一篠 優花・Yuka Ichijou・Reflector Shine

Main contact method is voice via LupNet.

Player Information
Name: Prof
Age: 31
Contact: ProfessorProf
Current characters: None

Character Information
Name: Yuka Ichijou
Appearance:
Non-transformed: 5'10", masculine. Athletic build, shortish black hair, reserved body language. Usually takes good care of her appearance, so neat and well-groomed.
Transformed: Here.

Age: 17
Canon Point: Following her reconciliation with the Reflectors after defecting.

Note: I'm apping this character together with Claire's OC Kyouko Kougami - the two share a setting and backstory. This is with her permission.

Canon History:
This story takes place in a world that is, at first, indistinguishable from our own. Specifically, in Kawamiishi, a medium-sized town on the outskirts of Tokyo. Next to that ordinary world, however, is a parallel world of dreams called the Imaginaerium.

The Imaginaerium is a surreal reflection of the real world, shape by the collective unconscious of the people living in it. Each human in the real world has a manifestation in the Imaginaerium in the form of a Shard, a crystal housing their soul. When a human's mental state deteriorates though intense discord and trauma in the real world, their Shard distorts in the Imaginaerium. In extremely rare cases, this can lead to the Shard taking root and infecting the landscape around it, transforming it into a Labyrinth - a monster-filled dungeon manifesting the darkness within the person's heart. If left unchecked, the Shard at the center of a Labyrinth will become a Mirage, a twisted copy of the Shard's owner who will eventually take over its host. Once this happens, the original human's personality is replaced by the Mirage, drive only by the discord and emotional impulses that led to its creation.

When this extremely rare occurence happens, the Imaginaerium reaches out to the human world. Any human with a strong desire to change themselves can be chosen by the Imaginaerium to become a Reflector, and fight to destroy Labyrinths. When one becomes a Reflector, they gain the ability to switch between the real world and inhabiting a reflection of their ideal self in the Imaginaerium, where they have incredible powers with which to fight the monsters lurking there.

In the year 2001, there was a disastrous multiple-car pileup accident in Kawamiishi, right outside the local high school. This incident was the spark that led to a series of Labyrinths manifesting in the Imaginaerium, which in turn led to the awakening of three new Reflectors, chief among them a girl named Nana Kuroi. Nana, a meek girl who dreamed of being a bold and dazzling girl who helps others, assumed the role of Reflector Diamond, and led her two friends in battle to save her peers from being overtaken by their Mirages.

For a while, this was fine. However, it couldn't last - the incident that destroyed Diamond's team revolved around Momoka Hanasaki, AKA Reflector Blossom. Nana discovered that Momoka was living in an abusive household, and when she tried to do something about it, she only ended up making things worse. The Hanasaki family moved away, and Momoka blamed Nana for trying to interfere and ruining everything. Realizing her own powerlessness, Nana turned away from her mission to fight Labyrinths, and instead decided that the only way to help everyone would be to fuse the Imaginaerium with the real world, letting every human in it fuse with their ideal selves and skipping past all the messy business of having to work for anything.

In reality, what was happening is that Nana's Shard was corrupted, and had formed a Labyrinth unbeknownst to her. When a Reflector gains a Labyrinth, the effects are much more dire than they are for regular humans. Over the following years, Nana retreated from the real world to live in the Imaginaerium, and the Imaginaerium began to draw closer to reality, making it easier for discord in our world to corrupt Shards. Sixteen years later, the Imaginaerium reached out again, calling forth a new team of Reflectors to save it.

Character History:
Ryouma Ichijou grew up as an only child to unremarkable parents, in an unremarkable town. Her childhood wasn't anything unusual, save for the eventual understanding that she identified as female, despite being raised as a boy. She kept this knowledge to herself, unsure what to do with it besides carefully maintaining her appearance to present as at least a tiny bit feminine when she could. Her well-groomed, slightly androgynous appearance had the unintentional side effect of making her very popular with the girls at her school, and she developed a bit of a reputation as the handsome, standoffish third year who all the girls are crazy about but doesn't seem to have many actual friends.

