Application for entranceway
Name: Kristen
LJ: mouthofbrass
E-Mail: kristen[at]spectrumvoid.net
IM: MadMadPhineas
Character Name: Aikawa Yuu
Series: Doubt
Timeline: Post-mortem
Canon Resource Link: Wikipedia article
Character Background: (I tried to make this as simple as possible, but the plot is convoluted and not easy to summarize, and I don't really know how to talk about Yuu outside the context of canon events so...sorry. ;;)
Yuu is a pretty normal dude. He's in high school, has a bff named Mitsuki who wears a weird, physics-defying barrett in her hair, and plays an online game called Rabbit Doubt (well it's actually played via cell phones, but whatever). This game involves a group of "rabbits", one of whom is randomly assigned to be the "wolf", and kill off all the others before he or she is found out. If the rabbits identify the wolf correctly, they win; if not, they all die.
One day, Yuu and four of his Rabbit Doubt buddies (Eiji, Haruka, Rei, and Hajime) decide to all meet up in person for the first time. Hajime doesn't show, but Mitsuki turns up before the others arrive and ends up tagging along as well. They go to do karaoke, but are all abducted and taken to a warehouse type of building. When they wake up, Hajime (a medical student) is with them. However Rei, a wheelchair-bound girl who used to hypnotize people on TV before being revealed as a fraud, has already been killed.
They soon discover that they are basically in a real life version of Rabbit Doubt. Each of them has been given a barcode, which will open one door in the building. That door will thereafter be programmed only to unlock with that specific barcode. Yuu, however, doesn't have a barcode and becomes increasingly nervous about this being found out as they explore the building. Though he's initially suspicious of Hajime, as the only person who wasn't with them at karaoke, he soon finds out that Hajime wasn't there because he'd apparently received a message from Yuu saying the time and place of the meeting was changed. This on top of the fact that he has no barcode keeps Yuu from pointing fingers at anyone, and he further starts to trust Hajime because of the logical and calm way Hajime approaches the situation they're in.
During the initial phase of everyone waking up and finding each other and seeing the dead girl and fighting and figuring out what the heck is going on, Yuu reassures Mitsuki that he'll protect her and tries to keep the peace between the other players, at one point physically intervening when Eiji tries to attack Hajime and again when Eiji tries to punch Mitsuki. The others don't suspect Yuu of having lied about his barcode, and even Hajime, despite apparently receiving that message from him, is willing to trust Yuu's judgment when it comes to how they should go about trying to find the person who did this to them. All of this indicates that Yuu in general gives off a trustworthy sort of vibe and at least tries to approach things from a cooperative angle (though his initial suspicions of Hajime show that he's not immune to emotional responses and doesn't have Hajime's level of analytical coolness).
Unfortunately, there are fewer barcodes than there are doors, so they have to do a bit of guesswork. Eiji ends up getting locked in a room by Hajime because he wasted his barcode opening up a bathroom. Hajime wants to leave him there rather than waste another barcode getting him out (especially since they've deduced that the room Eiji is in has no other exit and therefore is of no use to them), while Mitsuki wants Yuu to use his barcode to help Eiji. Afraid to admit that he has no barcode, Yuu sides with Hajime, saying that at least Eiji will be safe in a locked room. Mitsuki is clearly upset and surprised by this. This reaction supports earlier scenes from when they were at karaoke which show that Yuu's actually a very compassionate and understanding person who tries his best to help people. In this case, however, his nervousness about the others suspecting him causes him to go against his nature somewhat, showing that he's far from infallible even when it comes to his best traits: under pressure, he will often do what's easiest and immediately best for himself rather than taking the high road and entering arguments that put him in jeopardy.
Next they open up some sort of creepy medical room and find a dude wearing a giant rabbit mask and high on morphine inside, looking at some surveillance monitors. The dude attacks Yuu when they pull off his mask, but then dies due to a poisoned pin hidden inside the mask that pricked him when the mask was pulled off. Turns out that guy wasn't the real wolf, just a red herring accomplice. On top of that, while Yuu is struggling with him, Haruka notices that he has no barcode on his stomach, where he'd said it was when asked earlier. Hajime points out the pin in the mask that probably killed the man, and Yuu is temporarily paralyzed by guilt at the idea that he was the one who killed him.
