English Name: Su Matin
Mandarin Name: Su Ma Tian : Sù Mǎ tiān : 素螞天
Age:22 23
Birthday: May 6th
Gender: Technically both…? Identifies as male?
Nationality: Chinese (Hong Kong)
Class: Graduate School
Grade: Master’s Student
College Major: Violin
Appearance Description: Matin stands at five feet and three inches tall, with ebony-colored hair and grey eyes with just a hint of green. He is fair-skinned, with long hair that is normally tied into a high pony-tail with a yellow Asian-style braid and takes on a cyan-colored sparkle when exposed to strong light. He has bangs which sweep across his forehead from left to right and the front section of his hair looks a lot like a bowl cut. But it actually isn’t because his hair is too long. Though he looks feminine, people won’t confuse him for a girl anytime soon. Or maybe they can because he’s technically both. It doesn’t really matter, honestly. He constantly smells like sweet peas, all the time. People of all genders tend to find him attractive, which is flattering and also completely accurate but it quickly becomes annoying.
In terms of clothing, Matin tends to wear jackets that in a vaguely military style, and always in black or other dark colors with yellow or gold accents. He always wears high-kneed boots and also always wears a thin gold-chain necklace with a single black pearl the size of a bottle cap.
Personality Description: Matin is basically everything that a person could hope to be. He’s a quick learner with an above average IQ, good at most basic skills, perceptive, well-read, incredibly rich, and generally well respected among his community. He just isn’t very athletic and actually is kind of clumsy but he still bears with it most of the time. Many things come easily to him, which makes him regard life in general as boring. But it is what it is. He is a loner at heart and finds most other people to be annoying because he feels like people will in general always try to take advantage of others. Since he doesn’t want to be the victim, he simply pushes the unnecessary people out. It can be tiring, though, because he’s used to everybody trying to become his friend these days. It always ends in disappointment or jealousy so he might as well quit while he’s ahead. He was bullied a lot when he was younger because he was seen as the weak one of the family but since then, he has happily proved everybody just how wrong they are.
Matin has a soft side, of course, but he’s not nearly idealistic enough to show it around strangers or people that haven’t stuck around him long enough. He tends to snark a lot, even around people he likes but doesn’t really mean anything by it if he likes them. He really only gets upset at the people who deserve it. If he likes you, though, congratulations, you’re special. Or something. He’ll still sometimes have casual relationships here and there but those are likely going to go nowhere and it’ll still be hard to actually get him to open up beyond that.
In addition to being exceptionally smart, Matin is also a musical genius who can almost instantly tell exactly what any note is. Since he’s been studying music from the age of three, this is pretty much expected of him and though he focuses on the violin, he also has proficiency in playing a number of other instruments including the piano. He rarely ever sings but when he does, people are known to fall in love with his voice. That’s why he doesn’t do it.
Matin is rarely ever not confident in himself and sticks strongly to what he believes in. In addition to that, he has strong loyalties to people that he is close to. However, he also likes taking on challenges and generally breaks rules that doesn’t suit him. He isn’t a very patient person at all, either, and would rather get things done right away.
(But okay, seriously, he is an arrogant, childish jerk who tries too hard and has a brother complex. Don’t talk to him about his family unless it’s the general sense. He also tends to freeze up when actually encountering trouble.)
Family Powers: The Su family likes to claim that they are dragons when in reality, they are a family of butterfly-clam hybrids, blessed by the seahorse god with human forms. Every member of the family is born with a pearl in their mouth, which is closely guarded for the rest of their lives because it is the source of their non-species powers and also allows them to live as humans. The pearl can any color and be worn anywhere on the body, as jewelry, a loose stone, or simply partially merged with the skin. At normal size, these pearls will be large enough to fit comfortably in the palm of the hand and tend to grow as their owners do. However, they can also be shrunken down at will, to about the size of a bottle cap instead. The pearls can be destroyed through magic or stolen. If one is separated from its owner for more than an hour, the owner will lose their human form and individual powers within the hour, unless the pearl can be retrieved. The Su family has been able to pass these off as dragon pearls thus far.
