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Player Info
Your Name: Amy
Contact Info: AIM: palmedfire plurk: otokoyakudream
Are you over 18?: Yes
Time Zone: UTC -5
Other Characters Played: None (yet)
Character Info
Name: Ren Miyaki
Age: She doesn't remember. Probably around 25
Canon: OC
Canon Point: n/a
World Information: Ren's world is much like ours, with one, important difference. There is truth to some fairy tails. No, not the nice happy ones you read as a child where good fairies bless the heroes, and wicked fairies were quickly overcome. No, the older tales. The ones with blood and sex and horror. The ones written and told as cautionary tales. Don't wander off too far from home. Don't talk to strangers. Behave. Stay home. Do as you're told. If you don't, the Fair Folk may take you away.
Now it doesn't happen often. Extremely rarely in fact. And certainly in this modern day and age, there are usually perfectly mundane reasons for a person's disappearance. But sometimes, just sometimes, a person disappears and there is no trace; all leads dry up. Some of those people were taken by the Fae. And worse, sometimes people are taken, and they aren't missed, because the Fae that took them left a double in their place called a feitch, a construct of dirt and bone and fur, imbued with Fae magic to look and sound and think like the person the Fae have taken. To live that person's life.
What of those taken? They are taken to Arcadia, the realm of the Fae to slave for their new masters in a myriad of different ways. As time passes, the fae food and drink, the very nature of the place changes them, makes them more like the roles their masters have chosen for them. Those taken to be hunting beasts or pets slowly take on animal characteristics, those who serve as fighters or guards become bigger and more brutish, those taken to serve as ornamentation become more beautiful and graceful and so on.
Most never return, living out the rest of their lives as the playthings of their quixotic masters, slowly forgetting they were ever anything but what their masters wish them to be. But some don’t. Some cling to their identities, to memories of friends and family and home. And some of them try to escape. A few succeed.
Returning isn't easy, it's a terrifying run through the Hedge - the border between the lands of the Fae and the normal human world. And even after they make it through that, it is still no easy task to return to so-called 'normal' life. They have been changed, irreparably by their time in Arcadia, both in body and mind. A minor blessing of magic called the Mask hides the physical changes, makes them appear as the normal humans they once were, but they're not human. Not anymore. They're something both more and less. They're Changelings. And beyond the physical changes, they still retain a touch of fae magic as well.
Forever haunted by their fragmented memories of Arcadia and the lingering fear that one day their Fae masters may find them and drag them back, changelings walk a delicate line between sanity and madness. Spend too much time dealing with the mundane world at the expense of their fae side and they start going through withdrawal. Spend too much time reveling in their fae side, and they go mad.
Personality: Ren has always been a very driven person. She has long internalized the typical Japanese expectation of excellence. It's not enough for her to be merely good, she always wants to be the best. While yes she'd had teachers and family pushing her to excel, the main force of her drive has always been internal. At the same time, she has always been very observant, and saw how some of the other young boys and girls in her classes let that desire for excellence turn them bitter and nasty - jaded far before their time. She watched the older classmates freak out and have nervous breakdowns and knew she never wanted to be like that. So she adopted a ‘work hard, play hard’ philosophy, balancing her drive for perfection with a drive for friendliness and fun.
She has always had very clear goals in life and has always been focused on reaching those goals. It’s part of why even though she’s very friendly with a lot of people, she’s always had few true friends - she tends to shove them to the side in favor of working towards her own goals. Her friends have usually been people with similar drives, ones who can understand why she pushes them away sometimes, and who do pushing of their own. She’s also highly competitive, both professionally and personally. While this was almost a necessity as a Takarazuka actress, it also manifests itself in her more casual encounters, though usually in a more fun way. She’s the type you’ll be walking along with and she’ll suddenly say something like “Race you to the end of the street!” and then take off running. And then she’ll jokingly boast of her victory or declare you got lucky. She takes losing well, though privately she then vows to improve herself so she won’t lose again.
Ren has also always had a deep-seated sense of fairness, enforced by both her parents and her early teachers. In her mind, if you succeed by cheating, that doesn't count as success. Same thing if you succeed by making sure someone else fails. Better just to fail to someone being better and use that as inspiration to get better.
For all that she is outgoing and such normally, it is onstage where Ren truly comes alive. To say she loves performing is an understatement. The stage, the theatre is her home. Not just the performance, but all aspects of it, from the first read-through rehearsals to the final curtain call of closing night. She loves taking on a new persona, and playing out a story either tragic or comical. Though she will admit a slight preference for tragedies - those tend to have the best roles. And best plots. When asked why she loves performance, she’d often rattle off something about expressing truth through illusion or some other philosophical line of thought, the honest truth is she just finds it fun. And she loves the fact that she could make a living off of something she finds so fun.
