Cerealia App
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notsogreedyApplicant Info
◎ Name: Wei
◎ Journal:wei_jiangling
◎ Contact: aim: weijiangling plurk: zeroq1
◎ Current Character(s): None
Character Info
◎ Character's Name: Ankh
◎ Character's Canon: Kamen Rider OOO
◎ Character's Age: Looks young 20's, actually 800-something. He wasn't conscious for most of the 800, and it's never given how long he was actually alive before he got sealed away, so there's no solid answer to this question.
◎ Canon Point: Post-series, before Megamax (+ CRAU from Inugami)
◎ Background/History: Wiki
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? Ankh has a sixth-sense in the particular form of sensing the desires of others. If there is someone around who has some goal in life they desperately want to fulfill, he will notice. That said, he would have no reason to notice a ghost otherwise, and if he did, it would likely seem like the air over there suddenly really wants something, which might be pretty confusing. He probably wouldn't be able to directly communicate. If it was possible to make a Yummy from one, he might be able to talk to it as a representative, though that could easily end up a bit skewed since Yummies are manifestations of the desire itself.
As for hacking technology, it's debatable whether he might have some minor knowledge. He doesn't hack anything in the series, but he does have access to the mind of someone who is both technologically savvy and a police detective, and makes use of that information. Since it doesn't specifically come up in the series, though, I'd guess that only extends to being able to try muddling his way through things where any security is pretty obviously breakable, and not anything more complex than that.
◎ Personality: The Greeed were made 800 years ago to serve a power hungry king in his conquest of the world. Each was made incomplete, and awoke driven by a desire to be whole that could never be fulfilled. They live with limited senses and limited emotions, and try to fill the void by taking from humans all the things they can never truly own. Even amongst themselves, it's a constant battle for the one thing they always need: more.
Ankh is a Greeed, but he's something beyond that. He's the one who learned how to live, and how to be content. He's the Greeed who learned how to be human.
To be fair, at the start of the series, he was just as bad as the rest of them, and he maintains many of those characteristics. It's obvious in the first couple episodes that Ankh has very little reverence for life and all he cares about is getting more medals for himself. One of the first things Ankh did after giving Eiji the power to become Kamen Rider OOO was to stop him from defeating a Yummy that was wreaking havoc, because it hadn't finished growing yet. Though Eiji got his way and ended up taking down the Yummy earlier, Ankh's plan was to let the Yummy consume an entire office building filled with people just so that it would give him that many more medals afterward. Eiji's influence had an effect over the series in this regard, and by the time I'm picking him up from, it's unlikely that he would so happily sit by and watch that kind of destruction, much less cause it. After all, in the end, he did choose to take Eiji's side and protect the world and the people he ended up caring about. That said, Ankh is only protective of the people who matter to him in some way, and while at this point he's not so inclined to put strangers in harm's way, he won't go too far out of his way to help them, either.
Ankh is selfish and conniving and rarely does anything that doesn't benefit him in some way. Everything he does, he calculates. Sometimes it means that he'll do things that put him at a temporary disadvantage so that he'll come out on top later. His decision to let Eiji become OOO in the first place is a perfect example of that. While he initially thought that Eiji would be stupid and easy to push around, that was a snap assessment and there was a risk in giving that kind of power to a complete stranger. As it turned out, Eiji wasn't as dumb as he first looked, but Ankh continued to keep him on his side despite a lot of frustration because having OOO around was useful. (And over time, because he actually cared about the idiot, but I'll get to that later.) The flip side of that is that if you know what drives him, it's relatively easy to talk him into things, provided they aren't going to be too much of a hindrance to him. For example, there's an episode where someone asked him to act in a movie, and his first reaction was to dismiss the idea as a waste of time and start to walk out of the room. But once he found out there were medals in it for him, he not only agreed to do it, but did it with gusto. Likewise, he initially had no interest in Hina's safety, but Eiji talked him into protecting her by offering a year's supply of popsicles. And of course, Hina can get away with almost anything just by grabbing his ear, because she has super strength and it hurts.
He's also rude. The way he speaks is generally impolite, he makes no secret of it when he doesn't like something, and it's habit for him to call people idiots as soon as they do something he doesn't agree with or doesn't understand. When Eiji brought him to live at Cous Coussier where he would be forced to interact with regular human beings who didn't know his origins, he had to make up a cover story about Ankh having grown up in a rough environment in some foreign country, just to sufficiently explain his bad behavior.
Most of the reason for Ankh's calculating, guarded, and prickly nature comes from his background. At the beginning of the show he revived from several centuries of being sealed away in a stone coffin, and prior to that it doesn't seem like he'd had very much interaction with anyone besides the other Greeed and a power mad king. He lived in an environment where it was everyone for themselves, and the one alliance he had made led to betrayal. When the Greeed woke up again, none of them had a full set of their core medals and the first thing any of them did was steal from the others to try get the upper hand. When that's the environment he was used to, it's no wonder that he doesn't let his guard down easily.
Though for all that he's unfriendly and unsociable, it's a little surprising how much so-called stupidity he's actually inclined to deal with, whether that's getting dragged unwillingly into social events, tolerating the owner of Cous Coussier attempting to give him politeness lessons, or letting Eiji push him off a table while scolding him to sit normally. Ankh actually spends many of the less serious moments in the series being the butt of jokes, often involving fairly ridiculous slapstick, and while he's clearly not happy about any of that, he puts up with it, and even decides he misses some of it once he's not there with everyone. (Really, there's a scene where he's thinking he missed the place, and one of the flashbacks that goes along with it involves Eiji carelessly smacking him in the back of the head while he just doesn't bother moving out of the way.) He, of course, would chalk up all of it to needing to stay enough in everyone's good graces so he could hold on to whatever benefits they happened to be providing. But with as many times as he can be seen sitting in the background pretending not to pay attention while the rest of the group engages in whatever antics (usually dragging him in at some point) it's hard not to assume that some part of him just enjoys the company.
