Application
PLAYER INFO
Name/Nickname: ellie
Age: Old enough to rent a car :-)
Journal: darkluna
AIM/MSN/IM: darkluna08
Email: malycef[at]gmail[dot]com
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Mail "Matt" Jeevas
Canon: Death Note
Point taken from canon: Post-death
Age: 19
Gender: Male
Preferred Village:
Note that some of Matt's background is headcanon and/or conjecture, so I placed it in the "Other" section."
Appearance: Matt's slight and skinny, about 5'5" and 115 pounds. He's not very physically active, and is wiry instead of muscular. He has blue eyes and brown hair, which he wears in a shaggy bowl cut, falling far enough into his face to brush the orange-tinted goggles he only takes off to sleep. Those and his clothes-jeans, boots, big black gloves, and most often a striped shirt-are a sort of protective camouflage, both to make himself feel more at ease and so that he'll seem like a harmless, vaguely punk kid. He's good-looking in a boyish sort of way, with a straight nose that tips slightly up at the end and a wide mouth that wears a smile more naturally than any other expression. He's rarely without a cigarette.
Background: Canon gives very little concrete information about Matt. All we really know is that he was orphaned at some point and was sent to Wammy's House, the orphanage dedicated to the purpose of grooming a successor for L, the greatest detective in the world. Matt was ranked third of the potential successors. He was friends with Mello, who was second in line.
When Matt was about 13, the serial killer Kira began activities. It's not clear if Matt ever knew Kira was Light Yagami, or that the murder weapon was a notebook belonging to a god of death; but everyone on earth knew L was trying to catch Kira.
In 2004, L lost that fight and was killed. Mello left Wammy's to take up the case on his own. The top student, Near, also left the House to work on the case in his own way, recruiting FBI and CIA agents to form a task force, the SPK. Mello contacted Matt for help five years later, and Matt went to Los Angeles. There, he helped Mello with video and on-the-street surveillance, focusing on the Japanese police force members (the NPA), and on Misa Amane, who had been the second Kira. When the NPA and Amane went back to Japan, Mello and Matt followed them.
Not long after, Kira appointed an official spokesperson, Kiyomi Takada, an anchor at the Japanese station NHN. Since L's death, public opinion had slowly shifted so that most people were either outright supporters of Kira, or too frightened to openly oppose him.
Mello was in contact with Halle Lidner in the SPK, and through her, he found out about Near's plan to catch Kira by allowing the task force members' names to be written in the notebook. Mello a formulated a counter-plan meant to force the issue and claim victory for himself over Kira and Near. Matt's part was simply to provide a diversion for Mello to kidnap Takada. He fired a smoke bomb into NHN headquarters from his car and drove off, with a small army of bodyguards after him, while Mello grabbed Takada under the pretense of rescuing her. Matt led his pursuers on a chase through the streets of Tokyo, but there were so many that he never had a chance. They surrounded his car, and when Matt got out to try to talk his way out of the situation, they shot and killed him.
Personality: Matt is laid-back and easygoing, mostly because he just doesn't care. He's not emotionally engaged with much of anything, and comes off as having a Zen attitude because of this. As far as he's concerned, in a perfect world, he'd be left alone to play games, and would never socialize. However, the few friends he has made have his loyalty, to the extent that he was willing to help Mello in a fight Matt would never have gotten involved with otherwise. He's smart, but spent so much of his early years with insanely smart people that he doesn't think of his own intelligence as much greater than average. He is proud of his more specialized skills, though, and can be cocky about his abilities in those areas.
Matt's very shy, and tends to be awkward when interacting with people. Despite this, his demeanor is friendly, even cheerful. He speaks with a slangy, casual style, and curses fairly often. His persona is not exactly a front, but he does try to keep from calling too much attention to himself. He has a number of coping techniques for when he has to get out into the world and interact with people, the most noticeable being the goggles he always wears to hide his eyes. In a world where a serial killer needs only to see someone's face to kill them, this is partly practical, but Matt would probably wear them anyway. He has a short attention span and is easily bored, so he usually carries a DS. Like smoking, playing games is something to do with his hands, and helps make him feel more comfortable.
It takes a lot to make Matt angry, but he's definitely capable of a slow burn or an outburst if pushed too far. When something gets past his general apathy enough for him to believe in it, he's a true believer.
Abilities/Strengths: Matt may not be the smartest character in Death Note, but he's still a genius. He has an affinity for electronics, and good observational skills. At Wammy's House, he studied several subjects that were quite advanced for his age, and likely learned several languages. He definitely seems to know enough Japanese to conduct surveillance on people who speak it natively, and he can probably also get by in most Romance languages. He would also have learned about investigative procedures (both by-the-book and not-so-legal), forensics, and criminal psychology. HTR13 lists his emotional strength as relatively high, indicating he's resilient and self-sufficient.
