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Player Information

Name: Gorse
Age: 29
Contact details: ladygorse@gmail.com, gorsecloud, Gorsecloud#8698
Other characters: n/a

Character Information

Name: Futaba Sakura
Canon: Persona 5
Canon Point: Persona 5 Strikers, Night of August 24th, after the Jail infiltration has been completed for the day (scheduling in P5S is tight so I wrote a timeline if needed lmao
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU
Age: 16

World Information: Persona 5, Persona 5 Royal (enhanced rerelease, but the wiki page only mainly covers new additions), and Persona 5 Strikers (official sequel)

Personal History: wiki page

Personality:
Futaba... is not the easiest person to get to know, even under the best of circumstances. On the best of days, she can be shy and socially awkward. On the worst... she has difficulty going outside her room. Between years of having trouble interacting with her peers (often being outright bullied), the false accusation of driving her mother to suicide, and the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her neighbors and relatives, Futaba doesn't have a lot of trust. Especially towards adults and especially towards long-standing institutional power structures. The only god she's met was a douche too. It's not nearly as bad as it once was, but definitely still noteworthy.

For strangers, she's very likely to hold people at arms length with evasiveness or snark if she's uncomfortable, or just outright give monosyllabic answers or go silent entirely. Depending on who you are, it might not get too much easier even if she is ready to speak. Given that Futaba isn't always the most... straightforward with communication. At one point, Sojiro comments how she's "always drawing conclusions in her head," to the point where she might hop from point A to point F, without realizing nobody else can see points C-E. Additionally, it can be very hard for her to really engage with topics she's not personally interested in. Her ability to do "small talk" and other such niceties is almost nonexistent.

That being said, her snark isn't something reserved for strangers. Teasing and insults are honestly a regular part of her communication, with context being much more important to determine how serious she actually is. She teases the rest of the party - the people who she trusts more than life itself - on the regular, particularly ones like Yusuke and Ryuji. She even makes outrageous comments to them, clearly fishing for some kind of reaction, or defending her pride. Likewise with her adoptive father, Sojiro, when he comments one time on how she ran into a pole, she fires back about how he stubbed his toe the other day. All in all, it wouldn't be accurate to say she's spoiling for a fight, but she's not one to shy away from one either, especially if it lies in her comfort zone.

She's incredibly intelligent, and can be quite the self-starter when it comes to investigating topics of her own personal interest. When the rest of the party is first investigating her room, they discover things such as advanced medical textbooks, even though Futaba has only completed Japanese middle school. This isn't always to her benefit - Futaba inherited her mother's intense focus, which means that when in the midst of a project of personal interest or import, she can completely shut out all external stimuli. This also leads to less-than-healthy eating and sleeping habits.

As for those "topics of her interest," she's very clearly got a nerdy side, even to the point of obsession. But there's a bit more too it than that - video games are a bit of a window into her world, and out of it. Oftentimes Futaba will use gaming metaphors to relate her own experiences, especially if it's difficult for her to articulate otherwise. For example, referring to Akiren as her "key item" because of his ability to reassure her and help her go out of her comfort zone, saying she "got the platinum" when she finishes her promise list, things of that nature.

But also, those topics of interest can include the people she cares most about. One of those aforementioned projects includes the hacking app needed for the plan to fool Akechi in November (and thus save Akiren's life). Likewise, it's her love for Sojiro - and wanting to defend him against the false accusations of abuse he was facing - that leads to her reaching out to the Phantom Thieves in the first place. Her friends are her family, they're her foundation, and to put it in her own words, so long as they have each other, they don't need anything else.

And then at last you have... Futaba herself. Futaba is the hermit confidant, an arcana that is frequently associated with solitude, introspection, and self-understanding. And that is something she attempts to do significantly, especially during her confidant. She'll often notice things in herself and slowly work her way through them as it progresses, such as the time she notices her tendency to get caught up in the past when touring school with Akiren and Makoto.

Self-esteem? Not so great. She has things she knows she's good or knowledgeable at, but at the end of the day Futaba can struggle with how that fits in with everything else. Even after her confidant is fully completed, she'll still call herself borderline-derogatory terms such as "weirdo," and there's still a connotation of negativity to them. She's trying very hard to be "okay" with herself as she is. And it's just like with the anxiety - better, but still a work in progress.

But she does work at it. She doen't give up - it's a huge part of her entire role in the story. Despite feeling like she deserved to die for her mother's death, she didn't. She continued searching for her mother's research; she reached out to the Phantom Thieves for help. When the Phantom Thieves are blamed for Okumura's death, despite the onslaught of hate the Phantom Thieves receive, she keeps working to find out what happened, and then to figure out a solution to help save Akiren's life. During the period in the Velvet Room, she's the only one of the party who's able to fully talk herself out of her internal prison, using Akiren as a sounding board rather than him needing to question her. And it's what'll continue to see her through the rough times ahead - that, and her friends.

