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[Character Name] Ken Hidaka
[Canon] Weiss Kreuz
[Point Taken from Canon] The first anime series, Weiss Kreuz Kapitel, after the events of Episode 24, Endes des Weiss.
[Age] 19
[Gender] Male
[Sexual Orientation] Considers himself heterosexual.
[Eye Color] Brown.
[Hair Color] Dark brown.
[Height] 5'3" (160 cms). In other words, short.
[Other] Ken supposedly died in a fire, which has left him with burn scars on his back. He isn't particularly self-conscious about these and may intermittently forget they exist.
[Clothing] Casual to a fault. Ken dresses like pretty much every other late-adolescent guy did in 1998: he lives in jeans, tee-shirts and leather jackets to such an extent that he even goes out killing in them. He has a dim awareness that formal clothes exist, but largely considers neckties to be things that happen to other people.
[Background]
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 soccer player 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 often comes across as a fairly ordinary, if rather naive, nineteen-year-old boy. He's a lively, aggressively cheerful, extroverted guy by nature, though he can prove rather oblivious and socially awkward and, 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 girls, especially if they're showing clear interest in him. Some things he simply can't work out how to respond to.
One of Ken's most noticeable traits is his temper. 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 frequently loses his cool with the people he cares for, his anger usually has no genuine, long-lasting malice behind it. He's also extremely stubborn, the sort of person who won't back down no matter how difficult or outright dangerous it gets. 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.
He is loyal to a fault. Though he can be extremely hostile toward strangers - especially to strangers he's expected to work with - once Ken has put his faith in someone it's very, very difficult to convince him to break it. 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 friends he'd otherwise die to protect.
Ken is a forthright person, sometimes to the point of unintentional rudeness. If he doesn't see the point in doing something he'll probably 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. He is by his own admission a doer not a thinker, and nothing if he isn't impulsive. He prefers to act first and think about it later if he thinks about it at all, leaving him with a tendency toward recklessness which only becomes all the more pronounced when he's under stress. He's got the kind of mind that considers setting something on fire to be a great distraction tactic, without considering that the fire could get out of control or the fact that if it did he'd be stuck in a burning building. He simply isn't very good at subtlety or planning ahead.
Raised a Catholic, Ken is pretty convinced by now that he's going to Hell. Though its clear from his struggles with his feelings of guilt that Ken only appears to be an uncomplicated, untroubled soul, he is at heart an optimist. He doesn't really have much of a talent for introspection, and would far rather concentrate on what's going on around him. Any introspection he does do is far more likely to be prompted by the things he's seen or done than any real desire for an inner life.
[Specialties/Abilities]
Ken is an assassin who kills armed with a pair of bugnuk claws, a weapon that works effectively with his tendency to wade right into the thick of fights. Though he shows signs of competence with more traditional weaponry, at one point bringing down a helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade, he's at his best fighting at extremely close range. He's a highly skilled hand-to-hand fighter and has the strength, reflexes, speed and stamina to prove it. Ken has also proved himself to be a perfectly competent computer technician - though he's no genius-level hacker and lacks Omi's imaginative flair - often picking up the slack when his more talented teammate is otherwise occupied.
Outside of his night job, Ken is a remarkably talented soccer player. A former professional goalkeeper, he now works part-time as a soccer coach for some of the children in his neighborhood, feeling that if he can't play professionally he can at the least pass his love of the sport to others. As an athlete he's extremely dexterous and spatially aware, both skills that have helped keep him alive on at least one occasion. Ken also has an utterly innocent fondness for the company of children. He's very good with kids and happily spends time with them simply for the joy of it. Finally, his cover job has given him a good working knowledge of floristry.
Ken has learned to drive a car, but prefers to ride a motorbike.
