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Profile: Shinneri Tokiko

Gender: Male
Age: 379
Hair: White/silver, short, wispy
Eyes: Deep blue, but locked in tight squint most of the time. Wears half-moon glasses when masquerading as an intellectual
Stature: Slim male, pigeon-chested
Costume: Suit; grey turtleneck sweater and trousers; grey kimono with elaborate white coat (Tassels around neck, turret-like edges, large stylised eye in black on back); festival costume with white kitsune mask, ribboned tambourine and whistle
Birthday: 16/2/1628 – Aquarius, Dragon
Location: Shinto temple, downtown Beroborough
Full Physical Description: Shinneri has squinted eyes with only eyelashes showing. When opened, they are still narrow, but small royal-blue irises and tiny pupils can be seen. He has pale skin, a small sloped nose with turned-up tip, a small chin, small pointed ears, very thin white eyebrows, and wispy short silver hair that gets in his eyes, getting to its longest at the back. His mouth is long and curved into a grin (described as a ‘corpse-grin’ by Hyouden, head of the Tokikos). He has a very slender body, and is slightly taller than average. Shinneri has very elegant hands, with a black Matsunen tattoo on his left wrist. His eyes glow bright blue when using an ability.
Full Kitsune Description: As a fox, Shinneri is small/medium-sized and silver-white, with similar eyes and mouth to his human form. He is about three feet tall. Shinneri is sleek, and has three tails.
Personality: Cheeky, mischievous, slightly malicious, but otherwise good-hearted
Likes: kitsune udon (a lot), red sweet beans, dressing up, pranks and tricks, any big festival or celebration, cats
Dislikes: people who take his tricks and life in general too seriously, dogs
Name: Shinneri means “Annoying Persistance”, while ‘Shin’ can mean “new”, “thin” or “faithful”. He was named by Hyouden under oath to Senzai, who in his turn claimed to have received the name from the Lady herself.
Abilities: Kitsune-bi, time-stop – 60 mins, human form, hypnotise small creatures
Family: Chiyo Tokiko (mother) and Issei Tokiko (father), no siblings, Jouon Tokiko (uncle), Hyouden (great-something) and Senzai (great-great-great-great-great-something)

History:
Shinneri was born in1628 in the Tokiko realm. The twelfth (grey) generation of the Matsunen, at the mere age of three he was presented with his first grey robe and his white coat by Hyouden. His father, Issei, primarily cared for Shin, and along with Hyouden taught the boy quite conflicting views of the world – Hyouden taught obedience while Issei encouraged independent thought.
Because the other side of the Matsunen was still catching up, Shin did not have a bride. He remained oblivious to his fate until the age of 267, when he overheard a conversation between Hyouden and Issei, mainly about the whereabouts of Issei’s brother (and the ‘destined’ father of Shin’s hypothetical bride) Jouon. Horrified, Shin spent another month paralysed with terror.
He recovered from this and launched into a burning rage, one night taking all the family portraits from the portrait gallery and piling them in the snow, setting them alight. Issei witnessed this, and advised Shin to keep his head down. Nevertheless, Shin was punished by Hyouden, isolated from the rest of the Tokikos in a nightmarish, silent, dark room for a year.
Seventy years passed with little change – time passes strangely in the Tokiko realm and Jouon was still to be located. One night, Issei pulled Shin out into the snow, taking him to the edge of the realm and opening a portal to the real world (he asked Shiro, Hyouden’s wife with whom Issei had an on-going sexual relationship, to open it for him). It opened above a park in Kyoto, and Shin saw his first glimpse of changing seasons; it was autumn there. Issei pushed him from the portal and it closed after him, trapping Shin as a Genko (‘Black fox’ – one who lives outside the realms. The opposite is a Byako, ‘white fox’).
After a few days of roaming the streets, Shin did the one thing that had proved impossible so far – he found Jouon, or more, Jouon found him. The kitsune, going as ‘Johnny’, had been living in poverty in several cities for the last four hundred years, and was hooked on cocaine when Shin met him. Shin lived in Jouon’s care for a year before his uncle urged him to move on, for the Tokikos had tracked them down. He purchased tickets for Shin, sending him by train to Tokyo and then on, by plane, to London.
Jouon was later captured by the Tokikos and found to be sterile, upon which he was tortured, clothed in a black Matsunen robe and locked in the isolation room. Issei had attacked his own fertility with a sharp rock in the meantime, and the subsequent surgery to save him left him, too, infertile. Another isolation room and black robe was found for him, and the search continued for Shin.
For a long time, Shin wandered aimlessly around London, exploring his new world. On the advice of his uncle, however, he took a train to a small town, Beroborough, and installed himself there in the eccentric Shinto believer Ichigo Kajuji’s house as a kami kitsune.

