Taiki Hayama

Long, flowing spiraling hair, that's Taiki's most distinguishable feature. He has an almost legendary, impossible to forget voluminous mane that goes as far as to cover his shoulders in emerald-colored swirling locks, shinning so intensely, so healthily that you can't help but to wonder if there really exist any scizors that can cut it. Taiki also takes great pride on his hair so its always kept on top condition.

Besides that, the little face you can catch a glimpse of behind the layers of this wondrous whool has sharp, clearly defined features on a visage of optimal length and width, what makes it a remarkably expressive face, that conveys emotion very well. Specially remarkable are his eyes, not because of their pretty apple colour, but because of that vivacious, cunning shimmer they've got to them. Besides that his lips are quite thick and fleshy, plump and soft like peaches.

Physically Taiki is a bit shorter than average. Standing at merely 1.73 meters of height, Taiki has to look up to look at many of his classmates or even juniors. Perhaps to make up for this he compensates by manyaining a healthy, pretty athletic physique, although it isn't nothing outstanding either.

From having always lived by the sea, Taiki is pretty tanned, ranging from the colour of wheat or a light shade of gold in winter to a slight bronze shade at summer. Finally, despite practicing boxing, his hands are actually pretty smooth and delicate-looking, though he does bite his nails a bit too much.

Its also worth noting that his voice is very high pitched almost comically so, and that on top of that he is so expressive that its almost as if he was singing, what makes it sound like someone was trying to play a song only using squeaking rubber ducks everytime he opens his mouth.

When using his Persona, letters spelling the word T-U-R-B-O appears on Taiki's left iris, each letter disposed so to form a pentagram. The symbol "XX" also appears underneath, engraved on his left cheekbone on a bright, golden colour.

Taiki is a very quirky young lad. I say this because, somehow, everything about himself seems to be a total contradiction of almost completely irreconcilable traits that despite not making any sense exist simultaneously nonetheless. Not that he seems to mind and even wether he does even notice is unknown.

On one hand, he is a very kind person at heart, there's no denying that. He is very kind and giving person, the passive kind that enjoys taking things nice and alow and spending alone time doing nothing but whatever they want, be it something creative, thinking or just playing around. On the other he can be a very proactive, sociable person, a go-getter with a strong, volatile temperament and an aggressive streak that can make him difficult to deal with at times. There's no telling how Taiki will respond to something, because it only takes so much for him to switch from one state to the other, to the point it's befuddling.

This is because Taiki is the kind to feel emotions very strongly in an explosive manner, that is, for a very short period of time. Then he just either gets over it or simply forgets. Even then its impossible to tell if he's truly happy or upset because he's fond of faking either state only to slap his interlocutor with an even sharper contrast so to accentuate his real emotions whenever he drops his façade.

Even with his mine-like temperament, Taiki keeps present in his mind the interests of those he appreciates the most and even at his most pissed, harshest tone his words are full of a 'kindness' that can be misunderstood but that nonetheless proves the best that he DOES care. To put it in his own words, 'Some care enough not to want to offend you, others, enough to do so despite of it'.

Another trait that should be highlighted is his sly, mischievous nature, poking at others and using word and mind games for his own amusement, always within reason however. It wouldn't be any good if he were to mess with others excessively or in a bad way, though even then Taiki can the kind that often tests his limits which can be annoying.

Besides this, Taiki is incredibly intelligent and crafty, in fact, so much that he gets credit for it despite only getting above average marks. He enjoys using that intellect alongside his conversational skills to debate all sort of matters (always in a light-hearted tone), although only with people he respects (but then again he thinks that respect is a prerogative to dealing people you've just met until they prove otherwise, so isn't too fussy about talking in this manner with strangers), and does avoid the more serious subjects, specially political ones, since he knows there's a high risk of someone getting pissed and then there's no fun anymore.

He also greatly enjoys spending time reading information on several subjects, so to accumulate pieces of knowledge, trivia and popular wisdom. As a matter of fact he used to spend all his time doing this very thing when he was younger, so at this point his knowledge is nothing short of encyclopedic. He like to ponder over the things he has learnt, trying to deepen his understanding of what he's read, trying to extract some higher truth through which to understand the world better, or, at the very least, something beautiful, even if its nothing beyond that.

Oh, talking about beauty, it should be mentioned that Taiki is a person that greatly values the aesthetic qualities of things, which is not only limited to material things, such as works of art, but also actions and events. To him, existence is a narrative flow and everything within it is susceptible of possessing beauty within. Because we are capable of doing so, its our duty as human beings to search for this intrinsic beauty and, should we be unable to find it, redefining the object in our own terms and giving a newfound aesthetic virtue according to our conception of these. In a way Taiki considers beauty to be a moral value in the same way Plato did, capable of having substance and existential value in itself. This is perhaps why he takes such care of his own imagine and how he presents himself before the world. Every word he says is carefully picked, every gesture and stance worked on to perfection so that everything Taiki does is inherently beautiful (to him at the very least). This in turn makes him look in complete control and full of a confidence that makes him look like some kind of eccentric superman.

