Rikka Hishikawa (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
diamondlight) wrote2014-07-19 11:34 pm
diamondlight) wrote2014-07-19 11:34 pm
Entry tags:
Application: Empatheias
I think this is all done... boy, this ended up long. Rikka's headed for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
empatheias if all goes well.
⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: MaxSalsa
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
MaxSalsa
Age: 25
Current Characters: N/A
⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Rikka Hishikawa
Age: 15
Canon: Dokidoki Precure
Canon Point: Post-canon
Background: (Portions taken from applications for other games, mostly for High Seas, which uses other applications in turn, but those are linked there.)
Rikka is a middle-school girl that happens to have become a magical girl - a Precure - when her best friend found herself caught up in a conflict with the Selfish, a force that draws energy from the selfishness of humans. On the other side of that conflict is Makoto Kenzaki, Cure Sword, whose kingdom has been lost to an invasion by the Selfish. Her princess is now also missing. And Rikka's best friend Mana is exactly the sort of person that would jump headfirst into a situation she knows nothing about to save someone in need. Thus, Mana became Cure Heart, and when Rikka found that Mana was shutting her out and confronted her about it, Rikka took up the power of Precure herself to protect Mana, becoming Cure Diamond.
Over the next several weeks, the team is joined by two more girls: Alice, another of Mana and Rikka's friends that's the heiress to a large corporation, who becomes Cure Rosetta; and Makoto, originally from the Trump Kingdom that the girls' fairy partners hail from and presently a pop idol, who becomes Cure Sword. The team's goal: fight monsters formed from the selfish thoughts in the human heart (the Psyche), which have become massive entities somehow based on the selfish thought that created them (which are collectively known as Selfishness) by one of the servants of King Selfishness. (Yes, all the bad guys are Selfishness. I'm aware it's a horrid naming convention, but it's what we have.)
Once Makoto joins, the girls end up making an unexpected side trip to the remains of the Trump Kingdom, the realm from which the fairies - and Makoto - hail. It was invaded by King Selfishness and his forces, and the entire kingdom was lost as its citizens were turned into Selfishness. Makoto reveals that her reason for traveling to Earth in the first place is to search for the Trump Kingdom's princess, Marie Ange, who was lost after sealing King Selfishness to stop his reign of terror. Confronting King Selfishness, who requires the princess to unseal himself, the girls promise to help find the princess, and to save the Trump Kingdom.
Not long afterward, they encounter a strange egg at a nearby antique shop owned by the man that supplied Mana and Rikka with their Cure Lovies, a small pin that powers their transformations; the egg is at least a foot in diameter, and its design is rather peculiar. Almost immediately, the egg hatches into a baby, promptly named Ai-chan. Ai is immediately outed as being something strange; for starters, she can fly. The girls quickly discover that she's somehow related to their powers, too; she can randomly grant them increased strength or other abilities.
Some time after this, the girls begin to ponder ways to search for the princess. Eventually, Makoto hits on the idea of trying to track down the things the princess liked, and working from there; over the course of the next several weeks, they attend various events with ties to the princess's hobbies, and their efforts produce Royal Crystals, artifacts of the Trump Kingdom: one for each of the four of them in their own colors, plus one more for the Selfishness' new soldier - Regina, King Selfishness' daughter, who Mana befriends. Rikka is exceptionally jealous; Regina is, by nature, extremely possessive, and often takes Mana away to spend time with her regardless of Mana's feelings on the subject. She's not entirely sure how to deal with it... but then, she's dealt with it before, when Makoto joined and Mana spent all her time with that girl, so she'll manage somehow.
These daytrips end with the Royal Crystals split: four in the girls' possession, and the red Crystal with Regina. When Regina appears before the team to take the other Crystals, Mana convinces her to put all of them on the line in a battle of indirect combat: sporting events. Though the Selfishness cheat, the Precure eventually win... but Regina ends up stealing the Crystals anyway. When she brings all five together, they shine and fly off into the distance. The Selfishness give chase; Sebastian arrives with a satellite tracker following the Crystals, and the Precure are soon in pursuit in a helicopter chartered from the Yotsuba Group's fleet.
