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pitch_slapOOC Information:
Name: Anne
Are you over 15? Yep.
Contact: email: scarysnakelady@gmail.com
IC Information:
Name:
Preincarnation: Kuchiki Rukia
Reincarnation: Hikari "Lucia" MacIsaac
Canon: Bleach
Age:
Preincarnated: Around 115 years
Reincarnated: Newly 21
Preincarnation Appearance: Feel free to just link to an image.
Any differences: Ever so slightly taller, with a bit more weight to match. Around 5-foot even, at about 98-pounds. Her dark brown hair and blue eyes are due to her half-Japanese, half-caucasian heritage and some contacts, in her reincarnation.
Preincarnated History: In a world...
Where the dead either move on to the next world (called Soul Society), or hang around in the human world and essentially become hungry ghosts, Hollows, that want to gobble up other innocent, unsuspecting souls.
Where those innocent souls are protected, and the hungry souls cleansed, by guardians invisible to (most) living eyes called shinigami.
And where one boy is poised to change the destinies of a whole lot of people and ghosts and other things (but only after plenty of fights and getting stabbed a lot).
An infant girl died.
And when she came to Soul Society with her sister, she was abandoned, grew up alone at first, then gathering others like herself in a small gang. She took the name Rukia, at some point. She would lose almost all those friends and with the one remaining, named Renji, go on to try and find a better afterlife for herself as a shinigami, a cleanser and protector of souls.
She would gain an adopted brother (who would turn out to be her abandoning-sister's husband, the sister having long died out of the afterlife herself), and a vice-captain. A vice-captain she had to, because of the machinations of a Hollow (and someone behind that, it would later turn out), kill with her own hands.
And then one day on a routine patrol in the living world, she followed a Hollow to the bedroom of a living boy who, it turned out, could see her. He had always been able to see ghosts, it turned out, and his soul was so tasty, it was pulling some massive, hungry Hollow toward him.
To save his life, she stabbed him in the chest and transferred her powers to him. And that's how Kuchiki Rukia ended up mixed up in the life of one Kurosaki Ichigo, shounen hero and shinigami/human/Quincy/Hollow hybrid extraordinare.
It turned out that giving her powers away like that, even to a shounen hero, was kind of a Big Deal crime, and the shadowy bereaucracy decided that death was totally an appropriate sentence for said shenanigans. So Rukia was arrested (by her brother and that one friend who had made it to a better life with her, it turned out), sentenced to die, and set to await her death sentence in Soul Society.
Ichigo, being a shounen hero, of course could not allow this to happen, and so led a team to go and rescue Rukia. A lot of fights later, he actually managed to pull this off, rescuing Rukia seconds before she would have been burned to a crispy cinder.
Of course, his rescue happened to coincide with the internal politics of Soul Society kind of blowing up in everyone's face when one Aizen Sousuke, captain of the Fifth Division, decided he was done being devious and instead wanted to be a big, all-out-there god-figure, declared war on pretty much everyone, and flounced off to Hueco Mundo where the Hollows all live with the captains of the 3rd and 9th Divisions as well.
Not that things were quiet, after that. Our Heroes went back to the worlds they had started in, and Ichigo started some more Shounen Hero training, without everyone else. Some of Aizen's minions decided to pop into the real world fortea and biscuits terror and battles, some of which they lost (but only with adult supervision), and some of which they technically didn't really lose but forfeited. This made everyone get really serious about training, with Rukia taking Orihime under her wing for some actual combat training, instead of just telling her to stay on the sidelines as the healer like everyone else had thus far.
This lasted right up until Aizen, ever the cunning asshole, decided to send some minions to go kidnap Orihime and bring her to Hueco Mundo toparty with the Hollows essentially be Shounen Hero bait though ostensibly because her powers are Kind of a Big Deal, not that this gets explored much, but hey.
Rukia, despite wanting to go rescue her friend with everyone else, was ordered back to Soul Society, retrieved, again, by her brother. However, even though she and Renji had been ordered to return to Soul Society, no order had been given for them to stay there, so using this nifty bit of Rules Lawyering on the part of her brother, Rukia and Renji join up with the rest of the gang in Hueco Mundo.
There are, of course, a whole lot of fights once they get there. Rukia's first fight turns out to be not only against the Number 9 minion, but the Hollow that had eaten her vice-captain way back in the day and absorbed him. He tried to fuck with her mind and convince her that it really was said VC, but Rukia saw through it and was able to, at great personal cost to herself, defeat him.
Rescued by her brother, with a brief interlude where another minion tried to use her as a weapon against said brother, she went on to the next battle. Around this time, Aizen let everyone in on the fact that Orihime had, in fact, been Shounen Hero Bait and that he was going to go destroy the whole of Ichigo's hometown for the next step in his plan. Eventually Orihime was rescued, but by that time, everyone had to move on to the next crisis: the battle to save the whole hometown, take down Aizen, whose powers were getting rather out of hand even for a shounen villain, and save everyone.
