Azusa Kurokawa

» Name: Azusa Kurokawa
» Alias: Foxy
» Age: 86
» Gender: F

» Association: Humanity and Quincykind

» Appearance Image:


» Personality: Azusa is a calm, collected, typically serious individual who believes in the world around her, but maybe not its inhabitants. She doesn't think that the average person is capable of doing themselves good but also it's not necessarily her place to intervene. She wants the world to be a better place so that everyone gets a chance to thrive, but she's not going to go out of her way to make them do so. She is a paver of paths for the whole world in her eyes, not a dictator.

She's a gentle soul normally, but when Shinigami get involved she can turn very cruel very quickly. She has no remorse for those people, if you can even call them that. They care only about the balance of realms, not the people inhabiting them. They think if they play the role of the realms' "mediators" that they can then get away with whatever they want in the meantime. As far as she's aware, they're nothing but criminals. If this is the best that the realms can do for 'balancers', then perhaps it's better off letting everything slowly trend towards the inevitable. Azusa often wonders if the Shinigami prolong the suffering of the realms for some kind of devious reasoning, even if deep down she knows it's not true and they're just assholes.

In her spare time, when she's not hating Shinigami, Azusa enjoys the simple things in life like tea and incense or walks through the woods or simply finding a small cafe somewhere with good drinks and sweet snacks. If she's not doing even that, she is alone in her room agonizing over every little detail of her spirit weapons. Azusa is a fucking freak for weaponry of all kinds, including Zanpakutou. How do they work? Why do they transform like that? What's causing them to tick? She asks these questions about every single weapon she ever looks at or touches. It's a fascination of hers that has pushed into the realm of hyperfixation. Weapons are tools meant to impose oneself and their ideas, and Azusa tries every day to make hers the best at expressing hers.


» History: Azusa's history is painfully simple, and simply painful. She grew up in a remote town of Japan as a girl with overbearing parents with unrealistic expectations. They were also quincies. Their hatred for the Shinigami was so deep that they were hell bent on making their daughter the perfect killing machine, but they at least had the dignity to wait until she was 10 years old to start teaching her the Quincy ways. From the traditionalist approach of learning to form and shoot a bow, to forcing her to wear a Sanrei Glove the moment they felt she was able to and forcing her into more extreme, specialized training, her parents didn't let up. If it wasn't studying for school it was practicing in the backyard of their isolated home until her hands bled or her body collapsed. Whichever came first.

Of course, when she was fifteen, tragedy struck. A group of Shinigami were able to sense them from afar and came to investigate. It just so happened that these Shinigami were also fresh off the high of killing an invasive Hollow not that far away. They found Azusa and her parents, ransacked their home, killed her parents in cold blood, and then forced themselves upon her while she was only fifteen years old. They left her in her backyard beaten, bruised, humiliated, and now homeless. Her parents inherent hatred for Shinigami sowed the seeds of rage in Azusa's heart from a very young age, but this unfortunate day would see that hatred blossom into outright malice towards Shinigami kind.

That hatred was all that Azusa needed to see her training through, even if she had to seek out other Quincies in order to further learn new techniques, find resources, or even just ask for simple advice. Most of her training initially was self-taught or just her honing the absolute basics, but then one day she saw it. In the window of an antique shop in her rural hometown. Azusa used what little spare cash she had saved up from her cashier job to buy the intricate looking dagger that the antique shop had for sale. It was beautifully crafted with a small guard that looked like a bushel of flowers that had thorny vines twisting around its blade. It was utterly impractical, but the intricacy caught her eye. So of course she carried it around with her and used it for self defence once or twice. The way it felt in her hand was liberating compared to a large clunky bow. Even if she herself was a fragile thing, all it took was one well placed strike and her muggers were dead at her feet. It was this chance encounter that sent Azusa spiraling down the road of a weapon fanatic.

She'd buy antique weaponry and dismantle it and put it back together again just to see if she could. She'd buy whatever rusted weaponry she could just to examine the shapes and try to discern a purpose. At some point she even acquired a gun, illegally, and took it apart to figure out how it ticked before putting it back together just the way it was before. Her hobby for weapons turned into hyperfixation as she kept finding new things about them that only made her admire them even more.

Between practicing her quincy arts and obsessing over weapons, she eventually understood that the traditionalist route of using a bow and arrow was not for her. So Azusa moved on from it. She went on to learn martial arts from local dojos, then further out traditionalist dojos, until she was among the mountains with the monks learning battojutsu and iaido among old school japanese traditionalists. It was in these more extreme experiences with the hardassed oldheads that helped her to learn how to wield what she, somewhat reluctantly, considers the peak of any weapon design imaginable.

The katana.

