akatsukivampire

Player nickname: Ref

Player LJ: matrixrefugee @ Livejournal

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Email: Morraeonmarrithsdattir@gmail.com

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Are you at least 15?: Yes

Current Characters: NA

Character: Muraki Kazutaka

Fandom: Yami no Matsuei

Character Notes: Using pieces from various apps I've made in different places...

History: Muraki's genesis is shrouded in mystery: his grandfather, Yukitaka, a scientist with ties to the government and the military, seemed to have been involved in a genetic experiment that created Kazutaka's mother, since both she and her son are pale creatures with silvery eyes and peculiar natures.

Kazutaka was born into a life of privilege, the descendant of a long line of wealthy physicians. But things are not always as they seem. His father was largely absent, busy with his medical practice (or so he claimed, since he had started a second family), leaving Kazutaka entirely in the care of his mother. While that strange, pale woman doted on her young son, her behavior toward him grew increasingly erratic, either from discovering her husband's infidelity, or something inherent in her nature, or some side effect of the experiments that produced her. She began to treat him as if he were one of the porcelain dolls which she collected: she either smothered him with affection or neglected him, leaving him to his own designs. Perhaps because of her husband's infidelity, she grew increasingly jealous and possessive of him, even going so far as to destroy some of his beloved toys and anything else that seemed to come between them.

His grandfather intervened, seeing to the boy's education and separating the boy from his mother, whom he confined to a private clinic he had set up in a wing of the family mansion. However, the damage had been done to Kazutaka's personality, leaving him as a shy, wary, introverted young man. School proved to be something of a haven for him, since he was already of a bookish nature, intending to take up the family profession. It was here that he made friends with Mibu Oriya, the son of the proprietor of Ko Kaku Rou, Kyoto's oldest teahouse (which formed a front for a high class brothel), and Sakuraiji Ukyou, the heiress to a pharmaceutical company. Oriya soon became Kazutaka's protector, confidante and sometime lover, while Ukyou's gentle, nurturing personality and her tender love helped him to open up his guarded heart.

But this idyllic time came to an abrupt end in Kazutaka's seventeenth year: his father's mistress passed away suddenly, leaving her son, Saki Shidou, in his care. The boy, Kazutaka's half-brother and a few hours older than he, came to live with the family, and it soon became clear which was the favored son. Saki, on the surface, seemed the perfect "good son", but he soon made life an utter hell for Kazutaka, tormenting the pale young man emotionally, physically and even sexually, then forcing himself on Ukyou. But Saki's crimes did not end there: he proceeded to kill their father, likely through poison, then he attacked Kazutaka's mother, leaving her for dead. Out of compassion, Kazutaka quietly euthanized her, then, frightened at what he had done, he fled to the safety offered by Oriya's family.

During the procession for their parents' double funeral, Saki was given the place of the elder son, and it was then that Kazutaka saw his half-brother smirking, plotting something. That plot came to light a few days later, when Saki tried to cut down Kazutaka with a kendo sword. One of the family servants intervened, mistaking Saki for an intruder and shooting him in the back. This left Kazutaka as the sole heir to the family.

College proved another refuge for Muraki: plunging into his studies allowed him the chance to distance himself from the pain of the past. By his early twenties, he had qualified as a surgeon and took over his father's surgical practice. He was devoted to his patients, but the loss of several patients was more than his sensitive nature could bear, and he soon cracked under the strain. Around this time, the darkness that had been lurking inside him began to make itself visible. He grew obsessed with the notion of controlling death and keeping it at bay however he could. He soon developed the ability to sustain himself by absorbing the spirit energy of people around him, and he began to train himself in various forms of dark magic. At some point, through a botched summoning or a spell gone wrong, or some other accident, he lost his right eye, having it replaced with a glass eye. Besides magic, he also turned to science as a means to cheat death, including organ transplants and cloning research; in his quest, he came back into contact with Professor Satomi, his mentor during his years at Shion University. Satomi, a somewhat eccentric scientist, had been seeking a way to clone organs for transplant, but he had also been keeping a secret left by Muraki's grandfather, in a sub-basement lab under Shion University's Center for Frontier Medicine: a life support tank containing what remained of Saki, now reduced to a head and a spine (what happened to the rest of the young man's body is unclear in canon, but given Satomi's propensity for experiments worthy of Frankenstein, he may well have utilized Saki's organs...) Seeing that the bane of his existence had survived, albeit in an unconscious state, Muraki formed a plot to restore Saki in order to get his revenge. He started studying necromancy, successfully raising a Chinese pop singer, Maria Wong,after the girl's suicide. But this was only partly successful -- she became a vampire-like entity that depended on blood to stay alive and beautiful -- and so he sought other means.

