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[cynics]

» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: thorny
Current AGE: legal
Player TIME ZONE: cst apparently
IM & SERVICE: eyeball vore @ aim
Player PLURK: decapitation
Current CHARACTERS: n/a

» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: neku sakuraba
Canon & MEDIUM: the world ends with you, video game
Canon PULL-POINT: post-game
Character AGE: 15
Character ABILITIES:

Neku, when he retains a Player status in the Reaper's Game, has the ability to use psychs. Psychs are abilities that activate via stylistic pins which each correspond to a said ability whenever Neku wears them in a plane at a higher frequency than the Realground (where reality is situated); they are most prominently used in the Underground (which exists just above the RG and where the Reaper's Game takes place) and the special plane in-between belonging to Noise (where most battles take place).

Neku is noted to have a high amount of Imagination, which renders him able to use and master a wide ranger of pin skills - it is canonically noted how exceptional he is with using psychs. With over 300 pins available to master, Neku's versatility and spontaneity is high; most of these only work within battle, but there are exceptions (such as psychokinesis, e.g. when he attempts to kill Shiki outside of battle).

With a Player Pin, Neku has the ability to concentrate and read surface thoughts of people nearby in the RG, scan for Noise and engage them in battle, and use the imprinting system to feed buzzwords or memes to people nearby in the RG (commonly interpreted by such as insight). The Player Pin also serves as a protective agent for its user's Imagination, disallowing for them to be either read or imprinted; it also negates the effects of the O-pin, which is a pin used for mass imprinting on both Players, Reapers, and humans altogether.

Character HISTORY:

overview

Neku Sakuraba, the reluctant protagonist, is thrown into the Reaper's Game unawares after his untimely death, which to his chagrin he can't remember anything about; but he can't remember anything, period. This is because, in order to participate in the Reaper's Game, an entry fee of what the person values most must be taken - in Neku's case, his memory. This considerably handicaps him when he wakes up on Day 1 in the Scramble Crossing of Shibuya with his timer ticking and no idea how he got there or the rules he's performing under. He's more or less obligated to form a pact with Shiki Misaki, another Player he runs into while attempting to escape the Noise, in order to both prevent Noise from attacking him in the future and complete the missions which he would otherwise be unable to due to his withheld memories of both Shibuya and the Reaper's Game. Shiki teaches him what she knows and the two begin working with each other in order to stay alive, win the game, and earn a "second chance" at life; but Neku's personality and his attitude toward both people and Shibuya that has grossly misshapen from a past trauma prevent him from "opening his world" which causes both trust problems and doubt in general. After he attempts to even go so far as to kill Shiki because of this, unaware of the more harm than good it would cause, he is told by Mr. Hanekoma (who acts as guardian for the Game and its rules) that the only way to survive in this world is to "trust your partner" and gives him a tool for syncing up with his partner better. Albeit roughly, Neku overcomes his doubt with Shiki and even helps her overcome her underlying insecurities about a second chance at life that he also shares. Together, they manage to beat the week's Game Master, but are unfortunately informed via the Conductor that only one of them will be allowed to come back to life, and that it will be Shiki, per Composer's mandate. Neku's remaining options are to join the Reapers, play the Game again, or embrace erasure; he chooses the second, telling Shiki to go on ahead. The Conductor returns his previous entry fee in its entirety, although Neku notes that the details surrounding his death are still missing, alluding that he'd lost the memory through other means. His entry fee for his next game is then procured: Shiki Misaki.

In his second week, Neku makes a pact with Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu, whom he quickly becomes both aggravated with due to his personality and suspicious of due to the indication that he is able to scan him. Joshua exhibits wide knowledge of the game and a tendency for ditching the missions for his own agenda, much to Neku's displeasure due to the nature of his second entry fee; the scans Neku also performs on Joshua strongly suggest that he knows something about the nature of Neku's death. Despite his doubts, Neku attempts to refrain from voicing them and goes along with Mr. H's "trust your partner" slogan in order to last the week. Although Mr. H notes that "knowing it in your head doesn't mean much if you don't act on it", which is foretelling for when Neku ultimately refuses to trust Joshua when evidence arises that his death was actually by Joshua's hand and that Joshua is actually illegally playing the game while alive. However, this is thrown into question during the week's final battle when evidence arises that it was in fact the Game Master who killed Neku, and Joshua seemingly sacrifices himself for Neku by taking a fatal hit. Neku wins, but the game is made null due to Joshua's illegal entry.

