Post by Aiko Kohaku on Sept 26, 2017 19:38:37 GMT -5
Kohaku, Aiko
The Greatest Mundanity Has To Offer
[ AT A GLANCE ]
Age / Apparent Age: 20
Gender: Female
Height & Weight: 5 feet, 5 Inches/121 Lbs
Hair & Eye Color: Black Hair, Blue Eyes
Positive Traits:
-Levelheaded: Aiko is consistently calm.
-Studious: When given something to learn, Aiko will do so without hesitation: she enjoys learning.
-Kindhearted: Aiko doesn't enjoy hurting people, and tries to be as kind as she can around everybody.
-Analytical: Aiko is good at thinking and analyzing complex situations.
Negative Traits:
-Reclusive: Aiko can be shy and outright afraid of new people sometimes.
-Over-Analytical: One of Aiko's advantages also functions as a disadvantage: when in social situations, she struggles to "go with the flow" and tends to treat things much like a math problem, as if they fall into some formula.
-Emotional: Despite her best efforts, Aiko can get emotional very quickly, and this expresses itself strongly in her physical behavior.
-Insecure: Aiko feels uncomfortable about her own self-image, and thus avoids projecting it by wearing baggy clothing.
Loyalties: Aiko is primarily loyal to herself and her few friends. There are very few outside parties influencing her life as of right now.
Snapshots:
June 6th, 1997 - Aiko is born to a Japanese family living in Odawara, Japan, a relatively large coastal city.
June 19th, 2002 - Aiko writes her first poem, one to commemorate her mother's birthday.
November 4th, 2008 - Aiko discovers her power after writing something on her bedroom wall.
August 20th, 2010 - Aiko is sent off to boarding school after her parents discover that she has spiritual abilities.
March 5th, 2011 - Aiko encounters her first hollow, fending it off with the meager usage of her powers that she has developed.
June 6th, 2013 - Aiko returns to her home to find it deserted, her parents having left and just as likely disowned her.
September 3rd, 2013 - Aiko moves to Tokyo to stay with a friend who went to (and left) boarding school, finishing the rest of her high school years there.
August 21st, 2015 - Aiko gets a job working as a junior editor for a publishing company.
November 20th, 2015 - Aiko moves into her own apartment.
[ ON THE SURFACE ]
Physical Description: Aiko is a girl of average size, standing midway through the five-foot spectrum and weighing in at a solid 120 pounds. Her shoulders are not particularly broad, and her chest isn't overly large either. As for the rest of her upper body, she's not noticeably muscular or otherwise: in fact, she's quite light-looking. This gives her a very non-imposing demeanor, which does, consequently, fit in well with her personality. She's less likely to be up in your face trying to intimidate than a chipmunk, so in this case, the book can really be judged by its cover. Aiko's face and head areas are also quite normal looking, falling into the heart-shaped category. With a smile that's clean but doesn't sparkle and a nose that doesn't stand out but certainly isn't perfect, you'd be hard-pressed to notice her by any of her facial features. Her hair is a raven-like black color, though it does grow slightly lighter towards the tips, and her eyes are of a relatively standard blue coloring as well. No, they do not sparkle or swim with the ghost of her past. They are eyes. Normal, Japanese, female, eyes.
Aiko does have shaped hips, with her body curving inwards towards her waist, leaving her with a rather defined frame. Those hips merge into her long, slender legs, culminating with her feet of, as you would expect, average size. Something that is rather noticeable about Aiko is that she tends to wear male-marketed sneakers: they fit her better in her opinion, and she firmly stands by the opinion that they are comfier than female sneakers or for that matter, any other type of shoe. Also worth noting is a vibrantly colored and very detailed tattoo of a koi fish carressing a pink flower on her upper thigh. This is generally covered up by her pants though, regardless of how short they tend to be.
Speaking of pants, Aiko's sense of fashion does tend to be a subject of interest. Whilst many girls would like to show off their bodies, exposing as much of themselves as possible, she tends to do the exact opposite. This is predominantly caused by her lack of faith in her own image, although the fact that baggy and large clothes tend to be more comfortable for her also contributes to this. The only exception to this trend is her favoring of shorts over long pants, as she feels that normal pants just carry too much weight to be comfortable. That's not to say you won't find her wearing sweatpants or pajamas at home though: like I said, comfiness is of an importance second only to her own thoughts on her self-image.
Aiko, an avid writer, tends to care little for her posture, as she spends so much leaning over a piece of paper or a keyboard that she's grown accustomed to sitting however she feels comfortable. She can look prim and proper, but the question is if she really wants to. Among other minor things is her voice: it is light and high-pitched, but not so much so that it's annoying: only what you would expect from your average girl. When she sings, her voice does tend to take on a variety of pitches as her range is quite large. Besides that, there's little else about her worth mentioning.
