Akira Kurusu

PLAYER: Kai
ARE YOU AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD?: Yes.
CONTACT: ectoplasmfear or ectoplasmfear#9086
CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

NAME: Akira Kurusu.
CANON: Persona 5: Royal
CANON REFERENCE: General wiki, Akira’s specific page.
CANON POINT: Immediately after destroying Maruki’s paradise and waking up in the correct reality.
CRAU HISTORY: N/A.
AGE: 17
APPEARANCE: He’s a little above average height at around 5’9, has messy black hair that’s described as frizzy, wears glasses that he doesn’t need, tends to wear dark colors and has a deadpan expression half the time and a smirk the rest. Here’s a fullbody.
CONTRACT PAYMENT: A chance to return to his world two years ago, enough that he could change things and save Akechi before it’s too late. (And selfishly, to experience it all again.)

QUESTIONNAIRE:

Your Faction leader, not just your boss but the leader, has asked you to carry out a hit. The target is a non-affiliated public leader, well-liked by the people of the city. Do you carry it out? Why or why not?

[Akira shakes his head with a small laugh. It’s cocky, almost derisive.]

I’m no assassin. [It was a near thing, in a lot of ways. It’s something some of the others don’t like thinking about, but Akira remembers the day that he decided he was ready to kill Suguru Kamoshida very well. It was lucky that he didn’t have to kill him to make him suffer.] And even if I was… sorry, but they can go to hell.

If I let myself be controlled by the whims of someone like that, let myself sink to their level, I’d never hear the end of it. [From Morgana, Makoto, really any of the thieves, but especially Goro would consider it a unique kind of betrayal to follow in his footsteps after everything’s all said and done. Which would be pretty rich coming from him, but he’d deserve it.]

An enemy of your faction has asked for a meeting, proposing a truce of sorts to deal with a greater threat. On one hand, there is indeed a threat at hand, but on the other, this person double-crossing you is just as likely an outcome. Do you agree to the meeting? Do you trust them?

[He shrugs.]

What’s the expression? No risk, no reward? Hardly the first time I’ve had to cut a deal with the other side. [He smiles, just a little bit. It’s hard to pin down exactly what’s behind the expression. Akira Kurusu has never exactly been an easy book to read, but it’s just the slightest bit spiteful, the slightest bit fond.

It’s gone as soon as it arrived.]

Either way though, I trust organizations less than individuals. I’d be willing to hear them out, at least.

How do you react to betrayal? How severe must a betrayal be for you to consider it such?

[Akira’s eyebrows knit together, a flare of irritation at a still fresh wound being opened up. Some betrayals he saw coming. Akechi, Mishima, “Igor”, the public itself. Others stung worse. Like Maruki. Like the thieves - his thieves - being absorbed in Maruki’s paradise. He can’t blame them, it’s not remotely fair.

But it did hurt. So he just sighs.]

…I think it’s a betrayal if they prove that I never knew them at all. Or if they prove that the things they said mattered to them can be tossed aside on a whim. [Was it a betrayal then? When Goro forced him into a trap, all with the intent of a final scene with the cold steel of the detective’s gun against his head as his body goes limp after hours of punishment?

Well. Yes. But he was an idiot if he thought that’d be enough to make Akira give up on a friend.

And it still feels more honest than the months of careful manipulation Maruki put him through, all to use him for his own ends. Maybe because Goro didn’t ask to be thanked.] I don’t know. Bonds take many different forms. So do deals. I think a betrayal is when a deal is broken.

What does family mean to you and who do you consider a part of your family?
[Akira smiles at the question, this time more sincerely a smile of genuine fondness. It’s a bittersweet question, of course, as someone who is very much estranged from his biological family. But he’s found that doesn’t matter as much.]

Family is what you allow it to be. I found my family in Tokyo when I met the people who became the most important to me. My caretaker, his daughter, all my friends… Even if I can’t work things out with my blood parents, I think family is a place where you feel like you can belong. And I know that I have that.

[Akira’s not one for being this excessively sappy, it makes him seem a whole lot less cool and mysterious, but fortunately, none of them are able to hear him gush.]


