Sayuna Lewis

[Cicadan]

Name: Sayuna Patricia Lewis
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Hobbies and Interests: Anime, idol culture, music and singing, voice acting, streaming and VTuber culture, medicine and biology, audiobooks and podcasts especially horror genre, building PCs and keyboards

Appearance: Sayuna stands at an even 5’0” and weighs an average of 120 lb, with a rectangular body shape in fat distribution. She is half-Japanese and half-Caucasian, and her skin tone is accordingly fair with warm yellow undertones. 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 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. Her eyes are a very pale baby blue, almost indistinguishable from the whites of her eyes at a distance. She has monolid hooded eyelids, a small nose with a rounded tip, and a prominent cupid's bow on her lips. The quality of her skin is overall oily, and while she’s fortunately avoided significant issues with acne she can look greasy if she’s lax with her skincare for more than a day. Her ears are pierced. She can use makeup, sticking to a natural no-makeup look with no embellishment. She typically sticks to clear polish on her nails.

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 and projection capabilities when needed. She speaks both English and Japanese fluently.

Due to congenital blindness, Sayuna prefers to have a mobility cane at all times, and she has several she chooses from, usually decorated and personalized to her taste with stickers and the occasional ribbon. She wears a number of sunglasses with a variety of frames, typically thin round metal frames, which are always customized with rich hue pink lenses, the color she most prefers for the job of softening out the ambient light she is able to perceive. She almost always has one wireless earbud in- her most typical choice being a forest green Jabra- and is always playing music or a podcast or VTuber stream as background noise.

She is inclined towards a feminine style drawing inspiration from Asian streetwear looks, preferring prints and patterns and liking oversized clothes, and she has in rotation a few notable pieces of wearable merch of her favorite anime such as an oversize tee featuring Pochita from Chainsaw Man. She prefers skirts to pants but wears both. When layering for colder weather she loves using scarves and beanies in particular, along with thick sweaters and leggings. Sayuna only rarely wears jewelry besides her favorite faux silver earrings which she wears everyday, a gift from her maternal grandmother.

On the day of the abduction she wore a button-up collared shortsleeve, black with one-inch white polka-dots and a gray past-the-knee skirt along with two tiers and similar color thermal leggings beneath. She wore black pleather ankle boots with one inch heels. For warmth she wore a green bomber jacket and an alabaster white pom pom beanie adorned with small pins of the flags of Haiti, Pakistan, and Palestine, along with one of the Doctors without Borders logo. She had her usual colored lens sunglasses with silver round frames, and one of her mobility canes, a collapsible gray body, red tipped model decorated with stickers of the VTubers Pomu Rainpuff and Elira Pendora from Nijisanji. She wore her usual earrings.

Biography: Cameron Lewis, Sayuna’s father, had another family prior to her birth. His wife and one son a dozen years Sayuna’s senior had been based in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Cameron had been a professor of biology. A number of his papers were discovered to have been plagiarized, at times extensively, and the subsequent unemployment and attempts at suing for libel led to significant financial stress that led his wife to leave him, taking his son with her. Cameron paid child support for the years it was legally required of him, but never informed his future wife or family about them. Sayuna has thus never had contact with her half-brother.

Cameron found a job in the private sector as a salesman for business software, a job that had him traveling extensively in Asia to meet with clients. During one of these trips he met Sayuna’s mother, Miyuki Fujihara, while in Tokyo. The two dated then cohabited for a number of years before formally marrying and moving together back to the United States, where Cameron and Miyuki settled down in Seattle where Cameron’s employers were headquartered. Sayuna was born July 19, both her and her three years younger sister Natsumi being planned children. Cameron's skill at his job meant he was sales director of the company's sales department by the time Sayuna was born, providing his family with an upper middle class lifestyle for the duration of his career and being able to easily absorb the expenses that came with Sayuna's blindness.

