Player Name: Charles
Contact: bigdamnhero
Referred by: Pi! Rin Tohsaka's player
Other characters: N/A

Character Name: Masaomi Kida
Series: Durarara!!
Game transferring from: Luceti
Canon Point in previous game: Prior to learning Anri was hospitalized at the end of the Saika arc
Summary/History: Ey Yo

Changes in character from previous game: Masaomi went through tremendous change in the course of his time in Luceti. Which is probably only natural given that he was there for for four and a half years, aging from sixteen (in canon) up through just shy of twenty-one. During that time he made many friends, a handful of enemies, and had horrible experiences insofar as his love life is concerned. At different times during his stint in Luceti he fancied himself a soldier, a Pokémon Trainer, a broken man, and then ultimately came to peace with himself, as much as the dramatic circumstances of the game would allow. While he was there to the end of the Luceti, the point at his time in the game I intend to take him from is actually shortly before the actual conclusion. This is in large part because Luceti's slow ending caused me to lose interest in the game and I wouldn't recall the actual endgame details as much. While this is largely irrelevant for his development (his arc was more or less concluded before then), I'm noting it here for completion's sake.

Starting with the most obvious set of changes, Masaomi was incredibly influenced by his best friend in Luceti, Shikamaru Nara (from Naruto), as well as the fact that the world Luceti was on was a world at war. Initially drafted into the conflict (like everyone else in the game), Masaomi adapted to the conflict as best one would expect from a teenage gang leader from modern society, from Japan. Initially, the way the young man dealt with the drama of killing people and avoiding being killed was to distance himself from the reality of the situation, to prey on himself and his own guilt about how far into the "darkness" he had been pulled back in Middle School and equate the violence of the War with that. It's notable this was exacerbated by the fact that during one of his first drafts he learned some key spoilers about further on in his own canon, causing himself to become wary of many of his canonmates from there on out, even when they weren't in the game with him - Luceti had one significant explosion of DRRR characters early in its run but that trickled off a lot further into his time there. In fact, it was the loss of one of these important castmates which saw him both become closer to the one who would eventually be his best friend, and also saw him fully distance himself from the "Masaomi Kida" of back home, as he had been aging/developing differently here. In truth, he was a chaotic mess during his first year or so in Luceti, as is expected of the character.

This changed both as his foray into the combat persisted, but perhaps more importantly once he befriended Shikamaru. Alongside many others, Masaomi began to train himself more, wanting to become as strong as many of the superpowered people around him, building up muscle mass and honing his reflexes to what he hoped would be the peak of human ability. He worked with Shikamaru on team coordination, and further supplementing himself by working out combinations with others and trying to better his mind as well as his body. Later on (as I'll detail in abilities) he also worked on building up his chakra. But perhaps the greatest things he inherited from living alongside Shikamaru as his best friend was confidence and courage. While both men boasted that they didn't want to be heroes, seeing heroes as people who died rather than completing the mission, he did gain a sense of responsibility to the world that they were on, and him and Shikamaru became deeply involved with Luceti's voluntary mission system, building up a reputation with the Malnosso Organization on that world and using that credit to try to improve the lives of people in their village and the state of the planet as a whole. While Shikamaru, being a genius, was often at the face of the bigger movements to change the village, Masaomi adopted quickly into a position as a confident back up and right hand man for whatever plans the ninja came up with.

Masaomi's time in Luceti can be summarized through is relationships with three individuals. Through Shikamaru he gained confidence, responsibility, and his greatest sense of fun in the village. This arguably would make him the most important, but perhaps as if not more important was his Partner that he gained in Luceti, Linda. Linda was a Pichu that hatched out of an egg that Gold (from Pokémon Special, another one of his good friends) had accidentally hatched alongside Luceti's three other Luceti-born Pokémon. On a superficial level, Masaomi's acquisition of Linda would influence a lot of his other relationships, finding rivals (such as Shiemi Moriyama from Blue Exorcist and Hilda from Link Between Worlds), treasured friends (such as Cilan from the anime, Silver and Crystal from Special), and others who oversaw his growth as a Trainer. But more than that, it gave him (another) constant companion who was growing and learning alongside of him. Him and Linda, as she grew older and stronger, worked together for combination attacks, adapting themselves to the demands of the world they were on and the missions they would endure. But through that, Masaomi also learned about opening himself fully to others, as Linda more than perhaps any other person (or at least, she would tell you that) knew who he really was.

