Unmei Naraku | Master

Name: Unmei Naraku | 運命奈落 | Oningyo
Age: Naraku appears to be 21 years old. Being a homunculus, he never bothered keeping track of his age. When pressed though, he can recall the year of his birth, which puts his age currently at 19 years old.
Gender: One might make the argument that since he was once a homunculus, and given his appearance, Naraku is genderless. They would be incorrect though. Naraku is distinctly male if someone manages to strip him down.

Height & Weight: Naraku stands at an unassuming height of five feet and five inches. His weight should be pretty obvious given his build, only weighing one hundred and forty pounds. One hundred fifty if he’s had a big meal recently.
Hair & Eye Color: On paper, Naraku doesn’t seem to be all that much to look at. His eyes are black in color. Not dark brown, but pure blade, visually merging his iris and pupil. His hair his black as well, though when the light hits it at an angle, it can seem blue for a few moments. The length of his hair is kept so that it falls down between his shoulder blades, with his bangs cut to just above his eyes, and all other ends of his hair styled to be the same length. Not for efficiency or desire to have his hair as such. It’s just how his mother styled his hair, and he has not thought about it enough to change the style.
Physical Appearance: There are a few physical peculiarities to Naraku, not easily noticed. He was once a homunculus, and no homunculus is created perfectly. The most obvious of these would be the fact that his fingernails and toenails are black. Not painted, even if the gloss might suggest such. They are in all other respects normal nails. Just black in color. The second of these exists around his neck. A thin line of scar tissue stretching all the way around his neck in a perfect circle. While being assembled, his head was the last piece to be attached, and as such the skin there didn’t bond perfectly. Or so his mother told him. In reality it is just another imperfection of a homunculus.

For civilian clothing, Onin keeps it simple whenever he can. A loose t-shirt and some blue jeans will get him through the day. One of his most noteworthy traits is the complete lack of footwear. Socks, shoes, sandals, if it goes on the feet, he won’t wear it. Even when crossing some of the rockiest terrain, he either doesn’t care about his feet, or he’s trained himself to ignore the pain. It’s more likely the former. His hair, when he needs it out of the way, will be tied back, either with some sot of scrunchie, or with whatever string or cloth he can get his hands on. He makes a habit of keeping a scrunchie in his pocket since its also a habit of his to tie his hair back before going into battle.

Desired Servant Class: Undecided
Origin: While Naraku is not aware of his own origin, he has felt it’s presence all throughout his life. Pursuit, to put it in a word. From the very moment he was created, he has always been in pursuit of something. Whether it was the intangible, knowledge, or the perfection of a skill, he will pursue. And when it seems that his goal is unattainable, he will move on and pursue something else without a second thought. His driving force is not to any set end. He merely requires something to chase. A puppet needs it’s strings to function, and whatever he pursues holds his. Without something to pursue, he would shut down entirely, like a puppet without strings. No movement, no life, nothing.



Virtues

• Loyal. The puppet’s loyalties are not easily won. Nor are they easily lost. While Naraku might come off as clingy at times, that is merely a demonstration of the depth of his loyalty once it is won. He knows he can’t do everything by himself. He wouldn’t even exist by himself. So if he can find someone who has the same goals as him, or is at least willing to have his back, he will do anything to make sure that person can stay by his side as long as possible.
  
• Undaunted. Naraku lacks what would be termed a normal fear response. He still knows fear, and desires to continue his own existence, he is simply better at pushing it back and down than most people. The same could be said for pain. It gets very hot working the forge while working on a new weapon, and he often burns himself in the process, but not once has he ever dropped a scalding blade or shied away from the heat. There are some things that simply must be done, no matter how uncomfortable they might make you, and so he does them.
  
• Accommodating. It can never be said that the puppet isn’t willing to compromise on various matters. It does him no good to always try to get his way, even when he has the strength to make sure his way is the one that gets done. That takes time, and a loss of time is bad for both him and his partner. So, it’s much better to try and find a middle ground, or concede, so long as something gets done with as little time wasted as possible.
  

Vices:

• Obsessive. Unfortunately, Onin doesn’t just come off as obsessive, he is obsessive. Doing anything to keep someone by his side literally means anything. Even if it means having to tie them up so that they are unable to escape. While he was alone, he would often keep one homeless person or another that he’d kidnapped locked up with him for days. They would remain with him until he needed to travel, then they would meet the same fate as all other people that Naraku kidnapped.
  
