Stormbird
|| THE BASICS ||
- Full name: Rin Aikawa (R-In I-Ka-Wa)
- Preferred Name: Rin
- Alias: N/A
- Titles: N/A
- Species: Near Human
- Race: Keshian/Phaseling
- Homeworld: Voidborn - Murninkam
- Faction(s): None
- Rank(s):
- Force Potential
- Class:
- Phaser
- Telekinetic
- Warlock
- Master(s):
- Adrian Vandiir - Creator
- Padawan(s):
- N/A
- Force Sensitive: Yes
- Force Alignment: True Neutral
- Gender: Female
- Age: Young Adult - 18 GSY
- Height: 165 cm (5'5")
- Weight: 64 kgs (142 lbs)
- Complexion: Fair skin
- Eye Color: Brownish Crimson
- Hair Color: Auburn
- Distinguishing Marks: A couple small surgical scars.
- Marital Status: Single
- Sexual Conduct: Undetermined
- Languages:
- Galactic Basic Standard
- Read only Ur-Kittat
- Occupations:
- Waitress (Formerly)
- Unemployed
- Residence:
- None
- Familial Relations:
- TBD
Rin reads as a compact, athletic young woman with an easy, kinetic presence. The kind of energy that leans into the frame and brightens it. She's medium-short in stature with a lean, runner's build. Long, toned legs. A narrow, high waist, and softly curving hips and bust that give her silhouette a confident hourglass without bulk. Her skin is fair with a warm flush at the cheeks and chest, often catching the light with a soft sheen. A few faint freckles dust across the bridge of her nose when you're close enough to notice. The face is heart-shaped and expressive: straight, decisive brows. A small, upturned nose, and full, plush lips that default to a half-smile or a mischievous pout. Her eyes are the striking feature. Large and bright, a vivid magenta-red that reads immediately as uncommon. Framed by long lashes so the irises seem to glow. Hair is a rich chestnut bob with red-violet undertones, cut to the jaw with volume and swing. A heavy side-swept fringe scythes diagonally across her forehead and, depending on the angle, can veil one eye in an artful way. She talks with her hands. Slender fingers, long painted nails. Rin's style mixes streetwear and flirt. She favors off-the-shoulder knits and fitted tube-top minis that show collarbones and shoulder lines. Cropped or oversized bomber jackets (often red, sometimes with a faux-fur trim) shrugged low on the arms. Black shorts or a micro-skirt under long tops, and thigh-highs or bare legs paired with chunky, high-cushion sneakers in white and teal. Accessories are part of her signature. Big sea-glass-green earrings, a matching bangle, and occasionally a slim black choker or headband. Adding pops of color that echo the neon in her eyes. Altogether she looks like a city kid who can sprint for the train, pose for a photo mid-platform, and then step into a fight without changing outfits: sporty, feminine, a little loud on purpose, and unmistakably herself.
|| ATTRIBUTES ||
My strengths feel less like trophies and more like tools I've learned to hold without cutting myself. Willpower is the first one I reach for. My stubborn core that refuses to yield when the room tilts or the lights go red. It isn't pretty. It's grit in the gears, a quiet decision made again and again. Keep going! I'm fearless in the way a person becomes after surviving things that should have ended them. Not because I don't feel fear, but because I've practiced moving while it speaks. That same resolve sharpens my perception. The Force opens the world to me in textures and tensions. A web of lines I can hear in my bones. I can nudge those lines with telekinesis, gently if I'm disciplined, brutally if I must, and that gives me options when doors lock and people lie. My mind learns patterns quickly. I improvise well under pressure, and experience has taught me to favor the smallest effective action over the loudest one. My body, too, carries advantages I've made peace with, for the most part. Keshian vision that reads ultraviolet and infrared like extra syllables in a sentence, letting me see heat in a lie or danger gathering on the edge of a crowd. Reflexes tuned by too many alarms, and a pain tolerance earned the ugly way. Phasing is the strangest gift. An agreement I make with matter, stepping between its teeth. While my touch on gravity lets me tilt the board just enough to lighten my steps or weigh a threat down. None of this makes me special in a way I celebrate. It makes me responsible. When it works, it feels like collaboration with a universe that's willing to meet me halfway if I come to it honest and steady. During my time, we were taught to protect ourselves. Namely as some kind of weapon to be built. The training we received was that of a somewhat known fighting martial arts of Teräs Käsi. A unique fighting form that could be used with bare hands or even weapons. I am merely a novice in the art, but I do what I can to keep my skills sharp. As living alone and roaming the galaxy, requires much of someone like myself.
