[ooc] Application for towerofanimus

[firststep]

Player Information

Name: Mori
Personal Journal: paperforest
Age: 19
Contact Info: forestofsleep (AIM), gambleroflife@gmail.com, forestofsleep
Other Characters Played: N/A
Do you need an invite? NOPE

Character Information

Character Name: Yori Kawasawa
Character Age: 22
Character Gender: Male
World Description: Yori’s world is basically a (sorta) normal Earth where All Myths Are True, to an extent, so things such as supernatural creatures actually exist. Generically called “demons” (which makes it confusing since there are also actual demons, but anyway), they primarily exist in a parallel realm of existence known as the “spirit world”, which overlaps with but generally remains unseen by and cannot directly affect the physical realm. While the boundary between the two realms was once weak, allowing for all sorts of shenanigans as told in folklore and myths, these days only a small fraction of the human population is able to properly interact with the spirit world. On the other hand, demons are able to force themselves through the boundary at the cost of being weakened for as long as they choose to stay in the physical realm, and even then they cannot maintain their presence there for very long if they’re not exceptionally powerful.

And then sometimes, they just happen to discover a spot where the boundary is weaker than usual, and manage to slip through without much problem. And unsurprisingly, many of them take this as an opportunity to cause a ruckus, with sometimes rather unfortunate results, which is where hunter organizations come in.

Despite being termed “hunter” organizations, many of them don’t exclusively do exorcisms and exterminations for less serious incidents, rather they attempt to negotiate with or drive off the offending demons. But they’re universally unafraid to use lethal force when that fails, and all agents will at minimum receive training to defend themselves if not more. These organizations typically have long histories and immense influence behind closed doors -- the largest organization in Japan, Yatagarasu, has a history spanning from as early as the Kamakura shogunate and many, many connections throughout the country, to say the least. They’re pretty covert though, and people generally aren’t aware of their existence unless they’re really high up the chain of command or are already directly involved with them.

Due to Yatagarasu’s age there are things such as entire families who have traditionally been agents. Sort of like a family business, only they usually start from very young. It’s not uncommon for some of the older families to have some demon blood somewhere in their lineage, though typically by this point it’s very thin. Sometimes, things just happen -- and later on when the boundary between the realms started to become stronger, a few families opt to introduce demon blood as a measure to ensure future generations would remain “connected” to the spirit realm. These days actual direct descendants of a human-demon pair are rarely seen, as opposed to distant relations somewhere in the family tree.

Half-demons are the product of a union between a human and a demon. Whether they’re “predominantly” human or demon is dependent on the mother’s species; those with human mothers tend to be fundamentally humans with minor demon characteristics, while those with demon mothers are normally closer to being demons themselves. In the case of the former, it’s exceptionally rare for them to inherit supernatural abilities from their demon parent, and apart from appearance and personality quirks are indistinguishable from normal humans, for most of the part.

On the other hand, half-demons who do inherit their demon parent’s abilities tend to have them as an “incomplete” version. Because they are not full demons, they will lack some important aspect of the power, causing them to function abnormally -- usually for the worse. Half-demons like these typically suffer for it for a majority of their lives, as there are likely few proper solutions to the problem. Opinion is divisive among human agents; some consider them more accidents of nature or a necessary evil or even as a way to strengthen bloodlines, while others look down on them as abominations. Demons tend to judge hybrids based on the species of their demon parent, leading to wildly varying opinions.

Demons from Japanese folklore are locally referred to as youkai, whereas foreign demons are referred to with different terms.

Satori are a type of youkai which live in the mountains, and with their third eye they have the ability to read “hearts”, effectively giving them a powerful mindreading ability. That said, they’re also pretty unpopular with youkai due to a combination of their mindreading and species tendency to read thoughts out loud, occasionally trollish behaviour and reclusion. Basically even other youkai think they’re weirdos, and they certainly don’t appreciate the mindreading.

Another important aspect is demon contracts, which can be thought of as similar to a human taking on familiars (though most demons would be rather offended by the term). The contractee acts as a supplementary energy tank for the contracted demon, easing the demon’s transition into the physical realm and sharing the burden of maintaining their existence there. In exchange, demons provide services as agreed upon when the contract was made. While agents can have any number of contracts, they typically only have one or two summoned at the same time, as it’s very strenuous to maintain much more demons than that. Demons agree to contracts for a variety of reasons, whether for some reward out of it or because they’re just...really bored. They are usually only contracted to one person at any given time, but the number of contracts they have been a part of during their lifetime is a good indicator of their age and status among other demons.

As a note, Yori himself can form contracts with demons, but cannot be contracted as a demon himself since again, he’s not a full demon.

Character Background: Yori is the product of a drunken one night stand between a satori who for some god forsaken reason came down from the mountains into town and a normal human woman. A married woman, no less. Whoops. Fortunately for her the child turned out an albino and looking similar to her, making it a little difficult to determine that he was another man’s child.

