Getting back to camp, first thing's first, he deposits the wood next to the small fire Noah lit and tosses a few sticks onto the blaze without any prompting or permission. Next, he begins to wander off, trying to break line of sight with all of his friends but especially Kieran before digging his cooler out of the sand, retrieving two cans of Red Bull and then burying it again. He creates some distance from the hiding place, remaining out of sight of the others just in case, before cracking one can open and immediately downing half of it in one go.
When he finally comes back up for air, he begins pacing, still mostly obscured from the others by the pre-shore tree line. He needs a plan, a series of steps he can follow in order to achieve his goals, and the first step for that is determining what those goals actually are.
He likes Deuel, that much is undeniable. Though, as a romantic partner, he can't say anyone else comes further out of left field. At least, out of anyone he actually considers a friend. It's... not something he's sure about, at all. Although he's mostly deferred judgment on it because of his age and inexperience, love at first sight isn't something he currently believes to exist, and he can't imagine suddenly losing all of his brain cells at the sight of someone particularly attractive as so described in many a trite love song. As such, it strikes him as impractical to be holding out for some kind of divine revelation relating to his love life at the expense of his current prospects. They say relationships take time to build, don't they?
He's certainly had plenty of time to build a relationship with all five of his friends, but he's never had more than passing flights of fancy about it - mainly with Conner, and only because of the excessively affectionate mannerisms he shows everyone. Did all those years as friends not constitute adequate candidacy for a relationship? Has he been aromantic the whole time or is it just because he never bothered considering it?
Well, no, he's definitely considered it, but he's persistently identified himself as an underlying problem with any projection of hypothetical relationships with himself. He is undeniably pretty fucked in the head, and every scenario he maps out always loops back around to hurting not just his friends but himself in the end.
Him and Conner? Complete opposites. It's a miracle they're even friends. How happy could they be together when he doesn't even like the beach? There's no way Conner would be happy in a relationship with him.
Him and Kieran? Also a disaster in the making. Even now, he can't laugh off a prank because he has too many psychological hang-ups. It doesn't really matter how many apologies or assurances Kieran gives him when being made the butt of a joke always feels like a microcosm of his life.
Him and Ciel? It's like the blind leading the blind, except the one being led, Ciel, just lost his glasses while he's had his eyes scooped out like cannibal ice cream. Their friendship is already like that - Ciel's managed to open up about his insecurities, but what Niles has isn't a fear of judgment, it's quantifiable knowledge of his many inadequacies. Ask anyone - there's no denying he's the biggest wet blanket in their friend group. Their problems will only compound if they got together.
Him and Noah? God, him and Noah. It's so easy to form and hold grudges against the guy when he pushes so many of his buttons without even realizing it. His overreaction to any tiny slight against him is... it... it makes Noah hard to handle, and when he returns the favor, it just seems to piss Noah off, hypocrite that he is. If they got together there's a chance it'd end in blood and he's not sure whose.
Then there's Deuel. What else is there to say about Deuel? He's more distant than Noah or Ciel, similar to Niles in many ways yet utterly superior in others. His tendency to unilaterally compete with Niles has always made him wonder if Deuel secretly hated him; wanted to expose his vapid hairstyle and nonchalant attitude for the empty posturing that it is.
For a brief, heart-clenching moment, a swirling vortex of bubbling pitch seems to blot out the sunset sky; dread washing over him as he considers the possibility that this is a ploy set up by Deuel to manipulate or embarrass him.
No, he shakes his head to himself - no. Besides a less than graceful escape, he hasn't blown the situation up in his own face yet. If anything Deuel left himself more vulnerable with that straight-faced confession.
"But what I feel for you, this yearning, this warmth and fire, it's love."
Niles shudders. The wording - how can he doubt that level of sincerity?
So, Deuel likes him. Maybe it's just a fleeting crush he'll get over with time, but for now, it's going to be something he has to address either way, since, unlike the others, he's likely to continue seeing Deuel throughout college. That could potentially be bad, if things don't work out. He should probably plan that argument out in advance, when Deuel inevitably gets frustrated he's committed so much of his life to being around such an asshole. It's not hard to imagine how - money spent on charity is money that isn't spent on research, development, or expansion. You need to spend money to make money and beyond tax incentives, there will never be a time when he won't be able to argue that he could do more good by reinvesting and helping people with the greater resulting income.
He'll put a pin in rehearsing that argument for now.
As much as he likes Conner's freely given affection - as much as he likes Kieran's comfortable presence, dark humor, and emotional openness - as much as he empathizes with Ciel and admires him for tackling his struggles better than he ever could - as much as it means to him when Noah goes the extra mile to prove how much he cares about him, even when he tells Noah not to - as much as Deuel is perhaps the only person who can go off on a idealistic tangent and not only make him believe that such ideals can be lived up to, but that the person carrying it out, Deuel, actually believes what they're preaching - as much as a selfish, possessive, altogether ugly part of him wouldn't mind a relationship with any one of them, no matter how he hurts them, in the end, he doesn't want that. He doesn't want to hurt any of them.
Backing up a bit, he needed to decide what his goals are in order to form a plan. After careful examination of his feelings, he can say with confidence that a relationship with Deuel or anyone else isn't it. Not... not as the person he is now. Maybe that's not a realistic time frame, but maybe he's too messed up for a proper relationship.
If the goal is to make Deuel happy, he can't see any better way of handling his confession than a rejection.
After spending several more minutes spent pacing, searching for the right wording to use, and coming up with excessively numerous deflections to potential avenues of further inquiry, Niles returned to camp, depositing the empty red bull can into a bag for later recycling as he took a swig of the other one.
The bonfire was starting to flag a bit, and he sat himself down next to it, taking a pile of sticks and tossing them in one by one. It was perhaps bad for the eyes to be staring directly at the fire continuously, but watching the sticks burn was just too cathartic. Perhaps he was adding more wood than strictly necessary, but it's not like they didn't have the sticks to burn.
Niles noticed the arrival of most of the others, though he didn't realize Deuel had arrived until he announced that he had brought gifts for everyone. Before he could even debate when to tell Deuel his decision, Deuel was shoving a bag towards him.
He was at a bit of a loss here. He didn't deserve a gift from the guy right before breaking his heart, but if he had to explain why he couldn't accept a gift before even looking at it, he wouldn't be able to do it casually. "...Thank you."
He gingerly took the bag and lowered it, peering inside. Inside was some sort of plush doll, which he gently pulled out, only to realize it was a doll of Deuel.
A bit of a conceited gift, maybe, but as a token of their friendship, something to remember him by, it's perfect. It's... nice to have proof, that they were once friends... just in case.
Niles stared at the plush, a soft smile on his face below stormy eyes. He didn't want to say he liked it in front of the others, lest they get the wrong idea, especially given what he was about to do, but he did like it. He opted to repeat himself. "Thanks. We should talk, tonight." He can at least keep the matter private, for Deuel's sake. Give him the space to lash out, if it makes him feel better. Plus, no spectators means less variables. Less chance that someone asks something he hadn't planned for.
Well, for all his contingencies, the plan is pretty simple: I think we should stay friends.
The waitress nods, taking back the menu and leaving Jason to his own devices.
The gunmetal jacket Ai Chen had thrown in his face on the flight over is unassuming enough, though infiltration work really isn't his forte. That isn't to say he's feeling much career fulfillment carrying out haphazard acts of terrorism, but he has to admit that his Noble Arm is uniquely suited towards 'lowering morale.'
The mission itself is rather onerous - him against pretty much all of task force: Obsidian. While he hasn't been saddled with taking them all down, besides his extraction, he's mostly been left to handle the whole thing on his own. Can't have him flipping out on any partner, and it's not like they could split up after he begins spreading the virus.
The waitress eventually returns with his bowl of ramen. He shoots her a thank you before breaking apart a pair of chopsticks and digging in. Maybe he should have tried actual filipino food for his first visit, but as a creature of habit, he can't resist going back to his old favorites.
The spice dances mildly on his tongue, and he bites into it hard enough to bleed, willing the regeneration to do its damn job. The scars on his skin and dark circles under his eyes are both its most glaring failures, but his burnt taste receptors from years of drinking coffee before it adequately cools down is perhaps its worst shortcoming. It wouldn't be so bad if he could fix it once and be done with it, like the same haircut he's been sporting since he got his powers, but he either can't help but foil himself with the same bad habits he's always had or his self-image is so intertwined with the damage that he keeps bringing it back without realizing. Either way, he reaches for one of the bottles of chili oil the restaurant leaves on every table and begins pouring on more of it, then takes a bite and smiles at the double-whammy of repaired taste buds and increased heat. It's not like he can feel the painful parts, so the physiological responses to extreme heat have a novelty to them not unlike the deterioration of motor function from alcohol.
Whatever, this should do for the taste test.
He bites into his thumb and pulls a small ball of blood out, hidden from the other customers by his bowl. Modifying blood is his specialty, but the most literal of modifications still elude him. Changing the color of blood to a different shade of red is easy. Blood already changes color based on its level of oxygenation and can range anywhere from a vibrant scarlet to a claret shade of black. While he's managed to keep blood healthy and alive at its more unhealthy shades, nothing really happens when he tries to go for shades of blue or green. Perhaps more frustrating is that, when he tries, he finds that it really isn't that difficult to push the color slightly away from red, towards orange, brown, and especially towards pink. At the extreme end of alteration, the orb of blood looks more like an orb of Pepto Bismol. Something about the image of that wretched indigestion medicine near his ramen makes his stomach turn, so he returns the ball of blood to red before taking another bite.
What he'd really like to accomplish is clear blood, indistinguishable from water, but the opacity on his little ball of blood isn't quite so flexible. When separated into component parts, semitransparent blood plasma should make up more than half of the contents of blood, but even through conscious effort, all he seems to be able to make is this sickly yellow mess that fills him with similar disgust when left next to his food. Does pure blood plasma even still count as blood for his powers? Is the blood plasma he creates even close to pure, or is it some bastardized contaminated mix?
