"Keep your eyes peeled - this fucker is not nearly as chinese as he wants us to think he is."
Name: King San Dao
Age: 15
Nationality: Unspecified
Noble Arm: Stairway To Heaven is...
In its initial appearance, a mighty siege tower built in the image of a round eastern pagoda with as much attention directed towards style as to defensive capabilities! It is cylindrical in shape, standing one hundred and eight holy feet tall and half as much wide, built out of countless overlapping plates of incredible and unbelievable metal that is not known to mankind - every plate is unique in it's appearance, some thick and rectangular, some thin and round, some fractal and some oval, tarnished and shining, engraved and polished, with leering daemonic faces and marks of unknown battles cut into the metal's surface by unknown means and at unknown times. The material is incredibly heavy, many times denser than iridium, absolutely inert chemically, perfectly inelastic and superconductive. It should also be noted that despite being called a "metal" the material does not really has a conventional molecular or atomic structure at all, existing beyond some laws of physics. At the bottom of the tower, on the underside, there are eight spheres of that metal on which the tower rolls into battle, and on the top of it there's a dais guarded by two curling dragons on which the commander should stand while striking a heroic pose without any regard to his protection or safety when the deadly instrument of belligerence enters the conquered fortress. No siege tower would be complete without a harrizon, and so, on every of the nine 12-foot "stories" of the tower there is a crew or a eighteen archers, every single one, together with his gear and armaments wrought from the tower's mystical metal, ready to repel attackers and rain great swarms of arrows upon all enemies. However, the rigid nature of metal makes it unsuitable for strings, the bowmen are clearly lacking the manifold joints needed for excercising archery, and, most importantly, the overlapping armor-plates of the exterior and cramped interior provide no embrasure for archers to shoot from, nor any space to comfortably draw the bow if they could. Additionaly, if one would be scrutinous enough to examine the construction's sphere-wheels, he'd find that they are embedded into the construction and are incapable of actually rotating to provide mobility - after one recovers from the breathtaking glory ofthe rampart's menacing sight, it becomes clear to him that in actuality the most it can do in battle is very efficiently obstruct space. The reason behind this inefficiency is King's absolute ineptitude in siegecraft and large-scale warfare - a weakness which becomes absolutely insignificant when the tower's true power is revealed through power of will and thought! The wondrous special abilities of this Noble Arm are:
-Metaphysical Construction - the tower is not a true material object in the normal sense of the word, but instead, like every other Arm, a manifestation of King's spiritual energy, personality and nature, which will be described later. As such, it doesn't really exist in the world on constant basis, instead springing into reality whenever the user wishes it, existing literally at the speed of thought, controlled and constrained by King's ability to imagine and envision - in order to manifest the Tower at some point in space, he must clearly depict it's position and the world's reaction to its sudden appearance in his mind, after which it will immediately appear. There are no special effects and no visual or audial cue to the oncoming manifestation except maybe the brief look of incredible concentration on King's face, making it very useful for a dynamic entry or sudden and impressive display of power.
-Partial Manifestation - at some point during his life King realized the nature of his ability and, as any other person would, immediately tried to exploit it in beneficial and dishonest ways - surprisingly, these attempts were successfull! After a great deal of practice and trial-and-error research, he learned to precisely control the manifestation and enabled himself to will into existence separate parts of the construct, i.e. singular armor-plates or different shapes of metal forcefully separated from the Tower's mass and molded by his thought and place them in any place within range. Of course, such techniques take a great toll at one's mental fortitude and physical stamina, but the incredible versatility of offensive and defensive techniques is an incredibly worthy tradeoff!
