Kai Williams / Hokuikekai

BASIC INFO​

APPEARANCE​

Despite his rather unusual nature, Kai looks relatively normal. He can easily pass for fully human, and without any advanced warning of his unique situation, very few people will guess he's anything but. It's only his words and actions that give the game away. His coloring takes most closely after his darker skinned father, although his facial features more closely mimic his mothers. Kai stands at a rather average height of 5'7", and he tends to slouch unless he's making a point of paying attention to it. Kai looks mostly healthy, if a bit skinny, and it's only when he really has to exert himself (whether running or otherwise) that it becomes obvious he's simply not up to that level of physical activity.

Kai wears his hair in dreadlocks, and on hot days will tie them back. His clothing varies, although often comes off a bit too formal for his age, and is always immaculate. Any dirt on his clothes seems to mysteriously vanish, and any creases are neatly pressed out without him doing a thing.​

PERSONALITY​

If someone asked Kai to describe himself, he'd have a hard time of it. The truth is that Kai, as strange as it sounds, doesn't feel like he has a personality. He knows he did once growing up, but he's spent so long being sick that being sick felt like all he had. It was hard to socialize while sick, hard to go to school while sick, and the sicker he got, the less he did. For the last year he'd done next to nothing beyond clinging to life, and his abrupt return to the land of the living has left him confused.

It doesn't help that he's frequently confused, dealing with thoughts and memories that are literally not his own. He certainly didn't have any interest in astrophysics, haven't barely managed to scrape through the bare minimum of a GED, and yet he suddenly finds himself with an intense interest and understanding of polytropes, wormholes, and nucleosynthesis. He shares his brain and his thoughts with Hokuikekai, and there's no clear dividing line between the two of them. His thoughts are often not his own, which is disorienting even at the best of times. Hokuikekai's own personality is a bit of a mess, mapping poorly onto a human emotional spectrum. He knows that he - and his guest - are both passionate debaters, but he's not entirely clear how much of that is him, and how much of that is Hokuikekai.

Being functionally two people has also left him with more than a little bit of pronoun confusion. If he has a stance on some sort of council business, is that 'him' having the opinion? Or is it 'they'? Are his thoughts 'I' or 'We' or 'Him'? Any of them could work, and the fact that maka are a species with no sex or gender analog makes the whole thing even more confusing. Everything about his new companion is firmly alien, and impossible to relate to. Even so, it's comforting in a way. Hokuikekai knows him better than anyone else ever could. He knows all of Kai's thoughts, his history, his goals - everything. Really, the only thing stopping Kai from calling Hokuikekai his soul mate is that he's not entirely clear on how much of his connection is an emotional one, and how much of it is his body reacting to the obvious physical one.​

POWERS​

Kai himself is a completely powerless human. Anything he has that might be considered a power is the result of him being the partner of a maka.​

SPECIES ABILITIES​

The maka are a species from one of the planets near Nu Geminorum, in the constellation Gemini. They are a spacefaring race, and are considered quite old by the standards of the Confederation. Despite their long age and impressive technical capacity, the number of living maka is extremely few, with the best estimates settling around two thousand individuals at most. The maka themselves have no lifespan to speak of, and do not age or grow in the way that earth species do.

Each maka is composed of a core and their mesh. The core is extremely dense, and is about twice the size of a golf ball. It serves as the power structure and brain for the maka's mesh. Damage to the core (chips, small cracks, etc) can be repaired over time. If the core itself splits or shatters completely, the maka themselves dies. Splitting their core is also the maka's method of reproduction. Assuming that the core is exposed to a high enough dose of a specific type of radiation which is primarily found on their home world, the core will split in two, producing two maka with a distorted copy of the original's memories and knowledge. The new maka have distinct personalities, and are fully capable of differentiating their own memories from those of their parent.

The second part of the maka is their mesh. The amount of mesh associated with a given maka can change significantly. Some will only have a small amount, while others will have mesh of a volume equivalent to a large dog. The mesh itself is a light grey, and when relaxed looks similar to sand. When held together, it forms a structure similar to extremely tiny chainmail, interlocking to harden and form structures. Maka have an extreme level of control over their mesh, allowing them to perform tasks on a microscopic scale. When held together, the mesh is extremely strong, but also extremely brittle. While it's capable of supporting heavy weights, sudden blows will cause the mesh to crack apart, dissolving back into it's sand like state. This make the maka experts of fine construction and production, but for the most part completely useless at any sort of military endeavours.

The maka have no spoken or written language. They communicate each time their mesh touches, a form of communication that is more direct and less emotional than any possible human speech. They can understand each other clearly at the slightest touch, the closest earth equivalent being pheromone communication.

