OOC Information

Player name: Asher

Player age and gender: 28, he/him/his

Player Contact: asherdashery; asherdashery#5061

Any other characters in game? Prompto Argentum photoshooter



IC Information

Character name: Junpei Tenmyouji

Character canon: Zero Escape series, theairlock CRAU

Canon point: Original - CDQ-End 2: Payoff 2 (i.e., Zero Time Dilemma's true end)
Airlocked - Post-game

Physical Description: Average these two images and you more or less get the picture. Post-Airlocked, his right arm to the elbow has been replaced with a robotic prosthetic. He has two tattoos on his left arm: a circle formed of two stylized rabbits chasing each other on his inner wrist, and the Kingsglaive symbol taking up the rest of his inner lower arm.
At a glance: 5'8", brown, shaggy hair, 23 years old, average build for a young Japanese man

About the Character:

CANON HISTORY:

✗ (pre-999): Junpei Tenmyouji is born on February 8th, 2006, and enjoys a pretty average, happy childhood. He's best friends with the resident weird girl, Akane Kurashiki, and acts as her hero and protector until she moves away at the end of elementary school.

✗ (999): On November 1st, 2027, a kidnapped Junpei awakens aboard what seems to be an early 20th-century ocean liner not unlike the Titanic with eight other people and is forced by a mysterious figure named Zero to participate in what is called the Nonary Game. He solves puzzles, learns about strange scientific theories from fellow players, and works to discover Zero's motives in holding the deadly game.

999 features branching timelines according to the player's choices. In most of these timelines, at least some of the participants die--often including Junpei. In the True Ending, Junpei discovers that he "knows" information from these other timelines and uses his mysterious knowledge to get everyone to the final room alive. They find out that Zero is Akane and that this Nonary Game has been set up to accomplish two goals: 1) to wreak her revenge on the organizers of a previous Nonary Game in which she and seventeen other children were participants, and 2) to awaken Junpei's ability to access the morphogenetic field (i.e. become a telepath) so that he could save nine-years-ago!Akane's life.

✗ (post-999; pre-Zero Time Dilemma): After the Nonary Game, Junpei drops out of college and joins a private detective agency so that he can use their resources to search for Akane, who has dropped off the grid. For a while, nothing turns up, and exposure to the twisted underbelly of humanity erodes his faith in people. About a year after the events of 999, he hears that Akane will be participating in a "mission to Mars" simulation called Dcom; he threatens his way into participating as well.

✗ (Zero Time Dilemma): On December 31st, 2028, Junpei finds himself once again an unwilling participant in a "Decision Game" run by someone calling themselves Zero. The participants are split into three teams; Junpei's team includes Akane and an American firefighter named Carlos. The gimmick of this game is that each team is only conscious for ninety minutes at a time, during which they have to, you guessed it, solve puzzles, try to escape, and unearth the mysteries behind the game. They are also often prompted to decide whether to kill one, both, or neither of the other teams with a simple push of a button, as the deaths of six people will open the exit. At the end of each ninety-minute interval, they are injected with both a sedative and a drug that erases their memory of the last hour and a half.

Junpei consistently urges Carlos to kill the other teams, to his teammates' great disapproval, and in general acts like a gosh darn little shit. He also gets murdered a couple times, but again, branching timelines are in play along with the fragmented memories, making the whole thing a huge confusing mess.

Ultimately, Junpei, Carlos, and Akane pull themselves together enough to realize all three of them are SHIFTers--that is, ESPers who can use the morphogenetic field to transfer their consciousnesses to other timelines--and take advantage of this, with great difficulty and fatal trial and error, to jump to a timeline where they and the other participants all survive. Junpei also proposes marriage to Akane after revealing that he still cares deeply for her, despite his piece of shit attitude at the beginning of the game.

AIRLOCKED CRAU HISTORY:
I'm glossing over Airlocked's overarching plot, since I know both mods are well-versed in it. If players unfamiliar with Airlocked need more information, I can try to put something together, but good god, that was a year-long experience.

