Entry tags:
app for drift fleet.
OUT OF CHARACTER:
Name/Handle: Rae
Contact: Plurk @ ventose; AIM @ last laugh blues; PM to journal.
Reference: IT ME.
Other characters: Souji Seta (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
truthvalue) and Beyond Birthday (brokencopy)
IN-CHARACTER:
Character name: Micah Kelly (reincarnation); Mihael “Mello” Keehl (preincarnation)
Character journal:enflammen
Series name: Death Note (manga version; also including the spinoff novel Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, of which he is the narrator).
Canon notes: This version is both an AU and CRAU from about two months at Raise The Earth, plus a bit of PSL play after Raise The Earth closed. RTE’s premise is that characters of this version of Earth known as Numbered are reincarnations of OU characters who are given new lives and slowly reawakened to their preincarnations’ histories through plot events called Echoes.
Species: Entirely human.
History: Preincarnation: Summary at Death Note Wiki.
Reincarnation: Micah was born Michael Cale in Locke City, New Jersey; his parents were a working class couple who married right after high school. His father died when he was two years old, so Micah never knew him, and his mother, left with the daunting task of being sole provider for herself and a young child, turned to meth as a means of getting by in the long hours of working as both a waitress and a motel housekeeper. She wasn’t unkind to Micah, and even if she was a little neglectful from time to time as a result of her chemical dependency, Micah was more or less content with his life as it was, with just the two of them.
All of this radically shifted when Micah’s mother remarried an abusive drunk named Roger. Micah was ten years old at the time, and both he and his mother endured verbal and physical abuse at Roger’s hands. CPS launched an investigation when Micah began to turn up at school with mysterious bruises and black eyes; parental rights were terminated when Micah was twelve, and he became a ward of the state, placed into foster care, where he was shuffled around with abnormal frequency. Micah was an angry, rebellious child, frequently mean to other children, distrustful of authority, and after nearly three years of living in chaos, after being slapped by one of his foster parents for mouthing off, Micah decided to run away and make his own life, even if it meant living on the streets. He left the foster home two weeks before his fifteenth birthday, and received his first Echo - a memory of leaving a building surrounded by a large wrought iron gate, walking in the rain.
Micah decided that making his own life would be better done in New York City. His reasoning for doing so is that it was far enough away from Locke City that he probably wouldn’t be found by social services, and - well, it’s New York City, it’s a huge city, and it’s pretty much the place to be on the East Coast. He traveled by bus and train using cash stolen from his foster home, and hitched rides anywhere else a bus or train wouldn’t take him.
Micah spent approximately six months living on the streets of New York City, squatting in abandoned buildings, scavenging through dumpsters, and stealing what he needed to survive. He was picked up by police on shoplifting charges, and because he was underage, a social worker became involved in his case. Seeing that Micah was both smart and in a good deal of emotional pain, she called in the head of Quill House (a Boys Town-like Catholic-run local institution dedicated to rehabilitating troubled children) to come talk to the boy, who was now facing the possibility of time in juvenile detention for his offenses and his aggressively hostile attitude. Father Kelly had a frank discussion of his possible future outcomes with Micah, culminating in the question of whether Micah truly wanted to make something better of his life - whether he wanted to do better with his life than his parents had. The talk made a deep impact on Micah; he decided that he wanted to live at Quill House and work to turn his life around for the better.
At Quill House, Micah thrived; he was finally given the nurturing attention he’d been so sorely lacking in for the earlier years of his life. Therapy was a mandatory part of Quill House life, and helped Micah acquire anger management skills and behavioral/social skills that had gone underdeveloped. He also was given the opportunity to cultivate Catholic faith, with an emphasis on kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. Micah completed his GED by age sixteen, started community college courses, and was placed in an internship at one of the local fire stations. Through that internship, Micah decided he wanted to pursue a career in firefighting, and in preparation, he switched his focus at the community college to obtaining an EMT certification, which he completed in record time. He then attended the local fire academy and earned his Firefighter 1 certification, becoming a firefighter three weeks after his eighteenth birthday. He was the youngest firefighter on record at that particular fire station.
