I wanted a better bio. Still can't think of a theme, though. :T
- Name: Yukimura Noriko
- Magical Girl Title: The Ripper. Being far from the most cheerful of magical girl names, you have to wonder why Noriko has something so blatantly angst-ridden. The answer? Having no naming sense whatsoever and cheerfully picking up the first thing the fan community called her because of all the knives. It's a vast improvement over "The Girl That Stabs Things With Sharp Knives", even if she has little idea what it could possibly by referencing.
- Age: 18
- Gender: Female
- Appearance:
- Magical Girl Appearance:
- Personality: 'Magical girl fangirl' would not be the first choice for a traditional girl's hobby and yet, in Noriko's case, it very much is--or as much as you can be without going on the internet and taking part there. She receives every magazine that she can get a subscription to and follows them religiously, even though she occasionally makes appearances herself nowadays. It would be accurate to say that she has a deep appreciation for magical girls and their work but such a description is only accurate for her childhood. She really likes magical girls.
That being a magical girl allows her to get close to her idols and try to befriend them is an amazing opportunity that Noriko can't pass up. That being a magical girl means her identity is an unknown is even better. It means being able to act without having to keep to her upbringing every second of the day--and it exposes her vast enthusiasm for both her tasks and the girls around her. Yet she's still awkward about trying to get to know people and worries about her identity being exposed--which would mean a return to acting properly.
Outside of being a magical girl, Noriko tends to be polite but rather distant. Not only does she have little idea how to go about making friends with someone of her own age, her upbringing has left her with few common interests with the majority of people that she meets. She's actually rather shy when not hidden by being a magical girl. - Skills: Noriko's skills are conspicuously lacking in a large variety of everyday matters even despite her age. Her cooking skills don't even reach the point of being able to make tea normally and those rare attempts she makes at something as simple as rice tends to lead to abject failure, not least because of her incompetence with technological innovations of any kind. Her skill there looks like it should belong to a rural centenarian, with anything more complicated than 'make phone call' or 'turn on television' going badly.
Conversely, her traditional skills are far better than the norm. For all her inability to not burn tea on a day to day basis, the white-haired girl can perform tea ceremonies flawlessly. If it has some element of ceremony or art about it, even her handwriting, Noriko tends to be as accomplished as she is technologically hopeless.
Helpfully for a career as a magical girl, and a likely influence on why her abilities are so simple, is that her list of traditional skills include such things as being able to defend herself proactively. Such as by attacking someone with a sword. Or by punching them until they can't hurt her in return. Rather than any one style, Noriko is actually schooled in several different methods of fighting unarmed and a scale of how to use swords from 'I have a knife' up to 'am I supposed to be cutting through horses?' and 'I only have a stick'. Though mostly directly irrelevant to operating as a Magical Girl, it gave her a leg up on most new magical girls by actually having trained reflexes and an awareness for combat before being thrown in at the deep end. - Abilities: Anyone discovering Noriko for the first time is bound to expect some sort of herculean magical girl, provided they don't recognise the reference. These people are often surprised to learn that she's perhaps in the running for the most physically meagre magical girl, as she doesn't receive any sort of enhancement to her strength. What gets boosted abnormally is her speed, allowing her to get in, make a single wound, and get out again. There's a limited effectiveness in inflicting a death of a thousand cuts, which is why Noriko is rather thankful that the speed is just a vector for the application of her real ability.
She has the ability to pinpoint physical weak points. In doing so, it gives her the ability to severely cripple or even outright enemies if she can land her blow correctly. It was this surgical precision that lead her first followers to compare her use of knives to a famous murderer, despite her friendly attitude.
Though only she can actually see the exact point and exploit it to maximum effect, it's still a physical weakness. Anyone that knows roughly wear to hit can take advantage of their attacks not being so easily dismissed, which makes Noriko a valuable ally even in battles against something too large for her knives to have a major impact.
It is, perhaps, for the best that Noriko doesn't have a true finishing move because of her total inability to come up with a good name for even her ability to see weak points. When it has to be given a name in fact sheets, she picked "Knowing Where Things Break More When Stabbed". - Weapon(s): Knives. Noriko didn't actually name them given that she has no limit on the number that can be pulled out and you could buy their kind anywhere in Japan. They're remarkably well balanced, suitable for stabbing, cutting, or even throwing as the situation arises. On the downside... well, knives. They have no special abilities like other magical weapons might possess nor much reach. Combined with her lack of any method for hitting harder, tough opponents can ignore almost all attacks Noriko might conceivably make until she discerns their weakness and manages to strike it.
- Brief History: Being born the only child of an old and wealthy family is no insurance against poor health, as Noriko found out. From infancy, the girl spent more time actively sick than capable of causing problems in the normal vein of young children. On its own, no amount of advanced medicine seemed to improve her condition and her parents took the opposite approach: aside from the medicine itself, limit her contact with modern life and cities. She was consequently sent to be raised by her grandparents in the country, a household as untouched by technological advance as possible in this day and age.
Though her health was generally improved out here, enough that Noriko could start to learn the martial arts that had been passed down through the years, it was still marked by enough illness that her attendance at school was spotty and her time spent with her peers quite limited--they didn't even have similar interests, after all. But she enjoyed the surroundings and over time her health improved to the point that, after Junior High, her parents decided to send her to a selective high school in Umitori.
In her first year back in a city, Noriko's health began to decline once again and her lack of socialisation made it difficult for her to form friendships, especially as she started taking time off for illness. At the beginning of her second year, she was home ill once again--missing the beginning of year and even what class she was to be in--when she received an unexpected visitor: a fairy. The disgruntled girl offered her a simple trade: Noriko would become a magical girl and in the process her health problems would be corrected, or at least suspended indefinitely. Simply not being ill was an alluring choice, but to be able to make friends with the magical girls in her magazines without her previous illness casting a cloud over things and get another chance to make a first impression...
Noriko took the fairy up in it in a heartbeat, though even now she has yet to make any close friends this way but that's not going to stop the rich girl from trying her best as more and more magical girls are created.- Fairy Name: Hawthorne
- Fairy Appearance: Such a fancily dressed fairy.
- Fairy Personality: Hawthorne is quite... unfriendly for a fairy, and concerned only with her partner being the best magical girl possible, regardless of what this requires her to do. For instance, she specifically sought out someone in Noriko's situation, that would have no reason to turn her down and as many reasons to fulfil her assigned task as possible. In this, she's a very good support so long as Noriko has some desire to keep performing as a magical girl. If she were to give up on making friends this way, then she would have to get... creative. Even arranging a false friendship would be an acceptable step to Hawthorne.
- Theme Song:
