Akira Tsuchiya

## Appearance

Akira has a fair skin tone, gray eyes and messy, dark blue hair, with a ahoge that creates a curve within about the right side of his head. One of his streaks also goes over his face.

Akira dresses himself in a turtle neck covering his mouth for most of the time. He wears a normal sweater with comfortable pants. He also has slippers implying that he might have a soft side and/or stays home a lot which is no surprise for what his Ultimate is.

## Personality

Akira is shown to be aloof and rude when speaking and generally does not agree with the opinions of others while muttering on his own. He might be slightly perverted as he refers to Narumi Osone as "thicc" when finding out that she bloats up massively depending on the amount of food she consumes. Akira's depressing demeanor may stem from the loss of his grandmother, but this has yet to be confirmed. His depressing demeanor may also stem from the fact that he feels as though he is talent less and his worth means nothing compared to others with "real" talents. According to him, this gives him despair.

According to his voice actor, he's like a pin cushion, "probably has a soft spot, but it's impossible to get to".

## Backstory

As someone who grew up on the internet, Akira developed an addiction to it and it basically consumed his life. He built up a reputation online for hacking into simple gaming systems and rewriting the code to allow for customisation and piracy, which boosted his popularity immensely. Of course, he was always under an alias (0verthrown) and was careful not to reveal anything of his identity. He partook in many hacking challenges online, and became nearly became recognised as the Ultimate Hacker by hacking a website which no other person could crack. However, one other person had cracked the website moments beforehand, and the title went out of his reach. The first person who hacked that website was to be crowned the Ultimate Hacker, who came forward to claim their title and was thus registered.

However, due to the fact that Akira was addicted to the internet, and spent his entire life with computers, this resulted in a major problem for Akira: He was lonely. He didn’t talk much with real people, or have a single friend to call his own… except for one. His own grandmother, the Former Ultimate Ghostwriter, Sumiko Kamiya (note: different last name. Hence why Kego doesn’t realize Akira’s connection.). Sumiko had been a survivor of the original tragedy, and was a part of Class 77-A. She survived as although she was enrolled into Hope's Peak, she was not physically going to the school as she had received special permission from the Headmaster to do so because of the anonymity surrounding her talent. She was shy, and less social, much like Akira was. However, Sumiko was different to Akira due to being a writer. Sumiko wrote stories as a child, but was never confident enough to share them, instead sharing them anonymously. When these got praised, Sumiko tried larger writing projects, like books, plays, scripts, and music, before getting them published under other peoples’ names, mainly celebrities and stars. This earned her the talent of the Ultimate Ghostwriter, and she often spent time alone, writing her next work. Akira and Sumiko were quite close, and Akira often spent weekends at his grandmother's house due to their bond. She was a stabilising force that Akira could depend on, and was able to impart wisdom onto Akira when needed. The two even shared certain pastimes. While Sumiko wasn’t quite as internet-focused as Akira, she appreciated a good meme, and the two of them often played video games together in their downtime.

However, due to her exposure to the tragedy, Sumiko had long since been in despair. Though she survived the Future Foundation's initial purge of Despairs, she was able to hide her views through her aliases and come off as a normal person to the public. Sumiko worked with both older and younger despairs around the world to try and spread it, especially after the government started erasing evidence of the Tragedy's and Junko Enoshima's existence. By posing as a conspiracy theorist, she was able to rally more people to the cause. Sumiko did this by writing eloquent despair propaganda, putting it into her works, and other sources, causing the messages of despair to slowly become implanted among millions of people, forming more and more people into despairs themselves. When Akira started to grow, Sumiko began to talk in length about despair with Akira, much like how she gave him advice, telling him why despair was great. Her words weren’t like her despair-tainted propaganda, though, but her genuine views and opinions on it, given to Akira in her usual manner.

The future foundation learned of Sumiko’s role in spreading despair, her influence a high-level threat. They knew with things going on as they were going currently, her spread of despair would only get worse. So, they enlisted Kego to go after Sumiko, due to her being a high level threat, and Kego having proven himself in his field. However, Kego was instructed to kill Sumiko. Kego resisted the idea, but was told that her influence would only continue if she was imprisoned, due to her talent as the Ultimate Ghostwriter would make her more than capable of slipping out her propaganda unto the world, even if she was locked up at the Future Foundation’s best prison. One day, while Sumiko was home alone, Kego infiltrated her home, and took her out with a silent shot to the back of her head, killing her. He fled the scene, her body remaining unfound until Akira visited her home, finding her murdered. This sent Akira spiraling into a deep sadness. Over the period of 3 days, he sat down at Sumiko’s laptop, which she was using at the time, and attempted to use his hacking skills to figure out what happened. He managed to hack into to government’s surveillance archives, and got access to her laptop’s webcam footage. It was there that he found footage of her murder. Her working on her computer, before she was shot, pitching forward, revealing Kego behind her with a silenced pistol. Akira downloaded the footage, planting it on the laptop, and keeping a copy for himself. He was sure Sumiko would get justice for her murder. Finally, he reported the murder, telling police he had only found her shortly before he called.

Weeks went by...and to Akira’s shock, he found that the case was strewed to be a suicide, claiming Sumiko did it out of despair. Akira knew investigators would have had to have found that footage, so he hacked once more to get to the bottom of it. He learned how the case was buried, thanks to the Future Foundation, as it would not only expose Kego, but would likely provide too much fuel for despairs to use to start an uprising against the Future Foundation. This drove Akira into a deeper sorrow. He knew he couldn’t release what he’d found, as he may be targeted, especially if they learned of his relation to Sumiko. This further cemented his view of despair as good, finding the future foundation, and hope, to be horrible and evil, especially since they stole someone he cared for deeply from him.

During Akira’s descent into despair, Akira stumbled across the holy grail of despair: Junko’s Ai. He found it on a Future Foundation archive when he was compiling information on Kego, from which he learned of the existence of the Ai. He idolized Junko, thanks to Sumiko, and he quickly copied and downloaded it, along with other Enoshima Files. His overzealousness caused the future foundation to catch on to some movements, only that the Enoshima Files had been downloaded and copied, leading to them starting a hunt for a new Despair uprising. Akira found that Junko’s Ai was quite advanced, so much that it was unable to run on his computer to any effective degree. He knew he’d need stronger computer power to run her. He researched around, finding that Precept's Peak Academy had a system that could run it.