Post by Wesker Atkinson on Aug 22, 2019 0:49:43 GMT -4
Wesker Atkinson
BASIC INFORMATION
Hero/Vigilante/Villain alias: N/A
Player Name: Coyotebreath
Faceclaim/Series: Yamaguchi from “Haikyuu!!”
Age: 16
Gender: Male
Affiliation: Civilian
Height: 1.6m
Weight: 52kg
Hair/Style: Messy, but straight, black and short; hair usually smells earthy but not unpleasant.
Skin/Scars: Slightly sunburned and pasty white with a short story in each bruise.
Eyes: After discovering his quirk, his natural eye color changed from brown to dull yellow
Notables: Sometimes after shifting back to human form he retains a slight fang-like overbite. This is because he retains the wrong size canines if he doesn’t notice and correct it.
Player Name: Coyotebreath
Faceclaim/Series: Yamaguchi from “Haikyuu!!”
Age: 16
Gender: Male
Affiliation: Civilian
Height: 1.6m
Weight: 52kg
Hair/Style: Messy, but straight, black and short; hair usually smells earthy but not unpleasant.
Skin/Scars: Slightly sunburned and pasty white with a short story in each bruise.
Eyes: After discovering his quirk, his natural eye color changed from brown to dull yellow
Notables: Sometimes after shifting back to human form he retains a slight fang-like overbite. This is because he retains the wrong size canines if he doesn’t notice and correct it.
APPEARANCE AND PERSONALITY
Appearance: Wes is a pasty-white, multiracial troublemaker like his brother, and is almost done with his teenage years. He has a few more of his mother’s features that make him seem just a bit more Japanese rather than British, but none of those features really would help him fit in to any region of Japan too well. He carries his black hair fairly short and it stays straight naturally. He occasionally works out the knots with his hands, especially to contrast his brother’s laissez-faire approach to managing his similar head of hair. Wes is built like a short stick and seeing him from a side angle might convince you that a light-breeze going by might sweep him away.
Wes wears whatever he can find that’s durable and doesn’t impede his movements. Heavily worn street clothes are a usual for him. He tries not to stand out in any crowd, and usually chooses his attire to make sure of that. But on occasion when he’s comfortable and no one else is around, he might wear a dull red soda brand t-shirt he found left draped over a barbed wire fence that looks like bleach was spilled on it. If you asked about it for some reason, he’d probably say “This is the stain from that time we were running from a bunch of kids out for revenge and they threw a golf club at me in the laundromat! My brother shoved me out of the way, yelling ‘FOUR!’ as I collided into an open container of bleach. Yeah...that was hilarious." Whatever he wears gets scuffed-up, scraped and stained fairly regularly, so he tries to avoid plain white shirts. The boots he wears are sturdy and good for hiking and probably parkour. Heavily-worn jeans are the only thing found readily that are sturdy enough to support his lifestyle choices.
POSITIVE
✔ Crafty, practical, knowledgeable, strategic, fun-loving, imaginative
NEGATIVE
✖ Self-depreciative, dependent, insecure, indecisive, guilty
LIKES
✔ Blending into crowds, light-hearted mischief, rotisserie chicken, dilapidated buildings, campfires
DISLIKES
✖ Wealthy people, deafening silences, blame, willful ignorance, loud noises
Personality:
Wes is the spunky older (and smaller) brother of the Atkinson family. He couldn't help being a bit of a quick learner, which quickly chalked him up to be the “smart one”. His brother would be often intellectually left behind and make up for it by muscling for rank playfully. With his analytical side sticking with him into his teenage years, it came with a tendency to overthink problems and made it hard to accomplish difficult things under pressure. Often these were problems with a simple solution that his brother would bluntly point out. He would compare himself to his brother often and feel insignificant. For a variety of reasons, he is still a bit ashamed of his quirk and sits in starry-eyed admiration of Bishop’s Barghest. He has been through a few tough life transitions, and his brother had always been there to give him stability and a reality check. Without fully realizing it, being around his brother can be the only thing between mental stability and a nervous breakdown in the face of hardship. When he’s in a comfortable head-space, his active imagination and unique way of describing things becomes noticeable. He tends to laugh about things a lot and has the positive energy to entice people around him to laugh when he is out of his shell. Under a guarded exterior is just a dork with fox powers, really. He likes exploring abandoned places for the story in the small details, and compulsively learns about his surroundings as he goes.
