Application Supplement - History
Mar. 14th, 2018 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
diamantThe events of Star Driver take place on an island known as Southern Cross Isle, an isolated place that's only accessible by way of a daily ferry that runs in the mornings to and from the main island of Japan. The island is dominated by a reasonably-sized city with a close-knit community of citizens living in it; it's also self-contained with everything that a city needs to function, such that no one needs to leave the island if they don't want to - there are schools and shops and various trade jobs available, as well as various places like the ice cream parlor for recreation or meetups. Like any normal school, the high school on the island has various clubs established in it (the sports clubs do meets once in a while, the drama club puts on plays, the art club...seems to have, like, one person in it but that's okay); it has a tendency for the classes to develop silly trends among each other, as highschoolers are wont to do, and there are rules in place for the students' safety - namely, don't go into the abandoned gold mine nearby, because it isn't structurally sound and people tend to die down there.
Unlike any normal school, however, a large number of the students there are involved in a massive conspiracy that would probably put the actual Illuminati to shame.
The "abandoned" gold mine that they're all told to keep out of at the start of the school year actually contains the remnants of large, strange-looking structures called Cybodies - when fully functional, they're giant robots that were created by aliens and given to humanity to be used for the benefit of their society. However, humans abused the Cybodies' power and nearly destroyed themselves a few times over, so the Cybodies were eventually destroyed and the remnants of them were buried beneath the island. Furthermore, four seals were put in place to control the Cybodies' power, should they ever be unearthed again - four people known as Shrine Maidens were selected at birth to bear seals, manifesting as marks on their chests, that would keep the Cybodies' true power locked in an alternate dimension known as Zero Time, where they couldn't hurt anybody. As long as all four seals are intact, the Cybodies would be nonoperational; if one were to be broken, either by force or because the Shrine Maiden willingly allowed her seal to be broken, it would grant people the power to use them again, but only in an alternate dimension known as Zero Time. Breaking the second seal would grant the Cybodies greater power within Zero Time and would allow a human to properly sync up with a particular Cybody designated to them by birthright, the third is...poorly-explained but breaking it would lead to another massive power jump, and breaking all four would allow the Cybodies to leave Zero Time and manifest on Earth.
The first time we meet Reiji in the series proper, he's breaking the hell out of the first seal, belonging to the Northern Shrine Maiden.
Reiji, as it turns out, is part of a group known as Glittering Crux - an organization consisting largely of students from the high school whose primary goals are the restoration of the Cybodies buried beneath the island and the breaking of the Shrine Maidens' seals. Their stated aim with this is to use the Cybodies to change the physical and economical landscape of the world, effectively allowing them to rule it to their liking. Glittering Crux consists of six different sections, all consisting of codenamed members wearing gold masquerade-style masks and elaborate black costumes; Reiji (codenamed Head) is the leader of the second section, Vanishing Age, as well as the de facto leader of Glittering Crux until their true leader, codenamed King, can be found and brought into the organization.
Upon breaking the Northern Shrine Maiden's seal, the Cybodies can be accessed by way of a special piece of technology that allows humans to enter the Zero Time dimension and pilot them; piloting them (a process called apprivoise in the series) is something generally reserved for people with a specific birthright that allows them to do it (and grants them at least one reality-bending superpower along the way), but those means can be simulated by way of using the person's mask and...well, more technology, basically. The members of Glittering Crux manage to kidnap the Southern Shrine Maiden to try to break her seal, and then make it safely into Zero Time to watch someone apprivoise for the first time... Only for the process to be interrupted by the new student that just transferred into the high school, Takuto Tsunashi. Takuto announces his intentions to stop Glittering Crux from breaking any more of the seals keeping the Cybodies in Zero Time and save the Southern Shrine Maiden from being used by them. He then reveals his ability to apprivoise naturally, without the usage of technology to assist him, and he summons the Cybody Tauburn into Zero Time to fight the members of Glittering Crux.
