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extrasaltypotatoPlayer Information
Name: Talia, she/her
Age: 35
Contact details: Find me at
taliadoesrp or at Other characters: None
Character Information
Name: Akira Tsukuda, better known by his avatar's name, Hikaru Aosora
Canon: Isekai/Online tabletop roleplaying game adventure paths
Canon Point: Between S1 and S2; after discovering that the god Io was murdered and the fate of those disconnected from the server, but before Sekhmet's expedition to the Windswept Steppes.
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU.
Age: Actually 30; apparently a college-age Pixie, which can look younger to other species.
World Information:
As the five Adventurers from the guild - Deedee, Sekhmet, Alesha, Hikaru and Ace - stood before the glitchy mess that their UI helpfully told them was the Lost Temple of ($null_pointer_error), these queer disasterpeices found themselves wondering exactly how they got spirited away to another world as thier VR-MMO avatars.
Wait, let me back up.
IRL, it is the "Virtual 2040's." Life went back to a new normal in America - restaurants reopening, people meeting IRL, work on seawalls and at nanofacs and in space - but the scars left by the pandemic of 2020 caused social distancing tools to blast into the market like an ortillery strike; and no social distancing technology took off quite like the Neurohelm™. Allowing for full 6-sense™ immersion into virtual spaces, Neurohelms™ were first developed by DARPA for use by the Army - before the entertainment industry crafted new kinds of experiences with them.
Enter the Other Worlds Tourism Bureau, LTD. A startup staffed from the ranks of game companies, futurists, and ex-DARPA Neurohelm engineers, OWTB Ltd.'s second game released was the world's first, best VRMMO:
Another World Online: Mundane Fantasy Historia, a sword-and-sorcery adventure informed by the real-world European Renaissance.
Hikaru and the others all met in a tavern - virtually, in the Free Port City of Viacruz - becoming fast friends as on again/off again raid leaders in the guild DC/AC (short for Dungeon-Crawling And Chill). No one on Earth was more excited than DC/AC was about the latest DLC release... but it all went to hell a week later, when they fell unconscious in a firestorm of synaptic garbage and then woke up as the Avatars they were playing, at first level and with starter equipment, and on the Shores of Awakening just outside of the Free Port City of Viacruz.
They've now experienced two months within the world of Mundus, building strength and trying to prevent what the native Mundanes jokingly call The Siege of Viacruz from becoming a war in truth. Hikaru discovered one week in that ever since the Translation Event brought them here the teleport circles in shrines devoted to the primordial god of Space, Io the World-Sculptor, no longer worked - and the Lady Diana Sophitia Almudena Delsolar, the Elector Countess of Viacruz County herself, offered them the right to investigate a clue to how the "AWOl" Players got here and how they might escape: an expedition to a lost temple of Io.
If nothing else the state of Io's temple at least promised answers - but the truth was that Io was dead, poisoned and his code corrupted by a tarry black-and-purple substance that pulsated like crackling pixels. This was the work of the malevolent Griefers - a faction that call themselves the Ravagers, but no one else will allow these nazi fucks to even attempt to be cool and instead call them what they are, not what they wish to seem. No one knows how or why they did this - or how this trapped the player base in the game - but it's clear this is why the Players went AWOl.
Soon after returning with the terrible news, they were approached by one Radulf Kintsugi (nee Ralph Goldberg), a regular GM at their gaming table back home. He had wandered into camp one day, and told DC/AC that he had volunteered as part of an operation by DARPA to "save" the players and bring them home. Ralph further warned that for each month of ingame time everyone AWOl had experienced, the outside world experienced a week; and that everyone's bodies were on life support. Finally, the IRL contingent discovered to their horror that logging out of the game would kill the body but leave the avatar alive.
(Ace did not take this news well. At all.)
The news of the rescue effort back home caused a schism around what the good Adventuring population of Viacruz should have as their highest priority, and from there each founded one of three distinct factions:
Alesha represents The Returners, those who consider Mundus a prison to be escaped - and who consider their friends and family shouldering the medical costs of Player life support and the Mundanes shouldering the costs of the refugee Adventurers to be an untenable, even monstrous, burden to demand of them. Until they could find a way home and make the sacred Return, they would be keeping a close eye on the conduct and misconduct of the AWOl, preventing them from causing even more damage by their presence.