Of course, due to the tower being effectively a materialized figment of the user's imagination, the tower and its pieces are often exempt from common laws of nature and physics - for example, once manifested in space, the piece always remains there until abjured, unaffected by gravity, wind, or any attempts to move it. The only way through the tower-derived obstacle is to apply an incredible, absolutely inhuman amount of force to it in order to strain King's ability to imagine his Noble Arm sustaining such an attack, after which the meta-matter of the tower quickly dissipates into separate quarks and removes itself from the real world in increments of 1-5 cubic feet per such strike. Of course, with benefits come limitations, which are following:
-The Tower, being effectively something akin to King's small personal world, is centered around him, or specifically around his spine, which is treated as something like Axis Mundi in relation to the Construct - no matter what, King is always in the center of his tower on the horizontal axis and may not extend his powers further than 27 feet away from himself in any horizontal direction. Vertical axis, however, has no such constraint - King may move freely up and down his Tower, always treating what is directly beneath his feet as the bottom floor. This enables him to use his tower to effectively walk on the air on any height, constantly building and destroying something like a ladder for his tower to stand on.
-The Tower may not manifest in other objects or living creatures except for gases like air and such, due to user's inability to imagine the effect it would have on aforementioned objects and creatures - a limitation that might be lifted sometime later, but not right now. Air in which the Tower is created is merely displaced and pushed aside, but King's mind strains, or even refuses to comprehend the possibly explosive consequences such technique might have on living beings. When the place that the Tower manifests in is somehow obstructed, the construct simply "skips" the already-occupied space - for example if King summons a wall that should pass through an already-existing wall on some part of its length to form a cross, he effectively creates two perfectly-aligned constructions that are adjacent to the obstacle.
After almost a year of practice, King has developed several favorie techniques making full use of his abilities and qualities of the Tower's material - through concentration, channeling of will, rigorous training and rote memorisation he has made these specific shapes and forms easy and quick to manifest in an instant and without great exertion.
1) Juggernaut-Scouring Stars - Something like chaff countermeasure, but for people instead of radars, this technique creates a sparse cloud of incredibly fine metal particles less than a millimeter in diameter all around the King - all of them, of course, completely inert and just as dense and immovable as any other part of the Tower. Logical consequences for anyone who would attempt to swing his weapon at the golden mist, or worse yet, attempt to charge through it, are sad and immediately obvious. As if to make up for the extremely inhumane method this technique uses for deterrence, any and all bright light makes the metal mist sparkle and shine magnificently, like fey dancing lights.
2) All Suns' Mirror - developed as a mere cantrip during the training, this technique nevertheless proves useful in some circumsta
nces by creating a perfectly smooth and perfectly reflecting - King himself can't really descrive how exactly he manages to imagine this - substance in almost any shape of user's desire.
3) Indomitable Pangolin Rampart - One of the most potent defensive techniques, this form encases King into a half-sphere of Tower's armor about eight feet in height and as many in diameter on the inside, with as big amount of metal packed into the sphere's segmented surface as it is humanly possible to imagine - five, ten, two dozen layers of plates upon each other to provide as much protection as possible, with outer layer being the absolutely smooth, perfectly reflective and inventively sloped armor for the attacks and shots to bounce and ricochet right off. Through maintaining constant concentration, King may move the armor-sphere with him as he moves inside it, always remaining in the center of his bunker while at the same time changing his position on the battlefield. Occasionaly King will momentarily destroy a small piece in the carapace to peek on the outside for a brief second or draw a breath of fresh air if it becomes too stuffy inside, making him extremely vulnerable if someone manages to guess where exactly on the armor the window will open.
4) Cincinnati Sidewinder - Developed mere weeks after enrolling with the Academy and briefly educating himself on the subject of physics, this is the most creative use of his ability yet developed by King - and probably the only one that allows him to directly attack his enemies. The user picks up a small pebble or a prepares a steel ball bearing a small bag of which he now carries on his person and, by careful concentration wills into existence a long, perfectly polished hollow tube of the same circumference as the aforementioned pebble and connected to a gigantic and equally hollow barrel-like reservoir. The pebble is placed into the tube at one end, which is immediately sealed, and then the reservoir is instantly filled up with more meta-material, immediately and explosively displacing the air within it into the tube, which then pushes out the missile at absolutely incredible speed - something like a linear accelerator or an airgun in nature, but in the middle between the two in the capability for destruction.
