Rookshire Hill app
Apr. 11th, 2019 05:53 amPersonal Information
Name: Katy
Age: 30
Prefered Pronouns: she/her
Contact: plurk: damua, discord: damua#1089
Character Information
Character Name: Shion
Fandom: No. 6 (CRAU from Tower of Animus and then Life Aftr)
Character Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
savedbyasong
Character History: A wiki. His canon point is mid way through episode 8.
Note: Tower of Animus was a horror game and therefore should come with warnings for horror both psychological and physical -including body horror, torture, experimentation on children and despair (including suicidal ideation.)
Shion's personal history of the tower includes psychological torture, some body horror, unhealthy coping mechanics, co-dependency and unhealthy attitudes towards personal safety and death. I have endeavoured to talk about such things in a non-graphic way in my application.
A few hundred years before Shion was born there was a wore that broke the world. Humanity was largely wiped out, natural resources depleted and much of the world became uninhabitable. People survived in six cities, known only by their numbers.
No.6 is one of those cities. A perfect walled city where science is valued above all. The citizens on No.6 have everything they need. They swear allegiance to the city every day and have no need to complain. If they do then… Maybe on a bad day they might complain to a sympathetic little old lady on a park bench and they disappear, never to be seen again.
No.6 churns out obedient, mindless workers. People who are highly intelligent, the top of their fields of science but with no imagination, no reason to dream of anything more. Books are banned as is music and the arts. Families are formed with government permission, for procreation only.
No. 6 is a meritocracy and children are tested at an early age, the best and brightest are brought up in Chronos. In the best houses, with the best education and a guaranteed future as one of the elite scientists of No.6.
Shion is one of these children. His parents were scientists, though his father disappeared when he was just a baby. We first meet Shion when he is twelve, he and his friend Safu are on the verge of their final exams that will propel them into the ‘special program’. Shion is majoring in ecology and Safu in Biology.
Shion’s life was perfect and yet something felt wrong. Something he could never put a finger on but that something led him to opening his window and stepping out onto his balcony in the middle of a storm the night of his twelfth birthday and screaming at the sky.
It was a moment that changed his life forever. As he turned to close the window once more a noise made him turn back round and there on threshold was a drowned rat of a child, barefooted and bleeding.
Shion realises the boy is an escaped prisoner, who had been reported on the news earlier. But he is tiny and soaking and bleeding and Shion could not even comprehend reporting him. He removed the bullet and stitched up the wound. The boys name is Nezumi.
He sheltered Nezumi throughout the night and by the morning Nezumi is gone and the authorities are at the door.
Shion was interrogated and found guilty of harbouring a prisoner.He was expelled from school and kicked out of Chronos. He and his mum move to the district of Lost Town where Karen becomes a baker and Shion finds work programming cleaning robots for No.6’s parks.
This is where we find Shion four years later. There has been a death in the park. He meets with Safu who informs him that she is going to No.5 on a school exchange trip. She asks if he will have children with him and he refuses (very very awkwardly) but says if she still wants to when she returns from No.5 he would.
The next day he learns that the old man who died in the park was actually in his thirties the body has been taken away by the authorities, Shion foolishly wonders outloud if they are covering something up. Moments later he watches horrified as his co worker deteriorates, ages rapidly and dies in front of him. A bee flies out of the mans neck.
Shion is arrested on suspicion of murder and non conformity. As he’s being driven away to the correctional facility he is very dramatically rescued by no other than Nezumi. Nezumi forces Shion to throw away his No.6 identity bracelet and takes him out of the city.
Outside of the walls there is a slum town, known as West Town. It is here Nezumi lives in an underground basement room full of books, with robot mice that gather information for him.
Not long after arriving at Nezumi’s home Shion feels something on his neck and when he reaches up he feels a patch like what first appeared on those that died. He panics and begs Nezumi to cut it off him. He cuts the parasite bee larvae out of Shion. Shion's hair turns white and his eyes red, a red band appears on his skin starting on his face and swirling around his body.
Shion is terrified at first when he wakes up and sees the changes, but Nezumi yells at him some more until Shion agrees it is better to live. Shion wants to make a cure using his blood and the larvre but Nezumi refuses to let him.
West Town is a harsh place. Bodies lie in the street, children starve, it is chaos and noise and cutthroat. Full of people who will do anything to survive. Shion is a fish out of water. He gets threatened, prepositioned, stared at, robbed by small children.
Time goes on, Nezumi works on trying to unravel the mysteries of No. 6. Shion is mostly left in the dark though he tries to find out more about why Nezumi hates No. 6 so much and what he is not telling Shion. Nezumi often tells him that it is best they do not get to know one another so well as it will make it harder in the future, because of Shion learns the truth about No.6 and still thinks it worth saving then they will be enemies. Shion wonders if he can bring down the walls of No.6 so there is no inside the city and out. Nezumi calls Shion naive.
Shion is in West town about three or four months (enough time for Safu to settle into No. 5, break out of her elite No.6 way of thinking, her grandma to die and for her to return to No.6 and for winter to pass and it to become spring).
