Post by Lesa on Apr 23, 2010 4:57:38 GMT -5
I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we're done and we might as well be dead,
But I'm only a cockeyed optimist
And I can't get it into my head.
(Cockeyed Optimist, South Pacific)
[/center]Character Name: Mizumoto, Kasumi: Mizumoto (base of the water) Kasumi (mist)
Character Nicknames: Teasing (by her brother) Mizumi - sea water; Loving (by parents) Nixie - German water sprite; Umi-chan (sea) by close friends.
Senshi Name:Sailor Neptune
Age: 21
Birthdate: February 24th, ruled by Pisces and the planet Neptune
Personality: She’s serious, but a jokester. Ying and Yang within herself. Serious when she needs to be, a mild jokester the rest of the time, she specializes in a sarcastic wit that leaves her Improv troupe in tears of laughter. A leader when she needs to be, she can get others to rally under her, but being somewhat shy, it’s hard for her to address those people in the first place. This shyness has gotten better as she has gotten older, leading her now to simply be considered one who is quiet, rather than necessarily one who is extremely shy. Once people allow themselves to listen to her and befriend her, they can find her a fiercely loyal ally and generally shrewd leader, unless they wrong her. Then, all bets are off.
A daydreamer, with her head in the clouds, she tends to be out of the loop socially, though she has been getting better at this, sort of. The vast amount of college students does prevent it from being as effective as it would have been had she be ‘in the loop’ while still in high school. She’s smart, concentrating avidly on those topics that interest her and are easy, while working hard through those that do or are not, to get the disliked task or study over with. A firecracker when angry, she’s more likely to stare the person down than go at them verbally, worried about saying the wrong thing and making the situation worse. Generally considered a peace-maker and very kind because she hates conflicts, normally able to see both sides of an issue, even when she herself is involved in the issue at hand. She’s been working on building up her self-confidence; since she knows its low, and doesn’t like that it’s like that. Seems like she forgives and forgets fairly easily, but does remember the action that hurt her; won’t necessarily bring it up in a completely separate argument, but will hold grudges against those who wrong her past a certain extent. Very determined when she wants something, not afraid to put her whole heart and soul into getting it, whatever the goal may be.
At the same time, a little lazy, she likes to procrastinate – quite a bit. Absent-minded, sometimes she can barely remember things from one day to the next. She tries, really she does! This absent-mindedness has gotten slightly better since starting college – by necessity, since she wasn't reminded of things as much, more than any want of her to stop being absentminded. Even with this absent-mindedness, she still knows all these random facts that don’t have much to do with anything or even each other. She knows much of the practicalities of medicine, able to patch up her friends in a pinch, and normally able to assess what’s wrong with them if it’s a minor ache or pain. She never promises what she says is true, since she’s not a doctor, nor training to be one, but normally she’s pretty accurate. Her musical preferences stretch from alternate rock to classical to country to Broadway musicals and movie soundtracks, with an especial emphasis on the first and last. Makes it interesting when she gets a song stuck in her head – it might be one that no one else particularly wants to hear.
She’s a fair mezzo-soprano, able to hit both the high soprano and most of the low alto notes, when she does sing. She's decent, not brilliant idol-worthy, but solid and generally able to stay on pitch. Loves to sing, just not for giant crowds of people. For herself, sure. As part of a choir, sure. Not alone, by herself. Her voice is the one instrument she has, although she has been finding herself pulled more and more towards the violin in recent years, for reasons she doesn't understand - before this if she had to pick an instrument besides her voice, she would have always gone with the piano or guitar, since you can play and sing at the same time.
Has an odd, in its way, obsession with the African cheetah - her room is filled with cheetah plushies and posters of the littlest big cat jostle for room on her walls with movie stills and Broadway posters. Her favorite animal, hands down, even when she thinks of her love of swimming and water - it's always the cheetah. Adores Shakespeare, secretly, as well as many old English authors - specifically Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for his Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Slight bit of an Anglophile, it could be said.
