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NAME: Skyler Veracruz
INCARNATION OF: Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
AGE: 17
HEIGHT: 5'7.5" / 171 cm
BIRTHDAY: August 14, 1996
HISTORY:
Once upon a time, there was a kid named Skyler Veracruz, who lived in a place called Locke City, New Jersey. His mom was a nurse and his dad was high ranking financial adviser for a local company. He grew up pretty happy, even though his big brother Milo was kind of a shut in and never wanted to play. He was even okay with being a middle child after his little sister Arielle was born.
Then the US real estate market burst in 2008 and both his parents lost their jobs. They moved to a much smaller home, Skyler lost all his friends at his old elementary school, and he wasn't really able to make new ones because he had to spend a lot of time at home babysitting Ari because everyone knew that Milo couldn't. By the time he got the freedom to do so, everyone had already sorted themselves into new cliques and it didn't seem like anyone had much time for him. One clique did decide to make time for him, though. All he had to do was play along when the teacher turned her back and the shy kid next to him was drawing something on a piece of paper. All he had to do was take it.
Skyler, much like Sora, would do anything for his friends. He took the piece of paper and helped his new friends burn it after school.
Smash cut to summer of 2013. He was still taking care of Ari, who had grown to be a delightful creature, and he loved her to death. Which meant he kept her away from his... much more high school jock styled delinquent activities. His urge to do whatever it took for his friends and his reluctance to change himself took his behavior from bad to worse; he was, without bars, a fully fledged high school bully. Still, recently, he'd been thinking more about how his behavior made Ari's life much harder, and he'd started the very slow process of disentangling himself from his own crowd - all for Ari, and not himself. He more or less succeeded. He went into his senior year with no one his age he considered a real friend.
A year ago, he'd experienced an odd vision - the image of a redheaded girl with blue eyes startling him into waking him up. It felt like a memory. The numbers began to follow him after that. He hadn't realized before then that they were supposed to be used for anything. And then, one day, he decided to write down the numbers swirling around his head for a year onto his worksheet during Math, and his paper could suddenly scroll.
The Numbers network was filled with other people just as confused about the network as he was. They quickly filled him in: they didn't know what was going on, everyone was getting new powers, and whatever he did, he was NOT to trust the police if they weren't on the network already - they would kill him and him entire family. Naturally, he wanted to protect the only people he cared about - his family, especially Ari. So he made a few important decisions. He didn't tell anyone who he was. He got rid of the last of his weed. And he started figuring out who was going on, and how he could get the most power without turning into another person.
Because that was the other part of this: everyone was getting memories from strangers. And his stranger was a kid named Sora. And the more he absorbed from Sora's memories, the more he realized that having Sora's memories meant more than having a mental next door neighbor. After all, through his patchwork memories, he saw that Roxas never stood a chance. Why would Skyler fare any better?
So, he made some choices that Sora never would, hoping to get as far away from his other as possible. He started bullying people again. He tried to make himself as scarce as possible, refusing to make new friends. He joined a supernatural street gang, the Blood Keys, in order to see if he could leverage them to stop the transition. This supernatural street gang happened to be cyborgs, and they were also the Network's primary targets for violence. Skyler was okay with this. He let Thunder Corp, the company backing the Blood Keys, install cybernetics in him - metal lungs, metal heart, reinforced spine. Then, in secret, he started fighting against the Network and the Keys alike. He set himself up as the enemy as much as he possibly could. When it came to it, and a couple of Network members who had no reason to keep his secrets discovered what he'd done, he tried his absolute best to kill them.
But of course, Skyler, at some level, was just Sora reborn. He couldn't help but make a few new friends. A few people put their absolute trust in him, became friends with him even as other Network members refused to think he could ever change. And slowly, very slowly, he realized that if he wanted to make sure his friends and loved ones, Network and otherwise, would be safe from who he was and danger the Network faced, he had no choice but to become a better person. To do what Sora would do, and in the process let Sora take him.
So one day, sometime after he graduated, during his internship at the police station that one of his friends offered him in lieu of going to college, he decided to just let Sora handle things. He was very tired, after all. He'd done too much fighting. Sora couldn't really pretend to be him, but he was close enough. He was, honestly, the best substitute he could ask for. A good other.
Sora began to live Skyler's life that day, protecting Skyler's family and defending Locke City against more of its disasters. Very few cared to notice the difference, and those who did weren't enough to bring him back. Sora was far from home, in another dimension, and didn't have Yen Sid or King Mickey to explain what to do - he was still missing lot of his own memories. Still, Sora is Sora, no matter which world he lands in. He had a world to save, people to take care of, and someone in his heart who had no body of his own. It was time to get to work.