He and Nezumi have a lot of debates about the nature of No.6 and destroying vs. saving the city and more arguments about caring for people or not. There is lots of them staring at each other intently, Nezumi being unnecessarily violent towards Shion to prove that He Doesn't Care and lots of Shion wanting to know the truth about things and struggling to put feelings into words.
Shion goes to see one of Eve’s performances (without Nezumi’s permission), during the performance Nezumi faints, when he comes to he says ‘the wind blew’ and that he had heard a song.
Rikiga decides Shion needs a new coat and takes him to a place that sells clothes taken from prisoners of No.6. Shion recognises Safu’s coat and realises she’s in danger. He decides to rescue her, without Nezumi because he has already been such a burden to him.
So that night Shion thanks Nezumi for everything and says that there is nothing that scares him more than the thought of losing him. He kisses Nezumi and claims it a goodnight kiss. But it is a goodbye kiss. He sneaks away in the early hours of the morning. Nezumi follows him (he already knew Safu was missing) and they fight. They promise that there will be no more secrets between them.
Nezumi takes him to a cave, introduces him to the man who named him, a man who was also infected by the bees. He asks Shion to tell his story and he does so. Nezumi is taken by the wind and the song again, when he recovers the man asks Nezumi to sing what he heard. Nezumi sings, the cave begins to glow. Everything is embraced by a golden light.
Shion woke up in a bed, unable to move an orange liquid filled collar around his neck. There was a note. “Your world is destroyed. I saved you. Let’s be happy here.”
The Tower of Animus was set in a tower that grew to be over a hundred floors tall. Monsters prowled the corridors, the floors were everything from a library a room full of screaming with bloody handprints on the walls. A whole ocean, floating islands. Nothing made sense.
It was ran by five ‘administrators’ who used the residents as experiments, or in games. Shion was there for two and a half years. Their worlds had been destroyed and they were the only survivor -infinite universes meant that your best friend could be there, but it was not the one from your world. Yours was dead.
Shion had thought West Town bad, this was so much worse. He quickly learned that death was not real, he died twenty times, he wasn’t strong, wasn’t fast and his naivity angered some of the more… murderous residents.
Events happened monthly, sometimes games (hide and seek with murderous teddy bears, trick a treat with costumes that crushed you if you didn’t meet candy quotas), sometimes experiments (turning residents into ‘drones’, swapping around their collar fluid to see what happened, body swapping). Sometimes monsters attacked, once a space whale crashed into the tower.
Shion’s first May is notable. As punishment for dying during an event he was chained up and had to watch Nezumi (a drone thereof) be killed over and over again for everything Shion had ever done wrong and, when they ran out of crimes to list, as punishment for wrong answers to questions about art, literature etc. This lasted six days.
This gained him the start of a family through a man named Reno, who took him under his wing and with a mix of tough love and endless patience got through to him and began training him.
In July Shion disappeared from the tower for a couple of weeks. He ended up on his dead world. Just him in a dead universe. Everything dead including the sun. (This was the hiatus mechanic, so it happened a few times over the years, the most notable being just before end game when he was gone for a month and a half).
Life went on, Shion’s little family grew, he made friends, he made enemies. He saw his friends die far too many times. People sometimes disappeared, vanishing from existance, their names appearing in the graveyard. He lost control of the darkness and anger inside him many times, notably once killing Reno for a perceived betrayal of Xion. He made attempts to learn control.
One year before endgame the glamour system failed and they learned the truth. The tower was a harsh metal construct, everything was metal and foil, all the things they thought they saw were illusions. Most so their bodies. For they were not bodies at all, just metal frames, filled with fluid matched their collar colours, inside them was a soul- the only part of them that was real. They were just souls.
The power was running out. They had a year to fix things and escape or they would die, a real soul death.
Shion was part of the science teams that worked on figuring out the collar liquid, to try and give people their real powers back.
All this time Bad Things were happening. At one point whilst being strapped to a strange machine to help power the tower characters went through a mirror, which showed them all the infinite futures that could ever be, in one rush of information into their head.
Finally they defeated Ruana, figured a way to restore their worlds and finally went home.
Except Shion didn’t go home. He ended up on an archipeligo of islands. His sister, Xion was there. The islands were much better than the tower. But they still weren’t good and they still weren’t home. Islands came and went. (Were they real? Was anything about the islands ‘reality’ that’s a question Shion tried to answer by tally points in a notebook, results sway to ‘probably not’.)
His first few months were rough. He found himself stuck on a floating island for a while, whilst there he was controlled to want to ‘collect’ people, with a knife. He attacked Ignis, who knocked him out. He was then granted a ‘wish’ and shown Safu’s fate.
This is notable as Xion calmed him down and managed to stop him berserking, a breakthrough.
The next month a city with harsh rules appeared. Shion knew he shouldn’t go, it was too much like No.6 and very likely to cause him pain. He did so anyways, he followed the rules perfectly until he didn’t and got arrested.
Rule breakers were thrown into a colourless void, to eternally slumber. Xion rescued him. He decided to burn down the city. Laurent stopped him.
