Kohaku Yuhara

Kohaku's liminal room is based off of her dorm room at Aegis Academy, which is like student dorms everywhere: designed more for cramming as many students as possible into as small a space as possible than for luxury and comfort. Aegis was a very wealthy and modern school, though, so while it still wasn't exactly luxurious, it was at least comfortable.

This version of it is slowly undergoing changes as she adapts it from an exact replica to something that's more suited for her specifically. I don't have an exact floor plan but here's some reference pics to get a general idea of the aesthetic of the room: One, two, and three.

The most notable furnishings in the room other than basic furniture are a TV and a PS4. There are also two beds, as she originally had a roommate, so if someone needs a place to crash for a while and Kohaku likes them, she has that to offer.

Finally: She's taken to decorating it with stuff from each jaunt she goes on. So far she has:
- A small pile of bronze nails from Ancient Greece
- A poster for a rock show from California
- The complete Conan and Valeria book series from Harrowgate
- A closet full of fashionable clothes from the land of Yensid

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Eric
AGE: 32
PLAYER JOURNAL: overbringer
TIMEZONE: PST (GMT-8)
CONTACT: overbringer
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: d(o_od)

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Kohaku Yuhara
CANON: Aegis Monster Hunter Academy (Original Canon)
POINT IN CANON: Shortly before Kohaku discovers the conspiracy
AGE: 16
APPEARANCE: 5'8", athletic build (she works out a lot), not quite neck length messy black hair, clearly of Japanese descent. Extensive scars up and down along her spine. Kohaku is a girl, but when dressed like a guy (which she is, most of the time) she can pass for one.
CANON HISTORY: There is a whole genre of anime in which a handsome but inoffensive boy with super powers of some kind goes to a special school for people with super powers, where he then gets accosted by like 5-6 cute girls who all want to be his girlfriend. Usually, one of them is his little sister and another is the most powerful fighter in the school who loses to him in a duel in the first episode. There's generally something resembling a plot, but it's usually a half hearted mess that takes the back seat to coming up with more and more contrived reasons for our bland protagonist to accidentally grope people or walk in on them naked. I created Kohaku specifically and Aegis Academy in general to make my attempt to create something in this genre while having it not be sexist garbage, so keep this in mind while reading the following.

In the mid 1980s, on an alternate version of Earth, deep oil drilling uncovered a massive network of caves that riddled the crust of the entire world. They were also full of monsters, and they hated us. There were two types of monsters. The kind most people met would just burrow up from the depths and kill as many people as they could before getting taken down. They were all differently shaped, had different abilities, and were all very difficult to kill. Any moment, anywhere on the Earth could become a battleground.

The second kind of monster was less hostile. They were smaller, and almost entirely helpless on their own. But if you brought one of them to a human being in early puberty, it would immediately latch on to them and bond with them, forming a symbiotic link. Anyone who this happened to gained strange powers and mutations in exchange for playing the role of Host. Fire breath, invulnerable scales, time manipulation, shapeshifting...just about anything you could imagine. With the proper training, these Hosts became the single greatest weapon against the creatures emerging from the Deeps.

Skip ahead to 2015. Hosts and Monsters battling across the world is just a fact of life by now. Schools have popped up that focus on teaching superpowered youths how to control their abilities. The oldest, and most famous, is Aegis Monster Hunter Academy, on the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan. But that wasn't interesting to young Kohaku Yuhara. She was having just another ordinary day in her first year of Jr. High. It all went wrong when the ground started shaking. It wasn't an earthquake, of course. It was a monster burrowing up into the middle of the school. It burst forther and started rampaging through the building, knocking most of it down.

In the chaos and violence that followed, Kohaku found herself trapped under some debris. It was then that a symbiote that had come up behind the monsters found Kohaku. It burrowed into her spine and kept her alive until hours later, when the military finally was able to drive the monsters off and rescue the survivors. Kohaku came out with no serious injuries, though her father, who was a teacher at the school, lost the use of his legs. Kohaku's sister Ako, currently 10 years old, had always been a little strange, and she reacted to the monster very differently. She had also been in class, at the elementary school across the street. Ako saw the monster burst forth from the ground and while everyone else ran screaming, Ako's first thought was "I want to fight it."

