Individual

Character's full name: Yunazo [愈無須] Kimaru [木丸]
Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Yun
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Date of Birth: June 30 1996
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Union, New York
Nationality: American
Ethnicity/ Cultural Heritage: Japanese-dominated asian-etc multigenerational mutt

Appearance

Hair color and style: Black, roughly a quarter bleached (badly) and three quarters natural roots, and fluffy-shaggy but not long enough to hide behind
Skin Tone: The pale, not-quite-pink of untanned light-skinned asianness
Eye Color: See visible mutation; naturally black
Height: 5’7”
Build: Bony-thin and leanly built
Visible mutation: Yun’s eyes take on the colour(s) of the eyes of anyone his mutation is acting upon. If he cannot distinguish emotions between sources, the colours (if different) will be proportionately blurred.
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings:
Other features:

Everyday clothing style: Black or green (especially with brown), with frequent hoodies and either sweatpants or jeans.
Uniform:
Sleepwear: Bright yellow polar fleece bottoms (with randomly coloured dinosaur shapes) and either a random tee or a tagless sweater, depending on the temperature.
Miscellaneous clothing: A thin copper-plated chain of necklace length wrapped into a bracelet

, with three pendant charms: a black hematite ring with a small moodstone, a blunt silver arrowhead, and a copper feather. Also, when he’s feeling mutationally/emotionally stressed, an old woven wool blanket somewhere between small blanket and large throw in size. It is pale grey with three green bands along each side; the overlap between the bands on each corner is black.

Character

Personality: Quiet, shy, and rather limited in social skills, Yun is not asocial but is somewhat easily intimidated. He has an enormous capacity for emotion, and feels extremely strongly, but often has difficulty expressing it. He sometimes finds himself charging written words with emotion, but it is inconsistent, unpredictable, and not a particularly pleasant experience.

Sometimes Yun tries to be a good person. Mostly he tries to to be good to the people he cares about, and spares little, if any, thought for the rest of the world. He has barely begun to develop his own aspirations and ambitions, and currently is primarily occupied by surviving: surviving in the face of the cruelty that killed Jasper is a goal largely grown from his one supportive brother’s strength and determination.

Overall, Yun has a lot of growing to do as a person. The framework he has nestled in for most of his life is gone, and quite abruptly so, and at the very least he needs to find new ground to stand on, if not which direction to face and who to fight.

Not everything is all that serious, though. He gets impulsive when he’s sleepy and possessive of his drinks when he’s exhausted. He is really slow to drag himself out of a warm bed and some days he will fall asleep anywhere, without warning. He’s shy but knows how to smile, and still does when little things please him. He has a stubborn streak even if it’s not always obvious, and giving up isn’t usually his decision. He likes flowers but doesn’t know how to name, pick, or grow them, and can occasionally be caught playing improvised drums to any good music playing at the time. Valentine’s Day is his favourite holiday despite having never dated or fallen in love, simply because of the availability of cinnamon hearts. The chocolate is good too, but cinnamon hearts don’t make him tipsy after three bites like truffles.

Hobbies/ Interests: Fluffy animals who don’t want to attack him; people who are honestly nice to him; being warm and cozy and wrapped in blankets; helping friends do whatever it is they want to do; food containing cinnamon (or also paprika, cayenne, or lots and lots of black pepper).
Job or part time job and description: currently unemployed
Fears/ phobias/ concerns: Being attacked/assaulted/murdered; living on the streets and starving to death; forgetting Naveda and Jasper; being overwhelmed by outside emotions. He also doesn’t really like being called Yunazo, as only his family and strangers do that.
Special talents: Clambering over precarious piles of random things, tagging along behind others, writing poetry unpredictably, untangling string and knots, and cooking omelettes.

Morality

Good/ bad/ neutral/ other: Neutral with potential for extremes: Yun tends to feel very strongly, and is based more in emotion than in reason, so the breadth of his attachments may very well determine whether mainstream morality considers him good or bad. At the present time, he has no intention or desire to harm anyone, doesn’t think that any group is superior to another, and has seen recently both of his very dear friends destroyed by anti-mutant humans.

Mutations

Mutation description:
Yun bears the rather traumatizing ability to pick up on the emotions of others. He is most sensitive to emotions involving sorrow, anger, and fear, and can detect such negative feelings from much farther away than positive feelings. Separating the emotions he feels from others from those originating within himself is complex, for most emotions are complicated, tangled masses and simply feeling them alters his own emotions. Managing that mess takes considerable mental control. It should be noted that his mutation is more visible than most mental abilities, as his eye colour changes to that of whomever he is reading; if he is reading multiple people, then the colour will be fragments (emotions that can be differentiated between sources) or a blend (muddled emotions).