After he turned eighteen and was able to leave the House and live on his own, Micah sought out his mother, hoping for a reconciliation, but discovered that she had died the year before in a car accident. Roger, who was driving drunk at the time, was responsible for the crash; though Micah’s mother died, Roger survived, paralyzed. Micah was deeply saddened at the discovery, and decided that in order to truly make his life his own, he would legally change his name, from Michael Cale to Micah Kelly - Micah, after the prophet and book of the Bible, and Kelly, after his Quill House mentor, Father Kelly. A new name was symbolic of the fresh start he was making, leaving his old life behind.
With the wide-scale destruction of the Western US during the course of Save The Earth (Raise The Earth’s predecessor game), there was a shift of emergency services personnel such as firefighters/EMTs from lesser-impacted areas like New York to places like New Los Angeles, California; Micah took the opportunity to relocate, because his skills would be put to better use in areas harder hit by the destruction, and because it would provide him something of a challenge, and because there is also an element of risk-seeking in his personality, though it’s much less pronounced than in Mello’s preincarnate personality - his choice of career in firefighting is an example of that risk-seeking behavior, and perhaps a more healthy (or at least more socially acceptable) way to channel those instincts. Locke City was hard hit by the destruction too, but Micah chose not to return, because of the highly negative association he has with the location in his early years. Even though New LA is a dangerous place, he had street survival skills at his disposal, cultivated by his time spent living as a homeless teen, so he didn’t see it as a deterrent.
Micah did well as a firefighter until his second Echo was suddenly triggered - the memory of detonating the explosives in the Mafia hideout under siege from the Kira Task Force. The memory Micah gained was fairly short on detail, just a quick flash of being in a room with others, feeling threatened, and pushing the trigger. The Echo also caused a large burn mark to appear over the left side of his face, neck, and shoulder. Since it happened while on duty, the injury was assumed to have been caused by faulty equipment, and Micah was placed on medical leave. A month later, frustrated by bureaucratic red tape (a result of prevailing negative attitudes about Numbered in New LA and suspicion that Micah was Numbered, due to the unusual circumstances of his injury) and the amount of time it was taking to get reinstated to full duty, Micah quit his job as a firefighter and enlisted to work youth outreach at one of the relief centers instead.
In-game history: Micah’s discovery of his Numbered nature came without much fanfare; a string of numbers appeared in his mind and refused to leave, and he punched them into his phone and discovered access to the Numbered network. Since the existence of Numbered was well known throughout the world, he knew exactly what this discovery meant for him, and he addressed the network, saying “I guess I’m one of you now” by way of introducing himself. Through that initial conversation, Micah spoke with Nathan Brooks and Lazarus Lawliet - reincarnates of Near and L, respectively, who were both significant in the life of Micah’s other, Mello, and who both had an awareness of Mello from their own previous Echoes. After further conversations with both Nathan and Lazarus, Micah decided to travel via transporter to New Zealand to meet both of them in person; transporter travel triggered an Echo that restored spoken fluency in Japanese, and meeting and conversing with Nathan and Lazarus triggered a series of additional Echoes that restored memories about Near and L and Wammy’s House.
PSL history: Micah Echoed back a memory of Mello’s death and called Nathan to discuss it, thoroughly shaken by the experience. Through that discussion, Micah learned details of the Kira case that Mello and Near were involved with, and received two more Echoes that restored memories of Mello’s interactions with Near, the Death Note, and Kiyomi Takada.
(Full list of Echoes is here!)
Personality: Preincarnation: The first thing you should probably know about Mello is that he’s a legitimate genius. He’s brilliant - quick to think and act, a cunning strategist, infinitely resourceful - and he spent a good part of his early years in training as a potential successor to the great detective L, so he’s highly adept at critical thinking, problem solving, logical reasoning, and strategic planning. He wasn’t one of the final two candidates selected to succeed L for nothing. How to Read ranks him as 7/10 for both intelligence and creativity.
He isn’t necessarily an unkind person, but Mello can be downright ruthless if it’s to his advantage - and it often is. One doesn’t rise through the ranks of the Mafia by being a doormat, after all. He’s declared his intent to win, no matter the cost; all manner of illegal activity, even murder, is an acceptable means to that end. The maxim that “the means justify the end” absolutely applies to Mello.
