PLAYER Name: Mike Age: 31 Personal Journal: N/A E-mail: all.hail.dc@gmail.com AIM/MSN/etc:Plurk
CHARACTER Name: Akira Inugami Canon: Wolf Guy Age: 15-16 Timeline: After the ending, when Akira wakes up in the Phoenix Organ facility. If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A
Personality: Akira has the same tumultuous personal problems that happen to any teenager coming into his own. You just have to add on the fact that he's also a werewolf. It's hard enough to be a teenager and feel like you're all alone in the world, but Akira is literally one of the only remaining werewolves on the planet. He really IS all alone. That crushing loneliness and desperation consumes a pretty large part of Akira's entire psychological landscape. He ruminates quite frequently on the fact that he's pretty much the last of his kind, and if more are out there he has no way of finding or connecting with them.
Akira's early life was spent hanging around his mother for most of the day. Since they were two anomalies that any government would love to get their hands on, Akira's human father used his family's connections to always keep them hidden away. No matter where they went, he made sure that they were kept from the public, always staying in wild locales to keep them close to nature. Akira and his mother forged a very strong bond as a result of this, as most of their company during the daily schedule was with one another, while Akira's father was out working. As a result of her presence in his life, all of Akira's memories of her are light and airy. She has an almost holy significance in his mind, whenever he thinks back on her. These feelings affect his present day as well, considering his natural affinity for "motherly" types of women.
Akira has a negative view on life in general, but even more so where humanity is concerned. He starts the story with the opinion that most humans are terrible people to the core, barely covered by a veneer of civility. Self-serving, greedy, violent, and obsessed with maintaining their own status. A plague of vermin that's done nothing but dirty their own nest. To be fair, most of his interactions with them have certain reinforced this opinion. Humans took Akira's mother and killed his father, then shot him full of holes and left him to die. He was just six at the time. Even after his rescue, he still grew up with a distinctly unnatural aura about him, and that tended to put people off when he re-entered society. Every time he went to a new school, it was only a matter of time before he was getting harassed and attacked by the local toughs. Something about him triggered old, forgotten human instincts, which marked him as distinctly "other". People were put off by him, but they didn't know why they were put off. They only knew that he didn't belong with them. This pattern only escalated as Akira matured, and the older his foes got, the more brutal and creative they became. It's a wonder that he even grew up as well-adjusted as he is.
Since Akira eventually decided that the world was going to be against him no matter what, at some point he just stopped even trying to make peace with it. If the world hated him, he was going to hate the world right back. If he couldn't avoid trouble, then he might as well invite it in. Akira became foul-mouthed, trollish, and is generally unpleasant when forced to deal with people that he doesn't like. It's all a defense mechanism, a way of protecting his inner self from harm. All of his human interactions ended badly, so why would he even give people a chance to work their way past his defenses? It basically became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mock them before they can mock you. It led to him becoming quite adept at verbal sparring, using his more subtle abilities to pick up on people's weaknesses and use those against them. If things ever got physical, Akira never even gave them the satisfaction of a fight. He would just let them wail on him until they were tired, only to get back up completely unharmed. Proving his superiority without even raising a fist.
Another reason he pushes others away is to protect them. See, Akira was told his entire life that he's cursed. That he was born under a malicious star and that he could only bring pain and suffering to those around him. Look at the evidence. His mother and father were taken as a boy. He was shot near to death and left to fend for himself in the wild. The medium who said he was cursed died when a plane crashed into her home shortly after Akira's visit. Humans have attacked him for most of his life. His enemies target any people close him, just to get at Akira. With a life like that, who wouldn't believe they were cursed? The farther Akira pushes others away from him, the safer they are. At least in his opinion.
