Keyblade Order application
Player Info
Your Name: Qu-ko
Your LJ:
aphotic
Your Age: 20
Contact Information (Email and AIM/MSN/Yahoo): Email: kaleidobeam@gmail.com, AIM: HighinQusitor
Character Info
Character Name: Juudai Yuuki
Series: Yu-Gi-Oh GX
Character Age and Gender: 19 / Male
Character Personality: Juudai started off the series as a bit over-the-top ignorant and self-centered from the very beginning, no matter how well-meaning he was at heart. He has never wanted to be a bad person (with one notable exception), and for the most part, he never has been. In the beginning of the series, he often wound up being rather childish underneath the good-hearted exterior -- he tended to be thoughtless, scatterbrained, hesitant to take anything seriously, and even selfish, but most of these traits wound up getting masked by his inclination to be a good person and a kind hero admired by all, and often came across in a way that seemed more charming and innocent to most people than brash and stupid at first. He was just a nice guy, if a little dense and oblivious to things that mattered most of the time, along with the occasional insensitive remark that his friends would brush off as "typical Juudai".
However, these negative traits of his stopped being quite so "charming and innocent" when he wound up growing into someone who was outright reckless and neglected to consider the consequences of his actions, which really got to him when he realized just how much of a dick he'd been -- that's an understatement, not to mention too little too late, as he pretty much went off the deep end when unfathomable results came of his actions afterward. Then, once he'd fused with Yubel, it seemed a lot like he'd shifted gears from one extreme to the other; from being reluctant to handle anything with seriousness to being a little too "serious business" at all times. Over the course of season four, though, he relearned how to lighten up and have fun again, thanks to his friends and a little help from someone special, and found the right balance on his personality to make him a more mature, reliable person as a whole.
One thing about Juudai is that he is very trustworthy and righteous, and fiercely protective of those people he cares about. When he has an opinion, he says it. When he wants something changed, he takes action. And when somebody wants advice, he's the one who gets approached -- people trust him as a hero, and since his reformation, he hasn't let them down. In addition, he has a very cheerful air about him most of the time; he makes friends very easily and rarely finds someone who can resist his good-natured, charismatic charm. Once they get to know him better, though, occasionally he can come across as someone older than his years, who shoulders a heavy, tiring burden not meant for someone quite so young or inexperienced. Yet, even despite the world on his back, as it were, he looks out for people, and tries to be a good friend despite his past mistakes.
Juudai's biggest weakness lies in the well-being of those he cares about. The quickest way to get to him is through his friends, and the villains in his world have figured this out, it seems -- nearly all of them have preyed upon his friends in some way, torturing or brainwashing them in order to take the easiest route to bringing him down. At first, he attempted to alienate them to try and keep them safe from all the crazy that haunts him, but soon learned it didn't really matter if he did or didn't, that they would try to stick by him no matter what, so he decided he was just hurting them more and stopped. Even in the face of adversity, he's grown strong enough not to waver, but when it comes to a friend being in danger, he can be taunted and held up much more easily than if one were trying to take a direct route to play with his mind. At the point he's coming from, he's a very strong-minded and secure person, so trying to screw around with his self-confidence doesn't work quite as well as it might have earlier on in the series.
He can be quite sympathetic under certain circumstances, particularly to those close to him, but he does not like to get his friends wrapped up in the practically apocalyptic problems that tend to follow him like an unwanted shadow due to his prominent position in his own universe's grand scheme. Unless someone makes a particular effort to get in his way or antagonize him, Juudai will make a decent effort to be a nice enough guy to everyone who deserves it. A few leftover negative points still exist within him that were never quite ironed out all the way, being that he still has an arrogant streak a mile wide and can be a little abrasive sometimes to people who grate on him, but overall he's usually pretty laid-back.
Yubel: The Duel Monster he's fused to is also his lover, and they actually behave much like lovers in their own weird way. At one time, Yubel was overprotective of him to the point of driving away everyone around him, and it was only worsened when she was possessed by the Light of Destruction. It caused her to turn actively psychotic and warped her sense of love and pain -- this was only half the Light's doing, though; the other half was Yubel convincing herself that he loved her so much that he was putting her through this pain of being separated from him, as a sort of mental defense to avoid admitting he might no longer love her. She simply could never fathom that he didn't actually love her, because she'd based her life around him in every way possible -- physically, mentally, emotionally, and even so far as changing her human form permanently for the sole purpose of protecting him. With all she'd sacrificed to live for him, Juudai not loving her anymore was absolutely out of the question.
Once the Light was gone, though, Yubel mellowed out considerably, and more or less returned to the person that Juudai remembered from his past life. She's snarky and smart-mouthed, and will often tease Juudai privately in ways that anyone else might consider as abrasive, but that he regards as affectionate, and will even go so far as to smart-mouth her right back. She's still fairly one-track minded, and her only goal to live for is to protect Juudai, but that's all she really needs, and in a way, she's a bit emotionally stunted of her own doing because she's so focused on him alone. She rarely regards anyone else unless they're threatening her or Juudai personally, and instead concentrates obsessively on the only thing she's known for two lifetimes and thousands of years in-between.
She's extremely intelligent and cunning, though she no longer has reason to manipulate anyone like she did before. In her time, though, she's granted a number of "monkey's paw"-type wishes and struck up deals with multiple people to accomplish her purposes (which were, of course, designed to allow herto get back to Juudai), and in no way has she not kept her word... though perhaps not in the way anyone was expecting. She probably doesn't really regret it, because it brought her back to Juudai in the end, but she wouldn't need to do it again anytime soon. The mindset that "love is pain" and, likewise, "pain is love" has since left her, now that she's felt true love from him, but considering how snarky she can be, she's still got a knack for inflicting a special brand of pain on anyone who dares to cross her and/or Juudai.
Basically, her life revolves around him, in the most literal sense possible. If you asked her about it, the universe only exists because Juudai created it to give her and him a place to love one another, and little else. The existence of other people simply doesn't mean anything to her, but since she doesn't interact with other people while she's fused to Juudai anyway, it doesn't really need to. She does her job quite well, and she loves him, and that's all Juudai could ask for from her.
Brief History: There's a wiki entry here, but it's inaccurate in some aspects as well as biased towards the English dub, which is an entirely different canon as far as I'm concerned. So I'll write out the history as it took place in the original Japanese, and then explain the part that branches off.
For a large portion of his childhood, Juudai was alone. But like all simple descriptions, this isn't entirely accurate -- he had parents, but they were always busy with work and such and had little time for him. But he was without human companionship most of the time. Keyword: human. He's had the ability to hear and see duel monster spirits since he was born, and one in particular guarded him jealously... very jealously. Her name was Yubel, and so every time he would invite a neighborhood friend over to play with him, something bad would happen because of her, due to her overprotective nature concerning Juudai, until the neighborhood kids just simply stopped coming to play with him anymore out of fear the same would happen to them after she sent one boy to the hospital.
