She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Ringo Rumugi, age 13. Born on July 4, 1997, in New York City. A daughter of Japanese origin, her favorite color is a bright, Candy Apple Red. As far as she knows, she's human and is currently attending the summer semester at Anime High School, quite against her will. Summer is for playing, dammit! As a newly registered High School Freshman, she is living in the Campus Dormitories.
xxxxxx
At Least I'm Not A... Starr o3o
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Name: Ringo Rumugi Nickname(s): 'Fraidy-cat Keyword: R1309 Age: 13 Birthday: July 4 Ethnicity: Japanese Color: Apple Red Race: Neohuman School: AHS, HM204 Grade: Freshman Occupation: Student
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SpaceSaver 2000, click to Style and Profile
Themes
Mild RingoChild of Magic /Gyakuten Saiban Live High /Jason Mraz Love for a Child /Jason Mraz
Hair: Long, dark black hair. It hangs stick straight with little to no effort on her part. Her bangs are cut shorter than the rest of her hair, giving her the air of a princess doll. Or a Lolita, either one. Sometimes, for a change of pace, she'll hang it up in a ponytail, or a jaunty side pony, for fun.
Eyes: Steely gray blue eyes. Not many people can pull off having three colors in their eyes, but she can! Slightly upturned at the corners, her gaze can be piercing even when she's cowering in a ball from monsters. Her eyebrows are thin.
Extra: Ringo has a small, black snake-y birthmark on her scalp, peeking out of her hairline. It's completely covered by her bangs. To be fair, she only noticed it that one time she blew her candles out wrong on her sixth birthday.
Height and weight: She stands about 5'2 and has... seemed to have crossed out her weight on this application. That seems troublesome.
Clothing: Whatever she can get her hands on that covers, she'll wear. She does, however, have a tendency towards airy dresses, and shies away from anything that's short on the midriff. But unfortunately for her, Ringo is the one you just want to grab and shove into maid outfits. She's just got that look.
Personality
Ringo is a classic kind of girl; sweet, demure, and a bit of a crybaby when it's appropriate... well, at least when she's around people she doesn't know. When she's around friends, she can be a little loud and bossy, albeit a well-intentioned bossy-britches. Easily frightened, even the tiniest mention of blood, guts, bugs, or monster movies send her running to the corner in tears.
She loves music and movies, even if certain genres scare the pants off of her. Despite her being close to the archetypal clumsy girl, she can be quite a kitchen whiz, even though she mostly makes it up as she goes. Despite being 14, she's become mature for her age - her parents being complete children had a hand in that. Because of this, she has deeply ingrained parental issues - not enough to resent them, but enough to fib about them when the subject of families comes up.
But to be fair, any child that's shipped from New York to Japan on a yearly basis would go through this. She just wishes, however, that they'd grow up... if not for her, then for the family dog: the poor thing gets shaky when she picks it up after the plane ride. When she speaks of her parents honestly, she tends to pick up a sarcastic edge and is very joke-y; an unintentional defense mechanisim for when she's upset.
However, there's one tiny problem - Ringo has a sensitive head. Given a solid enough blow, Ringo's whole personality changes: she goes from being sweet and kind to... well... you'd have to see it to understand; even then, you might not quite know what to say. Just smile and nod, and let the lady freak out. She's not yet fully aware that she has such a condition, thus hasn't been able to cope or not cope with it.
Powers/Weapons
The Electric Tightrope
Ringo can, for lack of a more exciting description, touch certain kinds of light. Basically, any kind of light that is electrically generated, such as flashlights, fluorescent lighting, street lamps, spotlights, laser pointers; anything that can electrically emit light, she can touch with her skin, as if it were tangible.
Such uses include being able to "float" in a brightly lit room, and use smaller sources of light as ladders, poles, tightropes, weapons - she can use flashlights and like devices as weapons by holding the beam at a desired length and using it as a bludgeon.
DRAWBACK: Natural light sources, such as the sun, aren't included in her range. She can walk out in the sun as plain as day(Get it? Hah), which also extends to the light that comes off the moon. Any source of naturally produced light is unusable to her, unless it's been collected by a solar panel, thus being rendered electrically, which allows her to interact with it.
Of course, it does have it's limits. If she couldn't lift the object shining the light, she couldn't use it to beat someone with. She couldn't, say, lift a car by the headlight and smash someone over the head with it. She could still dash across the headlight beam and knock your windshield in, but she couldn't hit you with the car itself.
She does have a problem controlling this power fully, however: During the day, she has little to no trouble with it, only with getting stuck in the air whilst floating about the room. At night, however, she has problems adjusting to the dark of night outside and coming home to a brightly lit room. Some nights it can take her around fifteen to twenty minutes to walk through a door that crosses that threshold.