[Affection]
Possible, though prone to extreme awkwardness since he's been brought up thinking that Nice Boys Don't. He's prone to making snap judgements about people, though, so first impressions count for a lot with Ken. He'll usually respond to whatever gets thrown at him in kind: treat him pleasantly and he'll probably be pleasant right back, but he doesn't react at all well to teasing and will probably end up extremely irritated. For all his short temper he can be, and often is, perfectly friendly. Ken is pretty hopeless with girls and probably won't notice flirtation unless it gets very obvious, at which point he'll promptly become extremely flustered and wonder what the Hell he's supposed to do next. He'd have to feel pretty comfortable with someone to want to go much further than an arm about the shoulders.
[Fighting]
It's going to happen. Ken is a confrontational sort of person and when he gets confrontational he gets aggressive. If he's dealing with someone he considers a friend this usually stays on a purely verbal level; if it's someone he doesn't know and like already, things could very easily escalate to physical violence. As an assassin who kills in a very up close and personal way Ken's a very good fighter and not really the kind of person it would pay to start things with, but for all his skill he's far more reliant on short-range attacks and would have difficulty dealing with a target at long range, something he's usually not armed to handle. Finally he is, underneath it all, just an ordinary guy. Though Ken wouldn't hesitate to take on opponents who clearly have an edge on him and won't quit even when things look hopeless, he could very easily end up in way over his head when dealing with psychics or magic users.
(Yeah, he's a damage magnet. For all that I'd like to keep him alive and unmaimed except maybe this one time, though any injury that'll heal is fine.)
[Other Permissions]
Psychics, go for it. Personally, Ken is about as psychic as a bag of hammers and a trained telepath would have absolutely no trouble wreaking havoc with him. He's never really experienced psychic manipulation as Weiss Kreuz's resident mind-reader found him about as interesting as the aforementioned hammer-bag and consequently showed no interest in him whatsoever. I'd rather not have him fourth-walled, not least of which because he sees no reason to doubt his own existence and would most likely think anyone who tried to get him to was either joking or crazy or both.
[Other Facts]
Ken has been in Somarium before, for just under a year. He is retaining his memories of his previous time there.
I think Ken can cook in the same way most young men can: he's neither amazingly good or terribly bad. There's some basic competence there with simple dishes, but nothing spectacular.
Finally, as he can be extremely loose-tongued, especially in times of trial, Ken is rated R for language.
[Canon] Weiss Kreuz
[Point Taken from Canon] The first anime series, Weiss Kreuz Kapitel, after the events of Episode 24, Endes des Weiss.
[Age] 19
[Gender] Male
[Sexual Orientation] Considers himself heterosexual.
[Eye Color] Brown.
[Hair Color] Dark brown.
[Height] 5'3" (160 cms). In other words, short.
[Other] Ken supposedly died in a fire, which has left him with burn scars on his back. He isn't particularly self-conscious about these and may intermittently forget they exist.
[Clothing] Casual to a fault. Ken dresses like pretty much every other late-adolescent guy did in 1998: he lives in jeans, tee-shirts and leather jackets to such an extent that he even goes out killing in them. He has a dim awareness that formal clothes exist, but largely considers neckties to be things that happen to other people.
[Background]
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 soccer player 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 often comes across as a fairly ordinary, if rather naive, nineteen-year-old boy. He's a lively, aggressively cheerful, extroverted guy by nature, though he can prove rather oblivious and socially awkward and, 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 girls, especially if they're showing clear interest in him. Some things he simply can't work out how to respond to.
One of Ken's most noticeable traits is his temper. 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 frequently loses his cool with the people he cares for, his anger usually has no genuine, long-lasting malice behind it. He's also extremely stubborn, the sort of person who won't back down no matter how difficult or outright dangerous it gets. 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.
He is loyal to a fault. Though he can be extremely hostile toward strangers - especially to strangers he's expected to work with - once Ken has put his faith in someone it's very, very difficult to convince him to break it. 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 friends he'd otherwise die to protect.
Ken is a forthright person, sometimes to the point of unintentional rudeness. If he doesn't see the point in doing something he'll probably 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. He is by his own admission a doer not a thinker, and nothing if he isn't impulsive. He prefers to act first and think about it later if he thinks about it at all, leaving him with a tendency toward recklessness which only becomes all the more pronounced when he's under stress. He's got the kind of mind that considers setting something on fire to be a great distraction tactic, without considering that the fire could get out of control or the fact that if it did he'd be stuck in a burning building. He simply isn't very good at subtlety or planning ahead.
