Hᴇx - ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴏᴅ ᴍᴀᴄʜɪɴᴇ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
modmachine) wrote2015-07-29 12:42 am
modmachine) wrote2015-07-29 12:42 am
APPLICATIONS
In order to keep the number of players from getting overwhelming for the mods, all applications are processed in a queue in the order submitted and characters are accepted as space becomes available (either as space in the game is increased or other characters are removed from the game). Acceptance into the queue does not guarantee entrance to the game; unless there are glaring errors in the application (such as a missing section) or moderator concerns, all applications go into the queue based on the time of reserve (if applicable) or submission. There are two queues, one for newly arrived characters and one for those who are already residents of Hex. At the time of game opening, there will be twelve slots for new arrivals and twelve for current residents, discounting moderator characters. (Moderator characters apped in after game start will be a part of the queue.) The remaining four slots in the game will go to whichever fills up first. Post your applications to this entry in the following format: First comment should contain the OOC information section only. Successive comments should be posted in reply to that comment, as many as you need. Moderator responses will be appended to the last comment of the application. Last updated: Dec 5 11:pm EST
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Rikki Barnes | Marvel 616
Player name: Birdie
Player age and gender: 28, she/her/hers
Any other characters in game? N/A
no subject
Character name: Rikki Barnes
Character canon: Marvel 616
Canon point: Post-Young Allies, pre-Onslaught Unleashed
Character history: Wiki
Character world:
Character personality:
Character abilities: Rikki is not super-powered, just a physically gifted and exceptionally well-trained baseline human. She is athletic and highly trained in unarmed combat - she knows many different styles, but specializes in Muay Thai and Krav Maga. She uses a shield as both weapon and defense, and is probably more skilled in its use than anyone who has not actually been Captain America. She can get almost anywhere in an urban environment through parkour. She's also received all kinds of secret agent training from SHIELD: firearms, infiltration, hacking, deception, resisting torture and interrogation… all kinds of things someone her age has no business knowing. She also used to be a dancer, trained in ballet and modern dance, and though she's out of practice now, she's still quite talented.
Samples: http://tushanshu-logs.dreamwidth.org/72573.html?thread=7170941#cmt7170941
http://tushanshu-logs.dreamwidth.org/72573.html?thread=7211133#cmt7211133
Intended decay path: She'll likely have a life rather similar to what hers would have been if she'd never met Cap - a college student, a dancer, probably getting a little restless and considering something other than dancing for her actual career path… She's also some kind of supernatural, but I haven't decided what yet. Leaning toward werewolf or changeling, maybe?
Stigmatic glitch: Colors around Rikki seem unnaturally bright, almost like something out of a comic book.
ACCEPTED
To complete your entry into the game, please reply to the Taken Post with the journal you'll be using for the game, along with the other important information (character name, canon, your name, and the creature they are if not New Arrival). Then send your join requests to
You might also want to make use of the Squicks page and the Plot requests page! You can also join us on Discord chat and add the mod plurk at
Welcome again, and enjoy the game!
Anya Corazon | Marvel 616
Player name: Mat (reserve under Zip, long story, unrelated to app, it is still me)
Player age and gender: 30, n/a (they/them or he/him)
Any other characters in game? no
no subject
Character name: Anya Corazon
Character canon: Marvel 616
Canon point: Canon point being from a few weeks after the last arc of Avengers Assemble, when she was working with the Avengers to rescue her history teacher.
Character history:
Character world:
Character personality:
(no subject)
ACCEPTED
To complete your entry into the game, please reply to the Taken Post with the journal you'll be using for the game, along with the other important information (character name, canon, your name, and the creature they are if not New Arrival). Then send your join requests to
You might also want to make use of the Squicks page and the Plot requests page! You can also join us on Discord chat and add the mod plurk at
Welcome again, and enjoy the game!
Ryoji Mochizuki - Persona 3
Player name: Bookie
Player age and gender: 25, she
Any other characters in game? Nope
no subject
Character name: Ryoji Mochizuki
Character canon: Persona 3
Canon point: Riiiight before he vanishes on January 1st (Female route)
Character history: Link!
Character world:
Persona 3 primarily takes place in 2009 Japan, in the fictional city of Iwatodai (which can reasonably assumed is similar to Tokyo, with Port Island being a substitute to Odaiba, due to some various landmarks). The main difference between it and the real word is the existence of creatures called Shadows, born from negative human emotion, that only come out during the Dark Hour. The Dark Hour is a hidden hour between midnight and 12:01am that normal people don’t remember due to them being concealed in coffins, which protect them from Shadows.
Certain people, however, can be awake during the Dark Hour- this can end very badly for those who can’t defend themselves, but those who can do so with creatures called Personas, which are in theory the tamed Shadows of the users. However, they can only be summoned by forcing the user to be aware of their own mortality and often eliciting that fear in them, usually done by pretending to shoot themselves in the head.
About 10 years before the start of the game, a group of scientists tried to create the ultimate Shadow, Death, in order to summon Nyx to the world and effectively end it. The plan was thwarted, Death being weakened and then contained by an Anti-Shadow Suppression Unit, a robot specifically designed to fight Shadows. This requires androids of this type to be self-aware in order to be able to summon a Persona. This is not common knowledge.
Character personality:
On the surface, Ryoji is energetic, outgoing, and flirtatious (bordering on perverted, especially in that one part of the school trip...), quickly proving to be a favorite among the girls at his school thanks to his looks and charm. He’s very friendly and polite, and generally takes rejection well, since his flirting is hardly ever truly serious (not that the girls he's flirting with always know that). It's very much second-nature to him, and he doesn't seem to be entirely aware when he's doing it; even as he's heading out with the PC he calls some of the girls falling them 'cute,' and another time he hits on Mitsuru, and then Yukari as soon as Mitsuru left. The fact that he didn't know why that earned him a slap sort of speaks to the fact that he really doesn't think anything beyond the moment in terms of those actions. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of ability to commit, unless he really cares about the person in question, and more likely than not he’ll feel like he’s not worthy of them anyway.
He ends up finding a good friend in Junpei early on, probably due to similarities in their personality. While Ryoji's more of a charmer than Junpei is, the two of them get along well in terms of energy level, not being fans of taking something seriously unless it's really important, and perverseness, as shown by the class trip in which they 'accidentally' stayed in the hot spring during the girl's time and spied on them. (Ryoji says that even though Mitsuru made sure they paid for it, it was totally worth it. And then apologized to the PC so she wouldn't hate him.)
In the female!PC social link, it reveals a very different side of Ryoji that’s much more caring and introspective. Initially, he flirts with her like every other girl, but soon admits that when he’s around her, he feels like he needs to be more honest with her about who he is. He winds up being very romantic towards her, still using some of his flirty pickup lines but much more sincerely. He's very gentle with her, and obviously cares for her very deeply, even if she chooses not to date him. Towards the end of the month, he starts have a bit of an existential crisis (brought about by the fact that he’s going to end the world, even though he doesn’t know it yet) and feels terrible about the fact that he feels like he’s going to make her sad, even though she’s so important to him.
Once he regains his memories, Ryoji also has to deal with a lot of guilt. Not only because of things he has done, like pretty much break Aigis when she confronts him, but also because of the possibility of ending the world or making his friends suffer. Honestly, the part about his friends seems to be of bigger conflict to him- he's very fatalistic and doesn't believe the Fall can be stopped, so he desperately wants them to be able to live their last few months as if they were normal high school students, without any real cares, even though that means forgetting him and everything that allowed them to grow during the game. In that vein, he's a tad bit selfish, wanting to give up things that were so important to them, even if it's for a more selfless reason. He considers it unfortunate that they make the decision not to kill him, but still respects their decision and tries to help them (even though he's sure it won't do any good).
He’s well aware of the fact that if he hadn’t been trapped in the PC for 10 years, he would have never have learned anything about being human, and he’s very grateful to her for that, even if it does make that what he considers to be inevitable harder for him to cope with. The conflict is a big element to his character, as Shadows are meant to not feel emotion and essentially drain it from others, but the part of him that's human from the PC is very emotional. This is a balance that he usually manages pretty well (generally in favor of the human side), but when it comes to more extreme emotions he's not always sure what to do about them.
Character abilities:
Ryoji has the ability to turn into the shadow Death (looking very much like the persona Thanatos), which serves as a beacon to Nyx and eventually turns into her Avatar. As the shadow, Ryoji has never used his powers, so really anything for that would be speculation (I usually say he's got the same spell list as the Thanatos Persona). However, Shadows in general are made up from the negative emotions of humans- Ryoji especially so, since he was made specifically from the desire to end the world. Most Shadows can only really recognize when something is stronger then them, otherwise attacking anyone that is not Transmogrified (basically, hiding in a coffin) during the Dark Hour. Because of Ryoji's human element, he has much higher processing than this and can keep his reasoning and emotion intact, even in the form of the Shadow.
As Nyx's avatar, he has the power of Death, plus the twelve other arcana SEES defeated that complete him (plus the Fool arcana, not sure how he got that but whatever). He also has fourteen different forms. How this works is that he starts off with the powers related to the Fool arcana; once his HP is gone from that, he uses 'Arcana Shift' to change to the next one (the Magician). This keeps going, all the levels having relatively low HP before he hits his true arcana, the Death arcana. At that level, he knows all the highest level element spells, in addition to being able to cast 'Moonless Gown,' preventing any damage from being dealt to him. The later only happens on the ‘promised day,’ while it seems he can turn into the Shadow form at will. He also is incapable of being killed by anyone who is not the PC.
Samples:
Sample 1
Sample 2
Let me know if I need more!
AU nature:
Ryoji, instead of being a Shadow, is now a Sin-Eater, with a tagalong geist named Thanatos. The memento Ryoji carries from his geist is a beaten and battered children’s book, of a Torn threshold with the Phantasm and Stigmata keys. (Ryoji tries to read it to Thanatos sometimes, because he’s a dweeb.)
Mostly Ryoji uses Oracle and Caul, since he’s super not about the violence. However, he can use Marionette to do actual damage, and he hits hard. He can conduct ceremonies to help the dead pass on, and use their voice to give their messages to their loved ones.
AU history:
Ryoji grew up as a normal child (other than the fact he could kind of see ghosts) until he was about ten years old, when he and his parents were involved in a violent attack by muggers. His father was killed, but Ryoji and his mother survived. …Sort of. Ryoji had died, but a creature apparently took some kind of pity on Ryoji and offered him a second chance. Being frightened, confused, and not really seeing a downside to the arrangement, Ryoji agreed, and from that day on the geist Thanatos was a part of him.
The year that followed was a rough one, as his mother had to deal with the new balance of caring for her son and holding down a rather demanding job. Ryoji, meanwhile, was dealing with another presence in his head. Oddly, the intimidating looking creature was often totally fine with doing more childish things, but occasionally a violent, angry edge would well up. Too young to really filter that, Ryoji got in a bit of trouble at school and even wound up in a few fights. It was largely decided that it was trauma from the incident and he was sent to counseling- luckily, Ryoji was smart enough not to mention what was actually happening. Not to mention he was an incredibly cheerful and optimistic person by nature, which helped him out more than once.
He learned to better control the impulses Thanatos forced into his head, and learned to work with the geist to be able to use the powers he’s been gifted. Ryoji enjoys life to the fullest, knowing how precious and fragile it all is, and works to help the restless dead find peace- a process encouraged by his view on death being a cycle of reincarnation, and the ghosts he sees being trapped in their current stage. Currently, he is attending university, where he works hard (mostly), parties a lot, and still makes an effort to help those that need it. Though, he does also rather hate anyone who is not a Sin-Eater messing around with the dead, for some reason…
Thanatos’s history is almost entirely unknown to Ryoji, and barely known to itself, but worth noting. Originally a young boy, the geist was often ill and in a hospital. The doctor meant to care for him was researching geists and their creation, and had noticed that those who died from illness came out to be the same type. To view a difference sample, the doctor drugged up the child, explained his plan, and then violently murdered him.
