About Isawa AyoshiPrelude:
Isawa Ayoshi was born in the Nippon islands on the second half of the 13th century. Coming from a young family of farmers, Ayoshi was honored to be trained to become one of the apprentices of Grandmaster Shingu - and one of the men working the defenses of the protectorate headed by the honorable Mayor Kenshin, reporting directly to the Shogun of the Kakamura. The Bushido then - the old version, different than the currently known, established around the 17th century - was Ayoshi's life, and he was grateful for every breath of it. The coastal settlement survived mostly on the trade of spices with China, and the few nonfarmers villagers invariably became men of the sea. During a given voyage, however, the Kenshin ships were attacked and pillaged by pirates sent from the people he was negotiating with. Feeling betrayed, the mayor tasked Shingu to send a group of his yojimbo to defend his honor against the treachorous men from the western lands - and Ayoshi, still a young student, was one of the men to travel. Their ship never really reached the continent. Caught in a terrible storm, the few survivors washed ashore and were immediately captured by the local forces. Stripped from their armor and weapons, Ayoshi and the other students found out they were now just slaves of the armies of Kublai Khan. The next few months were those of torture and hard labor, and they never heard back from Kenshin, who just gave up on his will for revenge. Ayoshi ended up catching the attention of a strange foreigner in the Khan's court - a mysterious wizard from even further West. This man was part of a Venetian exploration company led by Marco Polo - which called Japan "Cipungu", "land of gold" - and Ayoshi came to understand he was a man of some prestige, and his wizard was as powerful as a Shugenja. A given night, Ayoshi was taken to meet the wizard. He would never reveal himself under the sun, and people said it was because he wanted to protect his beauty from the envy in the eyes of the lowborn. Ayoshi was guided to the man by his personal assistant - a pretty young girl with big eyes and long hair that the foreigners nicknamed as "Helenica", despite this not being her real name. Ayoshi had seen her in other nights before, but this was the first time he could be so close as to smell her perfume - and be inebriated by such. After a long walk through ornamented halls of hay the destitute samurai found himself in the presence of the night warlock. The man had an austere expression and kept an absolute silence for several minutes. Finally, Helenica approached Ayoshi and whispered in his ears "He wants to see you dance. To do the martial arts movements, as you and the others do after your meditation." The young man paused to think for moments, until he finally understood. Slowly he started to gracefully move his arms and legs, and then he was doing some basic kata - for the amusement of the present. And for the next weeks, every night he'd be brought to do it again and again. Until a night Ayoshi interjected. As Helenica approached him to ask him to start once again, he told her "I could show you an even more beautiful movement if I had my weapon with me... My katana. What would a single man with a blade do against the entire Khan's army outside?" She stopped to think for moments, then approached the wizard keeping her back to Ayoshi. He couldn't hear them, but imagined the exchange; some moments later she returned, and in her hands she had a much more crude, dull blade, poorly crafted by the foreigners in their rudimentary design. Ayoshi thanked, anyway - picked the weapon and, to the best of his skills, started the movements with the heavy sword; initially slowly, but as he progressed, violently fast. And then it happened - he jumped, barely touched a wall with his left foot, then lunged against the wizard. The sword was terrible when compared to his katana, but still lethal enough to pierce his stomach and let his dark blood spill all over the room. It was all so fast that he was able to catch the man in absolute surprise. Yet, as Ayoshi landed again, he didn't have the weapon on his hands anymore. Behind him, Helenica was laughing, tapping the weapon against the floor and slowly clapping with her other hand against it. "Oh, by the Hand of God! What a mess you made! Oh, it's precious! Precious! Leave us now.", she finally said... And Ayoshi obeyed. He didn't know why, he didn't know what was happening - but he felt so inescapably compelled to do so, that he stood up and in silence went away, back to his bed, and in the next day he still didn't quite know either. He expected to be executed the next day, but the sun came and went without anything being said. As the moon appeared, again Helenica came. With a smile in her face, she didn't even say a word, and Ayoshi followed her. Back to the wizard's room, to the young japanese surprise and horror, the man was again sitting in his austere silence, not an inch of a deadly wound to be seen, not a spill of blood anywhere. Helenica approached Ayoshi from behind, and on the back of his neck, whispered "Our night wizard is but a pawn, and it had been fixed as you can see. For my will is to be done, and you're now as mine as he is. You impressed me, and my gift will be beyond anything you can fathom." Her real name was Veronica, and by tasting her vitae he became her retainer, her plaything, for the next long nights to come. A pale shade of everything he was before, obsessed in love, barely remembering the Bushido. Again he had his armor and weapons. He was moved to sleep near Veronica and her fake wizard, and act as a bodyguard to them, doing their chores during the daylight hours. The other japanese men would spit and turn their back when he passed by, rejecting him for betraying the code. Their loud disapproval continued for a long time, and fed even more their will for revolting and fleeing; slowly they planned, until finally their big chance arrived. The Mongolian forces were attacked by the Chinese army, who pushed North to fight the invaders. In the commotion, the samurais freed themselves and went directly to the tunnels leading to the wizard's room - to kill the traitor and his liege. They were disarmed, but enough skilled to take advantage of the situation and violently progress through the Khan's men. When finally they met Ayoshi, they had already managed to salvage enough equipment to give him a true fight. Yet, the young man was even more changed now. Letting his love for Veronica guide his blade, he cut through his brothers with lethal precision, and alone became an impassible wall of death. As the men fell in disbelief, they retreated - and in their path, they set fire to the entire place. The night wizard was the first to succumb to the fire; covered in clothes, he was soaked in lamp's oil and died in pain, though as silent as he lived. Veronica entered in pure despair - her fear of the fire was beyond anything Ayoshi had ever seen, and all the confidence of the greek cainite vanished as she screamed and ran around trying to escape from the flames. She finally recovered her composure enough to stop by her retainer. Looking at Ayoshi deeply in his eyes, he didn't have any time to think, and she advanced... And in the next moments, as fire surrounded them, she embraced him. And then everything finally collapsed on top of them, and Ayoshi died... ... Only to wake up on the next night. He was still under the collapsed structure, but had been lucky enough to somehow survive (or whatever it was that happened to him). He didn't know anything about his new condition, and felt only hunger. Hunger for vitae... Hunger for blood. Under the structure he crawled. Veronica was nowhere to be found. He pushed through the charred bodies of his samurai brothers and Khan's guards, and in many of his movements, he would feel his body being pierced by debris. Even if he was now alive again for the sheer power of that strange woman, he knew if he didn't feed he'd quickly succumb from all his wounds. A loud noise came, and then suddenly everything collapsed again in an underground cave. As the dust settled, for the first time Ayoshi noticed he didn't have to breath anymore! He knew he would never see daylight again. He knew he wasn't truly alive anymore. Slowly he pushed himself and kneeled, looking around. He was alone there, surrounded by all the bodies and debris. Grey and bones, death and pain... Souls and dishonor. Ayoshi knew no one would ever find him anymore; the days, months, years, decades would pass, and his body would stay there, buried in his shameful path. Veronica wasn't there anymore, and he felt the pain for not having her, and at the same time the pain for betraying his comrades. In his knees, he pulled his wakizashi, and without a single tear being shed, he let it through his heart. The body fell down silently, and as another loud noise rumbled, the cave collapsed as well.
