Harumasa Asaba (æĩ
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life_ethereal) wrote2024-12-20 12:27 pm
life_ethereal) wrote2024-12-20 12:27 pm
Kaisou Application
Player Name: Ryuu
Contact: Ryuuto @ Discord
Invited by: Saffy at some point in the increasingly distant past
Other Characters: Venti, Dan Heng, Xie Lian, Lan Wangji, Nico di Angelo
Character Name: Harumasa Asaba
Canon: Zenless Zone Zero
Canon History: Harumasa
Canon Personality: CW for Spoilers, Child Abandonment, Child Experimentation, Unethical Medical Science Experimentation, and Terminal Illness
đš Harumasa comes off as a guy who fakes illness to get days off that he doesn't always have, and is an unrepentant slacker because of it. He will always complain about having to do overtime. To be clear, he does ham it up and that's gotten him into trouble or awkward situations, such as training new recruits who kept treating him like he was fragile and were way too overenthusiastic for him to keep up.
đš He will do just about anything to ensure that the work gets done efficiently enough so that he can clock out as early as possible.
đš Perhaps surprisingly, Harumasa has a lot of emotional intelligence and is very perceptive. He hasn't known the Proxy for very long nor does he know Zhu Yuan at all, but he can instantly tell that the reason Zhu Yuan is upset with the Phaethon siblings is because they didn't trust her enough and that hurt her.
đš Overall, though, he seems to be a very laid-back person who takes almost nothing seriously.
đš However, Harumasa is suffering from a chronic and terminal condition that will end with him dying young. In his chosen line of work, it's far more likely that the end stage will come when he is within a Hollow and that will almost immediately turn him into an Ethereal after excruciating pain and loss of sensory functions, most commonly sight and hearing. The systems the disease attacks are different for each patient, and for Harumasa it is in his lungs and heart.
đš He's only ever really known the inside of a hospital room for much of his childhood, and he was experimented on without realizing it for many years. The experience has left its physical scars on the back of his neck and on his spirit, though he will try to brush it off as nothing serious.
đš Because of this experience, he really tries to enjoy his life and newfound freedom to its fullest.
đš Harumasa really doesn't like people treating him differently because of his condition... unless it's to get more days off.
đš Harumasa is very protective, to the point where he'll risk his own life to save another's. He says that nobody values his life more than he himself does, which is true to an extent. When push comes to shove and it's between himself or another person's survival, he'll put that other person before him. The reasoning in his mind is simple: he won't live that long anyway, but this other person can. To him, that's a fair trade when it means he can go out on his own terms.
đš Turning into an Ethereal really does bother him greatly, no matter how much he tries to play it off. It's a recurring nightmare for him that disrupts his sleep constantly.
đš That being said, Harumasa definitely has some poor coping mechanisms. Whenever he encounters something he dislikes, he pushes himself into exposing himself to whatever is causing his dislike until he can get to a point where he can tolerate it. Whether that's food he doesn't like or a memory that causes those feelings to arise.
đš Overall, despite his outward attitude he's very hard on himself when he thinks he's come up short or has made a mistake that leaves him unable to help.
đš Although Harumasa doesn't think of himself as a good person, that's really what he is. A good person who hates seeing people suffer the same way he does. When he sees other kids with the same illness he has clearly being experimented on, he gives up some of his own spinal fluid just to spare them until he can help deal with the perpetrator once and for all.
đš He passes it off as "very inconsistent phone-phobia," but he does have a genuine fear of doctors because of what he's been through. It's hard for him to do his weekly telehealth check-ins as he gets very anxious about the calls, so he tends to put them off.
đš Harumasa is allergic to the word "friend," generally referring to Miyabi and Yanagi as Chief and Deputy Chief respectively despite their relative closeness to him (Miyabi will call him by his first name while Yanagi calls him by his surname unless she slips up out of worry for him). He seems to hold them at arm's length because he's uncomfortable with the idea of people caring about him to where they'll mourn his inevitable passing. At the same time, he has a desire to leave something of himself behind as proof that he was alive and human.
