#also if the rating allows it akane swears like a sailor and regrets that she keeps teaching tomoko swear words

[inamindfarfaraway]

Phantom Knight Afterlife Club: Part Two

Part One

Characters

Name

Akane Gushiken, aka Phantom Blood.

Age

Nineteen.

Appearance

Akane has a tall, muscular build with no excess fat and a gaunt face. Her tanned skin bears a multitude of scars, some of which are hidden, but that apart from the stab wound that caused her death she doesn’t mind being seen. Her thick black hair is back-length, unwashed and matted, in a scruffy ponytail to keep it out of her face. She has light brown eyes with blood red scelera. Her weariness makes her look older than she is.

She wears a black leather jacket with the silver zip on the right side, silver studs on the lapels and a red heart symbol over her heart with red major blood vessel lines branching out from it across the jacket; a dark crimson top; a thick, study bright red belt with a silver buckle; asymmetrically ripped black trousers with red hearts on each hip and knee; and black leather boots with more silver studs on the toes. Her living magical girl costume was similar, but had orange instead of red. Eight black steel pint canisters with vertical glass windows are securely attached to her belt, four on each side, containing a metaphysical facsimile of her lost blood. The belt also has a loop for her knife. Her shackles are around her wrists with short broken chains from over the inside, where she would be able to feel her pulse if she still had one (symbolic of her active, pugnacious, hands-on nature).

Power and Weakness

She can manipulate human blood and any other liquid containing so much as a drop of it (though more blood content means greater ease and finesse). She can freeze it into any shape and make it a vapour. Losing all her blood would make her cease to exist.

Weapon

A machete with a black hilt.

Backstory

Akane was born into a low-income family in an impoverished inner city district with low education and high crime rates. Her parents were loving and did their best, but her mother was a career thief to provide for her family and went to prison when Akane was seven, pushing her father Hikaru to work so much to keep them alive that he could hardly spend time with his daughter. Feeling invisible and unheard even if she was loved in theory, she spent lots of time playing on the streets and looked to children her age and older for belonging. Making lasting friendships was easier said than done. She ended up entangled in the area’s gang politics and her bonds with her peers were strained by their frequent separation for months at a time to go to court, correctional facilities or hospital. She’s been carrying a knife to defend herself since she was twelve. Sometimes people she’d called friends actively abandoned and betrayed her, sometimes they lost touch, but either way friends soon felt like more trouble and heartache than they were worth. She also almost consistently struggled at her poorly funded and run school, except one year where she had a considerate and nurturing teacher she made real progress under. Then that teacher had to move and Akane dismissed her progress as a fluke. She dropped out when she was fifteen to have more time to take care of Hikaru, who had developed prostate cancer, and make money for them.

It was at this low point that a fire spirit, Farei, offered her the chance to be a magical girl warrior with fire powers. She jumped to take it. Magic seemed the perfect escape from her miserable civilian life. It gave her a sense of purpose and slaughtering demons was a highly cathartic outlet for her previously aimless anger and disaffection. For the first time in her life, she felt like she was good at something. Like she was good enough to make a difference. A magical girl duo in a neighbouring territory were impressed by her skill and invited her to join them several times. She rudely declined, believing she could handle anything herself and unable to trust them.

Two years ago, Hikaru passed away. His cancer had worsened and he hadn’t been able to get a diagnosis until it had progressed to stage three, limiting the effectiveness of treatment. They’d grown a lot closer since she was little and he was the only person in her life she cared about, Farei more of a colleague. She was absolutely devastated. She got more and more reckless and self-destructive, chain-smoking, drinking more and picking fights she knew she couldn’t win, and these patterns of behaviour persisted up to her death, after she’d begun to come to terms with losing her dad.

Her insistence on going solo backfired when following her takedown of almost fifty demons consecutively one night, the last demon standing stabbed her in the back. Too exhausted and in shock to call an ambulance, she bled to death alone. This was coincidentally and the same night the Tenebrous Emperor was killed.

