Kurobe Chiaki

Kurobe Chiaki is a ghoul and RIFT operative living in the 20th Ward.

## Appearance

Kurobe is rather youthful-looking, appearing to be closer to 15 or 16 than his actual age. His boyish facial features are the biggest contributors to this with his large eyes, rounded face, and full lips. Apart from having larger eyes than most, he is generally indistinguishable from the average Japanese with brown hair and eyes. He keeps his hair fairly short on the back and sides, blended into the slightly longer, messy hair at the top. Most of the time, he wears a rather strange modified turtleneck sweater with the right sleeve missing at the shoulder and the left sleeve long enough to cover half of his hand. This has given him a tan line at his right shoulder. When on official business requiring interaction with clients, Kurobe dresses much more professionally, favoring a light-blue collared shirt with a black studded vest and red tie. Though he looks like he would have no muscle mass whatsoever, he is still capable of meeting the bare minimum of physical requirements needed for a RIFT operative but not much more than that. If he is in a situation where only RIFT or ghouls are present, he likes to keep his kakugan active, believing that it helps him concentrate and heightens his senses further. Due to greater than average use, his kakugan lack the red veins around the eyes typical of most ghouls.

## Personality

Kurobe breaks from the mold of most RIFT operatives in that he has a rather excitable and expressive personality. He almost seems as if he’d be unfit for service in the organization as he is easily distracted, a bit cowardly, and more inclined to smile than frown. One of his favorite things to do is make jokes or pull pranks at others’ expense. When necessary, he can be serious but will promptly drop his business-like mannerisms at the first sign that they aren’t necessary. **This is all a front for a personality that can have displays of emotion but usually restricts itself to flat and detached curiosity. He can fake happiness and comedy easily, but sadness, anger, and other negative emotions are works in progress.**

**It has been revealed that Kurobe is just as racist against ghouls as humans, if not more so. He has an inordinate amount of gratitude towards RIFT for what he perceives as the organization "uplifting" him from his savage roots and giving him purpose. His instinct is to immediately assume the worst of any interactions between ghouls and humans, avoiding personal hypocrisy by judging himself to be "better" than his fellows. Kurobe is one of the rare ghouls that is more comfortable around humanity than around his own kind.**

## Powers and Abilities

**Enhanced smell and hearing:** He can pick out and focus on the voice of a single person in a room with a decent number of people, like a cafe or a small convenience store, as long as it isn’t too loud. He is also capable of picking up scents of individuals in a roughly 20m circle around himself. **He is now able to obtain a rough count of numbers of humans and ghouls in a small room as long as he is present in the room.**

**Reduced appetite:** Unless he gets injured, Kurobe requires very little to eat compared to the average ghoul.

**Fake food eating:** He is remarkably good at faking the consumption of human food. It will still make him as sick as any ghoul, but to any but the most astute observer his eating will be indistinguishable from a human's.

**Combat:**

**Strengths:** Very skilled at running away.
**Weaknesses:** Subpar in just about everything else. Surprisingly unwilling to kill.
## Kagune

**Type:** Bikaku

**Appearance:** His kagune is a single tail, wide and flat, ending in two points like the tongue of a snake. Its surface is covered in patterns of repeating diagonal lines.  **It has evolved a textured surface giving it the ability to adhere to surfaces to a degree, similar in principle to velcro.**

**Strengths:** Its ribbon-like qualities make it on the more flexible side for a Bikaku kagune. Despite how flimsy it looks, it’s quite capable of digging into the sides of buildings or other parts of the environment. Kurobe mostly uses this to move around and escape.

**Weaknesses:** Its thin qualities make it easy to cut. Easily blocked and deflected. Because it’s a rather large tail, it is costly to his stamina to regenerate when damaged.

## Relationships

 Sayuri Kawaguchi | The two are currently dating after meeting in a CCG bar. Kurobe has a strictly professional understanding of their relationship, believing that he is only using her for information. The hints of her past disquiet him, but he doesn't understand why. She has been able to provoke strange reactions from his body like genuine blushing and an uncomfortable warmth in his chest. He chalks this up to being an exceptionally good actor.