Lewascan2

Kimetsu no Yaiba AU: Temen-ni-Guru (Arc 2)

@13org

Great stuff from Koshin! The fact that he picked up on what Hinotora was putting down so quickly should make it a lot easier for her to get to following her personal marching orders from Takaya a lot more swiftly. :D

It'll be interesting to see if the Daikaku Temple's resources do anything appreciable to counter Ryoshu's Blood Demon Art infection. The results of that may end up being fairly important and swiftly relevant if any characters other than Hinotora get infected, since she seems to be the only one with a reliable answer beyond not getting hit at all.

Kimetsu no Yaiba AU: Temen-ni-Guru (Arc 2)

Rengoku Hinotora

---

^{En route to the Daikaku Shrine...}

The soothing scent of green tea filled the air inside the limousine with what should have been an aura of relaxation, and yet... Hinotora didn't feel very relaxed at all. Sitting amongst at least three Hashira-class members of the Demon Slayer Corps along with the snoozing leader of the entire Tokyo Branch, she found herself tense enough to have to focus on her breathing to stay calm.

Click-shink. Fhwish. Shoo. Fhwish. Shoo.

She didn't let it show on her face, but her unease was written large by the way she toyed with the flame of the lighter in her hand. Rather than tapping her foot, Hinotora "fidgeted" by being productive, as the lighter's flame flickered, swelling and waning in size in time with her breathing.

Really, this arrangement wasn't too unusual. As the Tsuguko of the Dragon Hashira, she'd attended at least a couple meetings of this caliber before. And even though Jae-jiji was rather casual about the whole arrangement, there were still some minimal standards they were both expected to meet. But even so...

Even though this was ostensibly supposed to be a standard high-security pickup for critical demon slaying supplies, something felt different. On paper, Hinotora knew this was important, important enough that the entire matter had been referred to as immensely confidential, but to have Takaya personally involved?

Is this normal, to have this many high-profile figures involved in this? she wondered internally. It was her first time being involved in this process, so she honestly wasn't sure. Even though she'd handled many of those selfsame rare materials at some point in the Butterfly Mansion, she'd never been shown where they were sourced from before.

Privileges of being a Tsuguko now, I guess...

Shaking her head, Hinotora was prepared to dismiss her concerns as paranoia, when the sleeping Takuya's Raven abruptly broke the silence with a dreadful announcement.

Hinotora felt a chill crawl up her spine, as the Raven announced the true reason for such a gathering of powerful figures. A prediction. Worse, an official Prophesy. A foretelling of an ambush, of a massacre, of an inevitable conflict with the motherfucking Upper Moon 4. And though the Prophesy foretold victory, it also predicted a pyrrhic one.

The police would get involved? People would be captured? What about the delivery of critical supplies? Was the Daikaku Shrine about to be compromised?! A pyrrhic victory could mean far too many things for comfort. Literally anything was on the table. Would they kill the Upper Moon but lose the Shrine? Or would they save the Shrine but allow the Upper Moon to escape to try again? There were too many unknowns, and also...

Shink.

Hinotora's eyes hardened, as she closed the lighter in her hand with finality.

Capture was unacceptable. If the police -and thus the demons- managed to capture "all but one" here, they would have dealt a colossal blow to the core of the Tokyo's Demon Slayers. Who would escape? A Hashira? Takaya? Herself? Prophesy or no prophesy... that could not be allowed to happen. With that in mind, even with so precious little time to come up with a strategy to deal with an unfamiliar foe in an unfamiliar battlefield...

I don't care how absolute those prophesies are, I'll find a way through...

---

^{Shortly before the bloodbath...}

Hinotora was somewhat surprised to have Takaya approach her more clandestinely with special orders. She had to withhold a grimace at the need to protect that fuckwad Sun Hashira, but even so, she withheld her distaste and nodded in acknowledgement... even if confusion swirled inside her at what Takaya said next.

Muragarasu? Fucking Keodis? And Onsen?! What?! Those factors on their own already might have been concerning, but the volatile Water Hashira's involvement in the situation made the whole thing dangerously explosive. But more importantly...

After she was done? Was Takaya saying that she was the one that was going to escape police capture? That was... Considering how she might approach things, Hinotora couldn't say that didn't make sense, but she was a bit confused. If everyone else got captured, who exactly was she supposed to bring with her to the Onsen afterwards to defuse the Guen bomb? Was Takaya saying that his prophesy would actually be wrong?

Did he... lie about parts of it to manipulate the other participants? Is this underhanded OPSEC? Is he lying to me right now even in order to push me down a specific path? Is the prophesy itself misleading? Hearing it back then, it would sound like we'd get captured at the Shrine... but what if I'm actually leading the survivors into a trap at the Onsen? Surely, Takaya would know that though, right? Even at his most extreme, he wouldn't just toss us blindly to the slaughter, right?

Too many unknowns. Honestly, she really hated the concept of prophesies. Of the Fated. Of the Inevitable.

Fuck that shit. I'll make my own destiny, damn it!

Instead of voicing all those uneasy questions, however...

"If that's what you desire, Ubuyashiki-sama," Hinotora simply nodded, lips pursing. "I'll do my best to see as many of us survive as possible."

Worrying about what happened after the Shrine battle could wait. After all, nothing was truly certain, right? For now, Hinotora decided she had to focus on surviving. She was about to get involved with a clash with an Upper Moon, after all. Even more dangerously, she was being asked to most likely intervene very directly, given where she suspected the Sun Hashira would most likely get himself in trouble.

I'm being asked to potentially go head-to-head with an Upper Moon, even if only briefly. Can I do it? I've never even encountered a Lower Moon Consort, but my training with Jae-jiji seems to imply promising things. Yet... what does that matter? No post-Muzan Upper Moon has ever been slain, even with multiple Hashira against them. If I do this...

Hinotora's eyes hardened, as she steadied her resolve and grinned, feeling her body thrum with each breath.

Screw that. I'll survive. No matter what it takes, I'll do what needs to be done and make it out. So, I'm being faced with an Upper Moon? So what. I'm the motherfucking Phoenix Breather, damn it! It would be pretty embarrassing if I died to something like this, wouldn't it?!

---

^{Present day...}
As soon as the sentry's dying cry split the air, Hinotora was moving.

Third Phoenix Form: Fire Bird's Spirit...

Heat roared through her limbs like wildfire, sharpening her senses like a razor and sending strength surging through her bones, as she whirled around, coat whipping with the motion, and drew her longsword in the same flash of motion.

Wide eyes quickly catalogued the jerk of falling bodies, the way foliage began to sprout in bloody displays. She saw them flicker through the air, arrows that were near impossibly thin, carrying ridiculous force for their size, as they stuck in targets rather than penetrating straight through them. Other arrows were aimed not at specific targets but at areas, as they exploded in-

Shit!

A swarm of petal-shaped flesh shrapnel roared in from all sides, accompanied by a billowing ominous pink mist. Hinotora's eyes flashed around, seeing the Hashira deftly defend themselves, but... what about Takaya?!

Lunging for Takaya's position, Hinotora fell back on old basics and added her efforts as supplementation to Kenzo’s.

"Fourth Flame Form: Blooming Flame Undulation!" she bellowed, her sword igniting in a burning spiral, as Hinotora twisted around Takaya's body, trailing a curtain of billowing fire that crashed into the incoming mist and petals and burnt them to cinders before they could reach the Tokyo Oyakata. Finishing her motion with her body placed defensively between Takaya and the direction of the "arrows", she then shouted, "Get out of sight quickly, Takaya-sama! I'll cover you!"

Thankfully, Takaya seemed to have indeed prepared for this, as he moved with surety towards what Hinotora suspected was a planned destination, given his Clairvoyance. The Tsugoku accompanied him until she was sure he was out of an open line of fire, before swiftly returning to the fray.

"Fourth Flame Form: Blooming Flame Undulation!"

Charging into the mist and deadly petals, Hinotora leaped overhead and wove between scrambling monks, trailing flames with another use of the Flame Style, as she did her best to burn away the mist and petals before they could reach whatever victims the former Wind Hashira’s own impressive defense wasn’t quite able to cover.

Between breaths, however, one arrow landed and exploded far too close for comfort, pink mist flooding over Hinotora's position with the sickly scent of blood, as she twisted in a whirling flip to evade the storm of sharp, cutting petals that lanced out towards her. A prick at her right wrist made her eyes narrow, as she felt her lungs protest at inhaling the mist.

Immediately, as hyper-aware of her body as her Phoenix Style made her, Hinotora detected the nature of the demon's attack. It worked fast, terrifyingly so, a poison entering her bloodstream with each inhalation, bristling with infectious menace. But far more concerning, however, was the actual wound she had taken.

As with the monks being attacked around her, she could see the wound begin to spout flora, as tiny wildflowers began to grow on her skin, spreading out from the point of infection. Looking around at those less lucky than her, Hinotora could already see many being twisted irrevocably, locked in a state of horrified agony, as they were transformed into plants inch by inevitable inch.

What a terrifying Blood Demon Art... So, this is what the prophesy must have meant by "Art"... How ugly.

"First Phoenix Form: Furnace Breathing! Second Phoenix Form: Flaming Rebirth!"

As she leapt out of the worst of the mist regardless, Hinotora focused on her breathing, stoking the flame burning in every cell of her body, as she sent a blast of cleansing heat rushing through her veins. The wound on her wrist sputtered, a burst of golden fire leaping from her flesh and incinerating the flowers blooming from her skin, the blood in the wound coagulating in a searing crackle, as it began to quickly heal over. All the while, the poison in her veins was flushed out in a flash, either burned up by her internal fire or absorbed by her Sakasachi blood.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Hinotora centered herself, before diving back into the fray. A greater sense of confidence surged through her as well at having survived that. Honestly, if she had been any less proficient... Well, she wasn't sure even most of the Hashira here could have survived infection without amputating the infected area outright.

Is this why Takaya-sama assigned me to protect Ryunosuke? Because my Phoenix Style makes me one of the only people that can get close enough to help him and get out alive? That... is a lot of pressure. Speaking of which...

Her eyes barely caught the flicker of his movement, as the Sun Hashira blasted away in a blur of fire and fury, impacting a distant rooftop with a thunderclap. Immediately, the rain of demon arrows halted, as the Hashira clearly engaged the Upper Moon in close combat. Hinotora's eyes widened.

"Holy shit, I'm supposed to catch up to that?" she muttered incredulously under her breath. Eye twitching, she cast her gaze around at the wounded and dying, remembering Takuya's orders.

You can't save everyone, huh...

Grip tightening on her sword, Hinotora rushed towards the front gate.

Time was of the essence, and as much as she disliked him, the Sun Hashira was a critical asset. Allowing him to die would be a massive blow, both in hard power and morale, especially so soon after the last Moon Hashira's death. But even so, even if she didn't have time to stay back and help everyone...

There's something I can still do to save the most people possible.

In a flicker of movement, Hinotora was outside, eyes scanning until she located the allied demons Takaya had brought along and more specifically...

"Hey! Hold still!" she called, as she rushed up to the demon responsible for the barrier, flames beginning to flicker around her body. "This is going to hurt like fuck, but we need you in action, so sorry in advance!"

"Fifth Flame Form: Flame Tiger!"

Raising her sword into a high guard, Hinotora lunged at the barrier demon, flames exploding off her body in a burning corona shaped like a tiger. Her searing blade lanced into infected flesh in a multitude of slashes, sending scorching heat blasting into the demon's body, burning out the poison swimming in his veins and incinerating the arrows pinning him against the wall. Unfortunately, this obviously left the now mangled demon in a state best described as "crispy", but Hinotora didn't really have any better options.

Catching the allied demon's body before he could fully fall, Hinotora tossed him over her shoulder and blurred into motion, running towards the other side of the shrine. "Hey, somebody come guard this guy! I got the barrier demon! Also, if anybody has some blood or a spare limb to offer, he might need a pick me up to regenerate!" To the demon she was actually carrying, as she finally set him down on the other side of the compound, she smiled apologetically. "Again, seriously, you have my utmost apologies, but we need you -if at all possible- to get your barrier up again. The Sun Hashira is keeping the Upper Moon busy, but I don't know how long until the attacks on the compound continue. Before that, we need the defense up again. Can you do it?"

Casting a quick glance around, Hinotora nodded in satisfation.

With how she had repositioned the barrier demon, he should be out of the Upper Moon's line of sight and ability to attack now. If he could just get his barrier up again, the Shrine's occupants would have a chance to start treating the wounded in mass, rather than staying on defense. In this way, Hinotora hoped to give the most people the chance to survive, assuming the monks had any way to deal with or mitigate the Upper Moon's poison and infection until she could return to do more intensive care.

Kimetsu no Yaiba AU: Temen-ni-Guru (Arc 2)

Rengoku Hinotora Relationship Chart

^{Jae-eun Yoshihide} :
"Behind all that flowery nonsense, the Dragon Hashira's... not a bad guy. Honestly, I'm surprised that we clicked so well, but maybe I shouldn't be. He's a pretty easygoing guy at the end of the day, doesn't ask a lot from me, but ironically, that kinda just makes me want to actually put in more effort. Wild. Conversely, he's not all empty fluff when he needs to be. There's a real badass lurking underneath that mask of his. I'd say he should let his real feelings out a lot more though, because the more he bottles them up, the less control he'll have when that mask finally slips under pressure. Still, I feel like I've learned a lot from him, despite him mostly leaving me to my own devices, and honestly... I hope we get to continue on like this for many years to come." @xAlter

^{Ubuyashiki Takaya} :
"I have mixed feelings. While he's still a more palatable Branch Head than Kyoto's, he's made more than his fair share of questionable decisions. Under most circumstances, he seems cool-headed and good-natured, but there's no doubt that he has a merciless streak, considering he way he's ordered bombing attacks on not just demons, but rival human organizations. Also, I appreciate his willingness to coexist with peaceful demons, but isn't tolerating the former Upper 2 a bit too far? And I can't deny enjoying that Tokyo gives its Slayers a lot of slack in how they operate, but isn't allowing the Water Hashira to throw an unchecked tantrum across his territory beyond the pale? And more than that, to actively collaborate with her? Well... I suppose you have to take the good with the bad sometimes. As a person, I guess I don't particularly dislike him, but Takaya hasn't really given me any reason to call a kid 'master'. I guess he's a competent enough leader though, so I won't disrespect him outright... An 'Ubuyashiki-sama' should be serviceable." @Dane

^{Tomioka Guen} :
"Guen? That constant pain in my ass? Yeah, I know her. Hell, I've treated her wounds on Takaya's orders... a lot. More than is really reasonable even. Look, man, I know she lost her hubby and all, but she needs to take a step back and calm her tits. There's no revenge worth writing about in dying a stupid death, and that's the direction she's headed at this rate. Someday, she's going to get in over her head, and I'm not going to be able to do shit to save her after. Worse, if she keeps on like this, she's going to get other people -innocent people- killed in her crusade, and if that happens... I may have to respond accordingly. I hope she knows that." @Dane

^{Tenko Thompson} :
"I've only met her in passing honestly. Can't say I have an opinion worth a damn yet, but something about her kind of gives me the willies. And somehow, I'm not sure it's not the religious fervor. Maybe it's that she's also from the Rengoku bloodline, but- No, that's ridiculous. She looks and acts nothing like the main clan. Also, I guess she's pretty enough; she's got that 'girl next door' charm to her, at least on a surface level. I guess I'll just have to play things by ear..." @Randomguy

^{Ryūnoko Keodis} :
"The 'Info Broker'? Yeah, I've heard of him. Hell, I've met him... in passing anyway. I try to keep tabs on any demons that actually attempt the coexist with humans. But gotta be real? I'm wary of the guy. In principle, I appreciate the idea of a demon that's just trying to stay out of things, but come on... He's a former Blood Moon. You don't get that title for being all sunshine and roses. So, honestly, anyone that lets their guard down with him? That truly lets him in? They're an idiot. He's an information broker who is obviously and shamelessly playing both sides, and the only reason nobody from either side has gotten rid of him is that the price for doing so is bigger than anyone is willing to pay." @Arminwraith

^{Uzui Kairi} :
"Not exactly her biggest fan, to be honest. She's from the Kyoto Branch for one, and I don't got a lot of good memories of that place. Too many two-faced assholes, too many masks, and Kairi wears a lot more than most. Really, what's more bothersome is that overbearing plastic personality of hers. 'Older sister'? Screw off with that. I don't need the 'guidance' of someone like you." @Digmata

^{Tsugikuni Himari} :
"I know she's from the Corps' Kyoto Branch, but I still get the sense that we'd get along. Honestly, I don't give a damn about her family being related to the Demon King. The sins of the father are not that of the son, which is something I think isn't appreciated enough. And real talk, she's genuinely impressive. She's younger than me, only eighteen, and still already a full Hashira, one that defeated a Demon Consort alone even. Sure, there's not really any better candidates, and sure, there's historically been younger, but even so, credit where it's due. If nothing else, I'll give her props for being a lot more reasonable about her brother's death than his fiance turned out to be. It's understandable to grieve, but in our line of work, isn't this just business as usual? Call me callous if you wish, but we simply can't afford to lose our heads in this line of work. In fact, we practically have a responsibility not to. I think Himari understands that, and I have a lot more confidence that she won't let revenge come at the cost of justice." @King Kindred

^{Ryunosuke Kamado} :
"A colossal jackass. Fuck that guy. Metaphorically of course. Even if I were actually interested in men, you couldn't pay me to get involved with someone that whores around as much as he does. I realize I'm not much for tradition or conformity, but even I have something approaching consistent virtues. It's really a crying shame the power of Sun Breathing showed up in someone like him. I can only imagine the sort of frightening headway we'd make if the 'Strongest of Today' was actually interested in fighting demons for more than satisfying his superiority complex." @JrVader

^Xaku :
"The relatively recently appointed Police Chief certainly seems to be a 'problem', as they say. Considering the stranglehold of the Demon King Michikatsu over Japan's Yakuza right now... and considering the reports of how troublesome the police have become... and the fact that 'Xaku' has never been recorded under any open daylight conditions, it stands to reason that she could be some kind of demon, perhaps even a high-ranking one. The Blood Moon Demon Lords are all reportedly males though, so could she be a Demon Consort? Inconclusive. I could look into this more, but a Police Chief is a lot higher profile than most targets. Hell, I could be... Well, I suppose there's no rush for now. For all I know, I'm just crying wolf over nothing. Without confirmation... For now, I'll keep those suspicions to myself and just keep an eye out." @Aku the Samurai

^{Archer Demon Ryoshu} :
"Who?" @TimelessParagon

^{Kousai Agatsuma} :
"Heard of him at least. Hard not to in Demon Slayer Corps circles, when he's been one of the few to so much as kill a Demon Consort. I realize that does little to address the Demon Lords they serve, but it's a step in the right direction. And even without meeting him, on that merit alone, I can only assume his skills are impressive." @Taka

^{𝕄𝕦𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕤𝕦} :
"That Onsen proprietress? You mean the weirdo that's always wearing the fox ear cosplay? Well, I guess her faculties are commendable enough, but I only ever went there the once. Why? Well, I don't often tell people this, but I can tell when someone's bullshitting me. No, it's not like... a sixth sense or anything, just experience. I'm not a mind-reader. It's just that two-faced people stick out like a sore thumb. Their smiles. Their voices. The way their feelings don't quite reach their eyes. I guess I'm hyper-sensitive to that kind of thing considering the way I grew up, but that 'Mura' lady just kinda gives me the creeps. Not just that, but... I work in a hospital right? So, the thing is, my Phoenix Forms enhance my senses, quite a lot actually, and whenever I get near that Onsen, I can't help but notice the same way it sticks out to me in a hospital, even beneath the chemicals and air fresheners. It's blood. Old blood. The scent of rot." @HaHa

^{Daikaku Kōshin} :
"Who? What, he's some kind of monk? Yeah, I definitely don't know who that is. I don't go to temples or get involved in that Buddhist crap. Er, no shade, I guess; worship who you want or whatever, but I mean... I guess if he really follows that sort of religion, then he's probably a pretty chill guy?" @13org

^Overall :
"Well, I suppose it's a fairly typical lineup, eh? Lots of people with drama to spare and an axe to grind with demon-kind. It's a tale as old as time, of heroes and monsters and vengeance, but honestly? At the end of the day, it would be nice if more people survived than not in this latest crusade... Not going to hold my breath, considering historical precedent, but I suppose I'll just have to be satisfied with doing my best to keep them alive, even if they throw themselves at death like headless chickens. Sacrifice saves lives? You'll save a lot more if you live to help the people that need you tomorrow, so stop bleeding out on my table already!"

