Player's Name: Birdy
Contact info: shirhanblade (AIM) kyanve (plurk)
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kyanve_te_shirhan
Character: Mukuro Rokudou
Canon: Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Version: Manga, main/current-canon timeline
Canon Point: In between Inheritance Arc and Representative Battles
Age: 15
Gender: Male
History: There is only really one thing that's implied about Mukuro's parents, and that's that they were part of the Estraneo Famiglia. After said Famiglia developed the Possession bullets - something the entire rest of the underworld Did Not Like - they became pariahs, often being hunted down; being the wonderful upstanding people they were, they decided to declare war right back on the others. To that end, they needed weapons, and power; and to get that, they decided to remake the next generation of the Family into something that could take on any of the others, even the powerful Vongola.
Translated, they took all of their kids and put them through human experimentation trying to augment what powers and bits they already had access to into a generation of unstoppable weapons, hiding out until they had the force to strike back. For a while, it looked like this was a possible plan, as they hid out among the labs and their holes, hard at work; not all of the kids survived, but it's not like they had come into this with much of a conscience to haunt them anyway, and others seemed like they might be productive.
One of those that, at the time, seemed to be going the best was a boy where the only designation given back then was "Number 69" - a small child with an innate ability with the "Mist" element, illusions. Given that a lot of the most powerful Mist users of the past had been known for bargains with, and channeling from, various supernatural forces, they decided they'd try to cut out the middleman and cut down on the time needed, and began a campaign of killing and reviving him, forcibly punting him all over the incarnational cycle in the hopes that he'd bring back the powers from those other realms. For his part, he was one of the more docile, quiet, and least troublesome of the test subjects; he'd never even attempted to speak, nor screamed, nor cried out once, but just silently went along with whatever was done to him.
This went up until they replaced one of his eyes - the replacement something that was meant to enhance his powers; at this point, there was a sudden, sharp lesson that they'd succeeded all the way up and down the board, beyond their wildest imagination.
Unfortunately, that lesson came in the form of little 69 realizing that he didn't HAVE to do whatever they wanted anymore, that he WAS powerful enough to fight back, and massacring them all. As the slaughter went on, the adults tried to put down the other experiments in a feeble attempt at damage control. By the time it was over, there were only three survivors - him, and two of the other children they'd been experimenting on, and his first words were inviting the other two to come with him.
Of course, the rest of the underworld kind of noticed the Estraneo getting wiped off the map, and sent people in to clean up the mess; some of that clean up crew found the labs, and the three children. Unaware what'd happened other than that something the Estraneo had played with had finally blown up in their face, the clean-up crew scooped up the kids to adopt them into other, nearby Families, and "69" was rehomed with the boss of one of the other Mafia families of the area, personally adopted as a younger sibling by one of the Don's better men, Lancia. Lancia took that seriously, and treated the kid as a part of the family. Unfortunately for him and the others, the boy didn't quite process the acts of kindness, but was well aware that they were Mafia, the same as his creators, and somewhere during the massacre he'd resolved that his new purpose was to get rid of the Mafia and anyone like them.
Instead of a direct massacre, he started using his more subtle powers on Lancia, pulling mind control tricks; Lancia started having blackout periods, and as they went on he'd often find himself coming out of it surrounded by corpses, as Mukuro used him to massacre the rest of his Family. Soon Lancia was the only survivor, and as far as the Underworld knew, he was Rokudo Mukuro, the Six Paths Corpse, responsible for the massacres; of course, by this point, the periods he was actually in control were shorter and shorter.
The next chunk of time isn't spelled out, but roughly, "Mukuro" and the trio of weapon-kids ended up on the run, striking out at various Mafia groups where they could while the assorted Underworld came to a consensus that they were among the most dangerous things out there and Needed Dealt With; eventually, "Mukuro" and his two followers were captured and imprisoned, as the powers of the Underworld debated what the fuck to do and tried to figure out what the Hell they were dealing with.
Oh, by the way, that wasn't a false head count on the imprisonment - they got "Mukuro" - the controlled Lancia - and his two followers, Ken and Chikusa, but were utterly unaware there was another they should be looking for.
They held them for a little while, but not that long, at which point there was a jailbreak; "Mukuro", the two others, and several others that'd been held in the facility. The group broke and disappeared, apparently going to lie low and recoup while organizing their new gang - a gang made up of some of the most dangerous renegades in the underworld.
In truth, Mukuro - the real one - was pursuing some information of his own, and took the entire mess to Japan, moving into the abandoned Kokuyo amusement park. He'd found clues that the next successor of the powerful Vongola Family was somewhere in Japan, still young and in training, and started pulling test attacks to try to lure the young Vongola candidate out into a confrontation where he could possess the boy. During this time, as far as most of the Kokuyo gang besides Ken and Chikusa knew, the controlled Lancia was "Mukuro"; they had taken prisoner a boy close to the Vongola, and the real Mukuro hid out in the theatre, dealing indirectly with everyone except his two actual followers.
The baiting worked, and Mukuro managed to identify his target partly by posing as a hostage attempting to escape; the Vongola group threw all of their resources into dealing with the gang as far as they knew it - only to discover, after breaking Lancia free of control, that Mukuro himself was still out there. As much as they did walk right into the trap, even to the point of Mukuro possessing most of the group at once, it still ended in a loss for Mukuro - and the three of them being taken by the Vendice, the mysterious apparently undead lawkeepers of the underworld.
Naturally, Mukuro wasn't about to stay put; he managed another jailbreak with Ken and Chikusa, although the Vendice proved harder to evade, and he ended up getting recaptured himself while buying the two of them time to escape and go back to Kokuyo. At this point, the Vendice were a little fed up with the game, and moved him to the Water Prison - basically a set of stasis tanks. In theory, this should have prevented him from being able to do anything.
Instead, he ended up abusing his possession abilities, grasping around at straws for some avenue of other people he could work through, and ended up finding a dying girl in Japan; she showed signs of great talent as a Mist user, but had lost a good chunk of her internal organs in a nasty accident, and her family was leaving her for dead in the hospital. Mukuro struck a bargain with the girl, claiming her from her family and using his powers to replace her organs and keep her alive; in return, she'd act as a host when he needed to do something outside of the Prison, and she left the hospital bound for their old hideout as Chrome Dokuro, proof Mukuro should not be allowed to name things.
Via Chrome, he was approached by the Vongola with a request and a different bargain - protection for him and his people, in exchange for him agreeing to serve as the Mist Guardian of the young Vongola successor who'd beaten him... of course with an undercurrent of awareness that they were all in a very bad position to refuse. He agreed to it, as much as he was still too weak to do more than work through Chrome occasionally, and while they weren't close to the Vongola, they held to their duty through a challenge for succession, as he and Chrome took on and defeated one of the "Seven Strongest".
This is where there's a point where canon gets...complicated. See, there was a wonderful messy Xanatos Roulette game going on that involved time fuckery, and for at least a few days, as far as he knew, Chrome... disappeared, along with the rest of the Vongola 10th Gen. At the end of those few days, he got memory-dumped with the memories of certain events from his "self" from an alternate future ten years down the line, stopping an attempt at near-godhood via an individual trying to destroy the Vongola to gain the Rings - parts of a set of relics that, if gathered under one will, could give the power to remake the world. Part of the purpose of the memory-dump was to prevent that future from occurring and maintain the stability of the timeline, and he does have the memories of his future self's skullduggery and subterfuge attempting to spy on Byakuran and monkey-wrench the efforts to wipe out the Vongola. (Also likely a good sense of "...REALLY TSUNA. REALLY. TEN YEARS IN THE JAR?") In addition, he was left with an awareness of an apparent apprentice, as one of the people involved in the battle in the future was a very powerful and talented mist user that cited Mukuro as his "master" and teacher, leading to him ending up with another addition to the Kokuyo gang.
Of course, any relative peace couldn't last, as much as he didn't have a direct hand in the next mess at first; everything was pulled together to officially recognize Tsuna as the heir to the Vongola, and there was going to be a big ceremony with representatives from the underworld all over the world coming to acknowledge! Unfortunately one of the smaller groups invited had very, very old ties to the Vongola - ties that included an apparent betrayal back at the beginning of the history of both Families, as well as, for some STRANGE reason, a lot of personal grudges against the modern Vongola, and a lot of information nobody should've had. With the help of their mysterious benefactor, the Simon Family managed to badly damage the Vongola rings, and kidnap Chrome.
This is about where Mukuro's attention was gotten; Chrome had been doing perfectly well before that, and then suddenly disappeared, as their "benefactor" was a Mist user powerful and skilled enough to completely block his connection to Chrome, such that not only was he no longer keeping her alive, but he couldn't even guess at her location. This blackout state continued until, as the rest of the Vongola's pursuit and attempt to rescue went on, the one responsible both lifted the barrier keeping Mukuro from being aware... and suddenly stopped bothering to "help" and keep Chrome alive himself, leading to Chrome, suddenly back on Mukuro's radar and dying, broadcasting "DON'T COME IT'S A TRAP".
Sadly, Daemon Spade, the now body-hopping spirit of the first Vongola Mist Guardian, had managed to read Mukuro accurately; even with going in blind, Mukuro took the bait, possessing Chrome to find the problem and destroy them. Spade took the challenge, and there was a nasty bout of the kind of fighting only a couple of powerful illusionists could get into that seemed to end with Mukuro the victor; Spade fled his current host and left Mukuro and Chrome be just as the rest of the Vongola caught up, and Mukuro had a nice preening moment that he'd beaten the original Vongola Mist Guardian.
This lasted until he tried to return to his body, and pretty much slammed face-first into a "SORRY, OCCUPIED" sign, shunting him into the body of the owl Box-Weapon "familiar". The entire game of using Chrome as bait had been to get Mukuro to leave his body unattended where Spade would have access without a fight for it, since it'd be one of the few host bodies where Spade could abuse his full power and not run into pesky problems with what his host could or couldn't keep up with, and Spade had picked up a few of the Vendice's dimension-warping tricks to get around that annoying "stuck in a jar" problem.
Thus began a period of the Grumpiest Owl Ever, as Spade used Mukuro's body to try to annihilate the leader of the Simon and the few of the Vongola Tenth Gen that were still standing in an epic grudge-fueled psychotic snap while Mukuro was stuck coaching Chrome and the others as a seriously de-powered owl. (PS, yes, he was afflicted with that problem where even a pissy snowy owl somehow still looks poofy and fluffy.) Not only did this end in needing to wreck his body a good bit, but it almost turned into a self-sacrifice on the part of the Simon leader...except that Chrome dove in to generate a barrier she wasn't -QUITE- powerful enough to hold protecting the boy, and ended up acting as an external Normally Functioning Conscience for Mukuro, forcing his hand into helping hold the barrier as well with what power he could manage as an owl.
Once Spade was driven out and had run up his own white flag, the Vendice declared Mukuro's service more than adequate to earn him being left with his relative freedom. Mukuro returned to Kokuyo to recover from both being in the jar for an extended period and the beating he took while Spade had the body, still technically in the service of the Vongola but otherwise actually free and not being hunted (well, not being hunted besides Hibari, the Vongola Cloud Guardian he'd curb-stomped back in that first battle, seeking to even the score now and then) for the first time in his life.
Personality: One of the first, most important things to understand about Mukuro is that he is a lying liar who lies like a lying rug. Even on the rare occasions he says something truthful, he's still probably slanting or misrepresenting something. This means that, when trying to figure out what the Hell is going on in his head, nine times out of ten, he's the last person you should trust. He's a Mist User, and a damn good one in more ways than just raw power and illusions; his survival and existence is dependent on his skill in figuring out what other people are hiding while keeping his own secrets and leading other people astray about him and unsure what's true and what's a lie. One of his few lines that actually gives any useful insight is a moment of intimidation and theatrics - that the nature of Mist is "to hide the lies within the truth, and the truth within the lies".
