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May. 22nd, 2020 11:47 pmName: Haruaki Takuya (borrowed)
Species: Mononoke (fear-borne demon, dog youkai)
Age: ~450 years old
personality
Laid back and seemingly friendly from the outside, Takuya is a curious and playful individual who enjoys getting attention. In reality, this is only to serve his greater need for expanding the reputation of his acquired name and if the effort comes without concrete reward, he's more likely to drop the friendly part and move on. Selfish and somewhat hedonistic, as a fear demon, Takuya's main interest in life is experiences. He wants to discover more emotions and special moments among humans beyond the range of terror and despair, and deep down wants to understand what it really means to be an individual without a set purpose or driving need. Because of this, he's developed a passion for cooking and eating. Not only eating a lot, but experiencing the creation of food and mastering flavors. He's also fond of being dramatic, as that adds to the moment and usually draws in a better range of emotional reactions from those around him.
While he does feed on fear, since he is a youkai that was born from and is tied to emotion, he doesn't have personal strength like other demons. In a pinch, his rule of thumb is to talk his way out of things or desert them. Effort is hard and dangerous, and a low level youkai isn't going to stand much of a chance against an older, more powerful spirit. If he can kick up minor demons to bully or consume, he'll gladly do so, but if the threat becomes too serious, the black dog will duck out, throwing insults over his shoulder.
As a demon, his emotional range is also pretty limited. Quick to make friends and quick to move on from most things, he doesn't invest too much in long term arrangements unless they can further his goals in claiming ownership of his body or give him more pleasure to feed on. While he's not malicious, he does tend to intentionally incite fear in others and doesn't understand the concepts of love or loyalty. They sound delicious, anyway.
background
The black dog was born in the nightmare of a young girl. Forced to walk home late through the woods one evening, the girl had a dream of being stalked by the shadow of a wild dog, creating the seed of fear that he was made from. The seed attracted other fears, grew, and took the form of a stray dog that stalked the small village it lived in. Eventually it became known throughout the area as a demon dog, hunting travelers and feeding on their fears, and often attracted to those with the scent of tragedy on them.
It stayed at the edge of villages and towns for hundreds of years, stalking people at night and growing stronger on their feelings, until one traveler--a mother walking her children home--met the black dog on the trail. Instead of running, she left it some sweets leftover from their journey and thanked the dog for walking them home. This sharp change in perception and offering changed the demon's appreciation of humans dramatically. He followed the mother and her children home, watching the family live and grow happily together. When the children went out, the black dog would walk them to and from their destinations, chasing away anything that threatened them.
Over the years, members of the family passed on, visited at their ends by a strange black dog that seemed to disappear at will when anyone noticed it. The more that the demon observed human interaction, the more it wanted to experience the range of feelings beyond fear and mourning that it had fed on in the past.
One night, while out hunting, the demon found a man in an alley, running from another demon. Before the man could be devoured, the black dog intervened, stealing the man for itself. As the man lay dying, he deliriously begged the shadow in front of him not to let him be forgotten. The demon, interested in the trade as a chance to learn more about life, took over the man's body. Unfortunately, the man, Haruaki Takuya, was extraordinarily uninteresting. Single, average, and working as an unsuccessful painter, he wasn't notable in any way and had no close family to be remembered by. In short, the man was just a victim of literal failure, now without even a body as a marker. Unable to easily keep the bargain, the black dog was stuck with its agreement to find some way to earn a name before it could lay full claim to the body and become more like a living thing and not a creature born from a concept.
Since he was still technically a demon, Haruaki, the black-dog-now-part-human continued to feed on fear distress, living half of the time as a demon and the other half in human form. Over the years, he learned that television mediums and psychics were popular and attracted a lot of attention. Seeing this as an opportunity, he attended a staged haunting that was being shot and drove some real demons out into the open. After scaring the weaker creatures off, he began to make a name for himself as a psychic and occult investigator. Using the haunting shows to spotlight his "abilities", he would flush out weak demons and then defeat them, using this to begin to earn the fame he had agreed to grant in the dying request.