Sayuna’s blindness was discovered when she seemed to have increasing difficulty reacting to distinct visual stimuli as early as six months. She was determined to have Leber congenital amaurosis, specifically a variety not responsive to known gene therapy techniques at the time, and all that could be done for her was monitoring and quality of life measures. Her vision degraded rapidly and by the age of two she was fully blind as she is in the present day. Her form of blindness is light perception blindness, and she is capable of detecting light, but not distinguishably enough to have a functional picture of the world around her. Sayuna also suffers from photosensitivity and from a young age was used to using sunglasses for the sake of comfort.

Miyuki was a stay at home mom and Cameron was still regularly away on business, so Sayuna was close mostly with her mother. The best way to engage with Sayuna when young was through music, and as Miyuki was a hobbyist guitarist, the two spent most of their days before Sayuna entered kindergarten singing songs when at home. From a young age Sayuna primarily associated music with good memories.

When Sayuna started kindergarten and grade school she generally struggled when put in the classes of teachers who didn’t give her disability the accommodations she needed, so getting good grades was sometimes a challenge. She was also naturally very talkative and overly friendly, and tended to get in minor trouble due to being passively disruptive in class. Regardless, she applied herself fastidiously, as her father was very insistent on good grades, and Cameron likewise refused homeschooling or private schools or tutors that might have helped Sayuna out, as he had a strong insistence on traditional academic excellence for both his girls.

When Natsumi came along Sayuna strove to be a good older sister, but due to the difficulties navigating day to day life as a blind person brought, from a young age their dynamic was more one of Natsumi helping out Sayuna once they were both in school together. Sayuna became used to the people she loved in her life like friends babying her, as the only person tough on her in her life was Cameron, who was only around infrequently.

Sayuna most enjoyed science as a topic, but found that discussing the things she learned at school, as she was inclined to as a talkative girl, led to pushback from her father whenever he was around. Cameron remained bitter at the establishment due to his experiences after his plagiarism scandal, and this bias led him to often decry and be critical of even basic elementary school sciences despite hypocritically also expecting Sayuna and Natsumi to excel in the subject. He would push Sayuna to stress out over thoroughly explaining her opinions on science subjects, and throw out confusing and contradictory information that he had developed from a personal sense of conspiracy about the scientific community. Over time Sayuna grew quiet about her love of science while at home.

Before Sayuna entered the fourth grade Miyuki brought up moving back to Japan to live near her family, as she wanted her daughters to be more connected with her side of the family and their non-white cultural heritage, and she was confident they would acclimate as they both already spoke Japanese. Cameron, still often away on business trips, thought it would be a good idea to allow him to spend more time at home, and as both girls adored their mother at the time they were also happy with the idea. They moved into the home of Sayuna’s widowed maternal grandmother, Kanako Fujiwara, who lived in the immediate suburbs of Tokyo.

Sayuna studied in a school that supported Japanese kids returning from abroad, but even then she had issues fitting in. Her disability and her being especially Americanized compared to her batch made it difficult for her to find the same sort of friendships she’d made more easily in the States, as she was often treated only with politeness and distance. She had a small group of regular friends she met up with outside of classes, but she often seemed to be the one passively excluded from conversations, and was used by a few of the other girls in the group as someone to complain to without much emotional reciprocity.

With school becoming socially stressful for Sayuna, her motivation to do well in school faltered. As she started to enter puberty she also became more resistant to her father’s strictness, leading to more cold treatment and silence around the house, and her mother did little to openly support her, leading Sayuna’s opinion of Miyuki to cool as well. Her grades slipped to barely average, and she often blew off studying.