Kimetsu no Yaiba AU: Temen-ni-Guru (Arc 2)

Rengoku Hinotora

'Rengoku Hinotora'
'Rengoku Hinotora'

A g e: 20 | R a n k: Kinoto (Tsuguko to Dragon Hashira)

^{P e r s o n a l i t y} :

Hinotora is, in a word, "irreverent", having little respect for tradition or hierarchy. Strongly self-assured to the point of almost being arrogant, she is rather rude by Japanese standards, rarely using honorifics, calling others casually by given names -or nicknames- or just shamelessly voicing her discontent aloud, even in formal settings. While not fundamentally opposed to not making a problem of herself, Hinotora resents being expected to conform to the expectations of anyone but herself. In her eyes, the only approval she truly has to meet is her own, and as long as she's living life the way she has decided is correct, that's all there is to be said about it. She is the sort to revel in exertion, to exhibit the tendencies of a battle junkie once her blood gets pumping.

Her apparent brashness, however, clouds the true cunning in her nature. At heart, Hinotora is a deeply ambitious woman, tantalized by the idea of self-improvement and strength; yet, she is also steadied by a keen sense of self-preservation. Contrary to many -if not most- Demon Slayers, who glorify the ephemerality of life and the meaning in sacrifice, Hinotora has no intention of dying, not any time soon and ideally not any time at all. To her, sacrifice is cowardice and weakness, to take the easy way out, and true strength is to defy the dying light until the bitter end and beyond. As something of a fan of Western culture and media, she once encountered a quote that struck her poignantly: "Dying is easy, young man; living is harder!" Having internalized this concept, Hinotora believes true strength is continuing to live and fight on no matter what, because you're no good to the world dead. And no matter how many you save in the present by dying, you could have saved far more by living on in the long run. Yet, conversely, she does not scorn those that die simply because they were weak; in her eyes, the truer sin is not dying after having given your all but forgoing survival whilst having any other option.

This kind of ideology, needless to say, stands in stark contrast to much of what the Demon Slayer Corps believes, almost seeming to mock their history in how it interprets the pursuit of justice through a lens that many demons could appreciate. But it's far from the most controversial stance Hinotora holds. In fact, as far as actual demons are concerned, she views them as no different from humans spiritually. In her mind, it is only right to dehumanize others based on "inhumanity" as a concept, not physical status. "Humanity" to her is a way of life, lost or gained by deeds and choice, not by nature, and she is open to offering demons -particularly young ones- some level of slack in consideration for their biological murderous instincts, provided they show a willingness to rise above them. Conversely, she does not view the human and demon conflict as a matter of black and white and sees no issue with good demons killing evil humans. Despite this, she is not by any means blind to the nature of most demons, who more often than not selfishly abuse their powers to murder and consume the undeserving, and she doesn't hesitate in punishing the truly unjust and mercy-killing those too weak-willed resist their instincts.

At her core, though not arrogant enough to shun working with others, Hinotora is a girl who found a certain strength in isolation, who didn't crumble under the pressure of others' expectations but rose up to defy them and carve her own path. Despite her seemingly selfish ideals, however, the one thing the Rengoku Clan truly instilled into her was a genuine value for justice and the pursuit of a better tomorrow. Dazzled further by tales told in many a fiction she buried her nose in as a child, along with tales of legends in Demon Slayer history, Hinotora idealizes the concept of heroes and -in contrast to her outward tendency to dry cynicism- wants to stand for what is ultimately right, no matter how much her methods might disagree with the opinions of the majority.

The only person Hinotora seems keen to offer actual unvarnished respect as a matter of deferential authority is the head of the Butterfly Mansion, Yushiro, who she refers to as "Sensei", admiring him as the pinnacle of demon-kind's potential for coexistence with humanity and as a person of otherwise genuinely respectable intellect and legacy. She still finds his fits of annoyance amusing and is not above harmlessly needling him, having certainly attempted to pester him for stories of legendary events he was involved in.

^{S h o w a S e c r e t} :
The circumstances of Hinotora's birth were contentious in no small sense of the word.

Her mother, Rengoku Taiga, a Flame Breathing demon slayer, had conceived out of wedlock during a night of emotional fancy with a handsomely mysterious stranger, and while this would have already been scandalous enough, what would turn the matter borderline heretical was when the father of Taiga's child chose to make himself known. Having apparently kept tabs on her in the aftermath of their dalliance, he approached Taiga on a dark, moonlit night and revealed himself to be a demon, and it was at that moment that she realized with horror that the man before her was none other than a Blood Moon, the only demons that could sire children. And it was then with a terrible "kindness" that the Moon attempted to turn both mother and unborn child with his blood... and failed.

The aftermath of the attempt and the terribly weak state it left the mother in would leave it an open secret that the circumstances of the upcoming birth were the union of a demon and a human, and more ardently, it was advised that the fruit of the union be removed before it could blossom, such was the shamefulness of it. Yet, the soon-to-be mother rejected such advice, and for her ardent determination, she was rewarded with a healthy baby girl... who she'd not live long enough to raise.

This was the world Rengoku Hinotora arrived into, orphaned at birth and perceived rather unfavorably for the circumstances of it.

To the Rengoku Clan's credit, despite Taiga's more immediate family shunning and otherwise outright disowning her child for the walking stain on their reputation that she was, Hinotora was not disbarred from the same opportunities any other child of the clan had, having all her basic living and educational needs met. However, the rumors surrounding her heritage isolated her socially growing up, leading to some amount of ostracization, and she would end up not internalizing or properly embodying the Rengoku Clan's ideals, becoming a rebellious punk of a girl.

Despite being indoctrinated into Demon Slaying from nearly the moment she could walk (perhaps as a form of "penance" for her existence and "proof of worthiness" in certain eyes), Hinotora did not respond to harsh training and attempts to mold her into a simple cog-in-the-machine weapon with meekness and humble obedience, but instead earned scorn for being a snarky little shit that offered no respect to others that wasn't "earned", displaying a precocious awareness even early on that she knew she was being treated unfairly and had no intention of taking it lying down. Her increasingly irreverent behavior led to her being viewed as ungrateful towards her benefactors and occasionally heretical for the curiosity she showed towards "deviant" and "problematic" knowledge. This dissonance in values further ostracized her, especially once she developed the Phoenix Breathing Style rather than "course correcting", earning her even greater scrutiny for the "shamefully selfish and dishonorable" mindset emphasized by her new Breathing Style.

In the end, having felt as though she never truly formed bonds with her own family, Hinotora would take the opportunity shortly before she reached her age of majority to transfer away from the strict and traditional Kyoto branch of the Demon Slayer Corps -and subsequently, the Rengoku's larger sphere of influence- to study and fight abroad with the far more flexible and lenient Tokyo branch. There, she encountered an environment so diametric to the one she had left that she even found herself fighting alongside demons as allies every now and then.

As it turned out, the Tokyo branch of the Demon Slayer Corps paid much more respect to a niche element of their Corps' history, the reality that in their direst time of need, they had received aid from other demons against Muzan, the reality that demons could -if given the chance- reject their murderous instincts and coexist peacefully with humans. This understanding was something Hinotora found to resonate with her on a level she hadn't realized was possible. And as she continued to sharpen her skills on the rather more "intense" Tokyo territories in the demon vs slayer conflict and studying the history of said conflict and how it came to be, she found herself silently asking a rather poignant question...

Aren't humans and demons just two sides of the same coin, after all?

Not much more than two years ago, shortly after she'd moved to Tokyo and begun delving deeper into a medical education, that same question was brought into even sharper relief, as when encountering a demon during her "civilian hours" that nearly bested her due to attacking her while she was unarmed, Hinotora discovered that her blood was not only toxic to demons but had the capacity to convert them back into humans. Instead of being disturbed by the potential implications this might have for her own status, however, Hinotora was ecstatic, beginning to study the phenomenon deeper and consider the ways this could be used to further deepen the development of her Phoenix Style.

Nowadays, if you were to visit the Butterfly Mansion, perhaps you might encounter her occasionally, a young woman with jet-black hair and a dark red long-coat, her golden eyes curled into sharp coy smiles, as she casually engages in comradery with an allied demon. In recent years, Hinotora has slowly become a more common face amongst the most intellectual faction in the Demon Slayer Corps, earning her keep in performing experiments in new ways to fight demons, and from a mundane angle, "Doctor Hinotora" is slowly gaining a reputation amongst secretly Butterfly Mansion backed hospitals as a young rising star in the medical field.

Also fairly recently, Hinotora has been scouted as the Tsuguko of the Dragon Hashira, Jae-eun, and while she was initially wary of the offer of a man who so often wore a flowery mask, she has since found the arrangement between them to be surprisingly and pleasantly amiable.

_________________________________________________________________________

'K o k y ū'
'K o k y ū'

^{F l a m b o y a n c e} : Hinotora is a practitioner of Flame Breathing Forms 1-5 and is capable of the advanced form of Total Concentration: Constant Breathing. However in terms of the pure Flame Style, her proficiency lacks compared to her true specialty, the Style she developed as one more suited to her philosophy, Phoenix Breathing. It is for this reason and her general estrangement from the Rengoku Clan that has led to her never learning Flame Breathing Forms beyond the 5th.

Phoenix Breathing or “The Breath of the Phoenix” is a derivative offshoot combination of Flame Breathing and Total Concentration Breathing, which could be seen as heretical by many Demon Slayers, as it emphasizes a philosophy of "ascension" and the pursuit of survival, idealizing the concept of "stoking an eternal flame", rather than burning brightly and burning out. In a sense, it rejects the idea of sacrificing oneself in the pursuit of one's goals, instead emphasizing living to fight another day. For, after all, what point is there in fighting for a better world if you don't live long enough to enjoy the fruits of your labors, right? Regardless of this rather selfish premise, however, there is an undercurrent of honor, an idea that reckless sacrifice is -in itself- cowardly and that living to fight on guarantees the chance to save even more lives in the long run. In Hinotora's eyes, a true Phoenix may burn eternally, but they burn always for Justice. A true Phoenix shall Set Their Heart Ablaze... and always rise from their ashes.

Mechanically speaking, the Phoenix Style takes advantage of the great advancements in (semi) modern medicine and biological knowledge to create a foundation that surpasses its origins. It combines Flame Breathing with advanced forms of Total Concentration Breathing, primarily those of the Recovery type, and puts a focus on cultivating that power internally, reinforcing and enhancing the user's foundations to allow them to achieve a physicality and endurance comparable to Demons. Indeed, if this Breathing Style has but one definitive goal? It is "to become inhuman without rejecting one's Humanity".

Compared to other Styles, the current forms of Phoenix Breathing are typically less "special elemental moves" and more a series of stacking enhancements. This focus on "improving one's foundation" means that, on an external level, a user showcases very little "elemental power" compared to other styles until at least beyond the first 3 Establishing Forms, which act as the cornerstones for the entire style. The Style treats the user's body like an engine, pressurizing energy inside one's nerves and muscles to achieve explosive speed and power. All the while, the user's cells are treated as growing batteries, storing energy to be unleashed later.

As an actual sword style, Phoenix Breathing emphasizes a wide, deft swings with a strong sturdy blade. To fight as a Phoenix is to be a glorious burning bird of prey, swiftly closing the distance with a target, engaging in a relentless offense, before deftly retreating with equal agility to avoid retaliation and begin the whole cycle anew. Mobility is a key element and highlights a need for strong reflexes and quick thinking, along with making the user at home with executing midair maneuvers. It is a fighting style that creates brute strength through velocity and dexterity and -if practicing its Forms properly- provides in and of itself the necessary physical ability to do so.

✧ Form 1: Furnace Breathing - The first step in the style emphasizes purging impurities and reinforcing one's foundation. Acting as a variant of Recovery Breathing Method laced with cleansing Flame, the user stokes an internal fire surging with the "breath of life", flushing their body free of invasive elements (like poison, disease, etc) and energizing their cells with revitalizing energy and renewed stamina, providing them near limitless endurance. In practice, this form is meant to be used constantly, with every other part of the Phoenix style branching off of it. Side effects of long-term usage of this form include an overall improved immune system and general health along with increased longevity due to gradually restoring the expended capacity of the user's cells to naturally replicate.

✧ Form 2: Flaming Rebirth - As the style's mainstay recovery technique, the second form utilizes an improved form of the Enhanced Recovery Method. Whilst the first form focuses more on gathering and maintaining energy, this form releases that storage in a burst of restorative activity. By focusing their awareness and manipulation of their body, the user is able to detect and heal or otherwise mitigate even hidden internal injuries. By manually prompting their cells into replicating and forcibly accelerating the body's natural recovery systems, at the upper end, the user can manage a form of slow but combat-effective regeneration, limited -granted- to healing only injuries they could have otherwise theoretically recovered from naturally. Lesser uses of this technique can include slowing the circulation of poisons, seizing control of muscles to prevent organs from falling out or even halting bleeding by near-instantly coagulating blood or cauterizing wounds with the user's own flames. This form, once learned, allows the user to train much faster than normal, greatly increasing training time due to how fast their bodies can heal after even the worst and most insane training.

✧ And while this may mostly just sound like normal ERM on the surface, what the Phoenix style truly improves the technique with is the capacity to utilize it even when the user cannot breathe, forcibly drawing on reserves of vitality to induce emergency recovery and allowing them to restore vital bodily functions even in positions where a normal human would suffocate. However, performing the technique without breathing causes immense strain on the body, to the degree that it even decreases the user's lifespan, counteracting the improved longevity of the first form with overuse. Usage of this technique carries a glint of elemental power, as since the recovery is laced with a release of stored Flame energy, the user's wounds may occasionally spew flames when they "cauterize" in a burst.

✧ Form 3: Fire Bird's Spirit - Still staying true to much of the Style's "ladder"-like progression, this form is not an island, but rather an extension of prior forms. Once the body's foundation has been established and protected, this form is used to properly reinforce and enhance it. With this form, the user learns to constantly reinforce their body with the explosive power of flames, greatly enhancing strength, speed, reflexes and overall senses beyond the normal levels of Total Concentration Breathing. This form is learned third in the order of things, since without the second form, this form carries a great risk of burning one's own body up from the inside out without any way to address internal injuries. Because of this, this style could only be developed and trained by Hinotora once she was confident she had mastered both RCM and ERM, and as such it currently remains the third and final of the Phoenix style's maiden techniques.

✧ Usage of this form creates great heat inside the user's body, keeping them warm in cold environments whilst warding off extreme heat through the way the process of training the technique tempers the body against the opposite extreme. The process of learning the technique includes heat management usage of TCB in order to avoid overheating the body, and it's not uncommon for the user's breath to escape them in steaming exhales. Any damage this form does cause to the user's own body is typically swiftly rectified by the use of the prior two maiden techniques of the Phoenix Style.

_________________________________________________________________________

'N i c h i r i n'
'N i c h i r i n'

^{B l a d e W o r k} : Hinotora carries a blade glinting with a fiery orange hue, representing the explosive flames lurking beneath her skin. Unlike most Demon Slayers, she does not wield a traditional katana; instead, she carries a longsword of European shape, bringing to mind images of armored knights astride gallant steeds. A bold design emblematic of flames in a spiral of gold and orange runs down the center of the blade as well.

Yushiro Concealment Talisman: A standard-issue talisman used to cloak the presence of her sword and other demon slaying equipment while not in combat, allowing her to always be armed even in public without drawing suspicion.

Medical Supplies: Carries a small pouch of utilities for treating harm, including bandages, stitches, medical tape, painkillers and some other odds and ends. In the case of a situation where she has time to prepare for immense trauma level injuries, she can requisition an ambulance from a Butterfly Mansion backed hospital and load it with more heavy-duty equipment.

Kasugai Crow: Hinotora's assigned crow is a female that displays a more eloquent grasp of speech than the average talking corvid and who has grown quite the ego in part because of that, taking pride in displaying abnormal skills. Professional and smugly composed in most cases, she is a bird that has been referred to as "cat-like" in the past. Hinotora trained her to deliver messages quietly, rather than bellowing announcements to all and sundry in the area.