✗ Airlocked R2: The instant Junpei escapes the Decision Game--in fact, the last thing he remembers is ZTD's cliffhanger ending--InterGal7 grabs him for his third (chronologically, at least) death game. Since his memories are rewound to a pre-ZTD point, he makes every effort to be an asshole to his fellow Champions so he won't rekindle his belief in people and subsequently be disappointed. Despite his misanthropic principles, though, most of the people trapped in the Fantasy Sweet slip right through his guard and Junpei steadily grows closer to the friendly, heroic guy he's always been. Due to circumstance and shared trauma, he ends up particularly devoted to Ardyn Izunia, Leonard Church, and Wakasa Yuuri, and formalizes that four-way bond by becoming part of Ardyn's "you weren't supposed to take this seriously but here you are" Kingsglaive.

As a detective, Junpei takes a proactive investigative role in murders and trials, but his reckless nature often sidelines him due to injuries. Even as, in some ways, R2 takes him back to his heroic roots, he also starts to experience serious lasting consequences to his leap-first actions, not least of which is the loss of his arm. Yuuri is perhaps the strongest influence in his development here, as the romantic relationship that blooms between them leads to a deeper examination on both their parts of the structured roles that control their lives. Yuuri tells Junpei she wants to save him, and it turns his whole worldview upside down.

Somehow, Junpei and the rest of the Kingsglaive make it to the survivor pool and get outta town.

✗ R3-R4: For the most part, after Round 2 Junpei drives himself crazy compiling as much information about the show, the science, IG7, and the fandom as he can. His mad drive for intelligence leads to some pretty unintelligent choices, like fumbling the group's attempt to infiltrate a meet-and-greet and ding-dong ditching a private prison. That mistake and watching Rounds 3 and 4 get him questioning how his long-held heroic values might actually hurt the people he loves. By the time the pre-R5 intermission rolls around, he might even have started the process of learning how to do things differently. While he still sails straight into the trap, while he still makes reckless choices, Junpei's able to judge the most sensible way to go about their senseless mission--and of recognizing his own comfort and safety as something worth protecting, too. He wants someone to get out and be safe, not just for that person's own sake, but so that he'll know someone's out there. He wants it, and he lets himself want it, and if it comes to nothing plot-wise, it's no less a pivotal shift in Junpei's development.

✗ R5: That development evaporates once more when Junpei's reset back to the end of Zero Time Dilemma and he loses those memories. This season, Junpei starts out comparatively friendly and balanced--but losing Yuuri in the very first case, even though he doesn't remember his relationship with her, is the start of a rapid roller coaster-like decline. Helpless to prevent death after death, useless in freeing the group from Intergal7's clutches, bombarded with memories of people he didn't even know he lost, Junpei swings wildly between compassion, action, and despair. Ultimately, his desperation leads to his literal downfall--down an elevator shaft where he breaks his neck in an accident for which yet another of his friends is culpable.

After dying, Junpei spends a couple weeks in the simulation with the other deceased Champions but doesn't do much there of note, except propose to Yuuri once reunited with her and the full package of his missing memories. After the survivors free the dead from their comas, he goes with Yuuri and the rest of the R2 Kingsglaive to Persona 5's Japan, where he works odd jobs from home and babysits Yuuri's younger sister, Ruu-chan.

CHARACTER SUMMARY

In short, Junpei's what you get when you take a fairly average Japanese boy next door--one with a snarky punster's sensibilities and a heart of at least bronze, if not gold--and throw him into four death games in under two years. While Junpei remains essentially good-natured, a champion of children in particular and the weak in general, he's also seen far too much of humanity's ugliness and copes through cynicism and assholery towards those who can perhaps withstand it but don't usually deserve it. He's strongly oriented towards taking care of his own rather than saving the world, and he doesn't take kindly to anyone airing lofty ideals. Or someone trying to tell him what to do. Or people his people don't like.

That said, he can be weirdly easy to get along with if there's an understanding that he's going to be low-key antagonistic unprovoked, and he's adept at putting aside his pissiness and mistrust in order to get things done. Junpei is madly proactive, needs to be engaged at all times, and isn't afraid of working with people he finds unsavory for the good of his group. However, he can and will go to any lengths, including betrayal and murder, to keep his friends and family safe. While the Kingsglaive have overall had a positive influence on his nihilism, he still tends to place little value on his own health and safety in favor of getting things done and usually leaps before he looks, as trial and error is the name of the Junpei's game, really.

