#hc. self

[prkjiho]

[ SEO KANG-JOON, HE/HIM/HIS, CIS-MALE ] | [ JI-HO PARK ] just threw their bags into the car. With [ BACK IN BLACK BY AC/DC ] and the AC blasting, they depart [ CHICAGO, ILLINOIS ] with a [ STRAWBERRY MATCHA LATTE ] in their hand. Off to see their high school friends who know them as [ G ] when they’re really [ THE TECH-GURU ] now. The past five years, they’ve been [ GOING TO UNIVERSITY AND DEVELOPING APPS/GADGETS ] and it’s been pretty [ BORING ]. A few of the other pact members might be surprised by [ HIS TATTOOS (HALF-SLEEVE), SHAGGY BLACK HAIR, AND HIS TASTE IN HIGH END CLOTHES ]

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

⇝ Park Ji-ho was born in South Korea and lived there until he was five years old. His family lived in Hawaii, Washington, Texas, and Virginia before settling in Naperville, Illinois. His favorite place to live is Hawaii.

⇝ At the age of eight, he was in a horrible bike accident that resulted in a fractured wrist and several stitches on his left calf. He has a prominent scar on his leg from it.

⇝ Ji-Ho was taught Korean and English even though his parents only knew Korean. After they moved to America they started learning the English language together as a family. 

⇝ He was very self conscious about his speech and therefore was often quiet and hiding behind books (and later on whatever gadgets) he could get his hands on. His family moving every few years also made it hard for him to make friends.

⇝ His parents enrolled him in Taekwondo in an attempt to build his confidence and to hopefully help him make more friends. He is a black belt and used to compete, winning quite a few rewards.

⇝ Ji-Ho often helped his mother make dinner, he finds cooking relaxing even though nowadays he doesn’t do it often as he sometimes forgets to eat.

⇝ From a very young age he showed an interest in technology, he would be taking apart his Game Boy just to put it back together again.

THE WONDER YEARS (HIGH SCHOOL)

⇝ Shortly after his Freshman year of high school started, his family moved to Naperville, Illinois. His parents promised him they wouldn’t be moving for at least five years, it was their way of telling him to not be afraid to form connections with his classmates.

⇝ MEETING KENNEDY - Kennedy and Ji-Ho had English class together and she was his first real friend. She would often come up to him before and after class to try to have a friendly conversation with him but he never really gave her the time of day. But then one day during lunch hour she joined him and from then on he quietly joined her group of friends. She’s the one that was always trying to get him out of his comfort zone.

⇝ Since his social skills never really developed growing up, he was kind of socially inept. He didn’t pick up on social cues easily and he spoke matter-of-factly which made him seem cold to most people. It also didn’t help that most people just didn’t seem interesting to him.

⇝ He spent a lot of time in the library or computer lab during any free time he had during school. He was always studying or working on his next big idea.

⇝ He created an app the summer before his Junior year that allowed people to anonymously rate their classmates by their appearance which sent the school into a frenzy. To this day no one has been able to confirm that he was the one behind the app, some people had their suspicions but he was never proven guilty. 

⇝ During his Sophomore year it became known school wide how talented he was with computers and all things tech that he became the go-to person whenever someone had broken their phone or laptop or they wanted to enhance something because what they currently had wasn’t enough. He would gladly help out as long as they were able to pay his fee. 

⇝ KENNEDY DISAPPEARS - This sent Ji-Ho in a tailspin, but he hid it well. He was never good at showing emotions. He felt lost and could see the people he called his friends start to break and become strangers. In secret he hacked into any police records he could find on her disappearance to try to find her himself. He even looked into any security systems and footage he could find that may have caught her last moments.

THE LAST FIVE YEARS

⇝ After high school graduation he ran away to MIT where he studied Computational Science and Engineering. He graduated a year early and decided to move back to Illinois for his Master’s program and to be closer to his parents. 

⇝His first year of college was rough. He was trying to live his life in a way that Kennedy would be proud, which meant a lot of pushing his own boundaries and stepping outside of his comfort zone. This led him to meet some very interesting people.

⇝ He is still a very private and focused person but he has gained a sense of self (or maybe he’s more lost than ever) that he is able to exude some self-confidence that sometimes gets mistaken as arrogance. 

⇝ Ji-Ho fell out of touch with a majority of the group. If they message him he would reply but he rarely was the one reaching out to them. He didn’t know what to say and he didn’t want them to know that he failed in finding Kennedy.

⇝ His last year at MIT he got a half sleeve tattoo on his upper right arm. It consisted of cherry blossom branches, an hour glass, a cloud design, and a few other traditional Korean aspects in it. If I can find a photo I will share it.