Aftermath:
Ayoshi stayed in torpor for almost seven centuries, until recently - during excavations in Mongolia in the 1950s - when his body was found together with the old historical artifacts buried in the caves. The local excavators cheered at the incredible discovered - an almost intact mummified-looking japanese samurai committing seppuku! And then drank for several hours commemorating. Finally, though, one of them had the unfortunate idea of pulling the sword out of the body, as he saw the incredible engravings in it - and so Ayoshi awoke again, a lot hungrier than before and absolutely consumed by the beast. That night, lots of men died to his fangs and rage, until he finally fled and disappeared. The few survivors barely spoke about it, fearing the consequences of what could only be considered a curse... And the expedition leaders quickly paid for the overall silence, reporting all the deaths as an accident while digging for artifacts. Now more recovered from the beast, the young samurai - lost in the new times - assessed his situation to the best of his knowledge. His sire never truly spoke much about their nature and what they were, but he had seen enough to know how to feed and how to hide. His pure instincts helped him avoid the sun and travel in the dark. He survived several weeks feeding purely off the local fauna; he would meditate every night, searching for his balance, and trying to find answers in the teachings of his martial arts. He slowly found peace, but not the answers - instead, the answers found him. In the form of the expedition leaders, which tracked and hunted him for weeks. As it turns out, they were commanded by an European expert in Asian culture: a Greek woman they called Eleanor, but that Ayoshi knew with a different name: Veronica! It turns out his sire survived, after all of these centuries. The Toreador cainite fled back to Europe after the attack, leaving the Venetian explorers behind. As time passed she established herself again and took a new home in America. She thought Ayoshi dead, and sired other children of the night, but the news about the excavations made her eager to dig and find answers about the past. Although their relationship was never again that of love and blind devotion - as Ayoshi's embrace made him a completely changed man, following his own code of honor, and adopting the Path of Self-Focus - they nurtured a natural level of respect, and Veronica started treating Ayoshi not as a retainer anymore, but a fully fledged childe, being taught as such. Four decades passed in her travels through the world, and finally it was time to introduce Ayoshi to his new court in Washington DC. Despite being more than seven centuries old, Ayoshi in truth had only a few decades active, most of which spent on learning about the new times, costumes and languages.
Summary:
Isawa Ayoshi was a young yojimbo that was captured by the Mongolian armies. Gifted to the Khan's foreigner friends, he ended up being turned into a ghoul by a cainite, part of Marco Polo's expedition. After almost two years serving as a retainer for her, an attack with fire threw the vampire in a Rotshreck and in her single moment of sanity, she decided to embrace him. This ended up saving him from his final death, but as he awoke - now transformed as a child of the night, and without his sire - the remorse for his past made him commit seppuku. Instead of killing him, though, that put him in torpor, and centuries later he was unearthed and reawaken. A short time after that, his sire tracked him again, they reconciled and he was finally taught the basics of being a cainite. He has the lineage of a Toreador, but is very different than the usual one; his greatest arts are the martial arts, the perfect movement of well executed kata, and Shodo - the japanese art of calligraphy. He never learned as much Presence or Auspex as most of his vampiric clan, rather ending up with the more instinctive Celerity. He still struggles with adapting through the new times, although the decades since he was taken off torpor already helped a lot in this matter. The "ghosts" of his past still haunt him. He feels the urge to develop and progress with his arts, but it all brings him to pain and nightmares of the past, making him a tortured artist. The trauma of his Embrace causing his blood to mutate in such way that his vitae is infertile, and anyone he tries to embrace dies. He's fated to never sire children of his own.
Character Sheet:
-------------------------------------------- PROFILE -------------------------------------------- Name Isawa Ayoshi Sire Veronica Klapeykos Nature Enigma Demeanor Traditionalist Concept Kata Artist Chronicle DMV Nights Player Archlich Generation 8th Bloodpool 8 -------------------------------------------- ATTRIBUTES -------------------------------------------- Strength *** Dexterity **** Nimble Stamina *** Charisma **
Perception **** Attentive
Animal Ken
Academics
Kata **
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