That's the core of Akira, right there. The part that shines the most, after all the pride, self-loathing, distrust, and negativity is stripped away. For all his negative traits, the fact of that matter is that Akira doesn't want to hurt innocent people. He dislikes most humans, but he doesn't want to harm them, and as he develops in the manga he recognizes that more and more of them are worth protecting. Akira doesn't want innocent people to get caught up in his tumultuous fate, or maimed by someone who just doesn't like Akira, but can't get at him any other way. Despite how much he claims he "doesn't like to get involved" with people, he's the first to jump into the fray when terrible shit goes down. He was able to just leave when Haguro's lackey shot up the school assembly, but instead he jumped into the flames head-first, saving students and brutally killing the assailant. He gave his blood to Chiba, despite the two barely knowing one another. He went through absolute Hell to save his teacher, Akiko Aoshika, from a terrible fate, nearly losing his own life in the process. For all his talk to the contrary, Akira has a good, loving heart.
Strengths/Weaknesses: Physicality aside, Akira is a scholastic achiever. Despite the fact the barely pays attention at school and constantly gets in trouble, he has perfect grades. He's very studious when he wants to be, and has a special interest in mythology. It's pragmatic. What better way to research his people's origins, than by checking the folklore of other nations?
Akira's big mouth can be a problem for him, though. When faced with someone who really gets his goat, no matter how dangerous they are, he has a lot of trouble keeping his gob shut. He tends to offend others without regard for the possible consequences, and that's bitten him in the ass on more than one occasion.
His yearning for having a place to belong is also an easily exploited weakness. As told to his teacher, "stop dispensing hope to that boy like a spider's thread. He'll cling to it, if it's from a woman like you." Though his trust is hard to gain, once you have his loyalty it becomes a potent weakness, and allows him to be manipulated rather easily.
Abilities: Since all of Akira's abilities stem from his status as a werewolf, they vary in strength along with the lunar cycle. For the best example, his powers will be laid out as if the moon is in the fullest phase.
Superior Physical Abilities - Akira can move damned fast. Faster than the human eye can process, when he really puts effort into it. He was able to slip through an entire cadre of reporters who were out to interview him, even when they had their sights right on him. He can leap several stories high, shrug off impacts from vehicles, stabbings, gunshots, burn damage, bludgeonings, and long drops as if they're nothing. He has enough strength to cripple or kill a man with a well-placed blow, or snap a limb with a sharp gesture of his arm. His bones and body tissues are durable enough to take tremendous physical stress without major injury, and lesser melee weapons tend to break on his body after extended use.
Heightened Senses - He was once able to eaves-drop on a conversation inside a hospital room, despite being across the street and on the roof of another building, with the moon in a lesser phase. When he concentrates he can detect heartbeats and breathing, depending on his proximity to his target. Akira was able to figure out who attacked a friend of his just from the scent of the man's sweat on his friend's body. His night and long-distance vision is like-wise greatly enhanced.
High Pain Threshold - Akira shows very little reaction to most kinds of physical trauma when his power is on the upswing. Unfortunately, he becomes more attuned to it as his power wanes.
Transformation - Like any good werewolf, Akira can change form. This is only allowable during the Full Moon and a day or two on either side of it. In his transformed state, all of his physical parameters are raised up a notch, making him a bit more dangerous. He does, however, maintain his rational mind.
First Person:
[The scruffy-haired, golden-eyed young man on screen looks just a wee bit perturbed now.]
Look, I'm gonna' be perfectly honest here. I appreciate you guys fixin' me up and all. I like havin' both arms very much. Really, I do! That's very nice of you all.
Problem is? I wanna' go home. I don't care how. I don't care who I have to talk to or threaten. Hell, I don't even care why you bastards took me here in the first place. This was actually kinda' nice at the beginning, since it gave me time to clear my head and get my body back in order, but now I'm just gettin' pretty fuckin' pissed. As matter of fact, I think I went well past "pissed" the first time I got dropped in the catacombs.
One of you assholes has to be in charge around here. Send me back home, damn it! Send me back to Japan! I'm sick of bein' trapped here, you hear me! Somebody give me some damned answers!
