soul_campaign History and Info Summary
History @ Soul Campaign:
During the battle at the Black Order’s encampment in Jordan, Kanda is approached by a Noah who knows him, but whose name he does not know. It was at this point, just before his confrontation with Wisely, that Kanda found himself awakening in a strange underground chamber in a place called Death City, Nevada.
The very first day he was there, he ran into his new “neighbor” from the apartment across the hall-Heine Rammsteiner. They sparked off with tension and disliked each other immediately.
The world Kanda found himself in (and without his sword, no less, since the demonic device BREW had apparently taken it from him) was a world supposedly at war. He had been called on, ostensibly, to help the Shibusen school and faculty win an eons-long war with witches bent on their destruction. Shibusen provided a place to live and basic supplies, but they also asked their “guests” to sign a loyalty oath, swearing fealty to the reigning Shinigami. Meanwhile they provided no weapons or martial supplies, not even training equipment, and there was no evidence beyond their word of their supposed foe.
Suspicious of them from the get-go, Kanda mistrusted their motives and refused to sign any oath of loyalty. He set about procuring a weapon only to learn that there were no mundane swords available in the city. He was a meister, and if he wanted a weapon then it would have to be a human one-a person with the ability to change their body into weapon form as some of those who had been dragged into that world had gained the ability to do.
But wielding a human weapon was not so simple a matter as wielding a mundane one. It required a deep and true willingness on the part of both weapon and meister, and a resonance between their souls.
At first, Kanda understood this poorly. His initial attempts at finding a sword involved demanding or bullying virtually every human weapon he met into letting him try them. He turned up at people’s doors and barged into their apartments without so much as an “Excuse me,” and refused to leave until he’d made his attempt. But again and again he met with failure. A few of those he tried to wield were just unnaturally heavy so that he could not lift them. But others harmed him, scalding his hands or jolting him with shocks.
Meanwhile, the greatest threat in the city was coming not from witches, but from one of the “guests” brought to the world by BREW. Tohru Adachi had been attacking people, sexually assaulting young girls, murdering, and consuming the souls of his victims. Shibusen’s response was to restrict information, spread fear, and try to keep their “guests”-their supposed army-hiding inside while Adachi ran his rampage. The more Kanda learned of this, the more mistrustful of Shibusen’s motives he grew.
It was during this time that Kanda received an unexpected visitor-he awoke one morning to discover Heine knocking on his door. Upon having learned his own identity as a weapon and his form as two ornate chained blades, Heine apparently thought at once of the meister he’d had almost constant tension and discord with since they both arrived. From the moment that Kanda had Heine’s weapon form in his hands they both knew that the partnership was forged.
Shortly thereafter, a strange fog began to gather in the city, and out of this fog came Shadows-external manifestations of people’s most repressed desires, now released as pure and unbridled impulse and need. Kanda’s Shadow walked into the city’s church, doused it with kerosene, and set it on fire, but it was what his Shadow said-what it revealed of his past and of his private rage against the Order-that Kanda found unbearable. He set out to track it down in the city and to stop it, but on the way the Shadow he found was Heine’s not his own. As pure animal rage and lust, Heine’s Shadow might have torn him limb from limb, had it not been for Heine’s intervention.
As with other experiences they’d begun to have working together as partners, the experience bound the two, and when it was announced that the mysterious fog was linked with Adachi-whose unchecked consumption of souls had now turned him into a kishin, a monster the size of the whole school-the two hatched a plan together.
Shibusen wanted to seal Adachi in a chamber beneath the school to use him as a battery for a shield that they said would protect the city from witches. Kanda believed that Adachi should be killed outright and Shibusen not benefit from their negligent inaction which effectively fattened him on the souls that he consumed unchecked. Heine had his own reasons for wanting to see Adachi dead, but the two decided that, at the final key moment, they would slay the Kishin before he could be sealed.
However there were some who learned of this plan and who resolved to stop them going through with it. Alex Louis Armstrong and his partner Laura Kinney agreed to fight Kanda and Heine and prevent Adachi’s death. The battle left Kanda nearly cut in two and with a badly fractured skull, but he was saved from death by Franken Stein, in whose ghoulish care he recuperated for nearly a week. During that time, Heine remained loyally at his bedside, and when Kanda was released from the Shibusen clinic, Heine effectively moved in to Kanda’s apartment, taking up residence on his couch.
The relative calm of their routine in the city was broken not long after by the arrival of Giovanni-a man claiming to be Heine’s “brother” who seemed nearly obsessed with him. Giovanni knew things about Heine that Kanda didn’t know, and he played those to his advantage, working on Kanda’s insecurities about his partner and the still-veiled sparks of desire between them.
When Kanda intervened in a battle between the two, allowing Giovanni to escape and demanding explanations from Heine for his apparent murderous intent, the two turned their fight on each other. It was not until days later when Kanda finally managed to tell Heine something of his own past that they found a degree of reconciliation.
