[ INFO. ]
Character: Doctor Kasukabe (カスカベ博士)
Series: Dorohedoro
Timeline: After volume 9, just before volume 10.
Details:
APPEARANCES ➡ Think of your average doctor. Tall, well-groomed, hair combed back and eyes focused. Skin flawless and clean, and a bright smile, saying, "Don't worry, we'll be able to fix you." A button-up shirt and pressed slacks, a cleanly knotted tie under a spotless, pristine lab coat.
Now, take the opposite of that, and you have Kasukabe.
Well, the lab coat is still there, as is the smile, but everything else is a far cry from your average doctor. For one thing, he's pretty damn tiny -- 5'1" and 92 pounds, he probably comes up to your shoulder -- and he looks exactly like he did when he was 16. Black hair cut short, somewhat disheveled, and sleeve-tattoos composed of a medley of snakes, chains and black crosses. Attire? A kid would look terribly awkward in formal clothes, so he normal wanders around everywhere in a black T-shirt and cargo pants under that lab coat. And sneakers -- you'll never see him wearing anything more formal than that.
And his expression, well, it's -- unique. He's always wearing this spacey, happy sort of smile, but it's not exactly innocent, it's more. Well. Curious. Inquisitive. Because he may be a doctor, you see, but he started out as a researcher, and so he's always looking for new things. Interesting things. Strange things. Look at him once, you'd dismiss him as just some happy looking kid, but watch him tear into a corpse with a scalpel in hand and that same smile on his face, eyes bright with curiosity and joy -- you'll get what I mean.
PERSONALITY ➡ On the surface, he acts pretty much exactly like he looks. That spacey-happy smile means he'll go about life with a sort of nonchalant optimism, taking everything into stride and adapting to whatever happens. He's friendly to almost everyone -- "oh, hello, how can I help you?" -- and even if you're not friendly back to him, that's okay, he'll just accept that and go on his merry little way. A bit of a cloud-cuckoo-lander in that he seems to always live by his own agenda and any bad thing that happens just rolls off his back. But that's not a bad thing, right? Maybe he's just a little -- spacey, for being a kid.
But then again, the fact that he's mentally more than sixty, and the fact that his life motto is "Always calm" might tell something about him. Because he really lives by that motto -- nothing can really faze him. Blow a person's head to bits in front of him, he'll just go, "oh." Collapse in front of him spouting blood out of your ears? "Oh, wow." Chain him to a wall and torture him? "Ahaha, that kind of hurts." Sixty years is a lot of experience so most things don't surprise him any more, especially since he works in the business trying to cure people who've been mutated into monsters via magic. Show up with iron spikes growing out of your skull or your face shredded into a half-dozen floppy tentacles -- the only response he'll really give is, "wow, that's interesting!"
Because it really is interesting. Just because he's old doesn't mean he's bored -- he's a scientist, a researcher, a doctor. So he's always interested in the new and the strange. And for the sake of that, he'll do almost anything. Sure, he might have a cozy home and nice status, but he'll ignore all that and go ambling out in dangerous territory to find new and interesting cases of magical damage. After all, what's research without a bit of risk? And the term 'risk' accompanies a variety of things, because don't think he's the type of researcher to just sit at a table surrounded by books -- because he spends all his free time tearing apart unwanted corpses and stitching apart a collection of broken bones and ripped up organs, seeing how they work and what he can do with them. His lab? Scattered all over the place with dead bodies and dismembered limbs and jars of organs. The only reason he doesn't let most people near his office is because a lot of them tend to be sick, and he doesn't want any contaminants around his research material, you see. And it's not that he's really cold, or a misanthropist or anything, just -- they're dead anyway, might as well make their bodies useful, right? Who knows, maybe some new information can be found by using their corpses! Don't worry, he won't ever kill you for the sake of research -- he's never directly killed a person before (indirectly, sure, he's helped take care of a to-be-serial-killer before, ahaha, oops), but his philosophy on unclaimed dead bodies is that they're up for grabs.
And everything else in life, just -- it's a terribly ironic mixture of cool apathy and cheerful acceptance, really. He'll smile, he'll laugh, he'll take joy in the little things in life, like a good meal or a good book or meeting a new person, but the bad things in life are just fine too, like an epidemic or a person with multiple fractures or someone trying to mug him out in the streets. Don't get him wrong, he's kind to his friends, and he'll do what he can for them -- and he makes friends pretty easily -- and if his friends die, he'll feel sad and mourn for a bit, but he'll never crack, never cry, because he's lost a lot of acquaintances already, just one more person isn't that much difference. He's been living for a long time, it's just another day, another moment in the long life he's lived so far, right?
He likes life. He's just a bit too used to it.
HISTORY ➡ Kasukabe used to be a normal doctor -- in terms of his world, at least. He hails from a world caught in a never-ending and rather messy war, a war between the citizens of the two halves of the world. On one hand, you have the magic-users, people who can emit black smoke from their mouths or fingers, and once you're hit by this smoke, bam, who knows what will happen to you. Some users create smoke that can heal, some can melt your bones to nothing, some can turn you to mushrooms - the effects vary hugely, and so many magic-users turn to the non-magic-users - the citizens of the Hole, as the filthier half of the world is called - as guinea pigs. All magic-users have to do is create a little smoke and poof, there's a door to the Hole, where tons of unsuspecting and defenseless people lay, just waiting to be tested on. So there are the magic-users, the non-magic users, and everyone stuck in between.
He pretty much falls in that last category -- used to be a normal doctor, the head of the main hospital in the Hole in charge of taking care of magic victims. Except when he was almost 60, he found that old age was starting to hinder his research progress -- getting a bit harder to go around and filch corpses from lynch mobs, so he, ah. Experimented. With magic. A highly forbidden process, of course, but it worked! So, now stuck looking like a 5'1" teenager, he ambled back to the hospital, right back to where he was researching magic users and how to heal their victims.
Before the hospital, his life is a bit of a mystery. Born somewhere to someone, raised somewhere by someone, educated somewhere by someone. When he was around 30 -- back when he still had his real name, Haze, he met a young magic-user by the name of Kasukabe Haru. They eventually married -- he took her name -- and when she later fell ill, that's when he started researching magic users and their physiques, in hopes of curing his wife some day. One thing led to another, and he eventually ended up in the Hole, treating victims of magic users and gathering up corpses of dead magic users. Twenty-five-plus years he spent like this, researching, helping, curing, living. And sure, he's had his run-ins with misfortune -- had tangles with the magic-user mafia, tortured for information and nearly been killed in a few situations, but hey, that's all okay. It just happens, right?
He was out caught in a tangled-up incident involving the magic user mafia and the boss behind the magic user underworld -- the boss that looked so familiar to an old and decidedly dead patient of his -- when he was dragged out of his world and into this one. Haha, oops.
ABILITIES ➡ Oh, he looks sixteen, but don't let that fool you -- he's a fantastic doctor. He can work on almost everything, from broken bones to ruptured organs to transplants. Not just that, either -- he's made zombies, before, created magic artifacts out of the mangled corpses of magic users, torn apart bone and ligament to research the underlying forces behind magic. Y'know what? 'Doctor' isn't quite the right word for him. 'Mad scientist' is.
Other than that, though, there's not much he can or wants to brag about. He can handle a firearm decently -- he's not a perfect shot, but if you're charging at him, he can probably kneecap you pretty good. And he's a damn fast runner. After all, if you can't fend off the dangerous people, then the next best option is to make a run for it.