App for TLV

[whydoyoushine]

User Name/Nick: Airdra
User DW: hyperairdragon but it's pretty well unused
E-mail: kamenfirestorm at gmail dot com
Other Characters: N/A

Character Name: Emperor of Darkness Zed
Series: Ressha Sentai ToQGer
Age: It's vague in canon and for all we know he's elemental darkness that's been brewing for a very long time or elemental darkness that only just recently took human form, but his actor turned 33 during filming so I'll go with "an adult over the age of eighteen."

From When?: Episode 47, immediately after the ToQGers land the finishing blow and he dies.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate. He's a literal kids' show villain. Nothing says inmate material like being a literal kids' show villain! He is, however, a reluctant sort of villain. He's very childish and has been sheltered and raised to be the worst of the worst, even when he doesn't want to be--he keeps getting more powerful as the series progresses and is exasperated by it. He's selfish and can be cruel, but there's the sense that he just doesn't know any better and that no one has given him the chance to be any better. Zed believes he can't help it on some level because he is what he is--a being of darkness--and that try as he might, he can't break free from that. Given the way his canon's interpretation of light and darkness works, he's easily dazzled by the surface qualities of the light and fails to grasp his canon's more metaphysical aspects of it-- for example, being nice to someone because it's the right thing to do shines and he doesn't grasp why. He needs to learn right from wrong and that the world isn't quite as black-and-white as he thinks it is.

Item: N/A
Arrival: Snatched up at the moment of his death, so this is going to be real confusing for him.

Abilities/Powers: Zed is a Shadow, a being of darkness. Most importantly, he's the strongest of them all. His primary power is the manifestation and manipulation of darkness. He can make an area go dark at will, or he can lash out with darkness more defensively. Someone ticking him off? Knock them out of the way with darkness. Need to knock down a door? Smash through it with darkness. He's not particularly creative with this and it's just brute force waves of darkness energy. There's no Green Lantern style use of darkness constructs here. He can combine this with weapon use, like using a sword in tandem with his darkness for more powerful strikes, or he can just use this independently. The range and strength of this will be nerfed--where before he might be able to completely envelop a small town at will without breaking a sweat, here, he's limited to perhaps snuffing out a single room. He'll get a little more range than that with lashing out with darkness, but the force behind it won't be as strong--a shove versus a solid punch, for example. He will also not be constantly shedding microscopic bits of ambient darkness the way humans might shed skin cells, you're welcome, everyone who doesn't want to deal with that funk.

Zed is stronger, faster, and has more endurance than a human would. That's going to be throttled down as well. He'll still be a little stronger than a human baseline, but not by a whole lot. It's possible that a human who put a lot of work into weightlifting and working out could surpass what he's able to do effortlessly where before a human wouldn't have a chance of touching him without some magical rainbow imagination-powered train transformation trinket backing them up.

He also has a shadow monster form that provides a bit more power than his human form, but said shadow monster form also comes with a sword. The sword will not be there, and it will also not be accessible for Zed to just pull out of nowhere should he choose. I'll also have any sort of physical advantages he might get through transforming be negligible. He can just get kind of scary looking if he wants.

As far as Zed's nature as a Shadow goes, it comes with a rather unsettling gaze--look too long into his eyes, and you're looking into the void and the void's looking back before trying to steal your glittery balloon. It's not really a power he actively draws on, and is the sort of thing children might be sensitive to while an adult might not catch it. Zed can also look at a person and get a read of their personal levels of light or darkness. If someone's "shining," then they're full of all sorts of good feelings and kindness and self-sacrifice and that sort of thing. Darkness would be negative emotions, particularly rage and despair. Children by default will shine brighter than adults; they're open to more possibilities and have brighter imaginations. Adults don't make it to adulthood without having that shine dimmed and picking up at least a little darkness along the way--it's why the ToQGers had to be aged-up children. Zed will be a bit difficult with someone with high levels of darkness, if only because he'd think he was the boss of them. I'd at the very least ask before springing this on someone, and I was thinking I'd just throw a permissions post at everyone upon making an intro post. He's playable without using these powers, but it can lead to some fun CR moments.

I would also like not to nerf Zed's major weakness, as it serves absolutely no benefit to him, a Warden could use it to rein him in, and it's one of those things I can get some play out of: he's vulnerable to bright lights. This is a problem as far as he's concerned, for he loves bright lights. Moth, meet flame. He can and will stay out in the sunlight until he passes out, because he's just so fascinated with it. If the rest of the Shadow Line is trying to discourage his fixation on lights and all that sparkles, well, it's like he's got a seafood allergy and can't stop himself from hitting up the sushi bar. Bright nights will not automatically slow him down or hurt him (briefly shining a flashlight at him isn't really going to stop him), but they will distract him and with enough exposure, totally incapacitate or even kill him.

