Difference between revisions of "BrilliantRain/Kasumi"

Latest revision as of 15:41, 8 June 2010

Name: Kasumi Yamada-Ravenwood
Caste: Night
Motivation: Figure out what is going on with these ruins popping up.
Anima: Incan Solar Disk
Concept: Realistic Archaeologist
XP: Left/Total: 14/59

Attributes

Character Description

Kasumi is, first and foremost, fit. She is built like a gymnast, and as such, is more compact and sleek than she is big and busty. She has medium length hair, long enough to do things with, but short enough not to get in the way. She often wears a set of round purple tinted sunglasses to deemphasize her naturally blue eyes, which look very odd with her overall Japanese appearance.

Her clothing choices tend to the eclectic, with jeans and t-shirts being most common, but she has a number of outfits for all occasions, including formal business suits, other formalwear, hardwearing exploring clothes, and costumes from a number of historical periods. She likes to occasionally teach classes wearing authentic looking clothing from the period under discussion. Yes, she does own a fedora. Yes, she does wear it a lot.

Although Kasumi is not especially physically attractive (App 2), her force of personality (Cha 3) and somewhat exotic appearance do get her dates on a regular basis. Her skills with Yoga, innate flexibility, and status as six-year limbo champion generally ensure that offers for second and third dates are quickly forthcoming. However, she is currently unattached.

Expanded Backgrounds

AllyBrilliantRain/Rival: She has something of a rivalry with another Archaeologist named Dawn Kerr. Dawn is an Irish-American, although she was born here. She is a redhead and a bit curvier than Kasumi. They first met in high school when Kasumi saved her from some bullies. They remained good friends through the first couple of years of college, until there was a misunderstanding where they both thought the other was trying to claim sole credit on a joint thesis project. Now, they spend much of their time trying to outdo each other in their various papers and publications (and they make sure the other receives a copy of the paper). Although they both secretly would like to patch things up, neither thinks the other would listen. They still respect each other though.

Dawn is a bit more aloof and intellectual than Kasumi, but she is a nice person underneath it all. She tends more towards the academic as well (one of her projects is examining the architectural details of the various Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and South American pyramids to debunk claims that they were all built by the same people, as alien landing pads, etc.) but she does do some fieldwork on occasion. In fact, on a recent trip to get firsthand details of a specific South American ruin, she got lost in the jungle. She managed to stay calm and keep her head as she tried to remember everything about Jungle survival that Kasumi taught her and she managed to stay warm, dry, and safe until she was found several days later. She hasn’t said anything about the fact that she had to escape several snakes or that a Silvery Woman talked to her while she was lost.

(She should have a higher Lore and Craft than Kasumi, but a lower Investigation. Virtue spread of Comp 3, Conv 2, Temp 3, Val 2. Not as much of a linguist as Kasumi, so she should know a smattering of words from the Celtic languages and Japanese, but she does read Ancient Mayan and Ancient Egyptian.)

Artifact: One of her previous incarnations commissioned a personalized set of Gauntlets of Distant Claws. Soon they will be hers.

Backing: She is one of the hot new up and coming Assistant Professors at her college, so they tend to give her a bit more support than they might otherwise.

Influence: She wrote a couple of mass-market books which explained lots about Incan culture in a very accessible format. Between this, her eccentric appearance, and her story about giving up a chance at the Olympics, she has garnered a small amount of general fame as well as fame as an ArchaeologistBrilliantRain/Inca Expert.

Resources: It also helps that a couple of psudo-historical novels, about an Inca-like civilization that was using magic sun crystals to power flying pyramids with magic lasers to defend earth from evil monsters from beyond time and space, became popular recently. She writes under a pseudonym because she doesn’t really want it to get back to her students (or fellow academics). Still, the money is good and the history is pretty accurate, so it serves as another way to teach. Though she does usually include a question or two on each test that you will fail if you used those novels to study instead of the assigned reading.

Vice: When she was 10, she was bitten by a bat during a family trip to South America. It was very traumatic for her, especially since she had to get treated for rabies afterwards. Ever since then, she hasn’t been able to deal with them in any way. She is pretty much the only person in the country who knows practically nothing about Batman.

Ambidexterity: Naturally born a lefty, she broke her left arm falling out of a tree when she was five and had to learn to get along with her right for a few months. She learned how so well that she has been able to use both hands equally well ever since.

Double Jointed: A lifetime of gymnastics, yoga, and other physical activities have left her amazingly flexible to the point where some people wonder if she actually has bones.

Thunderbolt Attack Prana: Her Special Move is to exploit her flexibility to come from an unexpected direction.

Anima: An Inca style Golden Sun Disk with Old Realm characters describing her deeds inscribed upon it. When she first goes totemic, it blazes with the light of the noonday sun for a moment, before becoming deeply shadowed, although the carvings still manage to stand out in relief.

History

Kasumi Yamada-Ravenwood is an unusual person. Her mother was a successful business woman so she was mostly raised by her father, a woodcarver and artist who, among other things, crafted traditional Japanese puzzle boxes. From him, she gained an interest in history as well as a bit of an iconoclastic streak which has served her well over the years.

She has always been athletic and could have gone to the Olympics while in high school, but she never cared enough about it to train hard enough to make it. History was her true love, but not the staid history you got in books, the cool history you went out and found. Not that she doesn’t like books. She just prefers to go out and get the information first hand, rather than having it filtered through someone else’s perceptions. Plus, it is more fun that way.

She tries to encourage that “discover things yourself” attitude in her students as well. She likes to think that she is one of the “cool teachers” students like. She makes them work hard in her classes, but she is so clearly in love with the material that she often infects them with her enthusiasm.

She specializes in Pre-Columbian South American History (specifically the Inca, but she knows a lot about the other cultures, like the Aztec and Maya), but she is familiar with the general details of history the world over (as the new professor she gets stuck teaching a bunch of the basic undergrad “Intro to World History” type courses). She picked this specialty because much of the history was systematically destroyed by the Conquistadors and other colonists, so she views it as both a challenge and her duty to discover that which has been hidden. Although, figuring out what the frack is going on with the glowyness and new ruins popping up is soon going to take center stage with her curiosity.

She exalted on a research trip to study some recently discovered Incan ruins when one of the grad students accidentally found a hidden trap door. She managed to yank him out of the way, but fell in herself. She called up that she was ok and that she saw some light a little ways off, so she would try to make her own way out. Unfortunately for her, said way out was a gauntlet of inexplicably working booby traps. About halfway through the corridor she noticed that there seemed to be a glow around her and that she seemed to be managing to avoid the traps much more easily than she expected. When she got to the end of the corridor she was able to climb out through an air shaft, leaving the rest of the booby traps intact. She remained in the jungle for a few hours until the glowing stopped, and then rejoined the group. (It should be noted that she doesn’t actually know what her anima banner looks like.) That corridor has been placed off limits until it can be thoroughly checked and deemed safe.

Personality

Kasumi has very eclectic tastes. She likes what she likes and doesn’t really care much for people telling her what she is supposed to like or not like. Not that she will lose interest in something if it becomes popular either. She reads books, comic books, manga, although she prefers many of the independently run ones to the big powerhouses of DC and Marvel (possibly due to her issues with bats). Despite her training, she does have a weakness for things that feature archaeologist characters. She owns all of the Indiana Jones movies (except for the 4th one, which she didn’t like) and has the complete run of Gold Digger.

She likes history and is very enthusiastic about it. She tends to be the heart on her sleeve type, letting her emotions out rather than bottling things up.