Name: Kennosuke Tachibana
Nickname/s: Most people call him Ken for convenience
Species: Vampire (Made)
Age: 91
Gender: Male
Hometown: Kyoto, Japan; his (fake) identification says he's from London
Current Residence: Bracken House
Studying: Joint Honors in Mechanical Engineering and Architecture; Kennosuke is in his last year of undergraduate study.
Employment: Bartender at Calypso Nights
Family: Ichijo Yorihiko (father) and Komeya Kaneko (mother). Both are long dead
Friends: Ken enjoys a large circle of acquaintances rather than friends
Relationship: None/Open
Player: Lee
Contact Email: manic.elation@gmail.com
Model: Johnny Tri Ngyuen
Credit: Asian Fanatics
Background
According to Commonwealth records, Kennosuke Tachibana is a twenty-three-year-old engineering student born and raised in the London suburbs. He completed his compulsory education in the area before going on to Sixth Form and eventually the University of Reading.
In reality, Kennosuke Tanchibana was born Ichijo Kunihiko in late 1916, the only surviving child born to an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army and an heiress to a small banking fortune. The family was well-off thanks largely to his mother's background and he had a happy childhood considering the time and place of his birth. Young Kennosuke was interested in mechanical things from an early age and liked nothing better than to take objects apart and then (attempt to) put them back together again. He would have liked to pursue engineering and construction at the university level, but his career path had been planned for him practically at birth - he was expected to attend military academies followed by service in the Imperial Army.
At the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, Kennosuke excelled above and beyond expectations; the once light-hearted boy buckled down and graduated at the top of his class in 1938. During a short period of leave before his first assignment, one of his father's old friends treated the young man to a trip to one of Kyoto's hanamachi (geisha quarters) as a celebration marking his new commission. It was there he became acquainted with a geisha by the name of Kumizuru. Almost instantly, he was smitten with her and spent the rest of his time off in the hanamachi. Kumizuru seemed to welcome his attentions -- Ken was young, not bad looking, and had money to throw around. But he couldn't pursue her as much as he would have liked. In 1938, World War II was brewing and Japan had already engaged Chinese and Russians forces on the mainland. In the coming years, ambitious Kennosuke would spend much of his time deployed outside the country, but when he got leave, he could usually found in the same place -- with Kumizuru. They became lovers in 1940; meeting for illicit trysts when he was in town became the norm since he wasn't officially her patron.
From the beginning, Ken noticed minor but odd things about their encounters. First and foremost, Kumizuru seemed to like biting during the act and often drew blood in amounts that would have alarmed him had he not been hopeless infatuated with her. Sometimes he would recall images of women with molten silver eyes -- bad dreams, she said, and he took her at her word. By 1943, he had seen action in Guadalcanal and Burma before he got what he assumed would be his final chunk of leave time. Kennosuke returned to Kyoto to find the hanimachi closed. Nonetheless, Kumizuru had left instructions to meet her at her estate in the Akaishi Mountains; she had left the old capitol to escape possible Allied boming. He joined her there and, in the eyes of the human authorities, subsequently seemed to disappear into thin air.
In reality, Kumizuru turned him into a vampire almost immediately after he arrived. Ken spent the next two years honing his new skills while they waited out the war. He also learned a bit about Kumizuru -- namely that she was four hundred years old and a vampire of the Taite line. But to this day, she's never told him exactly why she turned him into a vampire. The only thing she'll say on the subject is, "Everyone dies one way or another."
After the American occupation of Japan ended, Kennosuke came out of hiding and located his mother, who had not only survived the war but managed to hold on to most of the family's assets; she was overjoyed to see that he wasn't dead (at least not due to the war), though Kaneko died herself not too long after they were reunited. After his mother's death, he put most of his remaining wealth in the hands of investors and spent the next few decades travelling. Without the responsibilities and expectations of his family, the military, and society in general to guide his course, his felt oddly rudderless doing what he wanted when wanted to. But soon the alien feeling of drifting wore off and he began to enjoy seeing, doing, and learning new things. Typically he'd stay somewhere he liked for awhile, maybe find a job, then move on. He spent the much of 1960s and 1970s in southeast Asia, hitting coastal and delta areas outside cities like Saigon, Manila, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. By the 1980s he had moved on to North America by way of Hawai'i and eventually to Europe.