This all happens within the first twenty minutes of the show.
The series follows three arcs overall; the first arc follows Takuto getting accustomed to life at the high school and becoming close to a pair of students that take him in and become friends with him, while following a formulaic fight-of-the-week sort of layout as he takes on the lower-ranked members of Glittering Crux to try to prevent them from finding the other three Shrine Maidens and breaking their seals. The second arc follows the Western Shrine Maiden as she realizes her purpose and wants to reject it, to the point of willingly offering her seal to be broken by a member of Glittering Crux that she befriends in her loneliness. The third and final arc reflects the consequences of that decision: Glittering Crux is now closer to completing their goal, and their pilots and Cybodies are intensely more powerful. Vanishing Age collectively steps up as the primary antagonizing force against Takuto; they all approvoise naturally as well, without the usage of technology, and as such any battles with them will end with the death of the pilot - something that provides conflict within Takuto, because while he opposes Glittering Crux and what they're trying to do, he doesn't want any of them to die, either. Eventually he finds a way to pull the pilot out of their Cybody without harming them, but the downside to this is that it still leaves them alive to continue their machinations on the island without really removing the threat. Eventually their leader, King, is found and brought into the group; King's personal Cybody, Samekh, has the potential to rewind and manipulate time at its pilot's discretion, at the cost of the lives of everyone on the planet.
Reiji's personal stakes in the events of the series don't appear to be terribly high at first; he seems casually invested, if not too terribly concerned, with the activities and progress made by Glittering Crux, but he spends most of his time locked in his room in the compound, separate from everyone else. It's revealed that after he broke the Northern Shrine Maiden's seal, he kept her locked in a cage near his bed, where he asks her to tell him stories and sing for him when he can't sleep; he spends a lot of time talking to her, and she tells him a long and involved story about someone who wanted love, but in the end used that love to fulfill his own ambitions, leaving him ultimately empty inside. Reiji becomes irritated with the story and its moral and dismisses her; she leaves the cage of her own volition, showing that it had been unlocked the whole time - she had stayed with him out of love for him, believing she could "save" him before he ended up like the main character in the story she told him every night.
As Takuto begins to get more and more involved in interfering with Glittering Crux, Reiji begins to escalate the attempts to stop him; he eventually fights Takuto personally in his own Cybody, once the second seal is broken and the fights have turned potentially lethal. He does everything in his power to kill Takuto, only to eventually be defeated; Takuto saves his life, as he's saved everyone else's, but destroys his Cybody. Reiji leaves the fight agitated but not altogether deterred, seeming to have a backup plan in mind.
Sometime after this, Reiji is shown to be taking care of a comatose man in his apartment, providing intensive medical care to keep him alive and try to bring him out of the coma; eventually it's shown that this man is Reiji's boyfriend, someone that Reiji manipulated into falling in love with him so that he would transfer his personal birthright and control of a Cybody to Reiji. Unfortunately, before the transfer could be complete, the man fell into a coma for unknown reasons; Reiji has been keeping him alive ever since, in hopes that he'll wake up and complete the transfer. The man is also the person responsible for Reiji's appearance - Reiji appears to be a teenager for the duration of the series, like everyone else (he's actually the art club's one member at the high school), but in reality the man he's caring for transferred part of his birthright's supernatural powers to Reiji, granting him functional immortality and greatly slowed-down aging. Reiji is actually somewhere in his 30s, and - perhaps more pressingly - his name used to be Tokio Tsunashi. Takuto is in fact his illegitimate son, born after an affair Reiji had with his best friend's girlfriend; after Takuto's mother left the island before giving birth to their son, he changed his name to Reiji Miyabi, casting off everything about his old life and deciding to go by the alias he used as an artist full-time.
