Accelerator (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
valevectorian) wrote2015-01-22 05:32 pm
valevectorian) wrote2015-01-22 05:32 pm
Entry tags:
Tu Shanshu Application: Accelerator
Player Information:
Name: Numi
Age: 32
Contact: Numikins @ AIM
Other Characters Played: N/A
Character Information:
Name: Accelerator
Canon: Toaru Majutsu no Index
Canon Point: New Testament Volume 10, end of Chapter 9
Age: 16
Reference Links: http://toarumajutsunoindex.wikia.com/wiki/Accelerator
Setting: Toaru Majutsu no Index takes place in a version of Earth sometime within the timeframe of 2008-2016, most likely 2015 based on a stray reference to a date and day of the week in an early volume. The precise year is never stated explicitly, only that it's been "over sixty years" since Aleister Crowley supposedly died in 1947. Supposedly, because in fact he is still alive. A magnificently talented doctor known as the Heaven Canceller saved Crowley's life. Crowley spent the next few decades building a large city that would eventually become known as Academy City, all while being a hermit hidden somewhere deep within the city and giving orders as the Chairman of Academy City's Board of Directors. Crowley's identity as the infamous magician Aleister Crowley is not common knowledge.
Academy City is located in the western region of Tokyo and houses a population of roughly 2.3 million people, 80% of whom are students. Academy City itself is essentially a giant city filled with schools, research facilities, and so forth. People don't raise families there. It's a place to send your kids for a good education. As such, the grand majority of people living there are students in dorms, teachers, and scientists and researchers. Academy City qualifies as an independent city-state with a government separate from the rest of Japan's. It is also the epicentre of scientific technology development and research in the entire world, to the point where the technology gap between AC and the rest of the world is twenty to thirty years. Within the context of the series, Academy City is known as the leader of the Science Side.
The other Big Thing about Academy City is the Power Curriculum Program. Scientists have found a way to scientifically engineer espers—psychics, if you need a different word for it. You know how diamonds and other precious gemstones that occur naturally in the world are considered highly valuable but may be rather small in quantity? They only occur under a certain set of conditions which can easily be extremely difficult to all match up naturally. But if you create an environment that contains all those conditions, then you can artificially create the same thing. Creating espers is like that. There are records of naturally created espers commonly referred to as Gemstones. Academy City artificially tries to replicate them.
Scientists use a number of methods including but not limited to drug therapy, hypnosis, and electrical stimuli to force a human's mental state out of touch with normal reality and unlock a "personal reality" of their very own. Theoretically, this unlocks a student's potential and eventually they learn to control their "personal reality," a reality where they are capable of manipulating a certain aspect of it. Over the course of these students' stay in Academy City it is expected that they develop their powers as much as possible. While everyone's potential is different, one of the strongest espers in the city got to where she did from as low as a Level One, proof that hard work and dedication is a viable route.
Put simply, the use of psychic powers in Toaru-verse works thus: espers take the current reality and replace it with a reality of their choosing. This is then inflicted on those nearby. However, an esper is limited to the one aspect of reality he or she can manipulate. A telepath can't do anything unrelated to telepathy. A pyrokinetic can't do anything unrelated to fire. A teleporter can only teleport. And so on. You have a base ability, and some are more versatile than others. Espers may also have other limitations depending on their power level and the requirements necessary for using an ability. Common potential limitations are needing to touch an object to affect it, and needing to use a physical object (paper clips, flashlight, remote control, etc) to focus an especially powerful ability.
Power levels are ranked on a six-level scale, going from Level Zero to Level Five. These are periodically measured through scientific testing via the System Scan. Over half of all students are Level Zero: normal people with weak or no powers that oftentimes cannot be detected by any equipment. From there the levels increase:
Level Zero: Person With No Powers
Level One: Person With Low Powers
Level Two: Person With Unusual Powers
The above three are considered not very useful in real life.
Level Three: Person With Strong Powers
Level Four: Person With Great Powers
Level Five: Person With Super Powers
The upper three levels are where elitism and true talent start to show themselves. Level Fours are generally considered equal to a one-person tactical force. Level Fives are exceedingly rare and, depending on the nature and versatility of their ability, can be considered one-person armies. Only seven Level Fives are known to exist: one who controls vectors, one who creates nonexistent matter, one who controls electricity, one who controls electrons, one with unimaginable telepathy-related abilities, an extremely powerful Gemstone whose powers cannot be explained scientifically . . . and nothing has yet to be revealed about the final Level Five.
There is also a mythical Level Six, Person With Absolute Power. It is thought that only the Number One ranked Level Five, Accelerator, has the potential to attain this. Sadly, under normal conditions it was theorized to take him over two hundred years.
Due to the rarity of them, there have been secret attempts at cloning Level Fives. The results proved that potential abilities are determined by one's DNA; all clones of the Number Three Level Five became electricity espers. The problem was the exponential difference in specs. Most were only Level Two or Level Three whose maximum outputs were insignificant fractions of the original. The idea of trying to create more Level Fives through cloning was abandoned. Instead, the clones were mass produced in even more secret to be used in a different experiment. One intended to level up Accelerator into a Level Six. Initial calculations for his level increase required that he battle 128 Railguns—that is, 128 of the Number Three Level Five. After some recalculation, it was determined that preparing 20,000 lower level clones would do the trick.
More of that will be detailed in the Personality section, and appears here due to the relevance to the setting. This is just how far the scientists in Academy City will go in pursuit of such a valuable existence as a Level Six.
One particular Level Zero of note is Kamijou Touma, a high school boy who possesses an ability known as Imagine Breaker. The city's System Scan was unable to pick up on anything remotely related to powers dwelling within him, but that is probably due to Imagine Breaker having an origin that is unrelated to psychic powers, as well as the nature of the power itself. His right hand from wrist to fingertips can negate anything it touches that is supernatural in origin. This is only useful against the likes of magic, psychic or divine powers, and it completely eliminates his luck. As such, Touma, the main character, is known for using Imagine Breaker as a special trump card against magicians, espers, and so on. He is a pivotal figure who just wanted a normal high school life if he could, but due to his abysmal luck levels is regularly dragged into conflicts that he must settle by destroying people's "illusions" that motivate their actions. He is an ordinary boy who doesn't follow any particular ideology, yet will risk his life to protect the smiles and wellbeing of a person in front of him that is suffering, even if that person is someone he once faced as an enemy in the past. Because of the influential power of what some refer to as the Kamijou Faction (in essence the comrades and allies who have gathered around him), he has become a target for elimination by many inside and outside of Academy City. Much of the series' plot revolves around him and the impact he has on the eventual power struggle between the Magic Side and Science Side.
The city also had a fairly active Dark Side, i.e. underworld, with a lot of unsavoriness going on. Many of the people in the Dark Side worked covertly under orders in small groups. Information on these groups came with high security levels. Their tasks ranged from taking out targets that needed to be eliminated for a number of reasons, to defending higher-ups and their people. Overall it boils down to lots of dirty work. Not everyone in the Dark Side was there willingly. Some were forced into it due to hostages and the like. Accelerator was one of these, joining GROUP at the end of V13 in order to better protect Last Order and his adoptive mothers Yomikawa and Yoshikawa and because he wound up saddled with a massive debt of several trillion yen in damages. At the end of the war (more on that further down), Accelerator threatened the Board of Directors into releasing everyone who had been forced into working for the Dark Side, earning freedom for himself and many others. This was not enough to eradicate the Dark Side completely, but the grand majority of people currently working in it are now there by choice.
Outside of Academy City, there are many sister research institutes that until recently worked in partnerships with Academy City. They broke off cooperation at the end of NT3 in response to the actions of the group of espers the magic cabal leader Leivinia Birdway brought to Hawaii. Aside from that, Academy City tends to maintain its position as the forerunner in the science community and hold very firmly onto its scientific secrets. Any technology and weapons distributed to the outside are always downgraded in specs, with special security measures included to prevent anyone from using the inner workings of the tech for themselves.
The secrets of psychic power development are equally well protected, both inside and outside the city, to the point where schools may require that their students only get their hair cut at approved hair salons with security cameras lest someone try to steal DNA samples by collecting hair. On top of that, the city is surrounded by a large, tall, thick, heavily guarded wall with tight security measures that scour everyone who comes and goes. Those without a permit or proper ID won't be getting in or out. Not even students may leave without permission. The entire city is under constant satellite surveillance. Streets always have security robots shaped like drums whizzing about to help with the blind spots of any satellite or stationary security camera.
As such, over time Academy City earned something of an elitist reputation. Much tension covers the globe over it. This, plus the natural tension between the three largest Christian institutions - the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church - and anything science-related, has made it such that during October of the Toaru timeline (the story starts in July and is currently in November), a certain turn of events finally resulted in World War III. It was a war of Science vs Magic, the supernatural powers system used by the religious institutions that is generally left unrecognized by scientific researchers whenever its existence is revealed in the first place. Magicians from all three divisions had already attempted invading Academy City on a number of occasions and riots had appeared in several parts of Europe by the time Russia declared war on Academy City.
Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church allied with the Roman Catholics, while the Anglican Church allied with Academy City. From there, the war escalated. Over the course of twelve long days Academy City overwhelmed Russia with its superior technology, giving them little chance to defend themselves or make non-useless attempts at breaking through Academy City's defense.
As it turned out, the man behind the war and pulling most of the strings was a member of God's Right Seat, a small group of magicians who had removed most of their original sin and attained special magic abilities. Each of them was aligned with a certain color and a certain archangel/elemental alignment. This man was Fiamma of the Right, whose color was red and archangel was Michael of Fire. He was an idealist gone wrong, a heretic who wanted to correct the imbalance in the elements of the world.
While he did succeed in correcting the imbalance and fixing the elemental alignments, the lengths to which he went to achieve this were the most extreme, and resulted in causing giant hundred-meter long arms to pop out of the lands and oceans all across the world, as well as nearly destroying a good portion of Eurasia with a giant blast of Telesma - angelic energy. He was stopped thanks to many people interfering in his plans, and his whereabouts are currently unknown to all but a few. The war ended on October 30th. There was some semblance of peace for a while. However, some magicians did not want the war to end. To them, the war's end was inconvenient, and Fiamma's group representing the Magic Side as the losing side was something they could not tolerate. They were GREMLIN, named after a type of occult fairy that causes machines and technology to malfunction.
GREMLIN have been working behind the scenes for their new goals, and have gone as far as to manipulate the American government, perform horrific experiments, target an unkillable woman of inexplicable nature being held prisoner in Academy City, and steal the internal organs of the second most powerful Level Five esper in order to bring about the results they want. Tipping the scales of power between the Science Side and Magic Side away from Academy City... and completing the spiritual weapon Gungnir so that the group's leader, Othinus, can become a complete Magic God and challenge the fixed ratio of 50% success, 50% failure that her infinite possibilities are stuck with. Othinus has goals of her own that she can only realize by switching the chances to 100% in either direction.
Personality: Accelerator is introduced as an antagonist of the sadistic, power-hungry sort, initially coming off as a veritable one-man army so unsatisfied with only being the most powerful esper that he yearned for the mythical Level Six and would pursue it no matter how much he had to stain his hands. However, this is soon revealed to be a persona he took on as a result of years of deliberate social isolation, a malicious and blackhearted environment that crafted him into believing he was the monster everyone else saw him as, and the conditioned belief that he needed to reject all forms of companionship in order to prevent others from being drawn into the conflict he would inevitably cause. To most, he was a monster whose only value was that as prize research material. His power, a highly destructive form of telekinesis that let him freely change the value of any vector he came in contact with, was a stigma that alienated him from everyone around him.
Early on, Accelerator became someone who stayed away from others and shut down his emotions. If no one saw reason to approach him or raise their hand against him because of what he said, did, or how he reacted, then maybe he wouldn't be the cause of conflict. Unfortunately, it did not yield good results. After being booted from the Special Ability Institute for being, in his own words, "absolutely uncontrollable," Accelerator was shuffled from facility to facility about every two months because no one could handle him for much longer than that. Sometime around the age of ten there was an accident involving children getting hurt that snowballed out of control. It brought in the military. This was when Accelerator truly despaired, lost hope in humanity, and gave himself up.
Because of this he decided that he had to change his strategy. His power created conflict. His power would not go away. If he could not get rid of his power, he would have to become an existence that prevented conflict, someone no one would want to approach in the first place.
The new solution he devised was to become the most powerful, most sadistic esper in Academy City, and gain such a horrific reputation as an untouchable existence that no one would ever dare wish to lift a finger against him. From that point on, anyone who tried attacking him would be destroyed to set an example for others in the future. He would scare them off. Anyone who tried to touch him would become an enemy. Those who kept their distance would walk away unharmed, even if it was only 10cm from him. His hope was that after enough time these sacrifices would yield the results of no one approaching Accelerator ever again.
Sometime around or after this, as a result of his involvement with the researcher Kihara Amata, Accelerator began to adopt the twisted, cool, sadistic personality he later on displays during the Level Six Shift Experiment, an inhumane experiment that boiled down to level grinding via combat experience: specifically the systematic murder of 20,000 clones of one of the other Level Five espers, an electromaster named Misaka Mikoto. In time Accelerator would become so hungry for absolute power that he lost sight of his true goals, making it hard to tell how much of that persona he put on for show was the real him. While initially hesitant about killing the first Misaka clone, he eventually allowed himself to believe the words of the scientists running the experiment: that the clones were nothing but living dolls made of chemicals and protein with no wills of their own, who would follow the experiment with no regard for their own lives. A clip of that encounter can be viewed here.
It is strongly implied that he deliberately said and did terrible things to the clones as a way to test their humanity or lack thereof, and therefore both verify that they really were as the researchers said, as well as justify to himself that his actions weren't murder. As well, it is implied he secretly wanted someone to stop him. He comes to these realizations as a result of Touma's and Last Order's words to him, during his defeat that signaled the experiment being frozen and at the restaurant where he takes Last Order on August 31st.
Over the course of the nearly three months since his introductory appearance, Accelerator has gone through a rollercoaster of development, searching within and around himself for the answers to how he should live his life as someone with many sins and a wealth of blood on his hands. For the first time in a very long time, he seriously considered the idea that it might not be too late to turn himself around, starting with his choice to go against Yoshikawa's order to kill Last Order, the Misaka Network's command tower, and instead find a way to both save her and eliminate the virus that threatened the entire remaining network of clones. The way he went about this and progressed through his rehabilitation, however, was full of struggles, a general difficulty to acknowledge that he cared about the people who would soon become his family, and a deep-seated belief that he had to do things a certain way. This belief was rooted in highly black and white views of good, evil, heroics, and villainy that would embarrass a kindergardener. Again, this and his efforts to combat against what held him back are the result of being a product of his environment and his conditioning.
The current Accelerator is rude, abrasive, cynical, sarcastic, distrustful, and easily annoyed. He is good at maintaining a composed facade of indifference, boredom, and stoicism. He comes off as rather apathetic and only shows his temper through his harsh words or hard glares. While it isn't too difficult to get him engaged in arguments, he prefers to avoid wasting effort on the truly pointless of anything. His tolerance for stupidity is a tad on the low side, and he's prone to lecturing. He intentionally maintains an emotional distance from everyone, out of fear of rejection and because he truly believes he's scum and undeserving of affection from others. Despite having wanted a family for longer than he could remember, it still took him two months to hug Last Order and admit he wanted to be with her forever.
He tends to show all his ugly, unpleasant sides to deter people and to keep hidden his more vulnerable secrets that would make people feel sorry for him upon learning. A good summary of his thought process: he doesn't want your pity, he doesn't deserve it because he's a horrible person and it'd be really annoying having to deal with you acting that way toward him. On top of that, he tends to ignore his issues and only speak of them in a matter of fact manner. Tsundere is a good word to describe him. As of his fight with Touma in V20 he has since thrown off the chains of his original black and white views of heroics and villainy, allowing himself to take on a more heroic role without thought to whether it's out of place for someone with his sins to do so. Despite this, he still doesn't think highly of himself. Some lingering effects remain.
He dislikes resorting to physical violence when he can help it. Unlike his past self he now prefers to give people verbal warnings, set psychological traps, incapacitate, and only use just the right amount of effort to kill when absolutely necessary. Say, a quick gunshot or a broken neck. He is insanely protective of the people he values, and would die for them if need be. What's more likely to happen is him going to violent, insane lengths and making enemies all around him in order to protect them and the peaceful world of light they live in, whether or not he can stand in it alongside them. His trust issues, guilt issues, monster issues, redemption issues, and general mental instability have hardened him into a lonely self-loather who responds viciously to perceived threats. Even when it's a magic god threatening to destroy the world, what motivates him into taking action is the knowledge that among the billions of people in the world at risk, are the few people he cares about. When presented with the option of eliminating that threat or not eliminating that threat (such as whether or not to kill Othinus, the magic god in question), his choice would be that he may as well eliminate it.
He refuses to acknowledge himself as a good person, believing that like the ugly duckling he was born this way and cannot change that. That said, he tries really, really hard to redeem himself and will keep doing good deeds like protecting innocents and being helpful - such as when he bought lots of food for the starving Index, when he was dragged to France to help search for an enemy body and instructed the pilots to skip the bombs because there were still civilians down below, or when he instructed a medic on the best way to medicate a pregnant woman without harming the unborn fetus. He dislikes seeing innocents, civilians, and noncombatants being dragged into dangerous situations - for one, he barely refrained from breaking a table in half upon learning that Birdway had put a real bomb inside the suspicious suitcase that was meant to lure out GREMLIN at the Hawaii airport - and goes to great lengths to keep them uninvolved or out of danger: securing escape routes for them, blocking attacks meant for them, using his powers to make sure not a single shred of debris in his first fight against Kakine got anywhere near the civilian onlookers, warning Yomikawa that she could wind up targeted by his enemies for insisting that he live with her, disobeying GROUP orders to kill Misaka Mikoto's mother and instead helping to rescue her from the Skill-Out members who were sent in his place, drawing the Archangel Gabriel away from the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations with the lambskin parchment it sought so that no one in the Alliance would wind up targeted, and so on.