Ichigo, of course, managed to do all of this. The cost of doing all of this, though, was sacrificing all of his shinigami powers due to a final move type thing. He passed out from the pain in front of everyone. He slept for a month. And then he had to say goodbye to Rukia, the one who had given him these powers and who he couldn't see anymore without those powers or artificial aids.
While Ichigo was resigned, it seemed at first, to a normal life, and then was working to get some powers back in a different from more like his friend Chad's, Rukia was working on a way to get him his shinigami powers back. There then ensued more chest stabbings, and more battles, this time with a group of people with Hollow-based powers known as Fullbringers. Facing them was not only Ichigo, powered up again, and Rukia, but a whole group of people responsible for helping return those powers. After all this, Ichigo was once again a shinigami, now with bonus Fullbring powers!
Things couldn't stay quiet for long after that, of course. The next crisis to overtake them was a series of surprise attacks, one of which killed the second of the head division in Soul Society. Soon after this, one of their old friends from their time in Hueco Mundo came crashing through into the living world to retrieve Ichigo and half the others because of some bad shit going on there. As soon as he was there, and pulled into a battle, the brunt of the attack came down on Soul Society, resulting in more destruction than we'd seen in a real location thus far, killing several minor characters, very probably, and lots of background characters. Ichigo, trying to get from Hueco Mundo to Soul Society in order to help, was trappedin the passage between. The captain of the head division was killed, and a lot of people, including Rukia, were gravely injured.
Then the Zero Division showed up. Last we saw of her, Rukia was floating ass-up in a healing hot spring in the ante-world to the Spirit King's world (aka the place that Aizen totally thought he could take over if he just got a copy of the key made).
For way more details (and way less snark), please see the wiki for the character and the general timeline wiki.
Reincarnated History: What happened to your character that got them to this point in their normal, human life? While a lot of information isn't necessary here, please give us a clear picture of who they are now and where they'll be headed in the context of the game.
Hikari Lucia MacIsaac was born to a Japanese mother and an American father of Scots-Irish ancestry, with grandparents in both the US and Japan. Her father was kindly, and loved both her and her mother very much, but was often busier with work than he would have liked to be. She was named for a musical in-joke between her parents (Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" is a great song to fall in love to, and also good for embarrassing your kids before they're old enough to appreciate a good, romantic story.) She grew up on the West Coast of the US, generally a bit of an outdoors-y child, going with her mother to visit relatives over in Japan on occasion.
Going by 'Lucy' in grade school and middle school in the states, and then Lucia when she hit high school, she was generally kind of a quiet kid, preferring to observe and absorb information. At home, she had piano lessons, and did quite well with those. Her earliest piano lessons were taught by her mother, who played a little, and then later an outside teacher. She did well on tests, generally, with a bit of an aptitude for writing. But where her true talents lay was, in fact, singing.
As most kids do, she started singing as a kid, discovered she had a lot of fun doing it, and then discovered that other people enjoyed her singing too. She never had voice lessons, officially, but there were, at least, music classes in middle school and high school, the district she was going to school in being wealthy enough to keep music education through to then for those that wanted it.
And then, at age 16, she broke into the big time. A YouTube video of her singing a cover version of song got passed on to a friend of a friend who knew someone, and it was decided by a big corporate music company that she was great and exactly the sort of talent they needed to put on their roster right now. They wanted her badly enough to offer her a contract, pluck her out of her high school, and turn her into a pop star under her first name and from then on stage name of Hikari.
Her first big hit came that same year, a bubblegum pop number auto-tuned and so glossy you could fix your hair in its reflection. Nevermind that she actually had a great voice, tone, and pitch, and was rather annoyed by the polish and gloss, the adorableness factor meant cute bubblegum pop for her. During this time, she stuck with her parents who, definitely not stage parents, were ever-so-slightly bewildered by this sudden fame and fortune, but still determined to raise their daughter into an actual human being, even if the record did make her sound like a very cute machine.
She couldn't avoid the press and the paparazzi entirely, but generally didn't interact with them much beyond bland, mask-like smiles and polite, simple answers or evasions. Her home life was quiet--she got her GED less than a year after her sudden stardom, between recording and then concerts and promotion. For the first year, she was stuck a little bit in the guise of a sugary pop princess.
At least until her initial contract with that company ran out. Before it did, she at least managed to wrest a little bit of control back for her sophomore album, which was a lot less sugary without totally diverging from pretty pop; this album, under-promoted by the label, essentially out of spite, is considered a flop, for her, selling far fewer copies than her first, heavily-promoted, album, or her third album, which was a lot less slick, and a lot more focused on real artistry. The awkward teenage record, in her budding career. At 19, she has just produced her third album, this time on a much smaller, though by no means tiny, label. This time, all of the songs have been penned by her and, while she does bring in other artists for some of the instruments, a lot of the keyboard and piano work is actually her on top of the vocals.
