espigeonage | (no subject)

boomtown

Player's Name: Joysweeper

Are you over 16? Yes.

Characters Played Here: n/a

Character: Sakazaki Yuuya

Series/Canon: Hatoful Boyfriend

From When? Post BBL, but pre-Epilogue. He has not yet fully recovered from the nerve toxin, though the body he gets for this is in perfect health.

History:In the future, a variant of the avian flu devastates humanity. Remaining humans try to exterminate the virus-carrying birds with their own virus, but the surviving birds are uplifted and become sentient. A hundred thirty years after that, humans are a tiny, powerless minority and birds rule the world.

When Yuuya was a child a nobleman killed his common father in order to marry Yuuya's mother. Yuuya held on to his full brother's egg when it should have been smashed, swapped it with the new egg containing his noble half-brother, then smashed the new egg. His brother Sakuya was brought up as the noble heir to the family. Yuuya was scorned and derided, barely cared for, due to his impure ancestry.

Burdened with the guilt of having killed his half brother, and to spite the noble family, Yuuya joined the Dove Party, a political faction which supported helping the remaining humans, and eventually wound up recruited into the espionage division. He picked up many skills there. When he reached the age of nine - doves age faster than humans - he was put on a long term assignment: infiltrate a prestigious high school and find out what a known antihuman (Hawk Party) agent, serving as the school doctor, was up to. He was frequently absent from class on shorter-term Dove Party missions but managed to keep his grades up.

Yuuya joined the infirmary volunteer staff and picked up on some things, but after two years discovered that Sakuya, who he'd been out of contact with, was to be enrolled. It would have been smarter if he'd left the assignment and let someone else take over, but he wanted contact with his brother. When he arrived Sakuya proved to be well indoctrinated by the nobility and harshly rejected him time and time again. To make things worse the doctor knew Yuuya was snooping, discovered that Sakuya wasn't a purebred noble, and blackmailed Yuuya.

So Yuuya helped the sadistic doctor, who ran experiments on students and was very unsubtly sinister. The doctor had a complicated plan which Yuuya, being younger and stronger, was instrumental in enacting. Yuuya dismembered the corpse of the school’s single human student and helped install her brain in a kind of really awful slave robot. When the human’s body was discovered and the school went into lockdown, he pretended to know nothing but crisscrossed the halls and grounds to try and keep more students from getting killed. He was on the fence, wanting to help, but also constrained by fears for Sakuya’s safety.

The doctor decided Sakuya, who was investigating the situation, was too annoying and tried to kill him with a scalpel coated in nerve toxin. Yuuya tackled Sakuya and shielded him with his own body, receiving several cuts. The doctor left with the robot and, fading, Yuuya confessed the egg swap to his brother, encouraged him, and appeared to die. Later he says that he was “loitering around on the border between life and death” until another Dove agent saved him, but recovery would take a very long time.

Personality: Yuuya virtually always appears to be confident, carefree, and cheerful. He’s social; seems to be able to take absolutely everything including his own occasional dorkiness, and accusations of murder, in stride; and can be gracious and a flirt. The unknown is greeted with a smile. Sometimes he plays himself up to annoy someone or for the fun of it. He can also be coolly professional if it’s called for, or even blend the attitudes.

Really Yuuya’s something of an extroverted loner, a bit aloof and opaque under the surface. He keeps secrets easily and lies and dissembles about things that are close to his heart, even when it would be better to tell; he tends to go with his first impulse and not think that closely about his decisions. Yuuya is weighed down by things he’s done which he feels he had no choice in doing - smashing his half-brother’s egg, helping the doctor - and he has a degree of insecurity and self-loathing which can peek through when he’s around people he likes, but he has accepted his sins and lets them drive him forwards to try and do good.

As well as tending to be impulsive and not thinking enough about what he’s doing, there’s a certain recklessness and carelessness to Yuuya in a fast-moving scenario, though he can be thorough in slower times. He’s flexible enough to be able to recover from some mistakes, but not all. Slowly he’s begun to get tired of his lifestyle, the seediness associated with it, of being recognized and attacked, and moral gray areas.

There is nothing in the world that means more to Yuuya than his brother’s life and happiness. In a pinch that will override everything. However, he does also care quite a bit about other people and the physical and emotional well-being of his friends, and he’s willing to put his life at risk for others. He rarely holds grudges and can step up and be heroic if it comes to that. He’s a better person than he secretly thinks he is, just not as good as he wants to seem.

Accepting the offer... Well, a number of his lies have been revealed. The Doves know he got subverted and blackmailed for months. Sakuya knows his own heritage. How they react - well, the Doves seem fairly forgiving even if they don’t trust him now, but Sakuya seemed pretty much destroyed. Other birds could report that he pulled himself together again, but it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking, and anyway Sakuya thinks Yuuya is dead.