TRIVIA:
- Locke City born and raised! His family isn't particularly well off but they live comfortably given the times.
- He's on both the swim and lacrosse teams, captain of neither because WHAT IS LEADERSHIP
- He had been in detention almost every other weekend until late Junior year because of his problem with authority figures other than his mom
- He's volunteered every summer at the local general summer camp program and just got back from his first real job as a life guard before hustling his ass into summer school UuU
- He can almost press 200 lbs. uou Still too wiry for power. in the meantime he plateaus around 180 lbs. he's working on it ok
- He went to Manila once to see family when he was 9 it was the best time he has ever had in his life thus far okok
- his fine arts credit is studio art and he doesn't do anything but shit around with oil pastels and text on his phone because he's an ASS
- uh he doesn't know how to dress himself like at all
- but he unfortunately knows the theory behind applying make-up because Ari uses him as a test subject all the time. His life is difficult
- he says he has a six pack but it's actually more of a lumpy four pack MORE SIT-UPS BOY (it actually doesn't look that bad and he doesn't get embarrassed about this but he will straight up lie and say it's a six pack INFORMATION FOR THE GENERATIONS)
- he knows how to cook a bit! filipino, american, a little bit of japanese, but only the stuff that Ari bullies him into making since he was the only one allowed to use the burner between the two of them for the longest time.
- he is also moderately trilingual! english, almost fluent in tagalog, passable japanese due to taking lessons in high school and the fact that jii-san refuses to speak in english these days.
- THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AS I FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE HIM MORE HILARIOUSLY DOUCHEY
- As of December 14, 2013, Skyler is a cyborg affiliated with the Blood Keys. This is not known to the network at large(except for maybe Derek Hale because Skyler cannot keep his mouth shut). This thread has a list of his additional abilities!
FAMILY:
- MR. VERACRUZ (Filipino, does accounting at a local company.)
- MRS. VERACRUZ (Japanese-White, Nurse's aide and homemaker.)
- MILO VERACRUZ (Older brother (20), attends Locke University with a Chem major, builds scale models for fun.)
- ARIELLE VERACRUZ (Younger sister (12), attends the local public middle school, adorable pink princess. BY FAR AND AWAY SKYLER'S FAVORITE PERSON)
- Mr. Veracruz' side of the family is back in the MOTHIRLAND
- Mrs. Veracruz's side mostly lives in California, except for Grandma Elle and Yuuhiko Jii-san, who live in Locke City as well.
ECHO DIRECTORY (note that some echoes are double posted because they fit multiple categories :Db)
- PHYSICAL CHANGES
- POWERS AND ABILITIES
- MEMORIES
- MENTAL
- ITEMS
- CREATURES
LATEST ECHOES (THESE ARE NOT ALL OF HIS ECHOES!! I only have his latest 15 echoes here in chronological order of acquirement because anything more is absolutely ridiculous. Full masterpost here, split arbitrarily into half years.)
- FEBRUARY 01, 2014: Bits and pieces of this bossfight, accompanied by yet another migraine. :)b Not the full bossfight, but lord dat lightning.
- FEBRUARY 01, 2014: The knowledge that there have been a lot of different versions of Sora, and one of them in particular experienced a lot of pain as he tried to reconcile his own identity with Sora's, particularly of the hallucinating Sora's memories and forgetting who you are so hard that your head hurts kind. (Yes, this is the best he'll ever remember about that one part in Days when Roxas went to Destiny Island.)
- FEBRUARY 11, 2014: Genie Jafar boss battle! With a particular focus on Iago, but the entire boss battle is there.
- FEBRUARY 17, 2014: Hercules boss battle!
- FEBRUARY 17, 2014: The knowledge that he's been cured in battle with magic several times before by a very good friend. The knowledge will focus on Donald, and the fact that there was one time he did it when it was very important, but even thinking about when that might have been will give him the warning signs of one of his CoM migraines. He didn't actually get that memory back, but the scene is there for reference.
- FEBRUARY 18, 2014: An upgrade to his Glide ability to the second level - he will be able to glide smoothly and without pause, but slowly - and Air Combo Plus, the first in three upgrades to the ability. It'll manifest ingame as the ability to launch into the air and hover, giving him just enough time to strike his enemy once more than gravity/his speed would usually allow.
- FEBRUARY 22, 2014: From here to 11:05. He gets thrown off of Xemnas's platform and has to fly his way back. Of note: he FINALLY gets context for that "Are you certain you can trust Riku?" quote, Skyler will not be certain that that's that Xemnas everyone's been talking about because WHOA THAT IS A BIG ARMOR, and HOLY SHIT WE ARE LITERALLY THROWING AROUND SKYSCRAPERS LIKE IT'S NOTHING.