Fuck it, he'll just put the blood in the chili oil.
Next, modifying the blood to have no taste. He begins trying to remove the iron so that the offensive taste of pennies doesn't stand front and center, but try as he might, any satisfyingly inoffensive taste constitutes complete death of the sample. He ends up having to bite into his thumb a few more times before finally giving up on removing the iron, aiming to overpower the taste instead. Luckily, enhancing the inherent meaty flavor leads to a surprisingly pleasant outcome, resembling the miso soup in some ways. Maybe he could slip it into the Miso too. Just gotta make it more of a dark orange-yellow... yeah, that works. Taste test, and- okay, a little bit more tweaking.
By the end, he has something that any chef would crucify him for comparing to miso, but it doesn't particularly change the flavor when added to proper miso broth.
It strikes him, all at once, that perhaps matching the ramen flavors was an unnecessary step to take, but he rather enjoyed the food here, and defending the chef's professional integrity is the least he could do before terrorizing the staff with zombie customers.
Well, no, the least he could do for them would be contaminating all of their supplies and not giving a damn how it affects the ramen. The entire exercise in blood flavoring has been a waste of time, hasn't it?
Jason physically shakes off the gloom. He has to consciously remind himself that further development of his Noble Arm could eventually lead to a breakthrough, no matter how inane the direction seems at first. He finishes off the rest of his ramen before flagging down the waitress for his check.
While he's waiting, he considers how to handle task force: Obsidian after drawing their attention here. Realistically speaking, all he'd need to do is infect one of them with the loneliness virus and his job would be done. Since they seem to be recuperating, it's unlikely that the Ritz hotel becomes an easier target just because some of them are drawn away, and thus it's likely best to just send one of them back as a trojan horse.
Jason takes his lightly flavored blood, keeping it red, and begins modifying the virus within for delayed release. This, he has already mastered, albeit only relatively, since the variance in victim metabolism makes it difficult to nail down a specific time frame before secondary symptoms manifest. A side effect of the greater delay is that the increased heart rate is harder to notice at first, though it stops being beneficial once it starts to kick in, becoming more obvious due to the longer period it's drawn out over. He should also probably keep collateral to a minimum, which in this case means making the virus lose potency if it hasn't infected a body by... let's see, the restaurant closes at midnight? That works.
Mixed in with a lot of broth or the rest of the chili oil, the dosage would be rather low, but direct consumption would still have people turning within several seconds. He decides to shoot for a dosage and potency where secondary symptoms begin to manifest after fifteen minutes or so, hopefully enough time for people to finish their meals and walk out, if only to lessen the trouble for the restaurant owners.
...Which is pretty pointless considering they're likely to get infected sooner or later, whether it be by the broth or their customers. He can feel a light ache at the back of his head at his own wishy washy bullshit and decides to stop thinking about it before the thoughts start to become their own problem.
When the waitress comes back with his check, he pays in cash, leaving a generous tip, before standing and infecting all the chili oil bottles he walks past. His own table was at the end of the restaurant, so it was simple to get all the unoccupied tables, and for the rest he just floated the blood droplets under their table when he passed by and into the chili oil bottles from behind their lines of sight, quietly observing the other customers as he did so to make sure none of them paid enough attention to notice. When he reaches the front of the restaurant, he stops, turning around and walking towards the back of the restaurant, as if forgetting something. It's rather trivial getting into the kitchen, albeit not very far in, and floating over the flavored, colored blood into all of the pots that look like miso.
One of the chefs realizes he shouldn't be there, but doesn't seem to have noticed his sabotage. "Sir, you can't be back here."
Since it's not the waitress, he plays up the clueless foreigner act, apologizing in Russian, not expecting it to be understood, before using a common tourist phrase, letting his accent shine through. "Where is the restroom?"
The woman shakes her head, probably unsure if the foreigner would even understand her words. "No public restroom." She moves forward to drive him out of the kitchen and he lets her, backing off and continuing away from the kitchen once he's out until he passes through the front doors.
"I'm sure everyone is getting cold by now so we should be getting a campfire going soon,"
"You're right, we shouldn't keep everyone waiting." He said, jumping on the excuse like a starving man, then cringing as he realizes how hypocritical and ironic it is to be phrasing it like that. He moves around Ciel, as if to walk back towards camp, but pauses as he passes by Deuel, speaking quietly. "Let's... talk about it later." After he's had another can of Red Bull. And maybe another. And maybe Dinner. And another.
He leads the way back to camp, plotting out ways he can avoid Deuel, just until he has some kind of presentable answer. At least he doesn't have to worry about not seeing Deuel again after the camping trip.
He gave Deuel a nod of acknowledgement as they walked about the many trees that preceded the sand, falling into a companionable silence as they gathered firewood. It didn't take too long before Deuel decided to speak up again.
"I'm coming with you. Not just here, but where you're going. I want to take a bigger role in my family's charities, but I want to be with you too."
At that, he smiled. He hadn't even finalized which college he was going to yet, and while there would be no sacrifice in terms of Deuel's professional aspirations in following him, it meant he'd have to leave his home and all of their shared friends behind. It... honestly made something inside him clench, a sucker punch of emotion that hit him hard enough to leave him reeling. He had to put conscious effort into making sure his breathing remained even and his expression remained neutral, because the last thing he needs at this moment is to make Deuel instantly regret his choice by acting like a needy child.
Before he can come up with a response, a way of expressing how much it means to him without creeping Deuel out, Deuel continues.
"I can afford to follow you, and I'd be a fool not to. Don't get me wrong, I like Conner and Ciel and the others as well, but I love you -"
It's words that Niles has always wanted to hear. Deuel is perhaps one of the last people he expected, much less fantasized, about hearing it from - at least relative to the other members of their shared circle of friends and his parents. He's always regarded Deuel's attitude towards him as more competitive if not antagonistic, compared to the rest of his friends, but evidently he'd missed the part where Deuel started regarding him as family. He's heard it's like that for siblings. He wouldn't personally know.
Before Niles can tell his bro that he loves him too, Deuel keeps going.
"I gave this some thought, pondered it over days and weeks and months. But what I feel for you, this yearning, this warmth and fire, it's love."
...Wait a second.
Wait wait wait wait wait hold on that's not - that - that can't be what he is saying, why would he- is this a prank? Who confesses like that? Is this real? Did he pass out from caffeine withdrawal or did he finally go into hypovolemic shock due to caffeine-induced ventricular fibrillation?
"But if you think you're not ready or if you don't want it, just forget what I said. If what I said burns what we have now, just forget about it."
No no no wait he hasn't even had time to give the idea proper thought. The idea of... h-him and... r-romantically...
"I don't want to lose you, or anyone, but I don't want to lose you."
Fucking say it, he tells himself, but his throat feels tight, like saying one thing would mean he has to say everything, and he doesn't have the foggiest clue what to say - what he even wants to say, beyond that.
This is Deuel we're talking about, the one who effortlessly matches his career prospects - the kind you need to be groomed for after having the good fortune of being born into it - the kind of person even his parents would approve of a relationship with. This is Deuel, who has all the grace and confidence he himself scrambles to pull off despite not breaking half the sweat that he does. This is Deuel, who has a philanthropic heart of gold that the inky lump of coal in his chest couldn't hope to even form a pale imitation of if he tried - which he usually doesn't. How could he even consider something beyond friendship with someone like that? If they ever got together, what will happen when Deuel realizes that, underneath it all, he's a selfish black hole of anxiety held together by scotch tape?
He stands there, in front of Deuel, unmoving. Throughout Deuel's confession, his face goes from a calm smile to wide-eyed bewilderment to thinly veiled distress if not panic. By the end of it, his lips are twitching upward in a desperate attempt to keep his clenched jaw and rigid posture from reading as anything negative, but the end result is closer to a grimace than a smile, and his eyes are wandering towards anything but Deuel himself.
The silence stretches on long enough to be awkward, before Niles finally regains a vague semblance of composure and chokes out, "you won't."
There. Nailed it. Niles mentally high fives himself. Excellent work today, I'll see all of you here tomorrow. Bye.
Deuel is staring at him but he still doesn't have an answer - can't even think of one. Even as he regains his outward composure, try as he might, his thoughts just race in circles like a hamster on a treadmill that is also on cocaine. He... he needs more Red Bull for this. He needs more Red Bull right the fuck now.
He's always hated the concept. At the end of the day, he felt like camping trips mostly boiled down to a number of self-imposed inconveniences. He's never been the type to stop and smell the roses, a fact he is both perfectly cognizant of and completely comfortable with. As such, the idea of spending days on end doing just that, almost literally, didn't exactly fill him with excitement. As tempting as it might have been to dig in his heels and aim to become the world's biggest stick in the mud, he'd be lying to himself if he were to pretend he wasn't looking forward to spending more time with his friends. Unfortunately, there was a good chance that this would be their last opportunity to do so, and while growing apart over time was an inevitability he saw coming miles - years away, he can't help but clutch desperately at his friends, as if holding onto them tightly enough would keep them from leaving and forgetting all about him.
Metaphorically of course. The touchy-feely stuff is Conner's schtick...
...
Honestly, if anyone's to blame, it's him. None of the colleges in the state come close to meeting his parents' exacting standards, and it's not like they didn't give him a decision when it came to inheriting deRo tech. His friends had all known he was getting sent off to some exclusive rich kid college well before they began picking out a college for themselves, so if they gave up on trying to stick together then it's obviously because he set the precedent. This was probably his only opportunity to try making up for that, not that setting up a campsite could ever make up for single-handedly destroying their friend group. He didn't even get the chance to set everything up by himself. As much as he's gotten proficient in just about every aspect of camping that matters thanks to numerous YouTube tutorials he's watched years ago, before their first camping trip, there was just too much work to be done for him to keep his friends out of it without making a big deal over it. Can't even do that for them.
