» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: Fyre
Current AGE: N/A
Player TIME ZONE: GMT+8
Personal JOURNAL: defenestrator
IM & SERVICE: [AIM] eighth helleluia
Player PLURK: muffyre
Current CHARACTERS: N/A

» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Teshigawara Naoya
Canon & MEDIUM: Another (Novel)
Canon PULL-POINT: Ch. 15 -- While he, Sakakibara and Mei are going downstairs to check on Kazami's condition after he pushed the latter off the balcony during the class trip
Character AGE: 15


Character ABILITIES: The ability to pick out the most blinding possible shirt. N/A

Character HISTORY: His overall history is easiest to tell in monthly terms.

[PRE-SERIES]

Teshigawara has lived in the small town of Yomiyama since he was born. He is said to be one of the few to have a cellphone in 1998, which means his family is probably of decent socio-economic status. He and Kazami Tomohiko have been classmates since the third grade and live quite close to each other; Teshigawara tends to call their relationship an 'ill-fated' one, but they do acknowledge each other as childhood friends.

One interesting detail about Teshigawara's early years is that he was classmates with Fujioka Misaki, Misaki Mei's twin sister, in elementary school. This caused his sense of unease around Mei later to be greater than it otherwise would have been, though he doesn't realize their relation.

[APRIL]

Unbeknownst to the rest of the class, the 'calamity' starts in this month -- normally it is signaled by the class missing a desk and a chair for an extra student, but there is no apparent extra this year until Sakakibara Kouichi transfers in.

The 'death of April' is Fujioka Misaki. Misaki Mei is the only one who realizes that the calamity may have started.

This 'calamity' would involve one or more students of Yomiyama North Middle School's third year Class 3 or someone closely related to them dying every month until graduation. The causes could be natural or murder or pretty much anything, but could not be traced to anything supernatural. It is also not a phenomenon that will occur every year. These more random traits have caused the phenomenon to be compared to a natural disaster rather than a curse.

It started 26 years ago when a boy named Yomiyama Misaki died in a fire at his home. As Misaki was incredibly popular at school and especially with his classmates and teachers, many were in denial about his death. His class, Yomiyama North third year's Class 3, eventually ended up pretending he was still alive and taking lessons with them; their teacher, Chibiki, and the school principal decided to respect their wishes and join them.

Unfortunately, this behavior brought Class 3 'closer to death' -- Yomiyama Misaki showed up in their graduation picture, and every year thereafter an extra person would be mixed into Yomiyama North's third year Class 3. Moreover, this person was always one of the people who had died in the calamity of one of the years past. The memories of their death would be erased from anyone who could identify them, and they themselves would have no idea that they were actually meant to be dead. In other words, they came back from the dead, and there was absolutely no way to tell who it was until graduation: when the extra person would disappear and fade from everyone's memories, leaving the real memories of their death in their place. Gradually, all the details of the year of calamity would become extremely blurry in everyone's memories.

Of course, Yomiyama North's third year Class 3 eventually figured out that something terrible was at work -- the story of the calamity and of its origin with Yomiyama Misaki has been passed down between the class' students and teachers from year to year. One of the only ways found to avert the disaster once everyone realized an extra person was present was a charm involving the entire class treating one member of the class as though they didn't exist. In other words, to do the reverse of what Yomiyama Misaki's class did 26 years ago.

[MAY]

This year, the class did not realize they had an extra until Sakakibara Kouichi transferred in. As the extra person should be one of the dead from previous years and Sakakibara Kouichi had not ever lived in Yomiyama, it was unlikely he actually was the dead person.

One month too late, Misaki Mei became the 'nonexistent' classmate of 1998. It is likely because she knew the calamity had started that she did not try very hard to avoid Sakakibara when he, having not been properly informed of anything, began trying to make friends with her. Meanwhile, Akazawa Izumi, head of the class' countermeasures team, was out with a cold. This left Kazami, as one of the members of the team, to deal with passing on knowledge of the 'nonexistence' charm and of the calamity to Sakakibara. Teshigawara, too, tried to help by inviting Sakakibara on a tour of the school with him and Kazami. They were both hesitant to bring up something as fantastical as 'the curse of 26 years ago', considering Sakakibara said quite clearly that he did not believe in the supernatural. This hesitation meant that Sakakibara did not listen to them when they tried to warn him away from interacting with Misaki Mei.