He has a very practiced, reflexive, carefully constructed persona that is how he's almost always seen and known; calm, controlled, arrogant and aloof, he carries himself as a predator, something alien to humanity. Other people might be tolerated, but are, at best, pawns, only of value as long as he has some use for them. He has a god complex, a sense of pride in the power he gained from the experiments, and an unshakable belief that it's made him something greater than human. As much as he carries himself as above everything, he has no issues with violence; if anything, given a reason, he can be downright bloodthirsty, with an edge of the special kind of sadism reserved for someone whose power focuses on mindgames - playing with prey like a cat. He can be very affable and charismatic when he wants to be, but silly things like social ties, friendship, relationships, and morality are for mortal creatures, and he's above and beyond all of it. Moreover, that calm charisma isn't that he tries to put people at ease - it's more a matter of his own confidence; he can quote things like a desire to start world war three and drown the world in blood with calm, unwavering focus, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. If anything, it can be unsettling to outsiders - he's not at ease and affable because he's "friendly", he's at ease and affable because he is the larger predator and there's nothing you could do to touch him. The more he's pushed or challenged, the sharper and more visible his claws get, and the more blatantly predatory he becomes. Still, he's a Mist user - and banks everything on cunning, planning carefully and calculating out risks and tactics, control of the field, and the ego doesn't go to overconfidence and a lack of acknowledging and respecting an enemy's skills...
He's just sure he'll prove that he's better in the end.
At least, all of the above is what he projects to the world. If it were purely false, this would be simple, but that ends up running into that bit about Mist User logic, and that he's a VERY talented and clever Mist user; he's not stupid enough to think he can keep up a facade that's entirely made of lies, so it's less that there's layers between "facade" and reality", and more that his outward persona is a careful weaving of his actual personality with various defense mechanisms and bits of tactical posturing, so there isn't really such a thing as "dropping the act". To make matters more fun, depending on the situation and who he's talking to, he's perfectly happy to express opinions, goals, and motives where he'll say completely contradictory things within the same page, all with the same conviction, just for the sake of muddling the waters further - so when he does express more than one opinion, not only is it necessary to unravel what he wants people to believe and what parts of it are "true", but then to chase a shell game of mixed puzzle pieces and stitch back together what bits of each thing he's said have what meaning - and what he might be hiding or drawing attention away from. As much as his actions and what he actually commits to is easier than trying to puzzle out his intentions from what he says, even that has aspects of the shell game to it; his survival, and that of others around him, depends on his ability to fake people out, which means that even his actions have to be read over time, weighing what things have actual impact - and therefore are things that'd be towards one or another of his goals.
The short form? He is intentionally incredibly confusing, and will just about never be completely lying... or completely telling the truth. Anyone dealing with him has to be prepared to deal with the minefield, since even with the people that do register as "closer", he will keep up the same game; it's less that he lowers his guard, and more that he might occasionally drop hints and otherwise relies on the people "closer" to him to be able to decode what he really means and wants out of the mix of grey-shades of truth and lies.
That having been said, there's a few things that are fairly stable traits that can be reconstructed, and two things that're major foundations of his behavior.
The first is that he's a created being (CEEB) in most respects. Sure, he was naturally born, but nothing is known of his parents; he was given up for experiments to turn into a weapon for the Famiglia at an incredibly early age, and odds are good that he neither knows nor cares who his real parents are (beyond maybe that he'd happily kill them if he found them). His earliest memories are of the lab, and a great deal of time, work, and care was put into both the experiments on him and into trying to groom him to be a weapon. Whatever else may come, that much will never leave him - on some level, he is a weapon, something created to exist for a purpose, and his early childhood and formative years were something with pressures and patterns almost alien to a normal human being. It's established that before his powers stabilized, he was basically a "good little experiment" in most respects, if a bit unsettling - he's the one child that never cried out, never screamed, never spoke, never expressed any discontent, just mutely and mechanically endured it all.
And then he became the poster child for the Frankenstein principle - create something and abuse it, and it will turn on you; try to create a monster and you'll succeed.
They'd made him to be a weapon, and he was a very good weapon, even when he decided to turn on his creators; this still shows to this day in his mentality - he was molded to be something that would destroy problems, and there is still an element that, left to his own devices, his solution to threats, things that strike him as wrong, abuses, etc. is to find the source and kill it. As of his first appearance in the series, this had spiraled out of control impressively, going from "destroying his creators" - the Estraneo Famiglia - to "destroy the other people LIKE the creators/associated with them" - the Mafia and underworld in general - to "Destroy anyone who'd allow that kind of thing to go on/try to use it/abuse power" - an end goal of infiltrating world governments, bringing about World War III, and reducing the world to "a pure and beautiful sea of blood"... a plan that was also, as a side note, inherently self-destructive and a bit on the "take everything out with us" side. He DIDN'T have a lot of hope for an extended future beyond that, and he and the others were weirdly at peace with this; it's unsure if he's achieved picking up better long-term goals yet, or if he's still too unwilling to trust/rely on anything that WOULD be a stable place for them.
The only people that he'd taken with him that seemed to have any actual understanding of him were two of the other experiments, also the first people he'd ever spoken to; he'd rescued them from the labs, and taken them under wing, and they responded with the kind of almost unsettlingly unwavering loyalty that comes from being molded to be unable to function outside of certain patterns and given a "master" that actually has some understanding and offer of protection. There was a good long period where it was basically them vs. the world in all mentality, and nothing really did anything to disagree with that assessment; they lashed out at what they saw as threats or things like their creators, which led to the rest of the underworld seeing them as basically rabid loose weapons of mass destruction and turning further against them, which confirmed the idea that everything was, in fact, out to get them, or at best indifferent to the point of allowing abuses.
That "us against them" mentality and basic defensive cornered lab rat aspect is a big part of why there ISN'T a "drop the act". He might relax more genuinely around certain people that're "safe", but otherwise, everything is, on some level, assumed to be a potential threat and something he might have to protect himself and the others from, whether the person he's dealing with means to be threatening or not. This leads to an almost pathological complex about not showing weakness and maintaining at least the illusion that he has control over the situation and could destroy those around him at any moment; if you're not on a very short list, you're an Outsider, a threat, and not only will he be dealing with you as a Weapon and a predator, but he won't risk giving you ANYTHING that you or anyone else might be able to use against him. It's ingrained enough that, even at times when it might be to his advantage to do things like "ask for help", or where admitting that he does care about that short list in his own odd way would make someone less likely to see him as a monster, he won't do it; he might leave a hint dropped in here or there in the hopes another party is smart enough to catch it, but anything else would be leaving openings and the first reflex is to assume those openings will be used against him. Moreover, anything that'd make him dependent on someone else is going to be couched heavily in "it's to his advantage" terms; if he's not at least keeping up a show of being self-contained and perfectly capable without someone else, then that means whoever it is has leverage they could use against him.
If it sounds paranoid, it is, but it's less a delusional sort of paranoia and more a kind of wounded-animal reflex; him and his have been through enough with even well-meaning people not really managing to handle them or protect them (even if some of it was self-fulfilling prophecies) that it's habit. Other people = they WILL hurt you, no matter how nice and kind and well-intentioned they might be, and "protecting himself" from them is a necessity. Being the biggest, baddest predator means nobody else around can touch him or harm him. He's capable of recognizing when people are acting to his benefit, and it's possible to get him to slowly acknowledge that you're useful/not a threat/NOT going to harm him, but unless you have a way to quickly establish yourself as nonthreatening and completely in his service, it's going to be slow going. Even then, at best, the defense mechanisms will still be there; if he decides he likes you or that you're beneficial to him and nonthreatening, he'll still be making sure to occasionally drop reminders that yes, he's a predator, yes, he could kill you, and yes, he's only there because he chooses to be... for now.
This also means that getting him to admit he cares about someone is like trying to pull out his intestines through his mouth with a hooked wire and no restraints. For that short list, those people are the only ones he's let inside his defenses and the only stable thing in his world he can keep, and he's acutely aware that yes, there are people that would target them for being associated with him or use them against each other. Moreover, it's something where if he falls, they all go with him, something all of them are well aware of; as much as he protects them where he can, if it's necessary to put them at risk to protect the whole, he'll be relying on them to take care of themselves to some extent. And if anyone asks or fishes or tests? He cares nothing for them, they're pawns, they're expendable, he could exist just fine without them, and aiming at them will only piss him off because they're possessions, not because you'd be damaging something he cares about, so it's not even worth using them as bargaining chips or targets to bank-shot.
The insistence that he doesn't care is one of his few true lies; as much as he doesn't process close relationships the way a normal person would, if he does start getting attached to someone he gets very protective and possessive, and Daemon Spade has proven that this CAN be used against him in spite of his protests after using Chrome as bait for a trap that Mukuro dove into. It's also one of the things he's most pathological about as defense mechanisms go - the more a given weakness can be used against him, the more he'll work to make sure it doesn't look like it exists.
It is worth nothing that there is slowly becoming more than one circle; there's the Short List - Ken, Chikusa, Chrome, Fran, and to a lesser extent MM - of people that're His, unquestionably, that he's the most possessive of. All of them are people that're, to some major degree, dependent upon him for survival/freedom, or people that've put themselves under his authority/ownership on some significant level. Basically, don't think you're ending up on the Short List unless you're someone he Owns.
Outside of that, there's a small, gradual, possible admission that maybe there's a few people that aren't completely out to get him that might be useful and good to keep around. This is still something that's very clearly pragmatically fueled; the Vongola 10th Gen, as much as they're connected to Mafia and therefore something where there's very blurry lines between them and "People just like Creators", are also the main thing standing between him and his people, and the continued retribution of the underworld and the Vindice. With the bargain he made, as long as he's keeping some foothold on being the Vongola Mist Guardian and helping protect the 10th Gen, him and his people are safe and allowed freedom; because of that, as much as there's protest and it's not something he's entirely comfortable with, he is actually reliable in his duty. There's a gradual possibility that they might manage to grow on him enough to register as "safe", but for now, that secondary circle is basically a place where, if achieved, you are probably somewhat confusing and not-sure-if-want, teetering in between "useful/safe" and "threat" where you're worth enough for him to want to keep you intact, but liable to get claw-batted at, tsun'ed at, and half avoided. (And if you manage to earn your way into that level and then either turn on him, or fail to hold up your proverbial end of the bargain, no God in heaven will save you, which is the "Truth" to the "bigger predator, I tolerate you and find your presence amusing and useful but mis-step and I will decorate with your entrails" bit of his persona.)
There's also authority issues inherent in this First Thing. He was a CEEB, kept in a box and experimented on and tortured because he only existed for a Purpose and he was told to be a good little weapon and be perfectly obedient, and escaping that fate took backlashing against it with incredible violence. Give him the slightest impression that there is a box, cage, intent to restrict or restrain him or his people, or that there will be Order imposed on him whether he wants it or not, and you will invoke that same backlash. It will be violent, it will be spectacular, and he will enjoy ripping you apart and playing in the bloody remains. The best you can get as far as "giving him orders" is setting up something where it's in his best interests to go along with it, being damn sure to maintain it being in his best interests, and avoid exerting force to pressure him into it; push and he will do things to prove that you can't control him and give warnings that trying will end with him slaughtering you. "Feral cat" is, again, an appropriate metaphor; the cat will generally not do tricks for you, and if you try to force it or take away its sense of ownership, it will shred your arms for trying. Give him enough of a sense of a lack of options and he's able to sit on the backlash and play along, but it'd be nearly impossible to do that without merely delaying the backlash until he feels like he can get away with it.
The extent of his "normal socialization" was a short stint of one Famiglia trying to adopt/rescue the kids; this ended spectacularly and bloodily, and registered to him more as a potential threat than anything. Outside of that, as much as he's watched and observed things where he can, he's been living with Ken and Chikusa, basically on the run with stints in underworld prisons. His experience with interpersonal relationships is stunted, warped, and bizarre; he might academically grasp other people's behavior, but he tends to function in a fairly cause-effect, behavioral response sense that's heavily couched in defense mechanisms. It's not that he doesn't have emotions per se or that he isn't capable of bonding to people...