_________________________________________________________________________

^{U n i q u e T r a i t s} :
✧ Sweet Tooth: Really likes her sweets. Often can be seen casually chewing on some form of candy, particularly gum or lollipops.
✧ Biology Major: Hinotora, supplied with the more "modern" education of the 1980's, aggressively pursued knowledge of the human body in the development of the Phoenix Style. Having worked closely with the Butterfly Mansion since the discovery of her Sakasachi blood, she has also done much study on human and demon biology. Her refined sense of her body gives her an upper hand in using Total Concentration Breathing techniques to manipulate her body in unconventional ways compared to the average Demon Slayer, and her knowledge of medical techniques, drugs and poisons is extensive enough to make her an able field medic and surgeon.
✧ Indomitable Will: Like many Demon Slayers, Hinotora possesses an ironclad will and spirit, refusing to give up and remaining lucid and focused even when under immense pressure and pain. As a result of her harsh training methods along with no small number of brutal demon encounters, she is quite familiar with pain and able to largely ignore it.
✧ Eye For Bullshit: Due to being raised in an environment filled with people that (in her words) "masked contempt as righteousness", she has a rather finely honed sense for when she is being deceived or misled. Though by no means does this imply she is a mind-reader or any such nonsense, it does mean she is very difficult to put up fronts around. "Masks" rarely go unnoticed, and once her suspicion is aroused, the possibility of her determining what is hidden becomes much higher.
✧ The only reason Hinotora doesn't have tattoos is that the development of Phoenix Form 1 resulted in the "purging of impurities" in her body, including any ink.

✧ Special Trait: "Blessed" (Sakasachi) Blood - As a result of her abnormal heritage, despite by all other accounts being a perfect picture of humanity, Hinotora's blood carries a special property which allows it to digest and assimilate demon genetics, "converting" them into healthy human biomass instead. Because of this, unless she makes a conscious effort to suppress her biology's natural instincts with some form of TCB, Hinotora's blood makes her highly resistant -if not immune- to the process of demon conversion. And conversely, even perhaps far more disconcertingly, it allows her blood to be used as a cure and poison both that is capable of converting demons... back into humans. This extremely rare -if not entirely unheard of- phenomenon has hence been classified as "Sakasachi Blood" by the Butterfly Mansion.

• A medical exam with the Butterfly Mansion revealed a number of other interesting oddities. Hinotora's resting baseline heatbeat-per-minute is 90; this gives her a higher baseline performance as a human, near the peak of what is possible while being healthy. However, it also means that her increased baseline should mean it is even harder for her to awaken a Demon Slayer Mark, as her body must undergo even more comparatively intense conditions to the average human to breach the involuntary activation threshold.
• The anti-demon properties of her blood also happen to make Hinotora incredibly stealthy when placed against their heightened senses. Her blood is near odorless, and she is able to bypass most Blood Demon Art barriers with ease, stealthy to a level of borderline environmental stillness.
• At present, the property of curing demons is relatively recently discovered and largely unexplored and unrefined, leaving it only capable of completely reverting a demon that was changed no longer than 3 days ago. Beyond that point, it is merely a highly potent -though not necessarily deadly- poison, making Hinotora's blood effectively toxic to demons.
• It is unknown what would happen to this trait if Hinotora were to be transformed into a demon. Would it somehow be retained? Would it be inverted? Perhaps the truth will never be known.

Kimetsu no Yaiba AU: Temen-ni-Guru (Arc 2)

THE CHART MUST BE FED

(Will update more later depending on how much information Hinotora might truly presently have in practice regarding everyone here. Otherwise, unless there was a fairly decent reason for them to have met or for her to have heard about them, I mostly assumed unfamiliarity. Ryoshu's was the funniest entry in this respect, even if I suspect that it might be inaccurate to assume a demon that long-standing is unknown.)

^{Relationship Chart} : Hinotora's thoughts regarding;

^{Jae-eun Yoshihide} :
"Behind all that flowery nonsense, the Dragon Hashira's... not a bad guy. Honestly, I'm surprised that we clicked so well, but maybe I shouldn't be. He's a pretty easygoing guy at the end of the day, doesn't ask a lot from me, but ironically, that kinda just makes me want to actually put in more effort. Wild. Conversely, he's not all empty fluff when he needs to be. There's a real badass lurking underneath that mask of his. I'd say he should let his real feelings out a lot more though, because the more he bottles them up, the less control he'll have when that mask finally slips under pressure. Still, I feel like I've learned a lot from him, despite him mostly leaving me to my own devices, and honestly... I hope we get to continue on like this for many years to come." @xAlter

^{Ubuyashiki Takaya} :
"I have mixed feelings. While he's still a more palatable Branch Head than Kyoto's, he's made more than his fair share of questionable decisions. Under most circumstances, he seems cool-headed and good-natured, but there's no doubt that he has a merciless streak, considering he way he's ordered bombing attacks on not just demons, but rival human organizations. I appreciate his willingness to coexist with peaceful demons, but isn't tolerating the former Upper 2 a bit too far? I can't deny enjoying that Tokyo gives its Slayers a lot of slack in how they operate, but isn't allowing the Water Hashira to throw an unchecked tantrum across his territory beyond the pale? And more than that, to actively collaborate with her? Well... I suppose you have to take the good with the bad sometimes. As a person, I guess I don't particularly dislike him, but Takaya hasn't really given me any reason to call a kid 'master'. I guess he's a competent enough leader though, so I won't disrespect him outright... An 'Ubuyashiki-sama' should be serviceable." @Yu Narukami

^{Tomioka Guen} :
"Guen? That constant pain in my ass? Yeah, I know her. Hell, I've treated her wounds on Takaya's orders... a lot. More than is really reasonable even. Look, man, I know she lost her hubby and all, but she needs to take a step back and calm her tits. There's no revenge worth writing about in dying a stupid death, and that's the direction she's headed at this rate. Someday, she's going to get in over her head, and I'm not going to be able to do shit to save her after. Worse, if she keeps on like this, she's going to get other people -innocent people- killed in her crusade, and if that happens... I may have to respond accordingly. I hope she knows that." @Yu Narukami

^{Tenko Thompson} :
"I've only met her in passing honestly. Can't say I have an opinion worth a damn yet, but something about her kind of gives me the willies. And somehow, I'm not sure it's not the religious fervor. Maybe it's that she's also from the Rengoku bloodline, but- No, that's ridiculous. She looks and acts nothing like the main clan. Also, I guess she's pretty enough; she's got that 'girl next door' charm to her, at least on a surface level. I guess I'll just have to play things by ear..." @Randomguy

^{Ryūnoko Keodis} :
"The 'Info Broker'? Yeah, I've heard of him. Hell, I've met him... in passing anyway. I try to keep tabs on any demons that actually attempt the coexist with humans. But gotta be real? I'm wary of the guy. In principle, I appreciate the idea of a demon that's just trying to stay out of things, but come on... He's a former Blood Moon. You don't get that title for being all sunshine and roses. So, honestly, anyone that lets their guard down with him? That truly lets him in? They're an idiot. He's an information broker who is obviously and shamelessly playing both sides, and the only reason nobody from either side has gotten rid of him is that the price for doing so is bigger than anyone is willing to pay." @Arminwraith

^{Uzui Kairi} :
"Not exactly her biggest fan, to be honest. She's from the Kyoto Branch for one, and I don't got a lot of good memories of that place. Too many two-faced assholes, too many masks, and Kairi wears a lot more than most. Really, what's more bothersome is that overbearing plastic personality of hers. 'Older sister'? Screw off with that. I don't need the "guidance" of someone like you." @Digmata

^{Tsugikuni Himari} :
"I know she's from the Corps' Kyoto Branch, but I still get the sense that we'd get along. Honestly, I don't give a damn about her family being related to the Demon King. The sins of the father are not that of the son, which is something I think isn't appreciated enough. And real talk, she's genuinely impressive. She's younger than me, only eighteen, and still already a full Hashira, one that defeated a Demon Consort alone even. Sure, there's not really any better candidates, and sure, there's historically been younger, but even so, credit where it's due. If nothing else, I'll give her credit for being a lot more reasonable about her brother's death than his fiance turned out to be. It's understandable to grieve, but in our line of work, isn't this just business as usual? I think Himari understands that, and I have a lot more confidence that she won't let revenge come at the cost of justice." @King Kindred

^{Ryunosuke Kamado} :
"A colossal jackass. Fuck that guy. Metaphorically of course. Even if I were actually interested in men, you couldn't pay me to get involved with someone that whores around as much as he does. I realize I'm not much for tradition or conformity, but even I have something approaching consistent virtues. It's really a crying shame the power of Sun Breathing showed up in someone like him. I can only imagine the sort of frightening headway we'd make if the 'Strongest of Today' was actually interested in fighting demons for more than satisfying his superiority complex." @JrVader

^Xaku :
"The relatively recently appointed Police Chief certainly seems to be a 'problem', as they say. Considering the stranglehold of the Demon King Michikatsu over Japan's Yakuza right now... and considering the reports of how troublesome the police have become... and the fact that 'Xaku' has never been recorded under any open daylight conditions, it stands to reason that she could be some kind of demon, perhaps even a high-ranking one. The Blood Moon Demon Lords are all reportedly males though, so could she be a Demon Consort? Inconclusive. I could look into this more, but a Police Chief is a lot higher profile than most targets. Hell, I could be... Well, I suppose there's no rush for now. For all I know, I'm just crying wolf over nothing. Without confirmation... For now, I'll keep those suspicions to myself and just keep an eye out." @Aku the Samurai

^{Archer Demon Ryoshu} :
"Who?" @TimelessParagon

^{Kousai Agatsuma} :
"Heard of him at least. Hard not to in Demon Slayer Corps circles when he's been one of the few to so much as kill a Demon Consort. I realize that does little to address the Demon Lords they serve, but it's a step in the right direction. And even without meeting him, on that merit alone, I can only assume his skills are impressive." @Taka

^{𝕄𝕦𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕤𝕦} :
"That Onsen proprietress? You mean the weirdo that's always wearing the fox ear cosplay? Well, I guess her faculties are commendable enough, but I only ever went there the once. Why? Well, I don't often tell people this, but I can tell when someone's bullshitting me. No, it's not like... a sixth sense or anything, just experience. I'm not a mind-reader. It's just that two-faced people stick out like a sore thumb. Their smiles. Their voices. The way their feelings don't quite reach their eyes. I guess I'm hyper-sensitive to that kind of thing considering the way I grew up, but that 'Mura' lady just kinda gives me the creeps. Not just that, but... I work in a hospital right? So, the thing is, my Phoenix Forms enhance my senses, quite a lot actually, and whenever I get near that Onsen, I can't help but notice the same way it sticks out to me in a hospital, even beneath the chemicals and air fresheners. It's blood. Old blood. The scent of rot." @HaHa

^{Daikaku Kōshin} :
"Who? What, he's some kind of monk? Yeah, I definitely don't know who that is. I don't go to temples or get involved in that Buddhist crap. Er, no shade, I guess; worship who you want or whatever, but I mean... I guess if he really follows that sort of religion, then he's probably a pretty chill guy?" @13org

^Overall :
"Well, I suppose it's a fairly typical lineup, eh? Lots of people with drama to spare and an axe to grind with demon-kind. It's a tale as old as time, of heroes and monsters and vengeance, but honestly? At the end of the day, it would be nice if more people survived than not in this latest crusade... Not going to hold my breath, considering historical precedent, but I suppose I'll just have to be satisfied with doing my best to keep them alive, even if they throw themselves at death like headless chickens. Sacrifice saves lives? You'll save a lot more if you live to help the people that need you tomorrow, so stop bleeding out on my table already!"

Kimetsu no Yaiba AU: Temen-ni-Guru (Arc 2)

Notes to Self/Future Brainstorming

Association with Butterfly Mansion elicits poison use?

Future Phoenix Form Names:?
-Burning Sky Dance: Something involving actual outward pyrokinesis, possibly something inspired by Flame Form 4 mixed with Form 5?
-Tailwind of the Sky God: Focused flame expulsions from a user's weapon or limbs that act as thrust to enable flight? Possible Phoenix Form 4 or 5 candidate, since this seems fairly straight-forward in terms of elemental shaping.
-Breath of Life/Merciful Phoenix Tear?: A technique that through closely syncing the user's breathing with a subject (potentially via mouth-to-mouth resuscitation-type contact?) allows them to extend the effects of Phoenix Form 2's accelerated healing to another person, guiding their body into performing the technique even if the subject is otherwise incapacitated? Potentially extremely straining on the subject; may save their life in the immediate but may also be more likely to induce the stress that lowers their lifespan as recompence. This downside is especially dangerous if the subject also has a Demon Slayer Mark.

Salamander Style?: A style mixing poisons with fire by ingesting toxic materials and mixing them with flames inside the user's body before expelling them in Breathing techniques?
-Form 1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wisteria: Consuming wisteria flowers beforehand, the user imbues them into the cloak of flames created by the 5th Flame Form, creating a new technique that slashes the target with poisonous flames, creating wounds that demons find more difficult to heal.

Alternatively: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Salamander, considering as a new Phoenix Form that is only truly safely possible due to the prior forms enabling the safe internal handling of poison to execute.

Or, instead staying true to the Phoenix Style's current running them, this technique is more of a general buff that is meant to be combined with a separate Flame-using Form. Meaning this Form is used first to then turn the flames of the following Form(s) poisonous and imbued with the chosen toxin.

Other note to self: Add a relationships chart section to the end of the sheet later!

Rengoku Hinotora

'Rengoku Hinotora'
'Rengoku Hinotora'

A g e: 20 | R a n k: Kinoto (Tsuguku to Dragon Hashira)

^{P e r s o n a l i t y} :

Hinotora is, in a word, "irreverent", having little respect for tradition or hierarchy. Strongly self-assured to the point of almost being arrogant, she is rather rude by Japanese standards, rarely using honorifics, calling others casually by given names -or nicknames- or just shamelessly voicing her discontent aloud, even in formal settings. While not fundamentally opposed to not making a problem of herself, Hinotora resents being expected to conform to the expectations of anyone but herself. In her eyes, the only approval she truly has to meet is her own, and as long as she's living life the way she has decided is correct, that's all there is to be said about it. She is the sort to revel in exertion, to exhibit the tendencies of a battle junkie once her blood gets pumping.

Her apparent brashness, however, clouds the true cunning in her nature. At heart, Hinotora is a deeply ambitious woman, tantalized by the idea of self-improvement and strength; yet, she is also steadied by a keen sense of self-preservation. Contrary to many -if not most- Demon Slayers, who glorify the ephemerality of life and the meaning in sacrifice, Hinotora has no intention of dying, not any time soon and ideally not any time at all. To her, sacrifice is cowardice and weakness, to take the easy way out, and true strength is to defy the dying light until the bitter end and beyond. As something of a fan of Western culture and media, she once encountered a quote that struck her poignantly: "Dying is easy, young man; living is harder!" Having internalized this concept, Hinotora believes true strength is continuing to live and fight on no matter what, because you're no good to the world dead. And no matter how many you save in the present by dying, you could have saved far more by living on in the long run. Yet, conversely, she does not scorn those that die simply because they were weak; in her eyes, the truer sin is not dying after having given your all but forgoing survival whilst having any other option.

This kind of ideology, needless to say, stands in stark contrast to much of what the Demon Slayer Corps believes, almost seeming to mock their history in how it interprets the pursuit of justice through a lens that many demons could appreciate. But it's far from the most controversial stance Hinotora holds. In fact, as far as actual demons are concerned, she views them as no different from humans spiritually. In her mind, it is only right to dehumanize others based on "inhumanity" as a concept, not physical status. "Humanity" to her is a way of life, lost or gained by deeds and choice, not by nature, and she is open to offering demons -particularly young ones- some level of slack in consideration for their biological murderous instincts, provided they show a willingness to rise above them. Conversely, she does not view the human and demon conflict as a matter of black and white and sees no issue with good demons killing evil humans. Despite this, she is not by any means blind to the nature of most demons, who more often than not selfishly abuse their powers to murder and consume the undeserving, and she is doesn't hesitate in punishing the truly unjust and mercy-killing those too weak of will to resist their instincts.

At her core, though not arrogant enough to shun working with others, Hinotora is a girl who found a certain strength in isolation, who didn't crumble under the pressure of others' expectations but rose up to defy them and carve her own path. Despite her seemingly selfish ideals, however, the one thing the Rengoku Clan truly instilled into her was a genuine value for justice and the pursuit of a better tomorrow. Dazzled further by tales told in many a fiction she buried her nose in as a child, along with tales of legends in Demon Slayer history, Hinotora idealizes the concept of heroes and -in contrast to her outward tendency to dry cynicism- wants to stand for what is ultimately right, no matter how much her methods might disagree with the opinions of the majority.

The only person Hinotora seems keen to offer actual unvarnished respect as a matter of deferential authority is the head of the Butterfly Mansion, Yushiro, who she refers to as "Sensei", admiring him as the pinnacle of demon-kind's potential for coexistence with humanity and as a person of otherwise genuinely respectable intellect and legacy. She still finds his fits of annoyance amusing and is not above harmlessly needling him, having certainly attempted to pester him for stories of legendary events he was involved in.

^{S h o w a S e c r e t} :
The circumstances of Hinotora's birth were contentious in no small sense of the word.

Her mother, Rengoku Taiga, a Flame Breathing demon slayer, had conceived out of wedlock during a night of emotional fancy with a handsomely mysterious stranger, and while this would have already been scandalous enough, what would turn the matter borderline heretical was when the father of Taiga's child chose to make himself known. Having apparently kept tabs on her in the aftermath of their dalliance, he approached Taiga on a dark, moonlit night and revealed himself to be a demon, and it was at that moment that she realized with horror that the man before her was none other than a Blood Moon, the only demons that could sire children. And it was then with a terrible "kindness" that the Moon attempted to turn both mother and unborn child with his blood... and failed.

The aftermath of the attempt and the terribly weak state it left the mother in would leave it an open secret that the circumstances of the upcoming birth were the union of a demon and a human, and more ardently, it was advised that the fruit of the union be removed before it could blossom, such was the shamefulness of it. Yet, the soon-to-be mother rejected such advice, and for her ardent determination, she was rewarded with a healthy baby girl... who she'd not live long enough to raise.

This was the world Rengoku Hinotora arrived into, orphaned at birth and perceived rather unfavorably for the circumstances of it.

To the Rengoku Clan's credit, despite Taiga's more immediate family shunning and otherwise outright disowning her child for the walking stain on their reputation that she was, Hinotora was not disbarred from the same opportunities any other child of the clan had, having all her basic living and educational needs met. However, the rumors surrounding her heritage isolated her socially growing up, leading to some amount of ostracization, and she would end up not internalizing or properly embodying the Rengoku Clan's ideals, becoming a rebellious punk of a girl.

