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[untiltheend]

User Name/Nick: Dre
User DW: N/A
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: narrowmybed @ Plurk
Other Characters Currently In-Game: N/A

CW: Violence, death, child abuse, sexual abuse, CSA

Character Name: Sebastian Michaelis
Series: Kuroshitsuji
Age: Old. Looks late twenties/early thirties.
From When?: Chapter 61, when he's ran through with a scythe. It doesn't kill him in canon, but it's a close call.

Inmate Justification: He's a mass murderer who has his sights set on eating a child. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Arrival: Against his will.

Abilities/Powers: Have a separate entry.

Inmate Information:

On his tenth birthday, Ciel Phantomhive's family was murdered, he himself was kidnapped by a Satanic cult and tortured for a month. Then, at the point of his deepest despair (to put it vaguely because of spoiler reasons) Ciel manages to summon a demon. It forms a Contract with him: it will help Ciel track down his family's murderers and help him get his revenge, and then, as payment it will eat his soul.

The demon takes the form of Ciel's butler and is given the name Sebastian. Together they head on to restore Ciel's earldom, as well as perform his job as the Queen's Watchdog (investigating any matters that the Queen can't officially be involved with, as well as occasionally do her dirtywork). Then there's saving Ciel from the semi-weekly assassination and kidnapping attempts, working 200% around the clock to keep the manour running... and by now in canon it's been over three years, and they're still making very little headway on that revenge thing.

The manga is ridiculously long at this point, but here are some highlights of the shenanigans Sebastian and Ciel get up to:

• Ciel is kidnapped by the mafia. why are there modern mafia gangs in 19th century England? no one knows. (Sebastian kills all the gang members... eventually. Before that, he dawdles, allowing Ciel to be hurt in the process, and when Ciel questions what's taking him so long, Sebastian's answer is essentially "well, because it SUITS YOU to be all tied up and beaten and pathetic like this, lol").
• They attempt to solve the case of Jack the Ripper (lots of people die, although Sebastian himself only beats a person to a bloody pulp).
• They investigate a circus where children mysteriously go missing (Sebastian burns down a house full of children, sexually assaults a woman, kills even more people... and somehow he's not the worst character in this arc).
• They arrange an elaborate Murder Mystery Mansion in order to frame a man for murder (murder and framing are both successful! The best thing about this arc is that Sebastian gets stabbed a lot. They also accidentally invent Sherlock Holmes).
• They board a luxury liner in order to investigate claims of a doctor who can resurrect the dead (Sebastian kills a lot of zombies, completely ignores innocent victims who ask him to save them from said zombies... This is the arc I'll be taking him from; it's the only time so far he's grievously wounded).
• They travel to a small German village in order to investigate a mysterious, deadly disease (Sebastian kills the equivalent population of a small town. Worse, though, when Ciel suffers a bad PTSD episode, Sebastian comes close to eating him for daring to stop being entertaining for five minutes. More on this particular arc later!)

Sebastian is in many ways just like you'd expect a Faustian demon to be: clever, manipulative, practically unflappable, effortlessly capable in everything he sets out to do, polite and charming on the surface while really - in deed and by own admission - cruel, sadistic and callous in regard to human life. Humans are to him weak and pathetic creatures who can occasionally be amusing and interesting in how far they are willing to go to satisfy their own selfish desires. His motivation for entering contracts in the first place? He's bored, and gobbling up just any soul he comes across is too easy and predictable.

On the other hand Sebastian's also... kind of a giant weirdo. He's a perfectionist, almost neurotically so, in absolutely everything he does, down to the last minutiae. Being five minutes late serving dinner is the same level of inexcusable as failing to protect his master from an attacker. He hates disruptions to his perfectly planned schedule and gets annoyed being behind even by a couple of minutes. For that matter, while Sebastian presents as cool and suave he's easily irritated and quick to lose his patience, often having to make an effort to conceal it. Sebastian's way of thinking also tends to comes across as somewhat... odd: he has a way of solving problems in roundabout, showy, peculiar ways… when he's not simply bulldozering over them (the manga author once described him as the kind to solve problems with his muscles rather than brain. that is, he's not unintelligent; his first answer just tends to be brute force). Whenever he needs to act as a tutor he insists on dressing up specifically for the part and wearing glasses for no earthly reason other than that, apparently, that's how a teacher looks to him. He can't be in the presence of cats without being reduced to a mess of "ablublublu", and he enjoys silly demon puns. Nerd.

Upon entering their contract, Ciel gave Sebastian the following conditions:

He is to never disobey an order from Ciel.
He is to always protect Ciel and never betray him.
He is never to lie.

