Basic Knowledge:
Birth/Real Name: Ryuu Tama
Alias: The Doc
Physical Age: 164
Height: 8' 2'' (2.5m)
Weight: 248lbs
Gender: Male
Day of Birth: 1/22
Village:
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Rank: Mercenary
Religion: Agnostic
Languages: Common/Runic Terran
Skin tone: Sun-Kissed
Eyes: Heterochromia (Green (Right)/Blue (Left)
Hair: Golden Blond
Physical Description:
Standing at an impressive 8ft, 2 inches, (or 2.5 meters), Tama is a creature unlike most that wonder this world. Golden blond hair cascades past his shoulders and down his back; rarely tied up yet impossibly tamed. His skin tone is something akin to “sun-kissed” rather than straight tan despite how often he resides in the sun. His eyes are a playful hertrochromia of green and blue - the former on the right, and the latter on the left. Caressing his near constant cocky smirk are two long scars on the left side of his face that he has taken to covering with scruff or a weirdly patterned beard; they were earned from his former partner, Uzumoreru Toushin. Despite being a man who can literally swap bodies, he has chosen to carry these scars for whatever twisted reason Tama has decided to do so. He is surprisingly muscular beneath his clothing, the toned vessel in which he currently stands in being one altered towards melee combat. Tama’s lips are, ‘ever, painted a strange green color.
His clothing consist, generally, of a nice white button down shirt tucked into blue cotton jeans with a silk black vest edged in silver trim that resides over the shirt; a golden chain hanging from one of its pocket attaches to a round brass watch. Over this he wears his trademark patchwork lab coat that has been at his side for well over 50 years now. On every other finger, (pinky, middle, thumb), is a different kind of ring, style, and gem. On his head rests a wide-brimmed hat with a short crown that he generally uses to keep the sun off his face. The only part of this outfit that generally changes are his footwear. They range anywhere from black leather ranching boots with a silver trim to match his vest, to a pair of red sneakers and everything in between. He’ll even occasionally wear Crocs.
Character's Mental Description:
To say that Tama is simply insane is irresponsible. To think of him as a calculating, tactical madman is purely laughable. Ryuu Tama is a creature who can’t simply be describe by a single noun; save perhaps, chaos. He is a man who does as he whims, following no one or anything but his own amusement. It is simultaneously his most redeeming quality and his hubris as he moves on from project to project, friend to enemy, enemy to friend, and done so often that Tama himself often looses track. While it is his most notable feature to his personality, it is far from his only one. The Hybrid scientist is a complex ball of emotions that range from infinite meloncollie to outlandish rage; sometimes without his input. His non-human heritage that flows through his bloodline often takes control of his emotions in moments when the scenario forces his blood-pressure above a certain threshold. Pride, selfishness, and a disdain for other humans begins to prevail above his normal happy-go-lucky attitude. It has made having a relationship nigh’ impossible for him, as he will always inevitably find something wrong with his partner and force it out into the light where he cruelly criticizes it.
Ancient History
Tama’s history dives back down as deep into the annuls of Sunagakure. Known for his coming and going throughout the timeline, the mad scientist is both revered, reviled, and stands as one of the few remaining living legends of his generation. While now he is of a more stable mentality, even friendly if with alcohol, that wasn’t always the case. Even now, as he plays at trying to be a better person and role model for his daughter, the sins of his past haunts his every moment.
Originally not even a child of the country, his mother traveled the entire continent as an escape from her cursed husband after the man had decimated what remained of the nomadic Ryuu clan. It is said that she chose the desert as a last resort when turned down everywhere else, and Mother Suna lead the woman through the desert to escape Tengokai’s wrath. Pulled through the Maelstrom without a mark, they were the first new comers to Sunagakure’s underground city in a long time, and were welcomed warmly.
Tama’s childhood leading up the Academy was somewhat rocky, but no worse than most kids his age. His mother was an alcoholic, forever running away from the horrors she bared witness to in his father’s actions. Seeing the man’s genius naturally pass on to their child unnerved her on many levels, and sometimes she even took it out on her son. Yet in the end she finally found a friend who was able to talk some sense into her, help her let go of the bottle, and enroll her clearly gifted son into the Academy.
The first few weeks had gone wonderfully. The child excelled in his studies and was already being looked at for grooming in specialty groups. That was, until the fateful night he decided to try testing his most recent project in an ally near his home.
Sunagakure had its problems. Being underground meant tensions ran high almost all the time. To join the military was a decision that most people made just to make enough money to enjoy the rare luxuries stored away, however many found out just how harsh the service was even then…especially back then. Genin who broke rank and quit service retained the skills given to them, but were placed under special watch by the overburdened ANBU branch. Inevitably, some of the rogue Genin eventually slipped through the cracks.
At the age of twelve, Tama was a victim to one of those Genin. A man in his early twenties, down on his luck, and heavily inebriated assaulted the child in an attempt to steal the invention and any money he had. The attack left the child beaten nearly to death before a something, intervened.
The Lord of the Deep Courts, either because he was checking up on the rogue Genin himself or out of sheer chance, caught the act. Before the man even realized what was happening, he was dead, with his soul ripped from his body. Kneeling before the child, Mikaboshi gave Tama the offer of life over what would have surely been death otherwise, and held out the spirit in the form of a small silver ball.
Tama, perhaps unwisely, took the offer.
To this day, the scientist doesn’t know why Mikaboshi chose him, and would rather not know. The soul absorbed into the child, into his body, and activated something deep inside of his genes that Tama doubted either of them had any idea he had. Just like the Lord before him, boiling deep inside of his cells, slept the power of an Ancient. A human soul was fed to those cells, awakening power and hunger that the youth had never known could exist.
Following this came a series of bad choices, with a single good one thrown in there for no reason save possibly fate. A week after he had graduated into Geninhood, somehow, his father had found the village and managed a way inside through an ancient relic that opened small portals. From there he rounded up enough of the rogues in the bad part of the city to form a large gang, then sent some of those men out to kill both Tama and his mother. They only succeeded in the latter after setting the house on fire. Having watched the child survive the assassination, the Ancient Mikaboshi, once again appeared before the child and asked if he wished for revenge.
Again, Tama took the offer.
The massacre that followed only remained unknown due to the fact that Mikaboshi himself took part in the violence of the unknowing apprentice. He warded off Tengokai rather soundly, forcing the man out the same way he entered and sealing it off after nearly killing the cursed father. Tama wouldn’t see any hide or hair of the man for nearly the rest of his life after that point, but it didn’t matter. Any corruption his father had intended to place in the child had been easily settled in under the machinations of the Deep Lord. In the death of the gang members the child had consumed a number of souls, experiencing life after life, and slowly began to fall into madness along with the power he had absorbed.
A month later, without the sup of a human soul, the boy had found he had aged another full year of life. With the money earned from doing the random mission here and there with his new found strength, he had managed to buy out some space in the cheaper parts of town. Aside from living, this space was mostly converted into a fully working lab to ever poke at what he didn’t yet know. After discovering that he had aged so rapidly for seemingly no reason, the budding scientist had a new project to work on. One that ended up staying ahead of all others as with each day that went by, the chill step of death crept nearer.
During the early parts of his experiments, in the attempt to combine the newly minted chakra crystals with his blood, he caused an explosion that destroyed most of his first lab. In this explosion he made a friend; a girl who just happened to walk by and speak to him out of curiosity. The explosion caused a strange effect on her, as she took the brunt of it, in that her hair and irises had turned a soft pink color. Though she suffered surprisingly no harm, her introduction as the Steward of Sunagakure’s daughter sent Ryuu Tama into a small panic. Sousuke was something of a hero of his at that time and he had just exploded science at his daughter.
Which he took surprisingly well. For the rest of that month Tama got to know Sousuke, accepted a small grant for his rather vague research, and became close friends with the girl known as Okibi. At the end of the month she vanished, Sousuke left in search of her for a long time, and Tama aged yet another year from his distractions. The scientist doubled down on his research and cut off all ties to the public; a mistake that nearly cost him his life.
