(no subject)
PLAYER INFO
Name/Nickname: Joe
Age: 30
Journal: andmydog
AIM/MSN/IM: AIM grimbitter
Email: wordsmith_242@yahoo.com
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Sha Gojyo
Canon: Gensomaden Saiyuki
Point taken from canon: Saiyuki Reload 7, just after Hakkai and the Seiten Taisei fight and Sanzo heads off with Hazel.
Age: 24
Gender: Very very male
Preferred Village: No preference
Appearance:
Sha Gojyo is 6'1" tall and about 150 pounds of bone, hair, and muscle. His blood-red hair and eyes mark him as a "child of taboo", a half-human, half-youkai bastard. Carved deep across his left cheekbone are two slightly curving scars - a memento from age twelve, when his stepmother attacked him with an ax. As ashamed as he is of his scars and coloring, he's proud of the rest of his body, and takes great pleasure in showing it off, wearing tight pants and frequently going without a shirt at all. Topless, his ribs and collarbone are even more prominent, but he wears his scrawniness well... and he's got a good layer of hard-won muscle over all the rest. He's been fighting for his life for over ten years, and it shows, not only in his muscles and bony ribs, but in a thousand little scars, from scrapes, cuts, bites... you name it. Here is a shot of him in his standard outfit (along with Goku):
But on top of it all, he's smiling. Even when he's angry he's smiling - boy never shuts his mouth for a minute. He's very touchy-feely, too, and can't go very long without human contact - an arm around a friend's shoulder, or a cute girl's waist, a hand mussing a kid's hair.
His typical outfit consists of worn leather workboots, black jeans or leather pants, a white wifebeater, and a wide bandanna pulled low across his forehead.
Background:
In an alternate version of now (or, more specifically, an alternate version of the 1970's), there was a war in Heaven. On Earth, humans and youkai, or demons, lived together peacefully until the youkai king Gyuumaoh (or "Ox King") went on a rampage, killing and maiming and generally being hugely destructive. As taking a life is not permitted in Heaven, a "dirty" creature was sent down to stop Gyuumoah. This "dirty" or "taboo" creature was the War Prince Nataku... who was also, for all intents and purposes, a seven-year-old boy. Four people objected to Nataku being used in this manner - a general, a field marshal, a bureaucrat, and another "taboo" creature named Son Goku. Major shit went down. Four people against an army rarely ends well, but they caused enough destruction before being killed (or, in Son Goku's case, locked in a cage on top of a mountain) that Heaven was still talking about it five hundred years later.
And five hundred years later was when the general, the field marshal, and the bureaucrat were reincarnated as Sha Gojyo, Cho Hakkai, and the boy Kouryuu, who grew up to be the high priest Genjyo Sanzo, the 31st of China. Someone out west in India has begun an effort to awaken Gyuumaoh, and the technique they are using, a forbidden mixture of science and magic, has created a kind of plague. This plague, the Minus Wave, is sweeping the planet, driving all the youkai mad and giving them a taste for human flesh. So the gods, under the direction of Hir Mercy Kanzeon Bosatsu, the boddhisatva of compassion, have ordered Sanzo and the others to travel to India and stop the resurrection.
Sha Gojyo was born to a youkai father and a human mother. His father was married to a youkai woman, and they had a son, Jien, who was about three years old when Dad fell in love with a human girl and abandoned his family to live with her. Shortly thereafter Gojyo was born, a forbidden, taboo mix of human and youkai blood. This taboo is clearly displayed in his blood-red hair and eyes. Karma loves parallels, so when Gojyo was three, he also lost his family. His father and mother committed suicide, and Gojyo was taken to live with his stepmother and brother.
It was not a happy situation. Gojyo's mother had gone somewhat crazy when her husband left, and being saddled with his halfbreed bastard was more than she could handle. She abused the boy, beating him regularly, and just seeing him made her cry. The hatred she gave Gojyo was mirrored in the love she lavished on his brother Jien, and when Jien was twelve or thirteen years old, that relationship became a sexual one, imprinting on Gojyo forever that love and sex were the same thing.
