deadculture application
CHARACTER
Series: Gantz
AU?: No
Full Name: Nishi Jouichiro
Timeline: Post chapter-290
History:
Not much is known about Nishi's home life or childhood, as he doesn't spend as much time talking about himself so much as he does mouthing off and being a creeper. It's safe to say he is probably a brilliant student, as it follows the character stereotype, not to mention his diction is better than that of a regular fourteen year old. He fell from the roof of a building when he was thirteen while escaping from a convenience store owner he had robbed. There's also a hint in the prequel light novel series that before he died Nishi found his mother had hung herself in the kitchen when he came home from school. It's implied that his father had left their family in some dramatic manner, likely an affair.
After supposedly dying he wakes up in a normal-looking apartment full of other people, each of whom remember also being sent off to meet their Maker. There's confusion, panic, all the natural responses to having been killed and yet still alive and (since Tokyo Tower can be seen from the balcony of the room) not far from home. And then the music starts playing, airy and cheery, and the mysterious black ball welcomes them, stating the obvious. "You are dead, and now your lives belong to me," is scrawled jeeringly across its surface. Drawers unfold from the sides of the ball and hung on the racks are a variety of alien guns and suitcases which contain something like a strange fetish suit. Inside the ball is a naked man hooked up with wires but nobody can wake him up and he won't respond to any stimulus they try.
A few people already wearing the clothes the black ball offered to them urge the others in the room to put on the suit, threatening that they will die without it. Nishi takes his, unsure and afraid but willing to do just about anything in this fragile state of mind. The people refer to the black ball, or the man controlling it anyway, as "Gantz".
This was his introduction to a new, miserable chapter of his life.
In his first mission, he discovers the cloaking technique and used it to hide from the aliens and avoid fighting as much as possible. He also discovered the countdown clock to Katastrophe (Gantz's version of the Apocalypse) but, naturally, for him anyway, he didn't tell anyone about it. Something about the room warped him during his stay there, twisting his personality from a cowardly child to someone more arrogant and sadistic and distrustful. Eventually he is the only one left out of the Gantz team before the one in the main story, and for a long time he is (deliberately) the only survivor of the game. During his time there he makes a website called "The Black Ball's Room", so named because of the mystifying black ball that derisively starts them on their objectives. He's careful and clever enough to detail the missions Gantz sends them off on without breaking the rule about giving away too much about what goes on there.
It isn't until Kurono Kei comes along during the Onion Alien hunt that he meets someone who not only put on the suit but managed to live through the round. Impressed by this, he offers Kurono the points for the kill, and is ultimately disappointed by Kurono's weak will and takes the alien for himself, "sending" him off somewhere with a beam of light fired by one the strange weapons provided. That brought his score up to 90 points. At the time neitherKurono, nor anyone else, could understand his obsession with the point system and seemed to think that he just considered this battle royale as an arcade game to kill time. Nishi doesn't bother to tell them what the points were for, though when he, Kurono, Kurono's childhood friend Katou, and the token girl and tittylicious Kishimoto all survive the round he does give them a tidbit of information about their objective.
He's the first in the series to call the man in the black ball Gantz. He lets them know that they're all really alive, but likely not even the original person that had nearly booked a one-way trip out of Life. They're all copies, like a fax that Gantz transfers from moments before their death into the room. He even shows them that by bothering Gantz, sticking one's finger in his ear, he can display the names and faces of the people who've died before them. There are many.
Katou, being a decent guy, asks why Nishi didn't tell them all this before and the boy replies with a pretty nonchalant "because the alien lets his guard down when the prey is easy". Katou grabs his collar, enraged by his disregard for human life, and is close to at least looking like he'll beat the shit out of him. Nishi only mocks him, asking him why he's fucking crying for all the morons that were quite provably too dumb to live and he demonstrates the power of the suit by nearly breaking Katou's arm with calm ease. He's only stopped when Kurono turns his gun on him. Nishi comments that he's here trying to help them out and all they're being is ungrateful so he declines to answer any more questions and cloaks his way out of there. He leaves them with a caution that if they tell anyone else about what has happened here, their heads would explode.
Nishi's sadistic nature is shown briefly when he's seen using an X-Gun to kill a cat, the remains of which the neighbourhood kids see and take a gross delight in. It's not enough for him though, and when he feels an exciting chill down the back of his spine he can tell that Gantz is getting ready to send them. He likely never thought it would be his final game for quite a while.
