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Shadows of Elysium[OOC]

S

shaderic

It is the year 20XX in the city of Shin-Fussa.

Dark red leaves fall from the trees, dancing in the autumn wind as they pile up on the curb. High-school students pull their coats tighter as they flood off the evening trains. It gets darker early now, the sun fully setting by 1730, but warm city lights and mingling crowds keep the night from feeling desolate or lonely on the streets.

Shin-Fussa is modern, unremarkable city on the suburbs of Tokyo. Fifteen minutes on the train can carry a person into the dense urban jungle that is the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, or to mountains and ancients forests that are nearly impenetrable on foot.

But this is not solely a tale set in the city. The fantastic world of Elysium, a VRMMO set in scifi fantasy is also our stage. Impossible ships fly on wings of magic between planets, while players fight monsters, machines, aliens, and even other ships with magic, swords, guns, mecha, and their own ships. It is the premier product of Absolute Fantasy, a company that headquarters itself in Shin-Fussa. A handful of locations from the game are explicitly based on local historical landmarks. In turn, a handful of popular signs and mascots from the game itself were erected in the city, creating a bond of truth in the fantasy and fantasy in the truth.

These things aside, there is hardly anything remarkable about Shin-Fussa.

Or so some would think.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

OK, so.

This is a little game I'm cooking up, and I've got some friends who are interested in playing it. That said, I'm only tentatively looking at adding a single player right now.

That basic concept is that this is a nested game. It's a story about people who are playing a VRMMO, but it's intended to be not only about the VR stuff, but to cover some stuff in their real lives. In addition, it's a story about how the two of those things tie together.

I know I'm a bit sparse of details right now, but that's kind of on purpose. I want to actually have some surprises in store for what's going to happen, even if I'm not particularly certain that they'll stay secret all that long.

In terms of character sheets for people interested, I want to make something clear. You're playing a character who plays a character. Your 'lead' character is effectively a mundane human. Their 'Elysium' character can be basically whatever would fit into a scifi fantasy kitchen sink VRMMO. For the sake of story-telling, your VR character will be starting out a newb, so keep that in mind too.

The 'basic' character sheet should be broken up into two portions. An 'IRL' character that lives in Shin-Fussa, and the 'Elysium' character that they play. I have to be up for work in a surprisingly short amount of time, so I'm just going to throw this up now and check in on things tomorrow.
 
Will the story deal with both real world and game world issues?
 


Name: 藻井 野乃子 Soui Nonoko
Username: Zabiko
Occupation: 3rd Year High School Student
In-game Character: Abhuman Sharpshooter

Overview
Most people don't start playing MMOs, even VRMMOs, for any particular reason. Certainly, Nonoko's motivation was as plain as her sense of presence in the classroom. There'd been a promotional collab between a mobile game she'd been casually playing during high school and the Elysium MMO, along with a sale on VR equipment as part of a promotion of the game within Shin-Fussa, and it had seemed like a fun way to get away from the ceaseless grind of schoolwork in the evenings.

So she had shelled out for the peripherals with her saved-up New Years money and casually set up a character.

That was all. There hadn't been any deeper meaning to it. But as she finished designing her avatar - a slightly cuter version of herself with dark hair and kitsune traits - she found herself drawn into the game world more than she had ever expected. Something about the experience resonated with her, made her feel connected with the virtual world to a shocking extent.

Part of her still feels awkward about the violence and the first-person shooter-type gameplay. The vast majority of her clocked hours have been her sitting in an instanced room in a safezone and using the built-in browser and writing tools for studying - satisfying her deal with her parents to get to use the VR machine as much as she wants - but every once in a while, she takes a few hours to go exploring. And there's something fairly satisfying about sniping down mobs or other players, and using her high-mobility coupled with her track-and-field experience to avoid retaliation.

