![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bio: The Division and Sixth Iteration
-Haruki Murakami
| PB: | Keisuke Asano |
| Time Zone: | US Mountain |
| Player: | Megan |
| Contact: | DM this journal |
Kira was the promising son and protege of a leader in the Manhattan psychic community, set to inherit his mother’s shop and the brownstone that had been in the family for three generations, home to local psychics and family members from across the globe. He was bright, caring, responsible, but as these things do, everything changed in his teens.
At sixteen, Kira met the boy he hoped to spend the rest of his life with; then he dreamed the fiery end of that life just ten years down the line. He stopped trying at school, and only made it another year before dropping out entirely. He threw himself into New York’s club scene and the exploration of his sexuality, leaving the wards for his empathy at home and numbing with drugs and alcohol instead.
Only ever able to hold Ty at arm’s length, he maintained the friendship even through Ty’s mysterious, four year absence in their twenties, and with his return and the two year deadline on his life, he started to settle down and repair things with his family, though he had no illusions about taking over the business.
The quarantine of New York after the release of the Green Poison virus feels like his logical end, but a last minute decision spares him his fate. See his full history at the bottom of this page for information on his actions during canon.
| Age: | 26 |
| Height: | 5'7" |
| Build: | Thin, compact |
| Eyes: | Dark brown, thin but dark lashes |
| Hair: | Black, messy on top, close cropped on back and sides |
| Dress: | Modern, hip-hop/street style, androgynous, dark or bold colors, bold patterns, skinny jeans and sweat pants |
Kira is here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and he’s never been out of bubblegum before. He’s only recently had to take his life seriously, having found that he might actually have to live it.
Before his mid-teens, teachers praised his intelligence and a surprising, quiet charisma—he excelled at group projects, steered but didn’t lead discussions, and reacted to conflict with easy humor. People expected great things from him, saw the seeds of a life that would be well-lived, a boy who would heal as many hearts as he broke—and saw the green shoots of those seeds die in a sudden frost.
He made friends who weren’t really friends, just people to dance and get high with. He skipped class, barely graduated, shrugged off guidance counselors and distraught parents with the same airy smiles and easy attitude. He wasn’t worried about it—why should they be?
Living without a care doesn’t mean he’s been living without empathy, though. It’s because he cares about others that he doesn’t let them close, doesn’t make himself important to their lives, doesn’t let them think he’s frightened, or hurting. Everything his mother told him about putting on a show—hiding his very real gifts, letting people think he’s all spectacle without substance—he puts into his daily life. He’s a placid lake with flirtatious waves—possessing hidden depths of occult power and absolute fucking terror, numbing despair, and a desperate desire to matter before he’s gone.
And he did—he did matter to Ty, but not enough for Ty to stay when he asked, or the universe to let him finish saving him before it turned inside-out. Kira doesn’t know if he can do it again, if he can show anyone the bad when he’s so good at shoving it under the rug, and people have been so good at dismissing or shying away from it.
Kira is a performer, struggling to decide what’s left now that the curtain’s dropped on a ten-year show. There are no more parties, no more doomsday dreams, and his audience is made up of strangers. He’s going to have to decide if that’s what he wants them to always be, when he might be stuck with them for the rest of a natural life.
| Status: | Bereaved / Single |
| Sexuality: | Kinsey 4 |
| Alignment: | True Neutral |
| Hometown: | New York City |
Levels vary based on game rules, but Kira is a psychic and empath, unable to read minds but tuned into probability and emotions. He is gifted in tarot reading and has some training in purification and exorcism rituals, can read omens best in his hometown of New York, and understands basic palm-reading techniques.
