JIGOKU APP

[fuckinghysterical]

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: NOISE
ARE YOU AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD?: Yes!
CONTACT: DatAss or PM!
CHARACTERS PLAYED: No one, yet! I did reserve Shinobu Jacobs, but I want to make sure I can handle one character here with no issue before trying my hand at two.

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Laughing Beauty (or Laughing Octopus, but Laughing Beauty is technically the correct codename for her "canon point" of like five whole minutes after she's Laughing Octopus... yeah MGS is just like that)
CANON: Metal Gear Solid 4
CANON REFERENCE: Right here! And some additional context on her unit, if need be!
CANON POINT: After she's defeated by Snake in her Beauty boss fight with him.
CRAU HISTORY: N/A
AGE: Though she's never given an explicit age, in canon, another very well-informed character does mention that all of the Beauty and the Beast members are "around 20". So, I just go with 21 for her.

APPEARANCE:
LB in the midst of freaking tf out. Otherwise, as shown as part of her boss battle, she's very comfortable in posing seductively (in the middle of a battle for no apparent reason, but let's not think about that too hard, MGS really do just be like that).

Though she's never given an official height, her model was based off of Lyndall Jarvis, a model who has her height listed as 5'10", so with no other source to go off of, that's what I roll with as well. Apart from being a little tall for a woman, the only other thing to mention about her appearance is that in spite of not coming into a game with her Octopus suit, she will still wear the silver plug suit underneath it, and thus might look a little weird with the spare plug hanging here and there. Or at least until she gets some actual clothes in game.

CONTRACT PAYMENT: All she wants is to be able to be at peace with herself and what she had done in the past, even if it is a really goddamned abstract contract. But hey, that's the whole reason she became a weapon of war in canon, so it works!

QUESTIONNAIRE:

What are your greatest regrets, if you have any? What would you have done differently?

The obvious answer to this is that LB deeply regrets the incident in her youth in which she was captured by the cult that hated her village (for eating octopus) and forced to kill her friends and family while laughing the entire time. Even if she was very young at the time (probably around 11-13) and under the threat of being killed instead if she didn't do it, the incident still traumatized her so badly in that she had to delude herself into thinking that she was a monstrous octopus and that the blood of her family was the ink of an octopus to try to cope with the incident. That and ever since the incident, she hasn't been able to stop laughing (as much as she really does wish she could stop).

Though there's no way to reverse what she did, LB will do everything to avoid being put through a similar situation. While she didn't have the power to stand up to her tormentors before, she's still so haunted by the experience that if fighting and doing whatever she could to kill any similar enemy would fail, LB would absolutely choose to die before ever killing someone she cared about again. Her greatest motivation in MGS4 is that she joins Ocelot's army under the simple promise that she'd be cleansed of her pain and sorrow. So thus, there's no way she'd ever be able to go through a repeat of her past.


What is your favorite diversion? Hobbies, indulgences, vices? Would you put off important things for that diversion, or would you be more strict about how you spend your time and/or money?

As someone who had a huge chunk of her life taken from her (from 11ish to 20ish), LB is in the unique position of which she wouldn't have had the chance to explore that side of herself as she was kind of trapped into a maniacal delusion, of which was both by the design of coping with her trauma, as well as Ocelot's army taking advantage of that and turning her into a weapon of war.

But now that she's out of her Octopus suit and has since regained her sense of humanity, it's definitely a side of herself that she's looking to discover about herself. As her thoughts constantly wander to less pleasant thoughts if left on her own, she's someone that's more likely to occupy her free time in the presence of others and doing her best to throw herself into having a good time, so she doesn't have to think about the bad times as much.

While she has too much experience in her former militant occupation to be the kind that was just straight up blow off work or be too irresponsible with her money, it's more that LB wants to occupy as much of her free time as possible. As much as she'd probably like to, she can't even get drunk, as the nanomachines within her body just filter it out (and from a small plot point from another character with nanos, it seems like it filters out anything more harmful to a human body than caffeine).

So the ways she can indulge herself is limited, but you better believe she's probably going to be willing to explore most avenues to have a good time anyway.


