Post by Tachibana Yamato on Oct 14, 2016 12:52:24 GMT -5
Tachibana, Yamato Tsunekage
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The Unwanted and Unseated Barroom Brawler of the Fifth Division
The Unwanted and Unseated Barroom Brawler of the Fifth Division
[ AT A GLANCE ]
Age / Apparent Age: 819 / Late Twenties to Early Thirties
Gender: Male
Height & Weight: 5'3" & 125 lbs
Hair & Eye Color: Black hair set in a messy, unkempt style. Turquoise eyes.
Positive Traits:
- Humble
- Empathetic
- Easygoing
Negative Traits:
- Cowardly
- Impetuous
- Spiteful
Loyalties: Yamato's primary concern is self-preservation, and he puts his own life above any other loyalties he has or oaths he's taken. After his own life, Yamato's loyalty lies with Division Five of the Gotei, after which he lives only for his own pleasure and indulgence, which mostly comes in the form of drinking himself into a stupor.
Snapshots:
Born (1198)
Death by Seppuku (1228)
Arrived in Rukongai (1230)
These should be only core events that somehow shaped your character’s life. Birth, death, what triggered their powers, and things of that sort should be mentioned here. Anything that other characters might want to reference, such as if you were in a previous division at some time, is useful as well. This is not a full timeline, just the highlights of your history.
[ ON THE SURFACE ]
Physical Description:
Spiritual Description:
[ BEHIND THE EYES ]
Personality:
Goals & Achievements:
This is where you briefly talk about things your character has done in the past, or things they want to do. Please note that you cannot have had any previous position of notable power (such as lieutenant or captain), however mentioning that you were once a seated officer in a certain division is very relevant information. This is a very good place to start a foundation of your story and make notes on the general direction of where you want to go with your character. Above all else, keep your goals reasonable; it was be a little ludicrous to go out the gate wanting to be Captain Commander. However, feel free to update this as you progress, so players have easy access to your current plans and accomplishments.
[ GUARDIAN ANGEL ]
Zanpakutō Spirit: Meiyo, a young girl who acts as Yamato's guide towards his true potential.
Spirits can look like anything and act like anything -- don’t be afraid to bind them to a standard human or wolf. Be as creative as possible, as these are the true expression of your character’s soul. More importantly, Spirits are not friends, nor are they enemies: they are guiders. A relationship with a Spirit should not necessarily start out on good or bad terms, unless you have a reasonable foundation for that conflict or lack thereof.
Inner World:
Power: "Sake ni Nagasu: Meiyo!"
When Meiyo's Shikai is activated, the sword transforms into a sake gourd containing a limitless supply of the drink. By using Meiyo's true power, Yamato is capable of drawing the sake out of the gourd and manipulating it into various, primarily weapon-based forms, which allow his "blade" to be any weapon Yamato can conceive of.
Zanpakutō: Yamato's Zanpakutō takes the unreleased form of a long katana blade, reflecting the style of blade he had used in life.. With a blade length of 73cm, Yamato has described the weapon as "good enough", though something about it feels off as the tachi he used in life was of a slightly longer blade. The hilt is dyed black and wrapped with a bronze-colored ray skin samegawa, and the circular tsuba of his blade reflects the Tachibana clan crest. His sheath is black with two pairs of criss crossing bronze streams that run down its length, one on each of the broader sides. At the opening and tip of the sheath is a small, simple bronze plating to complete the color palette of the blade.
Upon release, Meiyo transforms into an unassuming tan sake gourd. Tied around the neck, and then attached again at the bottom of the gourd, is a red cord Yamato uses as a handle. This cord can be detached from the neck should Yamato wish, allowing the gourd to act as a short, crude flail. Written down the side facing Yamato (if he were to hold it where the cord is with his right hand) are the kanji "七転び八起き", a Japanese proverb translating to "fall down seven times, get up eight". Within the gourd, as part of Meiyo's Shikai ability, is a limitless supply of sake which can either be used for combat or as a regular drink.
