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obscuraxrp · 7 years

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The smoke settles to reveal OBOROGE SHOUMU, also known as OBORO, a 32 year old baku-blooded of Sunseong. They are an EDM producer, translator, and occasional information broker who appears to be adept in dream manipulation and sleep inducement – but like most things in Sunseong, there seems to be more to them than meets the eye.

FACECLAIM: Chiba Yudai, actor

APPEARANCE:

shoumu’s natural form calls back to that of a baku – a dream-eating chimera with the head of an elephant, eyes of a rhinoceros, claws of a tiger, body of a bear, tail of an ox. indeed, small tusks peek from the corners of shoumu’s mouth – they are not so large that they cannot be covered, but they show through often nonetheless – and their ears sit low on their head, large and folded and rough with an emerald green tint, orange-brown fur growing in soft tufts from the tips of them. their irises are orange ringed with yellow, keenly bright despite their constantly tired expression. their fingers bear claws, sharp and wicked; their backside shows a tail, thin and whiplike with a plume of orange fur at the end. trailing up from their claws and their tail and their ears are marbled blotches of emerald skin, rough to the touch and splotchy as it fades into human flesh tone. along their spine and at the joints of their limbs, more orange-tinted fur grows; the hair on their head, too, has an slight orange tint, being naturally a mahogany-brown color.

BIOGRAPHY:

they are their mother’s child, they’re told: they have her smile, her eyes, her strength to face adversity with kindness, and of course – her beastly blood, the inhumanity that weighs heavily on her shoulders. the last of these was unintended, undesirable – their parents wanted a son to compliment their daughters and luck is a fan of irony, it seems, giving them the boy they wanted and the baku they did not. (so much for the blood being diluted, kaasan supposes.)

kaasan’s not interconnected with the magical community; she’s eschewed it, trying to live a human life, and she wants the same for her son even if she knows how hard it will be. otousan doesn’t know how to interface with his gold-eyed, tiger-clawed child but he tries still to be a father to shoumu, knowing too well the difficulty of having an absent father for a son. their sisters are younger so they adapt more easily; maybe it even inspires the second-oldest, miki, to become a witch herself, having a little brother who walks through dreams, mumbling “magic” merely by existing.

education is a challenge because school isn’t a possibility, especially not in their rural hometown; the sisters take turns tutoring shoumu, teaching them writing, reading, arithmetic – they take to it well enough when they don’t fall asleep during a lecture, but this is something their sisters are used to. they work hard at studying and farm-chores alike, when they’re alert; shoumu loves their family and tries not to be a burden, but shoumu knows that they are. it’s hard not to know when you’ve eaten your father’s nightmares about you being discovered – when you’ve seen the deep creases on your mother’s face when you ask if you can go with her into the city. they don’t want to be a burden – they want to learn to shapeshift soon, so they can make their mother smile instead of fret, so there won’t be any more nightmares.

at eleven they finally manage it, finally changes their form – look down to see human fingernails on their hands and run to the mirror in excitement.

but when they see themself, they can’t seem to smile.

there “he” is: small ears, dark eyes, black hair without a sign of orange, fawn skin without a hint of emerald, human, human, human – but not themself. there is a disconnect between the face in the mirror and the body they’re in and the soul that inhabits it; eventually, they will come to call this feeling dysphoria and they will learn to wrestle with it, but today, merely a child, they swallow it down with bitter disappointment. shoumu had hoped a human body would fix everything – they can be normal now, their parents will be happy, they should be happy – but their stomach turns uneasily when they expect a tail or ear to shift and finds that they do not exist, and their heart sinks for it.

this marks a change, one shoumu is grateful for in the end: gone are the days of filing back claws and wearing hoods any time they leave the house, of making friends more often in sleep than when awake, of hiding and keeping to themself in fear. they go to school for the first time – it’s a bit of a shock, the classroom environment, fumbling to catch up with what the teacher is saying – sentimental congratulations on no longer being too sick to come out to school. sick – is that what they are, what they were? when they’re alone they let their true form out without fail – shoumu just can’t get used to the feeling of being human, of lying with every step they take.