He's cleverer than he is wise, but more level-headed when it comes to interpersonal relationships than he seems. He excels at using his surroundings in creative, often reckless ways, and he can't resist a good challenge. Also, when the chips are down, he will usually do the right thing--as long as the right thing is in his loved ones' favor.

Character abilities:

✗ Morphogenetic Field

The morphogenetic field, a key mechanic of the Zero Escape series, posits that human thought, ideas, and memories are not generated nor stored within the physical brain, but rather comprise a separate plane of existence divorced from both space and time. All human thought takes place in this field or plane and is then relayed to the body that has to work in the physical, time-bound world.

In Airlocked, Church called it something like "cloud storage for psychics," which is a pretty good way of understanding it. Espers like Junpei are those with a higher level of access to the morphogenetic field, meaning they can come in contact with information they themselves--that is, the current iteration of them--did not experience. This special access to the morphogenetic field is boosted when the esper experiences danger and epiphany, thus Zero Escape's emphasis on mortal peril and multiple levels of puzzle-solving. These powers are also boosted by the presence of other espers, so it's beneficial to have more than one around.

Most ZE espers, including Junpei, access the morphogenetic field in one of two ways:

Transmission/reception
More prominent in 999 than in ZTD. Most espers find it easier to either transmit information through the morphogenetic field OR receive it, though they are all capable of both. This coincides neatly with a tendency for espers to come in sibling pairs of one transmitter and one receiver. An esper can't just think really hard at someone to send them a telepathic message; not only does the person they're trying to reach have to have the same ability, but they (usually) have to have a close connection. An esper can also send/receive information to/from themselves across branching timelines.

Though they aren't siblings, Junpei's esper pair partner is Kurashiki Akane. He was able to contact her nine years in the past through the morphogenetic field in order to save her life. He has not been seen to be able to connect with any other esper.

SHIFTing
Vitally important to VLR and ZTD, SHIFTing is the actual mechanism by which Junpei "time travels." It is not true time travel, but rather transferring his consciousness--which is, after all, nothing more than a complex bundle of thoughts, emotions, and memories--through the morphogenetic field to a Junpei in different timeline, effectively switching consciousnesses between two bodies.

*NOTE: Junpei is not a particularly strong esper on his own, but he grows significantly more powerful through the repeated stress of danger and epiphany in 999 and ZTD. While his powers were dampened in Airlocked, the same forces of danger and epiphany were constantly at play over a much longer period of time; it's reasonable to assume his psychic powers have become somewhat more usable, even without Akane or other espers around.

Transmission/reception won't really matter without other closely-bonded espers for him, but given PhanRift's supernatural setting, Junpei may at least be able to SHIFT or transmit information to himself when in mortal danger (i.e., if he died in another timeline).

✗ Kingsglaive: Ardyn

As a member of Ardyn's Kingsglaive, Junpei has access to the following magic powers:

Warping
Junpei's strongest suit, magically speaking. If Junpei throws an object, he can warp himself to it in a burst of magenta light.

Elemancy
In theory, like the Kingsglaive members in Final Fantasy XV: Kingsglaive, Junpei can draw from Ardyn's magic to summon fire, lightning, or ice, offensively; or a colorless wall, defensively. He hasn't experimented much with this and probably can't really do anything yet.

Armiger access
All the cool kids use their dads' magical hammerspace.

✗ Airlocked Nanites
Junpei's chock-full of healing nanites! Yaaay! They'll repair his body even if it dies! Y...aaaay... Generally, these provide him slightly faster than average healing. Also translation, in case whatever handles it in PhanRift ever goes down, I guess.

✗ Puzzles
You'll never guess, but Junpei's just, like, aces at puzzles. He's so good at puzzles, guys. Number puzzles, word puzzles, physical puzzles, puzzling out murders, turning his own death into a murder puzzle, he just. He's seen and solved so many goddamn puzzles, my dudes.

✗ Robotic Arm
His right arm can interface with Irken technology, and also, it vibrates.