As a senshi, especially as the eldest senshi, she knows that the others will look up to her. She has to set a good example. She’ll try. It won’t be easy. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor do a lifetime of bad habits go away in a day. But she’ll give it her best shot. Wish her luck.
She'll do much better as she henshins more - Kaidoh, Michiru was an elegant woman when she was alive, full of class and charisma and the ability to make those around her pay attention and respect to her. Kasumi will get there, eventually. Maybe.
Physical Appearance: Her knee-length hair is a multitude of hues, mostly pertaining to purple. Deep amethyst, light lavender, royal plum, elegant eggplant, with some garnet and fire-red mixed in, just to top it off and bring the overall hue to something clearly natural, rather than cleverly from a bottle. Despite it’s length or perhaps because of it, Kasumi generally keeps her hair in one long braid down her back – when she’s feeling childish, she will do pigtails or braided pigtails. As a child she loved to put her hair in odango and play as Sailor Moon. She’s always happy when others offer to braid her hair for her, as they tend to French braid it, and she still hasn’t managed that by herself, even after years of trying.
Her eyes are small, though not beady, nicely almond. The rich blue of the Artic Ocean, they change, like that great body, in color; they tell her emotions like they were really windows to her soul. Her heart-shaped face is well defined, with a delicate nose and rose-tinged cheeks. Her eyebrows are arched and neat, her lips bowed and pink. Rectangular glasses rimmed in black perch on the end of her nose, allowing her to see past the end of her nose. Her hands and feet are tiny (size twenty-one and a half Japanese in women's shoes for her feet), ‘ladylike’ as her Mom calls them, though she despises her size and height, of 4’10”. It’s too short, she thinks, and with near everyone she’s around taller than her, it’s irritating to have to ask for their help all the time to reach things.
She’s plump around the middle, ample in bust and hips - to her annoyance. It would be much easier to engage in her beloved swimming (and she would have done much better on her high school team), if she could lose the weight, and be the whip-cord thin of the best swimmers. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have that body type, more of the short-only-‘cute’-if-thin. Cursed sweet-tooth! To her horror, she has come to realize that the combination of her plumpness and her long hair conspire to make her seem shorter than she really is – and people treat her as younger than she really is. But she will not cut off her hair, being thought of as younger is good, in its own way. Another element of surprise and all. Being seen as shorter… not so much. She’ll deal, however.
Has a love of vintage clothing (more the styling than the actual clothing - the type she likes are so very old that the majority of the original style's clothes are little more than dust), but at the same time enjoys being comfortable and hanging out in jeans. Gives her a curious dichotomy; it’s not unusual to see her in some form of dark wash jeans and sneaker (heels, despite how they would help her height, being the death of her for clumsiness and balance), a frilly or otherwise overly feminine top and a simple black fedora. Also has a thing for vests and girly skirts, despite the previous mention of jeans. Really a mix and match type of girl - you may see her in a lacy Edwardian style top overlaid with a brocade vest, dark jeans and her fedora one day, and the next an 1950s skirt and tight fitting 2080s sleeveless top along with the fedora. But it works for her. Adores the color red, even as Sailor Neptune – red, a true red in any hue just looks good on her, with her pale skin, purple hair and blue eyes – makes her eyes pop behind her glasses.
When she gets going with her senshi training (and begins using up energy to henshin), she should lose the weight, becoming the slenderness she desires, if only because she has to. Three words can easily describe her most common activity, however: Nose. In. Book. She loves to read, and she loves to write, or even just spin tales out of thin air, be they ballads, short ditties or full-fledged novels – makes sense why she’s in college for writing.
Strengths: Loyalty - Kasumi will abide by her friends unless it has been made very clear to her that they would rather not be with her.
Humor - she’s one of those people who will crack the awkward joke to diffuse a tense situation, inadvertently putting the unwanted attention on herself.
Swimming - for while she may not be the fastest person there, none could ever deny that she had heart, always coming through with all of the laps assigned during practice, always coming close to fainting when getting out after races because she left so much of herself in the water.
