Cheria Barnes

Cheria Barnes is one of the female heroines and a main protagonist of Tales of Graces games.

She is the granddaughter of the butler working for the Lhant house in Tales of Graces. She holds feelings for Asbel Lhant, but refuses to tell him even though the pair make it obvious at times because the feelings are mutual between the two.

In the AWA fics, Cheria is a student at the AWA Academy.

Appearance
Cheria has a long frizzy dark-pink hair and gray eyes. She wears a high-collared white dress with purple sleeves wrapped in orange ribbons, orange mantle with black linings, pink short skirt with a big orange ribbon at the back, black high-knee socks and white & black creamed boots.

Personality
She has a positive personality which lets her face difficulty with cheerfulness. Though she holds feelings for Asbel, she is the type who will not be honest about it. Furthermore she grew distant to those feelings during the long seven years they were separated, making their relationship awkward. She has strong feelings about being useful to the Lhants, as she has been living with them all this time. Also, as a dedicated healer, she tries her best to help every injured individual she can, usually running straight to trouble. After meeting Pascal, Asbel notes that Cheria acts like a mother for the rest of the girls. As one of the core members of the relief organization she is in, many others see her as an angel, mainly due to her healing skills and her gentle personality. Because of this, she has gained the admiration of many of her peers, especially Raymond and Bailey.

Abilities
Cheria's arte style consists of throwing daggers, allowing her to pressure the enemy from a safe distance. Her burst style consists primarily of holy offensive spells and area-based healing magic with three support spells to augment the party's evasion, accuracy, and resistance against enemies. Cheria is a rather fragile character, possessing the second lowest physical defense parameter in the whole party, coupled with sluggish running speed. However, her base stats are on par with Asbel's, and she boasts the highest arte defense out of the entire party, meaning her stats are weakened mainly due to weapon balancing.

While some of Cheria's arte execution is slow, her fighting style allows her to be mobile after attacking. This allows the player to constantly move while pursuing enemies from afar. By guarding and concentrating, she can perform critical hits easier than the other members by striking from a distance. While her healing spells take longer than Sophie's to chant, they have the ability to heal multiple party members at once. She can also lower her chanting time through mastering titles and performing attack chains.

Trivia

 * Cheria is the first character from Tales of Grace to be introduced in the AWA fics.


 * Cheria possibly derives from the infinitive phrase "to cherish", alluding to Cheria's childhood, when she was infected with an unknown, unhealable disease and grew as a person cherishing each day she was alive. This is further alluded in the "Future" arc of the game, in which Lambda tells her, "Few know the preciousness of life as you do".
 * Cheria's childhood illness is unnamed in the game, but its symptoms heavily correlate with asthma, a common chronic inflammatory disease of the airways characterized by variable and recurring symptoms.