Before the next mission, Nishi is waiting silently as before and watching the fools floundering over their apparent return to life. He's heard it all before. They think it might be Heaven, they think it's a joke, they think they're dreaming. The boy doesn't bother to tell them anything, but suddenly that idiot Katou stands up and begins to inform the rest of those assembled what is going on, about Gantz and the alien-killing missions. Nishi flies into a rage, telling him to shut his stupid mouth because he is going to ruin his fun but Katou soldiers on anyway. Nobody believes him, obviously. A black ball brought them here right before their death so they could go dress up in skintight outfits and kill aliens? Pssh, whatever. And thus a crisis is averted. Nishi can't have people catching on, that'd be too troublesome and not nearly as amusing.
Things could have gone on normally from there, with Nishi owning a whole lot of alien and watching everyone die around him like sheep to the slaughter, but a biker moron just has to ruin everything by pointing a barrel of a gun at Nishi. And fires it. Nishi makes sure that asstard knows that was a big mistake when the kid pulls an X Gun from his sleeve and blows his head off. It's a wonder with how stupid he was that it didn't just pop like a balloon. That is Nishi's ultimatum to the people gathered there: "Don't get in my way. Point a gun at me and I'll kill you."
Gantz sends him out first, as per request, and he uses his usual tactic of lurking in the shadows and biding his time to strike. Except against this particular alien, he makes the mistake of stepping on one of its little minions and alerts it to his presence. After it takes away his advantage of invisibility with a sonic blast, Nishi flees, jumping from the bridge where he engaged it to the aqueduct below. The alien follows him, knocks his gun away, breaks his suit, and kills him. But not before Nishi pathetically pleads for his life from the people who he insulted and scared shitless. His dying words were to his mother, calling out for her and lamenting he was so, so close to one hundred points. So close to being free.
Then shit happens that nobody cares about because damn it, this is Nishi's show. Suffice it to say, the points that Gantz awards give the players the option of doing one of three things once they've acquired one hundred of them: Freeing themselves, getting a better weapon, or reviving someone stored in its memory; that is, any human that has ever been part of the game. Kurono had done very well in Nishi's absence (after hitting a new low point for humans everywhere) and gathering a team that managed to survive every round, but not before the missions Gantz sent them on started getting pretty insane and screwy. There were stronger aliens in greater numbers, the general public is starting to catch on to this crazy group of people, psychotic killers are appearing by the boatload. He needs people that have even the slightest clue about what the hell was going on and there is only one player he is aware of who knew more about Gantz than anyone.
You get one guess.
When he wins enough points to summon Nishi back from the dead, the boy's reaction is pretty mild. He catches on to the new situation immediately, chastises Kurono for being an idiot and not asking him these things nicely before he kicked it, and then tells them he'd talk about it later. "Later" comes in the next mission he's in, a massacre in Osaka, where he proceeds to jack alien shit up but good. Nearly everyone survives it, but he goes and pisses on their parade by letting them all know that surviving now won't do any good because the world is going to end in seven days. He calls it the Katastrophe, and the countdown can be activated by that code name being whispered tenderly into Gantz's ear. He theorizes that it will be a nuclear war that ends it all, and he throws in some more information about Gantz being man-made and then kicks off to go back to resume his regular schedule because he is just that apathetic.
The average day in the life of middle-schooler Nishi Jouichiro?
Wake up, get dressed, pack X-Gun in a gym bag, walk to school, have your desk thrown on you from the second floor, be a social pariah, get thrown out the window, then slaughter your classmates for four years of abuse and because fuck it, the world is ending.
Whatever equivalent of the SWAT team exists in Japan gets called in and he manages to make a few tap out permanently before the six or so submachine guns aimed at him destroy his suit and he is riddled with bullets. He falls, dying, but Gantz has one last mission for him. Who knew it'd be in the middle of a zombie wasteland?
Personality:
Nishi thinks of himself as independent, someone who could be dropped into the very bowels of the Earth and dig and scrape his way back to the mantle. Not only that, but the boy fancies himself enlightened. He has a Social Darwinist view of life and sees it as a natural occurrence that the weak and stupid die and the greater, stronger beings live on. Having survived on his own tens of missions involving rampaging, deadly aliens, he figures himself to be something higher than the weak, bewildered newcomers to Gantz's game. He likes to call those people, among a selection of equally demeaning phrases, "cattle". He likes to call the aliens "cattle" too. To him there is no distinction between a human and an alien, they're only so many fleshy, walking corpses that are either hostile and therefore legitimately subject to his special brand of stealth violence, or completely below his ability to acknowledge, with few exceptions.