• Inhuman. It’s a simple fact that Naraku lacks the ability to truly sympathize with others, or show mercy. When he leaves someone alive, it’s because they’re useful to him. If they have no use while they’re alive, then he will simply find a use while they’re dead. He can understand emotion on a basic level, and experience them himself, but he cannot consider the possibility that the emotions felt by others are similar to those he feels himself.
  
• Meticulous. Naraku is a creature of detail. Everything must be picked apart to be understood, and once it’s understood, it must be put back together in just the perfect way in order to maximize it’s efficiency. Take blacksmithing for example. He will experiment with all sorts of things, from the number of times to hammer a blade, the exact temperature of the tempering water, seconds the blade spent in the forge, how fast he poured the molten metal into it’s mold, everything. Sometimes in his quest to understand the details, he ends up taking more time than he should.
  

Wish Desired: Naraku desires the grail for only one purpose. His original pursuit. Or rather, the first thing he was directed to pursue. A soul. He was lead to believe that he didn’t have one, and for all he knows today, his mother is right. The only way he has to check for the soul usually involves the untimely end of another person. Therefore he wants to spend his wish on a soul. Whether he has one already or not, he will know for sure once his wish has been spent, he will have a soul. If he feels no different than before, then it just means he had a soul all along, and he will move on to pursue something new.


Magic Specializaition:

• Alchemy ~ It takes no great stretch of the mind to think of alchemy as destruction, alteration, and creation all rolled into one. Though in truth, it is more akin to a highly advanced form of alteration. Naraku’s specialty in Alchemy allows him to run prana through objects, and with that energy acting as a catalyst, change an object to a different form. His skill lies in the smaller scale alchemy than the larger scale. He could, if pressed, turn a wall into a massive array of spikes, or reduce the ground beneath him to a field of sand. But that is not what serves him in battle. In battle, his alchemy is focused on the shaping of an object into a physical weapon, such as a sword or throwing knife. Recently he has been attempting to work alchemy through a medium such as a weapon to change his opponent’s body. The alchemy of a living body is the hard part. He can work alchemy through a weapon, though this often weakens the weapon in the process until it falls apart.
  

Elements:

• Earth ~ The weaker of Naraku’s two elements, but also an essential one. This is the element that is employed by Naraku’s alchemy when he needs something on a large scale, like a wall of stone or a pit with spikes at the bottom. He uses this element less often because he prefers close quarters combat, not shaking thing up from a distance like a cartoon character. Though he is not above altering the ground beneath his feet into something more solid for sturdier footing, or the ground beneath an opponent for footing less than ideal. In the end though, this element is merely a gateway to manipulating it’s more refined form. Metal.
  
  
• Metal ~ This is where Naraku’s skills truly shine. In the manipulation of metal, he is unmatched. At least he likes to think so. In order to work alchemy, one must understand, deconstruct, then reconstruct. The latter two steps are the easy part. It is the understanding that allows Naraku to specialize in metal. Through his self imposed work as a blacksmith, he has come to understand metal in a way only a worker of the forge can. What makes it sing, what causes it to shatter. The types of metals needed for durability, and those needed for cutting power, and above all, how to mix the two. And while his already present blacksmith knowledge makes it possible for him to create swords to sell with mage craft, he still does it by hand, ever seeking to expand his knowledge of metal. And while metal can be founnd everywhere, it is not always good for battle weapons. As such, Naraku often keeps dense metal dowels on his person at all times, should he need to engage in battle away from his stock.
  

The History:
Oningyo, or as his birth certificate states Unmei Naraku, was not born in the traditional sense so much as made. He is a homunculus, and while it is possible for one to be conceived and born like a normal human being, it is far more expedient to build one from the ground up with human genetic material and special alchemical substances. Though a womb was not needed or him to grow his mother, Unmei Mikasa, still kept him in a large glass container while he developed. Leaving him out in the open was something she knew would lead to his destruction or misplacement as she wasn’t the tidiest or most careful of mages.

