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Character: Mao
Series: Disgaea 3
Version: Epilogue – Post Salvatore fight
Age: 1578
Gender: Male
Sexuality: Sciencesexual. …Okay, in all seriousness it’s hard to say. In any case, it would take a looooong time before he could actually think of someone that way, I think.
Appearance: Mao is a short, thin boy with a shock of messy white hair (which conceals a moon-shaped scar) and pale skin. It’s obvious the boy doesn’t smile very often; his red eyes are usually fixed in a glare at people whenever he’s not obsessing over something strange and—as far as he’s concerned—wonderful. He also wears a pair of large, round glasses capable of catching the light in eerie ways.

Mao’s outfit consists of a red, high-collared, long-sleeved jacket with various gold buttons attached to it pulled across his shoulders and held in place with a chain, the jacket’s sleeves trailing after him. Underneath that, Mao wears a black , long-sleeved shirt. It’s tight around his torso, but the sleeves hang fairly loose. For some strange reason, Mao wears two pairs of pants. One pair is black, the legs ending a few inches below his knee. The other pair, this one white, ends a few inches above his knee and is kept in place by a black belt. Finally, Mao wears a pair of white, black, and red tennis shoes whose tops reach above his ankles.

Personality: Mao is… a very odd boy to say the least. He’s generally cold and somewhat rude to most people and seems not to care about anyone but himself. He can also come off as rather perverted, immediately investigating whatever (or whoever) he finds interesting. The subject’s wishes don’t matter at this point, because the demon boy is usually drooling and practically hyperventilating over the experiments he could do to them. These usually involve things like adding rockets, lasers, and other such weapons to people or outright dissection. It all depends on how he’s feeling at the moment.

You could say Mao’s a bit of a nerd, too. He owns plenty of comics, anime, and video games, and plays them almost religiously, memorizing every bit that he can. He calls the time he spends reading/watching/playing “research,” which, in a roundabout sort of way it is. You see, Mao absolutely DESPISES heroes (except Almaz) and believes that by looking through these media he can learn everything he can about them and use it against them. Know thy enemy and all that.

Deep underneath all the mad-science and coldness, however, lies a very lonely, conflicted boy. For the most part, Mao grew up without any friends beyond his butler, Geoffrey, and—though he would never admit to thinking of her as such—his rival, Raspberyl. As such, he’s unsure how to deal with the friends he has now, and absolutely refuses to admit to them being such. He struggles to keep up his honor student reputation, and hates the idea of being thought of as kind or sweet or anything else like that—no matter how much he is. The boy has a big heart, he just abhors the idea of letting anyone know or see it.

Abilities/Weaponry/Strengths: Mao is fairly well-rounded when it comes to physical and magical attacks. He’s good with a sword and knows a variety of sword skills, and knows ice spells up to the second highest level. His special attacks are mainly star elemental and are often very flashy (Blast Finger ends in a green explosion and Shine Beam has tons of lasers). His most powerful attack is Vasa Aergun, which summons a large, dark-looking thing that shoots a huuuuuge laser. That one probably won’t be used as much due to the large blast radius.

Mao is also rather resourceful, quite intelligent, and very brave. He will persevere no matter what odds are against him (and get a stat boost depending on how many enemies--*shot*). Once he has decided he can trust something, Mao is very loyal. He won’t let anything happen to his slaves unless he allows it, often to the point of taking extreme offense to the action.

Deep within Mao is another power, one he absolutely hates using and does his best to keep suppressed. This power is his dark side, and it sits waiting and watching for its chance to come out. Mao’s dark side is, essentially, the darkness lying deep within his heart given consciousness and it packs one hell of a wallop (in the Human World ending of D3 Dark!Mao manages to not only destroy the Human World, but EVERYTHING). Mao’s dark side will only show itself If he’s got enough hate and anger bubbling up inside him, but, as said before, Mao tries to keep it shoved as far away as possible, preferring his own power to the dark power that was cultivated by Aurum over the years. There has to be one hell of a lot of anger, hate, and pain before it can even begin to surface, and it’s possible to calm Mao down out of it.

