Kyuubey

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Character Name:Kyubey / Kyuubey (either are acceptable ways of romanizing his name)
Series: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Timeline: The moment when Madoka is going to make her wish.
Canon Resource Link: here you go!

Character History:

Kyuubey is an alien from some other planet somewhere else in the universe. His species - which he calls Incubators - is quite advanced and has been for longer than humanity has even really been much of a thing, it seems. Long ago, they realized that more energy is lost than is created in the universe because of entropy - the universe is constantly heading towards a state of greater and greater disorder and will eventually experience heat death. However, they discover that this can be combatted by converting emotional energy to make up for that lost as heat and thus preserve the universe by fighting Entropy. However, his species lacks emotion, for the most part - indeed, when individuals of the species experience emotion, it is considered a mental illness. Ironically, it is this thing that they don't understand and view as abnormal that is the key to saving the universe. Consequently, they search the universe for other beings that experience emotion, and they find a prime harvesting ground on Earth with the very emotional humanity - in particular, adolescent females.

This brings us to what Kyuubey does, as he eventually explains to Madoka, an adolescent girl who is the main character of the series. Kyuubey finds adolescent girls and tells them that he can grant them one wish. In exchange, they must form a contract with him and become magical girls - or mahou shoujo. In addition to getting their wish, the girls also gain pretty transformations and amazing magical powers, which - among other things - allow them to fight beings known as witches. But it's more complicated than that - not that, of course, Kyuubey usually explains all the details right away. Kyuubey is nothing if not manipulative and shady - he'd really make a good snake oil salesman or a lawyer or something, for he often neglects to tell the girls certain key aspects of being a magical girl before they make the contract simply because they never ask.

How magical girls work is as follows: When they make their contracts, Kyuubey grants their wish and extracts their souls, putting them into an egg-like crystal called a Soul Gem. However, they can continue to control their bodies without ever even realizing that their consciousnesses now lie primarily within that Soul Gem. Nevertheless, the body is now really just an empty husk. As Kyuubey tells Sayaka, it's really more convenient this way. It allows the girls to endure more without feeling the pain that they otherwise would as well as allowing their bodies to be more easily repaired with magic and so forth. The Soul Gem is easier to protect from destruction than their whole bodies (though if the gem is destroyed, it will kill the girl). They can even totally dissociate themselves from their body in a way and thus feel no pain at all, if they wish.

But all this is not without a further price. As the girls use magic, their soul gems become tainted. The only way to remove this taint is to use something called a Grief Seed, which brings us to Witches. As Magical Girls are bringers of hope, the Witches are bringers of despair. They cause people to kill themselves. When a magical girl defeats one, the witch leaves behind a Grief Seed, which the girl can use to absorb the taint from her Soul Gem. Kyuubey then collects these Grief Seeds from the girls once they've absorbed all the taint they can before hatching witches again. However, the origins of Witches are more sinister. When a magical girl allows her soul gem to become too tainted and succumbs to despair, that gem hatches, and she becomes a witch herself. So really, this is all a horrible cycle of hope and despair - but it is not without purpose, as an immense amount of energy is released when a witch is born. Kyuubey collects this energy and uses it to combat entropy - or... so he says, at any rate. Most things he says must really be taken with a grain or five of salt because even though he never outright lies, he often slants the truth or omits important details - like where witches come from - in order to guide the girls to his desired end.

Kyuubey recognizes the potential in girls he encounters and becomes visible to them while he tries to recruit them. Craftily, however, when they don't immediately have a wish for him, he often waits until they are in a particularly desperate moment to offer them the contract again. He wants them to make wishes that may not turn out super well so that they will eventually succumb to despair and become witches. He is an incubator, after all, and their soul gems are the eggs ready to hatch...

Over the course of the series, he continually seeks to manipulate Sayaka and Madoka into making a contract with him and becoming magical girls. He succeeds with Sayaka, and she eventually becomes a witch. After this, he suggests without actually saying as much to Kyoko (another magical girl) that it might be possible for her to bring Sayaka back from being a witch. However, he does this knowing full well that this is impossible and that Kyoko will die in the process. Just more chess pieces in his game of trying to get Madoka to contract with him. This is because she has the greatest potential of anyone he has ever run into before, and he knows that not only would she become an absurdly powerful magical girl, but she would also become a witch powerful enough to destroy all of humanity. But that isn't the important part - no the important part is that in this way she would generate his quota of energy to collect from Earth and a surplus.