He knows his way around a good number of firearms and explosives, and while Mello may not present the most physically intimidating presence, he’s definitely not weak. However, he isn’t completely heartless, either - during their face-off (on November 11, 2009, in the manga version), he admits to Soichiro Yagami that he didn’t actually intend to kill him, in direct contradiction of his threats. Toward the end of the manga, he shows genuine remorse for his involvement in his friend Matt’s death, and even a measure of basic respect for Kiyomi Takada, whom he kidnaps and forces to disrobe in order to ensure no tracking devices are in operation, though not before providing her a blanket for modesty. This simple kindness later ensures his downfall, as the blanket allowed Takada to conceal and retain the piece of the Death Note she had hidden on her person, which she then used to kill Mello.
Mello is passionate, incredibly driven; his ambition is perhaps one of his greatest strengths (ranked 10/10 for initiative in How to Read). However, that ambition is tainted somewhat because Mello suffers from a vicious inferiority complex (ranked 8/10). He’s obsessed with being the best, and if he has one fatal personality flaw, it’s that he sometimes allows his emotions to cloud his judgment. (How to Read lists his emotional strength at 8/10.) Mello is by no means a loose cannon, though; while he is deeply emotional, he does not explode with emotional outbursts at the slightest (real or imagined) provocation. He’s even shown to be capable of keeping a cool head under high-pressure situations, like when surrounded and faced with capture in the Mafia hideout he then blows up in order to facilitate escape. It’s not an impulsive decision, but one that is carefully planned. His behavior is often risky, but it’s not without strategic consideration.
While he has embraced an identity as a criminal, Mello is not a sadist, sociopath, nor a psychopath - he does still adhere to a certain moral code, albeit one that is quite a bit skewed. Justice is what he wants, after all - revenge for his mentor’s death, but a certain kind of justice all the same, on his own terms. He’s never shown to delight in another’s suffering, and he does display compassion in limited examples. How to Read even states outright that “Mello is not purely evil.” On the spectrum of personality alignments, Mello could probably best be categorized as Chaotic Neutral.
The one area where Mello shows a notably shorter fuse is with respect to Near, who has been Mello’s (one-sided) rival dating back to when they were both children at Wammy’s House. Mello says when asked to work with Near as L after L’s death, “Near and I don’t get along … we’re always competing. Always … I’m always number two … no matter how hard I try …” and that really sums up their entire relationship, in Mello’s mind. The one borderline sadistic act Mello is shown to commit throughout the entire series is killing most of the SPK members once he has the Death Note, presumably as a way of hurting Near and turning the odds in his favor by taking some of Near’s resources from him. The one time Mello is shown as being provoked to an outburst of anger, it’s because Near says Mello has (unwittingly) helped his investigation, to which Mello replies, with gun drawn, “I’m not a tool for you to use to solve the puzzle.”
Reincarnation: The main difference between Micah and Mello is that Micah has been given the training and skills to cope with his negative emotions, primarily anger. Micah spent a good deal of his childhood in a constant rage, mostly over his mistreatment at Roger’s hands and his mother’s unwillingness/inability to make the change to eliminate Roger from their lives. He was angry about losing his father before he had the chance to know him, and he was angry about being placed in foster care, and because he was so wildly angry, Micah was frequently mean to other children, rebellious to the adults, and well on his way to becoming an abuser himself. Through the Quill House program, Micah learned anger management and distress tolerance, among other skills, and forgiveness, through his newly-cultivated Catholic faith.
Micah also wasn’t nurtured intellectually in quite the same way as Mello. Wammy’s House was an orphanage for geniuses, and while Micah was considered bright - probably even gifted, once he applied his focus to his studies - he was never given the designation of “genius,” and his studies resembled more typical American public and private school curricula. He learned a passable amount of Spanish, but nothing else really resembling (what I imagine) was taught at Wammy’s House, outside of the more general education topics.
Because competition wasn’t ingrained on him the way it was with Mello, and because he was actually considered something of a success story, Micah also doesn’t suffer from the intense inferiority complex that Mello does. He has overcome many obstacles in his young life, which gives him both a sense of pride and faith in his own abilities, but it’s also tempered with the humility emphasized in his spiritual education.
