Ozukiro, the String-striking refugee

This character will be played on my third MC account, which is named CunningCowboy now

Character Name: Kar’Ozukiro

Race: Ca’liar, small build

Age: 38

Gender: Male

Character Description:

Ozukiro stands at a measly 5'3", roughly 1.6 meters. His fur is short, a dusty shade of brown with some grey-white stripes here and there. On his head, his hair a slightly-darker shade of brown, longer and usually kept tied back and falling loosely to his shoulders. His eyes are a contrasting golden yellow.

Due to the deep, painful scar on the back of the ca’liar’s left leg, he has a permanent -1 to Speed.

Character Occupation: Small fodder soldier and minstrel

Character Personality/Traits:

Kar’Ozukiro was a fearful young man during much of his service to the Empire, nervous, lacking charisma. He was always most comfortable being let be by others since many who did talk to him had little good to say to a little weakling like him, who life was worth so much less than others. With opportunity on the horizon, he hopes to start fresh, maybe become more confident in himself, make friends with people who won’t look down on him - only physically, anyway.

The ca’liar expresses himself best through his music, his one constant passion throughout his life. Even when times were rough as a rice farmer and in the military, he could always get people to smile and look at him in a more positive light when playing. To him, it felt easier to make others see things the way he does when he, quite literally, tugs on their emotional strings by tugging on his shamisen strings. He even has a decent singing voice, too.

Character Biography:

Ozukiro was born into a family of farmers with many siblings. He was the smallest and the weakest of them all. His parents already had 2 previous litters of children over the course of their lives. They would be the last. The family was a big one. With four previous litter’s worth of siblings, Ozukiro had 12 siblings. He was the smallest of his litter, but only the second-smallest of them all.

The family worked a farm, naturally, and all of the siblings helped while they were young. Since the village was occupied by the Empire, however, the older boys were all taken when they were old enough to fight in the civil war and trained to unit the land under the Emperor’s banners. Ozukiro spent his youth reaping and sowing rice less-efficiently than all of his siblings due to his pathetic size and endurance. Ozukiro didn’t even know some of his siblings, as they had grown and were taken to fight before he’d ever even been born and the girls would all grow up and move away with their lovers to get away from the farmland. He mostly became acquainted with his litter siblings.

The young Ozukiro was teased and picked on for his size often by his older, larger siblings, namely the family’s only large build, Daisuke. He would always tell him how he was so small, he wouldn’t last long in the war while he would grow up and become great generals under the Emperor’s command, bringing great honor to their family, then mom and dad would never need to be mere farmers anymore.

Ozukiro hated the teasing, but every family had its bickering. Some days it was this, others, the Daisuke and the others were trying to help Ozukiro train so he could be a great warrior like them one day. At the end of the day, they all still loved one another and had good childhoods. Ozukiro loved his brothers and sisters.

When the family wasn’t busy with the fields, mom and dad taught them to read and write like any other parents would. Ozukiro’s mother would play a harp for them to listen to most nights, too. As they grew up, many of the children inherited the musical tastes of their mother and would play a variety of instruments in their free time to the point where they were nearly a family band. Kar’Ozukiro played a shamisen, and he kept his instrument with him for the rest of his life.

From a young age, Kar’Ozukiro was raised praying to Kenyeo for good harvests and a bountiful, long life. As he’d grow older, he’d devote his worship time to the same God as his parents, praying to the ki-giver and promising to one day see more of the land that He had created for them to see.

However, when Ozukiro was still in his teens, the civil war ended. Ri’Shaka had reportedly been slain and a new enemy, the yokai, infested the land. Later on, General Kar’Ren had reigned in the Empire and become the new Emperor during this new time of strife. Ozukiro was taken and trained. He was needed now more than ever.

Occasionally, he was even made to spar with Daisuke. It was never much of a fight. The large build would annihilate the young Ozukiro many times with the smaller ca’liar leaving his older brother with mere bruises.

Young Ozukiro dreamed of a day when he might bring real honor to his family. He was so weak compared to the others, how could he possibly make mother and father proud when he could hardly keep up with the others?