Spiritual Description: Aiko's reiatsu always starts its release at her fingertips: they are, after all, by far the most connected part of her body to her power. It then proceeds to envelop her in the form of a purple shroud of mist: those who come close enough to her in this state will find themselves smelling lavender and tasting bubblegum. When in the general presence of her spiritual energy, many feel at ease, or simply feel nothing at all. It has been said that this eerie sense of calm reminds people of the pressure in the air before a storm hits: your hairs are standing up and you can smell the humidity in the air, but the sky is still clear.
[ BEHIND THE EYES ]
Personality: Aiko is first and foremost something of an introvert. She doesn't actively dislike talking to people, but she can be downright afraid of new people due to her ever-present relationship anxiety. Said anxiety manifested itself after her abandoning by her family, making her forever worried that if she ever meets somebody, they will hate her, or pretend to like her and proceed to never appear in her life again. If she does have an established friendship with somebody, however, she will try her best to maintain it: Aiko is, as best she can, a very kind person who tends to care more about others than she does herself. This, as you might expect, isn't easy for somebody as analytical as her: Aiko tries to read into each and every word her peers say, searching for some hidden detail or code passed between them and another person or something of the like. If things do go wrong, however, Aiko does find it rather easy to remain calm, if not in the traditional manner of the word. She has her freakouts like any normal person, social situation or otherwise: she just has them quietly and in a stable manner.
Limits to social activity have their downfalls: with little to no practice keeping her emotions in check, the one thing that Aiko does struggle to remain calm for are emotional situations. Deaths, romances, and all the usual don't work out for her very often, as she struggles to maintain a stable emotional state. It doesn't help that she wasn't particularly stable in the first place either, mostly due to her parents literally jumping ship on their lifelong-job (being her parents), simply because she was different. Said parenting did have a lasting effect on her though: Aiko is studious to the core, never letting a piece of work go unfinished and actively going out of her way to learn as much as she can about anything that interests her. In her family, you either got A's or you had beatin' days. Aiko didn't much care for beatings, so it was A's or bust for her.
Finally worth mentioning is Aiko's deeply rooted insecurity over both her physical and mental self-image. Due to the perceived hatred her parents had for her, or maybe even just a lack of want for her in their lives, Aiko spent her teenage years pondering why she existed and why the world so hated her. Much of this was expressed through her favorite medium: writing. When Aiko was sad, she would write about exactly why. What she would write fluctuated, although her two favorites to write were probably her Poetry and her Fiction writing. Song lyrics also had a place in this grand scheme of things, but once again: Aiko refuses to believe that her voice is even half decent. Regardless of the importance and prominence of her self-expression, Aiko still fears sharing said expression with the world because of this same damn insecurity.
Goals & Achievements: Aiko largely seeks to get out more and stop being afraid of meeting people, but for as much time as she spends imagining conversations with people, she never does seem to be able to get them going: probably because she hides in her room when anybody she didn't invite so much as knocks on her apartment door. In regards to the long-term, Aiko wishes to find her parents, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to forgive them for abandoning her. She does, however, stand by the idea that if they do not apologize, there will be no reconciliation between the two. Above even this, however, is her desire to simply be happy and live without being afraid to walk out her door each morning.
[ GUARDIAN ANGEL ]
Weapon of Choice: A pen which, on the pressing of a hidden button, turns into a combat knife. This form is one that Aiko very rarely even touches upon, as she sees weapons as only fuel for lethal conflict. She'd much rather use her fists to deal with enemies, or better yet, spells.
Power: Aiko can manipulate any mundane mortal world material that she has touched with her pen's tip. For example, if she touched concrete, she would be able to direct said concrete to form lumps, or tiny spikes, so long as she envisioned it and made a movement which represented it with her pen through the air in front of her.
[ LEGACY CREATED ]
Origin: Aiko Kohaku was born on a hot summer's day in June of 1997. One could have called her something of an early birthday present to her mother at the time: said mother would be turning twenty-five two weeks after her daughter's birth. The weeks, months, and even first few years that followed Aiko's birth were mostly uneventful. Sometimes, she would hear things that her parents wouldn't hear and see things that they couldn't see, but of course, as she was simply a child, the family not thought of it. Why would they? After all, it was good to have a child with a "wild imagination". Really, the first major event in Aiko's life occurred when she was about five years old. Having learned to write at an early age, she found herself interested in penning one of those "rhymes" daddy read to her before she was to go to sleep. Deciding that she needed something to write about, Aiko chose her mother's upcoming birthday as her topic of choice. Thus a new and lifelong habit of hers was born: writing. With this interest developing into something of a talent, Aiko breezed through her first years of school, finding most things rather easy to grasp. She had friends, a loving family, and teachers who adored her and framed her work on their walls. By the time Aiko was eleven, she had stacks of paper piled up all around her room, some of them songs, some of them stories, and many others being poems.
