Tanner, Maya - Mortal

I'm Trapped...

"What you doin' here, girl? This is no place for someone like you."
 
"It's... Maya. Maya Tanner. And I remember when all of this was grass."
 
"But these homes have been here for eighty years... You can't be more'n twenty-one!"
 
"A barn stood on that hill, to the west. We kept cows there; chickens, too, in the wintertime. It's all gone now. They're dead and their children are dead and their grandchildren are old and don't know who I am. Everything I built, the land I tamed with my own two hands, all I ever had to be loyal to is erased by time, buried under tons of concrete and glass and steel."
 
"Huh? You're just messin' with me, right? Look at you, you're not a god or an angel or nothin', you're human, just like me!"

Here In This Prison Of Flesh

Height: 5'6" // Weight: 121lb // Hair: Blonde // Eyes: Blue

Tattered jeans, a ripped shirt, what's left of a decades-old wedding dress; Maya wears what she can hold on to. To her, clothes are memories, the little bits of moments past that she can't bring herself to forget. She doesn't care about modesty and she doesn't need the protection, but she does need reminding that the world still exists beyond today.

She had beauty, once. People would come from miles to find her, to seek out her smile or a caress from her hand. Now few can match her gaze. Her eyes carry the distance of years, the weight of pain.
 
She doesn't care what she looks like much, these days. People have to point out to her when her knees are still smeared with the dirt from the alley she sat in for an hour or two last week, or that there's dried blood on the cuffs of her sleeves.
 
She has trouble sitting still, or being alone in quiet places.
 
With All The Good Things...

• Focus: Maya is in the now. If she is looking at you, you are all she sees. If she is talking to you, you are her world. Everything she does has as much of her attention as she can give without forgetting to breathe. There is nothing that will escape her, no nuance of expression or hidden motion that will stay hidden for long, because she is motivated perhaps more than anyone to stay continuously engaged with anything that can make her feel.
  
  If she's looking at you, thinking of you, she's not thinking of herself. If she's in the now, she's not back then, not back in a place that feels like Paradise, that she wants so bad that thinking of it burns her. She has to stay moving, throwing herself from one moment to the next, finding new people, searching out emotional highs, forgetting all those that came before.
  
  She's in the now because it's safe. The past has demons that will eat her alive.
   
• Adaptability: It doesn't matter how she got there, it doesn't matter why, or what she's doing, Maya can make herself content anywhere. It's not quite like home--home is a place she'll never have again, lost in time and space--but it's close. It's the beat of the nightclub, the light glinting off his smile, the nice sounds rats make as they panic and die.
  
  Something will be there for her, something to make up for whatever things she left behind, wherever she came from before. It might be transient, but another thing will come along tomorrow, and if it doesn't another day will pass uneventfully, bringing a new tomorrow along.
  
  When all you want is the one thing you can never have, nothing else matters very much at all.
   
• Determination: In past lives, Maya was a thing to be admired, a thing to be feared. She rose through the ranks, she dominated the battlefield, she could have any man she wanted. There were those who said that--if she tried--she could have ruled it all, and privately she didn't disagree. Any roadblocks she seemed to run into were of her own making, an absence of motivation or desire rather than talent.
  
  Now she's a broken thing. She wants nothing more than to lose herself in emotion, to kill the part of her that can still be hurt, and she's almost lost. Almost. The part of her that's truly fearsome isn't gone, just dormant, waiting for a goal. All she needs is purpose, then she'll rise.
  
  Then the world had better run.
   
• Duty: There's a part of her that can't escape old patterns. No matter how deeply she tries to bury herself, key parts of the thing she was still shine through. She still has responsibilities, or she tells herself she does, knowing deep inside her heart it's just one more thing she can't let go of, one last attachment to a life forever lost.
  
  She doesn't know what the gods think when they see her, when they come to battle a soul-eating monster and find she's already won, when they collect a newly born ghost and find she's kept it company, kept it safe from the thing that go bump in the night. Sometimes they treat her as equals and sometimes they laugh, and she can't decide which hurts her more.
  
  But still she tries.
   
• Passion: Even when everything was right in the world, Maya was a creature of passion. To her, feeling and living are one and the same, and staying in a cold box, hiding from emotion, is just a kind of slow death of the soul. She wants every moment of her life to matter. She wants to revel in it.
  
  There are times to be calm and logical, times to think and times to plan, but they're just a backdrop, the spaces that exist so the words can have meaning. Whether it's killing or fucking or dancing or lying, those moments when the adrenaline rises in her body, when she can just throw her head back and scream from the sheer thrill of it all, those are the only moments worth having.
  
  Everything else is just white noise.

With All The Bad...

• Arrogance: Maya lives a life without consequence. Actions come before thoughts; things like planning, wondering what the future will bring, those don't ever seem to come at all. She stopped fearing death the first time she didn't starve, the second or third time she didn't die of exposure. Pain, now, pain's a thing to fear, but most of it goes away in time and as for the kind that doesn't, well...
  
  The last time someone tried to threaten her with pain, she laughed in their face. The time before that, she begged for it. Before that, she didn't even respond. If asked, she would say that nothing anyone can do to her scares her anymore. Not because she thinks she's strong; she's weak. Not because she thinks she can take it; she can't. But because everything that could possibly hurt her already has.
  
  Well, there's an arrogance in that, too.
   