Both siblings mostly have their heart in the right place. They never really meant to be in such a position to treat anyone poorly, and make constant strides to mitigate their impact on people when acting underhanded or stealing things for survival. They did so out of necessity for a long time, and shouldered a significant amount of guilt that the both of them coped with in different ways. In Wes’ case, he willingly takes blows to his self-confidence and started making jokes at his own expense more as time went on. He’s simply a work-in-progress of a person.
Wes wears whatever he can find that’s durable and doesn’t impede his movements. Heavily worn street clothes are a usual for him. He tries not to stand out in any crowd, and usually chooses his attire to make sure of that. But on occasion when he’s comfortable and no one else is around, he might wear a dull red soda brand t-shirt he found left draped over a barbed wire fence that looks like bleach was spilled on it. If you asked about it for some reason, he’d probably say “This is the stain from that time we were running from a bunch of kids out for revenge and they threw a golf club at me in the laundromat! My brother shoved me out of the way, yelling ‘FOUR!’ as I collided into an open container of bleach. Yeah...that was hilarious." Whatever he wears gets scuffed-up, scraped and stained fairly regularly, so he tries to avoid plain white shirts. The boots he wears are sturdy and good for hiking and probably parkour. Heavily-worn jeans are the only thing found readily that are sturdy enough to support his lifestyle choices.
POSITIVE
✔ Crafty, practical, knowledgeable, strategic, fun-loving, imaginative
NEGATIVE
✖ Self-depreciative, dependent, insecure, indecisive, guilty
LIKES
✔ Blending into crowds, light-hearted mischief, rotisserie chicken, dilapidated buildings, campfires
DISLIKES
✖ Wealthy people, deafening silences, blame, willful ignorance, loud noises
Personality:
Wes is the spunky older (and smaller) brother of the Atkinson family. He couldn't help being a bit of a quick learner, which quickly chalked him up to be the “smart one”. His brother would be often intellectually left behind and make up for it by muscling for rank playfully. With his analytical side sticking with him into his teenage years, it came with a tendency to overthink problems and made it hard to accomplish difficult things under pressure. Often these were problems with a simple solution that his brother would bluntly point out. He would compare himself to his brother often and feel insignificant. For a variety of reasons, he is still a bit ashamed of his quirk and sits in starry-eyed admiration of Bishop’s Barghest. He has been through a few tough life transitions, and his brother had always been there to give him stability and a reality check. Without fully realizing it, being around his brother can be the only thing between mental stability and a nervous breakdown in the face of hardship. When he’s in a comfortable head-space, his active imagination and unique way of describing things becomes noticeable. He tends to laugh about things a lot and has the positive energy to entice people around him to laugh when he is out of his shell. Under a guarded exterior is just a dork with fox powers, really. He likes exploring abandoned places for the story in the small details, and compulsively learns about his surroundings as he goes.
Both siblings mostly have their heart in the right place. They never really meant to be in such a position to treat anyone poorly, and make constant strides to mitigate their impact on people when acting underhanded or stealing things for survival. They did so out of necessity for a long time, and shouldered a significant amount of guilt that the both of them coped with in different ways. In Wes’ case, he willingly takes blows to his self-confidence and started making jokes at his own expense more as time went on. He’s simply a work-in-progress of a person.
HISTORY
My name's Wesley Atkinson, but honestly I can't handle that name. It sounds way too...British. Please, just settle with calling me Wesker or just Wes. I kinda tailored that name for myself without straying too far from the name my parents gave me. I hope that’s okay with them; I still have a place in my heart for where I grew up, after all.