But even Jien's attentions couldn't keep Mama Sha away from little Gojyo, and she finally snapped, going after the boy with an ax and leaving two deep scars carved on the left side of his face. She would have hacked him to bits, had not Jien intervened, killing his own mother with a sword, then, tearfully, abandoning little Gojyo to fend for himself. Whether he fled to keep the stain of matricide off Gojyo's head, or because he was only 19 himself and terrified, is unclear. Whatever the reason, Gojyo found himself alone at the age of twelve.
The next several years he lived how he could, fighting, gambling, and all the other ways street kids survive. He met a thief named Banri, and they moved in together, running jobs for the local gangs until Banri vanished, chased out of town by an angry husband. Gojyo continued to live how he could, winning enough at the poker table to buy food and smokes and pay his rent, and, in his own words, "living was so easy you could puke". And then he stumbled across a half-dead man in the middle of the road, his belly sliced open and guts hanging out. Instead of calling the doctor, or moving on, Gojyo took the wounded man home and patched him up.
The wounded man had been Cho Gonou, and he was wanted for the murder of five hundred humans and a thousand youkai, all over the kidnapping of his sister. When the authorities (in the form of Genjyo Sanzo and Son Goku) arrived at his door looking for the killer, Gojyo defended the man, fighting off the priest and giving Cho a chance to escape.
A lot happened after this point, but the short version is this: Cho Gonou was declared dead, and returned as Cho Hakkai. He immediately moved back in with Gojyo, and they spent three happy years running errands of a violent and not always legal nature for the local temple and the temple's head monk, Genjyo Sanzo, until the call came down from Heaven that they had to go to India to stop a demon king from being revived. And so they jumped in the jeep and headed west.
Currently, they've fought their way through a crazed monk with a crush on Sanzo, a ghost of Hakkai's past named Chin Yisou, have seen three times what happens when a force of nature is unleashed in the form of a boy, fought a god, fought themselves, fought the son of the youkai king, a village full of zombies, and, right before Gojyo wakes up in Kannagara, Hakkai removed his power limiters to fight Goku's true form, the Seiten Taisei, or Great Sage Equal to Heaven. Hakkai is badly wounded, Goku is still unconscious, and Sanzo - the team's leader - has abandoned them to join with their opponent, a slick Southern priest named Hazel. It's not the worst possible time for Gojyo to be dragged away from his team, but it's right up there.
Personality:
From the intro in the manga:
Gojyo is a lecherous kappa (water youkai). His behavior might seem vulgar and rough at first glance (and it is), but to his friends he's like a dependable older brother. He and Goku are sparring partners, he and Hakkai are best friends, and he and Sanzo are bad friends (ha ha!). Sometimes his love for the ladies gets him into trouble.
Gojyo has a soft spot for kids and hard-luck cases (having been both himself), and he'll do anything for a kid or a girl in trouble. For all his braggart posing, he doesn't think very highly of himself, and he's quick to deflect the conversation away from himself the second it gets too serious.
However, all of this soft candy center is covered in a brash, prickly exterior. Gojyo's a punk - he's a foul-mouthed, hard drinking card shark who has no problem getting into a fistfight when he's called out for cheating (or really, just because!). And the ladies love a bad boy - especially a bad boy with a heart of gold, who will treat them like they're made of glass - but for the past several years Gojyo's flirting around has been just that. That's not to say that he won't be interested in spending some quality time with a lovely lady or three, but he's more flash and less substance in that department since meeting his soul mate the group he's saving the world with.
Abilities/Strengths:
As a half-youkai, Gojyo has slightly better hearing, vision, and stamina than a normal person (and by "slightly better" I mean "seriously impressive"). He also has a magical summon weapon, his shakugetsujyo, which is a modified monk's spade, or shakujyo. It's about five and a half or six feet long with a mounted spade-shaped blade on one end, and a sickle blade on the other. The sickle blade detaches, and can be thrown and whipped around in crazy loops on a never-ending length of chain. Example image. Second example image. It comes when called, materializing in his left hand.
He can also drink you under the table, smoke four or five packs of cigarettes a day and not die, and his pickup lines are the worst, yet they somehow succeed. Sometimes.
