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whydoyoushineOUT of CHARACTER
Name: Airdra
Other characters: Kousuke Nitou (infinitemayonnaise, Torin Byrd (bravelyplucked)
IN CHARACTER
Name: Zed
Alias: Emperor of Darkness. He is also referred to as Zett or Z depending on the translation.
Fandom: Ressha Sentai ToQGer
Canon point/AU: Post-series.
Journal:whydoyoushine
PB:Zed is played by Kengo Ohkuchi.
Age: Zed's age is never explicitly stated. In his human form, he appears to be in his early 30s. His behavior is somewhat erratic and makes it difficult to pin him down with an age range; he's very much a spoiled teenager in some ways and an implacable ancient force in others.
History: There is a wiki link here that doesn't cover the entirety of the series and only goes up to Episode 41. To pick up where it left off, there is an episode guide here.
Presentation: Zed maintains an air of casual arrogance. He often appears to be bored or annoyed by what's going on around him. He lounges around a lot, largely apathetic to his responsibilities as Emperor of Darkness. Zed doesn't care about much, let alone what anyone thinks of him. He does what he wants when he wants. He's royalty, and he's not used to having other people tell him what to do--at least, not in any context where he absolutely must listen. He's often annoyed by people telling him what to do, unless what they want him to do matches up with what he wants to do. He sees no benefit in being any sort of people pleaser, at least not where the people he's surrounded with are concerned. He's capable of showing fondness for people; he takes an immediate liking to Grita, his betrothed, even though she's terrified of him. He seems to make note of this fact, but it doesn't concern him--his feelings are more important than anyone else's. Even though he likes her, he's still not willing to listen to her. Listening just isn't a skill he's really good at.
If he wants something, he doesn't hide it. He just takes it--or tries to. If taking the object in question hurts anyone else, oh, well. Sucks to be them. Zed isn't one to get upset over the consequences of his actions, so long as he's gotten what he wants. He will grow angry when called out on this behavior, and he will lash out at anyone who tries to tell him he can't do whatever it is he wants to do. This is why the ToQGers (particularly Right) are so much of a draw for him--they're bright, they're colorful, they're full of so much light...and they get in his way constantly. He seems to appreciate them as opponents because they're bright and shiny and entertaining, but they still need to be taken care of as long as they're trying to protect things from him. Protecting things from Zed is the same as telling him no, and he doesn't take that well.
He's forced to stay in the dark most of the time, and that's familiar. Familiarity is boring. It's the novelty of the light that really gets him worked up, even if it's dangerous for him. He gets creepily enthusiastic when presented with things he really wants. The intensity he displays can be unnerving in contrast to his normal relaxed facade--when he first meets Right, he is so pumped to have found a sparkly star balloon. Right, who is by no means a mature adult, is thrown off by Zed's behavior and the way the guy suddenly shifts focus to ignore everything else but what he's interested in at that moment in time. But he would have been willing to write Zed off as a harmless weirdo if he hadn't made prolonged eye contact and gotten a glimpse of the deep darkness that makes up Zed's being.
When Zed fights, he usually moves in a way that suggests he's unconcerned with the possibility of losing. Though he is prone to attacking with big, powerful moves, there is a certain coldness about it. He's confident enough in himself and his own power on the battlefield that he just doesn't let himself get too worked up over a fight. Sure, he can fight while angry, but there's still that cold darkness there that suggests he's using only a fraction of his power. He'd prefer to have battle come to him, rather than going to seek it out--he just doesn't care that much. When he loses his composure and starts moving a little more frantically and ferociously, that's when there's cause for concern. He can and will strike out at both enemies and allies, and he will show no remorse after doing so. He's just doing what needs to be done, taking care of all who would stand in his way.
Motivations: Zed wants most the one thing he can never have--to shine. He's born of darkness, and he must stay in the darkness--prolonged exposure to light will weaken and kill him. It wouldn't be out of line to call him a moth drawn to flame. He's fascinated by light, by the sorts of behavior that lead people to do things like sacrifice themselves for others or to remain optimistic in the face of danger. Even sparkly trinkets, like disco balls or shiny balloons, have a draw for Zed. He has been exposed to a new thing in the light, and he desperately wants to understand. That he cannot have any shining light of his own despite all his best efforts to take it all--or blot it out if he couldn't have it--is a constant source of frustration.