Infuriated and betrayed, the child did in fact come back as a geist, and proceeded to haunt the doctor and interfere with his plans at every turn. The geist is entirely motivated by the desire to not let people who don’t belong disrupt or toy with the dead, eventually molding into a form that aims to be their defender. This can be stopping other types of supernaturals from abusing them, laying ghosts to rest, and in general making sure the whole concept is as low key as possible. Thanatos finds violence to be justified- after all, violence is what brought it into existence in the first place.
Justification:
The main difference is that in this version, Ryoji had more than a month to understand how humans and society functions. He grew up in it, so while he’s still cheerful and friendly, he’s no where as naive as his canon counterpart. Another major difference is Ryoji’s attitude towards violence. In canon, Ryoji was so upset about what he was fated to do that he didn’t want to harm any human, ever. This version still finds the idea distasteful, preferring to compromise, negotiate, or frighten others to achieve a goal, but he will still be violent if it’s the only option. This is largely in part to Thanatos’s influences and goals.
Unlike the original, this Ryoji also has some sense of self-preservation- he is not immortal, and it has been made very clear that he is not, so while he’s still very selfless and will do his best to protect people, offering to let people kill him is a thing that’s kind of off the table now. He likes living, he would like to keep doing that for a while. This is exacerbated a bit by the fact that he’s not nearly as guilt ridden, and has little reason to believe he’s inherently worth less than everyone else. However, exactly like the original, Ryoji’s got kind of weird views on death. It’s a natural thing that happens, and while it’s often sad, it’s life that should be celebrated rather than its loss mourned. He knows he will die again someday, and he’s made peace with that, and sometimes doesn’t get why no one else has.
As a side note, Persona 3 is cited as one of the inspiration resources in the Sin-Eater playerbook, sooooooo…
ACCEPTED
To complete your entry into the game, please reply to the Taken Post with the journal you'll be using for the game, along with the other important information (character name, canon, your name, and the creature they are if not New Arrival). Then send your join requests to
You might also want to make use of the Squicks page and the Plot requests page! You can also join us on Discord chat and add the mod plurk at
Welcome again, and enjoy the game!
Haseo | .hack//G.U.
Player name: Lavvy
Player age and gender: 24, she
Any other characters in game? N/A
no subject
Character name: Haseo (real name: Ryou Misaki)
Character canon: .hack//G.U.
Canon point: The end of vol.2
Character history: .hack//Wiki
Since the wiki likes to include all the noncanonical spin-offs under his history without any distinction, you only need to pay attention to Roots and the G.U. Games. Sora's history in SIGN, ZERO, Liminality, and the original games are also relevant, though Haseo has no memory of any of those events.
Character world:
Character personality:
Character abilities:
Samples:
no subject
AU history:
no subject
Justification:
holy shit why is this so long, i'm so sorry
ACCEPTED
To complete your entry into the game, please reply to the Taken Post with the journal you'll be using for the game, along with the other important information (character name, canon, your name, and the creature they are if not New Arrival). Then send your join requests to
You might also want to make use of the Squicks page and the Plot requests page! You can also join us on Discord chat and add the mod plurk at
Welcome again, and enjoy the game!
Kitty | Shadowrun
Player name: Kira
Player age and gender: 28/she
Any other characters in game? N/A
1/2
Character name: Kitty
Character canon: Shadowrun V
Canon point: 2078
Character history:
Kitty was born as the biggest kitten in the litter of a stray cat somewhere in the Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex, a huge, polluted, multicultural sprawl in the very west of the Alliance of German Countries, short ADL. The mommy cat didn't return one day, and this might have been the early end of the baby shapeshifter, had a little old lady by the name of Chantalle Schulz not found the hidden corner that Kitty had been born in and rescued the only surviving baby cat. The strangely large size of the kitten didn't tip Chantalle off about something being off with this cat, nor did the fact that she aged very slowly - and really, considering the neighbourhood, it could always just have been that the mommy cat had eaten some science lab's incorrectly disposed of waste, hindering proper growth in her litter. It wasn't that strange, and the woman was just glad that her new companion didn't require much food - or medical attention, really, never getting sick. And what a bright and understanding little kitten it was. No, Chantalle was way too happy and uninterested in questioning her luck to make enquiries. She was also not particularly inventive when naming her kitten.
Kitty on the other hand was quite happy the way it was as a young kitten. She did sometimes turn into a human, but always quickly turned back, so that Chantalle never noticed. And then, when she was old enough to comprehend the trideo news flickering on after the shows that Chantalle had fallen asleep to, she started learning about the world outside the apartment. One night, there was a documentary on magical critter extinction measures in Quebec, and shapeshifters were mentioned, too. For a long time after she thought that being hunted down and killed was what happened to animals like her, bigger than they should be and able to turn into metahumans, everywhere. And when she learned that most countries and companies just didn't consider them metahuman but also didn't hunt them, and that there were even a few countries where they were valued more, it felt way too late to tell Chantalle about who she really was. So she just pretended that it wasn't there when the old woman was around, and started experimenting with her human form elsewhere. For this, she started to sneak out of the apartment more and more regularly and through trial and error learned how to appear metahuman and interact with people like she was one.
Chantalle's apartment was located next to a waste facility run by the Shiawase corporation. One day, a curious new scent came from over there, so one young shapeshifter cat decided that sneaking in there was an excellent idea to figure it out. All went well until she suddenly found herself without a place to hide and two security trolls came towards where she was - and she did the next best thing and jumped into the back of an open transporter (not a waste one. It was very clean inside). The security trolls closed the doors and walked away. She was stuck in a dark, mostly empty space with no food and slowly decreasing amounts of oxygen.
Nothing happened for well over a day - she can't tell how long it was, exactly, but it felt like eternity - and she was too afraid of what they might do with her to start meowing for help. But then something did happen: Someone opened the door, and she only in time managed to jump into a hiding spot before yelling and fighting erupted outside, and just as the transporter started moving two street samurai, a human woman with a balance tail and a male troll, jumped into the back of the vehicle. As it sped out of the facility, gunshots erupted.
They made some head before people started following them, and while there was a moment of peace, the troll noticed Kitty. And recognized her as the cat that a little old lady had asked him to look out for earlier that day when he had been in disguise to find an observation point of the waste facility a few stories above Chantalle's flat. There was no more time than for a few nice words and an attempt to calm her down from a distance, but when the shadowrunners (because that was what they were, Kitty would later learn) got into trouble, and the trouble threatened to take out the whole transporter, including Kitty, the shock and fear made her magic abilities surface - she switched into her human form and sent an acidic wave towards the helicopter that was about to shoot big grenades at them.
The mix of surprise and the actual damage that her (rather weak because unlearned) attack caused got the group the time that they needed to turn the tides of the battle, and they managed to escape without casualties.
Once escaped, introductions were made, and the runner team after some hasty discussions offered her a deal: She would help them in future runs, and in return they would get her ready to participate in metahuman society - get her the skills and the more materialistic means like a commlink and a fake ID - and also teach her how to make better use of her magic and her agility. It was a good deal for both sides. Kitty got what she needed at that time, and the runners got a team member that only wanted a small part of the monetary rewards for runs but due to her skills in infiltration and magic was quite valuable. Two members of the team became especially valuable to her: Ivokat, the mage, taught her how to use her magic and helped her find resources where what he had and could do stopped working for her. And Malicia, the street samurai with the balance tail, took her under her wing a bit and took her along for runs away from the other team members. This introduced Kitty to wetwork, aka assassination runs. Not that the other team members were unimportant: Leo, the rigger, who taught her some Japanese and got her a miniscooter to drive around on; Eärendil, the decker, who introduced her to the world of those of the upper and even higher classes; and Simon, the troll, who showed her how to blend in in parts of the town worse than the one she had been raised in. With the team having three Elves, two of which had ties with Tír na nÓg, an Elvish country, it happened almost naturally that she also learned some Sperethiel, the Elven language.
She still lives with Chantalle; the woman was overjoyed to see her return. But she has now become a free roaming cat, and after some panic the woman understood that her cat would always return to her,even if sometimes she stayed away for a few days.
Character world:
While not exactly the future of our world - the timelines parted a bit before the dissolution of the Soviet Union - the world of Shadowrun still in many ways is ours, just with a reawakened magic and the technology of 60 years into the future. And the pollution of 60 more years of only barely regulated environmental irresponsibility, can't forget that. I'll try to just name some highlights in each area.
The internet is wireless, you can enter it on a way more physical seeming level than today. Advanced technology makes it hard to avoid it; augmented reality (AR) is widespread and makes you be bombarded with AR ads instead of billboards or neon signs when walking around a shopping district. But you can also step into the internet itself, leaving your body behind and stepping into the virtual reality. People rarely drive their cars themselves anymore, vast advancements in medicine and technology have enabled a widespread use of implants and other technical enhancements to human bodies and advanced technology, guns typically come with network abilities... and so on. Oh, and most recently there are artificial intelligences that are fighting for their civil rights. Or stealing bodies and committing terrorist acts, that depends on your viewpoint.
And there's magic! Dragons and other magical animals, metahuman magic users, magic storms, astral planes, and yes, ...metahumans. While classic humans still exist, a number of them have been born or changed into dwarves, elves, trolls and orcs (and their subspecies) as the levels of magic in the world rose. Magic is everywhere, and it is not always nice - indeed, it can be pretty nasty. Magic critters can be quite dangerous, and in especially polluted areas they sometimes are more toxic than their surroundings. Viruses have created ghouls and vampires. All in all, most magical creatures in lore exist in the world of Shadowrun in one way or the other.
A highlight of pollution is certainly the SOX, an area in central Europe so radioactively polluted that it can only be entered in protective suits, filled with storms that negate all magic and thus kill spirits and dual beings. But other natural disasters are around too - water smuggling is a major issue in the countries of California and Australia because of the water shortage there. And magical calamities have joined the natural ones.
Nation states have lost most of their power where they still exist, with very few exceptions. Corporations have taken their place as the main power players; the biggest of them having their own extraterritorial areas all over the world and their own citizens. Organized crime is huge as well, and corruption and general shadiness is so widespread in all all three, countries, corporations and crime syndicates, that they often are less different than they try to pretend. Society can be roughly split in two groups: Upper and middle class people living in more or less highly controlled and pleasant environments with citizenship status and lower class people who are poor, often without a real ID and without any structural protection, who in turn at least don't have their every move tracked and controlled. To make it plastic: A poor person will only eat food made of soy and enriched with artificial flavours while a middle class person will sometimes have real foods and a rich person will have only that and real meat, too. ID-less people, especially when they are orcs, will often be killed in droves in "police raids" (there are almost no real police systems anymore, they're all private for-profit security firms now) without anyone caring or a good reason, while a higher up person might just discreetly vanish, but it would actually in some way be about them. There is minor movement between the groups - talents that are snatched off the streets or people who work their way into the corrupt systems, and people who for one reason or the other leave the perfect world to work in the shady underbelly of society. Chantalle is one of the poor people who have a state ID - a kind of ID that doesn't award real privileges as corporation IDs do, but at least she officially exists, which brings its own set of advantages, and has enough money to afford her own flat in a fairly safe section of the worse parts of the sprawl. Shadowrunners like the ones that Kitty met are in-betweens; they come from both sides of society and end up as highly skilled independent criminals for hire for various reasons. To use examples from her team: For the troll street samurai, it was a steep climb up the social ladder from a poor slum kid, for the elven mage it was a heavy fall from a high society member in his homeland to a fugitive in a different country selling his abilities. tl;dr: It's dystopian, but at least dead people aren't turned into soylent green. If they lie wounded on the street, they might however be disassembled for all their parts that can be sold with profit.