It's that the way he expresses and processes emotions is off-kilter, normal is a setting on the dryer, and any connection to others has to first get filtered through a lack of positive experience and a ton of habits and defenses, and even then he's probably going through the motions to get what he wants rather than actually understanding the other person and responding to them with empathy/sympathy. Given that the people he's the closest with are all off-kilter themselves, it's hard to tell if he'll eventually be good with people ... or always be kind of a hyperpredatory freak.
The second big thing besides the horrible morass that is CEEB issues, is what, specifically, was done to him. There's canon history for the more powerful Mist users drawing on supernatural or unnatural forces, and to make him the most powerful weapon they could, he was repeatedly killed and revived, with the intent of punting him back and forth across the incarnational cycle until he brought bits of the other realms back; he's basically lived repeated incarnations all across the cycle of Samsara to get his powers, and expressed memory of them all.
This ends up being the source of the aloof, "above it all" inhuman sense; not even animalistic but alien - beyond being a weapon like Ken and Chikusa, he has all the less reason to identify as "human" for having his early years packed with an overloaded mosaic of different states of being. Considering that he does seem aware of some of the lore around said cycle, the "above it all" god complex is something that's grown out of what he's become; on some level he really ISN'T human anymore, but a human-incarnated channel for something that's transcended the normal boundaries of the cycle, packed into a little teenage CEEB-shaped box. Given the amount of Buddhist imagery in some of his illusions, it's safe to say he's pretty familiar with the faith that the cycle is described in, and in that, it's hard to tell if he's a fairly good Buddhist all things considered, or the closest the religion can get to a theistic Satanist equivalent. He certainly has a sense of morality but it's one that isn't tied to "normalcy" or any standards of society or worldly habit; on some level, his morality is trying to dance to a "Higher law", and one where concepts like "good" and "evil" are tools, shades of grey and things to be played off each other. If it suits his goals and his sensibilities, he can be perfectly compassionate and protective, or intensely sadistic and cruel, and flicker between them without much warning as it seems necessary to him, and he does certainly seem to try to hold emotions and sentiment as something to weigh against other things and not rely on.
Or at least, he tries to, and would certainly love for everyone to believe it; he does have a ridiculous amount of self-control when he wants to, and a strong will. Moreover, some of the Buddhist tenets, particularly Zen sect, of seeking clarity and attempting to let go of delusions and preconceived notions are something that seems to seep into his behavior and perceptions; for all of his complexes, he's self-aware, and in a pinch will acknowledge or point out things with a good degree of clarity and insight, as well as a sense of weighing objective reality versus subjective impressions. Of course, this is also something that feeds into him being a Mist User at heart, as part of the purpose of a mist user is to be able to see through the deceptions, motives, and biases of others clearly, while being able to conceal what's important for self and those around them. It is still something that seems significant that, where most of the Tenth Gen has gotten at least an echo and reference to their First Gen counterpart's weapons in their last evolution of the Vongola Gear, his weapon isn't anything associated with Spade at all, but rather a khakkara - a Buddhist monk's staff. (Nevermind that a favorite recurring weapon/theme are lotuses and lotus vines, Buddhist symbols of transcendence, truth, and purity.)
Through all of this, it's worth noting that he is a teenager, as much as the experiments and extra lives make him seem older; all of this is still filtered through a person who has sixteen years at most of practical, direct experience with the world they're interacting with, and sixteen years in the current incarnation and body however much they might remember of other lives. He's very calculating and cunning, and incredibly mature for his age, but there's still times where he can act on whim or impulse, there is a temper that can be provoked, he lacks experience with a lot of things he won't want to admit to, and compared to his first-gen predecessor, he's not always the most subtle thing for a Mist Guardian. There's even times, with the Kokuyo gang, where he almost achieves a sense of "normalcy" or behavior that'd be about expected of a slightly primadonna and egotistical teenager. As confusing as the actual outward battle is, Spade pretty well ran circles around him in terms of deception and manipulation, and the older Mist Guardian managed to play him like a harp despite how difficult it can be to read his intentions.
He can also wax bitter, cynical, and violent in a worse state or worse mood. There is the curious note that in most cases, as sadistic and violent as he can be at his worst, it's not really malice so much as lashing out and that he's a -WEAPON-; there's not a great deal of personal involvement in harming others, they just happen to be there and damaging them is a means to an end that is one he happens to be good at/was made for.
Fears: *His childhood was spent as a lab rat. He has no intention of going back to that, and trying to force him to be a good little lab rat/weapon-in-development will not go over well.
*On the one hand, there's very little that he's strongly attached to; however, there's a very short list of people he does care about, all protests to the contrary, and he'd like to not lose them.
*He may not show it, and it's something that's a faceable fear, but he's NOT fond of the Vendice.
*Weakness - Mukuro does not take well to being unable to take care of himself, hold his own, and protect his own interests.
*He also does not like being restrained; boxes are not pleasant, anything that restricts his movement or impedes his abilities will grate on him, and as much as he was very patient with the whole stuck in a jar thing, he'd really rather not repeat that, kthx.
*There's a fairly complicated back and forth with his own nature as a Weapon, visible in his dislike of using the Path of Humans and his mental state while in it. On the one hand, with everything else layered on top of it, he's accepted that yes, he is a Weapon, and turned it towards something that seems to be growing into "instrument of divine retribution" - a weapon answering a higher law than the corrupt humans who reacted him. On the other hand, stripping that away to the base core bothers him; he'll USE the Path of Humans if he's cornered, but it DOES take away all of the rest and make him -just- Mukuro-The-Weapon - which, while it'd probably change in different circumstances, is a little bit unhinged. He also seems to have a mental skitter-around where it's hard to tell if he's internally resolved it or not, since when he uses the Path of Humans, he cites its berserk and monstrous state as "a reflection of how horrible humanity is" rather than a reflection of him-that-life-at-core. He's aware he IS a Weapon, and always will be a Weapon, but the idea of being JUST the Weapon bothers him.
Weaknesses: *There's this funny concept that most people take for granted that he's still trying to make sense of. It's some weird thing called "nor-mul intur-pers-uhn-uhl re-lay-shun-ships". He can grok normal people in terms of behavioral psych - needs, wants, goals - and pushing emotional buttons, but he doesn't relate to them at ALL, nor does he really understand normal social ties and relationships. In fact, his interactions with others outside of The Short List is basically a giant mass of defense mechanisms, suspicion, paranoia, and keeping distance, and even with the Short List he can't really be said to interact with them the way any normal human being would.
*He Is A Weapon. As subtle and clever as he can be, there's a part of his psyche that treats the instinctive solution to any problem to be destroying it, whether immediately and with great violence, or slowly through string-pulling and manipulation. That being said, give him an opening to destroy some problem immediately and with great violence, and he will.
*CEEB issues, CEEB issues everywhere! Just because he refuses to go back to the lab doesn't mean he doesn't bleed all sorts of special issues that go along with being a lab rat from earliest memory; beyond "Normal interpersonal relationships", as much as he can be damn survivalist, he doesn't really have an understanding of normal interactions with the world in general, period. You couldn't make him a normal human wormbaby if you tried.
*Ego ego ego. As much as all the experience of his other lives is squished through a teenage psyche, he does have some degree of memory of being demons, gods, and everything in between, and that he's sort of in a weird transcendent place on the cycle, which only makes it worse - it's not even "I am a god", it's "I'm above this and can skip across it at leisure". He does recognize that he's not invincible and has a good sense of tactical savvy, but he's very self-reliant, very aware that he's one of the most powerful things out there, and as careful as he is, it's still possible to use that ego against him, as Spade demonstrated.
*He's a paranoid little git. If you're not on The Short List, and don't end up registering as someone he Owns, you will always register, on some subconscious level, as a potential threat, whether you mean any harm or not. He will be distant, aloof, cautious, and not really want to let ANYONE close.
*Violent tendencies - He's one of the few Mist users that actually shows pride in physical combat abilities, and as mentioned, he has no qualms about beating the shit out of opponents, breaking bones, sadistic tendencies, or splattering an obnoxious enough problem across the walls and ceiling.
*walking ball of defense mechanisms - The paranoia and other defense mechanisms are pathological enough that there's a canon chapter after his current canon-point wherein it'd actually be to his advantage to drop his usual posturing ... and instead a third party has to play "Mukuro to Normal Human Being" translator. If you're not Short List but are managing to fall into that area where you're seen as "..maybe you are useful/not a threat after all", the best you can expect is him dropping confusing and contradictory hints now and then in between the posturing. While he's not as bad with "his People" as he is with others, he's very Zen-pragmatic, and doesn't flinch away from things that'd require him or one of them possibly getting hurt in the name of preventing worse threats or dealing with a problem, which can make him seem very harsh and cold even with the people he cares about.
*The Short List - Already used against him once, and in later chapters he does put himself between Chrome and threats when they're running low on power; he's very possessive and protective of the people he's decided he Owns, to the point that he will do things like let himself get captured to buy time for them to escape (granting that he had a plan to get away himself or at least act in spite of it) and walk into an obvious trap (albeit one he thought he could take) to keep them intact. He's not self-sacrificing exactly - he'll have at least a jury-rig, cobbled together attack plan and no intention of actually sacrificing himself - but he will take more risks than usual and gamble with much worse odds than usual when it comes to them.
*Faulty/Zen conscience. His sense of right and wrong is a mix of pragmatic and some weird sort of higher law. He doesn't lash out without a reason that at least makes sense to him, and if he doesn't feel he has a reason to be outright cruel, he won't do worse than posture - but if he does think he has a reason, he is incredibly cold-blooded, and can be downright sadistic in toying with his "prey". He doesn't see any shade of moral difference between the cold-blooded or sadistic moments, and the times he does something like protect and encourage Chrome. His sense of right and wrong isn't filtered through human standards, it's filtered through necessity and context, and he will NOT see anything wrong with doing things others might find abhorrent if he feels there's a good reason for it and it will lead to an improvement in the situation somehow. For the most part, this means that he's actually safer to be around than he pretends to be.... however, he does have some distorted triggers and cases of lack of good ways of handling some kinds of pressures and stress where a very nasty response seems perfectly logical TO HIM but not to anyone around him. (See also, the contrast between Lancia's memory of what happened and the way Mukuro would describe it. No, there ISN'T any guilt.)
Mundane Strengths/Abilities: *Mukuro is very, very clever. For all his limits of experience, he's a very fast learner, incredibly observant, and good at both putting information together and reading between the lines; with a little more experience he's a natural and incredibly good spy, and he's already capable of some fairly scary feats of information gathering and gleaning from his surroundings, as well as tactical planning and Xanatos-gambit plotting.
*He's a manipulative bastard. While there's definitely a distinct angle to it, he's very good at gauging people's goals, motives, fears, and personalities, guessing at how they're likely to react in a given situation, and not only planning for it, but setting things up to get them to jump to his advantage while making it look like it's their idea. The only thing gimping it really is the whole, CEEB issues, doesn't understand normal human wormbaby logic thing; he's got TALENT, but his skills are still a little blunt-instrument compared to the more actively insidious Mist users in the series.
*He's a lying liar who lies and is incredibly good at it. It doesn't hurt that pretty much every time he breathes and speaks, and his entire outward persona, is a stitched together shell-game tangle of bits of truth, bits of lies, bits of what he wants people to believe, red herrings, and accurate information. He's got an EXCELLENT poker face, and under most circumstances it doesn't so much drop as briefly flicker or show varying intensity. It doesn't hurt that accurately displaying his emotions and reactions is one of those pathological defense mechanisms he couldn't stop if he tried.
*He's damn good with the trident, staff, and in a fight in general; he's both got a decent amount of combat experience this-life, and apparently picked up some by osmosis from others, making him a very dangerous exception to the idea that taking away an illusionist's powers renders them weaker in a fight. In fact, he's been known to use that trope to his advantage for surprise value dropping into the Path of Asura.
