Ako Yuhara

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Prof
AGE: 30
PLAYER JOURNAL: prof
TIMEZONE: Central US
CONTACT: ProfessorProf
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Reimu Hakurei

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Ako Yuhara
CANON: Original
POINT IN CANON: Shortly before arriving at Aegis Academy
AGE: 14
APPEARANCE: PB. Lacking the giant hoop, and usually wearing either a pair of ragged jeans and whatever the nearest t-shirt was when she woke up, or a Street Fighter-esque tattered karate gi. Has a long, nasty scar running from her left shoulder to the right of her stomach. Japanese, 5'3", shredded. Age 14.

CANON HISTORY:
In a world much like our own, back in the 80s, humanity stumbled upon a massive network of underground tunnels, full of horrifying monsters which immediately surged upwards to the surface to wage brutal war with mankind. The only ray of hope was a second race of creatures from the Deep which were capable of forming symbiotic relationships with humans, giving them endless variations of supernatural powers. These Hosts were humanity's greatest weapon and last line of defense against the Deep Ones.

None of that matters much to Ako Yuhara, though, since she isn't a Host, nor does she ever intend to become one.

2015, about 30 years after the first breach of the Deeps. Ako was ten years old, by all accounts a fairly ordinary grade schooler, if one who showed signs of remarkable talent at martial arts. The moment that her life changed was something that happened not at her school, but at the middle school across the street, attended her older sister Kohaku. In a horrifying incident, a Deep One burrowed its way to the surface directly under the school grounds, laying waste to the campus. The other kids fled in terror, but Ako was immediately captivated by the sight of the dreadful creature, which couldn't be stopped by anything short of a full-scale military intervention. To put the feeling into words, she thought it looked unbelievably strong, and that she couldn't rest until she beat the shit out of it.

Of course, being ten, she had no way of fighting that particular Deep One, but that didn't stop Ako from dedicating her life to pursuit of absolute strength. Over the next three years, her unrefined talent exploded into the status of an out-and-out prodigy. She studied multiple martial arts, quickly outpacing her teachers in all of them. Already capable of trouncing all her peers, she started punching higher and higher above her own age bracket. When her sister became a Host, Ako trained her to use the sword herself, beating her regularly despite having no Host powers of her own. Before she knew it, she was fighting adults and winning with stunning consistency. Her strength, reflexes, and skills pushed the limits of common sense, as she rose from obscurity to become one of the strongest fighters in all of Japan, despite her youth.

In short, it was boring. Ako was getting tired of winning all the time, and was pushing close to the limit of how much she could push her own strength by fighting humans. Even among Hosts, she struggled to find opponents who could push her skills any further. So, her life plan finally came full circle: What began with the Deep Ones would have to end with the Deep Ones. Bringing with her only some rations, a longbow, and a sword carved from a Deep One's tooth, Ako ventured into the Deeps herself.

In the monster-infested underground, Ako finally found the challenges she was seeking. The deeper she traveled, the more terrifying monsters she found. She fought many, and even killed some of them, but finally met her match when she was found by one of the subterannean world's elites - the Deep Magi. In that long, bloody battle, she nearly lost her life, fleeing with a dozen grievous wounds. The worst of them left a massive scar across her chest. Following her defeat, she returned to the surface, but her last battle against the Deep Magus burned in her memory. Some day, she would return, and she would give that thing a scar to match the one she got from it.

The story stands with Ako having just returned to the surface, and heading over to Aegis Monster Hunter Academy to check in on Kohaku's progress.

CANON PERSONALITY:
Ako is someone who spends her life looking upwards. She lived relatively normally right up until she was given something to strive for - in her case, a ravenous killing machine the size of a bus - and then she dropped everything to dedicate every fiber of her being to climbing that mountain. With her original target out of sight, she measured her progress in terms of smaller peaks still above her, in the form of other people stronger than her. Each time, she set her sights, improved herself until she crushed her target, then picked the next stronger person in reach to do it all over again.

While this mindset keeps her almost obessively motivated, it also means Ako has a tendency to get tunnel vision. When she focuses on one thing, she loses sight of everything else. This even includes other goals - the reason she floundered when she stopped being able to find humans who could challenge her was that she got lost in each of the smaller goals that she set for herself on the way to becoming strong, and in the process she forgot about the overarching goal of becoming strong enough to fight monsters. The immediate target blinds Ako not only to what's around her, but also to what's beyond that target.

All this talk of strength and goals and self-improvement creates an image of someone who's all serious all the time, but that's not accurate at all - Ako does what she loves, and it just so happens that what she loves is getting stronger and seeing herself overcome obstacles. But beyond that, she loves lots of other things, most of them asinine. She loves taking pointless risks just to see if she can pull off improbable things. She loves getting really invested in low-stakes competitions, even when they're things she's terrible at. She likes doing simple things in the most convoluted, absurd way possible - never send a text when you can fasten a message to an arrow and fire it into something near the person you want to contact instead. To assign a theme, Ako enjoys filling life with needless, over-the-top hot-blooded embellishment and doing absurd things just because she can.

