Institute App

[vermis]

[content warning: human experimentation and child abuse.]

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Fox
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Yes
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: I am over 18.
CONTACT: teacuppity
CHARACTERS PLAYED: Tohru Adachi

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Kariya Matou
CANON: Fate/Zero
CANON REFERENCE: Wiki page
AGE: 27 (Kariya's specific age isn't stated in canon)
GENDER: Male
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: counselor and groundskeeper
APPEARANCE: Edit: Sorry to edit after posting my app, but after some thought, I realized it would make more sense, considering his AU, to give him his later canon appearance, which is here. He is badly scarred from carrying the Crest Worms for years, and the stress and the experiments have aged him beyond his years and turned his hair white.

PERSONALITY: A quiet young man who likes telling stories and taking pictures, Kariya Matou's tragedy is that he is hopelessly ill-suited to the family and the world he was born into.

Kariya is naturally gentle, kind, and soft-spoken, and those traits have been mistaken for cowardice or weakness, especially in the cutthroat world of the magi. However, the idea that he is weak couldn't be further from the truth. He is strong, and has been since before the Fourth Grail War. It is simply that his strength is utilized in non-traditional and less obvious ways. It takes strength for him to reject his powerful magus family, as a family member with Magic Circuits they could use. Choosing not to use his magic and turning his back on the problematic and abusive world he was born into, although it makes him weak in the sense that his magecraft is weak, takes both emotional fortitude and moral courage. Kariya lives as an outcast, by his own choice. As the story begins, he is, not wholly, but at least partly, satisfied with the choice he's made, with his freedom from the Matous and his life away from them. He doesn't mind being an outsider. He prefers that to being part of a society he hates.

The opinion of others aside, he is courageous, if not sensible. Unlike every other Master in the War (with the odd and dissimilar exception of Kirei Kotomine, at first), he does not enter the War because he wants to use the Grail to make a wish. Instead, he wants to obtain the Grail so he can give it to the head of his family, Zouken, in exchange for a single favor: to save someone else from the Matou family's cruelty. To do this, he sacrifices his life and freedom and endures a year of torture.

What Kariya wants most is for the young Sakura Tohsaka to be freed from the Matou Family. The girl is the daughter of Aoi, his childhood sweetheart and best friend. Kariya loves the child and is like an uncle to her. The Matou family adopted Sakura from the Tohsaka family because of the lack of any remaining young, viable magi in the family after the departure of Kariya. The Tohsaka family agreed to give Sakura to the Matous for political reasons, and it is this circumstance around which Kariya's involvement in the Holy Grail War centers.

Kariya agrees to return to his family to train as a magus, and to allow his family's Crest Worms to be placed in his body. This, all to save a single child, and, by association, to help her mother, the woman he loves. It is a sentimental, emotion-driven choice. Kariya values sentiment over cold logic. It is possible that a part of him knows that this failure is all but inevitable, but he enters into the agreement because he would rather undergo this suffering than be the kind of person who would allow it to continue without doing anything. He sees himself as a protector of the weak and innocent, with a soft spot for children. He is sustained by the idea of once again spending time with Sakura, Rin, and their mother, to be able to see the children playing together happily again. He doesn't ask for much. He likes simple things best: home and family.

That said, Kariya is not a person without flaw, not by any means. One could make a case for there being selflessness in his goal, but there is selfishness in him too, even as he is sacrificing himself. When he left his family, his brother Byakuya had to bear the weight of the family's expectations. This left Byakuya a broken man, and he'd be the first to call Kariya selfish. Byakuya believes he's doing what is right for the family and that Kariya deserted them. Also, Kariya's love for Aoi isn't without self-interest. Though he wants her friend to be happy, as her friend, there is desire there, too, and buried resentment. He isn't able to let go and move on and have other relationships. There's an immaturity in his feelings for her. There's some selfishness in that, too.

He greatly dislikes Aoi's husband Tokiomi, and after what happens to Sakura, that dislike grows into a destructive, blinding hatred that causes him to act irrationally. Eventually, he develops the overpowering desire to kill Tokiomi, even though—and in part because—Tokiomi is the man Aoi loves. (This jealousy is present in the AU, but because the AU lacks the Holy Grail War and the magus bloodlines that drive Tokiomi to adopt out one of his children, Kariya isn't inspired to hate. He does have that potential under the right circumstances, but it is clearly stated that it is Sakura joining the Matou family and then Kariya's deteriorating mental state that lead to the severity of his hatred and violence in canon.)

