application;
YOUR NAME: Lynne
CONTACT INFORMATION: star_maiden12@yahoo.com, lynne @ irc, grandcrossed @ aim
CHARACTER'S NAME: Nakamura Saya ("Aki")
AGE: 15
OCCUPATION: Student.
GRADE: First Year
CLUBS: N/A
SEX: Female
PLAYED BY: Joshua from The World Ends With You
WEAPON OF CHOICE: Crossbow (pierce damage)
PERSONA: Pandora
WEAK; Physical
STRONG; Electricity, Status Effects
NULL/BLOCK;
REFLECT;
ABSORB;
HIGH-EVADE;
PERSONA ABILITIES: Zio, Mudo, Enervation
ARCANA: Magician
INTENDED FACTION: Investigation Team
PERSONALITY:
Saya would describe herself as a "complication of contradictions", and that certainly holds true to a degree. She is very intelligent but possesses a highly destructive curiosity which she doesn't have the common sense or the self-discipline to rein in when she should, even when it gets her into trouble. She is also eccentric, selfish and careless: she doesn't care who she hurts in order to indulge her curiosity, and her morals are quite flexible at times when it comes to what lengths she is willing to go, but she also has a surprising capacity to try and make up for what she's done afterwards.
The central paradox at her heart is that while she is very intelligent, she is also extremely inexperienced and immature due to spending most of her life either in the hospital or at home. She is easily bored and impatient, with a rather large lazy streak: she will refuse to put any effort into a task that either cannot hold her attention or is something she doesn't want to do. Her emotional immaturity is how she can hurt someone mercilessly one moment, and be genuinely sorry the next, like a child would: she has not grown past that stage, and now that she has people she is attached to, she represses that knowledge rather then try to change, as it is easier to think that she is a better person then that rather then actually risk her friendships to admit and confront that.
Outside of online friendships or interactions with her tutors, parents, or people in the hospital, she has spent most of her time alone, and has had nearly none of the social interactions that a normal girl her age would have had. Spending time in the hospital, and with her tutors, was enough to teach her the basics of how society works, and her time at home with her family taught her the rudiments of how family worked, but she is still ignorant of the finer points of etiquette and how to deal with people that only experience brings, managing to regularly miss the subtleties of body language, be generally awkward in face-to-face interactions, and lacking a delicate touch for handling emotional issues.
While she is very well-read, as she reads constantly, she is also stunningly naive, with very little practical experience to balance her theoretical knowledge. She has never had to learn how to work in a situation where time and resources are limited, never had to work beyond theory, as most textbooks and manuals assume a hypothetical situation where those aren't an issue: if in such a situation, she would be able to come up with a theoretically good plan to deal with the situation from the information that she has read, but the chances that such a plan would be able to be implemented successfully would be less then good, due to a lack of time or resources.
Despite this lack of practical knowledge, Saya is not afraid of dealing with new situations unless they are completely outside her realm of knowledge: as long as she has read something about it, or there is at least some logical basis that she can try to puzzle out, then she will be reasonably confident in her ability to deal with it. What honestly terrifies her is the idea of being caught in a situation where nothing she knows or can do has any bearing on the outcome: she would lose her composure at the very least, panic at the most, but if she is not alone and has other people to focus on, would eventually manage to pull herself together.
What she is afraid of most is death. She has lived her entire life knowing that someday, she will catch an illness that she will not recover from, and will die, and understands the logic of it. However, she is afraid to die: there is still so much to learn, and what terrifies her the most about the idea of her own mortality is her complete inability to do anything about it. She pushes herself to the limits in whatever way that she can, trying to prove to herself that she can do something despite the inevitable.
BACKGROUND: There is little enough to do, when one is a sickly child genius, entirely too smart for her own good...or for anyone else's good. Her level of intelligence was discovered early, once her parents had found tutors for her, since her health prevented her from attending school regularly: the tutor had expected a child of normal intelligence and prepared lessons accordingly, and was not prepared for what he got instead. He did not last very long before quitting, unable to deal with her, and thus the tone was set for how Saya would get along with her tutors in the future.
Her real specialty lay in mathematics, and later programming and hacking as well, but she soaked up a lot of knowledge like a sponge, as her tutors discovered to her parents' initial pride-their only daughter was a genius, imagine that-, and asked entirely too many difficult questions that they could not answer easily. A hole in logic somewhere? She found it, and so on. Needless to say, she went through tutors like water, most of them unable to handle her extremely inquisitive temperament coupled with her stunning lack of common sense, nor her tendency to be chronically bored, and drove her parents completely nuts. After the first few tutors quit, her parents switched to hiring tutors that would teach her at the university level: while that was enough to satisfy her boredom, her temperament often still grated on them.
Saya was often confined to her bed, if not in the hospital,: her immune system was deficient: not bad enough for her to be put in a bubble, but bad enough that she was often ill, even while taking medication meant to try and boost her immune system. Even when she could get out of bed, most of what she could do was restricted, because of her parents trying to keep the environment as safe as possible for her. She couldn't run about and play, couldn't do this, couldn't do that, and it didn't help that she was very easily bored with what she could do, reading through all her books and wanting more, pestering her tutors to teach her more, and growing impatient when they couldn't, or wouldn't, explain things to her satisfaction and listening to conversations that she shouldn't have listened to and learning secrets she shouldn't have, just for the pleasure of *having* them.
Needless to say, when she got her hands on a computer, that was a turning point. Not only could she talk to people outside the confines of her limited life, be someone other then Nakamura Saya, there was plenty to do on the Internet, glimpses of a world beyond what she had, faraway exotic places she might never get the chance to visit in person, as well as plenty of secrets locked away behind encryption. For the first time, she made friends, nevermind that they were mostly a good deal older then her, and on the suggestion of one of those friends, she got herself books and instructional programs and taught herself coding and how to hack, gaining herself some measure of notoriety under the online handle "Veritas"* .
