Yuuya Sakazaki (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
espigeonage) wrote2013-02-24 09:35 pm
espigeonage) wrote2013-02-24 09:35 pm
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distantskies
ABOUT YOU
Name: Joysweeper
Are you 18 or over?: Yep
Other characters played: Luke Skywalker, Janine Farehouse, Scout
CHARACTER
Name: Sakazaki Yuuya (Japanese names put family name first, then personal name. He spent several formative years in the West, so he’s familiar with the Western convention, but he decides to order them this way anyway.)
Canon: Hatoful Boyfriend
Age: Twelve years old, thirteen at the end of April. He’s physically been full grown for most of a decade, but dove rates of mental and emotional development are... complicated. Doves a year or so younger than him seem to be in their late teens; Yuuya mostly seems similar and once says that he’s a minor, but there are moments when he seems much older.
History: You may want to read about Universe first.
Yuuya’s highly bred Japanese noblebird mother was betrothed to a French Le Bel for political reasons. She eloped with a common-born bird, a leatherworker of the lowest possible status, and had Yuuya in 2176. They were poor and not unhappy, but this state didn’t last long. Within two years, Yuuya’s father was murdered so the Le Bels could force his mother into marrying her betrothed.
After moving to France she laid an egg containing Yuuya’s full brother, but the “new father” wanted it smashed; he would feed Yuuya and adopt him into a lesser branch family only if this was done. She couldn’t stand to do it herself. Yuuya - who by then was fully fledged but not mentally mature - volunteered to do it but actually kept the egg safe and incubated it covertly. He talked to it every day and tried his best to take care of it.
His mother almost immediately mated to her new husband and laid an egg. Yuuya switched them, kept the new egg safe until he was sure the first egg would hatch, then smashed the new egg. Partly this was so that his brother would be raised and loved - partly it was out of sheer spite, since he suspected what the Le Bels had done. Even Yuuya’s not sure of his own motivations. But by that point the new egg was fairly developed - he didn’t simply break an egg as he thought he was doing, he murdered his own half-brother. That was the end of his innocence.
Sakuya was raised well as the Le Bel heir apparent, disdaining his “half-breed” brother as he was taught. The Le Bels arranged to have them usually apart, to keep Yuuya from tainting him, and Yuuya wanted as little to do with them as possible, even discarding the name of the branch family and retaking his father’s name, Sakazaki, as soon as he could manage alone. Still he tried to know as much as possible about Sakuya. He knew Sakuya would be disowned if his heritage was discovered or he didn’t toe the line, something he dreaded. Sakuya needed to continue in his place in the world - if he left, and Yuuya did come to want that, it should be on his own terms, following his own path.
As a young dove, Yuuya joined the Dove Party, an influential political faction which favored trying to live in peace with the remaining humans and opposed the similarly influential pro-bird Hawk Party. In part, he did this to further spite Le Bel, since the family was very Hawk-leaning. Before he was eight he was recruited into the clandestine branch called “Heaven-Soaring Wings”. They trained him as a spy and helped him develop skills in weaponry and clandestine information retrieval, and sent him on various missions. On some of them he associated with and became familiar with various humans. At nine, he was sent to the Japanese school St. Pigeonation’s, a prestigious three-year senior high school set up for gifted birds of all species, which had been started with the public goal of fostering cohabitation with humans.
There was one established Dove Party agent at the school, Mister One/Leone J.B., who worked as the janitor and mostly gave intel, assignments, and tech to Yuuya while allowing him great discretion. Honestly though... Yuuya had his uses, and he went on a lot of shorter-term assignments outside of the school, but as far as the school surveillance assignment went, he was essentially there to take the risks and attract the attention.
Much of the school had been set up with Dove goals, but right from the start there had been Hawk-leaning staff using the facility for their own purposes. There was a medical center in the basement that had even been used to test new lethal virus strains on captive humans. After it burned down, the head researcher took the name Doctor Iwamine Shuu and the position of school’s physician. The school was high-stress enough that sudden drop outs and students losing their grips on reality - since birds were so recently uplifted, they were somewhat prone to this under strain - weren’t too unusual, but sometimes they just went missing. There were rumors that missing students’ bodies were mixed in with the shredded poultry in the cafeteria...
Starting in 2186, Yuuya attended for all three years like any other student, doing things like infiltrating a weird club which had gotten obsessed with bonfires and became a cult. Because he was often needed for assignments in Hatchiman Littledove City - things like covertly protecting people from threats, or retrieving information - his attendance was rather lax, and about half the time he didn’t go to school at all. Still, he was good when he was there, and it added to his image as carelessly cool.
Yuuya also joined an after-school activity, serving on the infirmary staff, whose members had a marked tendency to either quit or, if they annoyed the doctor, to vanish. Yuuya was quick to figure out ways to cope there, and picked up some things about medicine over time. By his third year he was the health committee chairman, running the infirmary when Shuu was out, but the doctor was growing suspicious of him.
In Yuuya’s second year negotiations between the birds and humans of Japan led to a human girl, Hiyoko Tousaka, being admitted to the school as a minority representative. Partly it was an experiment, to see how well a human could be integrated among the birds, and that was the very Dove-ish public reasoning. There were secret negotiations, too.
If Tousaka were to die on the school’s grounds, the campus would be sealed off, and twelve hours after sealing, all the birds inside would be given to the humans as prisoners. The school would be declared an extraterritorial zone, and the humans would have free rein to do to the birds as they wished. That was partly to assuage paranoid humans, who were used to birds not putting much value on human life, and partly Hawk-ish, designed to start another round of fighting. The Dove Party was aware of this, and therefore Yuuya decided to look out for her, but that year was uneventful as far as risks to her went.
Before the start of Yuuya’s third term, he had received word that Sakuya would attend St. Pigeonation’s. He was given the choice to leave on new assignment, as was standard procedure whenever family became involved, or to stick it out. He chose to stay, claiming he and his brother would have little to do with each other, but on the very first day he tried to talk to Sakuya and was rebuffed. Throughout the school year he tried again with similar results, annoying and being insulted by the young aristocrat, and was never dissuaded.
In that year Hiyoko, who’d adjusted to school life, signed up for several after-school activities, including infirmary duty. She took well to Yuuya, as she did to almost everybirdie, though at some point she did tell him his flirtation was too much - he used a pick up line too awful to ignore - and he backed down a little. Hiyoko helped him out at the first-aid tent for a sports festival, and covered for him when he had to leave early.
Investigations were not turning up much; this was his last year at St. Pigeonations, so he stepped up attempts and found that every few months the flesh of missing students was served along with chicken, and their feathers were often sold in the school store. In July he got too careless searching the doctor’s desk, but he was saved when Hiyoko confirmed his fraudulent alibi.
At a summer festival he escorted Hiyoko around some, but had to leave unceremoniously when he spied dangerous birds looking for him. The next time she saw him it was while he was going through trash, and when she pressed him, Yuuya said it was dangerous to associate too closely with him. After that, while she stayed friendly and continued to cover for and talk to him, she cooled a little and focused more on other friends, to Yuuya’s equally hidden relief and slight disappointment.
At the tail of summer, the doctor took Yuuya aside. He had given Sakuya the customary pre-admittance physical examination in the spring and knew he was not a Le Bel. Shuu threatened to expose Sakuya in the harshest manner possible, unless Yuuya worked with him - Shuu had had an old injury to one wing and couldn’t do heavy lifting, but Yuuya was a young dove, and clever, even aside from the suspected-spy thing, which he didn’t admit to.
The Le Bels are awful people. Being exposed so openly might not just mean Sakuya getting kicked out into the street, though that would be bad enough - he was smart but had poor interpersonal skills and was not at all savvy or able to function on his own yet. Other potential heirs had sent assassins after Sakuya in the past. Even if Yuuya confessed everything to his Dove Party superiors and asked for their help - which went very much against his nature, and he didn’t even think of it for a long time - the Le Bels were powerful.
So Yuuya became complicit. He falsified reports, covered for the doctor, cleaned up the blood and incinerated the remains of one of Shuu’s victims, and tended the ones Shuu wanted alive - some imprisoned, some let go with stitches and confusion - as well as taking on more infirmary duties to free up his time. Shuu was working on something and had entire other rooms somewhere, but while his new help saw more, he didn’t get to see everything.
Yuuya hated this, but continued on with the same outwards careless cheer, even still vanishing now and then to go on simpler, action-y missions for the Dove Party. He couldn’t stop Shuu even by killing him - things had been set up so word would get out if the doctor died, and Yuuya needed time to find and disable them. Which he didn’t have. Yuuya ran himself ragged doing... small things, instead; quietly sabotaging some experiments, trying to prevent birds Shuu was interested in from being caught, leaving the ids of missing students out where they could be found, managing to get some birds slated for death free. He was very careful not to be implicated, and so did less than he could’ve.
In October a discouraged doctor put a hold on his in-school work and spent more time out of the city or working with older samples; the imprisoned students were released with no real memories of what had gone on, and Yuuya was released from his extra duties. Things returned to relative calm at the school, though Yuuya still could not tell anyone. With more time to spare he found one of those blackmail safeguards on Shuu’s computer, but didn’t know if it was the only one, and was reluctant to cold-bloodedly kill somebirdie who wasn’t actively in the process of chopping students up.
Late in December the party ordered him to investigate some mysterious tree-stealing individuals dubbed the Christmas Thieves. It was a ridiculous, straightforwards-looking case that Yuuya took on with a degree of eagerness, and almost immediately after discussing it late at night with JB they hit the school. Sakuya had had a lovely tree in the school council room, which was bombed and the tree destroyed. Yuuya gave chase but couldn’t catch them, and only got a picture of the thieves as they made off with the tree topper.
