deserted: (Default)
seki。 ([personal profile] deserted) wrote2000-01-01 12:00 am

[ INFO. ]

player information.

name: Miru.
are you over 18?: Yup.
personal dw: [personal profile] databomb
email/msn/aim/plurk/etc: [plurk.com profile] databomb | dash chromatique @ AIM | miruvix[@]gmail.com
characters in abax: None.


in character information.

series: Oyasumi Punpun.
name: Masumi Seki.
age: 20.
sex: M.
race: Human.
weight: 122 lb / 55 kg.
height: 5'7" / 170 cm.
canon point: Chapter 95, after fighting with Shimizu, but before speaking to Wada / "Sweet Pretty Lonely Heart Fluffybro."
previous cr: None.

history:

► Series information: Oyasumi Punpun [ @ Japanese Wikipedia ] [ @ TVTropes ]

► Seki is born to a couple just starting a new business. His father, an ambitious entrepreneur, starts up a bento business in collaboration with the local miso factory. The business seems to be going well, but because of it, his parents are always busy. Perhaps because of this less-than-affectionate upbringing, Seki ends up being a rather violent child -- starting fights with his classmates and throwing punches with zero hesitation from a very young age.

► Seki does manage to make one friend, though. Shimizu, a rather spacey young boy he goes to kindergarten with. Which is a good thing, since Seki's parents don't even have time to pick him up after kindergarten. Instead, it's Shimizu's mother who often walks him home at the end of the day. Shimizu's mother, sympathetic to Seki's situation, chides Shimizu to be good friends with Seki.

► Something awful happens one day. As they're going home -- Shimizu's mother leading the way, holding Seki's hand, Shimizu trailing right behind -- a drunk driver's truck comes barreling down the street towards them. Seki is the only one who notices this, and even then it's far too late. He only has time to save one person -- Shimizu, or Shimizu's mother.

► Seki throws himself backwards, just barely has the time to drag Shimizu back out of the truck's path as it mows down Shimizu's mother. She is killed instantly, and Seki can do nothing but watch as her body bleeds out on the pavement. But Shimizu -- he can't let Shimizu see this. As Shimizu struggles to his feet, asking where his mom is, Seki quickly covers his eyes and yells at him -- "Don't look!" Seki drags Shimizu away, around the corner, so he won't have to see his mother's corpse. He tells Shimizu, "It's okay, your mom's alive, she's right there, it's okay."

► Shimizu's mother is gone. But Seki's bluffs and lies worked too well. Unknownst to Seki, Shimizu continues to really and truly believe his mother is still alive.

► Sometime around this time, Seki acquires the scar across his nose.

► Soon afterwards, however, the miso factory goes bankrupt and takes down Seki's father's bento business along with it. Seki's father turns to alcohol, refusing to look for any other work. Seki's mother seems absent from his life. Perhaps as a result of his fragmented family life, Seki starts smoking, still in elementary school.

► He sticks with his small group of friends from school. Among them is Shimizu. Shimizu's spacey, delusional tendencies have grown even worse, but he's still Seki's best (and perhaps only true) friend.

► One afternoon, some of the kids in the group find a porn tape -- recorded over with some man babbling about having killed his family and buried the bodies at the old miso factory along with a large sum of money. Naturally, the kids are curious and want to go explore the factory. Seki decides to go along, mostly to prove that there's no dead bodies and that life's not so easy. Seki hates liars.

► Of course, they find no bodies and no money.

► But they do see a shadowy figure on the roof. All of the kids panic and flee, dragging Seki along. But just as they're about to make it out, Shimizu says that two of their numbers are missing, and that he's going back to look for them. The gate they were about to all escape out of closes. Shimizu and the two are stuck inside, and the two others that have gotten out run away in search of an exorcist. Seki can't open the gate to get back inside, nor does he believe an exorcist will be any use. He's stuck and useless.

► Just as Seki is about to leave, Shimizu called from inside the factory. He shouts, "There's a fire!" (Seki's cigarette must have lit the place up without them noticing.) The fire blows up part of the factory -- amidst the rain of glass and debris, an enormous shard of glass pierces neatly through the brim of Seki's baseball cap, very narrowly missing killing him. Seki, petrified, can only watch the factory smoulder and stammer to no one in particular, "Help ... Anyone ..."

► Suddenly, a downpour extinguishes the fire.

