@fellden

[jeobchog]

PLAYER

NAME: Nat
AGE: 28
PREFERRED CONTACT: salvatrice
OTHER CHARACTERS: N/A

CHARACTER

NAME: Ahn Lee
AGE: 21
CANON & CANON POINT: He Is Psychometric, Ep 3 post-time skip
RESERVATION LINK: HERE.
HISTORY:

Ahn's life up to the age of seven was not only normal, it was in many ways idyllic. An only child to two loving parents, a police officer and a stay-at-home mom, for the early years of his life Ahn's most pressing concern was the desire for a dog his parents didn't want to give him. It was on his seventh birthday, December 3rd, 2005, that everything changed.

Ahn was in the elevator of his apartment building with his parents, having finally convinced them to get a dog (by asking for a younger sibling instead), when an explosion rocked the complex and trapped the three of them inside the elevator. The security guard, a former firefighter, was able to save Ahn, but his parents weren't so lucky, as the elevator plummeted to the ground as soon as Ahn was pulled out. Minutes later, out of time, air, and options, an older boy named Seong-Mo Kang took Ahn in his arms and flung the two of them out of a window to escape the flames consuming the building. The two fell from the seventh floor, landing on a car, injured but alive, and it was this impact which would give rise to Ahn's gift of psychometry — he was now able to see the negative or traumatic memories of anyone and anything his skin touched.

In the aftermath of the fire, Seong-Mo became Ahn's de facto guardian and caretaker, his "hyung" — older brother. Seong-Mo had lost his mother in the fire, and being both newly orphaned as well as the one who saved Ahn's life, he felt both attached to and responsible for Ahn. He helped Ahn through the trauma of his parents' deaths, his newfound ability, and the children who bullied him relentlessly for it. It helped that, though Ahn couldn't control the visions he got from anyone or anything else, he never experienced any memory flashes from touching Seong-Mo, making him the only safe person in the world to touch. Ahn came to rely on Seong-Mo, seeing him as the one constant in a life that had so abruptly turned topsy-turvy — and then one day, Seong-Mo left the country, leaving Ahn alone at the orphanage. Without his hyung, Ahn became angry and bitter and cynical, and he began to hate his powers and everyone around him. Seeing the worst in everyone around him turned Ahn into a misanthropist, and for years after Seong-Mo left Korea Ahn didn't apply himself in school, got into fights, and isolated himself from others. He made a name for himself as a delinquent, and only made one friend during this time: an abused boy named Dae Bong, who learned of his ability and didn't judge him for it.

One night, after Ahn had beaten up a gang of other students, he found a puppy abandoned in a box on the sidewalk. Feeling a kinship with it — both abandoned, alone, orphaned and helpless — Ahn picked it up to take it home... And immediately looked up to see Seong-Mo waiting for him. Ahn forgave his hyung for leaving him, left his hate behind, and started trying to clean up his act.

At the end of his senior year of high school, Ahn was living with Seong-Mo, trying to avoid expulsion, and working on developing his psychometric ability in hopes of becoming a consultant with the police. Ji-Soo Eun, the daughter of the man who'd worked the apartment fire case and a close friend of Ahn and Seong-Mo's, had him attempt to help her investigate a fire at a senior care facility with a worryingly similar MO to the apartment fire case... only for Ahn to see some dead women's bra sizes and a woman wearing a ring. When explaining this to Dae Bong over the phone, Ahn was confronted by another student — she thought he was spying on her getting changed in the restroom, and his conversation with Dae Bong about underwear didn't do him any favours. To make matters worse, the math teacher at school wanted to expel him for breaking into school to steal test answers, which he also didn't do.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Ahn cleared his name of both the peeping tom charge and the cheating charge with the help of the same girl who had accused him in the first place, Jae-In Yoon, and his psychometric abilities. They became very close in this short amount of time, both opening up to each other about aspects of their pasts they usually kept secret, Ahn even saving Jae-In from the teacher attempting to throw hydrochloric acid in her face, and Ahn eventually promised to help Jae-In clear the name of her father, who had been framed for murders she believed he didn't commit. However, before Jae-In had made up her mind about whether to let him touch her and see her memories of the night of the crime, word got out at school about her father's crimes, and Jae-In fled the district, leaving Ahn a promise to find him when she was ready.