2/2
ACCEPTED
Hajime Aikawa | Kamen Rider Blade
Player name: Airdra
Player age and gender: 32, female
Any other characters in game? N/A
no subject
Character name: Hajime Aikawa
Character canon: Kamen Rider Blade
Canon point: Immediately following the events of the TV series
Character history: In the history of Hajime's world, ten thousand years ago, the creatures of the Earth decided to fight for the right to rule over the planet. Their desire to fight for supremacy spawned the formation of an immortal life-form called Undead. Fifty-three Undead were created, and they were ranked in the same manner as a modern deck of playing cards. The Undead were to fight each other in a Battle Royale, and when defeated, they were sealed into playing cards. Fifty-two of the Undead fit nicely into suits and ranks, and each of these fifty-two Undead represented a species vying for control of the planet. If one of these Undead won the Battle Royale, then that species would win the right to rule Earth. The fifty-third Undead, the Joker, was different. If Joker won, then all life on Earth would be eradicated. Human Undead won that first Battle Royale, and the remaining Undead were safely sealed away for ten thousand years.
Scientists researching immortality unsealed many of the Undead, causing the Battle Royale to restart. Joker was among the unsealed Undead, and he was quick to hunt down and seal the Mantis Undead, the most skilled fighter among the Undead. He then used his abilities to take Mantis Undead's form and power by using the proper card. After that, Joker targeted Human Undead...but Human Undead allowed himself to be sealed willingly. The combination of the Mantis Undead's fighting spirit and Human Undead's compassion had an interesting effect upon Joker--he started to develop emotions and feelings beyond being a mindless force of destruction. He also became unwilling to return to his original form, even disgusted by it. For the first time, he found himself without a screaming desire to destroy, and he didn't know why. He no longer wished to be called Joker, and so he took on the human name of Hajime Aikawa.
He was still, however, drawn towards strong enemies and trying to win the Battle Royale, so he continued to wander the countryside and fight other Undead in Mantis Undead's form. When he wasn't fighting, he was spending his time in Human Undead's form and trying to make sense of suddenly having feelings and emotions. When Hajime fought the Giraffa Undead in the mountains, a human photographer was fatally wounded in the crossfire. Hajime assumed his human form and approached the man as he died, and he was shocked when the man was unconcerned about his own fate--he only wanted to make sure his family was taken care of. He gave Joker a photograph of his wife and daughter and begged him to make sure they were safe. This was too much for Hajime's growing curiosity regarding the humans, and so he took on the identity of freelance photographer. The camera would be a useful tool as he indulged his growing curiosity regarding the humans. After all, humans usually pay more attention to the camera than to the photographer himself.
Hajime found the photographer's family, the Kuriharas, and was able to rent a room in the basement of their restaurant, the Jacaranda. Nine-year-old Amane took a shine to him, and, despite himself, he started to return that affection. Hajime was starting to learn about familial love, even if he didn't want any emotional attachments. He was also approaching the point at which he could reliably pass as a normal human, albeit a shy one who was uncomfortable around crowds and prone to asking awkward questions about emotions and human relationships. Hajime's behavior around the Kuriharas was different from his behavior around others--he made more of an effort to emote like a normal human.
It wasn't long before humans affiliated with an organization known as B.O.A.R.D. started using technology and the power of sealed Undead to create Kamen Riders, warriors who could seal the Undead. Hajime's transformation into Chalice was mistaken for another Rider, and he soon came into conflict with Kazuma Kenzaki, Kamen Rider Blade, and Sakuya Tachibana, Kamen Rider Garren. Hajime was initially hostile towards the pair of them, and he still saw humans as weak and useless...though he still had that love for the Kurihara family that he tried so hard to deny. It did not help that the Riders were aware that certain high level Undead were capable of disguising themselves as human, and they assumed this was the case with Hajime. He made no efforts to tell them otherwise. Why admit to being Joker when he now hated that part of himself?
Hajime fought against both the other Undead and the Riders as Kamen Rider Chalice until he was badly wounded in a fight with Garren and left unconscious and badly wounded in the woods. Kenzaki found him and nursed him back to health. This raised a few new concepts for Hajime--he was starting to learn more about human compassion. He didn't understand why Kenzaki might help an enemy, even if he did appreciate the help. This marked a turn in Hajime and Kenzaki's relationship, with Kenzaki making efforts to befriend the secretive Hajime. Kenzaki's reasoning was that there was good in Hajime--he'd seen the way Hajime worked to protect Amane. Hajime didn't understand this, but he slowly started to warm up to Kenzaki. For the first time, he found himself with a friend who had an idea of what he really was.
Other Undead started trying to target Hajime through the Kuriharas, although they assumed he was simply the Mantis Undead, Chalice the Legendary, taking human form. Hajime told himself these human attachments were nothing but a weakness he'd developed...and then he left the Kuriharas in order to keep them safe. He encountered a young man named Jin who dreamed of sailing the world, and he thought that would both keep the Kuriharas safe and get him away from the other Undead and the Battle Royale. It was clear that he missed the Kuriharas terribly; he sent Jin to check up on them without giving Jin a reason. Jin looked upon Hajime as an older brother figure, but when the Shell Undead attacked and destroyed Jin's boat before he and Hajime could set sail, Jin blamed Hajime for the destruction of his dream. Hajime had made a friend, and he was hurt by the rejection. At the same time, other Undead had targeted and kidnapped the Kuriharas. Hajime rescued them, but he allowed Kenzaki to take all the credit--he didn't want them to know of the part he played. The damage was already done; the Kuriharas had been associated with him for too long. He returned home to the Jacaranda, vowing to keep them safe as best he could. After all, if he was right there, then he'd be better able to protect them. Each time they were threatened, it became very clear that Hajime cared for these people, and that attacking someone he cared for was a very good way to get on his bad side.
Life got complicated for Hajime. A new Rider, Leangle, entered the fray. Leangle, a high school student named Mutsuki Kamijou, was possessed by the improperly-sealed Spider Undead. Hajime was outed as Joker by the other Undead, and this caused Mutsuki to fixate upon him, desiring to take Joker's power for his own. Tachibana believed Hajime should be sealed, but Kenzaki steadfastly refused. He swore that if Hajime were to become a problem, he would seal Joker himself--which was a gesture Hajime greatly appreciated. Kenzaki kept insisting that Hajime was now a human, and becoming a human had, by this point, become everything Hajime possibly wanted. He was growing tired of the Battle Royale and being targeted by the other Undead. He didn't want to destroy the world, and he was determined that this would not happen if he were to win the Battle Royale.
A brush with the Caucasus Undead damaged Hajime's repression of Joker. The easiest way to enrage Hajime was to threaten the Kuriharas, and the Caucasus Undead did just that after separating Hajime from the bulk of his cards, which helped to keep Joker's power in check. When Kenzaki attained Blade's King form by simultaneously using the power of thirteen Undead, it was too much for Hajime to take. That surge of power, combined with Mutsuki possessing Hajime's stolen cards, unleashed Joker's full fury upon the world once more. It wasn't until Kenzaki retrieved the stolen cards and the only remaining card in the Suit of Hearts, the Evolution King, for Hajime that Hajime was able to bring his Joker self under control through attaining Chalice Wild Form. Joker was successfully sealed away once more, and Hajime was even more determined to live as a human. He was Hajime Aikawa--not Joker. Not anymore.
The power in Blade's King Form that had caused Hajime to run amok also came with its own price--using that form's power for too long ran the risk of turning Kenzaki into another Joker. Kenzaki was manipulated into fighting Leangle to the point where it seemed as though he would fall to the power--but Hajime was quick to help his friend overcome the Joker that was threatening to awaken, saying that it was his turn to return the favor. He was happy to be the one helping Kenzaki instead of the other way around for once.
The entire time, B.O.A.R.D. scientists were still researching the Undead--the head of the organization, Tennouji, had been authorizing experiments on the Undead and was behind the Battle Royale restarting itself. Tennouji also wanted the Riders dead--they had outlived their usefulness in helping him weed out the weak Undead and collect Undead power. Tennouji unleashed a fused Undead that could both turn invisible and take the form of others. This Undead wreaked havoc among the Riders, causing Hajime and the now-in-possession-of-his-own-reason (following a sequence of events in which Hajime was not involved) Mutsuki to believe that Tachibana and Kenzaki were possessed by Undead. After being a creeper and unsubtly following Kenzaki around for a while, Hajime figured out what was going on, and he orchestrated a plan to trap this fused Undead. He faked a relapse into his Joker state, which caused the Undead to reveal itself in the hopes of defeating Joker. For the moment, it seemed as though everything was going well for Hajime--he had demonstrated that he had Joker fully under control, Tennouji's machinations had seemingly been stopped, and there was only one other Undead, the Giraffa Undead, left. He'd worked with all of the other Riders, and Giraffa didn't seem like he would be a problem under those circumstances. The Battle Royale wasn't yet complete, but he was feeling better about things than he had in a long time.
Tennouji had one last card up his sleeve, and he fused with the artificially created Kerberos Undead. The Riders, including Hajime, defeated him. At this point, Hajime and the Giraffa Undead were definitely the only ones left, and at one point, it seemed as though Tachibana was about to seal Hajime himself...but Tachibana decided to follow Kenzaki's lead and place his faith in Hajime's humanity. He almost died sealing the Giraffa Undead, leaving him incapacitated for what was to come.
With Giraffa sealed, Joker was the last remaining Undead--and the winner of the Battle Royale. As much as he tried to fight his fate, Hajime found himself once more trapped in his Joker form, and the uncontrollable army of Darkroaches spawned from the Undead Sealing Stone that governed the Battle Royale set about trying to end the world. Hajime had his reason and a bit of self-control, but his body was moving on its own to a certain degree. If anything attacked him, Hajime would be unable to stop himself from fighting back. He attempted to kill himself so he couldn't destroy the humans he had come to care so deeply about, but as an Undead, it didn't take. All he could do was hope Kenzaki would be able to seal him.
Mutsuki attempted to seal Hajime by himself, but Hajime warned him against it--he knew that Kenzaki was the only one with a prayer of sealing him. Hajime sent Mutsuki to the hospital, and, soon enough, Kenzaki came to put an end to the Battle Royale--though not in the way Hajime expected. Instead of sealing Hajime, Kenzaki fought Hajime using Blade King Form. King Form still came with the risk of becoming Joker, and Kenzaki used that. He willingly allowed himself to become an Undead, sacrificing his own humanity so that Hajime could keep his. Two unsealed Undead meant that the Battle Royale was restarted, and there was no winner. Because their Undead instincts would drive them to fight each other until only one remained, Kenzaki went far away, telling Hajime that he should stay and live with the humans--and that he would fight the Undead's fate.
Character world: Hajime's world is largely the world of the early 2000's. The biggest divergence is the existence of the Undead--not reanimated corpses, but immortal undying monsters who exist only to fight. Ten thousand years ago, the Undead came into existence to partake in a Battle Fight for control of the Earth. (Canon lore claims that they sprang into existence thanks to the will of the planets' creatures to fight. ) The Undead would fight, with the winners continuing to exist and the losers getting sealed into playing cards. There were fifty-three Undead, all sorted in the same way as a deck of playing cards. Fifty-two of those Undead represented a particular species--the Undead who won the Battle Fight would secure the Earth for whichever species that Undead represented. The fifty-third Undead, the Joker, represented the apocalypse. If the Joker was the last Undead standing in the Battle Fight, then the Earth would be destroyed. The Human Undead won that first Battle Fight and secured the Earth for the humans.
In the then-modern-day of the early 2000's, the Undead were unsealed by researchers working for an organization called B.O.A.R.D. who were seeking to harness the power of the Undead's immortality. This restarted the Battle Fight and leads B.O.A.R.D. to make use of Rider Systems in order to create Kamen Riders to send out and fight and reseal the freed Undead. The series starts a couple of years after the Undead have been unsealed. The Undead and the Kamen Riders are largely regarded as urban legends, and B.O.A.R.D. is just another unremarkable research company to the general public.