It was around now that Aiko started seeing and hearing those things that other people couldn't see or hear even more. This somewhat worried her parents, as they had assumed that their child would have grown out of her little "world of imagination" by her age. So, noticing that her parents didn't believe her, Aiko decided to just stop mentioning the things she saw and heard. She would just learn to hold her experiences in tightly, and not share them with her parents or really anybody, for that matter. It took her a short while to come to terms with what she saw herself, but after deliberation, Aiko concluded that what she was seeing could only be represented by one thing: ghosts. From then on, Aiko firmly believed in an afterlife, spirits, and all sorts of things that you wouldn't expect a modern pre-teen to believe in. As she grew bolder with her explorations into the unknown, Aiko found herself talking to some of the things she saw: they ranged from other children to old couples, doting about the material world, having not yet passed on. Aiko befriended many of them, and others, she simply conversed with. It was now that Aiko confirmed her initial assumption, and damn, did knowing that she wasn't crazy feel good.
Rise to Power: Well into her 12th year, Aiko's life changed dramatically. For better or worse, she couldn't tell. What she did know, however, was that she could do some crazy shit. It all happened on a Wednesday night in November. Aiko had had one of her few bad days in school: a pair of girls had teased her for "talking to herself" during lunchtime and then proceeded to continuously torment her throughout the day. She wasn't used to being bullied: people usually just ignored her quirks and focused on the presence she had in the classroom, always being sure to answer every question the teacher asked first. This experience made her doubt that this was the right idea: after all if two people didn't like her, what could stop the whole world from thinking the same. Under this pressure, Aiko decided to do what she always did when she had something to get off her chest: write about it! Unfortunately, Aiko ran into a dilemma rather quickly: she had no paper to write with. While a rather frequent issue in her home, usually her family was home to help in some manner, but tonight was different. Her father wasn't home that night, and her mother was on an Onsen trip with some friends, so that meant she couldn't use either of their computers and without one of her own, Aiko found herself unsure of where to write.
Then, an idea struck her: she could use the wall. Sure, it wasn't a perfect surface and her parents could get mad, but she doubted it: they liked to see her be creative, and if that meant that she had to write on the wall, they would (probably) be happy, or at least accepting of it. Thus, Aiko began to write, inscribing each letter with extra precision to make sure that, as she would be leaving a lasting mark on the wall, it would look good. She poured herself into each sentence, dumping her troubles into the piece of poetry, finishing after a full hour. Sighing, Aiko removed the pen from the wall, taking a breath. She was relieved it was done. Opening her eyes to look at the work, it was as if she could see the letters jumping out at her.
Oh, wait... they were. The wall had extended inwards toward Aiko, with each letter looking just as you would expect, except they were literally three-dimensional and made of... whatever her wall was made of. Initially shocked, Aiko took a step back, stumbling onto her bed after realizing what had just happened. Then, after a moment of silence between her and nobody else, she stood up, curious once more. Moving forward, Aiko inspected the wall: yeah, she wasn't dreaming. It was then that she had yet another thought. Picking up her pen (that she had dropped in shock), Aiko focused on the jutted out wall, and pushed the pen into it. Miraculously, the extended fonts began to shrink back into the wall, leaving only traditional penned letters. Aiko smiled: she was going to have a lot of fun with this. Over the next two years, Aiko experimented with this newfound ability of hers, making sure that when she did, her parents were out of the house. Each time she used it, she figured out something new, and by the time she was thirteen, she had at least something of a grasp on how her ability worked. All but a couple of her closest friends from school were in the dark about her powers, of course, so she felt safe using them. That was, until one fateful evening in the summer of 2010.
Call to Action: By every common variable, Aiko's life shouldn't have taken such a downward turn. Unfortunately, she had forgotten her mother's work schedule just one time, and that led to the sequence of events that followed. Returning home from school, she foolishly assumed the house was empty, and eagerly got to what she had spent all day waiting to do. Lightning a candle in her room, Aiko grabbed her pen and proceeded to tap the flame just barely with the tip of her pen. Instantly feeling the connection between her and the flame take, she got to fiddling with it. When she flicked her pen towards the ceiling, the flame would extend upwards like a tiny spear, and when she pulled her pen towards her, the flame would lean almost unnaturally in her direction. Her mother obviously had to walk in during the latter. Seeing your daughter near fire was never a good thing, especially when said daughter appeared to be directing it using... a pen? Oh dear, was Aiko's mother confused. Noticing her mother's presence in her room, Aiko quickly extinguished the flame and tried to brush off the event like it had been nothing. Unfortunately, the shock of seeing her daughter literally controlling a flame had hit Aiko's mother a tad too early for Aiko to have a hope of salvaging the situation. Simply rubbing her brow and sighing, the woman walked away. Aiko, unsure of what else to do, worried, and worried, and eventually started crying.
