JESUS TAPDANCING CHRIST WHAT IS THIS MONSTROSITY I mean, uh, completed C&C app. Also: SPOILERS.
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Spinel
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: spinelsoup
IM: CeyloniteSpinel (AIM)
E-MAIL: spinel.soup@gmail.com (sh-shut up I’ve been using this screen name for 8 years)
RETURNING: I am a blushing C&C virgin.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Bruno. Seeing as he can’t remember a damn thing from before a few months ago I’ve got no idea how he even knows what his name supposedly is, BUT HEY.
FANDOM: Yugioh 5Ds.
CHRONOLOGY: Episode 103, right after he staggers out the door from getting mentally badtouched by Sherry’s conversation about Zone. He’ll be under the impression that his sudden mysterious headache was just caused by the Porter nabbing him. Yay misconceptions!
CLASS: Hero! Derpy kind of unsure-of-himself hero, but hero nonetheless.
SUPERHERO NAME: Daisuki Bruno-chan Super Mechanic
ALTER EGO: Mechanic and all around good-at-techie-things-guy Bruno. His Green Card has his last name down as Adler NO FUCK THAT HIS LEGAL NAME HIS BRUNO BORELLI BECAUSE THAT IS AWESOME God bless you 4Kids Entertainment.
BACKGROUND: (which is... so overlong I had to split the cuttext into sections STOP JUDGING ME ;_; )
About a year and a half ago, the world was saved. ... Yes, by card games. Yes, by card games on motorbikes. Look, we’re all just going to have to accept that in this show this all makes perfect sense before we can move on.
Right, anyway, the gist is this. Neo Domino City and Satellite are a futuristic super-city and an isolated island slum that were violently split off from each other years ago by a “natural disaster” known as Zero Reverse (really an accidental meltdown of the city’s miraculous power generator, Momentum.) By a series of events that are five parts shady manipulation and one part fate, two guys from Satellite, Yuusei and Jack, and two girls from the City, Aki and Ruka, all cross paths and find that they all have similar mysterious birthmarks that are somehow connected to the unique dragon-type cards they each own (or, in Ruka’s case, should own.) It turns out that they are all “Signers” who have all been chosen by an ancient god called the Crimson Dragon, and that their fate is to battle against a group of “Dark Signers” chosen by the Dragon’s equally ancient enemies the Earthbound Gods. These gods incidentally are partially responsible for the reactor meltdown that not only ripped the city in two but also killed Yuusei’s parents, the lead designers of Momentum. After a series of life-or-death duels against the often all-too-familiar faces of the Dark Signers, the Signers (with the help of Yuusei and Jack’s old Satellite buddy Crow) defeat them all, but just a little too late to prevent the baddest god of all from awakening. To make things worse, one of the aforementioned shady manipulators, Director of Public Security Rex Godwin, has decided to merge the power of the missing 5th Signer mark and the last Earthbound God and become a living god in his own right. But with the help of the Crimson Dragon our heroes manage to defeat him and the so-called King of Hell, return the Dark Signers to normal, and fix the damage done to the city, and Crow for his part in it all gets to be made the 5th Signer.
So, fast forward about six months. With the man who was enforcing the status quo with a literal iron fist finally out of the picture, Satellite has been rebuilt and revitalized and is now an integrated part of the city. The current major goings-on in Neo Domino City all revolve around the city’s hosting of the upcoming World Riding Duel Grand Prix, or WRGP, which seems to be pretty much a cross between the Summer Olympics, the Formula One World Racing Championship, and card games. Three of our old destined hero crowd, Yuusei, Crow and Jack, are all living together in the city and working on upgrading their D-Wheels, specialized motorcycles that run on Momentum that are built for dueling, in order to enter the tournament next year. The other two, Aki and Ruka, along with Ruka’s twin brother Rua, are students at the city’s giant K12-slash-Duel-Monsters-magnet-school Duel Academia, and come over to visit the guys in the garage a lot. All in all life has been pretty peaceful for this lot for the last six months.
Well, we can’t have that, can we.
Enter plot, stage left. The director of Security, the city’s rather broadly powered police force, has finally been replaced. Unfortunately it’s by three guys in white robes (named after a trio of famous operatic tenors, what the fuck show) from Illiaster, the same shady Illuminati-esque group that was responsible for the last crazed world-ending guy with a god complex and the other guilty party in causing Zero Reverse. While the extent to which Illiaster was aware of Godwin’s plan to go bugfuck insane and try to wipe the world clean is profoundly unclear (like almost everything else about this bunch,) these three guys at first seem more interested in quietly keeping the Signers out of the way of their plans than anything else. What exactly their plans are is similarly vague at this point, but they clearly involve the brand new city-wide system of interconnected Riding Duel lanes built for the upcoming WRGP. Not to mention the mysterious “meteorite” which coincidentally crashed outside the city the day the three of them took office and which was quickly carted off and hushed up before anyone found out it was a large, rectangular tablet with some alien-looking text and a carving of some kind of mechanical monster on it.
Pretty soon after this is when our heroes get involved. There’s a mysterious D-Wheeler riding around challenging people to duels in the middle of the night, but every duel he’s in ends with the opponent crashing catastrophically. At first the guys don’t want to get involved, but when “Ghost” puts their cop friend Ushio in the hospital things get a lot more personal. They all split up to chase him down, and of course it’s our hero Yuusei who finds him and right away challenges him to a duel. During it Yuusei discovers that not only does Ghost have the power to make the damage dealt in the duel real (a power previously limited to the Dark Signers and certain special “psychic” duelists like Aki,) but that Ghost has a powerful monster they have never seen before known as “Machine Emperor Wisel,” a gestalt of 5 separate cards with 5 separate abilities. One of these is the game-breaking power to shanghai an opponent’s Synchro-form monsters, the lynchpins of most decks and the very type of card that the Signer dragons take the form of.
Yuusei just barely manages to get his dragon Stardust back and is forced to dip into the Savior Dragon power they defeated Godwin with to scrape a victory, and when his monster is destroyed the backlash sends Ghost careening off the elevated road. Being good guys and all Yuusei and the tailing along Jack and Crow circle back to get down there and help him, but before they make it there the crash scene receives a little visit from one of our Illiaster trio, Placido, who smugly picks what is apparently his own deck out of the wreckage and notes to himself that he’ll make sure to settle this in due time. The guys don’t make it there until Placido is well and gone, and they discover that the “D-Wheeler” Yuusei was dueling was actually a sophisticated robot which was apparently being remotely controlled. The police (including the recovering Ushio) investigate, but besides it being a modification of a stolen Security-designed prototype nothing more comes to light. But the fact that the deck was gone and all the computer data erased leaves everyone with the feeling that this isn’t the end of it.
A few months pass with relatively little of note going on except for Yuusei and Aki meeting a mysterious D-Wheeler (if threatening to detonate a bomb on your D-Wheel if you don’t duel with them counts as “meeting”) who turns out to be a woman named Sherry LeBlanc. The bomb threat was just a friendly ruse; she’s actually scouting Yuusei out as a prospective member of her team. She knows his history with Illiaster and asks him to join her in trying to get revenge on the organization that killed her parents, and explains that Illiaster is somehow behind the upcoming WRGP. She also presses on him the question of what exactly it is he duels for. Yuusei sympathizes, but he makes it clear that the team he’s on in the team he’s staying with. Sherry (who like Yuusei is big on the whole TRUE DUELIST RESPECTO thing) accepts his decision gracefully, especially after Aki uses her powers to save Sherry’s life from yet another group of much shadier characters trying to recruit Yuusei. Sherry rides off with her battle butler other teammate, but her question about what Yuusei duels for stays with him.
A little while later, our prospective team attends a sort of fancy preview gala for the WRGP, at which Yuusei feels oddly like he’s being watched. Which he is, although not just by that guy in the magenta sunglasses who always leaves frame as soon as Yuusei turns around; the Tenors are secretly scoping the event out too via remote surveillance from elsewhere in the building. So when the gala gets crashed by some random angry guy on a huge-as-fuck D-Wheel who then rides off getting gleefully chased by the police, Placido decides that he’s in the mood to teach a bitch a lesson. The next thing the cops know, there’s a D-Wheel blowing by them at impossibly high speed that has the same data signature (i.e. none at all) as the erstwhile Ghost. Yuusei and company overhear Ushio exclaiming about this over his earpiece, and like the meddling kids they are they run down to the parking garage to hop on their D-Wheels and chase Ghost down. At which point a mysterious man serenely steps in their way.
It’s the guy with the sunglasses and the swept-back blue hair from earlier. He tells them sharply that going out there is pointless; by now, the duel is no doubt already over. And it would be a doomed effort anyway, he says, because it is impossible for Yuusei to defeat Ghost as he is now. The man tells Yuusei to follow him out to witness a brand new strategy that can get around Ghost’s Machine Emperor, and Yuusei, who has been brooding over exactly that problem for the last few months, has his interest immediately piqued and follows him out onto the D-Wheel track winding around the event hall. Sunglasses starts off by playing a little follow-the-leader to confirm that Yuusei actually has the balls to push his speed and his riding skills to the very limit, and only when he’s satisfied does he actually challenge Yuusei to a duel. The rest of the gang watches from a monitor, while the Tenors (including Placido, who did indeed make short and violent work of the hoodlum) secretly watch from their own.
