Talk:Seishi Tamashige

Background

Seishi’s story begins about four hundred and fifty years ago, during Japan’s Warring States period, with a young man starving to death on the side of the road.

The young man was Jin, a ronin - a samurai without a master or a position in a noble house. With few resources and no reliable way to support himself, Jin’s efforts to make his way in the world and still hold onto his warrior’s pride had not gone well, ultimately leading him to collapse at the roadside, penniless and starving, without even a sword to his name.

In this state, he was happened upon by the shrine maiden Renge, who stopped in the midst of her own journey to pick him up and share some of her food and water with him. Renge, upon understanding his situation, asked him a simple question: What do you want?

A sword, he answered without hesitation. A lord to serve. A place in the world as a proper samurai, rather than a failure of a ronin.

“I can’t give you a sword,” she told him, “or a position in a lord’s house.” But, Renge told him, if it was a place in the world that he wanted, he could follow her. She explained that she was currently on a mission: she’d become aware of the growing threat of a supernatural entity called the Eater of Dreams, a being which corrupted and devoured the dreams of humans. The Eater of Dreams was taking advantage of the violence and uncertainty of the era to grow in power, and if not stopped, he would grow to threaten the entire country, if not the whole world.

Renge had already approached several daimyo regarding the threat of the Eater of Dreams. However, those lords not focused on aggressively expanding their territory and power were occupied with defending their lands from the immediate and obvious threat posed by their enemies. Nobody was willing to commit men to fighting a mysterious enemy they couldn’t even be sure existed. Thus, Renge made up her mind to gather together whichever warriors she could persuade to join her cause and set out to fight the Eater of Dreams directly.

If Jin was willing to join her, she told him, she could provide him with a weapon to use in the battles to come. Otherwise, she said, she could take him as far as the next village, and he could try his hand at abandoning his samurai pride and making his living as a farmer.

For Jin, it wasn’t even a question. He agreed to join Renge in her mission without hesitation, and as she’d promised, she provided him with a weapon, an enchanted metal combat fan she called the Shinken. (Renge, the young ronin quickly learned, had something of a puckish sense of humor: ‘shinken’ is an idiom for “seriousness” which literally means “real sword.” He did not find it as amusing as she did.)

The Shinken wasn’t all that Renge gave him, either. Feeling that they must have been led to meet by fate, she give him a new name as well to commemorate the change in his fortunes: “Akashimaru,” written with the characters for “red” and “thread,” representing the red cord of destiny.

And so, with Akashimaru as her companion, Renge continued on her mission. Bit by bit, she gathered others to her cause - people of unique circumstances and special skill, each with their own way of life and personal reasons for joining the group that Renge was collecting around her. Renge dubbed her companions the Guardians of the Gate of Dreams; one of the more humorous among them, meanwhile, gave the group the alternate name “the Nine Petals of the Lotus” (a moniker that several of them, Akashimaru included, did not find amusing).

The Guardians had a number of adventures, mostly in the process of combatting the youma servants of the Eater of Dreams. Bit by bit, they gained ground against him, until at last they were ready to confront the Eater of Dreams directly and put an end to the threat he posed once and for all. The night before what should have been the final battle, however, things went horribly wrong. The Eater of Dreams managed to secretly turn his influence on Akashimaru as he stood watch, and unknown to the others he played on all of Akashimaru’s doubts and insecurities: yes, he’d found a place with Renge and the Guardians, but once the quest was over, what then? They would surely each go their separate ways, and where would Akashimaru be but back where he started - still a ronin with no lord, no house, no position, lacking a place in the world, lacking even a sword.

For just one moment, he managed to make Akashimaru doubt… and that moment was enough to let him in. The Eater of Dreams took advantage of Akashimaru’s moment of vulnerability and weakness to possess him and use him to attack the other Guardians, forcing them to fight back against a trusted friend in a way that none of them were prepared for. Several Guardians died, and although Renge was able to drive the Eater of Dreams from Akashimaru’s body, it cost her dearly, leaving her without the power she needed to destroy the enemy. Instead, she could only seal him away, and only for a while - passing the mission down to their next lives.

