Sayaka had no last name for several years, until the current Obayun of the Yamaguchi-gumi's Grandmother heard a certain legend. Girls with gray eyes who could see no color but red were considered throughout history to be born assassins, and Sayaka was exactly that. With this adoption at age three, she became Sayaka Yamaguchi and immediately began training to stand alongside her brethren. She's often referred to as a 'little sister' of the expansive yakuza syndicate based in Kobe, and is fully involved. When she was four she began the long process of full-body tattooing.
At age six, Sayaka had an encounter with a strange man. She was running an errand at the time, delivering a warning to a small business in the area which had neglected to pay their 'tax' to the Yamaguchi-gumi for the past several months. She thought as she carried the letter down the street that it was generous of the syndicate to give a warning like this even after it became clear the payments were being purposefully ignored. Along the way she was stopped by a man named Kiyoteru Tanaka. He was another businessowner in the area, and knew where she had to return to, telling her she was going the wrong way after she delivered her envelope.
He offered to bring her there since she was so off-track, and she felt so foolish that she could have forgotten her way through the city she was sure she knew by now that she didn't think about the potential consequences of taking him up on that offer. Tanaka was a liar, a liar in the area who had been watching Sayaka for a long time. He was a pervert who owned a house out in the mountains, and there was nothing she could do by the time she realized that he had no intention of helping her.
Sayaka spent two weeks under the control of this man. One day, after having his way with her, he instructed her to go out into the backyard and chop firewood. She hadn't been allowed out of the house before, nor had she been able to get her hands on any sort of weapon. This was her first opportunity to put her upbringing thusfar to use, so she did. So she killed him, and stole a cherry lollipop from his cabinet before she walked home.
It took four days of walking, but she reached Kobe once more, reached her home. Arriving was bittersweet. She was glad to be home, she was welcomed back, but as far as she was concerned she had made a mistake of unacceptable magnitude. The child of the mob should not have been so easily tricked, she thought. All mistakes needed to be punished, and this one was of such an extent that she decided to atone for her transgressions by cutting off the tip of her pinkie finger. That was the last time she made such a large mistake, and the last time that her loyalty to the Yamaguchi-Gumi was ever in question.
Sayaka was a good liar, and with a prosthetic finger and long clothes, could disguise her origins while attending school, which her grandmother insisted upon her doing. She took up the false surname 'Shinku' and worked her way through school with mediocre academic grades, which she did not consider to be a failure due to the perceived irrelevance to her life. The only skill she focused on which had no bearing on her life as yakuza was baking, a hobby which often salvaged her grade in Home Ec.
When a third year in middle school, Sayaka received an invitation to a school in Nagasaki Prefecture called Korekara Academy, which was a school for "Troubled and Prodigal Young Girls". Despite the implications of being invited to a place like that, it was known to send those troubled girls out to do great things in adulthood, and it was a better school than Sayaka's grades could earn her, so she set off to attend.
In her first year, Sayaka received another odd invitation, this time to play a video game in development called Faetale Halidae. At first she had little interest, but accepted nonetheless. The game was an experiment in Virtual Reality of a degree the world had yet to experience, but did factor skill and ability in real life into the stats of the avatar. Sayaka didn't play often, seeing as her actual combat skills left early enemies no challenge to her, but raid bosses implausible to tackle solo. Her avatar was a Pixie Rogue called Red who was given the title of 'Battleaxe Assassin'. She did, however, join a guild called Mensch Marchen when a friend of hers named Kurumi Hoshikawa asked her to, and eventually took to using Red as a nickname in more common settings.
 |
| Red, the Battleaxe Assassin |
No comments:
Post a Comment