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Hotaka Miyazaki; If someone says "wax on, wax off" to me at the supermarket again, I'll crane kick them to the moon.
Topic Started: Feb 25 2017, 04:31 PM (183 Views)
The One True Nobody
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"...does this clockwork hand follow you... or guide you?"
Name: Hotaka Miyazaki
Gender: Male
Age: 57

Class: A proud former student of class 3-A at the high school that used to be where Reitaku High School is. He walked uphill both ways, but he'd be lying if he said he liked it!

Clubs/Occupation: Owner and proprietor of the Miyazaki Martial Arts Dojo, a small establishment that provides public and occasionally private instruction in kendo and karate. The former is only taught from beginner-to-intermediate level on specific days of the week, with Miyazaki-sensei advising students to seek more dedicated instruction if they reach a certain level. Miyazaki-sensei neither actively recruits for kendo nor enters his students into competitions against others, as his true passion is karate; the kendo lessons are a holdover from family tradition that he hasn't had the heart to cut from the schedule in over fifteen years of running the dojo. He frequently directs students who show promise and dedication to either the Kagami dojo or the Tsurugi dojo, depending on their specific aptitudes, and as a result both schools of swordsmanship owe a certain debt of gratitude to him for sending along some of their most prominent advanced-level students. Despite this, Miyazaki does not generally mingle with other business owners and has never personally spoken to either school's instructors.

Personality: A very friendly, spry, free-spirited old man who relates more easily to the vitality and independence of youth than to the conservatism of the old, Miyazaki-sensei is nonetheless more than willing to give uppity teenagers an epic tongue-lashing when deserved. Among the adults and the elderly of his community, Hotaka is known as something of a contrarian, and among the young, as something like that one friendly, eccentric uncle you get a kick out of introducing your friends to just to see the look on their face at the moment they realize what they're getting in to.

Generally genial and loose-mannered around younger people, Hotaka adopts a more restrained and stoic personality when he is either speaking as an instructor or speaking to adults, his elders, or to his own peers. Those who frequently witness both of these acts have difficulty determining which of the two is his most-genuine personality. During his leisure time, Hotaka enjoys good food, sake, and his impressive shelf of books, some of which are fiction, but a large number of which are non-fiction. As a result, he is often a dispenser of uncommonly-known facts, factoids, and bits of trivia that he picked up while reading about scientific theory, history, or philosophy; he rarely ever references anything unique to fiction, as his preferred genres are down-to-earth and realistic (historical fiction, mystery, drama, and low-key martial arts action movies are his books of choice). When he was younger, he was a great lover of martial arts movies, but this is an interest that he rarely indulges in his fifties. Action films these days, he says, are even flashier and bring less substance to the table than the films he enjoyed in his youth. Nevertheless, when a movie with great promise debuts in theaters, only his own lesson schedule gets between him and being first in line to see it.

History: Time blurs memory. Nearly everyone who knew the Miyazaki family growing up will tell you that Hotaka and his parents were Japanese-Americans who, following the war, quit the United States like a bad habit because of their treatment during the war and the horror they felt at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Having passed away nearly a decade ago, neither of Hotaka's parents are around to correct this misremembered mutation of the family history, which is propagated now even among his relatives. And Hotaka? Well, he just plain doesn't care enough to bother. But the true story isn't as cut-and-dry as the version one might be told if they asked about him now.

First of all, anyone with basic math skills could tell you that 57-year-old Hotaka Miyazaki is too young to have been alive at the time. In fact, his parents simply had a late start at a family because of the war, what with Hotaka's mother being kept in an internment camp and his father being drafted into the fight over on the European front. In truth, neither of the two has any special grievance with their treatment during this time, apart from the principle of the matter; the bombings that put an end to the war horrified them far more than their own situation, and once the war was done and leave granted to the pair of them to return their civilian lives, they traveled to Japan to assist in the recovery efforts, not out of protest against America (which they considered more their home country than Japan was), but out of compassion for the civilians whose lives were lost or destroyed at war's end. Hotaka was born over ten years later, when the pair had settled into their new life in a "homeland" they had never known.

Hotaka's birth was a great surprise to the pair, who had resigned themselves to being too old to produce sons or daughters and had decided that their efforts to help victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be their only legacy. Life, however, found a way: the two were blessed with a beautiful baby boy who grew into a fine young man. Having been born to parents with such a troubled history, it wasn't a surprise to many of the adults in Hotaka's life that he grew into a man of exceptional moral integrity, but what did surprise them was his propensity toward tomfoolery... in contrast to his laser-like focus when focus was required of him. What certainly surprised them was his total lack of interest in siring children of his own; Hotaka's twenties and early thirties were a haze of recreational one-night-stands mingled with the beginnings of a promising career as a professional martial artist (for Hotaka had learned to love karate, and put his father's traditional kendo lessons on the backburner as a side-sport he pursued only for sentimental reasons).

