Application: Mysterium Tremendum
PLAYER
Name: Skyler
Personal Journal: unsymbolic
Age: Over 25
Contact: unsymbolic [at] livejournal [dot] com
Other Characters Played: N/A
Link to last AC: N/A
CHARACTER
Name: Kanda Yuu
Fandom: D. Gray-man
Age: ~18
OU or AU?: OU
Timeline: End of chapter 97
Wiki link: Link.
History & Personality:
Sometimes seen as D. Gray-man's archetypal angry young (swords)man with a veiled past, Kanda (who disidentifies with his forename and avoids using it whenever he can) is an antisocial and often unpleasant young man. He makes no secret of his hatred of people, and he resents any situation that forces him to work as part of a team, making it a point to stay aloof, detached, and downright hostile to virtually everyone around him. He is a hard and hardened person who disdains self-pity, paltry self-sacrificing grand gestures, and noble naïveté. And for all he lets anyone see, he has no reason behind it save being ill-tempered and contrary by nature.
But though few people know it, Kanda has earned his disillusionment. A product of the Black Order’s “Second Exorcist” Project, he is a "synthetic disciple" engineered by the Order as a receptacle for the being (though not the consciousness) of an Exorcist killed in the war before him. As such, he has experienced first hand the hypocrisy and inhumanity enacted under the guises of Church righteousness. He grew up in a brutal world full of lies where religious idealism was quite literally meant to provide an opiate-an opiate that he has always refused to be lulled by.
Beginnings
The goal of the Second Exorcists project was to create compatible Innocence-users by a kind of twisted recycling. Its architects aimed to swell (or at least sustain) the ranks of the Order and thereby gain advantage in their war against the Millennium Earl. The Order had already tired and failed to simply implant Innocence into incompatible users and force them to sync with it (the tests apparently resulted in at least one child's death). In the Second Exorcist Project, they attempted to force synthetically generated bodies-bodies that were somehow linked to the Innocence-compatible dead (by literal brain tissue or, perhaps more metaphorically, by mind)-to sync with Innocence themselves.
The process was an incredibly brutal one, and the repeated attempts and tests were only made possible by the regenerative abilities of the bodies subjected to it-the bodies of Kanda and another child roughly his age, Alma Karma. The deaths Kanda and Alma both suffered at the hands of the Order during his childhood must certainly have numbered in the dozens if not far more.
But worse than this were the lies the Order’s scientists told to justify their actions, claiming that Kanda and Alma were saviors for humanity and hiding the fact that they were actually the product of a harvesting from Exorcists who had already given one life to the Church’s cause.
Kanda had always been the more hostile and belligerent of the two boys. He was never tractable, docile, or cheerfully accepting of their situation the way Alma was. His anger presaged his awakening, an intuitive rebellion against the scene of subjection that circumscribed his existence in that laboratory where they were created. Arguably, this intuition marks him as the more mentally adroit of the two (and far more insightful and intelligent than he’s usually given credit for).
Awakening
Whatever else their personalities say about them, Kanda's opinion of Alma's idiocy seems the expression of an inarticulate and utterly subjugated outrage at the situation they lived in. And yet the two boys became friends nonetheless--they had no one else but each other to rely on, no one who went through the daily tortures that they did.
It was during this time that Kanda began to have hallucinations-visions of a figure whose face and identity he could not make out. The woman whom he saw haunted his dreams where she appeared to him in a dying garden full of lotus blossoms, and the visions seeped into his wakeful mind as well. He didn’t know who this person was, but the place where he saw her was one he knew, under a sky that he recognized without having ever seen. And soon enough, he knew that he was not supposed to know “that person’s” identity, and that the Order would rather destroy him than allow him to remember.
Kanda had begun to awaken to consciousness of what the Order had done to make him-his "core" memories, memories of his own death, had begun to return. The Order's solution was to euthanize him in order to keep their transgressions secret, in order to maintain the farce of their cleanliness and righteousness. They sought, in a very literal way, to kill off their failure and start clean by killing him.
They miscalculated though, and the euthanasia they had planned failed to destroy either Kanda’s body or the sense of self inside of it. It was in that moment, as he refused to die, that Kanda’s Innocence came to him. He awoke to carnage-to a mortally wounded exorcist (Noise Marie) who he unwittingly saved, and to the discovery that Alma too, in what had begun as a bid to save Kanda, had gained his Innocence as well as his own “core” of memories.
Apparently mad with rage at his awakening to knowledge, Alma had killed all the laboratory staff, all the experimental subjects who had failed to awaken, and now intended to kill Kanda too. He wished to kill him so that he might die with him, in an ultimate retribution to spite the Order and to make them repent for what they had done. But Kanda was not so willing to perish in what was, effectively, a suicide pact to which he’d never agreed.