Key Relationships
藻井 湖白 Soui Kohaku (Mother) - While female employment has been steadily rising, actual opportunities remain few for those women who try to both raise a family and hold steady work. Nonoko's mother has managed to retain her office lady job, but she has seen little advancement or progress in her position in those years. The experience has worn away at her, and sometimes she fears for her daughter, pushes her to do well in the hope that she can avoid the same path.
藻井 波流彦 Soui Haruhiko (Father) - A well-educated but otherwise normal officeworker. With the era of black working conditions receding through new labour laws, he has managed to pull through life in a relaxed, somewhat unambitious way. On the downside the family never got the old dream of own house and own car, but on the other hand, he got to be there as Nonoko grew up. He thinks he got the better deal.
浦岸 幸玉 Uragishi Kodama (Best friend) - A second year high-schooler at Nonoko's school, and Nonoko's best friend since middle school, they met each other through the track-and-field club. Nonoko was one of the second-years handling new members, and Kodama was exactly the kind of pushy, slightly clingy girl that could attach herself to a senpai and become her close friend. As they were often apart in school, Kodama made a habit of getting them to spend time together outside of it. In high school, although Nonoko continued track-and-field, Kodama decided to join the naginata club. Her reasoning being that it's such a minor sport, she was guaranteed to get a regular spot around second year, and maybe even go to the Interhigh. She was right about the first part, but the second has turned out harder than expected...

Trivia
  • Most of Nonoko's gaming experience is mobile games. In particular she is a regular player of a male-oriented historical Japan-themed mobile game. This is probably where she got her thing for kitsune.
  • She has a purely cosmetic yukata outfit in Elysium due to the collab event that got her into the game.
  • Nonoko used to do track-and-field as her club activity since middle-school. She retired early on in her third year of high school to "focus on exams". She still goes running to keep in shape.
  • Her best subject is math and for silly reasons Japanese history. Her worst subject is English, but she's largely passable.
  • She loves extremely spicy food.
  • She's quietly popular with a lot of her underclassmen - particularly the female underclassmen - who consider her a cool and reliable senpai. She hasn't noticed.
  • Her mellow personality conceals a stubborn streak that'd see her body ground to dust before giving up on something genuinely important to her.
  • She's a bit of a late-bloomer and hasn't dated anyone yet. She reads a lot of shoujo manga though.
 
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I'm going to toss my hat in the ring for. If I don't get in, I'm fine with that I just couldn't resist using this image for the avatar.



Username: Karasu
Actual Name: Kotaro Ifukabe
In Game Role: Human Saboteur
RL Job: Maintenance Manager
Age: 34

Background: You ever had that urge to let loose some steam after a long day but not the actual desire to leave once you get home? Kotaro does and that's why he plays VR as he does. He often takes the role of an anti-griefer griefer venturing out of the safe zones often and disrupting hackers or player killers that ruining the flow of games he partakes. This is his way of venting office borne frustrations that he has towards co-workers. He wants to get his job down at a reasonable hour, they bombard with personal problems he really doesn't care for. That doesn't he doesn't care period, its just that there almost always easily avoidable problems, like "oh you coffee all over your tie. Well you wouldn't have it if you didn't text, drive, and drink to work would you?"

Generally believes in enjoying the game as much as problem and has problem with griefers, which is why he doubles back on them and griefs them constantly. He almost convinced one of the more active ones is a co-worker three doors down...

Trivia
-Owns a black cat called Mimi
-Covers for the security guards when they grab food from the office refrigerator
-Has completely forgotten his avatar's gender by this point in playing and doesn't actually care. (he equipped a voice scrambler early on and forgot to un-equip it after a raid)
-Saving up to move to a nicer apartment
-Weakness: Lack of Sleep, Fear of Arachnids (Found a tick on his cat and squirms at the mention of them), Cannot resist making certain players day absolutely miserable.
 
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Alright, it seems like people want details.

Basically, you are playing an ordinary person who lives in the japanese city of Shin-Fussa, one of the many suburbs of Tokyo. You also play a VRMMO called Elysium, a sci-fi fantasy kitchen sink that basically means that while your 'IRL' self is fairly mundane, your 'VR' self can be basically whatever you want it to be. Shadows of Elysium is intended to be a game about strange happenings and occurrences within Shin-Fussa and how they tie into the game, and vice-versa.