Events in the end of the series meant that the general populace had to deal with hordes of rampaging cockroach monsters, though they wouldn't necessarily know what these monsters were or why this was happening.
(no subject)
ACCEPTED
Corwin Gardener | OC
Player name: Gail
Player age and gender: 35, she
Any other characters in game? None
no subject
Character name: Corwin Gardener
Character canon: OC
Canon point: NA
Character history:
Corwin had a childhood spent largely at home, going out only for school and coming straight home afterwards. His mother was alcoholic, extremely controlling, and emotionally abusive. Corwin is always quick to say she never actually hurt him, though he's privately sure she might have wanted to and just held herself back for his sake. If anything, however, it was because she lacked the courage. Even as a child, he grew up like a weed, and towered over her already by twelve.
Between moving about once a year due to evictions, his mother's controlling nature, and his own quieter nature, he never really had friends. The only real friends he ever managed to make were neighbors' pets and stray animals, and that only with a lot of time and patience. Because it was all he had, Corwin did well in school, working hard and generally not having trouble understanding the material. His grades got him into college, just barely, for a computer programming degree, and after that he never went back to his mother, moving as far from her as he could without actually leaving the country.
Corwin's sire, an older vampire named Jared, discovered him when Corwin was twenty-nine. It took the vampire three years to turn him. He watched him for a long time before beginning a correspondence and finally turning him on their first face-to-face meeting. Once Corwin got over the fear of the "attack" and being dead, actually understood what had happened, and realized that Jared was not lying about being "family" now-- it helped when Jared introduced him to a couple other Strigoi vampires who lived nearby, and they were unreservedly accepting-- he was overjoyed.
Jared took his new progeny to New York, so Corwin could meet as much of the "family" as he wanted. They stayed there for two years, Corwin eating up everything he could about the Strigoi line, way of life, and abilities and making friends for the first time in his life. When they returned to home to Detroit Corwin decided, with his sire's fondly amused support, to try and share the gift of family immediately, and purposefully set out to find the unhappy, downtrodden, and outcaste and see if he could help them.
His first choice, a teenage boy named Eric, seemed painfully familiar: bullied, clever but friendless and lonely, with a difficult home life. Taking a cue from his own sire, Corwin watched-- perhaps "stalked" might be a better word-- for a whole year, then spent another sharing emails and internet conversations with his chosen. Rather than surprising him with teeth and blood and death immediately, however, he actually met Eric in person before he turned him. He liked the idea of letting the boy know what he was in for, first, rather than putting him through the fear Corwin had dealt with, and having someone willing to cooperate with the procedure made things easier. After a few awkward moments while Corwin convinced him he wasn't a demon and he was still his friend, Eric actually took it surprisingly well, and after Corwin's rather passionate testimonial, accepted the invitation.
Except it didn't work. Instead of a vampire, a son and a brother, what Corwin got was a ghost. Eric had trusted him so much that he wasn't going to pass on when he died that he didn't, but his new unlife was not at all what he'd expected. Corwin was horrified, Eric confused, and no one happy.
Eric forgave him, but Corwin wasn't about to forgive himself. Panicked, afraid that he'd done something wrong, Corwin tried again, this time with Theresa, a battered wife with a stubborn streak that applied to everyone except her husband, a bitter outlook on life, and a loner's nature. He was much hastier this time, and didn't reveal himself, afraid of giving her false hope-- and what if the fear was necessary, and that was what he did wrong with Eric? Except that didn't work, either. All that happened was that the terror she felt when he killed her, and her fury at being killed, led to her staying behind as a ghost, as well-- only she, unlike Eric, did not forgive her assailant when he penitently explained what he'd done.
Now unable to deny that something was wrong, he finally dared to face his sire with his "terrible mistakes", as he saw them. Jared explained sympathetically that some vampires simply were infertile and couldn't turn others. The "defect" was devastating to Corwin, despite the assurance that it wasn't his fault and he'd still be accepted among the family no matter what, and he now feels that he has to do something else to make up for his lack. It feeds into his subservience to older Strigoi vampires, increases his protectiveness towards those he would otherwise take into the fold, adds to his unwillingness to turn away stray animals, and often leads him taking on strange missions or crusades in the hopes of helping the helpless. He doesn’t stay in one place much, these days, instead moving around with a couple of stray cats, the pair of unquiet spirits, his laptop and cell phone for freelance programming work when he needed cash, and the hope that he can maybe make a difference in the world.
Character world:
Corwin’s original world, a now-closed original-character role-playing game called Praelitis, is actually probably a lot like the World of Darkness world: there are vampires, there are werecreatures, there are mages, there are spirits and demons, there are even angels, though they’re not much like the angels of the Machine. The supernatural stays underground there as well, with those few too sensitive, too unlucky, or too curious for their own good stumbling onto it now and then, for good or for ill.
The time is modern, early 2000s, and the setting is mostly like the USA of our world, only with the addition of those hiding supernaturals. Vampires in particular come in several varieties, and though they all share certain traits-- weakness to sunlight and fire; supernatural strength, speed, and healing; conditional immortality and the need for blood-- they are different enough to have their own specific species traits. Corwin’s type, the Strigoi, are the ones with the ugliest outsides but the kindest hearts. They take in outcastes and the abused, try to give them a family in undeath, somewhere to belong and someone to look out for them, but the turning warps them physically into something hideous and frightening, a truly inhuman monster in appearance. Their special abilities include the summoning of one specific type of animal (in Corwin’s case, cats); a painless or even pleasant bite, if he’s careful about it; an unerring sense of direction and ability to navigate; and a tendency to kill plant life in the vicinity of anywhere they take up residence, though that’s more like a curse than an ability. The Strigoi’s oldest and most powerful vampires in the States live in New York City, in the subway tunnels beneath the streets, where they keep watch on the homeless there and protect their own, and keep records of their kind. Their culture is one of protection, watchfulness, and acceptance, with little of the vying for power that other vampire lines tend to engage in.
The game setting itself is a small town in Michigan, where the supernatural tends to congregate, it being out of the way from any major cities and unusually magical in nature. One of your typical settings for a modern supernatural game, really. Corwin’s friends there included a pair of demons, a wereraven, and a blind dreamwalker-- which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
(no subject)
ACCEPTED
Tobias | Animorphs
Player name: Matt
Player age and gender: 27, male (he/they)
Any other characters in game? None (apping Makoto Fukami)
no subject
Character name: Tobias
Character canon: Animorphs
there is no TV show only booksCanon point: Middle of book 54.
Character history: Tobias, the series in general.
Character world: In general, the Animorphs world is pretty much our world in the mid-late 1990s, in particular California. (It's never stated really specifically but this is the fandom's best guess.) 56k modems are a thing, cell phones really aren't, and everything seems perfectly normal... which would be true, aside from the remnants of the alien invasion that happened - only recently revealed to have been occurring over the past three years.
Character personality: Tobias used to be a shy boy, a dreamer, and an artist. He was bullied relentlessly in school, only occasionally saved by people like Jake. He felt unwanted by his aunt and uncle, and kept his head down as much as he could. He felt weak and powerless and didn't know how to change at all. After he and the other Animorphs started fighting together, though, he starts gaining self-confidence quickly. He develops an intense crush on Rachel. Though they don't go very far (for one the species difference, for another they're both young and also fighting a war), their relationship is one of the things that drives him.
He fights with himself, trying to moderate between human and Beast. He has trouble with the drive to survive matched with normal human desires for companionship and friendship. He comes off as aloof sometimes, even if he doesn't mean to. He has a fierce independent streak now, and doesn't want to show weakness - because in the wild if you're weak, you're killed, and his hawk brain knows it. He doesn't want to lose all his humanity, but it's a constant struggle to remember simple things like warmth and touch. Tobias, even when not hunting, possesses a strong 'predator' instinct, due to all his time in the Primordial Dream. He also has a little trouble with human mannerisms like not staring intensely at people and using his fingers. He's still kept his human intelligence, though, and is good at practical problems and figuring out ways around things. Even if someone is 'prey', that doesn't mean he'll bully them - he still remembers what it's like to be harassed, bullied, and unwanted. However, letting go of his predatory instincts isn't easy. It's got to be life or death - nothing in between.
He jokes around a lot, and pretends that things are all right, but it's pretty obvious that things are never all right. Especially after he gets tortured by Taylor, one of the Strix, he has flashbacks and trouble dealing with the stress of what happened. It's difficult for him to deal with things like that, since not only isn't that something that he can really ask anyone about because teenage boy embarrassment, but it's also difficult because of the need to keep secrets. He doesn't really care. He pushes through because of the predator mindset, because he doesn't really have any other options. Besides, he can't stop - everyone needs him. They have things that need to be kept at bay. They're going to have to keep going, because letting humanity fall is entirely unacceptable. He used to miss being human, but not anymore other than in a vague sense since it would make things easier. He's accepted being a Beast and the fact that his life is going to be short and brutal, but he has to survive. It's just difficult when you don't know exactly where the end is.
When interacting with new people, Tobias reacts in one of two ways: fight or flight. That is to say that he either stares them down, leaning on his hawk instincts to give off an 'air of a predator' - or he goes quiet like he used to, and hopes the person will simply stop bothering him if they get too uninterested. Neither position leaves him feeling very good about it, but at this point he doesn't really know many other options. He feels trapped by his own nature, and by nature itself. He's a creature that should not exist by all the rules of nature, but he does. He does and he has to carve out his own niche. Interacting with new people is strange and scary and not something he has to do very often given the fact that they have to keep things secret. He's incredibly out of practice.
But to the people he knows, cares about, and fights with he's incredibly loyal. He would never betray their trust or their ideals, and is prepared to die to protect them if he has to. After all, he's the one Animorph who doesn't have a family. He's more expendable, at least in his mind. He will fight beak and talon to keep them from coming to harm, and even more so when Rachel is involved. His bonds are few, but strong. It would take a force greater than the entire Strix population to break the connections he feels with his teammates.
All of the Animorphs come out of things with a lot of mental damage, but Tobias may be one of the hardest-hit of all of them. The shock of being thrown from the position of a quiet, bullied, and somewhat abused boy to a creature that needs to hunt and kill to survive takes its toll on him. It takes him a long time to give in and start hunting, and longer to kill something on his own. It gets easier over time as he removes himself from the killing, but it makes him wonder if he's lost his humanity in the process. His psyche takes a further blow after being caught and tortured, and he feels somewhat worthless even if he did agree to be caught as part of their plan.
He recovers a bit, but it's not until he faces his torturer again that he feels he's reclaimed part of himself. Which self he's reclaimed, though, he's not sure. There's no longer a distinction between boy and bird, human and Beast. He is a strange combination of both, and he holds onto that identity because it's the one he has left. He can't lose himself into the Beast mind entirely, but he's no longer fully human. This is the foundation of his new identity - not discarding his past, not discounting the future, but focusing on the present and the immediate tasks in front of him. He will push through what he has to, enduring what he can, for the future of people who don't care about him because it's the right - and only - thing to do.
He's basically had to admit to himself that he's not as much of a human anymore as he thought he was. He's been forced into fight or flight as things got more and more serious, and flight isn't an option. He's helped make tough decisions, he's seen way too many people die... the whole group has been under constant stress but Tobias is one of the ones that's had to speak more from a place of logical fighting rather than emotions. That's usually been his role, but the team has kind of fractured. The relationships they had before just aren't the same. He's seen way more people die than he saw before, and people die that were on their side. He used to be the sad, gentle kid. Even more than before he has to realize that he can't even try to go back to that. He's not a kid anymore, he's barely human anymore, he's a Beast. And the love of his life got killed and he feels like his heart ripped out. Grief is hard to process and there's no one in the world who can really understand how he feels.
