A Bit About You
Your Name ∙ Amity
Chatango Username ∙ Yammity
Contact Information ∙ pm, email
Time Zone ∙ UTC/GMT +11
Introductions
Character’s Name ∙ Yukari Iwate
Age ∙ 18
Birthdate ∙ August 2nd, 182 H.E.
Gender ∙ Female.
Residing ∙ Unicorn district, Corus.
Character Type ∙ Commoner
Occupation ∙ Personal Assistant to __________ . Her job includes making deliveries to customers, delivering messages to clients, friends and so on, helping ________ prepare for banquets and feasts, taking notes in meetings if required, and running errands such as picking up an outfit for __________, and helping around the house when needed. If there's a menial task that needs doing, it's usually her job to do it.
Mindset
Sexual Orientation ∙ Hetrosexual
Overall Personality ∙ Underneath the practiced stony faced Yamani approach to living, Yukari is a warm hearted, friendly, gentle person. Yukari was never really skilled in schooling her face blank. Her eyes are the windows to her soul. She is able to master the outwards stillness and calm, but inwards, she experiences life with such intensity that it’s impossible to hide. Also impossible to hide, despite her best efforts is her shyness. As a teenager, she suffered from crippling shyness, hiding her face behind books and rarely speaking to anyone outside of her family, but she is slowly becoming more confident in herself. Her shyness manifests not in the reddening of her cheeks, but in her eyes and as a painful, yet endearing awkwardness in social situations. She’s reserved and quiet, which makes it hard to get to know her well.
Deep down she yearns to be impulsive, to be able to express herself, instead of having to hold back what she truly feels and thinks. Sometimes, she gets the overwhelming sense that she’s stuck in her own body and her own culture’s customs. She’s driven by convention; by her own value system and what she ‘ought’ to do, and ‘should’ do, rather than by what she wants to do. She often wishes that she had the bravery to break out, to disobey, to rebel in her own little way, but it’s a wish that her value system, tradition, respect for her family, and culture will not allow her to fulfil.
Yukari was raised in a culture of values. Even now, six months after arriving in Tortall, shock at the lack of, or different values and beliefs still catches her unawares. It isn’t that she looks down on the Tortallan way of life, or doesn’t want anything to do with it. Despite her best efforts to study it, and to learn it, she still doesn’t understand it, and has convinced herself that she probably never will. Not understanding the culture and the attitudes of the people she lives with makes life difficult for her. She now has a tentative grasp on the language, but struggles with the nuances no matter how small. She often misinterprets sarcasm, nor does she have a complete vocabulary and often finds herself unconsciously reverting back to Yamani when she has trouble finding a certain word. She can navigate one-on-one conversations but still finds groups of people overwhelming. She seems to get a little lost in a group of people, especially the markets or really anywhere there’s a large crowd of people. When she first arrived it was belittling, frightening experience but as her grasp on Common has grown, so has her self confidence.
She places high value on loyalty. Her family have always come first in her life, and will continue to do so for the rest of her life. There is nothing more important that family, and friends and doing what’s right by your family and friends. She harbours no ill will or disappointment in her family or her father for his decision to send her to Tortall, because she understands his reasoning and because of that, she recognizes that it was in hers and her family’s best interests. She may not like it, she may not be comfortable with it, but she accepts that this is her role to play in the welfare of her family. She also highly values respect; for family, for tradition, for one’s self, for other people and their property. She believes in earning your living, not stealing it, in protecting your body, not selling it and in adhering to the rules and laws, and not breaking them.
Yukari has a keen intelligence and a thirst for knowledge. She loves to read, she loves to draw and to write when she has the opportunity. But most of all, she loves to learn, about anything and everything. The greatest pleasure in her life at the moment is when her job takes her to the Palace because it gives her the opportunity to spend a few moments lost in the Palace libraries. She’s always learning more through her work, and her job tests her knowledge and pushes her to her limits, both physically and mentally at times. Her employer is hard and demanding, but never cruel. He drives her, and pushes her but also provides for her and gives her valuable time to herself away from her work. When angry, he can be harsh, sometimes physically overbearing without laying a hand on her, but it’s rare enough for her accept it as part of her job.
