drowns: (2 | and few can decipher)
▸ mitsuki ishikawa. | 石川 美月 ([personal profile] drowns) wrote2012-08-17 03:10 pm
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information. ↭ ❛the silent ocean knows.❜


content warning: contains written description of repeated physical and emotional abuse of a minor, mentions of suicide.
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( NAVIGATION. )
basic stats.
world.
history.
personality.
abilities.
summary.


( BASICS. )
name: Mitsuki Ishikawa (石川 美月 - Ishikawa Mitsuki)
canon: Original (The Directors: Magical Hunter Heavenly Keiko)
age: 16.
d.o.b.: july 8th (cancer)
appearance: (, , , , ), 5' even (152.5 cm). Fair-skinned. Petite, with some lean muscle from her magical girl fighting and recreational swimming. Very light blue hair (blue-silver), blue eyes. Wears black-framed glasses while a civilian, does not as a magical girl.
role in canon: One of seven main characters. Like the others, her life was carefully shaped and molded by the Directors, resulting in years of intense physical and psychological trauma and abuse. Serving as the "brains" of the group, Mitsuki controls the elements of water and ice. Her cold, focused and callous fighting style is a direct contrast to her polite, calm and understanding civilian persona.

( WORLD. )
Magical Hunter Heavenly Keiko takes place in the not-too-distant future of Japan, on an Earth indistinguishable from our own save for one crucial difference; it is the battleground for one group's fight against an immense alien threat to themselves, their planet, and all of humanity. Seven high school girls, each imbued with unique elemental powers and assigned animal companions as handlers, have been called upon and brought together to defeat this menace. It's a tale of adventure, heroic struggle, and above all... the bonds of friendship.

Or, as is eventually revealed, it's actually a cruel cosmic sham crafted solely for the purposes of entertaining other alien races. Selected during childhood by virtue of hair/eye color along with vague personality traits, these girls (dubbed Magical Hunters) are henceforth carefully molded until they resemble typical character tropes found in magical girl media. Their lives are purposefully pockmarked by trauma and loss in order to achieve this, with only one of them seemingly, blissfully free of personal grief. Unaware of the true nature of their battle, their roles, and even their animal handlers, the Magical Hunters cooperate to fight terrible "monsters" for the good of all. Like in most magical girl shows, they go about this apparently noble duty with a certain measure of secrecy; their families and friends, as well as society at large, are purposefully kept in the dark about their color-coded defenders. Both the Devouring and the Magical Hunters themselves appear to the normal human eye only as forces of nature, their battles typically attributed to things such as earthquakes and tsunamis.

( HISTORY. )
The beginning of Mitsuki's life was uneventful.

The second child born to Takahiro and Hana Ishikawa (a factory worker and cellist, respectively), Mitsuki's young world was comprised of playtime with her sister Natsuko, of her father's strong-armed bear hugs, and her mother's melodious lullabies. She would, in time, be expected to to do well in school, to burn a bright and blazing path toward her future, but back then, those times were far off. It was her father's dream that she become a doctor, her mother's that she learn to master an instrument. Both, most of all, wanted her to be as happy as her sister was, free-spirited and precocious.

Mitsuki did not end up as free-spirited as Natsuko, but she was precocious, had a penchant for figuring out things that had taken her sister (and other children, for that matter) a little longer to catch on to. She spoke her first word (Onee-chan, to her sister's endless delight) fairly early on, learned to walk shortly thereafter. She learned most things quickly, it seemed, and her parents soon grasped the idea that they had a very bright child on their hands. But there was another star in the constellation of Mitsuki's future, a dark omen, a stain that would spread to encompass every single aspect of her life, from cradle to grave. Every story, after all — no matter how awful — needed a bright child. The brains of the operation, the soft-spoken, clever genius. This was what drew the Directors to the Ishikawa household, and what made them begin to carefully pluck the strings that would mold the type of girl they needed to complete their ensemble, and in doing so, would erode and then destroy the foundation of her happy family. They initially began only with observations and minor tweaks, but on Mitsuki's seventh birthday, the tune began to change. Or more accurately, her mother did.

