Eugene Yokugawa | Kousei Kougami

This is my first time playing Kougami and I've still relatively new to DWRP. If you've got any issues you need to bring up with me, please leave them in this handy dandy HMD box. Comments are screened, but anon is turned off.

OOC Information:
Name: Bii
Are you over 15? Twice over!
Contact: AIM grandhighbiichama

IC Information:
Name: originally Kosei Kougami, Eugene Yokugawa after reincarnation
Canon: Kamen Rider OOO
Age: late middle age in canon, 51 after reincarnation
Preincarnation Appearance: HERE YOU GO
Any differences: Sadly, Eugene has way fewer opportunities to wear flashy suits.
Preincarnated History: Eight hundred years ago, there was a king who wanted to become a god. He ultimately failed in this quest, but not before his alchemist created the various Core Medals and through them the Greeed. For a time he ruled over Europe as the Great King OOO, but his unrestrained desires made him go mad with power and he was eventually taken down not by the Greeed but his own ambitions. In the end, the Great King OOO was transformed into a coffin, the Greeed sealed within him.

This coffin came into the possession of the Great King OOO's descendant, a Japanese businessman named Kosei Kougami. Sadly, we don't know much about his childhood in canon, so headcanon will have to fill in: Kosei Kougami had been born wealthy, his family's money a combination of inherited wealth and wealth derived from banking. He was an only child but his father had been a second son, so making sure the family name continued was the responsibility of his cousin. Kougami had been raised on tales of his illustrious ancestor. Because of this he grew up idolizing OOO, fascinated by the power of human desire. Kosei goes into finance, which he is amazingly good at. He's able to grow the wealth he inherited many times over its original sum, which he uses to bankroll archeological digs in Europe and later the Kougami Foundation. On one of those archeological digs he finds the medal coffin. If Kougami marries or has children, it is not shown on the show so I'm going to handwave that he was too busy for that.

Once we get to the events of the show, everything's a lot clearer. There's a really good summary of everything that happens on the show itself on wikpedia. It's pretty long but you can totes skim it if you need to. I'll just go into the things that Kougami is most directly concerned with. Although he never actually fights evil like the Kamen Riders—in fact, he hardly ever leaves his office—it would be pretty accurate to say that Kougami's ultimately responsible for a lot of the stuff that happens. The big old coffin full of medals—all that remained of the first OOO and for the most part the Greeed—was in the back of his museum, after all. The Kougami Foundation bankrolls the medal research that results in the RideVendors, the Candroids, the Purple Core Medals and the Birth Driver (and Birth Prototype)--and in doing so hires the unstable Dr Maki and allows him to create the Purple Medals which would eventually fuel Dr Maki's attempt to destroy the world.

When the Greeed are reborn, Kougami celebrates in his office because if the Greeed are back then OOO can't be far behind. If Ankh hadn't opened the seal on the coffin himself, Kougami had eventual plans to do it himself. After Eiji becomes OOO, Kougami wastes no time in trying to hire him, offering the convenience of the RideVendors and the Candroids in exchange for a certain percentage of the Cell Medals that Eiji and Ankh collect. When Ankh initially refuses, Kougami demonstrates to the Greeed how much he and Eiji need the Kougami Foundation—and then manages to accurately predict the exact percentage of medals that Ankh would eventually agree to give up.

After this, Kougami spends the rest of the series orchestrating events from the comfort of his office and providing support to OOO. He has Dr Maki create the Birth system so that the foundation can have their own homemade Kamen Rider to gather even more Cell Medals. He even ends up being the orchestrator of events that he didn't mean for to happen. When he finds out that Maki's working with Cazari he threatens to sack him, which results in Maki stealing the Purple Core Medals and that results in both Eiji and Dr Maki becoming vessels for those medals—and that ended up leading into the series' endgame. Which Kougami neatly survives (which is more than you can say for Dr Maki) and we know from a later movie that he goes on surviving decades in the future, until he is a very old man indeed.