Personality: Zed is the Shadow Line's Emperor of Darkness, and he's got zero interest in the responsibilities the position comes with. Yeah, he's in charge, he likes being in charge, but the actual job itself is boring as far as he's concerned. He's supposed to generate darkness and take territory, and he has no interest in that. He has no particular respect for the particulars of his station; if he's on the throne, he's sprawled out lounging on it. He'd much rather go out and try to gather light and shiny things for himself, much to his courtiers' chagrin. He's haughty and self-assured, and most of the time, he appears to be pretty lazy and laid-back. While he holds no great love for the power of darkness that he holds, he's in no way ashamed of it. Just because he's got power he finds to be boring does not mean he's going to avoid using it. It's simply there, a tool to be wielded as he sees fit. It's how he keeps uppity courtiers and his enemies in line. It's how he gets his way, should people not immediately back down and let him have what he wants. (Why wouldn't they? He's an emperor!)

He doesn't really understand a lot of the world outside of the Shadow Line. In his first appearance, the ideas of paying for something and waiting in line are completely foreign concepts. He ignores any attempts to tell him otherwise--said attempts would ruin his fun and are therefore not worth paying attention to. He's very childish in a sense. He's used to getting his way as the Emperor, and he also has little to no experience in how the wider world works and will show childlike enthusiasm for the smallest things should they catch his fancy. In his first appearance in the series, he's getting extremely excited over a shiny balloon and a merry-go-round. Zed's baseline normal is far from the normal that other people work with. This is probably due to the fact that he's in charge of an empire of darkness monsters who want to spread darkness throughout the world using evil trains. Zed commands monsters-of-the-week like Chair Shadow, who makes people miserable by causing whatever they're sitting on to affix to their butts. Other Shadows cause fairy tale characters to escape their books and annoy everyone, and still others threaten to drain out their victims' life forces through the application of evil wigs. This is all serious and normal in Zed's canon, though it would be utterly bizarre to someone from another world.

Zed can, however, turn from childish and lazy to serious and ready to mete out some punishment on a dime. He's not good at being told "no," and he doesn't tolerate people or things getting in his way very well. He tolerates a bit of interference from his Shadow Line subordinates when they drag him away from the light in the interest of him not dying, but he doesn't tolerate their various stabs at staging a coup. There's a lot of infighting among the nobility of the Shadow Line, and as soon as they go out and raise a hand against him, that's it, game over. He lets Madame Noire live after she maneuvers her daughter, Gritta, into trying to kill him and he in turn consumes Gritta, but he's quick to kill her once she makes another overt move against him. He's also smarter than he lets on; there's enough political infighting in the Shadow Line that while his immense power in comparison to the rest of them insulates him from a lot of their backstabbing, there's a certain amount of scheming he's got to be aware of at all times.

It can't be stressed enough that Zed is fascinated by light. It's the one thing that's been denied to him, and his seeing it for the first time turns out to be the inciting incident that sets the entire show into motion. When something interests Zed enough, he'll become very focused. This goes double for light and shiny things. Despite his desire for the light, he's never seemed to understand its true nature. He sees it, like anything else he wants in life, as something he can just take, regardless of the consequences. He can identify things like love, friendship, self-sacrifice, and generosity as the sort of shine he craves, but he's never been able to act on these impulses himself. He's seen it happening all around him both with the ToQGers and his own people in the Shadow Line. Even in the end, when his most loyal courtiers gladly sacrificed themselves to power him up again, he's more irritated than anything, complaining that they've chosen that moment to start shining, too--and he still cannot. He doesn't know how to shine on his own, and at canon's end, it seems he was never meant to.

