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CHARACTER NAME: GIN // Shikaku Jin.
SERIES: Original.
AGE: 21.
BIRTHDATE: 10/13.
PB NAME: Original // GIN.
FACTION: Ex-Yurei.
ABILITIES: Born, bred, and trained to be a soldier: that's an ability in itself. But that's not all -- Jin was created to be not just a soldier but a front-line soldier, the best front line soldier he could be. He's completely incapable of feeling pain and can naturally heal at a heightened rate: a bullet wound might take a day; a broken limb might take two or three; break his spine and he'll be down for a week but back up again the next, complaining about how boring it was to be unable to move from the waist down. It makes him pretty scary on the battlefield, because you can pretty much blow four or five holes in him (at least in non-lethal places), and he'll go right on running at you, impervious to shock.
This doesn't come without it's downsides, though: being unable to feel pain also makes him completely unable to gauge (except by vision) when he's better off retreating or when he's about to collapse from exhaustion. He's gotten into trouble during battles before when he'd gone to reach for his gun and found his arm broken -- woops, hadn't noticed that -- or he'd found wounds he hadn't noticed to patch up and had nearly bled to death. And of course, he's not invincible. Bash up that body badly enough -- take off enough limbs (those don't grow back if completely detached and lost) or get him with a solid head or heart shot -- and you'll kill him. His heart's been moved the dead center of his chest to make that a bit harder to do.
PERSONALITY:
He's far from the stereotypical born-and-bred soldier -- really. You'd expect battle-hardened, serious, humorless men, cynical and paranoid and jaded and questioning the morals of their jobs -- or maybe cruel, power-hungry sadists with a mean streak a mile wide and respect only for sheer brutality -- or maybe an emotionless machine, obsessed with efficiency and order and discipline. But -- well -- nope. Jin's just kind of a happy dude who really likes his life, Yurei-created for war or not (hey, whatever, he's alive, right!). And he likes his job, too! Or liked it, at least. Mostly because it was fun. I mean come on, shooting and killing and blowing people up? It's totally cool.
And oh yeah, he loves war. Was really sad (or well, disappointed) when the war ended, too. No more awesome explosions, no more battles where he gets to run at the head of the squadron and dive into a field of bullets flying past his face -- I mean come on, without that, where's the fun in life? Video games, music, partying, dancing, meh -- once you've been on a battlefield and had every second, every action, every movement determine whether you lived or died, nothing mundane can really match up to that, you know? Beating somebody at like chess or something is NOTHING compared to beating their face in with a crowbar, I mean it's just not as FINAL, not as SATISFYING and -- just like, dude, life's fun, but AS fun any more. You know?
So yeah, you can probably sum Jin up like this: massively desensitized. To everything! Blood, gore, pain, death, killing -- most everything to do with war that makes most people scared or disgusted or depressed -- but hey, can you blame him? The guy can't feel pain, how's he supposed to relate to the soldier writhing on the ground after his stomach's been torn open or something? I mean sure, Jin's stomach's been through that a ton of times, but he'd just thought it was pretty cool, all glistening and bloody (though kind of annoying having to hold all his intestines in, those things are way too slippery). And he supposes it's not so good for the people that CAN feel pain and so get scared and all that, but he's got no idea what that's all about. Oh well.
And emotionally? Like fear, hate, the thought that they'll never see a child or a parent or a lover again -- basically: huh? Having been born into Yurei and raised as nearly a machine, he's got and has never had any personal ties stronger than comrades-in-war, and all those comrades were constantly dying like the week after he met them, anyway, so what the hell! He befriends people very easily -- he's a real friendly guy unless he has to kill you, and he'll go right on being your friend (though I mean, if you don't wanna be his, that's ok, most people get like that when this happens for some reason he doesn't quite understand) until he shoots you in the face because aw, there's no point in being mean about it, I mean it's just killing. Happens all the time, right?
'Cause his care and worry and affection work kind of like a light switch: click on, click off. If you're there and hurt, he'll patch you up. If you're there and sad, he'll try to cheer you up. If you need someone to listen and search him out, he'll listen with a totally sympathetic ear. It's just that you know, if you leave and happen to get immediately run over by a car as soon as you step out of the door, his reaction will probably be like, "oh well, there goes another one." But don't get him wrong, he did care! He did like you, really! Or well, he did for as long as you lasted, at least, and then there's not much point in it any more, is there?
And he's not crazy. Really, he's not. His thought processes are pretty logical and sound, and there's a leader in there somewhere beyond all the laid-back, casual friendliness -- just as military and utilitarian and merciless as every other squad leader, just, you know, really, truly happy! He was the unofficial leader of the old Lambert-Butler group, that ragtag band of specialists called insane by everyone else but (most importantly) effective, by Yurei -- and some of the tactics they used to use -- well, okay, maybe he is a little bit crazy, but only in that he's totally fearless. Fearless as in, if he gets shot to death, that'd be pretty awesome. Fearless as in, if he dies in a giant explosion, that would be EVEN MORE AWESOME. Fearless as in, he doesn't know what fear is. Only thing keeping him from killing himself out of curiosity or something (well it wouldn't hurt anyway, right, and it's not like he's afraid of dying) is that he really likes life!
