POWER DESCRIPTIONS

Bryn's first power is a straightforward one. He doesn't have any control over it, but he doesn't need any. His body just recovers from injuries of all kinds at a much faster rate than usual. Minor scrapes and bruises that should take days to heal are gone in hours. Injuries that should take weeks heal in a matter of days and badly broken bones heal in only weeks. 

His duplication ability is a little more complicated. It takes a large amount of energy to spit in two.  It is, after all, essentially creating a whole second corporeal form. While split, Bryn can have his bodies act independently to a degree. Simple chores that require little intensive thinking, for example, would be easy to do. The more complicated the mental or physical activity done by the one body, the less complicated the other can perform as there's only one psyche behind the two bodies. 

What happens to one body is felt by the other; jammed fingers, scraped knees, bruises... While only the body that actually received the injury will carry it, the other will feel its effects. Should one of his bodies be killed, his split consciousness is snapped back together at dizzying speeds, leaving him stunned at best. It also leaves him physically drained as the energy that was used to manifest a second corporeal form is essentially trapped in a corpse that now needs disposing of.

APPEARANCE

Bryn is slightly on the shorter side of average in height. Without a frame of reference it might be hard to tell that, as his body is lean and toned and doesn't look like it would belong to a shorter person. His hair is the blue-black of quality ink, and is long enough to reach past his shoulder blades even when tied back in a low, loose ponytail. It's cut shorter in the front, giving him a bit of a veil to hide behind, as it frames and partially obscures his face.

And it's a pretty nice face, too. Both Japanese and European features are clear to the eye but it all fits together nicely. The biggest flaw to his attractiveness is that his lips are slightly on the thin side and his complexion is unusually pallid. His eyes though, they more than make up for minor flaws; when they're actually visible.  A deep and clear blue, they shift from lighter to darker depending on the lighting.

 He isn't one for flashy clothes. Generally, Bryn wears subdued colors. Getting him into anything more lively than forest green takes some serious work. He also prefers simple lines; nothing too tight or too baggy, but fitting comfortably.

PERSONALITY

Bryn is the sort of person who hates to make waves. He's the sort who prefers to keep their head down and minimize fuss and trouble. Generally quiet and unobtrusive, it's easy to overlook him and when push comes to shove he rolls with it and gets pushed over. Standing up to abuse never went well in his observations and it's better to just suck it up and deal.

In spite of all that, he is genuinely a kind boy. Although subdued and cautious, he is open to overtures of friendship and tends to be rather amiable under all but the worst of circumstances. He comes across as a bit awkward much of the time, his affect a bit flattened and an unwillingness to make direct eye contact. It makes some people think he's dishonest but it's really more a matter of anxiety.

BIOGRAPHY

Bryn's life isn't an especially exciting one, nor is it really a happy one. He got the short end of the luck stick in a great many ways; from his neighborhood to his genetics and everything in between. His parents were unwed when his mother conceived and neither one of them was really in the financial straights for a baby. None the less, Bryn was born.

He grew up in an impoverished corner of Los Angeles which was a horrible place for him, particularly.  It wasn't so much the neighborhood, although it was a bit rough around the edges.  It was more that, as far back as he could remember, exposure to even fairly diluted sunlight left his exposed skin raw at best. His mother was fair and sunburned easily, but Bryn would break out in hives, and even blisters, if left too long in the sun. And for him "too long" wasn't long at all.  Before he was five he had been in the hospital several times for sun poisoning, something that was terribly detrimental to his parent's almost non-existant bank accounts.

Finally a doctor had to spell it out for them; their son was essentially allergic to the UV radiation in sunlight and needed protection from it. That meant minimizing time outside in the daylight and the highest SPF sunscreen they could find and special clothes designed to block the UV radiation when going out was unavoidable. In other words, it meant more expense. 

Money money money. As far as his father was concerned, the only thing Bryn was good at was wasting it. He made sure his son knew it too.  He also made it abundantly clear, with words and fists and belts and rulers, that he blamed his wife for Bryn's deficient genetics. He blamed Bryn for it too, when Gwen wasn't around to shield her son from his father's ire. 

At some point in middle school, Bryn realized he was healing at a faster rate than before. His sunburns and the assortment of injuries he got from his father took less and less time to heal. Of course, since he was always acquiring new injuries no one else much seemed to notice; but it was Bryn's body so he did. 

The first day he split in to two Bryns was quite the doozy. His father had ordered him to get the apartment back in order by the time he got home from work the following day. Seeing as he had school and his mother was also working full time, there was no reasonable way for Junji to expect a cleaned home when he returned. But the last time Bryn and his mother had failed to deliver the "requested" clean apartment there had been hell to pay.

One morning, when Bryn Ishida woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into two distinct persons. They were both him, completely identical in every way, even down to old scars. He was aware of both of them and it was a wonder the input from two separate bodies didn't drive the poor boy utterly mad. 

It seemed like a miracle. Here was the way he could escape his father's wrath. There was a slight hiccup in his plan however. He had never tried to split his attention like that before. He could barely get both bodies to walk without falling over, let alone send one to school and use the other to clean. He was so clearly disoriented when his mother came in to make sure he was up that she gave him leave to stay home from school. When she left for work Bryn set to work practicing this whole two bodies one mind thing. One of him had hidden in the closet when his mom came in but now he had the apartment to himself. If he could get a handle on this strange miracle he might even be able to get things clean enough to save himself and his mother a beating. 

As it tuned out, you win some you lose some. Bryn did manage to get the basics of this double stuff figured out but hadn't gotten the house clean by the time he heard a key turning in the lock.  In his frantic need to recombine his two selves into one again he gave himself a bit of mental whiplash as he became one entity again. So it was that Junji found his son passed out in the kitchen with a mop in one hand. 

When Gwen returned home herself she, for the first time, verbally laid into her husband for making their clearly ill child clean house in his condition. It was also the last time, considering she ended up in a come from the beating that ensued. 

And so Bryn's life became a different shade of misery in which there was no motherly reprieve. Between his father's increasingly ridiculous demands and the lack of encouragement from his mother to brave the sun for an education, his grades began to slip. The only positive thing was his little secret; being able to split into two. 

It didn't stay a secret forever. His father came home early one day in an absolute rage. He had been laid off at work and took out his frustrations on the first person he found. When his fury cleared he was looking down at the brutally beaten corpse of his son. Bryn, hidden in the coat closet had seen and felt himself die but he still lived. His whole body was in agony but there wasn't a mark on him. And unrelated to the shock of what he had just witnessed he was on the verge of fainting. 

He stayed hidden until his father went to dispose of the body then crawled, unable to move faster than that, out a window. And it was none too soon. Junji Ishida was not the smartest of men and had been caught trying to hide his son's body. No sooner had Bryn curled up and passed out hidden by some convenient shrubs planted against the building, but LA's finest were pounding on the door and breaking into the crime scene.

When Bryn awoke he was in a comfortable bed in a cozy hotel room. There was a man reclining with a book on the other bed in the room.  Bryn had no idea where he was or who the man was. Before he could work himself into too much of a panic, the man introduced himself. He was a scout, apparently, for a place called Aurora Academy. And Bryn shouldn't worry; his secret abilities were safely kept secrets.  

Pronounced dead, Bryn Ishida is essentially a ghost as far as paperwork goes. He attends Aurora Academy and has no contact with people from home. After all, Junji Ishida is in jail for manslaughter. It wouldn't do for the supposed dead kid to show up again.

> HAKUOUKI; SAITO HAJIME <