Rintarou Okabe

Okabe is eccentric, theatrical and deliberately conspicuous. As Hououin Kyouma, he laughs dramatically, talks into a phone even when nobody is on the other end and invents conspiracies involving a shadowy Organization. Mayuri and Daru recognize the performance and respond to it with familiarity rather than alarm.

The persona also protects a more earnest and compassionate personality. Okabe is deeply attached to his small circle of friends and often uses exaggerated behavior to entertain or encourage them, particularly Mayuri. When those friends are genuinely threatened, his usual posturing gives way to determination and fear.

Repeated exposure to changing world lines takes a severe psychological toll on him. After experiencing Mayuri's death over and over while trying to escape the Alpha attractor field, his confidence erodes and the Hououin Kyouma persona becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

Okabe possesses Reading Steiner, the name he gives his ability to retain memories when the world line changes. Everyone else normally experiences the rewritten world as their continuous history, while Okabe remembers the previous world line.

Reading Steiner does not allow him to control time directly. His practical time-travel options depend on devices created by the Future Gadget Laboratory, including D-Mails and the Time Leap Machine.

Okabe is also resourceful under pressure. He lacks Kurisu's formal scientific expertise and Daru's programming ability, but he coordinates the laboratory, recognizes changes in world-line circumstances and uses accumulated knowledge from repeated attempts to alter events.

Okabe establishes the Future Gadget Laboratory and becomes the person through whose memories the consequences of changing history are experienced. After accidentally sending a message into the past, he realizes that reality itself has changed while everyone around him remembers only the new version.

The lab's later D-Mail experiments alter increasingly important events. When the consequences become catastrophic, Okabe uses time leaps and reverses previous D-Mails in an attempt to return to the world line from which the experiments began.

Escaping the Alpha attractor field saves Mayuri but returns Okabe to a Beta world line where Kurisu dies and World War III eventually begins. The final operation requires him to save Kurisu while preserving the sight that originally convinced his past self she was dead. He succeeds and reaches the Steins Gate world line, outside the known Alpha and Beta attractor fields.

Mayuri Shiina is Okabe's childhood friend and one of the people he is most determined to protect. His Hououin Kyouma persona partly developed as a way to help her through grief after her grandmother's death.

Itaru Hashida is Okabe's friend from high school, fellow university student and Lab Member 003. Daru supplies much of the technical expertise behind Okabe's experiments.

Kurisu Makise becomes Okabe's principal scientific partner. Their constant arguments develop into mutual trust and romantic love.

Suzuha Amane brings Okabe direct evidence of the future consequences associated with different attractor fields and becomes essential to his attempts to change them.

Moeka Kiryu enters the lab while searching for an IBN 5100. Her connection to the Rounders makes her central to the crisis surrounding SERN.