Right now he feels kind of like a zombie. It'll take some time for him to get over the shock, and some more time to adjust to the fact that she's not coming back, even if he goes back. He's mad, of course, but he sees the rationale behind it, and that scares him. This was war, they all knew the risks, he just... didn't think that the risks would ever come to pass. They've all been close to death before, but a death of someone on the core team, and especially the death of Rachel... he's just barely coming out of that. He's aware Rachel would want him to live, but it's difficult to imagine a new way of living without her. He's glad it's over, he really is, but it's kind of a cold comfort. He doesn't like the limelight. He doesn't like being the center of attention. There's got to be something for him... just not something amongst humans at home.
Character abilities:
- Morphing ability (the ability to change into any being that's touched and 'acquired')
* Thought speech (mental conversation, though he can't read minds to get an answer back)
- Hawk base form (he is a red tailed hawk, he has claws and wings and a beak and he will use them)
- Artistry (he can drawings good)
- Focus (he is very good at focusing in on details and absorbing them)
- Perseverance (he sticks to things and follows through because if they don't do it, no one will)
Samples:
Tobias and a werwolf plot to take down some mages.
The tale of the Battle of Oatmeal
AU nature: Beast - Ugallu Ravager
Specific abilities:
Atavisms - Eye of Heaven, Wings of the Raptor, Limb from Limb, Cyclopean Strength
Nightmares - You Cannot Run, You Will Never Rest, They Are All Around You
In place of flying ability from canon he uses parkour and Wings of the Raptor. He also has good rapport with hawks, and his lair takes the general form of a wide, windy field with a tree border that also stops all electrical/complex machines used inside of it.
AU history:
Once upon a time, an angel fell for a human that he was charged with protecting. The new demon married her, and they had a child. This story is not the story of the demon.
The demon wanted to take care of the woman and her child, but had to leave so they wouldn't be hunted. The woman suffered an accident when her child, Tobias, was a few years old, leaving him with his aunt and uncle. The pair hated each other and soon split, shuttling Tobias between homes every few years.
Tobias was a quiet, sensitive child - he read books and sketched birds, and always seemed to end up a target of bullies. He tried to be kind to people, even as he grew more and more tired from strange nightmares of being hunted by something flying above him. One day, another boy came to his rescue - boy named Jake. From then on, Tobias decided that Jake was now a good friend.
Tobias followed Jake around for a while, until one night his dreams took an even worse turn. The thing hunting him drew closer and closer, until finally it was on top of him. At that moment, he knew that he wasn't the prey - he was the predator. The creature devoured him, and he became the creature that had taken up residence inside his soul.
No one suspected Tobias - how could they? He was too kind, and he kept that act up. Slowly, he discovered that Jake and his best friend, Marco, also had strange dreams. Diving into the Primordial Dream, he guided the two to accept their creatures as well - and then Jake's cousin, Rachel and her best friend, Cassie. The five of them bonded quickly, and started to hunt down creatures they found in the night - especially a group of beings that were taking over people, known as the Strix. It was subtle at first, but the changes were there - and Jake's brother Tom was one of them.
They were later joined by a person who went by the name of 'Ax'. Ax was strangely knowledgeable about the creatures they were fighting, and eventually once they revealed their secret, he revealed his - he was a demon. The group had never clung too tightly to tales of the Dark Mother, but they knew that a creature like a demon was not one of their family. But Ax was definitely one of them - he'd fought alongside them enough to be considered part of the family. Maybe not his whole species, but Ax, definitely.
Their missions grew more and more dangerous, even leading Tobias into being captured and tortured, until finally they'd struck enough of a blow for the creatures to be truly afraid of them. Tobias rained down destruction from the skies, and finally things seemed to calm down.
And then tragedy struck. Rachel was killed during the course of a mission - they'd thought it would be easy enough. Horrified and lost, Tobias pulled away from the rest of the group and cut off contact with them other than letting him know he was alive. He didn't leave Hex, but his hunts became solo affairs rather than team efforts once more.
He'd wipe out the rest of those things with or without the others. They needed to pay for taking Rachel from him.
Justification: Tobias is a bird in canon, so Ugallu fits him well. His big issues have to deal with feeling not human anymore while still being able to walk among them. He has the constant alienation of being different - and he's handpicked by a being greater than himself - the Ellimist in canon, the Dark Mother (maybe) in his AU history.
ACCEPTED
Makoto Fukami | Kamen Rider Ghost
Player name: Matt
Player age and gender: 27, male (he/they)
Any other characters in game? None (apping Tobias)
no subject
Character name: Makoto Fukami
Character canon: Kamen Rider Ghost
Canon point: Episode 50.
Character history: Here's the wiki.
Character world: Basic 2016 Japan technology level - at least for the human world. The Ganma world merges human technology with some very undefined magic powers and has (or had) people with the ability to stuff souls into small items called Eyecons. Eyecons not made of living people tend to be formed from items connected to so-called 'Heroic Spirits', people who have made impacts on the world in a major way. (Edison, Goemon, and Mozart are all examples of Heroic Spirits from the show.)
Character personality:
Makoto tends sets himself up to be an antagonist. While it's not wrong that he's naturally antagonizing and somewhat blunt, he's more driven than anything else. His top priority in life is his sister and her safety (and yes, the fandom takes this too far and canon didn't help with it). Takeru and people he trusts draw out the more caring side of Makoto, but he remains driven, running towards his goal with very little real regard for his own safety. He's not protagonist-reckless, but pretty damn close.
Makoto doesn't talk about what Arcadia was like very often. It's no place for human children, even with the protection of the fey. Like it or not, he was a captive, which only proved to make him less likely to rely on others. He didn't even have to eat, which definitely must have come as a shock.
While not afraid to get his hands a bit dirty, other people tend to pull him back towards his moral center. Many of his more tender moments people can draw out of him surround either his sister or Takeru's father, who took in the two siblings when Daigo Fukami walked out on them. Makoto views Takeru's father as his real father, and harbors a lot of hate and resentment for the person who abandoned them.
Movie events may have changed it very slightly, but no one has put out a translation.The biggest issue he has, however, is a struggle for identity, both literally and metaphorically.In a more metaphorical sense, he's been away from Earth for ten years, and while he's gotten up to speed quickly it's still sometimes a bit strange for him. In an isolated place like the freehold, it's not hard to be out of the loop, but when he heads into town there's just... things that are different. He's a stranger in his own home, really. In a more literal sense, he's met his fetch, and he fought with it. It beat him and taunted him and asked him if he was sure he was the real one.
Makoto is driven, purposeful, and willing to leap into things. He is caring to those who are his allies and absolutely ruthless in battle if he decides he needs to fight someone. He doesn't always win, but that just makes him fight harder. He does not hesitate to leap in and take a blast for his allies, and he does not abandon them easily. Even when pushed, even when tested, he at least tries to do the right thing.
Character abilities:
- Motorcycle riding: Where he learned we don't know, but he's a Kamen Rider. He can ride a motorcycle because it's pretty much required.
- Hand to hand combat: Makoto has trained for years in hand to hand combat against both Prince Alain, others in the royal Ganma family, and other Ganma. His style tends towards swift and brutal strikes, generally erring towards punching rather than kicking.
- Ghost Driver: Makoto possesses the ability to summon a Ghost Driver, basically a transformation belt that lets him become Kamen Rider Specter. He uses his Eyecons to transform into different forms, though he only has Specter form available.
* Specter form: Increased speed/strength/etc. because it's a transformation. He also has access to his Gan Gun Hand, which is either a rod or a gun on its own, but if he attaches the Cobra Keita (cobra phone) he can make it into a scythe. He also has a kick finisher that uses spiritual power, a rod finisher that does likewise, and a sickle mode that does the same thing.
Samples: Hex test drive and a totally immersed Makoto in a PSL.
AU nature: Summer Court Changeling, Beast kith - specifically Truefriend (Winter Masques, page 67).
AU history:
Makoto and Kanon Fukami were born to a relatively poor family. Makoto was about two or three when Kanon was born, and complications from the birth led to their mother's death. Their father grew more and more mentally unstable, leading to him abandoning his children in the care of Ryu Tenkuji, a local Hunter. They were raised alongside Ryu's son, Takeru, until one day the two siblings were approached by a man who said that they knew where their father had gone.
Unbeknownst to them, this man was in the employ of some True Fey, and the two quickly were dragged into Arcadia, into the realm of a pair of Gentry that were once Changelings themselves (though neither of them ever revealed that). Both of the Fukami siblings were changed by the experience - Kanon became a 'doll' for Alia, and Makoto became Alain's loyal hound. Makoto spent day and night fighting other creatures in the 'arena', eventually coming to earn his master's favor. He was allowed to sleep on his master's bed, and when he was injured his master would tend to his wounds. Makoto cared deeply for Alain in return... but when he found out what had happened to Kanon, he knew he had to leave.
One night he escaped his 'kennel' and broke into Alia's area of the realm. He grabbed Kanon and dragged her back with him, past the edges of the broken city that made up most of the realm. They plunged back through the Hedge, Makoto fighting off everything he could. Finally they found a stone monolith, and touching it opened a door back into the human world. Makoto pushed Kanon through first, and almost didn't leave... but as much as his heart belonged to Alain, he needed to take care of Kanon.
Eventually the pair made it to the local freehold, where they were taken in. Makoto joined the Summer Court, never telling them how much he wanted to go back. He would never sell the others out, of course, but in his dreams he still ached for Arcadia. Makoto grew in power, using it to defend Kanon where he could, but kept his distance from most other supernatural creatures. He's carved out a basic 'human' existence - he works as a motorcycle courier and occasionally takes jobs where there are definitely no questions asked. It's enough for a basic apartment in the poor part of the city, and it helps pay some of the other Lost to keep her healthy - she suffered much worse damage coming back through the Hedge than he did.
Notable powers:
In mechanical terms, he has lowish levels of Fang and Talon (Canines), Den, Fleeting Summer, and Punishing Summer.
Justification: In canon, Makoto and Kanon are both dragged into the world of Ganma for ten years. (We really only know the specifics of what happened there in brief flashbacks, and Makoto's time is covered somewhat more in-depth.) Makoto and Alain are friends, though they started out as sparring partners and he had to earn the Prince's trust and friendship. But once it's gained, Makoto does not give up this friendship, even when he has to fight Alain in order to convince him of the rightness of the cause he's joined.
ACCEPTED
Malin Lindberg | Vampire: The Masquerade
Player name: Kira
Player age and gender: 28/she
Any other characters in game? Kitty
no subject
IC Information
Character name: Malin Lindberg
Character canon: Vampire: The Masquerade
Canon point: February 2016
Character history: Malin grew up as the single child of an upper class family. Her parents were alcoholics and showed various abusive behaviours towards their daughter, though they mostly neglected her. Due to both of them being quite functional and nice outside of their home life, and well, upper class, it was one of those cases where people refuse to believe such things might be possible - alcoholism and abuse only happen in poor families, right?
She got along well enough at school. Though she was neither the best student nor the most popular, she at least managed to never fail classes or ping as weak enough to be bullied.
Nobody noticed when she tried to run away for the first and second time. Or perhaps just nobody cared. And nothing was better after she returned, so the third time, not long before her fifteenth birthday, she went to Copenhagen and stayed there. She managed to make a living somehow, stealing and begging and slowly falling in with drug dealing, when she fell asleep one night in a lonely corner. Only to be woken by hands on her shoulders, pressing her down and against the wall. She fought back, but it really was no use, and her last thoughts before she succumbed to blood loss were how could I nod off in a place like this.
She woke up again alone. Her first nights were frightening, and the nights after were no better. But she survived and learned, somehow. The life of a Caitiff is never easy, but it wasn't really any worse than her existence had been before, she thought - shitty, but she'd never been a quitter.
And then things suddenly got better. She had to have done something really right for once in her life, because an older vampire, Lars Nielsen, decided to adopt her and show her the ropes. Things were looking up, for once. He taught her how to deal with her new life and new powers in better ways and finally introduced her to the Camarilla, and for a few years, things were good. Not perfect, but good.