Sebastian sticks to these rules with complete dedication, living his new life according to "a butler's aesthetics": his service is impeccable at all times no matter what, and he takes his role as a butler with utmost seriousness. Sebastian is confident, proud and more than a little stubborn, and thus he operates on a somewhat circular logic where, if Ciel orders him to defeat an opponent he will win, and if he says he will complete a seemingly impossible task he can do it, because otherwise he would break his word, and that's unthinkable.

We know very little about demons in the Kuroshitsuji verse – not even if they need to enter contracts with humans in order to consume souls. We do know they come from a different realm than humans, where they live with no laws, no responsibilities, no ties – all they have is their "aesthetics". Ergo: the only thing to give demons meaning is an arbitrarily chosen set of self-imposed standards. It may well be that nothing at all stops them from diverging from those standards… but then they're right back to their old purpose-less life. No wonder, then, that Sebastian is so willing to submit to others, work around the clock, endure all kinds of tasks heaped on him, suffer incompetent co-workers, and more than once nearly break his own neck to save his master – he could walk away from it all at any given moment and find some cheap souls to gobble up, but, heaven forbid, then he'd go back to being bored.

The takeaway here is that everything Sebastian does and endures as his master's pawn is a personal challenge and part of a game. Succeeding in getting dinner served on time is a game. Winning against an opponent is a game. Burning down a house full of innocent children while pursuing a criminal is a game. His thirteen-year-old child master's new life purpose, to achieve revenge and then die, is a game. Sebastian treats it all as such – certainly he's particular about always doing a good job and in that sense, Ciel's life goal is in good hands, but ultimately this is all for Sebastian's own entertainment, and his master better deliver or he might spice things up on his own. At one point, Ciel orders Sebastian to conduct an extensive investigation in order to track down a murderer. Sebastian dutifully does as he's told, only to then reveal that he knew all along Ciel was on the wrong track and that the investigation would be a complete waste of time. Why he didn't say anything sooner? Why, he's only a chess piece, and it's on Ciel to make the right moves with him. At another point, he deliberately puts Ciel in danger by following an order to the literal letter, since it's "your own fault if you give an unclear order" and "a game without thrills becomes boring".

As you can see, Sebastian likes to be an obnoxious bastard when the opportunity arises. He's not kind by any stretch of the imagination: a self-described sadist ("while I dislike being kicked, I do enjoy the feeling of kicking others"); world champion levels of passive-aggressive on a daily basis; blatantly enjoying himself when given the opportunity to intimidate, beat, or kill on his master's orders; outright acknowledged to be no good for Ciel's mental health and he himself remarking that misery will only make Ciel's soul taste all the better in the end. It would be a stretch to call him evil, however: Sebastian might revel in cruelty, but he never makes a move to, or as much as indicates he'd want to, inflict it on anyone whom he doesn't personally dislike or whom Ciel hasn't ordered him to deal with. He's not one to commit cruelties just for the sake of doing so – in fact, he's more likely to be randomly helpful (one of the official character guides mentions that he sometimes gives his pocket money away to random strangers, since he has no use for material possessions anyway). More than anything else, Sebastian enjoys doing things well, whether they be good or bad things, and he likes being recognised and praised for his good work. Being helpful neatly ticks both boxes.

While he'll needle, and make covert snide remarks to his master and others who annoy him, not to mention chew the household servants out and downright terrify them when they make mistakes, Sebastian doesn't speak unkindly to people who have not somehow, for lack of a better word, "earned" it. Ciel's fiancée at times confides in Sebastian how she worries that nothing she does makes Ciel happy, and instead of being distantly polite with her – which would be well within the bounds of proper butler behaviour – Sebastian often takes the time to reassure her that her fiancé does appreciate her efforts. Sebastian actually seems to generally appreciate honest, kind people (Ciel's fiancée and fellow butler Agni are examples) if they also show themselves to be competent and driven. It's a mistake, however, to assume Sebastian cares about anyone even if he might appreciate them: demons are incapable of the emotional depth of humans, and Sebastian often states that he does not understand humans. Oh, he's skilled enough at reading them and imitating them, but truly empathising with anyone is quite beyond him. And why would he want to, besides? Sebastian is firmly, unshakably of the conviction he is leagues above everyone else, humans in particular.

Path to Redemption: He needs to realise his hair is ridiculous, and to get a different haircut.

Joking aside: Sebastian will never, ever, be a good person. He's essentially an Eldritch horror, and quite a static character. However: while we know very little about Sebastian's life before his current Contract, we do know that when he was younger he was like most demons - he'd consume any soul he came across, regardless of its quality, and revel in acting the beast, in mindlessly killing. At his current point in life, however, this is boring to him. Nowadays, he's only interested in consuming Quality Souls, and he's willing to work for decades to cultivate one single soul just so, regardless of how hungry he is. I know my synopsis of the manga makes it seem as if Sebastian does nothing but mass murder all the time, but all the murders he commits in the story are either a) ordered by Ciel, or b) necessary in order to protect Ciel. Sebastian's long tired of just murdering for the sake of it.

