Basic Info: Full name is Dante Joel Blaize, Afro-Grenadian, 17 years old, star sign is Cancer, demisexual demiboy (he/they pronouns), Undead Element Specialist, character motif is warlocks.
Family: Dante is the sole child of a polycule, consisting of his father Xander Jones, mother Florette Blaize, and parent Kameron “Kam” Bishop. Xander is a homemaker, Florette is a baker, and Kam is a florist, with the latter two running a dual bakery and flower shop up until Dante was about twelve. In terms of extended family, on his father’s side there’s his great-grandmother Norma Jones, who passed away when Dante was twelve, and his grandparents Benjamin and Dorine Jones, who are retired and live in a nursing home, on his mother’s side there’s his uncle and aunt-in-law Sandy and Austyn Blaize, who both work as costume designers for theatre and movies, as well as their triplets Gregory “Georgie” Blaize, Isidore “Izzy” Blaize and Dejen Blaize, who are pre-teens and middle school students, and on his parent’s side there’s his cousin Itai Bishop, a zoologist who works in the care and rehabilitation of injured wild animals, and Itai’s many pets. Dante loves his family dearly and was very close knit to him, but life circumstances have lead him to grow distant and closed-off from them.
Personality: A kindhearted and caring boy who could be likened to a modern-day prince on a white horse, Dante is a tender and sensitive boy who goes out of way to help whoever he can, regards all he meets with courtesy and respect and holds compassion for even the smallest life. He carries himself with an elegant air fit for nobility, and seems to always know just what to say or do to earn people’s trust. His determination is unrivaled by most, and once he sets his sights on something, he tries his hardest to get it no matter how many fumbles he may make. Someone like him would seem like they’d be the happiest person on Earth, so beloved and having everything going for them... And yet, he holds a kind of sadness and pain abstract to most.
The hardships of his past have given Dante an obsession with fate, destiny and the future, and he finds himself constantly trying to devise ways to know what the future holds and how to change it, while also living with the constant dread and fear caused by the future’s uncertainty. To him, he sees no point in meandering about, living day by day knowing everything he cares about and everything he works towards could be rendered dead and obsolete in just the blink of an eye. His fruitless attempts to work towards ensuring a perfect future had left him a cynical, nihilistic shell of who he once was who found it hard to find value and joy in life and struggled to even get out of bed, until finally he was whisked away to Skylands and learned of his status as a portal master. Learning of the portal master’s ability to decide the fate of the world around them renewed his spirits, and lead to him putting his all to honing his powers and ensuring the future he desired... But, with his new friends’ help, he’s beginning to find that cherishing the present instead of worrying about the future has its perks, too.
Life on Earth: Dante grew up for most of his childhood in a very small, close-knit community, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone’s names. He lived in a nice house with his parents and extended family, had lots of friends in his neighborhood, helped out at his mother and parent’s bakery/flower shop, and life was just perfect. But, at the age of twelve, everything changed - a natural disaster had ravaged his hometown and left it in shambles, and community efforts to rebuild proved fruitless. In the end, most of the people who resided there, including Dante’s own family, were forced to move away.
While his extended family grew scattered across the country, Dante’s own parents moved to a bigger town some ways over and began rebuilding their life, doing whatever they could to make ends meet. Witnessing how the people he loved lost so much and struggled to cope with the aftermath of the disaster and how it wiped away everything he cared about, all those years of work in the blink of an eye, left Dante feeling frustrated, helpless, and dreading whatever the future held. So, he turned to whatever methods he could to learn the nature of the future and how to change it, but nothing truly made the mark, leaving him feeling hopeless. What was the point of leading life if all it took was one disaster, one bad day, just the tiniest thing nobody could have predicted to wipe it all away? What was the point of even living, knowing that everything could be for naught and he wouldn’t even know? These questions and more rattled Dante’s brain, leaving him apathetic and cynical. His parents tried their best to help him, but in the end not even they could ease his worries—after all, something as abstract as fears of the future can’t be so easily cured.