Personality

Akane is pretty disillusioned with humanity, caring little for the good of the many at first and quick to assume the worst of people. In physical combat and social interaction, she believes the best defence is a good offence - and she’s used to needing to perpetually defend herself. She’s easily irritated and belligerent. Anger is the emotion she’s most comfortable expressing. She possesses a sharp tongue, habit of being verbally aggressive and grim, sarcastic, irreverent sense of humour. She relishes the thrill of a good fight, to the point of drawing battles out and provoking strong opponents on purpose when she’s desperately bored or or desiring distraction. Or feeling she deserves to be punished, as she did in the initial throes of her grief. Even if she’s in a good mood and getting along with someone, she likes to playfully tease them. A sign that she’s extraordinarily upset is her not having the energy or engagement to mock or insult anyone, and responding to things that aggravate her with resignation or overt hurt, not snapping.

The other side to this relentless passion and drive is a valiant heroic spirit. Her courage and resilience is unshakable and she will never back down from a challenge, even knowing she’ll lose, if she believes it’s right. Once she sets her mind on something, she will not let it go. And by the same token, she won’t give up on her friends either. She may not have had it as a primary motivation until her teammates roped her into it, but she finds she does earnestly enjoy helping others. It’s so much more satisfying to have a significant positive impact on the world than a significant destructive one. That was a forgotten aspect of the rush of her early days of service. It’s just she believes hurting is what she’s best at and will probably end up doing anyway by her nature, so it’s less wasted effort not to try to do anything else. Harming the already downtrodden or mistreated really infuriates her, most of all children being hurt, manipulated or exploited the way the adults running her old gang exploited her.

She actually loves being a ghost and prefers it to being alive. She can still fight demons, the only thing she lived for; she has cool new powers; she doesn’t need to worry about survival besides the blood thing (it does annoy her that she can die of the exact same thing she already died of); and no human can hurt her ever again. Dying a war hero was honestly the best future she had hoped for in the last two years of her life. It beat going to prison. What does she have to mourn? Lost opportunities for a better life? What happiness and good relationships she did have? She was mourning those already. Being a magical girl was all she had and now it’s all she is. Telling herself she had nothing left to lose anyway and enjoying the perks of her new existence is how she deflects from processing her grief for a) her cruel death young, alone and unloved, b) the true injustice of the hand she was dealt in life and c) her parents, especially her dad. Her personal desire is to find Hikaru’s ghost, or if he isn’t a ghost, figure out how to get to this higher plane he’s on. She struggles the most out of the four to turn visible and tangible, because of her refusal to let herself feel emotional connection to the living world.

Akane is fiercely independent and afraid of vulnerability. She’s deeply averse to self-reflection because of her self-hatred and instead externalizes her turmoil through lashing out. She deliberately pretends to be stereotypically stupid and simplistic muscle so she can trick enemies into underestimating her, but more negatively to consciously stay or try to stay in ignorance of difficult, distressing insights and not have to unpack her feelings. Besides, school always made her feel stupid; she probably is, right? The truth is she’s sharper and more cunning that even she gives herself credit for and often wins using pragmatic tactics. If she would realize her mental strengths and apply herself to improving them, she could achieve much more. She lacks the social skills to be a good manipulator, however.

Over time she comes to care profoundly for her teammates and defend them loyally. People beyond her family showing her kindness like she’s worthy of it is a novelty, but even if she can’t comprehend what value they see in her they’re the best friends she’s ever had and she tries to show that she appreciates it in her own indirect manner. She develops particular protectiveness and affection toward Tomoko and Miu because the obvious pain and injustice in their lives before their deaths resonates with her. She used to disrespect Miu, but her new goal is teaching her to challenge people and express anger. Meanwhile, she thinks Shiko is a spoiled snob and has a rivalry with her. Shiko likes clever plans and leads most of the time; Akane usually thinks brute force would get the job done more easily and sometimes takes the lead in combat since she has the most experience killing demons.

Phantom Pain Form

Spilt Blood. She gets glowing, solid red eyes. Her canisters open and her blood engulfs her in a roiling orb, then freezes into a shell and cracks apart. She emerges with tracks of blood streaming down her cheeks like tears. Her hair bursts out of its ponytail and grows to reach her ankles with crimson streaks. Her clothes’ red and black are inverted with her heart symbols broken in two, the rips her old costume had when she died manifesting in them. The studs are now spikes. Her chains extend and join together, but are pretty loose and she can deftly wield the giant, two-handed sword her machete becomes.