Life went on. He missed Reno and his other friends from the Tower but he made new friends here. Notably he met Connor (Ceej). Due to a Lot of Things, including a shared dream experience he realised he liked him. Maybe like he liked Nezumi. Cue panic.
He explored islands, learned new skills. Practical skills like house fixing and harvesting fields but also how to tell stories. They found an island full of flowers and after much investigation learned that everyone there had died from a flower disease brought on by emotional lies. Half the islanders died to this disease, including Shion. This is notable because A) It meant he broke a promise he made to Xion right before Animus endgame, to not die anymore. B) Shion had thought he had a handle on his emotions but turns out he really didn’t.
Bad things didn’t happen all the time. Sometimes there were months were everything was calm and somehow those were worse. Because Shion waited on tenderhooks, expecting everything to crash down.
In November a Nezumi arrived. Cue Even More Panic. In December Shion was put in a trial where people were bodyswapped and had to do trials designed for the person whose body they were in. Prompto was in Shion’s body and had to use Shion’s skills.
Xion (also known as Aster) disappeared and Shion was lost without her. In January there were ‘shadows’ of everyone and also ‘lights’ their worst and best qualities personified. Nezumi’s shadow was terrible but it was the Light of Nezumi that made him think. He told Shion Nezumi’s truth, that the city that raised Shion had burned down Nezumi’s village, killed his people. He also told Shion that Nezumi needed Shion’s love, that Shion just as he was was enough.
Ceej had disappeared too, Gladio vanished, Prompto vanished. Shion was helpless as his friends slipped away from him. He tried to keep track of who was gone, to make sure they were remembered. Soon he too vanished.
Character Personality:
Shion is an idealist who believes people are worth fighting for. Despite everything he has seen, done and gone through this core of Shion has never changed. He knows people can be cruel, can harm others and do harm but he still ultimately believes in equality and peace. He loves animals and science and has a tendancy to babble when he’s excited or nervous. He panics often and gets overwhelmed quickly.
Shion is someone who will instinctively take the kindest path, even if actually it is not the correct path or the path that will do the most good in the future. Shion now is at least… aware that this is a problem of his. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.
No.6 is, at it’s core, a story about a naive child growing up. His time in two game worlds has only continued that growth. At canon point he believed he had seen the real world, believed he was not naive, that he could stand equal to Nezumi. Through his time in Animus he learned that his knowledge of suffering was nothing compared to the cruelties that could be inflicted on others. Yet during his time on the islands he learned that there was still more to learn. That growing actually was not something you ever stopped doing. It was something he had to work on, constantly.
Shion is a lot stronger than he seems and stronger than he believes. His main motivation is his wish to become a person who Nezumi would be proud of. During his time in Animus he became convinced that physical strength was the most important, he put a lot of stock in training with Reno until he was physically fit. He believed that physical strength was more important than the knowledge he had from No. 6. By his time leaving the tower his thoughts were a bit more balanced, science had done a lot in helping them escape.
When he arrived on the Islands he was back in his ‘real’ body, physically he was back to the weakling child of No. 6. He began training again but soon found that actually, his other skills were very helpful.
He sometimes still felt useless but he understood that a wide variety of skills were just as important as being physically strong.
Nezumi taught Shion that having connections was a bad thing, that he should throw away the ties to his old life because all they could do was hurt him.
Shion believes that Nezumi was, in this instance, wrong. Connections made you stronger. In the tower he found a family. Though they never replaced his mum they taught him a lot. Not just how to fight and stay alive. But how to live and how to love. He learned that you could love people in many different ways.
However in many ways Nezumi was right. Loving people was painful because you could lose them or they could be used to hurt you.
But if he had to chose between losing his new found family and friends and never having met them he would chose the former every time. His time on the islands has only strengthened that. Loving people could bring so much pain but it also brought so much joy and caring was still the choice Shion would make. Every time.
Shion is quite reckless, he often puts others in front of himself even if it often means they have to risk themselves saving him. This did not get better once he left his world.
In the Tower Shion stopped caring about death. In the cells during endgame Xion made him promise he would try not to die any more. This held for six months in Life Aftr, where he made a real effort to not die and break his promise.
He still has strong feelings about other peoples deaths. He believes others should not die and will be upset that they did, and angry if it is someone he is particularly close to. However the anger and sadness is more for the pain that dying caused them.
Due to his high death count in the Tower Shion began losing memories. This terrified him. Because of this Shion became obsessed with writing things down. Memories are precious. Remembering other people is also very important. Making sure his friends know that they will be remembered is important. He created a memorial garden on the islands, in order to make sure that everyone who passed through the islands was remembered even if a small way.
Shion went to his dead world a few times during his time in the tower, the longest time being just before they made the final push to restore the worlds when he was there for a month and a half. Being alone is difficult for him, the fear he might end up completely alone terrifies him. He doesn’t like the quiet, can’t sleep alone.
Shion would always rather know the truth. He would rather suffer then be kept in ignorance. He would rather a painful truth than living a peaceful lie.
No. 6 was a fake city, it was perfect but it was not real. When Nezumi rescued him he began to see the real world. In the tower he thought he knew about reality, the horror and the pain seemed like the 'real world' Nezumi was trying to teach him about. Then he discovered that it was all fake.
