Conscious, Conscientious

Character Profiles

Deon

Country: Tailpiece (not actually a Country—Tailpiece is a lone village blocked off with an invisible barrier. When Deon somehow slipped through the barrier, he ended up in central No Man’s Land).

Age: 18

Appearance: Lean and athletic, with white hair and sunset orange eyes. He always wears his traditional black family tunic.

Type: Imaginer

Background: Raised in the closed-off village of Tailpiece by his parents Meiv and Deren. Here, he spent most of his time training with help from his younger cousin Lammy, and fighting recreationally with other village kids after school. After having more and more vivid dreams of an outside world, he began to suspect there was something beyond Tailpiece. Finally, one evening, he stumbled into the Multiverse.

Personality: Very competitive, and always determined to test his abilities against others. He can get rather hot-headed and full of himself, but he’s also extremely loyal and protective of those who care about him. After seeing Skrili in the Conscious Competition championship, he’s determined to use his strength to protect others like she did.

Likes: Competitive fighting (What else did you expect?)

Skills: Deon is the best Imaginer in Tailpiece, and he has a natural ability that gives him a lot of potential to become a great consciousness. However, as he realized shortly after leaving Tailpiece, he still has a LOT to learn.

He can easily imagine average inanimate objects into existence, and is cunning when it comes to how he uses them. His ability to form more complex creations such as houses or fake living beings, however, is a level he’s still working towards. Signature techniques include: bug wing contraption, rapid-fire leather ball attack, and Twitchy: a squirrel monster varying from normal sized to a towering, giant beast.

As he’s recently discovered in fights against rival (and now friend) Pang, Deon’s imagining powers heighten drastically when he becomes angry, giving him a massive power-boost he barely understands.

Fun Fact: Despite his father’s protests, his mother Meiv constantly taught him new Imagining techniques and approaches throughout his childhood.

Lammy

Country: Tailpiece (not actually a Country—Tailpiece is a lone village blocked off with an invisible barrier. When Lammy accidentally slipped through the barrier, he ended up in central No Man’s Land).

Age: 13

Appearance: Short and stout, with a round face, longish white hair, and sunset orange eyes. His typical clothes are his traditional black family tunic, but lately he wears the handmade tunic he received from an Ancient Sage in Fantasy Country.

Type: Imaginer

Background: Raised in Tailpiece by his parents Ergi and Adon. While he struggled in most aspects of daily life besides school, he quickly discovered a talent for training others. He used his quick thinking and minimal powers to help his older cousin Deon improve his powers and fighting skills. Then one night, after a vivid dream, he found himself falling into a greater world beyond Tailpiece: the Multiverse.

Personality: Timid and very anxious around others he doesn’t know, and overall pretty introverted. Despite his intelligence, he doesn’t see himself as particularly gifted like his cousin. He’s naturally empathetic and always determined to defend those he loves.

Likes: Casual strolls with his cousin on their way to family dinner, just before sunset

Skills: While Lammy isn’t a very strong Imaginer, his understanding of fighting techniques and training skills make up for it. He can occasionally make objects appear in reality under urgent circumstances, and can manipulate the creations of other Imaginers. Since his Imagining powers usually are limited, he relies on his ability to analyze the combat situation at hand.

However, in particularly stressful or dangerous predicaments, Lammy’s imagining abilities can increase and advance. He’s also found he can somehow tap into his companion Zayza’s Dreamer powers to enter the Dream World as a bodiless being. Here, in this unrealistic realm, he can use his imagining boundlessly.

Fun Fact: He secretly hoped and expected Deon to marry their lifelong friend Savannah one day. But…then she dumped him.

Skrili

Country: Fiction

Age: 17

Appearance: Thin but athletic build, with long dark blue hair tied up, an ever-unemotional face, and vivid purple eyes. She wears a loose sleeveless blue shirt with a black design on it, tight black pants, and thin shoes.

Type: Power-Rebound

Background: Skrili has revealed very little about her origins. Based on what Deon has gathered, she appears to come from a very impoverished upbringing. After the death of her five-year-old brother Akri, she left her home behind to start a new life. Soon she met Pang, and they started a pro consciousness team together. They went undefeated for about a year until Pang decided they should part ways, claiming Skrili was holding her back. But as Skrili unveiled in the tournament, it was their matching traumas holding them back from each other, and she inspired Pang to mend their friendship.

