Yang Kangmo (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
excitababble) wrote2014-11-23 11:36 pm
excitababble) wrote2014-11-23 11:36 pm
Mask or Menace App
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Leigh
AGE: 24
JOURNAL:plonks
IM / EMAIL: NoondayClock // ffPyro@gmail.com
PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
splintercat
RETURNING: Yes! Minho (The Maze Runner)
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Yang Kangmo
CHARACTER AGE: 18
CANON ORIGIN: White Christmas
CHRONOLOGY: In the middle of episode six, when the boys are coming in from their romp in the snow.
CLASS: Hero… ish.
HOUSING: Anywhere is fine, but requesting housing with Juuzou Suzuya if possible.
BACKGROUND: When Kangmo's mother was pregnant with him she became sick, and developed a dangerously high fever. While she came out of the illness alright, her newborn son was not so lucky. Kangmo's hearing was badly damaged, to the point that for the rest of his life he's been unable to hear anything at all without the help of a hearing implant that he had put in at a very young age. His parents provided a loving and supportive environment for the boy, and he grew up fairly comfortably, though his inability to hear without his hearing implant did still create certain struggles for him. Still, he was a bright boy, and developed a passion for film, journalism, and photography, and his intelligence managed to land him a spot in the prestigious high school, Susin.
Susin High is a private school, isolated deep in the mountains of South Korea. The school forbids all extracurricular activities and encourages its students to do very little besides study. There's only one break a year (an eight day break around Christmas), and even visits from parents at other times of the year are discouraged. The students call it Three Years Alcatraz for a reason. But hey! The methods seem to work. Susin High produces the top 0.1% of South Korean high school students, and has an incredible success rate when it comes to exam scores and getting its students into top universities. It's an incredible school as far as academics go, even if it can put a pretty big toll on the students' emotional well being.
It wasn't just the school that could bring Kangmo down, however. The student body wasn't exactly full of charmers either. From the boy who bullied him mercilessly (Youngjae), to the young man that tried to force his friendship and pity on Kangmo based almost solely on Kangmo's disability (Jinsoo), Kangmo had plenty of people around he strongly disliked. And then, of course, there was the girl he liked a little too much. Again, the student body wasn't exactly full of charmers, and Kangmo could definitely be counted as part of that problem. Sometime in his high school career Kangmo took up stalking a girl named Eunsang. Unfortunately for the girl, Kangmo wasn't the only one to do this either (Youngjae and Jinsoo also being culprits of this). Perhaps a little more fortunately though, Kangmo stayed quiet and stayed back, choosing to take pictures of her (still creepy) instead of trying to approach her and shove his feelings at her. See, Eunsang had a boyfriend (Muyeol), and if nothing else Kangmo realized she was happy with him, and didn't want to get in the way of anything that made her happy.
Other than the unfortunate stalking that he managed to keep under wraps, Kangmo made a name for himself as the resident cameraman. He would take less secretive pictures of various events around the school, and film anything big that went down, like a student bungee jumping off the school roof. For the most part he carved out a comfortable enough niche for himself in Susin.
That is, until one year he received a mysterious letter before Christmas break accusing someone (or several someones) of committing eight various sins, and promising them that around Christmas they would see a dead body by the school's clock tower. Kangmo did not take the letter seriously, believing it was a prank, but opted to stay behind and investigate the story to satisfy his journalistic itch. Six other students stayed behind as well; Muyeol, Eunsang, Youngjae, Chihoon, Jaekyu, and Yoon Soo. While things started off quietly enough, the group quickly discovered that they'd all received the same mysterious letter, and a mystery that needed solving quickly developed.
To add a layer of complication to this strange winter break, a psychologist that had been involved in a terrible car crash (Yohan) appeared at the school's gate, needing immediate medical attention. The doctor's only contact was called immediately, while the students and the one teacher (that had stayed behind to watch the kids) did their best to help the poor man out. Even worse, shortly after the doctor seemed better Eunsang wandered off into the snow, and slit her wrist. She was found and rescued quickly by Kangmo and a couple others, but kept under watch afterwards.
Things eventually settled, and despite the phone lines and internet being down because of the snow, the investigation to find out who wrote the letter was underfoot, and a boy unrelated to the case broke into the school to take revenge on the guy that got him expelled.
And throughout most of this… Kangmo stayed in dark. He knew about the doctor, of course, and had some minor dealings with trying to make connections between everyone who received a copy of the letter, but knew nothing about Mireu (the boy that broke in). He certainly didn't know about Mireu helping the others discover the final key connection to the letter, Jinsoo, who had written down that Kangmo was his best friend in Susin. When Kangmo goes to deliver a message from Eunsang, the other boys finally decided to confront him after discovering his collection of photographs of Eunsang, and accuse him of writing the letter to get revenge for his friend, Jinsoo, because after all… Jinsoo had committed suicide in response to the perceived cruelties of the people around him.
Kangmo was shocked to find out about Jinsoo's passing, but told his side of the story. Denied the claims against him, and assured them all the truth of the matter was he had hated Jinsoo. The photos, however, he didn't bother to try to explain away. Before the confrontation could get violent (thanks to Youngjae), Eunsang appeared to inform them that the doctor had a high fever, dangerously high, in fact, and his life was at risk. All issues with Kangmo were shoved to the side so the group of kids could save the man's life.
Meanwhile, Kangmo began to grow suspicious of things happening around the school. Not only were the phone lines and connection still down (odd when the physical cables were built under the ground, where the snow shouldn't affect them), but the teacher had gone missing some time ago and no one had seen him. Without telling anyone what he was up to, Kangmo snuck into some of the maintenance rooms and found out that the lines had been purposely tampered with. It was then he realized that something was going wrong in the school, though he didn't know what. He planned to at least tell Muyeol about the lines, since Muyeol seemed to have his act together a little more than most of the other students. Unfortunately, when he finally got the chance Muyeol was with Eunsang, and Kangmo made the mistake of trying to hide at first. He was quickly busted, and the other two got suspicious of him immediately because he was holding a sharp pick in self defense, aware that someone tampering with the phone lines couldn't mean anything good. Message delivered, he left quickly not running into the rest of the students until awhile later. Kangmo immediately realized something was wrong, even though he was still in the dark about what, and kept a knife at his side, again for self defense.