In the years that followed, the scientist slipped further and further down in his morality towards humans. He was a serial killer now, picking off the dredges of the denizens suffering in the furthest reaches of their underground society. At first it was the sick and weak, but as Tama learned that souls reflect their last physical forms, he began to attack healthier citizens more and more. His purpose? The souls he harvested both sustained his current age of fifteen, and he stayed at that age for the last two years so long as he ate one human soul a week. The other side of it was using these said souls in science, ever grasping in the dark for a clue to fix his body and keep from eternally feasting upon his own race. Madness had fully gripped his mind in this time as well. Not only did killing his own people leave him restless at night, but he also made the forewarned mistake of reliving each and every life he consumed. Before long his science turned towards the arcane and the superstitious, he rarely knew who or where he was day to day, and all that mattered was that he keep this rare supply in stock.
It still remains a mystery that no one from ANBU ever touched Tama. In fact, his small reign of terror in becoming the new local boogeyman is what finally attracted a man who was capable of ending the problems the military would not. Uzumoreru Toushin, the greatest assassin his clan ever produced, was the first man to put a blade to the scientist’s throat; something he did quite well.
This would be the first time Ryuu Tama would escape a deserved death by sheer luck. By all means he should of died in the apartment he had feasted his last meal. A blade had been shoved through his right lung, then dragged across his throat, and finally he had been thrown out the window of the third story room. He had learned, on this day, he was very hard to kill. The soul he had collected that night and ate healed his wounds all save a chest cavity that was slowly healing as he awoke in a pile of trash, staring up at a rival scientist standing over him. The man had a special ability to literally being able to grab a person’s chakra coil, however, it did little more than slow down the flow. Tama’s chakra coil wasn’t human, though, and this time the man was able to actually extract the Hybrid’s power that kept the souls inside of him mostly stable. He was left like this, in the pile of garbage, half dead and now aging at a rapid pace again with the screams of the dead tearing his head apart.
It was here that the scientist came across another demon of Suna.
Kitanai, was an assassin, and introduced herself as one of the best. She promised that, if he paid handsomely, she would happily be the best damn bodyguard money could buy. After agreeing to anything to save his life, the femme fatal lifted his broken body and carried him back to the closest lab he could remember.
The assassin brought into Tama’s life three specific things. The fury of revenge, a hate for blackmail, and a deep seated fear of women. Shortly after he had recovered and decided to bathe in their local bathhouse, he met the assassin once more after she, with so little effort, broke the neck of someone the scientist was bathing with like she was taking out garbage. The scene, somehow despite everything he had done himself, traumatized the scientist. Then, along with this new found phobia of women, the assassin also brought to his doorstep increasing prices for her services through a mix of using the knowledge of what he really was, and through a quasi-romantic partnership with the hitman who had originally nearly killed him. Anytime the scientist got uppity or refused to pay, Toushin paid him a close call.
This went on for a nearly a whole year until finally the scientist was able to concoct a device that mimicked the chakra coil by absorbing a human’s natural energy and then reflecting it back out through their circulatory system; exactly as a normal coil would do. With this he was able to regain some of his lost strength and did what he had dreamed of doing since his power was stolen; revenge.
After capturing the scientist who had stolen his power, Tama tortured the man for a number of hours before finally killing him by removing the rival scientists’ own chakra coil. As horribly morbid and vile as it was, this was the original method that the Hybrid used in discovering how to detach, remove, and transplant the actual Coil every human has. With another Coil to replace the one stolen, Tama managed to do a few things to fix his life; fire Kitanai, regain a modicum of sanity, and rise above as one of the greatest medical minds of his generation. As a bonus the new coil also slowed down his rapid aging to near normal rates, and not at all if he simply consumed a human soul; also the voices of those he ate became mercifully silent. Later he would learn than transplanted Coils could be naturally rejected like any other transplanted organ, and that he just happened to be lucky enough that his rival was a match for his blood type.
A couple of months would pass by and the genius had managed to walk away from his vile life in the bad parts of town. He was working his way towards becoming a fully fledged medical shinobi now, his schooling paid for by the grant earned for his Chakra Coil Transplant procedure that he happily handed over. His life finally seemed to be balancing back out towards normal, despite the rocky start to his career with the military, when Okibi appeared at the gates one day in a horrible condition. Tama, of all people, was the first to happen across her beaten and torn body.
Aside from the injuries sustained from walking through the Maelstrom, the doctors reported to the Steward that his ward had faced physical and mental abuse; from the moment she had gone missing they theorized. This incident made Tama drop everything. Projects, research, his schooling; non of it mattered to the man compared to the girl who connected him back to a time before the madness. After months of intense recovery, a little bit of scientific magic, and the support of both Tama and her father, Okibi finally came back around to her normal self. For the first time in his life the scientist felt fully concerned about any other creature or person other than himself, and before he could stop it, caught the feels. She worked with his fear of fairer gender, he brought her back to reality - together they kept each other balanced. Half a year after her return, the rumors of the two’s closeness became more than just hearsay, and they shared dance on Okibi’s birthday that seemed to fully seal it.
Some time later, and the couple was nearly inseparable. Tama had finished schooling and was working diligently in the hospital when Sousuke received news of where Okibi’s kidnappers were located. Together, the trio decided to venture out into the Maelstrom to storm their base and put an end to the last of his lover’s nightmares. In this attack they were successful. They had all taken some physical damage, Tama probably the worst, though by the end he looked as if he hadn’t taken any. During his battle with a twisted Uchiha, the scientist was forced to eat the man’s soul to heal wounds inflicted by the clan’s black flame. However, the one who took the most mental damage that day was non other than Okibi herself after finding a child locked away deep in the facility - a child of her’s, produced by by the abuse she had suffered in her years captured.
They attempted to return to the village, the new mother fully overwhelmed, when the group found the entrance blocked by a member of the Cabal. Sousuke turned them back towards the desert to seek out aid in defeating the man they could not surpass despite the combined strength of Tama and the Steward.
During this journey, shortly after claiming the artifact they would need, Okibi made a decision; she would not be returning to Sunagakure.
The poor girl had not expected this much of simple revenge. She had destroyed those that had brought her harm but in exchange was only given a constant reminder of that pain in the form of a son. She could also only see a bitter future for herself and the child if she continued on and returned to the village, and so after saying some horribly choice words to her father, left into the desert. Torn between duty and love, Tama decided to follow his lover into the dunes beyond, both of them leaving Sousuke with a war to fight by himself, and a new child to raise.
Tama, however, did not get far. He had not consumed a soul in so long that the Uchiha was able to retain his personality, lurking in the back of the scientist’s mind. Once they were a great distance away from Sousuke, the remnants of the evil soul possessed Tama, and tried to kill Okibi. The result was Tama’s lover beating him nearly to death. After the deed was done the woman broke down, stroking her stomach softly while promising the conceived child between herself and the Hybrid a better life. She left his body in the dunes, bloody and broken, and wondered off towards the North.
His body was recovered by Tengokai. While, possibly, there may have been some subtle fatherly reason to save his son the main reason fell down to a prophecy he was trying to see completed. Since his son was a core part of that, the father saved the young man and secretly returned him to Sunagakure during the battle with the Cabal. In Tama’s basement was an experimental pod with fluids that would begin rapidly restoring a body at the cost of lifespan. Teng placed his son in this machine, read the scattered notes on how it worked, and turned it on before making a quick exit before a certain Ancient could notice him; though he suspected the being knew all along.
When the scientist awoke again, he was an old man, and not himself. For a very small moment of time, about thirty minutes, the Uchiha had full control over the scientist’s body before happening across a curious Ancient - Mother Suna. The legendary creature could easily deduce that the man controlling the shell wasn’t the owner, and easily destroyed the creature, allowing for Tama’s soul to take back over his own body. She fed to him the Uchiha’s soul once more, allowing him to recover most of his age but not the fractured memories running through his head. All he could recall was leaving Sousuke, though he had no idea who this man was, only that someone he loved deeply was mad at him. Seeing an opportunity, the Ancient with a religion decided to manipulate Tama against the Steward - for giggles.
So then started another strange part of his life. In disguise, the once renown scientist wandered around Suna trying to figure out how to gain enough power to take on the Kazekage and ‘steal back’ his ‘son’. The Ancient had manipulated him into believing that Aki was stolen away from himself and Okibi, and that he was here to get him back. However after weeks of planning, the scientist realized he was missing more than just power, but also memories. In the back of his mind he knew that there was one being who could help him, and that was Mikaboshi.