Third Person:
"Akiko!" Akira yelled, bolting upright on his bench. He was breathing hard and sweating like a panicked beast. For a moment he thought that he'd have to fight again, like every other time he'd been woken up by the men in the lab suits. It was a constant cycle where they had him held. Painful awakening, intrusive tests, and gassing back to sleep. He reflexively went to grasp at the stump that was his arm...only to find it was not a stump at all. His arm was there.
"...The fuck?" he said aloud, turning in surprise and seeing his body whole again, "I...how did..."
Had the full moon come? Did its power reach him down here? Did that mean that he could finally escape this place? His mind was so shocked from the revelations of being whole again, that he failed completely to notice that he wasn't even in the facility. Not anywhere near it. He was alone, in his hospital gown, and on a moving train.
"...Alright, if this is some kinda' fucked up dream, I'm gonna' be really mad."
He reached out to a holding pole, flexing his arm and warping the metal. His strength was working. Still a bit wobbly, he got to his feet, standing up tall just as the train stopped. Unfortunately, the sudden stop sent him right down, smashing against the next pole.
"Assholes!" he yelled, hopping to his feet, "At least let me adjust!"
He sniffed the air and attuned his senses as he left the cart. No other people got off the train. Hell, no other people even in the station, if his senses weren't lying to him. How lovely, somebody was treating him like a VIP. They even healed him up. Problem was, he had no idea where the hell the train had dropped him off. This was just another test, for all he knew. He wandered on bare feet, confused.
"Hello?" he called out, "Yo, anyone here? This ain't funny, you know. I'm not exactly in the mood to play games with people, right now. Come out and explain this to me. Who are you? Why am I here? How did I get out of that lab?"
He almost missed the device that fell from his lab-gown, reacting just in time to catch it. The small, metal object was turned over in his hands several times.
"...What's this, some kinda' media-phone? Pretty weirdly-shaped model. Looks like it hooks up to a message board of some kind. Guess it couldn't hurt to figure it out. Maybe one of these yahoos can help me..."
Akira Inugami | Wolf Guy | Not Reserved
Name: Mike
Age: 31
Personal Journal: N/A
E-mail: all.hail.dc@gmail.com
AIM/MSN/etc: Plurk
CHARACTER
Name: Akira Inugami
Canon: Wolf Guy
Age: 15-16
Timeline: After the ending, when Akira wakes up in the Phoenix Organ facility.
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A
Personality: Akira has the same tumultuous personal problems that happen to any teenager coming into his own. You just have to add on the fact that he's also a werewolf. It's hard enough to be a teenager and feel like you're all alone in the world, but Akira is literally one of the only remaining werewolves on the planet. He really IS all alone. That crushing loneliness and desperation consumes a pretty large part of Akira's entire psychological landscape. He ruminates quite frequently on the fact that he's pretty much the last of his kind, and if more are out there he has no way of finding or connecting with them.
Akira's early life was spent hanging around his mother for most of the day. Since they were two anomalies that any government would love to get their hands on, Akira's human father used his family's connections to always keep them hidden away. No matter where they went, he made sure that they were kept from the public, always staying in wild locales to keep them close to nature. Akira and his mother forged a very strong bond as a result of this, as most of their company during the daily schedule was with one another, while Akira's father was out working. As a result of her presence in his life, all of Akira's memories of her are light and airy. She has an almost holy significance in his mind, whenever he thinks back on her. These feelings affect his present day as well, considering his natural affinity for "motherly" types of women.
Akira has a negative view on life in general, but even more so where humanity is concerned. He starts the story with the opinion that most humans are terrible people to the core, barely covered by a veneer of civility. Self-serving, greedy, violent, and obsessed with maintaining their own status. A plague of vermin that's done nothing but dirty their own nest. To be fair, most of his interactions with them have certain reinforced this opinion. Humans took Akira's mother and killed his father, then shot him full of holes and left him to die. He was just six at the time. Even after his rescue, he still grew up with a distinctly unnatural aura about him, and that tended to put people off when he re-entered society. Every time he went to a new school, it was only a matter of time before he was getting harassed and attacked by the local toughs. Something about him triggered old, forgotten human instincts, which marked him as distinctly "other". People were put off by him, but they didn't know why they were put off. They only knew that he didn't belong with them. This pattern only escalated as Akira matured, and the older his foes got, the more brutal and creative they became. It's a wonder that he even grew up as well-adjusted as he is.
