→ the far shore: application
May. 9th, 2017 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
irregularName: laila
Contact:
Age: Positively middle-aged
Character Information
Name: Ken Hidaka
Canon: Weiss Kreuz
Canon Point: Episode 25 of Kapitel, the end of the first TV series.
Age: 19
History:
Ask Ken Hidaka who he is and he'll probably tell you that he's a florist and part-time soccer coach. He might go on to say that he doesn't think being a florist is all that great and that nobody warned him that a fan club would come with the territory. What he probably wouldn't go on to add is that he is also a scandal-tainted former professional athlete who, after supposedly dying in suspicious circumstances, now works as an assassin for a team named Weiss. They report back to Kritiker, a covert agency formed by the previous Chief of Police (now deceased) to dispense a very final kind of justice to criminals that the law couldn't touch.
Ken thought he wanted to know who was responsible for framing him for match fixing and getting him kicked out of the J-league right up to the point he actually found the man responsible: his best friend, Kouichirou Kase. Ken long believed that Kase had been killed the night he supposedly died, and only discovered that his friend was still alive when he walked into the mission briefing that named Kase as a target for his team: both he and the man he worked for were members of a crime syndicate. Horrified by the prospect of having to kill his friend and unwilling to believe that Kase could have known what his boss was up to, Ken desperately tried to prove Kase was innocent of the crimes Kritiker had accused him of, only to discover that Kase had been in on it all along. Worse was to follow when Kase tried to murder him, leaving Ken with no choice but to kill his friend.
A chance meeting with a rather nice girl named Yuriko seemed to offer Ken a chance to find a way out. While out riding his bike not long after Kase's death, a near-miss with a semi saw Ken run off the road and running into Yuriko within moments. The pair hit it off almost immediately, and a sudden storm that saw them spending the night away from the city proved the perfect excuse to spend more time together. Though sharing a room with a single bed had Ken, characteristically, choosing to sleep on the floor, it only served to cement their relationship. The happiness Ken found with Yuriko, though, wasn't to last. Yuriko, bored of her office job, wanted to emigrate to Australia and asked Ken to come with her. Though he longed to go, ultimately Ken's feelings of guilt and the impossibility of ever being open with Yuriko about the life he'd led and the crimes he'd committed pushed him into breaking off the relationship. She left for Australia alone and the pair never saw one another again.
Sticking with his comrades in Weiss saw Ken ultimately becoming an accessory to the fact of the assassination of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Reiji Takatori. Takatori had been directly responsible for the death of his teammate Aya's parents, and indirectly caused the deaths of many more. After narrowly escaping with his life after Takatori framed him and his teammates as terrorists, Ken took part in what he then believed would be Weiss's final mission: a frontal assault on Takatori's offices. The mission ultimately saw Aya killing his nemesis as the building burned around them, after which the team disbanded.
Ken didn't manage to stay away from Kritiker for long. For all Weiss had gone their separate ways, their old enemies were still out there and an attempt on Ken's life - which very nearly killed three of the children he coached with him - had him making his way back to the flower shop that had served as Weiss's base to discover that the rest of his former team were in the same position he was. With the team re-formed to combat the continued threat, he reluctantly returned to work.
Not long after Weiss re-formed Ken struck up an acquaintance with a motherly woman named Ruth, a former nun who worked at a nearby Catholic church. Fearing for her safety after a string of strange and savage attacks on Christian clergy, Ken took it upon himself to try and look out for her. He quickly came to realize that Ruth was trying to lead the murderer - Farfarello, member of a team called Schwarz who had formerly worked as Prime Minister Takatori's bodyguards - to her. With the assistance of his teammate Omi he kept a watch on her church, but failed to prevent Ruth's abduction by Farfarello. They tracked Farfarello down in time to stop him from murdering Ruth, but he very quickly overcame them. The only thing that spared Ken from dying at his hands was that Ruth saved his life at the cost of her own, jumping in the way of the attack that was meant to kill him. Between them, Ken and Omi managed to drive Farfarello away but it was too late to save Ruth, who died in their arms after confessing that Farfarello was her child.
