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revenance_rpg app
[OOC Information]
Name: skarme
Age: 20
AIM/Plurk/Dreamwidth/Email:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
blitzente
What characters do you already play here, if any? None, currently.
How did you hear about the game? ATP ads, Plurk friends and having tried to get into it once before o/
[IC Information]
Character Name: Naoto Shirogane
Series: Persona 4
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Species: Human
Appearance: Naoto is a standard human Japanese teenager, 152cm tall and slenderly built, with boyishly short dark hair and matching eyes. She habitually wears a binder and crossdresses, preferring long sleeves, trousers and other decidedly unrevealing clothes, almost always in cooler colours such as blue - she wears a lot of blue. In particular, she rarely steps outside without her signature dark blue cap. Adding to the image, she tends to affect a relatively deep, androgynous voice that only slips when she's surprised. Aside from that, her fashion sense is somewhat formal and pseudo-Victorian English, as if she fell out of an old-school detective novel - which, to a large extent, is the point.
Personality:
To describe Naoto is in many senses to describe the stereotypical gentleman detective at the turn of the twentieth century. Cool-headed, logically-minded, well-spoken and formal, often bordering on aloof, she exudes an air of maturity beyond her tender years. She can back it up, too, with an incisive mind, patient and thoughtful but lightning-fast to draw connections that many people would overlook - and yet she's rarely inclined to brag about her capabilities, preferring to conduct herself with a quiet, reserved confidence no matter what situation she finds herself in. That's how a classy private investigator should be, after all.
Spend long enough with her, though, and a few cracks start to appear in the perfectly unflappable facade - admittedly small cracks, since she is a serious person at heart, but noticeable, however furiously she may pretend otherwise in professional situations. For a start, it's more than possible to rile her up: she does not handle perceived failure at all well, but neither does she appreciate behaviour that she sees as patronising, whether jokingly or in earnest. Even with no reason to lose her temper, she becomes flustered fairly easily under the right circumstances, especially in a casual social context - although her awkwardness in those situations doesn't reflect an animosity toward them so much as a recognition that she's basically out of her depth, which links to some extent with her distaste for looking incompetent. A number of her hobbies, which partly due to the same social awkwardness she rarely talks much about, are at least on the surface jarringly childlike: puzzles, playing around with robots and other machines, cheesy kid-oriented sentai shows, and of course the same old-school detective novels she consciously models her appearance after. These and other little character tics such as her love of climbing and high places would seem to be at odds with the adult image she tries to maintain, so out of habit she generally keeps them, like her emotions, close to her chest.
In fact, a theme of Naoto's canon is that there's always more to a person that the side they deliberately show to the world, and few people are more deliberate about it than Naoto. The reason she first got into the habit of putting so much effort into her appearance is related to the career her childhood dream has landed her, which has been far from easy. Her co-workers look down on her because of her age, so she strives to fit in with adults as much as she can; the field she works in has a rampant problem with gender discrimination, so she presents as masculine an image as she can manage. This could be seen as a self-defense mechanism, but it also ties in to her hatred of her own weakness. The disconnect between her self-image and the image she tries to project is what gives rise to her Shadow, the part of her personality she least wants other people to see: an immature but deep-seated fear of acknowledging her own fallibility, to the point that on some level she would rather overwrite every other aspect of herself than let it be seen.
What she never counted on was finding the close friends she did when she took on the homicide case in Inaba, people her own age who would support her even (and especially) when she wasn't perfect at all times. With their help and the help of her remaining family, she was reminded of the true value of her childhood dream: not a strict checklist of everything she must never fail at, but simply the joy and thrill she derives from putting her all into a job she loves. This newfound acceptance, both external and internal, has become what now drives her forward. It's a work in progress, but lately she has been making tentative steps towards reconnecting with the young woman she thought she'd buried, and her confident smile is much more genuine. As she tells the protagonist towards the end of the game, these days, she can proudly say she is herself - nothing more, but nothing less.
Abilities:
Naoto is one of a number of people in her world who can summon a Persona, a facet of her personality brought under the control of her ego and given physical form. Hers is Sukuna-Hikona, a small, agile winged humanoid that wields a laser sword and can manipulate both light and darkness. In combat, she mostly uses it to go on the offensive, casting spells, creating temporary barriers to redirect attacks, and setting magical traps that if successful will deplete opponents' stamina in one shot or even vaporise them. It's worth noting that her Persona isn't invincible: she could theoretically fail to summon it if under the right kind of emotional pressure, it can be hurt by other magic or even conventional weaponry (although it's fairly durable), and any damage it takes also hurts Naoto. It's still the most powerful weapon she has access to, though.
