yue & cereal

[rikoren]

Applicant Info

◎ Name: Kestrel
◎ Journal: rikoren
◎ Contact: rikoren @ aim/plurk

Character Info

◎ Character's Name: Yue
◎ Character's Canon: Akaya Akashiya Ayakashino
◎ Character's Age: Physically 17, actually 7
◎ Canon Point: End of Day 1 (first meeting at the park)
◎ Background/History: Imagine a perfectly normal modern-day Japan, with cell phones and cars and all those cool gadgets we take for granted these days. (A particularly industrious pixiv user has put it down as the year 2011, if you want specifics.) Then add in all the Japanese spirits, or ayakashi, of traditional folklore: fox spirits, shrine gods, flying goldfish, and the like. It's implied that such spirits are struggling to survive in the human realm, though; the reason they can thrive in Yue's hometown of Utsuwa is because a fox spirit named Shin (one of the two shrine gods who watched over the area) had "spirited away" the entire town, casting a barrier that cut it off from the outside world. This barrier wiped the town off the map: trains pass right through the station, never seeing that there even is a station to stop at. Likewise, nobody ever leaves the town.

Ayakashi in this world have a very particular way of life: Humans are a sort of delicacy, and making one your meal is how ayakashi grow - without it, they will never grow in size or strength. But this doesn't mean they can eat just anyone. Humans are only visible to them if they have particularly strong spiritual energy or happen to be "meals". Like this. Proper consummation of a "meal" isn't just bloody murder, either: the victim is so perfectly devoured that the very memory of their existence is erased from the minds of the people around them. If an ayakashi eats people indiscriminately, that ayakashi will become an akujiki, which literally translates to "eating bad food". These creatures are considered the lowest of the low, and more often than not have lost control to the point they manifest only as corrupted shadows, unable to even speak properly.

Yue was born and raised in the local mountain shrine, where Shin's sister, the shrine goddess Mikoto, lives along with her ayakashi servants. Raised solely to be the vessel for Shin's soul, he was kept locked up in the house for the entire seven years he was alive, with little to no knowledge of the world outside the shrine's borders. Despite the severity of his house arrest, he's very well-taken care of: he's on friendly terms with Mikoto and all the other residents of the shrine, there's a servant to cook and clean for them all, and he has his "bodyguard" Kurogitsune to play with and keep him company. But Shin, despite being just a soul, is still keeping up the barrier that surrounds the town; and without a body of his own, the power being used to keep that barrier up is coming partly from Yue himself. The constant spiritual strain means that, unlike his companions, he needs a Meal to live, not to grow. By the start of the game, Yue's so lacking in energy that he sleeps for most of the day, and faints more than once. So you might consider it fate that, when Kurogitsune sneaks him out to see a festival, he happens to run into two different boys (Tsubaki and Akiyoshi) who catch his attention.

The incident at the festival leads to Mikoto explaining (in the vaguest terms possible) that those boys were potential Meals and that Yue should befriend one and bring him home (presumably so that the adults could help him actually complete the process). And so he spends the next few days meeting, befriending, and having fun with his new targets. The problem with this is that he himself isn't all that willing to devour the first and only friends he's ever made. There's also the fact that the principal at the local kindergarten was apparently devoured by an akujiki, leading everyone but Yue and his friends to forget he ever existed--an event which leads the three to embark on a grand detective adventure in which they have zero clues and the only available suspect is Yue (only Akiyoshi thinks it's Yue). Everything goes quickly downhill from there.
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? He has a sixth sense! A very slight one. He can see ghosts and spirits about as easily as he can see anything else, but aside from that he hasn't shown any ability to sense anything spiritual.

◎ Personality: Yue is a friendly kid, one canonly described with words such as "curious," "absent-minded," and "suspicious." All three of these are true, in their own ways: having been locked away in a Shinto shrine all his life, he's acutely aware of the fact he knows very little of the outside world, and when given the chance, tries the best he can to remedy that. His lack of knowledge and proper social skills works against him though - he doesn't understand why wearing his mask when there isn't a festival might be considered strange, and sees nothing wrong with chatting up strangers or wandering unannounced through a school in the middle of the day. But he has no ill intentions, and genuinely enjoys the companionship and learning experiences he gains from his adventures, taking pleasure in the simplest things from a nap shared with a friend to the prospect of eating "fluffy, dream-like" cotton candy. He enjoys helping people too if it's not a chore, and tends to stick up for people or shoulder blame himself if it's applicable. (Like saying he's to blame for sneaking to the festival, and not to punish Kurogitsune alone.) The absent-minded part comes in with the fact that he doesn't always pay attention to where he's going, and sometimes asks questions other people might think were kind of obvious, plus the fact he's half-asleep so often. He's the kind of good kid who'll flinch and apologize when he gets in trouble, and even apologizes to potential killers if they seem to disapprove of something about him. This isn't to say he never bites - when annoyed or otherwise not bothered to properly reply, his retorts include such childish things as name-calling or stealing things for an impromptu game of tag. Likewise, he'll argue when he feels he's in the right, and if curious enough, will casually break rules in order to get something he wants. He can also be surprisingly forward when he feels like it, actively hunting down a man everyone has told him to stay away from (because the guy can - and wants to - kill him) in one of the available story routes. Obviously though, he isn't a particularly belligerent person, and the worst he tends to do is complain that someone's being mean, or that he doesn't want to do something. He has a lazybones attitude towards life as a whole, his exhaustion often getting the better of curiosity.