Kira is a decent cook, excels at de-escalating situations and talking his way out of things, and displays an above-average intelligence despite only having a GED. His areas of knowledge focus on the occult, mythology, human psychology, and some knowledge of home-remedies and alternative medicine. Due to having to dramatize readings at the shop, Kira is also skilled at sleight of hand. Kira has a decent singing voice, but he doesn't use it often.
| Backtag: | Ask |
| 4th Wall: | No |
| Threadjack: | Ask |
| Mindread: | Yes |
| Fight: | Yes |
| Romance: | Yes |
| Hug/Kiss: | Yes |
| Injure: | Yes |
| Kill: | Not if death is permanent; ask |
| Age IG: | 27 |
| Scrubs: | Black |
| Status: | Single |
| Home: | House 22 |
| Pets: | Aurora (German Shepherd), Hoshi (Crow), Bethany Esda (Goat) |
Canon History, original 6I Canon Point
His mother took over the shop between the birth of her son and daughter, updating it with neon window signs and a bit more of the crystal and sage fanfare her new customers seemed to expect. When Kira showed signs of the gift, she tried to impress upon him how people could prefer the spectacle to the real deal, how to walk the line between entertainingly cryptic and terrifying prophecy.
Kira, in turn, pulled the shop into the 21st century, setting up a website to sell simple wares and a stream for online readings and horoscopes. He knew his mother needed a way to stay current, to reach people without the shop, and he knew he wouldn’t always be there to help her. Starting on his sixteenth birthday, he began having dreams of fire and metal, of screaming crowds, of snow falling through pluming smoke over a broken Manhattan skyline. He wasn’t going to live to take over the shop—the shop wasn’t going to be there to take over. Most teenagers feel invincible, even at their lowest points, but Kira took it to an extreme—he knew his expiration date, and he vacillated between desperate emotional need and complete withdrawal from those around him.
He hooked up, never dated; partied hard, dabbled in drugs, drowned in his mother’s smothering concern. Of course she knew, of course they didn’t talk about it. She made excuses to his father for his poor grades, his lack of ambition. He hid behind the accomplishments of his younger sister and found an apartment several blocks away to better hide his unsavory lifestyle. He went through grief in stages, mourned his own death, and in his twenties started to settle down. Before the pandemic, he’d started working at the shop more, partying less. His mother taught him to cook, and he divided his time between his family and his best friend, the son of a long term client his mother visited on the East End.
Ty’s mother had been bedridden as long as Kira had known him—it was why Kira knew him, accompanying his mother across the city for private readings in the vertically sprawling house. They were from different worlds: the doomed son of immigrants on a destructive spiral and the soft son of privilege. Ty liked to ride down to Chelsea and busk with a guitar for money he’d just give away later; Kira liked to talk a lot of shit and invite him to family dinners. Kira wanted to hook up with people he didn’t have to know, and Ty wanted to take him on a proper date.
Kira made him pick a card, any card, every time he asked. Ty picked the Three of Swords, and Kira shot him down. It was an old joke. It wasn’t a joke at all: three swords piercing a heart, a warning of disaster and grief.
In 2015, the crows came to roost—literally. They crowded the fire escape of the shop, the gates of the park. They turned up dead with threatening letters at the front door, and the buskers and tourists seemed to filter through the block on a loop, faces repeating, an acid burn fraying the edges of Kira’s intuitive paranoia. Summer waned to Fall, and clients came in with increasingly dire futures in their spreads. Kira moved his parents into his own apartment and closed the shop that September, over a month before the smallpox strain known as Green Poison infected Black Friday shoppers. He has yet to learn that the cell responsible for the bioterrorist attack on Manhattan had gutted and made use of his family’s building.
Green Poison swept through Manhattan, and in all his dreams of fire and the endless dark, he hadn’t imagined his loved ones could go with him. He stopped living like he was dying and started focusing on their survival. When Ty revealed he hadn’t left New York for college several years back, but to train with an elite force known as The Division for deployment in emergency situations, he buried his resentment and asked Ty to get his family out. They were able to secure seats on a first wave of evac helicopters, thanks to Kira’s early efforts to keep them isolated and healthy enough to pass the quarantine checks, and Kira was expected to leave with them.
Everything changed, as the kids say, when the Fire Nation attacked.
Rogue agents and a group of former sanitation workers known as The Cleaners interrupted the evac with mortars and flamethrowers. It was a violent response to the possibility of carriers making for the mainland, and one that his parents thankfully escaped. The chopper Kira had been on wasn’t so lucky, taking mortar fire and falling into the river in a ball of fire and metal. Here were the flames he’d sometimes felt on his face, staring into the horizon of a new day. This was the nightmare he’d had for ten years, the end of all things—
Except, he’d given up his seat.
