Sakata Udo

[Sakata]

Sakata’s Actual Life:
    Sakata is the twenty six year old manager at 秋葉原ボクシング＆スポーツジム, a boxing gym on the east side of Akihabara.  He also volunteers at the Mitsui Memorial Hospital when he isn’t working at the gym.  He is a very introspective person, and as a result people tend to think is doesn’t pay attention to the world around him, but thanks to his curse, he is very aware of the goings-on around him.  He is often quick to step in to assist others, but he never steps in farther than he feels is he able, as he knows full well the results of overstepping with his condition.

Sakata’s Family:
    Sakata’s family is small, unfortunate side effect of the curse, and consists of his mother, Azuma, his older sister, Fujita, and his younger brother, Sama.  His sister hates their burakumin history, and resents Sakata for embodying everything that caused their family to be in such poor conditions.  His mother is companionate, having lost her husband, Noda, to complications after surgery (he was a nurse).  Sama is 9, and is still trying to get a handle on what he has become.  Sakata has been practicing martial arts with Sama, just to start helping him work through the new pain he feels every day.

Sakata’s Friends:
    Sakata doesn’t have too many friends, but he had a very large number of acquaintances.  He has a decent relationship with Aiko Shin, a fellow trainer at the gym.  He keeps on the good side of the owner, Ryuu Rin, but wouldn’t consider him a friend.  He does have a friend that he went to school, Naoki, who is eats lunch with a couple of times a week, but they doesn’t have much of an interaction beyond that.

Successes & Failures:
    Sakata draws from a very practical place when he thinks about success and failure.  Each day that he get to go to bed again is a success, and he knows that one day, sooner than for most people, that won’t be true.  So he counts his successes and failures on a much smaller and more personal level.  When he eases the suffering of someone in need, he counts that as a success.  When he is unable to do enough to save someone he counts it as a failure.  This leads to largescale swings in mood as tragic events happen.  Were it not for his nearly boundless pool of internal fortitude, he would burn out like fledgling doctors with the same beliefs.  But instead he soldiers on, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders and never failing to stop and pick up another burden when he can.

    As far as large scale successes, his greatest personal achievement was graduating school, as he didn’t feel like it would ever end, but he continued anyway.  His greatest emotional success is tied tightly to his greatest emotional failing.  He believes, completely, that he failed to save his father and that he should have been able to.  His believes that his curse should have let him protect his father, but he wasn’t able to ease his suffering in the slightest.  This is the main reason he sees the sin-eating as a curse and not a gift, and he will never forgive himself for failing.  His greatest success is carrying on in his father’s footsteps, never allowing his memory to die.  He knows that his burden is larger now, but he refuses to let anything stop him from continuing in his father’s name.

Sakata’s Enemies:
    The Templars hunt his family, although this is more stories told in the night than people in particular that he knows.  But they certainly are hunting.  Additionally, Sakata has one real enemy, a former rival boxer who defeated Sakata in a championship match, and now runs a rival gym, Kuro Hideki.  Every encounter since has been adversarial, and there is always talk of a rematch, which Kuro very decisively knows he will win.

Major Possessions:
    Sakata has a number of possessions, although most of them are not the sort of possessions that he couldn’t live without.  The ones that are of value to him are detailed below.
• He has a picture of his father and him as a young child that he never goes anywhere without.
• The boxing gloves that his father learned to box with are hung over the ring in his current gym
• He has his father’s journal, which was actually passed down through several members of his family.  In many cases, because of the Templars, this journal contains some of the last real thoughts of some members of his ancestry.

Beliefs:
    Sakata is a big believer in his family’s mantra, which is a pair of ideals.  The first is practical, and that is that you have to be tough enough to survive the hand fate dealt you.  The boxing from a young age is to help cement this ideal in they heads, and Sakata takes it to heart.  The second ideal is more philosophical.  Sakata very much believes that his family was given their curse to help others, and a failure to ease the suffering of others is a failing to live up to his fate.  That isn’t to say that everyone deserves to be cared for, but that average person deserves a break now and again, and Sakata’s assistance is often that break for people.

