i am an app!
Out of Character Information
player name: Laura
player livejournal: hatesnog
playing here: nope
where did you find us? ATP
are you 16 years of age or older?: yeap
In Character Information
character name: Toto Sakigami/"Mockingbird"/Hagire Rinichiro
Fandom: Deadman Wonderland
Timeline: end of chapter 39
character's age: He looks somewhere in his late teens, but he's actually been jumping bodies for ten years and originally was somewhere in his 30s. So he's... somewhere in his 40s, approximately. And looks much younger.
powers, skills, pets and equipment:
Powers
OH BOY. Okay, so, Toto is a Deadman. In this body anyway, we'll deal with the bodies later. Deadmen, in brief sum, are people who, after the Great Tokyo Earthquake ten years before canon (caused by the Wretched Egg!!), developed the power to move their blood. This means that, if cut, they can move their blood outside their bodies and use it as a weapon. Each Deadman as a unique power, called a Branch of Sin, and manifests in a specific way, e.g. bullets, blades, whips, etc.
Toto's Branch of Sin is called Love Labyrinth, which isn't actually a combat skill -- it's a copycat skill. If he licks (yes I mean that) another Deadman's blood, his Branch of Sin will copy theirs, allowing him to use it at will. Currently, the only one he has is Senji's Crow Claw, which allows him to transform his blood into blades.
Skills
This comes in two halves! The first being Toto's skills, because even after being taken over by Hagire, the body retains its physical capabilities. Toto is a really good fighter! He's quick, light, and agile, which comes in handy in and out of combat. Unfortunately, his body is also falling apart, so too much physical stress can literally pull him apart at the seams.
The other half of the skills come from Hagire; notably, Hagire's intelligence. He's very smart, basically. He used to be a scientist and has enough talent to build a machine that uses another pair of Deadmen's Branch of Sin to download his consciousness into a new body. Even for a canon where people fight with blood, that's pretty intense. He also fancies himself a brilliant mastermind, which he can be when he's not. Going insane.
Pets
Nope.
Stuff
His clothes. Pants, shoes, some weird shirt thing that hangs in the back and exposes his midriff for no reason whatsoever.
canon history:
So Toto is not actually Toto, first of all. For the sake of names, he's going by Toto because that's how he does it in canon, so I'm going to... call him Toto, still. But! Ten years prior to the events of canon, Toto was not Toto because he was in his original body, the scientist Hagire Rinichiro. He worked in a medical facility with Sorae Igarashi (our charming protagonist Ganta's mother), doing experiments that were supposed to heighten the functionality of the immune system. Seems alright, doesn't it? Except that they experimented on actual individuals instead of cells grown in petri dishes, including our other lovely protagonist, Shiro. At first, the experiments don't go very well; a dog experimented on goes insane, and Shiro's cells start necrotizing because of the weird nanotechnology they're trying to fuse with her blood, called the Nameless Worm.
Yeah. They inject this little girl with absurdly painful shit and watch when her arms start falling off. For a long time, Hagire/Toto is not at all interested. He talks about his interest in percentage values, and only gets up to 30% when Shiro's body suddenly starts reproducing the Nameless Worm. This is enough for him to want to do an experiment on her, which is pretty vague but the gist is whatever horrible thing he giggled about while Sorae all but tortured baby Shiro caused Shiro to develop a split personality to cope with the trauma. This personality is totally insane and later became known as the Wretched Egg. He is obsessed with this part of Shiro, finding her so interesting it maxes out his interest-o-meter, going so far as to describe the feeling as LOVE. The experiments continue and basically just continue to get more and more gruesome and inhumane, including one in which Shiro's body is literally carved up (she heals very fast) to make a system that will contain her Wretched Egg personality. It's complicated and gross. Finally the Wretched Egg snaps and massacres the guards that cut her up every day when she's told to kill a moving target with her newly acquired WACKY BLOOD-MOVING SKILL! (It's a sheep. It survives.) This blows apart a decent part of the facility and gets shut up as "chemical explosion."
