Sheet:Kazuo Saitou
Kazuo Saitou's Sheet
Background
Kazuo Saitou is, pretty much, Trouble.
On the surface, he's a bright young man with good grades and an excellent record in the school kendo club. He lives with his mother, a slightly frantic office worker trying her best to keep them both fed and housed (in, given her salary and Tokyo prices, a very small apartment indeed). This is more trouble than usual since his mother is not only a widow, but only half Japanese herself. Being able to send her son to Radiant Heart Academy has been a vast relief.
Problem is, after school and kendo are over, he goes home - in theory - to an empty apartment.
And Kazuo's ability to stay calm and relaxed and silent is deceptive. He's bored. He's unsettled. He's angry for reasons he can't guess at or understand. For years now, instead of going back to that empty apartment, he's frequently spent afterschool time wandering. And getting in fights.
And, because he can't bring himself to care about consequences nearly as much as he should, getting caught.
What Kazuo and his mother don't know is that there are reasons he's bored and unsettled and frequently angry, and that he has trouble treating school as real and its rules as important. He tries! He tries his best. But he fails. Because he has locked inside him the secret potential to be a Guardian Knight - or a hideously powerful wielder of Dark Energy. And the emotions associated with that potential have no real outlet. Trying to give them one...
... gets him in trouble. A lot.
Personality
Did I mention that Kazuo is Trouble?
Kazuo has the ability to be calm, relaxed, amusedly silent, in remarkable conditions. Kazuo also has the ability to be *terrifyingly* angry - he just spends a lot of time tamping that down till he's in a place where he can let it loose.
Like when he and a couple of loose friends are starting a fight with some guys from another school, or a group of people who were jerks to some people on the train, or ... whatever pretext he came up with this time.
He's smart. He's got the ability to split his attention a dozen ways, monitoring situations till he can hone in on one detail that gives him an opening or a clue. He's not one of the top five students in his class, but he's definitely doing well, and that's *with appearing to sleep through half his classes*. (Appearing is important here. Sometimes he's actually asleep! Sometimes he's just too bored to keep his eyes open.)
Sometimes, when he's actually engaged with a situation, he's got a wickedly infectious grin. Sometimes, even the delinquents he hangs out with outside of school get protective of him - not because he can't handle himself in a fight, but because he could get expelled, and right now he's still got a chance at a life; and because he sometimes inspires loyalty despite himself.
Sometimes he holds on to things far too long. A schoolboy crush on a teacher. A piece of art or a poem that he ran across in class that tried to wake - something - in him. An urge to encourage someone to take care of themself, to practice just a little bit more in this weak point, to aspire a little higher.
There's loyalty in there, looking for a target to attach itself to. There are standards. There's affection.
And he really doesn't *mean* to disappoint his mother so often. He just - forgets. The unsettled pressure in his heart pushes, and the memory of consequences to come vanishes in the face of the moment.
It could get him in real trouble, one of these days.
Focus
THIS IS A TEMPORARY ENTRY. This should be overwritten and revised after the Dark Kingdom plot, when we can sit down properly with any other Shitennou players and Senshi and staff and hash out how this works.
Kazuo's focus is ... okay, honestly, Kazuo's focus is his connection to the Earth and Mamoru, but his focus ITEM is his earring. Specifically, the dangly crystal one. (Across canons there is a weird association between how many of his earrings are dangly crystals versus not and how much of his past he remembers/lives up to. Right now, he has one, not both, and thus is not completely oblivious anymore but does not have any kind of full access to past-life memories. Thankfully.)
Style
THIS IS A TEMPORARY ENTRY. This should be overwritten and revised after the Dark Kingdom plot, when we can sit down properly with any other Shitennou players and Senshi and staff and hash out how this works.
The Shitennou, once Endymon's knights/guardians/soldiers, are uniformed warriors who fight with magical projectiles, physical combat, or in some cases unique abilities (like Kunzite's creepy darkness thing). They are Tuxedo Mask's backup squad, and as such tend toward mobility, flexibility, and not uncommonly standing on tall things. (... okay, as Mochi pointed out, that's a Senshi thing in general.) This is triply the case with Kazuo in his temporary henshin, which is *explicitly* modeled as Tuxedo Mask backup.
Powers
THIS IS A TEMPORARY ENTRY. The base powerset is unlikely to change, but details may be tampered with when Kazuo gets his proper henshin, instead of his temporary one.
Kunzite's powerset varies wildly across canons, so I've opted for a version that makes sense across a number of them, and works with the stone he's named for, with a tweak suggested by Mochi. Specifically: Kunzite, the stone, is a gem-quality form of spodumene, which is a source of lithium. So: Kazuo's powerset is themed around being an energy battery.
ABSORPTION/SHIELDS: Kazuo can absorb energy from the area around him or from energies directed at him to recharge; he can either leave this the same type of energy, or transmute it to his own personal. (Note that in order to absorb *attacks*, he needs to either have appropriately power-absorbing defenses up already, or be aware of the attack in order to 'catch' it. He can't automatically defend against something he doesn't know is coming. Also, yes, he has limits to what he can hold - my rule-of-thumb is 'three standard attacks or one finisher,' variable according to rule of plot.)