On the less physical end, Gojyo is the heart of his team, and loves people in a way that even he doesn't quite understand. He will do anything for a friend, a lady, or a kid in danger, and once he's thrown in with someone, he's on their side forever. Even if they betray him and try to have him killed, he's still loyal.
Weaknesses:
Gojyo has never been one to think things through before acting. This, combined with his low self-esteem and how highly he holds his friends, ends up with Gojyo jumping head-first into situation after situation that would kill a lesser man... and he almost dies more than once himself. A "friend" asks him to be a hostage in the "friend's" place, when it's obvious to everyone that the "friend" is going to bail - Gojyo agrees. A pair of kids are killed by a god - Gojyo leaves his friends and responsibilities for a suicidal mission to teach that god a lesson. Hakkai's limiters come off, and he's bloodthirsty and out of control - Gojyo steps up, unarmed, to stop him. ...Hey, nobody every accused him of being the smart one.
He's also very addicted to cigarettes. If there aren't cigarettes in Kannagara, he will be very sad.
Defining Quote(s):
Gojyo: I didn't do it [saving Sanzo from falling off a cliff] because I like you or anything.
Sanzo: Then why?
Gojyo: ...I just like picking things up.
Sanzo. Hn. A habit of poor people.
Other: He's got a goddamn foul mouth. And his handwriting is terrible.
Third Person Writing Sample:
The cold snap that night was unexpected, but after everything that had happened, it wasn't really all that bizarre. "You pissed off th'fucking sky, monkey," Gojyo murmured, tucking his jacket around Goku's chest, and up snug under his chin. There wasn't a mark on the kid - and thank god for that. Hakkai was bad enough - but for someone so alive as the monkey, his stillness was a thousand times worse than any cuts or broken bones.
Well, maybe not any cuts. The kid had been cut nearly in half, and it was an image Gojyo would see for the rest of his life. Clawed into strips... he laid his hand on Goku's head, in the thick golden-brown hair right over the cool metal of his limiter. A brotherly gesture, saved for moments like this, moments when nobody was watching. Moments when the kid needed a gentle touch... and with Sanzo gone and Hakkai unconscious too, that duty fell to Gojyo. It was no hardship at all, that one. And maybe his bandages weren't tied as evenly, and his comforting touch didn't come with a charge of healing chi like Hakkai's. but he... he... god, Hakkai.
On the other side of the fire, Hakkai lay quiet, bandages white against whiter skin. If Goku looked sickly, Hakkai looked dead, and Gojyo felt the knot rising again in his throat. He'd died today. His heart had stopped. He'd left. It was an impossible thing to imagine, life without Hakkai. The years before they'd met now blurred into one long string of fights and drinks and running, pretty girls with too much lipstick on and raised voices. "I don't think I could live without you," he whispered, staring through the flames at the lump of shadow that sometimes was his best friend. "So don't you fucking leave me again."
It would be nice to pretend that Hakkai was sleeping more peacefully, after that. Gojyo stroked Goku's hair out of his face, poked the fire around to spread the coals, and turned his back on the flames, scanning the surrounding black for any signs of movement. Pity the bandit or youkai who tried to hurt his little family tonight. "You out there, Sanzo?" With the heat of the fire rolling in waves at his back, and the heat of the cigarette smoke filling his lungs, it was almost like being held, warm and safe. "You sonuvabitch, I'll get you for this." Warm and safe and secure, draining out the day's adrenaline, the hum of a thousand little insects blending together into a lullaby. No danger here. He didn't even notice when his eyes drifted shut.
He noticed when they opened, however. The empty town was about as far from the forest clearing at you could get, and the silence of the place sent his heart pounding faster than even an attack would have. "Who's there?" he called, rising to his feet and mentally checking himself out. No new bruises or sore spots, nothing stiff or cold, no restraints... No Goku. No Hakkai. Shakujyo was in his hand before he'd completed the thought. "Hakkai!" he hollered, heading for the nearest building and kicking the door in. If he and Goku were here, he'd find them. If they weren't... he'd still find them. "Where are you?!"