Things didn't get a lot better for the team after that. Esset, a group of crazed cultists who'd read far too much Lovecraft, were planning to summon a demon after first plunging Japan into anarchy and chaos, and for lack of anyone better Weiss found themselves burdened with the responsibility of stopping them. Discovering that Aya's younger sister had been kidnapped - first to be used as a test subject, then as the vessel for whatever it was Esset thought they were summoning - the team set about trying to kill the cult leaders, save her and stop the ritual. A string of awkward failures later, they managed to track Schwarz and Esset to a museum on a cliff-top, underneath which the three elders had built a massive, crypt-like temple where they planned to sacrifice Aya's sister in the hope of summoning 'The One', the creature they worshipped as a God.
Weiss broke up the party the only way they knew how: by killing everybody who stoood between them and the temple, then interrupting the summoning and taking down two of the three Elders. It was only after the third had escaped that they learned the girl on the altar was actually Sakura, a young girl with a crush on Aya who looked almost identical to his missing sister. The team discovered Aya-chan with Schwarz, who had turned on their employers and planned to use Aya-chan for their own obscure ends. The two groups fought while Weiss's handler Manx, arriving just in time, escaped with the girls. Weiss and Schwarz, however, weren't so lucky, and were trapped in the collapsing building as it fell into the sea.
Personality:
In day-to-day life, Ken comes across as an ordinary, though somewhat naive, nineteen-year-old boy - lively, aggressively cheerful, extroverted, impulsive, occasionally oblivious and almost entirely terrible with girls. For all his usual cheerful confidence, he's pretty easy to embarrass. His tendency toward late-adolescent awkwardness becomes especially pronounced in his dealings with women, especially if they're showing clear interest in him. He gets round this problem by making a habit of falling in love by mistake, which is pretty much the only reason he got anywhere with Yuriko.
Ken's general hopelessness with women can be explained thusly: when he got together with Yuriko, Youji thought the very idea that Ken's sudden cheerfulness could be explained by a new girlfriend was hilarious, while Omi couldn't get his head round the concept. Nor could Ken, who reacted to Yuriko's obvious displays of interest by 1) attempting to leave the room, the building and possibly the prefecture; 2) sleeping on the floor; and 3) needing to be rebooted after she kissed him on the cheek. For all this, he fell fast - to the point that when Yuriko, an incredibly impulsive woman in her own right, mentioned she was emigrating to Australia and asked if he wanted to come with her, his response was 'Okay!'. While Youji's reality check was both hypocritical and unfair, he had a point: going to Australia with a woman you've known for three weeks when you can't speak a word of English is really not the world's greatest idea.
Once Ken has put his faith in someone, it's very, very difficult to convince him to break it. It took being set on fire, left for dead, and then shot repeatedly to convince him that Kase - a childhood friend Ken was exceedingly attached to - genuinely was as bad as Kritiker were painting him. Loyal to a fault, and nothing if he's not stubborn, Ken clung to the idea that Kase was innocent, just as he had with his mother figure Kaoruko Amamiya some months earlier - and, in both cases, it took hard and horrifying proof before he was prepared to believe it. Ken has developed quite pronounced abandonment issues as a result - he finds letting go of the people he cares about extremely difficult, and is prepared to go to extreme lengths to stay with them. He is, however, ultimately flexible. He's dealt with a lot of change and uncertainty in his life, and a lot of sudden reversals. For all his stubbornness Ken is a survivor: while he might not like letting go, he certainly understands why it's necessary.