*He does have a very odd sort of pragmatic mental stability; it's not that he doesn't have moments where he can be a moody bastard, especially if the wrong triggers are hit, but he's generally good at mentally rolling with things and recovering his balance and footing. It's less being teflon and titanium that never scratches or has anything stick, and more like trying to stop a gyroscope - you might throw him off-balance, but his instincts are to react in a way that'd mean surviving and escaping, and as long as he's surviving, he can eventually recover.
*He has the kind of self control that's rarely seen in someone born and raised as a normal human worm baby, to the point that it almost becomes another one of those pathological things that doesn't really shut off. As moody and pissy as he can be, it takes a fairly bad corner to get him to actually lose control, and he dislikes and avoids it; it's only really been seen ONCE in the series, when he was cornered in the first big fight and facing being thrown in captivity himself for the first time since his escape from the labs. Just because he HAS violent tendencies and will happily act on them if he feels they're appropriate and he can get away with it, doesn't mean he's easily provoked; if anything, trying to provoke him will probably get him going more zen-calm just to piss you off and be contrary. This can make his mood swings all the more unpredictable, since you don't just have some of his occasionally alien logic to account for, but what he'll decide is a reaction he wants to have, if he's even going to act on it, and if he's going to act on it in the direction you expect.
*Pain tolerance. He's been tortured and experimented on, literally sent to Hell, stuck in a sense-dep/stasis tank for months straight, gotten the shit beaten out of him, holes put in him, and generally been through damn near everything. He doesn't really ENJOY pain, but it's something possibly a little too familiar; his pain tolerance is ridiculous, and he's used to picking up and toughing through/ignoring pain to an even more ridiculous extent.
And yes, he has picked up a bit of a "Hahahaha fuck you I've already been through worse so you can't touch me, but I'll destroy you for that on principle" complex about it.
Sensitivity/Magical Ability: (I AM SO SORRY FOR HIS EXISTENCE. AT LEAST HE'S NOT SPADE. SPADE IS WORSE.) He isn't overly sensitive in the "can sense things supernaturally" per se, but he does seem to have some ability to tell illusions from reality. It mostly seems to be very honed instinct and experience and self-training to judge differences between an actual presence and illusions. He also does have a bit of animal instinct sense for "something isn't right", but again, it doesn't seem to be anything unnatural so much as being observant and having good instincts honed by experience.
The majority of his powers come from the Six Paths; things he brought back via his time spent getting bounced around the incarnational cycle. While technically he can normally only use one at a time, it does seem like he's good enough to keep some small or ambient effects up when he's path switching, like maintaining Chrome's organs while doing other things. There IS a visual tell as to which Path he's using at any given time, in the form of a number-kanji mark in the unnatural red eye.
*Path of Hell - The path with the strongest outright illusions. The end effect does depend somewhat on how much effort he puts into it, and it is a truism that there's a battle of wills involved and it's hypothetically possible to overcome it, but he's grown powerful enough that if he's really working at it, the illusions generated by the Path of Hell are almost less illusions and more temporary reality-warps. Sure, it stops being real once he stops putting will into it, but for the duration that it exists, it takes a great deal of will and effort to NOT be affected as if it were real. He's shown the ability from early on to pretty much turn an entire area into something he can play with like putty, shattering things into earthquakes, summoning strangling vines and pillars of fire, warping gravity, and otherwise making life interesting for anyone caught in it. It is limited to what he can see and be aware of; he can't generate illusions away from where he is. Once he lets go of it, it ceases to exist, although injuries caused by it if someone doesn't manage to fight it off are real and will persist.
He can't alter things in a way that would allow changing the layout of the area; if there's a wall there, it can't be walked through just because he makes it as if it isn't. (This has been used as a trap by another illusionist in series to get someone ELSE to slam into a wall.) If an illusion includes the floor dropping out, someone afflicted can get hurt from the "fall", but if they manage to snap out of it or he cancels it, they're still on the ground where they were and looking probably pretty silly. He could possibly generate some kind of weapon that could be aimed at a wall to try and put a hole in it (Make weapon, make it solid, use it to damage something real), but he couldn't just have the wall suddenly have a hole in it. He can't make things cease to exist - a real knife aimed at him is still a knife, and will cut even if it doesn't look like it's there, although he could either play displacer beast (get someone striking at an image of him that's not where he really is, or even at something else instead of him), or create something to serve as a barrier/way to block. If someone's managing to hold their own in the battle of wills enough to "disbelieve", his creations will have less effect, or even possibly none, although he has been known to use a "that's an illusion and I know it" to hide an actual physical weapon in the past.
Yes, it's kind of messy, and depending on how he uses it and who he's trying to use it on, can end up being either very powerful, or incredibly fragile and finicky.
Oh, also, since part of the power relies on his ability to put will and faith into his own illusions - outside of obvious things like the displacer beast tricks and "hide a weapon attack in an illusion" fakeouts, his illusions will be perfectly real to him, as psychologically contradictory as it sounds. While he probably couldn't do things like live off Path of Hell illusions for food and water, as all he'd be doing is fooling his body into thinking there was food/water, he IS capable of dealing with injuries by basically covering them with an illusion that all is well. It's dependent on him having power and focus for it, and in most cases is more useful for "get somewhere safe/to where it can be properly cared for", but he has had several months practice on Chrome with something as severe as replacing missing internal organs with illusory doubles. It also seems like a safe assumption that him seeming as healthy and able as he is after several months in the jar and Spade getting the shit kicked out of him is partly him playing self-affecting-illusions when he's out and about. This can be used on someone else easier than on himself, although anything interrupting the effect on that person or blocking his power will make it piff. Normal healing does seem to go on under the illusion, but it won't make up for a lack of treatment.
*Path of Hungry Ghosts - Tied to his possession abilities; the Path of Hungry Ghosts allows him to use the abilities of whoever he's possessed. He doesn't retain them afterwards beyond maybe some kind of academic understanding, but it does mean that if he possesses someone, he has full use of their powers and skills while he's got their body.
*Path of Beasts - Summoning and commanding animals. So far his favorite has been snakes. It can only call things that're existing in the area; he can't portal things in or anything, just call them over and make them do what he wants for the duration of the effect. Of course, this might be useless to potentially dangerous in the House.
*Path of Humans - Or That Thing You'll Probably Not See. While he professes that it's a reflection of how ugly and horrible the human state is, it actually seems to be something akin to a Dying Will state...
Which basically means amplifying all of his "Abused Weapon CEEB" traits and taking off all the mental and physical safeties. Ironically, this ends up being one of the more monstrous paths, as he's shown to end up with black patterns crossing his skin, fangs, slight claws, and basically turning into what seems to be a self-image-gone wrong. Besides the fact that he can rip things apart in this state and is basically a living weapon of mass destruction that's very hard to injure and stop, it DOES seem to shut down normal surface-consciousness controls, and tends to end up with a sadistic berserk state.
*Path of Asura - Also marked by a visible mist-flame over his altered eye; pure physical-combat path - channeling the skills and power of one of the "vengeful gods/warring gods". Not quite the juggernaut the Path of Humans is, but still damn dangerous in a physical fight, and more given to tactical thinking and actual skill as opposed to ripping things apart and torturing them.
*Path of Heaven - The possession/mind control Path, also the one he usually stays in. He can do suggestion-type effects with eye contact and some force of will, although anything this state is subject to the victim resisting and him needing to overcome them. It's also possible for him to extend this out into a controlled state where the victim is completely obedient or being blackout-puppeteered, although those can be interrupted or broken, and often take a bit of other work to set them up psychologically. He can potentially take over someone's body completely, but this is a drain on resources and usually requires leaving his own body unattended; he doesn't often use the possession end without resorting to the Possession Bullets to make it as easy as possible.
Note that all of these are a bit easier for him if he can get a connection via drawing blood with his trident/"staff"/weapon.
Either way, if some outside effect manages to break his control over an unwilling target before he's let go, he can't re-establish it; they basically get a sort of immunity short of him mentally/emotionally breaking them down for it to work, and the most he can do after that is a sort of psychic tug-on-sleeve-and-point.
*Possession Bullets - He probably only has two or three of these; they're the forbidden work of the Estraneo, based on the Dying Will bullets. They're also a great way to confuse the fuck out of someone after him, since they work via him shooting himself, and he does seem, for all intents and purposes, dead for the duration of the effect, blood and everything.
However, while he's out, he can take over anyone he's "Marked" and completely suppress their will without them getting a chance to fight him off; moreover, he can control more than one person at a time, and has used this to possess four people at once.
*Box Weapon/Vongola Gear - Now a single entity; in "dormant state" they're a pair of funny indigo dangle-earrings. He can summon the "Box Weapon" familiar, Mukurou the owl, from it at any time, and it is worth pointing out that yes, he has Marked the owl so that he can possess it or control it beyond the usual level of familiar-loyalty. It can also use his Mist flame as a catalyst for a weapon form, the owl shifting into a Buddhist Khakkhara staff with the usual chime-rings adorned with sharp points. The staff is controllable enough to use those points as weapons, or channel illusions to spear things on them; however, the main power is that while it's active, he's capable of using all six Paths at once without having to favor one or the other, with a bit of amplification.
Yes, this does take a lot of power.
Yes, he's kind of powerful. His reserves are finite, however, so there is a limit to how much he can do, and he tends to play the Neuro gambit; he'll make occasional shows, but for the most part he's gauging how much force is necessary to deal with X problem as quickly as possible and not pushing further, trying to conserve power past what he needs to use. This means that, if allowed to play his usual games and keep some ability to control his involvement in a situation, he can make it look like he's got inexhaustible resources when really he's only putting solid pressure where it's needed and is trying to avoid overdoing it, and if he does push it too far, he can wear himself out, even to the point of physical collapse. It's worse if he's working through someone else's body, and it's been canon-history that almost every time he's worked through Chrome for a fight, she's ended up collapsing and he's ended up 'out' for a while after. Also the illusions are finicky, particularly against anything resistant to them or anyone who knows what they are and is resisting; it takes more power for him to do anything in those cases, and can make it so that he doesn't really have much stamina at all for an extended fight. In a recent-chapter example (future to his canon point, but not by a huge amount), he was able to put two of the Vendice - which are both very powerful and highly resistant to illusions - down with something summoned via such; however, that particular illusion had Chrome lending power to it, and was an all or nothing attack, taking enough of his reserves that he couldn't muster a second shot against the one that HADN'T gone down. Most of his extended fights that aren't against other illusionists end up using bait and switch tactics, the non-illusion paths, and fakeouts to trick people into accepting the illusion or mask weapons within things people have already resisted.
Supply List: *clothes
*Small revolver + three possession bullets
*Trident; the shaft is collapsible
*Mist Earrings, described above
Game Transfers: N/A
Sample RP post: That the darkness in the one room was unnatural wasn't exactly hard to guess; calling an illusory flame into his hand to test it proved perfectly useless, as if the blackness was absorbing away the light and the little bit of energy he was putting into it to boot -
And something was moving in the corners of the room in ways that didn't quite seem natural, enough to pique perverse curiosity; so some sort of otherworldly creatures were hiding out here.
He gave up on the light source; as "visual" as illusions could be, he'd found darkness to be an advantage at times, as it made people jumpier, more likely to react, easier to fool or catch off guard; things they would've questioned in brightly lit places became easily believed. Besides, sight was hardly the only way to navigate, and he was perfectly comfortable in the dark, relying on hearing and letting his eyes adjust to what little light there was. For a few moments, he stayed still, waiting to see if there was any signs of a reaction or clue from whatever else inhabited the room; but whatever was shifting in the dark and watching, it - they? - were staying away, in the corners.
Well, there was more than one way to get an idea what was going on here. He nudged the door shut behind him, taking another few steps in; when there was still no challenge or other reaction to his presence, he nudged the bed to confirm where it was, and curled along the foot of it like an oversized cat, quietly watching the corners for what he could make out of whatever was there. If something bold decided to be hostile, he had enough up his sleeve to fend them off and at least make it to the door if they proved to be too much trouble; and if they weren't hostile, well...
A quiet room that would put off the human residents seemed like a perfectly comfortable place to retreat to.
