Cid of the Lufaine

Cid of the Lufaine is a minor character in the Dawn of Souls and 20th Anniversary remakes of the original Final Fantasy. Though he does not appear in the game itself, he is mentioned by several townspeople in Lufenia as the ancient creator of the Airship.

Dissidia Final Fantasy expands his role in the original game considerably. Cid and his unnamed wife serve as foster parents for a young child named Garland who was born to be used as a tool of war for Lufenia. Cid is also stated to have been the researcher who created the systems for preserving Lufenian memories using the power of the discord. Cid is also the narrator of the Game, and its prequel Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, voiced by Bunta Sugawara and Rodger Parsons respectively in the Japanese and English versions of the game.

Dissidia Final Fantasy
According to the Chaos and Cosmos Reports, based on the memories of Cid and his wife, respectively, Cid was a great scientist of the Lufaine who studied the powers of Harmony and Discord, and discovered a way to use the Levistone's power to make flying vessels.

When a neighboring country threatened to use its summoning powers to summon Omega to destroy Lufenia, the government commissioned Cid to make an ultimate weapon using the powers he studied to protect their homeland. What he created was a child, capable of using the power of Discord. For some time, Cid and his wife fostered the child named Garland and treated him as their own son.

To the state, however, Garland was nothing more than a tool of war and was eventually taken by the army when the neighboring country attacks. When Garland refused to participate, Cid's wife was coerced by the army to "aid" Garland. Despite doing so to save her son, she refused to go on further missions after seeing her son slaughter innocent civilians on their first assignment. She and Cid were both imprisoned as a result, and the army seized Cid's work on the power of Harmony in order to create a way to control Garland.

Cid and his wife fled the prison, using the monsters in the dungeon as decoys. They returned to Lufenia's laboratories where they found Garland, gaunt and weary from war and experimentation, staring at the clone of his mother the army was creating to control him. Cid's wife briefly explained what had happened, and convinced him to flee with them. Garland opened an Interdimensional Rift using his powers of Discord to try to escape with his parents, but Cid's wife was shot before she could reach it. Cid and Garland escape through the Rift, but Cid's wife is left. She was able to return to Lufenia, just as Cid's Levistone was used to lift the entire town into the air to escape the war, creating the Flying Fortress. As she died, she used the ritual of her people to store her memories for future generations.

What happens to Cid after this is largely unexplained. While in the discord, he finds Shinryu within the Interdimensional Rift, and makes a deal with it: in return for losing his body, Shinryu would recreate the world and revive its combatants after the war's true end. The two gods are placed in charge of the opposing armies, and at the end of each battle, the losing god, with new pawns, is revived by Shinryu.

Cid continues his research, believing this endless cycle of war to be the perfect opportunity to understand the ultimate truth of harmony and discord. Cid and Shinryu work to prolong the cycle for this purpose, but after finally witnessing success in his experiment he works to correct the mistakes caused by the war in the world and seal the rifts in the dimensions.

Trivia

 * Shall one consider Cid of the Lufaine as the official Cid for Final Fantasy I, and of Dissidia. This makes him the very only Cid in the series to serve as the "Cid" character of two completelly different Final Fantasy games.

Cid de Lufenia