“Dark Glass,” as the duel info screen we the audience see rather engrishly calls him, duels extremely well but doesn’t do anything particularly noteworthy for the first few turns besides rapid-fire summoning a pair of Synchro monsters to his field. But then during the middle of Yuusei’s next turn, he suddenly accelerates dangerously fast and vanishes in a flash of light that thoroughly surprises Yuusei and shorts out the monitors of all the lookers-on. He flashes back moments later, now with a single extremely powerful Synchro monster, Tech Genus Blade Gunner, on his field. He just Synchro summoned using two other Synchro monsters as material, which he should manifestly not be able to do, let alone during the opposing player’s turn. Not to mention the whole “briefly disappearing from this dimension” thing. After some more heated dueling Yuusei finally powers up one of his monsters enough to take Blade Gunner down, but Dark Glass uses its ability to remove it from play and take the hit himself, ending to duel much sooner than it would have even if his monster had been destroyed. Yuusei drives up and bewilderedly asks him how he did what he did and why he threw the duel so early, but the man just smirks and says he’s not such a soft touch that he’d tell Yuusei all the secrets of his “Accel Synchro” technique quite so soon. He tells Yuusei he looks forward to the next time they can duel and rides off.
Later on (possibly later this same night, but hell if the canon actually tells us) Placido catches up with mister wears-sunglasses-at-night on a remote cliffside road next to the ocean. They exchange paint at high speed a few times while Placido urgently demands to know what he and Yuusei were up to while the monitors were out. Dark Glass responds that Placido and his lot have good reason to be afraid of him: he was sent into this world with the express purpose of bringing them all down and putting a stop to what they’re planning. But before they can go any farther with this exchange, something gets in the way. There’s a tiny kitten in the middle of the road, and Placido is nonchalantly barreling right towards it. Sunglasses notices this just in time, and to Placido’s surprise he rams his bike hard into the side of Placido’s just to shove him out of the way and save the cat. But apparently no good deed goes unpunished, because the road suddenly makes a sharp curve and Dark Glass tears right through the guardrail, sending both him and his bike on a long hard plunge into the ocean. Placido, skidding to a halt a short way down the road, sees the splash and thinks he’s just had the good luck of that little annoyance sorting itself out on its own.
At some point between this event and a couple months after the Gala, some guy with (now somewhat less vertical) blue hair washes up on a beach just outside Neo Domino with no memory of who he is or of any part of his life before he was found there. Gee, I wonder who this is.
Somehow or other “Bruno” (which is either what he calls himself or just a name someone stuck on him in lieu of “John Doe”) and his case end up being the responsibility of Head of Special Investigations Sagiri Mikage and her partner, our old pal Ushio Tetsu, who are unfortunately up to their eyeballs in work involving the upcoming WRGP and the hundreds of D-Wheelers and visitors steadily pouring into the city, and so is everyone else in the division. Getting desperate, Mikage and Ushio invite a few friends of theirs out to a very fancy dinner to schmooze them into taking him off of their hands for a little while. It just so happens that these friends are Yuusei, Jack and Crow. Who patently refuse, by the way.
Bruno was supposed to show up at this fancy dinner too, but he got sidetracked in the parking garage by this totally amazing monowheel D-Wheel he just had to go over and look at. ... And check out its computer... and tinker with its programming just a bit... and shine up the chassis a little. Unfortunately for Bruno it turns out this bike belongs to Jack, who’s just coming down from the dinner with Yuusei and Crow, and who immediately introduces his fist to Bruno’s face the minute he catches sight of him touching his bike before riding off in a huff. Then Mikage and Ushio hurry over and actually introduce him (although not before Mikage gives Bruno a scolding.) But about thirty seconds into this, Jack comes screaming back around their floor of the parking garage and... kidnaps Bruno by drive-by grabbing him and zooming off with him flopped over the seat of his bike. Yelling back at the very confused Mikage & co that he’ll return him later. Um.
After Crow and Yuusei follow Jack back to their place and Bruno briefly pleads for his life and limb, it comes out that Bruno’s tinkering had upped the power of Jack’s D-Wheel, Wheel of Fortune (yes they name these things) enough for him to notice as soon as he drove it. Yuusei, politely, asks Bruno to explain how he did it, and the next thing Jack and Crow know the two of them are launched into an engaging discussion on Momentum engine mechanics and Yuusei’s prospective engine upgrades. By the time they’re done, hours later, Bruno has happily offered to help Yuusei and his friends out in any way he can toward their goals for the WRGP and Yuusei in turn has offered to let Bruno stay at their place. They right away dive into a two-day straight programming binge (with friends an onlookers commenting that the two of them working together are like ducks in water, among other slightly more... uh... romantic turns of phrase) and by the end of it they have together sput off a god tier engine program. In a shocking display of anime characters actually acting like human beings, the two of them decide to celebrate this by getting some fucking sleep.
But heaven forbid these guys catch a break; that very night somebody breaks into their garage and steals the program, which they didn’t think to make a back up copy of before they passed out because they’re morons. Jack of course suspects Bruno’s behind it somehow, but fortunately for Bruno’s face they find a single fingerprint from the actual culprit. They scan it in, and then Bruno and Yuusei team up again to basically hack Security’s AFIS database to find a match. Turns out it belongs to Jaeger, the Vice-Director of Security and the man who answers directly to the sitting Director; formerly Godwin, and now the mysterious trio.
The guys head out to track him down, and after some wacky hijinks that end up splitting them into two groups Yuusei and Bruno are the first to tail him out to a seemingly-abandoned factory on the edge of town. Inside it looks as much like some futuristic spaceship as it does like a factory, but the two of them end up yet further split off from each other by a security door. While Yuusei searches on and finally gets his paws on Jaeger, Bruno jerry-rigs his way through a locked door (using the half-the-contents-of-a-toolbox he keeps on the inside of his jacket, what the fuck Bruno) and ends up breaking into some kind of massive dimly lit warehouse. Just to make both their days even worse, Jaeger has already made the drop to his boss, Placido - who is standing right behind Bruno. Bruno turns around and is struck by a piercing and debilitating headache as soon as he sees Placido’s face, but Placido just casually throws a sucker punch into his gut and leaves him sprawled unconscious on the floor with no particular fanfare and then sets to work installing the pilfered engine program onto the finished products of this factory: an entire army of Ghosts.
The newly souped-up Ghosts (or “Diablos,” and Placido is calling them like the drama whore he is) blow by just feet from the unconscious Bruno and out of the factory to parts unknown. Bruno comes to a little later, a bit disoriented and seemingly only vaguely aware of what just happened, and meets up with Jack and Crow who have finally caught up and made their way into the building. They all head up to the central control station thingy, where they find that not only has the entire factory been set to self destruct, but Yuusei is locked in a room with Jaeger and is in the middle of a duel with an automated guard robot that won’t disengage the locks until it is defeated. Placido’s a fan of the classics, it seems. They manage to talk to Yuusei over the factory’s comm and rapidly explain the situation to him, but while Jaeger flails around in the background and pleads to be rescued (more than a little unhappy that his employer considers him completely expendable,) Yuusei tells the three of them to go ahead and get to safety. He says he has a plan and that he’ll catch up.
After a brief argument in which Bruno rather petulantly insisted that he wasn’t leaving without Yuusei (an argument resolved by Jack’s fist and some manly manwords) the three of them get the hell out of dodge. Predictably Yuusei beats the robot at the last possible moment, and he only gets out alive thanks to the assistance of a grateful Jaeger (and his... personal... wrist-deployed balloon Jaeger is weird okay.) Jaeger gives Yuusei some vague words of warning to the effect of “don’t tangle with these guys if you value your life” and drops him off outside the compound with the rest of the guys before floating off. The advice, of course, goes in one ear and out the other, and the guys go home with basically nothing to show for themselves except the knowledge that this shit is only going to get deeper.
A little while after this is a plot in which Bruno does little of note besides stand around looking worried and keep up his tradition of getting beat up once an episode by getting a door kicked open right into his face, but it’s worth a brief mention. Jack is arrested by the police because they have highway footage of him, on his very unique bike and with his even more unique Signer dragon, forcing other D-Wheelers into crashes and generally being a huge douchebag. In the end it turns out to have been not only an imposter, but a robot duplicate of Jack with copies of his cards (which in this show is really hard/dangerous, at least in the case of mystical woo-woo cards like Jack’s Red Daemons Dragon.) We the audience find out that Jose, one of the other three Illiaster guys (and previously the most boring one,) is behind this.
Fast forward a couple months. Bruno meets up with Mikage and Ushio at Security (with Yuusei tagging along) to talk about whether there’s any progress on his case. First off they ask if any of Bruno’s memory has come back yet, but he still hasn’t remembered a thing. Unfortunately, even after running his prints and his face through every database they can think of they still haven’t found a lick of information on him either. He’s clearly crestfallen at the news, but he takes it well. Ushio gives him some upbeat assurance that the investigation will still continue, and asks Yuusei if he can keep putting Bruno up for the time being. Yuusei happily agrees, and the two of them head off soon after. On the way down Yuusei notices him looking out forlornly through the glass side of the elevator and asks him what’s up. Bruno tells him that whenever he looks out over the city like this, he find himself wondering if there’s someone out there waiting for him. Yuusei confidently assures him that the time for him to know the truth will come someday.
