Iwamine Shuu (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
morbirdinterest) wrote2014-05-29 09:31 pm
morbirdinterest) wrote2014-05-29 09:31 pm
Entry tags:
Synodiporia: Application (Last updated: 9/2/15)
P L A Y E R;
NAME: Cheshire (Note: Previously apped as Ivory and Horn. However, I recently updated my online handle on Plurk to Cheshire, and have been slowly phasing that into the other online spaces that I frequent. I figured re-apping was a good time to update Synodiporia with that. All my contact info is the same as before. o7)
AGE: 25
PLAYER JOURNAL:ivoryandhorn
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: ivoryandhorn @ dw/gmail/plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED:
Currently: none
Previously: Iwamine Shuu (Hatoful Boyfriend), Alice Liddell/Harmony (Heart no Kuni no Alice PG/AU), Ace (Heart no Kuni no Alice), and Quinn Quentes (OC)
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Iwamine Shuu
CANON: Hatoful Boyfriend
POINT IN CANON: post-Bad Boys' Love route
AGE: developmentally 35-40, chronologically 27 (There isn't a clear ratio between bird lifespan and human age as of yet and a bird's physical and mental development as well as lifespan can vary quite a bit, so while his chronological age is fact, his developmental age is my best-guess estimate.)
APPEARANCE:
- Bird: He is a giant Chukar partridge, round and fluffy and tending to keep his head pulled in, as in his default icon. Sizes of Hatoful birds in comparison to humans are unclear but I'm going with about 3 feet.
- Human: While the birds of Hatoful Boyfriend are actually birds, they do have canonical human designs. I expect this will be relevant during Jaunts, so here's Shuu's. He's the brunette on the left here.
CANON HISTORY:
The world of Hatoful Boyfriend is a post-apocalyptic world where birds have gained sentience and are the dominant lifeforms on earth while the human population has been decimated and lives in nature reserves. While it's currently a peaceful time, there are undercurrents of friction between birds and humans. In this post-apocalyptic wonderland was born a young Chukar partridge named (at the time) Ichijou Utsuro. Little Utsuro's parents were wealthy, well-known philanthropists and supporters of bird-human coexistence.
When Utsuro was still a chick, radical human terrorists attacked the high rise in which his family lived. He woke up in the hospital to find his parents dead, the right half of his body permanently nerve-damaged, and that he was now colorblind except for the color red. With no particular feelings about the loss of his parents, and no desire to take over his parents' company, he quickly signed his inheritance over to his relatives and vanished. Ichijou Utsuro resurfaced as a teen under the name Isa Souma, a young researcher in biological sciences who was a member of the radical Earth Crawlers terrorist group, which pushed for the annihilation of humans. He worked under Kawara Ryuuji, a brilliant but absent-minded scientist who Isa admired a great deal. Unfortunately, on a research trip Ryuuji fell sick and died. Regretting how he'd neglected his family for his work in the labs, Ryuuji made Isa promise that, should he meet Ryuuji's son, he'd grant him a wish.
After Ryuuji's death, Isa's life as a researcher went on. At one point he became a lawyer, becoming a well-known public prosecutor named Isshiki Mishio before "killing" Mishio and returning to research. While he continued to use the Isa name occasionally, Isa became a world-renowned researcher under the name Iwamine Shuu, as well as the school doctor for the renowned St. Pigeonation's Institute, and Iwamine Shuu became his primary alias.
At one point, Shuu did in fact encounter Ryuuji's son, Ryouta, as a young chick. He asked Ryouta what he wanted and, in grief and distress after a terrible tragedy (unrelated to Ryuuji), Ryouta wished for a peaceful world. Shuu, in his own morbid fashion, decided that he would grant Ryouta's wish by eradicating humans from the world. At St. Pigeonation's, which was secretly run by the Hawk Party, a political faction that wanted to destroy all humans, Shuu began conducting experiments to make Ryouta's wish come true. After years of research he managed to find and refine a strain of bird flu called the Charon virus that would kill humans through mere exposure. The initial carrier of the Charon virus, a young mourning dove named Fujishiro Nageki, set himself and Shuu's lab on fire in an attempt to prevent Shuu from using the virus to kill all humans. However, Shuu was able to salvage a bit of Nageki's body and froze it for later use.