While wading through constant emotional roller coasters is extremely draining, there isn’t really a time limit to Yun’s empathy - and it doesn’t necessarily fade out when he’s asleep or unconscious either. As he grows tired it becomes more difficult to differentiate between emotional sources, maintain any sort of internal emotional equilibrium, and simply function through the increasingly painful headache he develops. It is possible to stop feeling others, and to control which individuals he is receiving emotion from, but doing so consciously is not currently a skill of his - but he has subconsciously attached such a strong belief in the peacefulness of a particular blanket that wrapping himself in it filters outside emotions into near silence. The blanket itself is in no way special; it simply triggers subconscious control over Yun’s mutation.

Strengths: Superficially, Yun’s empathic abilities have potential application in socially interactive situations, or in supporting roles (from human lie detector to cheating at gambling). He is now able to tell if the people around him are suicidal, but he has just as few tools to improve others’ mental states and is at far greater risk for damaging emotions.

Weaknesses and Limitations: Emotional turmoil is tiring enough when all the emotions come from the same person and the same situation. Yun is exposed to the emotions of everyone around him more often than not, and it is wearying. In return for the energy drain that is his life these days, he needs a lot of sleep in order to remain functional. He is also only receptive to the emotions - and not thoughts or rationalizations regarding emotions - of humans and mutants.

Yun is most sensitive to negative emotions (i.e. fear, anger, sorrow, panic) and can pick up on these feelings in people he knows well up to a kilometre away. In strangers and acquaintances, however, he is fortunately limited to those within ten (clear emotional pickup) to twenty metres (vague sensing). He can detect positive emotions in friends from at most twenty metres away, while strangers’ joy is unnoticeable past five metres and only vaguely noticeable if more than two metres away. Direct physical contact does sharpen and clarify his empathy, and individuals with practiced, natural, or mutation-related mental resistance can quite easily disrupt his passive empathy. Yun himself has nearly no instinctive resistance to the mental effects of others.

Yun’s empathy is purely receptive: he cannot psychically effect the moods of others. Yun is also very sensitive by nature and does not have powerfully surging emotions of his own to override external feelings; even if his own feelings are strong in their own way, they have little power to persuasive power. Without learned control, his moods are dictated by his companions and how well wrapped in his blanket he is.

From a vulnerability to identification perspective, Yun is at a fairly subtle but unavoidable risk. Because his eyes take on the colour of the eyes of whomever he is currently reading, anyone who sees him in multiple environments or over time will likely notice the change. Reading a mutant with unusually coloured eyes will also reveal him extremely quickly.

Physical Abilities

General Physical Capabilities: No combat experience or training, and not particularly physically fit. Moderately agile from clambering around behind Naveda and Jasper.
Fighting Style: Confusion or panic, ideally with fleeing or hiding behind someone more combat-oriented.
Fighting Style Pros/Cons: No experience required!

History Of Your Character
Yunazo Kimaru. Named for his father’s most recognizable heritage more than any involvement with Japanese culture, Yun grew up in the same town where he was born. One of the many small cities on the fringe of New York City and nothing special in any recent way, Union and his outgoing, outspoken, overbearing family drew Yun from a quietly sensitive child into a shy teenager with few friends. He wasn’t friendless, and was in fact very attached to two individuals.

Yun met Naveda in elementary school. She lived down the road in an identical block of townhouses, and her mother had abandoned her and her father when she was a toddler. She was an inquisitive girl who loved animals and science and how things worked. One year, they were in the same class and their teacher put them together for an assignment. They got along better than most others expected, what with Nevada’s usual disinterest in humans relative to animals and conundrums and Yun’s shyness, and within a week Yun was tagging along (quietly) on Naveda’s adventures.

Jasper joined the group shortly after they moved up to middle school. He lived a bit farther away and had gone to a different elementary school. He liked to say that he had a crush on Naveda and that was why he spent a week stealing other kids’ assigned desks in order to sit closer. The teacher eventually gave in and swapped him with Yun.

When Naveda went to console Yun at lunch, Jasper followed her. Yun didn’t like Jasper then, but Naveda made them introduce each other. She didn’t care if Jasper did or didn’t have a crush on her. She did care how he affected her most consistent friend.