He took another swig of his breakfast, a 16 oz. can of Red Bull he cracked open on the drive over. He brought an entire cooler of the stuff, plus a few cans of other brands like monster and bang for variety, but he'd still have to hide and ration it all to make it last him the entire trip. Doing so might have been easy if everyone didn't ignore him when he tells them to bring their own tent. It's become a bit of a tradition for everyone to just share his tent. It's hilariously large, so there's plenty of room for all six of them, and he enjoys the company, but it is kind of heart-warming annoying when he occasionally catches sight of tents they didn't even bother to unpack from their car. 'I forgot' indeed.
He can't let them know that he knows. It's... a nice tradition.
When the tent is standing tall and his cooler full of energy drinks has been hidden somewhere Kieran will never find it, Conner asks if anyone knows how to start a bonfire. It was admittedly pretty paranoid for him to go so far as to learn how to start a fire with just some rocks or sticks, but hey, it's not like he forgot to bring a firestarter, and he wasn't the only one who could get it started. Besides, a proper bonfire needed more than just the ignition. "I'll go gather some tinder."
If there was one thing he liked about camping, it was tossing things into a bonfire and watching them burn.
Name: Jason Valenovich Etalin (Джейсон валенович эталин) Age: 24 Appearance: 6’1”, 190 lbs and perpetually youthful. His black hair matches the permanent dark circles under his eyes. Wears a red plague doctor mask on field assignments to hide his facial expressions and make it harder to trace his identity, since both could potentially be used against him in accordance with his ongoing personality disorder. Nationality: Russian
Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Razlyubit, a black wedding band that Jason typically manifests on his index finger.
Noble Arm Rank: A
Power: B- (Hemokinesis) Speed: A- (Hemokinesis) Range: D+ (Viral Blood Autonomy) Persistence: A Precision: C Potential: A
Noble Arm Type, Element, and Range: A versatile Noble Arm whose main abilities necessitate close range and thus a Melee fighting style. Based on Blood, Life, Emotions, and Promises.
Noble Arm Abilities:
Superhuman - Jason possesses a heavily augmented physiology. He is mostly ageless, having stopped and even partially "undone" senescence, and possesses physical speed and strength beyond that of an olympian athlete. His top running speed is approximately 30 mph and he can deadlift a few thousand pounds without too much effort. Could lift several thousand pounds overhead with exertion.
Thick Skin - Jason’s skin and flesh are relatively sturdy, able to stop most bullets and mundane weapons from causing deep wounds and/or heavy damage. Noble Arms with mostly mundane properties will similarly struggle to do significant damage.
Pain Immunity - Jason feels absolutely no pain, able to sense the sensation and where it comes from, but not feeling it as pleasant nor unpleasant.
Regeneration - The ability with the greatest power among Jason’s abilities, Jason’s healing factor is fast-acting and very difficult to counter even without his Thick Skin protecting him. It renders him immune to most forms of toxins and illnesses, including radiation and, surprisingly, cancer. He is capable of surviving otherwise fatal wounds to the heart and brain, as well as extreme loss of body mass via dismemberment. He can replenish his blood rapidly and regrow limbs and organs as if from nothing, though extended use of this ability without caloric intake will cause its effects to gradually slow down. That being said, even starving, his regeneration will never completely stop unless he is dead, and no wound or injury is permanent. It is capable of pushing bullets and other foreign objects out of the body, and could theoretically be directed to grow out Jason’s hair or nails on command. (It doesn’t by default as a sort of customizable parameter) With enough recovery time, (~6 hours under ideal circumstances) Jason could theoretically survive a beheading, his Noble Arms repositioning to the greatest remaining chunk of his body and working on autopilot as long as it has enough of a physical basis for his soul to cling to. Destruction of his body and severe damage to the disembodied head or vice versa would likely finish him off for good. The same goes for full-body burns to the fourth degree or being atomized, and tossing his body into a freezer after severe damage would slow the healing process enough that he’d never realistically become a problem again, assuming the damage is extensive enough and the freezer cold and reliable enough.
Hemokinesis - Jason can exert weak telekinetic force over blood in a short range. Despite being his longest-range ability, his blood control is limited to several dozen meters, and he can only move the blood around with speed and force if it’s within about ten meters. He is incapable of generating blood ex nihilo nor exerting significant force on blood in a foreign body without near touch range and concentration. He is incapable of shaping blood with particular precision, and without his other abilities, his ability to throw blood around is largely harmless. His ability to move around objects that are covered in blood is slightly more dangerous, but loses effectiveness at greater ranges.
Universality - Jason can modify blood for compatibility and adaptability as well as clean and rejuvenate it, functioning much like a dialysis machine as well as a blood oxygenator. This makes Jason and any blood he gains control over viable for universal donation, even without knowledge of who the recipient is.
Viral Blood - Jason’s blood, without modification, (as well as foreign blood modified to match) hosts a functionally autonomous supernatural virus that, upon entering into a foreign body, will quickly begin to accelerate their heart rate. Major symptoms begin to manifest approximately one minute after blood to skin contact, and can manifest in seconds if he gets blood into the mouth or mucus membranes. Secondary infection via body fluids (e.g. the sweat of the infected) can manifest after five to ten minutes through skin contact. By default, infection will inhibit the victim’s emotions and conscious thought processes, putting them into a dazed trance that puts greater emphasis on their baser instincts. (The infected seldom make use of their Noble Arms) The infection causes hallucinations and a chronic craving for raw meat, though, notably, the infected do not react aggressively towards each other. Left unchecked, the virus can spread into a typical zombie hoard. Jason has no fine control over the zombies, nor the virus, though the infected ignore him by default considering the virus is already in his blood. With concentration, Jason can cause those nearby to be excluded by the zombies, albeit only while they remain within a few dozen meters of him, and he requires line of sight to establish the exclusion. Infection typically lasts three days, petering out right as severe dehydration begins to set in, though it can last longer if Jason is able to manually refresh the virus through further exposure. The virus has no mundane cure, and its dynamic nature means one cannot realistically be developed, but it can nonetheless be countered by specialized Noble Arm abilities.
Emotion Control - By modifying the virus, Jason can alter its symptoms. The only unifying symptom is the initially accelerated heart rate. While the zombie virus iteration is generally the best for incapacitation and infectivity, he can instead make the virus induce:
Crippling fear, an effect compounded by hallucinations. This version robs the victim of the ability to distinguish friend from foe, and makes the victim a danger to themselves and others. This version often induces fight or flight reactions and involuntary crying. Infection from this version is largely limited to bodily fluids and their inability to distinguish friend from foe means that they are liable to attack Jason as well.
Crippling loneliness, accompanied by pervasive paranoia. Victims will typically exhibit uncharacteristically clingy behaviors, getting touchy with if not directly latching onto the nearest uninfected (not including Jason) in an attempt to soothe their symptoms. In the absence thereof, their symptoms gradually get worse, causing them to suffer panic attacks, mild hallucinations, and potentially cardiac arrest. Often more infectious than even the zombie virus, though it does not immediately incapacitate an enemy. Through concentration, Jason can make the infected identify him as uninfected. If left alone long enough, their symptoms will gradually become bad enough to mistake Jason for an ally, though Jason personally hates dealing with victims afterwards, since pushing them away can snap them out of it.
Crippling apathy, often in the form of catatonia. Victims will generally give up on whatever they were doing immediately, and may struggle to respond to basic questions or even stand under their own power.
Seething anger, an all-consuming need for immediate violence against anything and everything within reach. While infected, victims become rash and beyond reasoning. Although the victim is still able to prioritize the direction of their anger, their ability to do so deteriorates as time goes on, and even the smallest non-justifications become worth spilling blood over while in this state. Tends to burn out quicker than the other variants, lasting only one or two days, though it also tends to have a greater toll on the body.
Panacea - Jason is capable of modifying his blood into a cure for the virus as well as certain minor illnesses such as colds or hangovers. It can maintain its potency away from him for much the same duration ordinary blood would - eight hours at room temperature, a week in cold storage.
Knife Manifestation - Jason can materialize mundane knives made of Iron, to his specifications, albeit they must conform to his conception of what a knife is. He is only capable of materializing them stabbed somewhere into his back.
Blood Pact - Jason is capable of enforcing supernatural contracts through the exchange of blood between two (or more) parties. He need not participate in the pact himself for it to be valid, and the contract can be literal or as simple as a verbal agreement. Pacts last until a point that has been agreed upon, a point Jason assumes they intended it to end on, until Jason's death, or until Jason is able to undo the pact manually, if and only if both parties agree to end it. Undoing a pact manually cannot be done remotely. Once the pact is established, the exchanged blood goes on to infect all blood in the bodies of all parties, rendering all of it and any future transfusions subject to the effects of the pact. Violating the pact will cause an immediate, violent implosion of all blood in the violator's body, causing almost certain death. The pact then ends for that person, and will typically but not always end for the remaining party if there is only one other, depending on what was agreed upon and Jason's assumptions. Jason's judgment (no conscious thought required) serves as the final arbiter of any subjective terms of a pact.
Miscellaneous Abilities: In addition to his extensive medical knowledge and largely abandoned capabilities as an OPL practitioner, Jason is an excellent cook, a force to be reckoned with at Darts and Billiards, and fancies himself a master tactician based solely on his prowess in games of online chess.
Personality: Silent, serious, pragmatic, and almost robotic in nature. He obeys orders, keeps to himself, and at times seems as if he has the patience of a saint. He's unflappably stoic, calm and detached, except sometimes he can't seem to help but break character, as if without thinking. An illogically friendly gesture, a snarky comeback that accomplishes nothing. It's there one moment and gone the next, and he'll either pretend it didn't happen or apologize for it and expect everyone to move on. He wears no facades, yet his control over himself isn't always the best, and he seldom understands the way he acts at those times himself.
