Full Name - Saiba Aoi Hometown - Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, Japan Quirk Type - Transformation Gender - Femme -
P E R S O N A L I T Y
Hyperactive Aoi is fairly bursting with energy, all the time.. Often she needs to be reminded to slow down before she snowballs herself out of control, which is quite a common thing, all told. She is a chatterbox of the highest order; her mouth running like a faucet is second nature to her. Her attention span is questionable at best, and prone to wandering much of the time. All that being said, though, when it's time to go do hero things that energy becomes a tremendous asset, allowing her to keep pushing on and giving 110% for quite a long time.
Mischievous But when she's not 'doing hero things,' that energy is still there, and it does still have to go somewhere. Aoi is an unrepentant prankster, often leveraging her Quirk to jump around into other students' devices and sticking around for a while to mess with them. She never really wants to cause any real problems with this; she has less than zero interest in blackmailing or coercing or any of that distinctly non-heroic stuff. But while she'd never intentionally hurt you, she can be exremely annoying.
Positive Still, for all that irritation she can bring...she can still always be counted on to have a smile on her face. And while her having her grinning at you after she calls your mom through your cell phone without you knowing can be frustrating, having her stepping forward with a grin when things get bad and your backs are to the wall is another thing entirely. Even when playing her pranks, she is ever a font of limitless cheer, just as ready to laugh at herself as she is to laugh at you. She holds no grudges from pranks--turnabout is fair play, after all--and it really takes some doing to pull the smile off her face.
Physical Description
Saiba Aoi is...not tall. Standing at a tiny 148cm (more or less 4'10"), she is head and shoulders below several of her classmates, and still significantly shorter than even the other 'short' students. Cornflower blue hair tied in twintails and bright blue eyes frame and sit atop a narrow, pale face that is nearly always sporting a big smile. Her frame is as small as the rest of her and as narrow as her face. Her legs are long (proportionately, at least) and as slender as the rest of her. She is fairly weak as far as appearances go, with relatively undeveloped musculature. Still, though she isn't strong by any means, she's much stronger than she looks. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the obvious appearance: her legs evaporate into pixels and electricity, and then nothingness, from her mid-shin down. She can't fly or anything, but it does mean she never needs to touch the ground.
It must be noticed that with her Quirk fully active--that is to say, with her entire body digitized--she changes appearance slightly on whatever screen she manifests on. Her cornflower blue hair fades to glowing electric blue at the tips, and her blue eyes turn to a bright turquoise-cyan. She gains a few digitized lines on each cheek. Whatever she's wearing or carrying at the time comes with her when she jumps in. Excepting, of course, her phone if she uses it to jump in.
While at school she wears her Ishin Academy uniform as per requirements, when she's got the choice to wear something else she is inordinately fond of a tracksuit jacket with hugely oversized sleeves into which her arms just about disappear.
Personal History
Aoi has always been a computer person.
Even when she was a small child, she was endlessly fascinated by them, often spending hours poking at them (and accomplishing nothing, of course, she was a small child after all). Her mother Kimiko, a four-armed programmer, indulged her daughter, let her fiddle around to her heart's content as long as she didn't touch the work stuff. Still, as Aoi grew, she nursed a private worry. Quirks were inherited. But Aoi didn't have four arms like her, and her husband...
...Well, Saiba Ryoutarou was Quirkless. And as Aoi grew and grew, past six, seven, eight, it looked like she might be Quirkless too. And some of the kids at school were starting to notice.
So both Kimiko and Aoi were delighted--though Kimiko was deeply confused--to find that Aoi's legs had flickered and faded into pixelated data. And when she proudly walked into the classroom, hand in her pocket with her phone, and fell due to her unfamiliar physiology...she vanished. The class was instantly freaked out, and the teacher, even more so, running over in fear. Until...
"Whoaaaa!"
Character Arc
Perhaps it's not obvious at first glance what's up with Aoi, and where her character development will go. Well, I point you to the above backstory and ask you to consider it. For as cheerful and chipper as Aoi is all the time, she's also burdened down by feelings of inadequacy. Being treated as Quirkless until mid-elementary school, and then being told, however gently, that her Quirk just wasn't cut out of hero work... well, it's left some marks on her psyche.
