Grey — Roleplayer Guild

Name: Raniero Sciarra
Nicknames: Rani, though ten years in the future most will know him as 'Nero' since it sounds slightly more intimidating.
Age: 15
Gender: Male
Country of Origin: Italy
Role: Student > Ally > Eleventh Vongola Guardian of Cloud
Flame: Cloud and Mist (Fake/Corrupted), Sun (True)
Weapon/Fighting Style:
Mechanized Collapseable Forearm Crutch > "Irregular" Rapiers > Illusory Armaments
Overclocked Brain Implants (15 Minutes) > Overclocked Brain Implants (30 Minutes) > Flame Purification

Equipment In Detail [+]

Mechanized Collapseable Forearm Crutch - For something that's used for keeping someone upright, it makes a frighteningly good bludgeoning tool. This isn't even noting that it retracts and extends with a swift enough motion that, if more force were to be added, it could be considered a weapon in its own right.
"Irregular" Rapiers - Both similar in use and appearance to the three shortswords in the Asari Ugetsu's Four Irregular Swords combination. However, rather than mini-katanas, they're more like mini-European blades. They're also longer, being actually the size of shortswords, roughly 2.5 feet, rather than daggers, and, well, rapier thin hence the name. They can be wielded three in one hand between the fingers like the aforementioned AUFIS, one in each hand, thrown, or any combination of the previous.
Illusory Armaments - Weapons made of Mist Flames... And that's it.

Brain Implants/Physical Assistance Device - Due to permanent mental damage caused by an event in his past, Rani was fitted with neural implants to compensate for lost motor and mental capabilities, though not completely. However, he was also outfitted with a device connected to said implants, yet still independent from them, that would allow him to overclock his body functions in order to bring them up to peak performance for 15 minutes. Although, somewhere along the line, by ten years in the future this would be modified to go for 30 minutes. The official reason for the implant support is for 'sports purposes' but I think we know what that really entails.
Flame Purification - By forcing enough Flames through his body, he can essentially overload the Flame Bacteria within him to allow for the creation of a rather weak Sun Flame, given that he's using the majority of his natural potential to summon up the Flame in the first place. It's an incredibly painful and self-destructive process for reasons that should be inferrable once the rest of the sheet is read, but fortunately the Sun Flames can mitigate the internal injuries... if only slightly.

Raniero holds steadfast to two key rules when overclocking his brain implants for whatever reason: Get it done fast, get it done properly. Can't afford to dally when you only have 15 minutes on the clock, after all. As such, he will use absolutely everything in his disposal to finish the job under the rules he's laid out for himself. Fighting dirty, psychological tricks, faking loss... You get the idea. On one hand, he lacks the "natural talent" of the others and their inherent physical power, leaving him with average speed, mediocre strength and no outstanding special abilities apart from his Flames, which still hurt even to use. On the other hand, he's extremely analytical, has the instincts of a natural born hitman, and knows how to maximize his strengths by choosing a tactic relevant to a situation. The fact of the matter is, while he doesn't look the part, he's still the Cloud Guardian and can easily operate without any outside assistance.
Appearance: As a teen, Rani appears as a rather skinny teenager with a mess of short white hair. He stands at 173cm/5'6" and has brown eyes. All in all, his posture, figure, paleness, and general appearance, not to mention his crutch, make him look sick and fragile. As an adult he... still looks sick and fragile, moreso than before due to the spread of his 'disease'. However, this is only an outward indication, he's actually rather healthy despite his lanky frame and the fact that half his body looks like hell. His hair has grown out a bit, not that you'd really get to see it since he always keeps his hood up to avoid frightening children and what not, as has his body, bringing the young 25-year old up to a good 183cm/5'11". He also no longer needs to walk around with a crutch, but prefers to for sentimental reasons.
Personality: A good word to describe Raniero would be 'empty'. He has almost no sense of self, what with not even knowing what his life was like - not to mention what he was like - up until the last five years or so. Naturally, however, something had to have filled the empty shell of a human being he was upon waking up, and eventually the young man developed a personality that is equal parts childlike and unrelentingly straightforward. To give an example, Raniero is incredibly curious - though less in the 'what does this button do?' way and more in the 'I felt like it'-type of way - which manifests in fashions ranging from testing out different horticulture methods to figuring out how he can maximize his strengths so he can make the most of his 15 minutes, and he approaches these in almost the exact same way. Furthermore, the young man has a rather strange speech pattern in which he usually talks in sentence fragments, thinks aloud, occasionally answers his own questions, and rarely uses first person pronouns unless the sentence wouldn't make sense without them as well as having slight motor-mouth tendencies. The predominant reasoning for this is his preference for efficiency and the need for a better way to arrange his thoughts, as when his implants are activated he tends to speak much more concisely, though he keeps some of the terse speech patterns. Fitting his straightforward, brutal honesty, Raniero rarely, if ever, lies. He just makes vague statements that he lets other people misinterpret. See the difference?

