Abilities:
Spoiler for Abilities (Click to Show)
Weaknesses:
Spoiler for Weaknesses (Click to Show)
Personality: Gin carries himself with an air of noble authority, a portion of the hubris and self-obsession that his previous owners had possessed having bored into his own being. In spite of that same influence existing within his own makeshift heart, Gin finds pride to be a disgusting aspect of humanity, and he is likely to look less favorably on the prideful than on the humble. Or at least those who are not arrogant. Perhaps as an unconscious reaction to his hatred of arrogance, Gin feels a need to point out the flaws in that which another feels personal pride in. It is not his intent to put others down, so much as it is to steer them away from the haughty conceit he once witnessed day after day.
Gin, perhaps due to the nature of what he formed from, takes a particular joy in playing with the emotions of others. He knows what they want to hear, and what they don’t, and he is, as a consequence, particularly affecting on the moods of those he is in conversation with, while being simultaneously sensitive to them. To his enemies, his words cut like jagged pieces from his own self, while to those whom he holds as friends there is little more than praise and comforts, with the exception above related to their pride.
Appearance: Gin stands similarly to how he once did, as a tall mirror meant to fit in the whole of the body. Consequently, he is tall, tall enough to stand a head higher than the greater-than-average human being. All of his body has a certain smoothness to it, allowing reflections of all sorts, though because it is rather humanoid in appearance, the reflections can seem to be off.
When addressing someone directly, Gin generally reflects their own face back at them in a more perfect reflection. When he talks, the reflection moves its mouth for him, but Gin communicates his messages directly into the minds of the one he is addressing via telepathic ability. Generally, the voice that registers in the receiver’s head is their own voice.
Story: Gin began his existence as a mirror. A tall one, and every day his owner would stand before it, admiring himself, gloating to nobody about the perfection that was his physical form. Gin never knew what happened, then, but one day he had to be sold after a change in the winds of fortune and the man had to sell all his possessions to cover the costs of a series of lawsuits that hadn’t gone his way.
Gin’s next owner was much the same, but with a different face and body. Over time, Gin began to develop a hint of a sense of self-awareness, and with it came judgment. Gin was sold after the images reflected turned particularly unflattering, and the woman concluded that the piece was defective.
After that event, Gin was passed from owner to owner, each one seeing in his form the potential to admire themselves, and each one then having the mirror turn against them, revealing the uglier truths within their hearts and minds.
On the hundredth year of Gin’s existence, the budding awareness took full form, and Gin realized his own soul sought to escape this service. So he fashioned a body for himself, manipulating the glass surface of the mirror that was him and forming into a being. Shaped like the form he had come to know from 100 years of reflecting it back at them. Gin took the form of a human.
Demo:
Spoiler (Click to Show)
Walden, it seemed, had been changed by the tournament. He didn’t trust in the honor of his fellow man, and had paid for security to guard him during his stay. Even so, Gin found the mooks his target’s prey had purchased to be amusingly inadequate. As he approached each, he turned to face them, reflecting their faces back at them. And then their reflection spoke to them in words only they could hear. Words reassuring them of his intentions. That he was a guest, and an expected one at that. Yes, the one you had overheard being spoken of on the phone. Of course it’s me, and you know it is. Oh, to hell with your commander’s orders. He’s a fool, and you and I both know it.
Then there was the door, a much more daunting challenge. It stood, silent and unyielding, and Gin wondered if, perhaps, it would eventually grow to join him as an artifact spirit. Looking around, he found that such was unlikely. Everything, here, was much too modern. There were less of his kind every day, and the steady march of progress, he felt, was to blame.
Gin pressed on the door and, to his surprise, it opened. Perhaps this door was already on its way after all, and it was on his side. There, on a hospital bed, was the recovering man. Soon to be the dead man.
“What might you be?” The words made it apparent that Walden had no clue about Gin or his purpose for being in the room. Three steps, which was all it took for the towering mirror-man-construct to get close enough to look Walden directly in the eyes. There, reflected in the mirror’s face, Walden saw himself. Then he saw his reflection’s mouth move while his own mouth stayed shut, and as he watched the image of his mouth move, his head heard his own voice, speaking words that he did not conjure up.