Quirk Description
Aoi's Quirk is Cyber Jump.
A transformation-type Quirk, it allows her to turn her body into computer data. Passively, as mentioned, her legs end mid-calf, and so instead of walking she floats a little ways off the ground. This gives her some advantages, like never needing to touch the ground when she needs to sneak around or if there's something hazardous on the ground, as well as giving her a certain level of controlled descent as long as she's falling feet first. However, it also has a major caveat attached: her legs either being immersed in or deluged with a sufficient amount of water, or being struck with a powerful enough electrical shock, can short her legs out and stop her from 'walking' for anywhere from a few seconds to a handful of minutes as they reboot. They've got a few other properties as well; while she accelerates slower than most, once she's up and running she also runs faster than most, and while she can't jump at all from a standstill, her jump height is dependent on how fast she's going. At her current maximum speed--roundabout sixteen mph--she can jump about four feet in the air.
Actively, she can turn herself entirely into data, jumping into a device and working as a rogue computer program of sorts. She can either enter through a data stream that she has access to--i.e. disappearing into the camera network after being recorded by jumping after her recording--or perform a manual override by touching the object.
Once she's inside, she can move around the settings and data of the machine as she wishes, pretty much setting the rules inside of whatever device she's in. Pretty much nothing happens that she can't control. She can also jump from device to device as long as there's a stream of data connecting the two that she can use as a pathway, whether that be hopping between computers on the same Wi-Fi network or calling someone from inside of a phone and then hopping along the cell data.
That said, this power is certainly not limitless. First, in addition to the limitations of where she can enter a device, she can only leave at a terminal--she can't just jump out of a Wi-Fi signal in the middle of a house, only out of a computer, or phone, or router--and she can't leave instantly at any time. According to her, the dataspace of any given device has an 'exit door' that she needs to get back to before she can leave (although the same is true for riding on signals, it's MUCH faster for her, she can zip along one in less than a second as long as she's paying attention). And while she's immune to physical harm, there are a suite of other things that can spell disaster for her.
While she can stop commands to shut a computer or phone down, there's nothing she can do to stop someone from unplugging it, or taking out the battery. If that happens, then as long as the device is off, so is she; in a state of unconsciousness for as long as it takes to turn back on. If access to a network is revoked while she's in a device, whether by unplugging an ethernet cable or having the signal itself shut off (she can turn off airplane mode if it's turned on, so that doesn't do much), she is trapped inside of that device and can't leave until it's either reconnected, or plugged in to a different device manually, after which she can jump up the cable.
And finally, and most dangerous: if a device is destroyed and she can't jump out in time, either through not paying attention, or the device being switch off...then it's lights out for her, forever.
Description in brief: Passively, Aoi has digitized legs that have different properties than normal people, cutting off some avenues and opening up others. Actively, she can transform into computer data, jumping inside of a terminal. She can travel at internet-fast speeds on Wi-Fi, data cables, or wire connections, but needs to open a channel through cell data by making a call at the moment, and can only travel between devices; she can't jump out midway. If the device she's in is disconnected from all data, she can't exit it. If it's turned off, she goes unconscious until it goes back on. If it's destroyed, she dies.
As yet, she hadn't told any member of Rhodes Island any piece of her past more than they were required to know. She didn't have any kind of Dublinn iconography left on her, nothing that would indicate any kind of allegiance. The only thing to hint at her origin was the unshakeable accent that clung to her every word, something that she could stop no more than breathing. And in Rhodes Island, it seemed that nobody particularly cared. She thought she'd heard someone else talking in a similar accent, but every time, she'd turned and walked the other way. She didn't want to deal with any of it anymore. In all likelihood there was no link to Dublinn; but there could be, and that was enough.
The crystals embedded in her left shoulder twinged, and she winced as she rolled the joint. It never did anything for the pain, but she couldn't help but do it anyway.
