☤ SIRENS PULL APPLICATION
Player Information
Name: Ishmael
Age: 25
AIM SN: shadhahvar
email: ashenpaw@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Yes.
Currently Played Characters: N/A
Conditional: Activity Check Link: N/A
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: N/A
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Naruto
Canon Format: Manga
Character's Name: Haruno Sakura (western format, Sakura Haruno)
Character's Age: 18 (equiv. two years spent in a_facility, [plus highly negotiable] ~ 3/4 months in splendorocity)
What form will your character's NV take?
Coming straight out of Facility, what was commonly referred to as a "Faciliberry." For all intents and purposes, a black, unremarkable Blackberry. It operates as an Earth-standard Blackberry.
Coming out of Splendor, a round, ornate seal about the size of her hand (larger, five inches across). The center portion flips up into a text and video interface; when closed it still operates as an audio communication device. These were operated by mental willing; wishing to contact someone established a line of contact to their Seal. In theory this could work the same on the network, or she could find it now has a dialing or connection function on the flip part of the seal.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: [ Wiki ]
Stupidly In Depth Pretend Analysis of Canon Healing: [ a href="http://haruno.livejournal.com/4048.html">The bottom portion of this... other application. ]
Martial Artist: Even ignoring all her other skills, Sakura has been specifically trained to excel in hand-to-hand combat, and other forms of unarmed combat. Her body is a weapon, so to speak, and she's well toned, agile, flexible, and stronger than most women her size.
Chakra Enhancements: Chakra allows Sakura to move faster than a human being ought, walk and climb on walls and ceilings as well as water and the like, and utilize all the basic techniques on her world. (Clones, shadow clones, etc.) She additionally has perfect control of her chakra, to the point where she doesn't waste chakra unless she absolutely has to. Her overall reserves are greater than most shinobi, but sadly still far less than Naruto and Sasuke.
Subset - "Super" Stregth: Training with Tsunade has perfected Sakura's chakra release. She can use chakra to capitalize on single points of contact, a sort of KO style of fighting. These massive releases are capable of causing spontaneous fracturing of the ground for a significant distance and depth, shocking even Kakashi and Naruto into realizing just how dead they'd be with one direct intentional hit from Sakura.
Medical Training: Sakura can heal almost anything, as long as she's not being asked to heal on a cellular level. (This she just can't do - encouraging cells to regrow, yes, or flesh to reknit, but she cannot mend individual cell walls. See this as explained after Naruto uses his new technique on Kakuzu, I think. This should extend to not being able to cope with genetic defects (BUT CAN IDENTIFY THEM PROBABLY I cannot brain this canon), just side effects of those defects as best she can.) She's skilled at making antidotes, has presumably extensive herbal knowledge, and well. It's magic. Healing's not explained very well in series. She can't bring people back from death, that much is clear, so if you lose too much blood and there's no instant donor around, you're S.O.L. She's expected to surpass Tsunade at some point. Canon makes that trend blatantly obvious. What that actually means I don't think even Kishimoto actually knows, but apparently it includes on the fly gene code recognition to the nth degree. How the heck they manage genetic decoders in a world where movies aren't standard for anyone I legitimately don't know.
Genjutsu and Sakura: Unclear to what extent she knows or practices genjutsu. She still appears to be able to dispel genjutsu, or at least detect genjutsu, at a level beyond most shinobi. What this means is negligible, since the only obvious references in canon are when she's 13, and include her being able to withstand a high level sleep inducement on her lonesome. Presumably if she trains in this, and she really should have at least trained to recognize it (for the sake of not getting tricked by Sasuke's eyes, so to speak), Sakura would be a formidable genjutsu user. As it stands, there is no clear evidence of how much she does or doesn't know. She presumably has enough control of her chakra to break most holds used by genjutsu users - she can surge through her own brain so that their manipulation of her chakras is broken. Theoretically, which I can't stress enough. We just don't know. BUT WE KNOW HER RANKING. IT IS... LIKE 3.5. WHICH TELLS US NOTHING EXCEPT SHE'S RANKED.
Prior RP Related:
Nothing really relevant to this game, though her stats in taijustu and her overall medical capacity have increased dramatically enough to be noticeable. She started some genjutsu training, but it was never formal, and officially I'd say it never went far. Repeated exposure to Madara and his tricks makes her more and more inclined to learning how to break genjutsu, and in that she has gained some proficiency, if largely as a coping mechanism.
She does have auto-mail legs; they were actually more of a detriment for a long time, though now it can give her... as much of an edge as metal limbs can give anyone? She has to be careful to keep them in good condition. If they mess up, she's either on crutches, or back in a wheelchair. Her pain tolerance is really really high, and she more or less doesn't notice it as often as she should in regards to the strain on her legs or soreness pertaining to the auto-mail itself.
Weapons:
Shinobi medical kit; set of kunai and shuriken, explosive tags, stringing wire for explosive tags.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: [ Wiki | Prior Write-Up ]
Point in Canon: Chapter 492
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history:
Facility:
The Facilities were scientific testing grounds for a variety of different particulars, from things as oddball as the outer indications of sexual maturity as seen in the Loveless series to subjecting the body of test subjects to an advanced, hyper-strong strain of flesh-eating bacteria. Subjects who died were often resurrected at the week's end; life had a sort of cheap feeling time to time, but was precious none the less if even just as a finger held up to the people who had no regard for the lives of those they were experimenting on.
For a list of experiments she "participated" in during her stay in Facility, review the following list. Week 24 marks the start of her stay in the game; Week 73 marked her official departure; she returned briefly for the weeks held in The Abyss, and would ostensibly be coming from that point and time (pending disallowing of her tacking on Splendor-time).
Sakura found herself in this environment and protecting her much younger teammate Sasuke (he was eight at the time), as well as dealing with a younger version of her mentor, Tsunade. From the start she was surrounded by people she expected to be leaders, finding none of them were ready for the responsibility, and none of them knew who she was, because they had all been brought from an earlier period in time than the one she was from. This led to her infrastructure with people from home being stronger with those of her own age group at first, branching out to her shishou Tsunade out of necessity over time.
Sakura didn't have that steadying presence of her shishou or sensei from canon, what, with both of them being significantly younger than she remembered. (Tsunade was in her twenties; Kakashi in his teens.) As a consequence, she didn't always make the most informed decisions, and these did have a habit of coming back around and letting her know that she wasn't being careful enough.
The first time was when she got on the bad side of the Doctors running the experiment, allowing herself to be blackmailed into sitting on her hands and not directly helping her fellow subjects at the potential cost of an eight-year-old Sasuke's life. She circumvented the conditions placed on her by the Doctors, ultimately starting the other subjects down the paths they needed to go, but unknowingly being left open for a loophole on the Doctor's side: she was murdered by Pluto (of the Kuroshitjushi anime) as per say the written order of Light, granted access to his Death Note and performing the "service" for further services from the Doctors themselves.
It was the first stunning realization that for all the strength she'd earned back home, she could be all but powerless at the whim of another -- in this case the Doctors, and the demon dog whole tore her apart (and was later killed). She was brought back the next day by the Doctors, poorly healed and severely shaken up. It was a taste of the kind of ridiculous, casual brutality that could happen in the Facility, and it wasn't one she ever grew to appreciate.
The next time she faced difficulties came during a week where "twins" of almost all subjects had been created and released into the Facility. Sakura was unaware of her "twin's" activity, until such a point as she was accused by Naruto of having done things she patently knew she hadn't done. Working with other subjects in order to contain and mitigate the damage caused by the "twins" went as well as things ever do (better than one might expect!), but the week ultimately ended up as being another horrible experience; toward the end she was jumped by her "twin" and that of another subject's, then drugged, held captive, and tortured for a few days, though she remembers next to nothing of this time.
