And finally, the family I'm most attached to . . . the Choi family. :)
So, the two parents are Saeyoung and Micha, with Micha being my version of the Mystic Messenger MC. Her design is based on (though not the exact same as) MC 4 from that game. I actually have extensive backstory in my head for Micha, as well as how her and Saeyoung's story all plays out (which differs from the game in several major ways), but that doesn't need to be explained here.
The point is, Saeyoung and Micha are the parents, and the little boy in the middle is Taeoh, their son. Since Saeyoung and Micha are Korean, I wanted their son to have a Korean name as well, and Taeoh can be written with characters meaning "great" and "bright," which seemed appropriate. Also, it sounds cute. (They originally suggested some stupid-ass name like "Kent" for him and I was like . . . sort your lives out, no. And then Saeyoung got sassy and was like, "Then maybe YOU have a better name for MY child" and I was like yeah, in this case I do!!)
Also, you know how there's a little baby growing montage? In a stunning twist of canon accuracy, I got this:
The first thing Taeoh ever said was, "honey butter chips" LMAO. (Also I'm not an artist, don't judge me, I did my best. This was at least less lazy than how I did the Dr. Pepper.)
And then of course, Saeran is in the family photo because he lives with them. :) He's a vital member of this family!! And it's actually SO cute because he's so close with Taeoh . . . he actually loves Taeoh more than he loves Saeyoung according to his relationship list LOL. (He also prefers Micha over Saeyoung . . . Saeyoung baby I'm so sorry.)
He loves Saeran so much and Saeran is just like "he's fine I guess" 😭 (Okay, to be fair, Saeran's affection level has never dropped below "cares for" for Saeyoung. But still. Saeyoung's usually stays at either "cherishes" or at minimum "cares deeply for" for Saeran. SAERAN JUST LET YOUR BROTHER LOVE YOU.)
For the personalities, Saeyoung is an Ambitious Visionary, Micha is a Reserved Strategist, Saeran is a Reserved Perfectionist, and Taeoh is an Outgoing Merrymaker.
Also, as a final Choi family thing:
tfw your parents are being so embarrassing you have to sit all the way on a different bench.
Using a template I found on deviantART (well, via Google but otherwise on deviantART) and a couple picrews, I decided to make a Mystic Messenger style profile for my MC, Micha! A few bullet point notes:
She's based on MC 4, though I've changed / customized the design a little bit.
The age in parentheses is meant to match the Korean ages for the MM cast, so she's the same age as the Choi twins.
I chose the name Micha because, if you write it in the hyphenated style that Korean names are sometimes written, it's written as Mi-cha, i.e. MC. It's a common girls' name in Korea as well (with Lee being one of the most common surnames), and apparently means something like "beautiful daughter" lol, which is a fitting name for an otome game main character.
At some point I would like to write a novelization of both her trip through the MysMes story (Deep Story + Secret Endings) as well as everything that happens after, and maybe I will at some point . . . but for any who are curious, I'm also going to just write out her backstory and such under the cut here. With that said though, I've conceptualized her as a Mystic Messenger character, and so—particularly since she's a MysMes character in RFA—a tragic backstory is a requirement. Hence, content warnings for grooming and domestic / sexual abuse.
Micha Lee was born on January 30th in Busan, South Korea, and was left in the care of an orphanage shortly after her birth. (The orphanage officials were, incidentally, the ones who named her.)
Growing up, Micha was always a creative, but bold, child. And perhaps it was her bold attitude (which could be seen by some as rowdy), or maybe it was something else, but Micha was always overlooked when it came to potential parents. As she grew older, fewer and fewer adoptive parents looked her way. By the time she was a teenager, Micha resigned herself to the fact that she would likely age right out of the orphanage. By the time she was sixteen, she was the oldest orphan still there.
When she was sixteen, however, things did take a turn. A corporation headquartered in Busan known as Eclipse Enterprises decided that Micha's orphanage would be a perfect subject for a new charity enterprise—in this case, a complete renovation of the building, which was pretty old and could use some modernization. Eclipse Enterprises does a lot of charity work alongside their normal business ventures (it looks good to shareholders, provides tax benefits), and so while another charity project wasn't too surprising, the orphanage owners were still surprised and thrilled beyond belief that their orphanage was chosen.
As part of the renovation kickoff, the director of Eclipse Enterprises, Hojin Yoon, came on-site to look at the orphanage personally and speak with the contractors about the work that needed to be done, the expected timeline, et cetera. While he was there, he and Micha crossed paths; and for the first time, an adult visiting the orphanage took interest in her. Micha figured that it was likely because she was the oldest one there (how many were still orphanage residents at sixteen? at her orphanage at least, none except for her), but it was still nice to be talked to for once, particularly when Hojin took an interest in her art. He seemed to truly admire her artwork, and offered her an internship with Eclipse Enterprises on the spot, in their marketing and graphic design department. It would be an unpaid internship, but the experience would be invaluable. Micha, feeling seen and appreciated for the first time in she didn't know how long (and wanting to pursue art as a career someday), eagerly accepted.
