Zenko

Kuukoku Jinja no Zenko
A.K.A.	Zenko Bó Huì
Age	17
Voice Actor
Relatives
Series
Player	Exacerangutan

• Name: Kuukoku Jinja no Zenko
• Age: About 500
• Sex: Female
• Birthday: Probably sometime in March
• Parents: Two foxes
  • Place of Birth: Hizen Province (modern Saga Prefecture) on western Kyushu
  • Nationality: Japanese
  • Specialty: Illusion and infiltration
  • Hobbies: Trolling, teasing, flirting, prying into everything
  • Likes: Inari, jokes and amusing stories, cleverness, people with a healthy balance of respect and fun
  • Dislikes: Dogs, tanuki, boorish and dour people
  • Favorite Foods: Fried tofu, quality sake
  • Least Favorite Foods: Chicken and rabbit (not so appealing cooked and prepared but awkward to eat otherwise in a human form)
  • Most Valuable Possessions:
  • Seiyuu/Voice Actor:
  • Playlist: Classical Japanese/Rock/Pop mashups

• Physical Stats
  • Height: 5'6"
  • Weight: 120lbs
  • Eyes: Light brown
  • Hair: Black
  • Special: Black-furred fox ears, five silver-tipped black-furred fox tails

Appearance

Zenko in her natural form

Zenko appears in the form of a beautiful, athletic but curvy young woman with long black hair, black-furred fox ears, and five black-furred fox tails with white tips. She always wears a version of a traditional kitsune mask designed to conceal everything above her mouth, usually has a shimmering, luminous pearl worn on a necklace, and most often appears in a sort of scandalously revealing reinterpretation of a shrine maiden's uniform, with her tails poking out through a strategically located gap in the back of the skirt.

Zenko in her natural form (in which she might appear in illusions or in dreams which she's inflitrating) is a small black fox (generally regarded as a good omen) with white tips on her tails and a white stripe down her chest and belly.

Personality

Being a fox, Zenko finds the opportunity for japes and pranks and capers and jokes and puns difficult to resist. She loves getting a reaction out of people and entertaining herself, and goes out of her way to make a game out of everything she does--as long as she doesn't expect it to undermine her duties as a servant of Inari (which is what zenko means), which she actually takes quite seriously. However, she has very little patience for the crass, often scatological sense of humor and lack of piety of most tanuki, and is especially galled by tanuki being perhaps even more gifted shapeshifters and illusionists than foxes.

Typical of foxes, her curiosity is insatiable, and she isn't afraid to intrude and/or make an unapologetic nuisance of herself when a mystery grabs her attention. She also exhibits fox-like vanity, eagerly basking in attention and flattery, more than willing to flirt shamelessly without human notions of propriety or modesty to restrain her; she is also very proud of her age, her experience, knowledge, and connections among spirits, and her status as a zenko. She has the fear of dogs common among foxes, finding them at best annoying and distracting, and at worst absolutely terrifying. She loves aburage to the point of finding it hard to resist, and will gladly accept aburage or sake as offerings, if so presented.

Zenko isn't overwhelmingly concerned with human ethics where they don't line up with her own perspective as a centuries-old adjutant to divine authority--she's a benevolent spirit, but still a spirit. She tends to see humans more as wards rather than sovereign individuals, in that they deserve some degree of respect due to their divine qualities and great potential, but expects deference from regular humans who haven't achieved enlightenment or been elevated by divine right, and doesn't especially care about things like their personal space or private property, especially when it comes to doing what she deems necessary in service to Inari. She doesn't hesitate to point out if a human is wrong and a spirit is right, and doesn't feel bad if she's a bit harsh in "correcting" humans' bad behavior. She especially likes to exact punishment through humiliation, employing illusions and dreamwalking to shame the unrighteous and trick them into making fools of themselves, seeking atonement, or destroying themselves (socially and financially if not physically) if they especially offend her sense of right behavior. While weakness in the innocent is natural and calls for protection and weaning, weakness in the evil is to be scorned and mocked ruthlessly.

Background

Few details are known even among the spirits about the early life of the fox who came to be known as Kuukoku Jinja no Zenko--the Benevolent/Inari-serving Fox of the Lonely River Shrine--except that she came originally from Hizen province, and was presumably born sometime in the late Kamakura or early Muromachi period. As a fox, she didn't exactly keep close track of birthdays, so she isn't sure of her own precise age, but must be something like 500 years old, based on her earliest recollections of major human events that she paid any attention to. She remembers the civil wars of the Sengoku beginning around the time she earned her second tail and became a servant of Inari, so she was probably born roughly 100 years before the Sengoku period began.

During the following centuries, she traveled to China several times to collaborate with her distant cousins there in hunting and fighting malicious spirits, monsters, and demons. She also learned about spiritual beings rarely seen in Japan, and greatly improved her fighting skills. Her home base became the Lonely River Shrine, a modest but well-respected Inari shrine located in western Echizen province on an isolated minor tributary to the Kuzuryuu river, where she spent the last century or so, helping the shrine to develop its local reputation as a good place to go with maladies, to pray to Inari for health and prosperity, and pay respect to the foxes living on the shrine's grounds. More recently, she has begun to appear in the region surrounding the imperial capital at Kyo.

