Alma Karma [Akuma] (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theflowerspromise) wrote2016-03-29 05:21 am
theflowerspromise) wrote2016-03-29 05:21 am
Portes app/info
Player's Name: Nai
Contact info: plurk@starcrossedsky, AIM @ starcrossedskyy
DW:starcrossed_sky, STILL rarely used
Character: Alma Karma
Canon: D.Gray-man
Version: Manga/not applicable. There's an anime (of this arc) incoming but it's unlikely to fundamentally change things.
Canon Point: [Homestuck DEAD macro goes here]
Age: OH BOY, complicated answers right out of the gate. Physically, Alma is around 20, and that's the most straightforward answer of the lot. Chronologically, his current incarnation is about ten (having awoken in a ten year old body). Mentally, it's... a lot muddier. Though Alma's current incarnation has only a little over a year of life experience (mostly as a ten year old child before he went into a coma), he has an unknown amount of memories from his previous life (a female Exorcist who seems to be in her mid to late twenties, possibly even early thirties). In terms of maturity, it's probably safe to estimate him to be somewhere in his teens. Being an Akuma, and thus no longer human, he might not age any more.
Gender: UH. Currently approximating male. Previous life was female. Results may vary.
History:
Alma was "born" when he woke up from a pool deep within the laboratory of the Black Order's Asian Branch. There, he was told that he was created as a Disciple of God who could synchronize to Innocence and help protect the world - a Second Exorcist. (This wasn't entirely a lie.) For six months (based on his birthday from the information book, compared to Kanda's), Alma underwent painful experiments to attempt synchronization with the Innocence, a weapon that has the ability to destroy monsters called Akuma that are made from the souls of the dead.
When Alma was sixth months old, to the day, another boy was roused from the pools, and given the name Yu (a name he would later come to resent, after everything that happened to him and Alma; for clarity's sake I'll refer to him by the "family" name he was given later, Kanda). Alma was delighted to have a friend to explore the labs with, though it wasn't a delight his new companion shared. Kanda was a standoffish brat as a child, not wanting anything to do with Alma, and it took many fistfights and a great deal of time before the two settled into something resembling friendship.
But it was friendship, and that was what was important.
The problem was that Second Exorcists were not created from scratch - rather, they were created by transplanting the brains of brain-dead Exorcists into new bodies and giving them a jumpstart to force them to life again. And eventually, the memories of their old lives began to surface.
When Kanda began to remember (fields of lotuses, and a woman he'd made a promise to), the scientists in charge of the laboratory declared him a failure and intended to dispose of him. Due to the regeneration of the Second Exorcists, their only option was to send him into a dreamless sleep. But Alma, who had only one friend in the world and was determined to protect him, wasn't going to have any of that, and so he tried to steal Kanda away and escape from the labs.
He didn't succeed. The two were separated, and over the course of their attempts to reunite, both synchronized with Innocence. It's unknown where, exactly, along the line Alma began to regain memories, but the things he began to remember drove him into a frenzy of madness. Understanding of what had been done to him - done to them - dawned, and Alma turned and began to slaughter everyone inside the laboratory, intending to finish with Kanda and then himself.
Kanda objected to this idea. He had a promise he had to fulfill, someone he had to find... And so the two fought to the death, and then beyond the death, until one of them couldn't regenerate enough to fight any longer. That loser was Alma, who was declared dead to Kanda, and in reality put into a deep coma and taken away, just in case he could be of use to the Order later. (Waste not, want not.)
Cut to nine years later. Through some shenanigans (look, I'm not going to summarize the whole canon, we'll be here long enough as it is), the Black Order got their hands on fragments of the source of Akuma material, and decided to use it to create the "Third Exorcists" - part-Akuma agents who could consume other Akuma and so assist the traditional, Innocence-bearing Exorcists. To do this, they infused Alma's sleeping body with the fragments, his regeneration neutralizing the poison of the Akuma somehow ([canonical handwave]) so that his cells could be used to create the Thirds.
This kind of backfired when the Noah - the "family" that comes second on the Order's list of enemies only to the Millennium Earl who heads the family and creates Akuma - decided to wake Alma up. By having their psychic member use the resonance between Kanda and Alma's memories (and, unintentionally, giving Main Protagonist Allen Walker a front row seat to the whole painful flashback), they shattered Alma's sleep.
The thing about Akuma is that they derive their power from the anger and grief of the souls trapped inside of him. And Alma was already mad from anger and grief when he went to sleep. Put the two together and the result was an extremely powerful, just-shy-of-completely-berserk Akuma, whose first objective upon waking up was finishing the job - finishing the one and only friend - he'd failed at nine years before.
So there's a faceoff between Alma the Actual Incarnation of Rage, and Kanda, who is currently kind of bluescreening his way through combat due to trauma overload (reliving your worst memories and then finding out the subject of them isn't actually dead will do that to a person) with a lot of casual destruction of property involved. (Some of that property is people.) Allen, having a savior complex, keeps trying to get in the middle of it and make it stop, which eventually succeeds when he manages to get himself run through on Kanda's sword. This successfully breaks the bluescreening sequence.
