an zhe & etraya

[rikoren]

⏵ player information
name and pronouns: Kes, she/her
age: 18+
contact: rikoren @ plurk

⏵ character information
name: An Zhe
canon: Little Mushroom
age: Physically 19
canon point: Post-canon
history: (Disclaimer: I read this book in Chinese so while I'll try to use official English terminology I'll probably slip occasionally)
An Zhe started off as a harmless little mushroom living peacefully in the Abyss, also known as the deepest, darkest, most polluted part of the wilderness in dystopian future China, up until the day some men from the human base showed up on a research expedition, and took its spore as a sample. Being a one-spore kind of mushroom, it desperately wanted to get its spore back, but had no idea how. Conveniently, not long after this, it rescues a teenager named An Ze who'd been abandoned by his team in a monster attack...except it's too late to actually save him, and the mushroom's attempts to staunch the bleeding only mean that it absorbs his DNA, "infecting" it with humanity. The dying An Ze then names this mushroom "An Zhe" and invites it to eat the rest of him before telling it not to go to the human base and finally succumbing to his wounds. An Zhe obediently absorbs the rest of this human, transforms into an identical copy of him, puts on his clothes, picks up his pack, and sets out to find that forbidden Northern Base!

When An Zhe finally reaches the main entrance of the base, he immediately runs into the Arbiter, head of all the judges in the adjudication divion, whose most infamous job is executing anyone and everyone they suspect of being infected with non-human DNA (as a side note, this is a dystopian future in which even so much as a tiny bee sting can turn you into a giant killer bee creature). Arbiter Lu Feng, doubly infamous for having a 100% xeno-sensing success rate and a 2000% higher kill count than the rest of his team, turns heads that day by Not shooting An Zhe on sight, and instead taking him down to get a proper genetic test done (which he passes). An Zhe thus successfully invades a city in which no living beings aside from humans are allowed and, in order to survive in a place with no soil, gets a job as an apprentice to an old man who builds extremely lifelike sex dolls. They get hired to make Lu Feng, and successfully make an exact, full-size, true-to-life copy of him, only to learn that the buyer got infected and shot just the other day. An Zhe is forced to carry the obscenely heavy thing in a suitcase up to his fifth floor apartment in the middle of the night, which proves impossible because he is a weak mushroom child, there is no elevator, and An Ze's possessive ex is blocking the stairs. Luckily(?) Lu Feng conveniently(?) shows up, successfully scaring off the ex and then carrying the suitcase up singlehandedly despite An Zhe's repeated attempts to make him go away. After some bullying, the man gets An Zhe to make a bunch of random guesses as to what he may possibly have done wrong, before slapping handcuffs on him and charging him with indecency. (He later learns in prison that the actual charge was illegal possession of the Arbiter's personal information.)

This prison stay doesn't last a single night, however, before monsters attack the base; the following disaster causes catastrophic damage to the outer city, and the survivors are forced to go through a Judgement Day to ensure that no infected make it into the safe zone. After watching Lu Feng execute a countless number of people, An Zhe invites him to stay at his apartment for the night, and as recompense(?) is advised to go apply to become a teacher in the main city's Garden of Eden, a choice which ultimately saves his life, as it turns out all the applicants for main city jobs were the final chosen evacuees before Lu Feng nuked the remainder of the outer city.

With the outer city gone, An Zhe finds himself in a new apartment in the main city, right across the hall from Lu Feng. They coexist in relative peace for a good while, but then An Zhe discovers the concept of air vents and decides to try using one in mushroom form to get into the Lighthouse, the science-focused building where his spore is being kept. This venture fails, but he does end up meeting an escaped little girl from the upper floors of Eden, who helps him get back to the school part of the building just in time to run into an unimpressed Lu Feng. Shortly after this, one of An Zhe's students is discovered to be infected, and as his teacher, it becomes An Zhe's new job to hang out at the Lighthouse with this child as he gradually turns into a beetle. During his time here, he learns where his spore is, and also that it's traitorously attached to Lu Feng. The high security makes it impossible for him to rescue it, however, and before he can figure out what to do about that, the manmade geomagnetic field protecting them from solar radiation suddenly dies; there are two magnetic field generators, one in Asia and one in North America, and they discover that the one in North America is under attack. Lu Feng heads out with a team of men while the rest of the base quietly sits in increasing panic over dwindling food and oxygen. This gives An Zhe the opportunity to steal his spore back and return it to his belly where it belongs, but as that spore was considered an extremely important research subject due to its apparent immunity to mutation, he immediately becomes Wanted around the entire facility.

