The Journal of Hisoka Kurosaki

Name: Hisoka Kurosaki
Fandom: Yami no matsuei (Descendants of Darkness)
Timeline: He was kidnapped out of his canon world at the end of manga Volume 11, Chapter 67, and he has been in three games since then. He is currently keeping all his memories. (See the history section.)
Age: He is now 23.
Appearance: Hisoka is a slightly built young man with red-gold hair, dark red eyebrows and eyelashes, enormous green eyes, and a straight little nose. At first glance, he appears almost fragile, but in fact, hard work in the dojo, the shipyards, and aboard the ships has strung those slender bones with tough sinews and compact, flexible muscles. He stands only 5' 3'' in his boots, but when he wants to, he has physical presence. His typical facial expression is serious, thoughtful, or businesslike (sometimes grimly so), but with the occasional hint of a smile.


Personality:
Hisoka is serious, hardworking, intelligent, studious, and literate. He is self-assured and independent. He is a good listener, and when necessary, an effective speaker. He rarely fails to have ideas of his own; however, he is normally circumspect about how and in what situations he expresses his views. He was raised to be respectful to his elders and to authority, and to avoid open conflict with persons in either of these categories. He is community-minded; he has an awareness of the needs of others and of any group to which he owes his allegiance. He can be very kind. He has a sense of humor, whose expression is often deadpan or sarcastic. If disapproving of what is happening, his manner may be extremely chilly. There are occasions on which he is rude, abrupt, or preemptory, but he is quick to apologize when he realizes he is wrong or has treated someone unfairly or disrespectfully. He is usually calm and self-contained.

Under the quiet surface, however, there is heat (and light). Hisoka lives with a great deal of condensed rage. Thus, there is ferocity in those huge green eyes of his, as well as appeal. He has a volcanic temper as well as an affectionate heart. Getting angry shields him from pain, and so sometimes in an interpersonal situation, he reacts with anger instead of relying on his social skills. However, he doesn't permit his temper to get loose often, just as he does not always allow his heart to attach to other people with the full intensity of which he is capable. He trusts with pain; he knows how to do it, but he also knows how great the cost can be. Yet, he is capable of great devotion, to both people and ideals. And like many persons with difficult backgrounds, he has a need to reach beyond himself to engage in a higher enterprise or to find a cause that includes but is greater than his own needs and aspirations.

History:
Canon world:
Hisoka was born in Kamakura City, Japan. He came from a family that was troubled with depression, infanticide, and a persistent horned snake-demon ancestor (the Lake God, Yatonokami), but he managed to live a quiet life of academic achievement and martial arts study until the age of twelve and a half, when he was raped by a psychotic killer, Dr. Kazutaka Muraki. This clever physician, who was also a sorcerer, put a spell on Hisoka that caused an extreme illness and rendered him highly susceptible to the doctor’s will. Three years later, Hisoka died mysteriously, not from the illness but from a broken neck, an injury inflicted during his final encounter with Muraki.

In the afterlife, he was offered a job as a shinigami, a combination of supernatural detective and angel of death. His partner on the job was Asato Tsuzuki, a kind and compassionate man who became his friend. Tsuzuki, who had problems of his own--namely, suicide and prior experience with the Muraki family--nevertheless reached out to Hisoka and offered unfailing love and support until Hisoka regained the ability to trust. They worked together for two years, reaping souls and solving supernatural cases. When disaster finally struck, it was Hisoka who prevented Tsuzuki from consigning himself to a fiery grave along with the murderous, despairing Muraki.

Six months after that incident, Hisoka decided to seek the ultimate expansion of his shinigami powers, and he and Tsuzuki traveled to a world referred to as GenSouKai, or the Imaginary Country, so that Hisoka could find, defeat, and conclude a contract with a shikigami, a powerful spirit ally. His object was to gain so much power that neither he nor Tsuzuki need ever again be helpless in the grip of evil, and he was obsessed with this desire. He succeeded in acquiring Kurikara RyuOh, the dragon king of that country, but only after he had taken a second leap of faith, that of recognizing that the needs of the community were more important than his own personal desire for power.

Glaxcin Prison RPG:
On a return journey from the Imaginary Country (to search the Ministry’s records for information regarding an instability that was threatening to rend the spacetime fabric of that world), Hisoka was kidnapped out of the inter-dimensional gate, which he had entered alone, and spirited off to an occult prison in a universe whose location no one will ever know except the mysterious Warden of the facility. It was a spatially limited and appallingly bleak world, bounded by walls of steel, enclosed by an impenetrable fog, and shaped by arbitrary and sadistic rules and mysterious, trying events. The prisoners attempted to create lives for themselves in spite of everything, but here, ordinary life was an impossible achievement. People appeared in the prison, struggled with themselves and each other, and ultimately disappeared, not knowing why or where.