Of course, it also kicks the latent Noah in Allen's body into overdrive, because Noah and swords made out of Innocence don't really get along. (This was, really, the Earl's goal in the whole exercise. All the destruction Alma causes for the Order is just a bonus.) Though the Noah is sealed back up again for now, it's not without breaking a seal over the area that had been containing the power of Allen's cursed eye, which allows him to see the souls of Akuma.
And what he sees. Oh boy, what he sees. (And what everyone else, but especially Kanda, who kind of instinctively grabbed Alma during the Noah Moment, sees, because of the eye's Area of Effect ability.) Rising from Alma's chest is the sealed soul... Of the woman from Kanda's memories, who his previous life had loved so dearly. In the ensuing revelatory clusterfuck, Alma makes one last college effort at taking out Kanda with his secret intact by activating the Akuma ability to self destruct.
It... Sort of works. Kanda takes heavy damage, and Alma is all but destroyed, reduced just to an orb with the regenerative seal on it. He does, however, promptly begin regenerating again, and as soon as he's capable of dragging himself along with one regenerated arm, he starts dragging himself towards Kanda's body. (Allen, being a helpful chap, picks him up and carries him the rest of the way.) He's given to Kanda and some sweet words are exchanged before the Akuma matter in his body flips out, turning him into a weird gooey statue as it attempts to consume his soul.
With a lot of help from Allen, Kanda gets the most important parts of said statue into and through a gateway to somewhere more private for Alma's last moments. In Kanda's arms, Alma makes a declaration of love and, with apparent satisfaction at this ending, finally truly passes away. Kanda has a nice vision of the child Alma walking away hand in hand with the female form of his past life. (Certainly implies something better than the typical end of a soul inside an Akuma who dies by means other than Innocence, at least!)
Personality: A note: Due to the circumstances surrounding his canonpoint, the following is very much based on Alma's personality in the flashback, and extrapolation from that into what he would be like as a young adult when he's not being a ball of Akuma Raeg.
Cheerful, optimistic, and endlessly friendly, Alma is at first glance the absolute foil to grumpy-and-offputting Kanda. In spite of never once in his life leaving the labs and going through horrible experiments every day, Alma is a fountain of joy and enthusiasm, to the indulgent smiles of most of the lab staff and the constant annoyance of his sole peer.
Not that Alma can't keep up with Kanda in the annoyance department. As children, the two frequently wrecked parts of the lab with their fighting until they ran out of energy. They attacked each other with all the ferocity two ten-year-old boys could muster; it's what their friendship was really based on, in spite of Alma's attempts at being cheerful.
Additionally, Alma is a crybaby. The slightest emotional upset or rejection sends him into tears. At around the conclusion of the arc, someone in the fandom did a compilation of the number of times each character cried. Though this wasn't the intent, it revealed that Alma's cry-rank was fourth highest in the series, in spite of only being present in roughly two and a half volumes out of then-22.
The reason for this is obvious when you think about it - most of Alma's blissful optimism is a front. Really, he's a kid who has had a horribly miserable life from the moment he was born, and to keep from breaking entirely, he grabs onto any positive happening and makes a big deal out of it. At the same time, whenever something bad happens, he latches onto that with a big emotional production because it's a way to vent his real feelings about the things he can't change. That's also why he latches onto people so tightly - having Kanda for a friend was the one bright spot in his entire existence.
Of course, burying feelings can't last forever, and it doesn't - finding out the truth of what he is is a breaking point for Alma, because it means to him that things won't ever actually be better. Either he will live in the lab forever as an experiment or he'll synchronize with Innocence, become an Exorcist, and have to experience the same inevitable death in the war that his first life did. And then, depending on how he dies, possibly be brought back for a third time for the same kind of life. It's no wonder that he hit the despair event horizon hard and decided to take it all down with him.
And it wasn't even just for his own sake. Alma does care for other people, especially Kanda - his destruction of the lab was to be sure that what happened to him couldn't be done to anyone else. During his initial attempt to escape, he apologizes silently to the other Second Exorcist experimental subjects for the fact that Kanda is more important to him than them.
And Kanda is the most important thing. Even before the Akumafication Alma was hyperfocused on him, and now it's even worse. After all, now he's bearing the weight of the memories of his past life and the knowledge that that brings after seeing Kanda's memories. Probably, Alma had had memories beginning to wake up as well, and was just better at ignoring them in the labs. But the truth of their past lives can't be ignored, but at the same time, it's too much for Alma to handle - so he tries to escape in the only way he knows (by dying), hoping the secret will die with him so that it never has the chance to hurt his friend.
Alma understands - in a bitter, vengeance-thirsty way - that he was used for his entire life, really since before he was even born. And he understands that being used that way is responsible not just for his suffering directly but also for the joys he didn't get to experience like a normal person. He doesn't intend to let that happen again. He will die rather than let that happen again. Living is just a dead-end to having someone use him again, because what he is is too valuable to both sides of the war for them to let him disappear without draining every last drop of usefulness from him.
Of course, new circumstances could well shake those convictions. And a life where he isn't being used might be worth living after all.