AU Name: N/A
AU Age: 25
AU Birthday: July 19 (Canon)
AU History: CW for Child Abandonment, Child Death and Endangerment, Child Experimentation, Unethical Medical Science Experimentation, and Terminal Illness
Harumasa Asaba was born to a family that he simply didn't know very well. He had some problems with his health growing up, but mundane doctors could only really tell them that it had something to do with his heart and lungs. Something congenital and potentially life-threatening. He would remember in the years after how his parents took him to some kind of specialist when he was around five years old. After talking to the doctor, his parents told him that they would be right back and left him in the hospital alone.
He waited so patiently for them, but it was clear when it turned to evening that they weren't coming back for him. Harumasa started crying, until a doctor seemingly took pity on him and took him in. Being only five, he had no idea what was actually going on. However, his parents had said that doctors were trustworthy, so he took it on faith that this one was also worthy of his trust.
Harumasa was then told by this doctor that he had a very rare condition called Element Aptitude Regression Syndrome. Essentially, he would have powerful magic, but being around spiritual energy would cause strain on his heart and lungs. The higher the concentrations of spiritual energy, the deadlier it would get for him. His doctor told him that the research facility he was part of, Krusnik, was working on a cure to his condition and would need his help in finding that cure by taking part in their experiments. Of course, Harumasa believed him and agreed since he would be helping other kids like him, and maybe it could help those kids not be abandoned by their parents, too.
He wouldn't find out the truth until later, and by then the damage was already done.
The boy was taken to a facility somewhere in Europe. There, he was given bitter medicine to stabilize his symptoms and had his spinal fluid extracted from the back of his neck. Harumasa was also instructed in how to fight with long-ranged and melee weapons, as they had plans to put him through possession testing. At the time, he simply thought it was just a way for him to get exercise and build up his stamina.
After about a year of being at the facility, they came to find out that Harumasa had a powerful gift. He had the power to see the future with crystal clarity, and with further experimentation that they dressed up as "training" he was able to focus that on the futures of specific people. His team of doctors told him that they could use his gift to find other kids like him that need their help, and Harumasa was happy to agree to use it in that way.
It wasn't until a kid named Jun came along that he was able to piece together that something was wrong. Harumasa began to notice that there was a pattern to the kids they wanted to take in, and none of it had to do with any medical conditions that could affect their quality of life. Feeling distressed, he started to use his future sight on some of the other children and saw that so, so many would die by the hands of uncaring monsters parading as scientists and medical professionals. Harumasa just didn't know what their end goal was until his own possession experimentation began.
They were very interested in what possession would do to a child with this rare condition, as well as synthesizing a drug from him and others like him in order to boost... something. Harumasa at that point was catching on to that interest and began to do everything he possibly could to protect the younger kids from these experiments. He would volunteer for it if he could or he would act out in certain ways to take the scientists' attention off of one kid and onto himself. He would also do his best to befriend some of them and help them out. Sometimes he would play with them, and sometimes he would just let them cry on his shoulder. Harumasa gained a reputation for being something of an older brother figure as he tried to keep the other kids' spirits up.
Then, he started getting a vision of a raid led by one man who would cut a bloody swathe through the facility. So many children were going to die in the chaos, and Harumasa had to search for anyone he could save from that fate. It was very close, but he finally found one. Jun Kohinata was going to be moved to a facility, but he saw that if Jun stayed here the kid would survive and have a father. Decision made and resolve as tough as steel in his heart, Harumasa used every trick in the book to get them to take him instead of Jun.
And it worked.
Harumasa was moved to another facility without any chance to say goodbye to the kids there. His heart was shattered, but he had to hold onto the hope that maybe more of them would survive than his visions showed him. Eventually, he ended up in Lithuania. Some inhospitable part of it where there wasn't a major city. The intense cold coupled with his weak constitution led to Harumasa almost dying to pneumonia, of all things.
Yet he had such a strong desire to live. Not just to continue protecting the handful of kids still within that facility, but also so that he could taste true freedom and feel the wind on his face again. A deity answered his call. Apollo saved his life so long as Harumasa fulfilled his end of the deal. The details were fuzzy in his memories, but he understood his price for the pact. Harumasa recovered well physically from the pneumonia and Krusnik seemingly got what they had been wanting for years. Yes, Apollo was one of the Greek pantheon, but he was one of the easiest to manipulate so long as they were bold.