However, every member also has an innate weakness to two objects –shucking knives and any kind of net. Being caught by a net pretty much negates any of their individual powers but does not get rid of their human form. It does put them in a daze for the entire time they are under the net, though, plus half an hour afterwards. Being netted is traumatizing. Not even hairnets are safe.
Matin’s true form, when it materializes, is more or less the same as his human form, only made of the same substance that can be found on the shell of an oyster. This is harder than his human skin and about the same as a rock, more or less. It can be cracked open, revealing his “skin” to be a shell with an inner layer of nacre which is actually fairly strong. A clear, jelly-like substance keeps his organs suspended –the organs look like some sort of cross between a human’s and an oyster’s. If they fall out of his body, he probably wouldn’t immediately die but it would hurt a lot and make him wish he were dead. Smashing him to pieces or drying him out would definitely do it, too.
Somewhere inside of his shell, there might be a certain black pearl which also contains his powers. This form also comes with a pair of very large green and black butterfly wings, specifically from a Chrysozephyrus nishikaze. Though they are strong enough to lift his body and somewhat scaled for protection, they are also very easily torn with sharp objects that get under the scales. The shape of his body can be mildly manipulated –“resting” position is pretty much what a typical closed-valve oyster would like, with butterfly wings attached. It makes sleeping easier. He is able to see by keeping his pearl in one of his eye sockets, because otherwise the sockets are totally sealed over and he is blind in this form. With the exception of his wings, he actually cannot move any of his limbs in this form either.
If somebody attacks him with a knife while he is in his true form, he will instantly die. He doesn’t even get to roll a save, he just plain dies from even the tiniest of scratches. This only works with knives, not swords or files or any other type of bladed weapon. It just has to explicitly be a knife and not a sword filed down to a knife or anything like that. Basically, it had to have been made with the thought in mind that it is indeed a knife.
Animal Speech
Matin is able to communicate with all animals on Earth, as if they were human beings. Common animals are easy but with supernatural animals, he often has translation issues and mixes words up unless that creature is purposely trying to use a normal animal or human language to talk back at him. He is also much better at communicating with aquatic life, small mammals, and insects. With every other animal, it would seem as if they were speaking with an accent. With supernatural animals, the issue would be like speaking different dialects.
Flight
Matin is able to materialize a set of wings and fly. He can only fly as high as his body can take, because of the temperature and thinning oxygen. He can fly much faster than he can run, so about the speed of a car. He can also fly without the wings, which is really useful because he hates having them out. If he doesn’t have them out, however, then his flight speed is about the same as his running speed. These are always out in his true form.
Nacre Production
Because he is actually an oyster-butterfly creature, Matin sometimes produces pearls. This happens about once every few weeks. In his human form, he normally ends up literally coughing them up. The pearls tend to be bigger in his true form but that just means that there is even more urgency to get them out because if he goes back to being human, he’ll have an apple-sized rock in his lungs. In the week or so leading up to him having to expel a pearl, he appears to spontaneously develop asthma. Being in polluted areas will cause him to form pearls faster.
Underwater Breathing
Matin is able to breathe underwater, in any type of water. This is because he is descended from clams and clams can survive underwater.
Individual Powers: The greatest enemy of any valved creature is the shucking knife. As an apology to the family, the seahorse god has granted certain members with the knowledge of how to harness the power of their most despised foe, as well as many other bladed weapons. This also helps with cutting annoying nets. At all times, Matin carries both a shucking knife and a sword. The sword is pretty much only for decoration and has only one purpose, even though he knows how to kind of use it in a real fight. Because he’s Asian. Surely they all know how to use swords. (He knows how to swing it. What are tactics. And form.)
Flying Swords ‘R Us
Matin can stand on the sword and make it fly to other places. This way, he can bring other people with him, but only as many that the sword is big enough for. Basically, only one other person because Matin likes actually having space to balance. Two, if people are feeling brave enough to piggy-back each other. But not on him because he will throw them off. The sword has the some atmospheric limitations as his normal flight but also travels much, much faster. It can go up to two hundred miles per hour. He just. Needs to learn how to keep his balance better. And landing. What is landing. Most of the time, his landing involves the sword veering right into the ground and smashing the person in front of him into a bush. He could probably do better if he weren’t in such a rush. Also, he can just float to safety himself so. Well, he’s sure that the other person (coughshisdogcoughs) would be fine anyways. He could use other swords for this, too, but since those will probably be of different size and weight, it would take some getting used to. In comparison with Matin’s own height, this sword goes to about his hip.