She found she had more of the sort of close confidante she was used to in her grandmother. Kanako, who doted on her more than her own parents. Kanako had formerly been in computer sales, and remained a lifelong hobbyist, and she would spend a lot of time with her granddaughters showing them how she built and maintained PCs. Sayuna in particular spent a lot of time with her grandmother, as Natsumi had more luck finding close friends and having more opportunities to get out of the house. Sayuna got a lot of hands-on, guided experience in how to assemble PCs, developing a strong sense for how to make top-end PCs of the day that she maintains to the present day. Sayuna's PC building began a lifelong enjoyment of keeping up to date with her tech, as it was both practical given how many of her hobbies benefitted from having the best in audio cards and it was something more physically engaging to do with her hands that wasn't so risky for her given her visual impairment.

Sayuna spent most of her time at home on the computer, usually watching YouTube videos and downloading audiobooks. She especially liked commentary videos for games, anime that she listened to recommended by her friend group from school, and horror and supernatural genre audiobooks, as she found them more creative and engaging with their audio design even if she had a weak stomach for horror and was scared easily.

She was somewhat closer to the boys in her friend group at school, who generally treated her with more kindness. Among them was a geeky boy, who she knew only by last name Fujino, who introduced her to a lot of anime series, including many that would become her all-time favorites such as Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid and Love Live. She had a broad taste in genres, and mostly enjoyed anything that friends enjoyed since the hobby was one thing that could get her closer to friends her age.

Fujino and his friend group welcomed her, and they would start to introduce her to idol groups they followed on social media such as CY8ER and TRiDENT. She in particular enjoyed following idol groups as they appealed to her natural love of music. With this group she regularly began to go on outings to various otaku hotspots, including famous places referenced in anime that were outside of Tokyo. They were her closest friend group for the duration of her secondary education experience in Japan, and becoming a part of them marked an upturn in her cheerfulness and sociability. However there would be issues in the long-run. She ended up in a long term relationship with one of the other boys in the group, but a secretive one that was rocky and marked by periods of him being emotional neglectful alternating with love bombing and drama, and that continued up until she returned to the United States.

In her final year in Japan, equivalent to the eighth grade in the American education system, Sayuna was the one in her friends group to first stumble onto VTubers as a source of entertainment, given her love of listening through streams when at home. The major VTuber corporations Nijisanji and Hololive were both already beginning to make buzz within Japan’s pop media sphere by then, and Sayuna and her friends quickly fell into the concept and added it to their rotation of obsessions.

Cameron’s father, who lived in his hometown which was now a suburb of Saint Paul, began to experience declining health midway through Sayuna’s school year. After some discussion the adults in the family all agreed to move back to the United States to be closer. Natsumi, by then quite happy with her life in Japan, was resistant but Sayuna proved all too ready to move back. She was emotionally burnt out from her experiences with peers, feeling isolated and burdened by how passive aggressive and fragile her relationships generally had felt. Even her more innocent fun with Fujino’s group was tainted by association to the difficulty she’d experienced with her first boyfriend. She stayed in contact with most of these people when she moved, but more through her own effort than theirs, and ultimately she only remained truly fond of her grandmother and Fujino, keeping contact with the others often giving her difficult feelings as they continued to treat her the same way they did when she was still physically there.

When starting high school in Aurora Bay, Sayuna tried for a bit to be more comfortable by herself, to move past the trauma of her prior social situation, but she found that she couldn’t do it and was as miserable trying to keep her own company as with toxic friends. She vowed to make a group of friends she thought would be more inclusive and affirming for all. She chose to be picky with the sorts of friends she made intimate connections with. While she was polite with most of her classmates, she wanted to avoid the same sort of burnout she’d felt in her social networks in Japan. Her social group in high school would consist largely of out and proud geeks, though she maintained some openness to those beyond her preferences.

She joined the anime club, where the depth of her knowledge and ability to help import things from Japan for club usage and for individuals who asked her for specific merchandise quickly endeared her to others present. She became the introduction for others to aspects of idol culture and to VTubers, both of which she was happy to endorse to anybody curious.

