Syn app

[leftbehindagain]

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Jill
AGE: 28
PLAYER JOURNAL: minkhollow
TIMEZONE: Eastern US
CONTACT: minkhollow at gmail; setecastronomy
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: n/a

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Naoki Konishi
CANON: Persona 4 (AU)
POINT IN CANON: early April 2012, post-True End
AGE: 16
APPEARANCE: here!
CANON HISTORY: wiki!

Additional headcanon: Naoki’s grandfather started the shop. Mori Ranmaru (a fetch quest item early in the game) was a home brew, discontinued after Naoki’s grandfather died (Naoki was eight at the time). His father’s never taken his grandfather off the cash register access, and Saki won’t come off until he either retires or dies, at this rate. (Naoki comes by his inability to deal honestly.) Saki’s college boyfriend that she moved in with for about a week lives in Kyoto; they didn’t break up when she moved back to Inaba.

CANON PERSONALITY: Naoki is a professional sass bucket. Tell him you want to spend time with him? He’ll call you a strange person for it. Return something you borrowed from him? He’s sure it’s glad that it could fulfill its existence as an object. He runs on sarcasm.

What he needs most from the world around him is someone to hold him accountable and kick him in the ass when he needs it – if he had an Arena appearance, his title would be Captain Apathy for sure – and what he didn’t get in the wake of his sister’s death was exactly that. His parents didn’t care if he helped around the shop or not (the customers sure as hell did, but they were only visiting out of pity anyway, which only made their lectures worse). School didn’t care if he showed up late, left early, took tests home, didn’t do his homework, any of it. The Student Health Association was so understanding of the demands on his time that they basically drove him out because no one could figure out how to talk to him.

That combination led to Naoki stewing in his own juices, feeling like he couldn’t actually move on with his life. It didn’t help that he didn’t really feel like he was grieving Saki for months, mostly because he didn’t have any of the grand hysterics TV characters do when they’re mourning someone. With Naoki, it was a much quieter realization – it didn’t feel real until she failed to eat his cream puffs for him, and they went bad. It took so long to sink in that for a while, Naoki thought he was a naturally cold person, which wasn’t anywhere near the truth. (What he admittedly is is quick to judge people, especially when they make an unfavorable first impression – if you can get him to talk to you beyond that, though, he will apologize for it later.)

Left to his own devices, he sits on his ass, overthinks things, and ultimately does nothing. As terrible as it was, Saki’s death is the kick in the ass Naoki needs to realise he’s actually interested in his family’s liquor store. He considers quitting school to help out, but his parents reject the idea because they think he’s just trying to get out of school (he wasn’t, really, he just didn’t know how else to help). In the end, he finds a genuine interest in the product they already have, as well as making perfumes to sell alongside it.

He loved his sister – his use of “oneechan” in the anime speaks to that much – but… well. She was two years older than him, incredibly nosy, and got into his things (and food) all the time. Of course they fussed at each other.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: On Naoki’s first day of high school, his sister left school early and found a dead body on her way home. On the second day, she got ambushed by an asshole reporter and interviewed. On the third day, she left the house with a cop who wanted to talk to her about the case further… and never came home. That part’s no different.

The difference is this: the day before school started, Kanji Tatsumi’s mother had him run an errand at the gas station.

Kanji came to Naoki with the frankly weird story about sticking his hand through a TV a couple days after Saki died, and Naoki went to Junes to help him look into it because it sounded better than anything else he had going at the time. (Junes isn’t a big deal to Naoki anymore; it wasn’t their Special Headquarters, that was Aiya, but when you’re in a place like every other week because it’s the only public place with a big enough TV to carry out your investigation, you get used to it.) He was the first person to get a Persona the hard way (“you don’t miss her at all, you little shit”).

Helping investigate the matter and rescue people (Chie from her own stupidity in running off ahead, Yukiko, Naoto, Rise, Teddie, and Taka, a second year who had an inadvertently very public meltdown over parental pressure right after the school trip) gave Naoki something to be accountable for, even when no one else could be bothered. Kanji helped him through the worst of his drifting, and being able to talk to someone who’d known him most of his life was especially helpful when it finally sank in – all he had to say to explain it was “I had to throw out my cream puffs the other day,” and Kanji got it. Having more people around who were willing to treat him like a human being instead of handling him with kid gloves all the time also helped tremendously.

The school trip helped him figure out what to do next. It turned out a local museum had a textile exhibit – something naturally more interesting to Kanji than a factory tour – so they and Naoto skipped the factory thing to check it out. And halfway through, Naoki got distracted by another exhibit, about the history of brewing. It turned out to be really interesting, much to his surprise… and ideas started bubbling, for things the shop could do that Junes couldn’t. Home brew, for one. After overhearing some girls at school talking perfume when they got back, he decided to pursue that line too; even if it wasn’t a traditional liquor store product, any little thing that would sell would help.