Weaknesses: Mao is… pretty messed up. He doesn’t trust people easily, and even when he does come to trust them, a part of him still seems to wonder whether or not they’ll leave him anyway and if they’re just pretending to like him or if they have an agenda of their own that they’re trying to further. I suppose the easiest way to explain it is that he’s willing to let people in, but he’s very guarded and paranoid about it. It’s partially why he’s so cold, I imagine. On a similar note, Mao is very, very easy to rile up.

His father is also a sore spot. As the game puts it, Mao’s heart is “scarred” from his father’s death, and while he’s moved on to a point now that his father’s spirit’s moved on, he doesn’t like the subject to be brought up.

Mao’s love of science can easily be used against him. The boy loves experiments. He doesn’t even mind them being done to him—to a point. If he knows what’s going on and someone asks him, he’ll be right in there demanding notes and a description of the processes and all that. Considering what usually ends up happening to people who get experimented on in Paixao, that’s far from a good thing. Or if/when he decides to go after something dangerous. He’s probably not going to think it through very well. THE MARCH OF SCIENCE CAN NEVER BE STOPPED!

While Mao’s attack power is fairly strong, his defensive power (both magically and physically) is comparatively lacking, as is his speed. To put things simply, he can dish out hits, but has difficulty taking them or dodging them.

History: Once upon a time, there was a school—a school for demons to be exact. This school, the Nether Institute, Evil Academy, held evil acts in the highest regard (obviously) and those who committed the most of these were considered Honor Students. The greatest of these Honor Students was Mao, who happened to be the son of the Overlord/Dean.

Mao respected his father more than he let on, though he was quick to complain about the gigantic Overlord’s tendency to accidentally step on—and break—his things. After the destruction of his Slaystation Portable and the loss of millions of hours of data, Mao had enough, and stormed out of his room, swearing revenge.

Around that time, the Super Hero, Aurum happened to be passing by. He was on his last adventure—to destroy the strongest Overlord: Mao’s father. Mao happened upon him as he left the room, and, seeing an opportunity to get back at his father, decided to tell the Super Hero his father’s weak points (after getting an autograph, of course). Mao never thought Aurum could defeat his father, but his father wouldn’t fight back, too afraid of harming his son with his attacks.

The Overlord fell, and the Super Hero, having not expected to win, went a little crazy. He felt as though he needed to have a villain to fight, and, as such, he chose to create his own villain, deciding to use Mao after seeing the power behind the boy's rage at his father's death. He eventually became Mao’s butler, Geoffrey, and Mao, either due to Aurum’s meddling or due to trauma, blocked out most of the events.

Two hundred years later, little changed for Mao. He still had his goal of defeating his father in mind, and continued his extensive research on heroes. In that research, he came to the conclusion that, in order to defeat his father (who was lingering around the Netherworld as a spirit, unable to rest) he would become a hero himself.

He was aided in this quest by Geoffrey, who eventually led him to Almaz, a human boy who was more of a wannabe hero than a real hero. Raspberyl, a delinquent (which means she does good things as opposed to bad) and Mao’s rival, attempted to stop him, trying to keep Mao “on the straight and narrow” but she was defeated and Mao kidnapped Almaz and stole his title.

From there, the two went on to attempt to defeat the Overlord (though they only fought his hand due to the fact that he’s FRIGGEN HUGE), only to fail miserably. Mao finds out about then that the Hero title he stole is a fake and demands a refund, deciding to go inside his heart and take it out. However, his heart is shut tight, and his True Feelings within state that a part of Mao doesn’t want to let that title go.

Mao, believing that’s a load of bull, goes and attempts to open his heart… by eating a dragon egg sunny-side up. Needless to say, this doesn’t work (but apparently it was damn good. He was rolling around and everything).

