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APPLICATION
NAME: Gray
AGE: 30+
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
talkincodes, PM
CHARACTER(S): N/A
INVITED BY: Tea
NAME: Kaijin
AGE: 300+
CANON: Original
CANON POINT: Modern day, a few years after his internet-based resurrection
CRAU: N/A
OTHER: N/A
SUITABILITY: The setting would be really interesting for Kai because he is someone working to find who he wants to be, and learning how to better interact with people is a big part of that. He's comfortable with physical interactions and casual sex and is willing to try just about anything in order to learn, but he struggles with making real connections. He's been solitary and lonely and found that it's not good for him, which pushes him into reaching out more in hopes of finding what fit and means he might throw himself into some of the resort's games just to see what happens. I'm interested in exploring how he'll react to circumstances that force him into unusual kinds of social situations, emotionally or physically or both, to see if they prompt him to learn and grow in some unexpected directions.
HISTORY: Kai began as a komaneko, a cat-shaped guardian statue of a small shrine in the mountains outside Kyoto. Dedicated to the silk trade, the shrine saw enough traffic and garnered enough reverence that its pair of guardian komaneko were able to become kami, minor gods. While his partner was content to stay with the shrine, Kai was a bit more restless in wanting to wander, something that would lead to the most impactful moment of his life: the destruction of the shrine with Kai as the only survivor.
He had simply returned from his wandering one day to find that the shrine had completely burnt down with no immediately apparent cause. With no more shrine and no more worship, he went from kami to youkai, and his lone standing fire-damaged statue gradually attracted rumors that he was a spirit of misfortune instead. Enraged at his loss of status and and trying to ignore his own guilt, Kai took his anger out on the humans instead, terrorizing the surrounding area and into Kyoto itself as a herald of chaos and destruction. While he was eventually calmed and made to recognize his misplaced anger, the stories about him died out as sightings of the youkai lessened to the point that with no belief left to sustain him, the spirit went completely dormant.
Until the second pivotal moment in his history, his accidental resurrection in the modern age. One urban explorer blogger posting a picture of a creepy, fire-damaged cat statue was all it took for several memes to spring up, including a sem-viral creepypasta, a ‘repost for luck!’ mascot, and an urban legend about a fortune-telling statue and suddenly Kai had more than enough attention and belief to reform properly and find himself struggling to navigate the new internet age. Ironically, the internet’s attention has made him stronger than ever but also much more malleable, something he has been trying to turn to his own use in his search for self-determination.
ABILITIES:
Youkai - As a creature intrinsically tied with the spirit world, and can sense and communicate with any other creature similarly connected. He can also sense supernatural energy in humans, to a degree, especially if that energy is spiritual or involving the spirit world in some way. He's also effectively immortal, and can only be killed if his original form (a stone statue) is destroyed or if belief in him fades away to the point where he can no longer draw energy from it. He can be injured, but any physical damage will eventually regenerate depending on how much energy he can devote to it.
Shapeshifting - Kai has four main forms that he can shift in and out of at will: human form, a shaggy-haired Japanese man appearing somewhere in his twenties; cat form, a long-haired black cat with green eyes; youkai form, a roughly 6' black cat that seems to be dissolving into ash at the edges and has glowing eyes; nightmare form, a vaguely cat-shaped cloud of smoke and ash with light shining from the core and pouring out of its eyes like liquid. As the latter two are his strongest forms they come with a few benefits, supernatural speed and strength for his youkai form and the near-intangibility of being essentially a sentient ash cloud for his nightmare form. The ash cloud also works as a sort of in-between state when he's shifting, though it's more formless. His human and cat forms both appear as perfectly normal if a little uncanny, though anyone who can sense spiritual energy would be able to tell what he is.