Forced to make the choice between killing his only friend and dying along side him, Kanda elected the former. He slew Alma. (Or so he thought.)
Aftermath
Subsequently, Kanda became General Tiedoll's pupil and traveled around the world with him for a year before arriving at the Black Order Headquarters from his original "home" in the Asian Branch's Sixth Laboratory. Given what Bak says of "the tragedy nine years ago," he must have met Tiedoll shortly after Alma's destruction at his hands.
Kanda has thus spent his entire life with the Order, and the only life he has known besides that of an Exorcist was as the Order’s test subject. Having had to bear the brunt of their hypocrisy, he doesn’t revere them or embrace the religious framing which they assign their conflict-he tells Bak that he doesn't give a damn about the Order and when a Vatican representative accuses him of being disrespectful to God, he tells the man to shut up.
Read as a response to an institution which has been actively hostile to his existence-an organization which would rather destroy him than relinquish its totalitarian claims on the contours of his life-Kanda’s resentment seems impressively reasonable. In fact, from Kanda’s perspective, even his lone childhood friend ultimately preferred to see him dead than to let him live on his own terms, with his own ghosts, his own memories. It’s small wonder, then, that he encounters people with such hostility from the outset: he is, in large part, beating them to the inevitable punch.
But Kanda has also fought loyally for the Order, which means he’s needed to find his own reasons to do so. He has thus come up with rationales that allow him to make sense of his life and negotiate the slim range of choices available to him. Chief among those motivations has been his intention to find “that person,” the figure in the vision that has haunted him since his youth-the very figure whose continued existence in his mind marks his fundamental defiance of the Order’s choices for him.
While Allen (and many readers, following him) simplistically assume that the woman in Kanda’s vision is his true love from his past life, Kanda notably never says any such thing himself. It is clear that “that person” has deep importance for him, but she exists for him more as a mystery and a symbol, an open question rather than a definitive answer. Appearing first at the very moment when one of the Order’s scientists tries to explain human childbirth to Kanda, she arrives at least in part as the mother figure he will never know. In many ways, in fact, she is consistently that which he can never know. Instead, she is an ephemeral figure, a vessel into which he can project necessary meanings, a blank slate onto which he write, imagining her as the face of too many things he might have wanted but can never have. “That person’s” importance to him defies reductive labels, especially any so simplistic as the one that Allen applies.
Ideals
In many ways then, the single most consistent motivation in Kanda’s life has been a need to survive (both physically and mentally) which flies in the face of the Order’s dogma and its edicts. He has been intent on accomplishing his one personal goal, and thus on staying alive against all odds, by sheer force of will if necessary. Whatever else has happened to him, Kanda has been determined to live and “that person” is the language he has given to his own rationalization why.
Kanda does appreciate quiet strength. It's grandstanding (or what he perceives as grandstanding) and ignorant idealism that irritate him the most, and he does have a short temper, especially when it comes to things he deems inappropriate or indecorous.
He seems to routinely mistake flexibility for weakness and rigidity for strength, which leads him to be static and unyielding. If he has a job to do, he will not deviate from its course. If he resolves to accomplish something he will not be dissuaded. If he makes a judgment he will not alter it. He is arrogant, aloof, and stubborn; he also has virtually no respect for the dead or the dying.
In Kanda's view, the job of Exorcists is that of destroyers, not saviors. He has no interest in anyone's absolution, his own included, but he's also a person of his word, and he expects others to be the same. He cannot stand hypocrisy or people who do not follow through on what they say.
A deeply private person, Kanda has consensually shared his reasons and his motivations with no one. Along with his perpetual anger and bad temper, his will to find “that person” is one of the few expressions of agency and autonomy he's been able to have. A few members of the Order know of his perpetual hallucinations of lotus flowers, but even that is a secret which he speaks of to no one.
Of the many foes he has faced in his life as an Exorcist, Kanda has managed the considerable feat of defeating a Noah, making him the only Exorcist to have accomplished such a task. This battle, which takes place on the Ark during its disintegration is won at great cost to Kanda: Mugen is shattered, his life force is deeply drained, and he doesn't escape the room before its collapse around his ears.
But it is, inexplicably, at some point during this battle that things now take a different course, and Kanda walks down a different path….
Mode of Entrance: Alternative entry.
