Post by Mara Bhagat on Mar 6, 2016 0:04:09 GMT -5
Mar 6, 2016 0:04:09 GMT -5
FIGHTER | MARA BHAGAT
FACE CLAIM TOKYO GHOUL, Kaneki Ken, Mara BhagatPLAYED BY Cali |
BASIC-PHYSIQUE
| PERSONALITY POSITIVE TRAITS
NEGATIVE TRAITS
|
HISTORY & EXTRA INFO
As far back as he can remember, Mara has always been a fighter.
It started before he had ever stepped foot in a school - before he understood what units and spell battles were, and long before he met the steady-headed girl who would someday become the other half of his churning, incomplete soul. It started, of all places, on a playground.
Mara Bhagat was born to an Indian woman named Jalvi and her husband, a Japanese man named Tamotsu. The unanimous decision was made upon the conception of the child to give him Jalvi's family name instead of Tamotsu's, as the family lived in India, and a native name would fit the child better than a Japanese name.
However, something went wrong during Jalvi's pregnancy. Or at least, that's what everyone thinks. For the beloved son Mara (meaning Bitter with a connotation of Strength) was born without color. An ashen child with unnaturally pale skin and hair pure white, the boy was a case of one in twelve hundred. This was combined with another odd attribute: heterochromia. One of the child's eyes was pale blue, as was to be expected from a dark-eyed person with albinism. Yet the other eye was pale red, as was average for a light-eyed albino person. Mara Bhagat was an anomaly. The attending doctors considered the boy (and in turn, the family) to have been cursed by the goddess Radha. They wouldn't have him more than twenty-four hours in the hospital.
And so the family went home.
Life went on, and one could almost say it went on normally. But that would be a lie.
The entire family was all but ostracized from their community; the cruelty of grown adults could be astounding. The baby somehow gained the nickname शैतान. Satan. It was whispered behind his parents' backs everywhere they went - from the store to temple to Jalvi and Tamotsu's places of employment. Somehow, like magic, everyone knew little Mara as the devil himself. "Have you heard? Poor Jalvi... Her son will bring about the end of the world."
Mara was barely four when a slightly older child pulled him backward off the steps up to the slide. The sand on which he landed stuck to the sunscreen he had to wear to keep from burning. He still remembers the first time he ever heard the name called to his face. He was just scrambling to his feet, half-blind in his anger, when "You don't get to slide, Satan. Go back to hell!"
From there, he remembers the glee that filled him at the sight of blood running down the other child's chin from his nose. He remembers his mother sweeping in and picking him straight up off the ground, spanking him roughly as she carried him home. What Mara conveniently doesn't remember is the other boy's mother, screeching about Radha's Cursed Child and Jalvi, Satan's whore.
The first taste of a fight felt wonderful. This was how Mara could protect himself from larger, meaner children. Let them call him names or spit at his feet when he walked by, his two fists and gnashing teeth could take care of them. The boy started school, and with it the hurtful words only worsened, which caused a domino effect with the fights. He lasted but one year in public school before being switched to private. There, he lasted four years. There were still fights of course, but with the stricter oversight of his teachers they died down extensively until sixth grade.
From then on, Mara was nothing short of a hellion. Not a week went by without him pummeling or being pummeled. Jalvi and Tamotsu were at their wits end; between the cruelty of their own peers and their son's untiring rage, they hadn't an idea how to handle the situation that their son was becoming.
Tamotsu put out a call to his brother Naozumi, who assured him that sending Mara to Japan would do the boy much good. There, Naozumi guaranteed, the children were much too polite to say such crass things to a fellow. Tamotsu remembered his own very stifled childhood, and after a little work convincing his wife that parting with her baby was the best option for everyone, Tamotsu sent his fireball son to a much more mild setting.
Japan was drastically different than India. Mara went from wearing torn shorts to pressed suits for school, and although he did still receive odd looks, for the most part no one dared say anything. To insult the new boy was to dishonor oneself publicly.
He had been unfortunate enough to transfer in the middle of the school year, and was assigned a "mentor" to show him the ropes. By "show the ropes" Mara knew the girl was meant to keep him leashed - after all, his reputation was plastered all across his records.
