Kyubey

Persona Record: Magi Arena - Chapter 1 (Supporting)

**Kyubey** is an Incubator, also known as a Messenger of Magic. It grants normal girls' wishes in exchange for their souls. This is Incubator Normal Version.

## Biography

Kyubey is a creature who makes contracts with young girls to turn them into "magical girls" so that they can fight witches. In this process, the girl makes a wish and Kyubey grants it, but in return, the girl's soul is put in a small gem, which is also the source of their magic. If destroyed, the magic will disappear and the girl will die. If it is corrupted with darkness from grief, the gem will turn into a grief seed and the girl will turn into a witch. This is the ultimate fate of all Magical girls.

Much like the rest of its race, Kyubey does not possess any human emotion. As seen in a later episode, Kyubey refers to magical girls' bodies as empty shells while explaining why Sayaka "died" when separated from her soul gem. This may also be why Homura Akemi got angry when Madoka Kaname threw it. Kyoko Sakura claims that it tricked and turned them into zombies, though it wasn't its intention. It believed that it was doing a good thing, seeing as it was convenient that they were invincible.

Despite its emotionless attitude, it apparently likes hot baths and human food. It is also able to bleed, though it can reproduce its body and eat the old one. This body reproduction ability can be used whenever Kyubey's body is too damaged to be used or simply at an inconvenient state. (For example, is shown covered in bullet holes from being shot at.) It has an unlimited amount of these extra "bodies" that could be used, but it says that it would be more convenient to not use them so much.

## Appearance

Kyubey is a small, cat-like creature. It has white fur and four ears, one pair representing the average cat and the other similar to those of a rabbit's. It has red eyes and golden rings around its long ears. At the bottom of the ears, it appears that it is separated into three, along with a pink-white fade and three red ovals. These ears seem to be what turns the girls into magical girls, as seen when it makes Sayaka Miki's gem. It has a large tail and pointy ears, the inside of them being pinkish peach color. On its back is a Hot pink egg shape that can flip open to remove grief seed fragments.

## Personality

Despite appearing and sounding somewhat human, Kyubey is an Incubator and has no personal understanding of human emotion. Despite appearing as an individual, Kyubey and the rest of the Incubators do not seem to have a distinct sense of self. On the occasions where a Kyubey is killed, another will step out and continue to converse as if nothing had occurred.

The Incubators are an emotionless race, but seek to exploit the thermodynamics-violating emotions of the human race to produce energy and prevent the Heat Death of the Universe, the ultimate end of the universe itself. The fact that the system they use to harvest this power-- Magical girls and Witches-- would be considered horrendously evil by humans is inconsequential to the Incubators. They choose this method because it is the most expedient to their goals. No action they take is ultimately malicious, as they do not themselves experience or understand the emotions required to act in such a way. Everything about Kyubey, however, is implied to make it as appealing as possible to the Magical Girls, as well as emulating behaviors and 'emotions' for the same purpose. It is unknown if this body is the natural form of the Incubators, or simply a puppet used to interact with humanity.

This lack of understanding ultimately results in Kyubey being unable to predict or understand the actions of the Magical Girls or the results of those actions, despite them being obvious to the girls themselves.

## Abilities

Kyubey has a wide variety of magical abilities which he uses in his mission to counteract entropy. They are listed below