She has Akane’s anger issues and love of violence taken to the extreme and all her inhibitions removed, manically revelling in brutality and willing to hurt anyone, even her friends, who gets between her and instant gratification. She’s essentially feral. She isn’t evil, but amoral and savage, consumed by primal instincts just as Akane has been in survival mode for most of her life. Not thinking critically and engaging her higher thought processes in favour of following her surface emotions is Akane’s main unhealthy coping mechanism, so her Phantom Pain form takes that and runs with it.

***

Name

Shiko Doi.

Age

Seventeen.

Appearance

Shiko is a fair-skinned girl with a curvaceous figure and long legs, fit beneath her plumpness because her level of dancing is strenuous exercise and she’s been doing it regularly for years. Her wavy, glossy dark brown hair hangs loose to her shoulders, neatly brushed and coiffed with pink streaks (that interestingly have returned from her old magical form despite her dying as a civilian). She has brown eyes with white sclera. She wears soft, feminine pink lipstick and eyeshadow and her fingernails are painted the same shade.

She wears an elegant white and pink minidress with crack patterns on the white sections; high white heeled boots with crack patterns; and a flashy gold necklace, earrings and twin bracelets with rhombus-shaped rose quartz gemstones. She has shackles around her upper thighs with chains hanging down to her knees (symbolic of her dynamic, strong and proud nature, always standing tall and striding forward).

Power and Weakness

Geokinesis, based on the mineral component of bones. She can also more intuitively control bone itself. She will die if her spinal cord is disconnected.

Weapon

A poleaxe with an indestructible ghost-bone head that she can reshape and add to at will, e.g. giving it an additional curved spike at the back for grappling, two blades or a flat bludgeoning side. It has a rose quartz rhombus on each side of the bladed end of the handle. When not in battle, she enjoys casually experimenting with new decorative designs once she gets over her squeamishness about it being bone.

Backstory

The sole child of a wealthy family, Shiko grew up pampered. She was popular at school too. She always loved music and became an incredible singer, as well as a talented dancer and actor. She became a magical girl three years ago at fifteen, gifted the power to cleanse locations, objects and people’s souls of runaway dark magic’s spiritual corruption that was rampant in her town’s area, and heal any damage it wrought. She found it easiest to channel through song, when she was totally in tune with her positive emotions.

In a matter of weeks an idol company scout latched onto her. Seeing singing on a larger scale and going on tour as a means of widening her magic application to do more good, she accepted the job and took the stage name Sakura. She had a flower theme with pink as her primary colour (drawing parallels to the Greek goddess Persephone with her theme changing to the inorganic earth when she is suddenly ripped away from life to become a being of the afterlife, and in tandem her trading a cute childlike look for a more mature, regal one). While Sakura was an admired, beloved rising star, over time the stresses of idol life got to Shiko. Her manager was strict and dictatorial. Between training, performing and cultivating and maintaining her image she was so busy she eventually could hardly fit in the magical girl duties not sublimated into her performances. She had little to no quality time with her family and friends. Keeping up with the pressures of sudden fame slowly switched to being her top priority.

She died a week before Akane by accidentally running in front of a fast truck without checking the road for oncoming traffic at night. This was panic, not plain foolishness; she was in a hurry to get to the privacy of her home because she was being stalked by paparazzi. The collision gave her many injuries, but a broken spine was what killed her. Forming the team was her idea.

Personality

Shiko is a professional in everything, realist and generally levelheaded. She likes discipline and structure, one reason she always thrived in school and could hone her artistic talents so well. She doesn’t like to dwell on negatives and wallow in feeling bad, but does account for present and potential problems in order to fix them. She has a strategic, analytical type of intelligence, willing to sacrifice and take the long path to satisfaction, and trying to use every available advantage. Her fighting style is calculated, deliberate and a balance of graceful and forceful. Because of her more grounded nature, she finds making herself visible and tangible intuitive and has fun blending in with the living, grateful that her eyes look normal if the green blood vessels go unnoticed. She deeply resents dying when she had her whole life ahead of her and knows she could have had such great success in adulthood.