She also began to cultivate an interest in voice acting given its overlap with her general interests and it being something she could readily do and excel in despite her disability. She was able to get practice in working on amateur projects from her peers, and also began to develop an internet presence on social media offering her voice acting services, usually pro bono, and posting song covers. Under the alias of KanakoDansen, a name she picked in part to amuse her grandmother, she began to accrue followers with consistent uploads and a friendliness that earned her a circle of young online friends including artists, cosplayers, and game designers, along with a busy private Discord server.

Cameron had finally settled down and stopped regularly traveling, negotiating his duties as director within his organization so he could travel less. His high up position within his company could easily give his whole family an upper middle class lifestyle despite the medical bills for his father. His being around the house more, however, did not endear him to either of his daughters. He continued to be critical of their academic performance. Sayuna finally found something that Natsumi needed her as: a shoulder to cry on due to the ramped up passive aggression and nitpicking from their father, and the two grew far closer together than the more generic sisterhood they’d shared when younger.

Cameron’s propensity for conspiracies about the scientific establishment began to increasingly take root in the household. He convinced his wife to abandon western medicine, and as his suggestions of acupuncture and holistic medicine did make Miyuki feel personally more fit and energetic she began to strongly take on his beliefs. The two began a podcast where they offered contrary opinions to established medical practices, with regular guest interviews, that began to take off and develop a loyal following with tens of thousands of weekly listeners. This had consequences for his career, as the increasing visibility of his views became an embarassment for his company and he was quietly laid off with severance by the time Sayuna was a sophomore. He focused full time on the podcast after that, and along with investing into real estate he has kept the family afloat, but the family income has noticably decreased and both Sayuna and Natsumi's college funds have taken a hit.

It took Sayuna until her sophomore year to finally be proactive, but she felt motivated by the frustration of having had to deal with her father's distasteful worldview for so long. She pushed herself back into academics in a way she hadn’t since childhood, this time with a purpose. She wanted to do something in the medical field, in part out of an idealistic dream of making her father eat his words, and in part to right injustices she strongly felt in the world. Her politics became increasingly left, in part as a counterweight to the reactionary swing among her parents to be more friendly to anti-vax anti-lockdown Republicans, and in part due to the things she learned and internalized from liberal friends. She regularly posts about social justice causes with her internet reach.

For a time she struggled to get her grades to match her ambitions of becoming a medical researcher, and she was frustrated and helpless . She leaned on friends, however, who tended to believe in her earnesty and often wanted to pay her back for how kind she was to them. With their encouragement and advice, and a lot of study sessions and mutual aid, she began to pick up her performance. By the beginning of junior year she was getting near perfect grades, minus her struggles in PE classes even with accommodations for her blindness. Entering her junior year she had improved enough to take mostly AP classes. She was also doing extra online courses in biology and medical topics that her grandmother quietly paid for behind her parent’s back. She felt true passion for a future in science and academics for the first time in a long time.

In general, she began to find that she relied a lot on friends and close family, and felt helpless and without direction if she didn’t have some form of feedback on her ideas or things to do. She often double checks decisions with friends: what scholarships to apply for, new outfit ideas, anime to watch for the season, most everything she does is done with a soundboard from at least one other person.

She remained affable, but not too close to anybody who didn’t share her range of more geeky and indoorsy interests. She thus has little interest in the party culture of Aurora Bay, unless a friend she trusts so happens to invite her, and even then she might decline on principle. She has dated a few people, and is openly bisexual, having come to terms with her undeniable attraction to women with beautiful voices through her regular watching of streamers and VTubers. She’s romantic and doesn’t care much for casual dating, however, she treats any potential relationship very seriously and has been personally burned by breakups even if she’s intellectually understanding of the ephemeral nature of teenage attraction.

Sayuna maintains excellent grades up through her senior year and is heavily involved in Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF clubs on campus, along with doing a career exploration program with Mayo Clinic during her summer after graduation. She has currently been accepted into University of Michigan Ann Arbor, but is reconsidering on advice from the mentor at the summer program she is emailing back and forth with to consider her backup University of Minnesota instead for cheaper in-state tuition despite slightly less prestige.

