Rutee is the heroine of Tales of Destiny. She is a Lens Hunter, meaning she kills monsters in order to sell the Lens she gets to Oberon Corporation for money. She is the master of the Water Swordian Atwight, who uses water, ice and healing magic in battle. When you first meet Rutee, she seems like a good for nothing thief who only wants to use Stahn to get money. Her actions end up getting herself, Stahn, and Mary arrested, and placed on a mission to recover the stolen Eye of Atamoni along with Sienegald's genius swordsman, the sixteen year old Leon Magnus...
She had robbed a temple under Seinegald's protection but was caught in a trap. Mary, her partner of two years, had recruited Stahn to help her and when she saw his Swordian she figured he'd be the perfect partner. However, the solders came back with more men and their young commander, who quickly kicked their butts and arrested them. They would have been killed, too, had it not been for Hugo Gilchrist, the President of Oberon Corporation. He suggested that Rutee and Stahn, as Swordian Masters would be useful to investigate something that was going on at Straylize Temple. So the three were set free and equipped with electric tiaras so Leon could keep them out of trouble.
Throughout the game, she is often at odds with Stahn due to his utter naivety and dubs him "Country Boy" since he was born in a backwater village. Generally, whenever his lack of know-how is concerned, she pulls the nickname out again. He considers her nothing more than a selfish girl, until she rescues an orphaned child in Neustadt who was being picked on by some rich kids. There, Rutee shows another side of herself.
Leon is another cause for her irritation. He's always short with them, even when they haven't done anything wrong. Anytime anyone, especially Stahn, tries to be nice to him he pushes the person away with insults. Also, he spends a lot of time belittling Rutee and being cruel to her...including overuse of the tiara for non-essential purposes.
She also shows her biggest fault when Stahn is concerned, jealousy. For reasons Rutee can't quite understand, whenever Stahn pays attentions to other women she gets really angry. When Ilene takes Stahn out for a tour of the city, she forces Mary to follow them and see where they go. When Stahn takes Philia's side in an argument, even when Rutee jumped to conclusions and acted unreasonable, she feels it's only because he likes her more. Rutee is still young, though, and doesn't yet understand that she's fallen in love with the man she playfully calls "Country Boy"...
During the Phandaria Arc of the game, Mary is reunited with her husband, Dalis, who is under the mind control of Lydon. If the player has visited their former home in Cyril, Rutee will be able to save his life when he's returned to normal, and she insists that Mary stay to heal the wound in his soul. However, if the player does not, he will die and Rutee tries to get Mary to come along to fight Lydon...but she is too deep in her sorrow.
The team eventually defeats Lydon and prepares to go home. When Stahn goes to find Rutee, who left her room without telling anyone, she informs him of her true reasons for becoming a Lens Hunter; she was looking for the money needed to save some people who are important to her. Stahn is touched by the story, and not only turns down Hugo's reward and asks all the money be given to Rutee, but he also gives her his money and Lens in order to help her.
Shortly after, when the Eye of Atamoni is stolen a second time, he goes to Cresta to pick her up (along with Philia and maybe Garr). There, the boy learns that the people she wants to protect are the children of the orphanage. Turns out, Rutee was raised there so she considers the director and the children her family. Though they want to leave her in happiness with the children, Rutee vows to fight so she can protect them.
Finding out that Hugo and Leon are missing, the team goes to look for them. After running into them underground, Hugo leaves Leon behind to hinder the team's progress, using the threat of hurting a girl named Marian to keep the boy in line. Rutee questions Leon's sudden heroics, and he reveals some shocking news to her: both of them are the children of Hugo and a woman named Chris Katrea and that Hugo abandoned his daughter when she was small for a reason unknown as of this time. After that, Leon fights against the others and loses, dying in the flood that followed the cave in when Hugo activated the Aeropolis (although he comes back in Tales of Destiny II, but that's another story).
They continue onward, fighting Hugo's minions. After freeing Marian from Rembrant, Rutee refuses to beat around the bush about her brother's death because it would only hurt more. When Marian starts acting like she probably was only a shadow of Leon's dead mother, Rutee informs her about how Leon fought and betrayed all he believed in for her. She comforts the girl by thanking her for caring for Leon...accepting the boy as her brother for the first time. Then, as the escape pod starts carrying the girl to safety, Rutee vows her revenge.
