Elice

Elice is an amnesiac Shadowmancer who does not identify as being from any particular world. She is a lead character in Driving Shadows: Antimatter Introspection.

Gameplay
Elice is primarily a magic user that uses the power of Shadows. Because she does not use conventional magic, she does not have a conventional TP pool. She instead steadily gathers Shadows throughout the course of battle, meaning that she is limited in the pace in which she can cast magic. To compensate, her spells are among the strongest in the game, and she is able to sacrifice turns to increase her TP via her "Shadow Gather" skill.

Elice is also able to freely cast spells depending on the staff which she has equipped. Each staff grants her a unique spell, but she is obviously limited to equipping one staff at a time. Each staff is never objectively better or worse than the other, meaning that Elice earns most of her stat increases through her other equipment.

Shadowmancer Skills
(Note: Most, if not all of Elice's Shadowmancer skills can be upgraded through items and story events)
 * Shadow Gather - 0 TP - Lets Elice gain more TP for a turn
 * Shadow Curse - 1 TP - Deals damage to an enemy over 5 turns
 * Shadow Shock - 2 TP - Damages and stuns all enemies
 * Shadow Drain - 2 TP - Steals HP from an enemy
 * Shadow Blast - 3 TP - Deals dark damage to one enemy
 * Shadow Block - 3 TP - Raises an ally's resistance to light based attacks
 * Shadow Hymn - 4 TP - Regenerates the party's HP over many turns
 * Shadow Claim - 4 TP - Absorbs all life from undead enemies

Staff Skills
(All staff skills cost 0 TP)
 * Phantom Slash - Deals slashing damage to an enemy
 * Blue Flame - Deals freezing damage to an enemy
 * Purify - Cures all status conditions except poison and death
 * Warcry - Makes an enemy go berserk
 * Fortify - Raises Elice's resistance to physical attacks
 * Ethereal Inscription - Inscribes an enemy with a freezing glyph, allowing Jet to deal blast damage to an enemy

Storyline
Elice remembers nothing before one day waking up in Pirayl, with nothing but her memories of how to use her abilities as a Shadowmancer. Her past is left largely vague, aside from having some form of a romantic relationship with Ryneth and exploring other universes for roughly one year before meeting the main party.

Kato and Vern encounter Elice as she returns to Pirayl, and she offers to accompany the two in their pursuit of Ryneth and Maelach. Although Elice does not let her motivations be known to most of the party, she quickly warms up to Kato and allows him to be her confident, listening to many of her thoughts and feelings that she would never vocalize to the other party members.

Elice is called bipolar at times, as she can shift between being sarcastic and aloof to being grim and serious without a moment's notice. Her passion and anger can get the best of her on many occasions, which can be beneficial or detrimental depending on the situation. In a relaxed state, she can appear to be so joyful and carefree that it's difficult to believe that she may be harboring any dark or depressing feelings.

Development
Elice was originally developed by Rodpop to be a villian character that would eventually split the party's allegiances to either her own ideals or the Confluence's law. However, upon "remixing" his chapter, Rodpop mostly decided against this vision, and elaborated on Elice's character to focus on themes of maturity and relationships throughout her character arc and the introduction of hershadow.

Initially, Elice's gameplay focused entirely on her Shadowmancer skills, and her attack was generally useless in battle unless she was certain to hit an elemental weakness. Through some input of SC10, Rodpop developed the staff system that would not only incrase the usability of her physical attacks, but would also make each staff equally as useful throughout the game.

Trivia

 * There had been some controversy over how to pronounce Elice's name. While most of the development team assumed her name to be pronounced similarly to "Elise," Rodpop originally intended it to be pronounced like "Ellis." However, Rodpop eventually warmed up to the conventional pronunciation, though he hasn't considered either version to be canon
 * Each of Elice's staves are named in reference to members of RGP. For example, "Redaphire" is named after RGP member "REDDAP," and the description refers to REDDAP being the "music guy" of RGP. The only current exception to this rule is "Truce," which is named after a minor character in the now-cancelled game RPGM2KBRPG!.