A week of quiet murder crawled by as Tama collected enough souls for an offering. He wanted the Deep Courts to fully unleash the power deep in his core in order to fight Sousuke, and the creature vaguely agreed to help, if he could best him in combat.
They two fought on for an hour, an impossible length of time, before Mikaboshi finally broke down his old apprentice’s form into energy and scattered it. This action broke away Tama’s mental fog and all of the memories of who he was reconstructed his body once again as close to a full Ancient as he could get. It was held back only in the fact that his human soul was what held this new form together. With all his memories returned, Mikaboshi forced Tama into pact for this new form, and that it was to never be used against the Steward. The newly formed creature looked down at his hands and agreed, unsure now to what he was at all.
After a year of wandering the desert in search of his missing lover, he finally came across what he believed was Okibi. She was running with a wolf pack, hunting, and turned her head seemingly to regard Tama off in the distance before moving on. The link between them seemed gone, as if he no longer felt like a part of that fight for survival, and quickly began to spiral into a deep depression. The scientist then returned to Sunagakure, quietly, and descended back into the depths he had once managed to rise from.
At first all the being did was attempt suicide. He quickly found that human souls were incredibly indestructible, and that no matter how much he tried to inflict pain on himself, didn’t eat, or expose his form to natural danger, it kept kicking. In the troughs of fury at his trapped existence he began to throw his anger at those around him - the Underground.
At first, it was just something about souls he knew tasted better when the owner was a rather deplorable person. The filthier the sinner, the tastier the soul. In his search for the next delicious meal, Tama accidentally toppled most of the old mafia hierarchy that had been in place since the city slept beneath the dunes. It got to a point that those he left alive began to revere him as some kind of monster, not unlike his former master. Then once he survived an assassination attempt by Uzumoreru Toushin, the assassin king himself, everyone else simply fell in line. Before he knew it, the scientist had built a small empire beneath the city above. Created with violence and manipulation of the forgotten the Hybrid began to revel in everything money could buy. Men, drugs, fine alcohol, and more than enough money to funnel into any ridiculous project he could think of; it was all at Tama’s fingertips.
But it was an escape, and that was all. The deep hole left there by his ex-lover and the depression from all of his own sins weighted down deep on his mind. He grew to resent Suna, Sousuke, and everything else in the pit he had dug into. Eventually it turned into a game to see how far he could push the Steward until he pushed back. A new Kazekage had taken the throne, Sousuke had a lot more free time, and for years Tama played this game of cat and mouse until one day he decided to throw caution to the wind.
While trying to help a young Michino find out who his father was, Tama appeared before Sousuke for the first time in years, and stole off with a girl who was apprenticing under him for the day.
The mad scientist had planned it all. With Sousuke, he knew exactly how much to throw at the man so that, when they clashed in battle, the chances that they killed each other would be high. He wanted to end his existence, but also leave his mark. Toraono Michino was the monkey wrench that threw all those plans. Well that, and a great deal of his army just up and leaving after the Steward gave a merciful speech.
Once the battle started, the man who had once been his hero was far more capable than he planned for, and on top of that Michino was proving to be a capable fighter. Yet, despite the flaws, he was able to land more than a few solid blows on Sousuke, taking one of the Steward’s eyes, and even came close to the fatal blow that would end them both…until Michino grabbed his arm.
There was a trigger of chakra, a familiarity that said ‘family’, and the first person he thought of was Okibi. He swore in that moment he heard her voice before feeling his opponent’s blade tear through his body. In that moment near his death, he saw what could possibly be his son, and for the first time in years actually wanted to live. Unfortunately, in the battles before this, Michino had suffered a broken back from his last opponent, and had finally ran into a limit of how for the Toraono powers could take him. With the finally moments of his life, the scientist tried to save what he thought was his child.
Then Mikaboshi appeared, and reminded the promise they made about attacking the Steward. The Deep Ancient placed his hand on the boy and forced Tama’s healing energy to recirculate between them as he gave the scientist a small reminder about those who betrayed his trust…before granting upon them instead, a rare favor. Mikaboshi healed both of them.
Arrests were made, Tama went under trail, and Michino was taken to the hospital for a check-up. A private DNA test that did show he was at least related somehow to the Hybrid but, their technology wasn’t up enough to exactly determine how closely the two were related. So for awhile, the Toraono thought Ryuu Tama was his missing father.
Sousuke somehow managed to keep the Sunagakure government from imprisoning Tama for his high crimes. Instead the Ancient Hybrid was placed under house arrest at the Steward’s home. There the Takahashi kept a close eye on him as he weened himself off of human souls on a steady diet of fowls’. His other punishment was solving cases for the hospital from the house, never allowed to leave and tend to the patients himself.
After a couple of years the scientist was allowed to finally purchase his own home, near the residence of Sousuke for safety reasons, and then proceeded to be the greatest thorn he could in everyone’s side.
Perhaps it was the lack of human souls replaced with vengeful birds, or more likely the harsh life he had lead left a bitter taste in his mouth; from Underground riches to basic citizenship. Either way, Tama had stopped really caring about anything but being right and proving he was the best at anything he did. This lack of empathy and rise of pride eventually came to a head at Michino’s seventeenth birthday party, where the man whom the teen thought was his father for the last two years proved that was in fact not. With a new device that honed in on exact genes, it told him with a simple colored light bulb that Michino was not his son, but close enough to be direct family. After ruining the boy’s birthday he withdrew nearly completely from society, throwing himself fully into work and trying not to dwell on how the young Toraono was related to him.
A year later, and they both found out.
At a restaurant to celebrate Michino’s upcoming match in Underground Boxing, the cursed Tengokai revealed himself as his missing father, and removed the boxer’s left leg with the cursed sword that ruled Teng’s life. With his leg he stole a bit of Michino’s soul, one of two parts he needed to unlock his weapon’s true form. Sousuke, who was there on a separate occasion with his own social circle, rose in defense while others tried to escort the innocents away from the battle that rocked the Diamond District. Moments after the destructive bout began Tama and the Kazekage, Sunahoshi Katsuo, joined in defense of Michino. As the fight between the three old powerhouses and one possessed mad man tore up the restaurant, Tama saw the battle playing out before him and knew that it was only a matter of time before Tengokai struck someone with that cursed blade.
Seeing that it was finally his time to pay for his sins, he jumped in and took a blow that had been meant for Sousuke. Since the weapon absorbed souls and his entire shell was made out of a human soul, the scientist vanished instantly, save his clothes. A prophecy had been fulfilled, and Teng recieved the second soul he needed. Ryuu Tama had suffered his end at the hands of his own father and the cursed blade, which meant the rise of a dark and destructive force that was supposed to cover the West Lands for a thousand years. However, in his brother’s clothes, Michino found a steel tube in Tama’s empty lab coat. Inside of that tube was a scroll with vague instructions on absorbing an attack. Tengokai maneuvered through the attacks of his opponents before striking down to kill his second son and fully absorb the Toraono’s soul. On instinct the wounded soldier opened the scroll and held it up to take the attack. His father’s attack never connected, and instead, the scroll absorbed most of Teng’s arm. Then the paper began to consume the evil man slowly, causing him to cut off the arm before using the bits of both souls to unlock some of the weapon’s true form.
After being thrown across the room from the clash of sheer power in the eatery, Michino looked down at the scroll that had been thrown next to him and saw the seal had changed to read ‘blood’ and nothing else. Taking a little from his wounded leg, he activated the spell sealed inside of the scroll.
Tama’s secret weapon was a ninjutsu that required a large number of human souls. Having thought about his form and what could possibly kill it, he created a back up to his body; a blueprint for his soul. Having consumed a part of Tengokai’s body, which had an abundance of souls which included his own, the seal was able to mostly recreate Tama’s body. He was returned to his body right before Okibi retreated to the desert, and in that moment broke his own timeline; something the universe would later hunt him over. However with his old strength and human form returned, the three was able to overcome Tengokai and destroy him for good. As a bonus, they also coincidentally prevented an apocalyptic prophecy.
With his human form regained, Tama decided to finally rejoin society. It wasn’t exactly welcomed, though, and so he responded about as bitterly as one could imagine. He worked the longest and most at the hospital, but most of the staff save a few of the higher-ups hated working with him. He was constantly spell-checking nurses notes, switching up surgery schedules, sometimes out right stealing patients, and causing just general chaos. Basically just being himself once again.