After the battle with Ilene, Stahn falls into depression because he liked her. Rutee, bored watching the scientific Clemente and the newly revived and equally intellectual Igtenos work in the facility, goes to cheer him up. At first, she's unsuccessful in telling him he's needed (using the "have I ever lied to you" line when he knows she's lied a lot). However, when he asks her about the world and she mentions that there are good people like him, it gets better. Stahn says he's fighting not for the world, but for the people he cares about. Rutee tells him she's in the same boat and he perks up.
When the team fights Hugo, he tries to convince Rutee to join him but she refuses; she even tells him that he'll never be a father to her. After the fight, you learn that he was possessed by Kronos, the ancient king of the Atherians, whose soul escaped into the Swordian Berselius. Knowing that his sanity was dwindling, Hugo sent Rutee away in order to save her from becoming a slave to his evil. He asks Rutee for one last thing...to see her face. The girl complies and rushes to him, finally accepting him as her father. After his death, she feels broken down but Stahn again is there to comfort her...until Kronos comes back to life.
In the game, Rutee returns to Cresta at least once and possibly twice for the story. First, the team can choose to go there to help out with the monster invasion, where Rutee heals General Leen after he takes a hit for one of the children. She consoles the distraught girl and scolds the general for trying to overwork himself. Later, you have to return to get the special lens, however Rutee doesn't have any special scenes there.
The night before the final battle, Rutee and Philia have a heart to heart where they both talk about Stahn (Philia in a positive way, Rutee more negatively). Philia insists she be more honest with herself, and Rutee goes to the bar where Stahn finds her thinking about her past. He offers to listen, but she knows it isn't the time yet. However, the gesture is kind enough for Rutee; she knows he cares about her.
In Dycroft, Rutee has to help Stahn solve a puzzle when he is separated from the rest of the group. When he communicates with them via a special panel, she reads the clue on the wall telling what he has to do. After he solves the puzzle and returns, he jokes with her by calling out "Hi honey, I'm home." Of course, that embarrasses the girl greatly.
After finally destroying Kronos, the Eye of Atamoni goes wild and the team is forced to sacrifice the Swordians to blow it up. As Rutee is about to throw Atwight into the Eye, she tells the girl about how she'd promised Rutee's mother that she'd protect her daughter. Rutee seemingly finds comfort in that, as she throws her loyal friend into the Eye. Then they all retreat, and the world is saved. It will be another year before everyone sees one another again...reuniting at Stahn's house where Rutee gets the drop on him by jumping off the roof.
Sometime after the game, Rutee and Stahn get married, and Rutee becomes the new director of the Dunamis Orphanage in Cresta. They have a son named Kyle, born three years after Kronos' death, and she finds herself getting close to a boy named Loni whose parents died in the war (he's sort of like an older brother to Kyle). Because they don't want the other children to be jealous of Kyle, they give him the last name Dunamis like the other kids in the orphanage (or, at least that's the most accepted reason; the other one I've heard is that they didn't want everyone knowing he was their son). They, along with Philia and Garr, became known as the Four Heroes.
But approximately 8 years after the war, when Kyle was 5 and Loni was 13, tragedy struck. A stranger appeared and held the two boys hostage, calling for Rutee and Stahn to come out. He threatened to harm the children if the adults didn't drop their weapons, so they did. When Stahn asked if the man wanted money or lens, he simply yelled, "Your lives!" and attacked. Stahn was killed (don't know how long he lived after the blow cuz none of the other heroes went down fast and they could be saved) while Rutee was slashed across her right side. After that, Kyle began to suppress the memory of the incident and told himself his father had simply went on a journey, a belief Rutee and Loni were willing to let him hold because they felt it would be easier on him. Loni also blamed himself and decided to become a Knight of Atamoni to protect Kyle & Rutee and make it up to Stahn.
Ten years after this incident, 15 year old Kyle decides to go on his own journey...whether or not Rutee approves. At first, she tried to hold her son back in fear of losing him as well but eventually, after a short conversation under the stars (talking to Stahn despite him not being there to answer), she allows him to go off on his own and become a hero like his father. She has no idea of the magnitude of Kyle's quest to help the part-Goddess Reala stop her more cynical counterpart (Elraine, a woman posing as the new leader of the Atamoni Organization) from reviving Fortuna and leading to a world without freedom of choice or that he will discover the truth behind his father's murder. Nor does she know that the masked swordsman who is accompanying and helping to protect him is actually her brother, whom Elraine brought back to life to be an assassin before his refusal which led to her reviving Barbatos as well and messing with the timeline.
