Player Information
Name: Claire
Age: 22
Contact: superorbital @ plurk
Current characters: Karin Miyoshi

Character Information
Name: Kyouko Kougami
Appearance:

Untransformed, Kyouko is an aggressively average looking girl. She's 5'2'' and has a fairly healthy build for her height and age. Her hair is dark brown and aggressively fluffy despite all her attempts to tame it. She has it styled in a shoulder-length bob that she sometimes ties braids or other cute accessories into. Her style of dress is girly, floaty and AGGRESSIVELY PINK AND CUTE.

Transformed, as Reflector Heart: I N C R E A S E R I B B O N S

Age: 16
Canon Point: Just after Yuka reconciles with the Reflectors.
Canon History:

The world Daydream Reflection takes place in isn't all that much different to our own on the surface. On the mundane side of things is Kawamiishi, a mid-sized town on the outskirts of modern-day Tokyo. And on the other side of things is the Imaginaerium.

The Imaginaerium is a dream-like reflection of the real world, formed and influenced by the collective unconscious of humans there. In the Imaginaerium, people's hearts manifest as tiny crystals called Shards which are influenced by their owner's emotions. When a human in the real world suffers intense strife and trauma, their Shards take root in the Imaginaerium and begin to construct a Labyrinth -- a winding, twisting dungeon filled with monsters that reflects the discord in its hosts heart. When this Labyrinth is fully grown, the host's Shard becomes a Mirage, a twisted mirror image of the original. And in the real world, the host's body, without the rationality of its heart and mind, is left to run wild, driven only by the rampant emotions that made the Mirage initially manifest.

It's incredibly rare for this to happen, given the degree of stress and despair required to make it happen. But on the rare occasion it does, someone has to step in and make sure the host's heart is returned to its rightful place. And that's where the Reflectors come in.

Reflectors are, basically, magical girls. They're born of people in the real world who, like Mirages, are deeply unhappy or unsatisfied with some aspect of their lives. But a Reflector, rather than allowing their emotions to run rampant, is separated from a Mirage by one important thing: their drive to change and overcome the thing making them unhappy. If a person has a strong enough image of the person they want to become and a strong enough desire to become that person, they can be drawn fully into the Imaginaerium and empowered to take on a reflection of their ideal self. With these powers, Reflectors serve as a sort of protector whose duty it is to calm agitated Shards before they can take root and to send Mirages back to the real world where they belong.

Some sixteen years prior to the start of the story, there was a car pile-up just outside the local high school of Kawamiishi that caused a domino effect of Shards beginning to take root in response. The Imaginaerium responded by pulling in three girls to act as Reflectors and calm the agitated Shards before any of them could spawn a Labyrinth. One of these girls was Nana Kuroi who was shy and timid and wanted desperately to be a more outgoing, confident person. In the Imaginaerium, she fought as Reflector Diamond and through her adventures in there with her teammates she began to come out of her shell.

Unfortunately, the good times couldn't last forever. Nana began to grow overconfident in her abilities to fix things which came to a head when she discovered one of her teammates, Momoka Hanasaki (Reflector Blossom) was living with an abusive family. Her attempts to 'fix' this only made things worse and resulted in the Hanasaki family leaving the city. Momoka bitterly blamed Nana for making the situation worse with her interfering and with the team fractured, the two remaining Reflectors drifted apart and Nana was left all alone again.

This incident did to Nana what similar incidents had already done to so many people in her school -- her Shard became corrupted and had begun to manifest a Labyrinth, something much more dangerous for a Reflector than a regular human. With her emotions running rampant, Nana decided that the real world was no longer worth the effort of saving and if she wanted to save the people in it, she would bring them to the only place she had ever truly been happy. The Imaginaerium. She decided she was going to fuse the two worlds together, freezing everyone in a perfect stasis as their ideal selves for the rest of their lives.

With her Labyrinth fully rooted, Nana's heart fled to its center where it manifested not as a Mirage but as Reflector Diamond. And since the primary emotion that made Nana's heart leave for the Imaginaerium was "abandon the real world", when Nana's heart fled, her body followed.

Over the next sixteen years, these twin Nanas -- Reflector Diamond and her body, frozen in stasis and calling herself Paragon Diamond -- did what they could to make their vision of a perfect static world a reality. And when the situation grew dire enough to require intervention, the Imaginaerium reacted by reaching out and drawing in another group of Reflectors.

And that's where Kyouko comes in.

Character History:

Kyouko Kougami grew up as a sickly young kid, with a weak immune system and prone to nasty fits of fatigue to the point of missing months of school at a time. Much of her early childhood was spent making endless doctor's visits and spending nights in the hospital and it got to the point that her parents decided it was better to withdraw her from school and have her learn at home as best she could. It was a bit of a lonely childhood and her parents did what they could to make sure she wasn't totally isolated. She took part in tutoring groups, had play dates with children from her neighbourhood but it couldn't really be said that she made any real friends. Kyouko tried very hard not to mind but she was desperately hungry for the same kind of social life all the other children had -- all she wanted was to stop being the sickly, friendless kid dragging everyone behind and to actually have some fun.