After his battle with Skinn on the Ark, Kanda awakes to find himself stuck in some sort of abandoned limbo space, a wrinkle of dead time left over during the Ark’s imperfect download. After long searching, he finds a way out-a seemingly endless tunnel which leads him (inexplicably) into the southern Arizona desert, amidst the ruins of some ancient remote pueblo city. There he chances to find another man who’s in much the same predicament that he is-Heine Rammsteiner (bulletcarnage). More than anything, it’s simple practicality that keeps the two traveling together, particularly after they chance to learn that for both of them, the key to returning to their home worlds might lie somewhere in Massachusetts, at a place called Miskatonic University.
(For the purposes of the game opening, Kanda will have arrived in Arkham a little less than a week ago, after having scrabbled his way across the country with his traveling companion. The journey will have taken them the better part of a month to make. With no supplies and virtually no money, they’ve had to travel by hitching rides and jumping freight trains. They managed to contact an M.U. professor who they’d been told might be able to help them, but beyond an initial meeting in which they were generously offered a place to stay in a local boarding house, nothing has yet come of their quest to find a way home.)
Suitability:
Kanda’s life as an exorcist has provided him with plenty of experience in being sent on missions and dealing with mysterious unexplained happenings. Here, of course, it won’t be Innocence that causes strange supernatural events, and Kanda is admittedly not an especially cerebral person. (Unless a given issue can be solved by stabbing it, he’s not a very good problem solver.) He is, however, very practical and efficient at his job, so he’ll be useful and well-suited when it comes to missions and investigations.
When push comes to shove, he will be willing to help combat the otherworldy forces threatening this world. He’ll likely use the expediency finding a way home as an excuse to justify his rather grumpy participation in such endeavors, but in the end, he will adapt his life here to a pattern recognizable from his own world. As much as he can, he will continue just doing what he’s always done, allowing habit to stand in the place of his needing to grapple with any more complicated questions about his own motives.
FOR OUs ONLY
Items:
Kanda has Mugen (which was mysteriously whole when he awoke on the Ark) and not much else. His uniform was in tatters upon arrival. He didn’t even have a hair tie. (Though by the time he gets to Arkham he’ll at least have managed to have acquired a passable shirt to wear and a way to tie his hair back.)
Abilities/Powers:
Kanda has radically enhanced healing and regeneration abilities which have brought him back to full health even from what would clearly be otherwise fatal wounds. He can withstand attacks that would kill a normal person outright-that akumas' virus doesn't affect him; he's been nearly cut in two and has healed from it; he's even been shot in the face by an akuma and healed almost at once. He’s also effectively been “killed” in canon-his body literally shattered into pieces, only to awaken again a few minutes later.
There is, however, a limit to this regeneration (though what and where it is remains unspecified). Kanda is repeatedly told to be careful and not to squander his life force. At some point, the battery on which his regeneration draws will run out, and it has clearly been deeply depleted during recent canon events. The apparent power source (or at least the barometer) of this ability’s functioning is at tattoo-like Om symbol over his heart.
Kanda's primary abilities are as a swordsman. His katana, Mugen ("Six Illusions") is his anti-akuma weapon through which he can activate several abilities. Technically, most of these are powers "housed" in the sword, but they're not abilities of the sword's, per se. Kanda's Innocence (the substance that makes an anti-akuma weapon work) is an equipment-type, which means that Mugen took its form for him and only he can activate it.
We've thus far seen Kanda use the following:
Kaichu Ichigen (or "First Illusion: Hell's Insects")-releases a swarm of a dozen or so supernatural insect-like creatures. This effectively gives Kanda a ranged attack, as they fly out from the sword in an arc, attacking once and then disappearing.
Nigentou (or "Double Illusion Blades")-encases Mugen in a sheath of light which is then mirrored as a second katana, made purely of energy, in Kanda's other hand.
Hakka Tourou (or "Eight Flowers Praying Mantis")-used in combination with Nigentou, this is a quick series of eight slices, with the resulting cuts resembling a flower.
Shouka (or "Sublimate")-it's not completely clear whether this is one of the abilities Kanda activates with Mugen, per se, or if it's more one that he activates in his body directly, but it certainly works with the abilities of his Innocence. Shouka seems to be an activation of Kanda's Om tattoo more than anything, and by doing it he can actively sublimate his life force, making it available as a sort of battery for combative strength.
Sangenshiki (or "Three Illusions")-increases Kanda's speed and strength dramatically by drawing on the life energy made available by Shouka. (When Kanda uses this ability, his eyes change, the pupils becoming solid with three dots.)
“Fourth Illusion”-a further increase to speed and strength, again drawing on Kanda’s life force. (In this case, his pupils show four dots.)