Hisoka understood from the moment he opened his eyes in the entry cell that he must continue on the path he had begun to walk in his own universe. If love, friendship, or community could exist here, he must find them, or he would die. He threw himself into connecting with others, and he decided to give everything he had to the goal of a prisoners’ revolt against the Warden and a subsequent escape for everyone. It was a strange world in which to have personal relationships, and his experiences were both sublime and unspeakably sad. He sought and found more friendships than he could ever have imagined possible. He fell in love three times. But the prisoners’ attrition rate was very high, and in time he lost nearly all his friends. Furthermore, as a rebel, he was inexperienced. He discovered, to his surprise, that for human beings, the most difficult task on earth is not to get together to accomplish what they cannot do alone, but to get together, period. And the more critical it is that they do it, the more difficult it is. In time, the Warden terminated him, but his spirit escaped. He departed that world as others had before him, without realizing his dreams...but taking with him in his memory those he had loved, along with the knowledge gained from the experience of having tried to change the world.

The Sky Tides RPG:
Hisoka was reincarnated into a universe whose known geography consisted of a single continent and its associated islands, with all these land-masses floating mysteriously above a Sea of Cloud whose depths no one could guess. In this world, the Age of Steam was still going strong, and powerful airships plied the skies or contended with one another--military, commercial, smuggler or pirate craft. Hisoka grew up much as he had in his first universe, in a family made sick by their secrets. One of these was as regards their heritage--the Kurosaki were People of the Lake, a fusion of two genetic strains, human and Lake God -- in a society that despised all such combinations and termed them “demihuman.” However, the members of the Kurosaki family were shipwrights as well as samurai; these two critically important professions guaranteed them tolerance from the surrounding population, and sometimes even respect.

Hisoka was apprenticed young to the shipwright’s trade and later served on board the airships as a very young sailor. He met Muraki on schedule at the age of twelve, but he did not die as a result of this encounter, although he was ill for a year. He recovered and left home at fifteen to join the navy of a nation other than his own. He served as a gunner on a succession of Ivonian warships and then under cover on a mercenary ship, all during a time of great tension and political discord between the military powers of that world and between the commercial and pirate communities. One of his tasks was to try to live down his participation in a mutiny on his first ship, the Mary Rose, an act for which he and the other six junior officers were investigated but with which they were never charged. His other tasks were the same as ever: to confront his fundamental loneliness, to find friends and lovers, and to wrest meaning out of the life to which he had committed himself. Muraki eventually turned up again, and then Hisoka had to decide whether to attempt the path of blood revenge or, with the help of friends and a former commanding officer, to go the lawful route of gathering enough evidence to put the doctor in prison forever.

Nothing in this life turned out simply. In the end, he tried to clear his name (and those of the other six surviving mutineers, for whom he felt responsible) by volunteering for the continent’s fourteenth Underworld Expedition, which was basically a suicide mission. But he thought that there was a chance of survival and success; this was because he believed that down under those clouds was a mighty lake that stretched from pole to pole. For the navigator’s position, therefore, who better than a Son of the Lake? Before the expedition could be launched, a cataclysmic geological and meteorological event occurred, and one of its side effects was to lift the Sea of Cloud to reveal the New Lands far below, an entire unexplored world. The expedition no longer had a purpose. But some time later, the Navy decided to launch a similar vessel, the Nereid 2, on a voyage to explore that world’s Arctic ocean. Hisoka asked for this assignment, and he went down with the ship when it was broken up in a tremendous storm.

Carpe Horas RPG:
When he opened his eyes, he found himself standing on the cement plaza before a mansion house set above a wide and wintery lake. He was not utterly surprised; he already knew that death is not the end. But before he had a chance to take stock, his mind was struck by a tidal wave of memories not only from the airship world, but from Japan, the afterlife in Meifu, and from Glaxcin Prison. This was a staggering experience, this revelation that his past had left him a multiple being. He had lived two complete life cycles, died three deaths, had been human, shinigami, and Son of the Lake, and now he was…what? Other psychics at the Mansion informed him that his aura fluctuated, sometimes radiating in the shinigami spectrum, sometimes in the human, and sometimes there was a puzzling touch of the hybrid human/naga person he had been in the airship world.

In this world, he made friends and found love at last, and a lot more of it than he'd ever expected. But finding love doesn't make you a different person than you are, nor does it make other people different than they are. The world just keeps on worlding, as they say. He had barely gotten it straight who he was and what mattered to him when he got the unearthly summons again. He took his canoe out into a channel in the partially frozen lake and into the river and vanished forever from that world.