[ LEGACY CREATED ]
Origin: Tachibana Yamato was born to Tachibana Kazuki in the Kyoto area near the beginning of the Kamakura period of Japan. During the beginning of the thirteenth century Yamato was trained as a child to be a bushi, like his father before him. The child studied not only in swordplay and combat, but also in literature and other classic means of expanding the mind. While training with his father, Yamato was pushed to learn the intricacies of handling all types of weapon so as to become as powerful a warrior as he could be. He progressed stunningly, his father's insistence on multi-weapon training pushing Yamato to have no clear preference between any given fighting style. With the staff and spear he displaced his opponents, keeping distance while he waited to strike, while with the kusari-fundo his fluid movements worked to hide the true path of the chain. And, of course, his swordsmanship shone just as brightly as his other skills, preferring the daishō over carrying just a single blade. By the time Yamato was sixteen years old, he was serving his lord as a bushi, or samurai, in his own right.
A mighty warrior, Tachibana Yamato served for three years as a respected foot-soldier, slowly trying to earn through combat prowess what he could not attain by blood, for his family was a distant branch of the main Tachibana clan. The other bushi acknowledged his skills with weaponry, and his superiors saw how he fared in combat, which led to Yamato being placed in more and more dangerous positions of the battlefield, returning each time with no more than superficial wounds to be tended to, and his weapons themselves were often in worse shape than he was. In his off-time he would study the art of war, comparing the advantages of each weapon he had been trained with and in which situations and battlefields they may be most useful in. Tachibana Kazuki couldn't have been more proud of his son for his prowess on the battlefield, and as long as he was elevating the honor and pride of his branch family, Yamato was fully prepared to dedicate his entire life to serving his lord as a skilled warrior.
When Yamato was nineteen years old, he partook in an arranged marriage with a young woman of the Minamoto clan. The union of two of the four noble clans meant very little, as both members were of distant branch families, but when Yamato saw the beauty of Minamoto Hanae there was little else that mattered. Taking Hanae as his wife, Yamato began to divide his attention between preparing his body and mind for combat such as a bushi should be prepared for, and caring for his wife as she cared for their household. Soon, Hanae became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, who was named Aimi. Yamato was often called away for combat while Aimi was young, which resulted in Hanae and Aimi only being able to see their husband and father infrequently. When Hanae was not conceiving another child, the couple planned to adopt a son to become Yamato's heir. During one of the missions Yamato was called to fight for, he allowed his mind to become distracted with the matters of his family, and suffered the consequences of a lapse in discipline.
It began with a swordslash to his face, and then the panic set in. The fact that he had been fighting without concentration took hold of Yamato's senses as he adjusted the grip he had on his blade. Moving to strike back, he was slow and received another blow on his cheek, this time the upward slash splashing blood into his left eye. Half blind in the physical sense, and still trying to clear his senses to see the situation clearly in a metaphorical sense, Yamato took to defensive measures as he tried to decide how to proceed. The man continued coming at him with strong, straightforward strikes that battered and chipped the edge of Yamato's blade. When he thought he had found a pattern to his assailant's strikes, Yamato reached with his left hand to draw his tantō and make a surprise strike, when he saw the other man do the same. At this point, he had a choice - Yamato was skilled, and could attempt to avoid his blade at the last second and strike back, or he could take this moment of planning and fall back to ensure his safety and make sure he saw his family once more. Thinking about five-year-old Aimi, Yamato quickly took a jump back, moving the tachi in his right hand in attempts to catch any thrusting strikes aimed at him. The other man's tantō was parried, but his tachi came down like an executioner's axe on Yamato's right arm. There was the distinct 'thud' of steel on bone as intense pain shot through Yamato's body. Falling on his back, he could see his allies coming to his aid, though their efforts were in time only for his life.
When Yamato regained consciousness, his wounds were patched up, but he was still in immense pain. When he attempted to rub his head, Yamato found that he had lost his right arm in that fight. Or, more accurately, it was removed after the fight due to the extensive damage he had taken. Accepting a gourd of sake to numb the pain, Yamato was forced to realize that he would have to relearn how to use, at the very least, his tachi solely with his left hand, which was not anything he had imagined would need be done. Returning to his family a few days later, Yamato began to descend in a spiral of depression and self-loathing. Within a few months, when Yamato's left-handed training was showing no progress, he made his decision to defect from his service to his lord as a bushi. Between his muscle-memory for gripping the sword with both hands, and his over-indulgence in sake, which was originally for the pain of his wounds but was now being used as a coping method for his perceived self-worthlessness, Yamato made the conscious decision that he would not be a warrior again, and so he took his wife and daughter away from Kyoto to live in isolation.
