ÿþ<html><head><title>Sailor Starwatcher: Uezawa Kumie</title> <STYLE TYPE="text/css"> BODY {background-image: url(uezawa.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 5px 170px; background-attachment: fixed; } </STYLE> </head> <body bgcolor="#993333" text="#ffffff" link="#ffff00" vlink="#bb5500"> <font face="arial"> <table width=100% border=0 cellpadding=5 cellspacing=0> <tr><td width=105><P> <td> <h2>Part I: General Information</h2> <p><b>Name:</b> "Rei" works. <P><b>Email address:</b> rehrick[at]ameritech[dot]net <P> <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <h2> Part II: Character Information</h2> <P><b>Character Name</b>: N¢lENŸ[u` / Uezawa Kumie - Uezawa means "above the swamp," and and Kumie is written with the kanji meaning "long time/old story," "reality/truth," and "favor/blessing/grace." <P><b>Character Position:</b> Sailor Starwatcher, senshi of memory, and student in her second year at Chuo Gakuen <p><b>Birthdate and Age:</b> born on February 14, 1986, now 15 years old. Aquarius sun, Aries moon, Pisces rising. <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <p><b>Likes</b>: <ul><li><i>Facts:</i> Kumie eats facts for dinner. And breakfast, and lunch, and sometimes even a midnight snack, until her brain is just stuffed. It really doesn't matter how relevent it is to her life or school, she just loves tidbits of information. <li><i>Encyclopedias:</i> Kumie is the sort of person who just takes down the "K" (or "Ka- through ku-," perhaps) from the bookshelf and sits down for an evening of leafing through it, reading whatever catches her interest. <li><i><strike>Showing off</strike> Demonstrating her knowledge:</i> Kumie's teachers have told her she should sit quietly and let someone else have a turn, and she tries, but she's not very good at it. She's very proud of her knowledge and wants to share it, and also likes looking smart. <li><i>History:</i> Kumie's favorite subject, which should come as no surprise. She loves it in all its flavors. <li><i>Notebooks:</i> While there's nothing wrong with a plain notepad, Kumie prefers to write on some of the cuter varieties available. She browses stationary shops, and buys little notebooks with cartoon characters, flowers, velvet covers, etc. Her family knows they're always a safe present for any special occasion, too, because she goes through them so fast. </ul> <p><b>Dislikes</b>: <ul><li><i>Boredom:</i> Kumie gets very antsy when there's nothing to do. She usually keeps a book with her at all times to prevent this from happening; if she has any reading material, she's happy as a clam at high tide. But if she's in the subway and she's already read all the advertisements, her brain starts to get desperate for something to do. <li><i>Change:</i> Hoo boy. Kumie is not so good at accepting change. She wants to be a student forever and live in her parents house and GROWING UP OMFG things are just fine the way they are. <li><i>Questions with answers that can't be found in a book:</i> These are problematic to Kumie. She's used to being able to look things up when she doesn't know them, and while she can think critically and interpret things, it takes a lot more effort on her part than rote memorization. <li><i>Underachievers:</i> Kumie has a hard time understanding why anyone wouldn't strive to do their best in school. If you've got the ability, and you aren't getting straight A's, you're just wasting your gifts. </ul> <p><b>Hobbies</b>: <ul><li><i>Keeping a journal:</i> Kumie religiously records the events of her life--and everyone else's lives--in a journal, and has done so for the last six years. She doesn't want to forget anything, and finds it quite enlightening--and amusing--to look back at the thoughts of her past self. <li><i>Reading:</i> Mostly nonfiction, but she will occasionally pick up a novel or manga that catches her eye. She reads magazines, the newspaper, the encyclopedia, the nutrition facts on food, signs on the subway walls--and absorbs it all and files it away. <li><i>Overachieving:</i> Kumie thrives on seeing her name at the top of school test rankings. She goes to cram school three days a week and can't turn down an opportunity for extra credit. </ul> <p> <b>Description</b>: Kumie is cute rather than beautiful. She is little, at 4'11," and looks it; she just has a big mouth to make up for it. Kumie's chest development is best described as "slim to none." She wears glasses with small, rectangular tortoiseshell frames. Underneath them her eyes are a bright red-brown threaded with yellow, the color of red maple leaves. Her hair is a dark brown, very thick and straight, cut just