Years of treatment and medical interventions helped her health improve (though to this day she still has fatigue issues) and eventually she was told that, barring any major disasters, she would be able to pick up schooling from her second year of high school. Kyouko was elated and saw it as a chance to start over and make herself into a new person -- someone who wasn't such a drag, someone who could actually go out and make friends.

She had... mixed success. While her energy and enthusiasm was nice, most people found her a little too intense and awkward to make a really strong connection with. So while Kyouko was doing her best, she was still left with the feeling that she was spinning her wheels somewhat. This was until she encountered Ryouma Ichijou, a third year senior that half the girls in their school seemed to be in love with. Kyouko, rather unmoved by any romantic stirrings, instead managed to strike up a conversation with Ryouma and the two of them became firm friends before too long. Everything looked like it was going to work out just fine.

And that was when the Imaginaerium stepped in.

One of her classmates' Shards had begun to spawn a Labyrinth, spurred on by an incident in which an earnest love letter she'd written had been pinned up for everyone to see and mock. With no Reflectors to stop it happening, her Mirage spawned and the girl remaining in the real world accordingly went rampant, spurred on by anger and humiliation. Not understanding what was happening but wanting to do something to help, Kyouko tried to intervene and calm her down before she did something she may have regretted. That sincere desire to help and to become someone who could be of use to others finally triggered the Imaginaerium to pull Kyouko in.

She was plopped unceremoniously into the middle of her classmate's Labyrinth and unable to defend herself, Kyouko was almost a goner. It was here that Paragon Diamond -- calling herself "Reflector Diamond" -- stepped in and defended her before encouraging Kyouko to fight the rest of the battle herself.


"If you want to change, then change! Stop cowering on your knees, stand up, and fight as Reflector!"

And Kyouko did just that -- and Reflector Heart was born.

Initially alone, Kyouko spent as much time as she could fighting in the Imaginaerium to rescue as many people in the real world from themselves as she could. She was eventually joined by Ryouma Ichijou, who was pulled into the Imaginaerium as well and opened up to Kyouko about her desire to be a girl. Totally unshaken, Kyouko accepted her wholeheartedly and the two began to fight as a team in the Imaginerium. They were eventually joined by Orihime Kumoi, a slightly off-kilter girl whose strangeness made it hard for her to make friends at their school. Orihime joined them as Reflector Stella and the girls were a team of three from then on.

Disaster finally struck when the truth about "Reflector Diamond", who by then had become Kyouko's admired mentor and guide, emerged. Revealing herself as Paragon Diamond and the one behind the distortion causing the two worlds to blur together, she offered to let the Reflectors join her and help with her plan to merge the Imaginaerium and the real world. Heart and Stella rejected her but Reflector Shine, unable to see a truly happy future for herself without the Imaginaerium chose to betray the Reflectors and join Paragon Diamond.

Kyouko was heartbroken but unerringly determined to save Yuka. Not just for her friend's sake but because the trauma and stress of the situation had caused Yuka's own Shard to distort and begin taking root and if her Labyrinth reached completion, it would be the final unstable element that could bring the two worlds together. Returning to the Imaginaerium one more time, Heart confronted Shine and after a lot of screaming about their feelings a confrontation, Kyouko was finally able to reach Yuka and the Reflectors reunited.

Now a team once more, the three Reflectors were able to put up a fight against Paragon Diamond and defeat her, putting a stop to her efforts to merge the two worlds for now. But even her aborted attempt to nurture the growth of Yuka's Labyrinth had shaken the foundations enough that the Imaginaerium could now cause humans to turn into monsters while in the real world -- but on the same tokens, so too could the Reflectors transform into their ideal selves in the real world as well. This is the point for Kyouko's entry into the game.

Personality:

"That's okay! That's-- it's hard. Living in the real world when you know all the bad stuff that happens, especially when you have to live through so much of it! Wanting to run away from it to somewhere safe doesn't make you a bad person!"

Kyouko is intensely, almost aggressively effervescent. She's the kind of person whose presence seems to outstrip her actual size by several times by sheer force of enthusiasm alone. She spent so long in her childhood basically starved of the kind of social contact she was longing for that she's making up for lost time now with every ounce of energy in her body. She loves being around people and comes off as remarkably extroverted, marking her a sharp contrast against some of her more introverted friends. Shyness isn't even a word in her vocabulary and she'll approach anyone she thinks she can make a friend of regardless of how approachable they appear to be. She's a good girl to spend time with, though. Kyouko is a font of positive energy, playful and fun, and is as immediately comfortable around acquaintances as she is long-time friends. She'll beat up against against boundaries and do her best to worm her way into your affections with dorky shows of attention even if you try and push her away.