Her musical influences range from those early, heady days of sugar pop, plus
For now, she's taking a break from the spotlight, she hopes, to write more songs, maybe take a few classes at the university, and generally relax and avoid the tabloids.
If only she could get those numbers out of her head.
(Musical influences for the character: "Echo", by Fumiko Orikasa (aka Rukia's voice actor), Utada Hikaru, Vienna Teng, Vanessa Carlton (incl. her industry history), Nelly Furtado, Lady Gaga's acoustic stuff, "Life is Like a Boat" by Rie Fu, "Wing-Stock" by Ashley MacIsaac, ; what the studio wanted to make her sound like: Kelly Clarkson, Sara Bareilles, early Taylor Swift, even-less-threatening Katy Perry, Ellie Goulding without the EuroDance backing)
First Echo:
Lucy, Hikari, whatever you wanted to call her, had grown up in a temperate climate, one where, if snow fell at all (and that, rarely), it fell for a few hours, accumulated a gentle inch or two at most, and then melted into slush and sunshine. Tours had gone through places with harsher winters, but mostly in the summer when travel to the next show would not be delayed. So her first encounter with a real, proper Nor'Easter snowstorm her first winter in Locke City, was a revelation, in more ways than one. The howling storm shut down parts of the East Coast for days, and in all that howling wind and eerie, crystalline silence, there was a voice, but only for her.
This gave her the voice of her zanpakutou (essentially her sword, but they have souls and personalities in Bleach world). Right now it just makes her fear she's going mad finally, but eventually it will be a way for her to learn more about who she is and what she can do. Much much later.
Preincarnation Personality: Rukia, on a first glance, is a proper and serious Shinigami, graceful and well-suited for her position as a member of a noble house and one of the Gotei 13.
Rukia, on the whole, is a complicated person, strong in her personality while burdened with self-doubt and guilt too. Having grown up without adult supervision for a good part of her early life, Rukia is very independent, usually thinking she can do things on her own--even if sometimes she's wrong. She can sometimes admit when she's wrong, though when she is it's usually very, and therefore serious. And Rukia is very good at serious.
Willing to go above and beyond the call of duty in order to carry out what she is called upon to do. However, afterwards she will doubt the decisions she's made, and take all the blame for anything that went wrong--no matter if it's her fault or not. However, she tends to keep this self-doubt and guilt locked away, not wishing to burden others with it. However she is devoted to her friends and family. She also has a sense of fairness and equality that she certainly didn't get from growing up where she did--it seems to be an innate quality.
Though she keeps things to herself a lot, Rukia is quite good at playing any part thrown at her that she needs to, making up sob stories or putting on 'cute' voices as needed. She will bicker, fight, and even hit (if needed) with the best of them to get someone to see her point of view, or do what she says.
Despite all this, she does also have a bit of a refined, even girly, side. Graceful, she often chooses to wear dresses while out of uniform, despite the seeming severity of her appearance based on her looks, especially while in uniform. She also loves bunnies. Really. Really loves bunnies. Even her drawings of people end up looking kind of... bunny-ish, really. Though don't say anything about that part to her, she may get violent.
She's also, perhaps, a bit naive and silly, not about people mostly, but about "modern-day" stuff. This is less-so, since spending so much time in the human world, but there occasional thing still does trip her up. However, Rukia isn't one to let a little thing like not understanding something to stop her from finding out (usually by asking) and, because she is rather intelligent, it usually ends up working out for her.
Because of her small stature, which she hates people pointing out or making fun of, Rukia likes high places, including rooftops, telephone poles and occasionally other people. She also gets quite mad if people mistake her for being younger than she is, or treat her lightly because of her diminutive size.
Rukia is also very clever. She's able to form escape plans, battle strategies and everything in between in a matter of minutes, and then quick on her feet to carry them out. She's not the most skilled, or the strongest, but she is a good fighter when it comes down to it.
Overall, Rukia is a kind, serious person, who tends to hide her feelings, even from her friends, usually behind ceremony, or behind a tough front, but is ultimately loyal, through and through.
Any differences: You are encouraged to deviate from the original personality in three or four major ways, with as many changes made to make their personality logical to the setting. If the personality does not differentiate significantly, revisions may be asked for.
Hikari grew up fairly middle-class and with parents and a family and all, and so has a lot more of a stale family base. She still talks with her mother a lot (though is, by no means, dependent on her). Rukia was an abandoned orphan who had to fight for everything as a kid. Rukia is therefore a lot tougher than Hikari tends to be, though Hikari can have her moments when it's something important to her.