Initially passed off by Takahiro as stress over her high-pressure career, Hana's behavior became increasingly erratic. She would lose her temper in seemingly unprovoked ways, would spend hours tapping out incomprehensible, cacophonous notes on her instruments, would miss rehearsals. Worst of all was her behavior toward the children. There would be days of confusing emotional distance, moments where she would simply stare blankly off into thin air, days of crying fits and mumbling gibberish, and the other days. The awful, dark days, where her temper would be like a storm cloud over the house. Where she would throw things, or lash out at her husband and children in unprovoked rage. Hana was, understandably, horrified by the sudden outbursts of temper, and began to look into therapy and medication to stabilize her moods. Mental illness carries with it a stigma in Japan and other places, however, so her doctors were well-paid to keep quiet, and her visits were as discreet as she could manage them.

For a little while, during the time in her life that Mitsuki would gradually begin to think of as the beginning of the end, things went back to normal. The family survived like this, precariously teetering on a cliff edge. When Mitsuki was seven years old, the balance of her home life finally nosedived off the edge of that cliff. Her mother stopped her tours abruptly, and life at home became a nightmare. Until then, Hana had never raised a hand toward her children, but it became a commonplace thing now, and got worse over time. Takahiro, unable to keep his family from unraveling at the edges, spent more time at work, and so the girls were entirely at their mother's mercy. This mercy was brief, erratic, and rare. There would be days where in a flight of fancy, Hana would feed the girls entirely on sweets and take them on long, meandering drives through the city. She would take them to symphonies, and spend hours simply listening to the music, to things only she could hear. There would be days afterward though, of beatings, of long and solitary hours of being locked in small places, of not being fed at all, of being berated for every slight mistake. Mitsuki has clear memories of the days of being forced alongside her sister to scrub walls and floors by hand for hours at a time, for being punished for offenses only her mother seemed aware of. She once made the mistake of dropping a glass, and her mother nearly ripped her arm out of the socket. The shape and tone of their relationship changed here, in these pivotal years — this woman, for she was not Mitsuki's mother, not any longer — became a monster. A dark thing whispered about among herself and her sister, who was her only companion in those days, for a while at least. On a particularly bad day, when her sister and father were gone and she was left to her mother and her shadows, a strangely-colored little creature appeared at her window. This little cat introduced herself as Umi, and told her that she would be her friend, that she could confide in her and she would protect her. She initially believed Umi to be a creature everyone could see, but after a few days of animatedly talking about her new friend to her older sister, who had grown increasingly willful, angry and stressed, she was quickly availed of that notion.

Quit talking about stupid imaginary friends! You sound like Mother!

And so, Mitsuki learned to keep Umi to herself. Umi urged her to do this as well: after all, Natsuko would not understand. In fact, no one really did. Where was Natsuko, after all, whenever she needed her the most? Where was her father? They both could run and hide, go other places, but at Mitsuki's age, she was all alone. There was no one else to protect her, to listen to her or hold her when she cried. No one but Umi, her closest and dearest friend in those dark and lonely days. Through this manipulation, the relationship between Mitsuki and her sister began to erode as well. Natsuko became increasingly moody and irritable. Her grades plummeted; her time was spent outside of the house rather than under their mother's thumb. Mitsuki, on the other hand, withdrew into herself; she threw herself into her studies due to Umi's urging. Her little friend insisted that through this, the one thing she was best at, the skill no one could take away or break her out of, she would be able to restore the order that had been lost in her household— that the better she was, the more things would improve.

As long as she was smart and did her best, as long as she kept up the facade of being normal, she wouldn't have to depend on anyone. And to her surprise, it worked. While her family life dissolved and burned to ash, her grades skyrocketed. She did her level best to stay in school as long as she could to avoid going home, to linger in computer labs and libraries. By the time she was eight years old, her father had filed for a divorce at last, but his attempts to gain custody of his children, to rescue them from their mother...that was manipulated and warped too by the Directors, the unseen and unheard puppetmasters that kept Mitsuki's life in a stranglehold. Eventually, he gave up on trying, on fighting a legal system that seemed to thwart him at every turn, and as a result, his children gave up on him as well, Mitsuki most of all. What use was a parent, she thought, that didn't care enough to save her? What use was someone who left her alone to suffer?