Mikes was an alchemist, and lived in the mountains of Japan in a large log cabin, researching the soul and how to manifest it. while methods of preserving the soul of something in a part taken from it was well known, Mikasa was more concerned with discovering where the soul resided as a whole. Was it everywhere within a person, or was there some specific area where it resided when unobserved? Her colleagues would often deride her research, saying she was researching the equivalent of ‘where the lightbulb goes inside a refrigerator’. The reason she created Naraku is for one of her experiments. She considered homunculi to not have souls, much like inanimate objects. But, it was already established in japanese lore than an inanimate object could gain a soul if it survived for one hundred years. By creating Naraku, she knew exactly what into making him, and his physical structure. The experiment was then to create in him a soul through some means, and then direct him to observe what had changed.

She had to wait a few months for him to develop, and then to mature, but once he had achieved his adult form, he was ready for testing. By that point she was already referring to her son as Oningyo, a mix of oni meaning demon, and ningyo which meant puppet. She called him this because he lacked compassion towards humans, like a demon, and followed every order she gave him to the letter, like a puppet.

The first part of her experiment was teaching Naraku mage craft. Specifically alchemy. Part of the prana used by magi to cast spells came from the soul. A spark to get the spell going while mana from the atmosphere was used to sustain it. Mikasa believed that in teaching Naraku Alchemy, he would have to develop a soul in order to hold the extra energy needed to start a spell. Contrary to her expectations though, her son’s homunculus body with it’s abundance of magic circuits was able to draw mana from the air around him and use it in his alchemy with little, if any apparent effort. She also realized that the only way to test her theory would be to have her son perform magic in a mana free environment. What with the abundance of mana, it was beyond her ability to create such a zone for Naraku to practice in. For five years she continued nonetheless, working in vain to see if proficiency with mage craft could, in any way, create that spark of empathy, of independence in her child.

Naraku’s “childhood” was filled with such attempts. Again and again his mother would bring him some new skill to master or at least become competent at. From art, to medicine, to blacksmithing. Everything that could conceivably draw on the soul of the practitioner to complete, she set him to it. Time and time again she would force him into it, only to give up a short amount of time later when it was clear her efforts were gaining no results. By the time Naraku was ten, he had been forced to compose sonnets, play them, listen to them as well as those of others, draw, paint, sculpt, write poetry, write stories and even smith by hand the swords he could create in mere moments with his alchemy. None of them created the light in his eyes that Mikasa was looking for, and for a time, he was left to his own devices. Blacksmithing was the last of these taught skills, and also the only one that he continued beyond the time Mikasa gave him to develop a soul.

Mikasa began to call him Oningyo out of spite. A demon that plagued her research, and a puppet that was beginning to outlive it’s use to her. Naraku took this abuse, passive as always, then returned to his smithing when she no longer had need of him. With her pet project turning out to be a dud, Mikasa’s research took a grim turn. For some time she’d known of processes and chemicals by which one might preserve the soul of a person within an object. Starting with animals, she had Naraku go out and capture all the living creatures he could, then bring them back to the cabin. Then she would have him cut open the still breathing creatures and examine their workings as they worked, then remove various parts and treat them to see if a soul could be preserved within them. Mikasa’s health was starting to fail, mainly due to her frantic research into ‘soulful’ activities over the past ten years. Naraku was swiftly becoming a useful puppet once again in his capture and vivisection of animals, as well as his preparation of the chemical that kept the creatures from dying of shock and pain while they were cut open.

It is through this horrific research that Mikasa stumbled onto a quirk. Once the blood was removed from a creature, even if it was replaced by new blood from a different source, nothing else removed from that creature would hold it’s soul. Whether this was a mistake in her testing methods or a fraction of the truth, Mikasa became convinced that the soul was in the blood. The blood of captured creatures was preserved, and their souls within them. Seeing that Naraku had continued smithing past her instruction, she had him use this soul filled blood to mix with the metals in his crucibles and form statues of the animals they were supposed to represent. These were then sold to an old man who ran an antiques shop at the base of the mountain they lived on. Before Mikasa had sold elixirs through him to fund her research. Now that she was too sickly to make them and unwilling to share the formulas with her child, she had him give these statues to be sold. For three years “life-like” metal statues were sold from that little shop. Naraku never complained, or said a word against his sickly mother. Mikasa meanwhile kept herself up at night, wondering where she was to take her research next.