He has no qualms about using other people as diversions or bait to lure aliens into a false sense of security. Nishi goes so far as to lie about Gantz's missions and say it's a grisly reality show using hypnosis and the aliens are guys in costumes. He understands people well enough that given that kind of explanation the participants become a little more fearless and they get to do some of the work for him. (And considering that most of the new ones actually believe such a downright stupid lie, his low opinion of the human race is somewhat validated.) Nishi feeds this shit to the unsuspecting victims every time, or some variation of it, to keep people from leaving the area and getting their heads asploded for quitting the game before they're of any use to him as decoys. If anything he leaves everyone to die on purpose so that he can see them during the moment their last breath is squeezed out of them. Nishi gets off (literally) on seeing the dimmed, glassy eyes on their faces and gaping mouths of corpses and the blood and shattered bones that become inevitable when you enter Gantz's room. His voice only seems to hitch and run a beat too fast when he talks about the deaths he's witnessed while participating in these games. Maybe he sees it as justice that morons this soft society breeds are getting their due. It's more likely he's just extremely sick, though.
Despite the apathetic way he views life and death with concern to others, he shows the kind of tenacity with which he clings to breathing when he's at his most vulnerable. Even though he says quite calmly he doesn't care if he lives or dies, it's just a cool facade he slides on to unnerve people. Tear off that mask and he'll shamelessly beg you for his life when he's all but helpless. He'll do it right after he murders one of your comrades in a cinematically gruesome way too, and not even waiting for his declaration that he is not in any way your teammate to lose focus in your memory. This immodestly pompous attitude is justified in his mind, he believes that he deserves to live more than anyone else there standing up in the peanut gallery. He's worked so hard surviving on his own that he's owed some respect from the peasants below him, or that he at least thinks his usefulness as someone who knows pretty much everything that any person can know about Gantz will provide enough incentive for someone to save his sorry hide.
He puts up a very calm front that just barely conceals the kind of hatred and spite and sickness that fills him up until he chokes. Most of the time he's quiet, making note of the people around him with disdain and only speaking at dramatically opportune times when he feels he's reached the threshold of retardation that he can stand. Since he is, out of all of the currently living cast, the most experienced player and definitely the most knowledgeable, he knows he has something to dangle above the heads of the rest of the players.
He respects Kurono Kei, our hero, because Nishi never "likes" people. He also sees something worthwhile in the protagonist so he gives information to him and his group freely. Just as long as he's asked the right questions. He hasn't lied to them yet, and he probably won't if he doesn't see a reason to, though he does tend to dodge questions or get called out for being a brat before he can provide them with anything but vague answers. He's a very blunt informant, not bothering to pretty up news like "oh by the way if you tell anyone about this your brain will explode" or "the world is going to end in a little more than a week" and especially "what do you mean why didn't I tell you sooner?". He also doesn't hold back on criticism whether or not he's asked for it and often gets exasperated quickly by his "team" and isn't too shy about pointing out their stupidity.
More than anything, Nishi seems to take an overly hostile disposition against heroes when he's normally cool or plainly ignoring the rest. His favorite word is "hypocrite" and he waves it at anyone who tries to play the part of a saint. There is no such thing as a good intention, and you must be joking if you seriously claim to believe that at its core there is a single shred of selflessness in the human soul. When people try to save others from dying they're deluding themselves, because really, deep down, you wouldn't give a shit if every single person you met on the subway this morning died the moment they left your sight. After all, aren't you tired of all these self-absorbed, brainwashed sheep that surround you day in and day out? Hell, you might even want to watch them get hit by a truck. Look around, people don't slow down at a car crash to help, they do it to gawk. They're hoping that they get to see a dead body.
That's the theory, anyway.
Powers and Abilities:
...Inhuman smugness?
Starter Inventory
Anything else?:
Nah we're good.
Item of choice: 1937 Edition of The Detective
SAMPLES
Prose Sample
He couldn't move his fingers, couldn't feel his grip on the X-Gun, all he was aware of was that he was bleeding. Probably. To be honest, he didn't know if his body was even there anymore or if he had just become a massive bundle of nerves that had holes the size of golf balls punched through them at two hundred miles an hour. The bright flashes of the firefight had burned into the back of his eyes and filtered his vision with strobes of light and a hazy gray. He could hear a gurgling noise in the back of his throat and heavy footsteps as those fuckers who would turn submachine guns on a child surrounded him. Hearing was the last sense to go, or so he'd read. Hardly a comforting thought as he caught bits of static from their radio while lying unable to even spit the blood rising in his throat. Between struggling to keep his sight fixed on the hovering men swimming in his vision and trying to will his arm to lift, or his legs to just move, move, run!, he wondered how dying could feel so nostalgic.
