Institute app, take two

[comparative_insanity]

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Emi
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Definitely.
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: N/A
CONTACT: sweetjerry alienGirlscout @ AIM
CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A.

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Fai Flourite
CANON: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
CANON REFERENCE: Tsubasa Wiki page. Fai's info page on the TRC wiki.
AGE: 23. In canon his age is unspecified apart from the remark that he's lived "several times longer already" than a man who is somewhere in his twenties, so he's probably a hundred years at least.
GENDER: Male.
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: Teacher in biology, chemistry and mutation science + X-man.
APPEARANCE: 1, 2, 3. Fai is tall and built like a noodle fairly scrawny, although there obviously needs to be some kind of lithe musculature there somewhere. He has a mop of blond hair of the can't be tamed variety, pale skin, blue eyes. He'll be wearing a lab coat over his clothes even while not actually teaching, and while compelled to dress reasonably enough like a grownup in school, he'll find ways of livening things up. He'll still turn up in lady clothes when he feels like it, because he does what he wants.
The only difference from canon is that he now has some faint flecks of yellow in the blue of his irises. When he uses his powers, his eyes will turn gold, and when he pushes them to the limit of what he can do, his irises will swell and his pupil will become slitted. (This will not be apparent to any observer unless he decides to let them see it, or they are trained to withstand mind control. Otherwise they will appear to look just like his normal eyes by default.)

PERSONALITY: When Fai is introduced in canon he comes off as very a very agreeable and friendly person, but also someone who rarely takes things seriously and therefore often comes off as flippant and somewhat aggravating to have around. He seems to be one of those people who are forever a bit of a child at heart, restless and playful and either unwilling or unable to conform to social norms. And in a way, that is exactly what he is. Both this persona and the more introspective and elusive side you see when he's caught off guard seem to be parts of his personality that he enhances and uses as a sort of shield. Even after the canon point when keeping up a facade to people is no longer necessary, he still exhibits this playful and often rather silly behavior (for example spying on Sakura and Syaoran having a moment in the last manga, taking flying leaps off swing sets in Kobato).

Fai has an eccentric sense of humor, a flamboyant way of expressing himself and interacting with people, and several strange quirks, one being that he doesn't quite seem to be able to grasp the concept of personal space. He can be courteous to a fault, but at the same time also acts a bit too intimately with some people right off the bat, as if immediately assuming that they're a friend. With the people he likes he always pushes and prods and teases a bit, either trying to provoke reactions or simply as his own way of expressing affection. He doesn't always seem to know when he steps over the line for unacceptable or just kind of rude behavior, and either doesn't notice or care when people become outraged or, more frequently, embarrassed.

But there is no denying that at the beginning of his journey as a character, it is nonetheless true that Fai exaggerates this his carefree and eccentric behavior, to the point where he is downright faking being vapid and ignorant, and acting up as a way to confuse and mislead. Whenever he says something that betrays a deeper understanding of events, he immediately adds a "just guessing" or "or something like that", and when asked for an opinion or explanation it's not uncommon for him to reply with something noncommittal like "I wonder...", or even more often to simply not reply at all. He is still seen smiling even during rather pressured situations, and often makes light of and/or simply avoids battle unless he strictly has no other choice. This is obviously a planned and practiced method of keeping his true intentions hidden, and an attempt of making his companions write him off as a flighty fool and nothing more.

However, you also see him smiling to hide deeper emotions such as guilt / worry / hurt. One example of this occurs in Outo, smiling at Mokona and saying "I'm always happy" when Mokona tells him no one would blame him if he was, a fairly sensitive subject in his situation, and another example would be right at the beginning in Celes, where he smiles while he's talking to Chii even though he just had to put the sleep spell on Ashura. In the former case, one could assume that it might be a part of his unconcerned act and nothing more, but the second example - and others like it - where he doesn't have to pretend at all, show that there is an explanation that goes deeper than that. Specifically, finding out that he can only learn "magic that hurts people" as a child, not healing, and Ashura reacting to this by saying that he can heal people and make them better by smiling at them. What he effectively tells the already guilt-ridden child in his care in that moment is that even though Fai is destined to hurt people, he can at least do one thing for others: Smile. And at that time, Fai obeys, smiling widely to make Ashura happy even though he'd been visibly upset just a moment before. This suggests a behavior where Fai simply goes out of his way not to show painful emotions because he does not want to bring that pain onto other people, instead hiding them behind a smile.

