(no subject)

[espigeonage]

savetheearth

OOC Information:
Name: Joysweeper
Are you over 15? Yup.
Contact: PM me at this journal, or see me on Plurk at Joysweeper

IC Information:

Name: Sakazaki Yuuya in canon. Reincarnation’s name is Julien Sakazaki - in Japan names are ordered family name, then personal name, wheras in the West it’s the other way around.

Canon: Hatoful Boyfriend

Age: 13 in HB. 23 as Julien - his birthday is April 25. As an uplifted pigeon Yuuya doesn’t age quite like humans do. Physical and sexual development finish within five years, intellectual and emotional development takes longer and depend on individuals and circumstances. While Yuuya's just graduated high school and Julien's not long out of college, they're in a similar place.

Preincarnation Appearance: A screenshot from one of the games, an ending card, and a bit of my fanart.

Basically, he’s an uplifted fantail pigeon three feet tall if he stretches, with a seven-foot wingspan and prehensile feathers on his wings.

Any differences: Well uh... Julien is human. He looks a lot like Yuuya's gijinka from the game - the pseudohuman appearance which has nothing to do with the plot but is there for OOC purposes.

Differences between that and reincarnated appearance: he's nearsighted and needs to wear glasses (Gijinka!Yuuya doesn't need glasses, he wears them for the same reason he does as a pigeon: fashion and they can be useful, gadgety things), he's not really in good shape, he's quite short at about five foot five, and his natural hair color is black. As happens sometimes with males, he started getting gray hairs in his teens. Julien hates those - he resembles his hated father somewhat and his father went gray/white early - so he bleaches all of his hair and dyes it pale blue. It's typically styled up to be spiky, though less anime-looking than the icons, and dark roots often show. Thanks to his mixed Asian-Caucasian ancestry his eyes are a similar shade of blue.

Preincarnated History: Hatoful Boyfriend takes place in a future where a disease devastated the human population. Birds became uplifted and took their place in society, though not without strife. If you want to see a more in-depth explanation of how this world came to diverge from “normal”, see here.

Personal history in depth is here. Bare-bones version:

Yuuya was born in Japan to a highly bred noblewoman and a leatherworker on society’s lowest rung. They’d eloped and were happy, but this state only lasted two years. His mother’s fiance, head of the powerful Le Bel family, caught up with them, had his father killed, and forced his mother to marry him and move to France. Le Bel would make sure young Yuuya was cared for, but only if the newly-laid egg containing Yuuya’s full brother was smashed.

His mother was distraught and Yuuya offered to smash the egg himself, but instead kept it, incubated it, waited until his mother laid a new egg with Le Bel, and covertly switched them. He smashed the new egg and saw his brother Sakuya raised up as the new Le Bel heir - as a snobbish aristocrat looking down on anyone with impure blood.

Yuuya wasn’t allowed to have much contact with him. He was sent to boarding schools and to live back in Japan. He also fell out of regular contact with his mother. Soon he wound up part of the Dove Party, a political faction that wanted to preserve the remaining humans and live in peace with them. In time he ended up as an agent in the espionage division, Heaven-Soaring Wings. They trained him, and he had particular aptitudes for using guns and hacking computers. He went out on some global missions.

At the appropriate age he enrolled in a prestigious high school, Saint Pigeonations’, to spy on the school’s doctor, a known agent for the anti-human Hawk Party who was suspected of experimenting on students. He was often absent on minor missions, and while he was known for being popular he was close to no one. Yuuya volunteered in the infirmary and by his third year was trusted and capable enough to run the place when the doctor was out. He made friends with the school's single human student, and when he found that during his third and final year Sakuya would be transferred in, a year under him, he had the choice of leaving so familiar connections wouldn't interfere, or staying. He stayed just so he could be near his brother more, though Sakuya hated him.

By that third year he was also incautious enough that his snooping was found out. The doctor figured out that Sakuya wasn't a pure noble and blackmailed Yuuya into keeping quiet.

The Dove Party tasked Yuuya to stopping some thieves who he found were more dangerous than expected, and also they were not birds or humans but weird hybrid creatures created by one of the doctor's deceased colleagues. The doctor took them in and stayed creepy, but seemed to mellow out a bit. In the succeeding months Yuuya helped stop a laser attack, confronted his brother's assassin butler, had the hybrid things act as his assistants, and messed up some plans in the criminal underworld. I have no idea just what he did, but it involved stopping criminals from getting some influential people.

