The Hero of Love, Raiel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pianistofraielin) wrote2013-08-09 10:15 am
pianistofraielin) wrote2013-08-09 10:15 am
Entry tags:
App: Save the Earth
OOC Information:
Name: The Guindo
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact: theguindo@gmail.com,![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
ninjarobotclone
IC Information:
Name: Original: Raiel ; Reincarnation: Russel Goldman
Canon and medium: Violinist of Hameln; manga
Age: 20
Reincarnation age: 17 [11/24/1996]
Preincarnation Species:shounen protagonist Human
Preincarnation Appearance: Full-body reference (far-right), colour reference (top-right, the dude in green).
Blond hair, brown eyes, 5'9" tall. He has a collection of miscellaneous scars from encounters with Mazoku. Most notable are a pair of aligned scars through his hands from getting them speared to his piano, and one through his stomach from throwing himself on a sword. (The injuries are canon but scars are never mentioned/shown one way or the other.)
Any differences: He now dresses like a normal human being in modern-day America, but his fashion sense when it comes anything fancier than "casual-everyday wear" might be...slightly outdated.
Preincarnated History: Raiel grew up in the town of Anthem, the mayor's only child. One day, he came across a group of bullies picking on a boy who'd recently moved into a house on the outskirts of town. Raiel chased away the bullies and befriended the boy, whose name was Hamel.
Hamel lived alone with his mother, Pandora. Pandora, the Demon King Chestra's wife, the witch who had unleashed the evil and monstrous race of Mazoku upon the world, the woman responsible for humanity's suffering and terror under Mazoku rule. She was loathed by humans and hunted by Mazoku, and as long as Hamel had been alive, he'd lived in hiding with only his mother for company.
Raiel became the first person to treat the two of them kindly, and his parents welcomed Pandora and Hamel as friends. Pandora showed her gratitude by teaching Raiel how to play Magic Music on his family's piano. For a time, things were peaceful.
Until that fateful day that the Mazoku came to Anthem. They told the townspeople that if they handed over Pandora and Hamel, they would leave peacefully. Rightfully terrified, the townspeople did as the Mazoku asked. Raiel and his parents tried to stop them, but to no avail. Pandora was captured, trapped in a crystal and taken north to the Mazoku capital, and Hamel, in his grief and rage, was overtaken by his Mazoku blood.
Hamel slaughtered the people of Anthem. Only Raiel was spared.
Watching his best friend murder his parents along with everyone he'd ever known was understandably traumatic. When Hamel regained his senses and turned to Raiel with his grief, Raiel turned his back on Hamel and left him alone with the corpses of Anthem.
Orphaned at a very young age, Raiel quickly discovered that he could not rely on the charity of strangers in this harsh world. He learned how to make himself useful and worked to earn his keep wherever he could. He moved from town to town, trying to never overstay his welcome.
At the age of 12, he hit a breaking point. The world was harsh and cruel, and people had no sympathy for those who'd suffered at the hands of the Mazoku because, well, hadn't everyone? He decided that was no way for humanity to live. People needed to be reminded of the power of love and kindness.
Raiel returned to Anthem, took the magical golden piano from his family's house, and styled himself into "The Hero of Love, Golden Piano Player Raiel." He traveled the countryside, fighting off Mazoku and selflessly helping out wherever he could, to remind people that there was hope to be found in kindness. He never asked to be compensated for his deeds, declaring that love was the only payment he needed.
There were ulterior motives in his sappy goals, though. Raiel chose to blame Hamel for the atrocities of the Mazoku. He declared vengeance against Hamel, and his wandering was also an attempt to hunt him down and kill him. Behind the veneer of love was a well of hatred for the Mazoku and for Hamel.
When he did finally find Hamel, he basically lost it and threw his whole goody-two-shoes act out the window and turned into a cackling villain. He used his Magic Music to brainwash an entire town into turning on Hamel, and even tried to force Hamel's Designated Love Interest, Flute, to kill him. Buuut the manga is not called Pianist of Raielin so as you might have guessed this did not turn out as planned.