The 1990s found him living in London under alias Jun Konoe. It was there that Chiyo, another geisha he had known his wartime hanamachi days, arrived on his doorstep to tell him Kumizuru had been attacked (seriously but not quite fatally) in Vancouver, Canada. Hunters, whom Ken had heard of but had yet to come across himself, were responsible. Chiyo put him touch with some Vigilantes, one of many loosely allied pansupernatural groups formed to find and wipe out Hunters. He eagerly joined them and the next ten years he spent as part of a North American vigilante group were gory ones. Some time later he found the Hunter cell responsible for attacking Kumizuru; it was based in Quebec, headed by a man Bruno Grenier. Kennosuke foolishly decided the best form of reprisal for Kumizuru would be to find Grenier's wife (a woman, as he found out, named Lily) and forcibly turn her into a vampire, since it would hurt Grenier far more than mere death ever would. The act turned his life, not to mention those of his group, into a nightmare. Several Hunter cells focused on Ken's group and there were heavy losses on both sides. The survivors of Ken's group decided to scatter.
Kennosuke returned to England worn out with wrangling with Hunters and not a little bit guilt-ridden concerning Lily Grenier. In an effort to live a more peaceful life, he decided to study the disciplines that caught his interest as a child - engineering and construction. He selected the University of Reading due to its rather low-key supernatural population. Almost four mundane years passed as he kept at his studies, got a job at Calypso Nights, and generally enjoyed college life in a way he couldn't during his first round of higher education. Freshers' Week of 2007 brought a new crop of students and the suspicious murders of two fellow vampires and a shapeshifter. He's been subtly putting out his feelers in Reading's supernatural for info and, just in case it is Hunters, Vigilantes as well.
Physical Apperance
Ken appears to be a normal-looking young Asian man. He's kind of rangy-looking and has sharp facial features, but he's not a bad-looking ninety-one year old kid. Overall, he's tidy-looking in every sense of the word. Though lean, his build is more accurately described as trim rather than scrawny as he is very obviously athletically inclined. Likewise, his jet black hair is buzzed into a crew cut and he sports a neat circle goatee. He has brown eyes that turn molten gold when he feeds. His skin tone is the dusky tan color that that often comes in tandem with dark hair and eyes; if he hasn't fed for awhile, his complexion often starts to take on sallow, sickly-looking undertones. Standing at six feet even, Kennosuke was quite tall for his day and still is by modern standards.
Ken has no tattoos or piercings to speak of. But having lived a fairly violent life both as a human and a vampire, he has numerous scars to show for it. Faint knick-like scars are scattered across the backs of his hands, old shallow defensive wounds from grappling with a US Marine armed with a KA-BAR knife back in Guadalcanal. Likewise, he came home from Burma with some burns and flesh wounds after getting peppered with shrapnel; scars mar the right side of his rib cage and bits of metal are still working themselves out over sixty years later. He also has numerous pairs of healed puncture wounds that mark his wrists, the crook of his arms, and area around his neck and collarbone; those are result of Kumizuru's feedings. Those in particular have made others mistake him for a regular blood donor or a broken human in the past – in all fairness, that conclusion isn't too far off the mark. His most recent injury left him with a raised, jagged scar located over his left shoulder; a Hunter stabbed him with a stake and it almost cost Ken his left arm.
Ken typically dresses like a typical college student: jeans and tanks or tees with a jacket or hoodie for cold weather. The only difference is that the tidiness that pervades his general appearance carries over to his clothing - his clothes tend to look too meticulously fastidious to be completely casual. Nonetheless, he dresses trendier for work.
Personality
There are two main aspects of Kennosuke's personality. Most people know him as the bartender: laid-black with an easy, playful sense of humor and willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Despite the hyperactive club atmosphere of Calypso Nights, after he's served up a round or two he'll probably know your name, your face, and your favorite drink thereafter. He's the type who works hard and plays harder, meeting life head-on. His buoyant exuberance spills out from his job into his athletic and academic efforts, and it can be infectious. It makes him likeable, not to mention popular with girls. On the other hand, if you ever come face-to-face with Kennosuke the vampire, you'll see flickers of who and what he was in his mortal days – intensely driven, possessed of predator's tireless patience, and always with his eye on the prize.
His 'public' persona isn't all an act, per se, since his temperament has mellowed out considerably since his early days. But he's also aware you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Likewise, he's learned that presenting yourself as innocuous rather than threatening often gives you the upper hand. All in all, it makes you wonder who the real Ken is.
The truth is that it's both; as he closes in on his first century, the lively persona freed by transformation into a vampire is starting to fuse with the soldier/Vigilante he once was. The results of the merge between the quick-thinking predator with a refined survival instincts and the ever-adaptable wanderer are varied. Sometimes it forms obvious traits; his natural optimistic nature fusing with his determined drive makes for the formidable combination you might expect. There's others you might not see coming; for example, with all that smoldering intensity he exudes while on the prowl, you'll be just about to tell him lighten up when he'll drop some droll comment accompanied by wry grin a mile wide.
