Muraki Kazutaka (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
letsplaysurgeon) wrote2018-09-03 05:30 am
letsplaysurgeon) wrote2018-09-03 05:30 am
Entry tags:
Application to Siren's Pull
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Yami no Matsuei
Canon Format: Manga
Character's Name: Kazutaka Muraki
Character's Age: 33
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played.
What form will your character's NV take? Since Muraki is from the late nineties and technology was still in the fail-zone, he will be upgraded to this iPhone that will probably baffle him for a while.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: He describes himself as having a “peculiar constitution,” capable of absorbing the life force of others and making it his own. It is because of this that Muraki is often referred to as a vampire, sans the actual blood drinking and sparkles. The latter he would probably find tacky. Another feature of his “peculiar constitution” is his tolerance to various toxins and poisons that he developed by ingesting non-lethal doses over an indeterminable number of years. It remains to be seen why he started doing this in the first place, but he utilizes it in the King of Swords arc where he takes ten times the lethal dosage of strychnine and fakes his own death. While he fooled everyone, including a medical student, into believing he died, Muraki was merely in suspended animation, and snaps out of it later.
Call Muraki what you will, but he’s still a licensed doctor who has been in practice for eight years. It's never made clear whether Muraki has a specific practice or not, but he clearly went through all the medical rotations as doctors are required to in order to earn their license. He performed an autopsy on Wakabayashi, and the heart transplant that saved Tsubaki's life. He also continued to act as her general physician until her death. While he might be the last person you want to be alone with in a dark alley, Muraki can be an asset to have if you’re in a dark alley and going into cardiac arrest. He also seems to understand plants to some extent, displayed when he develops his own strand of peyote for the purpose of manipulating people in high doses without lethal side effects.
Next to his medical license, Muraki has a P.H.D. in creepy. In Nagasaki, he knew where to find the “yang” land necessary to resurrect a dead body, and was able to control said animated corpse. Instead of killing Hisoka on the spot like a normal psycho-murderer, he carved an elaborate curse into his body that caused him to suffer a slow and painful death, withering away for three years from an incurable illness. He was able to get away with it thanks to his ability to manipulate memories: he took them away, and gave them back after Hisoka became a shinigami for the trollol.
Muraki can also summon creatures; paralyze shinigami without touching them, and in some cases, teleport from place to place—including purgatory. In other words, he's more powerful than any doctor--or normal human being--should be.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them?
Weapons: Unless you count a pack of cigarettes and a chrome lighter as weapons. :|
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: Muraki was born into a wealthy family with multiple generations of doctors. His mother was mentally unstable and treated her son like one of the porcelain dolls she collected. His father was an adulterer. Muraki found this out the hard way when his father brought his half-brother Shidou Saki (a child he conceived with one of his patients) to live with their family. Muraki couldn’t forgive the fact that his father was unfaithful—while his mother was pregnant with him, to make matters worse. But he tried to put the blame where it belonged and get along with his new brother.
In the anime, it is made obvious through a flashback that Saki took advantage of this, killed both Muraki’s parents and then tried to kill Muraki before the butler killed him with a gunshot to the back. In the manga, however, what happened between the two brothers is left somewhat vague, especially since Muraki identifies himself as his mother’s killer. But he accuses Saki of destroying his family and hurting “his greatest love,” possibly referring to his fiancée Ukyou, who was his childhood sweetheart. Then Saki died (again of unknown circumstances in the manga), and Muraki preserved his severed head in the high hopes that he will be able to resurrect Saki one day and kill him again, as the opportunity was stolen from him.
Somehow Muraki maintained his aspirations and idealism into his college years and certification as a doctor, but when faced with his own weakness and inability to cure all his patients, his torment became a festering wound that inevitably drove him to become a murderer, familiarizing himself with black magic in his search for a way to ascend death.
Namely, he was looking for a shinigami, Tsuzuki Asato. After finding his photograph in his grandfather’s medical records, Muraki was immediately captivated by the man that he saw, and he devoted years to trying to find him. In Muraki’s own sick way, it was love at first sight. In the series, this obsession will become a reoccurring plot device.
The Nagasaki Arc
The King of Swords Arc
Point in Canon: In the middle of the King of Swords arc, after he is presumed “dead.”
The arc does not begin with Muraki, but with Tsuzuki and Hisoka—two shinigami in charge of investigating and solving cases where souls don’t die when they’re supposed to. Their work brings them to the Queen Camellia, a casino liner where souls have been disappearing instead of passing through the veil into the afterlife. They go undercover: Hisoka as a VIP passenger and Tsuzuki asfan service a dealer in the ship’s casino. So when Tsuzuki attempts to visit Hisoka’s suite, he is stopped by several American guards who try to inform him that the V.I.P. area is restricted, but Tsuzuki doesn’t understand a word they’re saying. Engrish is thrown about. And so are expensive bottles of wine—at Tsuzuki’s head. As it turns out, Muraki is also on the cruise liner and he is trolling, deciding that he wanted to make an entrance and almost give Tsuzuki a concussion at the same time. And then invite him to drink with him. Obviously Tsuzuki is shocked to see Muraki is alive and suspects that he is up to something sinister on the ship, while Muraki claims that he is just there to look after the owner’s daughter as he has been doing for the past seven years, even performing the heart transplant that saved her life. But his innocence seems even more questionable the next morning when one of the other V.I.P. passengers is found dead in his room—with his heart carved out of his chest and arterial punctures on his neck. Although the cause of death was actually poison, and the gory stuff occurred post-mortem, Tsuzuki and Hisoka find that the vampire hickeys are a little too reminiscent of what happened in Nagasaki, and waste no time accusing Muraki. Of course it doesn’t turn out to be that simple—Tsubaki had been feeling ill and called Muraki, who stayed by her bedside the entire night. The whole thing becomes a bit like a game of Clue: where the suspects are limited to whomever was on the V.I.P. floor. But Tsuzuki and Hisoka still suspect Muraki. At least until Muraki is also “murdered.” The word ‘murdered’ being in quotations because he took the poison himself and put himself into a state of suspended animation for a temporary amount of time.