… Probably not the best move in his part, as his classmates had just found the dead body of their murdered teacher, buried in the snow outside. Kangmo, not realizing this, proceeded to act suspicious and more than a little creepy, raising an alarm for them, and starting a witch hunt for Kangmo across the school.
While Kangmo didn't necessarily expect most of the boys to use deadly force, he still realized he was being blamed for something big, and when he saw them coming after him with weapons he immediately began moving from room to room, taking cover and hiding when needed, and moving to another room when they picked up his trail. And they seemed to pick up his trail often. It didn't take Kangmo long to realize they were tracking his movements with the security cameras around the school. Things were not looking good until Kangmo happened to run into Susin's resident unemotional, vulcan-like, genius, Chihoon. A short exchange between Jaekyu, Chihoon, and Kangmo managed to get Kangmo up to speed on the situation and provide him with a solution to the immediate problem.
Chihoon locked Kangmo up in the detention room (which for basically being a high school time out room looked scarily like a prison cell), and allowed Kangmo to add in blocks so that not only was he locked in, but he was able to keep anyone else from getting inside. When Youngjae and Muyeol found and confronted Kangmo again, he was safe inside his personal prison cell, and able to laugh at Youngjae's useless attempts to bust in and beat him within and inch of his life, and scold Muyeol for chasing him down like an animal. He was also able to get Muyeol to show all of the pictures of Eunsang he'd taken to the girl in question, which went over with her much better than one might expect.
Unfortunately, it meant that Kangmo was trapped inside that room and was once again kept in the dark when some pretty big revelations came out. The big one being that the person who has killed the teacher was the psychologist, Yohan, the kids had been trying so hard to save. Not only that, but the was a wanted serial killer, with a gun, who quickly took the kids hostage. Kangmo was no exception. He grabbed him from his cell and made him join the rest of the students, missing only Yoon Soo. The doctor quickly designed a game to play. He would partner up the students into three groups. Three would stay with him, and three would go and look for Yoon Soo. They had to come back within an hour, or Yohan would shoot their partner. Kangmo was paired with Youngjae, the bully, the boy that constantly beat him up and broke his hearing aid whenever the chance arose, someone Kangmo genuinely hated.
And yet… at the end of the hour, Kangmo still came back for him. As much as he hated Youngjae, he couldn't allow himself to be responsible for Youngjae's death. While none of the students managed to find Yoon Soo, the boy stupidly gave himself up after waking up from a nap and dopily walking right into the middle of the situation.
With all the players in place, Yohan's next game began. The premise was simple, Yohan would be trying to find out who had sent the students the letter. They could turn in the person responsible, resulting in that person's death, wait until the end of the three days and let Yohan decide who it was, or the person who had written the letters in the first place could confess and let Yohan know who they thought had committed the gravest sin. In the first two cases, Yohan would shoot the letter sender, in the last one, he would shot the person the letter sender decided was most deserving. No matter what, at least one person was going to die, and the kids were put into a hard predicament of trying to decide to betray their fellow classmates or not. Yohan, meanwhile, would have counseling sessions with all of the students one by one to determine who the letter sender one.
First up? Yang Kangmo.
For the most part the counseling session was just Kangmo nervously chattering away about whatever came to his mind first (movies and people he knew mostly), until Yohan asked him to be quiet for a few moments. Kangmo complied, and when Yohan had enough time to recover from Kangmo's rapid fire babbling, he started picking at Kangmo's insecurities. Getting to the heart of the matter, Kangmo's disability, and how it had created a constant feeling of desperation in him. Yohan used this, playing off of Kangmo's insecurities to make him feel like he could not trust his classmates. Admittedly, not hard to do since several of them had been trying to bash Kangmo's skull just a day or so prior. As Yohan continued his villainous therapist speech, the battery in Kangmo's hearing aid ran out. Even under normal circumstances this was a fear of Kangmo's, and having that fear just picked at Kangmo was not ready to admit to this extra weakness. He tried to pretend he could still hear, and given the stressful situation his classmates did not notice in oddities in his behavior.
The big problem with this was that while Kangmo was with Yohan, his classmates had come up with a plan to take the doctor down, and it all hinged on Kangmo's help. It would have been find, of course, if Kangmo had been able to hear the plan that Muyeol whispered into his ear, but he couldn't. When the time came to put it all into motion, Kangmo stayed in his seat, staring around in confused wonder as his classmates leapt into action, knocking the gun away from Yohan and into Kangmo's reach. Unfortunately, before Kangmo could have time to process the situation, Yohan was back on his feet and had the gun in hand again. Even more unfortunately, he decided to punish the person that had come up with this plan, Chihoon.
As the kids were ushered back into a room and locked up, Yohan escorted Chihoon off to dispose of him. It was only after angrily confronting Kangmo about his failure to help did they realize that he couldn't hear. A tense silence fell over the room as the other students began to cry when somewhere else in the school they heard a shot fire, signifying Yohan had finished taking care of Chihoon.
The game resumed after that. Yohan had Youngjae retrieve a battery for Kangmo's hearing aid to put him back on even footing with the rest of his classmates. After that the doctor took Youngjae off for his next "counseling" session. Before that session started though, Jaekyu revealed a discovery he'd made a breakfast, that Mireu had broken back into the school, this time with a lady friend in tow. They had a chance of escaping the doctor's clutches yet. Despite their best efforts though, they couldn't seem to reach Mireu or alert him to the danger they were in. As luck would have it, however, Mireu figured out on his own that something was amiss, and managed to knock Yohan unconscious long enough to shackle him to a bed with a pair of handcuffs and steal his gun. Finally, the kids were free!
