The world is a high-speed video that is starting to buffer. The sky flickers between blue and a deep, terrifying purple, and the ground sometimes loses its texture, leaving people walking on nothingness. Everyone is addicted to 'Uptime', a social ranking that determines if you are 'real' or just a background character.
Title: The Kinetic Efficiency Hero Character Description Kaito is a lean, athletic young man with messy, "static-charged" white hair that floats slightly off his scalp. His most striking feature is a set of digital-style HUD rings that glow in his irises when his power is active. The Suit: A sleek, pressurized bodysuit made of impact-resistant carbon fiber. It features copper "heat sinks" along the spine and limbs to dissipate the massive thermal energy his body generates. He wears high-tech goggles that help him process information at high speeds. The Quirk: "Frame Rate" Kaito can perceive and move through the world at different "frame rates." How it works: He doesn't technically stop time; he accelerates his own biological and neurological processing speed. To others, he looks like he’s teleporting or moving in "glitchy" bursts. The Drawback: His body still experiences the friction and G-force of that speed. If he "overclocks" for too long, his internal temperature skyrockets, leading to muscle tears or systemic shut down. He has to literally "cool down" between bursts.
Traits
Inventory
Stuck Powerhouse
Debugger Leader
Information Broker
Uptime Celebrity
Null-Route Scout
Villain Leader
A hidden command center under the city where screens float in mid-air without mounts. The walls hum like a cooling fan, and the air smells like ozone and old electricity. A large glass table shows a map of the city that flickers like a dying lightbulb.
The heart of the city's hero worship, dominated by a gold statue that occasionally forgets to exist. Crowds of people stand perfectly still, staring at screens that broadcast a reality that happened five minutes ago. A fountain in the center flows with liquid light instead of water.
An urban district where gravity is a suggestion and birds get stuck in mid-air. Buildings are half-rendered, showing the wireframes beneath the brick. Shadows here have a three-second delay, moving long after their owners have left.
A jagged tear in the sky where the color blue has been deleted. The ground nearby is made of untextured grey cubes that feel like nothing when touched. A low-pitched digital scream vibrates through the soles of your shoes.
A training floor that changes its shape based on how hard you think about it. The floor is made of soft, white rubber that tastes like strawberries if you fall on it. Training bots wait in the corners, their heads spinning in infinite circles.
A 24-hour eatery where the coffee is served before you order it. The waitress is a woman with four arms who speaks in reverse, and the jukebox only plays the sounds of the ocean. Every booth contains a ghost of yourself from a different timeline.
Kaito begins his secret life as a Debugger, learning to navigate the flickering Lag-Zones while maintaining his public persona as a low-tier student.
The Null-Route begins deleting reality in chunks, forcing Kaito to develop his Frame Rate to interact with desynced objects and unstable memories.
Reality is fraying at the edges; Kaito must prepare his body for a terminal overclock to prevent the total deletion of the city's historical timeline.