While some people who know me might already have an inkling of just what those ideas are, I want to try and keep them a surprise, and a bit mysterious for a while. To that end, for a fair bit the game will be relatively 'normal' for awhile. This gives me time to get a feel for group interactions and start establishing relationships your characters have with other people, both inside and outside of Elysium. That way, when things start getting weird, you'll appreciate it more.

For people interested in numbers, I'm afraid to say that I'm going to try and keep things as nebulous as possible. I do not want to get caught up in a big round of careful counting, balancing, and complex combat. This isn't to say that there won't be combat, but it'll be driven more by characters and narrative then numbers.
 
Being one of the people who knows Shaderic (and who is already a shoe-in because RPG groups are as always a bit of an Old Boys Club), I can suggest you look at my character concept and use that as sort of a template. It's the kind of "core concept" sheet that explains who your character is and what they're about. You can fill in more details if they're important - things like key pieces of aesthetic, key relationships you want to highlight, etc. - but at heart it's just "what does your character do in RL, what do they do in-game, and what kind of personality do they roughly have".
 

Name: Kyou Ishikawa
Username: Skull-Syntax
Occupation: Dry Goods Stocker
In-Game Role: Support

Overview: About a year ago, Kyou Ishikawa pooled together his moldy money and bought a pile Virtual Reality hardware when it went on sale. Picking up Elysium on release was the obvious choice, Absolute Fantasy had been touting the game as the next greatest thing in gaming since the first trailers dropped.

Since Kyou works nights, going in late to stock the shelves before coming home early in the morning, he typically logs into Elysium after eating dinner with his parents. So he's a fairly casual gamer, at least he thinks, though he'll put in extra time on his days off. Uncomfortable grouping up with randoms he hasn't really touched much of Elysium's content outside the PVP arena.

Trivia
  • Age 24
  • Still lives at home
  • Did one year of university before dropping out, says he's taking time to 'figure out what he wants to do with himself' - but he's not fooling anyone
 


Real Name: Jason Blair
Username: Scion_Storm
In-Game Role: Human Soldier
Occupation:Student/GM

Backstory: As a fan of the pen and paper tabletop games Jason would normally wouldn't use his VR equipment for anything other than entertainment purposes, then he heard about a Warhammer 40K event happening in a game called Elsyium, curious about this he decided to break out the VR head equipment for the game and try it out, if only to try it out to see if the event was worth it, To his surprise it was and he wanted to work playing it into his free time.

Now Jason in between his nights of GMing and days of school spends some of free time playing this game as an Imperial Soldier, hoping to join a group into role playing, or at least a group that can keep themselves in character when it counts, mostly because he feels like role playing is fun when done with others, and it's a nice change of pace participating in a story instead of worrying about making one for a change.

Trivia:
  • He was born in america but moved here after his father was..well moved here for a better position.
  • Knows two Languages, English and Japanese although he still prefers to talk in English when he can do so.

  • He prefers games which requires skill and frustrating amounts of difficulty just for the cathartic factor of beating a particularly hard boss or level and games with a clear story for him to participate in.

  • He tends to stay up really late at night, leading him to experience very little sleep on school days.
 
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Name: Ren Watanabe
Username: Vendetta
Occupation: University Freshman/Part-time Delivery
In-game Character: Human Ninja/Assassin

Overview
There was once a boy who dreamed of the green field where the best soccer players gathered. The World Cup. Harboring that dream since middle school, Ren Watanabe devoted his whole self to soccer training. Moving up to high school, he led his team to the semi-final of the All Japan High School Soccer Tournament, which he suffered from an injury that ultimately made him quit soccer.