So, they did the obvious thing. They celebrated. The broke into the faculty's supply of alcohol, and got drunk as a bunch of skunks… who had just survived a series of mind games from a serial killer. As much of the booze got poured over their heads as went into their mouths though. And when they were done with that, and finally seemed like they were ready to wind down, they decided to run out and romp about in the snow, because you can never get enough celebration going on when you've survived against impossible seeming odds.
Of course, things weren't over for the students yet, not by a long shot, but Kangmo's canon point ends here so that's a story for another time.
PERSONALITY: There's a strange dichotomy to Kangmo's personality. On one hand he seems relatively friendly and cheerful. He's very quick to smile and joke around with people, even those he doesn't really know that well. He's relatively outgoing and socially well adjusted, so he doesn't have much of a problem fitting in with his peers. On the other hand, he's very good at unintentionally outcasting himself, generating mistrust though questionable actions while neglecting to properly explain himself. He'll do things like make honest, biting comments in a light hearted and joking way that makes it hard to tell how serious he is. And he seems more than happy to act like everyone's friendly acquaintance who takes things in stride, while at the harboring feelings of intense bitterness for many of the people around him.
That's not to say that Kangmo is completely fake. He's not trying to hide his thoughts or feelings at all, and he's very upfront when he dislikes someone. Even if he tends to deliver his insults like he's making a joke, he still says whatever cutting thing might come to his mind to the people that have wronged him in some way. Youngjae is the main target of Kangmo's nastier remarks. Admittedly, Youngjae also bullies Kangmo near relentlessly, so there's a pretty good reason that Kangmo mouths off to him whenever the two of them are in a room together. And boy does he get mouthy! Kangmo might not have the strongest sense of self preservation at times, in his own words he resists more when he's punished. The worse someone treats him, the worse he'll bite back. The thing is, Kangmo isn't a particular large or impressive guy. He doesn't have the strength to fight back physically, so he fights back verbally. He mocks, ridicules, and generally insults his enemies, digging at them in whatever way he can to make them angry. Usually this winds up with him getting smacked around, but Kangmo's a stubborn kid, and he doesn't back down easily.
He also doesn't forgive that easily. While he's very good at tolerating people (mostly… sort of), that doesn't mean he doesn't hold in a lot of resentment for the people around him. Again, this isn't something that Kangmo tries to keep a secret either. When Muyeol joins in Youngjae's witch hunt for Kangmo, Kangmo makes a point of letting Muyeol know how disappointed he is in the most condescending manner he can manage. When Kangmo has been hurt by a person he doesn't pull any metaphorical punches, and does his best to hurt them back.
And there's a lot of hurt that Kangmo keeps inside himself to dish back out to people later. While his disability is not necessarily immediately noticeable to a stranger, outside of the hearing aid he wears, others usually still treat him differently. He receives pity and sympathy that Kangmo perceives as condescending feelings of superiority, and he resents it. He doesn't like people like Youngjae, who will pick on him by breaking his hearing implant and leaving him in silence for weeks until it can be replaced, but he hates people like Jinsoo, who try to shove canned words of encouragement down his throat, even more. Kangmo has accepted that people will think they're better than he is based on the fact that they can hear, but it still raises his hackles when they make it obvious that they do.
In part, Kangmo, like most people, doesn't like people acting like they're superior to him. The bigger issue, however, is Kangmo's own personal insecurities. Not being able to hear can be a scary thing. There's the obvious ways, of course. You can't hear someone sneaking up on you, or when alarms go off to alert you to danger. But that's not the only thing, you miss people calling out your name in the hallway, or any sort of audio cues. These small things aren't deadly, but they can get to a person. Kangmo relies completely on batteries of his hearing implant, and when the power runs out he's left in a world of silence. In these moments Kangmo doesn't necessarily feel scared as much as he feels anxious and desperate. Desperate not to mess up, desperate to do what comes to everyone else so naturally. He tells a story about when he was only six years old, and performing in a concert with his peers. Kangmo had the role of ringing the cowbell, something that only had to be done twice, a really insignificant part of a preschool performance, and he even admits that no one would care if he messed up and failed to ring it. At the same time, he felt so nervous and desperate to get it right and not mess up. It didn't matter to anyone else but him, wasn't even noticeable to the other people around him, but he wanted so badly to ring that bell on time. His entire life has been like this. Kangmo still hasn't let go of that same desperation he felt when he was six years old.
It feeds into some of his fake friendly behavior as well. Kangmo acts like he's joking about everything, because it's easier to deal with the world at large if he treats it that way. It puts people at ease, and lightens the atmosphere. Which is why when Kangmo gets nervous his mouth runs a mile a minute. He overcompensates for his trouble with listening by filling the silence around him with the sound of his own voice. Nothing he has to say in these moments of nervous tension are of any importance either, the words aren't all that important, it's the fact that he can't stop himself from spitting them out to assuage his own nervousness.
None of these feelings are ones that Kangmo really wants to share with the people around him, and so most of Kangmo's negative feelings are internalized. While Kangmo is open about his dislike for people, he's far less open about the things that deeply hurt him. He doesn't want to risk exposing himself to more potential pain, and he doesn't particularly trust easily. Kangmo understands friendship, and he knows how to make friends, but in his own words friendships are established over years of knowing each other. He doesn't open up to people that easily, and prefers keeping his problems to himself.
Unfortunately for him, mistrust breeds mistrust. Kangmo is not good at explaining himself. He's a smart boy, and very articulate, but he tends not to press issues or try to make people understand him in a lot of cases. If he's feeling threatened, he'll carry a weapon around with him in self defense, if people don't accept his brief reasoning for it, he won't try to reassure them further. It doesn't help that at times Kangmo can come across as kind of creepy and unnerving in his actions. While he seems perfectly well adjusted most of the time, in high stress situations he can get cagey and weird in a way that puts people on guard.
