If you want to see the sunshine...

APPLICATION

NAME: Ax

CONTACT: Email: ParkerHeustess@gmail.com, Plurk: AxiomaticGrue

PERSONAL JOURNAL: Voidbearer.

OTHER CHARACTERS:N/A.


CHARACTER NAME:Saori Kimura

CHARACTER SERIES: Original

SPECIES: Saori is a god of the natural world, the proper name for her species is Myojin.

AGE: She is 480 years old, though appears to be in her late 20s

CANON POINT: The character is being taken from after 19 months in the Dreamwidth game luceti. Her original canonpoint is July 2012

CLASS/ABILITIES: Saori will be losing all of her divine powers when she enters Azeroth and she will become a Priest. The reasoning for this is that I’d find it appealing to take away the supernatural abilities and strengths she’s come to rely on in favor of something new. The reason I’d like her to be a Priest is due to her divinity, as even stripped of the power, she’s still someone of great faith (in herself) and I think it would be ideal for her to draw on that inner fire. Also, as the application is a dual application with Vegeta’s, we thought that a matching pair of Paladin and Priest would be fun.

As far as species related things, she is still not entirely human, and her senses are supernaturally sharp. Her eyes and nose in particular are very keen. Additionally, her soul is not some ephemeral thing. It’s contained within a mirror, a shard of which she (and Vegeta) carry in a locket. If she is separated from both lockets and her mirror by force, then her memory will begin to fade. After a few days, it will go completely, leaving her with no memory of her life and nature until they are recovered. Destroying the mirror is/should be a difficult task, but it would result in her death as well.
Finally, in her long life she’s spent a great deal of time practicing martial arts, particularly swordplay and hand to hand fighting. With several centuries experience, she has some serious skill with these arts, though without her superhuman reflexes she’ll be clumsier. Over time I’d like for her to regain some level of her competence with these skills, through training and learning to cope without them.


HISTORY:
First of all, I apologize for length, this character is an OC, so I wanted to be thorough.

Saori Kimura was originally born into an inconspicuous, but well-off Jitō family during the latter years of the Muromachi Shogunate, the only child of a baron with four brothers. Her father was Toshi Kimura, and her mother was known as Mayuka,. Her family dwelled in the Hakata region of what is now the Fukuoka prefecture of Japan and they were respected for their kindness. On the day of her birth, her father brought her to the shrine of Tesshin, the most venerated local deity and the divine patron of his house. Placing her before the altar, he asked the priests to help him determine the course that the girl’s life should take, that she might bring honor to the house and to the gods. After much deliberation, prayer, and consulting with the spirits they told him to allow the girl to choose her own course, and that she alone could determine the fate of their family.

As such, Saori was raised quite differently than many, instead of receiving the traditional upbringing one might expect of a noble girl she was given a much broader one to compensate for the family’s lack of a male heir. Singing, dancing, storytelling, shamisen, and the more esoteric cultural arts like tea ceremonies and flower arranging were imparted on her by her mother and her aunts. On the flip side of this, her father and his brothers taught her the finer points of horsemanship, accounting, hunting, calligraphy, and even some of the more feminine forms of self-defense. This was an unusual choice for them to make, to collectively raise a daughter as one would raise a son, but without an heir they hoped to give Saori everything she could possibly need to survive and thrive, as well as provide her with the tools to choose her fate when the time came for her Gempukku, a coming of age ceremony.

The girl’s childhood was actually fairly pleasant, as her entire family doted on her. She was still instilled with all of the proper virtues and values through strict discipline, but typically Saori was a model of good behavior and was rewarded for it. She excelled at the physical side of things, and much to the chagrin of her father she took a liking to naginatajutsu and battōdō, two vastly different martial arts. Naginatajutsu was traditionally considered to be acceptable for noble girls, while the other was thought a masculine art. Her uncles discouraged it out of a desire to spare her the ordeal of becoming a warrior, but Toshi was adamant that Saori choose her own path, and that the wishes of the gods be respected.

At the age of ten, a series of events was set into motion that would forever change the course of Saori and her entire family. The shugo, or governor, of the province visited the Kimura family, as was his right to do. His visit was routine, and he was quite familiar with the entire family, including the girl. He was known as a harsh, cold man who had little regard for the gods and their ways. The governor disliked the Kimuras already for Toshi’s strict adherence to the old ways, and often sought to find ways to break his faith in the divine. He was even rumored to have employed maho, blood magic wielded by maho-tsukai blood mages who consorted with demons and other foul spirits so that he might find a way to overthrow the shogun and replace him.

It was during this visit, however, that a most inauspicious thing happened. The shugo had passed by a shrine to Tesshin and refused to pay the proper tribute, thus earning the ire of the shrine’s owner. The kami decided to punish him by sending a trio of its winged hour servants, hainu, to hound the man until he repented for his crimes. The first night, the dog spirits yowled and barked like a pack of wolves, leaving the entire household sleepless. During the day they prowled the grounds, preventing anyone from leaving. The second night, they continued, though their cries took on a more intelligible sound, demanding the governor come out and speak to them. When he refused, they remained a third night, demanding that the household expel the governor or they would suffer the ire of a great and mighty kami. At first, the family considered it, the brothers debating amongst themselves in secret, using Saori’s room as their meeting place. The finally decided that it wasn’t their place to expel the governor, and that they would continue to shelter him. Only her father, wise and penitent, disagreed, but he was outvoted by his brothers.

