In which I ramble for waaay too long about fictional characters.
I am now the happy owner of How I Met Your Mother season 1-5. There are a few...issues with shipping of season 3, and I have the option of asking for a re-shipping of season 1 and 2 as the cases are both damaged, but at least I have them with me. No more loading videos on the internet or timeouts from Megaupload or DivX Den, plus I've got great quality and COMMENTARY and other special features. I am a happy little fangirl. I've got quite a lot of thoughts on the show, as my last post involving it demonstrated, and there have since been a few new developments that I could probably go into, but I think I'm going to wait. It'd mostly be a lot of "maybe this theory has some validity" again rather than my own thoughts. (Though ideas that Nora's the Mother ARE extremely interesting; not sure if they'll hold any ground in the coming episodes, but heck, this is one show that looooves to tease and play with its fans.)
Something surprising happened today. I enjoyed Art History. Genuinely. As in, nearly all of the class. I know, shocking, right? First we had an amusing comment/discussion about a painting involving an incubus and this mishap Nike had a few years back creating a shoe line called Incubus, WHOOPS, and all I could think about was the still unnamed Gay Horror Sex Comedy that 1st_eggokage and I cooked up (it makes sense, I swear). The comments from the class got a smile out of me, and I thought that'd be it. THEN we got into a discussion about museums based on two different articles I had to read since I didn't go on a field trip last Thursday to the Chicago Art Institute and we non-fieldtrippers shared our thoughts and opinions and stuff about the articles and...I realized that I was enjoying the discussion. In fact, most of the class was spent not talking about art and the different styles and techniques, but about other things like the way art is received and how museums work on a social level. I think my problem is I can't retain the information about art; all of the vocabulary and complicated sets and memorizing each painter or sculptor and what they've done freak me out and my mind shuts down, but the politics of art actually fascinate me. Huh. Who knew? Good news here, I think I can make it through the class. We've got a quiz on Thursday (after I'd just had hopes of there being no more.....) and then one last double-quiz at the end of the term, but it'll be online BUT unlike last time, we will have the last, long written response as a non-timed portion! No more ragefisting! (I punched a wall last time, did I mention that?)
Japanese is...Japanese, going okay, I think. I hope I'll be able to devote more time to it soon. English Literature II has our final paper planning and I've STILL got to work on my journal entries. Those are freaking me out more than anything else in the class, god. I have a discussion about my thesis today, though, and hopefully I'll learn when I'll have to sit down and power through them. ...I pray it's not tonight.
That was a lot more class-spam than I'd intended. What I INTENDED with this entry was the following: Tomorrow's the first anniversary of Bokurano_RP!! So exciting. We have had eight different Earths with sub-Earths for three sets (though one was an abandoned arc hahaha), and it's been a wild ride. We're currently doing a story-arc based off Battle Royal and OH MY GOD IS IT FUN. I've never watched/read/etc. Battle Royal, but man do I want to. We combined it with the workings of the universe we've created for the RP, and we might do that again; adapt other stories to our world and our world to the stories. We sort of did that last Earth, where we brought a lot of Homestuck influences in, except this is to a much greater extreme. We have an elimination chart that's being dutifully updated, though it's not quite up-to-date right now. We've got another participant that's not on the list (Helios!) and another character's dead but he's got an alternate running around and one of the shaded characters may actually be alive... Either way, that's 105 player-character participants (not counting the alternate) and probably 64 dead. Tons of mysteries abound and we're at the half-way point for the plot.
See, while it's based off BR, we've obviously adapted it to fit our setting. Instead of only a few days, the participants are given six months in an abandoned museum to kill each other, only the last one going home. The thing is, the conspiracy about it all is that no one is intended to go home. At all. This was designed to take the most likely pilots for other Earths and pit them against each other, since this Earth-- Earth8-b-- is going to be participating in the Game, a tournament between Earths where people fight in robots and the winner's Earth gets to exist. So what better way than to take out the competition? The characters remaining are slowly finding this out, as well as the fact that there ARE not microchips in them that'll explode if they leave the blizzard-covered building, but with no way to spread the knowledge and many people driven to madness, not listening to reason anymore, can they even pull together, with language barriers and general animosity for the last three months driving them, the desire to live overpowering basic morals?
It's honestly one of the most depressing Earths thus far, as the Bokurano characters who started us off...well, not counting our alternate, only two remain. Two more from the universe also are among the participants, yes, but two of the sixteen original children? It's just sad... And only two Homestuck characters as well, and they have become our secondary cast.