That was before he recognized the familiar tingle at the base of his neck slicing past the settling agony in his body.
The boy smiled as the image of the special forces, so visibly bewildered even with those black-out helmets on, was erased bit by bit, giving way to Gantz's room. He could picture it now: the top of his head disappearing line by line, as if God had decided that he'd rather not write this part of his story, let's start elsewhere. Let's take him home, to those neutral and soothing cream walls and dull wooden floor and the black ball all greeting him fondly.
And then it blurred.
It didn't take even a blink for his eyes to refocus and see that he was no longer in the apartment. The triumphant smirk on his face was still there and fading fast as the rest of his body came with him. The ghosting ache of being shot a couple dozen times still hadn't left him and he winced as he turned to survey the area. It was somewhere by the sea, a sight he had never in his life experienced, being a city boy and disinterested in activities that didn't involve maiming. There was a strong wind picking up but that didn't make the sun any less scorching and he moved to loosen his tie. The signs and placards were all written in Roman letters, so somewhere foreign. With booths set up to look like little houses, an aggressively cutesy mascot plastered on every surface and scattered candy wrappers littering the area, it was obvious that he'd landed in some sort of theme park. A particularly pathetic theme park with the closest thing to a roller coaster being a tired dragon on a circular track and the rest of the area being dominated by monkey bars and winding metal sculptures meant more for prisoners or monkeys than children. It tried to look so desperately cheerful and kid-friendly but the obvious lack of maintenance made it seem like a trap that a poor man's Michael Jackson would lay. And there was a scent of decay soaking the grounds, familiar but too far gone for than he liked.
With growing irritation he flicked his wrist, flipping out the small controller attached to his arm. On the screen was a single flickering, green message: ERROR. SIGNAL OUT OF RANGE. That gave him pause.
He knew there would be one last mission. Although he was hoping it would happen before one of his lungs were punctured, but then even he had his limits when it came to predicting the end of the world's schedule. Perhaps Gantz scooping him up mere moments from death was a way of doing him a final favor before the Katastrophe? Of course, Nishi didn't believe in charity. It seemed more like he, or it, or they, had thought of a more amusing way to destroy him than letting him go an hero. Not that it mattered, not in the long run. What did matter was that this was becoming disquietingly unlike anything that bastard ball had done before.
Something which became abundantly clearer as the sounds of shuffling and groans reached him. Nishi cast a look sideways to see a group of children around fifty feet away and limping towards him. They all looked filthy, their clothes torn and mud (although in later inspection it could very easily have been streaks blood) all over their face and chest and hands. They looked more than a little mindless too. He didn't say a word to them but brought up his X-Gun. From the scan their skeletal structure looked human, but then he could have been able to tell that anyway as parts of their flesh had rotted and peeled away.
Nishi lowered the gun slightly. "Well, isn't this interesting?" he said. As if this were the cue, one of the children moaned loud and low and suddenly the group moved as one shambling beast towards him. The interested shine in his eyes dimmed as they charged him, already a thin sneer twisting his face. What he wouldn't do for a BFG right now.
Thread Link
From the GMH meme.
Series: Gantz
AU?: No
Full Name: Nishi Jouichiro
Timeline: Post chapter-290
History:
Not much is known about Nishi's home life or childhood, as he doesn't spend as much time talking about himself so much as he does mouthing off and being a creeper. It's safe to say he is probably a brilliant student, as it follows the character stereotype, not to mention his diction is better than that of a regular fourteen year old. He fell from the roof of a building when he was thirteen while escaping from a convenience store owner he had robbed. There's also a hint in the prequel light novel series that before he died Nishi found his mother had hung herself in the kitchen when he came home from school. It's implied that his father had left their family in some dramatic manner, likely an affair.
After supposedly dying he wakes up in a normal-looking apartment full of other people, each of whom remember also being sent off to meet their Maker. There's confusion, panic, all the natural responses to having been killed and yet still alive and (since Tokyo Tower can be seen from the balcony of the room) not far from home. And then the music starts playing, airy and cheery, and the mysterious black ball welcomes them, stating the obvious. "You are dead, and now your lives belong to me," is scrawled jeeringly across its surface. Drawers unfold from the sides of the ball and hung on the racks are a variety of alien guns and suitcases which contain something like a strange fetish suit. Inside the ball is a naked man hooked up with wires but nobody can wake him up and he won't respond to any stimulus they try.