Shucking Knife of Doom
THE SHUCKING KNIFE. This knife is (not) literally Satan. It is a straight blade about as long as his forearm, hilt and all. The flat of the blade is an inch wide and it’s fueled by the hatred of generations of the Su family and only works when in Matin’s hands. Matin can summon this shucking knife from a distance up to twenty feet away. The flat of the knife can be used to deflect any physical or magical attack, as long as it actually manages to make contact with said attack. Spoiler: Matin has no reflexes. He needs no reflexes. He has a dog for that. The actual blade is capable of cutting magic itself, with the catch that he has to find the magic first and does not have any sort of ability to actually let him see magic. Unless it’s something really obvious like a fireball, he needs to actually sit down and do research. Or throw somebody else in the way.
Matin is capable of cutting away charms, curses, and various types of enchantments, thus disabling their effects. However, he is not responsible for any sort of backlash from randomly severing things he has no real working knowledge of. He can’t cut magic that somebody is actively trying to use at a particular moment and he can’t cut out somebody’s own magic. And yes, his own knife can be used against him. Way to go, seahorse god. This is why the knife comes with a sheath.
Biography: A long time ago, a butterfly fell in love with an oyster. Though the waves kept them apart, the butterfly was persistent in its feelings. Everyday, it would fly over the place that the oyster had hooked itself to. Though the butterfly would often try to break through the water and join the oyster under the sea, the waves would always drive it back. As this happened, the oyster became more and more curious about this creature on the other side of the waves. Most times, only its shadow was visible but when the sun shone down fully, the oyster could see the color of its wings. By the butterfly’s determination, the oyster came to fall in love with it.
Soon, however, the butterfly had become very old, because butterflies are not long-lived. Too tired to venture across the sea one day, the butterfly rested on some rocks by the shore. After some time had passed, a dog came bounding out of the water, shaking droplets from its fur. The dog was a kind soul, so seeing that butterfly there, it asked it what was wrong.
The butterfly told the dog what it had been doing so long and, with a vague hope, asked the dog if it had ever been to the bottom of the sea. After a thought, the dog said that it had not but surely could if it tried. Optimistic now, the butterfly asked it if it could swim down to the oyster and give it a message.
The dog agreed and so a line of communication was set up between the butterfly and the oyster and the two fell madly in love.
However, under the sea, there was a god of seahorses who watched the exchange jealously, having fallen in love with the oyster a long time ago. Impatient to get its rival out of the way, the seahorse god tricked the butterfly into driving into the waves, pretending that it would clear them to allow it to be with the oyster. Horrified by the butterfly’s death, the oyster became reclusive, refusing to ever open its shell ever again. Eventually, it simply died of starvation, despite the seahorse god’s efforts.
The dog, angered by the senseless deaths, confronted the seahorse god under the sea but found the seahorse god to already be remorseful, though still not quite understanding of what it had done. The dog demanded that the seahorse god make amends but unable to comprehend, the seahorse god put the matter off, pondering it for years.
Finally, when the dog itself was also old and ready to die, the seahorse god came to a decision. It took the souls of the butterfly and the oyster and gave them human shells. Because of the dog’s loyalty, it transformed it into a human retainer for the couple, though it remained an elderly being. The seahorse god then granted the three with a set of scrolls before disappearing back into the sea, never to be seen again.
This was the sort of family that Matin was born to. The Su family lives right on the bay in Hong Kong, in an ancient seafront compound that has belonged to them for hundreds of years. It’s kept invisible to normal people through magic and even people with powers can’t see or get through it (though they can feel that something is there) without permission.