Her name was Eri Watanabe, an eleven year old intelligent enough to be moved up a year, something almost unheard of within Japan's school system. She was calm and quiet, and her collected demeanor seemed to muffle his own explosive one. Mara heard whispers about the young girl behind her back when they walked through the hallway, and although he didn't understand what their fellow students meant by unit and banished, he gathered enough to learn that her mother had run away from her family. He couldn't help but wonder, did Eri feel as lonely as he himself did, so far away from her parent - so far from comfort?
Mara also learned that Eri had a twin, older by almost twenty minutes, named Ren. Ren seemed to have an eerily similar reputation as he did, known for fighting and winning. Violent by nature, formed by his environment and his peers' taunting. And Mara figured he would get along with Ren; after all, they both had his sister's best interest at heart. With every whisper he heard, Mara felt the urge swell to take care of it - not for himself, but for Eri, the girl so apathetic to the cruelty of her classmates that it was almost sickening. Where Eri was calm, Mara was a churning ball of violence.
At first, Mara saw Eri as a hindrance. His incendiary nature beckoned for more violence - singling out every odd look the pair received - and there the girl always was, keeping him chained to her side. It was like this for a handful of months before each child began to open up to the other. They were alike in many ways: both outcast, solitary not by choice but by circumstance, both harboring pain and secrets... They both enjoyed reading, as well. Mara taught Eri about mythology from all over the world, from Greco-Roman Zeus/Jupiter to Egyptian Sepa (his personal favorite); Eri taught Mara anatomy. She was a saving grace as far as his dreadful grades were concerned.
Mara grew to like the girl within a year, which both excited and terrified him. He'd never been close to someone before, boy or girl, and the idea of being "friends" with her was foreign. But he figured if Eri herself could open her arms and invite him into her world, perhaps he could do the same for her. Maybe he could even do it for her brother Ren, if they got along when they finally met.
Ren did not like him, as it would turn out. But then again, Eri had technically been keeping Mara secret.
They would find this out the night their world came crashing down upon them - the night Mara revealed his most dangerous secret, and the night Ren and Eri turned into murderers. The night they orphaned themselves and their younger sister Mari.
He wasn't sure why he'd never done this before. The internet was right at his fingertips at any given moment, and he'd never been curious (or bored) enough to search the word perpetually hidden on his hand.
mael·strom
(ˈmālˌsträm,ˈmālˌstrəm) noun
It started before he had ever stepped foot in a school - before he understood what units and spell battles were, and long before he met the steady-headed girl who would someday become the other half of his churning, incomplete soul. It started, of all places, on a playground.
Mara Bhagat was born to an Indian woman named Jalvi and her husband, a Japanese man named Tamotsu. The unanimous decision was made upon the conception of the child to give him Jalvi's family name instead of Tamotsu's, as the family lived in India, and a native name would fit the child better than a Japanese name.
However, something went wrong during Jalvi's pregnancy. Or at least, that's what everyone thinks. For the beloved son Mara (meaning Bitter with a connotation of Strength) was born without color. An ashen child with unnaturally pale skin and hair pure white, the boy was a case of one in twelve hundred. This was combined with another odd attribute: heterochromia. One of the child's eyes was pale blue, as was to be expected from a dark-eyed person with albinism. Yet the other eye was pale red, as was average for a light-eyed albino person. Mara Bhagat was an anomaly. The attending doctors considered the boy (and in turn, the family) to have been cursed by the goddess Radha. They wouldn't have him more than twenty-four hours in the hospital.
And so the family went home.
Life went on, and one could almost say it went on normally. But that would be a lie.
The entire family was all but ostracized from their community; the cruelty of grown adults could be astounding. The baby somehow gained the nickname शैतान. Satan. It was whispered behind his parents' backs everywhere they went - from the store to temple to Jalvi and Tamotsu's places of employment. Somehow, like magic, everyone knew little Mara as the devil himself. "Have you heard? Poor Jalvi... Her son will bring about the end of the world."