⇝ He’s grown his hair out a bit, instead of the typical short (bordering buzzcut short) he had through out high school he now has somewhat shaggy black hair.

⇝ He is currently attending Illinois Institute of Technology for his Master’s in Artificial Intelligence.

[prkjiho]

THE MIND BEHIND HOWLONE

⇝ Ji-Ho has always been a quiet one, blending in the background and staying out of drama. So what motivated him to create a rather controversial app for his school? Attention. To this day, no one knows that he was the one behind the app but just knowing that HowlOne was (and may still very well be) the talk around school was enough for him.

⇝ He spent the summer before junior year and the first half of the school year building the app and making sure it had no bugs before launching it.

⇝ The way HowlOne works is it takes two students - boy vs boy, girl vs girl - and allows others to vote on who is "hot or not”. The photos used were taken from the school’s system and are the photos students took for their school IDs. Each photo had the student’s basic information, name, grade, and rank.

⇝ Students could sign up to receive real time notifications on their photo as it either moved up or down in ranks. It also allowed them to see who they “won” or “lost” against. 

⇝ During winter break of Junior Year, G hacked into the school’s automated email system and sent out an email to the entire student body letting them know of a new app to keep up to date with all things Naperville North High (i.e. school closures, events, the lunch menu, etc). 

⇝ It was soon realized that HowlOne was not the app described in the email and with word of mouth those that didn’t download the app over winter break soon had it themselves.

⇝ Phones were constantly being taken away during class because of HowlOne and rivalries were being made for those who took the rankings way too seriously.

⇝ At first it was just students voting but it was soon realized that anyone with the app could vote. So someone could have sent the app to their friends and family outside of Naperville North High to try to get their rankings up. 

⇝ Having the HowlOne be the talk of the school gave Ji-Ho a sense of pride, and a boost to his ego. He hadn’t expected it to take off as much as it did but a part of him - the sadistic part - wish it did. 

⇝ HowlOne still exists and has evolved to include the other Naperville high schools. It is updated every year with the current student roster.

⇝ HowlOne has made a big stir both in Naperville but also on the Internet with the help of social media. Some have reached out to the developer to get a similar app for their school which G has happily helped with for a fee and anonymously of course.

[mzryder]

[ AVAN JOGIA, HE/HIM/HIS, CISMALE ] | [ MASON “MAZE” RYDER ] just arrived from [ LAS VEGAS, NEVADA ] with [ FRAIL STATE OF MIND BY THE 1975 ] and the AC blasting. There’s a [ BLACK COFFEE ] in their hand as they stroll the sidewalks of Huntington Beach, their [ TEMPORARY RESIDENCE ]. If they had to be put in a box you might call them [ THE BROKEN ], but they really hate when you do that. The past few years, they’ve been [ SEARCHING FOR A PLACE TO CALL HOME ] and it’s been pretty [ EVENTFUL ]. When the pact members meet them, they might be surprised by [ HIS LONG FLUFFY HAIR, HIS SCHOOL BUS HOME, AND HIS ASSORTMENT OF RINGS ]

BASIC INFORMATION

NAME → mason ryder NICKNAME(S) → maze AGE → 25 y/o BIRTHDAY → may 21 ZODIAC → taurus-gemini cusp HOMETOWN → reno, nevada SEXUALITY → pansexual OCCUPATION → unknown - does whatever he can to make money SOCIAL STATUS → lower class - technically homeless if it weren’t for the small school bus he converted into a home EDUCATION → high school drop out LANGUAGES → english

FAMILY INFORMATION

FATHER → william, occupation unknown MOTHER → ava, prostitute SIBLING(S) → elise, younger half-sister - separated when they were young PET(S) → none, but he wants a dog

PERSONALITY

+ TRAITS → adaptable, dependable, charming - TRAITS → secretive, impulsive, dishonest (about himself) LIKES → music, not being tied down, meditating, tattoos, being on the open road DISLIKES → people prying into his past, elitists, law enforcement

HEADCANONS - full bio can be found here, but here are some highlights

tw. death, abuse (physical and sexual), drug use

→ His mother died from a drug overdose when he was eight years old and Elise, his younger half-sister, was four. Not knowing who their father was or having any other family to go to they were thrown into the foster care system.

→ He and Elise were separated, she was adopted relatively quickly into a loving home while he jumped from home to home. None of them were kind to him, it was just his luck it seemed. He endured years of abuse - emotionally, physically, and sexually - until he ran away at the age of fifteen. He hasn’t seen his sister since, and he doesn’t even know where she is.

