Post by Yamato Kameyama on Jun 17, 2017 7:27:14 GMT -5
亀山倭大 (Kameyama Yamato)
Cowboy Samurai
[ AT A GLANCE ]
Age / Apparent Age: Records being spotty at best, Yamato was born shortly before the end of the Edo Period old enough to have fought in the Satsuma Rebellion. This places his birth year around roughly 1860, while his death year was in 1877. His apparent age is only slightly older than this, around 19.
Gender: Male
Height & Weight: 5'9" & 180 lbs
Hair & Eye Color:Black and brown
Positive Traits: Loyal. Trusting. Friendly. Quickwitted.
Negative Traits:Oscillates between slow to decide and impulsive. Too trusting and oftentimes gullible as a result. Stubborn.
Loyalties:The Gotei 5 and Japan itself.
Snapshots:
Born in Kagoshima, Japan, roughly 1870.
Swordsman training begins, around 1873. Training in other aspects of the Samurai lifestyle begin shortly after.
First interaction with a firearm, 1885.
Killed in Hitoyoshi, Japan, 1887.
110 years ago. Joined the Academy.
100 years ago. Graduated Academy, joined Division 3.
50 years ago. Attained his Shikai
2 weeks ago. Transfer to Fifth Division approved.
[ ON THE SURFACE ]
Physical Description:Thin and wiry, but no less muscular like a standard swordsman, Yamato is more tan than one might expect. His jaw is strong and forehead a bit higher than some, but he is at least moderately attractive. His voice is deep and can carry a commanding edge when necessary, betraying the man that he could have lived to become. However he's more often than not a smiling, friendly young man. Yamato is a young soldier, but equal parts both of those things. His uniform is crisp and clean, but his hair might be a bit off regulation. While his hair never gets to full on 'shaggy', it has been known to get longer than the standard short cut of 'background recruits', parting slightly at the center to give off the effect of very small black waves crashing upon his forehead.
Spiritual Description:When it is time for battle, Yamato's reiatsu typically appears in the reddish hues, wafting around him and upwards until the spirit particles dissipate. He is generally in control of this, but in dire straits (times which he has only rarely faced in the Gotei 5), it tends to vent off of his shoulders, arms, and back unless properly directed.
[ BEHIND THE EYES ]
Personality: Yamato is young and prone to the whimsies of those with the best years ahead of them. There is a lot Yamato doesn't know and he seeks to rectify that as best he can. Silly questions and inquiries may seem like jokes but every gathered piece of information is something that may be referenced and used later. He is by no means hyper-intelligent or any sort of wunderkind, but his collection of trivia and factoids has found itself useful on more than one occasion. The most important trait to him is loyalty. Loyalty comes in many shapes and shades but finding a reliable place for lunch and trusting your life in the hands of your squad mates are of similar importance to him. This trust, once formed (and generally done so quite easily), is difficult to break. Yamato must be convinced of a severe misdeed by a trusted figure in order to shatter that bond.
Goals & Achievements:
*Achievements while alive include being a trained swordsman, first in his class consistently and with much of the training of the samurai under his belt.
*Additionally he entered the Soul Society only twenty years after his death, a relatively rare occurrence for deceased souls. Many considered this a mistake due to the amount of time that it took for him to get through the Academy itself.
*He was among the top candidates for a seat in the Third Squad before happenstance forced an internal switch into the Fifth Squad.
[ GUARDIAN ANGEL ]
Zanpakutō Spirit: 盲亀大砲 Mouki Taihou - Blind Tortoise Cannon
Mouki Taihou appears to take on the guise of a tortoise, a very small one, most often found relaxing on Yamato's left shoulder. His arms and head match the lightly tanned dust of Yamato's inner world with blood colored spots lining his forest green shell and head. Wide pure sapphire blue eyes stare at anyone speaking although he tends to prefer speaking himself. He raises his head when he speaks, but rarely ever looks at Yamato unless upset with him. Within the inner world he has been known to change guises to anything suiting the world itself.