Abilities: Preincarnation: Mello is human, and doesn’t possess any supernatural powers. However, he is extremely bright - an actual genius - and while the curriculum at Wammy’s House is never outlined in any sort of detail in canon, it’s reasonable to assume Mello was trained in a number of things in which L is shown to demonstrate proficiency: forensics and the investigative arts; problem-solving; creative thinking; logical reasoning; mathematics; and various types of computer work, including some programming and hacking. He’s shown speaking English and (presumably) Japanese (since he is shown speaking with Japanese Task Force members such as Soichiro Yagami without a translator); it’s also reasonable to assume that he would have learned other common world languages as well, most likely German, Russian, Mandarin, French, and Spanish, at minimum. Mello also demonstrates familiarity with firearms and explosives, and he’s shown riding a motorcycle with a good deal of skill. It’s also worth noting that How to Read lists a ranking of 9/10 in social skills; this is in direct contrast to the almost-negative ranking that both Near and L are given.
Reincarnation: Micah is, while smart, much less well-studied than Mello, and did not receive the same sort of academic training that Mello did as a successor to L. As a former firefighter, his main areas of study were fire science and emergency medical response, and his problem-solving skills lean heavily on an intuitive sense of situational analysis rather than a rigid adherence to logic. His social skills are even better than Mello’s, since he had a much more normal (albeit still troubled) life, and his cultivated sense of compassion is perhaps his greatest strength.
Augment Skillset: Lab Support augment, please!
Sample: I have a few …
Network style:
http://cracktheearth.dreamwidth.org/2249.html?thread=348105
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/27463.html
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/28529.html?thread=2527345#cmt2527345
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/28682.html?thread=2527754#cmt2527754
http://solvethepuzzle.dreamwidth.org/3343.html?thread=20495#cmt20495
Prose style:
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/28387.html
Bracket style:
http://driftfleet-ooc.dreamwidth.org/142318.html?thread=4117230#cmt4117230
FINAL NOTES AND QUESTIONS:
Q1: If he is accepted, will it be possible for Micah to continue regaining Mello’s memories?
Q2: If yes, will those need mod approval, or can I just make them happen on my own?
Notes: Since there is a possibility of crossover with both of my current in-game characters, I wanted to address how I intend to handle that upfront!
In general, I feel that the game logistics of individual ships and size of game make it pretty easy for characters to not interact - there are so many characters, it’s pretty much impossible for one character to know every other character in the game, and since they’re not all typically in the same physical location, it’s easy for one character to avoid interacting with another.
Souji had a relationship with a Mello in Synodiporia, so while he might recognize Micah as resembling him, if they talked (in a handwaved discussion), it would be pretty obvious to Souji that he wasn’t the same person. Souji knows enough about alternate realities to recognize that there are differences in people who look alike, and he isn’t the type to fixate on people or push interactions with them anyway. Plus, he’s got a romantic relationship developing with Wanda Maximoff, so he wouldn’t be interested in attempting to pick up where the previous CR left off. Since Micah does not share Mello’s extreme sense of opportunism, he wouldn’t pursue CR with Souji either, because there’s really no point to it.
B is a little tricker to work around since he comes from an offshoot of the shared canon, but I believe that Micah’s dramatic divergence from Mello will more than make up for that. There was a large age gap between Mello and B’s generations at Wammy’s House (fourth and first generations, respectively, and I usually estimate a gap of about 8 years between them); we’re given no specifics about it, so what I usually reason (and the Mello players I’ve played with in the past seem to agree) is that while B had an awareness of who Mello was, because the House was a closed environment, he didn’t consider Mello a person of much consequence. To make an analogy, a senior high school student wouldn’t give much consideration to another student still in elementary school, and that’s the sort of view I believe B would have had toward Mello before he left the house to commit the series of murders in Los Angeles. B would have no reference at all for the name Micah Kelly, even if he is able to observe that he resembles Mello, and since he clearly comes from a different reality, B would not have any interest in Micah, because there is no shared background. While Micah is aware of the name Beyond Birthday and the story L told him about the LABB Murders, and while he might recognize the alias B is currently using as fitting that story, he would not have an interest in B, because his knowledge of Mello’s life is fairly limited, and a serial murderer his Other knew about would not hold much interest for him. The text of Another Note leaves clues pointing to sympathy Mello felt for B and his situation, which Micah would not share, because he does not suffer from Mello’s inferiority complex. In the short amount of time he was in Raise The Earth, Micah also developed a fairly close relationship with Lazarus, L’s reincarnation, so I believe he feels a sense of loyalty to L because of that, and since B worked against L, he wouldn’t want to get involved with him.