school is good for them, still; shoumu makes friends and their world grows. they love music and art the most; they’ve always been full of ideas and energy from the dreams they devour, and painting and piano give them places to externalize those more than in notebook doodles and idle hummings. they fall in love hard and throw themself into practicing, convince their parents to get them a keyboard if they study hard for their high school entrance exams. this is shoumu’s own dream to chase: being able to give something of themself, their real self, to people, to make them happy, that’s what they want. maybe it’s not that simple; they’re spacey, never quite connected to the world around them, but shoumu’s friends find their “my-pace” style charming enough.

they want to go to the city for high school – somewhere better suited to teach them the things they want to know. their parents worry – it’s the same old things they always worry about, the fact that shoumu sometimes slips from their shifted form when they’re asleep, the fact that they’ve always been at home and their parents want to trust them but it’s scary for parents to think their children will be alone. but shoumu insists they’ll be fine – they’ll move in with miki-neesan, they won’t be completely alone – and their parents agree, if shoumu can get the scores they need, then they can go.

so they do, and the city is enthralling; shoumu’s the strange country boy full of images and songs but they find their place in time, working hard at school and even more at music club after. in what little free time they get they find their way into the doujin music scene, end up producing a few remixes for video-game inspired albums; they try to make sure things are easy enough for their sister, too, always a polite and unobtrusive house guest. somewhere along the way, they get into cosplay, too – directly from miki-nee, really – and independence, a more varied area, brings magic into shoumu’s view more and more often, though they’re never sure what to do with it.

living in the city means living around dreamers; shoumu finds themself sleeping more just to catch up on all the dreams going on around them, unintentionally. it’s easier to walk through dreams when there are so many, to see so much of the unreal world this way; they’re full of inspiration but realizing that reality is fuzzier than the dreams and it means that strange disconnect keeps coming back, and they hate it – but shoumu tries to capture the feeling in notes and chords, wondering if maybe they can control it that way.

they make it into a university for arts and they’re thrilled – their family’s thrilled for them, too. they finally move out, completely on their own; a friend drags them into applying to work part-time at a maid cafe and they end up sticking with it for supplementary income to buy instruments and synthesizers with. they make friends with a girl named watanabe ayumi who they find is bursting with dreams – some good, some bad – who wants so much out of the world as her stage but fears what she wants just as badly. she ends up asking shoumu out and they don’t see much reason to disagree, even though they don’t really feel for her the way she does for them – they still find themself fascinated with her and all of the color bursting from her mind, the raw depths of what she can feel.

ayumi’s the daughter of a wealthy ceo, a man who disapproves of her passion for performing – but she wants to be a rock star and shoumu knows she has all the makings of it; she’s afraid of failure, knowing one slip-up could mean the end of her father’s lenience. she and her friends – mutual friends – play with magic without even knowing shoumu isn’t human; shoumu wonders if there’s something good that can come of it, of them being what they are, of toying with forces like that at all.

shoumu tries to help her: they try to consume the nightmare that’s been plaguing her. shoumu had bitten off more than they could chew before, yes, but this was more than that – an insecurity so deeply set into the every fibre of ayumi’s being that they couldn’t take it without causing damage, and while shoumu wakes shivering and panicking, ayumi simply won’t wake at all.

the coma only lasts a few months but shoumu is wracked with guilt – they know it’s because they’d gone too far and it burns at them from the inside. her father sees right through them, knowing just what they are – shoumu has never felt so exposed by the form they’ve always felt most at home in as they do when that man glares through them like he can see it. it’s because of the guilt and the pain that shoumu agrees to work for watanabe-san, to use their dream-walking to get information – even if they hate it, if it means maybe they can make up for what they did to ayumi, or at least not have her find out that it was their fault that it happened – then shoumu will do anything.

this arrangement carries on for years, even after ayumi recovers – it takes time, after she finally awakens, but after enough time has passed she comes back stronger and more fearless than ever. shoumu recovers, too, and flourishes in their own way just as long as they don’t have to eat any huge dreams as part of their deal with the devil. they keep producing and even help ayumi compose her group’s debut album.

