Dec. 31st, 2028 11:57 pm
Recollé Application
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publishorperishPLAYER
YOUR NAME: Mark
18+?: Yes
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
nonfiltered
CHARACTERS IN GAME: None.
RESERVATION LINK: Here.
YOUR NAME: Mark
18+?: Yes
CONTACT:
CHARACTERS IN GAME: None.
RESERVATION LINK: Here.
CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Novus Laetor
AGE: 21
CANON: Original
NAME: Novus Laetor
AGE: 21
CANON: Original
CANON HISTORY:
(Both the setting, and a great deal of the history overlap with Mibu Hikaru ([Bad username or unknown identity: ”foxwitted”]. This is done with permission. A setting primer can be found here.)
In the near future, humanity reached a breakthrough on understanding what had been, until that point, purely theoretical realms of science. This breakthrough gave way to a new golden age, where science had become so sufficiently capable, as to effectively become magic. This age ended in an abrupt and calamitous fashion, as people turned this revelatory gift toward the sinister ends, and, lacking a failsafe for such an event, nearly destroyed the world. Those who remained were forced to embrace what technology remained and rebuild from the ashes of the old world. It has been some centuries since.
For many who possessed the capacity for using these technological items – now called Links, their tools regarded as relics of a magical era bygone – the easiest way to support themselves was through working together in hunting the monsters that had sprung up from the experiments of the last world, and the people who had become monsters from overuse of their relics, called AKs. While often mistrusted by the people of the world, the Links’ organization, the Akashic Union, helped preserve the peace and order of the new world through its gifted agents. Two such agents rose to legendary prominence: a fearsome warrior with an axe that was said to be able to cut anything, a brilliant battlefield tactician whose book was thought to know the future. The two brought down countless horrors from the old world and the current alike, and retired to the country, to settle down and raise a family of their own. They had tried their hardest to live in obscurity, and as such their children had relatively peaceful upbringings.
This changed one autumn evening, when the entire town came under attack. Cultists who had worshipped one of the things that the couple had murdered had come for revenge, willing to sacrifice the whole town. Worse yet, the couple had been on a business trip over to the next town, leaving them without a defense. Novus, the oldest of his siblings, knew something had to be done: he had never used a Relic before, but he knew his parents both had, and that the trait often bred true. While he could not use his father’s axe, his mother’s book bonded with him immediately. He made short work of the cultists, but at the cost of horrifying the entire town with the sheer destructive power of the Relic. Rather than try to make amends, he left, with the book, for the Akashic Union’s offices immediately.
Novus, thankfully, took well to fieldwork. In fact, he took a bit too well to fieldwork – his capabilities with the book were even greater than previous generations, but it was changing him into something else. Through his own studied, Novus was able to surmise that he had not, in fact, been a perfect candidate for his relic, but that, as an intelligent weapon, it had sensed his desperation and forged a connection with him. The resulting bond was turning him into an AK. To complicate matters, the branch office he had managed to isolate himself in was assigned a new agent, a mysterious young woman named Hikaru Mibu. The two found themselves on a tumultuous first mission, and ultimately had to confide their secrets in each other: that he was losing his humanity, and that her partially-spirit nature marked her as both one of the nobles of Izumo, and had made her capable of using every relic in the world, something that could easily get her killed or experimented on.
Eventually their work led them to a dangerous task, requiring them to team up with two other Links to transport a classified and highly valuable cargo. The cargo, it turned out, was the son of a prominent politician in one of the kingdoms, who had half-turned into an AK from his first bond with a relic. Driven mad and fully transformed by the tension and isolation, he threatened to kill everyone aboard. Without a thought, Novus forced his own relic to its limits, forcibly altering reality within the area of the train to save everyone. While his friends were able to subdue the monster, this had effectively turned Novus into another one. The only thing that stopped this was Hikaru’s quick thinking, using Liber Infinitus herself to turn the book into a limiter that allowed Novus to, for awhile, at least, control himself as a Link.
When all seemed lost, however, one of the two links whom they had been working with revealed that she knew of a cure: a relic that had once belonged to her mother, given to the Kingdom of Izumo after her death, so that they might be able to reverse engineer such a powerful tool and save others. While Hikaru was less than pleased with the idea of returning home, both her and Novus recognized it was his only chance – and perhaps the only chance for her family to be saved as well. The two traveled southwest from the broken continent back to her homelands, in search of a way to break the dome of pure energy that had enveloped her family’s manor. Tensions rose on the trip, however, as Hikaru and Novus both realized the situation was far from perfect. The Memory of Sunlight, as the relic was called, likely only had the strength to perform such a miracle once, and the strain was likely to turn someone into an AK or kill them if attempted again – and there were, at minimum, two people who needed it to survive. Novus refused to accept that Hikaru would sacrifice her father for him, and Hikaru was likewise horrified he would come all this way and risk so much to simply succumb to his condition.