After lunch, Jasper talked to the teacher and got him to change the seating plan once again. The three of them sat together after that, and Jasper turned out to be a pretty decent kid. He was loud, and he joked about everything, and he was kind of messy, but he was friendly and he went out of his way to make things work. He also stubbornly lied about it when he fixed things, but he couldn’t always hide his grin.

The trio were inseparable by high school. Naveda dragged them to museums and frog-filled park ponds and abandoned cars. Jasper pulled pranks and did spot-on impersonations of authority and interrupted their companionable silence with fake farts. Yun watched and offered up his hands whenever they were needed, regardless of how messy they got, and simply quietly enjoyed the energy of his friends. They didn’t all need to be chattery boxes of overflowing joy. Yun was happy, but he didn’t express it in the same way.

Naveda asked Jasper out in grade ten, and they dated for a year before parting on eventually good terms. That was a lonely year. It wasn’t awkward being with them, but they spent more and more time with only each other. They tried to make it up to him, but with increasing homework loads they all only had so much time. After they split, they avoided each other for a few weeks but hung out with Yun individually before he quietly prodded them to talk to each other.

Things settled out again after that, and they started chattering about careers and adulthood. Naveda was torn between marine biology and engineering. Jasper wasn’t sure, but had some interest in teaching. Yun had no idea. He was okay in class, and occasionally got a lot of praise for his writing, but he didn’t see writing as a real job. What was a real job anyway? Something you did for others so that they would give you money, which you could then spend on basic needs like shelter and food and warm clothing. Naveda liked taking him to thrift stores and making him try on clothes. He did like experimenting with them, but if he didn’t do it on his own then he got to do it with Naveda and Jasper.

In grade twelve, Jasper met another girl, Joslyn. They were dating within the month.

Over their last high school winter holidays, Naveda was hit by a taxi. She died the next day despite being rushed to the hospital: her face shattered against the pavement even before the taxi rolled over her. Yun spent the night in the hospital with her father, but she never woke and her father couldn’t bear to collect her few possessions. His own father sent him a text near midnight to ask where he was, and followed up with a ‘you look fine to me’ when they were next in the same room. He stayed with Jasper that night, and a few nights after that, and never let go of the necklace that Naveda had been wearing when she died.

He couldn’t cry. Jasper did, and even Joslyn. Everyone’s parents cried or showed their grief in some way, and when school resumed everyone behaved differently. Yun wasn’t empty. He wasn’t not sad. The grief was just… blocked off somewhere. Suffocating and festering. He couldn’t touch it. He tried, but either it was too far or there was something in the way. It hurt. Everything hurt. Food didn’t taste like food, or like anything else. Warm and cold were all the same, but not something in between.

Joslyn stopped visiting Jasper at home early that January. Yun stayed over every weekend but they didn’t do anything. They didn’t have the energy or the desire.

Jasper and Joslyn had a fight when the snow finally faded away. It was loud and it was vicious, and it was all about Naveda. It wasn’t about some perception that Jasper was still in love with his childhood friend and ex girlfriend. It vaguely started that way, or seemed to have when Yun came within earshot, but then it became about how Jasper and Yun were even friends with Naveda, with a mutant.

It hadn’t consciously occurred to Yun that Naveda’s spectacular diving times were more than spectacular. Mutants, like any other marginalized group, didn’t draw his dislike. Jasper had known, and he and Naveda had broken up because she didn’t want to guarantee that any children she might potentially have would be mutants. She wanted to give them a chance at normalcy, at something that wouldn’t push them into a career simply because they had some ability that suited it. She knew that Jasper was animal-natured from the first time they had made out and she ended up with a face full of moose hair. … and a broken chair.

The fight was filmed by another student, and before long most of the school had seen it. Jasper’s family wasn’t pro-mutant but they didn’t kick him out, but whenever he tried to go to class he would be spat at, hit with whatever people had to hand, and either endlessly insulted or ignored. His teachers mostly ignored him, although two tried to control their students and support him.

He drowned in his bathtub in late May. Yun was staying over at the time and was the first to think that something was odd.

He doesn’t remember the next two days, although he later saw the statement he apparently gave the police. Stuff about Jasper being bullied, and Naveda’s death, and how he’d seemed to be dragging himself onwards recently more than before.

He hadn’t noticed what his only remaining friend had been feeling, and Jasper had died because of it. No, not because of his inability to help. Because the people around him attacked him for a single aspect of his entire being, and not even an aspect that had much to do with his behaviour.

Yun’s final exams were waived where possible, given the circumstances, and he was allowed to write those that could not be ignored in private. He came very close to vomiting just walking through the half-empty school. People hardly noticed him, as usual; he was just the shy kid who tagged along with the now-dead mutants. He must have been desperate for friends.