It's not all a plus, though. Being alone for so long as a kid means that she hasn't exactly picked up a lot of the unwritten rules of social courtesy and she can overstep her bounds without even realizing she's doing so. She's socially awkward in a way that manifests as being loud and bouncy and occasionally unbearably pushy rather than being withdrawn and shy. Sometimes it serves her well -- if she's trying to befriend someone shy then it means she won't be put off by awkwardness. She doesn't have any preconceived notions of what people would find "weird" or potentially off putting so she's much more open to befriending people who might be similarly awkward to herself. For people who don't appreciate Kyouko's particular brand of enthusiasm though she can be a little too intense at best and unbelievably obnoxious at worst.

But regardless of what other people might think of her, Kyouko wears her heart proudly on her sleeve, so animated with her emotions that every high is the peak of her life and every low is a tragedy of Shakespearean drama and proportions. She holds nothing back, for better or worse, and is as open and sincere with strangers as she is close friends. Kyouko always says what's on her mind and never dances around a problem, which is certainly nice but her brain -> mouth filter is in pretty dire need of repair. It means she'll come out with observations and questions about things that would probably be better off staying unvoiced. It's a flaw she's aware of and one she's doing her best to repair but she still trips up more often than not.

More potentially damning a flaw than that, however, is that Kyouko is a bit of a busybody. It comes from a good if slightly selfish place -- as a child, she always felt like she was a burden and that she was being carried through life for the people caring for her. Now that she's healthy and able to stand on her own two feet Kyouko wants to repay that care by being as aggressively useful to the people around her as possible. It's the feeling that led her to become a Reflector, after all and it's a part of herself that has only come further forward since Reflector Heart was born. She's an optimist to the point of, perhaps, overconfidence -- "Impossible" isn't a word in her vocabulary and when told that she can't do something, her response is basically a big smile and "Well, I'm gonna try it anyway!". She's remarkably stubborn in this way which is a double-edged sword. It means that Kyouko can rush on ahead with all the vim and vigor she needs but she also suffers from tunnel vision. When she’s got a goal in mind, she’ll go after it full-force without letting anything distract her. She can make herself rather blind to just what kind of consequences her actions are having both on her and the people around her. Kyouko very much lives in the short term and even when doing her best to plan ahead she's not all that detail oriented when working by herself.

This hyperfocus can cause both Kyouko a lot of trouble if she's not careful to temper her worst traits and she'll often hit bumps in the road. She doesn't fall often but when she does it's fast and hard and she can struggle to pick herself up if she's left alone to mope. Failure smarts when she's out for the count and if she doesn't have people around to help her to her feet then Kyouko will spend too much time licking her wounds to try and pick herself up. Isolation doesn't help her. She works best with people at her side, balancing out the more extreme aspects of her personality and to serve as a voice of reason to ensure that she doesn’t get into too much trouble.

But at its best, her joyful energy and straightforward nature make Kyouko a force to be reckoned with. When properly motivated she rockets on through life with energy and passion and full-throttle force. Not content to just sit along for the ride, Kyouko will pursue the things that captivate her heart with nothing less than complete and honest enthusiasm and she'll drag everyone else along for the ride... whether they want to go or not.

Abilities:

❤ Reflector Heart: Kyouko is a sort of magical girl known as a Reflector and when transformed, she takes the form of Reflector Heart, a reflection of Kyouko's idealized image of herself. She transforms with a Shard, a tiny crystallized piece of her own heart that was born in the Imaginaerium. When transformed, Kyouko's appearance is radically different -- her build and face are fuller and look more healthy and her hair is long and flowing and bright pink. There's no particular time limit on her transformation, but she likely won't shift into Reflector Heart unless it's called for.

Reflector Heart's powers are drawn from the feelings that made Kyouko into a Reflector in the first place. Namely, the desire to be strong enough to stand up and help the people around her. This manifests as Reflector Heart being much stronger and faster than a baseline human -- she's the strongest and fastest out of the three Reflectors and essentially serves as their team's close range DPS. However, because most of Kyouko's powers are based on enhancing her physical capabilities, she's not very versatile and nearly all of her fighting technique is about getting up close and getting a hit in. This means that when she's on her own, Reflector Heart doesn't have a whole lot of other options. She's also mostly used to fighting monsters so the first time she goes up against an opponent who can actually think and strategize she's going to get a nasty surprise.

Reflector Heart's only other power is a very weak "feeling sense" that allows Kyouko to pick up on potential sources of emotional distress or discord. It's not specific enough to be empathy, since she generally can't tell what emotion is pinging her sense, just a general feeling that "something is wrong with this person". It also doesn't distinguish between different kinds of distress very well; she can be pinged just as easily by "I just lost my job and I'm probably going to starve" as she can by "My favourite character just died in the anime I've been watching". This power won't be active in the game without mod permission and won't be played without player permission on an appropriate permissions post.

Inventory:

Kawamiishi High School Second Year Uniform: Kyouko's school uniform. Nothin' fancy!
Phone: A bedazzled as fuck smartphone, with a fist-shaped cluster of obnoxiously glittery charms hanging off it. It's water-damaged but so long as the charms are unscathed, Kyouko will live another day.
Shard: The magical crystal that allows Kyouko to transform into Reflector Heart. do not throw shards!!!

Sample

Thread Sample:

Musebox Thread
Musebox thread

Q&A: nah i'm good