Inner World: Imagine the Wild West in the eyes of someone who has never seen it before. A lone road lined with wooden buildings that are in various states of disrepair or have large unsightly bullet holes haphazardly patched up. The giant clock on the great white two story wooden church is always set at high noon. Tumbleweeds interrupt the silence and bring in their wake, light waves of the dust on the ground. There are shadowy reflections of people but they never speak.
Quite possibly the most out of place object is the massive silver tortoise statue sitting on the opposite end of the long road.
Power: Mouki Taihou, the blind tortoise cannon, grants Yamato the ability to use his kido at an advanced speed. Additionally by absorbing physical attacks or spiritual attacks with his blade, he can fire them back with his gun in tangent with his own kido techniques.
Zanpakutō: Yamato's zanpakuto resembles a classic late Edo Period katana, with a silver turtle hanging from the grip which matches the massive statue within his spirit world. The grip is dark red and black stripes, with the guard vaguely oval in shape.
「驚いてくれ、盲亀大砲｡」"Odoroitekure, Mouki Taihou" "Go ahead and surprise 'em, Mouki Taihou."
With the release of his shikai, both the grip and blade of Mouki Taihou become shorter, capable of being wielded comfortably in one hand, specifically Yamato's right hand. In his left, a wild west style six shooter appears (a very non-patent infringing Colt). While the sheath of his blade remains hanging from his left side, his right gains a holster for the new gun. Two loose bandoliers of bullets cross his chest, matching the style of the gun which appears within his hand.
The blade adjusts slightly, not just becoming shorter, but also gaining a slight shield guard over Yamato's hand, almost like a fencing blade's handguard, that can act as a small buckler but will shatter against sufficient strength. The guard is, naturally, shaped like a turtle shell. It juts out enough that Yamato can still move his hand and wrist comfortably and wield the blade without bashing it against his forearm during combat.
[ LEGACY CREATED ]
Origin: Kameyama Yamato was born to the Kameyama clan, one of the dying samurai bloodlines during the end of the Edo Period. Growing up with the Meiji Restoration, he faced a rapidly changing world, with his family insisting on keeping to the old ways. Thus, Yamato was trained in sword fighting and the styles of the Samurai until these things were officially outlawed or banned. Contrary to popular belief those of the Satsuma Rebellion did not shun guns. They used them to great effect. This is where Yamato gained his love of firearms, and began hearing tales of those that wielded them to great effect. Unfortunately before the fighting began, an untrained warrior practicing his weapon fired on Kameyama. This spurred his love to even greater heights, but also had the unfortunate effect of killing him painfully. Despite some regrets at having never joined his clan under the banner of Saigo Takamori, he transferred peacefully to the next world.
Looking for a patchwork family in the Rukongai, Kameyama found nothing more than that which the had hoped to join in the material world: a military. The Soul Society's Gotei was the next thing to a family, the closest that he had found. This had requirements, of course, those with sufficient and overflowing reiryoku potential were accepted into the academy, as well as those with blade mastery. While he met the latter, he was far under-performing in the former, and thus for nearly fifteen years after his death he worked day and night to harness and manifest his own spirit energy in order to get it to a sufficient minimum that the Academy might accept him. Throughout all of this, Yamato had one vice: love for the weapons that had been the cause of his death. Imprints, hand drawn images, any stories any one would tell him, he would gladly trade a day's work for, or impart some swordsmanship lessons in exchange for hearing about, particularly, the "Wild West". How many of those stories were true? How many were made up for free work? These thoughts never crossed Yamato's mind.