Two years later, Ahn is more or less the same as he ever was — a little ditzy, only now with a goal — with aspirations of joining the police academy... And a tendency to see Jae-In in all the girls who cross his path.

PERSONALITY:

Ahn Lee isn't the brightest bulb on the tree. Street smarts are where he excels, and even those he doesn't have in spades — Ahn gave up on the world when he was young, and that included education. Why pay attention in school if there was no one to care about how well he did? Why go at all if no one would punish him for being truant? And why study, if he can just touch someone and see the answers they got as they studied? Everyone else lies and cheats, after all, he shouldn't have to do things the hard way. Despite all this, he can be very insightful, and even smart when he applies himself — he makes the connection between Seong-Mo's difficulty expressing emotion and alexithymia, eventually — it's just that more often than not, Ahn chooses not to apply himself. He prefers relying on psychometry and sheer bull-headed action to solve problems over using his brain. Even when he does use his brain, it's often just for coming up with ridiculous plans that rely on psychometry, like pulling the fire alarm and touching everyone who leaves through the front door to try to find the student who broke into the faculty building. For as much as Ahn can sometimes resent his ability, he uses it often.

Ahn's power of psychometry wasn't one he was born with, instead being a cruel consolation prize for his dead parents bestowed upon him by the universe in the aftermath of the fire. Throughout the years, Ahn has had a complicated relationship with his ability, never truly coming to like it so much as just accept it. For many years he even hated it, blaming it for how badly other children treated him as a child and falling to the dark side of anger and hate over the things it showed him people were capable of — murder, abuse, lying, theft — and worse, capable of getting away with. Ahn is a good, kind person, raised by good, kind people. He believed the world was likewise filled with good people, right up until he was continuously and traumatically shown that it really isn't — and all at the ripe old age of seven. This violent disruption to his world view, coupled with Seong-Mo's abandonment when he was most in need of a good, kind role model, led Ahn to hate people. He keeps a tighter lid on it now than he did when he was alone in the world, but Ahn generally thinks everyone in the world is a terrible person, and he especially doesn't trust people who act good, since they're the ones usually hiding the most terrible things. It isn't in his nature to be like this, though — we see in all the flashbacks that he can be kind of a bratty kid, but that he's kind and thoughtful and wants to help people — and his true nature can't help shining through all the trauma-induced resentment.

Had he not experienced this trauma so young, Ahn would have grown up into a very different person. He was kind as a child, trying to comfort a crying girl with candies when he himself had lost everything, and trying to use his ability to reunite a boy in the orphanage with his parents. His police officer father imbued Ahn with a sense of justice early on in life, and it was only the traumas of the fire and his ability that shook any of that in Ahn — and even despite all that, he is, at heart, kind and justice-minded. While he was initially willing to throw a pregnant classmate under the bus to protect himself and Jae-In from expulsion, it didn't take much convincing for him to come up with a way to save all three of them. He likes kids, and is willing to go out of his way to help them and be nice to them, buying candies for kids in the hospital and encouraging a kid to be honest with her mother when she scratched up a car so that she wouldn't let the memory of lying fester in her heart forever. Ahn's friendship with Jae-In is formative in this way, as her sense of and dedication to justice reminds him of what the concept used to mean to him, too. As the show goes on and Ahn interacts with more people and pushes himself to let his walls down, he remembers more and more what it was like to want to help people because it was the right thing to do, not because he wanted to be Korea's first official consulting psychometrist.