Reiji eventually becomes aware of Takuto's identity after another member of Glittering Crux sees a specific memento on Takuto's person; he tries to talk to him and convince him to stop what he's doing with regards to interfering, only for Takuto to reveal that he knows who Reiji is and punch him in the face. Reiji decides at that point that Takuto needs to die - he specifies that it's not for punching him (he's surprisingly not that petty) but rather because it's been made clear for him that Takuto isn't going to stop until his goal is reached.
And all of this is more or less the status of things, until two events happen almost simultaneously: the comatose man in Reiji's care comes back around into consciousness, and Reiji finds the individual that would be known to Glittering Crux as King.
Once the comatose man's birthright has been transferred to Reiji properly, he proceeds to leave him entirely, having no further interest in him; meanwhile, King is brought into Zero Time to apprivoise Samekh. The Eastern Shrine Maiden (one of two with her seal still left intact) sacrifices her seal because she believes it's what King would want of her, only for Reiji to interfere with the Cybody he now has control over since receiving the comatose man's birthright. He also makes it clear why he wanted this Cybody in particular: it has the power to control any other Cybody it can hone in on, and with that in mind he proceeds to take over Samekh for himself.
It's then that the crazy starts happening.
When confronted by the rest of Glittering Crux for his actions, he proceeds to scream at them and tell them that he had been using them for his own ends all along; the plan was never to change the world, as far as Reiji was concerned - it was to destroy it, to sacrifice the lives of everyone in it to power Samekh's abilities and allow Reiji to rewind time as he saw fit. He more or less has a meltdown at everyone involved, yelling that he wants to go back to what he had before, to become a "time traveler" that can experience his life over and over again and get back what he lost in his pursuit of power: his time with Takuto's mother and his friendship with his best friend, his relationship with the Northern Shrine Maiden... Takuto and the members of Glittering Crux try to talk him down, telling him that he would be trapped in the past while destroying all possibility of a future for the world, but Reiji refuses to listen - he wants to get back all the love that he'd had then, to regain those feelings and relationships, and he intends to do it by creating "a world of eternal dreams" for him and him alone.
At which point Takuto and the rest of Glittering Crux do the prudent thing and beat the absolute crap out of him.
Takuto doesn't kill Reiji, in the end; he continues to adhere to his standard of "no one dies" and spares Reiji's life, more or less physically tackling him out of his Cybody before it explodes. Reiji doesn't understand why, and that much is made abundantly clear; he's last seen being left in the general care of his best friend, who pretty much just tells him to stay there and let things happen while Takuto goes to disable Samekh. Because, you know, he's still got the world to save and all.
Unlike any normal school, however, a large number of the students there are involved in a massive conspiracy that would probably put the actual Illuminati to shame.
The "abandoned" gold mine that they're all told to keep out of at the start of the school year actually contains the remnants of large, strange-looking structures called Cybodies - when fully functional, they're giant robots that were created by aliens and given to humanity to be used for the benefit of their society. However, humans abused the Cybodies' power and nearly destroyed themselves a few times over, so the Cybodies were eventually destroyed and the remnants of them were buried beneath the island. Furthermore, four seals were put in place to control the Cybodies' power, should they ever be unearthed again - four people known as Shrine Maidens were selected at birth to bear seals, manifesting as marks on their chests, that would keep the Cybodies' true power locked in an alternate dimension known as Zero Time, where they couldn't hurt anybody. As long as all four seals are intact, the Cybodies would be nonoperational; if one were to be broken, either by force or because the Shrine Maiden willingly allowed her seal to be broken, it would grant people the power to use them again, but only in an alternate dimension known as Zero Time. Breaking the second seal would grant the Cybodies greater power within Zero Time and would allow a human to properly sync up with a particular Cybody designated to them by birthright, the third is...poorly-explained but breaking it would lead to another massive power jump, and breaking all four would allow the Cybodies to leave Zero Time and manifest on Earth.
The first time we meet Reiji in the series proper, he's breaking the hell out of the first seal, belonging to the Northern Shrine Maiden.