He secretly idolizes heroic/good people, particularly those who are able to balance their lives despite the dangerous circumstances they keep dealing with. Kamijou Touma, the Level Zero who defeated him in such a way that researchers felt compelled to stop the Level Six Shift Experiment, is his hero, and as of NT10 he has finally come to terms with and rid himself of feelings of inferiority, declaring to Touma in Denmark that while he can't follow the same path as him, this didn't mean he had to see Touma as superior. The following quote from NT2 sums up his stance in New Testament nicely: "I have no interest in being a villain, and I don’t think that I can become a good person. I’m at a halfway point where I’m not even sure which path I should walk down… but I guess even there, I can still interfere in someone’s life and help bring things to a positive conclusion…"
Likewise, he struggles with whether or not the clones have truly forgiven him. Last Order has a strong fondness for him and told him she believes he didn't actually wish to participate in the experiment. One of the clones he spoke to in his spinoff manga told him, "You are too painful to look at to even call pathetic, replies Misaka while facing the one who was injured to save a Misaka," referring to the bullet he took to his forehead to save Last Order and all the other clones on the night of August 31st. In spite of this, Last Order's unconditional affection for him, the clones' choice to use their network to lend him calculation space to compensate for his brain damage, and all the effort he has poured into protecting the clones from any threats that surface, part of him fears that the clones will eventually grow to hate him once they learn how to understand emotions better, and that the feelings of the clones who were killed would not agree with the others and the overall Will of the Network who have seemingly accepted him so far. Only the dead can understand the feelings of the dead. Misaka WORST's taunts at their first meeting and Kakine's manipulation of residual information to create Misaka clones made of Dark Matter in NT6 took advantage of these fears.
Upon meeting the Will of the Network at the end of NT6, he must accept that she refuses to hand him any answers, some of which she could easily answer for him if she so wished. Likewise, the Will expects him to struggle to become a better person. While she has chosen to leave Last Order and Misaka WORST in his care, she will throw him into an unimaginable hell if he instead keeps going down the path of least resistance as he quite frequently has done. She's not lending him calculation space so he can continue being a monster. Though his reaction to this is never revealed in the narrative, it should be assumed that he has taken her words seriously and plans to stick to them.
Toward the end of the original novels Accelerator outright rejected anything akin to friendship; he and the other members of GROUP had an agreement that they were all using each other so long as they were still useful, he pulled a gun on the pregnant woman's lover for trying to offer his assistance if he ever needed it and told him to fuck off, he only gave out fake phone numbers to people who asked for his contact information, the night he first met Last Order he commented to himself that "Now that I think about it, how many years has it been? To speak to someone without malice?" and so on.
These days, i.e. New Testament novels, he's a little more receptive to it, although we have yet to see anything concrete beyond befriending and working in tandem with Touma, sharing his real phone number, his willingness to work with the people on the trip to Hawaii, and his ability to somewhat get along with Misaka WORST despite how much she keeps trolling him much to his annoyance. That said, this change doesn't keep him from speaking harshly to those he cares about, even when unwarranted; he has no problem spouting insults and threats at his adoptive mother over teasing comments and insinuations that he finds mocking. And while he likes small children and coffee, he has yet to show much enthusiasm or appreciation for anything else, and spends most of his time lazing about Yomikawa's apartment relaxing. The current days are the longest breaks from strife that he's had in a long time.
Appearance:
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/images/5/58/NT_Index_v03_003-005.jpg
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=File:NT_Index_v06_000_cover.jpg
Accelerator is 168cm tall. He is naturally scrawny and described in the novels to have a wire-like slender body. Thanks to hormonal imbalances due to lack of UV radiation, a side effect of his ability, he developed an androgynous figure with girly hips. He has some form of oculocutaneous albinism (one that for unexplained reasons doesn't affect his eyesight negatively), which gives him moppy white hair, red eyes, and noticeably pale skin. His appearance in later novels is often compared to that of a white beast with red eyes. He always wears a black choker around his neck that contains a network terminal and electrode; the wires go from the terminal up to somewhere behind his ears. The cane he uses from V19 onward is usually strapped to his right wrist.
Abilities: The big one is Vector Transformation, also translated as Vector Change, Vector Manipulation, etc. Vector Transformation is a psychic ability that Accelerator developed while under the Power Curriculum Program in Academy City. As an esper he has what is called an AIM Diffusion Field, a field of passively generated psychic energy that all espers have but which is expressed in different ways based on the esper's ability, e.g. magnetic fields for electricity users, higher body temperature for pyrokinetics, etc. His AIM field comes across as a thin film of invisible energy that coats his entire body.
The AIM field allows an esper to inflict their personal reality on the surrounding reality, and acts as unconscious interference in the reality of others. In Accelerator's case it is what allows him to change the vector values of whatever vectors come in contact with his body, provided his ability is active at the time. Vectors as in things like force, momentum, electrical charge, air pressure, heat flux, gravity, friction, waves/rays (sound, shock, UV, etc), and so on. The ability can work automatically based on a subconsciously developed filtering system that uses predetermined criteria to sort the harmless vectors from the harmful. This has protected him from the likes of UV rays, projectiles, physical and psychic attacks, and he can alter the settings as needed in order to do things like redirect sound waves, defy gravity, etc. Upon contact with his AIM field the ability changes the direction of an affected approaching vector to its opposite, so it is not a barrier of absolute defense. More than one person has used this loophole to bypass his ability by using speed and pulling back at the last fraction of a second. If done properly this can trick his ability into pulling the invading vector toward Accelerator and, for example, basically making Accelerator get attacked instead of deflecting the attack. That said, it is highly difficult to accomplish and requires a working knowledge of Accelerator's ability as well as the technology or physical attributes/training to pull it off.
In addition to working passively as explained above, he can use his vector transformation to deliberately change the vector values he comes in contact with to values of his own choosing. This allows him to do things like mimic superhuman speed and strength; create plasma, dust explosions, wind tornadoes and shock waves; manipulate someone's blood flow or bioelectricity; electronically rewire a girl's brain to delete a computer-like virus from it; stop and crush the front end of a car aiming to ram into him; fire a gun at his own head and alter the trajectory to accurately hit the target in front of him in order to bypass a messed up gun sight; jump from a bomber plane safely without a parachute; walk safely through molten lava; detach a building from its foundation and throw it at another building several blocks away; pick up a car with one hand and throw it at a nuclear bomb shelter with so much force it put visible cracks all over the outside of said shelter; and turn snow into an attack of high speed water jets. This list of canon examples is not exhaustive. If it has a vector (magnitude and direction), he can theoretically manipulate it. Using his vector transformation requires a lot of high-speed, complicated mental calculations that his Personal Reality then executes. As such, mental disturbances and lack of concentration can affect these.
Now that he has suffered brain damage, Accelerator's speech, motor, and calculation abilities are affected. He has to use a cane to walk, and he must wear a special medical device around his neck that connects him to the Misaka Network and helps compensate for the brain damage. Its battery is rechargeable and can last for 48 hours on Normal Mode (speech, motor, and any calculation abilities needed for basic daily living, as well as UV ray deflection), or 30 minutes on Esper Mode (full use of his esper powers, and the only time he can support himself without a cane). The Misaka Network can only restore his ability to less than half of his original strength. Once you consider the fact that the Misaka Network is an electronic brainwave network that currently utilizes parallel calculations performed by roughly 10,000 Misaka clones, it shows just how ridiculous his brain's original calculation and processing ability must have been.
At his current canon point, Accelerator can enter either of two especially powerful modes that are believed to be related to a psychological phenomenon known as Awakenings- black wings, and white wings (Angel Mode). Awakenings happen when the affected person has a significant change in thought processes, like having a sudden epiphany or decisive moment. He has experienced several of these over the course of the canon timeline. Black wings are triggered when he is pushed into a corner psychologically or emotionally. He gets a major power boost, and his black wings are like explosive jets of black mist coming out of his back: long, sharp, plentiful, and fast, capable of being used as blades to stab targets in front of him. With Angel Mode, along with the major power boost he gains seraphic white wings. In V22 he had a halo as well, but in NT10 he does not. It is currently unknown whether the halo in this mode is more common, less common, or just a one-time thing. We've seen Angel Mode all of three times total, the third being when the cyborg Rensa 29 invoked his power in NT7.
In either of these modes he can manipulate real vectors, imaginary vectors, and vectors he is not directly touching, and all without the use of the Misaka Network. His wings in both cases seem to be made of an energy similar to Dark Matter and angelic Telesma. The wings do the calculations for him, and at a rate much faster than his already insane normal calculation ability. He can update the laws of reality and speak the language of the Angels.