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 it seems he was never meant to. Those realizations following his defeat hurt, and while he still wants to understand the light, that's been tempered by his defeat and the realization that he needs darkness.
He tried to cover the world in darkness like he was supposed to do as the Emperor of Darkness, and he failed. He was stopped by the ToQGers--literally defeated by children wielding the power of imagination--and he didn't care. When the ToQGers were able to rally for the first of their light-and-imagination-powered counterattacks, Zed is thrilled. He doesn't look like a man who's disappointed that all his evil plans have been for naught, he looks like a man who's happy to be going out in a blast of shining light. Granted, he doesn't go down easily in the end, and he takes a beating before the ToQGers are finally able to bring him down. Even then he still seems determined to attack Right, ToQ-1, in order to get some light for himself even as an angry mindless cloud of darkness before he's taken away. Even if it's a defeat he welcomed, it's not one he's handling well, in part because it ultimately means he's been denied light of his own.
Despite all of this, Zed isn't as ruthless as he could be. There are soft spots here and there, even if they're easy to miss. When Grita 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 Grita. (He may very well have done so only for her to have returned 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. We never see anything of Zed following his defeat by the ToQGers save that Gritta swoops in to take him away aboard a train all deus ex machina style. It's pointed out to him that darkness exists so that the light can shine brighter, and that he's got to be the one to provide that. This is a new sort of motivation for Zed--he doesn't have to cover the entire Earth in darkness to try to blot out the light, and he's free to make of that what he wishes, provided he stops trying to take light for himself. He needs to let the light shine alongside his darkness, rather than consuming it. It's rare that a sentai villain gets a second chance like that, and Zed is still not sure what to make of it.
Zed wants someone who will listen to him. He was brought up to be the Emperor of Darkness regardless of his own wishes. No one around him took his feelings on anything into account, and so he returned the favor. No one cared anything for him beyond what he was and what he could do, and he tends to treat people the same way. If he were presented with someone who genuinely cared about what he had to say without caring about what he is, he'd be enchanted by this concept. We see hints of this when he first meets Right and they start to make friends, but even before the Shadow Line showed up in full to bring Zed home, he was already starting to creep Right out with his inherent Darkness. Zed's very nature pushes people away, and he doesn't understand the light well enough to understand why.
Setting: Zed is coming off of a major defeat as it is, but having to do something that isn't trying to cover the world in darkness for the Shadow Line would be a welcome change of pace. He'll be more amused by this than anything, if only for the distraction it brings from his own situation. He's not going to make any efforts to point out that hey, he's royalty, just so he can see where this goes. It's all just a diversion for him, and it's an unusual chance to deal with people who won't see him only as the Emperor of Darkness. Plus, death games are an inherently dark activity--he'll be interested to see what sort of shining crops up in response to all this darkness the Capitol's generating. That's what darkness is for, after all--giving the light something bright to shine against. He's already died (or at least exploded into an angry cloud of darkness only to have to reconstitute himself) once, so he won't be too upset by that. He's also already killed people, so he won't be too upset by that, either, particularly if they come back afterwards. (It's not really shining, though, how frustrating.)
SAMPLES
First Person Thread:
[Zed rolls over to blearily look at the recording device, as though it's nothing but an annoying advisor sticking its head into the room to whine that they needed to gather more darkness. It takes a few moments for everything to slide into place. For him to realize what's going on here, to remember where he is and what he was doing. There's an almost lazy check of himself to make sure that the leg he'd lost shortly before dying is back in place--it is--and another equally lazy check to make sure his throat is likewise in one piece. He sits up, looking around the room curiously. He is not impressed.
