Rintarou Okabe

Name: Christopher Okabe (Formerly: Rintarou Okabe)
Age: 18
Occupation: LCU student (Freshman, major undecided)
Further Info / Permissions: Here.
Full Application: Here.

Echoes:
First Echo: Kurisu lying in a pool of blood.
Second Echo: The prelude to his RaiNet Access Battlers duel against Faris.
Third Echo: The assembly and eventual true form of the Phonewave.

Further Notes:
Pending.

OOC Information:
Name: Prof
Are you over 15? Yes.
Contact: AIM ZebulonCrispi, Plurk ProfessorProf

IC Information:
Name: Rintarou Okabe (Canon) / Christopher Okabe (AU)
Canon and medium: Steins;Gate (Game and Anime adaptation)
Age: 18 in both incarnations
Preincarnation Species: Human
Preincarnation Appearance: Tall, gangly, and prone to over-the-top gestures
Any differences: Same appearance.

Preincarnated History:
Rintarou Okabe's childhood was quite ordinary, until he was 13 years old, when his best friend Mayuri Shiina lost her grandmother. Mayuri spent half a year metaphorically lost at sea, barely talking to anyone, before Okabe confronted her at her grandmother's grab, holding her tightly and putting on a fake supervillain persona, claiming that Mayuri was now his hostage, and he wouldn't let her leave his side. This strange, roundabout gesture of compassion brought her back to her usual cheerful self, and that strange persona stuck with Okabe, as his mad scientist alter ego, Hououin Kyouma.

Half-jokingly insisting on being Hououin Kyouma, Okabe got into pop science, forming a club-sort-of-thing called Future Gadget Laboratory with Mayuri and a friend from high school named Daru. They produced a number of trivial inventions, but nothing came from it until a day when he met the famed young scientist Kurisu, whose murdered corpse he saw in an empty hallway. Upon texting this troubling discovery to Daru, something inexplicable happened - reality altered itself, so that nobody remembered the death of Kurisu but him. Not only that, but the next day, he encountered Kurisu, good as new.

To make a long story short, Okabe had accidentally stumbled across a way to send text messages into the past, rewriting the present. Kurisu ended up joining the Future Gadget Lab, along with several others who got involved - his transgendered shrine maiden friend Ruka, Akihabara heiress Faris, eccentric part-timer Suzuha, and shy retro PC enthusiast Moeka. As a group, they began sending texts back in time, each having a bigger effect on the present. Ruka's gender was changed, all of the otaku culture was erased from Akihabara, and Moeka apparently vanished completely. All the time, Daru was hacking into the hidden files of particle research organization SERN, which turned out to have been performing time travel experiments involving cruel human experimentation for the past 40 years.

The rapidly fluctuating Future Gadget Laboratory continued to expand on their crude time machine's capability. Kurisu, a respected neurobiologist, found a way to actually transmit someone's memories to their past self, rather than just sending a message. Okabe decided that this was too dangerous to risk, and experimentation was put oh hold... until Moeka returned, revealing her true nature as a SERN agent, and demanding that all of the time travel research and materials be handed over at gunpoint. To prove her seriousness, Moeka shot and killed Mayuri. In a desperate gambit, Okabe activated the untested Time Leap Machine, jumping into the past.

Over the next several subjective days, Okabe jumped back in time over and over again, trying to escape the cruel future he witnessed. However, no matter what move he made, Mayuri died at the exact same moment. Even if SERN's agents weren't involved, some coincidence would kill Mayuri. When he was beginning to lose hope, help came from an unexpected source: Suzuha, the girl working at the store downstairs, revealed that she was a time traveler from the year 2037, come to prevent a dystopian future where SERN rules over humanity. She explained the limitations of time travel: Timelines are gathered into clusters called Attractor Fields, within all timelines converge to certain events. One of these events was Mayuri's imminent death. In order to escape this fate, he would have to make drastic changes to the timeline to escape the current Attractor Field. The only way to do this: Undoing all the changes he made to the timeline before Mayuri died.

It wasn't easy. One by one, he had to hunt down the messages people had sent to the past. Sacrifices had to be made. Suzuha's memories of her time in the year 2010 were undone. Faris's message had saved her father's life, so his life had to be undone. Ruka went back to being trapped in a body she hated. All willingly accepted their sacrifices in the name of saving Mayuri, but his resolve finally broke when he realized the final sacrifice he would have to make to save Mayuri: In the original timeline, Kurisu was murdered.