Fears: Foremostly, Alma doesn't want to be alone again. That's at the heart of his attempted rescue of Kanda as a child and everything that follows. He'll do anything to avoid being abandoned or alone, because of the six months that he was the only one in the labs. Having someone to laugh with lessens his misery, and he's terrified of losing that, something that carries into any other situation.
Following that, he doesn't want to be used by anyone anymore. It's the kind of fear that makes him react with anger rather than showing it outwardly, but after the kind of things he's been through, he's very afraid of what someone else might do with him if they get control over him. His fear of being used is not so much in the sense of being manipulated as it is in literally being used as a resource, raw materials, or something of that type.
It should be noted that due to his regeneration, Alma has absolutely no fear of bodily injury, up to and including death.
Weaknesses: As you might expect from someone with his regenerative ability and complete lack of fear-of-pain, Alma is as reckless as it is possible for a person to be. It isn't simply that he's impulsive (although he certainly is that, make no mistake) or that he lacks an off button. Alma doesn't care about getting physically hurt and probably, to some extent, doesn't understand why he should care. Likewise, he's incredibly stubborn and difficult to dissuade from a path he's chosen - to make him change his mind, you have to show him why your solution works better than whatever he's trying, especially if it's not straightforward.
He's also kind of gullible, due to his almost complete lack of life experience. He's not truly stupid, and has the potential to wise up eventually, but at least for right now, that's simply potential. He'll believe most anything you tell him, and can be easily be led around by the nose by manipulator with any kind of skill. (Which could end poorly for the aforementioned manipulator; Alma doesn't exactly have a good history when it comes out to finding out that he's been used.)
By the same token, an academic Alma is not. He's not really knowledgeable in any field, including social skills, due to his upbringing. He knows, for general purposes, how a laboratory works, and he probably has a decent working knowledge of anatomy due to seeing his own organs, but anything else is beyond him. Even things that most people would take for granted, like the way the sky actually looks or how plants grow, are completely beyond his experience except for the strange echoes of memories from his previous life.
And that's without getting into the various weaknesses of being an Akuma. Most notably, under all the friendly layers, Alma's charged with a bloodlust that was specifically designed for murdering humans, and his existence is fueled by the frustration and pain of his own soul. And there's a lot of that, really, more than enough to go around, because Alma carried all the pain of the life he was born into until it ruptured. Even removed from the bloodlust, he's not exactly stable.
He also takes Aggravated Damage from Innocence and probably any other purifying-type weapons that might be in the game.
Mundane Strengths/Abilities: Most of Alma's mundane abilities are tied up so closely in his supernatural abilities that it's hard to define them. Due to his regeneration and the painful experimentation, he has an ungodly pain tolerance.
Having been raised in the Order's Asian Branch, he probably??? speaks both Chinese and English.
Finally, there's the question of what abilities, if any, Alma retains from his previous life. For simplicity's sake, I'm limiting this to a basic grasp of spear-and-javelin combat.
He is notably lacking in knowledge about the outside world, at least as a child before his previous life memories begin to return in earnest. For example, he appears to genuinely believe in the myth of Old Man Winter.
Oh, and his spade-tipped tail is prehensile.
Sensitivity/Magical Ability: Oh god. I'm sorry, mods, I'm apping a clusterfuck again.
GENERAL EXORCIST ABILITIES/INNOCENCE: Though Alma doesn't have access to these abilities because he's currently kind of the exact opposite of an Exorcist, they might come up and so need to be noted. Innocence is a substance that always comes with the power to free the souls powering Akuma safely upon the destruction of the Akuma, and usually with some other power that can be used offensively. (There's one exception to this, but it's not Alma, so I'm not going to get bothered about it.) Each fragment of Innocence synchronizes to only one person (called the 'accommodator' regardless of their status of being an Exorcist with the Order or not).
The power of Innocence is difficult to control in its raw form, and thus it usually is used by an Exorcist in one of three states: Imbued in a weapon ('equipment type'), implanted in the accommodator's body ('parasite type'), and a strange in-between state where the Innocence forms equipment-style weapons out of the accommodator's blood ('crystal type'). Alma's Innocence has, variously, been both of the first two types - an equipment-type spear in his previous life (seen in what is presumably overload form here), and a weird winged sickle-hand when he synchronized with it as a child. (Overloaded Innocence, when it manifests those white wings, is basically your typical shounen-type "I am going to probably die so I will pour my entire will into succeeding" mechanic. It causes the raw traits of the Innocence to overtake whatever form it normally has, which has a heavy drain on the accommodator's energy.)
We have no idea what its specialty was and are unlikely to ever get canon on the subject. Sob. If mods ever want to talk possibilities I'm open.
SECOND EXORCIST ABILITIES: Second Exorcists are created humans, and specifically they're created humans designed to take a beating. The experiments in synchronizing them with Innocence cause them to explode in horrible bloody fashions, and even if they manage, they're designed to be practically living weapons for killing Akuma. Even on a relatively mundane level, they have an extreme amount of strength and endurance. We're talking ten-year-old-child-picks-up-metal-table-and-throws-it here.