The situation, however, was further complicated: Novus had been unaware that his own family had shadowed him after he left for the Union, his mother realizing his imperfect bond with the Liber Infinitus would turn him monstrous. His sister, on the other hand, had taken a more proactive approach, breaking into vaults and caches, hassling or attacking other Links who might be able to help, and otherwise trying to find a cure for his condition herself. She likely had no idea of the relic in the vault, only that the Mibu were consummate collectors of them, and with the axe’s destructive capabilities, she was able to cleave the magical construct in two, breaking the enchantments inside: and releasing Hikaru’s parents, who had both turned into AKs in the intervening years. The two were no match for the incredibly potent AKs, and Novus was forced to act desperately, breaking the limiter condition within the book and hoping his humanity could hold out until Hikaru found The Memory of Sunlight. It was not a bad gamble; she found it, and was about to use it as Novus expended the last of his strength to hold her parents at bay. However, in the last second, Hikaru’s mother toppled it from her hands, and it went falling, rolling to Novus’ feet. With his consciousness fading, he took hold of it, forcing it to work for him. As the threat of turning into an AK from the use of the relic meant nothing to what little of him remained human, he poured everything he could into it, obliterating his consciousness and restoring Hikaru’s parents both back to their original forms.
To hear Novus tell it, the next thing he knew a month had passed and he felt as though he had the worst cold of his life upon waking up. What had happened, however, was that Hikaru had stolen back Liber Infinitus after he discarded it, throwing her own desperate gambit into the mix: using the book’s powers to rewrite things so that AKs could, in fact, be saved. Novus, for his part, had fundamentally been altered by turning into such a monster; the connection he had with the book was no longer imperfect, meaning that, having somehow been saved from the abyss, he did not have to fear it again. It would take months for him to recover, in fact, from the massive physiological changes such transformations had inflicted upon him, but he was well enough to travel and would likely be able to return to field work within a year. Novus, as he had done so many times before, attempted to escape in the night – only to find Hikaru and her family waiting for him at the docks. The two would be returning to the broken continent together.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Novus does his very best to project an air of nonchalance, even sometimes coming across as devil-may-care or even outright lazy when it comes to things. He isn’t above complaining if the situation inconveniences him, and is a very large proponent of working smarter, not harder – and sometimes using this maxim to justify not really working much at all. This isn’t to say that he is completely shiftless; if something needs to be done, he will go after it with all due haste and a surprising amount of competence. But a lifetime of farm work, and then dangerous task work for the Akashic Union has left him as someone who deeply relishes his leisure time.
However, this somewhat belies that Novus was raised by people who took being heroes seriously, and a good deal of that has rubbed off on him. Novus might prefer to take it easy, but in a crisis he will do everything in his power, even if it becomes detrimental to him, to help people. Even outside of problems, he has a charitable streak he cannot deny: if he can help, he will help, even if he complains about how much of a hassle it is the whole time. When working with others, he always tries to do more than his fair share, because of this underlying belief that you should always help when you can. And if he finds himself aiding people he already cares about, he will only double down on this effort to help them.
Despite his tendency toward wandering off and his attitude that things that can be done tomorrow are often best saved for tomorrow, Novus is not a loner at all. He is deeply self-reliant when he can be, to the point of seeming a bit dismissive, but he enjoys the friendships and relationships that he has developed over the course of his life. If anything, his habit of trying to do things himself or take on the work of others is proof of how much he cares: more than anything, Novus hates being a burden on those whom he cares about.
However, despite these good intentions, the young man’s not the best at communication and often assumes his feelings are just understood plainly. Because of this, he can get frustrated with people who see him as being standoffish or whiny, which typically causes him to pull away more, often exacerbating the issue. Novus is one of those sorts who often has to have a friend in the middle to play translator, to help him facilitate communications beyond the day to day level, if any sort of drama in his friendships or relationships occurs.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Novus is a Link, a human being capable of using items that are effectively magical (they’re science that might as well be magic). At one point his overuse of these Relics turned him into a monster known as an AK, but due to extraordinary circumstances he is one of the very few people who has ever recovered from such an experience.
Liber Infinitus: Novus’ Relic that he inherited (well, more technically stole) from his mother: its basic form is a large, leatherbound and highly decorated tome. Its pages are filled to the brim with notes, observations, formulas, and other useful information. Liber Infinitus is a powerful relic capable of a number of things. Each one of these would be a separate regain.
Its most basic function is as a source of information on the surrounding area and people. This is not an omniscience or even a clairvoyance, but simply an aggregate of information that is available to those observing people, things, and interactions in the nearby vicinity. Essentially, Novus can either opt to literally read the situation for clues, or review things that have just very recently happened to see information that he might have missed: effectively, it would let him review threads he had been in at a later date. This would require a permissions post, of course, and would be limited only to things he could learn from people’s words or actions – he could not figure out someone’s secrets, unless for some reason they were said or acted upon in those interactions, or the player in question specifically said the book should be able to figure it out.
Its more advanced function is to provide objects or effects that Novus needs, though it does so without explanation. It might be readily obvious, or not clear at all. For example, if Novus locked himself out of his car, the book might produce his spare key, even if he had not yet realized that he had done so, which would similarly give him impetus to go check. Similarly, if he was being snuck up on in the night, Liber Infinitus might suddenly provide him with a flashlight – which he could interpret as it realizing he was walking around in the dark, still remaining oblivious that it was also an improvised weapon and that he was in danger (unless he also stopped and consulted the book’s ability to explain the situation to him, which all but would guarantee he was doomed to be ambushed, reading a book by flashlight in the dark). It is worth emphasizing that it does not explain why it has given him what it gives him, and may even decide not to give him anything if it concludes he has the situation well enough in hand: he can’t use it to generate a winning lottery ticket or something; it’s what he needs, not what he wants.