At the same time, Kaiba Corporation had begun to accept cards made by people to send into space and study and gather the energy that came from it. He asked his parents to send in his own drawings of Neos, and Yubel as well with the hopes that she would receive the "energy of justice" and change her ways from the trip.
However, it didn't go as planned. There was a malfunction in Yubel's capsule, so after coming into contact with the "Light of Destruction", an evil force that resides in the far reaches of space, it plummeted back to earth, and Yubel burned up almost entirely in the atmosphere, leaving her with just her left arm remaining by the time she landed. While this was going on, her connection to Juudai caused him to have constant nightmares in which she tried to call out for him. His parents worried about him, and decided to pay for him to undergo a technological procedure that would erase a portion of his memory. Thus, the events involving Yubel, and even Yubel's existence itself, was forgotten for a time.
Years passed, and Juudai enrolled into Duel Academia for his high school years at last, landing in the lowest-ranked of three dorms, Osiris Red (which he didn't seem to mind at all, surprisingly... even actually enjoyed the low-quality dorms because he liked the color red). His first year involved getting acquainted with Duel Academia and its quirks, which included many strange happenings on the island the school was situated on. It turns out there were three legendary demons sealed beneath the school with the power to accomplish many seemingly impossible tasks -- like destroying mankind, creating a philosopher's stone, and granting eternal youth, among other things. He and six of his friends (including two of his teachers) were granted seven keys to the gate that locked away these demons. The chairman of the school board of Duel Academia, Kagemaru, hired seven assassins to retrieve the keys and bring them to him, all under different circumstances. In the end, by the time the seventh assassin (who turned out to be one of the keybearers himself, the teacher Daitokuji) made his appearance, six of the seven keys were in Kagemaru's possession, and only Juudai's key remained. He managed to take down both Daitokuji and Kagemaru himself, facing off against the three demons and avoiding disaster by a narrow margin.
Juudai's second year gave him knowledge of the existence of the Light of Destruction, when a new student named Edo Phoenix entered the school and used its power against him. When Edo defeated him in a duel, Juudai lost his ability to see his cards, and fell into a deep depression. He attempted to leave the school, but was swept away to Neo Space, where he regained his ability to duel and came back with a new deck all his own, the Neo Spacians that he'd designed and sent into space so long ago. The energy there had given them life, and so they lent Juudai their power. With it, he defeated Edo Phoenix in a rematch. In the meantime, though, other events were unfolding; a "society of light" was forming amongst the Obelisk Blue and Ra Yellow students, who had apparently been brainwashed by the power of the Light and a man with unusual psychic powers named Saiou Takuma, who was Edo's manager in the pro dueling leagues. After freeing his friends from the Light's control, a series of events led him to a showdown with Saiou where Edo had failed to undo the control the Light had over his best friend. It was a close match, but Juudai managed to send the Light packing for the moment, eliminating the control it had over Saiou's mind and ultimately saving the world from imminent destruction a second time.
His third year, however, was the year that changed his life forever. In the beginning, he met Johan Andersen, a transfer student from North School, with whom he struck up a friendship like no one else before. It had seemed he had a greater bond with Johan in a few days' time than he had with some of his friends from his time in the school up to two years prior, based on how the two of them acted together; it was as though they had known each other all their life, they were so close and so strikingly similar in personality. At the time, a teacher who had transferred to the school at the same time as Johan, Professor Cobra, had begun to collect energy from students as they dueled by equipping them with "dis belts" that gathered the energy generated by the duel and depositing it in his laboratory in the forest of the island. The truth was that the energy was being gathered for Yubel -- she had struck a deal with Professor Cobra when he found her as she crash-landed back on Earth years ago, promising him she could reunite him with his son if he helped her regain her body, which had disintegrated in the atmosphere with the exception of only her left arm. When Juudai and his friends infiltrate the lab, Juudai is made to begin to question the reasons for why he continues to duel, and if that reason is wrong or not... but he doesn't have time to think about it, as he is set up in a deathmatch with Cobra immediately afterward. When Juudai wins, Cobra is sent plummeting off the edge of the high-up platform they had been dueling on in a haze, presumably killing him (but not before seeing a Yubel-induced vision of his son, allowing her to fulfill her contract with him in the most twisted way possible... but still a fulfillment nonetheless). Yubel, who has by that point mostly regained her body, sends the entire school to a different dimension, much like a desert, in which Duel Monster spirits are real and tangible (while normally they are just that, spirits that cannot be seen by most humans). She possesses the mind of a boy named Martin to use his body as a vessel shortly thereafter.
The students begin to get desperate due to the extremely limited resources in this world, as well as Yubel turning half the student population into walking, brainless zombies. A connection is established between the desert world and their home dimension, along with an attempt to send their only hope to get home to them -- Rainbow Dragon, the ultimate card of the Gem Beasts, Johan's deck. The plan almost fails when the capsule containing the card is nearly swallowed up by quicksand, but it is retrieved successfully and delivered to Johan. After all the hardship and adversity, Juudai and Johan face off against Yubel in Martin's body... but Juudai does not remember her at all until the very end of the duel, in which all the sealed memories of his childhood come flooding back to him. In the end, Johan uses the power of his Rainbow Dragon to open the dimensional portal wide enough to send everyone else home... except for Yubel and himself.
Upon finding that Johan did not return with the rest of the school, Juudai is absolutely crushed and overwhelmed with guilt, and soon sets out alone to rescue him by going through the remnants of a portal to the alternate dimension. His friends approach him and offer their help despite his refusal to let them go, so together they fall into an entirely new world, much different than the desert-like one Yubel had sent them to earlier, called the Dark World. He begins his search, learning that in this world, if you lose a duel, you will quite literally explode into a cloud of sparkles, the equivalent of death to most. The going is tough, and the deaths of many people who didn't deserve it at all disturbs Juudai and the others greatly. Eventually, he runs into Brron, Mad King of Dark World, after running far ahead of his friends despite the warning not to, and finds that four of them (Fubuki, Asuka, Kenzan, and Manjoume) have been captured by Brron after he'd left them in the dust, with the intent of sacrificing them for the beginnings of a certain card, one with the power to fuse the twelve total dimensions together -- Super Fusion. Brron plans to use it to summon Colorless, the true ruler of the Dark World.