Raniero's sense of morality is a bit... odd. At best, it could be called myopic consequentialism, the ends justify the means except when he says it doesn't. A good example would be: tell him he'd have to kill 100 people to kill a villain, he'll do it; but tell him to kill a friend or you'll kill 100 people, and he'd likely just tell you to go right ahead before taking his pal in arm and wandering into the sunset. Quite honestly, he'd make a good left hand man, someone one to provide the unconventional, morally-ambiguous solutions nobody would be willing to think of and then act on those whether anyone would support him or not. In terms of other quirks, Rani has minor masochistic tendencies due to associating pain with significant payoff, but not enough to be really creepy. He also has an affinity for horticulture, a hobby he can often be seen doing in his spare time at home.
History:

Once Upon a Time... [+]

Roughly 20 years ago, a splinter group of Vongola R&D took a look at the Estraneo Famiglia's brutal experiments on their own children and thought to themselves: "We can do better than that". So they decided they were going to copy the research notes and pull off their own experiments under the nose of Decimo himself, for the good of the Vongola of course. ...Okay, they were only able to steal bits and pieces of the notes, but they could fill in the blanks themselves for the rest, right? Completely disregarding the fact that they were glossing over experiments that the hybridization of human and animal DNA, and, not to mention, possession as well as sending a human through all Six Paths of Reincarnation.

This did not end as badly as one would have initially assumed.

Fortunately they weren't able to procure enough information to put together a second Rokudo Mukuro, having lost essentially all of the information regarding the Six Paths and the Possession Bullet due to the Vongola getting rid of the records immediately after procuring them from the ruins of the Estraneo. However, the Vongola splinter gave up on that concept. Instead of looking for a way to give a person an eye that lets them use six different special skills, they would go for artificially grafting six different Flames into an individual by haphazardly mashing together concepts from various Estraneo experiments.

This too, did not end as badly as one would have initially assumed.

Surprisingly, that concept melting pot actually worked out well. The scientists were able to work up a 'Box Animal' (if it could even be called that) of sorts - Flame Bacteria that, in theory, could be able to forcibly convert even the weakest Waves into functional Dying Will Flames. However, they didn't have any subjects to test out their new breakthrough on, and it wasn't as if they could go about kidnapping dozens of people off the streets to perfect their creation. So they took the normal, non-mafia-affiliated nephew of the lead researcher and killed his family. It made for the perfect cover after all - an enemy mafia family targets an important member of the Vongola R&D and ends up slaughtering his family. There'd be no reason for suspicion to be placed on them at all!

And that's when it started to end as badly, though still not necessarily as badly as one would have initially assumed.

They managed to infect Raniero Sciarra with their particular strain of bacteria. It seemed perfectly fine at first... Until he random;y collapsed right in front of them immediately after one of the dozens of tests of the activated bacteria. The theory was that, if properly implemented, the bacteria would amplify the infectee's Wave Energy to produce multiple Flames. That was the plan. And it worked... Though not as they'd have expected. Rani did get multiple Flames... at the cost of his original Sun Flame. Rather than increase Wave conduction... They ate at them, consumed them, and then replaced them. Any time a Flame would be produced, it would be painfully corrupted and split into Mist and Cloud. Though it made his Flames exceptionally powerful by virtue of having all seven conduits converted for one purpose. Not that he ever got to learn this, since he fell into a coma.