Even organ transplantation did not entirely satisfy his obsession: he succeeded in saving the life of Tsubaki Kakyouin, the daughter of shipping magnate Takeshi Kakyouin, by giving her a new heart. What the girl did not know was that the heart came from an unwilling donor, her best friend Eileen, a flower seller from Hong Kong whom Kakyouin had hired to be his daughter's companion. Through a potion mixed with the cocktails of medicine that Tsubaki had to take after the transplant, Muraki succeeded in binding Eileen's vengeful spirit to Tsubaki, making her a vessel for a second personality which became conscious only at Muraki's bidding. But even this experiment was not enough.

Among his grandfather's files, Muraki discovered a record of a nameless patient, an exquisitely young man with violet eyes, who had arrived at his grandfather's clinic in the year 1918, badly injured and barely conscious. And yet, despite his life-threatening injuries, the young man's body healed without so much as a scar. The young man's ability as well as his handsome face, inflamed Muraki's curiosity and desires: he had to find him by any means necessary, though the youth had taken his own life in 1926.

Through his network of intelligence, Muraki found that the young man still existed, albeit now as a shinigami, by the name of Asato Tsuzuki, in the employ of the Ministry of Hades, leading the souls of the departed out of the mortal world and into the afterlife. And so he set out to find any means of luring Tsuzuki out into the open.

Soon enough, their paths crossed: while serving as Maria Wong's physician (read: controller) at the Nagasaki Music Festival, he encountered Tsuzuki, now accompanied by his partner, a young man named Hisoka Kurosaki. That second young man was a familiar face to Muraki, since three years earlier, Hisoka had witnessed one of his murders; not wanting to leave a witness, Muraki had forced himself on the young man, casting a curse on him that drained the boy of life and health over the next three years. Deciding then and there to entrap Tsuzuki, Muraki ensnared the young shinigami, using as bait to lure Tsuzuki into a trap, but the bond of friendship between the two shinigami allowed them to combine their strength and defeat the guardian beasts that Muraki had summoned to keep them cornered.

Personality: On the surface, he seems like a polite, highly intelligent and slightly reserved gentleman of wealth and taste who appreciates the finer things in life, a well-known surgeon with impeccable bedside manners, deeply devoted to his high school sweetheart. He's cheerful in a slightly cynical way, with a gleefully morbid and at times downright naughty sense of humor. He's not above politely teasing and flirting with people playfully, though under the surface of this affability, he may have other ideas.

Behind this genteel, even kindly mask, it's a whole other matter: he is a conniving, manipulative scoundrel who uses and discards people like pawns in a chess game of revenge, usually killing them once he no longer needs them; a mad scientist who keeps a personal horror hidden away in an eerie basement lab with a view to rebuilding it in order to destroy it because it once tried to destroy him; an energy vampire who feeds on the living (and sometimes on the dead or even on death gods) to sustain himself and build up his magical powers: his preferred method of feeding is generally sexual and he's not particularly picky where it comes from, male or female. He presents a kindly and affable facade, but he is also guarded and wary, not letting anyone too close out of a fear of letting himself be harmed. But he's not bent on world domination or something megalomaniac: he's let himself become a monster in order to gain control of his own corner of the world when everything spun out of control. As a child, he was emotionally and physically abused by his mother, who treated him little better than part of her collection of porcelain dolls, and as a young man, he was molested and nearly killed by his half-brother Saki Shidou, the offspring of one of their father's numerous extra-marital affairs. These tragedies eventually caused him to crack emotionally and turn to the darkness within to strengthen himself. And yet, at the same time, he's filled with a deep sense of self-loathing and disgust at himself, for letting himself become a monster, a disgust that leads him to despair. But he also takes pride in his work, legitimate and otherwise, whether he's working with a patient, casting a spell, or making a kill: with the latter, he's known to be quick and precise, but not above staging the scene like an artist crafting a masterpiece. He tends to keep people at a polite distance, but if someone catches his fancy in the wrong way, he can be an incredibly possessive and jealous lover. This jealousy may be an adult manifestation of a kind of separation anxiety stemming from the abuse he suffered as a child, when his mother would not let anything come between her and her son.

