Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Junior
Hobbies and Interests: Anime and manga, J-rock and Japanese indie music, video games, singing, voice acting, streaming and VTubing, medicine and biology, disaster relief skills and volunteerism.
Gift: Enforced Sympathy
Power Details: Sayuna’s gift causes the entirety of her eyeball to emit a soft, fluorescent-quality light of the specific red-pink color #FE2C54, with distinct areas of darker hues indicating an iris and pupil respectively. Her eyes otherwise function as the normal human eye does with no effect on how she perceives the world. Sayuna’s gift activates when a direct line can be drawn between any visible point of her eyeball and any other living entities’ version of visual receptors, with this angle also accounting for reflection and diffraction of the light between Sayuna’s eyes and potential targets. The activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system of any entity sustaining this eye contact will begin to rapidly evolve to match Sayuna’s own, such as her levels of cortisol and adrenaline or her heart rate. Additional effects will logically occur due to the impact on the endocrine system. There is no further suggestive effect beyond this, so further impacts by spikes and depressions of the stress response will depend on the target’s personality and reactions to stress. The speed of this mirroring of Sayuna’s stress levels is rapid and outpaces the typical human stress response by an order of magnitude: it is faster than typically severe panic attacks in speed of onset, and generally a maximum of four seconds of sustained eye contact is sufficient to reach Sayuna’s state of mind from virtually any starting point. When eye contact is broken any sort of reversion from the induced state is within the purveyance of their own nervous system, and is thus once again dependent on the target’s personality and tendencies under states of stress, or the inverse. The potency of the Gift does not fall off with distance so long as the target is visually capable of perceiving to any degree what they are looking at.
Limitations and Drawbacks: Sayuna’s gift is entirely dependent on personal control of her own state of stress for tactical usage, and it requires far more emotional control than she is known to possess to purposefully weaponize. Sayuna cannot control the application of her gift, it is permanently active and it will affect ally and enemy alike as long as the condition of eye contact is met. Sayuna also cannot sense when her gift is actively working on a target, so due to the speed of induction she has little opportunity to react to protect others from accidental exposure. Her gift does not work equivalently on all living things, for while most living things experience stress her gift seems to lose effectiveness the more differentiated a stress response is to her own human one. While she could, for example, induce her gift onto a fly it would take an extremely long amount of time. The conditions for this gift’s usage are strictly through visual reception through air, and tactical usage of induced blindness or usage of opaque items will prevent its impact, along with indirect viewing methods such as binoculars, telescopes, surveillance, and so on. Finally, the light her eyes produce at all times can be considered a detriment to potential for stealth, and perhaps an annoyance to allies trying to sleep in her presence as the light is strong enough to dimly light a room even through her closed eyelids.
Appearance: Sayuna stands at an even 5’0” and weighs an average of 110 lb, with a rectangular body shape in fat distribution and some lean muscle. She is half-Japanese and half-Caucasian, and her skin tone is accordingly a lighter shade of fair. Her hair is jet black, with a straight texture that is highly resistant to styling and is well-maintained to have a natural shine and sleekness. It is grown down the blades of her back, with the bangs grown out as well to the extent of obscuring the face if not styled out of the way.
She has a round face, with indistinct cheekbones and naturally rounded cheeks giving her a babyface look. The manifestation of her gift gives her a luminescent red-pink eye shade, similar to the human eye but with irregular coloration and luminosity. She has monolid eyes, a small nose with a rounded tip, and a prominent cupid's bow on her lips. Her ears are pierced. Her natural speaking voice without using voice acting techniques is on the higher end of average pitch for the female voice, full-bodied and pleasant, and with good articulation. She speaks both English and Japanese fluently.
To accommodate for the uncontrollable nature of her Gift, Sayuna will wear things such as blindfolds and opaque goggles, making her functionally blind while in public and necessitating the use of a mobility cane.