Then finally, at the age of fourteen, Naraku spoke his first words that were not a direct response to Mikasa. He asked her when they would move on to experimenting with humans. Whether it was her delirious mind, or surprise that her puppet had expressed an actual thought, Mikasa told him immediately. Any who ventured into their forest was quickly captured by the unfeeling puppet, and cut open before his mentally unhinged mother. Rumors spread of demons living on the mountain but by a stroke of luck, no one who went missing lived nearby or had any loved ones waiting for them. The rumors were treated as just that, and if anything, people visited the mountain more. The antique shack at the bottom of the mountain had just obtained a collection of swords, other weapons and the most macabre depictions of human in metal ever. The latter was assumed to be deliberate attempts to play up on the legend.

At sixteen, Mikasa received word that mage hunters would be investigating her workshop in relation to the rumors of disappearances on the mountain. She didn’t know what to do. She was wheelchair bound at that point. Unable to eve feed herself without her puppet’s help. She told Naraku that they had to escape, and commanded he prepare her to travel. Naraku disappeared for almost the rest of the day. Mikasa shouted herself hoarse, but he would not come to her call. All she could hear was the incessant ringing of the puppet in his forge. For a moment, some fleeting hope ran through her that for once Naraku would disobey. She closed her eyes and fell asleep to that thought, and was unable to open them again.

Naraku had spent the day working on a knife, mixing traditional methods and alchemy to create a weapon in less than a day that normally would have taken a week. He returned to his sleeping mother, and slit her throat over the basin used to collect blood from humans. He was following her order, but he knew that with her body, she’d be unable to leave the mountain in her current state. He would take her with him, but in a more compact form. Her frail body did not hold much blood. Not enough for a weapon, but plenty for a small bracelet that could be worn around the wrist or tucked into a pocket.

Without his puppet master, Naraku assigned himself the goal of finishing his mother’s research. Of finding the resting place of the soul, and obtaining one for himself. But he could not do it on the mountain. After Mikasa was buried, the workshop, house, and forge were all destroyed. Gunpowder was a trivial concoction for an alchemist that had an affinity for earth. Only Naraku’s tools and some metal dowels survived. He could create with alchemy all else he needed to forge items from the souls he harvested. And his food could be bought with the funds of those weapons, or caught in nature.

Naraku had heard rumors through his mothers ramblings of a wish granting device known as the holy grail. She always bemoaned being too weak to summon a servant and participate, which made joining the next grail war Naraku’s goal as well. With it he could obtain knowledge of the soul, or a soul for himself. Now all he needs is a servant.

\"Roleplay Sample” wrote:The ring of steel on steel was like a chant going up to the gods. With each strike of his hammer, the blade came closer and closer to perfection. At least, as close to perfection as he could come with his skills. The blades were sharp, and flexible, but he was left with the feeling that there was something just missing from the sword. Sword smiths of old were always said to put a piece of their own soul into ever blade they made. But that was something Naraku lacked the ability to do. You needed a soul in order to put it in something else.

Was he Oningyo today perhaps? No. He was working. He did not need to hunt, did not need to work magecraft. He was Naraku at the forge. With hammer in hand, that was his name. \\

He was only Oningyo when he needed to spill blood.

He always supplemented his swords. He could not use his own soul, so he used that of others. This soul was that of a fisherman. There were teeth on the blade he had not put there. The soul of the man at work. They were tiny, but they were there. This was a wicked blade who’s edge would hook in and not let go unless they took a great amount of flesh with him. Yes, this was truly a shark tooth blade. A shark smile blade. Samegao. That was a good name for a fisherman’s sword. Perhaps there was a swordsman by the sea who would have use of such a blade. The sea held so many fantastic creatures, the smile of a shark would surely be a boon.

The click of metal behind him did not stop the ringing of his hammer. Nor did the cold press of the metal to his exposed neck. He always tied his hair up to work the steel. The his of the quenching blade drowned out the robber’s words. Naraku had no need of them. Was he still Naraku? The barrel of the thief’s gun was merely sealed and reinforced. Reinforced at the cost of siphoning metal off the back of the gun. He did not need to kill yet.

The click of the hammer followed by the man’s screams triggered the change. The tang was sturdy, the blade was sharp, and had cooled to his liking. It was time for Samegao to get it’s first taste of blood. Naraku sat with his forge, but Oningyo rose with blade in hand. Blood was spilled before it could be collected. Naraku sat to clean the blade christened in blood.

“A pity, I could have named your blade Fukō. But you bled too fast. I guess you truly are unfortunate.”

This is as done as it's going to get.

I guess I am fine with pre-approving this.

Rob will deliver the score.