POWERS & ABILITIES: Oh boy. To start with, Akira has the power to summon personas that he’s defeated and taken into himself. They greatly vary in power, but even the weakest of them is able to do severe elemental attacks and greatly bolster Akira’s own strength, speed and defense. Once he regains it, he would start off only having access to his starter persona, Arsene, before he starts to regain the truly powerful lategame ones. I’d also like him to eventually regain the ability to access palaces and change hearts.

Beyond that, he’s skilled at crafting tools, weapons and bombs, including on his school desk. He’s great at making curry and coffee, he can drive a cat that is also a bus, he’s highly skilled with both a knife and a handgun, as well as excellent at stealth, strategy and infiltration as a phantom thief.

SUITABILITY: Akira is, in his canon, a criminal thief who is branded as a terrorist. His canon deals with grooming, systemic corruption, abuse, sexual assault, the mafia, police brutality, prostitution, nationalism, political assassination, murder and suicide… And in canon, he works as a bartender at a drag bar in Shinjuku at 16, so he’s not stranger to the shadier sides of cityscapes like this, even beyond plunging the depths of the human consciousness to root out the corruption from people’s hearts.

In terms of suitability for this game in particular, Akira is a character that was “condemned to hell itself” by a desire to stand up for people who needed it, no matter who it was he was picking a fight with. He’s very big on fighting the corrupt elite and living a double life, and would have a lot of things to do in a setting like this.

FACTION SUITABILITY:

Shuten: Akira is someone who has, through pure strength of will, defied his destiny and place in a plan designed by gods. He’s someone who has little to no faith in pre-designed structures of law and order or institutions put in place to benefit those who created them due to being screwed over by them before the start of the game and having witnessed all the ways they’ve hurt his friends, so when he feels something is wrong or unjust, he seeks to change it himself using his own power and will, often putting his own life in jeopardy.

While Akira doesn’t necessarily subscribe to an ideology of might makes right, the Shuten would fit his way of doing things and would likely approve of his methods and spirit. On top of that, he does work with an ex-Yakuza arms dealer in canon, so he’s not entirely unfamiliar with how the Yakuza operate.

Tamamo: Akira is someone who relies on his cunning and wits as much as his raw power, using both to outsmart the conspiracy that planned his assassination and fake his death. The Tamamo’s way of thinking would resonate pretty well with him, as a very sizable part of his reasons for enjoying being a phantom thief is that he’s quite simply a thrill-seeker who would be bored to tears of a normal life spent bowing his head to people telling him how to think.

To be a phantom thief, he needed to acquire information about his targets and figure out ways to breach their subconscious as well as then dealing with all the challenges within the palaces of his targets, so he’d be well suited as an asset of the Tamamo clan.

Sutoku: Just like with the Tamamo, Akira is someone who is used to having to dig for secrets, and his entire M.O is to force people’s secrets out of them in a public setting by stealing their hearts and forcing them to confess to their darkest sins and live on in eternal guilt and shame, so he’d be very well-suited as an agent of the Sutoku Alliance. Similarly, he’s someone who only goes after targets once he’s sure that they’ve committed wrongdoing, investigating them personally without revealing his real intentions, and using that to learn their secrets before deciding whether to expose them to the world.

And on the other hand, he is the type of person with a great deal of secrets of his own, having spent many months living under Sojiro Sakura’s roof while operating as a phantom thief at the same time, with Sojiro being (at first) none the wiser.

Enma: Laughs. This… would be Akira’s worst nightmare, I won’t lie. He’s very much someone who values justice and has an ironclad set of values, but in his own experience “justice” and “the legal authorities” don’t tend to blend well. He would be intensely resistant to having a contract with these guys, but if selected would bide his time and do what he can, likely living under the guise of just being an ordinary if unusually deadpan student and doing what’s expected of him.

He’d be relatively well suited as a peacekeeper, and would do his best to do what he can for the people he deals with with the power afforded to him. If contracted for the Enma, he would reluctantly try to give them a shot (at least at first) because he does have friends and people he cares for a great deal who believe in reforming the system.


SAMPLES

TDM Thread with Nero
TDM thread with Mikey