Ciel

Ciel (シエル) is one of the five heroines of Tsukihime. She appears to be a senior attending the same school as the main protagonist Shiki Tohno.

Background
Ciel, born as Elesia, was born in 1976 in a remote village in France to a French father and an Oriental mother. Due to a high degree of magical potential, she was born as Michael Roa Valdamjong's seventeenth incarnation. His sixteenth was destroyed by Arcueid Brunestud before he had a chance to find a family bloodline with both wealth and power. He could only fulfill the requirement that his next incarnation would have physical potential, so he was born into a normal family without any social standing. Her body instead had extremely high magical potential, which is the closest in power to his original body in all of his incarnations.

She grew up normally in the village, though she felt out of place due to looking like her mother. The townspeople were kind to her, and she lived happily, helping out in her father's shop, going to school, and falling in love like normal. Ciel's father viewed her as a rival in terms of making naan bread, so he told his daughter, "Don't you dare eat any curry, no matter what. Even if it kills you. No, in fact, I'll kill you if you do." She distanced herself from curry after that point.

Everything changed around her sixteenth birthday, when Roa finally began to manifest. She wanted to snap the necks of her friends for no reason, and the sight of a beggar on the road was so funny that she wanted to stab him with a knife. She tried her best to resist the impulses by locking herself away in her room. It was not the same as possession, as she equated the feelings to those normal small destructive passions that all humans possess solidified inside her mind. She knew something terrible would happen if she were to let them take over, so she tried not to see anyone or do anything to avoid hating anyone and bring about her feelings.

Locking herself away was a large mistake because that gave time for her mind to grind away and finally surpass its limits. She became completely replaced with Roa after that point, but still felt his actions as her own. With only the thought of her thirstiness, she left her room for the first time in months, and after greeting her worried parents with a smile, bit into their necks and sucked their blood. She heard her voice, despite having never heard it before, saying "---Has it been a hundred years? This body is very fascinating." Roa greatly enjoyed the amount of power the body gave him. Due to her having no social standing, it took him time to take over, and it was difficult to do so without having people notice.

He committed various atrocities to the citizens as he enjoyed using a body with true power, but it was not as wild as previous times and without as much blood spilled. The will of the incarnation still comes from the body, so she still had some power over his actions. She took the townspeople she loved one by one, and she humiliated and mutilated their souls. She figured that she would go insane, but also figured that insanity would cause her to commit even more sins than before. She tried to minimize the damage in order to persevere and keep her sanity. It only took a month before she was in full control of them and playing with their lives however she wished.

Her only solace was that it ended quickly. After the town was completely under Roa's control, he was inevitably hunted down by Arcueid, who managed to find him after two days of searching. She found him on a night with a crimson moon, and he was killed after their fight. Elesia's body was taken by the Church to the vatican. She eventually revived with her original personality without any of Roa's influence, while Roa moved on to his next incarnation, SHIKI Tohno.

Her body naturally healed her over time, and due to her connection to Roa, she gained immortality in the form of a paradox that says she will not die as long as Roa continues to exist. After being killed repeatedly by the Church for an entire month in an attempt to study her immortality and to vanquish her as a heretic, she was taken in by the Burial Agency due to her unique nature. Her main desire and mission being the elimination of Roa to end her eternal existence.

While she was originally scared of curry, on her first mission for the Burial Agency to defeat a Dead Apostle in India, she met with curry there. The offensive and eccentric taste shocked her, making her think, "Dad was keeping such a delicious food all to himself!" After that point, she became obsessed with it. The Dead Apostle Curry de Marche is said to be her reason for eating the curry, but his existence, as a parody character, makes that version of events somewhat dubious.

Personality
Ciel displays two vastly different personalities depending on her current role, that of the kind, calm, friendly, and peaceful upperclassmen and that of the cold member of the Burial Agency. While she tries to act as if it is only a disguise in order to find out if Shiki is Roa's reincarnation, her gentle self can be called the "real" Ciel, but they are both real in a way. As with all the characters, she has a large burden to handle, so she is able to be more honest right after having sex.

While acting as a senior at Shiki's school, she is the president and only member of the tea ceremony club. She comes to become good friends with Arihiko Inui, Satsuki Yumizuka, and Shiki. When not investigating Shiki, she likes to go to class, where she sits in the back out of everyone else's view and enjoys listening to the teacher. She runs through the hall helping people out, and likes doing things like fixing the broken fence outside. She has tricked the teachers into letting her have the tea ceremony room, even making them give her a budget so that she can eat as much candy as she would like. Relaxing there and drinking tea in the afternoon is important to her.