After his attempt to murder Hamel was foiled, he decided to tag along with the group. At first he said it was to keep tabs on Hamel, but before long it became clear that their friendship was rekindling. Hamel's goal was to travel north to the Mazoku stronghold to kill their king--his father. Raiel was totally down for that.
And then 35 volumes of shounen manga happened. To sum it up, the group traveled north, picking up a few other party members along the way, on a journey fraught with danger and peppered with battles against the Mazoku forces. Truths were learned, hardships were faced, and friendships were forged. You know, the usual stuff.
AND THEN A FINALE HAPPENED. Literally all the armies of the world united to assault the Mazoku stronghold, and the main characters (including Raiel) rushed into the Demon King Chestra's castle to face him. They rescued Hamel's mother from the crystal she'd been imprisoned in, and then they all got together and performed an orchestral rendition of Ode to Joy that utterly decimated the Mazoku armies and defeated Chestra once and for all.
And it was fucking amazing.
The end.
Reincarnated History: Russel is the only child of the Goldman family. They live in a nice suburban neighbourhood in Locke City, where they moved shortly before he was born. They own a four-year-old Australian shepherd named Tchaikovsky. She is adorable.
His mother, Patricia Goldman, has been in politics all his life, and is currently serving her second term as the State Comptroller. His father, Samuel Goldman, is a stay-at-home dad who writes unpopular children's books. They have money but live modestly, not wanting to distance themselves too far from their middle-class roots.
His parents were determined that Russel would have the full childhood experience of the average American boy, and so he attends a public school where he is a model student and a member of the football team and drama club. He's currently in his junior year.
He's always had a fondness for music, but unfortunately he is completely tone-deaf and has no musical inclination whatsoever. His father tried to teach him guitar and his mother tried to teach him the flute, but he failed miserably with both. He is vaguely aware of what the symbols mean on sheet music but he can't read it for the life of him. He's had to settle for having an absolutely massive collection songs on his iPod.
First Echo: When the city's drinking water was tainted by a contaminant that affected only reincarnates, Russel at first managed to slip by without being affected due to his family's water supply coming from a different reservoir. That did not hold for the water supply at school. He got hit by his first Echo in third period, after stopping at the water fountain in between classes.
What he received was Raiel's affinity for dramatic inspirational speeches. He was also sent to the principal's office because he wouldn't stop laughing in class and got a detention for being disruptive. IT WAS TERRIBLE.
Preincarnation Personality: On the surface, Raiel seems like a weirdo spaz...and, frankly, that's true. He's short-tempered and comically violent, has melodramatic mood swings at the drop of a hat, and freaks out about the weirdest, most minor things. He seems like someone whose life is largely lived inside his own head with little regard for objective reality.
That part, at least, is deceptive. While Raiel does have a tendency to spin elaborate fantasy scenarios and get lost in his own imagination, he's actually a surprisingly intelligent, perceptive, and insightful person. He's well-traveled and worldly, with a wealth of acquired knowledge, and has been living on his own long enough to be extremely self-sufficient. He's excellent at reading people and can spot emotionally tense situations that seem to fly under everyone else's radar--when he's paying attention. But he's paying attention a lot more than he seems to be.
Raiel cares very deeply for people, both individually and in general. He is sympathetic to the hardships of others and will do everything in his power to make life just a little bit better for everyone he encounters. He stands up for those who can't stand up for themselves, and he hates bullies--which the Mazoku most certainly are, in his book. He tries to inspire hope and confidence (usually through cheesy and/or dramatic inspirational speeches), and leads by example by being kind, generous, and hardworking. The worst feeling for him is knowing he can't do anything to help someone.
Because he spent his childhood trying as hard as possible to avoid being a burden on an already burdened society, he learned to hide his pain and pretend nothing was wrong. He doesn't want people to feel obligated to care about his hardships when they're so busy worrying about their own. This leads him to smile and brush off his own feelings in favour of focusing on others. Of course, this only applies for serious issues. He's more than willing to fall into melodramatic displays of despair over things that don't actually matter.