It's a new experience for me, because-- well, back on Earth6, I had the idea of killing Machi, my main character, early. I never do that. I always have her around until towards the end, so I'm not not playing her for too long. But then...she was the third dead. It was a lot of fun, but then I needed another character, and we'd started up our Homestuck cast. I had just gotten into it (how time flies) after reading interactions, and I became quite attached to Jade, one of the human girls. She became my new main and she lasted until the second-to-last battle on her Earth. Honestly tragic, I broke her completely. So then on Earth7, which focused more on the Homestuck characters, she was my main. On Earth8, I balanced her and Machi, with Jade having more background build-up because...well, when you play a set of characters for, like, ten months on end, it's kind of fun to explore new dynamics more, right? Anyway, I knew going in that I didn't want Jade or Machi to be the last...or even AMONG the last. I knew exactly, in fact, how I wanted Jade to go out, and Machi's death developed itself quite quickly. (I speak of all of this like this has been a long process; in actuality, we stared on the night of February 11th.)
And now Machi and Jade are both dead, and the other character who is my semi-main, took up a nice role before/after Machi's death on Earth6, is also dead. I've since taken two others, both familiar to me (very familiar actually) and...it's the first time that I don't have either of my mains to contend with them. It's fun, actually, discovering new things. I wanted to take a quick run-through of the characters I'm playing there, just because. Some will have more detail than others and some will be deliberately shrouded in mystery, for while I know what's going on with them, others do not... ;)
Yoko Machi: My first for the RP, my favorite always. On this Earth, the children from Bokurano, the main pilots, do not remember their past lives at all. Machi started the game with her usual slight secretive personality, attempting to be upbeat but not get close to people. Unlike other Earths, her scar -- which is on her left cheek, a constant throughout Earths that she either attains during the course of gameplay or very shortly before -- is a gunshot wound. She and her brother Shirou moved to Shinagawa, our setting, in January, five months before the start of the game, after Shirou's involvement in a gang in an unnamed city (likely Fukushima, that's our fallback) got their parents killed and gave Machi her scar. When the BR started, she could not find her brother among the crowd before the first people started killing each other and the kids scattered; he saw her, however, and while he ended up on the top floor (floor twenty-eight) early on, before it became difficult to reach the top due to multiple people taking up positions along the floors, she teamed up with two of he other Bokurano kids, Waku and Maria, who she knew from school. (Originally three but, Waku's little sister was killed day one... D: ) This expanded to include Moji and Kanji, two other castmates and classmates, with the spoken agreement that they were only teaming up until the last day, for Kanji was only in this for Moji. The group made the slow movement toward the top floor, for there would be less people the further up they got.
Machi on this Earth had a strong belief that it people bully you, you push right the fuck back, something she got from her brother. While she disapproved of his actions, she never blamed him for what had happened before. He always seemed disinterested in her and bullied her, but she only wanted to make him proud. So she figured early on that she, being smaller than many participants, would be picked off at one point, and with no parents and a brother who she assumed didn't love her waiting back home, she gave up her hopes of making it back, instead trying to find out if one of her companions had family to go back to. Her common philosophy was she had no intention of making it back alive...but she wasn't ready to die. Her briefly touched upon motivation was to make her brother proud. If someone could get back and somehow tell him...she wanted him to know that she survived for however long she did, that she was STRONG. This...became rather tragic later.
After about...I believe it was two months or so, the little group broke up with the death of Kanji and a disagreement on whether to bring a girl -- Komo, another castmate and classmate -- with them after she saved them from yet another castmate, Kako, who had SNAPPED completely. Waku and Maria continued together, and Machi set out to follow them, leaving Moji behind, something she regretted for some time. She found a journal that had before been a hot case of mystery among us, for we didn't know who was behind it and who he was traveling with. (Later revealed to be Roxas from Kingdom Hearts as the writer, Lucy from Elfen Lied as his companion, both dead by that time.) She read the journal and wrote in it herself, becoming obsessed with carrying it to the top and protecting it as a record that they were all there. She stopped trying to follow her former companions and made her own way. She met Ushiro (castmate!) and his alternate at floor twenty, overpowering the both of them (though the second Ushiro didn't do much) and making a truce; she got a place to sleep and they got one of her water bottles (they had raided the gift shop early on). Ushiro told her that her brother was at the top floor and she became determined again to reach it.
This...caused problems. She stopped her cautious manner of travel and instead pushing forward. She ran into a teenager, Afekia Bakura (Yu-Gi-Oh, anyone?) who caught her off-guard and, using a power drill, fatally injured her (stomach wound). She was able to fight him off, though, (tire iron swing!) and proceeded to go six floors while bleeding from her ripped up stomach. She ditched the journal and her duffel, after two floors, writing a hasty message in it telling whoever found it to take care of it, and collapsed on the stairs to the top floor. John of Homestuck fame found her and brought her up. She revived in her brother's arms, upon which he promptly gave her the recognition and love she'd always wanted, telling her she was his everything...and, actually happy, she died.
A big part of this Earth has been a family focus. Machi has been how I respond to that, and her death marked the halfway point, the end of month three. Regret set in an hour later. @_@
That was a wall-of-text, let's try and make the others shorter, right?