The plan ultimately backfires on Brron. When his friends are indeed sacrificed and Brron brings Juudai to the abrupt realization that it's entirely his fault for running ahead, leaving everyone behind, and ultimately being selfish and thoughtless... something that had been sleeping inside him for a long time awakened suddenly, turning his eyes a bright, crazed yellow. This was the power of Haou, the Supreme King of darkness. Somehow, Juudai's despair and guilt resonated with this power, causing it to awaken and for him to take on an entirely new persona, that of Haou, the power of which was supposed to represent that of "kind darkness", from which all his universe was supposedly born. But instead, that intense negativity which reached out and resonated with it warped it, causing him to become more of a figure of evil than good. He defeats Brron eventually, who tells him with his last words that Johan is dead. He reverts back to normal for a very brief moment, until another of his close friends, Shou, approaches him and tells him his trust in him is gone because of what he saw him do to his friends. This is the last straw as he mires himself further in negativity and darkness and allows himself to fully become Haou, the ruler of the Dark World, taking Brron's incomplete Super Fusion with the intent to complete it with the souls of other duelists, human and monster alike.
Juudai's remaining friends are forced to spread out and wander, until one of them, Jim, finds out that the new dictator of the Dark World is actually Juudai through direct confrontation, and duels him, attempting to drag him out of the darkness he's drowned himself in with the help of his Orichalcum Eye, an ancient artifact that can look into the hearts of others and see their true selves. Finding that Juudai was actually buried under layers upon layers of darkness and despair, he tries his best to get him to rethink his decision, but ultimately loses and is killed. Another of Juudai's friends who had been looking on, O'Brien, takes the Orichalcum Eye when Jim loses and flees the scene in terror. It takes a while, but he realizes that if he doesn't force Juudai to see the truth, no one else will, and so with the help of the small remainder of Juudai's living friends, he makes it to the top of Haou's castle to duel him. While the result ends up as a draw, O'Brien uses the power of the Orichalcum Eye at the last moment to drag Juudai out of darkness for good this time before he too succumbs to the rule of "your life points are your life".
When he recovers from his last match as Haou, Juudai becomes depressed and afraid to duel or use his fusion cards, knowing what he did and how many people he hurt and killed with them. It takes a duel with one of Haou's servants and an explanation from one of his friends that he and Haou are two sides of the same coin to gain some of his confidence back. Soon, however, he meets Johan, and is shocked to find that Johan has in fact been possessed by Yubel with the hope that if she has Johan's form, Juudai will love her like he loves Johan. Before Juudai can challenge Yubel, however, another of his friends, Marufuji "Kaiser" Ryou, steps in and has his own ultimate duel with Yubel-in-Johan's-body, and although he loses, it fulfills his final wish, as he realizes he was dying of a heart condition to begin with. Juudai, driven now mostly by grief and the burning desire to end all this death and pain, duels Yubel, first to expel her from Johan's body, a seemingly impossible task which he succeeds in accomplishing. When the first duel ends without result, Juudai leaves Johan in his teacher's care while he goes to finish his business with Yubel. After Yubel reveals their past lives together, the reason she loves him as much as she does -- because she gave up her body and underwent an intensely painful alchemic procedure to become the hideous hermaphroditic dragon she is now, after which past-life-prince Juudai pledges his eternal love to her and only her, no matter what anyone else may have said -- Juudai realizes what he has to do. When Yubel activates Super Fusion to fulfill her own ultimate goal, to fuse the twelve dimensions and create a world for only Juudai and her, Juudai uses a trap card to change the target of the fusion to himself and Yubel, fusing their souls together and returning all those dead to their proper worlds (well, not all, but the ones Juudai cared about the most, whose souls Yubel saved as potential bargaining chips in the future).
It is a week after the fusion that Juudai returns to Duel Academia as a shooting star (literally), and the transfer students, including Johan, are sent back to their schools to complete the year. All is not over, however, because a new trouble begins to stir during the final few months of the school year. While loose ends are being tied up by Juudai and his friends as they prepare for their adult lives, a force simply called Darkness, different from the "gentle darkness" that Juudai wields, begins to set his plans to bring everyone into the world of Darkness into motion. Juudai is, at first, all set to leave the Academia without graduating, but a conversation with Saiou and Kagemaru from his past years changes that, and he decides to stay to take care of the impending danger. In the meantime, he eases back from the school scene and lets his friends begin to choose the paths they want to take for their futures, as well as learning a little from them in return.
But when people mysteriously begin to disappear and succumb to the darkness in their hearts, Juudai goes to Domino prefecture in order to stop it. During a duel with Saiou, who has accepted the power of Darkness willingly, Juudai's fusion card is polluted with darkness. When he defeats Saiou, he finds the other has planted bombs onto the Kaiba Corporation building in which they'd had their match. Juudai manages to escape using Yubel's powers back into the now-empty Domino, whose residents, along with the rest of the world's population, have been swept away to the world of Darkness to experience their worst nightmares.
Juudai is about to return to Duel Academia when he meets someone who looks like the emissary of Darkness, Trueman (Mr. T for short), and chooses to duel him. He finds this Mr. T uses Johan's Gem Beast deck, and is shocked when he thinks Johan, too, has been taken by darkness, but after an attack from the pure and mighty Rainbow Dragon, his Polymerization card is dispelled of the darkness that Saiou planted within it, which had been blinding him from the truth, and Juudai finds that it is actually Johan, and not Mr. T like the darkness in his corrupted card had been tricking him into thinking. Without bothering to finish their duel, the two of them head back to the island by boat as quickly as they can for a final showdown with Darkness. After witnessing Fubuki attempt to take down the boy possessed by the Darkness of Nihility, Fujiwara, and failing when Fujiwara literally reverses time to defeat him knowing what his move will be, Johan and Juudai step up to the plate. Johan falls while defending Juudai, but Juudai manages to free Fujiwara and faces off against the true face of Darkness... which, as it turns out, happens to be a skeletal goat, which apparently has some alchemic connections. Long, three-episode duel put short: Juudai defeats him, and although Darkness claims he will return as long as there is darkness in the hearts of humans, Juudai says he'll be there to defeat him again, likewise.
After the graduation ceremony, which Juudai's friends all attend (though are unsurprised to see that he doesn't come), Juudai is whisked off to the year 1997 (from 2008, the year season four of GX took place in) by Hane Kuriboh, one of his most cherished duel spirits granted to him in the beginning of the series by the king of games himself, Mutou Yuugi. He and post-Battle City Yuugi have a duel, and it is through this that Juudai lightens up significantly and remembers the fun in dueling again. After, he acts on the decision he'd actually made way back at the beginning of season four, after the events in the Dark World, to travel the world and help people connect with duel spirits using his abilities as one of the few who can see and communicate with them.