The next day, finding that Sakuya and Hiyoko were investigating, he gave them the photo. Sakuya was angry that Yuuya hadn’t alerted him, and Yuuya calmly said that he hadn’t been able, since Sakuya had repeatedly refused to give him his phone number. Yuuya suggested they use Sakuya’s grand home tree as bait, and Hiyoko helped get Sakuya to agree to the plan. Yuuya had clout with the newspapers and could get that announced.
That evening the thieves brought a tank, and neither Le Bel security nor Hiyoko’s valiance could stop it. Yuuya was there with an anti-material rifle, but although he put some holes in it ultimately it didn’t really do any good and he got his tailfeathers burnt protecting Hiyoko from the cannon. Shuu showed up and got Hiyoko to throw a gas grenade that disabled the thieves, revealing that they were sentient but simpleminded genetically engineered mammal-bird hybrids created by a different researcher. Named Miru and Kaku, they were Christmas-obsessed and had been running around for years, ever since they were set free.
Shuu said the grenade had worked better because of those holes and thus gave some credit to Yuuya, much to Yuuya’s surprise. He also had Miru and Kaku live in the infirmary and was relatively patient and gentle around them. For Shuu, anyway.
During all this Yuuya had gotten a look at Sakuya’s crow butler Albert, and he didn’t like the man at all. Actually, Yuuya went and used Dove Party resources to investigate him. It took a while before he got results.
Late in January Shuu went elsewhere for a week, leaving Yuuya in charge of the infirmary. He did well at it. During this time a mad scientist rival of Shuu’s named Tohri decided to destroy the school with a laser weapon relying on a student’s hallucinogenic/reality-warping ability and powered by the fantasies of captive otaku birds. (Yes, really.) Yuuya’s connections with the Dove Party meant that when this weapon was destroyed, he had birds to help him get all the otaku out before the building crumbled.
Albert’s history was revealed in early spring. Yuuya’d thought he might be a spy, but he turned out to be an assassin! He was barely persuaded to wait and hear the details, which included the fact that Albert had killed one of JB’s coworkers, before he went and staked out the mansion, staying for days until he saw Albert taking off while holding a knife. Yuuya figuratively lost his head (You think I’ll let you!?) and got knocked out. His last words before losing consciousness and his first on regaining it were for Sakuya to run. With a lot more patience than usual, Sakuya told him the circumstances of the night - Miru and Kaku had been sneaking in to use a bathroom and Albert was to catch and scare them - and of Albert. Sakuya was both client and target, because this kept Albert from being employed by Sakuya’s enemies and because Albert, waiting for the signal, had to keep Sakuya alive until then. Yuuya had to accept this arrangement, but told the butler that if he did hurt Sakuya, he would be hunted to the ends of the earth and back.
Near the end of term a number of birds including Sakuya, Hiyoko, and Shuu went to watch a lunar eclipse on the roof, fell asleep, and had a long synchronized dream. Yuuya and JB, who hadn’t been up there, found them and could not wake them. Yuuya used some Inception-y tech to get into the shared dream through Sakuya, but rather than explain the circumstances right away he elected to chat and was ejected by his furious brother. Tohri showed up and was upset at not getting to fight his rival, so elected to help by clearing the clouds with his new improved laser weapon. After JB insisted that he was to try and get everybirdie out, not to try and take a hit for his brother, Yuuya went back into the dream.
He found Hiyoko and one of her friends, but they couldn’t get out. The dream was an element of the afterlife, the Holiday Star, created by a ghost called the King who was too afraid to move on. The King trapped them in a weird dark place. A wandering ghost dove gave them hints about what to do, and Yuuya split up from them. His first instinct was to protect the lady, but he knew she’d be safer with her friend. Yuuya found Sakuya and got him to want to leave by emphasizing the local lack of taste. Hiyoko’s childhood friend Ryouta took longer, since he was afraid of being apart from Hiyoko. Yuuya spoke to him patiently and at length, eventually convincing him partly with a confession that his own confidence and lack of fear was in part a bluff.
He met briefly with Hiyoko and her friend again and found out that one person was still missing - Hiyoko’s homeroom teacher Nanaki. Hiyoko went on to confront the King while Yuuya went on search and rescue. JB was able to briefly contact him and explain that he was about to administer psychotropics to both Yuuya and Nanaki, which apparently would help. Some of the King’s ghostly citizens tried to get in Yuuya’s way and he tried to explain, but eventually said if there was no negotiation he would make them move. They turned out to be projections of the King.
The King brought up Yuuya’s one greatest sin, the breaking of his brother’s egg, and offered to take the pain from him by absorbing him. Yuuya refused. That pain was part of him, who he was; he had accepted his guilt and what it meant, which was a thought so alien to the King that he left.
Yuuya found Nanaki in a deep pit. The quail was eyeless here and wanted to stay. Yuuya kept at it and tried to help out when Nanaki started trying to find him, only for the quail to try and strangle him. Getting clear, Yuuya talked to him soothingly, concluded that Nanaki had mistaken him for someone else, and managed to remind him that there were things he still needed to do in the real world. He went on to guide the quail out and help Hiyoko and Sakuya and the others fight the King, performing a delaying action while Hiyoko and Nageki went after the source of the King’s power.
The Holiday Star dissolved back into normal afterlife dreamstuff; the King became a normal quail ghost and those he had absorbed became normal ghosts again and were sent on along by Death, who also sent the dreaming birds and Hiyoko along back towards waking. Sakuya begrudgingly admitted that Yuuya had helped, which made Yuuya very happy.
Something he had seen had profoundly affected Shuu, who even weeks later was unusually withdrawn and quiet, disinterested in his work. He left infirmary duties increasingly to Yuuya, but then the term ended and Yuuya had to graduate and leave the school without finding and disabling other safeguards.
He was sent on various temporary assignments by a new handler and knew it was only a matter of time before he was stationed out of the city entirely - Yuuya was becoming increasingly recognizable to the wrong sorts of people and had to be careful in public. Leaving and letting Shuu maybe go back to experimenting on students and announcing Sakuya’s heritage, letting whoever got his assignment next go in half blind, seemed like his next terrible forced choice. Confessing things would lead to his ruin in several ways... but if it saved Sakuya, it would be worth it, right?
Point in canon: Some weeks after graduation, before Yuuya can decide what to do or be sent away. The same day of the same month as in Cittagazze.
Window Location: A dusty classroom in an abandoned hall on campus which once had a medical ward underneath. The whole building’s been sealed off for years. Saint Pigeonation’s is in Littledove Hatchiman City, part of Japan.
Universe: It’s really a lot darker than the premise suggests.
This started out as a 'verse very like ours on the surface, though the global Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 (thought to be a mutated bird flu) was somewhat worse in this universe.
In 2068 a new strain of influenza - natural or designed is never specified - became endemic to aviankind, easily spreading from them to humans. This strain was nicknamed Sumatra Flu, and it was absolutely devastating; it killed humans rapidly but was relatively benign to birds, so wherever birds went, particularly pigeons, humans started dying en masse. By 2070 billions had died, and the global human population had dropped to thirty percent of what it was in 2068, with no signs of stopping.
In desperation, human scientists came up with an avian annihilation project, "Operation Carneades", a lethal virus tailored to birds. They released this in summer of 2070, and there was a brief, hideous drop in bird populations. Many species went extinct. But the Carneades virus had a strange effect on the birds which were resistant - it uplifted them. By late 2071 pigeons had begun to understand the situation and organize. By December they had started to launch attacks on the humans. That was called Hitchcock Winter.
In 2075 the birds adopted their own declaration of independence in the Philippines, and humans and birdkind went to war for thirty years. By 2105 there were a mere 140 million humans alive on Earth - 4.6% of the pre-flu population, a prehistoric low. Ten percent was directly due to war deaths. The rest was Sumatra Flu. The remaining humans were resistant to the virus, and there was a ceremonial cease-fire agreement, but the humans in Japan, at least, were largely kind of penned up in reservations and not given political rights, even the right to govern themselves. They could hold jobs within bird society - this was the only way they could make money, as there were still some skills birds couldn't manage - but they had few rights. Human resistance movements cropped up frequently in the next century. After a harsh suicide bombing, truce rules in Japan were drawn up and habitats were more strictly segregated, humans restricted to living in those reservations.
Two main political factions exist in global bird society - the Dove Party and the Hawk Party. In a nutshell, the Doves believe in trying to live and integrate peacefully with the remaining humans, while the Hawks want to restrict or even exterminate them. There's more to both, of course, it’s not as black-and-white as it looks, and a Crow Party is mentioned without much context. The average bird might be fine with the few humans they know, even considering them friends, and still think of humanity as dangerous and hostile.
For whatever reason - maybe there had been humans sympathetic to the birds, teaching them language and how to organize - the new bird-run civilization is strikingly similar to the old human one. In fact, they largely seem to have just filled the vacancies, though there are some abandoned skyscrapers around. The same countries exist, schools are set up in familiar ways, there's similar infrastructure and traffic laws, music classes still study long-dead human composers, birds write and consume books and manga (some are birdified versions of 21st century stuff), there is Google and online porn... It's almost all recognizable, just mostly adapted so birds have easier uses of it.
Doves and pigeons of all species were the first to become truly intelligent, and were the most numerous besides, and so they dominate the population and all professions. Doves of particular breeding lines like the Le Bels are a kind of nobility. The uplift effects of the virus spread slowly to other avian species and, gradually, birds of many varieties hatched that grew a little slower and larger, had greater dexterity, and lived longer, though pigeons still live considerably briefer lives than humans. Recently uplifted species take some time to adjust to the lifestyle. By this point, 2188, the Prime Minister of Japan is a shoebill stork and kakapos have just become uplifted enough to be able to be toilet-trained. Other known citizen birds include various species of parrot, pelicans, java sparrows, quails, partridges, pheasants, puffins, seagulls, and crows. There's a certain psychological fragility to many birds, which is speculated to be due to the uplift process, and some individuals are "ferals" or "throwbacks", less intelligent to various degrees.