Despite being indoctrinated into Demon Slaying from nearly the moment she could walk (perhaps as a form of "penance" for her existence and "proof of worthiness" in certain eyes), Hinotora did not respond to harsh training and attempts to mold her into a simple cog-in-the-machine weapon with meekness and humble obedience, but instead earned scorn for being a snarky little shit that offered no respect to others that wasn't "earned", displaying a precocious awareness even early on that she knew she was being treated unfairly and had no intention of taking it lying down. Her increasingly irreverent behavior led to her being viewed as ungrateful towards her benefactors and occasionally heretical for the curiosity she showed towards "deviant" and "problematic" knowledge. This dissonance in values further ostracized her, especially once she developed the Phoenix Breathing Style rather than "course correcting", earning her even greater scrutiny for the "shamefully selfish and dishonorable" mindset emphasized by her new Breathing Style.

In the end, having felt as though she never truly formed bonds with her own family, Hinotora would take the opportunity shortly befoe she reached her age of majority to transfer away from the strict and traditional Kyoto branch of the Demon Slayer Corps -and subsequently, the Rengoku's larger sphere of influence- to study and fight abroad with the far more flexible and lenient Tokyo branch. There, she encountered an environment so diametric to the one she had left that she even found herself fighting alongside demons as allies every now and then.

As it turned out, the Tokyo branch of the Demon Slayer Corps paid much more respect to a niche element of their Corps' history, the reality that in their direst time of need, they had received aid from other demons against Muzan, the reality that demons could -if given the chance- reject their murderous instincts and coexist peacefully with humans. This understanding was something Hinotora found to resonate with her on a level she hadn't realized was possible. And as she continued to sharpen her skills on the rather more "intense" Tokyo territories in the demon vs slayer conflict and studying the history of said conflict and how it came to be, she found herself silently asking a rather poignant question...

Aren't humans and demons just two sides of the same coin, after all?

Not much more than two years ago, shortly after she'd moved to Tokyo and begun delving deeper into a medical education, that same question was brought into even sharper relief, as when encountering a demon during her "civilian hours" that nearly bested her due to attacking her while she was unarmed, Hinotora discovered that her blood was not only toxic to demons but had the capacity to convert them back into humans. Instead of being disturbed by the potential implications this might have for her own status, however, Hinotora was ecstatic, beginning to study the phenomenon deeper and consider the ways this could be used to further deepen the development of her Phoenix Style.

Nowadays, if you were to visit the Butterfly Mansion, perhaps you might encounter her occasionally, a young woman with jet-black hair and a dark red long-coat, her golden eyes curled into sharp coy smiles, as she casually engages in comradery with an allied demon. In recent years, Hinotora has slowly become a more common face amongst the most intellectual faction in the Demon Slayer Corps, earning her keep in performing experiments in new ways to fight demons, and from a mundane angle, "Doctor Hinotora" is slowly gaining a reputation amongst secretly Butterfly Mansion backed hospitals as a young rising star in the medical field.

Also fairly recently, Hinotora has been scouted as the Tsuguko of the Dragon Hashira, Jae-eun, and while she was initially wary of the offer of a many who so often wore a flowery mask, she has since found the arrangement between them to be surprisingly and pleasantly amiable.

_________________________________________________________________________

'K o k y ū'
'K o k y ū'

^{F l a m b o y a n c e} : Hinotora is a practitioner of Flame Breathing Forms 1-5 and is capable of the advanced form of Total Concentration: Constant Breathing. However in terms of the pure Flame Style, her proficiency lacks compared to her true specialty, the Style she developed as one more suited to her philosophy, Phoenix Breathing. It is for this reason and her general estrangement from the Rengoku Clan that has led to her never learning Flame Breathing Forms beyond the 5th.

Phoenix Breathing or “The Breath of the Phoenix” is a derivative offshoot combination of Flame Breathing and Total Concentration Breathing, which could be seen as heretical by many Demon Slayers, as it emphasizes a philosophy of "ascension" and the pursuit of survival, idealizing the concept of "stoking an eternal flame", rather than burning brightly and burning out. In a sense, it rejects the idea of sacrificing oneself in the pursuit of one's goals, instead emphasizing living to fight another day. For, after all, what point is there in fighting for a better world if you don't live long enough to enjoy the fruits of your labors, right? Regardless of this rather selfish premise, however, there is an undercurrent of honor, an idea that reckless sacrifice is -in itself- cowardly and that living to fight on guarantees the chance to save even more lives in the long run. In Hinotora's eyes, a true Phoenix may burn eternally, but they burn always for Justice. A true Phoenix shall Set Their Heart Ablaze... and always rise from their ashes.

Mechanically speaking, the Phoenix Style takes advantage of the great advancements in (semi) modern medicine and biological knowledge to create a foundation that surpasses its origins. It combines Flame Breathing with advanced forms of Total Concentration Breathing, primarily those of the Recovery type, and puts a focus on cultivating that power internally, reinforcing and enhancing the user's foundations to allow them to achieve a physicality and endurance comparable to Demons. Indeed, if this Breathing Style has but one definitive goal? It is "to become inhuman without rejecting one's Humanity".

Compared to other Styles, the current forms of Phoenix Breathing are typically less "special elemental moves" and more a series of stacking enhancements. This focus on "improving one's foundation" means that, on an external level, a user showcases very little "elemental power" compared to other styles until at least beyond the first 3 Establishing Forms, which act as the cornerstones for the entire style. The Style treats the user's body like an engine, pressurizing energy inside one's nerves and muscles to achieve explosive speed and power. All the while, the user's cells are treated as growing batteries, storing energy to be unleashed later.

As an actual sword style, Phoenix Breathing emphasizes a wide, deft swings with a strong sturdy blade. To fight as a Phoenix is to be a glorious burning bird of prey, swiftly closing the distance with a target, engaging in a relentless offense, before deftly retreating with equal agility to avoid retaliation and begin the whole cycle anew. Mobility is a key element and highlights a need for strong reflexes and quick thinking, along with making the user at home with executing midair maneuvers. It is a fighting style that creates brute strength through velocity and dexterity and -if practicing its Forms properly- provides in and of itself the necessary physical ability to do so.

✧ Form 1: Furnace Breathing - The first step in the style emphasizes purging impurities and reinforcing one's foundation. Acting as a variant of Recovery Breathing Method laced with cleansing Flame, the user stokes an internal fire surging with the "breath of life", flushing their body free of invasive elements (like poison, disease, etc) and energizing their cells with revitalizing energy and renewed stamina, providing them near limitless endurance. In practice, this form is meant to be used constantly, with every other part of the Phoenix style branching off of it. Side effects of long-term usage of this form include an overall improved immune system and general health along with increased longevity due to gradually restoring the expended capacity of the user's cells to naturally replicate.

✧ Form 2: Flaming Rebirth - As the style's mainstay recovery technique, the second form utilizes an improved form of the Enhanced Recovery Method. Whilst the first form focuses more on gathering and maintaining energy, this form releases that storage in a burst of restorative activity. By focusing their awareness and manipulation of their body, the user is able to detect and heal or otherwise mitigate even hidden internal injuries. By manually prompting their cells into replicating and forcibly accelerating the body's natural recovery systems, at the upper end, the user can manage a form of slow but combat-effective regeneration, limited -granted- to healing only injuries they could have otherwise theoretically recovered from naturally. Lesser uses of this technique can include slowing the circulation of poisons, seizing control of muscles to prevent organs from falling out or even halting bleeding by near-instantly coagulating blood or cauterizing wounds with the user's own flames. This form, once learned, allows the user to train much faster than normal, greatly increasing training time due to how fast their bodies can heal after even the worst and most insane training.

✧ And while this may mostly just sound like normal ERM on the surface, what the Phoenix style truly improves the technique with is the capacity to utilize it even when the user cannot breathe, forcibly drawing on reserves of vitality to induce emergency recovery and allowing them to restore vital bodily functions even in positions where a normal human would suffocate. However, performing the technique without breathing causes immense strain on the body, to the degree that it even decreases the user's lifespan, counteracting the improved longevity of the first form with overuse. Usage of this technique carries a glint of elemental power, as since the recovery is laced with a release of stored Flame energy, the user's wounds may occasionally spew flames when they "cauterize" in a burst.

✧ Form 3: Fire Bird's Spirit - Still staying true to much of the Style's "ladder"-like progression, this form is not an island, but rather an extension of prior forms. Once the body's foundation has been established and protected, this form is used to properly reinforce and enhance it. With this form, the user learns to constantly reinforce their body with the explosive power of flames, greatly enhancing strength, speed, reflexes and overall senses beyond the normal levels of Total Concentration Breathing. This form is learned third in the order of things, since without the second form, this form carries a great risk of burning one's own body up from the inside out without any way to address internal injuries. Because of this, this style could only be developed and trained by Hinotora once she was confident she had mastered both RCM and ERM, and as such it currently remains the third and final of the Phoenix style's maiden techniques.

✧ Usage of this form creates great heat inside the user's body, keeping them warm in cold environments whilst warding off extreme heat through the way the process of training the technique tempers the body against the opposite extreme. The process of learning the technique includes heat management usage of TCB in order to avoid overheating the body, and it's not uncommon for the user's breath to escape them in steaming exhales. Any damage this form does cause to the user's own body is typically swiftly rectified by the use of the prior two maiden techniques of the Phoenix Style.

_________________________________________________________________________

'N i c h i r i n'
'N i c h i r i n'

^{B l a d e W o r k} : Hinotora carries a blade glinting with a fiery orange hue, representing the explosive flames lurking beneath her skin. Unlike most Demon Slayers, she does not wield a traditional katana; instead, she carries a longsword of European shape, bringing to mind images of armored knights astride gallant steeds. A bold design emblematic of flames in a spiral of gold and orange runs down the center of the blade as well.

Yushiro Concealment Talisman: A standard-issue talisman used to cloak the presence of her sword and other demon slaying equipment while not in combat, allowing her to always be armed even in public without drawing suspicion.

Medical Supplies: Carries a small pouch of utilities for treating harm, including bandages, stitches, medical tape, painkillers and some other odds and ends. In the case of a situation where she has time to prepare for immense trauma level injuries, she can requisition an ambulance from a Butterfly Mansion backed hospital and load it with more heavy-duty equipment.

Kasugai Crow: Hinotora's assigned crow is a female that displays a more eloquent grasp of speech than the average talking corvid and who has grown quite the ego in part because of that, taking pride in displaying abnormal skills. Professional and smugly composed in most cases, she is a bird that has been referred to as "cat-like" in the past. Hinotora trained her to deliver messages quietly, rather than bellowing announcements to all and sundry in the area.

_________________________________________________________________________

^{U n i q u e T r a i t s} :
✧ Sweet Tooth: Really likes her sweets. Often can be seen casually chewing on some form of candy, particularly gum or lollipops.
✧ Biology Major: Hinotora, supplied with the more "modern" education of the 1980's, aggressively pursued knowledge of the human body in the development of the Phoenix Style. Having worked closely with the Butterfly Mansion since the discovery of her Sakasachi blood, she has also done much study on human and demon biology. Her refined sense of her body gives her an upper hand in using Total Concentration Breathing techniques to manipulate her body in unconventional ways compared to the average Demon Slayer, and her knowledge of medical techniques, drugs and poisons is extensive enough to make her an able field medic and surgeon.
✧ Indomitable Will: Like many Demon Slayers, Hinotora possesses an ironclad will and spirit, refusing to give up and remaining lucid and focused even when under immense pressure and pain. As a result of her harsh training methods along with no small number of brutal demon encounters, she is quite familiar with pain and able to largely ignore it.
✧ Eye For Bullshit: Due to being raised in an environment filled with people that (in her words) "masked contempt as righteousness", she has a rather finely honed sense for when she is being deceived or misled. Though by no means does this imply she is a mind-reader or any such nonsense, it does mean she is very difficult to put up fronts around. "Masks" rarely go unnoticed, and once her suspicion is aroused, the possibility of her determining what is hidden becomes much higher.
✧ The only reason Hinotora doesn't have tattoos is that the development of Phoenix Form 1 resulted in the "purging of impurities" in her body, including any ink.

✧ Special Trait: "Blessed" (Sakasachi) Blood - As a result of her abnormal heritage, despite by all other accounts being a perfect picture of humanity, Hinotora's blood carries a special property which allows it to digest and assimilate demon genetics, "converting" them into healthy human biomass instead. Because of this, unless she makes a conscious effort to suppress her biology's natural instincts with some form of TCB, Hinotora's blood makes her highly resistant -if not immune- to the process of demon conversion. And conversely, even perhaps far more disconcertingly, it allows her blood to be used as a cure and poison both that is capable of converting demons... back into humans. This extremely rare -if not entirely unheard of- phenomenon has hence been classified as "Sakasachi Blood" by the Butterfly Mansion.

• At present, this property is relatively recently discovered and largely unexplored and unrefined, leaving it only capable of completely reverting a demon that was changed no longer than 3 days ago. Beyond that point, it is merely a highly potent -though not necessarily deadly- poison, making Hinotora's blood effectively toxic to demons.
• It is unknown what would happen to this trait if Hinotora were to be transformed into a demon. Would it somehow be retained? Would it be inverted? Perhaps the truth will never be known.

Lewascan2's test zone

NA Post Holder

Unknown Place - 11/14/2022 ??:?? UTC+8

---

A cacophonous howl droned through the air like a siren, omnipresent and all-encompassing enough that it felt like it was vibrating every molecule of her being. A torrent of surging, chaotic energies followed right along, tearing through the air with a shriek that seemed to rip reality asunder in streams of fire, ice, twisted space, lightning, water, "love" and more.

There was very little finesse to the assault, just near-mindless brute force and overwhelming emotion. It was less a stream of coordinated attacks as it was a wave of power vomit, churning and roaring out in a barely coherent singular purpose... that being to drown a single target underneath it all.

Golden eyes flashed wide, a mind vastly superior to any normal human's paired with a reaction speed to match, calculating trajectories and danger zones in a torrent of data, and the owner's body reacted with cat-like grace, springing into the latest of many twisting motions to thread the needle of chaos. A black and green shield briefly appeared, warding off what portion of the deluge she simply couldn't dodge outright, as she braced her feet on the back side of her Noble Arm and rode the wave of power upwards, leaping at the apex to soar high above a sea of madness.

Crackling black ooze flowed over her skin, spilling over from underneath her own clothes and layering over the top of them, as pitch-black spears made of titanium alloy shot forth in all directions like javelins, lancing out around her like she was a giant sea urchin to rip into the screaming ocean below in search of physical purchase, of something approaching solid ground.

They did not find it, as the churning sea rippled and shifted around the projectiles. There was a lurch and then an ear-piercing splintering noise, as several of the ungodly durable spears snapped like twigs or unraveled like silly string on contact with the chaos below.

She was already falling, but the woman had already anticipated the possibility of failure and prepared accordingly.

A parachute billowing out from the ooze coating her back, unfurling with a whumph and delaying her descent, as she disconnected the spears from her ooze and instead regurgitated a long thin hardened plastic surface from the ooze on her stomach. Low weight. Maneuverable. And most importantly, it provided her power more surface area to work with.

Her ooze spread down the surface of the hard plastic sheet, crackling and bubbling, as it bulged and expelled the nose of what seemed to be a large missile with handles mounted on the side.

Grinning ferally, Lei Qingshe, Snake of the Zodiac, caught hold of one of those handles, wrenching the rocket free of her shadow fully, as she disconnected the parachute from her back and retracted the plastic plank back into her ooze. In the back of her mind, a wireless connection blinked to life, as she synched with the internal systems she had fixed into the rocket.

Now in free-fall, the Snake slung her legs over the side of the rocket, feet sliding into a pair of metallic stirrups, the fins of her new mount flexing in readiness. A single mental command was all it took to ignite the thruster mounted on the back end of her creation in a screaming jet-engine whine, and with a roar, the greenette suddenly became a blur of motion, pealing through the air in an upwards arc that just barely missed plunging into the madness below.

The screaming sea howled its displeasure at her ingenuity, but leaning down to flatten herself against the side of her rocket, the Snake could only grin in response.

"Alright, then..." she murmured, as ooze spread from her ears to protectively cover her eyes from the wind, the bubbling mass instead projecting a number of camera lenses for her to see through by proxy, "... it's about time I got somewhere with this."

Gritting her teeth, she felt again an ugly, crawling sensation ripple across her skin, one that she'd grown all too familiar with since being trapped in this place. It was more than just normal unease she was certain; in fact, she was confident it was like her very soul and Noble Arm wanted to quail in this place... but the Snake was not one to cower. Not anymore.

And that was why, despite having been in a running battle for the past day, she was still not even close to giving up on finding a solution to her current predicament.

What exactly is this supposed to be: the Russian nesting doll of Hell?

...

Summons rocket.

Ambushed by golden chains.

"You could have been great..." taunt.

How long had it been, Qingshe wondered... since she'd last been in truly dire straits?

Qingshe vs C.D.S.

---

Roughly three weeks ago...

Diamond Island Convention and Exhibition Center, The City of Phnom Penh - 11/11/2022 06:29 UTC+8

---

Callie's warning that there were infiltrators in the same building as the diplomatic summit may have been the first of its kind for what would soon be a day of madness... but by no means was she the only one following up on a lead of that nature.

Sliding through the halls with an amicable smile on her lips, Qingshe nodded to a patrolling guard, as she schooled her expression into cordiality long enough to turn a corner, before frowning. Heels clacked sharply through tiled halls, as the Snake strode with purpose, eyes narrowed sharply in search.

According to the tense formality of the situation, the greenette was actually wearing a far more socially acceptable outfit to the negotiations, a pale-blue button-up dress shirt paired with a black tie, long white coat, black skirt and black leggings. For once, she didn't stand out like a spotlight in the dark, and she had decided the best place for her in these negotiations was...

Well, to be honest, it was just not making a nuisance of herself by existing in the same room as the man she'd inadvertently collaborated in changing the weather with... to say nothing of the inherent unnecessary tension keeping the turncoat Snake and loyalist Dragon in the same zip code would bring. Her actions in the operation to dismantle the Rooster's prison camp had been about the furthest thing from subtle, and Qingshe rather doubted her presence would do anything to set anyone involved at ease.

So, she'd chosen the better part of valor and excused herself preemptively from the proceedings to focus on quietly patrolling the premises. Sure, there was something to be said for the risk of Huo Ren and one of Superbia's Avatars being left alone with her more vulnerable comrades and the national representatives... but Huo Ren would be a fool to start a fight in close quarters with Mr. Makri. And Mr. Henri's presence should hopefully ensure Superbia's Avatar was close to a non-factor if worst came to worst.

This was all to say that Qingshe had set herself what she felt was a fairly reasonable self-imposed position in all this... and she had spotted something... concerning.

A flare of a navy-blue coat passing just out of sight.