Despite Fai's tendency towards fakery - or more likely specifically because of it - he is very perceptive, and very sensitive to the emotions of the people around him. That is, unless they pertain to him in person, where he seems to have a huge blind spot. This means that he can offer deeply thought out and often very helpful advice in interpersonal matters to other people - and often does so whether they want him to or not - but at the same time seems utterly incapable of understanding and managing his own relationships without significant input and help from others.

He is also a very intelligent man in general, and he often possesses an impressive insight and understanding into events around him, along with an uncanny knack for guessing the outcome of said events based on what he observes. This is something he usually masks by acting as if he’s merely making wild guesses without substance, and in general it often suits his purposes to downplay his own intelligence.

Guilt is in fact the motivator for a lot of the things that Fai does, and something that permeates his entire backstory. He was conditioned to feel guilty for the death of his parents and the suffering of the people of Valeria from birth, and then even more so for his uncle's subsequent insanity and all of the deaths he caused, even to the point of a full-on panic attack and mental breakdown ("Even if we were to go to another country... would the same thing happen again? Would people who have nothing to do with us... die? Just because the two of us exist? ")
Some time after this, his twin dies, and Fei Wang Reed alters his memories to make him believe that it's his fault, making him into the perfect puppet, to use for his own ends. ("You choose yourself over your own twin and killed him. Why do you hesitate to kill someone else?") From that moment on, his guilt ensures that he more or less lives only to bring his twin back. This is especially heavily indicated in the way he chooses to discard his own name, Yuui, and go by the name of his dead twin until the moment he can give that name back again.
And while it's apparent that he slowly starts to heal and become better while living under Ashura's care, the moment it's revealed that Ashura is the one who is killing off the citizens of Celes, Fai's mind immediately returns to the curse of twins, and the sin which he will never escape. Ashura assuring him that he has killed the people to strengthen his own magic in an attempt to make Fai kill him also does absolutely nothing to alleviate his feelings of guilt - nor does being unable to kill Ashura, and instead fleeing that world.

It is not so strange, then, that someone who views themselves in such a manner is terrified of people getting too close to him. At the very core of his being is the belief that he's incapable of causing others anything but misery and suffering, and the fact that he's determined to later on betray, hurt or even kill his traveling companions means that he thinks he knows for certain that this fate is inevitable. His attempts at making sure that no one gets to know him too well - or even worse, starts to care about him - therefore appear to not only fill the function of keeping himself and his intentions safe from prying eyes. It's just as much about making his betrayal as painless as he can possibly make it when the time comes. ("I just don't want anyone to get hurt because they got too close to me.")

Yet despite his best efforts, Fai is a very loving person who practically craves the affection of others, and once someone has gotten under his skin he won't be able not to care very deeply about them, or detach himself once the line into friendship is crossed. He very easily sympathizes with the struggles of others, and it's hard for him not to involve himself and try to help when others are in need. Even so, Fai doesn’t see himself as kind, but rather seems to view this behavior as another form of selfishness. (“I have never been kindhearted. All I’ve ever been is weak.”) And it is true that despite caring for them, he's nonetheless quite capable of lying repeatedly to his friends and through omission and passivity put them in harm’s way if that means achieving what he truly desires. He seems to think that the fact that he cares about the people he deceives only makes him a worse person, and it could be argued that he has a point.

If someone gets too close, he will do this by either trying simply to deflect the question or change the subject completely, or on rare occasions when caught off guard, by revealing a small slice of the truth before quickly clamming up again, possibly in an attempt to confuse and deter further probing. At the point when he feels that he has become too important to someone, he will try to drive them off by becoming cold, passive-aggressive and manipulative, and by trying to do as much emotional harm as possible in an attempt to drive the person off. For their own good, of course.

