Tamaki Amajiki

The first things anyone notices about Tamaki are the hunched shoulders and the eyes that will not meet theirs. He is tall and quite pale, with ears longer than most and tapering to soft points, and his dark indigo hair sticks out behind his head while his bangs hang across thin, exhausted-looking eyes of the same color. Eight years on from the Final War he wears it cropped much shorter.

His school uniform matches what the other boys wear, worn loose: the tie hangs slack, the shirt is only half tucked, and a broad round gold buckle sits at his belt.

For hero work he wears a black bodysuit plated in beige across the arms and shoulders, layered under a white tunic with a matching cape and a hood carrying more beige on top. The cape ties into a collar shaped like a scarf, fronted by a silver mask, and a thinner beige mask with a clear purple lens covers his face. A purple carrier vest hangs off brown straps, studded with pouches. He goes barefoot, which gives his Quirk more room to work.

The post-timeskip version of the costume keeps the mask but not much else. Vest and pouches turn dark green, wrist armor comes in white, and the tunic and hood are recolored a hard scarlet, the hood reworked with white jaw-like spikes around the opening that give the whole silhouette a menacing edge. A small straw-like fitting on his left cheek appears to exist so he can feed his Quirk in a hurry.

Crowds are Tamaki's undoing. He is painfully shy, withdrawn, gloomy, and reads as forbidding to strangers, and simply speaking to another person can put him on edge. When the anxiety wins he turns away and presses into the nearest wall to get his face out of view, a reflex that fires just as readily when he feels slighted or senses something is about to go wrong.

His body and his Quirk are exceptional; his opinion of them is not. The demand that he be flawless sits on him constantly and has hollowed out his self-regard, leaving him unable to register his own achievements while he is quick to tell anyone else that they are being too hopeful. Set beside Fat Gum's relentless good cheer the contrast is stark, and praise from his own mentor tends to land on him as mockery rather than encouragement.

Underneath the timidity is real steel, surfacing in flashes. A boy that reserved still trained his way into the Big Three, and Mirio Togata is the reason: a lifetime of working alongside him has given Tamaki a small set of convictions he will actually raise his voice for. Chief among them is that nobody gets to belittle the work another person put in. Noticing that Class 1-A could not see how much Mirio had poured into his power, Tamaki lifted his head out of hiding specifically to say so. Mirio's example is what moves him when nerves have him pinned, and it was Mirio's courage during the yakuza raid that put him in front of three villains alone so the rest of the team could push on. In that fight he drove himself past his limits to be worth the expectations Fat Gum, Mirio, and everyone else had placed on him, and he told Soramitsu Tabe, Toya Setsuno, and Yu Hojo exactly what he thought of the way they treated themselves as disposable to Overhaul, even as he clearly grasped what ties comrades together.

Overall Abilities: Tamaki ranks among the strongest students U.A. has, standing with Mirio Togata and Nejire Hado as the Big Three, and his skills have been described as leaving most Pro Heroes behind. Fat Gum rates him above himself, and above a whole assembled squad of pros and students that had Rock Lock, Eraser Head, Ryukyu, and his two Big Three colleagues in it. He backed the assessment up in practice, neutralizing dangerous villains with ease before his Quirk was temporarily erased, and later squaring off three against one with the Eight Bullets trio of Soramitsu Tabe, Yu Hojo, and Toya Setsuno, confident he could handle all of them himself. During the Final War he was placed on the assault team sent after Tomura Shigaraki in his body-enhanced state, arguably the most powerful being alive, and he and his two teammates held that enemy off for a considerable stretch.

Manifest: His Quirk lets him express the physical traits of anything he has eaten, so a serving of takoyaki becomes octopus tentacles at his fingertips. Whatever he produces comes out stronger than the original: his crab claws will crush a metal weapon without difficulty, and the more of a given substance he consumes, the more formidable the result. The limits are logistical. He can only draw on material still inside him and loses access the moment it finishes digesting, which means restocking every day and planning his meals around the fights he expects. Hard training at U.A. expanded what he can do with it, letting him run several manifestations at once, dial their size up or down, and pick precisely the right trait for the moment out of everything currently in his system. He eats takoyaki and clams daily as a baseline, considering the pair a good offense and a good defense, and combines freely: tentacle fingers to bind an enemy behind a clamshell husk for cover, chicken talons reinforced with octopus muscle, tentacles braced with crab shell.

Ultimate Moves: Vast Hybrid, also rendered Vast Hybrid Chimera, is the umbrella technique, letting him grow one or more animal or food traits anywhere on his body for offense or concealment. Kraken converts both arms into four enormous sucker-lined tentacles that thrash across a wide area. Centaur turns his lower half into a bull's, sprouts horns, and replaces his hands with vines tipped in hard fruit for striking several enemies at once. Octopus Mirage borrows cephalopod camouflage to blend him into his surroundings for an ambush. Scorpius Toxin grows scorpion tails to stab and envenom a target. Plasma Cannon is the largest of them, warping his arm into a monstrous composite of many manifestations at once, which fires an immense laser blast when fed Nejire's energy. The ingredients behind it are not a fixed list, but moso bamboo, watermelon, dragonfruit, and red sea urchin have gone into it, as have locust, zebra tarantula, spider crab, sika deer, and a run of reptiles taking in the American alligator, the green sea turtle, and the soft shell turtle.

Tactical Intellect: Reading a fight is arguably his sharpest asset. Facing the Eight Bullets he disarmed all three opponents at once to swing the odds, then worked out that the villains were stalling to buy Overhaul time to escape with Eri, and argued that the other heroes should conserve their Quirks, Eraser Head above all, for the deeper reaches of the yakuza fortress and the shifting walls of Joi Irinaka's Mimicry. Mid-battle he improvised constantly, attempting to grow octopus neurotoxin inside his own arm on the reasoning that Soramitsu would be paralyzed if he bit it, and breaking the trio's coordination by blinding Toya first, having deduced that Larceny depends on sight, then swallowing Yu Hojo's crystals to raise a wall of them against their owner. Afterward he stripped the three of their masks and held onto them, having watched Toya produce a hidden dagger from inside his own at the start of the fight.

Food Pouches: His costume carries an array of pockets stocked with foods he can swallow on the spot, extending the range of manifestations available to him in the field.