For Novus, Liber Infinitus was fashioned into a limiter for his AK form, allowing him to function in the form with some of his sanity intact. While it is wholly up to the Mod team, I would like for him to regain the ability to access this form briefly. While he is using it, all other functions of Liber Infinitum completely shut off, and even once it has ended, takes some time to return. He instead gains a bit of height and body mass, and the overload of energy from him and the relic produces a sort of heat-haze, making his features and movements somewhat indistinct. The primary advantage of this form is its vastly increased strength, agility, and vitality, though its usage leaves him greatly exhausted. While he can mostly reason in this form, he is incapable of anything particularly complicated. Additionally, he can only maintain it for a few minutes at a time before the limiter forcibly ends the transformation.
(Both the setting, and a great deal of the history overlap with Mibu Hikaru ([Bad username or unknown identity: ”foxwitted”]. This is done with permission. A setting primer can be found here.)
In the near future, humanity reached a breakthrough on understanding what had been, until that point, purely theoretical realms of science. This breakthrough gave way to a new golden age, where science had become so sufficiently capable, as to effectively become magic. This age ended in an abrupt and calamitous fashion, as people turned this revelatory gift toward the sinister ends, and, lacking a failsafe for such an event, nearly destroyed the world. Those who remained were forced to embrace what technology remained and rebuild from the ashes of the old world. It has been some centuries since.
For many who possessed the capacity for using these technological items – now called Links, their tools regarded as relics of a magical era bygone – the easiest way to support themselves was through working together in hunting the monsters that had sprung up from the experiments of the last world, and the people who had become monsters from overuse of their relics, called AKs. While often mistrusted by the people of the world, the Links’ organization, the Akashic Union, helped preserve the peace and order of the new world through its gifted agents. Two such agents rose to legendary prominence: a fearsome warrior with an axe that was said to be able to cut anything, a brilliant battlefield tactician whose book was thought to know the future. The two brought down countless horrors from the old world and the current alike, and retired to the country, to settle down and raise a family of their own. They had tried their hardest to live in obscurity, and as such their children had relatively peaceful upbringings.
This changed one autumn evening, when the entire town came under attack. Cultists who had worshipped one of the things that the couple had murdered had come for revenge, willing to sacrifice the whole town. Worse yet, the couple had been on a business trip over to the next town, leaving them without a defense. Novus, the oldest of his siblings, knew something had to be done: he had never used a Relic before, but he knew his parents both had, and that the trait often bred true. While he could not use his father’s axe, his mother’s book bonded with him immediately. He made short work of the cultists, but at the cost of horrifying the entire town with the sheer destructive power of the Relic. Rather than try to make amends, he left, with the book, for the Akashic Union’s offices immediately.
Novus, thankfully, took well to fieldwork. In fact, he took a bit too well to fieldwork – his capabilities with the book were even greater than previous generations, but it was changing him into something else. Through his own studied, Novus was able to surmise that he had not, in fact, been a perfect candidate for his relic, but that, as an intelligent weapon, it had sensed his desperation and forged a connection with him. The resulting bond was turning him into an AK. To complicate matters, the branch office he had managed to isolate himself in was assigned a new agent, a mysterious young woman named Hikaru Mibu. The two found themselves on a tumultuous first mission, and ultimately had to confide their secrets in each other: that he was losing his humanity, and that her partially-spirit nature marked her as both one of the nobles of Izumo, and had made her capable of using every relic in the world, something that could easily get her killed or experimented on.
Eventually their work led them to a dangerous task, requiring them to team up with two other Links to transport a classified and highly valuable cargo. The cargo, it turned out, was the son of a prominent politician in one of the kingdoms, who had half-turned into an AK from his first bond with a relic. Driven mad and fully transformed by the tension and isolation, he threatened to kill everyone aboard. Without a thought, Novus forced his own relic to its limits, forcibly altering reality within the area of the train to save everyone. While his friends were able to subdue the monster, this had effectively turned Novus into another one. The only thing that stopped this was Hikaru’s quick thinking, using Liber Infinitus herself to turn the book into a limiter that allowed Novus to, for awhile, at least, control himself as a Link.
When all seemed lost, however, one of the two links whom they had been working with revealed that she knew of a cure: a relic that had once belonged to her mother, given to the Kingdom of Izumo after her death, so that they might be able to reverse engineer such a powerful tool and save others. While Hikaru was less than pleased with the idea of returning home, both her and Novus recognized it was his only chance – and perhaps the only chance for her family to be saved as well. The two traveled southwest from the broken continent back to her homelands, in search of a way to break the dome of pure energy that had enveloped her family’s manor. Tensions rose on the trip, however, as Hikaru and Novus both realized the situation was far from perfect. The Memory of Sunlight, as the relic was called, likely only had the strength to perform such a miracle once, and the strain was likely to turn someone into an AK or kill them if attempted again – and there were, at minimum, two people who needed it to survive. Novus refused to accept that Hikaru would sacrifice her father for him, and Hikaru was likewise horrified he would come all this way and risk so much to simply succumb to his condition.