A few people already wearing the clothes the black ball offered to them urge the others in the room to put on the suit, threatening that they will die without it. Nishi takes his, unsure and afraid but willing to do just about anything in this fragile state of mind. The people refer to the black ball, or the man controlling it anyway, as "Gantz".
This was his introduction to a new, miserable chapter of his life.
In his first mission, he discovers the cloaking technique and used it to hide from the aliens and avoid fighting as much as possible. He also discovered the countdown clock to Katastrophe (Gantz's version of the Apocalypse) but, naturally, for him anyway, he didn't tell anyone about it. Something about the room warped him during his stay there, twisting his personality from a cowardly child to someone more arrogant and sadistic and distrustful. Eventually he is the only one left out of the Gantz team before the one in the main story, and for a long time he is (deliberately) the only survivor of the game. During his time there he makes a website called "The Black Ball's Room", so named because of the mystifying black ball that derisively starts them on their objectives. He's careful and clever enough to detail the missions Gantz sends them off on without breaking the rule about giving away too much about what goes on there.
It isn't until Kurono Kei comes along during the Onion Alien hunt that he meets someone who not only put on the suit but managed to live through the round. Impressed by this, he offers Kurono the points for the kill, and is ultimately disappointed by Kurono's weak will and takes the alien for himself, "sending" him off somewhere with a beam of light fired by one the strange weapons provided. That brought his score up to 90 points. At the time neitherKurono, nor anyone else, could understand his obsession with the point system and seemed to think that he just considered this battle royale as an arcade game to kill time. Nishi doesn't bother to tell them what the points were for, though when he, Kurono, Kurono's childhood friend Katou, and the token girl and tittylicious Kishimoto all survive the round he does give them a tidbit of information about their objective.
He's the first in the series to call the man in the black ball Gantz. He lets them know that they're all really alive, but likely not even the original person that had nearly booked a one-way trip out of Life. They're all copies, like a fax that Gantz transfers from moments before their death into the room. He even shows them that by bothering Gantz, sticking one's finger in his ear, he can display the names and faces of the people who've died before them. There are many.
Katou, being a decent guy, asks why Nishi didn't tell them all this before and the boy replies with a pretty nonchalant "because the alien lets his guard down when the prey is easy". Katou grabs his collar, enraged by his disregard for human life, and is close to at least looking like he'll beat the shit out of him. Nishi only mocks him, asking him why he's fucking crying for all the morons that were quite provably too dumb to live and he demonstrates the power of the suit by nearly breaking Katou's arm with calm ease. He's only stopped when Kurono turns his gun on him. Nishi comments that he's here trying to help them out and all they're being is ungrateful so he declines to answer any more questions and cloaks his way out of there. He leaves them with a caution that if they tell anyone else about what has happened here, their heads would explode.
Nishi's sadistic nature is shown briefly when he's seen using an X-Gun to kill a cat, the remains of which the neighbourhood kids see and take a gross delight in. It's not enough for him though, and when he feels an exciting chill down the back of his spine he can tell that Gantz is getting ready to send them. He likely never thought it would be his final game for quite a while.
Before the next mission, Nishi is waiting silently as before and watching the fools floundering over their apparent return to life. He's heard it all before. They think it might be Heaven, they think it's a joke, they think they're dreaming. The boy doesn't bother to tell them anything, but suddenly that idiot Katou stands up and begins to inform the rest of those assembled what is going on, about Gantz and the alien-killing missions. Nishi flies into a rage, telling him to shut his stupid mouth because he is going to ruin his fun but Katou soldiers on anyway. Nobody believes him, obviously. A black ball brought them here right before their death so they could go dress up in skintight outfits and kill aliens? Pssh, whatever. And thus a crisis is averted. Nishi can't have people catching on, that'd be too troublesome and not nearly as amusing.
Things could have gone on normally from there, with Nishi owning a whole lot of alien and watching everyone die around him like sheep to the slaughter, but a biker moron just has to ruin everything by pointing a barrel of a gun at Nishi. And fires it. Nishi makes sure that asstard knows that was a big mistake when the kid pulls an X Gun from his sleeve and blows his head off. It's a wonder with how stupid he was that it didn't just pop like a balloon. That is Nishi's ultimatum to the people gathered there: "Don't get in my way. Point a gun at me and I'll kill you."