Fencing - she's no where near brilliant, but with a blade in her hand Kasumi can at least hold her opponent off - depending on how good they are. It's what happens when you end up as your fencing-champion younger brother's secondary parring partner. You get decent, fast. Even with him off to college now himself, she's kept it up, in part to see if she can best him when he visits on vacation. Unlikely, but enjoyable. Prefers the rapier to the foil, despite the heft of the blade.
Martial Arts - much like with fencing, Kasumi's semi-decent, even for her size, a combination of grappling with her brother the few years he took martial arts and her extended family wanting to be sure that she has enough tricks to defend herself if attacked.
Weaknesses: Absent-mindedness and procrastination – she will forget whatever she was supposed to do, or even if she did remember it, you can near lay a bet that Kasumi will put it off until the last possible minute, if its something she doesn’t particularly want to do.
Deathly allergic to sesame seeds and mustard - to the point where she breaks out in hives at even smelling mustard. Makes it hard to eat Western-style fast food.
Dreams: Being an editor or a published novelist… being able to use words in beautiful ways, to help people, even if it’s just to take them out of their troubles for a time.
Habits: Twisting her hair around her finger, if down, or the braid or the end of the braid if it is pulled back; whistling or humming when stressed, or bouncing a leg if anxious.
Background: Kasumi has the unenviable position of people thinking her a gaijin - the only way she really looks Japanese is the shape of her eyes. Her parents are both Japanese citizens, however both are themselves only half-Japanese. So this makes her half-Japanese, but with a fairly large melding of Western features to her face and figure, accounting for much of her plumpness. Her parents are both well respected in the medical field - her Japanese-German mother as a nurse, her Irish-Japanese father as a pharmacist. They make good money, enough to keep her in Catholic schools up into high school, but they are not filthy rich. Just... average. And they like it that way.
Kasumi was always a quiet child, for the most part. Interacted well in small groups, though large ones intimidated her. She wasn't the center of her schoolmates, but nor was she shunned: she seemed to get along with everyone, no matter what, though she took no pains to do so, it just happened. Her mother, Kiyomi got her interested in stories at a young age, always reading her translated Grimms Fairy Tales, in order to celebrate her German heritage. Her father Conn enjoyed reading her the Irish Myths and legends as well. No wonder she started reading by the age of three. As she moved into school, her love of reading - and writing - only grew.
Kasumi was making up stories about her babysitter's dog at age five, and only continued to dabble in writing as she went. Took her hours to write sentences for five spelling words in her younger grades - they had to make a story, not just be random sentences! For her, writing just... was, an extension of herself taking shape and form, even if her emotions were told through characters, not herself.
This is not to say that Kasumi spent every moment writing or reading and lost sight of the real world. No, she was a kind and caring child, eager to learn about the world around her, (except math - just couldn't make sense of math. Even as she got older, she would get complex Calculus problems wrong because 2+2=5 that day on the test, despite the fact that her entire formula, the ostensibly harder part, was completely correct!) History intrigued her, science challenged her, foreign languages wanted to make her tear her hair out in exasperation. She got through English, however, and has a smattering of German phrases at her disposal, thanks to her parents and her annoyingly-language-gifted younger brother, Daisuke.
She graduated her high school with honors and lost touch with the majority of her high school friends, as they were all generally going overseas or more medically/engineering minded schools, while she went to the little literary-arts university right in the heart of Tokyo.
Kasumi's been having strange dreams ever since she got into college - sometimes she sees a teal-haired woman playing the violin, or just staring at her, or talking with a taller, short haired blond, or laughing with a woman with long green hair, or baking cookies with a dark haired girl. Those, and others involving the teal haired woman and other women are the nice dreams. Those are the ones she doesn't really mind, despite them being confusing. Its the nightmares that are keeping her from sleeping. Blood, pain, death, terror, the light of the moon dying out... all this and more haunt her nightmares. She's just lucky she's still living at home, and that her parents will still comfort her if she needs it. She would surely have frightened off a roommate by now.
Her parents have taken her to see every doctor they could think of, even a psychologist, and nothing has helped. She's starting to lose sleep, and her grades are slowly starting to slip. She hates that. She hates that worse than her lack of a boyfriend, or lack of a date, ever. Twenty-one and never been kissed, when she thinks about it she thinks how pathetic it is. Sure, she's a romantic. But she's not purposefully waiting for a one true love. That only happens in books - she should know, she writes them enough!
