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STATISTICS
Keita Mōri (毛利敬太)
FULL NAME
39
AGE
June 14, 1845
BIRTHDAY
Mōri-shi (毛利氏)
CLAN
7❤
SUIT & RANK
Bisexual, leaning towards men
ORIENTATION
Married, kind of
MARITAL STATUS
SUIT & RANK
Keita is ranked seven of hearts.
I can't find a good reference image and I'm not good at mockups, so I'll just describe it or do my best: his tattoo is a heart about two inches wide at its widest part, which sits right at the nape of his neck, where it would be visible over the collars of his shirts (but only just). The heart is pale pink and streaked through with gold in the style of kintsugi, or the art of repairing something that has broken by using decorative gold to recombine pieces.
The bottom of the heart extends into a thin line that travels straight all the way down Keita's spine and terminates right at the dimples at the base of his spine. The line is part of the tattoo too, which means that it's subject to the same color changes associated with his suit.
PREFERENCES
PHYSICAL AFFECTION: He is extremely unaccustomed to physical contact in general, but doesn't hate it and won't necessarily turn it away if he can tell it's not a threat.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: OOCly, go for it; ICly, Keita will go out of his way to avoid violence, as he knows that when it comes to blows he's not likely to come out on top.
RELATIONSHIPS: He has a love interest at home, but he's married to a woman and at Keita's current canon point he's unsure where, if anywhere, that relationship will go.
PSYCHIC & PSIONIC INFORMATION: It's possible to get inside his head, and Keita has very little ability to block anyone from checking out what he's got going on upstairs.
MAGICAL INFORMATION: Anyone who can sense this sort of thing would be able to tell that Keita has some level of magical ability, but he doesn't seem especially powerful.
MEDICAL INFORMATION: Nothing of note! He's a regular human.
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: None of note.
BACKTAGGING: In general, I like to keep threads as current as possible, especially threads that are important for CR and would impact how characters interact with each other. I have no problem with backtagging as long as threads are continuing to progress and are being tagged fairly regularly, and of course I understand that life happens and delays aren't always predictable! That said, if threads start to drag on for longer than a month or two, I will generally prefer to handwave the rest and start something fresh when possible.
THREADHOPPING: I would prefer no threadhopping for logs, but it's fine for text threads, just try to read the room please!
FOURTHWALLING: No, thank you :)
NOT INTERESTED IN: Nothing for Keita particularly.
SHIPPING
SEXUALITY: Mostly interested in men, but could be interested in women depending on the individual!
GENDER: Male and content with that.
FAVE: His love interest Thaniel is definitely top of his interest list, and other than the he doesn't have strong preferences.
NOT INTERESTED IN: He's not interested in people who are needlessly cruel, but because of his clairvoyance (see below) he can find the good in just about anybody.
APPEARANCE
Rather short, standing at a height of around 165cm (5'5") or 167cm if you include the heels on his boots. Keita is Japanese, but dyes his hair to a golden blond color, and is described often as being thin but solid. He was raised in a samurai family and has never quite let that physique go, but also has developed a rather unfortunate habit of hunching over his work table, which means his posture tends toward slouching. While Keita is almost 40, he looks much younger. He speaks flawless English with a slightly Northern accent, as well as both Mandarin and Cantonese from his time as an interpreter in the East India Company.
The art in the sidebar is by Tumblr user diamondcrystals. The original is here. While I am currently using Do Yoonshin from No Moral as a PB, this is a temporary measure for me! I need to have icons commissioned but haven't found an artist with open commissions yet. It's for this reason that this profile is full of art of men with cute butts in suits. In the meantime, please envision Keita as a diminutive but rather handsome Japanese man who wears tailored (or close to tailored) suits and has a nice lil ass to look at.
AURAL: Soft, noted as being fairly deep for his frame. To those with synesthesia (such as Thaniel), Keita's voice is the color of rose gold.
OLFACTORY: Lemon soap, oil, and copper
DEMEANOR: Polite and quiet, but not particularly shy or demure; Keita can be rather stern when need be, it's just that he tends toward politeness unless he's given a reason not to be.