It took everything she had, and Renge died soon after, entrusting both Akashimaru’s Shinken and the guardianship of the seal to O-Yasu, her baku familiar, with her last breaths. As for Akashimaru, Renge’s efforts had returned him to himself only to be confronted with the damage he’d caused by his moment of weakness. Filled with self-loathing, he committed ritual suicide.

Centuries passed, the age of samurai giving way to the modern era. The Eater of Dreams bided his time, until at last the power of the seal began to weaken. And the souls of those who had been the Guardians of the Gate of Dreams were reborn in present-day Tokyo.

Akashimaru’s story began again with the birth of a daughter to a Tokyo couple, the Tamashiges. Seishi’s mother, Maya, was an aspiring journalist with a passionate belief in the power of honesty, truth, and communication; her father, Seishirou, chose a steady paycheck as a salaryman in order to support Maya’s pursuit of her dream career as a reporter. Seishi grew up in a safe, loving household, a bright young girl with interests in reading and poetry, archery and horses, and had a strong set of values instilled in her by her parents from an early age.

Then, during Seishi’s first year of middle school, her mother disappeared.

The police investigated, but found very little to go on; they speculated that she may have been pursuing a story that led her to run afoul of some dangerous person or group, but none of the assignments she’d been given by the newspaper she worked for involved anything so sensitive. The case went unsolved, questions unanswered, and in the absence of anything conclusive, rumors and speculation flew. Some claimed she must have been secretly involved in something shady, while others suggested that she’d voluntarily abandoned her husband and daughter for some selfish reason of her own. Her father and closest family friends did their best to protect Seishi from the more malicious gossip, but more than a few of her middle school classmates had things to say about it as well, and kids can be cruel. Though her closest friends stuck with her throughout the upheaval, many of her fellow students distanced themselves from her, whether out of insensitivity or simply because they had no idea what to say.

Things were even worse at home. Seishirou Tamashige had never been the most demonstrative person; of the two of them, Maya had been the more outgoing, more easily able to express her emotions. While the two of them were together, her influence had helped to bridge the gap, but now that she was gone he found it harder and harder to communicate with his daughter as both of them struggled with their feelings of confusion and loss. Nor did it help that he could hardly avoid seeing his wife in his daughter, a fresh reminder of her absence. Rather than reach out to Seishi, he withdrew emotionally, becoming distant and leaving her to cope on her own with only what emotional support her friends and a few of the other adults in her life could provide.

Her mother’s disappearance had a marked impact on Seishi. Before, like many other children her age, she’d had a lot of dreams and fantasies about the future, but little by way of concrete goals. Perhaps she’d become a writer or a manga-ka, or an Olympic archer, or a dancer, or perhaps she’d fall in love and marry a prince from a foreign land - the dreams of any normal thirteen-year-old girl. But as the weeks without her mother turned to months, and more months went by one after the next with no news and no answers for any of the questions that filled her absence, Seishi came to a decision: she was going to join the police and become a detective.

When the thought first came to her, it was an unreasonable pipe dream, a thought that if she became a detective she could find out what had happened to her mother where all other investigation had failed. As time went by, Seishi came to understand - at least in her head, if not in her heart - how unlikely it would be, but even then, the idea didn’t go away. She might never know what had happened to her mother, but at least, she thought, as a detective she would be able to help other people - to, if nothing else, keep others from feeling what she had, the helplessness of not knowing what had happened. She could help to make the world safer, so that no one else would disappear without a trace and leave their loved ones behind to wonder and grieve.