Matin was the fourth child of the family head’s firstborn son, with his eldest brother being nearly twenty years his senior and the two brothers in between them deceased. From an early age, it was clear that Matin was not like the other children of the family. For one, he took to the family’s magic quickly and was soon able to do things that nobody else could. He still had to suffer from the same weaknesses as the rest of his family members but despite that, he still managed what nobody else had done before –he deciphered one of the untranslatable scrolls that the seahorse god had originally gifted the family. To this day, he will say that he simply “had a feeling.” It’s because of this that Matin has the ability to cut away magic but nobody else in his family does.
However, because of an accumulation of his poor combat skills plus other people’s jealousy of his talents and rank, Matin was a frequent victim of bullying when he was young. He had no friends growing up as a result, with everybody being chased away. Frustrated at being pushed into what he felt were dead ends, he simply studied and trained harder than anybody else until the point when he could easily outclass all of the other children of the family until the point when he could easily outclass all of the other children of the family (oh, sorry, did I already write that? Whoops.)
However, there was always somebody better in Matin’s mind. His older brother, specifically. It always seemed like his brother was hovering over his shoulder, nitpicking at what he was doing and telling him why he should do this or that or whatever. He resented it growing up but, well, that was his brother. What exactly was he supposed to do about it? Adding to the resentment was the fact that in the face of real danger, it was his brother that everybody trusted to get things done. Matin knew he was perfectly capable of the same thing, and was probably even better, but people seemed to overlook him, either because of his age or something else. It was beyond him, really.
At least his parents were kind of supporting. Kind of. They didn’t really do much, honestly, except die horribly one day when he was just barely in his teens. There had been some sort of accident, apparently, with a nearby spirit and it had retaliated by tearing through their house as if it were made of paper. There almost wasn’t anything left to identify afterwards, which led many to believe, Matin himself included, that his brother had died with them. Nevertheless, the family elders drudged up an investigation to what seemed like a rather open and shut case. They must have actually managed to find something, though, because soon enough, they were all dropping dead like flies. Despite his young age, Matin took it upon himself to find out exactly what was happening. Which he did. All it took were a few broken bones here and there –yeah, all of them were his own.
Abridged version: His brother had faked his death and killed their parents. Upon being confronted, he didn’t even have a good excuse for it, mumbling something about the corruption of the elders and how he had to stop them. Before Matin could do anything else, his brother knocked him out and promptly vanished. There’s more to the story, of course, but Matin’s never told anybody the entire thing because it’s still distressing to think about. By the time that the encounter had happened, however, there wasn’t anybody important left to tell. Almost all of the clan elders had been assassinated in various ways and his remaining close relatives simply didn’t understand. In addition, he suddenly found himself surrounded by a bunch of people who either pitied him or wanted to somehow use him to advance their own positions within the clan.
A lot of stuff also happened later but the end result was that Matin eventually found out that the clan elders had actually been so desperate for power that they had been forcing people to try and decipher the remaining scrolls from the seahorse gods by any means, even summoning demons and trading the souls of others for knowledge. Nobody believed him at first so Matin confronted one of the remaining elders on his own and convinced her to spill everything about their plans. He had the conversation secretly recorded so afterwards, everybody believed him and rose up against the elders. For a while the family was divided between people who disagreed with the elders and people who thought that everything they did was for the greater good of the family’s future. However, one of the elders saw the errors of their ways when none of the others did and killed the remaining ones before killing himself, too, so then everything was okay and their positions all passed to the next group of old people.
Suddenly, though, Matin was the head of the family. He didn’t really know what to do at first but after studying what his parents had done, he managed to improve on the methods of his predecessors and invested a lot of the family’s money into various stocks. This made the family extremely rich almost overnight and everybody trusted his judgment on things after that. The new elders were really worried about him, though, because he was always alone and didn’t let people become close to him. So they opened up one of the seahorse god’s other scrolls and performed an ancient ritual.
And that’s basically how he met the dog. Or, rather, that’s how he was forced to meet the dog. They didn’t really get along at first but that’s kind of the standard with Matin. They eventually managed to get some kind of a decent relationship so that was good. After a few years of serving as the family head, though, Matin got really sick of it so he decided to go to Manta Carlos because the reclusiveness was boring.
Additional Information:
The dog (uh, one of them) mentioned in this app is important. Please consult the birb god Horus.
Most species of oysters are intersex.