Since Akira eventually decided that the world was going to be against him no matter what, at some point he just stopped even trying to make peace with it. If the world hated him, he was going to hate the world right back. If he couldn't avoid trouble, then he might as well invite it in. Akira became foul-mouthed, trollish, and is generally unpleasant when forced to deal with people that he doesn't like. It's all a defense mechanism, a way of protecting his inner self from harm. All of his human interactions ended badly, so why would he even give people a chance to work their way past his defenses? It basically became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mock them before they can mock you. It led to him becoming quite adept at verbal sparring, using his more subtle abilities to pick up on people's weaknesses and use those against them. If things ever got physical, Akira never even gave them the satisfaction of a fight. He would just let them wail on him until they were tired, only to get back up completely unharmed. Proving his superiority without even raising a fist.
Another reason he pushes others away is to protect them. See, Akira was told his entire life that he's cursed. That he was born under a malicious star and that he could only bring pain and suffering to those around him. Look at the evidence. His mother and father were taken as a boy. He was shot near to death and left to fend for himself in the wild. The medium who said he was cursed died when a plane crashed into her home shortly after Akira's visit. Humans have attacked him for most of his life. His enemies target any people close him, just to get at Akira. With a life like that, who wouldn't believe they were cursed? The farther Akira pushes others away from him, the safer they are. At least in his opinion.
That's the core of Akira, right there. The part that shines the most, after all the pride, self-loathing, distrust, and negativity is stripped away. For all his negative traits, the fact of that matter is that Akira doesn't want to hurt innocent people. He dislikes most humans, but he doesn't want to harm them, and as he develops in the manga he recognizes that more and more of them are worth protecting. Akira doesn't want innocent people to get caught up in his tumultuous fate, or maimed by someone who just doesn't like Akira, but can't get at him any other way. Despite how much he claims he "doesn't like to get involved" with people, he's the first to jump into the fray when terrible shit goes down. He was able to just leave when Haguro's lackey shot up the school assembly, but instead he jumped into the flames head-first, saving students and brutally killing the assailant. He gave his blood to Chiba, despite the two barely knowing one another. He went through absolute Hell to save his teacher, Akiko Aoshika, from a terrible fate, nearly losing his own life in the process. For all his talk to the contrary, Akira has a good, loving heart.
Background:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/WolfGuyWolfenCrest (Akira Inugami section)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Guy
Strengths/Weaknesses: Physicality aside, Akira is a scholastic achiever. Despite the fact the barely pays attention at school and constantly gets in trouble, he has perfect grades. He's very studious when he wants to be, and has a special interest in mythology. It's pragmatic. What better way to research his people's origins, than by checking the folklore of other nations?
Akira's big mouth can be a problem for him, though. When faced with someone who really gets his goat, no matter how dangerous they are, he has a lot of trouble keeping his gob shut. He tends to offend others without regard for the possible consequences, and that's bitten him in the ass on more than one occasion.
His yearning for having a place to belong is also an easily exploited weakness. As told to his teacher, "stop dispensing hope to that boy like a spider's thread. He'll cling to it, if it's from a woman like you." Though his trust is hard to gain, once you have his loyalty it becomes a potent weakness, and allows him to be manipulated rather easily.
Abilities: Since all of Akira's abilities stem from his status as a werewolf, they vary in strength along with the lunar cycle. For the best example, his powers will be laid out as if the moon is in the fullest phase.
