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Character Name: Gokudera Hayato aka Scowl
Canon: Katekyo Hitman Reborn
AU/OC/Previous Game: Yes, previous game! He is being taken from the end of Sabra la Tau, an insanejournal game
Age: 17-ish counting the year spent in Sabra
Appearance: 17-ish. His hair is long enough to pull into a ponytail and is a medium silver color. He's got green eyes and fairly pale skin due to being underground for nearly a year. He wears coveralls, heavy workboots, and t-shirts all in a bright neon green or orange. He's also a full inch shorter than in canon due to some shrinking and growing hilarity that took place during a game. His shadow is also not his own (it resembles Agito/Akito from Air Gear instead and is roughly a foot shorter than him). Final visual difference is a piercing in his left ear with a plain gold stud.
He has a tonnn of scars. One is a jagged scar encircling his upper right arm. As though it'd been ripped off and then reattached. :') There's also a huge blotchy mess of scarring over his entire chest and stomach. Stab wounds, acid scarring, etc... IT IS A MESS. Various scars from knife wounds. I know for sure there is one in his side and plenty of gashes on arms and legs and more on sides and everywhere. Lots of small scars from blades on his hands and fingers. He picked those up while learning how to make and throw knives. And finally a painfully looking scar below his left ear that looks like this: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v204/Hermisia/Sabra/flowersglyph.png
Also has a ton of tattoos! Covering his entire back: http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc271/Uncreativity/hydracula.jpg (the "centipede" has been altered to no longer appear dead.) He also has a tramp stamp of man-eating giant centipedes below that Those centipedes are surrounding a tattoo replication of the scar below his left ear. This wraps around his right arm: http://www.girl-tattoos.com/images/design_shark_tattoo_03.jpg and he has a spade (http://static.wix.com/media/136b61dd780a7223c0de06152a66c528.wix_mp ) with a star inside of it on the inside of his right wrist. Aaand on his chest is this thing: http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g257/strange_chan/skull.jpg
Cause of Death: Overwhelmed by the energy of a goddess of monsters/desires upon helping to destroy her which led to attacking a dragon in a bloodlust frenzy and getting himself killed. \:D/
Impact of Death: Regret and rage at being removed from the endgame for Sabra. He's Hydra's leader!! It's going to be appalling to him that he left his team behind to face it on their own. Some of this will be immediately soothed since there are people from well after the endgame to tell him there were some successes and some people did make it home as well as the fact that he expected to be killed for a long time, but he is not going to be happy with himself.
References Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayato_Gokudera for Dera specifically and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborn! for the overall series.
Character Info:
Character History: Gokudera's childhood was awesome. Where by awesome I mean horrible and traumatic. Sure, he grew up in a ridiculously huge mansion owned by his mafia boss father and had his own servants and maids, but before the age of eight Gokudera had been poisoned (over two years!), shot, rejected by his childhood hero, and learned that dear old dad had probably ordered a mafia hit on the woman who was his biological mother. Nooot the best of childhoods. When he learned about his real mother's death, he made the snap decision to run away, and for the next five years canon gets a little vague. It's heavily implied he spent most or all of that time trying to prove he could be a member of the mafia without the help of his childhood hero (a respected assassin) or his father and ran around Italy trying to get recruited into various mafia Families. It didn't go well.
Then he had the good luck of trying to kill the Vongola Family's boss-to-be, Sawada Tsunayoshi. He slipped up during the attempt and was saved by the clumsy kid and made the completely logical decision to pledge his life to Tsuna as a subordinate for as long as he lived. And true to his word he spends the rest of the series learning to tolerate other members of the Family as they're recruited, fighting loyally for Tsuna's sake at every turn (whether it's necessary or not), and gaining weaponry that doubles as fashion accessories, pets, or the most macabre set of hula hoops ever. Over the course of the series Gokudera's goal has become less and less about just being an impressive mafioso and more and more about becoming a person that Tsuna can truly rely on. It's just coincidence that he needs to be an impressive mafioso to do that.
Canon Personality: Given his early life, Gokudera is not a person who plays well with others. With most, he's loud and aggressive and quick to resort to violence when angered. And really, it isn't difficult to make him angry. He's distrustful as a rule and tends to see small slights as something more than they are. These overblown reactions have landed him in trouble in the past, and they still get him into quite a few fights these days, but he has been learning to tone it down to varying degrees with the other members of the Family.
And, of course, it's all for the sake of his beloved boss, Tsuna. More than anything, he wants to be a good, strong source of support and dependability for him. It's just taken Gokudera a while to get past his hang-up of competing with everyone around him for Tsuna's approval, attention, and praise to realize exactly how to do that. He's recently had it beaten into his head that he needs to actually act like the second-in-command he's always self-proclaimed himself to be, and he is working on filling the role as best he can. He doesn't blow the youngest member up nearly as often as he used to, for example! And he now takes protection of the Family as a whole much more seriously than he used to; he's realized they're all important to Tsuna, and what's important to Tsuna should be important to him.
Gokudera is also an exceptionally hard worker. He always pours 110% into whatever he's set his mind to. If it happens to be training, this may well mean working himself until he sleeps through meals, which is an improvement on working himself nearly to death. Literally. He's got genius level intelligence that lets him do things like solve NASA-ranked math problems in his head for the lulz, but he's never very arrogant about it. It's just not important to him when compared with his duties to Tsuna or his role in the mafia in general.