Her plan to join the police after high school added further strain between herself and her father - he’d already lost his wife, and the thought of letting his only child pursue a career that would put her in danger was almost unbearable. Even in the face of her father’s stern disapproval, however, Seishi remained determined, and through her last year of middle school she began forming concrete plans. She poured herself into studying, setting her sights on attending high school Verone Academy in the hopes that the school’s prestige and long history might open doors for her when it came time to enroll in the police academy, and managed to overcome her father’s objections by not just passing the entrance exam but earning herself a scholarship. She gave up the Archery Club she’d been part of all through middle school and instead joined Verone’s Kendo Club, seeing it as a leg up on the kendo training she’d be expected to undergo as a police officer. She stayed in close contact with her mother’s former kohai Yume Hashira, now a mounted office in the Tokyo police; Yume had already become one of Seishi’s main sources of moral support following her mother’s disappearance, but she was also a source of valuable information regarding Seishi’s plan to join the police herself as a detective, and Seishi soaked up whatever advice Yume could give her.

Her focus on pursuing her goal left her with less and less time to spend with her peers, and her social circle shrank further. As a middle-class scholarship student, Seishi found herself out of place in the elite atmosphere at Verone, looked down on by the snobbier of her upper-crust classmates. Starting over as a raw beginner in the Kendo Club after she’d started to achieve real skill in archery from her years in the Archery Club provided a whole other source of frustration. And to make matters worse, she began to have strangely vivid dreams, surreal and bloody images with little by way of context.

One night, she woke from an especially violent dream to find a creature in her bedroom, a dog-sized horned beast with a tapir’s snout and a tiger’s legs. The creature introduced himself as O-Yasu, a baku - the same baku who had been Renge’s familiar over four hundred years ago, charged with watching over the Shinken and the seal containing the Eater of Dreams until the Guardians of the Gate of Dreams were reborn.

O-Yasu explained to Seishi that the seal had weakened enough for the Eater of Dreams to escape into the dreams of humanity, once again corrupting them into nightmares. He was gathering power, trying to break through into the waking world, and it was time for Seishi to awaken and finish what she’d started.

None of this made any sense to Seishi, especially not since O-Yasu was far from thrilled that the first reborn Guardian he’d found was the one who’d caused their failure and Renge’s death centuries before. By the next morning, Seishi had convinced herself that the conversation was just another strange dream… until, on her way home from school, she walked directly into a literal nightmare, the surreal warping of reality caused by one of the servants of the Eater of Dreams harvesting the dreams of a human.

O-Yasu appeared again, this time bringing the Shinken and once again urging Seishi to awaken to her power. Prompted by an inner voice, she invoked the cord of fate and transformed, gaining all of the power and skill that her past life had once possessed.

Now, with O-Yasu’s grudging support, Seishi must find a way to juggle her personal goals and day-to-day responsibilities with the task of fighting the minions of the Eater of Dreams and finding the reincarnations of Akashimaru’s former comrades. She’s not thrilled about having the inherited mess of a past life getting in the way of her own goals, or about having to find a way to hide what she’s doing from the people around her - but she can’t ignore the fact that, as a magical warrior, she has a chance to help protect people from danger in exactly the way she wants to do by joining the police.

And she can’t help but wonder, now that she knows about the existence of a whole hidden world of supernatural danger… could there still be an explanation for what really happened to her mother, out there somewhere waiting to be found?

Abilities

Akashimaru’s fighting style centers around the Shinken, a magic weapon which normally takes the form of a metal combat fan. Her style is thus very loosely based on tessenjutsu, albeit considerably fictionalized given that the Shinken is a magic weapon - real-life tessenjutsu simply uses the closed fan as a bludgeon, and some tessen are simply bars of iron in the shape of a closed fan, but Akashimaru’s tessenjutsu includes open fan techniques as well.

The Shinken is a close-range weapon, and Akashimaru is a bold attacker who prefers to close with her opponent and engage them directly in a flurry of swift, strategically-aimed attacks. Although the Shinken is a fairly small weapon, it can be used for devastating strikes against weak points, and to block and deflect enemy weapons, projectiles, and energy beams or blasts.