This left both the countermeasures team and the rest of the class in a quandary, but especially Kazami, who was completely paralyzed with indecision as to how to warn Sakakibara after everything. Especially difficult were the several layers of gag orders surrounding the calamity and Class 3. They could not talk about it to anyone outside the class, and this factored into Teshigawara and Kazami's difficulties. Moreover, talking about Mei would mean acknowledging that she existed. At this point, Teshigawara stepped in to help by proposing a risky gamble: perhaps this was one of the years where the 'calamity' would not happen, since to their knowledge no one had died yet. They would wait out the month of May and try to keep Sakakibara away from Mei, and if no one related to the class died, then all's well that ends well. Teshigawara even called Sakakibara to warn him away from dealing with 'nonexistent things', promising to explain everything come June -- coming very close to actually acknowledging Mei herself. Of course, then their classmate Sakuragi Yukari and her mother became the 'deaths of May'.

[JUNE]

Now that the 'calamity' was confirmed to have started, Teshigawara could not risk acknowledging Misaki Mei, even to explain to Sakakibara. He also happened to be with Sakakibara when Mizuno Sanae was killed while on the phone with the latter. After she and their classmate Takabayashi became the 'deaths of June', it was finally decided to increase the number of 'nonexistent' students to two: Sakakibara and Mei both. It was a desperate measure and most people weren't too confident in it, but Class 3 had few other options.

[JULY]

Unfortunately, this countermeasure failed to stop the calamity: in July, their homeroom teacher Kubodera committed suicide in front of the entire class after having murdered his mother in their home. They, along with Ogura Atsushi (the brother of a classmate), became the 'deaths of July'. The side effect of this was that Sakakibara and Mei were permitted to exist again. However, many students stopped coming to school, and it was likely that a number of families fled from Yomiyama in that time (this tended to happen each year during the calamity).

At this point, there were no other known solutions to stopping the calamity midyear except for the class trip 15 years ago, which was said to have accomplished this through some unknown means. Accordingly, their replacement homeroom teacher Mikami scheduled a similar trip, where they would stay in a lodge at the base of Mount Yomiyama and go to pray for salvation at the Yomiyama Shrine there. Teshigawara and the others, however, were investigating on their own: they found out that a student named Matsunaga Katsumi had possibly been the one to save everyone from the calamity during the class trip 15 years ago, and set out to find the tape he'd left behind.

The tape was initially broken and needed repairs, but they were finally able to find this out: Matsunaga Katsumi had, during the trip 15 years ago, murdered a classmate who just so happened to be the 'dead' one that year. In killing the one who was supposed to be already dead, he'd stopped the calamity midyear. That was the method they would have to use this year if they wanted to save themselves. Of course, there was still no known way to tell who the 'dead' one was.

[AUGUST]

Only Teshigawara, Sakakibara, Mochizuki and eventually Misaki Mei knew the truth about the tape; without being able to decide what to do, they went along on the class trip with all those willing to come. Things came to a head when Akazawa Izumi snapped and began to accuse Sakakibara and Mei of responsibility for the calamity that year, and demanded apologies from them. It was at this point that Teshigawara, who'd been reluctant even to disclose the secret to Chibiki, nearly blurted out the contents of the tape for the entire class to hear. Luckily, he was stopped by a classmate's asthma attack.

This incident prompted Teshigawara to reach his own breaking point -- he made the decision to act on his suspicion of Kazami, whom he'd been testing for accurate memories of their childhood together with unsatisfactory results. They naturally got into a fight about the accusations that Kazami was the 'dead' one and, somewhere in the confusion and not entirely deliberately, Teshigawara pushed his friend off the balcony on the second floor of the lodge.

Afterwards, he went to find Sakakibara and Mei and completely broke down on them when he realized they still remembered Kazami -- meaning he was probably wrong. On the other hand, Sakakibara was the one who came up with the possibility that it was because Kazami wasn't yet dead (we do learn from Mei that Kazami isn't the 'dead' one, but Teshigawara doesn't know this for sure at this point). The point where Teshigawara will enter Exsilium is the moment they are going downstairs to check on whether Kazami is still alive.