Old Game Info:
Sabra la Tau was a memory loss/competition game. Characters were placed onto teams and made to compete in games for the right to earn back memories and eventually gain a wish for anything they could have wanted. However it turned out that the Judges were actually ancient gods feeding on the emotional energy gained from games in order to extend their life spans well past when they should have rightfully died. Essentially, Sabra was a murdercave food generator for gods desperately clinging to life. \:D/ FUN!!
Scowl was placed on Hydra, a primarily anti-hero team. There were more traditionally "good" characters placed on the team, but the most active were types wholly willing to take unpopular routes to achieve noble ends. They were also ridiculously fond of doing incredibly stupid or reckless things. Sometimes even for profit! A good example would be the time they rode a drillpecker for the sake of weapon upgrades. (A drillpecker is a larger-than-a-house pteradactyl with a beak that spins like a drill, and it wants to kill you. :Db) They also once willingly snuck into the middle of raptor territory and stole an egg to hatch, just because they wanted one. Hydra was very much that crazy too-shounen-for-the-shounen-teams team. :Db And Scowl was their leader! (Scowl was also the name he chose for himself when he arrived in Sabra since he couldn't remember his own, and it's stuck with him throughout the entire game.)
It's important to note that he didn't choose to be the leader so much as the role chose him. When Hydra was first introduced, the members were him, a very young girl, and a viking who was more prone to violent responses than he was at the time. So Scowl stepped up and took on a leaderly role mostly to keep the viking in check, and was never really able to step out of the role. He's never felt entirely comfortable in it, but at the same time Hydra's a team that historically has needed a leader, and since there was never anyone better to do the job he remained. Attempts to step out of the role were met with a shounen punch to knock him back into his leaderly senses. As a result he's developed a strong sense of leadership and is much more prone to giving orders and expecting to receive some level of respect from people. Basically it's a shift from a follower's role that he took in canon (with regard to Tsuna) to a more domineering, commanding role.
He's also become incredibly more paranoid and withdrawn in spite of the more leaderly role he's taken. Sabra was a very highly competitive game that encouraged rifts between teams, and Hydra had some pretty serious ones from the very beginning. Scowl is highly suspicious of people he isn't already comfortable with and, although he can hold perfectly civil and even friendly conversations with people, is incredibly difficult to get close to. He's reached a point where even people being friendly and welcoming to him is suspect because he doesn't feel he can trust their motivations or that they'll actually follow through on what they're promising. His faith and trust in people is at zero, to be blunt.
That lack of trust is also tied into a belief that people see him as a much worse person than he actually is. This is in part a canon belief, but it's been strengthened quite a lot by events in the course of his time in this game. Choices he's made or appear to have made during some of the competitive games have given him an overly ruthless reputation, and by the time he realized it was as bad as it was it was too late for him to shake the image on his own. He finally gave up trying to change perceptions of himself after arranging twice for every team to get involved in rebellion to save themselves from being eaten by the gods and getting zero acknowledgement for it outside people already familiar with him. \:D/ He's just resigned to the idea that people think he's a monster or terrible or whatever awful thing they want to think. He default assumes people will come to this conclusion about him no matter what he does, so he just doesn't see the point in bothering anymore.
He also baseline expects people to be terrible themselves. After months of being subjected to being terrorized by a socio torture goddess with a psychotic vendetta against his team and several beloved allies of his team, the game as a whole had a chance to destroy the awful parts of her! And went to do just that. :Db However, when it came time to make a final decision and two halves of her, one more terrible than the other, were in conflict, nearly every character outside of Hydra and Hydra's partner team wanted to save both halves of her. It struck as an unforgivable betrayal since as far as anyone could tell they had not destroyed all the bad within her which would put forth a risk that she'd continue to be a crazy torture happy nutjob who wanted to gut his mind and the minds of all his loved ones. So that is another newly formed baseline assumption about people. \:D/ They make terrible and stupid choices until proven otherwise.
To sum this section up for those of you familiar with Reborn canon, take canon Dera before Vongola picks him up and amplify his belief in the world being a terrible place by a thousand or so.
Other important changes include an intense phobia of both mirrors and invasive forms of psychic powers. Many bad experiences with a goddess of the former and more general instances with the latter built up a pretty heavy phobia for both things. He will adamantly refuse to own anything reflective and will go out of his way to avoid mirrors. He'll also seek out a way to shield his mind from invasion pretty much immediately.
He's also made a complete change in his choice of weaponry and fighting styles. Because they were underground, he shied away from ever picking up explosives as a weapon out of fear of causing cave-ins. He instead uses throwing knives that are sometimes tipped in sedatives, paralytics, or deadly poisons, and he even learned how to make his own weapons to avoid having to quest for new ones all the time.. There was also a game-wide event in which characters essentially remembered an entire other life--kind of a past life. Scowl picked up some very skilled herbal medicine and poison making skills from those memories, as well as some skill in the use of staves and field medicine and surgery.
Major CR:
Wanijima Akito/Agito: These two were essentially Scowl's right arm. His second(s) in command. They were teammates that he got an IC month into the game at a time when he really needed someone who could offer him support, and they filled that slot very neatly. He became incredibly close to them over the months they spent together in the game and considers them as close as brothers. He would never have been able to maintain his leader role without their support, and he values their opinions and input very highly. They're the only people he trusts to take a back-up leader role at times when he needs to take a break, and he knows he can count on them to always understand him and never judge him before listening to everything he has to say. He has total faith and trust in them.
