Application for Neo Sapien

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PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Matatabi
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Yep.
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: NA.
CONTACT: matatabibito @ Plurk.
CHARACTERS PLAYED: None yet!

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Nie Huaisang.
CANON: Modao Zushi aka The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation aka The Untamed... this series has a lot of names and a lot of versions (novel/animation/live action TV/comic/etc) but they're all more or less the same.
CANON REFERENCE: Wiki.
AGE: He's about 30 in canon, but I'm going to say late 20s to early 30s to allow for some wiggle room if canonmates appear.
GENDER: Male.

CHARACTER TYPE: Meta-human.
APPEARANCE: He belongs in a shampoo commercial.

PERSONALITY:
In canon, Huaisang spends most of his early life in the shadow of his elder brother Mingjue, the imposing leader of a powerful warrior clan. As the next in line to rule, Huaisang is sent off to study at a prestigious academy, but very little is expected of him. After all, it's almost unthinkable that anything could happen to Mingjue, so the spare heir is relatively free to indulge his artistic hobbies. He collects painted fans, writes sentimental poetry, and whiles away his afternoons watching birds in the gardens. Surrounded by geniuses and the scions of prominent families, Huaisang is notable for his lack of achievements or ambitions. He lags far behind his peers when it comes to the development of his magical abilities, but his easygoing, non-threatening demeanor allows him to ingratiate himself among opposing factions and play the role of peacemaker.

While Huaisang is a mediocre student and a terrible swordsman, he displays a keen social intelligence - whenever there's mischief at the school, he's usually behind it. He happily supplies his classmates with contraband liquor, naughty novels and salacious gossip, asking for nothing but their goodwill in return. He accumulates debts and favors while seeming to helplessly rely on everyone around him... and when his schemes are found out, he makes sure that the blame always falls on someone else. While Huaisang knows that he'll never equal his brother's physical or magical strength, there are other, more subtle forms of power that he can use to protect himself.

Huaisang clashes with his stern, warlike older brother, but they genuinely care for each other... and in many ways, they're surprisingly similar. Both are fiercely dedicated to their clan, and haven't quite abandoned the family's working-class-get-it-done roots despite generations of wealth and power. Both believe in keeping friends close, enemies closer, and useful friends closest of all. Both are willing to sacrifice their own reputations for the sake of pursuing justice. And both are willing to use other people to achieve their goals.

When Mingjue dies under suspicious circumstances, Huaisang initiates a decade-long secret plot to destroy the man he suspects of orchestrating his brother's death. For this, he'll need the help of the smartest person he knows: his former classmate, Wei Wuxian. The only problem is that Wei Wuxian is 1.) a traitor, 2.) a necromancer, and 3.) very much dead. Huaisang, through methods that are unexplained in canon but probably involve dabbling in a bit of forbidden magic himself, arranges for a secret necromancy text to fall into the hands of a mentally unstable young man and tricks him into sacrificing his own body to resurrect Wei Wuxian. He then uses his own brother's dismembered, demonically possessed corpse to lead Wei Wuxian towards solving the murder. If a few innocent people are killed, driven to suicide, or suffer irrevocable psychological harm in the process... well, Huaisang can put on his best wibbly face and deny all knowledge of what happened. His catch phrase is a plaintive "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!"

Maybe he truly believes that his hands are clean. There are hints, though, that Huaisang feels trapped by a familial duty that forces to commit terrible violence that goes against his basic nature. He's frequently shown with caged birds - specifically myna birds, who are skilled at mimicking human speech.

In this AU, Huaisang's personality will be largely the same, but he'll have a deep-seated distrust towards meta-humans due to reasons that will be explained in his history section. In truth, most of his unease around metas is due to him projecting his fears about his own hidden (and totally uncontrolled) meta-human heritage onto other people. He knows that his bias is unfair, and he tries to hide it... but that's not always possible.

POWERS & ABILITIES:
Huaisang's canon powers aren't really explained, and it's debatable whether he has powers at all. In the series, wizards known as "cultivators" have a range of mystical abilities including telepathic control over swords, flight, summoning spirits, and extended lifespans, but Huaisang never openly does any of these things (aside from maybe looking younger than a typical 30-year-old). This is because his family practices a type of magic that causes the user to gradually become possessed by the violent spirits of their swords. Huaisang refuses to even touch a weapon. However, it's implied that he has at least some knowledge of necromancy... although it's uncertain whether he actually practices it.

In this AU, I'm giving him a latent, largely untrained meta-human ability that manifests as magnetokinesis - the ability to control magnetic materials and magnetic fields (it's, uh, sorta close to controlling magical flying swords, right?). At full strength, he could deflect bullets or control deadly whirling blades within a radius of about 40-50 feet. However, due to his fear of invoking his family's hereditary madness, he's never trained his ability and he avoids using it consciously. When he's stressed, his control slips and he begins to generate a magnetic field that causes nearby metal objects to tremble. In moments of life-or-death desperation, his power activates with explosive force, capable of twisting and tearing through solid steel. It's brute force, instinctive self-preservation. Whether he's controlling one metal object or a whole array of improvised weapons, he can't do much more than blindly fling them at enemies. Theoretically, Huaisang's magnetic power could extend to electromagnetism, but he lacks the will or technical understanding to even consider using his talent in such a way.