It definitely doesn't help that he is genuinely kind of creepy too. Kangmo is a stalker, plain and simple. He followed a girl around for years taking candid photographs of her, and while he kept them nicely in a normal photobook instead of making some sort of creepy, ritualistic shrine to her, it doesn't undo the stalking. When he's confronted with it, he doesn't try to justify himself. He's aware of what he's doing, he's aware that what he's doing isn't acceptable behavior, but it doesn't stop him. While he crosses many big lines doing this, he will still draw some for himself. The girl he is enamored with is deeply enamored with another boy, and Kangmo makes no move to approach her and let her know about his feelings not out of shyness, but because he does not want to stand in the way of her own happiness.
Besides, standing back and watching things happen through the lens of a camera was more Kangmo's style for the longest time. He explains once, while watching one of his videos of Mireu bungee jumping off the roof of the school, that he didn't step in to stop Mireu from doing something life threatening because he is just the camera there to record what is happening, and nothing more. He also detaches himself from situations to an alarming degree, like emotionlessly taking pictures of Eunsang, the girl he likes, as she lies bleeding out in the snow (again, pretty creepy).
It isn't until he's forced to take responsibility for someone else's life that Kangmo is shaken out of his detachment. When Yohan arranges the first game to find Yoon Soo, and charges Kangmo with coming back in an hour in order to keep Youngjae from being shot, that's when Kangmo begins to slip. While he absolutely despises everything Youngjae is, Kangmo doesn't want him to die. More importantly, Kangmo doesn't want to be the reason that Youngjae dies, and so he comes back for Youngjae despite the fact that it means he gives up his only chance of escape. Kangmo cannot deal with the guilt of being responsible for another human being's death. While he manages to keep a cool face on the outside, it wrecks him internally. For example, when Kangmo messes up Chihoon's plan, and causes the doctor to cart Chihoon off to "take care" of him, Kangmo blames himself for that. At first Kangmo seems mostly unresponsive to Chihoon's supposed death, which seems cold even considering the fact that Chihoon and Kangmo were never close. However, when Chihoon later turns out to still be alive (surprise! Yohan didn't shoot him after all), Kangmo breaks down into tears for the first time in the entire ordeal, overwhelmed with the relief he feels.
He's a good kid deep down, creepy behaviors and scathing verbal smack downs aside. His heart is (mostly) in the right place, though it took some pushing to get him there. That said, while he will do some things to put himself at risk, like coming back for Youngjae, for the most part Kangmo is the type of person to play things smart. He is not an impulsive person by nature, and prefers to sit back and assess a situation before getting involved. Even if he doesn't have a strategy immediately ready, he wants to be ready and know what he's dealing with before he tries to tackle any challenges that are over his head. And he's good at knowing when something is too much for him as well. Kangmo is incredibly sharp and intuitive. He picks up on details (like any good photographer should), and notices when things are off faster than some of the Susin geniuses do. He's also fairly good at reading people, and understanding people's moods. He knows when to dodge out of a situation fast, and avoid trouble when he sees it. Well, for the most part. There's really not much you can do about serial killers in your high school, however.
POWER: [ NON CANON]
Sensory distortion
Kangmo has the ability to control people's sense perception of four of the five senses (sight, touch, taste, and smell). He cannot physically alter the world around them, but he can make an ice cream cone taste like vomit to a person, without changing anything about the ice cream cone itself.
Taste Straight forward, he alters the taste of an object. He can make something gross taste delicious, and make something delicious taste disgusting. He can also remove the flavor of something completely, or add flavor that isn't there.
Smell Much like taste, he can alter how someone smells something, good or bad. He can also suppress a person's ability to smell anything around them.
Touch Like the ice cream cone example, Kangmo could take a room temperature object and make it seem burning hot to the touch. A person might drop the object instantly, convinced they're in pain from having touched it, however, since the item itself is room temperature it would do no damage to their skin. Inversely, he could dull someone's sense of pain, and someone could slash their hand open on a broken piece of glass, and not even realize it until they see the blood flowing.
Sight More or less illusions. Visions that aren't there, or obscuring things that are. See that trashcan sitting against the wall? No you don't! You just threw your garbage on the ground, because there isn't really a trashcan there. See that boy sitting five feet away from you? What boy? All you can see is an empty park bench, though the trees behind the bench might look strange for some reason you can't explain.
Kangmo can only alter the senses of one person at a time. At first he'll only be able to alter one sense at a time too, and only in minor ways until he begins to develop his powers.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [VIDEO]
[ The video cuts on to a boy in his room, he's leaning towards the screen for a few seconds as he makes some last minute adjustments. Satisfied with his work he goes, and collapses into a desk chair, leaning back, and making himself comfortable. The angle seems pretty good, he's gotten most of himself in the straight on shot. Not bad work for a quick setup job.
He gives a big smile, and an exaggerated little wave at the camera. ]
Hello!
[ Gotta give a good impression to the good people, right? ]
I haven't been here long, and also haven't asked a lot of questions in person.
[ A pause, and a frown. ]
Well, I've asked a lot, but I've had most of them answered. I don't know if I believe them all, it sounds too much like a scifi movie doesn't it? A group of people from all different versions of Earth all brought together onto one of the Earths to fight crime.
[ Snapping his fingers. ]
It'd be even better if it was just one guy. Multiple versions of the same guy from all different Earths-- Ah! [ Getting sidetracked. ] That's not what I'm here to talk about.
[ A nervous laugh as he scratches at his jaw sheepishly. ]
It's about the crime fighting, actually. I know they want us to help with that, but to be honest I'm not very good at fighting, and with the powers I got I don't think I could help much anyway. It's not that I'm unwilling too, but maybe if I had different powers…?
[ A pause, staring intently at the camera for a few seconds. ]
Has it been done before? Can people actually change their powers if they want something else?
