Shikai Release (testing)

[Dysney]

(Shikai)

Name: Crescendo
Release Command: “A tiger’s silence is louder.”

Manifestation: A siberian tiger with blue eyes (that can turn various shades of blue, silver, and grey) that can appear as large as a german shepard-usually opting to be the size of a large house cat-and will be able to take on larger forms as Adele becomes more powerful.

Release Form: Crescendo takes the form of twin kodachi with neon indigo handles. Emblazoned in silver on the butt of one sword is a treble clef while a bass clef is on the butt of the other. While Adele can use them to fight traditionally, for some of her abilities she places the kodachi with the bass clef on one shoulder and uses the other as one would use a bow for a violin. Because she can hear the reiatsu she channels, she is able to use this method to “play” songs on her kodachi composed entirely of reiatsu. The effect of each song varies.

Ability
Pachelbel’s Protection
Adele hums the cello part of Pachelbel’s Canon in D while playing the violin solo on her kodachi. By channelling 10% of her reiatsu into this tune, she creates a spherical shield that has a radius between 1 and 3 meters. The shield repels foreign reiatsu up to 25 less rei than the strength of the shield (it can be modified to allow recognized reiatsu signatures to remain inside the shield). Pachelbel’s Protection only lasts as long as Adele plays and because it requires great focus, Adele has to stay in a fixed position while generating the shield. If she moves while playing this tune, she will lose an additional 100 reiatsu.

Attack
Radioactive
Adele channels 1000 reiatsu while playing Radioactive, by Lindsey Stirling, to create a “cloud” of corrosive reiatsu. The reiatsu has an effect similar to acid and can be tuned to a being’s reiatsu signature in order to limit the damage of the attack to the intended target.

Ability
Promise to Protect
Adele plays Lithium by Evanescence in order to imbue an ally with her reiatsu. The effect of this numbs the pain of injuries and reduces the effect of an attack on the protected person. The cost to Adele is 15% of her reiatsu. As a side effect, Adele cannot feel any pain or injury sustained while playing this tune. Unfortunately when she stops, she will feel the compounded pain of the person she protected plus the hurt from any damage to her person. She cannot use this ability for more than one turn per 1000 reiatsu she has without passing out afterwards.

 

[Shadowwind]

Yo dys as a former kai staffer, let me preface this by saying this happens a lot with people when they make their first kai which is why 90% of people end up resubmitting before they hit bankai. What's 'this'? First kai syndrome.

This is essentially a really random combination of things that while might line up cool in your head end up looking really discordant when viewed together by another person. You have a mash-up of different concepts that don't really seem to flow well with one another, take for example the random acid spray attack that has nothing to do with the two shielding abilities. All three abilities don't really seem to connect to this music theme you're shoving into the kai. I really think the form visually looks cool but it doesn't resonate throughout the rest of the kai. I mean yea you need to play a song to use the ability but you could have easily made the req having to somersault that doesn't turn it into a gymnast kai.

My personal recommendation is to sit down and take a look at what you really what out of the kai rather than artificially shove different themes into it. Do you want it to be musical? then it should resonate more with a musical theme like being sound based in effect. Do you want it to be more defensive? Then the musical bits need to be dropped and so does the random aoe acid thing in order to play up the defensive angles.

Keep in mind this is only my opinion and you're free to continue on with this concept at your own discretion.

 

[Apeiron]

I see what Shade means by random, but the overall thing holding these abilities together is that it ties to music. Not a bad idea, really. We have a few like that if I'm not mistaken. Bish, for example, has a dubstep kai last I checked.

My problems with this, Dys, are twofold initially. For starters it's too restrictive and limiting from a writing perspective. From a mechanical perspective it looks more or less like you threw numbers into it that you figured would be okay and are hoping that the feedback will enable you to make proper adjustments.

Another theme that seems to really hit with this idea, overall, is a want of protection. Both of your abilities (and mind you, shields do not need to be abilities just because they're not offensive) are protective in nature. Either for Adele or someone she might be paired with.

Why don't we start with the two biggest problems with this kai? 1) Drop Radioactive in favor of something that somehow fits better with the other two abilities you have. 2) Realize that the numbers you have, and the mechanics, for your abilities are either not clear or do not correlate properly.

With the mechanics you're getting a 1:1 ratio. 10% paid means a 10% barrier that is applicable to the barrier effects and weakening. I suggest that if you really have to have her stationed in one spot and playing, she can keep the barrier from losing its effectiveness, but if she stops playing it will suffer barrier effects. That way you have a steady decline if you're -for some reason- forced to move.