The backstory oyster was probably the female, though. Everybody else was probably male, not that it matters.
Matin could probably have kids with anybody, I guess. But his kids would all be oyster-butterfly people.
But seriously, the oyster-butterfly thing is a secret.
Secreeeeeeeeeet.
Don’t give him seafood, okay? That’s cannibalism.
Disclaimer:
I hope that the quality of this app was just as it deserved.
Mandarin Name: Su Ma Tian : Sù Mǎ tiān : 素螞天
Age:
Birthday: May 6th
Gender: Technically both…? Identifies as male?
Nationality: Chinese (Hong Kong)
Class: Graduate School
Grade: Master’s Student
College Major: Violin
In terms of clothing, Matin tends to wear jackets that in a vaguely military style, and always in black or other dark colors with yellow or gold accents. He always wears high-kneed boots and also always wears a thin gold-chain necklace with a single black pearl the size of a bottle cap.
Personality Description: Matin is basically everything that a person could hope to be. He’s a quick learner with an above average IQ, good at most basic skills, perceptive, well-read, incredibly rich, and generally well respected among his community. He just isn’t very athletic and actually is kind of clumsy but he still bears with it most of the time. Many things come easily to him, which makes him regard life in general as boring. But it is what it is. He is a loner at heart and finds most other people to be annoying because he feels like people will in general always try to take advantage of others. Since he doesn’t want to be the victim, he simply pushes the unnecessary people out. It can be tiring, though, because he’s used to everybody trying to become his friend these days. It always ends in disappointment or jealousy so he might as well quit while he’s ahead. He was bullied a lot when he was younger because he was seen as the weak one of the family but since then, he has happily proved everybody just how wrong they are.
Matin has a soft side, of course, but he’s not nearly idealistic enough to show it around strangers or people that haven’t stuck around him long enough. He tends to snark a lot, even around people he likes but doesn’t really mean anything by it if he likes them. He really only gets upset at the people who deserve it. If he likes you, though, congratulations, you’re special. Or something. He’ll still sometimes have casual relationships here and there but those are likely going to go nowhere and it’ll still be hard to actually get him to open up beyond that.
In addition to being exceptionally smart, Matin is also a musical genius who can almost instantly tell exactly what any note is. Since he’s been studying music from the age of three, this is pretty much expected of him and though he focuses on the violin, he also has proficiency in playing a number of other instruments including the piano. He rarely ever sings but when he does, people are known to fall in love with his voice. That’s why he doesn’t do it.
Matin is rarely ever not confident in himself and sticks strongly to what he believes in. In addition to that, he has strong loyalties to people that he is close to. However, he also likes taking on challenges and generally breaks rules that doesn’t suit him. He isn’t a very patient person at all, either, and would rather get things done right away.
(But okay, seriously, he is an arrogant, childish jerk who tries too hard and has a brother complex. Don’t talk to him about his family unless it’s the general sense. He also tends to freeze up when actually encountering trouble.)
Family Powers: The Su family likes to claim that they are dragons when in reality, they are a family of butterfly-clam hybrids, blessed by the seahorse god with human forms. Every member of the family is born with a pearl in their mouth, which is closely guarded for the rest of their lives because it is the source of their non-species powers and also allows them to live as humans. The pearl can any color and be worn anywhere on the body, as jewelry, a loose stone, or simply partially merged with the skin. At normal size, these pearls will be large enough to fit comfortably in the palm of the hand and tend to grow as their owners do. However, they can also be shrunken down at will, to about the size of a bottle cap instead. The pearls can be destroyed through magic or stolen. If one is separated from its owner for more than an hour, the owner will lose their human form and individual powers within the hour, unless the pearl can be retrieved. The Su family has been able to pass these off as dragon pearls thus far.
However, every member also has an innate weakness to two objects –shucking knives and any kind of net. Being caught by a net pretty much negates any of their individual powers but does not get rid of their human form. It does put them in a daze for the entire time they are under the net, though, plus half an hour afterwards. Being netted is traumatizing. Not even hairnets are safe.