He can be delusional, even when not impaired. When he likes people, like Aoi, he tends to put them on a pedestal, which prevents him from seeing them clearly and understanding their motivations and choices. He has a tendency to blame himself for events, even when to do so is illogical. He believes that what he is doing for Sakura is his penance, as he considers that his own actions led to what happened. He thinks Sakura's predicament is due to him leaving the Matou family without a viable heir. Not only that, but he blames himself for not telling Aoi his true feelings and not raising any objections to her marriage to Tokiomi. It's other people who are truly to blame for what happens to Sakura, but Kariya allows these unrealistic thoughts to take root, and for guilt to rule his actions.

In a similar vein, his desire to help and his idealistic desires can blind him to the reality of his situation(s). There is only a small chance that he can win the Holy Grail War. Even Zouken thinks that it is impossible that Kariya will win, and it is difficult to believe that Zouken would have kept his promise, even if Kariya had emerged the victor. Kariya's entire quest, then, may be pointless, and he has sacrificed himself in an act of futility. A more strategic or subtle person may have tried to find a way to free Sakura without involving himself in the dangerous game of the War. Kariya is too earnest and straightforward to concoct deceptive or manipulative plots. In another instance of his blindness, he fails to realize that his entry into the War is the last thing Aoi wants. She has no desire to see him sacrifice himself, and she certainly doesn't want him to kill her husband.

Canon highlights his weaknesses by putting him through the intense torture of the Holy Grail War. This extreme element is thus far lacking in his AU, even if he has suffered trauma, but it shows the worst he can become: once steady and quiet, if inwardly passionate and principled, he begins to lose his mind. His focus on his task becomes obsessive. His decline increases his negative traits the further it progresses: his self-sacrifice to the point of foolishness, his focus on his anger at Tokiomi, and his lack of guile and difficulty seeing through the deceit of others. This makes it easier for others to manipulate him, which leads him into the folly of an alliance with Kirei Kotomine.

He spends most of canon dying, but he continues to fight. He is not ineffective. He has an incredible amount of endurance, physical and mental, living on when almost anyone else would have died. He stands up to one of the Servant Caster's monsters in order to save the life of Aoi's other daughter, Rin. His ability to withstand suffering is immense. Zouken himself admits that he is impressed with and surprised by Kariya's continued survival more than once. It is Kariya's great sense of purpose, his single-minded focus on his compassionate goal, that allow him to keep living.

No one else believes he can succeed in his quest, and ultimately, he fails, but even his last moment will be one of hope. He outlives the Crest Worms that are killing him, and his will is so strong that only death stops him from striving to save the child he loves.

POWERS/ABILITIES: Kariya's power is simple enough. He can communicate with and control worms. Yes, worms. Not just earthworms, but various types of worms: earthworms, roundworms, flatworms, bristle worms, bootleg worms, arrow worms, priapulid worms... Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, and Annelida are all affected, and there may be some other animals that respond to him.

On the surface, one might think that's a minor power, but considering the average worm population in the US is approximately 53,767 worms per acre, that's a lot of worms. Even though some people call insect larvae worms, they are apparently not affected by Kariya's power, but that's still a lot of worms.

The worms come to Kariya's call and respond to his commands, though they're still worms, and he can't make them do anything they are ordinarily physically incapable of. The range of his "call" depends somewhat on soil conditions and other factors in the surrounding environment, but is generally about 3 miles in any direction from his current location. If he's on the open water, manipulating marine worms, his reach is even longer, as the call seems to travel better through water, but this is rarely relevant, as he doesn't often travel by water.

AU HISTORY: Most mutants are born into human families. Many of them have the experience of not being accepted for their powers. Being hated for them. Feared for being different. This wasn't the case with Kariya's family. No, his experience was quite the opposite.

His father, Zouken Matou (b. Makiri Zolgen) was an active mutant before mutants became widely known or widely spread. He is one of the oldest mutants in the modern era, and no one knows quite how old he is, because he is a man whose power involves absorbing life energy from others to prolong his own life. The Zolgen family originated in Russia, but as they were aristocrats, they fled the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, then eventually moved to Japan and became the Matou family.