Saori, of course, had overheard their discussion and she disagreed with it whole-heartedly. Her father was right. The gods should be granted audience, as was their right. When the men had left her room, the girl slipped out and went to a side-gate of their home and opened it. She called out to the dog spirits, inviting them to come and deliver their message to the obstinate governor. They bounded inside, tearing through the house and confronted the man, demanding that he revisit the shrine and offer up a tribute of rice, multiplying the usual amount by three for three days defiance.

Unhappily, the governor agreed, but he had been so embarrassed at the hands of such a child that he decided to vent his frustration on her family. The tribute was taken from the family’s wages, a substantial cut from their already low finances. Additionally, taxes were hiked within the Kimura’s lands, and two of her uncles were stripped of their titles and land, conscripted into service in the shugo’s personal guard. This placed even greater strain on the family, as they had to provide appropriate accoutrements for court samurai as well as give out their stores to prevent their population from starving.

During the following winter, when things seemed to be at their worst, tragedy struck when another uncle was stricken with a horrible wasting disease. This unnatural ailment was a quick, but painful death, clearly an ill turn sent to punish the Kimuras for some transgression. In a matter of days, the uncle was dead and three of Saori’s aunts were dying. Unable to afford the medicines that they needed, the family quarantined the sick, but it was too late. This wasting illness continued to claim lives, taking away the remaining uncle and aunt before finally reaching Saori’s parents. The household servants sequestered the girl away, having her stay away so that at least one Kimura would survive. In those days, when an entire generation was wiped out by disease, the family was considered to be marked, cursed by the gods as dishonorable. The villagers mourned the dying family, and debated what to do with the child, the last scion of a cursed household. None would take her in, as she’d undoubtedly bring her family’s curse with her, but it wasn’t right to leave her to die. While they squabbled, the disgraced girl ran off.

Saori refused to accept that this was the end, and went to the shrine that the governor had scorned to beg for aid, hoping that the spirit would listen to her plea. As she knelt in penitence, a great winged dog swooped down from the sky and spoke to her. The hound sadly informed her that the disease was beyond even the god’s powers to heal, but that there was a way to save her family’s honor. Saori was shaken by this revelation but agreed, asking what the hound’s price was for such a great boon. The creature replied that she should remain at the shrine, working and learning from Tesshin, and that all would be clear in time.

This marked the end of Saori’s childhood, and the beginning of her life as an acolyte. Day in and day out Saori worked, growing up in the service of Tesshin. Each year on her birthday she was allowed to ask him one question, and every year she would ask him the same one. “When will you tell me how to restore my family’s honor?” and each year the wise old kami would respond with “when you are a little older and a lot wiser.” This answer invariably irritated Saori, but she accepted it out of respect.

When she turned sixteen, it was time for her to undergo her Gempukku, the ritual to determine one’s true calling. The locals all gathered for the ceremony, eager to know what their former lord’s daughter would become. The common consensus was that she’d likely stay at her job as a miko, however when the priests asked the gods what their intentions were for her they were inconclusive. An Inu-gami appeared before the gathered crowd and informed them that the Kami had declared that Saori would remain in the shrine, to be educated.

Her days were peaceful and quiet, filled with meditation, learning, and the crafts of art and war, as well as learning of spiritual matters. In her mind she was being groomed to be a priestess, to perhaps redeem her family’s lost honor by serving the gods that way. The powerful god had other plans, however. He taught her everything that he could, treated her as a disciple, and possibly a successor. The storm god expected her to eventually turn from him, her belief changing, her faith wavering, but it never did. At the age of twenty-five, after fifteen birthdays under his tutelage, the young woman again asked “When will you tell me how to restore my family’s honor?” This time, for the first time, Tesshin responded differently.

“You have proven your devotion, by staying here, believing in me. This time, I will grant you the means that you seek.”

The wizened old spirit asked her to enter the central shrine and gaze in the mirror that rested on the altar. This was no ordinary mirror, instead an enchanted vessel that housed the soul and memories of the ancient one. This was an act that marked the end of Saori’s youth, and catapulted her into an entirely different form of existence.

The mirror empowered her, filling her with the wisdom of the Earth and the power of the Heavens, melding the ancient god with the young woman. As it happened, storms raged, thunder crackled, and the entire region was dominated by a massive typhoon for days. By the end of the third day, the weather had begun to return to normal, but Saori was forever changed. Tesshin knew his time was coming, a time when the gods ceased to matter, a time only a few centuries off. Rather than fade quietly into memory, he had opted to blend his soul with hers, entwining their fates, saving him and offering her a chance to become something more than a frightened, cursed woman. She was still fundamentally herself, but now her path was something entirely different. Stronger, faster, with dominion over the weather, the temperance and wisdom granted to her by her long years of study, the longevity of eons, and spiritual servants. But she also had responsibilities, with which she took to with great joy. Bringing rain, offering succor, and punishing transgression were her duties, and she felt like she finally had purpose, a responsibility to the world. With Tesshin’s former servants, and a few other creatures, she managed to take care of business without much difficulty. The other gods gave her a title as well, the Daughter of Wind and Rain.