Over the following three years, Kohaku's life changed dramatically. She went to therapy to deal with the trauma of simultaneously spending several hours trapped under a block of cement while monsters fought all around her AND having a living thing burrow into her spine while she was still conscious to feel it. Since her school had been destroyed, she, along with the rest of the surviving students, were sent to continue their education at other nearby jr. high schools. Kohaku insisted on going to the school her therapist worked at, despite it being an all boys school. She took to dressing in boys' clothes and generally acting less feminine, which was enough to stop her from getting hassled too badly, especially when combined with the fact that she had superhuman powers now.

Kohaku started learning to control her new powers from the most unlikely of people: Her little sister. Ako was...probably insane, to be honest, but her encounter with the monster had awoken a thirst for battle that could not be quenched. Ako reached ever greater heights of skill and strength despite not being a Host herself, and taught Kohaku how to fight.

2018. Kohaku got good enough grades that, combined with her status as a host, allowed her to get into Aegis Monster Hunters Academy. On her first day, she met Toyo Seiryu. Within minutes of meeting Kohaku, Toyo had come up with several reasons to dislike her, and eventually challenged her to a duel in the training ring. Kohaku, confused but convinced that she hadn't done anything wrong, accepted. This was when she found out that Toyo was the student council president of Aegis, and widly regarded as the most powerful fighter in the school.

Despite this, Kohaku managed to win the fight. It was only in the last second that she realized it was because Toyo was intentionally not trying. Kohaku was declared the winner, and then informed that because this was a school dedicated not just to academic pursuit, but also to creating deadly fighters, defeating the student council president in a duel meant you get their position. No take backs. Toyo was secretly an intensely lazy person, and had been looking for some poor schmuck to pass the job off to.

And so we reach the meat of our story. Kohaku, unexpectedly shoved into the position of Student Council President on her first day of school, does her best to balance dealing with the eccentric personalities of the student council with keeping up with her school work.

From here, the rest of the story was going to be a PSL so we only had a vague outline of events to come, but it went something like this:

- Kohaku is tormented by the various insane members of the student council, some of who think she is a boy and want to bang her
- There is some kind of school wide martial arts tournament and everyone gets to have sick fight scenes
- The student council discovers a conspiracy amongst the school faculty involving illicit medical research about how to graft symbiotes onto adults, or how to give one person multiple symbiotes, or how to make artificial symbiotes. You know. Mad scientist stuff.
- It is discovered that a race of super mysterious badguys from underground are pulling the strings
- Exciting climax of some kind!

CANON PERSONALITY: Kohaku's life took a wild turn during the monster attack. The double whammy of her school getting destroyed by monsters and her body being invaded left her fairly traumatized. Before that day, she was friendly if a bit on the quiet side, and responsible. Afterwards, she grew notably more moody and rude, withdrawn from social contact, and very jumpy. It took months of therapy before she even started to resemble the person she had been before. Now, she's able to function without having nightly nightmares or daily panic attacks, but she is still more prickly, defensive, and sarcastic than she might have been.

She's also sworn off romance. This is from a combination of having a very low key sex drive and from going to Jr High as the only girl in an all boys school. The fact that she was the only Host at the school as well meant that most of the other students were too nervous to try and hassle her, and that she could deal with the ones who weren't too nervous without any real problem. No, the actual problem was the students who tried to do it without being creeps. Kohaku received no less than nineteen heartfelt confessions from awkward teenage boys because she was the only girl around. At first she tried to deal with them gently, but over time she got more and more fed up. Her rejections (and it was always rejections. She wasn't interested) grew more and more curt and decisive. Maybe in another year or two she'll give it another go, but for now, Kohaku's first reaction to thinking someone might be attracted to her is to shut them down as quickly and clearly as possible.