Nothing of note really happens between then and the Great Tokyo Earthquake (during which a lot of Deadmen are created from contact with red crystals the Egg shoots out everywhere yeah), which is actually the Wretched Egg's power again, except that at some point, Hagire figures out how to download his mind into a new body to extend his life, so he can keep researching the Wretched Egg. This is actually the joint Branch of Sin of the Deadman twins Chan and En, whom Hagire discovered to be Deadmen and took in as his own demented children. That he never cared about other than their ability, but they were very devoted to him all the same. The point is: via the twins, Hagire downloaded himself into the body of some unnamed old guy, presumably for monetary purposes because he immediately founded Deadman Wonderland, the amusement park prison, at the site where the earthquake originated -- the medical center.
Deadman Wonderland is, as stated, a prison and an amusement park. It has a front of being a tourist attraction intended to bring vitality back into the ruined Tokyo, an amusement park manned and operated by prisoners, but its secondary purpose is to collect Deadmen -- and it's core purpose is to house the Wretched Egg. The Wretched Egg is contained by the Mother Goose System, which is the complicated and gross thing from before made of Shiro's flesh -- it's literally a big egg-shaped thing that plays a lullaby specially tuned to keep the Wretched Egg from taking over Shiro's consciousness. The song is amplified by Chorus Blocks, which would be called speakers scattered around DW if they weren't more like big gross cubes filled with liquefied flesh. Yep. Sorae Igarashi's genius and totally ethical invention, right here. The MGS can be unlocked, releasing the Wretched Egg entirely, via a "key" -- a biological key programmed in by Sorae. That will become significant later.
Here we are still in body number two, though, the Chairman of Deadman Wonderland. Underneath the facade, the Deadmen are detained and pitted against one another to fight in the Carnival Corpse, which is a glorified sketchy webshow broadcast by DW's second-in-command, Tamaki, who thinks he's cool. But really it's Hagire's method of finding a Deadman strong enough to be his next body, because the old guy's covered in tubes and barely hanging on and Tamaki keeps being weird and threatening him with puppets. THIS is where Toto, the real Toto, finally comes in to play.
Toto the Deadman is The Best. He's strong, he's fast, he loves fighting, and supposedly he can even hold his own against the Wretched Egg. Unfortunately for Toto, this means Hagire definitely wants to be all up in his wacky blood-fighting little body, and so he just takes it over when the old guy is knocked out of commission for real by the Wretched Egg. Hagire, now Toto, flounces around G-Ward, the Deadmen's sector of the prison, just popping up in corners and watching things, for the most part. He seeks out Shiro when she's alone and befriends her, sort of. More like she eats a lot of snacks while he sits there and complains that all she does is eat snacks. Shiro runs off, and there's some Scar Chain business Toto doesn't participate in, so the short version: a lot of people die. At the end, Toto watches from a doorway creepily. Shortly afterwards he runs into one of the Undertakers, anti-Deadmen, a little girl named Hibana who carries a really big sword and slaughters people mercilessly.
He decimates her in a single strike, because he is The Best. And his body still knows how to fight, even though his personality is less inclined towards combat. He comments as he wanders away from the mushed little girl that he's still fragile, a comment brought on by the fact that he is literally falling apart, because his body is sewn together (mostly at the joints, it seems, but he has a scar on his head too, suggesting that the body was probably systematically cut up for some weird reason before it was taken over). Then he vanishes again and there's some business about Tamaki making these fake Deadmen he controls, Forgeries, and letting the real Deadmen out into the rest of the prison instead of keeping them in the basement. While the protagonists wonder what they just witnessed during the broadcast of the Forgery and its ability to make people explode, Toto waltzes in to babble about love and what exactly Forgeries are. He also weirds out Senji by being too affectionate and tries to judo chop Ganta so he can lick him, but Shiro stops him. After he delivers some exposition and all the old-timer Deadmen wonder why he's out of his mind in a NEW way that isn't wanting to fight all the time, they have a party.
Yep. It's a pretty sweet party, Toto's very happy about it. Talks about love some more. Tells Ganta about how much he loves the Wretched Egg and very nearly drops that it's Shiro, but then Shiro turns up and he decides he'd rather sit back and watch the eventual fireworks than spoil everything just then.