Strong emotional stimulus tends to cause his higher thought processes to stall until he calms down, entering a state of fight or flight, without the flight, acting like a cornered animal regardless of whether he's trapped or not. If left alone, he'll likely snap out of it soon enough, though his ability to accurately gauge threats becomes exceptionally poor while in this state.
His personality disorders are theorized to be due to conflicts between his OPL code and Noble Arm functionality, possibly each defining different ideal states for his regeneration to leave his brain chemistry in. Since the two have apparently become part of the same whole, the accuracy of this theory is debatable.
Likes: Peace and quiet Dislikes: Lies, cigarettes Fears: That there is no solution. No cure, no way of coping, this is his life now.
Bio: When Jason was born, it was unto a single mother who, for all her life, never once fully understood Jason, right up until her death four years ago. Jason, in turn, never fully understood all her quirks and logically inconsistent behaviors, just as he seldom understood those of seemingly everyone else. Lying is wrong, except when it isn’t. Duress justifies anything, except when it doesn’t. Killing animals is wrong, except when you eat them, and even then, arbitrary lines in the sand are drawn about which animals and why. Jason was surrounded on all sides by rules upon rules that seem to bend and twist based on convenience, culture, or irrational cowardice. If his absentee mother, overworked and underpaid, ever noticed the ways in which he was different from other kids, she never made mention of it, much less did anything to address it.
Jason, growing up, had always been an intelligent child. Even without the support of his mother, once he found out that skipping a grade was less about personal capability and more about learning the next year’s lessons in advance, he began climbing an extra grade every other year through nothing but personal study, give or take adjustments to new schools. His only regret lay in how long it took him to realize that, but he still managed to graduate at the young age of 15 wherein he immediately began his college studies majoring in Biology. He slowed down a bit compared to his previous schooling in an attempt to learn Occult Programming Language at the same time through illegal channels. Both seemed necessary for his long-term goals.
There at college, he went on to meet the woman who would later become his wife, Lena. His relationship with Lena was like his relationship with any other person who decided to insert themselves into his life: complicated. She cared for him, for some inane reason he could never fathom and she could never explain, in ways not even his mother had, and yet, she was wrapped in all the frustrations that seemed to follow that mother and everyone else. It was not all pleasant for either of them - they almost broke up when Lena found out that Jason was younger than her, for despite being larger than her since the day that they met, he was still only 17 then, a fact he did not feel pertinent to mention the night they decided to get intimate. Perhaps it was his reaction to her confrontation that made it an issue rather than the act itself - after all, why would he mention it? She never asked, and there would never be any benefit to turning her over to the police. For some reason, such reassurances only seemed to make her angry, even though it was one of his most blatant declarations of affection; an admission that nothing would be worth losing her. If she couldn’t understand him, then it wasn’t his fault… right?
After graduation, Jason was scouted for Government Occult Research and Development thanks to his, at the time, frankly pitiful grasp of OPL and useful degree in Biology. For the first few years, he did nothing but learn from them, which, top-secret facilities aside, made it not particularly unlike his regular schooling, which he pursued in parallel. It was there at medical school that he met up with Lena again. They ignored each other at first, but seeing each other day in and day out, they eventually had to acknowledge each others’ presence again and it… wasn’t awful. They gradually fell back into familiar patterns. When Lena had trouble with something, she’d come to Jason, and when Jason had to miss a class, he went to Lena. Eventually they made up one afternoon, mending their relationship through a series of back-and-forth blunt admissions that only spurred on more and more of them. Just like that, they were a couple again.
On his 22nd birthday, Lena took him out for drinks after hearing him mention that he's never had alcohol before. After not 'getting it' after the first two glasses and Lena suggesting that he try drinking more, Jason ended up drunk off his ass and offhandedly proposed to her. She didn’t take it seriously, but after coming back to his senses, Jason didn’t forget, and he did take it seriously, at least after the fact. No matter what, he never wanted to lie to her, to confuse the one person who knew what kind of person he was and accepted him anyway. Thus, only days afterward, he presented her with a modest engagement ring, and she answered his question with a yes.
The wedding itself was a small, intimate affair. His mother had died the year before, and the only person on his side of the family to attend had been his aunt, a woman he had barely interacted with up until that point. She was friendly enough, he supposed. Lena’s family on the other hand, were a whirlwind he could never fully grasp, from her brother’s strange threats to her mother’s suspicious flirting. When he brought it up with Lena, she would just laugh it off, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do when your family makes death threats to and tries to seduce your husband.
It didn’t really matter in the end. Lena became his, and they were both better off for it. She even got him to admit it, out loud. He never did use the L word. He refused to willingly lie to her, even if he had no way of knowing if it was a lie. He had to be sure, even if he never thought he would be.
They both graduated from medical school around the same time Jason graduated from his position as an intern in OPL R&D. By then, Jason was 23, and he soon began to work on occult bioaugmentation research proper, funded by the Russian military. Lena had always pursued her career as a doctor out of her desire to save lives, but Jason never had the same inexplicable passion about philanthropy that she did.
From the start, Jason had pursued such a career path because of his fascination with the rules underlying life, death, and reality itself. From many angles, it seemed orderly, but once you peeled away the skin and dug deep into the flesh and viscera, you could catch a glimpse of the roiling chaos below. Occult Programming Language was much the same, operating on specific, predictable rules, yet the irreconcilable deficiencies compared to Noble Arms and glaring flaws that led to the latter’s existence in the first place begs the question of how much any of it could be trusted. The Noble Arms themselves were the worst of all, each individually finding new, unique ways of spitting in the face of comprehension just for the sake of doing so. Through Noble Arms, death could become a triviality, and thus the basis underpinning so many rules of society would crumble to dust with the wave of a hand.
Don’t even get him started on the concept of love. He’s pretty sure that bullshit’s somewhere in the OPL code too.
In order to get more answers, above all, what Jason needed was time. Time that he didn’t have. Time that no one he knew of had. He needed immortality, or at least some functional approximation of it. It wasn't for some grand ideal like advancing human progress, but rather for simple and selfish reasons. Life is short, and nothing short of government funding with minimal ethical oversight would suffice for the progress he needed. Now that all the distractions and obstructions were finally out of the way, he doggedly pursued a proverbial elixir of life, because every year he spent approaching entropy was a year he may never get back. Lena wasn’t pleased with her husband growing more and more distant with her, but Jason knew that her youth if not her life was on the line too.
With all of his drive and intelligence fully leveraged, he thought it could take him his whole life to barely complete something usable. Instead, barely a year after he started working under the government, he had a working prototype of OPL code that could render lab rats mostly immortal, capable of regenerating towards an idealized form regardless of whether it had the physical means to do so or not. Not wanting to waste a second more, he broke protocol, lying about the code in order to get the necessary collective use of OPL running. It was supposedly just another experiment, but the caged rat they brought along was never the designated target.
Just as he began to feel the OPL influence his body, his magnum opus made manifest, his life’s work coming to fruition, Jason began to form a Noble Arm that blended and mixed with his hitherto human-untested code. A simple black wedding band had appeared over his ring finger, next to his actual wedding band, and from then on, Jason was never the same.
He remembers having a splitting headache thereafter, like two sets of instructions were competing over which way to rewrite his brain. He felt things he had never felt before; anger, fear, and a bizarrely painful fluttering in his heart that reminded him of Lena. He was delirious, barely cognizant, and so it took him until he was shown a video feed of the test chamber to realize he had killed all the other OPL practitioners there using nothing but his bare hands.
Afterward, he had stumbled towards his lab space, destroying all traces of his utter failure, desperately hoping that ridding the world of the source would make the pounding in his head stop. His coworkers were alarmed, but he fought them off, leaving trails on the walls as he steadied himself on them by his bloodied hands.
He… he needed to see her, to know if what he was feeling was what he had been trying so desperately to understand. He drove like a madman, getting tailed by the police almost immediately, but he ignored them, going straight home and bursting through the doors, only to find Lena in bed with another man.
After that, all he can remember is seeing red and feeling no pain.
His body count that day had nearly reached the triple digits before he was apprehended by a Noble Arms user. He was tied up and sedated, more animal than man at that point, and taken in for containment and confinement by the Russian government.
When he next woke up, he didn’t feel quite the same, like a mixture of the new and old. He could feel the sensation of his head aching, but not the ache itself, and his memories felt fuzzy and unclear. He was restrained, and, upon waking, quickly taken around to interrogation. Not comprehending his current situation, he stuck by his policy of honesty, though his inability to remember crucial details frustrated his interrogators. It didn’t particularly bother him, since he couldn’t feel the torture in the slightest. It was kind of funny seeing some of their tools fail to break his skin. They wanted him to surrender the OPL code he had destroyed, but he couldn’t remember most of it. They wanted him to explain how the code worked, but he only remembered the broad strokes. They discussed the events that led up to his arrest, from his psychotic break at the research facility to his mad drive home and the eventual murder of his wife, Lena. Lena… Lena, Lena, Lena…
His breathing quickened, and the words the interrogators spoke didn’t mean anything to him anymore. He could feel the sensation of a headache, and very pointedly noticed the way it kept him from thinking clearly. He decided to wait it out, until someone - an enemy, tried to zap him again for insubordination. He lunged forward within his restraints, biting the man, and there was just so much blood. It spilled out, floating around him in circles like a protective blanket. That’s right, he had a Noble Arms now, right? He should…
…He couldn’t finish that thought. It was like being underwater, hearing but deaf, even to his own thoughts. The interrogators left, and he just sat there within his restraints and breathed, in and out, as the imaginary pain in his head gradually faded away.