Personality: Skrili rarely shows emotion, often maintaining the same blank expression, but she’s unafraid to put people in their place when they have it coming. In a fight, she’s levelheaded and slow to give up, taking hits better than most. She’s very unspoken about herself and her past, and prefers to avoid the subject.

Likes: Peace and quiet

Skills: As a Power Rebound—which is a particularly rare type—she receives boosts in energy and strength from any physical pain. While this can give her quite an advantage (especially against an unsuspecting opponent), she tends to rely on her sheer fighting skill first before depending on power boosts. She’s light on her feet and extremely quick, utilizing swift, precise kicks. When necessary, she’ll allow her opponent to injure her just enough to trigger a Power Rebound, and then use this extra strength to gain the upper hand.

When Power Rebounds receive a harsh enough head injury, it can trigger a second power-up called Concussion, which transcends normal Power Rebound boosts. While Concussion is awakened, Skrili can use the energy to fly, move at a pace too fast for the human eye, and fight with strength surpassing her normal abilities tenfold. This state only lasts for a short time, and leaves Skrili unable to fight for a while afterward.

Fun Fact: Despite saying she’s not passionate about participating in the Consciousness League herself, she looks up to certain celebrity teams quite a bit: namely, Kotono Inoue and Hiroko Hamasaki, as well as Alex Malachi and Ving Paw Nee.

Zayza

Country: Fantasy

Age: 19

Appearance: Medium height and build with long brown hair, a very beautiful face featuring large green eyes, and a calming smile. She wears a fancy green dress and jewelry around her neck and wrists in the Dream World. In reality, she currently dresses in hand-sewn clothing she received from an Ancient Sage.

Type: Dreamer

Background: She suffers from amnesia, originally remembering only her name and powers when Lammy met her. Recently, she’s recovered haunting thoughts and memory fragments about her past, many of which revolve around someone named “Vayva.” Soon afterwards, Hiroko Hamasaki and Kotono Inoue revealed that before her memory loss, they were best friends.

Personality: Extremely kind, polite, and bubbly. She is easy to excite and get along with, but her optimism can occasionally cause her to downplay dangerous situations in an attempt to encourage those around her.

Likes: Oranges

Skills: Being a Dreamer, she enters into the Dream World whenever she’s asleep. While in this abstract place, she travels around in search for her memories, which appear as floating orbs of light. Once she regains a memory, it returns to a cave that serves as her Dream World abode.

While in combat with a hostile Dreamer in the Dream World, Zayza can charge green energy beams into her limbs to create blasts and shields. She can also fly and warp to other Dream World locations. After recovering these memories, she realized she’s quite a master of these techniques.

Fun Fact: Her Dream World cave is beside a calm stream that changes colors. If you listen closely, the trickling of the running water lowers in pitch with each drop

Pang

Country: Fiction

Age: 16

Appearance: Short stature, with cherry-red hair, large golden eyes, and a confident demeanor. She wears a sleeveless blood-red t-shirt with a black design, tight black pants, and thin gray shoes

Type: Manipulator

Background: Pang is from the incredibly remote planet of Artifex, within a Fiction Country reality of the same name. From a very young age, her father brutally trained her to fight and kill, in order for them to move up in the social ranks and gain the means to escape their sinking home. Ultimately her father used her strength to attain this goal for himself, leaving her behind. Pang eventually found her way off the planet, and moved on to begin a new life.

She started a team with Skrili and they shared an undefeated career for a year, before their inner demons caused a rift and Pang suddenly cut ties. They eventually regrouped for one Conscious Competition to save Pang’s new teammate, Phillip. While they lost in the championship to Kotono and Hiroko, the victors deferred the prize money to them and they achieved their goal.

Personality: Confident, laid-back, and fun-loving. She’s never intimidated, and tends to say whatever is on her mind about someone to their face—often times making her rather offensive and harsh. She looks down on certain types of consciousnesses and gets bored with unimpressive competition.

Likes: Keeping one-sided conversations going with Phillip

Skills: Pang has the powerful ability to manipulate people’s consciousness powers: after sensing that a consciousness is preparing or using their skill, she can control the skill and use it as her own. Pang is also a lightning-fast and well-trained fighter, making for a very challenging opponent. She is particularly fond of fighting Imaginers, because she can manipulate anything an Imaginer creates, imagine her own attacks, and even imagine their creations back out of existence at her will.