At this point, the canon branches off into the AU. While he's traveling, he picks up wind of strange disappearances and shadowy creatures at Duel Academia, which he recalls is now a place of dimensional strain in his world. At first, he wonders if it's such a good idea to go back and help, but realizes quickly that if he doesn't do it, nobody will, and books it back to the island. It doesn't take long after that for him to encounter Heartless, which at first he thinks are just wayward Duel Monster spirits. Dueling certainly doesn't have any effect on them, though, considering they don't react when he activates his duel disk, nor when he summons Neos to punch them into oblivion -- in fact, Neos' attack just goes right through them ineffectively. Yubel tells him they're not Duel Monsters of any sort she knows (to which his response is "oh, sure, you tell me that now"), and the shadows start to close in on him because boy, that kid sure has a lot of tasty darkness in him!
The second they pile on him, though... Yubel's guardian instincts kick in, but in a slightly different way that it seems even she's surprised to see. A keyblade materializes in his hands, very Yubel-esque, with the third eye on the hilt and everything. Despite the fact that Yubel herself has no idea what the hell just happened, Juudai doesn't have time to question it, and starts smashing shadows at random; a little awkwardly, but it gets the job done. Before he can get jumped again, Yubel directs him to an open portal she's located, possibly the one used by the Heartless to get to Duel Academia. With no way to close this portal on his own, he decides traveling will have to take a back seat for now, and goes through to find a world with a castle on the other side...
Rank: New Student
Special Powers: The ones we've seen in canon for him involve mind tricks of some kind: mind control, for one, and resistance to mind control/illusions/what have you to go with it. He will never, ever use the mind control ability of his own volition, though -- it works on humans, at least; as for Heartless, who knows, but he's not about to find out. Too much trauma behind it, not to mention it's not a very nice thing to do without permission. Resistance, conversely, stems from his fusion with Yubel, and allows him to do various mind-related things such as see through and dispel illusions, resist possession, mind reading, and mental manipulation, and other such things of that nature.
I tend to believe that the power of Gentle Darkness has more uses than just "brainwash people" like it was used in canon, though, because it's such a vast power that was scarcely described and not even close to being used at its full potential at any point. And since Juudai's long beyond the point that he'd use it like that, I'll say that the element leaks into his keyblade use. Since it's a different alignment of darkness than the Heartless, though, I assume it would work just the same way as any other elemental-affinity weapon might, as the Heartless are still very capable of hurting him as well.
He's also capable of summoning spirit form Duel Monsters into real manifestations via Yubel's power, but since they're ineffective against Heartless, they'll probably be used less, and, if anything, for more practical uses like clearing obstacles. Yubel was also able to cross dimensions/worlds on her own, but I doubt Juudai has a very good handle on that particular ability yet, so it won't be used much, if at all, unless something comes up that requires it.
Light-element things, regardless of alignment, will probably bother Juudai or at least weaken him to some extent, because, well... he's good darkness incarnate. The Cornerstone of Light comes to mind, so he'll probably be avoiding that when he can help it.
Other Skills: Juudai's a very good strategist when he actually takes the time to think about something, though that doesn't always happen. He has some level of survival skills, too, along with resilience, considering he was traveling the world on his own with only a cat and a few spirits to help him, but I wouldn't call him an expert, just someone who learns from experience. Otherwise, I guess the best that can be attributed to him is that he can think on his toes extremely quickly and extremely effectively -- it comes from being a duelist.
Keyblade: "Nightmare Pain". It's a Yubel-style keyblade transformed from Yubel's card, with the third eye on the hilt and similar mishmashed, dragonskin design. |D
Reason for having a keyblade: Aside from being a shounen hero with crazy powers, I figure that, since Juudai is anything but a heart of purest light or anything, his capability and willingness to help others, strength of heart, and important position in his own world (being one of the incarnated forces that balances it out, plus fused with a spirit) are suitable substitutes. And since he's good darkness and all, I think it's very likely he, of all people from his world, would be chosen.
RP Sample: "There's a shadow hanging over this place," Yubel murmured to Juudai. "Someone has to do something about it."
"A shadow?" Juudai echoed, startled. His guardian slanted him an amused look from bold, mismatched eyes, bright colors nobody in the world could ever possess but her. And him, perhaps.
"A shadow." She waved vaguely. Outside the window life went on as normal; people walking from place to place, chatting with friends or lovers along the way. "Can't you feel it?"
Juudai sighed. The apparent failed association was inexplicably irritating. "It all seems pretty normal to me."
It didn't take Yubel long to realize that he wasn't moving, lying there on his side and staring off wistfully into the distance. "You should hone your powers, then, shouldn't you?"
"The hell I should." He closed his eyes. Yubel sat next to him, in material form, and they lounged together, more feeling each other's presence and emotional state than really seeing it. "I have to learn to use this 'keyblade' thing, too. It's going to be a lot different from just dueling."
"Think you can handle this?" Yubel inquired, a taunting intonation in her voice that, in anyone else, would've been intended to rile him up. She shifted closer across the bed, wrapping her arms around Juudai and dragging him to lean against her as she rolled to her back. Juudai allowed the gesture, letting her move him while knowing her intentions without having to be connected to her.
"Of course. I have to," he said. His fingers clenched in the sheets, and he sighed, impatient with himself; Yubel could see and sense him pushing away the frustration. "They're threatening my world, and it has to stop. I won't let them take it after I worked my ass off to save it from a lifetime's worth of threats."
He was all lean, willowy muscle and tousled miscolored hair and passionate emotions with deep meaning when she looked at him, and he was staring at her with his seemingly ordinary brown eyes glinting with searing, renewed determination. "The shadow is the Heartless' doing, though, isn't it? The shadow you said was blanketing this place."
"More than this place by now," she mused. "I don't know how they're capable of such a feat, however. Strength in numbers, or strength in sheer force. Either way, the organization that is fighting against them will need your help if they want to win."
Of course, she would think they would need his assistance over anyone else's. A breathy laugh emerged from his lungs. Juudai had his doubts about the whole thing, but as long as it helped his friends live out their lives and saved the world he'd fought so hard to protect the first three or four times, it didn't matter how he did it. Dueling would've been so much easier in his opinion, but... whatever worked.
"That sounds like you. But they sound like they can use all the help they can get." He straightened; it was his final answer. "I'm going to stop them."
Yubel smiled, the sly, enigmatic, yet bizarrely fond smile that they both possessed, the one with edges that burned and called like flame; the one that, in Juudai's life, had drawn so many moths to him, and in Yubel's, had burned just as many.
Note to Mods: Until/unless someone apps Yubel separately (because I'm trying to drag a friend or two with me eventually!), I'll be playing her as a kinda-sorta NPC. Not that she'll need to be played much, since Juudai's really the one I'm apping, not her -- that, and she doesn't come out much anyway. If/when she gets apped, I'll discuss with the player and possibly the mods what becomes of the fusion, and other such important details like that.