Zouken, in addition to being a mutant, is a scientist who has used his artificially lengthened lifespan to work on a number of monstrous projects, many involving human experimentation. He is most interested in using genetic manipulation to create new and more powerful (and more horrible) lifeforms, and one wouldn't be wrong to call him a mad scientist.

When Zouken had children, of course, he wanted mutants like himself, not useless, powerless humans. With this in mind, he was careful to marry a woman with a mutation, and he was sure his genes would produce powerful mutants.

He was wrong. His oldest son was born a pure human, without the X-gene. His second son, Kariya, was born with a mutation, but one that Zouken found laughably pathetic. When his power manifested at the age of twelve, Kariya was able to, as Kariya saw it, "make friends with worms". As a gentle boy who liked animals, Kariya thought this was fun, but Zouken wasn't so pleased. Disgusted by having produced two worthless sons, he basically made his eldest son a slave of the family, then made Kariya into one of his experiments.

Zouken's plan was to engineer a species of worms that Kariya could use as a weapon, so that he wouldn't be so useless. With this in mind, he created the parasitic Crest Worms, and he was so monstrous that he placed them within his son's body when Kariya turned sixteen. The Crest Worms, when dormant, rest within the body, absorbing energy from their host, and when active, they burst forth from the skin, taking their external form of winged, carnivores, capable of stripping flesh from the human body.

As a lonely, quiet child raised in an oppressive environment, Kariya had always been teased as a child. He only had one close friend: a girl from a neighbor family who he he'd grown up with. He had a childhood crush on her and adored her. Once he was made to carry the Crest Worms, however, he drew away even from her. Everyone was told that Kariya had grown very ill. He was withdrawn from school, and Zouken told the authorities he was now being home schooled, due to his health problems, when in actuality, he was being experimented on and trained to use the worms. The worms inside Kariya caused him terrible pain and distorted his appearance. His older brother, far from being sympathetic, was jealous that Kariya had the X-gene he lacked, so grew to hate him.

Kariya did continue to keep an eye on his one friend, but from a distance. Sometimes he watched her from his windows or walked by her house at night. He made sure there were lots of worms in her family's garden to keep the soil healthy. Time passed. His friend grew older and went away to school. He felt terribly lonely when she went away, even though he hadn't talked to her in a while. He asked Zouken if he could write her letters. He grudgingly gave his permission, although Kariya was allowed to say nothing about his condition or his mutation. He had to refuse to see her, or else the letters would have to stop. Kariya agreed to these terms. To Kariya's delight, his friend started writing him back. She told him about her life and what she was doing at school, and the letters became one of his few sources of comfort and joy.

Cowed by Zouken, deformed, ailing, and lacking anywhere else to go, Kariya usually stayed in the house, keeping to himself and writing his letters and stories. He loved reading his friend's letters, though when he eventually read that she was getting married, he felt horribly jealous and sad. Still, he kept it to himself. The important thing was that she was happy. She got married and had two children, girls. She sent him pictures of them, which made him very happy, though he still contended with pangs of jealousy. As nothing much had come of this correspondence, Zouken deemed it harmless and allowed the photos.

Kariya did go out at night sometimes, in spite of his weakness. It wasn't as if he was entirely forbidden to leave, although Zouken expected him to return. Almost always, he did. But one night, driven by loneliness and curiosity, he decided to go visit his friend. He didn't want to bother her, but if only he could see her and her children! Maybe it was a foolish idea, but he wasn't thinking clearly. His health had been worsening. So, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he took a night bus to her house. He almost knocked on her door, but at the last minute, changed his mind. He didn't want her to see him as he was. Through the window, he caught a glimpse of her playing with her children. They looked so cute! That was nice, he thought. At least he'd gotten to see her again.

Unfortunately, when he started home, Kariya was confronted by a group of young men in the neighborhood. They had seen him loitering around and thought he was a homeless man. When they got a better look at him and his distorted face, they guessed that he was a mutant. Japan had few laws restricting mutants' lives, but no laws specifically protecting them, and violence against mutants was far from unheard of. They probably weren't intending to kill Kariya. They most likely wanted to rough him up, but the Crest Worms in Kariya's body were very aggressive, and he was frightened and failed to control them. He was attacked, and then his worms attacked.

The screams were horrible. The worms were vicious, ripping into his attackers. The police were called. Kariya's old friend came out of the house and saw him as he ran—or limped— from the scene. He turned back to stare at her for a moment. He wasn't sure, but he thought she recognized him. The last thing he wanted was for her to have seen her as the monster he'd become.

