Twenty years ago a child was born in the deep winter of the Dragon mountains who did not cry. He lay clear-eyed and calm while the priest who read the omens proclaimed that the boy would reverse his family's ill fortune — and that the Wrath of the Kami, whose winter eruption is as dependable as the turning of the year, would not wake again within his lifetime. That winter the mountain slept, and it has slept since. The boy grew into a quiet, studious monk of the Togashi Tattooed Order. His name is Norikage.
The Portent
The Togashi are the strangest of the Dragon's families — ascetics and tattooed mystics who follow the enigmatic Kami Togashi, the prophet who excused himself from the Tournament of the Kami by seeing its outcome. Norikage was given to the Order young, marked from birth by a sign the priests could not ignore. Whether the prophecy over his cradle was blessing or burden, he keeps his own counsel; but the mountain's long silence has shaped every year of his life, and the Agasha who watch it have never once been at ease.
The Monk of the Spider
Through the Order's Blood of the Kami, Norikage bears a single mystical tattoo — a spider, worked across both pectorals — that empowers his kihō. When he stops, kneels, and presses his palms to the earth, Earth Needs No Eyes lets him feel the reverberations of everything that moves nearby: the breath of a warrior, the footstep of an ant. He is perceptive only in stillness, and half-blind in motion. When the world knots into a problem he cannot untangle, he may seek Lord Togashi's Insight — a difficulty-two meditation in which, if the Kami wills it, a fragment of a vision arrives to point the way.
He is no warrior. His body is disciplined — fitness honed to a keen edge — but his fists are untrained and his footing in a fight uncertain. His gifts are the meditation hall and the theologian's debate, not the duelling ground. The full account of his rings, skills, and techniques lives on his character sheet.
Sincerity Above All
Norikage holds Sincerity as his paramount tenet of Bushidō and Duty as the least of them — an ordering he has never yet been forced to test, because nothing has ever asked him to be false. He prizes the truth plainly told over the loyal lie. His stated desire is to study theology with the Phoenix, who seem to grasp the elemental imbalance now troubling the land better than anyone in the Empire. His duty is quieter and newer: his lord, a Togashi abbot, has posted him to a shrinking village to watch — to be, for the temple, its eyes and ears.
Those who knew him as a boy called him studious and tangential — the path between one thought and the next opaque to everyone but him. He is calm to a fault, an inadvertent traditionalist who finds new ideas hard to hold even when they intrigue him, and who worries, honestly, about being slow to adjust when the ground shifts. Under stress he does not lash out. He slows down.
The Game of Twenty Questions
The answers that made him, from his character's creation.
Possessions
He travels light, as a monk should: a bō that doubles as a walking staff, common clothes, a traveling pack. He keeps two things closer than the rest — a Jade Tadpole, a small charm given him by the priest who attended his birth, and a green sash worn always on the left arm, whose meaning he has not explained.