Jade Harley: My little Homestuck girl! Jade lived in California her whole life, first in San Francisco and then in Chula Vista, a city in San Diego. Her mother was...very unstable, having a slow-developing, never diagnosed case of paranoid schizophrenia for most of her adult life. After bugging their house and creating problems where there were none, she killed Jade's father over dinner one night. In front of her. Then she proceeded to lock her daughter up in her room for the next three years, forgetting she'd killed her husband and worrying that he'd take the little girl away, reading her stories through the door and giving her food through a cat-flap. When Jade reached age six, her mother's delusions grew too great and she thought her daughter was communicating with her father, as Jade overheard. Afraid, she was able to sneak out of her room when her mom slipped up and left it unlocked. She was unable to fully escape, as she unlocked a window but was discovered before she could climb out of it, but passerby's heard her mother's screams and rants (Jade had locked herself in a closet) and the woman was taken to a mental institution for the criminally insane.
One of the first to discover the scene was the man who would become Jade's "grandfather." He alerted the police and took pity on the little girl, having faith that no one would want to adopt such a scarred child and the foster system was...flawed. So, having a very high profile job (that I still have NO IDEA WHAT IS) that paid a lot, he paid off the government to adopt her right like that, moving her to a big house in Chula Vista. Unfortunately, to have enough money to keep her, he had to keep on traveling, and since he was only home every few months, he had to keep paying off inspections so he could keep her. It was a vicious cycle.
Jade thus grew up, like canon, very isolated from people, mostly communicating on the internet. She made friends with castmates John and Rose towards the start of the game, and through the magic of the internet, Dave as well. Dave was a special case, running through fast he'd taken up the position of bully at the school so he didn't get bullied himself, but he and Jade made quite good friends through her blog. He knew who she was, she had no idea. He let slip that they went to the same school, and they actually met at the school's cultural fest. Cultural fest was our way of getting the kids and the trolls to meet, the trolls being characters from India in our AU. John, Rose, and Jade each hosted four of them each, for their school paid the way of kids from India to come to America for several days. (It's 2050, the economy has improved. >_>) Other characters came as well, including bully Laila, who Jade got into conflict with very briefly. Dave chased the other girl off and after a bit of tension, he made friends with the others proper. Jade took to him right away, developing a bit of a crush. She hadn't had friends before, and with Kanaya as a mother figure, she was quite enjoying life.
...Then BR happened. To make a long story short, Kanaya was killed on the first day, an example. John appeared to go the same way, but it was later revealed that he was alive (!!!). The Homestuck cast tried to stay together (with the exception of Vriska who decided she had to, after the first night, kill everyone else so Karkat, who is her little brother in our AU, could go home). They were picked off, one by one.
Now, the important aspect of Jade's character is that, for the last few Earths, she's had an unconscious development: She became a very extreme pacifist. It started from watching all of her friends die one by one, mostly violently, on Earth6-c, and a latent unresolved and unrealized guilt after killing one of the enemy pilots during a battle, face-to-face. On Earth7, she just had a fear of the Game in general, of dying. On Earth8, it's become a fully-realized phobia, a phobia of any kind of conflict or violence whatsoever, pushed into this by watching her father die at a young age. This, obviously, is a very big problem.
Jade lasted...I would say it was two months. Maybe two and a half. After Rose died and then Feferi and Eridan right after (THAT WAS A TRAGIC LOG), she completely lost it. Unlike many others, the Homestuck cast had a goal of reaching the museum's electrical conduits and getting them running, getting message out and escaping. ALL OF THEM. Jade lost this drive, and, with only seven of them left in their group (four others still alive but separated), she told Dave that she thought she was a burden, with them having to protect her, and she shot herself in front of him (after kissing him to distract him, gao).
Now, Jade's story isn't over, though she's dead. In this universe, we've got the Otherworld, the place where all thoughts go; it's the afterlife. Essentially. We established prior that if you kill yourself, you cannot be reborn until you deal with something, a physical manifestation of the problems that caused you to take your own life. An early group of suicides that bonded in death have come to refer to it as your "wolf." (This is based heavily off The Path, the indie game that I adore.) You have to overcome it or else you're stuck in the Otherworld. Forever. Naturally, this is what Jade's going to do. I'm unsure if I'm going to have her conquer it before the next Earth or not. It's on-going, but an exciting development for our Otherworld plots after this Earth ends.
Kazuki Ano: Kazuki is a character who was introduced in Bokurano as a baby, Maki Ano's little brother. I took to aging him up for a fic I was writing that I will one day work on again. He's a gamerboy, a fan of manga, anime, and daydreams, having a fetish for older women and a desire for his life to not be boring. On past Earths he started to play a larger role, but...that honestly is to complicated to explain here, I won't even try.
He was introduced in the BR about a month or so in, I think. Maybe a little less. On the first day, he fled to the basement, not wanting to kill, but understanding the mentality. There he met a lot of other children, and it became a place where many young kids lived. He, being eleven, was one of the older ones of the group, but he helped out. He knew his sister was somewhere in the museum and he held on to hope that she would survive. (She didn't.) He made friends with Satoshi Matsumoto and Shu Matsutani, and the three of them vowed to find a way out. He received a PDA at the start of the BR, a rather useless and ironic weapon, as he'd wanted one his whole life and now he gets one when he could really use a good knife instead. He dismissed it but kept it around. After the snowstorm ended, he turned it on when they were attempting to get the emergency generator up, wondering idly if it could be of some use.