“Fifth Illusion”-seemingly a further sublimation of life force that has two separate ranged attacks associated with it. The draw it makes on his life force is damaging both psychically and physically, apparently resembling something of a berserker rage that impairs his rational capacity. Electricity and light spark from Mugen when the Fifth Illusion form is activated. It also makes his hair turn light purple.“Fifth Illusion: Ripping Flash Claw”-an energy attack emitted as targeted rays of light from Kanda’s hand.
“Fifth Illusion: Explosive Spirit Slash”-another energy attack; this one does slashing damage to a target from afar, but it is delivered through the motion of his hand, not his sword.
Suggested Power Reductions:
Kanda’s healing and regeneration abilities, though still faster than normal, will be well reduced. Since much of the time it’s his sheer stubborn will that keeps him on his feet and fighting, he will retain that, but his general healing rate will be at about half its normal rate. He will remain difficult to kill outright, but it will take comparatively less to bring him down in a fight so that he stays down and appears “dead” for some length of time-hours or the better part of a day before he can reawaken, as opposed to the scant few minutes or seconds it takes in canon. He will also find himself inexplicably fatigued for days after major injuries have healed.
As for offensive abilities, insofar as Mugen will have the ability to damage supernatural evil, he will still be able to activate his Innocence and to sublimate his life force to moderately increase his attacking power, but it will drain him far more quickly. He by sublimating his lifeforce, he will be able to activate Nigentou, Kaichu Ichigen (though there will only be three or four of the insect attackers, not a dozen) and Hakka Tourou (which is more a technique of swordsmanship anyway). But none of these attacks will be as strong as they originally were, and of course, he must be wielding Mugen to use them. He will also find himself unusually fatigued after any battle in which he uses Shouka or Nigentou.
WRITING SAMPLES
First Person: (Letter)
September 16, 1928
To Professor Elias Watney
Miskatonic University, Arkham MA
You don’t know me. I was told you could give me answers about something that has happened, so I am writing to you.
I will tell you the events. They happened to me and to another man. He is traveling with me, but he got here differently. We didn’t come from the same place, only arrived in the same one. I need to get back where I belong. He says the same.
I am an Exorcist with the Black Order. Maybe you will recognize that name, but no one else here does. Since you are not one of our scientists, I don’t expect you to understand all of what I say. You only need to understand the part that gets me home.
I had been trapped on Noahs’ Ark where I fought a battle. After I won, I must have passed out. When I woke up, the city was abandoned and there was no way out. In one room, there was a small cave. It led to a tunnel that was very long and narrow. After a long time, I came out into a ruined cliff city in the desert. That’s where I met the man who is traveling with me now. He came through some sort of underground passage too, but his world was not like mine. In mine, the date was almost 50 years ago.
We are coming to Massachusetts because we were told that your university might give us answers. Your name was given to me by a man in a church.
You cannot write to me. I have no address. We will speak to you when we arrive. Expect us.
Kanda
Exorcist of the Black Order
Third Person:
Kanda awoke to stillness, the near-silent whisper of falling snow. It coated his bare shoulders and his hair, which fell loose and limp and already wet over his cheeks and back.
There should have been a rumble, the shake of the room disintegrating around his ears, the sound of him falling into oblivion along with the cracked stone. Instead there were only the chill smooth banks of snow not even marred by the footprints and furrows of the battle Kanda knew he'd fought just meters away before he lost consciousness.
He remembered everything: the fight with Skinn, standing off against the Noah's penultimate blast, Mugen shattering in his hand, the final winning blow he'd dealt, and the room crumbling down around him before everything went black. He hadn't expected to wake up again. And now that he had-
Pushing himself to his knees, Kanda took stock of his surroundings: his fist was closed around Mugen's hilt, the blade was inexplicably whole, and his body, though naked to the waist, was uninjured.
Because there was no other choice to make, he staggered to cold-numbed feet and started walking. The door to which he'd been heading when the room's download got too far along was again whole and solid before him, and beyond that hallways, rooms, doors and corridors that turned unexpected angles and deposited him back into the outside of the city that was the Ark.
The whole way there was no one. No sign left by his comrades' passing nor by his enemies. No sign that any feet but his had crossed over the thresholds and paving stones in eons, though they must have done because Kanda sensed that he had not been unconscious more than a minute or two before he awoke in the snow.
Because their objective before had been to attain the city's highest tower, he went on still towards it. It wasn't the urgency of the disintegrating Ark that quickened his steps now, since the stone around him was as solid as any city he'd ever walked through and there wasn't so much as a tremor beneath his feet. It wasn't just the closing press of isolation, for Kanda didn't sense merely that he was alone-he would not have minded being alone; he preferred to work alone. And he would not have minded the knowledge that the city around him was dying and that he must to race to escape it. That would have been a discrete and comprehensible exigency.
