Kurosaki Shun | 黒咲 隼 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
raidraptors) wrote2018-03-15 02:47 pm
raidraptors) wrote2018-03-15 02:47 pm
Entry tags:
Ryslig History (cw: violence, blood, death, cannibalism, bodyhorror, claustrophobia, suicide, bugs)
The effects of the Fourth's summoning are quick to show themselves – within days the newcomers start to transform into zombie-like figures and gain abilities as well as the hunger for (in Shun's case) human energy. In an effort to keep casualties at a minimum, Serena forces Shun to team-up with her and Gongenzaka, though Shun insists on picking the target and issuing the killing blow. There is little time for Shun to process his first kill in this new dimension, as he runs across a starving Yuto afterwards – and solves that problem by forcing Yuto to feed off him. This however leaves him weakened when he runs across Yuri only a day later, an encounter that Shun barely survives.
A few days after, he encounters Reira Akaba in search for their older brother. Unimpressed by the stuttering child's intentions (and horrified when realizing that Reira is essentially a child soldier as well), but unable to leave them vulnerable in the streets, Shun brings Reira to the apartment and leaves them in Yuya's care before going to search for their brother Reiji Akaba. Once found, he confronts him over Reira's status with the Lancers and upon being unable to get any straight answer to his questions from Reiji, he decides to cut his own ties with the Lancers for good.
A week after Shun's arrival, the Fog God decides to banish the creations of the Fourth, calling for her followers to kill them and killing them off with her own power. Shun is one of the few to survive, in spite of his own attempt to kill himself via sunlight after being forced to watch Yuto fall to ash right before his eyes. Instead he is found by Yuzu now turned back into a human, who turns into crystal right before his eyes when the sun touches her.
A few days later, the Fog God summons her own set of newcomers and Shun leaves for Dyster in hopes of finding Yuto there. However before he can reunite with his best friend, he comes across IV who claims to be from Heartland as well (and incidentally sounds exactly like Akaba Reiji).
In spite of having been turned in a human again and knowing that there appears to be no way back into the dimensions he's familiar with, Shun settles fairly easily in Ryslig's largest city Bavan. He is quick to find a job and develops a daily routine. However after a while, the Fourth God starts to contact him via dreams, tempting him with images of Ruri until Shun decides to become his follower. Upon learning of this, Yuzu reveals herself to be a follower of the Fourth as well and the two of them decide to keep this fact secret from their respective best friends. Shortly afterwards, Yugo and Reira both become followers of the Fourth as well, much to Shun's displeasure.
Shun is quick to learn the price of his pact with the god, as only days later Yuzu returns home horrified and bloody. After some prodding he learns that she was out hunting – not to eat, but for a sacrifice for the Fourth God and that she killed someone in order to obtain more of his power. Then, Shun scolded her – not for the murder, but for going alone and not asking for his help, as they are now allies and he expects her to rely on him.
In spite of Shun and Yuzu's attempts to keep their connection to the Fourth a secret, thanks to Yugo accidentally revealing his own as well as their affiliation to Yuya, who in turn tells Yuto as well, their secret is blown into the open. This leads to a large verbal spat-down between Yuzu and Yuya, and Shun and Yuto respectively, after which Yuya and Yuto temporarily move out of the apartment.
A few days later, Shun and Yuzu attend the Date Auction (for charity), which IV had signed Shun up for and uses the opportunity to "buy" a date with him. Shortly afterwards, Shun finds out that the person that Yuzu had sacrificed to the Fourth had been no other than IV, and that Yuzu is intending to meet him in spite of Shun's attempts to persuade her otherwise.
Having sensed what kind of person IV is during their previous encounters, Shun threatens him during their 'date', declaring that he would consider IV his enemy if the other should harm Yuzu. He warns Yuya about Yuzu being in danger, and also makes up with Yuto shortly afterwards, causing both of them to come back to the Arc-partment.
Despite combined efforts to keep her save, Yuzu meets up with IV, a date that results in her death. A few days after that, Shun tracks IV to the Harvest Festival, where he assaults the other in an attempt to kill him. However, he is stopped by crops magically interfering and pulling him off IV before he can break the other's neck. Shun loses track of IV in the field, he stumbles across Yusei instead who attempts to convince Shun to sacrifice his blood to the crops and attacks him when Shun refuses.
Shun has little chance against the older Gargoyle (who long finished his transformation), and only manages to escape thanks to Katsuya's help, discovering his travelform (and the monster type he's been cursed into becoming) along the way. When he returns home, he discovers that Yuzu had been revived, curbing his need for revenge for the moment.
