EXPI: APPLICATION

[treesistance]

Player: Cris
Contact: PM or crissyphus on Discord
Age: 34
Current Characters: N/A

Character Name: Ekko
Character Canon: Arcane
Canon Point: Post-Season 1
Age: Late Teens

Crime: Sedition

Background: Here

Personality:

🙶 I charged him double price! Sucker. 🙷

For the first act of Arcane, while Ekko is still a child, he was a pint-sized conman. Even at a very young age Ekko had a knack for reading people (or picking out marks, really), and he was also insatiably curious, always finding ways to listen in to conversations that adults tried to hide from him. He was gregarious and mischievous, a totally incorrigible child, balanced out (or maybe bolstered by) by the fact that he was also a genius. Despite his incredibly young age at the start of the series he already worked at the junk shop owned by the man who took him in (Benzo), repairing things so they could be sold again, which probably helped to instill in him a hard work ethic that never faded. During those years is also when he started building pretty sophisticated machines out of the extra junk, from a sort of periscope to an automated monowheel for helping him make deliveries.

When not working he seemed to be left mostly to his own devices, which is where the trouble comes in. Adventurous and wily, Ekko developed the skills to sneak around even well patrolled places to gather information without being caught, and the restlessness to always be seeking out dirt on everyone and everything around him. Unfortunately, this did not come hand-in-hand with the wisdom to avoid poking his nosy little fingers into extremely dangerous business and (most tragically) dragging his friends down into it with him.

Even as a kid he was very brave, shooing another boy barely older than him away after spotting Enforcers (Arcane's cops) and sticking around as a distraction, helping Vi's gang escape a group of armed Enforcers later, and then secretly following the man who murdered Benzo despite the trauma of witnessing it before returning to free Vi and tell her where they went. This... did not go particularly well for everyone involved after, but what can you do?

🙶 That was a long time ago. People Change. 🙷

During the timeskip, Ekko was completely alone (due to previously mentioned things not going well.) A lot of the personality he developed in the interim between acts one and two has been a reaction to his dire circumstances: where he was once a lively jokester, he got a lot more withdrawn and cautious. The childishly short temper he'd had in act one has gotten a lot worse, but also a lot more righteous, and he became so active in his community that he made an enemy of his city's most powerful crime boss rather than sit back and let him take over without a fight. He is a meticulous planner, taking a stopwatch into fights to time everything down to the second, and due to his surroundings he is incredibly desensitized to violence even if he does lean towards non-lethal tactics himself. He also has no hang-ups about running away from fights he can't win as he is more practical than prideful, though has chosen to stay in in dangerous situations to cover for others retreating in-series as well.

Because so much of his life has been a desperate scrabble for survival, Ekko doesn't necessarily plan with the long term in mind, instead he is much more concerned with the here and now. In a series full of forward thinkers planning big things for the future, someone trying to help the people who are struggling in the present was a gap that desperately needed filling, but it does leave Ekko in a pretty precarious position of relying on secrecy and being able to hide for survival, without any real plans to change that reality on the horizon.

🙶 If a single seed could make it down here, so could we. 🙷

Not all is doom and gloom, though. Ekko became, if anything, more compassionate during the time skip, taking in orphaned children and addicts and building up a community where they were sheltered and (relatively) safe. Despite his effort to seem very serious, he still knows how to have fun and even invented hoverboards for his gang to joyride into battle because he can see the need for lifting spirits. And also because they're freaking cool, okay?

Ekko never lost his love for inventing, and he really lights up when he gets a chance to have deeply nerdy engineering conversations. Despite all of its (many, many) issues, Ekko genuinely loves his city and the people in it, and he does everything in his (admittedly limited) power to help them out where and when he can. He is sarcastically called the Boy Savior by another character (and his episode's title), and he seems determined to live up to that name, even if Arcane is a world in which that cannot possibly last, or end well.

Abilities: Ekko does not have any magic abilities(/gadgets) in canon yet, but he is a decent combatant and extremely agile (shown dodging bullets at close range by.... flipping over them? Ridiculous.) Ekko's real abilities are all intellectual: he's a self-taught genius inventor, specializing in steampunk-style gadgets and the more League of Legends-specific chemtech (which requires a mastery of both Engineering and Chemistry) and he seemed to work exclusively with repurposed scrap in canon. Give him a problem and some time, and he will create a machine out of nothing to solve it.

Inventory: Clothes (seen here) toolbelt pockets have a handful of small tools like wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers etc and some stray nuts/screws/gears, mask (here) which has an air filter and a vocoder in it, chemtech hoverboard (here) which attaches to the back of the coat from the previous picture, crutch (for broken leg.)

Samples: Sample 1, Sample 2 (bonus TDM)

Questions: N/A