She’s often plagued by ‘what if’s’. Her main source of disquiet is what might have been, or what might be if the situation had been different. She hides her jealousy of those who are free to do as they wish, to speak when they wish, and to be what and who they want to be behind her Yamani mask. She dare not speak of it, or acknowledge it just in case Yama, or the Tortallan gods hears her dissatisfaction, mistakes it for ungratefulness and decides to take everything she has away from her. She has so much weighing on her mind, so much to contemplate that it makes her free time hardly restful, and attempts at meditation quite difficult. It’s a struggle to clear her mind, though, she tries.
Additional Tidbits ∙ - She loves the water. For some reason, she finds it to be a calming influence. But she fears storms, and rough water as it never bodes well for those who make their lives on the water.
- She has a fondness for beautiful things. In a way, she’s a little like a magpie. She’ll collect, or buy anything that’s shiny, has some kind of beauty or simply catches her eye.
- She knows what it’s like to be hungry, cold and moneyless. She knows what it’s like to have everything stripped from you. The experience has given her strength, and character that she doesn’t even realize she has, not to mention an appreciation for the things she does have and a fear of them being taken away.
- She always wears a necklace with a misshapen pearl around her neck. It brings her good luck and ensures that her family are never far from her thoughts. It’s a reminder of who she is and where she comes from.
Reflection
Height ∙ Like most Yamani women, she’s quite small standing at around 155 centimetres or 5’1
Overall Appearance ∙ Yukari hasn’t really grown out of the wide eyed, innocent look of a child. Hence, she appears younger than what she really is. Her eyes are her most striking feature. Framed in long delicate eye lashes, they’re rich brown in colour, and doe like. Compared to her other facial features, her huge eyes dominate her face. She has a straight, small button nose that’s rather plain and simple against her eyes. Her mouth is small, and her lips equally so. She has sharp, defined angles to her top lip, while her bottom lip is just as full and turns outwards slightly. She has a love heart shaped face, with full cheek bones and deep set eyes, that ends gracefully in pointed chin.
Yukari has chestnut brown coloured hair that’s dead straight. She doesn’t wear it overly long, just sitting at chest length. It’s really the kind of hair you can do anything with, but the majority of the time she opts to either pin it back, or tie it back neatly off of her face.
True to her culture, she’s appears to be delicately thin; almost as if the tiniest breeze would knock her off of her feet, but in reality, she’s stronger than what she looks. She hasn’t yet developed enough confidence to let herself stand tall and proud, instead her shyness comes across in the way that she holds herself. Because of that, she has very little presence. Yukira has long arms, thin wrists and delicate fingers. The well worn palms of her hands from years hauling nets, or fishing with her father seem out of place.
When working, shopping, or during her daily life she dresses, rather uncomfortably so, in Tortallan dress. Despite her rather apparent discomfort for the style of clothing, it’s nothing compared to how inappropriate Yamani kimono’s and obi’s are for Tortallan daily life, nor to just how much more Yamani dress singles her out as a foreigner. That being said, she’ll often wear a haori or michiyuki over the top. She does have Yamani clothes, but she saves them for special events.
Backstory
Family History ∙ Yukari’s great, great grandfather was a simple, poorly fisherman who struggled to make a living for himself and for his small family. That is until he stumbled across a bed of oysters while spear fishing in shallow water. He took them ashore and began opening them, and preparing them for trade. About half way through his catch, something unusual caught his eye. Inside a shell was a small round stone. When his work was finished, he took both the stone and the shell to a jeweller who identified it as a pearl, and offered him more money that he’d ever seen in his life for it. He accepted the jeweller’s offer, and was able to purchase his own boat and start his own pearl hunting business. Pearls were few and far between, however just one pearl was enough to feed his family for an entire year. Eventually, his children took over the business, as did their children, and so on, until the war with Tortall broke out.
Family ∙
Haru Iwate – Grandfather.
Orika Iwate - (deceased) Grandmother.