Character PERSONALITY: Teshigawara isn't a particularly complicated guy: if you wanted to sum him up in a sentence it would be 'class clown with an incongruously fancy name'. For the most part, in each version of the series, we see him from Sakakibara's POV or in relation to whatever Sakakibara is doing at the time, a large part of which takes place at school. This makes sense as Sakaki is the MC.

The Teshigawara we see at school seems carefree, somewhat thoughtless, a benign sort of mischief-maker (and matchmaker) whose primary modes are teasing and joking and quintessential outgoing teenage boy. He's talkative and friendly; perhaps a bit too much so, according to Sakakibara, whom he nicknamed Sakaki almost right away of his own accord. His continued friendship with Sakaki is notable given that much of the class tacitly blamed Sakaki at least a little for the calamity that happened during their year. (Since his arrival meant the class gained an extra member, which was a sign of the calamity.)

We see this willingness to break away from the defensive group mentality the class has taken several more times -- he was the first to speak to Sakaki again after he and Mei were released from the charm of nonexistence, and even included Mei in conversation. When Akazawa tried to accuse Mei and Sakaki of being directly responsible for the majority of the calamity, he stood up for them; in fact, he was so indignant he very nearly spilled the secret of the tape, which would have been a disaster. Teshigawara can be quite reckless at times, but at the end of the day his heart is in the right place.

For instance, he can also be oddly considerate when he isn't sticking his foot in his mouth -- he tends to do his best to pass it off casually, but he realizes Sakaki's feelings of guilt about the calamity enough to try to reassure him about it, and admits to checking up on Kazami after the shock of Kubodera-sensei's suicide forces his friend to miss school.

Of course, the circumstances of Class 3 at school aren't exactly normal any way you look at it, and accordingly we only see Teshigawara's usual flippant attitude in snatches as disaster after disaster rain down on the students. By nature, he's relatively open and straightforward, but he is also not entirely unaffected by the desperate survival-driven hivemind of Class 3. Despite later professing not to believe in supernatural phenomena, he and Kazami bring up the subject in order to try to tell Sakaki about the calamity in a ridiculously roundabout way. Ultimately, Teshigawara only adds to the confusion in trying to communicate the class' countermeasures to Sakaki, despite his best efforts. He also participates in the class agreement to ignore the existence of Sakaki and Mei during June and July (as well as the plan to ignore Mei starting in May).

Although Teshigawara isn't exactly an intellectual -- he needs to be a proper counterpoint to his best friend, Kazami the honor student, after all -- he is action-oriented and quite resilient. When Kazami, as part of the countermeasures team for the class, is hesitant in trying to talk to Sakaki about Mei's nonexistence, Teshigawara is the one who decides on a risky gamble to break their paralysis. Please note that while Teshigawara's willingness to act is a good balance to Kazami's slower, more thoughtful process, it does not necessarily mean he comes up with good solutions. Granted, he and Mochizuki do push the 'solution' of the tape forward and thus contribute a great deal to ending the calamity of 1998, but Teshi's personal solution of accusing Kazami after dubiously 'verifying' his identity (or lack thereof) shows that his initiative can sometimes cross into leaping before looking territory. The incident where he pushed Kazami off the balcony can also be seen as Teshigawara's ability to bounce back from all the incidents finally reaching a breaking point -- he takes one too many risks on too little information and little good comes of it.


» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: His weapon will be a motorcycle. An entirely ordinary one, at first, which will eventually develop the ability to shrink and be carried around in one's pocket; possibly to grow and accommodate more passengers or cargo; go to ever-higher speeds (without crashing); and to change colors for the sake of fashion (may possibly develop full-fledged camouflage or stealth capabilities at some point).

In other words, a lot of the bike's initial capabilities will be either purely passive or support-type with an emphasis on rule of cool, with stray gun or laser mounts here and there (but nothing really substantial for a while). It will probably become more weaponized later on, but it depends on how soon Teshi adjusts to his new situation.

Character INVENTORY:

(1) crappy brick of a white 1998 cellphone with a silly strap


» SAMPLES

First PERSON:

[Click. Crackle. BOOMF. Thud, thud. Mutter.]