And by the end of the series, he really does care. At the start, he was a severed hand with an attitude who took over an unconscious human just so that he'd have a body to work with. But over time, through experiences provided by having that human body to work with and being surrounded by people who are friendly and caring, he becomes increasingly human, himself. While primarily done for self-preservation, taking over the body of the unconscious Shingo was the first step toward Ankh evolving beyond being a Greeed. Greeed have extremely limited senses, and while they can see, hear, and feel, it's all in some muted or distorted form, and the ability to taste is nonexistent. One of the first things he does upon taking over Shingo is to steal some popsicles from a vendor (which Eiji goes back to pay for, because Ankh doesn't understand money and can't be bothered anyway) and talk about how cool and refreshing they are. That's why the aforementioned bargain involving a year's supply of popsicles worked so well; Ankh loves them, and they never stop being novel. Having a human body gives him an entirely different way of perceiving things compared to the other Greeed, and presumably it also gives him some new ways of feeling things, since human bodies tend to react to emotions.
While Shingo's body is what made him physically human, it's his interactions with others that make him become more human in every other way. In the beginning, it's nothing more than an uneasy alliance. Eiji is an idiot who he adopted working with because having OOO as an ally is useful when struggling against the other Greeed, and Hina is nothing more than a hindrance he's forced to deal with because he happens to be possessing her brother's body. Then he spends a lot of time with them, and he gets used to them. Eventually, he starts to understand and even like them. It's not enough to keep him from betraying them and setting off on his own with Shingo's body as a hostage as soon as he gets his full power back, but that's where Ankh's development gets interesting.
Up until that moment, he had assumed that that power was all he wanted and needed. The second he felt strong enough to keep the upper hand in dealing with the others, he went back to the Greeed, looking for an alliance that would work to his ultimate benefit. In short, it's what he would have done at the beginning of the series if he hadn't started off in a bad position... and he doesn't realize until he gets there just how much he's changed in the meantime. At that point, he's become accustomed to a supportive environment where people care about and protect one another. The constant in-fighting amongst the Greeeds as they go about their neverending contest for who gets the most medals stands in sharp contrast, and he immediately decides he hates it. He had been collecting medals for himself, but after witnessing the Greeeds being their greedy selves, he throws those medals back in their faces and stomps off alone.
The other thing that sticks with him from his brief return to the Greeeds is the observation that he had started to think in terms of life and death, while Greeeds, being effectively a pile of medals, aren't alive to begin with. The revelation scares him because he's gotten used to experiencing life like a human, he's grown to enjoy that, and the only reason he can do it is because he's still possessing someone else's body. This leads to confrontations with first Hina, in which he asks her whether she'll allow him to keep her brother's body and she can't tell him anything but no, and then with Eiji, where he just goes in expecting to kill him because he knows he'll have the same answer, and he's the one with the power to do something about it.
Once again, he underestimates how much of an effect all that time spent together had on him. He thinks he's prepared to get rid of Eiji, but even in the face of that it's obvious that Eiji still cares about him, and is even willing to thank him for the things he'd done for him. After he'd already made himself an enemy, that's something he wasn't expecting. It shakes him so much that he loses any resolve he had. Ankh is someone who's conditioned to expect betrayal, to not forgive, and having someone treat him that way is something that he can barely even process.
He can't kill him, and even protects him when Maki, who had been working with the Greeed with a goal of destroying the world, steps in. Very fittingly, as he stops Maki's attack on Eiji and Maki demands to know what he's doing, he responds, rather resolutely, with "I have no idea." While he could be certain that protecting Eiji is right and it's what he wanted to do, the reasons underlying it had become something he didn't fully understand. As mentioned before, Ankh calculates everything he does. Up until that point, his emotions may have played a part in the equation, but they were never the deciding factor. Once they are, he doesn't quite know what to make of it, but that doesn't make him any less sure of his decision in the end.
So when it comes down to it, he cares, and he has cared for a long time by that point, but it's only at the very end that caring starts to be a thing that matters. It's only after that, when Maki has left him with his primary Core Medal broken, that he's willing to admit that he's actually enjoyed the life he had with them, and only when Hina shows concern about him dying that he feels confident in saying he lived.
That brings us back to the point about Ankh being protective of the people who matter. At that point, Ankh didn't have anything left to personally strive for because he had been mortally wounded, and that meant there was nothing getting in the way of his desire to keep Eiji and Hina safe. As soon as Hina found him, he decided to join them again and fight with Eiji one last time, in a battle that was ultimately over the fate of the world at large. When his medal finally broke completely, he stuck around for a moment as a fading spirit to make sure that Eiji stayed alive and tell him he was happy with this conclusion, and to offer Hina a smile that was very much a silent "thank you." They are extremely important to him, much as it took him a long time to realize that and doesn't generally like to admit it.