Your Name: Qu-ko
Your LJ:
aphoticYour Age: 20
Contact Information (Email and AIM/MSN/Yahoo): Email: kaleidobeam@gmail.com, AIM: HighinQusitor
Character Info
Character Name: Juudai Yuuki
Series: Yu-Gi-Oh GX
Character Age and Gender: 19 / Male
Character Personality: Juudai started off the series as a bit over-the-top ignorant and self-centered from the very beginning, no matter how well-meaning he was at heart. He has never wanted to be a bad person (with one notable exception), and for the most part, he never has been. In the beginning of the series, he often wound up being rather childish underneath the good-hearted exterior -- he tended to be thoughtless, scatterbrained, hesitant to take anything seriously, and even selfish, but most of these traits wound up getting masked by his inclination to be a good person and a kind hero admired by all, and often came across in a way that seemed more charming and innocent to most people than brash and stupid at first. He was just a nice guy, if a little dense and oblivious to things that mattered most of the time, along with the occasional insensitive remark that his friends would brush off as "typical Juudai".
However, these negative traits of his stopped being quite so "charming and innocent" when he wound up growing into someone who was outright reckless and neglected to consider the consequences of his actions, which really got to him when he realized just how much of a dick he'd been -- that's an understatement, not to mention too little too late, as he pretty much went off the deep end when unfathomable results came of his actions afterward. Then, once he'd fused with Yubel, it seemed a lot like he'd shifted gears from one extreme to the other; from being reluctant to handle anything with seriousness to being a little too "serious business" at all times. Over the course of season four, though, he relearned how to lighten up and have fun again, thanks to his friends and a little help from someone special, and found the right balance on his personality to make him a more mature, reliable person as a whole.
One thing about Juudai is that he is very trustworthy and righteous, and fiercely protective of those people he cares about. When he has an opinion, he says it. When he wants something changed, he takes action. And when somebody wants advice, he's the one who gets approached -- people trust him as a hero, and since his reformation, he hasn't let them down. In addition, he has a very cheerful air about him most of the time; he makes friends very easily and rarely finds someone who can resist his good-natured, charismatic charm. Once they get to know him better, though, occasionally he can come across as someone older than his years, who shoulders a heavy, tiring burden not meant for someone quite so young or inexperienced. Yet, even despite the world on his back, as it were, he looks out for people, and tries to be a good friend despite his past mistakes.
Juudai's biggest weakness lies in the well-being of those he cares about. The quickest way to get to him is through his friends, and the villains in his world have figured this out, it seems -- nearly all of them have preyed upon his friends in some way, torturing or brainwashing them in order to take the easiest route to bringing him down. At first, he attempted to alienate them to try and keep them safe from all the crazy that haunts him, but soon learned it didn't really matter if he did or didn't, that they would try to stick by him no matter what, so he decided he was just hurting them more and stopped. Even in the face of adversity, he's grown strong enough not to waver, but when it comes to a friend being in danger, he can be taunted and held up much more easily than if one were trying to take a direct route to play with his mind. At the point he's coming from, he's a very strong-minded and secure person, so trying to screw around with his self-confidence doesn't work quite as well as it might have earlier on in the series.
He can be quite sympathetic under certain circumstances, particularly to those close to him, but he does not like to get his friends wrapped up in the practically apocalyptic problems that tend to follow him like an unwanted shadow due to his prominent position in his own universe's grand scheme. Unless someone makes a particular effort to get in his way or antagonize him, Juudai will make a decent effort to be a nice enough guy to everyone who deserves it. A few leftover negative points still exist within him that were never quite ironed out all the way, being that he still has an arrogant streak a mile wide and can be a little abrasive sometimes to people who grate on him, but overall he's usually pretty laid-back.
Yubel: The Duel Monster he's fused to is also his lover, and they actually behave much like lovers in their own weird way. At one time, Yubel was overprotective of him to the point of driving away everyone around him, and it was only worsened when she was possessed by the Light of Destruction. It caused her to turn actively psychotic and warped her sense of love and pain -- this was only half the Light's doing, though; the other half was Yubel convincing herself that he loved her so much that he was putting her through this pain of being separated from him, as a sort of mental defense to avoid admitting he might no longer love her. She simply could never fathom that he didn't actually love her, because she'd based her life around him in every way possible -- physically, mentally, emotionally, and even so far as changing her human form permanently for the sole purpose of protecting him. With all she'd sacrificed to live for him, Juudai not loving her anymore was absolutely out of the question.
Once the Light was gone, though, Yubel mellowed out considerably, and more or less returned to the person that Juudai remembered from his past life. She's snarky and smart-mouthed, and will often tease Juudai privately in ways that anyone else might consider as abrasive, but that he regards as affectionate, and will even go so far as to smart-mouth her right back. She's still fairly one-track minded, and her only goal to live for is to protect Juudai, but that's all she really needs, and in a way, she's a bit emotionally stunted of her own doing because she's so focused on him alone. She rarely regards anyone else unless they're threatening her or Juudai personally, and instead concentrates obsessively on the only thing she's known for two lifetimes and thousands of years in-between.
She's extremely intelligent and cunning, though she no longer has reason to manipulate anyone like she did before. In her time, though, she's granted a number of "monkey's paw"-type wishes and struck up deals with multiple people to accomplish her purposes (which were, of course, designed to allow herto get back to Juudai), and in no way has she not kept her word... though perhaps not in the way anyone was expecting. She probably doesn't really regret it, because it brought her back to Juudai in the end, but she wouldn't need to do it again anytime soon. The mindset that "love is pain" and, likewise, "pain is love" has since left her, now that she's felt true love from him, but considering how snarky she can be, she's still got a knack for inflicting a special brand of pain on anyone who dares to cross her and/or Juudai.
Basically, her life revolves around him, in the most literal sense possible. If you asked her about it, the universe only exists because Juudai created it to give her and him a place to love one another, and little else. The existence of other people simply doesn't mean anything to her, but since she doesn't interact with other people while she's fused to Juudai anyway, it doesn't really need to. She does her job quite well, and she loves him, and that's all Juudai could ask for from her.
Brief History: There's a wiki entry here, but it's inaccurate in some aspects as well as biased towards the English dub, which is an entirely different canon as far as I'm concerned. So I'll write out the history as it took place in the original Japanese, and then explain the part that branches off.
For a large portion of his childhood, Juudai was alone. But like all simple descriptions, this isn't entirely accurate -- he had parents, but they were always busy with work and such and had little time for him. But he was without human companionship most of the time. Keyword: human. He's had the ability to hear and see duel monster spirits since he was born, and one in particular guarded him jealously... very jealously. Her name was Yubel, and so every time he would invite a neighborhood friend over to play with him, something bad would happen because of her, due to her overprotective nature concerning Juudai, until the neighborhood kids just simply stopped coming to play with him anymore out of fear the same would happen to them after she sent one boy to the hospital.