Poultry seem to be spared and uplifted birds continue raising and slaughtering them for food. A character has noticed that a (non-sentient) swallow parent is tending its offspring four months after all swallow chicks should be grown and out on their own, and speculated that all birds must be changing, but as of this point there are still numerous species which aren't sentient.
Oh, also: there are ghosts in this world, tied to locations near where they died and visible only to the pure of heart, and they can pass on to an elaborate afterlife and chat with Death. The afterlife can also be visited by dreamers, and there is Inception-tech that can be used to let a sleeper enter someone else’s dream even if it’s afterlifey. Medical technology is imperfect, but researchers can create or tinker with life in labs, and mount human heads on robot bodies. The one human we know much about, Hiyoko Tousaka, has “hunter-gatherer instincts” that seem to serve as enhanced intuition. One bird believes himself to be the reincarnation of a fallen angel, and claims a similar origin for Tousaka. The fact that he exudes hallucinogenic pheromones and can draw people into elaborate fantasies with them would seem to make that entirely delusion, except that he also has strange powers and another character actually is the reincarnation of a god.
Abilities: Um... well, he’s a fantail pigeon. A big one, and closer to garden than show variety. Here is another of his species, or here. Compared to “normal” pigeons he’s got proportionally longer and more robust legs, like those of a green peacock, but like many birds he can hunker down so his belly feathers hide them. With his neck stretched out and not counting the tail he’s about three feet long with a wingspan of seven feet, and while walking he’s a little under three feet tall. If he’s standing still he can kind of settle back and stretch his neck upwards to be somewhat taller. Weightwise he’s under twenty five pounds.
Naturally he’s able to fly, though this flight is more ballistic than that of “normal” pigeons. As a pigeon he also has some inherent homing ability, a good sense for navigation, and an ability to see ultraviolet light. And unlike most birds, he can drink without tossing his head back.
Despite... being a bird, Yuuya has a fair degree of grasping or manipulative ability with his wings. Part of uplifting meant changing the wing structure somehow, allowing birds to do things like pick up boxes. It's never elaborated on, but I like to believe fingers in the wing have resurfaced like in hoatzin chicks - not enough to move individually or typically be seen through the feathers, but enough for a small alula claw and a surface that can serve like a palm does in grasping. Apparently flight feathers are now prehensile too.
He’s got to apply beak and feet sometimes and even then he’s not got human-level variable dexterity, but he gets by pretty well. Yuuya is a fantastic hacker/codebreaker and a rapid texter, and he’s physically as well as mentally capable of nurse duties, though he needs specialized beak-mounted tweezers for tasks requiring both strength and precision.
In his world pigeons have adopted the various human languages, though with... birdie flairs and occasional cooing. Yuuya's fluent in Japanese, French, English, and Standard Chinese, and he can leave out the bird flairs. He's got some ability with other languages, just... less.
Yuuya is extremely fit - Hiyoko once says he’s “ripped” - and can move with great stealth. The Dove Party taught him some kind of physical fighting and how to knock someone out from behind without hurting them, and he is good with many kinds of guns made for birds, though he’d have difficulty with ones made for humans. In the water, he can swim so well that he can act as a lifeguard. ...Possibly just for other birds, though. He is strong, but decidedly smaller than a human.
Also he’s carrying the Carneades virus. He’ll be careful about that and it can’t survive long without a host, but... it is airborne, and there’s a distinct possibility of infecting ‘normal’ birds he comes in contact with. A naive bird that survives infection will change, though how much depends on maturity. None in the first generation will reach full sentience, but young birds will grow larger and end up smarter than infected adults, and any infected bird’s new offspring will be more affected. Enough for a degree of cooperation and language use. It takes three or four generations for wing dexterity to start appearing, and several generations of the virus being passed on for birds who achieve things like complex morality and advanced perspective-taking to be born, and physical changes will continue for many generations to come. By then the birds are too changed to be able to breed with natives of the original species, or to want to.
...I’m assuming the infected birds are pigeons. Some birds of other species might do the same, larger birds won't get as dramatically larger, some will change little or not at all but still carry and spread the virus, and their descendents may change more dramatically. Many other birds just won’t survive.
Possessions: Yuuya comes in with a kind of “backpack” that’s common for his world - the straps resemble a bird harness and like that one are partially hidden by his feathers; what isn’t, is covered by his yellow tie. The cargo compartment contains an iPon (Hato iPhone of The Future), synthetic preen oil, several pairs of little dove glasses in lightweight cases, a dose of antibiotics, a folded blue dove tuxedo, and a pistol.
His vision is fine and he wears glasses nominally as a fashion statement. One pair has built-in camera capabilities, another can amplify light to let him see in darker conditions, a third functions like sunglasses with adjustable tints, the rest are just for style. The camera glasses can sync to his iPon, which is also useful for hacking. The pistol is also lightweight, and is in a concealed compartment. It’s quiet and made for dove use, so humans would have trouble using it. He brought enough ammunition for five shots; they are extremely low caliber, though. We're talking barely more than a BB gun: it could kill a bird or even a human, but it would need to be used at close range and with precision.
Personality: “We cannot see tomorrow. All we can do is put on our bravest smiles and march forwards into the new day!”
At a glance, Yuuya is a confident carefree flirt, a ladies’ man (hen’s cock?), talkative, and a little absurd. He knows and is friendly and acts familiar with everyone. Sometimes smarmy, he seems to take absolutely everything in stride, accepting even insults and slights with the same air of careless, cheery ease. He’s gracious when corrected, and while he’s got a minor competitive streak his attitude is outwardly the same win or lose. Frequently absent from school, he doesn’t seem to care about much, including the future.
Yuuya is sexist in the chivalric way, but less so than he appears at first. It largely seems to be a surface thing. He’ll call anyone beautiful but is more effusive towards women; he may use cheesy pickup lines, typically as a greeting; he likes to be gallant to women and feels more protective towards them. But he’s not at all displeased when women don’t act delicate, he’s willing to believe they can take care of themselves, and he honestly does have respect for them in general. He’s gracious if told to knock it off and his most absurd pronouncements are reserved for when he’s flirted at back. It’s fun. In non-flirtatious/teasing situations he will often barely give lip service to flirtation, and then proceed to be relaxedly friendly or very professional, depending.
Despite an obvious social nature he’s oddly aloof and opaque. It’s always hard to tell what he’s really thinking about serious things. Just past the carefree surface he always wants to appear in control, of himself if not the situation. Yuuya’s quite free about physical intimacy and is very forwards, but if he talks about himself - and he doesn’t like to, aside from in passing - it will be largely lies. He’s really more of a very extroverted loner. Yuuya has many friends and is admired, but it’s almost all on the surface.
It's not a big part of him, but Yuuya's a little nerdy. Familiar with videogame conventions and the term "banhammered", anyway. When he has free time and no lady to spend it with he likes that kind of entertainment. He's also a bit of a romantic, as evidenced by some of the language he uses, and enjoys a little nostalgia.
Not-so-secretly he’s more cold-blooded and cynical than he seems. And defiant - he switched eggs, he slipped out of his adoptive noble branch and reassumed a commoner’s name, he’s persistent, teasing, and apparently unshakeably cheerful to some people (mostly Sakuya) he knows find it annoying, he is foreign in a Japanese school (always a good way to end up ostracized) and uses gratuitous French and English to call more attention to it.
He does have some respect for authority, but it’s on his own terms. Yuuya will answer to others easily enough, though he feels it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission sometimes, and in the end he really answers to himself.
When he isn’t coming off as cheerfully careless, he’s usually coming off as some degree or another of professional and competent, which can startle people. Sometimes the two attitudes are blended. If it’s called for he has a pretty good bedside manner too. Yuuya is the equivalent of a teenaged superspy, and he may happily show off a little if the situation calls for those skills to be used, but he’s unlikely to tell anyone how he got them.
Yuuya lies. He lies and withholds information if it doesn’t seem relevant at the moment, even if it would be better if he shared. He lies, deflects, and dissembles almost pathologically, and he’s got layers. The careless ~sexy and luxurious~ upperclassman is certainly part of him, yes, and so is the daring young superspy he shows people he’s closer to, but they’re both hiding something else. Yuuya’s unsure of himself and indecisive, he is burdened by guilt, and despite outer appearances he does not like himself much.
Sometimes, he’ll show that a little to someone he likes and trusts to some degree, talking about himself as a failure, speaking in a self-deriding or despairing way. He doesn’t want to worry people, though, and this really only comes out in dark moments. Even then he tends to lie and dissemble as he catches himself. Insults and taunting don’t bring him down much, even if his past is brought up - someone remarks that he has a heart of used tires, indestructible, and appears relaxed and calm even when accused of murder.
It’s his past actions and failures as seen by himself that weigh on him. There are many situations where he’s felt that he didn’t do any good, or even did harm, despite his best efforts. It all goes back to his childhood, really. The fact that he didn’t smash his half-brother’s egg until Sakuya was sure to hatch, the fact that he incubated it himself so he could switch it back if no chick was forthcoming, meant that when he did break the egg, the squab inside was fairly developed. And it’s left an impact.
If this secret is discovered, he doesn’t freak out or seek to explain himself. Yuuya carries the guilt of what he did, and knows he can’t change it, and he will not pass it on, though he does often think he should tell Sakuya. The least he can do is remember, himself, and carry it. It’s part of him. He’s accepted it.
Despite the weight of his many sins and failures, Yuuya can always continue on with a smile, and not even he knows how much of it is a bluff. Nobirdie can live without hurting anyone else. Nobirdie can ever be replaced. All he can do is keep going.