It's implied in the sequel movie that Eiji eventually manages to put the broken medal back together and bring Ankh back to life. After reviving, he is still basically his usual prickly self, just a little bit all around softer. He looks at the group with a fond smile, and when Hina runs up and hugs him, it takes a second for him to decide to shove her away. At this point, he's also more willing to show visible concern. He had paid attention and tried to keep Eiji out of too much trouble from the beginning, but now he's finally let himself care enough that it actively scares him a little when his friends are in danger. He's still Ankh, though, so as soon as everyone's safe again, he'll be right back to calling them idiots, and of course it's just their imagination if they catch some fondness in the way he says it.
It's also an important side note that Ankh's existence as a Greeed was originally distilled from the essence of birds. Aside from having an arm with a bird on the back of it and big shimmery wings that pop out sometimes, his bird origins color several other things, from the way he moves to certain habits. Like many birds, he's prone to sudden quick movements, tends to lead motion with his head, and carries most of his weight on one foot at a time. He tends to perch moreso than sit, finding either the nearest tree or the highest available place in the room. Where he chooses to sleep is likewise the highest point in the room, and with the way it's covered in a pile of red fabric it's almost like he built a nest up there. When he enters or leaves the room where he lives, it's through the window, not the door (and he lives in an attic). He also was at one point disturbed at having someone offer him chicken as a meal, because eating a cooked bird just seemed wrong (though that didn't stop him from getting irritated enough to take a bite out of the thing anyway).
◎ Powers/Abilities: Being a Greeed comes with a lot of perks. For one, they're just physically stronger than humans, to the point that there's basically no way to defeat them unless someone has a power suit. But beyond that, here are the specifics:
Medals - First of all, Greeeds are made of medals. Core Medals are, as the name implies, the core of a Greeed's existence. They are, essentially, what makes that Greeed themselves. Ankh's Core Medals are red and depict birds (hawk, peacock, and condor, to be specific). The more Cores a Greeed has, the more powerful they are and the more complete they feel. Ankh's consciousness is contained in a single Hawk medal, which broke into two pieces at the end of the series. Cell Medals, the more common and less powerful type, are silver in color and used for a lot of different purposes. Since Ankh is composed of these pieces, he can absorb them into himself or pull them out at will.
Making Yummies - One of the major things Greeeds do with Cell Medals is implanting them in someone with a strong desire in order to let that desire grow out of control. Each Greeed's Yummies work a little differently, and Ankh's tend to exist separately from their host and behave like a bird taking care of their young. They kidnap the host, keeping them in a central location that serves as a nest, while the Yummy goes out to get whatever the host wants and bring it back to them. As with all Yummies, this usually ends up with the host being extremely unhappy with this method of having their desire fulfilled, and of course havoc is wrought when the Yummy is out gathering metaphorical food for its chick. Ankh almost never creates Yummies, being incapable of doing so for most of the series, and only briefly of a mindset to consider it once he became able, but he does have the capability. He might think about it if Cell Medals are needed, because breaking down a Yummy that's grown through fulfilling desires is about the only way to create more of them.
Sensing Desire - In order to create a Yummy, a Greeed must first discover someone with a sufficiently powerful desire. In this particular field, they're a bit psychic. Unable to create Yummies for most of the series. Ankh rarely says anything about this as such, but other Greeeds notice the wishes of their would-be Yummy hosts, and Ankh certainly comments on Eiji having an utter lack of desire. Being creatures made from desire, he can easily notice the presence of a Yummy at a considerable distance, as well as pick out which human is the Yummy's host if he's able to interact with them at all.
Shapeshifting - Being fundamentally a pile of medals, a Greeed's physical appearance is mutable. Ankh's true form is humanoid, but clearly inhuman, with bird-like characteristics. But he can also choose to take on the appearance of any human he sees. Most of the time, he chooses to take the form of Shingo since he got used to that body after possessing him for so long, but he became Eiji once in order to play a trick on an enemy. Even in human form, he often has his true right hand, though he can choose to hide it.
Flight - His Greeed form is based on a bird, so of course he can fly. While he doesn't usually appear to have wings, he can choose to manifest them even while appearing as a human, at which point they will suddenly and dramatically sprout from his back. The wings are translucent and iridescent and give a general impression of being made of light.
Fire - His element is fire, and he can throw fireballs. This one is pretty straightforward.
◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory:
Taka Candroid - Candroids are about what they sound like. They look like soda cans, until they turn into something with mild AI that looks like an animal. This one looks like a hawk. It's particularly good for surveying an area or tracking someone, and can also pick things up and carry them.
Tako Candroid - This one shaped like an octopus. These are good at gripping things and can also spit ink in someone's face. They float, so they can also be used to fly around and look for things like Taka can.
Medal Book - Ankh keeps a book (originally given to him by Hina) with slots to store medals in. It will have one of each of the different Core Medals plus a few Cell Medals. These aren't especially useful to Ankh, since he can't do anything with them other than absorb them, which he won't because 1) using a whole bunch of different Cores is a good way to go crazy and 2) with a human body thanks to being at Inugami he doesn't really need them anymore, anyway. He just likes being the one in charge of the medals so that Eiji doesn't do stupid things with them. The Taka, Tora, and Batta medals are missing, because Eiji keeps those on him.
Taka Medal - In addition to the medals in the book, Ankh has a Taka medal that once contained his consciousness. It broke in half when he died, and Eiji had it repaired while at Inugami. There was something not quite right about the repair, though exactly what was never identified. Presumably his ability to use his powers is tied to the presence of this medal.
Cell Medals - He's not made of medals anymore, but he does still have ways to use them. He'll have a small stock of them, maybe 30 or so, that he can use to fuel his abilities.