Excel: Excel is the leader of Hydra's partner team, Vulpecula. Scowl's known her since the day he arrived in Sabra, and she's been one of the very few that's been supportive of him from the beginning. He once lost an arm, and she and her team were among the only who stopped in to check that he hadn't died and then stayed to help Hydra get back on its feet. That kind of support continued throughout the game and grew to become mutual, and then unhealthily codependent. Scowl became incredibly fond of her and, although he's well aware she's not the sanest person out there, trusts her to look out for him completely. He'd entrust his life to her in a heartbeat with absolutely no doubts that she'd do everything in her power to keep him safe, and he would do the same for her. She's another one that he considers as good as family.
Allen Walker: Boyfriend! \:D/ The two of them were initially pretty similar. They were both tsundere types who bonded by beating each other up and being a little more able to understand each other than everyone else. Over time they grew closer; checking in on each other after bad games, worrying after each other now and then, occasionally giving one another a good shounen punch when needed. Scowl flat out adores Allen and places him on the pedestal he reserves for Tsuna in canon. Allen can do no wrong in his eyes.
Sawada Tsunayoshi: Thanks to not having many lengthy memories of Tsuna, Scowl is actually not unhealthily attached to him any longer. He remembers snippets of scenes with him; minutes, maybe hours of time. Meanwhile he has nearly an IC year of life spent with his team and friends here, and the memory of a lifetime someone else once lived. His memories of Tsuna just don't compare to that. He still does adore Tsuna and is unshaken in his belief that Tsuna is a rare and wonderful person, but the attachment isn't nearly as strong as it is in canon.
Yamamoto Takeshi (Ten Years Future version): Other boyfriend! \:D/ Yamamoto came to Sabra specifically to help guide and protect Scowl, and that set a very strong foundation for their relationship. Scowl has complete trust in him, and after months of depending on him and his trust in him growing, finally agreed to a relationship with him. He looooves Yamamoto, though he does think of him as being completely different from present day Yamamoto. Their relationship developed in very different ways, and they have entirely different experiences as a result.
Jace Beleren: MIXED FEELINGS . . . For a very long time, Jace was painted as a one-dimensional villain in Scowl's mind. They had some very serious fallouts with each other on more than one occasion. However, in the last days of the game, they managed to have a good talk that layed the foundation for overcoming their poor perceptions of each other. There is still a strong wariness and uncertainty regarding him, but he may be open to listening to whatever Jace has to say should one ever be apped.
Flowers/Rota/Pale Maiden: His beloved patron goddess. Flowers was the goddess of rebirth/new life, the cycle new life rising from the dead. Hydra patroned themselves to her in an attempt to save their partners from a crazy goddess that was tormenting them, and in doing so discovered that she was one of the Judges trying to bring an end to Sabra. Scowl grew more and more fond of her the more he learned of her past. She was made crazy by being forced to take human sacrifices which went against her personality, and he couldn't help feeling sympathy for her. He loves her as much as any mortal can love a goddess and would do anything to please her (as long as it would truly please her and not just one of her fits of madness.)
Cloud: In one of Scowl's very first games, Cloud got his teammate killed and eaten in front of his eyes. \:D/ SCOWL DID NOT TAKE IT WELL AT ALL and held a grudge against Cloud for months. At one point he and the teammate that'd been killed revenge-killed Cloud in a game which obviously did nothing to help the relationship. He doesn't hate him any longer, but GOSH things will be super awkward with any Cloud he comes across in Thusia.
Rezo: THAT CRAZY FUCKER THAT KILLED HIM AND AKITO/AGITO ONCE AND MINDWARPED HIM INTO KIDNAPPING HIS BOSS AND STABBING A GIRL. Hate hate hate hate!!1
Hana Morenos: TEAM TINY \o/ She was one of Scowl's very first teammates, and they learned early on that she was abused by her foster family which made him very protective of her. He wanted to make her happy and to keep her safe from the worst parts of the game which led to him sheltering her a lot when he was able to.
Thorfinn: VIKING BRO. This is the other first teammate and the same one that got eaten in front of him in that first game. He actually isn't as close to him as he is to other friends and allies, but he does have a strong sense of attachment/obligation to him anyway because of that early death.
Other members of Hydra: There were a lot . . . Around a dozen or so, and he is fond of all of them to varying degrees. He feels/felt a strong sense of responsibility to them; to protect them and keep them happy as much as he was able to. They were his stand-in family, and he wanted to do right by them.
Other members of Vulpecula: Scowl felt more protective of Vulpecula than anything else. He was fond of the team too, but they had a tendency to get themselves hurt or into trouble even more than Hydra did, so he was often trying to shield them from themselves. Generally positive feelings towards all of them too.
Abilities (before Powercap): Most of his powers and abilities are based on a combination of weaponry and dying will flames (a kind of personal energy source along the lines of ki, inner magic, etc.) He can't use the flames alone, instead using them to power different weapons like a multi-functional gun, shields, a weaponized cat, a bow made from his weaponized cat, etc . . . He also has a number of more mundane abilities. Canon ones include archery, various explosive skills, and throwing dynamite. Over the course of his time in his previous game he also taught himself knife throwing, AT (physics defying skate skills from another canon), staff/stave skills, some basic to mid-range construction and weapon making, poison distilling, and herbal medicine, field medicine/surgery.