Inventory:
Outfit: Black, long-sleeved Spider-man tee, sleeveless white hoodie, horrible puffy blue vest, black jeans, pumped-up black kicks with red accents. (Wearing on arrival.)
Hardlight projector: It's set to disguise the wearer as a certain black-haired, blue eyed Lucian royal by default, but can be tweaked to mimic anyone as long as said target is larger than the user. (In his pocket.)
Puzzle screen: A tablet containing an apparently unlimited collection of puzzles seen in the Nonary, Ambidex, and Decision Games. Yes, it has sudoku. No, it won't open locked doors. (Probably in the Armiger.)
Promise Bookmark: This bookmark is patterned with diagonal stripes, dark red carnation petals and slightly red lighter cosmos petals alternating down the length of the card. On the back, above a handwritten note, is a little pattern made of marigold petals, carefully fanned out in a circle to look like a bursting firework. (Tucked inside his tablet cover.)
Key and Crown: A chain necklace bearing a crown charm and one half of a pull-apart pendant. (Wearing on arrival.)
Wallet: Inside is his ID, credit cards, and a regular day-to-day amount of Japanese cash and pocket change. (In his pocket.)

Samples: Junpei TDM toplevel | Tagout to Ardyn

[TBFixed]

1
Foego - A bottle of highly sugary soda. It's more sugar than liquid now. The flavor is .

2
Fruit Basket - A basket full of oranges, grapefruits, and several different kinds of apples.

3
Cat Pillow - An incredibly soft pillow that looks like a sleeping cat.

4
Good Vibes - A small, battery-powered device approximately the size and shape of a tube of chapstick. It vibrates pleasantly when the end is twisted.

5
Heating Pad - A pad that creates heat when plugged in. It has adjustable settings for maximum comfort.

6
Potato Chips - A bag of delicious greasy, salty potato chips. How can something so bad for you taste so good?

7
Fancy Lotion - This lotion is very creamy and smooth, and includes shea butter. Smells like the moon.

8
Heartburn Medicine - A bottle of heartburn medication. But can it fix a broken heart?

9
Cat Pillow - An incredibly soft pillow that looks like a sleeping cat.

10
Wolfjob - A 3D model of a wolf giving a guy a handjob. Pawjob?

11
Vodka - A bottle of vodka. This one is flavored like watermelon.

12
Nut Basket - It's a small wicker basket full of mixed nuts on a loving bed of green easter grass.

OOC

Name: Asher
Age: 27
Timezone: Eastern Time
Reserve link: Reserve
Password: Lucky Flannel
OOC contact: asherdashery


IC

Name + Username: Junpei Tenmyouji (misanthropicprinciple)

Age: 22

Canon point: Assumed: After dropping out of college, but before hearing that Akane Kurashiki would be participating in the Dcom experiment.
True: CQD-END: 2 (Pay-off 2/The Final Decision)

History: Junpei on the Zero Escape wiki. The section on Virtue's Last Reward is mostly irrelevant, since it's past Junpei's canon point, but the information from both 999 and Zero Time Dilemma applies.

...Gomen for all the branching timelines, mods. Here's a more concise, Junpei-focused history, though it lacks a lot of the details and background you'd find on the wiki:

✗ (pre-999): Junpei Tenmyouji is born on February 8th, 2006, and enjoys a pretty average, happy childhood. He's best friends with the resident weird girl, Akane Kurashiki, and acts as her hero and protector until she moves away at the end of elementary school.

✗ (999): On November 1st, 2027, a kidnapped Junpei awakens aboard what seems to be an early 20th-century ocean liner not unlike the Titanic with eight other people and is forced by a mysterious figure named Zero to participate in what is called the Nonary Game. He solves puzzles, learns about strange scientific theories from fellow players, and works to discover Zero's motives in holding the deadly game.

999 features branching timelines according to the player's choices. In most of these timelines, at least some of the participants die--often including Junpei. In the True Ending, Junpei discovers that he "knows" information from these other timelines and uses his mysterious knowledge to get everyone to the final room alive. They find out that Zero is Akane and that this Nonary Game has been set up to accomplish two goals: 1) to wreak her revenge on the organizers of a previous Nonary Game in which she and seventeen other children were participants, and 2) to awaken Junpei's ability to access the morphogenetic field (i.e. become a telepath) so that he could save nine-years-ago!Akane's life.