Hikari has never really had the opportunity to learn how to fight. Before settling on piano lessons, she had a few, long-forgotten karate lessons as a kid, but hasn't done anything like that in years. Rukia, on the other hand, is excellent in hand-to-hand combat, sword-fighting, and various shinigami arts like kidou and flash-stepping. As a result, when it comes to scary situations, even simple fights, Hikari is much more of a flight than a fight (though if it is called for, she can be brave, and master these instincts).
While Hikari is famous and therefore gets thrust into the position of a role model a lot, the biggest group she's ever led is a small five-piece (or so) band of musicians. Rukia, on the other hand, is leadership material of the sort of end up second-in-command of a whole division of people (and very often the one doing a lot of the work in the division). Hikari has become very good at delegation, but does tend to panic a little when she doesn't have people to do what she doesn't know how to do.
Hikari does not avoid fame, so much as she sometimes wishes she could avoid the consequences. She has few vices these days, and so she's become less interesting to the press (though she is well aware that a hint of scandal or mental instability, as she's worried these Echoes could be, would set their noses on her trail again). On the other hand, she would, of course, like her records to sell, and is ok being recognized by fans and fellow artists. Rukia is famous in Soul Society because of the family into which she was adopted, and the Shounen Hero she go mixed up with. She has a more complicated relationship with her notoreity, which is of a very different sort than Hikari's. Suffice it to say, Hikari is much less prideful, well aware that she could fuck it all up at any time, and that cameras will be there to catch every little slip. She is pleased with what she has accomplished so far, mostly, but well aware it could all go up in smoke at any time.
Hikari is fine with heights, though she isn't drawn to them like Rukia is; she doesn't mind people mistaking her for younger than she is. She dresses well, though often seems to consider clothes and fashion as a form of costuming--the correct outfit to wear for the correct occasion, even if that 'occasion' is auditing a class on campus.
Though Hikari also tends to hide her feelings, this is more to keep them from the public eye until they come out in a song instead. It is much harder to hide emotions when singing on a stage, and Hikari is a soulful singer. She simply manages to compartmentalize these emotions to those times and hide them away otherwise.
Abilities:
- Swordsmanship: about average, for a shinigami of her rank and experience, these days. She’s not great at it, but can hold her own in a fight, even against an expert.
- Kidou: Kidou is a range of spells (from 1, the easiest, to 99) that can be used for defense, combat, or healing. She has quite a bit of skill in kidou, skill that she’s worked for. She can use several kido in rapid succession, can use some high-level ones with the incantation and has considerable power and control. Her specialties are in binding, healing, purifying and destruction.
- Physical strength and hand-to-hand combat: Rukia is a pint-size powerhouse, able to kick and punch people several times her size with considerable force. She’s about average when it comes to skill in hand-to-hand combat, but again, can hold her own against most experts.
Flash step: Rukia is quite fast with shunpo, a movement technique that allows the user to move faster than the eye is able to follow, getting from one place to another in as few steps as possible, making it seem as if the user has disappeared and reappeared someplace else.
Reiatsu: The spiritual pressure created by the release of spiritual power. Rukia has a large amount of reiryoku—enough to be a seated officer, if her brother hadn’t pulled strings to make that not happen—meaning she can display a great amount of reiatsu, though she rarely does. She is very good at controlling it, and when is she focused or under great stress, it can manifest as floating ice crystals.
Zanpakutou: A zanpakutou is the main weapon of most shinigami, used to fight hollows and perform soul burials. A zanpakutou is both the reflection of the soul and power of a shinigami, and sentient in and of themselves. Generally they have about thre states: sealed, unsealed, or shikai, and full release, or bankai. Rukia's zanpakutou is Sode no Shirayuki. Sealed, it looks like a normal katana. When unsealed, the entire katana, including the guard and hilt, are pure white, with a long white ribbon trailing from the end of the hilt. Its release command is 舞え (mae—dance), and this transformation brings a rush of cold air and possibly fog with it.
Shikai abilities: Sode no Shirayuki has several abilities, called dances.
- Some no mai (first dance), Tsukishiro: Rukia slashes with the blade, and a variable-size circle of ice that freezes anything it touches appears around her target. This circle has influence not only on a flat plane, but extending up as well. This ice can then be shattered, shattering any victims who happen to be trapped inside.
- Tsugi no mai (second dance), Hakuren: Piercing the ground several times with the blade, Rukia then takes up a battle stance while up-flowing particles gather from the pierces. When a sufficient amount has gathered, they fire towards the target in a massive wall of white ice, freezing whatever it strikes.
- San no mai (third dance), Shirafune: If he blade is ever broken, she can use this dance to reforge it out of ice particles—even through solid objects like an opponent. This ice then freezes everything else it touches.
- Juhaku: Rukia stabs the ground with her zanpakutou, and a trail of ice is created, leading to her target, freezing it from the bottom up once it reaches it, turning it all into ice.