Abilities (after Powercap): Scowl will have some natural capping in place since he won't have any weaponry with him whatsoever, so he'll have to begin making weapons again to build up his store. He does have some very high accuracy levels in canon since he's a distance fighter, and I'll be limiting that to make things more challenging for him, especially since he's picked up a tendency to resort to poisons and sedatives after his time spent in Sabra. If/when he gains weaponry that he can power with his dying will flames, I'll be giving him a lower stamina than he's got in canon so that he can't continuously put out room-destroying levels of energy as well as just not giving him weaponry that COULD do that. Basically since he can only do as much as what his weapons allow him to do, he just won't gain access to weapons that will give him a huge advantage over the wildlife.
All of the herbal medicine and poisons he knows how to make will be useless knowledge in Thusia as well since the plant life is completely different. And, as with Bobby, although he does now have a lot of knowledge about emergency field medicine/surgery, it won't matter until he gets hold of the supplies to actually do anything with it. It also won't be a huge advantage at all since it's not at all magical in nature. People he medics for will still have to heal the long way, just with bonus stitches and not bleeding to death.
Items Brought In: Two pets! One is a sometimes-a-weaponized soul-flame powered leopard kitten that will be restricted to a storage box until Scowl can strike a deal with a god to open the box and release it. The other is an all-the-time weaponized man-eating centipede the size of a grown man's arm known as a terapede. The centipede is psychically bonded to Scowl thanks to a psychotic goddess's gift so it will obey his orders and not just attempt to devour everything and everyone that looks remotely edible. :Db And when I say weaponized I mean it can eat through solid rock (though I will tone that back for Thusia. Point is it has a hell of a bite.)
Samples:
You must do two of any of the following four:
Third person sample on the subject of your choice.
Scowl frowned down at the scrap of bone in his hands. It'd splintered suddenly in the midst of carving it, rendering the entire piece useful. He sneered in disgust and threw the piece to the floor where a few splinters broke away from it. "Useless piece of shit . . . !" He scrubbed a hand through his hair in frustration and stood up to see if there were any other pieces left that were at all usable. It was such a goddamn pain to get just a few . . . What if they all turned out to be this fragile?!
. . . He snatched another chunk of bone up and settled down to start carving again, drawing in a deep breath. Fang would've said something like that--calm down. We can always kill a different animal next time to try the bones from it instead. For a moment he found himself wishing Fang was here, and he hated himself for it in the next. He should be glad they weren't here. If they were, it'd mean . . .
No. It was definitely for the best that they'd ended up somewhere else. Somewhere they'd get to have a real fucking life instead of more of this forced service to worthless gods. There wasn't even a promise of rebellion here. Maybe later . . . once these "gods" showed their true colors. He knew they would, once they'd gotten what they needed from them. Even if they weren't as bad as King and his cronies had been, there was no way he was going to settle for being under the rule of yet another set of gods. Not when he'd just given his life to help escape from another pantheon.
But for now . . . he supposed he'd wait. If this was yet another chance at life again, then it was far too early to throw it away. Not while he knew nothing about what this world was really like, and especially not while he still had no idea what to make of the other people here. He'd play along for now. Just long enough to find out what he needed about this world.
IC Survey:
Introduce yourself in a few sentences.
I'm Scowl, leader of Hydra. If you don't know what Hydra is, you will. Try to stay out of our way.
Describe yourself physically.
What kind of stupid fucking question is this? Are you blind? I'm a guy. I'm fucking covered in scars and tattoos. Use your goddamn eyes.
What was your childhood like?
What's it matter to you? Knowing what it was like isn't going to change the way things are now, and there's no fucking way I'm going to give you any shit you can use to try and get on my good side. You've got to earn that. Don't expect to be handed information like that on a silver platter.
Who is most important to you, and why?
What is with these stupid questions? Isn't it obvious everyone's going to say family or friends to this? Maybe you'll get someone saying a single name, but I bet that's rare.
Obviously it's my Family and friends. They're the only ones I can really count on. Anyone else isn't worth shit.
What's your biggest pet peeve?
People who sleep in too late. Waste of fucking time.
Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist? Why?
I'm not either of those things. I'm a realist. I don't sugarcoat shit just to make myself feel better, but I'm not going to assume the worst about anything just because I don't have any hope or some stupid shit like that. I'll look into all the possibilities regarding a situation and decide which one seems the most likely based on the facts. That's the only way to really look at the world.
Where, or how, did you learn your most important skills?
I don't remember where I learned some of them. Others I had to teach myself. There was no one who gave enough of a shit to show us, so we figured it out on our own through trial and error. And a lot . . . I didn't exactly learn myself. I got someone else's memories of them . . . A pretty great guy, really. He apprenticed to some more experienced guys and learned his skills that way, and he learned a lot of other things from years of practicing himself. I just got lucky enough to remember his life for him.
Do you think world peace is possible?
Hah! There's no chance. People are always out for themselves, aren't they? Even if they say they want peace, they'll still turn around and do whatever they think will benefit them the most. They don't really give a shit about what's best for everyone.
Do you tend to argue with people, or avoid conflict?
There's no way to avoid conflict without rolling over and letting people treat you like shit. I'm not going to accept doing that, so yeah. I argue with people.
What turns you on the most?
Where the hell do you get off asking a question like that?! --DON'T ANSWER THAT!
Anything else you'd like to say?