The situation, however, was further complicated: Novus had been unaware that his own family had shadowed him after he left for the Union, his mother realizing his imperfect bond with the Liber Infinitus would turn him monstrous. His sister, on the other hand, had taken a more proactive approach, breaking into vaults and caches, hassling or attacking other Links who might be able to help, and otherwise trying to find a cure for his condition herself. She likely had no idea of the relic in the vault, only that the Mibu were consummate collectors of them, and with the axe’s destructive capabilities, she was able to cleave the magical construct in two, breaking the enchantments inside: and releasing Hikaru’s parents, who had both turned into AKs in the intervening years. The two were no match for the incredibly potent AKs, and Novus was forced to act desperately, breaking the limiter condition within the book and hoping his humanity could hold out until Hikaru found The Memory of Sunlight. It was not a bad gamble; she found it, and was about to use it as Novus expended the last of his strength to hold her parents at bay. However, in the last second, Hikaru’s mother toppled it from her hands, and it went falling, rolling to Novus’ feet. With his consciousness fading, he took hold of it, forcing it to work for him. As the threat of turning into an AK from the use of the relic meant nothing to what little of him remained human, he poured everything he could into it, obliterating his consciousness and restoring Hikaru’s parents both back to their original forms.
To hear Novus tell it, the next thing he knew a month had passed and he felt as though he had the worst cold of his life upon waking up. What had happened, however, was that Hikaru had stolen back Liber Infinitus after he discarded it, throwing her own desperate gambit into the mix: using the book’s powers to rewrite things so that AKs could, in fact, be saved. Novus, for his part, had fundamentally been altered by turning into such a monster; the connection he had with the book was no longer imperfect, meaning that, having somehow been saved from the abyss, he did not have to fear it again. It would take months for him to recover, in fact, from the massive physiological changes such transformations had inflicted upon him, but he was well enough to travel and would likely be able to return to field work within a year. Novus, as he had done so many times before, attempted to escape in the night – only to find Hikaru and her family waiting for him at the docks. The two would be returning to the broken continent together.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Novus does his very best to project an air of nonchalance, even sometimes coming across as devil-may-care or even outright lazy when it comes to things. He isn’t above complaining if the situation inconveniences him, and is a very large proponent of working smarter, not harder – and sometimes using this maxim to justify not really working much at all. This isn’t to say that he is completely shiftless; if something needs to be done, he will go after it with all due haste and a surprising amount of competence. But a lifetime of farm work, and then dangerous task work for the Akashic Union has left him as someone who deeply relishes his leisure time.
However, this somewhat belies that Novus was raised by people who took being heroes seriously, and a good deal of that has rubbed off on him. Novus might prefer to take it easy, but in a crisis he will do everything in his power, even if it becomes detrimental to him, to help people. Even outside of problems, he has a charitable streak he cannot deny: if he can help, he will help, even if he complains about how much of a hassle it is the whole time. When working with others, he always tries to do more than his fair share, because of this underlying belief that you should always help when you can. And if he finds himself aiding people he already cares about, he will only double down on this effort to help them.
Despite his tendency toward wandering off and his attitude that things that can be done tomorrow are often best saved for tomorrow, Novus is not a loner at all. He is deeply self-reliant when he can be, to the point of seeming a bit dismissive, but he enjoys the friendships and relationships that he has developed over the course of his life. If anything, his habit of trying to do things himself or take on the work of others is proof of how much he cares: more than anything, Novus hates being a burden on those whom he cares about.
However, despite these good intentions, the young man’s not the best at communication and often assumes his feelings are just understood plainly. Because of this, he can get frustrated with people who see him as being standoffish or whiny, which typically causes him to pull away more, often exacerbating the issue. Novus is one of those sorts who often has to have a friend in the middle to play translator, to help him facilitate communications beyond the day to day level, if any sort of drama in his friendships or relationships occurs.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Novus is a Link, a human being capable of using items that are effectively magical (they’re science that might as well be magic). At one point his overuse of these Relics turned him into a monster known as an AK, but due to extraordinary circumstances he is one of the very few people who has ever recovered from such an experience.
Liber Infinitus: Novus’ Relic that he inherited (well, more technically stole) from his mother: its basic form is a large, leatherbound and highly decorated tome. Its pages are filled to the brim with notes, observations, formulas, and other useful information. Liber Infinitus is a powerful relic capable of a number of things. Each one of these would be a separate regain.
Its most basic function is as a source of information on the surrounding area and people. This is not an omniscience or even a clairvoyance, but simply an aggregate of information that is available to those observing people, things, and interactions in the nearby vicinity. Essentially, Novus can either opt to literally read the situation for clues, or review things that have just very recently happened to see information that he might have missed: effectively, it would let him review threads he had been in at a later date. This would require a permissions post, of course, and would be limited only to things he could learn from people’s words or actions – he could not figure out someone’s secrets, unless for some reason they were said or acted upon in those interactions, or the player in question specifically said the book should be able to figure it out.
Its more advanced function is to provide objects or effects that Novus needs, though it does so without explanation. It might be readily obvious, or not clear at all. For example, if Novus locked himself out of his car, the book might produce his spare key, even if he had not yet realized that he had done so, which would similarly give him impetus to go check. Similarly, if he was being snuck up on in the night, Liber Infinitus might suddenly provide him with a flashlight – which he could interpret as it realizing he was walking around in the dark, still remaining oblivious that it was also an improvised weapon and that he was in danger (unless he also stopped and consulted the book’s ability to explain the situation to him, which all but would guarantee he was doomed to be ambushed, reading a book by flashlight in the dark). It is worth emphasizing that it does not explain why it has given him what it gives him, and may even decide not to give him anything if it concludes he has the situation well enough in hand: he can’t use it to generate a winning lottery ticket or something; it’s what he needs, not what he wants.
