take control (app).

[jichangwook]

MUSE NAME: Ji Changwook
PB NAME: Ji Changwook
GROUP/SOLO: Industry
MUSE LJ: jichangwook
MUSE IM: #razorandrust

AGE: July 5, 1987; 27
RESIDENT OR IMMIGRANT: Immigrant; moved to Hong Kong at the beginning of 2016
OCCUPATION: Has been surviving off of sporadic work since moving to Hong Kong, but is currently on the lookout for a position that provides a little financial more stability
RESIDENCE: Palatial Crest

RACE: Human
STANCE: Resistance (Hunter by trade)


HISTORY/PERSONALITY

Ji Changwook was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1987, to two overjoyed and loving parents. Ji Dongwook and Kim Miyoung, being first time parents, may have unintentionally spoiled their son by being overbearing and worrying for his safety at home and play. But for the most part, Changwook enjoyed a happy and carefree life, something that didn’t even change when his mother and father returned home one night when he was five years old with two bundles in their arms – his baby twin brothers. Jinwook and Jaewook. It didn’t take a day for Changwook to assume the protective older brother role, immediately taking a liking to his younger brothers, and vowing valiantly to protect them from all harm that might come their way. There was no way that Changwook, at the tender age of two, could have known about the horrific tragedy that would befall his family in just five short years. His family was comfortably middle class, with both of his parents owning and working in the chicken restaurant underneath their apartment. Business was good, steady, and while his parents worked long hours, they always made sure to make time for their children. Changwook had no reason to think that anything in his life would change, that on a bitter December afternoon, he would come home and find that his entire had knocked off of its kilter and flipped upside down.

The month is December. The year is 1994. Early evening. Changwook, at the tender age of seven, is dropped off in front of his home after his day-trip to the museum with his class ran later than anticipated and he ended missing his usual bus home. His teacher, Miss Lee Jungah, walks him to the door and knocks. When there is no immediate answer, Changwook produces his keys that his parents had given him in case of an emergency, and the teacher opens the door for him. He ran ahead of her, excited to get inside and tell his parents about the fun day that he had at the museum, but instead, what he sees is much more harrowing. Now twenty years later, he still wrests with accepting it as reality. His living was a bloody mess, signs of struggle in the furniture tossed and turned all over the room, broken picture frames fracturing the happy memories that he had of his family, the four bodies strewn about the room. While the bodies of his father, and his twin brothers are cold and lifeless, their necks torn to shreds, it’s his mother’s body that stands out in stark contrast in his minds eye – she’s slumped against the figure of a man, large and imposing, lifeless and bleeding profusely from her neck. The man had striking features, sharp eyes, and his face covered in blood and giving a particular gleam to the elongated fangs protruding from his mouth. Changwook hardly made a sound before the creature noticed him, dropping the lifeless body of his mother to the floor to join his father, making a quick get-away from the back door that led to a balcony.

Whatever happened after that passed in a blur. He remembered his teacher finding him numb, he remembered speaking to police and investigators, and he remembered hearing the word ‘homicide’ being thrown around. No matter how many times he tried to tell people about the man that he saw, about the way that he seemed to be eating his mother, no one believed him. The psychiatrists that he was forced to see on a weekly basis in the months following the brutal death of his family told relatives and concerned authorities that the creature was simply a construct of his mind, a defense mechanism to deal with the trauma of seeing his family murdered. As Changwook got older, he learned what to say and what not to say, and despite the fact that his psychiatrists believed that he was getting better, he was never able to completely let go of what he saw that evening. Something, not someone, took his family away from him, and the day would come that he would figure out what.

Having no other living relatives, Changwook was sent to live with his grandparents in a small, rural village, where he stayed until he was eighteen years old. It was during this time, understandably, that Changwook’s personality began to change. Rarely would he smile, he became increasingly more withdrawn emotionally, and he seemed to throw himself entirely into tasks given to him to avoid interacting with people, including his grandparents. He was a dutiful son, helping his grandfather manage the work on his farm, and it wasn’t long before he began to neglect his studies in favour of focusing on martial arts. He seemed to prefer tasks that involved his hands, so he thrived at martial arts, much more than he excelled in academics. He scraped by in school, always passing because the thought of being held back was just an inconvenience, but he excelled in martial arts. Ever since the death of his family, Changwook always felt as if there was some threat looming over his shoulder, and he knew that he wanted to be prepared whenever it decided to show itself.