Abilities:
Canon (Japan and the Japanese afterlife):
Hisoka is an accomplished swordsman, and he has also studied Aikido, Judo, and the Japanese bow. He is well-read, with a working knowledge of English literature (and presumably, Japanese literature as well). He is an empath, having the ability to directly sense other people’s emotions and sometimes thoughts. He has the ability to heal spontaneously, often with great speed, and to heal others as well. As a shinigami, a corporeal spirit, he is capable of shifting into pure spirit, invisible to ordinary eyes. He is an intermediate-level user of fuda. (These are strips of paper on which Buddhist blessings or incantations are written in Sanskrit, and which have magical properties. The art of employing these to raise, gather, and focus energy to create a protective shield, or for a defensive strike against an opponent, is referred to as ofuda.) He has the power to summon a spirit ally, Kurikara, the Dragon King of GenSouKai, to aid him in battle.

Glaxcin (the prison world):
Under the pressure of survival, Hisoka developed the ability to filter out other people’s thoughts and emotions. When he was alive, and even after he had become a shinigami, Hisoka’s psychic power was largely uncontrolled, and existing at all times in an ocean of others’ emotions made difficulties for him, though of course it was useful at times. But once he was kidnapped into the prison, it was no longer just a complication but a torture. The environment was so stressful that the psychic atmosphere was poisoned, and to continue to listen day and night to that cacophony of rage, misery, loneliness and fear that washed the prison from wall to wall would have been hellish, if not outright suicidal. He learned spontaneously how to filter what came into his mind. In six months, He was able to reduce the emotional noise and the continuous psychic chatter by ninety percent or better. Desperation is a great teacher. He retains this ability in the present.

The Sky Tides (the airship world):
From his experience in the airship world, he is skilled with many types of small arms and with the larger guns with which the steel warships were outfitted. He was an apprentice shipwright, and thus has carpentry, mechanical, and steel construction skills. He can crew a boat, and he is in addition a very good navigator. His education, formal and informal, has left him versed in the literature of that world and reasonably proficient in science and mathematics. He has knowledge of basic electricity and the rudimentary electronics of the era, and has taught himself to be handy with devices.

This Son of the Lake is an excellent swimmer! And it's possible he may still have the ability to stay under water for a very long time.

Carpe Horas (the Mansion world):
During his stay in that (mostly) peaceful little universe, Hisoka spent much of his time building small boats, docks, sheds, a dojo, two dragon pavilions, and a couple of small houses. He updated himself on modern mechanics, electricity, and electronics to the best of his ability, partly by reading and partly by taking apart and attempting to fix appliances and machines that he found in various parts of the house and its storage areas. Communications devices brought to the Mansion by new residents would not work in this environment – the house would not allow this – but he took them apart, too, and learned what he could. The most significant learning experiences, however, were never about technology.

Notes on the psychic powers:
Hisoka’s early difficulties have left him not only with a need for privacy but also with a great respect for the privacy of others. He doesn't even like overhearing other people’s thoughts inadvertently. And unless there is a compelling reason (such as an emergency healing), Hisoka would consider entering another person’s psyche as unethical, as an invasion, and his feelings about mind-rape are nearly as strong as his feelings about physical rape. His ethics safely limit his use of these skills.

[Important: Hisoka will never read any other character’s mind without the other player’s permission.]



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Roleplay Sample – Log:

The sky was almost black, now, and beyond the ship each wave rose up as a mountain. The seas were crashing against the ship and surging over the guardrail, each of them pouring over some part of the main deck. The sailors had long since cleared away all deck gear and battened down the hatches, but the water was flooding into various ship compartments anyway.

In the bridge house, the helmsman was at his station and fighting the sea with all his might. The captain stood clinging to a handrail and talking on the internal telephone system to the engineering chief. Hisoka was hanging over the radio station, listening to a weather report out of Morland Station on the coast. As the navigator, it was his job to keep track of the ship’s exact location, using multiple sources of information. At the moment, he could not use his sextant to take a bearing on the sun or any other star – the sky was nothing but running clouds, snow, hail, and roaring winds. He was able to plot their course using dead reckoning, adjusting for changes in wind velocity and direction since he knew they were being pushed off course by the steady pressure of the gale wind. He was also checking the few radio beacons whose signals could reach across hundreds or thousands of miles of ocean to be picked up by the Nereid. The technology was still primitive, but there was one at Morland Station and one at Cape Uncertainty. He could triangulate on his own chart (taped to the navigation desk) using those two signals, and add that data to the rest to get a course estimate. And he did not like the direction they were going in, since they had had to choose whether to steer closer to the center of the storm or to steer too close to the partially frozen ocean off the Cape. The captain was trying to tread lightly between these two bad alternatives, hoping to pass them both, by the skin of his teeth.

