Mercedes de Cuerno
From Inga no Kusari wiki
| de Cuerno, Mercedes ♀ | |
|---|---|
 Número Cinco | |
| Date of Birth | 23rd February, 1865 (147) |
| Place of Birth | Paris, France |
| Resurrecíon | Uróboros |
| Dormir | Lamenterse |
| Player | Mercedes |
| Arrancar | |
Contents |
Appearance
Mercedes' greatest disguise is her appearance: soft, cute and somewhat short, her opponents maybe lulled into a false sense of security when looking upon a bratty, whiny little girl with a babyface: however, behind her facade is hidden a destructive power she doesn't hesitate to use. Mercedes' body is tough, especially her head and neck. The remnants of her Hollow mask are on top of her head, in the shape of big, curled horns. Her hair is light violet, a little spiky in appearance and unevenly cut, but framing her face neatly in the front. Mercedes often wears the same shade of lipstick as her hair, for no other reason than feminine vanity. Her eyes are yellow, strikingly so, large and somewhat round. Her skin is light, close to pale and smooth. Strangely, Mercedes' ears are long and pointed for no apparent reason and decorated with big caricature skull-looking earrings.
Her outfit is heavily modified as well, to match her strength: it consists of a white top, a small black arm bracelet and loose white pants with black trimming, secured with a clothbelt to her hip level, the pantlegs bound with white gauze starting from a little below her knee and continuing all the way to the tips of her toes. The gauzes look like socks, but they're covered with black ballet shoe-like durable cloth slippers. For Mercedes, it's easier to move in such clothing, the usual garb of the Arrancar would just get in her way. She wears a black fabric collar in order to hide the hole on her throat. She just doesn't like it because it doesn't look "pretty", and instead uses the black cloth to cover it.
Mercedes carries her weapon, Uróboros, looped around her, resting diagonally over one shoulder and the opposite side hip. Uróboros is a ring blade, and it gets the name from the fact that the blade has sharp spikes that look like spines of a lizard, and there is a detail of a snake swallowing its own tail between two spines of the ring blade. While the weapon is relatively hard to control, it's still a very deadly choice especially when combined with Mercedes' agile and acrobatic fighting style. Uróboros can be hard to carry around, but it quickly makes the unconvinient shape and size in speed, handling and versatility. The diameter of the weapon is roughly 1 meter or 40 inches across.
Personality
A sociopath with a submission complex and obsession to blood would describe Mercedes quite well. While alive, she'd been just a little weird, but after her death and becoming a Hollow, her dormant and repressed urge to kill and maim became an almost uncontrollable thirst for blood and misery of others. That being said, despite being a skilled Arrancar in her own right, Mercedes can't help but attach herself to other Arrancar whom she views as a "master". Should her current master die, she'd find another as soon as possible. Needy, attention-seeking and clingy, Mercedes is the epitome of a lapdog, doing anything she can to please her master but caring very little for anyone else.
That being said, Mercedes is a bit of a snob as well. Maybe it's something she picked up while she had still been alive, maybe it's a recent development, but the Arrancar is snobbish, vain and self-centered while outside the presence of her "master". While these personality traits are not to the extreme, she still isn't exactly the most preferred companion.
Aside from being a sociopath, Mercedes is manipulative to an extent and is not above using whatever assets she has at hand to achieve her ends. Her favourite way to deal with enemies (and occasional allies) is to first break them mentally, then break them physically: she relishes the destruction she causes, and tends to use the term "toy" when talking about opponents, sources of food or entertainment. You'll often find her lamenting on how easily her toys break when she plays...
Many times Mercedes behaves like a child, using childish terms, speech patterns and words, squealing, giggling and taunting. The more she likes her toy, the more she'll torture it, but she will also become highly possessive of the toy, even killing other Arrancar who try to hurt it. With the exception of the master, of course. The master can play with her toys too, if he or she asks nicely.
History
Jeanette was the third child of a Parisian family, born 1865. There had always been something wrong with the child, so much that even her family noticed it. No one knew why or how, but Jeanette just wasn't... Normal. She was educated like her siblings, groomed to become a submissive, delicate little mademoiselle fit for the times she lived in. However, Jeanette was obsessed with death and witnessed two very accidental deaths in the house she lived in. Both casualties were servants, the first fell down the stairs and broke his neck and the second fell over a high banister, cracking her skull upon impact. Jeanette was the first to discover both bodies, and she was always discovered sitting close by the corpses, staring and singing lullabys.
The strange little girl had very little friends, and those she was required to befriend by her parents were dubious contacts at best. So her parents got her a doll. This little porcelain doll, made in Jeanette's image when she was 14 (even using some of her hair to make hair for the doll), was named Genevieve by the girl and she began to view the toy as her best friend. And so, where Jeanette went, Genevieve went too, even in death. When Jeanette was 16, her would-be friends didn't want to be around her anymore, and lured her into an old, abandoned building. They figured they could scare her so that she wouldn't want to see them ever again, and set to work.