Neku is forced to play the Game a third week (a 3-week Game being noted as a very unusual occurrence by the Reapers), his penalty being his entry fee carried over and the fact that he will not be allowed to participate in any further Games. In an attempt to eliminate him as quickly as possible, his entry fee is unfairly made to be all the other Players. Unexpectedly, a Player-turned-Reaper that Neku had been acquaintances with in Week 1 named Daisukenojo "Beat" Bito decides to turn-coat and form a pact with Neku in order to finish the game once and for all, with the intent of consecutively taking out the Game Master, the Conductor, and ultimately the Composer. In addition to the already existing oddities of the current Game, Neku and Beat begin to witness the early signs of the "breaking down" of Shibuya - scanned thoughts of people in the RG all becoming the same, Reapers making the same speech before attacking in an almost trance-like state, and Mr. H disappearing. Due to circumstances, Neku begins to doubt Mr. H's true identity as evidence points to him as the Composer, although he continuously attempts to shake off the doubt due to the fact that Mr. H was the one who taught him to trust others and expand his world. After Neku and Beat defeat the Game Master, they begin making their way to the Conductor, but are met by Shiki along the way. They shrug the technicalities off considering the amount of rule-breaking going on already, with Neku commenting that he's sure the Game is "null and void" by now. To his further surprise, after fighting an initial battle with the Conductor, the presumed dead Joshua reappears. Although the Conductor attempts to use both the same O-pin imprinting he'd spread within Shibuya (both RG and UG) and Neku's own partners against him, Neku is able to reform his pacts with all three partners and deliver the final blow. Afterwards, it is revealed that the entire three week Game was a special game of Conductor vs. Composer in order to judge the fate of Shibuya (which the Conductor had been attempting to avoid by reconstructing it entirely); additionally, Joshua presides as the true Composer and did in fact kill Neku in order to make him his proxy for the Game. Joshua, now having regained his authority over Shibuya and expressing an intention to rid its existence, challenges Neku to one final game (a shooting standoff) between only them, with the winner getting to do whatever they want with Shibuya. While Neku expresses a strong desire now to save Shibuya, he ultimately cannot bring himself to shoot Joshua due to their former relationship as partners and his strict wish to follow Mr. H's rule, "trust your partner". Although Joshua shoots Neku, he finds himself waking up in the RG afterwards in the Scramble Crossing of Shibuya, which is still in tact thanks to Joshua's change in mind, rendered about by Neku's change in trust and character. Neku, as promised in the UG, meets with Shiki, Beat, and Beat's younger sister a week later, commenting both on how he's picked up on a lot of important things thanks to his time in the Game and how he's "got friends now".

Character PERSONALITY:

Neku is a character that goes through a significant change in his world outlook over the course of the game. Initially, Neku is described as a character who is stuck in a "self-actualization loop" ⁽¹⁾, due to the fact that he is firmly rooted within his own reclusive creed of who he wants to be and won't allow anyone else into his "world". In fact, it is presented clearly that he abhors other people in the opening cutscene with phrases such as:


"Just go the hell away! All the world needs is me. I got my values... so you can keep yours, alright?"


Indomitably asocial, Neku claims he doesn't "get people" and that he never will; additionally, he states multiple times that he purposefully avoids relationships in order to avoid being "dragged down". Neku expresses, from his viewpoint, that friendships are predominantly built and maintained on lies or will only end in pain upon exposing yourself to them; this ideology is largely fueled by his blaming of himself for the death of his only friend a few years prior. His experience with people is evidently limited even before his pronounced misanthropic nature, considering he describes his deceased friend as his one real friend and the only guy that he could talk to, stating that he was fine when it was just them and nobody else. Needless to say, this causes him to act cold-mannerly toward others - generally opting to ignore them if possible, while flagrantly being rude if not. Ridiculously laced with trust issues and bitterness, Neku is an all-around unpleasant force that never takes off his headphones - or at least, in the beginning of the game, anyway.


"Enjoying your world means making it bigger. I finally get that. The world as one person sees it is tiny. You've gotta... gotta reach out to other people."


