application for demeleier

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Player Name: seki
Player DW: gasmask
Contact: thoughtcrime @ plurk
Character Number: second

Character: Oichi
Source: Sengoku Basara, a video game
Appearance: An average-height Japanese woman with long, flowing black hair and dark eyes. ICONS
History:

We aren't shown exactly what Oichi's life is like before the start of 2, but it is heavily implied that she was with her elder brother, Nobunaga Oda, until being married off to Nagamasa Azai. She is submissive and scared of her brother, and he treats her cruelly throughout the game, so it's implied that through his abuse she became the sad woman she is.

In the video game Sengoku BASARA 2, Oichi is introduced as the wife of Nagamasa Azai and the younger sister of Nobunaga Oda.

The first glimpse of Oichi we see is that of her wedding day. She has been married to Nagamasa Azai under the orders of her brother. It is a lovely day and Nagamasa is glowing while Oichi seems to be a bit more apprehensive. After the palanquin carrying her arrives, suddenly an army appears and attacks. It is the army of Yoshimoto Imagawa, who attacks to disrupt the powerful alliance between the Azai and Oda clans. And because he's butthurt he didn't get an invitation to the ceremony. Mostly the invitation thing though.

Nagamasa is infuriated by this, claiming it an evil to invade on such a good day, and quickly vanquishes Yoshimoto; Oichi praises him for this, and Nagamasa bursts with pride. They plan to restart the ceremony from the start. However! Before the ceremony, they receive a message from Xavi. It's an invitation to the Xavi chapel, where an eternal love ceremony would be held. But this is just a trap; Xavi intends to lure in more followers of his religion.

Flabbergasted by this, Nagamasa proclaims this an unforgivable evil, and they go to attack. Meanwhile, Mitsuhide, a vassal of Oichi's brother Nobunaga, speaks with her; it's revealed that the true intent behind Oichi's marriage is to carve out the Azai forces to attack the Asakura clan with fewer hindrances. Oichi is meant to assassinate her husband, but it's obvious that she's started to fall in love with him by her hesitance. She says that it is impossible to stand up against her brother, and hangs her head. Mitsuhide leaves.

During this, it's discovered that the marriage certificate has been replaced with a conversion certificate by Xavi. Nagamasa is angry and the two fight; at the end of the fight, Xavi vanquished, Oichi is saddened and claims that all around her are unhappy, and that's ok if Nagamasa hates Oichi for this. Nagamasa tells her that she shouldn't worry about things like that and gives her a flower. Oichi starts to cry, heart warmed by his kindness.

The ceremony is finally completed, and the two are wed. Oichi finds a bit of happiness in this, being with the man she quickly comes to love.

However, Nobunaga has other plans. Deeming Oichi's assassination attempt a failure by Mitsuhide's reports, the Oda clan moves to attack the Asakura. Nagamasa is horrified, and quickly annuls the pact formed via his and Oichi's marriage. Under the pretence of punishing the impudence of the Azai, Nobunaga manoeuvres his troops to Anegawa, the Azai's home.

It turns into a slaughterfield. The Oda troops quickly overwhelm them and Oichi is perfectly powerless, unable to do anything as she watches her husband's men die.

Oichi pleads with Nagamasa to apologize to her brother, but Nagamasa is stubborn; he claims that Nobunaga betrayed them by going on to attack Asakura, and that Nobunaga has turned away from honour. Mitsuhide enters the scene. He and Oichi fight, and he is killed after a short exchange. Nagamasa tells Oichi to withdraw, but she doesn't want to-- she wants to talk with her brother and to get him to stop attacking. She doesn't want her brother to kill her husband or herself. Before he can convince her to run away, Nobunaga appears.

Starting to plead with her brother does no good. He interrupts her straight away and tells her and Nagamasa that they do not offer second chances, and he aims his gun at Oichi, starting their brawl. Nagamasa and Oichi fight against Nobunaga, Oichi pleading with him all the while, and eventually Nagamasa cuts in, directing Nobunaga's attacks towards him. They talk and Nobunaga continues to be unforgiving. Eventually, one of Nobunaga's attacks hit Oichi and she is knocked over-- he raises his gun to fire at her, but before he can pull the trigger Nagamasa is in the way.

He is killed by the bullet intended for his wife, and Oichi watches him bleed out, completely horrified. Nobunaga says that this isn't bad either, referring to Oichi's distress, and tells her that this is her fault. She is the one who killed Nagamasa. Oichi takes this to heart, believing it to truly be her fault.

Oichi is whisked away by her brother and his troops; she is not allowed time to heal the wound left by the loss of her loved one and is instead thrown onto the battlefield, working for Nobunaga's conquest. Her miserable figure looms over the Oda clan's forces, and she can do little but weep and blame herself for her husband's death. It leaves her an empty shell; so empty that when her brother shoots by her head with his shotgun, she does not flinch.