Matin’s true form, when it materializes, is more or less the same as his human form, only made of the same substance that can be found on the shell of an oyster. This is harder than his human skin and about the same as a rock, more or less. It can be cracked open, revealing his “skin” to be a shell with an inner layer of nacre which is actually fairly strong. A clear, jelly-like substance keeps his organs suspended –the organs look like some sort of cross between a human’s and an oyster’s. If they fall out of his body, he probably wouldn’t immediately die but it would hurt a lot and make him wish he were dead. Smashing him to pieces or drying him out would definitely do it, too.
Somewhere inside of his shell, there might be a certain black pearl which also contains his powers. This form also comes with a pair of very large green and black butterfly wings, specifically from a Chrysozephyrus nishikaze. Though they are strong enough to lift his body and somewhat scaled for protection, they are also very easily torn with sharp objects that get under the scales. The shape of his body can be mildly manipulated –“resting” position is pretty much what a typical closed-valve oyster would like, with butterfly wings attached. It makes sleeping easier. He is able to see by keeping his pearl in one of his eye sockets, because otherwise the sockets are totally sealed over and he is blind in this form. With the exception of his wings, he actually cannot move any of his limbs in this form either.
If somebody attacks him with a knife while he is in his true form, he will instantly die. He doesn’t even get to roll a save, he just plain dies from even the tiniest of scratches. This only works with knives, not swords or files or any other type of bladed weapon. It just has to explicitly be a knife and not a sword filed down to a knife or anything like that. Basically, it had to have been made with the thought in mind that it is indeed a knife.
Animal Speech
Matin is able to communicate with all animals on Earth, as if they were human beings. Common animals are easy but with supernatural animals, he often has translation issues and mixes words up unless that creature is purposely trying to use a normal animal or human language to talk back at him. He is also much better at communicating with aquatic life, small mammals, and insects. With every other animal, it would seem as if they were speaking with an accent. With supernatural animals, the issue would be like speaking different dialects.
Flight
Matin is able to materialize a set of wings and fly. He can only fly as high as his body can take, because of the temperature and thinning oxygen. He can fly much faster than he can run, so about the speed of a car. He can also fly without the wings, which is really useful because he hates having them out. If he doesn’t have them out, however, then his flight speed is about the same as his running speed. These are always out in his true form.
Nacre Production
Because he is actually an oyster-butterfly creature, Matin sometimes produces pearls. This happens about once every few weeks. In his human form, he normally ends up literally coughing them up. The pearls tend to be bigger in his true form but that just means that there is even more urgency to get them out because if he goes back to being human, he’ll have an apple-sized rock in his lungs. In the week or so leading up to him having to expel a pearl, he appears to spontaneously develop asthma. Being in polluted areas will cause him to form pearls faster.
Underwater Breathing
Matin is able to breathe underwater, in any type of water. This is because he is descended from clams and clams can survive underwater.
Individual Powers: The greatest enemy of any valved creature is the shucking knife. As an apology to the family, the seahorse god has granted certain members with the knowledge of how to harness the power of their most despised foe, as well as many other bladed weapons. This also helps with cutting annoying nets. At all times, Matin carries both a shucking knife and a sword. The sword is pretty much only for decoration and has only one purpose, even though he knows how to kind of use it in a real fight. Because he’s Asian. Surely they all know how to use swords. (He knows how to swing it. What are tactics. And form.)
Flying Swords ‘R Us
Matin can stand on the sword and make it fly to other places. This way, he can bring other people with him, but only as many that the sword is big enough for. Basically, only one other person because Matin likes actually having space to balance. Two, if people are feeling brave enough to piggy-back each other. But not on him because he will throw them off. The sword has the some atmospheric limitations as his normal flight but also travels much, much faster. It can go up to two hundred miles per hour. He just. Needs to learn how to keep his balance better. And landing. What is landing. Most of the time, his landing involves the sword veering right into the ground and smashing the person in front of him into a bush. He could probably do better if he weren’t in such a rush. Also, he can just float to safety himself so. Well, he’s sure that the other person (coughshisdogcoughs) would be fine anyways. He could use other swords for this, too, but since those will probably be of different size and weight, it would take some getting used to. In comparison with Matin’s own height, this sword goes to about his hip.