You've worked with your Faction awhile now and you feel like the reward of your contract is within reach. But at the last moment, you are told you have even more service to pay beforehand, an obscure clause in the contract being exploited to keep you under your boss's thumb even longer. Your Faction Leader hasn't spoken on this, and might be able to dispute it. Do you go to your leader? Do you argue the dispute yourself? Do you begrudgingly accept the additional work? Something else?

In what is probably the most fantastic news to any of the Factions she's put in, LB has absolutely no desire to return to her world anyway and probably even prefers being in literal Hell than going back to a world that's ravaged by war and holds absolutely no sentimental value when she was already forced to kill everyone that meant anything to her long ago. Also, even before becoming a Lost Soul, she was already kind of forced into a pretty hopeless contract with Ocelot's army, so it's not like being exploited would be anything she hadn't experienced before!

With that depressing bit out of the way, LB probably wouldn't actually be that particularly upset over it. Her contract is a pretty nebulous one to begin with, and she truly wants to eliminate her pain and sorry so bad that she could easily be strung along probably as long as her faction leader wanted. Would she be disappointed? Yeah, obviously. However, LB probably wouldn't even protest the extended contract and in some fashion might even be relieved that she still had some purpose to stay.


An oni of the Shuten Clan has gone completely berserk, and is going on a violent rampage through the city. You can't stop him, but you CAN lead him elsewhere, but you only have two choices: a road by a discotheque with a large crowd in front, or the nearby park that you do not know is unoccupied, and may have children present. What do you choose, and why?

Though as Laughing Octopus, she was mostly used as basically a giant weapon, something that makes her stand apart from the others in her unit is that she makes great use of her surroundings to deceive and ambush her enemies to neutralize them as quickly as possible. So, even if fighting wasn't a possibility, LB would likely choose the path that had the most diversity to it. Even without her Octopus suit's ability to blend into environment, LB still has a talent in knowing what she'd be able to effectively hide herself within, what tight areas she could fit herself in a pinch, and has at least some experience in guerilla warfare in general.

While she could likely use either location as a good cover to lose the oni in (or at least assuming the park has some density to it and isn't just a completely open area), her conscious would weigh too heavily to potentially lead it to the park with even the smallest possibility that it could kill a child. She was once the helpless child before - she's not about to inflict the same kind of suffering on another, if she can help it.

There is the possibility that the large crowd in front of the disco could also fall victim to the oni, but it was just as likely that there might be someone (or maybe several someones) within that crowd that would be better at handling the oni than her. Even without that possibility, LB is someone that has unfortunately dealt with countless battlefields and thus has experienced a whole lot of people dying - she wouldn't be particularly happy about causing a tragedy on that scale (and yeah, that's something else that would hang onto her conscious pretty heavy), but out of the two options, it would make the most sense for her.

Even on a strategic standpoint, she can use the crowd to hide within, and her boss fight even deals with her finding several ways to hide herself within a building - having something like an entire discotheque to hide and confuse the enemy with would be definitely something in her wheelhouse.

...just don't stack too much debt on her if the building winds up destroyed as a result.


POWERS & ABILITIES:

NATURAL SKILLS (without need for her powered suit or nanomachines):

–Can use a gun decently

–Can perfectly mimic any voice (She not only imitated another woman’s voice, but a man’s as well). Because of this, she likely could sing very well, if she chose to.

–Speaks a few different languages. She speaks English in game, but as she grew up somewhere in Scandinavia, I’m going to say she knows Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, as they're all incredibly similar languages. It’s also mentioned that she led a unit based in France, so at least a basic understanding of French is likely.

NANOMACHINES (I’m so sorry, this is going to be needlessly complicated because the MGS series has a boner for nanomachines):

–Can hug or straddle a person to death, slowly - I don’t know either. But for whatever reason, without her suit on, she can slowly drain the life of anyone she hugs or touches. And yes, she very likely could actually fuck a person to death if she wanted to (however, for the sake of everyone's sanity here, I'll refrain from doing that, unless it's for some special mission on a minor NPC in game or something). As the power is really weak in canon (it takes around like 20 continuous seconds of hugging to actually be able to kill someone this method, and that's assuming she isn't thrown off in the process), I don't feel like it needs a nerf? This is honestly a "for the lulz" kind of ability in canon and if anything, it might be a fun avenue to actually buff this particular power in Jigoku.