Zed isn't as ruthless as he could be. There are soft spots here and there, even if they're easy to miss. When Gritta tries to consume him and he counters by consuming her, he doesn't actually destroy her. Whether or not he was actually able to kill her off for good is called into question on more than one occasion, and while Zed seems frustrated with her spirit lingering around him for a while, he's still not rushing to be rid of her. And when it looks as though he's really gone overboard and thrown himself into his villain role, it also looks as though he's killed Gritta. (He may very well have done so only for her to have returned somehow because this canon's just that way; the act is framed so that the viewer doesn't actually see what's happened after he moves his sword--they just hear her scream.) When that happens, it's taken as a narrative cue that Zed has crossed a line and that there will be no turning back. He's also coming in here without the immediate aftermath of his death in canon--namely that Gritta, despite everything, shows up in a literal deus ex machina and brings him right back to life by gathering up the remnants of his darkness. That also comes with a bit of an admonishment that he doesn't need to snuff out or otherwise take the light, but that the light and darkness can and should exist alongside one another. Where he is now, he's just gotten his butt handed to him and has lost a fight he never had any interest in winning. Right before Right lands the finishing blow, Zed seems happy. He's gotten to see so much shining, even though it's going to be the end of him. He's content enough with that, and he wasn't expecting to have to deal with the aftermath.

Barge Reactions: Zed's going to kind of love this on some level. He chafes under being told what to do because he's royalty and very used to being in charge and getting his way so he's bound to be difficult there, but here there's also the novel experience of not being expected to go out and gather and generate darkness. He's often exasperated with the way darkness congeals around him whether or not he wants it to, and having that actively discouraged is kind of nice, actually. He's actually not going to mind some of the power nerfing because he's really annoyed in canon when he does become stronger and more powerful, and not having to worry about accidentally generating ridiculous amounts of "oops, I enveloped Tokyo" darkness is liberating in a sense.

He's pretty sheltered and is shown to be both curious and easily amused by the world at large, and the barge will be full of all sorts of new things for him to stick his nose into. He's used to trains, not boats. That's to say nothing of the people there; they're not going to want to stab him in the back, kiss up to him, or automatically assume he's out to cover the world in darkness. It's a fresh start, even if he's not coming at it from the most noble of positions. The sheer novelty of it all is something Zed will appreciate.

Path to Redemption: Treating Zed like a normal person--not an emperor, not a monster, not an endless void of darkness that's trying to consume all light for himself--will get you pretty far, actually. Kindness is not something that's often directed Zed's way, and while he's witnessed it in action, it's still one of those things that feels quite foreign. He's had no real encouragement at being good, and no one around him seems to think he has that potential within him. With the beat his canon point ends on (really, in canon he gets better almost immediately after dying thanks to a literal act of deus ex machina), he's pleased to have been defeated. Following up on some sort of idea of light and darkness existing side-by-side--you can have both--would work for him. He's never been encouraged or allowed to play well with others, and he needs that.

On a very basic "please behave" level, he really likes light and sparkly things and will react positively to those. Give him a bottle of glitter and you'll have an unmitigated disaster on your hands, but it's on the level of a four-year-old on a sugar high and not "Zed, why did you just send a monster into town to terrorize the people for the 30th week in a row." Someone could probably have a lot of success with a behavior chart and appropriately sparkly holographic reward stickers, seriously. There would likely be an initial bit of difficulty with it, though it wouldn't be Zed being offended at the childishness of a behavior chart--the trouble would lie with Zed undoubtedly trying to get out of doing any work and just trying to steal the stickers. He would want those stickers, and any other sort of sparkly trinkets, quite badly. The bribery doesn't have to be done with valuables, just something that's appropriately glittery or sparkly. Shiny objects are your friends here.

Deal: N/A

History: The central conflict of Ressha Sentai ToQGer revolves around the existence of two supernatural train lines. The Rainbow Line is powered by imagination. Children are the only ones capable of seeing the Rainbow Line trains, for they are the only ones with enough imagination. The Shadow Line is powered by the forces of darkness, and it is their goal to plunge the entire world into darkness using the darker of human emotions--like fear, anger, and jealousy--thus becoming supremely powerful. In order to combat the Shadow Line, the Rainbow Line recruits five young adults with mysterious amnesia and the unusual ability to see the Rainbow Line's trains to serve as the Ressha Sentai ToQGer, a team of multicolored, imagination-powered heroes with access to all of the Rainbow Line's technology to fight against the Shadow Line.

The Shadow Line's manner of operations was fairly simple. In order to gather darkness, they would send an operative to a small town, where the operative would stir up some sort of negative emotion and cause the town in question to become a corrupted Shadow Town, inaccessible by normal means. The manner in which the Shadow would stir up trouble varied. Sometimes, they would force the residents of the town to duel each other. In other cases, the Shadow would try something like painting the entire town black, at which point he'd try to burn it down using his magnifying glass. The ToQGers would travel to these towns, defeat the monster of the week Shadow making the town miserable, and move on. As the ToQGers traveled and tried to get to the bottom of their amnesia--which was focused enough that they could not remember anything past snippets of their childhoods--the Shadow Line's court carried on with its political infighting.