For Novus, Liber Infinitus was fashioned into a limiter for his AK form, allowing him to function in the form with some of his sanity intact. While it is wholly up to the Mod team, I would like for him to regain the ability to access this form briefly. While he is using it, all other functions of Liber Infinitum completely shut off, and even once it has ended, takes some time to return. He instead gains a bit of height and body mass, and the overload of energy from him and the relic produces a sort of heat-haze, making his features and movements somewhat indistinct. The primary advantage of this form is its vastly increased strength, agility, and vitality, though its usage leaves him greatly exhausted. While he can mostly reason in this form, he is incapable of anything particularly complicated. Additionally, he can only maintain it for a few minutes at a time before the limiter forcibly ends the transformation.
CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Noah Leggieri
AU AGE: 21
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
Noah is mostly the same. He lacks the increased height and muscle mass from briefly being inhuman, as well as all the scars from working a very dangerous job for several years.
AU NAME: Noah Leggieri
AU AGE: 21
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
Noah is mostly the same. He lacks the increased height and muscle mass from briefly being inhuman, as well as all the scars from working a very dangerous job for several years.
AU HISTORY:
(This comes with permissions from Hikarufoxwitted, Ichirou wherethewildthingsare, Marcel fairhands, and Yukine secare.)
Noah is a native to the Recolle area! He is the oldest child of the household: his mother is similarly a native, a former professor of mathematics, and now a librarian in a working retirement. She fostered an incredible love of reading in him from a young age, and encouraged in a life-long love of learning about everything he could, through every means at his disposal. His father is an electrical engineer for an international petrochemical firm. He is supportive both emotionally and financially, but often not around for long stretches, as his job involved overseeing the setting up and maintenance of electrical and cathodic insulatory equipment all over the world. His father's in-home gym setup abandoned in the garage became something of a private haven for Noah as he got older, and is likely why he was in good enough shape for baseball once he got to high school.
As the oldest of the three children in that household, Noah wound up picking up some of the slack with a father who had to often be away on business. His younger sister, while if anything more intelligent and curious than him, was not of exceptionally great health in her earlier years (although she has grown out of that some), which meant their mother had to typically keep a much closer eye on her. As such, Noah had to grow up at a bit of an accelerated rate, both doing things to fill in when his father wasn't around to take care of his sister, and to be a model student as his mother hoped for him. This isn't to say he was abandoned or neglected entirely. His parents did their absolute best to provide for him, and while they demanded that he always do his best in school, weren't overly strict with him in other areas. His uncles also were part of the equation in this regard, helping his mother out, teaching Noah the various essentials when his father couldn't. In particular, Noah and his uncle Marcell have bonded over fashion, which for Noah just began as a way to pick up girls and instead has become something of a major hobby for him. Likewise, Yukine and he didn't get along particularly well when they were younger, due to the age gap, but as both have become older, they have a better understanding of each other; Noah views Yukine now more like a younger brother than a cousin, probably due to their mutual dislike of authority.
This strange household situation was instrumental in shaping Noah's big loves in life. In particular, Noah developed a love of history and mythology in his childhood, as a combination of his mother's insistence that he always be trying to improve his grades and find subjects to read about, and his father's tendency to bring back local art and antiques from wherever his work took him. Reading up on the places his father was going, as well as stories about the local customs and folklore became a way to connect with the man, as well as a means for him to entertain his younger sibling and cousin with all kinds of stories. As he got older, this love of stories and myth has had the side-effect of turning Noah into a bit of a gossip, and a huge fan of urban legends, rumors, even creepypasta and online stories about locations; the guy absolutely loves the idea of places having their own stories, especially ones that don't completely fit with how the real world is supposed to work.
However, the stress and so many people in and out of a single house was enough to where he needed an escape. One of these was working out or pick-up sports with other locals. However, this also lead to one of Noah's biggest hobbies forming: from about the time he was allowed some freedom to be out, so long as he kept his phone on him, Noah developed a bad habit of just going out for walks when he needed the room. This, coupled with that insatiable curiosity, inevitably translated to looking around abandoned buildings, trespassing on property, and otherwise just getting into places he shouldn't, and getting caught more than a few times. He always promised never to do it again, but inevitably would be caught a few months later, get grounded, and then when it was rescinded for good grades, start the process all over.
When he got older, Noah got into the idea of being popular. He worked out more, took pains to hide his never diminished love of reading (thank you smart-phones), really got into working out and fashion, and likewise did whatever he thought would work, including joining a sports team. This also meant that love of late night walks alone turned into sneaking out to parties or even to just hang out with friends, well past curfews. He still wasn't absolutely perfect at it, and did of course get dragged back home by the police a few times, with increasingly more irritation on their parts. Noah ultimately lost his place on the high school baseball team (and alongside it any potential scholarships and a lot of his social standing) when he got busted at a particularly wild house party with other teens; while the others mostly got off with stern talking-tos, his repeated minor offenses led to a more severe charge, that carried community service hours and a charge on his records. Even now he's not the most fond of the police, even if he will admit, with some cajoling, that this is his fault.