Saori’s ascension, however, did not entirely cleanse her fate. The curse placed upon her family was a lingering one, put in place by dark gods at the behest of the wicked shugo. These evil beings sensed the change in her destiny and Tesshin’s interference, but were unwilling to break the pact with the governor. Instead, they performed great works of vile magic, conjuring a demon and tying its thread to her destiny. The demon, Hatsu-no-Oni, took on the form of a brutish warrior who carried a massive, wrought iron cleaver into battle. The dark gods assumed that the newly awakened divine spark within Saori would be unable to stand up to Hatsu, but this too was an eventuality that wise Tesshin had prepared for. In Saori’s mentoring, he had trained her to bind and seal demons as an exorcist.

It was many weeks before their first meeting, but the demon assaulted her shrine as directed by his masters. He was a creature of overwhelming strength, and she was hardly a match for his brute strength, but she was cleverer than that. Tesshin’s wisdom lingered, and she managed to enact a binding ritual, freezing him in place before driving a steel stake through his heart, sending him back to Jigoku, the land of the Oni. Humiliated, the monster reformed in a year and a day, and began plotting his revenge.

Saori’s life was fairly uneventful for quite a long time, peacefully outliving the shugo, and the entire population of her home. She wasn’t human any longer, and her duties and responsibilities kept her busy. Gradually, however, she started feeling stranger and stranger, her mind having great difficulty with processing the slow, steady crawl of time. She saw generations of families she’d known in her youth grow old and die, and their children do the same, while she remained almost the same. To someone who was born a human, with all the expectations of death, this began to weigh heavily on her mind. She was never meant to live that long, and began to understand that immortality had a price. Tesshin had, however, also laid the groundwork for this eventuality.

When she first started having difficulty focusing, one of her servants, another inugami, brought to her an enchanted mirror and a scroll. The scroll taught her a secret ritual of the gods known as the Rite of Quicksilver, the act of implanting one’s memories into a mirror to stave off mental decay. The downside was that losing the mirror for more than a few days meant losing the memories, and her powers until it could be recovered. She decided it was worth it, and for the first time in the 18th century, Saori used the ritual. This sealed away the majority of her memories, and forever entwined her to the mirror. Saori was sure of who she was, what her purpose was, but without looking into the surface she had no idea about the less meaningful days of her past. Extraordinary days, people, and places remained after the ritual. She retained her skill at martial arts, traditional crafts, and music, and took the opportunity to further study them when her responsibilities didn’t get in the way.

It wasn’t long after this incident that her world began to change, most notably with the end of Sakoku. Her homeland, no longer isolated from foreign influence took on a vastly different shape. The old ways began to wane as people discovered the Western way. War, Religion, Fashion, Music, Technology, everything changed within a few years of Perry’s black ships. This altered the balance, and pulled the population’s attention and adoration away from the spiritual and more towards the scientific. For the first time in millennia, the power of the gods in Japan began to wane. Now Saori found her responsibilities lessening as rain and wind just…began to function on their own, human belief shifting from magic to science.

Nothing changed for the people, but it was a usurpation that many gods did not enjoy. Saori, as one of the newer gods, was asked to travel and see what sort of strange land these ‘Americas’ were, and to try and meet with their gods of Science and Technology and why they sought to tear the people away from the order of Nature. Unable to disobey an order from a more powerful spirit, she travelled to the United States in 1876. Separated from her shrine in the homeland, her powers diminished, but still remained functional, save for her control over the weather. The belief in science was too strong for her to be able to do much with it, though her ascended body remained unaffected. She had quite a few misadventures, from nearly getting sold to a brothel, to working a restaurant on a railroad, to wandering the desert of Arizona.

The Americas were not a hospitable place for an apparently unaccompanied ‘Celestial’ woman, and she faced persecution from all walks of life, as most believed she was a poor Chinese railroad worker’s wife. This lead to several violent conflicts, including a particularly memorable fistfight in Silver Bell, Arizona, that resulted in the deaths of at least a dozen men. The incident was sparked by a local gang leader, who felt Saori an easy mark. He was mistaken, and his gang paid the price for their aggression. Separated from her home she may be, but a god was still a god. Rumors began to spread throughout the West of a mysterious woman who came into towns asking for water, and those that gave it were rewarded while those that denied her were punished. She continued to roam the Americas for another few years, observing the death of the Native American gods as they were trampled under the boot of patriotism. This saddened her, but there was little she could do to stem the march of progress.

Gradually, she made her way east, where she had her first encounters with the new American “gods”, four in all. They referred to one another as Ideals and each was once human as she was, and thanks to the burgeoning belief of the land they ascended to a position not unlike hers. These men represented the ideals of Progress, Patriotism, Privilege, and Preference. She only met one in person, an elderly gentleman named Brigham Young, the embodiment of Preference and a religious leader of the period. When she entered Salt Lake City, Saori was approached by several of his disciples and was asked to speak with him. Agreeing, mostly out of curiosity the goddess spent several hours alone with the man, discussing philosophy and religion. This was a pivotal moment for her, as it marked the first time she had spoken with a foreign ‘divinity.’ Young treated her with respect, and informed her that the other three were interested in their foreign visitor, having kept an eye on her travels throughout the Americas.