This isn't the first time he's experienced catastrophic defeat. Nor will, he thinks, it be the last. But it's the first time he's experienced one quite so messy, and one that wasn't due to the forces of the light and the imagination of the Rainbow Line. No, this one was different. This was the defeat of darkness coming straight from some other, different darkness. The darkness of the Games. The idea amuses him--The Emperor of Darkness got killed by darkness. He throws his head back and laughs for a solid minute before flopping back to lie down again with a sigh.]
Oh, there's not too much shining here, is there? Not at all. Yet I still met my defeat.
[There's another laugh, a much more bitter one, as the mirth fades from his face.]
How interesting...
[For a moment, he doesn't do anything else. It seems as though he might not be willing to say anything else. Yet after a moment, he starts quietly singing to himself. It likely looks like he's lost his mind. He doesn't care what people might think. He never has.]
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are...
Prose:
Zed paced around the perimeter of the room, taking in all the weapons and training dummies. No guns, no trains, and nothing special that really shined as a weapon...but serviceable enough for the Gamemakers' purposes. Really, this whole thing sounded kind of like what Sabre Shadow had been doing back in the town he'd turned to a Shadow Town, forcing the residents to duel one another and drawing darkness from their pain and despair. Zed hadn't been supervising that operation, but he knew of it. It was a good, sound strategy if you wanted to spread darkness among humans. "If this place weren't so shining, I'd almost mistake it for a Shadow Town," Zed mused as he paced along the line of weapons. The Capitol he'd seen in that quick briefing had too much glitz and sparkle for it to be a true Shadow Town, but it did have certain qualities to it. "You and your blood sports..."
His voice was free of any sort of righteousness. In fact, he sounded almost bored by what was going on as he reached out and tested out a spear. Ho-hum, blood sports, must be Tuesday. Call him when something actually interesting happens. There was an air of disdain about him as he lazily threw the spear at one of the training dummies, hitting it in the chest. Zed seemed to take no pleasure from the hit as he selected a sword and gave it a well-practiced twirl. "Got yourself a pretty dull assortment here, even if the rest of the place shines." There was no warning as Zed suddenly made a move for another training dummy, removing one of its arms before jamming the sword into the gut of a third dummy. That display would have impressed his courtiers, even the ones who didn't put much faith in him, and though he knew it looked good, he didn't show it, treating that display with just as much disinterest as he'd shown anything else.
Seemingly bored, he left the sword embedded in the gut of that third dummy and glanced back at the Gamemakers. Were they impressed yet? He didn't wait for any signal, didn't treat them like he cared what they thought, and casually picked up another, bigger sword to have another go of it. "You don't have anything more interesting to do here?"
What is your character scored: Zed is a 10. He's a Super Sentai series final boss tier villain, meaning he's been a threat to the safety of the entire Earth and could only be stopped by heroes with multicolored giant robots, and he's not the sort to get sentimental about killing people. He has also already died and gotten better within the space of about two minutes, though this is in part thanks to some deus ex machina intervention. He knows quite well how to fight, though he's the sort who's used to easily overpowering most opponents.
Power-wise, he is essentially the embodiment of darkness itself. In his human form, he is stronger, faster, and more durable than a normal human would be. He has a monster form that is stronger still, and he can transform between this and his human form at will. He's capable of attacking using bursts of darkness energy in either form. It's most often something he appears to channel into a crazy-looking sword, but he's also been shown to use it to, say, shake people off if they're trying to grab him from behind. Zed's darkness is strong enough that other Shadows will respond to it, and he's been shown to kick other Shadows' powers into out-of-control overdrive with a little nudge, no matter how badly the other Shadow in question didn't want to be involved. He can also absorb Shadows in order to power himself up. Gathering more darkness and increasing his power seems to be effortless in a sense; he's actually annoyed when he gets a late-series power-up. He doesn't want this darkness, but he can't help what it is.