At the same time, Kaiba Corporation had begun to accept cards made by people to send into space and study and gather the energy that came from it. He asked his parents to send in his own drawings of Neos, and Yubel as well with the hopes that she would receive the "energy of justice" and change her ways from the trip.
However, it didn't go as planned. There was a malfunction in Yubel's capsule, so after coming into contact with the "Light of Destruction", an evil force that resides in the far reaches of space, it plummeted back to earth, and Yubel burned up almost entirely in the atmosphere, leaving her with just her left arm remaining by the time she landed. While this was going on, her connection to Juudai caused him to have constant nightmares in which she tried to call out for him. His parents worried about him, and decided to pay for him to undergo a technological procedure that would erase a portion of his memory. Thus, the events involving Yubel, and even Yubel's existence itself, was forgotten for a time.
Years passed, and Juudai enrolled into Duel Academia for his high school years at last, landing in the lowest-ranked of three dorms, Osiris Red (which he didn't seem to mind at all, surprisingly... even actually enjoyed the low-quality dorms because he liked the color red). His first year involved getting acquainted with Duel Academia and its quirks, which included many strange happenings on the island the school was situated on. It turns out there were three legendary demons sealed beneath the school with the power to accomplish many seemingly impossible tasks -- like destroying mankind, creating a philosopher's stone, and granting eternal youth, among other things. He and six of his friends (including two of his teachers) were granted seven keys to the gate that locked away these demons. The chairman of the school board of Duel Academia, Kagemaru, hired seven assassins to retrieve the keys and bring them to him, all under different circumstances. In the end, by the time the seventh assassin (who turned out to be one of the keybearers himself, the teacher Daitokuji) made his appearance, six of the seven keys were in Kagemaru's possession, and only Juudai's key remained. He managed to take down both Daitokuji and Kagemaru himself, facing off against the three demons and avoiding disaster by a narrow margin.
Juudai's second year gave him knowledge of the existence of the Light of Destruction, when a new student named Edo Phoenix entered the school and used its power against him. When Edo defeated him in a duel, Juudai lost his ability to see his cards, and fell into a deep depression. He attempted to leave the school, but was swept away to Neo Space, where he regained his ability to duel and came back with a new deck all his own, the Neo Spacians that he'd designed and sent into space so long ago. The energy there had given them life, and so they lent Juudai their power. With it, he defeated Edo Phoenix in a rematch. In the meantime, though, other events were unfolding; a "society of light" was forming amongst the Obelisk Blue and Ra Yellow students, who had apparently been brainwashed by the power of the Light and a man with unusual psychic powers named Saiou Takuma, who was Edo's manager in the pro dueling leagues. After freeing his friends from the Light's control, a series of events led him to a showdown with Saiou where Edo had failed to undo the control the Light had over his best friend. It was a close match, but Juudai managed to send the Light packing for the moment, eliminating the control it had over Saiou's mind and ultimately saving the world from imminent destruction a second time.
His third year, however, was the year that changed his life forever. In the beginning, he met Johan Andersen, a transfer student from North School, with whom he struck up a friendship like no one else before. It had seemed he had a greater bond with Johan in a few days' time than he had with some of his friends from his time in the school up to two years prior, based on how the two of them acted together; it was as though they had known each other all their life, they were so close and so strikingly similar in personality. At the time, a teacher who had transferred to the school at the same time as Johan, Professor Cobra, had begun to collect energy from students as they dueled by equipping them with "dis belts" that gathered the energy generated by the duel and depositing it in his laboratory in the forest of the island. The truth was that the energy was being gathered for Yubel -- she had struck a deal with Professor Cobra when he found her as she crash-landed back on Earth years ago, promising him she could reunite him with his son if he helped her regain her body, which had disintegrated in the atmosphere with the exception of only her left arm. When Juudai and his friends infiltrate the lab, Juudai is made to begin to question the reasons for why he continues to duel, and if that reason is wrong or not... but he doesn't have time to think about it, as he is set up in a deathmatch with Cobra immediately afterward. When Juudai wins, Cobra is sent plummeting off the edge of the high-up platform they had been dueling on in a haze, presumably killing him (but not before seeing a Yubel-induced vision of his son, allowing her to fulfill her contract with him in the most twisted way possible... but still a fulfillment nonetheless). Yubel, who has by that point mostly regained her body, sends the entire school to a different dimension, much like a desert, in which Duel Monster spirits are real and tangible (while normally they are just that, spirits that cannot be seen by most humans). She possesses the mind of a boy named Martin to use his body as a vessel shortly thereafter.
The students begin to get desperate due to the extremely limited resources in this world, as well as Yubel turning half the student population into walking, brainless zombies. A connection is established between the desert world and their home dimension, along with an attempt to send their only hope to get home to them -- Rainbow Dragon, the ultimate card of the Gem Beasts, Johan's deck. The plan almost fails when the capsule containing the card is nearly swallowed up by quicksand, but it is retrieved successfully and delivered to Johan. After all the hardship and adversity, Juudai and Johan face off against Yubel in Martin's body... but Juudai does not remember her at all until the very end of the duel, in which all the sealed memories of his childhood come flooding back to him. In the end, Johan uses the power of his Rainbow Dragon to open the dimensional portal wide enough to send everyone else home... except for Yubel and himself.
Upon finding that Johan did not return with the rest of the school, Juudai is absolutely crushed and overwhelmed with guilt, and soon sets out alone to rescue him by going through the remnants of a portal to the alternate dimension. His friends approach him and offer their help despite his refusal to let them go, so together they fall into an entirely new world, much different than the desert-like one Yubel had sent them to earlier, called the Dark World. He begins his search, learning that in this world, if you lose a duel, you will quite literally explode into a cloud of sparkles, the equivalent of death to most. The going is tough, and the deaths of many people who didn't deserve it at all disturbs Juudai and the others greatly. Eventually, he runs into Brron, Mad King of Dark World, after running far ahead of his friends despite the warning not to, and finds that four of them (Fubuki, Asuka, Kenzan, and Manjoume) have been captured by Brron after he'd left them in the dust, with the intent of sacrificing them for the beginnings of a certain card, one with the power to fuse the twelve total dimensions together -- Super Fusion. Brron plans to use it to summon Colorless, the true ruler of the Dark World.