She’s very socially skilled: confident, charismatic, a reassuring listener and persuasive speaker. She can intuitively recognize people’s individual strengths, flaws and insecurities and put them to good use, making her as highly effective a leader as she is uplifting and dependable a friend. She’s also prepared to challenge and call out her friends when they’re behaving irrationally. Being respected is more important to her than being liked. She still makes an effort to be liked, of course, but not trusting her, listening to her or valuing her skills will offend her much more seriously. To her ranking them the other way around would be frivolous and petty. For example, if she had to choose between the greater good and a friend’s feelings, she would sacrifice the friend’s feelings, telling herself the friend would understand why she was right and thus no longer be upset when they talked it out. That requires her to be very adept at the art of talking things out. She befriended multiple rivals during her idol career.

Although her motivation is genuinely wanting to help people, it is partly rooted in a subconscious sense of superiority - she doesn’t need help, she’s the one who helps others! Shiko has a lot to be justly proud of but goes too far into vanity. She can be attention-seeking and demanding. The trend of her serving as the voice of reason means she’s quite self-righteous and haughty, and so is awkward, shaken, defensive or downright in denial if it’s pointed out that she’s being irrational or in the wrong, and she can’t receive criticism and correction with nearly the amount of grace with which she expects others to accept hers. As a living magical girl and idol, she was constantly playing to a crafted persona and that mindset is initially her default. She’s inexperienced dropping her perfect walls and allowing people to understand and connect with her true self, and vice versa. The result is her sometimes lacking empathy. Without it her kindness becomes condescension and her inspirational confidence sheer arrogance.

She’s afraid of vulnerability in that she wants to seem like she always has the situation, or at least herself, under control and wants to be treated like an adult when she just isn’t yet, and infallible when she can’t be. She likes to remind her teammates that she was only a couple of months away from her eighteenth birthday. She was looking forward to it, hoping legal adulthood would grant her more autonomy in her career. Her excessive need for control is overcompensation for the lack of it she had as an idol. She’s ashamed of her death, because she threw her life away by not taking the care to look both ways before crossing the street; and because to explain why she wasn’t careful would mean admitting that she didn’t enjoy and control every aspect of her idol life. She’s also more generally ashamed of having been so burdened by consequences of the career she chose and strove to be successful in.

The liberty from life’s concerns and her new friends’ influence are encouraging her to live in the moment and let her guard down more. Shiko is increasingly comfortable acting like a normal teenager. For all her and Akane’s differences, she does begrudgingly recognize her insights as valuable and wishes she would use her brain more, and respects her and the others’ greater knowledge of demons. She encourages Miu to be more confident and tries to accommodate for her voice and ideals in her plans, and be a reliable rock for her to lean on. She has a sisterly bond with Tomoko. She’s actually mildly flustered by the depth of Tomoko’s admiration for her, wanting to live up to it and having never been this personally close to a fan before.

Phantom Pain Form

Shattered Bone. Her eyes glow solid white. In her transformation sequence we see her as in an X-ray, showing the damage the truck’s collision did to her skeleton. Her poleaxe gets new spikes and the blade fractures and becomes serrated due to the smooth edge breaking off in shards. Her chains extend into the earth to restrain her legs. Her limbs split apart along the complete breaks, the pieces floating near each other (by default) with pink light shining out of their severed ends. Small bone fragments and rocks float loose in midair around her. She can use them as projectiles. Her outfit turns whiter with the pink relegated to the inside of the wider, longer and more numerous cracks. Her hair turns fully pink and styled in low, thin, waist-length pigtails, each mostly contained in a white tube with two rounded puffs of hair at the end, resembling cartoonish long bones. Her default expression is of shock, terror and horror, the exact one she wore in the second between realizing the truck was about to hit her and being hit. She mostly manipulates her poleaxe telekinetically like a fifth limb.

Shiko tries so hard to keep her composure; Shattered Bone is what happens when that composure is obliterated. She runs on pure emotion. The upside is, she can recognize her friends and is very protective of them. The downside is, she’s volatile and unpredictable, normally in a blind, frenzied state of rage and anguish that she takes out on her enemies or at worst whoever else available in hopes of some measure of catharsis. Shattered Bone has none of Shiko’s technique in how she uses her power and is messy and imprecise.

***

Name

Miu, aka Phantom Breath. She doesn’t have a family name.

Age

Sixteen.

Appearance

Miu is a slender, lean, average height girl with dark skin. She has thick, kinked black hair tied by yellow bows in high, intricately braided pigtails that imitate wings at the side of her head, the rest in wavy cornrows. Her warm brown eyes have sunshine yellow sclera.