Zed can passively unnerve humans (and possibly animals, though that is never shown). He's got the most concentrated darkness out of anyone in the Shadow Line, and hanging around him for too long can give people the chills or just a really bad feeling about things. This only intensifies if the human in question makes eye contact with him for a prolonged period of time; they'll start to see the concentrated darkness inside. It's basically the exact opposite of hanging around someone who might be referred to as "a ray of sunshine." Even if he's being perfectly cheerful, there's still something off about him. It's not something he can turn off or seems to be aware of. If he tries to push someone away, there will be a pulse of dark energy.
Since he is a creature of darkness, Zed cannot handle being exposed to light for very long. There are points in canon in which he is stubbornly staying outside in bright sunlight only to collapse because he should have at least tried to stick to the shade. Even if he likes the light, he still can't handle it.
Aside from that, Zed's weakest point is his mind. It's easier to out-think him or strike at some emotional vulnerability than it is to try to take him out through brute force, particularly if he's got his powers. He's still not quite gotten a grasp on his obsession with the light and shining things, and he's still dealing with his final defeat at the hands of the ToQGers. He's effectively been told that he does have a place in the universe and that it doesn't have to be bad, but he's still dealing with being told no. When defeated in battle, he will explode, but said explosion will resolve itself into a vicious, mindless cloud of darkness that may still try to strike out at whoever Zed was fighting. It is possible for him to reconstitute himself, though he will be very weak, and it helps if he has some other source of darkness to go back to or someone to swoop in on a magic train and rescue him at the last possible second. Without somewhere to recuperate quickly, the light would likely finish him off.
The crowd would probably like him. When he's not being overly creepy or intense, he's got a flippant sort of bad boy attitude that would probably score well with some demographics, and he wouldn't seem to have any trouble with the concept of the Games--there will be no loud protests about the sanctity of human life from him. This is just a nastier version of something his Shadow Line underlings have tried already, anyway. He's smart enough to pay lip service that the powers that be, and having to do so is a novel enough concept that he'll play along.
Token: The gaudiest, sparkliest, blingiest star-shaped pin his Stylists can find. Rhinestones on top of rhinestones. Something he could learn what the word "bling" means with.
And an OOC question! Would Zed's sensitivity to light be something that the power dampening would take care of, or would he still have it in some capacity?
Name: Airdra
Other characters: Kousuke Nitou (
infinitemayonnaise, Torin Byrd (bravelyplucked)IN CHARACTER
Name: Zed
Alias: Emperor of Darkness. He is also referred to as Zett or Z depending on the translation.
Fandom: Ressha Sentai ToQGer
Canon point/AU: Post-series.
Journal:
whydoyoushinePB:Zed is played by Kengo Ohkuchi.
Age: Zed's age is never explicitly stated. In his human form, he appears to be in his early 30s. His behavior is somewhat erratic and makes it difficult to pin him down with an age range; he's very much a spoiled teenager in some ways and an implacable ancient force in others.
History: There is a wiki link here that doesn't cover the entirety of the series and only goes up to Episode 41. To pick up where it left off, there is an episode guide here.
Presentation: Zed maintains an air of casual arrogance. He often appears to be bored or annoyed by what's going on around him. He lounges around a lot, largely apathetic to his responsibilities as Emperor of Darkness. Zed doesn't care about much, let alone what anyone thinks of him. He does what he wants when he wants. He's royalty, and he's not used to having other people tell him what to do--at least, not in any context where he absolutely must listen. He's often annoyed by people telling him what to do, unless what they want him to do matches up with what he wants to do. He sees no benefit in being any sort of people pleaser, at least not where the people he's surrounded with are concerned. He's capable of showing fondness for people; he takes an immediate liking to Grita, his betrothed, even though she's terrified of him. He seems to make note of this fact, but it doesn't concern him--his feelings are more important than anyone else's. Even though he likes her, he's still not willing to listen to her. Listening just isn't a skill he's really good at.
If he wants something, he doesn't hide it. He just takes it--or tries to. If taking the object in question hurts anyone else, oh, well. Sucks to be them. Zed isn't one to get upset over the consequences of his actions, so long as he's gotten what he wants. He will grow angry when called out on this behavior, and he will lash out at anyone who tries to tell him he can't do whatever it is he wants to do. This is why the ToQGers (particularly Right) are so much of a draw for him--they're bright, they're colorful, they're full of so much light...and they get in his way constantly. He seems to appreciate them as opponents because they're bright and shiny and entertaining, but they still need to be taken care of as long as they're trying to protect things from him. Protecting things from Zed is the same as telling him no, and he doesn't take that well.