Species: Mononoke (fear-borne demon, dog youkai)
Age: ~450 years old
personality
Laid back and seemingly friendly from the outside, Takuya is a curious and playful individual who enjoys getting attention. In reality, this is only to serve his greater need for expanding the reputation of his acquired name and if the effort comes without concrete reward, he's more likely to drop the friendly part and move on. Selfish and somewhat hedonistic, as a fear demon, Takuya's main interest in life is experiences. He wants to discover more emotions and special moments among humans beyond the range of terror and despair, and deep down wants to understand what it really means to be an individual without a set purpose or driving need. Because of this, he's developed a passion for cooking and eating. Not only eating a lot, but experiencing the creation of food and mastering flavors. He's also fond of being dramatic, as that adds to the moment and usually draws in a better range of emotional reactions from those around him.
While he does feed on fear, since he is a youkai that was born from and is tied to emotion, he doesn't have personal strength like other demons. In a pinch, his rule of thumb is to talk his way out of things or desert them. Effort is hard and dangerous, and a low level youkai isn't going to stand much of a chance against an older, more powerful spirit. If he can kick up minor demons to bully or consume, he'll gladly do so, but if the threat becomes too serious, the black dog will duck out, throwing insults over his shoulder.
As a demon, his emotional range is also pretty limited. Quick to make friends and quick to move on from most things, he doesn't invest too much in long term arrangements unless they can further his goals in claiming ownership of his body or give him more pleasure to feed on. While he's not malicious, he does tend to intentionally incite fear in others and doesn't understand the concepts of love or loyalty. They sound delicious, anyway.
background
The black dog was born in the nightmare of a young girl. Forced to walk home late through the woods one evening, the girl had a dream of being stalked by the shadow of a wild dog, creating the seed of fear that he was made from. The seed attracted other fears, grew, and took the form of a stray dog that stalked the small village it lived in. Eventually it became known throughout the area as a demon dog, hunting travelers and feeding on their fears, and often attracted to those with the scent of tragedy on them.
It stayed at the edge of villages and towns for hundreds of years, stalking people at night and growing stronger on their feelings, until one traveler--a mother walking her children home--met the black dog on the trail. Instead of running, she left it some sweets leftover from their journey and thanked the dog for walking them home. This sharp change in perception and offering changed the demon's appreciation of humans dramatically. He followed the mother and her children home, watching the family live and grow happily together. When the children went out, the black dog would walk them to and from their destinations, chasing away anything that threatened them.
Over the years, members of the family passed on, visited at their ends by a strange black dog that seemed to disappear at will when anyone noticed it. The more that the demon observed human interaction, the more it wanted to experience the range of feelings beyond fear and mourning that it had fed on in the past.
One night, while out hunting, the demon found a man in an alley, running from another demon. Before the man could be devoured, the black dog intervened, stealing the man for itself. As the man lay dying, he deliriously begged the shadow in front of him not to let him be forgotten. The demon, interested in the trade as a chance to learn more about life, took over the man's body. Unfortunately, the man, Haruaki Takuya, was extraordinarily uninteresting. Single, average, and working as an unsuccessful painter, he wasn't notable in any way and had no close family to be remembered by. In short, the man was just a victim of literal failure, now without even a body as a marker. Unable to easily keep the bargain, the black dog was stuck with its agreement to find some way to earn a name before it could lay full claim to the body and become more like a living thing and not a creature born from a concept.
Since he was still technically a demon, Haruaki, the black-dog-now-part-human continued to feed on fear distress, living half of the time as a demon and the other half in human form. Over the years, he learned that television mediums and psychics were popular and attracted a lot of attention. Seeing this as an opportunity, he attended a staged haunting that was being shot and drove some real demons out into the open. After scaring the weaker creatures off, he began to make a name for himself as a psychic and occult investigator. Using the haunting shows to spotlight his "abilities", he would flush out weak demons and then defeat them, using this to begin to earn the fame he had agreed to grant in the dying request.