- MARCH 09, 2014: Superglide! He goes at his fastest speed, his angle of descent is as gradual as it will ever be, etc. Also, the requirements to summon a Keyblade. One can only summon a Keyblade if they have gone through the ceremony of inheritance - which just means that if you've touched a Keyblade before, one will become available to you if your heart is strong enough. This Echo will give him that prerequisite back. However, Skyler's current personality is not strong enough to summon a Keyblade. He may be able to summon in it small spurts, and if he's really focusing on achieving something that requires strength of character, or the power of his friends' faith and bonds with him, he may be able to summon it for longer, and may even get back to full Keyblade business as usual later if he gets enough character development (which sort of makes this a gradually occurring echo with an additional requirement), but otherwise his bond with it will be very weak. If anyone who has also gone through the ceremony/has a Keyblade tries to take it from him, they will be successful.
- MARCH 09, 2014: Up to 8:32! Xemnas' flightless dragon crashing.
- MARCH 09, 2014: The vague impression that he's familiar with a situation involving someone trying to kill their best friend, the moment where Roxas says "But we're best friends, right?" coming back the clearest. He's also aware that he was the one in danger of getting killed in the memory. Sort of. It's a weird dissociative memory again.
- MARCH 09, 2014: A short burst of memory of Joshua with a pair of wings stretching from his back. Still... no recollection of who Josh is AHAHA
- MARCH 09, 2014: The ability to grab onto ledges and pull himself up in a single leap with minimal effort.
- MARCH 09, 2014: BELLS FROGS BIG CHERRIES PETER PAN MAGIC CHEESE SEPHIROTH. This particular fight and the scene afterward where Cloud and Sephiroth Have At. No context for who Cloud or Sephiroth are hahaha, but at least Skyler already knows about the location?? sobbing
- MARCH 09, 2013: Salvation. It's. A hell of a light spell. OuO
- MARCH 09, 2014: The knowledge that most of his enemies exploded into anime bubbles and sparkles when they died! Sometimes the bubbles refilled his MP! Sometimes they exploded... into... other... things. Like money. And health balls. And. Drive orbs, and Dream fragments, and......... it's a lot of things ok. Most importantly, though, the Heartless usually released a heart after their deaths as well.
INCARNATION OF: Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
AGE: 17
HEIGHT: 5'7.5" / 171 cm
BIRTHDAY: August 14, 1996
HISTORY:
Once upon a time, there was a kid named Skyler Veracruz, who lived in a place called Locke City, New Jersey. His mom was a nurse and his dad was high ranking financial adviser for a local company. He grew up pretty happy, even though his big brother Milo was kind of a shut in and never wanted to play. He was even okay with being a middle child after his little sister Arielle was born.
Then the US real estate market burst in 2008 and both his parents lost their jobs. They moved to a much smaller home, Skyler lost all his friends at his old elementary school, and he wasn't really able to make new ones because he had to spend a lot of time at home babysitting Ari because everyone knew that Milo couldn't. By the time he got the freedom to do so, everyone had already sorted themselves into new cliques and it didn't seem like anyone had much time for him. One clique did decide to make time for him, though. All he had to do was play along when the teacher turned her back and the shy kid next to him was drawing something on a piece of paper. All he had to do was take it.
Skyler, much like Sora, would do anything for his friends. He took the piece of paper and helped his new friends burn it after school.
Smash cut to summer of 2013. He was still taking care of Ari, who had grown to be a delightful creature, and he loved her to death. Which meant he kept her away from his... much more high school jock styled delinquent activities. His urge to do whatever it took for his friends and his reluctance to change himself took his behavior from bad to worse; he was, without bars, a fully fledged high school bully. Still, recently, he'd been thinking more about how his behavior made Ari's life much harder, and he'd started the very slow process of disentangling himself from his own crowd - all for Ari, and not himself. He more or less succeeded. He went into his senior year with no one his age he considered a real friend.
A year ago, he'd experienced an odd vision - the image of a redheaded girl with blue eyes startling him into waking him up. It felt like a memory. The numbers began to follow him after that. He hadn't realized before then that they were supposed to be used for anything. And then, one day, he decided to write down the numbers swirling around his head for a year onto his worksheet during Math, and his paper could suddenly scroll.