That was the least of Aiko's worries: she never heard the conversation that her mother had with her father later that night. Both of them quickly put the pieces together: neither were dim-witted in the slightest and thus were capable of recognizing the correlation between the things that their little girl had claimed to see when she was younger to the events witnessed today. The prospects of such a thing frightened them: they weren't how to feel about their own daughter anymore. Slowly and subtly, both parents began to isolate themselves from Aiko throughout the summer, and although both probably thought she didn't notice, the opposite was all but too true. This neglect sowed the seeds of anxiety and self-hatred inside of Aiko, so much so that when she practiced with her power, she no longer really felt any joy at all. It was turning out to be more of a curse to her than anything else. Luckily, she'd soon be back in school and surrounded by her friends... right? Ah, but things weren't so simple. Her parents feared that a possible discovery of their daughter's powers would be awful for their image, thus, they did what any sensible parents would do: send their kid off to boarding school so that they could forget that she existed.
Aiko friend total went from somewhere around ten to a big fat zero in one terrible day. She would likely never see her old friends again, and whilst they would text each other once in a while, those promises to stay in contact slowly faded into hollow obscurity, with the distance between messages increasing daily until they stopped entirely. At boarding school, Aiko did only what she had to: study. She found no desire to go out and meet people anymore, lest she be forced to leave them again. There was, however, a single girl, one named Kaya, who befriended Aiko relatively quickly. Kaya would remain Aiko's sole friend throughout all of her time at the boarding school. Despite the melancholy nature of things though, Aiko persevered through: she believed, somewhere, somehow, there would be a happy ending to this trainwreck of a life that she called her own.
Of course, that would be just too much to ask, wouldn't it? One summer (specifically the one after her second year at boarding school), after taking a return flight home, Aiko came home to find the house deserted. At first, she thought nothing of it. Her parents could be out, right? Then the moving vans showed up, and without speaking a word, began to haul furniture and items out of the house, leaving only Aiko's room untouched. There was no note. No text. No phone call. Just an empty house, and a pair of vanished parents. Aiko had no doubts as to why this was occurring: in fact, she practically had expected it. Thus, there were no tears: only a look of confusion shared with only herself, and a phone call to Kaya, who lived in Tokyo. By the next morning, Aiko was on a train to Kaya's house. The place was nice: comfortably sized, and Kaya's family expressed nothing but positivity in Aiko's presence. She had stayed here once before on a winter break, but never for this long. Aiko was, for all intensive purposes, now living with Kaya. It was in Tokyo that she decided to not go to boarding school anymore: it wasn't worth the expense to her. Kaya followed suit, with both girls attending a high school in Edogawa. The next two years of Aiko's education flew by in a breeze, and before she knew it, the age of eighteen was a real thing for her. She was an adult: and she was alive, with very few scars and scratches on her body to say otherwise. Of course, this meant, at least to Aiko, that she had to get a job. Surprisingly, this wasn't that difficult. After looking around the writing industry and sending out applications, a publishing company in Karakura Town gave her a phone call letting her know that they were in need of an entry level editor. The pay was at least alright, certainly viable for a person of Aiko's age. With a self-sustaining job, Aiko then moved out of Kaya's home, though not without making a promise to visit. This promise, she wouldn't falter upon.
Aiko moved into an apartment in Karkaura the hopes of having a quiet space to be herself, and to her delight, that's exactly what she got. Writing was easy where she was, and disturbances were minimal. Of course, Aiko encountered the occasional hollow, but after picking up martial arts as an extracurricular activity while in high school, she was able to defend herself just fine. To put things simply, Aiko had a boring, normal life, with occasional spiritual interruption. That was until thoughts of her parents drilled their way into her psyche. She was asking herself questions, too many of them. Where were they? The movers had refused to so much as speak to her when she had asked two years ago, so Aiko really did have no clue. It was now that Aiko began to look through phone books and any other public database she had access to. It wasn't a matter of if she could find them, it was only a matter of when. Then again, when could be a long time from now for her, considering Japan had a population of 125,000,000. Aiko still continues searching to this day, almost treating it like a hobby. Yet each day, each time she thinks of her parents, she refuses to believe that she will hate them upon meeting them again. She promises herself that she will make them apologize and take that apology to her heart. Afterall, what else could she do but make promises? They'd pulled her through with Kaya, maybe they'd do the same with her parents.