It should be noted here that while Micha was sixteen, Hojin was twenty-seven.
Micha worked at Eclipse every day after school. While she worked there, Hojin paid for her meals, gave her rides back home to the orphanage every night, and bought her gifts: professional attire that she could wear at the office, a graphics tablet and laptop, things of that nature. Increasingly, he treated her to meals on the weekend, ostensibly so he could check in on how her internship was going. But it didn't feel only like work; Micha knew that Hojin was not interested in adopting her (and that it would be weird if he did, since he was only eleven years older than she was and so not old enough to be a parent), but it still at the very least felt like friendship, felt like something, felt safe and special. She accepted every invitation eagerly; she felt truly valued, truly wanted, in a way she hadn't before.
(Since she spent every day after school at Eclipse and, increasingly, her weekends with Hojin, she saw her friends at school less, and less, and less, until she only saw them during school hours, if even then. But she found she didn't mind too much, because she had so much going for her outside of school.)
When she turned eighteen, Micha aged out of the orphanage. She had originally planned to get a job and save money for an apartment, but after accepting the internship—the unpaid internship—she hadn't had time. Now she had nowhere to go—or at least, she would have nowhere to go, but Hojin offered her the biggest gift yet:
He offered to let her move in with him.
Micha was eighteen, and Hojin was now twenty-nine, and Micha had no job, no way to pay rent. She pointed this out, tried to reason how this was too much to accept—but Hojin said that he had a penthouse with too much space for just him, anyway, and that he could handle the mortgage just fine, thank you. She didn't need to pay him rent. He was happy to help out.
So Micha accepted, because for the past two years Hojin had been so kind, such a good person. How could she say no, in the face of such a genuinely selfless offer, in her time of need?
Coincidentally, Micha's internship ended at around the same time, and though she had thought she'd get hired on as an employee, Hojin lamented that the graphic design department at Eclipse was still fully staffed, and so there just wasn't space. But that was okay, he told her, because he could provide for her. And when Micha protested, saying that he didn't have to provide for her because they were just friends . . . Hojin said, well, what if we were something more than that?
Years later, Micha can't fully recall exactly how the conversation went. From her being completely blindsided and flabbergasted, to him telling her how he'd never felt about anyone the way he felt about her, to him asking if she felt the same, to her saying "I think so" and then agreeing because he'd been so kind and had done so much for her . . .
Micha had intended to get a job, or maybe even go to art school (for though she had learned a lot during her internship, there was always more). But Hojin assured her that, as his girlfriend, she didn't need to worry about any of that. She just needed to focus on being the best girlfriend she could be.
And that was when things, which were already bad (though she hadn't realized it), got worse.
Hojin was controlling. It wasn't just that he didn't want her to attend school or have a job; it was also that he didn't want her talking to others, especially men, without him present. It was that he wanted her to wear only clothes that he approved of (very expensive, very feminine). She had to grow her hair out because he liked it that way, she could only eat foods that he approved of. And when she did something to make him angry—
The first time he struck her, he immediately apologized, making excuses about how he'd had a long day, he was tired, he had just swung out with his hand and didn't realize how close he was—
The second time he apologized and said that she had just made him so angry.
The third time he didn't apologize at all.
When a physical altercation happened, Micha tried to fight back—at least at first. But that always made him angrier, and he was bigger and stronger than she was. This was also how, when guilt didn't work to push her into it ("don't you love me / I thought you loved me / you're my girlfriend, Micha"), he was able to sleep with her. After a fight, he insisted upon "make-up sex," and he always, always called her his "good girl" during and after.
This relationship lasted for three years, from when Micha was eighteen until she was twenty-one. She tried to end things multiple times, but each time he went ballistic. The last time she tried to break things off was shortly before her twenty-first birthday, and Hojin's reaction was so bad that she wasn't able to get out of bed for two days after.
It was then that Micha decided that, no matter what, she had to get out. She just couldn't tell him about it. So she started paying attention to where he stored money for safekeeping in the apartment. And six months after she turned twenty-one, she stole 50,000 won (equivalent to $35 USD) from his safe, and bolted with nothing but a backpack of clothes while he was gone at work for the day. The money she stole was exactly enough to get her a train ticket from Busan to Seoul—the largest city in South Korea, where she was sure he wouldn't be able to find her even if he tried.
Upon arriving in Seoul with nothing but the clothes she was able to stuff into a backpack, Micha sought out a homeless shelter. She figured she would be able to stay there until she found a steady job, and saved enough money to afford an apartment.
Well, she was able to stay there. Getting out of there, however . . .