Another of Ken's most noticeable traits is his temper, which could only be described as 'short' and has not been improved by a crash course in working retail. It's not particularly difficult to irritate him; he also has a tendency to fall back on defensive anger when he's flustered or upset. It's far more unusual for him to stay angry for very long. Though he can be extremely hostile toward strangers - especially to strangers he's expected to work with - and frequently loses his temper with the people he cares for, in these cases his anger has no genuine, long-lasting malice behind it. He's the kind of person you want on your side in a fight - as long as he's still standing he won't give up, and if he goes down at all he'll go down swinging. Prepared to give his all to protect the people he cares about, Ken believes the best about the people he considers friends: it takes a lot to make him turn on them even reluctantly. His loyalty isn't simply to people, though: he's prepared to go to the wall for what he believes in, even if it means going against his friends.
Ken is something of a perfectionist. Simply, he likes to be good at the things that he does - a trait that was benign enough when he was simply trying to be the absolute best soccer player he possibly could be. He tries, despite his lack of any real interest in the job, to be a good florist. But he spends his nights working as a hired killer, and there's a part of him that wants to be good at that too. He believes that his actions are sinful - while he is prepared to grant that Weiss may be a necessary evil, he still thinks what they do is wrong - and, perhaps in part to his Catholic upbringing, often feels profoundly guilty about it, but no matter how much he may dislike and disapprove of what he does he still wants to do it well.
Ken is a forthright person, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. If he doesn't see the point in doing something he'll say so, and repeatedly, regardless of how tactless his behavior might seem. He speaks his mind, often without considering how what he says will come across, still less if maybe it would be wiser to say nothing, and is nothing if not loose-tongued. He's a self-proclaimed 'action guy', preferring to act first and think about it later if at all, leaving him with a tendency toward recklessness which is only heightened when under stress. He's got the kind of mind that considers setting something on fire to be a great distraction tactic, without much regard for what might happen after that. Planning, for Ken, is something for other people to tell him about.
Though he's a lot less open than he initially appears, and its clear from his abandonment issues and his struggles with guilt that he only looks to be an uncomplicated, untroubled soul, Ken is still something of an innocent, an optimist at heart with a strong sense of self. For all that Omi is two years younger, and he was not the last one to join, he is in some respects very much the team's junior member, and horribly ill-suited for the job.
Abilities:
Ken is as psychically inclined as a box of rocks - and not even specially selected occult gemstones buffed and polished to a high shine, just plain old common-or-garden rocks. In a box. As a former professional athlete and paramilitary, he is extremely physically fit and agile but, taking Anime Physics into account, he functions at a no-more-than-human level. At that level, though, Ken is genuinely extremely dangerous - he's a trained killer who specializes in close-range hand-to-hand combat using a non-ranged weapon, and the fact that he's still breathing and has all his lights and limbs is proof enough that he's gotten very good at this very fast. He has also had a degree of paramilitary training, and has been shown to be competent with not only his own weapons - a pair of bladed gauntlets based on the Indian bagh nakha - but with small arms and light weaponry.
When all's said and done, though, Ken is a normal human and a young one at that. He has absolutely no defenses against magic users or psychic manipulation - he is vaguely aware that psychics exist, but he has no idea how you'd go about getting rid of one if 'jumping on them and working it out from there' didn't work. He also, for all his strength, stamina and training, lacks long-term experience. He'd be able to fight back against another normal adult with combat training and would definitely try, but he'd have a hard time keeping up with someone who'd been doing this for years.
Strengths:
Loyal
Cheerful
Determined
Strong sense of self
Ambitious
Weaknesses:
Impulsive. Let's-move-to-another-hemisphere-with-a-near-stranger impulsive.
Irritable
Naive
Massive. Abandonment. Issues.
Guilt-ridden
God/Shinki: Shinki
Why?: The current state of the Weiss Kreuz cast is such that the majority of characters in-game are the series antagnoists. Though Ken is reckless he is not actively suicidal and, if he was largely alone and had any idea who these people were, he would simply avoid them as far as he could. Since I really want to get him involved with the rest of the cast, Ken having no idea why these people are Very Bad For Him is pretty much non-negotiable.