Weeks afterward, she and all the other subjects found themselves with complete power suppression, commonly known as having a "gold collar." (Collars, which each subject had, bearing an engraving of their room number, were standardly silver, indicating 50% power access. At gold, powers were fully repressed; when black, powers were fully accessible.) The second week in which all subjects were "powerless" led to a deliberate decision on behalf of the Doctors; Uchiha Madara (a big bad from the Naruto series) was granted access to all of his powers, and the ability to selectively choose who else could access their powers, and when, and then if he wanted them to be power suppressed again. In what later was termed "Hell Week," Sakura volunteered herself to go into Madara's "care" along with Haku, (Haku of the Naruto series, to be specific), which ultimately ended poorly. Really, really poorly. Refusing to work for Madara or his ideals led to Sakura being roughed up and then having both her legs amputated mid-thigh; a condition she refused to beg the Doctors to address, and one which she found recourse to address with the help of Winry Rockbell and the incredibly difficult concept and reality of creating auto-mail limbs in less than ideal circumstances.
Sakura spent the next six months rehabilitating herself (with help from Winry, and Tsunade, time to time) to the point where she could walk again. While still wheelchair bound, she was mind controlled along with the majority of the Facility by Kadaj in an experiment gone wrong -- his attempt to unify everyone using Geostigma and then attacking the Facility to allow for another escape attempt ultimately backfiring as the uninfected subjects found a way to isolate and contain the disease in the bodies of the infected. (Sakura was among the first subjected to the decontamination, so to speak, and while recovering assisted as she could in the capacity she could -- as a healer.)
Later, when Sephiroth was introduced to the Facility, she found herself deliberately infected (by injection this time!) to be used as a tool against Cloud to force him to Sephiroth's will -- this led to one of Sakura's most horrifying "oh god why" moments -- beating up a My Little Pony. She was prevented from killing anyone (barely) during this time, which was a saving grace for her mentally afterward, though she put herself through the ringer apologizing and feeling guilty to the ones she had injured (such as Wind Whistler, the My Little Pony). During this time she was on crutches, unable to walk without their support. (Yes. She beat up a My Little Pony while on crutches. I... god this is so ridiculous to type out.)
[Note: This happened when the third facility was making itself similar to Death City from Soul Eater; as such, Sakura was assigned the role of a weapon, and took the form of the great and glorious... rolling-pin.]
After recovering from this reinfection, Sakura had to deal with both Naruto and Gaara being forced into succumbing to their tailed beasts; she and Madara worked to save Sasuke in the aftermath (Sasuke by then was at his expected age of 16), an uneasy truce on Sakura's part, and an indication of the particular mental shifts she was making as a matter of survival and coping.
More time passed. One week Sakura found herself being surrounded by people steadily losing their sanity; unbeknown-st to her, this was Hinamizawa Syndrome. She was one of the few "queens" who maintained sanity, along with the ability to keep others calm in her presence, though when the week ended and only fellow "queens" remembered it had happened in the first place, she wasn't inclined to speak about what she recalled to anyone, at any point. Her increasing ability to compartmentalize and repress was coming to the foreground again.
Problematically, as it turned out, as not long after she found herself in a situation she didn't know how to handle; body-swapped (or was it mind swapped? really) with Uchiha Madara, having to wear the form of someone she truly hated, but wouldn't allow herself to hate -- both for her sake, for Naruto's sake, and in ways for Sasuke's sake -- and it was her first big breakdown since the first time Naruto was "terminated" from the experiment. (He was brought back later, but that first time had been a shock, after five months of surviving everything together. Everything but Pluto, that was.) She tried to keep herself on an even keel, and still ended up snapping and lashing out at Uchiha Izuna, Madara's younger brother, wearing the body of someone else. After breaking his arm and nose, and then healing at least the arm, Sakura realized she wasn't handling any of this as well as she thought; Naruto came down hard on her for losing sight of what they wanted to work on. Getting out. Having hope. Not giving in to hate.
It bizarrely brought her closer to Sasuke, and two weeks later, they were even closer, as an extension of the wishes all of Team Seven had in their hearts. It was a temporary peace, as while all subjects had their wishes granted, it unfortunately meant all subjects had their wishes granted. Madara had his full potential strength, along with the Ten Tails he so desired; the genjutsu he cast caught many of the particular people he held no great love for, bringing them to him and prostrating before him, trying to let him know they understood just how wrong they were. Sakura was among this group, and up until Madara was destroyed that week, she mutilated herself and spoke again and again of how wrong she was, how right Madara was, how dare she have ever spoken out against him, etc.
Sakura broke down more privately this time, apologetic and angry that she hadn't been able to stand up against him, that she wasn't strong enough to break that ultimate genjutsu's control. Sai and Sasuke both helped her pull through, even as Naruto did. The scarring from this encounter was slowly and systematically worked on by Sakura, until it remained barely visible.
Soon after, Facility Three was transformed into Isla Nublar, familiar to those who read or watched Jurassic Park. Sakura's concern for a good friend and his particular acquaintances got her mangled vocal chords; someone's fingers had quite literally shoved in and wiggled about. A combination of the Doctors and Sakura's own skills restored her voice over the next few weeks, though it never sounded exactly the same again. Or did it? (Yes, actually, for reasons listed in the note at the bottom of this section.)
Then there was the break out into the Facility, which led to the murder of most the Doctors, and various members of their staff. Sakura was firmly against executing any of the Doctors, and helped with her village's efforts to keep a few alive -- the Doctors who had been helping the subjects in the ways they could over the last few months. It was then that they also learned that for each week they spent awake, they spent an equal length of time asleep -- twice as much time had been passing as any of them were aware of.
Ultimately the station was used to put all the subjects out and gather them back into their proper Facility. The experiments continued as usual, and then a notice went out around Valentine's. Anyone on the list provided was going to have their heart forcibly removed and left in the Biodome by the week's end if a suitable replacement heart with their name pinned to it wasn't left in the Biodome as a stand in before Sunday Reset.
Sakura was on that list. She refused to take any replacement; murdering one person wasn't an acceptable way of extending her own life. It was heavily implied at the time that this would be a permanent termination. In the day hearts were due, however, Kakashi was murdered by someone seeking to use his heart to save one of the other subjects, and Yamato asked (or in a way, begged) for Sakura to use her sensei's unintentional gift. (She did, reluctant, and guilty, for the relief she felt.)
Ultimately these subjects were returned, after a week kept outside the facilities, on operating tables. The experiments continued, and at one point Sakura was killed again, Geass'd by Rolo and shot point-blank through the forehead.
...
From broadcasted dreams to voodoo dolls to translation chip failure, Sakura persevered. Her final trip to Facility Three brought her to the city of Rapture (familiar through BioShock). In this odd environment she ultimately met her third (and supposedly final) ending -- through drowning, along with most the subject population.
Months later, Sakura found herself in yet another Facility Three -- and learned she'd been terminated and replaced, viewing the Sakura who had been brought in lieu of her and realizing how right she'd been before, and how liberating and saddening that reality was. Meeting up with friends she loved and knew she'd be leaving again soon (the Doctors were cruel, this would be only temporary before she was maybe added to the incinerator like the ones they'd seen in that horrible video before), and then defending them as best she could when the "natives" to The Abyss were brought in by the Doctors, she was both more at peace with herself and more frustrated at her lack of control over her life when she found the music box amidst the junk all around in Facility Three in the last hour of Saturday, and found herself... here.
Relationship Note: For the last few months she was in-game, Sakura and Sasuke had a very on again, off again, not-quite-relationship that they didn't like to talk about or think too much on. Her return during The Abyss revealed not only her own replacement to her, but also Sasuke's termination. It was devastating, but at the same time, maybe then he would find peace. Learning about Madara's termination was much less devastating, consequentially.