Regardless of Neku's substantiated style of living, he doesn't possess any dreams or goals, aside from abiding by CAT (an artist he describes as the only person he respect)'s motif, which is to "enjoy the moment". Neku interprets this message as doing what you want, how you want, and when you want with no restrictions or pretenses - basically, forgetting about people and enjoying life. However, between being in the Reaper's Game and having Mr. H (later revealed to be CAT himself) tell him that enjoying the moment is about "expanding your world" and pushing your horizons, Neku begins to see things (and most importantly, people) differently. Quite literally, in fact, considering the Reaper's Game allowed for him to scan people's minds and realize that Shibuya is full of people with just as many viewpoints, and that expanding his world doesn't mean writing off those values as inferior. With his newfound resolution to open up his world, it's likely that the possibility for future dreams or goals are on the horizon as well.


"Yo, forget this "partner" crap. You ain't my partner anymore, man. You're my friend! So trus' that, yo!"


His partners also largely helped in Neku's shifting viewpoint of people; most of them the type of person Neku would never waste time on, he now considers them friends and the first fruits of his own "world" expansion. He initially didn't want to cooperate with his first partner, Shiki (whom he refused to call by name for the longest time, dubbing her "Stalker"), and even attempted to kill her at one point due to trust issues on the notion that she might've been a Reaper. After this is when Mr. H criticizes Neku's outlook and tells him that the only way he'll survive is to "trust his partner". Neku, as an adaptive person, takes this to heart and falls back on the phrase a lot, but it takes a while for it to really shine through in his behavior. While spending time with Shiki, Neku begins to understand her little by little, and even helps her overcome her jealousy problem as she helps him to open up, if only slightly. Ultimately, he experiences something he had lost and long forgotten about - friendship, which leads to Shiki becoming his second entry fee (an entry free being the thing most important to a person) to both their embarrassment. With Joshua, Neku's "trust your partner" resolve is put to the test due to both Joshua's grating personality and suspicious behavior; but he sticks through it for Shiki - something he would not have done if she hadn't touched him in the first week. To Neku's surprise, he eventually finds out that him and Joshua are actually similar and even feels regret for not fully trusting him when Joshua "sacrifices" himself for Neku; he even expresses that he wishes he could've apologized to him. With Beat, a person Neku had initially clashed with in earlier weeks, Neku is ultimately able to respect his motives and the two even consider each other as friends - driving in just how much Neku has changed. While he can't help occasionally feeling doubtful and likely still harbors suspicious bones in his body while interacting with people, it's much less to an absurd degree and he will ultimately overlook these feelings for friends out of a changed sense of trust and consideration for other people's feelings.

Neku is adaptive - he'll usually roll with things if he finds out he has to, albeit reluctantly (i.e. with a dose of skepticism or "why me", but he's not completely unshakeable). Neku likes to get things done quickly - being slowed down or taking detours will irritate him if he doesn't think he has time for it, and in one sticky public relations situation Neku remarks that "the fastest way is just to ask". Neku is anything but ignorant and he notices things (e.g. he catches onto the details of the Reaper's wall system first despite knowing little to nothing about the game and complains when Shiki doesn't get it as fast as him); he's actually very smart (e.g. in the second week he was able to give Joshua the square root of 3 up to the 7th decimal point and also knew the periodic symbol for gold) and notably imaginative. Neku is able to piece things together from bare bones information (e.g. the pin scanning system not working on people that are part of the game, certain people only being able to use certain pins, etc.) and is described as insightful. He even has moments where he is able to articulate something encouraging or give relatively good advice at times, albeit a little roughly since it isn't something he's used to. If there's something Neku can be "dumb" or at least stubborn on, it's common pop-culture, trends, and really anything that qualifies as street smarts - he's heavily individualized in himself and is really only interested in CAT as far as brand names go; still, he considers himself stylish and will get defensive or offended if anyone remarks otherwise.


"I'm glad I met you guys. You made me... pick up on things, I probably would've just gone on ignoring. Trust your partner... and I do. I can't forgive you, but I trust you."


