Tauver Iezovant

Profile

Name: Tauver Iezovant (the I in his last name is silent, so it’s pronounced like Ezovant)
Gender: Male
Age: 23-29
Height: He’s tall for a yarin, but (probably) short compared to male humans his age.
Weight: Unknown

Description:
He has light brown fur, though he dies it that color. His eyes are either blue or green. Some of his teeth protrude like fangs, looking slightly like the claws on his dominant hand; he has one fang in the top of his mouth for each finger claw he has on that hand, as well as one in the bottom for that hand’s thumb claw. His fangs and claws are rounded off at the end. He can be downright adorable at times, though how much of that is due to his appearance (or his voice, for that matter) is currently unknown.

He normally wears a full suit of yarin armor with its own voice changer. He just recently became able to wear clothing other than a full suit of armor outside without feeling exposed, but the outfits he wears in public must still be modest. Also, he usually wears contact lenses to make up for his poor eyesight (they’re easier to wear under an armored helmet than glasses are).

He’s probably at least somewhat attractive (or cutetractive, during those times when he’s adorable) by human and/or yarin standards. If so, he isn’t aware of how attractive he is. After all, people don’t usually make passes or even googly eyes at people wearing full body armor.

Nicknames: Tau, Tauvy
Species: Yarin

Friends: Clygon, Noryon, Krajjinav
Enemies: Unknown
Family: Pikuri (Younger sister)

Hobbies: Playing retro video games (especially ones with extensive dialogue trees), Searching for obscure retro video games on the Syrmon 2 equivalent of the internet, Playing card games, Doing magic tricks (usually involving cards)

Love Interest:
None at this time. He’d love to pursue a romantic relationship, but he knows that any such relationship would end in disaster. Any girlfriend (assuming he was even able to control his nerves enough to get one in the first place) would certainly end the relationship once they found out how certain romantic gestures make him flustered. He has given up on romantic relationships (real ones, at least) until he can handle them.

Despite this, he can fall in love with sapient females and find them attractive regardless of their species. For instance, he developed a small crush on Jina once he got used to being around her. That was mostly because she was the first non-related female he’s been comfortable around in a long time (and he never really acted on that crush since he wasn’t that comfortable around her), but it still counts. He may or may not still have this crush.

Fighting Style: Unknown

Job(s):
Even his closest friends don't know what he does for a living. He moonlights as a Let’s Player, though as a hobby that he happens to make some money at than a real job. He made sure that no one involved in the Let’s Player side of things (or at least the audience) ever saw his real appearance or heard his real voice and that his real name was never mentioned on the show. However, he has recently decided to reveal his real name, face, and voice on the next milestone episode.

Personality:
He’s been shy for most of his life. Noryon has helped him get over some of his shyness, but he still has some of it. He’s easily flustered and exceptionally modest, and he gets nervous in many social situations. While he’s not especially outgoing toward people of any gender, he’s particularly shy toward females (as well as people who appear and/or identify as female but don’t have a biological sex).

He was terrible at making friends for most of his life (and most likely still is) due to his shyness, so he treasures any friends he does make. Because of this, anyone who earns his friendship will find him to be a loyal companion who won’t betray or disown them (as long as they don’t turn out to be a horrible person, since he’s not blind about his loyalty) and will do anything he can to help them when they need it (as long as what they need him to do isn’t something totally unreasonable, such as risking his life for something trivial). Also, he would be even more devastated than most people if he were to lose one of his friends, even if the loss were to happen because they turned out to be a horrible person. His loyalty and fear of losing his friends could theoretically be exploited to make him do things he’s uncomfortable with or otherwise doesn’t want to do, but this thankfully hasn’t happened yet.

He’s much more comfortable with his friends than he is other people. There are still plenty of things he’s too shy to do with or around his friends, however, as well as plenty of things he doesn’t want them to know; while he knows his friends aren’t as critical of or easily offended by him as he fears most people are, he’s still afraid that these things will make his friends think much less of him if not reject him entirely. Also, he doesn’t get quite as nervous as usual in social situations when he’s interacting anonymously or through a pseudonym; this doesn’t make him as comfortable as he normally is around his friends, though (unless he’s with his friends at the same time, obviously).