Family: Mizumoto, Conn (father, pharmacist, Irish-Japanese); Mizumoto, Kiyomo (mother, nurse, Japanese-German); Mizumoto, Daisuke (brother, 19, student at Duke in America, studying engineering, on the fencing team)
The Senshi Side of Life
Elemental Power: Water
Transformation Phrase:Neptune Power, Make Up!
Uniform Description: Deep Carribean-teal makes up the majority of Kasumi’s uniform, only rivaled by the fresh Pacific-blue of her two bows and the ever-present white of the bodysuit and gloves. She personally hates the short gloves and heels she has – the short gloves do little to protect her from attacks, and as for the heels… what can she say, she’s clumsy, and even if they feel when she’s wearing them like they’re just a pair of sneakers, well… the worst sprains she had to her ankles were while she was wearing sneakers. Does like the equally deep teal shorts under her skirt, however. Just because supposedly magic will prevent ecchi boys from seeing her panties doesn’t mean she’s about to trust the magic to prevent them from doing so.
Attack Name: Misty Dreamer
Description of Attack: A purely defensive attack, Misty Dreamer only needs to be whispered, with the smallest of hand movements.
A mere turning out of her hands, held chest high with palms against her chest, thumbs holding down ring and pinkie fingers, index and middle fingers extended like a benediction. From there she rolls her palms out to the air, much like the American Sign Language sign for 'how are you', minus the raised eyebrows.
At the moment, the attack is so weak that it will only make things hazy for two feet around Kasumi for a minute at most. As her strength grows, the radius of the attack will grow and the time the mist will stay will lengthen. The peak of this attack comes when besides creating a sheltering near solid mist, breathing in the mist will slightly heal her fellow senshi, while souring the air for their enemies - but that is a long time in coming.
Your Nickname / Alias: Lesa
Your Contact Information: (if needed, PM me first, please)
How Did You Find Us?: Shitennou Forums link to another dead SMRP that had a link to here.
Roleplaying Sample: Great. Just great. Takeda-sensei was going to skin her alive if she was late again! She loved the balding Writing professor to pieces, he looked just like a bird, blinking out from behind his glasses, with that nose... but she couldn't precisely explain to him that the reason why she was late was due to nightmares. Nightmares that caused her to sit bolt upright screaming at two am, having only gotten in bed at midnight because of her homework.
It had been a really bad one. All she'd known was she was a woman in more pain than a person could ever be, feeling as her daughter, her sister, her liege and her lover were all killed - she felt each wound they had. At twenty-one she should be stronger than she had been, nightmare or no nightmare - it had taken her near an hour to stop crying. Even when she had slept, it couldn't even be called sleep - she woke up every half hour. Which was why it was eight fifty-nine and she was still ten minutes away from her nine o'clock class. At least Mutti-chan had driven her to campus today, rather than make her take the train or walk. Small favors, small favors.
She was going to be late - it didn't matter what she did now. It was inevitable, especially once she realized she was going to have to barrel through a group of student protesters, protesting what? Wonderful.
Protesting that Queen Small Lady and King Helios should step down and instead a democracy should be started. Couldn't be something like better wages for the cafeteria workers on campus, or something like that! No, it just had to be something big and over the top and likely to get them all arrested. All she wanted to do was go to class! But of course, she was probably going to be rounded up and either told off or arrested by the police for some reason or another. Wonderful. At least Takeda-sensei would believe this excuse - he'd have to.
Knowing his sense of humor, that would be his punishment for her - write about your time in jail or your time getting arrested, five hundred words or so. Maybe she could scare him by writing about her - no. She couldn't write about her nightmares. Not even as a horror story... somehow, she knew, they weren't just the workings of her subconscious mind. They were true, they had happened. In a way that realization was scarier than the nightmares themselves.
She tugged her fedora down to shadow her face and began the slow, laborious process of skirting around the crowd.