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groundrules) wrote2021-01-08 03:30 pm
groundrules) wrote2021-01-08 03:30 pm
Entry tags:
applications
Eastbound is primarily an invite-only game — each existing player can currently invite up to one person per month, or get in touch about further invites. Existing players can hold two characters in game. A third character can be applied, if players can prove they have met activity requirements for two consecutive months with their existing two characters and have stayed engaged with the game. If you don't have an invite, somehow stumbled upon this neck of the woods, and you’d like to stay, drop the mod journal a line — we'll try to figure it out.
As of Oct. 1, cast/game caps are off. Please note, as of Dec. 1, Eastbound only has 3-4 months of gameplay left.
WHAT CHARACTERS CAN BE APPLIED?
YES: canon and original characters, if they have a solid and consistent personality and background. Characters brought in after they've died are a-okay. For characters taken from a time point just as they're in the process of dying, please read below on meeting medical requirements.
NO (at this time): real people, original characters set in a canon environment, characters from canons or canon instalments that have been released for less than one month, characters with imported development from other games (CRAU), alternate universe, or gender-swapped versions of canon characters.
Children or characters with very specific medical/magical/environment needs: appable, but please make a note of how your character will ICly meet their requirements and stay alive. Likewise, if you are applying for a character taken just as they're dying, provide a suggestion for how they can be kept alive on arrival (this might be easier in some app cycles than others). You can bend the world a little to make miracles happen (ex: a substitute for the medication your character needs to survive can be found for a high price at certain apothecaries, etc.)
Characters that were dropped or swept by activity checks: yes, but they’ll come back without their previous memories, if they are applied in by a different player.
APPLICATIONS CLOSED
→ NAVIGATION MENU
ren amamiya | persona 5
CONTACT: PM this journal
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Carolyn 🐸
CHARACTER: Ren Amamiya
CANON: Persona 5
CANON POINT: Evening of 11/21, escaping police custody with Sae Niijima's assistance
BACKGROUND: wiki
ABILITIES | POWERS: I am so sorry about this Jungian JRPG nonsense.
PERSONA: Ren can summon a physical manifestation of his rebellion and rage, called a Persona. This grants him a few special properties, among them a fashion makeover (with a mask!) and a strong resistance to distorted perception. Also notable: most people can only summon a single Persona, since it's a reflection of their heart, but Ren is what his canon calls a "Wild Card", or someone who can summon and utilize multiple Personas.
To spare everyone from min-maxing hell, he'll only have an upgrade of his initial Persona, Raoul, with the following skills:
- Maeigaon (deals heavy curse or dark magical damage to all enemies)
- Megidolaon (deals severe almighty or nonelemental magical damage to all enemies)
- Riot Gun (deals severe gunlike physical damage to all enemies)
- Brave Blade (deals colossal standard physical damage to one enemy)
- Phantom Show (high chance to put all enemies to sleep)
In canon, targets can have immunities to any or all of these skills (besides Megidolaon) and he just has to deal with it.METAVERSE: But wait, there's more! Ren has a phone app (don't ask) that can access the Metaverse, a parallel dimension formed by the collective unconscious, where people's distorted perceptions or cognition of the world create locations called Palaces. This also gives him access to warped people's Shadows, or their darker and more dubious desires made flesh. Defeating a Shadow and stealing their treasure—a physical manifestation of those desires—creates a Change of Heart, which causes the Shadow to return to their real self and take accountability for their actions. Killing them, however (which Ren refuses to do), effectively kills their real self.
Unless the Metaverse has somehow merged with reality (long story), Ren can only access this dimension with the name of the person causing the distortion, the location itself, and a keyword describing the distorted area. He can also access a "shared" Palace of the local public, but he won't know what it's called in Akhuras, so sucks to be him. Also, Personas can only manifest in the Metaverse.
Since Ren's phone is going to die real fast, I'm going to say he can learn to use his Persona's skills outside of the Metaverse without actually summoning it because [vague interdimensional mumbling]. He can also change his stock of available Personas if he has access to the Metaverse (and especially a certain room in the Metaverse), but...vague interdimensional mumbling. I'm just going to pull this off the table without some external factor.
If an event seems to have a way to access the Metaverse or I get the sick idea he should acquire another Persona, I'll run it past the mod. Alternatively, if he has an opportunity to nab a different conduit for his Persona (currently, he tears a mask off his face, but the mask only materializes in the Metaverse) or find some other workaround, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
THIRD EYE: In canon, this highlights points of interest in various ways; in Akhuras, it'll be more of an abstract sixth sense. Ren can sense traps, "see" in complete darkness, and gain insight to whether someone will be an easy or difficult fight. He also has an uncanny predilection for items or people he should interact with and areas he can get into—in accordance to or against his better judgment—and can improve his skill in activities like fishing, darts, or baseball. Basically, he can expand his ability to use Third Eye if he gains a deeper understanding of a topic.
OTHER: He's athletic and acrobatic to boot; while his baseline is an active human teenager, the Metaverse boosts his physical abilities so he can leap ridiculous distances, achieve much greater feats of strength, and do wild tricks with a grappling hook. He's skilled with handguns and knives, and knows how to make a variety of infiltration tools, chief among them smoke bombs and lockpicks. He's dexterous enough to steal from an enemy midattack and can learn new activities at a frankly alarming rate. Also, he makes a mean curry and coffee, but the road to getting there was long enough that he probably can't make anything else lol.