Her first encounter with Kyouko Kougami was on the roof of the school, when she found a notebook Ryouma dropped and sought her out to return it. Kyouko accidentally caught her trying to teach herself ballroom dancing, but didn't make fun of her about it at all. Being the only girl to talk to her in a while who didn't have an obvious huge crush, Ryouma and Kyouko got to talking fairly regularly, and became friends. Then, the Imaginaerium sent out a cry for help.

Kyouko was the first to get pulled into the Imaginaerium and become a Reflector. Ryouma was the second - when she emerged into the dream world, she found herself in the feminine body she had always dreamed of happening, and was overwhelmed with emotion. Kyouko (now Reflector Heart) found her before she could get into any trouble, and she opened up about her feelings of wanting to be a girl. Unsurprisingly, Kyouko was fine with it, and the two ended up teaming up as Reflector Heart and Reflector Shine. Ryouma also confided a desire to change her name, and started going by Yuka when it was just the two of them.

The team eventually reached three girls, working together to slip as needed into the Imaginaerium to destroy Dungeons and save the hearts of their friends in the real world who had become corrupted. Everything changed for Yuka, though, when Kyouko's mentor and guide, Reflector Diamond, revealed her true nature as Paragon Diamond, the one behind the interference between the Imaginaerium and reality. Paragon Diamond explained that her dream was to unite the two worlds permanently, allowing everyone to instantly become the people they dreamed of being and letting everyone exist in unchanging perfection. The other two Reflectors rejected this dream, but Yuka succumbed to the pressure of her inability to see a happy future for herself and defected, joining Paragon Diamond.

Isolated from the rest of the team, Yuka was unaware of Diamond's actual intent with recruiting her - as the turmoil in her heart increased, unbeknownst to her, her heart began to manifest a Labyrinth. Labyrinths born of Reflectors are special, and especially dangerous; the whole reason the worlds began to interfere with each other was because of Reflector Diamond's Labyrinth. If Yuka's Labyrinth finished materializing and took root, it would merge the worlds, realizing Diamond's goal at Yuka's expense. However, while the Labyrinth was nearing completion, Kyouko returned to the Imaginaerium and the two Reflectors confronted each other. In the end, Kyouko was able to reach Yuka's heart and bring her back from the edge of despair, disrupting her Labyrinth before it could take root. With the Reflectors once again united, the team took the fight to Paragon Diamond, defeating her in a climactic battle.

In the aftermath of the incident, while Yuka's Labyrinth had been interrupted, its limited growth had already altered the connection between the two worlds. It was now possible for the Reflectors to transform in the real world - but this also meant it was possible for influence from the Imaginaerium to turn humans into monsters in the real world. In the future, there would be many more battles and revelations - the fact that the interference with the Imaginaerium didn't stop with Diamond's defeat made this clear - but for now, this is where Yuka's story ends.

Personality:
Yuka is a quiet, thoughtful introvert. She needs time with herself to recharge after particularly heavy social interactions, and trends towards keeping her feelings hidden. Growing up as a trans girl without having access to the language to talk about or understand what she was feeling, she quickly grew accustomed to the idea that other people definitely wouldn't understand or sympathize with her worries. So, she quickly got used to playing her cards close to her chest - she's more likely to try and read people to figure out what they want her to say and go with that than be honest about her feelings. As far as she's concerned, the building stress of lying constantly about her emotions is a fair price to pay for avoiding the danger of social exile for being weird.

Ultimately, this means Yuka spends a lot of time not talking, which means a lot of time listening. She's highly perceptive, especially when it comes to other people, quickly picking up from subtle cues what kind of person someone is and what they're probably thinking. She's always paying attention when people around her are talking, and has a good memory, so if you say something around her, she'll certainly remember it later. Rather than talking openly, she is content to listen carefully, think carefully, then choose her words carefully before opening her mouth.

Due to a combination of personality and circumstances, Yuka is plagued with self-doubt. Whatever happens to her, her mind will try to twist into justifying as her own fault. Whatever she does, she'll invent ideas of how it could be upsetting or hurting other people. She suffers badly from impostor syndrome, thinking that if people really understood her for who she was, they would hate her, and that all her positive actions are her just her pretending to be a good person. She is kind and compassionate to a fault, setting aside her own well-being to help others find happiness, because she feels on some level that she doesn't deserve happiness. This is why her powers, born from her heart, allow her to heal and strengthen others but not herself. It's also why she betrayed the Reflectors.

