Yomijou Keikoku
From Inga no Kusari wiki
| Keikoku, Yomijou ♂ | |
|---|---|
 Captain, 3rd Division | |
| Date of Birth | 10th August, 1837 (174) |
| Place of Birth | Edo, Japan |
| Zanpakutō | Bunjinbonsai |
| Player | pantherasapiens |
| Shinigami | |
Contents |
Appearance
Standing about 5 foot 9 and weighing about 200 pounds, Yomijou has what would generally pass as a moderately fit build. His right arm is significantly more scarred and better-built than his left, as it is his dominant arm with which most of his swordplay is done.
He has longish black hair that never seems to lie down flat except when wet, and even then it looks mussed up. As a result, he stopped caring about it years ago; when it mysteriously developed gray and blue streaks in it too, he gave up totally on his hair and simply let it grow as it would.
He wears a shirt on the inside of his kimono and an armguard on his right arm. The armguard is made of chainmail and extends from just under his elbow to his wrist; between the armguard and his skin is a thin layer of denim, also beginning just under his elbow, but extending downwards to form a sort of fingerless glove covering his palm and the back of his hand.
He wears his haori normally, but has numerous cunningly-sewn pouches on the inside of it, where he keeps vials of Iburyou for use in combat (but he also keeps candy in some of those pouches). He also has one large rectangular glass bottle of it bound just above his left wrist.
Personality
Yomijou is a rather resigned person. Having grown up in Soul Society, he went through a puberty that lasted about 60 years and still left him completely without facial hair, apart from a stray hair or two on his chin. The traumatic experience left him with a serious envy of people with beards, moustaches, etc., as well as people with well-groomed hair—because his own is untameable.
At the same time, he's come to strongly believe in hitsuzen—that everything that happens is fated and unavoidable. As a result, he shows very little enthusiasm towards most everything that happens near him—it was bound to happen anyway. The few things that he does enthusiastically react to are his candy and his books; he loves reading, and tends to mutter angrily or blow up if repeatedly interrupted in the middle of a suspenseful chapter. He cannot be interrupted in the middle of a candy fest, although stealing his candy will ensure a deep, deep grudge that might never go away. Even if the candy is returned.
Overall, however, he's moderately friendly; while not constantly seeking to add names to his address book, he does seek out friends he's made for tea or a good book discussion. He has made good friends with most of the sellers of good food in Seireitei, and has managed to establish relations with enough candy-makers to ensure himself a steady supply of candy. He often assigns himself missions to Earth, although very few missions actually require him to go; the main reason is to allow himself the opportunity to buy real-world candy.
History
Yomijou was born in the late Tokugawa era, at the beginning of the period when Japan was starting to allow outside trade. Edo was one of the main ports at the time, and his parents decided that he would be best off helping to supplement the family income by helping the traders carry goods around or other odd jobs around the docks, never mind that he'd gone to school and was very, very overqualified to push a heavy trolley around. He didn't complain, though; it simply wasn't done.
Unfortunately, more than money came along to Japan with the trading ships; a series of cholera epidemics soon hit the country, and Yomijou, at 15, was one of the thousands of dead locals soon to be buried or cremated. He didn't at all enjoy the dying, since cholera happens to be a rather painful experience; but the epidemic had forced Seireitei to dispatch a larger number of shinigami to Japan to ensure the purification of all the unexpected dead, and he was very soon transported to Rukongai.
An elderly woman found him wandering about the streets later that night, and although he wasn't particularly hungry (having picked some fruits off a nearby tree) she insisted on taking him in as a sort of adopted grandchild. It turned out that the woman (she told him to do what everybody else did and call her Granny Tentonbo) had adopted a huge number of people over her two-thousand-year stay there, which left her with a massive number of contacts all over the place to call upon.
She helped him get used to the whole system of Rukongai, teaching him about the workings of the place and helping him get odd jobs here and there; however, he found her getting increasingly dissatisfied over the years as he flitted between odd manual jobs, all the time devouring her little library several hundred times over. One day he came back from a job picking fruit to find a shinigami in the house—one of her many orphans—and they had a little talk after dinner.
The upshot of that was that Yomijou found himself with a kendo sword and a huge stack of books, detailing moves and strikes and various attacks and counterattacks, which Granny Tentonbo insisted that he practise everyday. She also insisted that he remain henceforth unemployed, devoting the next few decades of his life to swordplay, with help every now and then from the shinigami (who always got called "Dear Loku-myu" by Granny Tentonbo and never got around to telling Yomijou his name).
Eventually it was decided that he could enrol in the shinigami academy without embarrassing both "Dear Loku-myu" and Granny Tentonbo and her countless other adoptees, and he did so; graduating with pretty good scores, too.
He served in the 3rd Division through his entire career to date, and was eventually promoted to the Lieutenant's position and then, during the events surrounding the defection of Kamui Shirou, to the Captain when the former Captain was killed. His current office has a window, which opens onto his left side and faces north, and is opposite the door—so that people entering the office see the window first. Two of the walls of the room are occupied by floor-to-wall cabinets of drawers. One contains assorted candies in its lower half and assorted memorabilia from the mortal world in its upper half; the other is half filled with novels and books, and half filled with paperwork. Occasionally the contents of all four get jumbled about. The last wall really isn't one, as it is half (from waist to ceiling) a flat TV screen, and the other half of it is taken up by speakers and a low table at which is a keyboard and a mouse, and various other accessories, all from Akihabara but augmented by the 12th.
Granny Tentonbo remains comfortable in her house in Rukongai, and Yomijou visits her occasionally.
Combat
Strengths
Yomijou is good with a sword in hand: having studied the diagrams for nearly 70 years and having had many years of combat experience by now, he can almost instantly recognise any stance, style, or strategy being used by an opponent and use one himself to counter, dodge, or parry it.
With his high skill in Hohō, he is able to move in and out of battle easily, allowing him to attack and move to strategic positions quickly.
He was also educated in board games, which were often played by Granny Tentonbo when she got bored the way only immensely old people can. He never managed to beat her at everything consistently, but he certainly improved greatly. His ability, developed from those, to strategise rapidly allows him to draw on all the reading he's done before to figure out a way to utilise his advantages and the target's weaknesses to the optimum.
Weaknesses
He won't do well against opponents using weapons with which he's unfamiliar; a highly traditional sort of education leaves his strategies somewhat useless when working against a weapon that he's never encountered before—and since most spirit abilities (shikai, resurrección, etc.) don't utilise the commoner weapons, he can fight most effectively only against unreleased opponents; otherwise he has to take time to devise a plan of attack, during which the opponents have the advantage.
A sword is also not a long-range weapon, causing him to be vulnerable to attacks from far away, such as kidō, arrows, projectiles, whips, etc. if they come too quickly to be dodged or blocked.
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