• Detachment: The things that live alongside her aren't real people. They're ants. They're cocoons. They wither and die in seconds. Any happiness she finds with them is transitory, they stop mattering as soon as she looks away. What does it matter if one of them dies a few days early? They were already heading that way in a decade or two, right? It's not like she can hurt them, not really. It's not like their pain is real.
  
  She grew attached, once, in the past, to one of these fake-people. It was bliss for years, for almost a decade, and then something came up. Something important. She had to leave, they had their tearful farewell, he said he'd wait for her, she promised she'd be fine, a lover's embrace, a tearful wave, then nothing.
  
  She came home to a corpse.
   
• Impulse: There's no longer any difference between the things Maya wants to do and the things she does. Responsibility is something she vaguely remembers with a hint of nostalgic fondness for a time where there were people who could tell her what to do, who cared about what she did at all. Those days are long, long gone.
  
  She is her own thing, directionless and broken. She moves from one day's whim to the next, leaving behind whatever had fascinated her seconds ago for some new trinket or toy, forgetting sometimes to tend to the bare minimum that her spiritually charged flesh still requires. She is building nothing, working towards absolutely jack fucking all.
  
  And she really couldn't care less.
   
• Loneliness: Maya is unique. There is nothing like her, there is nothing that understands her, and she cannot go back to what she was. Those who knew her in her old life look upon her with disgust; or worse, with misplaced compassion. They can't look at her without seeing how she's been scarred, can't see anything else behind her eyes but pain, and she doesn't want their pity.
  
  The things in her new world are worse, frail and hopeless. If she tried to make them understand the truth of what she was, she'd break them; they'd collapse under the weight of years, of the realization of their powerlessness. She's caught between lies and condescension, and she can't think when it was any other way.
  
  She doesn't remember ever being young.
   
• Hopelessness: The first and most important thing she understood about her new life is that none of it can change. She can never go back. It can't be fixed. It's permanent, from now until the end, and there are those who think she's insane for even wanting to try, who think only of what she's gained and can't understand what she's lost.
  
  She deals with it by avoiding it. She copes by not coping. Thought is the enemy, hope is anathema, and only a never-ending series of constant distractions, of little tiny reasons to live, let her forget that the big one's gone. But truly, it doesn't work that well, or even close to all the time.
  
  The only reason she's alive is that she knows what she'll turn into if she dies.

And All The Rest

• Shinigami are unwelcome intrusions into her new life. They insist on checking up on her, on making sure she stays their dirty little secret, and whether it's contempt or mourning they've long stopped treating her like what she is, either acting like she's some kind of disgusting animal or acting like nothing changed at all, expecting her to still be the person they used to know, to care about their gossip of their wonderful lives. They bring bad memories, and she wishes they would stay away forever.
   
• Hollows are just wonderful! Seeing one brightens up her whole day. It means that she can stop hiding, can unleash her true power and be doing it for a good reason. It means that something in this world can actually try to challenge her, and make her feel an echo of the ecstasy she felt when they used to be her enemy. They're a connection to her old life, and an excuse to kill without remorse.
   
• Arrancar are freaks, but so is she. She's never met one, not up close, not unless you count killing glares from the opposite sides of a battlefield, but now she understands them too much to want them dead. Waking up in a new world, in a new body, as a thing you never thought you'd be? Yeah. She can empathize with that. They're kindred spirits on opposite sides of a war she's long stopped fighting.
   
• Humans are fascinating.  She'd never seen anything like them before, thought men with real power were fairytales, until she spent some time among them and ran into the legends herself. She thinks they're like radiant little stars, burning so brightly before they die, and they can do the strangest most wonderful things. If there is any hope, if anything can fix her, it's one of them.

With New And Twisted Strength
 
She calls it somaturgy, creating bodies and using them as tools to carry out her will. She can empower and animate any non-living substance with her own brute imitation of life, creating constructs that obey her will or follow rudimentary orders before, eventually, falling apart. She is limited to solid, along with some liquid, substances, and cannot grant true life or truly manipulate the things she controls; she could create a makeshift bird out of a sheet of metal, but not send it flying through the air out of its own volition. She cannot heal the living, and can only turn the dead into soulless puppets of flesh.
 
I Dance To My Own Song
Dabin - The Take Down // Trifonic - Broken
 

I've Lived So Long

Shinigami
Birth Certificate

Name: Mayumi Tanaka
Age: 302 (appears mid-20s)
Gender: Female
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 132 lb
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Blue

Character Parameters

Physical Description: Mayumi--she hates the name--always stands out. It's one of the many things she's good at; turning heads and keeping them turned, taking eyes and making them stare her way. She likes it, but the truth is every second she spends making sure no errant strands of hair spring free, making sure her lips are just the right shade to match the way the autumn sunlight catches in her eyes, it's all a waste. Even at her worst, even panting and scarred, covered in sweat and blood and grime, fresh from the battlefield--another victory--she's just as transfixing, just as beautiful. The style's just a way of keeping score.

Blonde hair, blue eyes, pale and flawless skin; these are the things she was given. The ripple of the muscles in her biceps, the way she tints the skin around her lips just a shade darker so it shines with the light of her smile, the loose ponytail that frames her face and makes her zanjutsu instructor shake his head in dismay every time it sways around her as she moves... these things she earned. Just about anyone can succeed with a good enough hand--and she was dealt a good hand. Money, power, beauty, lineage; what more could anyone want?--but success means nothing to her unless it's hers.

