Elise "The Eternal Envy"

離The裂苦死ョN

"I... r-remember now... I... We..."
—Elise, Azure Striker Gunvolt

Elise, "The Eternal Envy", also known in Japan as "Unlimited Envy", Elise (嫉ましき生命輪廻（アンリミテッドエンヴィー）エリーゼ, Anrimiteddo Ennvuī, Erīze; Unlimited Envy translating to "Envious Life Revival") is a Sumeragi prisoner, later one of The Sumeragi Seven, a group of Adepts whom serve under Nova, and one of the antagonists of Azure Striker Gunvolt.

Once a young girl bullied for her Septima, Elise was captured by Sumeragi and locked in the Stratacombs where she is being held prisoner within said secret research facility so that the conglomerate can attempt to gain full control over her septima, "Rebirth", known in Japan as "Unlimited Animus" (生命輪廻（アンリミテッドアニムス）, Anrimiteddo Animusu lit. Life Reincarnation), which grants her the ability to manipulate the soul into weaving out life for an infinite duration, commonly manifested as necromancy.

English Website Description

Elise is an Adept who is currently being held prisoner by the Sumeragi Group. Her Septimal power, known as "Rebirth," gives her the ability to manipulate the soul, and return life to those who once lost it. Sumeragi failed to bring her immense septimal power under control, which in one incident, triggered a rampage that decimated the research facility where she was being held. This was caused by implanting her brain with a more aggressive persona to replace her original weak-willed self, which resulted in a split-personality that can manifest itself in the real world, unlike Lumen, which is only a virtual avatar. The Glaive which holds her septimal power is known as the "Living Blade."

Appearance

Elise is a teenager with waist-length white hair and purple eyes. She is seen wearing a female Sumeragi prisoners uniform, which is a short, pale blue gown, with black bracelets. Numerous artwork depicts her wearing a Sumeragi officers uniform.

In her Weaponized form, Elise gains short, purple hair, and black eyes with purple irises. She wears purple, grey and black armour. On her head is a headpiece which vaguely resembles a cobra's hood, with a long pink "tail" sprouting from it with a spearhead on the end. Her arms are also covered in armour that resembles a cobra hood.

Personality

Representing the sin envy, Elise is a very weak willed person. Frequently bullied at school, she became quiet and reclusive, occasionally playing video games to escape real life. She also appears to have some form of dissociative identity disorder (DID), switching from a very passive, cowardly persona, to an aggressive, dominating one. After being experimented on, this second personality became able to manifest itself into the real world. At her heart, Elise is a being corrupted by envy, full of hate and jealousy at those able to live a normal, happy life.

Alters

Unusual in DID cases, Elise's original alter can communicate with her other ones. Also, unlike any real-life case, her alters can manifest themselves as physical entities. She has three known alters.

Submissive Alter

Elise's original alter and the first one to be encountered. She is very passive and seemingly weak-willed.

The submissive alter is found at the end of the second part of Stratacombs ~Underworld~ where she appears frightened as well as amnesiac. She asks Gunvolt to help her find the way out. As they are exiting the facility, Elise recalls the terrible experiments done on her and the tragic events she had unfolded. Shortly afterward, she releases her dominant alter and fights Gunvolt.

Dominant Alter

The alter created by Sumeragi to replace the original one.

Despite her initial design to replace the original alter, the dominant alter coexists with the submissive alter. She is very objective and seems to play the "master" role in Elise. It's speculated that this dominant alter is the result of some tabooed longing Elise had regarding the bullies who bullied her.

The dominant alter is introduced after the submissive alter experiences an intense memory recall; she, along with the original alter, fights Gunvolt at Stratacombs ~Underworld~.

Crazed Alter

A third alter. She is much more powerful than the other alters.

She is introduced in Babel ~Stratosphere~. She fights Gunvolt along with the first two alters after she is introduced. She is invincible to Gunvolt's attacks.

Sometimes she compares battles to games: but that might be a representation of herself (since she never had any friends to play with) in her manner of doing things.

Plot

Elise was taken prisoner by the Sumeragi Group, who tried to uncover the secret of her Rebirth Septima. As she was unable to cooperate due to her weak personality, the scientists experimenting on her attempted to insert a new, obedient personality in her who would obey their bidding.

However, this resulted in an insane, almost beast-like alter ego who slaughtered nearly the entire team (this personality is believed to stem from the darkness in Elise's heart).

Hurriedly, the survivors implanted a third personality after sealing the beast through hypnosis in the depths of Elise's consciousness.

This new personality turned into a more confident, independent one, who then killed the remaining scientists and resurrected them in the form of zombies.

