Application: Contains Spoilers
Character: Makoto
Series: Ghost Hound
Version: Anime
Age: 14? Maybe 15.
Gender: Male
Appearance: Makoto is an adolescent Japanese male of slightly above average height with dark angular eyes and moderately lengthed blue-black hair that is slightly wavy (perhaps greasy?) and slicked back, the curl visible mostly at the loose ends. He has paler skin than normal and wears a severe expression, usually seen with something resembling a scowl or at least an unforgiving stare. He dresses in dark blues and greyse has a high-collared charcoal jacket with a blue V-shaped band and a smaller white band of the same shape underneath, which he wears over a bare white T-shirt, and baggy jeans, dark blue tennis shoes, and... well, that's it, actually. An elaborate dresser Makoto is not--but then again, he is a junior high student.
When having an out-of-body experience, he takes the form of a large, long canid with combined features of a dog, wolf, and fox--a long, flowing plumelike blue tail, angular glowing red eyes, long, savage jaws with large fangs, pointed ears, and three very long, solid talonlike claws per foot complete the pictures. Interestingly, it is also translucent, and you can see the through the body to the environment beyond--assuming you can see it, that is... only people who could normally see ghosts or other spirits unseen by the human eye are capable of seeing Makoto's spirit form at all.
Personality: Makoto is... angry. Aggressive, hot-tempered, cold, and distant, Makoto almost never attends class and often goes several weeks without appearing at his school at all. He resembles something of a young punk, but with a very dangerous edge--known for his violent measures, he takes everything very seriously, and often loses his temper at small provocations, but may simply drop it moments later, dismissing it and walking away without so much as another word. He is, in a lot of ways, an angry, rebellious teen with a fondness for loud music (as long as he's playing it, alone) and an (admittedly perhaps justified) uncommonly large chip on his shoulder that he can't do much of anything about. He's very curt but not entirely standoffish--he can occasionally be relied on for his spiritual and religious expertise: having grown up at the heart of the Ogami religion has left him with a wealth of knowledge that, while intensely useful in certain situations, he'd really rather just as well not have. Some of this comes from his home life, which is rocky at best--a great deal of it, however, appears to be inherent to Makoto, with his too-serious disposition and slightly obsessive tendency for grudges and remembrance of small slights or offences. Most people give him his space, which is to his preference--instead of spending time with other people his age or even with his family, Makoto prefers to shut himself in his (dark) room, hook up his guitar, don his headphones, and play, shutting his eyes and playing loudly and intensely at sensory-blocking volumes. This often continues until he simply passes out or wears himself out and goes to sleep, at which point he'll wake up and repeat the process, avoiding his grandmother and the rest of the world alike.
More recently, however, he's discovered something new he can do by means of his playing--transcend past reality and consciousness and into out of body experiences, becoming part of the Unseen World and literally separating his spirit from his body, upon which he can literally let his pent up energy out and run free, something he uses both for personal and openly productive purposes. In addition to the practical and spiritual aspects, this has given him something of a connection with his father, and he considers it very much a personal activity... something he shares occasionally with Tarou and Masayuki but which he otherwise wholly (and wisely) chooses to keep to himself. He can now also initiate OBEs by sleeping, but it is not as common, as he seems to prefer the intensely private experience of the guitar and the integration of sound into the process.
Makoto doesn't like to talk much--and he especially dislikes talking about personal matters, or even minor details; he'd rather talk about external situations or whatever is at hand, anything else that isn't about him... or his family, or his 'friends,' or... well, especially not his parents, especially not on personal terms. Makoto would rather do business with you than get to know you, and anything personal tends to be out-of-bounds. He also claims that he is not afraid to kill someone--a claim he will occasionally further by explaining that he suffered brain damage when he was small that required a large operation, making his brain 'not normal.' Occasionally he'll add that he can't understand why some people can't bring themselves to kill another person. He supports the suggestion of his willingness to kill regularly regularly by demonstration: while he has yet to actually kill someone, it's not uncommon for him to use physical intimidation or even violence to make his point or just vent his frustrations. Maybe it's even true.
Fears: Makoto has a lot of broken up fears, most of them fractured or buried where they don't particularly affect him in daily life, but which are leering fragments of thorny issues deeper in his subconscious and which he is supposed to face in series. His father is an issue with him, especially because of the circumstances under which he died--and as young Makoto was the first to find the bloody (and very dead) body, it left some lasting scars that still make him very brittle, even to this day. Any subject that suggest, implicates, or even darts near his father is an instant hot button, and in a way, Makoto is bother afraid that somehow his father is everything his grandmother has said... and that somehow the death is in fact his fault. (Alternately, it could be Tarou's falt but Makoto isn't touching it.) Even more damaging is the subject of his mother, whom he hates for abandoning him and his father, and who he does not fear but who strikes a very powerful (and negative) emotive chord in him.