Why was he circling blood around himself exactly?
He tried using the blood to get out of his restraints, but he didn’t have very good fine control over it, just feeling like he was making a mess. It was rather annoying, so when a Noble Arms user entered the room, he greeted them amiably. They demanded he put down the blood, so he asked them where he should put it, since it was likely to leave stains. When they just told him to drop it again, he somehow found himself inexplicably understanding, apologizing to them out of politeness and complying.
It took the Russian Government a while to determine the extent of his abilities and the quirks of his condition. His powers seemed to remain on permanently, even while asleep. When Razlyubit is pried off his unconscious fingers, it simply returns there as if nothing happened. They had always known about his sociopathy, but he was showing signs to the contrary now, and strong emotions seemed to cause his higher thought processes to stall until he calmed down, becoming a creature of nothing but instincts and aggressive self-defense measures. It was, in his opinion, dreadful, and he’s come to hate the new emotions he’s been saddled with. The new humanity he’s forced to feel. The OPL code that started this whole mess, the idea of such a cursed form of immortality. Even after his memories came back, only lost in the first place because of a bullet wound to the brain apparently, he feigned ignorance on the matter, refusing to let anyone else suffer through his own personal hell. It was cold comfort, since, from the start, he’s the only one he knows to have ever been outside of that hell. The human condition was maddening, but at least the few others like him would be safe from it.
Even after discovery, or rather, development, of his Viral Blood ability, and despite his usefulness as a willing soldier deployed against Ukraine, (After all, it's not like he could go back to his old life) Jason remained a problem child; a thorn in Russia’s side. What good was a soldier that would just go unresponsive for minutes at a time in the heat of battle? What good was his zombie virus when it was so easy to end up with friendly fire? Although he was a known quantity and proved himself a loyal soldier, rising up the ranks in spite of his shortcomings, he was eventually traded off with China, since they claimed they could make better use of him. There, he was assigned Ai Chen as his handler. She would tell him where to go and what to do, and in turn when her hands wandered down his chest he would simply remind her of his chronic inability to respond to compromising situations appropriately. Didn’t stop her from trying, and the resulting fight earned her a reprimand from Ren Huo, so despite taking one of her plasma arrows to the gut and gaining a temporary hole in his stomach, it took her longer to recover from the punch he gave her to the same spot, and in the end their working relationship ended up pretty cordial.
Current Goal: Find or develop a cure or improvement to his current condition, with the development of his Noble Arm being viewed as the most promising avenue.
Name: Jason Valenovich Etalin (Джейсон валенович эталин) Age: 24 Appearance: 6’1”, 190 lbs and perpetually youthful. His black hair matches the permanent dark circles under his eyes. Wears a red plague doctor mask on field assignments to hide his facial expressions and make it harder to trace his identity, since both could potentially be used against him in accordance with his ongoing personality disorder. Nationality: Russian
Noble Arm Name & Appearance: Razlyubit, a black wedding band that Jason typically manifests on his index finger.
Noble Arm Rank: A
Power: B- (Hemokinesis) Speed: A- (Hemokinesis) Range: D+ (Viral Blood Autonomy) Persistence: A Precision: C Potential: A
Noble Arm Type, Element, and Range: A versatile Noble Arm whose main abilities necessitate close range and thus a Melee fighting style. Based on Blood, Life, Emotions, and Promises.
Noble Arm Abilities:
Superhuman - Jason possesses a heavily augmented physiology. He is mostly ageless, having stopped and even partially "undone" senescence, and possesses physical speed and strength beyond that of an olympian athlete. His top running speed is approximately 30 mph and he can deadlift a few thousand pounds without too much effort. Could lift several thousand pounds overhead with exertion.
Thick Skin - Jason’s skin and flesh are relatively sturdy, able to stop most bullets and mundane weapons from causing deep wounds and/or heavy damage. Noble Arms with mostly mundane properties will similarly struggle to do significant damage.
Pain Immunity - Jason feels absolutely no pain, able to sense the sensation and where it comes from, but not feeling it as pleasant nor unpleasant.
Regeneration - The ability with the greatest power among Jason’s abilities, Jason’s healing factor is fast-acting and very difficult to counter even without his Thick Skin protecting him. It renders him immune to most forms of toxins and illnesses, including radiation and, surprisingly, cancer. He is capable of surviving otherwise fatal wounds to the heart and brain, as well as extreme loss of body mass via dismemberment. He can replenish his blood rapidly and regrow limbs and organs as if from nothing, though extended use of this ability without caloric intake will cause its effects to gradually slow down. That being said, even starving, his regeneration will never completely stop unless he is dead, and no wound or injury is permanent. It is capable of pushing bullets and other foreign objects out of the body, and could theoretically be directed to grow out Jason’s hair or nails on command. (It doesn’t by default as a sort of customizable parameter) With enough recovery time, (~6 hours under ideal circumstances) Jason could theoretically survive a beheading, his Noble Arms repositioning to the greatest remaining chunk of his body and working on autopilot as long as it has enough of a physical basis for his soul to cling to. Destruction of his body and severe damage to the disembodied head or vice versa would likely finish him off for good. The same goes for full-body burns to the fourth degree or being atomized, and tossing his body into a freezer after severe damage would slow the healing process enough that he’d never realistically become a problem again, assuming the damage is extensive enough and the freezer cold and reliable enough.
Hemokinesis - Jason can exert weak telekinetic force over blood in a short range. Despite being his longest-range ability, his blood control is limited to several dozen meters, and he can only move the blood around with speed and force if it’s within about ten meters. He is incapable of generating blood ex nihilo nor exerting significant force on blood in a foreign body without near touch range and concentration. He is incapable of shaping blood with particular precision, and without his other abilities, his ability to throw blood around is largely harmless. His ability to move around objects that are covered in blood is slightly more dangerous, but loses effectiveness at greater ranges.
Universality - Jason can modify blood for compatibility and adaptability as well as clean and rejuvenate it, functioning much like a dialysis machine as well as a blood oxygenator. This makes Jason and any blood he gains control over viable for universal donation, even without knowledge of who the recipient is.
Viral Blood - Jason’s blood, without modification, (as well as foreign blood modified to match) hosts a functionally autonomous supernatural virus that, upon entering into a foreign body, will quickly begin to accelerate their heart rate. Major symptoms begin to manifest approximately one minute after blood to skin contact, and can manifest in seconds if he gets blood into the mouth or mucus membranes. Secondary infection via body fluids (e.g. the sweat of the infected) can manifest after five to ten minutes through skin contact. By default, infection will inhibit the victim’s emotions and conscious thought processes, putting them into a dazed trance that puts greater emphasis on their baser instincts. (The infected seldom make use of their Noble Arms) The infection causes hallucinations and a chronic craving for raw meat, though, notably, the infected do not react aggressively towards each other. Left unchecked, the virus can spread into a typical zombie hoard. Jason has no fine control over the zombies, nor the virus, though the infected ignore him by default considering the virus is already in his blood. With concentration, Jason can cause those nearby to be excluded by the zombies, albeit only while they remain within a few dozen meters of him, and he requires line of sight to establish the exclusion. Infection typically lasts three days, petering out right as severe dehydration begins to set in, though it can last longer if Jason is able to manually refresh the virus through further exposure. The virus has no mundane cure, and its dynamic nature means one cannot realistically be developed, but it can nonetheless be countered by specialized Noble Arm abilities.
Emotion Control - By modifying the virus, Jason can alter its symptoms. The only unifying symptom is the initially accelerated heart rate. While the zombie virus iteration is generally the best for incapacitation and infectivity, he can instead make the virus induce:
Crippling fear, an effect compounded by hallucinations. This version robs the victim of the ability to distinguish friend from foe, and makes the victim a danger to themselves and others. This version often induces fight or flight reactions and involuntary crying. Infection from this version is largely limited to bodily fluids and their inability to distinguish friend from foe means that they are liable to attack Jason as well.
Crippling loneliness, accompanied by pervasive paranoia. Victims will typically exhibit uncharacteristically clingy behaviors, getting touchy with if not directly latching onto the nearest uninfected (not including Jason) in an attempt to soothe their symptoms. In the absence thereof, their symptoms gradually get worse, causing them to suffer panic attacks, mild hallucinations, and potentially cardiac arrest. Often more infectious than even the zombie virus, though it does not immediately incapacitate an enemy. Through concentration, Jason can make the infected identify him as uninfected. If left alone long enough, their symptoms will gradually become bad enough to mistake Jason for an ally, though Jason personally hates dealing with victims afterwards, since pushing them away can snap them out of it.
Crippling apathy, often in the form of catatonia. Victims will generally give up on whatever they were doing immediately, and may struggle to respond to basic questions or even stand under their own power.
Seething anger, an all-consuming need for immediate violence against anything and everything within reach. While infected, victims become rash and beyond reasoning. Although the victim is still able to prioritize the direction of their anger, their ability to do so deteriorates as time goes on, and even the smallest non-justifications become worth spilling blood over while in this state. Tends to burn out quicker than the other variants, lasting only one or two days, though it also tends to have a greater toll on the body.
Panacea - Jason is capable of modifying his blood into a cure for the virus as well as certain minor illnesses such as colds or hangovers. It can maintain its potency away from him for much the same duration ordinary blood would - eight hours at room temperature, a week in cold storage.
Knife Manifestation - Jason can materialize mundane knives made of Iron, to his specifications, albeit they must conform to his conception of what a knife is. He is only capable of materializing them stabbed somewhere into his back.