But their most notable ability is an incredible regenerative capacity. We're not talking "regrows lost limb" here, we're talking "oops, I died, back in ten minutes." Second Exorcists can seemingly regenerate from anything, so long as they still have a body (which is kind of complicated in Alma's case), though it's possible they wouldn't recover from something that fully eliminates the magical seal that is the source of their regeneration. It's short term gain for long term damage, however, as the regeneration drains their total lifespan. Alma's is nearly run out, which means that most of the time he regenerates more slowly (though it's possible for him to supplement it with his Akuma powers). I'm powercapping it at the amount of power it had when he transformed into an Akuma, because otherwise it would be practically impossible for him to actually die.
The regeneration also gives their blood healing properties when applied to others. As a result of the Akuma Blood Virus (see below), Alma's blood cannot be used to heal living people aside from parasitic-type Innocence accommodators. Or rather, it cannot be safely used to heal them; the injuries would presumably still heal, but the person would almost immediately dissolve from the virus and die.
GENERAL AKUMA ABILITIES: Akuma are evolving, intelligent weapons created by the Earl for the sole purpose of murderizing all of humanity. Alma's a somewhat unusual one, but he has a lot of the common traits.
The first, and most dangerous, is the Akuma Blood Virus, which is found in the blood of all Akuma. (It may or may not actually be a virus. Artistic license: infection is at play.) When introduced to the body of a living creature (usually by injury, but swallowing, skin absorption, and fumes can also lead to infection at various points in the series), it causes the skin of the creature to break out in black star designs. They progress rapidly (within ~one minute in most cases) to cover the skin entirely, and when the creature is entirely black, it turns into dust. There's only two known ways of surviving it - the Innocence of a parasite-type Exorcist can purify the tainted blood, or the infection can be stopped at the outset before it spreads to the rest of the body (one character cuts off his fingers to do this).
Akuma also possess a limited shapeshifting ability that allows them to create weapons out of their bodies (Alma usually uses it to turn his arms into makeshift blades or to lengthen his tail). It's organic-looking and weird to see, not the sort of thing that could be used for any kind of disguise, and not complete enough of a shift to enable getting into weird spaces - not for Alma, at least, who only ever seems to do it with his extremities.
Being weapons, they have no need for food or sleep (they're powered exclusively by the tormented souls used in their creation). Since Alma is organic and weird, I tend to play that he can eat and sleep when he wants, he just doesn't need to. Normal Akuma don't seem to make the attempt unless they're high enough level to have evolved intelligence - level 1 Akuma don't really ape humanity very well at all if you know what to look for. He also doesn't have body heat and probably isn't bothered by hot/cold/wet to the same extent humans are.
(I'd drop TLDR about Akuma evolution but since Alma is weird none of it... seems to apply to him anyway? And this is long enough.)
There's also the matter of Akuma bloodlust. They're programmed to murder humans and driven to do so - an Akuma possessed of a mind can restrain this impulse to a certain degree, though few of them have any reason to want to. Judging by Eliade, it will eventually overpower them and as a result they're somewhat ticking timebombs, but for the sake of NOT MURDERING PEOPLE CONSTANTLY I'm willing to handwavium that it's a bit easier to resist in a world that the Earl isn't actually in. Related to the bloodlust, Akuma can sense humans in the immediate vicinity.
Also, all Akuma, by default, obey the Earl first and foremost, followed by the rest of the family of Noah. Due to Alma's unique creation, it's uncertain how much this applies to him. They also have the ability to sense Noah (and Innocence), though the precise range isn't known and the castle would probably interfere with it anyway.
ALMA-SPECIFIC AKUMA ABILITIES: However! Rather than having been created by the Earl in the usual way, Alma is an Akuma created by the Order having implanted fragments of highly concentrated Akuma Matter into a living human (for whatever definition of living we're using for Second Exorcists here). This means that he's an exception to a few normal Akuma traits.
Firstly, his body is his own body, rather than a machine. Though Alma visually strongly resembles a Level 4, it's his own body he's using - technically he isn't an evolved Akuma at all, but he's still strong enough to pose a threat to Exorcists who are taking out level 4s semiregularly. As a result, he doesn't manifest any metal parts, including the usual blood-virus filled bullets that are the foremost weapon for most Akuma. Instead, he barfs lasers for some inexplicable reason. (He can also manifest them from his hands. They're generally overpowered like the rest of him.)
He also doesn't have a human skin to wear. Though he could potentially cause himself to appear more human with Weird Shapeshifting in general, it's not the same as having an indistinguishable-from-human identity to slip into at will.
Lastly, he's in much closer contact with the soul powering him, since it's his own (specifically, it appears as the image of his previous self to Allen). While most Akuma pick up a few vague traits from the souls inside them, they can't access the memories of that person and aren't super aware of the state of their soul in general. Since Alma's soul is his own, though, it means that they're the same fundamental personality and he can access those memories (at least as much as he can break through the block from the Second Exorcist Project).
Supply List: NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Okay but I did talk to Birdy about throwing his Innocence in with the castle treasures somewhere for Fun Times later on, so there's that. Otherwise NOT A SINGLE THING.