He does not appear to be afraid of dying, exactly, but he doesn't really like pain and probably isn't thrilled with the prospect. He is, obviously, neither afraid of ghosts or spirits, and magical things will neither frighten nor much faze him.
Weaknesses: Makoto's biggest weakness is, in fact, his OBEs--when having an out of body experience, he is free to roam wherever he wishes, have direct contact (and enter combat) with ghosts and other spirits, even very powerful ones... but his body remains behind, exposed--and, as you can imagine, this leaves him extremely vulnerable, open to just about anything while his physical shell is passed out wherever he left it. Other than that, his emotional stability and temper leave him well equipped to deal with a crisis but not persistent danger; this, combined with his relatively fragile state of existence (human and mortal), leave him vulnerable to most things that everyone else is susceptible to--Makoto is neither bulletproof nor fireproof nor anything else proof, for that matter... except perhaps waterproof, and even then he needs air.
Strengths/Abilities: Other than menacing people with landscaping equipment, Makoto's greatest power is his ability to sever his spirit from his body and shape it into a great dog-like form during out-of-body experiences--as this spirit, he can not only travel at great speeds and through walls and solid objects, he can see and interact with ghosts and other spitis, even touching, speaking with, and attacking them while invisible to the human eye. Other than this, however, Makoto is, unfortunately, a fairly average adolescent male, albeit with a slightly above average knowledge of spiritual matters and ability for violence. He is quick to turn to offencive tactics and will not hesitate to fight anything that may threaten him, but his judgement is sometime ssuspect, as is his emotional stability, as he is prone to harbouring deep grudges... even if he may be intelligent, Makoto is often unduly influenced by his bitterness and willingness to fight the world rather than addressing whatever might genuinely be ailing him, physically or otherwise. He is, however, physically capable, and seems to have a knack for improvised weapons, from seeding trolleys to pipes. As he comes to the House with only a somewhat large, but ominously bladed switchblade knife, this will probably be handy.
History: Makoto Ogami was born into the Ogami family and thus their religion, which is run by his grandmother Himeko and stewarded by various adherents--it operates out of the family home/temple and has many devotees in the local area. Interestingly, his family is a branch of the Komori family--a family of local brewers, who live not far from the Ogami house. When Makoto was very young, a pair of kidnappings happened nearby--Tarou Komori and his sister went missing and a ransom was issued, but the police managed to shoot the kidnapper before anything could happen. Unfortunately, with the kidnapper dead, there was no way to locate the children, and a week passed with no sign of them.
Then, tips from Makoto's area (in fact, from his grandmother) led the police to search an abandoned hospital behind a dam, where the Komori children were found--but it was too late for the older child, the sister, who died of starvation and dehydration. Tarou was revived, but suffered severe trauma (and would later be diagnosed with PTSD, while his mother became mentally unstable.) A week later, Makoto's father committed suicide, stabbing himself in the eye and cutting his own throat. Young Makoto found the body, but there was no note--it left him with deep psychological scarring and a great amount of animosity and resentment towards Tarou, whose kidnapping his father's suicide is believed to be connected. Though they attend the same school, Makoto and Tarou had little to do with each other and in fact avoided each other as much as possible, in part because of their respective psychological traumas. Makoto wishes to find out more about the circumstances surrounding and of his father's death, but has nothing to go on, and thus stews in his frustration a great deal, channeling some of that resentment and anger towards his mother, who left him and remarried after the death of his father. He will not call her his mother, referring to her only as "that woman."*
Because of this (and perhaps in part because of brain damage he suffered at a slightly younger age, which led to a large operation) Makoto grows into a hard and ruthless young man, who claims he doesn't care if he kills someone... and most of the evidence suggests this might even be true. Certainly he is both ill-tempered and bitter--he rarely, if ever, attends school and spends most of his time avoiding his grandmother and the Ogami religion, despite living in the same household as both. Other students avoid him because of his violence.
Eventually, however, in junior high, another student--named Masayuki--persuades Makoto to accompany him and Tarou to the abandoned hospital, where they break in to explore. In addition to a rumoured 'cursed chamber,' supposedly some sort of holding cell with bars over the window hidden deep in the hospital, they hope to find various answers... or at least Tarou does, Masayuki having convinced him against his will to look for some sort of memory there. Inside, Tarou starts seeing abnormal things--spirits, basically, which at one point chase him back to Makoto and Masayuki, who noticed nothing. The cellar turns out to be too flooded with mud from the dam, but they successfully locate the room in which Tarou and his sister were held. There, by the bed where Mizuka (his sister) died, Tarou begins having a flashback, which quickly morphs into something more terrible as her body begins to writhe grotesquely--Makoto and Masayuki, however, are sucked into it, and though Makoto is the first to look away, breaking his gaze and covering his eyes, he instead finds himself back in the doorway to his father's bedroom, staring at the bloody corpse through a surreal haze. All of them experience separate traumatic visions and are forced to flee out through the Unseen World, a separate and concurrent world that is part of this one... and realise that they are not themselves but protoplasmic, near-fetal versions of themselves.