However, frustrated that nothing scared the girl, they confronted her and in his rage, one of them shoved Jeanette down, but the building being in disrepair, Jeanette fell through the floor and into the basement below. The doll remained unharmed, but Jeanette didn't. She remained alive after the initial impact for a few moments, enough to see the horrified perpetrators run away and leave her there to die.
After a while, Jeanette came to, however. She noticed her own body on the floor and a strange chain on her chest, twining around Genevieve many times over. She felt alarmed and angry, but calmed down when she realized that she was in fact, dead. This strange state of numbness lasted for quite a long time, past her discovery, past her funeral, even. It wasn't until Genevieve, her precious doll, was sold by her grieving parents to a collector that she snapped.
Something stirred in Jeanette's soul, something frightening. The collector kept Genevieve in his study and the door was locked. One night, when the collector had fallen asleep, the strangest thing happened. Jeanette's rage seemed to make the doll move. Slowly, slowly, the little doll patted forwards, shakily but steadily. The doll climbed on the table, took a hold of the silver letter-opener... And stabbed the man. Then again, and again, and again. When morning came and the collector's wife opened the unlocked door, the doll was back in her place, the letter-opener was buried in the man's back along with over 20 stabwounds. And Jeanette felt great. And hungry. So, so hungry...
Genevieve was then sold again, and Jeanette used the doll to kill another collector. And every time the doll was sold, every time the buyer was killed: this went on for more than 70 years, and Jeanette's chain grew shorter with every kill, with every step deeper into the madness and her hunger grew. Genevieve was then sold to a strange little man in Japan (who put a voice circuit into Genevieve), and while Jeanette couldn't kill the man immedietly, he didn't die painlessly. For years Jeanette had been a ghost, so many had she killed that finally, the rage, the bloodlust, and the awful, horrible, gnawing hunger became too much, she couldn't sate it with stolen bread anymore and the chain was barely there anymore.
Jeanette screamed, feeling like her whole body was on fire. Time mattered very little, because all she could feel was the sensation of something covering her face followed by the sensation of her whole body rearranging itself. It several dolls and casings were knocked over during Jeanette's writhing, but Genevieve remained intact. Slowly the transformation was complete and Jeanette didn't quite feel herself... She smelled something delicious beyond the room she was in and instinctively headed for it. She smashed through a wall, up-turned some furniture until she finally reached the man who bought Genevieve and his friends.
The next morning the police came by and found the brutalized, bloody remains of five people. They were close to impossible to identify with the technology used that day, and panic spread in the wake of this mysterious killing. Jeanette was sated, relishing on the delightful aroma of blood and fear and human flesh and skulked around in the collector's house. The man had no relatives so no one came to claim his possessions at first, and the small suburban house was abandoned. But over the years, teenagers started breaking in and stealing the items inside, so Genevieve was hidden within the house, up on the attic. The stories of grizzly murders kept the teens coming back, opening a feeding ground to Jeanette, now calling herself RoueHorn. Only this time there was no evidence of bodies: the prey was lured up into the attic where RoueHorn cornered, killed and ate them all, and the frightening atmosphere around the house grew with every year, tempting more children to come and play somewhere forbidden...
But all good things must come to an end. In time the city had decided to demolish RoueHorn's little sanctuary to make way for a more profitable establishment. But in doing so, they managed to reveal RoueHorn's "toybox", an attic corner where she had been piling the corpses of her former dinners, toys or other humans that had wandered in. Around the same time, an Arrancar called Ortiga was nearby, and helped RoueHorn deal with the workers, leaving behind a field of blood, limbs and entrails in their wake. He then persuaded RoueHorn to find better toys, more durable toys, and the Hollow eagerly agreed. They did found someone, a little girl, but they were rudely interrupted by a shinigami or two, dubbed "monster ladies" by the simple Hollow. Genevieve was almost stolen by the little girl, but Ortiga got it back and held onto it even as he was fighting while RoueHorn tried to help by tossing different rubble at the enemy. Both monster ladies were defeated in the end, and Ortiga and a woman led RoueHorn and the pretty girl through a portal-thing. Reaching Ortiga's laboratory, he decided to give RoueHorn a "treat", and ripped off her mask, more or less forcing her to ascend into the ranks of the Arrancar.
Combat
Strengths
Quick and agile, Mercedes' strength lies in her ability to dodge and move fast, thus inflicting more wounds (though with less intensity than usual). She's also incredibly skilled with her weapon of choice, easily matching other more conventional weapons.
Weaknesses
This Arrancar isn't as strong as she is fast. Also, her single-minded and blind devotion can lead her to going up against opponents she has very little to no chance of winning against. Mercedes is also a bit of a loose cannon. If she's ordered to do so, or if she just feels like it, she can attack other Arrancar without hesitation or regret. Still folds like a cheap suit if you threaten her doll, but is much more likely to decapitate you in rage now once she gets the doll back.