While acting as a member of the Church, she is very serious and willing to do whatever it takes to get her tasks done. She wishes to settle her own vendetta with Roa and remove her immortality. She attempts to remain cold and calculating when focusing on completing her job of hunting him down, but her interactions with Shiki make it hard for her. There is only one person to whom she wants to show her merciful side, that being Shiki.

Ciel is a costume fetishist, having designed the outfit she wears when "on duty" personally. She also has a weakness for curry, which has been mentioned in several ways, such as her storing much curry in her apartment. She likes Curry Bread, and as a weapon limited to her, Fried Curry Bread carries the additional effect of instant death, but neither has any effect against Akiha.

Development
Ciel was based on Clobette, one of the heroines in Takeuchi Takashi's doujin manga "Valkyria", as well as a secretary named Cipher Neuvelvourg that was found in "Limitlessly Blue", a tabletop RPG game that Takeuchi GMed, which was also a basis to his doujin manga "Valkyria".

Ciel's route
With the help of Ciel, Shiki successfully defeats Roa. However, he transfers the burden of his madness to him, causing Shiki to have murdering thoughts and strange dreams (one of which Shiki finds about Ciel's past before and after being possessed by Roa). After he gets out of control and gravely injures and rapes Kohaku, Shiki runs away from the mansion, afraid that he will be unable to resist the urge to kill as long as he's around people.

Shiki calls Ciel and confesses to her that he's really a killer and needs to be away from people. She asks him to meet her at the school since there are no people there. He goes, but when she shows up she finds her dressed in her executor outfit as she carries her Seventh Holy Scripture. Ciel reveals to him that everything they shared in the past was all a huge lie, and her only purpose for being with him was to find out if he was Roa, and then kill him if he was. Shortly after, Ciel forces them to fight, despite Shiki not wanting to. Ciel quickly immobilizes him, but she is unable to kill him. She tries to convince herself that her love for Shiki was fake and it was just her mission to destroy Roa, but she ultimately collapses, sobbing onto Shiki's arms.

They later go to Ciel's house, when Shiki finds that his body has been excited after Roa transferred to his body. Ciel finds it out and tries a technique on him to calm the soul, in which they have sex. However, after they do it, Shiki is still succumbing to Roa, so he leaves Ciel's house, where he encounters with Arcueid, who was looking for him in order to kill him. She immediately blames Ciel for Shiki's current condition and tells him that she can save him if he obeys her. Depending of Shiki is given the choice to answer her.

If Shiki tells Arcueid that he does not love her, it results in Ciel's True Ending. He attacks her by cutting the line of her neck, causing Arcueid to threaten to kill him for real. Ciel appears and drags Shiki away, before Arcueid recovers. Ciel fights against Arcueid, but she is quickly defeated. Shiki, realizing that Roa has overtook his body, tries to kill himself by slashing his throat, so Arcueid won’t have to finish him. After doing this, Arcueid returns to her senses and vanishes after saying farewell to Shiki. However Shiki manages to survive and Ciel takes him to her house to heal his wounds, ending up together.

If Shiki tells Arcueid that he is attracted to her, it results in Ciel's Good Ending. After his response, Arcueid kisses him as she tries to get him to drink her blood, but she is stopped by Ciel. Ciel believes that if Shiki kills Arcueid, Roa might get weaker. As both girls discuss how to get rid of Roa, he overtakes Shiki's body. In order to stop it, Shiki slashes his chest in order to kill himself and stop Roa. After that, he has a vision of Roa before he started reincarnating and vanishes, disappearing for good. After killing Roa, both Ciel and Arcueid "share" Shiki, resulting in a sort of harem ending much to Ciel's chagrin.

In both scenarios, after Roa is destroyed, Ciel's body returns to normal.

Akiha's route
At first Ciel is a supportive character, acting as Shiki's senpai who is disliked by Akiha. After Shiki starts having strange dreams and confesses it to Ciel, she asks him to meet her at the school. Just like in the other routes, she appears in her executor outfit and attacks Shiki. However, after Shiki is unable to kill her, she reveals her true identity and the fact the always knew that Shiki wasn't the killer. After revealing her identity, she abandons school the next day, removing her memories of herself from all her classmates, with the exception of Shiki. Akiha later reveals to Shiki that the reason why she was so cold to her was because she felt she was different and inhuman (the same treatments she had towards Arcueid and young SHIKI).