Being someone competitive and obsessed with soccer and winning to the point of having a personality like that of a sports manga's rival/antagonist character, the fact that he could not play soccer at a professional level anymore came as a heavy shock to Ren. Distraught and crushed, he spent the last year of Highschool nearly on auto-pilot, and basically used school-work as a half-hearted mean to escape reality. He enrolled in a well-known university in Shin-Fussa, choosing International Relations as his major.

During a night out with his old friends, he was recommended playing Elysium and given one copy by an old teammate when it first came out. The VR sets pretty much came from his pocket money and savings from his part-time job as a delivery man on motorbikes. Originally dismissed it as some otaku hobby stuff, he left the case gathered dust in the corner of his tiny student apartment before a combination of a sudden day-off at his part-time job, a stormy class-free Saturday and curiosity drove him to try out the game.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, he messed up the character creation process and ended up with a female avatar as a result. To his surprise and reluctant admittance, the game complete hooked him. The feeling of combat in VR was thrilling and stimulating his dormant competitiveness, yet somehow nostalgic to his experience and memory as a soccer player. It defied his earlier pre-conception of the game as a usual MMORPG clickfest.

His character is an Assassin with Ninja sub-class. She used a combination of Ninjutsu(stealth, illusion, agility, acrobatic and parkour/mobility through rough terrains) and high speed attacks to finish off the enemies. Her disadvantages increased when facing multiple enemies at once, especially a highly-coordinated party. Her equipment are entirely for increasing stealth and agility, thus leave her fairly low on tanking attacks head-on.

Now, he routinely spent his Sunday mornings and evenings enjoying both PvP and PvE in Elysium, even his female avatar no longer bothered him anymore.

Trivia
  • Despite his injury, Ren still kept the habit of exercising following the regime of a semi-pro soccer player. He refrained from quick-sprint and long distance running exercise, though.
  • His previous position was of a playmaker/forward midfielder.
  • His mother died when he was young and his father often worked away from home. As a result, he was raised by his grandparents who owned a motorbike repair shop.
  • His weaknesses are ghosts, alcohols and green peppers.
  • He secretly enjoyed messing around with others in the game with his girl avatar, before breaking their illusion by revealing he was a man all along.
 
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Around how old should the Real Life character be? Whats the tone of the game you're going for? Will the game be held here? What are you looking for, player wise and character wise?

Meant to make a sheet or throw out concepts, but the last two days have been hectic.
 
Sablonus said:
Around how old should the Real Life character be? Whats the tone of the game you're going for? Will the game be held here? What are you looking for, player wise and character wise?

Meant to make a sheet or throw out concepts, but the last two days have been hectic.
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Well, while Shaderic sleeps, I guess I can try and help out a little...

(the following is merely informed guesses, not official)

Character age is "whatever", although I'd be wary of anything below high school or too old. The character has to be someone willing to play a VRMMO about science-fantasy fightin' and adventurin'. That's a pretty wide scope. To give some more context, the other shoe-in player who hasn't posted yet is messing around with a high-school teacher while I've made a student.

They have to plausibly be living in Tokyo. Either the easy way because they are Japanese, or else because for some reason that's where they live now.

They have to have picked up the game, but not have gotten hugely into it yet. This is a bit of a flexpoint because it's mostly so that the game itself can be super vague until bits of it are actually needed for something. Similarly the available classes and species and whatever in the game will just get adjusted so whatever the selected players are playing will be available.

Going by experience but not promising anything, the tone will probably be reasonably light, but the content can be serious. Though the one time I really aimed for a bit of a downer thing in an IRC-type oneshot solo game, I kinda ended up fighting to avoid accepting the Good End he was dangling in front of me. :V

The game will be play-by-post here on SV yes.

Finally, in my experience, but not necessarily what Shaderic is actually looking for, players who are somewhat self-motivating in terms of character interests, and character concepts that are either rocking a powerful aesthetic or which have some intriguing built-in tensions, are likely to do better.
 

