All-Kill Character Lore
For those who can't access the PTB, I have continued my "job" of transcribing Yun-Jin's and the Trickster's lore for you.
Yun-Jin Lee
Resilient and ambitious, Yun-Jin was born into a life of hardship finding success in the music industry after years of effort and self-sacrifice.
As a child, Yun-Jin was fascinated by sound, mimicking drums and hitting keys on the piano. When she turned ten, however, she lost her instruments. Her family was heavily in debt and did not make the payments in time. The creditors took everything they owned, including the house. Yun-Jin held her four-year-old sister tightly as she cried. They moved into a windowless, two-bedroom basement. Since her parents worked day and night to pay their debt, Yun-Jin became her sister’s caretaker. Every night she sang until they both fell asleep.
At seventeen, the renowned record label Mightee One Entertainment came to her high school to audition talent. She was rejected as an idol trainee but obtained an unpaid internship at the studio. For the following years, she created some of the studio’s biggest hits, without any credit or recognition. To get her dues, she emerged in the public eye wearing flamboyant fashion and put soundbites into her songs that looped her artist name, Magnum Opus. Fans began to recognize her songs and she became the producer of NO SPIN, a poorly performing boy band who needed her special touch.
Dissatisfied with NO SPIN’s commercial sound, she sought a rogue element to make the band stand out. Through her contacts in talent shows she found the edgy, raw sound of Ji-Woon Hak. She relaunched NO SPIN with Ji-Woon as its newest member. Within hours, their first video was a viral sensation.
Their success cemented Yun-Jin’s reputation as a shrewd producer. Adorned in high fashion to attend luxurious events, Yun-Jin’s harsh, impoverished childhood seemed far behind her. She moved into a penthouse and dined with socialites in skyline restaurants with breathtaking views of Seoul.
The success of the first album broke records, setting the bar high for NO SPIN’s second. As they were recording new tracks, the fire alarm suddenly blared. Concerned for her safety, Yun-Jin hurried to evacuate the building and left the dallying staff behind. Only when she bolted out into the street that she realized NO SPIN was nowhere amongst the coughing crowd. A goliath of flames engulfed the building, slowly tamed by the steady streams of fire hoses.
All members of NO SPIN perished in the fire except one: Ji-Woon. The album was ruined. The band was over. She would be shelved while Ji-Woon would rot away as an instructor for idol trainees. But she refused to be a victim who watched helplessly as vultures swooped in to take what was hers.
Unknown to Mightee One Entertainment, she created new tracks to relaunch Ji-Woon’s career. She pushed him to tap into his grief and create a song exploring the pangs of sudden loss. The music video showed Ji-Woon saying goodbye to each member of NO SPIN. Yun-Jin cleverly launched the song under Ji-Woon’s newly adopted stage name: the Trickster. He would embody both fear and awe like the legendary dokkaebi spirits.
Ji-Woon’s song was a global phenomenon, its universal themes of grief and guilt resonating internally. Together, Yun-Jin and the Trickster toured the world. Success greeted them on every shore. Yet disturbingly, so did a series of eccentric murders. This connection unsettled Yun-Jin as she noticed that the tour dates coincided with the victims’ time of death. She was weary after the loss of NO SPIN and anxious to preserve her artist, so she increased the Trickster’s security detail. What if a serial killer was an unhinged fan fixated on the Trickster, inspired by the artist’s morbid songs?
Returning to Seoul, Yun-Jin worked with Ji-Woon on his new material. When she entered the studio at the brink of dawn, she was surprised to see Ji-Woon already there. He seemed exhausted, like he had worked all night. When she listened to his track, she discovered a bizarre intro filled with shrieks and snares. It was too experimental for her taste.
A week later, another death was reported. The body showed traces of torture and was arranged in the same flamboyant style as previous murders, this time diamond cufflinks gouged into the victim’s eyes. The following day, the victim was on every television channel. A video from the victim’s social media showed her squealing, surprised when her boyfriend handed her a heart-shaped birthday cake. Yun-Jin’s stomach churned. That voice. So familiar. And yet, she had never met the victim.
The next morning, her heart froze when she listened to the Trickster’s opening track. The shrieks in his song matched the victim’s squeal. Did he sample the victim’s birthday video? No, that was impossible: he had recorded this song before the murder was reported. She stared at Ji-Woon on the other side of the booth’s glass window. He was NO SPIN’s only survivor. Everyone else was dead. Not to mention the eccentric murders that matched his tour dates. Death trails that seemed to converge… to him.