She wears a canary yellow knee-length A-line dress with fluffy matching feather trim on the short puffy sleeves and skirt, a black belt and bows on the skirt. She also has forest green tights and black patent leather Mary Janes with gold buckles. She wears a shackle around her neck with the chain section hanging from the front (symbolic of how her voice and spirit were stifled long before she died, and reflecting her strangulation).

Power and Weakness

Aerokinesis, including the ability to sense the chemical composition of air she touches. Unlike other ghosts, she needs to breathe, though the content of the air is irrelevant - she just needs to have some kind of gas to inhale or she’ll suffocate.

Weapon

A fine, light indestructible golden net of shimmering metal wire that can shrink or expand as much as she wills it to.

Backstory

A little over three years ago, when the Demon Empire first recognized the original magical girl team as a serious threat, the Emperor decided to fight fire with fire and had a healthy human girl kidnapped without a trace. Surely it would throw these pesky vigilantes off to have to face an enemy so similar to them. Her biological family eventually presumed her dead. Her memories were erased and for the next year she knew nothing but her new guardian’s indoctrination (he told her he’d saved her life because he saw potential in her) and abuse until she was deemed ready to fight on the frontlines. She had no magic of her own, but was trained in espionage, combat and the use of magical tools. As a dark magical girl, her canary motif was linked to the idea of a canary in a coal mine via specializing in weaponizing gases - knockout, poisonous and enchanted varieties, the latter having a range of effects, from filling people with irrational rage to standard mind control to affecting the environment with mystical corruption (she wore a grey titanium gas mask over her mouth and nose, stiff and pointed like a beak). She also wielded feathers throwing blades. The yellow and black in her dress were inverted and the green was more prominent and murkier, conveying toxicity. For stealth and intimidation, and to avoid saying anything wrong, she tended not to talk. She didn’t talk much at ‘home’ either, her ‘father’ making it clear her input and opinion wasn’t wanted and didn’t matter.

The first people to take interest in her personality and treat her like a sapient being were the heroes she was pitted against. They realized she wasn’t happy or loved, so they reached out to her in friendship. Though obviously she didn’t instantly trust them, but when they repeatedly proved their cared more about her than the Emperor and vice versa, it led to her questioning her indoctrination, the justness of the war and whether she could have an identity outside of a soldier in it. Her investigation found plenty of evidence she was on the wrong side, but directly disobeying her abuser seemed impossible. A year ago the team leader was captured. Miu was her only chance of salvation. In this critical moment she chose what was right rather than what was safe. The new friends escaped together and Miu officially joined the heroes.

Despite all her growth like learning to trust people and understanding that the abuse she experienced wasn’t her fault, she never forgave herself for her crimes or fully internalized that she was innately worthy of love. But she pretended she was further along her recovery than she was for her friends’ benefit. This barrier strained her side of those friendships to a degree and she would secretly wonder how secure her place on the team truly was. After all, they’d been a perfectly balanced well-oiled machine before and she worried she’d disrupted that. This doubt was never resolved.

The climax of her redemption arc came when she confronted the Emperor alone in a heroic sacrifice to protect her friends. She rejected his manipulation and denounced him to his face, and damaged his armour, which would later enable the rest of the team to defeat him; but he fatally strangled her. They swore to avenge her and validate her sacrifice. After watching over them for the month until they killed the Emperor, beating herself up for not living to help them, she made new friends and saw she was unhealthily torturing herself. She agreed to join their team and travel to make the most of her afterlife.

Personality

Miu is selfless and empathetic to a fault. She’s caring, patient, polite, respectful and intensely loyal, recalling how invaluable her living friends’ persistence in supporting her was. On the surface, you could believe her to be everything you’d want in a friend. That’s what she aims to be: exactly what she was missing. She’ll always put your wants and needs ahead of her own… always. Her sincere kindness is conflated with a pathological fear of conflict and compulsive people pleasing. She has the habits of swallowing or downplaying her opinions to avoid clashing with anyone and evaluating every question, even casual ones, to figure out the desired and ‘right’ answer. It’s taken her a while to internalize that every disagreement or fight won’t rip the group’s friendships to shreds. She’s still uncomfortable and anxious during arguments. She does her best to keep the peace in the group, but may ignore or be complicit in relationship problems to avoid addressing them, preferring to change the subject if a solution or compromise can’t be efficiently found. Being so agreeable and passive is her main social survival mechanism.