above her shoulders. She usually wears it tied into a half-ponytail, with two pieces hanging in front of her ears and thick bangs covering her forehead. When she's not in the school uniform, her personal style is somewhat out of date. Her mother buys her clothes, and...well, doesn't really dress her funny, but Kumie's clothing seems to have been designed for someone younger than she, though it fits her just fine. <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <p> <b>Personality</b>: Knowledge is Kumie's passion, and she absorbs information like the proverbial sponge. She wants to know everything there is to be known, and truly loves learning. It doesn't hurt that she has an exceptional memory, goes to cram school three days a week, and tends to fall asleep reading the encyclopedia. <P>Kumie excels in school, and has a much more "scholarly" bend than the other "smart cookies" of the senshi teams, Oki, Hanako and Miyako. While Hanako focuses on the bigger picture, Kumie is much more likely to get bogged down in details. And while Oki has her own set of priorities, Kumie tends to care passionately about every aspect of school and works her butt off even when she can't see the long-term use of a subject, because knowledge is important for its own sake. She probably has the most in common with Miyako, but the competitive Kumie looks at the older girl as a rival. Neither is Kumie isn't the quiet, sweet sort of "smart girl." She has a big mouth which she uses to impart all sorts of knowledge on her unsuspecting victims, and she tends to put her foot in it from time to time. <P>In school, Kumie has a reputation as an overachiever and a know-it-all. She has a hard time keeping her mouth shut when she knows the answer to a question--or just something that came to mind as interesting. In elementary school, she was the sort of kid who waved her hand about, half-jumping out of her seat, when she knew the answer to a question. While her behavior has improved a little bit since then, her mentality is still very much the same. She finds it hard to understand why other people aren't as interested in--well, everything--as she is, or why they don't like to listen to her rattle off the things she knows. <P>Kumie wants to help other students, but when it comes down to it, she's not a good teacher. She is impatient and gets frustrated easily, and though she can explain how she got to an answer, she's not so good at explaining why it works that way. She knows not everyone learns the same way she does, or absorbs information so easily, but it's hard for her to really understand that. <P>The most important reason to learn, in Kumie's view, is because if you don't know something, it doesn't exist to you. Things that are unknown are out of your reach, and things that are forgotten are lost. After her mother's parents died, Kumie wanted to make sure she didn't lose any memories of the people who was so precious to her, and started keeping a journal. Something that seems wonderful to you today may be gone tomorrow, and then that wonderful feeling is also gone. <i>Anything</i> of the slightest interest goes into this journal, and the journal accompanies her everywhere; things she sees, overhears, hears about third-hand, it all gets recorded. She has probably gone through a forest of paper to keep up with her habit; there are boxes of her old journals in her room. <P>Because of this philosophy, Kumie is always grasping at the past and trying to hold onto it, rather than living in the present. At fifteen, she is already consumed with nostalgia, yearning for things that are gone. In some ways, her feelings are in tune with the ancient Japanese philosophy of <a href="http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2004/08/27/mono-no-aware/"><i>mono no aware</i></a>, but she has yet to really accept "the impermanence of things," trying to hold on to the past, and stubbornly believing that what persists in memories is never really gone. The Zen ideal of living in the present is wasted on her; what's the point of spending weeks on a sand painting if you're just going to destroy it when you're done? Rather than enjoying the moment for what it is, Kumie suffers from a sort of constipation of memory. <P>Forgetting, or being forgotten, are both terrifying to Kumie. Her grandmother is developing Alzheimer's disease, and seeing her is a constant reminder of what one stands to lose. Memories are precious things. Becoming a doctor and trying to find a cure for the disease is the only thing Kumie has considered, future-wise, that doesn't make her want to hide in a hole with a bunch of books and