The third and final of Masaomi's big three relationships is with Katara (from a:tla), which brings us to his abysmal luck with love in Luceti. For much of his first year in Luceti, Masaomi had flirted with more or less the whole female population of the game, as might be expected of him, but Katara especially caught his interest for a variety of reasons, chief of which is that she insisted that he drop his bravado and made an earnest attempt to connect with him as a person. She's the reason he met Shikamaru in the first place, actually, because before his first draft she was the one he confessed that he actually knew how to fight to, prompting them to get in a last minute spar and for her to introduce him to the ninja to join a team during the draft. In that context, it's perhaps inevitable that he would begin to fall for her - but before that blossomed into anything, his actual love interest from DRRR (Saki) showed up in Luceti. Saki and Masaomi's relationship to her is a whole other can of worms largely influenced by how early his canonpoint is, but the gist of it is that he was deeply in love with her, but actively trying to deny it. In canon they had reconciled past where Saki was from, but it had not yet happened for him causing them to have a slow reconciliation in Luceti itself. He had finally come to be somewhat domestic with her at about the point that she dropped. Saki's drop devastated Masaomi, coupled together with the drops of other key canonmates like Mikado, which lead to two big rash choices - the first one which is that he used the mission system to remove the dye from his hair entirely (hence all my icons being dark haired) and the second being that only a few months later, he impulsively confessed his love to Katara.

She didn't answer immediately, to say the least. They ended up incredibly awkward from there on, and just about at the point where they had begun to normalize, where it looked like she might answer him sincerely, the game started to get some Korra-era characters, including Katara's own grandaughters, Ikki and Jinora (the former of which Masaomi would come to see as a dear friend too, despite her youth). This complication of destiny caused a crisis for Katara, one which arguably was not helped by the fact that both herself and Masaomi were now not only older than they were in canon, but had visible physical changes to their bodies (largely due to aging, but in par due to their training for battle or scars) which either did alarm or they worried would alarm canonmates. Both of them began to see themselves as being different people than the "Masaomi Kida" and "Katara" of their own worlds, and both of them fed each other's insecurities about that - Masaomi in particular feeding it with the hopes that Katara might feel better if she were to simply try out dating him. But circumstances continued to go poorly on that front, Katara not outright rejecting him, but timing never being on their side, all the way up until Luceti finally got an Aang, taken from far enough along that he had been dating Katara in canon. This led to Masaomi's final, embarrassing gambit where in he strained himself to the edge to finally get rejected by Katara, ultimately damaging their relationship for a long while. While it did repair, and they in fact shared some other wholly unique moments, such as he going back to Earth with him for a day and him getting AUed into her world for the glitch that happened thereafter (creating another identity Masaomi personified in his head as different, which he called the Prince of Omashu), they never did end up going anywhere romantically.

... And Masaomi was hung up on that for well over a year. More than half of his stay in Luceti had some sort of influence by him pining for Katara and trying to be cool about it and failing. The whole thing, even after it's "resolution" ended up seeing him longing for love (especially as he became closer to twenty than not and in shallow land was a virgin/had only ever had one serious girlfriend and it was back when he was fourteen) but unwilling to take the leap to commit to being serious about anyone else. It was only very, very late into his time in Luceti where he had begun to take an earnest interest in someone else (namely Crystal from Pokémon Special), but that also never reached fruition before the game ended, though they too had many near close connections.

But, of course, ultimately the greatest factor to Masaomi's changes was growing older. As I said in the beginning, he was apped in as a sixteen year old young man who was not over the trauma which a gang war had inflicted on him two years prior. By the time his stint in Luceti ended he was a little over twenty year old man who had fought in a real war for many years and who, late in his stay, had more or less come to terms with not only his canon trauma, but also much of what he had gained in the game itself. In this explanation, I'd made much of how he tended to personify different parts of himself or different alternates of himself from not being "him." Through his connection to Aang and Shikamaru, he would eventually resolve, by the very end, that while he had a responsibility to see Luceti through the end, after it he would go home and see what the future held for him. He was by no means fully cured of insecurity (for indeed, Masaomi Kida is a very insecure person) but he ended his stint at Luceti and would be coming into this game as a much more stable person.

Personality: As all that above explanation makes clear, Masaomi's personality has actually changed a fair bit due to his time in Luceti. As such, I'll be doing this personality in a before and after style, with some allusions to the changes noted in the midst of the description. If this format isn't how the personality section is meant to be done then feel free to ask me to correct it! Also it's not as if his core personality is changed that much, so it's not like he's a wholly different character.