The plan ultimately backfires on Brron. When his friends are indeed sacrificed and Brron brings Juudai to the abrupt realization that it's entirely his fault for running ahead, leaving everyone behind, and ultimately being selfish and thoughtless... something that had been sleeping inside him for a long time awakened suddenly, turning his eyes a bright, crazed yellow. This was the power of Haou, the Supreme King of darkness. Somehow, Juudai's despair and guilt resonated with this power, causing it to awaken and for him to take on an entirely new persona, that of Haou, the power of which was supposed to represent that of "kind darkness", from which all his universe was supposedly born. But instead, that intense negativity which reached out and resonated with it warped it, causing him to become more of a figure of evil than good. He defeats Brron eventually, who tells him with his last words that Johan is dead. He reverts back to normal for a very brief moment, until another of his close friends, Shou, approaches him and tells him his trust in him is gone because of what he saw him do to his friends. This is the last straw as he mires himself further in negativity and darkness and allows himself to fully become Haou, the ruler of the Dark World, taking Brron's incomplete Super Fusion with the intent to complete it with the souls of other duelists, human and monster alike.
Juudai's remaining friends are forced to spread out and wander, until one of them, Jim, finds out that the new dictator of the Dark World is actually Juudai through direct confrontation, and duels him, attempting to drag him out of the darkness he's drowned himself in with the help of his Orichalcum Eye, an ancient artifact that can look into the hearts of others and see their true selves. Finding that Juudai was actually buried under layers upon layers of darkness and despair, he tries his best to get him to rethink his decision, but ultimately loses and is killed. Another of Juudai's friends who had been looking on, O'Brien, takes the Orichalcum Eye when Jim loses and flees the scene in terror. It takes a while, but he realizes that if he doesn't force Juudai to see the truth, no one else will, and so with the help of the small remainder of Juudai's living friends, he makes it to the top of Haou's castle to duel him. While the result ends up as a draw, O'Brien uses the power of the Orichalcum Eye at the last moment to drag Juudai out of darkness for good this time before he too succumbs to the rule of "your life points are your life".
When he recovers from his last match as Haou, Juudai becomes depressed and afraid to duel or use his fusion cards, knowing what he did and how many people he hurt and killed with them. It takes a duel with one of Haou's servants and an explanation from one of his friends that he and Haou are two sides of the same coin to gain some of his confidence back. Soon, however, he meets Johan, and is shocked to find that Johan has in fact been possessed by Yubel with the hope that if she has Johan's form, Juudai will love her like he loves Johan. Before Juudai can challenge Yubel, however, another of his friends, Marufuji "Kaiser" Ryou, steps in and has his own ultimate duel with Yubel-in-Johan's-body, and although he loses, it fulfills his final wish, as he realizes he was dying of a heart condition to begin with. Juudai, driven now mostly by grief and the burning desire to end all this death and pain, duels Yubel, first to expel her from Johan's body, a seemingly impossible task which he succeeds in accomplishing. When the first duel ends without result, Juudai leaves Johan in his teacher's care while he goes to finish his business with Yubel. After Yubel reveals their past lives together, the reason she loves him as much as she does -- because she gave up her body and underwent an intensely painful alchemic procedure to become the hideous hermaphroditic dragon she is now, after which past-life-prince Juudai pledges his eternal love to her and only her, no matter what anyone else may have said -- Juudai realizes what he has to do. When Yubel activates Super Fusion to fulfill her own ultimate goal, to fuse the twelve dimensions and create a world for only Juudai and her, Juudai uses a trap card to change the target of the fusion to himself and Yubel, fusing their souls together and returning all those dead to their proper worlds (well, not all, but the ones Juudai cared about the most, whose souls Yubel saved as potential bargaining chips in the future).
It is a week after the fusion that Juudai returns to Duel Academia as a shooting star (literally), and the transfer students, including Johan, are sent back to their schools to complete the year. All is not over, however, because a new trouble begins to stir during the final few months of the school year. While loose ends are being tied up by Juudai and his friends as they prepare for their adult lives, a force simply called Darkness, different from the "gentle darkness" that Juudai wields, begins to set his plans to bring everyone into the world of Darkness into motion. Juudai is, at first, all set to leave the Academia without graduating, but a conversation with Saiou and Kagemaru from his past years changes that, and he decides to stay to take care of the impending danger. In the meantime, he eases back from the school scene and lets his friends begin to choose the paths they want to take for their futures, as well as learning a little from them in return.
But when people mysteriously begin to disappear and succumb to the darkness in their hearts, Juudai goes to Domino prefecture in order to stop it. During a duel with Saiou, who has accepted the power of Darkness willingly, Juudai's fusion card is polluted with darkness. When he defeats Saiou, he finds the other has planted bombs onto the Kaiba Corporation building in which they'd had their match. Juudai manages to escape using Yubel's powers back into the now-empty Domino, whose residents, along with the rest of the world's population, have been swept away to the world of Darkness to experience their worst nightmares.
Juudai is about to return to Duel Academia when he meets someone who looks like the emissary of Darkness, Trueman (Mr. T for short), and chooses to duel him. He finds this Mr. T uses Johan's Gem Beast deck, and is shocked when he thinks Johan, too, has been taken by darkness, but after an attack from the pure and mighty Rainbow Dragon, his Polymerization card is dispelled of the darkness that Saiou planted within it, which had been blinding him from the truth, and Juudai finds that it is actually Johan, and not Mr. T like the darkness in his corrupted card had been tricking him into thinking. Without bothering to finish their duel, the two of them head back to the island by boat as quickly as they can for a final showdown with Darkness. After witnessing Fubuki attempt to take down the boy possessed by the Darkness of Nihility, Fujiwara, and failing when Fujiwara literally reverses time to defeat him knowing what his move will be, Johan and Juudai step up to the plate. Johan falls while defending Juudai, but Juudai manages to free Fujiwara and faces off against the true face of Darkness... which, as it turns out, happens to be a skeletal goat, which apparently has some alchemic connections. Long, three-episode duel put short: Juudai defeats him, and although Darkness claims he will return as long as there is darkness in the hearts of humans, Juudai says he'll be there to defeat him again, likewise.
After the graduation ceremony, which Juudai's friends all attend (though are unsurprised to see that he doesn't come), Juudai is whisked off to the year 1997 (from 2008, the year season four of GX took place in) by Hane Kuriboh, one of his most cherished duel spirits granted to him in the beginning of the series by the king of games himself, Mutou Yuugi. He and post-Battle City Yuugi have a duel, and it is through this that Juudai lightens up significantly and remembers the fun in dueling again. After, he acts on the decision he'd actually made way back at the beginning of season four, after the events in the Dark World, to travel the world and help people connect with duel spirits using his abilities as one of the few who can see and communicate with them.