Rise to Power: His stay in the Academy was rough, but his blade mastery made at least that part of the training much easier. His kido work was always spotty at best, and he more than once wondered if he had chosen the right path in joining the Academy. This changed when he finally imprinted upon his asauchi, awakening a creature he simply knew as 'the turtle'. The Turtle was long winded and slow, but very patient, and taught him much about the finer arts of channeling his own reiryoku into successful, weak, kido spells. This allowed him to finally graduate from the Academy, roughly a hundred years before his Call to Action, and spending a sufficient amount of time in the Third Division, although Kido was never his specialty, he worked very hard over a hundred years to make it so. Around fifty years into his service, The Turtle revealed his name, Mouki Taihou, and with this surprise, came the first step into something much greater. Although Yamato had spent a considerable amount of time within his Inner World, mostly because of the meditation process of channeling his reiryoku (and because he thinks it's a really, really cool place), this was the first time that Yamato had held an actual gun in his hand. It would take considerable practice and accuracy training to get used to his shikai, and his knowledge of Kido would have to improve in order to make greater use of his weapon.
But for one hundred years? Why is Yamato not stronger? Why is he not a seated officer? One expects upward mobility from Youth and thus they may be curious about the reasoning behind Yamato's extensive stay in the Academy and the relative quiet nearly two hundred years of his stay. The truth is that the foundations did not come to Yamato as quickly as they had for others. For as many geniuses and wunderkind that there are, there are those that must work for each particle of spirit energy that they learn to summon, that must take remedial classes and risk expulsion from the Academy for their pace. But for those that wash out, there must then be those that barely succeed. And it is in that small gap that Kameyama Yamato fell. One who barely scraped by with worlds of growth ahead of him but no less eager to lend his abilities to the Soul Society as a Shinigami.
And for all of that time as a faceless crowd member of the third division, he did very little to garner attention aside from his chipper attitude. Instead, he trained and improved his kido skills. Going from the lowest rank to someone who could passably use Hado in battle, and Kaido to boot took several decades for him. More personally, there was no reason for him to do anything but enjoy his time as a Shinigami. He was a guard member for the Third Division's Restricted Wing but if there were any times of peril, it would have been reinforced with people far beyond his skill level, and thus most of his time working was as a security guard and nothing more. Still, the time that he has spent has made him a veteran of the Third Division and it is not entirely unheard of that those who have been there a while may know him by name or a reputation as 'the happy kid with shaggy hair who's kinda late sometimes'. But it's very unlikely that he did anything in particular to stand out during this time.
While he became very close with Mouki Taihou during this time, attaining his Shikai with some small level of mastery over it, his natural trust allowed the two to form a bond where Mouki Taihou was mostly responsible for his leaps and bounds in the mastery of Kido in general. His friends came and went, some transferred, some were lost, and others simply moved on. One rogued. But not all are meant to grow and expand until something kicks that along, and for Kameyama Yamato this happened very slowly.
Slowly, but surely.
Call to Action: Happenstance occurs to all; Yamato Kameyama didn't look for any of his family, and was told repeatedly that finding anyone you had known in the life before would be impossible. His memories had faded for the longest time until during an off duty stroll through the outskirts of the 15th district of the Rukongai, he smelled something that his heart could never forget: the special blend a homecooked breakfast made by his mother. Such a small, insignificant thing, but the spices were right, the food was unmistakable, and he couldn't help but follow the scent to a woman in her forties, a woman he recognized as Kameyama Fusako, his own mother. Retreating before she caught sight of him, he returned to the Seireitei to contemplate what to do with this information.
And of course, the universe abhors inaction. The next time he returned to that area, he found no woman of that description. Asking the locals about her, he found the gravest of news: Kidnappers from the outer districts had made a raid through the area, and taken a few bodies for whatever nefarious purposes. She had not been seen since. Appealing to the higher ups for aid was not risky, but nor was it wise. Finding his mother was his duty, if only to discover the fate of the rest of his family. Time had built a bridge between them, but if he could show his clan what he had become, then perhaps-- But the protection of the Rukongai was the Fifth Division's duty, not the Third. And it would take might far beyond his own in order to venture out that far out into the 'wild lands'. Thus Yamato Kameyama's transfer to the Fightin' Fifth, and his introduction to a brand new world.