Between her chaotic mess of half-formed hobbies and her obsession with becoming stronger, Ako bounces between carefree thrillseeking and relentless training and fighting at the drop of a hat. From the outside, it might look like she has some kind of strategy for how to pace herself, but the fact is that she doesn't, at all. Her self-improvement regimen is motivated largely by haphazard moment-to-moment whims. It wouldn't work at all if she wasn't absurdly talented - in the field of fighting and physical prowess, at least, she's never needed to do anything more complex than winging it, because everything comes so easily to her. As a result, she can find it a little hard to relate to the experiences of people who had to work hard to get where they are. What's easy for her must be easy for other people, right? Right?

That last point makes her a bit of an odd choice for Kohaku's teacher. The fact of the matter is, Kohaku needed a combat teacher, and Ako knew her well and was willing to help. What she lacked in educational skills she made up for with raw martial skill - a lot of Kohaku's training was just relentless, intense melee combat, while Kohaku's Host powers evolved as an instinctual response to the pressure. Ako really isn't a very good combat teacher, when it comes down to it - she maintains the role because she thinks it's fun, and vanished off into the Deeps without a second thought when she got distracted.

Ako's relationship with her sister is a strange and somewhat layered one. She semi-regularly calls Kohaku her 'brother', not out of any intention to misgender but as a runing joke due to the years she spent at an all-boys school. When she hasn't seen Kohaku in a while, she has a policy of ambushing her in the most over-the-top way possible, so as to measure how her combat skills have improved. The rest of the time, though, she hangs out with her totally casually, as if they weren't absurd teacher and mildly-terrified pupil the rest of the time, almost as if they were ordinary sisters. Ako's total dominion over Kohaku in all martial arts doesn't mean their dynamic is entirely one-sided, either - in any competition OTHER than fighting, be it video games, tests of luck, or arguments, Kohaku invariably prevails.

She can seem like it occasionally, but Ako is not an angry person. When losing at things, especially trivial and stupid things, she can get very loudly frustrated, and occasionally cause a bit of property damage, but that's usually the end of it. She doesn't hold on to anger, she just tantrums for a bit and then quickly bounces back. Combat alone, however, falls into its own category here - she's never been frustrated at all by losing a fight. On the contrary, losing a fight is exciting and wonderful, because it gives her a new immediate goal. If anything, she's more frustrated by winning too many fights. Unless it's against someone who beat her before, victory doesn't serve much of a purpose - it just means that her opponent was weaker than her, which doesn't help her measure her own power or become stronger. Paradise for Ako would be an endless series of foes who defeat her, and who she later overcomes and defeats in turn.

POINT OF DEPARTURE:

Despite the fact that her life was directed towards her obsessive violence treadmill in a single dramatic moment, it's fairly unlikely that an infiltration would see a more reserved, peaceful Ako. Seeing the Deep One didn't change Ako, it was something that was going to eventually happen sooner or later. She just needed a target, or an excuse. One way or another, Ako would eventually witness something beyond her, and go "I'm gonna fight that".

What could change is Ako's ability to reach the absurd summits she's reached in the alpha timeline. Even hosts aside, the setting of Aegis Academy isn't purely founded in realism, so for a teenager to fight adults and superheroes and win through talent and determination isn't completely out of the realm of reason. An Ako from a more grounded reality might end up just being a locally-infamous delinquent, beating up other teenagers instead of ruling the domain of martial arts. Paradoxically, this might be what mellows her out a bit - Real Ako's desperation to find worthy opponents kept escalating because she kept blowing past all of her goals. If she wasn't as invincible, then some goals could stay in the distance for years, or for her entire life. Looking at the same targets for a long time, without catapulting towards or past them at lightning speed, might help stabilize her personality a bit. Not a lot, but a bit.

VETERAN?: No

ABILITIES:
No supernatural abilities whatsoever. However, extremely fast and strong, and an improbable martial arts genius - skill in unarmed, sword, and bow combat borders on the physically impossible.

INVENTORY: Longbow, quiver, and a sword forged from a monster tooth - like the one her sister carries, but bigger.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Connected to already-apped OC Kohaku Yuhara, with permission from the player.

M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
Chariot: The gimme choice. Ako is impulsive, relentless, and full of energy, always charging forwards towards more reckless challenges for unclear reasons.
Devil: The Devil tarot represents the negative binding forces from within, including fear, uncertainty, and addiction. I'm here suggesting the latter - Ako is a junkie, addicted to her own treadmill of self-improvement and meaningless violence.
Sun: For all that her life is defined by violence, Ako is also an extremely positive person. Hard to keep down, usually having fun, full of energy and vitality.

VETO: I'm good.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Thread from previous game
PROSE SAMPLE: Threads from TDM
One more for good measure