Name/Nickname: Joe
Age: 30
Journal: andmydog
AIM/MSN/IM: AIM grimbitter
Email: wordsmith_242@yahoo.com
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Sha Gojyo
Canon: Gensomaden Saiyuki
Point taken from canon: Saiyuki Reload 7, just after Hakkai and the Seiten Taisei fight and Sanzo heads off with Hazel.
Age: 24
Gender: Very very male
Preferred Village: No preference
Appearance:
Sha Gojyo is 6'1" tall and about 150 pounds of bone, hair, and muscle. His blood-red hair and eyes mark him as a "child of taboo", a half-human, half-youkai bastard. Carved deep across his left cheekbone are two slightly curving scars - a memento from age twelve, when his stepmother attacked him with an ax. As ashamed as he is of his scars and coloring, he's proud of the rest of his body, and takes great pleasure in showing it off, wearing tight pants and frequently going without a shirt at all. Topless, his ribs and collarbone are even more prominent, but he wears his scrawniness well... and he's got a good layer of hard-won muscle over all the rest. He's been fighting for his life for over ten years, and it shows, not only in his muscles and bony ribs, but in a thousand little scars, from scrapes, cuts, bites... you name it. Here is a shot of him in his standard outfit (along with Goku):
But on top of it all, he's smiling. Even when he's angry he's smiling - boy never shuts his mouth for a minute. He's very touchy-feely, too, and can't go very long without human contact - an arm around a friend's shoulder, or a cute girl's waist, a hand mussing a kid's hair.
His typical outfit consists of worn leather workboots, black jeans or leather pants, a white wifebeater, and a wide bandanna pulled low across his forehead.
Background:
In an alternate version of now (or, more specifically, an alternate version of the 1970's), there was a war in Heaven. On Earth, humans and youkai, or demons, lived together peacefully until the youkai king Gyuumaoh (or "Ox King") went on a rampage, killing and maiming and generally being hugely destructive. As taking a life is not permitted in Heaven, a "dirty" creature was sent down to stop Gyuumoah. This "dirty" or "taboo" creature was the War Prince Nataku... who was also, for all intents and purposes, a seven-year-old boy. Four people objected to Nataku being used in this manner - a general, a field marshal, a bureaucrat, and another "taboo" creature named Son Goku. Major shit went down. Four people against an army rarely ends well, but they caused enough destruction before being killed (or, in Son Goku's case, locked in a cage on top of a mountain) that Heaven was still talking about it five hundred years later.
And five hundred years later was when the general, the field marshal, and the bureaucrat were reincarnated as Sha Gojyo, Cho Hakkai, and the boy Kouryuu, who grew up to be the high priest Genjyo Sanzo, the 31st of China. Someone out west in India has begun an effort to awaken Gyuumaoh, and the technique they are using, a forbidden mixture of science and magic, has created a kind of plague. This plague, the Minus Wave, is sweeping the planet, driving all the youkai mad and giving them a taste for human flesh. So the gods, under the direction of Hir Mercy Kanzeon Bosatsu, the boddhisatva of compassion, have ordered Sanzo and the others to travel to India and stop the resurrection.
Sha Gojyo was born to a youkai father and a human mother. His father was married to a youkai woman, and they had a son, Jien, who was about three years old when Dad fell in love with a human girl and abandoned his family to live with her. Shortly thereafter Gojyo was born, a forbidden, taboo mix of human and youkai blood. This taboo is clearly displayed in his blood-red hair and eyes. Karma loves parallels, so when Gojyo was three, he also lost his family. His father and mother committed suicide, and Gojyo was taken to live with his stepmother and brother.
It was not a happy situation. Gojyo's mother had gone somewhat crazy when her husband left, and being saddled with his halfbreed bastard was more than she could handle. She abused the boy, beating him regularly, and just seeing him made her cry. The hatred she gave Gojyo was mirrored in the love she lavished on his brother Jien, and when Jien was twelve or thirteen years old, that relationship became a sexual one, imprinting on Gojyo forever that love and sex were the same thing.