Part of the Shadow Line's infighting concerned the Emperor of Darkness, who had not been providing the strong leadership the Shadow Line needed. The Emperor of Darkness was set to be married to Miss Gritta, the daughter of Madame Noire, who had ruling aspirations of her own (and had also seen to the demise of her own unnamed husband.) Yet Miss Gritta wanted none of this, instead choosing to pine over General Schwarz, who disagreed with the way the Shadow Line was being run; he wanted to overpower the world with trains, not waste all this time corrupting towns one at a time. This was the situation that Zed, the Emperor of Darkness, came into when he finally came to stay at court.

Not that he wanted to have anything to do with court. His first appearance in the series was also his first venture outside into the light. Before then, he'd only known the darkness. This visit took him to an amusement park, where he encountered Right, ToQ-1, the red ToQGer. Right, who had several childlike qualities of his own, was baffled by a lot of Zed's behavior. Zed was absolutely fascinated by a shiny star-shaped balloon he'd found, and he didn't seem to get the concepts of waiting in line or having to pay for anything. Right followed the strange man around, and for a moment, it seemed as though they might be friends--up until the point that Right made prolonged eye contact with Zed and realized that there was something uncomfortably inhuman going on there. It frightened him. It was at this point that the Shadow Line showed up to collect its wayward Emperor, the rest of the ToQGers showed up, and proper introductions were made before Zed's weakness to light kicked in and the Shadow Line was forced into a retreat.

Zed never seemed to enjoy the darkness he was to rule over; he had a fascination with shiny things, for the light was the one thing he could not have. His first order of business upon being settled at court was to install a disco ball light to get a little sparkle going in there. His courtiers were very concerned at his eccentricity, but they let it slide for the moment. Zed was also introduced to Gritta, his betrothed, and while she wasn't too thrilled about things, he was ecstatic, for he could see something shining in her. Sure, that shine was actually her affection for Schwarz, but it was still shining. For a while, the Shadow Line kept on fighting the Rainbow Line as was normal, with Zed sometimes taking part in the proceedings. He was often bored by this; he didn't want to spread darkness as much as he wanted to try to take light for himself.

Soon, Gritta and Zed's wedding was to take place. The bride got a terrible case of cold feet and arranged to switch bodies with Mio, one of the ToQGers, and go live with Schwarz. After a series of wacky body-swap hijinks and a betrayal by Schwarz, the wedding was to go on despite Gritta's wishes. Despite not being able to be with Schwarz, she decided to go through with the wedding and her mother's plans for it. It was with Madame Noir's influence that Gritta swallowed Zed at the altar, thus absorbing his darkness and becoming the Empress of Darkness. Zed's darkness was strong enough that Gritta was no longer the sweet, dainty princess she'd once been, and, after a great deal of destruction and fighting with the ToQGers, he reasserted himself, counter-consuming Gritta in the process.

This stirred up a bit of dissention in the Shadow Line's ranks. Baron Nero saw Zed's behavior as weakness. Madame Noir was upset over the loss of her daughter (but quite glad she'd been spared despite her own treachery). General Schwarz still wanted to rule everything with trains, and he didn't see Zed as a fit ruler. Worse, he'd been fond of Gritta too, even as he'd betrayed her location to Zed when she'd tried to flee the wedding. Still, Gritta and her light lived on within Zed. For weeks, it became unclear as to whether or not her continued presence was a case of Zed refusing to completely obliterate her, or being unable to obliterate her.

The Shadow Line's Marchioness Mork came to take up residence at their court. She was most displeased with the way everyone had been handling the Emperor and his weird fixations on shining things. Mork was the one who raised Zed, and he put up with a little bit more crap from her than the others, even if she still annoyed him just the same. Zed wasn't happy through any of this. All he wanted to do was go out and explore the light, and here he was stuck in the dark. He'd consumed Gritta's light, but he completely failed to understand it or to make it his.

It wasn't until Christmas that the status quo began to shift. Christmas was traditionally when the Shadow Line was at its weakest; it was a time of joy and light, and the darkness was kept at its lowest ebb. The various bickering factions of the Shadow Line decided to strike, and Schwarz and Noire were able to extract Gritta from Zed. Gritta's light had been keeping Zed's darkness at bay, and without her, his darkness grew more powerful and intense. He killed Noire and Schwarz, and he tried to hurt Nero and Mork for no reason if only because they were happy about his increased darkness. He never wanted this power, never asked for it, but there it was. That he managed to do all of this at Christmas was very worrying to the ToQGers, for that meant he'd only get stronger.