This, unfortunately, means he is very bad at coping. He doesn't cope. He bottles up his pain and shoves it aside so he doesn't have to deal with it, which means that he never processes and overcomes it. This leads him to hold grudges, and to let negative feelings fester in the back of his heart. Raiel is not a very mentally healthy person. He is filled with hate for the Mazoku and what they've done to the world--and to himself and Hamel personally--and all he needs is the right excuse to turn that hatred elsewhere. For all his talk of love and kindness, he seems oddly predisposed toward cackling villainy given the appropriate circumstances.
He has a flair for the dramatic, particularly of the over-the-top shounen AND shoujo hero varieties. Actually, for a shounen hero, Raiel takes an awful lot of his inspiration from shoujo tropes. His idea of romance comes almost entirely from shoujo comics (some...how...in a world without shoujo comics). He likes to think he's a romantic but he's actually a super fuckin dork who can't talk to girls at all. In fact he is so bad at it that the merest hint of sexiness or romance is enough to give him a severe nosebleed.
Yes, Raiel gets life-threatening gag nosebleeds about cutesy shoujo fantasies. And he is a shounen hero so you know he has to lose A LOT of blood before it's actually life-threatening. These nosebleeds are embarrassing and he is deeply ashamed of them. Rather than, you know, being concerned for his well-being or anything silly like that.
Any differences: Russel's core personality is pretty close to Raiel's. He is still a total melodramatic spaz who flips out over the weirdest shit, but he mostly manages to come off as an outgoing, hardworking, friendly person whom other people's parents call 'just the nicest boy.'
He is WAY more mentally healthy than Raiel. Even though he also doesn't talk about his problems much, that's because he has perspective and realizes that his upper-middle-class problems aren't as bad as other people's. When he is having serious issues, he can usually talk to his dad about it, and has a few close friends to go to if his dad's not the right choice. However, as with Raiel, he will flip out dramatically over incredibly minor things and then get over it in a matter of minutes.
He will befriend literally anybody, even--and especially--if they seem resistant to it. He's collected a lot of friends out of the pool of kids who are ostracized for being different. That usually happens when he sees them getting picked on and jumps in to tell the bullies to knock it off. He does this a lot. He has gotten into fights. He has been suspended a couple times because the school had no other choice. He doesn't care because he knows he was doing the right thing, and his parents share that opinion.
He does not hate strongly like Raiel does, and is much more forgiving. For example, he's actually gone back and made friends with a few of those bullies he got into fights with, because he took the time to be sympathetic and figure out what was so wrong in their lives that they had to act out and bully others.
Unlike Raiel, Russel, of course, does not suffer from life-threatening gag nosebleeds at the merest thought of holding hands with a girl. He can talk to girls just fine, though not without some social fumbling around the ones he likes.
Instead of taking all his dramatic inspiration from shoujo manga, he takes it from jRPGs and anime. Oh yeah, for all the jock/prep/model student display he's got going on, Russel is still a huge fuckin dork. He's in online RPs, he plays MMOs, he's way into melodramatic overwrought faux-philosophical-look-at-how-deep-it-is animanga and video games. He doesn't get lost in extended daydream scenarios the way Raiel does, but you could call the RPing an outlet for a similar tendency.
He has an obsessive love for music and will listen to anything and everything. His iPod is his life. He has a playlist for every occasion. He can talk your ear off about music so you probably don't want to get him started.
He gets typecast into villain roles in drama club because of his hammy melodramatic overacting. He wishes he could be cast as the hero just once.
Abilities:
Shounen Protagonist:
Basically, I am playing the tropes straight. Even though these are not technically stated powers, they are demonstrably shown over the course of the manga.
