User Profile

YOUR NAME: RM
YOUR LIVEJOURNAL: zinthos
AIM SCREENNAME: EpicFailNinja

CHARACTER'S NAME: Sumiya Miho (炭谷美火) [In order, the kanji mean “ember,” “valley,” “beautiful,” and “flame.”]
CHARACTER'S LIVEJOURNAL: vestiality
AGE: 16. She’s a first-year high school student who had her b-day in October. o/
BIRTH DATE: October 2nd (Virgo)
HOMETOWN: Hikone, Shiga Prefecture, Japan
OCCUPATION: Student, for now. She used to help her grandmother with shrine duties while she lived in Hikone.
GRADE: First-year high school student.
CLUBS: None at the moment. She knows she should gravitate towards the more traditional clubs (since that’s what she’s good at), but she’s always wanted to be on the archery team…
SEX: N-never! .///. Er, female.
LEVEL: 5
PLAYED BY: Zashiki Warashi from xxxHolic.

Charm: 3
Academics: 5
Courage: 1
(-1 Points for adding Recarm to her Persona abilities.)

WEAKNESSES: Miho kind of lacks a spine. Oh sure, she’s blushy and cute and kind of sweet, but she’s also an extreme pushover. It’s incredibly easy to get her to do what you want, because she’ll cave at the slightest pressure. As a result, Miho tends to take the path of least resistance in general, gravitating towards the things that are easiest for her and/or cause the least amount of trouble for others. Doing new things and approaching new people are two of the most terrifying things in the world for her. Needless to say, discovering her Persona was a traumatic experience.

Physically, Miho is also a tiny little twig of a thing with very little physical ability whatsoever. She’s not completely hopeless—her grandmother did keep her busy with chores, after all—but you could still probably push her over with one finger. And then she’d apologize about getting in your way. :(

STRENGTHS: Although shy, Miho is a genuinely warm and affectionate person…if you don’t scare her off first, that is. She almost always puts others before herself and is very good at working out a good compromise. And while she’s not good at trying new things, once she figures out that she likes something, she sticks with it. Miho is also very good with her hands. She’s an excellent cook, loves calligraphy, and is almost always in the middle of knitting something, assuming she’s allowed to take her supplies with her. She is all about making little things and giving them to people that she likes. … It’s easier than talking to them, at least.

Also, since discovering her Persona, she’s … sort of toughened up a little. It’s not much, but it was enough for her to attempt fighting Shadows when her grandmother called her back to Hikone. She’s still an absolute pushover when it comes to real people, but Shadows? She can sort of deal with those.

WEAPON OF CHOICE: Kitchen implements! Various stuff. One battle, she might have a frying pan. The next, chopsticks! Spatulas! Trivets! Etc. They all come out to be weak strike weapons in the end.
PERSONA: Vesta (Roman; goddess of the home and hearth.)
WEAK; Ice, Dark
STRONG; Light
NULL/BLOCK; Fire
ABSORB; N/A
HIGH-EVADE; N/A
PERSONA ABILITIES: Agi, Dia, Patra, and Recarm. Vesta is primarily a support/healing Persona, with a particular talent for fixing status ailments; however, she’s good with magic too, so her Agi skills will pack a punch once she gets a couple levels in her. No physical attacks. Definitely gonna learn stuff like Spring of Life and Samarecarm later on. (Fire/Anti-Status Effects/Healing)
ARCANA: Empress
FACTION: S.E.E.S.
PERSONALITY: If you had to pick one word to describe Miho, it would be “shy.” (Or maybe “shy as all flaming fuck,” but that’s five words, so it doesn’t count.) This is a girl who would rather hide behind a telephone pole and admire you from afar than actually say a single word to you. It’s not that she isn’t social—she likes people, and she likes having friends, but she can’t remember how on earth you do something like that without your grandmother hanging over your shoulder 24/7. Coupled with her extreme phobia of confrontation, the side that most people see is the blushy, stuttery, oh-I’m-so-sorry-for-troubling-you little kouhai. (Even some of the students in her class probably call her Kouhai. She’s just that tiny and unintimidating.)

Underneath that … Miho is still pretty timid. She spent most of her life hanging off every word her grandmother said. Even now, with a bit more experience under her belt and a new reason to separate herself from her grandmother’s influence, she’s still extremely nervous about everything. Although she is inherently a good, sweet person, acting on that impulse usually comes in strange, obscure ways. For example, she met one of her best friends back in Hikone because she knitted the friend a pair of mittens and left them in the friend’s locker. Once a relationship starts, she’s usually okay, but the initiation is incredibly rocky.

