I'm the best! I'm the king of me! I'm gonna eat chips out of the garbage!
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- Jan 15, 2011
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Name: Chieko Sato Gender: Female Age: 18
Class: Reitaku 3-B
Clubs/Occupation: No clubs. Was once the star pitcher of the girl's softball team back in middle school, but those days are behind her. Works in upper management at Samurakami Road and Building, but she's not really sure what she's doing there anymore.
Personality: Chieko, in all things she does, tends to carry a distinct air of cynicism. Once upon a time, she'd had a spark of optimism, until something in life violently stomped it out. She makes an active effort to not see the brighter side of life, and personally sees any good things that happen to her as only leading up to later pain, and that it's better to not find hope in them so she'll be less surprised when the bad inevitably comes. In Chieko's opinion, there's little point to anything she does, since she'll just get fucked up in the ed anyways, so there's no point in having goals and ambition.
Over time, she's found satisfaction in destruction, and it's only in getting back at others and ignoring the consequences of her actions that she's found she can really feel anything, or so she's told herself. As far as she's concerned, if everyone's just going to treat her like a piece of shit anyways, then she might as well act the part.
Her moments of high emotion can often come as a surprise to herself, especially since she prefers to keep quiet and not speak up that often. She can keep a grudge better than anyone else, past the point when most people would have let go, though it's rare she'll actually act upon it. On the other hand, while she rarely cares about what she does to herself, she finds herself emphasizing a little too well with other people going through hardships, and watching other people destroy themselves and their lives tends to hit a bit too close to home for her. She's also something of a hopeless romantic, falling in and out of relationships easily, and she's never quite able to give up on a love she once had.
History: Excessively long. Chieko's memories of her biological father are vague and indistinct. When she was young, he was arrested after a botched convenience store robbery, so Chieko was mostly raised by her mother. Many of her memories of her childhood involve her mother constantly apologizing for how her husband had hurt the community and veiled insults being thrown at both Chieko and her mother because of it. Over time, she learned to tolerate the insults, because it would be improper to strike back, but she was always conscious of how others regarded her because of her apparent "criminal" lineage.
Despite these troubles, Chieko had managed to find some solace in P.E. at school, where her apparent athletic skill always made her a popular choice for team picks. In middle school, Chieko ended up joining the girls' softball team, and much to her surprise, she turned out to have something of a talent for it. Within a few months, she'd risen to be the team's star pitcher, and were it not for a few losses early on in the season, they might have topped the ranks for the prefecture. By the time Chieko started her second year of middle school, the team had taken it as a given they'd make it to competition, and maybe even to nationals.
Unfortunately, three months into the season, Chieko was injured in a car accident, causing severe damage to her dominant shoulder. She spent months in and out of physical therapy, but her worst fears were eventually confirmed: the injury was severe enough that it had caused permanent damage to her shoulder. She would never pitch again, not at the same skill and ability she'd shown before.
Chieko was allowed to remain on the team following her accident as their student manager. Though the other team members were sympathetic at first, their attitude quickly chilled toward her, especially once they began to lose games more consistently again. The pitcher who'd replaced Chieko on the team just didn't have the same skill she once had. More and more often, the team's frustrations would be turned on their fallen star pitcher, and Chieko once again found herself grinning and bearing it.
Things only got worse when funds that had been designated for the softball team's use started going missing. It didn't take long for fingers to be pointed at Chieko, as she was one of two people who had access to the team's funds, the other being the teacher who coached the team. Chieko vehemently denied any wrongdoing -- she would never take the teams funds for her own reasons, no matter how bad things got at home -- but when the coach revealed he'd found receipts equaling the missing funds in Chieko's bad, the team's opinion swiftly turned against her. Chieko continued to deny that she'd spent any of the money, especially since the receipts were to places she'd never even been before, but the coach and the team were firmly convinced it was her. The accusations mounted higher and higher, until Chieko realized what was going on... and like a cornered animal, she attacked the coach.
