Meiko Hayashihara - Peerless
Apr 30, 2012 13:20:00 GMT -5
Post by Meiko Hayashihara on Apr 30, 2012 13:20:00 GMT -5
MEIKO, HAYASHIHARA
"Don't you see that what you need
is standing in front of you?"
- Name: Meiko Hayashihara
- Nickname: n/a
- Sex: Female
- Birthdate: July 4
- Age:: 34
- Nationality: Japanese native
- True Name: Peerless
- True Name Location: The hollow of her left hip down to the inside of her thigh.
- Type: Sacrifice
- Affiliaton: Transcendere Fatum, Wind Chair
- Height: 5' 10"
- Weight: 140 lbs.
- Hair: She has curly hair that falls to her mid-back, which she typically leaves loose with a braid around the crown, or simply braided like this.
- Eyes: Large and red; usually half-shut.
- Outfit: It varies from day to day, but Meiko is a proponent of the skinny jeans and riding boots look. Hey, she certainly has the body for it. Flowy shirts are also another staple. She tends to black and white or pastels, though elements of brown and brighter colors do pervade her wardrobe ever so slightly. Flats are another shoe type she wears often. No matter what, her clothing choices always enhance the look of her willowy body.
- Ears: No.
- Sexual Orientation: Homosexual
- Personality: Meiko is a passionate woman, and when she believes in something or loves it, she is wholeheartedly committed to it. She is most passionate about equality and choice, with a fervent belief that not only is everyone equal, but they should also be free to make their own decisions about their lives and what they do with it. She loves ballet and history with all her heart, and spends the hours she works on trying to pass these passions to people. She generally tends to be successful, since she makes things interesting in her quest to educate her students. She is also passionate about people - not all people, just specific people, she's not Tiny Tim. She's wholeheartedly loyal when she cares for someone, and willing to protect them or help them at any cost.
Though she was not always so, Meiko is also an magnetic person. She walks into a room, and eyes are drawn towards her, not only because her face still garners plenty of recognition from ballet afficionados, but also because there is something that catches people's attention. Her emotions ride close to the surface, though they are not released by anything but her own discretion, for she is also restrained, and very self-possessed. Perhaps her magnetism is borne of confidence, perhaps from the energy she exudes. What other woman has the energy to be a professor, run a dance studio, be a head of a secret organization, and still find time for even a semblance of a social life? Stress isn't even in her vocabulary anymore, not after over ten years of juggling multiple jobs and schooling. If she lacked one of the things she does, she'd probably have to add another to the pile just to keep from getting bored. She is energy, seeming to never stop moving and doing, always with a bounce in her step, even at 2:00 AM when she's been up since 6:00 AM the previous day.
Her constant workload comes at the cost of her health, though. During her early years on her own, she practically starved to afford rent, and actually went down to a hundred pounds at one point. She's never been able to gain back the full weight she lost, riding in the underweight category for a long time, which certainly has had some effects on her health, just like her typical lack of sleep sometimes winds up with her being sick. Not that this stops her... She's like an unstoppable tidal wave, basically. She is polite and gracious by long habit, never stating anything nasty she thinks of others unless sufficiently anger, well-mannered under almost every circumstance. Lying is something that has come to her with age, though she can only manage to do the smallest of white lies even now, having been so thoroughly drilled not to lie that it physically and emotionally distresses her when she needs to, though, surprisingly, she doesn't care when others do.
She has a more vulnerable, less intense side to her. She's afraid of becoming too close to people, fearing control by another person more than anything else in the world. Meiko's even a bit of a romantic, albeit a clueless one. This has most definitely contributed to her great woe in life - not having a girlfriend. Surprisingly, she'd like to - wonders! - have a family with some nice girl, and be a cool mom and stuff. That whole idea, though, does come second to her work in Transcendere Fatum, though. She can't 'rest' till fate no longer restricts and binds.
Finally, there is the ugly side of Meiko. She is absolutely vicious when cornered and angry. Nothing is off-limits for her to do when she's furious. The worst rip-downs of character will be delivered with a pleasant smile, and she is willing to commit murder for her causes when she has her back up enough. Crossing her is a dangerous proposition, though most people wouldn't guess it, given her normally pleasant demeanor. Energy and passion can be channelled into things like anger and plotting better than niceness and politeness, after all. Typically, she doesn't let her anger have free reign, keeping her most powerful emotion on a tight leash, letting it out only where she needs its strength. But certain things will most definitely bring it out - people deciding things for others is the easiest way to let it go. Of course, she can be a tiny bit of a hypocrite on this - what Transcendere Fatum is doing with genetics is for the good of all, after all, it's just correcting a biological restriction that should have faded out once it stopped being necessary for whatever it was needed for. She can be cold as well, freezing out those close to her who have displeased her rather than fighting with them.