That aside, if I am capable of playing any character without their memories without that causing a major problem with my portrayal, this is the guy.
Cause Of Death: A horrible combination of cranial trauma and drowning. Ken canonically survives the collapse of the museum in Weiss Kreuz Kapitel, but the only explanation for exactly how is 'magic' and 'being an anime character'. The idea that some combination of having your head repeatedly introduced to a brick wall, becoming trapped in a collapsing building and then, while no more than semi-conscious, falling hundreds of feet into the sea (along with several thousand tons of masonry) just might prove fatal to a perfectly ordinary young adult human actually makes a lot more sense than the version of events the series gives us.
Vessel: A siberian tiger. Discussed with Famine, the previous Ken player, who used the same thing: she gave me the okay to keep the vessel form the same. Chosen not just because of the fact his weapon's name means 'tiger claw', but because this idiot boy quite literally tries to fight one hand-to-hand in one of the early Drama CDs. He survives this encounter, so it ends about as well as trying to fight a tiger ever does.
Name Location: Youki (falcon); on the back of the right hand.
Power: Failure Empowerment. Should Ken's God find that he or she is facing certain defeat in battle, they will find their strength, stamina and any exhausted or overused powers temporarily revitalising to the point that they would be capable of surviving and escaping the situation. At this stage this is good for nothing but allowing escape and provides only the opportunity to get away; there is absolutely no guarantee that the God in question will be able to escape from a critical situation if they do nothing to work toward it.
Writing Sample
I have not been RPing Ken outside of PSLs for a while now and have not got a more recent thread to use as a reference, so (incredibly old) evidence for what Ken sounds like in conversation can be found here.
Sample:
So: it's Obon, and apparently he's dead.
Fuck if that doesn't actually make sense. Maybe nothing else about this situation does, like why the tattoo and how come the only thing he's sure about right now is the fact that his name is Ken, but he's got enough - well, call it general knowledge to know that finding himself, at Obon, completely dead yet not lying down actually sounds about right. One less thing to worry about, or - well, no, actually he isn't worried, not really. Mostly he's just extremely confused and kind of annoyed. Which also feels about right. How the bloody hell is anyone supposed to find the spirits of their ancestors - no, wait, he's dead, other way round, Ken - if they don't even know who they're looking for and anyway it's not like you'd have descendents so what the Hell is he even doing apart from not-getting-lost? Does it make sense to know where you are when who you are is a closed book?
It's Obon and he's dead. He is a guy called Ken and this is his body and it seems, all things considered, pretty young for descendents to be an issue. Also, the thought makes him blush. Nope, definitely no descendants and let's not go there. How the fuck old is he meant to be, anyway?
This isn't a bad body, all things considered: it's all he's got to work with, so he goes with that. It seems positively enthused by the idea of walking (wandering aimlessly, but what else is a lost soul to do?) and seems like it would probably take to running, too. Ken would give it a go, actually - hey, it's not like he has anywhere to be or anything better to do, at least until he finds someone who knows what he's supposed to be doing and makes them Explain This Shit - if it weren't so damn crowded. It doesn't make a lot of sense that it's dead--
Except he doesn't want to think beyond it. There's something - God, something uncomfortable about it, something that makes him feel guilty and ill and apprehensive all at once: he shies away from it, don't burn your fingers. He's got a name and some idea of what he is (some kind of zombie? The non-brain-eating kind?) and that is absolutely enough thank you very much.
If only he knew what was going on.
Well, someone will fucking know. Every game has rules, every heap has someone sitting on top of it and admiring the view. All he has to do is Find That Guy, and... and something, he'll figure that out when he gets there. Hit them, maybe. And why not? A king's jaw is just as breakable as the next guy's, and anyone who'd let zombies loose in a major city probably deserves a smack on general principle. It's not much of a plan, but he'll take it.
Other
Anything Else?:
Ken has significant physical scarring, including burn scars from a fire. How do shinki handle discovering evidence of massive former trauma without triggering blight and/or transformation?