But despite that black mark, he had the grades to get into college just about anywhere. Instead, Noah took a full-ride from a local college, so that he could take care of things around the house still for his mother and other family members. It also is because he doesn’t want to leave behind the people whom he has spent his whole life with, given he isn’t the best at making friends. Naturally, Noah is pursuing a degree in sociology, with a focus on folklore, and a history minor. This is where he made several fast friends. Most of his friends circle in high school fell away after that house party ended with him actually getting in trouble - being a rumormonger, evidently, had come around to bite him rather quickly - but college was a mostly clean new start. In particular, though, he wound up study partners with Hikaru for an upper level class on Egyptology, and the two of them have been basically inseparable ever since. It's to the point he has stopped correcting his uncles when they insist on calling Hikaru his girlfriend. Said new friends also helped get Noah a job at the local history museum as a tour guide, after his patented strategy of pestering the staff with questions, and theories, and his own nonsense about local urban legends and going-ons had failed. He deeply enjoys the days when kids come in, since they're usually the most excited about learning, and also aren’t going to question the occasional aside that might be rooted more in myth and speculation than the 100% verifiable truth. Noah is currently about a good semester or so from graduating, and might be spreading his classes out because it gives him an excuse to hang around Hikaru and his other college friends more as well as ignore his legitimate anxiousness about his future.
AU PERSONALITY:
Noah, as compared to Novus, is a great deal more persistent in talking to people. He still has a bad habit of shutting up and ghosting on people when he feels slighted by how they treat him, but Novus was a man of few words. Noah, by contrast, wants to know everything he can about other people: he’s fascinated by them, their beliefs, and the ways that their relationships work - even if he isn't the closest with people, he just likes knowing and being involved with their situations. Because of this, Noah has not unlearned how to be a rumor mill, despite it helping to bite him in the ass in high school. These days, he won't stir the pot unless he has seriously good reason to believe it's true, but he is still fascinated by gossip, and you can get a lot of of him with the promise of some kind of dirt on someone, or especially with something like an urban legend he hasn't heard before.
Noah is also a lot more willing to shirk responsibilities and screw around if he thinks he can get away with it. This isn't born out of laziness or a dislike of hard work precisely, but because of the fact that he has had to be so incredibly responsible growing up: now that his sister is old enough to fend for herself more and he's more independent of his parents and uncles, Noah really relishes the time he has to spend with friends and people who he cares about. He's also not exceptionally disciplined, because he has been used to managing to get by without a lot of hard work. The end result is that Noah will absolutely put himself through the wringer for completely trivial stupidity, if it accomplishes even minor goals of his, but without motivation he's as likely to work on getting out of the responsibility as he is to work toward it.
This isn't to say that he doesn't have things he's willing to work hard for. Noah still loves to learn and read, and will be glad to talk for hours about either what he's reading or the weird minutiae of various subjects he has learned about. He still works out religiously, even though he doesn't play sports, and he has bonded with Yukine in particular over a mutual love of baseball. Noah maintains a blog even, about folklore, mythology, and urban legends; he doesn't post about personal gossip, but he does occasionally post shots of abandoned buildings or private property in the dead of night he's snuck onto for aesthetic shots, simply because those tend to get page clicks. He's also, perhaps owing to upper level classes and having a part-time job on top of them, become recently enamored of coffee; the different types of beans, the methods of bean preparation and techniques for brewing -- every aspect of the art, he's become interested in, and is likely dragging others into. Noah is just unable to do things by halves, and if he does love a topic, he will let it consume him.
There is a certain amount of ugly resentment that Noah tries to paper over. By his own count, his parents were occupied for most of his childhood with their own careers, then his sisters' health ate his mother's newfound free time, and to some extent he can't help but feel like Yukine being there is his mother fighting empty nest syndrome. His popularity proving to be not worth much when he needed friends has made him somewhat cynical about how much friends are ultimately worth. While he is getting better about learning to really make friends, not just acquaintances, some part of them is wary for the day when they just move on because he isn't as convenient. But while it's a bitter, caustic kind of belief, he does legitimately enjoy spending time with people enough that he can tamp this down except for when things go wrong. He's not a gloomy person, by and large! But when it's a bad day, it often ends with Noah in some very dark, lonely places, mentally.
If there is one area of his personality that Noah far outstrips Novus in, it is in that he is a lot better at understanding people. Novus believed in helping people no matter what, but wasn't any good with them; most of his way of helping was a very selfish kind of running out in the middle of things and trying to solve their problems himself. On the other hand, Noah is a lot better at understanding what others actually want, and while he isn't as willing to render aid as often as his original counterpart, he is able to do so a lot better. Somewhat ironically, while he is cynical about his own personal relationships, when he's approaching from the angle of helping, Noah is a surprisingly good judge of problems and will often go to extremes he'd never consider for himself to help others.
This ability to understand people better also translates out to making him a lot better about his relationships than the original Novus. While he will do his best to present that he does not care at all, Noah actually is considerate of the people who he truly cares about to a fault, worrying himself sick over small things and willing to prioritize their own happiness over his when it comes down to it. Part of it is because, at his best, Noah is a genuinely caring and selfless person, and when he's at his most down, feels like people taking advantage of him is just matter of course, and this is a place where those two rather nastily intersect. Still, even if sometimes it's not from the best place, Noah does consider his actual friends and loved ones absolutely irreplaceable, and would do anything for them.