Only two words were spoken: “Destiny calls.”
Walden, underneath his bed sheets, kept his pistol readied for moments such as this, and he raised it up, firing a shot directly into his own reflected face.
Gin reeled backwards from the impact, and time seemed to slow for a moment. Shards of glass flew through the air, in an elegant pattern. Somewhere, a nurse began to scream. The retort from the pistol reverberated in the room, and in a most unexpected fashion, the howl of wolves was heard.
Four of them pinned Gin against the wall opposite of Walden’s bed, and Gin observed a hundred different, fractured images of Walden sitting up in the bed, sliding his one leg over to the side. He was reloading his pistol, preparing for another shot, perhaps intending to finish what he had started. It wouldn’t work, of course. What was a bullet to Gin, who would not die, now that he finally lived?
More surprisingly to Walden, however, was the fact that his own wolves would not work, either, as the four turned away from Gin, releasing him, and suddenly they turned themselves onto Walden. The duelist’s eyes opened in shock as the pistol was knocked from his hands. The glass about the room came back to structure itself around his face, creating a bug-eyed Walden to be reflected back at him, and Gin knew how to finish the job that so many had failed to do.
Gin’s will was stronger than Walden’s, and so the man was restrained as Gin picked up the freshly-loaded pistol.
“Do you know what’s behind the glass of a mirror?” Walden heard Gin ask, his own voice sounding throughout his skull. The last word that he heard, then, before Gin pulled the trigger, was his own voice answering back: “Silver.”
[/spoiler]
Battles:
Spoiler (Click to Show)
Distracted by the blaze, the man in black saw the glint of sunlight on metal too late, and in the next moment he was falling off of his horse, a longsword protruding from his chest. The man in black was dead before he hit the sand. From the reflection of the blade, Gin waited, then, for what he knew would be coming next. An assassins’ war had finally claimed its first casualty, and the second would be soon to follow. It was just a matter of waiting with the patience that only a thing that felt more like a stone than like any living creature could muster. After all, the assassin would need to confirm the identity of the man he had just slain before he could collect on the bounty he had been offered.
After a time, a shadow fell across the blade that Gin waited within. There the man stood, Gin expected there to be a smirk on his face, and when the man pulled his sword from the man in black’s chest, Gin caught a glimpse of just that. For a moment, Gin knew that he had been scene, but it lasted only a moment, and the man, who he knew was named Ahrim, turned his back.
“Just the sun playing tricks on me. He rode slowly, and this heat’s just causing a few hallucinations,” The words played out through Ahrim’s head, and he found himself nodding in agreement with his own voice. “Besides, I’m Ahrim. Master of the Blade. One of the few who can claim to have survived Walden’s fury. Soon to join the man I just turned away from.”
The voice in his head was his own, but suddenly, in spite of the desert heat, Ahrim felt a chill run down his spine. There was a terrifying presence, now, and as he slowly turned his head to look behind him, he saw the thing that had arrived from nowhere. Gin, the mirror, towered over Ahrim, blocking the sun from his vision. Ahrim's hand grasped the sword, still in the chest of his dead target, but the image reflected in the mirror made no such action. Instead, it sneered, watching the man.
"What do you think you're going to do with that?" The voice didn't come from the reflection, even as its mouth moved, but it echoed throughout Ahrim's skull. "I know what you're going to do with that, of course. You think that I'm like that man, there. Flesh and blood. Weak. Something that your blade can even damage. Even if you were right, even if I could be harmed by your blade, it would make no difference. You are weak. You are flesh and blood. You are like that man, there. I have given you enough time to make your peace."
The Mirror's body seemed to ripple, and what had once been a glass hand seemed to fracture within itself. The pieces did not fall, but rather they seemed to move themselves by magic to form a long blade, like that of Ahrim's own sword.
"So, then, it seems you have a tradition of sheathing your blade in the flesh of others. I shall continue your tradition."
--
Ahrim couldn't find an opening to strike at. Every move that he made, Gin knew and preempted. The difference was that while Ahrim's arm began to burn, Gin's never slowed for even an instant. It was somewhere into the redirection of his own blade that Ahrim realized something about his opponent, that he seemed unwilling to take a direct hit. Of course, Ahrim rationalized, whatever it might b