After getting his plans back in order post-Nageki, Shuu invited Ryouta to St. Pigeonation's. Over Ryouta's first year there, Shuu secretly prepared Ryouta's body to become the vector for spreading the Charon virus. Once Ryouta's body was ready, halfway through Ryouta's second year at the school, Shuu implanted Nageki's remains into Ryouta's body, and with Nageki's remains the Charon virus itself. He then put his plan of human genocide into motion with the murder and dismemberment of Ryouta's human friend, Tosaka Hiyoko.
Once Hiyoko's body was discovered, the school was immediately put in lockdown mode and encased in an impassable dome. Shuu began the work of guiding Ryouta (and Ryouta's fellow investigator, a fantail pigeon named Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane) towards the fulfillment of his wish and of Shuu's plan. Shuu manipulated Ryouta into following him to the supposedly abandoned underground medical research facility on the St. Pigeonation's grounds. There, upon learning that he had been the one to (unwittingly) kill Hiyoko after Shuu had transplanted the Charon virus into him, Ryouta gave in to Shuu's manipulations and agreed to his plan to kill all humans, becoming a mindless berserker. However, his school friends arrived in the nick of time to save Ryouta with a sound JRPG turn-based beating. Back to his senses, Ryouta refused to go through with genocide, and Shuu acknowledged the end of his plans by showing Ryouta and his friends a safe way out of the dome for all the St. Pigeonation's students.
However, the story wasn't over yet. Nanaki Kazuaki, a seemingly harmless narcoleptic math teacher, shot Shuu several times in the left side of his body, revealing himself to be Nageki's brother. Having been overwhelmed with grief and despair at Nageki's death, Nanaki was was now obsessed with finding Nageki's remains and was prepared to kill Ryouta in order to retrieve the remaining scrap of Nageki's body from Ryouta's. Fortunately, with the help of Nageki's ghost, Nanaki's mind was put at ease and everyone headed out of the lab unscathed.
However, Ryouta, knowing that as long as the Charon virus remained in his body he would be a danger to all humans, chose to remain in the lab and enter cryogenic sleep with Hiyoko's remains, until such time as he could be revived without the Charon virus. Sakuya vowed to find a way to free Ryouta from cryogenic sleep.
(Note: I'm taking Shuu from after the epilogue to the BBL route. However, the timeframe of the epilogue is a little unclear so this next bit will contain some conjecture to make everything line up in a way that makes sense, flesh out Shuu's actions during the epilogue, and bring him to the canon point I'm taking him from.)
After leaving the lab, Shuu was taken to a hospital to recuperate from his gunshot wounds. Sakuya strong-winged Shuu into overseeing the research that would safely remove the Charon virus from Ryouta's body. Over the months of research, Shuu remained wheelchair-bound and served as a consultant. During that time, he was taken care of by Nanaki himself, who felt some obligation to look after Shuu's well-being after having injured him. After many months of intensive research, Ryouta was successfully freed from cryogenesis sans Charon virus. Not long after that, Shuu made a full recovery from his wounds.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Shuu is a creepy, morally bankrupt scientist who delights in frequently inhumane and awful research. Let's just put that on the table where everyone can see it. In his interactions with individuals he plays the creeper with gusto, with his evil laugh and penchant for casually requesting body parts for his cooperation. He keeps most people around him at arm's length out of distrust, warding people away either through his creepy demeanor or general irritability. Most people seem creeped out by him and stay away, which suits Shuu just fine. It seems that at some point in his young adult life he decided to just act like the morbid creeper he was all along without worrying about how off-putting it was.
In terms of how he presents himself to others, aside from his overall creepiness, Shuu has a tendency to claim and present himself as a researcher. He says openly that research is the only thing he cares about and is implied to care very little about mundane concerns such as his living space, salary, or any kind of ethical boundary whatsoever, so long as his superiors continue to fund whatever research he may wish to undertake. He is definitely a workaholic and is largely uncaring of what happens as a result of his research, preferring the purity of pursuing knowledge for its own sake, and will not shy away from brutally murdering anyone who threatens to expose his research or plans. Still, when the opportunity presents itself, he's perfectly fine with a bit of good old-fashioned blackmail or manipulation to secure the cooperation of individuals who might otherwise prove to be troublesome.