Weaknesses: Matt is ill at ease with people, and much prefers observing them from afar to interacting with them directly. Due to his poor social skills, his mouth has a tendency to run ahead of his brain when he has to talk to others. He lacks ambition, almost to the point of laziness, but when he does take on a task, he does it to the best of his abilities. It's just unusual for him to care enough about anything to make much of an effort. Neatness is one thing he doesn't care about: he's a slob, and lives mostly on junk food. Physical strength isn't one of his strong points either. He's underweight and shorter than average, and has little to no experience with physical confrontation. In general, he's a person to whom things happen, instead of someone who makes them happen.
Defining Quote(s):
"They are each the hero of their own stories. They don't know that they aren't the main character and are only there to move the plot along."
--Jim MacDonald, on minor characters
I made a mistake, chalked it up to design
I cracked through time, space, Godless and dry
I point my nose to the northern star,
Watch the decline from a hazy distance
--REM, "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us"
Other: Matt definitely likes video games, and I think he's probably generally geeky as well, and enjoys reading science fiction and fantasy. It never outright says so in the series, but I believe he was the one who set up the surveillance on Misa's apartment, and the computers he's seen using once he meets up with Mello, since Mello doesn't seem to have had those in place before Matt joined him. I think he knows his way around just about any computer system, and it seems likely he has some programming and cracking skills, too.
His early life is necessarily entirely headcanon. Matt has to be from somewhere, and for the purposes of the game, I've chosen the eastern seaboard of the US (just outside Philadelphia). My admittedly unsubstantiated theory is that he was orphaned relatively young, but wasn't picked up by Wammy's until later than the other children, possibly around ten or eleven years old. He would have bounced around the foster care system for some time. I think Matt developed his detached attitude early in life as a self-defense mechanism in reaction to being shuffled around so much: he knew making himself at home anywhere would only backfire. This is my explanation for why he seems to have been perfectly happy as third, and for why he seems not to have exerted himself a lot in his studies, nor cared about the rankings the way Mello did. Matt was old enough by the time he got into Wammy's that he didn't buy into the successor rivalry with the same emotional intensity as his friend. I also think he's pretty indifferent to L, both as a person and a concept.
After Mello and Near both left Wammy's in 2004, there's no canon information about what Matt did. I think he also drifted away from the House soon after, and made a living using his computer skills, keeping as low of a profile as possible.
Third Person Writing Sample:
"Easy as hell, in and out; you scatter 'em, I'll do the rest."
Mello was talking too fast, too loose and casual, in that way maybe only Matt had spent enough time around him to recognize as overacted confidence. And Mello only did that when his abundant natural store of it wasn't cutting it somehow.
"Yeah, I got it. What about you?"
Mello lifted the ever-present bar of chocolate to his mouth, but then he set it on the table without snapping off a bite. Matt stared. The tinny sound of a Mario biting the dust played from the DS.
"What about you, M?"
"I'll be fine."
Matt didn't believe it, not for a second, but he knew he wouldn't be getting any more out of his friend.
Morning after a restless night, and Matt fought the urge to give their goodbye a gravity he knew damn well Mello wouldn't appreciate. "See you when it's over," was all he said, in the end.
Mello smirked. "See you when we've won."
It did seem easy at first, the smoke bomb launched, the motorcycle speeding off in Matt's rearview mirror, Takada on back. He got a little breathing room, ahead of the cops, and gunned it.
Then it all went to hell.
Fucking unmarked cars pouring out of every side street, seemed like, like ants, like cockroaches. Nuclear holocaust, nothing left but fundamentalists and Kira fags. Matt laughed around the cigarette, and ashes flew. Geek equivalent of your life flashing before your eyes: all your favorite references come back to say hi one last time, because this might be it, huh?
"I aim to misbehave," he muttered, and took a turn hard enough to pull some Gs.
Then, there they were, a wall of cars blocking the way out of the intersection; they'd gone around. "Hm."
Matt braked hard, skidded to a stop, leaned out the window.
And heard the sound of about a hundred safeties being taken off about a hundred guns.
So fucking many, and they didn't even have their flashers on, which pissed Matt off for some reason. Send me off with some ceremony, assholes. His head buzzed with a weird elation. Maybe they'd bury him in the car. He'd always thought it would be more Mello's style to flip a double bird as his final salute to the world. Oh well. He took a big drag on his cigarette. Like smoking was gonna kill him at this point. In a distant sort of way, he was amused. It wasn't like he hadn't known what he was in for. Mello had said they'd only want to take him into custody, but Matt hadn't forgotten that chocolate sitting uneaten on the table.
So he smirked as he climbed out of his car, cigarette on his lip, gun at his back. "Okay, okay, you got me." If he'd learned anything from his best friend, it was to never let 'em see you scared.
He half-believed they wouldn't fire right up until he saw the flashes of the shots.