Blood Pact - Jason is capable of enforcing supernatural contracts through the exchange of blood between two (or more) parties. He need not participate in the pact himself for it to be valid, and the contract can be literal or as simple as a verbal agreement. Pacts last until a point that has been agreed upon, a point Jason assumes they intended it to end on, until Jason's death, or until Jason is able to undo the pact manually, if and only if both parties agree to end it. Undoing a pact manually cannot be done remotely. Once the pact is established, the exchanged blood goes on to infect all blood in the bodies of all parties, rendering all of it and any future transfusions subject to the effects of the pact. Violating the pact will cause an immediate, violent implosion of all blood in the violator's body, causing almost certain death. The pact then ends for that person, and will typically but not always end for the remaining party if there is only one other, depending on what was agreed upon and Jason's assumptions. Jason's judgment (no conscious thought required) serves as the final arbiter of any subjective terms of a pact.
Miscellaneous Abilities: In addition to his extensive medical knowledge and largely abandoned capabilities as an OPL practitioner, Jason is an excellent cook, a force to be reckoned with at Darts and Billiards, and fancies himself a master tactician based solely on his prowess in games of online chess.
Personality: Silent, serious, pragmatic, and almost robotic in nature. He obeys orders, keeps to himself, and at times seems as if he has the patience of a saint. He's unflappably stoic, calm and detached, except sometimes he can't seem to help but break character, as if without thinking. An illogically friendly gesture, a snarky comeback that accomplishes nothing. It's there one moment and gone the next, and he'll either pretend it didn't happen or apologize for it and expect everyone to move on. He wears no facades, yet his control over himself isn't always the best, and he seldom understands the way he acts at those times himself.
Strong emotional stimulus tends to cause his higher thought processes to stall until he calms down, entering a state of fight or flight, without the flight, acting like a cornered animal regardless of whether he's trapped or not. If left alone, he'll likely snap out of it soon enough, though his ability to accurately gauge threats becomes exceptionally poor while in this state.
His personality disorders are theorized to be due to conflicts between his OPL code and Noble Arm functionality, possibly each defining different ideal states for his regeneration to leave his brain chemistry in. Since the two have apparently become part of the same whole, the accuracy of this theory is debatable.
Likes: Peace and quiet Dislikes: Lies, cigarettes Fears: That there is no solution. No cure, no way of coping, this is his life now.
Bio: When Jason was born, it was unto a single mother who, for all her life, never once fully understood Jason, right up until her death four years ago. Jason, in turn, never fully understood all her quirks and logically inconsistent behaviors, just as he seldom understood those of seemingly everyone else. Lying is wrong, except when it isn’t. Duress justifies anything, except when it doesn’t. Killing animals is wrong, except when you eat them, and even then, arbitrary lines in the sand are drawn about which animals and why. Jason was surrounded on all sides by rules upon rules that seem to bend and twist based on convenience, culture, or irrational cowardice. If his absentee mother, overworked and underpaid, ever noticed the ways in which he was different from other kids, she never made mention of it, much less did anything to address it.
Jason, growing up, had always been an intelligent child. Even without the support of his mother, once he found out that skipping a grade was less about personal capability and more about learning the next year’s lessons in advance, he began climbing an extra grade every other year through nothing but personal study, give or take adjustments to new schools. His only regret lay in how long it took him to realize that, but he still managed to graduate at the young age of 15 wherein he immediately began his college studies majoring in Biology. He slowed down a bit compared to his previous schooling in an attempt to learn Occult Programming Language at the same time through illegal channels. Both seemed necessary for his long-term goals.
There at college, he went on to meet the woman who would later become his wife, Lena. His relationship with Lena was like his relationship with any other person who decided to insert themselves into his life: complicated. She cared for him, for some inane reason he could never fathom and she could never explain, in ways not even his mother had, and yet, she was wrapped in all the frustrations that seemed to follow that mother and everyone else. It was not all pleasant for either of them - they almost broke up when Lena found out that Jason was younger than her, for despite being larger than her since the day that they met, he was still only 17 then, a fact he did not feel pertinent to mention the night they decided to get intimate. Perhaps it was his reaction to her confrontation that made it an issue rather than the act itself - after all, why would he mention it? She never asked, and there would never be any benefit to turning her over to the police. For some reason, such reassurances only seemed to make her angry, even though it was one of his most blatant declarations of affection; an admission that nothing would be worth losing her. If she couldn’t understand him, then it wasn’t his fault… right?
After graduation, Jason was scouted for Government Occult Research and Development thanks to his, at the time, frankly pitiful grasp of OPL and useful degree in Biology. For the first few years, he did nothing but learn from them, which, top-secret facilities aside, made it not particularly unlike his regular schooling, which he pursued in parallel. It was there at medical school that he met up with Lena again. They ignored each other at first, but seeing each other day in and day out, they eventually had to acknowledge each others’ presence again and it… wasn’t awful. They gradually fell back into familiar patterns. When Lena had trouble with something, she’d come to Jason, and when Jason had to miss a class, he went to Lena. Eventually they made up one afternoon, mending their relationship through a series of back-and-forth blunt admissions that only spurred on more and more of them. Just like that, they were a couple again.
On his 22nd birthday, Lena took him out for drinks after hearing him mention that he's never had alcohol before. After not 'getting it' after the first two glasses and Lena suggesting that he try drinking more, Jason ended up drunk off his ass and offhandedly proposed to her. She didn’t take it seriously, but after coming back to his senses, Jason didn’t forget, and he did take it seriously, at least after the fact. No matter what, he never wanted to lie to her, to confuse the one person who knew what kind of person he was and accepted him anyway. Thus, only days afterward, he presented her with a modest engagement ring, and she answered his question with a yes.
The wedding itself was a small, intimate affair. His mother had died the year before, and the only person on his side of the family to attend had been his aunt, a woman he had barely interacted with up until that point. She was friendly enough, he supposed. Lena’s family on the other hand, were a whirlwind he could never fully grasp, from her brother’s strange threats to her mother’s suspicious flirting. When he brought it up with Lena, she would just laugh it off, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do when your family makes death threats to and tries to seduce your husband.
It didn’t really matter in the end. Lena became his, and they were both better off for it. She even got him to admit it, out loud. He never did use the L word. He refused to willingly lie to her, even if he had no way of knowing if it was a lie. He had to be sure, even if he never thought he would be.
They both graduated from medical school around the same time Jason graduated from his position as an intern in OPL R&D. By then, Jason was 23, and he soon began to work on occult bioaugmentation research proper, funded by the Russian military. Lena had always pursued her career as a doctor out of her desire to save lives, but Jason never had the same inexplicable passion about philanthropy that she did.
From the start, Jason had pursued such a career path because of his fascination with the rules underlying life, death, and reality itself. From many angles, it seemed orderly, but once you peeled away the skin and dug deep into the flesh and viscera, you could catch a glimpse of the roiling chaos below. Occult Programming Language was much the same, operating on specific, predictable rules, yet the irreconcilable deficiencies compared to Noble Arms and glaring flaws that led to the latter’s existence in the first place begs the question of how much any of it could be trusted. The Noble Arms themselves were the worst of all, each individually finding new, unique ways of spitting in the face of comprehension just for the sake of doing so. Through Noble Arms, death could become a triviality, and thus the basis underpinning so many rules of society would crumble to dust with the wave of a hand.
Don’t even get him started on the concept of love. He’s pretty sure that bullshit’s somewhere in the OPL code too.
In order to get more answers, above all, what Jason needed was time. Time that he didn’t have. Time that no one he knew of had. He needed immortality, or at least some functional approximation of it. It wasn't for some grand ideal like advancing human progress, but rather for simple and selfish reasons. Life is short, and nothing short of government funding with minimal ethical oversight would suffice for the progress he needed. Now that all the distractions and obstructions were finally out of the way, he doggedly pursued a proverbial elixir of life, because every year he spent approaching entropy was a year he may never get back. Lena wasn’t pleased with her husband growing more and more distant with her, but Jason knew that her youth if not her life was on the line too.
With all of his drive and intelligence fully leveraged, he thought it could take him his whole life to barely complete something usable. Instead, barely a year after he started working under the government, he had a working prototype of OPL code that could render lab rats mostly immortal, capable of regenerating towards an idealized form regardless of whether it had the physical means to do so or not. Not wanting to waste a second more, he broke protocol, lying about the code in order to get the necessary collective use of OPL running. It was supposedly just another experiment, but the caged rat they brought along was never the designated target.
Just as he began to feel the OPL influence his body, his magnum opus made manifest, his life’s work coming to fruition, Jason began to form a Noble Arm that blended and mixed with his hitherto human-untested code. A simple black wedding band had appeared over his ring finger, next to his actual wedding band, and from then on, Jason was never the same.
He remembers having a splitting headache thereafter, like two sets of instructions were competing over which way to rewrite his brain. He felt things he had never felt before; anger, fear, and a bizarrely painful fluttering in his heart that reminded him of Lena. He was delirious, barely cognizant, and so it took him until he was shown a video feed of the test chamber to realize he had killed all the other OPL practitioners there using nothing but his bare hands.
Afterward, he had stumbled towards his lab space, destroying all traces of his utter failure, desperately hoping that ridding the world of the source would make the pounding in his head stop. His coworkers were alarmed, but he fought them off, leaving trails on the walls as he steadied himself on them by his bloodied hands.
He… he needed to see her, to know if what he was feeling was what he had been trying so desperately to understand. He drove like a madman, getting tailed by the police almost immediately, but he ignored them, going straight home and bursting through the doors, only to find Lena in bed with another man.
After that, all he can remember is seeing red and feeling no pain.
His body count that day had nearly reached the triple digits before he was apprehended by a Noble Arms user. He was tied up and sedated, more animal than man at that point, and taken in for containment and confinement by the Russian government.