Contact info: shirhanblade (AIM) kyanve (plurk)
DW:
kyanve_te_shirhanCharacter: Mukuro Rokudou
Canon: Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Version: Manga, main/current-canon timeline
Canon Point: In between Inheritance Arc and Representative Battles
Age: 15
Gender: Male
History: There is only really one thing that's implied about Mukuro's parents, and that's that they were part of the Estraneo Famiglia. After said Famiglia developed the Possession bullets - something the entire rest of the underworld Did Not Like - they became pariahs, often being hunted down; being the wonderful upstanding people they were, they decided to declare war right back on the others. To that end, they needed weapons, and power; and to get that, they decided to remake the next generation of the Family into something that could take on any of the others, even the powerful Vongola.
Translated, they took all of their kids and put them through human experimentation trying to augment what powers and bits they already had access to into a generation of unstoppable weapons, hiding out until they had the force to strike back. For a while, it looked like this was a possible plan, as they hid out among the labs and their holes, hard at work; not all of the kids survived, but it's not like they had come into this with much of a conscience to haunt them anyway, and others seemed like they might be productive.
One of those that, at the time, seemed to be going the best was a boy where the only designation given back then was "Number 69" - a small child with an innate ability with the "Mist" element, illusions. Given that a lot of the most powerful Mist users of the past had been known for bargains with, and channeling from, various supernatural forces, they decided they'd try to cut out the middleman and cut down on the time needed, and began a campaign of killing and reviving him, forcibly punting him all over the incarnational cycle in the hopes that he'd bring back the powers from those other realms. For his part, he was one of the more docile, quiet, and least troublesome of the test subjects; he'd never even attempted to speak, nor screamed, nor cried out once, but just silently went along with whatever was done to him.
This went up until they replaced one of his eyes - the replacement something that was meant to enhance his powers; at this point, there was a sudden, sharp lesson that they'd succeeded all the way up and down the board, beyond their wildest imagination.
Unfortunately, that lesson came in the form of little 69 realizing that he didn't HAVE to do whatever they wanted anymore, that he WAS powerful enough to fight back, and massacring them all. As the slaughter went on, the adults tried to put down the other experiments in a feeble attempt at damage control. By the time it was over, there were only three survivors - him, and two of the other children they'd been experimenting on, and his first words were inviting the other two to come with him.
Of course, the rest of the underworld kind of noticed the Estraneo getting wiped off the map, and sent people in to clean up the mess; some of that clean up crew found the labs, and the three children. Unaware what'd happened other than that something the Estraneo had played with had finally blown up in their face, the clean-up crew scooped up the kids to adopt them into other, nearby Families, and "69" was rehomed with the boss of one of the other Mafia families of the area, personally adopted as a younger sibling by one of the Don's better men, Lancia. Lancia took that seriously, and treated the kid as a part of the family. Unfortunately for him and the others, the boy didn't quite process the acts of kindness, but was well aware that they were Mafia, the same as his creators, and somewhere during the massacre he'd resolved that his new purpose was to get rid of the Mafia and anyone like them.
Instead of a direct massacre, he started using his more subtle powers on Lancia, pulling mind control tricks; Lancia started having blackout periods, and as they went on he'd often find himself coming out of it surrounded by corpses, as Mukuro used him to massacre the rest of his Family. Soon Lancia was the only survivor, and as far as the Underworld knew, he was Rokudo Mukuro, the Six Paths Corpse, responsible for the massacres; of course, by this point, the periods he was actually in control were shorter and shorter.
The next chunk of time isn't spelled out, but roughly, "Mukuro" and the trio of weapon-kids ended up on the run, striking out at various Mafia groups where they could while the assorted Underworld came to a consensus that they were among the most dangerous things out there and Needed Dealt With; eventually, "Mukuro" and his two followers were captured and imprisoned, as the powers of the Underworld debated what the fuck to do and tried to figure out what the Hell they were dealing with.
Oh, by the way, that wasn't a false head count on the imprisonment - they got "Mukuro" - the controlled Lancia - and his two followers, Ken and Chikusa, but were utterly unaware there was another they should be looking for.
They held them for a little while, but not that long, at which point there was a jailbreak; "Mukuro", the two others, and several others that'd been held in the facility. The group broke and disappeared, apparently going to lie low and recoup while organizing their new gang - a gang made up of some of the most dangerous renegades in the underworld.
In truth, Mukuro - the real one - was pursuing some information of his own, and took the entire mess to Japan, moving into the abandoned Kokuyo amusement park. He'd found clues that the next successor of the powerful Vongola Family was somewhere in Japan, still young and in training, and started pulling test attacks to try to lure the young Vongola candidate out into a confrontation where he could possess the boy. During this time, as far as most of the Kokuyo gang besides Ken and Chikusa knew, the controlled Lancia was "Mukuro"; they had taken prisoner a boy close to the Vongola, and the real Mukuro hid out in the theatre, dealing indirectly with everyone except his two actual followers.
The baiting worked, and Mukuro managed to identify his target partly by posing as a hostage attempting to escape; the Vongola group threw all of their resources into dealing with the gang as far as they knew it - only to discover, after breaking Lancia free of control, that Mukuro himself was still out there. As much as they did walk right into the trap, even to the point of Mukuro possessing most of the group at once, it still ended in a loss for Mukuro - and the three of them being taken by the Vendice, the mysterious apparently undead lawkeepers of the underworld.
Naturally, Mukuro wasn't about to stay put; he managed another jailbreak with Ken and Chikusa, although the Vendice proved harder to evade, and he ended up getting recaptured himself while buying the two of them time to escape and go back to Kokuyo. At this point, the Vendice were a little fed up with the game, and moved him to the Water Prison - basically a set of stasis tanks. In theory, this should have prevented him from being able to do anything.
Instead, he ended up abusing his possession abilities, grasping around at straws for some avenue of other people he could work through, and ended up finding a dying girl in Japan; she showed signs of great talent as a Mist user, but had lost a good chunk of her internal organs in a nasty accident, and her family was leaving her for dead in the hospital. Mukuro struck a bargain with the girl, claiming her from her family and using his powers to replace her organs and keep her alive; in return, she'd act as a host when he needed to do something outside of the Prison, and she left the hospital bound for their old hideout as Chrome Dokuro, proof Mukuro should not be allowed to name things.
Via Chrome, he was approached by the Vongola with a request and a different bargain - protection for him and his people, in exchange for him agreeing to serve as the Mist Guardian of the young Vongola successor who'd beaten him... of course with an undercurrent of awareness that they were all in a very bad position to refuse. He agreed to it, as much as he was still too weak to do more than work through Chrome occasionally, and while they weren't close to the Vongola, they held to their duty through a challenge for succession, as he and Chrome took on and defeated one of the "Seven Strongest".
This is where there's a point where canon gets...complicated. See, there was a wonderful messy Xanatos Roulette game going on that involved time fuckery, and for at least a few days, as far as he knew, Chrome... disappeared, along with the rest of the Vongola 10th Gen. At the end of those few days, he got memory-dumped with the memories of certain events from his "self" from an alternate future ten years down the line, stopping an attempt at near-godhood via an individual trying to destroy the Vongola to gain the Rings - parts of a set of relics that, if gathered under one will, could give the power to remake the world. Part of the purpose of the memory-dump was to prevent that future from occurring and maintain the stability of the timeline, and he does have the memories of his future self's skullduggery and subterfuge attempting to spy on Byakuran and monkey-wrench the efforts to wipe out the Vongola. (Also likely a good sense of "...REALLY TSUNA. REALLY. TEN YEARS IN THE JAR?") In addition, he was left with an awareness of an apparent apprentice, as one of the people involved in the battle in the future was a very powerful and talented mist user that cited Mukuro as his "master" and teacher, leading to him ending up with another addition to the Kokuyo gang.
Of course, any relative peace couldn't last, as much as he didn't have a direct hand in the next mess at first; everything was pulled together to officially recognize Tsuna as the heir to the Vongola, and there was going to be a big ceremony with representatives from the underworld all over the world coming to acknowledge! Unfortunately one of the smaller groups invited had very, very old ties to the Vongola - ties that included an apparent betrayal back at the beginning of the history of both Families, as well as, for some STRANGE reason, a lot of personal grudges against the modern Vongola, and a lot of information nobody should've had. With the help of their mysterious benefactor, the Simon Family managed to badly damage the Vongola rings, and kidnap Chrome.
This is about where Mukuro's attention was gotten; Chrome had been doing perfectly well before that, and then suddenly disappeared, as their "benefactor" was a Mist user powerful and skilled enough to completely block his connection to Chrome, such that not only was he no longer keeping her alive, but he couldn't even guess at her location. This blackout state continued until, as the rest of the Vongola's pursuit and attempt to rescue went on, the one responsible both lifted the barrier keeping Mukuro from being aware... and suddenly stopped bothering to "help" and keep Chrome alive himself, leading to Chrome, suddenly back on Mukuro's radar and dying, broadcasting "DON'T COME IT'S A TRAP".
Sadly, Daemon Spade, the now body-hopping spirit of the first Vongola Mist Guardian, had managed to read Mukuro accurately; even with going in blind, Mukuro took the bait, possessing Chrome to find the problem and destroy them. Spade took the challenge, and there was a nasty bout of the kind of fighting only a couple of powerful illusionists could get into that seemed to end with Mukuro the victor; Spade fled his current host and left Mukuro and Chrome be just as the rest of the Vongola caught up, and Mukuro had a nice preening moment that he'd beaten the original Vongola Mist Guardian.
This lasted until he tried to return to his body, and pretty much slammed face-first into a "SORRY, OCCUPIED" sign, shunting him into the body of the owl Box-Weapon "familiar". The entire game of using Chrome as bait had been to get Mukuro to leave his body unattended where Spade would have access without a fight for it, since it'd be one of the few host bodies where Spade could abuse his full power and not run into pesky problems with what his host could or couldn't keep up with, and Spade had picked up a few of the Vendice's dimension-warping tricks to get around that annoying "stuck in a jar" problem.
Thus began a period of the Grumpiest Owl Ever, as Spade used Mukuro's body to try to annihilate the leader of the Simon and the few of the Vongola Tenth Gen that were still standing in an epic grudge-fueled psychotic snap while Mukuro was stuck coaching Chrome and the others as a seriously de-powered owl. (PS, yes, he was afflicted with that problem where even a pissy snowy owl somehow still looks poofy and fluffy.) Not only did this end in needing to wreck his body a good bit, but it almost turned into a self-sacrifice on the part of the Simon leader...except that Chrome dove in to generate a barrier she wasn't -QUITE- powerful enough to hold protecting the boy, and ended up acting as an external Normally Functioning Conscience for Mukuro, forcing his hand into helping hold the barrier as well with what power he could manage as an owl.
Once Spade was driven out and had run up his own white flag, the Vendice declared Mukuro's service more than adequate to earn him being left with his relative freedom. Mukuro returned to Kokuyo to recover from both being in the jar for an extended period and the beating he took while Spade had the body, still technically in the service of the Vongola but otherwise actually free and not being hunted (well, not being hunted besides Hibari, the Vongola Cloud Guardian he'd curb-stomped back in that first battle, seeking to even the score now and then) for the first time in his life.
Personality: One of the first, most important things to understand about Mukuro is that he is a lying liar who lies like a lying rug. Even on the rare occasions he says something truthful, he's still probably slanting or misrepresenting something. This means that, when trying to figure out what the Hell is going on in his head, nine times out of ten, he's the last person you should trust. He's a Mist User, and a damn good one in more ways than just raw power and illusions; his survival and existence is dependent on his skill in figuring out what other people are hiding while keeping his own secrets and leading other people astray about him and unsure what's true and what's a lie. One of his few lines that actually gives any useful insight is a moment of intimidation and theatrics - that the nature of Mist is "to hide the lies within the truth, and the truth within the lies".