Retribution was swift. Chieko was suspended from school and removed from the team, though the teacher she'd attacked chose not to press charges or call for her expulsion. By the time Chieko was allowed to come back to class, the rumors about her suspension had already spread through the school, and it now seemed like the whole school was convinced she was a thief and a thug. People she'd once called her friends suddenly wanted nothing to do with her. People who'd avoided her because of her family history already only felt more validated in their prejudice. In the space of a couple of weeks, she'd become completely alone.
She wandered hazily through her school days, always conscious of when other students would step out of her path or turn away from her. Over time, Chieko found herself becoming more sullen, more violent. More than once, she found herself getting into brawls with other students for heckling her. She'd begun a rapid spiral into delinquent self-destruction.
As for the teacher who'd started all of this? He successfully managed to petition for a coaching position on the boys' baseball team following the scandal. That year, the team managed to place first at the prefectural competition and several of the team's third years were picked up by local high schools on sports scholarships.
Before long, Chieko found herself falling in with the local girl gang, led by resident greenhaired Kansai hick, Nana Samurakami. Chieko had grown beyond the point of caring that she was just reinforcing her own delinquent reputation by being there, and she found comfort in spending time with the other girls there, who often were in staggeringly similar situations to her own. She fell into an on-again, off-again relationship with the gang's only male member, Daisuke Hino, and grew numb to the violence, the sex, and the drugs.
And this all continued until the day when Samurakami's father was killed in a hit and run, and Samurakami suddenly became a recluse. There was a nervous atmosphere around the gang -- everyone knew it had been Samurakami's girlfriend's other flame who'd hit Samurakami's dad to begin with, and whatever happened when Samurakami came back, there was going to be a massive power upheaval. Chieko's worst anxieties were confirmed when a group of girls in the gang, led by Emi Kashiwara, Samurakami's right hand woman, ambushed Hino one day.
Chieko, Hino, and a few other girls splintered off from the group and joined a different gang, which Hino eventually became banchou of. Through rumors, they found out what became of their old game -- Samurakami had been ousted when she'd tried to break up the gang, and Kashiwara was the new sukeban.
Time passed. Chieko tested into Reitaku High, and never thought too much about her future. She attended school often enough to not be expelled, and that was enough for her. And she continued hazily floating through her days... until the gas main explosion in Ruwashi Park shattered her everyday. Suddenly, Samurakami was back in Nagashima's back streets, claiming the explosion was the work of monsters. Suddenly, Kanon Watanabe was dead. Suddenly, Emi Kashiwara had been deposed and was apparently on the run.
And suddenly, Nana Samurakami was a new force of power in Nagashima's inner city. She spent several weeks absorbing smaller gangs into her own, and once her gang reached a massive size, she called Hino's gang out for a brawl. A brawl that ended with Hino dead.
Samurakami absorbed Hino's old gang into her own, and formed the "Samurakami Road and Building" company that day. Chieko was "asked" to be one of Samurakami's "enforcers" that day, as a representative of Hino's gang, and seeing no other choice, Chieko accepted. It was clear that Nana intended on building a yakuza group on Hino's corpse, but more than that, it was clear to Chieko that whatever reason Nana had for doing all of this, she was going to destroy herself doing it, and she didn't care if they all went down with her. And to Chieko, if that were the case, it would be better to take care of Samurakami then and there.
Chieko and several others who'd once been in Hino's gang secretly began planning ways to cause chaos in Samurakami's operation and at least get her hospitalized, if not killed, revolving around Hino himself as a martyr. And though no one in the group would ever admit it, part of their motivation was also because of anxiety over Road and Building itself -- no one was really sure how to feel about the promises that Samurakami was giving, nor were they sure they wanted to be the productive members of society she was trying to form them into.
At the same time Chieko was actively plotting to bring Samurakami down, however, Chieko had found herself conflicted about something comparatively mundane for the first time in a while: her grades. Thanks to her new, debatably legal employment, she and her mom had been able to pay off some long outstanding debts, and weights Chieko hadn't even realized were there had been lifted off her shoulders. She found herself worrying about what she was going to do after high school for the first time in a long while, and she came to the conclusion that she could probably do okay on most of her subjects if she applied herself, but English was something of a lost cause. With that anxiety weighing on her, she ended up answering an ad in the school newspaper for English tutoring services.