At this point, the canon branches off into the AU. While he's traveling, he picks up wind of strange disappearances and shadowy creatures at Duel Academia, which he recalls is now a place of dimensional strain in his world. At first, he wonders if it's such a good idea to go back and help, but realizes quickly that if he doesn't do it, nobody will, and books it back to the island. It doesn't take long after that for him to encounter Heartless, which at first he thinks are just wayward Duel Monster spirits. Dueling certainly doesn't have any effect on them, though, considering they don't react when he activates his duel disk, nor when he summons Neos to punch them into oblivion -- in fact, Neos' attack just goes right through them ineffectively. Yubel tells him they're not Duel Monsters of any sort she knows (to which his response is "oh, sure, you tell me that now"), and the shadows start to close in on him because boy, that kid sure has a lot of tasty darkness in him!
The second they pile on him, though... Yubel's guardian instincts kick in, but in a slightly different way that it seems even she's surprised to see. A keyblade materializes in his hands, very Yubel-esque, with the third eye on the hilt and everything. Despite the fact that Yubel herself has no idea what the hell just happened, Juudai doesn't have time to question it, and starts smashing shadows at random; a little awkwardly, but it gets the job done. Before he can get jumped again, Yubel directs him to an open portal she's located, possibly the one used by the Heartless to get to Duel Academia. With no way to close this portal on his own, he decides traveling will have to take a back seat for now, and goes through to find a world with a castle on the other side...
Rank: New Student
Special Powers: The ones we've seen in canon for him involve mind tricks of some kind: mind control, for one, and resistance to mind control/illusions/what have you to go with it. He will never, ever use the mind control ability of his own volition, though -- it works on humans, at least; as for Heartless, who knows, but he's not about to find out. Too much trauma behind it, not to mention it's not a very nice thing to do without permission. Resistance, conversely, stems from his fusion with Yubel, and allows him to do various mind-related things such as see through and dispel illusions, resist possession, mind reading, and mental manipulation, and other such things of that nature.
I tend to believe that the power of Gentle Darkness has more uses than just "brainwash people" like it was used in canon, though, because it's such a vast power that was scarcely described and not even close to being used at its full potential at any point. And since Juudai's long beyond the point that he'd use it like that, I'll say that the element leaks into his keyblade use. Since it's a different alignment of darkness than the Heartless, though, I assume it would work just the same way as any other elemental-affinity weapon might, as the Heartless are still very capable of hurting him as well.
He's also capable of summoning spirit form Duel Monsters into real manifestations via Yubel's power, but since they're ineffective against Heartless, they'll probably be used less, and, if anything, for more practical uses like clearing obstacles. Yubel was also able to cross dimensions/worlds on her own, but I doubt Juudai has a very good handle on that particular ability yet, so it won't be used much, if at all, unless something comes up that requires it.
Light-element things, regardless of alignment, will probably bother Juudai or at least weaken him to some extent, because, well... he's good darkness incarnate. The Cornerstone of Light comes to mind, so he'll probably be avoiding that when he can help it.
Other Skills: Juudai's a very good strategist when he actually takes the time to think about something, though that doesn't always happen. He has some level of survival skills, too, along with resilience, considering he was traveling the world on his own with only a cat and a few spirits to help him, but I wouldn't call him an expert, just someone who learns from experience. Otherwise, I guess the best that can be attributed to him is that he can think on his toes extremely quickly and extremely effectively -- it comes from being a duelist.
Keyblade: "Nightmare Pain". It's a Yubel-style keyblade transformed from Yubel's card, with the third eye on the hilt and similar mishmashed, dragonskin design. |D
Reason for having a keyblade: Aside from being a shounen hero with crazy powers, I figure that, since Juudai is anything but a heart of purest light or anything, his capability and willingness to help others, strength of heart, and important position in his own world (being one of the incarnated forces that balances it out, plus fused with a spirit) are suitable substitutes. And since he's good darkness and all, I think it's very likely he, of all people from his world, would be chosen.
RP Sample: "There's a shadow hanging over this place," Yubel murmured to Juudai. "Someone has to do something about it."
"A shadow?" Juudai echoed, startled. His guardian slanted him an amused look from bold, mismatched eyes, bright colors nobody in the world could ever possess but her. And him, perhaps.
"A shadow." She waved vaguely. Outside the window life went on as normal; people walking from place to place, chatting with friends or lovers along the way. "Can't you feel it?"
Juudai sighed. The apparent failed association was inexplicably irritating. "It all seems pretty normal to me."
It didn't take Yubel long to realize that he wasn't moving, lying there on his side and staring off wistfully into the distance. "You should hone your powers, then, shouldn't you?"
"The hell I should." He closed his eyes. Yubel sat next to him, in material form, and they lounged together, more feeling each other's presence and emotional state than really seeing it. "I have to learn to use this 'keyblade' thing, too. It's going to be a lot different from just dueling."
"Think you can handle this?" Yubel inquired, a taunting intonation in her voice that, in anyone else, would've been intended to rile him up. She shifted closer across the bed, wrapping her arms around Juudai and dragging him to lean against her as she rolled to her back. Juudai allowed the gesture, letting her move him while knowing her intentions without having to be connected to her.
"Of course. I have to," he said. His fingers clenched in the sheets, and he sighed, impatient with himself; Yubel could see and sense him pushing away the frustration. "They're threatening my world, and it has to stop. I won't let them take it after I worked my ass off to save it from a lifetime's worth of threats."
He was all lean, willowy muscle and tousled miscolored hair and passionate emotions with deep meaning when she looked at him, and he was staring at her with his seemingly ordinary brown eyes glinting with searing, renewed determination. "The shadow is the Heartless' doing, though, isn't it? The shadow you said was blanketing this place."
"More than this place by now," she mused. "I don't know how they're capable of such a feat, however. Strength in numbers, or strength in sheer force. Either way, the organization that is fighting against them will need your help if they want to win."
Of course, she would think they would need his assistance over anyone else's. A breathy laugh emerged from his lungs. Juudai had his doubts about the whole thing, but as long as it helped his friends live out their lives and saved the world he'd fought so hard to protect the first three or four times, it didn't matter how he did it. Dueling would've been so much easier in his opinion, but... whatever worked.
"That sounds like you. But they sound like they can use all the help they can get." He straightened; it was his final answer. "I'm going to stop them."
Yubel smiled, the sly, enigmatic, yet bizarrely fond smile that they both possessed, the one with edges that burned and called like flame; the one that, in Juudai's life, had drawn so many moths to him, and in Yubel's, had burned just as many.
Note to Mods: Until/unless someone apps Yubel separately (because I'm trying to drag a friend or two with me eventually!), I'll be playing her as a kinda-sorta NPC. Not that she'll need to be played much, since Juudai's really the one I'm apping, not her -- that, and she doesn't come out much anyway. If/when she gets apped, I'll discuss with the player and possibly the mods what becomes of the fusion, and other such important details like that.