So she learned how to transform her natural gifts into something nearly resembling perfection, all the little tricks that amplify beauty already there. She learned that everything life handed her was worth nothing unless she worked for it, that her mind, her power and determination were worth more than any gift from any weaker soul. She learned that, just because she was better, she didn't need to take, to make others feel worse just because they didn't draw the same lot in life as her. She learned to be noble.

To her it's more than just a word.
 
Loyalties: Mayumi's always thought that loyalty is a... strong term. To her it implies laying down her life, sacrificing everything she holds dear, for a cause, an idea... for family. Deep inside, in a part of her she doesn't like to acknowledge, there's a voice that wonders if she's capable of that, of giving up that much for someone else, or if she'd fail or run or turn or do any of the things that got people locked away or killed.

There were always rumors, weren't they? A friend's friend dropping off the face of the planet, whispers of sold secrets or moments of conscience or just plain incompetence, screams carried on the wind. She still remembers Shiro Nagawa. He was the first boy to ever ask her out. Everyone else had been too scared, intimidated by her looks or her ancestry, but he had the courage. He wanted her badly enough to try. She turned him down, of course, as gently as she could; you only had to look at the poor boy to know that she was far out of his league, but she never forgot his face, after all these years.

No one else even remembers his name.

Mayumi is dutiful if not devoted, obedient if not quite honor-bound. When her captain calls, she answers. When the worlds under her care need defending, her sword is always among the first to answer the call and spill monster-blood across the sands of distant shores. Happily, that's as far as things have ever gone.

She's been up to every task she's faced. Mindless beasts, psh, what challenge could they possibly bring? Instinct can never best a blood-tested blade, and she dances through worlds like everything in them belongs to her and her alone, mapping out battles so many steps ahead that they're often won before they start.

Maybe, in the face of real peril, she would falter.

But first she'd need to find it.

Positive Traits

• Fearless
  
  It takes a certain special something to throw oneself into mortal danger time and time again. Everyone has their reasons; protecting those they care about, fighting for a nation or an ideal, overcoming their fear or reveling in that moment of dominance, surrendering every last bit of self-control and living to follow orders--existing only as a blade. Mayumi does it because it simply hasn't occurred to her to be afraid. She conquers every challenge thrown her way with dignity and poise, looking down on those injured in battle with a smirk and just a touch of disbelief.
   
  The monsters she fights for the good of all--slavering beasts with little true strength and absolutely no grasp of tactical thinking--have honestly become a disappointment. She has her tricks to keep things interesting, of course; imposing little restrictions on herself, planning out arbitrary ways that fights should go, 'forgetting' to bring her sword that one time... but really, those masked atrocities are nothing but a cakewalk even with one hand tied behind her back (she tried that once, incidentally, and came out of it unscathed if you don't count one royal bitch of a rope burn) and she's still waiting for something real, something worth fearing, to come her way.
   
• Practiced
  
  Hundreds of years after Mayumi's birth, one clever mortal scribe would claim that he had cracked the secret to mastering any pursuit he cared to name; time. Ten thousand hours, almost fifteen hundred days. Four years straight; or ten, at a more reasonable pace. According to him, this, and not just natural talent, is what it takes to succeed at learning anything, at making foreign motions and ways of thought as familiar as breathing.
  
  Mayumi's had three hundred years. Her fierce desire for knowledge, for challenge, for novelty above all else, has led her to feverishly study any number of things, discarding them and moving on to the next once she'd learned everything she could, once they'd stopped being interesting. Her needlelike focus and ability to absorb skills and information is almost uncanny, but it only lasts as long as there's still something to learn.
   
• Indiscriminate
  
  When Mayumi was little, even in her earliest memories, her parents told her that she was special. Their little princess was meant for great things, coddled in gilt and gold; kept away from the cruel, coarse world outside. When she turned up after a frantic search playing with the gardener's boy, they were firm but insistent; he was beneath her, she should only play with people of her stature. Her kind.
  
  She'd be having absolutely none of that. After she escaped those expectations, when she started making her own way in the world, she only ever judged people based on what they brought to the table, never how much money they had or where they were born. If they made her smile, if they taught her something new--even if it was only something about herself--that was enough for her to make her theirs, at least for a little while.
   
• Passionate
  
  For Mayumi, life--or death, though it's the only life she's ever known--is about living. She's never content to let the clock tick, wasting seconds, time she could be feeling something. Whether it's stabbing deep into a hollow's heart or plunging her tongue between the lips of an eager lover, everything she does is in search of that one ecstatic moment, that one blink of electric presence, where she truly feels alive.
  
  So much of her life is frustratingly static. Politics, paperwork, all of those damnable responsibilities that people pile on you when you demonstrate competence. She's sure they're important. There's probably somebody--some clerk at a desk in some drafty office--whose day she just ruins when she rushes out to stop an attack, or when a new burger joint opens across the street--really, any excuse will do--leaving it all in a crumpled pile on the floor to become somebody else's problem. They have people for that, right?
   
• Influential
  
  Despite all the insults people have muttered around her over the years, just loud enough so that she could hear, and the countless more she's sure they've thought, resentful of the life she was born into, the one she tries her best to live up to, one thing people have never called Mayumi is a fool.
  
  She knows what people think of her. Many respect her. Some are even in awe of her, entranced by her beauty and skill, and those who have seen her fight often need to create a whole new classification in their minds just for her to occupy. When she feels the need to exert her will--like that time some drunk was about to slap around a girl she'd known since childhood--a pointed glare across a crowded room will often serve to get her message across.