During the attack on the Takeda, Oichi struggles to live, fighting her hardest. She believes in nothing but the idea that her husband must be hating her in the afterlife, that she has failed as a wife, that had she worked harder, Nagamasa may not have died. She kills her brother's enemies. At the end of the battle, she falls to the ground, weeping, apologizing to her dead husband.

Completely stuck is what Oichi is-- she is broken and beaten up, and thus unable to break away from her cruel brother's commands. She fights on, letting her brother use her as he sees fit, despite it ruining her bit by gradual bit-- because, you see, she believes she doesn't deserve any better. She wants to live, despite the hardships thrown her way; when her brother tells her to do as he says or die, she choses to do as he says.

Wailing that she can't do it when faced by Kenshin Uesugi, her brother urges her on; she says that it hurts, Nagamasa will never forgive her. This is her breaking point; this is the moment where it loops around and she starts to feel okay again.

Oichi starts to hear voices. The voice of her husband, in particular; she hears him praise her, tell her she's done well, and Oichi perks up. She likes to be praised by him, and thinks that fighting will make him happy, so she goes on to throw all of herself into the battle. She goes at it with a vigour none had ever seen her before. She fights in his name, giddy and excited to the point where she suggests they attack some peasants to suppress their uprisings. She's praised by many for her sudden change in attitude, but this does not affect her.

Going with her brother's wife, Nouhime, and his trusted vassal, Ranmaru, they approach the peasants and gradually cut them down. It's slow going, and Oichi begins to panic during it. Nagamasa's voice fades for her, and she's suddenly very keenly afraid that he will leave her. Nouhime and Ranmaru realize her panicked state and go to assist her, but it does nothing. Oichi continues to panic, egged on by the peasant girl Itsuki, and she faintly hears Nagamasa saying something. She strains to hear it, and when she does, she kills Itsuki. Their leader defeated, the peasants back down.

Ranmaru as well as Nouhime approach Oichi, alarmed by her behaviour. But she turns to them as though a doll on strings, claiming that Nagamasa has told her to kill everyone. And so, she does. Nouhime and Ranmaru die by her hand easily and quickly enough. Her sights become set on the next target: her brother. She wanders to the castle at Honnoji, unsure of why she wishes to kill him; unsure if it's for her own sake, for Nagamasa's, or for her brother himself.

When she and her brother meet, she tells him that Nagamasa wants his head; Nobunaga asks her who really wants it, and she insists that it's Nagamasa, not herself. But as the castle of Honnoji goes up in flames around them, it is revealed that Oichi herself wishes for it. She blames Nobunaga for what she's become, for how the people around her always end up. He denies responsibility and she asks for proof of that. She asks for him to beg for his life, fully caught up in a moment of her true demonic nature. She kills him without mercy, watching him fall to the ground in a final heap.

Cheering, Oichi raises her hands to the heavens, gleefully dancing around. At last! Oichi has avenged her husband and her own ruined life! But this happiness does not last. She crumples to the ground in tears, realizing the emptiness of such a thing; Nagamasa hasn't been brought back to life; it changes nothing; it brings her no peace; and she feels as though a monster, having killed her own brother who she loved despite all the torment he put her through.

Escaping the burning castle, Oichi's mind breaks to an extreme it had not before. She gradually suppresses everything-- Nagamasa's kindness and death, her revenge on her brother, killing Nouhime and Ranmaru... everything. She wanders Japan as an amnesiac, unsure of her life's purpose and feeling a hole in her heart without knowing why.

Timeline:

Personality: [ ties in heavily with my history. ]

On her wedding day, she is apprehensive; she does not like being married off, but there is nothing she can do about it. Her brother has an iron grip over her; she fears him completely. However, she becomes less apprehensive as time goes on and her husband proves to be a good man. He is shy to let his affections be known and this at times confuses her, but his clumsy kindness is something she's never really experienced before. She's used to people hating her, or just plain disliking her. And so she quickly falls in love with him.

His death leaves a hole in her. The first person to be truly kind to her is gone, and she believes herself to be to blame. She was always quick to apologize for something she perceived to be her fault, but that intensifies after he is killed. Everything around her is her fault; she is thrown into war to fight for her brother, and this slowly rips her to pieces. Being a gentle person, Oichi did not enjoy killing people-- but she had no other choice. However, once she starts to hallucinate her dead husband's voice, this changes. His praise in her mind is motivation enough to completely change her outlook on such things; it relieves her of her guilt, at least somewhat, and Oichi is desperate to escape from that.

Escape is a huge motivation in her losing her memories. She cannot bear to be defeated in victory, she cannot bear the emptiness of getting revenge, she cannot bear the death of all those close to her. So, she suppresses everything, and reverts to an easier time. Something more convenient to her. She reverts to a nonexistent time where she fought under her brother and Nagamasa did not exist. And in place of Nagamasa's voice, Oichi hears her brother. He instructs her to do things and resolves her of responsibility for her actions; after all, she's just doing what her brother told her to do, there's nothing wrong with that.