But the storm had veered towards the coast, effectively squeezing the ship between those two perils, the maelstrom and the closely packed, floating ice of the Cape Uncertainty waters. In any case this region, where strong ocean currents met, was notoriously turbulent. The helmsman’s task was to keep the ship’s bow pointed into each oncoming wave, as this is the orientation that is least likely to kill you. The ship pitches as it climbs each gargantuan wave, breasts its crest, and then slides down the other side, and then orients towards the next wave. The danger is less in the pitch than in the roll. If the ship is struck broadside by a wave, it rolls, the waters crash over the deck, and the ship may take water into its funnels as they lean into the onrushing waves, and the result can be a flooded engine compartment. In such seas, the vessel may even be in danger of capsizing simply from its own heeling motion if that motion is augmented by one wave after another with no time for the craft to recover from the first push. In such dangerous waters as this, with sea currents flowing around the Cape and forming massive whorls and eddies, even in good weather, a captain had to be cautious.

The ship suddenly lurched, everyone grabbed for anything he or she could hold onto. There was a vast whine and shudder that Hisoka could feel through the souls of his feet and the bones of his hands, and the starboard propeller suddenly ceased to turn. The captain snatched the phone receiver off the wall, cranked it, and spoke rapidly into it. When he looked up, he had received bad news from the engine room. Engine number two had blown a steam tube, and there were injuries (one serious, one fatal). Now they were in for it. It was going to be much more difficult to control the boat with one engine down until they could shut off the damaged devices and reroute the steam line, and even then, they'd end up with reduced power.

Hisoka looked up. “Captain, I should go down there and help. I can’t do much more here until the blow is over.” He had mechanical experience, and the engine room was already understaffed because of the illness that had struck the crew the previous month, carrying off the assistant engineer and two of the firetenders. The captain nodded, and Hisoka grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and pulled it on.

He had to wrench the bridge door shut after he exited, fighting it shut in the wind. The wind struck him like a hammer as soon as he cleared the bridge house. He looked around. Then he started across the deck, heading for the first of the tall mesh masts and the stanchions. If he made his way along in the wind-shadow of the masts and the amidships deckhouses, he could reach the hatch that led directly down into the engine compartment. The wind was so cold that it froze his eyelashes almost instantly. He pulled down his watch cap, ducked his face into his upturned collar, and clinging to anything he could grab hold of, he walked that rolling, bucking deck.

But he never reached his goal. There was a tremendous crash, and a hideous sound of tearing steel, and the ship rose up and pitched fiercely. Hisoka threw his arms around the big fluted tube of an air duct where it rose out of the deck, and knew that the worst had happened. They had struck ice. The remaining propeller ceased its restless rotation. And wouldn’t you know it, here came another mountain of water, and it was rising to their starboard side and coming directly at them to strike them beam-on. And they had no power to turn the ship into the wave. Still, he kept going, because if they weren’t swamped by this one, there might be time to get the starboard engine going again, and one propeller was better than none when it came to steering.

He reached the hatch, and clung to it. He shouted down it, but the wind and sea were too loud, and anyway there was probably nobody free to come and help him lift the heavy steel grid. He seized it, and in a feat of vast, determined strength, he heaved it off its frame. And now there was a problem, because the ship rolled sharply – and the hatch cover slid towards him. The deck rose and tilted forty-five degrees and water rushed over him and shoved him backwards towards the guardrail like a mighty hand. And suddenly he was struck by the full weight of the cover, all two hundred pounds of it. There was blackness.

He was carried towards the guardrail and then over it.

And even a Son of the Lake can drown, if the water is cold enough and he is unconscious.



Roleplay Sample – Journal:

[001] Hisoka Kurosaki [video]

[The feed clicks on, and the view is a tilted one, the meeting of the ceiling with the top of a wall in the patient treatment area of the Medical lab.]

Anybody picking this up? [pause] This is Lieutenant Hisoka Kurosaki of the Ivonian naval vessel, Nereid 2.

[The view pans past Hisoka’s face. He is a red-haired, green-eyed young man who wears an expression that is both dazed and determined.]

[Almost to himself.] No, wait. That was a while ago. That was before I drowned…

[Firmly, returning his attention to the matter at hand.] Where am I, exactly? [He holds the PCD at arm's length, and the view pans slowly around the patient area, and then back to Hisoka's face. His gaze is completely focused now, as though he were looking the person he is speaking to straight in the eyes. He waits for a response.]