A flicker of movement, a scruffy man gone almost as soon as he could be noticed.

Someone else might have mistaken those sightings for a hallucination...

But the Snake's sight and memory were too fine to be fooled...

Cao Bao was in the building.

Of course, Cao Bao's involvement wasn't unexpected. For all that he'd failed to show his face to the frontlines thus far, he was still Huo Ren's second, his bodyguard, backup and safety line. As long as Cao Bao was in the picture, it should be near impossible to eliminate the Dragon. No matter how grievously or lethally the Dragon was wounded, as long as Cao Bao activated his power even a moment before true death, Huo Ren would survive, transported back to Cao Bao's side in some safe haven or bolt-hole...

But therein laid the matter of concern...

Because Cao Bao was here. On the frontline.

Somewhere he'd never venture unless given orders from on high...

And knowing what she did about how terrifying the "support" could truly be if he set his mind to it...

Her jaw setting tensely, Qingshe kept her eyes peeled, even as a niggling feeling of unease grew more intense the longer her search went without results. Idly, she considered alerting the rest of the ASEAN team about the looming threat, but to be honest, they already seemed to have enough problems landing on their plate. And if Cao Bao were to engage them without her...

To call it a slaughter would be an understatement.

In other words, there was no point in worrying them over a possible threat until she could get actual confirmation that there was, in fact, a threat to be concerned over. Cao Bao was, at least nominally, a noncombatant. He was simply too obscenely valuable to risk on frontline operations, even considering China's rather excessive availability of Arms Masters and willingness to spend their lives like water. Amongst them, Cao Bao's value was easily A-Rank, and the only reason he wasn't ranked higher than B was a combination of politics and his own barely hidden commitment to doing the bare minimum to accomplish his duties and no more.

However, it was that selfsame attitude that clued Qingshe into how truly dangerous he was, because Cao Bao was a man of brutal efficiency, devoid of arrogance or the need to monologue to his opponents like so many of his comrades. If you were his enemy, he would just kill you, and he would do it without warning or prevarication. He would play as dirty as he needed to, and he underestimated no-one as a threat, resorting to overwhelmingly efficient murder, assassination and immediate retreats at the slightest sign of a true disadvantage as his tools of choice.

Cao Bao was a man with a -in his own words- "highly developed sense of self-preservation".

And in this sort of situation, Qingshe knew that made him the single most dangerous entity in this entire zip co-

A rustle of displaced air and the flare of body heat alerted her a moment before the sound of metal clashing rang out behind her.

Whirling around, Qingshe's narrowed eyes flashed from blue to gold, pupils narrowing to reptilian slits at the sight of...

...nothing.

Nothing except her floating shield, Ouroboros, fading back into invisibility from an unseen impact.

She didn't wait a moment longer even pretending the situation wasn't hot as lava, as her oozing shadow boiled out from beneath her feet in a rippling layer across the floo-

On instinct, the Snake's body twisted into a crouch, the whistle of displaced air signifying the passage of a scimitar through the place where her spine connected her neck to her torso. The rustle of a blue cloak met her ears just long enough to register its presence a moment before her assailant disappeared in another instantaneous flicker.

"Enough," she hissed, as her shadow erupted.

From the ooze spreading out around her, a halo of needle-thin titanium blades speared up like a forest of death, punching into the nearby walls and shattering the closest windows with a crash. Plaster rained down from above, as the blades tore through everything around her in a sweeping motion, rent lighting fixtures crying out in a crackle with their dying breath.

For a moment, the hallway was plunged into dead silence, save for the waning rain of glass and plaster, as the Snake glanced around her... and found no-one. Clicking her tongue, the greenette straightened up, not letting her guard down for a moment, as her ooze spread up the walls around her, coating the entire hallway in her immediate vicinity with bubbling, crackling black.

"Boy..."

The drawling man's voice drew her narrowed, golden eyes to drift over her shoulder, sighting a figure now leaning against the wall next to one of the broken windows...

"...I already knew you were one scary motherfucker," he continued with a grimace, one hand rubbing at his stubbled jawline, as a cigarette twisted between his lips, "but good grief, even that brief exchange just about launched my balls into my throat."

"Cao Bao..." Qingshe was proud of the way she managed not to openly seethe at the implications of this, her expression shifting into one of deceptive cordiality. "...might I inquire as to the meaning of this unprovoked assault on such an... auspicious occasion."

Cao Bao sighed, his eyes half-lidded, as he met her gaze with a calm he probably didn't feel. His hands fell to slip into the pockets of his coat, as he rolled his jaw. "Oi, believe me, I'm not any happier about poking the goddamn Snake of the Zodiac with a stick... but I think we both knew this was coming sooner or later."

There seemed to be a layered meaning in that statement that the Snake didn't fail to detect.

Qingshe's eyes narrowed, her expression of cordiality falling, as she hissed, "China would dare? If they sabotage these overtures of peace, the only thing waiting for them will be destruction."

Cao Bao shrugged, his own expression darkening with displeasure, as he sighed again. "Well, you know how it goes. Nothing personal, but... orders are orders..."

"Cao Bao, you-"

The man disappeared in a flicker, as Qingshe's eyes widened a moment before something cracked across her head hard enough to rock it forward. A warm trickling sensation and the acrid smell of gunpower niggled at her consciousness in the understanding that her reinforced skull had just warded off being burst like a watermelon by a bullet a split moment before her shadow responded in kind, eviscerating the area in search of her attacker.

Steel filled the air, as the forest of blades around her thickened, and a cacophony of raw noise announced the hailstorm of bullets that manifested to assault it in a tide of hot lead, the pinging cracks of ricochets sounding out. The Snake barely managed to catch a glimpse of Cao Bao's flickering form, as he teleported around the area her shadow occupied, bullets manifesting mid-flight in his wake to hurl themselves at her defenses in a ceaseless storm.

A thunderclap announced a shell the size of Qingshe's torso -a fucking battleship main gun round- splintering against her blades, before detonating in a firestorm that her Noble Arm flickered in front of her to guard against, as the explosion washed through her forest of blades, blew out even more windows from the shockwave and set the area ablaze

Qingshe clicked her tongue, her lips curling, as her shadow began to belch up a cover of blinding smoke, obscuring what she did next. Diving into her shadow, she cast her gaze outside it, dozens of reptilian eyes blooming open across the surface of her ooze in a wave, all of them hunting for the slightest hint of movement. All the while, her ooze flashed outwards, growing across every surface around the area she had initially deployed it and creeping out the windows to crawl on the outside of the building.

She finally found Cao Bao "hovering" just outside the building, propped up in the air and flickering in place under his power's constant "refreshes" of his position. A grimace was planted on his jaw, as his eyes narrowed at the cloud of smoke and ooze spreading out around it a moment before he disappeared again.

Distantly, from somewhere above and out of sight, Qingshe's shadow caught the sound waves of Cao Bao speaking into the static of a radio of some sort.

"You're up, Puppy."

Inside her shadow, Qingshe's eyes could only widen a moment before a crackling flash of purple streaked from the top of a nearby roof. Through dozens of eyes, she saw the approach of an all-too familiar figure, a girl wreathed in a buzzing corona of electricity, as she reached for a katana sheathed at her waist-

Qingshe's shadow belched fire and steel, a storm of blades and bullets spilling forth on an interception course-

-only for the crackling figure to appear entirely out of the line of fire, now with feet planted firmly on the ground below.

Cao Bao again!

The crackling figure glowed brighter, her blade baring itself to the air in a snapping hiss, as she blurred in a movement too fast for the Snake's network of eyes to physically track. Yet, Qingshe's shadow felt the building it lay upon shake, the eyes dotting her ooze watching as a purple streak left behind great cleaving gashes through the area just outside the shadow's radius, stalling and curtailing its further spread.

That could be problematic.

It happened in a flash almost too quick for an observer to catch, the entire exchange occurring within a bare few seconds.

Qingshe's shadow surged around the gaps in the building cut around it, flowing downwards around the crevices and bristling with blades, eyes and pillars, yet-

A streak of purple bounded off the walls around the oozing shadow like a living thunderbolt, gleaming glowing blade striking out like quicksilver, frying eyes and cleaving material extensions before they could act as bridges for the shadow to reach other surfaces.

Qingshe had been on the second floor at the time of the attack. Thus, as her shadow flowed downwards in a blur, it was soon coating the ceiling of what should have been the hallway below her. And it was there that the eyes blooming from it caught sight of a flash of blue-

Cao Bao dodged the hailstorm of firepower that all but annihilated the first-floor hall's tiles in another flicker outside, returning just in time for a forest of blades to shear downwards like a wave of death, inches from turning him into a pincushion-

A streak of crackling purple ripped through the wave of metal with an arcing slash, turning the storm of death into a hail of junk in a thunderclap, the shockwave of their passage sending the everything they cut flying in every direction but their actual target. The other attacker had arrived in defense of her collaborator.

Cao Bao flickered again, his scimitar reaching for the small portion of the ceiling Qingshe's ooze had yet to fully spread to-

A spray of crimson accompanied a thunderous crack of gunfire, as Cao Bao's body was filled with holes, torso rupturing and limbs disappearing in sprays of bloody mist in the face of a sudden outpouring of supersonic projectiles ripping his body to pieces in a hail of gunfire.

Yet-

The crackle of ozone and a blaze of purple intercepted the fire and steel aimed for Cao Bao's now disembodied head, deflecting the most critical part of the assault, as Cao Bao's collaborator physically transposed herself in front of the assault, wreathed in lightning. And despite being midair and having no apparent leverage, she suddenly jerked forward, diving straight upwards into the hail of steel, her own blade lancing forward through the tide.

There was a crackling, warbling whumph, as every bit of metal that touched her body was violently repelled... briefly creating a critical opening.

And then she was gone, and Cao Bao was in her place, completely intact and grinning broadly, as the tip of his blade made contact with the ceiling.

"Gotchya."

There was a lurch, and suddenly, Qingshe found herself blind to the world outside, as her shadow collapsed entirely. Immediately, she realized what was wrong.

He teleported the entire chunk of the building my shadow was layered over. They cut it off from the building and moved it, thus ripping the foundation right out from under my power.

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Qingshe found herself reluctantly impressed. Her opponents had apparently identified one of her power's notable weaknesses. Under normal circumstances, it was near impossible to exploit, but they had actually managed it... which now left her in something of a pickle.

After all, she couldn't just open her shadow anywhere. Under normal circumstance, she could only open and spread it using her body as an anchor point, but since she had been inside her shadow when it was entirely dispelled...

...that meant the only place she could reopen it was the last place it had been opened.

That being the chunk of building Cao Bao now had full control over the positioning of.

Seeing no other options, Qingshe did so, only for the connection to immediately shatter again. Frowning, she tried again. Same result.

Cao Bao must either be in transit or constantly repositioning the chunk to stop me from forming a shadow long enough to get anything through...

Gritting her teeth, Qingshe tried again. Same result. Swallowing her frustration, she realized she had no choice but to keep trying. With any luck, Cao Bao couldn’t keep doing this forever, or he had a particular destination in mind. Either way, she just needed a mere moment to break out of this... just a small opening.

"Come out, Snake."

Qingshe paused, a spark of trepidation oddly shooting through her.

"And I don't mean your usual puppet, Lei Qingshe," Cao Bao drawled now, his tone filled with a quiet menace. "I mean your real body, the one you haven't shown anyone in years."

Qingshe felt something like a thrill of actual concern, slide down her spine.

"Do it, or Dog and I will go back to the rest of your new pet projects and slaughter them to the last."

Oh... oh dear. That was... That could be "problematic".

"I'm on a schedule, so I'm gonna make this simple for you. If I don't see you out of that shadow in the next thirty seconds or if I think you tried to use a puppet, we'll go kill the rest of Task Force Obsidian anyway. But if you do?" Cao Bao sighed. "Well, suffice it to say, you know I'm a man of contract, and Dog's a loyal bitch that does as she's told. Get out here and fucking woman-up, and we'll check out of this fight and let Task Force Obsidian live another day. The only reason we're on the frontlines right now? It's you."

Qingshe hesitated.

"Clock's ticking, Snake," Cao Bao said. "And the countdown started twenty seconds ago."

Gritting her teeth and swallowing a sigh, Qingshe let her ooze wash over, her formal attire being quickly exchanged for her usual salacious "battlesuit" of a dress, as a window opened up through her ooze to allow her to spring free.

---

"There, was that so hard?" Cao Bao chuckled, as Qingshe rose from the crackling puddle of blackness spreading across the side of a chunk of building that was now laying in the middle of an abandoned parking lot.

Flicking his power, he "teleported" the chunk a fraction of a millimeter to the left, a shift so infinitesimal that it was practically atomic, and Qingshe's shadow disappeared instantly. He saw her shadow begin to spread again and then repeated the shift to the right, undercutting her power yet again.

The Snake shot him a sharp look, clearly assessing him for the threat he was, and Cao Bao barely withheld a thick swallow at her piercing reptilian stare. He felt static crawl across his skin, the air becoming subtly charged, as Dog beside him tightened her grip on her sheathed sword.

The Snake's gaze tracked to Dog, a smile little smile spreading across her lips. "Well now, isn't this quite the unexpected-"

Dog touched down behind Qingshe with a thunderclap, her sword sliding back into its sheathe with a clink, and Qingshe's body flopped to the ground bonelessly, her head rolling away.

Cao Bao heaved a shaky sigh of relief, running a hand through his hair, as he nearly bit off the tip of the cigarette dangling from his lips. "Fuckin' hell, that was-" He paused, seeing the way Dog had turned around to levy a glare at the Snake's corpse. "What? Yo, Dog, you want to set the body on fire too, because I can definitely give you a match."

Looking back at the still body of the Snake, he felt a chill run up his spine, when the static sensation in the air only intensified.

"Don't tell me-?!"

Qingshe's headless body sprang up without a care in the world, her Noble Arm blazing into existence just in time to catch Dog's crackling blade and send her rebounding towards a building.

"You fucking what?!" Cao Bao screamed, before his eyes widened. "Shit! The fuck you do!" He cried, teleporting so fast the wind rushed in his ears, as he appeared between Qingshe and the building, a hail of bullets erupting from his vicinity.

The underside of Qingshe's dress, however, was already pointed towards the building and already boiling with her shadow, as it responded in kind, deadly projectiles smashing into Cao Bao's barrage. Whatever did get past only disappeared into her shadow, swallowed whole and lost to him forever.

Motherfucker, Cao Bao bit out internally, as he felt dozens of tags fade away in a flash, before flickering forward in a more straight-forward movement to try and smack Qingshe's body directly and tag her in this state.

Of course, Ouroboros appeared in a flicker, blocking the slash in a flash of resummoning.

Cao Bao, however, took the opportunity to slam a kick into the Noble Arm shield's side, smashing it into Qingshe and throwing her off course from landing on a new surface to make her new shadow center.

The Snake's goal was obvious. If she could make contact with any other physical surface, she could open a shadow there and reset the area that was considered the last place her power had opened. If she dove into her shadow right now anywhere else, the only place she'd be able to exit would no longer be the chunk of building Dog had cut off the embassy for Cao Bao to teleport away. If she managed that, this entire trap would have been for nothing, and the Snake would escape.

And that was unacceptable.

They had never had a better chance to corner her than now, not since her true capacity had been discovered. If they failed here, it was possible they might not get another chance.

Do or die time, bitch, and unfortunately, I'm on the clock today.

Dog rushed in, trailing lightning, as she bounced off the buildings, smashing into Qingshe like a wrecking ball. The headless Snake again weathered the blow by resummoning her shield, but that left her open-

Gotchya, bitch-!

Cao Bao teleported behind her, blade jabbing for Qingshe's back, only to have his eyes widen at a distinct, metallic clang, a second fucking copy of the shield fading into visibility.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me!"

Midair, the Snake kicked at her own shields, bashing one into Dog, who slammed her blade down atop it and leveraged to leap over it midair with an otherwise uncharacteristic snarl of rage on her usually coldly composed face.

Avoiding the bash of the second shield, Cao Bao flickered around, teleporting both himself and Dog, fishing for an opening, but every time either of them struck out-

Clang! Clang! Clang-clang! Clang-clang-clang-! CLANGCLANGCLANGCLANGCLANG!

A lightning-fast dance of death in the sky ensued, with Qingshe's twins shields flickering about her in a whirlwind of movement, blocking every strike with such precision she seemed nearly precognitive.

How. The. Fuck. Is. She. Doing. This?!

Headless even!

Cao Bao grit his teeth, before snapping his fingers, and this time, Qingshe blocked a hit from below... from a main gun battleship round.

The Snake was sent catapulting to the sky in a blur, flattened against her shield by an explosion and then whirling into a tumble. Cao Bao flickered in pursuit, waving out a hand to summon a number of midair metal rods.

"DOG!"

The purple and black-clad girl nodded grimly, flicking out her hands, as the static buzz in the air intensified to a near scream, lashes of electrical energy tethering and bouncing between rods. A shrieking thundercrack of an obliterated sound barrier announced Dog turning herself into a living railgun shot.

Qingshe had already ripped a large rod out of the shadow in her dress, one that seemed to be made of stone in the center and had metal rods sticking out of both ends. Dog cleaved through the first metal rod like it was made of hot butter, and yet, her momentum suddenly staggered, the arcs of lightning around her sputtering out and weakening significantly, leaving her to suddenly go flailing off.

Lightning rods, Cao Bao figured, as he flickered past, leaving midair stepstones in his wake, which were obliterated between moments by Dog using them as new footholds to change her direction midair in spite of the limited leverage. She flashed around Qingshe, flickering from behind to level a blow into one of the Snake's shields that made the arm supporting it crumple with a sound of shattering bone.

The Snake didn't even take pause at the injury, as her shadow began to crawl out of the underside of her dress and up the top layer. Rocket engines began to protrude from the ooze, igniting with screams and hurling her away from Dog's kill-zone. However-

Dog curled her fingers in a sharp grip, letting out a scream of exertion, as Qingshe's rockets crumpled and detonated in showers of fire. Dog wrenched her arms back wide, and the Snake's momentum was reversed with a jerk of what Cao Bao was pretty sure was magnetism.

The Snake pivoted to offense immediately, as a spiral of heat-seeking rockets screamed out of her shadow into the air. Cao Bao flickered forward to tap them, but-

Fuck!

-screamed at a sudden shower of pressure and flame nearly vaporizing half his body before he could teleport away, chest heaving with the reconstitution of his matter.

Fucking proximity detonations?!