In 2007, Changwook graduated from high school without distinction. Later that year, his grandfather passed away peacefully in his sleep, and his grandmother followed barely a month later. At this point, Changwook was eighteen, and had no desire to tend to the farmland for the rest of his life. He had a dream, after all, and that was to find the truth behind what happened to his parents. After receiving a sum of money for the estate, Changwook packed up his bags, and moved back north to Seoul. It had been the first time that he had returned to the city since the death of his family, and the city had changed a lot since the last time that he was there. It was crowded, uncomfortably so, and Changwook found himself drawn to shadier areas, where there less people, and more opportunities to learn about what goes bump in the night. He rented a small bachelor’s pad that was a room, with a small closet bathroom tucked into the corner; it was big enough to fit a bed, a hotpot, and a mini-fridge for leftover takeout and beer.

Since Changwook was always good with his fists, it didn’t take him long to discover the existence of the supernatural once he dipped his toe in the underbelly of Seoul’s finest. He learned about vampires, about shifters and werewolves, about mutants and demigods, and all sorts of creatures that couldn’t be categorized as easily. He began to take small jobs, locating and exterminating creatures, learning more and more about them as he grew. It didn’t take him long to learn that it was a vampire that had attacked his family that December evening over a decade ago, the signs were all there, and while he took it as his personal mission to rid the world of all manner of creatures that brought pain and suffering, he held a particular grudge to vampires over all other manner of supernatural critters. After all, he still had not given up on the idea of getting revenge on the vampire that had taken his family, had taken his life away from him. He remembered the vampire’s face, as clear as the image of his family mauled and dead on his living room floor, so he knew that it was only a matter of time before they crossed paths again.

The year was 2014, and Changwook had been in Seoul for nearly seven years, working to rid the city of the supernatural, earning himself a fair bit of profit along the way. As the years wore on though, he started to notice that business was dwindling, and he learned over time that it was because the nodes, the source of supernatural power, around the world were slowly dying. While that would seem like a victory to most, Changwook felt as if it was fate trying to rob him his chance at revenge. There didn’t seem to be an immediate solution though, and with the supernatural population dwindling, and being desperately in the need of funds, he decided to join the military for his mandatory service. It wasn’t a hard decision; Changwook was a man that preferred things to be practical and not over the top. The military would provide him with a roof over his head for the next two years, guarantee income over that same time, and it would allow him to keep up with his training when business was on the slow side.

At the end of 2015, Changwook is discharged from the military. Upon discharge, he learns from his contacts still in Seoul that there were still nodes active in Hong Kong, and that was most likely where he would be able to continue to put his skills (and his grudge) to good use. After hearing rumours about a large vampire population both residing in, and migrating to, Hong Kong, Changwook did not have difficulty making up his mind about where he would go next. It was both the practicality of following business and the drive of his grudge that caused him to make that drastic of a move, but with no more living family to tie him to South Korea, Changwook didn’t have difficulty packing up his few measly belongings and moving to Hong Kong.


FACTS/QUIRKS

• Changwook is distant from personal relationships due to his dark past; he had trouble relating to kids his age during school, and by the time he became an adult, he doesn’t see the point in connecting with people on trivial matters and spending time with them outside of a professional setting.
• Although he’s a hunter by trade, he does understand that there is a necessity to interacting with the supernatural, mostly in regards to garnering information from them when he’s not a hunt.
• Practical to a fault – he does not go out of his way to do anything unless there’s a goal at the end to achieve. He will not carry out awkward small talk, just like he will not harm a supernatural creature unless he’s been hired for a specific job.
• He has very few personal belongs – the sparse personal items that decorate his apartment are old framed photos: one of his family (his father, mother, twin brothers and himself), and one of he and his grandparents. He also has his dog tags from his time in the army.
• Since he has only lived in Hong Kong for less than a year, his Mandarin and Cantonese are certainly something to be desired, but he is making a concentrated effort to learn – it is, after all, practical for him to do so, since he has decided to stay in Hong Kong for the foreseeable future.
• He is plagued by nightmares and night terrors about discovering the murder of his family, and so he has a difficult time sleeping through the night – he usually tries to take his mind off of things by working out or going out for a late-night or early-morning jog.
• If he gets particularly stressed, he has also been known to smoke, a habit he has never quite been able to kick. He started out by stealing cigarettes from his grandfather on the farm, and it slowly developed into a coping mechanism to deal with various stressors.
• Despite his inability to form personal relationships with people, he has recently taken a roommate into his small, bachelor style, one room apartment in Palatial Crest. It’s his practical nature that recognizes the need for steady income to make rent, so he ends up taking in a new immigrant to Hong Kong, a young Korean man aspiring to be a police officer.