Mara was barely four when a slightly older child pulled him backward off the steps up to the slide. The sand on which he landed stuck to the sunscreen he had to wear to keep from burning. He still remembers the first time he ever heard the name called to his face. He was just scrambling to his feet, half-blind in his anger, when "You don't get to slide, Satan. Go back to hell!"
From there, he remembers the glee that filled him at the sight of blood running down the other child's chin from his nose. He remembers his mother sweeping in and picking him straight up off the ground, spanking him roughly as she carried him home. What Mara conveniently doesn't remember is the other boy's mother, screeching about Radha's Cursed Child and Jalvi, Satan's whore.
The first taste of a fight felt wonderful. This was how Mara could protect himself from larger, meaner children. Let them call him names or spit at his feet when he walked by, his two fists and gnashing teeth could take care of them. The boy started school, and with it the hurtful words only worsened, which caused a domino effect with the fights. He lasted but one year in public school before being switched to private. There, he lasted four years. There were still fights of course, but with the stricter oversight of his teachers they died down extensively until sixth grade.
From then on, Mara was nothing short of a hellion. Not a week went by without him pummeling or being pummeled. Jalvi and Tamotsu were at their wits end; between the cruelty of their own peers and their son's untiring rage, they hadn't an idea how to handle the situation that their son was becoming.
To add to their list of problems, Jalvi and Tamotsu had been hiding a secret that would surely slam that final nail into all of the family's coffins - the scrawling word Maelstrom like a scar across the palm of their son's left hand.
It definitely couldn't be considered a "script-like" font - jagged and rough, like someone had taken a knife dipped in ink to Mara's hand when he was just a baby. The name started out light and hardly noticeable, but it grew darker and darker throughout the years of his childhood. Jalvi and Tamotsu did nothing for their son except hide the marking, covering it daily (most times more than once) and instilling their fear in his brain. The order was simple: never, ever reveal to anyone the word he held so gingerly in his palm. For if he did show someone, they would burn him alive. Like the Salem witches of Massachusetts, USA, or the Basque witches of Logroño, Spain.
Mara didn't understand why he was constantly being likened to that of witches, but it did exactly what his parents wanted it to do - scared him senseless enough to hide the name forever.
Jalvi and Tamotsu never told their son more than that; they kept him blissfully unaware of the war between units and mundanes, but they did agree that with the mounting violence in him, Mara couldn't stay in India much longer.
It definitely couldn't be considered a "script-like" font - jagged and rough, like someone had taken a knife dipped in ink to Mara's hand when he was just a baby. The name started out light and hardly noticeable, but it grew darker and darker throughout the years of his childhood. Jalvi and Tamotsu did nothing for their son except hide the marking, covering it daily (most times more than once) and instilling their fear in his brain. The order was simple: never, ever reveal to anyone the word he held so gingerly in his palm. For if he did show someone, they would burn him alive. Like the Salem witches of Massachusetts, USA, or the Basque witches of Logroño, Spain.
Mara didn't understand why he was constantly being likened to that of witches, but it did exactly what his parents wanted it to do - scared him senseless enough to hide the name forever.
Jalvi and Tamotsu never told their son more than that; they kept him blissfully unaware of the war between units and mundanes, but they did agree that with the mounting violence in him, Mara couldn't stay in India much longer.
Tamotsu put out a call to his brother Naozumi, who assured him that sending Mara to Japan would do the boy much good. There, Naozumi guaranteed, the children were much too polite to say such crass things to a fellow. Tamotsu remembered his own very stifled childhood, and after a little work convincing his wife that parting with her baby was the best option for everyone, Tamotsu sent his fireball son to a much more mild setting.
Japan was drastically different than India. Mara went from wearing torn shorts to pressed suits for school, and although he did still receive odd looks, for the most part no one dared say anything. To insult the new boy was to dishonor oneself publicly.
He had been unfortunate enough to transfer in the middle of the school year, and was assigned a "mentor" to show him the ropes. By "show the ropes" Mara knew the girl was meant to keep him leashed - after all, his reputation was plastered all across his records.