However, there was something lurking in the background after his soul. A being called Karma tormented him constantly, claiming to be the Herald of the Universe sent to collect only the most sinful souls. As a being who broke his timeline, a grave sin of Universal Law, Tama was slated to one day suffer untold horrors forever. Yet instead of heed the voice and prepare for his punishment, he instead trapped the Herald inside of his own body and drew on the power of the Universe itself for some time like the heathen he was.
Then a day came when Sousuke came to the hospital in seek of aid regarding his mental status. The scientist recognized the paperwork for a government official and switched up some charts to give Tama time to see Sousuke himself. It was there the Steward revealed his worries and the arcane scientist decided to investigate the weapons the man had used most of his life. After it nearly killed him, he implored Sousuke return to his house where they could preform a ritual to unbind whatever was connected to the sword away from the Steward. Unfortunately the ritual did more harm to either of them than it did help. In the end Sousuke’s physical form was destroyed and Tama was forced to place it inside of a mechanical body. The ritual used to preform that feat further fractured his timeline and released Karma from its prison to rip the scientist out of the current timeline and into a miserable existence, but before it did, Tama took off his most precious item, a ring, and threw it.
For nearly a hundred years Karma tormented him by forcing him to relive his worst mistakes. Every time he tried to alter the events he would die tragically and then forced onto his next mistake. He was finally able to break free of the trap by focusing on finding the one sole thing he truly ever loved; Okibi. Eventually over the years of suffering, he would see a glimmer, and started to focus towards it. Years of repeated deaths and finally he was close enough to see it The ring he had thrown before Karma ripped him way allowed him to focus on the love Okibi had once showed him. The ring represented everything he lived for, and so for a hundred years he searched for the timeline the ring was spinning in. Once it was caught, Tama slipped it back on his left finger.
It was an engagement ring enchanted with a special ninjutsu that allowed it to change sizes corresponding with the user’s chakra. He had originally created it to give to Okibi before they traveled out in seeking revenge, but never got the chance to propose marriage. It was the one thing that had survived after he regained his memories and visited his old house, and as far as he knew, was all that he had left of that time when he was truly happy. The focus on that ring and love eventually broke a crack in his prison he was able to exploit to return to his own timeline.
He hadn’t skipped much time apart from everyone else despite having suffered for a hundred years, but now was vexed with a new issue. His temporal form was broken three times over now. Karma was ever whispering threats into his ear and his body would shift between the ages of sixteen, twenty, early thirties, and sixty. It would happen usually when he injured himself, but sometimes it would also do so for no reason whatsoever. Tama felt he was just barely stable inside of the timeline, and so kept far away from combat until he could create a sustainable form; despite the war looming at their doorstep.
So, thusly, the scientist went back into full hiding again deep beneath the dunes under Suna. There he decided he would try to clone his original body which would have its own stability in the timeline to house his soul in.
His first experiments were completely unsuccessful, as he attempted to pour way too much Ancient DNA into the bodies in an struggling grasp at the power Mikaboshi once gave him. It wasn’t until he met a man who was a professional at creating clones that he learned his mistake had been in not making them human enough. The man helped Tama perfect his cloning technique before returning to his own business in assuring the village stayed supplied for the war. With the perfect clone created, Tama finally fixed the error he had made thirty years ago in consuming that Uchiha.
The new body was a perfect Hybrid. A splice of man and Ancient that was the best of both worlds. Though his mastery over the sky was far more limited than the powers blessed upon him by the Deep Lord, he now had a had a deep understanding of Time’s Flow and exactly how much he could bend without getting Karma’s attention. Between his ability to manipulate time within three seconds and an obscene control over oxygen, Tama believes he might be at his strongest ever, and had planned to live an unstoppable life with the sky...until Okibi herself appeared back at the gates with his actual child. To say that he reacted poorly was an understatement. His toxicity towards the woman he had once claimed to love was overtly more than Okibi could handle. She feared of what might become of their daughter whom she had hid away from his influence now for this entire time. Once the heartbreaking choice to send Otami to Konoha had been made, Tama responded by killing his rival and absconding off into the desert.
Originally not even a child of the country, his mother traveled the entire continent as an escape from her cursed husband after the man had decimated what remained of the nomadic Ryuu clan. It is said that she chose the desert as a last resort when turned down everywhere else, and Mother Suna lead the woman through the desert to escape Tengokai’s wrath. Pulled through the Maelstrom without a mark, they were the first new comers to Sunagakure’s underground city in a long time, and were welcomed warmly.
Tama’s childhood leading up the Academy was somewhat rocky, but no worse than most kids his age. His mother was an alcoholic, forever running away from the horrors she bared witness to in his father’s actions. Seeing the man’s genius naturally pass on to their child unnerved her on many levels, and sometimes she even took it out on her son. Yet in the end she finally found a friend who was able to talk some sense into her, help her let go of the bottle, and enroll her clearly gifted son into the Academy.
The first few weeks had gone wonderfully. The child excelled in his studies and was already being looked at for grooming in specialty groups. That was, until the fateful night he decided to try testing his most recent project in an ally near his home.
Sunagakure had its problems. Being underground meant tensions ran high almost all the time. To join the military was a decision that most people made just to make enough money to enjoy the rare luxuries stored away, however many found out just how harsh the service was even then…especially back then. Genin who broke rank and quit service retained the skills given to them, but were placed under special watch by the overburdened ANBU branch. Inevitably, some of the rogue Genin eventually slipped through the cracks.
At the age of twelve, Tama was a victim to one of those Genin. A man in his early twenties, down on his luck, and heavily inebriated assaulted the child in an attempt to steal the invention and any money he had. The attack left the child beaten nearly to death before a something, intervened.
The Lord of the Deep Courts, either because he was checking up on the rogue Genin himself or out of sheer chance, caught the act. Before the man even realized what was happening, he was dead, with his soul ripped from his body. Kneeling before the child, Mikaboshi gave Tama the offer of life over what would have surely been death otherwise, and held out the spirit in the form of a small silver ball.
Tama, perhaps unwisely, took the offer.
To this day, the scientist doesn’t know why Mikaboshi chose him, and would rather not know. The soul absorbed into the child, into his body, and activated something deep inside of his genes that Tama doubted either of them had any idea he had. Just like the Lord before him, boiling deep inside of his cells, slept the power of an Ancient. A human soul was fed to those cells, awakening power and hunger that the youth had never known could exist.
Following this came a series of bad choices, with a single good one thrown in there for no reason save possibly fate. A week after he had graduated into Geninhood, somehow, his father had found the village and managed a way inside through an ancient relic that opened small portals. From there he rounded up enough of the rogues in the bad part of the city to form a large gang, then sent some of those men out to kill both Tama and his mother. They only succeeded in the latter after setting the house on fire. Having watched the child survive the assassination, the Ancient Mikaboshi, once again appeared before the child and asked if he wished for revenge.
Again, Tama took the offer.
The massacre that followed only remained unknown due to the fact that Mikaboshi himself took part in the violence of the unknowing apprentice. He warded off Tengokai rather soundly, forcing the man out the same way he entered and sealing it off after nearly killing the cursed father. Tama wouldn’t see any hide or hair of the man for nearly the rest of his life after that point, but it didn’t matter. Any corruption his father had intended to place in the child had been easily settled in under the machinations of the Deep Lord. In the death of the gang members the child had consumed a number of souls, experiencing life after life, and slowly began to fall into madness along with the power he had absorbed.
A month later, without the sup of a human soul, the boy had found he had aged another full year of life. With the money earned from doing the random mission here and there with his new found strength, he had managed to buy out some space in the cheaper parts of town. Aside from living, this space was mostly converted into a fully working lab to ever poke at what he didn’t yet know. After discovering that he had aged so rapidly for seemingly no reason, the budding scientist had a new project to work on. One that ended up staying ahead of all others as with each day that went by, the chill step of death crept nearer.
During the early parts of his experiments, in the attempt to combine the newly minted chakra crystals with his blood, he caused an explosion that destroyed most of his first lab. In this explosion he made a friend; a girl who just happened to walk by and speak to him out of curiosity. The explosion caused a strange effect on her, as she took the brunt of it, in that her hair and irises had turned a soft pink color. Though she suffered surprisingly no harm, her introduction as the Steward of Sunagakure’s daughter sent Ryuu Tama into a small panic. Sousuke was something of a hero of his at that time and he had just exploded science at his daughter.