My weaknesses are not mysteries. They are the familiar rooms I still learn to exit cleanly. Anger is the most obvious. Bright, fast, and convinced it's righteous. It kept me alive more than once, and for that I respect it, but it also convinces me to speak before I listen and to escalate when grace would have saved me grief. Pride is its quieter twin, the part of me that would rather break than bend, and I know how often stubbornness is just fear wearing armor. Isolation is a habit I taught myself in captivity. If no one is close, no one can be taken from me, and I cannot fail them. The cost is emptiness at the exact moment people should be there. Beneath all of it runs the old lab-script is the voice that says I am a problem to be managed, a variable that ruins data, a danger that only looks like a girl. On the bad days, that script writes me into worthlessness and I follow its punctuation. My powers share those same flaws. They are strong and they are volatile. When I am exhausted or upset, telekinesis shakes and strikes wide, telepathy bleeds and drags other people's storms into my skull, phasing flickers and tempts me to trust a margin that isn't there. My wide-spectrum sight overwhelms in chaos. These bright arcs and hot edges become too much, and I lock up. Gravity work drains me fast if I hold it, turning my limbs to sand. There's a superstition that clings to me. That of a Stormbird, and even when I tell myself it's just fear projected outward, the way people flinch writes its own truth. Worst of all are the cliffs I can't ignore. Re-solidifying inside a wall if my count slips, collapsing into echo loops, ripping the world instead of smoothing it. I live with those possibilities the way sailors live with charts of reefs: respectfully, attentively, never pretending they aren't there.
What these strengths and weaknesses mean to me is simple and difficult: they are the boundaries of who I am today, not the verdict on who I have to be tomorrow. Strength, for me, is not dominance. It's the precision and restraint. The courage to do less, but do it right. It is the discipline to knock before I enter someone's mind, the humility to step back when my touch would harm, the patience to choose a whisper over a shout. Weakness, for me, is not a moral failure. It's information. When anger bites, I ask what boundary I failed to guard. When pride digs in, I ask what I'm afraid will break if I yield. When isolation sounds like safety, I ask if I'm hiding from loss or from love. The Force does not grade me. It answers honestly to what I bring. A clean breath, clear intent, or the frantic noise of a frightened animal. My work, every day, every scene, is to bring more of the first two and less of the last. Trying to treat fatigue and fear as signals to ground, eat, rest, and to practice the small uses of power that leave the world more intact. If I do that long enough, the shape of me changes. The storm I carry doesn't vanish, but it learns to travel with purpose.
So I hold both truths at once. I am dangerous, and I can be safe to stand beside. I am angry, and I can be kind. I am powerful, and I can be careful. The strengths I keep are the ones that serve people other than me. I feel courage, clarity, resilience, a willingness to learn. The weaknesses I watch are the ones that turn me inward until I can't see who I'm hurting. I fee pride, isolation, the seductive certainty of rage. I don't expect perfection, that's impossible. I expect practice. I expect to count my breaths before I step through a wall. I expect to ask permission before I touch a mind. I expect to apologize when I fail and to try again with better boundaries and softer hands. If there is a prayer I believe in, it is simple. Let my power arrive where it is needed, and leave without scars. Until then, I keep showing up to myself with the same honesty I bring to the Force, because in the end they are the same conversation. What I choose to move, and what I choose to release.