► It turns out that Shimizu and the two kids who had gone missing first are all safe. Everything's okay in the end. Despite everything that happened, they all manage to escape unharmed.

► (Except Seki. He develops a crippling fear of fire. He stops smoking, as a result.)

► Middle school. Seki's family's financial situation is growing worse. He grows into a loner as his small group of friends begins to drift apart. Seki attends fewer and fewer of his studies, thinking it pointless. On the other hand, Shimizu is being bullied, having his money taken away by cruel classmates. Seki tries to defend him ("Money is something to be earned with hard work,") but his fear of fire is exploited and he's beaten up. He doesn't really care. What he does care about:

Shimizu: "Seki, aren't you lonely being by yourself all the time?"
Seki: "If ... If you'll believe in me, I swear I'll protect you!"
Seki: "So don't ... leave me alone anymore ..."
Shimizu: "... OK!"

► Middle school nears its end. Seki skips almost all of his classes and has no intention of continuing his education into high school, saying, "Even if someone like me studies, I'll only learn how to be crafty." But he tells Shimizu to study hard and go to a good high school. He gets into frequent fights, and rumor goes that he knocked up one of the prettiest girls in the school. Following this rumor (or is it the other way around?) he skips school for over a month.

► Middle school ends. True to his word, Seki doesn't go to high school. His father has gone completely missing. His family's situation is dire -- Seki dresses in ragged clothes, wearing the same coat he wore back in middle school. "In fact, if we can't bring in the money this time, we might even be forced to give up our home. And then we'll all be homeless, haha."

► Wandering around with Shimizu one afternoon, bored, Seki spots a poster that someone has put up advertising that they'll "do anything." Seki scratches out the phone number and instead puts down Shimizu's phone number -- he doesn't have a phone. Soon afterward, Shimizu's phone rings.

► It turns out to be a pretty lady. She's been dumped and scorned by her boyfriend. She wants Seki to kill him. Seki, desperate for the money and apathetic about what might happen to him, agrees, and stalks down the man in question. Follows him to a subway station, and stands right behind him near the rails. No one is watching. He prepares to push the man in front of the incoming train.

► In the end, he doesn't. The weather was too nice. He couldn't do it.

► He meets the woman to return the money. She also says she's glad he didn't do it. For a moment, it looks like they might have a meaningful conversation, but of course, that's dumb. When he tries to console her, he gets a cup of water dumped on his face. To a certain extent, he agrees to what she did.

► Afterward, he meets back up with Shimizu at the park. They talk, have dinner, wander around like normal. Seki muses to himself over food, "I was thinking of getting a normal part-time job or something." Seki quietly tells Shimizu, "Let's just ... try to stay as good friends as possible." It's a quietly upbeat moment that Seki doesn't know how to maintain for too long.

► True to his word, Seki finds himself a job -- but commits to it in all the wrong ways. He throws himself into manual labor with a listless sort of fury. Finds himself a job in collecting furniture and large electronics for a recycling company, but then follows it up with additional jobs in delivery work, a construction site, any sort of mind-numbing labor that will accept him. It's not that he needs -- or even wants -- the money; Seki doesn't spend most of what he earns. It's more that Seki seeks the mind-numbing, soul-crushing tediousness of manual labor. When he's working, he doesn't need to think about anything else in life. In that way, it's most comfortable for him to be constantly working at multiple jobs, even some things that might not be entirely moral. Several years pass this way. Seki's surviving quite well after he ran away from home, really.

► Also true to his word, Seki remains close friends with Shimizu, hanging out with him every so often even as Shimizu attends college. They spend enough time together that Seki's girlfriend grows suspicious, accusing him of being gay. Seki rebukes that accusation at a deadpan, and when his girlfriend asks him why he's even going out with her, says plainly that it's because she doesn't smoke. He gets slapped for that.

► He's out on a job with Shimizu one day when things go awfully wrong. Because it somehow comes up in conversation -- Shimizu mentions his mother. Says he doesn't want to make her feel lonely. Talks like she's still alive. And Seki, who had to watch as she was crushed under the wheels of that truck before his eyes back then, snaps. He grabs Shimizu's face, yells at him, calls him a retard -- accuses him of acting like an idiot for shits and giggles. Asks if Shimizu enjoys being such a fuckup. Says that maybe it's Shimizu's fault that his life is in shambles. Who knows what else he might have said, if a phone call from his employer didn't interrupt him at that moment.