They don’t talk about this power at all, in canon, so I’m just going to assume it’s a power made possible through nanomachines (since pretty much any superpower is courtesy of nanomachines, in the MGS series). She likely wouldn’t use this power unless she was threatened or ordered to use it.

–She’s shown to be able to perfectly coordinate attack formations with her unit without even talking. Basically, people with nanomachines are programmed to share each other’s senses and work more efficiently as a team by then coordinating battle tactics with each other. This also likely wouldn’t come into play in the game, unless someone else maybe apps someone with nanomachines that would have this same (or a similar) function.

-Has healing abilities. While it wouldn’t be able to instantly heal her, it’s said in canon that soldiers are unable to get drunk, as the nanomachines break down alcohol and can purify unclean water. In addition to that, nanomachines in her universe are even used to slow (but not cure) cancer. So basically, she’d still need medical attention for any serious injury she received, but she'd still have resistances to other character's poisons (though I'm still down for any poisons in game, or even any otherwordly alcohol to still work)!

–Her nanomachines monitor her body’s functions and basically makes it so that she’s at her best possible shape during combat. By controlling adrenaline and endorphins that flow through her body, it elevates her senses and accuracy whenever she encounters a combative situation. It also suppresses and heightens certain emotions during these times, to make her even more effective (for LB, it’s said that she laughs the hardest during times of combat, this is likely due to nanomachines).

OCTOPUS SUIT:

While she won't be coming into the game with the suit, I figured I better still detail its capabilities for the possibility of earning the suit back as a future reward in the game.

–CAMOUFLAGE. Her Octopus suit can take on any pattern and seemingly shape shift to a degree to perfectly blend in with her surroundings. The mask of her suit is shown to be able to make the wearer take on anyone’s appearance perfectly (and she can somehow still move her mouth despite it being a mask) and can be used entirely independent of her suit. Thus, she would still be able to use that to change her facial features if she wanted to, even without getting the rest of her suit fixed.

However, the entirety of her suit allows her much more variety in camouflaging herself, some examples being an anatomy model, blending in with a painted picture, disguising a tentacle as a wire to a big machine, making herself appear as a robot, somehow fitting herself into a tiny ass box, and she also can just stand around and blend in with any background. Note that if a person has thermal vision or goggles, her disguise really wouldn’t be effective at all.

–TENTACLES. The tentacles on her suit have been showed to whack people, climb up walls (and hold her position in higher areas), restrain (and crush an unfortunate person to death), and pierce through stomachs.

–INK SMOKE… THING? Her suit can emit an ink smog that provides cover for her to escape from situations that she deems too up close and personal to deal with. The downside is that she apparently must vomit all the black ink out when she’s out of the suit (I really don’t know about this canon either).

–ROLLING INTO A BALL. She can also roll her tentacles up to become some sort of ball, rev herself up (think Sonic the Hedgehog), and plow into a person.

–ELECTRICITY. While it’s a pretty weak power, she has some sort of power to emit a sort of shock to a person. While it wouldn’t kill a person from a brief touch, a longer duration can be fatal.


SUITABILITY: She's already had it really fucking rough in canon, Jigoku will be a godsend in comparison. Not to mention, her canon is all about the entire world being in constant war, so she's very used to violence. And really, the occasional sex aspect really isn't going to bother her either.

FACTION SUITABILITY:

The Shuten Clan
Though much of LB's power comes from a state-of-the-art technology power suit, her nanomachines do still respond to fights by releasing adrenaline and endorphins into her body, which make her feel amazing during fights, even if she lacks the actual technique to actually be good at fighting in a hand-to-hand capacity. However, she would absolutely love to learn to strengthen that particular weakness of hers, if only to increase her own ability for self-defense.

Another positive is that while LB is immune to the effects of alcohol (and probably sad about that much, because BOY would she love a way to take the edge off), LB would be down for hard partying as she was denied the chance to do so in pretty much the entirety of her life and there's no time to make up for it than the present! Also, she's not particularly good at lying, so the whole honesty policy might jive well with her, as she's far more of a type of person to omit the truth rather than just straight up lie about something.