Arriving in Skylands and Life There: It was during Dante’s nightly studies that a portal opened up in his room, and seeing it as a side effect of his studies into magic (another attempt at finding some method of controlling future events), he entered it. The portal dropped him into Skylands, inside a ruined village filled with strange artifacts. As it turned out, this village stood on the edge of the Underworld, and yet in spite of this, its Undead energy didn’t transform Dante the way it transformed most of the living. No, it embraced him, welcoming him and his wonders of the future—after all, as the element of death and the afterlife, of the ultimate ends of all time and life, it was only natural that it would find kinship within someone who desired knowledge of what the future held. He was given the Element’s blessing in a vision, and soon after found by Master Eon and brought to their base of operations. Learning about portal masters and their powers fascinated Dante, but nothing so much as one particular thing that Eon said—which was that portal masters, in essence, defined the fate of their generation and the world around them. Learning of this was the power he held as a portal master renewed his spirits, and Dante threw his all into studying and honing his abilities. It was then that he learned the true power of the Undead’s blessing, finding that he had the ability to rewind what would otherwise be fatal injuries and revive those who had fallen in battle. Feeling as though he was finally getting somewhere in his studies, Dante continues studying the future and his newfound powers to this day, while offering his skills on the battlefield, and slowly bonding with the other portal masters and Skylanders—something that’s made him realize that the present’s a pretty great time, too.
Powers: When he came to Skylands, Dante was blessed with the ability to revive the fallen and rewind the spread of injury, and from there on he became fascinated with the Undead Arts. Spending most of his time studying them has given him great insight into the art of necromancy and communicating with the dead, allowing him to summon ghosts and raise zombies without even so much as batting an eyelash. He also specializes in more traditional undead magic as well, from corrosion spells to seances and even just channeling undead energy. Unlike the other portal masters, Dante doesn’t have a weapon of choice, instead preferring good old spellcasting.
Relationships:
Bruno: Finds Bruno’s ability to control time an amazing gift that he could be using for grand purposes... If he wasn’t so careless with it and constantly using it for his own whims. He constantly tries to get Bruno to teach him the secrets of time and its workings for Dante’s own desires to know the future, but Bruno recognizes that Dante’s obsession with the future is maybe a little unhealthy and constantly tries to get him to chill out. They’re, still working on coming to an understanding on each other’s fronts.
Ryeo: Finds her meddlings with tarot a bit fruitless (as he himself had tried using tarot to divine the future in the past with little luck), but admires her dedication to knowing the future nonetheless. They sometimes butt heads because of their methods, but share an unspoken respect for each other.
Nine: They’ve rubbed elbows here and there, but both of them are so focused on their own studies that neither have talked much. However, both find the other incredibly curious, and occasionally swap notes from time to time. Though they themself have feelings for Molly (who has a massive crush on Dante), they don’t think of him as a rival for her affection or any nonsense like that—as long as she’s happy, they’re happy, and he’s a fine, respectable student of the Undead Arts, which makes him a pretty cool dude in Nine’s book. (As you can guess, they all end up in a polycule)
Molly (OC): Molly had been enchanted by Dante from the moment they first talked, finding herself fascinated with his charming and kind demeanor—for her, it was like she had met the prince of her dreams! But, as they grew closer and she learned of his own inner battles, Molly had come to realize she had maybe put him on a bit of a pedestal, fixating on her ideal love instead of the person he really was. Her efforts to understand the real him and the kindness she showed him helped him start to realize that there was more to life than just worrying about the future, and before he knew it, he found himself just as enchanted by her as she was him.
The Skylanders: Generally holds a level of respect for them, as they both share a common goal (Crafting a better future for everyone), but mainly stays around the more magically-inclined Skylanders, as well as some others who have dealings in time and the future like Wind-Up, so as to learn the secrets of knowing the future.
Trivia and Voiceclaims:
- Dante’s design was cobbled together from leftover assets for Version One’s male portal master avatar, with his outfit being a tweaked version of an unused alternate outfit for the avatar. In particular, his appearance was modeled after an alternate design for the male portal master avatar that was used for the global Ring of Heroes website
- His Portal Master Skill icon was reused from an old skill icon for Rattle Shake.
- Yes, his name is a Dante’s Inferno joke, I couldn’t help myself.
English Voiceclaim: Joshua David King
Japanese Voiceclaim: Akira Ishida
Korean Voiceclaim: Gyu-Hyeok Shim