The Greatest Mundanity Has To Offer
[ AT A GLANCE ]
Age / Apparent Age: 20
Gender: Female
Height & Weight: 5 feet, 5 Inches/121 Lbs
Hair & Eye Color: Black Hair, Blue Eyes
Positive Traits:
-Levelheaded: Aiko is consistently calm.
-Studious: When given something to learn, Aiko will do so without hesitation: she enjoys learning.
-Kindhearted: Aiko doesn't enjoy hurting people, and tries to be as kind as she can around everybody.
-Analytical: Aiko is good at thinking and analyzing complex situations.
Negative Traits:
-Reclusive: Aiko can be shy and outright afraid of new people sometimes.
-Over-Analytical: One of Aiko's advantages also functions as a disadvantage: when in social situations, she struggles to "go with the flow" and tends to treat things much like a math problem, as if they fall into some formula.
-Emotional: Despite her best efforts, Aiko can get emotional very quickly, and this expresses itself strongly in her physical behavior.
-Insecure: Aiko feels uncomfortable about her own self-image, and thus avoids projecting it by wearing baggy clothing.
Loyalties: Aiko is primarily loyal to herself and her few friends. There are very few outside parties influencing her life as of right now.
Snapshots:
June 6th, 1997 - Aiko is born to a Japanese family living in Odawara, Japan, a relatively large coastal city.
June 19th, 2002 - Aiko writes her first poem, one to commemorate her mother's birthday.
November 4th, 2008 - Aiko discovers her power after writing something on her bedroom wall.
August 20th, 2010 - Aiko is sent off to boarding school after her parents discover that she has spiritual abilities.
March 5th, 2011 - Aiko encounters her first hollow, fending it off with the meager usage of her powers that she has developed.
June 6th, 2013 - Aiko returns to her home to find it deserted, her parents having left and just as likely disowned her.
September 3rd, 2013 - Aiko moves to Tokyo to stay with a friend who went to (and left) boarding school, finishing the rest of her high school years there.
August 21st, 2015 - Aiko gets a job working as a junior editor for a publishing company.
November 20th, 2015 - Aiko moves into her own apartment.
[ ON THE SURFACE ]
Physical Description: Aiko is a girl of average size, standing midway through the five-foot spectrum and weighing in at a solid 120 pounds. Her shoulders are not particularly broad, and her chest isn't overly large either. As for the rest of her upper body, she's not noticeably muscular or otherwise: in fact, she's quite light-looking. This gives her a very non-imposing demeanor, which does, consequently, fit in well with her personality. She's less likely to be up in your face trying to intimidate than a chipmunk, so in this case, the book can really be judged by its cover. Aiko's face and head areas are also quite normal looking, falling into the heart-shaped category. With a smile that's clean but doesn't sparkle and a nose that doesn't stand out but certainly isn't perfect, you'd be hard-pressed to notice her by any of her facial features. Her hair is a raven-like black color, though it does grow slightly lighter towards the tips, and her eyes are of a relatively standard blue coloring as well. No, they do not sparkle or swim with the ghost of her past. They are eyes. Normal, Japanese, female, eyes.
Aiko does have shaped hips, with her body curving inwards towards her waist, leaving her with a rather defined frame. Those hips merge into her long, slender legs, culminating with her feet of, as you would expect, average size. Something that is rather noticeable about Aiko is that she tends to wear male-marketed sneakers: they fit her better in her opinion, and she firmly stands by the opinion that they are comfier than female sneakers or for that matter, any other type of shoe. Also worth noting is a vibrantly colored and very detailed tattoo of a koi fish carressing a pink flower on her upper thigh. This is generally covered up by her pants though, regardless of how short they tend to be.
Speaking of pants, Aiko's sense of fashion does tend to be a subject of interest. Whilst many girls would like to show off their bodies, exposing as much of themselves as possible, she tends to do the exact opposite. This is predominantly caused by her lack of faith in her own image, although the fact that baggy and large clothes tend to be more comfortable for her also contributes to this. The only exception to this trend is her favoring of shorts over long pants, as she feels that normal pants just carry too much weight to be comfortable. That's not to say you won't find her wearing sweatpants or pajamas at home though: like I said, comfiness is of an importance second only to her own thoughts on her self-image.
Aiko, an avid writer, tends to care little for her posture, as she spends so much leaning over a piece of paper or a keyboard that she's grown accustomed to sitting however she feels comfortable. She can look prim and proper, but the question is if she really wants to. Among other minor things is her voice: it is light and high-pitched, but not so much so that it's annoying: only what you would expect from your average girl. When she sings, her voice does tend to take on a variety of pitches as her range is quite large. Besides that, there's little else about her worth mentioning.