They are, in short, having an out of body experience--their souls escaped, but their bodies were left behind. Now capable of seeing all the monstrous, ghostlike forms around them, however, Masayuki and Tarou panic, leaving Makoto to lead them back through. Once he's returned to his body, the others follow suit, and they leave, the other two much distressed... and Makoto, with them, much exhausted. He explains to them about the Unseen World and describes the act of leaving one's body to visit it--a practise he refers to as astral projection, normally available only to highly trained individuals. He informs the others that the place under the dam is likely the boundary between the Unseen World and the one they normally inhabit, the Apparent World.
In the following weeks, however, Makoto and the others begin experiencing OBEs more often with varying regularity, and they even learn to start leaving their bodies of their own respective wills (or at least on purpose), exploring the Unseen World as spirits and attempting to learn more about it and the spirits that inhabit it.
Then, sudddenly, a ghost is seen at the abandoned Pachinko parlour where Tarou and his sister were first taken, and 'curses' one of the junior high school students who found it by entering his body (and making him capable of seeing the spirits of the Unseen World, much to his dismy)--based on the description, Tarou believes it is the ghost of Sukua, the man who kidnapped him. Determined to prove to that Sukua is the man who kidnapped him and that Makoto's father had nothing to do with it, he persuades Makoto (and the very, very unwilling Masayuki) to accompany him out of their bodies to neutralise the vengeful ghost and--at the very least--incapacitate it so that it cannot leave the Unseen World. (It is during this episode that we first learn that there are several layers of the Unseen world/Kakuriyo, one on top of another, and which overlap the Apparent World/Utsushiyo at some points.)
Upon seeing the ghost, however (who follows the same loop over and over, running out of the Pachinko parlour and in front of a phantasmal truck, which obliterates him so that he starts over), Tarou recognises it--and a chain reaction is triggered inside of him, warping his spirit form into something resembling a small prehistoric predator--one he'd met earlier in the Unseen World. This attracts the attention of the ghost, who turns towards them--and Tarou, maddened by the knowledge that this was the man who killed his sister, attacks it. As he charges, his jagged jaws open, however, the man's face emerges from the black mass of the ghosts's head and Tarou is startled, barely avoiding the ghost's retaliatory blow and slipping back out of the form (as well as bouncing along the cement like a little eggplant.) Unfortunately, the ghost's pattern has been broken, and he proceeds to go after Tarou, but is distracted by Makoto, who harasses it, telling Tarou to run. The ghost, however, seizes Makoto and throws him to the ground, whipping its arms around like tentacles to catch him and sling him to the ground before turning on Masayuki. A chase ensues, and finally Masayuki loses it and turns on the ghost, acting as though he is in a virtual reality game... and shooting the ghost down in a fiery blaze, using his spiritual energy like a gun.
A couple of nights later, Makoto takes to the Unseen World on his own, without Masayuki and Tarou, willfully concentrating his energy and deliberately morphing his spiritual body into something of his own making--a large, taloned foxlike wolf/hound, as which he leaps off into the night sky, bounding over the trees and holdings of the mountain valley.
Ironically, getting to know Tarou and Masayuki (and his dealings with them) lead Makoto to attend school somewhat more regularly, and he has been appearing more often when a body is found floating in the Kameiwa dam. While in the crowd looking over the water, Makoto's mother is spotted, and the priest, Komagusu who accidentally gave her awat, is forced to tell them about his high school days, when he, Makoto's father, his mother, and a current political chairman used to hang out together. Makoto was aware of this already, having found a photograph and confronted him, but more of the conflicted dynamic comes out now, as well as the story of the four's own exploration of the abandoned hospital (ten years out of use, before the construction of the dam), and Maoto and Tarou actually follow the story by accident, in part of the Unseen World. It is amid the ruckus of this that Makoto falls into Dollsy, lost and disoriented from the contents of the memory.
*The truth is a little more complicated--originally, the kidnapper had planned to take Makoto, and did so, striking Makoto a great blow to the head in the process (the brain damage from his childhood), but his mother sold out the Komori children, and in doing so, saved Makoto's life, as apparently part of the reason he was taken was for his organs. The Ogami religion, unfortunately, plays a very large role in this, and his father's suicide is connected to all of these.