It's unknown just where his limitations lie for any mode. What we do know is that when in Angel Mode he is at least Angel Class, that without awakening he was powerful enough to take out both the awakened Kakine Teitoku and a weakened Archangel Gabriel (unknown to him, this was thanks to help in various forms from FUSE Kazakiri, Acqua and Touma), and that in white-winged Angel Mode he was able to float in the air, fly 5000 meters upward instantaneously, and block a gigantic amount of Telesma from decimating Eurasia. All black-winged instances were triggered by great emotional disturbances or changes in thought processes that led to his determination to defeat his enemy no matter the consequences. Think of it as a last resort move of desperation. The white-winged Angel Mode appears to be triggered by the desire to protect being his primary motivation to defeat his enemy. His first usage of magic is believed, but not confirmed, to have helped instigate the change from black wings to white ones.
To a certain degree, Accelerator is able to sense the presence of magical energy given off by beings (e.g. Biblical angels), artifacts (e.g. clothing and weapons belonging to magicians he fought in Russia, and the lambskin parchment), concentrated masses (Telesma), and certain types of spells (his GROUP coworker Unabara Mitsuki wears a magical disguise that transforms his appearance to that of someone he's taken a human skin sample from). This comes across in the form of a pressure-like sixth sense when he is in close enough proximity to them. It happens automatically.
Accelerator has demonstrated the ability to use magic in a limited capacity. Due to the incompatibility of AIM fields and magical energy, espers who use magic wind up with severe stress in the nervous and circulatory system. V1 contains the following explanations: "The circuits in those who have talent... and those who don't... are different. Someone with abilities can't... use a system created for... those without it..." and "Espers like him acquired their supernatural endowments by forcing their irregular brain circuits to open using drugs and electrical stimulation. Their bodies actually were fundamentally different." The usage of magic by an esper can result in ruptured blood vessels and possibly lead to death. His first attempt at using magic gave him internal bleeding and made him cough up blood; this side effect is used to great effect in NT3 when Gremlin members set him up to unintentionally perform a magic spell.
However, NT2 shows that if Accelerator concentrates very carefully while in ESPer Mode, he can use magic and stave off the more adverse effects. He used some type of magic detection, applied the basics of feng shui to it and used this to accurately locate a magic crystal based on the flow of energy and the movements of the general populace. The worst side effect he wound up with was a feeling of tension in his veins and an unnatural sweat on his body. He must consciously monitor everything to avoid the normal side effect.
Aside from that, Accelerator is proficient with guns, especially handguns. He knows how to ride a motorcycle. He's tech-savvy, both with computers/hacking, and with building mechanical items like his cane. His memory is impressive: it took him less than two minutes to first visually scan Last Order's personality code and then memorize the entire thing in one sitting. His head is filled with a ridiculous amount of scientific information. Not only did his education hold a heavy emphasis on math and physics, but his brain was modified to allow him to instantaneously do all sorts of complicated equations in his head, which are necessary for using his powers. He has shown the ability to come up with new applications and computations for his power on the fly, and to reverse-engineer the properties of inexplicable/unknown laws his body has experienced (e.g. Kakine's Dark Matter). He has a fair amount of basic underworld knowledge despite only working for GROUP for about a month, was able to identify eight different professional freelance spies accurately based on actions/body language alone, and displayed interrogation skills in making one of them talk. He speaks English, Japanese, French and Russian, if not more.
Inventory: His white winter outfit and the clothes he was wearing under them. His wallet, mobile device, battery charger, cane, and whatever other random stuff he might have had in his pockets at the time.
Suitability: As a key player in many of the dramatic goings on in the Science Side, and one of the people who helped bring World War III to an end, Accelerator is in an influential position no matter how much he hates the attention and much of the responsibility it saddles him with. The combination of that, his experiences of survival in his environment, and his distaste for both corruption and the endangerment of civilians makes him a good candidate for becoming a person of influence in the game setting.
There will be an initial lack of motivation on his part due to not knowing anyone and not caring about a world that ultimately doesn't affect his own. However, he is coming from a point of uncertainty as to the outcome of his world's fate; Academy City has ordered all of the Level Fives to take on Kamijou Touma and his travel partner Othinus, a girl who as a magic god threatened to destroy the world. Accelerator had made the effort to be the first to fight him and intentionally lost in order to make the city's higher-ups think twice about sending anyone else after someone who lost to their most powerful esper. As Accelerator's canon point is shortly after waking up from passing out after his fight, he will know very little about the state of the world's fate, and I can see him becoming restless and impatient in Tu Vishan during his wait to get back to his own world. That restlessness and his experiences with the corrupt-on-the-inside Academy City would compel him to gradually become involved in whatever BS might sprout up in-game. It's also a good chance for him to loosen up and develop positive relations with other people outside of his immediate family, resistant as he will be about that.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person (Prose):
His chest throbbed and ached. Taking a rock to the heart just as his redirection field got negated by that boy's right hand had been enough to make his mind go blank and knock him unconscious. Considering how fast he'd been going in his plummeting attack attempt, it would be a miracle if he got out of it without at least a hairline fracture somewhere. But it would be a while before he could get examined. First, he had to get the hell back to Academy City from all the way up in northern Denmark. Return travel plans had been arranged before he had set out, so it was a matter of getting to the place of departure from where he was.
Doing that with his chest pain and his cane would not be particularly enjoyable, no matter the distance. On top of that, he first had to deal with an unanticipated annoyance. The clone who'd fallen unconscious once the Will had finished possessing her in order to speak to him directly. It was troublesome, but not something Accelerator had the conscience to walk away from and ignore. Besides, she would come in handy for global positioning. Surely she was stationed somewhere nearby, at least in the same region of Denmark, and communicating with the other Sisters to answer anything he and she didn't already know would be easy enough. For now it was a waiting game. He sat crosslegged in the snow near her body, which neatly lay face-up with one shoulder touching his knee and the legs sprawled out straight. This way he could keep an eye on her till she awoke.
When the Will had taken control of Last Order the first time she made contact, the brat had been fine after being out for a few minutes once control had been given back to her. He was using that as an estimate for how long he'd have to wait. If it took longer than that for this one, his plan was to start nudging and poking somewhere like the shoulder or cheek. Thinking this over to himself, he drew in a careful, slow sigh that resonated with annoyance and made him wince. The ache in his chest was dull, but seemed to have no intention of subsiding completely. "Anytime now, brat," he muttered after a couple minutes, hoping it might prompt a reaction. He could see her breath form faint clouds above her mouth. She was dressed warmly; as long as he kept a watchful eye on her she ought to be fine despite the frigid weather.
Another minute passed. He thought he noticed a faint shift, the whisper-light crunch of snow, and then her eyelids flickered. "Oi. Wake up," he commanded with palpable irritation, his voice a low rasp.
"Misaka is already awake," came a soft, foggy-sounding reply from the girl before him, and she moved her far elbow now, "says Misaka in reply to the command that has come after the action commanded of her."
"It sure doesn't fucking look like it. It usually also involves opening your damn eyes and making an attempt to get up." He let out another sigh and grabbed his cane. He could rise from a sitting position using his two hands if he had to, but having the cane in one hand was a must if he wanted to stay upright for long, especially with all the glass beneath the snow.
"Waking is a process that encompasses several stages, not all of which are observable by an onlooker, says Misaka while going through with the motions that are." The clone's eyes were open now, and she stared forward with a blank expression, only panning her head to look at him once she was sitting upright in front of him.
He clucked his tongue. Such comments were evidence that the annoyance known as WORST didn't get her sass from completely out of nowhere. "Whatever. Quit wasting time and get up. Tell me your serial number and where we are. There's somewhere I need you to locate for me from here."
Network:
[CONSOLE - VIDEO]
[The feed opens up with a headshot of a guy at the console. Moppy white hair that barely touches his shoulders, red eyes, pale skin. An expression that seems to embody a mixture of boredom and annoyance. A black choker encircles his neck, with a black box connected to it and wires that go from the box to somewhere behind his ears. A person who doesn't know any better would likely mistake it for a fancy, if unusually designed MP3 player. He takes a moment to glare daggers at the screen before proceeding to speak.]
To start off, I'm only going to bother with three questions.
[The rest could always wait.
Accelerator holds up the pointer finger of one hand.]
One- I don't care whether you're someone I'd hate or tolerate; does the name 'Academy City' mean anything to anyone else here?
[He holds up the middle finger now.]
Two- I need to know if anyone's come across a girl named Misaka who speaks in the third person. She was with me right before I woke up in this weird-ass place.
[He holds up a third finger.]
And three...
[Deliberate pause. His eyes narrow, brow furrowing. He hates to bring this up in case it brings too much attention to the topic he plans to ask about, but it's too important to ignore for the time being.]
Three. What's the norm for supernatural abilities when you're not from here?