With a growl, Cao Bao dove back into the fray, a shower of more conventional projectiles filling the air with lead and explosions, setting off proximity explosions in a blinding fireworks display. Wrenching a hand out, Cao Bao summoned a number of missiles in a fan-like pattern, causing them to naturally spread out in a series of wide footholds.

Footholds Dog used to once more close the distance with the Snake, a shriek of steel announcing the weapon lock between them, as they began to plummet towards the ground in a frenetic melee.

Cao Bao dove down beside them, keeping a bit of distance, as he teleported quickly. He yelped at a shower of blades roaring from Qingshe's shadow-covered dress to fill the air, but Dog's war cry announced her sending the entire hailstorm of blades hurtling back towards her and Qingshe in another yank of magnetism.

Qingshe countered with a strange pulse of energy from her dress that caused Dog's magnetic effect to falter, only to whirl around and smash the top of her shield into Dog's jaw, resummoning it into position so as to leave no warning to dodge.

Dog spun around, grabbing the top of the shield as leverage and reaching out to wrench some of the falling metal projectiles around them back toward's Qingshe's back. This time, she exercised a bit of precision and subtly. Yet, the Snake's second shield blocked the attack handily. Dog lashed out with a punch, which was blocked by the forward-facing shield, before smirking, as she copied the Snake's technique.

Dog's own sword flickered in her grip, shifting position between moments to cleave around the Snake's shield and chop off her remaining unbroken arm.

Cao Bao's eyes flicked to the falling appendage, but the Snake's shadow burbled, an inky-black spear stabbing out to impale her own severed limb and drag it back into the darkness.

Cao Bao shivered, as a peal of familiar laughter began to emanate through the air. Despite the Snake's headless state, she was laughing... projecting the sound of her voice from her shadow.

"You've grown! You've grown so wonderfully, my dear Puppy~!" Qingshe trilled.

"Shut up!" snapped Dog, her electric-pink gaze blazing with fury. "Just shut up and die, Traitor!" Her blade flashed out in a series of jabs, but Qingshe's shield blocked them with a noise like gunfire.

"Awww~! But we have so much to talk about, dearie~!" the Snake laughed.

Cao Bao circled the pair, as they continued to duel all the way down, looking for an opening. All he needed was one good touch on the Snake's main body with his Noble Arm, Blueblood, and this fight was as good as over. Frankly, he was kicking himself for not going for it the second the Snake had been beheaded in the first place.

I got fucking cocky, dammit. That'll teach me, I suppose...

A large mechanical limb sprouted from Qingshe's shadow, holding a flat metal panel on one end, and Qingshe's shadow shot up the limb to cover the flat of that panel in more of its crackling ooze. Cao Bao could only really watch in consternation, as that panel swept over to briefly dip onto the Snake's neckline, before retreating to show she had regrown a whole new head, hale and hearty.

The Snake's smile was ferociously wild, a feral, gleeful thing, as a proper laugh now issued from her throat in a high-pitched songbird cry. Cao Bao personally felt that no noise that beautiful should be able to issue from a creature so terrible.

The "panel limb" swept around the Snake's dress, rotating across the outside to do the same to each of her arms before retreating, leaving Qingshe now wholly restored from her prior injuries. The Snake reached down, her open hands catching the hilts of two gleaming blades that sprouted from her shadow, the edges humming with a strange emerald glow.

"Come on, Dear~!" Qingshe laughed. "Don't stop now! Come at me! Show me just how much you've evolved!"

"You really are a monster..." Cao Bao sighed with a grimace.

Looking down, he saw that the ground was coming up fast. Before long, they'd be back in the same position they had near the beginning of things, before he'd taken them to the sky, and he imagined that if he tried his prior tactic again, Qingshe would be ready to counter it, now with her body in top shape once more.

...

Notes:

Cao Bao gets injured. Lucky damage to his Noble Arm sends his power on the fritz, forcing Dog to rescue him and taking him out of the fight. Qingshe injures him seriously during this.

Seeing that simply killing her won't be so simple, Superbia reveals himself to take advantage of the situation. Superbia traps Qingshe in the scroll NA once given to Tian Fei.

Superbia takes the severed head of Qingshe that was till left lying around to use in his later taunt to Task Force Obsidian.

Qingshe's severed head sitting in a morgue, however, later acts as an anchor by which she can reopen her shadow back on earth to escape the Downward Descent's realm.

Accursed Tropes: The Last Airbender (Isekai; Fanfic Cliches infiltrating Canon, Lewascan gave me Permission)

Chaka

Name: Chaka of the Swamp
Titles: n/a is a baby
Age: 0
Physical Description: Is currently a baby with bright orange eyes. However, they will eventually grow into athletically built 5’ menace. His dark brown hair would grow out into a messy mop that touches his collar.

Personality: Chaka is quite the free spirit. Having been quite repressed in his previous life, he subconsciously chooses to not let anything hold back his actions. Often acting and speaking before he can think things through. Often coming across as very immature and impulsive.

Short Biography: The person that would be born to be Chaka led a very different life to the one that he would soon discover. He was the first son of an Evangelical Preacher. As such was brought up was brought up in a very conservative environment. He was expected to be the perfect son. Any variation of his father’s vision of his ideal son was quickly beaten back into shape. So to spare himself the beatings he found it better to fall in line and be a good little boy.

Eventually he would suppress his own desires so much that he believed he was the perfect Evangelist he pretended to be. He went to church once a week. Prayed often. Didn’t drink. No premarital sex. Lived as sin free as humanly possible. He married a good Christian woman and had three kids.

His life came to in end on a very brutal and traumatic way, when someone broke into his house. Tied him to a chair, then tortured and killed his family in front of him before killing him. The trauma of his early childhood, coupled with the traumatic nature of his death meant when he was reincarnated, he suppressed most, if not all, of his memories of his past life.

Inventory: N/A currently a baby

Skills:

• Is a baby

Tropes:

• Dual Element - Water/Air - Chaka is able to bend water and air.
• Airbender Mentor - Chaka’s grandfather is still alive and is one of the surviving members of the Air Nomads.
• Ninja Village - Chaka was born in a secret ninja village within the foggy swamp.

Bending/Crossover Power: Is a relatively untrained water and air bender.

Current Goals:
Short Term: Grow Up
Long Term: Become Steong enough to protect the village

Extra:

@Sanity43217

Would possibly like to see some more detail on those Mentor and Village tropes, but I'll be letting you cook for now and waiting to see where you're going with this IC, given your earlier OOC comments about the probable future fate of both those things.

Official Approval the First.

Accursed Tropes: The Last Airbender (Isekai; Fanfic Cliches infiltrating Canon, Lewascan gave me Permission)

?????????? - Xiao Yu

---

Unknown Location - Unknown Time

---

A Memory of the Void (Entirely Optional Character Interaction Reading)

The soul of a young woman watched the proceedings surrounding the absurd, wondrous phenomenon that was the meeting with Avatar Aang... if that was, indeed, who he was. Admittedly, she wasn't sure if she was right to be paranoid, especially given his apparent generosity, but she was still someone who was inclined to caution in the face of anything that seemed just too good to be real.

And that was why she hung back. Beyond her initial comments, she had found herself slinking back into the crowd, letting others take the lead in asking questions about how this whole reincarnation process was going to work. She watched, as one soul after another made their requests and was sent on their way. She listened to what was rejected and what was accepted, and as her own turn came closer by simple dint of there being increasingly fewer alternatives, she seriously considered her own choice.

I want to have the power to make a difference... to live my life the way I want, to be able to make a real impact from the word go. The helplessness of being an infant... I reject it! Like hell I'm going to endure years of that dull existence just waiting to grow up! If I'm going to have time before the supposed Imposter appears to prepare, then I'm not going to waste a second of it!

She continued to watch Aang, the Avatar, observed his mannerisms, the basis of his decisions and concerns he raised, and the more she saw, the more convinced she was that this was either the real thing or a very good actor. Either way, she already knew what she was after.

"Well, it seems like you're the last one," Aang said with a wan smile.

The girl's soul glanced around the crystal-filled void and nodded. "Seems that way..."

"You looked rather lost in thought there," Aang observed.

The woman's lips quirked. "How could I not be? This is a big decision, and honestly? I want to be discerning about it." Shaking her head, she rubbed the bridge of her nose. "To be honest, I'm rather concerned by the number of my supposed allies that chose to be reborn into the Fire Nation..."

Aang chuckled, but there was a somewhat somber and perturbed expression sneaking behind his own features. "Guess I can't blame you for that." The Avatar leaned on his staff, despite that he was still floating freely in the void. "But you know, the Fire Nation isn't all bad. Their people deserve saving and consideration as much as any other."

The woman's lips pursed, before a sigh escaped her. "It's not that I fundamentally disagree... but the Fire Nation of the Hundred Year War's era isn't the kind of place that's safe to draw attention. For all its advancements, it was a place of cultural brainwashing and propaganda." She frowned. "Am I really wrong to be concerned about those who were supposed to be going there to stop the Fire Nation going native?"

Aang shook his head. "Maybe not... but this isn't really about stopping the Fire Nation, you know?"

The woman fell quiet at that, inclining her chin. "The Balance, huh...? In the end, the Fire Nation as a whole isn't really the true enemy here, but those that lead them... and the imposter wearing your body." She sighed. "I guess I shouldn't have expected anything less from Avatar Aang of all people. You were always the type to be doggedly optimistic about redemption and coexistence."

Aang smiled a bit awkwardly, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. "Eheh... I know I sort of brought it on myself, but it's still weird to hear people talk about me like that... like they're confident they know me inside and out."

The woman frowned, briefly bowing her head. "Sorry about that."

Aang waved her off. "There's nothing to apologize for." He trailed off, glancing around the void, before continuing. "Not to rush you... but have you made a decision yet?"

The woman chuffed. "Maybe I haven't."

Aang smiled a little, before frowning. "I can't keep you here forever, you know. It's already bad enough that I pulled souls out of their proper cycle, but the longer you stay like this, the more chances you situation grows... unstable." His expression grew apologetic. "If you don't choose something soon, for your own good, I'll have no choice but to put you back where I found you or send you along with whatever seems decent."

The woman didn't respond immediately beyond a frown, a long moment passing before she asked, "Are you going to be okay?"

Aang blinked. "Okay?"

"Here alone," the woman elaborated. "Humans aren't meant to live in total isolation, and I don't think you ever mention how long you'd actually been trapped here..."

"Ah." Aang smiled softly. "Don't worry about it. After all, the Avatar is never truly alone."

"Ah, that's right. Raava?"

Aang nodded, a flicker of a white glow around him preceding what almost seemed to be a hallucination of countless indistinct figures standing behind him. "With Raava here and my past lives, I won't ever be alone, not really."

The woman sighed. "A part of me wants to say that's not enough, but... 'different strokes for different folks' as they say." She snorted. "Alright then, I think I've got an idea in mind."

Aang smiled. "Go ahead."

She told him, and after a long moment of shuffling through the crystalline shards around them, Aang could be seen peering at one of the rather more sizable chunks among them with a critical eye. The Avatar frowned, turning the shard over a few times, before glancing to the woman. "This power... I'm not exactly opposed, and the baseline is within the ability of your soul to assimilate safely... But are you sure about this?"

"I am."

Aang's brow furrowed in indecision. "I'm a bit surprised honestly; hearing you talk before, I would have expected something more... heroic." He glanced at the shard again, the crystal gleaming with alien power. "If you let this power get out of hand..."

"It won't," the woman replied confidently. Aang shot her a concerned look, but she only smiled. "If anything happens, I'll clean up my own mess. That much I can promise you. If you can trust anything, trust that I want to make the future better, not worse."

"Good intentions have been the root of many unfortunate actions..." Aang murmured.

"I'm not about to lose sight of why we're here," the woman said, chuckling. "That's why, assuming my soul can hold it, I'd like those memory protections others asked for as my second boon. That way I'll never forget why I'm truly here and what I promised you." She smiled softly, a true smile on her lips. "Aang, I'm not sure you understand just how amazing this opportunity is for someone like me. A new life? A chance to be someone? A chance to have fantastical powers and save the world? This is a dream come true. But if I'm going to make sure the job gets done, I need to settle for nothing but the best..."

Gaze oddly piercing, Aang was silent for a long moment, mulling over her words, before slowly nodding. "Well, you believe what you're saying at least..." He sighed, his expression firming, as he called forth a smaller shard to float beside the larger. "And what does a 'better' future mean to you?"

The woman grinned. "It means a world where people are satisfied but productive, coexisting but ambitious. To ask for a world without conflict is to ask too much of human nature, but I don't think harmony amongst themselves and with spirits is ultimately unrealistic. Growing pains are inevitable, natural, but once overcome, I believe there is a golden dawn waiting beyond the horizon."

"And you'll accomplish that with powers like these?"

The woman chuckled. "I hope you aren't expecting whatever future you've seen through our memories to remain intact, Avatar Aang." Her good humor dimmed a bit. "Be it the machinations of the Imposter or the other ways this world might be warped by these... 'tropes' they used to imprison you, this world's future will ultimately be its own."

Aang frowned but nodded. "I think I get what you're saying, but..."

"Asking a pack of scattered, uncoordinated and ambitious reincarnates with meta-knowledge to somehow preserve a perfect 'canon' timeline is unrealistic, Aang," the woman grinned wryly. "We'll deal with the Imposter, I imagine, even if only out of self-preservation for some as altruism for others, but this world's future is far from certain..." She inclined her chin. "Though I suppose you already knew that, right?"

Aang met her gaze for a moment, before sighing, "Yeah... I did, but... I don't know. Maybe I wanted to hope..."

"Sometimes, it's better to keep your expectations tempered," the woman shrugged. "And like you said before: these are desperate times and even more desperate measures. In the grand scheme of things, the Imposter is the real threat here, so as long as we can keep the world intact and foil the schemes of the Imposter and other evils alike, wherever they may rise... that will just have to be enough, right?"

"...Yeah."

"Haah, sorry to be a downer, I guess."

"No, it's fine. You're right... I don't like it, but you are."

"Hey, just try to see the silver linings, you know? Once we take care of the Imposter, you'll be able to return, right?"

"Yeah," Aang nodded. "Once their own power is no longer constantly reinforcing this prison, my spirit should be able to reenter the world."

"Then just look forward to that. In the meantime, trust this world to make its own future, you know? It may need saving right now, but at the end of the day, everyone has the right to choose their own destiny..." She smiled. "Even you."

"Huh?"

"You didn't choose to be the Avatar, Aang, and honestly, it's not something you ever really wanted, right?"

"...Maybe not, but I've had long enough to come to peace with it. Besides... considering my situation, I was never much of an Avatar to begin with..."

"Oi, you shut it with that self-depreciating shit," the woman snorted.

"Uh..."

"You're not at fault here. You couldn't have possibly been prepared for this situation, and honestly, you're making the best of it with what you have," the woman said bluntly. "You deserved better than this, and honestly, when all is said and done? I hope the world doesn't need an Avatar." Aang's eyes widened. "You deserved to have a full childhood. You deserved to choose your own destiny. You deserved to live in peace and prosperity... Life isn't fair, but those were all things you should have had." The woman's lips quirked. "So, you know what? I think my real hope for you by the end of this... is that the world you are able to return to is one with no grand duty laid out before you. If we can build a future that gives you the freedom to live life however you choose, then I'll be satisfied."

Aang fell quiet for a while, before sighing. "I... guess we'll just have to see." He visibly firmed himself. "But I think that's enough delaying now. I'll approve these abilities you're after. Whatever happens next, whether you succeed or fail, I'll trust that at least here and now, you set out with the intent to use them for good."

The woman smiled brightly at him. "Coming from you, that's quite the vote of confidence." She chuckled. "Yeah, I suppose we've delayed long enough..." Spreading her arms, her grin widened. "Beam me up, Scotty!"

A moment later, two shards of impossibility made possible slammed into her chest, and her disembodied soul was consumed in a flash of golden light...

...that soon bristled underneath with a spark of ignited darkness.

---

Earth Kingdom - AG 82 (Spring)

---

In the grand scheme of things, the reborn soul of the young woman would not have said she truly regretted asking her benefactor for the protection of her memories. After all, memories were what made someone who they were. Take those away, and -regardless of some silly technicality like having the same soul- you were basically dead. In other words, it was ego-death, no different than truly dying really. It was one of the things she had truly feared in some dark corner of her mind, the distant worry about growing old and having her own mind, the very bedrock of her selfhood, failing her, leaving her body as little more than a walking corpse puppeted by some blank slate wearing her face and name like a skinwalker. She would honestly rather die than be reduced to such a disgraceful, humiliating state.

And that was why she wouldn't regret choosing to prioritize preserving who she was above all else. No matter the benefits she reaped from this arrangement, no matter the opportunities this new life offered her, it was all utterly pointless if the "her" enjoying them wasn't the "her" that actually mattered. The benefits far outweighed any downsides, those yet realized or otherwise, and she would endure a thousand screaming births in crystal-clear detail before she ever even considered not being herself.

Even so...

Ah yes, so this is what it means to wish you could repress things.

...maybe having a bit of conscious control over what she remembered most clearly would have been nice.

Being an infant again was a special sort of hell, the newly named Xiao Yu decided. It was a roller coaster of humiliation, helplessness, hunger and just general utter mind-numbing boredom.

You couldn’t walk... or talk... or even have any real agency worth a damn. And all the worse, assuming you were actually conscious and lucid in this period of your life, you were also basically illiterate and incapable of understanding anything others said.

Or, at least, that is what she could have been concerned about. Instead, for some reason, despite most of the Elemental Nations being blatantly Asian in cultural inspiration, they all spoke in English dub...

Well, she supposed she couldn't really complain there. It was a small salve against her indignity at needing to relearn bladder control, a relief against the boredom of staring up at a ceiling from her crib, and she'd take those silver linings where she could get them.

Then again...

Well, she certainly had other ways to solve boredom.

Churning in her core, the energy she could now feel at all times these days ebbed and flowed like a crackling tide, an ever-present warmth that tickled her guts with the comforting promise of its existence.

Gooey baby lips twisting into a whatever passed for a sly smile on her dumpling of a face, Xiao Yu stoked and prodded that energy with intent, feeding it her indignity, her anger and determination, and in a flash of orange light-

Trans-Magia

-her helpless saggy baby body was filled with surging power, a wordless coo of glee leaving her lips, as she was draped in tiny segments of black armor and adorned with a crimson cape flowing down her back.

As usual, she found herself grimacing, however, her once weak baby arms now possessing just enough strength and dexterity to rub at the space just below her collar, where a trio of black stars stood out against her skin like tattoos around a larger golden star that was outright imbedded in her flesh.

Already, she could feel the strain on her body.