(Note she hasn't done much of this, but this is her limit after a few weeks of practice - it's not like it's a complicated power to begin with. )
The Electric Chair
If you hit Ringo on the head, there's a chance you might knock her screws loose. And if you knock her screws loose - what you're doing is basically knocking them into place, if you get my drift. No? Well, neither do I. Anyway, if you hit Ringo on the head, there's a good chance she might go crazy. Insane, even. It's like knocking into a record player and the needle rips across the vinyl. While she's having a crazy spell, she can be reasoned with, just not easily.
In addition, her metabolisim shoots through the roof, causing her physical capabilities increase by about double. She can:
Jump a bit higher ---Maybe a clean, clear jump on a 6-7ft wall
Survive marginally longer falls ---Maybe survive a 8-10ft fall when she misses the landing jumping over said 6ft wall
Take relatively harder hits ---Like maybe when something else witty happens that ends with a semi-pro bodybuilder punching her in the face
Hit a little harder ---Remember that whole thing about the car and it's headlights and how she couldn't lift that? Yeah, nix that, but replace "definitely not a car" with "hybrid car," amiright? Lolz "maybe a small moped".
However, her:
Speed increases exponentially ---Like say, making it from Tokyo to Kyoto about 1/3 as fast as the bullet train; not to say she could keep it up that long, though
DRAWBACK: Needless to say, since she's so silly in this state, she can't be fully relied on to help anyone. She can't turn this on and off at will; she either has to be bludgeoned, hard, to literally knock some sense into her(which to be fair, she could do herself, but you know), or she has to burn out on her own - which doesn't take her very long, since she goes full blast from the moment she enters the state. If she isn't very active during her crazy spells, she can sustain it for about four to four and a half hours; during normal usage, it's about an hour and a half to two hours. The longer she stays in this state of mind, the crazier, and occasionally, the darker she gets*. It takes a good night's sleep to restore even basic brain function.
For reasons science has yet to understand, after being induced, burning out, and recovering, Ringo plays board games at near genius levels. It's not really a drawback(or really even related to the powers), Ringo just thinks it's hilarious.
*To say she gets darker and crazier as the clock ticks, I mean to say she goes from acting like a cross between Freakazoid and The Joker to GLaDOS at endgame. She's never actually been active in this state for more than 20 minutes.
History
What is this I don't even how did this even get so long
When I went to live with my Grandparents when my parents split up, my Grandma would give me advice. One thing she told me was that when she started highschool, she started her memoirs; she said it would help her get her mind flowing for homework. I just think her crazy is hereditary. But when she heard I was starting highschool, she gave me a journal and wouldn't stop calling me until I wrote something.
So here we go, then.
My life started about as ceremoniously as a goldfish's funeral; my mother went into labor while roaming about the face of New York State. My father didn't realize what she meant by "labor" until I was born in the backseat of the car that would be my home for the first few months of my life(I mean, we had a house, but, well... my parents were weird), at least until my grandparents finally convinced my parents to get on a plane to come back home to Japan.
My mom still tells that story to this day - "What else could I have meant by LABOR, Ringo?! I swear, that monkey is going to end up killing somebody..." - which at that point, she wanders back off to what she was doing, grumbling like a bear. The best thing to do is ignore her at that point.
She says my father named me Ringo, because his favorite fruits are apples, and because he was a big Ringo Starr fan. Mom says he wanted to name me Apple, but she wouldn't let him. When Dad tells that story, it's longer; he says she punched him for suggesting it - Mom leaves that part out. He also starts whining about that celebrity that named her kid Apple - "It was totally my idea first!" - which at that point, he starts grumbling like a bear... in which case again, you just leave him alone.
Anyway, I was about two when they finally moved back home to let me be around family. They had moved out to America when they were in their late teens, and to be fair, they fit in a lot better in America. You know, 'cause they're hippies... Well, they fit in a lot better when they moved there in the 80's.
A few months after we moved home, my parents, while hosting some kind of party, started making out in a car. Who's car, I'm not sure; every time I hear the story it's a different car. While they were ever-vigilantly looking out for little toddling me, I fell into the small pool we had in the back yard - you know, the kind you get when you have money to get a pool, just no room to put one; the "ultimate giant middle finger to society", my dad said(no, I didn't get it either). I hit my head on the bottom, knocking me sensless for a few days - which is why my memory is so hazy of my childhood.
My earliest memory is when I was six or seven, and somehow blew my candles out towards me; I was almost bald in one spot for a month, which was the day I learned I had a big, black birthmark on my head. I was sort of upset, because it looked really cool, but when my hair grew back, it covered it back up.
Geez, off track again - anyway, when they brought me home from the hospital, my grandparents, thank God, stepped in and let me stay with them while my parents bickered like children over who's fault it was that I got hurt. Eventually, my parents split up over it; either my mom put my dad out on his ass - or the other way around, I forget who actually dumped whom - and my mother moved back to New York.
However, instead of bumming around in a van like she did the last time, she picked up a bit role on Broadway, in the process actually becoming quite the star. I guess the experience told her she needed to grow up a little. My dad, however, didn't do anything near that productive, and instead started mooching off of my mother after a few years, to which she willingly obliged - which makes me think that after those few years they weren't really mad anymore, but just too immature to say they were sorry.