Which he took surprisingly well. For the rest of that month Tama got to know Sousuke, accepted a small grant for his rather vague research, and became close friends with the girl known as Okibi. At the end of the month she vanished, Sousuke left in search of her for a long time, and Tama aged yet another year from his distractions. The scientist doubled down on his research and cut off all ties to the public; a mistake that nearly cost him his life.
In the years that followed, the scientist slipped further and further down in his morality towards humans. He was a serial killer now, picking off the dredges of the denizens suffering in the furthest reaches of their underground society. At first it was the sick and weak, but as Tama learned that souls reflect their last physical forms, he began to attack healthier citizens more and more. His purpose? The souls he harvested both sustained his current age of fifteen, and he stayed at that age for the last two years so long as he ate one human soul a week. The other side of it was using these said souls in science, ever grasping in the dark for a clue to fix his body and keep from eternally feasting upon his own race. Madness had fully gripped his mind in this time as well. Not only did killing his own people leave him restless at night, but he also made the forewarned mistake of reliving each and every life he consumed. Before long his science turned towards the arcane and the superstitious, he rarely knew who or where he was day to day, and all that mattered was that he keep this rare supply in stock.
It still remains a mystery that no one from ANBU ever touched Tama. In fact, his small reign of terror in becoming the new local boogeyman is what finally attracted a man who was capable of ending the problems the military would not. Uzumoreru Toushin, the greatest assassin his clan ever produced, was the first man to put a blade to the scientist’s throat; something he did quite well.
This would be the first time Ryuu Tama would escape a deserved death by sheer luck. By all means he should of died in the apartment he had feasted his last meal. A blade had been shoved through his right lung, then dragged across his throat, and finally he had been thrown out the window of the third story room. He had learned, on this day, he was very hard to kill. The soul he had collected that night and ate healed his wounds all save a chest cavity that was slowly healing as he awoke in a pile of trash, staring up at a rival scientist standing over him. The man had a special ability to literally being able to grab a person’s chakra coil, however, it did little more than slow down the flow. Tama’s chakra coil wasn’t human, though, and this time the man was able to actually extract the Hybrid’s power that kept the souls inside of him mostly stable. He was left like this, in the pile of garbage, half dead and now aging at a rapid pace again with the screams of the dead tearing his head apart.
It was here that the scientist came across another demon of Suna.
Kitanai, was an assassin, and introduced herself as one of the best. She promised that, if he paid handsomely, she would happily be the best damn bodyguard money could buy. After agreeing to anything to save his life, the femme fatal lifted his broken body and carried him back to the closest lab he could remember.
The assassin brought into Tama’s life three specific things. The fury of revenge, a hate for blackmail, and a deep seated fear of women. Shortly after he had recovered and decided to bathe in their local bathhouse, he met the assassin once more after she, with so little effort, broke the neck of someone the scientist was bathing with like she was taking out garbage. The scene, somehow despite everything he had done himself, traumatized the scientist. Then, along with this new found phobia of women, the assassin also brought to his doorstep increasing prices for her services through a mix of using the knowledge of what he really was, and through a quasi-romantic partnership with the hitman who had originally nearly killed him. Anytime the scientist got uppity or refused to pay, Toushin paid him a close call.
This went on for a nearly a whole year until finally the scientist was able to concoct a device that mimicked the chakra coil by absorbing a human’s natural energy and then reflecting it back out through their circulatory system; exactly as a normal coil would do. With this he was able to regain some of his lost strength and did what he had dreamed of doing since his power was stolen; revenge.
After capturing the scientist who had stolen his power, Tama tortured the man for a number of hours before finally killing him by removing the rival scientists’ own chakra coil. As horribly morbid and vile as it was, this was the original method that the Hybrid used in discovering how to detach, remove, and transplant the actual Coil every human has. With another Coil to replace the one stolen, Tama managed to do a few things to fix his life; fire Kitanai, regain a modicum of sanity, and rise above as one of the greatest medical minds of his generation. As a bonus the new coil also slowed down his rapid aging to near normal rates, and not at all if he simply consumed a human soul; also the voices of those he ate became mercifully silent. Later he would learn than transplanted Coils could be naturally rejected like any other transplanted organ, and that he just happened to be lucky enough that his rival was a match for his blood type.
A couple of months would pass by and the genius had managed to walk away from his vile life in the bad parts of town. He was working his way towards becoming a fully fledged medical shinobi now, his schooling paid for by the grant earned for his Chakra Coil Transplant procedure that he happily handed over. His life finally seemed to be balancing back out towards normal, despite the rocky start to his career with the military, when Okibi appeared at the gates one day in a horrible condition. Tama, of all people, was the first to happen across her beaten and torn body.
Aside from the injuries sustained from walking through the Maelstrom, the doctors reported to the Steward that his ward had faced physical and mental abuse; from the moment she had gone missing they theorized. This incident made Tama drop everything. Projects, research, his schooling; non of it mattered to the man compared to the girl who connected him back to a time before the madness. After months of intense recovery, a little bit of scientific magic, and the support of both Tama and her father, Okibi finally came back around to her normal self. For the first time in his life the scientist felt fully concerned about any other creature or person other than himself, and before he could stop it, caught the feels. She worked with his fear of fairer gender, he brought her back to reality - together they kept each other balanced. Half a year after her return, the rumors of the two’s closeness became more than just hearsay, and they shared dance on Okibi’s birthday that seemed to fully seal it.
Some time later, and the couple was nearly inseparable. Tama had finished schooling and was working diligently in the hospital when Sousuke received news of where Okibi’s kidnappers were located. Together, the trio decided to venture out into the Maelstrom to storm their base and put an end to the last of his lover’s nightmares. In this attack they were successful. They had all taken some physical damage, Tama probably the worst, though by the end he looked as if he hadn’t taken any. During his battle with a twisted Uchiha, the scientist was forced to eat the man’s soul to heal wounds inflicted by the clan’s black flame. However, the one who took the most mental damage that day was non other than Okibi herself after finding a child locked away deep in the facility - a child of her’s, produced by by the abuse she had suffered in her years captured.
They attempted to return to the village, the new mother fully overwhelmed, when the group found the entrance blocked by a member of the Cabal. Sousuke turned them back towards the desert to seek out aid in defeating the man they could not surpass despite the combined strength of Tama and the Steward.
During this journey, shortly after claiming the artifact they would need, Okibi made a decision; she would not be returning to Sunagakure.
The poor girl had not expected this much of simple revenge. She had destroyed those that had brought her harm but in exchange was only given a constant reminder of that pain in the form of a son. She could also only see a bitter future for herself and the child if she continued on and returned to the village, and so after saying some horribly choice words to her father, left into the desert. Torn between duty and love, Tama decided to follow his lover into the dunes beyond, both of them leaving Sousuke with a war to fight by himself, and a new child to raise.
Tama, however, did not get far. He had not consumed a soul in so long that the Uchiha was able to retain his personality, lurking in the back of the scientist’s mind. Once they were a great distance away from Sousuke, the remnants of the evil soul possessed Tama, and tried to kill Okibi. The result was Tama’s lover beating him nearly to death. After the deed was done the woman broke down, stroking her stomach softly while promising the conceived child between herself and the Hybrid a better life. She left his body in the dunes, bloody and broken, and wondered off towards the North.
His body was recovered by Tengokai. While, possibly, there may have been some subtle fatherly reason to save his son the main reason fell down to a prophecy he was trying to see completed. Since his son was a core part of that, the father saved the young man and secretly returned him to Sunagakure during the battle with the Cabal. In Tama’s basement was an experimental pod with fluids that would begin rapidly restoring a body at the cost of lifespan. Teng placed his son in this machine, read the scattered notes on how it worked, and turned it on before making a quick exit before a certain Ancient could notice him; though he suspected the being knew all along.
When the scientist awoke again, he was an old man, and not himself. For a very small moment of time, about thirty minutes, the Uchiha had full control over the scientist’s body before happening across a curious Ancient - Mother Suna. The legendary creature could easily deduce that the man controlling the shell wasn’t the owner, and easily destroyed the creature, allowing for Tama’s soul to take back over his own body. She fed to him the Uchiha’s soul once more, allowing him to recover most of his age but not the fractured memories running through his head. All he could recall was leaving Sousuke, though he had no idea who this man was, only that someone he loved deeply was mad at him. Seeing an opportunity, the Ancient with a religion decided to manipulate Tama against the Steward - for giggles.