Of course, things don't quite go as planned, for although Madoka ultimately does make a wish and a contract, she wishes to prevent all magical girls from succumbing to despair and becoming witches. In this way, she completely rewrites the universe such that all magical girls find peace when they run out of magic, instead of despair. She absorbs their grief and despair from throughout time and space, transforming herself into an immense powerful witch -- but! she includes herself in the wish, and she forsakes her humanity and even her existence as Madoka Kaname to instead become no more than a concept - a personification of hope, present everywhere and always, thus eliminating her own witch as well.

Kyuubey is still present in this new world, though he is less manipulative as he no longer needs girls to become witches. Instead, he collects little grief cubes harvested from a new being of despair that arises in this new universe called Demons. These grief cubes can be used like grief seeds to remove the taint from soul gems and prolong a magical girl's life, and Kyuubey still seems to collect them for energy, though he doesn't seem to remember the way the old world was. Homura - the one magical girl who remembers - tells him, however. Nonetheless, he otherwise seems pretty much the same at this point.

Abilities/Special Powers:
✴ Being kawaii as fuck. Seriously just look at him.

✴ Inspiring copious hatred in fandom. Because he lacks emotions and empathy and you know... causes a lot of suffering and is horrendously manipulative and just doesn't understand why that's bad. What do you mean manipulating pubescent girls is a bad thing?

✴ Telepathy. This is how he talks to people. He can also act as a sort of antenna, allowing for telepathic communication between nearby magical girls or magical girl candidates.

✴ Teleportation. He can move across great distances very quickly this way and also just kind of show up. He often tends to simply show up at the best moment for a girl to make a particularly emotionally charged wish, implying that he has a very good sense of timing.

✴ Wish Granting. The details of how this works are unknown, but he can grant people a single wish in exchange for forming a contract with him to become a magical girl.

✴ Soul Gem creation / Magical Girl making ness. He can extract someone's soul and transform it into a soul gem, granting them all sorts of powers, which are generally based on the wish they made, until they "mature" into a witch, allowing him to collect the massive amount of emotional energy that is generated. More about this is talked about in the history section.

✴ Replication / consumption of old body. When one of his bodies is killed, a new Kyuubey pops up and will come consume his old body.



YUM

✴ Collection of energy / conversion to combat entropy. He can open up a trap door on his back to collect grief seeds and grief cubes.

✴ Apparently having no internal organs; just a sea of red inside....

✴ Resembling a uterus. SHUT UP THIS IS A POWER TOO OK.

Third-Person Sample:

If there was one thing about Wonderland that interested Kyuubey most, it was the closets. He had never met anything else as capable of granting wishes as himself - though it had its limits, just as he did. Nevertheless, he found himself wondering what the price was and what the purpose was. So far, he had yet to discover any, save perhaps keeping the residents here content while they were harvested. That made sense to him, and he could not begrudge this mansion that, but still he wondered at times... was there more? Was this place combatting its own entropy this way or did it have other aims?

In the end, though, it didn't matter so much, as he had yet to find a way to harvest energy directly from the closets - and the people here still had many needs and desires that were not provided for, and there he had an opportunity. Here he would not limit himself to adolescent human girls - after all, so many of the people here (humans and otherwise) had so much potential for hope and despair ripe for the picking. Besides, it wasn't as if there were very many young women here of the optimal age anyway, so he would have to make do.

But that still left the closets. There was a lot to be learned about individual people here by what appeared in their closets. And so, Kyuubey had taken to appearing in them himself, teleporting into their rooms with or without their permission and nosing around. If nothing else, it was certainly an amusing pastime to see what mundane things people would wish for, while he waited for the prime opportunity to begin to make contracts and start the cycle here...

First-Person Sample:

[ Communicating via telepathy makes the voice and video functions somewhat useless for Kyuubey, so he doesn't bother with them when he wants to talk to people at a distance. But he doesn't even bother with this all that often, either, because it isn't all that hard for him to get around here. People are so much easier to observe in person. Still, sometimes general announcements need to be made... ]

If you could have any wish whatsoever, what would you wish for?

Would you be willing to fight for it? Would you be willing to die for it? I am particularly interested in hearing what non-humans among you have to say.