Kenzo Iwate – Father, fisherman.
Tatsuya Iwate – Mother, net weaver.
Enrikei Iwate – (16 years) brother, fisherman.
Birthplace ∙ Minato-Mura, a small Northern coast village in the Yamani Islands
Background ∙ Born the eldest of two children to Kenzo and Tatsuya Iwate, successful pearl merchants, Yukari’s childhood was a relatively privileged one by Yamani standards. Kenzo and Tatsuya were childhood friends, whose friendship blossomed into romance. They married after just six months of courtship. A year into their marriage Tatsuya was pregnant with Yukari, her first child. Yukari was born into prosperous times for the Iwate family. The family business was making more money than ever before. Pearls were still difficult to find, but upon taking over the business Kenzo had built connections with a jeweller named ________ in Tortall who was willing to pay twice the amount of money for Iwate pearls. No longer just scraping by, the Iwate family now made enough money to be able to afford certain privileges for their children, such as good clothing, an education, a good, sturdy home and steady flow of food for their table.
When Yukari was but two years of age, her brother Enrikei was born. She thought him to be a rather strange, wrinkled thing that needed a lot of attention and a lot of looking after. As he grew older, she began to understand that he was just like her, only smaller and a lot more daring and adventurous. They developed a close brother-sister bond that involved a lot of teasing, the usual fights and arguments and a fond sibling rivalry. When Enrikei was five and Yukari seven, the Iwate siblings were introduced to education. Where Enrikei struggled with his lessons, Yukari excelled. Where Enrikei became outspoken, rebellious and filled with infectious energy, Yukari seemed to settle in to herself and become quiet, shy and scholarly. She absorbed all she could from her lessons. It was as if it opened up a whole new world to her.
Things went pear shaped when Yukari was almost fourteen years of age. Money stopped coming in, they started going short of food. The lessons stopped abruptly because her father could no longer afford to finance them. Distraught, Yukari approached her father wanting to know why. He sat her down and told her of the disagreement between Tortall and the Yamani Islands. He told her that even though there were still pearls buried under the ocean, arguments over fishing rights meant that they could no longer go out and find them. Things worsened when Tortall officially declared war on the Yamani Islands, cutting off trade and trade connections. When funds completely dried up, they had to sell their good steady house and all of their fine things and, comfortable clothing and move into a cramped, barely furnished, damp, cold house.
The war only lasted two years, but by then, the Iwate family had had no choice but to revert to their former commoner status. After the war Kenzo attempted to rebuild connections with __________ the Tortallan jeweller, but found it incredibly difficult to overcome the barriers and the prejudices that had grown between Tortall and the Yamani Islands. For the survival of his family, he was forced back onto the water as a simple fisherman. It was a struggle, one that he was losing.
At seventeen years of age, Yukari’s grandmother became ill. A fisherman’s life didn’t provide enough money for food, let alone what it cost to see a healer. She was sickly for months before she died. There was little time or opportunity for mourning. The family had to keep working. To accommodate for the loss of money and trade over the two year war, the Emperor raised the taxes. To try and circumvent this Kenzo had to sell his boat to a noble family, and lease the use of it from them. He would pay less tax if he was fishing for someone else. But still, things got worse.
With a hungry belly, concern for the safety and the welfare of his family, Kenzo sent a letter to _______ in Tortall, offering his daughter as a maid. In a show of good will, bound to old connections ___________ accepted the offer. In the privacy of the boat, Kenzo broached the subject to Yuka, who took it like any Yamani would; stony faced, hiding her distress and her fear. He told her that she would be able to live a better life in Tortall, and afford to buy books again, and to use her studies to help the family. Though she didn’t like it, she saw his reasoning. Before she knew it, she was on a boat to Tortall, and then living in a large house in the Unicorn district. She spent only three months as a maid, before __________ saw her potential, and keen mind and she was promoted to personal assistant. Yukari still hasn’t had time to process everything that’s happened, she’s still dealing with the huge culture shock.
Contract
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Amity This post has been edited by Yukari Iwate on Nov 14 2009, 04:59 AM
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