Application for Syn

[bodyhorrorbeauty]

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Kaja
AGE: 36
PLAYER JOURNAL: kajarainbow
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: kajarainbow
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Saya Yamada
CANON: Original
POINT IN CANON: After the school tournament
AGE: 16
APPEARANCE: Image of her PB. I'll note that she's fairly good-looking through intentional body-tweaking effort on her part.

CANON HISTORY:
I'm going to summarize the setting info, since it was already covered in Kohaku's app. In the 1980s, drilling uncovered a deep network of caves spanning the entire planet, containing a wild assortment of hostile monsters that posed a threat to humans and could burrow up at any point, as well as symbiotic monsters that readily fused with humans in their early teens, giving them special powers that could be nearly anything imaginable. By the point the main story of this 'canon' starts in 2018, monsters were a normal thing, as well as the people with symbiotes, many of who fight the monsters. There exist combat-oriented schools for teaching those teens who've ended up with symbiotes, Aegis Monster Hunter Acadmy being the oldest and most famous.

Saya was born to a scientist couple that were working on research on the symbiotes. At birth, she was designated as male. Growing up, she idolized her parents and wanted to be a scientist like them. But she also wanted to have cool powers and fight monsters like the heroes she saw on television. She also was the kind of kid who loved bugs, worms, and the like, an interest that her parents encouraged since they studied similarly icky things. Her parents even let her bring a dead symbiote to school once to show the class, which was the highlight of her childhood. Her parents also let her help out around the house since they were often busy with their research and praised her when she did, rewarding her.

In middle school, she started getting some limited responsibility for her younger siblings, which she saw as an important job to help out her beloved parents. She also became increasingly aware of the differences between her and boys. At this point in her life, her parents pulled some major strings to bring her blindfolded to work, where they offered a symbiote and told her it was her choice if she wanted to let it enter her body so she could gain a power. Even with their warning that the process would be unpleasant even with painkillers, she eagerly accepted. Once she'd gotten over the experience, she started experimenting with her new power which allowed her to modify her body and others. One day, her parents returned home to find her in a feminine body. They took it for just experimentation at first, but her insistence that she was a girl led to a long talk. At the end of the talk, they told her that it'd take some time to get used to her being their daughter, but they were going to support her. And they did, helping her pick out more girly clothes and her mother helped her correct details about her body.

Her parents also arranged for her to get training using their contacts with the older symbiote users, so she ended up with an early start on learning how to fight using her powers. By the time she entered Aegis Academy, largely because of her talent and because her family lived nearby, she was decently well trained. Going directly for a student council position, Saya prevailed in most of the fights to determine who got what position (because it's that kind of school). But then she hit a wall. A wall called Toyo, who had the power of a dragon. In the end, Toyo got the president position while Saya got vice president. A year passed by mostly uneventfully while Saya established herself as the responsible and mature VP who readily helped others. It was partly a facade to make herself look good, partly habit from helping out her parents with housework and raising her siblings, and partly a good nature.

And then Toyo of all things went and threw a fight to a first year underclassman in order to get out of the president position. By this point, Saya had already seen enough of both jobs to decide she preferred being the vice president over the president, so she didn't bother challenging the new president, Kohaku. Besides, she was actually relieved to get a president who actually cared about their job--a year with the lazy Toyo as president had been more than enough. So she helped Kohaku out, showing her everything she needed to know about being student council president. She came to like the new president and asked 'him' out (like most she thought Kohaku was a boy) and was turned down with the explanation that Kohaku wasn't into girls. She wasn't the only one to get rejected.

Then came the school tournament. Saya became very busy helping Kohaku organize it, until the time for the tournament came. Wanting to show her ability as the third strongest in the school, Saya joined and found herself paired up with the second strongest in the school, Naoki, who had the ability to form powerful armor from his body. Right from the start, Naoki rubbed her the wrong way with his abrasive attitude. Nevertheless, a team consisting of those widely acknowledged as the second and third strongest were quite a formidable match; only weird gimmick powers really slowed them down.

Until they faced off against the team consisting of Kohaku and Toyo. At this time, Naoki's grudge against Toyo for rejecting him became obvious and he quickly challenged her to an one-on-one. Saya decided she'd had enough of her teammate and went easy on Kohaku, putting in just enough effort to make it look like she was sincerely trying, while Toyo and Naoki whaled on each other. Only when Toyo had finished beating Naoki did Saya go all out. She lost. While she was healing Kohaku after the match because it was quick and easy for her to do it, she realized that Kohaku actually had a girl's body. At first she misunderstood what that meant, but Kohaku clarified that she was fine being a girl, she just had her reasons to take on a masculine guise.