My brother and I lived a bit too long in a fairly impoverished part of Chicago called Roseland. A place of fairly frequent gang violence and many condemned and abandoned properties. If it wasn't so dangerous it wouldn't have been all that bad, honestly. But that place was ruined by our unfortunate circumstances, and we really shouldn't set foot there again.
When I was about 13 years old, the whole family began to unravel when our Mother got very, very sick. The doctors called it Candida auris, and it apparently invaded her blood-stream. The doctor left us with, “happens a lot around here, but I’m sorry. The treatments should be frequent and they cost a small fortune.” With half of our family’s source of income now incapacitated, and disability trickling like coins in a fountain, our Dad buckled down on job hunting. My brother and I were more or less forced to grow up and scavenge anything we could while we saved up money to keep Mom alive. Dad worked diligently as a bank teller for a few years. It was probably incredibly boring. At least...it probably was until the mobsters in the area decided to break in and flood the place with warning shots and restraining devices. When Dad was the only one on the job who fought back admirably, somehow he earned some respect from the organization and got offered a better “paycheck” so to speak. I guess it was to keep Dad from being a loose end, but he certainly was a hero of the family, even if he might have been lightly forced into it anyways. And in turn, his new line of work began to influence me and bro’s idea of what “normal” was.
If Dad worked for mobsters to earn an honest living by stealing a thing or two here or there…or whatever he actually did at work... then we should be meant to do the same thing! At least...that’s how I ironically assumed DNA worked (it may or may not have been a mental excuse at the time). And there was no turning back when Bishop followed my lead, although ungracefully at first. Bro quickly realized that I was the one meant to sneak around crowds picking pockets. Concealing his...very loud... voice and footsteps alone was a hopeless job. His “talent” for attracting attention led us to combine our strengths. Before our eyes, an entire crowd of people at a stoplight was suddenly a playground for my grubby fingers. The hardest part was picking targets, because people down on their luck rarely deserve more than they already live through. But often the middle-class folk had just a bit to spare and they could probably rebound from a single petty theft. I'd only take cash and put the wallet back, no matter how brave or desperate I felt at the time to try to take more. Blending in with the crowd like a ghost was thrilling, but the guilt was hard to live with…even if every dollar was more food and one step closer to getting Mom to function again.
Eventually Bishop was strong enough and confident enough to convince me to crash underground fighting rings with him. I was really scared at first because the idea sounded extremely reckless, but I quickly realized that the new scheme had the potential to improve everything about our situation. The wallets were hefty because the... sport(?)... attracted many high rollers who seemed to have quite a bit of disposable income. The crowds were even more distracted (and possibly a bit drunk), and my brother could go all out on someone that was already in it for the adrenaline, just like him. Some rings even liked the attention of an unknown fighter showing up without warning and I could actually take some of the stolen money to bet "all in on the feral child weirdo". After all, only the two of us knew who played dirty enough to win reliably. Even when things got just a bit too close on occasion, so I had to get good at fixing up his bruises and scrapes pretty quickly when he refused to help himself. Luckily, he only complained the first few times, given that I'd always wait for a time when no one else was watching.
One day during business as usual out in the pit, what should have been a good pickpocket target suddenly ceased my arm and pulled me in to have a word. It turned out we had some secret admirers, but instead of sending fan mail, the mob thugs grabbed their favorite pair of black sunglasses and hung out in the crowd to chat in person. They told me that we were invited to “HQ” to talk with the boss. I was hesitantly excited as both of us were quickly lead out the doors and thrown into a heavily tinted limo. The confused, disappointed and angry crowd was satiated when one of the thugs threw a Benjamin in the middle of the ring; everyone collapsed on top of it like it was Black Friday.