(Rukia has not yet achieved Bankai, a second level of abilities for a zanpakutou.)
All of the above abilities she used on a near-daily basis, either in actual fights or in training.
Name: Anne
Are you over 15? Yep.
Contact: email: scarysnakelady@gmail.com
IC Information:
Name:
Preincarnation: Kuchiki Rukia
Reincarnation: Hikari "Lucia" MacIsaac
Canon: Bleach
Age:
Preincarnated: Around 115 years
Reincarnated: Newly 21
Preincarnation Appearance: Feel free to just link to an image.
Any differences: Ever so slightly taller, with a bit more weight to match. Around 5-foot even, at about 98-pounds. Her dark brown hair and blue eyes are due to her half-Japanese, half-caucasian heritage and some contacts, in her reincarnation.
Preincarnated History: In a world...
Where the dead either move on to the next world (called Soul Society), or hang around in the human world and essentially become hungry ghosts, Hollows, that want to gobble up other innocent, unsuspecting souls.
Where those innocent souls are protected, and the hungry souls cleansed, by guardians invisible to (most) living eyes called shinigami.
And where one boy is poised to change the destinies of a whole lot of people and ghosts and other things (but only after plenty of fights and getting stabbed a lot).
An infant girl died.
And when she came to Soul Society with her sister, she was abandoned, grew up alone at first, then gathering others like herself in a small gang. She took the name Rukia, at some point. She would lose almost all those friends and with the one remaining, named Renji, go on to try and find a better afterlife for herself as a shinigami, a cleanser and protector of souls.
She would gain an adopted brother (who would turn out to be her abandoning-sister's husband, the sister having long died out of the afterlife herself), and a vice-captain. A vice-captain she had to, because of the machinations of a Hollow (and someone behind that, it would later turn out), kill with her own hands.
And then one day on a routine patrol in the living world, she followed a Hollow to the bedroom of a living boy who, it turned out, could see her. He had always been able to see ghosts, it turned out, and his soul was so tasty, it was pulling some massive, hungry Hollow toward him.
To save his life, she stabbed him in the chest and transferred her powers to him. And that's how Kuchiki Rukia ended up mixed up in the life of one Kurosaki Ichigo, shounen hero and shinigami/human/Quincy/Hollow hybrid extraordinare.
It turned out that giving her powers away like that, even to a shounen hero, was kind of a Big Deal crime, and the shadowy bereaucracy decided that death was totally an appropriate sentence for said shenanigans. So Rukia was arrested (by her brother and that one friend who had made it to a better life with her, it turned out), sentenced to die, and set to await her death sentence in Soul Society.
Ichigo, being a shounen hero, of course could not allow this to happen, and so led a team to go and rescue Rukia. A lot of fights later, he actually managed to pull this off, rescuing Rukia seconds before she would have been burned to a crispy cinder.
Of course, his rescue happened to coincide with the internal politics of Soul Society kind of blowing up in everyone's face when one Aizen Sousuke, captain of the Fifth Division, decided he was done being devious and instead wanted to be a big, all-out-there god-figure, declared war on pretty much everyone, and flounced off to Hueco Mundo where the Hollows all live with the captains of the 3rd and 9th Divisions as well.
Not that things were quiet, after that. Our Heroes went back to the worlds they had started in, and Ichigo started some more Shounen Hero training, without everyone else. Some of Aizen's minions decided to pop into the real world for
This lasted right up until Aizen, ever the cunning asshole, decided to send some minions to go kidnap Orihime and bring her to Hueco Mundo to
Rukia, despite wanting to go rescue her friend with everyone else, was ordered back to Soul Society, retrieved, again, by her brother. However, even though she and Renji had been ordered to return to Soul Society, no order had been given for them to stay there, so using this nifty bit of Rules Lawyering on the part of her brother, Rukia and Renji join up with the rest of the gang in Hueco Mundo.
There are, of course, a whole lot of fights once they get there. Rukia's first fight turns out to be not only against the Number 9 minion, but the Hollow that had eaten her vice-captain way back in the day and absorbed him. He tried to fuck with her mind and convince her that it really was said VC, but Rukia saw through it and was able to, at great personal cost to herself, defeat him.
Rescued by her brother, with a brief interlude where another minion tried to use her as a weapon against said brother, she went on to the next battle. Around this time, Aizen let everyone in on the fact that Orihime had, in fact, been Shounen Hero Bait and that he was going to go destroy the whole of Ichigo's hometown for the next step in his plan. Eventually Orihime was rescued, but by that time, everyone had to move on to the next crisis: the battle to save the whole hometown, take down Aizen, whose powers were getting rather out of hand even for a shounen villain, and save everyone.