Sample RP post: Here on the TDM.
Contact info: plurk@starcrossedsky, AIM @ starcrossedskyy
DW:
starcrossed_sky, STILL rarely usedCharacter: Alma Karma
Canon: D.Gray-man
Version: Manga/not applicable. There's an anime (of this arc) incoming but it's unlikely to fundamentally change things.
Canon Point: [Homestuck DEAD macro goes here]
Age: OH BOY, complicated answers right out of the gate. Physically, Alma is around 20, and that's the most straightforward answer of the lot. Chronologically, his current incarnation is about ten (having awoken in a ten year old body). Mentally, it's... a lot muddier. Though Alma's current incarnation has only a little over a year of life experience (mostly as a ten year old child before he went into a coma), he has an unknown amount of memories from his previous life (a female Exorcist who seems to be in her mid to late twenties, possibly even early thirties). In terms of maturity, it's probably safe to estimate him to be somewhere in his teens. Being an Akuma, and thus no longer human, he might not age any more.
Gender: UH. Currently approximating male. Previous life was female. Results may vary.
History:
Alma was "born" when he woke up from a pool deep within the laboratory of the Black Order's Asian Branch. There, he was told that he was created as a Disciple of God who could synchronize to Innocence and help protect the world - a Second Exorcist. (This wasn't entirely a lie.) For six months (based on his birthday from the information book, compared to Kanda's), Alma underwent painful experiments to attempt synchronization with the Innocence, a weapon that has the ability to destroy monsters called Akuma that are made from the souls of the dead.
When Alma was sixth months old, to the day, another boy was roused from the pools, and given the name Yu (a name he would later come to resent, after everything that happened to him and Alma; for clarity's sake I'll refer to him by the "family" name he was given later, Kanda). Alma was delighted to have a friend to explore the labs with, though it wasn't a delight his new companion shared. Kanda was a standoffish brat as a child, not wanting anything to do with Alma, and it took many fistfights and a great deal of time before the two settled into something resembling friendship.
But it was friendship, and that was what was important.
The problem was that Second Exorcists were not created from scratch - rather, they were created by transplanting the brains of brain-dead Exorcists into new bodies and giving them a jumpstart to force them to life again. And eventually, the memories of their old lives began to surface.
When Kanda began to remember (fields of lotuses, and a woman he'd made a promise to), the scientists in charge of the laboratory declared him a failure and intended to dispose of him. Due to the regeneration of the Second Exorcists, their only option was to send him into a dreamless sleep. But Alma, who had only one friend in the world and was determined to protect him, wasn't going to have any of that, and so he tried to steal Kanda away and escape from the labs.
He didn't succeed. The two were separated, and over the course of their attempts to reunite, both synchronized with Innocence. It's unknown where, exactly, along the line Alma began to regain memories, but the things he began to remember drove him into a frenzy of madness. Understanding of what had been done to him - done to them - dawned, and Alma turned and began to slaughter everyone inside the laboratory, intending to finish with Kanda and then himself.
Kanda objected to this idea. He had a promise he had to fulfill, someone he had to find... And so the two fought to the death, and then beyond the death, until one of them couldn't regenerate enough to fight any longer. That loser was Alma, who was declared dead to Kanda, and in reality put into a deep coma and taken away, just in case he could be of use to the Order later. (Waste not, want not.)
Cut to nine years later. Through some shenanigans (look, I'm not going to summarize the whole canon, we'll be here long enough as it is), the Black Order got their hands on fragments of the source of Akuma material, and decided to use it to create the "Third Exorcists" - part-Akuma agents who could consume other Akuma and so assist the traditional, Innocence-bearing Exorcists. To do this, they infused Alma's sleeping body with the fragments, his regeneration neutralizing the poison of the Akuma somehow ([canonical handwave]) so that his cells could be used to create the Thirds.
This kind of backfired when the Noah - the "family" that comes second on the Order's list of enemies only to the Millennium Earl who heads the family and creates Akuma - decided to wake Alma up. By having their psychic member use the resonance between Kanda and Alma's memories (and, unintentionally, giving Main Protagonist Allen Walker a front row seat to the whole painful flashback), they shattered Alma's sleep.
The thing about Akuma is that they derive their power from the anger and grief of the souls trapped inside of him. And Alma was already mad from anger and grief when he went to sleep. Put the two together and the result was an extremely powerful, just-shy-of-completely-berserk Akuma, whose first objective upon waking up was finishing the job - finishing the one and only friend - he'd failed at nine years before.
So there's a faceoff between Alma the Actual Incarnation of Rage, and Kanda, who is currently kind of bluescreening his way through combat due to trauma overload (reliving your worst memories and then finding out the subject of them isn't actually dead will do that to a person) with a lot of casual destruction of property involved. (Some of that property is people.) Allen, having a savior complex, keeps trying to get in the middle of it and make it stop, which eventually succeeds when he manages to get himself run through on Kanda's sword. This successfully breaks the bluescreening sequence.