Shucking Knife of Doom
THE SHUCKING KNIFE. This knife is (not) literally Satan. It is a straight blade about as long as his forearm, hilt and all. The flat of the blade is an inch wide and it’s fueled by the hatred of generations of the Su family and only works when in Matin’s hands. Matin can summon this shucking knife from a distance up to twenty feet away. The flat of the knife can be used to deflect any physical or magical attack, as long as it actually manages to make contact with said attack. Spoiler: Matin has no reflexes. He needs no reflexes. He has a dog for that. The actual blade is capable of cutting magic itself, with the catch that he has to find the magic first and does not have any sort of ability to actually let him see magic. Unless it’s something really obvious like a fireball, he needs to actually sit down and do research. Or throw somebody else in the way.
Matin is capable of cutting away charms, curses, and various types of enchantments, thus disabling their effects. However, he is not responsible for any sort of backlash from randomly severing things he has no real working knowledge of. He can’t cut magic that somebody is actively trying to use at a particular moment and he can’t cut out somebody’s own magic. And yes, his own knife can be used against him. Way to go, seahorse god. This is why the knife comes with a sheath.
Biography: A long time ago, a butterfly fell in love with an oyster. Though the waves kept them apart, the butterfly was persistent in its feelings. Everyday, it would fly over the place that the oyster had hooked itself to. Though the butterfly would often try to break through the water and join the oyster under the sea, the waves would always drive it back. As this happened, the oyster became more and more curious about this creature on the other side of the waves. Most times, only its shadow was visible but when the sun shone down fully, the oyster could see the color of its wings. By the butterfly’s determination, the oyster came to fall in love with it.
Soon, however, the butterfly had become very old, because butterflies are not long-lived. Too tired to venture across the sea one day, the butterfly rested on some rocks by the shore. After some time had passed, a dog came bounding out of the water, shaking droplets from its fur. The dog was a kind soul, so seeing that butterfly there, it asked it what was wrong.
The butterfly told the dog what it had been doing so long and, with a vague hope, asked the dog if it had ever been to the bottom of the sea. After a thought, the dog said that it had not but surely could if it tried. Optimistic now, the butterfly asked it if it could swim down to the oyster and give it a message.
The dog agreed and so a line of communication was set up between the butterfly and the oyster and the two fell madly in love.
However, under the sea, there was a god of seahorses who watched the exchange jealously, having fallen in love with the oyster a long time ago. Impatient to get its rival out of the way, the seahorse god tricked the butterfly into driving into the waves, pretending that it would clear them to allow it to be with the oyster. Horrified by the butterfly’s death, the oyster became reclusive, refusing to ever open its shell ever again. Eventually, it simply died of starvation, despite the seahorse god’s efforts.
The dog, angered by the senseless deaths, confronted the seahorse god under the sea but found the seahorse god to already be remorseful, though still not quite understanding of what it had done. The dog demanded that the seahorse god make amends but unable to comprehend, the seahorse god put the matter off, pondering it for years.
Finally, when the dog itself was also old and ready to die, the seahorse god came to a decision. It took the souls of the butterfly and the oyster and gave them human shells. Because of the dog’s loyalty, it transformed it into a human retainer for the couple, though it remained an elderly being. The seahorse god then granted the three with a set of scrolls before disappearing back into the sea, never to be seen again.
This was the sort of family that Matin was born to. The Su family lives right on the bay in Hong Kong, in an ancient seafront compound that has belonged to them for hundreds of years. It’s kept invisible to normal people through magic and even people with powers can’t see or get through it (though they can feel that something is there) without permission.
Matin was the fourth child of the family head’s firstborn son, with his eldest brother being nearly twenty years his senior and the two brothers in between them deceased. From an early age, it was clear that Matin was not like the other children of the family. For one, he took to the family’s magic quickly and was soon able to do things that nobody else could. He still had to suffer from the same weaknesses as the rest of his family members but despite that, he still managed what nobody else had done before –he deciphered one of the untranslatable scrolls that the seahorse god had originally gifted the family. To this day, he will say that he simply “had a feeling.” It’s because of this that Matin has the ability to cut away magic but nobody else in his family does.