✗ (post-999; pre-Zero Time Dilemma): After the Nonary Game, Junpei drops out of college and joins a private detective agency so that he can use their resources to search for Akane, who has dropped off the grid. For a while, nothing turns up, and exposure to the twisted underbelly of humanity erodes his faith in people. About a year after the events of 999, he hears that Akane will be participating in a "mission to Mars" simulation called Dcom; he threatens his way into participating as well.

✗ (Zero Time Dilemma): On December 31st, 2028, Junpei finds himself once again an unwilling participant in a "Decision Game" run by someone calling themselves Zero. The participants are split into three teams; Junpei's team includes Akane and an American firefighter named Carlos. The gimmick of this game is that each team is only conscious for ninety minutes at a time, during which they have to, you guessed it, solve puzzles, try to escape, and unearth the mysteries behind the game. They are also often prompted to decide whether to kill one, both, or neither of the other teams with a simple push of a button, as the deaths of six people will open the exit. At the end of each ninety-minute interval, they are injected with both a sedative and a drug that erases their memory of the last hour and a half.

Junpei consistently urges Carlos to kill the other teams, to his teammates' great disapproval, and in general acts like a gosh darn little shit. He also gets murdered a couple times, but again, branching timelines are in play along with the fragmented memories, making the whole thing a huge confusing mess.

Ultimately, Junpei, Carlos, and Akane pull themselves together enough to realize all three of them are SHIFTers--that is, ESPers who can use the morphogenetic field to transfer their consciousnesses to other timelines--and take advantage of this, with great difficulty and fatal trial and error, to jump to a timeline where they and the other participants all survive. Junpei also proposes marriage to Akane after revealing that he still cares deeply for her, despite his piece of shit attitude at the beginning of the game.

Memories:

- Threatening the Dcom staff to let him into the experiment
- Turning himself and Carlos into machine gun Swiss cheese in the rec room
- The Boy and the Ring
- The Anthropic Principle
- C-END: 1
- CQD-END: 2

Regains:

Engagement ring: A woman's ring set with one large, emerald-cut diamond.
Jumpy doll: A worn yarn voodoo doll small enough to fit in a child's palm. Looks at least a decade old.
Four-leaf clover bookmark: Did you know the leaves of a four-leaf clover stand for "hope," "faith," "love," and "luck"?
Leather jacket: A simple leather jacket with a dark red collar and cuffs. Fashion and warmth for the economy-class emo.
UN-lucky flannel: This ensemble consists of a red plaid flannel shirt, a sleeveless white hoodie, a bright blue puffy vest, loose jean capris, and ugly sneakers. Who are you supposed to be: Marty McFly?
Copper-plated funyarinpa: Actually, it's just a rectangular copper memorial plate. The engraving on it is no longer legible.

Character Underwear:
Junpei's Funyarinpants: At first, the print on these Calvin Klein cotton trunks seems to be a random assortment of black and white blotches (image source: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-HjmyvGVSlM4/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAACM/COc6U2d-toA/photo.jpg), but if you keep looking, a shape might emerge...

Strengths & weaknesses:

Starting with weaknesses first, because, oh boy, does Junpei ever give off a particular impression at this time in his life.

✗ Prickly
Just looking at Junpei's enough to realize he is not here to make friends and influence people. He's all dark colors; sullen, closed-off body language; and sour expressions. When he does speak up, it's to offer biting, often unfunny sarcasm or a cynical observation. He deflects genuine efforts to understand him with jabs meant to make people uncomfortable and rolls his eyes at most displays of sincerity.

Obviously, the guy has trust issues, and he's not afraid to make everyone else around him feel bad for not seeing the "realistic" (i.e., shitty) side of things. Or perhaps, it's not that he isn't afraid, but isolation is one of the ways he chooses to protect himself from further shock and pain. In only a year of working for a detective agency with ties to the underworld, he's seen enough of humanity's talent for dehumanization--brutality, murder, trafficking, and so on--to shatter the easy faith he'd once had in people.

What makes this such a deep weakness is that Junpei needs people. He's the type of person that has to care about others, has to connect with them, has to believe and trust them in order to pursue a healthy and fulfilling life. The only times he comes alive are when someone needs a hand.