She additionally waffles back and forth on how seriously she should continue to take her work with KanakoDansen, as she personally enjoys it greatly and still has some small dreams of starting up as a VTuber and releasing her own original music, but it takes a lot of additional time she feels she will need more of for her studies in college and she doesn’t perceive it as valuable to helping others in need. The increasingly dubious finances of her parents also factors in, and Sayuna is beginning to feel the perceived pressure of having to potentially navigate a future where she must be financially independent and possibly support Natsumi.

Advantages: Sayuna has superior hearing due to her lifelong blindness and her many audio related hobbies, and will have this sensory advantage and the unique benefits it can offer in the island environment. She is also a talented voice actress who can use her set of impressions, some of which are of existing classmates, to her advantage. Among those close to her Sayuna tends to evoke strong positive regard due to her very friendly and generous nature, to the point that she’ll likely have more helpful allies and have an easier time keeping them at least initially.
Disadvantages: Sayuna’s congenital blindness is a severe challenge that will hamper her ability to protect herself in dangerous situations. Her personality is codependent and she will likely have difficulty keeping her composure without significant support from others that she cannot rely on in difficult situations. Her poor stamina and conditioning due to not emphasizing fitness leaves her below average compared to her peers in terms of physical ability needed for survival. She generally has poor emotional regulation when under stress and is prone to freeze reactions, exacerbating her poor chances of survival due to her other disadvantages.

Original Character: Sayuna Lewis (Supers)
Permissions: My own character

[MurderWeasel]

Hey, Cicada! Sayuna's looking solid, just a bit left.

Did Cameron pay child support of any sort to his previous family? Does his current family know about his past?

What was Sayuna's family's economic situation in the years while her father was traveling?

What about building PCs appealed to Sayuna? Was it mostly just an excuse to spend time with her grandmother, or did she enjoy the activity in its own right as well?

You mention Natsumi having little more than passing grades during the years following Sayuna's enrollment at Aurora Bay, but last I'd heard Sayuna's grades had also slipped to the lower side of average. Had she pulled them back up again? When did that happen? Or, if it's mostly later (when it is explained), could I maybe get a little more detail for why Natsumi was targeted more?

Can we maybe get something a touch more formal and specific than "cringe" used to describe Sayuna's and her sister's take on their parents' podcast? Also, the timeline doesn't quite sync up here—the start of the pandemic was in 2020, which would be right at the tail end of Sayuna's eighth-grade-equivalent year, and thus would've already been well underway when the podcast kicked off.

Post when you've got that handled, and we'll give Sayuna another look. Thanks!

[Cicadan]

Edited! Added the following things:

[+] .

• Clarified Cameron's relation to his old family. He paid child support until it was no longer required of him, his current family does not know about them.
• Clarified the following: Cameron was a high level director in his company by the time Sayuna was born so the family was upper middle class most of Sayuna's life. His being able to settle down and travel less came from re-negotiating his job responsibilities later on in life. He was quietly let go due to the visibility of the anti-medical establishment podcast and the family income (and Sayuna's college fund) took a hit thereafter, nowadays Cameron and Miyuki focus full time on the podcast along with getting passive income through renting out some investment property.
• Due to the significant changes above Sayuna is more leery of the lack of support from her parents for her future career and I note that she's preparing for a future where she'll need to be fully independent, which factors into the stress she feels around balancing her hobbies with her future career.
• Specify that Sayuna had her own personal reasons to enjoy PC building: practical in relation to her other hobbies and enjoyable as a low-risk thing that was more physical and hands-on compared to her wealth of terminally online hobbies.
• I cut out the detail about Natsumi being worse off in grades- the two would both have been equivalent here until Sayuna's motivation kicks off to get her academics back into shape and aim for more rigor at school. Timeline for this happening is shifted into her sophomore year.
• Removed the reference to Covid-19, it wouldn't be relevant, as you said.

[MurderWeasel]

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