Her name was Eri Watanabe, an eleven year old intelligent enough to be moved up a year, something almost unheard of within Japan's school system. She was calm and quiet, and her collected demeanor seemed to muffle his own explosive one. Mara heard whispers about the young girl behind her back when they walked through the hallway, and although he didn't understand what their fellow students meant by unit and banished, he gathered enough to learn that her mother had run away from her family. He couldn't help but wonder, did Eri feel as lonely as he himself did, so far away from her parent - so far from comfort?
Mara also learned that Eri had a twin, older by almost twenty minutes, named Ren. Ren seemed to have an eerily similar reputation as he did, known for fighting and winning. Violent by nature, formed by his environment and his peers' taunting. And Mara figured he would get along with Ren; after all, they both had his sister's best interest at heart. With every whisper he heard, Mara felt the urge swell to take care of it - not for himself, but for Eri, the girl so apathetic to the cruelty of her classmates that it was almost sickening. Where Eri was calm, Mara was a churning ball of violence.
At first, Mara saw Eri as a hindrance. His incendiary nature beckoned for more violence - singling out every odd look the pair received - and there the girl always was, keeping him chained to her side. It was like this for a handful of months before each child began to open up to the other. They were alike in many ways: both outcast, solitary not by choice but by circumstance, both harboring pain and secrets... They both enjoyed reading, as well. Mara taught Eri about mythology from all over the world, from Greco-Roman Zeus/Jupiter to Egyptian Sepa (his personal favorite); Eri taught Mara anatomy. She was a saving grace as far as his dreadful grades were concerned.
Mara grew to like the girl within a year, which both excited and terrified him. He'd never been close to someone before, boy or girl, and the idea of being "friends" with her was foreign. But he figured if Eri herself could open her arms and invite him into her world, perhaps he could do the same for her. Maybe he could even do it for her brother Ren, if they got along when they finally met.
Ren did not like him, as it would turn out. But then again, Eri had technically been keeping Mara secret.
They would find this out the night their world came crashing down upon them - the night Mara revealed his most dangerous secret, and the night Ren and Eri turned into murderers. The night they orphaned themselves and their younger sister Mari.
He wasn't sure why he'd never done this before. The internet was right at his fingertips at any given moment, and he'd never been curious (or bored) enough to search the word perpetually hidden on his hand.
mael·strom
(ˈmālˌsträm,ˈmālˌstrəm) noun
- a powerful whirlpool in the sea or a river.
"a maelstrom in the sea"
[li]a situation or state of confused movement or violent turmoil.[/li]synonyms: turbulence, tumult, turmoil, disorder, disarray, chaos, confusion, upheaval, pandemonium, bedlam, whirlwind
"the maelstrom of war"[/ul]
Search term:"Why have I had a word written on my hand since birth?"
The flood of information was a maelstrom in and of itself; between the anonymous questions other frightened strangers had posted - and the less-than-polite responses they had garnered - the first-hand accounts of a war he had been blissfully unaware of, and the textbook pages of a place called Selene Isle, the answer to satisfy so-called units and mundanes... How had he never stumbled across this? How could he have been so utterly blind?
From there, Mara thought his task was easy: find out as much about these units as he possibly could.
The search results were all over the place. Pairs of people who could bend reality to their will - one by casting spells and the other by taking that damage into and against their bodies... Restraints and magic and that violence Mara had held so closely in his chest his entire life. And he knew... he didn't need to try to make anything move or bring some sort of inanimate object to life. He would be bending the world to fit him - he wouldn't be taking restraints.
Still. He had to try. There was an aloe plant sitting peacefully in his window, and Mara closed his eyes as he sliced his hand with a sheet of paper. The wound stung and he could feel blood filling the thin slit between the flesh, but he focused on the healing energy of the plant on the sill. As he reached out toward one of the long, thick leaves, he orated "everything within your reach is mended."
He could feel the long cut sew itself back together as soon as his fingers curled around the sheath of aloe, and when Mara opened his eyes to look at his palm, there was nothing but a smear of blood to serve as proof of what he'd done.
His first spell ever hadn't even been violent. It had been healing.