► But it all comes back to bite him in the ass. Because that angry tirade of his has made something in Shimizu's head buckle, too. They're done with their job, about to head back home, and Seki flatly tells Shimizu that they're going back -- when Shimizu tells him to go on ahead alone. Tells him, I can get back by myself. Snipes at him, Didn't you say I was a bother to you?

► Seki drones, "Don't take everything I say so seriously, you idiot. Besides, you can't even do anything without me --" But Shimizu yells at him, You don't understand anything about me!

► Shimizu's never rebuked him before. Seki snaps. Storms off. Angry. Hurt. Sits in his shitty truck with his forehead pressed against the steering wheel with no idea what he's going to do next.

► Enter [community profile] abaxcity



personality:

In a nutshell, Seki is a fucked-up kid who was forced into adulthood too quickly.

It starts off with at least a hint of subtlety. First impressions would mark Seki as a rather stoic young man, his expression usually a tightly-controlled, somewhat sleepy looking blank facade. Seki's voice is almost always kept at a quiet deadpan, completely lacking in emotion -- not completely offputting, but not really inviting, either. He seems to address any and all obstacles he comes up against with a plodding, enduring attitude, showing little in the way of displeasure or pleasure. Whatever happens, happens, seems to be his attitude.

But it's really not that difficult to see past that thin veneer of stoicism and realize that Seki's -- kind of messed up. Embittered. Harsh. Far more cynical in his worldview than most people his age would be.

For starters, Seki's a little bit sociopathic in some ways -- has been since he was very young. Even as a kindergartener, he had no hesitation in starting fights with people and throwing punches, busting people's noses and not caring if he got his own face bruised up. He spent most of his middle school years tousling with other delinquent students and getting into fistfights with whoever he found reason to, spending more time in brawls than he did in classrooms. Not because he enjoys fights, though. Seki doesn't seem to gain any pleasure out of violence, doesn't really accomplish anything by punching the shit out of another person. He doesn't even care if a fight ends up with him losing. He'll take any blows stoically, too apathetic to complain if he happens to get beaten into the ground with his face all busted. Seki doesn't fight for the sake of fighting.

It's more that Seki just doesn't see the need to back away from fights. He's aggressive. There are a great many things in the world that piss him off -- people who lie, people who take money that they don't deserve, people who delude themselves from the truth, people who cling to stupid dreams -- and when Seki bumps into something that grinds against his nerves, he just lashes out.

And while his violent tendencies have quieted down a little bit over the years, perhaps because getting into constant fights doesn't really work miracles when he's trying to land jobs, Seki hasn't mellowed at all over the years. His aggressive nature has, instead, translated into a sort of ruthless insensitivity -- say anything that'll rub him the wrong way, and Seki will say what's on his mind in the bluntest, most awful way possible. Not necessarily out of malice, but out of sheer apathy.

People. It's people that Seki doesn't like, perhaps. People, and society, and all the stupid things that these issues entail. In some ways, Seki is sick and tired of life at age twenty. A rough childhood and rougher adolescence have done nothing to persuade him that life is anything full of hope, and so Seki plods through life with great reluctance -- not so much enjoying life as he is enduring it. It's the reason why he works four or five different part-time jobs, not even leaving himself time to spend the money he earns, and it's the reason he'll stay with a girlfriend he doesn't really care about, just because she doesn't smoke, and it's the reason why he doesn't ever seem to truly enjoy anything. He doesn't want to think, doesn't want to deal, doesn't want to face what the world has to offer him. Just wants to get through the days as quickly and quietly as possible.

If someone were to ask him why he doesn't just kill himself, it would actually be a pretty good question. Deeply distrustful of just about everyone, scarred and embittered by his neglectful parents, Seki leads a pointless, pointless life that could end at any moment and he would have little to regret. It says a lot that he's considered murdering a man for money before, and is willing to step into immoral and/or illegal territory at times -- he just doesn't have much of anything to lose.

So why does Seki still keep dragging his feet? The answer: deep down inside, Seki is too dutiful, too loyal, too weak to give up on living.

The base of the problem might be that Seki wasn't always a bad person. Sure, he was always a little blunt, always kinda insensitive, but at his very core, Seki doesn't hate people. He makes some vague effort to remain polite-ish in public, tries to keep a few friends around, seems like a decent enough (if somewhat distant) guy to his girlfriend. He still retains some sense of what is right and what is wrong, and there are certain moral thresholds that he will, generally, refuse to cross. As much of a problem child as he's been, Seki isn't 'evil.'