A while later, the Fog God calls new monsters into Ryslig, among them one of the Lancers, Shingo Sawatari, who moves into the Arc-partment, and another, Tsukikage, who starts helping to take care of Reira. Around the same time, Shun's changes start in earnest.
Around mid-month, Shun receives dream visions of his canon, leading to him remembering his second duel with Dennis MacField and the other's true affiliation to Academia. He then discusses his new knowledge with Yuzu.
A few days later, the monsters get called to Plaga’s Peak, where they are trapped in holes and transformed into different monster types by the Mountain, leading to Shun becoming a Harpy. Around that time, Yuzu hashes out a truce with IV, which Shun is mostly unhappy about, but promises to obey to, noting that it would be pointless to go after IV until he knows how to make his death stick permanently.
As a side-effect of their mountain induced transformation, Shun and the rest of the monsters receive headaches and nightmares while away and in proximity of the mountain respectively, the Arc-parment crew decides to camp at a nearby island, Tunn. A few days into their outing, an earthquake (induced by the Fog God) hits and breaks Plaga's Peak as punishment for meddling with the monsters; and runes start to appear on many monsters' bodies (Shun receives one on his wrist in shape of his sister's bracelet).
Unbeknownst to Shun, IV's brother III arrived earlier that month and befriended Yuzu, with neither of them knowing about each other's connection to IV. When III finds out about IV's murder by Yuzu's hand, he attacks her, leading to Yuzu accidentally eating his soul. Wounded, she messages Shun, who then comes to help her get to a clinic and contacts IV on her behalf so he can pick up his brother. Once IV figures out the identity of III's killer, he murders Yuto in return.
Unrelated to this inter-franchise murder feast, Shun kills (and then eats) Apollo Justice in order to gain more power from the Fourth God.
Yuto returns with the next Fog, but in spite of Shun's attempts to make him reveal what happened, refuses to name his killer. Shun, after a nightly outing, returns home just in time to overhear Yuto and Yuzu arguing, then interrupts when Yuto pegs him as self-sacrificial, noting that he would not have to have Yuto harm him to keep him fed if Yuto would start to take care of himself.
After that, he takes Yuzu to the Fourth God's arcade in order to make sure that she feeds as well. When he encounters III a few days later, he threatens him to keep to the truce.
With Christmas approaching, Shun asks Tikbalang for Yuto's deck and is sent on a doll trade quest to receive it, which leads him to start regularly visiting a playground in Bavan first to trade dolls, and later makes a habit of it, as playing with the children in his travel form grants him peace of mind.
While the small Christmas gathering in the Arc-partment proceeds mostly uneventful, the large monster Christmas masquerade, which Shun attends with the suspicion that something might go wrong, is cursed when one of the fireworks explodes in a large red skull that proceeds to make all of the mask wearers paranoid, resulting in Shun flashing back to Heartland and mistaking Yuzu for his sister. He knocks her out, when he hallucinates her praising Academia, then transports her to the Arc-partment, where he finally comes back to his senses.
On New Year's Eve, Yuzu and IV meet up to resolve their feud once and for all in a Duel, with both Shun and III following them and observing their (for once cardgame) fight.
The new year doesn't start of peacefully, as a mysterious radio message broadcasts in Bavan and Vandare, indicating targets of a possible attack. As followers of the Fourth God, Shun and Yuzu both receive dreams that warn them to stay alert and not dismiss the broadcast as preventing the oncoming tragedy would keep them safe, leading both of them to start preparing themselves for battle.
During the Bloody Bones attack on several sites in both cities, Shun goes to Vandare to help evacuate the hospital.
As uneasy peace settles again over Bavan, Shun resumes his visits at the playground, leading to his meeting with Lyra Belacqua. However that peace doesn't last long, as the monster start to receive visions about the past of Ryslig, and the night after the visions stop, monsters awaken with names of other monsters etched into their skin and the compulsion to seek after them and kill them in order to stay alive themselves.
Shun awakens to Lyra's name. Realizing that killing an innocent human child might be a line even he doesn't dare to cross, Shun encourages Yuto to stay alive and says good-bye to Yuzu before searching for Lyra, still unsure of what to do. Only when seeing her fearful but determined to stay alive and find a third way out, Shun makes his decision to let her go. He then finds a secluded place, and commits suicide in order to spare Lyra from being killed by the curse that was laid on both of them.