Still suspicious of Shibusen’s true agenda, the two joined a major mission in Colorado where they were on the front lines of a battle outside a witch stronghold. But upon return, the unspoken tensions between them again boiled to the surface, both imagining his desire to be solitary and unwelcome, and neither wanting to alienate his partner with an advance. Kanda ignored the situation for as long as possible, but in the end, their resonance broke and for days they did not talk, until finally, late one night, Heine turned up at Kanda’s door and they both threw caution to the wind.
They woke the next day, however, to find a strange air about the city. Drawn by an unshakable sensation as they passed down their building’s corridor, Kanda rushed into the apartment of a comrade from his own world, Mirada Lotto, with Heine only a few steps behind him. He had no way of knowing that Miranda’s Time Record was activating-malfunctioning-and before he had a chance to escape, he found himself being dragged into a vortex with Miranda and the two other inhabitants of the room, Winry Rockbell and Yuuri Shibuya.
The four of them were pulled ten years into the future, though they arrived separately: Kanda and Yuuri found themselves in the mountains miles away from Death City, where they met a patrol from a commune hidden in the mountains. In this dystopic future where Shibusen were losing their war and on the brink of defeat, a splinter group deserted Death City long ago to form this Calming Wavelength Camp out in the mountains.
Kanda and the others were stuck in this future time for nearly two months during which time Kanda’s views on Shibusen, their war, and their strategies shifted dramatically. Heine, he learned, was dead there. Having succumbed to madness and eaten human souls until he became a kishin, he was killed by those who had once been his allies. Kanda’s goal thus became to assure that this future would not come to pass. To that end, he knew that he must return to their original time, and to do that he must have a weapon.
It took him weeks of trying before he managed to wield Yuuri (who was a sword) successfully, learning to put aside all his personal dislike and resentment and truly allow himself to resonate with a weapon other than Heine, but he did it through his commitment to his partner. He thus won them the right to fight in the battle which would reclaim the Time Record and open the path for the four to return to the time they came from with a knowledge of the events that shaped this future and an awareness of how they might prevent them.
Their first action when they returned was to prevent the murder of Spirit Albarn at the hands of witches in the city. And shortly thereafter, once Kanda and Heine reunited, they joined a major mission in Michigan to destroy a witch stronghold and factory there. Having met with success there, they then took on a solo mission to clean up a kishin egg infestation in New Jersey.
They arrive in the town and set about the task of finding and destroying the kishin eggs there, but while they sleep on their first night there, Kanda will have had a vivid dream: he is again in Jordon and a strange looking man who wears a pale turban is approaching him on the battlefield. Kanda will have heard the man-Wisely-call him by name, and he will have heard himself answer back, “Who the hell are you?” And then the man speaks a name that Kanda knows all too well, though he hasn’t heard it said in years: Alma.
“Do you know that name?” the stranger says, “You do, don’t you. Your mind. Let us use it for our party.”
Wisely attacks. Kanda falls. And he will wake up in a place he's never seen before.
Post-Soul Campaign personality shifts/developments:
In Death City, for the first time in his life, Kanda was able to live outside the reach of the Order’s hand. He was given the opportunity to select his own loyalties, whom he would fight for and why, without the decision having really been made for him a priori and his “choice” a mere formality. The field of possibilities was open for him in a way that it had not been in his own world: he was free to hate and resent the Order, and that resentment has largely shaped his path since leaving his own world.
Having had to face and accept his Shadow as a part of himself means that he’s been forced to acknowledge, at least privately, the extent of the damage and hurt done to him by the Order. But on the other side was the realization that he did want something different than the life he had been handed. And the more time Kanda spent away from the Order’s reign, the broader the gulf between him and his objectives in his own world grew.
The experience of wielding a human weapon, and the necessity of forging genuine connectedness with another person in order to do so, taught Kanda that the possibility of positive intimate contact is not foreclosed for him. It has not, however, made him amicable or open to friendships in the least. As his weapon and partner, Heine has been the exception, not the rule, to Kanda’s treatment of people, and save for a few, he has constantly remained standoffish and aloof with others.
The meister/weapon system made it possible for intimacy to masquerade as practical necessity, and Kanda is very much a pragmatist, particularly when it comes to war. But that system also gave an institutional legitimacy to his relationship with Heine. In Death City, the scope of their personal commitment and desire were never laid bare, but always managed to appear with the patina of military efficiency. Kanda has thus maintained the public fiction that his partnership is utilitarian, while privately experiencing it as deeply personal. This sharp distinction between, and management of, the private and the public extends Kanda’s canon tendencies to privacy. Without advertising this fact though, Kanda has come to view this intimacy and bond as a strength (even a strength in battle) rather than a liability.
Kanda has a history of (secretly) finding his motivation to fight and to survive at all costs in people. But unlike “that person,” Heine is present and real, not a haunting apparition in Kanda’s mind. Upon his return from the “ten years later” future, Kanda had resolved (though never stated in public) not to return to his own world. His commitments and loyalties have been altered-his first concern now is to assure that the caprice of whatever powers brought him and his partner together does not throw them apart again into their separate worlds.
Additional information:
Kanda's Soul Campaign CR chart, which also includes timeline links.