In the meantime, Ushio up in Special Investigations gets a bomb threat over the phone. When he angrily asks if this is someone playing a prank, the culprit calmly “confirms” it by setting off a small preview explosion (that’s still big enough to rock the whole building.) The building is, of course, immediately evacuated, all except for Yuusei and Bruno, who were in the elevator when the power suddenly cut out. They jimmy themselves out with the metric fuckton of random tools Bruno keeps on his person and end up running across the culprits themselves: our old friend Sherry and her butler, Mizoguchi. Turns out the actual bomb threat was a ruse again, they’re just trying to access Security’s ridiculously powerful supercomputer. Yuusei, who hates the idea of a duelist of Sherry’s caliber committing a crime like this, tries to chase after her with Bruno, but Mizoguchi blocks his way and only Bruno manages (by getting tripped and sliding across the floor like a derp) to make it into the hall before the door shuts behind Sherry.
While Mizoguchi hooks the lock control system up to his duel disk and challenges Yuusei to a manly man-duel if he wants to pass (what is it with these people?), Bruno catches up to Sherry in the computer room and urgently yet politely insists that what she’s trying to do is a crime. Sherry, who is apparently one of the few actual genre savvy people in this show, tries to get him out of her hair the sensible way: by beating him to a pulp. Bruno for his part panics and flails but does manage to barely dodge pretty much everything she throws at him, all the while vainly trying to reason with her. After Sherry gets a call from Mizoguchi that Security is wise to them and is on their way (during which Bruno collapses on his butt to gasp for breath,) Sherry decides to get serious and grabs the nervous-but-still-trying-to-reason Bruno by the collar. She tells him in a dangerous tone that the reason Illiaster killed her parents was to get their hands on a single, mysterious card known as Z-ONE - a card which was actually left with their daughter for safekeeping. If she can analyze the card and find out exactly why Illiaster wants it so badly, she could be one step closer to getting her revenge. So she’s not going to let anything get in her way.
Sherry suddenly brandishes her duel disk, and... a pair of stun gun prongs stick out the end of it and she thrusts the whole assembly straight towards Bruno’s face.
Bad idea.
Bruno’s eyes instantly flash to bright red and he vaults backward out of her grip at ridiculous speed. Sherry doesn’t miss a beat and tries to take him down like before, but the extremely brief scuffle ends seconds later with her throat locked in his grip and his fist hurtling at her face. She braces herself for the hit... that never comes. She tentatively opens her eyes and finds Bruno, face still blank and eyes still glowing red, staring at the card that worked its way halfway out of her pocket during the fight. He drops his perfectly paused fist to pick it up and examine it more closely. Sherry manages to choke out a desperate plea for him to give it back; it’s the only key to the truth she’s been searching for.
Some part of this clearly strikes a chord with what’s left of Bruno. He slowly repeats the last few words of her plea and his eyes gradually fade back to their normal matte grey. He calmly lets her go and stands up (ignoring her brief choking fit as her throat finally stops being crushed) then walks to the computer terminal and soberly begins to run the analysis on the card himself, much more quickly and expertly than she would have been able to do it. When she asks him why, he says he’s not really sure, but he does know that he believes everyone has the right to know the truth about themselves.
Several minutes later two things happen in fairly quick succession: Yuusei beats Mizoguchi, who honors his word and lets him pass, and Bruno finishes the analysis of Sherry’s card. But Bruno and Sherry are shocked at the readout and Sherry calls bullshit on the computer, because the results say that the card is perfectly normal. And Sherry is proved right, when... the card on the console suddenly explodes with brilliant white light and the room is filled with wind and chaotic energy and general craziness. Even the sky outside suddenly starts to fill with clouds and lightning, we see. This is the scene Yuusei and Mizoguchi run in on, and Yuusei decides to bolt right for the console as soon as he sets eyes on Bruno and Sherry. Suddenly the entire room fills with blinding white light too, when it fades Bruno, Sherry and Yuusei all find themselves standing on some kind of infinite blue-white plane with faint grid arrays as a kind of floor and ceiling.
They look around in confusion at this place that is most definitely not the computer room they were just in, and Yuusei catches something out of the corner of his eye that seems to be watching him. The three of them turn around curiously to find something that for lack of a better description looks like a man-sized robotic ammonite floating in midair and slowly turning. As soon as it turns directly towards them, the camera (and presumably the characters’ vision) hyper-focuses on a single narrow grate on the front of the object, through which can be seen a single, upside-down, blue human eye. The three of them are somehow all shocked silent and still by this sight, and whatever it is it seems to focus on Yuusei and “scan” him somehow.
The next thing Yuusei and Bruno know, they are groggily waking up on a beach at night, with Mizoguchi close by holding the still-unconscious Sherry. He explains that no he doesn’t know what the fuck just happened either, he just woke up here too, and then takes his leave to tend to the lady. Yuusei and Bruno have a brief conversation themselves, in which Bruno says he feels almost like “he” (the thing in the light) let them escape. Yuusei seems slightly interested in Bruno’s use of the pronoun, but then simply muses to himself whether this has anything to do with Illiaster.
But after this the boys all get caught up in preparing for the WRGP, and pretty soon it’s time for the preliminary rounds. There are setbacks, there are windfalls, there are adorable matching pit crew uniforms for Bruno and the twins. But in the end the newly minted “Team 5Ds” scrapes a miraculous victory over the famous and favored Team Gay Team Unicorn. The entire team plus associated peanut gallery and hangers-on decide that this calls for a party!
The party goes on normally enough for a while (Mikage and Carly fight over Jack, Jack and Crow fight over nothing) until who should crash it but good old Sherry LeBlanc. They all get to talking, and turns out this party was just a recap episode in disguise. Things continue to be very recap for a while, up until Sherry and Yuusei start recounting their adventures in the computer room. Bruno is rather quiet during this particular conversation, and when Sherry finishes her spiel on a cryptic note and the camera cuts to him we find out why: Bruno is leaning weakly on the computer table in the corner, breaking out in a cold sweat and pale as a sheet. A moment later after Sherry rides off equally cryptically, he makes his way to the center table and leans on it heavily. Yuusei and the others finally notice something is up and ask him if he feels alright, but he just mildly replies that his head suddenly started hurting and he probably needs some fresh air, and then walks out of the garage.
This right here is his pull point, but considering what happens next is ridiculously important I’m going to go over it too.
I’m guessing he stumbled to his D-Wheel and took a drive, because the next we see of him (after a completely unsubtle cut-away from Yuusei wondering who “that sunglasses guy” was, I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE SHOW) he’s standing on the beach where he was found, wondering mournfully to himself about where he came from. Apparently sensing the waves of sad coming off him, a completely adorable little kitten comes up and happily rubs against his leg. He is, of course, immediately cheered up a little and gingerly picks the kitten up to smile at it. But after just a few moments of looking at it, his eyes suddenly flash to red again and a short glimpse of a strange memory of speeding down a highway toward a cat is followed by the memory of meeting Placido back in the factory. Thoughts rapidly race through his head about whether he knows that man, why, what all does he know, why does he feel like he has some kind of mission... and then the memory of the thing he met in that light, except now what the eye is staring at is a red-eyed and severe faced Bruno and it seems like it’s sending some kind of stream of data directly into his mind...
And then the Bruno out in the real world seizes up, shakily drops the cat and grips his head in pain and confusion, and then starts screaming and thrashing around and scaring the everloving shit out of the poor cat. And then we cut to some crashing waves and that’s all we see of him until the next episode. In which he’s... cheerfully doing engine work with Yuusei as though nothing at all happened.
And although there are some other things that happen later than are alluded to elsewhere in this app, this is all I really feel like glossing for now because this is already reallyfucking long, good GOD. If it ever becomes super-relevant/if I ever canon update him, I’ll be sure to go over it then.
PERSONALITY:
Bruno is about 6 feet tall, strong chinned, looks to be in his early 20s and is by no means scrawny, but spend five minutes with him and you’ll start wondering if he still uses bunny ears to tie his shoelaces. He’s sweet, he’s a bit naïve, and he’s kind of a dork. His default mode pretty much seems to be friendly and mellow, and he has a very fresh-faced and genuine air about him like someone who’s never had to experience the darker parts of life. He is apparently optimistic about many people to the point of lacking any sense of self-preservation, never considering Jack any less of a friend even though he’s been clobbered by him at least four times to date (and usually for no good reason) and becoming amiable with Sherry within minutes of her trying repeatedly to kick his head off. He’ll be the first to tell you he’s not one for violence, and threatening or scolding him will usually render him flustered and apologetic before anything else. Luckily for him he’s pretty good at dodging when he actually sees the hit coming.
While he doesn’t come off as sophisticated he is far from stupid or absentminded. He is of course a straight up genius at Momentum engine control systems and at technology in general, but he can also be very observant when it matters, although moreso about things than about people; he does seem to be a bit bad at reading the mood of a room sometimes. In places where his expertise does lie he is always happy to offer what help he can, and he’s perfectly content to be the behind-the-scenes guy that helps other people to shine as opposed to being in the limelight himself. Although apparently this support work also includes things like cooking, babysitting and being the guy relegated to sleep on the couch.
Not every side of him is sweetness and light, of course. Talking about his memory loss always throws a quiet, listless shadow over the conversation. He’s grateful for the life he has now, but he obviously feels that big hole where the rest of him should be, and his experience makes him acutely sympathetic to anyone who’s missing or seeking out some kind of truth about their life. He can be dead serious when the situation calls for it, and while he doesn’t rile up all that easily, a reliable way to do it is to put his friends (especially Yuusei) in real peril.
