Name (Former): Jou Kurata
Name (Character): Parks
Age: 23
Appearance:

Character Level: 51
Character Class: Summoner
Personality: In game, Parks is very flighty. They tend to treat everything like it’s all a play, dramatically moving their entire body when they speak, standing up when they need to make a point and using their summons to aid in lighting their backdrops. They long for spotlights, but in battle prefers to let others be seen, not one to soak up damage but to deal it from the back while their summons (or servants as they refer to them) do all the work. They treat some people as if they were somehow peasants beneath them as well and flatters all who they can tell don’t appreciate it.
They tend to crack under pressure and drop the facade and shift back to their real self, less witty and quiet, letting others figure things out for them, because let's be honest if they were good at strategy they would make their Parks persona good at it too. Once they’re back in character, they will 100% try to take credit for some part of the plan.

Abilities:Most of Parks’ skills are summons, being a summoner and all.

Dryad: Summons a nature spirit that can hold down 2 enemies at once, covering them in thorny wooden vines that break in 3 hits

Dancing Fog- A cloud of fog is summoned with lights flitting about within it, and giggling can be heard. This fog heals a total of 100% of the caster’s max HP distributed evenly among non-hostile creatures within its reach.

Fairy Swarm: Summons 10 small pixies that move in a cloud to distract foes for a short time. They raise critical hit chance for the attackers and lower accuracy for the targets.

Minor Summons: Summon elemental fairies to do a number of simple things based on nature. Be it setting things on fire, growing plants to hinder movement, create gusts of wind, freeze things, or mimic certain minor spells from other classes. These all come with a slightly longer cast time, due to the summon appearing and then casting the spell.

Mirror Image: Parks makes 2 more of themself that deal next to no damage but lose health at the normal rate. They follow them and cannot act on their own, but perfectly mimic all of their actions to confuse opponents and redirect aggro.

Basic magic attacks, no other effects than elemental damage.

Skills: Parks made their way in the game without experiencing much combat, only ever taking trade and political themed quests. Therefore, their weapon abilities are lacking.

Speech: Being the noble subclass coupled with their failed acting career, Parks has used this to get some good in game boons through just talking.

Tailor: Parks sews a mean set of light/cloth armor. Their skills is fairy high, though not maxed so it’s nothing too sought after.

Cooking: Only used a few times to beat quests, it’s... okay food.

Overall though, Parks plays the game as a support. Whenever anyone would need a healer or other guild mate to support them while they went off to a dungeon or raid, they would sit in the back and use their summons to do whatever they could to not attract any attention. They have very little offensive capability, but a lot in the way of buffing their friends and applying conditions to their enemies. Their strongest attacks are summons that last for 10 seconds at most and have a high cooldown.

Equipment: Spring Court’s Attire, a mid level armor set for summoners in the support branch. It adds a bit of green into things and boosts the mana pool of the wearer by 10% and increasing condition duration (poisons, stuns, burning, etc) by 5%, and allows for minor aggro redirection through an added skill, Mirror Image.

Backstory: A college drop out with a half completed theater degree and a history of being active only online and not in the gym, Jou was slowly losing steam for real life. Between Dungeons and Dragons games 4 nights a week and running with a roleplay guild on Emerald Odyssey, it was amazing that he managed to stay afloat with his apartment but he always came through with rent that he shared with his 3 roommates. He didn’t even know them, and they just knew him as the guy who doesn’t talk.

He would work jobs online, tutoring high schoolers in math he just googled the answers to, writing essays for lazy college students, and even setting up a patreon for his guild that honestly just went to his own pocket. He wasn’t really doing much in the upward movement category of living.

His family supported him but he was more worried about himself to really worry about them. He would go to family events and holidays but overall he wasn't too close with anyone in particular.

Other: Parks has the hours of a high level player, but due to avoiding combat at all costs and never picking up a craft, they suffer from a low amount of EXP due to a lack of grinding or level progression in any of his skills other than speech. That and a long history of RP that does nothing for them in the way of levels..

He made his character for an aesthetic and is fairly uncomfortable with the current height of his avatar. The avatar’s androgynous nature seems to be affecting him as well, given the voice being higher pitched and the body slightly more feminine.

Name (Former): Minoru Tachibana
Name (Character): Ewan Berrybranch
Age: Late 20s

Appearance: Diminutive and androgynous, Ewan perfectly fits the phrase ‘fair youth’, his snowy complexion and silky hair bringing him to that fantastical boundary of physical attractiveness that only a complex character creation system could create. A Halfling by race, his feet are bigger and tougher than what one would expect out of a 4’3 humanoid, and his muscles far more developed as well, but overall, one could still call Ewan a child. That’s fine though. With oversized clothing and princely features, it’s clear that Ewan was designed with one goal in mind: MAXIMUM CUTE.