In his attempts to hide, An Zhe runs into the escaped girl from earlier, who successfully convinces her caretaker, Madam Lu, to let An Zhe come with them to the upper floors of the Garden of Eden, where fertile girls are kept to keep the human population from dying out. Madam Lu tells An Zhe a story basically illustrating how she's been under severe emotional stress for decades and wants to be free, before turning into a giant queen bee and consequently turning every single other member of the Garden's girl section into worker bees. By the time soldiers show up, the swarm has escaped and An Zhe is the only one left, meaning he ends up getting interrogated in an electric chair. He refuses to tell them what happened to the spore, however, and ultimately escapes by turning back into mushroom form and slipping out through the vents again. He travels on beeback for a while, but that night a plane crashes nearby, and he successfully rescues Lu Feng from inside. The two travel together across the wilderness, discover the last survivors of a group from the beginning of the apocalypse who'd been hanging out in an underground mining facility, and continue on to an abandoned city, where they learn that not only are living creatures combining with each other, but inanimate objects are, too. Later that same day, in a private moment together, Lu Feng finally cracks and makes out with An Zhe, who does not fully understand the concept of kissing and also does not appreciate the intensity of his first kiss. In a second, much more gentle kiss, he uses his own mushroom properties to temporarily knock out Lu Feng, then finally gives birth to his fully matured spore, at which point he realizes that he's fulfilled his life duty as a mushroom and must go on to die. He leaves the spore with a note telling Lu Feng how to take care of it, then makes his way back to the Abyss on his own.

It turns out that the Abyss is not a static object, though, and the route he'd memorized on his way out is no longer anywhere to be found. He gets totally lost, and is eventually found by a man belonging to the Highland Facility, an old laboratory now being used as a hideout for infected who'd regained their sanity, as well as a 100-year-old infected scientist named Polly who believes that humans and monsters can one day live in harmony. An Zhe is welcomed here, but he is gradually dying, and as nobody knows he's a mushroom at the end of his lifespan, his "illness" causes a lot of general worry from his new family. This all comes to a head when the manmade geomagnetic field finally dies for good, allowing those pulses of mysterious cosmic energy to come down with full force and simultaneously instigating all the monsters of the world to attack what remains of humanity. During this attack, Polly realizes that each individual creature has its own "frequency" which one of his machines is capable of deciphering, but 1. He learned this from various monsters burning to death on the extremely hot machine, and 2. He needs the frequency of an extremely stable creature, which An Zhe realizes is himself. The Northern Base is near to falling at this point, and Lu Feng's team flies to the Highland Facility just in time to see An Zhe throw himself into the flames, which gives Polly the exact frequency needed to recalibrate the magnetic field generators and save the world.

...Three years after this, An Zhe wakes up again to learn that not only is he Not Dead, but that spore he'd cared about more than his life was, in fact, himself; after dying, his full consciousness simply transferred to the spore he'd left behind, thus continuing the mushroom cycle of life. By this point the world is already more or less at peace again, and while humanity is down to a measly few hundred or so, with many of them also mutated, they've kept their humanity and are continuing to build a new future, one which will probably be full of animal people. (And then An Zhe and Lu Feng live happily ever after.)
abilities: An Zhe can freely switch between human and mushroom forms; in shroom form he is extremely mobile and can move freely as a massive collection of filaments, but he is physically weak in either form. He's also a polymorph who can absorb the DNA of various things he ingests, giving him some of their memories and the ability to transform into them, but not everything is compatible with him and it's dangerous to eat random things off the ground, plus Lu Feng prefers him to be in human form, so in general he's not going to be doing much of that. (A potato knocked him out for three hours, as an example.)
He also has photographic memory and can cook a real good soup!
personality:
Being a mushroom, An Zhe tends to be a rational thinker, seeing things objectively regardless of what's going on around him. As much as he might care about the people he meets, he grew up in the wilderness, and is also literally a fungus, so he doesn't tend to brood over most things that happen. He's also relatively resourceful, able to quickly change parts of himself on the fly in moments of danger, and is surprisingly brave despite how weak he is, showing no qualms about exploring unknown places, taking potentially dangerous risks in exploration, or even sacrificing himself if he thinks it will help the greater good. (He likely won't explain himself for any of the actions he takes though.)

While this might occasionally lead him to come off as uncaring to other people, An Zhe is a kind person at his core, who even as a mushroom would occasionally pull injured creatures into his cave to try to help them, and whose soft demeanor naturally attracts the affection of small children (and bullies). He remembers and appreciates all the kind things people have done for him, and will put his full trust into anyone he thinks is a good person (which would probably be a bad thing if he didn't have such good judgment in people). He's also extremely polite and obedient, and just as extremely bad arguments, a flaw which he personally blames on his incomplete grasp of the human language. And he is in fact still relatively new to human concepts and language, having been human for less than a year; as such, he often doesn't fully understand or know how to articulate his feelings, or the reasons behind many of his actions. He doesn't emote much thanks to that, though he's been getting better at it - of all the emotions he expresses, what he's best at is looking offended at being teased, because guess who spent a good chunk of his first three months of humanity getting bullied? This guy, that's who.

samples: TDM 1, TDM 2