In the last year of this, when Mitsuki was nine, the tone of her mother's abuse changed. Losing Takahiro had seemed to return some awareness of her actions, and when she was not lashing out at the girls in unprovoked ways, she would instead turn to punish herself. Her depression was a more frequent thing than her rage then, and the girls were forced to keep an eye on her, to prevent anything from going too awry, from something happening that they could not hide. Something worse than bruises and scars. Umi informed Mitsuki during this year that it was integral that they not reach out and search for help for her mother. They would be taken away, she said, and separated from each other. This home of theirs was a terrible place to be, Umi sympathized, but the world outside was even worse. There was no future for some child cast aside, with no father and a mother who had done something so shameful and unthinkable as to commit suicide. Natsuko had become increasingly unreliable, Umi insisted, and so Mitsuki, nine years old and terrified, would have to be the voice of reason. She would have to grow up, very quickly — and so she did. When she wasn't at school, she was watching her mother from a distance, always making sure that she did nothing drastic, nothing extreme. All of this culminated into an intense degree of anxiety, for herself and Natsuko, who was beginning to unravel at the edges.

And then, as suddenly as a cloudburst during a sunny day, at the end of Mitsuki's ninth year of life, her mother simply stopped, wound down like an old and broken watch. Gone were the nights of restless pacing, the ranting at things that were not there, the unprovoked and sudden violence, but in exchange, other things were lost. Her mother's vibrancy and creativity had all but vanished. In its place was a shell of a woman, afraid of herself, afraid of hurting her children, afraid of the world. And so the truncated Ishikawa household — the girls, specifically — had lost something integral. As their father was long gone by now (his children viewed his failed custody suits as essential abandonment, despite his efforts), it became Natsuko's job to be the primary caretaker. Their mother's financial estate was still an impressive one, due to her years of traveling and performances, but keeping up with it, and with Mitsuki, as well as their mother, was a little too much for a teenage girl to handle. Mitsuki learned self-sufficiency through this. She became the family caretaker, and for a time things were fine. Not perfect by any means — their mother was hardly an ideal, and the girls struggled with their lingering feelings of resentment and fear, but it was better than it had been before. As the years dragged on and Mitsuki's good reputation in school grew, she began to foolishly think that it was all just a very long nightmare and that their lives would go back to normal. Perhaps, she would confide to Umi, in a small voice, in the evenings when it was just the two of them, since Mom feels better, she'll start playing again. I'll practice my viola a lot too, to encourage her. Wouldn't that be just wonderful, Umi-chan? We could travel again, and Natsuko would be happier.

However, this was not to be. Mitsuki's mother never really got better, so much as stopped functioning in the ways they were accustomed to. And by the time Mitsuki was thirteen and Natsuko was seventeen, her dear Onee-chan had crumbled under the pressure of keeping their home life under wraps and under control, of being the adult. She could not stand to live in a loveless home, with a mother she hated, and urged her little sister to leave with her. But Mitsuki would not be swayed. It was her job to maintain the status quo, she thought, and it was their responsibility to keep their mother protected, to maintain what was left of their little family. It would be insane to leave now.

If you'd like to run away like Father, Onee-chan...Natsuko-san, feel free to. I don't need you anymore. I never needed someone like you at all. And that was the end of that. The truth was, Mitsuki was afraid. Umi's words as a child had not left her — there were worse places than home, after all. And she resolved to handle things on her own. She kept her mother's illness and her prior abuse a tightly-held secret. She kept the house clean, she cooked, and she made sure bills were paid on time and people stayed away. She forged signatures, she lied...whatever needed to be done, that was what she did. It was lonely, and awful. She missed her sister and her father, and at times she missed the woman her mother used to be. She did not dare to make close friends, out of fear that they would learn about her family secrets. And so she survived this way, not really happy, but not the desperate, unhappy child she had been before, and decided it was enough to get by on.

At last, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Umi revealed the reasons behind her monitoring, the reason she had been watching over her for so long. Mitsuki had a great and grand destiny — she was to be a Magical Hunter, a warrior granted with power beyond imagining to be used to defend the defenseless human race against awful creatures known as the Devouring.