As the boy was staring incredulously at his own hand, the word Maelstrom still as visible as ever despite the blood, he noticed something else. A thin, sparkling red thread that originated at his navel and looped around him again and again before finally slipping out his bedroom door. Mara held the thing gingerly with one hand as he typed again into the search bar of his laptop. This "thread of fate" apparently would lead him to his other half - the part of his soul that had manifested in someone called a sacrifice.
This person could most likely be found at Selene Isle, according to various websites. Not to mention, when it finally did get out that he was hiding such a chaotic and violent name he would be spurned and rejected from the rest of "normal" society. Selene Isle was where he could find answers and be with other people like himself. So that's where Mara needed to go.
He was almost finished haphazardly shoving clothes into his suitcase when he felt a reeling sort of feeling, like the earth itself had cracked beneath his feet. It made him dizzy and nauseated, and he had to sit down for a long second before he felt alright enough to get back into motion. Mara didn't need to ask what that feeling was - all he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that it had originated from Eri, the girl originally assigned as his mentor and whom he had grown uncommonly close to throughout the years.
Eri was in distress, and Mara was compelled to find her.
The pull was like gravity itself; if he didn't get to the girl in time, his world would be shattered. Now, they had grown quite close over the years. What was once seen as an obstacle between himself and punching the daylights out of anyone who looked at him funny had slowly turned into the welcomed weight of a forced calm. Where Mara was a flurry of chaos, Eri was a stone wall - still and pale as marble, and as collected as he'd ever seen a person be. She had somehow turned into his best friend (a term he would never grow accustomed to using), possibly his first crush - maybe? - , and Mara didn't know what to think of his being able to feel her suffering.
His half-packed whirlwind of clothes sat in his suitcase as the boy jumped out of his window. The less his uncle knew about everything going on, the better.
The scene that greeted Mara's mismatched eyes was grisly.
There was blood everywhere. A man and woman lay in puddles of it in the kitchen, and Eri was standing in silent horror beside her brother, who at the sheer sight of Mara's worried face went on the verbal offensive. Eri broke it up with few words, commanding both young men with a blank sort of determination that called for their attention to turn back to the matter at hand.
The house should burn, her steady voice commanded. And so it did.
It wasn't but a few extended moments after the roof was engulfed in flames that the secret finally came out - Mara wasn't planning on asking why he just assisted in covering up a double murder, but the word slipped somehow. Maelstrom. There it was again. He looked at his hand, which smelled of gasoline and held traces of char, and slowly extended it toward the younger girl. (Could she still be considered a mere girl? She had murdered her step-mother in cold blood, after all... Perhaps woman was a more suitable term).
Ren was convinced it was time to leave. And as much as Mara held an immediate disdain for the older twin, he had to admit that he was right. It was time to leave. But they'd never be welcome in the world as it was. There was only one place they could head where it would be safe for them; at least, Eri and himself could go there. Ren would reach the end of his line right there in the driveway - the era of him holding sway over his sister was grinding to a halt. Mara's voice was rushed as he explained the haven for units like themselves.
Eri's blood-slickened hand slid into his, and that pull of gravity he'd felt before crashed down around Mara with the strength of a thousand earthquakes. She held him to the ground now, and he would die without her. He couldn't explain how he knew, but he did.
Selene Isle wasn't all he had read it to be. It was as though the island itself were a building, and the foundation was cracking. Mara and Eri were nothing more than scared teenagers with the clothes on their backs and the money Mara had stolen from his uncle the night they'd left. And he didn't understand why this was their safe haven. This... lie of a utopia for those like them. Everyone here had some sort of high pitched ringing noise emitting from god knew where, and they all had shifty eyes, never holding contact for more than a fleeting moment - all mistrustful. Mara remembers pulling Eri closer, afraid she would be snatched away if he let go for even one second.
It was hard at first, but eventually, life settled down. The new unit - how odd for him to think of it that way - assimilated into the belly of the city. Eri found a job at the hospital and even took some RN classes. While she learned to help and heal, chaos poured down around her. As though the young woman were a beacon for violence, it surrounded her at any given moment of the day.
Mara learned everything he could about what it meant to be a fighter.