But it was kind of nice to work the floor after the separation - What? I was a little kid and they were both giving me stuff. You're not supposed to have a concience when you're under 10. My parents shipped me back and forth from house to house, and even though I'm guilty about it now, I enjoyed both my christmases and my birthday cakes. They never bothered to check my grades either - but I'd be a fool to complain about that now.
The way they acted, it's probably because when you're young, it's easy to fall by the wayside... very easy to be ignored. I'd like to believe they acted that way out of love for their child, but I know my parents, they're both posessive, impassioned people. Eh, but I know they love me, they just need to get over themselves. But I'm a big girl - I can handle it until then. I'm just worried about their dog - they fight over him about as much as me, and he hates planes. Poor thing. Well, I guess that's about it...
Oh!
I remember once... oh, maybe last year, about this time, actually; I visited my mother and some of her castmates on stage, once, during rehersal. Like most of my mother's friends that she'd introduced me to, they love to fawn over tiny little Japanese children; "Oh, she's so pretty!," "Oh my God, look at her silky hair!," "Aw, Minami, I just want to take her home!," is all they say until my mom shoos them off of me. For some reason, it's very hazy after all that, but I remember someone shouting "Ringo, look out!," and I blacked out.
...It's... it's the only thing I can't get my mom to tell me about. I mean, I can chalk up forgetting most of my childhood to falling into the pool, but... I wasn't hurt or anything, if something hit me. None of her friends will tell me either; they all look at me like I'm a wild animal. One of them started laughing uncontrollably, not like, hysterics, but like she remembered a really good joke - I'm not sure what that was about.
Mom won't even let me go back to the set. It's almost a year later, and her only excuse not to let me go back is "it's being painted." It's... strange. She ended up shipping me back to my dad's a few weeks later, though. Poor Peaches had to get back on the plane.
When we got off, even my dad was acting like he'd committed a crime. It was like he'd robbed a jewelry store and hidden the goods in my head - he walked real close to me, with his arm around my neck and his hand on the top of my head. I could chalk that up to him being just that weird, but with Mom and Dad both acting that way, something was fishy. I tried to ask him if mom had told him something, maybe to get a clue about what she was freaking out about - but he wouldn't tell me either, so I didn't see a point in asking anymore.
I... don't wanna say this, 'cause it's weird - even weirder than what happened that weekend, but a few weeks after that, I was playing with a flashlight, making shadowpuppets on my ceiling - and after about ten minutes... my hand didn't go through the beam of light... and I could touch it. Like it was real.
I've only messed with it a little bit, and for some reason, I can hover a few inches off my bed - I just kind of shimmy around and all of a sudden it's like... I don't even know, it's weird. And it was like there was a brick wall keeping me outside last night, I had to literally push my hand inside to reach the dimmer switch so I could get inside.
Dad asked me why I was so shaky that night... it's a good thing I have a history of being a frightened little chicken at scary movies or I wouldn't've had a good excuse.
The other morning, about a month ago, I suddenly got the idea to rummage through my dad's desk - which, I would never do, honest, but something just struck me. Must be a full moon - and I saw an envelope addressed to me. It was from some highschool out a-ways, and it had a letter inside, that said I had been awarded a scholarship to attend this highschool.
Of course, at that point, I went to seek out my father, since it said check enclosed, and there was no check enclosed. Plus the little envelope that had that printed on the front was open. So I fiii~iiigured it was a safe bet he had it. After I wrestled with him to get the check back, we spent the afternoon calling the highschool I was to attend this summer.
Of course, I let my dad explain why we were dropping, since in retrospect, saying "Yeah, I just got a letter and free money from a school I've never heard of, fuck you, I'm keeping my money and going there," might come across as somewhat rude. Needless to say, he worded it a lot nicer than that. He might be childish, but at least he had a hold of the language.
So... that's why I'm here; I tried to google the name of the school, but the only stories I saw were about some famous graduates, nothing actually about the school itself.
Well, I'm leaving to go tomorrow, so I've gotta go pack. Ja.
Relationships
Where Ringo Muses About Who She's Met
Nothing!
Ringo's Friends and Family Back Home - (Ringo's NPCs)
Shingo Rumugi, age 32. Born on August 21st, 19XX, in Kyoto, Japan. A man of Japanese ancestry, his favorite color is whatever color his shirt is on a given day. He's Human, and works for peanuts in a small Piano Bar down in Nagano, where he's also living now to be within driving distance of his daughter, Ringo.
Minami Rumugi, age 29. Born on December 13th, 19XX, in Nagano, Japan. A woman born of Japanese parentage, her favorite color is a Buttery Yellow. She's human, and is currently in New York City, preforming on Broadway; where she lives during shows in a Studio Apartment. In the off seasons, she lives in Nagano, Japan with her mother.