Got this approved via PMs yesterday night, been busy and edited and tweaked some things on the suggestion of our GM. Putting it out here for the playerbase's consideration.
Name: Ezekiel Williams
Age: 18
Gender: Male
Appearance:Standing at 6 feet 2 and weighing around 200+ pounds or so, Zeke’s obviously athletic and his body already shows the wear and tear of his tough life thanks to a few scars and his rough, hardened fists and shins. Though his tricked out karate gi quite suits his size and demeanour, he obviously doesn’t walk around in it all the time. He will, however, take most any excuse he can to do so. When it comes to casual clothes, he typically dons dark green cargo pants, a grey wifebeater and a white zip-up hoodie.
Personality:Zeke is something of an odd one. Despite looking like more or less like a common punk or gangster of some sort he is typically calm, easy going and fairly approachable, a cool-headed man who walks through life with such natural confidence that blatant forcefulness seems unnecessary to him. Born to a not exactly traditional environment and having gone through a hectic upbringing, he takes the strangest occurrences in stride with great ease and is all for experiencing anything and everything life has to offer. On the other hand, his fierce looks aren’t just for show, and blatant forcefulness is very much a part of who he is.
A firm believer in self reliance and extremely driven to excel and achieve great things in life, Ezekiel Williams holds himself to very high standards and is more than a bit arrogant as a result. He's outspoken, stubborn, honest to a fault and feels every man should stay fit and know how to fight. He will also absolutely not take crap from anyone if he feels it's unjustified or let people get in the way of his goals and dreams. What’s worse, he feels this is the proper way to climb up in life (or die trying) and doesn’t take too kindly to cowards, doormats and the like, who he treats with open contempt.
Backstory:Growing up travelling from one bad part of Florida to another as the son of a hard-nosed mechanic and a tough as nails teacher for youth detention centers has most certainly marked Ezekiel Williams for life. Though not as uneducated as one might assume thanks to the efforts of his mom, Zeke has been immersed in a chaotic, very physical culture for as long as he can remember. Living around the streets, struggling to make ends meet, fighting to protect himself and his rights and pushing ever on were part and parcel of his upbringing. That he turned out something of a punk was absolutely no surprise to anyone involved.
To be fair, Zeke always wanted to make something of himself, what he wasn’t quite sure admittedly, and never allowed himself to be forced into violent gangs and petty crime, but a straight shooter he was not. Hoping to curb his rebellious nature with some discipline, Ezekiel’s parents decided to sign him up to a karate school at age 10. They chose the dojo because it was cheap and it advertised working with troubled youth, wholly expecting it all to be little more than an engaging workout for their son. Had they looked deeper they would've realized the place had a reputation for producing fearsome, hardened fighters.
By the time Mr. and Mrs. Williams realized their mistake, when the bruises and skinned limbs started to become much too common for their liking, Zeke would’ve dropped his studies and gone off to find a job just to keep training. His parents’ plan had worked a little too well and, under the harsh discipline of sensei Reginald Quinlan, Ezekiel Williams found his purpose in life as a flourishing martial artist. His growth was nothing short of amazing, and soon he seemed well above petty street fights. Even former rivals came to recognize that he was meant for greater things and expected him to leave a mark in combat sports.
And then, one day, he vanished. Word around the street was that his illegal fights as a trained and dangerous martial artist had finally caught up with him, and he had been sent to a specialized correctional facility. In truth, Zeke’s channeller abilities were finally detected, but there was just one problem: There was no way him or his family would buy into or agree to the whole alternate society spiel. Deeming it too dangerous for him to go around unknowingly tapping into his powers, The Institute instead presented the situation as attempting to reform a case of juvenile delinquency before the police got involved.
It’s not as though Zeke’s happy about the arrangement, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean a lot to him. He’ll continue to go down his chosen path and crap, this whole thing might even make for a hell of an adventure.
Equipment:Nothing of combat use or that bears mentioning. Clothes, school supplies, a cellphone, you know, the usual.
Abilities:-Jissenkai Karate: An american freestyle school of karate developed by Sensei Quinlan and his close friends and associates, all of them lifelong martial artists with a wide variety of backgrounds. Jissenkai stands for "Real Combat Society" and the style can very much be called mixed martial arts, with a strong basis in practical application of karate techniques and using the framework of japanese budo as a way to guide both physical and personal growth. Zeke has trained ceaselessly in this for eight years now, and combined with his experience in street brawls this makes him an extremely proficient fighter.