That being said...as little as Rhodes Island seemed to care about the few hints of her past that she gave off...Rhodes Island weren't Victorians. She had a bit of a paranoia attached to them ever since she could remember; and the County Hillock incident had only made it so much worse. Being around any number of them now was enough to make her skin start to itch, and certainly enough to stay well and truly silent. Ideally, to never see or interact with them at all.
But this wasn't exactly an ideal situation.
So Aoife turned to Seven, wiping the fringe of her hair away from her face, where it had already begun to take on sweat. "Think being Rhodes Island could give us some pull on customs?" A pause as she inhaled a long breath--"You know better than me."
For a brief moment after Mio stopped her from falling and helped her up, the two of them just stared at each other, and Haruhi became keenly aware of how much taller than her Mio was.
Then Mio jerked away with a "sorry," and, stare-off broken, Haruhi jerked, then blinked in confusion. Sorry? Sorry for what? She'd saved Haruhi from bonking her head on the floor, if anything Haruhi should be apologizing to her. So...what? But before she could ask, Mio poked her head out into the forge, observed what was going on. Haruhi would normally want to be there looking out as well--her curiosity was a powerful force indeed--but more powerful was that feeling of apprehension and fear she'd felt, enough to make her sick. So instead she slumped up against the wall, still breathing heavily, and trying to calm herself down. She lifted her hands up in front of her, staring at them as they trembled. She'd never felt anything like that before.
"One moment."
Haruhi's head jerked up to find Mio stepping out of the smithy where they stood, and out into the open air. A moment later and she was lost to view. A part of Haruhi wanted to go out and see what she was doing, but just the thought of going towards the man--what was it, Katsuro?--sent another bolt of lightning through her. So no, she would be in here until he left, she decided. She didn't know what he was carrying, what it did. The voices she heard--Keiko and Fumiko, it seemed--didn't seem nearly as spooked as she was, so maybe it wasn't that big a deal; but Haruhi trusted her instincts, and whatever it was, if it elicited that level of fear from her, it was probably best to keep away from both him and it.
Quinn took a long, deep breath, staring up at the perfect night sky that hovered above them. The faraway Hovvi moved with a dreamy blur, and her heart squeezed with what in the waking world might be pain, as vague, scattered memories of a sunny day months back passed behind her eye. But the memories were quiet, and the pain was eclipsed; not only by the deadening effect of the dream, but by her own pride alongside Quinnlash's. And her each word rang true: Quinn nodded and stretched, taking another deep breath.
"Yeah.. Her voice was quiet and warm, and she looked down on the little her with a smile that was gentle, but no less happy. "Yeah, we did it." They'd done it. They really had. They had lived up to what it meant to be Ablaze. Screw all the people telling her that she'd done something wrong by crediting someone with saving her life. The same people had told her to either kill Roaki outright, or leave her for dead. Sure, Axan Dane was a Euseran, and from what she'd seen, the Euseran Reputation was well-earned. But as far as Quinn could tell, Axan had dropped into danger, saved her life, and asked for nothing in return.
Plus, she also didn't like dueling, it seemed, and in Quinn's book? That was a win right there.
She stood from her seat, ambling over to the cooler and pulling out a pouch of melonberry juice. Popping the straw in, she took a long drink, and the nostalgia and memory of that day that felt so long ago--the good parts--filled her up like nothing else. Looking up at the stars again, she smiled softly.
With the laundry situation over and done with and Dahlia calm, Quinn sank down further into her chair, throwing the crook of her elbow over her face as she tamped down the entire nightmarish half an hour she'd just had. Really, it would be so much better to completely forget everything that had happened after she'd hugged her sister in the hangar. All the complicated junk that everyone (her included, of course) had to deal with now. At least for a while.
All the while, she pondered what Dahlia had asked. What did she want to eat? At that exact moment, she was pretty sure that she couldn't stomach much, but she knew as well as anyone that she'd need to eat eventually. She heaved a long sigh, trying to think back to things that she'd seen made, or seen in cookbooks and coming up with very little. She sighed again, then dragged her arm away from her face and hauled herself to her feet, making a beeline towards the kitchen. If she couldn't remember any of the recipes she'd seen or anything she really wanted to eat, then she'd just need to scan the cookbooks until she found something.
