Deus Ex Machina: The Xenogears Tale
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PERSONA SHEET
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Player Information
------------------

Name or Alias: Azusa
Age (optional): 19
Sex: F
E-mail address: AzusaEris@aol.com
ICQ/AIM/Yahoo! Pager/etc. (if applicable): AIM: AzusaEris ICQ: 41219437


Character Information
---------------------

-Name: Mariko Koha
-Age: 14
-Sex: Female

-Occupation(s): Student

-Substitutes which Xenogears Character? (if applicable): Maria Balthazar

-Birthdate: February 23
-Height: 5'2"
-Weight: 102 lb.
-Eyes (colour and shape): Blue, with a gentle curve to the lids which give them a moonlike appearance.
-Build: Mariko is small and relatively frail; her strength and body are rather weak and underdeveloped.
-Complexion: Light tan
-Facial Features: Her nose has a slight upturn to it; her features in general seem a bit large and gawky on her face. One might say that she's in the awkward adolescent stage.
-Identifying Marks: Her necklace; a small red birthmark underneath her left ear which is usually obscured by hair.
-Hair (colour and style): Black hair, normally worn long and straight, that reaches to the middle of her back; sometimes she wears it tied back in a ponytail.
-Voice: A rather low, very quiet, often soft tone; can range from obnoxiously shrill when she's upset to almost inaudible in the presence of strangers.

-Dress/Attire: When not in her school uniform, generally a loose blue shirt with black pants, or something similarly comfortable and generally unfashionable.
-Jewelry (if any): A silver Nisan cross necklace with a locket at the center, containing photographs of her parents. The necklace was a gift from her mother, a follower of the Nisan sect, upon her departure to Solaris. Although Mariko is not a religious person, she wears the necklace on a daily basis, refusing to take it off for sleeping or showering.
-Weapons/Tools (if any): N/A
-Armour (if any): N/A

-Personality: Mariko is a shy, quiet girl with a low opinion of herself and not much of a social life. She aspires to be a Gear engineer or a scientist like her father, her interest fueled in childhood by her father's work. For most of her life, Mariko has experienced a profound sense of being "different" from other children, distanced from them by her maturity and by factors she could never quite explain. Although she becomes depressed easily, she has a sense of responsibility and dedication which most adults find remarkable in a child in her age; in part because she knows she is expected to be mature, she often suppresses the more childlike parts of her personality, to her own detriment.
Emotionally, however, she is still fourteen, and has felt frightened and alone since the disappearance of her parents. Her true age manifests itself only under great stress, when she is prone to fits of crying and temper tantrums. Although like most children she has great dreams of adventure, in an actual battle she is something of a coward and loses all rationality-- at least in the beginning.
Although adults tend to admire Mariko for her maturity and responsibility, children her own age find her somewhat odd-- few people can ever recall seeing her smile or laugh, and although she is polite in the presence of adults, she usually comes across as withdrawn and brooding in social interactions with people of her age.
-Background and History: Mariko Kaminoshi was born to Sarah Kaminoshi, a native of Nisan, and Tetsuya Kaminoshi, a scientist from Shevat. Although she was born in Shevat, her parents moved to Aveh shortly afterwards, and she spent the first eleven years of her life on the surface world until the terrible day when her father mysteriously defected to Solaris, leaving behind neither explanation nor clues as to why he had disappeared into the heart of the empire he had dedicated his life to opposing.
Mariko's mother left in search of him shortly after, leaving Mariko in the care of relatives in Shevat, Kaori and Genian Koha. She infiltrated a Gebler base on the surface, where she was caught and executed; news of her death did not reach Mariko for several months, by which time her body had already been sent to Nisan for a proper burial. Since she was forbidden to leave Shevat under any circumstances, out of fear that Solaris would attempt to use her in some way, she was never able to visit her mother's grave.
Until her father's disappearance, she had been told very little of what her father's actual work involved. It was a time of disturbing revelations, and Mariko was left alone in a strange and unfamiliar land with no friends and nobody to confide in. At school, her land-dwelling origins are not much of a secret, as her accent betrays them clearly, and many of the students torment her on a regular basis. Though her foster parents are kind to her and treat her as an equal, they understand little of the true nature of Dr. Kaminoshi's work and his relations to Solaris, and Mariko has never been able to openly confide in them and treat them as parents.
Unbeknownst to her, Mariko is actually an active participant in a defense effort orchestrated by her father from his captivity within Solaris. Shortly after her arrival in Shevat, she was presented with a Gear "simulation" game-- a computer program which emulated the controls and motion of a Gear almost perfectly and was designed with combat and exploration scenarios. Although the ostentible purpose of the game was to keep Mariko entertained in her new and unfamiliar surroundings, in reality she is training for the actual piloting of a Gear. Shortly after the beginning of the DEM story, Mariko will make the acquaintance of a mysterious woman, a Shevat spy infiltrating Solaris, who presents her with her gear Nijusan and begins to instruct her in actual Gear combat. Eventually, she becomes a part of Shevat's defense force.
-Birthplace: Shevat