Name/Handle: Rae
Contact: Plurk @ ventose; AIM @ last laugh blues; PM to journal.
Reference: IT ME.
Other characters: Souji Seta (
truthvalue) and Beyond Birthday (brokencopy)IN-CHARACTER:
Character name: Micah Kelly (reincarnation); Mihael “Mello” Keehl (preincarnation)
Character journal:
enflammenSeries name: Death Note (manga version; also including the spinoff novel Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, of which he is the narrator).
Canon notes: This version is both an AU and CRAU from about two months at Raise The Earth, plus a bit of PSL play after Raise The Earth closed. RTE’s premise is that characters of this version of Earth known as Numbered are reincarnations of OU characters who are given new lives and slowly reawakened to their preincarnations’ histories through plot events called Echoes.
Species: Entirely human.
History: Preincarnation: Summary at Death Note Wiki.
Reincarnation: Micah was born Michael Cale in Locke City, New Jersey; his parents were a working class couple who married right after high school. His father died when he was two years old, so Micah never knew him, and his mother, left with the daunting task of being sole provider for herself and a young child, turned to meth as a means of getting by in the long hours of working as both a waitress and a motel housekeeper. She wasn’t unkind to Micah, and even if she was a little neglectful from time to time as a result of her chemical dependency, Micah was more or less content with his life as it was, with just the two of them.
All of this radically shifted when Micah’s mother remarried an abusive drunk named Roger. Micah was ten years old at the time, and both he and his mother endured verbal and physical abuse at Roger’s hands. CPS launched an investigation when Micah began to turn up at school with mysterious bruises and black eyes; parental rights were terminated when Micah was twelve, and he became a ward of the state, placed into foster care, where he was shuffled around with abnormal frequency. Micah was an angry, rebellious child, frequently mean to other children, distrustful of authority, and after nearly three years of living in chaos, after being slapped by one of his foster parents for mouthing off, Micah decided to run away and make his own life, even if it meant living on the streets. He left the foster home two weeks before his fifteenth birthday, and received his first Echo - a memory of leaving a building surrounded by a large wrought iron gate, walking in the rain.
Micah decided that making his own life would be better done in New York City. His reasoning for doing so is that it was far enough away from Locke City that he probably wouldn’t be found by social services, and - well, it’s New York City, it’s a huge city, and it’s pretty much the place to be on the East Coast. He traveled by bus and train using cash stolen from his foster home, and hitched rides anywhere else a bus or train wouldn’t take him.
Micah spent approximately six months living on the streets of New York City, squatting in abandoned buildings, scavenging through dumpsters, and stealing what he needed to survive. He was picked up by police on shoplifting charges, and because he was underage, a social worker became involved in his case. Seeing that Micah was both smart and in a good deal of emotional pain, she called in the head of Quill House (a Boys Town-like Catholic-run local institution dedicated to rehabilitating troubled children) to come talk to the boy, who was now facing the possibility of time in juvenile detention for his offenses and his aggressively hostile attitude. Father Kelly had a frank discussion of his possible future outcomes with Micah, culminating in the question of whether Micah truly wanted to make something better of his life - whether he wanted to do better with his life than his parents had. The talk made a deep impact on Micah; he decided that he wanted to live at Quill House and work to turn his life around for the better.
At Quill House, Micah thrived; he was finally given the nurturing attention he’d been so sorely lacking in for the earlier years of his life. Therapy was a mandatory part of Quill House life, and helped Micah acquire anger management skills and behavioral/social skills that had gone underdeveloped. He also was given the opportunity to cultivate Catholic faith, with an emphasis on kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. Micah completed his GED by age sixteen, started community college courses, and was placed in an internship at one of the local fire stations. Through that internship, Micah decided he wanted to pursue a career in firefighting, and in preparation, he switched his focus at the community college to obtaining an EMT certification, which he completed in record time. He then attended the local fire academy and earned his Firefighter 1 certification, becoming a firefighter three weeks after his eighteenth birthday. He was the youngest firefighter on record at that particular fire station.