Nanako Dojima was never kidnapped (a combination of her never being home alone at a convenient time and the group talking Namatame out of his kidnapping plan before he got a clear shot), and they managed to corner Adachi in November – funny thing, when someone in the heart of the investigation can say his sister left the house with a cop and not a delivery guy, it helps a lot. Adachi tried to creep on Naoto when they got too close for his comfort; fortunately, she managed to pull him into the TV after her, and doubly fortunately, she got dumped back in her lab and Adachi ended up in his own little reality. Having to rescue Naoto again slowed them down a little – she was exhausted from trying to fend off the Shadows – but at least Adachi didn’t have a chance to unload his gun into her, which he surely would have done if they’d been in the same place. (The less said about whatever the hell possessed Adachi’s attempts to control them, the better, really.)

But then it got foggy and never lifted, and people started acting weird; clearly there was a loose end, which turned out to be a disco eyeball monster. It took some doing, and rescuing Teddie from a second existential crisis, but they took care of the problem and cleared the fog from Inaba a little before Christmas.

Even after that, there were loose ends. For one thing, Naoki had been wondering from the beginning why Kanji didn’t have a Shadow himself; it wasn’t like he had any shortage of issues he was repressing. Then there was the question of how Kanji, Adachi and Namatame could get inside TVs on their own in the first place (well, presumably Namatame could, if he kept chucking people in them; as far as they ever found out, he never tried it himself, just assumed it was safer than leaving potential victims out in the world). Not to mention Kanji’s weird friend Marie – it was obvious, once she tried to leave the human world and they had to rescue her, that she was a tool, but whose? And Kanji eventually worked out another piece: He had access to a lot of mythological couples as Personas, but while Izanagi was his first one, Izanami never showed up.

Because she was trolling everyone and working at the gas station to set everything in motion, apparently. It turned out she was trying to figure out what all of humanity wanted a) from an impossibly small sample set that b) was inclined to the Despair and Emptiness side of the scales anyway, what with Junes decimating the shopping district – and she was still determined to come back and do the experiment again another time. Like hell any of them wanted to leave it for the future to clean up.

So they went back into the TV one last time to stop her, and they did – not before she wiped out the entire party, and dying isn’t an experience Naoki wants to repeat any time soon. (Even if it did mean he got to see Saki again, for a few moments; she told him to get up off his ass and see this through, now that he’d started it.) After socking it to Izanami and lifting the fog in the TV world too – turns out it’s a beautiful place, the collective unconscious – Kanji gave everyone hell for taking that bullet for him.

But Naoki would do it again in a heartbeat.

Compared to canon, Naoki’s not quite as bad about sitting on his ass indefinitely; being Kanji’s second in command from the beginning was a big help with that, as was having a group of people who treated him like normal. He never considered dropping out of school, and going to Junes is far from a life-altering event. He’s also not as quick to judge people by surface-level bad impressions – he’s seen a few too many Shadows in action for that to last long.

ABILITIES: The big one is the Persona, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, Naoki’s a pretty smart guy, and creative when he applies himself. He’s still not one of nature’s fighters – whenever possible, he’ll cheerfully leave that to Kanji, Chie or Taka – but the nature of the TV world got him pretty handy with staffs, improvised or actual.
INVENTORY: Casual clothes (hoodie, long-sleeved t-shirt, and jeans); wallet, with a few thousand yen, a photo of him and Saki, a photo of the investigation group, and Hanged Man card; TV-world glasses (you never know); notebook with various notes on his homebrew/perfume/etc. ideas, including a copy of his grandfather’s Mori Ranmaru recipe; Saki’s handkerchief; cell phone with an adorable strap made by Kanji
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?

You wanna know more about him, ask him yourself.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Great job, Hanamura.
PROSE SAMPLE: nightmare dreamscape

It’s not just any whispers; after everything, it can’t be.

I wish Junes would go under.

Naoki closes his eyes against the nausea, not that it does any good at all for the noise (it’s all because of that store a psychic on TV said that their ancestors committed some sin don’t you think your parents are worried with you wandering about just like your sister did just tell me why you have to work there of all places if everything else can’t disappear it won’t matter if I do you don’t miss her at all, you little shit), and lets out a sigh of relief when the onslaught finally stops – relief that promptly turns to dread when he opens his eyes and sees a half-obliterated shopping district better suited to Magatsu Inaba than even his sister’s personal hell spread out before him.

He pulls out his glasses on instinct, not at all surprised when they help his visibility (not as much as he’d like, but then again, this is the stuff of nightmares). There are Shadows lurking around the gas station – of course there fucking are, and here’s him without any weapons. Times like these he really, really doesn’t like Rule 3, for all it kept them from getting arrested. It’s not exactly practical to carry around a staff.

At least he still has his card. He pulls it out and crushes it, and Koga Saburo half-bows and goes on ahead, never getting more than a few meters away. It’ll do for now, at least until Naoki can find something to improvise with.

He doesn’t dare go in the shattered remains of the liquor store, which somehow still has four walls and a door. He has a pretty good idea of what he’d find if he did, and knowing he narrowly avoided watching his sister die on TV, mostly because he didn’t give the Midnight Channel any credence at that point, is more than enough for him. Even without going in, though, he has to fight to keep his gaze off what’s left of the area’s telephone poles (every one of them’s probably topped with a corpse).

Kanji has to be around here somewhere – or Naoto, she’s just as good in a pinch. All he can do for now is try to keep himself upright and not breaking down until he finds some backup.