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: Test Drive Meme
FINAL NOTES: Nope!
NAME: Leigh
AGE: 24
JOURNAL:
plonks IM / EMAIL: NoondayClock // ffPyro@gmail.com
PLURK:
RETURNING: Yes! Minho (The Maze Runner)
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Yang Kangmo
CHARACTER AGE: 18
CANON ORIGIN: White Christmas
CHRONOLOGY: In the middle of episode six, when the boys are coming in from their romp in the snow.
CLASS: Hero… ish.
HOUSING: Anywhere is fine, but requesting housing with Juuzou Suzuya if possible.
BACKGROUND: When Kangmo's mother was pregnant with him she became sick, and developed a dangerously high fever. While she came out of the illness alright, her newborn son was not so lucky. Kangmo's hearing was badly damaged, to the point that for the rest of his life he's been unable to hear anything at all without the help of a hearing implant that he had put in at a very young age. His parents provided a loving and supportive environment for the boy, and he grew up fairly comfortably, though his inability to hear without his hearing implant did still create certain struggles for him. Still, he was a bright boy, and developed a passion for film, journalism, and photography, and his intelligence managed to land him a spot in the prestigious high school, Susin.
Susin High is a private school, isolated deep in the mountains of South Korea. The school forbids all extracurricular activities and encourages its students to do very little besides study. There's only one break a year (an eight day break around Christmas), and even visits from parents at other times of the year are discouraged. The students call it Three Years Alcatraz for a reason. But hey! The methods seem to work. Susin High produces the top 0.1% of South Korean high school students, and has an incredible success rate when it comes to exam scores and getting its students into top universities. It's an incredible school as far as academics go, even if it can put a pretty big toll on the students' emotional well being.
It wasn't just the school that could bring Kangmo down, however. The student body wasn't exactly full of charmers either. From the boy who bullied him mercilessly (Youngjae), to the young man that tried to force his friendship and pity on Kangmo based almost solely on Kangmo's disability (Jinsoo), Kangmo had plenty of people around he strongly disliked. And then, of course, there was the girl he liked a little too much. Again, the student body wasn't exactly full of charmers, and Kangmo could definitely be counted as part of that problem. Sometime in his high school career Kangmo took up stalking a girl named Eunsang. Unfortunately for the girl, Kangmo wasn't the only one to do this either (Youngjae and Jinsoo also being culprits of this). Perhaps a little more fortunately though, Kangmo stayed quiet and stayed back, choosing to take pictures of her (still creepy) instead of trying to approach her and shove his feelings at her. See, Eunsang had a boyfriend (Muyeol), and if nothing else Kangmo realized she was happy with him, and didn't want to get in the way of anything that made her happy.
Other than the unfortunate stalking that he managed to keep under wraps, Kangmo made a name for himself as the resident cameraman. He would take less secretive pictures of various events around the school, and film anything big that went down, like a student bungee jumping off the school roof. For the most part he carved out a comfortable enough niche for himself in Susin.
That is, until one year he received a mysterious letter before Christmas break accusing someone (or several someones) of committing eight various sins, and promising them that around Christmas they would see a dead body by the school's clock tower. Kangmo did not take the letter seriously, believing it was a prank, but opted to stay behind and investigate the story to satisfy his journalistic itch. Six other students stayed behind as well; Muyeol, Eunsang, Youngjae, Chihoon, Jaekyu, and Yoon Soo. While things started off quietly enough, the group quickly discovered that they'd all received the same mysterious letter, and a mystery that needed solving quickly developed.
To add a layer of complication to this strange winter break, a psychologist that had been involved in a terrible car crash (Yohan) appeared at the school's gate, needing immediate medical attention. The doctor's only contact was called immediately, while the students and the one teacher (that had stayed behind to watch the kids) did their best to help the poor man out. Even worse, shortly after the doctor seemed better Eunsang wandered off into the snow, and slit her wrist. She was found and rescued quickly by Kangmo and a couple others, but kept under watch afterwards.
Things eventually settled, and despite the phone lines and internet being down because of the snow, the investigation to find out who wrote the letter was underfoot, and a boy unrelated to the case broke into the school to take revenge on the guy that got him expelled.
And throughout most of this… Kangmo stayed in dark. He knew about the doctor, of course, and had some minor dealings with trying to make connections between everyone who received a copy of the letter, but knew nothing about Mireu (the boy that broke in). He certainly didn't know about Mireu helping the others discover the final key connection to the letter, Jinsoo, who had written down that Kangmo was his best friend in Susin. When Kangmo goes to deliver a message from Eunsang, the other boys finally decided to confront him after discovering his collection of photographs of Eunsang, and accuse him of writing the letter to get revenge for his friend, Jinsoo, because after all… Jinsoo had committed suicide in response to the perceived cruelties of the people around him.
Kangmo was shocked to find out about Jinsoo's passing, but told his side of the story. Denied the claims against him, and assured them all the truth of the matter was he had hated Jinsoo. The photos, however, he didn't bother to try to explain away. Before the confrontation could get violent (thanks to Youngjae), Eunsang appeared to inform them that the doctor had a high fever, dangerously high, in fact, and his life was at risk. All issues with Kangmo were shoved to the side so the group of kids could save the man's life.
Meanwhile, Kangmo began to grow suspicious of things happening around the school. Not only were the phone lines and connection still down (odd when the physical cables were built under the ground, where the snow shouldn't affect them), but the teacher had gone missing some time ago and no one had seen him. Without telling anyone what he was up to, Kangmo snuck into some of the maintenance rooms and found out that the lines had been purposely tampered with. It was then he realized that something was going wrong in the school, though he didn't know what. He planned to at least tell Muyeol about the lines, since Muyeol seemed to have his act together a little more than most of the other students. Unfortunately, when he finally got the chance Muyeol was with Eunsang, and Kangmo made the mistake of trying to hide at first. He was quickly busted, and the other two got suspicious of him immediately because he was holding a sharp pick in self defense, aware that someone tampering with the phone lines couldn't mean anything good. Message delivered, he left quickly not running into the rest of the students until awhile later. Kangmo immediately realized something was wrong, even though he was still in the dark about what, and kept a knife at his side, again for self defense.