This conversation was instrumental in Saori’s development as a divine being, as she began correspondence with the other three Ideals. A young immigrant inventor named Nikolai Tesla represented Progress, a politician named Theodore Roosevelt was Patriotism, and the wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie represented Privilege. In their letters to one another, the Ideals passed on the seeds of idea to the goddess. These concepts, Privilege, Progress, Patriotism, and Preference were entirely new ideas to someone who’d grown up in a feudal society. They gave her a unique perspective, one that she would bring back to Japan with her a few years later.

When she finally did return, Saori reported her findings to the greater deities, who’s influence over things had continued to wane. They had mixed feelings about the Ideals and the thoughts that they shared, but after much discussion they agreed that perhaps these were worth investigating. Finally, Saori was allowed to return home to Kyushu and her little shrine. The locals had kept it in reasonable shape, the rural nature and strong traditional identity of the area helping keep them pious. In her absence, the spiritual servants she’d inherited from Tesshin had taken care of things, though there was little cause for her to worry thanks to the waning belief that humanity was suffering from. Many of the other gods schemed to take back their power, hurling themselves futilely forward, summoning storms, a great earthquake, stirring monsoons, and even inciting a war with the rest of the world. Contrary to their hopes, these disasters instead drove people to seek answers in science and among themselves.

Time passed quietly for Saori in her little shrine, and thanks to the changing world she had more time to work on and practice the things she cared for. The war barely touched her home, isolated as it was, so she kept out of it. This left her with time to think, a veritable eternity. In solitude, she pondered what she had experienced, and the letters exchanged with the American Ideals. The virtues they embodied were of course not without flaws, but at the core they were all beneficial. This sparked a great change in her, when one day the young god decided that she would break from the established and do something to progress herself. Stagnation, she reasoned, would lead to ruin and death. Rather than try and change things back to the way they were, she instead opted to embrace the world that the humans now lived in. In the later part of the twentieth century, Saori moved out of the shrine and began travelling Japan as a wandering fortune-teller.

While she had been living for the last several centuries Hatsu-no-Oni had not remained idle. Dwelling within Jigoku, he had remained hidden, watching the world change with a mixture of bemusement and malice. Demons, unlike gods, weren’t so concerned with the source of power, so embracing technology and science broached no argument from any. Hatsu had hatched a plan to get back at Saori for his embarrassing defeat, by stealing the mirror she had left hidden in her shrine. She was gone, but the mirror remained on the altar, a symbol for the locals of her watchful gaze. It was regarded as a novelty by adults, an old story for old people by the youth, and a poignant reminder of times long passed by the elderly. Hatsu had little difficulty taking it from its resting place, the spiritual servants she’d left to watch it far too weak to stand up to the mighty dark spirit.

Immediately after it left the grounds of the temple, Saori knew, and then she didn’t, her memories and powers fading. She awoke in a hospital bed several hours later, suffering from a near complete lack of memory. The mirror, however, did not remain long in the demon’s hands. Hatsu knew that he hadn’t the means to destroy it, so instead he cast it into the sea, hoping it would be lost for all time. Fate, however, had decreed otherwise. The wise Kami Isora, Lord of the Shores, noted Hatsu’s presence and instead caused the mirror to drift from Kyushu to Shikoku, another of the home islands, where it was picked up by a fisherman. The man knew what it was, a shrine mirror, and so he brought it to the local priest and had it placed in a rural shrine that needed a new one. Hatsu, none the wiser, opted to spend time on Earth, exploring the delights of this new world.

Saori, on the other hand, struggled to get by in the world without knowledge of who she was or where she was from. She was given a name at the hospital, Etsuko, and was eventually released into the care of a kind nurse. The nurse, Yuuna, helped her settle into a routine, helping her build a new life. She’d been in Takamatsu, on Shikoku when she’d lost her memories, one of the few large cities in the prefecture at the time, the vast majority of the island still quite rural. Yuuna arranged for ‘Etsuko’ to work as a delivery girl, driving a truck. For a number of years, ‘Etsuko’ lived with Yuuna and her pet dog, and she was fairly happy, even coming to accept that her memories might never return.

However, inevitably something had to change. On a delivery to a coastal city, ‘Etsuko’ entered a shrine complex, taking supplies to a rural priest. It was here that she was noticed by Isora, the patron of the temple. The Lord of the Shore suddenly gained a much clearer picture of the situation, immediately recognizing the divine spark in the young woman. Sending a servant, a crow, to follow her, the god soon learned more of her: that she was missing her memories. On a whim, the mercurial but kind Kami opted to help. He located the mirror again, his servants having very little trouble finding the lost artifact and he set events into motion for Saori to make a delivery to the shrine where it was kept. ‘Etsuko’ replaced the usual deliveryman, who Isora poisoned with a spoiled oyster, and in doing so she came into contact with the mirror.

Power surged back into Saori, and now she remembered everything. Her name, her job, her benefactor, her powers, and most importantly: Hatsu. She vowed to seek out and end the demon, after she repaid a debt. Returning home, Saori spoke to Yuuna, and swore that if it took a thousand lifetimes she would repay her for her kindness. The nurse was stunned at this revelation, incredulous until the reborn god proved herself with a display of divine power. Yuuna, for her generosity, was repaid a thousand fold as the goddess showered her with jewels, gems, and other treasures collected over her incredible lifespan as well as a promise of a return. With the debt settled, off Saori went to find and destroy the demon.