When he next woke up, he didn’t feel quite the same, like a mixture of the new and old. He could feel the sensation of his head aching, but not the ache itself, and his memories felt fuzzy and unclear. He was restrained, and, upon waking, quickly taken around to interrogation. Not comprehending his current situation, he stuck by his policy of honesty, though his inability to remember crucial details frustrated his interrogators. It didn’t particularly bother him, since he couldn’t feel the torture in the slightest. It was kind of funny seeing some of their tools fail to break his skin. They wanted him to surrender the OPL code he had destroyed, but he couldn’t remember most of it. They wanted him to explain how the code worked, but he only remembered the broad strokes. They discussed the events that led up to his arrest, from his psychotic break at the research facility to his mad drive home and the eventual murder of his wife, Lena. Lena… Lena, Lena, Lena…
His breathing quickened, and the words the interrogators spoke didn’t mean anything to him anymore. He could feel the sensation of a headache, and very pointedly noticed the way it kept him from thinking clearly. He decided to wait it out, until someone - an enemy, tried to zap him again for insubordination. He lunged forward within his restraints, biting the man, and there was just so much blood. It spilled out, floating around him in circles like a protective blanket. That’s right, he had a Noble Arms now, right? He should…
…He couldn’t finish that thought. It was like being underwater, hearing but deaf, even to his own thoughts. The interrogators left, and he just sat there within his restraints and breathed, in and out, as the imaginary pain in his head gradually faded away.
Why was he circling blood around himself exactly?
He tried using the blood to get out of his restraints, but he didn’t have very good fine control over it, just feeling like he was making a mess. It was rather annoying, so when a Noble Arms user entered the room, he greeted them amiably. They demanded he put down the blood, so he asked them where he should put it, since it was likely to leave stains. When they just told him to drop it again, he somehow found himself inexplicably understanding, apologizing to them out of politeness and complying.
It took the Russian Government a while to determine the extent of his abilities and the quirks of his condition. His powers seemed to remain on permanently, even while asleep. When Razlyubit is pried off his unconscious fingers, it simply returns there as if nothing happened. They had always known about his sociopathy, but he was showing signs to the contrary now, and strong emotions seemed to cause his higher thought processes to stall until he calmed down, becoming a creature of nothing but instincts and aggressive self-defense measures. It was, in his opinion, dreadful, and he’s come to hate the new emotions he’s been saddled with. The new humanity he’s forced to feel. The OPL code that started this whole mess, the idea of such a cursed form of immortality. Even after his memories came back, only lost in the first place because of a bullet wound to the brain apparently, he feigned ignorance on the matter, refusing to let anyone else suffer through his own personal hell. It was cold comfort, since, from the start, he’s the only one he knows to have ever been outside of that hell. The human condition was maddening, but at least the few others like him would be safe from it.
Even after discovery, or rather, development, of his Viral Blood ability, and despite his usefulness as a willing soldier deployed against Ukraine, (After all, it's not like he could go back to his old life) Jason remained a problem child; a thorn in Russia’s side. What good was a soldier that would just go unresponsive for minutes at a time in the heat of battle? What good was his zombie virus when it was so easy to end up with friendly fire? Although he was a known quantity and proved himself a loyal soldier, rising up the ranks in spite of his shortcomings, he was eventually traded off with China, since they claimed they could make better use of him. There, he was assigned Ai Chen as his handler. She would tell him where to go and what to do, and in turn when her hands wandered down his chest he would simply remind her of his chronic inability to respond to compromising situations appropriately. Didn’t stop her from trying, and the resulting fight earned her a reprimand from Ren Huo, so despite taking one of her plasma arrows to the gut and gaining a temporary hole in his stomach, it took her longer to recover from the punch he gave her to the same spot, and in the end their working relationship ended up pretty cordial.
Current Goal: Find or develop a cure or improvement to his current condition, with the development of his Noble Arm being viewed as the most promising avenue.
Name: Niles de Rochefort Age: 18 Appearance: 5'7" with dark hair, brown eyes, and a smile that doesn't quite reach them. Niles deliberately cultivates an aesthetic of sprezzatura, with carefully styled hair that sticks up in wild yet deliberate arrangements. He never uses hair gel, though almost always uses some type of hair spray. In accordance with his business classes, he's required to dress up in formal attire, and always chooses to do so at the extreme lower end of business formal (no suit, black slacks, black tie) despite business casual being acceptable. Outside of school or on days without business classes, he tends to look like he's between photo shoots for typical men's fashion magazines. When attending high-profile events, he tends to dress in suits with small ornate designs on them, always making a statement albeit never a loud one.
Personality: Niles is high-strung, self-destructive, and powered almost entirely by red bull and spite. He's calculating, manipulative, and can't help but think that he knows better than most of the people around him. He has a tendency to take on the problems of those he cares about even if he isn't asked to do so, and will prioritize his friends over strangers and especially himself.
Niles tends to maintain a nonchalant attitude, and is slow to anger, albeit not annoyance. He's good at keeping his cool under pressure, but in emotionally difficult situations, he tends to get trapped in analysis paralysis, freezing up or resorting to avoidance. He has a deep-rooted need to prove his self-worth, and suffers horrible anxiety over his perceived failures and inadequacies. Claims to hate being touched, which isn't entirely untrue since he's scared of opening up to people, though, in reality, it's the complete opposite, a self-perpetuating problem originating from his abandonment issues.
History: Niles is the scion of the deRo tech company, a multi-billion dollar enterprise that spans the globe. From a young age, Niles has always been described by his parents as self-sufficient and independent, capable of taking care of himself even from the young age of eight. Niles is no stranger to modern high society, nor the constant networking amidst social vipers within, and he's become fairly good at it over the years, since securing opportunities for his parents are one of the few things he can do to earn their praise and momentary attention. He's been taught to know better than to bother his parents with trivial matters or his 'childish' habits. His parents are very busy people, and if it does not concern their enterprise or particularly meritorious schoolwork, then it is a waste of their time. His parents have always said he was too clingy, and, 'logically' speaking, he agrees that they're right. They really have better things to be doing than waste time sticking around at home.
Ms. Mariel, a housemaid hired by his parents, comes by once a week to clean their manor and restock their kitchen. She's quite nice, although they don't talk much, since she tends to grow upset whenever they talk at length. He tries not to bother her too much, since his parents told him that the last housemaid quit because of that a few years back.
Magical Form: When transformed, Niles' irises begin to exhibit a pair of squares that rotate around his pupils in opposite directions, and a single streak of hair in his bangs changes color to a dirty shade of orange. Niles' outfit changes to a dark brown three-piece suit, including a long coat covered in ornate darker brown geometric patterns, a waistcoat with a gold trim, and trousers with a golden angular pattern going down the sides, but detouring twice to wrap around his lower thigh and upper shin. It resembles yet contrasts with the ornate swirling pattern that appears in gold on his tie, the only patterns on his outfit that don't consist entirely of sharp angles.
Weapon: Niles is able to create and shape metal into daggers or swords when needed for close combat, though his weapons of choice are his throwing stars, which he can manipulate autonomously for as long as his concentration holds.
Abilities: Niles has the ability to create and manipulate Earth, including metals and fine particles. Although creation ex nihilo of large masses is not particularly fast, he can still create and shape weaponry on the fly provided he isn't pressured too heavily. By comparison, his manipulation of preexisting Earth is blisteringly fast and devastatingly powerful. Although not quite as fast as a gun, a speeding pebble compelled forward with great force can accomplish much the same against undefended soft tissue. Beyond that, no element is capable of throwing around more sheer mass than his, at least not with the ease he does it.
Niles' personal specialization lies in his ability to go underground, sinking through the Earth as if it were water or even air. Once there, he can manipulate the Earth around him to reposition and even launch himself out at his opponents at great speeds. Assuming he can't just let his shuriken do all the work, this is his preferred method of attack, and he can do it all without actually getting dirty, using his powers to keep him and his clothing utterly immaculate. He doesn't even need to let the Earth tousle his hair.
Companion's Name: Oro, so named because of her unwillingness to divulge her true name and her tendency to grab if not bite on her own tail to stay curled around a limb when Niles is in motion.
Appearance: Oro is a particularly large blind snake, about a foot long from head to tail and a diameter slightly less than that of an American Dime. Like most blind snakes, she's very round on either end, lacking the head shape or pointed tail of other snakes, though she still has the signature forked tongue used by snakes to test the air. She's mostly a dark grayish color, though the scales on her underbelly are a milky white, and all of her scales shine a bit under light.
Companion's Name: Oro is cripplingly shy as well as a rather unhelpful guide, owing to her abrupt loss of all limbs as well as almost all of her sight, only able to see changes in light levels. As blind snakes live mostly underground, she finds herself suffering from the mild instinctive photophobia of her race, and has generally taken to wrapping around Niles' arm at all times, under his sleeve. Trapped by the practical considerations of her perpetual disorientation, she lives in constant fear that she'll become lost and end up all alone, unable to find her way back to another intelligent being. She tends to remain silent when people other than Niles are around unless something important comes up, though when it's just her and Niles, she's pretty level-headed and sweet. She occasionally makes offhand mentions of her previous life as a sorceress that imply that she used to be an alarmingly different person.
Name: Niles de Rochefort Age: 18 Appearance: 5'7" with dark hair, brown eyes, and a smile that doesn't quite reach them. Niles deliberately cultivates an aesthetic of sprezzatura, with carefully styled hair that sticks up in wild yet deliberate arrangements. He never uses hair gel, though almost always uses some type of hair spray. In accordance with his business classes, he's required to dress up in formal attire, and always chooses to do so at the extreme lower end of business formal (no suit, black slacks, black tie) despite business casual being acceptable. Outside of school or on days without business classes, he tends to look like he's between photo shoots for typical men's fashion magazines. When attending high-profile events, he tends to dress in suits with small ornate designs on them, always making a statement albeit never a loud one.
Personality: Niles is high-strung, self-destructive, and powered almost entirely by red bull and spite. He's calculating, manipulative, and can't help but think that he knows better than most of the people around him. He has a tendency to take on the problems of those he cares about even if he isn't asked to do so, and will prioritize his friends over strangers and especially himself.