Next they find a room with a bunch of books (which they get into by using the dead dude's barcode, since Haruka's and Mitsuki's were both used on doors in the upper story of the warehouse), and Haruka finds a folder with information about each of them. This includes information about Mitsuki, who was supposedly with the group by chance. This leads Haruka and then Hajime to assume that Yuu and Mitsuki are behind the whole thing. They lock Mitsuki in the bathroom, then tie Yuu up and leave him in the room with the surveillance monitors. Haruka, not trusting Hajime either, goes and locks herself in the room they started out in, while Hajime explores on his own.
While he's alone, terrified that he's going to be found and killed, Yuu watches on the monitors while a person wearing another creepy, gigantic rabbit mask kills Eiji in the closed room he's in. Hajime returns and after Yuu tells him what he saw, they go to investigate. The door of the room where Eiji was trapped is now open, but it is jammed with something so that they can't enter. However, they are able to see Eiji hanging by his neck from the ceiling and a cellphone on the ground near the door. Hajime makes Yuu reach into the room to get it, even though the door being jammed from the inside means that the killer is probably still in there.
Yuu reaches his hand in and pulls out the phone...only to have Eiji's severed hand come with it.
8|
Luckily, he can use the barcode on the wrist to release Mitsuki from the bathroom. Which he does after jumping Hajime and tying him up; since he couldn't see Hajime anywhere on the surveillance cameras during the time when Eiji was killed, he assumes Hajime is the murderer.
When he finds Mitsuki, she's a bit out of it from the beginning stages of an infection, but she comforts him as he breaks down and cries over the fact that he didn't protect her like he said he would and he lied about his barcode and that he wasn't able to help Eiji or Rei and because dsalkgfjdfg they are all going to die. Which is all pretty understandable considering the situation they're in.
After a little while he gets over it and he and Mitsuki start looking for clues. This brings up some backstory about Haruka and Eiji and how they're actually terrible people--the relevant part of this backstory is that Eiji killed someone in a gang fight and the person he killed was presumably Haruka's boyfriend, leading Yuu to think Haruka is the one behind Eiji's death at least. While looking for Haruka, they find another cellphone, and receive a call on it, which Mitsuki answers. All she hears is the phrase "for the one I love" which makes Yuu assume the call is from Haruka and is her way of confessing.
Following this, they find the door to the final room on the ground floor open. In the room is a bunch of nooses and weird rabbit masks and other things-for-killing-folks in it, as well as a door to the outside. Of course, they can't open the door to the outside and Yuu figures Haruka's left them there to die. Then Mitsuki passes out, Yuu takes her back to Hajime who helps her, and Yuu goes off alone and finds Haruka's severed head, which scares the crap out of him.
Thereafter follow some confusing shenanigans in which Yuu thinks Mitsuki's dead, he and Hajime fight a bit, and Hajime figures out who the wolf is. Unfortunately, he gets stabbed by someone in a mask before he can tell Yuu. Yuu helps him as much as he can, then goes and gets a crowbar and goes wolf hunting.
He finds the wolf and reveals its identity, but gets knocked out. When he comes to, we find out that lol the wolf is actually Mitsuki dressed like a dude, who is targetting liars. Needless to say, Yuu is confused and pretty upset. She is actually pretty crazy and convinced that he lied to her about being busy when in fact he was going with some girl they knew to buy a birthday present for her. Then she decided to give him a second chance by not giving him a barcode, figuring the others would suspect him and lock up him safely like they did Eiji, so she could kill all of them and then go off and live happily ever after with Yuu. But then Yuu lied about his barcode and now he's the scum of the earth.
She drags Hajime to where Yuu is, and Hajime admits he's actually an undercover detective trying to find a serial killer targetting people through the game Rabbit Doubt. He and Yuu manage to escape from their predicament and hide in the building, after which Yuu takes on Mitsuki again. During this, she reveals that she killed the girl Yuu had gone shopping with by showing him a bunch of pictures she took and then had printed of the girl's dead body. She also hits him in the head with a wrench and takes an ax to one of his legs, but he manages to best her with just a scalpel, totally by accident. Then, despite the fact that she has been trying to kill him, he's still determined to save her; obviously he either thinks that whatever is wrong with her is something that can be fixed or he's just too in shock to know what else to do but go along with his previous plan of protecting her no matter what. He carries her to the outside door with his axed leg but can't get it to open using her barcode.