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: When he poisoned himself on the Queen Camellia, Muraki had expected to remain asleep until it was time to unveil his plan. Instead he was pulled from his universe into one known as Luceti, where the men are men and everyone sports a pair of fluffy angel wings. Needless to say he was not happy with this development until he learned that Tsuzuki and Hisoka were there and had no idea that he found them. He even had conversations with Tsuzuki over text without Tsuzuki being any wiser. So Muraki decided to take advantage of this opportunity and the public network in order to spy on the shinigami and gather information to use against them later.
For three months he flew under the radar, convincing many that he was a good doctor and nothing more. Then the Malnosso conducted a mass experiment, warping everyone’s memories so they believed that they had been born in Luceti and had families with the other villagers. For a week or so, Muraki was married and had a teenage son, and Tsuzuki was his childhood friend. So after the experiment wore off, Tsuzuki and Hisoka were finally made aware of Muraki’s presence in Luceti, leaving him no choice but to relocate to keep them off his doorstep. It also prompted him to plan his first attack.
One of Tsuzuki’s friends had been a patient of his during the experiment, and Muraki takes advantage of their trust by poisoning them over a gradual period of time. This was going to lead into abducting said victim, staged as a mallynapping, but this will be the point that the Core will pull Muraki from.
Character Personality: Let’s start this off with a Western superhero cliché: by day, Muraki Kazutaka appears to be nothing more than a mild-mannered doctor. He takes care of sick people. He wears clean, white outfits. He’s strikingly attractive. He’s Doctor McDreamy with less hair product and a fake eye. But this is the type of misconception that he thrives on, and exploits with lethal results. Many have been fooled to believe he’s a good man, but behind his angelic appearance and suave disposition lurks a cold-blooded killer adept in the art of manipulating those around him like his own collection of puppets.
Eight years of practicing medicine frustrated Muraki with its limitations, and dead patients filled him with guilt and self-hatred. He was driven mad by his own weaknesses, and pitted him against death. And because he hit a brick wall in conventional medicine, he turned to alternative—supernatural—means to go beyond the restrictions of the human body, which he was so willing to leave behind in disgust in search of something more potent: the perfect physical form.
It doesn’t take a trained psychiatric professional to determine that Muraki is crazy, but it’s more than just being a couple plums short of a Christmas pie. He tells Dr. Satomi, his former professor and pawn in the Kyoto Arc, that he no longer understands what a heinous crime it is to play god and toy with human lives—after all, he considers himself above the human race, and there’s nothing wrong with using (and disposing of) tools once he has no more use for them. This is not even the first time that Muraki is happily out of fucks to give about the lives he destroys. It could be that he just discusses these things lightly in order to cause Tsuzuki and Hisoka pain, or murder and rape is as casual to Muraki as knitting or another equally unassuming hobby.
But unlike some evil-doers who commit their wrong deeds in the shadows and try to get away with it as long as they can help it, Muraki actively tries to get the attention of the Ministry of Hades, so they will dispatch the shinigami and be forced to deal with him, which often leads to Muraki killing a bunch of people to bring Tsuzuki to him.
Muraki is ambitious and steadfast beyond the point of obsession. He is a man that can’t be stopped once he’s after something, whether it’s power over death, a new doll for his collection, or the blood of a shinigami. Another example of Muraki’s obsessive goals is his half-brother Saki, whom he despises for reasons that were—as mentioned in the history section—left somewhat ambiguous in the manga. Regardless, when Saki died sixteen years ago, Muraki preserved his head in a sci-fi-esque pod of unidentifiable liquid and origin, and has been holding onto the desperate, irrational hope that one day he will find a way to bring Saki back to life…and then kill him with his own two hands.
He doesn’t treat his victims equally. When he loves something, he “makes a special effort,” which is a vague way of saying he tortures his favorite prey. Hisoka’s death was unnecessary and cruel. The truth is Muraki didn’t have to kill him when he already took away his memories of the murder he witnessed, but he wanted a piece of him. The curse Muraki laid upon him continues into his afterlife as well, as he explains during their poker game: “My mark is a part of you now, it’s in your very being…on my whim, it begins again” (Volume 3, Page 64).
And his interaction with Tsuzuki is often a steady process of emotional evisceration, tearing into his past and his love for human beings in order to watch his heart break when they perish in front of him. Muraki finds it both fascinating and repulsive.