Yuuya remains outwardly cheerful when faced with Sakuya’s scorn, but there is resentment there, which he’s careful not to show him. At times he thinks of his brother as childish, and he does resent insults sometimes. He just doesn’t show it except to the very few he trusts. Yuuya’s noticed Sakuya’s enthusiasm and passion for music. As much as he dreads the idea of his brother being disowned and stripped of the Le Bel name, as much as the little aristocrat annoys him sometimes, he still wants to see Sakuya follow his dreams.
While he’s pretty fine with people not liking his little brother, Sakuya’s life and happiness means everything to him. When he thinks Sakuya is really, pressingly threatened Yuuya loses his cool and becomes raw and desperate. If Sakuya is seriously attacked, Yuuya completely discards his sense of self-preservation - there is a route where he covers Sakuya’s body with his own, not even trying to grab at the weapon.
He’s quite slow to care about anyone else to that same degree, but he does care about people - he doesn’t lose his head, but he will similarly lunge to tackle people out of the way of attacks and think nothing at all of injuries received on the way. And he has some concern for emotional hurts too. He might think derisive thoughts, but he knows better than to speak them. When talking to Ryouta about Hiyoko and the changing nature of relationships, Yuuya was patient, fairly gentle, and even let go of one of his secrets - that some of his cheerful attitude is a bluff.
He will put himself at risk for others even besides his brother, if that doesn’t conflict with protecting Sakuya. Yuuya bears few grudges and will bring his characteristic unflappability to bear when helping drowning swimmers who half crush him, or soothing hostages who try to strangle him. He is better than he thinks he is, deep down. He’s just not as good as he’d have anyone who’s seen him act heroic believe.
Thread Sample: Here
Prose Sample: For quite a while after he’d first been put on that assignment, Yuuya had enjoyed going through the school at night. It had such an air of mystery to it in the dark. He’d used to fantasize about showing Hiyoko. Primate night vision was so much better than a dove’s, and perhaps she would have led him by the wing.
This time, while he tried to enjoy the clandestine atmosphere, the knowledge that he was sneaking back into the school after graduation, it only went so far. Not that he’d expected otherwise. Those nights helping the doctor had wiped away a lot of the pleasant nostalgia of those older times.
Regardless, he had no trouble getting in and navigating the corridors until he had found the door to the maintenance office. That he pecked at in a particular sequence of soft taps, until it was opened and he sauntered inside.
Mister One - JB - locked the door behind Yuuya. The static generator on the low tea-table clicked and started up apparently by itself, whirring softly and interfering with any listening devices. Maybe he’d had it synchronized with the lock. The cockatiel made his slow way farther into the maintenance office and turned towards Yuuya, grave. “Sit down. Let’s keep it brief. A choice for you, Sakazaki.”
He was always like this, and as he sank into crouching position Yuuya couldn’t not comment on it. “To the point as ever, Mister One. Your mysterious disappearance set many crests to raising, and the moment you summon me it’s another choice?”
JB ignored the irrelevant remark, as he always did. There was something comforting in his constance. “Sakazaki Yuuya. You are no longer a student at this school, and as a supposed college student you cannot be immediately signed on as staff. Any roles you now play in the investigation will be minor - so, you are free.”
“In a way, sure. My schedule’s heavy with short-term assignments. You’ve seen some of them, right? I miss your suave commentary.” Yuuya’s orders came from another fantail pigeon these days, but the man was so good at being covert and ignorable that he apparently had no personality at all. It was like conversing with a list.
“If you accept this, they’re off the table indefinitely. You might get special assignments now and then, but it’s likely you would be out of contact much of the time.” JB regarded him gravely. “I know the last long term was hard on you, Sakazaki. This is high priority, but I’m giving you a choice.”
The cockatiel had no idea how hard it had gotten. And by now, it was far too late for Yuuya to tell him. “You’re very fond of giving me choices. Don’t you ever wonder what happens if I make the wrong ones?”
There was a pause as JB glanced at the table. Yuuya followed his gaze with the eye on that side, but saw nothing of note but documents. At last JB said, “You wouldn’t be the first agent to do that, and you won’t be the last. But I’m not offering this out of charity. Frankly, you’re the best agent in the country at dealing with humans, bar none. This assignment calls for contact with a great number of naive humans. Ones unaffected by the last century or so of our history.”
“And that means...”
“No general immunity. Minimal experience dealing with birds that aren’t animals or pets. They even govern themselves.”
Yuuya pulled his head back, touching his chin to his chest. “But that’s not possible. There could be some on an island somewhere, I suppose, but Sumatra Flu... It’s not everywhere like it used to be, but it’s reached every corner of the globe. There aren’t any humans left without immunity.”
“Nonetheless, there we have it. They haven’t been exposed at all. One of the factors in sending someone there is a concern for not changing that. Naturally, no one from the Hawk Party has any idea.”
There was already unusual emphasis on containing diseases at Saint. Pigeonations, since it had a human representative. But Hiyoko enjoyed hereditary immunity, and besides that she had been interacting with birdkind since she was a chick. Chances were that she would fight off the Sumatra Flu without even noticing, if it tried her at all. Naive humans...
“And there is another concern,” the cockatiel said, his tone deceptively placid. He picked up one of the files with delicate wingtips, opened it, and in his terse, blunt way, explained windows, the city, and dæmons.
If this had been anyone else, Yuuya would have thought he was being teased. That wasn’t in JB’s nature, though, and he knew it. So the fantail was quiet.
Yuuya had been raised Christian and with the concept of dualism, and so the idea of his soul and the rest of him being separated wasn’t as dismaying as it might be to a proper Japanese bird. Still. And the idea of souls being such real things - so, what would happen to his, in the end?
“It sounds like something out of science fiction,” he had to say eventually. “How soon do you want my answer?”
“Quickly, Sakazaki. We don’t know the situation there. It could lead to such Bright and Massive things as I don’t like to speculate about. Or to ruin and another round of wars, or not much at all. But even if we turned our backs, the window is still there, and if we don’t take this chance...” JB shook his head and stood up to put on a pot of coffee. No doubt he wanted his answer by the time it was finished brewing.
Well, Yuuya thought. This... window was on school grounds. If it stayed open, Yuuya could advise and help his replacement discover those things that needed to come to the Dove Party’s attention. He might have an unusual avenue of retreat, and he would be more boldly able to search out the doctor’s secret space, those other computers where his failsafe program was. And if it stayed open, Yuuya might never be far from Sakuya.
If he put it that way... Yuuya stood. “What would you want me to do?”
Plans: I’d like sort of unusual circumstances here - namely that Yuuya’s former superior/handler, Leone JB/”Mister One” came through the window first, as said in the prose sample. JB is a cockatiel around the size of a large Hycanith Macaw. He would have ended up with an Egyptian Vulture, but he would have rejected the offer and gone home.
Yuuya will be seeking to join the medical staff, and making up for the NPC nurses having no personalities by having far too much of one. Ahaha.
...he’ll try and settle in, get a feather on the pulse of goings on, and eventually start snooping. If he tells anyone he’s from the Dove Party, it’ll take a good while. He’ll dissuade people from visiting his ‘verse and being exposed to Sumatra Flu, but he won’t really talk about Carneades, and... he may end up accidentally spreading the bird uplift virus. Maybe in Cittagazze. Maybe somewhere else.
Notes: Hatoful Boyfriend is two games. One has several "routes" in which the player, in command of Hiyoko, can focus on one bird or another, and one route where she dies and a lot of unsettling backstories only hinted at in the dating sim portion are revealed. The other is a mild AU, where all background elements are the same but some different things happen in the timeline. This app's history is a synthesis of both games and a story from the guidebook.
...Said guidebook also marks him as seventeen, but um... doves canonically don't live for nearly as long as humans, and still reach sexual maturity within a year. So I'm saying that to go with that, mental and emotional development takes somewhat less time than in humans. Age is only mentioned in the one place, and it might have been referring to his ICPSS - the pseudohuman appearance which has nothing to do with the plot, but is there to let new players feel more comfortable with a bird dating sim.
DÆMON
Name: Canaille, but he almost always calls her Mon Coeur (my heart), so it’s easy to think that’s her name.
Sex: Female
Form: Channel-billed Cuckoo
Additional notes: From the Hatoverse. I don’t know the canon state of these birds. It's not yet been said! It's not too likely to be said; Moa is conservative about world details. But I will assume that channel-billed cuckoos survived and are very slow to change. Still normal sized, they don't have prehensile flight feathers or significant added intelligence, but wing structure has changed slightly and there's a tiny curved claw like that of a rail or vulture at each alula.
Her dark gray wings are maybe a shade darker than is common, but nothing too unusual, there seems to be a certain variability in photos. The black bands on her underside, particularly her lower tailfeathers, are wider, so the white tips of these feathers are tiny, barely existent. And her feathers are typically slightly disarrayed or ragged, rather like his. These are a reflection of the guilt Yuuya carries - not slowing him down, not obvious to others as meaning anything, still very much part of him.
He’ll likely seek to dye the striking red skin around her eyes.
Why this form: A pale bird, easily mistaken for a raven, a hornbill, or a bird of prey, which moves around a lot... and is a brood parasite. Females of the species lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, sometimes eating the host’s eggs to make room, and leave the hosts to raise them. The genus, Scythrops, means angry/sullen face/eye/countenance and refers to that red eye skin. It reflects in general a side of himself he doesn't like to show. Resentment is part of him, and guilt and self loathing, and the spite that was half of Yuuya’s reason for switching the eggs. He did this very early in his life - doves reach sexual maturity within a year of birth, but their minds are still very young at that stage - and it’s left a great impact on him.