Slingshot - A wooden slingshot he got from the school store in Inugami.
Invisibility Compact - A special item he got from the school store in Inugami. It looks like a makeup compact, but when activated causes him (or whoever has it – it's not specifically bonded to him in any way) to become invisible for a maximum of five minutes. It will only work once per day.
CEREALIA-Specific
◎ Element: His canon element is fire.
◎ Sense: Taste. All of the senses are extremely important to him, being a Greeed, but that's the one that specifically came up in the form of an obsession with popsicles. It's also more complex in that it relies on smell and texture as well, so that's probably particularly intriguing.
◎ Seven Character Traits: (determined, resourceful, human) | (selfish, distrustful, devious) + protective once he's decided someone is important enough
Samples
◎ First-Person Sample:
Test Drive
Inugami log
Meme (for the sake of having something here that's not Eiji)
◎ Third-Person Sample:
No one ever looked up.
It was a useful fact that never ceased to amaze Ankh. He might have chalked it up to the way humans were generally inattentive, but it was true even among his fellow Greeed. Wings had always given him a certain advantage, if only when the others were also too distracted to notice shadows.
Not that he had wings, now. But for now he didn't need them. A roof was enough. It was a good place to sit and eat a popsicle on a pleasant day, but more than that, it was a good place to watch everyone else. Today, lacking business at the restaurant, Chiyoko had decided it would be fun to take Eiji and Hina out for a picnic instead. For once, Ankh had managed to disappear before he got dragged into the plans, but that didn't mean he wasn't still idly watching as the others went in and out, repeatedly realizing they had forgotten something.
After what seemed like a stupidly long time spent preparing (first it was napkins someone needed to run back for, then utensils, then, oh, shouldn't we have a blanket to sit on?) the group finally headed off to wherever they had chosen, the women giggling to each other about something Ankh didn't care that he couldn't hear. Eiji hung back, letting the others go ahead until they were nearly out of view.
Then, to Ankh's surprise, he looked directly at him. It seemed he'd been spotted this time, after all.
"Ankh!" He called up with his usual unrelenting cheerfulness, "Why don't you come join us?" Equally predictably, all Ankh did was raise an eyebrow. "Ah, well, I guess it wouldn't really interest you... but it's probably boring always just sitting up there, isn't it?"
"Tch." He looked away, enough of a response to tell the other not to bother. If he had been interested in Hina trying to feed him more poultry, he would have been down there with them already. As much as he chose to watch them from a distance, he wasn't in a mood to be any more involved. Apparently unsurprised, Eiji simply shrugged and walked away, seeming equally cheerful to have had his offer turned down. Ankh couldn't help wondering why he'd tried in the first place.
It then occurred to him that Eiji had just said "always."
He didn't notice how long he'd stared wide-eyed down at the previously occupied ground until the popsicle started melting down his fingers.
(Alternately, if that canon point is too early on and you'd rather a sad thing involving headcanon about Ankh being a ghost hand, you can have this instead.)
◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories? He's coming in after spending a month at Inugami. Prior to getting to Inugami, the last thing he remembered was being dead. When he woke up in an unfamiliar school, he was understandably very confused. He tracked down Eiji, who admitted to having his medal fixed, and both assumed it was because of that that Ankh appeared in the school right then. He was actually pulled in just like anybody else and showed up human because everyone does at first, but the misconception that this was Eiji's fault has never been corrected.
Shortly after he arrived, there was an event (log above) where students were kidnapped and underwent medical experiments. The victims died and were brought back to life as basically zombies. They still had their personalities, but very little sanity to go along with it. When Ankh realised what had happened to Eiji, he wasn't in any condition to do anything about it (thanks to temporary blindness as a side effect of using the invisibility compact for the first time) but once he recovered, he sought out Eiji to confront him. It started as an attempt to keep Eiji from doing things he would regret, like rampaging around the school and probably killing someone, and maybe, as what seemed like a viable option once they started talking, to turn that aggression toward whoever was responsible for the situation in the first place. It ended up with a lot of shouting and fighting and running and accidentally getting deep into the woods where wolves would attack and starting a forest fire. By the end, it was clear that both of them were going to die, whether thanks to fire, wolves, or each other, and Ankh just chose to run, let Eiji chase, and see which of three deaths was going to catch up with him. Technically he accomplished his goal. He hadn't been there long enough to have seen how death in Inugami isn't permanent, but even if it was... The insane state Eiji was in wasn't really living, and as far as Ankh was concerned, he wasn't really supposed to be alive again to begin with. He wasn't happy with how that all played out, but he didn't have any regrets about it, either.
Since he had only been there a month, he was entirely human and had lost all his powers and possessions. It's possible to regain powers and items over time in Inugami (and actually the game close event that happened shortly after the point I'm taking him from allowed everything to be regained at once) so I'm assuming that he got most of his abilities back between there and here, plus the medal book and a pile of Cell Medals. (The other listed items, he either got from Eiji or the school store while he was at Inugami). As such, his powers will be mostly complete, aside from the part where he has a human body as a base now. He can still absorb medals, but he isn't made of them, so he's probably lost the ability to shapeshift to the likeness of other people or just being an arm, though he can still go between his human form and his Greeed form (At this point it most likely functions more like armor made from whatever Cell Medals he has, so if he only has the handful mentioned in the items, this is probably limited to manifesting his inhuman arm; he would need to make a Yummy at some point or find some other source of new medals in order to have his full Greeed body).
