Characteristic

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6

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2

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26

19

11

2

0

5

5

10

5

5

15

10

15

5

5

5

10

0

1

1

1

1

1

Shinji Miromoto did not plan on becoming an anime villain cliché. In fact, he wanted to be a pilot. Or a mechanic. Or maybe an architect. To be honest, it really didn’t matter. What DID matter was that none of these dreams included him cackling malignantly, wearing a charcoal grey uniform straight off of the bridge of a Star Destroyer, while the greater Tokyo metropolitan area burned in flames around him.

However, no one believed him.

You see, Shinji was an uber, whose power manifested itself quite tamely, in the middle of the night, in his 13th year. This, in and of itself, was not the reason his family and peers viewed his existence with suspicion; many in Japan were active ubers, and many had gone on to national or international fame, brining honor on their families for their heroic deeds. No, the issue that was so divisive about the eldest Miromoto scion was that his power allowed him to access Dark Energy: the very force that every magical girl sentai team seemed able to sense and associate with evil, deprivation, and in one extremely odd case, tentacle monsters.

After the 3rd time a devil hunter interrupted dinnertime to “slay the foul demon that dared intrude on our…oh, terribly sorry, have you seen an evil sorcerer around here somewhere”, Shinji’s parents insisted he stop doing whatever it was he was doing to attract such unwanted attention, and get a real hobby. As the only thing he could think that he was doing was breathing, or perhaps reading hentai manga, Shinji decided to get professional help.

The local Buddhist temple didn’t help. The Shinto shrine was a wash as well, as was the Daoist priest he found in the phone book. (He briefly considered tracking down a Catholic church of some kind, but figured they’d try to crucify him, or something.) At wits end, he finally realized that the only people who knew how to control this kind of thing seemed to be, well, villains. With that in mind, seeking out a mentor was surprisingly simple: watching the news for the latest villain to attempt to destroy Tokyo Tower was easy enough. After that, it was mainly an issue of tracking down said supervillian, not getting killed, and convincing him (or her, as this was the 21st century after all) to become his sensei.

After several embarrassing events, near-death experiences, and a firm reputation established as a complete weirdo, Shinji managed to gain an audience with the Ginshou, an upcoming villain whose last competent flunky managed to get himself incarcerated during a battle with the “Flower Petal Five”, or something like that. Shinji never really got the specifics, and Ginshou never really filled in the specifics. Regardless, Shinji pledged his loyal service to Ginshou (as long as it didn’t interfere too much with his schoolwork), in return for training in the Dark Arts.

As it turns out, Shinji’s mentor was not long for this world. While Shinji was able to make some progress over control of his powers, Ginshou became more and more obsessed with the discovery of the “Silver Queen”, who was some sort of being Ginshou claimed to have had a vision of. His plans for discovering this creature became more and more unhinged, and seemed to attract the kind of attention that Shinji knew entirely too well. Seeing the writing on the wall, Shinji began laying plans.

When Sparkling Mystic Princess Mia managed to hit Ginshou with a Purifying Heart Punch during their climactic battle over Yokohama harbor, Shinji was quietly photocopying the spellbooks and shredding the evidence. When the police arrived, Shinji was “found” along with 23 other junior high students, who Ginshou had kidnapped to power his Dark Soul Ascension Process. Whatever that was; Shinji was never quite sure, and suspected that neither did the G-man. Regardless, Ginshou, who turned out to be a 42-year old accountant from Hokkido, slipped into a coma and died soon after, never revealing the name of his sometimes-protégé who had assisted him in his criminal endeavors.

This process repeated itself over the next several years: Shinji would find himself a Dark Mentor, would study under them for some time while providing loyal minion service, only to watch as they undid all their carefully-laid plans in some foolish and unlikely scheme for power. In time, Shinji began to suspect that either people who used Dark Energy were inherently insane, or there was something about Dark Energy that made them such. This belief was confirmed by Red Witch Shiko, Shinji’s fourth Dark Mentor – she showed him several texts, when she wasn’t cackling on about her inevitable conquest over the Lovely Knights of Azuria, which discussed the nature of Dark Energy.

As it turned out, there were two main schools of thought on Dark Energy. One theory was that the energy in question is simply an element native to an alternate plane of existence. The name came from the idea that the energy native to that plane was easily controlled by the “darker” emotions: rage, anger, hatred, and so on. Thus, those with hatred in their hearts, as well as the magical or psychic means to access alternate dimensions, would naturally gravitate towards using Dark Energy in their rituals. The alternate theory was that the plane in which Dark Energy originated was quite easy to access, but the Energy itself caused malignant feelings in the users, thus driving such users insane even as they grow more skilled in the manipulation of its power.

Shinji never asked why Shiko got into using Dark Energy; at that point, he was once again at Kinko’s while the Dark Mistress got her Dark Arse handed to her by the aforementioned Lovely Knights. Still, in the now-familiar ‘prisoner’ debriefing with Tokyo’s Uber Response Squad #3, Shinji pondered this new information. He still had no desire to set fire to Tokyo, and yet he had been steeped in Dark Energy for well on three years; according to Shiko, she had been playing with it for only seven months before their encounter. Thus, he thought as he sipped coffee in the stationhouse, it seems as though Shiko was at least wrong in some specifics. (As an aside, his claim to being kidnapped repeatedly by various supervillians was met not with skepticism by the Tokyo PD, but with reserved understanding and light-natured kidding – it seems that some people are, in fact, villain magnets, and Shinji was able to claim to be one of them.)