Of course, it also kicks the latent Noah in Allen's body into overdrive, because Noah and swords made out of Innocence don't really get along. (This was, really, the Earl's goal in the whole exercise. All the destruction Alma causes for the Order is just a bonus.) Though the Noah is sealed back up again for now, it's not without breaking a seal over the area that had been containing the power of Allen's cursed eye, which allows him to see the souls of Akuma.
And what he sees. Oh boy, what he sees. (And what everyone else, but especially Kanda, who kind of instinctively grabbed Alma during the Noah Moment, sees, because of the eye's Area of Effect ability.) Rising from Alma's chest is the sealed soul... Of the woman from Kanda's memories, who his previous life had loved so dearly. In the ensuing revelatory clusterfuck, Alma makes one last college effort at taking out Kanda with his secret intact by activating the Akuma ability to self destruct.
It... Sort of works. Kanda takes heavy damage, and Alma is all but destroyed, reduced just to an orb with the regenerative seal on it. He does, however, promptly begin regenerating again, and as soon as he's capable of dragging himself along with one regenerated arm, he starts dragging himself towards Kanda's body. (Allen, being a helpful chap, picks him up and carries him the rest of the way.) He's given to Kanda and some sweet words are exchanged before the Akuma matter in his body flips out, turning him into a weird gooey statue as it attempts to consume his soul.
With a lot of help from Allen, Kanda gets the most important parts of said statue into and through a gateway to somewhere more private for Alma's last moments. In Kanda's arms, Alma makes a declaration of love and, with apparent satisfaction at this ending, finally truly passes away. Kanda has a nice vision of the child Alma walking away hand in hand with the female form of his past life. (Certainly implies something better than the typical end of a soul inside an Akuma who dies by means other than Innocence, at least!)
Personality: A note: Due to the circumstances surrounding his canonpoint, the following is very much based on Alma's personality in the flashback, and extrapolation from that into what he would be like as a young adult when he's not being a ball of Akuma Raeg.
Cheerful, optimistic, and endlessly friendly, Alma is at first glance the absolute foil to grumpy-and-offputting Kanda. In spite of never once in his life leaving the labs and going through horrible experiments every day, Alma is a fountain of joy and enthusiasm, to the indulgent smiles of most of the lab staff and the constant annoyance of his sole peer.
Not that Alma can't keep up with Kanda in the annoyance department. As children, the two frequently wrecked parts of the lab with their fighting until they ran out of energy. They attacked each other with all the ferocity two ten-year-old boys could muster; it's what their friendship was really based on, in spite of Alma's attempts at being cheerful.
Additionally, Alma is a crybaby. The slightest emotional upset or rejection sends him into tears. At around the conclusion of the arc, someone in the fandom did a compilation of the number of times each character cried. Though this wasn't the intent, it revealed that Alma's cry-rank was fourth highest in the series, in spite of only being present in roughly two and a half volumes out of then-22.
The reason for this is obvious when you think about it - most of Alma's blissful optimism is a front. Really, he's a kid who has had a horribly miserable life from the moment he was born, and to keep from breaking entirely, he grabs onto any positive happening and makes a big deal out of it. At the same time, whenever something bad happens, he latches onto that with a big emotional production because it's a way to vent his real feelings about the things he can't change. That's also why he latches onto people so tightly - having Kanda for a friend was the one bright spot in his entire existence.
Of course, burying feelings can't last forever, and it doesn't - finding out the truth of what he is is a breaking point for Alma, because it means to him that things won't ever actually be better. Either he will live in the lab forever as an experiment or he'll synchronize with Innocence, become an Exorcist, and have to experience the same inevitable death in the war that his first life did. And then, depending on how he dies, possibly be brought back for a third time for the same kind of life. It's no wonder that he hit the despair event horizon hard and decided to take it all down with him.
And it wasn't even just for his own sake. Alma does care for other people, especially Kanda - his destruction of the lab was to be sure that what happened to him couldn't be done to anyone else. During his initial attempt to escape, he apologizes silently to the other Second Exorcist experimental subjects for the fact that Kanda is more important to him than them.
And Kanda is the most important thing. Even before the Akumafication Alma was hyperfocused on him, and now it's even worse. After all, now he's bearing the weight of the memories of his past life and the knowledge that that brings after seeing Kanda's memories. Probably, Alma had had memories beginning to wake up as well, and was just better at ignoring them in the labs. But the truth of their past lives can't be ignored, but at the same time, it's too much for Alma to handle - so he tries to escape in the only way he knows (by dying), hoping the secret will die with him so that it never has the chance to hurt his friend.
Alma understands - in a bitter, vengeance-thirsty way - that he was used for his entire life, really since before he was even born. And he understands that being used that way is responsible not just for his suffering directly but also for the joys he didn't get to experience like a normal person. He doesn't intend to let that happen again. He will die rather than let that happen again. Living is just a dead-end to having someone use him again, because what he is is too valuable to both sides of the war for them to let him disappear without draining every last drop of usefulness from him.
Of course, new circumstances could well shake those convictions. And a life where he isn't being used might be worth living after all.