Magic -MahoAko magic, rather- was peculiar in the sense that part of your stamina in using it came from the actual strength and age of your physical body. Therefore, being that she was literally a months-old infant, she couldn't practice her magic for nearly as long or hard as she wished.

At least, not the more magic heavy powers.

A moment's concentration was all it took for her body to leave her crib, taking flight, as she slipped over to her window and easily lifted it open.

Smiling wide, with glee bubbling in her chest, the emotion feeding further into her magic and bolstering her depressingly small reserves, a single infant soared high into the night sky of the Earth Kingdom, her now magically sharpened gaze casting across long expanses of rich forests and rocky fields.

Feeling the wind in her tufts of hair, feeling the true freedom of soaring closer to the clouds... as Xiao Yu rocketed across the dark skyline of Ba Sing Se at a pace that would have probably put some helicopters to shame, she decided that this had been worth it. No matter how little of this power's true potential she could manifest right now, improvement was just a matter of time and training, and this sense of freedom she had acquired... this sense of truly being able to take her future into her own hands...?

Well, as long as Aang doesn't interfere further or demand more of me than the present task, I suppose it's a price worth paying for this... I may be grateful and all for this chance, but I'm hardly going to commit myself to supporting his every future whim. As much as he should have had the right to choose his own destiny, I've got the right to choose mine.

Of course, tonight, she was on a particular sort of hunt, one she'd been working towards slowly ever since she'd started getting strong enough to secretly leave her home unnoticed by her parents.

Raising her hands towards the air, the infant's face scrunched up in concentration, the golden star on her chest channeling her intent into guided patterns and carving a cloudy dark gate in space into the air.

Abruptly, she gasped -wheezed really- as the drain on her magical reserves from what was supposed to be one of the cheapest magical feats in her entire cheat powerset still nearly knocked the breath out of her.

Guh... if I were just a little older, damn it..

Taking a couple seconds to catch her breath, the infant wasted no time diving through the small dark gate-

-and came out the other side about what she estimated to be halfway across the continent.

The main way she could mostly say that for certain was that she was currently floating high above a point where two massive rivers flowed into a yawning titanic lake behind her. That same lake, somewhere further east at her last expedition's starting landmark, was crossed by a narrow strip of land called the "Serpent's Pass". And directly forward to the west, large forests clustered across the land.

Smiling widely, Xiao Yu let her dark portal close and set off flying again, straight due west as much as she was able... which, admittedly, wasn't too hard. The titanic lake behind her and the connected rivers (or were they more like long, massive water channels really?) were distinctive enough landmarks that as long as she had a map with her, she was not likely to get lost any time soon.

And she did, of course. Have a map, that was.

Stolen, yes, but really, who was going to miss it, right? That map shop had plenty more, after all. And hey, her cheat powerset came from a villainess anyway! So, of course, she was going to use a few questionable methods for the sake of saving the world!

And besides, she was a literal infant right now!

How in the world was she supposed to acquire what she needed in any sort of legitimate manner, eh?! She didn't have time to waste!

So, naturally, she had spent her first nights out with her powers experimenting, then preparing for her future voyages, then stealing a decent quality map of the Four Nations, and then beginning to take periodic nighttime flights out into the world around Ba Sing Se to expand her options.

See, the thing about her portal magic was that visualization was important. She couldn't just imagine a scene from a cartoon and pop right out in the Fire Lord's palace. No, she needed to actually see that place in person somehow and be able to clearly visualize and recall it as a way to teleport back.

Sure, she could have tried to use scrying magic to remotely view the world from the comfort of her home, and -to a degree- she had managed that, even used it to help plan her map heist... But scrying was weirdly a lot more mana intensive compared to just portaling out and exploring personally.

And honestly? She didn't really mind that too much.

Being able to get out and stretch her metaphorical wings... to be free of the stifling existence of an infant even for an hour that she could finally move her body correctly and forget about her currently degrading existence... that was a priceless thing to her right now, this freedom. And she wouldn't give it up even if she had an alternative.

Thus, the plan was relatively simple.

Right now, she was too weak to do much other than fly around and make maybe two portals a day before being tuckered out. But even while that was the case, she had enough resources to be productive.

Therefore, for this first year of her childhood, her primary goal was to visit all the major locations of the world of Avatar she could find and burn them into her memory, radically expanding her options for her portal targeting down the line.

Everything else could wait, aside from trying to mess around with her chi while she was otherwise stuck playing the part of a normal infant. But right now, the important thing was to ensure her dark portals could reach every corner of the Four Nations, the sooner the better.

This was, after all, turning out to be a fairly big world, much bigger than the show had made it seem at least, and once she linked up with her fellow "saviors", she was sure they would rather appreciate not having to make the same sort of treks the GAang did to get everywhere.

Smiling in satisfaction, Xiao Yu soared through the sky with confidence and a sense of progress burning in her chest, the pleasant hum of improvement raising her spirits, as she took yet another step towards her goals.

And that night, when she returned to her crib and released her transformation with a weary sigh that soon transformed into the groan of sleep from her feeble infant body, the reincarnated soul still slept with a satisfied -and perhaps concerningly smug- smile planted upon her lips, satisfied with another flawless operation, no-one the wiser of her absence.

---

Ba Sing Se, Earth Kingdom - AG 82 (Winter)

---

Honestly, the weather in the world of Avatar was fucking weird. The concept of seasons barely seemed to exist across national borders, as each nation seemed to largely perpetually maintain a single season year-round. Really, about the only thing that seemed to mark the passage of time in the actual series was the movements of the celestial bodies and the night and day cycle.

Which was why living in the Earth Kingdom meant a baby could be wandering about outside barefoot in the dead of what should have been -and technically was- winter and be completely fine.

"Aamamamahhttbbbtt..." Yu babbled mostly aimlessly, as she toddled forth on stocky baby legs. Honestly, she would have done so mostly in silence normally, but working her lips was the first step to coherent speech. And besides...

"You're doing so good, Yuyu~!" cooed her mother, apparently quite enamored with the nonsense flowing out of her child in baby-speak.

Yu resisted the urge to scowl at the baby-talk, because she just knew that her frustration would only make her look even cuter somehow. Honestly, nothing entertained adults like a small, harmless creature looking petulant and trying to appear angry. She would know; she'd been one, after all. At this point, the only thing she could really do was endure the humiliation and fight harder to regain the control of her body that she'd lost.

Case in point, she was currently spending her daylight hours establishing her independent streak from the word go. Already about a year into her rebirth, and she had the basics of walking down, even if it was still more comfortable to use something as a handhold to keep her up.

Like the wooden fence she was currently peering through, staring across a wide expansive field with bright blue eyes at the herd of strange creatures that still made her want to cringe as much as watch in fascination.

The creatures in question were large, flightless bird-like entities... if birds had the tail and head of a horse with a broad and curved beak mounted on the front of the latter. They were mostly covered in feathers, aside from a bit of short course hair around the horse-like parts of the head and the long stream of the tail, and the fully grown members of the creatures towered at what Yu could only eyeball at an easy eight feet tall.

"Hehee~, do you like the ostrich horses, Yu?" her mother giggled.

Again, the baby restrained the urge to cringe at the creatures' name. It wasn't the first time she'd heard it by any means, but she still wasn't even close to getting used to it.

Seriously, what is it with this world and fusing random fauna together? Is it so much to ask for to see more normal animals around here?

"Ablabbrrble," she instead replied sagely in response, wobbling a bit, as she tightened her grip on the fence she was standing against.

Her eyes were drawn to the only human currently out in the field, her father, who was currently mounted atop one of the horse-bird things and running the rest of the herd through what seemed to be tolerance exercises. Namely, that her father would steer his steed over to a group he had yet to accost in turn, dismount... and start earthbending.

It was with utter fascination that Xiao Yu watched, feeling the distant rumble of displaced earth vibrate through her feet, as her father sometimes ripped jutting walls out of the ground and soon replaced them, while other times chucking boulders about and seeing which steeds didn't clear away squawking in offense. Those that didn't sometimes got additional attention, as her father earthbent obstacle courses and other structures, before guiding ostrich horses through them to gradually acclimate them to earthbending in their vicinity.

From what she could already gather about her parents' jobs, it seemed they were some of the latest in a multi-generational series of earthbending ranch owners (her father born into it and mother married into it), who seemed to be raising military steeds. Honestly, that was about the only reason Yu could think of to put so much focus on training the otherwise docile horse-bird-things to not be freaked out by any amount of earthbending. If you were out in the middle of a battlefield, the last thing you'd want is for your steed to panic and buck you off over your own damn attacks... or just generally run for the hills every time you dismounted to get serious.

"Do you like daddy's earthbending?" her mother interrupted her thoughts again, smiling in that way that was casually patronizing and indulgent, even if adults maybe didn't mean it to be.

What do you think, lady?!

"Blyuh." Instead of frowning, Yu just nodded seriously, earning a gleeful little giggle from her mother. Yu rather doubted her mother actually thought her baby understood what she was saying, but maybe if she...

As the thought occurred to her, Yu was struck with indecision. On the one hand, it would be immensely satisfying and make her feel quite smug... On the other hand, was she ready to start distancing herself from the cover of safety in obscurity? Hmmm... perhaps not. Still, as long as she wasn't unlucky enough to attract the Dai Li's attention somehow... it should be fine, and even if it wasn't? Well, she had options they couldn't account for even now.

Fine then. It was decided.

Furrowing her brows, Yu shifted her feet, gripping the fence like a lifeline, as she dared to bend her wobbly baby knees and nearly toppled over. Immediately, the burn of weak baby muscles began to protest, but instead of letting herself fall, she mustered as much will as she could manage to remain in an increasingly crouched stance.

Her knees shook precariously, burning with exertion... but Yu simply looked down, then back up at her father, focusing on mirroring her stance to her father's, as he tore up another line of the field. Sucking in a slow, steadying breath, she closed her eyes and simply let herself... feel and listen.

The key to earthbending is confidence. More than anything else, it is the will to face anything head-on, to endure and power through with brute force and will. To be a true earthbender is to understand the concept of neutral jing, to balance offense and defense to withstand any assault until the perfect moment to act decisively arrives.

Her mother was still chatting at her every now and then, but Yu wasn't really paying her much attention. Instead, she was focused on the soil underneath her feet, on the rumble of every shift of the earth and every heavy footfall of the creatures that lived in it. She focused on perceiving those vibrations, on feeling the way they rippled up her shaking legs. She focused on the way her feet dug minutely into the soil yet further, as she ground her heels and toes into it, deepening her stance as best she was able.

But more than that, earth is a stubborn element, and you must be stubborn in order to bend it. For an earthbender, the only paths are to endure or advance. You must be unyielding and utterly sure of yourself. Fear is the mind-killer. Doubt is weakness. If you do not believe with absolute certainty that the earth will obey you... if you do not impose your will upon it, the earth will not answer.

She listened instead to the sound of the earth around her, to the way it crumbled and cracked, trying to imagine what her father was doing with it based on sound alone. She listened to the squawks and whinnies of the ostrich horses, listened to their footfalls and tried to guess where the closest ones to her were.

In this way, the first step should theoretically be the hardest. After all, somewhere in the back of a normal person's head, they aren't really going believe they can move the earth. They are going to doubt. They are going to question. They are going to hesitate. And they are going to get caught in a spiral of self-reinforcing failure until they get lucky and break through.

She inhaled deep, letting the scent of the earth fill her.

But me?

Xiao Yu let go of the fence, letting her body fully settle into the stance of her wobbling legs. Scrunching up her brow, she tensed, forcing her legs to stop shaking, as they burned harder.

Bitch, I'm a motherfucking isekai insert, and we're simply Built Different.

"HWAH!" shouted the baby just a few months short of a year old, thrusting her arms out through the gaps in the fence, and the soil before her lurched in response. Even as her gut did summersaults with a brand new sensation, a tingling running up her legs and spine, Yu didn't have all that much time to revel in the feeling of triumph, before the shift of nearby earth ripped her own footing right out from under her and sent her toppling back into the grass with a yelp.

There was abrupt shouting, the squawk of a few ostrich horses that she had barely noticed getting closer, and Yu soon found herself scooped up her mother's arms, the wide-eyed woman fretting over her incessantly. Grumbling internally, Yu fumbled to swipe away at the fingers brushing dirt off her clothes and questing over her head in search of fresh bruises.

Wan-dammit, woman, I'm a baby earthbender! I'm not a regular-ass glass cannon of a child. If there's any bloodline that would be born with hardier stuff, it's us! Oi! Are you married to an earthbender, or not?! Where was all this concern when I was toddling around barefoot around the fence in search of splinters, eh?!

Despite Yu's frustration, however, it was still immensely funny to see her mother suddenly round on her father with no few berating words on her lips, chiding the poor, confused man over earthbending so recklessly so close to her "precious baby" and apparently not quite recognizing that it was Yu, herself, who had actually managed the feat, despite doing it right in front of her.

It was, therefore, even more amusing to squirm around in her mother's arms until she finally let her down, before planting herself by her mother's leg and throwing an even more confident punch forward... accompanied by a shifting spray of the dirt in front of her.

And as her parents both stared at her utterly gobsmacked, Xiao Yu finally couldn't stop the peals of genuine victorious laughter from screaming uncontrollably from her mouth, as she tumbled over, finally -perhaps ironically- looking much more like a normal baby for once in the face of her joyous accomplishment.

Grinning widely with her mouth of tiny baby teeth, Xiao Yu's eyes gleamed with triumph.

In the end, with earthbending, it's like a little green troll once said...

Do or do not; there is no try.

---

[Trope Acquisition: Prodigy (Earthbending).]

---

After that little "incident", the rest of her first year of life started to go in a rather more tolerable direction. The knowledge that their child was capable of earthbending at her age drastically ripped the rub out from under her parents' feet as far as underestimating and babying her... mostly anyway.

Yu was still a baby, after all, and suspension of disbelief only went so far. Her parents started to treat her as more capable and weren't as surprised when she started showcasing even more atypical baby behavior, but that didn't mean they started placing unusual expectations on her.

If anything... it was almost the opposite?

Indeed, her prodigal showing, if anything, seemed to make them more worried than proud, and Yu felt she could hazard a guess as to why.

Long Feng and his ROOT knockoffs.

The citizens of Ba Sing Se did not like the Dai Li, the secret police of the Earth Kingdom. Though no-one would perhaps dare whisper of it aloud, plenty of rumors likely told of what happened to those that crossed the tyrannical organization that held the entire city in the quiet iron grip of fear.

Of course, if she thought about them like ROOT, then it didn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to guess why her parents would be concerned. After all, one had to wonder: where did the Dai Li recruit their absolutely loyal earthbenders from? Of course, the most diabolically efficient way would be to just abduct young earthbenders to brainwash as soon as possible, whilst also brainwashing anyone that objected to forget they even existed.

Maybe she was reaching, but honestly, given the shit they had pulled in canon, Yu was pretty confident that she wasn't even half wrong.

And that was why she could understand why her parents were reluctant to indulge her push to learn further earthbending young. Of course, they couldn't really stop her from trying on her own, but every time she tried to get her father to show her more, he would try and steer her towards something else, as if it were so easy to redirect her supposed infant attention span. Her mother, meanwhile, had taken to trying to keep her inside more, filling her time with books and learning.

On the upside, this was actually useful. Being educated faster meant being able to sooner justify communicating through writing the words her mouth couldn't yet pronounce properly. And as for her father's attempts at distractions, it had led to her being introduced more closely to the ostrich horses, and Yu was actually quite interested in getting involved in the family business.

Unfortunately for her parents though, they weren't dealing with a normal infant, and Yu honestly didn't see any reason to delay her earthbending education for a moment. From what she could gather of her family's business, she wasn't the sort of earthbender the Dai Li would probably abduct, because she was part of sustaining an important enterprise. Training war mounts for the Earth Kingdom properly required earthbenders, and thus, thanks to her family's position, even as low-class as they were, that should mean she would be considered more valuable right where she was.

In short, she was pretty sure she was untouchable unless she went out of her way to attract trouble. Making her disappear and covering the tracks would be more trouble than it was worth, given how large a family she'd seen at one of their holiday gatherings and their probable incidental connections due to who they must be actually selling war steeds near exclusively to.

Besides, she was an earthbender, dammit!

Backing down and giving up simply wasn't in the nature of her chi. An earthbender endured hardship and challenges stubbornly, and she wasn't about to let herself falter ideologically from the word "go".

Less than a year old or not, Xiao Yu would be learning earthbending now.

And if her parents assumed otherwise? Well, they were free to be as incorrect as they liked.

---

GM Notes

In order to hopefully help smooth out the writing of the first round, I made sure to have this post prepared in advance. Xiao Yu's Year One post hopefully gives a more concrete idea of the general structure of what we are expecting for the "infant post".

You're technically allowed to keep a bit of a flashback to the reincarnation/crystal void, but it may be simpler not to have it unless you'd like to slightly collab over it, given that Aang will not be making any appearances beyond the first round for the time being. You're free to largely assume your OC had a decent amount of time to have some questions answered about the process before being shuffled off on their way. Post-birth, we'd like to get at least a basic idea of the OC's new family situation in their fresh life, and you can stretch this out to occur over the course of up to a 1-year period IC. You can do so in about as much detail as me, if you like, or you can instead treat this as somewhat of an extension or "part 2" of the backstory on your character sheet and summarize relevant events in more moderate detail.

As a side note? On the matters of birth, while not always the case, benders are often born in the season their bending also happens to be strongest: Water (Winter, Earth (Spring), Fire (Summer), Air (Fall). As to the specific year they'd need to be born in to have a maximum age of 18 before "canon start/AG 99" arrives, you can have them born as early as late Winter (January) of AG 81; simply count up towards AG 87 for those potentially planning to be 12-year-olds.

The latter segment of this post can be viewed as a bit of an example template of how we'd like to see Trope acquisition/invocation carried out. By no means, of course, are players ultimately required to use a similar level of detail in their own Trope invocations (if only in these opening rounds) though, as "long and detailed" is simply my natural writing style. So, don't feel obligated to replicate it.

As discussed fairly openly in the OOC, the OCs are only allowed to acquire a maximum of 1 new Trope in the opening round, and this will count towards an overall maximum total of 6 new Tropes between birth and the start of "canon". OOCly, this limit is for balance reasons and limiting chaos a bit. ICly speaking, you can see this as an extension of the reason Aang didn't load the OCs up with more than 3 starting Tropes. Their souls are still new to this, and they need time to grow into their capacity to safely absorb and actively manipulate further Tropes. As such, within the first year of their life, they will perhaps find themselves able to invoke and absorb a single new Trope before finding all others to slide between their metaphorical fingers for a while thereafter. You are, of course, also free to have your OC not acquire any new tropes at all in this period if you wish and save all of them for the next round and the timeskip.