At the beginning of the show, Ahn covers himself with layers and layers of jackets and sweaters to avoid being touched. This is a metaphor for how hard he works to avoid letting anyone into his life, and all the walls he constructs to avoid having to care about people. He's trained himself over the years to do many things without using his hands, covering them in sweater paws and twisting into odd bodily configurations to avoid touching anyone he doesn't want to touch. Truly, the only times he seems willing to touch people without asking or worrying about what he might see is when he's fighting them, or trying to use them to cheat on a test. At all other times, Ahn would rather embarrass or injure himself than touch someone — he catches Jae-In on his back rather than in his arms when she's falling after having been stabbed in the side only hours earlier. As the show goes on, Ahn begins to shed these layers, symbolising both his acceptance of his ability and his letting himself connect more with people. Trust isn't something that comes easily to Ahn, what with all the abandonment issues and his belief that even the best people are hiding something awful, but with Jae-In's influence to remind him of how important it is to believe in and be kind to people, he's beginning to make the effort.

For a long time in Ahn's life, if he wasn't alone, he only had two people to rely on: Seong-Mo and Ji-Soo. They are his hyung and his noona, his older brother and sister, and Ahn loves them both. He's at his most relaxed around the two of them, able to freely talk about his power and unafraid to touch either of them — he hugs Ji-Soo without asking, and fistbumps Seong-Mo all the time. When Ahn was in his worst period, abandoned by Seong-Mo and raging at the world, he made friends with Dae Bong, because he was a little bit pathetic, but very kind. Those three were his only friends for much of his life after the fire, and he never really wanted to branch out... Until he met Jae-In. Jae-In was annoying at first, as someone who could ruin his life over a misunderstanding, but until he met her Ahn had sort of... forgotten that people could be like her. She stood up to a teacher who was being a dick to the students, and to Ahn in particular, despite hating him at the time, and from that moment Ahn was fascinated by her and her goodness. Though they were separated before he could really feel her influence in high school, when they reunite as adults, it's through Jae-In's influence that Ahn begins to take the responsibility of a police officer seriously, and slowly free himself from all the walls he constructed around himself and the outside world.

ABILITIES/SKILLS:

HE IS PSYCHOMETRIC Whenever Ahn touches anyone or anything, he gets involuntary visions of the worst memories associated with that object or person. He cannot choose what he sees, and the visions from objects in particular are often jumbled, incoherent, and difficult to find a narrative within. The memories of people can either be the worst things they've done, or traumatic experiences they've had. People who are especially buttoned down and experience little emotion are very difficult to get a read on. If through these memories Ahn experiences someone's death, it's extremely stressful on his body, and can result in loss of consciousness and even a heart attack, if he experiences too many deaths in a row.

FIGHT ME Though not trained in any specific fighting style, Ahn's gotten into enough fights that he has a pretty good idea of how to throw down. He can fight off whole gangs all by himself, and seems to not be bothered much by things like being punched in the face or stabbed in the kidney.

INVENTORY/COMPANIONS:

WHITE SNOW The puppy Ahn found when he was at his lowest point, White Snow is now a mature maltese dog that Ahn loves more than he loves most people. Please let him have White Snow, he'll be very sad without his good good doggo.

FACTION CHOICE: Court of Stars

REASON:

Ahn is a very impulsive, illogical person — he's not concerned with using his head, he follows his gut at all times. He'd rather run headlong into a problem and figure it out as he goes than sit and come up with a real plan, and the plans he does come up with are often just as reckless as he would be if he'd just followed his gut in the first place.

TATTOO:

Ahn's tattoo will be a large tattoo of the constellation gemini on his inner forearm.

SAMPLES

NETWORK: TDM compass thread

LOG: TDM thread

NOTES, QUESTIONS, COMMENTS: Ahn's psychometry would of course come with a permissions post, and if it needs further nerfing I'm happy to have it not work on NPCs, or whatever you think would be best!