Were the islands real? This was a question Shion asked a lot as his drive to know what was ‘reality’ blew up into existational nonsense.
Shion has a lot of darkness inside him. Shion loses control when Nezumi is threatened, insulted or harmed going as far as murdering a guard violently after Nezumi was hurt.
The first time he lost control in Animus was after he was punished for dying in the labyrinth. As things got worse Shion felt himself getting angrier more. He made a genuine effort to try and control the feelings, chronicling feelings and trying to work out why he was feeling them.
It was something he let slip when he first came to the islands, but he once again tried to make an effort to sort out his feelings. It didn’t work all that well. He learned during the flower plague that actually he had absolutely no grip on his emotions at all.
He also has a lot of opinions about being controlled. About beings of power and what they do with that power. He does not trust powerful beings, even if they seem kind. He doesn’t believe anyone should hold sway over anyone else. ‘Learned helplessness’ is something he rallies against. He fears falling into routines, getting too used to things. He sees the part of him that likes order and stability as a weakness.
Love and relationships are worth noting because he comes from a place where such things were highly discouraged and before leaving No.6 love was something Shion didn’t understand at all.
Shion loves Nezumi. He believes that compared to Nezumi he is not strong enough, that he will always be someone who relies on Nezumi and will just slow him down. Despite this he is desperate to prove that he can be Nezumi's equal, he can be someone Nezumi can be proud of. He believes he needs to work harder to be a person Nezumi can trust in. Nezumi’s light told him, he is enough just as he is. He’s not sure how to feel about that, how that fits with everything else he knows.
On the islands he met Ceej. It took a while but eventually he came to realise that he loved him, like he loved Nezumi. He’s still… It’s confusing because Ceej isn’t Nezumi? This is one area where Shion is practically a normal confused teenager.
Shion knows that if Nezumi had not saved him he would have grown up to be a mindless adult. He would have never known what it was like to love, or hate or feel. He knows hate now, he knows what it feels like to want to destroy everything around you. He knows love so deep it makes his heart want to burst. He knows loss, he knows what it is like to lose, to be brought so low that he could not see a way to stand up again.
And he knows what it is to win. To succeed despite all the odds. To do the impossible.
When he left the tower he was full of hope that no mater what his world threw at him he could face it. He could rescue Safu, he could save No. 6.
He soon realised it was not to be. Safu was already dead. He learned the truth of why Nezumi hated No. 6 so much.
Does he want to go home?
If Safu was already dead, if Nezumi leaves him, could he face going home?
Like so many things. He doesn’t know.
When he was heading towards escaping the Tower he believed that once he escaped it would be alright, he could face the world and anything it had to throw at him. Nothing could be worse than what he had endured.
On the islands he learned that they didn’t have to be. The damage was done. He was always going to carry the scars of his past, the nightmares didn’t stop, he might not be in the tower any more but the real monsters are the ones inside his head.
Powers and Abilities:
Powers: Shion has no powers, he is a completely unpowered human.
Science and medical knowledge: Shion is very good at science. Though he was only twelve when he was expelled from the special program he had more knowledge than most adults. He is confident he can stitch Nezumi's wound even whilst admitting he has never done it before. Later after he has left No. 6 he is working on making a serum with his own blood to counteract the effects of the parasite bees.
In Animus his medical skills and knowledge grew. He worked under Hojo at the makeshift clinic and learned from him. He got very good at first aid and in first aid without a lot of supplies. Shion has never been squeamish but his time in the tower has made him even less so.
His science knowledge increased as well. Helping with the collar fluid research meant that he worked with scientists from other worlds and was able to help figure out how to unlock the potential from their souls. He has a very good memory and this helps him with science.
Survival and combat: Shion first learned survival techniques in the tower, in times where the food was stopped. He learned to trap, how to preserve meat and how to cook on an open fire. He was able to use his No. 6 learned ecology and with help from Reno apply it to real life. He could gather edible plants and even made a guide to help others do the same.
Since then he has spent 14 months on a series of islands where gathering and outdoor survival was the only choice. Suffice to say he’s gotten pretty good at it.
Reno taught him to fight. He has the knowledge of how to fight, pressure points to immobilise people, fighting styles and how to defend himself. He is still working on the strength and stamina to back it up.
Other skills: Shion can cook and bake very well. He learned to swim in the tower. He can make half decent barricades. He can do basic survival DIY.
Inventory:
~ His clothes - he is wearing light weight trousers, this T shirt and boots.
~ A bag with his name stitched on it. Inside he has
~ A first aid kit, pretty depleted
~ A sewing kit, pretty depleted
~ A knife (more a utility knife than a weapon, but it’s sharp)
~ A battered notebook full of notes.
~ Another notebook, this one is handmade and more a piece of art than an actual notebook full of ocean themed pages and a vague picture story running through it about a merman who falls in love with a man from the shore.
~ Two pencils, two pens and an eraser.