In the specific case of Kai, Hokuikekai's core currently rests in the middle of his internal organs, nestled safely inside him. The mesh itself has spread throughout Kai's body, and serves the all important function of keeping him alive. When the two joined, almost all of Kai's organs were filled with tumors, functioning at a fraction of their proper capacity, if they were functioning it all. Hokuikekai has an unusually large amount of mesh to compensate, forcing kai to consume large amounts of vitamin C, which function as the primarily building blocks for producing more mesh. The mesh takes the place of Kai's internal organs, replicating each organ's individual functionality to the best of their ability. At the same time, they're also slowly rebuilding them, letting his organs heal millimeter by millimeter. Without the mesh, Kai would die within five minutes. Keeping Kai alive takes up the majority of Hokuikekai's existing mesh, with only small extrusions coming out otherwise. This allows him to manipulate the environment (as if he was using thousands of tiny fingers), but only within about a foot of his body, as the mesh can't travel very far from the core.​

BIOGRAPHY​

Despite only being twenty one, Kai feels like his childhood was impossibly far away. His happy childhood memories have faded after years in the hospital, and even before his move to Manta Carlos, he wasn't in contact with any of his old friends. He was first diagnosed when he collapsed at the age of twelve, and started treatment immediately. It was a constant string of chemotherapy, hospital visits, and tests. By thirteen, he was confined to the hospital full time, his immune system too compromised by repeated treatments. He was in remission at fifteen, but it lasted only a few months - not even long enough for him to return home before his cancer returned.

It seemed like a dull, painful hell. Treatment after treatment was tried, and bit by bit, Kai continued to get worse. He lost the use of his legs, even as he continued trying to do schoolwork to maintain some level of normalcy, and the treatments became more and more intense. They flew him to the mainland, to the best hospitals his parents could afford, and each new treatment seemed promising - that it might finally beat it.

In the end, he gave up. He was flown back to Hawaii, to the small hospital near his home, and treatment was halted. He was twenty, he had never graduated high school, and he'd spent almost his entire life in different hospitals. He had done nothing with his left but rot away, seeming to shrink with each passing year.

Hokuikekai's own history was much longer than Kais, and began before Kai's great great great grandfather was even born. The maka do not age, and have no true concept of maturity, with each maka springing into existence with the knowledge of everything their parent knew. Hokuikekai had a particular interest in other species, and immediately moved into the ranks of the confederation. They moved outward, jumping from planet to planet and helping to bring new species into the confederation. To Hokuikekai, the jump to earth seemed like the tiniest amount of time, and yet the planet itself was of particular interest. Nowhere else had they found a planet with so much natural species variety. Even discounting the other extraterrestrial life present, dozens of species still existed side by side in absolutely miniscule numbers. The slightest disruption could have caused the extinction of any number of species, and yet still they carried on.

Of course, holding a position while incapable of the standard form of human communication posed a challenge. They rapidly discovered that humans were nervous about the form of thought sharing used by the Maka, and so they set about solving the problem. The solution came in the form of a rarely used loophole in the rules about the veil. An exception existed that allowed the veil to be broken in limited circumstances in 'cases of life and death'. The exception itself did not specify whose death that was. While the law was obviously intended to protect the lives of those who knew of the veil itself, Hokuikekai liberally interpreted it to allow someone from the narrow reality, near death, to learn the truth.

For Kai, it meant the end of the hospital trips. The end of the visits. He was so incoherent that if Hokuikekai had been forced to speak to him, he would have died long before he'd understood. Hokuikekai didn't need to speak though - they'd simply swirled his way inside, granting Kai an understanding of what he was being offered. There was no real question about if he'd accept, considering that the alternative was finally succumbing to the cancer that had torn him apart for the majority of his life, but Hokuikekai had cared enough about the idea of human free will to at least ask.

To say that the next few months were hard was to massively undersell just how difficult it was. For Hokuikekai, it meant literally tearing out each and every cancerous cell in Kai's body. For Kai, it meant living through it, coughing up literal chunks of tumors and trying desperately to keep enough fluid and vitamin C in his body to keep Hokuikekai going. The longer it lasted, the more a part of him Hokuikekai became, until he could no longer even seperate his own thoughts from that of the alien inside him. He became immediately aware of both Hokuikekai's own needs, as well as Hokuikekai's own knowledge. He knew about Manta Carlos, about the confederation, about 'his' new position on the council. It was obvious enough when he finally returned on Manta Carlos, the council took the entire thing poorly, but had no real ground to object. Hokuikekai had broken no laws, and it was vastly easier for the council to function with all of their members able to speak freely, without the need of any pesky mind-invasions.

For Kai, Manta Carlos was both a familiar home and a completely new experience, and the clash of memories is something he continues to struggle with.
​

EXTRA INFO​