So then started another strange part of his life. In disguise, the once renown scientist wandered around Suna trying to figure out how to gain enough power to take on the Kazekage and ‘steal back’ his ‘son’. The Ancient had manipulated him into believing that Aki was stolen away from himself and Okibi, and that he was here to get him back. However after weeks of planning, the scientist realized he was missing more than just power, but also memories. In the back of his mind he knew that there was one being who could help him, and that was Mikaboshi.
A week of quiet murder crawled by as Tama collected enough souls for an offering. He wanted the Deep Courts to fully unleash the power deep in his core in order to fight Sousuke, and the creature vaguely agreed to help, if he could best him in combat.
They two fought on for an hour, an impossible length of time, before Mikaboshi finally broke down his old apprentice’s form into energy and scattered it. This action broke away Tama’s mental fog and all of the memories of who he was reconstructed his body once again as close to a full Ancient as he could get. It was held back only in the fact that his human soul was what held this new form together. With all his memories returned, Mikaboshi forced Tama into pact for this new form, and that it was to never be used against the Steward. The newly formed creature looked down at his hands and agreed, unsure now to what he was at all.
After a year of wandering the desert in search of his missing lover, he finally came across what he believed was Okibi. She was running with a wolf pack, hunting, and turned her head seemingly to regard Tama off in the distance before moving on. The link between them seemed gone, as if he no longer felt like a part of that fight for survival, and quickly began to spiral into a deep depression. The scientist then returned to Sunagakure, quietly, and descended back into the depths he had once managed to rise from.
At first all the being did was attempt suicide. He quickly found that human souls were incredibly indestructible, and that no matter how much he tried to inflict pain on himself, didn’t eat, or expose his form to natural danger, it kept kicking. In the troughs of fury at his trapped existence he began to throw his anger at those around him - the Underground.
At first, it was just something about souls he knew tasted better when the owner was a rather deplorable person. The filthier the sinner, the tastier the soul. In his search for the next delicious meal, Tama accidentally toppled most of the old mafia hierarchy that had been in place since the city slept beneath the dunes. It got to a point that those he left alive began to revere him as some kind of monster, not unlike his former master. Then once he survived an assassination attempt by Uzumoreru Toushin, the assassin king himself, everyone else simply fell in line. Before he knew it, the scientist had built a small empire beneath the city above. Created with violence and manipulation of the forgotten the Hybrid began to revel in everything money could buy. Men, drugs, fine alcohol, and more than enough money to funnel into any ridiculous project he could think of; it was all at Tama’s fingertips.
But it was an escape, and that was all. The deep hole left there by his ex-lover and the depression from all of his own sins weighted down deep on his mind. He grew to resent Suna, Sousuke, and everything else in the pit he had dug into. Eventually it turned into a game to see how far he could push the Steward until he pushed back. A new Kazekage had taken the throne, Sousuke had a lot more free time, and for years Tama played this game of cat and mouse until one day he decided to throw caution to the wind.
While trying to help a young Michino find out who his father was, Tama appeared before Sousuke for the first time in years, and stole off with a girl who was apprenticing under him for the day.
The mad scientist had planned it all. With Sousuke, he knew exactly how much to throw at the man so that, when they clashed in battle, the chances that they killed each other would be high. He wanted to end his existence, but also leave his mark. Toraono Michino was the monkey wrench that threw all those plans. Well that, and a great deal of his army just up and leaving after the Steward gave a merciful speech.
Once the battle started, the man who had once been his hero was far more capable than he planned for, and on top of that Michino was proving to be a capable fighter. Yet, despite the flaws, he was able to land more than a few solid blows on Sousuke, taking one of the Steward’s eyes, and even came close to the fatal blow that would end them both…until Michino grabbed his arm.
There was a trigger of chakra, a familiarity that said ‘family’, and the first person he thought of was Okibi. He swore in that moment he heard her voice before feeling his opponent’s blade tear through his body. In that moment near his death, he saw what could possibly be his son, and for the first time in years actually wanted to live. Unfortunately, in the battles before this, Michino had suffered a broken back from his last opponent, and had finally ran into a limit of how for the Toraono powers could take him. With the finally moments of his life, the scientist tried to save what he thought was his child.
Then Mikaboshi appeared, and reminded the promise they made about attacking the Steward. The Deep Ancient placed his hand on the boy and forced Tama’s healing energy to recirculate between them as he gave the scientist a small reminder about those who betrayed his trust…before granting upon them instead, a rare favor. Mikaboshi healed both of them.
Arrests were made, Tama went under trail, and Michino was taken to the hospital for a check-up. A private DNA test that did show he was at least related somehow to the Hybrid but, their technology wasn’t up enough to exactly determine how closely the two were related. So for awhile, the Toraono thought Ryuu Tama was his missing father.
Sousuke somehow managed to keep the Sunagakure government from imprisoning Tama for his high crimes. Instead the Ancient Hybrid was placed under house arrest at the Steward’s home. There the Takahashi kept a close eye on him as he weened himself off of human souls on a steady diet of fowls’. His other punishment was solving cases for the hospital from the house, never allowed to leave and tend to the patients himself.
After a couple of years the scientist was allowed to finally purchase his own home, near the residence of Sousuke for safety reasons, and then proceeded to be the greatest thorn he could in everyone’s side.
Perhaps it was the lack of human souls replaced with vengeful birds, or more likely the harsh life he had lead left a bitter taste in his mouth; from Underground riches to basic citizenship. Either way, Tama had stopped really caring about anything but being right and proving he was the best at anything he did. This lack of empathy and rise of pride eventually came to a head at Michino’s seventeenth birthday party, where the man whom the teen thought was his father for the last two years proved that was in fact not. With a new device that honed in on exact genes, it told him with a simple colored light bulb that Michino was not his son, but close enough to be direct family. After ruining the boy’s birthday he withdrew nearly completely from society, throwing himself fully into work and trying not to dwell on how the young Toraono was related to him.
A year later, and they both found out.
At a restaurant to celebrate Michino’s upcoming match in Underground Boxing, the cursed Tengokai revealed himself as his missing father, and removed the boxer’s left leg with the cursed sword that ruled Teng’s life. With his leg he stole a bit of Michino’s soul, one of two parts he needed to unlock his weapon’s true form. Sousuke, who was there on a separate occasion with his own social circle, rose in defense while others tried to escort the innocents away from the battle that rocked the Diamond District. Moments after the destructive bout began Tama and the Kazekage, Sunahoshi Katsuo, joined in defense of Michino. As the fight between the three old powerhouses and one possessed mad man tore up the restaurant, Tama saw the battle playing out before him and knew that it was only a matter of time before Tengokai struck someone with that cursed blade.
Seeing that it was finally his time to pay for his sins, he jumped in and took a blow that had been meant for Sousuke. Since the weapon absorbed souls and his entire shell was made out of a human soul, the scientist vanished instantly, save his clothes. A prophecy had been fulfilled, and Teng recieved the second soul he needed. Ryuu Tama had suffered his end at the hands of his own father and the cursed blade, which meant the rise of a dark and destructive force that was supposed to cover the West Lands for a thousand years. However, in his brother’s clothes, Michino found a steel tube in Tama’s empty lab coat. Inside of that tube was a scroll with vague instructions on absorbing an attack. Tengokai maneuvered through the attacks of his opponents before striking down to kill his second son and fully absorb the Toraono’s soul. On instinct the wounded soldier opened the scroll and held it up to take the attack. His father’s attack never connected, and instead, the scroll absorbed most of Teng’s arm. Then the paper began to consume the evil man slowly, causing him to cut off the arm before using the bits of both souls to unlock some of the weapon’s true form.
After being thrown across the room from the clash of sheer power in the eatery, Michino looked down at the scroll that had been thrown next to him and saw the seal had changed to read ‘blood’ and nothing else. Taking a little from his wounded leg, he activated the spell sealed inside of the scroll.