Super-human strength and durability. He carries around a 500kg solid gold piano on his back, has survived 10-story falls with the piano landing on top of him, and has held his own in a fistfight against Hamel's Mazoku strength. He was also stabbed through the hands and recovered his full piano-playing ability within, what, a couple days? Jeez.
Super-human blood volume because holy shit have you seen how much this kid can bleed. There's a joke at one point about how the black shadow creeping across the page's background is actually a pool of blood from his nosebleed. Basically he can lose several pints of blood and be perfectly fine, and recovers from blood-loss much faster than should be possible.
Magic Music:
Raiel is a musical genius and a master pianist of unparalleled skill. He has perfect pitch, can play 4-hand songs 2-handed, can play any song by ear, can sight-read/sight-play from sheet music, and can play any song from memory once he's learned it. He knows how to tune a piano and can do it by ear. He is also highly knowledgeable about classical composers and their life histories, which he needs to put the pieces he plays into context.
Magic Music draws upon the emotions behind a composition to affect the hearts of those listening. Using Magic Music requires an understanding of a song's power, which means the more you know about a piece's meaning and context, the more effective you can make it. Without understanding the music's origins, you cannot understand how it is meant to affect people. Magic Music has no effect on those who cannot hear it, whether they're hearing impaired or simply plugging their ears.
Magic Music can be used in a few different ways:
• Affecting a person's emotions can be considered the standard bard-class buff/debuff skill. You can play a battle anthem to make people stronger in battle, or play something soul-crushingly sad to make them give up and lay down to die. This uses the sentiment of a piece to draw out and amplify similar feelings in the listener; if they can't relate to the song's sentiment, it will have no effect on them.
• The Marionette Version of songs work like the above, but strengthen a person's emotions to the point where the musician is able to use the music to control them like a marionette. It increases the target's strength and abilities significantly. Some people are more susceptible to it than others; those unaffected by the marionette control simply experience a surge of emotion based on the song.
Raiel excels at marionetting large groups of people, but the last time he did it was...regrettable, so he has vowed never to abuse it again.
• Summoned spirits are created by or attracted to the call of a particular song. Raiel can summon a large phoenix with Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, for example. This technique is Raiel's main focus, essentially making him the group's summoner. While the other types of Magic Music only stay in effect as long as the music is being played, summoned spirits will remain active as long as the musician keeps a mental focus on the music.
• There is also direct attack music that only works in certain contexts, like requiems that are able to turn the undead to dust, or which can banish magically-summoned monsters. These are highly specialized songs that are only useful in specific instances.
Equipment:
He's also got his distinctive outfit, with the green coat and yellow ascot and fingerless gloves and etc. This is also fireproofed AND heat-shielded. Because Raiel's an idiot who rides around on a giant firebird as his basic mode of transportation.
Roleplay Sample - Third Person:
Test drive thread with Mint
Roleplay Sample - Network: [Audio/Handwritten]
[Russel, stuck in detention, has absentmindedly doodled that number stuck in his head onto his math notes. So the first thing that appears are pre-calculus notes interspersed with doodles of popular S&M characters.]
[this is followed by a loud exclamation of surprise and the sound of metal scraping against tile and an ensuing crash. Then a possibly familiar female teacher's voice shouting admonishingly from across the room: "Russel!"]
YES MA'AM SORRY MA'AM. [sounds of a chair being righted, and then the oppressive stillness of a detention hall. Also, the notebook being slammed shut, which just muffles the silence.]
[a moment later, he realizes he can't do his homework without his notes and opens it back up. But, um, his notes are covered in other things right now, so he can't really use them anyway…?!]
[handwritten: ] Whatever you are, do you think you could maybe get out of my math notes? I'm trying to do my homework and it's really distracting!
Any Questions? None!
I do have a supplemental network sample in case that one's not enough to show his characterization. It's old but the threads are a pretty good example of what Raiel's like.