Cowboy Samurai
[ AT A GLANCE ]
Age / Apparent Age: Records being spotty at best, Yamato was born shortly before the end of the Edo Period old enough to have fought in the Satsuma Rebellion. This places his birth year around roughly 1860, while his death year was in 1877. His apparent age is only slightly older than this, around 19.
Gender: Male
Height & Weight: 5'9" & 180 lbs
Hair & Eye Color:Black and brown
Positive Traits: Loyal. Trusting. Friendly. Quickwitted.
Negative Traits:Oscillates between slow to decide and impulsive. Too trusting and oftentimes gullible as a result. Stubborn.
Loyalties:The Gotei 5 and Japan itself.
Snapshots:
Born in Kagoshima, Japan, roughly 1870.
Swordsman training begins, around 1873. Training in other aspects of the Samurai lifestyle begin shortly after.
First interaction with a firearm, 1885.
Killed in Hitoyoshi, Japan, 1887.
110 years ago. Joined the Academy.
100 years ago. Graduated Academy, joined Division 3.
50 years ago. Attained his Shikai
2 weeks ago. Transfer to Fifth Division approved.
[ ON THE SURFACE ]
Physical Description:Thin and wiry, but no less muscular like a standard swordsman, Yamato is more tan than one might expect. His jaw is strong and forehead a bit higher than some, but he is at least moderately attractive. His voice is deep and can carry a commanding edge when necessary, betraying the man that he could have lived to become. However he's more often than not a smiling, friendly young man. Yamato is a young soldier, but equal parts both of those things. His uniform is crisp and clean, but his hair might be a bit off regulation. While his hair never gets to full on 'shaggy', it has been known to get longer than the standard short cut of 'background recruits', parting slightly at the center to give off the effect of very small black waves crashing upon his forehead.
Spiritual Description:When it is time for battle, Yamato's reiatsu typically appears in the reddish hues, wafting around him and upwards until the spirit particles dissipate. He is generally in control of this, but in dire straits (times which he has only rarely faced in the Gotei 5), it tends to vent off of his shoulders, arms, and back unless properly directed.
[ BEHIND THE EYES ]
Personality: Yamato is young and prone to the whimsies of those with the best years ahead of them. There is a lot Yamato doesn't know and he seeks to rectify that as best he can. Silly questions and inquiries may seem like jokes but every gathered piece of information is something that may be referenced and used later. He is by no means hyper-intelligent or any sort of wunderkind, but his collection of trivia and factoids has found itself useful on more than one occasion. The most important trait to him is loyalty. Loyalty comes in many shapes and shades but finding a reliable place for lunch and trusting your life in the hands of your squad mates are of similar importance to him. This trust, once formed (and generally done so quite easily), is difficult to break. Yamato must be convinced of a severe misdeed by a trusted figure in order to shatter that bond.
Goals & Achievements:
*Achievements while alive include being a trained swordsman, first in his class consistently and with much of the training of the samurai under his belt.
*Additionally he entered the Soul Society only twenty years after his death, a relatively rare occurrence for deceased souls. Many considered this a mistake due to the amount of time that it took for him to get through the Academy itself.
*He was among the top candidates for a seat in the Third Squad before happenstance forced an internal switch into the Fifth Squad.
[ GUARDIAN ANGEL ]
Zanpakutō Spirit: 盲亀大砲 Mouki Taihou - Blind Tortoise Cannon
Mouki Taihou appears to take on the guise of a tortoise, a very small one, most often found relaxing on Yamato's left shoulder. His arms and head match the lightly tanned dust of Yamato's inner world with blood colored spots lining his forest green shell and head. Wide pure sapphire blue eyes stare at anyone speaking although he tends to prefer speaking himself. He raises his head when he speaks, but rarely ever looks at Yamato unless upset with him. Within the inner world he has been known to change guises to anything suiting the world itself.