On the surface, Masaomi Kida is an energetic, outgoing, exuberant young man. Easily excitable to the point that he's often babbling out nonsense which no one (himself included) could even follow, Masaomi has a tendency to try to be the center of attention in a given social situation. This can involve (and often does) jokes which he will assure you are excellent (even if they aren't) and dynamic poses, movements, and animated facial expressions. In particular, he has a real passion for women, repeatedly shown through the series to flirt with (or at least say he intends to flirt with) most all women he encounters in the series, using his slick tongue to talk in circles around them, flattering them the whole time. This doesn't appear to be limited to where he would have a "success rate" either, as it's noted that even as a first year in high school he would regularly flirt with office workers and is quoted once that the real joy of talking to women is the talking itself, and anything more that happens is a bonus. Impish, he actually displays a fair degree of social awareness, such as when he repeatedly protected Anri from the arguable sexual predator, Nasujima, merely by being there and shaming Nasujima for his looks. He has a tendency to want to look out for his friends, and if he can hide the depth of his thoughts, he will tend to do that, projecting out his silliest self even as he's looking out for, say, Mikado's well-being with a rather perceptive gaze.

Of course, that is only the surface. It's rapidly proven through the series that much of what Masaomi puts forward is an act, or at least a mask he wears to cover up the much more insecure self that hides under it. It's worth noting for his Luceti development that early on he himself seems to believe that these two selves are like a switch, referring to his continued involvement with gangs or the underworld of Tokyo as being "dragged back into the darkness." Underneath his boisterous exterior, Masaomi is a very depressed and traumatized young man who is trying to run away from the responsibility which was too much to bear for his actions back when he founded the Yellow Scarves gang or the tragic aftermath, but seeing that very same escape as being the "responsible" thing. He's paralyzed by his fears about both himself and the world at large and when push comes to shove is relatively quick to lash out with violence, as seen with his reaction to Anri being hospitalized. Hung up on his ex-girlfriend, Saki, Masaomi also feels trapped by the guilt that he feels for her paralysis and a large part of his flirting is in hopes of discovering a new love and life where he can prove to himself that his love back then simply wasn't strong enough to act... even as he is still in love with her, and in denial about it. It's worth noting that from the canon point I'd originally taken him from in Luceti he actually had not reached his lowest point in canon, and so the lessons he learned about both how far he could fall and how he could put it back together ended up playing out differently in Luceti.

In Luceti, Masaomi was faced with even more hardship than he experienced in canon, though it also played out differently. His cripplingly poor sense of self-worth manifested in a twofold inferiority complex: both that he wasn't as strong as many of his (more superpowered) compatriots, and told about his actions later in canon (such as moving away from everyone else following the Scarves arc) without knowing his then-emotional context at the time, came to see himself as a coward on top of things. Or well, the "him" from back home was a coward. Through his time in Luceti, Masaomi compartmentalized more and more of himself: the "him" which the world saw, the "him" who he was becoming in Luceti, the "him" which moved on in Ikebukuro (who, because of his fear of cowardice, he didn't want to become), and later on the above-mentioned "Prince of Omashu." This fragmentation and denial of the self resulted in him leaning very heavily on those who actually supported him, eventually coming to look at many of them more favorably than he did his friends from canon, even as he put the likes of Anri and Mikado on untouchable pedestals when he was removed from them, like they were more pure or innocent than him even when he learned other later-canon facts like how Mikado had joined/led the Blue Squares (his former enemies back home).

However, through his time in Luceti, that same leaning on other people also saw him improving from that same fragmentation it caused and conquering a lot of the hang ups he had out of canon as well. Because of his want to be loved and and appreciated, his friendship with the likes of Ikki, Aang, Gold, Silver, Katara, and especially Shikamaru caused him to re-examine himself and his priorities, going through many stages as he matured as a person. This is not to say, of course, that all his changes were positive: Luceti might have had many domestic qualities and a great deal of downtime, but it was a world at war, and while he ironically gained more humanity about that the more he matured, he did mature into something approaching a soldier. But on the whole, he started to accept that every part of himself was still him and while initially deciding that he might be better off just remaining in Luceti forever, fearing what he would become back home, by the end of his time on that world, he resolved to go home and face whatever the future there would become, even if he had to forget the "him" from Luceti.

This cannot be stressed enough: Masaomi's first two years in Luceti resulted in a steady build up of crippling self-depreciation, doubt, and self-hatred. Over time his image of himself deteriorated to such a point that he was barely holding it together, projecting a happy face for the world at large to make them write him off as frivolous. And that shallow frivolity could shift to violence with no hesitation when it was called into question or was made impossible by circumstances. However, through the efforts of his friends to reach out to him, and especially through becoming a Pokémon Trainer and internalizing the ethos related to that burden via Silver and Cilan, he was able to pull himself back up and mature. As stated above, even in canon Masaomi has a tendency to want to help his friends out without it making it obvious how overt he's been in doing that, but because of his gratitude for how much support he was given and out of a genuine desire for no one to be as demolished as he was, during his later years in Luceti he developed a penchant for trying to coyly help people out. While this wasn't necessarily 100% successfully (his attempts to assist in Katara's self image resulting in mutual destruction is evidence of that), there were some successful results: the very cagey Silver came to trust him over time, he helped Ventus (from Kingdom Hearts) and Fuuko (from Clannad) realize their feelings for each other, and he played some role in helping Gold pull himself out of a similar dark place.