… Probably not the best move in his part, as his classmates had just found the dead body of their murdered teacher, buried in the snow outside. Kangmo, not realizing this, proceeded to act suspicious and more than a little creepy, raising an alarm for them, and starting a witch hunt for Kangmo across the school.
While Kangmo didn't necessarily expect most of the boys to use deadly force, he still realized he was being blamed for something big, and when he saw them coming after him with weapons he immediately began moving from room to room, taking cover and hiding when needed, and moving to another room when they picked up his trail. And they seemed to pick up his trail often. It didn't take Kangmo long to realize they were tracking his movements with the security cameras around the school. Things were not looking good until Kangmo happened to run into Susin's resident unemotional, vulcan-like, genius, Chihoon. A short exchange between Jaekyu, Chihoon, and Kangmo managed to get Kangmo up to speed on the situation and provide him with a solution to the immediate problem.
Chihoon locked Kangmo up in the detention room (which for basically being a high school time out room looked scarily like a prison cell), and allowed Kangmo to add in blocks so that not only was he locked in, but he was able to keep anyone else from getting inside. When Youngjae and Muyeol found and confronted Kangmo again, he was safe inside his personal prison cell, and able to laugh at Youngjae's useless attempts to bust in and beat him within and inch of his life, and scold Muyeol for chasing him down like an animal. He was also able to get Muyeol to show all of the pictures of Eunsang he'd taken to the girl in question, which went over with her much better than one might expect.
Unfortunately, it meant that Kangmo was trapped inside that room and was once again kept in the dark when some pretty big revelations came out. The big one being that the person who has killed the teacher was the psychologist, Yohan, the kids had been trying so hard to save. Not only that, but the was a wanted serial killer, with a gun, who quickly took the kids hostage. Kangmo was no exception. He grabbed him from his cell and made him join the rest of the students, missing only Yoon Soo. The doctor quickly designed a game to play. He would partner up the students into three groups. Three would stay with him, and three would go and look for Yoon Soo. They had to come back within an hour, or Yohan would shoot their partner. Kangmo was paired with Youngjae, the bully, the boy that constantly beat him up and broke his hearing aid whenever the chance arose, someone Kangmo genuinely hated.
And yet… at the end of the hour, Kangmo still came back for him. As much as he hated Youngjae, he couldn't allow himself to be responsible for Youngjae's death. While none of the students managed to find Yoon Soo, the boy stupidly gave himself up after waking up from a nap and dopily walking right into the middle of the situation.
With all the players in place, Yohan's next game began. The premise was simple, Yohan would be trying to find out who had sent the students the letter. They could turn in the person responsible, resulting in that person's death, wait until the end of the three days and let Yohan decide who it was, or the person who had written the letters in the first place could confess and let Yohan know who they thought had committed the gravest sin. In the first two cases, Yohan would shoot the letter sender, in the last one, he would shot the person the letter sender decided was most deserving. No matter what, at least one person was going to die, and the kids were put into a hard predicament of trying to decide to betray their fellow classmates or not. Yohan, meanwhile, would have counseling sessions with all of the students one by one to determine who the letter sender one.
First up? Yang Kangmo.
For the most part the counseling session was just Kangmo nervously chattering away about whatever came to his mind first (movies and people he knew mostly), until Yohan asked him to be quiet for a few moments. Kangmo complied, and when Yohan had enough time to recover from Kangmo's rapid fire babbling, he started picking at Kangmo's insecurities. Getting to the heart of the matter, Kangmo's disability, and how it had created a constant feeling of desperation in him. Yohan used this, playing off of Kangmo's insecurities to make him feel like he could not trust his classmates. Admittedly, not hard to do since several of them had been trying to bash Kangmo's skull just a day or so prior. As Yohan continued his villainous therapist speech, the battery in Kangmo's hearing aid ran out. Even under normal circumstances this was a fear of Kangmo's, and having that fear just picked at Kangmo was not ready to admit to this extra weakness. He tried to pretend he could still hear, and given the stressful situation his classmates did not notice in oddities in his behavior.
The big problem with this was that while Kangmo was with Yohan, his classmates had come up with a plan to take the doctor down, and it all hinged on Kangmo's help. It would have been find, of course, if Kangmo had been able to hear the plan that Muyeol whispered into his ear, but he couldn't. When the time came to put it all into motion, Kangmo stayed in his seat, staring around in confused wonder as his classmates leapt into action, knocking the gun away from Yohan and into Kangmo's reach. Unfortunately, before Kangmo could have time to process the situation, Yohan was back on his feet and had the gun in hand again. Even more unfortunately, he decided to punish the person that had come up with this plan, Chihoon.
As the kids were ushered back into a room and locked up, Yohan escorted Chihoon off to dispose of him. It was only after angrily confronting Kangmo about his failure to help did they realize that he couldn't hear. A tense silence fell over the room as the other students began to cry when somewhere else in the school they heard a shot fire, signifying Yohan had finished taking care of Chihoon.
The game resumed after that. Yohan had Youngjae retrieve a battery for Kangmo's hearing aid to put him back on even footing with the rest of his classmates. After that the doctor took Youngjae off for his next "counseling" session. Before that session started though, Jaekyu revealed a discovery he'd made a breakfast, that Mireu had broken back into the school, this time with a lady friend in tow. They had a chance of escaping the doctor's clutches yet. Despite their best efforts though, they couldn't seem to reach Mireu or alert him to the danger they were in. As luck would have it, however, Mireu figured out on his own that something was amiss, and managed to knock Yohan unconscious long enough to shackle him to a bed with a pair of handcuffs and steal his gun. Finally, the kids were free!