Unfortunately the Shinigami used those almost exclusively, until they didn't, but that was only for the good ones. What was up with that? Why did they do that? Azusa went out to where she knew earth protecting Shinigami were at and proceeded to butcher them despite their pleas to help. They didn't show her mercy, so an eye for an eye it was. Azusa took their Zanpakutou from their cold lifeless hands and proceeded to study them. Their shape, their weight, their reishi composition. Needless to say she couldn't at all understand how they functioned or why they did transform, not that the ones she found did that, but still.

So Azusa set out to make her own expression of what a katana should be. Beautiful and deadly. Destructive and efficient. Not an inch of its shape wasted, its curvature perfectly designed to be drawn and struck with in one swift motion before being returned to its sheathe in a swift yet elegant flourish. There was a beauty to these things, as there was a beauty in the traditional side of Japanese culture. One would call her a weeaboo, but is there such thing as being a weeaboo when you yourself are Japanese?

Further down the rabbit hole she went until one day she decided, purely on a whim while she was bathing beneath a waterfall, that she would become a kyuubi. In an expression of one's self, Azusa did the most inane thing she's ever done. She forged her own Quincy Cross and paid her fellow Quincy to embed it directly in her spine. They did so for the money. Without that, they likely would have told her she was just too weird and left her alone. The next time they saw her, months later, Azusa had fox ears and nine fluffy tails that felt exactly like what fox fluff should feel like. They would never find out what those tails were actually for. Her next group of Hollow victims would, though.

Azusa unleashed her first instance of her Izanami at age 22, combined with the power of a fully powered tail-battery and adept Blut Arterie, and sliced an Adjuchas clean in half in a single swing. This was after narrowly avoiding being devoured, but still. It was the biggest feat of her life at the time. And Azusa was not happy. Her Izanami wasn't the right curvature, her tails weren't storing as much reishi as she had hoped, and her form was so off... It was like she was an amateur trying to play with the big kids at the park. She did it, but she looked fucking stupid doing so.

So she kept improving, even in the most minute of ways. Training, fixing, testing, fixing again, more testing, infinitely changing every day, every week of every month, for years. For the sake of the earth, for the sake of Quincykind so no one else had to go through what she did, and for the sake of herself, Azusa kept improving in the mountains with the monks she lived with. However, it did not go under the radar that there was a Quincy in the area and so Shinigami would come to investigate the erasure of souls happening around there.

Azusa was forced to defend her home against a small detachment of Shinigami and, as they weren't anything special, she wiped them out without any effort. The lowest tier of foot soldier was nothing but ants to her. Of course this merited stronger Shinigami showing up after they lost contact with Azusa's victims who also didn't return. A captain was deployed not just because it was clear this particular threat was a cut above the rest, but also because that particular Captain was worried she was a different breed. One Yhwach's children gifted with his power. She was not, but still despite Azusa's best efforts, she was mortally wounded and her home in the mountains, along with the monks, the closest thing she had to a family anymore, were accidentally destroyed in the fight. For a second time a Shinigami had taken the world from her and now she was left in ruins. Seething hatred turned into roiling malice. Forevermore she would hate all of Shinigami-kind.

It has been about 20 years since that particular incident and Azusa's hyperfixation on weaponry hasn't dwindled a bit. She's been waiting for the right time to make a move and, after catching wind that the Soul Society had taken a massive hit, believes that now is the time.


» Natural Abilities:

Brittle Figure: Azusa is not the strongest nor most durable. Her physique is not what's important to her outside of keeping appearances. Her skills come in her Quincy abilities, leaving her strength and durability totally lacking. That being said, what she lacks in those areas, she excels in speed and soul. Because of her heritage as a Quincy, as well as how she uses her Quincy abilities even in mundane life, Azusa has focused herself into developing a level of speed outpacing all but the absolute best, and a level of reishi and reiryoku efficiency that, even when she used to be a young Quincyling, she was still able to output absurd displays of spiritual power purely because of how efficiently she used what little reiryoku she had at the time. Now? 70 years of experience later? Calling her level of spiritual power 'little' or 'subpar' would leave one wondering where that sword came from and how it got in their stomach.

Speedfox: Steigen, or Hirenkyaku as Azusa knows it, is absolutely her most profound strength. Her body is average like a human's in terms of strength and durability, but her ability to maneuver her lithe figure around at speeds faster than the typical eye can see is hard to match. There are faster beings, but they are few and far between. Even without using Steigen, Azusa is fast as fuck. She can outpace specialized aircraft, she can run circles around towns in moments and cities in minutes, and she can move so fast that an inexperienced mind might just get scrambled trying to comprehend how impossibly fast she is.