Name: Hisoka Kurosaki
Fandom: Yami no matsuei (Descendants of Darkness)
Timeline: He was kidnapped out of his canon world at the end of manga Volume 11, Chapter 67, and he has been in three games since then. He is currently keeping all his memories. (See the history section.)
Age: He is now 23.
Appearance: Hisoka is a slightly built young man with red-gold hair, dark red eyebrows and eyelashes, enormous green eyes, and a straight little nose. At first glance, he appears almost fragile, but in fact, hard work in the dojo, the shipyards, and aboard the ships has strung those slender bones with tough sinews and compact, flexible muscles. He stands only 5' 3'' in his boots, but when he wants to, he has physical presence. His typical facial expression is serious, thoughtful, or businesslike (sometimes grimly so), but with the occasional hint of a smile.


Personality:
Hisoka is serious, hardworking, intelligent, studious, and literate. He is self-assured and independent. He is a good listener, and when necessary, an effective speaker. He rarely fails to have ideas of his own; however, he is normally circumspect about how and in what situations he expresses his views. He was raised to be respectful to his elders and to authority, and to avoid open conflict with persons in either of these categories. He is community-minded; he has an awareness of the needs of others and of any group to which he owes his allegiance. He can be very kind. He has a sense of humor, whose expression is often deadpan or sarcastic. If disapproving of what is happening, his manner may be extremely chilly. There are occasions on which he is rude, abrupt, or preemptory, but he is quick to apologize when he realizes he is wrong or has treated someone unfairly or disrespectfully. He is usually calm and self-contained.

Under the quiet surface, however, there is heat (and light). Hisoka lives with a great deal of condensed rage. Thus, there is ferocity in those huge green eyes of his, as well as appeal. He has a volcanic temper as well as an affectionate heart. Getting angry shields him from pain, and so sometimes in an interpersonal situation, he reacts with anger instead of relying on his social skills. However, he doesn't permit his temper to get loose often, just as he does not always allow his heart to attach to other people with the full intensity of which he is capable. He trusts with pain; he knows how to do it, but he also knows how great the cost can be. Yet, he is capable of great devotion, to both people and ideals. And like many persons with difficult backgrounds, he has a need to reach beyond himself to engage in a higher enterprise or to find a cause that includes but is greater than his own needs and aspirations.

History:
Canon world:
Hisoka was born in Kamakura City, Japan. He came from a family that was troubled with depression, infanticide, and a persistent horned snake-demon ancestor (the Lake God, Yatonokami), but he managed to live a quiet life of academic achievement and martial arts study until the age of twelve and a half, when he was raped by a psychotic killer, Dr. Kazutaka Muraki. This clever physician, who was also a sorcerer, put a spell on Hisoka that caused an extreme illness and rendered him highly susceptible to the doctor’s will. Three years later, Hisoka died mysteriously, not from the illness but from a broken neck, an injury inflicted during his final encounter with Muraki.

In the afterlife, he was offered a job as a shinigami, a combination of supernatural detective and angel of death. His partner on the job was Asato Tsuzuki, a kind and compassionate man who became his friend. Tsuzuki, who had problems of his own--namely, suicide and prior experience with the Muraki family--nevertheless reached out to Hisoka and offered unfailing love and support until Hisoka regained the ability to trust. They worked together for two years, reaping souls and solving supernatural cases. When disaster finally struck, it was Hisoka who prevented Tsuzuki from consigning himself to a fiery grave along with the murderous, despairing Muraki.

Six months after that incident, Hisoka decided to seek the ultimate expansion of his shinigami powers, and he and Tsuzuki traveled to a world referred to as GenSouKai, or the Imaginary Country, so that Hisoka could find, defeat, and conclude a contract with a shikigami, a powerful spirit ally. His object was to gain so much power that neither he nor Tsuzuki need ever again be helpless in the grip of evil, and he was obsessed with this desire. He succeeded in acquiring Kurikara RyuOh, the dragon king of that country, but only after he had taken a second leap of faith, that of recognizing that the needs of the community were more important than his own personal desire for power.

Glaxcin Prison RPG:
On a return journey from the Imaginary Country (to search the Ministry’s records for information regarding an instability that was threatening to rend the spacetime fabric of that world), Hisoka was kidnapped out of the inter-dimensional gate, which he had entered alone, and spirited off to an occult prison in a universe whose location no one will ever know except the mysterious Warden of the facility. It was a spatially limited and appallingly bleak world, bounded by walls of steel, enclosed by an impenetrable fog, and shaped by arbitrary and sadistic rules and mysterious, trying events. The prisoners attempted to create lives for themselves in spite of everything, but here, ordinary life was an impossible achievement. People appeared in the prison, struggled with themselves and each other, and ultimately disappeared, not knowing why or where.