The only people Meiko is willing to follow directions from are the bosses she chooses - such as the Void, or the chair of the history department at her university. Them, she willingly takes orders from - most of the time. Every now and then, she does have to question their decisions, but since the bosses she chooses are generally people she agrees with on most issues, objections are only known to be raised when she spots a serious flaw in a decision, or is confused by the rationale behind it. With these people, she is fairly 'go with the flow' for the most part, rather than her typical energetic fight against the current. - History: Meiko sees the world as a ballet, divided into four acts. Birth and early life is the first, teenage years and the first taste of young adulthood the second, the remnants of being a young adult to the beginning of her old years the third, and the final, from the end of the third till death. This is what she has danced this far into her life.
In Act I, she was born. The princess in the fairy tale, born to humble means and greater things. The dancer who could not yet move. She was a healthy child, born to a businesswoman mother. Mother liked control, and she taught it to her young daughter. Mother was Meiko's world. Her father, she didn't know, but Mother was power and strength and beauty. She was the cold queen, masking herself as the warm mother, playing a role she never was meant for. Mother ran a business. She had to hire a nanny to take care of little Meiko, the angel who would be her pawn, the innocent, doomed princess of the ballet, for is not every ballet a slightly exaggerated reflection of real life? Well, her caretaker was just like the fairy tales. Warmer than her own mother, more mother than she had been. Games and stories and laughter brought light to the little girl's life whenever her mother was hard at work building what she hoped would become an empire.
Dreams are always an important part of the ballet, or any other performance. A performer becomes the character, grasps for their dreams, hopes their hopes, sighs their sighs, cries their tears, hurts in their agony, revels in their joy. Meiko's mother had dreamed of chemistry, felt the powerful thrill of creating something new from something else, in high school, but been consigned to business school for her college years. Her mother, similarly deprived of dreams, had made sure of that. It was a vicious little family circle. What the mother could not have, she pushed on her daughter, and so Meiko was pressed towards the sciences. As Act I of her young life drew to a close, as she finished what some westerners call third grade, she was roped into a ballet class. Her mother had made enough to move from their tiny house to a larger one, and had heard that ballet taught girls to be more ladylike. And a ladylike daughter was a good reflection on the household, no?
Act II of Meiko's life begins with her year in fourth grade. She was passionate about ballet. Though she had only performed once, and that in a recital, she loved the feel of it, and she had seen older girls and boys perform dances of such beauty that she was hooked. She heard them talk about the feeling it gave them, the energy. The way they were breathless by the end of a dance not because of the exertion, but because of the passion they put into it. Little girls tend to be romantics at heart, and her first romance was with dance. Her mother drifted, working and pushing ever harder, and her little girl put all her love and heart into dance. She was actually rather gifted at it, and this gift only grew the more she practiced. She danced in lines, walking down the hall at school, even practiced getting her feet in the right positions while sitting and working on homework. She made good grades, high enough to please her mother, high enough that she could stay with her passion. Oh sure, it was a little odd when she turned thirteen and most of the girls from her classes left dancing behind for makeup, boys, and candy bars, but she got to go on pointe for the first time. Soon she was doing some of the larger roles for ballets in the studio she was taught at, and she even took a few theater classes on the side, with her caretaker's - the promoted nanny - encouragement. Her grades suffered for a little bit, and she was nearly pulled from the studio before she pulled them back up to the average her mother expected. The relationship, long turned from the "My mother is my world" it had been in the child's early years, had been distant, now it became a game of chase. Mother watched her grades, Meiko snuck about. She finally understood her mother, at the ripe age of sixteen, when her mother sat her down to talk about college. "College?" she had asked blankly, before thinking a moment. Well, she wanted to do ballet professionally, but she supposed she could go to school and get a degree in something. She liked history. Maybe she could go be a history teacher? Oh, and she could study the history of ballet, and teach it to little kids when she couldn't dance professionally anymore. But before she could tell that to her mother, who had been waiting for something more from her usually intelligent daughter, the woman informed her of her fate. She was to study chemistry, the subject that she had been cheating in in order to make good grades. And her mother's tone brooked no argument, not even the few tiny playful ones that she had ever dared to try in their slowly disintegrating relationship. "If you refuse this, you will leave this house at eighteen," she was told. Well! Giving the girl that choice made her angry. She had allies, people who wanted her to succeed in what she chose. Perhaps