Next 15% on top of your 10% is huge. I'm not kai staff, so final ruling is to them, but I'm not entirely certain if that's a fair percentage. Again we go back to the 1:1 ratio where you pay 15% of your reiatsu for an effect that will numb pain by 15% (however you deem that appropriate during writing is relative). The restriction that she can only play it for one turn per every 1,000 reiatsu is probably something you can do away with as it's extremely limiting. One turn can go by really fast, and depending on who you're writing with can last anywhere between a single second to several seconds or more in close collaborations. As it's written, you wouldn't get more than a single note out.

Speaking of notes, another real big thing I want to hit on: music selection. I have 0 problem with you writing Adele playing Radioactive. None. Nil. Zilch. But I don't think you need to restrict Adele's kai to those songs that you've chosen. If you like those songs, and want to use them in your writing - wonderful. Please, by all means do. But there's absolutely no reason why Adele can't play Mozart or Dvorak and not get the same results.

I'll stop my input here for now. Hope I was helpful somehow.

 

[Dysney]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I didn't really have any idea of what I was doing other than what I gleaned from looking through the Release Submissions thread. How's this for abilities and attacks, then?

Attack
Pachelbel’s Protection
Adele hums the cello part of Pachelbel’s Canon in D while playing the violin solo on her kodachi. By channelling 10% of her reiatsu into this tune, she creates a spherical shield that has a radius between 1 and 3 meters. The shield repels foreign/enemy reiatsu. Enemy reiatsu is recognized based on the sound of the reiatsu of anything that approaches the shield, allowing allies to remain in the shield, unharmed. Pachelbel’s Shield loses one 1% of its strength per turn after it is cast if Adele stops playing or leaves the shield.

Ability
Lithium High
Adele uses 15% of her reiatsu plays Lithium by Evanescence in order to imbue an ally with her spiritual energy effectively reducing damage taken by that person by 15%. Pain inflicted by any harm incurred by the person she protects will not be felt but instead cause a reduction in Adele’s reiatsu. Because of this ability’s numbing properties, Adele will be unable to feel pain and have reduced sensitivity to touch until she stops playing.

Ability
Your Poison Protects Me
By playing Alice Cooper’s Poison, she coats herself or an ally in her own reiatsu. The energy, while not harming her target has corrosive qualities that will eat away at anything else they come into contact with. This requires 3% of her reiatsu per person protected.

 

[Apeiron]

A little clarification on ability slots vs. attack slots:

Attack slot - By the loosest definition, attack slots have a cost that generate an effect. By more strict standards (I'm looking at you Herculean Judge) attack slots not only cost some amount of reiatsu but have some sort of offensive purpose. This rule *can* be bent depending on the whole of the kai, however, I usually lean towards no.

Ability Slot - Ability slots don't have to have an offensive purpose, and don't have to cost reiatsu. These are the open book of kai slots, and are quite precious. Your imagination's the limit: Undead like vitality, giant war wolf steeds, the ability to see into the true reflection of an opponent's soul, or creating a giant dancing statue are just a few examples of what ability slots can do!

Why does this matter? - Well, for me its pretty simple. Different races have a different number of slots and a different distribution of attack and ability slots. For example, Shinigami get 1 ability and 3 attack slots in bankai. Their ability slot is *strong*. Their attack slots are usually skewed towards the strict definition of attack slots. Advent humans have 3 slots, all fairly strong, and all ability slots. This is to express the unique and 'free' nature of their release versus the process of a shinigami's release. Extra ability slots don't mean much if we aren't making sure they do!

TL;DR version: I was pointing out to you that your shield doesn't have to be an ability slot. As you have it, though, you have 3 attack slots.

The Shield
Okay, so to help you get a feel of how exactly your shield would work in a given fight, let's run some numbers.

Given: Your reiatsu is 1,000, this kai is passed, the fight has just started, your enemy is of similar strength and a mixture of zanjutsu and kidou build.

Each time you want to make a shield, Adele has to play a song - a very specific song - and pay 100 reiatsu to create a dome shield with a diameter of 6m. This dome - providing that the 1% degradation passed - would last for 100 or so turns, and that's if Adele stops playing.