The chase brings the girls to a distant mountain; the Crystals were seen there via satellite. Unsure if there'll be a safe place for the chopper to land (and more than a little worried they'll be either shot down or leading the Selfishness straight to the Crystals), they take the last bit of the journey on foot, scaling the mountain in their Cure forms. As they reach the summit, the Selfishness arrive at the same time; an avalanche makes everyone separate, but Regina and Mana fall into a fissure and are trapped inside the mountain. Rikka, against her better judgment, joins the others in an uneasy truce until the missing girls are found; while the operation is in progress, Mana and Regina discover the crystallized form of Marie Ange, and when everyone else arrives, the Selfishness recapture Marie Ange and Regina, who Mana had finally won over.
In pursuit of Marie Ange once more, Ai and the Royal Crystals somehow open a portal to the Trump Kingdom, and the Precure sortie in hot pursuit to take back the princess. Unusually, Regina's friendship with Mana causes her to stand against her father and request he not attack Earth again; in a rage, he seals her powers and leaves her severely injured. Mana moves to find her, while the others deal with a massive crowd of monsters; once Mana gets there, one of the Selfishness attempts to kill her and Regina both, but Mana's selflessness to protect Regina finally gets through to the girl, and the seal on her powers breaks just in time as she rescues Mana from certain death and, Marie Ange in tow, escapes with the other Precure back to Earth.
Regina returns to Mana's house, and the girls settle down for a rest, but it's cut short. Regina can't seem to settle into the carefree life Mana and the others lead; during a visit to the beach, King Selfishness appears and tells her that it's because she's discovered the feeling of "love", and that feeling conflicts with her selfish heart. To make the pain go away, he infuses Regina with a huge amount of selfish energy, effectively brainwashing the caring feelings away and increasing her power several times over. Demonstrating her new abilities, Regina turns on the team and very nearly slaughters them all in a fearsome display of strength, until her deathblow is parried at the last possible moment by a new Precure: Cure Ace. Her overwhelming power forces Regina and the others to flee, and the girls return home. Mana is crushed by the loss of Regina after everything, and despite Alice and the others' best efforts, they can't get through to her. Ace, angered by this shameful display, confiscates Mana's Cure Loveads (and with it, her ability to become Cure Heart), telling her to regain her love if she wants it back. The others end up trying to fill in for Mana's myriad roles in the community while the pinkette is on autopilot, but eventually it's Ai that reaches her, and when the other three find themselves in trouble, Mana snaps out of her funk and, recovering her Loveads from Ace and finding herself with a big power boost, takes care of business.
Rikka, meanwhile, has been wavering on a lot of things - her time as Cure Diamond has been cutting into her study time again, but more important, she's not sure she still wants to be a doctor. Is that what she wants, or is that just what she's doing because it's expected of her? Rikka starts to take some time to consider that on a day trip to the ocean, but her musing is cut short when she finds an unconscious Ira, one of the Selfishness cronies, washed up on the shore (after being struck by lightning). She tends to him briefly, and when he comes to, he has amnesia, so she brings him back to her home to make sure he's all right. Rikka proceeds to display some of the most absurd mothering yet seen from her, and she seems to be making real headway with convincing Ira he's not a bad person, before Mana and Alice's fairies catch her, and the girls have a strategy meeting that ends in battle when the other Selfishness appear. Ace almost immediately declares her intent to shoot Ira down and purify him once and for all, but Rikka refuses to allow that, putting herself in front of Ira as a shield. Moved by her courage, Mana and Alice do the same, and Ace, satisfied with her resolve, backs down; with a surge of power from the growing resolution in her heart, Rikka, as Cure Diamond, blasts the Selfishness to kingdom come, and they retreat with Ira.