This absorption will manifest as an absence of whatever he's absorbing - so if he's soaking up heat, it shows up as cold; if he's soaking up light (and his shields are almost always soaking up light), it shows up as darkness. The classical example is a sphere of darkness, though the form is very much variable; the sphere is the most efficient, though, and the one he's best with.
... And yes, I am going to refer to this as 'his shields' a lot, because that *is* the most common use he puts that to when not evil. (He *can* use energy absorption as a direct weapon against living creatures. But it is very much a villain move, and Not Good For Him. Doing much of it is likely to start causing dark energy contamination in short order, and Mamoru would be Disappointed. He is about as good at dealing with Disappointed Mamoru as Mamoru is at dealing with Disappointed Usagi.)
It is also, to note, harder for him to absorb kinetic energy than most other types; a physical attack will make him have to work a *lot* harder to shield against than a magical or energy-based one.
LIMITED PURIFICATION: One would think, speaking of dark energy contamination, that dark energy-based attacks would also cause him trouble. However, *if* Kazuo is in the right mental/emotional state, Kazuo can absorb a dark-energy-based attack and *purify the energy*. This requires, unsurprisingly, a lot of emotional involvement, and that emotion needs to be of the appropriate type. Protective anger will work. Vengeful, spiteful anger will not. The same holds with other emotions: if the emotion is in a self-involved form that is likely to *feed* dark energy, he won't be able to cleanse the energy; if the emotion is in a connective, other-focused form that is likely to *oppose* dark energy, he will be able to use it. (Yes, this is something that doesn't appear in canon, but Mochi suggested it as a reasonable extension and I realized it worked with the metaphysical qualities ascribed to kunzite; we know Naoko used that kind of thing in quantity, so...)
MAGICAL ATTACKS: Absorbed attacks and other energies can be used in their own form (sometimes resulting in an attack flying directly back into its own originator's face), or transformed into part of Kazuo's own personal energy supply. If it's changed, though he's not yet aware of this, he can still attack; the most usual form is your standard laser type, or lightninglike effects for areas, but he can also form the energy into blades, suitable for throwing or slicing (or throwing in order to slice).
Direction for attacks, however, is not carried out in the safety-conscious manner that most magical girls use; his attacks are cued by gesture and sign, not verbally. This means that in many ways the most effective way to take Kazuo out of a magical battle is to injure his hands. (If you think this is a nod to Venus doing so in Classic, you are totally correct.)
MELEE AND CAPETANK: Like Mamoru, Kazuo frequently uses his cape (as Kunzite, or currently as Kaitou Kamen) as a focus for defense. It is *much* more useful for deflecting thrown objects, and about as useful for deflecting magical attacks. Psychological element: Kazuo can absorb attacks by catching them in the *inside* of his cape, but attacks that hit the outside are more likely to glance off.
As Kaitou Kamen, his Tuxedo Kamen-associated temporary henshin, Kazuo can also come up with a cane. One of the reasons he is convinced that the henshin is not associated with *his* subconscious is that it's not a sword cane. However, he's got enough experience with kendo in this life, and with a number of martial and sword-focused disciplines in his past life as Kunzite, to be able to use it deftly in a fight. The possibility exists for him to use *it* as a focus for his powers, keeping it from being immediately destroyed by magical opposition, but he hasn't experimented in that direction yet.
UTILITY ABILITIES AND ANALYSIS:
Kunzite can use a shield bubble around himself to hover, or to fly (albeit not as fast as dedicated fliers). This is not something Kazuo knows about as Kaitou Kamen; what he *does* know about is the vastly increased speed and leaping ability, parallel to Tuxedo Kamen's. Standard increase in strength and durability goes along too.
Absorbing energy goes hand in hand with *analyzing* energy. Even outside of henshin, Kazuo is likely to be aware of particularly strong or contaminated energy fields around him. (This is not the same as knowing someone nearby is a villain, unless they are having serious leakage problems.) His night vision has also gone up to startling levels. *In* henshin, Kazuo can analyze energy patterns in detail; this is especially true if he can get a 'taste' of the energy involved, but anything not shielded is likely to be visible to him. (Shielded energy is not, full stop. Yes, this means that people can probably carry Devices past him in henshin without his being aware of it. Kazuo is good at analysis; that does not mean that he is written by Conan Doyle.)
Since electricity is energy, Kazuo has *some* ability to interface with electric/electronic devices. Note the 'some.' He is not practiced at this and frankly is liable to accidentally make mundane technology overheat or explode in the process, while he learns fine control. Still, it does mean that he has capabilities in the direction of magic/technology hybrids, that might or might not eventually get followed up on.
DEFENSE ANALYSIS: Most importantly in the analysis and utility area: Kazuo can, given sufficient exposure and/or time, find *weak points* in magical defenses. Or entities. There may not *be* such a weak point, in which case he's out of luck. Or the amount of time or exposure may be too much. (This, like many of Kazuo's abilities, is very much plot-dependent; it will not be successful unless the plotrunner wants it to, and it will be superseded in cases of people with more appropriate specialties or histories.) But if Mamoru needs to know the weak point to pass on to the Senshi of a demon that Kunzite had a lot of exposure to in his past life ... just to pull a random example ... Kazuo might just be able to point him in the right direction.