However, being as immersed in the creative world as she is has always left Ren with a profound difficulty understanding those who don’t appreciate the arts. She can understand, at least intellectually, that some people themselves aren’t creative, but to not appreciate creativity? She vaguely remembers her maternal grandfather being like that, and having near-constant arguments trying to justify why she was ‘wasting her life’ and not ‘doing something useful’. And while she sees the need for people to do the boring, mundane jobs, the idea of being one of those people fills her with a dread almost as bad as the idea of being dragged back to Arcadia.
Her kidnapping to and subsequent escape from Arcadia has had profound impact on her, though she's often loath to admit it. For all that she loves performance, she can't escape the knowledge that it was that skill that drew the Fae to her in the first place, and it could draw their attentions again. And yet, at the same time she was very skilled, and has only become more so. To not take pride it that would be to let them take more from her than they already have.
And the Fae already took almost everything. Ren's greatest dream had always been to become a top star in the Takarazuka, and that dream, that desire is part of what she held to in Arcadia, part of what helped her escape. Yet when she returned, it was to find someone, something else, wearing her face and name had achieved that dream. She knows she needs to leave that dream behind, move far away, out of country even, and find a new dream. But it's hard, and it feels too much like giving up. She's caught, knowing she needs to move on, but not yet ready to, even though she knows staying also increases her risk of being recaptured.
There is nothing Ren fears more than recapture. Though her memories of her time in Arcadia are blessedly muddled, she does remember excruciating pain and even more excruciating pleasure, often mixed and taken far beyond sane endurance. And it's also a well-known fact amongst the few other changelings she's met that no one who's been recaptured has ever escaped again. Things that remind her too strongly of her capture are likely to bring on PTSD-like reactions, especially any sort of restraint or attempt to manipulate her emotions. Or physical intimacy. Not just sexual intimacy, either. An unexpected hug can set her off as bad as anything else. She doesn't trust easily, not quite to the point of paranoia, but close sometimes, especially if she's already upset or worried. But she doesn't deal well with being alone too long either. It's a balancing act, and she's never quite sure she's found the right balance.
Background: Much of Ren's memory of her young life is hazy at best. She remembers her parents faces, but not their names. She remembers her mother's father and his constant belittling of her desire to become an actress. But she can't remember her 'real' name - Miyaki Ren is her stage name. She can't remember exactly how old she is, though she knows from looking up 'her' career details that she's somewhere between 25 and 28. Or maybe less, since her perception of the time she spent in Arcadia is different from the amount of time that seems to have passed in the normal world.
The first concrete memory she has is of standing outside the gates of the Takarazuka Music School with her aunt as they posted the names of those who’d made it in, and seeing her own name on the list. She remembers her two years in the school, the lessons, the pressure, the constant competition with the other girls. She remembers the excitement after the first year as they were sorted in to who would play male roles (otokoyaku) and who would play female roles (musumeyaku), and her own swell of pride that she would be an otokoyaku.
She remembers her debut in the Revue, and being sorted Star Troupe. She remembers flashes of her years in troupe, names and faces of friends and fellow actresses. Flashes of memories of shows or rehearsals. And she remembers Ootori Michio (nicknamed Taka-san), the top star of Star Troupe, and her mentor.
More than anything else, Ren remembers the night of her first leading role in a shinjin koen performance - the one night of the run of a show where the junior stars perform the lead roles. It went perfectly. The experience, the energy of being on stage, of being the leading man was everything she wanted it to be. Maybe that was why when the strange man pulled up along side her on her walk home, said he was a fan and offered her a ride she didn't think to question. Which was, of course a mistake, because that 'handsome man' was one of the Fae, and once she entered the car he whisked her away to Arcadia
Her memories of Arcadia are blessedly muddled and muted. She knows she lost herself, lost all thought and memory of home, at least for a time. Nothing mattered for her except the will of her Fae lord, Lord Garaile of Ice and Vines. She remembers singing and dancing for her lord, and being punished, painfully, for the slightest imperfection. She remembers there being countless, ever changing rules for everything, how she was supposed to walk, to speak, to even look, and the pain, the excruciating pain that came when she broke those rules. But there was pleasure too, and that was almost worse than the pain, because it too was past all endurance and yet it was so, so addictive.
It was a song that brought her back to herself, at least partially. A song sung not by her, but by a young man much like herself, enslaved to a Fae lord of his own, who was visiting Ren's lord. The song triggered her memories enough to remind her of what she'd left behind, rekindle the fire of her dreams. She had to escape.
