Empatheias App

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Prof
Contact: ProfessorProf
Age: 28
Current Characters: None


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Hata no Kokoro (western order: Kokoro Hata)
Age: ~1300 years as a collection of haunted masks, less than a year as a self-aware entity
Canon: Touhou Project
Canon Point: After Urban Legend in Limbo

Background:
Wiki link

Personality:
The crux of Kokoro's personality rests in the fact that she wasn't always a person. Most of her existence was as a collection of 66 haunted masks, each representing one emotion, and not really having a unified identity (despite having one human-shaped body). It wasn't until very recently that Kokoro has emotions of her own, or a sense of a self separate from her masks.

The big takeaway from this is that Kokoro doesn't express emotions in the same way that most people do. Having not been a part of her existence for a very long time, her face and voice don't express them naturally, so she uses masks as a supplement. As she experiences various emotions, she swaps out various masks showing faces with different feelings to match the face she would be making as closely as possible. This isn't an instinctive emotional response, either - she just does it out of courtesy to others, so that she can communicate how she's feeling.

Behind her blank face, Kokoro is a lot like a child. She approaches the experience of being a person who has feelings with excitement and curiosity. Since she hasn't done all that much since becoming properly self-aware, most things are new and interesting to her. Imitation is a big thing for her - playing roles or mimicking what other people did, as a way to learn more about emotional/social interactions. She often takes actions specifically aimed at inciting emotional reactions in others, so that she can study them and learn more about emotions.

Ritual and repetition act as an emotional anchor for Kokoro. Her origin is a collection of traditional Noh masks, so her blood runs with a very specific kind of formal, methodical kind of acting. When she's trying something new - reprising the role of a specific urban legend villain, picking fights with strangers to get stronger - she composes a script for each encounter in her head, and repeats it almost verbatim each time, rather than letting the conversations flow naturally. When her emotions are unstable, she stabilizes through Kagura dance. Things that are predictable and repetitive help her relax.

Due largely to her unusual origins and upbringing, Kokoro has a pretty questionable moral compass. While she generally wouldn't fight someone who couldn't fight back, challenging people to battles or sneaking up and threatening strangers don't strike her as particularly objectionable hobbies. She was 'born' during a series of over-the-top battles over trivial stakes, so it became something of an ingrained part of her worldview that magic fights are a totally normal way to solve disputes. This doesn't cause any problems when she's living in Gensokyo, but in a more reasonable place this could easily lead to trouble.

Abilities:
Originally, Kokoro was comprised of 66 masks, each embodying a different emotion. Each mask would, on its own, radiate that emotion, causing a surge of it to be felt in anyone nearby - however, all 66 together perfectly balanced each other out, resulting in no effect at all. When one (the Mask of Hope) was separated from the others, it caused the person who found it to be instilled with a newfound sense of hope, but the void it left behind caused people all over the town where she was residing to start to feel hopeless and listless. Since then, she's been working at handling her emotions herself, rather than delegating them to the masks, to the point that she can get along fine without a Mask of Hope - if she were to lose another mask now, something similar might happen, but it would be a much smaller incident than it was last time.

While she's made much progress in transferring her emotions from the masks to herself, Kokoro's masks are still the focus of her power. They float around her on their own, generally existing in a vague sort of immaterial hammerspace, and most of her abilities are channeled through them - each can project various kinds of beams or blasts of spiritual energy (generally nonlethal). Beyond the masks, she can fly, and materialize weapons out of spiritual energy, favoring a naginata.

Alignment: Peromei
Kokoro's chief struggle over the course of canon was regarding the loss of her Mask of Hope, and subsequent regaining of the emotion of hope on her own, which was the stepping stone to her existence as a single feeling entity rather than a collection of youkai masks.

Other: I wrote up a primer on her various masks here.

⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample:
Here's one
Here's another
Here's a musebox post


Questions:If you play the movie Jaws backwards, it's about a shark that spits up so many people that they have to open a beach.