Ichigo, of course, managed to do all of this. The cost of doing all of this, though, was sacrificing all of his shinigami powers due to a final move type thing. He passed out from the pain in front of everyone. He slept for a month. And then he had to say goodbye to Rukia, the one who had given him these powers and who he couldn't see anymore without those powers or artificial aids.
While Ichigo was resigned, it seemed at first, to a normal life, and then was working to get some powers back in a different from more like his friend Chad's, Rukia was working on a way to get him his shinigami powers back. There then ensued more chest stabbings, and more battles, this time with a group of people with Hollow-based powers known as Fullbringers. Facing them was not only Ichigo, powered up again, and Rukia, but a whole group of people responsible for helping return those powers. After all this, Ichigo was once again a shinigami, now with bonus Fullbring powers!
Things couldn't stay quiet for long after that, of course. The next crisis to overtake them was a series of surprise attacks, one of which killed the second of the head division in Soul Society. Soon after this, one of their old friends from their time in Hueco Mundo came crashing through into the living world to retrieve Ichigo and half the others because of some bad shit going on there. As soon as he was there, and pulled into a battle, the brunt of the attack came down on Soul Society, resulting in more destruction than we'd seen in a real location thus far, killing several minor characters, very probably, and lots of background characters. Ichigo, trying to get from Hueco Mundo to Soul Society in order to help, was trappedin the passage between. The captain of the head division was killed, and a lot of people, including Rukia, were gravely injured.
Then the Zero Division showed up. Last we saw of her, Rukia was floating ass-up in a healing hot spring in the ante-world to the Spirit King's world (aka the place that Aizen totally thought he could take over if he just got a copy of the key made).
For way more details (and way less snark), please see the wiki for the character and the general timeline wiki.
Reincarnated History: What happened to your character that got them to this point in their normal, human life? While a lot of information isn't necessary here, please give us a clear picture of who they are now and where they'll be headed in the context of the game.
Hikari Lucia MacIsaac was born to a Japanese mother and an American father of Scots-Irish ancestry, with grandparents in both the US and Japan. Her father was kindly, and loved both her and her mother very much, but was often busier with work than he would have liked to be. She was named for a musical in-joke between her parents (Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" is a great song to fall in love to, and also good for embarrassing your kids before they're old enough to appreciate a good, romantic story.) She grew up on the West Coast of the US, generally a bit of an outdoors-y child, going with her mother to visit relatives over in Japan on occasion.
Going by 'Lucy' in grade school and middle school in the states, and then Lucia when she hit high school, she was generally kind of a quiet kid, preferring to observe and absorb information. At home, she had piano lessons, and did quite well with those. Her earliest piano lessons were taught by her mother, who played a little, and then later an outside teacher. She did well on tests, generally, with a bit of an aptitude for writing. But where her true talents lay was, in fact, singing.
As most kids do, she started singing as a kid, discovered she had a lot of fun doing it, and then discovered that other people enjoyed her singing too. She never had voice lessons, officially, but there were, at least, music classes in middle school and high school, the district she was going to school in being wealthy enough to keep music education through to then for those that wanted it.
And then, at age 16, she broke into the big time. A YouTube video of her singing a cover version of song got passed on to a friend of a friend who knew someone, and it was decided by a big corporate music company that she was great and exactly the sort of talent they needed to put on their roster right now. They wanted her badly enough to offer her a contract, pluck her out of her high school, and turn her into a pop star under her first name and from then on stage name of Hikari.
Her first big hit came that same year, a bubblegum pop number auto-tuned and so glossy you could fix your hair in its reflection. Nevermind that she actually had a great voice, tone, and pitch, and was rather annoyed by the polish and gloss, the adorableness factor meant cute bubblegum pop for her. During this time, she stuck with her parents who, definitely not stage parents, were ever-so-slightly bewildered by this sudden fame and fortune, but still determined to raise their daughter into an actual human being, even if the record did make her sound like a very cute machine.
She couldn't avoid the press and the paparazzi entirely, but generally didn't interact with them much beyond bland, mask-like smiles and polite, simple answers or evasions. Her home life was quiet--she got her GED less than a year after her sudden stardom, between recording and then concerts and promotion. For the first year, she was stuck a little bit in the guise of a sugary pop princess.
At least until her initial contract with that company ran out. Before it did, she at least managed to wrest a little bit of control back for her sophomore album, which was a lot less sugary without totally diverging from pretty pop; this album, under-promoted by the label, essentially out of spite, is considered a flop, for her, selling far fewer copies than her first, heavily-promoted, album, or her third album, which was a lot less slick, and a lot more focused on real artistry. The awkward teenage record, in her budding career. At 19, she has just produced her third album, this time on a much smaller, though by no means tiny, label. This time, all of the songs have been penned by her and, while she does bring in other artists for some of the instruments, a lot of the keyboard and piano work is actually her on top of the vocals.