Name: Rachel Kalinin
Username: Dragunova_Snayperskaya
Occupation: High School English Teacher
In-game Character: Android Commando

Rachel never was much into video games. Of course, that doesn't mean she never played a video game in her life, it would be hard to avoid that in the modern age, but sports, hiking and books were her hobbies, and her passion was language - gaming only occasionally caught her interest. This didn't change after moving from Los Angeles to Japan - the stress of her new work, new environment and new social circle meant that her Metal Gear collection box set - the only games she cared enough about to bring along - became a permanent fixture of one of her shelves and kept gathering dust there for the next decade. Mountain hikes with her friends became her favored activity, walking for several kilometers, then spending the night under a tent, reading some trashy light novel or grading her students' work by the lamplight.

Still, virtual reality? There was hardly a person in the world who wasn't interested. As the costs of a VR rig went down, she eventually decided to shell out for a new PC and the necessary peripherals and tried out Elysium, the newly-released VRMMO that came with the latter. The experience was incredible, and as she spent time in the game, she decided it was…

...pretty okay?

She still comes back to it every few weeks when she feels too lazy or too sick for effort, but nothing beat the mountains, a basketball match or a good workout. Still, the appeal of being a stylish android commando, wall-running and explosions have kept her from simply uninstalling the game and trying something else.

Trivia
  • Born in LA, her mother is American, her father Ukrainian.
  • Knows five languages, including Ukrainian.
  • She always wanted to live abroad, but Japan was actually her second choice. Ukraine was the first, but the horrific state of the country made it a non-starter. She still wants to visit Lviv, at some point.
  • Spoke reasonable Japanese by the time she was sixteen. Everyone called her a weeb and she didn't really get why.
  • Hasn't actually watched much anime before moving to Japan.
  • Still doesn't watch much anime.
  • Likes fancy hairdos and odd headpieces a bit too much. If anyone asks, she claims it's a part of her cultural heritage (it isn't)
  • Often fills in for the PE teacher when they're on sick leave.
 
Name: 田中 星野 Tanaka Hoshino
Username: SumimaSumi
Occupation: 1st Year High School Student
In-game Character: Cyborg Berserker

Overview
For Hoshino, MMOs are a guilty pleasure. Her highschool reinvention plan involved doing away with every bit of her old boring, stay at home in the dark looking at glowing screens otaku-esque middle school self. But somehow the community that MMOs brought- that was something she couldn't do away with.

By all accounts, Hoshino's high school reinvention plan was a huge victory. All that time learning how to dress nice, dye and style her hair, and talk to people without flinching away from direct eye contact had payed off nicely. When she made her high school debut she was able to attract a large number of affluent looking friends and from the point of view of middle school Hoshino- had become one of the big scary popular social powerhouses of the high school. There was even a sharp looking man in a business suit who had said she had potential as an idol and offered her his business card (which she hasn't decided whether she'll go for or not.) But at home, she was still the person she always was. She spent most of her time on the PC with her guild, same as her high school self. It wasn't ideal for her new image- if her new friends at school discovered she was putting up a huge front and was actually a hardcore MMO gamer she feared they might abandon them. But still she couldn't let go.

The moment her guild decided they were moving to Elysium should have been an ideal point for her to break with her sorrowsome history and make a fresh start for herself. But still she couldn't let go.

Against her better judgement she moved with her guild to Elysium. She bought the VR headset and everything, and spent tons of time fiddling around with it. The settings were interesting- the character creature unfamiliar but refreshing. She spent some time plinking around with it and made a character. She tells herself that she's not going to get too into Elysium, this is just a casual thing and she'll probably be too busy with real life to jump into it anyways... but she secretly suspects that she won't be able to resist. Old habits die hard and although her guild was composed of entire net-friends in her heart the relationships they formed as anonymous strangers feels strangely real.

