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Arashi was born in 1666, the third year of the reign of Emperor Reigen, during the Edo period in Japan, just outside of the capital. From his early life until his death in 1690, he was part of a group of traveling performers who moved from place to place, entertaining the citizens that would otherwise refuse to breathe the same air. Although vagrants such as actors and wandering bards were considered to belong to the outcast group known as hinin (a derogatory term literally meaning "non-human"), the time of Ukiyo ("Floating World") saw a mixing of the classes, allowing the performers a bit more interaction with the higher classes than they would otherwise have endured. Arashi was a naturally gifted performer who often played female roles thanks to his particularly feminine appearance, and he became the leader of the traveling troupe at a fairly young age.

In 1690, Arashi was abducted by a Wild vampire and turned against his will. His sire was a psychopath who turned new vampire children and kept them for the purpose of having a victim that would never die, until he took the extra effort to kill them; for decades he kept Arashi trapped and tortured him with grisly methods, feeding him just enough to keep him conscious, if not coherent. His escape was mostly luck; a perfectly timed moment of either conserved survival instinct or insane desperation allowed him to free himself and attack his sire. Arashi severed his captor's head and threw his heart into a fire.

It didn't take long for the Japanese coven to pick up the stumbling, blood-drenched lunatic off the dirty nighttime streets of Edo. Arashi was dragged before the Master council, where his history was opened up and his crime revealed; a vampire killing his sire is a nearly unforgivable crime. At this point, Arashi was stark raving mad himself, even when he was properly fed; however, the Japanese Master defended him, saying that because Arashi's master was not only a Wild but a psychotic killer who tortured him for decades, the circumstances justified the murder. The Master vampires agreed to spare Arashi from execution only if he could successfully undergo psychological treatment from Jingfei, the Chinese Master with a gift for deep telepathy.

This treatment essentially amounted to a mental overhaul to restore Arashi to his original mental health, and took 100 years to complete fully. Although it appeared to be successful, the substantially enigmatic nature of the mind made a permanently positive diagnosis impossible; there was always the chance that lingering traces of his master were left behind, indelibly embedded upon his psyche, and would reveal themselves in time. No coven was willing to accept responsibility for Arashi, even the Japanese Master, and the end result was his exile, limited to controlled regions of the world lest he be classified as a Wild and hunted down.

Arashi has not returned to Japan since the death of his sire. He knows there is the slim possibility that he has vampire siblings elsewhere in the world, if any of his sire's earlier victims managed to escape and survive, but he has neither the inclination nor the desire to find them. For a long time, that same sense of self-preservation that saved him in Edo was the only thing that kept him from walking into the sun. Fortunately, although he considers his days of performing to have died when he did, his knack for leadership and recognizing talent in others impressed a demon, who gave Arashi a permanent job as the talent manager of his underworld nightclub, Necropolis.

Nowadays, Arashi lives for his job, and his supernatural coworkers seem determined to like him despite his poisonous personality. Because if the world's going to hurt him, he intends to deserve it...

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twisted little star, darker shining » 嵐

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