Fallen into despair, Okabe once again returned to trying to protect Mayuri by other means, but it was impossible. He had to choose one or the other. When he finally told this to Kurisu, she told him that she would never forgive him if he chose to kill Mayuri just to save her life. After a final confession of love, Kurisu left for the states, shutting herself off from Okabe, and Okabe sent the final message to cross the Attractor Field wall, saving Mayuri's life at the cost of all of his time spent together with Kurisu being retroactively undone.

Things might have ended there, but the new timeline's Suzuha appeared before Okabe in her own time machine, telling him that she needed his help to change the past one more time to prevent World War III. He refused, already too scarred by his history with time machines, until Suzuha revealed that the only way to do this was to reach the single timeline in the valley between the two Attractor Fields, one where Mayuri and Kurisu both survive.

Suzuha and Okabe traveled back in time to the day he discovered Kurisu's body, and Okabe laid in wait for Kurisu's killer, who turned out to be her own father. However, when he tried to save her, in the process of attempting to dispatch her killer, Okabe accidentally stabbed Kurisu, bringing about her death with his own hands. He returned to the present a broken man, beyond the reach of hope, but a message from his future self revealed to him the only way to save her - after all, his past self already saw her body, so it couldn't be undone. He returned to the past one last time, this time driving off Kurisu's killer without killing him, but was grievously wounded in the process. After doing this, he knocked Kurisu unconscious, and dropped her in a pool of his own blood, thusly tricking his past self into thinking she was dead.

Okabe returned to a present where Mayuri and Kurisu were both alive, but only Mayuri knew who he was. By chance, he ran into Kurisu on the street, and they introduced themselves to each other again, Okabe full of memories of all the other timelines, and Kurisu drawn to him by a strange sense of deja vu.

Reincarnated History:
Chris's history is very similar to his past self, aside from everything that happened after the time machine was discovered. The place is different - Chris is born and raised in Locke City. His parents, although both Japanese by heritage, were both born on American soil, and his Japanese is about as bad as Rintarou's English (read: horrible).

Chris's life has been fairly uneventful. His parents are rather well-off (mom's a lawyer, dad's a middle manager at a tech company), so he's lived a pretty privileged life. He got deep into anime and video games early in life, and stuck with them ever since, a thorough and self-proclaimed geek.

There WAS an event in junior high mirroring his experience with Mayuri and her grandmother's death that sparked the invention of Hououin Kyouma. I'll leave who the friend was undetermined, to leave it as a possible retcon plot hook, but somebody lost someone close to them, and he cheered them up with his strange, roundabout way of expressing his refusal to give up on them as a friend by way of pretending to be a mad scientist.

After graduating from high school - still keeping in touch with a lot of his underclassman friends - he was accepted into Locke University, where he is currently just starting.

First Echo: Watching the first episode of Elementary up to the point where a murdered woman's corpse is discovered, recalling Kurisu's bloody body.

Preincarnation Personality:
In a sense, there are two different people: Rintarou and Kyouma. The Insane Mad Scientist Hououin Kyouma is a persona that Rintarou consciously created, based on the villain of a sentai series he had been watching at the time. Initially, Kyouma was created as part of a weird attempt to cheer Mayuri up, but he has since evolved into an elaborate Original Character Do Not Steal. Most of his interactions with people are as Kyouma, much to the confusion and annoyance of most of his peers. As Kyouma, Okabe is melodramatic and prone to over-the-top monologues about his own insane genius, making constant references to an enigmatic "Organization" that opposes his every move.

The thing about Kyouma, though, is that Okabe doesn't actually believe in any of that. He's not a delusional paranoid - he pretends to be Kyouma because it's fun to him. He treats most of life as an elaborate game, and when there are actual consequences to acting like a ridiculous loser, he's fully capable of dropping the act and acting like a normal, civilized human being.

