hiro kageyama

OOC INFORMATION
NAME: Matty
AGE: Older than 18
PREFERRED CONTACT: jungler
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A

IC INFORMATION
NAME: Hiro Kageyama (Protagonist)
AGE: 18
CANON: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 (game)
CANON POINT: Septentriones, Daichi’s Way+, accessing the Akashic Record
CANON INFORMATION: here!

PERSONALITY: The thing that a lot of people notice about Hiro is that he’s strange. He’s not strange in the way that makes you think he might be a serial murderer in disguise; he’s not awkward or uncomfortable to be around. With Hiro, his strangeness is more of a conscious decision, as evidenced by his staggering number of completely inappropriate answers as dialogue options (along with, generally, something that’s saner). It’s not that he doesn’t know what to say in any given situation - he possesses the social skills necessary to know what to say in any given situation. It’s just that sometimes he chooses not to use them and instead goes with “whatever’s funniest”.

That strangeness is a disarming quality of his that makes a lot of his more commendable qualities all the more surprising to a lot of people. Underneath the bunny hood and the non-sequiturs is a young man who is driven and determined, and won’t let anything stand in his way - even when “anything” seems like the sort of thing that one can’t fight even on a conceptual level. He sees his own death foretold in a video clip that tells the future, sees that he’s about to die, and his response to his own impending death is essentially “No, that’s not how it’s happening.” When he sees other people who are going to be killed if he doesn’t intervene, Hiro doesn’t think about the possible consequences to himself; he just knows that they have to be saved, and he will do it - and he’s successful.

One of the things that drives him, though - not as much to save himself, but to save his friends, to save potential enemies, to save humankind as a whole - is the belief that humanity as a whole is inherently good. While there may be evil people in the world, Hiro works to see the viewpoints and see the good in everyone, even those who may have questionable methods in order to achieve their goals (such as Yamato Hotsuin). There may be people who are “bad” in the world, who are simply irredeemable - but in Hiro’s mind, those people are few and far between. People don’t just go “ha ha! I’m evil! I’m going to do evil things!”, and he wants to see why they do what they do - even if he doesn’t necessarily agree, understanding someone’s viewpoint and being in their shoes makes it hard to dislike them.

Hiro is also very open to new ideas and concepts, to a degree that some of his friends find alarming. Upon discovering that his phone now has an application that summons demons, and that the demon he had just fought was now contracted to him - this new information that was completely foreign to his understanding of the world didn’t faze Hiro at all. There was no “This can’t be real” or “Holy crap” or anything, like his companions Daichi and Io. He just immediately accepted that this was a thing (having seen firsthand that it was), and started taking that into account when dealing with situations - that he was now a demon summoner.

This is more impressive when you take into account that Hiro had no idea that demons existed until approximately 20 minutes before this, and it was immediately accepted after he’d fought them. Even fighting them wasn’t something that caused him to panic and go “oh my god is this really happening”; it was just that there was a demon, if he didn’t defeat it, it’d kill him, and so he had to defeat it. It’s that simple to Hiro.

While he’s able to incorporate new information (like “demons are real, and they’re not my friends unless I beat them up”) rapidly, this should not be taken to mean that Hiro is some sort of smooth super-calm mastermind. Compared to some of his Shin Megami Tensei protagonist contemporaries (such as Yu Narukami and Makoto Yuki), Hiro is significantly more emotional; his dialogue options under stress tend to become much more loud and aggressive - which is much more reminiscent of, say, a shounen hero than a calm, almost zen protagonist.

On the surface, yes, Hiro is a teenage boy; sometimes loud and obnoxious, and occasionally strange. But that’s only the shallowest view, and beneath that is a kid who will adapt to almost any set of circumstances and find a way to do well, and a young man who will go out of his way to help his friends - and even in some cases, his enemies. He’s a young man who believes that humankind is fundamentally good, and that he wants to do the best he can for them - and even more than his best for people who he counts as friends.