And he just wouldn’t be a villain if he didn’t claim that he and Tsuzuki had something in common. In Nagasaki: “I am you and you are me…we were born from the belly of the same woman…” (Volume 1, page 157) and in Kyoto: “You and I are of the same breed. We’re abominations, the products of genetic experiments that violated the laws of nature. We who were born of darkness must walk in darkness. Because we were never meant to exist…we’re the sons of men who wear the black mark upon their foreheads. We are…descendants of darkness!” (Volume 8, page 109-110) He implies that he knows (or thinks he knows) Tsuzuki on a level deeper than just reading his case file. It’s not terribly farfetched to speculate that he sees himself in Tsuzuki’s agony over people dying in front of him (the way he felt agony over his dead patients) and hates it. Manipulation and bloodshed has not healed Muraki’s self-loathing, either. As his friend Oriya points out to Hisoka, “he continues to hate and curse himself…his parents, the world, even god.”
Supernatural power, experimentation or the kind of stuff that Prince wouldn’t sing about—whatever Muraki wants Tsuzuki for; he wants him with a profound hunger. He admits to having no control around him, and his actions often prove as much. One example is how he initially foregoes an opportunity to draw energy from Tsuzuki’s mouth because it was “too early in the relationship” for that, but then pins him to the ground on a whim. He has a penchant for bad touching at the worst possible moments. All that said, Muraki isn’t gay—exclusively at least. It’s specified by the author in the third volume that if he’s interested in someone, it doesn’t matter what sex they are. He also has a fiancée, or at the very least a girlfriend that he’s known since childhood. And Muraki seems to care very deeply about her, despite his repeated cruelty towards other women.
When dealing with the world, Muraki is often well-mannered and proper: a meticulous gentleman that no one would suspect of a parking ticket, let alone numerous homicides. However he also has a side that is eccentric and forward. When he loses his patience or simply doesn’t give a damn, he discards his polite language in favor of being blunt and cold—even sarcastic. One example is when he receives a phone call during breakfast, and instructs his friend Oriya to blow them off by telling them that he’s eating “go-to-hell” soup. He takes pleasure in telling people more than they want to know or what they’re ready to hear at the moment.
Muraki also possesses a keen ability to stay calm as a cucumber in most situations. It could be something he developed in his medical practice, where a doctor has to keep a level-head and make rational decisions when a patient is coding, or some other type of hospital shit hits the fan. Or it could be the fact that everything in his world is going according to plan. At the end of the King of Swords arc, when the truth is revealed and Tsuzuki is raging at him, he looks him straight in the eye and deadpans, “It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, no?” This composure is borderline suicidal at times, when Muraki puts himself at risk of pain and horrible death by the King of Hell’s right hand man, and doesn’t seem the least bit perturbed about it most of the time.
That said, Muraki is shown to be an occasional victim of jealousy. In the anime it drives him up the wall when Tsuzuki is too preoccupied with Hisoka’s safety to enjoy their “date,” and things get ugly. In the manga, his jealousy is just a footnote in Nagasaki when the shinigami team up and it starts to look like he’s going to lose. Regardless it suggests that when such a rare phenomenon occurs, Muraki can’t stand it when things don’t go his way.
He has a taste for beautiful things, and a flair for picking out fine wine and roses—qualities that would make him an appealing romantic partner if it didn’t come with a side of extra-strength crazy. He also has a spiritual side, which is possibly a little more prevalent in the anime, where he first appears in a church and some time afterwards takes Tsuzuki to a museum and empathizes with the oppressed Christians. In the manga, there is a graveyard full of stillborn babies and fallen women that Muraki visits more frequently than his own friends in Kyoto, saying that the energy there “calms him.” He also explains the Japanese concept of sin to his old professor, how it is akin to being unclean, and filthiness can be treated with water. So no matter how many sins Muraki commits, he is “born” anew once he cleanses himself, and is free to commit even more sins.
It is sometimes hard to detect due to his gentlemanly disposition and regal posture, but Muraki also has a profound childishness about him. Referring to the Freudian model of structure, Muraki is heavily influenced by the id, which is based on the pleasure principle and the initial structural component of a developing personality. According to Freud, the id is the center of our desire, our basic animal needs and impulses that demand instant gratification. The id doesn’t care about the reality of the situation, or the needs of others, it only cares about its own satisfaction. Subsequently, when Muraki wants something, nothing else is important. To fulfill his motive, he goes to any length necessary, tossing aside morality and limitations to satisfy his need. He’s like a child playing with toys.
And speaking of toys. Muraki has a collection of dolls that he inherited from his mother that play a part in his fragmented psyche. The first glimpse into his childhood is a flashback of his mother referring to him as the “prize of her collection” and the imagery heavily suggests sexual abuse--at the very least of a verbal nature. This is more likely than not correlated with Muraki’s frequent reference to his victims as “dolls” or puppets to dispose of at his whim. It might also contribute to his fixation on youth and exterior beauty.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: Muraki had only been in Luceti for about five months, which isn’t enough time for a personality like his to undergo significant change. The loss of control in being pulled from his universe into an alternate one (before he could wake up and enjoy the climax of his evil scheme, no less) hits him where it really hurts. Most characters don’t appreciate the inter-dimensional mind fuck that is waking up in a different world, but Muraki has a pre-existing complex about control, best displayed in his reaction towards the helplessness he felt over his dead patients. He became a murderer in order to find a way to one-up death. This complex was further exacerbated by the experiments that the Malnosso conducted on him, altering his heart and even his memories. He didn’t take kindly to that (or the undeniable karma in the last scenario), and wanted to find the Malnosso so he could destroy them for their impertinence. But in the meantime, he had no choice but to settle down in the village and attempt to live a life similar to what he had in his own universe.