Soon before graduation a number of staff and students went into a shared dream ruled over by a pain-averse ghost, who had become a kind of bizarre soul-absorbing horror. Yuuya used Inception-style tech to access the dream and helped the dreamers fight the ghost, who at one point offered to absorb Yuuya so he would feel no more guilt or pain. He refused. To help encourage a deeply troubled student who was considering the offer, Yuuya had a long talk with him, during which he revealed more of his personal philosophy and true nature than usual, including that some of his cheer was a bluff.

The ghost was defeated, Sakuya grudgingly admitted that Yuuya had helped, and by the time Yuuya graduated the doctor still hadn't been able to get past something that had shocked him to the core.

Reincarnated History Julien was born in Quebec to parents who were both Asian-Caucasian mutts, most of their Asian blood coming from Japan. His father was very wealthy and influential, his mother not so much. When he was five they divorced acrimoniously. Julien lived with his mother, who moved to the States and remarried. His new stepfather was kind of distant, and growing up Julien felt betrayed by his father, who he was said to resemble.

For a while he compensated with humor, becoming the class clown and sometimes playing hooky. In time this faded back, but he remains someone who doesn't normally show what he's really feeling, and who just about always seems lighthearted and carefree.

Besides the divorce and moving, Julien's life has been fairly uneventful. His family once sheltered in a basement while a tornado passed by, he had an ear pierced once and the hole has since filled in, he's done all manner of absurd things with his hair as soon as gray appeared in it, he took up smoking for a year or so and then quit... Lots of little things like that. He lived in Locke City for some years as an early teenager, but moved away.

He has a sister, Cecilia, six years his elder who he’s fairly close to and is aware that his estranged father has had kids, but doesn’t know much about them except that there’s a brother or a half brother somewhat younger than him out there. While he’s had a lot of friends, most of them are/were casual only - he’s got a massive Facebook flist and is fun to hang out with, but there are few people he’s close with.

Julien encountered a very modern problem after graduating high school - not having any idea of what he wanted to do with his life, he spent a good while in college trying to figure himself out, racked up a mountain of debt, and couldn’t get a good job. Julien ended up moving into the spare room of his older sister back in Locke City, since the job market was a little better there and because he could help take care of her baby daughter. He's been there for just under a year, bouncing from job to job.

Since he’s decent with computers, he currently works tech support part time in an office, but he knows he has no job security and doesn't like it. Julien knows he should be on a confirmed career path, but... he’s just kind of drifting.

First Echo: His sister Cecilia has a little daughter, Val, who's talking but not very skilled at it yet. She can't pronounce "Julien" yet but calls him something that sounds like it's in the middle, between his preincarnation name and current one. He's always responded just as readily to "You" as "Julien", but hearing it from a giggly toddler sent a weird chill through him.

What it gives him is Yuuya's desire to be, and stay, in good shape. Not an instant physical change, but he's been motivated to spend more of his time exercising.

Preincarnation Personality: 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 insults with the same air of careless, cheery ease with which he responds to compliments. Even if accused of a murder he had something to do with, he seems relaxed. He’s gracious when corrected, and while he’s got a minor competitive streak his attitude is outwardly the same win or lose. He doesn’t seem to care about much, including his future. Just under the surface Yuuya's kind of dorky and a romantic, too.

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. He’s really more of a very extroverted loner. Yuuya has many friends and is admired, but it’s almost all on the surface.

Not-so-secretly he’s more cold-blooded, cynical, and defiant than he seems. Willing to get his feathers dirty, literally or otherwise. 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 only to himself. He's also quite impulsive in the heat of the moment and likely to do things that turn out to be poor decisions.

When he isn’t coming off as cheerfully careless, he’s usually coming off as some degree or another of professional and competent. 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 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 - impulsive, remember. He lies, deflects, and dissembles almost pathologically, hating to reveal that he's been lying, 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, 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.

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 when he was little. 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.

Yuuya feels immense guilt and shame over what he did, and knows he can’t change it, and he keeps quiet about it. Though he does often think he should tell Sakuya, that would mean revealing the lie - he might do it, but not casually. Until then the least he can do is remember by himself, and carry that weight. It’s part of him. Maybe he doesn't like himself, but he's accepted what he's done and what it means about him. It drives him to try and be a better person, more forgiving, more concerned for people.

Despite the weight of his sins and failures, Yuuya can always continue on with a smile, and not even he knows how much of it is a bluff. He's become philosophical about things. 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 mean 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. Sakuya is also his weakness, in that Yuuya can be blackmailed or otherwise made to do things he usually wouldn't if his brother's safety is brought up. This is, though, also a good way to make him hate someone and search for ways around it.

