expi app

[avitus]

Player: Batty
Contact: goodluckmodes
Age: 32
Current Characters: n/a

Character Name: Yusuke Urameshi
Character Canon: Yu Yu Hakusho
Canon Point: Episode 104, after the tournament is announced but before it begins
Age: 16

Crime: Aimlessness

Background: Here

Personality:

At first glance, Yusuke is just a punk, a thug, and that's all there is to him. Indeed, most of the people around him, especially adults, have dismissed him as a delinquent and never bothered to look past this first impression to get to know him. Even Yusuke, to a certain extent, has bought into this image of himself, and as such has largely coasted through most of his life on anger and and an intense aversion to any form of authority, avoiding getting too invested in anything in case it too hurts him and lets him down, as Genkai calls him out on at one point.

A look underneath the layers of defense mechanisms and devil-may-care slacker attitude reveals a much more complicated picture, however––a young man empathetic enough to reach out to an apparent enemy to hear out their story against the advice of those around him, and compassionate enough to risk throwing his life away for that very enemy, simply because he couldn't bear the thought of their mother's grief at losing a child. Someone who, despite his reputation, maintains a sense of honor–valuing the weight of a promise and disdaining bullying and disloyalty, as seen by the time he goes out of his way to help then-rival Kuwabara avoid getting kicked out of school by a power-tripping teacher so the other teen can keep his promise to his friends. He never really signed up to save the world––once, Botan needs to bribe him with tickets to a martial arts event to get him to participate in one of Koenma's Spirit Detective missions–-but he cares about it nonetheless, and when someone manages to push his buttons with an act of cruelty or callousness, he will stop at nothing to make them regret it.

That picture also reveals someone much more vulnerable than the image he would prefer to project. When Yusuke finally does find what's important enough to him to invest in and commit to, it's not anything intrinsic to his own needs or desires, but rather the friends and loved ones depending on him. And while this commitment is able to bring him to quite literal new heights of power, it's a double-edged sword, to the point where even his allies realize that the trauma of a friend's apparent death might be the only thing that can access enough of his power to secure victory over a deadly foe that has him outmatched. Yusuke just can't really muster that level of concern or interest in his own life or well-being; upon his first death from being hit by a car saving a child, he initially rejects the Spirit World's offer to give him a trial so he can return to life, having no particular attachment to living. He only changes his mind after the reaper Botan brings him to his own wake, where he sees his mother and childhood friend Keiko, as well as his rival Kuwabara, distraught at his death. At one point, to save Keiko, he pours his very life energy into a final attack against an enemy, ready to sacrifice himself without a second thought. Later on, when Genkai transfers her power to him, he nearly succumbs to the agony of the process and embraces imminent death, reassuring himself that Keiko would probably be better off without him, until he happens to witness how it affects his Spirit Beast, quite literally the externalized manifestation of his soul, and overcomes the pain to protect it so that it doesn't continue to suffer because of him.

He's a rather lost individual, overall, adrift in a world he has never quite found meaning or purpose in, and he finds himself desperately uncomfortable whenever he might have to face that reality, becoming restless and belligerent in the lulls following both the life or death battles of the Dark Tournament and the defeat of Sensui, who sought to end the world. At one point in the final arc (past his canonpoint), he loses motivation to continue right in the middle of a battle, realizing that now that he isn't really angry with life anymore, he's not really sure why he continues to fight and wondering if he's going to end up like Toguro or Sensui, who had nothing left but to seek someone powerful enough to kill them. Ultimately, it's that commitment he made to his loved ones that levels him out again, and he finds himself at peace with that–yet he never truly comes to define himself outside the value he holds to those around him. It's likely he wouldn't know how even if he wanted to.

Abilities:

- Spirit Awareness: ability to detect and distinguish the energy of individuals, especially those with spiritual or demonic abilities, both at close and long range. This would likely apply to characters that use some form of chi or chakra etc as well.

- Enhanced strength, speed, stamina, and durability from an ordinary human (e.g. can run for 3+ days without stopping to rest, has thrown a punch that knocked out an ordinary human adult from the shockwave without making contact, managed to keep up with a car on a bicycle, etc)

- Yusuke can focus his spiritual energy and release it in a blast, either concentrated at a single point or not. He can also spread out the force of his energy by releasing it over multiple weaker blasts to target multiple enemies. This ability comes in multiple named variations (Spirit Punch /Spirit Gun / Spirit Shotgun / Spirit Wave) and when his latent demon blood awakens, he is also able to perform a version of this ability using demon energy rather than spiritual energy. For the purposes of the game, the two types of abilities are functionally identical, though characters sensitive to that kind of thing might be able to note that the blasts would "feel" different. In canon, the primary difference came about in a battle in which an opponent had an ability to block attacks that use demon energy, and Yusuke broke through the shield by alternating between the different sources of power.

Note that by the end of canon, these abilities became powerful enough to blow up entire mountains. These will be toned down for Expiation to about the equivalent of destroying a large building.

As a second note, his mentor Genkai was the original possessor of the Spirit Wave ability, which she passed onto Yusuke. She was able to use this ability for healing and purification purposes (i.e. it freed some individuals of mind control at one point), which Yusuke should theoretically be able to use as well, though he's only ever done any healing once when he thought his friend had been killed and his emotions subconsciously changed the nature of the energy he was emitting. In Expiation if he chooses to go this route, he will need to explicitly practice it for it to be useful.

Inventory: Just the clothes on his back.

Samples:
TDM thread with Kurama
TDM thread with Scott
TDM thread with Yukina

Questions: Let me know if powers will need any further nerfing!