He met two people that reminded him of his best friend and fiancée on a subconscious level. This is rather significant, since it can be speculated that Muraki hasn’t had a single meaningful relationship with anyone since he lost his kumquat. Muraki didn’t hate Nill or Trafalgar Law, and didn’t have any use for them. So he resolved to keep them at a distance so they wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire that would inevitably expose him as the monster that he was.
And then there was Tsuzuki, the key component that kept Muraki from self-destructing. Because Tsuzuki was also a prisoner in the village, he could still obsess over him and focus his energy on targeting his loved ones in order to break Tsuzuki—the closest thing to normal Muraki could get in an alternate universe, which leads into what will happen to Muraki psychologically in Siren’s Port.
Character Plans: This will be the second time that Muraki has been torn from one of his diabolical schemes into an alternate universe against his will. He will feel shamed, then enraged, and then he will lose it. Chances are he will kill the Greeter for the very misfortune of being the first person he sees in Siren’s Port. And being alone in a new city without Tsuzuki or anyone else he recognizes (even the stupid brat that he killed once upon a time) will make him unstable. But Muraki is too arrogant to kill himself or languish for too long. So he will repeat the formula that he had in Luceti: locate the nearest hospital or clinic and attempt to get a job there; then gain the trust of the masses who don’t know any better. It will be a short adjustment to needing money again, after living in a village for five months where everything was provided for him. He will fly under the radar just as he did in his own world, and he might not feel like doing anything despicable for a while because Tsuzuki is not there to catch him for it—nor the shinigami bureau that he was trying to declare war on. At the very least he will still be driven to explore new science and medicine in order to get the best of death and resurrect his dead half-brother. With this in mind, he will most likely take interest in SERO and their human sciences, medical development and the anti-human slant in their advertising. The fact that the company experiments on humans will not even faze him in the slightest. But if he allies with them, he won’t consider himself a drone of theirs, but rather part of a convenient partnership until he gets what he needs to go home (at this point it doesn’t need to be said that the reality of the situation and what goes on in Muraki’s head tend to be at odds with each other).
Appearance/PB:
[001] [002] [003]
Due to his time in Luceti, he has also acquired a bar code on the back of his neck, and a pair of bird wings that are much too small to fly with and probably look silly in proportion to the grown man they’re attached to. These are a few of the reasons he dislikes them and keeps them hidden underneath his clothes most of the time. The wings are white with rose red down feathers that are revealed when they are spread or lifted.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The first thing anyone should notice is the immediate onslaught of white when the video feed begins. From his hair down to his shoes, the man is like a blank sheet of printer paper if one were to ask the Blue Fairy to turn it into a real boy. He’s had a few days to compartmentalize his rage, so Muraki merely crosses his legs and smiles at the camera. No trace of the homicidal rage he exhibited upon arrival.]
I suppose I should be more shocked by this, if this were my first time being…hm, the proper term would be “kidnapped,” wouldn’t it? It has gone well beyond the point of disruptive into the absurd: if there was a God, I’d wonder what his motives are for transporting me so often. I might even question him. But I do not believe in God.
[Muraki seems to stop at that, but removes his glasses in order to examine the lenses in the light and then polishes them.] …In fact, it was a machine that brought me here, if memory serves right. [He replaces the glasses on his face.] I suppose I should be thankful that I was allowed to keep my clothes this time. …It’s a shame though, that this Core couldn’t do something about the tacky wings.
Third Person Sample
After he pulled himself off the ground and brushed the red dirt off his clothes, he was surprised that the first person who surfaced to mind was not Ukyou or even his beloved Tsuzuki. It was a faceless stranger whose name he could no longer place. But he remembered his word that he would speak to him again about whether or not Muraki changed his mind about Luceti being Hell. He still had no doubts: Luceti wasn’t Hell. And if there was a dimension of ineffable torment, he wanted to give it more credit than just grafting a pair of vulnerable bird wings onto his back.
It was constantly uprooting him from any semblance of control and destroying his carefully laid plans. For a second time he had Tsuzuki right where he wanted him, and he was yanked even further away from everything that mattered to him.
Overseas. Fourteen years into the future. All this information relayed onto him by a middle-aged man with watery eyes and a cheap threadbare suit.
“Canada?”
“Yeah.”
He could feel a headache coming on, and it wasn’t just from the setting sun reflecting off the pattern of green parrots on the Greeter’s tie. “How is this possible?”
“You’re standing on top of it, actually. It’s this big machine called the Core that keeps malfunctioning and pulling people into the city. And uhh…you’re one of them.”
Muraki snorts at this and runs a hand through his hair. “How fortunate of me.”
And then silence. He turns to look at the empty parking lot beyond the baseball field, but he could still hear the greeter fidgeting, kicking the dirt and jingling loose change in his pockets. “…I can show you where the Newcomers normally stay, if you want…”
He wants to tell him to go fuck himself, but is furious to acknowledge that he didn’t have much choice in the matter. “Thank you.” At first he follows the Greeter with a blank mind and no intentions. Then all too suddenly his patience withers like a leaf in a wildfire. Steeped in anger and the repulsive hatred for himself and this new prison, he just snaps.