Fai is very stubborn, and once he's decided on a course of action which he believes to be the best, it will take quite a lot to shake some sense into him when he's wrong. For all that he is a fractured and broken person, he possesses great determination and strength, and once he can be convinced to not turn a lot of this upon himself, he is most definitely a force to be reckoned with. And for all that he can seem frighteningly cold-blooded when there is something he feels he needs to do, in the end the thing that motivates and drives him is always love - love that he will go to any lengths to protect and fight for.

It should be pointed out, however, that this capacity for loving goes hand-in-hand with being incredibly selfish. Fai undoubtedly hates what he is intending to do for the sake of his brother, because he's not a vicious or cruel man, but he still considers it a reasonable sacrifice to let an untold number of entire universes be torn apart just for the sake of his own wish. For the sake of his brother, it doesn't matter that countless faceless people suffer; all that matters is that he gets his twin back. And it's only when Fai starts getting personally attached to the people he travels with that he finally starts doubting what he is about to do. In other words, he was quite willing to sacrifice who knows how many, as long as they didn't mean anything personally to him; it's only when he directly stands to lose something in the gamble that he starts to balk at the thought for real. And this is no doubt another source of self-hatred for him as more time passes. He knows exactly what a hypocrite he's being, being determined to do Fei Wang Reed's bidding all of his life, only to have second thoughts because suddenly the people he'd seen as nothing more than obstacles are now people to him, and people that he loves.

This is not to say that Fai is an inhuman monster who cares for no one else but himself, because that's not true. It's just that he was raised - and manipulated - into being so singularly obsessed with his brother's death and his own guilt that it's very hard for him to accept that perhaps this is neither what he, nor his brother, ever wanted in the first place. After telling himself for most of his life that he's a heartless creature with only one goal in mind, it's no wonder he has eventually started to believe this. And every time he displays perfectly human feelings - not being able to kill his beloved father despite what he's done, not wanting to betray the children he's spent so much time protecting or the man who happens to be his soulmate - he sees this as further signs of his own weakness, rather than his humanity and compassion. And so the evil circle keeps spinning on, and he has gone on like this so far by now that he's not capable of breaking himself out of it on his own. He doesn't even realize he's trapped in the first place.

AU differences: The biggest and most obvious deviation difference between Fai's canon iteration and that of the Institute universe is that he has not lost his twin. Yuui is alive and well, and while their relationship has never been uncomplicated, Fai has never had to lose the center of his life in anything near as profound a fashion as he does in canon.

Fai's tendency to guilt and self-blame are therefore nothing as horrifically destructive in this AU, but they are still definitely present. They are centered a lot more around growing up being constantly compared to Yuui as the "good twin" and the resentment that sprung from that, his own feelings of inadequacy in most of his relationships, and the fact that his underlying selfishness often results in him hurting people - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

Growing up and going to college has allowed him to overcome some of the more crippling insecurities he harbored as a teenager concerning his own intellectual abilities, but it has also unfortunately escalated his less than flattering views of his interpersonal abilities. It's not that he ever has troubles making friends, but rather that his innate fear of anyone getting too close to him makes it very hard to keep them - and this goes double for his romantic relationships, which always seem to crash and burn in some horrific manner. (And this is probably not helped by the fact that he's been in love with his best friend since he was seventeen.)

Basically the differences can be summed up that Fai's life has not been the ridiculous Trauma Konga Line it is in canon, and he is therefore naturally not the shattered emotional wasteland of a human being that he spends the first half of his life being. He's a young man from a rather dysfunctional family who has seen his fair share both of bullying and extremely inadvisable relationships, and his personal issues are more proportionate to this. Nor is he the impossibly intuitive and wise mage who has spent more than a normal person's entire lifetime studying the much briefer lives of the people around him, preparing for a seemingly impossible task. He's naturally charismatic, has both the passion and talent necessary to have potential for greatness in his field, and he has developed a pretty impressive control of his power over the years, but this won't actually mean that he'll always be several steps ahead of everyone around him.

POWERS/ABILITIES: THIS SECTION IS A BEHEMOTH AND I AM SORRY. Ahem.