And it should also probably be noted that if Seki has any one admirable trait, it's his stubborn, undying loyalty. It's at least fifteen years that he's spent staying by Shimizu's side -- partly out of friendship, and partly out of some twisted form of duty. (After all, he did just let Shimizu's mother die right before his eyes.) And when he promised in middle school that he'd always protect Shimizu, he seriously meant that, because he remembers that years later and always has it at the back of his mind. Seki hates liars, and wouldn't break a promise that he makes -- given the chance, he probably would have stuck by Shimizu's side until at least one of them died.

And it's this level of loyalty and devotion that also makes Seki hideously vulnerable. Because it's so rare for him to place any amount of trust in anyone, all it takes is a few well-placed words to completely crush what little faith he might have left in the world. That tenuous grasp he maintains on morals and rules and 'what is right' is almost purely out of willpower, and as much as he tries to distance himself from the world, Seki can't block out everything. Break through that thick layer of apathy and disdain of his, and it would only take a single, sharp jab for Seki to completely fall apart. He always seems to be teetering at the edge of a self-destructive, completely amoral rampage, and it's hard to tell how long it'll be before something finally pushes him over that line.

Deep down inside, Seki might still want to believe that the world is a good place. He's just been given so little proof of it, and the twenty years he's been clinging to this socially-accepted belief by his fingernails is about all he can take. The apathy and distance and aggression he treats everything with isn't so much an attack on the world as it is a defensive measure. But give him a chance, and he might prove to be a decent person after all -- it'd be more of a chance than he's ever been given before.



abilities/powers:

Seki is just a normal human. So -- no superpowers. Nothing. In terms of more mundane abilities, Seki is -- still pretty normal. Kinda sad, isn't it?

Not to say he's completely useless. Though he's not really "smart" per say -- especially since he dropped out of school before entering high school -- Seki tends to be pretty sharp and sly, with a fairly quick understanding of how to react in different situations. He picks up on things pretty quickly and is extremely adaptable. Resourceful and dogged, managing to make himself a living after running away from home at age sixteen. Physically fit, with good stamina and endurance from lots of mindless manually labor -- not really strong, but hardy enough. Also, he seems to be a pretty good brawler when it comes to fistfights and back-alley scuffles. Nothing on the level of actualy gangsters and thugs, but enough that he can hold his own. Fairly high pain tolerance, especially for just "a normal guy." Given a different set of circumstances, Seki might have actually become a fairly capable person. But as is, he's mostly just a dogged young adult with an incomplete set of qualifications and no real abilities to speak of.



first person sample: [ post from another game, multiple comment threads ]

third person sample:

This has got to be some sort of joke.

Seki wakes up, and he's already in a foul mood. Was in a foul mood. (Not something he wants to think about.) He doesn't remember falling asleep, but that's probably not very important -- chances are he just passed out at the wheel of his truck after sulking himself into exhaustion. No use thinking about the past. No use dwelling over what's already happened. (So he tells himself.)

So Seki sits up, but what he immediately realizes is that this situation is wrong. Very wrong. His clothes are gone. This is -- a morgue. Nowhere that seems even remotely familiar. His first thought is that he's dreaming a really shitty dream, and will be waking up any moment now. But the floor is cold against his feet when he steps down, and he hasn't woken up yet. Seki inhales slowly, exhales past gritted teeth.

Fine.

Fine, he'll deal with this.

Objective: find out what the hell is going on here. It'll be like one of those shitty mystery tv series they show late at night, right? Wandering around looking for clues, acting smart, all that stuff. Nothing big. Nothing serious. It'll be a nice distraction. (Distraction from -- things. He doesn't want to think about what he's trying to distract himself from. Doesn't want to think, period.) The cellphone in his hand sure isn't his, but he doesn't care about that too much at the moment. It'll be handy later regardless.

One step at a time, he heads down the hallway towards the door. Knows he looks ridiculous in this paper slip, but that's also something he'll address later. The paper slip -- hospital wear, isn't it? Maybe he passed out in his truck and some do-gooder called him an ambulance. (Ha ha ha. Very funny. As if that'd happen.) The cold's already making his hair stand on end, his nerves bristling, and Seki grits his teeth as he shoves the door open with his shoulder.

Whatever comes up, he'll accept it. Face it. Roll with the punches. That's the only way he can keep going on, really.



case no: Random, please!