never come out. Almost as scary as forgetting is growing up; living in the past as much as she does, the future is something to be avoided. Learning new things isn't scary, but doing new things is. She hasn't been able to reconcile her love of things past to the fact that all things must pass, and this is the source of much of the turmoil in her life. <P>Though high school gets boring sometimes, she still gives it her all. She loves having her intelligence acknowledged; after all, if people notice you exist, you're less likely to be forgotten. If you stand out in skill at something, people will remember you for that. Besides, Kumie is proud of her brain. If it works so well, she wants to put it to good use--and the best way she can see to do that is to do well at school. Most subjects come easily to her--with the exception of math, but she isn't afraid to take up its challenge for the sake of her GPA. <P>Kumie's not so bad to have a friend, so long as you don't mind occasionally getting your ear talked off about subjects ranging from the fall of the Roman Empire to obscure mathematical facts that she finds equally fascinating. She has a certain amount of social awkwardness, especially among people she doesn't know well, but it's not all that hard to get by. She has a very competitive streak, and can get snotty if she's upstaged or humiliated on her home ground. She can come across as (very) condescending, though she doesn't mean to. She knows that being smarter than other people doesn't make her <i>better</i>, but she sure likes being smarter than other people anyway. Deep down, she thinks other people are jealous of her, rather than acknowledging her own jealous tendencies. <P>Her mother pushes her to go into some scientific field; in a way, she is living vicariously through her daughter, and hopes she will have some of the opportunities Sayo chose not to take. Fortunately, Kumie was inclined academically, or her mother's "encouragement" would have stressed their relationship greatly. Other people may find her mother pushy, but Kumie just doesn't see it. Kumie hasn't given much thought to her future. She'd like to go to college, and then, well...maybe grad school? If she could, she'd like to be a student all her life. Kumie is a brilliant girl, but she is being dragged into young adulthood kicking and screaming. Boys? She's had a few crushes, but actually acting upon them would take her into unfamiliar territory, so no thanks. <P>In summary: <ul><li>Strengths: Intelligent, great memory, conscious of the past, good study ethic <li>Weaknesses: Terrified of change, insufferable know-it-all, condescending, jealous </ul> <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <p><b>History</b>: Waseda university student Uezawa Kiyotaka was madly in love with his classmate Fujimoto Sayo, and she seemed pretty fond of him, too. But when he popped the question, Sayo couldn't say yes right away. She was a brilliant woman, who dreamed of a career in computers and electronics, not as a housewife caring for her husband's aging parents and any children she might have. She turned him down--but then, when graduation time came, and the idea of Kiyotaka walking out of her life really struck her, she reconsidered, and accepted his offer. Two years later she gave birth to Kumie, and for the most part has been happy, though she never stopped thinking about what could have been. <p>Kumie's father is a software engineer who never really cared for climbing the management ladder, preferring instead to stick to what he did best, and he gets paid well for it. He and his family live in a narrow, three-story house in the Korakuen district, where Kumie lived all her life. The house is also home to Kiyotaka's parents, retired businessman Hirotaka and his wife Harumi, who never quite approved of Sayo taking her place in the household. When Kumie was 4, younger brother Takayuki became a part of the household. bringing it to its current capacity. <p>Kumie's most cherished memories are of traveling to Kobe to see her mother's parents. While her home-grandparents were strict, her Kobe-grandparents always had presents for her, played games with her, and as she got older, she became more and more intrigued by their stories of the past. They were both in good health, and though she hated to go home after a visit, she always knew they'd be there for her to visit again. <p>Then, on January 17 1995, tragedy struck in the form of the Great Hanshin Earthquake. More than five-thousand people were killed, mostly in Kobe, and Sayo received news that her parents had been among those who lost their lives. After the