Name: Youma Kenji
Age: 24
Gender: Male
Alignment: NeutralPowers: Kenji's powers are based almost entirely around his capacity to surprise people.
Peripheral Translocation: To this end, he is capable of teleporting at will. Kenji's most favored teleportation destination is just outside of his target's peripheral vision, at which point Kenji either deliberately catches their attention or sucker-punches them.
"Urameshiya!": Likewise, Kenji is capable of eliciting panic and surprise from
anything. It may last for just a second, but with a single phrase, Kenji can force an acute stress response in his targets. Those who hear it are immediately hit with a sudden wave of dread, disgust, and surprise, and are forced to react fearfully. There is no defense against this, and it affects everyone equally, regardless of their brain chemistry.
Weapons: Kenji is equipped with nothing but a fancy suit, a knife about six inches long, and whatever his superiors see fit to equip him with. Despite this, Kenji is exceptionally skilled at using his knife, and draws great enjoyment from showing off with it.
Personality: Kenji is confident and capricious. When off the job, he is very easygoing and is happy to let a slight against him slide. When on the job, he develops a strong sense of duty, and vehemently refuses to muck about. However, if he is forced into combat with someone, he will do everything in his power to annoy and infuriate his opponent. Kenji has an unbreakable bond with the Youma family, and reacts violently to any perceived insult against them. When working with a fellow Youma, Kenji is respectable and deferential.
History: The Youma family has existed for decades, and controls a significant portion of Tokyo. The Youma family is one of many families that make up the infamous Yakuza, and particularly specialize in ensuring the civilians under Yakuza remain cooperative and healthy. If a shopkeeper is unwilling to pay up, an enforcer from the Youma is sent in. The Youma are recognized for their fixation on family values and spiritualism, and name each of their members after figures and spirits from local mythology.
Kenji was an only child born in the south side of Osaka, just outside of the port area. His father worked at the Osaka Aquarium, and his mother was a data analyst. Though he was treated well by his parents, their relative absence from his life generally meant that he grew up and developed through his peers at school. For the most part, Kenji was a well-developed child.
When he turned 18, Kenji moved from his parents' home to Tokyo, in the hopes of making a living without his parents' intervention. Shortly he got settled into a cheap apartment, he found himself working as a cook in a ramen shop. Luckily for Kenji, the shop was a popular hangout for local Yakuza toughs, and Kenji managed to make a decent impression with them.
After treating a minor Yakuza boss's men to an exceptional meal, they offered him a chance to pledge himself to the Yakuza. Kenji, seeing nowhere to go in his job at the ramen shop, gladly accepted.
After several months of grueling hazing, training, and gruntwork, Kenji was finally accepted into the Yakuza proper. Since new Yakuza members are added to whatever family introduced them to the process and it was the Youma family who had done so, Kenji was inducted into the Youma family with much ceremony.
Kenji's mythological creature of choice was the
Hitotsume kozō, the one-eyed priest boy. When he made his choice, the Youma family enacted a strange ritual to give him powers beyond any mere man. With little trepidation, Kenji gouged out one of his own eyes and sealed the wound with a series of malevolent salves. As the salves sizzled violently in the ruins of his eye socket, Kenji fell into a coma for twenty days. On the twentieth day, he made a full recovery and was personally welcomed into the Youmas by the family's patriarch.
Youmas, the patriarch had said,
undergo this ritual to prove their trust in the family. The reward for your bravery is a place amongst the Yakuza and the blessings of the gods themselves. Since Kenji had picked the
Hitotsume kozō as his spirit of choice, the ritual had given him powers similar to a
Hitotsume kozō.
Since then, Kenji found satisfaction in being a Yakuza enforcer. He happily does whatever his elders demand, regardless of their moral implications. Kenji does this regardless of whether it's helping the community build itself up, crushing thugs and villains under his heel for the sake of the community's safety, brutalizing innocent people who refuse to pay their dues, or terrorizing people who don't know not to screw with the Yakuza. Kenji likes his job, and puts all of his effort into it.
Weakness: Kenji is, for all intents and purposes, an average human. Though he is not overconfident, he holds non-Yakuza in contempt and reacts poorly to insults to his family. In addition, Kenji is unable and unwilling to go against the will of his superiors. If they want him to lay down his life for the Yakuza, Kenji will do so.
