Jai Singh

BASIC INFO​

APPEARANCE​

Jai does his best to look the part of a med student, or at least how people would like to think they should look. Most of his fellow students look perpetually exhausted, but thanks to use of his power, Jai generally looks just fine, as if he hasn't been up for four days. He has bright blue eyes and short blond hair, and he keeps himself clean shaven primarily for health reasons. He's pale, and stands 5'11". He dresses nicely, and wears a lot of hats to make up for his lack of turban, even if he knows it's not quite the same.​

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Jai always wears a plain steel bracelet around his right wrist. His kara is smooth, with no engravings so that he can easily wash it. He wears it constantly, and is never seen without it.[/align]​

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PERSONALITY​

Jai's a friendly person, which makes him a good choice for student tours. He's perpetually upbeat, and always there with a smile. He's quick to make friends, and does his best to help people out, even if they wouldn't necessarily return the favor. While he gets angry, he does his best to let go of grudges and treat people fairly. This doesn't mean being gullible - it just means he's not going to go out of his way to help someone he knows has hurt him in the past.​

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He's, if anything, a bit of a goodie two shoes. His eagerness to help means he's considered a teacher's pet by many, and his refusal to drink or smoke has also made him seem like he's too eager to please. For the most part, he's not actually naturally helpful. He has to force it, and he's doing his best to keep things like forgiveness in mind.​

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His biggest dilemma is magic. The Guru Granth Sahib is simultaneously extremely clear and extremely vague on the subject of magic. While it mentions magic, it only mentions magic specifically used for evil or trickery. On powers like his families, it remains totally silent. He's decided the most logical way to treat magic is to treat it the way he does everything else: To use it for good if possible, and to not make mischief with it otherwise. When it comes to demons and other species that seem to exist to cause humanity harm, he's a bit more hesitant.​

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As far as himself, the issue he struggles with most is vanity. He knows that he should return to keeping kesh when he graduates, but he's grown attached to the look of his clean shaven face. He feels more presentable that way, and he spends far more time than he's used to getting ready in the morning as a result.​

POWERS​

Storage: Jai's power is an intrinsic part of himself. Despite no one ever explaining it to him, he understands it as naturally as a human understands how to breath. His power allows him to store not objects, but instead things that affect him personally. One month is really the absolute limit of this power. If he hasn't used up his stored sleep after a month, it essentially stops being stored. As a general rule, the majority of his caching works by a rule of two, going half as fast now to go twice as fast later.​

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Sleep: Jai can store sleep in order to combat tiredness later. If he has a lot of time to sleep, he can sleep excessively, storing it up for later use. Then, when he needs to stay up for four days straight, he can burn his stored sleep, leaving him acting as if he's only just slept.​

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Energy: His use of energy is much like his use of sleep. Jai is always the proper physical weight because he's capable of 'storing' excess energy with his power, a process not unlike the way the body stores fat, only far more efficient. He still has to digest the food to turn it into energy in the first place, which means he can't stuff himself without feeling sick to his stomach, but he can comfortably eat more than his weight would allow, and then skip meals later without consequence.​

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Physical Speed: Jai can store his own physical speed for later use. If he knows he has 20 minutes to get to class, and could walk there in 10 minutes, he can sap his own speed, leaving him moving half as fast so he gets there right on time. This lets him use that speed later, so that when he's late for class, he could run there in five minutes. Of the five things he can currently store, this is the newest, and he's still working on applications for it.​

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Health: Health, while the most practical sounding, is the storage he uses the least. In theory, it allows him to recover from injuries by healing faster. In practice, he's got a decent enough immune system that he doesn't make much use of it. On days home after cleaning, he'll have 'sick days', where he stores up his own immune responses, essentially compromising his own immune system for the day. In exchange, he can recover from injury or illness. If he were to have a cold, he'd recover around twice as fast, and the same goes for minor injuries.​

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Senses: By far the most useful of his storage abilities is the ability to store senses. While he can apply this to any of his senses, eyesight and hearing are the two that get used the most. In particular, this is the only storage ability he has where reducing something is a particular benefit. If he's studying, he can half his hearing, reducing the amount of outside distraction, and allowing him to hear whispered conversations later. Eyesight is also used well - he has no true need to squint when he can burn stored vision to be able to see perfectly clearly.​

BIOGRAPHY​

Jai's father spent the first half of his life doing wildlife photography, although Jai knows that part of him only from saved photos. Four years before Jai was born, his father was doing a shoot on state animals, and photographing the black buck in India. Stalking through bushes, he was bitten by a Krait on the ankle, although he didn't realize what it was. With no swelling or other signs, he was convinced he was fine, and it was only hours later when paralysis began to set in that he realized anything was wrong. Far from the closest village, he ended up lying on the ground helpless, unable to walk and too exhausted to drag himself further. As Jai's father tells it, he prayed to every god he knew of for help, certain he was going to die - and then, as he prayed to the god of the Sikhs, two Sikh farmers emerged from the bushes to find him, taking him back to civilization and ensuring he got the antivenom.​

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Jai has his doubts about just how realistic his father's story is, and he's pretty sure it's been heavily adjusted in the years since. Even so, the majority of it is at least true - he truly was bitten by a krait, he was saved by two Sikh farmers, and his brush with death gave him a newfound appreciation for Sikhism, a religion he knew next to nothing about. He spent the next few years studying, converted, and later met his wife when doing physical therapy. While he lived, the muscles in his leg were damaged, and he walked with a limp from that point after.​

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Jai's mother is a soft spoken woman with an unusual gift. Her touch could aid people in healing, leading to her work as a physical therapist. It was there that she met Jai's father, and she joined him in Sikhism, although not as devoutly as her husband. Jai followed a year after they were married, and his sister followed a few years after that. While not immediately obvious, both Jai and his sister were blessed with their own unique gifts, although neither was explicitly a healer like their mother.​

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While born and raised in Canada, Jai's invitation to Starlight Academy arrived in a timely enough manner. Even so, his family didn't move to Manta Carlos until years later. They were happy where they were, and neither Jai nor his mother's gifts were obvious enough to draw unnecessary attention. It wasn't until his sister began showing signs of being gifted in a much more obvious way that they made the decision to move.​

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They settled on Manta Carlos, living there much as they had in Canada. His father worked as a wildlife photographer and dreamed of running a gurdwara when money permitted. His mother worked as an accountant, although she complained frequently that Manta Carlos tax law was so much simpler she was halfway out of a job. His father was khalsa, although no one else in the family joined him, and for the first few years on the island, Jai kept kesh. It was only when he chose his college degree that he cut his hair for the first time, shaving himself clean. It was a strange experience, but for the most part it was one chosen out of necessity. It was not a requirement that he grow his hair out, and his inability to pull on a mask was a constant hindrance.​

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He graduated with honors before moving onto med school, doing student tours and other jobs around the school for cash. He strove to keep himself expense-neutral to be as little a burden on his parents as possible.​

EXTRA INFO​