A lot of the things that make him nervous are things you’d expect to make a shy person nervous. However, some of his nervousness triggers are odd and don’t make any sense to most people (and only vaguely make sense to him). Some of these include explaining non-personal, objective things to females that they might know (he doesn’t want to risk being condescending to them), being chivalrous toward females (he’s never sure of how well they’ll take it), and complimenting females on their appearance (he doesn’t want to risk objectifying them). Actually, many of his stranger nervousness triggers involve females in some way, mostly because he never knows what kind of behavior they’ll accept from him. However, these female-specific triggers make him nervous even with females he knows are okay with the behaviors in question, such as good friends (though not family members, due to them being grandfathered grandmothered in).

His shyness usually doesn’t extend to non-sapient, fictional, or non-specific creatures (or things); the one exception to this is non-sapient AI entities that convincingly resemble and act like sapient females; he can’t help but be shy around them, even when he knows they aren’t real people. It also doesn’t extend to sexual/perverted/awkward depictions and descriptions of people he doesn’t know personally, though it still extends to those people themselves.

His shyness completely goes away when he’s drunk. You’d think that would be a good thing, but the boost in confidence comes with a dark side. He always tries to take advantage of his temporary confidence as much as possible before it runs out, which (due to his inhibitions being temporarily shut down) leads to him being obnoxious at best. Once he becomes sober, he’s always completely ashamed of himself when he finds out what he did while under the influence. Because of this (and because he doesn’t want to end up telling anyone his deepest secrets), he avoids getting drunk whenever possible. He also avoids getting high for the same reasons.

He had very low self-esteem back when he could barely be in the same place with other people (particularly female people) without freaking out. It was pretty low before then too, but not to the same extent. Well anyway, his self-esteem has improved a lot since he got over some of his shyness, though it’s still lower than that of most people. He’s still too hard on himself sometimes, even regarding things that aren’t his fault or that aren’t a big deal to most people.

While he has a hard time interacting with most people well enough to fully show it to them, he’s a kind, intelligent person with a dry sense of humor. Even so, he can be scary when someone or something manages to make him mad enough (usually by hurting or threatening his friends in some way).

Quirks:
He sometimes puts on a different manner of speaking than usual: he rarely uses first or second person pronouns, avoids casual language, and generally tries not to say (or type) more than he needs to. He doesn't enjoy speaking like this in most circumstances, though he will generally (if not always) do so if he’s mad enough and/or it’s absolutely imperative for him to dull his nervousness (such as in life or death situations). He tried talking like this all the time for a while, but doing so made the real him seem cold and arrogant (and sometimes vain). Plus, it dulled his other emotions as well. While he liked being able to reduce his nerves to a point where he could talk to people, doing so was pointless if it made people not want to talk to him and reduced his enjoyment of it when they did.

He stutters when he’s feeling strong negative emotions. His stuttering is worse the stronger the emotion is. Nervousness, fear, and embarrassment tend to cause him to stutter more easily than other negative emotions. In addition, he also suffers from other physical anxiety symptoms if he’s feeling strong enough nervousness, fear, or embarrassment. These symptoms usually include things like trembling and/or sweating, but in extreme cases can (but may not always) include things like being rendered unable to speak, freezing in place, and/or going into a panic attack. The different manner of speaking he uses to dull his nervousness also helps reduce the severity of his physical anxiety symptoms.

He calls shotgun on pretty much anything with a steering mechanism, even when it makes no sense for him to do so. At least, he does when he’s not too nervous, scared, or embarrassed to say the word. I’m not sure if he takes this seriously or if he just calls shotgun for fun.

His blushes somehow show through his fur. Most people don’t know what to make of this. He tries to cover his blushing sometimes for various reasons (like trying to avoid people asking him about it).

