Application for arintero

[deadshallspeak]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Name: Steph
Age: 25
Contact: elemental_shark, seventhdoctor#7661 on Discord, Dreamwidth PMs
Characters in Game: None


CHARACTER INFORMATION
Canon Section
Name: Naomi Kimishima
Age: 31
Canon/Canon History Link: Wiki here, noting that a bunch of the stuff related to her and Navel's relationship is...biased, to say the least, so ignore that stuff. Or I have my own writeup of Naomi's canon history here.

Personality: Whether by nature or by control, Naomi is not one to display emotion in extremes. It's rare to see her bursting with happiness or crushingly depressed, though this isn't to say she's stoic. She jokes and teases if she's fond of somebody; she gets happy when she's achieved something, sad when uncovering tragedies, melancholy when thinking about death, angry when people make a mockery of life - Naomi experiences all of these and more when anybody else would, just sometimes in a more quiet, musing manner. Exceptions do exist when her emotions are at their highest, but those naturally require the most extreme situations - like seeing someone caught up in an explosion, or running into the former terrorist coworker she never expected to see again.

Naomi is a creature of the present, often more focused on the situation at hand and leaving thoughts of the past or future for when she can afford to. Unlike her more heroic counterpart Derek Stiles Naomi doesn't have grand visions of curing all disease; she focuses more on making up debts she owes, karmic or otherwise, and surviving through the corners she's continually pressured into. This is a tendency that allows her to go on with her life without significant angst about being blacklisted in her home country for having supernatural powers; it's also a tendency that allows her to work for bioterrorists and only let herself feel guilty once she's out of their grip. This applies short-term as well as long-term: even when confirming that she was fatally ill, Naomi never even flinched - just calmly asked for details and tried to understand what was coming on her own in the following months.

For this reason Naomi also has a tendency to cast aside even things that most people would probably consider essential, banning her ex-terrorist coworker from discussing their shared past or considering her medical career her "glory in the distant past" less than a year after her illness forced a job change. She doesn't like to reflect on times gone by and diseases cured when they're of no use and there are other, more useful things to do.

Of course, this has implications for her social life as well. Naomi isn't one to get close to others easily and is in fact never shown to have a friend before her second game, whether because she's naturally disinclined to seek people out or because a string of relocations and a few environments where she couldn't trust those around her has discouraged her from it (or more likely, both). Further than that, she gives up on life once she realizes she's terminally ill and spends much of the game waiting for death to come even as she goes on working until her wake-up call in the form of the CIFM bombing. The fact that she adopts Alyssa at the end of her character storyline in Trauma Team is significant in this way, showing that she has decided to let people closer into her life and to use her remaining time to actively make a difference in the ways left to her; that her illness is later cured grants her a chance to follow through on this in the long term.

Naomi doesn't always get why people feel or say as they do, and her relationships can reflect this lack of understanding. She misses out on pop culture jokes and fails to understand why someone would be upset over being cheated on and involved in a murder investigation, and makes occasionally biting comments intended as quips. (One of these involved a jab at Gabe's recent divorce, although to be fair he retaliated by making fun of her powers and possibly her history with Delphi so maybe it goes both ways there.) However, she cares for the friends she does have in her own way even if her approach varies: with Little Guy she teases but holds him at arm's length, save for a single admission of her trust; with Gabe, she's a little softer when she's concerned about him, though both of them are too private to be very open with each other. With Alyssa, however, she's relatively relaxed and indulgent - partially because after the bombing that orphaned and nearly killed Alyssa Naomi feels that "I owe it to her to make her happy" and partially because Alyssa is a sweet eight-year-old girl and therefore much easier to relax around than any adult she's familiar with.