The Force, to me, isn't a religion or a side to pick. It's weather. It's pressure and pattern, a constant hum that bleeds through the bones of everything, indifferent to who's praying and who's cursing. The lab tried to turn it into numbers. Waveforms, thresholds, failure states, but my body learned it as sensation long before I had language for it. Some days it feels like a room strung with invisible lines, each line thrumming at a slightly different pitch. If I were to breathe just right, I can hear which ones belong to people, which belong to stone, which are the echoes of what happened here yesterday. Other days it's not sound at all but weight. The very air that grows thick around a lie, a corridor that wants you to walk faster because someone is afraid at the far end. Is it light? Is it life? The philosophers can argue. What I know is that it moves, and that it moves whether I believe in it or not. It doesn't love me and it doesn't hate me. People do those things. The Force just is, and when I'm honest, that's a kind of comfort. Its a storm that doesn't take sides.
When I work with it, I don't "command." I listen, match, then nudge. Telekinesis is the easiest to name and the hardest to do cleanly. It's like hooking two fingers into that web of lines and choosing a vector. If I try to muscle it, if I confuse force with Force, it snaps back, and I learn the same lesson again with bruises. Done right, it's economy. I set the intention, trace the line, apply the least amount of pressure that still changes the outcome. Gravity is a cousin to that, but broader. Imagine the world as a tilted board and everything on it as a bead. I can feel the slope and alter it by a degree or two, enough to make a blaster weigh like a brick in someone else's hand or to take the lead out of my own steps. It's exhausting if I hold it too long, like clenching a muscle you can't name. Phasing is the liar among my talents. Its soft, very tempting, and fatal if I get it wrong. It's not disappearing. It's stepping sideways through the lattice when the lattice is at its loosest. Breath is everything. Three slow in, two out, hold, listen for where the matter is already oscillating, then align myself to that rhythm and pass through on the exhale. I put my palm on the surface first. If it buzzes against my skin like a distant engine, I know I have a margin. I also know to count. If I lose count inside a wall, panic will make me solid at the worst possible second. I've learned to keep one thought burning in my head as an anchor. My name, the shape of my friend's laugh, the exact number of steps to the far side. All so I come back where I meant to be.
Telepathy is the place where ethics aren't optional. I grew up without doors in my own mind, and I won't do that to other people on purpose. The Force makes other minds loud to me. Fear has this metallic taste, grief sits cold and low, a lie throws off a thin, high whine, and if I'm tired, the signals bleed through whether I invited them or not. So I built habits. When I walk into a crowded room, I "lower the gain". I hum a tune under my breath, or recite the serial number etched in a med-scanner I stared at for years, or count to seventeen and back down. These shields that are more rhythm than wall. If I need to reach someone, I knock first. Not literal knocking, obviously duh, but a gentle pressure at the edge of their awareness that says may I? If they tense or spike with alarm, I step back. If they open, I keep my touch like a window cracked for a breeze rather than a door kicked off its hinges. Objects speak too, in their way. The Force echoes trapped in these sharp events. A scorched deck remembers a fire. A knife remembers being chosen. Those are dangerous rooms to walk through. They stick. I've learned to ground out afterward. To touch something living, run water over my wrists, name five colors I can see in ultraviolet and five I can only see in infrared. Small, little rituals that bring me back to the present spectrum instead of the past's.
