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Tomiko Ukiyo, alias "Asari"; ...who spends her days floating in a sorrowful world
Topic Started: Mar 29 2017, 02:50 PM (259 Views)
The One True Nobody
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"...does this clockwork hand follow you... or guide you?"
Name: Tomiko Ukiyo (also known as "Asari")
Gender: Female
Age: 25

Class: Former student of Shujin Academy in Tokyo. Academic performance decent but unremarkable.

Clubs/Occupation: Career actress in adult videos, though her age makes work harder to find than it used to be. Currently seeking more distinguished acting work.

Personality: Tomiko is a woman who is very used to putting on an act. Having made very few friends or acquaintances outside of her professional connections, she maintains an outward appearance of glamour, cheer, and restraint. Being in a position where she must routinely speak of a career she has become totally bored with in smiling, positive tones, she has almost forgotten how to express her honest feelings about work as a sex object (in summary: "meh"), and will usually give some kind of hand-wave response (such as "I enjoy it, but it's time I moved on"). Anyone expecting this to be a major psychological complex would be sorely disappointed, however, as she has simply come to view it the way one might view working at a fast food restaurant: it makes a living, but is it really living?

To those unfamiliar with her, Tomiko is all smiles and sunshine, often slipping into the same kind of quirky, innocent persona that she often has to portray when typecast for an adult video project (suffice it to say, this is the main reason her age has begun to outrun her career prospects in that field). Those who get to know her will find that she loosens up around those she's familiar with, with the ironic effect that she becomes quite a lot easier to take seriously. While not the sort of person who'd blow anyone away with her intellectual superiority, she can be quite sharp when she needs to be and has a talent for seeing both sides of a difficult problem or conflict. They also might catch shades of a deeper issue: Tomiko is a worn-down dreamer, and while she hasn't given up hope of living the fantasy she pursued in her younger years, she is far less the starry-eyed, ambitious girl now than a hopeful cynic who wants to live the dream just once before fading into obscurity.

History: Born to a middle-class family of little consequence, Tomiko's story might have ended in an office job of equally little consequence, quite possibly in her home city of Tokyo, had the economic bubble-burst of the '90s not turned her "middle-class family of little consequence" into a "lower-class family scrabbling to make ends meet." Tomiko vaguely remembers the nice, neat house she lived in as a toddler, but she grew up in a series of steadily-less-spacious apartments and having two parents who both worked full-time jobs for middling pay meant that she spent the majority of that time at home alone. To keep her occupied on days like those, Tomiko's mother would supply her with a near-constant stream of movie rentals. By the time she sat her first homeroom at Shujin Academy, Tomiko was a star-struck movie buff who wanted nothing more than to grow up to become a beautiful, charismatic actress with her name in lights across the country.

Natural talent was unfortunately not something that Tomiko was possessed of, and although she worked hard to hone her craft in Drama Club at school, her academic performance never quite reached a level of excellence that would have made pursuing this career through acting classes feasible. She was presented, as she neared her eighteenth birthday, what looked like an easy way into something resembling her dream job, however. She had always seen a kind of romanticism in the idea of taking part in love scenes on television or the big screen, so when she was scouted out to star in softcore adult videos, it didn't seem like much of a leap for her to give it a try.

What followed was what Tomiko often describes as a career that took off like a snowball downhill, until the downhill part ran out and the snowball became an aimless tumbleweed. Softcore became explicit, explicit became hardcore; then some experimentation with more artistic erotic work, and just as she was getting really comfortable with the whole process and even beginning to take some pride in it, the industry started to get a bit too congested, and the work became far too mundane and monotonous for her liking. This continued for so long that Tomiko, who had always been a big diary person, found herself writing, to her great surprise, Never in my life has imagining a legion of men with boners jerking off to what I'm doing felt so... stupid. Is this really how I want to spend the rest of my days?

Things never got to "dire straits" territory, but Tomiko (by this time better known by her stage name "Asari") had always been perceptive where she needed to be, and she could tell where the wind was blowing. Inside of a few years, she knew, her career would fizzle, work would slow and then the good jobs she enjoyed would vanish under a slow stream of dull, unfun productions... and then she would get too old for the job and probably waste away working at a grocery store or something. Before that happened, Tomiko wanted to be a real star in a real movie or television show, even if it was only one time. She had no illusions of making it big anymore, but she wouldn't settle for anything less than scratching the dream off of her bucket list so that she could at least grow old with a good memory and die happy with it.

It was only after many auditions that she found work in a most unusual production indeed, which seemed sketchy as hell but drew her in like a moth to flame even so... almost as if, on a subconscious level, she might have known what destiny had in store for her in the city where the show was to be shot.

That city was Nagashima, and perhaps it was here that the tumbleweed might become a snowball again? Eh, a girl can dream.

Appearance: Noticibly tanned with light-brown eyes and cherry-blonde hair (dyed), Tomiko was gifted with admirable natural beauty that became apparent only in her late teens and persists to this day, even if she looks far more an adult woman than she did even a year ago. But when make-up and sexy lingerie are removed from the equation, she's not quite goddess-tier. One who indulged in such a vice on a regular basis might recognize her primarily from low-budget, free-to-stream adult videos, although she's done a few "artsier" adult productions in her time, as well.

In person, Tomiko usually wears long coats and sunglasses over otherwise stylish tops and skirts, usually accompanied by various pairs of sunglasses that are flashy, glittery, or stylish... but all large enough to make it more difficult for passersby to recognize her on the street. Her make-up is always done just right, subtle enough yet noticible enough to highlight the best of her facial features.

Current Weapon/Combat Skill: Tomiko knows some basic aikido for self-defense, but is otherwise inexperienced when it comes to fighting and possesses no weapons.
Mask: A deep scarlet porcelain mask that covers the entire upper half of Tomiko's face, shaped like a bunny's face with an intricately detailed nose and two ear-shaped extensions on top that give her the appearance of a woman wearing it for its coquettish appeal. A gilded choker always appears around Tomiko's neck while she summons her Persona, connected by an etherial chain to the matching choker her Persona wears.

Persona:
~Name: Lola Burns
~Arcana: XIII - Death
~Drain: Fire
~Weak: Ice, Wind, Water
~Null: n/a
~Reflect: n/a
~Resist: n/a
~Skills: Agi, Patra, Analysis
Though it appears to be a real-world name, the most likely connection one might turn up in a search for the source of this Persona is the 1933 American film, Bombshell, a story of a sex-symbol actress who attempts to find a life of normalcy but is deceived into returning to Hollywood by her publicist, who hired actors to pretend to accept her and then brush her off when they learned the truth of her identity. A voluptuous blonde woman in a (figuratively) scorching fire-red dress that shows lots of leg, the most prominent features of her outfit are the gilded choker tightly strapped around her neck (a leash-chain extends from the back of it, hovering in the air as it binds summoner and Persona together) and a dark-scarlet porcelain mask with bunny-ears extending from the top, which matches that Tomiko uses to summon her Persona exactly save that it has no eye holes: instead, finely-pained long eyelashes are drawn where the eyes should be, to give the appearance that her eyes are closed. On closer inspection, the mask is belted into her hair with the same material as the gilded choker.

While capable of single-target fire attacks, Lola Burns is primarily a support Persona with emphasis on Analysis, enhancement magic, and mental status-effect recovery magic.

Have you read all the stickies?
Yes, yes, yes, oh God, yes. *yawn*
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Czernobog
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Best Influence.
Approved.
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