He has a very practiced, reflexive, carefully constructed persona that is how he's almost always seen and known; calm, controlled, arrogant and aloof, he carries himself as a predator, something alien to humanity. Other people might be tolerated, but are, at best, pawns, only of value as long as he has some use for them. He has a god complex, a sense of pride in the power he gained from the experiments, and an unshakable belief that it's made him something greater than human. As much as he carries himself as above everything, he has no issues with violence; if anything, given a reason, he can be downright bloodthirsty, with an edge of the special kind of sadism reserved for someone whose power focuses on mindgames - playing with prey like a cat. He can be very affable and charismatic when he wants to be, but silly things like social ties, friendship, relationships, and morality are for mortal creatures, and he's above and beyond all of it. Moreover, that calm charisma isn't that he tries to put people at ease - it's more a matter of his own confidence; he can quote things like a desire to start world war three and drown the world in blood with calm, unwavering focus, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. If anything, it can be unsettling to outsiders - he's not at ease and affable because he's "friendly", he's at ease and affable because he is the larger predator and there's nothing you could do to touch him. The more he's pushed or challenged, the sharper and more visible his claws get, and the more blatantly predatory he becomes. Still, he's a Mist user - and banks everything on cunning, planning carefully and calculating out risks and tactics, control of the field, and the ego doesn't go to overconfidence and a lack of acknowledging and respecting an enemy's skills...
He's just sure he'll prove that he's better in the end.
At least, all of the above is what he projects to the world. If it were purely false, this would be simple, but that ends up running into that bit about Mist User logic, and that he's a VERY talented and clever Mist user; he's not stupid enough to think he can keep up a facade that's entirely made of lies, so it's less that there's layers between "facade" and reality", and more that his outward persona is a careful weaving of his actual personality with various defense mechanisms and bits of tactical posturing, so there isn't really such a thing as "dropping the act". To make matters more fun, depending on the situation and who he's talking to, he's perfectly happy to express opinions, goals, and motives where he'll say completely contradictory things within the same page, all with the same conviction, just for the sake of muddling the waters further - so when he does express more than one opinion, not only is it necessary to unravel what he wants people to believe and what parts of it are "true", but then to chase a shell game of mixed puzzle pieces and stitch back together what bits of each thing he's said have what meaning - and what he might be hiding or drawing attention away from. As much as his actions and what he actually commits to is easier than trying to puzzle out his intentions from what he says, even that has aspects of the shell game to it; his survival, and that of others around him, depends on his ability to fake people out, which means that even his actions have to be read over time, weighing what things have actual impact - and therefore are things that'd be towards one or another of his goals.
The short form? He is intentionally incredibly confusing, and will just about never be completely lying... or completely telling the truth. Anyone dealing with him has to be prepared to deal with the minefield, since even with the people that do register as "closer", he will keep up the same game; it's less that he lowers his guard, and more that he might occasionally drop hints and otherwise relies on the people "closer" to him to be able to decode what he really means and wants out of the mix of grey-shades of truth and lies.
That having been said, there's a few things that are fairly stable traits that can be reconstructed, and two things that're major foundations of his behavior.
The first is that he's a created being (CEEB) in most respects. Sure, he was naturally born, but nothing is known of his parents; he was given up for experiments to turn into a weapon for the Famiglia at an incredibly early age, and odds are good that he neither knows nor cares who his real parents are (beyond maybe that he'd happily kill them if he found them). His earliest memories are of the lab, and a great deal of time, work, and care was put into both the experiments on him and into trying to groom him to be a weapon. Whatever else may come, that much will never leave him - on some level, he is a weapon, something created to exist for a purpose, and his early childhood and formative years were something with pressures and patterns almost alien to a normal human being. It's established that before his powers stabilized, he was basically a "good little experiment" in most respects, if a bit unsettling - he's the one child that never cried out, never screamed, never spoke, never expressed any discontent, just mutely and mechanically endured it all.
And then he became the poster child for the Frankenstein principle - create something and abuse it, and it will turn on you; try to create a monster and you'll succeed.
They'd made him to be a weapon, and he was a very good weapon, even when he decided to turn on his creators; this still shows to this day in his mentality - he was molded to be something that would destroy problems, and there is still an element that, left to his own devices, his solution to threats, things that strike him as wrong, abuses, etc. is to find the source and kill it. As of his first appearance in the series, this had spiraled out of control impressively, going from "destroying his creators" - the Estraneo Famiglia - to "destroy the other people LIKE the creators/associated with them" - the Mafia and underworld in general - to "Destroy anyone who'd allow that kind of thing to go on/try to use it/abuse power" - an end goal of infiltrating world governments, bringing about World War III, and reducing the world to "a pure and beautiful sea of blood"... a plan that was also, as a side note, inherently self-destructive and a bit on the "take everything out with us" side. He DIDN'T have a lot of hope for an extended future beyond that, and he and the others were weirdly at peace with this; it's unsure if he's achieved picking up better long-term goals yet, or if he's still too unwilling to trust/rely on anything that WOULD be a stable place for them.
The only people that he'd taken with him that seemed to have any actual understanding of him were two of the other experiments, also the first people he'd ever spoken to; he'd rescued them from the labs, and taken them under wing, and they responded with the kind of almost unsettlingly unwavering loyalty that comes from being molded to be unable to function outside of certain patterns and given a "master" that actually has some understanding and offer of protection. There was a good long period where it was basically them vs. the world in all mentality, and nothing really did anything to disagree with that assessment; they lashed out at what they saw as threats or things like their creators, which led to the rest of the underworld seeing them as basically rabid loose weapons of mass destruction and turning further against them, which confirmed the idea that everything was, in fact, out to get them, or at best indifferent to the point of allowing abuses.
That "us against them" mentality and basic defensive cornered lab rat aspect is a big part of why there ISN'T a "drop the act". He might relax more genuinely around certain people that're "safe", but otherwise, everything is, on some level, assumed to be a potential threat and something he might have to protect himself and the others from, whether the person he's dealing with means to be threatening or not. This leads to an almost pathological complex about not showing weakness and maintaining at least the illusion that he has control over the situation and could destroy those around him at any moment; if you're not on a very short list, you're an Outsider, a threat, and not only will he be dealing with you as a Weapon and a predator, but he won't risk giving you ANYTHING that you or anyone else might be able to use against him. It's ingrained enough that, even at times when it might be to his advantage to do things like "ask for help", or where admitting that he does care about that short list in his own odd way would make someone less likely to see him as a monster, he won't do it; he might leave a hint dropped in here or there in the hopes another party is smart enough to catch it, but anything else would be leaving openings and the first reflex is to assume those openings will be used against him. Moreover, anything that'd make him dependent on someone else is going to be couched heavily in "it's to his advantage" terms; if he's not at least keeping up a show of being self-contained and perfectly capable without someone else, then that means whoever it is has leverage they could use against him.
If it sounds paranoid, it is, but it's less a delusional sort of paranoia and more a kind of wounded-animal reflex; him and his have been through enough with even well-meaning people not really managing to handle them or protect them (even if some of it was self-fulfilling prophecies) that it's habit. Other people = they WILL hurt you, no matter how nice and kind and well-intentioned they might be, and "protecting himself" from them is a necessity. Being the biggest, baddest predator means nobody else around can touch him or harm him. He's capable of recognizing when people are acting to his benefit, and it's possible to get him to slowly acknowledge that you're useful/not a threat/NOT going to harm him, but unless you have a way to quickly establish yourself as nonthreatening and completely in his service, it's going to be slow going. Even then, at best, the defense mechanisms will still be there; if he decides he likes you or that you're beneficial to him and nonthreatening, he'll still be making sure to occasionally drop reminders that yes, he's a predator, yes, he could kill you, and yes, he's only there because he chooses to be... for now.
This also means that getting him to admit he cares about someone is like trying to pull out his intestines through his mouth with a hooked wire and no restraints. For that short list, those people are the only ones he's let inside his defenses and the only stable thing in his world he can keep, and he's acutely aware that yes, there are people that would target them for being associated with him or use them against each other. Moreover, it's something where if he falls, they all go with him, something all of them are well aware of; as much as he protects them where he can, if it's necessary to put them at risk to protect the whole, he'll be relying on them to take care of themselves to some extent. And if anyone asks or fishes or tests? He cares nothing for them, they're pawns, they're expendable, he could exist just fine without them, and aiming at them will only piss him off because they're possessions, not because you'd be damaging something he cares about, so it's not even worth using them as bargaining chips or targets to bank-shot.
The insistence that he doesn't care is one of his few true lies; as much as he doesn't process close relationships the way a normal person would, if he does start getting attached to someone he gets very protective and possessive, and Daemon Spade has proven that this CAN be used against him in spite of his protests after using Chrome as bait for a trap that Mukuro dove into. It's also one of the things he's most pathological about as defense mechanisms go - the more a given weakness can be used against him, the more he'll work to make sure it doesn't look like it exists.
It is worth nothing that there is slowly becoming more than one circle; there's the Short List - Ken, Chikusa, Chrome, Fran, and to a lesser extent MM - of people that're His, unquestionably, that he's the most possessive of. All of them are people that're, to some major degree, dependent upon him for survival/freedom, or people that've put themselves under his authority/ownership on some significant level. Basically, don't think you're ending up on the Short List unless you're someone he Owns.
Outside of that, there's a small, gradual, possible admission that maybe there's a few people that aren't completely out to get him that might be useful and good to keep around. This is still something that's very clearly pragmatically fueled; the Vongola 10th Gen, as much as they're connected to Mafia and therefore something where there's very blurry lines between them and "People just like Creators", are also the main thing standing between him and his people, and the continued retribution of the underworld and the Vindice. With the bargain he made, as long as he's keeping some foothold on being the Vongola Mist Guardian and helping protect the 10th Gen, him and his people are safe and allowed freedom; because of that, as much as there's protest and it's not something he's entirely comfortable with, he is actually reliable in his duty. There's a gradual possibility that they might manage to grow on him enough to register as "safe", but for now, that secondary circle is basically a place where, if achieved, you are probably somewhat confusing and not-sure-if-want, teetering in between "useful/safe" and "threat" where you're worth enough for him to want to keep you intact, but liable to get claw-batted at, tsun'ed at, and half avoided. (And if you manage to earn your way into that level and then either turn on him, or fail to hold up your proverbial end of the bargain, no God in heaven will save you, which is the "Truth" to the "bigger predator, I tolerate you and find your presence amusing and useful but mis-step and I will decorate with your entrails" bit of his persona.)
There's also authority issues inherent in this First Thing. He was a CEEB, kept in a box and experimented on and tortured because he only existed for a Purpose and he was told to be a good little weapon and be perfectly obedient, and escaping that fate took backlashing against it with incredible violence. Give him the slightest impression that there is a box, cage, intent to restrict or restrain him or his people, or that there will be Order imposed on him whether he wants it or not, and you will invoke that same backlash. It will be violent, it will be spectacular, and he will enjoy ripping you apart and playing in the bloody remains. The best you can get as far as "giving him orders" is setting up something where it's in his best interests to go along with it, being damn sure to maintain it being in his best interests, and avoid exerting force to pressure him into it; push and he will do things to prove that you can't control him and give warnings that trying will end with him slaughtering you. "Feral cat" is, again, an appropriate metaphor; the cat will generally not do tricks for you, and if you try to force it or take away its sense of ownership, it will shred your arms for trying. Give him enough of a sense of a lack of options and he's able to sit on the backlash and play along, but it'd be nearly impossible to do that without merely delaying the backlash until he feels like he can get away with it.
The extent of his "normal socialization" was a short stint of one Famiglia trying to adopt/rescue the kids; this ended spectacularly and bloodily, and registered to him more as a potential threat than anything. Outside of that, as much as he's watched and observed things where he can, he's been living with Ken and Chikusa, basically on the run with stints in underworld prisons. His experience with interpersonal relationships is stunted, warped, and bizarre; he might academically grasp other people's behavior, but he tends to function in a fairly cause-effect, behavioral response sense that's heavily couched in defense mechanisms. It's not that he doesn't have emotions per se or that he isn't capable of bonding to people...