Fun fact: The similar outfits she and Skrili wear originally served as their team uniform, modeled after their favorite consciousness team Kotono and Hiroko.

Phillip

Country: Horror

Age: 17

Appearance: Tall, thin, and ghostly pale. He wears a black hooded jacket over a black and white striped T, tight black jeans, and thin shoes (one black and one white). His long and spiky hair usually masks his eyes.

Type: Illusionist

Background: Became Pang’s teammate after Pang parted ways with Skrili. After Pang recovered Skrili’s stolen TeamTrack from a couple thugs, they decided to use it as their own, with Phillip faking Skrili’s identity so they could keep Pang and Skrili’s winning record. After Deon defeated Phillip and Pang, Phillip ultimately decided this lifestyle was unfair, and allowed Deon to take Skrili’s TeamTrack back. He forged an appreciation for and friendship with Skrili and (begrudgingly) Deon during the Fantasy Country Conscious Competition.

Personality: Very soft-spoken and reserved, and always seems melancholy. He usually keeps his opinions and feelings private, but if he feels strongly enough, he’ll speak up.

Likes: Allowing Pang to carry an entire conversation, because he knows he won’t have to say anything

Skills: Phillip can conjure images and sounds to trick his opponents, allowing him to base his fighting style around the art of surprise. His most common illusion is one or many phony versions of himself, which move and speak as he would, based on his command.

Phillip has a rare and devastating last-resort technique: he uses illusions of himself to distract his opponent(s) while hiding elsewhere and preparing a much more complicated illusion—one that causes his opponents to see and hear horrifying images so intense that their minds eventually give out and they lose consciousness.

Fun Fact: In the early versions of this story, Phillip was only going to be in a couple chapters as a side character. But after a couple of my friends told me he was their favorite, I reworked the story to keep him around. Now, I think the current plot is much stronger for it!

Hiroko

Country: Fantasy

Age: 22

Appearance: Smooth dark skin with triangular black tattoos all along her arms, legs, and on one cheek, short and curly purple hair, intimidating yet alluring ice-blue eyes, and a toned, tough build. She dresses in a fitted sleeveless purple shirt, tight black pants, and is always barefoot.

Type: Predictor

Background: From an ancient, sacred village deep within the Mainland Desert in Fantasy Country. She became a pro consciousness and teamed up with Kotono Inoue, and the two were quickly a powerhouse, becoming massive stars. They also developed a romantic relationship, keeping this private from everyone but their best friend Zayza (and, by accident, Lammy). The team often partners with charities, most recently winning a championship to fund the restoration of Hiroko’s home region.

After reuniting with Zayza, she forged a plan to keep her and Lammy safe and now guides them behind-the-scenes to Deon and Skrili, with hopes to transport them to take refuge in her home village.

Personality: Tough and unfazed by adversity. Though she’s often stoic, her warmness and love peeks through while she’s around Kotono and Zayza. She sees rules as general suggestions, often playing by her own code and (much to her management’s dismay) is unafraid of calling out the flaws within the Consciousness League.

Likes: Skipping formal consciousness after-parties with Kotono to go make their own fun elsewhere

Skills: Her Predictor powers give her the ability to visualize and analyze all possible outcomes of an event in an instant, and plan her moves accordingly. She uses this against her opponents to uphold an unbeatable defense, and relies on her unprecedented, masterful strength and speed to dominate the fight offensively. Being from the harsh desert, her resilience surpasses practically everyone else in the League.

Fun Fact: Her home village neighbors another sacred tribe, and despite their history of sporadic rivalry, she ensured the restoration project she fought for will also restore this tribe’s land, as well.

Kotono

Country: Fantasy

Age: 22

Appearance: Very petite and dainty frame, shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair, bright red round eyes full of joy, artful makeup, and an overall light demeanor. In public, she commonly dresses in wavy, short red dresses, dark red leggings, and gold and/or red shoes. At home or in hotels, she often throws on one of Hiroko’s t-shirts

Type: Emovert

Background: Caught up in the world of the Consciousness League circumstantially (which will be explored later), Kotono met Hiroko and they immediately clicked, rising in fame and success while falling in love. She and Hiroko met Zayza at a mandatory after-party, and the trio were seemingly inseparable from that night on, until Zayza’s disappearance.