when watanabe-san makes plans to stop her in her tracks, though, shoumu realizes that they stand to lose more than just ayumi’s friendship and everything they’ve wanted for her and the others if they take action – the man has a grip on every facet of their life, by this point, and they’re terrified. but shoumu can’t simply let it by, even if they know how much trouble they’ll be in for not only being disobedient but for outright lashing out. shoumu makes preparations, steels themself, and tears the ambitions from watanabe-san’s dreams – leaves him in worse shape than they left his daughter, not to even mention the toll it took on shoumu themself, well aware that the people surrounding him would soon realize that only the baku-blood could’ve accomplished this feat quite the way they did.

afterwards they flee the country, with a little help from some shady connections, and fake their own death with a little help from their own uncharacteristically deep sleeping and a little bit of magic from witches that miki went to school with. neesan knows, so she can tell their family that they’re okay – they can’t tell ayumi or her band or their other friends, but it’s for their own good; they’re too tightly tied into everything that’s happened, and shoumu doesn’t want the people they care about to ever think less of them.

sunseong, south korea, is a decent place to lay low as a supernatural – it’s easy enough to get there, even if shoumu would’ve rather gone to america or europe or somewhere farther and wilder, but sunseong is a comfortable enough fit (even if it does take them a year or so to be able to decipher signs written in hangul). they have connections here and that’s what’s truly important – and well, if it has a blooming club scene, then maybe that doesn’t offend them too much either. their connections continue to utilize their dream-walking for information from time to time, but shoumu’s grown desensitized to it by now – they’d rather do clean work, but since they’re pretending to be dead, they have to make some sacrifices somewhere.

the underworld catches flame into an uproar and shoumu can’t miss it, the dreams and nightmares it inspires and the way their “connections” grow testy – they try to lay low, keeping up with their more mundane work as usual, but the whole city seems to be on high alert. they just hope it doesn’t bring more attention than necessary – all they want is to blend in.

CHARACTERIZATION:

YOU FELL IN LOVE WITH UNREALITY. the real world is blurry and slips through your grasp; it is in dreams where you feel most at home. your spirit bursts at the seams with energy such that it seems to exhaust your physical form, filling you with color and life that hides beneath sleepy eyes and lethargy. the wells of your soul run deep and you want to give deeply from it, so that others may know the love that you know for the intangible and ambiguous. not everyone understands it; you tend to speak in a vague and breezy way that other people find difficult to connect with.

YOU LEARNED TO HIDE YOUR TRUE SELF. you have seen too much fear and too much misunderstanding, hidden yourself too well for too long; you wish you could give your entire soul to the world, but you know that you cannot. you know it would be misused and misunderstood, and that saddens you. you keep your true depths under lock and key, letting only small rays of your inner warmth show through. even if it is a necessity, you have long learned to loathe the disconnect between your heart and mind and body and words; you want to be genuine and unambiguous, but in truth, you never have been before.

YOU STILL BELIEVE IN HOPE. childish aspirations are only childish if they are not followed through; you are a lover of hopes and dreams of all kinds, a source of inspiration and support for those who would pursue theirs. you are soft, and you are not always wise – you enable and you encourage with little regard to practicality. to you, people are all capable of amazing things – you want to watch them create and flourish and see a world that’s filled with colors. perhaps you are idealistic and naive still, despite knowing the world can be dark and cruel – but even if you always look toward the best for the future, in the moment, you can be more fatalistic than you admit.