And Mitsuki, none the wiser as to how her life had been set up for this, this terrible, cruel scam for the entertainment of others, gladly took on the task.

I'll do my best to protect humanity! I'll be strong and brave, Umi-chan, you'll see. I won't let anything hurt me, or anyone else, anymore. You won't be disappointed.

I promise, I won't let you down.


Like the other Magical Hunters, Mitsuki was at first unaware of the other girls until numerous battles (as secretly orchestrated by their handlers) forced them to work together. With their cheerful, eternally optimistic leader, Keiko Nakagawa, serving as the member of the group that kept them bound together, the girls began to form friendships and learned to depend on one another, Mitsuki included. In addition to this, Mitsuki began to develop deeper feelings for another one of the girls, her elemental and polar opposite, Kotone Sasaki. The two had a very rocky...rocky start, but through the help of Keiko and their other friends, began to learn how to understand each other.

The girls suffered a major blow, however, when Mayu Kawano, fellow Magical Girl, passed away due to a lifelong illness. This was, like Mitsuki's abuse and the other myriad childhood traumas the girls suffered through, another scheme created by the Directors. They would lose another friend, Sora Yamamoto, after she sacrificed herself to protect Keiko from one of the Devouring. Mitsuki will be taken from this point, prior to the beginning of her investigation with Hoshi Takeda (another magical hunter...there are like seven of them, sorry) to uncover the reasons behind the strange coincidences that seem to connect all seven of them to one another. She will also be taken before the reason behind this is figured out in the reveal, which all but destroys the foundation of their remaining group and ends in Keiko's suicide.


( PERSONALITY. )
For all intents and purposes, Mitsuki is a girl who appears to have things all together. An overachiever and academic hotshot, she's one of those people who is on a clear, straight line toward success. When complimented, she'll humbly shrug it off and insist there are others who are just as good, if not better than her. When asked for her plans for the future, she might not have a concrete decision just yet, but she'll be able to give a list of challenging and fascinating possibilities. She is intelligent, perceptive and studious, the strategist of the group, and fairly quick on the uptake. In fact, it is Mitsuki and fellow Magical Hunter and friend, Hoshi Takeda, who begin to suspect the Directors before the others and eventually uncovered the information that would lead to their reveal. Demure, calm and soft-spoken, she's quick to gain admirers and people vying for her friendship and attention. She seems to be passive, and oftentimes is. But if one manages to push beyond the boundary of polite, if distant friendliness, they might notice that what friends she has are less like close companions and more numerous, shallow acquaintances, her hobbies are sparse and centered around furthering her already expansive wealth of knowledge, and any discussion of her home life is danced around and thus avoided. And there are nastier aspects to her unerring politeness as well: insults veiled in calm, unassuming tones, an outright aversion to building meaningful relationships, a stubborn insistence on maintaining an almost alienating degree of distance from her peers.

Truth be told, this outer surface that most people see of Mitsuki is just that: the surface. Akin to a thin sheet of pristine ice covering brackish, black water in the dead of winter, Mitsuki's quiet and unassuming public appearance hides a great deal of bitter resentment beneath. Every day of Mitsuki's life is a balance on a tightrope: a tightly-controlled effort to appear as normal and as self-sufficient as a girl her age possibly can. Her mother's mental illness has made it near impossible for her to maintain a normal, healthy life, and so Mitsuki is too ashamed and disgusted to mention her to others. Her father's battling for custody ended in sound defeat, and so Mitsuki thinks him a coward. Her sister left after the pressure of their stifling, loveless home life became too much for her to handle, and so Mitsuki feels abandoned and unloved herself. All of this is combined with the sense of responsibility she feels toward her mother: she has taken on the mantle of parent and provider, and so she isn't so much balancing her life as she is circling the drain of it. In this, she is plagued with the thought that her life lacks any true value because she was abandoned: after all, if she had been better, or smarter, or stronger, these things would not have happened. In the same vein, she believes that the level of resentment she holds toward her family for their abandonment is misdirected, that her negative feelings are only symptoms of a deep-abiding selfishness. And so these feelings are swallowed down, pushed deep beneath the surface of that polished veneer that makes up her outer personality, and ignored.