In that respect, Masaomi's biggest change in personality is the steady and slow (with many painful setbacks) growth into a responsible adult. While he still is an incorrigible flirt and prone to projecting a happier face than he truly feels, over his time in Luceti it reached an equilibrium: it's far less of a "mask" now than it is a projection and a way to put people off guard or make them feel like he's friendly or at least trustworthy. He became less desperate for attention and validation as he gained a greater sense of peace with himself. The wounds are still there, and it's worth noting he's not really had any therapy or anything- they could be ripped open arguably even worse than before with the right triggers. For example, as he matured he felt a great deal of guilt for all of the poor choices and bad actions he took when he was younger, many of which he is unable to apologize for. He also, despite most of this growth, is very slow to give himself that much credit; if you compared what he and Shikamaru did for each other in their friendship, even at the end, Masaomi would give himself far less credit than his friend would give him if he was being sincere. And up until Cilan questioned him on it, he was considering leaving Linda in Luceti, because that was the only home she had known and he didn't even think she would give it up to go home with him where he might not even remember her. But on the whole? He's a much happier and somewhat more balanced person.

And he tells terrible jokes still.

Powers/Abilities: Apart from all of the various items he won, commissioned, or was gifted (listed below), Masaomi has a handful of other abilities that he's built up over time. Most mundanely, over the last several years he has trained himself physically more or less daily, often in a chamber with increased gravity, which has resulted in him becoming even more strong and agile than he's presented in canon. In canon, Masaomi Kida is scrappy and a very strong street fighter with a noted knack for hitting people's weak points with strong kicks for a teenager. With all of his training put on top of that as well as taijutsu sparring with some Naruto-verse ninja, he's a very accomplished martial artist with an improvised style and close to peak physical condition for his age.

Of course, he is still only just human. Insofar as his physical strength, he doesn't have super strength, speed, or endurance. It is shown in canon he has a knack for forcing himself through painful situations, but that's not supernatural.

Now, where he has built up some extra-human powers is working with Shikamaru to learn how to mold and manipulate his chakra and gain some basic abilities of Naruto-verse ninja. After years of training in it, he's gained abilities on par with a newly minted genin: he's capable of walking on water and up vertical surfaces, he's able to perform a substitution jutsu, and (though he is very poor at both of these) he can do a short lived clone and transformation jutsu. However, because he's got little stamina for the two other than substitution, he doesn't tend to rely on them. In truth, his chakra stamina as a whole is fairly limited - having begun his training well into being eighteen as opposed to from a younger age his overall potential is severely limited. He also trained in the indigenous spirit-based magic that Luceti had, forming a pact with a few of the spirits there. However, because that spirit magic is setting-specific to Luceti and the wings he formerly had there, he cannot use it here.

Plus, of course, he has a Pokémon! Specifically, he has his Raichu, Linda. He's raised Linda since she was a Pichu and she's a fairly powerful Pokémon at this point, albeit she would state she is the strongest (she's not, but she tries). Linda tends to be better at physical attacks augmented with electricity (Thunderpunch, Volt Switch, etc) as opposed to large electrical discharges, something they had been working on when he left Luceti. As such, she cannot consistently perform Thunderbolts or other big iconic special attacks known to Raichu.

Items on your character: This is his full combat attire and he'll be coming in with all those items, many of which were gifts from various people he met in Luceti. So he'll have a ninja flak vest (which has had all Konoha symbology removed and has been re-stitched in a few places), special boots and gloves made from electric retardant materials, some sturdy (if worn) bracers, an earring which limits electrical damage, an enchanted necklace that raises his physical defense, and goggles.

In terms of weapons and other items he has a Pokédex, Linda's Pokéball, some ninja wire, flashbombs, kunai, some combat knives, some summoning scrolls, two collapsible combat batons which all largely fit in the pockets of the vest. He's also got an impact dial and, purely sentimentally, a bracelet he got from Katara. Plus obviously the clothe on his pack and two non-enchanted earrings. He'll also have his magi-technology journal (which is a paper book with never ending pages which was remotely wired into the in-game network) from Luceti. It likely won't be able to access the network here, but it would have been in his pocket, so.