Rich people and their expensive things were like an alien world that we were exploring for the first time. Wine coolers inside a vehicle? 20 feet of ceiling in every room in the house? So many shiny decorations that you basically need sunglasses indoors? I didn’t really get it, and Bishop didn’t seem to either. Worse, he kept telling me how nervous he was in this whole situation, which was unlike him. I tried to explain that this could be our chance to turn our lives around. Even more so than what we were doing late at night these days.
Despite our worries and doubts, this criminal organization spoke the universal language; we were offered entire trays of buffet food while we waited for the boss to talk with us. It felt like we had never eaten real food before that moment and everything was some crazy dream. After everything seemed to be going well, the dream-like state was short lived. I should have listened to bro and his worries that night.
They pulled a fast one on us. We were suddenly tied us down in our comfy chairs before we could fill up completely and started trying to get information out of us. They wanted to know about our father. Where he goes at what times, the kinds of locks on our front door...they were using our capture as leverage to pressure our Dad to use his knowledge and access to the hospital Mom was in. Apparently they were dabbling in bio-warfare with their enemies. I must have suppressed most of the details because what they were discussing made me sick to think about.
I had legitimately no idea what to do for the first time in my life. Bishop didn’t reveal any information they wanted; he just struggled and demanded a fair fight. The boss walked over to me with his cane in one hand and clutching a glock in the other with his tough raisin fingers. My fragile life was pinned against the cold steel of his weapon pressed against my head. Bishop struggled and yelled more than I had ever seen before. Although this kind of threat would willingly force my most precious secrets out of my mental vaults, I didn’t even have time to say anything. At that moment, my brother found his quirk.
My brother’s entire body stretched and distorted from his old self until the captors were flung across the room like hockey pucks. What stood in Bishop’s place was a huge black-furred dog demon breathing murderous intent. The guards tried a few other times to take control of the situation, but they were all battered around the expensive marble floor and left breathing heavily and most likely passed out. Next, the dog bounded toward the boss like a bulldozer going freeway speeds. The old man had just grabbed a shotgun from under a table behind us in desperation, leaving me between the demon and a man with a shotgun. As the demon sprinted toward its target, my chair was violently knocked over sideways in the process. The boss was tackled full force against the ground and my shoulders collided with the hard floor. The huge dog had him pinned with its large claws close to piercing his limbs all the way through. My body was tightly restrained and vulnerable; the overwhelming fear that prevailed in my mind was that I could be next. In that moment it felt like my brother was gone forever, and there was no where else to go. All I could do was run away from that nightmare or die trying.
The horrendous sound of the shotgun erupted through the room. In the struggle before me, the shells barely missed the demon’s head, but tore off a large piece of the dog’s ear as it reeled back in anguish. Some of the blood from the impact was quickly splashed over my face, and my need to run at all costs activated my quirk that night too. Suddenly I could start flailing my body out of the rope constraints and out of my (now huge) bundle of clothes and I ran stumbling out of the room on all fours. All that was left of me was a cowardly fox with nowhere left to turn to. I never fully processed my quirk activation or anything else that happened that night. I think I jumped out an open window. An endless cascade of branches hitting my face and a cloud of constant foreign information was all I could remember. After I got away I must have slept close to 16 hours that night...
I woke up alone in an abandoned animal den feeling small, defenseless and completely unlike myself. I sat there for some time trying to process what my mind was racing through, while my nose was doing nothing to calm me down. I could hardly think correctly or calm down at all. It was only when my thoughts were interrupted hours later by the sound of distant, labored footsteps. I kept thinking “fear”… “person”… “danger”... but some distant part of me needed to investigate anyway. A mile back through deer trails and the nightmare was at its end. I couldn’t believe I was seeing my brother, huge but back to normal, and not a ghost-eyed killing machine. I was so thankful to be alive. I ran to him as fast as I could, but didn’t realize I came up to his ankles as I stumbled and ran into his legs. Bro making his way back into my life again made me realize that my quirk was active for so long I had forgotten that I wasn’t born a fox all this time. Even though Bishop couldn’t fully understand how to communicate with me very well, he kept trying. As he kept talking with me, telling me familiar names of places and people, it made me realize that I had the power to change back and be his big brother again.