For the most part, Shuu's claims of being interested only in research and the pursuit of knowledge are true...unless someone he cares about is concerned. Shuu can be moved to do extraordinary things for the sake of someone he cares for deeply. In the route I'm taking him from, he spends a decade working towards genocide, persisting through several false starts. In a different route, when he falls in love with the protagonist, he willingly gives up on that quest in order to die with her (sort of. It's a long story.). Once someone manages to worm their way into Shuu's heart, they are seemingly there for good, and he will move heaven and earth to fulfill what he perceives as his obligation to that person (whether there is room in his heart for more than one person at a time is debatable).
Shuu's feelings about his own capacity of feelings are self-awareness but also a kind of self-deprecation. The sense is that he would, perhaps, prefer not to have so many feelings about people, and that he would really, really love to be the emotionless researcher that he claims to be and so often manages to be. Just as he is aware that he's a creeper, he's aware that the lengths to which he goes for loved ones are immense, but also rather pathetic in their own way, and can't stand to be pitied for how long he spent living in the shadow of his devotion to Ryuuji.
Overall, Shuu is a consciously creepy, morbid individual without any morals or ethics whatsoever, paranoid and mistrustful and really just kind of a manipulative dick, but his capacity for love is as terrifying in its depth as it is pathetic in its breadth.
Post-BBL epilogue, Shuu is left in a rather ambiguous place. Having been released from his obligation to Ryuuji, he has nothing of value left in his life except the research. While he still has that research ahead of him, there is no greater goal driving him now, leaving him at a loss as to what he should strive for.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: n/a
ABILITIES:
- Doctoring: Despite his preference for, uh, mad science, Shuu can perform first aid and surgeries and so on. However, his specialty is research.
- Medical Specialist: Shuu's specialty in research is pathology! And with it, several associated areas like immunology, epidemiology, pharmacology, and more general areas to support his specialist knowledge.
- Biotech: Not strictly related to his research specialty, but he knows enough to have fixed up a prototype robot that was to be powered by a human brain, and to transfer said brain into robot successfully...
- Ninja-like stealth: He can sneak up on a hunter-gatherer schoolgirl used to hunting for every meal, so...he's pretty darn sneaky.
- Basic cooking: Bachelor mad-science shut-ins need to stay fed somehow... He can even prepare other birds.
- Flying: Giant talking birds are still birds.
- Various from his previous runs in the game.
INVENTORY:
- butcher's cleaver
- awesome striped tie
- stack of printouts (mostly academic articles on botany and a few on tuberculosis)
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?
- Color-blind in that he can only see red. Also has weak peripheral vision.
- Nerve damage along the right side of his body so those limbs are weaker than normal. Details for this point and the one before.
- Recently-healed bullet wounds along the left side of his body so those limbs are also weaker than normal.
- He can gesture and use his wings to do anything hands can do.
- His official seiyuu is Koyasu Takehito. This Tumblr post has a brief audio sample. His voice is usually cold and emotion-free.
S A M P L E S;
FIRST PERSON: Thread from a previous game. In that thread he's partially amnesiac, but the amnesia did not have a severe effect on his personality other than making him more open around other birds, so he's a bit more relaxed in that thread since he's talking with a teammate he's comfortable with. That post contains some other threads of him speaking with other teammates as well!
THIRD PERSON:
It was quiet in the infirmary, which was how he preferred it. The medicines in their rows, the illegal, experimental medicines in their own rows, and no patients to annoy him or mess up his neat, pristine office.
The only sound of significance was Ryouta sleeping. Or rather, Ryouta lying unconscious and drugged as Shuu waited for his unfortunate human friend to arrive in search of him. He had gulped down the sedative without complaint, believing that it had merely been a new medicine Shuu had devised for his stomach. It was true, in a manner of speaking; the concoction was just the first step in Shuu's plan, which would ultimately result in Ryouta's stomach never bothering him again.
Ryouta tossed and turned in his sleep, wracked by uneasy dreams. Despite himself, Shuu found his thoughts drifting to Ryuuji's last days; his dull feathers, the persistent cough. Unlike his son, though, Ryuuji's final sleep in a hospital bed had been marked by the terrifying stillness of someone whose body was too weak to carry on.
Shuu shook off his thoughts. Now was not the time for maudlin reminisces, not with Operation Hatoful's completion so close at hand. Much depended on this afternoon. He busied himself with checking Ryouta's vital signs and then the time. School would almost be out for the day. Soon everything would be complete. Soon his obligation to Ryuuji would be fulfilled.
There was a knock on the infirmary door, the distinctly sharp, impatient knock and muffled shout that could only belong to a certain human girl, a specific Miss Tosaka. Shuu brushed a wing over Ryouta's forehead and allowed himself a private smile of anticipation as Miss Tosaka opened the door.