[He's felt drained since he woke up. No matter what the truth of the nature of this place was, his connection to the Misaka Network doesn't seem to be compromised. His power, on the other hand, seems to be barely functional, based on the few testing attempts he made when he first woke up. Something was up.]
Name: Numi
Age: 32
Contact: Numikins @ AIM
Other Characters Played: N/A
Character Information:
Name: Accelerator
Canon: Toaru Majutsu no Index
Canon Point: New Testament Volume 10, end of Chapter 9
Age: 16
Reference Links: http://toarumajutsunoindex.wikia.com/wiki/Accelerator
Setting: Toaru Majutsu no Index takes place in a version of Earth sometime within the timeframe of 2008-2016, most likely 2015 based on a stray reference to a date and day of the week in an early volume. The precise year is never stated explicitly, only that it's been "over sixty years" since Aleister Crowley supposedly died in 1947. Supposedly, because in fact he is still alive. A magnificently talented doctor known as the Heaven Canceller saved Crowley's life. Crowley spent the next few decades building a large city that would eventually become known as Academy City, all while being a hermit hidden somewhere deep within the city and giving orders as the Chairman of Academy City's Board of Directors. Crowley's identity as the infamous magician Aleister Crowley is not common knowledge.
Academy City is located in the western region of Tokyo and houses a population of roughly 2.3 million people, 80% of whom are students. Academy City itself is essentially a giant city filled with schools, research facilities, and so forth. People don't raise families there. It's a place to send your kids for a good education. As such, the grand majority of people living there are students in dorms, teachers, and scientists and researchers. Academy City qualifies as an independent city-state with a government separate from the rest of Japan's. It is also the epicentre of scientific technology development and research in the entire world, to the point where the technology gap between AC and the rest of the world is twenty to thirty years. Within the context of the series, Academy City is known as the leader of the Science Side.
The other Big Thing about Academy City is the Power Curriculum Program. Scientists have found a way to scientifically engineer espers—psychics, if you need a different word for it. You know how diamonds and other precious gemstones that occur naturally in the world are considered highly valuable but may be rather small in quantity? They only occur under a certain set of conditions which can easily be extremely difficult to all match up naturally. But if you create an environment that contains all those conditions, then you can artificially create the same thing. Creating espers is like that. There are records of naturally created espers commonly referred to as Gemstones. Academy City artificially tries to replicate them.
Scientists use a number of methods including but not limited to drug therapy, hypnosis, and electrical stimuli to force a human's mental state out of touch with normal reality and unlock a "personal reality" of their very own. Theoretically, this unlocks a student's potential and eventually they learn to control their "personal reality," a reality where they are capable of manipulating a certain aspect of it. Over the course of these students' stay in Academy City it is expected that they develop their powers as much as possible. While everyone's potential is different, one of the strongest espers in the city got to where she did from as low as a Level One, proof that hard work and dedication is a viable route.
Put simply, the use of psychic powers in Toaru-verse works thus: espers take the current reality and replace it with a reality of their choosing. This is then inflicted on those nearby. However, an esper is limited to the one aspect of reality he or she can manipulate. A telepath can't do anything unrelated to telepathy. A pyrokinetic can't do anything unrelated to fire. A teleporter can only teleport. And so on. You have a base ability, and some are more versatile than others. Espers may also have other limitations depending on their power level and the requirements necessary for using an ability. Common potential limitations are needing to touch an object to affect it, and needing to use a physical object (paper clips, flashlight, remote control, etc) to focus an especially powerful ability.
Power levels are ranked on a six-level scale, going from Level Zero to Level Five. These are periodically measured through scientific testing via the System Scan. Over half of all students are Level Zero: normal people with weak or no powers that oftentimes cannot be detected by any equipment. From there the levels increase:
Level Zero: Person With No Powers
Level One: Person With Low Powers
Level Two: Person With Unusual Powers
The above three are considered not very useful in real life.
Level Three: Person With Strong Powers
Level Four: Person With Great Powers
Level Five: Person With Super Powers
The upper three levels are where elitism and true talent start to show themselves. Level Fours are generally considered equal to a one-person tactical force. Level Fives are exceedingly rare and, depending on the nature and versatility of their ability, can be considered one-person armies. Only seven Level Fives are known to exist: one who controls vectors, one who creates nonexistent matter, one who controls electricity, one who controls electrons, one with unimaginable telepathy-related abilities, an extremely powerful Gemstone whose powers cannot be explained scientifically . . . and nothing has yet to be revealed about the final Level Five.
There is also a mythical Level Six, Person With Absolute Power. It is thought that only the Number One ranked Level Five, Accelerator, has the potential to attain this. Sadly, under normal conditions it was theorized to take him over two hundred years.
Due to the rarity of them, there have been secret attempts at cloning Level Fives. The results proved that potential abilities are determined by one's DNA; all clones of the Number Three Level Five became electricity espers. The problem was the exponential difference in specs. Most were only Level Two or Level Three whose maximum outputs were insignificant fractions of the original. The idea of trying to create more Level Fives through cloning was abandoned. Instead, the clones were mass produced in even more secret to be used in a different experiment. One intended to level up Accelerator into a Level Six. Initial calculations for his level increase required that he battle 128 Railguns—that is, 128 of the Number Three Level Five. After some recalculation, it was determined that preparing 20,000 lower level clones would do the trick.
More of that will be detailed in the Personality section, and appears here due to the relevance to the setting. This is just how far the scientists in Academy City will go in pursuit of such a valuable existence as a Level Six.
One particular Level Zero of note is Kamijou Touma, a high school boy who possesses an ability known as Imagine Breaker. The city's System Scan was unable to pick up on anything remotely related to powers dwelling within him, but that is probably due to Imagine Breaker having an origin that is unrelated to psychic powers, as well as the nature of the power itself. His right hand from wrist to fingertips can negate anything it touches that is supernatural in origin. This is only useful against the likes of magic, psychic or divine powers, and it completely eliminates his luck. As such, Touma, the main character, is known for using Imagine Breaker as a special trump card against magicians, espers, and so on. He is a pivotal figure who just wanted a normal high school life if he could, but due to his abysmal luck levels is regularly dragged into conflicts that he must settle by destroying people's "illusions" that motivate their actions. He is an ordinary boy who doesn't follow any particular ideology, yet will risk his life to protect the smiles and wellbeing of a person in front of him that is suffering, even if that person is someone he once faced as an enemy in the past. Because of the influential power of what some refer to as the Kamijou Faction (in essence the comrades and allies who have gathered around him), he has become a target for elimination by many inside and outside of Academy City. Much of the series' plot revolves around him and the impact he has on the eventual power struggle between the Magic Side and Science Side.
The city also had a fairly active Dark Side, i.e. underworld, with a lot of unsavoriness going on. Many of the people in the Dark Side worked covertly under orders in small groups. Information on these groups came with high security levels. Their tasks ranged from taking out targets that needed to be eliminated for a number of reasons, to defending higher-ups and their people. Overall it boils down to lots of dirty work. Not everyone in the Dark Side was there willingly. Some were forced into it due to hostages and the like. Accelerator was one of these, joining GROUP at the end of V13 in order to better protect Last Order and his adoptive mothers Yomikawa and Yoshikawa and because he wound up saddled with a massive debt of several trillion yen in damages. At the end of the war (more on that further down), Accelerator threatened the Board of Directors into releasing everyone who had been forced into working for the Dark Side, earning freedom for himself and many others. This was not enough to eradicate the Dark Side completely, but the grand majority of people currently working in it are now there by choice.
Outside of Academy City, there are many sister research institutes that until recently worked in partnerships with Academy City. They broke off cooperation at the end of NT3 in response to the actions of the group of espers the magic cabal leader Leivinia Birdway brought to Hawaii. Aside from that, Academy City tends to maintain its position as the forerunner in the science community and hold very firmly onto its scientific secrets. Any technology and weapons distributed to the outside are always downgraded in specs, with special security measures included to prevent anyone from using the inner workings of the tech for themselves.
The secrets of psychic power development are equally well protected, both inside and outside the city, to the point where schools may require that their students only get their hair cut at approved hair salons with security cameras lest someone try to steal DNA samples by collecting hair. On top of that, the city is surrounded by a large, tall, thick, heavily guarded wall with tight security measures that scour everyone who comes and goes. Those without a permit or proper ID won't be getting in or out. Not even students may leave without permission. The entire city is under constant satellite surveillance. Streets always have security robots shaped like drums whizzing about to help with the blind spots of any satellite or stationary security camera.
As such, over time Academy City earned something of an elitist reputation. Much tension covers the globe over it. This, plus the natural tension between the three largest Christian institutions - the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church - and anything science-related, has made it such that during October of the Toaru timeline (the story starts in July and is currently in November), a certain turn of events finally resulted in World War III. It was a war of Science vs Magic, the supernatural powers system used by the religious institutions that is generally left unrecognized by scientific researchers whenever its existence is revealed in the first place. Magicians from all three divisions had already attempted invading Academy City on a number of occasions and riots had appeared in several parts of Europe by the time Russia declared war on Academy City.
Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church allied with the Roman Catholics, while the Anglican Church allied with Academy City. From there, the war escalated. Over the course of twelve long days Academy City overwhelmed Russia with its superior technology, giving them little chance to defend themselves or make non-useless attempts at breaking through Academy City's defense.
As it turned out, the man behind the war and pulling most of the strings was a member of God's Right Seat, a small group of magicians who had removed most of their original sin and attained special magic abilities. Each of them was aligned with a certain color and a certain archangel/elemental alignment. This man was Fiamma of the Right, whose color was red and archangel was Michael of Fire. He was an idealist gone wrong, a heretic who wanted to correct the imbalance in the elements of the world.
While he did succeed in correcting the imbalance and fixing the elemental alignments, the lengths to which he went to achieve this were the most extreme, and resulted in causing giant hundred-meter long arms to pop out of the lands and oceans all across the world, as well as nearly destroying a good portion of Eurasia with a giant blast of Telesma - angelic energy. He was stopped thanks to many people interfering in his plans, and his whereabouts are currently unknown to all but a few. The war ended on October 30th. There was some semblance of peace for a while. However, some magicians did not want the war to end. To them, the war's end was inconvenient, and Fiamma's group representing the Magic Side as the losing side was something they could not tolerate. They were GREMLIN, named after a type of occult fairy that causes machines and technology to malfunction.
GREMLIN have been working behind the scenes for their new goals, and have gone as far as to manipulate the American government, perform horrific experiments, target an unkillable woman of inexplicable nature being held prisoner in Academy City, and steal the internal organs of the second most powerful Level Five esper in order to bring about the results they want. Tipping the scales of power between the Science Side and Magic Side away from Academy City... and completing the spiritual weapon Gungnir so that the group's leader, Othinus, can become a complete Magic God and challenge the fixed ratio of 50% success, 50% failure that her infinite possibilities are stuck with. Othinus has goals of her own that she can only realize by switching the chances to 100% in either direction.
Personality: Accelerator is introduced as an antagonist of the sadistic, power-hungry sort, initially coming off as a veritable one-man army so unsatisfied with only being the most powerful esper that he yearned for the mythical Level Six and would pursue it no matter how much he had to stain his hands. However, this is soon revealed to be a persona he took on as a result of years of deliberate social isolation, a malicious and blackhearted environment that crafted him into believing he was the monster everyone else saw him as, and the conditioned belief that he needed to reject all forms of companionship in order to prevent others from being drawn into the conflict he would inevitably cause. To most, he was a monster whose only value was that as prize research material. His power, a highly destructive form of telekinesis that let him freely change the value of any vector he came in contact with, was a stigma that alienated him from everyone around him.
Early on, Accelerator became someone who stayed away from others and shut down his emotions. If no one saw reason to approach him or raise their hand against him because of what he said, did, or how he reacted, then maybe he wouldn't be the cause of conflict. Unfortunately, it did not yield good results. After being booted from the Special Ability Institute for being, in his own words, "absolutely uncontrollable," Accelerator was shuffled from facility to facility about every two months because no one could handle him for much longer than that. Sometime around the age of ten there was an accident involving children getting hurt that snowballed out of control. It brought in the military. This was when Accelerator truly despaired, lost hope in humanity, and gave himself up.
Because of this he decided that he had to change his strategy. His power created conflict. His power would not go away. If he could not get rid of his power, he would have to become an existence that prevented conflict, someone no one would want to approach in the first place.
The new solution he devised was to become the most powerful, most sadistic esper in Academy City, and gain such a horrific reputation as an untouchable existence that no one would ever dare wish to lift a finger against him. From that point on, anyone who tried attacking him would be destroyed to set an example for others in the future. He would scare them off. Anyone who tried to touch him would become an enemy. Those who kept their distance would walk away unharmed, even if it was only 10cm from him. His hope was that after enough time these sacrifices would yield the results of no one approaching Accelerator ever again.
Sometime around or after this, as a result of his involvement with the researcher Kihara Amata, Accelerator began to adopt the twisted, cool, sadistic personality he later on displays during the Level Six Shift Experiment, an inhumane experiment that boiled down to level grinding via combat experience: specifically the systematic murder of 20,000 clones of one of the other Level Five espers, an electromaster named Misaka Mikoto. In time Accelerator would become so hungry for absolute power that he lost sight of his true goals, making it hard to tell how much of that persona he put on for show was the real him. While initially hesitant about killing the first Misaka clone, he eventually allowed himself to believe the words of the scientists running the experiment: that the clones were nothing but living dolls made of chemicals and protein with no wills of their own, who would follow the experiment with no regard for their own lives. A clip of that encounter can be viewed here.
It is strongly implied that he deliberately said and did terrible things to the clones as a way to test their humanity or lack thereof, and therefore both verify that they really were as the researchers said, as well as justify to himself that his actions weren't murder. As well, it is implied he secretly wanted someone to stop him. He comes to these realizations as a result of Touma's and Last Order's words to him, during his defeat that signaled the experiment being frozen and at the restaurant where he takes Last Order on August 31st.
Over the course of the nearly three months since his introductory appearance, Accelerator has gone through a rollercoaster of development, searching within and around himself for the answers to how he should live his life as someone with many sins and a wealth of blood on his hands. For the first time in a very long time, he seriously considered the idea that it might not be too late to turn himself around, starting with his choice to go against Yoshikawa's order to kill Last Order, the Misaka Network's command tower, and instead find a way to both save her and eliminate the virus that threatened the entire remaining network of clones. The way he went about this and progressed through his rehabilitation, however, was full of struggles, a general difficulty to acknowledge that he cared about the people who would soon become his family, and a deep-seated belief that he had to do things a certain way. This belief was rooted in highly black and white views of good, evil, heroics, and villainy that would embarrass a kindergardener. Again, this and his efforts to combat against what held him back are the result of being a product of his environment and his conditioning.
The current Accelerator is rude, abrasive, cynical, sarcastic, distrustful, and easily annoyed. He is good at maintaining a composed facade of indifference, boredom, and stoicism. He comes off as rather apathetic and only shows his temper through his harsh words or hard glares. While it isn't too difficult to get him engaged in arguments, he prefers to avoid wasting effort on the truly pointless of anything. His tolerance for stupidity is a tad on the low side, and he's prone to lecturing. He intentionally maintains an emotional distance from everyone, out of fear of rejection and because he truly believes he's scum and undeserving of affection from others. Despite having wanted a family for longer than he could remember, it still took him two months to hug Last Order and admit he wanted to be with her forever.
He tends to show all his ugly, unpleasant sides to deter people and to keep hidden his more vulnerable secrets that would make people feel sorry for him upon learning. A good summary of his thought process: he doesn't want your pity, he doesn't deserve it because he's a horrible person and it'd be really annoying having to deal with you acting that way toward him. On top of that, he tends to ignore his issues and only speak of them in a matter of fact manner. Tsundere is a good word to describe him. As of his fight with Touma in V20 he has since thrown off the chains of his original black and white views of heroics and villainy, allowing himself to take on a more heroic role without thought to whether it's out of place for someone with his sins to do so. Despite this, he still doesn't think highly of himself. Some lingering effects remain.
He dislikes resorting to physical violence when he can help it. Unlike his past self he now prefers to give people verbal warnings, set psychological traps, incapacitate, and only use just the right amount of effort to kill when absolutely necessary. Say, a quick gunshot or a broken neck. He is insanely protective of the people he values, and would die for them if need be. What's more likely to happen is him going to violent, insane lengths and making enemies all around him in order to protect them and the peaceful world of light they live in, whether or not he can stand in it alongside them. His trust issues, guilt issues, monster issues, redemption issues, and general mental instability have hardened him into a lonely self-loather who responds viciously to perceived threats. Even when it's a magic god threatening to destroy the world, what motivates him into taking action is the knowledge that among the billions of people in the world at risk, are the few people he cares about. When presented with the option of eliminating that threat or not eliminating that threat (such as whether or not to kill Othinus, the magic god in question), his choice would be that he may as well eliminate it.
He refuses to acknowledge himself as a good person, believing that like the ugly duckling he was born this way and cannot change that. That said, he tries really, really hard to redeem himself and will keep doing good deeds like protecting innocents and being helpful - such as when he bought lots of food for the starving Index, when he was dragged to France to help search for an enemy body and instructed the pilots to skip the bombs because there were still civilians down below, or when he instructed a medic on the best way to medicate a pregnant woman without harming the unborn fetus. He dislikes seeing innocents, civilians, and noncombatants being dragged into dangerous situations - for one, he barely refrained from breaking a table in half upon learning that Birdway had put a real bomb inside the suspicious suitcase that was meant to lure out GREMLIN at the Hawaii airport - and goes to great lengths to keep them uninvolved or out of danger: securing escape routes for them, blocking attacks meant for them, using his powers to make sure not a single shred of debris in his first fight against Kakine got anywhere near the civilian onlookers, warning Yomikawa that she could wind up targeted by his enemies for insisting that he live with her, disobeying GROUP orders to kill Misaka Mikoto's mother and instead helping to rescue her from the Skill-Out members who were sent in his place, drawing the Archangel Gabriel away from the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations with the lambskin parchment it sought so that no one in the Alliance would wind up targeted, and so on.