◎ Name: Wei
◎ Journal:
wei_jiangling◎ Contact: aim: weijiangling plurk: zeroq1
◎ Current Character(s): None
Character Info
◎ Character's Name: Ankh
◎ Character's Canon: Kamen Rider OOO
◎ Character's Age: Looks young 20's, actually 800-something. He wasn't conscious for most of the 800, and it's never given how long he was actually alive before he got sealed away, so there's no solid answer to this question.
◎ Canon Point: Post-series, before Megamax (+ CRAU from Inugami)
◎ Background/History: Wiki
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? Ankh has a sixth-sense in the particular form of sensing the desires of others. If there is someone around who has some goal in life they desperately want to fulfill, he will notice. That said, he would have no reason to notice a ghost otherwise, and if he did, it would likely seem like the air over there suddenly really wants something, which might be pretty confusing. He probably wouldn't be able to directly communicate. If it was possible to make a Yummy from one, he might be able to talk to it as a representative, though that could easily end up a bit skewed since Yummies are manifestations of the desire itself.
As for hacking technology, it's debatable whether he might have some minor knowledge. He doesn't hack anything in the series, but he does have access to the mind of someone who is both technologically savvy and a police detective, and makes use of that information. Since it doesn't specifically come up in the series, though, I'd guess that only extends to being able to try muddling his way through things where any security is pretty obviously breakable, and not anything more complex than that.
◎ Personality: The Greeed were made 800 years ago to serve a power hungry king in his conquest of the world. Each was made incomplete, and awoke driven by a desire to be whole that could never be fulfilled. They live with limited senses and limited emotions, and try to fill the void by taking from humans all the things they can never truly own. Even amongst themselves, it's a constant battle for the one thing they always need: more.
Ankh is a Greeed, but he's something beyond that. He's the one who learned how to live, and how to be content. He's the Greeed who learned how to be human.
To be fair, at the start of the series, he was just as bad as the rest of them, and he maintains many of those characteristics. It's obvious in the first couple episodes that Ankh has very little reverence for life and all he cares about is getting more medals for himself. One of the first things Ankh did after giving Eiji the power to become Kamen Rider OOO was to stop him from defeating a Yummy that was wreaking havoc, because it hadn't finished growing yet. Though Eiji got his way and ended up taking down the Yummy earlier, Ankh's plan was to let the Yummy consume an entire office building filled with people just so that it would give him that many more medals afterward. Eiji's influence had an effect over the series in this regard, and by the time I'm picking him up from, it's unlikely that he would so happily sit by and watch that kind of destruction, much less cause it. After all, in the end, he did choose to take Eiji's side and protect the world and the people he ended up caring about. That said, Ankh is only protective of the people who matter to him in some way, and while at this point he's not so inclined to put strangers in harm's way, he won't go too far out of his way to help them, either.
Ankh is selfish and conniving and rarely does anything that doesn't benefit him in some way. Everything he does, he calculates. Sometimes it means that he'll do things that put him at a temporary disadvantage so that he'll come out on top later. His decision to let Eiji become OOO in the first place is a perfect example of that. While he initially thought that Eiji would be stupid and easy to push around, that was a snap assessment and there was a risk in giving that kind of power to a complete stranger. As it turned out, Eiji wasn't as dumb as he first looked, but Ankh continued to keep him on his side despite a lot of frustration because having OOO around was useful. (And over time, because he actually cared about the idiot, but I'll get to that later.) The flip side of that is that if you know what drives him, it's relatively easy to talk him into things, provided they aren't going to be too much of a hindrance to him. For example, there's an episode where someone asked him to act in a movie, and his first reaction was to dismiss the idea as a waste of time and start to walk out of the room. But once he found out there were medals in it for him, he not only agreed to do it, but did it with gusto. Likewise, he initially had no interest in Hina's safety, but Eiji talked him into protecting her by offering a year's supply of popsicles. And of course, Hina can get away with almost anything just by grabbing his ear, because she has super strength and it hurts.
He's also rude. The way he speaks is generally impolite, he makes no secret of it when he doesn't like something, and it's habit for him to call people idiots as soon as they do something he doesn't agree with or doesn't understand. When Eiji brought him to live at Cous Coussier where he would be forced to interact with regular human beings who didn't know his origins, he had to make up a cover story about Ankh having grown up in a rough environment in some foreign country, just to sufficiently explain his bad behavior.
Most of the reason for Ankh's calculating, guarded, and prickly nature comes from his background. At the beginning of the show he revived from several centuries of being sealed away in a stone coffin, and prior to that it doesn't seem like he'd had very much interaction with anyone besides the other Greeed and a power mad king. He lived in an environment where it was everyone for themselves, and the one alliance he had made led to betrayal. When the Greeed woke up again, none of them had a full set of their core medals and the first thing any of them did was steal from the others to try get the upper hand. When that's the environment he was used to, it's no wonder that he doesn't let his guard down easily.
Though for all that he's unfriendly and unsociable, it's a little surprising how much so-called stupidity he's actually inclined to deal with, whether that's getting dragged unwillingly into social events, tolerating the owner of Cous Coussier attempting to give him politeness lessons, or letting Eiji push him off a table while scolding him to sit normally. Ankh actually spends many of the less serious moments in the series being the butt of jokes, often involving fairly ridiculous slapstick, and while he's clearly not happy about any of that, he puts up with it, and even decides he misses some of it once he's not there with everyone. (Really, there's a scene where he's thinking he missed the place, and one of the flashbacks that goes along with it involves Eiji carelessly smacking him in the back of the head while he just doesn't bother moving out of the way.) He, of course, would chalk up all of it to needing to stay enough in everyone's good graces so he could hold on to whatever benefits they happened to be providing. But with as many times as he can be seen sitting in the background pretending not to pay attention while the rest of the group engages in whatever antics (usually dragging him in at some point) it's hard not to assume that some part of him just enjoys the company.