Plucking a book from the small shelf on a whim, she found herself looking at a book of Lombardi recipes. Plunking it down on the kitchen table, she popped it open to a random page, but found nothing interesting. She let her cheek rest on her hand, turning the pages as she tried to find something she wanted to eat.
Oh, hey, that looked good!
She perked up, instantly paying more attention to the picture, then the name, then glancing over the list of ingredients. Without looking up, she called out,
"Hey, Deelie...? Have you ever heard of something called 'fettucine alfredo' before?"
Quinn didn't answer right away, opting instead to help Dahlia pick up her clothes, shake the ice cubes out of the shoes, find the sweatpants in the freezer, and so on and so forth. It was almost impressive just how much Roaki had managed to accomplish with no legs and one arm in such a short time. After bringing it all back into Dahlia's room, she returned to the common area, sinking down into her beloved blue chair and staring up the ceiling before she finally responded, a look on her face that could only be described as brittle.
"...No. I didn't figure anything out. I think I'm even more confused." She paused, took a breath, thought. At least her entire brain wasn't trying to combust in on itself anymore. Talking to her sister and deep breathing, probably. Both of those were things that calmed her down, so combining them--and the distraction of Roaki's textile slaughter--had her thinking pretty straight again. "Buuuut I did figure out that I can't figure it out right now, and that I shouldn't worry about it until I can."
That was, of course, underselling the turmoil that was still boiling inside of her, threatening to burst out at any moment; Quinn was emotionally fragile at the best of times, and this was not exactly that. But she found that when she was with Roaki, it was a bit easier to keep it all down, to hide it and deal with it later. Perhaps it was an artifact of the way that they'd talked when Roaki was still in that room in medical, or perhaps it was just the ways that their personalities played. But even though she really did want to curl up in a ball again and keep crying some more, she...wasn't. A faint ghost of what might one day be a smile came to her face as she considered that Roaki could therefore be perhaps classified as a good influence. "So...thanks--"
She realized only after she said it that she didn't exactly know what she wanted to thank Roaki for. Just that she did. So she paused for a second, only to shake her head a moment later.
Quinn...stared. At the clothing scattered around, the brutal fabric massacre covering essentially the entire common room of the dorms. Dahlia screaming at Roaki. Justifiably.
Stared some more, at the entire bizarre tableau.
Stared at Roaki, as she let fly a bunch more of Dahlia's clothes.
The spell was broken as a pair of balled-up socks bonked her in the nose, prompting a sneeze of alarm. Her eyebrow twitched, and the loud, jagged grinding in her head was nearly audible as her brain abruptly shifted gears that were not, at that moment, prepared to shift. Dahlia's stuff being thrown about--Dahlia yelling--Roaki doing it--Quinn's affection for Roaki--
The socks that had bounced off her face rolled to a stop a few feet away from her, and for a moment that felt frozen in time she just...stood there. And blinked. And stared at the socks, completely unsure what she should do in this situation.
Then the gears in her brain caught and started to move again, and something like a strangled growl crossed with a tired groan seeped from her throat. She marched up to Roaki, face caught in some bizarre triangulation between sadness, confusion, and stormy frustration. Taking care not to step on Dahlia's dress, she stood in front of the smaller--and legless--girl, took a deep breath, bent down, lifted her hand, and...
Flicked her once, gently. Right in the middle of the forehead. "Roaki, you..." she chided--then paused, and the chiding tone left her voice, to be replaced by restrained frustration. Still gentle, as Quinn always was with Roaki, but present nonetheless as Quinnlash's anger reared its head as well. "Apologize to Dahlia. Right now." She took another deep breath as she straightened, trying to quell the irritation and annoyance that were bubbling up in her. She'd had a long day. "You're acting like a child. You're better than this."
Member
Mcmolly
Altered Tundra
Supermaxx
Zeus23
Xaltwind
Lurking Krog
SONIC
Neziul
Not a Sayan
Obscene Symphony