Niles tends to maintain a nonchalant attitude, and is slow to anger, albeit not annoyance. He's good at keeping his cool under pressure, but in emotionally difficult situations, he tends to get trapped in analysis paralysis, freezing up or resorting to avoidance. He has a deep-rooted need to prove his self-worth, and suffers horrible anxiety over his perceived failures and inadequacies. Claims to hate being touched, which isn't entirely untrue since he's scared of opening up to people, though, in reality, it's the complete opposite, a self-perpetuating problem originating from his abandonment issues.
History: Niles is the scion of the deRo tech company, a multi-billion dollar enterprise that spans the globe. From a young age, Niles has always been described by his parents as self-sufficient and independent, capable of taking care of himself even from the young age of eight. Niles is no stranger to modern high society, nor the constant networking amidst social vipers within, and he's become fairly good at it over the years, since securing opportunities for his parents are one of the few things he can do to earn their praise and momentary attention. He's been taught to know better than to bother his parents with trivial matters or his 'childish' habits. His parents are very busy people, and if it does not concern their enterprise or particularly meritorious schoolwork, then it is a waste of their time. His parents have always said he was too clingy, and, 'logically' speaking, he agrees that they're right. They really have better things to be doing than waste time sticking around at home.
Ms. Mariel, a housemaid hired by his parents, comes by once a week to clean their manor and restock their kitchen. She's quite nice, although they don't talk much, since she tends to grow upset whenever they talk at length. He tries not to bother her too much, since his parents told him that the last housemaid quit because of that a few years back.
Magical Form: When transformed, Niles' irises begin to exhibit a pair of squares that rotate around his pupils in opposite directions, and a single streak of hair in his bangs changes color to a dirty shade of orange. Niles' outfit changes to a dark brown three-piece suit, including a long coat covered in ornate darker brown geometric patterns, a waistcoat with a gold trim, and trousers with a golden angular pattern going down the sides, but detouring twice to wrap around his lower thigh and upper shin. It resembles yet contrasts with the ornate swirling pattern that appears in gold on his tie, the only patterns on his outfit that don't consist entirely of sharp angles.
Weapon: Niles is able to create and shape metal into daggers or swords when needed for close combat, though his weapons of choice are his throwing stars, which he can manipulate autonomously for as long as his concentration holds.
Abilities: Niles has the ability to create and manipulate Earth, including metals and fine particles. Although creation ex nihilo of large masses is not particularly fast, he can still create and shape weaponry on the fly provided he isn't pressured too heavily. By comparison, his manipulation of preexisting Earth is blisteringly fast and devastatingly powerful. Although not quite as fast as a gun, a speeding pebble compelled forward with great force can accomplish much the same against undefended soft tissue. Beyond that, no element is capable of throwing around more sheer mass than his, at least not with the ease he does it.
Niles' personal specialization lies in his ability to go underground, sinking through the Earth as if it were water or even air. Once there, he can manipulate the Earth around him to reposition and even launch himself out at his opponents at great speeds. Assuming he can't just let his shuriken do all the work, this is his preferred method of attack, and he can do it all without actually getting dirty, using his powers to keep him and his clothing utterly immaculate. He doesn't even need to let the Earth tousle his hair.
Companion's Name: Oro, so named because of her unwillingness to divulge her true name and her tendency to grab if not bite on her own tail to stay curled around a limb when Niles is in motion.
Appearance: Oro is a particularly large blind snake, about a foot long from head to tail and a diameter slightly less than that of an American Dime. Like most blind snakes, she's very round on either end, lacking the head shape or pointed tail of other snakes, though she still has the signature forked tongue used by snakes to test the air. She's mostly a dark grayish color, though the scales on her underbelly are a milky white, and all of her scales shine a bit under light.
Companion's Name: Oro is cripplingly shy as well as a rather unhelpful guide, owing to her abrupt loss of all limbs as well as almost all of her sight, only able to see changes in light levels. As blind snakes live mostly underground, she finds herself suffering from the mild instinctive photophobia of her race, and has generally taken to wrapping around Niles' arm at all times, under his sleeve. Trapped by the practical considerations of her perpetual disorientation, she lives in constant fear that she'll become lost and end up all alone, unable to find her way back to another intelligent being. She tends to remain silent when people other than Niles are around unless something important comes up, though when it's just her and Niles, she's pretty level-headed and sweet. She occasionally makes offhand mentions of her previous life as a sorceress that imply that she used to be an alarmingly different person.
As it does every year, the King of Games' deck went on tour. As usual, it made one of its pit stops at the Duel Academy, coinciding with one of the students' day off.
It was Chris' idea to throw a party on the same day to celebrate Roché's safe return. She couldn't remember how she ended up passed out in the woods, but she wasn't about to say no to a party, and since it was a day off, Professor Sartyr signed off on it, provided it ended by curfew and that the students would clean up afterwards. Several Ra Yellow students didn't participate, going to see the famous deck belonging to the King of Games, or just off somewhere else to get some peace and quiet. Rin in particular was buzzing about the King of Games' deck exhibit the whole morning to anyone that would listen.
The party continued through sundown, and Miles and Mina agreed to using the cover of night to slip away, meeting up with the man with the millennium eye.
5A: Farewell, Ra Yellow.
The party was in full swing - music blaring, video games up on the lounge's TVs, and several students dueling in and around the dorms. Some students from other dorms even came by to participate. By all accounts it was a huge success up until someone yelled out that there was a fire. The students were evacuated, and when the fire extinguisher was finally retrieved, it ended up being too little, too late.
Professor Sartyr stood outside the dorm, looking back at the raging pyre with a mixture of sadness and mounting dread at the possibility that he had missed someone in the evacuations. He did a headcount on his students and sent a message to all others who weren't there - After some agonizing waiting and several repeated messages, they each responded back. No one was hurt.
However, Ra Yellow was gone.
After contacting campus administration, the Ra Yellow students were all led to Obelisk Blue for shelter overnight.
5B: Not This Shit Again
On the same night the Ra Yellow Dorms went down in flames, the deck belonging to the King of Games went missing. The exhibit had closed for the day, but someone evidently snuck in and took the deck for themselves. In the chaos of the party and its abrupt end, many students were unaccounted for for long periods of time, and in the eyes of the staff, very few students have a proper alibi. The few that do, are mostly because of the saturation of the school faculty in the Obelisk Blue Dorms.
5C: Deal With a Homeless Person
Although Miles had already described the man as hobo-like, it was still jarring to see him eating instant noodles by a small campfire. He was wearing the same black eyepatch from yesterday, which hid the millennium eye surprisingly well. The man’s lower face was covered in a thin layer of stubble, and his hair - a striking shade of hot pink, was an unkempt mess.
Although he was initially concerned by Mina’s presence and the consequences thereof, he relaxed after Miles introduced her and explained the events of last night. Before they could discuss any more, however, the man launched into lecturing Miles about the dangers of using the ends to justify the means, and how he’d regret it. He went on for quite a while before offhandedly mentioning that the girl he was looking for was an Obelisk Blue student named Alexis.
The day after, a school assembly was called to go over the two incidents from the night prior.
Chancellor Sheppard started out with reassurances - that the Ra Yellow dorms were being rebuilt, that the thief behind the missing deck would be caught and punished, and that the mysterious figure spotted lurking in the woods would be caught and, if they were responsible for either incident, brought to justice. Ra Yellow students would receive new uniforms for free to replace the ones that went up in flames, and if they left their decks behind, that they would be able to get get a free replacement from the Duel Academy card shop. Other considerations are being left on hold while Duel Academy investigates, and he pledged that the teachers and staff of Duel Academy would support the affected students and get to the bottom of things.
Afterward, Dr. Crowler took the stage, and he immediately accused the Ra Yellow students of being behind the incidents from that night, followed by accusing the Slifer Red students of the same, just because. He then went on to declare that, until the true culprit behind both are found, that the Ra Yellow students would be camping out with the “Slifer Slackers.” Naturally, there weren't enough dorm rooms left in Slifer Red to accommodate all the Ra Yellow students, but Professor Sartyr and Ms. Hibiki came on stage to assure students that it would be a “fun camping experience,” and that they’d already set up tents next to Slifer Red for all of them. Audible groans and angry complaints erupted from many of the Ra Yellow students, though Dr. Crowler silenced them with threats of expulsion until Professor Fontaine intervened. She changed the topic, going on to announce a fundraiser to cover the costs of rebuilding Ra Yellow. Soon, Duel Academy would hold a globally televised dueling event where students would compete in tournaments for the chance to win rare prize cards. They were now taking suggestions for tournament categories - standard duels were already set, but they would hold a vote on what side tournaments to include, such as tag duels, deck swap tournaments, drafted deck tournaments, or whatever else the students could think of.
Chancellor Sheppard returned to the stage to say some encouraging words about “moving towards the future” before the students were sent back to class as usual. Ra Yellow students got an extension on their homework deadlines, at least.
Later that day…
Sina
The Masked Rabbit
Today would be the day that THE MASKED RABBIT can stand by no longer.
Too many have suffered. Too much was lost. Now was the time for action!
A girl clearly wearing a Lunalight White Rabbit Halloween Costume, or perhaps a cosplay, stepped out of Slifer Red dorm 103, in full view of the camping Ra Yellows and a couple of Slifer Reds. She caught the attention of many of them quite quickly.
“Fear not, my fellow - I mean, students of Duel Academy! Of which I am not one of! THE MASKED RABBIT will find the culprit behind the vile misdeeds committed upon you! AWAY!”
She gallivanted off towards the remains of the Ra Yellow dorm, ignoring the baffled stares of the onlookers.
Super Sleuth Sina I mean Masked Rabbit is on the case.
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