And by the end of the series, he really does care. At the start, he was a severed hand with an attitude who took over an unconscious human just so that he'd have a body to work with. But over time, through experiences provided by having that human body to work with and being surrounded by people who are friendly and caring, he becomes increasingly human, himself. While primarily done for self-preservation, taking over the body of the unconscious Shingo was the first step toward Ankh evolving beyond being a Greeed. Greeed have extremely limited senses, and while they can see, hear, and feel, it's all in some muted or distorted form, and the ability to taste is nonexistent. One of the first things he does upon taking over Shingo is to steal some popsicles from a vendor (which Eiji goes back to pay for, because Ankh doesn't understand money and can't be bothered anyway) and talk about how cool and refreshing they are. That's why the aforementioned bargain involving a year's supply of popsicles worked so well; Ankh loves them, and they never stop being novel. Having a human body gives him an entirely different way of perceiving things compared to the other Greeed, and presumably it also gives him some new ways of feeling things, since human bodies tend to react to emotions.
While Shingo's body is what made him physically human, it's his interactions with others that make him become more human in every other way. In the beginning, it's nothing more than an uneasy alliance. Eiji is an idiot who he adopted working with because having OOO as an ally is useful when struggling against the other Greeed, and Hina is nothing more than a hindrance he's forced to deal with because he happens to be possessing her brother's body. Then he spends a lot of time with them, and he gets used to them. Eventually, he starts to understand and even like them. It's not enough to keep him from betraying them and setting off on his own with Shingo's body as a hostage as soon as he gets his full power back, but that's where Ankh's development gets interesting.
Up until that moment, he had assumed that that power was all he wanted and needed. The second he felt strong enough to keep the upper hand in dealing with the others, he went back to the Greeed, looking for an alliance that would work to his ultimate benefit. In short, it's what he would have done at the beginning of the series if he hadn't started off in a bad position... and he doesn't realize until he gets there just how much he's changed in the meantime. At that point, he's become accustomed to a supportive environment where people care about and protect one another. The constant in-fighting amongst the Greeeds as they go about their neverending contest for who gets the most medals stands in sharp contrast, and he immediately decides he hates it. He had been collecting medals for himself, but after witnessing the Greeeds being their greedy selves, he throws those medals back in their faces and stomps off alone.
The other thing that sticks with him from his brief return to the Greeeds is the observation that he had started to think in terms of life and death, while Greeeds, being effectively a pile of medals, aren't alive to begin with. The revelation scares him because he's gotten used to experiencing life like a human, he's grown to enjoy that, and the only reason he can do it is because he's still possessing someone else's body. This leads to confrontations with first Hina, in which he asks her whether she'll allow him to keep her brother's body and she can't tell him anything but no, and then with Eiji, where he just goes in expecting to kill him because he knows he'll have the same answer, and he's the one with the power to do something about it.
Once again, he underestimates how much of an effect all that time spent together had on him. He thinks he's prepared to get rid of Eiji, but even in the face of that it's obvious that Eiji still cares about him, and is even willing to thank him for the things he'd done for him. After he'd already made himself an enemy, that's something he wasn't expecting. It shakes him so much that he loses any resolve he had. Ankh is someone who's conditioned to expect betrayal, to not forgive, and having someone treat him that way is something that he can barely even process.
He can't kill him, and even protects him when Maki, who had been working with the Greeed with a goal of destroying the world, steps in. Very fittingly, as he stops Maki's attack on Eiji and Maki demands to know what he's doing, he responds, rather resolutely, with "I have no idea." While he could be certain that protecting Eiji is right and it's what he wanted to do, the reasons underlying it had become something he didn't fully understand. As mentioned before, Ankh calculates everything he does. Up until that point, his emotions may have played a part in the equation, but they were never the deciding factor. Once they are, he doesn't quite know what to make of it, but that doesn't make him any less sure of his decision in the end.
So when it comes down to it, he cares, and he has cared for a long time by that point, but it's only at the very end that caring starts to be a thing that matters. It's only after that, when Maki has left him with his primary Core Medal broken, that he's willing to admit that he's actually enjoyed the life he had with them, and only when Hina shows concern about him dying that he feels confident in saying he lived.
That brings us back to the point about Ankh being protective of the people who matter. At that point, Ankh didn't have anything left to personally strive for because he had been mortally wounded, and that meant there was nothing getting in the way of his desire to keep Eiji and Hina safe. As soon as Hina found him, he decided to join them again and fight with Eiji one last time, in a battle that was ultimately over the fate of the world at large. When his medal finally broke completely, he stuck around for a moment as a fading spirit to make sure that Eiji stayed alive and tell him he was happy with this conclusion, and to offer Hina a smile that was very much a silent "thank you." They are extremely important to him, much as it took him a long time to realize that and doesn't generally like to admit it.