Furthermore, with memory specifics stripped on entering Siren's Pull, Sakura will only be aware that she's been in some messed up form of relationship with someone she no longer remembers -- and certainly wasn't from home, right? Because wouldn't she remember then? (Being her internal logic.)
Note: By game canon, and this is where I'm guessing maybe she wouldn't be able to come here with prior RP memories, Sakura is a clone of Sakura. Approximately clone number... 6? 5? This was an in-game revealed fact over time, nothing known at the start of the game. Ultimately from a psychological standpoint it makes Sakura more sensitive to concepts of originality and of belonging; it is nothing she would bring up, and it wouldn't stop her from helping castmates get home, though it would mean she believes she knows she has no home to go to -- because the person she is/is supposed to be is already there. She never left.
If Splendorocity history is allowed as the extension to this, that problem had been solved by Splendor's game mechanics.
Splendorocity:
I'm not sold on needing Splendor's history tacked on too, though the upside to if it is comes in a mellowing of Sakura, a technical reality that she's actually the original Sakura, and not a clone like she believes in Facility, and upgraded/better maintained automail due to time spent with Winry in Splendor.
Splendor is fairly simple; Sakura showed up in the first week that a mass influx of people appeared in a city where the residents refused to acknowledge their existence. She was healing people on their rather bloody arrivals, but found herself as mystified as the rest of the people brought there when confronted by realities such as an anti-violence law enforced over them all.
She was part of a group orchestrating a movement to investigate the influence and power behind Splendor, attending a Halloween masquerade in hopes of learning more about the city. She did, with the help of a friend named Altair, if their conjectures had everything to do with Splendor demonstrating its ability to null powers and manipulate reality whenever it felt so inclined. Conjectures based on this event led to her calling a meeting and helping out with scouting groups mapping out the layout of their new "home," along with pooling resources to further investigations as to why they were there, and why the locals who were clearly looking to send them home weren't bothering to include their guests in that effort.
Months away from constant experimentation was starting to allow her to breathe easy in spite of herself; for the first time in technical years, the influence ruling her life gave her some room to wiggle, and she was using it to plot the return to Facility and get everyone still alive the hell off the station.
(Her life was otherwise filled with vignettes, spending time cataloging things in the forest, going hiking, sparring with fellow guests of Splendor, meeting Sasuke again and doing her damnedest to hold a henge so no questions would come up from that avenue. It wasn't something she wanted to explain, not to people from home.)
She did experience one city shift while in Splendor, into a space station heavily reliant on Jedi technology. She and her team managed to rescue their hostages and defeat the Sith Lords... who were other members of Splendor's guest population.
Character Personality:
Sakura is an intelligent, sometimes preachy (to those she knows and/or finds clueless about a given subject she is knowledgeable about), caring young woman. She takes her job as a medical shinobi seriously, and this seriousness is displayed in how she handles any work assigned to her. Sakura likes to be thorough, complete, and as close to perfect as possible. Be this in her written reports, her abilities, her training, or any other aspect of her life. She's also neat, from what little can be seen of her home.
Her tendency to follow the rules also lends itself to her having little patience for people acting perverted - especially when "people" includes Uzumaki Naruto. As a twist, Sakura herself is a closet yaoi fan. Most her attempts to flirt fail, or end in her punching guys in the face. She does not like people implying she's flat-chested. She's not as sensitive about her appearance as she once was, but making an issue of it with her is asking for retribution.
Sakura is determined to achieve her goals, and achieve them well. She has a good grasp of tactics and a good mind for cryptology and research. Her memory is very good, and her detail recall is high, but not infallible. Sakura is also tenacious in her resolve. She is far less judgmental than she was as a pre-teen, and is far more likely to forgive (if not forget) people's minor indiscretions. (Or major ones, as in the case of Sai.) She holds teamwork as incredibly important, and still respects the opinions of her elders enough to listen to them when they give advice. Most the time, anyway.
Sakura is honest, even to the point of bluntness (though she has decent helpings of tact, so she's usually only blunt to those she knows well, or who she requires certain standards from), and has been known to overreact to people, particularly with irritation and anger and outrage. What used to be repressed and relieved through "Inner-Sakura" is now more freely expressed to the world - not that it's always appreciated. She's the sort of person who could be talked into a challenge, even if she wouldn't blindly accept one (taking on challenges in even those things she's not so good at, due to a competitive spirit). Sakura hates losing, and giving up got written out of her dictionary years ago.
She is confident in her skills and abilities, if not to a point where she doesn't feel the need to re-evaluate and take a look at herself from time to time. Her resolve to improve makes her a harsh taskmistress on herself, in order to make sure that she's able to stand equal with Naruto, Sasuke, Sai, Kakashi - everyone important to her - and not end up on the sidelines, unable to help. Perhaps her greatest fears and failures come from feeling inadequate in the face of her important people; being unable to help them would drive her up a wall.
Note: I say she's confident, and she is! Most the time. Sort of. Okay so canon also has her facing bouts of crippling lack of confidence because she's not able to keep up with Naruto and Sasuke, to the point where she kind of happily consigns Sasuke to Naruto because what the blast was she going to do anyway. Her skill set when applied away from her immediate friends is something she's much more confident in, and with added other game time, she doesn't suffer from this sort of crippling lack of confidence even around her teammates. In large part this has to do with literally living through so much where she could do nothing and the most powerful people and gods could do nothing and this is, apparently, sometimes what you can do. Absolutely nothing.
Even with her more emotionally "open" personality, Sakura has displayed excellent bedside manner, doubtlessly invaluable in her profession. Her kindness towards others, including Naruto, and her ability to relate has improved with time. She does practice more restraint than she's probably given credit for by those in her own generation. She's also willing to pass off the things she's done if it avoids an explanation of what she found stupid in the moment it was uttered - telling Kakashi it was nothing when both Sai and Naruto had fat cheeks visiting him in the hospital.
Sakura is not above gossiping, though she keeps it to a minimum. She doesn't appear to talk about herself or her feelings often, presumably because she doesn't want to burden others and prefers to deal with them head on. Then again, most the time she reads like an open book. Some of her compatriots are simply too thick-headed, or too uninvolved, to notice.
tl;dr version: she's a teenager with emotional hangups over her teammates, who wants to help her closest people out, often fails, and keeps her belief in her bestest friend ever -- or at least best used punching bag -- because it's what she has so annoyingly decided she simply must do.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game:
Facility:
As a consequence of her just about year (or, given the IC timeframe revealed, two years) in the Facilities, Sakura did change. Most notably is her loss of xenophobia towards new peoples, cultures, and species; by necessity alone, she'd lost that over the time spent in-game. This doesn't make her more trusting of people -- she's still willing to believe the best, because that has paid off at least some of the time. Yet she doesn't put trust in people easily, and holds herself at an emotional reserve at first. It's a coping mechanism, while she also can't stay away from people. Being constantly surrounded has made her long for some solitude, but at the same time she doesn't know how to live without being surrounded by other people. It'd be too quiet at times, and too unnerving -- or so she thinks. Over time she could adapt.
She has a different and uneasy relationship with authority figures, finding a merit basis to be necessary and not suggested. She finds human experimentation completely against any moral code she holds. She has taken Naruto's code about not allowing hate to dictate and rule you to heart, and thus does not allow herself (to the best of her ability) to act out against others based on those hatreds she feels. (See Madara for the most notable example of this.) Sakura practices the idea of "rising above" the example of those who she does hold extraordinary dislike for -- she will help enemies if it's within her capacity, in part perversely because they wouldn't, and in part because it's something she can do. She won't let other people dictate her life, and has severe dislikes of mind-control or manipulation.