The Numbers network was filled with other people just as confused about the network as he was. They quickly filled him in: they didn't know what was going on, everyone was getting new powers, and whatever he did, he was NOT to trust the police if they weren't on the network already - they would kill him and him entire family. Naturally, he wanted to protect the only people he cared about - his family, especially Ari. So he made a few important decisions. He didn't tell anyone who he was. He got rid of the last of his weed. And he started figuring out who was going on, and how he could get the most power without turning into another person.
Because that was the other part of this: everyone was getting memories from strangers. And his stranger was a kid named Sora. And the more he absorbed from Sora's memories, the more he realized that having Sora's memories meant more than having a mental next door neighbor. After all, through his patchwork memories, he saw that Roxas never stood a chance. Why would Skyler fare any better?
So, he made some choices that Sora never would, hoping to get as far away from his other as possible. He started bullying people again. He tried to make himself as scarce as possible, refusing to make new friends. He joined a supernatural street gang, the Blood Keys, in order to see if he could leverage them to stop the transition. This supernatural street gang happened to be cyborgs, and they were also the Network's primary targets for violence. Skyler was okay with this. He let Thunder Corp, the company backing the Blood Keys, install cybernetics in him - metal lungs, metal heart, reinforced spine. Then, in secret, he started fighting against the Network and the Keys alike. He set himself up as the enemy as much as he possibly could. When it came to it, and a couple of Network members who had no reason to keep his secrets discovered what he'd done, he tried his absolute best to kill them.
But of course, Skyler, at some level, was just Sora reborn. He couldn't help but make a few new friends. A few people put their absolute trust in him, became friends with him even as other Network members refused to think he could ever change. And slowly, very slowly, he realized that if he wanted to make sure his friends and loved ones, Network and otherwise, would be safe from who he was and danger the Network faced, he had no choice but to become a better person. To do what Sora would do, and in the process let Sora take him.
So one day, sometime after he graduated, during his internship at the police station that one of his friends offered him in lieu of going to college, he decided to just let Sora handle things. He was very tired, after all. He'd done too much fighting. Sora couldn't really pretend to be him, but he was close enough. He was, honestly, the best substitute he could ask for. A good other.
Sora began to live Skyler's life that day, protecting Skyler's family and defending Locke City against more of its disasters. Very few cared to notice the difference, and those who did weren't enough to bring him back. Sora was far from home, in another dimension, and didn't have Yen Sid or King Mickey to explain what to do - he was still missing lot of his own memories. Still, Sora is Sora, no matter which world he lands in. He had a world to save, people to take care of, and someone in his heart who had no body of his own. It was time to get to work.
TRIVIA:
- Locke City born and raised! His family isn't particularly well off but they live comfortably given the times.
- He's on both the swim and lacrosse teams, captain of neither because WHAT IS LEADERSHIP
- He had been in detention almost every other weekend until late Junior year because of his problem with authority figures other than his mom
- He's volunteered every summer at the local general summer camp program and just got back from his first real job as a life guard before hustling his ass into summer school UuU
- He can almost press 200 lbs. uou Still too wiry for power. in the meantime he plateaus around 180 lbs. he's working on it ok
- He went to Manila once to see family when he was 9 it was the best time he has ever had in his life thus far okok
- his fine arts credit is studio art and he doesn't do anything but shit around with oil pastels and text on his phone because he's an ASS
- uh he doesn't know how to dress himself like at all
- but he unfortunately knows the theory behind applying make-up because Ari uses him as a test subject all the time. His life is difficult
- he says he has a six pack but it's actually more of a lumpy four pack MORE SIT-UPS BOY (it actually doesn't look that bad and he doesn't get embarrassed about this but he will straight up lie and say it's a six pack INFORMATION FOR THE GENERATIONS)
- he knows how to cook a bit! filipino, american, a little bit of japanese, but only the stuff that Ari bullies him into making since he was the only one allowed to use the burner between the two of them for the longest time.
- he is also moderately trilingual! english, almost fluent in tagalog, passable japanese due to taking lessons in high school and the fact that jii-san refuses to speak in english these days.
- THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AS I FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE HIM MORE HILARIOUSLY DOUCHEY
- As of December 14, 2013, Skyler is a cyborg affiliated with the Blood Keys. This is not known to the network at large
FAMILY:
- MR. VERACRUZ (Filipino, does accounting at a local company.)
- MRS. VERACRUZ (Japanese-White, Nurse's aide and homemaker.)
- MILO VERACRUZ (Older brother (20), attends Locke University with a Chem major, builds scale models for fun.)
- ARIELLE VERACRUZ (Younger sister (12), attends the local public middle school, adorable pink princess. BY FAR AND AWAY SKYLER'S FAVORITE PERSON)
- Mr. Veracruz' side of the family is back in the MOTHIRLAND
- Mrs. Veracruz's side mostly lives in California, except for Grandma Elle and Yuuhiko Jii-san, who live in Locke City as well.