funerals, she brought her daughter with her to Kobe to go through her parents belongings. Both were particularly hurt by the loss, and Kumie was especially afraid she might forget her beloved grandma and grandpa. Sayo brought home some of her parents' things, including many books, a collection of letters and a collection of journals her mother had kept sporadically. <P>Though Kumie didn't understand a lot of the kanji, she struggled to read her grandmother's journals. Even though the woman had died, her thoughts had survived, and Kumie, feeling very afraid of death, began keeping her own diary, so that if anything happened to her, her own thoughts would survive. She wanted to read the books that had belonged to her grandparents, but again the kanji were too difficult--well, the way to fix that was to learn more kanji. She started going to a class on saturday afternoons, and found that the kanji, and the stories behind them, were actually pretty interesting. And then the books, as she read them, were even more interesting. Her grandparents had left them a variety of things, from the Manyoshu to medical texts, and Kumie read them all. Her parents were at first amused, then surprised at Kumie's devotion to reading and learning, and her ability to actually retain the information she absorbed. She had always been a good student, but it was at this point she became a real stand-out. <P>Her parents blame her constant reading for the fact that her eyesight started to decline around the age of 11, when she began wearing glasses. They continued to encourage her studies, however, and although Kumie probably could have gotten into a better school, her father wanted her to go to Chuo, his alma mater. Kumie was happy to go to a school with relevant memories for her father, rather than a place that would be completely unfamiliar. <P>The girl with a love for the past was a perfect fit for the starseed of the Senshi of Memory, and when she received it she only noted that she seemed to be able to remember things more clearly. Now and then she felt a flash of deja vu, but nothing too much out of the ordinary. <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <p> <b>NPCs</b>: <ul> <li>Uezawa Kiyotaka (Blue Sky): Kumie's father, a software engineer for Honda. Kumie probably gets her tendency to be a know-it-all from him. <li>Uezawa Sayo (Small Night): Kumie's mother, who gave up a promising career to marry and have children. Now that her children are old enough to get by most of the day by themselves, she is considering moving back into the workplace, though her husband's parents are dead set against it. <li>Uezawa Harumi (Clear Beauty): Kumie's paternal grandmother, who lives in her house. After Sayo moved into her house, there was a great deal of hosility between the two, but Harumi softened somewhat over the years. She is now showing the first signs of alzheimers. <li>Uezawa Hirotaka (Wide Sky): Kumie's paternal grandfather, who lives in her house. <li>Uezawa Takayuki (This Heaven): Kumie's eleven-year-old brother, and about as annoying as you'd expect an eleven-year-old brother to be. He's pretty good at soccer. <li>Fujimoto Keiko (source-of-the-wisteria Comet child): Kumie's maternal grandmother, who died in the Kobe earthquake of 1995. <li>Fujimoto Akatsuki (dawn): Kumie's maternal grandfather, who also died in the earthquake. </ul> <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <p> <h2>Part III: Soldier Information</h2> <p><b>Senshi History</b>: Poor Sailor Starwatcher was the first to go when Chaos fell upon the Kinmoku system. She had long memories of how her fellow senshi had defeated every other minor branch of Chaos that had invaded their territory, but underestimated the power of Chaos's main force. A skirmish intended to test the power of this new invasion went badly, and it was Starwatcher who stayed behind to hold off the enemy while the others took their princess to safety. She did not survive the fight. <P> <b>Special Skills</b>: <ul><li><i>Photographic Memory:</i> Kumie not only knows she's seen that face before, she can almost always remember where and in what context. Though the magic of the transformation may foil her powers of recognition, she's still going to have a feeling that she's heard that voice somewhere before. Kumie will also remember details--so long as she is paying attention. If she's got her face in a book, she's not going to remember exactly what the man next to her on the subway is wearing. But if she's paying attention, not only will she remember, she'll remember down to the scuffs on his shoes. <li><i>Flashback:</i> Kumie has the ability