Dude.

[Click and-- cha-ching! Bleached roots o'clock, somebody hasn't found the zoom-out yet. Or, you know, he might be fixing the camera with his hair. What a shocking twist.]

This thing has video. Seriously? Serious--

[Everything jerks crazily for a moment, there's a glimpse of a single bright brown eye, and then: there you go, cheerful teenage boy complete with shit-eating grin and rumpled everything and an inexplicable giant garish orange and navy motorcycle sitting on the bed behind him. He blinks a couple of times and then gives the camera a little wave.]

Right, right. Hello world! Um, Teshigawara Naoya speaking. Teshi or Naoya is fine. Or, you know, whatever, I'll answer to a lot of things. [Brief chuckle. His tone is happy and casual, unless you know what carefully suppressed stiffness and nerves sound like.] But that's not the-- No, no, wait, that's actually the point.

[He's such a pro cameraman you guys, it's straight-up Blair Witch in here. Hope you don't get motion sickness easily. Meanwhile, our boy is getting his serious face on.]

I have a question! So, names. These, uh, weapons or whatever... they're alive, right? [Conspiratorial whisper--] Or whatever it is the shady organization with the time travel and the UFO pads wants us to think. And if they're (supposedly) alive, it's only polite to name them, huh?

[He gives the motorcycle an affectionate pat.]

I can take suggestions, but what I really want to know is how you guys did it. What'd you name 'em? Do they come when you call? Do they come when you don't?

[A waggle of his eyebrows, an oddly lengthy pause, and then he clicks the camera off.

Another pause.]

... I really hope that wasn't me talking to myself the whole time.

Third PERSON: He spends the entire first day sleeping, apocalypse and time travel and probably aliens or cult worship be damned.

It's a teenage boy's most cherished dream come true, sleeping away a weekday, even if he's basically sleeping while he's sleeping -- what could all this be except some ridiculously elaborate dream, after all? Some dreams don't die even if-- well, even if there hasn't been much occasion for good dreams, lately.

Naoya doesn't do nightmares, but he'd have to be some kind of robot if his life lately didn't keep him up at night. Sort of. (A robot, or Misaki. She seems like the type to breeze through everything, even if she also seems like the type that never sleeps.)

So, new world, new buildings, new people, even a whole new kind of pollution; hell yes he's going to get some shut-eye while he doesn't have to worry about dying in his dream-sleep. Probably. (If you die in a dream, you die in real life.)

Even if, now that he's awake and actually having a look around, he'd like to have a word with his dream-interior designer.

"Okay, so I'll give you that, it's pretty modern and stylish and everything, but..." He sighs up at the ceiling and leans against his new motorcycle, which appeared on his bed yesterday and which he's been putting off moving in case he gets himself run over. Inside the apartment, how lame would that be? "It's weird. A little too art museum for me, you know? Talking to yourself in a dream is okay, right?"

He ignores the nagging feeling in his throat, at the back of his mind, that tells him he's holding on to the idea of dreamland a little too hard. By his fingernails, in fact. He's always been very good at that, the ignoring thing. Kazami would probably--

"I wonder if they'd let me redecorate. Wonder if they even have anything from home. I think I'm in England or something, Bike, why is the apocalypse in England?" He's been meaning to come up with something better to call the thing. Maybe that'll make it less inclined to fall over onto him. It's bulkier than he is -- a wrestling match would not go well. Nope.

He lets himself fall back on the sheets. The mattress is soft and cool. Everything else is cool, slick and hard and it really feels like aliens might have built the place, even if he knows this is in vogue somewhere in the magazines. "Well, better England than Yomiyama, I say."

After a long moment, he bounces up again and right off the bed, fighting the urge to simply roll over and go back to sleep until doomsday's done dooming its way through. Something about sleeping for too long makes him nervous, even here, and he really needs to figure out what to do with Bike. It's pretty unfair that, even in a dream, he doesn't magically have the ability to drive it already.

"Hey, Bike. You going to follow me downstairs like a good boy? Um, good bike?" Silence. "... Maybe I should've asked for a dog."


» ADDITIONAL NOTES
N/A