PERSONALITY: Quiet and unobtrusive at first glance, Ren dresses neatly and makes an effort to maintain a socially acceptable facade. While it wouldn't be right to call it a lie—it's fairly superficial, like "his glasses are fake" superficial, because he really is a tidy person with poor posture—he's very aware of how the world perceives him. It's a side effect of being framed for assault, expelled from his hometown high school, and dumped on a stranger in Tokyo because only Shujin Academy would enroll him. And Ren is powerless to do anything about it, not only as a minor, but as someone who got on the bad side of a man far above him in status.
And so he's learned: Doing what's right doesn't protect you from other people's bad faith, especially when society favors those with influence. His mental image of his situation is of a prisoner, someone in shackles, even if he isn't always conscious of what, exactly, is tying him down. He's keenly aware of the injustice of his situation and what it is to be abandoned; no one helped or believed him when he needed it most and it derailed the course of his life.
Tale old as time, Ren gets power and uses it. He becomes a vigilante and leader of a group of teenagers who call themselves the Phantom Thieves of Heart, who see a change of heart as the only way to deal with people who are untouchable by the law or simply aren't important enough to be noticed by the law. Some might call it ego, that teenagers believe they know better than the adults around them, but mostly it's rage. Because Ren is angry that society is unfair and corrupt, that it would tell him it's a mistake to help someone because it puts him at risk. If the choice is standing by and watching or taking action, Ren takes action because he knows what it means to be failed by the world around him. His Persona awakens explicitly because of his desire to help people.
Which isn't to say his actions aren't morally dubious. It's right there in the title of vigilante, of thief, even if he takes the stance of someone who goes after the powerful to protect those less fortunate. While he's egalitarian in his leadership and gives all of his friends voice in their most important decisions—everyone has to agree before they pursue any target—being able to change someone's heart is a lot of power for a bunch of kids in high school. But while Ren is willing to break rules that don't benefit him or his cause, he does make an effort to draw the line. At one point, he and the other Thieves choose to leave a classmate's Shadow alone because the Phantom Thieves aren't meant to be an end-all solution to every problem. They aren't going to touch someone who is just being kind of shitty; they're there to pursue entities of active harm.
He likes to stay active and keep his hands busy, picking up odd jobs and often fidgeting with whatever he's holding. School bores him and he spends his days slumped at his desk and staring out the window, even if he's listening. And he is, frequently, listening. While he might not have natural genius like some of his friends, he's observant and capable of school smarts. Planning and coordination is simply not his priority, so he leaves it to his fellow Thieves instead. And when he does make plans, he has an unfortunate tendency to go sparse with details or omit them altogether. Depending on which route you take in the game, he might turn himself into the police behind everyone's backs. And, while he can't exactly ask permission without revealing himself as a Phantom Thief, he often intervenes without asking if his allies' have a problem that can be solved by a change of heart.
In this way, he's catlike; Ren slouches through life on his own terms, unwilling to bend to anyone's will but his own. He holds his own counsel and refuses to compromise his morals. He's obstinate to an almost unhealthy degree, especially once he makes a decision, and pursues his goals with a feline tenacity. This, coupled with his innate nosiness (he is constantly eavesdropping), can make him kind of pushy; Ren doesn't really know when to leave well-enough alone. He's drawn to people who have been ostracized like himself and tends to leap to their assistance, whether it's wanted or not. He's overprotective in that sense, but these connections are genuinely important to him; if given a chance to say whether he wants to stay or leave Tokyo at the end of his probation, he unquestionably wants to stay.
He also takes shit in stride to a bizarre degree. He hallucinates in the middle of Shibuya and casually dismisses it, gets dragged into wild situations by his friends and confidants, and sometimes has skewed priorities when observing his surroundings. After getting captured and thrown in a shoddy Palace cell, he idly notes the bed is in terrible condition, so he'd like to use it as little as possible. Which isn't to say he isn't awkward, or doesn't find himself out of his depth; he's overwhelmed at first by the sheer number of people on the Tokyo Metro and shies away from being put in the spotlight if it isn't on his own terms. When he gets ditched by two of his classmates during Operation Maid Watch (...where they hire a maid to clean so they can watch), he sweats his way through the interaction and won't even turn around to face her.
He is, put simply, kind of a dumbass. A reckless one; he takes some mystery medication that briefly puts him in a coma and goes along on a shady deal with a former yakuza. And his guise in the Metaverse, the thief who uses the code name Joker, is what happens when Ren is unfettered by society's niceties. Conjured up from his image of rebellion, Joker is cool the way a teenager thinks of cool: cocky to the point of arrogance, grossly disinterested in his own mortality, and clad in a lot of black. He's theatrical, lowering his voice and making broad, dramatic gestures. He is a showoff.
He cuts loose in the Metaverse because it's a world where society can't judge him, where his sense of alienation becomes a strength. He craves excitement, riding the high of adrenaline and the thrill of power. Even when the odds are stacked against him, he treats it as a challenge. If you solo a battle with him and emerge victorious, he's sheepish but pleased with himself. His initial Persona, Arsène, gives voice to his anger in the Metaverse, telling him, "Kill [your enemies] however you want. Run wild to your heart's content!"
That said, Ren isn't an inherently deceptive or negative person. While he absolutely will lie, especially to protect people he cares about, he prefers to reverse questions back on people or joke around. Otherwise, he opts for honesty, audacity, and practicality. His sense of humor is very deadpan; people can't always tell when he's joking.
He seems to like it that way.
SAMPLE: network | log
INVENTORY: The clothes on his back, a pair of hip glasses, and a smartphone.
NOTES: n/a
IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I'm good with either!
APPLICATION RECEIVED
ACCEPTED
Thank you for your application!
ADMIN
NOTES
INTRO
Since quite a few folks in the application batch wanted or were open to a plottier intro, we’ll have a part in the upcoming travel Arc log that’s exclusive to new entrants, covering their arrival. Stay tuned!