~ A leather flask
~ A woven basket
~ An extremely loyal Tigerlilly, named Cobweb,
Samples:
Here (cw: wounds and stitching of them)
Here
Here
Here (cw: gore, neck trauma)
Name: Katy
Age: 30
Prefered Pronouns: she/her
Contact: plurk: damua, discord: damua#1089
Character Information
Character Name: Shion
Fandom: No. 6 (CRAU from Tower of Animus and then Life Aftr)
Character Journal:
savedbyasongCharacter History: A wiki. His canon point is mid way through episode 8.
Note: Tower of Animus was a horror game and therefore should come with warnings for horror both psychological and physical -including body horror, torture, experimentation on children and despair (including suicidal ideation.)
Shion's personal history of the tower includes psychological torture, some body horror, unhealthy coping mechanics, co-dependency and unhealthy attitudes towards personal safety and death. I have endeavoured to talk about such things in a non-graphic way in my application.
A few hundred years before Shion was born there was a wore that broke the world. Humanity was largely wiped out, natural resources depleted and much of the world became uninhabitable. People survived in six cities, known only by their numbers.
No.6 is one of those cities. A perfect walled city where science is valued above all. The citizens on No.6 have everything they need. They swear allegiance to the city every day and have no need to complain. If they do then… Maybe on a bad day they might complain to a sympathetic little old lady on a park bench and they disappear, never to be seen again.
No.6 churns out obedient, mindless workers. People who are highly intelligent, the top of their fields of science but with no imagination, no reason to dream of anything more. Books are banned as is music and the arts. Families are formed with government permission, for procreation only.
No. 6 is a meritocracy and children are tested at an early age, the best and brightest are brought up in Chronos. In the best houses, with the best education and a guaranteed future as one of the elite scientists of No.6.
Shion is one of these children. His parents were scientists, though his father disappeared when he was just a baby. We first meet Shion when he is twelve, he and his friend Safu are on the verge of their final exams that will propel them into the ‘special program’. Shion is majoring in ecology and Safu in Biology.
Shion’s life was perfect and yet something felt wrong. Something he could never put a finger on but that something led him to opening his window and stepping out onto his balcony in the middle of a storm the night of his twelfth birthday and screaming at the sky.
It was a moment that changed his life forever. As he turned to close the window once more a noise made him turn back round and there on threshold was a drowned rat of a child, barefooted and bleeding.
Shion realises the boy is an escaped prisoner, who had been reported on the news earlier. But he is tiny and soaking and bleeding and Shion could not even comprehend reporting him. He removed the bullet and stitched up the wound. The boys name is Nezumi.
He sheltered Nezumi throughout the night and by the morning Nezumi is gone and the authorities are at the door.
Shion was interrogated and found guilty of harbouring a prisoner.He was expelled from school and kicked out of Chronos. He and his mum move to the district of Lost Town where Karen becomes a baker and Shion finds work programming cleaning robots for No.6’s parks.
This is where we find Shion four years later. There has been a death in the park. He meets with Safu who informs him that she is going to No.5 on a school exchange trip. She asks if he will have children with him and he refuses (very very awkwardly) but says if she still wants to when she returns from No.5 he would.
The next day he learns that the old man who died in the park was actually in his thirties the body has been taken away by the authorities, Shion foolishly wonders outloud if they are covering something up. Moments later he watches horrified as his co worker deteriorates, ages rapidly and dies in front of him. A bee flies out of the mans neck.
Shion is arrested on suspicion of murder and non conformity. As he’s being driven away to the correctional facility he is very dramatically rescued by no other than Nezumi. Nezumi forces Shion to throw away his No.6 identity bracelet and takes him out of the city.
Outside of the walls there is a slum town, known as West Town. It is here Nezumi lives in an underground basement room full of books, with robot mice that gather information for him.
Not long after arriving at Nezumi’s home Shion feels something on his neck and when he reaches up he feels a patch like what first appeared on those that died. He panics and begs Nezumi to cut it off him. He cuts the parasite bee larvae out of Shion. Shion's hair turns white and his eyes red, a red band appears on his skin starting on his face and swirling around his body.
Shion is terrified at first when he wakes up and sees the changes, but Nezumi yells at him some more until Shion agrees it is better to live. Shion wants to make a cure using his blood and the larvre but Nezumi refuses to let him.
West Town is a harsh place. Bodies lie in the street, children starve, it is chaos and noise and cutthroat. Full of people who will do anything to survive. Shion is a fish out of water. He gets threatened, prepositioned, stared at, robbed by small children.
Time goes on, Nezumi works on trying to unravel the mysteries of No. 6. Shion is mostly left in the dark though he tries to find out more about why Nezumi hates No. 6 so much and what he is not telling Shion. Nezumi often tells him that it is best they do not get to know one another so well as it will make it harder in the future, because of Shion learns the truth about No.6 and still thinks it worth saving then they will be enemies. Shion wonders if he can bring down the walls of No.6 so there is no inside the city and out. Nezumi calls Shion naive.
Shion is in West town about three or four months (enough time for Safu to settle into No. 5, break out of her elite No.6 way of thinking, her grandma to die and for her to return to No.6 and for winter to pass and it to become spring).