Fai's mutant powers can in short be summed up as the ability to manipulate how he is perceived by others. This includes both the ability to control what kind of an impression he makes, as well as projecting purely physical attributes in the form of glamours; he can make a person find him trustworthy, attractive, frightening, repulsive, and so on, or he can convince them that he looks, sounds and acts like their dead mother or a complete stranger. But of course, there are some limitations to this.

Firstly, and most importantly, Fai needs eye contact to do anything at all - so his powers will not work on anyone who is blind, or if the target has the presence of mind to close their eyes before he attempts to control them. Once eye contact is established, however, he will be in full control as long as he remains in the presence of his target - that is to say, he doesn't have to keep staring soulfully into anyone's eyes to keep controlling them. All he needs is a brief moment to establish a connection. And even when he leaves it, the impression he's made will linger. How much will depend entirely on the strength of character and discipline of the person in question, and will also be affected by outside influences which contradict the impression he's made. (For example, someone walking up and going "You know that guy who you found so completely charming and trustworthy that you let him into the super secret base? He's a mind-controlling mutant who screwed with your brain, you absolute moron.")

Secondly, while Fai has the whole range of emotions at his disposal in theory, it'll become increasingly difficult to change the mind of someone who already has formed their own impression of Fai in any way which conflicts with their view. Which is to say that Fai could never make his own twin hate him, or find him frightening; and similarly if someone has a very strong dislike for Fai, it would be very hard for him to make them suddenly trust him implicitly.

Thirdly, while Fai will seem to change his entire appearance, his glamours are not in any physical sense real. To a person under his power the illusion covers all aspects, even such subtle things as touch and smell, but to anyone he hasn't made eye contact with will see him exactly as he is, and will be forewarned. While his power works even through video, he still needs to know that the camera is there and look directly at it for this to have any effect on anyone watching... and what the camera records will still Fai, not the glamour. His powers cannot fool anything that doesn't have a mind and emotions. A thumb or retinal scanner won't be tricked no matter how hard he stares at them. A camera with facial recognition means serious bad news for him. (On the plus side of the glamours, however, the fact that he is basically convincing the other person's brain rather than their senses, their mind will fill in all the things they think should be there automatically.)

Finally, when it comes to his powers, Fai is essentially flying blind. Which is to say, he can control what a person feels about him, but he can neither control or foresee the way they act upon it at all. He has gotten very good at reading people with time, but this doesn't still mean that something which might seem a good idea to him (ie making someone extremely attracted to him to make them more compliant) won't actually backfire horribly (by, say, awakening some kind of issues involved with said attraction and actually causing the other person to freak the fuck out). Similarly in the case of his glamours, Fai can't actually see them himself. If he is imitating a person from his own memory, this isn't that much of a problem, because he'll still know who he looks like to everyone else. But if he is trying to imitate a person from his target's memory who he has never seen, simply by manipulating their emotions (a person they trust, a person they fear, a person that represents authority), he will have no idea who he looks like unlike his target actually tells him, and will therefore have to improvise a lot. And if he then ends up looking like someone's father despite said father being dead/in Indonesia/estranged/kidnapped by the mafia, there is not amount of mental manipulation in the world that will keep the target from getting suspicious. And if he does that with more than one person in the room he will, of course, look like five different memories unless all five for some unlikely reason have the exact same feelings about one specific person.

As for who and how many people Fai can control, the usual standard disclaimer about incredible mental strength or being trained to withstand such techniques of course stands. Animals are incredibly hard for him to affect at all, because their minds and emotions differ too much from human minds/emotions - and the less intelligent the animal, the less it'll be affected. Basically he might be able to invoke a simple impression like "I'm no threat" or "I'm completely uninteresting" to a dog, but actual affection will be completely beyond him, and so will using glamours, because animals perceive senses in ways which are completely alien to a human mind.

When it comes to how many, Fai is not limited so much by the actual number of people at this point so much as the eye contact factor. It's possible to keep a room full of people under his sway provided they can all see him, but a whole crowd is going to be problematic, since there is no way he is going to manage to make eye contact with all of them. A recording will increase the spread of his power, but a recording is also extremely imprecise in comparison, since he has direct connection to the people he controls and no way of reading their reactions, and therefore can only evoke the most basic of impressions, and any glamours of people that he has no mental picture of himself are going to be a complete mess.