With this, the scientists were able to synthesize a more stable version of the drug they'd been using Harumasa and other children with his specific illness to create. In order to test the efficacy of the drug in humans, they used a control group of normal people and the other... well, they used Harumasa himself. From what he could gather, they were testing to see if they could boost his tolerance of using Apollo's divine power and discern what side effects there might be. After all, Harumasa was their only subject that was currently possessed by a god. The side effects in normal people were... severe. The one that was most concerning was that they ran the risk of going insane just from the first dose. However, there was another side effect to using the drug: a high risk of becoming dependent on it in order to live as their body broke down once the effects wore off.
It was hard to say what, exactly, caused Harumasa's side effects to be different. It could very well have been that the combination of Apollo and his particular illness made his body metabolize the drug differently. The end result was that his body became dependent on magical energy, but not to the drug itself. Apollo was able to help guide him into learning how to absorb the ambient spiritual energy around him. Yet with how little there was in the facility, it was clear that he wasn't going to survive very long if they weren't careful.
The scientists were debating how they could refine the formula to be ready for mass production when a man came through to destroy the facility. The man, Ragna, saved Harumasa and was able to get him back on his feet. Honestly, he wasn't sure where to go now that he so abruptly had freedom within his grasp, but he knew he wanted to get the hell out of Lithuania. A highly difficult task when he didn't even have any form of identification. Still, Harumasa was resourceful enough to get himself to the nearest city and use a computer from a college campus to do some research. He stumbled upon a hacker known as Phaethon and contacted them. With Phaethon's help, Harumasa was able to not only get identification and plane tickets to the nearest spiritual hot spot in Europe, but Phaethon also got him a good supply of the medication he needed to manage his symptoms. Harumasa did his best to work odd jobs despite his medical condition. While off the clock, he did his own personal investigations into the drug they had used him to create in order to try and destroy as much of it as he could. The last thing Harumasa ever wanted was for other kids to end up like him.
At the same time, Harumasa was genuinely enjoying looking at Europe. All the sights, people, and food he never knew was out there. It was really nice, and he took every moment he could to enjoy it. He wanted to enjoy his first taste of freedom since he could remember and savor it. Eventually, he went to America. While wandering, he ran into Lia and had a few adventures with her, enough to form a solid friendship with her. She helped him out of a few tight spots, and in return he gave her cryptic rhyming couplets about important events in her future.
After years of wandering, he made his way to Kaisou. He'd heard it had become a hotbed of spiritual energy, and he figured that if he wanted to find a reliable source of the medication he needed, he'd have to get a stable job with healthcare benefits and a thriving Underground community. Harumasa had been living there for two to three weeks, getting himself adjusted to the high concentrations of spiritual energy, when he suddenly found an app had mysteriously downloaded itself onto his definitely-legally-acquired phone.
AU Personality Differences: đââŦ He sure does have a lot more guilt about not being able to save more of the kids at Krusnik, as well as his part in targeting them in the first place. Misplaced guilt or not, Harumasa lives for them so that at least someone can remember.
đââŦ Harumasa does have some bad habits that he had to use in order to survive, and he never lost his kindness despite everything. Some of those habits would come up only in specific situations, such as feeling like someone younger than him wasn't eating enough and surreptitiously giving them his own food.
đââŦ Apollo is probably ironically the only reason Harumasa isn't much worse. As much as he complains about Apollo running his mouth a lot, he honestly appreciates what the god has done for him.
đââŦ Given that in this AU he didn't have a father figure who died because he wanted to make a cure instead of a wonder drug, Harumasa has instead felt very guilty for leaving behind Ash, Ana, and Jun. He feels like he abandoned them, even though that's very much not the case.
đââŦ Other than that, not much has really changed about him.
Element: Wind
Purchased Powers: Fortune Telling (8pts), Homing Instinct (1pt)
Possession: Apollo
1: Harumasa must deliver his visions to others in the form of a rhyming couplet.