Family:

田中遥斗Tanaka Haruto (Father): A stay at home hypochondriac. He has a very eclectic skillset ranging from cooking, to fortunetelling, to Mixed Martial Arts. His old friends are all very rough looking tattooed men who often come looking to ask him favors. His greatest secret is that he is a semi-successful light novel author whose work is actually set to be adapted into a anime this coming Fall. If it is ever uncovered he will die of humiliation.
田中慶子Tanaka Gyeong-Ja (Mother): A high power business executive poached by Sony to facilitate operations between their Korean branch and Japanese headquarters. She is secretly aware of her husband's own secret through her work with Sony Music Entertainment, and her current biggest worry is about often the Seiyuus for his upcoming anime seem to asking him to come in for 'consultation sessions'. She had enough rivals when they were only dating, thank you very much.
田中武健 Tanaka Takeshi (Old Brother): Academic, athlete, and all around perfect older brother. Is currently at Tokyo U pursuing a Biology degree after successfully leading his underdog high school baseball team to Koshien semifinals against all expectations. He is a cool collected figure who is extremely popular. That is why no one has figured out that he is actually terrible with girls, freezing up whenever he sees a pretty face. Throughout high school and even in college he regularly shanghais his younger sister into 'advising him' regarding whatever poor girl managed to work up the courage to confess to him this week. On every occasion this has ended with misunderstanding and failure.

Quirks
  • Hoshino is what you could call 'immensely teasable'. She is highly sensitive and easy to provoke, but cannot hold much of a grudge and is far too affable to get angry for long. However these same personality traits allow her to make friends that are immensely protective of her. From others, that is.
  • Hoshino's front is less secure than she thinks it is. Most of her friends have already figured out that she was sort of a dork in middle school, and although she doesn't know that they know they exploit her paranoia about it as an easy target for friendly teasing.
  • She can't handle things that are too sweet, but always drinks sugary soft drinks to fit in with her friends. She makes pained faces when she thinks they won't notice. (They do.) She longs to suggest some spicy or bitter food places for them to hang out instead of cake shops, but she is afraid her friends wouldn't like it. (They wouldn't care.)
  • Her in game personality is very different from her actual personality, considerably more assertive and foul mouthed. She has far more self confidence when hiding behind the face of a digital avatar.
  • She min-maxed her character to the extreme, taking a large amount of drawbacks for the ability to facemaul most anything within the equivalent level range. This will probably come back to bite her.
  • She is good at English and maths, but poor at history and classical literature. She just can't see the point in studying old things.
  • She plays some mobages since her friends to, but largely looks down upon mobile gaming. PC gaming (and VR now, she supposes) is the far superior option in her eyes.
  • She is quick to imagine fanciful romantic delusions for everyone she lays eyes upon but is largely oblivious to her own prospects. Since the beginning of the school year 14 boys and 3 girls have already confessed to her and she has unwittingly turned them down without even noticing.
  • Her mother is a Korean immigrant to Japan (thanks to an astounding grand epic love story between her mother and her father which is almost unbelievable when heard in real life) and she has learned a functional grasp on the language mostly through osmosis and K-pop. Somehow Hoshino still hasn't noticed that she slips into another language when speaking with her mother.
 
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Alright, I'm just going to keep character submissions open for one more day.

After that, I'm just going pick out the players I want and construct an opening around them.

I'm sorry if I'm a bit vague on what the game is about, but the game itself is intended to be flexible. While I do have an over-arching plot in mind, the individual beats and details of that plot will be driven by the characters in it. Which aren't all in yet.
 
shaderic said:
Alright, I'm just going to keep character submissions open for one more day.

After that, I'm just going pick out the players I want and construct an opening around them.

I'm sorry if I'm a bit vague on what the game is about, but the game itself is intended to be flexible. While I do have an over-arching plot in mind, the individual beats and details of that plot will be driven by the characters in it. Which aren't all in yet.
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Would a middle schooler be okay? If you can be anything, can you be mundane things in the game like a Bartender? Working on my sheet, but likely won't finish until sometime tomorrow. What uh. What do you like in characters? What sort of tone, too? Might go for a contrast or subversion theme. It's mainly cyberpunk style gunmen or robots, right?
 