Tama’s secret weapon was a ninjutsu that required a large number of human souls. Having thought about his form and what could possibly kill it, he created a back up to his body; a blueprint for his soul. Having consumed a part of Tengokai’s body, which had an abundance of souls which included his own, the seal was able to mostly recreate Tama’s body. He was returned to his body right before Okibi retreated to the desert, and in that moment broke his own timeline; something the universe would later hunt him over. However with his old strength and human form returned, the three was able to overcome Tengokai and destroy him for good. As a bonus, they also coincidentally prevented an apocalyptic prophecy.
With his human form regained, Tama decided to finally rejoin society. It wasn’t exactly welcomed, though, and so he responded about as bitterly as one could imagine. He worked the longest and most at the hospital, but most of the staff save a few of the higher-ups hated working with him. He was constantly spell-checking nurses notes, switching up surgery schedules, sometimes out right stealing patients, and causing just general chaos. Basically just being himself once again.
However, there was something lurking in the background after his soul. A being called Karma tormented him constantly, claiming to be the Herald of the Universe sent to collect only the most sinful souls. As a being who broke his timeline, a grave sin of Universal Law, Tama was slated to one day suffer untold horrors forever. Yet instead of heed the voice and prepare for his punishment, he instead trapped the Herald inside of his own body and drew on the power of the Universe itself for some time like the heathen he was.
Then a day came when Sousuke came to the hospital in seek of aid regarding his mental status. The scientist recognized the paperwork for a government official and switched up some charts to give Tama time to see Sousuke himself. It was there the Steward revealed his worries and the arcane scientist decided to investigate the weapons the man had used most of his life. After it nearly killed him, he implored Sousuke return to his house where they could preform a ritual to unbind whatever was connected to the sword away from the Steward. Unfortunately the ritual did more harm to either of them than it did help. In the end Sousuke’s physical form was destroyed and Tama was forced to place it inside of a mechanical body. The ritual used to preform that feat further fractured his timeline and released Karma from its prison to rip the scientist out of the current timeline and into a miserable existence, but before it did, Tama took off his most precious item, a ring, and threw it.
For nearly a hundred years Karma tormented him by forcing him to relive his worst mistakes. Every time he tried to alter the events he would die tragically and then forced onto his next mistake. He was finally able to break free of the trap by focusing on finding the one sole thing he truly ever loved; Okibi. Eventually over the years of suffering, he would see a glimmer, and started to focus towards it. Years of repeated deaths and finally he was close enough to see it The ring he had thrown before Karma ripped him way allowed him to focus on the love Okibi had once showed him. The ring represented everything he lived for, and so for a hundred years he searched for the timeline the ring was spinning in. Once it was caught, Tama slipped it back on his left finger.
It was an engagement ring enchanted with a special ninjutsu that allowed it to change sizes corresponding with the user’s chakra. He had originally created it to give to Okibi before they traveled out in seeking revenge, but never got the chance to propose marriage. It was the one thing that had survived after he regained his memories and visited his old house, and as far as he knew, was all that he had left of that time when he was truly happy. The focus on that ring and love eventually broke a crack in his prison he was able to exploit to return to his own timeline.
He hadn’t skipped much time apart from everyone else despite having suffered for a hundred years, but now was vexed with a new issue. His temporal form was broken three times over now. Karma was ever whispering threats into his ear and his body would shift between the ages of sixteen, twenty, early thirties, and sixty. It would happen usually when he injured himself, but sometimes it would also do so for no reason whatsoever. Tama felt he was just barely stable inside of the timeline, and so kept far away from combat until he could create a sustainable form; despite the war looming at their doorstep.
So, thusly, the scientist went back into full hiding again deep beneath the dunes under Suna. There he decided he would try to clone his original body which would have its own stability in the timeline to house his soul in.
His first experiments were completely unsuccessful, as he attempted to pour way too much Ancient DNA into the bodies in an struggling grasp at the power Mikaboshi once gave him. It wasn’t until he met a man who was a professional at creating clones that he learned his mistake had been in not making them human enough. The man helped Tama perfect his cloning technique before returning to his own business in assuring the village stayed supplied for the war. With the perfect clone created, Tama finally fixed the error he had made thirty years ago in consuming that Uchiha.
The new body was a perfect Hybrid. A splice of man and Ancient that was the best of both worlds. Though his mastery over the sky was far more limited than the powers blessed upon him by the Deep Lord, he now had a had a deep understanding of Time’s Flow and exactly how much he could bend without getting Karma’s attention. Between his ability to manipulate time within three seconds and an obscene control over oxygen, Tama believes he might be at his strongest ever, and had planned to live an unstoppable life with the sky...until Okibi herself appeared back at the gates with his actual child. To say that he reacted poorly was an understatement. His toxicity towards the woman he had once claimed to love was overtly more than Okibi could handle. She feared of what might become of their daughter whom she had hid away from his influence now for this entire time. Once the heartbreaking choice to send Otami to Konoha had been made, Tama responded by killing his rival and absconding off into the desert.
Current History:
Tama’s history dates far back into Suna’s records. His past, though full of wonder and mystery, is not what’s for sale today.
Instead, we’ll focus on his recent doings.
Some years ago a lone ANBU soldier stood his ground against a missing shinobi at the gates of Sunagakure. Though the battle was hard fought, and he technically lost, the solider managed to survive the ordeal for a few weeks until his cancer came roaring back like a vendetta. While on his well deserved death bed, a one Ryuu Tama snuck into the man’s bedroom under the guise of his actual doctor; and killed this lone soldier.
The soldier? Uzumoreru Toushin. An ANBU leader in keeping important information firmly redacted. The two men had a history together that intertwined more often than not, and the scientist could not bare to see his rival finally defeated. More than that, Tama could not imagine a world in which Toushin wasn’t constantly trying to kill him. The assassin gave his life a spice that made it worth continue to live; which was getting harder to find as an immortal. So he put into motion an insane plan to keep his rival forever. Shortly after Uzu’s funeral, the scientist who had been thrown out of the fourth story window of his rival’s hospital room by Toraono Michino, and had been missing since, reappeared briefly to rob Toushin’s corpse from its very grave and abscond into the desert.
Far into the Outlands, a place where demons tread and humans could barely walk, did one of the doctor’s many secret labs reside. Within the madman harnessed the cursed energy of the land to fuel his current clone project. It was there that he preformed a ritual of magic and science that pulled Toushin’s soul from the Great Beyond itself to implant it into a new, immortal, body. It was a clone made from a mix of Tama’s cells, Toushin’s, and the cells of Toushin’s late wife; Ame. It was created to be the “perfect assassin body” so that they could try and do their utmost to kill each other until the very universe itself came to an end.
And Uzu simply, could not care less. Was upset in fact, that he had finally found rest, and Tama had taken it away from him.
The reborn assassin eventually left Tama’s side, and was never seen again. Not in all the years that followed, no matter what the mad scientist did, he could not catch the attention of his rival. He once started a cult that worshiped him as some second coming of Primus, using his massive array of powers to tempt a large following to his side until he crashed the entire thing himself by simply getting bored of it one day. No one from either Suna, nor did Toushin, ever come to stop him; so he abandoned it. Then there was the time he tried to Frankenstein a sand worm’s corpse openly in the attempt to restart the market on Chakra Crystals only to also grow tired and abandon it when the undead worm, no matter what he fed it, would not pass bowel.
No matter what assortment of major or petty crimes he tried to commit, or even that one time he turned over to being a ‘good guy’ for a little bit, caught the attention of the people he wanted. He even went as far as to seal his own soul away into a special younger clone. The act created a void within himself that constantly eats at his bodies in order to further silence the Hybrid side of his self so as to keep from falling into the pit that causes him to commit to evil; and even then, no one he wanted to care, cared.
It wasn’t until Kaen posted up a bounty for Tama to be captured for “Tax Evasion”, did the giant finally get dragged back into Sunagakure by, literally, his ankles. Yet he was not to be punished, strangely, but asked by the man in ANBU to help him - and in return half of Tama’s very well recorded misdeeds were gone. The other half would be rendered unto ash if he could succeed in Kaen’s request to find the country’s Hybrids. The blond couldn’t help but take that bait; simply out of sheer boredom if nothing else.