Inner World: Imagine the Wild West in the eyes of someone who has never seen it before. A lone road lined with wooden buildings that are in various states of disrepair or have large unsightly bullet holes haphazardly patched up. The giant clock on the great white two story wooden church is always set at high noon. Tumbleweeds interrupt the silence and bring in their wake, light waves of the dust on the ground. There are shadowy reflections of people but they never speak.
Quite possibly the most out of place object is the massive silver tortoise statue sitting on the opposite end of the long road.
Power: Mouki Taihou, the blind tortoise cannon, grants Yamato the ability to use his kido at an advanced speed. Additionally by absorbing physical attacks or spiritual attacks with his blade, he can fire them back with his gun in tangent with his own kido techniques.
Zanpakutō: Yamato's zanpakuto resembles a classic late Edo Period katana, with a silver turtle hanging from the grip which matches the massive statue within his spirit world. The grip is dark red and black stripes, with the guard vaguely oval in shape.
「驚いてくれ、盲亀大砲｡」"Odoroitekure, Mouki Taihou" "Go ahead and surprise 'em, Mouki Taihou."
With the release of his shikai, both the grip and blade of Mouki Taihou become shorter, capable of being wielded comfortably in one hand, specifically Yamato's right hand. In his left, a wild west style six shooter appears (a very non-patent infringing Colt). While the sheath of his blade remains hanging from his left side, his right gains a holster for the new gun. Two loose bandoliers of bullets cross his chest, matching the style of the gun which appears within his hand.
The blade adjusts slightly, not just becoming shorter, but also gaining a slight shield guard over Yamato's hand, almost like a fencing blade's handguard, that can act as a small buckler but will shatter against sufficient strength. The guard is, naturally, shaped like a turtle shell. It juts out enough that Yamato can still move his hand and wrist comfortably and wield the blade without bashing it against his forearm during combat.
[ LEGACY CREATED ]
Origin: Kameyama Yamato was born to the Kameyama clan, one of the dying samurai bloodlines during the end of the Edo Period. Growing up with the Meiji Restoration, he faced a rapidly changing world, with his family insisting on keeping to the old ways. Thus, Yamato was trained in sword fighting and the styles of the Samurai until these things were officially outlawed or banned. Contrary to popular belief those of the Satsuma Rebellion did not shun guns. They used them to great effect. This is where Yamato gained his love of firearms, and began hearing tales of those that wielded them to great effect. Unfortunately before the fighting began, an untrained warrior practicing his weapon fired on Kameyama. This spurred his love to even greater heights, but also had the unfortunate effect of killing him painfully. Despite some regrets at having never joined his clan under the banner of Saigo Takamori, he transferred peacefully to the next world.
Looking for a patchwork family in the Rukongai, Kameyama found nothing more than that which the had hoped to join in the material world: a military. The Soul Society's Gotei was the next thing to a family, the closest that he had found. This had requirements, of course, those with sufficient and overflowing reiryoku potential were accepted into the academy, as well as those with blade mastery. While he met the latter, he was far under-performing in the former, and thus for nearly fifteen years after his death he worked day and night to harness and manifest his own spirit energy in order to get it to a sufficient minimum that the Academy might accept him. Throughout all of this, Yamato had one vice: love for the weapons that had been the cause of his death. Imprints, hand drawn images, any stories any one would tell him, he would gladly trade a day's work for, or impart some swordsmanship lessons in exchange for hearing about, particularly, the "Wild West". How many of those stories were true? How many were made up for free work? These thoughts never crossed Yamato's mind.