Fuck you!
Canon: Katekyo Hitman Reborn
AU/OC/Previous Game: Yes, previous game! He is being taken from the end of Sabra la Tau, an insanejournal game
Age: 17-ish counting the year spent in Sabra
Appearance: 17-ish. His hair is long enough to pull into a ponytail and is a medium silver color. He's got green eyes and fairly pale skin due to being underground for nearly a year. He wears coveralls, heavy workboots, and t-shirts all in a bright neon green or orange. He's also a full inch shorter than in canon due to some shrinking and growing hilarity that took place during a game. His shadow is also not his own (it resembles Agito/Akito from Air Gear instead and is roughly a foot shorter than him). Final visual difference is a piercing in his left ear with a plain gold stud.
He has a tonnn of scars. One is a jagged scar encircling his upper right arm. As though it'd been ripped off and then reattached. :') There's also a huge blotchy mess of scarring over his entire chest and stomach. Stab wounds, acid scarring, etc... IT IS A MESS. Various scars from knife wounds. I know for sure there is one in his side and plenty of gashes on arms and legs and more on sides and everywhere. Lots of small scars from blades on his hands and fingers. He picked those up while learning how to make and throw knives. And finally a painfully looking scar below his left ear that looks like this: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v204/Hermisia/Sabra/flowersglyph.png
Also has a ton of tattoos! Covering his entire back: http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc271/Uncreativity/hydracula.jpg (the "centipede" has been altered to no longer appear dead.) He also has a tramp stamp of man-eating giant centipedes below that Those centipedes are surrounding a tattoo replication of the scar below his left ear. This wraps around his right arm: http://www.girl-tattoos.com/images/design_shark_tattoo_03.jpg and he has a spade (http://static.wix.com/media/136b61dd780a7223c0de06152a66c528.wix_mp ) with a star inside of it on the inside of his right wrist. Aaand on his chest is this thing: http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g257/strange_chan/skull.jpg
Cause of Death: Overwhelmed by the energy of a goddess of monsters/desires upon helping to destroy her which led to attacking a dragon in a bloodlust frenzy and getting himself killed. \:D/
Impact of Death: Regret and rage at being removed from the endgame for Sabra. He's Hydra's leader!! It's going to be appalling to him that he left his team behind to face it on their own. Some of this will be immediately soothed since there are people from well after the endgame to tell him there were some successes and some people did make it home as well as the fact that he expected to be killed for a long time, but he is not going to be happy with himself.
References Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayato_Gokudera for Dera specifically and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborn! for the overall series.
Character Info:
Character History: Gokudera's childhood was awesome. Where by awesome I mean horrible and traumatic. Sure, he grew up in a ridiculously huge mansion owned by his mafia boss father and had his own servants and maids, but before the age of eight Gokudera had been poisoned (over two years!), shot, rejected by his childhood hero, and learned that dear old dad had probably ordered a mafia hit on the woman who was his biological mother. Nooot the best of childhoods. When he learned about his real mother's death, he made the snap decision to run away, and for the next five years canon gets a little vague. It's heavily implied he spent most or all of that time trying to prove he could be a member of the mafia without the help of his childhood hero (a respected assassin) or his father and ran around Italy trying to get recruited into various mafia Families. It didn't go well.
Then he had the good luck of trying to kill the Vongola Family's boss-to-be, Sawada Tsunayoshi. He slipped up during the attempt and was saved by the clumsy kid and made the completely logical decision to pledge his life to Tsuna as a subordinate for as long as he lived. And true to his word he spends the rest of the series learning to tolerate other members of the Family as they're recruited, fighting loyally for Tsuna's sake at every turn (whether it's necessary or not), and gaining weaponry that doubles as fashion accessories, pets, or the most macabre set of hula hoops ever. Over the course of the series Gokudera's goal has become less and less about just being an impressive mafioso and more and more about becoming a person that Tsuna can truly rely on. It's just coincidence that he needs to be an impressive mafioso to do that.
Canon Personality: Given his early life, Gokudera is not a person who plays well with others. With most, he's loud and aggressive and quick to resort to violence when angered. And really, it isn't difficult to make him angry. He's distrustful as a rule and tends to see small slights as something more than they are. These overblown reactions have landed him in trouble in the past, and they still get him into quite a few fights these days, but he has been learning to tone it down to varying degrees with the other members of the Family.
And, of course, it's all for the sake of his beloved boss, Tsuna. More than anything, he wants to be a good, strong source of support and dependability for him. It's just taken Gokudera a while to get past his hang-up of competing with everyone around him for Tsuna's approval, attention, and praise to realize exactly how to do that. He's recently had it beaten into his head that he needs to actually act like the second-in-command he's always self-proclaimed himself to be, and he is working on filling the role as best he can. He doesn't blow the youngest member up nearly as often as he used to, for example! And he now takes protection of the Family as a whole much more seriously than he used to; he's realized they're all important to Tsuna, and what's important to Tsuna should be important to him.
Gokudera is also an exceptionally hard worker. He always pours 110% into whatever he's set his mind to. If it happens to be training, this may well mean working himself until he sleeps through meals, which is an improvement on working himself nearly to death. Literally. He's got genius level intelligence that lets him do things like solve NASA-ranked math problems in his head for the lulz, but he's never very arrogant about it. It's just not important to him when compared with his duties to Tsuna or his role in the mafia in general.