The severe trauma of the Emperor’s parenting style has fundamentally shaped her character. She has low self-esteem, does not think that she deserves unconditional love and struggles to grasp that concept itself, and is excessively humble and self-deprecating. She apologizes reflexively and inordinately, used to being declared to be in the wrong anytime without warning. Feeling completely safe is very difficult for her and managed the easiest with her friends all around her, in a secure shelter with good visibility - but depending on how close to okay she is internally at that time, may still be impossible. She’s hypervigilant, timid and jumpy. She needs to believe so ardently in her higher ideals and causes because her belief in herself is so frail. She used to be terrified of how her friends would react to her dark past. Even now that she’s told them a vaguer, abridged version of her life and they didn’t love her any less afterward, she can never quite shake the concern that they might leave her. Because really, how worthwhile could she be? Stuttering and losing her speech are telltale signs that she’s afraid, upset and specifically triggered. On the worst days she’ll barely say a word.

Her driving motivation is to atone for her crimes and put enough good into the world to outweigh them. Having clawed her way to morality out of hell, her code of ethics the one thing besides her love of her friends she’s unwilling to compromise on. She tries to see the best in everyone and believes firmly in redemption; she’ll even attempt to reason with the more humanlike demons, and with every ghost and human antagonist they meet. She isn’t naive. She knows all too well about irredeemable evil. But she knows you can’t change unless you know that it’s possible and have the opportunity first. Her discomfort with violence, still associating it with her abuser, means she seeks diplomatic solutions and has a merciful, indirect fighting style focused on restraining the foe, tiring them out and other nonlethal methods. Her net comes in handy for this. She’s also very generous with second chances and will put her personal grudges aside to uphold her ideal of forgiveness to a surrendered or reformed enemy. These pacifistic policies are impractical sometimes, yes, but they’re Miu’s way of keeping herself inside the lines of her redefined identity and preventing backsliding.

Miu isn’t traditionally intelligent and in her memory hasn’t had much of a formal education, but she’s good at working with what she has. She’s highly resourceful and adaptable, and more perceptive than you might presume. Hypervigilant, remember? While she doesn’t have a good head for plans, a far better follower than leader, she possesses strong lateral thinking skills and can solve problems and win battles creatively and unpredictably. It helps to offset the practical cost of her strict moral code. After all, demon society was rigid and oppressive and she escaped it by broadening her mind to think outside its boxes. Let’s put it this way: she’s talented enough in this way to admit that she has some talent.

She may not trust herself much, but she does trust her friends. She and Akane had the rockiest relationship at first - Akane dismissed her as a wimp and Miu was on edge around her and disgusted by her combativeness. Since learning the basics of her past and getting to know her better, Akane has connected with her over their shared experience of being in survival mode in dangerous, precarious, traumatic situations for years on end and greatly respects the inner strength it took to betray the Emperor. Shiko in contrast is almost unfailingly nice to her, but doesn’t understand what she’s gone through at all and can inadvertently be insensitive to her C-PTSD. Miu is avoiding this issue and the first to bow to Shiko’s assertions of authority. She has the clearest view of Tomoko’s own low self-worth and relates to it. Her sensitivity and caution ground Tomoko and in return the younger girl teaches her most prominently how to have fun and live in the moment.

Phantom Pain Form

Last Breath. A miniature tornado whips up around her and when it clears, she’s wearing her old villainous outfit, the tip of the gas mask broken off. Her eyes glow solid yellow. Bruises are visible on her neck where they extend above and below her shackle. The chain extends to join a new loop on her bodice positioned at the bottom of her trachea. Large black bird wings that are lung-shaped when folded grow from a curved green ridge imitating a trachea going down her spine and have visible green bones in imitation of air passages. Her hair lengthens, gains yellow streaks and the braids of her pigtails, though not the pigtails themselves, come loose to better flow and lash in her wind. They’re always being blown around, even if there isn’t any wind that anyone else can feel at the moment. Her net turns black.