To Chieko's surprise, she and the tutor, Makoto Nakagawa, ended up building a closer relationship than she'd expected. There was something in him that felt familiar to her, and the fact that he treated her nicely despite her reputation helped quite a bit as well. The two quickly fell into a less-than-professional relationship with each other, and Makoto eventually confided in her parts of his past, something she'd found she could relate to, because she'd already been ostracized for her own family's criminal past herself. In turn, she'd found herself confiding in him about Samurakami and Road and Building, and Makoto decided to ally himself with her.
Chieko and the other Hino-loyalists in R&B worked to secretly spread the truth of what happened with Hino's death, culminating in a plan to firebomb Road and Building's office. It went a little too well -- the office was burned to the ground, but Samurakami, who'd been in the office at the time ended up being hospitalized with far more severe burns than had been planned, something Makoto chalked up to her Persona possibly being "weak" to fire. Chieko and the other enforcers were put in charge of obtaining new office space while Samurakami recovered, but shortly afterward, one of the other enforcers and a worker who'd been with her were murdered by an unknown party.
But in the end, Samurakami recovered, Road and Building went back to being a construction company/yakuza front. Chieko and Makoto ended up breaking up in the meantime -- mostly because Makoto had posted some tasteless things about Chieko on that Persona-user forum she'd found on his phone, but also because she'd begun to be bothered by some of his behavioral patterns, especially after his brother was hospitalized with Hoculus. But things kept moving on. At least, until Samurakami suddenly died in a duel with a certain Aleksandria Fyodor.
There was no joy in Nana's death for Chieko -- It quickly became clear that it had been Nana's personable and shrewd nature that had kept the company together, and suddenly it was up to the remaining members of "management" to run the company that had been entirely built on that loose sense of camaraderie and criminal elements. The tight control Road and Building had held on Nagashima's backstreets was quickly slipping, and so were the employees, who were leaving the company more and more, day by day. The yakuza groups that Nana had paid lip service to were now moving back into Nagashima, and it began to seem like Nagashima would once again even out to its pre-Nana state.
And in the meantime, the seasons changed, and Chieko's third year of high school has started with her hanging on at the cold remnants of Nana Samurakami's ideals, unsure of how to proceed, or if she even should.
Appearance:
Image Chieko is slightly taller than most girls her age, and while she's not quite a giant, she tends to be a bit easy to pick out of a crowd because of it. Her most identifying characteristics are her brown bob cut, her green eyes, and the perpetually tired expression on her face. She's pretty clearly an active person -- while she doesn't have a lot of obvious muscle, she doesn't have much in the terms of extraneous body fat either. While she's left handed, she tends to prefer her right when it comes to strenuous activity, thanks to a permanent injury in her left shoulder. It's not something particularly debilitating in most circumstances, but it limits the motion she can take with that arm quite a bit.
For clothing, she generally prefers simple blouses and long skirts or slacks. The skirt on her school uniform has had the hems ripped out so that it's longer than it's typically worn. Whenever she wears a skirt, she always wears bike shorts underneath, just in case. She also prefers to wear a jacket with her outfits, which is typically an old varsity jacket or her school PE jacket.
Current Weapon/Combat Skill: Her combat skill mostly boils down to what she knows from several years spent getting into brawls in alleyways. Her preferred weapons are crowbars, iron pipes, and bats with lots of nails nailed into them for extra pain. Mask: Appears as a faded, cracked, white porcelain mask with intricate blue designwork across it. Large chunks have fallen out of it, and the mask seems to be barely held together.
Persona: Image The ghost of a maid tricked into believing that she'd lost one of her sire's precious plates by a samurai who wanted her to marry him. When she refused, he killed her by throwing her into a well. Her ghost rises from the well every night, still counting the plates and trying to find the missing tenth one, while her soul was reborn as a kind of worm that infests wells. ~Name: Okiku-mushi ~Arcana: Tower ~Drain: ~Weak: None ~Null: ~Reflect: ~Resist: None ~Skills: Eiha, Rakunda, Marin Karin, Dia, Regenerate 1
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