Negative Traits

• Arrogant
  
  How far does it go? If you kick the ass of everyone that tries to take you down, if you leave them bleeding and still wanting more, if your every bit of braggadocio is justified, where do you cross that line from confidence to arrogance? When do you stop living up to the standard that you think you set?
  
  Life comes easily to Mayumi. She's strong and smart and beautiful, powerful and rich, not too petty or vain. It's not that she thinks amazingly highly of herself, but that no one else seems to be able to match her in... well, anything. Is it any wonder that she'd start to think to herself that no one else matters, that she can do it all...? Has there ever been anything she couldn't do? She doesn't know where it stops, anymore. She's not even sure she cares.
   
• Restless
  
  What does any of it matter? So what if people kept saying how great she is with a sword, her natural flair for leadership, whispering in her ear how she could be a Captain soon if only she applied herself. What did she want with any of that? The only moments the world felt right was when, when someone bumped into her in a hallway or told a joke she hadn't heard before, swept her off her feet and carried her off into another world for a few minutes or hours, forgetting the things she had to be, forgetting what everyone wanted for her.
  
  What did she care about ordering people around? Even people were beginning to pale, becoming too predictable to be exciting. For a while now, the only times she felt alive were those few seconds on the battlefield before it clicked in her mind, before she zeroed in, found chinks in chink-filled armor and danced a dance of death. Lately, even those moments were beginning to fade. There has to be something more, right? There has to be.
   
• Obsessive
  
  One day, Mayumi decided she wanted to learn to make soufflés. She'd heard a guy she kind of liked, someone who caught her eye, say something about liking them once. Maybe his mother made them? Who knows. She looked it up and decided to learn how to make them for him. Weeks, maybe even months later, after dozens of burned pans and a few small fires, she'd done it. The perfect soufflé. She rushed out to tell him, but found him with someone else, who hadn't neglected him for weeks to learn how to cook something from his half-remembered childhood.
  
  She threw the thing in the garbage. So what if she could make the best damn soufflé in the entire Soul Society? It was the triumph she was after, not the taste. Now that she'd had that, she was done with eggy cakes, moving on to the particulars of 14th-century kickboxing, or the precise composition of an Impressionist-era painting, tracing brushstrokes until she could not only copy it perfectly, but make improvements. It was something to do. She always needs something to do.
   
• Capricious
  
  Some things utterly defy Mayumi's expectations; when the right person looks at her and smiles, flooding color into her grey little world, she'll drop everything to pursue it, ditching a formal dinner to go dance in some dive bar or skinny-dip on a moonlit night, caught in the sway of another intoxicating presence.
  
  There's a part of her that needs more; some voracious yearning for... freedom, for weakness, for knowledge, for anything other than what she is. Anything that surprises her, that's new and exciting and outside her sphere of control is something she'll make a snap decision to pursue until the novelty's gone out of it once more. For a few hours, a few days, she'll be happy... and then it's gone.
   
• Self-Absorbed
  
  Often, when her fellow soldiers meet, they speak of loyalty. It's somehow important to them to die in blind service to their captains, to their commander, protecting wives or children or even just the lives of everyone they've met. This is important to them, sacrificing their lives to some greater goal.
  
  Mayumi's never understood that. Battle, for her, is a moment of absolute adrenaline-filled control, testing herself in a moment of absolute dominance that's hers and hers alone. She tired of people years ago, using up every useful interaction except, now and then, more and more rarely, when someone makes her laugh or crack a smile. She doesn't care about anyone other than herself, her goals have just aligned with those of her superiors up until now.

Theme: Cosmic Gate - Under Your Spell (feat. Aruna)
 

Bond Undeniable

Sealed Zanpakuto

The event had such pomp and ceremony. It was like she was being given keys to the city or some kind of medal instead of just this. Her parents didn't quite walk her down the aisle, but they weren't far, taking time out from their busy and important lives to see their only little girl take her first footsteps into their world. With the amount of attention they gave it, how many times they told her that decorum was important, that she must represent her ancestors and uphold their honour, she was expecting something more than this dull sword. In her mind it was wicked, plated in gold and caked in the blood of her enemies, saw-toothed and razor-sharp, but the man--his solemnity a joke--took it from a rack full of dozens just the same. He even made a show of wiping it against his threadbare shihakusho, brushing dust onto the cold tile floor, before handing it over. A shallow hilt, just like any other, like thousands more. Who she was didn't change a thing.

Shallow Imprint
To tell the truth, she was both excited and afraid. She'd heard the stories--who hadn't?--of those poor souls who couldn't face what was inside them, taking one look and running so fast and so far that they burned their swords or simply never woke up again. She had to be better than that. Not because of her family or because of her name, but because she was better than that, so she tried. Day and night, night and day, she kept the sword beside her. Oh, there were some times she let it slip out of her sight--who goes to a party with a sword?--and sometimes, maybe, once in a while, she needed to fall asleep knowing that she'd be the only one inside her dreams.

Inner World

One day--oh, faster than it took most others, but not by much--she rolled over in her sleep, brushing her hand against its hilt, and she woke up in another world. She'd heard tell of imposing castles with monstrous turrets, lava-moats policed by mind-sharks and worse, but every time her anxiety grew over her friends' stupid stories, something made it bleed away. She couldn't be anything but calm, here in this place. The only sound was the grass growing under her feet, a trickle of water in the distance. There were no shadows here, only sunlight and the calm after the rain. Trees ringed the clearing, some gnarled and shrouded in darkness, but as the voice that spoke into her mind told her, this place was hers.