ABILITIES: This is a bit of a doozy.

The short version is that Hiro can summon up to two demons. The concept of "demons" is pretty loose, but Hiro should be able to summon a decent selection of things from this list - given his canon point, pretty much anything under level 60ish. There's a limit of 24 demons that he can hold, so if you'd like me to come up with a list of specific demons he has access to, I can definitely do that.

He can also equip skills that let him use some of the same abilities demons do - up to 3 Command, 3 Passive, and 1 Auto skill, from this list. They can't be changed while in combat but can be changed while out of combat, and some of them do have statistical requirements - again, if you'd like me to figure out specific stats for Hiro (and the skills he should have access to), I can go through and do that too!

He cannot summon demons without his phone or access his equipped skills. As for whether he can put the app onto another device...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The app seems to be able to show up on cell phones regardless of their operating system, so who knows!

Without his phone, Hiro doesn't have much in the way of supernatural abilities, unless one counts his determination as supernatural. He's a pretty in shape 18-year old boy, but that's about it.

INVENTORY: The only notable thing is a cell phone with the demon summoning application on it, unless you wanna include his sweet sweatshirt with the bunny hood.

MEMORY ALTERATION: “Something weird happened while Hiro was altering the Akashic Records, he blacked out and ended up here”. It might sound somewhat implausible, but Hiro is shown to be pretty flexible in rolling with things, and honestly, “ending up underwater after changing the history of mankind” isn’t even the strangest thing that’s happened to him in the past week.

SAMPLE:

“A pair of clogs.”

This wasn’t Hiro’s first request to the robots URSULA had so thoughtfully provided to try and get them things they’d requested. Nor was it going to be the last of them. A person who wasn’t quite so curious, so strange, might have just accepted that the robots weren’t going to give them what they asked for. After all, his first request, of ‘a bowl of ice cream’, had resulted in a bowl of raw meat that had been put through an ice cream maker - which was almost, but not entirely, not what he wanted.

The floating robot scurried off - perhaps not physically scurrying, but the concept of scurrying was there. It was intent on filling his orders; for all of its inability to actually get him the things he wanted, it was putting an admirable effort into attempting. Hiro couldn’t fault it for that, and its eagerness at getting him something that was almost, but not entirely, unlike what he wanted brought a smile to his face. It wasn’t the droid’s fault it wasn’t good at its job.

The smile didn’t fade from his face when the droid returned with… an object; a rod with two rubbery flanges on each end. The droid didn’t communicate anything as it returned, merely bobbing up and down like an excited dog. Hiro supposed this was its way of telling him that it was back and it had done its best to get him what he wanted… he just had to figure out what it was.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the rod and flanges as he patted the robot on the head. It was cold and not entirely pleasant to the touch, but Hiro thought it’d be a nice gesture anyway, on the off chance that URSULA had decided that her droids needed to be somewhat animal-like; at worst it couldn’t hurt. He turned the rod in his hands, inspecting the flanges carefully like looking at them would reveal some sort of fundamental secret of the universe; anyone who’d happened to wander across Hiro would have seen an eighteen-year old boy looking particularly silly, especially if they realized what it was faster than he did.

When he did, that serious expression immediately broke, replaced by laughter echoing down the hallways. Maybe he sounded crazy, but that didn’t really bother Hiro - anyone who couldn’t see the humor in this situation, frankly, probably needed a new sense of humor. He’d asked for a pair of clogs, and it had given him something that was almost, but not quite, exactly the opposite. Somehow it’d gotten two plungers attached to each other, with one rubbery suction flange on each end.

It’d given him a pair of unclogs.

Once he finished laughing, though, he’d have to come up with something else to ask it for. If somebody else were around, he’d gladly inform them that this changed everything, but in truth, it didn’t really tell him much that he didn’t know, other than that the droids’ sense of “things” was not very good. But it was funnier to play up the moment.