That isn't to say that the number of people being controlled is unimportant. Because the more people Fai is trying to control, the longer he has to keep up an impression or glamour the stronger he tries to make his influence.... all of this will eat away at the enormous reserve of mental energy needed simply to control his power, and once he reaches the end of it, we will go completely haywire. At the point where this happens, both sides of his power will go into overdrive simultaneously, and will be completely ruled by his own emotions. He will have no control over who other people see him as, or how they perceive him, and his own fear of being out of control might accidentally cause him to scare everyone around him as well, or to simply forget he even exists as he tries to make himself as unnoticeable as possible. And of course this is extremely exhausting, and he will at the very most last a couple of hours in this state before his brain simply shuts itself off in self-defense before the strain kills him. After that, he'll be dead to the world for a couple of days, and wake up with the mother of all headaches, his eyes stuck permanently on yellow, and his powers completely depleted for at least a week.

Basically, Fai attempting to overreach his own capabilities is a Bad Idea.

AU HISTORY: From his early years, Fai has always been somewhat of a problem child. There was a lot of friction between him and his teachers due to his erratic attention span, absolute inability to stay put for any extended amount of time, and lack of a brain-to-mouth filter which - or rather, the right kind of brain-to-mouth filter. He would lie and omit when he liked his version of the truth more, but would at the same time be too honest sometimes in ways that came off as rude or insensitive. Even after he was properly diagnosed with ADHD, there were still plenty of authority figures who would simply view him as a spoiled brat, and in some ways they were not completely incorrect.

To put it bluntly, in a household where his father suffered from Parkinson's disease, and could only work part time from home due to his disability, and his mother had to spend a lot of time away from home due to her work as a judge, Fai was just a little bit more trouble than either parent had bargained for. And then there was Yuui, who more or less took care of himself and was in very many ways the perfect son. This led to them allowing Fai to more or less run wild most of the time - after a certain point the effort of attempting to rein him in just didn't seem worth it - but to also react very harshly to the trouble he got into and thereby would drag the rest of the family into as well.

If you then add in the way Fai really didn't know how to not draw negative attention at school, and frequently got targeted by other children for being weird, stupid and annoying - not to mention apparently not understanding why boys couldn't wear dresses, or why doing things like entering buildings via the window on the second floor or spending an entire class on your back on your desk makes you a huge freak - and it became the perfect storm of problems that his parents just didn't want to deal with. Yuui, on the other hand, couldn't not get involved, and so he would end up getting into trouble in school as well, simply because he was defending his brother against bullies. In the end, this definitely factored into their parents' decision to send Yuui to a high-end music school in Italy when the twins were 14, far away from the distraction and disrupting influence that was Fai.

With Yuui gone, Fai withdrew into himself completely for several months, barely speaking or even acknowledging the presence of others at all. It was a time of incredible emotional stress, since Fai didn't know how to relate to the world around him at all without Yuui there next to him, and at the end of it, a couple of classmates having a go at him served as his final breaking point. Until then, he had tried very hard to not show any of emotions in front of his contemporaries, since getting angry or crying would only result in further mocking. Not so much this time. Instead, his classmates seemed genuinely abashed and ashamed of what they had done, and awkwardly invited him to a party taking place later that week.

And so began Fai's time as a popular kid, coinciding neatly - and for obvious reasons - with his debut in blatant and horrendously unethical power abuse. At first, he wasn't even aware that he was doing it, and simply thought that people had somehow started liking him for real. But it didn't take him long to realize that this just wasn't very likely, and that every time his eyes would start to burn, people would immediately start going along with Fai's own personal script. He could get as much admiration he wanted from anyone he choose, he could make people vie against each other for his attention, he could make anyone agree with him on just about anything, no matter how stupid. His bitter disappointment at realizing that people only liked him because he forced them was quickly followed by a lot of not very nice feelings about the power he suddenly held over his former tormentors. Basically, he was a very lonely and creepy kid, and might have continued down that road toward Very Bad Things if an argument with his parents hadn't led to Fai abusing his powers against them. Horrified and disgusted with himself once he realized what he'd done, he immediately confessed everything to them and got sent to the Xavier Institute post haste.