SORRY I JUST HAVE TROUBLE COLD-WRITING POSTS AND WANT TO COVER MY BASES
Name: The Guindo
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact: theguindo@gmail.com,
IC Information:
Name: Original: Raiel ; Reincarnation: Russel Goldman
Canon and medium: Violinist of Hameln; manga
Age: 20
Reincarnation age: 17 [11/24/1996]
Preincarnation Species:
Preincarnation Appearance: Full-body reference (far-right), colour reference (top-right, the dude in green).
Blond hair, brown eyes, 5'9" tall. He has a collection of miscellaneous scars from encounters with Mazoku. Most notable are a pair of aligned scars through his hands from getting them speared to his piano, and one through his stomach from throwing himself on a sword. (The injuries are canon but scars are never mentioned/shown one way or the other.)
Any differences: He now dresses like a normal human being in modern-day America, but his fashion sense when it comes anything fancier than "casual-everyday wear" might be...slightly outdated.
Preincarnated History: Raiel grew up in the town of Anthem, the mayor's only child. One day, he came across a group of bullies picking on a boy who'd recently moved into a house on the outskirts of town. Raiel chased away the bullies and befriended the boy, whose name was Hamel.
Hamel lived alone with his mother, Pandora. Pandora, the Demon King Chestra's wife, the witch who had unleashed the evil and monstrous race of Mazoku upon the world, the woman responsible for humanity's suffering and terror under Mazoku rule. She was loathed by humans and hunted by Mazoku, and as long as Hamel had been alive, he'd lived in hiding with only his mother for company.
Raiel became the first person to treat the two of them kindly, and his parents welcomed Pandora and Hamel as friends. Pandora showed her gratitude by teaching Raiel how to play Magic Music on his family's piano. For a time, things were peaceful.
Until that fateful day that the Mazoku came to Anthem. They told the townspeople that if they handed over Pandora and Hamel, they would leave peacefully. Rightfully terrified, the townspeople did as the Mazoku asked. Raiel and his parents tried to stop them, but to no avail. Pandora was captured, trapped in a crystal and taken north to the Mazoku capital, and Hamel, in his grief and rage, was overtaken by his Mazoku blood.
Hamel slaughtered the people of Anthem. Only Raiel was spared.
Watching his best friend murder his parents along with everyone he'd ever known was understandably traumatic. When Hamel regained his senses and turned to Raiel with his grief, Raiel turned his back on Hamel and left him alone with the corpses of Anthem.
Orphaned at a very young age, Raiel quickly discovered that he could not rely on the charity of strangers in this harsh world. He learned how to make himself useful and worked to earn his keep wherever he could. He moved from town to town, trying to never overstay his welcome.
At the age of 12, he hit a breaking point. The world was harsh and cruel, and people had no sympathy for those who'd suffered at the hands of the Mazoku because, well, hadn't everyone? He decided that was no way for humanity to live. People needed to be reminded of the power of love and kindness.
Raiel returned to Anthem, took the magical golden piano from his family's house, and styled himself into "The Hero of Love, Golden Piano Player Raiel." He traveled the countryside, fighting off Mazoku and selflessly helping out wherever he could, to remind people that there was hope to be found in kindness. He never asked to be compensated for his deeds, declaring that love was the only payment he needed.
There were ulterior motives in his sappy goals, though. Raiel chose to blame Hamel for the atrocities of the Mazoku. He declared vengeance against Hamel, and his wandering was also an attempt to hunt him down and kill him. Behind the veneer of love was a well of hatred for the Mazoku and for Hamel.
When he did finally find Hamel, he basically lost it and threw his whole goody-two-shoes act out the window and turned into a cackling villain. He used his Magic Music to brainwash an entire town into turning on Hamel, and even tried to force Hamel's Designated Love Interest, Flute, to kill him. Buuut the manga is not called Pianist of Raielin so as you might have guessed this did not turn out as planned.
After his attempt to murder Hamel was foiled, he decided to tag along with the group. At first he said it was to keep tabs on Hamel, but before long it became clear that their friendship was rekindling. Hamel's goal was to travel north to the Mazoku stronghold to kill their king--his father. Raiel was totally down for that.