Since he was young Yori was always something of the odd one out -- his appearance aside, his heritage showed itself in other ways, like him being able to speak to spirits and creatures unseen by everyone else, and an uncanny instinctive ability to just...know what people were thinking. Not their actual thoughts, but their intent, like some kind of scarily accurate gut instinct. Needless to say Yori was no good at making himself seem normal, and he grew up with only a handful of friends at most. But he was happy, because those friends were good to him and his parents were loving and tried their best to raise him well.

And then he hit puberty and it started going out of control.

The supposed gut instinct seemed to become more and more defined and detailed, until he was soon receiving the thoughts of those around him than some vague sense of intention. In the beginning it was quiet and was something he only really noticed if he paid enough attention, but his power increased exponentially in short order, culminating in a flatout information overload while he was in the middle of the street. His mind was overwhelmed but the sudden surge of feedback and shorted itself out, causing Yori to fall into a coma.

He would spend the next five years comatose, lying in a hospital bed. But even in this state of minimal consciousness at most, his mindreading was still active. Yori continued to receive every conscious thought of the patients and hospital staff within the building -- their surface thoughts, their experiences, their memories, even their dreams and nightmares. Together they became some strange patchwork of thoughts and memories which were then woven into Yori’s own mind, so to speak. In the meantime, a visiting youkai who worked for the Yatagarasu organization coincidentally discovered this child who reeked of satori, and informed the higher-ups.

When Yori woke up, he believed he was someone else entirely and that he had a different life than what had actually transpired. The only consistency that he believed he was still 14, which was when he had slipped into a coma. Needless to say he panicked to find himself in the hospital with people who seemingly called him the wrong name and with the wrong people calling themselves his parents -- only when he was presented with actual physical proof otherwise did he accept that he might have been wrong.

For the next three years Yori spent a lot of time in physical rehabilitation and for a time in therapy, trying to navigate through the noisy mess that was his own mind on a daily basis. Many of his friends had since moved on, nor did it help that he could not remember them as being his friends, making relations very awkward -- in the end, he simply chose to drop out of their social lives. As much as he appreciated his parents’ support at the same time he felt alienated from them, knowing they were worried about him yet not being able to remember them like he should. Bluntly put, he was actually kind of miserable since it felt like he didn’t even know his own life.

And then one day he was visited by an agent of Yatagarasu and given an explanation on the nature of his powers. Then, he was offered a proposition -- the organization would pay off his parents’ debt caused by his hospital bills, and in exchange he will take on the equivalent value of the debt himself and work for them to pay it off. At this point, Yori had little else to do and was more than a little guilty about the trouble he had caused his parents, so he agreed to it. It hadn’t occurred to him there were ulterior motives to this assistance, since he hadn’t picked any of that up from the agent who met him, and he was simply too trusting to suspect anything.

Mindreaders were hard to come by. And with his powers being some weird permanent passive, Yori was by himself a huge potential threat to national security. They had simply figured it would be more beneficial to have him on their side rather than to capture or kill him since he hadn’t done anything dangerous yet.

So Yori is now something of an agent for them, with a tengu assigned to him as his partner (though really, she’s there more to babysit him and keep tabs on him). Technically, he’s still a trainee and hasn’t had much field experience, but he tries!

And then the Tower happened. Whoops.

Personality: Yori is pretty weird, when it boils down to it. To most people he’s a little erratic and strange, being the sort of person who openly talks to demons which cannot be seen most people and seemingly being unable to stay focused on a particular line of thought for very long. He answers questions before they’re asked and repeats thoughts before they’re said, and is somewhat prone to devolving into incoherency and back. Admittedly, a lot of this is more an effect of being a telepath with no off switch, but even then there’s some inherent weirdness to him -- Yori doesn’t exactly have the best concept of “normal”, what with him spending a lot of time around supernatural creatures and such.

That said, his mind reading powers deserve to be noted because of how deeply it’s affected him and the way he is -- the constant flood of thoughts he experiences everyday while living in the city constantly threatens to drown out his own thoughts, and he is literally incapable of having a quiet moment to himself unless he were to move to some far remote place in the country. Yori is terrible at keeping his own mind anchored down in the face of this storm, so a lot of times it seems like he’s trying to express too many thoughts at once without realizing it. The constant thoughtdump makes it difficult for him to focus and concentrate, resulting in him existing in a semi-permanent daze. He deals with it by not dealing with it -- he kind of lets thoughts go in but doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to them most of the time, or to much of what’s happening around him. This is related to how he copes with Terrible Things in general as will be explained later!

So most of the time, Yori is a derpface. As the earlier points would imply, he has terrible social skills simply because he doesn’t really get that he operates on an entirely different standard of normalcy than most people do. And you know, generally being a weirdo. He tries very hard though, and he is a really nice guy if you ignore the weirdness. He can seem even childlike, being only mentally 14 years or so and having missed out on a lot of growing up in the past few years. His moments of lucidity tend to be short and aren’t any less weird than his usual self; he just demonstrates more awareness and better use of the giant inventory of information in his head. But it takes effort that he isn’t always up for expending, so generally if he’s being lucid he’s (trying) to be Serious.