ABILITIES & SKILLS
CLAIRVOYANCE
Keita is clairvoyant! There is a super quasi-scientific explanation for this in canon: light moves through something called "luminiferous ether," which is everywhere but is also undetectable by modern scientific methods. Along with conducting light waves, the luminiferous ether also responds to the electrical impulses of people's decisionmaking, since all thought is really just electricity in the brain. Keita is able to instinctively receive and interpret disturbances to the luminiferous ether in a way that allows him to predict every possible outcome of every possible decision up until the point that decision is made.
Or, the less pseudoscientific version is, he can see the outcomes of all the decisions he or anybody around him is going to make, much like going through a video game decision tree where certain endings depend on certain choices being made earlier in the tree. He "remembers" near-future events more clearly, while distant-future events are fuzzier like old memories. As soon as a decision is made, all the branches of that decision that are no longer possible vanish from his memory and he forgets them entirely.
The way this manifests for Keita is that, for example, there's a song he knows how to play on the piano only because there's a possible future where he asks Thaniel to buy the sheet music for him; however, when Thaniel forgets to buy the sheet music, Keita immediately forgets how to play the song. Similarly, he speaks fluent English with a Lincolnshire accent only because he spends so much time around Thaniel in the future; however, when faced with decisions that might ruin Keita and thaniel's relationship, Keita is no longer able to speak fluently in english.
ABOUT
Keita Mōri (surname Mōri, first name Keita) is a watchmaker living on Filigree Street in the Knightsbridge neighborhood of London. He is also a clairvoyant, with the ability to "remember" every possible future that could arise from a decision, at least until the decision is made. He builds clockwork animals, octopi and fireflies, and smells like lemon soap.PERSONALITY
Much of Keita's life can be defined by two words: "loneliness" and "manipulation."
Keita is lonely. Some of it has to do with his family; he was born a bastard child into a high-ranking samurai family, which meant that he was alternately either ignored or abused by various family members. There was no one in his family that he could truly trust or rely on; the higher-up members of the family couldn't and wouldn't interact with him, but he held too high a position in the family to spend much time rubbing elbows with the serving staff, either. Add to that his clairvoyance and his predilection towards playing with clockwork and learning English, and Keita was a veritable outcast among his peers in Hagi Castle.
His clairvoyance also makes it difficult for him to form close relationships with people outside his family, even after he escapes from under their thumb and moves to England in the 1880s. He can see every possible outcome of every possible decision that any person might make, and the noise of it filling his head is enough to put him off spending too much time with people—not to mention that he constantly feels as though he's manipulating the people around him, no matter how hard he tries not to.
Speaking of manipulation, though, Keita is quite good at it. Since he was a child, he has been engineering the outcomes that would allow him to leave Hagi Castle and the Mōri clan, manipulating both people and circumstances to achieve those goals. For much of his early life these orchestrations are fairly minor, but as an adult they become more serious: Keita is able to play with the strings of fate to kill people, or to threaten them, to make sure that they're in the right place at the right time for his goals to be achieved. Although Keita is never cruel without reason, he is extremely determined and also very willing to do whatever it takes to achieve the things he wants, with one exception: Thaniel.
HISTORY
Keita was born in June of 1845, a bastard child of the head of the Mōri clan of samurai at Hagi Castle. Since then, he has existed in the unique position of being simultaneously very powerful and very weak—powerful by virtue of his family's name, but weak by virtue of his bastardry. As he grew, he was treated varying shades of poorly by varying members of the family, ranging from being ignored entirely to being treated as a punching bag by the higher-ranking members of the peerage. But Keita did have one secret that no one was ever able to beat out of him: his clairvoyance, his ability to read the waves in the ether generated by the intent to do something. This ability allows Keita to trace every decision to its conclusion, to see the results of every choice before it's made and therefore to influence the outcome, which meant that even while he was being abused by the family around him, he was biding his time and making the choices that would eventually free him from their grasps.
In 1857, at age 12, Keita takes a job as an interpreter for the East India Company in Hong Kong, putting himself aboard a ship traveling the Pearl River. This placed him square in the middle of the Second Opium War and, more specifically, the Second Battle of Canton in 1857. When the ship he's on is shelled and sinks, Keita takes the opportunity to engineer a disabling accident for the man for whom he's interpreting, Merrick Tremayne, which changes the course of his life and enables several of the key things that happen to Tremayne during the events of The Bedlam Stacks (another Natasha Pulley book). Then Keita returns to Japan and to the family that doesn't want him.