Personality: Minoru was tired, beaten down, and lost, an individual that oozed through life who latched onto anything that sparked her interest for an intense period of time, only to burnout way too soon and fall apart once more. She’s riddled with self-doubt and anxieties, depression and nihilism, but the circumstances of her family and her social life has taught her how to fake carefree ambivalence all too easily. If nothing else, she’s a hardworking individual capable of chugging on through life even on fumes. But she’s short-sighted as well, someone with no clear goals and no real hope for the future, a person that would suffer long-term consequences in order to avoid short-term embarrassment. Reflexively, she lies, and most of the time, she doesn’t even know why.

As Ewan, nothing really changed, but at least she can go around playing or whatever. It’s not like the world would miss her, and it’s not like she’d miss the world either. It’ll be good enough if the status quo of ‘do quests, get paid, eat food, sleep’ could be maintained.

Ah, if only shapeshifting really did turn her into another person.

Character Level: 43
Character Class: Shapeshifter

Abilities: Someone out there said that Halflings were supposed to be intelligent, dexterous, and lucky, but outside of being able to walk anywhere on bare feet, Ewan’s just lucky, with lower than average physical stats and the only standout being his relatively high MP regen. Shapeshifters, after all, rarely apply only their ‘normal’ form in combat, and are largely enabled by the variety of monstrous forms they can shift into.

The core of the class is the <<Thousandfur>> passive, which enables them to transform into monsters that they have slain in the past, with the caveat being that the higher the ‘rarity’ of the monster, the more of those monsters they have to kill in order to gain access to such monstrous metamorphosis. While common creatures like goblins or wolves can be obtained with relative ease, higher rarity mobs like greater demons or pure dragons require more kills, and to transform into a boss monster would require a hilarious amount of grinding, especially the higher-level boss monsters.

Once the Shapeshifter has transformed, their MP is drained at a consistent rate regardless of what actions they perform, while their stats are scaled based off their level and the monster they’ve transformed into. Wolves would be AGI-focused, for example, while Golems would be END-focused, and the rarity of the monster affects stat-scaling and MP consumption as well, with the general rule being that the higher one’s rarity, the high the stats and MP consumption. Alongside the <<Thousandfur>> passive, however, Shapeshifters do have a few other transformation-related abilities.

<<All Tongue>> - Enables communication with monsters that you can transform into.

<<Half-Form>> - Partially shift into a monster, gaining extra stats and monstrous passives, but with no monstrous abilities.

<<Extra Shift>> - Instantly manifest a part of a monster from your body to perform a monstrous ability.

<<Scapegoat>> - Cloak yourself in the skin of a monster, increasing resistances and gaining a temporary HP shield. After the HP shield is destroyed, monster cannot be shifted into for a long period of time.

<<Superior Amalgamation>> - Transform into a fusion of [Level/20] monsters, gaining both their stat bonuses, passives, and abilities, while also doubling mana consumption.

Backstory: Back when Minoru was still in university, she got into a game called Emerald Odyssey, playing the game when it was just released. It provided her an opportunity to have fun and play out some fantasies, and when they released a super hot, super tragic quest line, perhaps that opportunity to have fun turned into a bit of an obsession that ended up with her nabbing the super sexy, super dark mini-boss as a viable transformation for her over-leveled Shapeshifter.

Then everything about the game became tedious, and she stopped playing.

Five years later, and life became tedious as well. Minoru didn’t manage to get the job she really wanted right out of university, got swatted by a glass ceiling, had to deal with perverted managers and shitty customers, realized that the world would be fine even if she wasn’t part of it, and repressed her anger every day when her parents innocuously asked if she found herself a boyfriend yet. She did her unpaid overtime, her afterwork drinking parties, her 6AM commutes, her daily diet of fast food, and it was all weighing down on her too much. Escape was needed. A lot of escaping. Maybe she could even just give up on full-time work altogether.
Minoru didn’t expect to want to live past her 50s, after all, not when she already had headaches and back pain and a crippling sense of isolation.

Maybe it was enough if she could just buy ready-to-eat dinners from the local Lawsons and pay for her basic utilities with wages earned in a part-time job.

Maybe being a shut-in wasn’t so bad.

But before those steps could be taken, before she could fall fully, Minoru disappeared.

And found herself in the world she left five years ago.

Other:
Minoru likes little boys, but it’s definitely really weird, being one.
Most of Ewan's gear is outdated, relics of a younger game. Thankfully, Shapeshifters don't really have to worry about equipment.

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