Her forays into the online world, especially into encrypted files that she shouldn't have been accessing in the first place would have gone swimmingly; except that she found out quite an embarrassing secret about her father's boss. The man was having an affair, and had paid for a good chunk of the costs on the company expense account: Saya's father had known, and was complicit in helping to cover it up. If anyone learned of this, it would damn both of them. And, unfortunately, she was just a little careless in covering up her tracks as she was having an off day due to feeling sick, and her father found out what she had learned. Thankfully, his boss had no idea, and her father managed to complete the job of covering up her tracks before he dealt with his daughter.
After that, her father ended up packing her off to Inaba to live with a cousin, Kitaniji Ken'ichi, before she managed to get herself and the rest of the family into trouble. At the very least, it meant that she wouldn't be near anyone else in person to possibly let anything slip at the wrong time, and thus the family could avoid scandal. Well, mostly. Reluctantly, her father let her take her computer when she went to live with her cousin: as much as he would have preferred to have as little chance for her as possible to repeat her activities online, he knew that without diversion, Saya would just get into trouble of another sort, and her computer had a massive collection of foreign e-books and her own legitimate programming work to keep her occupied. Instead, he took another tack with keeping her offline: he instructed Ken'ichi, to keep her off the limited internet connection which was all that he could afford.
Ken'ichi managed to keep her off his limited connection until the Mexican foreign exchange student that he had agreed to let stay with him before Saya was thrown on his doorstep, Alejandro Roa, showed up a month later. Needless to say, that threw that plan completely off: Alejandro declared that he had a show to do and that Ken'ichi's current connection wouldn't cut it, and bought an unlimited access connection. Ken'ichi refused to allow her, at first, even with Alejandro being the one to pay for the connection or her threats to go through his things out of boredom. He wouldn't relent until his father came to visit, after he had heard his niece was living with his son. Saya herself was very curious about her uncle: she had never met him, and he wasn't really talked about much in the family. Ken'ichi wouldn't even talk about his father much, and from what little Ken'ichi talked about him, it didn't seem like her cousin knew what his father did.
The visit turned out interestingly, to say the least. At the very least, Ken'ichi's dad had very shady ties, that even his own son wasn't aware of, and suggested that she tell him about some of the stuff she found out, in return for him making Ken'ichi let her use the Internet connection. She agreed, and he warned her to not mess with anything that the family couldn't get her out of, or at least be extremely careful in doing so. Oh, and not to tell her father that she had the Internet again, which was something she had no intention of doing. Perhaps she can keep herself out of trouble this time.
...Maybe.
SAMPLE POST:
Would you stop yelping at me for just a minute, Ken'ichi? I have no intention of breaking your computer, no matter what you might think. I'm upgrading it. Upgrading it. You were three versions behind on your operating system-and you really should consider another operating system, the one you have is riddled with security holes and is subpar in performance compared to several others that are just as readily available-, not to mention that you had a barely adequate amount of RAM and your harddrive was only one-hundred and twenty gigabytes. How do you expect to do any kind of work on there when your computer's hardware is taxed so? I couldn't manage with less then a terabyte of hard disk space, and even then it is cutting it close.
And for the last time, I know what I'm doing. The last time was because you wouldn't leave me alone right at the most delicate part of the operation, and even with your interference I managed to repair the problem. Now would you stop being neurotic for a moment, cousin, and hand me the screwdriver?
ROLEPLAYING SAMPLE:
The steady clattering of keys echoed through the room as Saya's fingers flew across the keyboard, the darkened room only barely lit by the glow of her monitor, and even that glow was muted by the blanket she had pulled over her head in order to hide the laptop. She was supposed to be in bed resting now, or so Mother had instructed her about an hour ago: already, Saya was picking apart every argument her mother was likely to throw at her when she inevitably caught her working. Technically, she was in bed, at least, and working on her computer was scarcely strenuous activity, even if it was not quite what Mother would consider 'resting': what she called 'resting' was more precisely termed 'sleeping'.
If she had to be fair, she wasn't completely opposed to the idea of sleeping at some point in the near future: she was tired, and did not entirely feel well, lightheaded and dizzy even when laying down. Saya was, however, opposed to the expectation that she would go to sleep exactly when told to do so, before she was ready, especially as she was working on something.
For a moment, she stopped typing and stared at the data that was displayed on the screen, idly chewing on her lower lip as she studied it. Hm. Invidia** always had really good encryption on the e-mails that she sent: show me how good you are, a test every time to see if Saya was worth her time to keep corresponding with.
Hmph. Saya lifted her hands from the keyboard and cracked her knuckles, before settling back to work. There was a trick to this last cipher, she was sure. A pattern. Something that she had missed.
For a moment, the letters on the screen blurred, as she yawned, and then shook her head to clear it. I am not ready yet, she reminded her body sternly, no matter how much it craved sleep. Not until she solved this puzzle. There was something she was missing, the key to unlocking the cipher was so close, she knew it, the sensation very much like having a word at the tip of her tongue that she could not quite remember, right there but just out of reach. Vexing.
And then, as she idly tapped her fingers against the keyboard, a moment of clarity, the pattern unveiling itself in her mind's eye. There. That was what she had missed.
"Finally," she muttered, and continued to type.
*: "Veritas" is Latin for "truth". Also Saya's online handle.
**: "Invidia" is Latin for the sense of envy or jealousy, also the sin of envy. It's also the handle of one of Saya's online friends.