The details are fuzzy, but she remembers a window left unlocked, a daring flight from her lord's manor, through the thorns of the Hedge and eventually diving towards a shimmering light with only the faintest hope it might lead home. It did, sort of. She tumbled out through a mirror in one of the dressing rooms at the Takarazuka Grand Theater, fortunately late late at night when no one was there. Her happiness at finally being free was quickly crushed as she made her way out of the theatre and caught sight of a poster for the upcoming show. A poster with her face prominently on it in what was obviously the lead role. Confused, disoriented, and overwrought, she tore out of the theatre heedless of direction or purpose.
Fortunately for her, her escape from the Hedge had not gone unnoticed by the local changelings and two of them found her and brought her to the local Court. They let her calm down, and tried to explain everything. Though it had only seemed like two years in Arcadia, five had passed in the mortal world. And the Fae had replaced her with a feitch, which had in those five years continued on the career Ren had been snatched from. She spent the next week and a half with the Court, learning about everything that had changed since she'd been taken, and learning the extent of the fae abilities she still retained
Several times she debated killing her feitch and taking it's place, but she realized that would only cause more problems than it solved. She didn't know, didn't remember the names, the people who were supposedly her troupe mates. She would be thrown into a very public life when she still wasn't feeling particularly stable about the meager subsistence one she was living. But she couldn't stay where she was either. Her soul ached for the stage again, to perform in front of an audience again. Her skills had only been heighten in Arcadia, and she wanted the acclaim. But to do that she would have to go away, far away, because even with the minor magic of her kith, she still looked too similar to her feitch to try to make a career where she was. And that change was terrifying. Finally she decided to travel up to Tokyo, to maybe see what her options were there.
She fell asleep on the train and woke up as it pulled into the station in Stolen New York.
Abilities: Due to a quirk of Fae magic known as the Mask, most people see Ren as a perfectly normal looking human being. However, that is as the name implies just a mask over her true form. Her Fae lord sculpted and molded her form to fit his particular ideal of beauty, and in true fae fashion that meant sculpting her to look more like him. Her ears taper to points, her eyes are slightly larger and darker, and her fingers lack nails, instead tapering to long, graceful points. Her hair is a deep, nearly purple color now, with a texture somewhere between hair and silky fur, and shot through with streaks of vivid blue reminiscent of a butterfly's wings. Though she isn't any taller, her limbs are longer, and she's thinner, with almost no noticeable curve of hip or chest.
She can, with a supreme effort of will 'take off the Mask', and allow anyone to see her true Fae form. Unfortunately the same magic that cloaks her normally works to cloud normal people's minds and they soon forget or rationalize away what they saw.
One of consequences of her Fae lord's sculpting is there is another minor illusion at work on her appearance that highlights the features of her that the viewer finds the most attractive. A person who is attracted to nice hair will notice hers is beautifully smooth and glossy. A person who likes eyes will notice hers are exceptionally bright. And so on. While this can not change her actual appearance, it does mean no two people will describe her exactly the same way. It also functions on both her human Mask and her true fae appearance.
She's also retained some fae magic as well. She can tell, with some concentration, what a person's deepest desire is and how far that person would go to achieve that desire. She can also wrap her hands around a plant, or a part of a plant and bring it to full harvest growth in a few moments. Finally, she can extend the Mask to make one object appear to be another. The illusion lasts about an hour, but after it fades, and anyone affected knows she is the one who created the illusion.
Like the Fae, changelings suffer a weakness to cold iron and Ren is no different in that respect. Wounds caused by pure iron (not steel or other iron alloys) take longer to heal and always scar, even if they are just a minor scratch. Even just skin contact with pure iron also gives her waves of nausea. However, since cold iron is one of the few things that can actually hurt the Fae, she does carry an iron knife with a wood and leather hilt in her bag. Just in case.
Inventory: A stuffed backpack containing:
Two changes of clothing
Basic bathroom supplies (Toothbrush, toothpaste, hair brush, etc)
Three issues of the Takarazuka GRAPH (One with the pictures from her shinko lead, 'her' top star debut issue, and the most recent)
Two issues of Kagaki (Most recent, and an older one with an interview she did before her shinko lead)
The Takarazuka run program for Sun and Shadow
The Takarazuka run shinjin koen program for Sun and Shadow
A cold iron knife, wrapped in leather
A silver pin in the shape of a feather, inset with tiny crystals
Roughly 10,000 yen
Which PIC?: The Masters'