→ From then on he hoped from shelter to shelter to find a warm place to sleep at night but spent the days wandering the streets trying to survive. Relying on his looks and his charms, he started to do whatever he had to to make a little bit of money. He isn’t proud of any of it.

→ At sixteen he fell into the wrong crowd. He started using, started dealing, started following in his mother’s footsteps because it was easy money but it wasn’t money he was able to keep.

→ At eighteen he ran into his music teacher, Mr. Dennis, and he was the first person to show Mason that he cared. He took him in, only temporary, and helped him get cleaned up. Since then Mason has been clean, he hasn’t been sober but at least he’s been clean.

→ Mr. Dennis is also the person who helped him buy his little school bus and convert it to a home. By the time he was twenty he was on the road and running away once again but this time from the entire city he used to call home.

→ He’s hasn’t stayed in one place for more than six months and has lived in the following places: Phoenix, Arizona Sante Fe, New Mexico Houston, Texas New Orleans, Louisiana Atlanta, Georgia Tallahassee, Florida Asheville, North Carolina Louisville, Kentucky Denver, Colorado Canon Beach, Oregon Las Vegas, Nevada Currently - Huntington Beach, California

→ Mason often will lie about his past when people ask him about it. He’s ashamed of his upbringing and honestly doesn’t want people to pity him.

→ He enjoys meeting new people and easily makes friends. He is able to blend in where he needs to. 

→ You know that “the loneliest people are the kindest...” quote, yeah that’s Mason in a nutshell. 

[prkjiho]

people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do

BASIC INFORMATION

NICKNAMES → g AGE → 23 y/o BIRTHDAY → feb. 18 ZODIAC → aquarius, pisces cusp OCCUPATION → student, inventor HOMETOWN → busan, south korea SEXUALITY → heterosexual SOCIAL STATUS → middle class EDUCATION → b.s. in computational science and engineering, pursuing m.a.s. in artificial intelligence LANGUAGES → english, korean

FAMILY INFORMATION

FATHER → park ha-jun, 60 y/o, public relations specialist MOTHER → park mi-sun, 55 y/o, seamstress SIBLING(S) → none PET(S) → none

PERSONALITY

+ TRAITS → ambitious, educated, independent - TRAITS → assertive, emotionless, uncompromising LIKES → surfing, calm and quiet people, good listeners, people who can challenge him intellectually, home cooked meals, the sound of a new gadget booting up, books, iron man, soju, being alone, cats DISLIKES → limitations, being told what to do, people who always feel the need to talk or do something exhilarating, ignorance, messes, the past

APPEARANCE

HEIGHT/WEIGHT → 6′0″ 175 lbs BODY TYPE → muscular EYE COLOR → caramel HAIR COLOR + STYLE → short/medium length, shaggy, black TATTOO(S) → half sleeve, upper right arm, cherry blossom branches, an hour glass, a cloud design, and other traditional korean aspects (photos to come if i can find them) PIERCING(S) → used to have his ears pierced

HEADCANONS

These are additional headcanons not listed on Ji-Ho’s intro post. you can find that post here.

⇏ He likes to think of himself as the Korean Iron Man. ⇏ He is very close to his parents and moved back to the Chicago area to be closer to them and take care of them since they aren’t getting any younger. ⇏ He brought a lot of long sleeve shirts, or shirts that at least cover his upper arms, to hid his tattoo from the group. He never seemed like the type to get a tattoo and he doesn’t want them poking fun or asking questions. He’s not ready to deal with that just yet. ⇏ He got into technology from old video games his father showed him and seeing how gaming has progressed. ⇏ He wants to change the world with his inventions. His dream is to create a company that works on saving the planet to humans don’t have to fear its extinction. ⇏ He has had a few internships at big forward thinking companies and even turned down another one in order to come to California for the summer. ⇏ Compared to high school, you could say he is more outgoing but the more he is around his friends from the past the more he feels himself reverting to that kid he was. ⇏ He’s helped create a lot of apps, both popular and not so popular, but he never boasts about it. ⇏ He’s always wanted a sibling but his parents were more focused trying to give him the life they never had. Both of them grew up in poor families. ⇏ He didn’t date until college, although if he allowed himself to take the risk he would have asked Addison out back then. ⇏ He could have graduated a year early but he didn’t want to leave his friends behind. ⇏ Even though he is big on technology and connecting with the world, he doesn’t use social media much. He has accounts and he’ll go on there at least once a week to see if he’s missed anything important but that’s about it.