Zanpakuto Spirit

He peeled out of the trees, trailing darkness behind him. He lived beyond them, he told her, and her respect for him was such that she never tried to venture there. He was a tall man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, well-dressed in a white shirt and grey pants, an open suit-jacket, a crumpled tie. He told her his name was Nathaniel, and he was the ocean to her storm. She laughed it off at first, more than a little disappointed that this thing inside her that was meant to be this terrifying beast she had to conquer, whose enigmatic power she had to harness, was just a man; an unassuming, quiet man, who looked only a few scant years her elder. But, with enough time, these things change.

Growing Closer

She confided in him, over time; as her power and standing grew, her patience waned. Things made her want to turn and snap at people, betraying the patience and control, the grace that people had expected of her all her life. It was easier to bottle it up, to come home after a busy day of bullshit politics, fancy dinners and snobbish half-wits expecting her to join their little cliques just because her grandfather once gave their second aunt the honour of a dance. It was safer to just let it all out inside her head, scream in a voice that no one else could hear about all the injustice in the world. He listened. All he ever did was listen.

Co-Dependency

In time, she stopped wanting to talk to anyone else. He knew her better than she knew herself--maybe he always had. He made her laugh. He calmed her down. He was always there, and he let her be restrained and poised on the outside. He took away all her insecurities, let her forgive herself her failings because he said loved her anyway. And one day, while eating overpriced and undercooked spaghetti to a horribly distasteful violin concerto and another eager young man all but falling over himself in his desire to impress her, as she sat there storing away funny anecdotes, little twists to liven up the story when she told him about this disaster later that night, she realized she loved him too.

Equilibrium

Those who knew her well--and there were few--might have noticed her withdrawing from the world. She got into fewer fights. Fewer parties, fewer late-morning regrets; all of the little ways she went askew, the ways she showed she couldn't take the pressure, all but vanished. She stopped talking to people, didn't bother with potential romance or even with most friends unless someone said the right thing, struck her fancy in just the right way; and even then, most of the time they were a disappointment. She'd found her other half within herself, and had all the companionship she'd ever need.

She was perfect; she was whole.

Shikai

"Aim, Nathaniel." Her featureless sword, held in two hands, seemed to flicker and melt. The metal ran down her left arm and pooled, forming into a hardened gauntlet, the tip of the blade still pointing over her knuckles. She flipped her arm towards the beast, and lines of blue fire sprang from her wrist, forming the shape of a bow, tensing and waiting. The gauntlet twitched a second before her other hand released, launching the bolt of power early, but it still flew true, shattering the mask of the monstrous thing and imploding it, blasting clouds of sand into the air of the featureless desert. She flipped back, covering her eyes and drawing one of the other blades she carried, making sure she always had an edge.

Bankai

"Nathaniel," she whispered. "Be my eyes." The metal slid up her forearm, thinning out and concentrating around the left side of her face. It shielded her one eye, forming a glowing lens; she closed the other. The grit thrown up from the Gillian's demise battered her body, stinging her face and eyes, but she didn't need to see to know there was another one out there. She could track it by the beating of its heart, the heat of its breath, the pure stench of the thing, and know where it would move before it had even thought of moving--or what passes for thought in those hive-mind brains--even if it was behind her and miles away. And it was. The lens showed her everything; the trail her arrow would follow, predicting how it would blow and sway in the wind, which way the beast would topple, though the shot was impossible.
She made it anyway.

FLASHBACK

"Tell me a story! Tell me a story!" The little girl scrambled under the covers, grinning eagerly, as her mother shook her head and sighed.

"Dear, it's late, you should really just--"

"Moooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!"

"Alright, alright." The woman took a seat on a chair next to the bed and dimmed the light on the nightstand. "Once upon a time, there was a courageous knight--"

"No, mom!" the little girl interrupted, rolling her eyes. "A new story!"

"Well. I can tell you about... a legendary warrior." She paused, seeing if she'd be allowed to continue this time, but her daughter just flashed her an impish smile. "Before your father's time, before your father's father, back thousands and thousands of years ago, there was a man. He was just like you, just like me. His mother probably told him stories just like this one when he was your age--"

"Even the one about the dragons?" the girl asked, giggling.

"Of course the one about the dragons!" Her mother grinned, leaning back in her chair. "When he grew older, he was chosen by a spirit of great power, an honor given to very few. It could have given him anything. He could have been the most handsome man in the world. He could have learned to make people happy, or to sing, or to never, ever, let his dinner burn." Both of them laughed, remembering just the other night, when the mother's plans for an elaborate casserole went awry and they ended up feasting on jam sandwiches instead.

"He chose to defend us," the woman continued, her face turning serious again. "He gained power... unimaginable power. He fought in so many wars. All for us, all in our name. You wouldn't be here if not for him." She sighed, looking suddenly weary. "But even the strongest warrior meets his match in time."

"There was... we don't know what went wrong. There were more of the monsters than ever before. He volunteered to go, but... He knew he wasn't coming back. He killed them all. He died for us. And because of that we remember him. Thousands of years from now, when we're all dead and gone, little boys and girls will still be hearing his story. He'll be remembered forever. And if you try as hard in your studies, if you do half as much as that man, maybe you'll be remembered too."

"But... that's..." The girl was frowning, a puzzled look on her face.

"What's wrong? Don't you want that, dear?" the woman asked, reaching out with a comforting hand.

"No!" She cried out, her voice pure and sharp, shaking her head violently from side to side.

"I don't ever want to die."