It was surprisingly able to receive wi-fi and he excitedly was about to tell everyone that they could get a message out and escape...but someone (Vriska) turned on the sprinkler system in the basement, wanting to kill the refugees down there with the extreme cold combined with the cold water. While many of them escaped, Kazuki was among those killed. He couldn't get his message out to the group or to the world, freezing to death very shortly after getting blasted by a jet of water. However, Chizu, a pregnant girl (and castmate), picked up his PDA and has gotten a message out to someone. Where this goes has yet to be seen...
Now, chronologically, Jade died, then Kazuki, then Machi. I had no one left. What to do? Intro old-new characters.
Arietta Silveri: Arietta from Tales of the Abyss fame! I played her in this setting briefly on Earth6, as one of the many clones of Nana (Elfen Lied), a Dung Beetle (AI) who was kidnapped and cloned and experimented on. I couldn't many places with her, as the subplot tapered off shortly after I picked her up. Before that, in imaboku, I played her as the spirit of a dead planet.
Some backstory here: In Now and Then, Here and There, the story that RP was based off, Lalaru is commonly assumed to be the spirit of Earth, which is dying. And when she sacrifices herself (SPOILER), the planet starts to revive. We expanded on this in Bokurano_RP, effectively making the two intertwined. In Narutaru, there's things called Dragonettes, or whatever you want to call them. We introduced this aspect in Bokurano_RP way back on Earth2, saying they were the remains of dead planets who bonded with people. On Earth6, we introduced the idea that when you properly fuse with your Dragonette, it revives a planet. We then finished that with saying that when a Dragonette and its user gave up on the planet and separated...that's when the Game came up, and that planet could then go through it. Sometimes it's a slow process that mimics a planet actually dying, like in NTHT. Still following? Good. In imaboku, the soles of dead planets-- the former users of Dragonettes-- tried to convince Lalaru to give up on her planet completely, for she regained hope in it after separating. If she did this, they were convinced they could be reborn and live again. (I assume in looking backward, they were crossing over from the Otherworld, confused on the process.) When she fully combined with the planet again, the remaining planet people would die slowly. Arietta was the first to go, regretting her decision to kill her planet and hoping to make it up to those who had lived there.
...Obviously that's difficult to replicate, though I immensely enjoyed playing this AU. But, what better to do than keep reimagining?
On Earth8, Arietta is an Italian girl (with dyed hair, yay pink) from a lower class family. Her mother died from an illness a year prior to the BR. She appears more malnourished than many others, hinting that she's had some kind of history with it back home. She knows Italian, Japanese, and English at least, though she speaks the latter two very slowly, and she talks about a boy-- Ion-- who tells her not to share her thoughts as much. She creates a grasping motion quite often, mostly when she's nervous, as if she's trying to hold something in front of her that's not there. She spent the first three months of the BR trying to avoid fighting, being very timid in nature, but she did for self-defense early on (she had a glass bowl) and took the shards of her weapon with her. Growing insane from hunger, she fed on a human body and promptly threw up, retreating to the basement where she found the frozen people, including Lalaru, who she was captivated by. Sara, one of the remaining kids, found her and when Arietta said she would kill anyone, she followed her to where everyone had been living.
Arietta has since made a connection with Chizu out of her own desire to be a mother and her missing her mother, but Chizu has left the basement for parts unknown. The basement has started to cave in and collapse, forcing everyone out, so Arietta's story is still continuing, with most of the former planet people being on this Earth and seemingly remembering their time there. She is bound to get drawn in...
Rika Furude: Now, Rika, of Higurashi fame, will have a MUCH shorter backstory, for while I've done a lot of AUs for her, only one thing is important: on every reality, Rika's mind fractures and creates the personality of Frederica Bernkastel, who, depending on the world, can either be very receptive to humanity, or very rejecting of it. She has gone from creating friendships with other people to denouncing all of them except for Rika.
On this Earth, Rika's backstory is unremarkable. She lived a happily live in Shirakawa with her friends until the BR, upon which her mind fractured and Bernkastel was created. Rika took her as a guardian angel, a friend. After John discovered his friends had all died in the last three months, he met Rika, who had pillaged from a model Eskimo and walked around with a little backpack of stuff. She claimed not only to have a good hiding place, but to have never killed. When John offered her sanction on the twenty-eighth floor (he had met Shirou and his group), Rika declined, saying her protector didn't often like people. She urged John on his way, and shortly after he left, Bernkastel took control, berating Rika for letting him go. She has actually been the one killing people, while Rika often blacks out. For Rika to survive, everyone else must die. Bernkastel is quite adamant about this.
What will her role be? Will her hiding place be discovered? Will Rika herself have to kill? Will Bernkastel develop a rapport with any other survivors, or will she remain cold and hard in her desire to only protect Rika? I don't know. At all. Her story is developing as we go, with any outcome possible..