For a couple of years, Yamato made as much of a living as he could as a farm-hand using the nanori he had chosen for himself during his coming of age ceremony (genpuku) "Tsunekage". Being a private name, he hoped to keep his identity secret in case any soldiers were sent to find the cowardice traitor Yamato, and for a couple of years his life went on in the same pattern: work from dawn to dusk, drink himself into a stupor in the nearby village, return to his family with a drink in hand. And every time he drank, Yamato was taken back to "The Day he Lost Everything", as it was dubbed in his mind. And every time he relived those events, the situation grew slightly different. By the time a few years had gone by, he had tossed aside the fact that he backed away to see his family, and instead focused on the idea that he could have - no, that he should have taken the counter-attack. He took the coward's way out, payed for it with his arm, and then continued acting like a coward, paying for it with his honor. His daughter was nearly eight years old, and she was growing up on the edge of civilization. When she becomes a woman, he reasoned, she would have no proper suitors anywhere around, at least not of the standing she could have had. And he had taken Hanae away from the life she knew in Kyoto, all because he was a low-life who would abandon honor to save his own skin. The sake was bitter in his mouth, but he couldn't stop drinking it or else his emotional pain would consume him.
When his emptiness and self-loathing had consumed Yamato, and his alcoholism became less efficient at keeping his emotions dead, Yamato quietly left his life one day to return to Kyoto. Finding his lord, he fell to his knees and begged that Hanae and Aimi be provided for. His head to the ground and tears streaming down his face, Yamato poured out his regret for what had happened that day, calling himself vile names in hope for retribution as he begged and begged for the lord he had fled to care for his family. And then he poorly drew the tantō he had taken with him and performed a terrible rendition of seppuku. Despite have a couple of years working with only his left hand, it was still far weaker than it would have been to properly perform the ritual with both hands, and moving the blade inside his body was clumsy and painful to watch. Because of the lacking strength, the cut was shallow, resulting in a slow and painful death for Yamato as he screamed for mercy the entire time he was dying.
When Yamato's soul awakened, he was unsure what had happened. It was as if he had awoken from a drunken state, hungover and wanting nothing more than to go home. His memory of what had happened a little fuzzy, Yamato made his way back to the farm he had taken his family to so he could hide from his life as a bushi. Seeing his wife from afar, he tried to go up to her, but felt ashamed of his attempted suicide. Instead, he snuck into the building to find his daughter. When he saw her, there was a chain wrapped up around her body. Mortified, he tried to grab it and pull it off of her, but not only would the chain not move, Aimi didn't even notice he was there. As he stepped back in confusion, he noticed that the chain led away from his daughter, and to something behind him. Turning around, Yamato could not find the chain again. Looking back, he ran his hand along the chain and up to his chest. Mortified and utterly confused, Yamato pulled and pulled on the chain and went back to Aimi to try and free her because of his love for his daughter. But those who don't understand what happens when they die can never comprehend what even a Tsukirei is, none the less that they have become one.
It wasn't long before Yamato was visited by a Shinigami. The woman who appeared to Yamato tried her best to explain what had happened - that he was dead, what the Chain of Fate was, why his daughter was tied up in it, and most importantly what had to happen for him to move on and the chain to leave her - but he was too stubborn to listen to the truth. It all sounded like some kind of myth, something that couldn't be real despite all he saw before him. Exhausted with his stubbornness, the Shinigami attempted a forced Konsō, but his attachment to his daughter held Yamato firm to the Human World. Unwilling to waste any more time with him, the Shinigami departed, leaving Yamato to pine over his family as a Possessive Spirit for a couple of years. During this time Yamato saw soldiers of the lord he served come take his family away from their hiding place, one of the bushi taking Hanae as a concubine while Aimi was left to be just another adoptive child of that warrior. It pained Yamato to see to the loves of his life treated less than he felt about them, and in his state of being a soul he forgot the pain he had put his family through with his constant drinking. He longed to be with them again, and regretted every day that he had taken his own life from them as watching their lives unfold without him slowly tortured him to the point of insanity.