She's more sure of her abilities as a healer now than she was before; she's able to accomplish more with less chakra, and consequentially has refined her control even more than before. She knows how to be deadly, and staunchly refuses to be deadly; life is too precious. The Facilities have driven that into her deeper than anything else. Basic respect for others and for their lives is important to her. Even the monsters, though she's not infatuated with them being monsters, and feels they need to be curbed and managed. Reasonably managed.
Other changes include her receptivity to touch. Sakura doesn't like uninvited touch in the slightest; it's liable to provoke immediate retaliation in the form of disengaging and/or seeking to control the situation on her part. She has little to no tolerance for illusions. Also game relevant: she learned what it meant to hold her tongue, and what the price of silence was. In Facility, Sakura's been learning how to better lie and hide how she feels, though it's not healthy, and it's breaking her down slowly because she doesn't know how to cope.
Being in ostensibly unrestrained areas will probably cause Sakura to suffer some form of agoraphobia after so long stuck in a space station and the spatially limited Facilities. (In Splendor she ended up dealing with bouts of dizziness and overwhelming disorientation in large, exposed places. The grand expanses of ceilingless sky had a kind of feel like she can fall up through it quality that sent her heart racing, if she was working on it through sheer stubborn perseverance. She's not comfortable sitting under open sky without something that feels anchoring nearby -- boulders, trees, houses -- to this day.)
Splendorocity:
Taking the fatalism and obsessive dedication to her no kill policy, Splendor threw Sakura into a pool of mostly strangers against a new, unfaced force. She found herself relying on techniques and leadership skills that had been used by others in Facility in order to orient herself and start focusing other people on proactive action, moving forward on things like getting gardens going to supplement their food allowance.
The short version is she started being more outwardly assertive in getting things done, frustrated at people talking in circles and not taking action. She explored and asked people to perform to the extent of their abilities, and tried organizing small groups to get things done, as well as sharing information regarding Splendor fairly freely. She chose to take a gamble on trust as a middle finger at her conditioning with Facility, keeping talks on herself or her history to the absolute minimum. The experience it's given her has turned into an experience pool she uses in order to keep an outward even keel for the sake of those around her who aren't used to large forces of something or someone else manipulating what they can and can't do.
Her distaste for magic, or the ease of wishing, has gone up. She's more reserved than ever, if she's also followed her old standard of not hiding her automail limbs. They're part of her, it's not worth disguising.
If it means a few half-assed explanations along the way, she'll swing them when she has to.
Sakura's less totally unhinged after Splendor, able to stand on her own feet even if she desperately does and does not want to see her friends from home again. She remembers all of them, but she still thinks she's a clone -- and that she'd be the imposter in their already complicated lives.
Character Plans:
Sakura's pretty goal driven, and by this point her goal is people. Connecting to but finding some way to test out the clone thing on her friends will be important; she's strict in her no kill policy, and has no tolerance whatsoever for human experimentation. Neither of the companies are ones she can support, and she'll figure out how to balance her sense of right and wrong with the world of Siren's Port.
She'll be as dedicated to getting back out as anyone else, with added bonus of wanting to find a way to spring the Facilitees out, even into Siren's Port itself. For all it's messed up, Alpha-Omega station is much worse in Sakura's mind. Pending Splendor being part of her history, Splendor as a stop-over would also be important. People in all these other worlds need to get back home, or figure out their own lives.
She wants to help make that happen, since she still believes she can't really go home. But she'd be damned before she leaves anyone behind like what she feels she needs to be. Also I'd be interested having her actually pursue something in law or within the police department, above, past, and beyond the medic role she often falls/is pushed into by certain necessities.
Appearance/PB: [ Full Body Reference ]
In addition, Sakura has two automail legs (designed by Winry, considerably heavier than if she'd had decent metal available at the time), starting at the upper/mid-thigh. She also sports a bronze collar around her neck, a ring of metal with "007" etched into the surface.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample (focused on immediately post-Facility)
[ Video; ]
[ The feed activates, a young woman staring into the camera eye with a frown. Week three was up. The clock had already wound down.
She'd awoken in this place, and that shouldn't have been possible. ]
I don't recognize the surroundings, but it's a step up from where I just was. If this is another one of the Facilities...
[ Sakura pauses, looking off camera. Doesn't feel right, for a facilty. Far too many people here, even if most of them weren't out in the streets at the moment. ]
Awfully nice of them to have a welcoming committee. That's new.
[ She focuses on the camera eye in the faciliberry again, managing to smile through the start of her next statement. ]
Guys, this is Sakura -- from 10-C. Let me know if you're out there. For those who have no idea who I am... like I said, I'm Sakura.
Pleasantries aside, where am I, and what's going on?
Third Person Sample
Sakura withdrew from the rest of the people she knew, pulling into herself like an octopus gathering tentacles to fit inside an empty soup can. She felt smaller, but relieved; the people she cared about hadn't all been saved, but most had been, and most would be patched back together by the Interns over the next unconscious week. She wondered how many people even thought about that time discrepancy anymore. Did it matter, when you didn't remember living all that extra time?
Probably not, she decided, with time being as relative as distance, speed, and feeling. She looked up into the inky blackness that defined the nothing above her. It was disconcerting, staring into a void that had no presence to stare back, and yet still seemed to. She preferred the stars, from the few times she'd seen them out the Station's windows. She wondered if she'd ever see stars again.
It was an unpleasant, almost obsessive thought. Sakura forced herself to her feet, looking around at the dystopic horror of this setting. The Abyss, that's what it was called, wasn't it? They'd managed to bring cities in Facility Three to ruin during their stays there (Sakura remembers Death City in particular, and later how London had been destroyed), but outside of the place known as Rapture, things had never been so dark from the outset. Even Rapture had been in better disrepair, if such a thing existed. Moving through the debris, she waited for the other shoe to drop. Her time was up.
Since she couldn't remember being active in any second experiment group, it was just as likely no such thing existed... or if it did, she wasn't slated for it. The incinerators flickered in the back of her mind, and she swallowed, sick to her stomach.
The sickness twisted, growing sharp enough that Sakura flinched in surprise, hands coming to her stomach. Was she panicking? After all this, after fighting to get everyone back, was she giving into panic now?
The sensation got worse, a pulling that left her with an intense headache as she gritted her teeth. Were those bastards taunting her? Knocking her out slowly, knowing she'd be aware enough as she sunk back down into a final unconsciousness. It pissed her off, in that sick, frustrated hopelessness that had her fighting the sensation, fighting against the pull that seemed to be tearing her away from even this lonely section of someone else's hell.
And then it stopped. Head jerking up, Sakura stumbled back a few steps. She was salivating, tasting a hint of bile at the back of her mouth. What the hell had just happened?
She looked around at her new surroundings. The faces of everyone she'd just been with were a blur of impossible to remember names in the back of her mind, as foreign and yet familiar as the graffiti on the walls of this -- baseball diamond. She recognized what this was supposed to be.
"What the hell's going on?" She felt for her Faciliberry, patting pockets and fumbling it out. She still had it. She still had it. "Guys?" Why couldn't she remember their names? The little girl, who meant so much. The god, whose face she couldn't even place right now. The man who'd taken her legs in a fit of pique over being attacked by -- who?
She activated the feed, clamping down on her confusion, and the rising tide of panic. Center. Focus. Figure this out. "I don't recognize the surroundings, but it's a step up from where I just was. If this is another one of the Facilities..." she trailed off, looking around the diamond again. Someone was coming over.
Welcome to Siren's Port!
"Awfully nice of them to have a welcoming committee." She watched them approach, on edge. "That's new."
Flicking her eyes down to the faciliberry, she swallowed, blurting out the rest. "Guys, this is Sakura -- from 10-C. Let me know if you're out there. For those who have no idea who I am... like I said, I'm Sakura." Maybe they'd recognize the room number, even if someone else occupied it since she was last in the experiment proper.
She had to be in another facility. How long had she been out this time?