And then 35 volumes of shounen manga happened. To sum it up, the group traveled north, picking up a few other party members along the way, on a journey fraught with danger and peppered with battles against the Mazoku forces. Truths were learned, hardships were faced, and friendships were forged. You know, the usual stuff.
AND THEN A FINALE HAPPENED. Literally all the armies of the world united to assault the Mazoku stronghold, and the main characters (including Raiel) rushed into the Demon King Chestra's castle to face him. They rescued Hamel's mother from the crystal she'd been imprisoned in, and then they all got together and performed an orchestral rendition of Ode to Joy that utterly decimated the Mazoku armies and defeated Chestra once and for all.
And it was fucking amazing.
The end.
Reincarnated History: Russel is the only child of the Goldman family. They live in a nice suburban neighbourhood in Locke City, where they moved shortly before he was born. They own a four-year-old Australian shepherd named Tchaikovsky. She is adorable.
His mother, Patricia Goldman, has been in politics all his life, and is currently serving her second term as the State Comptroller. His father, Samuel Goldman, is a stay-at-home dad who writes unpopular children's books. They have money but live modestly, not wanting to distance themselves too far from their middle-class roots.
His parents were determined that Russel would have the full childhood experience of the average American boy, and so he attends a public school where he is a model student and a member of the football team and drama club. He's currently in his junior year.
He's always had a fondness for music, but unfortunately he is completely tone-deaf and has no musical inclination whatsoever. His father tried to teach him guitar and his mother tried to teach him the flute, but he failed miserably with both. He is vaguely aware of what the symbols mean on sheet music but he can't read it for the life of him. He's had to settle for having an absolutely massive collection songs on his iPod.
First Echo: When the city's drinking water was tainted by a contaminant that affected only reincarnates, Russel at first managed to slip by without being affected due to his family's water supply coming from a different reservoir. That did not hold for the water supply at school. He got hit by his first Echo in third period, after stopping at the water fountain in between classes.
What he received was Raiel's affinity for dramatic inspirational speeches. He was also sent to the principal's office because he wouldn't stop laughing in class and got a detention for being disruptive. IT WAS TERRIBLE.
Preincarnation Personality: On the surface, Raiel seems like a weirdo spaz...and, frankly, that's true. He's short-tempered and comically violent, has melodramatic mood swings at the drop of a hat, and freaks out about the weirdest, most minor things. He seems like someone whose life is largely lived inside his own head with little regard for objective reality.
That part, at least, is deceptive. While Raiel does have a tendency to spin elaborate fantasy scenarios and get lost in his own imagination, he's actually a surprisingly intelligent, perceptive, and insightful person. He's well-traveled and worldly, with a wealth of acquired knowledge, and has been living on his own long enough to be extremely self-sufficient. He's excellent at reading people and can spot emotionally tense situations that seem to fly under everyone else's radar--when he's paying attention. But he's paying attention a lot more than he seems to be.
Raiel cares very deeply for people, both individually and in general. He is sympathetic to the hardships of others and will do everything in his power to make life just a little bit better for everyone he encounters. He stands up for those who can't stand up for themselves, and he hates bullies--which the Mazoku most certainly are, in his book. He tries to inspire hope and confidence (usually through cheesy and/or dramatic inspirational speeches), and leads by example by being kind, generous, and hardworking. The worst feeling for him is knowing he can't do anything to help someone.
Because he spent his childhood trying as hard as possible to avoid being a burden on an already burdened society, he learned to hide his pain and pretend nothing was wrong. He doesn't want people to feel obligated to care about his hardships when they're so busy worrying about their own. This leads him to smile and brush off his own feelings in favour of focusing on others. Of course, this only applies for serious issues. He's more than willing to fall into melodramatic displays of despair over things that don't actually matter.