Kotono recognized Zayza at the Fantasy Country Conscious Competition, and made arrangements with Hiroko to help her stay hidden from bounty hunters Fewpar and Najinzu. Now she supports Zayza and Lammy from afar, doing her best not to make their secret efforts known.

Personality: Soft-natured and giving, though also a bit gullible at times. She’s addicted to sweets, finds pleasure in sneakily averting rules, and ironically, hates fighting. While she hides it well from the public eye, Kotono suffers from severe social and general anxiety. She only feels comfortable holding conversations if Hiroko is present, though sometimes her sheer determination can nudge her outside of her bubble for an instant. Since her anxiety constantly keeps her on-edge, she relies on Hiroko heavily for a sense of security. Kotono knows she can count on Hiroko to calm her down and keep her powers at bay.

Likes: Drinking a questionable amount of Phoenix Floats with Hiroko, far away from crowds and the press

Skills: Kotono is possibly the most powerful consciousness in the League. As an Emovert, her emotions turn into energy, which she can use to shoot blasts, block attacks, and even create storms. Kotono is terrified of fighting, which in turn, makes her dauntingly powerful: her raw fear fuels an unending well of energy so strong that sometimes she can’t control it, which overwhelms just about all of her opponents.

As she discovered during the Fantasy Country Conscious Competition, her emotions of remorse and sorrow trigger a green energy she can use to heal others.

Fun Fact: Kotono holds the record for the most business sponsorships in the entire Consciousness League. But if she had it her way, she would just partner with The Phoenix and get unlimited access to Phoenix Floats

Fewpar

Country: Fantasy

Age: Mid 20’s

Appearance: Tall, very thin, well-poised demeanor, intricately styled pale blonde hair, long face. Wears fashionable formal clothing, usually featuring light blue

Type: Dreamer

Background: Originally one of Zayza’s colleagues in their homeland, he used to study the Dreamer Arts with her. Now, he’s working with their kingdom to hunt down and capture Zayza, believing she’s guilty of murder.

Personality: Extremely confident with an eerily soothing voice, and usually unperturbed. But if things escalate out of his control and don’t go how he wants, he’s quick to lose temper, exploding with rage and approaching insanity.

Likes: Being the smartest and wittiest in the room

Skills: As a trained Dreamer, Fewpar is knowledgeable in one-on-one combat. He relies mostly on close-range attacks, charging his blue energy into his fists to deliver devastating, supercharged punches. Like Zayza, he can also fire beams of light. Though as he’d hate to admit, his mastery of Dream World combat is far inferior to Zayza’s.

When outclassed, Fewpar taps into his cunning nature to trap his opponents into situations where they must surrender, often using threats.

Fun fact: Don’t ever touch Fewpar’s flawless hair. Nothing makes him angrier.

Najinzu

Country: Fantasy

Age: Mid 20’s

Appearance: Moderately toned build, terrible posture, and disorderly pitch-black hair that hides most of his face except for one thin, dark eye. A gray bandana covers his mouth. He wears all black and slightly ripped clothes, with thin boots

Type: Sense-Enhancer

Background: A childhood friend of Fewpar and formerly Zayza’s colleague, Najinzu studied and became a Pain Tolerance Trainer. Now, he works alongside Fewpar as a bounty hunter for their kingdom in Fantasy Country. Their current mission is to hunt down and capture Zayza, a task they’re both particularly passionate about.

Personality: Overall unapproachable, though he gets along well with Fewpar. Najinzu is very impatient and often sporadic. He takes pleasure in punishing his targets with violence.

Likes: Using his disturbingly thin knives for everything from cutting fruit, to tormenting bounties and Pain Tolerance clients

Skills: Najinzu’s Sense-Enhancer abilities allow him to increase the intensity of whichever sense he pleases, granting himself heightened sight, hearing, smell, touch, or taste. He is also well trained in tools and weapons such as throwing knives and blow darts. Combined with his remarkable speed, these traits make him highly stealthy and dangerous.

As a Pain Tolerance Trainer, he artfully uses his weapons to give individuals the most pain possible. When initiating this practice on Dreamer clients, it heightens their Pain Tolerance in the Dream World, allowing them to fight in the alternate realm longer. But consequently, his knives leave behind disturbingly beautiful scars.

Fun fact: Fewpar wishes Najinzu would buy at least one change of clothes.