Muraki grabs the Greeter by the back of his jacket and shoves him in a swift jerking motion, watching as his forehead connected with the edge of the bleachers and he rolls like a duffel bag. A cut blooms on his temple, and he lies motionless in the darkened grass. He stands over the greeter’s body and peers down at him with careful eyes—it was possible he was already dead and the end to his outburst was premature…
The greeter twitches, rasping at him: “Don’t—”
“No,” Muraki responds plainly as he crouches over him. Wrapping his hands around his neck seems to cause a swell of adrenaline to break through the greeter’s haze like the last resort to save his pitiful life, gripping at one of his wrists and tugging at it.
“Stop. Why are you doing this?”
His attempt weakens to a physical whisper as Muraki’s thumbs press down on his throat, just underneath the masculine lump of cartilage with unbearable slowness.
It took patience to choke someone to death, and that’s why it wasn’t his normal cup of tea. But he needed to watch the life drain out of something. Even some pathetic simpleton that was just trying to help him out.
General
Canon Source: Yami no Matsuei
Canon Format: Manga
Character's Name: Kazutaka Muraki
Character's Age: 33
What form will your character's NV take? Since Muraki is from the late nineties and technology was still in the fail-zone, he will be upgraded to this iPhone that will probably baffle him for a while.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: He describes himself as having a “peculiar constitution,” capable of absorbing the life force of others and making it his own. It is because of this that Muraki is often referred to as a vampire, sans the actual blood drinking and sparkles. The latter he would probably find tacky. Another feature of his “peculiar constitution” is his tolerance to various toxins and poisons that he developed by ingesting non-lethal doses over an indeterminable number of years. It remains to be seen why he started doing this in the first place, but he utilizes it in the King of Swords arc where he takes ten times the lethal dosage of strychnine and fakes his own death. While he fooled everyone, including a medical student, into believing he died, Muraki was merely in suspended animation, and snaps out of it later.
Call Muraki what you will, but he’s still a licensed doctor who has been in practice for eight years. It's never made clear whether Muraki has a specific practice or not, but he clearly went through all the medical rotations as doctors are required to in order to earn their license. He performed an autopsy on Wakabayashi, and the heart transplant that saved Tsubaki's life. He also continued to act as her general physician until her death. While he might be the last person you want to be alone with in a dark alley, Muraki can be an asset to have if you’re in a dark alley and going into cardiac arrest. He also seems to understand plants to some extent, displayed when he develops his own strand of peyote for the purpose of manipulating people in high doses without lethal side effects.
Next to his medical license, Muraki has a P.H.D. in creepy. In Nagasaki, he knew where to find the “yang” land necessary to resurrect a dead body, and was able to control said animated corpse. Instead of killing Hisoka on the spot like a normal psycho-murderer, he carved an elaborate curse into his body that caused him to suffer a slow and painful death, withering away for three years from an incurable illness. He was able to get away with it thanks to his ability to manipulate memories: he took them away, and gave them back after Hisoka became a shinigami for the trollol.
Muraki can also summon creatures; paralyze shinigami without touching them, and in some cases, teleport from place to place—including purgatory. In other words, he's more powerful than any doctor--or normal human being--should be.
Weapons: Unless you count a pack of cigarettes and a chrome lighter as weapons. :|
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: Muraki was born into a wealthy family with multiple generations of doctors. His mother was mentally unstable and treated her son like one of the porcelain dolls she collected. His father was an adulterer. Muraki found this out the hard way when his father brought his half-brother Shidou Saki (a child he conceived with one of his patients) to live with their family. Muraki couldn’t forgive the fact that his father was unfaithful—while his mother was pregnant with him, to make matters worse. But he tried to put the blame where it belonged and get along with his new brother.
In the anime, it is made obvious through a flashback that Saki took advantage of this, killed both Muraki’s parents and then tried to kill Muraki before the butler killed him with a gunshot to the back. In the manga, however, what happened between the two brothers is left somewhat vague, especially since Muraki identifies himself as his mother’s killer. But he accuses Saki of destroying his family and hurting “his greatest love,” possibly referring to his fiancée Ukyou, who was his childhood sweetheart. Then Saki died (again of unknown circumstances in the manga), and Muraki preserved his severed head in the high hopes that he will be able to resurrect Saki one day and kill him again, as the opportunity was stolen from him.
Somehow Muraki maintained his aspirations and idealism into his college years and certification as a doctor, but when faced with his own weakness and inability to cure all his patients, his torment became a festering wound that inevitably drove him to become a murderer, familiarizing himself with black magic in his search for a way to ascend death.
Namely, he was looking for a shinigami, Tsuzuki Asato. After finding his photograph in his grandfather’s medical records, Muraki was immediately captivated by the man that he saw, and he devoted years to trying to find him. In Muraki’s own sick way, it was love at first sight. In the series, this obsession will become a reoccurring plot device.
The Nagasaki Arc
The King of Swords Arc
Point in Canon: In the middle of the King of Swords arc, after he is presumed “dead.”
The arc does not begin with Muraki, but with Tsuzuki and Hisoka—two shinigami in charge of investigating and solving cases where souls don’t die when they’re supposed to. Their work brings them to the Queen Camellia, a casino liner where souls have been disappearing instead of passing through the veil into the afterlife. They go undercover: Hisoka as a VIP passenger and Tsuzuki as
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: When he poisoned himself on the Queen Camellia, Muraki had expected to remain asleep until it was time to unveil his plan. Instead he was pulled from his universe into one known as Luceti, where the men are men and everyone sports a pair of fluffy angel wings. Needless to say he was not happy with this development until he learned that Tsuzuki and Hisoka were there and had no idea that he found them. He even had conversations with Tsuzuki over text without Tsuzuki being any wiser. So Muraki decided to take advantage of this opportunity and the public network in order to spy on the shinigami and gather information to use against them later.