Spiritual Description: Aiko's reiatsu always starts its release at her fingertips: they are, after all, by far the most connected part of her body to her power. It then proceeds to envelop her in the form of a purple shroud of mist: those who come close enough to her in this state will find themselves smelling lavender and tasting bubblegum. When in the general presence of her spiritual energy, many feel at ease, or simply feel nothing at all. It has been said that this eerie sense of calm reminds people of the pressure in the air before a storm hits: your hairs are standing up and you can smell the humidity in the air, but the sky is still clear.
[ BEHIND THE EYES ]
Personality: Aiko is first and foremost something of an introvert. She doesn't actively dislike talking to people, but she can be downright afraid of new people due to her ever-present relationship anxiety. Said anxiety manifested itself after her abandoning by her family, making her forever worried that if she ever meets somebody, they will hate her, or pretend to like her and proceed to never appear in her life again. If she does have an established friendship with somebody, however, she will try her best to maintain it: Aiko is, as best she can, a very kind person who tends to care more about others than she does herself. This, as you might expect, isn't easy for somebody as analytical as her: Aiko tries to read into each and every word her peers say, searching for some hidden detail or code passed between them and another person or something of the like. If things do go wrong, however, Aiko does find it rather easy to remain calm, if not in the traditional manner of the word. She has her freakouts like any normal person, social situation or otherwise: she just has them quietly and in a stable manner.
Limits to social activity have their downfalls: with little to no practice keeping her emotions in check, the one thing that Aiko does struggle to remain calm for are emotional situations. Deaths, romances, and all the usual don't work out for her very often, as she struggles to maintain a stable emotional state. It doesn't help that she wasn't particularly stable in the first place either, mostly due to her parents literally jumping ship on their lifelong-job (being her parents), simply because she was different. Said parenting did have a lasting effect on her though: Aiko is studious to the core, never letting a piece of work go unfinished and actively going out of her way to learn as much as she can about anything that interests her. In her family, you either got A's or you had beatin' days. Aiko didn't much care for beatings, so it was A's or bust for her.
Finally worth mentioning is Aiko's deeply rooted insecurity over both her physical and mental self-image. Due to the perceived hatred her parents had for her, or maybe even just a lack of want for her in their lives, Aiko spent her teenage years pondering why she existed and why the world so hated her. Much of this was expressed through her favorite medium: writing. When Aiko was sad, she would write about exactly why. What she would write fluctuated, although her two favorites to write were probably her Poetry and her Fiction writing. Song lyrics also had a place in this grand scheme of things, but once again: Aiko refuses to believe that her voice is even half decent. Regardless of the importance and prominence of her self-expression, Aiko still fears sharing said expression with the world because of this same damn insecurity.
Goals & Achievements: Aiko largely seeks to get out more and stop being afraid of meeting people, but for as much time as she spends imagining conversations with people, she never does seem to be able to get them going: probably because she hides in her room when anybody she didn't invite so much as knocks on her apartment door. In regards to the long-term, Aiko wishes to find her parents, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to forgive them for abandoning her. She does, however, stand by the idea that if they do not apologize, there will be no reconciliation between the two. Above even this, however, is her desire to simply be happy and live without being afraid to walk out her door each morning.
[ GUARDIAN ANGEL ]
Weapon of Choice: A pen which, on the pressing of a hidden button, turns into a combat knife. This form is one that Aiko very rarely even touches upon, as she sees weapons as only fuel for lethal conflict. She'd much rather use her fists to deal with enemies, or better yet, spells.
Power: Aiko can manipulate any mundane mortal world material that she has touched with her pen's tip. For example, if she touched concrete, she would be able to direct said concrete to form lumps, or tiny spikes, so long as she envisioned it and made a movement which represented it with her pen through the air in front of her.
[ LEGACY CREATED ]
Origin: Aiko Kohaku was born on a hot summer's day in June of 1997. One could have called her something of an early birthday present to her mother at the time: said mother would be turning twenty-five two weeks after her daughter's birth. The weeks, months, and even first few years that followed Aiko's birth were mostly uneventful. Sometimes, she would hear things that her parents wouldn't hear and see things that they couldn't see, but of course, as she was simply a child, the family not thought of it. Why would they? After all, it was good to have a child with a "wild imagination". Really, the first major event in Aiko's life occurred when she was about five years old. Having learned to write at an early age, she found herself interested in penning one of those "rhymes" daddy read to her before she was to go to sleep. Deciding that she needed something to write about, Aiko chose her mother's upcoming birthday as her topic of choice. Thus a new and lifelong habit of hers was born: writing. With this interest developing into something of a talent, Aiko breezed through her first years of school, finding most things rather easy to grasp. She had friends, a loving family, and teachers who adored her and framed her work on their walls. By the time Aiko was eleven, she had stacks of paper piled up all around her room, some of them songs, some of them stories, and many others being poems.