2: Every day at noon and midnight, he must sing to someone or send a song to someone. However, on full moons he has to dedicate both songs to Artemis specifically.
Contact: Ryuuto @ Discord
Invited by: Saffy at some point in the increasingly distant past
Other Characters: Venti, Dan Heng, Xie Lian, Lan Wangji, Nico di Angelo
Character Name: Harumasa Asaba
Canon: Zenless Zone Zero
Canon History: Harumasa
Canon Personality: CW for Spoilers, Child Abandonment, Child Experimentation, Unethical Medical Science Experimentation, and Terminal Illness
đš Harumasa comes off as a guy who fakes illness to get days off that he doesn't always have, and is an unrepentant slacker because of it. He will always complain about having to do overtime. To be clear, he does ham it up and that's gotten him into trouble or awkward situations, such as training new recruits who kept treating him like he was fragile and were way too overenthusiastic for him to keep up.
đš He will do just about anything to ensure that the work gets done efficiently enough so that he can clock out as early as possible.
đš Perhaps surprisingly, Harumasa has a lot of emotional intelligence and is very perceptive. He hasn't known the Proxy for very long nor does he know Zhu Yuan at all, but he can instantly tell that the reason Zhu Yuan is upset with the Phaethon siblings is because they didn't trust her enough and that hurt her.
đš Overall, though, he seems to be a very laid-back person who takes almost nothing seriously.
đš However, Harumasa is suffering from a chronic and terminal condition that will end with him dying young. In his chosen line of work, it's far more likely that the end stage will come when he is within a Hollow and that will almost immediately turn him into an Ethereal after excruciating pain and loss of sensory functions, most commonly sight and hearing. The systems the disease attacks are different for each patient, and for Harumasa it is in his lungs and heart.
đš He's only ever really known the inside of a hospital room for much of his childhood, and he was experimented on without realizing it for many years. The experience has left its physical scars on the back of his neck and on his spirit, though he will try to brush it off as nothing serious.
đš Because of this experience, he really tries to enjoy his life and newfound freedom to its fullest.
đš Harumasa really doesn't like people treating him differently because of his condition... unless it's to get more days off.
đš Harumasa is very protective, to the point where he'll risk his own life to save another's. He says that nobody values his life more than he himself does, which is true to an extent. When push comes to shove and it's between himself or another person's survival, he'll put that other person before him. The reasoning in his mind is simple: he won't live that long anyway, but this other person can. To him, that's a fair trade when it means he can go out on his own terms.
đš Turning into an Ethereal really does bother him greatly, no matter how much he tries to play it off. It's a recurring nightmare for him that disrupts his sleep constantly.
đš That being said, Harumasa definitely has some poor coping mechanisms. Whenever he encounters something he dislikes, he pushes himself into exposing himself to whatever is causing his dislike until he can get to a point where he can tolerate it. Whether that's food he doesn't like or a memory that causes those feelings to arise.
đš Overall, despite his outward attitude he's very hard on himself when he thinks he's come up short or has made a mistake that leaves him unable to help.
đš Although Harumasa doesn't think of himself as a good person, that's really what he is. A good person who hates seeing people suffer the same way he does. When he sees other kids with the same illness he has clearly being experimented on, he gives up some of his own spinal fluid just to spare them until he can help deal with the perpetrator once and for all.
đš He passes it off as "very inconsistent phone-phobia," but he does have a genuine fear of doctors because of what he's been through. It's hard for him to do his weekly telehealth check-ins as he gets very anxious about the calls, so he tends to put them off.
đš Harumasa is allergic to the word "friend," generally referring to Miyabi and Yanagi as Chief and Deputy Chief respectively despite their relative closeness to him (Miyabi will call him by his first name while Yanagi calls him by his surname unless she slips up out of worry for him). He seems to hold them at arm's length because he's uncomfortable with the idea of people caring about him to where they'll mourn his inevitable passing. At the same time, he has a desire to leave something of himself behind as proof that he was alive and human.
