What Weapon Should A Blue Mage Use?

[Rayo]

On a Side note, I'm curious now what kinda aesthetic/lore/theme/story a Blue Mage job has, I've been seeing alot of people want magitek origin which is fine (except the body augmentation from 11, gonna have to explain alot why the WoL doesn't just whip it out during any other job, since Job crystals are more about filling the crystal with experience and knowledge over actual in-universe training or experimentation)

Personally I'd like the Blue mage's story being kinda like an inheritance story similar to MHA One for all, You're just one of a line of Blue Mage Job crystal wielders, each one making the job more powerful by absorbing the Power of Monsters

[Limecat]

since Job crystals are more about filling the crystal with experience and knowledge over actual in-universe training or experimentation)

It's not that hard to hash out with what they've shown us, really.

• Soul crystals are condensed fragments of the aether/souls of people containing their memories of abilities and experiences.

• People know how to artificially make empty ones.

• That Garlean tech for extracting aether and powers from one person to transfer them into another isn't that far off of an idea from what blue magic is. That itself is a callback to the magic extraction from the Magitek Factory in FF6, another setting using the notion that the soul of a being can become a crystal after death and impart the magic of whoever it was derived from to someone else.

• A bit on the nose, but the ceruleum used by the Garleans to power their magitek is, well, blue, and is refined from natural deposits of condensed aether.

• For a bit of icing on the cake, the methodology for blue magic in XI is that you're absorbing a fragment of a monster's soul into your own to gain access to its powers.

Given all this, speculating a framework for what might happen is simple:
Garleans lack in-born magic, so they use refined blue aether to achieve magic-like effects through technology capable of channeling those energies. The BLU soul crystal would be an artificial one based on the extraction tech(or possibly is a prototype or offshoot from that research). In seeking aetheric abilities capable of harming primals or other immaterial beings, they turn to some of the powers exhibited by monsters and imprint those into the soul crystals rather than strictly the memories of the holder. Additionally, like most magitek evoking them requires feeding ceruleum into the system. Consider how the higher officers in the empire need their armor and weapons to do their crazy attacks; they would have to house ceruleum or even more condensed aether sources in batteries/tanks of some kind in the equipment(makes for a nice nod to MCH's aetheromabobber too in regards to personal tech for magic manipulation).