"Pleasantries aside, where am I, and what's going on?"
Name: Ishmael
Age: 25
AIM SN: shadhahvar
email: ashenpaw@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Yes.
Currently Played Characters: N/A
Conditional: Activity Check Link: N/A
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: N/A
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Naruto
Canon Format: Manga
Character's Name: Haruno Sakura (western format, Sakura Haruno)
Character's Age: 18 (equiv. two years spent in a_facility, [plus highly negotiable] ~ 3/4 months in splendorocity)
What form will your character's NV take?
Coming straight out of Facility, what was commonly referred to as a "Faciliberry." For all intents and purposes, a black, unremarkable Blackberry. It operates as an Earth-standard Blackberry.
Coming out of Splendor, a round, ornate seal about the size of her hand (larger, five inches across). The center portion flips up into a text and video interface; when closed it still operates as an audio communication device. These were operated by mental willing; wishing to contact someone established a line of contact to their Seal. In theory this could work the same on the network, or she could find it now has a dialing or connection function on the flip part of the seal.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: [ Wiki ]
Stupidly In Depth Pretend Analysis of Canon Healing: [ a href="http://haruno.livejournal.com/4048.html">The bottom portion of this... other application. ]
Martial Artist: Even ignoring all her other skills, Sakura has been specifically trained to excel in hand-to-hand combat, and other forms of unarmed combat. Her body is a weapon, so to speak, and she's well toned, agile, flexible, and stronger than most women her size.
Chakra Enhancements: Chakra allows Sakura to move faster than a human being ought, walk and climb on walls and ceilings as well as water and the like, and utilize all the basic techniques on her world. (Clones, shadow clones, etc.) She additionally has perfect control of her chakra, to the point where she doesn't waste chakra unless she absolutely has to. Her overall reserves are greater than most shinobi, but sadly still far less than Naruto and Sasuke.
Subset - "Super" Stregth: Training with Tsunade has perfected Sakura's chakra release. She can use chakra to capitalize on single points of contact, a sort of KO style of fighting. These massive releases are capable of causing spontaneous fracturing of the ground for a significant distance and depth, shocking even Kakashi and Naruto into realizing just how dead they'd be with one direct intentional hit from Sakura.
Medical Training: Sakura can heal almost anything, as long as she's not being asked to heal on a cellular level. (This she just can't do - encouraging cells to regrow, yes, or flesh to reknit, but she cannot mend individual cell walls. See this as explained after Naruto uses his new technique on Kakuzu, I think. This should extend to not being able to cope with genetic defects (BUT CAN IDENTIFY THEM PROBABLY I cannot brain this canon), just side effects of those defects as best she can.) She's skilled at making antidotes, has presumably extensive herbal knowledge, and well. It's magic. Healing's not explained very well in series. She can't bring people back from death, that much is clear, so if you lose too much blood and there's no instant donor around, you're S.O.L. She's expected to surpass Tsunade at some point. Canon makes that trend blatantly obvious. What that actually means I don't think even Kishimoto actually knows, but apparently it includes on the fly gene code recognition to the nth degree. How the heck they manage genetic decoders in a world where movies aren't standard for anyone I legitimately don't know.
Genjutsu and Sakura: Unclear to what extent she knows or practices genjutsu. She still appears to be able to dispel genjutsu, or at least detect genjutsu, at a level beyond most shinobi. What this means is negligible, since the only obvious references in canon are when she's 13, and include her being able to withstand a high level sleep inducement on her lonesome. Presumably if she trains in this, and she really should have at least trained to recognize it (for the sake of not getting tricked by Sasuke's eyes, so to speak), Sakura would be a formidable genjutsu user. As it stands, there is no clear evidence of how much she does or doesn't know. She presumably has enough control of her chakra to break most holds used by genjutsu users - she can surge through her own brain so that their manipulation of her chakras is broken. Theoretically, which I can't stress enough. We just don't know. BUT WE KNOW HER RANKING. IT IS... LIKE 3.5. WHICH TELLS US NOTHING EXCEPT SHE'S RANKED.
Prior RP Related:
Nothing really relevant to this game, though her stats in taijustu and her overall medical capacity have increased dramatically enough to be noticeable. She started some genjutsu training, but it was never formal, and officially I'd say it never went far. Repeated exposure to Madara and his tricks makes her more and more inclined to learning how to break genjutsu, and in that she has gained some proficiency, if largely as a coping mechanism.
She does have auto-mail legs; they were actually more of a detriment for a long time, though now it can give her... as much of an edge as metal limbs can give anyone? She has to be careful to keep them in good condition. If they mess up, she's either on crutches, or back in a wheelchair. Her pain tolerance is really really high, and she more or less doesn't notice it as often as she should in regards to the strain on her legs or soreness pertaining to the auto-mail itself.
Weapons:
Shinobi medical kit; set of kunai and shuriken, explosive tags, stringing wire for explosive tags.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: [ Wiki | Prior Write-Up ]
Point in Canon: Chapter 492
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history:
Facility:
The Facilities were scientific testing grounds for a variety of different particulars, from things as oddball as the outer indications of sexual maturity as seen in the Loveless series to subjecting the body of test subjects to an advanced, hyper-strong strain of flesh-eating bacteria. Subjects who died were often resurrected at the week's end; life had a sort of cheap feeling time to time, but was precious none the less if even just as a finger held up to the people who had no regard for the lives of those they were experimenting on.
For a list of experiments she "participated" in during her stay in Facility, review the following list. Week 24 marks the start of her stay in the game; Week 73 marked her official departure; she returned briefly for the weeks held in The Abyss, and would ostensibly be coming from that point and time (pending disallowing of her tacking on Splendor-time).
Sakura found herself in this environment and protecting her much younger teammate Sasuke (he was eight at the time), as well as dealing with a younger version of her mentor, Tsunade. From the start she was surrounded by people she expected to be leaders, finding none of them were ready for the responsibility, and none of them knew who she was, because they had all been brought from an earlier period in time than the one she was from. This led to her infrastructure with people from home being stronger with those of her own age group at first, branching out to her shishou Tsunade out of necessity over time.
Sakura didn't have that steadying presence of her shishou or sensei from canon, what, with both of them being significantly younger than she remembered. (Tsunade was in her twenties; Kakashi in his teens.) As a consequence, she didn't always make the most informed decisions, and these did have a habit of coming back around and letting her know that she wasn't being careful enough.
The first time was when she got on the bad side of the Doctors running the experiment, allowing herself to be blackmailed into sitting on her hands and not directly helping her fellow subjects at the potential cost of an eight-year-old Sasuke's life. She circumvented the conditions placed on her by the Doctors, ultimately starting the other subjects down the paths they needed to go, but unknowingly being left open for a loophole on the Doctor's side: she was murdered by Pluto (of the Kuroshitjushi anime) as per say the written order of Light, granted access to his Death Note and performing the "service" for further services from the Doctors themselves.
It was the first stunning realization that for all the strength she'd earned back home, she could be all but powerless at the whim of another -- in this case the Doctors, and the demon dog whole tore her apart (and was later killed). She was brought back the next day by the Doctors, poorly healed and severely shaken up. It was a taste of the kind of ridiculous, casual brutality that could happen in the Facility, and it wasn't one she ever grew to appreciate.
The next time she faced difficulties came during a week where "twins" of almost all subjects had been created and released into the Facility. Sakura was unaware of her "twin's" activity, until such a point as she was accused by Naruto of having done things she patently knew she hadn't done. Working with other subjects in order to contain and mitigate the damage caused by the "twins" went as well as things ever do (better than one might expect!), but the week ultimately ended up as being another horrible experience; toward the end she was jumped by her "twin" and that of another subject's, then drugged, held captive, and tortured for a few days, though she remembers next to nothing of this time.