With the help of some other small builds in the imperial army, Ozukiro started to focus more on his fleet of foot rather than sheer strength like his brothers. While older, stronger ca’liar would spar with bokken with him, they might take the larger shafts resembling yumi, kanabo, and odachi, but Ozukiro devoted his training to the katana and bo staff. One for cutting and bleeding, the other to compensate for his small size and break bones. With some years of training and culling various uprisings rebelling against the new Emperor, Ozukiro managed to survive.

He was no accomplished warrior, no, he was still a mere weakling compared to the other troops, but he managed to keep enemies at bay in the heat of battle while his larger soldier friends would flank and kill rebels. Ozukiro was a survivor. He fought with his feet, dancing around his problems, avoiding what he could and fleeing whenever it was possible. It gained him some small recognition from his trainers and mentors, and eventually they granted him the honorific of Kar’, for despite his pathetic size and apparent physical weakness, he worked with what he had and ultimately made up for it.

Some just called him lucky. Others, however, were not so pleased with Ozukiro’s style. A medium build man who he served with, one of his constant rivals ever since he was brought in to serve the Empire, named Ko’Ken, always looked down on Ozukiro, now Kar’Ozukiro. In a show of his disdain for his dishonorable fighting style, Ko’Ken challenged Kar’Ozukiro to an honorable duel. The next day, they would fight sword-to-sword in the fort’s courtyard when Kenyeo’s light was highest in the sky.

Kar’Ozukiro had no choice but to accept or bring dishonor to his family, so he met the taller, stronger man in the courtyard with sword in-hand. The duel was decidedly not a short one, as many expected. Kar’Ozukiro managed to keep Ko’Ken moving, missing, and continuously defended himself against his attacks. He danced circles around the slower man. Unfortunately, all it took was a single misstep to end the duel. With one well-placed cut to the man’s heel, Kar’Ozukiro was permanently crippled and lay bleeding in the courtyard from the heel. The young soldier was dishonored, proving his style may have been clever enough to make him a survivor, but he was truly no warrior like Ko’Ken was.

Kar’Ozukiro was healed, but he would never quite walk the same way again. He would be even slower and less agile than the average small build. He was truly doomed to die now.

Despite this, his life had less meaning than other soldiers and he had little honor left as it was, so he was kept in service.

Eventually, rebels became less frequent as the Empire grew to accept Emperor Kar’Ren’s rule, but then yokai became a new problem. Such a terrifying enemy was bound to take the small soldier’s life one of these days. Kar’Ozukiro could barely survive fighting his own, how could he fight yokai?

Kar'Ozukiro was dispatched with a unit of troops into a cave in the nearby mountains to slay a group of yokai who had recently wiped out a group of scouts. While the battle itself was a success on the army's tactics, they were brutal, borderline suicidal for the frontline fodder like him. He nearly deserted then and there, but was compelled to stay by the soldiers fighting at his side. Nevertheless, the ca'liar survived, but lost a great many friends that day. He would never forget how horrible it was fighting them, how hopeless it felt. Even when marching with the other small ca'liar, he couldn't even keep up anymore. If he had to flee from yokai, he would surely never survive another battle like that.

One early morning while on leave for the day, Kar’Ozukiro met with a group of smugglers on the docks and paid them all of his savings to smuggle him away. He didn’t care where, just so long as there were no yokai to eat him. He was a crippled ca’liar with no future here, only death and dishonor.

That morning, Kar’Ozukiro brought shame to his family and was smuggled away on a ship to nowhere. He didn’t know where he was going. All he kept with him was the unkempt, rusty service katana that he’d brought the first dishonor to his name with, the dirty kimono around his dusty brown-furred body, and his shamisen. His family would curse his name for this act, but in the end, Kar’Ozukiro was a survivor. He still dreamed of a life he thought he’d never have, a life where he was the honorable, strong warrior he’d always wanted to be, but he couldn’t do that being killed by yokai.

The small soldier lived to play and flee another day as the smuggler’s ship sailed into the sunrise off to a new world where, he hoped, he could start anew. Maybe he would be less afraid, more confident. Maybe he would make new friends.

Maybe he wouldn't dishonor them, too.