It's that the way he expresses and processes emotions is off-kilter, normal is a setting on the dryer, and any connection to others has to first get filtered through a lack of positive experience and a ton of habits and defenses, and even then he's probably going through the motions to get what he wants rather than actually understanding the other person and responding to them with empathy/sympathy. Given that the people he's the closest with are all off-kilter themselves, it's hard to tell if he'll eventually be good with people ... or always be kind of a hyperpredatory freak.
The second big thing besides the horrible morass that is CEEB issues, is what, specifically, was done to him. There's canon history for the more powerful Mist users drawing on supernatural or unnatural forces, and to make him the most powerful weapon they could, he was repeatedly killed and revived, with the intent of punting him back and forth across the incarnational cycle until he brought bits of the other realms back; he's basically lived repeated incarnations all across the cycle of Samsara to get his powers, and expressed memory of them all.
This ends up being the source of the aloof, "above it all" inhuman sense; not even animalistic but alien - beyond being a weapon like Ken and Chikusa, he has all the less reason to identify as "human" for having his early years packed with an overloaded mosaic of different states of being. Considering that he does seem aware of some of the lore around said cycle, the "above it all" god complex is something that's grown out of what he's become; on some level he really ISN'T human anymore, but a human-incarnated channel for something that's transcended the normal boundaries of the cycle, packed into a little teenage CEEB-shaped box. Given the amount of Buddhist imagery in some of his illusions, it's safe to say he's pretty familiar with the faith that the cycle is described in, and in that, it's hard to tell if he's a fairly good Buddhist all things considered, or the closest the religion can get to a theistic Satanist equivalent. He certainly has a sense of morality but it's one that isn't tied to "normalcy" or any standards of society or worldly habit; on some level, his morality is trying to dance to a "Higher law", and one where concepts like "good" and "evil" are tools, shades of grey and things to be played off each other. If it suits his goals and his sensibilities, he can be perfectly compassionate and protective, or intensely sadistic and cruel, and flicker between them without much warning as it seems necessary to him, and he does certainly seem to try to hold emotions and sentiment as something to weigh against other things and not rely on.
Or at least, he tries to, and would certainly love for everyone to believe it; he does have a ridiculous amount of self-control when he wants to, and a strong will. Moreover, some of the Buddhist tenets, particularly Zen sect, of seeking clarity and attempting to let go of delusions and preconceived notions are something that seems to seep into his behavior and perceptions; for all of his complexes, he's self-aware, and in a pinch will acknowledge or point out things with a good degree of clarity and insight, as well as a sense of weighing objective reality versus subjective impressions. Of course, this is also something that feeds into him being a Mist User at heart, as part of the purpose of a mist user is to be able to see through the deceptions, motives, and biases of others clearly, while being able to conceal what's important for self and those around them. It is still something that seems significant that, where most of the Tenth Gen has gotten at least an echo and reference to their First Gen counterpart's weapons in their last evolution of the Vongola Gear, his weapon isn't anything associated with Spade at all, but rather a khakkara - a Buddhist monk's staff. (Nevermind that a favorite recurring weapon/theme are lotuses and lotus vines, Buddhist symbols of transcendence, truth, and purity.)
Through all of this, it's worth noting that he is a teenager, as much as the experiments and extra lives make him seem older; all of this is still filtered through a person who has sixteen years at most of practical, direct experience with the world they're interacting with, and sixteen years in the current incarnation and body however much they might remember of other lives. He's very calculating and cunning, and incredibly mature for his age, but there's still times where he can act on whim or impulse, there is a temper that can be provoked, he lacks experience with a lot of things he won't want to admit to, and compared to his first-gen predecessor, he's not always the most subtle thing for a Mist Guardian. There's even times, with the Kokuyo gang, where he almost achieves a sense of "normalcy" or behavior that'd be about expected of a slightly primadonna and egotistical teenager. As confusing as the actual outward battle is, Spade pretty well ran circles around him in terms of deception and manipulation, and the older Mist Guardian managed to play him like a harp despite how difficult it can be to read his intentions.
He can also wax bitter, cynical, and violent in a worse state or worse mood. There is the curious note that in most cases, as sadistic and violent as he can be at his worst, it's not really malice so much as lashing out and that he's a -WEAPON-; there's not a great deal of personal involvement in harming others, they just happen to be there and damaging them is a means to an end that is one he happens to be good at/was made for.
Fears: *His childhood was spent as a lab rat. He has no intention of going back to that, and trying to force him to be a good little lab rat/weapon-in-development will not go over well.
*On the one hand, there's very little that he's strongly attached to; however, there's a very short list of people he does care about, all protests to the contrary, and he'd like to not lose them.
*He may not show it, and it's something that's a faceable fear, but he's NOT fond of the Vendice.
*Weakness - Mukuro does not take well to being unable to take care of himself, hold his own, and protect his own interests.
*He also does not like being restrained; boxes are not pleasant, anything that restricts his movement or impedes his abilities will grate on him, and as much as he was very patient with the whole stuck in a jar thing, he'd really rather not repeat that, kthx.
*There's a fairly complicated back and forth with his own nature as a Weapon, visible in his dislike of using the Path of Humans and his mental state while in it. On the one hand, with everything else layered on top of it, he's accepted that yes, he is a Weapon, and turned it towards something that seems to be growing into "instrument of divine retribution" - a weapon answering a higher law than the corrupt humans who reacted him. On the other hand, stripping that away to the base core bothers him; he'll USE the Path of Humans if he's cornered, but it DOES take away all of the rest and make him -just- Mukuro-The-Weapon - which, while it'd probably change in different circumstances, is a little bit unhinged. He also seems to have a mental skitter-around where it's hard to tell if he's internally resolved it or not, since when he uses the Path of Humans, he cites its berserk and monstrous state as "a reflection of how horrible humanity is" rather than a reflection of him-that-life-at-core. He's aware he IS a Weapon, and always will be a Weapon, but the idea of being JUST the Weapon bothers him.
Weaknesses: *There's this funny concept that most people take for granted that he's still trying to make sense of. It's some weird thing called "nor-mul intur-pers-uhn-uhl re-lay-shun-ships". He can grok normal people in terms of behavioral psych - needs, wants, goals - and pushing emotional buttons, but he doesn't relate to them at ALL, nor does he really understand normal social ties and relationships. In fact, his interactions with others outside of The Short List is basically a giant mass of defense mechanisms, suspicion, paranoia, and keeping distance, and even with the Short List he can't really be said to interact with them the way any normal human being would.
*He Is A Weapon. As subtle and clever as he can be, there's a part of his psyche that treats the instinctive solution to any problem to be destroying it, whether immediately and with great violence, or slowly through string-pulling and manipulation. That being said, give him an opening to destroy some problem immediately and with great violence, and he will.
*CEEB issues, CEEB issues everywhere! Just because he refuses to go back to the lab doesn't mean he doesn't bleed all sorts of special issues that go along with being a lab rat from earliest memory; beyond "Normal interpersonal relationships", as much as he can be damn survivalist, he doesn't really have an understanding of normal interactions with the world in general, period. You couldn't make him a normal human wormbaby if you tried.
*Ego ego ego. As much as all the experience of his other lives is squished through a teenage psyche, he does have some degree of memory of being demons, gods, and everything in between, and that he's sort of in a weird transcendent place on the cycle, which only makes it worse - it's not even "I am a god", it's "I'm above this and can skip across it at leisure". He does recognize that he's not invincible and has a good sense of tactical savvy, but he's very self-reliant, very aware that he's one of the most powerful things out there, and as careful as he is, it's still possible to use that ego against him, as Spade demonstrated.
*He's a paranoid little git. If you're not on The Short List, and don't end up registering as someone he Owns, you will always register, on some subconscious level, as a potential threat, whether you mean any harm or not. He will be distant, aloof, cautious, and not really want to let ANYONE close.
*Violent tendencies - He's one of the few Mist users that actually shows pride in physical combat abilities, and as mentioned, he has no qualms about beating the shit out of opponents, breaking bones, sadistic tendencies, or splattering an obnoxious enough problem across the walls and ceiling.
*walking ball of defense mechanisms - The paranoia and other defense mechanisms are pathological enough that there's a canon chapter after his current canon-point wherein it'd actually be to his advantage to drop his usual posturing ... and instead a third party has to play "Mukuro to Normal Human Being" translator. If you're not Short List but are managing to fall into that area where you're seen as "..maybe you are useful/not a threat after all", the best you can expect is him dropping confusing and contradictory hints now and then in between the posturing. While he's not as bad with "his People" as he is with others, he's very Zen-pragmatic, and doesn't flinch away from things that'd require him or one of them possibly getting hurt in the name of preventing worse threats or dealing with a problem, which can make him seem very harsh and cold even with the people he cares about.
*The Short List - Already used against him once, and in later chapters he does put himself between Chrome and threats when they're running low on power; he's very possessive and protective of the people he's decided he Owns, to the point that he will do things like let himself get captured to buy time for them to escape (granting that he had a plan to get away himself or at least act in spite of it) and walk into an obvious trap (albeit one he thought he could take) to keep them intact. He's not self-sacrificing exactly - he'll have at least a jury-rig, cobbled together attack plan and no intention of actually sacrificing himself - but he will take more risks than usual and gamble with much worse odds than usual when it comes to them.
*Faulty/Zen conscience. His sense of right and wrong is a mix of pragmatic and some weird sort of higher law. He doesn't lash out without a reason that at least makes sense to him, and if he doesn't feel he has a reason to be outright cruel, he won't do worse than posture - but if he does think he has a reason, he is incredibly cold-blooded, and can be downright sadistic in toying with his "prey". He doesn't see any shade of moral difference between the cold-blooded or sadistic moments, and the times he does something like protect and encourage Chrome. His sense of right and wrong isn't filtered through human standards, it's filtered through necessity and context, and he will NOT see anything wrong with doing things others might find abhorrent if he feels there's a good reason for it and it will lead to an improvement in the situation somehow. For the most part, this means that he's actually safer to be around than he pretends to be.... however, he does have some distorted triggers and cases of lack of good ways of handling some kinds of pressures and stress where a very nasty response seems perfectly logical TO HIM but not to anyone around him. (See also, the contrast between Lancia's memory of what happened and the way Mukuro would describe it. No, there ISN'T any guilt.)
Mundane Strengths/Abilities: *Mukuro is very, very clever. For all his limits of experience, he's a very fast learner, incredibly observant, and good at both putting information together and reading between the lines; with a little more experience he's a natural and incredibly good spy, and he's already capable of some fairly scary feats of information gathering and gleaning from his surroundings, as well as tactical planning and Xanatos-gambit plotting.
*He's a manipulative bastard. While there's definitely a distinct angle to it, he's very good at gauging people's goals, motives, fears, and personalities, guessing at how they're likely to react in a given situation, and not only planning for it, but setting things up to get them to jump to his advantage while making it look like it's their idea. The only thing gimping it really is the whole, CEEB issues, doesn't understand normal human wormbaby logic thing; he's got TALENT, but his skills are still a little blunt-instrument compared to the more actively insidious Mist users in the series.
*He's a lying liar who lies and is incredibly good at it. It doesn't hurt that pretty much every time he breathes and speaks, and his entire outward persona, is a stitched together shell-game tangle of bits of truth, bits of lies, bits of what he wants people to believe, red herrings, and accurate information. He's got an EXCELLENT poker face, and under most circumstances it doesn't so much drop as briefly flicker or show varying intensity. It doesn't hurt that accurately displaying his emotions and reactions is one of those pathological defense mechanisms he couldn't stop if he tried.
*He's damn good with the trident, staff, and in a fight in general; he's both got a decent amount of combat experience this-life, and apparently picked up some by osmosis from others, making him a very dangerous exception to the idea that taking away an illusionist's powers renders them weaker in a fight. In fact, he's been known to use that trope to his advantage for surprise value dropping into the Path of Asura.