This, unfortunately, means he is very bad at coping. He doesn't cope. He bottles up his pain and shoves it aside so he doesn't have to deal with it, which means that he never processes and overcomes it. This leads him to hold grudges, and to let negative feelings fester in the back of his heart. Raiel is not a very mentally healthy person. He is filled with hate for the Mazoku and what they've done to the world--and to himself and Hamel personally--and all he needs is the right excuse to turn that hatred elsewhere. For all his talk of love and kindness, he seems oddly predisposed toward cackling villainy given the appropriate circumstances.
He has a flair for the dramatic, particularly of the over-the-top shounen AND shoujo hero varieties. Actually, for a shounen hero, Raiel takes an awful lot of his inspiration from shoujo tropes. His idea of romance comes almost entirely from shoujo comics (some...how...in a world without shoujo comics). He likes to think he's a romantic but he's actually a super fuckin dork who can't talk to girls at all. In fact he is so bad at it that the merest hint of sexiness or romance is enough to give him a severe nosebleed.
Yes, Raiel gets life-threatening gag nosebleeds about cutesy shoujo fantasies. And he is a shounen hero so you know he has to lose A LOT of blood before it's actually life-threatening. These nosebleeds are embarrassing and he is deeply ashamed of them. Rather than, you know, being concerned for his well-being or anything silly like that.
Any differences: Russel's core personality is pretty close to Raiel's. He is still a total melodramatic spaz who flips out over the weirdest shit, but he mostly manages to come off as an outgoing, hardworking, friendly person whom other people's parents call 'just the nicest boy.'
He is WAY more mentally healthy than Raiel. Even though he also doesn't talk about his problems much, that's because he has perspective and realizes that his upper-middle-class problems aren't as bad as other people's. When he is having serious issues, he can usually talk to his dad about it, and has a few close friends to go to if his dad's not the right choice. However, as with Raiel, he will flip out dramatically over incredibly minor things and then get over it in a matter of minutes.
He will befriend literally anybody, even--and especially--if they seem resistant to it. He's collected a lot of friends out of the pool of kids who are ostracized for being different. That usually happens when he sees them getting picked on and jumps in to tell the bullies to knock it off. He does this a lot. He has gotten into fights. He has been suspended a couple times because the school had no other choice. He doesn't care because he knows he was doing the right thing, and his parents share that opinion.
He does not hate strongly like Raiel does, and is much more forgiving. For example, he's actually gone back and made friends with a few of those bullies he got into fights with, because he took the time to be sympathetic and figure out what was so wrong in their lives that they had to act out and bully others.
Unlike Raiel, Russel, of course, does not suffer from life-threatening gag nosebleeds at the merest thought of holding hands with a girl. He can talk to girls just fine, though not without some social fumbling around the ones he likes.
Instead of taking all his dramatic inspiration from shoujo manga, he takes it from jRPGs and anime. Oh yeah, for all the jock/prep/model student display he's got going on, Russel is still a huge fuckin dork. He's in online RPs, he plays MMOs, he's way into melodramatic overwrought faux-philosophical-look-at-how-deep-it-is animanga and video games. He doesn't get lost in extended daydream scenarios the way Raiel does, but you could call the RPing an outlet for a similar tendency.
He has an obsessive love for music and will listen to anything and everything. His iPod is his life. He has a playlist for every occasion. He can talk your ear off about music so you probably don't want to get him started.
He gets typecast into villain roles in drama club because of his hammy melodramatic overacting. He wishes he could be cast as the hero just once.
Abilities:
Shounen Protagonist:
Basically, I am playing the tropes straight. Even though these are not technically stated powers, they are demonstrably shown over the course of the manga.
Super-human strength and durability. He carries around a 500kg solid gold piano on his back, has survived 10-story falls with the piano landing on top of him, and has held his own in a fistfight against Hamel's Mazoku strength. He was also stabbed through the hands and recovered his full piano-playing ability within, what, a couple days? Jeez.