'Cause he's got a ton of the other end of the spectrum in emotions. He won't form any sort of attachment to anything, but while people and things are actually around, he'll love them! He likes people in general -- they're funny and interesting -- even if they're murderers or rapists or pedophiles or something -- whatever, people suck but hey, who cares? He likes lemonade and iced tea with sugar and he loves puppies, puppies are adorable. Not that he'd have anything against twisting the puppy's head off once he's done playing with it if ordered to, but it was adorable while he was playing with it anyway, okay? And he'll fight for the other Lambert-Butler soldiers, but only really because it's a matter of "them vs us" and he'll opt for "us" every time -- losing them would detract from the remnants of the unit -- nothing personal, just a logical and residual soldier thing, you know?
Like, the world's a good place. Boring now that there's a stalemate and everything, but it's not so bad -- there's still video games to play and super-violent movies to watch (and wish he were in them) and shooting ranges to go on picnics to and random buildings to bomb for the hell of it and random fights to find in the streets or something, so it's still pretty fun. It'd be even better with more war and explosions (like if he could get enough people to stage another actual battle for fun somewhere in the city someday, that would be the BEST THING EVER), but hey.
He's working on that, okay?
HISTORY:
- Born in one of Yurei's baby labs, genetically altered before birth, in a batch of kids designed to become eventual front-line soldiers. Never had parents, never had a name, only his serial number: 101386.
- Grew up as a child soldier and loved it! While most of the other children grew depressed and antisocial, 101386 thought it was the coolest thing ever when they put a gun in his hand and told him he could actually shoot it, at people, like in the movies! Like cops and robbers except for real! ALL THE TIME! Awesome.
- Happily spent his childhood years going through Yurei's soldier training and participating in all the battles he could sign up for. Seven when he got his first confirmed kill! He had a small party.
- Fought in the Sphere vs Yurei war. How many times has he been wounded? Wow, he can't even remember. Nearly got blown to pieces a few times, but he managed to find his limbs and hold them back on until the skin around the bones healed enough for the arms and legs and stuff to hang there on their own while recovering -- oh, and one time someone got him in the spine and knocked him out waist-down for like a week. He'd had to drag himself back to camp with just his arms, and he'd had no fingernails for like two days. That kind of sucked a little, but only because it was boring sitting there doing nothing for so long.
- Joined up with the Lambert-Butler squadron, one among many organized squads named after cigarette brands. A few front-liners, some snipers, an explosives expert -- you know, everything a balanced group needs. Tired of calling each other by long strings of numbers, they gave themselves code names, too: this time, after types of alcoholic drinks. 101386 became GIN -- since the medic, 082175 - TONIC, was usually busy patching him up.
- Fought with them until the end of the war.
- Once the stalemate happened and both sides collapsed and the Lambert-Butler soldiers found themselves needing to actually live in normal society, they realized they needed actual names. All of them took Shikaku as a family name, then adapted their old code names to fit. GIN became Shikaku Jin.
- Having had no money to their name (considering they were Yurei products to begin with and therefore were not paid for fighting), the Lambert-Butler soldiers resorted to mugging and killing and breaking and entering and basically taking over other people's stuff. Like -- sorry dudes, but we kinda need this. With no police force or military around any more to stop them, it wasn't like it was very hard or anything.
- Currently living with the rest of the Lambert-Butler squadron (or at least, what remains of it) in a large house near the hospital.
WRITING SAMPLE:
Another week, another day of sitting around not killing things. Man, he's bored, and there's only so much that GTA 45 can do about it. Of course, he could go out there and do what he's playing in real life, but meh, what's the point of that? He'd just come back home, fall asleep, wake up, and be bored again. There's gotta be something more lasting than that -- something like war. Where he'd wake up every day knowing he's gonna go out there fight again.
Man, he misses the war.
'Course, it's not like that much has changed -- it's still all over the news, people dying and fighting and everything. But it's not the same, not the same rules of them vs. you and everybody willing to fight -- it's people running and screaming and getting all scared, and man, it's less fun when they're not fighting back, you know? There'd been a kind of beauty in the war 'cause it'd made everything so simple: kill or be killed, if you messed up, you died, the end. Not all this surviving to whine and wail about oh no, I got attacked, oh no, I got mugged, oh no, Lambert-Butler soldiers stole my home.
Back then, it'd just been "how do I survive to tomorrow?" No other questions. Simplicity in chaos. Waking up in the morning's stopped feeling like an accomplishment, ever since the stalemate.
Mm. Oh well. He's getting sort of hungry. Might as well go poke at the others to see if they wanna try to cook something or maybe go out and mug someone for money for lunch. Don't need much, probably something like 3000 yen'll cover 'em all, no need to actually kill them or anything.
Or well, maybe just for fun.