Contact:
Age: Positively middle-aged
Character Information
Name: Ken Hidaka
Canon: Weiss Kreuz
Canon Point: Episode 25 of Kapitel, the end of the first TV series.
Age: 19
History:
Ask Ken Hidaka who he is and he'll probably tell you that he's a florist and part-time soccer coach. He might go on to say that he doesn't think being a florist is all that great and that nobody warned him that a fan club would come with the territory. What he probably wouldn't go on to add is that he is also a scandal-tainted former professional athlete who, after supposedly dying in suspicious circumstances, now works as an assassin for a team named Weiss. They report back to Kritiker, a covert agency formed by the previous Chief of Police (now deceased) to dispense a very final kind of justice to criminals that the law couldn't touch.
Ken thought he wanted to know who was responsible for framing him for match fixing and getting him kicked out of the J-league right up to the point he actually found the man responsible: his best friend, Kouichirou Kase. Ken long believed that Kase had been killed the night he supposedly died, and only discovered that his friend was still alive when he walked into the mission briefing that named Kase as a target for his team: both he and the man he worked for were members of a crime syndicate. Horrified by the prospect of having to kill his friend and unwilling to believe that Kase could have known what his boss was up to, Ken desperately tried to prove Kase was innocent of the crimes Kritiker had accused him of, only to discover that Kase had been in on it all along. Worse was to follow when Kase tried to murder him, leaving Ken with no choice but to kill his friend.
A chance meeting with a rather nice girl named Yuriko seemed to offer Ken a chance to find a way out. While out riding his bike not long after Kase's death, a near-miss with a semi saw Ken run off the road and running into Yuriko within moments. The pair hit it off almost immediately, and a sudden storm that saw them spending the night away from the city proved the perfect excuse to spend more time together. Though sharing a room with a single bed had Ken, characteristically, choosing to sleep on the floor, it only served to cement their relationship. The happiness Ken found with Yuriko, though, wasn't to last. Yuriko, bored of her office job, wanted to emigrate to Australia and asked Ken to come with her. Though he longed to go, ultimately Ken's feelings of guilt and the impossibility of ever being open with Yuriko about the life he'd led and the crimes he'd committed pushed him into breaking off the relationship. She left for Australia alone and the pair never saw one another again.
Sticking with his comrades in Weiss saw Ken ultimately becoming an accessory to the fact of the assassination of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Reiji Takatori. Takatori had been directly responsible for the death of his teammate Aya's parents, and indirectly caused the deaths of many more. After narrowly escaping with his life after Takatori framed him and his teammates as terrorists, Ken took part in what he then believed would be Weiss's final mission: a frontal assault on Takatori's offices. The mission ultimately saw Aya killing his nemesis as the building burned around them, after which the team disbanded.
Ken didn't manage to stay away from Kritiker for long. For all Weiss had gone their separate ways, their old enemies were still out there and an attempt on Ken's life - which very nearly killed three of the children he coached with him - had him making his way back to the flower shop that had served as Weiss's base to discover that the rest of his former team were in the same position he was. With the team re-formed to combat the continued threat, he reluctantly returned to work.
Not long after Weiss re-formed Ken struck up an acquaintance with a motherly woman named Ruth, a former nun who worked at a nearby Catholic church. Fearing for her safety after a string of strange and savage attacks on Christian clergy, Ken took it upon himself to try and look out for her. He quickly came to realize that Ruth was trying to lead the murderer - Farfarello, member of a team called Schwarz who had formerly worked as Prime Minister Takatori's bodyguards - to her. With the assistance of his teammate Omi he kept a watch on her church, but failed to prevent Ruth's abduction by Farfarello. They tracked Farfarello down in time to stop him from murdering Ruth, but he very quickly overcame them. The only thing that spared Ken from dying at his hands was that Ruth saved his life at the cost of her own, jumping in the way of the attack that was meant to kill him. Between them, Ken and Omi managed to drive Farfarello away but it was too late to save Ruth, who died in their arms after confessing that Farfarello was her child.