Sheathed Soul-Slayer: Azusa's prime fighting style is Iaido techniques that utilize her speed, focus, and precision to fatally devastate those who oppose her. She'll assume a stance ready to unsheathe her most powerful spirit weapon and leave it to her focused senses to determine when and where to strike. After that it's just a matter of speed and whether or not her weapon is powerful enough to wound her opponent; something she agonizes over when she's alone and tries to make sure her spirit weapon is the best spirit weapon out there. So that when she utilizes this fighting style, she kills. That's what this is for, after all.


» Racial Abilities:

Reishi Queen: Azusa's proficiency is that of Reishi. Not just manipulation, but its applications in combat and practical use cases. She's so used to reishi, even the subtle differences across the realms, that she can manipulate it into fine shapes both big and small at will. Of course bigger ones take more time and smaller ones can be done almost instantly, but she can do it still is the point. Her prowess with Sklaverei has extended to using it in her daily life even for mundane purposes. Sklaverei is something so natural to her that she doesn't even think about it and can use it on an instinctive level. It's like breathing to her.

Martial Fantasizer: Azusa is a fanatic for weaponry, for better and for worse. She is never truly content with her spirit weapons nor the weapons of those around her due to her literal hyperfixation on them. She sees flaws in her opponents armaments before she sees flaws in herself, and she sees flaws in herself before she sees flaws in her opponents. A lot about her fighting style revolves around weaponry, both swapping between her own and her finely tuned fighting style that involves exploiting the weaknesses in her opponent's choice of weaponry.

Not only this, but her obsession with weaponry leads to her tuning her spirit weapons almost constantly. Azusa is never truly happy with how they turn out and so she's constantly tuning them. Every day she checks on the state of them even if they haven't be used recently just to see if she can come up with some way to make them better. It is not uncommon to find her agonizing over minute, sometimes insignificant details of her weaponry both out of a desire to improve them, and a desire to make them better to use for herself. Some would even go so far as to say it's insane to even suggest that there are flaws to be improved in her weapons. The less experienced would say they're perfect and are something everyone should strive for, but to Azusa there is always room to improve... even when there might not be.

Instanced Steigen: A fancy term for leaving still afterimages whenever she uses Steigen, or Hirenkyaku as she's known it all her life. She has lived in Japan all her life after all. Whenever Azusa uses Steigen, she deliberately leaves an afterimage using reishi, but it's so paper thin that anyone cutting through it would feel like they cut through paper. The fact there was a sensation at all is something to be curious about, but it's mostly a trick that Azusa uses to distract opponents while she repositions to attack from a more favorable angle. The afterimage, regardless of her Soul or Steigen or anything, only ever lasts a few seconds, and is not perfect. Her face might seem a little distorted, her tails a little less fluffy, there might be some 'static' when she initially uses Steigen, there's always some of these flaws present whenever she uses the technique. Whether or not the opponent notices them in the heat of battle is another thing.

Mid-Gebet: Gebet is not Azusa's mainstay claim to fame. It's merely something she does every so often when she finds the situation calls for it, or it's convenient. At best, she can cast a few spells, mostly low level ones, and that's it. It's not something she finds natural and it's not something she particularly takes pride in, but she can use them. That's really all there is to note.

Melty Blut: When Azusa can't purely outspeed her opponent, she relies on Blut to alleviate the weaknesses in her body. Between both forms of Blut, Azusa uses them in every fight, when she trains, and even when she's afraid of getting hurt in mundane life or needs the strength to do something on her own. It's rare she doesn't use these in a fight anymore, not because she's gotten worse, but because everyone else is getting so much stronger as well. Blut Vene is for making sure anyone with any sort of supernatural power doesn't instantly kill her when they sneeze on her, and Blut Arterie is for matching or even potentially overpowering those who rely purely on strength. Azusa can swap between the two on a whim and in a matter of milliseconds as well. It's almost instant. Not that most people would know it wasn't anyways. Speed is her thing after all, and that does include her ability to utilize one form of Blut after the other.


» Spirit Weapon 1: Izanami

» Spirit Weapon Appearance:

Spoiler:

» Spirit Weapon Abilities: Azusa's pride and her most powerful spirit weapon. Izanami is a long katana who's blade is made purely of highly condensed, rapidly vibrating, extremely volatile reishi. It is difficult to keep such a blade in the shape that it is, but Azusa does it almost flawlessly. Occasionally reiryoku can be seen arcing off of this blade like electricity, but in reality that's just an expression of the kind of power required to keep this blade in its intended shape.

Izanami is incredibly lightweight despite being made of high amounts of highly condensed reishi. To Azusa, it weighs almost nothing, yet its blade on contact feels like she's swinging around a few hundred pounds of raw metal. The blade is designed to sever things at an atomic level without slicing atoms or causing unwanted chemical reactions. In short: it is an anti-defense weapon. It itself does not shoot beams nor does it extend or do anything else. But it will cut through opponents and unreleased zanpakutou like butter. That is, after all, its intention.