As a side note, Bruno has a bit of a problem sometimes with a concept most of us like to call other peoples’ things. There’s obviously the infamous “walk up to an unknown D-Wheel in a parking garage and re-program it for kicks” thing, but even once he’s the official team mechanic he’s seen once or twice doing work on things obviously without their owner’s explicit permission. He also rather gratuitously dips into Jack’s ramen supply at one point with only a cursory “Hey, can I eat this?” to Yuusei without really bothering to wait for an answer. It’s not like he’s got some kind of disdain for common courtesy, he just doesn’t seem to have as firm a grasp on it as most people.
From what little we’ve seen of his original personality, Bruno must have whacked his head pretty damn hard on the way down. “Dark Glass” is intense, self-assured and all business, and all in all is basically the epitome of “cool.” It’s his mission to bring down Illiaster and he doesn’t mind saying it right to Placido’s face. With the actual particulars he seems to play it closer to the hilt, staying stubbornly enigmatic and appraising throughout his and Yuusei’s first encounter. While the exact relationship between him and Zone is not known, there’s nothing to suggest that he’s working with him against his will and, similar to how he is as Bruno, he fully accepts that his role is support before anything else. But for all this the man obviously enjoys a good duel, and he’s not above getting a little cocky. And when it comes right down to it, this is a guy who rammed another motorcycle at high speed on a dangerously tight road just to save a kitten from getting run over. Maybe he’s not all that different from the Bruno we know after all.
But lastly, there’s that side of Bruno we’ve seen only once and very briefly so far: the side that fought back when Sherry attacked him. Whether this was some kind of incomplete reawakening of his former personality or just a reflexive response to a serious threat is never really gone into, but the way he retaliated was efficient and mechanical, without any hint of either anger or empathy. If he had calculated that it was in the best interests of his eventual objectives, it’s not hard to imagine him having killed her when he was like that.
POWER:
Bruno is under the impression that he is a perfectly normal guy who happens to be suffering from catastrophic memory loss. Bruno is very, very wrong.
We haven’t seen much of him “in action” yet, but what we have canonically seen includes: launching from a prone position on the floor into some kind of insane reverse vertical butterfly kick in an obscenely short fraction of a second, stopping a roundhouse kick to the face with one hand without so much as a flinch, casually throwing a grown woman thirty feet with one arm, apparently running fast enough to catch up with her in midair and grapple her by the neck the second she landed, and leaping from a speeding motorcycle off of a forty foot cliff and doing a multiple backflip before landing in a perfect crouch like some ninja Olympic gymnast.
As noted below, though, the odds are high that Bruno doesn’t actually know he can do this shit. In fact, he may very well be not able, or permitted, to use the full extent of his abilities unless he’s in some particular active state.
Which is where the Porter comes in. Bruno’s City power is that he can still do all this stuff, except all the time. So now even the everyday derp-tastic Bruno can leap off a five story building without so much as a twisted ankle and kick a guy in the head three times before he can say “that jacket looks hideous.” Of course Bruno, totally ignorant of the fact that he’s actually some kind of robot ninja bodyguard, just thinks that the Porter happened to give him super-strength and enhanced speed and durability as his superpowers. And... kung-fu. Hurp.
This doesn’t mean that his “programming” is any different, though. If he or someone under his charge is ever in real serious danger, he could very well go “active” again. And while normal Bruno is hardly a violent kind of guy and will probably never use his full strength on someone unless he has to, this Bruno won’t be holding anything back. Have fun with that!
Continuing on the “wacky shit Bruno can canonically do” line, he is really good with computers. No, like, really good. Even putting aside the Momentum engine mechanics stuff, which won’t exactly be that applicable in the City, he still hacks the in-universe version of the FBI in something like half an hour from a home workstation, flawlessly operates a specialized supercomputer he had probably never even heard of before that afternoon, and makes a valiant stab at bypassing a countdown lock on an unfamiliar operating system that may very well have been, depending on your personal theories about the origins of the Tenors, either from outer space or from the future. Granted Bruno may himself be from space and/or the future, who the hell knows at this point. Certainly not him. And definitely worth noting, shortly after he regains his memory in a later episode, he is seen summoning his D-Wheel (the original one that fell into the ocean with him) using, by all accounts, only his mind. That’s not even getting into the whole... henshin... thing look don’t make me explain it it was weird. Anyway, I obviously won’t be letting him regain THAT much power in the city, but I think given everything else he’s got up to he can be said to have some mild technopathy going on.
As a side note: weaknesses! Considering the fact that getting punched, kicked, almost run over by an army of motorcycles and put in the vicinity of two separate large explosions never set him off yet the threat of having a stun gun thrust in his face did, I’m going to say that he’s at least somewhat vulnerable to electric shock due to being probably full of circuitry and metal bits.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
Ended up getting used for his intro post after all :U Yayyy laziness!
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
“There we go, all set!”
Bruno leaned back in the computer chair and admired his work with a smile. Wheel of Fortune was a tricky bike to program for, but he had just customized its engine subroutines to improve the accuracy of its booster throughput by an extra 3.7%! He closed out the modification interface and got up to unplug the bike.
“See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said as he closed the dataport panel and gave the D-Wheel a fond little pat. Jack usually wouldn’t let him touch Wheel of Fortune unless Bruno explained exactly what he was doing to it, which was hard because Jack didn’t know much at all about Momentum engine mechanics. But Jack was across the street at the café right now, and Bruno figured he wouldn’t be too mad once he felt how much better she ran after this. After all, the WRGP was coming up fast.
Bruno crossed his arms over his chest in a satisfied pose, then... wondered what he should do next. He thought about working on finishing the re-write of the engine program with Yuusei, but Yuusei was out doing a repair job today. He glanced over at Black Bird. Crow sometimes got a little tetchy too when Bruno fiddled with his bike, but Bruno had been meaning to double-check that those odd readings were gone after that Blackfeather Dragon thing. He had asked Crow about it when Crow came home from some late-late night deliveries this morning, and Crow had kind of mumbled something and waved one hand vaguely toward the bike while covering a yawn with the other. Bruno figured that was close enough to a “yes.”
So he launched into that for a little while. But it didn’t take him long to confirm that all the irregularities were gone after all. So then he ended up trying to work on re-writing the engine program anyway, but just like he thought he didn’t get all that far without Yuusei around to bounce ideas off of. So then he just leaned his arms on the computer table and stared quietly at the screen for a minute.
He didn’t like times like this. When no one was around, and there was nothing to do. It made his mind wander, and that only ever ended in fog and empty spaces and locked doors. He glanced over at his own D-Wheel, the unmarked Duel Chasers unit one that Ushio had lent him and told him to bring it back exactly the way he’d found it or he’d wring his neck. (He was pretty sure Ushio wouldn’t mind that he’d doubled the energy efficiency, though.) But there wasn’t anything wrong with it to fix right now, and besides, sometimes... sometimes when he worked on it, he’d catch himself almost calling it by a different name. And it would be on the tip of his tongue for just a fraction of a second, and then it would slip away. Just like everything else.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
He’s left-handed!
Bruno’s eyes are kind of odd. Not that they’re oddly colored usually, it’s just that they don’t seem to reflect light the way normal people’s eyes are supposed to, which gives them a vaguely lifeless look. But it’s not the easiest thing to notice, especially since Bruno’s personality is anything but lifeless.
Although I make a lot of robot jokes, strictly speaking the show hasn’t come down on one side or the other about it yet. But they’ve definitely dropped enough hints that at least some of his head is filled with binary instead of regular people brains. Not to mention they’ve been prodding recently that he’s some similar sort of entity to the Tenors, and, well, Placido is pretty definitely a robot at this point. So I’m about 95% certain that Bruno’s at least mostly a robot.
On a related front, we really have no idea what was going on in his head with regard to the so-far-two glowing red eyes freakouts he’s had. Since he’s never actually brought either of them up with any other character on screen (including Sherry, who’s he’s been in the same place with at least twice since their song and dance routine,) and since no other character has made any indication that they know about them, I’m guessing he’s never told anyone. Which seems odd, for him. And seeing as he’s never internally monologued about it either, I am making the leap that his memories of them are being partially suppressed, possibly by Zone, and presumably to keep him from figuring out who or what he really is before it’s convenient for him to. He knows he managed to get the upper hand on Sherry, but he can’t recall the particulars of how it happened, and (had he been pulled from later) he would have remembered going out to the beach and might even have remembered the cat, but he wouldn’t remember having a breakdown there. Hey, it’s not like he isn’t already an amnesiac anyway.
Also, with regard to glowing red eyed asskicking, while he’s only done it in self-defense so far we do know canonically that (at least since encountering Zone in the computer room) protecting Yuusei is part of his standing orders, as it were. For the purposes of C&C I’m going to assume that this extends to the other Signers as well, since we do know that definitely at least Jack is going to get an Accel Synchro too and also because the Signers in general seem to be a package deal.
Speaking of flagrant assumptions, I am going to say that he has a language pack installed for he can speak English in addition to his canonical Japanese, with maybe a couple other major world languages thrown in if I need to asspull anything. He’ll obviously be waving this off as “Oh wow I must have done a lot of traveling before I lost my memory :O”
Also, he’s a cat person.