Her developments in Strikers are more passive, a continuation of sorts of her canon development. Overall, it sees an increase in her independence and self-reliance. At the beginning of the game, she's still clearly anxious in large groups and crowds, to the point that she hangs back and does reconnaissance online while the other Phantom Thieves investigate Shibuya for information on Alice. However, between travelling around all over Japan with only the other Phantom Thieves, and the period around August 22nd-23rd - where she was the only Phantom Thief to escape capture and had to figure out how to rescue the others with only the then-powerless Zenkichi for assistance - by the end of the game at Osaka, Futaba is able to move among crowds of strangers relatively easily, confident that she can retreat if needed and that her friends are nearby to back her up.

Key themes: For Persona 5 in general, there's justice, questions about what it is and what it isn't, and what is justified while pursuing it. Fighting against apathy and complacency - moving and taking action when you see injustices that are occurring rather than turning a blind eye. Finding your own inner strength to triumph over adversity, but also finding the strength and clarity you can get from bonds and connections. For Royal, additional themes include the idea that you can't change the past, no matter how bad or painful - where you are now is a result of where you've been; But despite this, you can change the future, and that the best future is always the one you earn for yourself. For Futaba personally, there's understanding and learning to being happy with yourself - that you are enough and there are people around you who love you as you are. And if there's a way you want to change, you can.

Main Motivation: Understanding the truth of things, protecting her friends and family, and acting out against injustice

Skills:
Futaba is a "normal" Persona user (as opposed to a wildcard), which means that she only has one Persona, that has the ability to evolve into another based on her own personal character growth. That Persona would be Necronomicon, with its evolved form being Prometheus, and its ultimate form being Al Azif. That being said, Futaba's Persona is of a somewhat rarer variety in the series - specifically, her Persona focuses solely on support to the exclusion of any and all offensive abilities. As of right now, per Strikers, her Persona has reverted to Necronomicon, though in theory evolution/regaining its higher forms should be possible again.

Her Persona's innate abilities allow her to scan the area around herself and track signals from friends and foes, along with get a general gist of the map (especially if an actual map has been obtained of the area, which she can use to supplement her scans). Also, it allows her to keep track of information gained about enemies once observed or learned somehow, such as elemental strengths/weaknesses. Lastly, it is able to recover both the health and energy of party members who are not currently taking place in battles. This all goes for Necronomicon and her Persona's evolved forms.

Meanwhile, as her Social link grows, she's able to cast Moral Support, which allows her to support the party in one of multiple ways randomly (at least so far as gameplay goes) during battle, including healing them, casting stat-boosting spells, and later on recover some of their energy and charge their attacks up. Other abilities unlocked through her social link include sometimes being able to scan all of the current floor of Mementos at the start, sometimes being able to immediately turn the tables if the party is ambushed, sometimes being able to "refresh" nearby treasures after battle, allowing party members to switch out in emergencies, and her final ultimate move is sometimes being able to completely nullify an otherwise fatal attack. Some of these are heavily reliant on the fact that P5 is a turn-based RPG, and thus not all of them may translate well to an RP setting (even with Strikers giving us a better impression how many of her skills would perform in an action setting/game), but I'm willing to work with you guys for whatever you want/need

Note that Futaba does have several skills in her own right unconnected to her Persona. She is a prodigious hacker, having already made a name for herself long before the game has started. She's able to use this several ways, including making changes on various websites, looking up obscure information, sending anonymous messages to both Akiren's individual phone and to the Phantom Thieves group chat, and planting surveillance on the Leblanc cafe and Akiren's phone. On top of that, she's incredibly intelligent and quick-witted, despite having only officially completed middle school (there is some evidence that she's studied some personal topics of her own interest on her own time, and taken online courses) There's also evidence of her having incredibly rapid comprehension skills, coupled with near-photographic memory: she mentions in elementary school, she was able to remember and repeat the titles of all the books on a shelf after only glancing at them briefly, and remembered the contents of Kana's diary from just looking over the pages briefly while picking them up.

Item: Her laptop (as seen here;), barring that (if you guys deem her laptop too big basically), her smartphone

Sample: these would have been longer but then fanfic brainworms ate me, plus also

Notes: Can her laptop/phone come with charge cord attached/plugged in as a sort of "set" because otherwise recharging them is gonna be a bitch and a half I'm sure