After that, all the Deadmen minus Toto are harassed into a Carnival Corpse match with a bunch of Forgeries, and they do a really poor job of it. Toto has to skip in and save them, which he does, very stylishly and using Senji's skill. No big. Just as he's about to kill one of the Forgeries that Ganta has realized is his friend from outside the basement, Azami, Ganta wigs out and blasts them all with his blood bullets and effectively stops the match and nearly kills everyone. This gets Ganta labeled a traitor and he wakes up days later in a hidden place with Shiro, and manages to stutter a bit before Toto flounces in to give him a hard time and clap at him. He reminds Ganta of what he did aaand then Ganta goes off to be the hero while Toto hangs out with Chan and En somewhere else. He doesn't show up again until the end of a lot of complicated stuff involving Tamaki controlling the Forgeries and Ganta trying to stop him -- the other anti-Tamaki force, prison warden Makina and her cool friends, have Tamaki cornered when the Wretched Egg blasts a hole in the roof they're on and Toto and the twins climb out. Toto reveals that he's the Chairman and Tamaki flips out because he thought he was the one in control after the Chairman "died." Then he shoots himself in a last ditch effort to be in control of "his game," rather than have Toto kill him. Ganta shows up too, and Toto giggles about how great everything is and sics the Wretched Egg on him because why not. Everything starts falling apart and the Wretched Egg is revealed to be Shiro after Ganta uses some super Branch of Sin slightly different from his usual one, and more stuff explodes. Toto, the twins, and the Wretched Egg hightail it out of there, somehow, with blood samples from the other Deadmen, conveniently in little vials for Toto's creepy blood-drinking pleasure!
But I'm taking him before he gets everyone's abilities, so he's just run off and collected his bearings after revealing that he's actually the Chairman, but hasn't yet revealed he's also Hagire. In sum: Toto is everyone, and he's very cheery about it.
personality:
Toto is unstable, if it were unclear. When he was only Hagire, he was brilliant and bored. He had a particular fondness for interesting things, which is ambiguously defined as scientific things that should not be possible, e.g. a little girl's body suddenly reacting to foreign injections and giving her supernatural abilities. He was easily drawn into things he found interesting and hooked; incredibly myopic about his Interests, there was very little that could get him to show any kind of emotion besides derision and boredom to something else. Including morals and ethics. Who needs those, honestly? Hagire was also incredibly smart and creative, finding innovative ways to use Branches of Sin and being a generally talented scientist besides that.
These all remain in Toto as he is now, of course, only his last bits of sanity are slowly slipping away (more than they had before ha ha) due to his extended obsession with the Wretched Egg. He is fixated on her, to the point where he claims to love the Wretched Egg, although he is more infatuated with the duality she represents (being, you know, half pure and innocent and half corrupt and murderous) than the actual person. He's really, really into talking about LOVE! all the time, although his own definitions of what love is are clearly disturbed.
Toto also has a slightly warped sense of self. He is Hagire; then he was DW's Chairman, now he's Toto -- but he refers to himself as "the third generation," because jumping around into other people's bodies has scrambled his mind a bit. Pieces of the body's original owner's mind remain in the takeover, shown by how Toto still has a tendency to clap when he's excited, something the original did habitually. He also frequently forgets what pronoun he's supposed to be using and doesn't really care about the fact that he's Toto now. Basically, he appears to have severed all important ties between his mind and his body, and doesn't care whose identity he takes over as long as he can still live and continue researching the Wretched Egg!! He does favor bodies that are strong enough to handle her and anyone else who might try to stop him, though, because he's a calculating bastard and plans very, very far in advance.
He's also completely without remorse. He tortures a child because it's interesting, then keeps her locked up to study her some more, then manipulates and kills a bunch of people just because he can. He strings Tamaki along for presumably years, because it's funny to watch him think he's in control. That's another thing he does, intentionally mess around with people for kicks. He likes to say things to rile people up and watch them go, because he's certain that even if someone tried to get back at him, they wouldn't be able to. He also just doesn't bother telling people important things: when the Deadmen throw him a party, he very nearly tells Ganta that Shiro is the Wretched Egg, but instead just says some cryptic stuff about how Ganta is really cruel (for wanting to kill the Wretched Egg, not knowing it's Shiro) and wanders off, because he figures it will be more fun to watch Ganta completely break down than spoil the whole thing right there. He tends to put forth an air of cheeriness and likeability, although he's a bit weird no matter what; invading personal space, giggling and smiling while he talks about gruesome violence, that kind of thing. It doesn't even appear to be an act, because he keeps at it even after he reveals himself as kind of a complete bastard. The faux friendliness isn't even as fake as it appears, oddly enough -- he just doesn't care about anyone.