Kariya fled, but he was hardly stealthy or able to escape easily on foot, and the police were able to find him. He knew he didn't have the stamina to endure much of a chase. He'd be caught. But suddenly, and unexpectedly, he was rescued as he ran through the park. A man—who seemed like some kind of knight to Kariya in his distress—jumped up, carrying a park bench of all things, and fended off the police with it. He rescued Kariya, who promptly collapsed in exhaustion, terror, and pain.

As it turned out, the man was an ally of the X-Men from England who happened to be in Japan with a group looking for other mutants to recruit to join the X-Men's cause. They'd been monitoring the police, which was how they'd come across Kariya in the midst of his plight.

After hearing Kariya's story, the other mutants were horrified by Zouken's treatment of him and used their connections to smuggle him back to England. From there, it was deemed that the people best able to treat his condition were in America, so he was sent there. After years of work by dedicated professionals, the last of the Crest Worms was successfully removed from his body and he was healed. He was able to continue his schooling. Now he works at the institute as a counselor and uses his powers to keep the grounds healthy and happy with his thousands of worm friends—so he's sometimes called the groundskeeper.

He didn't want to allow the Crest Worms to be killed, and the scientists at the institute wanted to study Zouken's work, but the surviving creatures are held in isolation in a climate controlled chamber below the institute.

SAMPLES

NETWORK SAMPLE:

[Kariya doesn't make a lot of network posts, and his voice, when he speaks, is quiet. He doesn't look directly at the camera at first, but then he turns toward it and gives a half smile.]

It was Mental Illness Awareness Week last week. Maybe some of you saw the signs around school, or went to one of the talks. Just because it's over, that doesn't mean you should be less aware. There's no shame in mental illness.

I'd like you to know ... if any of you need someone to talk to, we're happy to help you here in the counseling department. Professor Xavier cares a lot about you, and so do we. If you're students or—staff. Everything you say to us is confidential. It doesn't have to be about anything serious. There's a lot of scary stuff in the news lately, and that's okay to talk about, too.

[His tone is serious, but he suddenly brightens.]

Oh—I was thinking, we could put a literary magazine out. That might be fun. What do you think? A good way to get out all our feelings... I don't know, maybe no one else thinks so? But I'd like to do that. We must have a lot of creative people here on campus.

I look forward to hearing from you. About whatever you want to talk about.

LOG SAMPLE: "It's a nice day, isn't it?" Kariya knelt down in the grass.He hadn't put on his gardening gloves yet, so he could feel the blades against his fingers, both soft and sharp. He flexed his fingers, pressing down into the soil, his gaze tracing the faint scars that still marked his fingers. "Just moist enough, but not too wet. You all seem so happy down there." He laughed. It was nice that, wherever he went, he had friends. He used to resent the worms, because they'd been all he had. He'd thought that if he just had a better power, better friends, he could have been free to do what he wanted.

That wasn't true. He knew that now. It wasn't their fault, or his.

"Lots of birds out here now, so stay down there where it's safe." It was natural for a lot of them to be eaten, and even good for the environment, but that didn't mean he didn't help them out from time to time. Whenever he saw a worm stuck on the sidewalk after the rain, he'd gently help it back into the earth. Even worms wanted to live. Too many people didn't care about smaller, weaker creatures. That was a lot of what was wrong with the world. All people needed to do was care a little more.

He still didn't put on his gloves, although he could have. He wanted to feel the grass and dirt against his skin. He moved to the nearest flowerbed and started to pull weeds up from the dirt. "But maybe you could help me," he added. The worms didn't understand his words, or anything like human language, just the wordless call he put out, but he'd gotten into the habit of talking to them. It was nice to have someone to talk to. The soil stirred. Just a little. No one else would have noticed, but when he started to pull at the weeds again, the soil felt a little looser, and the weeds came out easier.

There wasn't such a thing as a "bad" power. All the kids he'd met here were so amazing and so talented. He never got tired of learning about them. They could do so many different things. He liked them a lot. So many of them, like him, hadn't had an easy time growing up, but look how strong they were. Kariya had always wanted a family of his own ... he knew, now, that that was probably never going to happen. Even if he could find someone to care for, which was very unlikely, his body was too damaged. But it was great that he could help so many kids while he was here. Living here was a little like having a family.

"Not bad," he told the worms. "You've done a wonderful job here."