Hatsu, for his part, had no idea what was coming. He’d taken up residence in the United States, finding the culture to be more to his liking. So for the second time in a century, Saori left Japan and took to the New World. Her fury was heralded by a singularly massive storm that engulfed the entire East Coast, an absolute expression of divine anger. Hatsu sensed this, and met her head on, certain of his victory. Without words, God and Demon met on a small island in Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna River known as Three-Mile Island. Their conflict was swift and brutal, damaging a great deal of the surroundings. Fists, flame, electricity, and swords clashed for only a few moments before the demon fell, defeated again by the god’s martial prowess. In his death throes, however, he lashed out and superheated the surroundings with infernal flame.

The resultant heat caused a catastrophic meltdown of the area, which neither of them knew was actually a nuclear site, overloading the coolant pipes. Acting quickly, Saori called down a massive storm, and a wall of wind to prevent anyone from entering, all the while frantically assisting the workers with everything she possibly could. Learning that the core needed cooling, Saori insisted that she be allowed to help, and the desperate workers couldn’t really argue. The plant workers were incredulous as she tore open a melted coolant valve and flooded the reactor, preventing a total meltdown and a worse disaster. She slipped away in the confusion, not wanting to draw undo attention to herself. To this day, some of the workers still talk about a guardian angel, and others say they saw some sort of walking tornado.

Following the incident Saori returned home to Japan, and took up residence once again with Yuuna. The nurse was delighted to have her back, and had welcomed ‘Etsuko’ with open arms. Deciding that perhaps it was best to integrate herself into modern society, she kept the name and resumed her former job as a delivery girl. The work was menial, but it gave her a sense of purpose. It was just something that she enjoyed doing, a simple, repetitive task that afforded the god ample time for her own pursuits.

Five years passed, during which time ‘Etsuko’ had been promoted to a higher position within the delivery company. By this time, the divine responsibilities of the gods had faded into the stuff of legend, the world utterly divorced from the idea of magic. The gods existed still, but their role in the makeup of reality was vastly diminished, and because of this Saori had less and less contact with her own kind. Yuuna had continued to work at the hospital, despite the vast wealth Saori had provided and the two took frequent trips around the world together. It was during one of these trips that Saori began to suffer from more memory-problems, this time similar to the first, the weight of centuries pressing down on her mind.

With great reluctance she again performed the Rite of Quicksilver, knowing that without it she’d risk insanity, but not sure if she’d forget Yuuna. When Saori pressed her mind to the mirror, the two friends shared a tearful goodbye…that was completely unnecessary. When Saori was ensconced in meditation she discovered that she could actually be more selective in her memory alteration. The first time was an act of despair and confusion on the part of a human coming to grips with immortality, but this time it was a calculated act on the part of a god. When she re-emerged she had removed much, but kept the essence that made her…who she was. Yuuna was overjoyed, and the two moved on.

By this point, Saori was well over four-hundred years old, but had physically aged only a handful of years since her transformation. Yuuna, on the other hand, had just turned thirty. As the first mortal Saori had become close with, this meant something to the goddess. The awful realization that she was immortal while her friend was growing old was quite a shock, and it kept her awake for many, many long nights. Eventually, she decided to confer with the other gods, seeking them out alone in their shrines. First she went to Isora, only to be told that there was no way, so she approached Fujin the Wind God. Fujin told her that to conquer death was beyond humanities grasp, to which Saori replied that she had. The Wind laughed and suggested she go to Hokkaido and speak to Gama, the Kami of Longevity and Memory.

Gama was one of the more traditional Kami, and one of the lesser known but most powerful, which made her reluctant to speak with him, but eventually her kindness overran that fear and she made the journey. Gama received her and listened to her question with a grim expression. He agreed that it was quite tragic, but that for him to extend the longevity of Yuuna, Saori would have to pay a price. Without flinching, she agreed unconditionally, which gave the elder Kami pause as he’d not expected that. Moved by the younger god’s passion he requested only that Saori share with him a glimpse of her mirror. Unquestioningly, she did so, baring her mind to him andsharing her innermost secrets, a tribute few were willing to offer. The Kami’s second request was for Saori to do him a favor in the future, without question and whenever he needed it. This too was agreed upon, and the bargain was struck. Saori returned home with a blessing to confer on Yuuna, and the two continued their existence for a few more years, peacefully cohabitating as lovers, traveling companions, and close friends.

In the summer of 2012, Saori woke up in Luceti, dazed and more than a little confused. It quickly became apparent that things were going to get much, much more difficult for her. She spent the first few weeks of her time there in relative peace, making friends and trying to adapt to life. She moved into a house with a young sorcerer who helped her when she arrived, a man named Helios Sprensonne, and another friend of hers named Lirael, and things were quiet until the Malnosso (the scientists that are the shadowy overlords of the setting) performed an experiment on Helios and awakened a dark god that had been sealed within him. Saori, with the help of Harry Dresden and his apprentice Molly Carpenter, defeated the god and sealed him back within Helios. Since that time, Saori has kept a wary watch over her friend for signs of her seal weakening.