NAME: Cheshire (Note: Previously apped as Ivory and Horn. However, I recently updated my online handle on Plurk to Cheshire, and have been slowly phasing that into the other online spaces that I frequent. I figured re-apping was a good time to update Synodiporia with that. All my contact info is the same as before. o7)
AGE: 25
PLAYER JOURNAL:
ivoryandhornTIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: ivoryandhorn @ dw/gmail/plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED:
Currently: none
Previously: Iwamine Shuu (Hatoful Boyfriend), Alice Liddell/Harmony (Heart no Kuni no Alice PG/AU), Ace (Heart no Kuni no Alice), and Quinn Quentes (OC)
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Iwamine Shuu
CANON: Hatoful Boyfriend
POINT IN CANON: post-Bad Boys' Love route
AGE: developmentally 35-40, chronologically 27 (There isn't a clear ratio between bird lifespan and human age as of yet and a bird's physical and mental development as well as lifespan can vary quite a bit, so while his chronological age is fact, his developmental age is my best-guess estimate.)
APPEARANCE:
- Bird: He is a giant Chukar partridge, round and fluffy and tending to keep his head pulled in, as in his default icon. Sizes of Hatoful birds in comparison to humans are unclear but I'm going with about 3 feet.
- Human: While the birds of Hatoful Boyfriend are actually birds, they do have canonical human designs. I expect this will be relevant during Jaunts, so here's Shuu's. He's the brunette on the left here.
CANON HISTORY:
The world of Hatoful Boyfriend is a post-apocalyptic world where birds have gained sentience and are the dominant lifeforms on earth while the human population has been decimated and lives in nature reserves. While it's currently a peaceful time, there are undercurrents of friction between birds and humans. In this post-apocalyptic wonderland was born a young Chukar partridge named (at the time) Ichijou Utsuro. Little Utsuro's parents were wealthy, well-known philanthropists and supporters of bird-human coexistence.
When Utsuro was still a chick, radical human terrorists attacked the high rise in which his family lived. He woke up in the hospital to find his parents dead, the right half of his body permanently nerve-damaged, and that he was now colorblind except for the color red. With no particular feelings about the loss of his parents, and no desire to take over his parents' company, he quickly signed his inheritance over to his relatives and vanished. Ichijou Utsuro resurfaced as a teen under the name Isa Souma, a young researcher in biological sciences who was a member of the radical Earth Crawlers terrorist group, which pushed for the annihilation of humans. He worked under Kawara Ryuuji, a brilliant but absent-minded scientist who Isa admired a great deal. Unfortunately, on a research trip Ryuuji fell sick and died. Regretting how he'd neglected his family for his work in the labs, Ryuuji made Isa promise that, should he meet Ryuuji's son, he'd grant him a wish.
After Ryuuji's death, Isa's life as a researcher went on. At one point he became a lawyer, becoming a well-known public prosecutor named Isshiki Mishio before "killing" Mishio and returning to research. While he continued to use the Isa name occasionally, Isa became a world-renowned researcher under the name Iwamine Shuu, as well as the school doctor for the renowned St. Pigeonation's Institute, and Iwamine Shuu became his primary alias.
At one point, Shuu did in fact encounter Ryuuji's son, Ryouta, as a young chick. He asked Ryouta what he wanted and, in grief and distress after a terrible tragedy (unrelated to Ryuuji), Ryouta wished for a peaceful world. Shuu, in his own morbid fashion, decided that he would grant Ryouta's wish by eradicating humans from the world. At St. Pigeonation's, which was secretly run by the Hawk Party, a political faction that wanted to destroy all humans, Shuu began conducting experiments to make Ryouta's wish come true. After years of research he managed to find and refine a strain of bird flu called the Charon virus that would kill humans through mere exposure. The initial carrier of the Charon virus, a young mourning dove named Fujishiro Nageki, set himself and Shuu's lab on fire in an attempt to prevent Shuu from using the virus to kill all humans. However, Shuu was able to salvage a bit of Nageki's body and froze it for later use.
After getting his plans back in order post-Nageki, Shuu invited Ryouta to St. Pigeonation's. Over Ryouta's first year there, Shuu secretly prepared Ryouta's body to become the vector for spreading the Charon virus. Once Ryouta's body was ready, halfway through Ryouta's second year at the school, Shuu implanted Nageki's remains into Ryouta's body, and with Nageki's remains the Charon virus itself. He then put his plan of human genocide into motion with the murder and dismemberment of Ryouta's human friend, Tosaka Hiyoko.