It's implied in the sequel movie that Eiji eventually manages to put the broken medal back together and bring Ankh back to life. After reviving, he is still basically his usual prickly self, just a little bit all around softer. He looks at the group with a fond smile, and when Hina runs up and hugs him, it takes a second for him to decide to shove her away. At this point, he's also more willing to show visible concern. He had paid attention and tried to keep Eiji out of too much trouble from the beginning, but now he's finally let himself care enough that it actively scares him a little when his friends are in danger. He's still Ankh, though, so as soon as everyone's safe again, he'll be right back to calling them idiots, and of course it's just their imagination if they catch some fondness in the way he says it.
It's also an important side note that Ankh's existence as a Greeed was originally distilled from the essence of birds. Aside from having an arm with a bird on the back of it and big shimmery wings that pop out sometimes, his bird origins color several other things, from the way he moves to certain habits. Like many birds, he's prone to sudden quick movements, tends to lead motion with his head, and carries most of his weight on one foot at a time. He tends to perch moreso than sit, finding either the nearest tree or the highest available place in the room. Where he chooses to sleep is likewise the highest point in the room, and with the way it's covered in a pile of red fabric it's almost like he built a nest up there. When he enters or leaves the room where he lives, it's through the window, not the door (and he lives in an attic). He also was at one point disturbed at having someone offer him chicken as a meal, because eating a cooked bird just seemed wrong (though that didn't stop him from getting irritated enough to take a bite out of the thing anyway).
◎ Powers/Abilities: Being a Greeed comes with a lot of perks. For one, they're just physically stronger than humans, to the point that there's basically no way to defeat them unless someone has a power suit. But beyond that, here are the specifics:
Medals - First of all, Greeeds are made of medals. Core Medals are, as the name implies, the core of a Greeed's existence. They are, essentially, what makes that Greeed themselves. Ankh's Core Medals are red and depict birds (hawk, peacock, and condor, to be specific). The more Cores a Greeed has, the more powerful they are and the more complete they feel. Ankh's consciousness is contained in a single Hawk medal, which broke into two pieces at the end of the series. Cell Medals, the more common and less powerful type, are silver in color and used for a lot of different purposes. Since Ankh is composed of these pieces, he can absorb them into himself or pull them out at will.
Making Yummies - One of the major things Greeeds do with Cell Medals is implanting them in someone with a strong desire in order to let that desire grow out of control. Each Greeed's Yummies work a little differently, and Ankh's tend to exist separately from their host and behave like a bird taking care of their young. They kidnap the host, keeping them in a central location that serves as a nest, while the Yummy goes out to get whatever the host wants and bring it back to them. As with all Yummies, this usually ends up with the host being extremely unhappy with this method of having their desire fulfilled, and of course havoc is wrought when the Yummy is out gathering metaphorical food for its chick. Ankh almost never creates Yummies, being incapable of doing so for most of the series, and only briefly of a mindset to consider it once he became able, but he does have the capability. He might think about it if Cell Medals are needed, because breaking down a Yummy that's grown through fulfilling desires is about the only way to create more of them.
Sensing Desire - In order to create a Yummy, a Greeed must first discover someone with a sufficiently powerful desire. In this particular field, they're a bit psychic. Unable to create Yummies for most of the series. Ankh rarely says anything about this as such, but other Greeeds notice the wishes of their would-be Yummy hosts, and Ankh certainly comments on Eiji having an utter lack of desire. Being creatures made from desire, he can easily notice the presence of a Yummy at a considerable distance, as well as pick out which human is the Yummy's host if he's able to interact with them at all.
Shapeshifting - Being fundamentally a pile of medals, a Greeed's physical appearance is mutable. Ankh's true form is humanoid, but clearly inhuman, with bird-like characteristics. But he can also choose to take on the appearance of any human he sees. Most of the time, he chooses to take the form of Shingo since he got used to that body after possessing him for so long, but he became Eiji once in order to play a trick on an enemy. Even in human form, he often has his true right hand, though he can choose to hide it.
Flight - His Greeed form is based on a bird, so of course he can fly. While he doesn't usually appear to have wings, he can choose to manifest them even while appearing as a human, at which point they will suddenly and dramatically sprout from his back. The wings are translucent and iridescent and give a general impression of being made of light.
Fire - His element is fire, and he can throw fireballs. This one is pretty straightforward.
◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory:
Taka Candroid - Candroids are about what they sound like. They look like soda cans, until they turn into something with mild AI that looks like an animal. This one looks like a hawk. It's particularly good for surveying an area or tracking someone, and can also pick things up and carry them.
Tako Candroid - This one shaped like an octopus. These are good at gripping things and can also spit ink in someone's face. They float, so they can also be used to fly around and look for things like Taka can.
Medal Book - Ankh keeps a book (originally given to him by Hina) with slots to store medals in. It will have one of each of the different Core Medals plus a few Cell Medals. These aren't especially useful to Ankh, since he can't do anything with them other than absorb them, which he won't because 1) using a whole bunch of different Cores is a good way to go crazy and 2) with a human body thanks to being at Inugami he doesn't really need them anymore, anyway. He just likes being the one in charge of the medals so that Eiji doesn't do stupid things with them. The Taka, Tora, and Batta medals are missing, because Eiji keeps those on him.
Taka Medal - In addition to the medals in the book, Ankh has a Taka medal that once contained his consciousness. It broke in half when he died, and Eiji had it repaired while at Inugami. There was something not quite right about the repair, though exactly what was never identified. Presumably his ability to use his powers is tied to the presence of this medal.
Cell Medals - He's not made of medals anymore, but he does still have ways to use them. He'll have a small stock of them, maybe 30 or so, that he can use to fuel his abilities.