Despite his ideological change, Neku is still more of an introvert and tends to internalize most things to himself; he scrutinizes and reflects on the majority of any given situation in his own head. Most notably, he keeps his confusion and doubt to himself; he possesses a self-blaming flaw, and tends to internalize guilt that can last for quite a while due to this. Neku also internalizes his more biting remarks if he needs to, and generally has a pretty good brain-to-mouth filter so long as his fuse isn't off, but this is entirely dependent on what his brain actually wants to filter. If he's by himself, he has a habit of speaking aloud to himself if there's something particularly weird to remark on. Essentially, while Neku has improved in just how asocial he is, it's more likely that he will only open up to close friends rather than strangers and he isn't necessarily a shining ball of optimism, either - rather, he's more of a work-in-progress with a healthier path now in sight. Neku is very proud and defensive of both himself and his principles - a sure-fire way to provoke him being anyone either criticizing him or telling him how to behave or think. Neku will honestly probably never be a people person, so despite the fact that he has grown to respect other values and appreciate their existence and can probably get along with anyone given enough time, he still doesn't care for anything being shoved onto him and stands to decide his own viewpoints for himself (i.e. the world ends, or rather, begins with him). Neku does make more of an effort to please his friends more than others, but if provoked, he won't hesitate to throw whoever pushes him into a wall of retaliation. While he's generally more laid-back than he used to be and better at controlling his anger than before, he's still prone to heavy sarcasm and short outbursts if pushed. Neku is definitely not a pushover and is most likely to stand up for himself, or simply avoid a situation altogether if he can't do that much. While he isn't as inclined to flat out ignore people as he used to be, he still reverts to this on occasion if he really doesn't want to deal with something/someone exceptionally aggravating or thinks it has nothing to do with him; this occasionally has consequences (e.g. him walking into a wall from not listening to someone), but it's difficult to deter Neku in cases like these. Aside from this, Neku expresses multiple times his intolerance toward lying (likely due to his aforementioned trust issues); he doesn't like lying, and he definitely doesn't like being lied to - even if not lying equates to being on the blunter side of things. Neku is also slow to forgiveness and has an ability to hold a lingering grudge depending on the situation, one of his last lines in-game being "I don't think I can forgive you yet," in reference to Joshua; although afterwards, he notes that regardless of this he still trusts him and considers him a friend. Neku still wears his headphones and can occasionally still give the impression that he's ignoring people, but he doesn't feel a constant need to wear them anymore and is actually shown taking them off in the ending cutscene, symbolizing his change.


⁽¹⁾ this is not a Real psychology term but?? twewy uses this

» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON:

Neku will be sticking with his psychs considering his level of familiarity and expertise with them. Although there are 300+ pins and Neku has amassed quite a collection from canon, he'll be limited to his max inventory of wearable pins (i.e. six, plus his Player Pin). Although there will only be six, there is canonically a level-up system within pins based on how often they're used until mastery is achieved - this will carry over for the six selected psychs he'll be using (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) which will start from the weakest pin of each corresponding psych and gradually transform into stronger pins with better stats and boot time as they're mastered. His Player Pin will also gradually increase in effectiveness, allowing for stronger scanning capabilities and imprinting of custom memes, although the use of this pin will be limited to missions.

Character INVENTORY:

Aside from his psychs, Neku will only have the threads he's wearing, his cell phone, headphones, and a packet of ramen or some shit.

» SAMPLES
First PERSON:

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[ alright, so - neku doesn't necessarily want to make his first post on this sketch message board with the video or voice function, although he notes that they are both options that are there. real high tech, but please. he's not going to sit here filming a presentation for something that looks like a board. ]

is this for real?

i mean i get that i'm here, but it's kinda hard to buy all that stuff she said.

so i gotta know: do you guys actually trust these people?

'cause i could really do without any more games.

[ here goes. post. ]

Third PERSON:

"You gotta be kidding me."

The only verbalization Neku deigns to make aloud after exiting the Initiative Hold and shoving his hands in his pockets - and to nobody in particular either, considering he's by himself right now. The sensation of cold metal in one of his pockets that definitely wasn't a pin prompts him both to remove the mostly-foreign object and redirect his attention to one of (admittedly many) topics that had been floating around in his head while the woman had been explaining something that sounded right out of a sci-fi flick.

... Or not. He thinks, haphazardly giving the Housing key a toss in his hand while mentally responding to his ongoing doubts about the place. Honestly, he's not sure what to believe here or why something like this is happening to him... again, but he supposes if he's going to have partners for this he might as well ask what all they know and see if it matches up to his own knowledge - he's supposed to trust these guys, right? Fastest way to figure out what he should do would be from there, then.

This isn't exactly how he expected to be broadening his horizons, that's for sure - but with a deep sigh, he's jamming the key back in his pocket and pulling his headphones back over his ears from around his neck. Even if he didn't ask for this and it wasn't anything like Shibuya...

Enjoy the moment, right?