There are any number of kidou that your opponent can use to destroy or overpower your shield at this level. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just means that at lower levels you're not going to do a whole lot of blocking against higher powered attacks, and that's fair. At 10,000 reiatsu your shield would cost 1000 reiatsu. Still not terribly impressive when a kidoutard can cast a Raikouhou to tear through it, but that's still a 1000 rei barrier that anyone who isn't can't really stop without an ability costing the same amount or more.

Result: Drop the 1% loss. The fact that at 1000 rei it lasts 100 rounds is ridiculous. Though this might be countered by how weak it is, that in effect makes it moot. A standard kidou barrier that persists will lose 25% of its effectiveness per round, and the same should be good for you. So from round 1 to 4 it would be: 100% -> 75% -> 50% -> 25%

In it's place simply say that as long as Adele keeps playing, the barrier degradation stops.

 

[Eidolon]

Van here: currently the kai staff guy. I'm going to fire off some points, but first, some caveats.

1) I'm not trying to trample your creativity. I say things because at times I feel like I have some wisdom/experience in the matter.

2) I never pass/fail a kai based on its theme alone, my job is to make sure the mechanics look right. However, I really encourage an in-genre/character approach. Is Adele a very, very young spirit? Unless she's transitioned in the last few years, she wouldn't know these songs most likely.


Now,you're using a kai that reflects musical talent, but is the effects you're creating really hitting off on that? You're teeing off on songs to match the effect, I can see that, but a shinigami's release is an expression of the core nature. What is music to Adele, is it the ultimate form of creative expression? Is it that the sense of sound is something that really defined her life? These kinds of questions can help to flesh out a fulfilling kai.

As for the mechanics: for barriers I'm fine with a passive effect added to the barrier. Say, I pay x/y% to make a barrier that also makes the target immune to pain while its active. That's swell. Anything beyond that and, as per the kai faq, I'm going to be looking for some tradeoffs (such as only having 2 slots instead of 3, paying more than you get for the barrier's strength, having it lockout for a time and so on).

Now, as for a sound kai, thinking about how sound works might help you fuel some ideas too. Sound can destroy through resonance, deafen, disorient through disabling anatomy (inner ear messed up = nausea). It can also inspire potent emotion. All things to chew on and check against your character!

 

[Dysney]

Van here: currently the kai staff guy. I'm going to fire off some points, but first, some caveats.

1) I'm not trying to trample your creativity. I say things because at times I feel like I have some wisdom/experience in the matter.

2) I never pass/fail a kai based on its theme alone, my job is to make sure the mechanics look right. However, I really encourage an in-genre/character approach. Is Adele a very, very young spirit? Unless she's transitioned in the last few years, she wouldn't know these songs most likely.


Now,you're using a kai that reflects musical talent, but is the effects you're creating really hitting off on that? You're teeing off on songs to match the effect, I can see that, but a shinigami's release is an expression of the core nature. What is music to Adele, is it the ultimate form of creative expression? Is it that the sense of sound is something that really defined her life? These kinds of questions can help to flesh out a fulfilling kai.

As for the mechanics: for barriers I'm fine with a passive effect added to the barrier. Say, I pay x/y% to make a barrier that also makes the target immune to pain while its active. That's swell. Anything beyond that and, as per the kai faq, I'm going to be looking for some tradeoffs (such as only having 2 slots instead of 3, paying more than you get for the barrier's strength, having it lockout for a time and so on).

Now, as for a sound kai, thinking about how sound works might help you fuel some ideas too. Sound can destroy through resonance, deafen, disorient through disabling anatomy (inner ear messed up = nausea). It can also inspire potent emotion. All things to chew on and check against your character!

Adele is rather young, but has come to love music due to being literally surrounded by a symphony 24/7. To her reiatsu has a sound. Everything is composed of reiatsu and therefore has a sound. When spiritual energy is manipulated it sounds a certain way. Because of this when she focuses reiatsu it sometimes helps her to think of a song and attempt to manipulate her reiatsu so that its "sound" matches the physical sound of one particular piece or another. However, reiatsu sound is expressed in effects on reiatsu as no actual sound waves are involved. So if she were have an ability that destroyed resonance, she would be messing up their ability to sense and mold reiatsu, not their inner ear. (Is it even possible to manipulate other beings' reiatsu?) That is why I have thus far avoided any "sound" based attacks. Adele doesn't use physical sounds involving sound waves and vibrations.

 

[Dysney]

Alrighty. I think I fixed the mechanics and whatnot. This look okay?