---

Mayumi grew up quickly. Private tutors, retired master swordsmen and ancient kido practitioners on retainer from her father made sure she'd have everything she needed to be a warrior, both sides of the coin, physical prowess and inner might. Her mother made sure she had everything she needed to be a girl.

For anyone else, it could have been a difficult life. Others would have cracked under the pressure, fearing the impossible standards she was forced to live up to. Mayumi soared. Every day brought with it something new to learn, new challenges to overcome. For a while, it was paradise.

Then she got her sword.

The academy was boring. It took months for her to come across something she hadn't seen before, in the privacy of her own home, learning at her own pace. There were other things to teach herself, of course; about people, how to make them like her, do what she wanted. More than enough of them wanted to hate her, prissy rich bitch coming in, too good for the likes of them, already knowing half of what the teachers taught. Most of them she dealt with by just being nice; a few required harsher words, and at least once she had to beat a man within an inch of his life, but always she was learning.

It came as a mild shock when she graduated at the top of her class. She was sure there had to be more to it. Even a child could figure out most of this, surely? Was it really that hard for everyone else? She was quickly placed in the fifth division, her talents undeniable, her family pulling strings she'd rather they have left alone. Now she was there on something other than her own merits. She'd have to prove herself again.

It didn't take long.

She'd expected grand battles, adventure, something that truly tested her, made her face the sum of her being and almost, almost be found wanting. This was closer to pest control. For a time she went through the motions, feigning exertion, eagerness, jubilation in victory. Before too long she gave up on even that.

They told her she could reach Lieutenant if only she applied herself, but what would be the point? There had to be more out there. Something greater. Something that mattered, not just commanding this band of weaklings, giving out tips how best to extinguish nests of supernatural vermin.

Soon she stopped showing up at all. Oh, she was there when it counted. When the alarms sounded, when she heard the call to battle, she'd join her compatriots for just long enough to deal some fatal blows before slipping back home, back to her work. There were things more important than stopping bands of hungry ghosts. Hidden things. Secret things.

She grew obsessed with threads of her family's lore. References to weapons, relics of vast power, were strewn throughout their past. They chose their wielders, she knew that--and while she wouldn't give up her zanpakuto spirit for anything in the world, she was at least a little jealous that she hadn't been chosen--but something didn't quite add up.

One of them was missing.

There were often gaps between manifestations, hundreds of years sometimes, but not thousands. She was astonished that no one had noticed before--but who had time? Everyone was busy worrying about when the next scaaary Hollow would attack some poor mortal fool. What a great pity that would be. It wasn't like there were billions of them or anything.

She searched everywhere she could, but much of the documents from that time had been erased or destroyed; the formation of the Gotei and the ensuing civil war made it rather easy for embarrassing secrets to disappear. There were still traces, though, and in one torn and mildewed prison ledger, she found all the proof she'd never need.

The officers of the Sixth were more than happy to let her in; her reputation and connections had their uses. One--a cute little boy with freckles--followed her around like a lovestruck puppy until she told him, three times, that she wanted privacy, and even then he looked so pitiful that she promised she'd come see him again she left. But she didn't want anyone else overhearing this. It was hers.

The man was only too happy to talk. Loyalty stops counting for much after the first century or two. His story, once she entangled it, his words tripping over themselves in their eagerness to be heard after so many years of silence, was... magnificent. He told of lies. Of treachery. Of a weapon so powerful it made its wielder stop being a man, so battle-hungry and alien that his fellow soldiers were terrified. A caged beast, thrown out against only the most invincible opponents, and soon even that became something his commander could not abide.

Killing a noble openly, so soon after the Soul Society was split apart by civil war, would have sent the world spiralling back into chaos. A plan was hatched. A pretext, the largest gathering of Hollows and Arrancar the world had ever seen. But when the man arrived with his captain in the valley in eastern Europe where it was rumored to be, he found nothing but emptiness, far enough away to tell a lie.

The captain came back, crawling, bleeding, on the verge of passing out from sheer exhaustion, to tell his second-in-command--This man, the man in the prison cell--that the job had been done. It went down in the record-books as negligence, the lieutenant tasked with summoning backup that would never come. In truth, it was assassination.

Then the man made what would turn out to be the greatest mistake of his life.

He told her where it was.

---

 
The locals avoided it, to them it was a land haunted by demons, where live men didn't venture if they valued their souls. Things grew stunted and warped, if at all. The air felt wrong. Even from the outskirts, she could see the bones.

She could feel it calling to her. It needed to be wielded, had been waiting all these years, trapped, twisted by forces expended by the two unimaginable warriors, unable to move on. It oozed sick potentiality, hungry for a hand on its hilt, craving drawn blood. She moved as if in a trance.

It was a weapon of desire. It gave its wielders what was in their heart. A meek, cowardly man, wanting nothing more than to stop being afraid, to serve the people he saw every day, became an unstoppable warrior at the cost of everything else he had ever been. The only thing Mayumi truly wanted was to become closer to the other half of her soul, that shattered part of her that made her feel complete. As she touched it, as thousands of years of sparking overloaded energy was released in one fell burst, it thought it understood.

She was born flawed.

It made her whole.
 

Day One

It felt like a dream. One of those dreams you never wake up from, just going through layers and layers of imagined release before the dresser sprouts eyes or the mirror turns against you, hair falling out in patches and hungry expressions before arms reach through glass, turn to flesh and strangle, the pain comes and the blackness spreads before waking again, granted another few minutes of peace.

