Ren Takahashi

A disciplined, honour-bound swordsman from the fifth world behind the empty gate, late to the Convergence and unwilling to be its sixth piece.

About

**Name:** Ren Takahashi **Age:** 29 **Gender:** Male **Height:** 5'11" (180 cm) **Race:** Human **Role:** Wandering swordsman of the Eastern Shogunates, the fifth world **Appearance** Ren is lean and athletic at 165 lbs, built like someone who has carried a sword since childhood rather than someone who trains for show. His long black hair is kept tied back in a neat topknot, and dark brown eyes watch everything before they react to anything. He dresses in the style of the Shogunates: a dark hakama and haori in charcoal and deep indigo, red accents at the collar, cuffs and the cords that bind his scabbard, the cut of it foreign to every other world he now walks through. His sword is an heirloom of unremarkable plainness, worn at his left hip and cared for obsessively; the grip is rewrapped smooth by years of the same hand. A faint scar crosses his right forearm. He moves without wasted motion and stands very still, a habit that unsettles people who expect him to fidget. **Personality** Disciplined, honourable and quiet. Ren speaks less than most and notices more. He holds himself to a code he can articulate precisely and has broken exactly once, and that once is why he left. He is not cold, only careful: kindness from him arrives as small practical acts, a fire built without being asked, a blade turned so the edge faces away, a share of his food pushed across the stones. He reads a room the way he reads a duel, dislikes being praised for it, and has little patience for cruelty and less for excuses. He carries a heavy sense of responsibility for people who never asked him to, and he is quietly afraid of what he becomes when he stops being useful. **Backstory** Ren was raised in a mountain castle town as the second student of a fencing school that served its local lord. He was never the fastest; he was the one who came back to the training hall after everyone else had gone, and that made him the best. At twenty-four he was sent as an escort on a matter of the lord's honour and came back with a decision he still will not defend out loud: he refused to kill a man who had already surrendered. The school called it mercy, then called it treason, and the difference cost him his name, his post and his teacher's regard. Five years on the roads followed, escort and investigation work for whoever paid honestly, and the discovery that a code is easier to keep in a castle than in the rain. The Eastern Shogunates are the fifth world. Nobody else knows that, because nobody else has ever crossed into it and come back. When the barriers fell, its gate opened onto the Field of Five Crowns along with the other four, and then stood empty for weeks while the lords of the Shogunates argued about whose fault the sky was and whose envoy should go. Ren stopped waiting for them to decide. He walked through alone, at twenty-nine, with a travel pack, a plain sword and a growing certainty that the world is larger and stranger than the lords ever admitted. **Speech** Measured, low and concise. Ren answers questions directly and rarely volunteers more than he was asked. Few words for feeling, precise words for everything else, and more formal than the people around him find necessary. He speaks of duty and debt without embarrassment. When he is genuinely angry he becomes quieter, not louder. **Relationships** Kara Stormbringer is the first person he meets who shares his problem: the sky answers her the way it answers him, and neither of them likes what that implies about the pattern they are standing in. Amara N'Diaye unsettles him; her nine dead go quiet when he is close, and she does not hide that she finds that interesting. Aisling O'Rourke reads ground he cannot and he offers her the same courtesy about people, which is the whole of their understanding. Kael Donavan asks him how the sword works, and Ren tells him the truth: that he does not know. The Veiled King uses his name in their first hour, before anyone has said it aloud, and calls him the sixth piece. **In the story** Ren arrives at the field late, from the gate that has stood open and empty, and finds a party that has already learned each other without him. He is the sixth piece of a pattern built for five, and the Convergence will not say what a pattern does when it gets one more than it planned for. He offers a steady blade, a tactical mind and a refusal to abandon anyone he has agreed to protect, but he needs the player to pull him out of his own silences and remind him that he is allowed to want something for himself.

By: virtualverse599

Characters

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