For three months he flew under the radar, convincing many that he was a good doctor and nothing more. Then the Malnosso conducted a mass experiment, warping everyone’s memories so they believed that they had been born in Luceti and had families with the other villagers. For a week or so, Muraki was married and had a teenage son, and Tsuzuki was his childhood friend. So after the experiment wore off, Tsuzuki and Hisoka were finally made aware of Muraki’s presence in Luceti, leaving him no choice but to relocate to keep them off his doorstep. It also prompted him to plan his first attack.
One of Tsuzuki’s friends had been a patient of his during the experiment, and Muraki takes advantage of their trust by poisoning them over a gradual period of time. This was going to lead into abducting said victim, staged as a mallynapping, but this will be the point that the Core will pull Muraki from.
Character Personality: Let’s start this off with a Western superhero cliché: by day, Muraki Kazutaka appears to be nothing more than a mild-mannered doctor. He takes care of sick people. He wears clean, white outfits. He’s strikingly attractive. He’s Doctor McDreamy with less hair product and a fake eye. But this is the type of misconception that he thrives on, and exploits with lethal results. Many have been fooled to believe he’s a good man, but behind his angelic appearance and suave disposition lurks a cold-blooded killer adept in the art of manipulating those around him like his own collection of puppets.
Eight years of practicing medicine frustrated Muraki with its limitations, and dead patients filled him with guilt and self-hatred. He was driven mad by his own weaknesses, and pitted him against death. And because he hit a brick wall in conventional medicine, he turned to alternative—supernatural—means to go beyond the restrictions of the human body, which he was so willing to leave behind in disgust in search of something more potent: the perfect physical form.
It doesn’t take a trained psychiatric professional to determine that Muraki is crazy, but it’s more than just being a couple plums short of a Christmas pie. He tells Dr. Satomi, his former professor and pawn in the Kyoto Arc, that he no longer understands what a heinous crime it is to play god and toy with human lives—after all, he considers himself above the human race, and there’s nothing wrong with using (and disposing of) tools once he has no more use for them. This is not even the first time that Muraki is happily out of fucks to give about the lives he destroys. It could be that he just discusses these things lightly in order to cause Tsuzuki and Hisoka pain, or murder and rape is as casual to Muraki as knitting or another equally unassuming hobby.
But unlike some evil-doers who commit their wrong deeds in the shadows and try to get away with it as long as they can help it, Muraki actively tries to get the attention of the Ministry of Hades, so they will dispatch the shinigami and be forced to deal with him, which often leads to Muraki killing a bunch of people to bring Tsuzuki to him.
Muraki is ambitious and steadfast beyond the point of obsession. He is a man that can’t be stopped once he’s after something, whether it’s power over death, a new doll for his collection, or the blood of a shinigami. Another example of Muraki’s obsessive goals is his half-brother Saki, whom he despises for reasons that were—as mentioned in the history section—left somewhat ambiguous in the manga. Regardless, when Saki died sixteen years ago, Muraki preserved his head in a sci-fi-esque pod of unidentifiable liquid and origin, and has been holding onto the desperate, irrational hope that one day he will find a way to bring Saki back to life…and then kill him with his own two hands.
He doesn’t treat his victims equally. When he loves something, he “makes a special effort,” which is a vague way of saying he tortures his favorite prey. Hisoka’s death was unnecessary and cruel. The truth is Muraki didn’t have to kill him when he already took away his memories of the murder he witnessed, but he wanted a piece of him. The curse Muraki laid upon him continues into his afterlife as well, as he explains during their poker game: “My mark is a part of you now, it’s in your very being…on my whim, it begins again” (Volume 3, Page 64).
And his interaction with Tsuzuki is often a steady process of emotional evisceration, tearing into his past and his love for human beings in order to watch his heart break when they perish in front of him. Muraki finds it both fascinating and repulsive.
And he just wouldn’t be a villain if he didn’t claim that he and Tsuzuki had something in common. In Nagasaki: “I am you and you are me…we were born from the belly of the same woman…” (Volume 1, page 157) and in Kyoto: “You and I are of the same breed. We’re abominations, the products of genetic experiments that violated the laws of nature. We who were born of darkness must walk in darkness. Because we were never meant to exist…we’re the sons of men who wear the black mark upon their foreheads. We are…descendants of darkness!” (Volume 8, page 109-110) He implies that he knows (or thinks he knows) Tsuzuki on a level deeper than just reading his case file. It’s not terribly farfetched to speculate that he sees himself in Tsuzuki’s agony over people dying in front of him (the way he felt agony over his dead patients) and hates it. Manipulation and bloodshed has not healed Muraki’s self-loathing, either. As his friend Oriya points out to Hisoka, “he continues to hate and curse himself…his parents, the world, even god.”
Supernatural power, experimentation or the kind of stuff that Prince wouldn’t sing about—whatever Muraki wants Tsuzuki for; he wants him with a profound hunger. He admits to having no control around him, and his actions often prove as much. One example is how he initially foregoes an opportunity to draw energy from Tsuzuki’s mouth because it was “too early in the relationship” for that, but then pins him to the ground on a whim. He has a penchant for bad touching at the worst possible moments. All that said, Muraki isn’t gay—exclusively at least. It’s specified by the author in the third volume that if he’s interested in someone, it doesn’t matter what sex they are. He also has a fiancée, or at the very least a girlfriend that he’s known since childhood. And Muraki seems to care very deeply about her, despite his repeated cruelty towards other women.