Right up until the point when her and Lars were ordered before the Prince and Lars was accused of having not adopted, but sired her. Without permission. To this day she doesn't know if the accusation was correct, but she also doubts that it would have really mattered. The only reason why she wasn't destroyed alongside Lars was that one of the Tremere Elders had requested that she be spared and given to her instead. Malin hadn't expected that to mean anything good, and it didn't.
See, this Tremere was working on some research about the beast, and a younger colleague of her in this quest had figured that experimenting on its most visual representation, the aftermath of a Gangrel's frenzy, would be a good idea. So Malin was given to this Tremere ancilla, Lise Mikkelsen, who then kept triggering her into frenzies by all means possible, from humiliation to starving to forcing her into fight or committing atrocities.
The Tremere made a mistake, though. She had blood-bonded Malin to her for better control early on, but Malin came to hate her so much that she could shake the bond for a bit and murder the woman. Or, rather: Diablerize her. She might not have done that before Lars's death, but Lise's actions had made her less human than she had once been. The act, of course, didn't help with Malin's humanity, but she was free and managed to escape.
Her automatic response was to head back to her native town, but on the way she realized that that was a terrible idea.
For one, whom would she go back to? And two ...well, unlike before, she would stand out massively anywhere where there were humans. The Tremere's experiments had turned her into a monster straight out of nightmares within a few years.
But she remembered some stories that Lars had told her about the very north of Scandinavia. Dangerous territory, he had said, but beautiful. The last true wilderness of this part of the the world. Ripe with Lupines, but still the best place to be for those Gangrel who really couldn't get by in a city anymore... And the only other vampires there would be independent Gangrel, most likely. She didn't know what that would mean in relation to her, but hoped that it meant that they would just let her be.
So she headed north (though she did pass by her old home to grab some nourishment from her parents in some undefined semblance of revenge). So far, she has managed to survive there quite well, but summer is coming, the time of eternal daylight. She would laugh about how she has the opposite problem now of the one that she had as a human on the street, if it wasn't so life-threatening...
Her only saving grace physically is at this point that she still sounds human - she still has quite a nice singing voice, really. The only pieces of human clothing that she still owns are a long XXL military coat with a hood and a pair of boots - she's long forgone regular clothes because she neither needs nor can wear them anymore. But the coat provides shelter, and combined with the boots and dark corners she can shuffle around human settlements, at least as long as nobody properly looks at her. She would learn Obfuscate in a heartbeat if someone taught her, but that never happened.
Character world:
Malin's world is a lot like our present world, just grittier - all the negative traits of the social and political structures of the human race are more pronounced and generally more rigid. There are two main differences: The existence of supernaturals and the existence of spaces beyond our known reality. (I assume that they changed nothing majorly here between oWoD and nWoD so I'll move on to vampire society.)
Among those supernaturals are vampires. Due to where and when Malin lives and learned about them, they present to her roughly like this:
Vampire (Kindred, as they call themselves) society is structured along two fault lines, sect and clan. Sect-wise she used to belong to the Camarilla and is now independent and clan-wise she is of the Gangrel. For a while, she was considered to be Caitiff, that is, clanless. In her case it meant that she didn't know which clan she came from because she hadn't been told and that she lacked the support of clan belonging. It can also mean someone who genuine has no belonging because they don't manifest the specifics of any clan.
The Camarilla is the dominant group in Copenhagen, where Malin was embraced, enforcing the Masquerade - the rule that no vampire may alert humanity to the existence of the undead, neither through their words not their actions - and consisting of a number of clans, among them, as one of the founding clans, the Gangrel. Since they, as a rule, are wanderers who like the wilderness and prefer to stay away from the political games of the Jyhad (a penchant for being mercenaries notwithstanding), the stationary, city-bound sect has however never held the greatest appeal for them. So even the large number of Gangrel that nominally are Camarilla often don't belong to a specific Prince's dominion or have strong ties with the sect. Many Gangrel are independent, but there is also a sizable antitribu faction (two, actually) in the Sabbat. Generally, the Gangrel have a strong independent/anarch presence in Scandinavia that reaches back much further than that of any other clan, and in opposition to especially Toreador and Ventrue they have a significant Scandinavian pagan history.
The Gangrel clan disciplines center around lordship over animals, being in touch with one's beast, the feral power inside, and durability. Their weakness is that with time (and frenzies, the loss of control to the beast), their bodies start to reflect this and they take on more and more animalistic traits - mostly physical, but also in behaviour, voice, and other areas.
The second clan that is important in Malin's background are the Tremere. Unlike all other vampires (more or less, there are other special cases), the Tremere weren't vampires originally, they were mages trying to figure out immortality. Eventually, that led them to become vampires. They are the scientists among vampires and the clan which as a whole feels the need to watch their collective back the most. They are also the only ones who can find out about someone being a diablerist after the black streaks that consuming another vampire's soul brings having vanished from one's aura. They also practice thaumaturgy and are tightly knit through blood bonds and a strong hierarchy, and they are a pillar of the Camarilla.
Unsurprisingly, after her experiences with this clan, Malin has no interest in ever returning to this sect.
Other good reasons for this lack of interest are that she has committed two offences that the Camarilla considers worthy of the offender's destruction: Having been sired without permission of the Prince, and having diablerized someone.
Character personality:
Two biographical details of Malin's life deserve to be looked at closely in this section.
One is that she is very young in more ways than one. She wasn't even of age when she was embraced, and she wasn't a vampire for much longer when Lars met final death - it bears mention that Lars himself wasn't very old when he embraced her, either, having been sired during the German occupation. This means two things: Firstly she has very little actual knowledge about the history and society of the Kindred, and what she knows of both is still heavily coloured by the Camarilla point of view; her knowledge about the Sabbat, for example, can be summed as "insane fanatics who try to get everyone killed by refusing the Masquerade". She has little knowledge about her own clan, too, having had few encounters with Gangrel past Lars and Lars having concentrated more on her studying the clan disciplines than hearing stories about it. This makes it hard for her to correctly estimate dangers and see chances relating to vampiric society. Secondly it also means, along with how she grew up, that she never had the chance to develop into a person with mature coping mechanisms and social strategies, especially when it comes to relationships.
The other is that she is a survivor more than anything else. Life may be shitty, but she'll prevail, somehow. Something better than death can always be found if you try for it hard enough. At heart she is still the streetkid having run from an abusive home that she was in life, distrustful and jaded but desiring safety and kindness more than anything. Life, to her, is a fight, not so much for a prize but for survival. Others might get prizes - status, friends, riches, safety -, but she has come to believe that those aren't available to her, at least not in more than very modest capacities. At the point that I'm taking her from, this has gone to extremes - she doesn't know what more she can expect than survival, and she isn't fighting for more, fully occupied with this task. She is, at this point, a not very human bundle of basal needs - partly because of what happened to her and partly because she has tried to limit herself that way in recent months, finding it easier to survive that way in a place where her social abilities (whatever there is left of them) simply weren't needed.
She isn't necessarily angry, she isn't filled with hate - the one person whom she hated enough to override everything else is dead, after all. But she is fearful, driven by terror of what she did catching up with her, by what she is catching up with her, by werewolves or anyone else who might take an issues with vampires in general catching up with her. Fear is her driving power now, but fear could also potentially lead her back towards other people, if she thinks that they can provide safety for her. ...It would be surprisingly simple, really, and not even require the promise of protection so much as the promise of a place where she can be around others without it being potentially dangerous. Even more potent would be an offer of kindness. She's always craved someone caring, understanding. It might be buried now, but no matter how jaded she is, the need is as strong as ever, and if she can perceive it clearly in someone, she will latch onto it.
But she is deeply distrustful, so any deeper connection will be hampered by it. Every time that she thought that there was someone whom she could put some trust in, who would support her, she has been disappointed - most recently and starkly by Lars.
If she has to deal with others, her first attempt to deal with the situation will be to keep her head down and not attract attention. Failing that, she will typically try to please those above her station and only support these of like or lower station if she thinks she'll gain something from it herself (since she craves kindness, that could be as little as treating her kindly, material advantages aren't necessarily required). She sees no problem with kicking back when someone who isn't stronger is kicking her, or someone who is stronger and will endanger her survival cannot be appeased in any other way.
She's hypersensitive to all shifts in people's emotions and the atmosphere of a situation when dealing with those stronger than her, tries to always be five steps ahead of any of their moodshifts and will try to appease any negative shifts if she cannot escape such situations. Lars managed to get the tactic of blaming herself overly before anyone else can accuse her out of her and generally helped her hide some of her more compromising reactions to social stress, but even if they are hidden then patterns are still there.
That hypersensitivity and her general lack of academic background are further reasons for her lack of knowledge about the Kindred in general: It simply seemed far more important to her to figure out those people that were actually present than learning about far-away seeming theoreticals.
Along the way of her frenzies, she has picked up a number of animal behaviours - most prominently: She likes to cram herself into small spaces for a feeling of safety; she will feel compelled to eat with her mouth instead of her hands and then lick the container that the food was in clean; she often treats her own reflection in a mirror as another person. She can stop herself from all of these behaviours, but it takes willpower.
A thing that she will have to learn how to deal with when returned to any kind of society will be not only to interact with people again, but interact with them as someone who immediately pings as a threat or at least repulsive due to her appearance. She acquired all her permanent (and the still lasting non-permanent) traits in Lise's laboratory and thus her last free interaction with anyone who saw her as more than a lab rat dates back to before she acquired anything that made her look less human than the average vampire.
(no subject)
ACCEPTED
Richter Belmont | Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Player name: Art
Player age and gender: 22, Female (she/her)
Any other characters in game? No
Re: Richter Belmont | Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Character name: Richter Belmont
Character canon: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Canon point: Best End (canon ending, where Maria chases Alucard)
Character history: Here is his history through the games! Headcanon other than that... he was raised by his parents until he was a preteen, and then raised and trained by his grandfather, Juste, who was a mage as well as a vampire hunter, in preparation for Dracula's resurrection. He returned to hs hometown at about 16 as a fully fledged hunter, and started dating hs childhood friend, Annette.
Character world: The world is akin to the 1790s of the real earth in terms of technology and culture, but magic is off the charts. Most notably, monsters are real. Hunters fight them. There are mages, as well; Richter is in fact descended from a clan of magic users, though his abilities are mostly minor; item crashes and the ability to wield the Vampire Killer.
Character personality: Richter Belmont is... overly invested in his work, and overly dramatic as well. However, he's a hard worker, and doesn't let anything stop him. Not vampires, not werewolves, not... ok, he's a little susceptible to mind control. He's a big eater, and will eat practically anything, including but not limited to meat found in walls. Richter Belmont is very, very devoted to his loved ones, but not as much as he is to the deliverance of life from evil. He was willing to save his girlfriend, Annette Renard, from Dracula's clutches at great personal danger, but in the bad path, where she is not saved before being turned into a vampire, he kills her, though he is not at all happy to do so. He's saved many people from evil, and believes it to be his calling, and he's not wrong.
Richter is strong, and that defines a lot of him. He's strong in his decisions, his actions, and his words, to the point of being a bit of a ham. More than a bit, really. He's a very firm man, and usually comfortable in his work, and can adjust to any decision he must make.
Richter is a loving man. He risked his life for the sake of the girl he loved, many times, and slayed thousands of monsters for her sake. He's also a very self-sacrificing, selfless man, doing what he does for the sake of humanity as a whole, above and beyond what he does for his loved ones. He's somewhat empathetic, as shown when he sees that Maria has feelings for Alucard. He's kind enough to tell her to follow her feelings, too.
In Hex, Richter's changed a little. He's become somewhat more callous, as he sort-of-remembers killing Annette. He tends to be withdrawn and is hard to open up. However, in any universe, he likes and gets along well with children. Children can always open his heart, even when that may not be the best thing (see: teaching a girl how to use a swing set and dropping his guard while patrolling).