Attack
Pachelbel’s Protection
Adele plays a classical piece on her kodachi to channel 10% of her reiatsu into this tune, she creates a spherical shield that has a radius between 1 and 3 meters. This is most effective when she uses Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The shield repels foreign/enemy reiatsu. Enemy reiatsu is recognized based on the sound of the reiatsu of anything that approaches the shield, allowing allies to remain in the shield, unharmed. Pachelbel’s Shield degrades over time if her kodachi do not come into contact with one another in order for her to play at least once per turn.

Ability
Lithium High
Adele uses 15% of her reiatsu plays Lithium by Evanescence in order to imbue an ally with her spiritual energy effectively reducing damage taken by that person by 15%. Pain inflicted by any harm incurred by the person she protects will not be felt. Because of this ability’s numbing properties, Adele will be unable to feel pain and have reduced sensitivity to touch until she stops playing. Once she stops however, Adele will feel the compounded pain from any injuries she has sustained as well as from harm to the person she protects.

 

[Time Lady Katie]

In re your question about manipulating the reiatsu of others: Mystics study reiatsu and learn how to control it. While being able to do some seriously powerful attacks to others by messing with their reiatsu would be overpowered, messing with them in the form of a debuff of some kind is theoretically plausable given the training Adele would have. Don't know what Van would approve, but my personal favorite use of this was I once saw a shikai that disrupted the harmony between shinigami and zanpakutou, effectively locking out shikai/bankai. So using that as a yardstick there are certainly creative ways you can use your Mystic training and your Shikai to mess with other's reiatsu.

 

[Nargles]

FEAT STAFF TAG IN *FIREWORKS*

Anyway, your kai really looks a lot better. My only concern is that you might be overlapping your two shikai abilities too much and might be heading for a net negative when using your abilities. Both are essentially shields of two different flavors, which is cool. I'm totally for shield based, defensive kais which is awesome, but I think the two abilities are essentially covering the same niche, defending against reiatsu (mainly because DR doesn't stop the person from being cut up) based attacks.

The first AOE shield looks good, it's 1 to 1 and degrades like normal barriers which is good. The main thing is the second ability. Let's look at what you've written to get a good feel for the cost/benefit. 15% in general is a very very steep cost associated with really powerful abilities. On paper a 15% reduction to all attacks seems to be really strong, but does it really carry a really powerful oomph to play up that cost? Part of the ability is essentially the spell threshold, which theoretically, every shinigami could naturally acquire with a small kidou investment. The damage reduction is cool, but you already have a way to shield someone else. The barrier is already really strong, so how much of the attack is going to make it through the barrier?

My advice is maybe rework the second attack to be strong against physical based attacks. An idea that might allow both abilities to appear more distinct is making two separate defensive shielding abilities. The first works on reiatsu, the second works on direct physical attacks but a person can only have one affecting them at a time. That way you get a cool counter-play of switching up shields to match the situation but not rendering people immune to all attacks.

Also, as a tangential note, there is a lot of leeway with directly attacking souls. For example, Lucia's kai directly strikes their soul and causes reiatsu usage to feel like being stabbed multiple times in the chest. It's more of a play by ear thing really.

 

[Dysney]

Alright. Here are the two abilities with all the final edits made. I kept in mind the Mystics' ability to manipulate reiatsu and the need for an ability/attack with a more physical affect in order to compliment Pachelbel's Shield when redesigning Lithium High. Does this look alright?

Attack
Pachelbel’s Protection
Adele plays a classical piece on her kodachi to channel 10% of her reiatsu into this tune, she creates a spherical shield that has a radius between 1 and 3 meters. This is most effective when she uses Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The shield repels foreign/enemy reiatsu. Enemy reiatsu is recognized based on the sound of the reiatsu of anything that approaches the shield, allowing allies to remain in the shield, unharmed. Pachelbel’s Shield degrades over time if her kodachi do not come into contact with one another in order for her to play at least once per turn.

Ability
Lithium High
Adele plays a song from the rock genre, her preferred song for this technique being “Lithium” by Evanescence, in order to speed up her or an ally’s reflexes. The affected person’s reiatsu will be excited by “vibrations” from Adele’s spiritual energy that warps their perception making everything appear to be happening in slow motion (their physical speed is not affected by this). By adding 2% of her reiatsu to the technique she can give the affected person a slight speed increase that lasts for one turn. Not stackable with Pachelbel’s Shield. Lithium High’s affects fade at the standard degradation rate of a normal shield.