Sekhmet lead a small but vocal faction of Homesteaders who felt that they had nothing worth returning to at home. Sekhmet argued that life might be violent, but racism and homophobia were almost unknown - and treasure enough to live well in Mundus was as close as the PvE areas, as plentiful as the respawning monsters, and as reliable as your equipped weapon. They felt that they could earn a new and better life, if only they made themselves indispensable to the people of Viacruz.
And Hikaru himself, ever the programmer, gathered his Mechanists from raiding and speedrunner friends to study the new physics of Mundus. At first an intellectual exercise, this became an urgent life and death matter after the expedition to the lost temple of Io, whose state they've dubbed a "Glitch Sargasso" - their first and highest priority to understand, and if possible, patch out.
It is at this point, as the adventurers split up to pursue their own agendae, that Hikaru is brought on board the train.
Personal History:
Akira Tsukuda was, until the Translation, the kind of person who every class voted ‘most likely to die of caffeine overdose’. Autistic, prone to hyperfocus only on that which he cares about, and with poor social skills, he’s often misunderstood and prone to lose himself in what he loves, to the exclusion of the world - which means it's a damn good thing that he loves friends who'll help him find his way back to reality.
On Earth, he was a STEM major (minoring in film studies) who worked in system administration. He worked QA on Another World Online, and on top of that, he ended up writing most of the fan documentation on MundaneWiki. He was far fonder of Mundus than of Earth, spending most of his time in other worlds rather than trying to understand the irrational, unstable world IRL. However, despite this social awkwardness, and his tendency to stay in his room for 72-hour nonstop coding sessions, and his self-professed distaste for life offline, he cares deeply about his friends and would involve himself in their lives. He plays tabletop games with Sekhmet and Deedee and Alesha - babysitting Alesha's children when she needed help, and sharing a love of toku, musicals, and pastel cartoon horses with the child, helping push them down the nerd path.
Personality:
Hikaru believes in heroes.
Hikaru has believed in heroes ever since he was a wee lass of 10 (he's transmasculine), when his babysitter on the TV was the action scientist
He protests that he's the only member of his guild that's not a weeaboo, but can only manage to do so on the technicality that he's nisei Japanese; Cicaider Nano blowing his goddamn mind before he even used he/him pronouns led him down the rabbit
(Naturally, he won't recognize any of the people on the train - as part of my formal and informal agreements with the Valor devs, I've been compiling a list of expies and parodies of the sort of things he and his friends have been into, some of which are other projects of mine. Although, that said, he might tell a hypothetical Rainbow Dash how much she reminds him of Skybiscuit, the Pegasus Champion of Valor...)
Hikaru as a result can seem simultaneously standoffish and naive; He is the type who will lose track of the world and everything going on in it when he finds his passion, but he doesn’t understand what goes on in people’s heads well - which also means he has trouble recognizing when people aren't acting in good faith, and he can seem rather gullible when he's not already suspicious of someone's motives. A string of code is simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand for Hikaru; and with computers, if you don’t have any errors in your code, the output of your input is predictable. But people are messier, and there’s no ‘right’ answer, no way to precisely match input to output.
That doesn’t mean he’s okay with this state of affairs. He’s bad at showing it, but he does have a lot of empathy - perhaps too much, even. He doesn't have difficulty understanding the emotions of others, but rather with appropriately expressing his own. He doesn’t know when he hurts people, but when he finds out, it hurts him too. He doesn’t want to be alone, even if he has accepted it as the most likely outcome due to who he is and what he’s like. He doesn’t want pity, he just wants to be understood.
Hikaru isn't bothered by the Translation itself; he quite enjoys the intellectual puzzle of unraveling the game physics of Mundus, and of feeling like a benevolent genius when his discoveries improve the Namer condition.
