Kyo | "For me, it's personal."

[Kyo 0]

Profile:
Username: Kyo | Real Name: Kyo Morinaga
Age: 22 | Gender: Female | Height: 4' 3"

Kyo Morinaga has, for the longest time, affected a tomboyish and very tough-girl manner and aesthetic style.
This is somewhat undermined by the inescapable fact that she is unusually short, even for a Japanese girl, and very "cute" in the face.
If you were to ask her whether she cares, her response would probably have something to do with quantum supercomputers and how many "f***s" she gives.
In fact, she would switch to speaking in English to give that answer, because Japanese just doesn't have words to emphasize how little she gives a...

*ahem*

Anyway, the point is she's kind of a gremlin, inside and out. Short, green-haired and with
a penchant for cargo pants, boots, jackets, and mid-rif baring tops—
all the better to show off those abs; she worked hard for them, after all!—
she gives the impression of an uncultured, hotheaded loudmouth who leaps before she thinks.
And the Osaka-ben dialect coming out of that loud mouth does nothing got dissuade that notion!

But Kyo Morinaga is a habitual schemer, a gremlin in the truest sense.
And she isn't just out to free herself or the other players from the prison that Sword Art Online has become.
For her, it's personal: Akihiko Kayaba murdered the man she loved, and used her as the instrument to do it.

You just can't let something like that pass.

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Background:

    During her high school years, Kyo Morinaga was a blazing trash-fire of spite and malice. In rebellion against the strict expectations of her mother, who wished for her to be the ideal Japanese lady, Kyo dyed her hair green and adopted a full-tilt tomboy aesthetic, even going as far as to build visible muscle and adopt a fully masculine set of mannerisms in her day-to-day life. Then, when many of the boys around her interpreted this as her being "easy" to get into bed, she rebelled against that, too; at her worst, Kyo deliberately seduced a few spoken-for young men just to "prove" to their girlfriends that none of them really cared. Eventually her spite drove her to join a small-time street gang, and soon she was directing her anger not just through her feminine wiles, but also through her fists.
    It was around senior year when all of this came to a head, with Kyo nearly provoking a girl one year her junior into suicide with her malicious bullying. Expelled from her first school mid-way through her final year, she tried to be nonchalant and just wash her hands of the whole situation, but someone—a boy from a neighboring school who had heard the rumors—caught sight of her outside of a convenience store and confronted her, asking her why she had done all the things she'd done.
    Now, after pushing things very much too far, Kyo was already feeling the twisty-squirmy anxiety of guilt and getting quite fed up with the way it just would not let her relax, so before she knew it she was venting all of the contents of her spleen at this complete stranger. Partway through her tirade, the boy's suppressed anger melted gradually to understanding, and he just... let her do it. Eventually they got to talking in more civilized fashion and found some common ground (he, himself, was a former street-punk brawler who had only recently cleaned up his act). After a month or so, Kyo transferred to a new school, was more or less disowned by her mother and shunted off to live in a dorm adjacent to said school, and claimed this boy—Kenshin Nakadachi—as her first official, steady boyfriend in a long line of one-night stands. By the end of it, Kyo had resolved to turn over a new leaf and somehow make up for her years of malicious, randomly-directed rage at the world.
    Fast forward to her early twenties, and Kyo had fallen in with Kenshin's group of friends: a group of content-creators who did gaming content, and made some decent yen doing it! It wasn't until she stood in line for the first launch run of Sword Art Online that she got involved with the channel itself, but she had long held a passion for videogames as a by-product of her "I'm going to do every boy-like thing I can just to spite my mother" phase. She and Kenshin had developed a playful rivalry across a number of fighting games and PvP-based MMORPGs, and so the prospect of fighting in virtual reality, combining their mutual love of gaming with their mutual love of a good street-punk brawl, and even managed to squeeze in some practice by way of an early NerveGear fighting game, a scant five days before Sword Art Online's launch.
    At 3:45 PM on November 6, 2022, Kenshin and his friends, with Kyo Morinaga as their plus-one, had all assembled outside the Town of Beginnings to have an impromptu dueling tournament. In their excitement, they set the duels to Fuel Finish. The winner of the tournament, and the only player in the group not to shatter into polygons, was Kyo. Mid-way through, one of Kenshin's friends was abruptly disconnected from the game as they stood on the sidelines; half a minute later, Kyo drove her dagger into the throat of Kenshin's avatar, likewise killing him.
    After finding herself too cowardly to fling herself off the outer edge of the first floor, and after a blur of time curled up in a ball on one of the opening town's inn beds, Kyo found her strength of will in that old persona of a devil's spite and spit-fire. When she left the Town of Beginnings at last, she was out for blood: that of Akihiko Kayaba, in specific, though if she has to end a few orange players along the way... well, Kyo figures she won't lose any sleep.