Many of the culture references he makes tend to be of things so old that most people haven’t heard of them. Sometimes, his friends will teasingly ask him to start referencing more recent things.

He’s not normally embarrassed about his height. Despite this, he tends to slouch whenever someone mentions how tall he is for a yarin. He's not any more embarrassed about his fangs. I’m sure he got teased about them a lot, though, so he doesn’t like people pointing them out.

Wishes: He wants to continue getting rid of as much of his shyness as possible. He’s thankful that Noryon helped him get over enough of it to function in public (at least to some extent), but he’s still crippled by it. He has also recently started wanting to become less secretive about his life, but there are only one or two secrets he’s ready to reveal now.

Strengths:

  • Usual Yarin Strengths
  • He’s quite intelligent
  • He’s great at finding information
  • He still remembers quite a bit of the information he found over the years
  • He’s able to wear full-body powered yarin armor for a long time without much discomfort
  • His sleight-of-hand is impressive
  • He’s really good at keeping things secret, especially regarding himself

Weaknesses:

  • Usual Yarin Weaknesses
  • He’s shy, especially toward females
  • He’s too hard on himself sometimes
  • His loyalty and fear of losing his friends could be exploited
  • His stuttering makes it easy to tell when he’s experiencing (a) strong negative emotion(s)
  • Strong enough nervousness, fear, or embarrassment causes him physical anxiety symptoms
  • He can’t make yarin armor as well as most normal yarin

Likes: Historical art. This interest used to be limited to specific kinds of old video games, but his tastes broadened to include all historical art as he worked on the Let’s Play show.

Dislikes: Things that embarrass him (especially ones involving sapient females), Social situations that make him nervous, People forcing him into embarrassing or nerve-wracking situations, People intentionally doing things that embarrass him, His shyness, Sitting in public seating right next to other public seating, Getting drunk (or high, for that matter)

Fears: Losing his friends, People (especially his friends) finding out his biggest secret, Looking like an idiot in front of others, Embarrassing himself, Making people upset with him, Being abusive (especially in a sexual way), The Brotherhood of Distinction

Favorite Drink: Suffocating Geese (alcoholic mixtures of blueberry juice and gooseberry juice) without the alcohol

Favorite Food: Rock Candy

Possessions (Buildings not Included):
Yarin Armor – Tauver wears a suit of yarin armor for most of his public appearances, though he’s trying to not have to wear it so often. It covers even more than most sets of yarin armor, concealing his entire body instead of just most of it. Aside from that (and the tiny openings on the palms and the bottoms of the feet), it doesn’t look too unusual for yarin armor. At least, not on the outside. The inside is a different story. It’s actually a suit of power armor that includes a voice changer in the helmet, temperature regulation functions, and just enough strength enhancement that Tauver can wear it as easily as normal clothes. Even just those functions make the armor fairly expensive and hard for him to create, so he likely made non-powered armor first and upgraded it later.

Holograph Deck – These cards have nothing on them until they’re turned on, at which point they produce flat holographic images based on the card game the deck is currently set for. The cards can be “shuffled” or “sorted” without moving the actual cards, and the backgrounds of the holographic images can be customized on the fly.

Light Brown Fur Dye Conditioner – As the name implies, this conditioner dyes Tauver’s fur light brown when he uses it. It doesn’t have the negative side effects of normal fur dye and is more convenient to apply. However, the color only lasts about a couple of days, so he must reapply it pretty much every day if he wants to keep his fur light brown. Incidentally, that’s the main reason he showers (or bathes, I’m not sure which) daily. It may or may not be scented.

A Huge Collection of Old Video Games – His video games are all played on a device with a screen, rather than being virtual reality based like most new games in Syrmon 2. All of his games are digital, as physical copies are either impossible to find or too rare to be worth tracking down. A large portion of them simulate interaction with people in some way. A surprisingly large portion of those are adult in nature. Despite what he would have you believe, he didn’t buy the adult games specifically for the Let’s Play show. Some of his games don’t simulate any kind of personal interaction; many of those he actually did buy specifically for the show, though he has started appreciating such games after playing enough of them.