Given her rank and long activity in service to Inari, Kuukoku Jinja no Zenko has a certain amount of renown among spirits and particularly foxes, giving her some leverage in garnering their cooperation, but also meaning some information about her can be garnered by others who can communicate with spirits.

Skills

Physical Skills:

• Alertness: Incredible (plus heightened senses)
• Athletics: Amazing
• Stealth: Incredible

Social Skills:

• Subterfuge: Incredible
• Streetwise: Very good
• Etiquette: Incredible
• Performance (shamisen, koto): Incredible
• Performance (voice): Excellent

Mental Skills:

• Medicine: Good
• Languages: Fluent Chinese, smattering of Dutch and Portugese
• Law: Excellent
• Occult: Amazing (Shinto legends, spirits, monsters)
• Politics: Excellent

Other Skills:

• Survival: Good (Excellent at foraging)
• Empathy: Excellent
• Animal Ken: Excellent (but not cool with dogs)

Special Abilities

Shinto purification rituals further infused with potent spirit energy

Drawing out and communicating with spirits

Master of taiji, proto-baguazhang, and daitou-ryuu aiki-juujutsu (precursor to aikido)

Master of the jian and short staff

Powers & Merits

Superhuman Senses: Zenko has greatly heightened senses of hearing and smell in particular, compared to humans, and can gauge people's emotional states or identify them easily by scent. She can also sense spiritual power and other similar supernatural distinctions, and can see and communicate with spirits and other beings humans may not be able to, from major beings of power (e.g. river deities) to common youkai and other presences dwelling in the wilderness (e.g. kamaitachi, tengu, kodama, etc).

Fox Possession (Kitsunetsuki): Zenko cannot perform full fox possession, but can slip into the subconscious of a sleeping (or otherwise not-fully-awake) person and enter their dreams, either to influence them or just to explore their psyche from the inside and learn secrets.

Illusions: As a fox-spirit of significant rank, Zenko can generate large, complicated, extremely realistic illusions that affect all the senses, and does so both for pranks and as a matter of course. Illusions can be preprogrammed to follow some course of action and respond in simple ways (e.g. an illusion of an object can be picked up) but without her continued attention, can't interact much more than an NPC in a classic JRPG. If she loses consciousness, her illusions gradually fade over a matter of minutes or seconds, sustained longer the more observers believe in them. Illusions generally affect anyone within perceptual range of them, being constructed with spirit-energy and having a "reality" of their own, but with a touch, Zenko can put an illusion in a single person's mind, instead.

Fox Fire (Kitsunebi): Zenko can form and control blue-white spirit-fire that can burn with heat, or alternatively, can burn away spiritual impurities (e.g. injuries caused by evil spirits), as well as harming spirits directly. When it isn't burning hot, it still projects the sensation of heat, but won't cause pain or physical harm to humans and mundane objects. She can release her fire as a gout of flame blown from her lips, collected as a ball in her hand or on the tips of her tails, or like claws at her fingertips.

Weightlessness: Zenko can reduce her effective weight (but not mass) to almost nothing, enabling her to stand on the smallest of branches, run across water, use thrown weapons as stepping stones, and make extraordinary, Crouching Tiger-like leaps.

Fabrication: Zenko can create simple objects up to several pounds in weight by concentrating spirit-energy and gathering available raw material. Such objects can be made stronger than a conventional material object would be (but aren't unbreakable), with any material properties she understands and can imagine (e.g. "like silver" she can do, but "superconductor" she can't), but will fall apart within a day or two unless she maintains it, and can be banished by dissipating the spirit-energy binding them together. Unless she actively concentrates on repairing a broken object created this way, it comes apart into its constituent matter and spirit-energy.

Clear Sighted (3)

Graceful (2)

Unique Items

Star-Ball (Hoshi no Tama): A large, sparkling, luminous pearl which Zenko typically wears on a necklace. It serves partially as a repository for her spiritual energy, and is to a fox like a samurai's sword or a police officer's firearm: precious, difficult to replace, extremely embarrassing to lose, and potentially carreer-endingly shameful if it should fall into the hands of someone who can misuse it. She can still use her powers without it, but the scale of the more energy-intensive powers (e.g. Fox Fire, Illusions, and Fabrication) will be much more limited.

Items Of Note

???

Weaknesses & Flaws

See Star-Ball above.

Although far less powerful than a nine-tailed fox, whose powers are often said to be so great as to strain reason, Zenko has a significant aura which any onmyouji, priest, or other person sensitive to spirits would notice at close quarters, or when she isn't suppressing it. Although she can minimize her presence, she can't hide completely from such people, and may incite trouble depending on their attitudes toward foxes.

Curiosity (2):

Fear of dogs (1):

NPC(s) to go with char

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