to remember important past events--sometimes even if she wasn't there--if some event in the present triggers her memory. She is completely unable to change anything that has happened, but she does remember things. Her memories are colored by emotion and impression, however, and may not be completely factual--memory is a subjective beast, and at best Kumie will only remember one side of the story. At worst, it can be so distorted that the facts will be skewed beyond recognition, causing a headache for poor little miss just-the-facts. <li><i>Knowledge is Power:</i> With all the things that Kumie knows, at least some of it is going to come in handy sooner or later. It can't all be useless...right? </ul> <p> <b>Powers</b>: <ul><li><i>Star Piercing Burst:</i> <ul><u>The Shiny:</u> "Star..." Against a dark, starry background, Watcher crosses her arms in front of her so the backs of her hands are facing each other, bows her head, and closes her eyes. "...piercing..." Tiny points of light begin to appear in the space between her hands, making up a sphere that gets brighter and brighter as more tiny "stars" appear. "Burst!" She opens her eyes, and pulls her arms apart, and the tiny stars shoot out towards the enemy, one by one, but at great speed. A split-second later, it's over. <P><u>The Smackdown:</u> It hurts like having a thousand burning hot needles shooting into you. The attack is over very quickly, but the sensation is enough to throw most off their feet, and leave them disoriented. You have to be very quick to dodge it, and it will bend a bit to follow the target. It is a blaster set to stun--though it's over in a second, the aftershock of the intense pain is more difficult to recover from. It's more of a throw-the-enemy-off-balance attack than a finishing attack. The more power she puts into it, the longer the effect will last, and the victim's own physical and mental hardiness has a great deal to do with the impact and duration of the effect. </ul> <p> <b>Fuku</b>: Starwatcher's primary color is reddish-brown, and her secondary color is tan. Her Kinmoku standard issue skirt, halter top, sailor collar, and shoes are in the brown, while her arms and legs are wrapped with tan ribbons.<br> <p> <b>Henshin</b>: "Watcher Star Power, Make up!" Mild-mannered Kumie turns into a sparkly orange silhouette after shouting this phrase, and several stars flutter down from the sky around her. The first lands on her chest to become her brooch, and others land on her body and meld together to form the pieces of her fuku. When this is finished, Starwatcher's features reemerge, and her finishing pose has her leaning forward, her hands clasped behind her back. <p> <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <h2>Part IV: Other Information</h2> <p> <b>Connections</b>: <P><I>Kinmoku</i> <ul><li>Kakyuu/Hanako: Kumie loves her princess, but for reasons she can't quite understand she is a little jealous of Hanako as well. Perhaps it is difficult for her to accept that there is another kind of wisdom that doesn't fit into her current worldview, but in the end brings a greater amount of peace and happiness. <li>Starfighter/Katsuko: Kumie admires Katsuko's determination and go-getter-itude. Both are overachievers in their fields, but since Katsuko's field of expertise is so far removed from Kumie's, she never feels like they're competing with each other. <li>Starmaker/Miyako: Miyako is a great student, and Kumie admires that in a sempai. There is potential for friendship here; Miyako seems the sort of person who would listen patiently to Kumie's tangents, though Kumie probably wouldn't realize the extent of Miyako's self-sacrifice. There is also potential for rivalry, at least on Kumie's part. <li>Starhealer/Hitori: Without much in common and a lack in personal interaction skill on both sides, they'll probably be able to work together, but I don't see these two interacting on their own initiative. <li>Starseeker/Celeste: Celeste and Kumie share an insatiable curiousity, though it has led Celeste to look forward, as Kumie looks backward. Kumie would want to hear all about the places Celeste has been, and Celeste might be able to propel Kumie out of her stagnation. </ul> <P><i>Connections for other factions are so totally forthcoming.</i> <P align="center"><img src="leaf.gif"> <h2>Part V: Grammar Check</h2> <p><ul><i>Let's have a look at that thar grammar...</i> <P> <li>Subject/Verb agreement? Check. <li>You're/Your and They're/Their/There? Check. <li>Capitalization, spelling, and punctuation? Check. <P><i>Yup, the ol' grammar seems to be in working order!</i> </ul> <p> </td></tr></table>