Shun returns with the next Fog, awakening in the middle of Lake Dala, quickly reuniting with Yuto, who was devastated by Shun's death. When Tsukikage and Reira temporarily move into the Arc-partment due their own apartment burning down during Vows, Shun uses some of his coins to buy a magical expansion of their living space, resulting in an additional floor.
After most of March passes peacefully, April starts off with a rain of glass shards heralding the arrival of the Glass Witch, who proceeds to abduct children in Bavan (including some from Shun's playground). Like many others, Shun follows into her maze, where he is forced to relive memories of home while he looks for the children.
At the end of the month, the monsters receive an invitation to the Sun festival of the usually isolationist village Kulen. Shun is especially suspicious of the locals interest in Yuzu, as they seem to be more friendly to her than to other people around them. His suspicions turn out true as at the final day of the festival, the monsters are lured into the temple of the sun god and assaulted by bug larvas, which start to swarm out and force themselves down their throat. Yuzu, suffering a side effect of a Mana Pancake (attracting insects), is swarmed and infected by several insects; Shun who tries unsuccessfully to get to her before that happens is infected as well. Their group makes it back home, but the uncertainty of what the insects nesting inside of them will bring lingers.
There isn't much time to think about that though, as the Fog rolls over the land – Vandare, which has lost their mayor during the sun festival in Kulen, dissolves into riots and hunts after new and old monsters. Yuzu, who receives a desperate call from her friend Beat, tries to go there in spite of still suffering the aftereffects of being invaded by several bugs, but Shun stops her and promises to go in her stead if she stays put.
In Vandare, he connects with a group called the Toyotomi, who aim to free the town from the influence of the Bloody Bones. During the two weeks he spends helping out in Vandare, he once more receives vision-like dreams of his home universe, which catch him up to the point where he realizes that in his and Yuto's absence, all of his comrades in the Spade chapter of Resistance have fallen.
Knocked off-balance by this new knowledge, Shun grows careless and is surprised by one of the rioters, who stabs him in the side with a silver knife. In spite of his injury, he makes it back home to Bavan, where he is greeted by a worried Yuto, who had gotten himself killed in his absence and lost his red kerchief as well as his memory of its importance. Shun calls him on that, angry to realize that Yuto had lost his life again as well as such an important memory, and they discuss Shun's new memories of home. Later, Yuzu uses her holy magic to cure Shun from his silver poisoning, transferring his injuries to herself without his knowledge.
Shortly afterwards, Yuto disappears into the Fog, not to be seen for a long time. In the wake of his disappearance, Shun combines their decks to one.
Even though the loss hurts, there is little time for Shun to focus on it as the first changes brought by the parasite infection sets in and the monsters are summoned back to Kulen and into the stronghold of the "Cursed Ones" (aka, the bug people) with a few selected being invited to talk to their Empress, Yuzu included.
Though against this expedition, Shun accompanies Yuzu into the hole, guarding the entrance of the audience chamber as Yuzu negotiates with the Empress, trying to find a way to extract the parasites without killing the monsters. Finally the Empress tells her the history of the bug people as well as that the monsters would have to steal her sister's (the queen of the monster crabs living near Vanadre) eggs, most of which Yuzu later relays to Shun later though she keeps the news of the potential cure to herself.
Soon after, the situation in Vandare comes to head as the crew of the Devil's Nest and the Toyotomi agree on an united assault on the town to rid it of the Bloody Bones. Shun attends their strategy meeting as he has his own interests in getting rid of the biker gang.
It doesn't take long until Shun is called to Vandare to aid the assault, during which he kills any human that takes up arms against him without much regret. After returning to Bavan, he runs into Spencer of the Bloody Bones, who manages to kill him while Shun attempts to capture him for an interrogation.
A short while later, Yuzu asks Shun to accompany her on a mission for the Fourth God into Liewen Laboratories, where Shun distracts the guards (Tsukikage among them) while Yuzu uncovers the bones of the Fourth's sister. Together they manage to escape and bring her back to the Arcade, where the Fourth buries her properly. As a result both Yuzu and Shun obtain new powers from the Fourth as well as a flower pendant made of gold each (monkshood for Yuzu, larkspur for Shun) and permission to visit a copy of his sister's coffin.
Soon after a memorial for the victims of the Fog God during the Fourth Wall, Yuzu finally comes clean about her information on the parasite cure, leading to a short fight between her and Shun, who questions why she kept this secret from him. Nevertheless, the assault on the crab eggs takes place and succeeds, resulting in all of the cast's infections being cured.