People argue that the Force wants serenity or passion, obedience or will. I think it wants honesty. My nervous system doesn't lie, and the Force listens to that better than any creed. If I'm furious and pretend I'm calm, my telekinesis shakes and breaks things I didn't mean to break. If I'm terrified and admit it, I can channel that fear into precision. Smaller pushes, cleaner exits. Anger is fuel that burns dirty. Sometimes it's the only thing between me and an open grave, so I use it with respect and a plan to put it down fast. The trick that keeps me alive is ritual, not dogma. Grounded with touch. The cold steel rail, a raw stone pillar, my own knuckles. Scope the field and close my eyes, map the strongest lines, find the quietest one and tie my breathing to it. Vector the change. What's the minimum nudge that yields the maximum shift. Release, then let go before the recoil writes its lesson across my ribs. When I get it right, I'm not imposing my will on the world so much as collaborating with it. You already want to fall this way. Here, let me help. When I get it wrong, it's because I tried to be louder than a storm instead of learning where to put the sail.
My Keshian eyes are a cheat and a teacher both. Seeing ultraviolet through infrared lets me read heat seams in a crowd and the afterglow of a power conduit, but it also warns me when I'm overclocking. Colors skew when I push too hard. The edges halo, the world develops a flicker at 30 hertz that isn't there. That's my cue to stop, to drink water, to eat salt and sugar, to stand barefoot if I can and bleed the static into ground. The lab never taught me that. Experience did. The lab taught me failure states. Like phasing inside an object, collapsing from an energy crash, echo loops that trap me in someone else's nightmare. I respect those cliffs. I don't go near them unless I must, and when I must, I tie a rope around my waist made of breath counts and names. I won't pretend I'm the best student of other people's systems. The Jedi serenity feels like a room I can't breathe in, and Sith volume makes me deaf. I want clarity. I want a way to be dangerous that leaves other people more whole, not less. So I practice the small things. Smoothing a fracture in a girder, lightening a crate for someone with a bad back, quieting a panic spiral in a stranger by lending them my steadier rhythm for three breaths and then giving it back.
How do I feel about the Force? Grateful, wary, stubborn. It took and it gave, and I won't let either fact erase the other. I don't think it has a plan for me. No destiny or predetermined path. I think it offers me leverage and asks me to own the consequences. I use it because it is part of me, the way bone is part of me and pulse is part of me. I use it like a tool I refuse to worship and a companion I refuse to fear. One day, if I do this right, the word "Stormbird" will mean call her when the wind rises, she knows how to set a line and bring you home. Until then, I keep listening. I keep matching. I keep nudging. And I keep telling myself the truth: the Force doesn't make me good or bad. What I do with it does.
|| POSSESSIONS ||
Weapons:
- Rin's Talons - A set of Petar that she can use with her Martial Arts training.
- Waitress Clothing
- Basic clothing
- N/A
|| BIOGRAPHY ||
PRE-ROLEPLAY
I don't remember being born so much as I remember being watched. The first faces I knew were reflected in visor glass and the polished eyes of recording lenses. They told me I was "voidborn," that my first breaths were taken in the air of a ship riding the dark above Murninkam, but what mattered wasn't the where. Only the why. I was a variable to be measured. Lights hummed. Med-droids marked my growth against charts. Voices beyond the glass traded my name for numbers and thresholds. When the world is a room and the room is a test, you learn to read the weather in footsteps and the tilt of a clipboard. You learn what it means to pass, and what it costs when you don't. They called the results "phenomena." I called them accidents. A toy that rose on its own because I wanted it. A cup that shattered because I didn't. The first time I reached into someone's head by mistake, touched a thought that wasn't mine, I cried for an hour and the monitors recorded it as "prolonged stress response." That's the joke of being studied. Even your grief wears a tag.
There was another child. I won't say her name. We shared a wall so thin I could feel her heartbeat in the rails when the power dipped. We passed contraband across the grate. Half a sweet roll, a drawing made with scavenged carbon, the rumor of a sky neither of us had seen. We made plans with the careful optimism of prisoners. Which is to say we fantasized about the ordinary. Stupid arguments, bad food, someplace with a window that didn't look in. My gifts were louder than hers, and the handlers liked mine better until they didn't. The day it went wrong is a corridor of flashes. Alarms, the taste of metal, her panic colliding with mine until our heads were a single storm. I tried to pull everything back, to make the world quiet, and something in me answered by making it explode instead. I remember the shriek of rending steel. I remember hands dragging me clear. What I don't remember is her walking out beside me. They wrote that up too. "Cascade event; subject destabilized." I keep it simpler: I got out; she didn't. And every time my power surges now, I hear two heartbeats in the rails.