AU Name: N/A
AU Age: 25
AU Birthday: July 19 (Canon)
AU History: CW for Child Abandonment, Child Death and Endangerment, Child Experimentation, Unethical Medical Science Experimentation, and Terminal Illness
Harumasa Asaba was born to a family that he simply didn't know very well. He had some problems with his health growing up, but mundane doctors could only really tell them that it had something to do with his heart and lungs. Something congenital and potentially life-threatening. He would remember in the years after how his parents took him to some kind of specialist when he was around five years old. After talking to the doctor, his parents told him that they would be right back and left him in the hospital alone.
He waited so patiently for them, but it was clear when it turned to evening that they weren't coming back for him. Harumasa started crying, until a doctor seemingly took pity on him and took him in. Being only five, he had no idea what was actually going on. However, his parents had said that doctors were trustworthy, so he took it on faith that this one was also worthy of his trust.
Harumasa was then told by this doctor that he had a very rare condition called Element Aptitude Regression Syndrome. Essentially, he would have powerful magic, but being around spiritual energy would cause strain on his heart and lungs. The higher the concentrations of spiritual energy, the deadlier it would get for him. His doctor told him that the research facility he was part of, Krusnik, was working on a cure to his condition and would need his help in finding that cure by taking part in their experiments. Of course, Harumasa believed him and agreed since he would be helping other kids like him, and maybe it could help those kids not be abandoned by their parents, too.
He wouldn't find out the truth until later, and by then the damage was already done.
The boy was taken to a facility somewhere in Europe. There, he was given bitter medicine to stabilize his symptoms and had his spinal fluid extracted from the back of his neck. Harumasa was also instructed in how to fight with long-ranged and melee weapons, as they had plans to put him through possession testing. At the time, he simply thought it was just a way for him to get exercise and build up his stamina.
After about a year of being at the facility, they came to find out that Harumasa had a powerful gift. He had the power to see the future with crystal clarity, and with further experimentation that they dressed up as "training" he was able to focus that on the futures of specific people. His team of doctors told him that they could use his gift to find other kids like him that need their help, and Harumasa was happy to agree to use it in that way.
It wasn't until a kid named Jun came along that he was able to piece together that something was wrong. Harumasa began to notice that there was a pattern to the kids they wanted to take in, and none of it had to do with any medical conditions that could affect their quality of life. Feeling distressed, he started to use his future sight on some of the other children and saw that so, so many would die by the hands of uncaring monsters parading as scientists and medical professionals. Harumasa just didn't know what their end goal was until his own possession experimentation began.
They were very interested in what possession would do to a child with this rare condition, as well as synthesizing a drug from him and others like him in order to boost... something. Harumasa at that point was catching on to that interest and began to do everything he possibly could to protect the younger kids from these experiments. He would volunteer for it if he could or he would act out in certain ways to take the scientists' attention off of one kid and onto himself. He would also do his best to befriend some of them and help them out. Sometimes he would play with them, and sometimes he would just let them cry on his shoulder. Harumasa gained a reputation for being something of an older brother figure as he tried to keep the other kids' spirits up.
Then, he started getting a vision of a raid led by one man who would cut a bloody swathe through the facility. So many children were going to die in the chaos, and Harumasa had to search for anyone he could save from that fate. It was very close, but he finally found one. Jun Kohinata was going to be moved to a facility, but he saw that if Jun stayed here the kid would survive and have a father. Decision made and resolve as tough as steel in his heart, Harumasa used every trick in the book to get them to take him instead of Jun.
And it worked.
Harumasa was moved to another facility without any chance to say goodbye to the kids there. His heart was shattered, but he had to hold onto the hope that maybe more of them would survive than his visions showed him. Eventually, he ended up in Lithuania. Some inhospitable part of it where there wasn't a major city. The intense cold coupled with his weak constitution led to Harumasa almost dying to pneumonia, of all things.
Yet he had such a strong desire to live. Not just to continue protecting the handful of kids still within that facility, but also so that he could taste true freedom and feel the wind on his face again. A deity answered his call. Apollo saved his life so long as Harumasa fulfilled his end of the deal. The details were fuzzy in his memories, but he understood his price for the pact. Harumasa recovered well physically from the pneumonia and Krusnik seemingly got what they had been wanting for years. Yes, Apollo was one of the Greek pantheon, but he was one of the easiest to manipulate so long as they were bold.