All in all, Richter is a genuinely good man. His one great weakness, the fear that Shaft played upon, is the fear of being useless. He is afraid of having nothing left to conquer, no fight left to fight, and of being forgotten. Shaft played upon that, allowing Richter's deepest darkest desire - the desire for glory - to taint his thoughts and actions, leading hm to raise Dracula for an eternal battle. Perhaps he would even have been willing to give up his mortality for that corrupted glory under Shaft's influence. Richter's greatest sin is pride, knowing that he is the best of the best, but he tries to temper his pride with humility and realism. After all, even the best can die in the field. And secretly, Richter would be more ok with that than with dying of old age.
Character abilities: Richter is an extremely talented fighter of the mundane variety. He's able to use many weapons, but his specialities include dodging, acrobatics, and whip-fighting. On the less mundane side, Richter can use Vampire Killer to absorb life energy and convert it into magic, which he then uses to perform item crashes and abuse subweapons, including creating axes and knives or flinging infinite holy water. Yes, he can do these things, or could before.
Samples: Thread Sample
Traditional Sample
It happens too much, and lately it's getting worse. He can't see a therapist about this, or at least can't be more than vague. These nightmares, they keep coming, but he can't tell just anyone that he dreams about his girlfriend - or wife, now, even though she's in his old, half-remembered home, he hopes - turning into a vampire and trying to kill him. This goes double for not telling them that he then dreams he staked her and threw a molotov cocktail - how does he even know that phrase? - into the building before driving away. It'd get him crazy looks from all but his fellow hunters or a very in-the-know priest, and that's all he confides in.
It's good that the church reaches even here and now, he thinks as he watches his face. Without them, he'd be lost. Maybe in Hex, maybe in Afghanistan, which he sometimes remembers and dreams about as well. Those dreams, at least, he can talk to a therapist about, except the parts with the cults killing soldiers in the mountains. Sadly, those parts feature heavily in his nightmares.
That's not even going into his half-remembered old life. Those dreams are less frequent, but none the less terrifying for it. Even remembering... The recall causes him to slip with his razor, and he cuts himself, drawing a sharp breath and a choked curse. God above, that smarts. The pain distracts him from the memory... Yet another victory for the god-machine, though he does not know that.
AU nature: Richter is now a Hunter, a mundane master of using anything at hand to fight the forces of the supernatural. While he stll has the Vampire Killer, he does not use it much, because it is a Relic in hunter terms - a magical weapon granted to him by the church that has awesome powers. In this case, it gives the ability to convert damage that it deals into temporary XP that can be spent on boons and bonuses. It's kind of OP. He can no longer perform item crashes.
AU history: Richter remembers a totally different version of his history. He remembers public school education. He remembers Juste being a veteran of the Korean war. He also remembers being a soldier himself, fighting in Afghanistan. When in the field, he had his first encounter with the supernatural, but wrote it off as a demon cult or something. Then he came home... And found out his girlfriend had become a vampire. That really hurts the self esteem, and other people, so he lured her to an abandoned warehouse, staked her and threw a molotov into the building. That was not that long ago.
Justification: Richter is a hunter in canon, and in one bad end kills Annette. I just played on that.
ACCEPTED
Kageyama "Mob" Shigeo | Mob Psycho 100
Player name: Kippie
Player age and gender: 26, female
Any other characters in game? None
no subject
Character name: Shigeo Kageyama
Character canon: Mob Psycho 100 (manga)
Canon point: Chapter 97
Character history: Wiki link!
Character world: Mob's from a fictional city called Spice City, presumably in an alternate universe Japan. Most things are regarded as fictional, but supernatural creatures, ghosts, spirits and espers are all extremely real. By the point in the current chapters, the truth about the supernatural is beginning to arise with the growth of a giant broccoli (yes, I'm serious) and various other unexplained incidents (almost all of which were also caused by Mob).
Character personality: Kageyama Shigeo is called "Mob" by his peers because his bland face and personality makes him blend in with the crowd (bless that Japanese lack of understanding of English), and his subdued demeanor is what most people see when they first meet him. Shigeo is an emotional kid just like any other teenager, but because he makes a regular habit of tempering his emotions down, he rarely raises his voice or gets angry, and has a hard time getting along with people and understanding their interests or following the crowd's mood. He has a habit of not being in on the joke, young and socially unaware in general, and being socially outcast by his awkward behavior only exacerbates the situation. After several negative experiences, including a time when he seriously hurt some older kids, the reason he has a hard time expressing himself is because he is subconsciously very wary of his own powers and what he might do if he truly cuts loose. Even more than that, when most kids responded to his powers with wariness or disinterest, he found even less of a use for expressing them in front of people. Even without consciously thinking it, Shigeo has a hard time having a strong emotional reaction to stimuli, simply out of the complex he's built to protect himself and others.
Despite that, Shigeo is a very sweet and compassionate young man who hates hurting other people, and yearns for friendship and even some popularity. He never holds bitter resentment towards other people for the way they mistreat him, instead often internalizing it or even simply becoming resolved to try and improve himself to suit them. He wants to help people, and he hates the idea of using his powers on other people, but he will do whatever it takes to keep his friends and family safe in an emergency. There are many situations where responsibility for the safety of strangers falls on his shoulders, which is more than most 14-year-olds can bear and often strains Shigeo to the limits of what he can emotionally endure. Nonetheless, he can and has taken those responsibilities on himself in order to do the right thing, and when facing powerful opponents, he always tries to talk them down or to disable them rather than ever doing them serious harm.
Shigeo has always wanted to do something productive with himself, though it has taken him a long time to really understand that what he wants is to be able to do what he wants without using his psychic powers, per se. He hasn't solidly decided on what he wants to do, and he doesn't exactly hate his powers... he has joined the Body Improvement club to make up for the physical weakness he had developed from being too dependent on his psychic powers, and he has been working with his 'mentor' Reigen to seek guidance in the world. He's an impressionable kid, and consistently needs direction, which is the core of his character - he's fourteen years old, a dangerously powerful psychic, and he has literally no idea what he wants out of his life.
Character abilities: Mob has incredible strength as an Esper, clearly one of the strongest in the setting thus far. He is capable of absorbing and holding an inconceivable amount of psychic energy, and apparently has had his body described (by a spirit) as highly conductive. With this, Mob has access to telekinesis strong enough to lift entire buildings into the air with energy to spare, energy awareness where he can pinpoint other espers or ghosts by sensing their energies, energy transference where he can dump his power into someone else (esper or not) and convey thoughts and feelings in that manner, astral projection, and chlorokinesis to control plants.
Samples: [We require two samples, at least one of which must demonstrate the character interacting with another in a thread. There should be a little introspection between the two samples, but you are welcome to use either a thread and a traditional sample or two threads.]
Test Drive Top Thread
AU nature: Mob is no longer an esper, but a Mage. He has a diverse collection of the Arcana, holding power in Death, Forces, Prime, and most recently in Life. He also has impressive Gnosis (reflecting his surprising wealth of power in canon).
AU history: Shigeo experienced his "Awakening" at a disturbingly young age, far too young for most Mages - he wrote his name on the Watchtower, becoming a Moros at a very young age. He then grew up exhibiting strange powers, experimenting with them intermittently but mostly just living like a normal kid. He could see ghosts, and all sorts of strange things... but that was simply life, for Shigeo. It wasn't until an incident with some high schoolers bullying him and his brother that Shigeo used his powers to attack someone - and immediately felt the guilt and misery, both of hurting the bullies on purpose and of accidentally hurting his little brother Ritsu in the process.
Feeling isolated and terrified by his power, which he had never used very seriously before, he sought out guidance - and encountered a plain mortal posing as a magician named Reigen Arataka. Although Reigen was completely oblivious to real magic, he certainly pretended he knew what he was talking about, posing as a master of spiritual magic and rituals and pretending to also be a man with incredible powers, just like Mob. Despite Reigen using Mob for his ghost exorcism business, he offered really valuable words of advice, giving the young Mage a code of ethics that he could live by. He would never use his powers poorly, and especially never on normal people. He would try his best to make himself better, and to be a good person.
In his recent life, he decided to join the Body Improvement Club at his middle school, thinking that he might be able to impress the girl he has a crush on. Thus far, he hasn't yielded many results - distraction from his job investigating the supernatural (particularly ghosts) tends to keep him busy.
Justification: Mob's struggle with himself is, in part, a struggle to figure out what to actually do with his powers. He doesn't want to use them to hurt people, and wants to help others - finding the point of your powers and using them wisely most pertinently reflects the story of Mage. Additionally, Mob's powers are most easily paralleled by Mage Arcana.
REVISIONS REQUEST
Revision!
ACCEPTED
Kousuke Nitou | Kamen Rider Wizard
Player name: Airdra
Player age and gender: 32, female
Any other characters in game? Hajime Aikawa
no subject
Character name: Kousuke Nitou
Character canon: Kamen Rider Wizard
Canon point: Post-series, following the events of Kamen Rider x Kamen Rider Gaim and Wizard: The Fated Movie war Feud. Basically, he's gotten himself re-possessed by Chimera but is now using Helheim fruit as a magical food source as opposed to mana.
Character history: There's a wiki link here! The episode summaries here are also good for history; Nitou first appears in episode 17. Please note that the subs I watched went with a different spelling of his name than the wiki uses, and I'm rolling with that.
There's an argument about sub groups and this fandom in here somewhere.Character world: Nitou's world is largely equivalent to the modern world save for the presence of magic. Magic is by no means a common thing--only certain people can become wizards, and this is not common knowledge. Those with the ability to become wizards are, should they fall into a significant enough despair, are at risk of giving birth to a Phantom, a creature of despair. When a Phantom is successfully born from despair, the potential wizard will die, and the Phantom will take their form and their place.
Wizards are those who have faced their internal Phantoms, not succumbed to despair, and continued on. They use the awakened power of their defeated Phantom in conjunction with magical rings and belts and continue to fight manifested Phantoms and to stop more Phantoms from being born. (Nitou's powers, though they do make use of rings, skew more towards using a bound spirit than something that comes from within and are different enough that he is referred to as the Ancient Wizard by those in the know. I will go into more detail in his abilities section.) It is possible for a wizard to go into the Underworld (basically, their psyche) of a person in the process of giving birth to a Phantom, fight off the Phantom that is trying to be born, and save the person from their despair. When the nascent Phantom is defeated, that person will no longer have the potential to become a wizard. By and large, the public is unaware of all of this. The wizards don't really make too much effort to conceal themselves, and the police are definitely aware of things, but it's by no means a big thing in the public eye. There was an incident late in canon in which it looked like Tokyo might be wiped out, but the average citizen wouldn't have known much beyond "there was a weird eclipse and everyone almost died."
Character personality: Nitou usually comes off as a loud and crazy hobo. This is in no small part because he really is a loud, crazy hobo. He does not maintain a permanent place of residence, instead pitching his tent wherever he ends up. He is not always good about things like making sure that he is allowed to pitch his tent wherever, and it's not unusual for him to get driven away after parking it somewhere they don't appreciate vagrants. He's happiest when he can keep moving and adventuring, always on the lookout for something new and exciting. He is the sort of man who would get himself inhabited by an insanely powerful magical creature that threatened to kill him if he didn't do its bidding, cut that magical creature loose in a last-ditch effort to save his friends and the entire city of Tokyo, and then, once he was free of the magical creature, go seek it out again and renew that contract because the adventure involved was just too good to pass up. He's in this for the thrill of it all, and if he can help some people along the way, then that's cool, too. Nitou coasts through his life propelled by the thrill of it all. He is an adventurer. An adventurer without much foresight, no less.