Fears: Foremostly, Alma doesn't want to be alone again. That's at the heart of his attempted rescue of Kanda as a child and everything that follows. He'll do anything to avoid being abandoned or alone, because of the six months that he was the only one in the labs. Having someone to laugh with lessens his misery, and he's terrified of losing that, something that carries into any other situation.
Following that, he doesn't want to be used by anyone anymore. It's the kind of fear that makes him react with anger rather than showing it outwardly, but after the kind of things he's been through, he's very afraid of what someone else might do with him if they get control over him. His fear of being used is not so much in the sense of being manipulated as it is in literally being used as a resource, raw materials, or something of that type.
It should be noted that due to his regeneration, Alma has absolutely no fear of bodily injury, up to and including death.
Weaknesses: As you might expect from someone with his regenerative ability and complete lack of fear-of-pain, Alma is as reckless as it is possible for a person to be. It isn't simply that he's impulsive (although he certainly is that, make no mistake) or that he lacks an off button. Alma doesn't care about getting physically hurt and probably, to some extent, doesn't understand why he should care. Likewise, he's incredibly stubborn and difficult to dissuade from a path he's chosen - to make him change his mind, you have to show him why your solution works better than whatever he's trying, especially if it's not straightforward.
He's also kind of gullible, due to his almost complete lack of life experience. He's not truly stupid, and has the potential to wise up eventually, but at least for right now, that's simply potential. He'll believe most anything you tell him, and can be easily be led around by the nose by manipulator with any kind of skill. (Which could end poorly for the aforementioned manipulator; Alma doesn't exactly have a good history when it comes out to finding out that he's been used.)
By the same token, an academic Alma is not. He's not really knowledgeable in any field, including social skills, due to his upbringing. He knows, for general purposes, how a laboratory works, and he probably has a decent working knowledge of anatomy due to seeing his own organs, but anything else is beyond him. Even things that most people would take for granted, like the way the sky actually looks or how plants grow, are completely beyond his experience except for the strange echoes of memories from his previous life.
And that's without getting into the various weaknesses of being an Akuma. Most notably, under all the friendly layers, Alma's charged with a bloodlust that was specifically designed for murdering humans, and his existence is fueled by the frustration and pain of his own soul. And there's a lot of that, really, more than enough to go around, because Alma carried all the pain of the life he was born into until it ruptured. Even removed from the bloodlust, he's not exactly stable.
He also takes Aggravated Damage from Innocence and probably any other purifying-type weapons that might be in the game.
Mundane Strengths/Abilities: Most of Alma's mundane abilities are tied up so closely in his supernatural abilities that it's hard to define them. Due to his regeneration and the painful experimentation, he has an ungodly pain tolerance.
Having been raised in the Order's Asian Branch, he probably??? speaks both Chinese and English.
Finally, there's the question of what abilities, if any, Alma retains from his previous life. For simplicity's sake, I'm limiting this to a basic grasp of spear-and-javelin combat.
He is notably lacking in knowledge about the outside world, at least as a child before his previous life memories begin to return in earnest. For example, he appears to genuinely believe in the myth of Old Man Winter.
Oh, and his spade-tipped tail is prehensile.
Sensitivity/Magical Ability: Oh god. I'm sorry, mods, I'm apping a clusterfuck again.
GENERAL EXORCIST ABILITIES/INNOCENCE: Though Alma doesn't have access to these abilities because he's currently kind of the exact opposite of an Exorcist, they might come up and so need to be noted. Innocence is a substance that always comes with the power to free the souls powering Akuma safely upon the destruction of the Akuma, and usually with some other power that can be used offensively. (There's one exception to this, but it's not Alma, so I'm not going to get bothered about it.) Each fragment of Innocence synchronizes to only one person (called the 'accommodator' regardless of their status of being an Exorcist with the Order or not).
The power of Innocence is difficult to control in its raw form, and thus it usually is used by an Exorcist in one of three states: Imbued in a weapon ('equipment type'), implanted in the accommodator's body ('parasite type'), and a strange in-between state where the Innocence forms equipment-style weapons out of the accommodator's blood ('crystal type'). Alma's Innocence has, variously, been both of the first two types - an equipment-type spear in his previous life (seen in what is presumably overload form here), and a weird winged sickle-hand when he synchronized with it as a child. (Overloaded Innocence, when it manifests those white wings, is basically your typical shounen-type "I am going to probably die so I will pour my entire will into succeeding" mechanic. It causes the raw traits of the Innocence to overtake whatever form it normally has, which has a heavy drain on the accommodator's energy.)
We have no idea what its specialty was and are unlikely to ever get canon on the subject. Sob. If mods ever want to talk possibilities I'm open.
SECOND EXORCIST ABILITIES: Second Exorcists are created humans, and specifically they're created humans designed to take a beating. The experiments in synchronizing them with Innocence cause them to explode in horrible bloody fashions, and even if they manage, they're designed to be practically living weapons for killing Akuma. Even on a relatively mundane level, they have an extreme amount of strength and endurance. We're talking ten-year-old-child-picks-up-metal-table-and-throws-it here.