*He does have a very odd sort of pragmatic mental stability; it's not that he doesn't have moments where he can be a moody bastard, especially if the wrong triggers are hit, but he's generally good at mentally rolling with things and recovering his balance and footing. It's less being teflon and titanium that never scratches or has anything stick, and more like trying to stop a gyroscope - you might throw him off-balance, but his instincts are to react in a way that'd mean surviving and escaping, and as long as he's surviving, he can eventually recover.
*He has the kind of self control that's rarely seen in someone born and raised as a normal human worm baby, to the point that it almost becomes another one of those pathological things that doesn't really shut off. As moody and pissy as he can be, it takes a fairly bad corner to get him to actually lose control, and he dislikes and avoids it; it's only really been seen ONCE in the series, when he was cornered in the first big fight and facing being thrown in captivity himself for the first time since his escape from the labs. Just because he HAS violent tendencies and will happily act on them if he feels they're appropriate and he can get away with it, doesn't mean he's easily provoked; if anything, trying to provoke him will probably get him going more zen-calm just to piss you off and be contrary. This can make his mood swings all the more unpredictable, since you don't just have some of his occasionally alien logic to account for, but what he'll decide is a reaction he wants to have, if he's even going to act on it, and if he's going to act on it in the direction you expect.
*Pain tolerance. He's been tortured and experimented on, literally sent to Hell, stuck in a sense-dep/stasis tank for months straight, gotten the shit beaten out of him, holes put in him, and generally been through damn near everything. He doesn't really ENJOY pain, but it's something possibly a little too familiar; his pain tolerance is ridiculous, and he's used to picking up and toughing through/ignoring pain to an even more ridiculous extent.
And yes, he has picked up a bit of a "Hahahaha fuck you I've already been through worse so you can't touch me, but I'll destroy you for that on principle" complex about it.
Sensitivity/Magical Ability: (I AM SO SORRY FOR HIS EXISTENCE. AT LEAST HE'S NOT SPADE. SPADE IS WORSE.) He isn't overly sensitive in the "can sense things supernaturally" per se, but he does seem to have some ability to tell illusions from reality. It mostly seems to be very honed instinct and experience and self-training to judge differences between an actual presence and illusions. He also does have a bit of animal instinct sense for "something isn't right", but again, it doesn't seem to be anything unnatural so much as being observant and having good instincts honed by experience.
The majority of his powers come from the Six Paths; things he brought back via his time spent getting bounced around the incarnational cycle. While technically he can normally only use one at a time, it does seem like he's good enough to keep some small or ambient effects up when he's path switching, like maintaining Chrome's organs while doing other things. There IS a visual tell as to which Path he's using at any given time, in the form of a number-kanji mark in the unnatural red eye.
*Path of Hell - The path with the strongest outright illusions. The end effect does depend somewhat on how much effort he puts into it, and it is a truism that there's a battle of wills involved and it's hypothetically possible to overcome it, but he's grown powerful enough that if he's really working at it, the illusions generated by the Path of Hell are almost less illusions and more temporary reality-warps. Sure, it stops being real once he stops putting will into it, but for the duration that it exists, it takes a great deal of will and effort to NOT be affected as if it were real. He's shown the ability from early on to pretty much turn an entire area into something he can play with like putty, shattering things into earthquakes, summoning strangling vines and pillars of fire, warping gravity, and otherwise making life interesting for anyone caught in it. It is limited to what he can see and be aware of; he can't generate illusions away from where he is. Once he lets go of it, it ceases to exist, although injuries caused by it if someone doesn't manage to fight it off are real and will persist.
He can't alter things in a way that would allow changing the layout of the area; if there's a wall there, it can't be walked through just because he makes it as if it isn't. (This has been used as a trap by another illusionist in series to get someone ELSE to slam into a wall.) If an illusion includes the floor dropping out, someone afflicted can get hurt from the "fall", but if they manage to snap out of it or he cancels it, they're still on the ground where they were and looking probably pretty silly. He could possibly generate some kind of weapon that could be aimed at a wall to try and put a hole in it (Make weapon, make it solid, use it to damage something real), but he couldn't just have the wall suddenly have a hole in it. He can't make things cease to exist - a real knife aimed at him is still a knife, and will cut even if it doesn't look like it's there, although he could either play displacer beast (get someone striking at an image of him that's not where he really is, or even at something else instead of him), or create something to serve as a barrier/way to block. If someone's managing to hold their own in the battle of wills enough to "disbelieve", his creations will have less effect, or even possibly none, although he has been known to use a "that's an illusion and I know it" to hide an actual physical weapon in the past.
Yes, it's kind of messy, and depending on how he uses it and who he's trying to use it on, can end up being either very powerful, or incredibly fragile and finicky.
Oh, also, since part of the power relies on his ability to put will and faith into his own illusions - outside of obvious things like the displacer beast tricks and "hide a weapon attack in an illusion" fakeouts, his illusions will be perfectly real to him, as psychologically contradictory as it sounds. While he probably couldn't do things like live off Path of Hell illusions for food and water, as all he'd be doing is fooling his body into thinking there was food/water, he IS capable of dealing with injuries by basically covering them with an illusion that all is well. It's dependent on him having power and focus for it, and in most cases is more useful for "get somewhere safe/to where it can be properly cared for", but he has had several months practice on Chrome with something as severe as replacing missing internal organs with illusory doubles. It also seems like a safe assumption that him seeming as healthy and able as he is after several months in the jar and Spade getting the shit kicked out of him is partly him playing self-affecting-illusions when he's out and about. This can be used on someone else easier than on himself, although anything interrupting the effect on that person or blocking his power will make it piff. Normal healing does seem to go on under the illusion, but it won't make up for a lack of treatment.
*Path of Hungry Ghosts - Tied to his possession abilities; the Path of Hungry Ghosts allows him to use the abilities of whoever he's possessed. He doesn't retain them afterwards beyond maybe some kind of academic understanding, but it does mean that if he possesses someone, he has full use of their powers and skills while he's got their body.
*Path of Beasts - Summoning and commanding animals. So far his favorite has been snakes. It can only call things that're existing in the area; he can't portal things in or anything, just call them over and make them do what he wants for the duration of the effect. Of course, this might be useless to potentially dangerous in the House.
*Path of Humans - Or That Thing You'll Probably Not See. While he professes that it's a reflection of how ugly and horrible the human state is, it actually seems to be something akin to a Dying Will state...
Which basically means amplifying all of his "Abused Weapon CEEB" traits and taking off all the mental and physical safeties. Ironically, this ends up being one of the more monstrous paths, as he's shown to end up with black patterns crossing his skin, fangs, slight claws, and basically turning into what seems to be a self-image-gone wrong. Besides the fact that he can rip things apart in this state and is basically a living weapon of mass destruction that's very hard to injure and stop, it DOES seem to shut down normal surface-consciousness controls, and tends to end up with a sadistic berserk state.
*Path of Asura - Also marked by a visible mist-flame over his altered eye; pure physical-combat path - channeling the skills and power of one of the "vengeful gods/warring gods". Not quite the juggernaut the Path of Humans is, but still damn dangerous in a physical fight, and more given to tactical thinking and actual skill as opposed to ripping things apart and torturing them.
*Path of Heaven - The possession/mind control Path, also the one he usually stays in. He can do suggestion-type effects with eye contact and some force of will, although anything this state is subject to the victim resisting and him needing to overcome them. It's also possible for him to extend this out into a controlled state where the victim is completely obedient or being blackout-puppeteered, although those can be interrupted or broken, and often take a bit of other work to set them up psychologically. He can potentially take over someone's body completely, but this is a drain on resources and usually requires leaving his own body unattended; he doesn't often use the possession end without resorting to the Possession Bullets to make it as easy as possible.
Note that all of these are a bit easier for him if he can get a connection via drawing blood with his trident/"staff"/weapon.
Either way, if some outside effect manages to break his control over an unwilling target before he's let go, he can't re-establish it; they basically get a sort of immunity short of him mentally/emotionally breaking them down for it to work, and the most he can do after that is a sort of psychic tug-on-sleeve-and-point.
*Possession Bullets - He probably only has two or three of these; they're the forbidden work of the Estraneo, based on the Dying Will bullets. They're also a great way to confuse the fuck out of someone after him, since they work via him shooting himself, and he does seem, for all intents and purposes, dead for the duration of the effect, blood and everything.
However, while he's out, he can take over anyone he's "Marked" and completely suppress their will without them getting a chance to fight him off; moreover, he can control more than one person at a time, and has used this to possess four people at once.
*Box Weapon/Vongola Gear - Now a single entity; in "dormant state" they're a pair of funny indigo dangle-earrings. He can summon the "Box Weapon" familiar, Mukurou the owl, from it at any time, and it is worth pointing out that yes, he has Marked the owl so that he can possess it or control it beyond the usual level of familiar-loyalty. It can also use his Mist flame as a catalyst for a weapon form, the owl shifting into a Buddhist Khakkhara staff with the usual chime-rings adorned with sharp points. The staff is controllable enough to use those points as weapons, or channel illusions to spear things on them; however, the main power is that while it's active, he's capable of using all six Paths at once without having to favor one or the other, with a bit of amplification.
Yes, this does take a lot of power.
Yes, he's kind of powerful. His reserves are finite, however, so there is a limit to how much he can do, and he tends to play the Neuro gambit; he'll make occasional shows, but for the most part he's gauging how much force is necessary to deal with X problem as quickly as possible and not pushing further, trying to conserve power past what he needs to use. This means that, if allowed to play his usual games and keep some ability to control his involvement in a situation, he can make it look like he's got inexhaustible resources when really he's only putting solid pressure where it's needed and is trying to avoid overdoing it, and if he does push it too far, he can wear himself out, even to the point of physical collapse. It's worse if he's working through someone else's body, and it's been canon-history that almost every time he's worked through Chrome for a fight, she's ended up collapsing and he's ended up 'out' for a while after. Also the illusions are finicky, particularly against anything resistant to them or anyone who knows what they are and is resisting; it takes more power for him to do anything in those cases, and can make it so that he doesn't really have much stamina at all for an extended fight. In a recent-chapter example (future to his canon point, but not by a huge amount), he was able to put two of the Vendice - which are both very powerful and highly resistant to illusions - down with something summoned via such; however, that particular illusion had Chrome lending power to it, and was an all or nothing attack, taking enough of his reserves that he couldn't muster a second shot against the one that HADN'T gone down. Most of his extended fights that aren't against other illusionists end up using bait and switch tactics, the non-illusion paths, and fakeouts to trick people into accepting the illusion or mask weapons within things people have already resisted.
Supply List: *clothes
*Small revolver + three possession bullets
*Trident; the shaft is collapsible
*Mist Earrings, described above
Game Transfers: N/A
Sample RP post: That the darkness in the one room was unnatural wasn't exactly hard to guess; calling an illusory flame into his hand to test it proved perfectly useless, as if the blackness was absorbing away the light and the little bit of energy he was putting into it to boot -
And something was moving in the corners of the room in ways that didn't quite seem natural, enough to pique perverse curiosity; so some sort of otherworldly creatures were hiding out here.
He gave up on the light source; as "visual" as illusions could be, he'd found darkness to be an advantage at times, as it made people jumpier, more likely to react, easier to fool or catch off guard; things they would've questioned in brightly lit places became easily believed. Besides, sight was hardly the only way to navigate, and he was perfectly comfortable in the dark, relying on hearing and letting his eyes adjust to what little light there was. For a few moments, he stayed still, waiting to see if there was any signs of a reaction or clue from whatever else inhabited the room; but whatever was shifting in the dark and watching, it - they? - were staying away, in the corners.
Well, there was more than one way to get an idea what was going on here. He nudged the door shut behind him, taking another few steps in; when there was still no challenge or other reaction to his presence, he nudged the bed to confirm where it was, and curled along the foot of it like an oversized cat, quietly watching the corners for what he could make out of whatever was there. If something bold decided to be hostile, he had enough up his sleeve to fend them off and at least make it to the door if they proved to be too much trouble; and if they weren't hostile, well...
A quiet room that would put off the human residents seemed like a perfectly comfortable place to retreat to.