Weeks afterward, she and all the other subjects found themselves with complete power suppression, commonly known as having a "gold collar." (Collars, which each subject had, bearing an engraving of their room number, were standardly silver, indicating 50% power access. At gold, powers were fully repressed; when black, powers were fully accessible.) The second week in which all subjects were "powerless" led to a deliberate decision on behalf of the Doctors; Uchiha Madara (a big bad from the Naruto series) was granted access to all of his powers, and the ability to selectively choose who else could access their powers, and when, and then if he wanted them to be power suppressed again. In what later was termed "Hell Week," Sakura volunteered herself to go into Madara's "care" along with Haku, (Haku of the Naruto series, to be specific), which ultimately ended poorly. Really, really poorly. Refusing to work for Madara or his ideals led to Sakura being roughed up and then having both her legs amputated mid-thigh; a condition she refused to beg the Doctors to address, and one which she found recourse to address with the help of Winry Rockbell and the incredibly difficult concept and reality of creating auto-mail limbs in less than ideal circumstances.
Sakura spent the next six months rehabilitating herself (with help from Winry, and Tsunade, time to time) to the point where she could walk again. While still wheelchair bound, she was mind controlled along with the majority of the Facility by Kadaj in an experiment gone wrong -- his attempt to unify everyone using Geostigma and then attacking the Facility to allow for another escape attempt ultimately backfiring as the uninfected subjects found a way to isolate and contain the disease in the bodies of the infected. (Sakura was among the first subjected to the decontamination, so to speak, and while recovering assisted as she could in the capacity she could -- as a healer.)
Later, when Sephiroth was introduced to the Facility, she found herself deliberately infected (by injection this time!) to be used as a tool against Cloud to force him to Sephiroth's will -- this led to one of Sakura's most horrifying "oh god why" moments -- beating up a My Little Pony. She was prevented from killing anyone (barely) during this time, which was a saving grace for her mentally afterward, though she put herself through the ringer apologizing and feeling guilty to the ones she had injured (such as Wind Whistler, the My Little Pony). During this time she was on crutches, unable to walk without their support. (Yes. She beat up a My Little Pony while on crutches. I... god this is so ridiculous to type out.)
[Note: This happened when the third facility was making itself similar to Death City from Soul Eater; as such, Sakura was assigned the role of a weapon, and took the form of the great and glorious... rolling-pin.]
After recovering from this reinfection, Sakura had to deal with both Naruto and Gaara being forced into succumbing to their tailed beasts; she and Madara worked to save Sasuke in the aftermath (Sasuke by then was at his expected age of 16), an uneasy truce on Sakura's part, and an indication of the particular mental shifts she was making as a matter of survival and coping.
More time passed. One week Sakura found herself being surrounded by people steadily losing their sanity; unbeknown-st to her, this was Hinamizawa Syndrome. She was one of the few "queens" who maintained sanity, along with the ability to keep others calm in her presence, though when the week ended and only fellow "queens" remembered it had happened in the first place, she wasn't inclined to speak about what she recalled to anyone, at any point. Her increasing ability to compartmentalize and repress was coming to the foreground again.
Problematically, as it turned out, as not long after she found herself in a situation she didn't know how to handle; body-swapped (or was it mind swapped? really) with Uchiha Madara, having to wear the form of someone she truly hated, but wouldn't allow herself to hate -- both for her sake, for Naruto's sake, and in ways for Sasuke's sake -- and it was her first big breakdown since the first time Naruto was "terminated" from the experiment. (He was brought back later, but that first time had been a shock, after five months of surviving everything together. Everything but Pluto, that was.) She tried to keep herself on an even keel, and still ended up snapping and lashing out at Uchiha Izuna, Madara's younger brother, wearing the body of someone else. After breaking his arm and nose, and then healing at least the arm, Sakura realized she wasn't handling any of this as well as she thought; Naruto came down hard on her for losing sight of what they wanted to work on. Getting out. Having hope. Not giving in to hate.
It bizarrely brought her closer to Sasuke, and two weeks later, they were even closer, as an extension of the wishes all of Team Seven had in their hearts. It was a temporary peace, as while all subjects had their wishes granted, it unfortunately meant all subjects had their wishes granted. Madara had his full potential strength, along with the Ten Tails he so desired; the genjutsu he cast caught many of the particular people he held no great love for, bringing them to him and prostrating before him, trying to let him know they understood just how wrong they were. Sakura was among this group, and up until Madara was destroyed that week, she mutilated herself and spoke again and again of how wrong she was, how right Madara was, how dare she have ever spoken out against him, etc.
Sakura broke down more privately this time, apologetic and angry that she hadn't been able to stand up against him, that she wasn't strong enough to break that ultimate genjutsu's control. Sai and Sasuke both helped her pull through, even as Naruto did. The scarring from this encounter was slowly and systematically worked on by Sakura, until it remained barely visible.
Soon after, Facility Three was transformed into Isla Nublar, familiar to those who read or watched Jurassic Park. Sakura's concern for a good friend and his particular acquaintances got her mangled vocal chords; someone's fingers had quite literally shoved in and wiggled about. A combination of the Doctors and Sakura's own skills restored her voice over the next few weeks, though it never sounded exactly the same again. Or did it? (Yes, actually, for reasons listed in the note at the bottom of this section.)
Then there was the break out into the Facility, which led to the murder of most the Doctors, and various members of their staff. Sakura was firmly against executing any of the Doctors, and helped with her village's efforts to keep a few alive -- the Doctors who had been helping the subjects in the ways they could over the last few months. It was then that they also learned that for each week they spent awake, they spent an equal length of time asleep -- twice as much time had been passing as any of them were aware of.
Ultimately the station was used to put all the subjects out and gather them back into their proper Facility. The experiments continued as usual, and then a notice went out around Valentine's. Anyone on the list provided was going to have their heart forcibly removed and left in the Biodome by the week's end if a suitable replacement heart with their name pinned to it wasn't left in the Biodome as a stand in before Sunday Reset.
Sakura was on that list. She refused to take any replacement; murdering one person wasn't an acceptable way of extending her own life. It was heavily implied at the time that this would be a permanent termination. In the day hearts were due, however, Kakashi was murdered by someone seeking to use his heart to save one of the other subjects, and Yamato asked (or in a way, begged) for Sakura to use her sensei's unintentional gift. (She did, reluctant, and guilty, for the relief she felt.)
Ultimately these subjects were returned, after a week kept outside the facilities, on operating tables. The experiments continued, and at one point Sakura was killed again, Geass'd by Rolo and shot point-blank through the forehead.
...
From broadcasted dreams to voodoo dolls to translation chip failure, Sakura persevered. Her final trip to Facility Three brought her to the city of Rapture (familiar through BioShock). In this odd environment she ultimately met her third (and supposedly final) ending -- through drowning, along with most the subject population.
Months later, Sakura found herself in yet another Facility Three -- and learned she'd been terminated and replaced, viewing the Sakura who had been brought in lieu of her and realizing how right she'd been before, and how liberating and saddening that reality was. Meeting up with friends she loved and knew she'd be leaving again soon (the Doctors were cruel, this would be only temporary before she was maybe added to the incinerator like the ones they'd seen in that horrible video before), and then defending them as best she could when the "natives" to The Abyss were brought in by the Doctors, she was both more at peace with herself and more frustrated at her lack of control over her life when she found the music box amidst the junk all around in Facility Three in the last hour of Saturday, and found herself... here.
Relationship Note: For the last few months she was in-game, Sakura and Sasuke had a very on again, off again, not-quite-relationship that they didn't like to talk about or think too much on. Her return during The Abyss revealed not only her own replacement to her, but also Sasuke's termination. It was devastating, but at the same time, maybe then he would find peace. Learning about Madara's termination was much less devastating, consequentially.