After he turned eighteen and was able to leave the House and live on his own, Micah sought out his mother, hoping for a reconciliation, but discovered that she had died the year before in a car accident. Roger, who was driving drunk at the time, was responsible for the crash; though Micah’s mother died, Roger survived, paralyzed. Micah was deeply saddened at the discovery, and decided that in order to truly make his life his own, he would legally change his name, from Michael Cale to Micah Kelly - Micah, after the prophet and book of the Bible, and Kelly, after his Quill House mentor, Father Kelly. A new name was symbolic of the fresh start he was making, leaving his old life behind.
With the wide-scale destruction of the Western US during the course of Save The Earth (Raise The Earth’s predecessor game), there was a shift of emergency services personnel such as firefighters/EMTs from lesser-impacted areas like New York to places like New Los Angeles, California; Micah took the opportunity to relocate, because his skills would be put to better use in areas harder hit by the destruction, and because it would provide him something of a challenge, and because there is also an element of risk-seeking in his personality, though it’s much less pronounced than in Mello’s preincarnate personality - his choice of career in firefighting is an example of that risk-seeking behavior, and perhaps a more healthy (or at least more socially acceptable) way to channel those instincts. Locke City was hard hit by the destruction too, but Micah chose not to return, because of the highly negative association he has with the location in his early years. Even though New LA is a dangerous place, he had street survival skills at his disposal, cultivated by his time spent living as a homeless teen, so he didn’t see it as a deterrent.
Micah did well as a firefighter until his second Echo was suddenly triggered - the memory of detonating the explosives in the Mafia hideout under siege from the Kira Task Force. The memory Micah gained was fairly short on detail, just a quick flash of being in a room with others, feeling threatened, and pushing the trigger. The Echo also caused a large burn mark to appear over the left side of his face, neck, and shoulder. Since it happened while on duty, the injury was assumed to have been caused by faulty equipment, and Micah was placed on medical leave. A month later, frustrated by bureaucratic red tape (a result of prevailing negative attitudes about Numbered in New LA and suspicion that Micah was Numbered, due to the unusual circumstances of his injury) and the amount of time it was taking to get reinstated to full duty, Micah quit his job as a firefighter and enlisted to work youth outreach at one of the relief centers instead.
In-game history: Micah’s discovery of his Numbered nature came without much fanfare; a string of numbers appeared in his mind and refused to leave, and he punched them into his phone and discovered access to the Numbered network. Since the existence of Numbered was well known throughout the world, he knew exactly what this discovery meant for him, and he addressed the network, saying “I guess I’m one of you now” by way of introducing himself. Through that initial conversation, Micah spoke with Nathan Brooks and Lazarus Lawliet - reincarnates of Near and L, respectively, who were both significant in the life of Micah’s other, Mello, and who both had an awareness of Mello from their own previous Echoes. After further conversations with both Nathan and Lazarus, Micah decided to travel via transporter to New Zealand to meet both of them in person; transporter travel triggered an Echo that restored spoken fluency in Japanese, and meeting and conversing with Nathan and Lazarus triggered a series of additional Echoes that restored memories about Near and L and Wammy’s House.
PSL history: Micah Echoed back a memory of Mello’s death and called Nathan to discuss it, thoroughly shaken by the experience. Through that discussion, Micah learned details of the Kira case that Mello and Near were involved with, and received two more Echoes that restored memories of Mello’s interactions with Near, the Death Note, and Kiyomi Takada.
(Full list of Echoes is here!)
Personality: Preincarnation: The first thing you should probably know about Mello is that he’s a legitimate genius. He’s brilliant - quick to think and act, a cunning strategist, infinitely resourceful - and he spent a good part of his early years in training as a potential successor to the great detective L, so he’s highly adept at critical thinking, problem solving, logical reasoning, and strategic planning. He wasn’t one of the final two candidates selected to succeed L for nothing. How to Read ranks him as 7/10 for both intelligence and creativity.
He isn’t necessarily an unkind person, but Mello can be downright ruthless if it’s to his advantage - and it often is. One doesn’t rise through the ranks of the Mafia by being a doormat, after all. He’s declared his intent to win, no matter the cost; all manner of illegal activity, even murder, is an acceptable means to that end. The maxim that “the means justify the end” absolutely applies to Mello.