The others go through trials in this way to awaken their hearts; Makoto debates giving up singing, and Alice is forced to re-evaluate what it means to protect. Once the four gain their new strength of heart, Ace seems to approve of them a little more, and while she's still hard on them as a means to force them to grow strong enough to take on King Selfishness and rescue the Trump Kingdom, she's able to let a little more of her true self show. Even better, she joins the team properly, introducing herself as Aguri Madoka... who is actually several years younger than the others, and ages up when she transforms.
It's not long after Ace joins that the team determines additional power is required, and Aguri happens to know of a couple good ideas: namely, the Three Sacred Treasures, which are totally not meant to mirror anything. While two of the Treasures are in the wrong realm to be pursuing, the Magical Lovely Pad is actually being held by a fairy living on a distant island... which Alice is handily able to provide transportation to. The fairy in question was once the partner of a trio of legendary past heroes, with each of the three wielding a Treasure. Cure Empress wielded the Lovely Pad, and Melan, her fairy, still has it... and still defends it harshly. When the girls arrive at the island, Melan transforms into a dragon and engages them, defeating them after a hard fight. Mana cooks food once they come to, and invites Melan to join them for dinner. The fairy is impressed with the girls, and allows them a second chance the next morning. While the fight is even harsher, and Mana pushes herself beyond her limits, Melan approves of both their power and their will, and surrenders the Magical Lovely Pad, a mirror in a frame of purple stone.
The girls spend a week or three trying to figure out how the Pad works, but crisis strikes as two Selfishness attack the city together, and the girls' parents are placed into coma states. They sortie, and in a moment of carelessness the Pad is stolen from them and crushed into several pieces. In their devastation, all five of them lose their power, and Mana bursts into tears, which really never happens. But after a minute or two of crying, she simply slaps her cheeks, clears her head, and stands up, and the others are not long behind her. Their combined resolution to keep going, driven by Mana, causes the five large pieces of the Magical Lovely Pad to transform into five much smaller devices, one for each Cure. Together, the five execute a new team attack, and the city is saved.
From this point, Mana's goal is largely to figure out how to make their last push to save the Trump Kingdom, as they have rather a lot of power now. This is a several-step process: it involves rescuing Regina from her father's brainwashing, acquiring one or both of the remaining Treasures, and (of course) defeating King Selfishness. The second is complicated by the first, as a series of coincidences gives Regina the Miracle Dragon Glaive, an absurdly powerful spear originally wielded by the princess of the Trump Kingdom, Marie Ange. It's supposedly only usable by members of the royal family, which means it doesn't make any sense that it's Ace that pulls it from the ground in the first place, but nobody really pays that any mind when they're being shot at.
Along the way, Mana's parents find an old wedding dress passed through the family line; Mana's mother wore it for her wedding, and her mother wore it before her. Mana wants to wear it herself, but trouble comes calling and attempts to steal the dress in the middle of the night. Eventually, it comes calling loudly enough to need an intervention from the Precure, and the enemy, calling himself Marsh, declares that he and his force of discarded objects are the revenge of the lost, forgotten, and thrown away. In fact, he's out for Mana specifically, but he'll accept getting to her through her friends and family. Trying to protect her parents and her close friends, she and the other girls are sucked into their memories. Rikka remembers her earlier childhood, when she was a prodigy on the piano, but she's forgotten her other friends; Mana too is alone, Rikka's house occupied by an American, and her friends having apparently never existed. It takes Rikka and Alice coming across each other by chance to remember themselves, but Mana remains alone until her grandmother gives her some advice that helps snap her out of the funk she falls into when she realizes she was responsible for her childhood pet's death.