Emergency Glasses – He has these for those times he can’t wear contacts (like if his supply gets stolen or something).

Attacks:
Unknown

History:
Tauver doesn't talk about his childhood much. Even Noryon doesn't know the full details. He knows that Tauver was shunned and bullied a lot up through high school, and he got shyer and less confident in himself as he got older (to the point where he became unable to even be in the same area with people without freaking out). Also, he's apparently adopted by a cylmori female who tried to teach him how to properly treat females after her husband walked out on her (soon after the adoption).

Not being able to interact with most people made him lonely, so he replaced actual relationships with fake ones found in video games. He tried virtual reality games at first, but the realistic female characters in those games made him just as nervous as actual females. He had much better luck with older games, where it’s much more obvious that the characters are fictional. He mostly played games where he could choose how to interact with other characters (such as Visual Novels, Dating Sims, many RPGs, and many Adventure Games). He blew through these games quickly due to how much time he was spending on them, so he quickly became good at finding even the oldest and most obscure games. He even tried joining an online community of people who liked old games as much as he did, hoping he wouldn’t be as afraid to meet people if it wasn’t done in person. As it turned out, it was easier for him to talk to people if they didn’t know who he was; the operative word there is easier, though, so he was still quite reserved in his interactions with the community. Once the other members got past his brusque manner of posting (he worried too much about what he was saying if he spent enough time making a post, so he made his posts short to avoid that) and found out how good he was at finding games, they were impressed. A few of them even gave him some extra pocket money to find games for them.

He still hated being unable to have real in-person relationships, so he briefly considered about getting some psychiatric help. He stopped considering it after doing some research on the therapists closest to him and finding out they were all female. That may seem sexist, but having to explain to females even things about himself they couldn’t possibly know made him too nervous to do so. He’d never be able to get the words out, so he would just be wasting their time if he made any appointments with them. Even if he could explain things to them, therapists were far too expensive for a high school student to afford and he doubted his mother would spring for the cost…plus, he didn’t like talking about himself. He then thought about trying various substances to make him confident enough to leave the house. This technically worked, but he regretted what he did under their influence so much he refused to ever try it again. He even did some weirder things like trying to trick himself into being less nervous by talking like an outside observer of his own life. These things were either ineffective or had negative consequences too severe to keep using them.

While his attempts to become less shy hit a dead end, his skill at finding games eventually expanded to finding other things, and his method of getting a bit of extra spending cash now and then became a full-fledged career (albeit a secret one).

He moved into his own place as soon as he could afford to. While he was glad to no longer have to deal with his mother, the move made him even more isolated than he was before. Dealing with people on online communities didn’t make him feel much less forlorn. Even though he’s not the type to complain online about personal issues, the people he dealt with online could tell how forlorn he felt. One user relentlessly tried to cheer him up, even asking to meet in person (in public, of course) once they got to know each other well enough. Tauver was naturally terrified of the prospect, but he somehow managed to chastise himself into going through with it. Someone wanted to be friends with him for the first time in what felt like forever, and he was about to ruin it with his spinelessness. Even if this guy turned out to be a serial killer or something, meeting him still had to be better than being a pathetic loner forever.

The other user, who thankfully was not a serial killer, was a psychiatrist named Noryon Trylnor. He made it clear the meeting mostly occurred because he really needed new clients. He generally liked Tauver and wanted to help him, though. This, along with his reasonable rates, convinced Tauver to try out his services. Tauver warmed up to him over time, mainly because his hard to offend personality and appreciation of honesty made it easier for Tauver to be himself without feeling like he’s walking on eggshells (at least for the most part). They eventually became the best of friends, even though it's not proper for a psychiatrist to become friends with a patient.

