Character Name: Tobias "Toby" Westen

Description:
He's an athletic teenager of about 17 years of age, standing at a slightly above-average height of 6'1" and weighing at just around 200 pounds or so. He's got dark brown hair that he either combs straight back or has parted to one side. Not that his hair is always visible. It's pretty rare to find him without his signature baseball cap featuring the logo of his high school team, the Tigers. Outside that he'll either be wearing his school clothes or maybe one his old jerseys paired with blue jeans or the like. In colder weather he has a brown denim jacket he's been known to occasionally wear to stave off the cold.

Personality:
Terrible sense of priorities. No respect for authority. Self-entitled jackass. You know, the typical teenager crap. But there is something a bit more buried underneath all that. Sure, he's just some idiot kid, but he's an idiot kid who is seemingly incapable of backing down. Does this land him in trouble? Oh absolutely. And yet it also lends itself well to someone who's job at the end of the day is stand up against the scary monsters so that they won't hurt any innocent people. He's also competitive... very competitive. Probably has something to with his athletic background, but the point is, he absolutely hates losing. Any loss suffered is typically met with a raw determination to get payback.

Background:
Toby only ever had two great loves in his life: Baseball and Duel Monsters. Well for the former he was recently cut from the team at his school. He got in one too many arguments with the coach, who Toby insists hates his guts for some unknown reason. The truth is that his competitive nature made him difficult to work with but like hell if he was ever going to admit that. But for the latter, Duel Monsters has essentially become Toby's surrogate replacement for baseball since he can no longer play for his school. Toby's competed in a local or two, but nothing major beyond that. He's still relatively new to the game, and so his deck and collection of cards is still rather limited. He plays a decent deck but often finds himself hurting for cash to buy better cards. Still, he at least knows how to work with what he's got, such as it is. At one point it was a Structure Deck that was originally given to him by a friend to help him get into the game. Toby has since made some modifications, namely the addition of some extra Felgrand and Red-Eyes Monsters. Also, Toby's relative inexperience in Duel Monsters means he has not even so much as met any factions, much less joined one.

Name: Claire Turner

Gender: ♀

Personality: A wanderer at heart, Claire likes to think of herself as the type of person who doesn’t stick around one place for too long, but who leaves lots of memories and stories in her wake. She tries to be assertive and confident with people she hasn’t met, forward and hopefully with an easy charm that makes people like her. She tries to pursue what she wants, not letting the opinions and concerns of others hold her back and hopes that it comes across as decisive rather than selfish.

Enigmatic; or at least she wants to be. Claire knows more about the people around her than they know about her and that is entirely intentional; part of it is asking questions, being friendly and getting people to talk about themselves, but it is also a deliberate desire to be secretive and dodge any return questions, but in a teasing way that plays up the mystery around herself. The ties in to Claire’s aloof nature; she had an easy time dealing with other people socially, but prefers to avoid attachments. She doesn’t keep friendships, at least not for long ad tries to keep her distance from people.

History: Claire is a normal girl from a relatively small town in the Northern prefectures of Japan. As a kid she was fond of sports, very energetic and had more in common with the boys her age than the girls, but as she got older and her friends started to take their sports more seriously she drifted away from them. Instead she developed more of an interest in nerdy hobbies and took a liking to sci-fi, fantasy and anime; in particular she became interested in the game of Duel Monsters after watching the shows in middle school. Luckily, her school had a club for the game that was fairly popular and after playing a few games with a borrower deck she started buying packs and made her own. As you’d expect from a first attempt, it was pretty bad and she lost a lot of game, but her new friends were helpful and helped her to improve both the deck and as a player and she ended up becoming pretty good at the game; one of the best in her small town at least.

Aside from the card game, after moving to high school Claire developed an interest in engines and mechanics; particularly motorcycles, something inspired by the fact that the older brother of one of her friends had bought and was repairing an old motorcycle in their garage. The fact that she had a crush on the brother had nothing to do with it, she swears. Clair offered to help him, despite not knowing anything about it at the time, and although it started as an excuse to spent time with him, she developed a genuine interest in the subject.

As a teen, Clair started to have strange dreams; dreams about monsters and things in the shadows that were sinister and malicious. At first they were like regular nightmares, indistinct and scary, but over time they became clearer; clear enough that she began to recognise some of the monsters in her dreams as coming from the game of Duel Monsters. She thought nothing of this, dismissing them as the product of an over active imagination, until she started to see things in real life too. Shadows out of the corner of her eye that were gone when she turned to look, silhouettes in the dark that might have been something inhuman, bumps in the night that no one else heard. The nightmares continued to wear away at her and now it seemed like they had followed her to the waking world too, something she knew she could never tell anyone.