As a side-effect of having a Persona, she has the ability to jump into TV screens, and may in fact do it accidentally - the screen will ripple like a liquid when she touches it, allowing other people to go through at the same time. At home, these acted as portals to the world of the collective human subconscious; since she isn't in Inaba here, she probably won't find anything behind them except a lot of empty space.
Persona aside, she certainly isn't considered a prodigy for nothing. Befitting the image of the unruffled detective that she tries to cultivate, her grasp of deductive logic is a finely-honed weapon, and her supporting knowledge of science, technology and history as they relate to forensics and other aspects of her job is extensive. She has a particular affinity for machines, although her experience with building and modifying them isn't quite as formal as the rest of her.
Despite being a private detective, she is also used to carrying a revolver, and her aim with it isn't bad.
Items: Police ID, assorted other notes, cards and scraps of paper that she wasn't quick enough to throw away, a small multitool that she was using to tinker with an extremely small toy robot, a loaded revolver (but no spare ammunition), and a homemade fake detective badge with a hidden radio transmitter.
History:
The latest in a long line of respected private investigators, orphaned at a young age after a car accident and raised by her grandfather, Naoto carries the full weight of the Shirogane legacy, but has never really minded it; her childhood dream was always to become an ace detective and solve all kinds of mysteries like the heroes she read about in books. Proving herself to be a prodigy, she soon took up the mantle, assisting the police with case after case. Her successes eventually earned her nationwide media attention and the moniker of "Detective Prince". Still, neither her accomplishments nor her fame translated to much congeniality in the workplace - though she would crossdress and present as male both to closer fit her idealised image of a detective and to head off the considerable gender discrimination she would otherwise have faced, there was no disguising her age, and many of the officers she worked with treated her as a kid to babysit or condescend to rather than a colleague.
Despite her suppressed bitterness, she continued to pursue the career she loved. Around May 2011, an open serial murder case in the otherwise sleepy rural town of Yasoinaba caught her eye: the oddest details about the two victims were that both bodies had been found hung up on TV antennas for no obvious reason, and no clear cause of death had been determined for either of them. Noting her interest in the case and the fact that the local police force had yet to even identify a suspect after over a month of investigation, the higher-ups in the force sent Naoto to help.
Once there, however, another puzzle attracted her attention. While there hadn't been any more reported killings in Inaba since the first two, there had been a slightly unusual spate of reported disappearances in the area. All of the missing teenagers returned disoriented but unharmed after a few days, and the police had little reason to chase after a serial kidnapper that might not even exist when they were still neck-deep in the murder investigation. Only Naoto, the outsider, happened to notice a couple other strange coincidences connecting the possible kidnappees: all of them appeared to be part of the same social group at Yasogami High School after returning regardless of whether they'd had any reason to know each other before, and all of them been featured on local television for one reason or another just before being reported missing. The last observation had particular weight, because both of the victims found in April had also appeared on TV, then been reported missing - the sole difference was their failure to come back alive. For Naoto, this similarity was incongruous enough to spark suspicions of a deeper connection.
But in July there was a third murder, one that broke the established pattern and appeared to prove her suspicions unfounded. More than that, the police were able to lift enough evidence from this new crime scene to quickly pin down a suspect, a student at a different nearby high school who was apprehended in the local department store and confessed to everything. With the confession, the investigation and Naoto's official role in it could finally come to a close - but Naoto thought differently, dissatisfied with the neat solution and convinced that she'd been on the right track all along. Her convictions were only strengthened when she explicitly confronted the group of teenagers she'd suspected earlier and heard them all but admit to being a self-proclaimed Investigation Team who'd been looking into the same murder case in their spare time.
When her official requests to reopen the case met with nothing but contempt, she enrolled herself as another transfer student at Yasogami High, planning to get to the heart of the matter - and enlist the Investigation Team's help in doing so, now that the matter was out of the police's hands. Her first idea was to try and get a straight answer out of the Investigation Team themselves, but with her less than stellar people skills this went nowhere fast. Before long, she decided to take a more drastic measure: arrange to have herself appear on local TV, in her case by giving an interview to a news station about the recently wrapped-up case, and hope that the pattern would hold once again, so she could see for herself what the connection was.