He's forced to stay in the dark most of the time, and that's familiar. Familiarity is boring. It's the novelty of the light that really gets him worked up, even if it's dangerous for him. He gets creepily enthusiastic when presented with things he really wants. The intensity he displays can be unnerving in contrast to his normal relaxed facade--when he first meets Right, he is so pumped to have found a sparkly star balloon. Right, who is by no means a mature adult, is thrown off by Zed's behavior and the way the guy suddenly shifts focus to ignore everything else but what he's interested in at that moment in time. But he would have been willing to write Zed off as a harmless weirdo if he hadn't made prolonged eye contact and gotten a glimpse of the deep darkness that makes up Zed's being.
When Zed fights, he usually moves in a way that suggests he's unconcerned with the possibility of losing. Though he is prone to attacking with big, powerful moves, there is a certain coldness about it. He's confident enough in himself and his own power on the battlefield that he just doesn't let himself get too worked up over a fight. Sure, he can fight while angry, but there's still that cold darkness there that suggests he's using only a fraction of his power. He'd prefer to have battle come to him, rather than going to seek it out--he just doesn't care that much. When he loses his composure and starts moving a little more frantically and ferociously, that's when there's cause for concern. He can and will strike out at both enemies and allies, and he will show no remorse after doing so. He's just doing what needs to be done, taking care of all who would stand in his way.
Motivations: Zed wants most the one thing he can never have--to shine. He's born of darkness, and he must stay in the darkness--prolonged exposure to light will weaken and kill him. It wouldn't be out of line to call him a moth drawn to flame. He's fascinated by light, by the sorts of behavior that lead people to do things like sacrifice themselves for others or to remain optimistic in the face of danger. Even sparkly trinkets, like disco balls or shiny balloons, have a draw for Zed. He has been exposed to a new thing in the light, and he desperately wants to understand. That he cannot have any shining light of his own despite all his best efforts to take it all--or blot it out if he couldn't have it--is a constant source of frustration.
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 it seems he was never meant to. Those realizations following his defeat hurt, and while he still wants to understand the light, that's been tempered by his defeat and the realization that he needs darkness.
He tried to cover the world in darkness like he was supposed to do as the Emperor of Darkness, and he failed. He was stopped by the ToQGers--literally defeated by children wielding the power of imagination--and he didn't care. When the ToQGers were able to rally for the first of their light-and-imagination-powered counterattacks, Zed is thrilled. He doesn't look like a man who's disappointed that all his evil plans have been for naught, he looks like a man who's happy to be going out in a blast of shining light. Granted, he doesn't go down easily in the end, and he takes a beating before the ToQGers are finally able to bring him down. Even then he still seems determined to attack Right, ToQ-1, in order to get some light for himself even as an angry mindless cloud of darkness before he's taken away. Even if it's a defeat he welcomed, it's not one he's handling well, in part because it ultimately means he's been denied light of his own.
Despite all of this, Zed isn't as ruthless as he could be. There are soft spots here and there, even if they're easy to miss. When Grita 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 Grita. (He may very well have done so only for her to have returned 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. We never see anything of Zed following his defeat by the ToQGers save that Gritta swoops in to take him away aboard a train all deus ex machina style. It's pointed out to him that darkness exists so that the light can shine brighter, and that he's got to be the one to provide that. This is a new sort of motivation for Zed--he doesn't have to cover the entire Earth in darkness to try to blot out the light, and he's free to make of that what he wishes, provided he stops trying to take light for himself. He needs to let the light shine alongside his darkness, rather than consuming it. It's rare that a sentai villain gets a second chance like that, and Zed is still not sure what to make of it.