Her musical influences range from those early, heady days of sugar pop, plus
For now, she's taking a break from the spotlight, she hopes, to write more songs, maybe take a few classes at the university, and generally relax and avoid the tabloids.
If only she could get those numbers out of her head.
(Musical influences for the character: "Echo", by Fumiko Orikasa (aka Rukia's voice actor), Utada Hikaru, Vienna Teng, Vanessa Carlton (incl. her industry history), Nelly Furtado, Lady Gaga's acoustic stuff, "Life is Like a Boat" by Rie Fu, "Wing-Stock" by Ashley MacIsaac, ; what the studio wanted to make her sound like: Kelly Clarkson, Sara Bareilles, early Taylor Swift, even-less-threatening Katy Perry, Ellie Goulding without the EuroDance backing)
First Echo:
Lucy, Hikari, whatever you wanted to call her, had grown up in a temperate climate, one where, if snow fell at all (and that, rarely), it fell for a few hours, accumulated a gentle inch or two at most, and then melted into slush and sunshine. Tours had gone through places with harsher winters, but mostly in the summer when travel to the next show would not be delayed. So her first encounter with a real, proper Nor'Easter snowstorm her first winter in Locke City, was a revelation, in more ways than one. The howling storm shut down parts of the East Coast for days, and in all that howling wind and eerie, crystalline silence, there was a voice, but only for her.
This gave her the voice of her zanpakutou (essentially her sword, but they have souls and personalities in Bleach world). Right now it just makes her fear she's going mad finally, but eventually it will be a way for her to learn more about who she is and what she can do. Much much later.
Preincarnation Personality: Rukia, on a first glance, is a proper and serious Shinigami, graceful and well-suited for her position as a member of a noble house and one of the Gotei 13.
Rukia, on the whole, is a complicated person, strong in her personality while burdened with self-doubt and guilt too. Having grown up without adult supervision for a good part of her early life, Rukia is very independent, usually thinking she can do things on her own--even if sometimes she's wrong. She can sometimes admit when she's wrong, though when she is it's usually very, and therefore serious. And Rukia is very good at serious.
Willing to go above and beyond the call of duty in order to carry out what she is called upon to do. However, afterwards she will doubt the decisions she's made, and take all the blame for anything that went wrong--no matter if it's her fault or not. However, she tends to keep this self-doubt and guilt locked away, not wishing to burden others with it. However she is devoted to her friends and family. She also has a sense of fairness and equality that she certainly didn't get from growing up where she did--it seems to be an innate quality.
Though she keeps things to herself a lot, Rukia is quite good at playing any part thrown at her that she needs to, making up sob stories or putting on 'cute' voices as needed. She will bicker, fight, and even hit (if needed) with the best of them to get someone to see her point of view, or do what she says.
Despite all this, she does also have a bit of a refined, even girly, side. Graceful, she often chooses to wear dresses while out of uniform, despite the seeming severity of her appearance based on her looks, especially while in uniform. She also loves bunnies. Really. Really loves bunnies. Even her drawings of people end up looking kind of... bunny-ish, really. Though don't say anything about that part to her, she may get violent.
She's also, perhaps, a bit naive and silly, not about people mostly, but about "modern-day" stuff. This is less-so, since spending so much time in the human world, but there occasional thing still does trip her up. However, Rukia isn't one to let a little thing like not understanding something to stop her from finding out (usually by asking) and, because she is rather intelligent, it usually ends up working out for her.
Because of her small stature, which she hates people pointing out or making fun of, Rukia likes high places, including rooftops, telephone poles and occasionally other people. She also gets quite mad if people mistake her for being younger than she is, or treat her lightly because of her diminutive size.
Rukia is also very clever. She's able to form escape plans, battle strategies and everything in between in a matter of minutes, and then quick on her feet to carry them out. She's not the most skilled, or the strongest, but she is a good fighter when it comes down to it.
Overall, Rukia is a kind, serious person, who tends to hide her feelings, even from her friends, usually behind ceremony, or behind a tough front, but is ultimately loyal, through and through.
Any differences: You are encouraged to deviate from the original personality in three or four major ways, with as many changes made to make their personality logical to the setting. If the personality does not differentiate significantly, revisions may be asked for.
Hikari grew up fairly middle-class and with parents and a family and all, and so has a lot more of a stale family base. She still talks with her mother a lot (though is, by no means, dependent on her). Rukia was an abandoned orphan who had to fight for everything as a kid. Rukia is therefore a lot tougher than Hikari tends to be, though Hikari can have her moments when it's something important to her.
Hikari has never really had the opportunity to learn how to fight. Before settling on piano lessons, she had a few, long-forgotten karate lessons as a kid, but hasn't done anything like that in years. Rukia, on the other hand, is excellent in hand-to-hand combat, sword-fighting, and various shinigami arts like kidou and flash-stepping. As a result, when it comes to scary situations, even simple fights, Hikari is much more of a flight than a fight (though if it is called for, she can be brave, and master these instincts).