She is inclined towards a feminine style with fast fashion pieces, preferring prints and patterns to monocolor. She prefers skirts to pants but wears both. Sayuna only rarely wears jewelry besides her favorite faux silver earrings. She can use makeup, usually preferring a natural look with little embellishment in color palette. On the day of the abduction she wore a button-up collared shortsleeve, black with one-inch white polka-dots and a grey past-the-knee skirt along with two tiers and similar color leggings beneath. She wore black pleather ankle boots with one inch heels. She had a simple red blindfold and one of her mobility canes, a collapsible grey body, red tipped model.
Background:
- Sayuna’s father, Camron Lewis, was a former university professor of biology who lost his credibility and position after being implicated in a series of plagiarism scandals. The financial stress from this also cost Camron his first marriage and family, and he would travel abroad as a salesman for several years before meeting his second wife and mother of Sayuna, Miyuki Fujihara. The two eventually developed a small business selling homeopathic cures and medicines, along with Camron currently running a niche but well-monetized podcast that primarily deals in anti-medical establishment conspiracy theories.
- Sayuna has one younger sister by two years, Natsumi. Both sisters were subject to the disciplinarian tendencies of their father to be very demanding from a young age about grades, and both of their parent’s conspiracist tendencies. The two are quite close, especially in being able to commiserate over how difficult their parents are to deal with.
- Sayuna’s Gift manifested during her first year of elementary school, causing a number of minor classroom incidents. The school administration had difficulty convincing Sayuna’s parents to find some manner of curbing the disruptive effects, be it power suppressants or restricting Sayuna’s vision, and Sayuna was almost suspended. Eventually her parents relented, and Sayuna would proceed from then on with the inferred requirement of having something covering her eyes in most public situations, rendering her legally blind and requiring all sorts of lifestyle adaptations like only being able to do schoolwork at home and needing friend’s help with note taking. Within a year Sayuna had grown used to the complications involved.
- Sayuna moved to Japan in the fourth grade as her mother wished for the girls to have at least some time with her side of the family. They had spoken Japanese conversationally around the house and language was no issue, but besides this Sayuna found it somewhat difficult to acclimate to the unfamiliar style of studying in Japan. She made some friends, but spent most of her time playing video games (Nintendo, particularly), watching anime, and listening to music, and her performance in school slipped.
- Here in Japan Sayuna also grew close to her grandmother, who remains to this day a major source of support for Sayuna’s interests, both financial and emotional, that Sayuna often cannot find in her own parents. Her grandmother is the one who helped Sayuna set up the rig she would use in her streaming career.
- The family returned to Bend when Sayuna started high school to be close to Camron’s ailing father, and Sayuna was okay with this as she rather missed her old lifestyle in America despite having acclimated to Japanese society and school culture. Sayuna was quick to return to being more outgoing, developing a reputation as reliable and approachable and beholden primarily to fellow nerds but without coming off as uncool or off-putting. She picked up her academic performance and studied harder, going from being a middling C student equivalent in Japan to getting straight As.
- Sayuna began to develop an interest in medicine, in part to reject her parents' views and make it clear to herself and others that she did not share their questionable practices. She became a member of the school's Red Cross club and dedicated time to develop her skills in various forms of disaster preparedness training as well, although due to the nature of her Gift her role is purely administrative as much as she'd like to have more hands-on experience beyond training sessions in safe environments.
- As an alternative to her dreams of being in medicine Sayuna has developed an interest in the VTubing trend of the past years, introduced to the popular phenomenon of Hololive by friends back in Japan. In particular, the habit allows her to be herself without the interference of her Gift, sharing her more solitary hobbies with an audience she can view in a way as friends she does not have to blind herself around. She’s invested significantly into the hobby and has decent engagement metrics for an independent streamer, earning a part-time jobs’ worth of income due to a small and dedicated fanbase. The hobby gives her time to practice her singing and voice acting skills in particular, and she hopes to do music or acting for a video game or anime in the future.
- She is conflicted between her two general fields of interest and uncertain of which she should seriously pursue. She feels she could make more of a difference going into medicine but is dead set on getting out of the house and volunteering for a year to build her resume before hand. Her counselor has indicated she will need to consider a regimen of power suppressants to make this a reality, and she is indecisive about if she considers the potential drawbacks of long-term usage worth it.
Other Skills: First aid training, swimming, vocal mimicry