He and Nezumi have a lot of debates about the nature of No.6 and destroying vs. saving the city and more arguments about caring for people or not. There is lots of them staring at each other intently, Nezumi being unnecessarily violent towards Shion to prove that He Doesn't Care and lots of Shion wanting to know the truth about things and struggling to put feelings into words.
Shion goes to see one of Eve’s performances (without Nezumi’s permission), during the performance Nezumi faints, when he comes to he says ‘the wind blew’ and that he had heard a song.
Rikiga decides Shion needs a new coat and takes him to a place that sells clothes taken from prisoners of No.6. Shion recognises Safu’s coat and realises she’s in danger. He decides to rescue her, without Nezumi because he has already been such a burden to him.
So that night Shion thanks Nezumi for everything and says that there is nothing that scares him more than the thought of losing him. He kisses Nezumi and claims it a goodnight kiss. But it is a goodbye kiss. He sneaks away in the early hours of the morning. Nezumi follows him (he already knew Safu was missing) and they fight. They promise that there will be no more secrets between them.
Nezumi takes him to a cave, introduces him to the man who named him, a man who was also infected by the bees. He asks Shion to tell his story and he does so. Nezumi is taken by the wind and the song again, when he recovers the man asks Nezumi to sing what he heard. Nezumi sings, the cave begins to glow. Everything is embraced by a golden light.
Shion woke up in a bed, unable to move an orange liquid filled collar around his neck. There was a note. “Your world is destroyed. I saved you. Let’s be happy here.”
The Tower of Animus was set in a tower that grew to be over a hundred floors tall. Monsters prowled the corridors, the floors were everything from a library a room full of screaming with bloody handprints on the walls. A whole ocean, floating islands. Nothing made sense.
It was ran by five ‘administrators’ who used the residents as experiments, or in games. Shion was there for two and a half years. Their worlds had been destroyed and they were the only survivor -infinite universes meant that your best friend could be there, but it was not the one from your world. Yours was dead.
Shion had thought West Town bad, this was so much worse. He quickly learned that death was not real, he died twenty times, he wasn’t strong, wasn’t fast and his naivity angered some of the more… murderous residents.
Events happened monthly, sometimes games (hide and seek with murderous teddy bears, trick a treat with costumes that crushed you if you didn’t meet candy quotas), sometimes experiments (turning residents into ‘drones’, swapping around their collar fluid to see what happened, body swapping). Sometimes monsters attacked, once a space whale crashed into the tower.
Shion’s first May is notable. As punishment for dying during an event he was chained up and had to watch Nezumi (a drone thereof) be killed over and over again for everything Shion had ever done wrong and, when they ran out of crimes to list, as punishment for wrong answers to questions about art, literature etc. This lasted six days.
This gained him the start of a family through a man named Reno, who took him under his wing and with a mix of tough love and endless patience got through to him and began training him.
In July Shion disappeared from the tower for a couple of weeks. He ended up on his dead world. Just him in a dead universe. Everything dead including the sun. (This was the hiatus mechanic, so it happened a few times over the years, the most notable being just before end game when he was gone for a month and a half).
Life went on, Shion’s little family grew, he made friends, he made enemies. He saw his friends die far too many times. People sometimes disappeared, vanishing from existance, their names appearing in the graveyard. He lost control of the darkness and anger inside him many times, notably once killing Reno for a perceived betrayal of Xion. He made attempts to learn control.
One year before endgame the glamour system failed and they learned the truth. The tower was a harsh metal construct, everything was metal and foil, all the things they thought they saw were illusions. Most so their bodies. For they were not bodies at all, just metal frames, filled with fluid matched their collar colours, inside them was a soul- the only part of them that was real. They were just souls.
The power was running out. They had a year to fix things and escape or they would die, a real soul death.
Shion was part of the science teams that worked on figuring out the collar liquid, to try and give people their real powers back.
All this time Bad Things were happening. At one point whilst being strapped to a strange machine to help power the tower characters went through a mirror, which showed them all the infinite futures that could ever be, in one rush of information into their head.
Finally they defeated Ruana, figured a way to restore their worlds and finally went home.
Except Shion didn’t go home. He ended up on an archipeligo of islands. His sister, Xion was there. The islands were much better than the tower. But they still weren’t good and they still weren’t home. Islands came and went. (Were they real? Was anything about the islands ‘reality’ that’s a question Shion tried to answer by tally points in a notebook, results sway to ‘probably not’.)
His first few months were rough. He found himself stuck on a floating island for a while, whilst there he was controlled to want to ‘collect’ people, with a knife. He attacked Ignis, who knocked him out. He was then granted a ‘wish’ and shown Safu’s fate.
This is notable as Xion calmed him down and managed to stop him berserking, a breakthrough.
The next month a city with harsh rules appeared. Shion knew he shouldn’t go, it was too much like No.6 and very likely to cause him pain. He did so anyways, he followed the rules perfectly until he didn’t and got arrested.
Rule breakers were thrown into a colourless void, to eternally slumber. Xion rescued him. He decided to burn down the city. Laurent stopped him.
Life went on. He missed Reno and his other friends from the Tower but he made new friends here. Notably he met Connor (Ceej). Due to a Lot of Things, including a shared dream experience he realised he liked him. Maybe like he liked Nezumi. Cue panic.