Representing Miu’s fear that she’ll never overcome her dark past, she makes people very appreciative of her peaceful nature in her right mind. In fact Miu’s behaviour as an agent of evil was dispassionate and efficient, but her anxiety and trauma has exaggerated her own evil in her self-perception. The result? Last Breath is nothing short of sadistic. She will pull enough air out of your lungs to make you experience nearly dying before she puts it back, repeatedly, for fun. She likes using her net to strangle her enemies and restrain them in painful and/or humiliating positions. She can be bargained with and directed, but only if your proposal or plan still involves someone suffering, preferably at her hands. That she maintains Miu’s sweet, pleasant mannerisms and attitude adds to her creepiness.

***

Name

Tomoko Fujisaka, aka Phantom Nerve.

Age

Twelve.

Appearance

Tomoko is thin with youthfully round cheeks, and small by the standards of her age. She has pale skin, a shock of white hair in a pixie cut constantly spiky with static in an exaggeration of her messy living hairstyle, and pink eyes with light blue scelera.

Her clothing is a form-fitting purple speed skating outfit with light blue interconnected neuron motifs on the trunk, and darker blue knee pads and rollerblade boots with three pink wheels each. She wears a pink safety helmet, which resembles a brain with light blue hemisphere outlines, wrinkle and fissure lines, her chain on the back connecting the ‘hemispheres’ (symbolic of her intellect and obsession with knowledge). It can be taken off, but if she tries to leave it behind it’ll teleport back onto her person. She also wears purple glasses with bright blue lightning bolts arcing along their arms.

Power and Weakness

Electrokinesis. She can generate electricity (coloured faintly bluish white) through her body and rollerblades, the wheels of which crackle and spark when spinning, letting her skate on a stream of her own lightning. Later she discovers the ability to change her body itself into a bolt of lightning briefly. Even when she isn’t literal lightning, she can move about as fast. However, she is vulnerable to strong magnetic fields like electricity, the more so the more she uses her power. Unlike the others, magnetism won’t kill her unless it’s extremely intense, but before reaching that level it can disrupt and temporarily deactivate her electrokinesis.

Weapon

Her weapon is a purple handheld catapult that fires ball lightning.

Backstory

Tomoko was born to a loving middle-class family in a big city. She was bookworm and excelled in school, said to be a pleasure to have in class, and an athlete, especially loving roller skating and then rollerblading. Her sister Rai, six years older, was her hero and they were very close.

Rai and her four friends were one of the earliest magical girl teams to spring up. Her parents remained oblivious, but Tomoko soon found out and begged them to let her help and accompany them. After impressing them with her courageous assistance defeating a powerful demon - mostly through diverting his attention - her wish was granted and she was made a part-time member, with a view to being a full-time one when she got older. Life was amazing.

The problems began a year into this merry status quo. Being albino, her vision was naturally poor, so her parents thought little of it when she needed stronger glasses. But then her motor skills started to regress and she grew uncharacteristically forgetful and confused, forcing her to reluctantly, bitterly resign from skating and being a magical girl. She and her family realized something was badly wrong. Tomoko was diagnosed with childhood dementia, the symptoms of a rare neurodegenerative disease she’d had the horrible luck to inherit. Her health rapidly deteriorated. She began to have seizures and they just got more frequent. Wearing a helmet went from being a necessary precaution skating to one in everyday life, to mitigate the damage of her falling on her head. She forgot how to write, read, speak and walk in an agonizing decline, until five months prior to the Emperor’s passing she died abruptly during a seizure.

Her death rent the Fujisaka family apart. Her parents’ relationship has grown dysfunctional; her sister fell into depression and quit being a magical girl, breaking the item she transformed with to seal it; and without their leader or ray of sunshine, the team disbanded, their morale crushed. In their absence the city has become a burgeoning dark magic hotspot. Tomoko doesn’t know any of this. She darted out of her old neighbourhood immediately to explore Japan and isn’t ready to see her living loved ones again.

Personality

Tomoko never does anything by half. She’s overflowing with energy and intense, bubbly cheer, slow to lose hope but quick to grow restless if unstimulated. She can find fun, or at least engagement, in almost any situation. Her hyperactivity, impulsivity and impatience have only increased since getting super speed; she’s using her powers more often than not, and activates them for the sake of it by far the most of the team. Being so optimistic, she typically expects the best of endeavours. She also has solid confidence in herself. But that makes her cocky, foolhardy and stubborn, hesitant to admit to her miscalculations, as often as nobly bold.

