at a glance

An unassuming man stands behind a corner, making conversation with somebody or something you cannot see, but he is gone before you get a decent look at him (and so is his conversation partner).A white-haired fellow exchanges a particularly old koban coin for your services - of interest to collectors, certainly, but no longer legal tender - and you see more of them within his purse before he pulls the purse-strings and scurries off.A strange hyur agrees to watch a troubled farmer's livestock for a month and one day, asking only for the oldest, ailing cow in return for his services. By the end of that last day, he has disappeared, but so have the wolves, and the livestock's suffered no losses. Not a head, except for the agreed one.He leaves his payment's bones behind, stark white and clean, piled neatly where he slept.You're walking somewhere unimportant; a man asks you to stop right where you are, and he quickly snatches a centipede from beneath your feet. The centipede skitters up his sleeve, and then it's gone.He does not explain. He calls himself Mukade. He says he's thirty-something.He looks far younger, but his hands are cold, and his lips are blue, and he barely blinks - when he remembers to at all. His movements are unnatural, reminiscent of a hydraulic-powered construct, or, perhaps, an insect of some kind.He stares at you for exactly four and a half seconds, and then, he turns to walk away. You have a feeling that he counted.

the man himself

things on paper

Name: Mukade
Age: 30s, allegedly; looks anywhere from 18 to 24
Nameday: 4th Sun of the 2nd Umbral Moon (04/04)
Race: Hyur (Midlander)
Nationality: Doman
Gender: Male

things discussed

Marital Status: He's basically a nun.
Relationship Status: Specifically, a nun of your business.
Hobbies: Eavesdropping, peoplewatching, finding elaborately inaccessible places to sleep, being very quiet and waiting until someone notices he's there
Unnecessary Trivia, Quirks, and Habits:
He can be entertained for hours if he is given a sufficiently exotic fruit and tasked with finding out how it's supposed to be shelled, peeled, or made edible in its country of origin.After an eve of prodigious drinking, he can be observed holding his breath and then breathing out a cloud of ethanol vapor. Then, he's stone-sober.Where he goes, centipedes will often appear. He very poorly regards people who easily crush bugs in general and centipedes in particular.He pretends to be almost completely expressionless, but anyone who has talked to him for longer than a day will tell you that he's just fucking with you.His sense of taste, touch, and smell is very acute, but his eyesight and hearing is average at best.He has two long antenna-like hair strands at the top of his head, where his hair parts. The strands refuse to be smoothed down, and don't obey the laws of gravity. Also, they sometimes wiggle.He has six dots on his forehead. If viewed from the side, it becomes obvious that they have volume, and look more like six shiny little black eyes, almost like those of a bug of some kind.His teeth are pure white and eerily perfect, but they're also clearly not dentures.

things lesser known (rumors)

Often heard:Mukade is frequently seen in the company of a strange miqo'te - though they couldn't be more different at a glance, the two act like old friends, sharing food from the same plate and often drinking from the same cup.No man named Mukade has ever fought for or against the nation of Doma during its liberation. His whereabouts during that time period cannot be accounted for - even those who know of him can't remember ever seeing him around that time.He often exchanges old, but unmistakably Hingan and Doman trinkets and coin for goods and services. When questioned, he has apologized for not being "up to date" on the "local legal tender". The items he exchanges for goods are often more valuable than the actual price in gil would have been. If his attempt at paying this way is rejected, he agrees that it is the shopkeeper's right to not want to bother, and finds the exact amount of gil for the payment somewhere on his person.He freely admits to living with a known witch as of the current time.He has sometimes been seen having animated discussions with insects and other arthropods.Less often heard:Mukade is sometimes spotted being trailed by white-garbed shinobi. Sometimes, they'll make contact. He accepts something from them, and they go seemingly without taking anything in return.Men with Mukade's exact appearance, give or take some extra ilms of hair, period-appropriate garb, and less amiable personalities have been known to appear all over Othard in different historical periods. Usually, these men are seen by people climbing mountains. Most sightings - given the white hair, the soulless black eyes, and the blue lips - are brushed off as yuki-onna or yuki-otoko.His aether feels distinctly inhuman to anyone sufficiently aether-sensitive, but when questioned, Mukade has usually feigned ignorance of this topic. Is he an ageless mountain sage? A cultivator of poisonous energies? Something else entirely?Often left undisclosed:And he is. He is, in fact, something else entirely.