Super-human blood volume because holy shit have you seen how much this kid can bleed. There's a joke at one point about how the black shadow creeping across the page's background is actually a pool of blood from his nosebleed. Basically he can lose several pints of blood and be perfectly fine, and recovers from blood-loss much faster than should be possible.
Magic Music:
Raiel is a musical genius and a master pianist of unparalleled skill. He has perfect pitch, can play 4-hand songs 2-handed, can play any song by ear, can sight-read/sight-play from sheet music, and can play any song from memory once he's learned it. He knows how to tune a piano and can do it by ear. He is also highly knowledgeable about classical composers and their life histories, which he needs to put the pieces he plays into context.
Magic Music draws upon the emotions behind a composition to affect the hearts of those listening. Using Magic Music requires an understanding of a song's power, which means the more you know about a piece's meaning and context, the more effective you can make it. Without understanding the music's origins, you cannot understand how it is meant to affect people. Magic Music has no effect on those who cannot hear it, whether they're hearing impaired or simply plugging their ears.
Magic Music can be used in a few different ways:
• Affecting a person's emotions can be considered the standard bard-class buff/debuff skill. You can play a battle anthem to make people stronger in battle, or play something soul-crushingly sad to make them give up and lay down to die. This uses the sentiment of a piece to draw out and amplify similar feelings in the listener; if they can't relate to the song's sentiment, it will have no effect on them.
• The Marionette Version of songs work like the above, but strengthen a person's emotions to the point where the musician is able to use the music to control them like a marionette. It increases the target's strength and abilities significantly. Some people are more susceptible to it than others; those unaffected by the marionette control simply experience a surge of emotion based on the song.
Raiel excels at marionetting large groups of people, but the last time he did it was...regrettable, so he has vowed never to abuse it again.
• Summoned spirits are created by or attracted to the call of a particular song. Raiel can summon a large phoenix with Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, for example. This technique is Raiel's main focus, essentially making him the group's summoner. While the other types of Magic Music only stay in effect as long as the music is being played, summoned spirits will remain active as long as the musician keeps a mental focus on the music.
• There is also direct attack music that only works in certain contexts, like requiems that are able to turn the undead to dust, or which can banish magically-summoned monsters. These are highly specialized songs that are only useful in specific instances.
Equipment:
- A baby grand piano. Not just ANY baby grand piano. It is:
- Magic
- Holy
- Solid gold
- Waterproofed up to 100 meters
- Fireproofed up to 50,000 F
- Modified with a harness that allows him to carry it on his back and swing it down into a playing position
- Surprisingly sturdy and damage-resistant
He's also got his distinctive outfit, with the green coat and yellow ascot and fingerless gloves and etc. This is also fireproofed AND heat-shielded. Because Raiel's an idiot who rides around on a giant firebird as his basic mode of transportation.
Roleplay Sample - Third Person:
Test drive thread with Mint
Roleplay Sample - Network: [Audio/Handwritten]
[Russel, stuck in detention, has absentmindedly doodled that number stuck in his head onto his math notes. So the first thing that appears are pre-calculus notes interspersed with doodles of popular S&M characters.]
[this is followed by a loud exclamation of surprise and the sound of metal scraping against tile and an ensuing crash. Then a possibly familiar female teacher's voice shouting admonishingly from across the room: "Russel!"]
YES MA'AM SORRY MA'AM. [sounds of a chair being righted, and then the oppressive stillness of a detention hall. Also, the notebook being slammed shut, which just muffles the silence.]
[a moment later, he realizes he can't do his homework without his notes and opens it back up. But, um, his notes are covered in other things right now, so he can't really use them anyway…?!]
[handwritten: ] Whatever you are, do you think you could maybe get out of my math notes? I'm trying to do my homework and it's really distracting!
Any Questions? None!
I do have a supplemental network sample in case that one's not enough to show his characterization. It's old but the threads are a pretty good example of what Raiel's like.
SORRY I JUST HAVE TROUBLE COLD-WRITING POSTS AND WANT TO COVER MY BASES