Once Hiyoko's body was discovered, the school was immediately put in lockdown mode and encased in an impassable dome. Shuu began the work of guiding Ryouta (and Ryouta's fellow investigator, a fantail pigeon named Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane) towards the fulfillment of his wish and of Shuu's plan. Shuu manipulated Ryouta into following him to the supposedly abandoned underground medical research facility on the St. Pigeonation's grounds. There, upon learning that he had been the one to (unwittingly) kill Hiyoko after Shuu had transplanted the Charon virus into him, Ryouta gave in to Shuu's manipulations and agreed to his plan to kill all humans, becoming a mindless berserker. However, his school friends arrived in the nick of time to save Ryouta with a sound JRPG turn-based beating. Back to his senses, Ryouta refused to go through with genocide, and Shuu acknowledged the end of his plans by showing Ryouta and his friends a safe way out of the dome for all the St. Pigeonation's students.
However, the story wasn't over yet. Nanaki Kazuaki, a seemingly harmless narcoleptic math teacher, shot Shuu several times in the left side of his body, revealing himself to be Nageki's brother. Having been overwhelmed with grief and despair at Nageki's death, Nanaki was was now obsessed with finding Nageki's remains and was prepared to kill Ryouta in order to retrieve the remaining scrap of Nageki's body from Ryouta's. Fortunately, with the help of Nageki's ghost, Nanaki's mind was put at ease and everyone headed out of the lab unscathed.
However, Ryouta, knowing that as long as the Charon virus remained in his body he would be a danger to all humans, chose to remain in the lab and enter cryogenic sleep with Hiyoko's remains, until such time as he could be revived without the Charon virus. Sakuya vowed to find a way to free Ryouta from cryogenic sleep.
(Note: I'm taking Shuu from after the epilogue to the BBL route. However, the timeframe of the epilogue is a little unclear so this next bit will contain some conjecture to make everything line up in a way that makes sense, flesh out Shuu's actions during the epilogue, and bring him to the canon point I'm taking him from.)
After leaving the lab, Shuu was taken to a hospital to recuperate from his gunshot wounds. Sakuya strong-winged Shuu into overseeing the research that would safely remove the Charon virus from Ryouta's body. Over the months of research, Shuu remained wheelchair-bound and served as a consultant. During that time, he was taken care of by Nanaki himself, who felt some obligation to look after Shuu's well-being after having injured him. After many months of intensive research, Ryouta was successfully freed from cryogenesis sans Charon virus. Not long after that, Shuu made a full recovery from his wounds.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Shuu is a creepy, morally bankrupt scientist who delights in frequently inhumane and awful research. Let's just put that on the table where everyone can see it. In his interactions with individuals he plays the creeper with gusto, with his evil laugh and penchant for casually requesting body parts for his cooperation. He keeps most people around him at arm's length out of distrust, warding people away either through his creepy demeanor or general irritability. Most people seem creeped out by him and stay away, which suits Shuu just fine. It seems that at some point in his young adult life he decided to just act like the morbid creeper he was all along without worrying about how off-putting it was.
In terms of how he presents himself to others, aside from his overall creepiness, Shuu has a tendency to claim and present himself as a researcher. He says openly that research is the only thing he cares about and is implied to care very little about mundane concerns such as his living space, salary, or any kind of ethical boundary whatsoever, so long as his superiors continue to fund whatever research he may wish to undertake. He is definitely a workaholic and is largely uncaring of what happens as a result of his research, preferring the purity of pursuing knowledge for its own sake, and will not shy away from brutally murdering anyone who threatens to expose his research or plans. Still, when the opportunity presents itself, he's perfectly fine with a bit of good old-fashioned blackmail or manipulation to secure the cooperation of individuals who might otherwise prove to be troublesome.
For the most part, Shuu's claims of being interested only in research and the pursuit of knowledge are true...unless someone he cares about is concerned. Shuu can be moved to do extraordinary things for the sake of someone he cares for deeply. In the route I'm taking him from, he spends a decade working towards genocide, persisting through several false starts. In a different route, when he falls in love with the protagonist, he willingly gives up on that quest in order to die with her (sort of. It's a long story.). Once someone manages to worm their way into Shuu's heart, they are seemingly there for good, and he will move heaven and earth to fulfill what he perceives as his obligation to that person (whether there is room in his heart for more than one person at a time is debatable).