Freedom, when it came, did not feel like triumph. It felt like the glare of unfiltered light and the dizzying truth that no one would tell me when to sleep. I learned quickly that I could pass for normal if I kept my eyes down and my temper leashed. I worked tables in a place that smelled like fryer oil and bleach, and for a while that was enough. A universe of clattering plates and invented small talk, a uniform that made me anonymous. But my edges are not dull. The vision spectrum that's part of me caught too much. The heat bloom of a bad argument about to happen, the quick flare of someone lying, and the voices didn't always stay on their side of the glass. If I was tired or scared, my hand would slip through a tray handle when I meant to grip it. A customer's drink would suddenly weigh as much as a brick because my focus snagged on a memory. I laughed it off until the day laughing didn't work and a wall decided it didn't want to be solid. Word travels. People begin to look at you as if you're an omen instead of a girl. The nickname followed me like a shadow. Stormbird. Not a badge, not an epithet. A warning.
So I kept moving. It's easier to be unlucky when no one has the time to measure it. I learned the city by its back doors and quiet roofs, the way scaffolds buzz under your feet when generators kick on, the hours when a market becomes a sanctuary because everyone there is too busy counting credits to count the ways you don't fit. I tested my limits like you test a ladder you don't trust. One rung, then another, listening for the creak. Phasing is a liar. Gentle when it works, lethal when it doesn't. Gravity is a flirt. Promising lightness until it drags you to your knees. Telepathy, telekinesis, the rest. They're all just words for the same truth. Power without mastery eats its wielder first. I tried to teach myself and found out I am a poor teacher. I tried to let others teach me and found out I am a worse student when control is demanded before understanding is offered. Jedi, Sith, zealot, scientist. The labels change, the hunger behind them doesn't. Everyone loves a weapon until it refuses to be pointed where they want.
I am not going to pretend I'm above anger. I carry it like a second spine. Some days it keeps me upright; some days it bends me in half. I say too much, too sharply. I choose solitude because it's easier to disappoint myself than to watch someone else do it. The old scripts from the lab run in the background. If you were better, she'd be alive. If you were quieter, they wouldn't have feared you. If you were anyone else, you'd belong. But there are other days, more of them lately, when I notice smaller truths. That I am stubborn in ways that keep me alive. That my fearlessness is not emptiness but defiance. That I can look at a room and sense which thread to pull to stop an argument before it becomes a fight. That when I put my hand on a fractured girder and ask it not to fail, sometimes it listens. I am learning to treat my instincts as companions instead of criminals. I am learning that resilience is not the absence of pain but the refusal to let pain decide the ending.
What do I want? Fewer metaphors and more answers. I want a place where my name isn't entered into a log before I'm allowed to use it. I want to look at a door and choose whether to walk through it instead of falling through it because my nerves misfired. I want to be the kind of dangerous that protects, the kind of storm you call when a fire is out of control, not the omen people cross the street to avoid. That means training, but on my terms. Not obedience masquerading as discipline, not sanctity pretending to be safety. I will study the edges of what I am until I can navigate them without slipping. I will find teachers who can tolerate the way I learn and students I can help long before their gifts teach them to hate themselves. I will find the people who see a bird and not a curse. I know I can't fix the ledger behind me. The numbers don't add up. They never will. What I can do is stop acting like the universe wrote my story in a lab and all I'm allowed to do is annotate the margins. My future is not a case report. It's a map, and if the storm is coming with me either way, I'd rather be the one steering it.
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