When Hotaka was about thirty-one, he fell in love with a fellow karate practitioner, a young woman with a similar blend of free spirit and dedicated focus as he prided himself on, but this relationship was short-lived. There was no disastrous falling-out or dramatic break-up; Yumi Takenaka simply wanted children, and Hotaka Miyazaki simply didn't, so they simply went their separate ways. Today, fifty-two-year-old Yumi still challenges her old friend to occasional sparring bouts at his dojo and he still invites her out to dinner to ask how the overgrown toddlers are getting along in their fancy office jobs and shiny new cars.

Hotaka's career as a karate practitioner was fairly prolific, earning him several national accolades and a job as a writer for a karate magazine for a time, though the publication in question suffered financially toward the end of his five-year run with them and he was let go when a publisher merger came along, accompanied by a severe bout of layoffs (the publisher in question would retire its presses for good a mere two years after that and become a trashy Internet tabloid company, so Hotaka doesn't regret this at all). After losing this job, Hotaka invested his savings into starting his own karate dojo, a small establishment sandwiched between a health-food restaurant and a yoga place. He has lived there ever since, and run a steady and successful business for over fifteen years teaching students young and old the graceful-yet-down-to-earth take on karate that he was known for writing of in that magazine back in the day... though his tendency to favor students who show intense dedication or exceptional talent over casual, recreational practitioners has made him an unpopular choice among all but those who already know they're serious about learning the art. More popular among casual practitioners are his one-night-a-week sword lessons, which he does not teach nearly as strictly nor take half as seriously... although he will refer talented students to more serious local kendo instructors from time to time.

Though his life as a karate instructor has been hitherto uneventful (he even slept straight through the Ruwashi Park incident, being bedridden with the flu at the time), recent news from a favorite cousin (once removed) in Nagoya alerted him to the extraordinary events taking place in his city, and requested that he take in a young girl whose only wish was to return to Nagashima so she could do her part to end the madness broiling beneath the surface of the normalcy he had enjoyed up until that point. Hotaka agreed, and accepted Shizuka Setsuko as both a tenant at his dojo and an employee. That was how this crusty, aging karate master came to be involved in his home city's magical adventures at last, and suffice it to say, he upped his weekly sake intake by quite a bit from that point forward.

Appearance: A squinty-eyed, gray-haired man of medium height and lean build, his lined, fair-skinned face and dark-brown eyes are complimented by a thin beard and mustache, and a prominent receding hairline. Unless in his instructor's uniform, Hotaka dresses in simple pants and button-up shirts with plain brown shoes, and effect that would make him appear to be just another run-down old man if not for the impressive vitality his stance and movement always projects, which gives him the appearance and attitude of a much younger man. Hotaka wears an old, but well-cared for analog wristwatch, in spite of always checking the time on his cutting-edge mobile touchscreen phone instead.

Current Weapon/Combat Skill: While possessing intermediate competence with traditional kendo and owning a perfectly good sword, Hotaka Miyazaki is generally more inclined to leave such weapons behind in favor of employing unarmed karate, which he has mastered and continued to practice daily since his early teens. In Miyazaki-sensei's mind, over forty years' experience at martial arts trumps any blade, especially when the option to infuse one's foot or fist with Force magic is presented. While possessing extraordinary physical fitness and stamina for his age, Hotaka isn't as young as he once was and can no longer fight non-stop through endurance situations, and is thus better utilized in situations that can be neutralized quickly and efficiently through precision, skill, and hard-hitting power.
Mask: A white-and-black headband bearing a seemingly random design.

Persona: (Unawakened)
~Name: Chiron
~Arcana: XI - Strength
~Drain: n/a
~Weak: n/a
~Null: n/a
~Reflect: n/a
~Resist: n/a
~Skills: Zan, Sonic Punch, Pulinpa
Appearing as a distinctly Asian centaur with the same mustache, beard, and receding hairline as Hotaka himself (although it colored black to match the Persona's youthful appearance), Chiron is unorthodox-looking in more ways than one. For starters, instead of having the complete lower body of a horse, his front legs are human, with his torso melting into the back half of a horse at his midsection instead. Chiron has a very well-groomed and clean-cut appearance, and instead of going barefoot, all four of his feet are protected by shoes: the back by metal horseshoes, the front by Japanese wooden sandals. Unclothed (the front-midsection of his torso is about as explicit as an undressed Ken doll), the only accessory that this Persona wears is an antique Japanese coin on a string around his neck, dangling over a lean, toned, hairless upper torso.

Chiron's combat abilities emphasize speed, power, and a side of confusion, with Force elemental spells being his only non-physical means of attack. At Hotaka's advanced age, he's about as wise and he's going to get. Minor philosophical course-adjustments notwithstanding, he is unlikely to receive a visit from his personal Shadow, contract Hoculus, or to achieve any sort of ascension. What you see is what you get, and what you get is a weirdly not-Greek centaur that can rear up into a crane kick if it wants to!


Have you read all the stickies?
I have mastered the crane kick by balancing on top of them.
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Czernobog
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Best Influence.
Approved.
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