Things didn't get a lot better for the team after that. Esset, a group of crazed cultists who'd read far too much Lovecraft, were planning to summon a demon after first plunging Japan into anarchy and chaos, and for lack of anyone better Weiss found themselves burdened with the responsibility of stopping them. Discovering that Aya's younger sister had been kidnapped - first to be used as a test subject, then as the vessel for whatever it was Esset thought they were summoning - the team set about trying to kill the cult leaders, save her and stop the ritual. A string of awkward failures later, they managed to track Schwarz and Esset to a museum on a cliff-top, underneath which the three elders had built a massive, crypt-like temple where they planned to sacrifice Aya's sister in the hope of summoning 'The One', the creature they worshipped as a God.
Weiss broke up the party the only way they knew how: by killing everybody who stoood between them and the temple, then interrupting the summoning and taking down two of the three Elders. It was only after the third had escaped that they learned the girl on the altar was actually Sakura, a young girl with a crush on Aya who looked almost identical to his missing sister. The team discovered Aya-chan with Schwarz, who had turned on their employers and planned to use Aya-chan for their own obscure ends. The two groups fought while Weiss's handler Manx, arriving just in time, escaped with the girls. Weiss and Schwarz, however, weren't so lucky, and were trapped in the collapsing building as it fell into the sea.
Personality:
In day-to-day life, Ken comes across as an ordinary, though somewhat naive, nineteen-year-old boy - lively, aggressively cheerful, extroverted, impulsive, occasionally oblivious and almost entirely terrible with girls. For all his usual cheerful confidence, he's pretty easy to embarrass. His tendency toward late-adolescent awkwardness becomes especially pronounced in his dealings with women, especially if they're showing clear interest in him. He gets round this problem by making a habit of falling in love by mistake, which is pretty much the only reason he got anywhere with Yuriko.
Ken's general hopelessness with women can be explained thusly: when he got together with Yuriko, Youji thought the very idea that Ken's sudden cheerfulness could be explained by a new girlfriend was hilarious, while Omi couldn't get his head round the concept. Nor could Ken, who reacted to Yuriko's obvious displays of interest by 1) attempting to leave the room, the building and possibly the prefecture; 2) sleeping on the floor; and 3) needing to be rebooted after she kissed him on the cheek. For all this, he fell fast - to the point that when Yuriko, an incredibly impulsive woman in her own right, mentioned she was emigrating to Australia and asked if he wanted to come with her, his response was 'Okay!'. While Youji's reality check was both hypocritical and unfair, he had a point: going to Australia with a woman you've known for three weeks when you can't speak a word of English is really not the world's greatest idea.
Once Ken has put his faith in someone, it's very, very difficult to convince him to break it. It took being set on fire, left for dead, and then shot repeatedly to convince him that Kase - a childhood friend Ken was exceedingly attached to - genuinely was as bad as Kritiker were painting him. Loyal to a fault, and nothing if he's not stubborn, Ken clung to the idea that Kase was innocent, just as he had with his mother figure Kaoruko Amamiya some months earlier - and, in both cases, it took hard and horrifying proof before he was prepared to believe it. Ken has developed quite pronounced abandonment issues as a result - he finds letting go of the people he cares about extremely difficult, and is prepared to go to extreme lengths to stay with them. He is, however, ultimately flexible. He's dealt with a lot of change and uncertainty in his life, and a lot of sudden reversals. For all his stubbornness Ken is a survivor: while he might not like letting go, he certainly understands why it's necessary.