She is very precocious and intelligent in terms of vertical thinking. She has an insatiable appetite for knowledge and understanding, apparent through her habit of questioning everything and knowing stories and concepts notably above her age level (let alone the one she was in when she stopped attending school; and a knack for breaking complex things down to their most important parts. If Shiko devises a clever plan, Miu does something creative or Akane employs a cunning tactic in a fight, Tomoko will rapidly recognize what they’re going for and be able to explain it well. She’s talkative and surprisingly sophisticated in speech, having a reader’s accent (mispronouncing words she’s read but not heard). Her memory is sharp and specific. She consistently learns from her mistakes in the sense that she won’t make the same practical one - e.g. taking on an enemy too powerful for her or attempting a mission with elements that aren’t her strong suit solo - twice. However, her naivety impedes her reckoning much with the underlying flaws that lead to her those decisions.

Tomoko wants to be capable and useful more than anything. This stems from the combination of wanting to make the people she loves proud of her (even more than in life, thanks to believing she let down her parents, sister and old team), and loathing and fearing the feeling of lacking skills and knowledge that she should have, especially compared to the precedents she sets. That’s all she felt when she was slowly dying. Feeling it again triggers her traumatic memories of that period. (She hates hospitals.) Her worst fear is being a failure, useless and worthless and helpless. This obsessive craving for competence is the root of a lot of her behaviour, like her tendencies to overachieve, leap into danger, bite off more than she can chew and go against her protective teammates’ wishes to try to prove herself.

Her insecurities are part of why she values knowledge so much: it’s simultaneously ammunition to prove her worth and a distraction. Information can be understood objectively, clarified, organized and articulated in ways emotions can’t. The fear beneath her bravado also explains why she’s, if she can help it, always either thinking about something external, doing something, or finding something to do or think about. As long as she never slows down, she never has to process her trauma. That and it feels so incredibly, addictively wonderful to have not only normal levels of ability, but actual superpowers after the level of motor skills she was reduced to. Yes, they and superhero antics are more distractions.

She is determined to be, if not necessarily a great hero, at least her teammates’ equal - and the more they bond, the deeper the worry that one day she’ll let them down irreparably burrows. Shiko is the most similar to Rai and soon takes the place of a second big sister in her heart. Seemingly incongruously, her authoritative presence either has the best results in making Tomoko stay out of trouble because Tomoko can’t stand to disappoint her, or incites the most rebellion and shows of independence from her. This is due to Tomoko’s subconscious guilt that she’s dishonouring and replacing her sister by loving someone else the same way. It urges her to throw in fits of conflict and distance between them to try to prevent them getting that close. Where Shiko and Miu’s measured approaches balance her out, Akane is similarly action-oriented and reckless, if more pragmatic and brutal, and they get up to a lot of chaos together.

Phantom Pain Form

Raw Nerve. Her whole eyes glow blue and so do the nerves nearest to her skin. Lightning surges through her from her heart outward, disintegrating her glasses, helmet except the chain, and clothes and replacing them with the grey T-shirt, blue shorts and purple socks she was wearing when she passed away in her hospital bed. The chain extends and stiffens slightly to be a whole loop encircling her head. Her hair spikes grow into long locks branching in all directions that resemble the dendrites of a neuron and link to the inside of a cerebral cortex-shaped construct of crackling electricity surrounding and above Tomoko’s head, her body representing its brainstem. The wheels from her destroyed boots float horizontally around her waist and channel and direct lightning bolts.

In stark contrast to Tomoko, Raw Nerve is joyless, quiet, blunt and coldly, ruthlessly logical and she usually hovers in place or moves so fast she practically appears to teleport. She attacks purely remotely with lighting strikes and blasts (no longer needing her catapult) rather than also incorporating hit-and-run tactics like Tomoko. She’s so emotionally overwhelmed inside that she externally shuts down. Part of the personality shift is also wanting to be mature, since Raw Nerve is the embodiment of her unhealthy response to her fear of being weak and useless. When she does express emotion, she quickly gets distraught and risks zapping everything and everyone in the vicinity, friends included.