[attr="class","header2"]APPEARANCE

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Tobias Murakami had a tumultuous early life. The illegitimate child of esteemed opera singer Claudia Germanotta and her lover and local politician, Dr. Makoto Murakami. The two met at an after-party and, after one escapade, Claudia became pregnant. Fearing for his reputation, Makoto urged his lover to abort the pregnancy, but Claudia refused. She would bring her child into this world and raise him on her own, with or without Makoto's help.

Claudia took a hiatus from performing during Tobias's first two years of life, bonding with her infant son. They lived modestly, surviving on her savings. She continued to rehearse until Tobias was old enough to travel. Then, the two of them traveled the world together as Claudia performed for crowds across the globe. Young Tobias was raised with a love of the theater, particularly opera– he loved the costumes that his mother always wore, loved listening to her sing.

His life was not without its troubles– being young and beautiful, Claudia continued to be quite active in the party scene. Sometimes Tobias was tended to by babysitters, but sometimes young Claudia forgot, and Tobias was left to his own devices.

It was a blissful but short-lived lifestyle. Claudia fell gravely ill while on-tour. As her health took a dire turn, she contacted Makoto, fearing for her son's well-being. Tobias never knew what his mother had said to his father in their numerous conversations– but, in her final days, she revealed to Tobias that he'd be staying with his estranged father until she got better.

That was the last that Tobias saw of her. He was eight years old at the time.

The transition into his new life was a difficult one. Makoto Murakami and his wife had two children of their own, both Tobias's senior. They all collectively seemed to deign the boy's presence there. Tobias, beset by grief, proved a difficult child, too. Denial gave way to sorrow and fury, but he had no one to turn to for help navigating those emotions. His mother was all he had ever had, and now he had no one.

Additionally, as he was catapulted into the public school system, his complete unfamiliarity with Japanese alienated him from his peers. He was big for his age, filled with confusing emotions, and he had strange hair and pale eyes.

In this time of great stress, his quirk emerged. One day, when another classmate pushed the boy too far, Tobias lashed-out against them. Golden magma burbled from his skin, burning him and the grass around him. As his fury mounted, the eruption accelerated, fully engulfing the child. Tobias blacked-out, and didn't come-to until he was extinguished by the fire department. The playground had been decimated. And Tobias– now locked in a fiery shell– was the clear culprit.

He was expelled, sent to a school for troubled children–for, despite Tobias’s protests, the school administrators and his parents had believed his destruction to have been voluntary.

It was at this school where Tobias began to flourish. In the throes of the Quirk Rights Movement, and with many parents of the era being products of the Vigilante era and earlier, many of the children there were simply kids with quirks that their parents didn’t know how to manage. Perhaps it could have been considered a predecessor to a “hero” school, although it did still serve unquirked children. It also focused predominantly on managing one’s powers and psychiatric health. Here, Tobias learned Japanese, received counseling for his grief and anger, and began to understand his quirk. He learned that his quirk was spurred by spikes of emotion, and could usually reduce the damage done by calming himself down. He still struggled to fit-in due to his appearance and stature, but he found his own niche of classmates to run around with.

The Murakami's did the bare minimum for Tobias, only permitting him to visit during holidays, but otherwise pretending the boy did not exist– frankly, Tobias dreaded the holidays as much as they did, and found every excuse to avoid visiting them. The rest of his adolescence passed with relative normalcy– from elementary school to junior high, then from junior high to high school.

His progress in learning to control his quirk in elementary school and junior high school allowed him to be unenrolled from the troubled school– but, not wanting anything to do with Makoto’s illegitimate son, Tobias was sent directly to the JGSDF High Technical School– a high school that acted as a precursor to joining the Japanese military. Tobias excelled there. He was a bright boy with a powerful quirk who thrived in the structure that military school provided him.

Immediately after graduation, Tobias joined a covert governmental unit that specialized in investigations of high-level villainous threats– and subsequently covertly neutralized them by any means necessary, whether by arrest or execution. While the young man enjoyed the investigative work–finding small bits of information here-and-there in order to intuit answers– the executions never sat right with him. Though Tobias never did the killing himself, his quirk often sparked the flames that burned away the evidence and made the villain’s disappearance look like an accident. The guilt of being even loosely involved would often turn his stomach.

Six months ago, Tobias was sent on a mission that would change the course of his life forever. They were targeting the Kanzaki-kai, a gang in Japan that focused primarily on smuggling illicit items and dealing them to elite’s internationally. For a long time, Tobias’s unit had been tracking Kanzaki-kai, and they had gained information that the group would be striking a new deal with another gang in a week’s time, and that one of the boss’s sons (the third-in-command) would be present for the exchange.

The plan was made and the unit was dispatched the night before the sting operation. The designated time came and went without a single Kanzaki-kai member making an appearance. Unrest rippled through the outfit. Had they been given bad information? Had the Kanzaki-kai changed locations at the last minute, or called the deal off?

It was far worse than that– whoever had given them the information was double-dealing, and the Kanzaki-kai swooped in with hundreds of their loyal yakuza goons, raining an unforeseen attack on the officers present. A chaotic battle ensued. Somewhere in the midst of it all, Hikaru Kanzaki– the youngest son of the gang’s boss– struck Tobias with a close-range, quirk-generated explosion aimed directly at Tobias’s chest.

Any normal person would have died– and Tobias almost did. The force of the blast threw him from his feet, and blood began to seep from his chest-wound. The world around him swam and his vision began to fade. Well… it was a short life, but at least he had done some good, Tobias thought…

As the young man slipped into unconsciousness, his quirk activated in a last-ditch effort to save him, molten gold coating the wounds and sealing them. Tobias was retrieved by someone else from his cohort, and awoke weeks later in a hospital room.

The incident had rendered all of the blood in his circulatory system liquid-gold, giving his body the signature veins that weaved their way all over his body. At the site of the attack, a starburst of gold consumes most of his chest.

After months of rehabilitation and many difficult conversations, Tobias was medically retired from the unit. He still maintains his role as an investigator, but has been shuffled into a public pro-hero position. Due to his continued rehabilitation, he has yet to be cleared for work again.