Hisoka understood from the moment he opened his eyes in the entry cell that he must continue on the path he had begun to walk in his own universe. If love, friendship, or community could exist here, he must find them, or he would die. He threw himself into connecting with others, and he decided to give everything he had to the goal of a prisoners’ revolt against the Warden and a subsequent escape for everyone. It was a strange world in which to have personal relationships, and his experiences were both sublime and unspeakably sad. He sought and found more friendships than he could ever have imagined possible. He fell in love three times. But the prisoners’ attrition rate was very high, and in time he lost nearly all his friends. Furthermore, as a rebel, he was inexperienced. He discovered, to his surprise, that for human beings, the most difficult task on earth is not to get together to accomplish what they cannot do alone, but to get together, period. And the more critical it is that they do it, the more difficult it is. In time, the Warden terminated him, but his spirit escaped. He departed that world as others had before him, without realizing his dreams...but taking with him in his memory those he had loved, along with the knowledge gained from the experience of having tried to change the world.

The Sky Tides RPG:
Hisoka was reincarnated into a universe whose known geography consisted of a single continent and its associated islands, with all these land-masses floating mysteriously above a Sea of Cloud whose depths no one could guess. In this world, the Age of Steam was still going strong, and powerful airships plied the skies or contended with one another--military, commercial, smuggler or pirate craft. Hisoka grew up much as he had in his first universe, in a family made sick by their secrets. One of these was as regards their heritage--the Kurosaki were People of the Lake, a fusion of two genetic strains, human and Lake God -- in a society that despised all such combinations and termed them “demihuman.” However, the members of the Kurosaki family were shipwrights as well as samurai; these two critically important professions guaranteed them tolerance from the surrounding population, and sometimes even respect.

Hisoka was apprenticed young to the shipwright’s trade and later served on board the airships as a very young sailor. He met Muraki on schedule at the age of twelve, but he did not die as a result of this encounter, although he was ill for a year. He recovered and left home at fifteen to join the navy of a nation other than his own. He served as a gunner on a succession of Ivonian warships and then under cover on a mercenary ship, all during a time of great tension and political discord between the military powers of that world and between the commercial and pirate communities. One of his tasks was to try to live down his participation in a mutiny on his first ship, the Mary Rose, an act for which he and the other six junior officers were investigated but with which they were never charged. His other tasks were the same as ever: to confront his fundamental loneliness, to find friends and lovers, and to wrest meaning out of the life to which he had committed himself. Muraki eventually turned up again, and then Hisoka had to decide whether to attempt the path of blood revenge or, with the help of friends and a former commanding officer, to go the lawful route of gathering enough evidence to put the doctor in prison forever.

Nothing in this life turned out simply. In the end, he tried to clear his name (and those of the other six surviving mutineers, for whom he felt responsible) by volunteering for the continent’s fourteenth Underworld Expedition, which was basically a suicide mission. But he thought that there was a chance of survival and success; this was because he believed that down under those clouds was a mighty lake that stretched from pole to pole. For the navigator’s position, therefore, who better than a Son of the Lake? Before the expedition could be launched, a cataclysmic geological and meteorological event occurred, and one of its side effects was to lift the Sea of Cloud to reveal the New Lands far below, an entire unexplored world. The expedition no longer had a purpose. But some time later, the Navy decided to launch a similar vessel, the Nereid 2, on a voyage to explore that world’s Arctic ocean. Hisoka asked for this assignment, and he went down with the ship when it was broken up in a tremendous storm.

Carpe Horas RPG:
When he opened his eyes, he found himself standing on the cement plaza before a mansion house set above a wide and wintery lake. He was not utterly surprised; he already knew that death is not the end. But before he had a chance to take stock, his mind was struck by a tidal wave of memories not only from the airship world, but from Japan, the afterlife in Meifu, and from Glaxcin Prison. This was a staggering experience, this revelation that his past had left him a multiple being. He had lived two complete life cycles, died three deaths, had been human, shinigami, and Son of the Lake, and now he was…what? Other psychics at the Mansion informed him that his aura fluctuated, sometimes radiating in the shinigami spectrum, sometimes in the human, and sometimes there was a puzzling touch of the hybrid human/naga person he had been in the airship world.

In this world, he made friends and found love at last, and a lot more of it than he'd ever expected. But finding love doesn't make you a different person than you are, nor does it make other people different than they are. The world just keeps on worlding, as they say. He had barely gotten it straight who he was and what mattered to him when he got the unearthly summons again. He took his canoe out into a channel in the partially frozen lake and into the river, and vanished forever from that world.

Abilities:
Canon (Japan and the Japanese afterlife):
Hisoka is an accomplished swordsman, and he has also studied Aikido, Judo, and the Japanese bow. He is well-read, with a working knowledge of English literature (and presumably, Japanese literature as well). He is an empath, having the ability to directly sense other people’s emotions and sometimes thoughts. He has the ability to heal spontaneously, often with great speed, and to heal others as well. As a shinigami, a corporeal spirit, he is capable of shifting into pure spirit, invisible to ordinary eyes. He is an intermediate-level user of fuda. (These are strips of paper on which Buddhist blessings or incantations are written in Sanskrit, and which have magical properties. The art of employing these to raise, gather, and focus energy to create a protective shield, or for a defensive strike against an opponent, is referred to as ofuda.) He has the power to summon a spirit ally, Kurikara, the Dragon King of GenSouKai, to aid him in battle.