NAME: Spinel
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: spinelsoup
IM: CeyloniteSpinel (AIM)
E-MAIL: spinel.soup@gmail.com (sh-shut up I’ve been using this screen name for 8 years)
RETURNING: I am a blushing C&C virgin.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Bruno. Seeing as he can’t remember a damn thing from before a few months ago I’ve got no idea how he even knows what his name supposedly is, BUT HEY.
FANDOM: Yugioh 5Ds.
CHRONOLOGY: Episode 103, right after he staggers out the door from getting mentally badtouched by Sherry’s conversation about Zone. He’ll be under the impression that his sudden mysterious headache was just caused by the Porter nabbing him. Yay misconceptions!
CLASS: Hero! Derpy kind of unsure-of-himself hero, but hero nonetheless.
SUPERHERO NAME: Daisuki Bruno-chan Super Mechanic
ALTER EGO: Mechanic and all around good-at-techie-things-guy Bruno. His Green Card has his last name down as Adler NO FUCK THAT HIS LEGAL NAME HIS BRUNO BORELLI BECAUSE THAT IS AWESOME God bless you 4Kids Entertainment.
BACKGROUND: (which is... so overlong I had to split the cuttext into sections STOP JUDGING ME ;_; )
About a year and a half ago, the world was saved. ... Yes, by card games. Yes, by card games on motorbikes. Look, we’re all just going to have to accept that in this show this all makes perfect sense before we can move on.
Right, anyway, the gist is this. Neo Domino City and Satellite are a futuristic super-city and an isolated island slum that were violently split off from each other years ago by a “natural disaster” known as Zero Reverse (really an accidental meltdown of the city’s miraculous power generator, Momentum.) By a series of events that are five parts shady manipulation and one part fate, two guys from Satellite, Yuusei and Jack, and two girls from the City, Aki and Ruka, all cross paths and find that they all have similar mysterious birthmarks that are somehow connected to the unique dragon-type cards they each own (or, in Ruka’s case, should own.) It turns out that they are all “Signers” who have all been chosen by an ancient god called the Crimson Dragon, and that their fate is to battle against a group of “Dark Signers” chosen by the Dragon’s equally ancient enemies the Earthbound Gods. These gods incidentally are partially responsible for the reactor meltdown that not only ripped the city in two but also killed Yuusei’s parents, the lead designers of Momentum. After a series of life-or-death duels against the often all-too-familiar faces of the Dark Signers, the Signers (with the help of Yuusei and Jack’s old Satellite buddy Crow) defeat them all, but just a little too late to prevent the baddest god of all from awakening. To make things worse, one of the aforementioned shady manipulators, Director of Public Security Rex Godwin, has decided to merge the power of the missing 5th Signer mark and the last Earthbound God and become a living god in his own right. But with the help of the Crimson Dragon our heroes manage to defeat him and the so-called King of Hell, return the Dark Signers to normal, and fix the damage done to the city, and Crow for his part in it all gets to be made the 5th Signer.
So, fast forward about six months. With the man who was enforcing the status quo with a literal iron fist finally out of the picture, Satellite has been rebuilt and revitalized and is now an integrated part of the city. The current major goings-on in Neo Domino City all revolve around the city’s hosting of the upcoming World Riding Duel Grand Prix, or WRGP, which seems to be pretty much a cross between the Summer Olympics, the Formula One World Racing Championship, and card games. Three of our old destined hero crowd, Yuusei, Crow and Jack, are all living together in the city and working on upgrading their D-Wheels, specialized motorcycles that run on Momentum that are built for dueling, in order to enter the tournament next year. The other two, Aki and Ruka, along with Ruka’s twin brother Rua, are students at the city’s giant K12-slash-Duel-Monsters-magnet-school Duel Academia, and come over to visit the guys in the garage a lot. All in all life has been pretty peaceful for this lot for the last six months.
Well, we can’t have that, can we.
Enter plot, stage left. The director of Security, the city’s rather broadly powered police force, has finally been replaced. Unfortunately it’s by three guys in white robes (named after a trio of famous operatic tenors, what the fuck show) from Illiaster, the same shady Illuminati-esque group that was responsible for the last crazed world-ending guy with a god complex and the other guilty party in causing Zero Reverse. While the extent to which Illiaster was aware of Godwin’s plan to go bugfuck insane and try to wipe the world clean is profoundly unclear (like almost everything else about this bunch,) these three guys at first seem more interested in quietly keeping the Signers out of the way of their plans than anything else. What exactly their plans are is similarly vague at this point, but they clearly involve the brand new city-wide system of interconnected Riding Duel lanes built for the upcoming WRGP. Not to mention the mysterious “meteorite” which coincidentally crashed outside the city the day the three of them took office and which was quickly carted off and hushed up before anyone found out it was a large, rectangular tablet with some alien-looking text and a carving of some kind of mechanical monster on it.
Pretty soon after this is when our heroes get involved. There’s a mysterious D-Wheeler riding around challenging people to duels in the middle of the night, but every duel he’s in ends with the opponent crashing catastrophically. At first the guys don’t want to get involved, but when “Ghost” puts their cop friend Ushio in the hospital things get a lot more personal. They all split up to chase him down, and of course it’s our hero Yuusei who finds him and right away challenges him to a duel. During it Yuusei discovers that not only does Ghost have the power to make the damage dealt in the duel real (a power previously limited to the Dark Signers and certain special “psychic” duelists like Aki,) but that Ghost has a powerful monster they have never seen before known as “Machine Emperor Wisel,” a gestalt of 5 separate cards with 5 separate abilities. One of these is the game-breaking power to shanghai an opponent’s Synchro-form monsters, the lynchpins of most decks and the very type of card that the Signer dragons take the form of.
Yuusei just barely manages to get his dragon Stardust back and is forced to dip into the Savior Dragon power they defeated Godwin with to scrape a victory, and when his monster is destroyed the backlash sends Ghost careening off the elevated road. Being good guys and all Yuusei and the tailing along Jack and Crow circle back to get down there and help him, but before they make it there the crash scene receives a little visit from one of our Illiaster trio, Placido, who smugly picks what is apparently his own deck out of the wreckage and notes to himself that he’ll make sure to settle this in due time. The guys don’t make it there until Placido is well and gone, and they discover that the “D-Wheeler” Yuusei was dueling was actually a sophisticated robot which was apparently being remotely controlled. The police (including the recovering Ushio) investigate, but besides it being a modification of a stolen Security-designed prototype nothing more comes to light. But the fact that the deck was gone and all the computer data erased leaves everyone with the feeling that this isn’t the end of it.
A few months pass with relatively little of note going on except for Yuusei and Aki meeting a mysterious D-Wheeler (if threatening to detonate a bomb on your D-Wheel if you don’t duel with them counts as “meeting”) who turns out to be a woman named Sherry LeBlanc. The bomb threat was just a friendly ruse; she’s actually scouting Yuusei out as a prospective member of her team. She knows his history with Illiaster and asks him to join her in trying to get revenge on the organization that killed her parents, and explains that Illiaster is somehow behind the upcoming WRGP. She also presses on him the question of what exactly it is he duels for. Yuusei sympathizes, but he makes it clear that the team he’s on in the team he’s staying with. Sherry (who like Yuusei is big on the whole TRUE DUELIST RESPECTO thing) accepts his decision gracefully, especially after Aki uses her powers to save Sherry’s life from yet another group of much shadier characters trying to recruit Yuusei. Sherry rides off with her battle butler other teammate, but her question about what Yuusei duels for stays with him.
A little while later, our prospective team attends a sort of fancy preview gala for the WRGP, at which Yuusei feels oddly like he’s being watched. Which he is, although not just by that guy in the magenta sunglasses who always leaves frame as soon as Yuusei turns around; the Tenors are secretly scoping the event out too via remote surveillance from elsewhere in the building. So when the gala gets crashed by some random angry guy on a huge-as-fuck D-Wheel who then rides off getting gleefully chased by the police, Placido decides that he’s in the mood to teach a bitch a lesson. The next thing the cops know, there’s a D-Wheel blowing by them at impossibly high speed that has the same data signature (i.e. none at all) as the erstwhile Ghost. Yuusei and company overhear Ushio exclaiming about this over his earpiece, and like the meddling kids they are they run down to the parking garage to hop on their D-Wheels and chase Ghost down. At which point a mysterious man serenely steps in their way.
It’s the guy with the sunglasses and the swept-back blue hair from earlier. He tells them sharply that going out there is pointless; by now, the duel is no doubt already over. And it would be a doomed effort anyway, he says, because it is impossible for Yuusei to defeat Ghost as he is now. The man tells Yuusei to follow him out to witness a brand new strategy that can get around Ghost’s Machine Emperor, and Yuusei, who has been brooding over exactly that problem for the last few months, has his interest immediately piqued and follows him out onto the D-Wheel track winding around the event hall. Sunglasses starts off by playing a little follow-the-leader to confirm that Yuusei actually has the balls to push his speed and his riding skills to the very limit, and only when he’s satisfied does he actually challenge Yuusei to a duel. The rest of the gang watches from a monitor, while the Tenors (including Placido, who did indeed make short and violent work of the hoodlum) secretly watch from their own.