However, even if LB appreciates strength, it's an attribute that even she herself feels she lacks in. Without her Octopus suit, her Beauty fight is actually laughably easy as she's quite literally a pushover. She only "attacks" by hugging and straddling Snake, and even if LB sometimes shows a surprising amount of strength in being able to turn Snake over from his stomach to back, she can still be thrown to the ground pretty easily.

In addition to that, although she admires people with strength, she probably wouldn't resonate well with the MIGHT MAKES RIGHT policy as she herself is pretty lacking in that part of herself. And while she's not a particularly dishonorable person, she would very much disagree with death before dishonor, as she could be sympathetic to someone who might have bent the rules for a just cause.

The Tamamo Clan
As someone whose entire gimmick in the game was being able to copy people's facial appearances through her suit's mask and having the capability to copy voices as well, LB may already be well primed into learning the delusions to appeal to the imaginations of the clients. In addition to this, she's shown absolutely no hesitation in hugging and straddling some stranger - even if it is to try to kill him in a very odd method, it's hard to imagine she'd be against cozying up in less lethal ways as well.

Also, LB has shown some capability in more deceitful means to try to gain the advantage in a couple of situations. In one instance, she copied the face of Snake as she went on a rampage against a rebel force to trick them into focusing their attacks against him. And in her Octopus battle, there's a point where she uses the voice of one of Snake's allies to try to lure him into a trap she set up for him. Toward the end of her Octopus fight, LB even goes to the extent of copying the face of another woman Snake is familiar with to try to guilt him into not attacking her further (it didn't work, but she tried).

It might be a little bit of a learning process for her to perfect the way of using her abilities for the purpose of pleasure, rather than in a combative fashion, which could be a little bit of a drawback (as well as the fact that she'd be new to any restaurant or sex work)? But also, LB would appreciate being able to do some kind of good with her skills instead of just harming people all the time too.

The philosophy of using one's freedom for pleasure is something LB could learn to appreciate too, as she had a good chunk of her life stolen away from a cult destroying traumatizing her to the point she could only join a militant group under a very nebulous promise given to her to try to reclaim her life and sanity. Now that she's more or less gotten her sanity back, LB is going to want to try to experience everything that she was forced to miss out on before, so she'd likely appreciate the relief from a stressful world.


The Sutoku Alliance
Seeing as her official title in the Beauty and the Beast Unit was a "stealth expert", she might be of some interest to the Alliance in gathering information for their cause. Even if most of her use to this particular group would be in the technology she doesn't currently have, she could be a hell of an asset to the group if she did eventually gain access to her full kit. Even without all her tools, though, she does have some mind for strategy, so that could perhaps be utilized within the Alliance? Also, without her Octopus suit and gun, she's definitely an "underdog" kind of person and could fit in pretty decently within the culture.

And if they want loyalty, LB would probably rather die than to have them release all the dirt on what she did in her past (that's a whole lot of skeletons in her closet, man). So rest assured, she would never cross them!

However, though her more deceitful tactics listed above might translate pretty well in information tactics, LB isn't otherwise particularly book-smart and might not be entirely what the group is looking for. She has absolutely zero job experience in anything besides mercenary work and might not immediately appeal to a district that seems to be filled with financial type of work - not to mention LB will have the fun task of figuring out how the hell to juggle with financial decisions on her own for the first time!

The Department of the Enma
As LB was technically working as a sort of mercenary for the government, she wouldn't actually be entirely out of place in working for the cops in Jigoku-cho. Considering her past in which her hometown was overtaken in a pretty chaotic fashion by a cult, LB could be convinced to work for the side of order to try to nip any similar incident in the bud. And as mentioned a couple times above, LB definitely isn't against using underhanded tactics either, if she finds it necessary.

However, it should also be noted that LB was working for the government (in canon) while absolutely out of her fucking mind, and wouldn't carry any particular loyalty to the cops or anything similar to it (if anything, she might even sympathize with the people in low places more, to boot). As her primary motivation is to try gain some peace of mind, LB could also possibly be against certain "underhanded tactics", depending on what was being asked of her.

SAMPLES

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