Glaxcin (the prison world):
Under the pressure of survival, Hisoka developed the ability to filter out other people’s thoughts and emotions. When he was alive, and even after he had become a shinigami, Hisoka’s psychic power was largely uncontrolled, and existing at all times in an ocean of others’ emotions made difficulties for him, though of course it was useful at times. But once he was kidnapped into the prison, it was no longer just a complication but a torture. The environment was so stressful that the psychic atmosphere was poisoned, and to continue to listen day and night to that cacophony of rage, misery, loneliness and fear that washed the prison from wall to wall would have been hellish, if not outright suicidal. He learned spontaneously how to filter what came into his mind. In six months, He was able to reduce the emotional noise and the continuous psychic chatter by ninety percent or better. Desperation is a great teacher. He retains this ability in the present.

The Sky Tides (the airship world):
From his experience in the airship world, he is skilled with many types of small arms and with the larger guns with which the steel warships were outfitted. He was an apprentice shipwright, and thus has carpentry, mechanical, and steel construction skills. He can crew a boat, and he is in addition a very good navigator. His education, formal and informal, has left him versed in the literature of that world and reasonably proficient in science and mathematics. He has knowledge of basic electricity and the rudimentary electronics of the era, and has taught himself to be handy with devices.

This Son of the Lake is an excellent swimmer! And it's possible he may still have the ability to stay under water for a very long time.

Carpe Horas (the Mansion world):
During his stay in that (mostly) peaceful little universe, Hisoka spent much of his time building small boats, docks, sheds, a dojo, two dragon pavilions, and a couple of small houses. He updated himself on modern mechanics, electricity, and electronics to the best of his ability, partly by reading and partly by taking apart and attempting to fix appliances and machines that he found in various parts of the house and its storage areas. Communications devices brought to the Mansion by new residents would not work in this environment – the house would not allow this – but he took them apart, too, and learned what he could. The most significant learning experiences, however, were never about technology.

Notes on the psychic powers:
Hisoka’s early difficulties have left him not only with a need for privacy but also with a great respect for the privacy of others. He doesn't even like overhearing other people’s thoughts inadvertently. And unless there is a compelling reason (such as an emergency healing), Hisoka would consider entering another person’s psyche as unethical, as an invasion, and his feelings about mind-rape are nearly as strong as his feelings about physical rape. His ethics safely limit his use of these skills.

[Important: Hisoka will never read any other character’s mind without the other player’s permission.]



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Roleplay Sample – Log:

The sky was almost black, now, and beyond the ship each wave rose up as a mountain. The seas were crashing against the ship and surging over the guardrail, each of them pouring over some part of the main deck. The sailors had long since cleared away all deck gear and battened down the hatches, but the water was flooding into various ship compartments anyway.

In the bridge house, the helmsman was at his station and fighting the sea with all his might. The captain stood clinging to a handrail and talking on the internal telephone system to the engineering chief. Hisoka was hanging over the radio station, listening to a weather report out of Morland Station on the coast. As the navigator, it was his job to keep track of the ship’s exact location, using multiple sources of information. At the moment, he could not use his sextant to take a bearing on the sun or any other star – the sky was nothing but running clouds, snow, hail, and roaring winds. He was able to plot their course using dead reckoning, adjusting for changes in wind velocity and direction since he knew they were being pushed off course by the steady pressure of the gale wind. He was also checking the few radio beacons whose signals could reach across hundreds or thousands of miles of ocean to be picked up by the Nereid. The technology was still primitive, but there was one at Morland Station and one at Cape Uncertainty. He could triangulate on his own chart (taped to the navigation desk) using those two signals, and add that data to the rest to get a course estimate. And he did not like the direction they were going in, since they had had to choose whether to steer closer to the center of the storm or to steer too close to the partially frozen ocean off the Cape. The captain was trying to tread lightly between these two bad alternatives, hoping to pass them both, by the skin of his teeth.

