Player Info:
Name: Prof
Timezone: Central US
Contact: ProfessorProfCharacter Info:
Name: Hata no Kokoro (English order: Kokoro Hata)
Age: Complicated. Technically she's existed for 1300 years, but she didn't really exist as a unified, cohesive entity with a sense of self until about a year ago.
AU/PG/CANON/OC: Canon (Touhou Project)

Key Points:

• Prince Shoutoku created a set of 66 Noh theater masks.
• Over time, the masks came to life and developed a personality.
• Kokoro was born as a mask-based hivemind entity with no particular sense of self.
• One day, she loses one of her masks, causes a bunch of problems, and starts learning how to be a person instead of a cluster of barely-connected emotions.
• Kokoro expresses no emotions with her face, instead putting on masks to show how she feels.
• In her spare time, she performs Noh dramas on the stage, by herself.

History:
Way back in the 8th century, Prince Shoutoku created a set of sixty-six masks for usage in Noh theatre. Over hundreds of years, these masks were used to express the same emotions over and over, until they eventually became infused with those emotions. Ultimately, the sixty-six now-haunted masks congealed into a single spirit named Hata no Kokoro, the collective will of the masks given humanoid form.

For the vast majority of her life, Kokoro didn't identify herself as an individual entity. She was the masks, each mask carried an emotion, and she was no more than the sum of those individual emotions. Centuries later, a critical event changed her dramatically - one of the masks, the Mask of Hope, went missing. This upset the delicate balance of emotions from the mask cluster, causing her emotional state to become unstable. She tried to offset the sudden hope deficit by draining the hope out of her surroundings, but that resulted in a crisis when the surrounding village was plagued with hopeless apathy.

The vanishing hope caused a wide variety of reactions among the community. Several religious leaders tried to capitalize on the situation by appealing to the disillusioned crowd for converts. Others hunted Kokoro down and fought her, tried to find alternate ways of dealing with her missing mask, or both. Kokoro found the person who took the mask, fought her, and lost, failing to reclaim it. Ultimately, rather than using any substitute method, Kokoro learned how to feel hope on her own through her battles, and was able to grow a new Mask of Hope to replace the old one.

Now, Kokoro is slightly more humanlike and expressive than she was before, and is on a quest to learn more aboute motions and how to express them properly. She uses theatre and dance to keep her newfound emotions stable, even if most people don't tend to understand the performances.

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. In addition to the masks, she has a tendency to consciously exaggerate her body language to make her emotions more visible.

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.

Gem Considerations:
Blue Opal. Its qualities include calm and serenity, which Kokoro presents in spades, and clear communication of your emotions, which is central to Kokoro's core struggle. I intend her character arc to be characterized by gradually learning to better express herself through moments of strong emotion.

Physically speaking, being a gem won't be particularly different for her. As a youkai, she already didn't have to eat or sleep, and she's from a world where strange superpowers are commonplace.

Power considerations:

• Levitation
• Causing spectral masks to appear (they don't actually do anything other than show facial expressions)
• Draining emotions (causing the target to feel the emotion less, but Kokoro to feel it more)

None of Kokoro's powers are so great that the power cap will be a problem. The only particular consideration is that normally she has her 66 original masks available in some sort of nebulous hammerspace for easy access - losing access to those masks will probably make her panic at first.

Sample: Here

⌈ 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.