Slingshot - A wooden slingshot he got from the school store in Inugami.
Invisibility Compact - A special item he got from the school store in Inugami. It looks like a makeup compact, but when activated causes him (or whoever has it – it's not specifically bonded to him in any way) to become invisible for a maximum of five minutes. It will only work once per day.
CEREALIA-Specific
◎ Element: His canon element is fire.
◎ Sense: Taste. All of the senses are extremely important to him, being a Greeed, but that's the one that specifically came up in the form of an obsession with popsicles. It's also more complex in that it relies on smell and texture as well, so that's probably particularly intriguing.
◎ Seven Character Traits: (determined, resourceful, human) | (selfish, distrustful, devious) + protective once he's decided someone is important enough
Samples
◎ First-Person Sample:
Test Drive
Inugami log
Meme (for the sake of having something here that's not Eiji)
◎ Third-Person Sample:
No one ever looked up.
It was a useful fact that never ceased to amaze Ankh. He might have chalked it up to the way humans were generally inattentive, but it was true even among his fellow Greeed. Wings had always given him a certain advantage, if only when the others were also too distracted to notice shadows.
Not that he had wings, now. But for now he didn't need them. A roof was enough. It was a good place to sit and eat a popsicle on a pleasant day, but more than that, it was a good place to watch everyone else. Today, lacking business at the restaurant, Chiyoko had decided it would be fun to take Eiji and Hina out for a picnic instead. For once, Ankh had managed to disappear before he got dragged into the plans, but that didn't mean he wasn't still idly watching as the others went in and out, repeatedly realizing they had forgotten something.
After what seemed like a stupidly long time spent preparing (first it was napkins someone needed to run back for, then utensils, then, oh, shouldn't we have a blanket to sit on?) the group finally headed off to wherever they had chosen, the women giggling to each other about something Ankh didn't care that he couldn't hear. Eiji hung back, letting the others go ahead until they were nearly out of view.
Then, to Ankh's surprise, he looked directly at him. It seemed he'd been spotted this time, after all.
"Ankh!" He called up with his usual unrelenting cheerfulness, "Why don't you come join us?" Equally predictably, all Ankh did was raise an eyebrow. "Ah, well, I guess it wouldn't really interest you... but it's probably boring always just sitting up there, isn't it?"
"Tch." He looked away, enough of a response to tell the other not to bother. If he had been interested in Hina trying to feed him more poultry, he would have been down there with them already. As much as he chose to watch them from a distance, he wasn't in a mood to be any more involved. Apparently unsurprised, Eiji simply shrugged and walked away, seeming equally cheerful to have had his offer turned down. Ankh couldn't help wondering why he'd tried in the first place.
It then occurred to him that Eiji had just said "always."
He didn't notice how long he'd stared wide-eyed down at the previously occupied ground until the popsicle started melting down his fingers.
(Alternately, if that canon point is too early on and you'd rather a sad thing involving headcanon about Ankh being a ghost hand, you can have this instead.)
◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories? He's coming in after spending a month at Inugami. Prior to getting to Inugami, the last thing he remembered was being dead. When he woke up in an unfamiliar school, he was understandably very confused. He tracked down Eiji, who admitted to having his medal fixed, and both assumed it was because of that that Ankh appeared in the school right then. He was actually pulled in just like anybody else and showed up human because everyone does at first, but the misconception that this was Eiji's fault has never been corrected.
Shortly after he arrived, there was an event (log above) where students were kidnapped and underwent medical experiments. The victims died and were brought back to life as basically zombies. They still had their personalities, but very little sanity to go along with it. When Ankh realised what had happened to Eiji, he wasn't in any condition to do anything about it (thanks to temporary blindness as a side effect of using the invisibility compact for the first time) but once he recovered, he sought out Eiji to confront him. It started as an attempt to keep Eiji from doing things he would regret, like rampaging around the school and probably killing someone, and maybe, as what seemed like a viable option once they started talking, to turn that aggression toward whoever was responsible for the situation in the first place. It ended up with a lot of shouting and fighting and running and accidentally getting deep into the woods where wolves would attack and starting a forest fire. By the end, it was clear that both of them were going to die, whether thanks to fire, wolves, or each other, and Ankh just chose to run, let Eiji chase, and see which of three deaths was going to catch up with him. Technically he accomplished his goal. He hadn't been there long enough to have seen how death in Inugami isn't permanent, but even if it was... The insane state Eiji was in wasn't really living, and as far as Ankh was concerned, he wasn't really supposed to be alive again to begin with. He wasn't happy with how that all played out, but he didn't have any regrets about it, either.
Since he had only been there a month, he was entirely human and had lost all his powers and possessions. It's possible to regain powers and items over time in Inugami (and actually the game close event that happened shortly after the point I'm taking him from allowed everything to be regained at once) so I'm assuming that he got most of his abilities back between there and here, plus the medal book and a pile of Cell Medals. (The other listed items, he either got from Eiji or the school store while he was at Inugami). As such, his powers will be mostly complete, aside from the part where he has a human body as a base now. He can still absorb medals, but he isn't made of them, so he's probably lost the ability to shapeshift to the likeness of other people or just being an arm, though he can still go between his human form and his Greeed form (At this point it most likely functions more like armor made from whatever Cell Medals he has, so if he only has the handful mentioned in the items, this is probably limited to manifesting his inhuman arm; he would need to make a Yummy at some point or find some other source of new medals in order to have his full Greeed body).