Another of Ken's most noticeable traits is his temper, which could only be described as 'short' and has not been improved by a crash course in working retail. It's not particularly difficult to irritate him; he also has a tendency to fall back on defensive anger when he's flustered or upset. It's far more unusual for him to stay angry for very long. Though he can be extremely hostile toward strangers - especially to strangers he's expected to work with - and frequently loses his temper with the people he cares for, in these cases his anger has no genuine, long-lasting malice behind it. He's the kind of person you want on your side in a fight - as long as he's still standing he won't give up, and if he goes down at all he'll go down swinging. Prepared to give his all to protect the people he cares about, Ken believes the best about the people he considers friends: it takes a lot to make him turn on them even reluctantly. His loyalty isn't simply to people, though: he's prepared to go to the wall for what he believes in, even if it means going against his friends.
Ken is something of a perfectionist. Simply, he likes to be good at the things that he does - a trait that was benign enough when he was simply trying to be the absolute best soccer player he possibly could be. He tries, despite his lack of any real interest in the job, to be a good florist. But he spends his nights working as a hired killer, and there's a part of him that wants to be good at that too. He believes that his actions are sinful - while he is prepared to grant that Weiss may be a necessary evil, he still thinks what they do is wrong - and, perhaps in part to his Catholic upbringing, often feels profoundly guilty about it, but no matter how much he may dislike and disapprove of what he does he still wants to do it well.
Ken is a forthright person, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. If he doesn't see the point in doing something he'll say so, and repeatedly, regardless of how tactless his behavior might seem. He speaks his mind, often without considering how what he says will come across, still less if maybe it would be wiser to say nothing, and is nothing if not loose-tongued. He's a self-proclaimed 'action guy', preferring to act first and think about it later if at all, leaving him with a tendency toward recklessness which is only heightened when under stress. He's got the kind of mind that considers setting something on fire to be a great distraction tactic, without much regard for what might happen after that. Planning, for Ken, is something for other people to tell him about.
Though he's a lot less open than he initially appears, and its clear from his abandonment issues and his struggles with guilt that he only looks to be an uncomplicated, untroubled soul, Ken is still something of an innocent, an optimist at heart with a strong sense of self. For all that Omi is two years younger, and he was not the last one to join, he is in some respects very much the team's junior member, and horribly ill-suited for the job.
Abilities:
Ken is as psychically inclined as a box of rocks - and not even specially selected occult gemstones buffed and polished to a high shine, just plain old common-or-garden rocks. In a box. As a former professional athlete and paramilitary, he is extremely physically fit and agile but, taking Anime Physics into account, he functions at a no-more-than-human level. At that level, though, Ken is genuinely extremely dangerous - he's a trained killer who specializes in close-range hand-to-hand combat using a non-ranged weapon, and the fact that he's still breathing and has all his lights and limbs is proof enough that he's gotten very good at this very fast. He has also had a degree of paramilitary training, and has been shown to be competent with not only his own weapons - a pair of bladed gauntlets based on the Indian bagh nakha - but with small arms and light weaponry.
When all's said and done, though, Ken is a normal human and a young one at that. He has absolutely no defenses against magic users or psychic manipulation - he is vaguely aware that psychics exist, but he has no idea how you'd go about getting rid of one if 'jumping on them and working it out from there' didn't work. He also, for all his strength, stamina and training, lacks long-term experience. He'd be able to fight back against another normal adult with combat training and would definitely try, but he'd have a hard time keeping up with someone who'd been doing this for years.
Strengths:
Loyal
Cheerful
Determined
Strong sense of self
Ambitious
Weaknesses:
Impulsive. Let's-move-to-another-hemisphere-with-a-near-stranger impulsive.
Irritable
Naive
Massive. Abandonment. Issues.
Guilt-ridden
God/Shinki: Shinki
Why?: The current state of the Weiss Kreuz cast is such that the majority of characters in-game are the series antagnoists. Though Ken is reckless he is not actively suicidal and, if he was largely alone and had any idea who these people were, he would simply avoid them as far as he could. Since I really want to get him involved with the rest of the cast, Ken having no idea why these people are Very Bad For Him is pretty much non-negotiable.
That aside, if I am capable of playing any character without their memories without that causing a major problem with my portrayal, this is the guy.