Things get more vague because Kohaku's player hasn't worked out the details yet, but there were some suspect activity going on during this time, and when Kohaku and her cohort (including Saya) investigated, they discovered a secret laboratory facility in which many unethical experiments were being carried out involving symbiotes and humans who were not entirely volunteers. This massively upset Saya, particularly when she found out her parents were willingly involved in this research. This completely shook Saya's admiration of her parents, and she felt like her world view had shattered, something that would take her some time to recover from.

After that, they discovered all this research was part of a plot by a race of intelligent monsters, leading to an unspecified climax.

CANON PERSONALITY:
Outwardly, Saya projects an image of a confident, motherly person. This is an image that she deliberately cultivates. She adopted it in an effort to reassure her siblings who she was taking care of and the praise she got from her parents for her maturity encouraged her to keep it up. She also enjoys being admired by her fellow students. That said, this facade isn't a hard one to break: just put down her carefully crafted body and beauty, damage her favorite clothes, or the like.

This is because she's basically a vain, prideful person on some levels. It's a pride born out of carefully designing her own body, erasing every defect and flaw until she reached that delicate point between supermodel level beauty and uncanny valley. It's also a pride born out of people's positive reactions to her beauty and to her projected facade.

That isn't to say that she isn't a nice person. Vain, yes, projecting a facade, yes, but there's a genuine good nature in there. After all one of the chief reasons she adopted this facade was to make her family happy and ease the pressures of having two parents working much of the time. And giving some of her self-made lunch to someone who looks like they could use it is only partially an attempt to look good. And she genuinely enjoys helping arrange and handle things as vice president for the sake of the other students.

Nevertheless, she's willing to harsh on someone who annoys her, or at least have fun at their expense. Just look at her acceptance of Kohaku's practice of harassing Toyo with contrived excuses to keep the lazy ex-president from enjoying a leisurely life, or her essentially standing aside as Toyo beat the crap out of her annoying teammate Naoki. She does try to get 'revenge' in a way that makes her look good, however. And it takes a lot to earn her ire anyways, because she has an easy-going personality by nature.

A notable thing about her and probably the biggest break with her cultivated image is that she genuinely enjoys insects, spiders, worms, and other gross things. She also enjoys doing dissection in biology class and learning how the body works. Her parents got her a book about parasites and she loved it. She likes her power not just for its capability for making her beautiful, and routinely uses it to solve everyday problems like growing a third super stretchy arm to reach something far away. She doesn't mind her reputation being one of a beautiful, kind, motherly, but eccentric person. Her love of weird biological stuff also extends to her interest in becoming a scientist like her parents. Ultimately, her dream is to become a fighting scientist who defeats monsters and then studies them.

POINT OF DEPARTURE:
Without the existence of symbiotes, Saya'd likely still be a budding scientist (or natural philosopher or whatever depending on the setting), memorizing lots of facts about invertebrates instead of symbiotes. She'd also be low-key miserable because of the whole transgender thing so I'm going to just say that her infiltrations're mostly cisgendered girls because gender dysphoria isn’t fun to play out particularly when one’s experienced it oneself. Probably the most visible difference is that she'd likely be considerably less vain because she wouldn't have such a carefully crafted appearance, though she’d still seek to make a good impression on others.

Instead of admiring symbiote users and aiming to become one, she’d admire and aim to become whatever the Jaunt’s equivalent of heroes is. (So a Champion in the case of Questing Country.) If the infiltration came without a family for whatever reason, she'd instead turn to others for the validation she seeks.

VETERAN?: Nah

ABILITIES:
To put it quite simply, Saya's symbiote allows her to manipulate bodies, both her own and others' own. It's a fairly flexible power, so I'll try to cover all the use cases.

Firstly, she's capable of healing with with this power, though it takes some attention and caution to not to accidentally screw up the one she's healing. Basically, it doesn't have the ease of use of many healing powers. However, she's become pretty skilled at this and has healed things like cancer the person didn't even know they had, diseases, and other such things. In addition, she's familiar enough with her body through constant experience altering it that it's easy for her to do things to herself. But there're some things she can't heal, especially genetic disorders (making genetic changes is beyond her), dead bodies (she can fix the basic damage, but reviving them is beyond her), many kinds of brain damage (if it's something relatively simple like interior bleeding, that isn't as much of a problem, but much of the brain's beyond her and she's hesitant about messing with it), and things like that.