She would have liked to be asleep. It was better than the silence.

There must have been a time without him, when she was a little girl, alone inside her mind. Before the sword, before the spirit, before the interplay of the shards of herself became everything to her. She remembered being alone. She remembered being afraid. She didn't remember how to make it stop. She tried breathing loudly, started humming in increasing desperation, tapping her fingernails, pounding her feet on the floor, but the silence overpowered it all.

The mirror, at least, was kind. She looked the same--no, she looked better than the same. Her hair was radiant, her skin gleamed. She looked better now--half-asleep, half-mad with adrenaline and terror--than she ever had before. She looked more alive now than on almost any other day of her life, but inside, something was dying. The mirror mocked her, told of this perfect vision of her, glaring, challenging, daring...

The knock on the door came just before she put her fist through it.

The thing that struck her later on was how calm she'd stayed when the man--an old friend, a past lover--didn't tell her anything. She hadn't spoken to him in years, but she'd seen him, watching on the edges of her life. Any other time she'd have brushed him away, but now he was a piece of the familiar, and even unwelcome things were welcome now.

He kept flashing her puzzling, reassuring smiles as he bustled around, pouring glasses of fresh orange juice and fiddling with the toaster, like he thought she'd break or fade if he looked away. For a time she thought she could ignore it, throw herself into this fake moment and make it real, but, but but, the hum rose in her ears and the beat rose in her heart and pulsed through her veins and shattered her precious core of peace.

She dropped her spoon in her cereal bowl and tried not to scream.

The man--she couldn't even remember his name--covered the distance in an instant, falling over himself to help her, wiping off spattered milk with a napkin, uttering sweet soothing words of nothingness, of imagined love, until he saw her eyes. The tale came out in fits and starts, his eagerness slowly overcoming his awe of her, his newfound protective desire. Soon enough it didn't matter who she was.

He lost her in the terminology, in the details. He wasn't good at talking to people--one of the many, many reasons she'd left him by the wayside so many years ago--but he was good at his work. Today, she learned, his work was her. She'd been asleep for weeks--a fact she took silently, in a wave of cold adrenaline--and she'd been under examination all this time, he'd been running tests, exhaustive tests, but he always--he stuttered here, and color spread across his cheeks--he'd always been circumspect and considerate, didn't take advantage, didn't...

He couldn't even say it out loud.

As he kept going, words slipped out of his half-mumbled explanations and lodged in her psyche. Feedback. Trapped. Transformed. As he babbled on about exotic potential energies and stored cascades discharging, there was one final word that he saved till the end, that could have said it all.

Human.

The feeling inside her was blood, rushing through her veins.

She was alive, truly alive, and just about everyone she'd ever cared about thought she was truly dead. He said it so matter-of-factly, like it was a conclusion she had already arrived at, when the thought of it, the enormity, could barely fit in her mind.

A new life means the old one ends.

If they knew--he said--if they knew they'd tear her apart, they'd look inside her for whatever secret they'd think she kept and never stop until they knew it could never happen again, to anyone else among their number. He cared too much for her, he told her. He'd stolen her away.

She could never go back.

He was quick to assure her that she'd be well-cared for, that he'd care for her with her family's help, that there was more than enough money for her to do whatever she wanted with her new life, that the gaping hole inside her would heal. There would be side effects, he said, that lingered for a time. It was the last thing he said before he left.

Side effects.

That was how he described the murder of the only man she'd ever loved.

It was so simple at first.
 

Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Girl loves him back, even if she always seems like she's comparing him to someone else, someone he never quite measures up to. He never asks about her past and she never volunteers; he takes what he is given and ignores when she doesn't know things that she should, when she never seems to run out of money, when five years later she looks just like, just like, a picture of the day they met.

Such is his love for her, for the life they built together, the ambitions they shared. When she leaves him, when she says goodbye to the house that was meant to last two lifetimes combined, it is with all the regret in the world. She could see the age in his eyes, the grey hairs he was trying to hide, the questions that were beginning to form in his mind that she could never answer, that love alone could never heal. She has plenty of reasons to leave.
 
On the far side of the sea, known to few, war is brewing. No one has told her that, in this world, women are not soldiers.
 

///

They laughed at her. They told her to go home, to tend to her children, to leave the fighting to those with the strength to see it through. When she told them she didn't have children, one started to say he'd be happy to fix that for her before she gripped his throat, holding him off the ground with a single hand, and asked him to kindly tell her which of them appeared to have more strength now?
 
They drew their guns and she laughed, they barked frantic orders into little radios and she laughed more, giving a jaunty little wave and a hint of a smile, red lips against smooth pale skin, as she vanished, dancing, into the city.
 

///

The second great war was well and truly underway before she found her way across the sea. She had met an old friend and called in an even older favor, baring her soul in a way she hadn't since it was in pieces, but the truth poured out of her in waves. It felt so good, guilt and exhilaration all in a rush, to talk without worrying. There were so many things she couldn't say, things it hurt to think about, that happiness became a game of denial--but now her words were free.
 
The absence of her sword itched at her side and in her mind, but an old pistol hung there in poor replacement. There were monsters here that threatened her home, the home she'd made, the man she'd given her life to, even if it wasn't a gift he could keep. She could take them without her sword, without her hands, without her eyes. All she needed was her soul.
 
As she strode through a breach in the wall between worlds, it was hard to remember that the last five or ten years of her life hadn't just been affectation; that this 'human' thing was more than playing pretend.
 