We had ended up not too far East of Roseland somewhere in the huge abandoned golf course. It was a good thing we could find the Lake as we walked, or we’d really be lost. After bro found a pair of clothes for me in a free pile (that were way too big) we limped back to the house.
We needed to gather some things and leave home...probably for good. We had to in order for Dad to keep his job. “It’s handled, everything will be fine. Trust me.” was the note we were left with on the fridge. We knew what we had to do.
With no hope of returning to our normal lives again, we had to run with our tails between our legs and be hopeful for a better future or a place that accepted us the way we are now. My brother managed to get me to suck it up, and started packing. I took as many survival tools as I could, an old Labrador plushie I never wanted to throw away, mp3 player equipment and a red Wiffle Ball I found when I was a kid.
A lot of things happened on the road over those 2 months after we had to leave. Hopping fences, dumpster diving for coupons. And most importantly, I talked to my brother about the worst day of my life, when I thought I had lost him forever. It wasn’t much better for him. I saw his power as a valuable asset to our survival. And I saw my own abilities as a way to run away from my problems like some washed up superhero that didn’t deserve to be looked after. Bishop was that other half of me that kept my flaws in check more than ever that night.
Many small adventures laid themselves out before us on the road to the Atlantic coast. We frolicked and sprinted around at night when no one was awake to bother us. Evening walks and runs in animal form felt nice when we had each other's support and advice. It kept the dream that we could make it safely to Japan alive and well. We experimented with our quirks and got a bit more comfortable with them. I learned that I could appear invisible one night and for the first time my quirk could actually be useful. The old man I pulled a little prank on that night gave me a hilarious story to tell afterwards too.
Anyways, it took a lot longer than we thought to reach the coast in earnest. I’d pencil potential reasons as follows: terribly inefficient, sometimes lazy, sometimes caught up in fun and mischief, and above all hunger and general exhaustion. Falling asleep as a fox would necessitate a system of Bishop’s questions and answers to get me to remember who I was, as if I was recovering my bank password or something. We would desperately locate the quickest and easiest food for Bishop so that he didn’t fall into any more hunger spells. I’d have my own ways to calm him down when he started acting up and showing his teeth loudly at me.
We finally got through navigating New York’s crazy highways and found the coast. We decided to stay up until morning and play cards out on a picnic bench overlooking the ocean, mostly to celebrate, and also to discuss the dangers of sneaking on a cargo ship. Even though we arrived there at the crack of dawn, someone on his way to his boat came over and saw us playing Heads-Up. Apparently it reminded him of fond childhood memories. We talked about how much the two of us played when we were kids too, and he decided to join and turn it into a legitimate poker game by the ocean. Playing cards with a random stranger was scary and unexpected at first, but in the end was very comforting and especially lucky for us. He was planning on taking a trip to Japan by boat in three days and confessed to overhear our previous conversation because we were talking so loud and enthusiastically. When I asked him if he was worried about sketchy kids like us trying to steal his stuff, he just laughed. Apparently both of his kids fell deep into the criminal lifestyle when they got older and it didn’t make them into rampant kleptomaniacs every hour of their lives, so he wasn’t worried. Staying with someone that actually made us belong and traveling the ocean for days was the most I had felt like a real person since the journey began.
Life finds a way to balance itself though. After saying goodbye to the nicest yacht owner ever, he sailed off to somewhere in China on his tourism binge and we made our way to the mystery relative’s address. The landscapes were strange on this part of the ocean, but this person was even stranger. Not really in a good way. We really didn't get along and had very different ideas of how quirks should be used. We got into quite the argument over it and I'd rather not talk about it. We just have to move on somehow, and being around them would leave us trapped, so we left a note and continued on the road again.
Now that we’re wandering without direction, we can actually start our lives like a clean slate, I hope. We just need to keep looking for answers around here for a while, no matter what it takes. As long as we keep finding food, we’ll figure things out somehow.