It was around now that Aiko started seeing and hearing those things that other people couldn't see or hear even more. This somewhat worried her parents, as they had assumed that their child would have grown out of her little "world of imagination" by her age. So, noticing that her parents didn't believe her, Aiko decided to just stop mentioning the things she saw and heard. She would just learn to hold her experiences in tightly, and not share them with her parents or really anybody, for that matter. It took her a short while to come to terms with what she saw herself, but after deliberation, Aiko concluded that what she was seeing could only be represented by one thing: ghosts. From then on, Aiko firmly believed in an afterlife, spirits, and all sorts of things that you wouldn't expect a modern pre-teen to believe in. As she grew bolder with her explorations into the unknown, Aiko found herself talking to some of the things she saw: they ranged from other children to old couples, doting about the material world, having not yet passed on. Aiko befriended many of them, and others, she simply conversed with. It was now that Aiko confirmed her initial assumption, and damn, did knowing that she wasn't crazy feel good.
Rise to Power: Well into her 12th year, Aiko's life changed dramatically. For better or worse, she couldn't tell. What she did know, however, was that she could do some crazy shit. It all happened on a Wednesday night in November. Aiko had had one of her few bad days in school: a pair of girls had teased her for "talking to herself" during lunchtime and then proceeded to continuously torment her throughout the day. She wasn't used to being bullied: people usually just ignored her quirks and focused on the presence she had in the classroom, always being sure to answer every question the teacher asked first. This experience made her doubt that this was the right idea: after all if two people didn't like her, what could stop the whole world from thinking the same. Under this pressure, Aiko decided to do what she always did when she had something to get off her chest: write about it! Unfortunately, Aiko ran into a dilemma rather quickly: she had no paper to write with. While a rather frequent issue in her home, usually her family was home to help in some manner, but tonight was different. Her father wasn't home that night, and her mother was on an Onsen trip with some friends, so that meant she couldn't use either of their computers and without one of her own, Aiko found herself unsure of where to write.
Then, an idea struck her: she could use the wall. Sure, it wasn't a perfect surface and her parents could get mad, but she doubted it: they liked to see her be creative, and if that meant that she had to write on the wall, they would (probably) be happy, or at least accepting of it. Thus, Aiko began to write, inscribing each letter with extra precision to make sure that, as she would be leaving a lasting mark on the wall, it would look good. She poured herself into each sentence, dumping her troubles into the piece of poetry, finishing after a full hour. Sighing, Aiko removed the pen from the wall, taking a breath. She was relieved it was done. Opening her eyes to look at the work, it was as if she could see the letters jumping out at her.
Oh, wait... they were. The wall had extended inwards toward Aiko, with each letter looking just as you would expect, except they were literally three-dimensional and made of... whatever her wall was made of. Initially shocked, Aiko took a step back, stumbling onto her bed after realizing what had just happened. Then, after a moment of silence between her and nobody else, she stood up, curious once more. Moving forward, Aiko inspected the wall: yeah, she wasn't dreaming. It was then that she had yet another thought. Picking up her pen (that she had dropped in shock), Aiko focused on the jutted out wall, and pushed the pen into it. Miraculously, the extended fonts began to shrink back into the wall, leaving only traditional penned letters. Aiko smiled: she was going to have a lot of fun with this. Over the next two years, Aiko experimented with this newfound ability of hers, making sure that when she did, her parents were out of the house. Each time she used it, she figured out something new, and by the time she was thirteen, she had at least something of a grasp on how her ability worked. All but a couple of her closest friends from school were in the dark about her powers, of course, so she felt safe using them. That was, until one fateful evening in the summer of 2010.
Call to Action: By every common variable, Aiko's life shouldn't have taken such a downward turn. Unfortunately, she had forgotten her mother's work schedule just one time, and that led to the sequence of events that followed. Returning home from school, she foolishly assumed the house was empty, and eagerly got to what she had spent all day waiting to do. Lightning a candle in her room, Aiko grabbed her pen and proceeded to tap the flame just barely with the tip of her pen. Instantly feeling the connection between her and the flame take, she got to fiddling with it. When she flicked her pen towards the ceiling, the flame would extend upwards like a tiny spear, and when she pulled her pen towards her, the flame would lean almost unnaturally in her direction. Her mother obviously had to walk in during the latter. Seeing your daughter near fire was never a good thing, especially when said daughter appeared to be directing it using... a pen? Oh dear, was Aiko's mother confused. Noticing her mother's presence in her room, Aiko quickly extinguished the flame and tried to brush off the event like it had been nothing. Unfortunately, the shock of seeing her daughter literally controlling a flame had hit Aiko's mother a tad too early for Aiko to have a hope of salvaging the situation. Simply rubbing her brow and sighing, the woman walked away. Aiko, unsure of what else to do, worried, and worried, and eventually started crying.
