Near's finger puppets

Among Near's clutter of toys sit these tiny figures, each one modeled on a person who matters to his reasoning. He rolls them between his fingers while sorting out the part every individual plays in the unfolding case.

Each puppet is small enough to balance on a fingertip and tends to sport wide, rounded eyes. They took over from an earlier batch of blocky, construction-style toys: the stand-in for Kira was inked with the words L and Kira plus Light's first name in Japanese, while the one for X-Kira bore Teru Mikami's surname. Takeshi Obata has said the figures gave him a way to bring out a darker side of Near, who shapes them with pointed bias, drawing L as unattractive because he admires the man without liking him, yet pouring real care into Mello out of genuine affection. Tsugumi Ohba added that they never appeared in the original thumbnails and simply made the closing scenes look better.

Near alone builds and uses the set. The cast he models reaches from himself and his SPK aides, Rester, Lidner, and Gevanni, across the Task Force regulars Aizawa, Matsuda, Mogi, and Ide, and on to Misa, Takada, a pair standing in for Kira and X-Kira, and the two rivals L and Mello. He is first seen piecing them together as Aizawa calls to confirm that Light and Takada have been swapping notes at their nightly meetings, which prompts Near to note that the Task Force no longer figures in his investigation. A later one-shot, Never Complete, hands Near a Ryuk puppet fitted with its own detachable Death Note, plus an A-Kira figure modeled on Minoru Tanaka that closely echoes his original Kira puppet. Killer Within, a Death Note video game, bases its player avatars on these very figures.