Channel-billed Cuckoos will feed in groups, sometimes of mixed species, but otherwise tend to be solitary outside of mating season, when they form pair-bonds and cooperate closely. Yuuya often has one or two people he lets get closer than most, though they’re not necessarily romantic interests.
distantskiesABOUT YOU
Name: Joysweeper
Are you 18 or over?: Yep
Other characters played: Luke Skywalker, Janine Farehouse, Scout
CHARACTER
Name: Sakazaki Yuuya (Japanese names put family name first, then personal name. He spent several formative years in the West, so he’s familiar with the Western convention, but he decides to order them this way anyway.)
Canon: Hatoful Boyfriend
Age: Twelve years old, thirteen at the end of April. He’s physically been full grown for most of a decade, but dove rates of mental and emotional development are... complicated. Doves a year or so younger than him seem to be in their late teens; Yuuya mostly seems similar and once says that he’s a minor, but there are moments when he seems much older.
History: You may want to read about Universe first.
Yuuya’s highly bred Japanese noblebird mother was betrothed to a French Le Bel for political reasons. She eloped with a common-born bird, a leatherworker of the lowest possible status, and had Yuuya in 2176. They were poor and not unhappy, but this state didn’t last long. Within two years, Yuuya’s father was murdered so the Le Bels could force his mother into marrying her betrothed.
After moving to France she laid an egg containing Yuuya’s full brother, but the “new father” wanted it smashed; he would feed Yuuya and adopt him into a lesser branch family only if this was done. She couldn’t stand to do it herself. Yuuya - who by then was fully fledged but not mentally mature - volunteered to do it but actually kept the egg safe and incubated it covertly. He talked to it every day and tried his best to take care of it.
His mother almost immediately mated to her new husband and laid an egg. Yuuya switched them, kept the new egg safe until he was sure the first egg would hatch, then smashed the new egg. Partly this was so that his brother would be raised and loved - partly it was out of sheer spite, since he suspected what the Le Bels had done. Even Yuuya’s not sure of his own motivations. But by that point the new egg was fairly developed - he didn’t simply break an egg as he thought he was doing, he murdered his own half-brother. That was the end of his innocence.
Sakuya was raised well as the Le Bel heir apparent, disdaining his “half-breed” brother as he was taught. The Le Bels arranged to have them usually apart, to keep Yuuya from tainting him, and Yuuya wanted as little to do with them as possible, even discarding the name of the branch family and retaking his father’s name, Sakazaki, as soon as he could manage alone. Still he tried to know as much as possible about Sakuya. He knew Sakuya would be disowned if his heritage was discovered or he didn’t toe the line, something he dreaded. Sakuya needed to continue in his place in the world - if he left, and Yuuya did come to want that, it should be on his own terms, following his own path.
As a young dove, Yuuya joined the Dove Party, an influential political faction which favored trying to live in peace with the remaining humans and opposed the similarly influential pro-bird Hawk Party. In part, he did this to further spite Le Bel, since the family was very Hawk-leaning. Before he was eight he was recruited into the clandestine branch called “Heaven-Soaring Wings”. They trained him as a spy and helped him develop skills in weaponry and clandestine information retrieval, and sent him on various missions. On some of them he associated with and became familiar with various humans. At nine, he was sent to the Japanese school St. Pigeonation’s, a prestigious three-year senior high school set up for gifted birds of all species, which had been started with the public goal of fostering cohabitation with humans.
There was one established Dove Party agent at the school, Mister One/Leone J.B., who worked as the janitor and mostly gave intel, assignments, and tech to Yuuya while allowing him great discretion. Honestly though... Yuuya had his uses, and he went on a lot of shorter-term assignments outside of the school, but as far as the school surveillance assignment went, he was essentially there to take the risks and attract the attention.
Much of the school had been set up with Dove goals, but right from the start there had been Hawk-leaning staff using the facility for their own purposes. There was a medical center in the basement that had even been used to test new lethal virus strains on captive humans. After it burned down, the head researcher took the name Doctor Iwamine Shuu and the position of school’s physician. The school was high-stress enough that sudden drop outs and students losing their grips on reality - since birds were so recently uplifted, they were somewhat prone to this under strain - weren’t too unusual, but sometimes they just went missing. There were rumors that missing students’ bodies were mixed in with the shredded poultry in the cafeteria...
Starting in 2186, Yuuya attended for all three years like any other student, doing things like infiltrating a weird club which had gotten obsessed with bonfires and became a cult. Because he was often needed for assignments in Hatchiman Littledove City - things like covertly protecting people from threats, or retrieving information - his attendance was rather lax, and about half the time he didn’t go to school at all. Still, he was good when he was there, and it added to his image as carelessly cool.
Yuuya also joined an after-school activity, serving on the infirmary staff, whose members had a marked tendency to either quit or, if they annoyed the doctor, to vanish. Yuuya was quick to figure out ways to cope there, and picked up some things about medicine over time. By his third year he was the health committee chairman, running the infirmary when Shuu was out, but the doctor was growing suspicious of him.
In Yuuya’s second year negotiations between the birds and humans of Japan led to a human girl, Hiyoko Tousaka, being admitted to the school as a minority representative. Partly it was an experiment, to see how well a human could be integrated among the birds, and that was the very Dove-ish public reasoning. There were secret negotiations, too.
If Tousaka were to die on the school’s grounds, the campus would be sealed off, and twelve hours after sealing, all the birds inside would be given to the humans as prisoners. The school would be declared an extraterritorial zone, and the humans would have free rein to do to the birds as they wished. That was partly to assuage paranoid humans, who were used to birds not putting much value on human life, and partly Hawk-ish, designed to start another round of fighting. The Dove Party was aware of this, and therefore Yuuya decided to look out for her, but that year was uneventful as far as risks to her went.
Before the start of Yuuya’s third term, he had received word that Sakuya would attend St. Pigeonation’s. He was given the choice to leave on new assignment, as was standard procedure whenever family became involved, or to stick it out. He chose to stay, claiming he and his brother would have little to do with each other, but on the very first day he tried to talk to Sakuya and was rebuffed. Throughout the school year he tried again with similar results, annoying and being insulted by the young aristocrat, and was never dissuaded.
In that year Hiyoko, who’d adjusted to school life, signed up for several after-school activities, including infirmary duty. She took well to Yuuya, as she did to almost everybirdie, though at some point she did tell him his flirtation was too much - he used a pick up line too awful to ignore - and he backed down a little. Hiyoko helped him out at the first-aid tent for a sports festival, and covered for him when he had to leave early.
Investigations were not turning up much; this was his last year at St. Pigeonations, so he stepped up attempts and found that every few months the flesh of missing students was served along with chicken, and their feathers were often sold in the school store. In July he got too careless searching the doctor’s desk, but he was saved when Hiyoko confirmed his fraudulent alibi.
At a summer festival he escorted Hiyoko around some, but had to leave unceremoniously when he spied dangerous birds looking for him. The next time she saw him it was while he was going through trash, and when she pressed him, Yuuya said it was dangerous to associate too closely with him. After that, while she stayed friendly and continued to cover for and talk to him, she cooled a little and focused more on other friends, to Yuuya’s equally hidden relief and slight disappointment.
At the tail of summer, the doctor took Yuuya aside. He had given Sakuya the customary pre-admittance physical examination in the spring and knew he was not a Le Bel. Shuu threatened to expose Sakuya in the harshest manner possible, unless Yuuya worked with him - Shuu had had an old injury to one wing and couldn’t do heavy lifting, but Yuuya was a young dove, and clever, even aside from the suspected-spy thing, which he didn’t admit to.
The Le Bels are awful people. Being exposed so openly might not just mean Sakuya getting kicked out into the street, though that would be bad enough - he was smart but had poor interpersonal skills and was not at all savvy or able to function on his own yet. Other potential heirs had sent assassins after Sakuya in the past. Even if Yuuya confessed everything to his Dove Party superiors and asked for their help - which went very much against his nature, and he didn’t even think of it for a long time - the Le Bels were powerful.
So Yuuya became complicit. He falsified reports, covered for the doctor, cleaned up the blood and incinerated the remains of one of Shuu’s victims, and tended the ones Shuu wanted alive - some imprisoned, some let go with stitches and confusion - as well as taking on more infirmary duties to free up his time. Shuu was working on something and had entire other rooms somewhere, but while his new help saw more, he didn’t get to see everything.
Yuuya hated this, but continued on with the same outwards careless cheer, even still vanishing now and then to go on simpler, action-y missions for the Dove Party. He couldn’t stop Shuu even by killing him - things had been set up so word would get out if the doctor died, and Yuuya needed time to find and disable them. Which he didn’t have. Yuuya ran himself ragged doing... small things, instead; quietly sabotaging some experiments, trying to prevent birds Shuu was interested in from being caught, leaving the ids of missing students out where they could be found, managing to get some birds slated for death free. He was very careful not to be implicated, and so did less than he could’ve.
In October a discouraged doctor put a hold on his in-school work and spent more time out of the city or working with older samples; the imprisoned students were released with no real memories of what had gone on, and Yuuya was released from his extra duties. Things returned to relative calm at the school, though Yuuya still could not tell anyone. With more time to spare he found one of those blackmail safeguards on Shuu’s computer, but didn’t know if it was the only one, and was reluctant to cold-bloodedly kill somebirdie who wasn’t actively in the process of chopping students up.
Late in December the party ordered him to investigate some mysterious tree-stealing individuals dubbed the Christmas Thieves. It was a ridiculous, straightforwards-looking case that Yuuya took on with a degree of eagerness, and almost immediately after discussing it late at night with JB they hit the school. Sakuya had had a lovely tree in the school council room, which was bombed and the tree destroyed. Yuuya gave chase but couldn’t catch them, and only got a picture of the thieves as they made off with the tree topper.
