Hiroshi Ando (Goes by Ando) - Finished

[Shokkou]

Name: Hiroshi Ando (goes by Ando for reasons that will become apparent; only his mother calls him Hiroshi)

Age: 24

Gender: Male

Love Interest: N/A

Organization: Unaffiliated

Weapon/Fighting style: Likes knives even though he knows they’re completely ineffective against ghouls and can display a surprising amount of creativity with regards to improvised weaponry when necessary. Isn’t particularly strong but is quick on his feet with fast reflexes so in a fight he tends to favour dodging and fighting dirty. Has no formal training; all his fighting skills are the result of years of having to defend himself from bullies and his mother’s more dickish boyfriends, plus some pointers from his best friend who was sick of seeing him get his ass kicked. Avoids fighting ghouls because he isn't stupid.

Primary Stats: Health, Stealth, Speed

Physical Description: 5ft 7, wiry build, very dark brown eyes, shaggy black hair that is usually hidden under a grey knit cap and thus frequently subject to hat hair, and a fairly forgettable face. Tends to be a bit on the scruffy side. Occasionally has gel pen and/or ballpoint 'tattoos' on his left arm and/or anywhere else he can get at due to a) having the urge to draw but no sketchbook handy, b) boredom, or c) both.

Personality: Is a little ‘off’ with some odd quirks and morals due to his childhood and spending a lot of time around a ghoul (eg, his attitude to a ghoul eating someone who's already dead more or less boils down to 'waste not, want not' and he's a bit more..flexible about the idea of killing than normal, but cannibalism is still a major no-no unless it's a survival situation or something). Is utterly devoted to his best friend in the slightly desperate way of someone who doesn’t really have anyone else and didn't have enough emotional support growing up, but wary of other people. Is the opposite of squeamish and is pretty thoroughly desensitised to ghoul dietary habits. Has a bit of a grudge against the CCG and is terrified of his friend falling prey to them or another ghoul. Is pretty much incapable of being afraid of said friend.

History: Ando didn’t have the best start in life. He was an ‘accident’ whose father is unknown, with the three most likely candidates being a married man who was having an affair with his mother until his wife found out and a couple of guys who his mother had rebound flings with after the cheater dumped her. Since he takes after his mother’s side of the family in terms of looks there’s no help narrowing things down there. As for his mother, she’s an irresponsible borderline alcoholic with a poor taste in men who had him for all the wrong reasons and largely lost interest in him when he stopped being cute. To make matters worse, when he started school he quickly became a target for bullies. Thus he spent most of his childhood unhappy, isolated, starved of affection and emotional support and very, very lonely.

When he was eleven, a woman and her son moved into the same apartment building as Ando. The boy, who was also named Hiroshi, was a few months older than Ando and to the surprise of both of them they became friends. The matching names issue was a source of confusion at first but for one reason or another they eventually settled on Hiroshi Yamada being Hiroshi and Hiroshi Ando being Ando.

Ando was the happiest he’d been in his life. Finally he wasn’t alone anymore; he had a friend. However after a while he started noticing things that were a bit odd about his new friend. Hiroshi didn’t go to school, was never sick or injured, he never saw him eat or drink anything other than water or unsweetened black coffee, and on one of the few occasions that he was inside Hiroshi's apartment he discovered that the fridge was empty. On their own these things may have been dismissed out of hand but at the time his mother was dating a guy with a major horror obsession that included an interest in ghouls and between the documentaries he watched and the books and magazines he occasionally left lying around the apartment Ando ended up picking up quite a bit of knowledge on the subject, enough for certain things to stand out for him and suspicions to develop. However they were never more than suspicions and, afraid of losing the only person who gave a crap about him and reasoning that since Hiroshi hadn’t had so much as a nibble despite plenty of opportunities he either wasn’t a ghoul or the stuff he’d heard about didn’t apply to him, he kept them to himself. The two continued to be friends and by the age of fourteen they were pretty much attached at the hip. They could have continued on like that indefinitely, the ghoul issue being in a perpetual state of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ but alas fate had other plans. Early one morning Ando saw the CCG arrive at their apartment building and faced with the possibility that they might be there for Hiroshi and his mother, he had to make a decision. He phoned his best friend and warned him.