Over the next two Dark Masters, Shinji put his theory to the test, delving more deeply into Dark Energy than he had before. And, while he confirmed that everyone ELSE was becoming unhinged in proportion to their use of Dark Energy, he seemed fine. In that, he realized what his power was: not to control Dark Energy, although he had that in moderation, but to be immune to its insanity-causing effects.

Unfortunately, the experiments done to confirm this immunity were not without their costs. As it turns out, his last Mentor had boasted of the quality of Shinji’s service and loyalty at that year’s Dark Congress. So, in addition to having several Dark Generals vie for his service, (which was actually quite flattering, in a creepy “I hope they don’t torture my parents as an incentive for me to join” sort of way) he had picked up what he had longed dreaded: a rival.

Fire-Fire Yuki was a Category 3 (personal vendetta against the forces of darkness), Power level 2 (could throw around cars and cut through plate steel), Power Source 4 (mystic artifact) Devil Hunter, at least according to the Shinji Scale of Metahuman Psychos. Her clever plan was to use a villain-magnet, such as what Shinji claimed to be, as a stalking horse, in an attempt to lure out villainy. Her theory was that such victims should be grateful for her protection, despite the fact that she was more destructive in her attempts to ‘save’ them than most villains ever were. (The traditional Dark Energy attack is to drain its victims of their life energy. In contrast, Fire-Fire Yuki’s traditional attack was to set her victim’s house on fire. Three guesses which one does less damage to property values.) The fact that Yuki was an arrogant ass, fully convinced of the righteousness of her cause, willing to do anything to advance said cause, and a bully to boot, didn’t help much. Shinji had caught her attention in his dramatic ‘escape’ from The Rotting Hell (actually quite nice, as lairs go: the ventilation he helped install took care of the smell), and decided that he needed her protection more than most. The results were unpleasant.

Everyone knew what happened; the news crew that showed up a third of the way through caught most of the fight. However, like many thing in Shinji’s life, it was depressingly anticlimactic. A stray fireball (the press would later call it “a near-miss”), a gas station already damaged by a mystic sword (a “noble blow that nearly felled the villain”) and a nearby high-tension power line (a “tragic accident”) resulted in one dead magic girl. Suddenly, it wasn’t funny any more. Shinji wasn’t the loyal flunky, or the humorous sidekick, or the constant victim, or the butt of the station houses’ jokes. He had been playing both sides for years, and now he was Uber Response Squad’s #3’s number one target.

He ran.

The resulting investigation ultimately cleared him of the murder of Yuki Nakamura: it was fairly easy to reconstruct exactly what had happened, and the magical girl community was curiously reserved in their hunt for the ‘black sorcerer’ who had defeated one of their own. However, where he had gained such power to fight off a magical girl had come under scrutiny, and his secret life was laid open in the press. Several mid-level officials resigned over the resulting scandal, and Uber Response Squad #3 was disbanded, their resources split amongst the other Response Squads. Shinji’s parents were disgraced, and had to move to Kyoto to get away from the press coverage.

Shinji was never found.

Shinji is an uber with the ability to manipulate Dark Energy. He also is immune to the long-term side effects of exposure to having Dark Energy course through one’s brain, the most common of which include paranoid schizophrenia and brain aneurysms. His actual power level, compared to most Dark Generals, is actually middling; it seems that his native immunity to Dark Energy inhibits his ability to channel such energy somewhat. Even as someone who has been controlling Dark Energy for almost five years, he is only now approaching the same level as one of his original mentors. For Shinji, this is fine: better the slow road to excellence, even in something such as this, than the quick route to insanity.

That being said, Shinji has been able to study a variety of techniques for controlling Dark Energy. One of his earlier instructors, Nega-Kumo (the Black Spider), showed him how to channel dark energy as though it were chi, empowering a sort of ‘dark Kempo’ style of fighting. Shinji has improved on this technique over the years, and has become a fundamental aspect of his fighting arsenal. Others showed him how to summon a small squad of shadow minions, to create pits of dark entanglement, and to step through the Shadow Dimension itself.

The most recent power that he applied is Dark Intelligence – the ability to summon the shade of one who has died violently and in torment near the practitioner. Such a death leaves a psychic imprint on the Dark Dimension – essentially, the practitioner is able to copy that imprint and carry it around with them in their mind, fueling it with dark energy to manifest the shade whenever they want to. It takes practice, though, and only recently has Shinji been able to recreate, at least temporarily, the body and mind of Yuki Nakamura. The irony of someone whose death in fighting against the forces of darkness essentially bound their mind to that same force has not been lost on Shinji.

Shinji is an unassuming Japanese boy in his late teens. His athletic frame, still honed from the kempo he practices daily, tends to be hidden with the baggy clothing he now prefers. His once-close-cropped hair has grown out slightly, but is still fairly short. He is also compulsively clean, a habit he picked up from his overbearing mother. On occasion he may adorn the tailored grey uniform and black trench coat of his Loyal Lieutenant days.