The result of this weird duality is that Okabe is a constant seesaw of highs and lows. When he's in a good mood, he strides and poses and laughs maniacally. When he's up against a wall, he falls into dark, quiet stupors. Half aware of the connection between being Kyouma and feeling in control of his life, sometimes Okabe will deliberately, awkwardly attempt to put up the Kyouma face as a defense mechanism, at least trying to convey to people who know him that everything is okay, so that he can shoulder all of his pain himself.

Man, speaking of shouldering pain alone, this is something Okabe does way too much! He's self-reliant to a fault, taking blame and responsibility for everything around him. Okabe has an extremely strong sense of friendship, to the point that he'll make great sacrifices for the happiness of his friends. It takes a lot of outside prompting to get him to realize that a lot of those friends would actually feel better about being able to help share his burdens, rather than him suffering alone. In his mind, suffering alone is a virtue, because it means that others suffer less, because he doesn't really have a very strong sense of empathy.

For all his mad scientist trappings, Okabe really isn't a very good scientist. Even in the lab, he doesn't make so much as the most rudimentary allusions to the scientific method - he experiments like somebody who's never heard the word "experiment" outside of a B horror movie. In general, he's not very good at big-picture problem solving, constantly overlooking the obvious and failing to come up with decent plans. Where he shines is in single-minded determination. Once Okabe has a goal, he latches onto it and never lets go, fully prepared to throw away his happiness, dignity and well-being to see it through.

Any differences:
The main source of difference between Rintarou and Chris is the place they grew up - one in Akihabara, Japan, and one in Locke City, America. Chris isn't being constantly bombarded on all sides by otaku culture, which means that in order to get this deep into Weirdo Geekville, he had to seek it out himself. Accordingly, he's more of an active anime/gaming nut than his past self (Rintarou had a passing interest in mecha anime but otherwise showed little to no personal interest in the culture), and generally spends a lot more time online. He illegally downloads the shit out of most of his entertainment, posts on a dozen different message boards, and regularly (poorly) trolls people on 4chan. His pop culture references, of which he makes a lot, tend to slant towards being incomprehensible to the mainstream audience.

American society, particularly in his most recent slice of it, high school - is also considerably less accepting of Hououin Kyouma than his past life's parade of Akiba goons. Spending most of your waking hours pretending to be a mad scientist is a fast track to complete social isolation, which is why Chris spends a lot more time being Chris than Rintarou does being Rintarou. Instead of his near-universal identity, Chris wears Kyouma like a secret superhero alter ego: To be used with close friends or total strangers. Friends are people he knows well enough that they won't be too weirded out by his brand of lunacy, and strangers are just one-off encounters anyway, so who cares what they think? But in a larger social circle, such as a classroom or group of friends of friends, he instead defaults to at least a slightly more toned-down version of his default behavior. Online, of course, he is always Hououin Kyouma.

Abilities: Has the obscure and probably irrelevant ability to retain his memories of the former present after a change to the past changes the timeline.

Roleplay Sample - Third Person:
Roleplay Sample - Network:
Both here.

Any Questions? Okay, I'm fully expecting this to be a no, but at least hear me out on this.
In the first half of canon, Okabe has a crude, highly limited time machine at his disposal. It can send a text message to any phone the user knows the number for, to be received at any arbitrary point in the past. Immediately after it's send, the present reconfigures itself to account for the message being received in the past, and only Okabe remembers the old timeline. As an example, if Bob uses the machine to send a D-mail to himself telling himself not to buy a new cell phone, then (assuming his past self believes him) the timeline would change to one where Bob had no memory of ever buying the new phone, sticking instead to his old phone. Okabe, meanwhile, would remember Bob with the new phone, and if he didn't know about Bob's message, would be confused as to when Bob went back to using his old phone.

Is this something that could be regained in the game? I'd be very careful with its usage, clearing anything that might affect the plot with the mods. Anything that would be problematic for the metaplot (or for other player plots) could be handwaved as being impossible due to Attractor Field convergence forcing any attempts to change those events to fail.

If this is too much of a can of worms, that's totally fine, but I had to at least ask. Time machine! If it flies, then I revise the Reincarnated History slightly to clarify that instead of living on campus, Chris loves in a small apartment in the space over a store that repairs, refurbishes and sells old electronics.

Note: I was super inconsistent in the app for some reason, but to clarify: Rintarou and Kyouma are given names, Okabe and Hououin are surnames.