It turned out to be more than she'd bargained for. There was a kidnapper going after people in Inaba who'd recently attracted media attention, the Investigation Team had been rescuing the people he kidnapped from the fate of the first two victims after all, he was still active even though the police's suspect was safely behind bars and had been for a while, and the place he threw Naoto into was literally unlike anywhere else on Earth. In this realm of the human mind, accessible to certain supernaturally-aided people through TV screens in the Inaba region, people's deep-seated complexes and desires take on physical forms and lives of their own. Naoto was no exception - in the depths of a futuristic laboratory constructed from the repressed childish parts of her psyche, she came face to face with a twisted version of herself, her Shadow. Unwilling to deal with the gap between her self-perception and her idealised image of a detective that her Shadow represented, on top of having her real gender trumpeted to everybody in the room, Naoto attempted to deny it, causing the Shadow to go berserk; fortunately, the Investigation Team arrived in time to subdue it, and with a little encouragement Naoto grudgingly accepted her darker side, granting her the same power of Persona they'd been using all this time.
After returning to the real world and recovering from her stint in the other one, Naoto joined the Investigation Team's efforts to track down the true culprit. Her skills of deduction and police connections proved to be strong assets. Even so, they were far from infallible. Notably, neither she nor anyone else managed to foresee the kidnapping of the main character's little sister, orchestrated by the real killer as a deterrent, and she took it badly - when the team finally cornered the man they thought was behind everything, she was one of the party members willing to essentially murder him in the heat of the moment before their leader talked everyone down. After that, though, she and her new-found friends persevered in search of the real truth, and by March 2012 the case was closed for good.
Or so everyone thought. In May, continuing with her detective work despite remaining based in Inaba so as not to lose contact with her friends, Naoto was assigned under the pretense of a police escort to spy on Mitsuru Kirijo, the once-heiress of the influential Kirijo Group corporation who had announced her intention to move some highly-classified equipment from their old labs. Following her led, much to Naoto's confusion, to an Inaba junkyard where Mitsuru and a couple of colleagues promptly dove into a TV; with her typical regard for personal safety, Naoto jumped in after them. In the ensuing chaos, she discovered that Mitsuru's intentions had been perfectly noble from the start, trying to recover an escaped anti-Shadow weapon before things could get out of control - but also that the trials of her and her friends in the TV world weren't quite over, with the appearance of a mysterious "malevolent entity" pretending to be her Shadow in an attempt to split her apart from her Persona, and on defeat promising ominously that they'd see each other again.
Armed with renewed resolve and a burning determination to pay back whatever entity had tried to co-opt her form, Naoto and the rest of the Investigation Team vowed to get to the bottom of this new case together - and not long after that, she fell asleep.
Name: skarme
Age: 20
AIM/Plurk/Dreamwidth/Email:
What characters do you already play here, if any? None, currently.
How did you hear about the game? ATP ads, Plurk friends and having tried to get into it once before o/
[IC Information]
Character Name: Naoto Shirogane
Series: Persona 4
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Species: Human
Appearance: Naoto is a standard human Japanese teenager, 152cm tall and slenderly built, with boyishly short dark hair and matching eyes. She habitually wears a binder and crossdresses, preferring long sleeves, trousers and other decidedly unrevealing clothes, almost always in cooler colours such as blue - she wears a lot of blue. In particular, she rarely steps outside without her signature dark blue cap. Adding to the image, she tends to affect a relatively deep, androgynous voice that only slips when she's surprised. Aside from that, her fashion sense is somewhat formal and pseudo-Victorian English, as if she fell out of an old-school detective novel - which, to a large extent, is the point.
Personality:
To describe Naoto is in many senses to describe the stereotypical gentleman detective at the turn of the twentieth century. Cool-headed, logically-minded, well-spoken and formal, often bordering on aloof, she exudes an air of maturity beyond her tender years. She can back it up, too, with an incisive mind, patient and thoughtful but lightning-fast to draw connections that many people would overlook - and yet she's rarely inclined to brag about her capabilities, preferring to conduct herself with a quiet, reserved confidence no matter what situation she finds herself in. That's how a classy private investigator should be, after all.
Spend long enough with her, though, and a few cracks start to appear in the perfectly unflappable facade - admittedly small cracks, since she is a serious person at heart, but noticeable, however furiously she may pretend otherwise in professional situations. For a start, it's more than possible to rile her up: she does not handle perceived failure at all well, but neither does she appreciate behaviour that she sees as patronising, whether jokingly or in earnest. Even with no reason to lose her temper, she becomes flustered fairly easily under the right circumstances, especially in a casual social context - although her awkwardness in those situations doesn't reflect an animosity toward them so much as a recognition that she's basically out of her depth, which links to some extent with her distaste for looking incompetent. A number of her hobbies, which partly due to the same social awkwardness she rarely talks much about, are at least on the surface jarringly childlike: puzzles, playing around with robots and other machines, cheesy kid-oriented sentai shows, and of course the same old-school detective novels she consciously models her appearance after. These and other little character tics such as her love of climbing and high places would seem to be at odds with the adult image she tries to maintain, so out of habit she generally keeps them, like her emotions, close to her chest.