    Both of his beliefs are summed up in Sakata’s one and only tattoo, which is quite simply the poem Invictus tattooed along his back and quoted below.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Sin-Eater’s Curse:
    The Sin-Eaters, of which the Odu’s family are members, are a group of people who, through some means have been cursed to endure the trials and tribulations of others, and to absorb their pain.  The causes of these curses are varied, but in the case of Odu’s family, the origin lies in Rome.  Sakata’s ancestor, Felix Gallus, was one of the roman soldiers present at the crucifixion of Christ.  While he wasn’t the soldier who pierced the side of Christ with the spear, he was close enough to be splattered with the blood, and unbeknownst to him, that blood carried the divine origin of a strain of the Sin-Eater curse, as the original Christian sin-eater.  This curse attached itself to Felix, and his progeny.  Every male born unto his line will be cursed to mirror his curse.

    As a result of the new curse visited upon him, the army of Rome became a torturous place, and Felix retired, looking to find relief from his curse.  He went to the temples, and no one could cure him.  But they did take notice of him.  Given the prevalence of wars in this time, there was never a shortage of suffering people, and the temples continues to encourage Felix to help them, promising to work on a cure while he did.  Felix did so, for a short time, but couldn’t handle the overwhelming pain.  He retired with his family into the countryside.  He passed not too long later, complications of his curse.  His wife raised his children, happy to find that his daughter, Claudia, was normal, and didn’t share Felix’s curse.  Unfortunately, Claudia’s first and second born sons both shared their grandfather’s curse.  From a young age, they both exhibited the curse, but as they matured into adults, one of her sons, Octavius the second born, sees the value of his curse, and uses it in way his grandfather couldn’t.  His fortitude allowed him to take in the pain of the wounded and sick, and allow them peace.  His brother didn’t fare as well.  He was drafted into the military, and was killed by unusual circumstances.  He died on the back line in his first large scale battle, from dozens of arrow wounds, while no arrow struck anywhere near him.

    Claudia decided it was time to leave Rome, to go somewhere safer for her family.  They packed up and traveled first north, across Europe.  The settled near modern day Denmark, and Octavius began again helping the wounded and sick.  It was at this point that the Templars made their first appearance.  The events of those interactions are left intentionally nebulous, but almost always result in the deaths of one or more of the Sin-eaters, and over the course of several generations, the Gallus family moved east, and south, into India, and then further into Asia.  The women are blessed in their lacking of the curse, but their carry it in their blood, and every male born to the line is born with the trait.  Many of the males don’t live to old age, and the family teaches to take after Octavius, and to use their misfortune to try to help, and to toughen themselves to better withstand the unfortunate affliction.  Sometime around 1500 A.D. they integrate into Japanese society, and with the establishment on the caste system, they become eta.  Being able to hide within the eta caste provided them some protection through anonymity, and they very quickly integrate into the new roles.

The Templars:
    These guys…are figuratively the worst people on the planet.  They started out well meaning.  Hyper-religious, they felt the path to heaven was through punishing oneself for sins committed.  Christ’s significance and sacrifice caused these types to enter a weird period of their faith where the self-punishment they had come to know as the path to salvation was no longer the path, but instead to surrender their sins to another, so that that being may suffer for them instead.  Had this been where the story ended, they might have been able to come to terms with that.

    That said, this particular group of Jews did not take the coming of Christ well.  He took their sins, and without their own self-punishment for those sins, they lost the ability to get into Heaven.  This caused a schism that drove them away from the path of current Christianity.  Driven away from the public eye, this sect took measures into their own hands, punishing those that used Christianity as a shield to forgive the terrible things they did.  The punishments always fit the crime, and the general public saw these punishments with mixed feelings.  Some thought of them as poetic justice, and others, as reckless and dangerous.  But as time went on, the punishments became more and more severe, punishing perceived sins, and punishing higher authorities much more severely.

    All around generally, these guys are bad news.  No regard for innocent bystanders, as no one is innocent in their eyes.  Committed zealots, and those zealots have set their eyes on the Sin-eaters as the cause of their religion’s downfall.

    I’ll document only one of the events of the Templars hunting a sin-eater.  Aulus was known to help the sink in India, but the Templars were uncertain of which of the assistants in the medical facilities was their target.  To identify him, they gathered many of the sick and all the assistants together, and beheaded a series of the ill to draw out the sin-eater.  Inundated by the pain of several lives silenced in his immediate vicinity, Aulus was rendered unconscious.  Having identified their target, and being unsatisfied with his suffering, they tortured several of the gathered ill and assistants in view of Aulus, knowing his curse would cause him to suffer with them.  Once they had brought him to the edge of death with the suffering of others, they flayed him to death, leaving him near the entrance to the medical facilities as a warning to others who try to ease suffering and prevent ascension to Heaven.