All of the girls are ejected from their collective dreams, and find the resolve to fight once more. Marsh turns into a massive dog, having been Mana's puppy, Mallow, all along, and fights them; Cure Heart, separated from the others, elects not to dodge an attack coming for her, and is bitten, a huge wound visible on her shoulder. Using that as a final nail in the coffin, she convinces Marsh to stop his attack, and he returns to the form of Mallow, once again a manageable size. The true enemy, a spirit possessing a clarinet, takes offense at this, and tries to attack the girls again. But they've had enough, and they charge into the enemy's stronghold, reaching the center relatively quickly as everyone clears a path for Mana before following behind. They have a clear shot, but their team attack fails, and while she's stunned, the enemy takes a cheap shot at Mallow, leaving him dying at Mana's feet. He tells her not to cry, and turns what remains of his life force into a new power. Mana absorbs it, and Cure Heart transforms into Engage Mode, wearing a ridiculous exaggeration of her mother's wedding dress and wielding a bow of pure light, with which she takes a single shot at the clarinet and wipes it from space-time. The city returns to normal, and the remainder of Mallow's spirit, along with a fairy that had helped them and turned out to be the soul of Mana's dead grandmother, returns to the skies.
Meanwhile, the last remaining knight in the princess' service, Jonathan Klondike, successfully finds the Eternal Golden Crown in a faraway land, bringing it back and promptly letting all the girls try it on to see if it confers its knowledge to them. It ignores all of them, except for Aguri; she seems to black out, and when she comes to, she seems different. She disappears later that afternoon, having come to some dangerous conclusions, and brings only Jonathan and Makoto for what she is hoping to make the final battle against Regina; part of the Crown's knowledge included what she is, and what Regina is.
Mana and the others dump themselves in the way of the fight at basically the last second, and everyone is dragged on a trip through the past to see the history of the Trump Kingdom and its fall. There are several large revelations, but the largest by far is Marie Ange ripping out her own Psyche as she's about to be captured, and splitting it into two halves: one dark, representing her selfish desires that caused the downfall of her kingdom, and one pure, representing her untainted will to protect that kingdom. The dark half went elsewhere in the occupied Trump Kingdom and became Regina; the pure half fell to Earth and became a baby, who instantly turned into Aguri (age 10) upon being found on Earth by the woman that would become her grandmother. The two halves can't co-exist; only one can survive, and it has to be by each other's hand.
Except that's not really how it goes; Mana disagrees with this idea from the start, and at the end of the day it turns out that both girls can happily co-exist. But that's not really an immediate concern, because King Selfishness is waking up, and there's a final battle to be fought. Things happen, and Regina is made to realize that her father's plan isn't a good idea. The fighting moves inside King Selfishness once the girls are beaten up a fair bit, and most of the team is taken out in a series of heroic sacrifices. Rikka is the second to become a distraction tactic, as she uses her most powerful attack, Diamond Blizzard, to create a solid block of ice dozens of feet tall just inside King Selfishness' mouth, freezing herself inside it. It's Mana and Regina that eventually make it into the core of the titanic enemy, and find a massive Psyche, completely black except for a single spot of light in the center: the king. The girls fish him out, and purify what remains. It seems like all is well.
And then Bel has to go and ruin everything again, taking the released dark power for himself, and turning into an even worse monster, stronger and faster. But Mana is having none of it, and through her friendship with her friends, she takes on a new, even more powerful form. Cure Heart Parthenon Mode defeats the enemy with a single shot, and peace is restored once and for all. The remaining Selfishness retreat, and the Trump Kingdom's people are returned to normal. Complicating matters, a tear in dimensions rent by King Selfishness is not repaired at battle's end, and the Trump Kingdom finds itself suddenly connected to Earth, a short distance off the coast of Japan; the Yotsuba Group is the first to establish trade with it, and the Trump Kingdom goes through a brief period of change before electing Jonathan as its president, establishing a democracy out of nowhere. The days are peaceful, and Mana's team is now public knowledge. Whenever trouble strikes, the Dokidoki Precure will always be there to save the day, no matter what they were in the middle of, and no matter where the call takes them.
Personality: By herself, Rikka is... honestly not that interesting. She spends a lot of time studying, to the point that she appears in quite a few scenes reading through flashcards while she walks, and she spends quite a bit of time in the student council room. She doesn't take a lot of time for herself either; she often goes to Mana's family's restaurant for dinner, since her own parents are away so often. And she spends quite a lot of time alone. She's easy to tease, and her parents do so on somewhat frequent occasion. She gets worried easily, and she stresses over a lot of little things.