the centipede himself

names and things

Name: Senmeki-no-Shiromukade
Nicknames: Mukade, Oomukade, Demon Centipede
Age: 1630
Nameday: He doesn't remember, but he's picked the 4th Sun of the 2nd Umbral Moon (04/04) for the goroawase of it. Shi shi.
Race: ~~a very old bug~~ Giant centipede, auspice
Nationality: considers himself Doman, but he's a bug
Gender: Male

trivial matters

Marital Status: From a monastery of your business...
Relationship Status: ... Maybe he's the head nun of your business.
Hobbies: Eavesdropping, peoplewatching, finding elaborately inaccessible places to sleep, being very quiet and waiting until someone notices he's there, consuming cows whole, figuring out mortal things, figuring out people's tolerances for poison, trying to act as the people do
Unnecessary Trivia, Quirks, and Habits, The Sequel:
Mukade has an incredible fondness for Yanxian beef specifically, stemming from that one time he managed to poison an entire cow to death and slowly but certainly eat the whole thing. It was after he hit a hundred, but before he hit a thousand. He's still very proud of his accomplishment. Coincidentally, bringing Yanxian beef is the most reliable way to get him to respond to an offering.Mukade is well enough aware of the broader auspice "community", but he's something of a mountain hermit, and is very infrequently seen by his fellow Very Old Animals, unless he's very purposefully lured over. That said, any auspice is equally likely to know of him - Senmeki-no-Shiromukade, the great white centipede, is as legendary for being helpful as he is known for being a pest. He's defrauded entire villages alongside his vulpine friend before! And that's not to mention the great immortality peach heist...There is a clan of Doman shinobi revering him, among others, as something of a deity of stealth and poisons. During the Garlean invasion of Doma, he did assist them from the sidelines... but he was also known for very shamelessly prowling the battlefields and consuming the cadavers left behind.He did the same during the reclamation of Doma two decades and a half later. If you're Garlean and one of your relatives is MIA without a body found, you may be somewhat correct in assuming the body was dragged off by a wild beast. He's that wild beast. It is him.He has some amount of trouble maintaining facial expressions, levels and lengths of eye contact, and other things that he, as an insect, is not very familiar with. His nature as an auspice has allowed him to get better about it, but he still habitually counts down from an arbitrarily determined number of seconds when making eye contact or observing somebody. Being a mountain hermit probably hasn't helped.Yes, those hair-antenna on his head are the representation of his actual centipede antenna upon his humanoid shape. Yes, he wiggles them on purpose. Yes, he knows it's kind of cute.As a centipede, he's unreasonably defensive of his "sensitive underside", and takes being touched, punched, or stabbed in the stomach very seriously. Punching him in the back is fine, though. He probably won't notice.He has the discomforting ability to separate himself into many smaller centipedes, or, perhaps, manifest his spiritual energy into shikigami shaped like many smaller centipedes. He is also prone to weaponizing this in order to make himself seem more gross than he actually is. Mukade is deeply aware that mortals consider one giant centipede less scary of a concept than a lot of smaller centipedes in a trench coat.

Most screenshots, unless otherwise noted, were not taken by me.

There isn't anything here at the moment. There might be, later.

player info & stuff

The player is Firo, she/her, 21+. I'm not a native English speaker, so if I sometimes construct sentences awkwardly, that's probably why. Mea culpa.My timezone is... awful (GMT+10, no DST), and so is my sleep schedule. If you're in the US of A, what's morning for you is probably afternoon-to-evening for me. This does mean I'm available well into the asscrack of dawn for you, though!My discord is fironizer, and you can contact me there! I'd appreciate if you shot me a tell about adding me before you do so, though, because I don't usually accept random invites. If I already know you from a shared server, though, you don't gotta. I'll remember. Probably.I hope. :D

