Sayuri Suzuki

14

Freshman

Female

Atmokinesis - the ability to manipulate the atmosphere, like making storms.

Sayuri is quiet and reserved. She prefers the company of books and enjoys being in libraries or coffee houses. She loves music and must always have music on. She can be a bit distracted sometimes since she has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She can sometimes have mood swings that come out of nowhere.

Likes: Anime, music, manga, reading, sci-fi, researching, libraries, learning, swimming, kayaking.

Dislikes: Rudeness, tardiness, being told her opinion is wrong, not being taken seriously, black coffee, hovering adults, being part of a group, not having her own private space.

Sayuri was born in a small seaside town in the countryside of Japan. Her mother is Japanese and her father was American. They lived in Japan for the first five years of her life before moving to Pavar. She speaks fluent Japanese and English with native accents. She is an only child and sometimes she wishes that she had siblings, though this feeling is usually at war with her introverted personality. She’s always done good in school and she had plans to eventually go to Oxford to earn a degree in Astrophysics, however, a very powerful event in her life changed everything.

When she was 12, her father was killed in a mugging as he was coming home from work. Her father’s death devastated Sayuri and her mother. She started feeling depressed and she had nightmares. Her mother became distant, when before she used to be warm and loving. Sayuri felt her mother drift away into herself. It hurt Sayuri that her mother was still there, but leaving her to fend for herself emotionally. Her mother started taking pills and no longer treated Sayuri like her daughter. She became cold and threw herself into her work as a bank executive.

Sayuri began to have difficulties managing her emotions. She started to have more mood swings and she occasionally felt the urge to snap at people and tell them mean things - though she never did. Her grades began to suffer. She was still learning, but she wouldn’t do her homework and didn’t care about turning it in. She didn’t care about the future or where she would go to school. Life seemed meaningless to her. What was the point of living when you could get mugged inches from your car and murdered?

Even after realizing she had a gift, it only made life harder for her. Her gift was volatile and it meant that she had to try and keep a tighter reign on her emotions. It was enough to make someone crazy. Sayuri believed that she would eventually go crazy.

Everyone was crying. Her mother was crying - the last time she ever would. Her aunts and uncles were crying, the hypocrites. They never liked her father and it made her sick that they were pretending to now. All of her father’s friends were there. He hadn’t had any blood relatives. Her father had always told her that she was his whole world.

Sayuri hadn’t been able to cry. Her mother had slapped her in the car minutes before the ceremony at the graveyard, but she couldn’t cry. It was like she’d dried up before she’d even had a chance to shed a single tear. Even the black suits and black dresses and black mesh covering her aunts’ faces, and even the priest making his speech over her father’s casket as it was being lowered - none of it let it her cry. It made her angry, but she couldn’t even hold on to that anger. It was leaking out of her. Leaking out like the tears were supposed to.

She looked up at the clear sky and the scorching sun. She felt hot in her black mourning dress. Her father would have thought this was funny. People wearing ridiculous clothing during a hot summer day. The sky was trying to cry too. She could feel it in her bones. But it couldn’t cry. Not until she did.

The priest stopped speaking and people formed a line to pour dirt into the hole where her dad would live for the rest of eternity. When it was her turn, she picked up a handful of sand.

“What a strange custom,” she thought - and then she opened her hand and started to cry. She fell to the ground and a pain so absolute blossomed inside her soul and filled her completely. She let out a silent scream and tears streamed down her face so violently that she could feel herself being hollowed out. Someone was at her side, she didn’t know who. Water began to pool underneath her and she thought it was strange that she could cry so much as to create a pool. And then it seemed to go dark. She could hear people calling out to her, but she didn’t want to hear them. Thunder boomed. Someone tried to move her and she cried out. There was a flash of light and then - boom! The thunder was right on top of them and she could feel buckets of water pouring down on her. Why were they throwing buckets of water at her?

She finally looked up. The sun was gone. Instead, dark living clouds covered the sky. They roared with anger and sadness and she knew that it was her own anger, her own sadness, trapped in those clouds.

“Where did this rain come from?” She heard someone yell. Everyone around her was drenched and trying to find cover. It began to hail and large chunks of hail hit the ground around her. One of her uncles would later have a black eye were one large piece of hail hit him. Lightning fell from the sky. The wind howled and she could feel it fly by her faster than she ever had before. Part of her mind registered tornadoes in the distance. People were trying to stay on the ground, but she saw the priest carried past her by strong winds. She almost laughed in hysteria.

She could feel bits of debris hitting her face, but she didn’t care. Her emotions were pouring out and she didn’t want it to stop. But part of her knew that she had to stop. And so she did. Her energy had expended itself. She could feel the clouds moving away. Rays of sunlight shone through the dark clouds. The rain stopped and so did everything else. When she looked up at the sky again, the sun was back. She fell to the ground and let herself smile sadly.

“Goodbye father,” she said. She has not been able to cause a storm like that again and wasn’t sure if she ever could.