Cerealia Application

[roughcut]

Applicant Info

◎ Name: Loki
◎ Journal: quetzalcoatl
◎ Contact: quetzalcoatl, helbindi
◎ Current Character(s): None.

Character Info

◎ Character's Name: Kouha Ren
◎ Character's Canon: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic.
◎ Character's Age: 19
◎ Canon Point: Chapter 267, after the strategy meeting.
◎ Background/History: Here.
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? Nope!

◎ Personality: In spite of his rank, Kouha is absolutely terrible at seeming princely, and that is probably the first impression anyone would have of him. He speaks in sing-song tones often, dragging out words, dropping random letters off the end of words, and smashing words together to make “want to” into “wanna”, and he hardly ever bothers to stop using these speech patterns, despite being fully capable of doing so and knowing people dislike it from one of his station.

His lackadaisical speech goes hand in hand with his brutal honesty, and it allows him to come across as sweet when he means to be kind. He also has a habit of speaking just as rudely when he doesn’t care. He will bluntly call people he’s just met “dirty brats” and other insults without batting an eye, despite having significant practice with diplomacy. Even in the royal court, at his own father’s funeral, he mouths off and makes faces like a bored kindergartener. When faced with a powerful, inhuman being that he had come into the lair of to make an ally of, he insults her right to her face. He goes so far as to make fun of her make-up and call her a pervert who “lost her man”, knowing she could crush him if she chose to.

He can be impatient with minor things and prefers comfort over convenience, such as complaining about that the speed of magic carpets and the chance to avoid any real danger on the ground isn’t worth his hair and skin drying out from the wind. However, he will sacrifice it for the sake of being a proper leader. He considers appearance and “looking good” as a leader to be very important, in order to gain respect and maintain a proper princely atmosphere. It isn’t so surprising, with that in mind, that he takes beauty care and fashion as a hobby, to the point that he idly brushes and braids his own hair and those of others when he’s bored.

He is prone to random acts of violence that range from small, minimally damaging slaps to the face for his magician attendants to slicing men in half for holding up his carriage during a robbery. The people who populate the palace he lives in speak behind his back and say that he “likes the sight of blood” and that his personality is eccentric, due to his mother’s lack of sanity while he was growing up. Whether or not this is the case, he has no lack of empathy. He simply has a terrible temper, is used to throwing his weight around, as one of the royal family of a great world power, and being babied by his siblings because he is the second-youngest in their immediate family.

Despite all of his immaturity in some areas, he is very much a grown man. He is shameless in his flirting, though he almost never teases. When he flirts, it’s with genuine compliments he really means. He is most attracted to people who are outcast by normal society, whether it is as friends or lovers. He likes people who are “individual” and unique the most, especially if they achieved that through hard work or sacrifice.

In fact, he has created his own unit filled with physically deformed magicians created from human experimentation, swordsmen from clans that have horrible, frightening reputations, and people whose families were exiled for rebelling against the king years before. He doesn’t care at all that ordinary people consider his men to be strange and bad company for a prince, as he knows what it is like to be looked at different for how you were born or how you live your life.

He cares for them so much that he knows the names of every single one of the hundreds of members in his unit, and he makes a habit of remembering the names of anyone he considers interesting. He has a good memory for this, and he makes it a point to dote on his men with gifts of silk clothes and other niceties, simply because he is proud of them and wants them to show their pride on their sleeves, too.

Kouha idolizes his eldest brother, though he is closest to his second brother, and considers all of his family important, especially his nine siblings. They are always his first priority, no matter the circumstance. Even in the middle of a world-ending battle against something that could wipe out all of humanity, he threw himself in the path of an attack aimed at his youngest sister, despite her being a capable warrior herself. He deliberately changes the way he speaks to be more polite when speaking to his eldest brother, who he considers to be his king, despite all of them technically only being princes, and has no dreams of ever being a king in his own right, in favor of making sure his eldest brother becomes emperor uncontested.

Despite loving his family deeply, he has an inferiority complex about being only a half-sibling to any of them. Part of this is likely due to the fact that his mother was insane and only a concubine, but he feels unworthy of his brothers and is desperate to make sure they get what they want in life, after they were so good to him growing up.

In sum, Kouha is a spoiled, arrogant man who feels no shame in the way he chooses to live his life, no matter who thinks otherwise. He knows who he is and feels proud of it, barring some minor insecurities, and it shows in his way of speaking and his actions.


◎ Powers/Abilities: After conquering the dungeon “Leraje”, Kouha gained the djinn of that dungeon as an ally. It is a magical being that lives inside of his sword, unable to come out or react to anything but Kouha’s command for power outside of the extremely special circumstance of one of the highest ranked magicians in the world commanding it. This sword is a weapon known as a “metal vessel”, and it allows Kouha to use great amounts of magic without being a magician himself.