Also, Miho is one of those people whose values … really haven’t developed yet. Right now, she’s still very uptight and traditional, and thus doesn’t really understand how to be a real teenager (or an adult, for that matter) just yet. One day, she’ll find a cause she’ll find a good outlet for her devotions, but for now, she’s very, very floundery. And very easy to get molded into something that may not be entirely healthy for her. She is a very in-between person at the moment. In-between homes, in-between family members … and now in-between the choices she has to make about her own life. Where should she live? Should she continue to fight the Shadows? Her return to S.E.E.S. is very much an unsure, temporary thing, even now.

In addition to all that, the girl has some very real quirks and flaws. She is meticulous to the point of being OCD—absolutely everything must be in its place. It’s one of the few things that she’ll fight people about. Or, at least, she’ll succumb to whoever’s bitching at her and then move things once they aren’t looking. While she generally submits to everyone around her, she needs control over the little things in her life. Making sure food is cooked correctly. Taking care of her uniform. Knitting. Etc. Also, the girl does have a temper … somewhere down in there. It’s a very timid little temper, but it does remember everything that has been done to her. Miho can hold grudges for a very, very long time.

BACKGROUND: Sumiya Miho was born in Hikone, Japan, to a single mother. Horrified by her daughter’s supposed recklessness, Miho’s grandmother (Sumiya Kaede) took custody of her, while the disowned mother moved to the Tokyo area. As a result, Miho never really knew her mother as a child. Her grandmother was an incredibly strict old lady who ran the local Shinto shrine with an iron fist. She raised Miho in what she considered to be the “right” (aka traditional) way. As a result, Miho spent most of her time at the shrine, completely sheltered for the first few years of her life. Even when she started attending a regular school, Kaede made sure that she only did “proper” things with her life: traditional clubs, no unusual boys coming home with her, and plenty of time spent helping out at the shrine. :|

And then, when Miho was in middle school, something unusual happened: her mother got in contact with her again. As it turned out, her mother (Sumiya Naoko) had been working hard all those years she’d been separated from the family, and had gotten herself a steady job as a local newspaper reporter for Tatsumi Port Island. And now that she had enough money to support a kid, she wanted Miho back. At first, her grandmother was opposed to this. Naoko and the main family weren’t on good terms, after all. But Naoko pleaded with Kaede, and, eventually, she gave in. Miho was sent to live with her mother—for one year. If, at the end of that year, Naoko’s parenting skills don’t live up to Kaede’s standards, then Kaede will insist that Miho return home to Hikone.

All of this has been more than a little stressful for Miho. Leaving her friends and her hometown was bad enough; trying to reacclimate herself to a new town and a new school has been incredibly stressful for someone as shy and reticent as she is. And to top it off, her mother is being incredibly smothering at the moment. Between the fact that she just got to see her daughter again and the part where her mother will take Miho back if she doesn’t do a good job … Naoko’s just a tad bit overenthusiastic about this whole “parenting” thing. Miho’s been doing her best to make things easier on her mother, but lately, things have been getting weird. Do normal people wake up in the middle of the night to see coffins in the street? Or a bright, green moon overhead? And why is it that, when she looks in a mirror, she sometimes sees a face that is not her own…?

… is how things were before she came to S.E.E.S. After a rocky initiation, she settled into things easily enough. Her mother worried about her late-night excursions quite a bit, but in the end, there was very little she could do, since her reporter job kept her quite busy. And so Miho did her part for the team, occasionally going on a Tartarus run but mostly practicing in her own quiet way. (AKA sitting in front of the dorm and watching for Shadows.) She never received any unusual injuries, but she did often come home with bruises and scratches. Her mother worried, of course, but once again couldn’t do anything to stop her.

And then … one day, Miho came home a bit more bloodied than usual, only to find her grandmother waiting at their apartment. Oops. Needless to say, there was a pretty awful fight, followed by Grandmother dragging her granddaughter straight back to Hikone, with no time to say goodbyes or do anything else, really. Once there, she quickly settled back into her normal life at the shrine … except, of course, the Dark Hour kept happening. Miho rarely saw Shadows (and of course she couldn’t fight without an Evoker), but she couldn’t forget about SEES, either. Sometimes she would stray off on her own, practicing with a borrowed kitchen implement or two, or quietly talking to Vesta in her head. And finally, she came to a conclusion: she had to go back to SEES.

Convincing her grandmother to let her go back … was a lot harder. But she stuck with it, and finally (months later) her grandmother gave in. She had to make some special arrangements with school (what with the end of the year looming), but they allowed her to come back to Iwatodai after taking some tests and essentially finishing her first year of high school a trimester early. (She still attends classes, of course, but her former school already marked her as having passed first grade.) So now she’s back! And slightly less nervous, but … not by much.

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