Zed wants someone who will listen to him. He was brought up to be the Emperor of Darkness regardless of his own wishes. No one around him took his feelings on anything into account, and so he returned the favor. No one cared anything for him beyond what he was and what he could do, and he tends to treat people the same way. If he were presented with someone who genuinely cared about what he had to say without caring about what he is, he'd be enchanted by this concept. We see hints of this when he first meets Right and they start to make friends, but even before the Shadow Line showed up in full to bring Zed home, he was already starting to creep Right out with his inherent Darkness. Zed's very nature pushes people away, and he doesn't understand the light well enough to understand why.
Setting: Zed is coming off of a major defeat as it is, but having to do something that isn't trying to cover the world in darkness for the Shadow Line would be a welcome change of pace. He'll be more amused by this than anything, if only for the distraction it brings from his own situation. He's not going to make any efforts to point out that hey, he's royalty, just so he can see where this goes. It's all just a diversion for him, and it's an unusual chance to deal with people who won't see him only as the Emperor of Darkness. Plus, death games are an inherently dark activity--he'll be interested to see what sort of shining crops up in response to all this darkness the Capitol's generating. That's what darkness is for, after all--giving the light something bright to shine against. He's already died (or at least exploded into an angry cloud of darkness only to have to reconstitute himself) once, so he won't be too upset by that. He's also already killed people, so he won't be too upset by that, either, particularly if they come back afterwards. (It's not really shining, though, how frustrating.)
SAMPLES
First Person Thread:
[Zed rolls over to blearily look at the recording device, as though it's nothing but an annoying advisor sticking its head into the room to whine that they needed to gather more darkness. It takes a few moments for everything to slide into place. For him to realize what's going on here, to remember where he is and what he was doing. There's an almost lazy check of himself to make sure that the leg he'd lost shortly before dying is back in place--it is--and another equally lazy check to make sure his throat is likewise in one piece. He sits up, looking around the room curiously. He is not impressed.
This isn't the first time he's experienced catastrophic defeat. Nor will, he thinks, it be the last. But it's the first time he's experienced one quite so messy, and one that wasn't due to the forces of the light and the imagination of the Rainbow Line. No, this one was different. This was the defeat of darkness coming straight from some other, different darkness. The darkness of the Games. The idea amuses him--The Emperor of Darkness got killed by darkness. He throws his head back and laughs for a solid minute before flopping back to lie down again with a sigh.]
Oh, there's not too much shining here, is there? Not at all. Yet I still met my defeat.
[There's another laugh, a much more bitter one, as the mirth fades from his face.]
How interesting...
[For a moment, he doesn't do anything else. It seems as though he might not be willing to say anything else. Yet after a moment, he starts quietly singing to himself. It likely looks like he's lost his mind. He doesn't care what people might think. He never has.]
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are...
Prose:
Zed paced around the perimeter of the room, taking in all the weapons and training dummies. No guns, no trains, and nothing special that really shined as a weapon...but serviceable enough for the Gamemakers' purposes. Really, this whole thing sounded kind of like what Sabre Shadow had been doing back in the town he'd turned to a Shadow Town, forcing the residents to duel one another and drawing darkness from their pain and despair. Zed hadn't been supervising that operation, but he knew of it. It was a good, sound strategy if you wanted to spread darkness among humans. "If this place weren't so shining, I'd almost mistake it for a Shadow Town," Zed mused as he paced along the line of weapons. The Capitol he'd seen in that quick briefing had too much glitz and sparkle for it to be a true Shadow Town, but it did have certain qualities to it. "You and your blood sports..."
His voice was free of any sort of righteousness. In fact, he sounded almost bored by what was going on as he reached out and tested out a spear. Ho-hum, blood sports, must be Tuesday. Call him when something actually interesting happens. There was an air of disdain about him as he lazily threw the spear at one of the training dummies, hitting it in the chest. Zed seemed to take no pleasure from the hit as he selected a sword and gave it a well-practiced twirl. "Got yourself a pretty dull assortment here, even if the rest of the place shines." There was no warning as Zed suddenly made a move for another training dummy, removing one of its arms before jamming the sword into the gut of a third dummy. That display would have impressed his courtiers, even the ones who didn't put much faith in him, and though he knew it looked good, he didn't show it, treating that display with just as much disinterest as he'd shown anything else.