For the next 14 years, Keita haunts the halls of his family home at Hagi Castle, putting together clockwork and "learning" fluent English. Finally, in 1871, when Keita is 26, foreign minister Itō Hirobumi pays a visit to Hagi Castle in an attempt to talk Keita's cousin, the lord of the castle, into appearing at court before Emperor Mutsuhito. Despite having sworn an oath of fealty to the young Emperor, there is, of course, no way that the proud Lord Mōri would ever actually give up his own seat of power and dedicate his sword to the service of the throne. With Keita's help, Itō is able to put together a plan that, once enacted, will essentially force Lord Mōri to give in to the Emperor's wishes. Keita is aware that once the plan is enacted, so long as his cousin lives, he will never be free of the Mōri clan—so he engineers his cousin's death under the collapse a weakened section of the castle wall, triggered by the footsteps of a cat. This becomes the catalyst for Keita's departure from Hagi Castle and his conscription into the civil service under Itō. He joins with a warning that he will only be able to serve under Itō for ten years before he boards a ship to England, because he has someone in England he needs to meet.
Keita serves his ten years under Itō, but when the time comes, Itō doesn't believe that Keita will really leave. In fact, he forbids Keita from doing so, even going so far as to provide his photograph to the harbormasters of Japan to ensure he doesn't get on any ships to England. Of course, Keita has been aware of and planning for this eventuality for the entire decade of his service, so it becomes only a matter of convincing Itō. Keita reveals his clairvoyance to Itō, along with the fact that he has been secretly disposing of every assassin sent against Itō for the last several years; of course, he has never actually murdered anyone with his own two hands, but he has been very careful about making choices that allow those people to be in the wrong place at the right time. Up to and including the last of them, who would have died under a falling pear tree outside the Rokumeikan if Itō hadn't given chause and caused the would-be assassin to pause a few steps short. Once he has Itō convinced that his clairvoyance is real, Keita makes one last threat: he informs Itō that Itō's wife has a deadly and as yet undiscovered allergy to bees. Itō correctly interprets this as Keita's quiet way of threatening Itō and his family, and chooses to throw him out of Japan instead, sending him to England on a ship just like Keita wanted.
It's in England that Keita meets Thaniel Templeton. Or maybe it was in Japan that he met Thaniel for the first time, and their meeting in England is more like the first step on the path home. At any rate, this is the man for whom Keita has engineered his entire life: a telegraphist at the Home Office in London who gets himself somehow caught up in a Clan na Gael terrorist plot. Keita saves him from a bombing with a clever bit of clockwork and from there, it's a matter of the two men growing slowly closer as Thaniel investigates Keita and Keita falls and stays in love with Thaniel.
But Keita can only see all the possible futures; he has no way to know which one will come true until the moment the choice is made. So when Thaniel meets and starts to fall for Grace Carrow, Keita must choose to let Thaniel go.
clairvoyance opt-in!
This means that he may occasionally pre-empt things that other characters plan to do, or may answer a question that they think about asking but don't actually ask out loud. However! I have zero intention of god-modding, which is why I would love if people opt in or opt out of his powers when the CR starts to develop.
OPTING IN: I'm more than happy to hard carry the clairvoyance experience! For the most part, this will just be Keita slightly predicting things that a character might reasonably do (with input from the player, of course) and/or responding to things that the character thinks in brackets but doesn't necessarily say out loud. If there's something in particular that you want Keita to do or react to, this might also involve a player writing a bit into a tag that lets me know what Keita should react to before it's said or done.
OPTING OUT: While Keita's actual clairvoyance will remain unchanged (he can't turn it off, it's ~scientific), I as a player will totally avoid all mention of predicting the future, and Keita won't pre-react to anything said or done by characters who opt out of his powers.
Please just go ahead and leave a comment using the below code letting me know if you want to opt in to Keita's occasional clairvoyance and what you'd like him to be able to pick up! And if you have any questions just let me know, I'm happy to talk at length about this stupid man!
octopus opt-in!