In reality the real Taiki is a far cry from this façade. He has worked very hard to not only convincingly wear the mask he wears before others, but to actively become what he represents. He does so of his own, conscious will, since he believes that's the sort of person with qualities and ideals such as his should be, in other words, he pretends to be, and through that become, his ideal self.

To be honest, its undeniable that he has had a sizable degree of success in this endeavour, but, rather than ceasing to be one to be the other, you could say that Taiki's self has bifurcated, the traits of both selves existing within him. This other Taiki is a tremendously insecure fellow, unable of doing things right or by himself, always screwing up at all times and, worst of  all, excruciatingly self-centred, childish and apathetic. These are all things Taiki has to watch out from resurfacing, though at times he can't help it, what causes a huge internal conflict.

And it is that Taiki is always at odds with himself. On one hand he feels a brutal fury towards everything he does that so much as reminds him of his previous self, what leads to him having strong self-destructive tendencies that he has to constantly keep in check. If only he could, he definitely would kill that shameful Taiki he can't run away from. It doesn't help that Taiki has a prodigious, out of this world memory that makes him to remember all his wrongdoings in the past wether he wants or not. Therefore, one of the most important factors in Taiki's quest for constant renovation is that huge grudge he harbours towards himself and that he can't in no shape or form ever forgive.

On the other hand Taiki isn't truly satisfied with his current situation. Sure, each day brings him closer to who he set out to be, but it's all a huge artifice. Hardly do things come naturally to him and even his studied beauty feels at time like a huge charade lacking any sort of authenticity, which he finds to be quite depressing.

In the end, beneath the permanent glitter freeze shielding him Taiki is an immensely unsatisfied person, unhappy with how he is in the inside, unhappy with how he is on the outside and unhappy with his situation and the world around him, all adding up to a boy that doesn't really like the life he leads and that can't run away from it as well. So, what does he do?

Easy, he keeps pushing forward.

Through his short life if there's something Taiki has learnt that's perseverance. In the family he grew up it was his only tool to deal with any sort of problems, to steel your heart and never stop walking in hopes better times come. Its the only thing he can think of doing, but despite or maybe because of doing it his entire life he can't tell how much he can go on, since even if things are looking up compared to how they used to be they are still a complete disappointment compared to what he expected. He is horrified these are all the fruits of his labor he is ever gonna get.

Strengths:

—Strength Name: Vital Surge
—Description: Taiki has an extraordinary vitality that, as a matter of fact, is raised the more damage he sustains. He'll keep fighting ferociously beyond his body's very limits, to the point he collapses.

—Strength Name: Quick Feet
—Description: Being an amateur boxing, Taiki is quite fit. He is a boxer-puncher, which besides giving him some terrific power makes him exceptionally agile and graceful, when he's into it that is.

—Strength Name: Charisma
—Description: Taiki is increndibly self-conscious, but that sometimes that plays as an advantage towards his ends. For one he is absolutely aware of how how his personality, words and actions affect other people and is quick to see through them to discover how to use to use that to press their buttons and irrestibly draw them towards him and obtain whatever he needs from them. It's no surprise he  always ends up being the center of attention, so enticing he can be. In other words, he is an extremely manipulative person that can control people and situations and easily turn them to his or others' benefit.

—Strength Name: Brave
—Description: In no small part because of his aggressive, competitive streak, Taiki isn't the kind to back down at all or be intimidated by others. Despite of this he is afraid of fairly trivial things, such as being alone in big, open dark places, needles and cocktoaches, specially the latter two, wich kind of embarrass him.

—Strength Name: Lucky
—Description: There rarely are people as lucky as Taiki. For him, everything seems to fall into place, like the golden steps of a stair leading to God knows where. It has gotten to a point Taiki firmly believes he has a destiny he has to fulfill, a path to greatness only his to walk... And actually believing so has seemingly only increased his luck. It's the small stuff really, but it happens damn often. Thing is, this luck follows him in a way through his daily life in a way that makes everything seem as if it was meant to be, even if those lucky strikes usually aren't too much of a deal.


Weaknesses:

—Weakness Name: Absent-minded
—Description: The excessive vitality within Taiki has lead him to have poor attention spans, become bored easily and on top of that, constantly forget basic stuff, such as pens for that test he had been working on all week, the keys to his house and a huge variety of things normal people would do just by going through the motions.

