Katsura Ryker

"'Gotta keep moving, life's a blur'"Team: HMLK (Pronounced “Hemlock”)

Age: 17

Gender: Male

Race: Human

Height: 5’5”

Weight: 152 lbs

Hair: Black

Eyes: Coffee Brown

Appearance:
Katsura is notably… short. At a mere 5’5” he’s the shortest on his team, but don’t be fooled, he stands tall. Always at the center of a conversation he’s hard to overlook. His hair is perfectly styled, the most hip and modern it can be. His hair is long (for a guy) and fine like silk. He keeps it parted and slicked way back. It leaves his somewhat large forehead uncovered but blends seamlessly with all his other features. His facial features are neither here nor there, not soft but not harsh. His eyes are color of unadulterated coffee, not quite black but almost. They seem firm but not necessarily hard. Overall he can be said to be rather attractive. His build, while scaled down a little bit, is strong and especially quick. It is a sprinting kind of quick rather than a lithe king of quick. More adapted to unexpectedly rushing an opponent that dodging them. His voice grabs the attention but doesn’t bend the conversation towards itself. It’s the voice that is well suited to the host of a party, assertive but not harsh.

Katsura’s sense of style is, for all intents and purposes, infallible. He has a very future forward sense of fashion mixed with a bit of conservative elegance. He wears clean, sharp shirts with buttons and collars but with patterns just bizarre enough to not be traditional while still being in style. His pants can be cautery, slacks, khakis, jeans, or anything that goes perfectly with his outfit. His shoes are often grey converse with white laces. He also likes to wear a well fitted black pea coat of both function and style. His Haven uniform is worn cleanly and neatly although the jacket is often off with the shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He wears it with a certain gaudy grace that makes him seem just that much more “in style” than the rest of his classmates. His outfit also comes with the latest tech offered in the four kingdoms. He is almost never seen without his hover board, either deactivated at his belt or humming beneath his feet.

In combat Katsura prefers a plain, white button down shirt and a blue jacket with a pair of form fitting black jeans. He further dons a silver helmet of the daft-punk variety. The helmet includes a complete heads-up-display as well as a near 360 visual monitor. Although it transmits sound from the outside it cannot perform the reverse task and thus mandates that Katsura communicate via hand signals.

Personality:
Katsura is a natural conversationalist. He talks with anyone and everyone and does a great job with it. His conversations are interesting and widely appealing. At a party he can be found with a great crowd of hangers on and will have shared words with nearly every guest by the time he’s ready to go. He possesses a great deal of tact and can work himself out of hole in the rare instance that he comes to be in one. He also is a fabulous negotiator and can often diffuse to people who are at each other’s throats. Katsura is predictably very popular with women who often go well out of their way to get his attention. Surprisingly though, he never seems to possess much romantic interest at all. If fact, he often finds the persistence of certain girls rather obnoxious. Despite his reputation as a social butterfly Katsura also has a great affinity for a little bit of alone time. He peruses computer science, reads sci-fi, listens to EDM, and is even a very skilled video game player. Because of his mixed talents he can join in with pretty much any social group he wants.

Katsura is lacking in any particular moral convictions. He follows the law and will enforce it if it’s his job but definitely won’t go out on any moral crusades. If you have any kind of serious internal issues it’s for you to deal with and him to stay out of unless he’s asked for help. While not a rule breaker, Katsura has issues with any particularly authoritarian control and tends to chafe against tight regulation. He’s mostly very “chill” and just generally doesn’t like people who go out of their way to be in someone else’s business. He doesn’t care much for bully types but, again, doesn’t make it much of his problem. The one issue he really does have issues with, however, is discrimination or any other kind of race related conflicts.

Weapons and Abilities:
Katsura’s fighting style relies heavily on his hover board. While not a weapon in itself, the hover board allows him extreme maneuverability and speed. This works in combination with his weapon: a laser sabre/pistol. The melee form is a bright blue energy blade. The blade curves like a cavalry sabre and is best suited to downward strikes from a fast moving platform. The gun form of the weapon is a small energy pistol. The pistol is not suited to shootouts or heavy strikes, but is used primarily for covering fire or simply forcing his opponent to move. If need be, Katsura can fight on foot or ram with his hover board but he generally prefers to avoid that.

Katsura’s aura is an electric blue and is relatively weak. If has remarkable ability to withstand glancing blows as well as small, high-speed impacts but otherwise provides very little protection against straightforward blows. Katsura’s semblance is called Shandian Jingxiang, or in English Lightning Sight. This semblance is almost wholly passive and therefore requires little to no aura to use. In short, it allows him to see the flow of energy, particularly electron pathways, mostly in electrical devices, as well as whatever machinery the electricity powers. He can see a strong current through up to 20 feet of concrete. This semblance his useful in allowing Katsura to detect weak points in almost any powered device. It also allows him to predict the capabilities of many of his opponent’s weapons before they are fully used. These powers also make Katsura an excellent electrician and engineer. The two downsides are that he can often become disoriented in the presence of too much electricity/energy as well as the fact that he is unable to view any kind of wholly un-electronic device..

Backstory:
Katsura was raised on a small island to the south of the kingdom of Atlas. He lived on the small estate of his family. His family was very conservative, particularly in their military tradition. The family has served in the Atlesian military for three generations, and had passed through the academy for the last two. Katsura was then raised very strictly in a military style.

Katsura’s one breaking from his family was his intense passion for technological goods coming from Atlas proper. When his family insisted on training Katsura would instead be playing. The culmination of his little rebellion was when he purchased his hover board behind the backs of his parents. The only reason he was allowed to keep the board was his insistence that he could use it to become a better fighter.

Eventually, after years of chaffing under house rules, Katsura was sent to combat school at Sanctum. It was there that he got his first taste of civilian life as well as life outside of Atlas. Here he found a love for Mistral fashion as opposed to the bland uniforms his family insisted on him wearing.

It ws when he returned from Sanctum that Katsura had his major falling out with his father. His father wanted Katsura to join the military and attend the Huntsman academy of Atlas like his older sister Eve. Katsura on the other hand wanted to attend Haven and remain in the kingdom he had fallen in love with. Shouting matches turned to silence and an ultimatum: Katsura would attend Atlas or he would be living on his own. He chose the free life and went to Haven.

To make ends meet on break, Katsura works part time on IT and is apprenticed to an electrician. Otherwise, Haven is his only source of food and shelter.

Katsura was paired with Larkspur Diolmhain, the ying to his yang. The two get along remarkably well although their personalities seen to be polar opposites. Together, they are on team HMLK with Hibiscus Aurum and Malacus Thuelban. He likes his team leader who he sees as strong and reliable. In contrast he thinks that Malacus seems like a crook, but hey, that’s none of his business.

Trivia
Katsura is a type of tree

Ryker means fast strider