As the Chain of Fate finally corroded most of its length, Yamato began undergoing the transformation into that of a Demi-Hollow. He was sick of watching his wife live with another man. He was tired of seeing his daughter being the lesser child. He hated seeing how little his once-comrades thought of him. He wanted to step in, to fix things himself. At least this is what Yamato thought was happening as his inner darkness began coming out during the slow Hollofication process. He wanted to break the chain, to go over to the bushi and slit his throat with his own tachi, to do anything to feel any sort of power again. He began giving into his darkness, feeling it fill him and flow out of his very being, when something came out of his shoulder. His thoughts paused as he tried to register what had happened. His Hollowfication had been underway for a few days, but the Shinigami who had first found him had been checking up on his soul every so many months to ensure his safe passage to Soul Society without becoming a Hollow. When she saw how short his Chain of Fate had become, she began stopping by more regularly. Pulling the blade out of Yamato's body, she performed Konsō once more to cleanse the Hollow from his being and allow his soul to leave the Human World and enter Rukongai.
When Yamato arrived in Soul Society, the ticket he received pointed him towards a distant district in West Rukongai. With no memories of his life in the Human World, and his right arm fully in tact as a soul, Yamato met a farmer and, after a long exchange and several drinks, he joined the man's livelihood as a farmhand. And so the next several hundred years of Yamato's life went: work the land, go out for drinks, return to the people he considered to be a "family", though he thought of them more-so a collection of distant cousins than brothers and sisters. In his routine, Yamato always had mixed feelings. On the one hand, everything felt familiar, as though he were living his life on muscle memory, while on the other everything seemed uneasy. Neither hand felt comfortable to use the farm tools with, and the mundane-ness of the day-to-day frustrated him to no end. It seemed some unconscious piece of him remembered his life, how his right arm should be gone and his left is weaker, and how this was how he lived to escape his daimyo, and was trying to make his conscious mind recall it as well, pushing him to grow as a person and surpass the life he had lived.
The farmer who took Yamato in had a son several decades after the two met. His wife was also a deceased soul, but their son was pure. Wanting the utmost best for the child, the farmer told his son legends of the Shinigami, spinning tales and growing the child's ambitions, hoping that he could move to a closer district if his son were capable of graduating from the academy. When he was a teenager (in appearance), the boy left to the Shinigami Academy so that he could become a Shinigami, like his parents hoped for him. But after the expected amount of time for the child to graduate, he didn't return to his family, and they stopped hearing from the boy altogether. With great disappointment, the family continued on with their lives, everyone else living on the farm continuing their jobs just as they had been.
In the following years, when Yamato would be in the bar, the same Shinigami would appear on-and-off every few months or so. A young man, and though he never actually saw the boy's face, the Shinigami always had the same high-and-mighty attitude and over-confident stride that left a sick taste in Yamato's mouth. One day when the Shinigami was around, a fellow patron of the bar mocked Yamato's small stature, which resulted in a furious brawl on the barroom floor. Prying the two drunk men apart, the Shinigami pulled Yamato to the side and revealed that he was the farmer's son, always off patrolling the districts near where he grew up, but never having the proper freedom to see his parents. Insulting the boy for his lack of commitment to family, Yamato was pressed against the wall and lectured on his own lack of commitment to anything, his lack of discipline, and how he could never understand just how hard it was to live the life of a Shinigami. With a cocky grin, Yamato took the lecture as a bet.
The next day, Yamato went to the Academy in the attempt to learn when he could take the entrance exam. He was not quiet about his motivation, that he merely wanted to prove a point to another person, and though the Shinigami he was speaking to were disapproving of him as he was, they did inform him and allow Yamato to return so he could take the exam. He failed his first attempt, being completely unable to produce any meaningful sort of Reiatsu. Spurred forward by spite towards the farmer's son, Yamato sought the secret to this "Reiatsu" thing from those he had taken the test with. For the next year, Yamato added time spent in meditation to his daily life, between working and drinking. Yamato passed his second attempt at the entrance exam by the skin of his neck and moved into the next phase of his life: training to be a Shinigami.
Rise to Power: Yamato's time in the Academy were both dull and stressful. One of the largest issues Yamato faced was how the upper classmen and instructors viewed his drinking habits, insisting that his over-indulgence in sake was unbecoming of a Shinigami. His motives for being in the Academy were often questioned, and always met with the same response, "some punk doesn't think I can do it", a thought that many who heard it agreed with.
Call to Action:
This is where you talk about the event(s) that made your character shift from an NPC to a player character. For whatever reason, they need to be pulled away from the daily grind and put into the spotlight. In this section, you’ll want to highlight that event(s) and justify why your character is they way they are today.