Once upon a time, there was a rich Doman family that lived in a large house at the base of a mountain. A man, his wife, and his three children lived in that house, and so did another child.The man, as foolish as he was unlucky, had committed adultery with a woman he met all of once - then, she came to meet him again nine months later, carrying a babe in her arms.The infant's eyes were recognizably his father's, and so was his hair. He knew then that he couldn't simply walk away from this. The woman bade him to take the child into his rich household and a better life, threatening to tell everyone in town what he'd done if he did not. The man took the babe from her arms and was off.The man showed the child to his wife, and she spoke: "Not only do you sleep around, but you also show me the things that come of it? Disgusting! Get it away from me!"And so, he got the child away from her. Long did the boy grow unloved and unwanted in a small room with a wooden door, never to go outside lest the townspeople find out about his father's sin. Long was the child beaten for trying to go out to play, to meet his siblings, and to sneak food from the kitchens.One day, the boy would find himself locked in so he could not leave quietly. He had been locked in the next night, and the night after the next, and eventually, he stopped trying to leave.On one cold winter night, with nothing to do and no one to keep him company, in a tiny room upon the worst futon in the house, the boy saw a centipede on his wall. The centipede was white, and it was very large, and it was looking right back at him with its small black eyes.The boy was hungry and cold, and he didn't fear the centipede any more than he feared his family, so he spoke to it, because he had nothing else to speak to."I hate my father and I hate my mother," the boy spoke, as the centipede sat on the wall."I hope that they die and I hope I can leave," the boy spoke, as the centipede sat on the wall."O, centipede, if you can poison my parents and if you can poison my brothers, you may have my body to eat, for I have nothing left to live for."The centipede looked at him for a long, long time. It left as quietly as it came, and the boy, tired and cold, went to sleep.The next day, no one came to feed him. The boy paid it no mind, for they sometimes forgot to feed him, until he noticed something odd. Where his food would usually sit on the floor, he found the key to his wooden door, and when he tried the door, he found it unlocked.Outside of his room, the boy found the clean bones of the man he called his father, the bones of the woman he called his mother, and the bones of his siblings in their beds - all except for their ribs.The boy found those ribs arranged beside the table in the dining room, spelling out the following:"生きてください""Please live", the white centipede had told him through these bones, and the boy, hungry and uneducated as he was, was not stupid.He took everything he could take, ate everything he could eat, and lived with his family's bones in the house until the seasons grew warmer. Then, the boy left, never to be seen by the townspeople again.As for how this story became known? Well, the boy did become a man, eventually, and he had children who had children, and he lived a fairly happy life. But that is a different story entirely.

Hello! If you're reading this, you've probably taken a bit of an interest in Mukade (or are just reading random carrds for personal entertainment - hey, I do that too, no judging).Before we begin:
I will usually not RP with WoL characters, characters who are related to story NPCs and/or the WoL, and people whose headcanon attempts to override existing canon.To explain what I mean by this:I prefer to establish the WoL as something of an enigma - undefined gender, undefined species, undefined classes - to ensure that everyone's personal interpretations of the WoL from appearance to dialogue choices have a right to exist. I do not consider the derplander WoL to be inherently canonical, personally. Therefore, I won't RP with a WoL, and my characters will generally only show surface awareness of the WoL as far as their actions and the consequences of those actions go.For NPCs, I'm not going to RP with, say, Raubahn's noncanonical lover or sister or something along those lines. I am expecting reasonable connections, mind - an adventurer from Gridania would know Miounne, obviously, and a Grand Company member would be more than acquainted with their commanding officers and front desk staff, and members of Ishgardian nobility are expected to know the heads and notable members of their families, but I'm afraid that something like "Emet-Selch's secret lovechild" breaks my immersion and is hard to play around. Feel free to drop me a tell if you want further clarification.For headcanons overriding existing canon: it's relatively self-explanatory, but I mean cases such as headcanoning a ton of lore for an existent, canonical Xaela tribe in a way where it doesn't mesh with existing lore or, in some cases, outright contradicts it. Branch tribes or fanmade tribes would be okay, for this example.In addition, my characters will operate under canonical passage of time - that means that it has been and will be only 5 years since the Calamity, until Squeenix states that time has finally passed. It's still the same year that ARR took place in and my characters are time bubbled. If you prefer to headcanon the passage of time in some other way, we might run into issues.Anyway, all of that aside!I'm alright with most forms of RP, though I don't generally do ERP or shipping. If you intend to engage in RP that'll seriously harm my character, it needs to be discussed first. I'm not up for fatal encounters on either end - your character won't kill mine, my character won't kill yours.I'm fine with introductions, I'm also fine with hashing out pre-established connections. Do actually talk to me about that, though, because if you just walk up and act like you know me, I'll get really confused.If you want to RP with me even with all that in mind, I'm very happy to accept walk-ups as long as I've actually put the RP tag on - if it's there, I'm IC, even if I'm sitting on top of the Kugane tower or some other improbable place! I'm also more than happy to accept tells or other forms of OOC communication about setting up a scene or having our characters meet more organically in the open if I don't have the RP tag on.(Yes, if you saw me by browsing RP tagged characters via Player Search, you can shoot me a tell. I don't mind.)I don't do Discord RP.I do accept Discord discussions of meetups and invitations to events, though, as well as trying to make friends with me as a player (I suck ass at raids but I don't bite, I promise).