THAT was a horrible wall-of-text. I hope you at least read some of it, as I'm very excited about everything to do with the stories at the moment. Just a little view into what I'm up to, what this game that's taken over my mind has me thinking up. As for what we're doing for the anniversary? Crack-log. Where all the dead return to life and we have a big Bollywood dance number.
It. Will. Be. Glorious.
Something surprising happened today. I enjoyed Art History. Genuinely. As in, nearly all of the class. I know, shocking, right? First we had an amusing comment/discussion about a painting involving an incubus and this mishap Nike had a few years back creating a shoe line called Incubus, WHOOPS, and all I could think about was the still unnamed Gay Horror Sex Comedy that 1st_eggokage and I cooked up (it makes sense, I swear). The comments from the class got a smile out of me, and I thought that'd be it. THEN we got into a discussion about museums based on two different articles I had to read since I didn't go on a field trip last Thursday to the Chicago Art Institute and we non-fieldtrippers shared our thoughts and opinions and stuff about the articles and...I realized that I was enjoying the discussion. In fact, most of the class was spent not talking about art and the different styles and techniques, but about other things like the way art is received and how museums work on a social level. I think my problem is I can't retain the information about art; all of the vocabulary and complicated sets and memorizing each painter or sculptor and what they've done freak me out and my mind shuts down, but the politics of art actually fascinate me. Huh. Who knew? Good news here, I think I can make it through the class. We've got a quiz on Thursday (after I'd just had hopes of there being no more.....) and then one last double-quiz at the end of the term, but it'll be online BUT unlike last time, we will have the last, long written response as a non-timed portion! No more ragefisting! (I punched a wall last time, did I mention that?)
Japanese is...Japanese, going okay, I think. I hope I'll be able to devote more time to it soon. English Literature II has our final paper planning and I've STILL got to work on my journal entries. Those are freaking me out more than anything else in the class, god. I have a discussion about my thesis today, though, and hopefully I'll learn when I'll have to sit down and power through them. ...I pray it's not tonight.
That was a lot more class-spam than I'd intended. What I INTENDED with this entry was the following: Tomorrow's the first anniversary of Bokurano_RP!! So exciting. We have had eight different Earths with sub-Earths for three sets (though one was an abandoned arc hahaha), and it's been a wild ride. We're currently doing a story-arc based off Battle Royal and OH MY GOD IS IT FUN. I've never watched/read/etc. Battle Royal, but man do I want to. We combined it with the workings of the universe we've created for the RP, and we might do that again; adapt other stories to our world and our world to the stories. We sort of did that last Earth, where we brought a lot of Homestuck influences in, except this is to a much greater extreme. We have an elimination chart that's being dutifully updated, though it's not quite up-to-date right now. We've got another participant that's not on the list (Helios!) and another character's dead but he's got an alternate running around and one of the shaded characters may actually be alive... Either way, that's 105 player-character participants (not counting the alternate) and probably 64 dead. Tons of mysteries abound and we're at the half-way point for the plot.
See, while it's based off BR, we've obviously adapted it to fit our setting. Instead of only a few days, the participants are given six months in an abandoned museum to kill each other, only the last one going home. The thing is, the conspiracy about it all is that no one is intended to go home. At all. This was designed to take the most likely pilots for other Earths and pit them against each other, since this Earth-- Earth8-b-- is going to be participating in the Game, a tournament between Earths where people fight in robots and the winner's Earth gets to exist. So what better way than to take out the competition? The characters remaining are slowly finding this out, as well as the fact that there ARE not microchips in them that'll explode if they leave the blizzard-covered building, but with no way to spread the knowledge and many people driven to madness, not listening to reason anymore, can they even pull together, with language barriers and general animosity for the last three months driving them, the desire to live overpowering basic morals?
It's honestly one of the most depressing Earths thus far, as the Bokurano characters who started us off...well, not counting our alternate, only two remain. Two more from the universe also are among the participants, yes, but two of the sixteen original children? It's just sad... And only two Homestuck characters as well, and they have become our secondary cast.
It's a new experience for me, because-- well, back on Earth6, I had the idea of killing Machi, my main character, early. I never do that. I always have her around until towards the end, so I'm not not playing her for too long. But then...she was the third dead. It was a lot of fun, but then I needed another character, and we'd started up our Homestuck cast. I had just gotten into it (how time flies) after reading interactions, and I became quite attached to Jade, one of the human girls. She became my new main and she lasted until the second-to-last battle on her Earth. Honestly tragic, I broke her completely. So then on Earth7, which focused more on the Homestuck characters, she was my main. On Earth8, I balanced her and Machi, with Jade having more background build-up because...well, when you play a set of characters for, like, ten months on end, it's kind of fun to explore new dynamics more, right? Anyway, I knew going in that I didn't want Jade or Machi to be the last...or even AMONG the last. I knew exactly, in fact, how I wanted Jade to go out, and Machi's death developed itself quite quickly. (I speak of all of this like this has been a long process; in actuality, we stared on the night of February 11th.)