The next day, finding that Sakuya and Hiyoko were investigating, he gave them the photo. Sakuya was angry that Yuuya hadn’t alerted him, and Yuuya calmly said that he hadn’t been able, since Sakuya had repeatedly refused to give him his phone number. Yuuya suggested they use Sakuya’s grand home tree as bait, and Hiyoko helped get Sakuya to agree to the plan. Yuuya had clout with the newspapers and could get that announced.
That evening the thieves brought a tank, and neither Le Bel security nor Hiyoko’s valiance could stop it. Yuuya was there with an anti-material rifle, but although he put some holes in it ultimately it didn’t really do any good and he got his tailfeathers burnt protecting Hiyoko from the cannon. Shuu showed up and got Hiyoko to throw a gas grenade that disabled the thieves, revealing that they were sentient but simpleminded genetically engineered mammal-bird hybrids created by a different researcher. Named Miru and Kaku, they were Christmas-obsessed and had been running around for years, ever since they were set free.
Shuu said the grenade had worked better because of those holes and thus gave some credit to Yuuya, much to Yuuya’s surprise. He also had Miru and Kaku live in the infirmary and was relatively patient and gentle around them. For Shuu, anyway.
During all this Yuuya had gotten a look at Sakuya’s crow butler Albert, and he didn’t like the man at all. Actually, Yuuya went and used Dove Party resources to investigate him. It took a while before he got results.
Late in January Shuu went elsewhere for a week, leaving Yuuya in charge of the infirmary. He did well at it. During this time a mad scientist rival of Shuu’s named Tohri decided to destroy the school with a laser weapon relying on a student’s hallucinogenic/reality-warping ability and powered by the fantasies of captive otaku birds. (Yes, really.) Yuuya’s connections with the Dove Party meant that when this weapon was destroyed, he had birds to help him get all the otaku out before the building crumbled.
Albert’s history was revealed in early spring. Yuuya’d thought he might be a spy, but he turned out to be an assassin! He was barely persuaded to wait and hear the details, which included the fact that Albert had killed one of JB’s coworkers, before he went and staked out the mansion, staying for days until he saw Albert taking off while holding a knife. Yuuya figuratively lost his head (You think I’ll let you!?) and got knocked out. His last words before losing consciousness and his first on regaining it were for Sakuya to run. With a lot more patience than usual, Sakuya told him the circumstances of the night - Miru and Kaku had been sneaking in to use a bathroom and Albert was to catch and scare them - and of Albert. Sakuya was both client and target, because this kept Albert from being employed by Sakuya’s enemies and because Albert, waiting for the signal, had to keep Sakuya alive until then. Yuuya had to accept this arrangement, but told the butler that if he did hurt Sakuya, he would be hunted to the ends of the earth and back.
Near the end of term a number of birds including Sakuya, Hiyoko, and Shuu went to watch a lunar eclipse on the roof, fell asleep, and had a long synchronized dream. Yuuya and JB, who hadn’t been up there, found them and could not wake them. Yuuya used some Inception-y tech to get into the shared dream through Sakuya, but rather than explain the circumstances right away he elected to chat and was ejected by his furious brother. Tohri showed up and was upset at not getting to fight his rival, so elected to help by clearing the clouds with his new improved laser weapon. After JB insisted that he was to try and get everybirdie out, not to try and take a hit for his brother, Yuuya went back into the dream.
He found Hiyoko and one of her friends, but they couldn’t get out. The dream was an element of the afterlife, the Holiday Star, created by a ghost called the King who was too afraid to move on. The King trapped them in a weird dark place. A wandering ghost dove gave them hints about what to do, and Yuuya split up from them. His first instinct was to protect the lady, but he knew she’d be safer with her friend. Yuuya found Sakuya and got him to want to leave by emphasizing the local lack of taste. Hiyoko’s childhood friend Ryouta took longer, since he was afraid of being apart from Hiyoko. Yuuya spoke to him patiently and at length, eventually convincing him partly with a confession that his own confidence and lack of fear was in part a bluff.
He met briefly with Hiyoko and her friend again and found out that one person was still missing - Hiyoko’s homeroom teacher Nanaki. Hiyoko went on to confront the King while Yuuya went on search and rescue. JB was able to briefly contact him and explain that he was about to administer psychotropics to both Yuuya and Nanaki, which apparently would help. Some of the King’s ghostly citizens tried to get in Yuuya’s way and he tried to explain, but eventually said if there was no negotiation he would make them move. They turned out to be projections of the King.
The King brought up Yuuya’s one greatest sin, the breaking of his brother’s egg, and offered to take the pain from him by absorbing him. Yuuya refused. That pain was part of him, who he was; he had accepted his guilt and what it meant, which was a thought so alien to the King that he left.
Yuuya found Nanaki in a deep pit. The quail was eyeless here and wanted to stay. Yuuya kept at it and tried to help out when Nanaki started trying to find him, only for the quail to try and strangle him. Getting clear, Yuuya talked to him soothingly, concluded that Nanaki had mistaken him for someone else, and managed to remind him that there were things he still needed to do in the real world. He went on to guide the quail out and help Hiyoko and Sakuya and the others fight the King, performing a delaying action while Hiyoko and Nageki went after the source of the King’s power.
The Holiday Star dissolved back into normal afterlife dreamstuff; the King became a normal quail ghost and those he had absorbed became normal ghosts again and were sent on along by Death, who also sent the dreaming birds and Hiyoko along back towards waking. Sakuya begrudgingly admitted that Yuuya had helped, which made Yuuya very happy.
Something he had seen had profoundly affected Shuu, who even weeks later was unusually withdrawn and quiet, disinterested in his work. He left infirmary duties increasingly to Yuuya, but then the term ended and Yuuya had to graduate and leave the school without finding and disabling other safeguards.
He was sent on various temporary assignments by a new handler and knew it was only a matter of time before he was stationed out of the city entirely - Yuuya was becoming increasingly recognizable to the wrong sorts of people and had to be careful in public. Leaving and letting Shuu maybe go back to experimenting on students and announcing Sakuya’s heritage, letting whoever got his assignment next go in half blind, seemed like his next terrible forced choice. Confessing things would lead to his ruin in several ways... but if it saved Sakuya, it would be worth it, right?
Point in canon: Some weeks after graduation, before Yuuya can decide what to do or be sent away. The same day of the same month as in Cittagazze.
Window Location: A dusty classroom in an abandoned hall on campus which once had a medical ward underneath. The whole building’s been sealed off for years. Saint Pigeonation’s is in Littledove Hatchiman City, part of Japan.
Universe: It’s really a lot darker than the premise suggests.
This started out as a 'verse very like ours on the surface, though the global Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 (thought to be a mutated bird flu) was somewhat worse in this universe.
In 2068 a new strain of influenza - natural or designed is never specified - became endemic to aviankind, easily spreading from them to humans. This strain was nicknamed Sumatra Flu, and it was absolutely devastating; it killed humans rapidly but was relatively benign to birds, so wherever birds went, particularly pigeons, humans started dying en masse. By 2070 billions had died, and the global human population had dropped to thirty percent of what it was in 2068, with no signs of stopping.
In desperation, human scientists came up with an avian annihilation project, "Operation Carneades", a lethal virus tailored to birds. They released this in summer of 2070, and there was a brief, hideous drop in bird populations. Many species went extinct. But the Carneades virus had a strange effect on the birds which were resistant - it uplifted them. By late 2071 pigeons had begun to understand the situation and organize. By December they had started to launch attacks on the humans. That was called Hitchcock Winter.
In 2075 the birds adopted their own declaration of independence in the Philippines, and humans and birdkind went to war for thirty years. By 2105 there were a mere 140 million humans alive on Earth - 4.6% of the pre-flu population, a prehistoric low. Ten percent was directly due to war deaths. The rest was Sumatra Flu. The remaining humans were resistant to the virus, and there was a ceremonial cease-fire agreement, but the humans in Japan, at least, were largely kind of penned up in reservations and not given political rights, even the right to govern themselves. They could hold jobs within bird society - this was the only way they could make money, as there were still some skills birds couldn't manage - but they had few rights. Human resistance movements cropped up frequently in the next century. After a harsh suicide bombing, truce rules in Japan were drawn up and habitats were more strictly segregated, humans restricted to living in those reservations.
Two main political factions exist in global bird society - the Dove Party and the Hawk Party. In a nutshell, the Doves believe in trying to live and integrate peacefully with the remaining humans, while the Hawks want to restrict or even exterminate them. There's more to both, of course, it’s not as black-and-white as it looks, and a Crow Party is mentioned without much context. The average bird might be fine with the few humans they know, even considering them friends, and still think of humanity as dangerous and hostile.
For whatever reason - maybe there had been humans sympathetic to the birds, teaching them language and how to organize - the new bird-run civilization is strikingly similar to the old human one. In fact, they largely seem to have just filled the vacancies, though there are some abandoned skyscrapers around. The same countries exist, schools are set up in familiar ways, there's similar infrastructure and traffic laws, music classes still study long-dead human composers, birds write and consume books and manga (some are birdified versions of 21st century stuff), there is Google and online porn... It's almost all recognizable, just mostly adapted so birds have easier uses of it.
Doves and pigeons of all species were the first to become truly intelligent, and were the most numerous besides, and so they dominate the population and all professions. Doves of particular breeding lines like the Le Bels are a kind of nobility. The uplift effects of the virus spread slowly to other avian species and, gradually, birds of many varieties hatched that grew a little slower and larger, had greater dexterity, and lived longer, though pigeons still live considerably briefer lives than humans. Recently uplifted species take some time to adjust to the lifestyle. By this point, 2188, the Prime Minister of Japan is a shoebill stork and kakapos have just become uplifted enough to be able to be toilet-trained. Other known citizen birds include various species of parrot, pelicans, java sparrows, quails, partridges, pheasants, puffins, seagulls, and crows. There's a certain psychological fragility to many birds, which is speculated to be due to the uplift process, and some individuals are "ferals" or "throwbacks", less intelligent to various degrees.