In September, Shun accompanies Loki and Marty on a mission to show the Obelisk that contains the names of all lost characters to the Fourth God. As a result, that Obelisk is broken by a robot a short while later, with a strange mist settling over Ryslig and conjuring ghosts that start to haunt the monsters (Shun's takes form of Kaito., Yuzu's ends up being Yuto). This drives Shun to make a prayer to the Fourth.
When Shun finds out that Tsukikage had starved himself and lost control of his hunger, he makes good of previous threats and asks Reira to move away from the ninja and into the Arcpartment, as he considers Tsukikage as unfit of taking care of the kid.
After taking Reira trick-or-treating during Halloween and consuming some of his candy, Shun temporarily grows gills, a change he is faintly disturbed by, but that fades quickly again. However the Halloween Candy was just a test run for a group of scientists – who proceed to kidnap several monsters (Shun among them) to force-feed them candy and harvest any limbs that grow as result. However as a side-effect of the candy, the monsters start to become malleable and start to stick together, eventually forming a giant Blob that escapes into the streets of Bavan.
To their luck, the remaining monsters manage to drive the Blob into Lake Dala, resulting in
Yuto reappears with the begin of December, who returns to live in the Arc-partment and informs Shun about having seen his sister as well as the events surrounding Akaba Leo, Zarc and Ray, and how the bracelet girls are involved with them.
Tsukikage approaches Shun on the topic of Reira, pleading his case to be allowed to become the kid's primary care taker again, which Shun allows after much convincing.
Before Shun can truly think of how to act on this new knowledge from Yuto, both he and Yuto are taken by the Fog…
Personality changes/development as result of game events!
Between revelation of Dennis' true affiliation, the feud with IV and getting regularly involved in Events at Ryslig, Shun has thoroughly honed his sense of paranoia; while he isn't quite at the point anymore where he distrust everyone and anyone he meets at sight, he still is fairly wary of people he doesn't know until they have proven themselves trustworthy in his eyes.
Over all, while he was initially rather annoyed about certain changes to his person (who even needs to be two and a half meters tall, someone tell him), Shun has embraced all aspects of his new form and become very proficient in dealing violence in both day- and night form.
Thanks to the Fourth God, Shun experienced the Hunger much earlier than most monsters in Ryslig do and while he was fairly disturbed by the experience for the first hour, he eventually grew to be thankful for the experience as it lowered his inhibitions towards killing for survival, leading him to learn quickly how to pick targets that would leave him without regrets.
In general, Shun has developed even lower inhibitions towards killing than he already had in canon – though he doesn't enjoy it consciously, he has adopted a predator's mindset and, as a side-effect from his parasite infection, considers a successful hunt as rather satisfying, especially when he got a spent a decent part of that hunt with stalking his victim.
But even Shun has lines he won't cross – he absolutely refuses to work with Reira under the Fourth God, as he considers the kid to be too young to be involved with the god war, and he straight out refuses to harm or kill children in general (unless they are affiliated with Academia, then all bets are off). He proves as much during the Vows event, where he was set to clash with Lyra Belacqua in a fight to the death, resisting the mental compulsion towards fighting her long enough to let her go and then kill himself so she wouldn't have to.
As pretty much oldest cast member and due being an older brother as well as bear instincts, Shun has come to adopt Yuzu and Reira into his circle of important people. Especially Yuzu, who was the one of the first to tell him about his eventual fate to become a man-eating monster and whom he fought alongside for the Fourth God, has become important to him… almost like another sister (even though Shun would never say that out loud, to her or anyone else, out of respect for Ruri).
This bond translates into incredibly protective instincts, which result in him attempting to order them around when their safety is concerned – when Yuzu was weakened by the parasites but decided to go to the bug's stronghold anyway, he verbally fought her decision along every step of the way. Similarly he harshly judged Reira's guardian Tsukikage for taking them along into the Holes event and eventually even threatened to take Reira out of Tsukikage's care, should the other ever slip in his duties, which he followed up on months later when Tsukikage lost control of his Hunger.
Though Shun's trust in humanity has been shaken through events in canon and in Ryslig alike – to the point where he holds a lowkey hatred of all humans over the age of fourteen and their potential for cruelty in general – thanks to his interactions with Crow (in both game and canon) and the children of Ryslig, he retains his faith in the future generations, and remembers his own purpose and goals beyond saving Ruri: to create a future where his home can be rebuilt in peace and the children of Heartland can have a life beyond the chaos that the dimensional war has brought upon them.