While she detests her mother for the years of abuse she suffered, she also fears and pities her, and so can't bring herself to lash out. Unable (or unwilling) to vent her anger in healthy ways, her aggression instead is acted out on others and takes on a decidedly indirect, insidious turn when it does occur. Her insults, while infrequent, are decidedly cutting and cruel, for all that they are cushioned in gentle words, her ever-present politeness seems insincere and forced at times, and as a Magical Hunter, her method of battling is cold, analytical, and focused, a callousness that is almost unnerving. Her acceptance of Umi's offer to become a hunter was in part to vent her aggression against those she feels "deserve it," which in this case were the Devouring, monstrous creatures that existed only to cause harm to others. However, while these aspects of Mitsuki are part of what make her who she is, they are only parts of a whole. It's true that she vents her anger in passive-aggressive ways, that her anger toward past events drives most of her actions, but it's coupled with an intense degree of self-loathing and feelings of helplessness. She maintains her distance from others to avoid being abandoned or left behind again, and when eventually faced with the patient, if relentless attempts at friendship from Keiko and forced to work with the others, that distance falls apart and she becomes dependent on their support and their presence in a desperate, unhealthy way. While guarded and carefully distant whenever her own issues are brought up, Mitsuki has a fondness for, or perhaps feels some level of kinship toward people who exhibit, to her, a degree of loneliness or isolation. This is in part why she is so attached to Kotone, whom she has a rather volatile (and in many ways, unhealthy and codependent) relationship with. She is not fully aware of this, and so while she is a bright girl, it leaves her in danger of running into similar individuals. This is, in part, due to her history of abuse and her overall lack of self-worth.

That said, everything she does isn't simply because she fears being cast off again, or a result of her needing an outlet for her anger. Like the element she controls, at times she can be frigid and unyielding, or forceful and overpowering, but on some days, just as the water can be calm and a source of comfort rather than fear and strength, so can she. She is driven to be a provider and nurturer out of a genuine desire to see other people be happy and healthy. She has a thirst and passion for her studies, and they grant her a sense of power and inner peace that she rarely experiences in her day-to-day life.


( ABILITIES. )

By holding her magical key and calling out the transformation phrase: "Open the portal to the realm of water!" Mitsuki transforms into a Magical Hunter, and is given access to an array of special abilities. Her outfit changes, her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, her key turns into her weapon, a kusarigama (chain sickle), and she controls the elements of water and ice. Her abilities and magical powers are as follows:
( PHYSICAL ENHANCEMENTS. )

( SPEED. ) » Much higher than the average human. She's capable of short bursts of speed sort of like flash steps, but too much wears her out. She is one of the fastest of the Magical Hunters, but is outclassed by Kotone with this skill.
( STRENGTH. ) » Increased strength. It's higher than the average human, but not enough to throw cars or rip trees out of the ground. She's about in the middle-range for this skill, and while she can likely knock out a normal human without too much effort, monsters, stronger Magical Hunters and other superpowered individuals will give her a lot of trouble or be impossible to defeat if she tries to win with brute strength alone.
( STAMINA. ) » Increased stamina. Mitsuki can hold her own in a fight for a while, but she is not as capable of lasting long battles as some of the other Magical Hunters are. This is why her battle style favors careful strategy and mid/long-range combat over close-range attacks.
( ENDURANCE. ) » Increased endurance. She is primarily a mid-range/long-range fighter and specializes in speed and battle tactics rather than the ability to take hits. Normal humans she can handle with little effort, but monsters, other Magical Hunters and superpowered individuals can hit her a few times and she's out for the count.

( MAGICAL ENHANCEMENTS. )

( HEALING. ) » Enhanced regeneration. Mitsuki can magically heal minor to moderate wounds, and at least lessen some major (non-mortal) wounds as long as she does so within fifteen minutes of their infliction. She is also able to heal others, with the same limitations.
( JUMPING. ) » Can jump really high, switch directions mid-jump, double jump, and appear to hang in the air for several moments. A sort of magical gravity manipulation.
( SHIELD. ) » Mitsuki can produce a blue shield to deflect magical and physical attacks. She can expand it to cover up to three people, but it gets significantly weaker. She's decent at shields, but not an expert.
( PRISM SHIELD. ) » When the Magical Hunters join powers to create a shield, they can make a really awesome incandescent rainbow bubble that is incredibly strong and covers a wide area. This is difficult to pull off, as the girls need to be in harmony to do it. When they manage it, though, it's very powerful, and can reflect or absorb attacks as directed.