Seemingly bored, he left the sword embedded in the gut of that third dummy and glanced back at the Gamemakers. Were they impressed yet? He didn't wait for any signal, didn't treat them like he cared what they thought, and casually picked up another, bigger sword to have another go of it. "You don't have anything more interesting to do here?"
What is your character scored: Zed is a 10. He's a Super Sentai series final boss tier villain, meaning he's been a threat to the safety of the entire Earth and could only be stopped by heroes with multicolored giant robots, and he's not the sort to get sentimental about killing people. He has also already died and gotten better within the space of about two minutes, though this is in part thanks to some deus ex machina intervention. He knows quite well how to fight, though he's the sort who's used to easily overpowering most opponents.
Power-wise, he is essentially the embodiment of darkness itself. In his human form, he is stronger, faster, and more durable than a normal human would be. He has a monster form that is stronger still, and he can transform between this and his human form at will. He's capable of attacking using bursts of darkness energy in either form. It's most often something he appears to channel into a crazy-looking sword, but he's also been shown to use it to, say, shake people off if they're trying to grab him from behind. Zed's darkness is strong enough that other Shadows will respond to it, and he's been shown to kick other Shadows' powers into out-of-control overdrive with a little nudge, no matter how badly the other Shadow in question didn't want to be involved. He can also absorb Shadows in order to power himself up. Gathering more darkness and increasing his power seems to be effortless in a sense; he's actually annoyed when he gets a late-series power-up. He doesn't want this darkness, but he can't help what it is.
Zed can passively unnerve humans (and possibly animals, though that is never shown). He's got the most concentrated darkness out of anyone in the Shadow Line, and hanging around him for too long can give people the chills or just a really bad feeling about things. This only intensifies if the human in question makes eye contact with him for a prolonged period of time; they'll start to see the concentrated darkness inside. It's basically the exact opposite of hanging around someone who might be referred to as "a ray of sunshine." Even if he's being perfectly cheerful, there's still something off about him. It's not something he can turn off or seems to be aware of. If he tries to push someone away, there will be a pulse of dark energy.
Since he is a creature of darkness, Zed cannot handle being exposed to light for very long. There are points in canon in which he is stubbornly staying outside in bright sunlight only to collapse because he should have at least tried to stick to the shade. Even if he likes the light, he still can't handle it.
Aside from that, Zed's weakest point is his mind. It's easier to out-think him or strike at some emotional vulnerability than it is to try to take him out through brute force, particularly if he's got his powers. He's still not quite gotten a grasp on his obsession with the light and shining things, and he's still dealing with his final defeat at the hands of the ToQGers. He's effectively been told that he does have a place in the universe and that it doesn't have to be bad, but he's still dealing with being told no. When defeated in battle, he will explode, but said explosion will resolve itself into a vicious, mindless cloud of darkness that may still try to strike out at whoever Zed was fighting. It is possible for him to reconstitute himself, though he will be very weak, and it helps if he has some other source of darkness to go back to or someone to swoop in on a magic train and rescue him at the last possible second. Without somewhere to recuperate quickly, the light would likely finish him off.
The crowd would probably like him. When he's not being overly creepy or intense, he's got a flippant sort of bad boy attitude that would probably score well with some demographics, and he wouldn't seem to have any trouble with the concept of the Games--there will be no loud protests about the sanctity of human life from him. This is just a nastier version of something his Shadow Line underlings have tried already, anyway. He's smart enough to pay lip service that the powers that be, and having to do so is a novel enough concept that he'll play along.
Token: The gaudiest, sparkliest, blingiest star-shaped pin his Stylists can find. Rhinestones on top of rhinestones. Something he could learn what the word "bling" means with.
And an OOC question! Would Zed's sensitivity to light be something that the power dampening would take care of, or would he still have it in some capacity?