That was the least of Aiko's worries: she never heard the conversation that her mother had with her father later that night. Both of them quickly put the pieces together: neither were dim-witted in the slightest and thus were capable of recognizing the correlation between the things that their little girl had claimed to see when she was younger to the events witnessed today. The prospects of such a thing frightened them: they weren't how to feel about their own daughter anymore. Slowly and subtly, both parents began to isolate themselves from Aiko throughout the summer, and although both probably thought she didn't notice, the opposite was all but too true. This neglect sowed the seeds of anxiety and self-hatred inside of Aiko, so much so that when she practiced with her power, she no longer really felt any joy at all. It was turning out to be more of a curse to her than anything else. Luckily, she'd soon be back in school and surrounded by her friends... right? Ah, but things weren't so simple. Her parents feared that a possible discovery of their daughter's powers would be awful for their image, thus, they did what any sensible parents would do: send their kid off to boarding school so that they could forget that she existed.
Aiko friend total went from somewhere around ten to a big fat zero in one terrible day. She would likely never see her old friends again, and whilst they would text each other once in a while, those promises to stay in contact slowly faded into hollow obscurity, with the distance between messages increasing daily until they stopped entirely. At boarding school, Aiko did only what she had to: study. She found no desire to go out and meet people anymore, lest she be forced to leave them again. There was, however, a single girl, one named Kaya, who befriended Aiko relatively quickly. Kaya would remain Aiko's sole friend throughout all of her time at the boarding school. Despite the melancholy nature of things though, Aiko persevered through: she believed, somewhere, somehow, there would be a happy ending to this trainwreck of a life that she called her own.
Of course, that would be just too much to ask, wouldn't it? One summer (specifically the one after her second year at boarding school), after taking a return flight home, Aiko came home to find the house deserted. At first, she thought nothing of it. Her parents could be out, right? Then the moving vans showed up, and without speaking a word, began to haul furniture and items out of the house, leaving only Aiko's room untouched. There was no note. No text. No phone call. Just an empty house, and a pair of vanished parents. Aiko had no doubts as to why this was occurring: in fact, she practically had expected it. Thus, there were no tears: only a look of confusion shared with only herself, and a phone call to Kaya, who lived in Tokyo. By the next morning, Aiko was on a train to Kaya's house. The place was nice: comfortably sized, and Kaya's family expressed nothing but positivity in Aiko's presence. She had stayed here once before on a winter break, but never for this long. Aiko was, for all intensive purposes, now living with Kaya. It was in Tokyo that she decided to not go to boarding school anymore: it wasn't worth the expense to her. Kaya followed suit, with both girls attending a high school in Edogawa. The next two years of Aiko's education flew by in a breeze, and before she knew it, the age of eighteen was a real thing for her. She was an adult: and she was alive, with very few scars and scratches on her body to say otherwise. Of course, this meant, at least to Aiko, that she had to get a job. Surprisingly, this wasn't that difficult. After looking around the writing industry and sending out applications, a publishing company in Karakura Town gave her a phone call letting her know that they were in need of an entry level editor. The pay was at least alright, certainly viable for a person of Aiko's age. With a self-sustaining job, Aiko then moved out of Kaya's home, though not without making a promise to visit. This promise, she wouldn't falter upon.
Aiko moved into an apartment in Karkaura the hopes of having a quiet space to be herself, and to her delight, that's exactly what she got. Writing was easy where she was, and disturbances were minimal. Of course, Aiko encountered the occasional hollow, but after picking up martial arts as an extracurricular activity while in high school, she was able to defend herself just fine. To put things simply, Aiko had a boring, normal life, with occasional spiritual interruption. That was until thoughts of her parents drilled their way into her psyche. She was asking herself questions, too many of them. Where were they? The movers had refused to so much as speak to her when she had asked two years ago, so Aiko really did have no clue. It was now that Aiko began to look through phone books and any other public database she had access to. It wasn't a matter of if she could find them, it was only a matter of when. Then again, when could be a long time from now for her, considering Japan had a population of 125,000,000. Aiko still continues searching to this day, almost treating it like a hobby. Yet each day, each time she thinks of her parents, she refuses to believe that she will hate them upon meeting them again. She promises herself that she will make them apologize and take that apology to her heart. Afterall, what else could she do but make promises? They'd pulled her through with Kaya, maybe they'd do the same with her parents.