Reincarnated History: Eugene Yokugawa was born to a pair of Japanese immigrants in the early sixties. His younger brother, Mortimer, was born six years later. The two of them had a fairly normal upbringing and childhood for the time period. They were both clever kids, especially Mort who ended up getting admitted to a special school for gifted children in downtown Locke City. Unfortunately, during Eugene's last two years of high school tragedy struck the Yokugawa family. First Mr Yokugawa suffered a fatal heart attack Eugene's junior year of high school. A few months later, Mrs Yokugawa was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Unfortunately it was in too late a stage to do anything. She was dead within the year.

As Eugene was eighteen by then, he was able to take custody of twelve-year-old Mort so that his younger brother wouldn't have to be shipped back to their relatives in Japan or go into foster care. Unfortunately, this also meant that Eugene's plans for college would be put on hold. Although their parents had left them their savings, there simply wasn't enough money to keep Mort at his gifted school and let Eugene go to college. Eugene decided to sacrifice his future in favor of his brother's, getting a full time job at a local bakery to help support the two of them. This paid off, as Mort eventually became a respected psychologist with a series of fairly successful self-help books. Eugene ended up rising in the ranks of the bakery, eventually becoming manager. When the old owner was ready to retire, Eugene bought the bakery out from him, renaming it to MAGNIFICENT BAKERY.

When Eugene turned thirty, he started going to night school in order to finally get his degree. He and one of his female classmates ended up starting a relationship. She got pregnant and Eugene did the honorable thing of marrying her. Their daughter Rhonda was born not long after Eugene turned thirty-five. A year after that, he graduated from Locke City University with a B.S. in Business Management.

When Eugene was forty-two, he and his wife ended up divorcing, with Eugene ending up with custody of seven-year-old Rhonda. He didn't remarry, instead choosing to raise his daughter with Mort's help. She's sixteen now and goes to school at the public high school. MAGNIFICENT BAKERY is currently thriving, enough so that Eugene has opened a second branch and is thinking of opening a third.

And that's when he ends up joining the secret numbers club!

First Echo: One night while closing at the main store—Eugene likes to work the front sometimes—he sees a black puffy thing (really a Vermini) fly past the windows. Soon after Eugene finds a cell medal in the till while he's counting the money. He's not sure why it looks so familiar or why it's so important that he find more of these and he's really not sure where these numbers in his head came from either.

Preincarnation Personality: Kousei Kougami approaches life with enthusiasm. Some might even say too much enthusiasm. He has a reputation for being a true eccentric in the Japanese business community and after even a single comversation it's easy to see why. Kougami has a tendency to capslock as if he were BRIAN BLESSED, especially around his employees. His absolute favorite word is SUBARASHII--“MAGNIFICENT”--which he will use to punctuate his sentences whenever he thinks he can get away with it. His other favorite phrase is an English one, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” which he will use whenever he gives something to someone or even if he just thinks something counts as a new birth. Kougami is all about births, all about the start of things just like Dr Maki is about the ends of things. He's also all about human desire. He believes that human desire is the purest and most powerful form of energy on the planet, a major player in evolution. His obsession with desire dates back to childhood when he learned the story of the Great King OOO.

He also loves cakes. Really, really loves cakes. Birthday cakes especially. He prepares and bakes them in his office, actually, often while singing along to his recording of the Happy Birthday song. He's dedicated those cakes to various people and concepts: Greeeds, OOO, 60%, the 1000 episode of Kamen Rider. It usually falls to his assistant, Miss Satonaka, to eat those cakes if she isn't delivering them to anyone else.

Kougami is arrogant and self assured, with balls the size of core medals. He's the kind of guy who will send his personal assistant out to greet you carrying a giant cake and a tablet computer and then proceed to inform you over video chat that you that it'd be in everyone's best interest if you went to work for him. He has the confidence in himself to be able to out-haggle a living embodiment of greed. He has absolute faith that his subordinates will enact his desires and their own, ruling the Kougami Foundation like a benevolent shouting king in a colorful suit. And like that king, Kougami lays down the law from high above, but rarely enacts leaves his office to enforce his will, preferring to work through intermediaries like Gotou and Miss Satonaka.