And now Machi and Jade are both dead, and the other character who is my semi-main, took up a nice role before/after Machi's death on Earth6, is also dead. I've since taken two others, both familiar to me (very familiar actually) and...it's the first time that I don't have either of my mains to contend with them. It's fun, actually, discovering new things. I wanted to take a quick run-through of the characters I'm playing there, just because. Some will have more detail than others and some will be deliberately shrouded in mystery, for while I know what's going on with them, others do not... ;)
Yoko Machi: My first for the RP, my favorite always. On this Earth, the children from Bokurano, the main pilots, do not remember their past lives at all. Machi started the game with her usual slight secretive personality, attempting to be upbeat but not get close to people. Unlike other Earths, her scar -- which is on her left cheek, a constant throughout Earths that she either attains during the course of gameplay or very shortly before -- is a gunshot wound. She and her brother Shirou moved to Shinagawa, our setting, in January, five months before the start of the game, after Shirou's involvement in a gang in an unnamed city (likely Fukushima, that's our fallback) got their parents killed and gave Machi her scar. When the BR started, she could not find her brother among the crowd before the first people started killing each other and the kids scattered; he saw her, however, and while he ended up on the top floor (floor twenty-eight) early on, before it became difficult to reach the top due to multiple people taking up positions along the floors, she teamed up with two of he other Bokurano kids, Waku and Maria, who she knew from school. (Originally three but, Waku's little sister was killed day one... D: ) This expanded to include Moji and Kanji, two other castmates and classmates, with the spoken agreement that they were only teaming up until the last day, for Kanji was only in this for Moji. The group made the slow movement toward the top floor, for there would be less people the further up they got.
Machi on this Earth had a strong belief that it people bully you, you push right the fuck back, something she got from her brother. While she disapproved of his actions, she never blamed him for what had happened before. He always seemed disinterested in her and bullied her, but she only wanted to make him proud. So she figured early on that she, being smaller than many participants, would be picked off at one point, and with no parents and a brother who she assumed didn't love her waiting back home, she gave up her hopes of making it back, instead trying to find out if one of her companions had family to go back to. Her common philosophy was she had no intention of making it back alive...but she wasn't ready to die. Her briefly touched upon motivation was to make her brother proud. If someone could get back and somehow tell him...she wanted him to know that she survived for however long she did, that she was STRONG. This...became rather tragic later.
After about...I believe it was two months or so, the little group broke up with the death of Kanji and a disagreement on whether to bring a girl -- Komo, another castmate and classmate -- with them after she saved them from yet another castmate, Kako, who had SNAPPED completely. Waku and Maria continued together, and Machi set out to follow them, leaving Moji behind, something she regretted for some time. She found a journal that had before been a hot case of mystery among us, for we didn't know who was behind it and who he was traveling with. (Later revealed to be Roxas from Kingdom Hearts as the writer, Lucy from Elfen Lied as his companion, both dead by that time.) She read the journal and wrote in it herself, becoming obsessed with carrying it to the top and protecting it as a record that they were all there. She stopped trying to follow her former companions and made her own way. She met Ushiro (castmate!) and his alternate at floor twenty, overpowering the both of them (though the second Ushiro didn't do much) and making a truce; she got a place to sleep and they got one of her water bottles (they had raided the gift shop early on). Ushiro told her that her brother was at the top floor and she became determined again to reach it.
This...caused problems. She stopped her cautious manner of travel and instead pushing forward. She ran into a teenager, Afekia Bakura (Yu-Gi-Oh, anyone?) who caught her off-guard and, using a power drill, fatally injured her (stomach wound). She was able to fight him off, though, (tire iron swing!) and proceeded to go six floors while bleeding from her ripped up stomach. She ditched the journal and her duffel, after two floors, writing a hasty message in it telling whoever found it to take care of it, and collapsed on the stairs to the top floor. John of Homestuck fame found her and brought her up. She revived in her brother's arms, upon which he promptly gave her the recognition and love she'd always wanted, telling her she was his everything...and, actually happy, she died.
A big part of this Earth has been a family focus. Machi has been how I respond to that, and her death marked the halfway point, the end of month three. Regret set in an hour later. @_@
That was a wall-of-text, let's try and make the others shorter, right?
Jade Harley: My little Homestuck girl! Jade lived in California her whole life, first in San Francisco and then in Chula Vista, a city in San Diego. Her mother was...very unstable, having a slow-developing, never diagnosed case of paranoid schizophrenia for most of her adult life. After bugging their house and creating problems where there were none, she killed Jade's father over dinner one night. In front of her. Then she proceeded to lock her daughter up in her room for the next three years, forgetting she'd killed her husband and worrying that he'd take the little girl away, reading her stories through the door and giving her food through a cat-flap. When Jade reached age six, her mother's delusions grew too great and she thought her daughter was communicating with her father, as Jade overheard. Afraid, she was able to sneak out of her room when her mom slipped up and left it unlocked. She was unable to fully escape, as she unlocked a window but was discovered before she could climb out of it, but passerby's heard her mother's screams and rants (Jade had locked herself in a closet) and the woman was taken to a mental institution for the criminally insane.