“Dark Glass,” as the duel info screen we the audience see rather engrishly calls him, duels extremely well but doesn’t do anything particularly noteworthy for the first few turns besides rapid-fire summoning a pair of Synchro monsters to his field. But then during the middle of Yuusei’s next turn, he suddenly accelerates dangerously fast and vanishes in a flash of light that thoroughly surprises Yuusei and shorts out the monitors of all the lookers-on. He flashes back moments later, now with a single extremely powerful Synchro monster, Tech Genus Blade Gunner, on his field. He just Synchro summoned using two other Synchro monsters as material, which he should manifestly not be able to do, let alone during the opposing player’s turn. Not to mention the whole “briefly disappearing from this dimension” thing. After some more heated dueling Yuusei finally powers up one of his monsters enough to take Blade Gunner down, but Dark Glass uses its ability to remove it from play and take the hit himself, ending to duel much sooner than it would have even if his monster had been destroyed. Yuusei drives up and bewilderedly asks him how he did what he did and why he threw the duel so early, but the man just smirks and says he’s not such a soft touch that he’d tell Yuusei all the secrets of his “Accel Synchro” technique quite so soon. He tells Yuusei he looks forward to the next time they can duel and rides off.
Later on (possibly later this same night, but hell if the canon actually tells us) Placido catches up with mister wears-sunglasses-at-night on a remote cliffside road next to the ocean. They exchange paint at high speed a few times while Placido urgently demands to know what he and Yuusei were up to while the monitors were out. Dark Glass responds that Placido and his lot have good reason to be afraid of him: he was sent into this world with the express purpose of bringing them all down and putting a stop to what they’re planning. But before they can go any farther with this exchange, something gets in the way. There’s a tiny kitten in the middle of the road, and Placido is nonchalantly barreling right towards it. Sunglasses notices this just in time, and to Placido’s surprise he rams his bike hard into the side of Placido’s just to shove him out of the way and save the cat. But apparently no good deed goes unpunished, because the road suddenly makes a sharp curve and Dark Glass tears right through the guardrail, sending both him and his bike on a long hard plunge into the ocean. Placido, skidding to a halt a short way down the road, sees the splash and thinks he’s just had the good luck of that little annoyance sorting itself out on its own.
At some point between this event and a couple months after the Gala, some guy with (now somewhat less vertical) blue hair washes up on a beach just outside Neo Domino with no memory of who he is or of any part of his life before he was found there. Gee, I wonder who this is.
Somehow or other “Bruno” (which is either what he calls himself or just a name someone stuck on him in lieu of “John Doe”) and his case end up being the responsibility of Head of Special Investigations Sagiri Mikage and her partner, our old pal Ushio Tetsu, who are unfortunately up to their eyeballs in work involving the upcoming WRGP and the hundreds of D-Wheelers and visitors steadily pouring into the city, and so is everyone else in the division. Getting desperate, Mikage and Ushio invite a few friends of theirs out to a very fancy dinner to schmooze them into taking him off of their hands for a little while. It just so happens that these friends are Yuusei, Jack and Crow. Who patently refuse, by the way.
Bruno was supposed to show up at this fancy dinner too, but he got sidetracked in the parking garage by this totally amazing monowheel D-Wheel he just had to go over and look at. ... And check out its computer... and tinker with its programming just a bit... and shine up the chassis a little. Unfortunately for Bruno it turns out this bike belongs to Jack, who’s just coming down from the dinner with Yuusei and Crow, and who immediately introduces his fist to Bruno’s face the minute he catches sight of him touching his bike before riding off in a huff. Then Mikage and Ushio hurry over and actually introduce him (although not before Mikage gives Bruno a scolding.) But about thirty seconds into this, Jack comes screaming back around their floor of the parking garage and... kidnaps Bruno by drive-by grabbing him and zooming off with him flopped over the seat of his bike. Yelling back at the very confused Mikage & co that he’ll return him later. Um.
After Crow and Yuusei follow Jack back to their place and Bruno briefly pleads for his life and limb, it comes out that Bruno’s tinkering had upped the power of Jack’s D-Wheel, Wheel of Fortune (yes they name these things) enough for him to notice as soon as he drove it. Yuusei, politely, asks Bruno to explain how he did it, and the next thing Jack and Crow know the two of them are launched into an engaging discussion on Momentum engine mechanics and Yuusei’s prospective engine upgrades. By the time they’re done, hours later, Bruno has happily offered to help Yuusei and his friends out in any way he can toward their goals for the WRGP and Yuusei in turn has offered to let Bruno stay at their place. They right away dive into a two-day straight programming binge (with friends an onlookers commenting that the two of them working together are like ducks in water, among other slightly more... uh... romantic turns of phrase) and by the end of it they have together sput off a god tier engine program. In a shocking display of anime characters actually acting like human beings, the two of them decide to celebrate this by getting some fucking sleep.
But heaven forbid these guys catch a break; that very night somebody breaks into their garage and steals the program, which they didn’t think to make a back up copy of before they passed out because they’re morons. Jack of course suspects Bruno’s behind it somehow, but fortunately for Bruno’s face they find a single fingerprint from the actual culprit. They scan it in, and then Bruno and Yuusei team up again to basically hack Security’s AFIS database to find a match. Turns out it belongs to Jaeger, the Vice-Director of Security and the man who answers directly to the sitting Director; formerly Godwin, and now the mysterious trio.
The guys head out to track him down, and after some wacky hijinks that end up splitting them into two groups Yuusei and Bruno are the first to tail him out to a seemingly-abandoned factory on the edge of town. Inside it looks as much like some futuristic spaceship as it does like a factory, but the two of them end up yet further split off from each other by a security door. While Yuusei searches on and finally gets his paws on Jaeger, Bruno jerry-rigs his way through a locked door (using the half-the-contents-of-a-toolbox he keeps on the inside of his jacket, what the fuck Bruno) and ends up breaking into some kind of massive dimly lit warehouse. Just to make both their days even worse, Jaeger has already made the drop to his boss, Placido - who is standing right behind Bruno. Bruno turns around and is struck by a piercing and debilitating headache as soon as he sees Placido’s face, but Placido just casually throws a sucker punch into his gut and leaves him sprawled unconscious on the floor with no particular fanfare and then sets to work installing the pilfered engine program onto the finished products of this factory: an entire army of Ghosts.
The newly souped-up Ghosts (or “Diablos,” and Placido is calling them like the drama whore he is) blow by just feet from the unconscious Bruno and out of the factory to parts unknown. Bruno comes to a little later, a bit disoriented and seemingly only vaguely aware of what just happened, and meets up with Jack and Crow who have finally caught up and made their way into the building. They all head up to the central control station thingy, where they find that not only has the entire factory been set to self destruct, but Yuusei is locked in a room with Jaeger and is in the middle of a duel with an automated guard robot that won’t disengage the locks until it is defeated. Placido’s a fan of the classics, it seems. They manage to talk to Yuusei over the factory’s comm and rapidly explain the situation to him, but while Jaeger flails around in the background and pleads to be rescued (more than a little unhappy that his employer considers him completely expendable,) Yuusei tells the three of them to go ahead and get to safety. He says he has a plan and that he’ll catch up.
After a brief argument in which Bruno rather petulantly insisted that he wasn’t leaving without Yuusei (an argument resolved by Jack’s fist and some manly manwords) the three of them get the hell out of dodge. Predictably Yuusei beats the robot at the last possible moment, and he only gets out alive thanks to the assistance of a grateful Jaeger (and his... personal... wrist-deployed balloon Jaeger is weird okay.) Jaeger gives Yuusei some vague words of warning to the effect of “don’t tangle with these guys if you value your life” and drops him off outside the compound with the rest of the guys before floating off. The advice, of course, goes in one ear and out the other, and the guys go home with basically nothing to show for themselves except the knowledge that this shit is only going to get deeper.
A little while after this is a plot in which Bruno does little of note besides stand around looking worried and keep up his tradition of getting beat up once an episode by getting a door kicked open right into his face, but it’s worth a brief mention. Jack is arrested by the police because they have highway footage of him, on his very unique bike and with his even more unique Signer dragon, forcing other D-Wheelers into crashes and generally being a huge douchebag. In the end it turns out to have been not only an imposter, but a robot duplicate of Jack with copies of his cards (which in this show is really hard/dangerous, at least in the case of mystical woo-woo cards like Jack’s Red Daemons Dragon.) We the audience find out that Jose, one of the other three Illiaster guys (and previously the most boring one,) is behind this.
Fast forward a couple months. Bruno meets up with Mikage and Ushio at Security (with Yuusei tagging along) to talk about whether there’s any progress on his case. First off they ask if any of Bruno’s memory has come back yet, but he still hasn’t remembered a thing. Unfortunately, even after running his prints and his face through every database they can think of they still haven’t found a lick of information on him either. He’s clearly crestfallen at the news, but he takes it well. Ushio gives him some upbeat assurance that the investigation will still continue, and asks Yuusei if he can keep putting Bruno up for the time being. Yuusei happily agrees, and the two of them head off soon after. On the way down Yuusei notices him looking out forlornly through the glass side of the elevator and asks him what’s up. Bruno tells him that whenever he looks out over the city like this, he find himself wondering if there’s someone out there waiting for him. Yuusei confidently assures him that the time for him to know the truth will come someday.