For now Yuuya’s an invalid and in Dove Party care, and recovery is slow and painful. He’s impulsive. Yeah, it would be better all around if he stayed through the physical therapy and discomfort and people he’s lied to taking him to task. But leaving, skipping the healing process, and doing something purely productive and without any ethical concerns sounds good right now.

Why do you think your character would work in this setting?

Yuuya’s resourceful, a decently quick study, and unafraid of work. He’s friendly and likes to do good, even if he’s also impulsive and lies. He is good in moments of crisis - Hatoful Boyfriend has several branching paths, and the one I’ve chosen for this doesn’t really display it, but he performs a lot of Big Damn Hero moments in some of the others, when he has the chance. But he’s also good at the long haul, and he can be very professional.

The world he lives in, while it is future-Earth, is in many places rougher than our modern day. Wild animals roam around near population centers and have to be avoided or defended against - admittedly, avoiding them is easier if one can fly. Impoverished birds live more like non-uplifted birds, gathering their own food and finding shelter where they can get it, and this isn’t stigmatized. Yuuya hasn’t had to do that for a while, but as a child especially he had to resort to gleaned food on and off. Insects, raw grains, leftovers - all seem good. He can get by with minimal comforts.

And he’s got a variety of skills. Hacking and computerwork might not be of any use, swimming is a maybe, you never know when gun skills might come in handy, and he’s got enough medical expertise to act as a nurse. Plus, he can fly due to not being entirely human.

Notes on shape: Instead of being a turkey-sized fantail pigeon, his form is changed to a human-faced avian hybrid, five feet tall and with a ten-foot wingspan. He has wings where arms would be, with the same kind of prehensile primary feathers of his dove body, but he also has human-style arms and hands set a little ahead and below of them. Essentially, four hands, though the prehensile feathers are better designed for fine/soft manipulation than a hard grip. His calves each have a set of feathers which are usually folded up out of the way but can be spread to either side to act as a tail in flight. Aside from that he looks pretty human, but anatomically he’s more bird, with a deep keeled chest, complex efficient lungs with air sacs, hollow bones, and keen eyes allowing for a vastly wider range of color vision, though his eyes appear human at a glance. His “hair” is pale blue and actually composed of fine feathery filaments which tend to clump a bit.

It comes with disadvantages too! The downside to bird lungs is higher susceptibility to pollutants, a tendency to canary-in-a-coalmine. The downside to pigeonlike eyes is poor vision in low light, and noticing the flickering of screens and lightbulbs. He has a high metabolism. And while he’s able to fly, even with all the bird anatomy it’s somewhat clumsy and ballistic. Plus it means having to modify all his clothing, and when folded his wings are still bulky and interfere a little with the range of arm motion.

Honestly, going to a setting full of humans, it would have been smarter of him to go with a mostly human body with smaller wings, if any, but he’s got a kneejerk aversion to losing the ability to fly.

Inventory: All in a multicompartmented bag a little like a backpack, though the straps are at neck and waist with one vertical in the middle over the front, connecting them. The yellow tie he wears hides some of the straps. He has a set of clothes modified for his physique too - doves don’t usually wear them, but he gets that the rules are different when you look human.

His iPon, a kind of smartphone of The Future. It’s unlikely to find anything to link up to, but it’s solar powered and has camera and a library of music and games to waste time with. Comes with a sort of headband for sound.

A garment rather similar to a Snuggie, but made for birds - so, short and with very wide sleeves for wings. It’s a neutral bluish color and he stole it from the hospital.

Glasses. They polarize against bright light, but are otherwise just for fashion ~~and to match his icons~~.

A compact first aid kit - sanitizer, gauze, disinfectant, a roll of bandaging, a cold pack, tweezers, feather-cutting scissors. The latter two are made for beaks, but hands can use them in a pinch.

A vial of mealworm eggs. He can start up a mealworm “farm” with them, given some kind of container and bran. Mealworms are tasty and nutritious, raw or cooked, and less trouble than crickets! They’re future mealworms, bred or genetically altered to grow slow and large.

A pistol, maintenance equipment for it, and five magazines with fifteen rounds of ammunition each. A disassembled anti-materiel rifle, same and same but only ten shots’s worth. There’s a holster and straps for the pistol, and carrying straps for the rifle. Both are lightweight and made to be used with prehensile feathers; the pistol is very low caliber and would need either point-blank range or precision aiming to kill a human. The rifle is much higher caliber and can pierce a tank, but is made to be flown with and rather smaller than comparable human weapons, only a couple feet long.

Samples:

Third-Person Sample: Here, here

First-Person Sample:Here