Name: Fyre
Contact: fyrefyght
Invited by: lav
Reservation: here

Name: Cid Kagenou (and sundry aliases)
Canon: The Eminence in Shadow
Canon Point: Anime, end of S2 when he jumps into the Black Rose
Age: 15 (+ 18, thanks reincarnation)

History:

• EARLY LIFE, EARLY INSANITY, DEATH

In his first life, Cid was Kageno Minoru, a regular Japanese high-schooler. He was also secretly a crazy dilettante cultist who tried a bunch of extreme New Age woo-woo stuff and bizarre religious and black magic bullshit to try and become a magician. All this to become an "Eminence in Shadow", a fictional archetypal mastermind who moves the world from behind the scenes. His ultimate ambition is to survive a nuclear bomb unscathed.

Of course, he also mastered the art of acting unremarkable in order to properly elevate his shadowy mystery. By day he was a totally forgettable student; by night he was the Fancy Hoodlum Slayer and Ski Mask Berserker and went around beating up criminals. That is, until he tried the art of running into a forest buck-naked to bash his head against a tree as part of his magic training and subsequently got hit by a truck.

• REINCARNATION, REINCARNATED INSANITY, THE FOUNDING OF SHADOW GARDEN

Then he found himself reincarnated into a low-ranking baron's family; the one thing that stood out was that they produced generations of dark knights, warriors who wielded magic with the sword in battle. When he became aware of all his memories from his previous life at a few months old, he began training his newly acquired magical powers and never stopped. He also became the Fancy Bandit Slayer and actually slew bandits. Nevertheless, he continued to pass himself off as an "ordinary" nobleman's son in daily life as he entered the Midgar Academy for Dark Knights.

He also founded Shadow Garden, his very own secret organization led by his alter-ego Shadow. In practice, it's both the resistance against the villainous Cult of Diablos and also Cid's fanclub of of girls who owe him for saving their lives from being cursed. Cid himself thinks the entire thing is an elaborate LARP.

• AURORA THE CALAMITY WITCH EVENT

Perhaps his most important encounter was with Aurora the Calamity Witch: during the Goddess' Trial in the city of Lindwurm, the one day of the year when the city's special Sanctuary is open. The trial allows warriors to battle those from the past; Cid battled Aurora and opened access to the Sanctuary, prompting an entire invasion by Shadow Garden and various guests. There, they find more information about the Cult of Diablos, which used the Sanctuary as a laboratory -- but Cid himself misses all this and instead wanders around with Aurora trying to break her seal.

They end up destroying the entire Sanctuary and freeing Aurora, who is merely a fragment of the demon Diablos. It's debatable whether Cid knows any of the particulars, but at least there was a demonic bonding experience.

Powers:

• SKILLS

1. Martial Arts: Canonically, he's devoted himself to learning the art of fighting -- everything from karate to boxing to mixed martial arts and more -- and synthesized his own unique and efficient fighting style. He prides himself on fighting as logically and with as few movements as possible, likes to combine offense and defense to the point of cheerfully allowing himself to get stabbed as long as he can stab his opponent too, and really enjoys leaving illusionary after-images for his opponents to get mad at even if he isn't a ninja. All his fighting techniques are reinforced by both magic and his body self-modification, please see the Magic #2 section.

2. Swordplay: This is sort of an offshoot of the above, but his swordplay is notable because as a dark knight his canon fighting is very much focused on using swords and other types of blade-like implements. In his canon world, magic as well as magic-infused objects that get too far from their wearer's body will rapidly lose power -- that's why most magic users focus on close combat or short-range projectiles rather than any long range fighting. Cid has multiple styles of swordplay -- his own is unique and just as efficient and honed as his martial arts, but he also dabbled in a more florid, showy style that he uses when he feels like it. As with martial arts, all his techniques are reinforced by both magic and body self-modification, please see the Magic #2 section.

3. Art of Disguise (Dubious): Cid demonstrates remarkable skill at keeping up with a number of personas and distinguishing them to the point where it's hard to connect them for people not in the know or who don't possess specific supernatural senses. His "normie" persona is Cid Kagenou, the totally average student and hum-drum dark knight who's the disappointing one in his family; his "eminence in shadow" persona is Shadow, the leader of Shadow Garden hidden behind a mask who speaks dramatically and appears mostly to fight and look cool; his pre-reincarnation persona, "Kageno Minoru", is very similar to Cid with the exception of being a bit more outwardly chuuni (can't exactly make NPC references in a world where no one knows what they are); he also has a couple of one-off personas, "Mundane Mann" where he used a fake face and fighting style to enter a tournament, and "John Smith" which was another one-off that had a totally different skill set. He's well on his way to building even more alternate identities.