Raised a Catholic, Ken is pretty convinced by now that he's going to Hell. Though its clear from his struggles with his feelings of guilt that Ken only appears to be an uncomplicated, untroubled soul, he is at heart an optimist. He doesn't really have much of a talent for introspection, and would far rather concentrate on what's going on around him. Any introspection he does do is far more likely to be prompted by the things he's seen or done than any real desire for an inner life.
[Specialties/Abilities]
Ken is an assassin who kills armed with a pair of bugnuk claws, a weapon that works effectively with his tendency to wade right into the thick of fights. Though he shows signs of competence with more traditional weaponry, at one point bringing down a helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade, he's at his best fighting at extremely close range. He's a highly skilled hand-to-hand fighter and has the strength, reflexes, speed and stamina to prove it. Ken has also proved himself to be a perfectly competent computer technician - though he's no genius-level hacker and lacks Omi's imaginative flair - often picking up the slack when his more talented teammate is otherwise occupied.
Outside of his night job, Ken is a remarkably talented soccer player. A former professional goalkeeper, he now works part-time as a soccer coach for some of the children in his neighborhood, feeling that if he can't play professionally he can at the least pass his love of the sport to others. As an athlete he's extremely dexterous and spatially aware, both skills that have helped keep him alive on at least one occasion. Ken also has an utterly innocent fondness for the company of children. He's very good with kids and happily spends time with them simply for the joy of it. Finally, his cover job has given him a good working knowledge of floristry.
Ken has learned to drive a car, but prefers to ride a motorbike.
[Affection]
Possible, though prone to extreme awkwardness since he's been brought up thinking that Nice Boys Don't. He's prone to making snap judgements about people, though, so first impressions count for a lot with Ken. He'll usually respond to whatever gets thrown at him in kind: treat him pleasantly and he'll probably be pleasant right back, but he doesn't react at all well to teasing and will probably end up extremely irritated. For all his short temper he can be, and often is, perfectly friendly. Ken is pretty hopeless with girls and probably won't notice flirtation unless it gets very obvious, at which point he'll promptly become extremely flustered and wonder what the Hell he's supposed to do next. He'd have to feel pretty comfortable with someone to want to go much further than an arm about the shoulders.
[Fighting]
It's going to happen. Ken is a confrontational sort of person and when he gets confrontational he gets aggressive. If he's dealing with someone he considers a friend this usually stays on a purely verbal level; if it's someone he doesn't know and like already, things could very easily escalate to physical violence. As an assassin who kills in a very up close and personal way Ken's a very good fighter and not really the kind of person it would pay to start things with, but for all his skill he's far more reliant on short-range attacks and would have difficulty dealing with a target at long range, something he's usually not armed to handle. Finally he is, underneath it all, just an ordinary guy. Though Ken wouldn't hesitate to take on opponents who clearly have an edge on him and won't quit even when things look hopeless, he could very easily end up in way over his head when dealing with psychics or magic users.
(Yeah, he's a damage magnet. For all that I'd like to keep him alive and unmaimed except maybe this one time, though any injury that'll heal is fine.)
[Other Permissions]
Psychics, go for it. Personally, Ken is about as psychic as a bag of hammers and a trained telepath would have absolutely no trouble wreaking havoc with him. He's never really experienced psychic manipulation as Weiss Kreuz's resident mind-reader found him about as interesting as the aforementioned hammer-bag and consequently showed no interest in him whatsoever. I'd rather not have him fourth-walled, not least of which because he sees no reason to doubt his own existence and would most likely think anyone who tried to get him to was either joking or crazy or both.
[Other Facts]
Ken has been in Somarium before, for just under a year. He is retaining his memories of his previous time there.
I think Ken can cook in the same way most young men can: he's neither amazingly good or terribly bad. There's some basic competence there with simple dishes, but nothing spectacular.
Finally, as he can be extremely loose-tongued, especially in times of trial, Ken is rated R for language.