A woman had been seated across from him with her son, and they’d been in tears, reaching helplessly back for an elderly woman in the crowd. She insisted they go first, and knowing there was little chance he’d survive this day—the crowds, the snow, the fires in the distance—Kira had climbed back down into the despairing crowds, and the woman had taken his place. He didn’t die. In the subsequent flight from attacking Cleaners, in the chaotic week wandering quarantined Manhattan, he survived.
What the fuck was he supposed to do now?
Manhattan was imploding around him, and he was fretting about his sense of self, his purpose gone blurry, his future vague. He had his best friend’s parka, a deck of tarot cards, and a pack of gum. The cards said to find his friend; the bodies and gunfire around him said to get the fuck inside and live off oyster crackers and dry cup noodles for as long as he possibly could. Kira chose the cards, following his intuition deeper into the infected areas and territory disputes, until Ty found him near an abandoned safehouse, stubbornly refusing to give up his parka to looters.
Maybe it was the pressure of the situation, maybe it was the possibility of seeing thirty—maybe it was just his best friend back from boot camp, filling out a bulletproof vest and cultivating some impressive stubble—but Kira broke his own rules over the months of occupation and quarantine. Ty was welcome at his boarded up apartment between missions, and they approximated life for hours at a time, boiling rations and keeping each other warm the old fashioned way. He didn’t do feelings; Ty was supposed to leave behind all attachments for his work, deploy where he was told and put the lives of civilians ahead of his own. After seven years of holding him at arms length, slowly freezing and starving in a gutted brownstone, Kira didn’t care. It was easier, to narrow his attention to one person, to survive for love until he found something better.
He had his parka, his cards, his best friend. He could lay any of them across his couch, not yet burned for warmth, and breathe easy, confident they’d make it through another day.
“What would you do if I told you not to go out there,” he asked, shuffling the deck between his palms.
“I’d still go,” Ty admitted. Maybe he didn’t believe in it, maybe playing the hero always involved sacrifice. “If something’s meant to happen, you can’t really fight it, right?”
Kira bit his lip and turned over—over and over. How could he argue with it, when he’d lived that logic for years, when the fire hadn’t gotten him, but the ice might. He didn’t want to fight about it. He didn’t want to be right.
He hated being right.
The dream came at the end of the siege: a nightmare of rusted rebar, ripping flesh, crippling fever. He woke to Ty shaking him, clutched at his arms with sleep-heavy hands, begged him not to go. The lines of rioters and Cleaners had been broken, and it was time to clear the rogue agents out of the Dark Zone, plumb the lost supply lines, establish communication with the outside. It was time for the final push that would get them out of Manhattan, and Ty wouldn’t survive it. Strong, familiar hands pressed Kira back into the bed; someone kissed his forehead, told him to sleep it off, that everything would be alright. When he woke, Ty was gone.
Weeks passed, agents trickled back in from their furlough, carrying fresh supplies with their wounds. After two weeks without word, Kira’s old neighbor Nicky—a Division plant and owner of the garage converted into the neighborhood’s safehouse—went into the Dark Zone after the remaining agents. Ty wasn’t the only agent with a flexible idea of attachments, and Nicky had watched Kira grow up across the street. He brought back Ty several days later, a hole in his side and going septic. Without the proper medication, his chances for recovery were slim, and Nicky wouldn’t risk another team in the collapsing power structures of the city, each faction hitting the streets hard in their death throes.
Kira had his parka, his cards, and his best friend’s pistol. He remembered the safehouse they’d sheltered in months before, knew he was living on borrowed time as it was. The day after Nicky returned, Kira went back out into the crumbling city, trusting his gut to guide him through the violent streets. It took two days of roof access ladders, crouching in dumpsters, and looping the long way into the Dark Zone from the opposite end of the map, but he managed to reach the alley where he was first cornered, a block away from his destination.
A patrol of desperate rioters swept the area, and he laid face down in the snow, patiently playing dead until they passed. He had no idea how to properly fire the gun in his pocket, and he know they’d be less likely to strip a body in the contamination zone. It is at this point, his face going numb and the crunch of their footsteps receding down the alley, that Kira wakes up in the fountain and swims for the surface—stripped of his sentimental supplies and most of his powers, subject to a fate even he could not predict.