But their most notable ability is an incredible regenerative capacity. We're not talking "regrows lost limb" here, we're talking "oops, I died, back in ten minutes." Second Exorcists can seemingly regenerate from anything, so long as they still have a body (which is kind of complicated in Alma's case), though it's possible they wouldn't recover from something that fully eliminates the magical seal that is the source of their regeneration. It's short term gain for long term damage, however, as the regeneration drains their total lifespan. Alma's is nearly run out, which means that most of the time he regenerates more slowly (though it's possible for him to supplement it with his Akuma powers). I'm powercapping it at the amount of power it had when he transformed into an Akuma, because otherwise it would be practically impossible for him to actually die.
The regeneration also gives their blood healing properties when applied to others. As a result of the Akuma Blood Virus (see below), Alma's blood cannot be used to heal living people aside from parasitic-type Innocence accommodators. Or rather, it cannot be safely used to heal them; the injuries would presumably still heal, but the person would almost immediately dissolve from the virus and die.
GENERAL AKUMA ABILITIES: Akuma are evolving, intelligent weapons created by the Earl for the sole purpose of murderizing all of humanity. Alma's a somewhat unusual one, but he has a lot of the common traits.
The first, and most dangerous, is the Akuma Blood Virus, which is found in the blood of all Akuma. (It may or may not actually be a virus. Artistic license: infection is at play.) When introduced to the body of a living creature (usually by injury, but swallowing, skin absorption, and fumes can also lead to infection at various points in the series), it causes the skin of the creature to break out in black star designs. They progress rapidly (within ~one minute in most cases) to cover the skin entirely, and when the creature is entirely black, it turns into dust. There's only two known ways of surviving it - the Innocence of a parasite-type Exorcist can purify the tainted blood, or the infection can be stopped at the outset before it spreads to the rest of the body (one character cuts off his fingers to do this).
Akuma also possess a limited shapeshifting ability that allows them to create weapons out of their bodies (Alma usually uses it to turn his arms into makeshift blades or to lengthen his tail). It's organic-looking and weird to see, not the sort of thing that could be used for any kind of disguise, and not complete enough of a shift to enable getting into weird spaces - not for Alma, at least, who only ever seems to do it with his extremities.
Being weapons, they have no need for food or sleep (they're powered exclusively by the tormented souls used in their creation). Since Alma is organic and weird, I tend to play that he can eat and sleep when he wants, he just doesn't need to. Normal Akuma don't seem to make the attempt unless they're high enough level to have evolved intelligence - level 1 Akuma don't really ape humanity very well at all if you know what to look for. He also doesn't have body heat and probably isn't bothered by hot/cold/wet to the same extent humans are.
(I'd drop TLDR about Akuma evolution but since Alma is weird none of it... seems to apply to him anyway? And this is long enough.)
There's also the matter of Akuma bloodlust. They're programmed to murder humans and driven to do so - an Akuma possessed of a mind can restrain this impulse to a certain degree, though few of them have any reason to want to. Judging by Eliade, it will eventually overpower them and as a result they're somewhat ticking timebombs, but for the sake of NOT MURDERING PEOPLE CONSTANTLY I'm willing to handwavium that it's a bit easier to resist in a world that the Earl isn't actually in. Related to the bloodlust, Akuma can sense humans in the immediate vicinity.
Also, all Akuma, by default, obey the Earl first and foremost, followed by the rest of the family of Noah. Due to Alma's unique creation, it's uncertain how much this applies to him. They also have the ability to sense Noah (and Innocence), though the precise range isn't known and the castle would probably interfere with it anyway.
ALMA-SPECIFIC AKUMA ABILITIES: However! Rather than having been created by the Earl in the usual way, Alma is an Akuma created by the Order having implanted fragments of highly concentrated Akuma Matter into a living human (for whatever definition of living we're using for Second Exorcists here). This means that he's an exception to a few normal Akuma traits.
Firstly, his body is his own body, rather than a machine. Though Alma visually strongly resembles a Level 4, it's his own body he's using - technically he isn't an evolved Akuma at all, but he's still strong enough to pose a threat to Exorcists who are taking out level 4s semiregularly. As a result, he doesn't manifest any metal parts, including the usual blood-virus filled bullets that are the foremost weapon for most Akuma. Instead, he barfs lasers for some inexplicable reason. (He can also manifest them from his hands. They're generally overpowered like the rest of him.)
He also doesn't have a human skin to wear. Though he could potentially cause himself to appear more human with Weird Shapeshifting in general, it's not the same as having an indistinguishable-from-human identity to slip into at will.
Lastly, he's in much closer contact with the soul powering him, since it's his own (specifically, it appears as the image of his previous self to Allen). While most Akuma pick up a few vague traits from the souls inside them, they can't access the memories of that person and aren't super aware of the state of their soul in general. Since Alma's soul is his own, though, it means that they're the same fundamental personality and he can access those memories (at least as much as he can break through the block from the Second Exorcist Project).
Supply List: NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Okay but I did talk to Birdy about throwing his Innocence in with the castle treasures somewhere for Fun Times later on, so there's that. Otherwise NOT A SINGLE THING.
Sample RP post: Here on the TDM.