My brother and I lived a bit too long in a fairly impoverished part of Chicago called Roseland. A place of fairly frequent gang violence and many condemned and abandoned properties. If it wasn't so dangerous it wouldn't have been all that bad, honestly. But that place was ruined by our unfortunate circumstances, and we really shouldn't set foot there again.
When I was about 13 years old, the whole family began to unravel when our Mother got very, very sick. The doctors called it Candida auris, and it apparently invaded her blood-stream. The doctor left us with, “happens a lot around here, but I’m sorry. The treatments should be frequent and they cost a small fortune.” With half of our family’s source of income now incapacitated, and disability trickling like coins in a fountain, our Dad buckled down on job hunting. My brother and I were more or less forced to grow up and scavenge anything we could while we saved up money to keep Mom alive. Dad worked diligently as a bank teller for a few years. It was probably incredibly boring. At least...it probably was until the mobsters in the area decided to break in and flood the place with warning shots and restraining devices. When Dad was the only one on the job who fought back admirably, somehow he earned some respect from the organization and got offered a better “paycheck” so to speak. I guess it was to keep Dad from being a loose end, but he certainly was a hero of the family, even if he might have been lightly forced into it anyways. And in turn, his new line of work began to influence me and bro’s idea of what “normal” was.
If Dad worked for mobsters to earn an honest living by stealing a thing or two here or there…or whatever he actually did at work... then we should be meant to do the same thing! At least...that’s how I ironically assumed DNA worked (it may or may not have been a mental excuse at the time). And there was no turning back when Bishop followed my lead, although ungracefully at first. Bro quickly realized that I was the one meant to sneak around crowds picking pockets. Concealing his...very loud... voice and footsteps alone was a hopeless job. His “talent” for attracting attention led us to combine our strengths. Before our eyes, an entire crowd of people at a stoplight was suddenly a playground for my grubby fingers. The hardest part was picking targets, because people down on their luck rarely deserve more than they already live through. But often the middle-class folk had just a bit to spare and they could probably rebound from a single petty theft. I'd only take cash and put the wallet back, no matter how brave or desperate I felt at the time to try to take more. Blending in with the crowd like a ghost was thrilling, but the guilt was hard to live with…even if every dollar was more food and one step closer to getting Mom to function again.
Eventually Bishop was strong enough and confident enough to convince me to crash underground fighting rings with him. I was really scared at first because the idea sounded extremely reckless, but I quickly realized that the new scheme had the potential to improve everything about our situation. The wallets were hefty because the... sport(?)... attracted many high rollers who seemed to have quite a bit of disposable income. The crowds were even more distracted (and possibly a bit drunk), and my brother could go all out on someone that was already in it for the adrenaline, just like him. Some rings even liked the attention of an unknown fighter showing up without warning and I could actually take some of the stolen money to bet "all in on the feral child weirdo". After all, only the two of us knew who played dirty enough to win reliably. Even when things got just a bit too close on occasion, so I had to get good at fixing up his bruises and scrapes pretty quickly when he refused to help himself. Luckily, he only complained the first few times, given that I'd always wait for a time when no one else was watching.
One day during business as usual out in the pit, what should have been a good pickpocket target suddenly ceased my arm and pulled me in to have a word. It turned out we had some secret admirers, but instead of sending fan mail, the mob thugs grabbed their favorite pair of black sunglasses and hung out in the crowd to chat in person. They told me that we were invited to “HQ” to talk with the boss. I was hesitantly excited as both of us were quickly lead out the doors and thrown into a heavily tinted limo. The confused, disappointed and angry crowd was satiated when one of the thugs threw a Benjamin in the middle of the ring; everyone collapsed on top of it like it was Black Friday.
Rich people and their expensive things were like an alien world that we were exploring for the first time. Wine coolers inside a vehicle? 20 feet of ceiling in every room in the house? So many shiny decorations that you basically need sunglasses indoors? I didn’t really get it, and Bishop didn’t seem to either. Worse, he kept telling me how nervous he was in this whole situation, which was unlike him. I tried to explain that this could be our chance to turn our lives around. Even more so than what we were doing late at night these days.