Noryon tried quite a few things to help Tauver get over his shyness and lack of self-esteem, though I only care to mention two of them. He introduced Tauver to Clygon, his twin brother, and Jina, another of his friends. This must have worked to some extent, as Tauver was eventually able to befriend them as well. Then again, their closeness to Noryon made it somewhat easier, and getting comfortable enough with Jina to carry on a conversation with her (much less actually become her friend) was difficult for him.

Noryon also had the crazy idea of making videos of them both playing old video games while talking about them, and then putting the resulting videos online as a show. That way, Tauver could get used to talking to a large group of people without having to actually talk to a large group of people. Strangely enough, it seemed to help. The first episodes of the show never saw the light of day due to Tauver’s nervousness making them cringe-inducing, but he eventually learned to talk to Noryon (as well as Clygon and Jina whenever they guest-starred on the show) as if he wasn’t being watched by thousands and thousands of people. He admittedly couldn’t do it without wearing his full body armor, changing his voice, and going under a pseudonym, but it was a start.

All in all, Tauver has made great progress in his therapy. He can now function in public to some extent, and he no longer feels completely unlikable now that he has friends who care for him. He’s still making progress, in fact, if his plans to stop using an alternate identity on the show is any indication. He still has a long way to go before his shyness is no longer pathological, however, and I don’t think it will ever go away entirely. It will also be a while before his self-esteem reaches a normal level.

He might be ready to reveal what his job is, at least to his friends and family. He may even quit that job altogether and start working at an occupation that’s similar but less shady. He’s gotten tired of all the secrecy in his life. There are days he thinks about confessing some of his other secrets, but he’s still far too scared to do so.

Special Info:
Before he became friends with Noryon, he didn’t like talking about himself. He has mostly gotten over this, though he’s still not his favorite topic of discussion. On the flip side, he loves discussing stuff related to historical art and is more talkative (though still not necessarily talkative) when doing so. Well, except maybe when speaking to females. Even when discussing his favorite topic, he’s afraid of accidentally treating them like they’re stupid by explaining things they already know.

The reason he doesn’t like sitting in public seating right next to other public seating is because doing so always makes him feel he’s taking up too much of the space for the other seats. The only way he can rectify this is to “shrink down” as much as possible, which…well, it’s not comfortable for him. He doesn’t have this problem with private seating, for some reason.

He has a daily exercise regimen, though it’s nothing special. It consists of weightlifting and cardio.

He feels silly about his shyness toward non-sapient AI females. While he has bigger secrets, he still doesn’t really want it spread around.

Various misunderstandings and/or other things that happened in his mother’s teaching convinced him that he’s a bigger pervert than he actually is. If his behavior when drunk and huge collection of adult video games are any indication, that’s saying something. No one has corrected him on this, since he tries to keep his perversions (both real and imagined by him) a secret from most people.

These same misunderstandings (if that’s what they are) might have left him with the impression that females are inherently prone to being treated badly, especially when compared to males. If he believes this, it doesn’t affect how he treats females for the most part. No one likes to be proactively pitied, after all. Plus, there’s no way they would let him live it down if he let them find out he believed this, much less if he proactively tried to protect them (despite not intentionally being demeaning). This even hold true for females he knows well, though he tries to secretly protect them a bit more than most. He sends gift boxes with self-defense tools and sometimes a weapon on their birthdays each year, but without anything that could be used to trace the gifts back to him. These gifts are in addition to the ones he gives them normally, so they don’t wonder why he’s not giving them anything. He also donates just as secretly to women’s shelters and the like.

Many of those misunderstandings involved his sister in some way or another, so he feels it’s in her best interest if he avoids keeping in contact with her (aside from sending her presents on her birthday). As much as he would like to see her again, he also doesn’t want to hurt her any more than he thinks he already has. He hasn’t told anyone about what he believes he did to her.

Most yarin have someone in their immediate family to teach them how to make yarin armor. The only people Tauver had to teach him were the ones in the online tutorials he watched while making his armor. They certainly helped, but going through tutorials isn’t the same as having someone to work with him while he’s practicing and let him know what he’s doing wrong.

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