With this, the scientists were able to synthesize a more stable version of the drug they'd been using Harumasa and other children with his specific illness to create. In order to test the efficacy of the drug in humans, they used a control group of normal people and the other... well, they used Harumasa himself. From what he could gather, they were testing to see if they could boost his tolerance of using Apollo's divine power and discern what side effects there might be. After all, Harumasa was their only subject that was currently possessed by a god. The side effects in normal people were... severe. The one that was most concerning was that they ran the risk of going insane just from the first dose. However, there was another side effect to using the drug: a high risk of becoming dependent on it in order to live as their body broke down once the effects wore off.
It was hard to say what, exactly, caused Harumasa's side effects to be different. It could very well have been that the combination of Apollo and his particular illness made his body metabolize the drug differently. The end result was that his body became dependent on magical energy, but not to the drug itself. Apollo was able to help guide him into learning how to absorb the ambient spiritual energy around him. Yet with how little there was in the facility, it was clear that he wasn't going to survive very long if they weren't careful.
The scientists were debating how they could refine the formula to be ready for mass production when a man came through to destroy the facility. The man, Ragna, saved Harumasa and was able to get him back on his feet. Honestly, he wasn't sure where to go now that he so abruptly had freedom within his grasp, but he knew he wanted to get the hell out of Lithuania. A highly difficult task when he didn't even have any form of identification. Still, Harumasa was resourceful enough to get himself to the nearest city and use a computer from a college campus to do some research. He stumbled upon a hacker known as Phaethon and contacted them. With Phaethon's help, Harumasa was able to not only get identification and plane tickets to the nearest spiritual hot spot in Europe, but Phaethon also got him a good supply of the medication he needed to manage his symptoms. Harumasa did his best to work odd jobs despite his medical condition. While off the clock, he did his own personal investigations into the drug they had used him to create in order to try and destroy as much of it as he could. The last thing Harumasa ever wanted was for other kids to end up like him.
At the same time, Harumasa was genuinely enjoying looking at Europe. All the sights, people, and food he never knew was out there. It was really nice, and he took every moment he could to enjoy it. He wanted to enjoy his first taste of freedom since he could remember and savor it. Eventually, he went to America. While wandering, he ran into Lia and had a few adventures with her, enough to form a solid friendship with her. She helped him out of a few tight spots, and in return he gave her cryptic rhyming couplets about important events in her future.
After years of wandering, he made his way to Kaisou. He'd heard it had become a hotbed of spiritual energy, and he figured that if he wanted to find a reliable source of the medication he needed, he'd have to get a stable job with healthcare benefits and a thriving Underground community. Harumasa had been living there for two to three weeks, getting himself adjusted to the high concentrations of spiritual energy, when he suddenly found an app had mysteriously downloaded itself onto his definitely-legally-acquired phone.
AU Personality Differences: đââŦ He sure does have a lot more guilt about not being able to save more of the kids at Krusnik, as well as his part in targeting them in the first place. Misplaced guilt or not, Harumasa lives for them so that at least someone can remember.
đââŦ Harumasa does have some bad habits that he had to use in order to survive, and he never lost his kindness despite everything. Some of those habits would come up only in specific situations, such as feeling like someone younger than him wasn't eating enough and surreptitiously giving them his own food.
đââŦ Apollo is probably ironically the only reason Harumasa isn't much worse. As much as he complains about Apollo running his mouth a lot, he honestly appreciates what the god has done for him.
đââŦ Given that in this AU he didn't have a father figure who died because he wanted to make a cure instead of a wonder drug, Harumasa has instead felt very guilty for leaving behind Ash, Ana, and Jun. He feels like he abandoned them, even though that's very much not the case.
đââŦ Other than that, not much has really changed about him.
Element: Wind
Purchased Powers: Fortune Telling (8pts), Homing Instinct (1pt)
Possession: Apollo
1: Harumasa must deliver his visions to others in the form of a rhyming couplet.
2: Every day at noon and midnight, he must sing to someone or send a song to someone. However, on full moons he has to dedicate both songs to Artemis specifically.