Those mentions I made earlier about how he'll sometimes dawdle and needlessly drag out missions just to be a jerk? All those instances happen quite early in the manga. For quite a while now, Sebastian wholeheartedly throws himself into whatever scheme Ciel's got going on... partly because things have become complex enough that it's interesting all on its own; partly because things have become difficult enough that Sebastian can't afford to mess around like he used to do and still come out on top.

That last storyline I mentioned, where they travel to a German village and Sebastian ends up almost eating Ciel? By the end of it, Sebastian asks what he should do about all the people they've defeated. Ciel tells him he may go completely to town on them and act the beast all he likes, in a very "have fun, as a treat" way. So Sebastian dutifully does, burning the entire building and everyone in it. While doing so, he idly notes to himself that his master misunderstands: as of right now, he doesn't find mindless slaughter the most fun; the most entertaining thing is instead this dress-up butler game they're playing. At the same time, he concludes that if his master wants him to just be a beast, that's what he'll be. The layout of the scene heavily suggests that at least part of the reason why he tried to eat Ciel earlier was precisely because that's what he thought his master wanted/needed in that moment. Mind you, he still calls it a "game", but even so it implies he's capable of changing priorities even besides food preferences. It's just, because of his extreme devotion to his aesthetics, any slight progress Sebastian might be able to make away from the awful person he is will always be hindered by Ciel's (justifiably) cynical view of him.

Sebastian is old and bored. He needs an entertaining, complex goal to obsess over. Right now, that goal is eating his master's soul, and that's... not going to change, ever, until he's accomplished it. And this goal involves killing a whole bunch of people. But after that? He'll need a new goal. And, as laid out earlier, while Sebastian is a cruelty-inclined creature, he's also a perfectionist overachiever who takes pleasure in doing a plethora of other things; they don't necessarily have to involve anything bad. And see, while Sebastian likely will always think of humans as lesser than him, part of the reason he has such a low opinion on humanity in general is... well, the kind of people willing to sell their soul to a demon are either very desperate, very wretched, or very ruthless. He's spent hundred and hundreds of years primarily interacting with the very worst humanity has to offer. It would take an awfully long time and a whole lot of work, but he could, in theory, grow to find kinder people - with kinder goals - the more fulfilling sort.

With that said, he'll loathe having a Warden. It's not that he's above getting feedback or being influenced by others (he canonically listens and adjusts his ways several times, when the input comes from people he respects). It's the concept of having someone ~above him~ trying to ~better him~ that he'll be very offended by. Honestly, his ideal Warden would be a fellow skilled butler! But barring that: a competent, honest, intelligent, level-headed person would have the best chance of getting anywhere at all with him. Competence is the most important aspect for getting any respect from Sebastian. A kind Warden wouldn't necessarily be a bad match - one of the people whose advice he does take is one of the kindest, most selfless characters in the manga.

History: Kuroshitsuji | Sebastian

Sample Network Entry: (Note: I couldn't find anything in the FAQ about a limit to how many jobs a character may have, but Sebastian's a workaholic, so.)

[Text]

Good morning. Please excuse my using the written method of communicating as it is more familiar to me, although I gather it is not quite the norm. [He's not making any public audio or video recordings until he's tested it out privately and made 100% sure he knows how to do it correctly, thank you.] For those I have yet to be introduced to: my name is Sebastian Michaelis, butler of the Phantomhive manour. I will of course make a personal introduction to my future colleagues at the library, the pool, and engine room upon my first shift [Sebastian how many jobs have you signed up for...] but a general introduction seemed the most efficient to begin with. Should anything need to be communicated to me prior to starting work, by all means contact me through this device. It is quite remarkable how efficient it seems in facilitating quick communication.

[Filtered to workers in the kitchen]

My apologies in advance if this has been previously discussed, but seeing as I have already worked a few shifts, [in fact, it's entirely possible people have mistakenly thought the Admiral has brought in identical triplets before realising that, no, it's just Sebastian working multiple shifts per day in the kitchen] I cannot help but to feel this needs addressing:

Simply leaving food out for the passengers to serve themselves makes the work easier, I realise, but the effect it has on the quality of the meals is atrocious, is it not? The current size of the populace is not overly large, I would say: preparing each individual meal should be entirely doable, as should be serving it to the individual person. [Take some pride in your work, people! Gosh.] Should it be needed, I would volunteer to arrange a system for such a service.

Thank you for your time, and do have a good day.

[Besides, the more people are milling about in the dining hall at once? The easier it is to steal a few knives without anyone noticing. There's that, too.]

Sample RP:
ONE
TWO (CW: talk of dismemberment. Also, in the first comment I accidentally wrote "Warden" when I meant "Admiral".)

Special Notes: Nothing!