In addition to these incredible superpowers and techinques that King posessess, he is also quite adept at dirty and unfair hand-to-hand and knife fighting - really, he is very rarely caught without a stabbing implement on his person - is quite quick on his feet, is a somewhat justifiedly self-proclaimed master pickpocket and is also surprisingly adequate at playing several kinds of guitar and banjo. It is unknown where he picked up that last skill.
Personality: Hungry for praise and admiration, enthusiastic and ambitious, therefore quickly agitated.
Likes: Fighting, winning, not losing, being popular whenever he manages to, having a lot of money on his person at any given moment.
Dislikes: Thinking about his problems even if he has any, losing, not winning, geography as a school subject and a science.
Fears: His problems catching up with him, having to resort to what he calls "actual crime" to get through in life.
Bio: Born in the slums of an unspecified city in Taiwan to an anonymous shady individual and a whore whose only distinguishing feature was her single leg, King San Dao miraculously survived through infancy and ended up in a foster home of Taiwan Fund For Children and Families where it quickly became apparent that instead of genetic diseases or disfigurments, his blood inherited from both parents a mystical attraction to petty crime and great disdain for law enforcement - oh, and apparently one of the parents was of thai ancesty because that skin color wasn't quite widespread in China. Utterly sure that no one on earth worth being adopted by would ever adopt him, the little guy decided to pave his own road into the bright and happy future and so was back on the streets as soon as he could walk on his own and reach most pockets on the clothing of a grown man without having to stand on tiptoes.
It all went up uphill from there: a street gang, good friends, exciting life, a several luckily victimless robberies, and at some point King even dreamed of becoming a Blue Lantern in the Bamboo Union - but such thing was never destined to happen. One day he and his friends tried to stick up very wrong people and King quickly made a shocking discovery - real criminals don't just steal from people, but sometimes do things much, much worse. Of course, someone might've said it was obvious, and it's not to say that King wasn't suspecting this, but making it happen was pretty much the worst experience in his life. Long story short, after unsuccesfully trying to mug a member of Bamboo Union Triad, King had to stab him, repeatedly and mortally.
To make short another long story, afterwards he cried like a bitch, threw his murder implement in the sea and visited every single temple and church in Taipan where he lived at the moment and prayed to each and every god to grant him forgiveness and save his life from the incoming retribution. His prayers were answered, though maybe not in the way he imagined it - triads still found him and still exacted retribution by beating the everloving shit out of every single part of his body, but stopped after he began to bleed from his ears instead of being any more thorough. Once again shortening otherwise a medium-length story, one week and several dozens of stitches and braces later he opened his eyes in the hospital and the building was immediately impaled by all 33 meters of his Tower - the standing theory as of now is that his Noble Arm was awakened by serious brain damage. Skipping even more words, the beating and spiritual enlightenment that followed not only gave King superpowers but also made some of his stupidity and childishness leak out from his head, which sparked in him interest in activities more legal and profitable than petty thievery - such as actual education, with which he concerned himself after roughly a year after leaving the hospital and escaping into the mainland China to research his newfound abilities and get away from the Bamboo Union's people. One another thing a boot to the head did to him was to mystically instil within his mind a great love for rock&roll music and unnerving skill with playing electric guitar - any living space he occupies for longer than several days begins to steadily fill up with musical paraphernaila, speakers that rarely stop playing and various vintage posters of bands and musicians.
Sadly, however, most of the respectable Noble Arm-related establishments couldn't accept him due to the delinquent background and several convictions, which is why he eventually ended up in Trinidad - one of few academies with low enough standards and even lower education costs which he is able to cover with his stipend and fighting in the Philippine underground rings.
Current Goal: Graduate and become a legal mercenary in a good company.
Student Rank: 731