Then shortly upon ‘breaking out of jail’ and getting back his little black book that held well over 80% of his life’s research he came face to face with the new Kazekage; Raizo. Well, new for Tama, anyways. However instead of what should have been a dramatically cool fight between two legends, the Kazekage offered him a deal instead. It had come to his personal attention that despite how dangerous Tama could have become, the Hybrid had an innate habit of stepping down before he went too far. That alone told the Suna leader that somewhere inside was a person who just wanted to do good, and Raizo had a way to help Tama accomplish just that. It also told Tama that Suna had been paying attention, they just knew better than to engage.
Due to who he is, and the mixed feelings thorough the entire military who can still remember what a tyrannical experience it was to have Tama live with them, the scientist was offered to be an exclusive mercenary to Sunagakure. He couldn’t live within Suna, but would have access to it so long as he revealed his secret ways of getting in and out; for security purposes. He’d also have all the perks of being able to work with them - ie, getting paid money he desperately needed to fund projects and not avoiding taxes - but wouldn’t have to follow any of their pesky laws to keep him from doing what Tama did best: finding cures to the incurable in the most unorthodox of ways.
However, he was carefully warned that didn’t mean they wouldn’t drop his sorry ass the moment it was convenient for them to do so. It was recommended that he would best keep his nose clean when it came to the laws imposed by the people who ran the country itself. To that end, the other part of the bargain, the part that would hold the scientist down for Suna’s sake, was on the grounds that the Kazekage place a Cursed Seal on his heart that would keep him from uttering anything about Suna.
Raizo knew the old mad scientist far too well to simply enter an agreement he would inevitably betray on just simple good will. Tama agreed readily, with a surprising swiftness. As further measures to keep the desert shinobi village’s most ancient secrets, he revealed to Raizo the location of his next form, should this one perish; a child who had no memory of the thing he had become. It held his actual soul and a fresh start; all in the hands of the Sunagakure’s leadership.
To this day Tama has kept his end of the agreement and actually reduced his entire work flow into a privacy. No longer did he try to flaunt what he was doing, ethical or otherwise. Suna has called on his services no more than once, so far, and it was to help develop a vaccine to a viral disease that had evolved beyond Suna’s current technology. He walked in, took his own personal notes, ignored all the current research, and developed a cure within hours. Took no credit and money upfront. Yet it has been heavily whispered that the “known” creator of the cure is a hack and that it was outside help that conceived of the cure. Little by little, the fame that Tama sought began to build. He now occasionally takes to being a traveling doctor, curing the ails of Wind Country with his mystical ability to wield science at levels that has only increased his fame.
The locals say if you need a cure, there’s a man out in the desert who lives beneath the dunes who can cure anything that ails you; for a price.
Instead, we’ll focus on his recent doings.
Some years ago a lone ANBU soldier stood his ground against a missing shinobi at the gates of Sunagakure. Though the battle was hard fought, and he technically lost, the solider managed to survive the ordeal for a few weeks until his cancer came roaring back like a vendetta. While on his well deserved death bed, a one Ryuu Tama snuck into the man’s bedroom under the guise of his actual doctor; and killed this lone soldier.
The soldier? Uzumoreru Toushin. An ANBU leader in keeping important information firmly redacted. The two men had a history together that intertwined more often than not, and the scientist could not bare to see his rival finally defeated. More than that, Tama could not imagine a world in which Toushin wasn’t constantly trying to kill him. The assassin gave his life a spice that made it worth continue to live; which was getting harder to find as an immortal. So he put into motion an insane plan to keep his rival forever. Shortly after Uzu’s funeral, the scientist who had been thrown out of the fourth story window of his rival’s hospital room by Toraono Michino, and had been missing since, reappeared briefly to rob Toushin’s corpse from its very grave and abscond into the desert.
Far into the Outlands, a place where demons tread and humans could barely walk, did one of the doctor’s many secret labs reside. Within the madman harnessed the cursed energy of the land to fuel his current clone project. It was there that he preformed a ritual of magic and science that pulled Toushin’s soul from the Great Beyond itself to implant it into a new, immortal, body. It was a clone made from a mix of Tama’s cells, Toushin’s, and the cells of Toushin’s late wife; Ame. It was created to be the “perfect assassin body” so that they could try and do their utmost to kill each other until the very universe itself came to an end.
And Uzu simply, could not care less. Was upset in fact, that he had finally found rest, and Tama had taken it away from him.
The reborn assassin eventually left Tama’s side, and was never seen again. Not in all the years that followed, no matter what the mad scientist did, he could not catch the attention of his rival. He once started a cult that worshiped him as some second coming of Primus, using his massive array of powers to tempt a large following to his side until he crashed the entire thing himself by simply getting bored of it one day. No one from either Suna, nor did Toushin, ever come to stop him; so he abandoned it. Then there was the time he tried to Frankenstein a sand worm’s corpse openly in the attempt to restart the market on Chakra Crystals only to also grow tired and abandon it when the undead worm, no matter what he fed it, would not pass bowel.
No matter what assortment of major or petty crimes he tried to commit, or even that one time he turned over to being a ‘good guy’ for a little bit, caught the attention of the people he wanted. He even went as far as to seal his own soul away into a special younger clone. The act created a void within himself that constantly eats at his bodies in order to further silence the Hybrid side of his self so as to keep from falling into the pit that causes him to commit to evil; and even then, no one he wanted to care, cared.
It wasn’t until Kaen posted up a bounty for Tama to be captured for “Tax Evasion”, did the giant finally get dragged back into Sunagakure by, literally, his ankles. Yet he was not to be punished, strangely, but asked by the man in ANBU to help him - and in return half of Tama’s very well recorded misdeeds were gone. The other half would be rendered unto ash if he could succeed in Kaen’s request to find the country’s Hybrids. The blond couldn’t help but take that bait; simply out of sheer boredom if nothing else.
Then shortly upon ‘breaking out of jail’ and getting back his little black book that held well over 80% of his life’s research he came face to face with the new Kazekage; Raizo. Well, new for Tama, anyways. However instead of what should have been a dramatically cool fight between two legends, the Kazekage offered him a deal instead. It had come to his personal attention that despite how dangerous Tama could have become, the Hybrid had an innate habit of stepping down before he went too far. That alone told the Suna leader that somewhere inside was a person who just wanted to do good, and Raizo had a way to help Tama accomplish just that. It also told Tama that Suna had been paying attention, they just knew better than to engage.
Due to who he is, and the mixed feelings thorough the entire military who can still remember what a tyrannical experience it was to have Tama live with them, the scientist was offered to be an exclusive mercenary to Sunagakure. He couldn’t live within Suna, but would have access to it so long as he revealed his secret ways of getting in and out; for security purposes. He’d also have all the perks of being able to work with them - ie, getting paid money he desperately needed to fund projects and not avoiding taxes - but wouldn’t have to follow any of their pesky laws to keep him from doing what Tama did best: finding cures to the incurable in the most unorthodox of ways.
However, he was carefully warned that didn’t mean they wouldn’t drop his sorry ass the moment it was convenient for them to do so. It was recommended that he would best keep his nose clean when it came to the laws imposed by the people who ran the country itself. To that end, the other part of the bargain, the part that would hold the scientist down for Suna’s sake, was on the grounds that the Kazekage place a Cursed Seal on his heart that would keep him from uttering anything about Suna.
Raizo knew the old mad scientist far too well to simply enter an agreement he would inevitably betray on just simple good will. Tama agreed readily, with a surprising swiftness. As further measures to keep the desert shinobi village’s most ancient secrets, he revealed to Raizo the location of his next form, should this one perish; a child who had no memory of the thing he had become. It held his actual soul and a fresh start; all in the hands of the Sunagakure’s leadership.
To this day Tama has kept his end of the agreement and actually reduced his entire work flow into a privacy. No longer did he try to flaunt what he was doing, ethical or otherwise. Suna has called on his services no more than once, so far, and it was to help develop a vaccine to a viral disease that had evolved beyond Suna’s current technology. He walked in, took his own personal notes, ignored all the current research, and developed a cure within hours. Took no credit and money upfront. Yet it has been heavily whispered that the “known” creator of the cure is a hack and that it was outside help that conceived of the cure. Little by little, the fame that Tama sought began to build. He now occasionally takes to being a traveling doctor, curing the ails of Wind Country with his mystical ability to wield science at levels that has only increased his fame.
The locals say if you need a cure, there’s a man out in the desert who lives beneath the dunes who can cure anything that ails you; for a price.
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