Ultimately, the biggest and most striking difference between Novus and Noah is that Noah lacks the drive of his original universe counterpart. His life isn’t in danger, nor is anyone he cares about, and he’s been smart and talented enough to basically coast through life to this point. Now that school is coming to an end, he is unsure where he wants to go next: he likely could go to graduate school, but is unsure that academia is where he wants to wind up. It’s not quite a need to grow up, but it is definitely a reluctance to transition to the next part of his life. The end result is he’s a bit nicer, but also a bit flakier: and he’s going to have that second one smacked out of him.
(This comes with permissions from Hikaru
foxwitted, Ichirou wherethewildthingsare, Marcel fairhands, and Yukine secare.)Noah is a native to the Recolle area! He is the oldest child of the household: his mother is similarly a native, a former professor of mathematics, and now a librarian in a working retirement. She fostered an incredible love of reading in him from a young age, and encouraged in a life-long love of learning about everything he could, through every means at his disposal. His father is an electrical engineer for an international petrochemical firm. He is supportive both emotionally and financially, but often not around for long stretches, as his job involved overseeing the setting up and maintenance of electrical and cathodic insulatory equipment all over the world. His father's in-home gym setup abandoned in the garage became something of a private haven for Noah as he got older, and is likely why he was in good enough shape for baseball once he got to high school.
As the oldest of the three children in that household, Noah wound up picking up some of the slack with a father who had to often be away on business. His younger sister, while if anything more intelligent and curious than him, was not of exceptionally great health in her earlier years (although she has grown out of that some), which meant their mother had to typically keep a much closer eye on her. As such, Noah had to grow up at a bit of an accelerated rate, both doing things to fill in when his father wasn't around to take care of his sister, and to be a model student as his mother hoped for him. This isn't to say he was abandoned or neglected entirely. His parents did their absolute best to provide for him, and while they demanded that he always do his best in school, weren't overly strict with him in other areas. His uncles also were part of the equation in this regard, helping his mother out, teaching Noah the various essentials when his father couldn't. In particular, Noah and his uncle Marcell have bonded over fashion, which for Noah just began as a way to pick up girls and instead has become something of a major hobby for him. Likewise, Yukine and he didn't get along particularly well when they were younger, due to the age gap, but as both have become older, they have a better understanding of each other; Noah views Yukine now more like a younger brother than a cousin, probably due to their mutual dislike of authority.
This strange household situation was instrumental in shaping Noah's big loves in life. In particular, Noah developed a love of history and mythology in his childhood, as a combination of his mother's insistence that he always be trying to improve his grades and find subjects to read about, and his father's tendency to bring back local art and antiques from wherever his work took him. Reading up on the places his father was going, as well as stories about the local customs and folklore became a way to connect with the man, as well as a means for him to entertain his younger sibling and cousin with all kinds of stories. As he got older, this love of stories and myth has had the side-effect of turning Noah into a bit of a gossip, and a huge fan of urban legends, rumors, even creepypasta and online stories about locations; the guy absolutely loves the idea of places having their own stories, especially ones that don't completely fit with how the real world is supposed to work.
However, the stress and so many people in and out of a single house was enough to where he needed an escape. One of these was working out or pick-up sports with other locals. However, this also lead to one of Noah's biggest hobbies forming: from about the time he was allowed some freedom to be out, so long as he kept his phone on him, Noah developed a bad habit of just going out for walks when he needed the room. This, coupled with that insatiable curiosity, inevitably translated to looking around abandoned buildings, trespassing on property, and otherwise just getting into places he shouldn't, and getting caught more than a few times. He always promised never to do it again, but inevitably would be caught a few months later, get grounded, and then when it was rescinded for good grades, start the process all over.
When he got older, Noah got into the idea of being popular. He worked out more, took pains to hide his never diminished love of reading (thank you smart-phones), really got into working out and fashion, and likewise did whatever he thought would work, including joining a sports team. This also meant that love of late night walks alone turned into sneaking out to parties or even to just hang out with friends, well past curfews. He still wasn't absolutely perfect at it, and did of course get dragged back home by the police a few times, with increasingly more irritation on their parts. Noah ultimately lost his place on the high school baseball team (and alongside it any potential scholarships and a lot of his social standing) when he got busted at a particularly wild house party with other teens; while the others mostly got off with stern talking-tos, his repeated minor offenses led to a more severe charge, that carried community service hours and a charge on his records. Even now he's not the most fond of the police, even if he will admit, with some cajoling, that this is his fault.