Becoming a Reflector, and gaining the body that comes with it, was a dream come true for Yuka, but it also served to remind her of the painful, impassable gulf between who she was and who she wanted to be. For all that the Imaginaerium gave her, it also cemented in her mind the notion that she would never be able to become that person, and therefore would never be able to be happy. Paragon Diamond's plan to merge the real world with the Imaginaerium gave her what she saw as her only chance at happiness - to skip the impossible and directly, permanently become her own ideal, while allowing the same hope for anyone else similarly trapped. Eventually, when Kyouko confronted her in the Imaginaerium, she came to accept that this was a reckless plan that was making an important decision for other people without their consent, but still resisted coming back because she thought that she had already taken things too far to be forgiven. She was only able to break free of her doubts and Diamond's influence because of Kyouko's willingness to look past her actions and understand why she was suffering, and love her in spite of what she almost did.

Following her confrontation with Paragon Diamond and reconciliation with Kyouko, Yuka took a step forward regarding her own confidence. While she's guarded with her emotions in general, she's become much more open with the people close to her (mainly the other Reflectors), and trusts them to understand who she is and what she's thinking or feeling. She's also fiercely, relentlessly loyal to her friends, willing to go to any lengths to protect or support them. All is not perfect, of course; she still feels guilty over hurting Kyouko, and the lengths she went to in order to save Yuka makes her occasionally feel like a burden (a feeling she has so far kept to herself). Despite having gained the power to transform into her Reflector form indefinitely in the real world, she feels apprehensive about doing so, because in some hard-to-justify way it feels like she's lying to people by presenting them a fake image instead of the "real" her. The fact of the matter is that the body created by the Imaginaerium reflects who she actually is in her heart, so in that sense it's more "real" than the body she was born with, but it will take a while longer for her to accept that. Ultimately, the most important thing she gained from her trials is a greater sense of mindfulness of her own anxieties - she still feels the same worries and moments of self-doubt, but she's more capable of understanding them as the intrusive thoughts they are, and accordingly less inclined to surrender to them.

Yuka's decision-making process is slow, careful, and methodical. She doesn't jump to conclusions quickly, instead thinking and rethinking and overthinking the various sides to anything she's wrestling with at great length. Once she overcomes that cliff of indecision, though, her resolve manifests, and she'll stick to her decision no matter how difficult it becomes. She takes action like a freight train - slow to start, but impossible to stop once she's built up the mental momentum to see it through to completion.

Abilities:
Yuka is a Reflector, a sort of magical girl. She carries with her a Shard, a crystalized piece of her own soul that she can draw power from in order to transform into Reflector Shine. As Shine, she appears as the person she aspires to be - in her case, nearly a foot shorter and with a feminine body. There's no particular time limit to transforming, so she'll be in this form most of the time.

While transformed, Shine's speed, strength and durability are significantly upgraded, putting all of her physical parameters well above that of a mundane human. By the standards of her team, though, she's still weak - she's slower and doesn't hit as hard as Reflector Heart, because her primary powers manifested as more magical than physical. She has two special powers - Healing and Enhancement.

Healing: Shine can concentrate to generate a circle around her (radius about 3m) that acts as a healing aura. While standing inside it, other people's injuries will gradually heal on their own over time, as will fatigue and exhaustion. It's not a perfect ability - life-threatening injuries may be beyond her ability to heal, and things like missing limbs won't grow back. It also can't heal Shine herself, and overusing it can drain her stamina. Also, while projecting the healing aura, she can't move.

Enhancement: Rather than an aura, this allows Shine to strengthen one person. The range is longer, and as long as she concentrates, the target's strength and speed will be amplified by about double. The effect has diminishing returns for already-powerful targets - a normal human might get a 100% boost or more, but someone like Goku might only get a 30% boost. As with healing, she can't move or fight to protect herself while using this ability.

Inventory:
Clothes (male student uniform, plus her magical girl outfit when she transforms)
Smartphone (a little out of date, and also probably rendered useless by water damage by the time she arrives)
Notebook (also extremely damp by now, half-full of notes from class and doodles)
Shard (magical crystal that lets her transform into Reflector Shine)

Sample

Thread Sample:
TDM toplevel
TDM thread
TDM thread
Musebox thread