Azure Striker Gunvolt

Stratacombs (Underworld)

Eventually, Gunvolt (assisted over comlink by Zeno) infiltrates the base where Elise claims refuge. He manages to find Elise (in her original persona), who is suffering from amnesia, and takes her with him. As they walk past a room, Elise suddenly clasps her head in pain and runs into the room, Gunvolt on her heels.

Having regained her memories, she activates her glaive, not only transforming her, but giving her dominant personality physical form. The dominant Elise belittles the original for losing her memory, before explaining their situation to Gunvolt, then promptly attacking him.

During the fight, Gunvolt pleads with Elise, saying he has no wish to fight them, but the dominant persona dismisses him, expressing her wish to be use her power. GV then turns his attention to the submissive, who only apologises, too weak-willed to do anything on her own. As Gunvolt attempts to kill them, they only keep reviving each other, much to the dominant's amusement. Out of options, Gunvolt finally defeats them by killing both at the same time.

However, unbeknownst to Gunvolt, Elise's crazed personality is released just before the end of the battle.

Babel (Stratosphere)

At some point, Elise becomes affiliated with Sumeragi lieutenant Nova Tsukuyomi and revives the other adepts under his command. She, along with the others, wait as Gunvolt makes his way to the space station Firmament where Nova waits.

Eventually, Gunvolt reaches Elise, who revives the two personalities that Gunvolt previously faced. He battles them, but it quickly becomes apparent that the Elises will continue to revive each other endlessly. Once Gunvolt defeats the dominant and submissive personas twice in a row, the crazed persona starts to revive them again, but is suddenly interrupted by Copen, who, using the septimal power he obtained from Carrera, kills Elise once and for all.

Elise makes no canonical appearance after this.

Azure Striker Gunvolt: The Anime

Elise makes a cameo at the end of the OVA, along with the rest of The Sumeragi Seven (minus Merak), surrounding Gunvolt.

Lazy Kingdom

At some point before the events of the first game, Elise decides to play the popular MMORPG September Record to escape from a stressful day at school involving bullying when she receives a mysterious email that promises to bring out "the true nature of her Avatar".

This allows her to manifest her Septima powers within the game whenever she hears Lumen's song, making her a Player Killer. This ends up drawing the attention of Merak, who manages to deduce that Elise is the Player Killer and sets a trap for her by distracting her with a remote-controlled Avatar while he uses his Wormhole Septima to go to her house and capture her.

Other Appearances

Mighty Gunvolt

Elise appears as a DLC boss in Mighty Gunvolt, having similar attacks as in the original game.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 2

Elise is part of the DLC pack for Azure Striker Gunvolt 2. She appears in the Mysterious Manor.

Mighty Gunvolt Burst

Elise appears as a collectable pixel sticker as a drop from a random enemy.

Powers and Abilities

As a human attuned to the Septimal stage of the Lifewave, Elise is a powerful adept whom is capable of harnessing the Septima known as "Rebirth" (生命輪廻（アンリミテッドアニムス）, Anrimiteddo Animusu; Unlimited Animus meaning Life Reincarnation), a highly-coveted power which grants her the ability to manipulate and control souls, weaving life indefinitely as her powers tie into the Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound.

Rebirth enables Elise to resurrect anything that constitutes being "alive", and induce various deadly effects upon targets of her ire. The most prominent ability displayed by her Septima is that of resurrection, bringing back to life those previously deceased no matter their method of death.

However, Elise's usage of the ability to bring back the dead is known to be heavily flawed in nature when it's unleashed by herself – instead of bringing targets back from the afterlife as good as new, their corpses become heavily mutated, purple husks of their former selves as they're animated once more which crawl around on all fours, dole out more damage than most robotic enemies, and scatter into dust when defeated; Elise's Septima's flaw is that anything she resurrects is transformed into a zombie, a unique type of enemy that comes in two flavours, the Zombie Leaper and the Zombie Shambler, and thus the Rebirth can be considered a pseudo-necromancy in its most basic form.

Like every other Adept with a perfect connection with the Lifewave, Elise is able to invoke Skills, which are specialized techniques that make the most of her Septima, accompanied by skill names and elegant haikus. However, like most of the Swordsmen of Sumeragi under Nova as well as the Seven of the multinational adept group known as Eden, by using a specially designed device, in this case, a Glaive, which artificially augments and boosts her abilities to higher levels when transformed, it appears that several abilities Elise displays in both of her battles against Gunvolt are actually skills, the Skill Point cost required for each completely removed as a result of weaponization.

Several attacks that Elise displays in her battles are focused around her snake motif while retaining a connection to her Septima, such as resurrecting the corpse of a snake as a zombie and from there launching the corpse forward in the form of a kunai, commonly taking an unaware enemy by surprise.