In fact, a theme of Naoto's canon is that there's always more to a person that the side they deliberately show to the world, and few people are more deliberate about it than Naoto. The reason she first got into the habit of putting so much effort into her appearance is related to the career her childhood dream has landed her, which has been far from easy. Her co-workers look down on her because of her age, so she strives to fit in with adults as much as she can; the field she works in has a rampant problem with gender discrimination, so she presents as masculine an image as she can manage. This could be seen as a self-defense mechanism, but it also ties in to her hatred of her own weakness. The disconnect between her self-image and the image she tries to project is what gives rise to her Shadow, the part of her personality she least wants other people to see: an immature but deep-seated fear of acknowledging her own fallibility, to the point that on some level she would rather overwrite every other aspect of herself than let it be seen.
What she never counted on was finding the close friends she did when she took on the homicide case in Inaba, people her own age who would support her even (and especially) when she wasn't perfect at all times. With their help and the help of her remaining family, she was reminded of the true value of her childhood dream: not a strict checklist of everything she must never fail at, but simply the joy and thrill she derives from putting her all into a job she loves. This newfound acceptance, both external and internal, has become what now drives her forward. It's a work in progress, but lately she has been making tentative steps towards reconnecting with the young woman she thought she'd buried, and her confident smile is much more genuine. As she tells the protagonist towards the end of the game, these days, she can proudly say she is herself - nothing more, but nothing less.
Abilities:
Naoto is one of a number of people in her world who can summon a Persona, a facet of her personality brought under the control of her ego and given physical form. Hers is Sukuna-Hikona, a small, agile winged humanoid that wields a laser sword and can manipulate both light and darkness. In combat, she mostly uses it to go on the offensive, casting spells, creating temporary barriers to redirect attacks, and setting magical traps that if successful will deplete opponents' stamina in one shot or even vaporise them. It's worth noting that her Persona isn't invincible: she could theoretically fail to summon it if under the right kind of emotional pressure, it can be hurt by other magic or even conventional weaponry (although it's fairly durable), and any damage it takes also hurts Naoto. It's still the most powerful weapon she has access to, though.
As a side-effect of having a Persona, she has the ability to jump into TV screens, and may in fact do it accidentally - the screen will ripple like a liquid when she touches it, allowing other people to go through at the same time. At home, these acted as portals to the world of the collective human subconscious; since she isn't in Inaba here, she probably won't find anything behind them except a lot of empty space.
Persona aside, she certainly isn't considered a prodigy for nothing. Befitting the image of the unruffled detective that she tries to cultivate, her grasp of deductive logic is a finely-honed weapon, and her supporting knowledge of science, technology and history as they relate to forensics and other aspects of her job is extensive. She has a particular affinity for machines, although her experience with building and modifying them isn't quite as formal as the rest of her.
Despite being a private detective, she is also used to carrying a revolver, and her aim with it isn't bad.
Items: Police ID, assorted other notes, cards and scraps of paper that she wasn't quick enough to throw away, a small multitool that she was using to tinker with an extremely small toy robot, a loaded revolver (but no spare ammunition), and a homemade fake detective badge with a hidden radio transmitter.
History:
The latest in a long line of respected private investigators, orphaned at a young age after a car accident and raised by her grandfather, Naoto carries the full weight of the Shirogane legacy, but has never really minded it; her childhood dream was always to become an ace detective and solve all kinds of mysteries like the heroes she read about in books. Proving herself to be a prodigy, she soon took up the mantle, assisting the police with case after case. Her successes eventually earned her nationwide media attention and the moniker of "Detective Prince". Still, neither her accomplishments nor her fame translated to much congeniality in the workplace - though she would crossdress and present as male both to closer fit her idealised image of a detective and to head off the considerable gender discrimination she would otherwise have faced, there was no disguising her age, and many of the officers she worked with treated her as a kid to babysit or condescend to rather than a colleague.
Despite her suppressed bitterness, she continued to pursue the career she loved. Around May 2011, an open serial murder case in the otherwise sleepy rural town of Yasoinaba caught her eye: the oddest details about the two victims were that both bodies had been found hung up on TV antennas for no obvious reason, and no clear cause of death had been determined for either of them. Noting her interest in the case and the fact that the local police force had yet to even identify a suspect after over a month of investigation, the higher-ups in the force sent Naoto to help.