Eventually, Kyle faces the decision of killing Fortuna and thus ending Reala's existence or letting the world become Fortuna's. He talks to the surviving heroes, including his mother. Rutee now notices how much like Stahn Kyle is becoming, even though he can barely remember him. She also apologizes for keeping the secret of his father's death because she thought it would be for the best. When she hugs her son, she can sense the pain of his decision but tells him that his heart is what holds the answer. He should not let his heroic status decide, but what he thinks is best for Reala and what she would want to do; no matter what, Reala will always believe in Kyle's heart. Rutee ends the conversation by telling him to treasure her because of the difficulty of the decision, and that he truly is his father's son. And after everything is over...Kyle should come back with his friends and see her. As the boy leaves, she tells him that both she and Stahn believe in him.
Time passes, and Kyle finishes saving the world. But because he eliminated Fortuna and Elraine, the timeline was reset. Judas (Leon) was never brought back to life in order to assassinate the heroes, but that means that Barbatos was not revived either. So Stahn never died and both of them were able to live happily together, raising their son and the other orphans. After Stahn insists he's old enough, even with the time he started his adventure in the altered timeline, she lets Kyle go on a journey with Loni. Of course, Rutee is about to discover that he'll be back with a girlfriend (Reala, brought back as a human because of Kyle's love) all too soon afterwards...
Games
Tales of Eternia (her picture is part of the clues in Chat's dungeon along with Stahn's and Philia's, while all five Swordian Masters appear when you get the Swordian Master skill)
Tales of Fandom: Volume 1 (Appearance)
Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 2 (I think PC but have no confirmation on this)
Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 3 (Playable Character along with all characters from Phantasia through Symphonia)
Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology (Playable Character along with Stahn, Leon and an assortment of characters from the other games)
Namco x Capcom (Playable Character in a Partner Unit with Stahn, with a storyline revolving around the Eye of Atamoni and Leon's death and revival)
Tales of Symphonia (her data is dummied into the game and can be accessed with cheat codes, in addition to her picture being in the artbook...suggesting she might originally have been a part of the cameo battle and was edited out last minute).
Other Media
Peach Gummie DVD (interviewed by Jade and Zelos along with Stahn and Leon while she kept trying to make a fast buck...repeatedly using Leon as a pitch)
Apparently, she resembles her mother. You see, Marian is specifically said to look like Chris Katrea, and Marian resembles Rutee. Also, Chris is most likely the woman in the portrait in Hugo's Mansion.
Adding to that evidence, in the remake Hugo tells her that a face she makes when they meet underneath Libra IV reminds him of her mother (which confuses Rutee since she'd yet to learn of her true heritage). Finally, one Title she can gain during the game, involving her speaking to a maid in the mansion, is called Mother Resemblance.
Although I picked her birthday at random, it has significance. Cancers are said to be family oriented, and look to hold onto their pasts. They also retreat into an emotional shell to keep from being hurt. Well, Rutee never shows her pain to the others, excluding when her father died or when she thinks of Leon. Also, she does kind of go on a quest to find her lost past.
During the game, she is shocked by Leon's device a total of 3 times: once when she laughs about Rembrant calling him a boy in Hugo's Mansion, once when she complains about him not taking her tiara off but taking Mary's off then calling him a snot-nosed brat at Ilene's, and once when she blames him for their earlier captivity when she and Stahn were in Heidelberg Prison.
She can be cheerful in almost any situation, which can cheer the others up. But she has no idea of how to deal with others' pain.
Both Rutee and her brother are left handed. However, Leon only uses his left hand when he is fighting against the party (so they can flip the sprite to avoid redesigning it) or the ambidextrous fighting style he uses as Judas in ToD2 (which his remake counterpart also adopts).
If the battle ends while Rutee is using her Search Gald skill, and she fails to find anything, the other fighters will hang their heads downward. Mary, being used to her, and Leon, being the perpetually annoyed brother, don't share this characteristic.
Rutee's Snipe Roar and Leon's Flying Dragon share the exact same TP cost and appearance, and Hugo uses a variant of the move (called Kuu Shuu Ken in the Drama CD...the Japanese name of Flying Dragon) in the fight with him. Though Leon would probably have trained with Hugo at some point in his life, Rutee was so young when she was abandoned that she probably never lifted a sword in her father's presence. Perhaps she remembered the move from seeing her father use it (either in a dream, fantasy or passing thought) but not its name.
During the Aether Wars (as revealed in ToD II when Kyle & Co. go to the distant past to prevent the timeline from being altered), Atwight and Dymlos were in love with one another. It's quite ironic that the last (perhaps only in Dymlos' case since he was sleeping all those years) masters they had in their lives ended up forming a romantic relationship with one another.