( nika - backstory )

[mayuzumi]

backstory Nika could be described as a child of misfortune. His mother died during childbirth, and his father remarried a woman who had a daughter of her own soon afterwards. Luckily, he got along well with his new family – his father was an independent business-owner and was only around in bits and pieces, but his step-mother worked freelance as a website designer from home, and essentially was a stay-at-home mom for him and his step-sister. His step-mother had a daughter about a year and a half older than him, and the two of them grew up exceptionally close. Although they knew from a young age that they were only half-related, they considered each other true siblings. Although they generally had a balanced relationship, she more often was the one taking care of him than the other way around. When she was thirteen and he was eleven, she died in a home invasion when their parents had been out. He was the principal witness for the crime. When investigators asked him what he saw, he continuously answered: A monster killed my sister. The psychologist on the case concluded that he had probably been so traumatized by the incident that he was perceiving the killer as a monstrous figure. He later changed his story to better align with the prosecution’s case against the prime suspect, although it was mostly due to being pressured both by the prosecutor and his parents to quickly wrap up the case and bring his sister peace in death. The truth is: a monster really did kill his sister. The evening of the attack, a man had been possessed by a youkai spirit, body altered horrifically due to the violent possession and driven temporarily insane by it, leading him to break into the house. Nika’s sister, upon hearing the sounds of somebody breaking things elsewhere in the house, had forced Nika to hide – Nika had thought she was being paranoid, so he had resisted for a while before giving in, thinking that he would just play along with her whim – but because of that, she didn’t have time to hide herself before the man entered the room and killed her, strangling her and breaking her neck before taking a knife to her carotid artery and drinking the blood from her body. The incident awoke some of the latent spiritual potential in him. Although Nika cannot see monsters who are not taking a human form, ever since then, he’s been instinctively and deeply drawn towards any monsters both seen and unseen. Additionally, due to the fact that his spiritual potential had been jarred awake, he became much more susceptible to receiving any negative spiritual energy, making him prone to picking up on monsters’ thoughts as intrusive ideas in his mind. It also seemed to kill off something in him – a capacity to care, perhaps, or something else fundamentally human. At any rate, it severely diminished his emotional range and his sense of empathy towards others. The negative thoughts from the spiritual plane sort of functioned to fill that void, twisting his humanity even further. After his sister’s death, life within the family became much more difficult for him. Strangely, his step-mother was sympathetic to him, perhaps because she had spent more time with the two of them and saw how genuinely close they were. On the other hand, his father was much more adversely affected, and began verbally abusing him whenever his father was at home: It’s because you’re not dead that they’re not alive. No. It’s because you’re alive that they’re dead… You kill the people around you. Until his father was convinced that his son was some sort of monster, a creature that killed the people around him to keep himself alive. Nika didn’t quite believe that, not at first, but in the wake of his sister’s death he began developing an intense obsession with both death and the act of killing. Pressured from different directions – his father’s words, unintentionally drawing in negative thoughts from the spiritual plane – Nika came to an understanding to help him cope with everything going on in his life: My mother and my sister loved me so much they died so I could live. It’s because other people die that I know I’m alive. After nearly failing out of middle school, his “realization” helped him regather himself as he entered high school, returning to some sort of façade of normalcy. Any youthful cheerfulness, though, had thoroughly been wiped from him. He became very detached emotionally, which allowed him to compartmentalize his thoughts from his actions, and the intrusive negative thoughts from his own. During his high school years, he got decent grades, was generally well-liked, and played junior varsity tennis – but most of his relationships at the time were temporal, fleeting. He didn’t keep up with his classmates after graduating, and only made one close friendship that lasted between his sophomore and junior years. That friendship was pretty deep, but vastly because Nika clung to the other person. The most important facet of their relationship was that he felt “needed” and “more like a normal person”, and that eventually became obsessive and overwhelming until the friendship naturally drifted apart. It was a cycle that would repeat again during college, and then once again after graduating. He moved to New York City to attend college there, where he got a major in sociology and a minor in economics. An overall above-average student academically, he also was moderately involved in student government and worked a part-time job as a library research assistant. The biggest incident that occurred in his college days, though, was that in his junior year, he was attacked late one night in the staircase of his apartment by another youkai-possessed human. Because of the circumstances of the attack, he came out of it with clear marks of assault with the intent to kill (including a scar on his waist from getting stabbed), so when he retaliated and ended up killing the assaulter via blunt force trauma by throwing him down the stairs, it was considered a clear case of combined accident (the police concluded that he had panicked and put more force into the blow than intended) and homicide by self-defense and was not charged with anything. Perhaps partially because of that incident, he took up a job as a paralegal for a fairly prolific criminal defense firm after graduating. It also deepened his tendency towards morbidity, bringing it from a preoccupation with death straight