Superior Physical Abilities - Akira can move damned fast. Faster than the human eye can process, when he really puts effort into it. He was able to slip through an entire cadre of reporters who were out to interview him, even when they had their sights right on him. He can leap several stories high, shrug off impacts from vehicles, stabbings, gunshots, burn damage, bludgeonings, and long drops as if they're nothing. He has enough strength to cripple or kill a man with a well-placed blow, or snap a limb with a sharp gesture of his arm. His bones and body tissues are durable enough to take tremendous physical stress without major injury, and lesser melee weapons tend to break on his body after extended use.
Heightened Senses - He was once able to eaves-drop on a conversation inside a hospital room, despite being across the street and on the roof of another building, with the moon in a lesser phase. When he concentrates he can detect heartbeats and breathing, depending on his proximity to his target. Akira was able to figure out who attacked a friend of his just from the scent of the man's sweat on his friend's body. His night and long-distance vision is like-wise greatly enhanced.
High Pain Threshold - Akira shows very little reaction to most kinds of physical trauma when his power is on the upswing. Unfortunately, he becomes more attuned to it as his power wanes.
Transformation - Like any good werewolf, Akira can change form. This is only allowable during the Full Moon and a day or two on either side of it. In his transformed state, all of his physical parameters are raised up a notch, making him a bit more dangerous. He does, however, maintain his rational mind.
First Person:
[The scruffy-haired, golden-eyed young man on screen looks just a wee bit perturbed now.]
Look, I'm gonna' be perfectly honest here. I appreciate you guys fixin' me up and all. I like havin' both arms very much. Really, I do! That's very nice of you all.
Problem is? I wanna' go home. I don't care how. I don't care who I have to talk to or threaten. Hell, I don't even care why you bastards took me here in the first place. This was actually kinda' nice at the beginning, since it gave me time to clear my head and get my body back in order, but now I'm just gettin' pretty fuckin' pissed. As matter of fact, I think I went well past "pissed" the first time I got dropped in the catacombs.
One of you assholes has to be in charge around here. Send me back home, damn it! Send me back to Japan! I'm sick of bein' trapped here, you hear me! Somebody give me some damned answers!
Third Person:
"Akiko!" Akira yelled, bolting upright on his bench. He was breathing hard and sweating like a panicked beast. For a moment he thought that he'd have to fight again, like every other time he'd been woken up by the men in the lab suits. It was a constant cycle where they had him held. Painful awakening, intrusive tests, and gassing back to sleep. He reflexively went to grasp at the stump that was his arm...only to find it was not a stump at all. His arm was there.
"...The fuck?" he said aloud, turning in surprise and seeing his body whole again, "I...how did..."
Had the full moon come? Did its power reach him down here? Did that mean that he could finally escape this place? His mind was so shocked from the revelations of being whole again, that he failed completely to notice that he wasn't even in the facility. Not anywhere near it. He was alone, in his hospital gown, and on a moving train.
"...Alright, if this is some kinda' fucked up dream, I'm gonna' be really mad."
He reached out to a holding pole, flexing his arm and warping the metal. His strength was working. Still a bit wobbly, he got to his feet, standing up tall just as the train stopped. Unfortunately, the sudden stop sent him right down, smashing against the next pole.
"Assholes!" he yelled, hopping to his feet, "At least let me adjust!"
He sniffed the air and attuned his senses as he left the cart. No other people got off the train. Hell, no other people even in the station, if his senses weren't lying to him. How lovely, somebody was treating him like a VIP. They even healed him up. Problem was, he had no idea where the hell the train had dropped him off. This was just another test, for all he knew. He wandered on bare feet, confused.
"Hello?" he called out, "Yo, anyone here? This ain't funny, you know. I'm not exactly in the mood to play games with people, right now. Come out and explain this to me. Who are you? Why am I here? How did I get out of that lab?"
He almost missed the device that fell from his lab-gown, reacting just in time to catch it. The small, metal object was turned over in his hands several times.
"...What's this, some kinda' media-phone? Pretty weirdly-shaped model. Looks like it hooks up to a message board of some kind. Guess it couldn't hurt to figure it out. Maybe one of these yahoos can help me..."