He secretly idolizes heroic/good people, particularly those who are able to balance their lives despite the dangerous circumstances they keep dealing with. Kamijou Touma, the Level Zero who defeated him in such a way that researchers felt compelled to stop the Level Six Shift Experiment, is his hero, and as of NT10 he has finally come to terms with and rid himself of feelings of inferiority, declaring to Touma in Denmark that while he can't follow the same path as him, this didn't mean he had to see Touma as superior. The following quote from NT2 sums up his stance in New Testament nicely: "I have no interest in being a villain, and I don’t think that I can become a good person. I’m at a halfway point where I’m not even sure which path I should walk down… but I guess even there, I can still interfere in someone’s life and help bring things to a positive conclusion…"
Likewise, he struggles with whether or not the clones have truly forgiven him. Last Order has a strong fondness for him and told him she believes he didn't actually wish to participate in the experiment. One of the clones he spoke to in his spinoff manga told him, "You are too painful to look at to even call pathetic, replies Misaka while facing the one who was injured to save a Misaka," referring to the bullet he took to his forehead to save Last Order and all the other clones on the night of August 31st. In spite of this, Last Order's unconditional affection for him, the clones' choice to use their network to lend him calculation space to compensate for his brain damage, and all the effort he has poured into protecting the clones from any threats that surface, part of him fears that the clones will eventually grow to hate him once they learn how to understand emotions better, and that the feelings of the clones who were killed would not agree with the others and the overall Will of the Network who have seemingly accepted him so far. Only the dead can understand the feelings of the dead. Misaka WORST's taunts at their first meeting and Kakine's manipulation of residual information to create Misaka clones made of Dark Matter in NT6 took advantage of these fears.
Upon meeting the Will of the Network at the end of NT6, he must accept that she refuses to hand him any answers, some of which she could easily answer for him if she so wished. Likewise, the Will expects him to struggle to become a better person. While she has chosen to leave Last Order and Misaka WORST in his care, she will throw him into an unimaginable hell if he instead keeps going down the path of least resistance as he quite frequently has done. She's not lending him calculation space so he can continue being a monster. Though his reaction to this is never revealed in the narrative, it should be assumed that he has taken her words seriously and plans to stick to them.
Toward the end of the original novels Accelerator outright rejected anything akin to friendship; he and the other members of GROUP had an agreement that they were all using each other so long as they were still useful, he pulled a gun on the pregnant woman's lover for trying to offer his assistance if he ever needed it and told him to fuck off, he only gave out fake phone numbers to people who asked for his contact information, the night he first met Last Order he commented to himself that "Now that I think about it, how many years has it been? To speak to someone without malice?" and so on.
These days, i.e. New Testament novels, he's a little more receptive to it, although we have yet to see anything concrete beyond befriending and working in tandem with Touma, sharing his real phone number, his willingness to work with the people on the trip to Hawaii, and his ability to somewhat get along with Misaka WORST despite how much she keeps trolling him much to his annoyance. That said, this change doesn't keep him from speaking harshly to those he cares about, even when unwarranted; he has no problem spouting insults and threats at his adoptive mother over teasing comments and insinuations that he finds mocking. And while he likes small children and coffee, he has yet to show much enthusiasm or appreciation for anything else, and spends most of his time lazing about Yomikawa's apartment relaxing. The current days are the longest breaks from strife that he's had in a long time.
Appearance:
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/images/5/58/NT_Index_v03_003-005.jpg
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=File:NT_Index_v06_000_cover.jpg
Accelerator is 168cm tall. He is naturally scrawny and described in the novels to have a wire-like slender body. Thanks to hormonal imbalances due to lack of UV radiation, a side effect of his ability, he developed an androgynous figure with girly hips. He has some form of oculocutaneous albinism (one that for unexplained reasons doesn't affect his eyesight negatively), which gives him moppy white hair, red eyes, and noticeably pale skin. His appearance in later novels is often compared to that of a white beast with red eyes. He always wears a black choker around his neck that contains a network terminal and electrode; the wires go from the terminal up to somewhere behind his ears. The cane he uses from V19 onward is usually strapped to his right wrist.
Abilities: The big one is Vector Transformation, also translated as Vector Change, Vector Manipulation, etc. Vector Transformation is a psychic ability that Accelerator developed while under the Power Curriculum Program in Academy City. As an esper he has what is called an AIM Diffusion Field, a field of passively generated psychic energy that all espers have but which is expressed in different ways based on the esper's ability, e.g. magnetic fields for electricity users, higher body temperature for pyrokinetics, etc. His AIM field comes across as a thin film of invisible energy that coats his entire body.
The AIM field allows an esper to inflict their personal reality on the surrounding reality, and acts as unconscious interference in the reality of others. In Accelerator's case it is what allows him to change the vector values of whatever vectors come in contact with his body, provided his ability is active at the time. Vectors as in things like force, momentum, electrical charge, air pressure, heat flux, gravity, friction, waves/rays (sound, shock, UV, etc), and so on. The ability can work automatically based on a subconsciously developed filtering system that uses predetermined criteria to sort the harmless vectors from the harmful. This has protected him from the likes of UV rays, projectiles, physical and psychic attacks, and he can alter the settings as needed in order to do things like redirect sound waves, defy gravity, etc. Upon contact with his AIM field the ability changes the direction of an affected approaching vector to its opposite, so it is not a barrier of absolute defense. More than one person has used this loophole to bypass his ability by using speed and pulling back at the last fraction of a second. If done properly this can trick his ability into pulling the invading vector toward Accelerator and, for example, basically making Accelerator get attacked instead of deflecting the attack. That said, it is highly difficult to accomplish and requires a working knowledge of Accelerator's ability as well as the technology or physical attributes/training to pull it off.
In addition to working passively as explained above, he can use his vector transformation to deliberately change the vector values he comes in contact with to values of his own choosing. This allows him to do things like mimic superhuman speed and strength; create plasma, dust explosions, wind tornadoes and shock waves; manipulate someone's blood flow or bioelectricity; electronically rewire a girl's brain to delete a computer-like virus from it; stop and crush the front end of a car aiming to ram into him; fire a gun at his own head and alter the trajectory to accurately hit the target in front of him in order to bypass a messed up gun sight; jump from a bomber plane safely without a parachute; walk safely through molten lava; detach a building from its foundation and throw it at another building several blocks away; pick up a car with one hand and throw it at a nuclear bomb shelter with so much force it put visible cracks all over the outside of said shelter; and turn snow into an attack of high speed water jets. This list of canon examples is not exhaustive. If it has a vector (magnitude and direction), he can theoretically manipulate it. Using his vector transformation requires a lot of high-speed, complicated mental calculations that his Personal Reality then executes. As such, mental disturbances and lack of concentration can affect these.
Now that he has suffered brain damage, Accelerator's speech, motor, and calculation abilities are affected. He has to use a cane to walk, and he must wear a special medical device around his neck that connects him to the Misaka Network and helps compensate for the brain damage. Its battery is rechargeable and can last for 48 hours on Normal Mode (speech, motor, and any calculation abilities needed for basic daily living, as well as UV ray deflection), or 30 minutes on Esper Mode (full use of his esper powers, and the only time he can support himself without a cane). The Misaka Network can only restore his ability to less than half of his original strength. Once you consider the fact that the Misaka Network is an electronic brainwave network that currently utilizes parallel calculations performed by roughly 10,000 Misaka clones, it shows just how ridiculous his brain's original calculation and processing ability must have been.
At his current canon point, Accelerator can enter either of two especially powerful modes that are believed to be related to a psychological phenomenon known as Awakenings- black wings, and white wings (Angel Mode). Awakenings happen when the affected person has a significant change in thought processes, like having a sudden epiphany or decisive moment. He has experienced several of these over the course of the canon timeline. Black wings are triggered when he is pushed into a corner psychologically or emotionally. He gets a major power boost, and his black wings are like explosive jets of black mist coming out of his back: long, sharp, plentiful, and fast, capable of being used as blades to stab targets in front of him. With Angel Mode, along with the major power boost he gains seraphic white wings. In V22 he had a halo as well, but in NT10 he does not. It is currently unknown whether the halo in this mode is more common, less common, or just a one-time thing. We've seen Angel Mode all of three times total, the third being when the cyborg Rensa 29 invoked his power in NT7.
In either of these modes he can manipulate real vectors, imaginary vectors, and vectors he is not directly touching, and all without the use of the Misaka Network. His wings in both cases seem to be made of an energy similar to Dark Matter and angelic Telesma. The wings do the calculations for him, and at a rate much faster than his already insane normal calculation ability. He can update the laws of reality and speak the language of the Angels.