So, they did the obvious thing. They celebrated. The broke into the faculty's supply of alcohol, and got drunk as a bunch of skunks… who had just survived a series of mind games from a serial killer. As much of the booze got poured over their heads as went into their mouths though. And when they were done with that, and finally seemed like they were ready to wind down, they decided to run out and romp about in the snow, because you can never get enough celebration going on when you've survived against impossible seeming odds.
Of course, things weren't over for the students yet, not by a long shot, but Kangmo's canon point ends here so that's a story for another time.
PERSONALITY: There's a strange dichotomy to Kangmo's personality. On one hand he seems relatively friendly and cheerful. He's very quick to smile and joke around with people, even those he doesn't really know that well. He's relatively outgoing and socially well adjusted, so he doesn't have much of a problem fitting in with his peers. On the other hand, he's very good at unintentionally outcasting himself, generating mistrust though questionable actions while neglecting to properly explain himself. He'll do things like make honest, biting comments in a light hearted and joking way that makes it hard to tell how serious he is. And he seems more than happy to act like everyone's friendly acquaintance who takes things in stride, while at the harboring feelings of intense bitterness for many of the people around him.
That's not to say that Kangmo is completely fake. He's not trying to hide his thoughts or feelings at all, and he's very upfront when he dislikes someone. Even if he tends to deliver his insults like he's making a joke, he still says whatever cutting thing might come to his mind to the people that have wronged him in some way. Youngjae is the main target of Kangmo's nastier remarks. Admittedly, Youngjae also bullies Kangmo near relentlessly, so there's a pretty good reason that Kangmo mouths off to him whenever the two of them are in a room together. And boy does he get mouthy! Kangmo might not have the strongest sense of self preservation at times, in his own words he resists more when he's punished. The worse someone treats him, the worse he'll bite back. The thing is, Kangmo isn't a particular large or impressive guy. He doesn't have the strength to fight back physically, so he fights back verbally. He mocks, ridicules, and generally insults his enemies, digging at them in whatever way he can to make them angry. Usually this winds up with him getting smacked around, but Kangmo's a stubborn kid, and he doesn't back down easily.
He also doesn't forgive that easily. While he's very good at tolerating people (mostly… sort of), that doesn't mean he doesn't hold in a lot of resentment for the people around him. Again, this isn't something that Kangmo tries to keep a secret either. When Muyeol joins in Youngjae's witch hunt for Kangmo, Kangmo makes a point of letting Muyeol know how disappointed he is in the most condescending manner he can manage. When Kangmo has been hurt by a person he doesn't pull any metaphorical punches, and does his best to hurt them back.
And there's a lot of hurt that Kangmo keeps inside himself to dish back out to people later. While his disability is not necessarily immediately noticeable to a stranger, outside of the hearing aid he wears, others usually still treat him differently. He receives pity and sympathy that Kangmo perceives as condescending feelings of superiority, and he resents it. He doesn't like people like Youngjae, who will pick on him by breaking his hearing implant and leaving him in silence for weeks until it can be replaced, but he hates people like Jinsoo, who try to shove canned words of encouragement down his throat, even more. Kangmo has accepted that people will think they're better than he is based on the fact that they can hear, but it still raises his hackles when they make it obvious that they do.
In part, Kangmo, like most people, doesn't like people acting like they're superior to him. The bigger issue, however, is Kangmo's own personal insecurities. Not being able to hear can be a scary thing. There's the obvious ways, of course. You can't hear someone sneaking up on you, or when alarms go off to alert you to danger. But that's not the only thing, you miss people calling out your name in the hallway, or any sort of audio cues. These small things aren't deadly, but they can get to a person. Kangmo relies completely on batteries of his hearing implant, and when the power runs out he's left in a world of silence. In these moments Kangmo doesn't necessarily feel scared as much as he feels anxious and desperate. Desperate not to mess up, desperate to do what comes to everyone else so naturally. He tells a story about when he was only six years old, and performing in a concert with his peers. Kangmo had the role of ringing the cowbell, something that only had to be done twice, a really insignificant part of a preschool performance, and he even admits that no one would care if he messed up and failed to ring it. At the same time, he felt so nervous and desperate to get it right and not mess up. It didn't matter to anyone else but him, wasn't even noticeable to the other people around him, but he wanted so badly to ring that bell on time. His entire life has been like this. Kangmo still hasn't let go of that same desperation he felt when he was six years old.
It feeds into some of his fake friendly behavior as well. Kangmo acts like he's joking about everything, because it's easier to deal with the world at large if he treats it that way. It puts people at ease, and lightens the atmosphere. Which is why when Kangmo gets nervous his mouth runs a mile a minute. He overcompensates for his trouble with listening by filling the silence around him with the sound of his own voice. Nothing he has to say in these moments of nervous tension are of any importance either, the words aren't all that important, it's the fact that he can't stop himself from spitting them out to assuage his own nervousness.
None of these feelings are ones that Kangmo really wants to share with the people around him, and so most of Kangmo's negative feelings are internalized. While Kangmo is open about his dislike for people, he's far less open about the things that deeply hurt him. He doesn't want to risk exposing himself to more potential pain, and he doesn't particularly trust easily. Kangmo understands friendship, and he knows how to make friends, but in his own words friendships are established over years of knowing each other. He doesn't open up to people that easily, and prefers keeping his problems to himself.
Unfortunately for him, mistrust breeds mistrust. Kangmo is not good at explaining himself. He's a smart boy, and very articulate, but he tends not to press issues or try to make people understand him in a lot of cases. If he's feeling threatened, he'll carry a weapon around with him in self defense, if people don't accept his brief reasoning for it, he won't try to reassure them further. It doesn't help that at times Kangmo can come across as kind of creepy and unnerving in his actions. While he seems perfectly well adjusted most of the time, in high stress situations he can get cagey and weird in a way that puts people on guard.