Furthermore, with memory specifics stripped on entering Siren's Pull, Sakura will only be aware that she's been in some messed up form of relationship with someone she no longer remembers -- and certainly wasn't from home, right? Because wouldn't she remember then? (Being her internal logic.)
Note: By game canon, and this is where I'm guessing maybe she wouldn't be able to come here with prior RP memories, Sakura is a clone of Sakura. Approximately clone number... 6? 5? This was an in-game revealed fact over time, nothing known at the start of the game. Ultimately from a psychological standpoint it makes Sakura more sensitive to concepts of originality and of belonging; it is nothing she would bring up, and it wouldn't stop her from helping castmates get home, though it would mean she believes she knows she has no home to go to -- because the person she is/is supposed to be is already there. She never left.
If Splendorocity history is allowed as the extension to this, that problem had been solved by Splendor's game mechanics.
Splendorocity:
I'm not sold on needing Splendor's history tacked on too, though the upside to if it is comes in a mellowing of Sakura, a technical reality that she's actually the original Sakura, and not a clone like she believes in Facility, and upgraded/better maintained automail due to time spent with Winry in Splendor.
Splendor is fairly simple; Sakura showed up in the first week that a mass influx of people appeared in a city where the residents refused to acknowledge their existence. She was healing people on their rather bloody arrivals, but found herself as mystified as the rest of the people brought there when confronted by realities such as an anti-violence law enforced over them all.
She was part of a group orchestrating a movement to investigate the influence and power behind Splendor, attending a Halloween masquerade in hopes of learning more about the city. She did, with the help of a friend named Altair, if their conjectures had everything to do with Splendor demonstrating its ability to null powers and manipulate reality whenever it felt so inclined. Conjectures based on this event led to her calling a meeting and helping out with scouting groups mapping out the layout of their new "home," along with pooling resources to further investigations as to why they were there, and why the locals who were clearly looking to send them home weren't bothering to include their guests in that effort.
Months away from constant experimentation was starting to allow her to breathe easy in spite of herself; for the first time in technical years, the influence ruling her life gave her some room to wiggle, and she was using it to plot the return to Facility and get everyone still alive the hell off the station.
(Her life was otherwise filled with vignettes, spending time cataloging things in the forest, going hiking, sparring with fellow guests of Splendor, meeting Sasuke again and doing her damnedest to hold a henge so no questions would come up from that avenue. It wasn't something she wanted to explain, not to people from home.)
She did experience one city shift while in Splendor, into a space station heavily reliant on Jedi technology. She and her team managed to rescue their hostages and defeat the Sith Lords... who were other members of Splendor's guest population.
Character Personality:
Sakura is an intelligent, sometimes preachy (to those she knows and/or finds clueless about a given subject she is knowledgeable about), caring young woman. She takes her job as a medical shinobi seriously, and this seriousness is displayed in how she handles any work assigned to her. Sakura likes to be thorough, complete, and as close to perfect as possible. Be this in her written reports, her abilities, her training, or any other aspect of her life. She's also neat, from what little can be seen of her home.
Her tendency to follow the rules also lends itself to her having little patience for people acting perverted - especially when "people" includes Uzumaki Naruto. As a twist, Sakura herself is a closet yaoi fan. Most her attempts to flirt fail, or end in her punching guys in the face. She does not like people implying she's flat-chested. She's not as sensitive about her appearance as she once was, but making an issue of it with her is asking for retribution.
Sakura is determined to achieve her goals, and achieve them well. She has a good grasp of tactics and a good mind for cryptology and research. Her memory is very good, and her detail recall is high, but not infallible. Sakura is also tenacious in her resolve. She is far less judgmental than she was as a pre-teen, and is far more likely to forgive (if not forget) people's minor indiscretions. (Or major ones, as in the case of Sai.) She holds teamwork as incredibly important, and still respects the opinions of her elders enough to listen to them when they give advice. Most the time, anyway.
Sakura is honest, even to the point of bluntness (though she has decent helpings of tact, so she's usually only blunt to those she knows well, or who she requires certain standards from), and has been known to overreact to people, particularly with irritation and anger and outrage. What used to be repressed and relieved through "Inner-Sakura" is now more freely expressed to the world - not that it's always appreciated. She's the sort of person who could be talked into a challenge, even if she wouldn't blindly accept one (taking on challenges in even those things she's not so good at, due to a competitive spirit). Sakura hates losing, and giving up got written out of her dictionary years ago.
She is confident in her skills and abilities, if not to a point where she doesn't feel the need to re-evaluate and take a look at herself from time to time. Her resolve to improve makes her a harsh taskmistress on herself, in order to make sure that she's able to stand equal with Naruto, Sasuke, Sai, Kakashi - everyone important to her - and not end up on the sidelines, unable to help. Perhaps her greatest fears and failures come from feeling inadequate in the face of her important people; being unable to help them would drive her up a wall.
Note: I say she's confident, and she is! Most the time. Sort of. Okay so canon also has her facing bouts of crippling lack of confidence because she's not able to keep up with Naruto and Sasuke, to the point where she kind of happily consigns Sasuke to Naruto because what the blast was she going to do anyway. Her skill set when applied away from her immediate friends is something she's much more confident in, and with added other game time, she doesn't suffer from this sort of crippling lack of confidence even around her teammates. In large part this has to do with literally living through so much where she could do nothing and the most powerful people and gods could do nothing and this is, apparently, sometimes what you can do. Absolutely nothing.
Even with her more emotionally "open" personality, Sakura has displayed excellent bedside manner, doubtlessly invaluable in her profession. Her kindness towards others, including Naruto, and her ability to relate has improved with time. She does practice more restraint than she's probably given credit for by those in her own generation. She's also willing to pass off the things she's done if it avoids an explanation of what she found stupid in the moment it was uttered - telling Kakashi it was nothing when both Sai and Naruto had fat cheeks visiting him in the hospital.
Sakura is not above gossiping, though she keeps it to a minimum. She doesn't appear to talk about herself or her feelings often, presumably because she doesn't want to burden others and prefers to deal with them head on. Then again, most the time she reads like an open book. Some of her compatriots are simply too thick-headed, or too uninvolved, to notice.
tl;dr version: she's a teenager with emotional hangups over her teammates, who wants to help her closest people out, often fails, and keeps her belief in her bestest friend ever -- or at least best used punching bag -- because it's what she has so annoyingly decided she simply must do.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game:
Facility:
As a consequence of her just about year (or, given the IC timeframe revealed, two years) in the Facilities, Sakura did change. Most notably is her loss of xenophobia towards new peoples, cultures, and species; by necessity alone, she'd lost that over the time spent in-game. This doesn't make her more trusting of people -- she's still willing to believe the best, because that has paid off at least some of the time. Yet she doesn't put trust in people easily, and holds herself at an emotional reserve at first. It's a coping mechanism, while she also can't stay away from people. Being constantly surrounded has made her long for some solitude, but at the same time she doesn't know how to live without being surrounded by other people. It'd be too quiet at times, and too unnerving -- or so she thinks. Over time she could adapt.
She has a different and uneasy relationship with authority figures, finding a merit basis to be necessary and not suggested. She finds human experimentation completely against any moral code she holds. She has taken Naruto's code about not allowing hate to dictate and rule you to heart, and thus does not allow herself (to the best of her ability) to act out against others based on those hatreds she feels. (See Madara for the most notable example of this.) Sakura practices the idea of "rising above" the example of those who she does hold extraordinary dislike for -- she will help enemies if it's within her capacity, in part perversely because they wouldn't, and in part because it's something she can do. She won't let other people dictate her life, and has severe dislikes of mind-control or manipulation.
She's more sure of her abilities as a healer now than she was before; she's able to accomplish more with less chakra, and consequentially has refined her control even more than before. She knows how to be deadly, and staunchly refuses to be deadly; life is too precious. The Facilities have driven that into her deeper than anything else. Basic respect for others and for their lives is important to her. Even the monsters, though she's not infatuated with them being monsters, and feels they need to be curbed and managed. Reasonably managed.