It's unknown just where his limitations lie for any mode. What we do know is that when in Angel Mode he is at least Angel Class, that without awakening he was powerful enough to take out both the awakened Kakine Teitoku and a weakened Archangel Gabriel (unknown to him, this was thanks to help in various forms from FUSE Kazakiri, Acqua and Touma), and that in white-winged Angel Mode he was able to float in the air, fly 5000 meters upward instantaneously, and block a gigantic amount of Telesma from decimating Eurasia. All black-winged instances were triggered by great emotional disturbances or changes in thought processes that led to his determination to defeat his enemy no matter the consequences. Think of it as a last resort move of desperation. The white-winged Angel Mode appears to be triggered by the desire to protect being his primary motivation to defeat his enemy. His first usage of magic is believed, but not confirmed, to have helped instigate the change from black wings to white ones.
To a certain degree, Accelerator is able to sense the presence of magical energy given off by beings (e.g. Biblical angels), artifacts (e.g. clothing and weapons belonging to magicians he fought in Russia, and the lambskin parchment), concentrated masses (Telesma), and certain types of spells (his GROUP coworker Unabara Mitsuki wears a magical disguise that transforms his appearance to that of someone he's taken a human skin sample from). This comes across in the form of a pressure-like sixth sense when he is in close enough proximity to them. It happens automatically.
Accelerator has demonstrated the ability to use magic in a limited capacity. Due to the incompatibility of AIM fields and magical energy, espers who use magic wind up with severe stress in the nervous and circulatory system. V1 contains the following explanations: "The circuits in those who have talent... and those who don't... are different. Someone with abilities can't... use a system created for... those without it..." and "Espers like him acquired their supernatural endowments by forcing their irregular brain circuits to open using drugs and electrical stimulation. Their bodies actually were fundamentally different." The usage of magic by an esper can result in ruptured blood vessels and possibly lead to death. His first attempt at using magic gave him internal bleeding and made him cough up blood; this side effect is used to great effect in NT3 when Gremlin members set him up to unintentionally perform a magic spell.
However, NT2 shows that if Accelerator concentrates very carefully while in ESPer Mode, he can use magic and stave off the more adverse effects. He used some type of magic detection, applied the basics of feng shui to it and used this to accurately locate a magic crystal based on the flow of energy and the movements of the general populace. The worst side effect he wound up with was a feeling of tension in his veins and an unnatural sweat on his body. He must consciously monitor everything to avoid the normal side effect.
Aside from that, Accelerator is proficient with guns, especially handguns. He knows how to ride a motorcycle. He's tech-savvy, both with computers/hacking, and with building mechanical items like his cane. His memory is impressive: it took him less than two minutes to first visually scan Last Order's personality code and then memorize the entire thing in one sitting. His head is filled with a ridiculous amount of scientific information. Not only did his education hold a heavy emphasis on math and physics, but his brain was modified to allow him to instantaneously do all sorts of complicated equations in his head, which are necessary for using his powers. He has shown the ability to come up with new applications and computations for his power on the fly, and to reverse-engineer the properties of inexplicable/unknown laws his body has experienced (e.g. Kakine's Dark Matter). He has a fair amount of basic underworld knowledge despite only working for GROUP for about a month, was able to identify eight different professional freelance spies accurately based on actions/body language alone, and displayed interrogation skills in making one of them talk. He speaks English, Japanese, French and Russian, if not more.
Inventory: His white winter outfit and the clothes he was wearing under them. His wallet, mobile device, battery charger, cane, and whatever other random stuff he might have had in his pockets at the time.
Suitability: As a key player in many of the dramatic goings on in the Science Side, and one of the people who helped bring World War III to an end, Accelerator is in an influential position no matter how much he hates the attention and much of the responsibility it saddles him with. The combination of that, his experiences of survival in his environment, and his distaste for both corruption and the endangerment of civilians makes him a good candidate for becoming a person of influence in the game setting.
There will be an initial lack of motivation on his part due to not knowing anyone and not caring about a world that ultimately doesn't affect his own. However, he is coming from a point of uncertainty as to the outcome of his world's fate; Academy City has ordered all of the Level Fives to take on Kamijou Touma and his travel partner Othinus, a girl who as a magic god threatened to destroy the world. Accelerator had made the effort to be the first to fight him and intentionally lost in order to make the city's higher-ups think twice about sending anyone else after someone who lost to their most powerful esper. As Accelerator's canon point is shortly after waking up from passing out after his fight, he will know very little about the state of the world's fate, and I can see him becoming restless and impatient in Tu Vishan during his wait to get back to his own world. That restlessness and his experiences with the corrupt-on-the-inside Academy City would compel him to gradually become involved in whatever BS might sprout up in-game. It's also a good chance for him to loosen up and develop positive relations with other people outside of his immediate family, resistant as he will be about that.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person (Prose):
His chest throbbed and ached. Taking a rock to the heart just as his redirection field got negated by that boy's right hand had been enough to make his mind go blank and knock him unconscious. Considering how fast he'd been going in his plummeting attack attempt, it would be a miracle if he got out of it without at least a hairline fracture somewhere. But it would be a while before he could get examined. First, he had to get the hell back to Academy City from all the way up in northern Denmark. Return travel plans had been arranged before he had set out, so it was a matter of getting to the place of departure from where he was.
Doing that with his chest pain and his cane would not be particularly enjoyable, no matter the distance. On top of that, he first had to deal with an unanticipated annoyance. The clone who'd fallen unconscious once the Will had finished possessing her in order to speak to him directly. It was troublesome, but not something Accelerator had the conscience to walk away from and ignore. Besides, she would come in handy for global positioning. Surely she was stationed somewhere nearby, at least in the same region of Denmark, and communicating with the other Sisters to answer anything he and she didn't already know would be easy enough. For now it was a waiting game. He sat crosslegged in the snow near her body, which neatly lay face-up with one shoulder touching his knee and the legs sprawled out straight. This way he could keep an eye on her till she awoke.
When the Will had taken control of Last Order the first time she made contact, the brat had been fine after being out for a few minutes once control had been given back to her. He was using that as an estimate for how long he'd have to wait. If it took longer than that for this one, his plan was to start nudging and poking somewhere like the shoulder or cheek. Thinking this over to himself, he drew in a careful, slow sigh that resonated with annoyance and made him wince. The ache in his chest was dull, but seemed to have no intention of subsiding completely. "Anytime now, brat," he muttered after a couple minutes, hoping it might prompt a reaction. He could see her breath form faint clouds above her mouth. She was dressed warmly; as long as he kept a watchful eye on her she ought to be fine despite the frigid weather.
Another minute passed. He thought he noticed a faint shift, the whisper-light crunch of snow, and then her eyelids flickered. "Oi. Wake up," he commanded with palpable irritation, his voice a low rasp.
"Misaka is already awake," came a soft, foggy-sounding reply from the girl before him, and she moved her far elbow now, "says Misaka in reply to the command that has come after the action commanded of her."
"It sure doesn't fucking look like it. It usually also involves opening your damn eyes and making an attempt to get up." He let out another sigh and grabbed his cane. He could rise from a sitting position using his two hands if he had to, but having the cane in one hand was a must if he wanted to stay upright for long, especially with all the glass beneath the snow.
"Waking is a process that encompasses several stages, not all of which are observable by an onlooker, says Misaka while going through with the motions that are." The clone's eyes were open now, and she stared forward with a blank expression, only panning her head to look at him once she was sitting upright in front of him.
He clucked his tongue. Such comments were evidence that the annoyance known as WORST didn't get her sass from completely out of nowhere. "Whatever. Quit wasting time and get up. Tell me your serial number and where we are. There's somewhere I need you to locate for me from here."
Network:
[The feed opens up with a headshot of a guy at the console. Moppy white hair that barely touches his shoulders, red eyes, pale skin. An expression that seems to embody a mixture of boredom and annoyance. A black choker encircles his neck, with a black box connected to it and wires that go from the box to somewhere behind his ears. A person who doesn't know any better would likely mistake it for a fancy, if unusually designed MP3 player. He takes a moment to glare daggers at the screen before proceeding to speak.]
To start off, I'm only going to bother with three questions.
[The rest could always wait.
Accelerator holds up the pointer finger of one hand.]
One- I don't care whether you're someone I'd hate or tolerate; does the name 'Academy City' mean anything to anyone else here?
[He holds up the middle finger now.]
Two- I need to know if anyone's come across a girl named Misaka who speaks in the third person. She was with me right before I woke up in this weird-ass place.
[He holds up a third finger.]
And three...
[Deliberate pause. His eyes narrow, brow furrowing. He hates to bring this up in case it brings too much attention to the topic he plans to ask about, but it's too important to ignore for the time being.]
Three. What's the norm for supernatural abilities when you're not from here?
[He's felt drained since he woke up. No matter what the truth of the nature of this place was, his connection to the Misaka Network doesn't seem to be compromised. His power, on the other hand, seems to be barely functional, based on the few testing attempts he made when he first woke up. Something was up.]