Go Masayoshi, the Big Brother

[RelentlessImp]

Name: Go Masayoshi
Race: Human, Kozakuran
Class: Warrior Poet Samurai 1/Rogue 3//Yokai Hunter Ranger 4
Age: 42
Gender: Masc, AMAB
Sexuality: Heteroromantic, Pansexual, Monogamous
Current Level: 4

Masayoshi began life as a simple child of a farmer in service to their daimyo in Kozakura, raised on stories of glorious battles of their daimyo's samurai in battle. Early life often found young Masayoshi shirking his duties to play pretend at being a samurai with a stick serving as his katana, battling imaginary foes and, in his mind, being one of the greatest samurai on life. Such fantasies were commonplace; storytellers would not infrequently weave tales of a humble peasant being raised to the status of samurai over a single act of might or humility, after all.

Masayoshi had no idea the price of such fantasies. Everything happened so quickly. Raiding goblins swept across his village, putting houses to the torch and butchering Masayoshi's family before his very eyes. Enraged, young Masayoshi escaped from the goblins just long enough to retrieve a heavy cleaver from the kitchen that his mother had so often used to prepare meat; he'd seen the actions a thousand times before, and he put those commonplace actions to use on the goblins that had slaughtered his family, cleaving skulls and breaking bones.

Of course, he was just one boy, regardless of how filled with rage he was at the goblins taking his family from him. The goblins had the advantage of numbers; for every one of their number he struck down, another took its place, and he was soon in a running fight that ended with him in an alley, the end of which was a building engulfed in flames. Determined to go down with honor, he threw himself at the goblins - who were distracted by the sounds of thundering hooves.

The daimyo's samurai had arrived too late to save everyone, but they rode through the town, their katanas and naginata cutting down goblins with ease. Masayoshi, reinvigorated by the sight of the heroic samurai, hurled himself into the fray of the goblins blocking him from them, yelling to get the samurai's attention, setting the cleaver to swinging. He almost, almost cut himself free of the throng - but then a goblin fist hit him in the kidney, and a blade sliced across his face, blood streaming into his eyes, and he collapsed, winded.

His valiant efforts had drawn the attention of one of the daimyo's samurai, a short, relatively young woman named Arima Azumi, who had heard the boy's shouting and dismounted to approach the throng of goblins from the back. She had seen Masayoshi bravely slicing his way through, and she was cutting her own way into the back of the pack. She reached him as he went down and stood over him, shouting challenges as her twin katanas cut and dipped and sliced in a ballet of death, accompanied by brutal kicks that sent goblins flying into the sky to be sliced in half or booted into the nearest wall or into the street beyond, where they were promptly stomped apart by her horse.

Out of a village of four hundred, barely fifty survived the swift, brutal goblin raid, some having been saved by the samurai and others having defended themselves with crude farming implements. Masayoshi, despite his sliced face, survived his injuries, and his bravery in the face of death had touched Azumi's heart. She took the boy in under her wing as her bushi, and trained him in the art of the samurai as her servant. His grief weighed him down, but the chance to be one of the honorable, noble samurai that stories were told about in service to the daimyo balanced out his grief. He took to Azumi's training and his servitude wholeheartedly, and grew skilled and talented beneath Azumi's tutelage.

At the age of 18, shortly after earning his own katana and wakizashi, he found those idealized dreams of the samurai shattered. Azumi had the heart of a true samurai, but not the will to defy her daimyo, which saw Azumi and Masayoshi, now paired, chasing down escaped criminals. It was hardly an effort to run down a pair of common merchants, but the merchants begged for mercy. They had only stolen rice enough to feed their family after a horrific trading season had left them destitute; seeing the husband and wife huddled terrified before him, shielding their children, broke something in Masayoshi. When Azumi went to strike the killing blow, as ordered, Masayoshi's untested katana tasted her blood, beheading her from behind.

Horrified at his own actions, Masayoshi screamed at the family to flee. He penned a quick message that the criminals had been taken care of and sent it off to the daimyo - and then he shed his blood-soaked trappings of station and buried them and his weapons, and fled from the service he had long admired and now saw as nothing more than the cruel brutality that it was beneath the Shogunate.

He fled from Kozakura entirely, dressing the part of simple farmer once more, and found passage over to T'u Lung to escape the natural justice of his crime, stewed wholly in guilt. He found his way to Xianxing, and drowned his sorrows in the pleasure district in women, opium, and petty brutality enacted on his fellow patrons who couldn't take no for an answer. He became something of a local legend, protector of brothels and opium dens alike, but was in truth little more than a common wastrel with skills beyond his newfound station.

After several years of drunken debauchery, a young Kaijitsu Ameiko sought him out after hearing of his legends after a spectacularly loud row with her father, and tasked him with a job - to accompany her into the wilds of T'u Lung to seek adventure. A large sack of gold stolen from her father's house enticed the former Samurai, and he agreed to her terms. With two others, they set out to adventure, and found mild success, and Masayoshi found a measure of pride in his skills again.

However, in an adventure neither of them will talk about, only Masayoshi and Ameiko survived with tragic fates befalling their two adventuring companions, sending them back to Xianxing after only a year on the road together. Masayoshi, though, reinvigored by the adventures of defending the downtrodden (even going full Seven Samurai with only four of them at one point) decided that drunken debauchery was no longer befitting him. He took on the trappings of a merchant, the lowest social class of Wa, and purchased a caravan with his adventuring gains. He was occasionally joined by Koya Mvashti, a woman of strange descent but hellishly talented with her healing and fortune-telling, on his roamings through T'u Lung and even briefly into Shou Lung, moving goods and occasionally routing bandits, putting his tainted past behind him. He always returns to Xianxiang for the winter to ride out the brutal cold, and with only mild debauchery keeping him warm through the wintry months, mostly at peace with himself for the first time in a very long time.

Edited March 27, 2023 by RelentlessImp (see edit history)