Other changes include her receptivity to touch. Sakura doesn't like uninvited touch in the slightest; it's liable to provoke immediate retaliation in the form of disengaging and/or seeking to control the situation on her part. She has little to no tolerance for illusions. Also game relevant: she learned what it meant to hold her tongue, and what the price of silence was. In Facility, Sakura's been learning how to better lie and hide how she feels, though it's not healthy, and it's breaking her down slowly because she doesn't know how to cope.
Being in ostensibly unrestrained areas will probably cause Sakura to suffer some form of agoraphobia after so long stuck in a space station and the spatially limited Facilities. (In Splendor she ended up dealing with bouts of dizziness and overwhelming disorientation in large, exposed places. The grand expanses of ceilingless sky had a kind of feel like she can fall up through it quality that sent her heart racing, if she was working on it through sheer stubborn perseverance. She's not comfortable sitting under open sky without something that feels anchoring nearby -- boulders, trees, houses -- to this day.)
Splendorocity:
Taking the fatalism and obsessive dedication to her no kill policy, Splendor threw Sakura into a pool of mostly strangers against a new, unfaced force. She found herself relying on techniques and leadership skills that had been used by others in Facility in order to orient herself and start focusing other people on proactive action, moving forward on things like getting gardens going to supplement their food allowance.
The short version is she started being more outwardly assertive in getting things done, frustrated at people talking in circles and not taking action. She explored and asked people to perform to the extent of their abilities, and tried organizing small groups to get things done, as well as sharing information regarding Splendor fairly freely. She chose to take a gamble on trust as a middle finger at her conditioning with Facility, keeping talks on herself or her history to the absolute minimum. The experience it's given her has turned into an experience pool she uses in order to keep an outward even keel for the sake of those around her who aren't used to large forces of something or someone else manipulating what they can and can't do.
Her distaste for magic, or the ease of wishing, has gone up. She's more reserved than ever, if she's also followed her old standard of not hiding her automail limbs. They're part of her, it's not worth disguising.
If it means a few half-assed explanations along the way, she'll swing them when she has to.
Sakura's less totally unhinged after Splendor, able to stand on her own feet even if she desperately does and does not want to see her friends from home again. She remembers all of them, but she still thinks she's a clone -- and that she'd be the imposter in their already complicated lives.
Character Plans:
Sakura's pretty goal driven, and by this point her goal is people. Connecting to but finding some way to test out the clone thing on her friends will be important; she's strict in her no kill policy, and has no tolerance whatsoever for human experimentation. Neither of the companies are ones she can support, and she'll figure out how to balance her sense of right and wrong with the world of Siren's Port.
She'll be as dedicated to getting back out as anyone else, with added bonus of wanting to find a way to spring the Facilitees out, even into Siren's Port itself. For all it's messed up, Alpha-Omega station is much worse in Sakura's mind. Pending Splendor being part of her history, Splendor as a stop-over would also be important. People in all these other worlds need to get back home, or figure out their own lives.
She wants to help make that happen, since she still believes she can't really go home. But she'd be damned before she leaves anyone behind like what she feels she needs to be. Also I'd be interested having her actually pursue something in law or within the police department, above, past, and beyond the medic role she often falls/is pushed into by certain necessities.
Appearance/PB: [ Full Body Reference ]
In addition, Sakura has two automail legs (designed by Winry, considerably heavier than if she'd had decent metal available at the time), starting at the upper/mid-thigh. She also sports a bronze collar around her neck, a ring of metal with "007" etched into the surface.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample (focused on immediately post-Facility)
[ Video; ]
[ The feed activates, a young woman staring into the camera eye with a frown. Week three was up. The clock had already wound down.
She'd awoken in this place, and that shouldn't have been possible. ]
I don't recognize the surroundings, but it's a step up from where I just was. If this is another one of the Facilities...
[ Sakura pauses, looking off camera. Doesn't feel right, for a facilty. Far too many people here, even if most of them weren't out in the streets at the moment. ]
Awfully nice of them to have a welcoming committee. That's new.
[ She focuses on the camera eye in the faciliberry again, managing to smile through the start of her next statement. ]
Guys, this is Sakura -- from 10-C. Let me know if you're out there. For those who have no idea who I am... like I said, I'm Sakura.
Pleasantries aside, where am I, and what's going on?
Third Person Sample
Sakura withdrew from the rest of the people she knew, pulling into herself like an octopus gathering tentacles to fit inside an empty soup can. She felt smaller, but relieved; the people she cared about hadn't all been saved, but most had been, and most would be patched back together by the Interns over the next unconscious week. She wondered how many people even thought about that time discrepancy anymore. Did it matter, when you didn't remember living all that extra time?
Probably not, she decided, with time being as relative as distance, speed, and feeling. She looked up into the inky blackness that defined the nothing above her. It was disconcerting, staring into a void that had no presence to stare back, and yet still seemed to. She preferred the stars, from the few times she'd seen them out the Station's windows. She wondered if she'd ever see stars again.
It was an unpleasant, almost obsessive thought. Sakura forced herself to her feet, looking around at the dystopic horror of this setting. The Abyss, that's what it was called, wasn't it? They'd managed to bring cities in Facility Three to ruin during their stays there (Sakura remembers Death City in particular, and later how London had been destroyed), but outside of the place known as Rapture, things had never been so dark from the outset. Even Rapture had been in better disrepair, if such a thing existed. Moving through the debris, she waited for the other shoe to drop. Her time was up.
Since she couldn't remember being active in any second experiment group, it was just as likely no such thing existed... or if it did, she wasn't slated for it. The incinerators flickered in the back of her mind, and she swallowed, sick to her stomach.
The sickness twisted, growing sharp enough that Sakura flinched in surprise, hands coming to her stomach. Was she panicking? After all this, after fighting to get everyone back, was she giving into panic now?
The sensation got worse, a pulling that left her with an intense headache as she gritted her teeth. Were those bastards taunting her? Knocking her out slowly, knowing she'd be aware enough as she sunk back down into a final unconsciousness. It pissed her off, in that sick, frustrated hopelessness that had her fighting the sensation, fighting against the pull that seemed to be tearing her away from even this lonely section of someone else's hell.
And then it stopped. Head jerking up, Sakura stumbled back a few steps. She was salivating, tasting a hint of bile at the back of her mouth. What the hell had just happened?
She looked around at her new surroundings. The faces of everyone she'd just been with were a blur of impossible to remember names in the back of her mind, as foreign and yet familiar as the graffiti on the walls of this -- baseball diamond. She recognized what this was supposed to be.
"What the hell's going on?" She felt for her Faciliberry, patting pockets and fumbling it out. She still had it. She still had it. "Guys?" Why couldn't she remember their names? The little girl, who meant so much. The god, whose face she couldn't even place right now. The man who'd taken her legs in a fit of pique over being attacked by -- who?
She activated the feed, clamping down on her confusion, and the rising tide of panic. Center. Focus. Figure this out. "I don't recognize the surroundings, but it's a step up from where I just was. If this is another one of the Facilities..." she trailed off, looking around the diamond again. Someone was coming over.
Welcome to Siren's Port!
"Awfully nice of them to have a welcoming committee." She watched them approach, on edge. "That's new."
Flicking her eyes down to the faciliberry, she swallowed, blurting out the rest. "Guys, this is Sakura -- from 10-C. Let me know if you're out there. For those who have no idea who I am... like I said, I'm Sakura." Maybe they'd recognize the room number, even if someone else occupied it since she was last in the experiment proper.
She had to be in another facility. How long had she been out this time?
"Pleasantries aside, where am I, and what's going on?"