Cause Of Death: A horrible combination of cranial trauma and drowning. Ken canonically survives the collapse of the museum in Weiss Kreuz Kapitel, but the only explanation for exactly how is 'magic' and 'being an anime character'. The idea that some combination of having your head repeatedly introduced to a brick wall, becoming trapped in a collapsing building and then, while no more than semi-conscious, falling hundreds of feet into the sea (along with several thousand tons of masonry) just might prove fatal to a perfectly ordinary young adult human actually makes a lot more sense than the version of events the series gives us.
Vessel: A siberian tiger. Discussed with Famine, the previous Ken player, who used the same thing: she gave me the okay to keep the vessel form the same. Chosen not just because of the fact his weapon's name means 'tiger claw', but because this idiot boy quite literally tries to fight one hand-to-hand in one of the early Drama CDs. He survives this encounter, so it ends about as well as trying to fight a tiger ever does.
Name Location: Youki (falcon); on the back of the right hand.
Power: Failure Empowerment. Should Ken's God find that he or she is facing certain defeat in battle, they will find their strength, stamina and any exhausted or overused powers temporarily revitalising to the point that they would be capable of surviving and escaping the situation. At this stage this is good for nothing but allowing escape and provides only the opportunity to get away; there is absolutely no guarantee that the God in question will be able to escape from a critical situation if they do nothing to work toward it.
Writing Sample
I have not been RPing Ken outside of PSLs for a while now and have not got a more recent thread to use as a reference, so (incredibly old) evidence for what Ken sounds like in conversation can be found here.
Sample:
So: it's Obon, and apparently he's dead.
Fuck if that doesn't actually make sense. Maybe nothing else about this situation does, like why the tattoo and how come the only thing he's sure about right now is the fact that his name is Ken, but he's got enough - well, call it general knowledge to know that finding himself, at Obon, completely dead yet not lying down actually sounds about right. One less thing to worry about, or - well, no, actually he isn't worried, not really. Mostly he's just extremely confused and kind of annoyed. Which also feels about right. How the bloody hell is anyone supposed to find the spirits of their ancestors - no, wait, he's dead, other way round, Ken - if they don't even know who they're looking for and anyway it's not like you'd have descendents so what the Hell is he even doing apart from not-getting-lost? Does it make sense to know where you are when who you are is a closed book?
It's Obon and he's dead. He is a guy called Ken and this is his body and it seems, all things considered, pretty young for descendents to be an issue. Also, the thought makes him blush. Nope, definitely no descendants and let's not go there. How the fuck old is he meant to be, anyway?
This isn't a bad body, all things considered: it's all he's got to work with, so he goes with that. It seems positively enthused by the idea of walking (wandering aimlessly, but what else is a lost soul to do?) and seems like it would probably take to running, too. Ken would give it a go, actually - hey, it's not like he has anywhere to be or anything better to do, at least until he finds someone who knows what he's supposed to be doing and makes them Explain This Shit - if it weren't so damn crowded. It doesn't make a lot of sense that it's dead--
Except he doesn't want to think beyond it. There's something - God, something uncomfortable about it, something that makes him feel guilty and ill and apprehensive all at once: he shies away from it, don't burn your fingers. He's got a name and some idea of what he is (some kind of zombie? The non-brain-eating kind?) and that is absolutely enough thank you very much.
If only he knew what was going on.
Well, someone will fucking know. Every game has rules, every heap has someone sitting on top of it and admiring the view. All he has to do is Find That Guy, and... and something, he'll figure that out when he gets there. Hit them, maybe. And why not? A king's jaw is just as breakable as the next guy's, and anyone who'd let zombies loose in a major city probably deserves a smack on general principle. It's not much of a plan, but he'll take it.
Other
Anything Else?:
Ken has significant physical scarring, including burn scars from a fire. How do shinki handle discovering evidence of massive former trauma without triggering blight and/or transformation?