Raniero used to be a normal kid, albiet one whose instincts were better for high-adrenaline situations. He lived an uneventful life, went to school and made friends and all. Then one day his uncle picked him up at the end of school. Said his mom and dad told him to pick him up, and then brought him to a facility. They put something in his head, and it hurt a lot. But what happened to him wasn't cruelty, it was just rationally applied love, right? His uncle said he'd end up being an illustrious person, famed for his achievements if he'd just go through with it. His uncle loved him, and he understood that, yet the pain still ate away at him after they tested him by making him start fires with his mind or something. And then the pain eventually became unbearable. If what he was experiencing had just been cruelty, maybe he could've coped. Unfortunately, Rani really felt that his uncle had his best interests in mind, which was why he refused to tell them that it hurt so much, that sometimes his body would just stop responding to his thoughts.

And then everything went black.

When Rani woke up at age 10, he was in a hospital. The doctors told him he had been in a car crash that killed his mom, dad, and uncle, and put him in a coma for 4 years until they were able to fit him with neurological implants. His body was... wrecked. Motor and mental functions permanently impeded, but the implants were supposed to mitigate those effects. He stayed in the hospital for a while as he went through rehab, and before long, was enrolled in a school and sent off to live in a regular house with a doctor who had taken the liberty of adopting him in order to better observe and care for him. At first, he had to deal with bullies who thought that he'd be an easy target, but, surprising almost everyone who saw, he was able to deal with them easily and effectively after activating his brain implants' assistance device. Nobody really picked on him anymore after the display of a kid beating another kid into submission with a crutch.

Finally, after getting into the groove of regular life, Rani just considered that most of the previous events were just vivid dreams after he got into that car accident. Magic fire, mad scientists, so much pain... No matter how vivid, they were just dreams. It's not like those things could really happen, and that stuff only existed in stories right?

Overview: Rani used to be a normal kid like you until he took special bacteria to the brain and fell into a coma. Now he's crutch-bound, sickly, and relies on brain implants to go about daily life. He also believes the years of his life that weren't spent being in a coma were just wacky dreams. While he is incredibly weak, he's also skilled and smart enough to take advantage of what strengths he has... But only for 15 minutes. He also has a weird speech pattern.
Other: "Don't understand any of you, likely never will. Same in reverse, maybe."

"What to do, what to do...?" the red courier mused as he dangled his legs off the edge of some building, watching the hustle and bustle of midday Karstberg going on in the streets below him. He was breathing rather deeply, and sweating a significant amount more than he usually would have after a leisurely run through his usual pathways of choice. There was a simple reason for that, and it was because of a rather short but spurring encounter he had earlier.

Previously, Thane had been traversing the heights of Karstberg, using his usual magically augmented free-running style for a more show-offy method of going from A to B rather than his usual straightforward work routine, when he noticed a black-clad figure on a rooftop adjacent to his position. The figure was undoubtedly female though the wardrobe made it a bit difficult to discern at first. Normally, the courier would've paid someone like that no mind, but this one was also a skilled practitioner of parkour if what he saw was indeed not magically assisted like his own. The two noted each other's presence, her with a nod and a facial movement of some sort - a smile maybe? - and him with a tip of the hat and a smile of his own, before going off on their separate ways, hers to the Market District and himself to... Wherever. He had yet to set a destination for himself. Though that was unimportant. What was, was that the woman from earlier had inspired Thane to try free-running without utilizing his magic. He was good even without it, but he soon realized that his some of his skills had atrophied due to reliance on using magic to smooth things out. Shame really, but now that he knew about it, he could - just did - try to fix it.

But not now, Thane was almost out of energy. He removed the apple that he normally kept in his bag and began to consume the thing. Once that was done with, he dropped down, using his magic to give him a safe landing like earlier, before noting a diminutive lady in some religious-looking garb having a temper tantrum on the adjacent street corner. Normally he wouldn't be staring impolitely as he was, but his self control was being overwhelmed by the lack of energy.

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