As it turned out, Hiroshi was a ghoul. Ando’s warning allowed him to escape by the skin of his teeth but alas his mother must have been picked up earlier because he never saw her again. When Hiroshi later cornered him and demanded to know what he knew and how he knew it, Ando was equal parts relieved and afraid. The fear died a swift death when his friend broke down and ended up crying on him. He wasn’t a monster, he was his best friend and he was hurting. That was the moment that Ando started to form a grudge against the CCG.

The next few years passed by quietly enough. Ando and Hiroshi met up as often as they could, which given that Ando spent his teens trying to spend as little time at home as possible was quite a lot. They tried to keep the ghoul stuff separate from their friendship but it didn’t work out. By the age of fifteen Ando was better informed about ghouls and the CCG than most of the human population and the term ‘Dove’ had become permanently embedded in his vocabulary. At seventeen he found himself playing look out while Hiroshi scavenged a corpse in an alleyway. Faced with simply ignoring his friend's diet no longer being an option, he rationalised the situation as being not all that much different from organ donation, since one person's death allows another to live. Since then he has more or less managed to convince himself that a person is only a person when they're alive, that once they're dead they're just so much meat, and that it'd be a shame for said meat to go to waste when people need it to live (his feelings regarding how quinques are made on the other hand are far more negative, which is kind of understandable given that he's had re-occurring nightmares about Hiroshi getting turned into a suitcase).

Between a lack of academic aptitude, the bullying and his crappy home-life, Ando’s grades weren’t good enough for him to go to university (in fact it was a minor miracle that he even managed to get into a high-school rather than his education ending at the age of fifteen and an even larger miracle that his mother was able/willing to pay for it, although he still had to get a part-time job to ‘help out’). He drifted from one job to another, eventually landing a position as a hospital porter. As jobs go, it was a bit cruddy but he quickly realised that it came with certain opportunities, namely that it provided access to medical waste, including body parts. Opportunistic and very, very sneaky thieving in the interest of feeding his friend ensued. After a couple of years a position as a hospital incinerator operator opened up and seeing an opportunity for slightly better pay and easier scavenging he applied and somehow managed to get the job. Now that the body parts were coming to him and he was usually out of sight, his scavenging both increased in scale and became a little more selective, being able to pick out the best stuff. Even then there was sometimes more than Hiroshi needed to eat so the two decided to sell the surplus to other ghouls and split the profits, Ando being the supplier and Hiroshi being the middleman.

In his free time he reads manga, draws, does stuff with Hiroshi including going to cafes and watching horror films for the unintentional comedy value, and consumes an excessive quantity of coffee.

Residence:Shares a 1K (ie, one room with a bathroom and tiny kitchen area) apartment in the Karasuyama district of the 12th Ward with Hiroshi as neither could afford even a tiny apartment on their own. As living arrangements go it is cramped and somewhat risky for a variety of reasons, but it's still better than the alternatives (Ando did have the option of living in the hospital's employee dorm but that would leave Hiroshi high and dry as well as making the side-business trickier).

Other: His reaction the first time he saw Hiroshi’s kakugan was “Huh. Cool.” His reaction to his kagune was “Awesome” swiftly followed by “Bro, you’ve got a tail.” His unofficial motto is "friends help you move, best friends help you move bodies" and he has a history of taking it literally.

Ando is fully aware of the illegality of his actions but he regards the risks as worth it, plus the way he sees it he broke a couple of the anti-ghoul laws just by being friends with one and keeping his mouth shut, and a couple more when he helped Hiroshi escape from the CCG so he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Is perpetually short of cash, hence the side-business.

[Live To Serve]

I LOVE this character. Very creative. Approved.

[Shokkou]

Thanks. Ando is the product of many, many sources of inspiration. Plus I figured that given that "ghouls and their humans" are kind of a reoccurring theme in canon, there should be an example here as well.

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