She can force anyone who looks at Elise with her special visor into an induced near-death state that petrifies them, inflicting the status condition known as stone, which freezes the opponent's movements while momentarily disabling any measures of offense and tripling the damage they'd take from the succeeding blow.

Elise's Glave is the Living Blade, known in Japan as the Futsunomitama (布都御魂（フツノミタマ）, Edict Municipal August Spirit), which was the name of the sword referred to as a Totsuka-no-Tsurugi, the blade wielded by Takemikazuchi that he used to subjugate the Middle Country in Japanese mythology.

Grasping it in her hand as her meek body trembles and invoking weaponization, a cascade of butterflies envelops her body as her snake-styled armour superimposes her existence. After the process of weaponization with her Glaive has been completed, Elise's alternate personality is drawn from her psyche and given form by using Unlimited Animus through a technique that resembles mitosis, doubtlessly a result of Adept augmentation that comes with wielding the tool.

All forms of Elise are known to possess the exact same level of skill in wielding her Septima, though notably the second personality seems to be better at combat than the shy first personality. With two of her alters serving as the main combatant, Elise can be considered one of the trickier enemies that Gunvolt does battle with to deal with, both submissive and dominant alter fighting perfectly in tandem in spite of their personality differences, the two launching various combination attacks and stacking any effects their techniques possess together.

Swinging around on the cables of her boss arena in the Stratacombs as well as her second boss battle, one generally remains at the top of the vertical ropes and one stays at the bottom, sometimes reaching the same height to unleash more powerful techniques.

While a perfect resurrection of somebody in both body and soul is impossible for the ordinary Elise, thanks to both the second personality given physical form and their power amplified by weaponization, Elise in general gains the ability to invoke a perfect resurrection upon herself and her allies while negating the hazardous side-effect of mutating targets of her Septima into mindless zombies it normally contains, bringing themselves back from the other world.

In the case when the power is activated upon herself, Elise is resurrected with one fourth of her hit points returning along with them – this ability to bring herself back from the dead is established as her sole skill in both of her boss fights which activates the moment one of Elise's personality is slain, the other invoking Resurrection to undo the fatality.

In battle, this makes Elise notably frustrating to deal with, as this resurrection gimmick requires her opponent to slay both versions of Elise simultaneously, otherwise, she can simply revive herself over and over until she wins and her enemy is killed.

Making this even more difficult to handle is that the meek Elise seems to take more damage at a quicker rate than the aggressive one produced by her Septima perhaps owing to her time spent as a guinea pig, allowing the second Elise to bring her back from the brink, meaning that Gunvolt will be required to divide damage evenly between the two to ensure that he can end her torment – the greatest Offensive Skill of the Azure Striker Septima, Voltaic Chains, seems to be especially effective in this case.

During the time-span in-between Joule's kidnapping by Merak and her final death onboard Sumeragi's orbital station, Firmament, more about Elise's powers are revealed – the secret and utterly insane third personality within Elise's fractured psyche was released by the aggressive personality, the latter hoping on the former to revive the duo, something which paid off, allowing both the submissive and aggressive Elise to subsequently revive each of the Swordsmen of Sumeragi using her Septima whom then go up against Gunvolt.

In her next boss battle, the aggressive, submissive, and insane personalities of this Swordsman fight together, the latter being completely immune to any sort of damage with Gunvolt's Flashfield unable to tag her (it's said that the crazed Elise's endless vitality is the key to her immunity), the trio lashes out at their enemy in tandem, the insane Elise launching serpentine kunai at Gunvolt while the other two continue to fight as normal.

This time, even if Gunvolt manages to down both submissive and aggressive Elise, the insane personality utilizes a much more powerful version of Resurrection that revives the other two, turning the battle into an infinite loop that would under any normal circumstance continue for a never-ending duration until her enemy is killed, turning the fight against her into a battle to stay alive.

The versatility and destructive potential displayed by Rebirth is known to why Sumeragi were so eager to have Elise under their control in the first place, as she can bring anyone back to life and make people immortal along with previously-mentioned abilities, with Elise herself implying that anyone she turns into a zombie is able to infect more people as to transform them into zombies, making her exceedingly dangerous and adding more credence to Nova's ideal of guiding Adept-kind through Sumeragi.

Skills

Viper Throw

蛇手裏剣、Snake Shuriken

Elise's standard attack. Both alters toss kunai (made using snake corpses as a basis), two at a time, at Gunvolt. The kunai transform into cobras (through Elise's Septima) that slither across the floor upon contact with Gunvolt, the Flashfield, or the floor. The kunai, both in its shuriken and snake form, can be destroyed with the Flashfield.