( WATER MANIPULATION. )
Mitsuki can manipulate water as well as ice, shooting torrents of water, freezing areas over, or creating heavy mist and thick fog to obscure herself and disorient enemies. She doesn't have to call out the names of her attacks, but doing so increases the power of the attack. She is vulnerable to being attacked while performing a calling sequence, however.

( CRYSTAL OVERTURE. ) » A spray of icicles. The crystals are large enough to tear through opponents.
( DIAMOND WALTZ. ) » A blizzard of shimmering snow and ice. The temperature drops enough to instantly and temporarily cover the area and targets in frost.
( OCEAN'S REQUIEM. ) » Waves of ice-cold water cascade over the area — a contained tsunami that catches opponents in the undertow.
( TORRENTIAL ENCORE. ) » A storm comes. The battlefield is pummeled in sheets of freezing rain and sleet, as well as hailstones large enough to do considerable damage to anyone caught in the onslaught.

( UNISON ATTACKS. )

Mitsuki is capable of harmonizing her elemental powers with the powers of another Magical Hunter, resulting in combination attacks far more powerful than any she can do alone. These attacks are difficult to learn, and difficult to pull off, with the same chance of interruption during the calling sequence.

( BLESSED RAIN. ) » (keiko nakagawa) Holy water falls from the sky, healing surrounding allies and damaging enemies.
( ABYSSAL MAELSTROM. ) » (hoshi takeda) A vortex of water that tears a rift in space-time.
ϟ ( FULMEN WAVE. ) » (mayu kawano) A tidal wave of electrically charged water.
( BLAZING TORRENT. ) » (kotone sasaki) A flash flood of superheated water.
( MIRE CASCADE. ) » (sora yamamoto) A rushing mudslide covers the area.
( GALEFROST. ) » (suzume fujioka) A whirlwind of wind and ice.

In addition to her magical abilities, Mitsuki has some musical aptitude, as befitting of her "ideal character type." She played the viola at a very young age up until she was thirteen years old, after her sister left home. She was skilled at this instrument, and has knowledge of classical music and music theory thanks to that and her mother's previous profession.

( SUMMARY. )
Mitsuki comes from the fictional city of Sugikishi, Japan. Her life and backstory can be considered a gruesome combination of The Truman Show and various magical girl shows: an alien force that regularly uses the people of Earth as its entertainment decided to create a show based on the popular magical girl or mahou shoujo genre. To that end, they picked seven girls at birth to serve as their protagonists, and manipulated and twisted their lives to make them exemplify various traits commonly seen in the genre.

Mitsuki was meant to fill the spot of the intelligent, shy blue-haired girl (tv tropes) To achieve the level of withdrawn behavior and isolation common to this character type, they completely destroyed her home life by driving her mother to insanity. Her father was unable to gain custody of his children, and her sister eventually broke under the pressure of caring for Mitsuki and her mother and left them. This resulted in Mitsuki's intense fear of abandonment in tandem with withdrawn anxiousness when forced into social situations, and soft-spoken shyness (so as not to invoke the ire of others). However, she lashes out in passive-aggressive, underhanded ways because of her feelings of self-loathing and helplessness. As a result of her mother's struggles with mental illness, she is deeply unnerved by and fears those with similar issues, though she usually takes on a distantly polite (if insincere) attitude toward those people.

As common with her character type, Mitsuki controls the elements of ice and water. She is notably more callous and unconcerned with trivialities as a magical girl, as she takes on aspects of her real personality when in combat situations. Her magical girl disguise is modeled after the image of the ninja in contemporary fiction, and functions much in the same way as the transformations in Sailor Moon, that is, a magical (or alien-induced in this case) mental barrier of sorts prevents people from being able to tell it is her.

She has a history of physical and psychological abuse. She will rarely speak of it, but it may come up (vaguely) in her internal thoughts, if a situation reminds her of it. Either way, I'll avoid detailing it in graphic ways.

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