This is because lmfao the wolf really isn't her. Turns out it's Rei-who-was-never-dead. After she was called a fraud and publicly humiliated as a child, her parents tried to commit group suicide with her. She survived and started hypnotizing people like Mitsuki to be her accomplices in this giant game of Rabbit Doubt. Turns out the cellphone call while they were looking for Haruka and other such signals were all to trigger certain programmed responses in Mitsuki.
Rei explains all of this and then leaves, but is nice enough to inform the police that they're still in the building. Yuu, Hajime and Mitsuki are all saved.
At the hospital, Hajime explains to Yuu that there is no physical proof that Rei was ever in the building, so Mitsuki will take the fall for all the murders/attempted murders. He then heads off to check out the crime scene again, hoping to find some evidence. Unfortunately, one of Rei's accomplices works for the forensics team and kills Hajime while they're there.
Meanwhile, Yuu sits in Mitsuki's room worrying. He sees a discarded cellphone under her bed, and when the phone rings he answers. Guess who it is.
Just guess.
Nope, you're wrong, it's Rei.
She tells Yuu about how Hajime is going to be killed and about how she called the police. She also explains that she's made it so that even if she dies, her hypnotized accomplices will make sure that these games keep going on. She manages to get him to say the phrase "for the one I love," then explains that this is actually a switch to put Mitsuki into killing mode. The manga ends with Mitsuki coming across the room with a knife to kill Yuu.
Note: The manga doesn't confirm that Yuu lives or dies. But Mitsuki managed to drag Hajime up a flight of stairs with just one hand and she also hauled Eiji's body up to hang it from the ceiling, so Rei's hypnotism must somehow allow her to overcome her body's normal strength/endurance limitations. Therefore I'm assuming she managed to kill Yuu, who was already wounded and couldn't walk without crutches.
Another note: Yuu would be coming into the mansion suffering from a bit of PTSD. Normally he's a pretty easy-going guy, but based on the events of his canon, on his initial entry and probably for the first two or three weeks, he'd be extremely paranoid and anxious.
Abilites/Special Powers: None.
Third-Person Sample:
"This time it really is goodbye."
For a second, Yuu was frozen, staring into the reflective surface of the window in front of him, watching Mitsuki pick up the knife off of the table. She shouldn't have been able to move--she'd been unconscious and anemic since they'd arrived--but there was no hesitation in her step.
The phone clattered to the floor at his feet as he turned, dodging the first swipe of the knife by a hairs-breadth.
"Mitsuki!" She didn't respond to his voice. There was no expression whatsoever on her face and he felt his whole body go cold as their eyes met. This wasn't Mitsuki. This wasn't his best friend. Whatever Rei had done to the girl in front of him, Mitsuki wasn't there anymore.
He tried again, anyway. He'd already failed her so many times--he hadn't been there for her when her father died, he hadn't protected her in the warehouse, he had lied to her... He had almost killed her. He couldn't give up on her now. "Mitsuki, please!"
She only stabbed at him again and as he evaded, his injured leg gave out under him and he fell. She was on him in an instant and terror filled him like it had so many times in the past day. He brought his arms up uselessly to shield himself, closing his eyes so that he wouldn't have to stare into her vacant face as she killed him.
He felt the knife in his throat and then he felt nothing at all. He stayed still for what seemed like a long time, and when he finally opened his eyes again and lowered his arms, he could only stare in surprise. He stood slowly, using the closed door beside him to get up off of the floor. He was in a Western-style house that looked almost abandoned, but not in disrepair. It was definitely not the hospital. It wasn't anywhere he'd ever been in his life.
Somehow, finding himself in an unfamiliar place was only slightly less unsettling the second time.
First-Person Sample:
M-Mitsuki? Where'd you go? I thought--
This--this isn't the hospital. What is this place? How did I get here? Didn't I just d--
[He doesn't finish that thought. There's a long pause.]
...Please tell me this isn't another game. I really can't handle another one.