But even Jien's attentions couldn't keep Mama Sha away from little Gojyo, and she finally snapped, going after the boy with an ax and leaving two deep scars carved on the left side of his face. She would have hacked him to bits, had not Jien intervened, killing his own mother with a sword, then, tearfully, abandoning little Gojyo to fend for himself. Whether he fled to keep the stain of matricide off Gojyo's head, or because he was only 19 himself and terrified, is unclear. Whatever the reason, Gojyo found himself alone at the age of twelve.
The next several years he lived how he could, fighting, gambling, and all the other ways street kids survive. He met a thief named Banri, and they moved in together, running jobs for the local gangs until Banri vanished, chased out of town by an angry husband. Gojyo continued to live how he could, winning enough at the poker table to buy food and smokes and pay his rent, and, in his own words, "living was so easy you could puke". And then he stumbled across a half-dead man in the middle of the road, his belly sliced open and guts hanging out. Instead of calling the doctor, or moving on, Gojyo took the wounded man home and patched him up.
The wounded man had been Cho Gonou, and he was wanted for the murder of five hundred humans and a thousand youkai, all over the kidnapping of his sister. When the authorities (in the form of Genjyo Sanzo and Son Goku) arrived at his door looking for the killer, Gojyo defended the man, fighting off the priest and giving Cho a chance to escape.
A lot happened after this point, but the short version is this: Cho Gonou was declared dead, and returned as Cho Hakkai. He immediately moved back in with Gojyo, and they spent three happy years running errands of a violent and not always legal nature for the local temple and the temple's head monk, Genjyo Sanzo, until the call came down from Heaven that they had to go to India to stop a demon king from being revived. And so they jumped in the jeep and headed west.
Currently, they've fought their way through a crazed monk with a crush on Sanzo, a ghost of Hakkai's past named Chin Yisou, have seen three times what happens when a force of nature is unleashed in the form of a boy, fought a god, fought themselves, fought the son of the youkai king, a village full of zombies, and, right before Gojyo wakes up in Kannagara, Hakkai removed his power limiters to fight Goku's true form, the Seiten Taisei, or Great Sage Equal to Heaven. Hakkai is badly wounded, Goku is still unconscious, and Sanzo - the team's leader - has abandoned them to join with their opponent, a slick Southern priest named Hazel. It's not the worst possible time for Gojyo to be dragged away from his team, but it's right up there.
Personality:
From the intro in the manga:
Gojyo is a lecherous kappa (water youkai). His behavior might seem vulgar and rough at first glance (and it is), but to his friends he's like a dependable older brother. He and Goku are sparring partners, he and Hakkai are best friends, and he and Sanzo are bad friends (ha ha!). Sometimes his love for the ladies gets him into trouble.
Gojyo has a soft spot for kids and hard-luck cases (having been both himself), and he'll do anything for a kid or a girl in trouble. For all his braggart posing, he doesn't think very highly of himself, and he's quick to deflect the conversation away from himself the second it gets too serious.
However, all of this soft candy center is covered in a brash, prickly exterior. Gojyo's a punk - he's a foul-mouthed, hard drinking card shark who has no problem getting into a fistfight when he's called out for cheating (or really, just because!). And the ladies love a bad boy - especially a bad boy with a heart of gold, who will treat them like they're made of glass - but for the past several years Gojyo's flirting around has been just that. That's not to say that he won't be interested in spending some quality time with a lovely lady or three, but he's more flash and less substance in that department since meeting his soul mate the group he's saving the world with.
Abilities/Strengths:
As a half-youkai, Gojyo has slightly better hearing, vision, and stamina than a normal person (and by "slightly better" I mean "seriously impressive"). He also has a magical summon weapon, his shakugetsujyo, which is a modified monk's spade, or shakujyo. It's about five and a half or six feet long with a mounted spade-shaped blade on one end, and a sickle blade on the other. The sickle blade detaches, and can be thrown and whipped around in crazy loops on a never-ending length of chain. Example image. Second example image. It comes when called, materializing in his left hand.
He can also drink you under the table, smoke four or five packs of cigarettes a day and not die, and his pickup lines are the worst, yet they somehow succeed. Sometimes.