One of the first to discover the scene was the man who would become Jade's "grandfather." He alerted the police and took pity on the little girl, having faith that no one would want to adopt such a scarred child and the foster system was...flawed. So, having a very high profile job (that I still have NO IDEA WHAT IS) that paid a lot, he paid off the government to adopt her right like that, moving her to a big house in Chula Vista. Unfortunately, to have enough money to keep her, he had to keep on traveling, and since he was only home every few months, he had to keep paying off inspections so he could keep her. It was a vicious cycle.
Jade thus grew up, like canon, very isolated from people, mostly communicating on the internet. She made friends with castmates John and Rose towards the start of the game, and through the magic of the internet, Dave as well. Dave was a special case, running through fast he'd taken up the position of bully at the school so he didn't get bullied himself, but he and Jade made quite good friends through her blog. He knew who she was, she had no idea. He let slip that they went to the same school, and they actually met at the school's cultural fest. Cultural fest was our way of getting the kids and the trolls to meet, the trolls being characters from India in our AU. John, Rose, and Jade each hosted four of them each, for their school paid the way of kids from India to come to America for several days. (It's 2050, the economy has improved. >_>) Other characters came as well, including bully Laila, who Jade got into conflict with very briefly. Dave chased the other girl off and after a bit of tension, he made friends with the others proper. Jade took to him right away, developing a bit of a crush. She hadn't had friends before, and with Kanaya as a mother figure, she was quite enjoying life.
...Then BR happened. To make a long story short, Kanaya was killed on the first day, an example. John appeared to go the same way, but it was later revealed that he was alive (!!!). The Homestuck cast tried to stay together (with the exception of Vriska who decided she had to, after the first night, kill everyone else so Karkat, who is her little brother in our AU, could go home). They were picked off, one by one.
Now, the important aspect of Jade's character is that, for the last few Earths, she's had an unconscious development: She became a very extreme pacifist. It started from watching all of her friends die one by one, mostly violently, on Earth6-c, and a latent unresolved and unrealized guilt after killing one of the enemy pilots during a battle, face-to-face. On Earth7, she just had a fear of the Game in general, of dying. On Earth8, it's become a fully-realized phobia, a phobia of any kind of conflict or violence whatsoever, pushed into this by watching her father die at a young age. This, obviously, is a very big problem.
Jade lasted...I would say it was two months. Maybe two and a half. After Rose died and then Feferi and Eridan right after (THAT WAS A TRAGIC LOG), she completely lost it. Unlike many others, the Homestuck cast had a goal of reaching the museum's electrical conduits and getting them running, getting message out and escaping. ALL OF THEM. Jade lost this drive, and, with only seven of them left in their group (four others still alive but separated), she told Dave that she thought she was a burden, with them having to protect her, and she shot herself in front of him (after kissing him to distract him, gao).
Now, Jade's story isn't over, though she's dead. In this universe, we've got the Otherworld, the place where all thoughts go; it's the afterlife. Essentially. We established prior that if you kill yourself, you cannot be reborn until you deal with something, a physical manifestation of the problems that caused you to take your own life. An early group of suicides that bonded in death have come to refer to it as your "wolf." (This is based heavily off The Path, the indie game that I adore.) You have to overcome it or else you're stuck in the Otherworld. Forever. Naturally, this is what Jade's going to do. I'm unsure if I'm going to have her conquer it before the next Earth or not. It's on-going, but an exciting development for our Otherworld plots after this Earth ends.
Kazuki Ano: Kazuki is a character who was introduced in Bokurano as a baby, Maki Ano's little brother. I took to aging him up for a fic I was writing that I will one day work on again. He's a gamerboy, a fan of manga, anime, and daydreams, having a fetish for older women and a desire for his life to not be boring. On past Earths he started to play a larger role, but...that honestly is to complicated to explain here, I won't even try.
He was introduced in the BR about a month or so in, I think. Maybe a little less. On the first day, he fled to the basement, not wanting to kill, but understanding the mentality. There he met a lot of other children, and it became a place where many young kids lived. He, being eleven, was one of the older ones of the group, but he helped out. He knew his sister was somewhere in the museum and he held on to hope that she would survive. (She didn't.) He made friends with Satoshi Matsumoto and Shu Matsutani, and the three of them vowed to find a way out. He received a PDA at the start of the BR, a rather useless and ironic weapon, as he'd wanted one his whole life and now he gets one when he could really use a good knife instead. He dismissed it but kept it around. After the snowstorm ended, he turned it on when they were attempting to get the emergency generator up, wondering idly if it could be of some use.