The next major event that occurred for her was in October of 2012, when she was conscripted to fight in a battle against an enemy known as the Third Party, a group of nihilistic cultists bent on annihilating all life on the planet. The battle was brutal and long, though Saori fell into the company of Captain Steve Rogers and Clint Barton, becoming fast friends with the two Avengers. Towards the third day of fighting, however, things began to go from bad to worse. A plague began to spread among the combatants, a virus that created zombie-like symptoms and eventually raised the dead to fight against the living. Saori was forced to defend herself from a zombified friend, a young godling from Asgard named Loki (from the Journey into Mystery comic series) and kill him or risk infection herself. This single event more than anything else in her time in Luceti has given Saori pause, as not only was she forced to fight when she didn’t want to, but she had to kill someone she considered a friend, and another god at that. It’s led to nightmares, sleepless nights, and drinking on her end.

After that, the next major event she had a hand in was the following Valentine’s Day, February 2013. The Malnosso use this event yearly to alter the feelings and emotions of the residents of the village, and Saori was affected the same as everyone else. She was forcibly given feelings for one of her friends: Steve Rogers. It didn’t lead to anything other than the two of them sharing an awkward kiss, but it was yet another rude awakening to the fact that her emotions weren’t always her own.

Not long after that she was kidnapped by the Malnosso and experimented on in the same manner as Helios had the previous summer. The experiment brought out the worst aspects of her divine nature, turning her from a reserved but friendly person to a capricious, cold, uncaring individual. It led her into many near conflicts as she grew disgusted and angry with the people around her, until she finally was talked down by Lirael and Vegeta. The Saiyan prince managed to get her to realize just how wrongly she was acting, and while the two nearly came to blows, his words and Lirael’s kindness got her back to her usual self.

Immediately after that was another draft, this time on a floating city. During this battle, Saori and Vegeta worked together and bonded while competing to see if his ki powers or her magical winds could trash more enemy airships. During the fighting, an enemy managed to use its powers to trap Vegeta in dreams of his own past, and Saori entered the dream world to rescue him. There she learned about the past of his people and convinced him it was an illusion, freeing him.

The summer following this draft was relatively quiet, until July. Yuuna Sugasawa, Saori’s partner from home, arrived in the village. She simply woke up in Saori’s bedroom, an arrival that was as surprising as it was welcome. The two caught up and Yuuna moved into her home without delay.

August, when the antagonistic Third Party invaded Luceti and trapped the entire population in an illusion: That they’d been born and lived in the village for their entire lives. They were given false families and false friendships, entire fictional lives. Saori believed that she was a wealthy, landed aristocrat and that she’d been married to Yuuna for several years, and that she had three siblings and a brother-in-law. Hinata and Neji Hyuuga and Barnaby Brooks Jr. became her family, as well as Barnaby’s husband Kakashi Hakate. They had all had a quiet, happy little life together for as long as they could remember, but after a week the Third Party’s psychic hold over the village began to crack. Characters, including Saori and her family, began to realize things were wrong, and their supernatural abilities (stripped away by enemy magic) began to return. The police (all Third Party soldiers in disguise) began to attack people, and Saori and Yuuna fought back and killed many with their returned powers.

Shortly after the initial shock, Saori began to realize that the Mayor of the village was the one who’d been causing all the trouble, a man named Zompano. She confronted him, determined to get to the bottom of what was going on. Zompano attacked her, and she was forced to fight him. After a protracted battle that left her with several grievous injuries, she killed him and passed out. Her recovery took some time, but the entire event got her thinking of family and community.

The next major event in her Luceti life was in December 2013, when after a great deal of thought (and haunted with memories of her marriage in the false life Zompano had given her), she proposed to Yuuna Sugasawa. The other said yes, and the two set a wedding date for the upcoming summer.

The final major in-game event before her arrival in Azeroth occurred in February 2014. The dreaded Valentine’s Day shift began quietly a few days AFTER the holiday, and Saori’s feelings were again bent towards two people. The first, obviously, was Yuuna, who she lavished affection on. The second, however, was one of her closest friends: Vegeta. Saori’s trust in and affection for Vegeta was already strong, so the shift in her feelings didn’t really clash with her instincts. Under the influence of the experiment she named him her divine champion, a ceremonial position that granted him a measure of her power through a blessing while at the same time giving him authority to act in her name in battle (and absolution from his past sins). It also entitled him to carry a small shard of her Soul’s Mirror, the enchanted object that houses her soul, so she made him a magical locket that matched her own. The feelings induced by this event resulted in the two of them sleeping together.

And the morning after that shift wears off? The pair of them wake up in Azeroth, leaving all that behind, full of guilt over what’s happened and needing to figure out just what to do with one another.


PERSONALITY:


Saori Kimura is a quiet, reserved woman with a noticeable kindness in her dealings with others. She lives by the saying ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick,” very rarely willingly tipping her hand in any situation where strife could be involved. Generally, she prefers to avoid conflict by deflecting or acquiescing until such a time as she sees something as genuinely offensive or angering. She is not an overly proud individual, thanks to Tesshin’s teachings, but she does prefer to be treated with courtesy by strangers. If someone treats her rudely, they can expect a curt response, and possibly a lecture if they push her enough.

