Stephan Charbonie

Stephan Charbonie
kana	ステファン・シャルボニエ
romaji	Sutefan Charubonie
Also known as	Cantona, Stefan Charbonier
Nationality	French
Occupation	System engineering specialist
First appearance	Flower, Sun, and Rain (2001)

Stephan Charbonie (ステファン・シャルボニエ, Sutefan Charubonie) is a character in Flower, Sun, and Rain. He is a system engineering specialist from France who visits the Flower, Sun, and Rain hotel on Lospass Island several times per year, described by Edo Macalister as a VIP guest. During the events of the game, he appears to have spent the majority of his three month stay at the hotel in his room writing a thesis. Stephan acts as the antagonist for the initial arc of the game in which Mondo is trying to make it out of the hotel.

Biography

Charbonie is an extreme soccer enthusiast, gaining inspiration for his own work from athlete Alberto Ferrente. Charbonie takes an interest in searcher Sumio Mondo, calling Mondo on his second day at the hotel to lecture him on the importance of inspiration. Charbonie also requests Mondo use his searching skills to find his suitcase and return it to him at the pool on top of the hotel. When his suitcase is instead returned by Mati Sding, Charbonie calls Mondo at the roof of the Flower, Sun, and Rain, berating him for not recovering the suitcase himself, although he forgives him so that he can move on to another matter, a cryptic explanation of his passion for soccer. Charbonie asks Mondo to identify who his favorite athlete is, directing him to start by speaking with Yayoi Hanayama, a woman sunbathing at the hotel pool.

While Hanayama describes Charbonie as the type of man that repulses women, Charbonie is obsessed with her, and becomes jealous when she is attracted to Mondo, leading him to later explain to Mondo a plot to poison and kill Hanayama. Mondo uses Charbonie's hints to search for an antidote but without success. Believing he is too late to save Hanayama, he then realizes Charbonie lied, when in fact the woman was merely drugged unconscious. Through a chat program on his PDA, Charbonie explains to Mondo that his true intentions in pretending to poison Hanayama were to test Mondo's skills and teach him a lesson about trust, warning him to be careful of Edo Macalister.

Charbonie returns in the game's final chapter, when he meets Mondo outside Lospass Airport, admittedly regretting some of his earlier decisions. However as the two disband, Charbonie makes off with Mondo's Toyota Celica, Giggs. This is the last appearance of Charbonie, as well as the car.

Trivia

• Charbonie prefers to be called by his full name, as he explains when he calls Sumio Mondo at the roof of the Flower, Sun, and Rain.
• Like most other characters in the game, Charbonie possesses an awareness of the fourth wall. His repeated mention of "flags," though apparently used as a sports term, is also a reference to video game flags, otherwise known as triggers or switches, where a game scenario cannot progress until the player makes a specific interaction.
• There is a scene in The 25th Ward: The Silver Case in which an offscreen, unnamed character comments on a Postal Federation advertisement. This character inexplicably segues into a reference to a soccer player and compares his desired goal to the player's technique, much like Charbonie always does. Due to the field of systems engineering being very relevant to the design of wards such as Ward 25, there is a theory that that unknown character is Charbonie himself.