-Affiliation: Shevat, more by default than by choice. Like her father, she feels bitter enmity towards Solaris, although she considers Nisan her true home.

-Mother: Sarah Kaminoshi
-Father: Tetsuya Kaminoshi
-Siblings: None
-Mate: None
-Children: None
-Other relations: Kaori and Genian Koha, aunt and uncle (father's side), who live in Shevat and are Mariko's foster parents.

-Secondary Skills: In theory, she has extensive training in piloting a Gear (although in practice she has no experience whatsoever). Mariko is also unusally knowledgable about the workings and functionings of different types of Gears, due to her interest in her father's work as a child, and has a limited ability to troubleshoot functional Gears.
-Abilities/Disabilities: Mariko is essentially useless in any form of non-Gear combat. She can defend herself rudimentarily, but her physical strength is minimal and she has little stamina; in addition, she is prone to hyperventilation when nervous. She has no experience with weapons of any sort, and although she has latent Ether abilities, either a lack of mental discipline or her youth prevent her from using them effectively outside of Gear combat. Although these abilities can be drawn out through battle-enhancement drugs, she does *not* use these on a regular basis if her author can help it (This is your face. This is your face on 'Drive.' Just say no!). Her body, like Elly's, is hypersensitive to the drugs, resulting in memory lapses and fits of delirium.
-Hobbies: Thinking. She does quite a lot of this, and prefers to be alone to do so if she can at all help it. She also enjoys reading, especially about science, and collects and builds model Gears.

-Current residence: Shevat
-Current Life Conflicts: Dealing with the loss of her family and her lack of anyone to trust or confide in; fear that Solaris will come after her as they did for her father.

-Other notes: Mariko starts the story completely untrained in actual battlefield experience, and when confronted with a potentially dangerous situation, panics, cries and generally makes a nuisance of herself. Theoretically, as the story goes on, she will become more mature and capable of handling herself in combat. Eventually she will have to confront and defeat her father, Tetsuya Kaminoshi (see his sheet for details).

-Deathblows (name and function): Outside of her Gear, none.

-Gear name: Nijusan
-Gear description: A heavily-armored, blue-and-green combat Gear, employing a combination of Solarian technology and neurological technology invented by her father, Dr. Tetsuya Kaminoshi. Although in most respects it uses ordinary parts and materials, certain parts of the CPU cannot be disassembled and their function remains unknown.

-Class: The experimental prototype for a proposed heavy-combat Gear class incorporating Ether amplification devices.
-Primary function: Combat and defense

-Weapon(s): Its primary weapons are its arms and legs. It also includes an experimental cannon capable of releasing huge Ether blasts, generated by tapping and amplifying the pilot's Ether ability. In the case of Mariko, it can tap into her latent abilities but she has little control over it.
-Abilities/Disabilities: Physically, Nijusan is immensely powerful owing to its size; conversely, this also makes it considerably slower and more unwieldy than an ordinary Gear. It has strong defense against both physical and Ether attacks.

-How your character acquired the gear: The gear was designed by Dr. Kaminoshi, Mariko's father. During his imprisonment in Solaris, he was forced to use his work for the Solaris military before becoming a test subject against his will and fused with his own experimental Gear, Nijushi, modeled after Mariko's and an improvement upon it in nearly all respects. However, Dr. Kaminoshi was aware of his imminent fate, and had no desire to become a puppet of Solaris. Before sending his Gear away with a deep-cover Shevat spy, he added a final touch designed to undermine Solaris's scheme to use him: using the technology he had pioneered and been forced to share with Solaris, he integrated some of his own brain's neurons with Nijusan's central processing unit and added a program which would activate only in the presence of his own gear Nijushi. Through this twist of fate, he remains forever, in a sense, at Mariko's side.