, which means "to smash", fitting Fractus’s powerful and intimidating nature.
*Fractus’s family name, Zhantom, is partly a reference to her wind powers - originally, there was more emphasis on the family’s ability to attack unseen with their wind-themed abilities. This element is largely removed from the current versions of the characters, though. However, it has been given an additional meaning with Fractus's Smoke Winds, which have an ominous vibe much like those of phantoms.
Category:Flydevins
Category:Humans
Category:Poisonshot's Characters
Category:Females
Category:Antagonists