Not without being called crazy.

It all culminated in one night, a couple of weeks after her graduation from high school, when one of her nightmares decided to show themselves to her, plain as day, as she was walking home one night. Claire tried to ignore it, it wasn’t real after all, monsters couldn’t be real, but when it came close enough that she could feel its breath on her face, smell the musk of its body and its claws pricking her skin? It had to be real.

Claire ran that night. Ran all the way home, to gather her belongings and what money she could and her Duel Monster deck for some instinctive reason and packed her bags. She ran to her friend’s house, to their garage, and let herself in with a spare key to take the motorcycle she had helped rebuild. She ran to the open road on a stolen bike without telling anyone where she was going, in fear of the monsters that had been stalking her for years by this point and who no longer seemed content to staying in the shadows.

Deck(s):

Personality

A serious girl who is calm and collected most of the time. Her teachers often described her as responsible and mature, but at the same time almost always had an addendum of 'don't get along with her peers'. The type of girl who would absolutely remind the teacher that they had homework. Despite everything, however, pretty much everyone knew that if you wanted to get things done, you go to Aile, and as she took her duty as the Student Council President seriously, even her biggest detractors begrudgingly tolerated her. She also has a high expectation of herself and of others, sometimes to an uncompromising degree, which led her to butt head with others. An infamous incident was Aile breaking up with her first boyfriend over organizational matters. She did not think that he was doing his job well enough as the student council's secretary, and thus removed him from the position, leading to an argument. Of course, most people considered her actions to be extreme, but she was a true believer in 'if things are worth doing, they're worth doing well', again sometimes—or perhaps most of the time—to her detriment.

Background
Born to the Schulze family of the Wohnglück conglomerate, Aile spent her childhood attending the best tutoring money can afford. From academics to etiquette in high society as well as artistic pursuit, Aile grew up with her entire day's schedule full of these tutoring. The Schulze family is descended from old German nobility, and they maintain a noblesse oblige look in regard to their company. In short, they are at its core a business passed down in the Schulze family though its heirs are expected to dedicate their lives to the company. Aile, is of course, no different in this regard, she has been brought up as an heir to the massive conglomerate with all the lessons and strict upbringing that come with it.

Her relationship with the rest of her family, is of course, more professional than the warmth provided by a conventional family, with many being people of importance in various sectors and family politics a commonplace occurrence. With her father being the sole exception. A former philanderer and rebel in his youth, Aile's father, Joshua Schulze tried his best to be laxer with his daughter and provide her with a more normal childhood, in particular introducing her to various games from chess, tabletop, and video games, and of course, duel monster—to the consternation of the rest of his family, in particular, his mother—at least until Aile was five years old. In a tragic course of events, both Joshua's mother and wife died in the span of a few months. His mother on a plane accident and his wife from an illness. As he took over the conglomerate, Aile began to see him less and less often, eventually the only times Aile would interact with him was through phone calls or emails amidst his supposedly busy schedule.

By the time Aile graduated from middle school, she got into an uncharacteristically rebellious phase and decided to attend high school abroad. After a heated exchange with her father (over a call, of course), she had permission, to attend school in Domino City, where an old friend—though apparently they’ve been estranged for a while—would act as her guardian. While Aile agreed, she had also managed to wrangle the concession of her living on her own. And so her new 'independence' life (as much as one can be independent as a teenager whose living cost is still paid for) begins. While living without the constant lessons and tutoring was nice, after a few months, Aile was starting to get restless at suddenly having too much free time. She eventually took to do some tutoring for middle school kids as well as joining the student government, eventually becoming the student council president as a first year. A feat that she repeated in High School.

In her 3rd year of High School, she found out that her father had gone missing on a business trip. After looking deeper into it, she had found the circumstances to be off, but further inquiry was blocked by the Wohnglück conglomerate. Her trail of investigation ultimately led to her guardian in Domino City, William Burke. William eventually revealed that her father, as the head of the Wohnglück conglomerate, was actually part of the secret society the Conspiracy, whom the conglomerate had been backing for a while now, and he had gone missing while conducting some business as a Conspirators. William himself was a member of their rival society, the Duelist Society, finding out Aile’s father's involvement with the Conspiracy was what led to their original estrangement.