///
 

It's so easy to say 'monster'. Monsters don't have lives. They don't have families or dreams, hobbies or cute little nervous tics to set them apart. They can't be understood. They just want to kill you, and you do the world a favor by not letting them, by ending them first. The girl, standing on the battlefield, had fought monsters before in her life. She saw none of them here. Only the dying and the dead and the carrion crows, pieces of men and men fading.
 
She'd heard stories of this. People at the academy playing the one game that she could never take part, dredging back through shattered minds to tell of their last moments, the ends of past lives. She always listened, even though she had nothing to share. Mortars, louder than thunder. The smell of rotting meat, hot under the sun. Feet in poor-fitting boots, wet and cold. Waiting, hours of waiting, seconds of death. How could anyone find glory here?
 
One of them spoke and it tore her heart apart.
 
He thought she was an angel. He cried out for salvation. He asked after comrades, dead and alive. He babbled in pain and tried, for her, not to scream too loud.
 
Parts of him were overflowing. If he tried to sit up he would just split and his innards would fall to the ground, like a ripped plastic bag. He told her his name was Cedric, that there was a girl at home named Emily that he wanted to marry, that he had already bought a ring, was keeping it safe. She had never been a healer.
 
Look, he said. There's no blood on it.
 
It shone.

///

For a time she thought she was powerless, just one of the millions of ordinary people that moved through the city she found herself in. Time proved that to be a lie. She was still stronger than she should have been, and faster; she never broke things or injured herself, never made any of those little fumble-fingered mistakes. When she was cut, it healed quickly. She didn't seem to age.
 
Most of all, she could feel it. The power was still there, even if she couldn't use it, even if it wasn't what it was before. She couldn't cast bolts of fire, couldn't call upon her splintered sword to grant her power, but it was still there, thrumming in the back of her mind, just out of reach.
 
She tried to grab ahold of it, to push it into him, trying to save him. She thought it was part of her life, that she could give to him to so he would live, so he would heal or stay, be able to hold on until... until...
 
He stood, but not with human motion. No breath issued from his lungs. His heart was still, then beat to her rhythm. In panic, she flexed her newfound muscle and the man doubled in size, leeching flesh from the corpses around him. He stood on dozens of hands. Five eyes twisted in a single socket. She screamed, and echoing cries--Teufel! Geist!--answered her, hysterical bursts of gunfire traced their way across the nearby ground.
 
The thing pulped them. It half ran, half slid across the ground and gained mass as it covered distance, growing arms tipped with a collection of helmeted heads it used as flails, the other studded with teeth. More died of terror than of trauma, but all fueled it, fueled the tugging from her core. She felt faint, staring without seeing, as it put a metal-lined fist through the top of a tank, and something disconnected inside her, the thing slid into meaty component parts and rotted, the remaining soldiers fled.
 
She tried to breathe but her hands were shaking, and when she looked inside herself for the calm voice and steadying hand that had always been there, that kept her stable and strong, there was only silence.
 
It would always be like this! When she needed someone to tell her that she was that she was worthwhile, that she was loved, or even just that everything would be okay, there was no one there. When she needed to feel the touch of another human being, needed a shoulder to cry on, there was nothing. It was just her. He was gone.
 
There would always be nothing.

///

From then on she wandered in a daze. The war ended but she didn't go home. When men saw her they screamed, they fled, they called her devil and goddess. Tales spread faster than her feet, but she kept walking until she outpaced them, until there were people that barely knew of the war, embroiled in their own conflicts or simply the struggles of day-to-day life. She made a home among some of them, for a time, growing to love them and then leaving them behind, before any of them could tell what she was.

More than a dozen little lives, each of them special, each of them pointless.

She made her way east, walking barefoot in Russian winters, creating her own legends. Tales would be told of the ice woman in certain remote parts of the world for decades to come; in others, of the girl who could make monsters out of the ground itself, of the lady who made the trees walk.

It would be decades before she returned to civilization.

///

In Japan she found a kind of solace. There were people there who knew what she was, or thought they did, were familiar with something close enough to her to treat her with something approaching propriety. They weren't nice people by any stretch of the imagination. They wanted to use her power for themselves, plying her with drugs, giving her nice things and taking them away, threatening pain or withdrawal when she misbehaved.
 
She didn't mind. It was such a relief, really. It was so nice, they made it so nice, and...
 
It would be months before she remembered she had a husband.
 

///

 
Eventually they let her go back to the other side of the world, where she'd left him so long ago, and she recognized nothing. They told her he was dead, and she didn't understand, thought they must be talking about someone else, it couldn't be her Nate, not hers looking that old, looking so small in that pine box. It wasn't until she went looking for another man, one she thought of as a brother, to talk and to eat and perhaps to go dancing together as they had so many times in the past, that...
 
When she found him wheelchair-bound and dessicated in a nursing home, she understood the way her life would be.
 

THIS IS WHO I AM.

Out of Character

Player Alias: Colin/Snake
Desired GP: 2200+
Roleplaying History: Seven years (half forum, half tabletop)
Referred By: Sakuya Chiaki
Other Characters: Colin Arascain
 
Note: The Roleplaying Sample is copied from Doppelganger I Love You, the thread where Maya began life as an NPC. I will not claim GP for this post, and would like to include it in the application as I do not believe I am capable of writing a better sample for her. If this is unacceptable for grading purposes, please ignore it. Additionally, please make sure to open the spoiler underneath 'I've Lived So Long'. It's very important, and there is another sample there if this one cannot be used.