If he caused… this, no artist would survive the scandal. Yun-Jin’s career, no, her life would be over. All she had would be destroyed. A wave of nausea surged over her. Heart racing, she rushed to the restroom. Wild thoughts blazed through her mind as she splashed icy water over her face. There had to be a simpler explanation. Perhaps she was overworked. Or maybe, she did not trust her success. Her mind was fabricating this suspicion because disaster was easier to trust than success. It was all in her head. She returned to the recording booth, eager to put her worries behind her.
Months later, pressure came from Mightee One Entertainment executives. Revenue was down and they blamed the Trickster since they disapproved the violent themes in his music and the knife tricks he pulled during performances. While Yun-Jin was furious they scapegoated her artist, she agreed Ji-Woon’s sound was too niche to generate profit. She told Ji-Woon she fought them off but was ultimately outnumbered. Because of her initial fury, he believed her to be on his side. They were given three months to create and perform the next hit for Mightee One.
Months flew by and the time came for Yun-Jin to take a seat at the executive’s private show. She was confident about her song, but, as soon as the music started, she knew something was amiss.
Dense, foul smoke permeated the room. Yun-Jin coughed and gasped for air. But the more she coughed, the more she inhaled. Her body sank in the chair, her limbs heavy and numb and her eyes widened as she watched, terrified, a nightmare come to life.
The Trickster was a whirlwind of blood, slashing, stabbing and chopping limbs. The executives were carved up like meat. They could not run. They were stuck, like Yun-Jin, paralyzed. A boiling rage swelled in her gut. How could she have denied her instincts? The fire. The murders on tour. It was him. It had always been him. And she had known from the start. Now her career was over, and so was Mightee One. Everyone she had worked with, her colleagues, her friends, dying before her eyes. Everything she had, taken from her once more.
No, she would not let him. He would pay. He would know her suffering. Suddenly, dark coils of black fog rose from the ground and she was… somewhere else.
Bright lights flashed and blinded her. A spotlight found her in the darkness. Then a crowd erupted, chanting her name. “Magnum Opus! Magnum Opus!”
She smiled and welcomed the darkness within.
The Trickster
Ji-Woon Hak thrived under the attention of others, energized by every eye that watched him and every tongue that spoke his name. Amidst the prestige, he had only one desire: more. Even as a child, he found ways to draw crowds. Working at his family’s restaurant, he attracted business with spectacles he performed using throwing knives. Gullible tourists believed this was a traditional South Korean experience, gladly parting with the money to witness it. Ji-Woon’s father spent the restaurant's earnings on dancing and vocal lessons for his son, pushing him to attain the fame he never could.
Ji-Woon did not disappoint. After years showcasing his abilities to nobodies at talent shows, he hit the track to stardom. Yun-Jin Lee, a producer at Mightee One Entertainment, recruited Ji-Woon into her training program. He transferred to a dormitory in Seoul where, for fourteen hours a day, he was crafted into a star, taught how to move and sing, how to carry himself with the right balance of confidence and modesty.
Draining as the process was, it worked. Yun-Jin selected Ji-Woon to join the band NO SPIN, bringing a raw energy to their tracks. Fame was almost immediate. Ji-Woon lived in a daze of interviews and adoration, and though the frenzied schedule exhausted his bandmates, he was invigorated. Each day was an affirmation that he was greater than the mediocrity society spewed out.
But over time, the champagne grew stale. When he looked at his fans, he saw their joy and envy split five ways, thinned out between each band member. The validation that surged through him left a desperate yearning for more.
Ji-Woon kept up impressions, mimicking a charm long buried under loathing. He recorded the latest NO SPIN album with his bandmates, never missing a beat. After a lengthy lunch break, he returned to the studio to discover fate had granted him a gift. The scent of burning wires was unmistakable. He rushed to the control room, finding the door blocked by fallen speakers. On the other side, his bandmates pounded on the door, their cries accompanied by the crackling of flames.
Ji-Woon called to them, dashing to the speakers, grabbing one andーstopping. He froze. Each breath was a conscious, deliberate process requiring all his attention, the nearby cries hardly audible until, slowly, he backed away. And then he heard it. They were screaming his name as they burnt. Screaming for him to save them. “Ji-Woon! Ji-Woon! Ji-Woon Hak!” It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. When the fire crew arrived, his tears were genuine.
Ji-Woon was celebrated as a tragic figure, a hero who did all he could in a futile attempt to save his friends. Yun-Jin paraded him through interviews until it was time to rebrand. He was reborn as the Trickster, a solo artist who produced his own songs, sporting a soft heart beneath a wild exterior. But, away from concert set-ups and television stages, something darker grew.