In the meantime, Ushio up in Special Investigations gets a bomb threat over the phone. When he angrily asks if this is someone playing a prank, the culprit calmly “confirms” it by setting off a small preview explosion (that’s still big enough to rock the whole building.) The building is, of course, immediately evacuated, all except for Yuusei and Bruno, who were in the elevator when the power suddenly cut out. They jimmy themselves out with the metric fuckton of random tools Bruno keeps on his person and end up running across the culprits themselves: our old friend Sherry and her butler, Mizoguchi. Turns out the actual bomb threat was a ruse again, they’re just trying to access Security’s ridiculously powerful supercomputer. Yuusei, who hates the idea of a duelist of Sherry’s caliber committing a crime like this, tries to chase after her with Bruno, but Mizoguchi blocks his way and only Bruno manages (by getting tripped and sliding across the floor like a derp) to make it into the hall before the door shuts behind Sherry.
While Mizoguchi hooks the lock control system up to his duel disk and challenges Yuusei to a manly man-duel if he wants to pass (what is it with these people?), Bruno catches up to Sherry in the computer room and urgently yet politely insists that what she’s trying to do is a crime. Sherry, who is apparently one of the few actual genre savvy people in this show, tries to get him out of her hair the sensible way: by beating him to a pulp. Bruno for his part panics and flails but does manage to barely dodge pretty much everything she throws at him, all the while vainly trying to reason with her. After Sherry gets a call from Mizoguchi that Security is wise to them and is on their way (during which Bruno collapses on his butt to gasp for breath,) Sherry decides to get serious and grabs the nervous-but-still-trying-to-reason Bruno by the collar. She tells him in a dangerous tone that the reason Illiaster killed her parents was to get their hands on a single, mysterious card known as Z-ONE - a card which was actually left with their daughter for safekeeping. If she can analyze the card and find out exactly why Illiaster wants it so badly, she could be one step closer to getting her revenge. So she’s not going to let anything get in her way.
Sherry suddenly brandishes her duel disk, and... a pair of stun gun prongs stick out the end of it and she thrusts the whole assembly straight towards Bruno’s face.
Bad idea.
Bruno’s eyes instantly flash to bright red and he vaults backward out of her grip at ridiculous speed. Sherry doesn’t miss a beat and tries to take him down like before, but the extremely brief scuffle ends seconds later with her throat locked in his grip and his fist hurtling at her face. She braces herself for the hit... that never comes. She tentatively opens her eyes and finds Bruno, face still blank and eyes still glowing red, staring at the card that worked its way halfway out of her pocket during the fight. He drops his perfectly paused fist to pick it up and examine it more closely. Sherry manages to choke out a desperate plea for him to give it back; it’s the only key to the truth she’s been searching for.
Some part of this clearly strikes a chord with what’s left of Bruno. He slowly repeats the last few words of her plea and his eyes gradually fade back to their normal matte grey. He calmly lets her go and stands up (ignoring her brief choking fit as her throat finally stops being crushed) then walks to the computer terminal and soberly begins to run the analysis on the card himself, much more quickly and expertly than she would have been able to do it. When she asks him why, he says he’s not really sure, but he does know that he believes everyone has the right to know the truth about themselves.
Several minutes later two things happen in fairly quick succession: Yuusei beats Mizoguchi, who honors his word and lets him pass, and Bruno finishes the analysis of Sherry’s card. But Bruno and Sherry are shocked at the readout and Sherry calls bullshit on the computer, because the results say that the card is perfectly normal. And Sherry is proved right, when... the card on the console suddenly explodes with brilliant white light and the room is filled with wind and chaotic energy and general craziness. Even the sky outside suddenly starts to fill with clouds and lightning, we see. This is the scene Yuusei and Mizoguchi run in on, and Yuusei decides to bolt right for the console as soon as he sets eyes on Bruno and Sherry. Suddenly the entire room fills with blinding white light too, when it fades Bruno, Sherry and Yuusei all find themselves standing on some kind of infinite blue-white plane with faint grid arrays as a kind of floor and ceiling.
They look around in confusion at this place that is most definitely not the computer room they were just in, and Yuusei catches something out of the corner of his eye that seems to be watching him. The three of them turn around curiously to find something that for lack of a better description looks like a man-sized robotic ammonite floating in midair and slowly turning. As soon as it turns directly towards them, the camera (and presumably the characters’ vision) hyper-focuses on a single narrow grate on the front of the object, through which can be seen a single, upside-down, blue human eye. The three of them are somehow all shocked silent and still by this sight, and whatever it is it seems to focus on Yuusei and “scan” him somehow.
The next thing Yuusei and Bruno know, they are groggily waking up on a beach at night, with Mizoguchi close by holding the still-unconscious Sherry. He explains that no he doesn’t know what the fuck just happened either, he just woke up here too, and then takes his leave to tend to the lady. Yuusei and Bruno have a brief conversation themselves, in which Bruno says he feels almost like “he” (the thing in the light) let them escape. Yuusei seems slightly interested in Bruno’s use of the pronoun, but then simply muses to himself whether this has anything to do with Illiaster.
But after this the boys all get caught up in preparing for the WRGP, and pretty soon it’s time for the preliminary rounds. There are setbacks, there are windfalls, there are adorable matching pit crew uniforms for Bruno and the twins. But in the end the newly minted “Team 5Ds” scrapes a miraculous victory over the famous and favored Team Gay Team Unicorn. The entire team plus associated peanut gallery and hangers-on decide that this calls for a party!
The party goes on normally enough for a while (Mikage and Carly fight over Jack, Jack and Crow fight over nothing) until who should crash it but good old Sherry LeBlanc. They all get to talking, and turns out this party was just a recap episode in disguise. Things continue to be very recap for a while, up until Sherry and Yuusei start recounting their adventures in the computer room. Bruno is rather quiet during this particular conversation, and when Sherry finishes her spiel on a cryptic note and the camera cuts to him we find out why: Bruno is leaning weakly on the computer table in the corner, breaking out in a cold sweat and pale as a sheet. A moment later after Sherry rides off equally cryptically, he makes his way to the center table and leans on it heavily. Yuusei and the others finally notice something is up and ask him if he feels alright, but he just mildly replies that his head suddenly started hurting and he probably needs some fresh air, and then walks out of the garage.
This right here is his pull point, but considering what happens next is ridiculously important I’m going to go over it too.
I’m guessing he stumbled to his D-Wheel and took a drive, because the next we see of him (after a completely unsubtle cut-away from Yuusei wondering who “that sunglasses guy” was, I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE SHOW) he’s standing on the beach where he was found, wondering mournfully to himself about where he came from. Apparently sensing the waves of sad coming off him, a completely adorable little kitten comes up and happily rubs against his leg. He is, of course, immediately cheered up a little and gingerly picks the kitten up to smile at it. But after just a few moments of looking at it, his eyes suddenly flash to red again and a short glimpse of a strange memory of speeding down a highway toward a cat is followed by the memory of meeting Placido back in the factory. Thoughts rapidly race through his head about whether he knows that man, why, what all does he know, why does he feel like he has some kind of mission... and then the memory of the thing he met in that light, except now what the eye is staring at is a red-eyed and severe faced Bruno and it seems like it’s sending some kind of stream of data directly into his mind...
And then the Bruno out in the real world seizes up, shakily drops the cat and grips his head in pain and confusion, and then starts screaming and thrashing around and scaring the everloving shit out of the poor cat. And then we cut to some crashing waves and that’s all we see of him until the next episode. In which he’s... cheerfully doing engine work with Yuusei as though nothing at all happened.
And although there are some other things that happen later than are alluded to elsewhere in this app, this is all I really feel like glossing for now because this is already reallyfucking long, good GOD. If it ever becomes super-relevant/if I ever canon update him, I’ll be sure to go over it then.
PERSONALITY:
Bruno is about 6 feet tall, strong chinned, looks to be in his early 20s and is by no means scrawny, but spend five minutes with him and you’ll start wondering if he still uses bunny ears to tie his shoelaces. He’s sweet, he’s a bit naïve, and he’s kind of a dork. His default mode pretty much seems to be friendly and mellow, and he has a very fresh-faced and genuine air about him like someone who’s never had to experience the darker parts of life. He is apparently optimistic about many people to the point of lacking any sense of self-preservation, never considering Jack any less of a friend even though he’s been clobbered by him at least four times to date (and usually for no good reason) and becoming amiable with Sherry within minutes of her trying repeatedly to kick his head off. He’ll be the first to tell you he’s not one for violence, and threatening or scolding him will usually render him flustered and apologetic before anything else. Luckily for him he’s pretty good at dodging when he actually sees the hit coming.
While he doesn’t come off as sophisticated he is far from stupid or absentminded. He is of course a straight up genius at Momentum engine control systems and at technology in general, but he can also be very observant when it matters, although moreso about things than about people; he does seem to be a bit bad at reading the mood of a room sometimes. In places where his expertise does lie he is always happy to offer what help he can, and he’s perfectly content to be the behind-the-scenes guy that helps other people to shine as opposed to being in the limelight himself. Although apparently this support work also includes things like cooking, babysitting and being the guy relegated to sleep on the couch.
Not every side of him is sweetness and light, of course. Talking about his memory loss always throws a quiet, listless shadow over the conversation. He’s grateful for the life he has now, but he obviously feels that big hole where the rest of him should be, and his experience makes him acutely sympathetic to anyone who’s missing or seeking out some kind of truth about their life. He can be dead serious when the situation calls for it, and while he doesn’t rile up all that easily, a reliable way to do it is to put his friends (especially Yuusei) in real peril.