Lewascan2's test zone

Notes to SelfFuture Brainstorming

Association with Butterfly Mansion elicits poison use?

Future Phoenix Form Names:?
-Burning Sky Dance: Something involving actual outward pyrokinesis, possibly something inspired by Flame Form 4 mixed with Form 5?
-Tailwind of the Sky God: Focused flame expulsions from a user's weapon or limbs that act as thrust to enable flight? Possible Phoenix Form 4 or 5 candidate, since this seems fairly straight-forward in terms of elemental shaping.
-Breath of Life/Merciful Phoenix Tear?: A technique that through closely syncing the user's breathing with a subject (potentially via mouth-to-mouth resuscitation-type contact?) allows them to extend the effects of Phoenix Form 2's accelerated healing to another person, guiding their body into performing the technique even if the subject is otherwise incapacitated? Potentially extremely straining on the subject; may save their life in the immediate but may also be more likely to induce the stress that lowers their lifespan as recompence. This downside is especially dangerous if the subject also has a Demon Slayer Mark.

Rengoku Hinotora

PLACEHOLDER: Appearance still to be fully decided

'Rengoku Hinotora'
'Rengoku Hinotora'

A g e: 20 | R a n k: TO BE DECIDED BY GM

^{P e r s o n a l i t y} :

Hinotora is, in a word, "irreverent", having little respect for tradition or hierarchy. Strongly self-assured to the point of almost being arrogant, she is rather rude by Japanese standards, rarely using honorifics, calling others casually by given names or just shamelessly voicing her discontent aloud. While not fundamentally opposed to not making a problem of herself, Hinotora resents being expected to conform to the expectations of anyone but herself. In her eyes, the only approval she truly has to meet is her own, and as long as she's living life the way she has decided is correct, that's all there is to be said about it. She is the sort to revel in exertion, to exhibit the tendencies of a battle junkie once her blood gets pumping.

Her apparent brashness, however, clouds the true cunning in her nature. At heart, Hinotora is a deeply ambitious woman, tantalized by the idea of self-improvement and strength; yet, she is also steadied by a keen sense of self-preservation. Contrary to many -if not most- Demon Slayers, who glorify the ephemerality of life and the meaning in sacrifice, Hinotora has no intention of dying, not any time soon and ideally not any time at all. To her, sacrifice is cowardice and weakness, to take the easy way out, and true strength is to defy the dying light until the bitter end and beyond. As something of a fan of Western culture and media, she once encountered a quote that struck her poignantly: "Dying is easy, young man; living is harder!" Having internalized this concept, Hinotora believes true strength is continuing to live and fight on no matter what, because you're no good to the world dead. And no matter how many you save in the present by dying, you could have saved far more by living on in the long run. Yet, conversely, she does not scorn those that die simply because they were weak; in her eyes, the truer sin is not dying after having given your all but forgoing survival whilst having any other option.

This kind of ideology, needless to say, stands in stark contrast to much of what the Demon Slayer Corps believes, almost seeming to mock their history in how it interprets the pursuit of justice through a lens that many demons could appreciate. But it's far from the most controversial stance Hinotora holds. In fact, as far as actual demons are concerned, she views them as no different from humans spiritually. In her mind, it is only right to dehumanize others based on "inhumanity" as a concept, not physical status. "Humanity" to her is a way of life, lost or gained by deeds and choice, not by nature, and she is open to offering demons -particularly young ones- some level of slack in consideration for their biological murderous instincts, provided they show a willingness to rise above them. Conversely, she does not view the human and demon conflict as a matter of black and white and sees no issue with good demons killing evil humans. Despite this, she is not by any means blind to the nature of most demons, who more often than not selfishly abuse their powers to murder and consume the underserving, and she is doesn't hesitate in punishing the truly unjust and mercy-killing those too weak of will to resist their instincts.

At her core, Hinotora is a girl who found a certain strength in isolation, who didn't crumble under the pressure of others' expectations but rose up to defy them and carve her own path. Despite her seemingly selfish ideals, however, the one thing the Rengoku Clan truly instilled into her was a genuine value for justice and the pursuit of a better tomorrow. Dazzled further by tales told in many a fiction she buried her nose in as a child, Hinotora idealizes the concept of heroes and -in contrast to her outward tendency to dry cynicism- wants to stand for what is ultimately right, no matter how much her methods might disagree with the opinions of the majority.

The only person Hinotora seems keen to offer actual unvarnished respect as a matter of deferential authority is the head of the Butterfly Mansion, Yushiro, who she refers to as "Sensei", admiring him as the pinnacle of demon-kind's potential for coexistence with humanity and as a person of otherwise genuinely respectable intellect and legacy. She still finds his fits of annoyance amusing and is not above harmlessly needling him, having certainly attempted to pester him for stories of legendary events he was involved in.

^{S h o w a S e c r e t} :
The circumstances of Hinotora's birth were contentious in no small sense of the word.

Her mother, Rengoku Taiga, a Flame Breathing demon slayer, had conceived out of wedlock during a night of emotional fancy with a handsomely mysterious stranger, and while this would have already been scandalous enough, what would turn the matter borderline heretical was when the father of Taiga's child chose to make himself known. Having apparently kept tabs on her in the aftermath of their dalliance, he approached Taiga on a dark, moonlit night and revealed himself to be a demon, and it was at that moment that she realized with horror that the man before her was none other than a Blood Moon, the only demons that could sire children. And it was then with a terrible "kindness" that the Moon attempted to turn both mother and unborn child with his blood... and failed.

The aftermath of the attempt and the terribly weak state it left the mother in would leave it an open secret that the circumstances of the upcoming birth were the union of a demon and a human, and more ardently, it was advised that the fruit of the union be removed before it could blossom, such was the shamefulness of it. Yet, the soon-to-be mother rejected such advice, and for her ardent determination, she was rewarded with a healthy baby girl... who she'd not live long enough to raise.

This was the world Rengoku Hinotora arrived into, orphaned at birth and perceived rather unfavorably for the circumstances of it.

To the Rengoku Clan's credit, despite Taiga's more immediate family shunning and otherwise outright disowning her child for the walking stain on their reputation that she was, Hinotora was not disbarred from the same opportunities any other child of the clan had, having all her basic living and educational needs met. However, the rumors surrounding her heritage isolated her socially growing up, leading to some amount of ostracization, and she would end up not internalizing or properly embodying the Rengoku Clan's ideals, becoming a rebellious punk of a girl.

Despite being indoctrinated into Demon Slaying from nearly the moment she could walk (perhaps as a form of "penance" for her existence and "proof of worthiness" in certain eyes), Hinotora did not respond to harsh training and attempts to mold her into a simple cog-in-the-machine weapon with meekness and humble obedience, but instead earned scorn for being a snarky little shit that offered no respect to others that wasn't "earned", displaying a precocious awareness even early on that she knew she was being treated unfairly and had no intention of taking it lying down. Her increasingly irreverent behavior led to her being viewed as ungrateful towards her benefactors and occasionally heretical for the curiosity she showed towards "deviant" and "problematic" knowledge. This dissonance in values further ostracized her, especially once she developed the Phoenix Breathing Style rather than "course correcting", earning her even greater scrutiny for the "shamefully selfish and dishonorable" mindset emphasized by her new Breathing Style.

In the end, having felt as though she never truly formed bonds with her own family, Hinotora would take the opportunity shortly befoe she reached her age of majority to transfer away from the strict and traditional Kyoto branch of the Demon Slayer Corps -and subsequently, the Rengoku's larger sphere of influence- to study and fight abroad with the far more flexible and lenient Tokyo branch. There, she encountered an environment so diametric to the one she had left that she even found herself fighting alongside demons as allies every now and then.

As it turned out, the Tokyo branch of the Demon Slayer Corps paid much more respect to a niche element of their Corps' history, the reality that in their direst time of need, they had received aid from other demons against Muzan, the reality that demons could -if given the chance- reject their murderous instincts and coexist peacefully with humans. This understanding was something Hinotora found to resonate with her on a level she hadn't realized was possible. And as she continued to sharpen her skills on the rather more "intense" Tokyo territories in the demon vs slayer conflict and studying the history of said conflict and how it came to be, she found herself silently asking a rather poignant question...

Aren't humans and demons just two sides of the same coin, after all?

Not much more than two years ago, shortly after she'd moved to Tokyo and begun delving deeper into a medical education, that same question was been brought into even sharper relief, as when encountering a demon that nearly bested her, Hinotora discovered that her blood was not only toxic to demons but had the capacity to convert them back into humans. Instead of being disturbed by the potential implications this might have for her own status, however, Hinotora was ecstatic, beginning to study the phenomenon deeper and consider the ways this could be used to further deepen the development of her Phoenix Style.

Nowadays, if you were to visit the Butterfly Mansion, perhaps you might encounter her occasionally, a tall young woman with mostly jet-black hair that almost seems to shift into hues of licking flames at the ends, her golden eyes curled into sharp coy smiles, as she casually engages in comradery with an allied demon. In recent years, Hinotora has slowly become a more common face amongst the most intellectual faction in the Demon Slayer Corps, earning her keep in performing experiments in new ways to fight demons, and from a mundane angle, "Doctor Hinotora" is slowly gaining a reputation amongst secretly Butterfly Mansion backed hospitals as a young rising star in the medical field.

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'K o k y ū'
'K o k y ū'

^{F l a m b o y a n c e} : Hinotora is a practitioner of Flame Breathing Forms 1-5 and is capable of the advanced form of Total Concentration: Constant Breathing. However in terms of the pure Flame Style, her proficiency lacks compared to her true specialty, the Style she developed as one more suited to her philosophy, Phoenix Breathing. It is for this reason and her general estrangement from the Rengoku Clan that has led to her never learning Flame Breathing Forms beyond the 5th.

Phoenix Breathing or “The Breath of the Phoenix” is a derivative offshoot combination of Flame Breathing and Total Concentration Breathing, which could be seen as heretical by many Demon Slayers, as it emphasizes a philosophy of "ascension" and the pursuit of survival, idealizing the concept of "stoking an eternal flame", rather than burning brightly and burning out. In a sense, it rejects the idea of sacrificing oneself in the pursuit of one's goals, instead emphasizing living to fight another day. For, after all, what point is there in fighting for a better world if you don't live long enough to enjoy the fruits of your labors, right? Regardless of this rather selfish premise, however, there is an undercurrent of honor, an idea that reckless sacrifice is -in itself- cowardly and that living to fight on guarantees the chance to save even more lives in the long run. In Hinotora's eyes, a true Phoenix may burn eternally, but they burn always for Justice. A true Phoenix shall Set Their Heart Ablaze... and always rise from their ashes.

Mechanically speaking, the Phoenix Style takes advantage of the great advancements in (semi) modern medicine and biological knowledge to create a foundation that surpasses its origins. It combines Flame Breathing with advanced forms of Total Concentration Breathing, primarily those of the Recovery type, and puts a focus on cultivating that power internally, reinforcing and enhancing the user's foundations to allow them to achieve a physicality and endurance comparable to Demons. Indeed, if this Breathing Style has but one definitive goal? It is "to become inhuman without rejecting one's Humanity".

Compared to other Styles, the current forms of Phoenix Breathing are typically less "special elemental moves" and more a series of stacking enhancements. This focus on "improving one's foundation" means that, on an external level, a user showcases very little "elemental power" compared to other styles until at least beyond the first 3 Establishing Forms, which act as the cornerstones for the entire style. The Style treats the user's body like an engine, pressurizing energy inside one's nerves and muscles to achieve explosive speed and power. All the while, the user's cells are treated as growing batteries, storing energy to be unleashed later.

As an actual sword style, Phoenix Breathing emphasizes a wide, deft swings with a strong sturdy blade. To fight as a Phoenix is to be a glorious burning bird of prey, swiftly closing the distance with a target, engaging in a relentless offense, before deftly retreating with equal agility to avoid retaliation and begin the whole cycle anew. Mobility is a key element and highlights a need for strong reflexes and quick thinking, along with making the user at home with executing midair maneuvers. It is a fighting style that creates brute strength through velocity and dexterity and -if practicing its Forms properly- provides in and of itself the necessary physical ability to do so.

✧ Form 1: Furnace Breathing - The first step in the style emphasizes purging impurities and reinforcing one's foundation. Acting as a variant of Recovery Breathing Method laced with cleansing Flame, the user stokes an internal fire surging with the "breath of life", flushing their body free of invasive elements (like poison, disease, etc) and energizing their cells with revitalizing energy and renewed stamina, providing them near limitless stamina. In practice, this form is meant to be used constantly, with every other part of the Phoenix style branching off of it. Side effects of long-term usage of this form include an overall improved immune system and general health along with increased longevity due to gradually restoring the expended capacity of the user's cells to naturally replicate.

✧ Form 2: Flaming Rebirth - As the style's mainstay recovery technique, the second form utilizes an improved form of the Enhanced Recovery Method. Whilst the first form focuses more on gathering and maintaining energy, this form releases that storage in a burst of restorative activity. By focusing their awareness and manipulation of their body, the user is able to detect and heal or otherwise mitigate even hidden internal injuries. By manually prompting their cells into replicating and forcibly accelerating the body's natural recovery systems, at the upper end, the user can manage a form of slow but combat-effective regeneration, limited -granted- to healing only injuries they could have otherwise theoretically recovered from naturally. Lesser uses of this technique can include slowing the circulation of poisons, seizing control of muscles to prevent organs from falling out or even halting bleeding by near-instantly coagulating blood or cauterizing wounds with the user's own flames. This form, once learned, allows the user to train much faster than normal, greatly increasing training time due to how fast their bodies can heal after even the worst and most insane training.

✧ And while this may mostly just sound like normal ERM on the surface, what the Phoenix style truly improves the technique with is the capacity to utilize it even when the user cannot breathe, forcibly drawing on reserves of vitality to induce emergency recovery and allowing them to restore vital bodily functions even in positions where a normal human would suffocate. However, performing the technique without breathing causes immense strain on the body, to the degree that it even decreases the user's lifespan, counteracting the improved longevity of the first form with overuse. Usage of this technique carries a glint of elemental power, as since the recovery is laced with a release of stored Flame energy, the user's wounds may occasionally spew flames when they "cauterize" in a burst.

✧ Form 3: Fire Bird's Spirit - Still staying true to much of the Style's "ladder"-like progression, this form is not an island, but rather an extension of prior forms. Once the body's foundation has been established and protected, this form is used to properly reinforce and enhance it. With this form, the user learns to constantly reinforce their body with the explosive power of flames, greatly enhancing strength, speed, reflexes and overall senses beyond the normal levels of Total Concentration Breathing. This form is learned third in the order of things, since without the second form, this form carries a great risk of burning one's own body up from the inside out without any way to address internal injuries. Because of this, this style could only be developed and trained by Hinotora once she was confident she had mastered both RCM and ERM, and as such it currently remains the third and final of the Phoenix style's maiden techniques.
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'N i c h i r i n'
'N i c h i r i n'

^{B l a d e W o r k} : Hinotora carries a blade glinting with a fiery orange hue, representing the explosive flames lurking beneath her skin. Unlike most Demon Slayers, she does not wield a traditional katana; instead, she carries a longsword of European shape, bringing to mind images of armored knights astride gallant steeds. A bold glint of silvery azure running down the center of the blade from the wide guard subtly hints at Hinotora's tendency for flexible thinking in the pursuit of her ideals.

Yushiro Concealment Talisman: A standard-issue talisman used to cloak the presence of her sword and other demon slaying equipment while not in combat, allowing her to always be armed even in public without drawing suspicion.

Medical Supplies: Carries a small pouch of utilities for treating harm, including bandages, stitches, medical tape, painkillers and some other odds and ends. In the case of a situation where she has time to prepare for immense trauma level injuries, she can requisition an ambulance from a Butterfly Mansion backed hospital and load it with more heavy-duty equipment.

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^{U n i q u e T r a i t s} :
✧ Sweet Tooth: Really likes her sweets. Often can be seen casually chewing on some form of candy, particularly gum or lollipops.
✧ Biology Major: Hinotora, supplied with the more "modern" education of the 1980's, aggressively pursued knowledge of the human body in the development of the Phoenix Style. Having worked closely with the Butterfly Mansion since the discovery of her Sakasachi blood, she has also done much study on human and demon biology. Her refined sense of her body gives her an upper hand in using Total Concentration Breathing techniques to manipulate her body in unconventional ways compared to the average Demon Slayer, and her knowledge of medical techniques, drugs and poisons is extensive enough to make her an able field medic and surgeon.
✧ Indomitable Will: Like many Demon Slayers, Hinotora possesses an ironclad will and spirit, refusing to give up and remaining lucid and focused even when under immense pressure and pain. As a result of her harsh training methods along with no small number of brutal demon encounters, she is quite familiar with pain and able to largely ignore it. As long as her body is physically capable of continuing, she will drive it to fight on, even in the face of wounds that should evoke immense trauma.
✧ Kasugai Crow: Hinotora's assigned crow is a female that displays a more eloquent grasp of speech than the average crow and who has grown quite the ego in part because of that, taking pride in displaying skills beyond most of her kind. Professional and smugly composed in most cases, she is a bird that has been referred to as "cat-like" in the past. Hinotora trained her to deliver messages quietly, rather than bellowing announcements to all and sundry in the area.

✧ Special Trait: "Blessed" (Sakasachi) Blood - As a result of her abnormal heritage, despite by all other accounts being a perfect picture of humanity, Hinotora's blood carries a special property which allows it to digest and assimilate demon genetics, "converting" them into healthy human biomass instead. Because of this, unless she makes a conscious effort to suppress her biology's natural instincts with some form of TCB, Hinotora's blood makes her highly resistant -if not immune- to the process of demon conversion. And conversely, even perhaps far more disconcertingly, it allows her blood to be used as a cure and poison both that is capable of converting demons... back into humans. This extremely rare -if not entirely unheard of- phenomenon has hence been classified as "Sakasachi Blood" by the Butterfly Mansion.

• At present, this property is relatively recently discovered and largely unexplored and unrefined, leaving it only capable of completely reverting a demon that was changed no longer than 3 days ago. Beyond that point, it is merely a highly potent -though not necessarily deadly- poison, making Hinotora's blood effectively toxic to demons.
• It is unknown what would happen to this trait if Hinotora were to be transformed into a demon. Would it somehow be retained? Would it be inverted? Perhaps the truth will never be known.