Once there, however, another puzzle attracted her attention. While there hadn't been any more reported killings in Inaba since the first two, there had been a slightly unusual spate of reported disappearances in the area. All of the missing teenagers returned disoriented but unharmed after a few days, and the police had little reason to chase after a serial kidnapper that might not even exist when they were still neck-deep in the murder investigation. Only Naoto, the outsider, happened to notice a couple other strange coincidences connecting the possible kidnappees: all of them appeared to be part of the same social group at Yasogami High School after returning regardless of whether they'd had any reason to know each other before, and all of them been featured on local television for one reason or another just before being reported missing. The last observation had particular weight, because both of the victims found in April had also appeared on TV, then been reported missing - the sole difference was their failure to come back alive. For Naoto, this similarity was incongruous enough to spark suspicions of a deeper connection.
But in July there was a third murder, one that broke the established pattern and appeared to prove her suspicions unfounded. More than that, the police were able to lift enough evidence from this new crime scene to quickly pin down a suspect, a student at a different nearby high school who was apprehended in the local department store and confessed to everything. With the confession, the investigation and Naoto's official role in it could finally come to a close - but Naoto thought differently, dissatisfied with the neat solution and convinced that she'd been on the right track all along. Her convictions were only strengthened when she explicitly confronted the group of teenagers she'd suspected earlier and heard them all but admit to being a self-proclaimed Investigation Team who'd been looking into the same murder case in their spare time.
When her official requests to reopen the case met with nothing but contempt, she enrolled herself as another transfer student at Yasogami High, planning to get to the heart of the matter - and enlist the Investigation Team's help in doing so, now that the matter was out of the police's hands. Her first idea was to try and get a straight answer out of the Investigation Team themselves, but with her less than stellar people skills this went nowhere fast. Before long, she decided to take a more drastic measure: arrange to have herself appear on local TV, in her case by giving an interview to a news station about the recently wrapped-up case, and hope that the pattern would hold once again, so she could see for herself what the connection was.
It turned out to be more than she'd bargained for. There was a kidnapper going after people in Inaba who'd recently attracted media attention, the Investigation Team had been rescuing the people he kidnapped from the fate of the first two victims after all, he was still active even though the police's suspect was safely behind bars and had been for a while, and the place he threw Naoto into was literally unlike anywhere else on Earth. In this realm of the human mind, accessible to certain supernaturally-aided people through TV screens in the Inaba region, people's deep-seated complexes and desires take on physical forms and lives of their own. Naoto was no exception - in the depths of a futuristic laboratory constructed from the repressed childish parts of her psyche, she came face to face with a twisted version of herself, her Shadow. Unwilling to deal with the gap between her self-perception and her idealised image of a detective that her Shadow represented, on top of having her real gender trumpeted to everybody in the room, Naoto attempted to deny it, causing the Shadow to go berserk; fortunately, the Investigation Team arrived in time to subdue it, and with a little encouragement Naoto grudgingly accepted her darker side, granting her the same power of Persona they'd been using all this time.
After returning to the real world and recovering from her stint in the other one, Naoto joined the Investigation Team's efforts to track down the true culprit. Her skills of deduction and police connections proved to be strong assets. Even so, they were far from infallible. Notably, neither she nor anyone else managed to foresee the kidnapping of the main character's little sister, orchestrated by the real killer as a deterrent, and she took it badly - when the team finally cornered the man they thought was behind everything, she was one of the party members willing to essentially murder him in the heat of the moment before their leader talked everyone down. After that, though, she and her new-found friends persevered in search of the real truth, and by March 2012 the case was closed for good.
Or so everyone thought. In May, continuing with her detective work despite remaining based in Inaba so as not to lose contact with her friends, Naoto was assigned under the pretense of a police escort to spy on Mitsuru Kirijo, the once-heiress of the influential Kirijo Group corporation who had announced her intention to move some highly-classified equipment from their old labs. Following her led, much to Naoto's confusion, to an Inaba junkyard where Mitsuru and a couple of colleagues promptly dove into a TV; with her typical regard for personal safety, Naoto jumped in after them. In the ensuing chaos, she discovered that Mitsuru's intentions had been perfectly noble from the start, trying to recover an escaped anti-Shadow weapon before things could get out of control - but also that the trials of her and her friends in the TV world weren't quite over, with the appearance of a mysterious "malevolent entity" pretending to be her Shadow in an attempt to split her apart from her Persona, and on defeat promising ominously that they'd see each other again.
Armed with renewed resolve and a burning determination to pay back whatever entity had tried to co-opt her form, Naoto and the rest of the Investigation Team vowed to get to the bottom of this new case together - and not long after that, she fell asleep.