He lives the life of a vagrant despite the fact that he comes from a wealthy family--it's all about adventure. Nitou lives by the idea that in danger, there is opportunity. The series is all about hope, and this is Nitou's way of looking at bad situations and having hope--no matter how bad things get, there's always an opportunity to be found somewhere. Nitou is a bit of a gambler and a lot of a risk-taker. Most people might be a little uneasy to have an insanely powerful magical creature living inside of them and demanding regular tribute of Mana in order to prevent oneself getting devoured. Not Nitou. He's resistant to any and all attempts to have Chimera forcibly removed in part because this is the greatest opportunity he's ever had. With Chimera, he's always in the middle of some grand adventure and amazing battle, even if it comes with a heaping helping of danger on the side. Nitou's penchant for taking chances is even evident in his weaponry. Beast uses a Dice Saber, which means that a six-sided die mounted in the saber's hilt is rolled before the saber launches a magical attack. If he rolls a six, then the attack will be spectacularly successful. A roll of a one is a failure, and the resulting attack will be laughable.
With Nitou, what you see is largely what you get. He's honest and direct, and there are times it seems as though he expects that everyone else will be the same way. This can make him somewhat easy to fool. When an archaeologist named Nakamoto finds a couple of relics that look like Nitou's rings and belt, he's excited and goes to see the man--though he effectively opens the dialogue with "hey, I think you have something of mine," which does not go over well. Nakamoto decides to steal Nitou's things to add to his own find, despite the fact that Nitou seems agreeable to allowing Nakamoto to study the items anyway. Nakamoto's approach is to get Nitou so drunk he passes out, and it works beautifully. Nitou never suspects a thing, and it actually takes a little convincing for him to realize that he's been played. In that vein, when he first meets Haruto, it's very hard for him to grasp that Haruto is fighting Phantoms for reasons other than harvesting Mana, for that's exactly why he's fighting Phantoms. Seeing the situation from someone else's point-of-view and accepting that things can work differently than how he's experienced them or views them is hard.
Subtlety is not his strong suit. He tends to be blunt and direct, and he has no problems with interrupting people or charging headlong into a situation to do what he thinks needs to be done. If someone needs to be confronted, he's not about to take the time to think about the most diplomatic means of approaching the situation. He's just going to up and talk to them. He isn't much good at sugar-coating things, and he'll call it like he sees it. He's loud and animated, but if things aren't going well for him, he'll try to hide it. He doesn't often think things through, and making snap judgments and poorly thought out decisions is a thing with him. He grew up thinking his grandmother was strict and hated him, when in reality, she was trying to stop him from doing dangerous things that could get him seriously injured. It takes a Phantom targeting her life--and her saying she's willing to get sacrificed to become a Phantom if that meant he'd get to eat her energy and continue surviving--to get him to see this. In a lighter example, when he thinks he's found Medusa in human form disguised as a high school student, he springs into action, trying to drag the freaked-out girl away while threatening to eat her up in front of a large amount of witnesses. The girl in question is not Medusa, as should have been apparent to Nitou from her behavior when he jumped her, but he is genuinely surprised when he ends up in jail--he was trying to do something good, and he's completely failed to realize how this just might look bad.
Nitou has a knack for cheerfully doing his own thing, much to the discomfort of everyone else around him. The logic that he uses doesn't always match up with everyone else's. This makes him pretty good at improvisation, even if the results of his improvisation usually bring a lot of secondhand embarrassment to all who know him. In one instance, he does not want his grandmother to know that he is a wizard, but he's got to fight off an attacking Phantom. He's transformed into Beast out of sight. He is wearing a full face mask. As long as he keeps quiet, she would have absolutely no way of knowing it was him. So what does he do? He proclaims himself to be the Magical Girl Beast and commences fighting that Phantom in the manner of a magical girl, complete with a high-pitched voice, twirling, blowing kisses at people, and a lot of "tee-hee"s.
Food is a Big Deal for Nitou. He often speaks of things in food-like terms--his battle cry is "It's lunchtime!", and he will often address his enemies in mealtime terms, such as referring to bigger and more powerful Phantoms as the "main dish." While a meal of Mana is a supernatural need, Nitou's got a big appetite to match Chimera's magical one. His favorite food in the whole world is mayonnaise. He puts mayonnaise on everything. Everything.Donuts, ramen, hot dogs, if Nitou eats it, it's going to be drowned in mayonnaise. He stubbornly refuses to accept anyone else's opinion on the food and can't seem to grasp the fact that not everyone else wants their donuts drowning in the stuff. Even when the donut shop owner breaks down and makes a tuna-mayo donut for him, he's got to put more mayo on there to make a mayonnaise tuna-mayo donut. He also has no qualms about reaching over and squirting mayonnaise on anyone else's food, just so he can share the glory and perfection that is mayonnaise.
It is easy to get Nitou horribly distracted and send him into a particular realm of stupid if you are a good-looking woman. He can and will make an ass of himself if he thinks a girl is cute or if he thinks she might be interested in him, regardless of whether or not he would actually stand a chance with her. He's confident enough that he believes himself to be amazingly attractive. It is, however, relatively easy to dissuade him from thoughts of this nature with things like food, a good fight, or an old-fashioned slap upside the head. Nitou has declared Haruto to be his rival, and Haruto's protests and insistence that they are not rivals does not seem to mean much to Nitou. Haruto is Nitou's rival because Nitou says so, and that's that. Having a rival is really cool and makes this whole wizard endeavor much more of an adventure. Sure, rivals can become friends, but using the word "friend" makes things way too mushy, in Nitou's opinion.
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ACCEPTED
Casper Leblanc Jr. | Scion/WoD OC
Player name: Matt
Player age and gender: 27, he/they
Any other characters in game? Tobias, Makoto [Dropped]
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Character name: Casper LeBlanc, Jr.
Character canon: Scion/WoD
Canon point: Heading towards Jupiter City.
Character history: A warning before you read further:
Casper's history deals with some fairly rough topics, including death, drug abuse, Nazis, fratricide, attempted rape, and emotional/possibly physical child abuse.
Got it? Good.
Casper's story begins up in Montreal, Canada. His father was a single parent, running a funeral home. Young Casper grew up around dead bodies and grieving widows, the scent of flowers and a knowledge from early on that the world was not as safe as it seemed. His city, you see, had a vampire problem. Bodies would come in with suspicious puncture marks, but his father told him to keep his mouth shut. No one believed him, anyway, just like no one believed him that there was a man who talked to him. 'Creepy Whisper Man' was no imaginary friend, but a ghost. He would sometimes tell Casper about what it was like to die, or what it was like to kill. He was the ghost of a serial killer, after all. Casper tried not to pay attention to the darker bits of his friend's discussions. Casper also had a bird that he rescued - a baby raven that he named Bob, in his infinite childhood creativity.
Casper and his father eventually moved from Montreal to Colorado when Casper was in high school, and there Casper made friends with a girl named Aiden. She was smart, capable, and funny, and willing to tolerate Casper's chronic tendency to put his foot in his mouth. Soon after they met, Casper was visited by a woman while he was researching mythology in the library. The woman had a face that was half-decayed, and she took Casper aside and told him that she was his mother, Hel. She gave Casper a bone necklace and told him that his raven was going to be important, as well. Without much more of an explanation, she was gone. Soon afterwards, Casper received a clear baseball bat that seemed very cold. He didn't give all of this too much more thought as school was picking up.
Unfortunately he didn't get to enjoy school for very long. On the way to a charity dinner that he had won a contest to go speak at, things went wrong. Trolls headed through things and buildings started to collapse, and the event's hall was quickly in ruins. Casper met up with Aiden and an older person named Caspian, as well as one of one of Caspian's friends, and together they fought off the trolls. They were doing pretty well until Aiden got captured, and Casper ran off after them, up towards the mountains. He rescued Aiden and they met up with the other two. Casper should have known something was wrong, but the revelation that they were all children of various gods was kind of more important at the moment.
They started traveling together, and eventually started heading towards Hawaii, bashing through monsters all the way. After some misadventures with cop cars, trolls, kidnappings, and mystical hobo sex, they finally made their way to the base of the Children of Hephaestus off the shore of Hawaii. And then they were promptly sent back to the mainland to deal with more monsters. Joy. More monsters rampaged across the land, and our intrepid heroes chased them down as much as they could before heading back towards Hawaii to relax. (And for Aiden's mom to get married. To Ares. Aiden was a child of Hades and this did not go over well.) Aiden got captured by a giant, and Casper tried to rescue her. Caspian made him leave by threatening to shoot Casper's father, so he went along with it. Aiden was strong... so she would be fine, right?
This was a mistake.
Caspian, a heroin addict, stopped a car, shot the driver, and took the car. Casper went along with this because he wasn't sure what else to do. Unfortunately, there were two kids in the car. Caspian terrorized Casper into sedating one of them. The other one ran off, but Casper finally snapped and tried to attack Caspian when the ghosts Caspian had in his pocket (from a poker game) started calling Casper a monster. Determined to get the kids to a hospital, Casper stopped the car. Caspian handed Casper a tire iron to kill the kids with. Casper attacked Caspian, and ended up being shot in the leg and left to bleed out. Which he did. Fatally.
He went to Helheim, body included, to stand in front of Hel. Casper's mother was not pleased by this development, and allowed him to climb back up Yggdrasill in order to come back to life - but she stuffed his soul inside of his raven. Determined to not let his weakness be taken advantage of again, Casper clawed his way back to life out of his grave minus half of one leg. Fortunately, he made his way to the base where the Children of Hephaestus made him a prosthetic inlaid with runes.
More fighting ensued over the next months, and the group shifted focus. Casper wanted to go after Caspian, but Caspian ran off somewhere as the Titans and titanspawn started to become a bigger threat, and so it was just Casper and Aiden who joined up with a bunch of other Scions. (Caspian was a thief as well as a drug addict, and given that he was a child of Hermes, patron of thieves and tricksters, if he didn't want to be caught, he wouldn't be.) Casper did some serious physical training during this time, so as to not be caught in a similar situation as the one he was in. A bunch of fights later, and Casper was visited by his mother again, instructing him to go take out a lab. Not willing to risk his mother's wrath, Casper went off to take out this lab, which turned out to be full of stolen Nazi experiments. And one of the experiments happened to be... Casper's older brother that he didn't know he had. Not half-brother, full brother, because as his father revealed when he came in to finish the job while Casper was getting the shit beat out of him, he was a mage and had been a scientist during World War II. Casper knew that their family line was German, but not... that. Somewhat disillusioned, he helped kill his brother and went back to rejoin the group.
Casper's soul was stuck in Bob until he 'proved himself', and this largely seemed to consist of being stuck with the worst jobs his mother could give him. He dragged souls around as he tried to find an entrance to the Underworld to shove them into, and kept fighting monsters with his new group along the way. One one trip back across the ocean from the base, their ship got sucked under the sea and into the domain of a powerful ocean spirit. They were treated to his 'hospitality', and given the choice of his children to spend the night with. Casper, in his infinite bad luck, was stuck with Prince Crab who was nice if somewhat misshapen... until they were alone and the prince tried to force himself on Casper. Casper climbed the walls and ceiling to get away from him and escaped, hiding out until the rest of his group was ready to go, and got the hell out of there with a newfound terror of crabs and shellfish. The group continued on their trip to the northeast part of the United States, dodging zombies and trolls and horrific creatures of all sorts on their way to Jupiter City, which is where the story leaves off.
Character world: You know the World of Darkness. This is that world merged into the world of Scion. Scion is a canon where the gods are real. All of them. (Maybe not the Abrahamic one, that's still up for debate and is never answered in canon, though there's something that claims it's that god. It probably isn't. But it might be.) World War II was caused/made worse by Loki attempting to thwart Ragnarok (good job, Loki), numerous people through history have been scions (children of the gods), and things are vaguely analogous to 2003/2004ish Earth.
Sort of. The world's starting to (attempt to) end, thanks to the Titans - the ancient enemies of the gods - trying to escape from their prisons. The gods are spending all of their time and energy trying to hold the door shut, so their children are the ones who have to do most of the work. ... If they don't go power-crazy, at least.
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ACCEPTED