And there Fai found the environment he'd always needed, one where he didn't actually have to abuse his powers to make friends, and where being weird and different wasn't immediately equivalent with exclusion and condemnation. It still took a while for him to start to open up, however, and only two years later it was discovered that Yuui was in fact also a mutant, and was going to transfer to the Institute immediately. This created a bit of tension between the twins, since Fai had kind of neglected telling his brother about being a mutant, and also telling his schoolmates about having a twin, but happily, the sheer relief of being allowed to go to school together once again ended out winning out in the end.

Once rid of the final crippling hindrance of believing himself to not be a whole person when Yuui wasn't around, Fai flourished. He established several deep and meaningful friendships; he found that there were some subjects in school that he wasn't just genuinely interested in, but was also really good at; and he managed to make it out of his first real relationship a lot stronger and wiser, despite it taking a turn for the downright abusive there at the end. Despite kidnappings and attacks and boyfriend-related head trauma, he enjoyed this year at school like he never had before.

And then the Phoenix Incident kind of happened. That was not as enjoyable, but like several of his friends - at least the ones who hadn't been put in stasis - he nonetheless decided to stay at the Institute and finish high school. Once that was done, he stayed on for the post-graduate program and XI, but also spent a lot of time at a number of other colleges and universities during this time. In between this, he squeezed in as much time as an X-man as he could manage and lent a hand whenever he could spare one to Feliks' mutant right campaigns.

So he has led a very crowded and busy life these last four years, and while this has also been incredibly rewarding, it has sapped both Fai's energy and his funds. His family has always been well off, but with his father's waning health they have lost one income and gained a lot bills, and Fai really doesn't want to add to the burden - he still has some issues with that. And so once it was announced that Xavier's would be opening its doors to new students once again, Fai figured that helping guide this generation of confused and overwhelmed teenage mutants might be a very interesting new challenge, and also something that actually comes with an income, so why not? If nothing else, he can't imagine he'll be that much weirder than the teachers he used to have.


SAMPLES

NETWORK SAMPLE:

Video
[Ah, gone are the days when Fai made videos of waxing his brother's legs, or where he rambled at length about sex - well, actually, he's kind of in charge of the Sex Ed, so no, that might still happen. But Yuui doesn't let him wax his legs anymore. Boo.

The point is, Fai looks downright respectable, as befits a teacher, in a crisp white lab coat, black turtleneck and sensible shoes. The pants are still a bit tighter and and more sparkly than one might expect, but you can't get everything. And he might still be sitting in a teenagery knot on his chair, one knee tucked under his chin, but he seems to be focusing on the camera, and he is exuding an air of confidence and calm. Practically radiating, in fact. Weird, that.]

Hello everyone, I thought maybe I'd introduce myself! My name is Fai Flourite, and I'll probably end up being your teacher in one thing or another eventually - mostly biology and chemistry, though.

I've been told that my scientific methods can sometimes be a bit... unconventional, but I think we can all agree that it's not an interesting lesson unless something escapes from a terrarium or goes bang, right?

[He's joking. Kind of. Mostly. It won't be every lesson.]

Anyway, when I'm not being your ever charming teacher in the noble art of science, I'll also be working here as an X-man. I won't tell you the rather pretentious code name I used to have as a teenager - though I've got a tramp stamp as a reminder - but nowadays I will be referred to as Glamour. Very flattering, very apt - I obviously choose it myself.

[For a moment, a number of different people are visible instead of him: A couple of presidents, Julia Roberts, Professor Xavier, Peewee Herman, the Queen of England. And then Fai is back, grinning widely.]

O~kay, I think this is all for now. Anyway, the camera is on a timer so I won't ramble on and bore you all. See your around. [He gives the camera a jaunty wave, stands up and... starts climbing out through the window. In a couple of seconds he's gone, and then the feed cuts.]

LOG SAMPLE:Here's a sample! And here's another one, just in case.