But despite that black mark, he had the grades to get into college just about anywhere. Instead, Noah took a full-ride from a local college, so that he could take care of things around the house still for his mother and other family members. It also is because he doesn’t want to leave behind the people whom he has spent his whole life with, given he isn’t the best at making friends. Naturally, Noah is pursuing a degree in sociology, with a focus on folklore, and a history minor. This is where he made several fast friends. Most of his friends circle in high school fell away after that house party ended with him actually getting in trouble - being a rumormonger, evidently, had come around to bite him rather quickly - but college was a mostly clean new start. In particular, though, he wound up study partners with Hikaru for an upper level class on Egyptology, and the two of them have been basically inseparable ever since. It's to the point he has stopped correcting his uncles when they insist on calling Hikaru his girlfriend. Said new friends also helped get Noah a job at the local history museum as a tour guide, after his patented strategy of pestering the staff with questions, and theories, and his own nonsense about local urban legends and going-ons had failed. He deeply enjoys the days when kids come in, since they're usually the most excited about learning, and also aren’t going to question the occasional aside that might be rooted more in myth and speculation than the 100% verifiable truth. Noah is currently about a good semester or so from graduating, and might be spreading his classes out because it gives him an excuse to hang around Hikaru and his other college friends more as well as ignore his legitimate anxiousness about his future.
AU PERSONALITY:
Noah, as compared to Novus, is a great deal more persistent in talking to people. He still has a bad habit of shutting up and ghosting on people when he feels slighted by how they treat him, but Novus was a man of few words. Noah, by contrast, wants to know everything he can about other people: he’s fascinated by them, their beliefs, and the ways that their relationships work - even if he isn't the closest with people, he just likes knowing and being involved with their situations. Because of this, Noah has not unlearned how to be a rumor mill, despite it helping to bite him in the ass in high school. These days, he won't stir the pot unless he has seriously good reason to believe it's true, but he is still fascinated by gossip, and you can get a lot of of him with the promise of some kind of dirt on someone, or especially with something like an urban legend he hasn't heard before.
Noah is also a lot more willing to shirk responsibilities and screw around if he thinks he can get away with it. This isn't born out of laziness or a dislike of hard work precisely, but because of the fact that he has had to be so incredibly responsible growing up: now that his sister is old enough to fend for herself more and he's more independent of his parents and uncles, Noah really relishes the time he has to spend with friends and people who he cares about. He's also not exceptionally disciplined, because he has been used to managing to get by without a lot of hard work. The end result is that Noah will absolutely put himself through the wringer for completely trivial stupidity, if it accomplishes even minor goals of his, but without motivation he's as likely to work on getting out of the responsibility as he is to work toward it.
This isn't to say that he doesn't have things he's willing to work hard for. Noah still loves to learn and read, and will be glad to talk for hours about either what he's reading or the weird minutiae of various subjects he has learned about. He still works out religiously, even though he doesn't play sports, and he has bonded with Yukine in particular over a mutual love of baseball. Noah maintains a blog even, about folklore, mythology, and urban legends; he doesn't post about personal gossip, but he does occasionally post shots of abandoned buildings or private property in the dead of night he's snuck onto for aesthetic shots, simply because those tend to get page clicks. He's also, perhaps owing to upper level classes and having a part-time job on top of them, become recently enamored of coffee; the different types of beans, the methods of bean preparation and techniques for brewing -- every aspect of the art, he's become interested in, and is likely dragging others into. Noah is just unable to do things by halves, and if he does love a topic, he will let it consume him.
There is a certain amount of ugly resentment that Noah tries to paper over. By his own count, his parents were occupied for most of his childhood with their own careers, then his sisters' health ate his mother's newfound free time, and to some extent he can't help but feel like Yukine being there is his mother fighting empty nest syndrome. His popularity proving to be not worth much when he needed friends has made him somewhat cynical about how much friends are ultimately worth. While he is getting better about learning to really make friends, not just acquaintances, some part of them is wary for the day when they just move on because he isn't as convenient. But while it's a bitter, caustic kind of belief, he does legitimately enjoy spending time with people enough that he can tamp this down except for when things go wrong. He's not a gloomy person, by and large! But when it's a bad day, it often ends with Noah in some very dark, lonely places, mentally.
If there is one area of his personality that Noah far outstrips Novus in, it is in that he is a lot better at understanding people. Novus believed in helping people no matter what, but wasn't any good with them; most of his way of helping was a very selfish kind of running out in the middle of things and trying to solve their problems himself. On the other hand, Noah is a lot better at understanding what others actually want, and while he isn't as willing to render aid as often as his original counterpart, he is able to do so a lot better. Somewhat ironically, while he is cynical about his own personal relationships, when he's approaching from the angle of helping, Noah is a surprisingly good judge of problems and will often go to extremes he'd never consider for himself to help others.
This ability to understand people better also translates out to making him a lot better about his relationships than the original Novus. While he will do his best to present that he does not care at all, Noah actually is considerate of the people who he truly cares about to a fault, worrying himself sick over small things and willing to prioritize their own happiness over his when it comes down to it. Part of it is because, at his best, Noah is a genuinely caring and selfless person, and when he's at his most down, feels like people taking advantage of him is just matter of course, and this is a place where those two rather nastily intersect. Still, even if sometimes it's not from the best place, Noah does consider his actual friends and loved ones absolutely irreplaceable, and would do anything for them.
Ultimately, the biggest and most striking difference between Novus and Noah is that Noah lacks the drive of his original universe counterpart. His life isn’t in danger, nor is anyone he cares about, and he’s been smart and talented enough to basically coast through life to this point. Now that school is coming to an end, he is unsure where he wants to go next: he likely could go to graduate school, but is unsure that academia is where he wants to wind up. It’s not quite a need to grow up, but it is definitely a reluctance to transition to the next part of his life. The end result is he’s a bit nicer, but also a bit flakier: and he’s going to have that second one smacked out of him.
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