(Mis)Fortune - Thanks to his dual roles of being both a source of luck and bring of disaster, Kai can influence fortune to a certain degree in either direction. He can't cause anything to happen that wouldn't already have a chance of occurring and he can't control what it is that happens, only able push to things in a luckier or more unfortunate direction. At the absolute height at either end, he can bring down buildings or make you win the lottery, but only if there's the possibility the building could fail or you bought a ticket. Also swinging too far at either end of the scale means that he essentially gets stuck at that side of things until he can even out, making him an uncontrollable source of good or bad luck. Most of the time he tries to avoid it entirely, with only the gentlest of nudges either way.
Barriers - One of the last remnants of his guardian kami abilities, Kai can create barriers against both physical and spiritual energy. They last as long as Kai has the spiritual energy to maintain them and can be broken by either overpowering him or having him run completely out of energy. The larger the barrier, the more energy they take to maintain.
VICES:
Guilty - Kai carries a massive amount of guilt for not being able to prevent the destruction of his shrine, not only for failing at the job he was literally created for as a shrine guardian but for also being responsible for the total destruction of his partner. It creates an unconscious feeling that whatever bad things happen to him, he probably deserves it and a lot of existential angst about what he is if he couldn't manage his primary function. He could likely manage to connect with others a lot better if part of him didn't feel like he doesn't deserve to.
Angry - He mostly manages to keep it under wraps, but at the core of him Kai carries a lot of anger. A lot of it is self-directed for his failings, but it also spills over into being angry at his loss of status, that the people who paid homage to him turned on him so quickly in the aftermath of tragedy. A part of him really resents that he can be manipulated so easily by human stories and that he's essentially beholden to whatever people decide about him. It's caused him to lash out violently in the past when he was at his worst, and while he's managed to bury that impulse it's still there somewhere deep inside.
Uncertain - The downside to realizing you can self-determine is that you have to actually make those choices. Kai has no real idea who he is or who he wants to be and struggles with where to even start deciding. His nature means that he doesn't really fit in with other youkai or spirits, he definitely isn't human enough to blend in with the human world, and he doesn't entirely feel comfortable with the urban legends and cryptids either. He's stuck in the middle of a lot of things and decision paralysis means that he has a very hard time moving in any directions at all.
VIRTUES:
Protective - At his heart, Kai is still a guardian. There's a somewhat instinctive drive to look after people and places that he registers as being 'his', and he will get very defensive over them. He doesn't even need to like or get along with a person in order to feel the need to defend them from outsiders once they've entered his circle. He's not exactly a caretaker in the emotional sense, but he will do what he can to ensure that people get their needs met. Acts of service over actually expressing himself in any meaningful way, mostly because he's never really learned how to talk about it.
Curious - Cliches aside, the main thing about Kai is that he wants to learn. Kai was always someone who wanted to explore more of the world, and his surprise second chance has given him the ability to see more of it than he ever expected. He likes finding new things and gaining understanding, he likes knowing that there's more out there he hasn't had a chance to experience yet, and he isn't particularly bothered about the possibility of looking stupid in his quest for new information.
Open-Minded - Kai is well aware that he's coming at the world from a very odd viewpoint, so his instinct tends to be to take things at face value. It's not that he doesn't understand lies and misdirections, he's spent way too much time in both the spirit world and on the internet to be any kind of naive, its just that his first reaction to most things is usually easy acceptance unless he has a reason to think otherwise. It makes him unusually direct in turn, especially considering youkai in general tend more towards the cryptic.
SUIT REQUESTS:
Diamonds - As an animal spirit, Kai is already very connected to the physical. Since he's trying his hardest to learn to fit in better with humans, forcing him into something more animalistic and uncontrolled and stripping away anything he's managed to learn so far could be very interesting. He's a naturally instinctive person, but reducing him entirely to animal impulse would fascinate me.
Spades - Kai has struggled with anger issues and lashing out in the past, and he'd be much more susceptible to that kind of corruption. It could very likely push him back into the headspace of being at his lowest point, being overwhelmed by his darkest feelings and fears, which are all something he's done a lot more repressing than dealing with constructively. I'd be interesting to see what putting him back into that kind of a state would do for his development.
RANK REQUESTS: Random is fine!