All that aside, he does have his serious moments. The issue of his "Meal" comes up often, for example, and while most of his worries are never voiced, he does go out of his shell to ask for other people's thoughts on who his meal should be, and what the importance of the meal really is. But he only asks one question, to one person, and only when they ask what he's thinking. This reticence is a way to keep others from worrying about him; the only complaints he ever openly makes to people are health-related, such as exhaustion or hunger, or silly things such as saying getting his fortune told is a pain. When asked if anything's wrong, or if there's a reason for his questions about the Meal, he denies it and lets the matter rest. In one path in the PSP remake of the game, Yue is confronted with the realization that he actually feels the need to eat his new friend Tsubaki (as opposed to just understanding that he needs to do so eventually), and only manages to voice his fears to Mikoto when she finds him walking around in the middle of the night and asks him what's wrong. But generally Yue keeps these things to himself (and to Shin), wondering what will happen, what he should do, whether he's even able to do it, never telling anyone else his worries. Likewise, he tries not to pry into other people's affairs, backing down if they don't want to answer - though it's still pretty obvious that he really wants to know.

When faced with something particularly dangerous, his first reaction tends to be to freeze up like a deer in headlights: unsure what to think or say or do, he absolutely fails at avoiding attack or injury, and does get laid low once or twice because of this. He dislikes fighting as a general rule, preferring to try to talk it out if given the opportunity, or even when...there really isn't an opportunity. On the other hand, when faced with the prospect of someone particularly close to him getting hurt, especially someone he thinks of as needing his help, he'll immediately run to their aid. For example, he jumps to protect Tsubaki and Akiyoshi when akujiki attack (like a guard dog) but is less likely to do the same for his fellow ayakashi (who are generally able to take care of themselves), and entirely unlikely to attempt helping those humans whose faces he can't even see. (The most he feels for them tends to be something along the lines of how you'd feel for stray dogs or roadkill; a little compassion, but not enough to do anything about it.) In other words: he's totally vulnerable when surprised in battle, or when faced with any sort of danger whatsoever, but will give it everything he has if someone he cares about is the one in danger. Sadly his only actual fighting methods are to run away or act as a flimsy human shield. He's very willing to be a shield though, and there's multiple endings in which he sacrifices his life or his freedom for the friends he's known for less than a week.

◎ Powers/Abilities: Yue has the magical ability to be susceptible to those things people tend to put on permission posts: possession and attacks and the like. He might give off something of an unnatural aura, due to having been steeped in ayakashi stuff all his life, and he looks sort of unnatural with his white hair and yellow foxy eyes, but really he's a total weakling raised by a family powerful enough that even the goldfish could eat him without any trouble.
◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory: - his fox mask
- some food-shaped erasers
- a small arctic fox
- a handsewn plush fox
- a churadama
- a cute birdy keychain
- a diary

CEREALIA-Specific

◎ Element: Air
◎ Sense: Taste! Because of the whole "meal" thing, and also because of his love of sweets.
◎ Seven Character Traits: +(playful, protective, patient) -(childish, -lazy, stubborn) (self-sacrificing)

Samples

◎ First-Person Sample:

Test drive threads!
Previous game threads!

◎ Third-Person Sample:

Cooking wasn't hard. Yue had seen people do it all the time back home--in Utsuwa, at his house in Holly Heights, at the cafe...everyone could cook! It was easy!

That's what he'd told himself, anyway, but it was turning out to be a lot more difficult than he remembered. Noodles! Noodles were easy, right? He'd helped make seafood pasta once, it was just noodles in a pot and...everything else...in a pan. Right? Right. Not that he'd really helped much back then, all he'd done was peel the shrimp. Still, he remembered a very little bit of those casual cooking sessions with Setsuna, all that time ago, and he'd watched a little of what they did in the cafe's kitchen, and...he'd made drinks! And part of the noodle-making process was just boiling the noodles in water, so how different could it be, really?

The answer, it turned out, was very. He'd managed to burn the noodles somehow, despite them having been mostly submerged - he'd been so distracted trying to figure out the vegetables that he'd honestly forgotten about them until it was too late. Speaking of which, the vegetables had come out awkwardly cooked and haphazardly sliced (also he'd cut himself a few times), and Shin-chan had eaten all the shrimps when he was distracted by the noodle pot boiling over.

So maybe he should have stuck to making drinks. Still though, he needed to eat, and dinner obviously wasn't going to make itself, judging by the mess he'd made of his brand new kitchen. Which meant it was time for a trip to...wherever the restaurants were. He still wasn't entirely sure how to navigate, with the new technology and new city and new everything else. Which was why, shortly afterwards, he found himself wandering into the Ceres Game Center with no particular destination in mind (anymore). He'd never seen most of these games before - or any, really, he'd only ever tried video games back at the cafe, and those hadn't exactly been the arcade kind. Staring at all the games that were on display, he found his eyes drawn towards...darts. He remembered darts. There'd been a dart game at the festival in Utsuwa, so very long ago...at least it felt like a long time ago, now. He and Kurogitsune had had just enough money for one try, and he'd failed it, because why wouldn't he have? The game had been harder than it looked. Still, the memory brought a sad sort of smile to his face, as he recalled Kurogitsune's amusingly tearful goodbye to the plush doll he'd wanted so badly.

"...Maybe I can win it for you this time. In case you ever come here." And with that quiet thought, he stepped up to try.

Only to lose the next ten times.

◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories? Yes, from Holly Heights! Considering the relatively carefree nature of the game, there wasn't much in the way of big life-changing events. However, his overall time there - getting a job at the cafe, learning to do housework, experiencing long stints of time in an empty house - all contributed to a growing sense of independence. He's become more competent, less lazy, a little better at socializing, and...also more lonely. Not that he's let anyone know that, but after spending a few years away from his family, with a constantly changing household, it's hard not to get a little homesick.