He knows his way around a good number of firearms and explosives, and while Mello may not present the most physically intimidating presence, he’s definitely not weak. However, he isn’t completely heartless, either - during their face-off (on November 11, 2009, in the manga version), he admits to Soichiro Yagami that he didn’t actually intend to kill him, in direct contradiction of his threats. Toward the end of the manga, he shows genuine remorse for his involvement in his friend Matt’s death, and even a measure of basic respect for Kiyomi Takada, whom he kidnaps and forces to disrobe in order to ensure no tracking devices are in operation, though not before providing her a blanket for modesty. This simple kindness later ensures his downfall, as the blanket allowed Takada to conceal and retain the piece of the Death Note she had hidden on her person, which she then used to kill Mello.
Mello is passionate, incredibly driven; his ambition is perhaps one of his greatest strengths (ranked 10/10 for initiative in How to Read). However, that ambition is tainted somewhat because Mello suffers from a vicious inferiority complex (ranked 8/10). He’s obsessed with being the best, and if he has one fatal personality flaw, it’s that he sometimes allows his emotions to cloud his judgment. (How to Read lists his emotional strength at 8/10.) Mello is by no means a loose cannon, though; while he is deeply emotional, he does not explode with emotional outbursts at the slightest (real or imagined) provocation. He’s even shown to be capable of keeping a cool head under high-pressure situations, like when surrounded and faced with capture in the Mafia hideout he then blows up in order to facilitate escape. It’s not an impulsive decision, but one that is carefully planned. His behavior is often risky, but it’s not without strategic consideration.
While he has embraced an identity as a criminal, Mello is not a sadist, sociopath, nor a psychopath - he does still adhere to a certain moral code, albeit one that is quite a bit skewed. Justice is what he wants, after all - revenge for his mentor’s death, but a certain kind of justice all the same, on his own terms. He’s never shown to delight in another’s suffering, and he does display compassion in limited examples. How to Read even states outright that “Mello is not purely evil.” On the spectrum of personality alignments, Mello could probably best be categorized as Chaotic Neutral.
The one area where Mello shows a notably shorter fuse is with respect to Near, who has been Mello’s (one-sided) rival dating back to when they were both children at Wammy’s House. Mello says when asked to work with Near as L after L’s death, “Near and I don’t get along … we’re always competing. Always … I’m always number two … no matter how hard I try …” and that really sums up their entire relationship, in Mello’s mind. The one borderline sadistic act Mello is shown to commit throughout the entire series is killing most of the SPK members once he has the Death Note, presumably as a way of hurting Near and turning the odds in his favor by taking some of Near’s resources from him. The one time Mello is shown as being provoked to an outburst of anger, it’s because Near says Mello has (unwittingly) helped his investigation, to which Mello replies, with gun drawn, “I’m not a tool for you to use to solve the puzzle.”
Reincarnation: The main difference between Micah and Mello is that Micah has been given the training and skills to cope with his negative emotions, primarily anger. Micah spent a good deal of his childhood in a constant rage, mostly over his mistreatment at Roger’s hands and his mother’s unwillingness/inability to make the change to eliminate Roger from their lives. He was angry about losing his father before he had the chance to know him, and he was angry about being placed in foster care, and because he was so wildly angry, Micah was frequently mean to other children, rebellious to the adults, and well on his way to becoming an abuser himself. Through the Quill House program, Micah learned anger management and distress tolerance, among other skills, and forgiveness, through his newly-cultivated Catholic faith.
Micah also wasn’t nurtured intellectually in quite the same way as Mello. Wammy’s House was an orphanage for geniuses, and while Micah was considered bright - probably even gifted, once he applied his focus to his studies - he was never given the designation of “genius,” and his studies resembled more typical American public and private school curricula. He learned a passable amount of Spanish, but nothing else really resembling (what I imagine) was taught at Wammy’s House, outside of the more general education topics.
Because competition wasn’t ingrained on him the way it was with Mello, and because he was actually considered something of a success story, Micah also doesn’t suffer from the intense inferiority complex that Mello does. He has overcome many obstacles in his young life, which gives him both a sense of pride and faith in his own abilities, but it’s also tempered with the humility emphasized in his spiritual education.
