OOPS MORE JOJ OCS
info under the cut
originally i was gonna draw suzume’s mom and dad but then it spiraled out of control. the first girl at the top if Kaede Shimabukuro, Suzume’s grandmother and a hamon protege in the small village she lived in. she lived among other hamon users in a secluded village near the coast of japan where those who were born showing great affinity for hamon stayed and those who did not were given away to the greater populace of japan in the form of adoption. Kaede initially saw no problems with this until her twin daughters were separated due to her younger daughter, Hanako, not showing any affinity for Hamon initially. The infant was put up for adoption by the elders of Kaede’s clan and the mother decided to up and leave the clan to track down where her second daughter had gone.
Meanwhile, Hanako had hopped from home to home, having no luck with finding a family to call her own. The girl ended up as a poor street rat for many years before stumbling upon an olden hamon teacher. While initially clueless on what hamon was, it turned out Hanako was gifted from the start, being able to utilize it without much training. It was through this that she learned to pick pocket better and maintain much of her concentration. After being caught pickpocket by utilizing her Hamon, the old teacher decided to give Hanako a chance and offered her to live among the temple he taught at. Hanako became the top student of the temple and was thought to become one of the next teachers. However Hanako decided to leave her life at the temple and return to the greater cities of Japan. It was through this time that Hanako was discovered by her separated twin sister and taken to their mother. It was finally time that Hanako felt that she had a family after all.
Mariko Shimabukuro was a bit of a wildcard, while extremely gifted in Hamon, she didn’t raise a match to the skill and control her sister presented. However Mariko was fine with that, she never really was much interested in the form aside form using it to perform cheap parlor tricks and impress others. Instead, Mariko was more fascinated with traveling the world and seeing what it had to offer before she was forced to settle down and have a family, much like her younger sister had already done. She was an excellent aunt to her three nieces but because she was never home in Japan, she never got to see the munchkins much growing up. However she did send them wonderful souvenirs from her many travels across the globe.
A Pillar man child looked over when Kars and Esidisi slaughtered their clan, Cambera hid in a secluded alcove of the vast underground cave they lived among. For the longest time Cambera lived by herself, having the entrance to this alcove caved in so that she didn't have to live with the scent of decay. The alcove, while smaller than the initial communal cave she lived in, was large enough to house the lone Pillar man. Food was still abudant as she managed to dig herself a new entrance to the surface to feast on the humans at night. Eventually humanity began to catch on that the only Pillar man who seemed to be left was Cambera, and with that they realized they had numbers. They came to chase her out of her cave in the hopes of finally beridding themselves of the Pillar man threat. The humans were initially successful and chased Cambera away into the night, where she eventually settled for a smaller cave. With food no longer abundant, she decided to go into hibernation by merging herself to a wall. And if any human came close due to their curiousity, she would absorb them and eat them. Cambera was eventually discovered by the vampire Arte Popenhagen many years later, in her endless quest to discover how the Stone Masks worked, Arte stumbled upon the small cave in which Arte decided and set off the catalyst to awaken the ancient Pillar man. Initially hostile towards Arte, the two formed an uneasy, but beneficial friendship, with Arte using herself as bait to lure in victims for Cambera, and Cambera providing all the information she knew about the Pillar man and the part the Stone Mask played in their downfall.
The Popenhagen family was a notoriously wealthy family in Britain, with Arte's father being a renowned archeologist, the Popenhagen family had numerous ornamental decorations in their homes recovered from Mr. Popenhagens archeological digs. One of the few that Arte was particularly fascinated by was a stone mask that her father had uncovered from a dig in northern Rome. This fascination turned to obsession as the young Popenhagen was greatly interested in the occult and wanted nothing more than to figure out the usage of the device- as she thought it was something morbid in and of itself, while her father merely wrote it off as some kind of ceremonial garb. Her suspicions became correct as when Arte snuck into her father's study to steal the mask, she cut her finger on the sharp edges of the mask, causing some blood to stain the stone and activate the tendrils hidden within. Now having some sort of idea of what it could be, and convincing herself that the ceremonial part of her father's initial theory could be half true, the young lady of the Popenhagen family turned to using animals as test subjects. She documented the transformation stages as she came to the conclusion that humanity could achieve ascension through the devices- however the only problem was that the transformation- which she has drawn parallels to fictional 'vampires'- had only one flaw: it made the subject vulnerable to sunlight. Every test subject she had whether it was a dog, cat or a horse, all perished in sunlight and desintigrated into dust. Considering her evidence inconclusive to furthering the state of humanity, Arte put her research on hold as she graduated high school and tried to enter college. However to her inevitable surprise, no college seemed to want someone considered a heretic or crazed woman who's entire thesis was on the occult and the theoretical usage of ascending humans to gods via the use of these dug up stone masks. Through grief and perhaps rage, Arte wanted to prove to these college electives- to her father, to everyone that her papers were right, that SHE was right. Arte Popenhagen subjected herself in a live demonstration to the stone mask, which lead to a tragedy that not many could forget. With about twenty eight people dead and Arte no where to be found, the reputation of the Popenhagen family was tarnished and destroyed. However many believed Arte had finally lost her mind and fled, some say they could see her in the windows of the old abandoned estate her family once owned, studying by candlelight and subjecting more and more to her cruel tests to understand, truly, how the Stone Mask worked.