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 hard-kept personal secrets.

He will put himself at risk for others even besides his brother, if that doesn’t conflict with protecting Sakuya. He loves the idea of being protective and supportive and loving to someone younger and less careworn. 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.

Any differences: Julien doesn’t have that sort of dark history driving him. There was the divorce, which led to him being kind of lighthearted and opaque even now, and there's an impressive college debt looming over him which he's frankly unlikely to ever be able to pay. Neither are as big to him as siblicide is to Yuuya, and he doesn't feel as responsible for either. The memory of the divorce is not really weighing down on him, the debt kind of is, but it isn't driving him to do good and help people in the same way. Oh, he's a decent sort, but he's not motivated, he's lazier and more complacent than Yuuya. He is trying to distinguish himself from his father by being better than him, at least.

Since he's never had much to hide, Julien's not such a good liar, but he's decent at being opaque. His sister Cecelia can read him anyway. He's closer to her than Yuuya was to... well, anyone, and in that he's probably healthier. He loves her dearly and helps support her when he can but there isn't the same need to take care of her that Yuuya had for Sakuya. There also isn't that same resentment, though with his driftiness, student debt, and inability to get a good job he does feel a little inferior to her sometimes. Instead of wanting to be a big brother Julien wants to be an excellent uncle for Val. He's troubled sometimes remembering that he has a younger brother or a half brother, but tries not to think about that, since he's had no contact with his wealthy father's side.

While he tends to have a pretty even, happy-looking keel and doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, less has happened to Julien, so he's more sheltered and doesn't have the same degree of blatant unflappability. He'll show shock, anger, etc much more easily than as Yuuya, he won't take things in stride as easily, or smile so much when his world is breaking, and he's not so philosophical and accepting of things.

Julien's been trying to find what he wants to do for a while now, restless, and so he's dabbled in a number of things. He's thought about the military but couldn't get past boot camp. He's learned enough cooking to play sous chef, enough about computers to work as office tech support, enough about basic first aid to be employed as a summer camp counselor sometimes. He can drive a motorcycle but doesn't have one right now.

Also, since he's grown up human, he's grown up with clear gender roles, plus he's not entirely secure in himself. So, unlike Yuuya, to whom these things are kind of quaint and have nothing to do with the real world (Birds don't habitually wear clothes and doves are not dimorphic like humans) he's not inclined to crossdress. And he has no tendency to catchphrase - he doesn't say "Salut!" and "Adieu!", he rarely uses variations of "Sexy and Suave". Though he might still say things like "That's a little cruel".

Abilities: Um... well, Yuuya is an oversized fantail pigeon, closer to garden than show variety. Compared to “normal” pigeons he’s got proportionally longer and more robust legs, like those of a green peacock, making walking and running easier. 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. Weightwise he’s under twenty five pounds. He lacks mammalian vocal chords but can speak human languages because of a parrotlike syrinx.

Being a pigeon comes with some inherent skills: flight, an inherent homing ability and navigation-sense, hideous blithering fantastic color vision (humans are trichromats and can distinguish up to ten million colors. Pigeons are pentachromats and can distinguish ten billion - so, he could see as if under a blacklight, if things that had been in the same place for ages had been moved recently, if something was recently painted over, etc). Unlike most birds, they can drink without tossing their heads back. I'm sure this will be great consolation when he starts to physically change.

You'd think having feathered wings would mean very low manual dexterity, but it's not so! Uplifted pigeons have somewhat altered wing structures. Palmlike surfaces are present under the primary covert feathers. Flight feathers are also prehensile, and while they can't take as firm a grip as human fingers, they're capable of more delicate manipulation. Threading a needle is easy, getting it to pierce something tough is very difficult and might require using a beak.

Also, Yuuya's very fit. A character once says he's "ripped", and official gijinka art shows his human form as possessing a six pack. (And crossdressing, but that's not an ability.) As a bird he's quite strong... but rather smaller than a human. Like a swan, he may be able to break bones with his wings.

He sings well. Larger feathers can be made into lovely quill pens. Singe or burn one to produce a pleasant, appetizing smell. If killed and cooked, he is delicious.

Finally, he’s carrying the Carneades virus. It doesn't survive long out of the host, but 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.