4. Forty-Eight Hands of Minor Mystery: Hidden Normie Techniques: These are well-polished techniques ranging from the mundane to the literally supernatural that Cid uses to maintain his Extremely Normal Person status. Examples include Spinning Guard, Bloody Tornado (used to fake-spew blood while spinning away from a strike); Swiss-Cheese Dance, Bloody Marionette (used to pretend to be struck by bullets); and notably, Ten-Minute Death, Heartbreak Mob (allows the user to stop their heart and keep blood-flow running to the brain with magic, then restart their heart later; the ultimate fake-out death technique).

• MAGIC

1. Dark Knight Abilities: Dark knights have a range of superhuman abilities thanks to their mastery of magic -- they have greater speed, strength and stamina than common folk as well as quicker self-healing; it's noted that they're also resistant to firearms. Cid himself has elevated these to truly extraordinary levels thanks to his training; he's also able to completely conceal his own presence for maximum stealth as well as detect the magic, attacks and presence of others. He is also able to see magic as grains of colored light.

2. Self-Modification (Physical/Magical): Starting from when he was a baby, Cid has been restructuring his own body and magical pathways using magic -- he notes that he is able to rearrange muscles, nerves and bones for optimal combat configurations; in the most extreme versions of this, he's able to shift organs including the heart out of harm's way during combat. He has also advanced his use of slime-based magical accessories to the point where he has fused his own flesh and magical pathways with slime; it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he is at least a little bit part-slime at this point. Other biological effects of his magical power include: the ability to temper his stomach to consume just about anything, the ability to go without food for a month and without water for ten days, and the ability to extend his own lifespan by hundreds of years.

3. Overdrive: This is a fairly straightforward technique that breaks the magical limits of the body in order to use stronger techniques; if used excessively it can lead to physical damage to the user. Cid is practiced at this and uses it fairly often. The most visible sign of magical overdrive is the eyes turning red.

4. Magic Control: Also a relatively straightfoward concept where the user manipulates magic with extreme precision for a variety of applications -- in Cid's case it manifests most often in the compression or concentration of magical power into denser forms that allow its output to be amplified by up to 1000 times (quality over quantity). However, he can also thin out magical power into threads so thin that they are undetectable by magical artifacts. Both extremes allow him to bypass various types of magic drain.

5. Healing/Curse-Breaking: A higher-level version of the dark knights' naturally accelerated self-healing; Cid is able to instantly heal light to severe wounds on himself and others, which includes older scars as well. He's also able to do this with larger groups. His curse-breaking, which breaks the possession of Diablos or rather the rampage of Diablos cells in living bodies, is largely the result of reckless experimentation and throwing a lot of magic at the problem. But hey, whatever works.

6. I Am Atomic: His signature move, I Am Atomic, is the result of his obsession with trying to survive a nuclear blast -- if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In other words, rather than trying to stop a nuclear blast, he decided to become a nuclear blast, because that makes total sense. This is more or less the instantaneous release of magic compressed in #4 and results in an explosion of magical energy that can be destructive but can also be used for other ends due to its potency. He has a few variations of just destroying everything and making a large crater; but Recovery is a healing application that can heal large groups despite damaging structures, and apparently counteracts vampiric powers; Sword is basically a superextension of his usual sword technique that can slice everything in a wide area; and so on and so forth.

• OTHER

1. Slime Jelly: The discovery of slime-based combat accessories is one of Cid's greatest magical breakthroughs -- slimes are 99% conductive to magic, allowing any magical power infused into them to be used with very little loss. By crushing slime cores and refining them into slime jelly, he was able to create a pretty much all-in-one magical material. This can be used for attack, defense, disguise, accessorizing, and a pretty much unlimited variety of other applications. Shadow Garden and Cid himself tend to use slime bodysuits (magic-infused slime jelly is able to withstand attacks proportional to the magic in them, which makes them pretty great if you have enough magic) as well as slime swords (similar to the bodysuits, infusing these with magic strengthens them and allows them to extend either in length or in width, making them extremely versatile for slicing shit up or breaking everyone else's swords), slime tentacles (sometimes you just want some slimy murder whips I guess) and slime projectiles (you can actually snipe people with these, but he doesn't really use them that much). All of these can also be compressed and stored in easily portable forms on the user's person. For slime-based weird biology things please see Magic #2.

2. Magical Wires: True to the name, these are just wires infused with magic and used to entrap and slice through opponents that get caught in the web. I'm mostly putting this here to document that he can fight with stuff other than swords if he really feels like it, because sometimes you have to change it up for the greater good(?).