Soon, the reason for Zed's fascination with the light was revealed, even as he came to accept that he could never have it. The ToQGers--with the exception of Akira, a reformed Shadow--were all children when their town was absorbed by the Shadow Line and made into a Shadow Town. The Rainbow Line extracted these children because they were shining so very brightly with imagination, and then they were aged up into adults so that they would be physically strong enough to fight the darkness. When the ToQGers' town was swallowed up, Zed saw this shining imagination--in particular, the shining of Right, ToQ-1--which was the first light he'd ever seen. A bit of that light had gotten into Zed, but in the process, a bit of Zed's darkness had also gotten into Right. This caused Right to transform into a dark version of ToQ-1, trying to fight darkness with darkness.

The ToQGers tried to get Gritta to the Shadow Line's Castle Terminal, the base of their operations, in the hope of shutting it down and freeing their hometown, which Zed had latched onto in particular. They were successful in this to some degree; Gritta was able to move the Terminal, but the ToQGers still had to deal with Mork and Nero, as well as Zed himself. There was also the problem of Right's newfound darkness, and Right tried to go on by himself, taking the others' train passes and causing them to age back into children, forgetting everything. He still had the assistance of Akira, ToQ-6, but the bulk of the team was out of the fight.

This ended well for Zed, but not for Right. Zed was able to soundly defeat the ToQGer, and he left Right abandoned and alone in the darkness as he took control of the Castle Terminal once more--apparently killing Gritta in the process--and turned it into a monster that covered the area in a stronger darkness than before. Zed was close to covering the entire world in darkness, even as he was still disappointed that Right's ever-fascinating light had gone out. Meanwhile, Akira had enacted a backup plan that caused the other ToQGers to regain their memories and age back into adults, and they came to Right's aid. The ToQGers combined their powers and their trains, and they were able to take down the monster that was the Castle Terminal once more. By this point, the Castle Terminal was in ruins, and Zed was severely weakened. Baron Nero and Marchioness Mork offered their strength--and their life force--to Zed to power him back up again so that he could win the fight, thus annoying him with the fact that even they managed to shine in the end. Zed took their power and made one final attack on the ToQGers. At that point, the ToQGers all channeled their power and imagination into Right, who transformed into ToQ-1 Rainbow. Right was finally able to defeat Zed, who exploded into a pulse of darkness energy upon his death.

Sample Journal Entry: [I'm rolling with the Kid Flood as the prompt here.]

Oi, someone else has got to deal with all these kids. I don't do kids. They don't like me, I scare them.

[He's looking over his shoulder like he's keeping an eye out for a kid.]

I mean, at least none of these have any trains on 'em, I got that going for me. But they're kind of noisy, you know? And they're probably gonna mess with my stuff, and...why are they even here, anyway? A guy thinks he can relax, and then bam, there's kids everywhere.

Whatever, they're not my problem.

Sample RP: [I'm going with this as the prompt here.]

Oh. Oh. Zed was invisible, huh. How about that. It did not take him long at all to realize that. He didn't really care much about not being able to see himself--honestly, this was about the level of some lower-ranking Shadow's plot to take a Shadow Town what with people going invisible and the snow and all--but he got annoyed pretty quickly with not being able to see things he was holding. How's a guy supposed to admire all the shiny objects he's collected if he can't see them? Boring.
At first, he seemed content to sit in a cozy nook somewhere and sulk, but that soon got boring and also Zed got tired of people accidentally trying to sit on him. It was funny the first couple of times because there was a certain sort of thrill to being able to momentarily startle people like that, but it got old really fast--and just too confusing if the other party was also invisible.

Time for a new plan. Zed found a trash can, tossed the trash in the hall near his room because what is worrying about such things elsewhere, and filled the can up with snow, humming "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" to himself while he worked. It didn't take him long; the trash can wasn't particularly large. From there, all he had to do was wait. Just stand by a doorway and wait for the first person to walk on through there, then he'd dump a trash can full of snow on them.

Any minute now, someone would come through that door. Any minute...

Special Notes: There's no official translation for his canon, and other sources will refer to him as Emperor of Darkness Z or Emperor of Darkness Zett. I'm using "Zed" because I'm going off of Over-Time's subs for everything.