POWER DESCRIPTIONS

Shion is a skilled illusionist. It awakened later than his more physical abilities but he has honed his craft well.  Illusions that fool a single sense are easiest and require only a reasonable amount of concentration. The more complex the illusion the more effort it takes. Exceedingly detailed and realistic illusions require Shion to enter almost a trance-like state to achieve. And he can't do it from too far away. The more distance the less he can do. If he can use a base for his illusions it makes it easier. A splatter of water can appear to be blood to all the senses with much less effort than it takes wholly illusory blood to fool the same senses. 

It is into his physical powers that Shion has poured the bulk of his efforts. The enhanced senses that came upon him in early puberty only grew with practice and education until he could control how strong he wanted his various senses at will. In his junior year at Aurora he was able to branch his physical abilities out into accelerated healing and regeneration. These are less controlled and more automatic, though in the beginning it took great effort and concentration to achieve. He is now able to soak considerable amounts of damage just by virtue of the healing and regenerative powers that he has developed. The more he needs to heal and recover from the more energy it takes, of course. He can, and has, overexerted himself past the limits of his highly accelerated abilities but given time and safety he is able to recover from almost any injury save dismemberment that doesn't immediately kill him. It just might leave him as useful as a week old kitten for a while.

APPEARANCE

Golden-amber, monolid eyes and crimson hair past his shoulders; it would be no surprise if one assumed Shion's looks enhanced by colored contacts, hair dye, and the like. One would be wrong, however. The creamy, pale, olive-toned skin; scarlet hair; and striking eyes are completely natural to him. His face is elegant and beautiful, rather than classically handsome and he's never anything other than smooth-cheeked. 

He's tall, especially for someone of Japanese origin, leading many to assume he's of mixed blood.  They wouldn't be wrong, but it's anyone's guess as to his paternity. Long and lean and well toned, Shion is more than reasonably attractive and he knows it.  He dresses to display himself to his advantage. His tastes run to sleek and fashionable but no matter what he wears it is tailored perfectly for both aesthetic and mobility. 

Black, white, and rich jewel tones make up his preferred wardrobe; and much of that is made of sensual materials like silk and cashmere. Unless he's on an assignment, even his more casual attire is elegant and rather striking.  On assignment, of course, he wears whatever he has to depending on the mission.

PERSONALITY

In short, Shion is a monster. Completely devoid of morals or empathy, he has no problems with hurting or even killing another. Far from it, in fact, as he positively enjoys both activities, especially when he has time to play head games with his targets. For not only is he a deceptively charming killer, but he's a phenomenally twisted sadist as well. People are all just toys to him. He's loyal only in as much as being loyal is convenient to his desires. 

He really is charming, though. Good looks aside, he has learned how to read people and shape his facade to best appeal to them. Although his sense of humor is bitingly dry, he can adopt roles and personas to an extent that only a practiced empath could be sure he's a walking lie. It doesn't take too much effort for him to virtually manufacture a thin veneer of emotion that is enough to fool the empathically sensitive and less practiced or less strong empaths. 

Shion isn't a man of deep emotions, generally.  He likes some things and people well enough but feels little to no pangs of regret over losing or hurting them. It's in part because he has co carefully guarded his core.  Never again will he be a helpless little boy taking abuse for being different. Should someone truly worm their way into his actual affection and then betray it, his vengeance would be swift but lasting, and entirely cruel.

BIOGRAPHY

Shion was born in the outskirts of Tokyo to an impoverished single mother as the product of a drunken night's discretions. With no recollection of that night's activities, her child's appearance gave her something of a surprise. At first it wasn't so bad. If his first baby wisps of hair were of a ruddy hue and his eyes uncommonly light well that didn't mean much. Infants often looked a little weird, right? But when his hair only grew more vividly red, and his eyes remained that unusual amber-gold, young Hinako was increasingly unnerved. She was a superstitious person and was sure no good could come of such a strange baby.

When the child was only two he was left at an emergency exit door of a hospital where there was, theoretically, a chance he would be discovered and survive in spite of the low temperatures. As fate would have it, he was. An orderly on a smoke break found the boy and alerted the authorities. Thus, Shion was sent to a baby institution for a year or so before being sent to a children's institution.  

Life wasn't easy. He stood out vividly amidst the other orphans in the institutions. With that highly atypical coloration he couldn't be anything but a hafu and the other children never let him forget it. It wasn't until he finally hit a growth spurt that the subtle and not so subtle bullying stopped. 

At 12 years old he was almost a head taller than his peers and was able to dish out plenty of abuse of his own. It just so happened that around that time he found himself a bit more aware of his surroundings.  The other kids couldn't sneak up on him; he would always hear them coming.  If they lay in wait he might hear them or even smell them. Pesky prank-like traps such as a tripwire were soon useless against him as he saw them clearly well before he was in any danger of falling for them. In short, he became something of a nightmare for his former tormenters. For now he made it his personal mission to dish out everything that had come his way in the last decade.

At 13 he had had enough. His peers were sufficiently cowed as to be boring and there was nothing to be gained from staying in the institution. Having recently discovered his ability to trick the eye; causing people to think they saw something different on a paper or in a picture than was actually there; he ditched the place.  Using his heightened senses and a rough and tumble sensibility honed by years of not-so-friendly tussles, Shion played a smash-and-grab theft on a number of people. Mostly accosting drunks and idiot tourists, he acquired a decent sum of money. No two of his victims every reported the same description of their attacker so the police assumed it was gang activity.

When he had enough money, and enough successes passing as other people, the brash young man used his ill-gotten gains to catch a plane out of Japan. It was easy enough to make people think the picture on the stolen passport looked like him after all.  

At that point in time, Shion wasn't the sort of person who lay many longterm plans. He hit the ground running when he landed in Italy and never looked back. Petty theft and mind games soon took a nastier turn and before too long he was racking up a body count. It wasn't even a case of necessity either. Interestingly enough, he was taken under the wing of a crime family with their fingers in many pies. They saw his abilities as the useful tools they could be and set about turning him into a powerful weapon. 

It was also through them that he was tapped for Aurora Academy as unusual powers were not unknown to them and some of their own had graduated from there. Although he was too old to start as a freshman he was incredibly intelligent and wasn't playing educational catchup for long as a sophomore. And so he went to school to earn an education, both usual and arcane; and his breaks were spent being honed into a weapon of assassination for the Valentine family. 

It didn't matter to him that he was killing people.  He'd have been doing it anyway, most likely, and this way he was more efficient at it and got better pay for it than whatever his victims may have had on their persons at the time. Between the schooling and the killing it didn't seem long at all before Shion had graduated. 

He might have been out of school but he still belonged to the Valentine family. It didn't bother him much, however.  They left his leash adequately long and gave him both a good income and enjoyable employment. If he had to do a little babysitting of the leader's granddaughter, well... at least she was old enough to be amusing, not to mention at Aurora for lessons during the bulk of the day. He could also be fairly sure she wouldn't burn his place down when he was away on assignments, though he couldn't rely on her to water his plants. That was fine. He had ways around that.

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