* **Telepathic Communication:** Kyubey communicates with potential and contracted Magical Girls through telepathy, as opposed to verbally. He is able to use himself as a medium through which non-contracted girls can communicate to each other or contracted Magical Girls.
* **Vision Sharing:** Kyubey can share visions of sights and sounds with potential and contracted Magical Girls.
* **Selective Invisibility:** Kyubey is invisible to everyone except for Magical Girls and girls with sufficient magical potential. Normal humans do not notice his presence at all, just as he does not seem able to communicate with them.
* **Wish Granting:** Kyubey can grant wishes to those with magical potential, no matter how wild and unrealistic they may be. However, this process is limited by the karmic potential of a contractee, and insufficient karmic power may result in negative or unintended side-effects, such as lack of power control or a wish that cannot be properly or completely executed. Kyubey himself has no control over *how* a wish is interpreted, and seems to be unable to refuse or revoke a wish once a proper one has been made. However, there have been shown to be some exceptions to what he can grant, unlimited by a girl's karmic potential, such as if a wish is for something that does not exist (for example, wishing to visit a fictional location).
* **Soul Gem Creation:** Kyubey is capable of creating a small egg-shaped gemstone called a Soul Gem for each Magical Girl ; he does this by pulling the contractee's soul out of their body and forming it into their Soul Gem. As such, this results in temporal pain on the contractee while the contract is made. This makes the newly formed Magical Girl capable of transforming and using magic, as well as increased agility, strength and pain threshold, at the expense of the soul being separate from the body and thus controlling it externally, akin to a puppet.

* **Soul Gem Stimulation:** Kyubey can create impulses of certain feelings on a soul gem simply by touching it.
* **Energy Conversion/Collection:** Kyubey is able to collect emotional energy from Witch transformation, and Doppel summoning. As explained in Magia Record, Kyubey does not need to be in proximity to a Witch formation or the summoning of a Doppel to obtain its energy, as he collects it even while he cannot enter Kamihama City. This implies that the collection of this emotional energy is an inherent part of either process that he merely facilitates, or that this energy is naturally released into the universe when it is created.
* **Grief Seed Consumption:** Said to be one of Kyubey's "many duties", he can open a hole in the teardrop-like marking on his back to consume Grief Seeds. This permanently destroys the Grief Seed, preventing the Witch within it from regenerating when it accumulates enough taint from a Soul Gem it purifies. It is unclear if he only does this to prevent Witches from reappearing, and thus keeping their population manageable, or if it is part of his process of collecting emotional energy, given he already collects it when Soul Gems become Grief Seeds.
* **Replication:** Kyubeys, or Incubators, are an artificially-created hive-mind/collective that span the universe, looking for people to turn into Magical Girls so as to collect emotional energy and combat entropy. Multiple individuals of his kind, referred to as "terminals", exist simultaneously, and can act, think, and talk independently of each other, but they all retain the same knowledge and memories. Typically, only one Kyubey terminal is primarily active in a given territory at any time, though several are either kept in reserve nearby or are somehow instantly deployed to replace one another if they are killed by some means. So as to save energy, they will consume the remains of their fallen selves when possible.

## Relationship

### Magical girls

Kyubey exchanged covenants and watched all the magical girls fight the witch, even though it had an evil plan to turn Magical Girl into a witch, but sometimes it was a refuge for them.

### Persona-Users

Kyubey became interested in Persona-Users when their powers were as powerful as magical girls, but things they didn't know were coming to them soon.

## Trivia

* Kyubey's speech patterns may have been used to give a "foreign" touch to Kyubey's speech, as this pattern emulates the typical way of speaking in other languages, such as English.
	+ It can also be interpreted as Kyubey treating personal names just as tags for identifying individuals, similar to a social security number.
	+ *Boku* is also used by girls, but this is uncommon in real life. In manga, anime and alike, this is often employed for girls exhibiting "boyish" personality traits. Such girls are called *boku-kko* (僕っ子) a western equivalent is a "tomboy".
* He will often flick his ears or roll around when teasing or being interested.
* The spelling of Kyubey's name in Japanese is peculiar. It uses a mixture of hiragana and katakana, and the long u sound in "Kyu" is marked with a small u (ゥ) instead of a large u (ウ) or dash (ー). Both features are fairly uncommon and non-standard.

* Kyubey's appearance and name share an affinity with Kyuubi, which are mythical Japanese foxes with nine tails. In folklore, Kyubey is known to possess men and have them do the Kyuubi's bidding, a trait identical to Kyubey's desire to collect energy from magical girls.

## Gallery

Moemura and KyubeyKyubey WatchedKyubey is Sleeping