Gantz sends him out first, as per request, and he uses his usual tactic of lurking in the shadows and biding his time to strike. Except against this particular alien, he makes the mistake of stepping on one of its little minions and alerts it to his presence. After it takes away his advantage of invisibility with a sonic blast, Nishi flees, jumping from the bridge where he engaged it to the aqueduct below. The alien follows him, knocks his gun away, breaks his suit, and kills him. But not before Nishi pathetically pleads for his life from the people who he insulted and scared shitless. His dying words were to his mother, calling out for her and lamenting he was so, so close to one hundred points. So close to being free.
Then shit happens that nobody cares about because damn it, this is Nishi's show. Suffice it to say, the points that Gantz awards give the players the option of doing one of three things once they've acquired one hundred of them: Freeing themselves, getting a better weapon, or reviving someone stored in its memory; that is, any human that has ever been part of the game. Kurono had done very well in Nishi's absence (after hitting a new low point for humans everywhere) and gathering a team that managed to survive every round, but not before the missions Gantz sent them on started getting pretty insane and screwy. There were stronger aliens in greater numbers, the general public is starting to catch on to this crazy group of people, psychotic killers are appearing by the boatload. He needs people that have even the slightest clue about what the hell was going on and there is only one player he is aware of who knew more about Gantz than anyone.
You get one guess.
When he wins enough points to summon Nishi back from the dead, the boy's reaction is pretty mild. He catches on to the new situation immediately, chastises Kurono for being an idiot and not asking him these things nicely before he kicked it, and then tells them he'd talk about it later. "Later" comes in the next mission he's in, a massacre in Osaka, where he proceeds to jack alien shit up but good. Nearly everyone survives it, but he goes and pisses on their parade by letting them all know that surviving now won't do any good because the world is going to end in seven days. He calls it the Katastrophe, and the countdown can be activated by that code name being whispered tenderly into Gantz's ear. He theorizes that it will be a nuclear war that ends it all, and he throws in some more information about Gantz being man-made and then kicks off to go back to resume his regular schedule because he is just that apathetic.
The average day in the life of middle-schooler Nishi Jouichiro?
Wake up, get dressed, pack X-Gun in a gym bag, walk to school, have your desk thrown on you from the second floor, be a social pariah, get thrown out the window, then slaughter your classmates for four years of abuse and because fuck it, the world is ending.
Whatever equivalent of the SWAT team exists in Japan gets called in and he manages to make a few tap out permanently before the six or so submachine guns aimed at him destroy his suit and he is riddled with bullets. He falls, dying, but Gantz has one last mission for him. Who knew it'd be in the middle of a zombie wasteland?
Personality:
Nishi thinks of himself as independent, someone who could be dropped into the very bowels of the Earth and dig and scrape his way back to the mantle. Not only that, but the boy fancies himself enlightened. He has a Social Darwinist view of life and sees it as a natural occurrence that the weak and stupid die and the greater, stronger beings live on. Having survived on his own tens of missions involving rampaging, deadly aliens, he figures himself to be something higher than the weak, bewildered newcomers to Gantz's game. He likes to call those people, among a selection of equally demeaning phrases, "cattle". He likes to call the aliens "cattle" too. To him there is no distinction between a human and an alien, they're only so many fleshy, walking corpses that are either hostile and therefore legitimately subject to his special brand of stealth violence, or completely below his ability to acknowledge, with few exceptions.
He has no qualms about using other people as diversions or bait to lure aliens into a false sense of security. Nishi goes so far as to lie about Gantz's missions and say it's a grisly reality show using hypnosis and the aliens are guys in costumes. He understands people well enough that given that kind of explanation the participants become a little more fearless and they get to do some of the work for him. (And considering that most of the new ones actually believe such a downright stupid lie, his low opinion of the human race is somewhat validated.) Nishi feeds this shit to the unsuspecting victims every time, or some variation of it, to keep people from leaving the area and getting their heads asploded for quitting the game before they're of any use to him as decoys. If anything he leaves everyone to die on purpose so that he can see them during the moment their last breath is squeezed out of them. Nishi gets off (literally) on seeing the dimmed, glassy eyes on their faces and gaping mouths of corpses and the blood and shattered bones that become inevitable when you enter Gantz's room. His voice only seems to hitch and run a beat too fast when he talks about the deaths he's witnessed while participating in these games. Maybe he sees it as justice that morons this soft society breeds are getting their due. It's more likely he's just extremely sick, though.