Poultry seem to be spared and uplifted birds continue raising and slaughtering them for food. A character has noticed that a (non-sentient) swallow parent is tending its offspring four months after all swallow chicks should be grown and out on their own, and speculated that all birds must be changing, but as of this point there are still numerous species which aren't sentient.
Oh, also: there are ghosts in this world, tied to locations near where they died and visible only to the pure of heart, and they can pass on to an elaborate afterlife and chat with Death. The afterlife can also be visited by dreamers, and there is Inception-tech that can be used to let a sleeper enter someone else’s dream even if it’s afterlifey. Medical technology is imperfect, but researchers can create or tinker with life in labs, and mount human heads on robot bodies. The one human we know much about, Hiyoko Tousaka, has “hunter-gatherer instincts” that seem to serve as enhanced intuition. One bird believes himself to be the reincarnation of a fallen angel, and claims a similar origin for Tousaka. The fact that he exudes hallucinogenic pheromones and can draw people into elaborate fantasies with them would seem to make that entirely delusion, except that he also has strange powers and another character actually is the reincarnation of a god.
Abilities: Um... well, he’s a fantail pigeon. A big one, and closer to garden than show variety. Here is another of his species, or here. Compared to “normal” pigeons he’s got proportionally longer and more robust legs, like those of a green peacock, but like many birds he can hunker down so his belly feathers hide them. With his neck stretched out and not counting the tail he’s about three feet long with a wingspan of seven feet, and while walking he’s a little under three feet tall. If he’s standing still he can kind of settle back and stretch his neck upwards to be somewhat taller. Weightwise he’s under twenty five pounds.
Naturally he’s able to fly, though this flight is more ballistic than that of “normal” pigeons. As a pigeon he also has some inherent homing ability, a good sense for navigation, and an ability to see ultraviolet light. And unlike most birds, he can drink without tossing his head back.
Despite... being a bird, Yuuya has a fair degree of grasping or manipulative ability with his wings. Part of uplifting meant changing the wing structure somehow, allowing birds to do things like pick up boxes. It's never elaborated on, but I like to believe fingers in the wing have resurfaced like in hoatzin chicks - not enough to move individually or typically be seen through the feathers, but enough for a small alula claw and a surface that can serve like a palm does in grasping. Apparently flight feathers are now prehensile too.
He’s got to apply beak and feet sometimes and even then he’s not got human-level variable dexterity, but he gets by pretty well. Yuuya is a fantastic hacker/codebreaker and a rapid texter, and he’s physically as well as mentally capable of nurse duties, though he needs specialized beak-mounted tweezers for tasks requiring both strength and precision.
In his world pigeons have adopted the various human languages, though with... birdie flairs and occasional cooing. Yuuya's fluent in Japanese, French, English, and Standard Chinese, and he can leave out the bird flairs. He's got some ability with other languages, just... less.
Yuuya is extremely fit - Hiyoko once says he’s “ripped” - and can move with great stealth. The Dove Party taught him some kind of physical fighting and how to knock someone out from behind without hurting them, and he is good with many kinds of guns made for birds, though he’d have difficulty with ones made for humans. In the water, he can swim so well that he can act as a lifeguard. ...Possibly just for other birds, though. He is strong, but decidedly smaller than a human.
Also he’s carrying the Carneades virus. He’ll be careful about that and it can’t survive long without a host, but... it is airborne, and there’s a distinct possibility of infecting ‘normal’ birds he comes in contact with. A naive bird that survives infection will change, though how much depends on maturity. None in the first generation will reach full sentience, but young birds will grow larger and end up smarter than infected adults, and any infected bird’s new offspring will be more affected. Enough for a degree of cooperation and language use. It takes three or four generations for wing dexterity to start appearing, and several generations of the virus being passed on for birds who achieve things like complex morality and advanced perspective-taking to be born, and physical changes will continue for many generations to come. By then the birds are too changed to be able to breed with natives of the original species, or to want to.
...I’m assuming the infected birds are pigeons. Some birds of other species might do the same, larger birds won't get as dramatically larger, some will change little or not at all but still carry and spread the virus, and their descendents may change more dramatically. Many other birds just won’t survive.
Possessions: Yuuya comes in with a kind of “backpack” that’s common for his world - the straps resemble a bird harness and like that one are partially hidden by his feathers; what isn’t, is covered by his yellow tie. The cargo compartment contains an iPon (Hato iPhone of The Future), synthetic preen oil, several pairs of little dove glasses in lightweight cases, a dose of antibiotics, a folded blue dove tuxedo, and a pistol.
His vision is fine and he wears glasses nominally as a fashion statement. One pair has built-in camera capabilities, another can amplify light to let him see in darker conditions, a third functions like sunglasses with adjustable tints, the rest are just for style. The camera glasses can sync to his iPon, which is also useful for hacking. The pistol is also lightweight, and is in a concealed compartment. It’s quiet and made for dove use, so humans would have trouble using it. He brought enough ammunition for five shots; they are extremely low caliber, though. We're talking barely more than a BB gun: it could kill a bird or even a human, but it would need to be used at close range and with precision.
Personality: “We cannot see tomorrow. All we can do is put on our bravest smiles and march forwards into the new day!”
At a glance, Yuuya is a confident carefree flirt, a ladies’ man (hen’s cock?), talkative, and a little absurd. He knows and is friendly and acts familiar with everyone. Sometimes smarmy, he seems to take absolutely everything in stride, accepting even insults and slights with the same air of careless, cheery ease. He’s gracious when corrected, and while he’s got a minor competitive streak his attitude is outwardly the same win or lose. Frequently absent from school, he doesn’t seem to care about much, including the future.
Yuuya is sexist in the chivalric way, but less so than he appears at first. It largely seems to be a surface thing. He’ll call anyone beautiful but is more effusive towards women; he may use cheesy pickup lines, typically as a greeting; he likes to be gallant to women and feels more protective towards them. But he’s not at all displeased when women don’t act delicate, he’s willing to believe they can take care of themselves, and he honestly does have respect for them in general. He’s gracious if told to knock it off and his most absurd pronouncements are reserved for when he’s flirted at back. It’s fun. In non-flirtatious/teasing situations he will often barely give lip service to flirtation, and then proceed to be relaxedly friendly or very professional, depending.
Despite an obvious social nature he’s oddly aloof and opaque. It’s always hard to tell what he’s really thinking about serious things. Just past the carefree surface he always wants to appear in control, of himself if not the situation. Yuuya’s quite free about physical intimacy and is very forwards, but if he talks about himself - and he doesn’t like to, aside from in passing - it will be largely lies. He’s really more of a very extroverted loner. Yuuya has many friends and is admired, but it’s almost all on the surface.
It's not a big part of him, but Yuuya's a little nerdy. Familiar with videogame conventions and the term "banhammered", anyway. When he has free time and no lady to spend it with he likes that kind of entertainment. He's also a bit of a romantic, as evidenced by some of the language he uses, and enjoys a little nostalgia.
Not-so-secretly he’s more cold-blooded and cynical than he seems. And defiant - he switched eggs, he slipped out of his adoptive noble branch and reassumed a commoner’s name, he’s persistent, teasing, and apparently unshakeably cheerful to some people (mostly Sakuya) he knows find it annoying, he is foreign in a Japanese school (always a good way to end up ostracized) and uses gratuitous French and English to call more attention to it.
He does have some respect for authority, but it’s on his own terms. Yuuya will answer to others easily enough, though he feels it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission sometimes, and in the end he really answers to himself.
When he isn’t coming off as cheerfully careless, he’s usually coming off as some degree or another of professional and competent, which can startle people. Sometimes the two attitudes are blended. If it’s called for he has a pretty good bedside manner too. Yuuya is the equivalent of a teenaged superspy, and he may happily show off a little if the situation calls for those skills to be used, but he’s unlikely to tell anyone how he got them.
Yuuya lies. He lies and withholds information if it doesn’t seem relevant at the moment, even if it would be better if he shared. He lies, deflects, and dissembles almost pathologically, and he’s got layers. The careless ~sexy and luxurious~ upperclassman is certainly part of him, yes, and so is the daring young superspy he shows people he’s closer to, but they’re both hiding something else. Yuuya’s unsure of himself and indecisive, he is burdened by guilt, and despite outer appearances he does not like himself much.
Sometimes, he’ll show that a little to someone he likes and trusts to some degree, talking about himself as a failure, speaking in a self-deriding or despairing way. He doesn’t want to worry people, though, and this really only comes out in dark moments. Even then he tends to lie and dissemble as he catches himself. Insults and taunting don’t bring him down much, even if his past is brought up - someone remarks that he has a heart of used tires, indestructible, and appears relaxed and calm even when accused of murder.
It’s his past actions and failures as seen by himself that weigh on him. There are many situations where he’s felt that he didn’t do any good, or even did harm, despite his best efforts. It all goes back to his childhood, really. The fact that he didn’t smash his half-brother’s egg until Sakuya was sure to hatch, the fact that he incubated it himself so he could switch it back if no chick was forthcoming, meant that when he did break the egg, the squab inside was fairly developed. And it’s left an impact.
If this secret is discovered, he doesn’t freak out or seek to explain himself. Yuuya carries the guilt of what he did, and knows he can’t change it, and he will not pass it on, though he does often think he should tell Sakuya. The least he can do is remember, himself, and carry it. It’s part of him. He’s accepted it.
Despite the weight of his many sins and failures, Yuuya can always continue on with a smile, and not even he knows how much of it is a bluff. Nobirdie can live without hurting anyone else. Nobirdie can ever be replaced. All he can do is keep going.