Huaisang comes from a family of meta-humans, but their power is unstable and overuse harms the user. At first, the effects include fatigue, temporary irritability and insomnia, but regular continued use leads to severe mood swings, paranoia, aggression and death. If Huaisang uses his power, he'll experience a proportional level of exhaustion and anxiety for the next 24 hours or so. The growth and usability of his power are strongly limited by his fear of his meta-human abilities, so any further development would be contingent on him finding a cure to the madness.

Noteworthy personal skills include:

• Traditional painting and calligraphy, among other artistic pursuits.
• Managing business, personnel and finance, although he doesn't particularly enjoy it. He has solid leadership skills under his feigned helplessness.
• Being rich. He inherited a successful company so he has money to throw around.
• He's surprisingly good with computers, or at least his Google-fu is strong. He no hacker, but he knows how to hide his tracks from the average security scan.
• Having fabulous hair that's always silky smooth.
• Being a stealth manipulative bastard.

AU HISTORY:
Nie Huaisang's ancestors were once butchers in rural China, but over generations their family business, Qinghe Foods, has grown into a major producer of synthetic meats and other engineered food products. Qinghe is a subsidary of the Douman Zaibatsu (like virtually every other company in the biotech industry). Huaisang serves as CEO, having inherited the company after his older brother's untimely death several years prior. However, he's rumored to be an idiot who's more interested in poetry and paintings than in running an international biotech company. The continued growth of Qinghe Foods seems to indicate that he has a talent for hiring competent underlings, if nothing else. Huaisang is free to devote most his time to his art collection and his pet birds.

But the Nie family hides a dark secret... an unstable meta-human lineage that drives those affected by its curse to madness and death. For generations, a few among the butcher clan have been born with a magnetokinetic power that allows them to control the blades of their ancestral trade. Or perhaps it is the blades that control their users - all of those with the talent have inevitably given in to uncontrollable bloodlust. This deadly skill served the family well during its rise within the business world, where criminal gangs operate as extensions of corporate power and the ability to foil an assassination attempt or sabotage a rival company's machinery gave them an edge over the competition. Unfortunately, power has always come at the cost of slow mental and physical deterioration. Huaisang's father had already developed the recklessness and violence that characterize the later stage of the disease at the time of his death in a hunting accident.

Huaisang was born the younger of the family's two sons - although Huaisang was the product of an extramarital affair, he was always close to his brother, Mingjue. Mingjue, who took over the leadership of the Qinghe Corporation after their father's death, had a ruthless business acumen that was tempered by a strong sense of honor. While he could be an unyielding disciplinarian, his genuine affection for his younger sibling was never in doubt. Mingjue believed that the family affliction could be controlled through a strict regimen of meditation and exercise, so when he realized that both he and Huaisang bore meta-human abilities, he forced his brother to study swordplay and military strategy. Huaisang preferred the fine arts over the martial arts, though, leading to constant friction between the brothers. Where Mingjue was determined and authoritative, Huaisang was indecisive, clingy and effete. He collected pretty things, read trashy novels, filled his notebooks with drawings and poems, played childish pranks, and neglected his combat training. The relationship between the siblings grew strained, with Mingjue pushing his brother to harness his power for self-defense and Huaisang protesting that he could avoid the Nie curse simply by not using his meta-human abilities. He wasn't very talented to begin with, so it all seemed like far more trouble than it was worth. Besides, the so-called "curse" had surely been exaggerated, like all the other fearmongering rumors about meta-humans. The Nie family was no more brutal or corrupt than the rest of the wealthy business dynasties operating under the Douman Zaibatsu.

Roughly ten years ago, Mingjue contacted the Neo Sapien Organization in search of way to remove his meta-human abilities. Although a complete cure was never found, deep brain wave stimulation seemed to calm Mingjue's more aggressive tendencies. Huaisang grudgingly participated in the organization's research as well... until Mingjue suffered a sudden and unexplained descent into madness, far faster than the decline of any Nie clan member before him. It almost seemed as if some outside force was stoking the burning rage that consumed him. Any metal object in Mingjue's vicinity became a lethal weapon, and by the time of his death not even Huaisang was safe from his blind violence.

Despite Huaisang's inexperience, he proved to have a keen sense for business management that carried Qinghe Foods through the shock of his brother's untimely death. Within a few years, he'd stabilized the company's finances, improved their standing within the Zaibatsu, and surrounded himself with a team of highly capable administrators... all while maintaining a facade of helpless incompetence. Stability left him with time to ruminate on the strange circumstances of Mingjue's death. He became convinced that someone within the Neo Sapien Organization had deliberately induced his brother's madness as a way of striking against the Zaibatsu. Maybe his brother's murder had been a test... a first step towards a meta-human revolution that would destroy humanity.

But with no evidence, and fearful of exposing his own meta-human nature, Huaisang was in no position to make accusations. Instead, he became an open supporter of the NSO. He contributed to scholarship funds for meta-human schools, and advocated for protected meta-human enclaves within New Gate City - a sort of socially conscious apartheid. Meanwhile, he cultivated NSO connections and let it quietly be known among select organization members that he desperately needed their help. Of course, all of these efforts were carefully calculated to bring him closer to the NSO so he could figure out what really happened to his brother.

[If anyone apps one of his canonmates, feel free to assume that he was involved in resurrecting a certain former schoolmate around this time, and we'll hash out the details later.]

SAMPLES

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