In general, Kohaku doesn't hold gender to be terribly important. She thinks of herself as a girl, but she doens't hold a terrible amount of importance to this fact, and doesn't really care what other people think she is. In fact she started dressing and acting more like a stereotypical boy just so she could fit in with her classmates in Jr. High better. She found that just over all, she had to deal with less crap if people mistook her for a boy, so it became a habit. There was less getting stared at by people twice her age, she didn't have to wear a skirt, she actually got clothes with pockets, and just generally found things easier to deal with. So she puts in a certain amount of effort to look kind of boyish. If you referred to her as "him", she wouldn't correct you, but she also wouldn't correct you if you referred to her as "her", or even "them". It's just not high on her list of priorities.

It really says something about Kohaku that she realized she had been tricked into the position of Student Council President and still actually tried to do the job rather than complain or otherwise express outrage. She's the type of person who bottles things up and makes the best of any situation she ends up in. As a result, she comes across as weirdly cool with everything, no matter how outrageous or weird. That lasts until she bottles it all up for too long, and either it starts dripping out as passive aggressive sarcasm or explosive temper tantrums (though the latter of those is extremely rare.)

One thing Kohaku is bad at is taking into account that other people do not think like her. She sometimes forgets that other people don't have superhuman senses, leading to mild surprise or embarrassment. Likewise, her predisposition towards subdued reaction is definitely not mirrored by everyone around her, but she forgets this unless she's making a point about concentrating on it.

Kohaku is very much a child of the 21st century. Yes, she has to deal with battles and monsters and other insane things, but she is just as comfortable dealing with twitter and memes and video games. She plays phone games, fucks around online, she knows who Pepe is. If you showed her our world, she would fine it very familiar beyond the lack of monsters rampaging across the countryside. Her superhuman reflexes make her very good at anything that requires fast reaction times. Vs fighting games like Street Fighter, or FPSs like Counterstrike are the ones she's best at.

A few other random tidbits: She still has fairly intense claustrophobia from the time she got pinned under debris. She also fears Ako, who vanished mysteriously months ago but could come back any second to continue making her life a living hell training her. She has been passive aggressively getting back at Toyo ever since she realized she'd been tricked by coming up with increasingly convoluted reasons to get her involved in stuff against her wishes. She is intensely not a morning person, preferring not to have to move too much or talk to people before noon, so the fact that she has classes in the morning leaves her very grumpy until around lunch time. Coffee or energy drinks help, but can only do so much.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: A lot of Kohaku's personality stems from the monster attack in her youth. If you get rid of that, you end up with a fairly different person. Unless her fake history had a similar traumatic event in it, Kohaku as an infiltrator would be more talkative, less claustrophobic, and probably less responsible. She would still be bad at mornings, though.

The OTHER big thing that would change would be her views on romance. She's never going to be a die hard romantic, but without her memories of her very awkward Jr. High experience, Kohaku would definitely be more open minded about such things. Even if she didn't, she probably wouldn't spend most of her time trying to pass off as a boy.
VETERAN?: No
ABILITIES: A symbiotic monster burrowed into Kohaku's spine and replaced most of her nervous system. As a result, she has dramatically improved reaction speeds and can supercharge her senses. This allows her to see in the dark, tell where people are by scent or by sounds of motion, read books from a block away, and so on. Basically think Daredevil, but not blind. Her senses are always slightly more acute than normal, but she can actively increase their sensitivity to far beyond anything a human could reasonably expect. Doing so for more than a minute or two at a time can give her a headache.

Also, anyone who is a host to one of these symbiotes is notably difficult to kill. Any injury that doesn't immediately kill a host probably won't kill them for a long time, as the creature inside them manually maintains vital functions long after merely human biology would have given up and shut down. They won't be able to get back up and start doing stuff, but they'll just kind of lie there on the ground and slowly bleed for hours longer than a normal person and not QUITE die.

Most importantly, though, Kohaku can deaden her sense of pain, giving her a short burst of nigh superhuman strength at the cost of ignoring the fact that she's damaging their own body with each action. Effectively, this means Kohaku can spend like a minute throwing people through the air, lifting cars, and ignoring injuries, after which she'll collapse into a worthless wreck of torn muscles and worse.
INVENTORY: The normal stuff you'd expect a 21st century teenager to carry: Wallet, phone, book back for school stuff, etc. The only unusual thing she owns is a katana carved from the horn of the monster that attacked her school. Whatever weird substance the horn is made of, it is FAR stronger than mere steel and allows her to harm monsters despite not really having any offensive powers.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I was experimenting with using They/Their pronouns for Kohaku in some of her sample threads before deciding I didn't actually like that and switching back to She/Her.