Secondly, she can change an organic body in all kinds of ways, though not on the genetic level. For example, causing extra limbs to manifest, changing someone's appearance, increasing their physical strength, adding weapons, giving someone an extra heart, growing an armored shell, and other such things. She does such things to other people rarely, however, since those changes're permanent unless she undoes them. Far more often, she'll modify herself to solve a problem and then revert it once the problem's solved. Like with healing, she has to be careful while making those modifications, though she knows her own body inside and out so it's easy for her to modify it. Some examples of weapons she's manifested include spikes, blades, bludgeons, gun barrels that fire bone bullets, and the large bone spike launcher which packs a powerful punch but is slower to fire because of the extra effort it takes to create 'ammo' that can withstand the forces involved.

In essence because of her familiarity with herself she can use her ability on herself quickly and easily enough to make it viable for midcombat tweaking and healing, but using it on other people requires her to be careful and take her time, making it hard to do so in the middle of combat. However, there's a notable exception: when she doesn't care about causing damage to the victim. With a quick contact, such as with a punch, she can randomly scramble and generally fuck up the area around the spot she hits, often causing it to turn into a tumorous mass. She's only done this to monstrous creatures so far due to her own squeamishness about doing it to humans.

A necessary component of her ability is being able to essentially 'scan' bodies both herself and those she're touching. It's a sort of sense that tells her about the body's workings and state. It allows her to tailor her healing or other modifications specifically to the target's unique body. (It's how she realized Kohaku was actually a girl once she tried to heal her.)

Her baseline body is actually significantly strong, to an superhuman extent. It's also exceptionally tough and fast. This is the result of her modifications to her baseline body. She also has a 'combat transformation' with a standard set of modifications that she uses when necessary--she's practiced the combination until she can pull it off smoothly. Basically, it packs more muscle than her normal baseline, some armor, and more speed at the price of not being very pretty (thus why she keeps it in reserve). Though she's limited in her speed by how much her brain can handle, since she's wary of modifying her own brain. Innate weaponry is added depending on the situation.

INVENTORY:
She has a bunch of things a regular teen high school student would have, such as her phone, wallet, house keys, school supplies, and such. The most unusual possession on her is a well-worn nonfiction book about parasites.

ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?
/shrugs

M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
Death: Saya's ability is very transformative in its nature. Not only that, she's gone through a major life transition (living as a girl instead of as a boy). As well, there's going from idolizing her parents to being upset at them for their immoral acts.

Empress: Saya often acts as a mother to others, providing aid and advice. She regularly looks after her own siblings. As well, she deliberately created a sensual and beautiful appearance for herself.

Chariot: This essentially reflects her pride in her own carefully crafted body, her self-assertion of herself as a girl, and both the strength of her confidence as well as its imperfection, because a lot of it she's only projecting outward for others.

VETO: None. If you think another Arcana fits better, go with it.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE:
Test Drive top level

PROSE SAMPLE:
As soon as she arrived home, her two brothers and a sister were mobbing her, asking her about dinner. Well, they were greedy guts like always, but it’s not like she didn’t love them or enjoy cooking for them. Watching them eat with gusto was always a pleasure, as it was a compliment to her cooking skills. And she always liked to see her siblings happy.

Today she prepared a simple dish that barely required any thought from her, as she wanted to do some thinking. Today’s rejection by that new boy Kohaku was a definite disappointment. At least it wasn’t more than that. She’d fancied him, but she’d asked him out as soon as she noticed she fancied him so it hadn’t had more time to develop into a more intense crush.
Not interested in girls, huh? Well, it wasn’t her business. At least it hadn’t been because of some defect on her own part. That would’ve really stung. She was aware of her own vain tendencies, but she had a body she had carefully perfected into a masterpiece, it was only natural for her to be a little vain.

That Kohaku was a really interesting sort, though. Even though he’d been effectively forced into the position, he had taken his job in earnest and done his best. She’d liked that about him. She liked her boys (and girls and whatever) hard-working and mature. Well, comparatively so, but she couldn’t begrudge him his little pettiness toward Toyo. She’d had her own fill of the lazy dragon girl. Sure, doing a good share of the president’s job was a good way to impress others, but she already had enough to do with her own vice president position, schoolwork, housework, and caring for her siblings.

Oh, it looked like the rice was ready, and the other curry components were going to finish soon. Time to eat dinner, and then maybe she could chill with that book on mollusks.