Ciel reappears again, saving Shiki from SHIKI and leaving Akiha behind. She takes him to her house, when she cures him, but when an angry Shiki asks her why she didn’t save Akiha, she calmly responds that SHIKI will soon turn Akiha into a mindless monster and there’s nothing that can be do about it. Despite her warnings, Shiki goes to save Akiha.

In the continuation of Akiha's True Ending in Kagetsu Tohya, Ciel sends a letter to Akiha, saying that after Shiki stabbed himself to save her, Ciel was able to take him with her and save his life, so he might return to the Tohno mansion in some months. Rather than be happy for that revelation, Akiha is upset because Ciel was the one who saved Shiki instead of her.

Kagetsu Tohya
After the threat of Roa is gone from the town, she stays with the excuse of killing off his children vampires. They normally die after the parent dies, but those treated as successors can live on after the parent's death, such as Satsuki Yumizuka in Melty Blood. The area needs investigation even after they are exterminated, and the real job of purification only begins after that point. She still had to tweak her paperwork slightly in the end to get the job of doing it.

Other appearances
Ciel has a number of roles in Carnival Phantasm as one of the heroines of Tsukihime. It parodies her constant fighting with Arcueid, especially over Shiki, and her love of curry. Chie Rumiko, whose name is a homonym of Priestess Ciel, is a parody character in the Higurashi no Naku Koro ni series. She has a love for curry and utilizes six T-squares in the same manner as Ciel handles Black Keys. Ciel's voice actor for the Tsukihime anime also does her voice.

Abilities
Ciel has a body with extremely high physical and magical potential. She can jump to the top of lamp posts with ease, leap from rooftop to rooftop and match the speed of vampires. With the training of the Burial Agency, Ciel can match most vampires and perhaps some lower ranking Dead Apostles alone. Although she has super-human strength, speed and reflexes, most Dead Apostles are still significantly stronger than she is; however, with the Seventh Holy Scripture, Ciel still poses a high threat to any Dead Apostle and perhaps even Arcueid. She is one of the few people listed as being able to fight against Servants, but she is only able to put up a defensive fight against one rather than match them in direct combat.

Combat
Ciel can be called almighty in that she can use any weapon. She has no true favorites, but guns are they only ones she likes overall. While preferring to utilize combat weapons like swords and guns, she is quite strong as a magus, as it is her actual nature, but she doesn't like it because of her dislike for utilizing Roa's knowledge.

She is fighting at her strongest in Melty Blood under the title "Powered Ciel." She utilizes self-induced hypnosis to make her better suited for fighting, making her personality colder. She uses equipment and energy that she has been stockpiling for a year, and makes constant use of the Seventh Holy Scripture. She only brought items specific to facing Roa while in Japan, so she has more specialized wares back home.

Black Keys
Ciel's main weapon as an Executor of the Church are the Black Keys. The Black Keys have the appearance of sword hilts with blades materialized by sorcery, though the Keys are treated more as daggers than swords and can be thrown. If the Keys manage to hit the shadow of a target, the target will be pinned down and unable to move as the shadow cannot separate from the body, and in such a case only Ciel can remove the Key pinning the shadow. Ciel has access to a huge number of Black Keys, as she can create them using pages from the Bible.

Seventh Holy Scripture
The Seventh Holy Scripture is considered, as one of the most powerful weapons of the Catholic Church, but as it needs an incredibly strong wielder, it is not often used. It is both a physical and conceptual weapon, meaning those undead and vampiric cannot heal from the wounds it causes immediately.

The Church hunted a unicorn, that was said to eat souls; the Seventh Holy Scripture was created by crossing the horn with the deceased spirit of a girl. The horn of the unicorn is used to prevent reincarnation. Although that is the final use, it is also used like a spear or a bayonet. It did have some dignity as a Scripture, until Ciel borrowed it and modified it as a pile bunker. When the bayonet shoots, what is discharged is really a page of the Bible, and the shell is one as well.

It resembles a large handheld cannon tipped with a spike, has the power to completely destroy an opponent; body and soul. The cannon appearance is created by Ciel herself, being manifested in that form by her own will. The Seventh Holy Scripture is made from the horn of a mystical beast, and is inhabited by the spirit of a young girl sacrificed during its creation. The spirit is named and referred to by Ciel as Seven, though referred to as Nanako. Ciel is the first wielder of the Seventh Holy Scripture powerful enough to allow this spirit to manifest in physical form.

She uses reinforcement to make herself strong enough to swing it combat, and she is better at utilizing it than Riesbyfe Stridberg can use her own Scripture. It would take an entire team of magi to utilize it constantly like she does, all due to her innate abilities.