It started with gangs, of a sort. Small groups that hung out in bars and clubs and liked to take their violence out on each other for sport. Battles with words that could infiltrate the mind and body. He figured out what it meant to carry the name Maelstrom - because that's what it was: a name. His name, and Eri's name, two halves of the whole.
He stumbled across Rapture by meeting the right people one of the nights he was tending the bar at Nightshade. Eri worked all sorts of ridiculous hours, and Mara had found himself wandering one too many times without his sacrifice. Money was tight, and he was desperate for a job.
Mixing drinks wasn't exactly difficult. It was just measuring, pouring, muddling, mixing... He was even surprisingly good at it. But the best part was getting to listen in on all the conversations people thought were private. No one ever suspected the bartender.
They were referred to as Rave, and the higher ups were called Regalia. They ran the show, and he was hungry to learn more.
So he infiltrated their system. His beliefs matched theirs, and his willingness to fight for that right to be normal and accepted drew the faction to Mara as much as Mara was drawn to them. He thrived on missions - practically lived for them - and it took him three years until he was receiving his bell. The sound was almost unnatural; clicking and clacking like a hundred little legs crawling over marble floors. They called him Scolopendra on account of the large centipede tattoo that lay across his neck, shoulder, and back. It had been a gift to himself when they'd first moved to the Isle - a reminder of his past life, an homage to Sepa, and a promise to himself: never forget to protect her. Sepa would aid this protection, he was positive. His body was a temple, and he would devote it to fighting for the security and sanctuary of his sacrifice.
Mara still bartends at Nightshade occasionally, when he's feeling bored or isn't running all over the Isle on a mission. He prides himself on the fact that he has friends and acquaintances. Eri has moved much further than just a best friend. He's living, he's thriving, and he's still just as much a fighter as he was on an almost-forgotten playground in India.
EXTRA INFO
FAMILY
- Tamotsu Iwasaki (father)
- Jalvi Iwasaki nee Bhagat (mother)
- Naozumi Iwasaki (Uncle)
LIKES
- Eri Watanabe
- Fist fighting
- Oranges/Clementines
- Boxing
- India's Top 40
- Speaking a language no one else knows
DISLIKES
- Ren Watanabe
- The entire Wraith faction
- Raspberries/Blackberries
- Overbearing order (i.e. immaculate places/people)
- Japan's airless/oppressive culture
- Pretty much anyone who isn't Eri.
FEARS
Mara fears only one thing above all else: Losing Eri and being completely alone again.
[/div][/div][/div]SPELL LIST
OFFENSIVE SPELLS COLUMN ASUNDER "I watch as the pieces tear away" As he casts the spell, twenty small, linked puzzle-piece shapes appear at Mara's feet, glowing and made of light. The pieces crackle with electricity as they break apart, lifting into the air and reforming into shards/bolts. They shoot toward the opponent, slicing any skin they touch. LEVEL: Basic ACCURACY: 15% COOL DOWN: 8 turns Chorum Scolopendra "The noise of one hundred scuttling legs drives you mad" Upon incanting, the opposite sacrifice's head is filled with the sound of centipede legs, distracting them with the clamor and sensation of bugs crawling within their ears. LEVEL: basic ACCURACY: 10% COOL DOWN: 7 turns | DEFENSIVE SPELLS COLUMN Indra's cloak "Absorb the trauma, swallow the pain" Upon this spell being cast, a crash of thunder signals the appearance of a dark grey cloud. The cloud will encapsulate Mara or his sacrifice, blocking them from view but also blocking their view of the field. Damage cast by the opposing team will be absorbed and lessened by the cloud, and a numbing effect is cast upon whomever it surrounds, dulling the pain of any restraints/spells cast during cool down. LEVEL: basic ACCURACY: 15% COOL DOWN: 8 turns Eye of the Storm "While chaos stirs around you, let there be peace within" Mara will only cast this particular spell on his true sacrifice. It blocks the pain receptors in Eri's head and slows her neural activity, causing her to go numb to physical and mental attacks - it's just calm and quiet; a false sense of meditation. LEVEL: basic ACCURACY: 10% COOL DOWN: 7 turns |
MADE BY PANNY FOR WAR OF CHANGE IN-SITE USAGE ONLY!