Despite our worries and doubts, this criminal organization spoke the universal language; we were offered entire trays of buffet food while we waited for the boss to talk with us. It felt like we had never eaten real food before that moment and everything was some crazy dream. After everything seemed to be going well, the dream-like state was short lived. I should have listened to bro and his worries that night.
They pulled a fast one on us. We were suddenly tied us down in our comfy chairs before we could fill up completely and started trying to get information out of us. They wanted to know about our father. Where he goes at what times, the kinds of locks on our front door...they were using our capture as leverage to pressure our Dad to use his knowledge and access to the hospital Mom was in. Apparently they were dabbling in bio-warfare with their enemies. I must have suppressed most of the details because what they were discussing made me sick to think about.
I had legitimately no idea what to do for the first time in my life. Bishop didn’t reveal any information they wanted; he just struggled and demanded a fair fight. The boss walked over to me with his cane in one hand and clutching a glock in the other with his tough raisin fingers. My fragile life was pinned against the cold steel of his weapon pressed against my head. Bishop struggled and yelled more than I had ever seen before. Although this kind of threat would willingly force my most precious secrets out of my mental vaults, I didn’t even have time to say anything. At that moment, my brother found his quirk.
My brother’s entire body stretched and distorted from his old self until the captors were flung across the room like hockey pucks. What stood in Bishop’s place was a huge black-furred dog demon breathing murderous intent. The guards tried a few other times to take control of the situation, but they were all battered around the expensive marble floor and left breathing heavily and most likely passed out. Next, the dog bounded toward the boss like a bulldozer going freeway speeds. The old man had just grabbed a shotgun from under a table behind us in desperation, leaving me between the demon and a man with a shotgun. As the demon sprinted toward its target, my chair was violently knocked over sideways in the process. The boss was tackled full force against the ground and my shoulders collided with the hard floor. The huge dog had him pinned with its large claws close to piercing his limbs all the way through. My body was tightly restrained and vulnerable; the overwhelming fear that prevailed in my mind was that I could be next. In that moment it felt like my brother was gone forever, and there was no where else to go. All I could do was run away from that nightmare or die trying.
The horrendous sound of the shotgun erupted through the room. In the struggle before me, the shells barely missed the demon’s head, but tore off a large piece of the dog’s ear as it reeled back in anguish. Some of the blood from the impact was quickly splashed over my face, and my need to run at all costs activated my quirk that night too. Suddenly I could start flailing my body out of the rope constraints and out of my (now huge) bundle of clothes and I ran stumbling out of the room on all fours. All that was left of me was a cowardly fox with nowhere left to turn to. I never fully processed my quirk activation or anything else that happened that night. I think I jumped out an open window. An endless cascade of branches hitting my face and a cloud of constant foreign information was all I could remember. After I got away I must have slept close to 16 hours that night...
I woke up alone in an abandoned animal den feeling small, defenseless and completely unlike myself. I sat there for some time trying to process what my mind was racing through, while my nose was doing nothing to calm me down. I could hardly think correctly or calm down at all. It was only when my thoughts were interrupted hours later by the sound of distant, labored footsteps. I kept thinking “fear”… “person”… “danger”... but some distant part of me needed to investigate anyway. A mile back through deer trails and the nightmare was at its end. I couldn’t believe I was seeing my brother, huge but back to normal, and not a ghost-eyed killing machine. I was so thankful to be alive. I ran to him as fast as I could, but didn’t realize I came up to his ankles as I stumbled and ran into his legs. Bro making his way back into my life again made me realize that my quirk was active for so long I had forgotten that I wasn’t born a fox all this time. Even though Bishop couldn’t fully understand how to communicate with me very well, he kept trying. As he kept talking with me, telling me familiar names of places and people, it made me realize that I had the power to change back and be his big brother again.