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» Spirit Weapon 2: Reishi Batteries

» Spirit Weapon Appearance: Her nine fluffy tails

» Spirit Weapon Abilities: Also known as her fluff-batteries when she's casually joking, in reality her tails are actually latent reishi storage devices that slowly, yet perpetually, gather in little scraps of reishi from the environment in ways that are subtle and borderline unnoticeable. The only time anyone really notices is when they're skilled enough to see such small efforts, and also when they're actively looking for it. Azusa's tails can take months to gather their maximum amount of held reishi per tail. She can, if she desires, increase the speed at which they can gather reishi, but that would actively start to erode the environment, so she doesn't do it often unless she needs to.

The Quincy Cross that Azusa uses to manifest this spirit weapon is embedded in her lower spine, specifically where the tails sprout out around her tailbone. They are always active and out and use extremely low amounts of reiryoku to sustain both their form and their function. Azusa's tails are extremely energy efficient, to the point that even when she's fully drained, they absorb latent reishi in the atmosphere or environment in order to sustain their form, always having a trace amount of energy stored up so they never vanish. If they did vanish, that would be kind of... weird.

The purpose of these tails is to store reishi for Azusa to call upon in order to use for her own purposes. Each tail can store enough reishi to construct a small house, inner details, furniture, and amenities included. Not that she'd need to, nor that she could do it instantly. Her batteries don't store shapes or anything, just raw reishi to be used however Azusa sees fit. The first of the two primary functions in combat is keeping reishi stored yet able to be used at any time to craft constructs like barriers or 'reishi' weapons, typically swords, spears, and other melee armaments because they are the fastest to make. The other function is empowering her spirit weapons, allowing her to launch a single devastating attack at the cost of a single tail's worth of reishi. Combining reishi with her reiryoku, Azusa can launch devastating explosions or arcs of energy, but nothing too specific. The limitation is her Soul, speed, and imagination.

After a tail is fully expended, Azusa cannot use it for anything else until it is recharged. Recharging her tails takes, with concentration, days of steady effort. Without actively trying and just relying on her batteries' passive absorption, a full tail will take weeks to fully recharge. If a tail gets severed, it will take months to reconstruct and will be a constant effort by Azusa to regrow it.

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» Spirit Weapon 3: Gunbuster

» Spirit Weapon Appearance:

Spoiler:

» Spirit Weapon Abilities: A with a long, double barrel shotgun with a long japanese bayonet shaped almost like a sword, but without the curve because that would get in the way of the barrel. It shoots a spread of 12 reishi bullets every shot, shoots twice before needing to be reloaded, and Azusa has to construct reishi bullets that need to actually be reloaded into the gun before it gets shot again. It's a double barreled shotgun. With a bayonet.

Its main defining feature is the ability to charge up the reishi bullets into a single railgun-like shot that can travel for miles with precision before starting to be affected by gravity. It takes a few seconds to charge and isn't something Azusa uses often, but she can do it.


» Letzt Stil:

» Name: 無限のキュウビ - Mugen no Kyuubi (Endless Nine-tailed Fox)

» Appearance: The atmosphere around Azusa erupts with her purple translucent reishi and her tails begin to glow a bright purple. Her body then beings to crackle with lightning while her eyes reflect a deep purple hue to whoever is unfortunate enough to meet her gaze.

» Abilities: In this state, she can instantly recharge all nine of her tails once per post by gathering large amounts of reishi at almost instantaneous speeds. This of course eats at the reishi in the environment and, if there's not much of it around, she gathers the same amount of reishi from a wider area to compensate, potentially damaging an even broader area than she normally would, as is natural by just outright removing the reishi that's apart of the world.


» Equipment:

Spoiler:

(To Find Out about what these skills are for, please READ THIS THREAD before you try doing anything to it)

General Attributes
» Durability: SS/S/A/B/C/D/E
» Speed: SS/S/A/B/C/D/E
» Strength: SS/S/A/B/C/D/E
» Soul: SS/S/A/B/C/D/E

Will Skills
» Willpower: Elite/Advanced/Adept/Beginner/Untrained
» Deduction: Elite/Advanced/Adept/Beginner/Untrained
» Focus: Elite/Advanced/Adept/Beginner/Untrained

Quincy Skills
» Blut: Elite/Advanced/Adept/Beginner/Untrained
» Gebet: Elite/Advanced/Adept/Beginner/Untrained
» Kreuzen: Elite/Advanced/Adept/Beginner/Untrained
» Steigen: Elite/Advanced/Adept/Beginner/Untrained


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» Character Intent: [Optional. This is where you can explain the intent behind the character. What this might entail is where you are imagining the character strength-wise, your purpose for creating the character, and potential story beats. This section is to assist the grader in understanding where you are aiming with your character and may be able to provide advice if other aspects of the application do not match. This needs to be no more than 5 sentences.]