SPECIALTIES:

dream manipulation – rank II (40 points)

the baku is an eater of dreams – called upon to devour nightmares, though a malicious one may well devour good dreams and even one’s hopes and aspirations if it grows hungry.

in their sleep shoumu walks between the dreams of others, as if drifting; they may enter another’s dream and watch it as well as influence it, altering its fabric in small ways – much like a lucid dreamer may influence their own dreams, but with a barrier formed by the unwilling subconscious of the other dreamer.

naturally, shoumu may walk through dreams only when they is asleep themself. interestingly enough, however, shoumu is occasionally able to eavesdrop on the “daydreams” (or simply thoughts) of waking people when shoumu is asleep as well, provided the person they're eavesdropping on is extremely close in proximity to their sleeping form.

shoumu can communicate with people in their dreams, as well, though whether or not they realize it’s shoumu or remember the conversations is another matter entirely.

alterations to dreams only take very minor forms; shoumu cannot shift the entire dreamscape, but rather introduce small factors that change the direction in which it moves. oftentimes these are completely ineffective in making any true difference in the dream’s meaning, but other times, the smallest seed can grow into a towering tree – though whether this is for better or worse is often difficult to determine, as dreams are mysterious things indeed.

when dream-walking, shoumu is technically outside of their own body; the father they travel from it, the more time it will take to return, during which time their body is sleeping and vulnerable. the “distance” they travel from their body may be measured both in how far, physically speaking, they go to reach the other person, and how deeply they delve into another's mind in order to influence their dreams (as versus staying on the outer level and merely observing them). in theory it is possible for shoumu to become trapped in another person’s mind for an extended period of time under various circumstances; they are careful to avoid this.

shoumu’s own dreams are always lucid, but they gain little from this other than a sense that their dreams are, in a way, more real than reality itself, as they have eidetic memory of what occurs in dreams but only normal memory of what occurs outside of them.

of course, the nature of a baku is not merely seeing dreams, but eating them in part or in whole – eaten dreams will be forgotten, all traces of them removed from the mind of the dreamer, appearing as black gaps in their memory should they remember any other part of the dream shoumu “took a bite of”, in a sense.

to an extent, shoumu needs to eat dreams – it is not a requirement to sustain their life, per say, but a requirement to sustain their emotional energy and creativity. even devouring bad dreams can help them regain their inspiration and improve their mood in general.

devouring too many dreams can make shoumu sick, especially dreams that are thick in meaning – simple nightmares and fantasies won’t bother him, but they’ll begin to feel unwell if they devour ones that are too deeply rooted in the dreamer’s subconscious. typically this makes it difficult for shoumu to sleep and feel rested, and they may experience symptoms of depression and/or anxiety for a time until their mind is able to fully digest the dreams he’s consumed.

due to the deep psychological roots of many dreams, over-eating is easier than it seems – shoumu would hardly ever intentionally devour the good dreams and hopes of another person, but accidentally uprooting them in an attempt to eat a deep-set nightmare is far more common. these things will reform with time, but the victim will remain somewhat hollow and emotionally empty for a time until this occurs -- though in shoumu's experience, a coma prior to the state of emptiness is common as well, and the idea of this leaves them shaking with guilt.

sleep inducement – rank I (20 points)

in kind with their nature as a dream-eater, shoumu is able to put other beings into a state of deep sleep – usually one wherein they will have particularly vivid dreams.

they cannot induce sleep for themself, which would make using their dream-walking easy – though they naturally tend to have an easy enough time falling asleep that this isn’t entirely necessary.

supernatural beings tend to be more difficult to put to sleep, especially fae and vampires.

those with strong mental fortitude, as well, may resist sleep.

shoumu must touch the target in order to induce sleep, and for fully alert targets, they will need to maintain contact with a target for a few minutes to push them all the way to sleep.

the amount of time it will take for the target to awaken depends primarily on how much magic shoumu concentrates into putting them to sleep, how strongly they resist that magic (either through willpower or through their own magic), and on how tired they were in the first place – but generally speaking, a target sleeping for an “abnormal” amount of time would be, well, abnormal, and probably have less to do with shoumu’s magic and more to do with the current state of the target. a few hours is typical – a full night’s rest is possible under the best circumstances.

innate abilities

constantly sleepy; it’s very easy (read: too easy) for shoumu to fall asleep even in noisy or bright places (read: inopportune places)

natural weapons: claws; in natural form only; these are not very effective for shoumu beyond maybe clawing someone’s eyes out

enhanced hearing due to folded ears; in natural form only

enhanced intuition for dreams and dream meanings

leftover points: 40

#obs: follow #*chiba yudai #blackmail cw #coma cw

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