SAMPLES:
February TDM Top Level
TDM Thread
June TDM Top Level
OOC
NAME: Gray
AGE: 30+
CONTACT:
CHARACTER(S): N/A
INVITED BY: Tea
IC
NAME: Kaijin
AGE: 300+
CANON: Original
CANON POINT: Modern day, a few years after his internet-based resurrection
CRAU: N/A
OTHER: N/A
SUITABILITY: The setting would be really interesting for Kai because he is someone working to find who he wants to be, and learning how to better interact with people is a big part of that. He's comfortable with physical interactions and casual sex and is willing to try just about anything in order to learn, but he struggles with making real connections. He's been solitary and lonely and found that it's not good for him, which pushes him into reaching out more in hopes of finding what fit and means he might throw himself into some of the resort's games just to see what happens. I'm interested in exploring how he'll react to circumstances that force him into unusual kinds of social situations, emotionally or physically or both, to see if they prompt him to learn and grow in some unexpected directions.
HISTORY: Kai began as a komaneko, a cat-shaped guardian statue of a small shrine in the mountains outside Kyoto. Dedicated to the silk trade, the shrine saw enough traffic and garnered enough reverence that its pair of guardian komaneko were able to become kami, minor gods. While his partner was content to stay with the shrine, Kai was a bit more restless in wanting to wander, something that would lead to the most impactful moment of his life: the destruction of the shrine with Kai as the only survivor.
He had simply returned from his wandering one day to find that the shrine had completely burnt down with no immediately apparent cause. With no more shrine and no more worship, he went from kami to youkai, and his lone standing fire-damaged statue gradually attracted rumors that he was a spirit of misfortune instead. Enraged at his loss of status and and trying to ignore his own guilt, Kai took his anger out on the humans instead, terrorizing the surrounding area and into Kyoto itself as a herald of chaos and destruction. While he was eventually calmed and made to recognize his misplaced anger, the stories about him died out as sightings of the youkai lessened to the point that with no belief left to sustain him, the spirit went completely dormant.
Until the second pivotal moment in his history, his accidental resurrection in the modern age. One urban explorer blogger posting a picture of a creepy, fire-damaged cat statue was all it took for several memes to spring up, including a sem-viral creepypasta, a ‘repost for luck!’ mascot, and an urban legend about a fortune-telling statue and suddenly Kai had more than enough attention and belief to reform properly and find himself struggling to navigate the new internet age. Ironically, the internet’s attention has made him stronger than ever but also much more malleable, something he has been trying to turn to his own use in his search for self-determination.
ABILITIES:
Youkai - As a creature intrinsically tied with the spirit world, and can sense and communicate with any other creature similarly connected. He can also sense supernatural energy in humans, to a degree, especially if that energy is spiritual or involving the spirit world in some way. He's also effectively immortal, and can only be killed if his original form (a stone statue) is destroyed or if belief in him fades away to the point where he can no longer draw energy from it. He can be injured, but any physical damage will eventually regenerate depending on how much energy he can devote to it.
Shapeshifting - Kai has four main forms that he can shift in and out of at will: human form, a shaggy-haired Japanese man appearing somewhere in his twenties; cat form, a long-haired black cat with green eyes; youkai form, a roughly 6' black cat that seems to be dissolving into ash at the edges and has glowing eyes; nightmare form, a vaguely cat-shaped cloud of smoke and ash with light shining from the core and pouring out of its eyes like liquid. As the latter two are his strongest forms they come with a few benefits, supernatural speed and strength for his youkai form and the near-intangibility of being essentially a sentient ash cloud for his nightmare form. The ash cloud also works as a sort of in-between state when he's shifting, though it's more formless. His human and cat forms both appear as perfectly normal if a little uncanny, though anyone who can sense spiritual energy would be able to tell what he is.