When dealing with the world, Muraki is often well-mannered and proper: a meticulous gentleman that no one would suspect of a parking ticket, let alone numerous homicides. However he also has a side that is eccentric and forward. When he loses his patience or simply doesn’t give a damn, he discards his polite language in favor of being blunt and cold—even sarcastic. One example is when he receives a phone call during breakfast, and instructs his friend Oriya to blow them off by telling them that he’s eating “go-to-hell” soup. He takes pleasure in telling people more than they want to know or what they’re ready to hear at the moment.
Muraki also possesses a keen ability to stay calm as a cucumber in most situations. It could be something he developed in his medical practice, where a doctor has to keep a level-head and make rational decisions when a patient is coding, or some other type of hospital shit hits the fan. Or it could be the fact that everything in his world is going according to plan. At the end of the King of Swords arc, when the truth is revealed and Tsuzuki is raging at him, he looks him straight in the eye and deadpans, “It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, no?” This composure is borderline suicidal at times, when Muraki puts himself at risk of pain and horrible death by the King of Hell’s right hand man, and doesn’t seem the least bit perturbed about it most of the time.
That said, Muraki is shown to be an occasional victim of jealousy. In the anime it drives him up the wall when Tsuzuki is too preoccupied with Hisoka’s safety to enjoy their “date,” and things get ugly. In the manga, his jealousy is just a footnote in Nagasaki when the shinigami team up and it starts to look like he’s going to lose. Regardless it suggests that when such a rare phenomenon occurs, Muraki can’t stand it when things don’t go his way.
He has a taste for beautiful things, and a flair for picking out fine wine and roses—qualities that would make him an appealing romantic partner if it didn’t come with a side of extra-strength crazy. He also has a spiritual side, which is possibly a little more prevalent in the anime, where he first appears in a church and some time afterwards takes Tsuzuki to a museum and empathizes with the oppressed Christians. In the manga, there is a graveyard full of stillborn babies and fallen women that Muraki visits more frequently than his own friends in Kyoto, saying that the energy there “calms him.” He also explains the Japanese concept of sin to his old professor, how it is akin to being unclean, and filthiness can be treated with water. So no matter how many sins Muraki commits, he is “born” anew once he cleanses himself, and is free to commit even more sins.
It is sometimes hard to detect due to his gentlemanly disposition and regal posture, but Muraki also has a profound childishness about him. Referring to the Freudian model of structure, Muraki is heavily influenced by the id, which is based on the pleasure principle and the initial structural component of a developing personality. According to Freud, the id is the center of our desire, our basic animal needs and impulses that demand instant gratification. The id doesn’t care about the reality of the situation, or the needs of others, it only cares about its own satisfaction. Subsequently, when Muraki wants something, nothing else is important. To fulfill his motive, he goes to any length necessary, tossing aside morality and limitations to satisfy his need. He’s like a child playing with toys.
And speaking of toys. Muraki has a collection of dolls that he inherited from his mother that play a part in his fragmented psyche. The first glimpse into his childhood is a flashback of his mother referring to him as the “prize of her collection” and the imagery heavily suggests sexual abuse--at the very least of a verbal nature. This is more likely than not correlated with Muraki’s frequent reference to his victims as “dolls” or puppets to dispose of at his whim. It might also contribute to his fixation on youth and exterior beauty.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: Muraki had only been in Luceti for about five months, which isn’t enough time for a personality like his to undergo significant change. The loss of control in being pulled from his universe into an alternate one (before he could wake up and enjoy the climax of his evil scheme, no less) hits him where it really hurts. Most characters don’t appreciate the inter-dimensional mind fuck that is waking up in a different world, but Muraki has a pre-existing complex about control, best displayed in his reaction towards the helplessness he felt over his dead patients. He became a murderer in order to find a way to one-up death. This complex was further exacerbated by the experiments that the Malnosso conducted on him, altering his heart and even his memories. He didn’t take kindly to that (or the undeniable karma in the last scenario), and wanted to find the Malnosso so he could destroy them for their impertinence. But in the meantime, he had no choice but to settle down in the village and attempt to live a life similar to what he had in his own universe.
He met two people that reminded him of his best friend and fiancée on a subconscious level. This is rather significant, since it can be speculated that Muraki hasn’t had a single meaningful relationship with anyone since he lost his kumquat. Muraki didn’t hate Nill or Trafalgar Law, and didn’t have any use for them. So he resolved to keep them at a distance so they wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire that would inevitably expose him as the monster that he was.
And then there was Tsuzuki, the key component that kept Muraki from self-destructing. Because Tsuzuki was also a prisoner in the village, he could still obsess over him and focus his energy on targeting his loved ones in order to break Tsuzuki—the closest thing to normal Muraki could get in an alternate universe, which leads into what will happen to Muraki psychologically in Siren’s Port.