During the story:
Shin runs away from Kajuji in a hissy fit after staying in his fox form for many, many years, and turns up at Akiru’s house stark naked. He’s given some clothes and proceeds to wreak havoc, especially with Shigure, who finds him trespassing on his property and attacks him. They chase each other over the Beroborough rooftops, and at one stage bounce off the roof of Hannah Jones. Shigure earns the now-permanent nickname ‘Bakako’ from Shin during this. The fight leaves Shin ‘drowned’ but not dead, and he returns the next night with a sword and his Matsunen robes (the grey under-robe and white coat he wears in all of the pictures).
They fight again. Shin reveals his Tokiko powers here, slowing down and stopping time to hamstring Shigure (among other things) and start it up again so that the kitsune falls onto his knees in front of Shin (his ‘proper place’). A scramble and a rain-storm later, and Shigure slices open Shin’s stomach and drops him off a building. He manages to survive this and start to stagger across a road…
To be hit by Hannah’s car. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…
Shigure is horrified (and frightened that Shin is dead – he has a fear of anything dead, associated with death and dying) and springs down to help, pulling Shin out, miraculously still alive. He’s shoved into Hannah’s mini’s boot, and taken home by her, where he slowly recovers.
But this isn’t even the first part of his story over yet!
Hannah had scheduled a trip to the beach on her paid holiday, and Shin, believing that he is an inconvenience (despite having one arm and all his ribs shattered…), won’t let her stay home to take care of him. Oh no. He goes with her to this deserted, gritty, salty, cold English beach in the middle of winter. Despite ‘not really’ liking her, he recognises how lonely she is and follows his instincts. At the end of the first night (they are spending three days there, staying in a small holiday house/shack) they make love. Not a problem, really, except that Shin has hardly even received an elementary school education on sex, essentially knowing only the taboos of kitsune relationships with humans. And he forgets them in the spur of the moment, anyway. He has no idea what’s going on, although he feels that this is the ‘only way to save her’, and has a bloody marvellous time. It’s only the next morning that he realises that 1. he just broke a major kitsune law, and 2. Hyouden is likely to skin him alive for it.
Horrified, he ends up running away but only makes it a few hundred meters down the beach before he has a massive mental breakdown, leaving him unable to move. Dying of his anguish (kitsune do, you know – they die of feelings. Pain counts as a feeling, that’s why there’s so many swords – they have more potential to hurt than a gun), he emits what Shigure calls ‘life waves’ – these are kind of a signal emitted by a dying kitsune to those within a few hundred kilometres, the first an hour before death, the second half an hour, and then one every ten minutes to the last ten minutes, where there’s one every minute, getting stronger every time. These are received by Shigure, Akiru (main character) and Kemuri (Akiru’s brother), and they rush to work out the problem.
Akiru and Kemuri don’t find Shin, they find a distraught Hannah instead, searching for him, and Shigure orders them to take her back to the house. He goes on to find Shin, and has the whole thing explained to him. He helps Shin back to the house, and Hannah and the kitsune make up.
Oh ho, but our three heroes weren’t the only ones to feel those life waves. The Tokikos turn up a few hours after, and drag Shin back to the realm for punishment. Given that Jouon has been found sterile, Shin is to be paired with his mother to achieve the last and all-powerful generation of pure-blooded Tokikos. Shigure, Akiru and Kemuri follow through the portal and generally wreck the place. Issei and Jouon are freed by Shigure, while Akiru and Kemuri somehow manage to awaken the four-thousand-year-old Senzai, who holds all power of the Tokikos but has been in a kind of coma for around 900 years.
Now, Senzai was the one who predicted Shin’s birth 900 years prior to it, as well as Issei, Jouon and Chiyo’s births before him. He even named them, and foresaw their genders and appearances, especially Shin’s, who he says is the ‘One’ who will overthrow Hyouden. Hyouden himself is terrified of Senzai, who was already creepy and ancient when he was just a tyke, and thus frightened of Shin because the latter bears such a resemblance to Senzai. You can imagine Hyouden’s shock when Senzai shuffles into the light (Hyouden actually locked him in a drawer with knock-out gas incense sticks) and demands to see his One (Senzai speaks very weirdly, addressing everyone as ‘one’. A particularly confusing excerpt: “One knows, one does, that there will come a day when one will be born who is as one who’s birth is lost in time immemorial, and that one will have all that that one desires in return for one’s real destiny... and that one will be the one that brings an end to one’s reign, in all true time… This is so, for the Lady told Sansenzai that it is so. And the Lady watches one and all through every moment of the past and future.” ‘Sansenzai’ is Senzai, he was only three-thousand then, and now calls himself ‘Shisenzai’ to mark that he is four-thousand). Shin is saved through this intervention, and also Shigure’s (very serious) threats to neuter him there and then if anyone so much as touches him. They take him back home. End of story?