Instead, it was the absence of any such surety that made him hurry onward through the doors: it was the unsettlingly paranoid sense that there was no one here and, more importantly, that there had never been, so there would be no way out, so that he would find only emptiness in room after room. It was the sense that this place he was in now was only the afterimage of an Ark that had already downloaded and that he was only here by a chance glitch in code, an inescapable malfunction that would trap him in the dead city forever.
There was no one in the room atop the highest tower. No sign that any living thing had been through before him. A long empty table, bare and unadorned, a few doors that led only to more bare and lifeless rooms, a piano, a couch. No exit.
He told himself, If this place exists at all, there must be a way out of it. There must be someone alive in the city. He tried to force himself to calm by repeating the words in his mind, tried to dispel the yammer in his chest that whispered again and again There is someone alive in the city: it's YOU. He passed through door after door, lost himself in labyrinthine corridors that only eventually deposited him back outside onto the bleached white of the cobbles. There was light, but there was no sun only a uniform, unchanging illumination that gave no warmth. In some of the rooms it poured rain or blew wind in gales. In some there was no floor but only an empty expanse of water too deep for vision to plumb. A few held desert sand and heat that rolled in waves with the force of solid rock making it hard to draw breath.
It was in one of these, atop a mesa which stood in solitary silhouette against the otherwise rolling horizon, that he found the fissure, jagged like a wound cut into the rock but wide enough that he could, by crouching, pass inside. It was dark within, the stone raw and uncut and smelling of earth. The passage went on a long way. So long, in fact, that though its diameter decreased gradually along its length, by the time it had become small enough for Kanda to have to kneel, it didn't occur to him to turn back. And by the time he had to make his way along at a crawl, pressed low on hands and knees with the ceiling still brushing his back, he could have no doubt that this was indeed a passage that led to something and no natural cave in the rock (not that there could be any such thing as natural when he was not on earth at all but in some infernal Noah-devised parody of it).
There was no sound but his breath and the rustle of his body as he crawled. And there was no light at all. He couldn't have drawn his sword if he'd had to fight. Yet somehow the only fear to gnaw at him was that the culvert might become too narrow for him to squeeze through before he reached its terminus. It must have been that which drove him, at last, to inch along on his belly, arms outstretched above his head, even when the aperture became so small that it threatened to trap him.
He had no way to mark the passing of time, but he could, at last, feel the crevasse begin to open gradually around him, a mirror of its slow constriction. Now he could crawl, now kneel, and at last regain his feet. His hands and knees were bruised and raw, and he could feel that his chest and forearms and the front of his trousers had been torn against the rock, but he didn't allow himself to stop, convinced that whatever he would finally come out to, it would be at least somewhere unlike the hopeless emptiness of the ark he'd left behind.
But none of that prepared him for what met his eyes when he did at last emerge, blinking against a brightness that seemed to burn his cornea even with the long slow adjustment they'd had as the tiny sliver of light on the very limits of his vision grew bigger and bigger with every step he took towards it. When he emerged again into the outside world, the first thing that he saw was rock and sand, and he dropped to his knees in helpless defeat: it wasn't different than what he'd left behind at all.
It was only belatedly, as a tiny brown lizard the size of his finger skittered haltingly over the ground and through the periphery of his vision that his breath caught and his eyes shot up.
He was kneeling near the base of a great terraced slope, like a broad steep staircase of stone, though not stone of the sort he was used to seeing. This was ruddy and smooth, like baked clay, only a shade apart from the sandy ground around him. At his back was a nearly-sheer cliff that towered some fifty or sixty feet above and whose surface was pockmarked with dark recesses so that it looked almost spongy and so, were he not still knelt immediately at its threshold, would have made the cleft from which he'd emerged nearly impossible to distinguish or to ever find again. The rock face didn't end at the top of its vertical ascent, however, but instead curved forward overhead, stretching above him like a great roof of stratified clay so that only a thin swath of blue sky was visible between it and the rim of the stone structures before him. He was, in effect, in a giant concavity of rock, and so, he began to see as he look around him, was the entire expanse of what appeared to be a city molded and carved from the earth all around.
For long moments he knelt panting, the heat even in the shade of the rock making the dry air coarse and heavy. And then, at length, having no other option before him, he began to climb the terraced clay into the mysterious city before him.
Additional Notes:
The log of Kanda and Heine’s meeting, which proceeds from the third person sample above, is available here, and is offered as a further example of how players might approach the alternate arrivals route. (Please note that we don’t expect players will have logged characters’ meetings on their own journals before entering the game. This is just done for the sample.)