Two things changed that trend: meeting Mana (and Alice) when she was little, and becoming a Precure. Mana is and will always be a dominant personality, in a very real way, and by the time she's fourteen, she almost automatically falls right into line when Mana asks something. It's not that she's the yes-man, and in fact she's against a large number of Mana's crazy ideas from the outset. But she's comfortable with how Mana's head works, and if she's got a plan, at the end of the day it'll probably work. It helps that Mana's insane charisma motivates people to give their best, Rikka included. She's also driven to help protect Mana from herself, since sometimes she doesn't actually see what kind of effects her antics will have. But some of Rikka's habits fall under that same umbrella; she does a bit more than is really necessary sometimes.
That might be easier to explain: the girls have known each other since they were fairly young, and Rikka's gotten closer to her best friend that is perhaps safe. She doesn't even realize it, in some cases; earlier in canon, when Makoto starts to get friendly with Mana, Rikka mentions her chest feels tight and her emotions are going haywire, and it's really only happening when she sees the two of them together. Alice recognizes the feeling - jealousy. And Rikka, understandably, feels terrible about it for a little while, because why is she feeling something like that for her best friend? As more time passes, though, she starts to come to terms with how she feels, and eventually she realizes what their relationship is. She'll never say it aloud, but Rikka is well aware that the feeling is love. Mana's admitted it herself, if in a note rather than directly.
Unfortunately, Rikka tends to expect things to go a certain way, because she thinks she knows what's going on, and when that doesn't happen it throws her off. This has the side effect that everything about the whole legendary warrior thing throws her off rather badly. That said, she also trusts that Mana will keep everything under control and do the hard work. Along the way, she's just trying to keep Mana safe. Early in canon, Rikka tells Mana the story of the Happy Prince, as originally written by Oscar Wilde: the Prince, a gold-leaf statue in a square, gives everything of himself to keep the people happy and healthy, eventually giving the gem in his sword, then his ruby eyes, and finally his gold-leaf coating. A passing-through swallow, heading south for the winter but moved by his giving, carries the gifts to the people, though he repeatedly asks the Prince if there's not a better way. Once everything's been given, the Prince asks the swallow to leave him and go on to his final destination... but he's stayed too long and freezes to death at the Prince's feet, whose lead heart breaks, and he dies as well. It's a morbid tale, but it highlights Rikka's worries - she's concerned that Mana will work herself to death helping others, and while she tries to keep her away from the most dangerous jobs, she helps make sure everything goes off without a hitch.
You might have noticed that a lot of this talks about Rikka in the context of other characters, particularly Mana. This is on purpose; Rikka really isn't interesting alone. She takes a lot of her personality from Mana, largely unconsciously, and she devotes herself to her best friend in a lot of ways. Rikka does have her own ambitions, and can do things on her own, but she prefers to stick together and follow someone with the confidence to make things work. She exists for her precious people. And while she loves her parents, at the end of the day it's Mana that she'll stick to, because she can't imagine a world that doesn't have Mana in it.
Rikka does have one habit she enjoys alone: karuta. A deck of 100 small cards contains the last half of a hundred famous short poems or sayings, collectively the Hundred Poems. A side party reads off the first half of a poem, and the goal is to be the first to pick up the second half from the table where the cards have been laid out in a pattern. Rikka got into the game because it's something intellectual, but also because a large number of the Hundred are love poems, which she has a soft spot for. Aside from that, though, it's also something she does for herself. Mana's not involved, the world isn't at stake, it's not something she needs for her future as a doctor... she just does it for herself. And it's something she enjoys, even if she has to overextend herself to find the time for it.