Specific Shinken techniques include:

• Sankonsen (Iron-Shattering Fan): Akashimaru’s main form of attack is to strike with the closed fan, using it as a blunt weapon and aiming for weak points or, if it seems possible, attempting to break the enemy’s weapon.
• Sundansen (Shredding Fan): In addition to the closed fan strike of sankonsen, Akashimaru may also strike with the edge of the open fan. The ends of the fan’s slats are sharp, allowing it to be used as a cutting blade.
• Hiraisen (Flying Fan): The magic of the Shinken allows Akashimaru to throw the open fan in essentially the same fashion as a boomerang, and have it return to her hand. The range is not all that long, and throwing one’s sole weapon has risks, but even if the fan is intercepted Akashimaru can pull it back to her hand via the cord of fate.
• Hansha-Sen (Reflecting Fan): The open fan can be used defensively to block melee attacks and deflect, or possibly even bounce back, projectiles and blasts or beams of energy.
• Sankyosen (Fan that Disperses Lies): Drawing on her connection to the power of dreams as one of the Guardians of the Gate of Dreams, Akashimaru uses the open Shinken to “blow away” illusions and magical deceptions. How well this works mostly depends on each affected individual’s strength of will, and on the strength of the power behind the illusion.
• Nightmare Breaker: Akashimaru’s main iconic finishing move empowers the Shinken with the strength of its wielder’s determination, unleashed in a flurry of blows.
• Katsujinken (Sword That Saves People): The Akashimaru of the past never unlocked the true potential of the Shinken. Eventually, given sufficient experience and character development, Seishi will gain the ability to transform the war fan into a katana which can cut through dark power and magical bonds without causing any injury to human flesh. Katsujinken, the sword that saves lives, is empowered by Akashimaru’s will to save another; it can free a person from possession or magical control, sever magical bindings and barriers, and destroy dark energy. In a sense, Katsujinken is a blade that can sever the bonds of negative karma. However, it must be motivated by empathy and a genuine desire to save another person. If that desire isn’t there, Seishi can’t form the sword.

Additionally, the Shinken can temporarily transform into a shortbow to allow Akashimaru a longer-ranged attack in situations where she can’t close with her enemy. The arrows she fires are only magical in the sense that they are created by the power of Akashimaru’s will channeled through the Shinken, and they don’t have any special effects. This ability provides only a basic ranged attack option, and my plan is for Seishi to rely on it more early on due to being more familiar with archery, then have it gradually phased out later as she grows more experienced with using the Shinken’s main form.

Outside of combat, Seishi has several other abilities related to her role as one of the Guardians of the Gate of Dreams. She sometimes has dreams in which she’s able to converse with the manifestation of her past self; she can’t consciously control when this happens, but since dream-Akashimaru is pretty much an expression of Seishi’s subconscious, it tends to happen either when there’s something she wants to consult her past self about or when there’s something that her subconscious is chewing on.

With O-Yasu’s assistance, each of the Guardians can share dreams and venture out of their own dreams into the collective dreamscape of humanity, visiting the dreams of other people in search of places where the Eater of Dreams may be hiding and/or exerting his influence. For RP purposes, this provides the opportunity for Seishi (as Akashimaru) to visit the dreams of other player characters, and will be done only with the consent of all players involved. For all in-character purposes, dream-riding is dangerous, both because dreams are fluid and malleable and dreamers may produce nightmares that pose a danger to a dream-riding Guardian, and because it’s possible to get lost in the dreamscape and not be able to wake up. As such, it is best approached with caution.

As a final note: all of Seishi's powers are based in the strength of her determination. The stronger her drive, the greater her power; on the flip side, anything that affects the strength of her motivation affects the strength of her power. Doubt can cripple her, and giving into despair will cause her to lose the ability to henshin entirely until her will to persevere is renewed.