Learned/Trained Skills:

He's really very good at hacking and codebreaking, and can find things on even password-protected computers rapidly. His words per minute rate is incredibly high, though part of that is thanks to having ten long "fingers" for each arm. Yuuya is a deft and capable nurse/medic, and quite calm and able to prioritize even when presented with numerous patients. Japanese is his mother tongue, but Yuuya's also fluent in French, English, and Standard Chinese. He knows some of a number of other languages, but... he's not as good with them. He also knows how to operate an Inception-y rig.

Despite clawed scaly feet and pure white feathers Yuuya can move with impressive stealth even on tiles. He can fight with bare wings, though to incapacitate rather than to kill, and knock people out from behind without hurting them. And he's such a skilled swimmer, he can act as a lifeguard despite... doves not really being built for swimming.

Weapons laws have changed by his time. Yuuya is adept at a wide range of firearms, and accurate at a distance with them. He can also carry a pistol concealed, but that might be the holster's doing.

Possessions/Equipment:

Sets of tweezers, scissors, etc designed to be handled with an oversized pigeon beak

Numerous lightweight guns made to be used with prehensile feathers. None of them really correspond well to modern human weapons, but there's a range from easily concealable pistols to long-range antimateriel rifles

Ammunition and maintenance... stuff for same. Getting any gun would come with some of this

A wiretap

Many, many sets of little gold-rimmed pigeon glasses. Some do nothing, but there are glasses which work as lowlight-vision goggles to help offset the fact that pigeons can't see well in dim light, there are polarizing sunglasses-y ones, and there are camera ones and ones that interface with/act as secondary screens with the iPon

His iPon, a kind of lightweight future smartphone made for and by birds. It's got a lot of future pigeon music on it and some games, all the text is in Japanese, but he never bothered to use it as a diary, and while it's got all kinds of numbers on it he never wrote down who these people are, and calling/texting will just lead to wrong numbers. It can be used in hacking, though

A yellow silk tie belonging to him

A fancier sort of red ribbon tie belonging to his brother

A kind of dove backpack

A Snuggie made for birds

...why not, a maid outfit made for birds

An Inception-y rig of wires and things which can be used to get into the dreams of someone else, though the one going in has to be unconscious too. Needs a third person operating some computer equipment. The iPon works

Purple roses on trimmed stems, in bouquets, even planted and in pots.

Many, many, many white shed feathers, some over a foot long

I... suppose Miru and Kaku probably can't count as creature echoes. They're a pair of identical furry little dove-mammal hybrids with the ability to speak and, weirdly, act as field medics, very simpleminded, and Christmas-obsessed. Comic relief characters. They're childlike and simple, but might be too complex.

Roleplay Sample – Third Person: There was a radio channel here that loved playing the Beatles. Julien listened, absently wondering if he might like to be a DJ or something, until "Hey Jude" came on. He'd always liked it, but he wasn't in the mood today.

Julien shut it off. The apartment he shared with Cecelia wasn't big, so when his sister called out, "You! Grocery run!", he heard her clearly.

He grinned, levered himself off his bed, and ambled out. Julien had always responded to "You" just as readily as his name. "A mission! What are my objectives, o lovely one?"

Cecelia pursed her lips. She looked tired, he thought. "Milk, vegetables, a unicorn, peace on Earth, and something that can star as dinner. You pick."

"Unicorn peace steaks it is," he said, pretending to write something with a flourish. "Cece, do we have enough baby food?"

"I want her on soft solids... She's old enough now she shouldn't get baby food anymore, right? Why do you keep feeding it to her?"

"Have you tried the pear puree?" He ducked as she swatted playfully at him. "All right, all right, I'll stop."

Cecelia rubbed her eyes. "No, get the fruit. She might as well have some dessert. I'm getting a nap."

Nodding, Julien went after the reusable bags and slung them over his shoulder. She worked too hard, but he knew better than to say it. "You do that. Don't worry about it."

As his sister disappeared into her room, he checked up on his niece in the nursery. Val was fast asleep in her crib, a blanket drawn over her chubby body. The little girl was drooling in her sleep. He wiped the spit away and tugged at the blanket, though it was already straight. As happened sometimes he was struck with a wash of protectiveness, quiet but fierce. She was going to grow up into something wonderful, and he needed to be there. No matter how restless he felt sometimes, that wouldn't change.

Julien crept out of the nursery and then out of the apartment. Humming to himself, he started towards the grocery store.

Roleplay Sample - Network: Here

Any Questions? ...I really want some early item echoes to come with pure white shed feathers for great confusion and misdirection.