It really was mainly a Conceptual Weapon usable on spirits, but as it was remodeled, it has now become a metal weapon that can shoot a vampire dead by physical power alone. It weights 60kg, but that weight can double with optional parts. Ciel has 'customized' the weapon, adding four dots to it to make it look more industrial.

Magecraft
Ciel's magic potential is extraordinary, so much that she far surpasses an "A rank magus." Given numbers, a high ranking magus like Rin Tohsaka would rank anywhere from 70-100, while Ciel would be 100. Her excellent qualities are far above that of normal prana preservation limits. Normal magi can be compared to having a beer mug's worth of prana and being able to fight with the output of a water gun, while Ciel has a twenty liter tank's worth of prana and can fight with the output of a water hose. Even with that potential, she cannot be called good at magecraft, as she only knows a lot about it from Roa's memories. She rarely ever uses it, wasting her talent and leaving her with many spells that she knows while never having used them.

Ciel inherited a large amount of magical knowledge from Roa, such as Numerology, High Speed Incantation, Simplified Repetitive Incantation, and Necromancy. During Arcueid's route, she utilizes a number of the Dead Arcueid killed in order to attack her. She preserved them from the day before and manipulated them with string from atop a streetlight. While the use of it wasn't easy for her, it is something she is capable of as "Roa's daughter." All of those chosen to be Roa's reincarnated body can be called his descendants even though they are not related by blood, so they can be called his children. He had the most attachment to Ciel out of all of his hosts.

She uses magic along with the sacraments of the sacred church. Commonly, this magical ability manifests in her control of the Mystic Eyes of Whisper, allowing her to manipulate people to a limited extent, hypnotizing them into not doubting the words that she says, unless there is direct evidence otherwise. It was this technique that allowed her to infiltrate Shiki's school.

Immortality
The reason Ciel originally revives after her body has been slain by Arcueid has to do with her magical potential. Her Magic Circuits are so great that, as long as her brain isn't destroyed, they will keep processing mana and healing her body as long as they exist. Normal magi doing anything remotely similar would require a Magic Crest built up over many generations. After her body revived in such a fashion, the World, recognizing her soul as Roa, caused a contradiction to form. While she lived as a unique person for her first fifteen years, she was a human born as Roa. She is herself, but she is also Roa because the name of her soul is Roa according the the world.

If the girl called Roa is dead when Roa is alive, that would be a contradiction to the world. The world will correct even a slight error whenever it occurs in order to preserve itself, so as long as Roa still lives, his soul still exists, she will continue to exist as well. The progeny of the existence Roa, the daughter of Roa, cannot die before him, and as his soul is set to exist for all eternity due to his reincarnation method, she too will exist for all eternity. She is "outside the cycle", so her life will be forever stopped. She will not die as long as Roa still lives, even if every cell of her is destroyed, because the world itself will always fix the error automatically. While vampires can be called immortal while they live, their regeneration stops after they die. Time itself is what restores her, so she is brought back without even any input from her own will.

She has gained a form of immortality due to the contradiction, always reverting her to her original state no matter the damage, whether it is lethal or not. She cannot age, so she cannot die of old age. Even if she is burnt to ashes, time will reverse her to her original state. She is not able to die under any circumstance, meaning that she was able to be killed every moment of an entire month without a single negative consequence to her body. Shiki can see death on her body with his Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, but he describes the death he sees on her to be very different from other people. He can see lines, and as they have no exception, cutting the line on her neck kills her.

It is not healing or regeneration, but more like any wounds caused to her are "rewound." After cutting her neck, blood sprays everywhere, but within a moment, the wound and all of the blood are gone, returned to how it was before as if being rewound like a video. Even pools of blood and damaged clothes are instantly reverted, leaving no trace of having existed, and her heart will start to beat again even with a sword through her brain. The ability does not remove foreign objects impaling her, so she will still be trapped in place even if they cannot kill her. While it is useful in battle, it does not allow her to compete with Arcueid in direct combat. Though she cannot die, Arcueid can kill her repeatedly to keep her from retaliating.

Due to her connection to Roa, she can tell where his soul exists more accurately than his master, Arcueid. She will lose her immortality should Roa's soul be destroyed, returning her body to that of a normal human that can age and die. If Arcueid were to regain her power by directly taking in Roa's soul, she would then have to wait for Arcueid's death as well. After Roa's soul is fully destroyed, she loses the immortality, but still is very tough due to the self-preservation magic she learned.