that was where her mother had failed where her own mother had succeeded, really. Meiko's mother had not isolated her as securely as her own mother had; when she had reached adulthood there had been no options that she knew of. Her father hadn't cared what happened, and so, she had been doomed to what her mother wanted. Meiko, however, had a woman who had been her mother in all but blood since she was small, a dedicated teacher, and few dancer friends who had already outlined vague plans to dance together when they were through with high school. She tried to play the obedient daughter she always had been before, to avoid her mother's wrath, and covertly got a job, a way to give herself some savings for the day she'd be kicked out. The whole obedient daughter thing though...didn't work. She was a good actress, not a good liar. Now, some say the two are the same - an actress pretends to be someone she is not, a liar says things that are not and plays someone they are not, and so where is the difference? It lies in the intent; a liar aims to win something from others, be it money, sex, or pity. An actress' only charge is to make people feel an emotion, not for her gain, but for their own. Meiko as the dancer was an actress, playing to emotion to make people enjoy themselves. Meiko as the obedient daughter was a liar, trying to please her mother so she could get away with something right under her nose, a plan that was an attempt at good strategy, and a rather miserable failure. Her mother found out too early, stopping by the clothing store she had taken a job at. She only saw her from the back, but recognized her anyhow. While Meiko sorted the racks, her mother got everything on her from the rather confused, but cooperative, manager.
The scheme fell apart even quicker than it had been put together. Her mother coldly gave her a choice: leave with what she could carry at eighteen, or abandon those things that distracted her from the chosen path. It had worked on her, after all, and she expected it to work on her daughter. But Meiko had been raised by a different woman, and was a very different person from her mother. With the choices so clearly laid out, and practically on house arrest but for school, she chose the first. Meiko's meager savings managed to get her a downpayment on an apartment. She was trying not to rely on help her mother had sneered about; she had claimed Meiko would be unable to survive without tons of aid from those few she was close to, she felt the need to prove herself. She managed an audition for the Tokyo Ballet and won a coveted place in it, the money from which she chose to put into college. She found another job to pay her rent, working as a bartender at a rather seedy bar, and lost her ears the first time she got drunk- and has a hazy recollection of almost getting arrested, or at least, something involving cops.
Act III of her life involved her introduction to the world of Fighters and Sacrifices, as well as her brightly rising professional star, while she quietly starved in her apartment busting her ass between two full-time jobs and keeping a 4.0 at college. Her name had appeared during that last furious fight with her mother - which, by the way, left her heavily scarred across her abdomen thanks to having a vase smashed into her chest - and shortly into college, she was discovered and promptly dismayed to find that she was bound to someone not of her choosing for life by some paltry 'fate'. Anger kindled in her heart - she would not be party to this sort of thing. Fate should have left her a pitiful remnant in her mother's house, yet here she was, age twenty and suddenly having her dancing achieve international recognition (and significant pay raises). She quit her second job as a bartender and began to focus on trying to come up with ideas for how to change this Fighter-Sacrifice thing, refusing to actually try to find her Fighter or to join Septimal Moon. Blanks distressed her, so she never actually bothered to acquire one, preferring to make do on quick wits and a couple of small spells that she could do that allowed her to escape should anything...untoward happen involving another unit. A chance encounter coverlty informed the twenty-something about a leader of the Seven Voices having left for similar reasons. Inspired, she went hunting. The end result was that she wound up as one of the members in charge of Transcendere Fatum, the Wind Chair, shortly after her graduation from graduate school, entering a post-graduate program to continue her education. Midway through her doctorate program, she chose to quit professional dancing, and opened her own dance studio, teaching children and teenagers to dance, trying to impart her passion to them. Surprisingly, she made enough money off of that to not only pay off what little debt she had acquired as a student, and enough that when she finished her PhD, she didn't need to take up the job she had thought she needed to, that of a history teacher or professor. Meiko being the shameless workaholic she was, and used to years of constantly working, she still took up and adjunct proffessor-ship at the university she had graduated from, while continuing to run her studio and work in Transcendere Fatum. The Mendax have made her happier than any other thing involving her organization, since they basically give others a choice, which is all she wants. She still isn't interested in meeting her Fighter, preferring the idea of finding a steady girlfriend to that by a high margin. - RP Sample: See Hoshi Kamisaka's application. -lazy child-
- Your Name: Chama
- Timezone: EST (US)
- Faceclaim:
[b]PRINCESS TUTU[/b] - [i]Rue Kuroha[/i] - MEIKO HAYASHIHARA