As a side note, Bruno has a bit of a problem sometimes with a concept most of us like to call other peoples’ things. There’s obviously the infamous “walk up to an unknown D-Wheel in a parking garage and re-program it for kicks” thing, but even once he’s the official team mechanic he’s seen once or twice doing work on things obviously without their owner’s explicit permission. He also rather gratuitously dips into Jack’s ramen supply at one point with only a cursory “Hey, can I eat this?” to Yuusei without really bothering to wait for an answer. It’s not like he’s got some kind of disdain for common courtesy, he just doesn’t seem to have as firm a grasp on it as most people.
From what little we’ve seen of his original personality, Bruno must have whacked his head pretty damn hard on the way down. “Dark Glass” is intense, self-assured and all business, and all in all is basically the epitome of “cool.” It’s his mission to bring down Illiaster and he doesn’t mind saying it right to Placido’s face. With the actual particulars he seems to play it closer to the hilt, staying stubbornly enigmatic and appraising throughout his and Yuusei’s first encounter. While the exact relationship between him and Zone is not known, there’s nothing to suggest that he’s working with him against his will and, similar to how he is as Bruno, he fully accepts that his role is support before anything else. But for all this the man obviously enjoys a good duel, and he’s not above getting a little cocky. And when it comes right down to it, this is a guy who rammed another motorcycle at high speed on a dangerously tight road just to save a kitten from getting run over. Maybe he’s not all that different from the Bruno we know after all.
But lastly, there’s that side of Bruno we’ve seen only once and very briefly so far: the side that fought back when Sherry attacked him. Whether this was some kind of incomplete reawakening of his former personality or just a reflexive response to a serious threat is never really gone into, but the way he retaliated was efficient and mechanical, without any hint of either anger or empathy. If he had calculated that it was in the best interests of his eventual objectives, it’s not hard to imagine him having killed her when he was like that.
POWER:
Bruno is under the impression that he is a perfectly normal guy who happens to be suffering from catastrophic memory loss. Bruno is very, very wrong.
We haven’t seen much of him “in action” yet, but what we have canonically seen includes: launching from a prone position on the floor into some kind of insane reverse vertical butterfly kick in an obscenely short fraction of a second, stopping a roundhouse kick to the face with one hand without so much as a flinch, casually throwing a grown woman thirty feet with one arm, apparently running fast enough to catch up with her in midair and grapple her by the neck the second she landed, and leaping from a speeding motorcycle off of a forty foot cliff and doing a multiple backflip before landing in a perfect crouch like some ninja Olympic gymnast.
As noted below, though, the odds are high that Bruno doesn’t actually know he can do this shit. In fact, he may very well be not able, or permitted, to use the full extent of his abilities unless he’s in some particular active state.
Which is where the Porter comes in. Bruno’s City power is that he can still do all this stuff, except all the time. So now even the everyday derp-tastic Bruno can leap off a five story building without so much as a twisted ankle and kick a guy in the head three times before he can say “that jacket looks hideous.” Of course Bruno, totally ignorant of the fact that he’s actually some kind of robot ninja bodyguard, just thinks that the Porter happened to give him super-strength and enhanced speed and durability as his superpowers. And... kung-fu. Hurp.
This doesn’t mean that his “programming” is any different, though. If he or someone under his charge is ever in real serious danger, he could very well go “active” again. And while normal Bruno is hardly a violent kind of guy and will probably never use his full strength on someone unless he has to, this Bruno won’t be holding anything back. Have fun with that!
Continuing on the “wacky shit Bruno can canonically do” line, he is really good with computers. No, like, really good. Even putting aside the Momentum engine mechanics stuff, which won’t exactly be that applicable in the City, he still hacks the in-universe version of the FBI in something like half an hour from a home workstation, flawlessly operates a specialized supercomputer he had probably never even heard of before that afternoon, and makes a valiant stab at bypassing a countdown lock on an unfamiliar operating system that may very well have been, depending on your personal theories about the origins of the Tenors, either from outer space or from the future. Granted Bruno may himself be from space and/or the future, who the hell knows at this point. Certainly not him. And definitely worth noting, shortly after he regains his memory in a later episode, he is seen summoning his D-Wheel (the original one that fell into the ocean with him) using, by all accounts, only his mind. That’s not even getting into the whole... henshin... thing look don’t make me explain it it was weird. Anyway, I obviously won’t be letting him regain THAT much power in the city, but I think given everything else he’s got up to he can be said to have some mild technopathy going on.
As a side note: weaknesses! Considering the fact that getting punched, kicked, almost run over by an army of motorcycles and put in the vicinity of two separate large explosions never set him off yet the threat of having a stun gun thrust in his face did, I’m going to say that he’s at least somewhat vulnerable to electric shock due to being probably full of circuitry and metal bits.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
Ended up getting used for his intro post after all :U Yayyy laziness!
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
“There we go, all set!”
Bruno leaned back in the computer chair and admired his work with a smile. Wheel of Fortune was a tricky bike to program for, but he had just customized its engine subroutines to improve the accuracy of its booster throughput by an extra 3.7%! He closed out the modification interface and got up to unplug the bike.
“See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said as he closed the dataport panel and gave the D-Wheel a fond little pat. Jack usually wouldn’t let him touch Wheel of Fortune unless Bruno explained exactly what he was doing to it, which was hard because Jack didn’t know much at all about Momentum engine mechanics. But Jack was across the street at the café right now, and Bruno figured he wouldn’t be too mad once he felt how much better she ran after this. After all, the WRGP was coming up fast.
Bruno crossed his arms over his chest in a satisfied pose, then... wondered what he should do next. He thought about working on finishing the re-write of the engine program with Yuusei, but Yuusei was out doing a repair job today. He glanced over at Black Bird. Crow sometimes got a little tetchy too when Bruno fiddled with his bike, but Bruno had been meaning to double-check that those odd readings were gone after that Blackfeather Dragon thing. He had asked Crow about it when Crow came home from some late-late night deliveries this morning, and Crow had kind of mumbled something and waved one hand vaguely toward the bike while covering a yawn with the other. Bruno figured that was close enough to a “yes.”
So he launched into that for a little while. But it didn’t take him long to confirm that all the irregularities were gone after all. So then he ended up trying to work on re-writing the engine program anyway, but just like he thought he didn’t get all that far without Yuusei around to bounce ideas off of. So then he just leaned his arms on the computer table and stared quietly at the screen for a minute.
He didn’t like times like this. When no one was around, and there was nothing to do. It made his mind wander, and that only ever ended in fog and empty spaces and locked doors. He glanced over at his own D-Wheel, the unmarked Duel Chasers unit one that Ushio had lent him and told him to bring it back exactly the way he’d found it or he’d wring his neck. (He was pretty sure Ushio wouldn’t mind that he’d doubled the energy efficiency, though.) But there wasn’t anything wrong with it to fix right now, and besides, sometimes... sometimes when he worked on it, he’d catch himself almost calling it by a different name. And it would be on the tip of his tongue for just a fraction of a second, and then it would slip away. Just like everything else.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
He’s left-handed!
Bruno’s eyes are kind of odd. Not that they’re oddly colored usually, it’s just that they don’t seem to reflect light the way normal people’s eyes are supposed to, which gives them a vaguely lifeless look. But it’s not the easiest thing to notice, especially since Bruno’s personality is anything but lifeless.
Although I make a lot of robot jokes, strictly speaking the show hasn’t come down on one side or the other about it yet. But they’ve definitely dropped enough hints that at least some of his head is filled with binary instead of regular people brains. Not to mention they’ve been prodding recently that he’s some similar sort of entity to the Tenors, and, well, Placido is pretty definitely a robot at this point. So I’m about 95% certain that Bruno’s at least mostly a robot.
On a related front, we really have no idea what was going on in his head with regard to the so-far-two glowing red eyes freakouts he’s had. Since he’s never actually brought either of them up with any other character on screen (including Sherry, who’s he’s been in the same place with at least twice since their song and dance routine,) and since no other character has made any indication that they know about them, I’m guessing he’s never told anyone. Which seems odd, for him. And seeing as he’s never internally monologued about it either, I am making the leap that his memories of them are being partially suppressed, possibly by Zone, and presumably to keep him from figuring out who or what he really is before it’s convenient for him to. He knows he managed to get the upper hand on Sherry, but he can’t recall the particulars of how it happened, and (had he been pulled from later) he would have remembered going out to the beach and might even have remembered the cat, but he wouldn’t remember having a breakdown there. Hey, it’s not like he isn’t already an amnesiac anyway.
Also, with regard to glowing red eyed asskicking, while he’s only done it in self-defense so far we do know canonically that (at least since encountering Zone in the computer room) protecting Yuusei is part of his standing orders, as it were. For the purposes of C&C I’m going to assume that this extends to the other Signers as well, since we do know that definitely at least Jack is going to get an Accel Synchro too and also because the Signers in general seem to be a package deal.
Speaking of flagrant assumptions, I am going to say that he has a language pack installed for he can speak English in addition to his canonical Japanese, with maybe a couple other major world languages thrown in if I need to asspull anything. He’ll obviously be waving this off as “Oh wow I must have done a lot of traveling before I lost my memory :O”
Also, he’s a cat person.