Elise will occasionally position her dominant and submissive alters across from each other and shoot three kunai towards center-screen.
During her fight at Babel ~Stratosphere~, Elise occasionally summons her crazed alter to toss a single energy-charged kunai at Gunvolt from the top of the screen. Unlike the kunai of the other two alters, the energy-charged kunai does not transform into a cobra upon impact and cannot be blocked with the Flashfield. Beginning with battle phase two, the crazed Elise fires her energy-charged kunai much more rapidly.

Slithering Whip

ジャコードウィップ、Jacord Whip

Elise's standard tag team combo. She positions her submissive and dominant alters at opposite corners of the screen. Each personality then whips out her arm to grab the pole at the center of the screen and swings across to the other side of the screen.

Viper Rondo

バイパーロンド)

Elise begins using this tag team combo at battle phase two. She positions her submissive and dominant alters on either side of Gunvolt.

One of them shoots three kunai at Gunvolt, while the other pulls herself to the center pole. The kunai-throwing alter then extends her arm to the center pole and propels herself to jump across the screen. At the conclusion of the attack, the second alter swings to the side of the screen opposite her initial position.

Gorgon Gaze

ジェラシックゴルゴン、Jealousic Gorgon

Elise begins using this tag team combo at battle phase two. Elise positions her dominant and submissive alters at opposite corners of the screen.

The attack proceeds with the alters moving in opposite vertical directions while shining their Gorgon's eyes in front of them. The beams themselves deal no damage but inflicts the stone debuff if Gunvolt faces the light source.

If Gunvolt is turned to stone, the alters fire unforgiving barrages of kunai at Gunvolt.

File:Resurrection.jpg

Resurrection

リザレクション

"Life, return to life / Break the cycle and return / This soul from nether coils! Resurrection!"

" 廻る輪廻が生命を紡ぐ / 不可逆の帳を超えて / 魂よ、現世に還れ ! リザレクション ! "

"Die die die die DIE / DIE die die die die die DIE / Die die DIE die die! ReSURexIOnnN!"

" 死死死死死死死死死 / 死死死死死死死死死 / 死死死死死死死死死 ! 離The裂苦死ョN ! "

Elise's special skill. When either the dominant or submissive alter is destroyed, the other will immediately activate this skill. The user will engulf the other side of the screen with a pillar of purple light and revive the other alter with a third of her maximum health.

Unless both the dominant and submissive alters are killed simultaneously, Elise will use this skill up to a total of five times.
Elise will interrupt tag team combos to use this skill if one of her alters perishes. The only exception is Gorgon's Gaze, in which case Elise will use this skill as a follow-up.
In the battle at Babel (Stratosphere), the crazed Elise will use her more powerful version of this skill when Gunvolt kills the other two alters simultaneously. In this instance, both perished alters are revived, each with a half of her maximum health. The crazed alter will do this only once per battle. The second time both the dominant and submissive alters are destroyed while fighting the crazed, she will try to use Resurrection, but is destroyed by Copen, who you fight right after.

Designer Comments

Elise is a character whose personality has split into several others, but the general image was thought of using a weak-willed main one as a basis. Her long hair that coils inward is meant to express her withdrawn personality and her being shut inside her shell. Her post-transformation form uses a jealous snake as a motif, and incorporates the images of ninja and assassins hiding weapons inside their long sleeves. The eye-patterns common on snakes' bodies is also a main point. Her special skill being resurrection is probably because it incorporates the symbol of medicine's design, the Asclepius rod, one that also uses snakes. When I began designing her I originally intended for her to be a gross character, but her VA's acting was cuter than expected, so I ended up portraying her as such.

(Hatakeyama Yoshitaka)

Trivia

Elise bears a striking resemblance to Argoyle and Ugoyle, bosses in Mega Man ZX Advent. Both are purple, use coordinated attacks, and are twin bosses. However, Argoyle and Ugoyle don't need to be killed at the same time.
- Elise also bears a slight resemblance to another Mega Man ZX Advent boss, Rospark, as both use poles to move around and attack the player.
Prior to the events of the game, Elise was being held prisoner and was experimented on by Sumeragi. Stratos has a similar story.
Elise's Septima Form is likely based on Greek mythological monster Medusa.
- The Submissive, Dominant, and Crazed Alter is likely based on the Three Gorgon sisters from the Greek mythology: Medusa, Sthenno and Euryale.
The seven featured Adept bosses are based off of the seven deadly sins and an animal based on it. Elise represents envy and based on Snakes.
Elise is one of two bosses able to inflict the stone debuff.
- Copen is the second boss to inflict the stone debuff except it is only after Elise is defeated.
The names for Nova and The Sumeragi Seven are derived from luxury cars. Elise's name comes from the Lotus Elise.

Japanese Version

"Oh no... I'm sorry..."
—Elise, Japanese official site

Title: The Jealous Life Reincarnation (Unlimited Envy)

Azure Striker Wiki