Ezekiel’s style is grounded on simple but effective techniques and an excellent understanding of defense, with a strong grasp on less quantifiable factors like distance, timing and anticipation, over a flashy, complicated arsenal. Evasion, control of position and angles of attack, laying traps and exploiting openings with explosive bursts of precise offense, his karate is very much about grasping the intangibles of fighting and mixing up a minimalistic game so that each of his tools play off of eachother. For real life parallels, look primarily into former UFC champion Lyoto Machida and a bit of kickboxing and muay thai champion Giorgio Petrosyan.
-Tameshiwari: Breaking bricks, boards and the like. It’s not a particularly useful skill for learning to fight more often than not, better to learn to understand the flow of an engagement via sparring and competition, but it makes for a pretty okay party trick and who knows, there might be times where you might want or even need to break an unresisting object in the most efficient way using nothing but your body.
-Parkour and shooting hoops: Zeke is generally athletic and learned to throw hoops with other kids. Before he really settled into fighting, he also learned that sometimes that wasn’t the best idea and taught himself a bit of parkour to escape bad situations.
Channeller category: Augmenter
Description of power:Zeke is a late bloomer with a comparatively weak connection to his channeler powers, which manifest entirely through his dedication to the martial arts. Rather than react to a lone specific emotion, Zeke has developed his abilities through the chaotic mixture brought about by intense training and fighting. It’s that combination of pain and fatigue both physical and mental, trumped by the accompanying sense of achievement and self improvement, that powers him. On the same line, he doesn’t have specific "moves", such a thing would go against his style, and instead his abilities manifest as heightened versions of existing concepts in Karate.
Names/descriptions of moves:-Maai: Translating simply as "interval", maai is actually a complex concept in japanese martial arts for the space between two opponents and the position from where an attack can be landed. Encompassing the distance between adversaries, how fast it can be covered, the angles involved and the rhythm of attack, it’s a dual relationship where each fighter’s methods and skills influence each other's maai constantly. Understanding and learning to control maai is perhaps the single most important defensive skill anyone can develop, a way to control engagements and live up to the old adage of "hit without getting hit".
In channeler terms, Zeke reads the ebb and flow of energies of his opponents to a very precise, minute level and this gives him an almost instinctive understanding of an enemy’s attacks and intentions. Though nowhere near as fast as speed-focused channelers, he can ruthlessly exploit this ability to seem far, far faster than he is in both defense and offense thanks to his martial arts skills. Of course, this isn’t infallible. After all, rarely does a karateka have to face, say, someone throwing living bombs at them, and the fluid nature of maai means a practitioner has to adapt his reading of it to every new nuance in an opponent.
-Ichigeki: Ichigeki means "a single blow", and is a somewhat nicer way of conveying the old concept of Ikken Hissatsu, or "one blow, certain death". Derived from swordsmanship, where the idea is rather more feasible, it is not meant to be taken quite literally but it’s rather both the spirit/state of mind a karateka should partake in and perhaps something of an ideal to strive towards. Every attack should be executed with full intent to settle a fight with it, so as to ensure things do not escalate and to preserve one’s integrity, and every enemy attack should be treated as deadly which it may well be in a self defense scenario.
In Zeke's case, he takes Ichigeki to heart. Though not the strongest in pure muscle, size and strength are just a part of it all. Relaxed and proper technique to maximize power generation, timing and precision to generate the best connections (and yes, this ties into maai), committing to the blow even at the expense of a followup, these are essential striking factors. Though his methods more or less preclude the use of rapid combinations of blows, Zeke is an explosive, decisive attacker whose techniques are not only precise but much faster and stronger than his pure running speed or lifting capacity would imply and cannot simply be brushed aside.
In channeler terms, Ichigeki would be focusing oneself fully to every technique to maximize its fight-finishing potential, putting as much energy into a single attack and delivering to the weakest point possible. For an example of maai and ichigeki in action, check
this clip out. The first karateka reads the maai where both of his opponents will need to step in to attack and counters in a devastating manner when they do. The second one reads the maai so effectively he can not only avoid sword strokes but block the attacking motions at their weakest, with enough skill that he could have used a fight-ending followup had he wanted to. Both of the actors are real life 7th dan karateka and the movie, Kuro Obi, is centered around depicting traditional karate.
-Hojo Undo: Translated as "supplementary exercises", the methods may vary but it’s simply the kind of physical conditioning that every single martial artist worth his salt engages in. Strength, stamina, toughness, coordination, speed, flexibility, fighting is an extremely demanding activity. Zeke’s physical augmenter powers aren’t up to par with the more superhuman, dedicated abilities of his classmates, but he is certainly quite an athletic specimen for a human of 18 years of age and has room to grow. Of them all, it’s likely his ability to take a punch that’s the most developed, making his unarmed melee focus less of a suicidal proposition.
Character theme song: Def Jam: Fight for NY was an amazing fighting game and you should check it out, especially if you like early 2000s rap culture.