Although Kougami is loud and in-your-face, behind it all he's a remarkably subtle person. He'd have to be in order to manipulate things behind the scenes as well as he does. And he is amazingly manipulative, able to trick Ankh into agreeing on giving up the exact percentage of medals he'd decided on before they haggled. He's clever—wily, even—and always has plans within plans. In fact, the only time you'll ever see Kougami acting serious is when—such as after Dr Maki steals the Purple Core Medal—things have gone so awry that none of his contingencies cover what just happened.

Any differences: Eugene's less arrogant than Kougami. Way less arrogant. He's also less manipulative and controlling. He's not entirely without a certain measure of all three of these qualities (which probably had a lot to do with the divorce), but having been brought down in the world in this incarnation, he doesn't have the power of being a fantastically wealthy business executive to encourage him into the excesses of his canon self. Also, unlike Kougami who stayed in his office and let the Kamen Riders deal with the bad guys, Eugene would actually try to get involved physically involved with the secret number club shenanigans.

Eugene is also way less obsessed with human desire, probably from not having learned the story of Great King OOO at a young age. That's really Mort's thing. Finally, one thing that is way important to Eugene in this life that wasn't when he was Kougami is family. Mort and Rhonda mean everything to him. This is definitely related to him and his brother losing their parents at such a young age. It's made Eugene really possessive of the family he has left.

Abilities: Kougami had no special abilities that we know of in Kamen Rider OOO—or at least, no capabilities beyond that of humans. His ability to plan and manipulate so thoroughly is special in its own way, but it doesn't count for thing sort of thing, I don't think. Neither does being super duper rich, which was his other “special ability” from his canon. He did have a bunch of cell medals and some core medals—plus it was his company who set up the RideVendor system and the Candroids—so it wouldn't be completely out of the question for him to regain some of this stuff as physical echoes. (I'll leave that up to you guys, though.)

Roleplay Sample – Third Person:

“Beyond the palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard,” Eugene sings along to the radio as he locks the bakery door and flips the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. “Girls comb their hair in the rearview mirrors and boys try to look so hard.” If you can say one thing for Eugene Yokugawa's singing, it's loud. Loud and enthusiastic and okay, maybe not perfectly in tune, but you can tell he's enjoying the heck out of it.

On the other side of the class door a little black puffball whizzes past Eugene's face. A second later some teenagers clatter past, almost as if they were following the puffball.

“The amusement park rises bold and stark, kids are huddled on the beach in the mist.” As he walks back to the register, he wonders idly what the puffball had been. It kind of looked like something out of one of those cartoons Rhonda had watched when she was little. “I want die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.”

Register unlocked, tray out, time to gather the checks and large bills from their hiding place from underneath the tray. But what's this?

Lying in the corner of the tray, in the hollow reserved for paperclips and rubber bands and the odd dollar or half-dollar coins is—well, it's the biggest coin Eugene's ever seen, bigger than an Eisenhower dollar and thicker. It's silver colored, with a stylized bird on the front of it. He picks it up and turns it over. The back is a large X.

“Magnificent,” Eugene says under his breath. It's almost not a coin at all, really. It looks like something an athlete would wear around his neck: a medal. A Cell Medal, his mind supplies, though he has no idea why.

He stashes the coin—the medal—in his trouser pocket.

Roleplay Sample - Network:

[Eugene has chosen to write his numbers in frosting on a shiny reflective worktable in the back of the main branch of MAGNIFICENT BAKERY. Mort and Rhonda are lucky he didn't do the same thing on the living room coffee table. Because of this, the first thing anyone sees is the bakery ceiling while a deep voice shouts from off to the side:]

SO! By way of these secret numbers, I have gained access to an equally secret supernatural network! MAGNIFICENT!

[And now the owner of that voice is leaning over the table. He appears to be a middle-aged Japanese man, wearing chef's whites, with a streak of flour on his cheek and a very manic expression covering the rest of his face:]

I look forward to learning more about this secret numbers club! However, there is one thing I must know first!

… when are your birthdays?

[How else is he going to know when to make the cakes?]

Any Questions? Not really a question, just letting you know that Airdra and I worked out the details of Mort and Eugene's shared background together.