Shuu's feelings about his own capacity of feelings are self-awareness but also a kind of self-deprecation. The sense is that he would, perhaps, prefer not to have so many feelings about people, and that he would really, really love to be the emotionless researcher that he claims to be and so often manages to be. Just as he is aware that he's a creeper, he's aware that the lengths to which he goes for loved ones are immense, but also rather pathetic in their own way, and can't stand to be pitied for how long he spent living in the shadow of his devotion to Ryuuji.
Overall, Shuu is a consciously creepy, morbid individual without any morals or ethics whatsoever, paranoid and mistrustful and really just kind of a manipulative dick, but his capacity for love is as terrifying in its depth as it is pathetic in its breadth.
Post-BBL epilogue, Shuu is left in a rather ambiguous place. Having been released from his obligation to Ryuuji, he has nothing of value left in his life except the research. While he still has that research ahead of him, there is no greater goal driving him now, leaving him at a loss as to what he should strive for.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: n/a
ABILITIES:
- Doctoring: Despite his preference for, uh, mad science, Shuu can perform first aid and surgeries and so on. However, his specialty is research.
- Medical Specialist: Shuu's specialty in research is pathology! And with it, several associated areas like immunology, epidemiology, pharmacology, and more general areas to support his specialist knowledge.
- Biotech: Not strictly related to his research specialty, but he knows enough to have fixed up a prototype robot that was to be powered by a human brain, and to transfer said brain into robot successfully...
- Ninja-like stealth: He can sneak up on a hunter-gatherer schoolgirl used to hunting for every meal, so...he's pretty darn sneaky.
- Basic cooking: Bachelor mad-science shut-ins need to stay fed somehow... He can even prepare other birds.
- Flying: Giant talking birds are still birds.
- Various from his previous runs in the game.
INVENTORY:
- butcher's cleaver
- awesome striped tie
- stack of printouts (mostly academic articles on botany and a few on tuberculosis)
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?
- Color-blind in that he can only see red. Also has weak peripheral vision.
- Nerve damage along the right side of his body so those limbs are weaker than normal. Details for this point and the one before.
- Recently-healed bullet wounds along the left side of his body so those limbs are also weaker than normal.
- He can gesture and use his wings to do anything hands can do.
- His official seiyuu is Koyasu Takehito. This Tumblr post has a brief audio sample. His voice is usually cold and emotion-free.
S A M P L E S;
FIRST PERSON: Thread from a previous game. In that thread he's partially amnesiac, but the amnesia did not have a severe effect on his personality other than making him more open around other birds, so he's a bit more relaxed in that thread since he's talking with a teammate he's comfortable with. That post contains some other threads of him speaking with other teammates as well!
THIRD PERSON:
It was quiet in the infirmary, which was how he preferred it. The medicines in their rows, the illegal, experimental medicines in their own rows, and no patients to annoy him or mess up his neat, pristine office.
The only sound of significance was Ryouta sleeping. Or rather, Ryouta lying unconscious and drugged as Shuu waited for his unfortunate human friend to arrive in search of him. He had gulped down the sedative without complaint, believing that it had merely been a new medicine Shuu had devised for his stomach. It was true, in a manner of speaking; the concoction was just the first step in Shuu's plan, which would ultimately result in Ryouta's stomach never bothering him again.
Ryouta tossed and turned in his sleep, wracked by uneasy dreams. Despite himself, Shuu found his thoughts drifting to Ryuuji's last days; his dull feathers, the persistent cough. Unlike his son, though, Ryuuji's final sleep in a hospital bed had been marked by the terrifying stillness of someone whose body was too weak to carry on.
Shuu shook off his thoughts. Now was not the time for maudlin reminisces, not with Operation Hatoful's completion so close at hand. Much depended on this afternoon. He busied himself with checking Ryouta's vital signs and then the time. School would almost be out for the day. Soon everything would be complete. Soon his obligation to Ryuuji would be fulfilled.
There was a knock on the infirmary door, the distinctly sharp, impatient knock and muffled shout that could only belong to a certain human girl, a specific Miss Tosaka. Shuu brushed a wing over Ryouta's forehead and allowed himself a private smile of anticipation as Miss Tosaka opened the door.