Yuuya remains outwardly cheerful when faced with Sakuya’s scorn, but there is resentment there, which he’s careful not to show him. At times he thinks of his brother as childish, and he does resent insults sometimes. He just doesn’t show it except to the very few he trusts. Yuuya’s noticed Sakuya’s enthusiasm and passion for music. As much as he dreads the idea of his brother being disowned and stripped of the Le Bel name, as much as the little aristocrat annoys him sometimes, he still wants to see Sakuya follow his dreams.
While he’s pretty fine with people not liking his little brother, Sakuya’s life and happiness means everything to him. When he thinks Sakuya is really, pressingly threatened Yuuya loses his cool and becomes raw and desperate. If Sakuya is seriously attacked, Yuuya completely discards his sense of self-preservation - there is a route where he covers Sakuya’s body with his own, not even trying to grab at the weapon.
He’s quite slow to care about anyone else to that same degree, but he does care about people - he doesn’t lose his head, but he will similarly lunge to tackle people out of the way of attacks and think nothing at all of injuries received on the way. And he has some concern for emotional hurts too. He might think derisive thoughts, but he knows better than to speak them. When talking to Ryouta about Hiyoko and the changing nature of relationships, Yuuya was patient, fairly gentle, and even let go of one of his secrets - that some of his cheerful attitude is a bluff.
He will put himself at risk for others even besides his brother, if that doesn’t conflict with protecting Sakuya. Yuuya bears few grudges and will bring his characteristic unflappability to bear when helping drowning swimmers who half crush him, or soothing hostages who try to strangle him. He is better than he thinks he is, deep down. He’s just not as good as he’d have anyone who’s seen him act heroic believe.
Thread Sample: Here
Prose Sample: For quite a while after he’d first been put on that assignment, Yuuya had enjoyed going through the school at night. It had such an air of mystery to it in the dark. He’d used to fantasize about showing Hiyoko. Primate night vision was so much better than a dove’s, and perhaps she would have led him by the wing.
This time, while he tried to enjoy the clandestine atmosphere, the knowledge that he was sneaking back into the school after graduation, it only went so far. Not that he’d expected otherwise. Those nights helping the doctor had wiped away a lot of the pleasant nostalgia of those older times.
Regardless, he had no trouble getting in and navigating the corridors until he had found the door to the maintenance office. That he pecked at in a particular sequence of soft taps, until it was opened and he sauntered inside.
Mister One - JB - locked the door behind Yuuya. The static generator on the low tea-table clicked and started up apparently by itself, whirring softly and interfering with any listening devices. Maybe he’d had it synchronized with the lock. The cockatiel made his slow way farther into the maintenance office and turned towards Yuuya, grave. “Sit down. Let’s keep it brief. A choice for you, Sakazaki.”
He was always like this, and as he sank into crouching position Yuuya couldn’t not comment on it. “To the point as ever, Mister One. Your mysterious disappearance set many crests to raising, and the moment you summon me it’s another choice?”
JB ignored the irrelevant remark, as he always did. There was something comforting in his constance. “Sakazaki Yuuya. You are no longer a student at this school, and as a supposed college student you cannot be immediately signed on as staff. Any roles you now play in the investigation will be minor - so, you are free.”
“In a way, sure. My schedule’s heavy with short-term assignments. You’ve seen some of them, right? I miss your suave commentary.” Yuuya’s orders came from another fantail pigeon these days, but the man was so good at being covert and ignorable that he apparently had no personality at all. It was like conversing with a list.
“If you accept this, they’re off the table indefinitely. You might get special assignments now and then, but it’s likely you would be out of contact much of the time.” JB regarded him gravely. “I know the last long term was hard on you, Sakazaki. This is high priority, but I’m giving you a choice.”
The cockatiel had no idea how hard it had gotten. And by now, it was far too late for Yuuya to tell him. “You’re very fond of giving me choices. Don’t you ever wonder what happens if I make the wrong ones?”
There was a pause as JB glanced at the table. Yuuya followed his gaze with the eye on that side, but saw nothing of note but documents. At last JB said, “You wouldn’t be the first agent to do that, and you won’t be the last. But I’m not offering this out of charity. Frankly, you’re the best agent in the country at dealing with humans, bar none. This assignment calls for contact with a great number of naive humans. Ones unaffected by the last century or so of our history.”
“And that means...”
“No general immunity. Minimal experience dealing with birds that aren’t animals or pets. They even govern themselves.”
Yuuya pulled his head back, touching his chin to his chest. “But that’s not possible. There could be some on an island somewhere, I suppose, but Sumatra Flu... It’s not everywhere like it used to be, but it’s reached every corner of the globe. There aren’t any humans left without immunity.”
“Nonetheless, there we have it. They haven’t been exposed at all. One of the factors in sending someone there is a concern for not changing that. Naturally, no one from the Hawk Party has any idea.”
There was already unusual emphasis on containing diseases at Saint. Pigeonations, since it had a human representative. But Hiyoko enjoyed hereditary immunity, and besides that she had been interacting with birdkind since she was a chick. Chances were that she would fight off the Sumatra Flu without even noticing, if it tried her at all. Naive humans...
“And there is another concern,” the cockatiel said, his tone deceptively placid. He picked up one of the files with delicate wingtips, opened it, and in his terse, blunt way, explained windows, the city, and dæmons.
If this had been anyone else, Yuuya would have thought he was being teased. That wasn’t in JB’s nature, though, and he knew it. So the fantail was quiet.
Yuuya had been raised Christian and with the concept of dualism, and so the idea of his soul and the rest of him being separated wasn’t as dismaying as it might be to a proper Japanese bird. Still. And the idea of souls being such real things - so, what would happen to his, in the end?
“It sounds like something out of science fiction,” he had to say eventually. “How soon do you want my answer?”
“Quickly, Sakazaki. We don’t know the situation there. It could lead to such Bright and Massive things as I don’t like to speculate about. Or to ruin and another round of wars, or not much at all. But even if we turned our backs, the window is still there, and if we don’t take this chance...” JB shook his head and stood up to put on a pot of coffee. No doubt he wanted his answer by the time it was finished brewing.
Well, Yuuya thought. This... window was on school grounds. If it stayed open, Yuuya could advise and help his replacement discover those things that needed to come to the Dove Party’s attention. He might have an unusual avenue of retreat, and he would be more boldly able to search out the doctor’s secret space, those other computers where his failsafe program was. And if it stayed open, Yuuya might never be far from Sakuya.
If he put it that way... Yuuya stood. “What would you want me to do?”
Plans: I’d like sort of unusual circumstances here - namely that Yuuya’s former superior/handler, Leone JB/”Mister One” came through the window first, as said in the prose sample. JB is a cockatiel around the size of a large Hycanith Macaw. He would have ended up with an Egyptian Vulture, but he would have rejected the offer and gone home.
Yuuya will be seeking to join the medical staff, and making up for the NPC nurses having no personalities by having far too much of one. Ahaha.
...he’ll try and settle in, get a feather on the pulse of goings on, and eventually start snooping. If he tells anyone he’s from the Dove Party, it’ll take a good while. He’ll dissuade people from visiting his ‘verse and being exposed to Sumatra Flu, but he won’t really talk about Carneades, and... he may end up accidentally spreading the bird uplift virus. Maybe in Cittagazze. Maybe somewhere else.
Notes: Hatoful Boyfriend is two games. One has several "routes" in which the player, in command of Hiyoko, can focus on one bird or another, and one route where she dies and a lot of unsettling backstories only hinted at in the dating sim portion are revealed. The other is a mild AU, where all background elements are the same but some different things happen in the timeline. This app's history is a synthesis of both games and a story from the guidebook.
...Said guidebook also marks him as seventeen, but um... doves canonically don't live for nearly as long as humans, and still reach sexual maturity within a year. So I'm saying that to go with that, mental and emotional development takes somewhat less time than in humans. Age is only mentioned in the one place, and it might have been referring to his ICPSS - the pseudohuman appearance which has nothing to do with the plot, but is there to let new players feel more comfortable with a bird dating sim.
DÆMON
Name: Canaille, but he almost always calls her Mon Coeur (my heart), so it’s easy to think that’s her name.
Sex: Female
Form: Channel-billed Cuckoo
Additional notes: From the Hatoverse. I don’t know the canon state of these birds. It's not yet been said! It's not too likely to be said; Moa is conservative about world details. But I will assume that channel-billed cuckoos survived and are very slow to change. Still normal sized, they don't have prehensile flight feathers or significant added intelligence, but wing structure has changed slightly and there's a tiny curved claw like that of a rail or vulture at each alula.
Her dark gray wings are maybe a shade darker than is common, but nothing too unusual, there seems to be a certain variability in photos. The black bands on her underside, particularly her lower tailfeathers, are wider, so the white tips of these feathers are tiny, barely existent. And her feathers are typically slightly disarrayed or ragged, rather like his. These are a reflection of the guilt Yuuya carries - not slowing him down, not obvious to others as meaning anything, still very much part of him.
He’ll likely seek to dye the striking red skin around her eyes.
Why this form: A pale bird, easily mistaken for a raven, a hornbill, or a bird of prey, which moves around a lot... and is a brood parasite. Females of the species lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, sometimes eating the host’s eggs to make room, and leave the hosts to raise them. The genus, Scythrops, means angry/sullen face/eye/countenance and refers to that red eye skin. It reflects in general a side of himself he doesn't like to show. Resentment is part of him, and guilt and self loathing, and the spite that was half of Yuuya’s reason for switching the eggs. He did this very early in his life - doves reach sexual maturity within a year of birth, but their minds are still very young at that stage - and it’s left a great impact on him.
Channel-billed Cuckoos will feed in groups, sometimes of mixed species, but otherwise tend to be solitary outside of mating season, when they form pair-bonds and cooperate closely. Yuuya often has one or two people he lets get closer than most, though they’re not necessarily romantic interests.