As Leraje is a djinn of “strength” magic, Kouha is able to manipulate gravity and "power", essentially powering up his own ordinary attacks by making his own sword huge and letting gravity carry it down for him, which enables him to cause more damage with a single attack.

He also has the ability to “wear” his djinn, using an ability called “djinn equip”. With it, the user takes on some physical characteristics of the djinn, and it allows for greater immediate access to the djinn’s power. These powers include flight, an extremely tough body that can take a lot of damage, and their “extreme magic”. Kouha’s extreme magic is the ability to crush whatever under his djinn’s symbol by increasing the force of gravity in the air, barring an equally powerful barrier stopping it.

To save magoi, the magical energy all people produce that a djinn’s powers use to manifest, a user might choose to forgo full equip and only compress their djinn’s powers in a weapon, which is called “djinn weapon equip”. It allows control over the djinn’s offensive abilities and flight, but it’s less powerful and more limited. He can also transform his sword into a giant scythe while in this form or in full djinn equip.

A djinn’s power can also be lent out to the user’s most loyal allies, giving them small amounts of the djinn’s abilities to use in defense of themselves and the original user. This is called a djinn’s “household”, and each member of a household has an ability unique to them. Households can only contain those who go into battle with the original user, and those with strong magical ability are incapable of being part of one. In Kouha’s case, the number and abilities of his household members (if any exist) is unknown.

Without having his weapon within a sight or on hand, he has no supernatural abilities. More mundanely, Kouha is a trained fencer, and he is quite skilled in swordplay. Despite his frame, he can cut a large wooden carriage (or a grown man) in half without much strain. He also has practice with intimidation and diplomacy, due to his role as a younger prince of his empire.

◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory: His metal vessel (aka that large magical sword strapped to his back), his hat, and his clothes.

CEREALIA-Specific

◎ Element: Earth. Kouha’s djinn magic is a “strength” type, which manifests as physical forces such as gravity and is represented by crystals. He’s also a fairly grounded person, so earth suits him best.
◎ Sense: Touch. Kouha is an incredibly tactile person. If he likes you, he’s probably leaning or grabbing onto you in some way. If he doesn’t, you’re getting shoved away, or he’s getting in your face. Losing the other senses are something he’s semi-prepared to deal with, as a warrior. Without touch at all, though, he wouldn’t really understand his own strength, and it would severely mess with his head.
◎ Seven Character Traits: (Loyal, friendly, open-minded) | (Hot-tempered, violent, blunt) + Flirty

Samples

◎ First-Person Sample: Test drive thread.


◎ Third-Person Sample: ViViD is, generally speaking, not very nice to newbies. Kouha Ren learned this the hard way, though he wouldn’t have minded so much, if he’d been allowed to keep his own clothes on at the time. (Seriously, could they maybe hire a less tasteless welcome committee next time? Talk about starting off on the wrong, and super gross, foot.)

After the shock and annoyance of his first trip into the game, Kouha had spent some time tracking down and bothering anyone he could for more information on how it worked. He didn’t get much help there, and all he got was talk about that “virtual reality” illusion magic he’d heard before. He didn’t really get any of it, except for the whole “it seems totally real” part that he’d experienced for himself. He was no scholar, so he’d have to take everything he couldn’t see for himself with a grain of salt.

He did, however, get a few hints on what to expect, and that was plenty to work with. Knowing what was coming the next time he went in was invaluable, especially when he just knew he was going to go back. (There was no point debating that fact. It was going to happen, one way or another, if only because it was interesting and strange enough to deserve a second look.)

But war is not a game. This was something Kouha would like to make sure you remember, before you set a single step outside onto a battlefield. Turning it into one was reckless in a way that was distasteful at best, but he couldn’t completely condemn the whole thing. The idea that he could go fully wild, slice down anything in his path without worry of retribution or real danger, was a bit too enticing to ignore. He’d been so idle in this place, with no wars to wage and petty fights in the street being put down so quickly. The chance to vent a little of that energy sounded too good to resist.

He might be a prince, but he’d never been particularly good at the “respectability” thing. It wasn’t like his reputation could get much worse, could it? Over some overblown sparring session? As if. Even if it did, it would just reaffirm the things everyone already said about him, and he could probably live with that.

All of these justifications were enough to convince him, and within a week of his first exposure to ViViD, a swarm of monsters was supposedly preventing people from getting out of the game. If that didn’t just scream “perfect opportunity”, Kouha would eat his hat. Besides, if he waited any longer, it might seem like he was waiting for an engraved invitation or something.

As he moved forward, Kouha could feel a wide smile taking over his face. War might not be a game, but this was, and it was going to be fun. Over his shoulder, he called to the others would-be heroes, a laugh in his voice.

“Well? You comin’ along, or am I leaving you in the dust?”

◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories? No.