Reiji, as it turns out, is part of a group known as Glittering Crux - an organization consisting largely of students from the high school whose primary goals are the restoration of the Cybodies buried beneath the island and the breaking of the Shrine Maidens' seals. Their stated aim with this is to use the Cybodies to change the physical and economical landscape of the world, effectively allowing them to rule it to their liking. Glittering Crux consists of six different sections, all consisting of codenamed members wearing gold masquerade-style masks and elaborate black costumes; Reiji (codenamed Head) is the leader of the second section, Vanishing Age, as well as the de facto leader of Glittering Crux until their true leader, codenamed King, can be found and brought into the organization.
Upon breaking the Northern Shrine Maiden's seal, the Cybodies can be accessed by way of a special piece of technology that allows humans to enter the Zero Time dimension and pilot them; piloting them (a process called apprivoise in the series) is something generally reserved for people with a specific birthright that allows them to do it (and grants them at least one reality-bending superpower along the way), but those means can be simulated by way of using the person's mask and...well, more technology, basically. The members of Glittering Crux manage to kidnap the Southern Shrine Maiden to try to break her seal, and then make it safely into Zero Time to watch someone apprivoise for the first time... Only for the process to be interrupted by the new student that just transferred into the high school, Takuto Tsunashi. Takuto announces his intentions to stop Glittering Crux from breaking any more of the seals keeping the Cybodies in Zero Time and save the Southern Shrine Maiden from being used by them. He then reveals his ability to apprivoise naturally, without the usage of technology to assist him, and he summons the Cybody Tauburn into Zero Time to fight the members of Glittering Crux.
This all happens within the first twenty minutes of the show.
The series follows three arcs overall; the first arc follows Takuto getting accustomed to life at the high school and becoming close to a pair of students that take him in and become friends with him, while following a formulaic fight-of-the-week sort of layout as he takes on the lower-ranked members of Glittering Crux to try to prevent them from finding the other three Shrine Maidens and breaking their seals. The second arc follows the Western Shrine Maiden as she realizes her purpose and wants to reject it, to the point of willingly offering her seal to be broken by a member of Glittering Crux that she befriends in her loneliness. The third and final arc reflects the consequences of that decision: Glittering Crux is now closer to completing their goal, and their pilots and Cybodies are intensely more powerful. Vanishing Age collectively steps up as the primary antagonizing force against Takuto; they all approvoise naturally as well, without the usage of technology, and as such any battles with them will end with the death of the pilot - something that provides conflict within Takuto, because while he opposes Glittering Crux and what they're trying to do, he doesn't want any of them to die, either. Eventually he finds a way to pull the pilot out of their Cybody without harming them, but the downside to this is that it still leaves them alive to continue their machinations on the island without really removing the threat. Eventually their leader, King, is found and brought into the group; King's personal Cybody, Samekh, has the potential to rewind and manipulate time at its pilot's discretion, at the cost of the lives of everyone on the planet.
Reiji's personal stakes in the events of the series don't appear to be terribly high at first; he seems casually invested, if not too terribly concerned, with the activities and progress made by Glittering Crux, but he spends most of his time locked in his room in the compound, separate from everyone else. It's revealed that after he broke the Northern Shrine Maiden's seal, he kept her locked in a cage near his bed, where he asks her to tell him stories and sing for him when he can't sleep; he spends a lot of time talking to her, and she tells him a long and involved story about someone who wanted love, but in the end used that love to fulfill his own ambitions, leaving him ultimately empty inside. Reiji becomes irritated with the story and its moral and dismisses her; she leaves the cage of her own volition, showing that it had been unlocked the whole time - she had stayed with him out of love for him, believing she could "save" him before he ended up like the main character in the story she told him every night.
As Takuto begins to get more and more involved in interfering with Glittering Crux, Reiji begins to escalate the attempts to stop him; he eventually fights Takuto personally in his own Cybody, once the second seal is broken and the fights have turned potentially lethal. He does everything in his power to kill Takuto, only to eventually be defeated; Takuto saves his life, as he's saved everyone else's, but destroys his Cybody. Reiji leaves the fight agitated but not altogether deterred, seeming to have a backup plan in mind.