Talents & Weaknesses
Kennosuke is a made vampire. He's not particularly old as far as vampires go, but he is closing in on the hurdle of the one hundred year-mark. So he's as strong, fast, and resilient with the finely-tuned senses as one would expect of a vampire his age. He also has the mental abilities common amongst his species. He can capture humans with his gaze and bespell them fairly efficiently; he can alter memories of weak-minded, intoxicated, or otherwise incapacitated subjects. If all else fails, he can simply render the bespelled unconscious, but he dislikes the risk of putting others under and making them lose time with no explanation. Lastly, Ken can communicate with others of his kind by means of telepathy.
On the other hand, being a vampire is a double-edged sword at times. Due to his age, his powers aren't foolproof. He finds it particularly difficult to bespell other preternatural types and there are times when his abilities simply won't work against the psyche of a particularly stable, capable human. More worrisome is the fact that this vampiric nature sometimes hinders his efforts to fit into human society. He is constantly making excuses for the idiosyncrasies people notice about him - for example, no one has ever seen him sit down and eat anything. The truth is he doesn't eat solid foods because they aren't nutritious and tend to make him violently ill; he's still young enough to take liquids but unless it's blood he's drinking, he doesn't benefit from them. But he can't tell people the truth without being labeled as crazy or revealing his true nature, so he's quite dependent on little white lies. Insofar he's yet to get caught up in the untruths but, as the saying goes, there's a first for everything.
Lucky for him, most of the old wives' tales about vampires don't apply; he's fine in sunlight, and he'd burst out laughing if you whipped out garlic or tried to douse him in holy water. He'd shut right up if you were brandishing a wooden stake or a flaming torch, however.
Ken has little problem dealing with witches, shapeshifters, and made vampires like himself. He's usually polite and eager to work out a mutually beneficial relationship. He tends to be uncharacteristically cagey around born vampires, however. Given their lineage abilities he feels he's at a deficit in comparison, so he's apt to deal with them in a cool manner tinged with suspicion and maybe even a little jealousy concerning their inborn powers. Regular humans present an issue as well. Despite his instinct for self-preservation, Kennosuke dislikes taking advantage of humans and often feels compelled to protect them should they get in the middle of the preternatural crossfire. It's likely he's trying to atone for striking at Lily Grenier by trying to keep other bystanders safe.
Kennosuke spent many years travelling and given his adaptive, curious nature he picked up a number of talents along the way. He's the classic "...jack-of-trades, but master of none." He often found himself working in the capacity of a general laborer or handyman, so he's a natural for building, fixing, and occasionally jury-rigging things: installing appliances, oiling up squeaky door hinges, and tuning up beater cars are right up his alley. His current studies in the fields of engineering and architecture bolster his abilities in this area. The other skill of note he acquired during his nomadic phase is bartending, which he picked up Vietnam during the late 1960s. He can mix practically any drink under the sun.
Over the past eighty years or so, he developed a talent for picking up languages. Most of them he first encountered during his career in the Imperial Army and then later expanded upon during his travels. That said, Ken's mother tongue is, naturally, Japanese but given the political climate of his youth, he studied English and German to fluency. In particular, he speaks English colloquially but his accent is hard to pin down; he initially studied standard British English, but ended up perfecting his command of the spoken language amongst the American troops stationed in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Later down the line he gained a working knowledge (of varying degrees) in Russian, Cantonese, Malay, Burmese, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, and Quebec French. However, his linguistic talents are very much geared to speaking rather than writing; he's okay when it comes to kanji and kana or the Latin alphabet, but where languages that don't use those scripts are concerned, his writing skill tends to be almost non-existent.
His enrollment Reading is his second round of university-level education, thus Kennosuke is rediscovering his academic strengths and weaknesses. He has a natural aptitude for maths and sciences and is able to figure out calculations and equations easily. Despite his aforementioned gift for languages, his reading and writing abilities are ordinary – competent but nothing outstanding. The arts tend to leave him scratching his head; he concedes that they're 'pretty' but doesn't really 'get' them beyond, say, analyzing them for elegance of design. Paradoxically, he's not a bad sketch artist but this skill is geared more towards drafting blueprints and the like than anything else. Complimenting his academics are his efforts on the athletic field. He's rather in love with the game of football and enjoys both watching and playing the game; as for the latter, he's a versatile player fit for the role of deep-lying forward or attacking midfielder. Off the pitch, Ken has studied martial arts since he was a young boy – judo and shotokan karate are his preferred forms of unarmed combat. He's also adept at the sword-based disciplines of iaido and kenjutsu, which he learned from his father. Kennosuke still has his father's daisho, and used them extensively during his Vigilante period.