He explored islands, learned new skills. Practical skills like house fixing and harvesting fields but also how to tell stories. They found an island full of flowers and after much investigation learned that everyone there had died from a flower disease brought on by emotional lies. Half the islanders died to this disease, including Shion. This is notable because A) It meant he broke a promise he made to Xion right before Animus endgame, to not die anymore. B) Shion had thought he had a handle on his emotions but turns out he really didn’t.
Bad things didn’t happen all the time. Sometimes there were months were everything was calm and somehow those were worse. Because Shion waited on tenderhooks, expecting everything to crash down.
In November a Nezumi arrived. Cue Even More Panic. In December Shion was put in a trial where people were bodyswapped and had to do trials designed for the person whose body they were in. Prompto was in Shion’s body and had to use Shion’s skills.
Xion (also known as Aster) disappeared and Shion was lost without her. In January there were ‘shadows’ of everyone and also ‘lights’ their worst and best qualities personified. Nezumi’s shadow was terrible but it was the Light of Nezumi that made him think. He told Shion Nezumi’s truth, that the city that raised Shion had burned down Nezumi’s village, killed his people. He also told Shion that Nezumi needed Shion’s love, that Shion just as he was was enough.
Ceej had disappeared too, Gladio vanished, Prompto vanished. Shion was helpless as his friends slipped away from him. He tried to keep track of who was gone, to make sure they were remembered. Soon he too vanished.
Character Personality:
Shion is an idealist who believes people are worth fighting for. Despite everything he has seen, done and gone through this core of Shion has never changed. He knows people can be cruel, can harm others and do harm but he still ultimately believes in equality and peace. He loves animals and science and has a tendancy to babble when he’s excited or nervous. He panics often and gets overwhelmed quickly.
Shion is someone who will instinctively take the kindest path, even if actually it is not the correct path or the path that will do the most good in the future. Shion now is at least… aware that this is a problem of his. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.
No.6 is, at it’s core, a story about a naive child growing up. His time in two game worlds has only continued that growth. At canon point he believed he had seen the real world, believed he was not naive, that he could stand equal to Nezumi. Through his time in Animus he learned that his knowledge of suffering was nothing compared to the cruelties that could be inflicted on others. Yet during his time on the islands he learned that there was still more to learn. That growing actually was not something you ever stopped doing. It was something he had to work on, constantly.
Shion is a lot stronger than he seems and stronger than he believes. His main motivation is his wish to become a person who Nezumi would be proud of. During his time in Animus he became convinced that physical strength was the most important, he put a lot of stock in training with Reno until he was physically fit. He believed that physical strength was more important than the knowledge he had from No. 6. By his time leaving the tower his thoughts were a bit more balanced, science had done a lot in helping them escape.
When he arrived on the Islands he was back in his ‘real’ body, physically he was back to the weakling child of No. 6. He began training again but soon found that actually, his other skills were very helpful.
He sometimes still felt useless but he understood that a wide variety of skills were just as important as being physically strong.
Nezumi taught Shion that having connections was a bad thing, that he should throw away the ties to his old life because all they could do was hurt him.
Shion believes that Nezumi was, in this instance, wrong. Connections made you stronger. In the tower he found a family. Though they never replaced his mum they taught him a lot. Not just how to fight and stay alive. But how to live and how to love. He learned that you could love people in many different ways.
However in many ways Nezumi was right. Loving people was painful because you could lose them or they could be used to hurt you.
But if he had to chose between losing his new found family and friends and never having met them he would chose the former every time. His time on the islands has only strengthened that. Loving people could bring so much pain but it also brought so much joy and caring was still the choice Shion would make. Every time.
Shion is quite reckless, he often puts others in front of himself even if it often means they have to risk themselves saving him. This did not get better once he left his world.
In the Tower Shion stopped caring about death. In the cells during endgame Xion made him promise he would try not to die any more. This held for six months in Life Aftr, where he made a real effort to not die and break his promise.
He still has strong feelings about other peoples deaths. He believes others should not die and will be upset that they did, and angry if it is someone he is particularly close to. However the anger and sadness is more for the pain that dying caused them.
Due to his high death count in the Tower Shion began losing memories. This terrified him. Because of this Shion became obsessed with writing things down. Memories are precious. Remembering other people is also very important. Making sure his friends know that they will be remembered is important. He created a memorial garden on the islands, in order to make sure that everyone who passed through the islands was remembered even if a small way.
Shion went to his dead world a few times during his time in the tower, the longest time being just before they made the final push to restore the worlds when he was there for a month and a half. Being alone is difficult for him, the fear he might end up completely alone terrifies him. He doesn’t like the quiet, can’t sleep alone.
Shion would always rather know the truth. He would rather suffer then be kept in ignorance. He would rather a painful truth than living a peaceful lie.
No. 6 was a fake city, it was perfect but it was not real. When Nezumi rescued him he began to see the real world. In the tower he thought he knew about reality, the horror and the pain seemed like the 'real world' Nezumi was trying to teach him about. Then he discovered that it was all fake.