Despite being a physician, he does not seem to take seriously that line from the Hippocratic Oath "First, do no harm", but whether this is a result of his own disillusionment or because he has stepped across the line between the human and the preternatural, is not entirely clear, and perhaps, in a bid to hide in plain sight, he wants it that way. Not to say that he kills randomly and without reason: even when he seems to kill for its own sake, he generally intends it to play a part in a greater scheme known only to him (usually trying to get the attention of Tsuzuki). If human psychology applies to him any more, he might be considered a sociopath of some kind, with a tendency toward histrionics (given his flair for the theatrical in arranging his crime scenes) and narcissism (given his vanity).

But his conscience is not entirely dead: from time to time, the memories of a relatively more innocent time in his life return to haunt his memory, causing him to turn inward and brood over what he has allowed himself to become. He is well aware that he has become as much of a monster as the people who harmed him, and this pains him. He can, when his heart is touched, be incredibly gentle and even affectionate toward china dolls and small children, even to his prey, he has moments of tenderness, when he might reach in to wipe away their tears with a gentle hand.

He takes a certain pride in his work, both as a physician and as a practitioner of magic: failures are seen, not as set backs, but as a chance to rule out what doesn't work, the better to find what does. A highly meticulous planner, he looks ahead, calculating and predicting possible outcomes to the maneuvers he intends to make, preparing for any possible scenario, As cynical as he might seem, he is surprisingly good-natured and even optimistic in his own strange way.

Other: Abilities:

--Energy vampirism: He can add to his strength and restore his health by absorbing lifeforce/energy from people around him. His preferred choice is through killing or sexual contact, but he is able to take from a person by extending his own energy field to that of a person within a few feet and absorbing it directly.

--Dark magic: He's able to cast curses on a person draining their energy to their death; has raised a girl from the dead a few days after her passing, turning her into a vampire-like entity which drank the blood of the living to keep herself alive; has created barriers that can keep spirits from escaping; has even created traps for shinigami,

--Veiling: He can turn invisible and move about unseen.

--Summoning familiars in the form of a white Eastern-style dragon, a three-headed Western-style dragon, and three griffin-like chimeras.

--Mind reading. He has to grip someone's forehead to do it, but he can search through a person's thoughts and even seal away selected memories.

Additional Links: On Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Descendants_of_Darkness_characters#Kazutaka_Muraki

First Person (entry type):

I'm going to have to have a word with Sakaki: the new kitchen maid doesn't seem to know how to descale a tea kettle properly, or if she does, she's shirking at it. I specifically stated in the list of her duties, which she was given when we hired her, that the tea kettle was to be descaled every three days. Otherwise, my green tea starts to taste of copper and limestone.

Good help is hard to find these days, particularly good *discreet* help, in the form of servants who don't ask too many questions. There again, the ones who start to nose about where they shouldn't also have their uses. The older staff here, the ones who have serving the longest, know enough not ask why some of the newer ones "don't make the cut", and why their departure was so sudden and unannounced. I'd rather this didn't end up happening with the new kitchen maid: she's positively smitten with me, the sort who's only too happy follow the master's orders in order to gain his approval, and thus all the more willing to be discreet when discretion is called for. Hopefully a simple word or two correction will solve the matter of the mineral-contaminated tea.