M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION: MOON: Kohaku is all about deception, confusion, and lack of clarity. Not intentionally, she just tends to deflect questions about a lot of things about herself.
TOWER: The most formative moment on Kohaku's personality and future was a massive and abrupt disaster. The monster attack on her school dramatically changed her life.
HERMIT: Kohaku's kind of a quiet person who spends a lot of time thinking before taking action rather than asking other people for advice. She is prone to introspection.

VETO: DEVIL: The Devil is all about giving in to temptation and sensuality, and Kohaku is one of the least sensual people you will ever meet. So not this one, I guess.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Her Test Drive thread and a bonus thread
PROSE SAMPLE: (setting this in the upcoming jaunt as an investigator)

Kohaku stubbornly sweated under the hot Mediterranean sun. The obvious solution would be to strip off a few layers, but she did NOT like the idea of running around in her underwear. Or less, if the natives were any indication of what you could get away with. The minute people saw she had boobs they'd start asking her all kinds of stupid things that were frankly none of their business. So instead, she wore several layers, sweated like a pig, and got strange looks all day long that she did her best to ignore.

She was also getting strange looks on account of how she was just standing still in the middle of a marketplace in Iolchis with her eyes closed. When thrown into a strange place like this, relying too much on just your eyes cut you out of a lot of information. Plenty of the other infiltrators could smash boulders in two or fly or any other number of strange things, but Kohaku could get information, which in the end was probably more useful.

She tuned out her sense of sight and focused on her other senses. She could feel the creature inside of her shifting about as it adapted to her needs, improving her sense of hearing and smell, mainly. She picked through a dozen different conversations taking place nearby, some of them whispered, many of the nervous. She smelled the tang of human fear, underlying the multitude of other powerful stenches of a busy marketplace. People here were nervous. She felt...someone approaching behind her, trying to be stealthy about it. The would be thief started when Kohaku turned around, opened her eyes, and regarded him with mild irritation.

"I'm busy. Go away before I tell the guards about a pickpocket. You'd be lucky getting away with a beating."

Back in the 1980s, drilling for oil grew too extensive and too deep. Humanity started breaching ancient caverns miles below the Earth's surface. They weren't uninhabited caves either. This extensive cave network was the home of unknowable numbers of massively beasts who now regularly escaped to and rampaged across the surface.

Some of the beasts were not hostile, though. They wanted to protect the surface world, and found the best way to do so was to symbiotically bond with humans, combining the deadly power of the depths with the agile minds of humanity. People who took these creatures into their own bodies became Hosts, and they were the only hope humanity had int protecting themselves.

As most people who become hosts did so at a relatively young age, though, they still have to go to school. To learn how to control their newfound powers AND to learn how to be a productive member of society. YOU are such a Host, and YOU have been accepted in the best school in the world for Hosts:

AEGIS MONSTER HUNTER ACADEMY


Set on the Japanese coast, a few miles south of Tokyo Japan, Aegis is a marvel of modern architecture and a beacon of hope to the nation. It includes on campus housing for student, state of the art training facilities, and is practically a self contained town in and of itself. Kohaku Yuhara is just now becoming a first year student here. What adventures will the new kid have?

Possible thread hooks
- It's orientation day! Time for everyone to figure out where their classes are going to be and meet their classmates/roommates
- It's T-T-T-TIME TO DUEL! As graduates from Aegis are expected to be badass monster hunters, getting some combat experience is a must. That means it is accepted policy for students to resolve differences via public duels
- Combat training! This time it's not against each other, but against simulated monsters. How well do you work as a team?
- Class! This teacher is boring and never stops talking. Exchange whispered conversations. Pass notes. Doodle in the margins of your notebook.
- Day off! A good time to catch up on your studies/training, or to go and actually relax! Read a book! Go for a walk! Watch a movie! Go on a date!
- Or anything else you can think of.