Were the islands real? This was a question Shion asked a lot as his drive to know what was ‘reality’ blew up into existational nonsense.
Shion has a lot of darkness inside him. Shion loses control when Nezumi is threatened, insulted or harmed going as far as murdering a guard violently after Nezumi was hurt.
The first time he lost control in Animus was after he was punished for dying in the labyrinth. As things got worse Shion felt himself getting angrier more. He made a genuine effort to try and control the feelings, chronicling feelings and trying to work out why he was feeling them.
It was something he let slip when he first came to the islands, but he once again tried to make an effort to sort out his feelings. It didn’t work all that well. He learned during the flower plague that actually he had absolutely no grip on his emotions at all.
He also has a lot of opinions about being controlled. About beings of power and what they do with that power. He does not trust powerful beings, even if they seem kind. He doesn’t believe anyone should hold sway over anyone else. ‘Learned helplessness’ is something he rallies against. He fears falling into routines, getting too used to things. He sees the part of him that likes order and stability as a weakness.
Love and relationships are worth noting because he comes from a place where such things were highly discouraged and before leaving No.6 love was something Shion didn’t understand at all.
Shion loves Nezumi. He believes that compared to Nezumi he is not strong enough, that he will always be someone who relies on Nezumi and will just slow him down. Despite this he is desperate to prove that he can be Nezumi's equal, he can be someone Nezumi can be proud of. He believes he needs to work harder to be a person Nezumi can trust in. Nezumi’s light told him, he is enough just as he is. He’s not sure how to feel about that, how that fits with everything else he knows.
On the islands he met Ceej. It took a while but eventually he came to realise that he loved him, like he loved Nezumi. He’s still… It’s confusing because Ceej isn’t Nezumi? This is one area where Shion is practically a normal confused teenager.
Shion knows that if Nezumi had not saved him he would have grown up to be a mindless adult. He would have never known what it was like to love, or hate or feel. He knows hate now, he knows what it feels like to want to destroy everything around you. He knows love so deep it makes his heart want to burst. He knows loss, he knows what it is like to lose, to be brought so low that he could not see a way to stand up again.
And he knows what it is to win. To succeed despite all the odds. To do the impossible.
When he left the tower he was full of hope that no mater what his world threw at him he could face it. He could rescue Safu, he could save No. 6.
He soon realised it was not to be. Safu was already dead. He learned the truth of why Nezumi hated No. 6 so much.
Does he want to go home?
If Safu was already dead, if Nezumi leaves him, could he face going home?
Like so many things. He doesn’t know.
When he was heading towards escaping the Tower he believed that once he escaped it would be alright, he could face the world and anything it had to throw at him. Nothing could be worse than what he had endured.
On the islands he learned that they didn’t have to be. The damage was done. He was always going to carry the scars of his past, the nightmares didn’t stop, he might not be in the tower any more but the real monsters are the ones inside his head.
Powers and Abilities:
Powers: Shion has no powers, he is a completely unpowered human.
Science and medical knowledge: Shion is very good at science. Though he was only twelve when he was expelled from the special program he had more knowledge than most adults. He is confident he can stitch Nezumi's wound even whilst admitting he has never done it before. Later after he has left No. 6 he is working on making a serum with his own blood to counteract the effects of the parasite bees.
In Animus his medical skills and knowledge grew. He worked under Hojo at the makeshift clinic and learned from him. He got very good at first aid and in first aid without a lot of supplies. Shion has never been squeamish but his time in the tower has made him even less so.
His science knowledge increased as well. Helping with the collar fluid research meant that he worked with scientists from other worlds and was able to help figure out how to unlock the potential from their souls. He has a very good memory and this helps him with science.
Survival and combat: Shion first learned survival techniques in the tower, in times where the food was stopped. He learned to trap, how to preserve meat and how to cook on an open fire. He was able to use his No. 6 learned ecology and with help from Reno apply it to real life. He could gather edible plants and even made a guide to help others do the same.
Since then he has spent 14 months on a series of islands where gathering and outdoor survival was the only choice. Suffice to say he’s gotten pretty good at it.
Reno taught him to fight. He has the knowledge of how to fight, pressure points to immobilise people, fighting styles and how to defend himself. He is still working on the strength and stamina to back it up.
Other skills: Shion can cook and bake very well. He learned to swim in the tower. He can make half decent barricades. He can do basic survival DIY.
Inventory:
~ His clothes - he is wearing light weight trousers, this T shirt and boots.
~ A bag with his name stitched on it. Inside he has
~ A first aid kit, pretty depleted
~ A sewing kit, pretty depleted
~ A knife (more a utility knife than a weapon, but it’s sharp)
~ A battered notebook full of notes.
~ Another notebook, this one is handmade and more a piece of art than an actual notebook full of ocean themed pages and a vague picture story running through it about a merman who falls in love with a man from the shore.
~ Two pencils, two pens and an eraser.
~ A leather flask
~ A woven basket
~ An extremely loyal Tigerlilly, named Cobweb,
Samples:
Here (cw: wounds and stitching of them)
Here
Here
Here (cw: gore, neck trauma)