We had ended up not too far East of Roseland somewhere in the huge abandoned golf course. It was a good thing we could find the Lake as we walked, or we’d really be lost. After bro found a pair of clothes for me in a free pile (that were way too big) we limped back to the house.
We needed to gather some things and leave home...probably for good. We had to in order for Dad to keep his job. “It’s handled, everything will be fine. Trust me.” was the note we were left with on the fridge. We knew what we had to do.
With no hope of returning to our normal lives again, we had to run with our tails between our legs and be hopeful for a better future or a place that accepted us the way we are now. My brother managed to get me to suck it up, and started packing. I took as many survival tools as I could, an old Labrador plushie I never wanted to throw away, mp3 player equipment and a red Wiffle Ball I found when I was a kid.
A lot of things happened on the road over those 2 months after we had to leave. Hopping fences, dumpster diving for coupons. And most importantly, I talked to my brother about the worst day of my life, when I thought I had lost him forever. It wasn’t much better for him. I saw his power as a valuable asset to our survival. And I saw my own abilities as a way to run away from my problems like some washed up superhero that didn’t deserve to be looked after. Bishop was that other half of me that kept my flaws in check more than ever that night.
Many small adventures laid themselves out before us on the road to the Atlantic coast. We frolicked and sprinted around at night when no one was awake to bother us. Evening walks and runs in animal form felt nice when we had each other's support and advice. It kept the dream that we could make it safely to Japan alive and well. We experimented with our quirks and got a bit more comfortable with them. I learned that I could appear invisible one night and for the first time my quirk could actually be useful. The old man I pulled a little prank on that night gave me a hilarious story to tell afterwards too.
Anyways, it took a lot longer than we thought to reach the coast in earnest. I’d pencil potential reasons as follows: terribly inefficient, sometimes lazy, sometimes caught up in fun and mischief, and above all hunger and general exhaustion. Falling asleep as a fox would necessitate a system of Bishop’s questions and answers to get me to remember who I was, as if I was recovering my bank password or something. We would desperately locate the quickest and easiest food for Bishop so that he didn’t fall into any more hunger spells. I’d have my own ways to calm him down when he started acting up and showing his teeth loudly at me.
We finally got through navigating New York’s crazy highways and found the coast. We decided to stay up until morning and play cards out on a picnic bench overlooking the ocean, mostly to celebrate, and also to discuss the dangers of sneaking on a cargo ship. Even though we arrived there at the crack of dawn, someone on his way to his boat came over and saw us playing Heads-Up. Apparently it reminded him of fond childhood memories. We talked about how much the two of us played when we were kids too, and he decided to join and turn it into a legitimate poker game by the ocean. Playing cards with a random stranger was scary and unexpected at first, but in the end was very comforting and especially lucky for us. He was planning on taking a trip to Japan by boat in three days and confessed to overhear our previous conversation because we were talking so loud and enthusiastically. When I asked him if he was worried about sketchy kids like us trying to steal his stuff, he just laughed. Apparently both of his kids fell deep into the criminal lifestyle when they got older and it didn’t make them into rampant kleptomaniacs every hour of their lives, so he wasn’t worried. Staying with someone that actually made us belong and traveling the ocean for days was the most I had felt like a real person since the journey began.
Life finds a way to balance itself though. After saying goodbye to the nicest yacht owner ever, he sailed off to somewhere in China on his tourism binge and we made our way to the mystery relative’s address. The landscapes were strange on this part of the ocean, but this person was even stranger. Not really in a good way. We really didn't get along and had very different ideas of how quirks should be used. We got into quite the argument over it and I'd rather not talk about it. We just have to move on somehow, and being around them would leave us trapped, so we left a note and continued on the road again.
Now that we’re wandering without direction, we can actually start our lives like a clean slate, I hope. We just need to keep looking for answers around here for a while, no matter what it takes. As long as we keep finding food, we’ll figure things out somehow.