Junpei likes people. Cutting himself off isn't a sign that he's already jaded and crusty, but rather that he's actively hurting and needs help; it's not a scar but a symptom of his spiraling depression and self-destruction.

✗ Reckless and self-defeating

Even at peak mental health, Junpei has a habit of leaping before he looks, risking himself without thinking in the heat of the moment. At his best, it's heroism and courage. At his worst--that is to say, right now--it's despair. Because existence is so bleak for him, he throws himself headlong into dangerous, disgusting situations, and what he finds there only reinforces his negative outlook.

Lately, he's taken to drinking himself to sleep and sleeping in the bathtub with the shower running to wash away the smell of blood. Here is a boy made of good life choices.

✗ Low self-priority

His poor self-care doesn't all stem from his depression, either. While Junpei does have a high--perhaps surprisingly so, given how his life is falling apart--drive to survive, when presented with a choice and no time to think, he will choose to save others over himself every time. Sometimes this means sacrificing others for those he cares about--in one ZTD bad ending, he betrays Carlos so that he and an unconscious Akane can escape, and in VLR he pulls the same kind of stunt a few times for someone he considers family--but he's honestly never selfish enough to hurt others for his own sake. Physically, anyway. He's hella cruel to Akane for a while in ZTD, but he still would--and does--give up everything for her.

✗ Can't resist a call for help

And that's because Junpei is a sucker. If he didn't push others away, if he didn't immediately shut down all opportunities for them to ask him for help, he'd be opening himself to a world of pain, because Junpei Tenmyouji just cannot say no to someone who needs saving. Even if he didn't have intense, complicated feelings for Akane, of course he still would have saved the twelve-year-old girl crying in the incinerator. Even if he hadn't been dragged into this mess of Nonary Games and ESPer warfare, he'd still fight to save the six billion people killed by the cultist-engineered virus Radical 6 because it's the right thing to do. It gets him in trouble, and it'll get him in trouble for the rest of his life.

But one might also call that one of his strengths.

✓ Heroic

"Sorry, but I am done with playing the action hero... Because I grew up." (ZTD)

Sure you did, Junpei. Earlier, I noted that Junpei's apparent misanthropy isn't a defensive shell but a reaction borne of present emotional pain--not armor but a slap to get away from someone poking a raw wound. Underneath that, he's still the same Junpei he's always been: funny, clever, kind of a dork, steadfastly devoted to the people he loves, unafraid, decisive. During one emergency in ZTD, he shows his true heroic colors all over again, using his quick thinking and creative use of SHIFTing to direct the rest of his team in a frankly foolhardy (but successful) gambit to win two keys to escape (which, sadly, ends up not working, but he got them!) and ensure Akane's survival, if not his and Carlos's. Which, you know. Annoyed both Carlos and Akane.

When Akane chews him out for this and breaks down, he finally shelves his A-class jerk act and softly offers her what he's wanted to all along: an embrace and an engagement ring. All this time, he's been searching for Akane not to hurt her for what she did to him the year before, but to stand by her side and help shoulder the weight of the war she's fighting. It doesn't change the fact that he's been a pissbaby, but it's both a welcome change and an inevitable one. Junpei's a bad actor. His honesty and love always come through.

✓ Determined and resilient

The fact that he could spend all that time in a morally unbearable, physically dangerous, fiscally underwhelming situation just to see Akane again shows that Junpei just does not give up. His actions in all three Zero Escape titles prove this over and over as well. Whether he's in danger of drowning, locked in a freezer, facing a world where six billion people are about to die, or caught in yet another goddamn death game on the moon with his ten-year-old grandson, he keeps seeking a way out and grasping for the truth until someone hauls him away. Or, you know, stabs him in the back. It's happened a couple times.

(The exceptions that can break his resolve are those involving the deaths of his dear ones. Even now, at the lowest point of his life, such a thing is likely to cause him to blank out or fall apart inside. Hence, the self-distancing. What is love? Baby, don't hurt him. Don't hurt him no more.)

He's not afraid of power, and arguments don't sway him when he knows he's right. He may lack self-esteem--that is, he doesn't really value himself--but he has no shortage of self-confidence. Junpei knows what he's capable of achieving.