Abilities: Preincarnation: Mello is human, and doesn’t possess any supernatural powers. However, he is extremely bright - an actual genius - and while the curriculum at Wammy’s House is never outlined in any sort of detail in canon, it’s reasonable to assume Mello was trained in a number of things in which L is shown to demonstrate proficiency: forensics and the investigative arts; problem-solving; creative thinking; logical reasoning; mathematics; and various types of computer work, including some programming and hacking. He’s shown speaking English and (presumably) Japanese (since he is shown speaking with Japanese Task Force members such as Soichiro Yagami without a translator); it’s also reasonable to assume that he would have learned other common world languages as well, most likely German, Russian, Mandarin, French, and Spanish, at minimum. Mello also demonstrates familiarity with firearms and explosives, and he’s shown riding a motorcycle with a good deal of skill. It’s also worth noting that How to Read lists a ranking of 9/10 in social skills; this is in direct contrast to the almost-negative ranking that both Near and L are given.
Reincarnation: Micah is, while smart, much less well-studied than Mello, and did not receive the same sort of academic training that Mello did as a successor to L. As a former firefighter, his main areas of study were fire science and emergency medical response, and his problem-solving skills lean heavily on an intuitive sense of situational analysis rather than a rigid adherence to logic. His social skills are even better than Mello’s, since he had a much more normal (albeit still troubled) life, and his cultivated sense of compassion is perhaps his greatest strength.
Augment Skillset: Lab Support augment, please!
Sample: I have a few …
Network style:
http://cracktheearth.dreamwidth.org/2249.html?thread=348105
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/27463.html
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/28529.html?thread=2527345#cmt2527345
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/28682.html?thread=2527754#cmt2527754
http://solvethepuzzle.dreamwidth.org/3343.html?thread=20495#cmt20495
Prose style:
http://raisetheearth.dreamwidth.org/28387.html
Bracket style:
http://driftfleet-ooc.dreamwidth.org/142318.html?thread=4117230#cmt4117230
FINAL NOTES AND QUESTIONS:
Q1: If he is accepted, will it be possible for Micah to continue regaining Mello’s memories?
Q2: If yes, will those need mod approval, or can I just make them happen on my own?
Notes: Since there is a possibility of crossover with both of my current in-game characters, I wanted to address how I intend to handle that upfront!
In general, I feel that the game logistics of individual ships and size of game make it pretty easy for characters to not interact - there are so many characters, it’s pretty much impossible for one character to know every other character in the game, and since they’re not all typically in the same physical location, it’s easy for one character to avoid interacting with another.
Souji had a relationship with a Mello in Synodiporia, so while he might recognize Micah as resembling him, if they talked (in a handwaved discussion), it would be pretty obvious to Souji that he wasn’t the same person. Souji knows enough about alternate realities to recognize that there are differences in people who look alike, and he isn’t the type to fixate on people or push interactions with them anyway. Plus, he’s got a romantic relationship developing with Wanda Maximoff, so he wouldn’t be interested in attempting to pick up where the previous CR left off. Since Micah does not share Mello’s extreme sense of opportunism, he wouldn’t pursue CR with Souji either, because there’s really no point to it.
B is a little tricker to work around since he comes from an offshoot of the shared canon, but I believe that Micah’s dramatic divergence from Mello will more than make up for that. There was a large age gap between Mello and B’s generations at Wammy’s House (fourth and first generations, respectively, and I usually estimate a gap of about 8 years between them); we’re given no specifics about it, so what I usually reason (and the Mello players I’ve played with in the past seem to agree) is that while B had an awareness of who Mello was, because the House was a closed environment, he didn’t consider Mello a person of much consequence. To make an analogy, a senior high school student wouldn’t give much consideration to another student still in elementary school, and that’s the sort of view I believe B would have had toward Mello before he left the house to commit the series of murders in Los Angeles. B would have no reference at all for the name Micah Kelly, even if he is able to observe that he resembles Mello, and since he clearly comes from a different reality, B would not have any interest in Micah, because there is no shared background. While Micah is aware of the name Beyond Birthday and the story L told him about the LABB Murders, and while he might recognize the alias B is currently using as fitting that story, he would not have an interest in B, because his knowledge of Mello’s life is fairly limited, and a serial murderer his Other knew about would not hold much interest for him. The text of Another Note leaves clues pointing to sympathy Mello felt for B and his situation, which Micah would not share, because he does not suffer from Mello’s inferiority complex. In the short amount of time he was in Raise The Earth, Micah also developed a fairly close relationship with Lazarus, L’s reincarnation, so I believe he feels a sense of loyalty to L because of that, and since B worked against L, he wouldn’t want to get involved with him.