While Hikari is famous and therefore gets thrust into the position of a role model a lot, the biggest group she's ever led is a small five-piece (or so) band of musicians. Rukia, on the other hand, is leadership material of the sort of end up second-in-command of a whole division of people (and very often the one doing a lot of the work in the division). Hikari has become very good at delegation, but does tend to panic a little when she doesn't have people to do what she doesn't know how to do.
Hikari does not avoid fame, so much as she sometimes wishes she could avoid the consequences. She has few vices these days, and so she's become less interesting to the press (though she is well aware that a hint of scandal or mental instability, as she's worried these Echoes could be, would set their noses on her trail again). On the other hand, she would, of course, like her records to sell, and is ok being recognized by fans and fellow artists. Rukia is famous in Soul Society because of the family into which she was adopted, and the Shounen Hero she go mixed up with. She has a more complicated relationship with her notoreity, which is of a very different sort than Hikari's. Suffice it to say, Hikari is much less prideful, well aware that she could fuck it all up at any time, and that cameras will be there to catch every little slip. She is pleased with what she has accomplished so far, mostly, but well aware it could all go up in smoke at any time.
Hikari is fine with heights, though she isn't drawn to them like Rukia is; she doesn't mind people mistaking her for younger than she is. She dresses well, though often seems to consider clothes and fashion as a form of costuming--the correct outfit to wear for the correct occasion, even if that 'occasion' is auditing a class on campus.
Though Hikari also tends to hide her feelings, this is more to keep them from the public eye until they come out in a song instead. It is much harder to hide emotions when singing on a stage, and Hikari is a soulful singer. She simply manages to compartmentalize these emotions to those times and hide them away otherwise.
Abilities:
- Swordsmanship: about average, for a shinigami of her rank and experience, these days. She’s not great at it, but can hold her own in a fight, even against an expert.
- Kidou: Kidou is a range of spells (from 1, the easiest, to 99) that can be used for defense, combat, or healing. She has quite a bit of skill in kidou, skill that she’s worked for. She can use several kido in rapid succession, can use some high-level ones with the incantation and has considerable power and control. Her specialties are in binding, healing, purifying and destruction.
- Physical strength and hand-to-hand combat: Rukia is a pint-size powerhouse, able to kick and punch people several times her size with considerable force. She’s about average when it comes to skill in hand-to-hand combat, but again, can hold her own against most experts.
Flash step: Rukia is quite fast with shunpo, a movement technique that allows the user to move faster than the eye is able to follow, getting from one place to another in as few steps as possible, making it seem as if the user has disappeared and reappeared someplace else.
Reiatsu: The spiritual pressure created by the release of spiritual power. Rukia has a large amount of reiryoku—enough to be a seated officer, if her brother hadn’t pulled strings to make that not happen—meaning she can display a great amount of reiatsu, though she rarely does. She is very good at controlling it, and when is she focused or under great stress, it can manifest as floating ice crystals.
Zanpakutou: A zanpakutou is the main weapon of most shinigami, used to fight hollows and perform soul burials. A zanpakutou is both the reflection of the soul and power of a shinigami, and sentient in and of themselves. Generally they have about thre states: sealed, unsealed, or shikai, and full release, or bankai. Rukia's zanpakutou is Sode no Shirayuki. Sealed, it looks like a normal katana. When unsealed, the entire katana, including the guard and hilt, are pure white, with a long white ribbon trailing from the end of the hilt. Its release command is 舞え (mae—dance), and this transformation brings a rush of cold air and possibly fog with it.
Shikai abilities: Sode no Shirayuki has several abilities, called dances.
- Some no mai (first dance), Tsukishiro: Rukia slashes with the blade, and a variable-size circle of ice that freezes anything it touches appears around her target. This circle has influence not only on a flat plane, but extending up as well. This ice can then be shattered, shattering any victims who happen to be trapped inside.
- Tsugi no mai (second dance), Hakuren: Piercing the ground several times with the blade, Rukia then takes up a battle stance while up-flowing particles gather from the pierces. When a sufficient amount has gathered, they fire towards the target in a massive wall of white ice, freezing whatever it strikes.
- San no mai (third dance), Shirafune: If he blade is ever broken, she can use this dance to reforge it out of ice particles—even through solid objects like an opponent. This ice then freezes everything else it touches.
- Juhaku: Rukia stabs the ground with her zanpakutou, and a trail of ice is created, leading to her target, freezing it from the bottom up once it reaches it, turning it all into ice.
(Rukia has not yet achieved Bankai, a second level of abilities for a zanpakutou.)
All of the above abilities she used on a near-daily basis, either in actual fights or in training.