The problem with middle schoolers is just... they're hard to write, you know? Normal middle schoolers are kind of a bunch of weird hormonally-fuelled and very clever dumbasses. They also have a lot more parental supervision, less ability to go out on their own, less ability to regularly connect with people outside their age-group or family due to social dynamics and just...

shit's hard to make work. If you think you can make it work it's not forbidden or anything. Hell, if you do make it work it might be really interesting. But it's not something I would recommend, personally.

As to non-combat-y stuff in the game... I guess sure? I think there'll probably be something involving some fighting - purely speculating here - and it might be trickier to join up with the other characters, but I figure the fanciest new VRMMO probably has some EVE Online/Second Life-ish gameplay where you can play without much if any combat.

The rest isn't really something I can confidently answer, except the aesthetic is probably a lot more shiny anime Sci-fi and Fantasy in a lot of places and not just cyberpunk.
 


Name: 井上 楓 Inoue Kaede
Username: Ayumu
Occupation: Housewife, former OL
In-game Character: Abhuman Tank/Healer

Overview:
Kaede is a classic bored housewife. She did everything a good girl is supposed to do - study hard, do well for her exams, get into a decent university, find a respectable job, meet a nice man, get married, quit her job to look after the home....
Except well, they don't have kids (yet) and there's only so much cleaning and cooking and baking you can do before the walls start closing in. Her husband is a good man and he dotes on her when he has the time, but he's also very busy at work. He misses the last train home two or three nights a week, and even when he manages to get home it's usually late and he's exhausted. The weekends are precious but he also spends a lot of time just recovering from the week, so they don't usually do too much.
With so much time on her hands, Kaede needed a new hobby. Something that would ideally also help her understand and appreciate what her husband was going through at work. So she picked up a copy of the game his company produced, and started playing....

Key relationships:
井上 忠正 (Inoue Tadamasa) - Husband and digital illustrator. A game like Elysium needs vast amounts of game art, and accordingly a small army of illustrators and animators to create it. Or, if it's Absolute Fantasy, a smaller platoon that you work to the bone. Tadamasa doesn't mind the work that much - he enjoys it and it's exciting - but he does feel bad that he doesn't see his lovely wife as much as either of them would like. But he's living the dream and he's pulling down a pretty nice salary, and in this day and age you can't ask too much. Unless you want to live in a flophouse and eat nothing but ramen all day. Someday when he's climbed the ladder a bit he can slow down and they'll be able to spend more time together, have the kids and family life they want....
福岡 美意子 (Fukuoka Miiko) - Best friend. Miiko took the other path in life: she's still working, still single, living large and partying hard. At first glance it's hard to tell why they're such good friends, when they're so different. But they've been besties since junior high, and while Miiko is getting ahead in her career she still respects the quiet strength she's always seen in Kaede. She thinks it would be better for her to get out of the house a little more, but she's also a good enough friend not to hassle Kaede about it.

Trivia

  • Kaede used to work at a major engineering firm. Her old bosses still think well of her, and were genuinely sorry to see her go.
  • She can really hold her liquor. She can go toe-to-toe, drink for drink, with a middle manager and make it home without someone needing to pour her into a taxi. This is part of why she's such good friends with Miiko.
  • She's a dab hand at ikebana. She used to do the flower arrangements for the office.
  • She also used to be pretty good at track, and she works out regularly.
  • She doesn't have a lot of gaming experience, so she just rolled a character that sounded cool. She ended up with Ayumu, a CQB-specced kitsune paladin who's kind of a hybrid (read: poorly optimized) off-tank/healer/melee DPS. Surprisingly non-sucky in PvE and grinding though, which speaks well for the game balance in Elysium.
 
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@shaderic About the lore here, is Elysium supposed to be the first fully VRMMO in-universe or it's just one of many in the market?
 
So. I spent the day tossing and turning ideas in my head, but none of them, none of them seemed to click with me. Still drew up a sheet because it'd feel wrong to just ignore this game.