He targeted those who lived alone, coming to them in the night. The first was a college student with a fire escape that led to her living room window. Ji-Woon woke her up with a baseball bat to the skull, binding her arms and legs, gagging her with a rag duct taped into her mouth. He tortured her for hours, dissecting her alive. Yet, there was something missingーa connection. He wanted to hear her pleading as he cut her belly open, but all he received was muffled cries through a rag.
He learned and adjusted.
Victims had to be abducted, driven to an abandoned building where he could let their voices carry unrestrained emotion. He made music from them, prodding in the right places to evoke different types of shrieks and howls. Stabbing the quadratus lumborum elicited a long, guttural wail, while slashing the carotid artery created a sound similar to a cat being strangled. There was honesty in their suffering. Ji-Woon recorded each session, synthesizing and working them into his songs, hiding them behind layers of melodies.
He was elated with his work. He left hints for police, arranging a mink boa from a recent photoshoot around a victim’s slashed throat. For his next killing, he removed the teeth from a man that a boxer in one of his music videos was without. During a particularly audacious plea for attention, he killed a fan he had met during a VIP meet-up, replacing her eyes with his diamond cufflinks and writing I HAVE SEEN GOD in blood across her chest. Each scene was a dazzling spectacle.
Between music and murder, Ji-Woon’s work was discussed globally. However, as violence became his preferred art style, his music career took a hit. Revenue was down and Mightee One executives pointed their fingers at him. Yun-Jin, with professional fury, came to his defense, but she was outnumbered. It was decided that Ji-Woon would no longer self-produce his songs.
The decision was devastating. His tracks fused genuine humanity into music, yet executives rejected anything that wasn’t generic and expected. And so be it. If they couldn’t understand his art, he would incorporate them into it until they did.
He had three months until he was to perform a private show for Mightee One’s board members; three months to plan his magnum opus. He transferred obscene amounts of money to a veterinarian in exchange for canisters of nitrous oxide, then bribed the stage technician of Mightee One’s private theater for access to the room. His celebrity granted him a benefit of the doubt no regular person could conceive. When the show was ready, gas seeped into the room as executives and stagehands awaited Ji-Woon, conveniently running behind schedule.
When he arrived, half-conscious bodies were splayed in their seats and crawling across the floor. He worked quickly, blinding everyone, pausing only when he came to Yun-Jinーthe woman who had plucked him from a mudhole and set him on the path he deserved. She would be rewarded, granted special access to the coming display of wonder. Even under sedation, she fought, a raging storm within her, far stronger than the others. He propped under up as the lone audience member, prying her eyes open. The others, sniveling and sobbing, were brought on stage to perform their final act. With a contemptible sneer, he slapped makeup onto their faces and shone stage lights upon them. They became his instruments.
To the sound of self-produced melodies, he tortured them, gracefully dashing from one body to another, conducting an operatic crescendo from their wailings. They shouted, whimpered, screamed, cried for their loved ones, cried for their mothers. It was a magnificent outpouring of emotion, of what it meant to be human, and they did it with eyes fixed on Ji-Woon.
Viscera drained from the stage until, with the toss of his throwing knife, the final human instrument fell silent and the music stopped. Covered in sweat and blood, an exhausted Ji-Woon looked to Yun-Jin and bowed. Curtain call. He had attained perfection. With blade in hand, he made his way to Yun-Jin, prepared to tie up loose ends before the credits rolled. But as he reached herー
The fog.
From where, he didn’t know, but it billowed around them, damp, cool… comfortable. He saw the grand stage: hospitals and temples, forests and slaughterhousesーan eternal plane adorned with rusty hooks, sustained by the million eyes that would watch him, run from him, experience him. All he had to do was accept, become an implement of the fog and, most importantly, make them scream.
Encore!
Comments
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I realized that yun jin lee's lore is kind of strange, because that end seems to point more to her being a killer. Its almost seems too sinilar to the spirit's Lore
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to be honest: I do think the devs ARE running out of ideas cause they are clinging to the idea of 'there MUST be constant updates bringing in new killers and survivors' so stubbornly that it's counterproductive
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Yeah, they must be. Those endings are STUPIDLY similar.
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honestly, reading through the lore it almost feels as if the survivor was meant to BE a killer (a siren or something) and the lack of gameplay variety put a stop to that, so the joker-expy was shoehorned in
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