—Weakness Name: Clumsy
—Description: Taiki can be cery precise with his movements in his daily life and even agile and gracefulwhen boxing, but that's only because he is giving his all and maintaining an unfaltering conscious effort for it to be that way. As soon as he stops doing so, his movements become jagged and clunky, any balance his body might have appeared to have going down the drain. This is because he was actually born with his finer psychomotor functions attriphiated, which caused him to be unable to control his limbs until he grew up and even now has a hard time doing so consistently 24/7

—Weakness Name: Liar
—Description: Manipulative tendencies aside, Taiki grew up with lies as his only defense mechanism to protect himself from constant constant scrutiny of his life, he doesn't like doing so and will try to avoid resorting to lies, but if he feels like its for the better he will at the very least twist the truth and he will hardly feel guilty about it either. More than anything he will lie when under pressure and when dealing with very specific people.

—Weakness Name: Too Cocky
—Description: Taiki, for all his smug, over-the-top bravado can find himself forcefully having to take back his words after saying something he shouldn't have. He still hasn't learnt to watch his tongue, especially when all's seemingly going well for him and he feels emboldened. In other words, he bites more than he can possibly chew.

—Weakness Name: Hubris
—Description: What is hubris?, Hubris doesn't refer to pride or arrogance, though they both come tied to it oftentimes. No, hubris is a pretension, an impulse for a human to be more than he is, to try and climb up through the echelons to places his kind don't belong in, above humanity, the world and sometimes over the gods themselves. Its the ultimate self-improvent instinct, one that leads beyond the confines of humanity, but at the same time setting your sights so high usually does lead to failure and disappointment. Taiki knows he'll be shot dowm every time, but he still feels inside him an inner blaze that brings him to keep trying and reach his own small plot of land in paradise, be it through his quest for self-perfection... Or the T-U-R-B-O Eye…


Soul Bound Weapon:

Weapon Name: March of the Zapotec & Realpeople - Holland
Weapon Description: A pair of twin tonfas.
Weapon Image:

Spoiler:

Weapon Attack Type Strike
Weapon Element: N/A

The son of a sailor and a big-city woman, Taiki is half Japanese, although for all purposes he has inherited the looks of his Mother, meaning he could pass for an Azores native if it weren't for his name, inherited from his paternal grandfather.

Due to his father's job in the sea he was raised exclusively by his mother, a woman that, despite of loving his child very much, was terrible with children in general and even worse with someone as troublesome as Taiki. Maybe its because of this that he always felt drawn towards his father and, by extension, the sea. With him, he had fun. He was this big, hero that wasn't scared of anything, not even the endless oceans. He felt than he was with him, he understood him, that no matter what, he could always rely on him.

Intending to do what he did when he grew up, he took every chance he had to go out sailing on a small wooden boat property of his family whenever he came back in the weekend, holydays or whenever the weather was good. This habit carried on into his adolescence with him learning to control the boat all on his own and his studying of aeronautics, in his dreams he was a ship capitan, comanding his own cargo ship (or maybe even a warship as a captain of the navy?) and sail across the seven seas from harbour to harbour, visiting all sort of places and meeting all sorts of people. To him, that was the true man's life.

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. At sixteen years of age Taiki witnessed his father departing towards America, never to return. He, his ship and the rest of the crew dissappeared in a sudden storm without a trace, not a body, not a scrap of iron, nothing they had simply vanished like a fleeting dream.

Taiki learnt of it in the news the very day it happened, everyone knew he wouldn't take it well, but no one expected what he did.

Rushing back home, he went to the inlet by his house where the family boat was anchored, boarded it and went deep into the ocean after his father.

It wasn't long before he penetrated the storm. All around him the waters raged and the wind howled like a banshee, raising waves over fifteen feet tall that crashed against the deck, which cracked with sounds of wooden agony as it thrashed from side to side. On it Taiki stood, trying to control the sails, pulling from the ropes with bloodied hands as he struggled to keep the boat afloat and going While being throw around like a rag doll with each shake and each jump. He knew he would never make, that it was impossible. If a massive ship like his father's hadn't been able to make his itty bitty boat didn't stand a speck of a chance.

So why had he come here?, To die seemed like the only logical answer, but as the boy's battered, bruished body refused to give in, the blaze he felt inside pushing him right back on his feet, he knew that wasn't it. Maybe he fought because it was the right thing to do, maybe he did it out of pain or maybe he was fighting simply for the right to fight, but it didn't matter. The only thing that did was that he refused to surrender.

But then, reality imposed itself as a thirty feet wave came crashing down on the meager vessel, shredding it to pieces.