Sometime after this, Reiji is shown to be taking care of a comatose man in his apartment, providing intensive medical care to keep him alive and try to bring him out of the coma; eventually it's shown that this man is Reiji's boyfriend, someone that Reiji manipulated into falling in love with him so that he would transfer his personal birthright and control of a Cybody to Reiji. Unfortunately, before the transfer could be complete, the man fell into a coma for unknown reasons; Reiji has been keeping him alive ever since, in hopes that he'll wake up and complete the transfer. The man is also the person responsible for Reiji's appearance - Reiji appears to be a teenager for the duration of the series, like everyone else (he's actually the art club's one member at the high school), but in reality the man he's caring for transferred part of his birthright's supernatural powers to Reiji, granting him functional immortality and greatly slowed-down aging. Reiji is actually somewhere in his 30s, and - perhaps more pressingly - his name used to be Tokio Tsunashi. Takuto is in fact his illegitimate son, born after an affair Reiji had with his best friend's girlfriend; after Takuto's mother left the island before giving birth to their son, he changed his name to Reiji Miyabi, casting off everything about his old life and deciding to go by the alias he used as an artist full-time.
Reiji eventually becomes aware of Takuto's identity after another member of Glittering Crux sees a specific memento on Takuto's person; he tries to talk to him and convince him to stop what he's doing with regards to interfering, only for Takuto to reveal that he knows who Reiji is and punch him in the face. Reiji decides at that point that Takuto needs to die - he specifies that it's not for punching him (he's surprisingly not that petty) but rather because it's been made clear for him that Takuto isn't going to stop until his goal is reached.
And all of this is more or less the status of things, until two events happen almost simultaneously: the comatose man in Reiji's care comes back around into consciousness, and Reiji finds the individual that would be known to Glittering Crux as King.
Once the comatose man's birthright has been transferred to Reiji properly, he proceeds to leave him entirely, having no further interest in him; meanwhile, King is brought into Zero Time to apprivoise Samekh. The Eastern Shrine Maiden (one of two with her seal still left intact) sacrifices her seal because she believes it's what King would want of her, only for Reiji to interfere with the Cybody he now has control over since receiving the comatose man's birthright. He also makes it clear why he wanted this Cybody in particular: it has the power to control any other Cybody it can hone in on, and with that in mind he proceeds to take over Samekh for himself.
It's then that the crazy starts happening.
When confronted by the rest of Glittering Crux for his actions, he proceeds to scream at them and tell them that he had been using them for his own ends all along; the plan was never to change the world, as far as Reiji was concerned - it was to destroy it, to sacrifice the lives of everyone in it to power Samekh's abilities and allow Reiji to rewind time as he saw fit. He more or less has a meltdown at everyone involved, yelling that he wants to go back to what he had before, to become a "time traveler" that can experience his life over and over again and get back what he lost in his pursuit of power: his time with Takuto's mother and his friendship with his best friend, his relationship with the Northern Shrine Maiden... Takuto and the members of Glittering Crux try to talk him down, telling him that he would be trapped in the past while destroying all possibility of a future for the world, but Reiji refuses to listen - he wants to get back all the love that he'd had then, to regain those feelings and relationships, and he intends to do it by creating "a world of eternal dreams" for him and him alone.
At which point Takuto and the rest of Glittering Crux do the prudent thing and beat the absolute crap out of him.
Takuto doesn't kill Reiji, in the end; he continues to adhere to his standard of "no one dies" and spares Reiji's life, more or less physically tackling him out of his Cybody before it explodes. Reiji doesn't understand why, and that much is made abundantly clear; he's last seen being left in the general care of his best friend, who pretty much just tells him to stay there and let things happen while Takuto goes to disable Samekh. Because, you know, he's still got the world to save and all.