Although Yori has the ability to know every single unpleasant, nasty thought someone has and has ever had, he chooses to believe that everyone are essentially decent people. No one is inherently evil or irredeemable, in his mind! It’s something he really wants to believe in despite all evidence to the contrary, if only so he can try to give some meaning to his own powers -- that he can somehow use them to benefit or help other people, and to make them a little more bearable to him. On the one hand it makes Yori incredibly tolerant and perhaps even forgiving, because he will always give someone the benefit of the doubt at the very least. On the other hand, it’s naive, hopeful and possibly why Yori is a little too trusting for his own good.

Which brings us to the fact that he copes with life, particularly the Bad Things he learns and/or experiences, through a combination of denial and dissociation. It started out as some meagre defence mechanism against the daily thoughtflood within his own head, and it’s now kind of how he deals with terrible shit in general. Yori is the sort of person so tends to just block out things when under duress -- he removes himself from the situation, at best acknowledging it as happening but not letting himself connect the dots and say it’s happening to him. Like selective obliviousness, only probably far more unhealthy. Unsurprisingly he’s somewhat easily influenced by the people he hangs around as a matter of inevitability, assimilating little things like quirks and speech patterns and sometimes traits -- and to an extent the dissociation keeps him from accidentally absorbing some really nasty shit.

Deep down, Yori feels lonely and alienated, even from his own self. Back home it’s not like he can really talk about the mindreading thing with most people, and the whole memory screw inflicted upon him has alienated him from any friends he had and his own parents, as much as he loves them and knows they care about him. He’s positively terrified at the possibility that there is no real “him” left, just one constructed from everyone else’s memories. It scares him that every now and then, bits of other people just sort of leak into his sense of self; he remembers different things again, and his interests change without him ever remembering them doing so. Due to this he clings desperately to the few things that he wants to be “his”, and he tries to circumvent any memory loss by keeping records and reminders for himself. Along with his general social fail and having missed out on most of his adolescence, he feels isolated because he knows that he’s not normal, and won’t ever be.

But really, for most of the part he’s just a dumb big kid with a lot of power that he doesn’t exactly want in his hands, trying to figure out where he fits in life after having missed out on a lot of it.
Abilities: As mentioned earlier, Yori has the power to read “hearts”, which effectively makes him a very powerful telepath by his world’s standards! He is constantly hearing surface thoughts and is capable of focusing on a particular target to rummage through their memories for specific information, with an increasing risk of having them rub off on him the deeper he digs. Barring mental blocks, he can easily read the minds of humans -- with non-humans it starts getting a little iffier. In most cases he hears their thoughts in bits and pieces unless he is actively making an effort to read their minds, and even then sufficiently powerful and/or old non-humans like gods are still capable of blocking him out entirely. Non-organics like robots are...kind of a gray zone since his power is vaguely worded (“hearts”), and I will leave it up to player discretion for that! In most cases he will exercise a certain level of focus on whoever he’s talking to; not enough that he’s looking into their memories, but enough that he gradually copies their speech patterns and quirks the longer the conversation goes on. His telepathy’s range is approximately a five floor radius, though certain floors will probably distort this (thinking floors 6 and 23, in particular). This can be extended to ten floors either upwards or downwards, but it requires a lot of effort on his part!

He also has a degree of resistance against mental manipulation, though this is less an ability and more a side effect of having a giant wall of thoughts to muck up his mind. This will ultimately vary depending on specifics, but in general supernatural mind tricks and such are less effective, or at least take a while to take root, if only because Yori’s head is such a mess that he doesn’t really process a lot of things to begin with.

Yori also has access to binding seals and wards! Seals are done through the use of talismans, which in this case are slips of paper with spells written on them in his blood. They are meant to restrain a target -- his take the form of medical restraints, restricting movement. They spawn from magic circles created by the talisman, and while they may be painful if the target tries to resist against them, don’t actually do harm. It’s still possible to break free from them if they’re persistent and/or strong enough, and since Yori’s kind of new to this his seals aren’t particularly powerful.

Wards on the other hand, require more preparation on his part by drawing a magic circle around the area he wants warded, and spilling blood to activate it. By default they protect the area from “those with malicious intent”, though with modifications he could design them to keep out specific persons instead. Wards will forcefully repel those on its “blacklist”, and the way the spell is designed also means that anyone within the circle that fits the ward’s criteria when it’s activated will also find themselves ejected from it. Wards last for a maximum of two hours, depending on how much blood was sacrificed. Again, still possible to break through if you’re persistent or strong enough to force your way in! Also, while it’s possible to activate the ward with blood other than Yori’s, it will be weaker in response.

He also has some basic training in hand-to-hand combat, but he’s really terrible at it whoops. He somewhat paradoxically has an amazing memory when he's more lucid, in the sense that he can remember most anything that's gone into his head with astonishing clarity and detail -- provided it hasn't been overwritten from his brain already. He can remember facts like a boss, more personal things? Not so much.

Sample Entries: Here and here. For context this was in a setting where he was depowered, so there was less mind screwy shenanigans on his end. He was still a weirdo regardless.