to a preoccupation with killing, amplified by the fact. He became interested in serial killers and in general, unusually brutal crimes – murders and assaults that were considered inhumane. The intrusive negative thoughts that he was unintentionally receiving from the spiritual plane merged with his fixation on the act of killing, and he became unable to compartmentalize those thoughts from his own. At the age of 24, after a particularly sensationalized murder case in which the perpetrator dismembered the victim’s body and reassembled it into a macabre “statue” using plaster, Nika’s preoccupation with killing reached its lowest depths: to seek the “reason” that somebody would kill in such a horrific manner, he committed a copy-cat crime and mimicked the circumstances of the crime as well as he could, given what information was released to media sources. His second copy-cat killing was committed just after turning 25, a case where the victim was tortured using the 1,000 cuts method. His third murder was the only time that he committed a crime without copying any elements from other murder cases. Somebody attempted to mug him coming home late one night; he retaliated and killed the attacker via strangulation. He disposed of the body immediately and methodically, as far as he tracked the situation, it was never discovered. In the meanwhile, he led a fairly normal life outside the occasional killing. He made acquaintances and friends, though never particularly close ones. He dated casually. He was generally well-liked at work, where he was thought of fairly highly due to his excellent work ethic. He never seemed bothered by the murder he committed here and there, because he simply wasn’t. His “normal” life and his “abnormal” side were always kept apart. At the age of 26, he met a kumiho in human form and was immediately drawn towards it because of his strong sixth sense. He became deeply infatuated with it, convinced that he was in love, and entered a relationship with it. For a while, both of them kept their identities secrets from each other – the kumiho as being a monster in disguise, Nika as being whatever it is that he is. Eventually, the kumiho decided to reveal its true identity to him, as it had genuinely fallen in love with him. It was an awkward conversation, and they agreed to take some time off from each other to think about what to do. Nika researched a bit in his spare time, and when they came back together to decide where their relationship would go, he asked: Is it true that a kumiho will turn into a human being if it eats enough human hearts? The kumiho explained to him that yes, that particular bit of mythology is true. Being a rather old being, it estimated it would take about 50 human hearts for it to turn human – but it has no interest in doing so, as it has grown to really love human beings, nor does it require human flesh as sustenance. Nika, though, was of a different mind and believed that the only way they could be together – truly together – was for the kumiho to become a human being, as he felt he was unable to love a monster with sincerity. Being actually really okay with killing people, he decided to fully consummate their love, he would finish satisfying the requirements for the kumiho to become a human being, killing as many people necessary to feed it their hearts. The kumiho reluctantly went along with this, helping him reluctantly. The entire thing basically was just Nika’s escalating descent into complete crazy, the boundaries and mental compartments that he’d assembled to keep himself detached and function as his main coping mechanism collapsed. He withdrew from others, became obsessed with the idea of making his kumiho lover “a perfect human being”, was intensely fixated on the idea of protecting and serving it as some sort of twisted knight figure, and his “normal” life all went to shit. He stopped showing up to work; he fell out of contact with all of his casual friends. He began slipping up hard whenever he killed people. Around that time, a person born to a lineage of sin, Aurora Rothschild, came in the middle of all of this. More orthodox in her duties, she tended to believe in a black-and-white view of the world: monsters prey on human beings. At first, from her perspective, she believed the kumiho was coercing Nika to help it kill humans, and tried to kill it, but was stopped short when Nika protected it even at the risk of his own life. After finding Nika shortly before he planned on killing somebody, though, she realized from the way that he talked and his general mental state that it was actually the opposite of what she had originally thought: it was Nika who wanted to kill others, and the kumiho who was against the idea. Unsure of how to continue on, she purposely distanced herself to try and reconcile her views with the reality of the situation. During that time, Nika succeeded in completing his goal: he had fed the kumiho enough hearts that it had turned into a human. He also had basically lost it completely, mind warped to the point where he was easily the more monstrous between the two. His sense of human worth had disappeared entirely, regarding other people as “prey”, deriding them for not being able to defend themselves, and hypocritically insisted that it was because humans cannot keep their emotions in check that they routinely fail to do the rational thing. At this point, Aurora was pretty upset by the entire thing – technically, she no longer had to do anything; the holy mandate only insists that she prevent humans and monsters from getting involved with each other. The kumiho was no longer a kumiho; she felt that she had no right to interfere anymore, and that she was not qualified to “judge” Nika the same way that she “judges” monsters. Upon meeting with her for one last time before Nika planned on leaving the city with his lover for good, to escape the crimes he’d committed, he even went as far as to taunt her for her incapacity to act. Isn’t this the kind of world where we reaffirm our beliefs by testing them? I tested mine, and they held up. You were too weak to even try, weren’t you…? Luckily for her, she didn’t have to do anything to make sure that Nika got what was coming for him: he had slipped too many times in his streak of serial killings and left behind too many markers of his identity. He was eventually arrested on multiple charges of murder. He pleaded guilty.