Despite the apathetic way he views life and death with concern to others, he shows the kind of tenacity with which he clings to breathing when he's at his most vulnerable. Even though he says quite calmly he doesn't care if he lives or dies, it's just a cool facade he slides on to unnerve people. Tear off that mask and he'll shamelessly beg you for his life when he's all but helpless. He'll do it right after he murders one of your comrades in a cinematically gruesome way too, and not even waiting for his declaration that he is not in any way your teammate to lose focus in your memory. This immodestly pompous attitude is justified in his mind, he believes that he deserves to live more than anyone else there standing up in the peanut gallery. He's worked so hard surviving on his own that he's owed some respect from the peasants below him, or that he at least thinks his usefulness as someone who knows pretty much everything that any person can know about Gantz will provide enough incentive for someone to save his sorry hide.
He puts up a very calm front that just barely conceals the kind of hatred and spite and sickness that fills him up until he chokes. Most of the time he's quiet, making note of the people around him with disdain and only speaking at dramatically opportune times when he feels he's reached the threshold of retardation that he can stand. Since he is, out of all of the currently living cast, the most experienced player and definitely the most knowledgeable, he knows he has something to dangle above the heads of the rest of the players.
He respects Kurono Kei, our hero, because Nishi never "likes" people. He also sees something worthwhile in the protagonist so he gives information to him and his group freely. Just as long as he's asked the right questions. He hasn't lied to them yet, and he probably won't if he doesn't see a reason to, though he does tend to dodge questions or get called out for being a brat before he can provide them with anything but vague answers. He's a very blunt informant, not bothering to pretty up news like "oh by the way if you tell anyone about this your brain will explode" or "the world is going to end in a little more than a week" and especially "what do you mean why didn't I tell you sooner?". He also doesn't hold back on criticism whether or not he's asked for it and often gets exasperated quickly by his "team" and isn't too shy about pointing out their stupidity.
More than anything, Nishi seems to take an overly hostile disposition against heroes when he's normally cool or plainly ignoring the rest. His favorite word is "hypocrite" and he waves it at anyone who tries to play the part of a saint. There is no such thing as a good intention, and you must be joking if you seriously claim to believe that at its core there is a single shred of selflessness in the human soul. When people try to save others from dying they're deluding themselves, because really, deep down, you wouldn't give a shit if every single person you met on the subway this morning died the moment they left your sight. After all, aren't you tired of all these self-absorbed, brainwashed sheep that surround you day in and day out? Hell, you might even want to watch them get hit by a truck. Look around, people don't slow down at a car crash to help, they do it to gawk. They're hoping that they get to see a dead body.
That's the theory, anyway.
Powers and Abilities:
...Inhuman smugness?
Starter Inventory
- School Uniform: A dark blazer and paints with a white shirt and red tie.
- Gym Bag: A navy blue bag, school-issue, and medium-sized. About enough to hold a towel, pair of sneakers and a change of clothes, however when he arrives it's empty.
- Body Suit: Looks like this. The suit he received from Gantz is the most precious item in his possession. It's a tight black body suit held together with silver snaps and resembles something of a ridiculous cosplay. It's invaluable in missions because of its ability to enhance the physical capabilities of the user. The wearer is given amazing strength while wearing the suit. Enough power to leap several stories in the air and grapple with the Jolly Green Giant, at any rate. As body armor it takes blunt-force attacks like being repeatedly thrown into buildings as if they were nothing and one can stand against an initial assault of sub-machine guns without so much as a scratch. These functions, however, are not unlimited. It's unknown how the suits are powered but we do know that when it's "gone bad" a blue liquid leaks out from the silver discs holding the suit together. After that you're basically shit out of luck, unless you have guns and fast little legs to run on. The armor properties also do not seem effective against slash attacks. But, in case that little glitch doesn't deter you, the suit is tailored only for the wearer's use, meaning someone cannot swipe the thing, squeeze into it, and suddenly be badass.
- Controller: Looks like this. Used to be used as a map of the mission area and also points out objectives. It'll obviously be useless now. It allows Nishi to "change frequencies". It's assumed this means that it can change the suit's emission spectrum to allow the user to leave a visible frequency, making him and his clothes and weapons invisible save for an initial shimmer, a tactic Nishi uses often when he's out hunting. This is powered separately from the suit, so the suit can break while the controller is still functional or vice-versa. With the right counter-equipment the cloaking becomes useless, and some powerful aliens have shown the ability to "see" him, either by the sound of his footsteps or because they're just plain godmode, but that's what firepower compensates for.