He is annoyed that his 4'2" stature contributes to his youthful appearance, with guesses anywhere from 16 to 25: to put it bluntly, he is and remains a tremendous flirt, looking for love pretty much anywhere he thought his attentions would be mutually amusing... before getting isekai'd into a body that most humans double-guess the age of. Meaning he has to second guess the motives of everyone demonstrating interest in a Pixie like him and he hates it - do they think he's a teenager and an easy mark, or do they appreciate him for his maturity and his sense of humor?
Key themes:
The video game I eventually intend Hikaru to costar in tracks three different moral values as part of it's dating sim routing logic: Courage, Empathy and Reason. Under this rubric, Hikaru has Courage and Reason in spades, with strategic and scientific acumen to spare; but while he isn't unEmpathetic, he's long since decided pretending to be neurotypical is a waste of his and his allistic colleagues' time and has both a hackerish disdain for small-talk and nigh-Russian bluntness - along with a reluctance to think ill of people that makes him dangerously naive.
His arc words are:
"We need more data, more context."
"I don't care about justice, I care about suffering - ending suffering."
"But that changes everything!"
Main Motivation:
As the face of the Mechanists, Hikaru knows that if he can just decode the mysterious Translation, if he can just figure out what happened - reverse-engineer the rules of this new world - he can help everyone. He continues his quest to science the hell out of the Namer condition, and unearth the secrets that will allow him to save the people of Mundus from more grief. So - shall he continue his experiments, and seek the winning theorem?
Skills:
This version of Hikaru is a 6th level character using the Valor: Heroic Roleplaying tabletop RPG system.
Diegetically. Isekai, y'all.
Specifically, he has the Attributes, Skills and Techniques that mark him as what AWO would call a "Wizard," an arcane spellcaster and warmage that uses both Spirit-based impulsive evocations and more involved Mind-based thaumaturgical rituals.
His Attributes of Spirit and Mind are both as good as they can be for a 6th level character, granting him keen intuition and reasoning skills as well as a faintly palpable aura of both magical power and benevolence, mostly manifesting as a powerful and commanding voice - and people confiding in him without knowing why in canon. These grant him an exceptional amount of physical stamina, which he can easily charge with the spiritual energy that, on Mundus, would be called "Breath" or "Pneuma."
In comparison, his Agility and Guts are a high civilian or heroic average value, while his physical Strength, typically of Pixies, is abysmal.
His Skills include various ways to increase his raw magical power (Energy Attacker, Empower Attack, Blazing Might and Versatile Fighter), and thaumaturgical skill enough to: shape AoE spells with Discretion so as to miss allies; activate his Spirit Sight, which can sense creatures and magical constructs by their Aura; Nullify ongoing magical effects or heal minor afflictions; fog foes minds to Seal away their most obnoxious Techniques (physical or magical); and pinch space to make a Portal between two areas he can see that are both within 25 feet of him. He's also an expert in Thaumaturgy, as maybe the only person in America who actually read the damn loreposts.
He presently knows the following spells (properly, Techniques):
Fireball, which werfs flammen;
Frost Lance, which fires a spear that freezes over any target it hits, immobilizing them until they wrench free of the ice;
Livewire, a stunning chain lightning effect;
The ability to scribe Pentagrams of Power, runic circles that increase the magical power of anyone standing within one for about 15 seconds -
And his Ultimate Technique or Tension Break, which he can only use in moments of high stress and when he's taken particularly valiant actions: evoking the mantle of
Item:
A black cherrywood blasting rod tipped with a triangular gold and red sunstone focus crystal, containing a living ember of flame that
Sample:
Getting situated on the train:
"That just raises further questions!" Hikaru says, almost pleased at the thought.
To Tamamo no Mae:
"If I am to be as heroic as those I admire, I cannot pretend that my killing is without consequence; and if you insist that to kill that way is my dream, we will have problems with our working relationship."
Notes:
Thorne.tcai and Cora Philomena, potentially apping this round, are canonical Isekai/Online characters used with my permission and blessing. Ace Striker, sitting this round out, is also a canonical I/O character played with my blessing. If I see any more I/O peeps, I'll let you know.
If you see information that seems to have been copypasted from this app to any other I/O original universe character apps, that's because they did so with my approval and blessing so as to be properly canonical to I/O.