What William had told her confirmed most of what she had found out from her own investigations, as well as giving better context to the situation. Aile’s current hypothesis was that the Conspiracy was responsible for her Father’s disappearance in a secret experiment that had gone awry. And so, to get to the truth of the matter, Aile was inducted into the Duelist Society through William.

Name: Lucy Mallory
Age: 24

Personality:
“You’re right, I could win right now with a single direct attack. You’re out of monsters, you have got no traps to speak of, and no spells left… Right now, if I want win, I tell Miss Judge to slap you for 1800, and that’ll be it…”

“...”

“NO, LET'S LET FATE DECIDE!"

"I FLIP SUMMON DICE JAR!”

“COME ON, THROW YOUR DICE! LET’S SEE WHO’S HEAD WILL BE ROLLING TONIGHT!”

Lucy is the type of person that views just about everything in life, and life itself, as nothing more than a game. You pick your move, you play your card, and you wait to see if life has some sort of response. As a result, she has a hard time bothering to care about things outside of herself. If another person can’t get her something she wants, or they aren’t even fun to be around, why waste time sticking around them, you know?

As a result of her perspective on life, alongside her selfish tendencies, if given an opportunity to do so, Lucy can and will take entirely unnecessary risks just for the sake of seeing what might happen. If it’s something that she knows will seriously fuck her over, her selfishness will more than likely steer her away from it… but that’s extremely infrequent, as what she considers too risky and what others consider too risky are on entirely different spectrums, once again a result of her mentality.

A selfish gambler who sees life as nothing more than another game to be played at the table.

Backstory:
Despite the way she acts, Lucy’s background is… actually nothing notable at all.

Though, perhaps, that in it of itself is why she acts this way.

Her childhood was nothing besides standard, except, perhaps, for her difficulty when it came to holding friendships. Through kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school, she always remained somewhere around the middle of the pack. Like any other child, if she had applied herself, she likely would have managed to move past the pack and done better, but that simply didn’t interest her.

At the end of the day, it was just a matter of working out how much work she’d be getting throughout the year, and seeing where she could afford to slack off and where she couldn’t. After all, why waste time on something you don’t even care for?

It was a trait that caused a good deal of friction between herself and her family. Lucy was a constant point of frustration, and had she not gone off to college on a whim, might’ve inadvertently driven her family apart. Not that she really cared. She might’ve heard something about her parents making a new kid…? But it’s kinda whatever, now.

After all, once she moved out, they barely even talked more than once a year.

Regardless, much like her earlier school life, college wasn’t really anything special either… The school itself, that is.

You see, while Lucy found herself using the same old strategy for schoolwork with about the same effectiveness… She found herself thrust into one of the great pleasures of life that her family had tried to steer her away from.

Gambling.

It also coincided with her introduction to duel monsters… in the form of gambling, of course. And, of course, it was no surprise that she cheated at every opportunity. Drunk and smashed as most ended up at those kinds of parties, it was plenty easy to slip things by, no matter the game being played. Suffice to say, her out of school college life was a bit hectic. But like all games, it’s gotta end eventually.

And end it did.

Lucy graduates, and finds herself drifting...

What game of life will catch her eye next?

Messy dark hair partly covers a plain and dour face framed by square glasses. His frame is that of relatively average build, though he's relatively tall, sitting around 6ft2in. He's in shape, but not exactly fit, active but not the type to deliberately work out. He is usually seen in a beat-up old bomber jacket, plain colored button-ups, a belt, jeans, and worn-out sneakers, a style he rarely deviates from or accessorizes on top of.


Anthony is a strange young man. A first impression might reveal him to be terse, cold, potentially even, mechanical, manipulative, and calculating. Others might describe him instead as insightful and friendly, though a tad too fond of rambling for his own good. He would agree with both evaluations, they're both aspects of the complicated system of factors that lead him to be who he is. That's how he views most things, in terms of elements that add up into wholes, with each part having a function towards the purpose of the thing, and a reason they were put there in the first place. People follow that rule the same as his bike, or his decks, just in a more roundabout fashion. He deeply enjoys the process of learning how things worth, and training his intuition on further data such that he can improve his understanding of the world. Knowledge is very much power to Anthony. He's a good-natured kid, ultimately, not yet losing his positivity despite the loss of his father and his mother's distance, though those elements of his personality are often guarded from most that he meets. He reserves that positive mood for his close friends and the fellow duelists he takes under his wing.