But the storm had veered towards the coast, effectively squeezing the ship between perils, the maelstrom and the closely packed, floating ice of the Cape Uncertainty waters. In any case this region, where strong ocean currents met, was notoriously turbulent. The helmsman’s task was to keep the ship’s bow pointed into each oncoming wave, as this is the orientation that is least likely to kill you. The ship pitches as it climbs each gargantuan wave, breasts its crest, and then slides down the other side, and then orients towards the next wave. The danger is less in the pitch than in the roll. If the ship is struck broadside by a wave, it rolls, the waters crash over the deck, and the ship may take water into its funnels as they lean into the onrushing waves, and the result can be a flooded engine compartment. In such seas, the vessel may even be in danger of capsizing simply from its own heeling motion if that motion is augmented by one wave after another with no time for the craft to recover from the first push. In such dangerous waters as this, with sea currents flowing around the Cape and forming massive whorls and eddies, even in good weather, a captain had to be cautious.

The ship suddenly lurched, everyone grabbed for anything he or she could hold onto. There was a vast whine and shudder that Hisoka could feel through the souls of his feet and the bones of his hands, and the starboard propeller suddenly ceased to turn. The captain snatched the phone receiver off the wall, cranked it, and spoke rapidly into it. When he looked up, he had received bad news from the engine room. Engine number two had blown a steam tube, and there were injuries (one serious, one fatal). Now they were in for it. It was going to be much more difficult to control the boat with one engine down until they could shut off the damaged devices and reroute the steam line, and even then, they'd end up with reduced power.

Hisoka looked up. “Captain, I should go down there and help. I can’t do much more here until the blow is over.” He had mechanical experience, and the engine room was already understaffed because of the illness that had struck the crew the previous month, carrying off the assistant engineer and two of the firetenders. The captain nodded, and Hisoka grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and pulled it on.

He had to wrench the bridge door shut after he exited, fighting it shut in the wind. The wind struck him like a hammer as soon as he cleared the bridge house. He looked around. Then he started across the deck, heading for the first of the tall mesh masts and the stanchions. If he made his way along in the wind-shadow of the masts and the amidships deckhouses, he could reach the hatch that led directly down into the engine compartment. The wind was so cold that it froze his eyelashes almost instantly. He pulled down his watch cap, ducked his face into his upturned collar, and clinging to anything he could grab hold of, he walked that rolling, bucking deck.

But he never reached his goal. There was a tremendous crash, and a hideous sound of tearing steel, and the ship rose up and pitched fiercely. Hisoka threw his arms around the big fluted tube of an air duct where it rose out of the deck, and knew that the worst had happened. They had struck ice. The remaining propeller ceased its restless rotation. And wouldn’t you know it, here came another mountain of water, and it was rising to their starboard side and coming directly at them to strike them beam-on. And they had no power to turn the ship into the wave. Still, he kept going, because if they weren’t swamped by this one, there might be time to get the starboard engine going again, and one propeller was better than none when it came to steering.

He reached the hatch, and clung to it. He shouted down it, but the wind and sea were too loud, and anyway there was probably nobody free to come and help him lift the heavy steel grid. He seized it, and in a feat of vast, determined strength, he heaved it off its frame. And now there was a problem, because the ship rolled sharply – and the hatch cover slid towards him. The deck rose and tilted forty-five degrees and water rushed over him and shoved him backwards towards the guardrail like a mighty hand. And suddenly he was struck by the full weight of the cover, all two hundred pounds of it. There was blackness.

He was carried towards the guardrail and then over it.

And even a Son of the Lake can drown, if the water is cold enough and he is unconscious.



Roleplay Sample – Journal:

[001] Hisoka Kurosaki [video]

[The feed clicks on, and the view is a tilted one, the meeting of the ceiling with the top of a wall in the patient treatment area of the Medical lab.]

Anybody picking this up? [pause] This is Lieutenant Hisoka Kurosaki of the Ivonian naval vessel, Nereid 2.

[The view pans past Hisoka’s face. He is a red-haired, green-eyed young man who wears an expression that is both dazed and determined.]

[Almost to himself.] No, wait. That was a while ago. That was before I drowned…

[Firmly, returning his attention to the matter at hand.] Where am I, exactly? [He holds the PCD at arm's length, and the view pans slowly around the patient area, and then back to Hisoka's face. His gaze is completely focused now, as though he were looking the person he is speaking to straight in the eyes. He waits for a response.]

The journal's title line is from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, "Merlin and the Gleam."

Excerpts as follows:

O young Mariner,
You from the haven
Under the sea-cliff,
You that are watching
The grey Magician
With eyes of wonder [...] (lines 1-6)

And so to the land's
Last limit I came-- (lines 109-110)

Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O young Mariner,
Down to the haven,
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel,
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow The Gleam. (lines 120-131)


[This 1889 poem is a favorite of mine. Tennyson uses it to describe the creative journey (and the passing of the torch to a younger generation of poets); Hisoka uses it to say why these voyages between the universes matter so much to him. Once he would have said the light he pursues is love. Now he thinks that whatever it is, it is not so easily captured and named. But still he follows.]