Saori’s dealings with most humans can be summed up by how long she’s dealt with them. She has difficult empathizing with most people, finding their concerns a little difficult to relate to, particularly fleeting things like wealth and power. She does like people, but often comes across as awkward because she doesn’t always know how to deal with them, so her default response is to remain silent. She is a person who touts the benefits of daily meditation and the idea of centering oneself to maintain a healthy mind, as well as to keep cool in stressful situations.

Under pressure, Saori retains a cool head, and it takes quite a lot to genuinely upset or bother her. If she is pressed hard enough, she will snap completely, her demeanor breaking from a quiet stoicism into a furious and horrifying rage. When she blows up, Saori reacts violently, lashing out with her fists, and her divine magic. She keeps her emotions in tight check to prevent such an explosion, but a few times, such as when she fought Hatsu she was unable to contain herself, and she cut loose, damaging the area around her as badly as he did.

Saori isn’t the kind of person to dwell on things, though. Even after a violent outburst of anger, she can let it go, the centuries of life allowing her to quickly shift her emotions, almost like flipping a switch. However, if she genuinely feels strongly about something, such as a close friend, she has the opposite, hyper obsessing to the point of interfering with her everyday life. Generosity isn’t a trait that she struggles with, as Saori was raised to share the bounties of one’s life with the people around them. If she can help someone, she will, and she will go out of her way for that person.

Around friends like Helios, Saori actually adopts another face. Underneath it all, with people that she trusts, she’s actually a little childish. She wants to laugh, and tease, and share secrets and stories, because she’s lonely and she’s been lonely since she was a child, nearly four hundred years ago. That’s a long time, and even though she’s sealed away a great majority of her memories, that’s quite a long time to be so alone. She’s had less than twenty years of time with a true friend that wasn’t a servant, and so she’s quite open to meeting new people, and she wants to open up to them, but often finds it difficult to do so if they learn of her nature. As such, she tends to hide it, preferring to have people treat her as a human instead of a god. She’s found that usually ends with a great many uncomfortable questions that ruin friendships. This had begun to change in Luceti, as she's found people more accepting of her divine nature. She's less likely to hide it there, thanks to the warm and open acceptance she's found at the hands of the residents. Saori actually enjoys reading comic books, a guilty pleasure that she picked up from Harry Dresden.

Her motivations in life are somewhat skewed towards more ephemeral, conceptual things. Possessing things isn’t important to her, and neither are most people. The thing that she strives for more than anything else is perfection. Saori wants to be the pinnacle of whatever it is that she applies herself to, unflinchingly working at whatever it is for as long as it takes to master it. This drive towards perfection has given her a great deal of faith in herself, an inner flame that propels her forward, guiding her to surpass herself, surmount her problems, and be the best that she can, no matter the situation.

Life is paramount to her, and she does not take lives easily, nor happily. She is a god of rain, and rain is as much a bringer of life as any healer. In many ways, she’s a mother figure for her friends, her sense of perfectionism extending towards making her companion’s lives as perfect as she can. This is shown extensively in her friendship with the child Loki, who came to see her as a kind of surrogate mother figure. As a god of summer in her own world, she’s warm in her affections, and ferociously protective of her friends and kin. She’s no love of war, but she’s willing to fight for her beliefs, her friends beliefs, and to protect who and what she can.

Her time in Luceti has given Saori extensive contact with mortals, far more than she’d had in her isolated life at home. While she still has some difficulty with some aspects of dealing with them, namely their fears of death, failure, and their lack of perspective when it comes to time, she’s gotten much better at empathy, particularly at reading people’s body language and emotion. She’s also grown a great deal more trusting and willing to invest faith in them. Certain people she’s befriended in Luceti showed her a side of humanity that she hadn’t seen much of. A willingness to work hard to complete a goal, a drive to be stronger and overcome their own limits, and a kind of faith that things will go their way and that if they don’t they have the power to change it. She has grown to respect mortals more because of her time in Luceti and seeing just how difficult some of their lives truly are while getting to know them and their problems.
Particular individuals that have had a telling influence on her in Luceti are Yuuna Sugasawa (an OC from her world), her partner through thick and thin, Helios Sprennsonne (Another OC), her housemate and the person that showed her just how much suffering a man can bear and still smile, Belle (from Beauty and the Beast), who helped her learn restraint when it comes to dealing with personal slights, Harry Dresden (The eponymous hero of the Dresden Files), a man that showed her that humans can accomplish amazing things with enough determination and Vegeta (from Dragonball GT), who’s shown her the pinnacle of what mortals can achieve by showing her a strength of heart and will that rivals any immortal’s own. These five are definitely the most influential members of her past CR, drastically changing her opinion of humankind and how she views social interaction, though there are others.

Another dramatic change in Saori’s personality is due to her close companionship with Morrigan Aensland (from Darkstalkers), a succubus who taught her to be more open physically. She’s still a reserved person, but she’s more willing to show affection and love than she was previously. Due to this companionship she’s grown a bit more extroverted and less withdrawn, especially among friends. She’s come to believe that there are varying degrees of love because of Morrigan’s influence as well, which led her to becoming more amenable to “dating,” a notion that she tried out briefly before Yuuna Sugasawa arrived in the game. The two of them had a longstanding arrangement about seeing other people for dates and flings, and Luceti was the first time she took advantage of that, during a Valentine’s Day experiment.