ECHO DIRECTORY (note that some echoes are double posted because they fit multiple categories :Db)
- PHYSICAL CHANGES
- POWERS AND ABILITIES
- MEMORIES
- MENTAL
- ITEMS
- CREATURES
LATEST ECHOES (THESE ARE NOT ALL OF HIS ECHOES!! I only have his latest 15 echoes here in chronological order of acquirement because anything more is absolutely ridiculous. Full masterpost here, split arbitrarily into half years.)
- FEBRUARY 01, 2014: Bits and pieces of this bossfight, accompanied by yet another migraine. :)b Not the full bossfight, but lord dat lightning.
- FEBRUARY 01, 2014: The knowledge that there have been a lot of different versions of Sora, and one of them in particular experienced a lot of pain as he tried to reconcile his own identity with Sora's, particularly of the hallucinating Sora's memories and forgetting who you are so hard that your head hurts kind. (Yes, this is the best he'll ever remember about that one part in Days when Roxas went to Destiny Island.)
- FEBRUARY 11, 2014: Genie Jafar boss battle! With a particular focus on Iago, but the entire boss battle is there.
- FEBRUARY 17, 2014: Hercules boss battle!
- FEBRUARY 17, 2014: The knowledge that he's been cured in battle with magic several times before by a very good friend. The knowledge will focus on Donald, and the fact that there was one time he did it when it was very important, but even thinking about when that might have been will give him the warning signs of one of his CoM migraines. He didn't actually get that memory back, but the scene is there for reference.
- FEBRUARY 18, 2014: An upgrade to his Glide ability to the second level - he will be able to glide smoothly and without pause, but slowly - and Air Combo Plus, the first in three upgrades to the ability. It'll manifest ingame as the ability to launch into the air and hover, giving him just enough time to strike his enemy once more than gravity/his speed would usually allow.
- FEBRUARY 22, 2014: From here to 11:05. He gets thrown off of Xemnas's platform and has to fly his way back. Of note: he FINALLY gets context for that "Are you certain you can trust Riku?" quote, Skyler will not be certain that that's that Xemnas everyone's been talking about because WHOA THAT IS A BIG ARMOR, and HOLY SHIT WE ARE LITERALLY THROWING AROUND SKYSCRAPERS LIKE IT'S NOTHING.
- MARCH 09, 2014: Superglide! He goes at his fastest speed, his angle of descent is as gradual as it will ever be, etc. Also, the requirements to summon a Keyblade. One can only summon a Keyblade if they have gone through the ceremony of inheritance - which just means that if you've touched a Keyblade before, one will become available to you if your heart is strong enough. This Echo will give him that prerequisite back. However, Skyler's current personality is not strong enough to summon a Keyblade. He may be able to summon in it small spurts, and if he's really focusing on achieving something that requires strength of character, or the power of his friends' faith and bonds with him, he may be able to summon it for longer, and may even get back to full Keyblade business as usual later if he gets enough character development (which sort of makes this a gradually occurring echo with an additional requirement), but otherwise his bond with it will be very weak. If anyone who has also gone through the ceremony/has a Keyblade tries to take it from him, they will be successful.
- MARCH 09, 2014: Up to 8:32! Xemnas' flightless dragon crashing.
- MARCH 09, 2014: The vague impression that he's familiar with a situation involving someone trying to kill their best friend, the moment where Roxas says "But we're best friends, right?" coming back the clearest. He's also aware that he was the one in danger of getting killed in the memory. Sort of. It's a weird dissociative memory again.
- MARCH 09, 2014: A short burst of memory of Joshua with a pair of wings stretching from his back. Still... no recollection of who Josh is AHAHA
- MARCH 09, 2014: The ability to grab onto ledges and pull himself up in a single leap with minimal effort.
- MARCH 09, 2014: BELLS FROGS BIG CHERRIES PETER PAN MAGIC CHEESE SEPHIROTH. This particular fight and the scene afterward where Cloud and Sephiroth Have At. No context for who Cloud or Sephiroth are hahaha, but at least Skyler already knows about the location?? sobbing
- MARCH 09, 2013: Salvation. It's. A hell of a light spell. OuO
- MARCH 09, 2014: The knowledge that most of his enemies exploded into anime bubbles and sparkles when they died! Sometimes the bubbles refilled his MP! Sometimes they exploded... into... other... things. Like money. And health balls. And. Drive orbs, and Dream fragments, and......... it's a lot of things ok. Most importantly, though, the Heartless usually released a heart after their deaths as well.