It was surprisingly able to receive wi-fi and he excitedly was about to tell everyone that they could get a message out and escape...but someone (Vriska) turned on the sprinkler system in the basement, wanting to kill the refugees down there with the extreme cold combined with the cold water. While many of them escaped, Kazuki was among those killed. He couldn't get his message out to the group or to the world, freezing to death very shortly after getting blasted by a jet of water. However, Chizu, a pregnant girl (and castmate), picked up his PDA and has gotten a message out to someone. Where this goes has yet to be seen...
Now, chronologically, Jade died, then Kazuki, then Machi. I had no one left. What to do? Intro old-new characters.
Arietta Silveri: Arietta from Tales of the Abyss fame! I played her in this setting briefly on Earth6, as one of the many clones of Nana (Elfen Lied), a Dung Beetle (AI) who was kidnapped and cloned and experimented on. I couldn't many places with her, as the subplot tapered off shortly after I picked her up. Before that, in imaboku, I played her as the spirit of a dead planet.
Some backstory here: In Now and Then, Here and There, the story that RP was based off, Lalaru is commonly assumed to be the spirit of Earth, which is dying. And when she sacrifices herself (SPOILER), the planet starts to revive. We expanded on this in Bokurano_RP, effectively making the two intertwined. In Narutaru, there's things called Dragonettes, or whatever you want to call them. We introduced this aspect in Bokurano_RP way back on Earth2, saying they were the remains of dead planets who bonded with people. On Earth6, we introduced the idea that when you properly fuse with your Dragonette, it revives a planet. We then finished that with saying that when a Dragonette and its user gave up on the planet and separated...that's when the Game came up, and that planet could then go through it. Sometimes it's a slow process that mimics a planet actually dying, like in NTHT. Still following? Good. In imaboku, the soles of dead planets-- the former users of Dragonettes-- tried to convince Lalaru to give up on her planet completely, for she regained hope in it after separating. If she did this, they were convinced they could be reborn and live again. (I assume in looking backward, they were crossing over from the Otherworld, confused on the process.) When she fully combined with the planet again, the remaining planet people would die slowly. Arietta was the first to go, regretting her decision to kill her planet and hoping to make it up to those who had lived there.
...Obviously that's difficult to replicate, though I immensely enjoyed playing this AU. But, what better to do than keep reimagining?
On Earth8, Arietta is an Italian girl (with dyed hair, yay pink) from a lower class family. Her mother died from an illness a year prior to the BR. She appears more malnourished than many others, hinting that she's had some kind of history with it back home. She knows Italian, Japanese, and English at least, though she speaks the latter two very slowly, and she talks about a boy-- Ion-- who tells her not to share her thoughts as much. She creates a grasping motion quite often, mostly when she's nervous, as if she's trying to hold something in front of her that's not there. She spent the first three months of the BR trying to avoid fighting, being very timid in nature, but she did for self-defense early on (she had a glass bowl) and took the shards of her weapon with her. Growing insane from hunger, she fed on a human body and promptly threw up, retreating to the basement where she found the frozen people, including Lalaru, who she was captivated by. Sara, one of the remaining kids, found her and when Arietta said she would kill anyone, she followed her to where everyone had been living.
Arietta has since made a connection with Chizu out of her own desire to be a mother and her missing her mother, but Chizu has left the basement for parts unknown. The basement has started to cave in and collapse, forcing everyone out, so Arietta's story is still continuing, with most of the former planet people being on this Earth and seemingly remembering their time there. She is bound to get drawn in...
Rika Furude: Now, Rika, of Higurashi fame, will have a MUCH shorter backstory, for while I've done a lot of AUs for her, only one thing is important: on every reality, Rika's mind fractures and creates the personality of Frederica Bernkastel, who, depending on the world, can either be very receptive to humanity, or very rejecting of it. She has gone from creating friendships with other people to denouncing all of them except for Rika.
On this Earth, Rika's backstory is unremarkable. She lived a happily live in Shirakawa with her friends until the BR, upon which her mind fractured and Bernkastel was created. Rika took her as a guardian angel, a friend. After John discovered his friends had all died in the last three months, he met Rika, who had pillaged from a model Eskimo and walked around with a little backpack of stuff. She claimed not only to have a good hiding place, but to have never killed. When John offered her sanction on the twenty-eighth floor (he had met Shirou and his group), Rika declined, saying her protector didn't often like people. She urged John on his way, and shortly after he left, Bernkastel took control, berating Rika for letting him go. She has actually been the one killing people, while Rika often blacks out. For Rika to survive, everyone else must die. Bernkastel is quite adamant about this.
What will her role be? Will her hiding place be discovered? Will Rika herself have to kill? Will Bernkastel develop a rapport with any other survivors, or will she remain cold and hard in her desire to only protect Rika? I don't know. At all. Her story is developing as we go, with any outcome possible..
THAT was a horrible wall-of-text. I hope you at least read some of it, as I'm very excited about everything to do with the stories at the moment. Just a little view into what I'm up to, what this game that's taken over my mind has me thinking up. As for what we're doing for the anniversary? Crack-log. Where all the dead return to life and we have a big Bollywood dance number.
It. Will. Be. Glorious.