Rise to Power: His stay in the Academy was rough, but his blade mastery made at least that part of the training much easier. His kido work was always spotty at best, and he more than once wondered if he had chosen the right path in joining the Academy. This changed when he finally imprinted upon his asauchi, awakening a creature he simply knew as 'the turtle'. The Turtle was long winded and slow, but very patient, and taught him much about the finer arts of channeling his own reiryoku into successful, weak, kido spells. This allowed him to finally graduate from the Academy, roughly a hundred years before his Call to Action, and spending a sufficient amount of time in the Third Division, although Kido was never his specialty, he worked very hard over a hundred years to make it so. Around fifty years into his service, The Turtle revealed his name, Mouki Taihou, and with this surprise, came the first step into something much greater. Although Yamato had spent a considerable amount of time within his Inner World, mostly because of the meditation process of channeling his reiryoku (and because he thinks it's a really, really cool place), this was the first time that Yamato had held an actual gun in his hand. It would take considerable practice and accuracy training to get used to his shikai, and his knowledge of Kido would have to improve in order to make greater use of his weapon.
But for one hundred years? Why is Yamato not stronger? Why is he not a seated officer? One expects upward mobility from Youth and thus they may be curious about the reasoning behind Yamato's extensive stay in the Academy and the relative quiet nearly two hundred years of his stay. The truth is that the foundations did not come to Yamato as quickly as they had for others. For as many geniuses and wunderkind that there are, there are those that must work for each particle of spirit energy that they learn to summon, that must take remedial classes and risk expulsion from the Academy for their pace. But for those that wash out, there must then be those that barely succeed. And it is in that small gap that Kameyama Yamato fell. One who barely scraped by with worlds of growth ahead of him but no less eager to lend his abilities to the Soul Society as a Shinigami.
And for all of that time as a faceless crowd member of the third division, he did very little to garner attention aside from his chipper attitude. Instead, he trained and improved his kido skills. Going from the lowest rank to someone who could passably use Hado in battle, and Kaido to boot took several decades for him. More personally, there was no reason for him to do anything but enjoy his time as a Shinigami. He was a guard member for the Third Division's Restricted Wing but if there were any times of peril, it would have been reinforced with people far beyond his skill level, and thus most of his time working was as a security guard and nothing more. Still, the time that he has spent has made him a veteran of the Third Division and it is not entirely unheard of that those who have been there a while may know him by name or a reputation as 'the happy kid with shaggy hair who's kinda late sometimes'. But it's very unlikely that he did anything in particular to stand out during this time.
While he became very close with Mouki Taihou during this time, attaining his Shikai with some small level of mastery over it, his natural trust allowed the two to form a bond where Mouki Taihou was mostly responsible for his leaps and bounds in the mastery of Kido in general. His friends came and went, some transferred, some were lost, and others simply moved on. One rogued. But not all are meant to grow and expand until something kicks that along, and for Kameyama Yamato this happened very slowly.
Slowly, but surely.
Call to Action: Happenstance occurs to all; Yamato Kameyama didn't look for any of his family, and was told repeatedly that finding anyone you had known in the life before would be impossible. His memories had faded for the longest time until during an off duty stroll through the outskirts of the 15th district of the Rukongai, he smelled something that his heart could never forget: the special blend a homecooked breakfast made by his mother. Such a small, insignificant thing, but the spices were right, the food was unmistakable, and he couldn't help but follow the scent to a woman in her forties, a woman he recognized as Kameyama Fusako, his own mother. Retreating before she caught sight of him, he returned to the Seireitei to contemplate what to do with this information.
And of course, the universe abhors inaction. The next time he returned to that area, he found no woman of that description. Asking the locals about her, he found the gravest of news: Kidnappers from the outer districts had made a raid through the area, and taken a few bodies for whatever nefarious purposes. She had not been seen since. Appealing to the higher ups for aid was not risky, but nor was it wise. Finding his mother was his duty, if only to discover the fate of the rest of his family. Time had built a bridge between them, but if he could show his clan what he had become, then perhaps-- But the protection of the Rukongai was the Fifth Division's duty, not the Third. And it would take might far beyond his own in order to venture out that far out into the 'wild lands'. Thus Yamato Kameyama's transfer to the Fightin' Fifth, and his introduction to a brand new world.