Third Person: Muraki hardly expected to bag his prize on the first go, but even still, he could not help feeling a bit of a let-down as he slipped through the shadows, returning to his hotel empty handed: shinigami were elusive creatures to begin with, hiding in plain sight, according to his sources. For another thing, this one, this Asato Tsuzuki, proved to be far more than a pretty face. Cornering him again would be a challenge: his cover was blown and Tsuzuki had seen him as he was, as a chessmaster of dubious intent. Perhaps this was for the best, though having his strategy revealed this early in the game would make it a challenge to lead the violet-eyed beauty to the endgame he had planned.

He dropped the veil and stepped out of the shadowed sidestreet and into the pool of light beneath a streetlamp, turning up the collar of his trenchcoat against the autumnal evening breeze, before he rummaged in his breast pocket for his cigarette case. A group of young folk passed him by, coming from the opposite direction, chatting among themselves: high school students on their way home from an evening of studying, most likely. One light-haired youngster among them vaguely reminded him of Hisoka Kurosaki, but the passerby was a shade older and not nearly as pretty-faced, at least in this light. He smiled gently, nodding to the group of young people as they passed, wishing them a polite "Good evening." One girl returned the nod and smiled to him, but the light-haired youngster had turned his face away, distracted by another classmate talking to him. Just as well: He couldn't stay here exchanging polite chatter with young passersby and thinking of the youth whom he had used to bait a trap that had not gone as anticipated; he had to be back to the hotel suite and soon. Maria Wong's 'expiration date' was coming quickly, thanks to the meddling of the Ministry of Hades, and he would have to help her mother prepare a statement to the public regarding the girl's sudden demise. He couldn't try another resurrection: the last one had only partially worked and another attempt wasn't worth hazarding. He'd have to resort to another line of experimentation, one that wasn't so unpredictable and which didn't chew into his own energy reserves.

Perhaps someday that experiment would involve the shinigami.

* * * *

By the time he returned to the hotel, Maria was already on what he could tell would be her deathbed, lying on the pillows with her limbs sprawled, exhausted, her breath already shallow and rasping. Her mother paced the floor like the caged tiger she was, huffing impotently under her breath.

As he closed the door behind him and hung up his trenchcoat, the angered remonstrances began.

"You told me that you could keep her alive, you told me that spell would work," the woman argued, striding up to him.

Muraki walked past her to seat himself on the edge of the bed, taking Maria's hand by the wrist and feeling her pulse, timing it against his pocket watch. "I told you I could resurrect her: I made no guarantees as to how long she would stay alive," he replied. The girl's pulse was thready and erratic, as her heart gradually lost its battle with the inevitable. "And I certainly did not expect those detectives to show up."

"How did they find us out? I thought you were an expert at this...sort of thing," Madame Wong blustered. "I thought you could do this discreetly."

Muraki laid the girl's hand on her chest, reaching down to brush a strand of hair from her pale forehead, before rising and turning to the harpy yattering at him. "I took every precaution, but the resurrection was imperfect: Maria had a strong will, despite my efforts to keep it in check," he said, taking off his eyeglasses. The temptation arose to draw the switchblade from his pocket and silence the harridan once and for all, but he'd done enough to draw attention from the authorities: that now burning warehouse where Tsuzuki had confronted him was enough commotion for one night. "We all are subject to mortality, to entropy: it's the way of the universe: we come into it, we spend what time fate or circumstance grants us to live, and then we are claimed by nature's need to conserve its resources."

"How can you just stand there spouting such rubbish! She's dying!" the woman screamed, raising her hand to strike him.

He caught her smaller hand in his, gripping her wrist hard, letting her know he would brook none of this. He caught her gaze with his, then spoke, evenly: "Yes, she is dying, but if I tried to raise her again, the very agency which sent those detectives would see that the spell did not succeed: we both would suffer for that kind of folly. Let the girl go: she has served her purpose in life. Let her sleep this time and forever."

He let her go so suddenly that she staggered back a step. As strode away to his bedroom, setting his back to the woman, he thought he heard a choked sob, the sound of the weak creature that she was coming out from its hiding place behind her tiger-like mask.