It definitely doesn't help that he is genuinely kind of creepy too. Kangmo is a stalker, plain and simple. He followed a girl around for years taking candid photographs of her, and while he kept them nicely in a normal photobook instead of making some sort of creepy, ritualistic shrine to her, it doesn't undo the stalking. When he's confronted with it, he doesn't try to justify himself. He's aware of what he's doing, he's aware that what he's doing isn't acceptable behavior, but it doesn't stop him. While he crosses many big lines doing this, he will still draw some for himself. The girl he is enamored with is deeply enamored with another boy, and Kangmo makes no move to approach her and let her know about his feelings not out of shyness, but because he does not want to stand in the way of her own happiness.
Besides, standing back and watching things happen through the lens of a camera was more Kangmo's style for the longest time. He explains once, while watching one of his videos of Mireu bungee jumping off the roof of the school, that he didn't step in to stop Mireu from doing something life threatening because he is just the camera there to record what is happening, and nothing more. He also detaches himself from situations to an alarming degree, like emotionlessly taking pictures of Eunsang, the girl he likes, as she lies bleeding out in the snow (again, pretty creepy).
It isn't until he's forced to take responsibility for someone else's life that Kangmo is shaken out of his detachment. When Yohan arranges the first game to find Yoon Soo, and charges Kangmo with coming back in an hour in order to keep Youngjae from being shot, that's when Kangmo begins to slip. While he absolutely despises everything Youngjae is, Kangmo doesn't want him to die. More importantly, Kangmo doesn't want to be the reason that Youngjae dies, and so he comes back for Youngjae despite the fact that it means he gives up his only chance of escape. Kangmo cannot deal with the guilt of being responsible for another human being's death. While he manages to keep a cool face on the outside, it wrecks him internally. For example, when Kangmo messes up Chihoon's plan, and causes the doctor to cart Chihoon off to "take care" of him, Kangmo blames himself for that. At first Kangmo seems mostly unresponsive to Chihoon's supposed death, which seems cold even considering the fact that Chihoon and Kangmo were never close. However, when Chihoon later turns out to still be alive (surprise! Yohan didn't shoot him after all), Kangmo breaks down into tears for the first time in the entire ordeal, overwhelmed with the relief he feels.
He's a good kid deep down, creepy behaviors and scathing verbal smack downs aside. His heart is (mostly) in the right place, though it took some pushing to get him there. That said, while he will do some things to put himself at risk, like coming back for Youngjae, for the most part Kangmo is the type of person to play things smart. He is not an impulsive person by nature, and prefers to sit back and assess a situation before getting involved. Even if he doesn't have a strategy immediately ready, he wants to be ready and know what he's dealing with before he tries to tackle any challenges that are over his head. And he's good at knowing when something is too much for him as well. Kangmo is incredibly sharp and intuitive. He picks up on details (like any good photographer should), and notices when things are off faster than some of the Susin geniuses do. He's also fairly good at reading people, and understanding people's moods. He knows when to dodge out of a situation fast, and avoid trouble when he sees it. Well, for the most part. There's really not much you can do about serial killers in your high school, however.
POWER: [ NON CANON]
Sensory distortion
Kangmo has the ability to control people's sense perception of four of the five senses (sight, touch, taste, and smell). He cannot physically alter the world around them, but he can make an ice cream cone taste like vomit to a person, without changing anything about the ice cream cone itself.
Taste Straight forward, he alters the taste of an object. He can make something gross taste delicious, and make something delicious taste disgusting. He can also remove the flavor of something completely, or add flavor that isn't there.
Smell Much like taste, he can alter how someone smells something, good or bad. He can also suppress a person's ability to smell anything around them.
Touch Like the ice cream cone example, Kangmo could take a room temperature object and make it seem burning hot to the touch. A person might drop the object instantly, convinced they're in pain from having touched it, however, since the item itself is room temperature it would do no damage to their skin. Inversely, he could dull someone's sense of pain, and someone could slash their hand open on a broken piece of glass, and not even realize it until they see the blood flowing.
Sight More or less illusions. Visions that aren't there, or obscuring things that are. See that trashcan sitting against the wall? No you don't! You just threw your garbage on the ground, because there isn't really a trashcan there. See that boy sitting five feet away from you? What boy? All you can see is an empty park bench, though the trees behind the bench might look strange for some reason you can't explain.
Kangmo can only alter the senses of one person at a time. At first he'll only be able to alter one sense at a time too, and only in minor ways until he begins to develop his powers.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [VIDEO]
[ The video cuts on to a boy in his room, he's leaning towards the screen for a few seconds as he makes some last minute adjustments. Satisfied with his work he goes, and collapses into a desk chair, leaning back, and making himself comfortable. The angle seems pretty good, he's gotten most of himself in the straight on shot. Not bad work for a quick setup job.
He gives a big smile, and an exaggerated little wave at the camera. ]
Hello!
[ Gotta give a good impression to the good people, right? ]
I haven't been here long, and also haven't asked a lot of questions in person.
[ A pause, and a frown. ]
Well, I've asked a lot, but I've had most of them answered. I don't know if I believe them all, it sounds too much like a scifi movie doesn't it? A group of people from all different versions of Earth all brought together onto one of the Earths to fight crime.
[ Snapping his fingers. ]
It'd be even better if it was just one guy. Multiple versions of the same guy from all different Earths-- Ah! [ Getting sidetracked. ] That's not what I'm here to talk about.
[ A nervous laugh as he scratches at his jaw sheepishly. ]
It's about the crime fighting, actually. I know they want us to help with that, but to be honest I'm not very good at fighting, and with the powers I got I don't think I could help much anyway. It's not that I'm unwilling too, but maybe if I had different powers…?
[ A pause, staring intently at the camera for a few seconds. ]
Has it been done before? Can people actually change their powers if they want something else?
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: Test Drive Meme
FINAL NOTES: Nope!