Character Plans: This will be the second time that Muraki has been torn from one of his diabolical schemes into an alternate universe against his will. He will feel shamed, then enraged, and then he will lose it. Chances are he will kill the Greeter for the very misfortune of being the first person he sees in Siren’s Port. And being alone in a new city without Tsuzuki or anyone else he recognizes (even the stupid brat that he killed once upon a time) will make him unstable. But Muraki is too arrogant to kill himself or languish for too long. So he will repeat the formula that he had in Luceti: locate the nearest hospital or clinic and attempt to get a job there; then gain the trust of the masses who don’t know any better. It will be a short adjustment to needing money again, after living in a village for five months where everything was provided for him. He will fly under the radar just as he did in his own world, and he might not feel like doing anything despicable for a while because Tsuzuki is not there to catch him for it—nor the shinigami bureau that he was trying to declare war on. At the very least he will still be driven to explore new science and medicine in order to get the best of death and resurrect his dead half-brother. With this in mind, he will most likely take interest in SERO and their human sciences, medical development and the anti-human slant in their advertising. The fact that the company experiments on humans will not even faze him in the slightest. But if he allies with them, he won’t consider himself a drone of theirs, but rather part of a convenient partnership until he gets what he needs to go home (at this point it doesn’t need to be said that the reality of the situation and what goes on in Muraki’s head tend to be at odds with each other).
Appearance/PB:
[001] [002] [003]
![[001]](http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f49/KurikaraRyuOh/Muraki%20and%20Tsuzuki/7.jpg){kind=link}
![[002]](http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e272/Small_J/CP/muraki-char.jpg){kind=link}
![[003]](http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/mm126/HA2693/Shonen-ai_yaoi/Yami%20no%20matsue/moo.jpg){kind=link}
Due to his time in Luceti, he has also acquired a bar code on the back of his neck, and a pair of bird wings that are much too small to fly with and probably look silly in proportion to the grown man they’re attached to. These are a few of the reasons he dislikes them and keeps them hidden underneath his clothes most of the time. The wings are white with rose red down feathers that are revealed when they are spread or lifted.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The first thing anyone should notice is the immediate onslaught of white when the video feed begins. From his hair down to his shoes, the man is like a blank sheet of printer paper if one were to ask the Blue Fairy to turn it into a real boy. He’s had a few days to compartmentalize his rage, so Muraki merely crosses his legs and smiles at the camera. No trace of the homicidal rage he exhibited upon arrival.]
I suppose I should be more shocked by this, if this were my first time being…hm, the proper term would be “kidnapped,” wouldn’t it? It has gone well beyond the point of disruptive into the absurd: if there was a God, I’d wonder what his motives are for transporting me so often. I might even question him. But I do not believe in God.
[Muraki seems to stop at that, but removes his glasses in order to examine the lenses in the light and then polishes them.] …In fact, it was a machine that brought me here, if memory serves right. [He replaces the glasses on his face.] I suppose I should be thankful that I was allowed to keep my clothes this time. …It’s a shame though, that this Core couldn’t do something about the tacky wings.
Third Person Sample
After he pulled himself off the ground and brushed the red dirt off his clothes, he was surprised that the first person who surfaced to mind was not Ukyou or even his beloved Tsuzuki. It was a faceless stranger whose name he could no longer place. But he remembered his word that he would speak to him again about whether or not Muraki changed his mind about Luceti being Hell. He still had no doubts: Luceti wasn’t Hell. And if there was a dimension of ineffable torment, he wanted to give it more credit than just grafting a pair of vulnerable bird wings onto his back.
It was constantly uprooting him from any semblance of control and destroying his carefully laid plans. For a second time he had Tsuzuki right where he wanted him, and he was yanked even further away from everything that mattered to him.
Overseas. Fourteen years into the future. All this information relayed onto him by a middle-aged man with watery eyes and a cheap threadbare suit.
“Canada?”
“Yeah.”
He could feel a headache coming on, and it wasn’t just from the setting sun reflecting off the pattern of green parrots on the Greeter’s tie. “How is this possible?”
“You’re standing on top of it, actually. It’s this big machine called the Core that keeps malfunctioning and pulling people into the city. And uhh…you’re one of them.”
Muraki snorts at this and runs a hand through his hair. “How fortunate of me.”
And then silence. He turns to look at the empty parking lot beyond the baseball field, but he could still hear the greeter fidgeting, kicking the dirt and jingling loose change in his pockets. “…I can show you where the Newcomers normally stay, if you want…”
He wants to tell him to go fuck himself, but is furious to acknowledge that he didn’t have much choice in the matter. “Thank you.” At first he follows the Greeter with a blank mind and no intentions. Then all too suddenly his patience withers like a leaf in a wildfire. Steeped in anger and the repulsive hatred for himself and this new prison, he just snaps.
Muraki grabs the Greeter by the back of his jacket and shoves him in a swift jerking motion, watching as his forehead connected with the edge of the bleachers and he rolls like a duffel bag. A cut blooms on his temple, and he lies motionless in the darkened grass. He stands over the greeter’s body and peers down at him with careful eyes—it was possible he was already dead and the end to his outburst was premature…
The greeter twitches, rasping at him: “Don’t—”
“No,” Muraki responds plainly as he crouches over him. Wrapping his hands around his neck seems to cause a swell of adrenaline to break through the greeter’s haze like the last resort to save his pitiful life, gripping at one of his wrists and tugging at it.
“Stop. Why are you doing this?”
His attempt weakens to a physical whisper as Muraki’s thumbs press down on his throat, just underneath the masculine lump of cartilage with unbearable slowness.
It took patience to choke someone to death, and that’s why it wasn’t his normal cup of tea. But he needed to watch the life drain out of something. Even some pathetic simpleton that was just trying to help him out.