She was able to land day-gigs from a labor center in town, as well as occasional freelance art projects (under a pseudonym, always under a pseudonym to avoid detection). She was able to save up enough money to get a cheap smartphone with pay-as-you-go minutes, so that a job would be able to reach out to her to schedule an interview and the like. But the job search was crushing. And over six months later, after she turned 22, she was still living out of the homeless shelter, pretty much all of her hope wilted.
(But still, it was better than where she had come from, considering.)
It was while she was at the shelter one night, scrolling through job adds on her phone, that she noticed a strange messenger app install itself on her phone. She opened it to find herself speaking to someone named Unknown, who said that he wanted her to go to an apartment so that he could let the owner know that he found their phone.
Now, after everything she had been through, Micha was hypervigilant, and no longer so trusting. But she'd also been homeless for eight or so months at this point, and so she figured, well, if he wanted to rob her she had nothing worth stealing, and if he wanted to kill her . . . well, who would miss her?
So she went. And that was how she found herself in Rika's apartment, speaking to RFA through the messenger app that Saeyoung had created.
Micha had absolutely no interest in party planning whatsoever. But the apartment was nice. And she apparently had to stay there if she wanted to plan the party. Which meant that, if she agreed to plan the party, she could stay in a nice apartment for free while she continued her job search on the side. (She also got Jumin to agree to give her a weekly stipend as part of her coordinator duties, using the excuse that she couldn't go attend her job and also attend the party. He didn't have to know that she didn't actually have a job that she was giving up; all he had to do was send her the money she needed to live.)
In other words: Micha agreed to become the RFA party coordinator out of pure self-interest. Out of a need to survive. But she didn't feel as bad about it as one might expect, because hey, she was still talking with potential party guests; it wasn't as if she was lying about that, was she?
- - -
Micha's personal journey through the story would involve her learning to trust RFA—both in seeing them as friends / family rather than just a means to an end, and also allowing herself to actually trust again, because of how much her trauma from Hojin burned her trust in her own abilities to believe in others. While I envision her going through Saeyoung's route (and thus also the Secret Endings), there are some key differences that I envision:
They do not become a couple by the end of his route; it's only eleven days by that point, and not only is that only acceptable in an otome game (and not a more grounded story like what I would want to write), but it's also just not realistic given the trauma that Micha endured for three years, only to escape less than a year before this would take place. Not to mention, Saeyoung himself has a shit-ton to work through as well. By the end of the eleven days they are friends, and by the end of the Secret Endings they may even consider each other best friends, but they are not dating and both would deny that even being a possibility to anyone who asks.
Micha and Saeyoung would likely argue and yell a lot at each other during the rough days in the apartment. Micha is hypersensitive to any behavior she perceives as controlling (and has also sworn to herself to not let anyone talk down to her again), and Saeyoung, meanwhile, is having literally the worst week of his entire life after discovering what was done to Saeran, + he does see Micha as a friend even if he doesn't want to admit it, so it's just kind of a mess for a time. But they work through it, because despite her trauma telling her not to, Micha does care about Saeyoung, and vice versa. They both need friends and allies.
After the events of the Secret Ending 01, Micha can't exactly go back to Rika's apartment (yes Saeyoung bought it and disabled the bomb security system, but he bought it to be RFA headquarters), but also, she doesn't have enough for a place yet either. So she tells Vanderwood (who was driving her back from the hospital) to drop her off at the homeless shelter . . . at which point he says "what the actual fuck" and takes her back to his place instead, under the excuse that "Seven would kill me if I left you there." ("Seven doesn't have to know" / "He'll find out and I'm not dealing with his tantrum when he does")
Micha and Vanderwood are (100% platonic) roommates for at least a year following. This is especially good because it gives Saeyoung and Saeran time to work through their mutual trauma in the bunker, with Micha occasionally bringing by food for them and otherwise offering support to Saeyoung where she can. (So they do grow closer still, emotionally, but from a distance until Saeran is stable enough to be left home alone for periods of time and/or have guests over.)
It's at least a year until Saeyoung and Micha start dating, in other words, by which point they do consider each other best friends, but they still take it slow with actual dates because Saeyoung never has before, and Micha . . . has a complicated history . . . that she still hasn't told anyone about beyond truthfully answering that she doesn't have a family, having grown up as an orphan in Busan. She's not ready to talk about Hojin, and she feels that she doesn't even have to really think about him anymore since he's out of her life now!
. . . So you can guess what happens right after she lets herself think that, huh. (Because before any engagements or weddings can happen, the two lingering threats — Hojin for Micha, and Saejoong for Saeyoung — need to be dealt with, first.)
but anyway, I'd really like to write all this out someday, but until then . . . there is just this summary. Maybe if nothing else I can write oneshots someday . . . but we'll see.