Of course, not every change has been a positive one. Thanks to being trapped by a group of mad scientists called the Malnosso and being relentlessly tormented and experimented on, Saori’s temper has gotten a great deal worse. She absolutely loathes the Malnosso and everything they stand for, and her resentment at her treatment has grown into an irrational dislike for scientists in general. She doesn’t fly into a rage, her reception of them is just simply much frostier than ordinary, as she’s come to equate them all with cruelty and pain.

She’s also grown fearful of things she never really thought possible. The first and most notable among her new fears is death. An immortal in Luceti is not, and thanks to a pair of wings each character receives upon entering that world, a god is just as vulnerable as anyone else. She’s learned that hundreds of years prior to her coming to Luceti she’d been there before, with no memory of the previous visit, and had been tortured and murdered multiple times, a chilling bit of knowledge that gives her nightmares regularly. The second of her new fears is of powerlessness. A god where she is from is strong, capable, and unmatched in battle thanks to their divine rights and powers. But in Luceti, she finds herself limited, and oftentimes finds herself completely powerless, brought down to the same level as an ordinary human and denied her divinity. This is a constant source of anxiety when it happens, as it’s a shocking violation of herself, and one that leads her to train her body so that she can overcome enemies without her supernatural abilities. This helps, somewhat, but it feeds the fear of death as the possibility of being drained of power and taken off guard is not entirely out of the question. It’s led her to rely more on others rather than rushing off on her own to fight. She prefers to work in tandem with a partner or two, mainly to help prevent that fate. Finally, she’s developed a fear of loss. Not of material goods, but of people. She’s made friends many times, and had them vanish completely, returning to their world without so much as a goodbye. Each time it’s painful, and each time she makes a friend she’s nagged by doubts, wondering when and if they’ll be split up by random chance. It doesn’t stop her from trying to make friends, it just eats at her each time she loses one.

And finally, the biggest change to Saori in Luceti is a sense of camaraderie that she never knew before. A home, she had to do most things by herself, and if she needed help from her divine family it would cost her dearly. In Luceti, the majority of the population all agreed that working together and being a part of the community was the right thing to do, and Saori found herself swept up into that atmosphere. She grew to enjoy the company of people, and developed a strong desire to see them succeed and be happy in their life while she could. She had more acquaintances than she knew what to do with, and her circle of friends was fairly tight-knit in ways she never thought possible. It drew her in, and made her more of a helper and a doer than someone who simply reacted. She pays every act of kindness forward out of a sense of neighborly generosity, regularly helping perfect strangers and acting in the defense of the village in times of trouble to keep people safe, rather than simply protecting people she considers friends and allies. The wellbeing of the group is an important part of her thoughts, now, rather than just her own small circle, and it’s a trait she’ll continue to display for as long as she remembers the experiences and sense of belonging that she does in Luceti.


FIRST PERSON SAMPLE:http://lucetilogs.dreamwidth.org/449745.html?thread=128867025#cmt128867025 This thread is during the 2014 Valentine’s event, where Saori is re-meeting someone she’d only met once, when he’d been transformed into a dinosaur.



THIRD PERSON SAMPLE:

Prompt B: The Orphan

As she stepped closer, eyes fixated on the dead dragonkin, Saori’s eyes widened in surprise. The black scaled creature had been slain clutching a dark, mottled green egg! An egg that was beginning to shake! She gasped and covered the distance in a flash, casting furtive glances around, ever wary of danger. Her fingers dug in and she used all of her strength to pry the dragonkin’s clawed hands off their prize. Straining with effort, she dug in her heels and yanked, finally breaking its grip.

The egg tumbled free and she deftly caught it, holding it tight against her robes. The tiny creature inside was preparing to hatch, she knew, and it shouldn’t be out here all alone. There was not a doubt in her mind, no baby should be left for a potential enemy to find, and enemy flight or not…that changed nothing. Still holding the little bundle to her, she began to cautiously move away from the fallen foe, eyes still trying to watch every direction at once. There were dragons nearby, certainly, but as she backed away, she saw no greens, only red and black. The egg gave another rattle, prompting her to hasten her retreat back towards her confederate’s lines.

Surely it wouldn’t matter of the hatchling was the wrong color, Saori thought. A child is a child, and it wouldn’t be turned away. Well…it wouldn’t if she had anything to say about it, anyway. If her Red allies wouldn’t live up to their claims of kindness and a desire to preserve life, then she had already resolved to tend to the baby herself. The differences between these dragonflights meant little to her, after all, and next to nothing compared to her own beliefs. Even without her power, she still upheld the morals she and her kind lived by, and the protection and nurturing of youth was one of the key values all of her kind lived by, and one she would not abandon.

Her thoughts were broken by the long, mournful cry of a war-horn sounding an assault. Briefly, Saori looked back and saw a swarm of allies rushing towards a group of retreating foes. Shrugging, she hunched her shoulders and kept on moving towards the encampment, unconcerned with the end. Whatever the outcome, she intended to find a place for this little orphan, for better or worse. Anything less would be simply inconceivable.