Old Game Info:
Sabra la Tau was a memory loss/competition game. Characters were placed onto teams and made to compete in games for the right to earn back memories and eventually gain a wish for anything they could have wanted. However it turned out that the Judges were actually ancient gods feeding on the emotional energy gained from games in order to extend their life spans well past when they should have rightfully died. Essentially, Sabra was a murdercave food generator for gods desperately clinging to life. \:D/ FUN!!
Scowl was placed on Hydra, a primarily anti-hero team. There were more traditionally "good" characters placed on the team, but the most active were types wholly willing to take unpopular routes to achieve noble ends. They were also ridiculously fond of doing incredibly stupid or reckless things. Sometimes even for profit! A good example would be the time they rode a drillpecker for the sake of weapon upgrades. (A drillpecker is a larger-than-a-house pteradactyl with a beak that spins like a drill, and it wants to kill you. :Db) They also once willingly snuck into the middle of raptor territory and stole an egg to hatch, just because they wanted one. Hydra was very much that crazy too-shounen-for-the-shounen-teams team. :Db And Scowl was their leader! (Scowl was also the name he chose for himself when he arrived in Sabra since he couldn't remember his own, and it's stuck with him throughout the entire game.)
It's important to note that he didn't choose to be the leader so much as the role chose him. When Hydra was first introduced, the members were him, a very young girl, and a viking who was more prone to violent responses than he was at the time. So Scowl stepped up and took on a leaderly role mostly to keep the viking in check, and was never really able to step out of the role. He's never felt entirely comfortable in it, but at the same time Hydra's a team that historically has needed a leader, and since there was never anyone better to do the job he remained. Attempts to step out of the role were met with a shounen punch to knock him back into his leaderly senses. As a result he's developed a strong sense of leadership and is much more prone to giving orders and expecting to receive some level of respect from people. Basically it's a shift from a follower's role that he took in canon (with regard to Tsuna) to a more domineering, commanding role.
He's also become incredibly more paranoid and withdrawn in spite of the more leaderly role he's taken. Sabra was a very highly competitive game that encouraged rifts between teams, and Hydra had some pretty serious ones from the very beginning. Scowl is highly suspicious of people he isn't already comfortable with and, although he can hold perfectly civil and even friendly conversations with people, is incredibly difficult to get close to. He's reached a point where even people being friendly and welcoming to him is suspect because he doesn't feel he can trust their motivations or that they'll actually follow through on what they're promising. His faith and trust in people is at zero, to be blunt.
That lack of trust is also tied into a belief that people see him as a much worse person than he actually is. This is in part a canon belief, but it's been strengthened quite a lot by events in the course of his time in this game. Choices he's made or appear to have made during some of the competitive games have given him an overly ruthless reputation, and by the time he realized it was as bad as it was it was too late for him to shake the image on his own. He finally gave up trying to change perceptions of himself after arranging twice for every team to get involved in rebellion to save themselves from being eaten by the gods and getting zero acknowledgement for it outside people already familiar with him. \:D/ He's just resigned to the idea that people think he's a monster or terrible or whatever awful thing they want to think. He default assumes people will come to this conclusion about him no matter what he does, so he just doesn't see the point in bothering anymore.
He also baseline expects people to be terrible themselves. After months of being subjected to being terrorized by a socio torture goddess with a psychotic vendetta against his team and several beloved allies of his team, the game as a whole had a chance to destroy the awful parts of her! And went to do just that. :Db However, when it came time to make a final decision and two halves of her, one more terrible than the other, were in conflict, nearly every character outside of Hydra and Hydra's partner team wanted to save both halves of her. It struck as an unforgivable betrayal since as far as anyone could tell they had not destroyed all the bad within her which would put forth a risk that she'd continue to be a crazy torture happy nutjob who wanted to gut his mind and the minds of all his loved ones. So that is another newly formed baseline assumption about people. \:D/ They make terrible and stupid choices until proven otherwise.
To sum this section up for those of you familiar with Reborn canon, take canon Dera before Vongola picks him up and amplify his belief in the world being a terrible place by a thousand or so.
Other important changes include an intense phobia of both mirrors and invasive forms of psychic powers. Many bad experiences with a goddess of the former and more general instances with the latter built up a pretty heavy phobia for both things. He will adamantly refuse to own anything reflective and will go out of his way to avoid mirrors. He'll also seek out a way to shield his mind from invasion pretty much immediately.
He's also made a complete change in his choice of weaponry and fighting styles. Because they were underground, he shied away from ever picking up explosives as a weapon out of fear of causing cave-ins. He instead uses throwing knives that are sometimes tipped in sedatives, paralytics, or deadly poisons, and he even learned how to make his own weapons to avoid having to quest for new ones all the time.. There was also a game-wide event in which characters essentially remembered an entire other life--kind of a past life. Scowl picked up some very skilled herbal medicine and poison making skills from those memories, as well as some skill in the use of staves and field medicine and surgery.
Major CR:
Wanijima Akito/Agito: These two were essentially Scowl's right arm. His second(s) in command. They were teammates that he got an IC month into the game at a time when he really needed someone who could offer him support, and they filled that slot very neatly. He became incredibly close to them over the months they spent together in the game and considers them as close as brothers. He would never have been able to maintain his leader role without their support, and he values their opinions and input very highly. They're the only people he trusts to take a back-up leader role at times when he needs to take a break, and he knows he can count on them to always understand him and never judge him before listening to everything he has to say. He has total faith and trust in them.