He wrote his exams while drowning in pity, and walked home in a painful daze. He ended up at Jasper’s house, but fled his friend’s parents’ artificial smiles and internal disgust before they opened the door. He’d liked them. Did they blame him for their son’s death? But it was other people who had been mean. He had just tried to find some vague comfort with his last friend.

His own parents ignored him. His two older brothers and younger sister absently badgered him to clean something, and then paid him no further mind.

He drifted around aimlessly through the summer, interacting less and less and seemingly disappearing from the world. They sent his visiting oldest brother, Kuname, to check on him one day in November, several days after any of them had last seen him; they eventually remembered that he was indeed there, and hadn’t gone off to college two months before (only Kuname remembered that Yun had been accepted to two small colleges, but not responded to either). Kuname found him wrapped in an old wool blanket beside his bed, unresponsive and far paler than usual.

Yun woke up in the hospital with an IV for dehydration and, given the recent events of his life, suicide prevention supervision. Cinema was playing games on his phone; Yun tried to ignore whatever it was Kuname was trying to ignore. He tried to ignore the smell of the hospital too, and the feel of the hospital bed sheets. He tried to ignore the emanating pain and misery he imagined oozing from the other occupied beds, whether it came from the multiple colliding problems of old age or the pain of a recent surgery incision.

He later woke in pain himself, as if the distress around him had abruptly finished clicking into focus. In some ways, it had, and other than the confusing jumble of mixed messages, everything pouring into his head was clear and precise.

One of the doctors put two and two together, and lo and behold Yun was identified as a mutant with some form of at least receptive empathy.

His family stopped visiting, and when he was discharged he found only Kuname waiting. His brother took him home, but when they arrived it was to the sight of Yun’s less-valuable belongings haphazardly boxed and stacked beside the garbage bin. Apparently his parents had gone through anything he had had of value and kept that for their own use, and apparently most of his belongings had been considered useless. He himself was not deemed valuable, and wasn’t even allowed into the house.

So life had been for Jasper, until it had ended, and so it would be for Yun. He wasn’t willing to endure it until he gave up, though. It was winter and he was shy and his head split with outside emotions whenever he wasn’t wrapped in a blanket, but right up until his brother waved and left him at the bus station he felt too stubborn to lay down and die. By then he had a ticket to the big city, the address of a few purportedly mutant-friendly places, and too much apparent commitment to back out.

Roleplay
Where did you learn about this site?: Alli! (again, and also myself, Aiden)
Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: Inactive: Aiden, Crow, Maria
Sample RP:
The bus trip wasn’t long enough for anyone else to try to sleep, but Yun spent the entire time wrapped up anyway, He hadn’t been able to get a window seat, so he couldn’t see anyway. The bus was full of people and their overflowing feelings. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to be crushed under them all. The old woman beside him was the only happy one. Everyone else was vaguely or specifically miserable.

The blanket blocked both the stares and the moods, and left him alone to rest. He did nothing but rest these days. Rest and sleep and avoid the world.

The woman shook his shoulder long after he was awake. It took him longer to realize that there was no vibration under his feet, no road noise. Just voices and shuffling clothing.

“This is my stop, kid. Get out of the way.”

She might be happy, but she wasn’t nice. She was right that he was in the way, though, and this was his stop too. He tucked his blanket away from his face and stiffly moved into the aisle. She bustled past him, still looking soft and gentle and sweet but clearly more complex than that, and he joined her in the line slowly filing out of the bus.

His bag was larger than the old woman’s, and it still had the price tag on it. He tugged at it before turning to leave the station, but it was made of plastic and the strap didn’t want to break. He’d have to get it later.

His phone buzzed in his hand, but it was just a junk email. Kuname had said he wouldn’t be able to do much more. A text would have been nice, but if Yun sent one it might draw too much attention to his brother. He sighed. He had reached the city close to noon, and even if he had to walk everywhere with his suitcase he was close enough to two of the places he and Kuname had found to be off the streets before evening drew in its darkness.

Back in action, yo~

Japanese heritage? Clearly you should join the cult of the dragon God. Welcome back! ^_^

Wow, that backstory...Amazing character!

Oh what fun!! Emotional rollercoaster you say... See what happens when I'm around.

Now able to tell if people around him are suicidal? Might be somewhat awkward if Yun were to meet Danny. Really cool character, though!

Ooooh, plotsinesses. I am open to plots~