In short, no.

There are three more short stories with Shin – one where he is forced to reveal his human form to Kajuji, who hasn’t seen it, and moves in with Hannah, another where, at one point in their relationship, both Hannah and Shin come to the conclusion that each is cheating on the other, leading to an unresolved tension for a very long time, and in the third story, Hannah gets pregnant. They have several arguments over this: Hannah wants to keep her baby while Shin literally begs her to have an abortion, as he can’t deal with both the gravity of the situation and the possible genetic condition of the child. They both know Fubuki’s son, who is half-kitsune and suffering excruciating pain from genetic mutations, from lung disease to vomiting blood, even bleeding from his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, under his nails and just about every other orifice when he exercises too much. And Fubuki is perfectly healthy, whereas Shin is inbred and weak. This situation is resolved when Hannah has a miscarriage, but this in itself is a heavy cross to bear…
He also participates in many other stories, since Foxglove is a character-based serial.
I think that’s it. We’ll finish with some…

Trivia:
- Shin likes cats. Really likes cats. He feeds strays in the alley behind his flat.
- He loves to sing, especially Santana and complicated theme songs from TV. However, he still thinks that ‘feat.’ is a first name.
- Instead of pubic hair, he has white fluffy down. And he’s got a fox’s-… err, it’s never explicitly stated, but it is implied. Hannah doesn’t seem to mind, somehow. *shrug* A freak for a freak, I suppose.
- He swears with the word ‘Kitsuke’ (pronounced ‘Kit-sook’), and also barks with that sound when in fox form. For stronger expletives, he uses ‘dang’ or ‘darn’. That’s because he’s a wuss.
- Not really trivia, but I think he’s cute in a ‘Yay! Kitties!’ kind of way. My brother thinks he’s disturbing. I had a Sims2 character of him, he had a flower shop. He was never touched by any other playable sim other than my own. This is weird, since my mother’s sims (‘Barbie’ and ‘Ken’. Urg.) would bonk anything that moved. Both romance sims… (last time I checked, Ken was dead, Barbie had six kids, all girls, and three generations of women were all sleeping with the poor mechanic. Or not poor, if you consider it, but he was being held as a kind of sex slave in their house) they even got crankiness-central Shigure’s virginity, which was… very weird. I deleted him and remade him. But, despite this, they didn’t come near Shin. I don’t know whether to consider that an insult or not. Well, I think my mother doesn’t like him, either…

Shigure got this kind of rivalry going with a kid in the neighbourhood (which was fairly creepy, but...), used the SimVac on the poor guy, and then did the 'gross out' irritate command. I laughed myself right out of my chair ^.^
And a gay couple (fanfiction characters... so you haven't met them) started hitting on my brother's straight male sim. Seriously, they dream about him and discuss how hot he is over dinner. It's... kind of scary, since he's the ugliest sim in the whole place. And...
Just no.



Yes... but in order to keep with the legend, they have to be hundreds of years old. I already have several young ones (21, 21, 23 and 14 respectively) and the problem is that according the the rules of the universe, those kitsune are so weak it's disgusting. And I can't give everyone superultradestinedpowers, so... they have to be old. In Shin's case, he lived in the Tokiko realm, which is a different world, and time moves... differently there. A lot of them are bored. Hell, a fair few just gave up and went to sleep. But I can't not make some of them old, because of my own rules.
Damn alternate universes.
I suppose, since they're adapted to living longer, they have less of that problem. I mean, most of them find just watching stuff exciting. Like... bricks. Shigure loves filling out tax forms. *shrug* He's weird like that, and facinated by calculators. On the personality side of things, most of them are assholes. Shin is innocent enough to deflect a lot of this, but he's still an a*****e. Most people are, anyway.



It's not that short a timespan. I'm just condensing it. Since, rather than a single novel, it's a character based serial, the events are spread out a bit more. In the last few things (his whole lifey thing), those are all separate occasions...
I'm not saying it's not a lot. It's just not... over.



I can understand that. 3nodding But I refuse to be called weeaboo! scream Not only is that the most inane, pointless word ever created, I am not the kind that lurks around forums with Mary-Sue copies of well-known characters screaming to be acknowledged! I must complain that basically only the names are like that, to keep the authenticity. You can't say 'Japanese creature' and then call it... Jones or something.

^.^ Please ignore the above short rant. I just don't like being compared to those crazy freaks.

Pbbt, that's fine. Don't apologize, and some of the stuff you explained did make sense. Although in my mind, weeaboo =/= crappy Mary Sue anime fanfiction authors, just Japanophile stuff in general. Although there's a big difference from having a healthy interest in Japan than LOLZ KAWAII DESUUUUUUU! ^___^, so I do give you that.