Excel: Excel is the leader of Hydra's partner team, Vulpecula. Scowl's known her since the day he arrived in Sabra, and she's been one of the very few that's been supportive of him from the beginning. He once lost an arm, and she and her team were among the only who stopped in to check that he hadn't died and then stayed to help Hydra get back on its feet. That kind of support continued throughout the game and grew to become mutual, and then unhealthily codependent. Scowl became incredibly fond of her and, although he's well aware she's not the sanest person out there, trusts her to look out for him completely. He'd entrust his life to her in a heartbeat with absolutely no doubts that she'd do everything in her power to keep him safe, and he would do the same for her. She's another one that he considers as good as family.
Allen Walker: Boyfriend! \:D/ The two of them were initially pretty similar. They were both tsundere types who bonded by beating each other up and being a little more able to understand each other than everyone else. Over time they grew closer; checking in on each other after bad games, worrying after each other now and then, occasionally giving one another a good shounen punch when needed. Scowl flat out adores Allen and places him on the pedestal he reserves for Tsuna in canon. Allen can do no wrong in his eyes.
Sawada Tsunayoshi: Thanks to not having many lengthy memories of Tsuna, Scowl is actually not unhealthily attached to him any longer. He remembers snippets of scenes with him; minutes, maybe hours of time. Meanwhile he has nearly an IC year of life spent with his team and friends here, and the memory of a lifetime someone else once lived. His memories of Tsuna just don't compare to that. He still does adore Tsuna and is unshaken in his belief that Tsuna is a rare and wonderful person, but the attachment isn't nearly as strong as it is in canon.
Yamamoto Takeshi (Ten Years Future version): Other boyfriend! \:D/ Yamamoto came to Sabra specifically to help guide and protect Scowl, and that set a very strong foundation for their relationship. Scowl has complete trust in him, and after months of depending on him and his trust in him growing, finally agreed to a relationship with him. He looooves Yamamoto, though he does think of him as being completely different from present day Yamamoto. Their relationship developed in very different ways, and they have entirely different experiences as a result.
Jace Beleren: MIXED FEELINGS . . . For a very long time, Jace was painted as a one-dimensional villain in Scowl's mind. They had some very serious fallouts with each other on more than one occasion. However, in the last days of the game, they managed to have a good talk that layed the foundation for overcoming their poor perceptions of each other. There is still a strong wariness and uncertainty regarding him, but he may be open to listening to whatever Jace has to say should one ever be apped.
Flowers/Rota/Pale Maiden: His beloved patron goddess. Flowers was the goddess of rebirth/new life, the cycle new life rising from the dead. Hydra patroned themselves to her in an attempt to save their partners from a crazy goddess that was tormenting them, and in doing so discovered that she was one of the Judges trying to bring an end to Sabra. Scowl grew more and more fond of her the more he learned of her past. She was made crazy by being forced to take human sacrifices which went against her personality, and he couldn't help feeling sympathy for her. He loves her as much as any mortal can love a goddess and would do anything to please her (as long as it would truly please her and not just one of her fits of madness.)
Cloud: In one of Scowl's very first games, Cloud got his teammate killed and eaten in front of his eyes. \:D/ SCOWL DID NOT TAKE IT WELL AT ALL and held a grudge against Cloud for months. At one point he and the teammate that'd been killed revenge-killed Cloud in a game which obviously did nothing to help the relationship. He doesn't hate him any longer, but GOSH things will be super awkward with any Cloud he comes across in Thusia.
Rezo: THAT CRAZY FUCKER THAT KILLED HIM AND AKITO/AGITO ONCE AND MINDWARPED HIM INTO KIDNAPPING HIS BOSS AND STABBING A GIRL. Hate hate hate hate!!1
Hana Morenos: TEAM TINY \o/ She was one of Scowl's very first teammates, and they learned early on that she was abused by her foster family which made him very protective of her. He wanted to make her happy and to keep her safe from the worst parts of the game which led to him sheltering her a lot when he was able to.
Thorfinn: VIKING BRO. This is the other first teammate and the same one that got eaten in front of him in that first game. He actually isn't as close to him as he is to other friends and allies, but he does have a strong sense of attachment/obligation to him anyway because of that early death.
Other members of Hydra: There were a lot . . . Around a dozen or so, and he is fond of all of them to varying degrees. He feels/felt a strong sense of responsibility to them; to protect them and keep them happy as much as he was able to. They were his stand-in family, and he wanted to do right by them.
Other members of Vulpecula: Scowl felt more protective of Vulpecula than anything else. He was fond of the team too, but they had a tendency to get themselves hurt or into trouble even more than Hydra did, so he was often trying to shield them from themselves. Generally positive feelings towards all of them too.
Abilities (before Powercap): Most of his powers and abilities are based on a combination of weaponry and dying will flames (a kind of personal energy source along the lines of ki, inner magic, etc.) He can't use the flames alone, instead using them to power different weapons like a multi-functional gun, shields, a weaponized cat, a bow made from his weaponized cat, etc . . . He also has a number of more mundane abilities. Canon ones include archery, various explosive skills, and throwing dynamite. Over the course of his time in his previous game he also taught himself knife throwing, AT (physics defying skate skills from another canon), staff/stave skills, some basic to mid-range construction and weapon making, poison distilling, and herbal medicine, field medicine/surgery.