However, because of an accumulation of his poor combat skills plus other people’s jealousy of his talents and rank, Matin was a frequent victim of bullying when he was young. He had no friends growing up as a result, with everybody being chased away. Frustrated at being pushed into what he felt were dead ends, he simply studied and trained harder than anybody else until the point when he could easily outclass all of the other children of the family until the point when he could easily outclass all of the other children of the family (oh, sorry, did I already write that? Whoops.)
However, there was always somebody better in Matin’s mind. His older brother, specifically. It always seemed like his brother was hovering over his shoulder, nitpicking at what he was doing and telling him why he should do this or that or whatever. He resented it growing up but, well, that was his brother. What exactly was he supposed to do about it? Adding to the resentment was the fact that in the face of real danger, it was his brother that everybody trusted to get things done. Matin knew he was perfectly capable of the same thing, and was probably even better, but people seemed to overlook him, either because of his age or something else. It was beyond him, really.
At least his parents were kind of supporting. Kind of. They didn’t really do much, honestly, except die horribly one day when he was just barely in his teens. There had been some sort of accident, apparently, with a nearby spirit and it had retaliated by tearing through their house as if it were made of paper. There almost wasn’t anything left to identify afterwards, which led many to believe, Matin himself included, that his brother had died with them. Nevertheless, the family elders drudged up an investigation to what seemed like a rather open and shut case. They must have actually managed to find something, though, because soon enough, they were all dropping dead like flies. Despite his young age, Matin took it upon himself to find out exactly what was happening. Which he did. All it took were a few broken bones here and there –yeah, all of them were his own.
Abridged version: His brother had faked his death and killed their parents. Upon being confronted, he didn’t even have a good excuse for it, mumbling something about the corruption of the elders and how he had to stop them. Before Matin could do anything else, his brother knocked him out and promptly vanished. There’s more to the story, of course, but Matin’s never told anybody the entire thing because it’s still distressing to think about. By the time that the encounter had happened, however, there wasn’t anybody important left to tell. Almost all of the clan elders had been assassinated in various ways and his remaining close relatives simply didn’t understand. In addition, he suddenly found himself surrounded by a bunch of people who either pitied him or wanted to somehow use him to advance their own positions within the clan.
A lot of stuff also happened later but the end result was that Matin eventually found out that the clan elders had actually been so desperate for power that they had been forcing people to try and decipher the remaining scrolls from the seahorse gods by any means, even summoning demons and trading the souls of others for knowledge. Nobody believed him at first so Matin confronted one of the remaining elders on his own and convinced her to spill everything about their plans. He had the conversation secretly recorded so afterwards, everybody believed him and rose up against the elders. For a while the family was divided between people who disagreed with the elders and people who thought that everything they did was for the greater good of the family’s future. However, one of the elders saw the errors of their ways when none of the others did and killed the remaining ones before killing himself, too, so then everything was okay and their positions all passed to the next group of old people.
Suddenly, though, Matin was the head of the family. He didn’t really know what to do at first but after studying what his parents had done, he managed to improve on the methods of his predecessors and invested a lot of the family’s money into various stocks. This made the family extremely rich almost overnight and everybody trusted his judgment on things after that. The new elders were really worried about him, though, because he was always alone and didn’t let people become close to him. So they opened up one of the seahorse god’s other scrolls and performed an ancient ritual.
And that’s basically how he met the dog. Or, rather, that’s how he was forced to meet the dog. They didn’t really get along at first but that’s kind of the standard with Matin. They eventually managed to get some kind of a decent relationship so that was good. After a few years of serving as the family head, though, Matin got really sick of it so he decided to go to Manta Carlos because the reclusiveness was boring.
Additional Information:
The dog (uh, one of them) mentioned in this app is important. Please consult the birb god Horus.
Most species of oysters are intersex.
The backstory oyster was probably the female, though. Everybody else was probably male, not that it matters.
Matin could probably have kids with anybody, I guess. But his kids would all be oyster-butterfly people.
But seriously, the oyster-butterfly thing is a secret.
Secreeeeeeeeeet.
Don’t give him seafood, okay? That’s cannibalism.
Disclaimer:
I hope that the quality of this app was just as it deserved.