Naomi has a great deal of talent and is aware of it, and ideally she'd rather make use of it in some way. While she's pragmatic and not very idealistic, there are certain things that she holds in high regard. Life and saving lives remain important to her, and that's relatively constant as time goes on. Even when she was resigned to her own death she worked to bring truth for those whose live had been cut short early, and became angry at those who defiled or made light of others' deaths. At the same time she also prefers to work quietly as she likes, and to do so without attracting major attention. She keeps her powers low-profile in contrast to Derek, her internationally famous counterpart, and prefers to work at CIFM without fanfare rather than playing detective for the FBI. It's telling that her happy ending in Trauma Team is to continue as she is at CIFM rather than returning to surgery like she probably could with her illness gone for the time being. She has Alyssa to take care of in Portland; she has a few friends, people who she trusts; and she has work to do. It's not fame or glory or excitement, but it's enough for her.

Abilities:

• Medical knowledge: Naomi is an excellent doctor and surgeon, applauded and called a master surgeon for her skill in the operating room. This ability is compromised in Trauma Team due to a mostly unspecified illness, but as it's later cured I'm calling it as enabling her to operate again.
• Healing Touch: Naomi's surgical skill is augmented by the Healing Touch, a supernatural ability that allows her to raise the patient's vitals and improve their condition (a skill that could be used for unscrupulous means as well as life-saving, as Delphi used it to keep their research subjects alive). Naomi cannot activate this power in isolation, only while she is already operating. Her surgical abilities are not dependent on this power, however.
• Dead's last words: Naomi is also shown to have the strange ability to hear the last words of the dead on her cell phone once she sees their body or acknowledges their death – probably a more recent development than the Healing Touch as a speculation, although why she can do it at all is given exactly zero explanation. False positives have been possible in one instance, in an incident where she was afraid somebody was going to die.
• Other: Naomi is good at piecing together puzzles and mysteries, and can also improvise in a pinch even when it comes to surgeries, performing first aid by penlight or even changing her Healing Touch on the fly to imitate Derek's (despite the fact that this is the only known incident ever of such a thing). As far as fighting goes she knows how to use a gun, though it's not likely she has much practical experience with it.

In-Game Section
In-Game Name: Naomi Kimishima, same as canon name
Meta/Non-Meta: Meta
Abilities/Powers: Diagnostics: by focusing on a person Naomi will know their physical condition, including the presence of any illnesses or injuries (internal or external). She is also able to identify the sources where necessary, e.g., if a patient were to have cancer she would be able to identity the affected areas with high precision. Actual treatment of any ailments is left up to her learned knowledge and training, however. This ability is inactive by default, meaning that Naomi has to activate it when she needs it. This ability also requires Naomi to physically see the target, meaning that visual obstacles or enough distance would prevent it from working.

In-Game Memories: Naomi Kimishima in this universe discovered her powers at the age of ten when a cousin of hers fell from a tree. After some discussion, she and her well-meaning but unprepared nonmeta parents chose to send her abroad from their home country to Arintero feeling it would be better for her education with respect to her meta abilities.

She was placed with a host family of metas who worked closely with GUARDIAN, with visits home during holidays. Naomi was polite but reserved with her host family up until she was fourteen years old, when she learned that her parents had died in an accident. Her host family served as a significant source of support in the following months, and as she opened up to them they eventually legally adopted her permanently. Naomi was and remains extremely grateful to her new family - indebted even, as without them she knows she would be in a much more difficult situation - and in the years to follow aimed to do her best to give back to both her adoptive family and GUARDIAN.

Given her powers Naomi had always considered herself destined for a career as a passive hero in GUARDIAN in some capacity, and her determination helped her to pass the necessary tests. After graduating from high school Naomi went on to college and medical school to become a surgeon, and upon completing her residency successfully applied to work fulltime as a surgeon and medical researcher at GUARDIAN headquarters. As of the time of application/game start, she would have been settled in this position for about six months.


Any Differences in Personality in-game:

• Due to her more stable environment, Naomi forms attachments more easily than her canon counterpart. Her aloof manner and occasional social failings remain, however.
• She's also a little more altruistic than her canon counterpart again thanks to a more positive background, though it's usually targeted towards paying GUARDIAN back for what they've done for her and towards helping other metas find good lives as she was lucky enough to do.

SAMPLE
Testdrive threads, with ten comments between them (but unfortunately not in a single thread, sorry!):
Toplevel
Lea
Akira