✓ Quick-witted

His most reliable weapon is his sharp, fast-working mind. What he lacks in specific knowledge, he makes up for with a gift for absorbing and combining the information and frameworks others give him in innovative, practical ways. He's not usually the smartest guy in the room, but he's steadily clever, and it comes through in his jokes and teasing.

With two puzzle-heavy death games under his belt, Junpei's an expert puzzle solver and highly capable under pressure. His specialty is number puzzles. Don't ask him about sudoku. Just. Don't.

Skills & abilities:

Starting with title-worthy skills:

✓ Champion Puzzle Solver/Champion of Sudoku/Escape Room Champion:

These are the obvious skills he displays through all three Zero Escape games. He's great at integrating the information other people give him, thinking critically, and applying general logic in order to solve not only the puzzles each Zero sets before him, but to break open the mysteries surrounding each game.

One could also say that for Puzzle Solver and Sudoku in particular, he's not only a champ at solving puzzles, but that solving puzzles allows him to be a champion and hero for others--notably for Akane.

✓ Champion Challenger:
Zero Escape's creator Uchikoshi has stated that Junpei's personality is based on Enneagram Type 8, or the Challenger. He exemplifies Challenger traits both at his best and worst: Just from the top of this page on Type 8, he hits the whole checklist of self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.

In addition, in 999 Junpei plays the challenger role in the sense of "A challenger approaches!" He's the hero stepping up to the plate, David ready to take on Goliath. More than any other Nonary Game participant, Junpei was Zero's (the defender, in this image) necessary opponent in order to create the kind of game--and win the results--Zero wanted. His role in Zero Time Dilemma could be a fun play on challenger, too, given that he spends most of the game challenging Akane's and Carlos's morals and being a challenging personality to deal with himself.

✓ Champion Childhood Friend

Not only does Junpei fight for Akane and against her loneliness as a scrappy elementary-schooler, save her life by playing the ruthless Nonary Game she forced him into, and dedicate forty-five years of his life to trying to find her to free her from the burdens she bears, but Uchikoshi again states that his very existence as an ESPer--not something he does, but something he is--is rooted in his bond with Akane. The connection they share goes beyond romantic love. For all his pain and bitterness towards the girl he once knew, Junpei would still do anything for her.

(Personally, I like Champion Challenger best, but, y'know. Options!)

Other skills:
✓ Professional detective skills: He's been working at a private detective agency for about a year at his canon point, specializing in apparently dirty, bloody work. His forensic skills and desensitization to murder is likely to come in handy during investigations, but he's hardly the only detective in Zero Escape and it's not really part of his identity.
✓ Bilingual (English and Japanese): You never know when you'll need to be able to make awful puns in two languages!
✓ Morphic resonance: As an ESPer and SHIFTer, Junpei has an ability to access the morphogenetic field, receive information through it, and jump to other timelines. However, he has never been shown to be able to use these powers without Akane and other ESPers around. He's definitely one of the weaker ESPers in the series.
✓ Obscure and random trivia: Why does he know so much about the Titanic? When is knowledge about the worst beer in the world going to be useful? What can make him stop talking about Rupert Sheldrake? We just don't know.

Motives:

✗ Akane Kurashiki: Information on her activity and whereabouts, threats against her safety, the chance just to see her again--he's desperate enough about her to kill for possibly any of these reasons.
✗ Saving innocent lives: If someone's going to kill someone he likes, you know he gon' interfere.
✗ Heat of the moment: Junpei's shown to act without thinking when it comes to anger, revenge, and immediate threats to his life and others'. His recklessness can go as far as physical violence.

It's worth noting, however, that through all three Zero Escape games and their multiple timelines, Junpei is one of the few characters never to kill someone directly. He's voted to betray and sometimes subsequently kill fellow game participants, but he's never taken a life with his own hands.

Third Person Sample:
TDM: Angel, Morphogenetic Field Theory
TDM: Nishitani, Murder Investigation

Plot Involvement

Would you be okay with your character being a mole?: Sure! Junpei takes meticulous notes and will do just about anything for information on/a chance to see Akane. Also, at least early on, he wouldn't see any problem with securing an advantage or two in return for informing on his fellow participants, though he wouldn't agree to kill anyone unless it aligned with the motives delineated above.