I figure with Gejhi soon to be released to the public, I should probably start working on his closest friend, Aurumo.

As far as this animation goes:
It was a pain in the ass and I'm still tweeking it. Making very subtle movements at a high frame-rate in pixel art is a challenge sometimes. Plus, I kept slightly altering the pose, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted. I made him much beefier than my original concept for him. He's supposed to be a defensive TANK, so I felt his build should match that, so now he much more swol. I also made him taller, I wanted him to be at least be about a foot taller than Gejhi.

As for his development:
Aurumo is going to have an archetype that is contrasting to Gejhi's, with a heavy defensive lean. The general mindset behind his design is going to be "knight" where he uses ice to form various weapons and shields for the majority of his attacks. Likely references to Ike in Smash, as well as Dark Souls inspired attacks.

While Aurumo has a heavy lean on ice powers, he can also use fire and a few of his moves will use that. In my lore, fire and ice are routed in the same ability, the movement of heat energy. To create ice, he absorbs heat, and to create fire, he expels heat. This ability is inherent to his race. That said, he will have a "heat meter" that increases as he uses ice attacks. If used to much without using a fire attack, he will start to take passive damage, BUT, the higher his heat is, the more powerful his fire attacks are.

He'll generally be much slower than Gejhi, but far more strong in raw power. He'll excel at medium-range, with long reaching normal attacks, as well as a slow moving freeze projectil, and the ability to place ice spikes down, which will also freeze harder if he hits with the attack, but will otherwise act as a weak "wall" of sorts, blocking foes from passing though unless then hit it. Don't jump on it though, can still damage you that way.

He'll have a larger than normal lifebar, and a very high guard HP. His combos will generally not be as fluent with cancels as Gejhi's are, instead, relying more on linking the long hit-stun and freeze affects of his attacks to chain moves together.

He won't be able to dash-cancel his guard for meter like Gejhi, but instead can use a shield bump to push foes (at the cost of guard HP), or for meter, make his shield explode for a blow back. He will also be one of the few that can also walk slowly while holding up his guard, but will take double damage to his shield if hit while walking.

The freeze effect will not just act as a single hit to knock the foe out of the freeze, but rather, the frozen foe will have a certain amount of damage taken before the freeze is broke. This will deplete over time, but can also be sped up if the foe mashes inputs to get out faster. His freeze projectile will have a small amount of this power, but the spike's freeze will be considerably larger, letting Aurumo get a few hits in, or one huge hit before it breaks.

Aurumo will still have the normal parry, but will also get a special command parry, where he swings a shield. If this connects with a foe's attack, it will put them into a special stun for follow up. His normal grab will change to s special one with equal damage to grabbing the foe from behind.

As for a breif on his lore:
While Gejhi is more of a mercenary, Aurumo is an established knight for his homeland, having learned a variety of weapon based skills that he then leaned to channel into ice, making it take the approximate form of whatever he needed for a strike. The two of them met during one of Gejhi's travels and hit it off after fighting together and finding that the contracting nature of their fighting styles covers each other very well. The two often meet up for allied ventures. They also frequently spare to practice and test their styles against one another. Gejhi also sees some similarity in Aurumo to that of his mentor when he was younger, who was also a strong defensive type. Gejhi ended up feeling disappointed when he couldn't match up to the same defensive power, but found extreme success in using speed and pressure over pure counter tactics, also brought on by the fast that his dark powers inherent to his kind manifested in a less common way, as loose energy, rather than the more common solid mass. Gejhi still finds a sense of comfort being around someone who is like what he wanted to become. Aurumo fits that archetype well, even if the powers he uses are very different.

Gejhi also admires the fortitude that Aurumo exhibits. Stoic and confident, and able to relax and loosen up while not on task. Aurumo is super serious when in battle, but seems like it switches off once he's not. Seemingly soft and friendly and easy going, which generally helps Gejhi relax more, because when left on his own, Gejhi tends to become anxious during down time, often looking to keep busy to distract himself from his inner troubles. Aurumo has picked up on these issues and works with him to rid him of that self-doubt, as it could end up leading him into ruin if not kept in check.

Aurumo also end up assiting Gejhi in mentoring Jeibu, (a teenager duing Gejhi's saga) who shows promise in becoming what Gejhi wanted to be. Jeibu's dark power manifested in the way more typical of hibeia (what Gejhi and Jeibu are), the more solid matter, as well as being a bit bigger and bulkier than Gejhi was at that age. Aurumo ends up teaching him more defensive tactics to use that solid matter to his advantage for space control. Through this, Jeibu end up learning a variety of techniques from the two, and ideas on how to modify Gejhi's techniques into more blunt powerful attacks for what he seems to lack in speed.

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