❧ profile.
❧ basic rundown
Name: Fuji Shuusuke
Age: 23
Race: Human
Class: Nobility
Occupation: Semi-serious poet and full-time black-market researcher.
Physical Description:
Chin-length brown hair that has a tendency to get in the way of his work at odd hours, he likes to keep it back with long and unwieldy clips that may or may not double as sharp, pointy objects of self-defense. He tends to walk around with his eyes squinty from his generally pleasant smile, and his eyelids hide astonishing blue the color of something fierce.
He’s short, perky, and generally dresses well - though fairly standard of his class, so as not to stand out. He finds that he has a better time blending in with the lower class than anything else, and doesn’t try to dress otherwise. He does, however, swim around in his lab coat, given that they don’t exactly come in his size. This is always a matter of great consternation with him, and he’s yet to find a satisfying resolution for it.
❧ personality
Quiet, unassuming, whimsical with an off-beat sense of humour and a unique worldview, Fuji Shuusuke defies conventions simply by existing and he rarely tries to pretend otherwise. His work colleagues know him as a level-headed genius with a steady hand who is rarely fazed by the disgusting nature of their line of work. Readers of his poetry think of him as a soulful, philosophical young man who has peeled back the layers of the universe in an attempt to convey the beauty that lies beneath. His acquaintances speak of him as a brilliant young man with presence as fleeting as slivers of blue beneath closed eyelids, carrier of a sharp sense of humour and irrepressible whimsy - well-traveled, well-learned and generous with his words (with a penchant for saying a lot without saying anything at all). Those who know him - and you can count their numbers on one hand and still have plenty of fingers left over - know him as a caring family member, but sadly distant; an affectionate soul, a good person but not necessarily a kind one. His research specimens know him as the lightly smiling researcher who is gentle with his methods, sympathetic, pitying and ultimately- uncaring.
Peeling away the perceptions of others - that is to say, any superficial definitions of his personality - Fuji is actually just mostly disillusioned, vaguely lost, and mildly bitter. He’s spent his whole life trying to contain himself with the neat gridlines of his research notebooks, and it’ll take him a few more years yet for him to fully realize that no matter how much he wants it to happen, he simply can’t.
In the end, the only thing he won’t admit to is that he knows he’ll be his own downfall.
❧ history
He grew up as a member of the nobility. That is to say, he grew up amidst a scandal - he was the first male child born into a high-class family by the wrong concubine, and thus was always on the fringes of acceptance - always being pushed towards succession, but never actually quite reaching there. He spent most of his childhood alternating between being locked up and being ignored, and thus grew a strong dislike of suppression and various nit-picky people telling him what to do. After the birth of his younger half-brother, however, his status switched to being permanently ignored, and this suited him just fine - he learned his letters, did his math, and spent a good deal of time making as many mistakes as possible in order to level the playing field for his younger sibling, whom he learned to adore. By the ninth year of his life, he spoke three languages fluently, was capable of delving into calculus, had performed his first dissection on a poor hapless pond animal and was immensely tired of not giving his all.
At the age of ten, he watched his first +Anima transformation: the poor cook boy getting seventy lashes for spilling drink on his sort-of uncle’s shoes, and, in desperation, had sprouted claws the size of his forearm and burrowed into the ground the way a mole would. His fascination with +Anima became endless. He spent the next three weeks attempting various near-death exercises without actually being near-death, out of the fancy that maybe he would sprout wings and fly away to some place where it rained forever. Delving into the topic out of curiosity, he took trips with the slave acquisition team down to the slave markets and watched with curious eyes as children were turned forcibly into +Anima. Eventually, however, the fascination died down as quickly as it came, and his whimsy got the better of him. Putting away the books on +Anima, he moved onto greener pastures.
A year later, he accidentally teetered into the courtyard pond at an ungodly hour of the night while weakly combating his sleep disorder, and had discovered a sense of helplessness that he would spend the rest of his life trying to simultaneously avoid and recreate. To this day, he’s not entirely sure how he managed to pull himself out of a rather painful drowning, but it must have happened at some point or another - he had climbed out of the pond, wet, bedraggled, and stretched himself amongst the rocks. And there he laid awake, still slight delirious from his near-drowning, and wondered why he hadn’t simply grown fish fins and swum away.
It’s the question that he would attempt to answer for the next twelve years. Suddenly delving back into +Anima research frantically, he soaked up knowledge almost desperately until there was nothing left he could gain through legal means. He then left without looking back (too much) for the illegal knowledge of the black market, the +Anima experimentations and so much human cannon-fodder. He would spend the next few years making a name for himself in the underground world almost unconsciously as he sought the source of his woes. Slowly, he lost his life in the world of +Anima, himself victim to his own unhealthy fascination.