Seto

Lean and wiry with sun-darkened skin, the young Seto kept his black hair shaggy and unkempt. A brown skirt of leaves sat above a tan loincloth, a white cap marked with inverted black U-shapes covered his head, and the pale wings shared by every Shandia rose from his back. Grown older, he gathered his hair into a ponytail, left the cap behind, and added a pair of yellow bands to his upper arms.

Courageous and guided by principle, Seto longed to mature into a great Shandia warrior who would carry his people's ideals onward. The dream gripped him so tightly that contracting the deadly Tree Fever broke him with grief at the prospect of dying before he could fulfill it. More open-minded than most of his tribe, he was sincerely curious when Mont Blanc Noland described the idea of progress. He also rejected reckless cruelty, planting himself between his fellow warriors and Noland's crew to halt an early execution he judged dishonorable by Shandia custom. Kind toward animals, he made a habit of feeding a young snake and bestowed on it the name Nola.

Roughly four hundred and nineteen years before the present day, a Tree Fever epidemic swept through the Shandia. As the dying elder Chiya demanded that the maiden Mousse be offered to the god Kashigami, a fresh mark appeared on Seto's own arm, proof that he too had been infected. He panicked, tried in vain to cut the sign away, and wept when Kalgara, the warrior he idolized and hoped to match, came to his side. Soon after he fell unconscious near the shore, where Noland's expedition discovered and cured him before learning of the planned sacrifice.

Noland's meddling got his party captured, and when the warriors lost patience and prepared to kill them ahead of schedule, Seto shielded the outsiders, insisting his people carried more pride than that. The explorer delivered his promised cure right on time. A close bond formed over the next month, until the crew cut down great swaths of the hallowed Ancestor Trees and turned the tribe cold, prompting Seto to bluntly ask when they meant to leave. Only after the Shandia realized the trees had been felled to stamp out the fever did the wound close, and a remorseful Seto joined the effort to sound the Golden Bell, marking the restored friendship.

In the years that followed, Seto wed Mousse and became father to at least one child, accompanying Kalgara on routine journeys to Shandora to sound the bell, which his father-in-law had sworn to keep ringing until Noland came back. There he befriended Kashigami's grandchild and named it Nola in the explorer's honor. Then a Knock Up Stream tore that section of Jaya skyward to settle atop the Sea Clouds, and war with the native Skypieans broke out. The fighting dragged on past the end of Seto's life while the bell remained lost, and Nola, torn away from him, still grieved for him in nightmares centuries afterward.