To elaborate: he doesn't have anything against Ganta, really. He's interesting at first because the Wretched Egg is interested in him, and Toto is heavily invested in the Wretched Egg's hobbies. Toto is friendly to Ganta and everyone else, although when it comes time to get serious he slips right back into cunning bastard mode with a slightly more devious smile. He is so proud of himself!! The thing is, there isn't malice in his actions so much as complete lack of emotion. He needs Ganta's other Branch of Sin? Okay, let's download the mind into Ganta's body, nothing personal. Opportunity to kill Senji? Make a joke about it, get him out of the way. Chan and En sacrifice themselves to save his life? "I never loved you." Toto is not nice, that much is certain -- he is a twisted, ruthless individual for sure -- but any feelings he might have towards anyone greater than a brief twinge of emotion are completely overpowered by his obsession with the Wretched Egg. Everyone else is essentially another fun distraction to keep him busy when the Wretched Egg is asleep or something. His lack of concern and flouncing, pseudo-friendly attitude are default, because literally nothing else is important to him besides the Wretched Egg.
In sum, he's not quite right.
why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting?
WELL he's already familiar with supernatural dystopia sorts of places -- true that Deadman Wonderland isn't really the same as Anatole, other than having a lot of weird things happening that should not be, but the fact of the matter is that DW is some kind of Heart of Darkness with Colonel Toto at its center because he made it that way. Anatole is comparatively tame, somehow.
Writing Samples
Network Post Sample:
[First the video is focused on nothing too informative -- a torso, clad in white, with a hand tapping the screen. Stitches on the wrist.]
... Aha. ☆
So it does work!
[He flips the video up to his face, beaming and so friendly and don't mind that flash of anger, look, it's gone now.]
I'm, ah- [it doesn't even matter, just pick what's easy to remember--] Sakigami Toto. Mockingbird. Call me "Toto," please. I'm sure we'll all get along!
[He lifts a finger to his chin, tapping once, twice.]
Hey, how good are you people with missing persons? Now that I'm here I need to look for someone, but I don't know where to start! ☆
Third Person Sample:
Toto wakes up in his new room and sits bolt upright immediately. Something is wrong. Obviously, because since when does he sleep in the middle of the day, but there is something else that is decidedly wrong all of a sudden. He doesn't know where he is, for a start. He should be hidden away in the bowels of Deadman Wonderland, not... wherever this room is. He sighs and swing his legs off the bed, bounding over to the door and sticking his head outside.
Nope. No idea where he is. He calls out idly for Chan and En, only mildly irritated when they don't answer or appear at all. They must not be around; he knows they'd be at his side in seconds, after all. Oh well. Not that much of a loss. He'll have to carry things around by himself, is all. He puts his hands on his hips and huffs, practically pouting as he turns back to the empty room. It doesn't matter about the twins, really, he can get by without them -- but they have the briefcase.
Toto swears, folding his arms and scowling around the room. The twins have the blood samples, damn them, how is he supposed to get any research done now on -- where is the Wretched Egg.
It's as if something in him snaps, and he stands there stiff as if he's gone into shock. She isn't there. He was right there, with her, and now the Wretched Egg is nowhere in sight. This, actually, is a problem. He had been getting closer and closer to unlocking that stupid Mother Goose System, and now? Nothing. Wrong place, no Wretched Egg.
Toto very nearly slices his new bed in half. He chews the tip of his thumb, brooding and ignoring the thin drip of blood onto his tongue. He can handle this, really. He's waited this long, after all. It's not like he's some kind of child, like the Wretched Egg and that Ganta -- he will think of something to aid in his research. There are other doors outisde his own he saw just a moment ago -- is it possible the Wretched Egg is here, behind another one of those, sleeping and not even realizing what's happened? Maybe Chan and En and more importantly, the briefcase -- Toto licks his bitten thumb clean and surveys the room again. He sees the items left for him finally and picks up the squarish device. It's heavy, and terribly unwieldy, but it looks like- a phone? The screen blinks to life as he taps a few buttons, welcoming him to some kind of network.
Well. Okay. Maybe his new socialites will have something helpful to tell him. It's a start.
Anything else? Sometimes he falls apart because his body is literally sewn together at most of the major joints. It's a thing.