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Virtues:

• Intelligence. Kyo possesses a cunning mind that her punk-tomboy personality often obscures, capable of outside-the-box thinking that sometimes leaves others who don't know her well questioning her sanity. Being a habitual schemer—a trait from her bullying and street-punk days that hasn't quite disappeared—Kyo's modus operandi is to look for the loose threads she can tug on to unravel a difficult problem, and then... pull like her life depends on it. She also has a talent for deductive reasoning, although she is not so talented at explaining that reasoning in ways that make sense to other people.
• Guilty compassion. Self-loathing often directs Kyo to help others or try to make them feel better, in an effort to make up for past sins. At the back of her mind she is always checking and double-checking with herself to make sure she understands what's going on in another person's life; empathy does not come as naturally to her as others, but Kyo has found her own way of forcing it. "Fake it 'til you make it," as the saying goes, and the philosophy seems to be serving her well... so far.
• Determination. Kyo never gives up until the moment she determines that there is no chance of success, at least when the only risk is to herself. Even then, she will always try to find a way to make the most of a bad situation. Kyo firmly believes, however, that there is nothing that can't be overcome if one is only clever and hard-headed enough; "despair" isn't a word in her dictionary.

Flaws:

• Cynicism. Kyo does not believe in the good of mankind; at best she tries to be a good person in spite of a negative perception of the world. She neither expects nor particularly hopes that the society around her will achieve more than a slow orbit around the drain, so to speak, no matter how well-meaning certain people are. In short, she subscribes to the idea that "a person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it!"
• Trust issues. Kyo's default assumption is that other people are either malicious or incompetent. To be fair, she does try to brute force her mind into a "benefit of the doubt" state, but it doesn't always work out. It takes quite a long time for her to get comfortable with the idea that a given person either won't stab her in the back, or won't fall apart at a crucial moment if she isn't there to help them get things done right.
• Ruthlessness. Kyo might not go as far as to put others in danger for the sake of a plan, but she is perhaps a bit too willing to use violence or coercion if she thinks the cause is good. She also has a below-average aversion to killing other players if the situation seems to require it. Not that she takes any particular pleasure in hurting other people... or, well, not anymore; but she doesn't have the same instinctive resistance against it that others would. While it hasn't come up yet, it may be only a matter of time until the death game brings this side of her to the fore.

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Skills:

Unused Skill Points: 2 | Used Skill Points: 8

• <<Whip>> Weapon Skill | RANK 1

    Known Sword Arts:
<<Whiplash>> | [x4] ST-I (4 EN) | A single-target sword art.
<<Sonic Boom>> | [x3] AOE-I (1 + [2 * targets] EN) | AOE | A sword art that strikes multiple targets at once.
<<Striking Viper>> | [x4] TECH-A (5 EN) | STUN | A single-target sword art that stuns an enemy.

• <<Cloth Armor>> Armor Skill | RANK 1

Inventory:

New Character Bundle: Basic Package

Equipment:

Leather Whip
        [Whip, Uncommon] [Keen I] | Quantity: 1
     A simple leather whip bought from an NPC shop in the Town of Beginnings. To her credit, Kyo did at least search the whole town to determine
     where the best starting weapons could be bought before buying one.

Boarskin Jacket
        [Cloth Armor, Uncommon] [Evasion I] | Quantity: 1
     This low-level, black-dyed "cloth armor" item was actually made for Kyo by a low-level crafter in the Town of Beginnings and given to her as a gift. Not that this means anything.
     But it at least has some sentimental value. It is designed to resemble a black leather biker's jacket in the real world, although it still looks a bit too "medieval" to really pull off the look.

Consumables:

Starter Healing Potion
        [Heals 50 HP] | Quantity: 5
      A novice-level alchemical healing concoction available in most shops on the lower floors. More useful out of battle than in.

Roleplay Log:

Spoiler

• On Picking Yourself Up, and Putting Your Enemy Down «The First Few Lessons» [In Progress]
• Paradise Lost [Complete!]
• The Red Dragon Café [In Progress]

Quest Log:

Spoiler

Standard Quests:

«The First Lesson»
[In Progress]

 

Relationships:

Spoiler

Kyo has established a casual acquaintance with the following players:
- Morningstar
- Freyd
- Vigilon

 

Edited March 30 by Kyo
Level Up!

[Nari-Lanreth 0]