(Mis)Fortune - Thanks to his dual roles of being both a source of luck and bring of disaster, Kai can influence fortune to a certain degree in either direction. He can't cause anything to happen that wouldn't already have a chance of occurring and he can't control what it is that happens, only able push to things in a luckier or more unfortunate direction. At the absolute height at either end, he can bring down buildings or make you win the lottery, but only if there's the possibility the building could fail or you bought a ticket. Also swinging too far at either end of the scale means that he essentially gets stuck at that side of things until he can even out, making him an uncontrollable source of good or bad luck. Most of the time he tries to avoid it entirely, with only the gentlest of nudges either way.
Barriers - One of the last remnants of his guardian kami abilities, Kai can create barriers against both physical and spiritual energy. They last as long as Kai has the spiritual energy to maintain them and can be broken by either overpowering him or having him run completely out of energy. The larger the barrier, the more energy they take to maintain.
VICES:
Guilty - Kai carries a massive amount of guilt for not being able to prevent the destruction of his shrine, not only for failing at the job he was literally created for as a shrine guardian but for also being responsible for the total destruction of his partner. It creates an unconscious feeling that whatever bad things happen to him, he probably deserves it and a lot of existential angst about what he is if he couldn't manage his primary function. He could likely manage to connect with others a lot better if part of him didn't feel like he doesn't deserve to.
Angry - He mostly manages to keep it under wraps, but at the core of him Kai carries a lot of anger. A lot of it is self-directed for his failings, but it also spills over into being angry at his loss of status, that the people who paid homage to him turned on him so quickly in the aftermath of tragedy. A part of him really resents that he can be manipulated so easily by human stories and that he's essentially beholden to whatever people decide about him. It's caused him to lash out violently in the past when he was at his worst, and while he's managed to bury that impulse it's still there somewhere deep inside.
Uncertain - The downside to realizing you can self-determine is that you have to actually make those choices. Kai has no real idea who he is or who he wants to be and struggles with where to even start deciding. His nature means that he doesn't really fit in with other youkai or spirits, he definitely isn't human enough to blend in with the human world, and he doesn't entirely feel comfortable with the urban legends and cryptids either. He's stuck in the middle of a lot of things and decision paralysis means that he has a very hard time moving in any directions at all.
VIRTUES:
Protective - At his heart, Kai is still a guardian. There's a somewhat instinctive drive to look after people and places that he registers as being 'his', and he will get very defensive over them. He doesn't even need to like or get along with a person in order to feel the need to defend them from outsiders once they've entered his circle. He's not exactly a caretaker in the emotional sense, but he will do what he can to ensure that people get their needs met. Acts of service over actually expressing himself in any meaningful way, mostly because he's never really learned how to talk about it.
Curious - Cliches aside, the main thing about Kai is that he wants to learn. Kai was always someone who wanted to explore more of the world, and his surprise second chance has given him the ability to see more of it than he ever expected. He likes finding new things and gaining understanding, he likes knowing that there's more out there he hasn't had a chance to experience yet, and he isn't particularly bothered about the possibility of looking stupid in his quest for new information.
Open-Minded - Kai is well aware that he's coming at the world from a very odd viewpoint, so his instinct tends to be to take things at face value. It's not that he doesn't understand lies and misdirections, he's spent way too much time in both the spirit world and on the internet to be any kind of naive, its just that his first reaction to most things is usually easy acceptance unless he has a reason to think otherwise. It makes him unusually direct in turn, especially considering youkai in general tend more towards the cryptic.
SUIT REQUESTS:
Diamonds - As an animal spirit, Kai is already very connected to the physical. Since he's trying his hardest to learn to fit in better with humans, forcing him into something more animalistic and uncontrolled and stripping away anything he's managed to learn so far could be very interesting. He's a naturally instinctive person, but reducing him entirely to animal impulse would fascinate me.
Spades - Kai has struggled with anger issues and lashing out in the past, and he'd be much more susceptible to that kind of corruption. It could very likely push him back into the headspace of being at his lowest point, being overwhelmed by his darkest feelings and fears, which are all something he's done a lot more repressing than dealing with constructively. I'd be interesting to see what putting him back into that kind of a state would do for his development.
RANK REQUESTS: Random is fine!
SAMPLES:
February TDM Top Level
TDM Thread
June TDM Top Level