On the less physical end, Gojyo is the heart of his team, and loves people in a way that even he doesn't quite understand. He will do anything for a friend, a lady, or a kid in danger, and once he's thrown in with someone, he's on their side forever. Even if they betray him and try to have him killed, he's still loyal.
Weaknesses:
Gojyo has never been one to think things through before acting. This, combined with his low self-esteem and how highly he holds his friends, ends up with Gojyo jumping head-first into situation after situation that would kill a lesser man... and he almost dies more than once himself. A "friend" asks him to be a hostage in the "friend's" place, when it's obvious to everyone that the "friend" is going to bail - Gojyo agrees. A pair of kids are killed by a god - Gojyo leaves his friends and responsibilities for a suicidal mission to teach that god a lesson. Hakkai's limiters come off, and he's bloodthirsty and out of control - Gojyo steps up, unarmed, to stop him. ...Hey, nobody every accused him of being the smart one.
He's also very addicted to cigarettes. If there aren't cigarettes in Kannagara, he will be very sad.
Defining Quote(s):
Gojyo: I didn't do it [saving Sanzo from falling off a cliff] because I like you or anything.
Sanzo: Then why?
Gojyo: ...I just like picking things up.
Sanzo. Hn. A habit of poor people.
Other: He's got a goddamn foul mouth. And his handwriting is terrible.
Third Person Writing Sample:
The cold snap that night was unexpected, but after everything that had happened, it wasn't really all that bizarre. "You pissed off th'fucking sky, monkey," Gojyo murmured, tucking his jacket around Goku's chest, and up snug under his chin. There wasn't a mark on the kid - and thank god for that. Hakkai was bad enough - but for someone so alive as the monkey, his stillness was a thousand times worse than any cuts or broken bones.
Well, maybe not any cuts. The kid had been cut nearly in half, and it was an image Gojyo would see for the rest of his life. Clawed into strips... he laid his hand on Goku's head, in the thick golden-brown hair right over the cool metal of his limiter. A brotherly gesture, saved for moments like this, moments when nobody was watching. Moments when the kid needed a gentle touch... and with Sanzo gone and Hakkai unconscious too, that duty fell to Gojyo. It was no hardship at all, that one. And maybe his bandages weren't tied as evenly, and his comforting touch didn't come with a charge of healing chi like Hakkai's. but he... he... god, Hakkai.
On the other side of the fire, Hakkai lay quiet, bandages white against whiter skin. If Goku looked sickly, Hakkai looked dead, and Gojyo felt the knot rising again in his throat. He'd died today. His heart had stopped. He'd left. It was an impossible thing to imagine, life without Hakkai. The years before they'd met now blurred into one long string of fights and drinks and running, pretty girls with too much lipstick on and raised voices. "I don't think I could live without you," he whispered, staring through the flames at the lump of shadow that sometimes was his best friend. "So don't you fucking leave me again."
It would be nice to pretend that Hakkai was sleeping more peacefully, after that. Gojyo stroked Goku's hair out of his face, poked the fire around to spread the coals, and turned his back on the flames, scanning the surrounding black for any signs of movement. Pity the bandit or youkai who tried to hurt his little family tonight. "You out there, Sanzo?" With the heat of the fire rolling in waves at his back, and the heat of the cigarette smoke filling his lungs, it was almost like being held, warm and safe. "You sonuvabitch, I'll get you for this." Warm and safe and secure, draining out the day's adrenaline, the hum of a thousand little insects blending together into a lullaby. No danger here. He didn't even notice when his eyes drifted shut.
He noticed when they opened, however. The empty town was about as far from the forest clearing at you could get, and the silence of the place sent his heart pounding faster than even an attack would have. "Who's there?" he called, rising to his feet and mentally checking himself out. No new bruises or sore spots, nothing stiff or cold, no restraints... No Goku. No Hakkai. Shakujyo was in his hand before he'd completed the thought. "Hakkai!" he hollered, heading for the nearest building and kicking the door in. If he and Goku were here, he'd find them. If they weren't... he'd still find them. "Where are you?!"