After she loses these memories, Oichi is stripped down to her very core. And at that core is someone who has dealt with unending cruelties their entire life, someone shattered several times over, someone stunted and longing for kindness. She is someone who is steeped in darkness and misery and pain, and even forgetting everything does not rid her of that.

Her melancholy is the second most prominent part of her. While she no longer remembers the things she has endured, she feels their effect. She feels a great emptiness inside of her, and is resigned to it not ever feeling any better; she says that she must endure despite it, and she does. She is often seen crying because of this.

Her dark side is the most immediately obvious part of her. Oichi has a dark streak through her a mile wide, a whimsical lilt of dark humor and cruelty. Her cruelty is that of a child's-- pulling the wings off of an insect, watching it squirm and writhe in idle curiosity.

Oichi acts on intuition, feelings and instinct more than logic-- logic is generally the last thing on her mind, and when deciding what to do she often goes with what feels best. What has the best colour, what has the best texture, or what sounds prettiest. It's not often that something feels bad, but Oichi is drawn to brightness, warmth, and happiness, but then contradictorily takes comfort from darkness and misery, because they're familiar to her.

She speaks oddly, referring to herself in the third person; this is a sign of just how detached from herself Oichi is.

Abilities:

Oichi is a playable character in a combat game, so it goes without saying that she too is a skilled fighter. In the game she is initially introduced in, she fights with a naginata, and her skill with that is presumably not supernatural. However! From her introduction it's implied very heavily that Oichi has demonic blood flowing through her, and as such has some supernatural powers.

Her supernatural abilities make themselves manifest in the way of hands made out of tangible darkness or shadow. I don't think Oichi has a direct sort of control over these hands, but they seem to go along with what she wants them to do, generally fighting, and haven't canonly disobeyed her. They also help her with simple tasks such as walking upright, mounting a horse, riding a zipline, etc; they also allow her to sink into the ground and reappear in other locations, to open portals which suck enemies underground, and to even glide through the air!

Additionally during the night and when she is an enemy, she is canonly unable to be defeated. Doing some guesswork (we're never told why she's unable to be defeated) I'm thinking that it's because she draws strength from the dark of night. So basically she's immortal at night.

Inventory: The clothes on her back.

Prose Sample:

There is something wrong.

Oichi is carried across the stone temple steps, arms limp by her side but the mirror clutched carefully in her hand. The crown sits on her head though she is not sure what it does or what it means. The dark hands carry her along in the direction she wants to go, and she looks about-- very curious.

There is something wrong, and Oichi is deeply puzzled. She cannot place the temple. She cannot place these meadows. She has never seen these places in her entire life, and yet... ah, what's that. Oichi hears a whispering. It is a voice unlike the ones she usually hears. There are many voices actually, now that she strains to hear them. They are talking in different pitch, different rhythm and tone. Each voice belongs to a different person, and Oichi's brow furrows further than it had been before. How strange!

She does locate where the sound is coming from. It is from the mirror. Oichi tells the hands to place her gently onto the ground among the flowers and she looks into the mirror, listening and listening. She wonders, ah, she wonders if she's been spirited away. She must have been. It is not long before she figures out how to broadcast her own message, and she does it with a childlike interest or joy.

How interesting, how quaint. A magical mirror.

Journal Sample:

[ The mirror flickers, giving brief glimpses of a woman, of flowers, of grass.

It takes a while to focus. Oichi looks into the mirror at the picture of herself, and she leans her head against her shoulder. Rain pitter patters across the surface. She stares into it for an uncomfortably long time before finally speaking up. ]

Say something... Ichi is warning you, magic mirror... please speak. Please talk to Ichi. Ichi is ever so lonely, and Ichi wants to talk... ah, no. Ichi understands... Ichi hears you, though you do not speak. You're shy, aren't you... so shy, so meek and mild-mannered... it's ok. Ichi promises she doesn't mind. You can say anything, anything at all, anything your heart desires. Ichi just wants to hear your voice, ok...? So please speak up. Ichi is lonely. Ichi has not spoken to anyone for such a long time.

Are you awake?

[ She giggles. ]

Sleepyhead... wake up. It's morning. The rain is cold, how can you sleep through that...?

[ And her voice suddenly darkens, low and dangerous and unstable. ]

No. You must be dead. I won't accept that. Ichi just found you, and you went and died... Ichi will find you in the netherworld when her time comes, and she will make your death as hellish as your life... it's what you deserve for being so cruel. Go to bed and never wake up. Ichi doesn't care.

[ In her frustration, she tosses the mirror down on the grass. The feed cuts. ]