Abilities (after Powercap): Scowl will have some natural capping in place since he won't have any weaponry with him whatsoever, so he'll have to begin making weapons again to build up his store. He does have some very high accuracy levels in canon since he's a distance fighter, and I'll be limiting that to make things more challenging for him, especially since he's picked up a tendency to resort to poisons and sedatives after his time spent in Sabra. If/when he gains weaponry that he can power with his dying will flames, I'll be giving him a lower stamina than he's got in canon so that he can't continuously put out room-destroying levels of energy as well as just not giving him weaponry that COULD do that. Basically since he can only do as much as what his weapons allow him to do, he just won't gain access to weapons that will give him a huge advantage over the wildlife.
All of the herbal medicine and poisons he knows how to make will be useless knowledge in Thusia as well since the plant life is completely different. And, as with Bobby, although he does now have a lot of knowledge about emergency field medicine/surgery, it won't matter until he gets hold of the supplies to actually do anything with it. It also won't be a huge advantage at all since it's not at all magical in nature. People he medics for will still have to heal the long way, just with bonus stitches and not bleeding to death.
Items Brought In: Two pets! One is a sometimes-a-weaponized soul-flame powered leopard kitten that will be restricted to a storage box until Scowl can strike a deal with a god to open the box and release it. The other is an all-the-time weaponized man-eating centipede the size of a grown man's arm known as a terapede. The centipede is psychically bonded to Scowl thanks to a psychotic goddess's gift so it will obey his orders and not just attempt to devour everything and everyone that looks remotely edible. :Db And when I say weaponized I mean it can eat through solid rock (though I will tone that back for Thusia. Point is it has a hell of a bite.)
Samples:
You must do two of any of the following four:
Third person sample on the subject of your choice.
Scowl frowned down at the scrap of bone in his hands. It'd splintered suddenly in the midst of carving it, rendering the entire piece useful. He sneered in disgust and threw the piece to the floor where a few splinters broke away from it. "Useless piece of shit . . . !" He scrubbed a hand through his hair in frustration and stood up to see if there were any other pieces left that were at all usable. It was such a goddamn pain to get just a few . . . What if they all turned out to be this fragile?!
. . . He snatched another chunk of bone up and settled down to start carving again, drawing in a deep breath. Fang would've said something like that--calm down. We can always kill a different animal next time to try the bones from it instead. For a moment he found himself wishing Fang was here, and he hated himself for it in the next. He should be glad they weren't here. If they were, it'd mean . . .
No. It was definitely for the best that they'd ended up somewhere else. Somewhere they'd get to have a real fucking life instead of more of this forced service to worthless gods. There wasn't even a promise of rebellion here. Maybe later . . . once these "gods" showed their true colors. He knew they would, once they'd gotten what they needed from them. Even if they weren't as bad as King and his cronies had been, there was no way he was going to settle for being under the rule of yet another set of gods. Not when he'd just given his life to help escape from another pantheon.
But for now . . . he supposed he'd wait. If this was yet another chance at life again, then it was far too early to throw it away. Not while he knew nothing about what this world was really like, and especially not while he still had no idea what to make of the other people here. He'd play along for now. Just long enough to find out what he needed about this world.
IC Survey:
Introduce yourself in a few sentences.
I'm Scowl, leader of Hydra. If you don't know what Hydra is, you will. Try to stay out of our way.
Describe yourself physically.
What kind of stupid fucking question is this? Are you blind? I'm a guy. I'm fucking covered in scars and tattoos. Use your goddamn eyes.
What was your childhood like?
What's it matter to you? Knowing what it was like isn't going to change the way things are now, and there's no fucking way I'm going to give you any shit you can use to try and get on my good side. You've got to earn that. Don't expect to be handed information like that on a silver platter.
Who is most important to you, and why?
What is with these stupid questions? Isn't it obvious everyone's going to say family or friends to this? Maybe you'll get someone saying a single name, but I bet that's rare.
Obviously it's my Family and friends. They're the only ones I can really count on. Anyone else isn't worth shit.
What's your biggest pet peeve?
People who sleep in too late. Waste of fucking time.
Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist? Why?
I'm not either of those things. I'm a realist. I don't sugarcoat shit just to make myself feel better, but I'm not going to assume the worst about anything just because I don't have any hope or some stupid shit like that. I'll look into all the possibilities regarding a situation and decide which one seems the most likely based on the facts. That's the only way to really look at the world.
Where, or how, did you learn your most important skills?
I don't remember where I learned some of them. Others I had to teach myself. There was no one who gave enough of a shit to show us, so we figured it out on our own through trial and error. And a lot . . . I didn't exactly learn myself. I got someone else's memories of them . . . A pretty great guy, really. He apprenticed to some more experienced guys and learned his skills that way, and he learned a lot of other things from years of practicing himself. I just got lucky enough to remember his life for him.
Do you think world peace is possible?
Hah! There's no chance. People are always out for themselves, aren't they? Even if they say they want peace, they'll still turn around and do whatever they think will benefit them the most. They don't really give a shit about what's best for everyone.
Do you tend to argue with people, or avoid conflict?
There's no way to avoid conflict without rolling over and letting people treat you like shit. I'm not going to accept doing that, so yeah. I argue with people.
What turns you on the most?
Where the hell do you get off asking a question like that?! --DON'T ANSWER THAT!
Anything else you'd like to say?
Fuck you!