Not long after that, Mao meets up with Sapphire--the princess that Almaz has a big-ass crush on and wants to protect--while on his way to a class as part of a plan to learn what crushes are. Eventually, believing his heart to NOW be open (it isn’t), they head back into Mao’s heart and stumble upon the scar of his father’s death (and the blame Mao feels over it all). They fight and defeat it only for it to come back. Almaz decides to pull the plug on the Overlord (yes, you read that right), and goes into the newly opened heart to grab his title back, not noticing that there was something wrong with Mao.

You see… it was at this time Mao regressed to an infant.

After a pep-talk, Almaz and Sapphire enter Mao’s heart again to set things right and, with the help of Raspberyl (who graduates from Evil Academy and joins up with them afterwards), do so. When they all exit Mao’s heart, however, they find something terrible has happened to the campus… The Freshmen have all been brainwashed to become delinquents!

The group then sets out to find out what happened, meeting up with the Sophomores and their charismatic leader, Master Big Star (whose voice is sexy in BOTH language tracks), who is unimpressed by Mao’s leadership. Apparently, the Sophomores and the Seniors had become involved in a huge war, with the Seniors being the ones to brainwash the Freshmen. Mao and company fight one of the Diez Gentlemen (legendary, powerful seniors), Salvatore the Magnificent, but she hardly gets a scratch.

Just as she is about to attack Mao, Geoffrey pops up out of nowhere and takes the attack. He dies (except not really), and Mao freaks out, almost going out of control. Mr. Champloo, legendary home economics teacher and master of food metaphor, manages to “cool his heart down” and stops something disastrous from happening.

Following this incident, Mao and company take ANOTHER trip into Mao’s heart in order to clear out some subconsciouses lying within. During this process, Mao begins to uncover the past he had repressed and, as he does, becomes more and more distant from those he had become close to. They exit the heart and head back to fight Salvatore, winning this time. It’s then that the Senior Leader shows up, and that leader… is Geoffrey.

Geoffrey reveals himself as Aurum and Mao, understandably, is pissed. However, he decides that, in order to get revenge on the Super Hero, he’s going to destroy the Human World. Everyone else tries to dissuade him from this as they go along the path toward the Human World, but Mao will have none of it. Meanwhile, Almaz becomes weaker and weaker due to a cursed teddy bear he stopped the princess from hugging on the way to Salvatore (yes, I know that sounds weird).

As they finally get to the entrance to the Human World, Almaz tries one last time to talk Mao out of it, giving him a heartfelt plea to stop, and that he just wanted to help Mao be happy and be Mao’s friend. And, after that, the Hero-wannabe dies.

Mao is finally snapped out of it, but his dark side still wants to take over and manages to manifest himself outside of Mao. The two fight, and Mao manages to bring Almaz back to life, either through the power of friendship or the power of plot device, opening his heart (for realz this time) in the process.

The group then goes to take down Aurum, snapping a few Freshmen from their brainwashing and quickly finding out that Almaz’s near-permanent death and the near-destruction of the Human World had all been planned out by Aurum as a way to fully bring out Mao’s power. During the final battle, Aurum is verbally, then physically pwned. It turns out that, over the years, he’s become an evil god, taking parts from Overlords he’d defeated and somehow absorbing them or something like that. This… is not something you say around Mao.

Aurum is currently spending the rest of his days being experimented on.

But before that Mao heads into another room, where the spirit of his father is finally moving on. Turns out, he wasn’t staying behind because he blamed Mao for his death, but because he wanted to make sure Mao grew up some (no wonder he and Vyers hit it off, lol). He leaves the Netherworld to Mao before finally disappearing.

A few months later, Almaz and Sapphire drop by the Evil Academy again on their honeymoon, only to find that things are being stolen all around the campus! The group sets out to find the culprit, and manages to gather that the Legendary Overlord is to blame. On his way to another sweep of part of the campus, Mao is taken into Paixao.