Taiki woke up with the gentle caress of the sunrays. Even through unconsciousness he had been clutching to a panel from the wreckage. Too small to stand on it, the best he could do was lie half submerged in the cold water and not sink. So, this was it huh?, He was dead meat. It wouldn't take long, less than an hour he estimated, for him to die from hypothermia, if by then the storm hadn't come back to drown him. Now he seemed to have reached the eye of the storm, but rest assured, it wouldn't last long. At least he did have this respite before he died.

Turning his aching body, he laid on his back over the wooden board and gazed at the reddening skies above. It was dusk and soon, night.

"And in my time of dying, I get to see the sunset one last time. Heh, how fitting..."

But as Taiki made peace with himself, he felt something touch his hand.

Lifting his head, he searched the source of the contact only to find... An eye. A human eye. Both horrified and somewhat mesmerized he found himself unable to push it away. The iris of the disembodied organ was of a soft almond color, but the most bizarre thing about it was that it seemed to have white letters engraved on it, arrayed in a pentagon shape around the pupil.

"What the...?"

"Tuur..."

Taiki's heart skipped a beat, just now he had heard a voice, he was sure of it but from where?

"T-U-R... B-O... Bo"

Suddenly his head started hurting so badly he couldn't help but to clench his head... But when he did, he felt something cold touch his left temple, something that wasn't him...

And when he looked at his left palm he saw it. The strange eye, it was attached to his hand, firmly logged in it.

But it wasn't over. Before the shocked Taiki could muster a reaction, the eye started moving up his arm, diving underneath his skin. The boy screamed in horror, clawing at his skin, trying to take it out, but it was useless, he could feel it going inside him, parting his innards, hitting against his bones and the only thing he could do was shriek helplessly while on his mind a voice roared louder and louder, "TUUR... TUUURRRRRRR... B-O.", the eye was now on his throat and it burned so hot, hot like fire, it burnt him, he could feel it burning his shivering, tender flesh and for a moment he thought he would throw it up, but it didn't want to leave his body, instead, it phazed through his chattering skull and into his left socket, it pressed against his own left eye, so much it felt like it was going to burst. The pain was maddening, Taiki rolled around, the pain from the bruises forgotten as he tried to somehow escape, his cries were now jagged as he breathed in and out rapidly and shallow between pain spikes, his head, his mind felt like someone was banging metallic cymbals with a baseball bat and they wouldn't stop resonating, drowning every of his thoughts but the omnipresent physical anguish, "T-U-R-B-O", "T-U-R-B-O", "T-U-R-B-O" was all he could hear as both eyes started dissolving, melding into one single one, and just like that, it all went away, leaving a trembling Taiki sobbing until the goosebumps finally forced him to throw up what little he had in his stomach.

But it wasn't over, oh no, it was FAR from over.

Slowly, Taiki began drifting in circles in the water. turn after turn, he steadily seemed to draft perfect circumferences, but he didn't seem to even notice. Not yet anyways.

Because as he went round and round, he also begun picking up in speed. accelerating steadily, what begun as a shy rotation ended up in a wild whirlpool that irresistibly drawn him in. Desperate, with his heart beating at 300 bpm, he tried holding it into the board, in a desperate struggle to preserve his life a little longer as he hit the center of the spiral.

And he didn't sink, but raise.

Rising through the air, the board between Taiki's arms was shredded into oblivion, and it was then when he realized that he himself was spinning. Every single of his fingers, his limbs, his muscles, his bones and even his very cells, they were spinning in perfect synchrony. He himself was the center of the rotation and as he accelerated exponentially, rising through the air above the stormy clouds, his body started coming apart. suddenly he felt an indescribable electric feeling, as if he was a plate breaking against the ground into dust, as if a ten thousand needles had prickled every single atom of his body. For a moment, time and space dilated into infinity, and in this state of dying ecstasy, he saw the unblinking eye before him, larger than the universe itself.

Bewildered, he contemplated it for what seemed all of eternity as it poured an infinity of ever-changing yet immutable colors and shapes incomprehensible for the human mind that emptied his whole being, tearing down everything he was and refilling him only to empty him all over again, and at last, he heard it one. Last. Time.

"T-U-R-B-O"

And he repeated along, "T-U-R-B-O"

And then, nothing.

...

When Taiki woke up, he was lying on the shore of the beach, just by his house. He was completely destroyed, covered in bruises, his skin shred and his bones broken, but he was alive. Later he learnt that he had been missing for a week, and after a long hospitalization he rejoined school.

But nothing would be the same again, not as long as that the eye, that accursed yet marvelous eye, was inside his. He would reach out the truth one day, maybe not today or tomorrow, but the day would come when he unearthed the mystery of both the eye and his father's disappearance.