Edit: ..Guess what I needed was to just stay up for a few hours, one Thursday night. Wandering robot monk bard is a go. Is there anything that can be heavily improved, changed, or is needed in the sheet? Should I keep the cartoonish robotic feel or go for something more humanoid and realistic? I've got pictures for both. Classes.. Couldn't decide so I left it sort of.. Vaguish.

Edit 2: I'll tweak details and the backstory a little later, wanted to post this now just in case. Overview and Trivia need some polishing, but.. This is the gist, I suppose. Went with a Bicycle Courier because it'd be the most interesting, and allow for the most to happen narratively.




Name: Chiyo Moegara
Username: Templar_Red
Occupation: Bicycle Courier
In-Game Character: Offensive Support (Robot Warrior Monk?)

Overview:
Always moving, always packing, always in motion. Introductions, awkwardness, warming up to the new boy, then saying never seeing him again. There had been few times in his life Chiyo knew for sure when the next move would be, the next set of heartfelt goodbyes and possible childhood friends robbed from his life. Always saying they would keep in touch, yet never following through. Year after year--What was the point? Eventually, he grew cold, numb to his ever shifting surroundings as he immersed himself through fiction, fantasy clouding his mind. One step in reality, the other in a world of his own making.

The boy didn't blame his parents by any means. Hell, he relished the shifts on occasion, a fresh start and tabula rosa of oppurtunity letting him flee from whatever hateful self reflections and social anxieties and he had developed in the last area. Socially, he was inexperienced, never having to deal with quite the same problems as his peers, yet his skills only broadened with every change in scenery. Sadly though, not his phone's contact list. He fully understood however, that the reason they moved from town to town, city to city, was the same reason he always had food on the table.

He threw himself into his studies and hobbies with vigor to distract himself, and it worked, just.. A little too well. His grades were near perfect, yet no after school curriculars allowed themselves onto his papers, his desire to join one outweighed by the fear he would just have to go through another goodbye. He walked through parks, cycled through the city, and tried to enjoy the ambience of wherever he was, the only sound his thoughts. And everybody else. How could somebody stand in a crowded room and feel so isolated still? It was lke that for him at every moment, every glance to the side revealing yet another group of childhood friends out and about enjoying each other's presence, as well as a kick to his own spirit.

When he got his own place, in ever shifting, never sleeping Shin-Bussa, he felt right at home. But for the first time, the possibility of knowing people, knowing people like in those anime and games he had binged--Was.. Just a bit too much for him. Chiyo as a nervous wreck, couldn't even do his job properly the first day while he got used to that thought. He'd realized something, over the course of years, though. Friends born by tense battle, bonds made online through hours of browsing.. Regularly lasted longer than any relationship he believed he would ever find in the real world. This was the new world--A world where moving didn't mean you had to give up your bonds, where life long friends could be made through a screen.

It was this sudden epiphany that led to him picking up Elysium, the first step in his journey to stave off his isolation, to find an idyllic group birthed from his mind that would accept him, faults and all, inseperable and indomitable. If not that, then at least somebody he could call a friend? The boy had heard of finding significant others through MMOs. Why couldn't he? But.. It had to be natural, of course. He would have to become strong enough to be worth calling himself their equal, strong enough to even catch somebody's attention in the first place. Loud, flashy..

Key Relationships:

Trivia:
  • The boy is aromantic, and his desire for friendship purely platonic in nature.
  • He only knows how to play guitar because of a botched attempt to join a music club. The skill stuck, though, and he's improved fairly well.
  • Despite his scatter-brained near attention deficit and penchant for spacing out at the wrong time in person, Chiyo's situational awareness on a bike has been honed through years of crashes.
  • In person, he's a near-mute, deep-voiced muttering stutterer, yet online his confidence bumps up and tension slips away.
  • His character's preferred weapon, gained through either luck or skill, would be a guitar-shaped axe, and his own fists and body.
  • He's never really played an MMO before, despite one of his goals being to become stronger, and with his attention span it's difficult for him to get many things done. Quests, tasks, and other responsibilities the game piles over him makes him question why he's there in the first place, occasionally, but he always gets back on path.
 
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