- X-Gun: Looks like this. The Derringer of the Gantz world, a diminutive powerhouse that you'd laugh out of town right up til the point where you no longer had a head. It doesn't shoot bullets, but lets out a flash of light and causes the target to explode. There is, however, a significant time delay of around twenty or thirty seconds in between when it shoots and when things get interesting, so it's a bitch against someone agile. There is a screen embedded on the butt of the gun that displays an x-ray of the target (or targets). It also possesses two triggers, one for locking on and viewing the subject in x-ray vision and one for firing. The X-Gun is unique to the guns in its world because even if you're not pointing the gun at the target, as long as you're locked on it will fire and hit, and is even capable of aiming at multiple target although obviously choosing more than one consumes a lot of time. The gun can also be shot without locking on to an individual (because let's face it, the delay is bad enough already). It doesn't seem to have any ammo but for the purposes of this roleplay, it is capable of firing 50 times.
Anything else?:
Nah we're good.
Item of choice: 1937 Edition of The Detective
SAMPLES
Prose Sample
He couldn't move his fingers, couldn't feel his grip on the X-Gun, all he was aware of was that he was bleeding. Probably. To be honest, he didn't know if his body was even there anymore or if he had just become a massive bundle of nerves that had holes the size of golf balls punched through them at two hundred miles an hour. The bright flashes of the firefight had burned into the back of his eyes and filtered his vision with strobes of light and a hazy gray. He could hear a gurgling noise in the back of his throat and heavy footsteps as those fuckers who would turn submachine guns on a child surrounded him. Hearing was the last sense to go, or so he'd read. Hardly a comforting thought as he caught bits of static from their radio while lying unable to even spit the blood rising in his throat. Between struggling to keep his sight fixed on the hovering men swimming in his vision and trying to will his arm to lift, or his legs to just move, move, run!, he wondered how dying could feel so nostalgic.
That was before he recognized the familiar tingle at the base of his neck slicing past the settling agony in his body.
The boy smiled as the image of the special forces, so visibly bewildered even with those black-out helmets on, was erased bit by bit, giving way to Gantz's room. He could picture it now: the top of his head disappearing line by line, as if God had decided that he'd rather not write this part of his story, let's start elsewhere. Let's take him home, to those neutral and soothing cream walls and dull wooden floor and the black ball all greeting him fondly.
And then it blurred.
It didn't take even a blink for his eyes to refocus and see that he was no longer in the apartment. The triumphant smirk on his face was still there and fading fast as the rest of his body came with him. The ghosting ache of being shot a couple dozen times still hadn't left him and he winced as he turned to survey the area. It was somewhere by the sea, a sight he had never in his life experienced, being a city boy and disinterested in activities that didn't involve maiming. There was a strong wind picking up but that didn't make the sun any less scorching and he moved to loosen his tie. The signs and placards were all written in Roman letters, so somewhere foreign. With booths set up to look like little houses, an aggressively cutesy mascot plastered on every surface and scattered candy wrappers littering the area, it was obvious that he'd landed in some sort of theme park. A particularly pathetic theme park with the closest thing to a roller coaster being a tired dragon on a circular track and the rest of the area being dominated by monkey bars and winding metal sculptures meant more for prisoners or monkeys than children. It tried to look so desperately cheerful and kid-friendly but the obvious lack of maintenance made it seem like a trap that a poor man's Michael Jackson would lay. And there was a scent of decay soaking the grounds, familiar but too far gone for than he liked.
With growing irritation he flicked his wrist, flipping out the small controller attached to his arm. On the screen was a single flickering, green message: ERROR. SIGNAL OUT OF RANGE. That gave him pause.
He knew there would be one last mission. Although he was hoping it would happen before one of his lungs were punctured, but then even he had his limits when it came to predicting the end of the world's schedule. Perhaps Gantz scooping him up mere moments from death was a way of doing him a final favor before the Katastrophe? Of course, Nishi didn't believe in charity. It seemed more like he, or it, or they, had thought of a more amusing way to destroy him than letting him go an hero. Not that it mattered, not in the long run. What did matter was that this was becoming disquietingly unlike anything that bastard ball had done before.
Something which became abundantly clearer as the sounds of shuffling and groans reached him. Nishi cast a look sideways to see a group of children around fifty feet away and limping towards him. They all looked filthy, their clothes torn and mud (although in later inspection it could very easily have been streaks blood) all over their face and chest and hands. They looked more than a little mindless too. He didn't say a word to them but brought up his X-Gun. From the scan their skeletal structure looked human, but then he could have been able to tell that anyway as parts of their flesh had rotted and peeled away.
Nishi lowered the gun slightly. "Well, isn't this interesting?" he said. As if this were the cue, one of the children moaned loud and low and suddenly the group moved as one shambling beast towards him. The interested shine in his eyes dimmed as they charged him, already a thin sneer twisting his face. What he wouldn't do for a BFG right now.
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From the GMH meme.