One more thing worth mentioning: Rikka takes her role of protecting Mana very, very seriously. She'll put herself in danger to keep Mana safe, or so something she knows is foolish because it's something that has to be done. It's part of Rikka's desire to even start to repay Mana for the things she's done over the years, and she really will push herself to her limits and beyond. Even before she had powers, she worked hard; as Cure Diamond, she'll fight even more fiercely. Besides, Mana has more power than she does anyway (or so she things), so it's her responsibility to make sure Mana can keep going.
Abilities: Rikka's mundane abilities are... well, her intelligence. And that's about it. For being fifteen, she's very smart, and she arrives to solutions quickly, though she sometimes needs help to actually execute them. She's not terribly athletic, though she's much better than she was a year and a half ago, when the whole Precure mess started.
The difference... is her partner, Raquel, a blue plushie with a diamond motif, and with vaguely canine features (mostly the floppy ears). Raquel is bonded to her, and can transform into a device not unlike a cell phone called a Lovely Commune. Through using her Commune and a small pin called a Cure Loveads, Rikka can transform into Cure Diamond, a legendary warrior called a Pretty Cure (Precure, for short). Precure, as a general rule, are fairly durable, quite fast and mobile, and are relatively skilled in melee combat. Diamond has a few other useful abilities: Twinkle Diamond, a thin and focused beam of ice; Diamond Shower, a directed and malleable flow of ice; Diamond Swirkle, which generates a whirlpool of freezing water; and Diamond Blizzard, which freezes enemies solid almost instantly. She also has access to team attacks through her teammates, but she needs at least a four-Cure team to access them. Precure go by their titles while transformed, as a rule.
It's not a great resource, but the Precure Wiki has information on Cure Diamond. It's also worth noting that if Rikka can't transform, she's only a little stronger and a little tougher than an average teenage girl - that is, she's basically mundane.
Other: Rikka's fairy partner, Raquel, needs to be present in order to Rikka to transform. That means he'll be hanging around, but I don't plan to use him as more than a set piece. I've learned that lesson once already. Anyway, he's very dependable, and a little shy; he's almost as devoted to Rikka as Rikka is to Mana. He sticks to Rikka pretty much all the time, and he worries after her pretty severely - he's also pretty attached to her emotionally, considering he takes over in the middle of an attack at one point to protect someone. He's also a newborn fairy, so he's not particularly bright, but he tries hard. The three were born not long before they were forced to leave their home in the Trump Kingdom and find new Precure to save their world. Raquel's pretty uninteresting as powers go; he can turn into a Lovely Commune so Rikka can transform, and on the other end of the scale, he can turn into a boy that looks about ten. Raquel can maintain this form freely, but while he's like this, he can't help Rikka transform, and he can't sense Selfishness forming. While in his base form, Raquel can fly and speak, and while he's a Commune he can be used to call the other fairies, not unlike an actual cell phone.
⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
First Person Sample: Test Drive top-level; there's a few things here, and I think I've got options that work well for first-person. I think I'll officially submit her thread with Mana, though.
Third Person Sample:Test Drive thread with Rin AHAHA right I can't use this for that. Uh... let's just write a new sample, I think.
She'd forgotten what it felt like to be out of the loop on something. For so long, being close to Mana and Alice meant that she had an inside view on just about everything that mattered to her. Relationships between the team, insight into politics - such as they were - at the school, the culture and productivity of the Trump Kingdom... she didn't really want for information, and when it came her way, she drank it up. So this situation was a little new to her; she didn't have all the information, and by this time, she knew it. In fact, she had very little of it. And there weren't a lot of options to get it, either. The library would tell her about this place in general, but likely not about the diamond-shaped crystal around her neck, already bearing just a couple drops of icy-blue liquid that sloshed when she shook it gently. Not that she'd had a chance to try yet, of course. She'd been too busy settling in, and figuring how to make herself (and the others) solvent. Back in their Japan, that would be a job better left to Alice and her vast contacts. Here? Their collective knowledge of business meant that any of them could do the job about as well, unless they planned to set something up. And that wouldn't really go well, either - Precure powers aside, they had no unique skills.
That meant they'd have to find a job, whether from odd things that needed to be done, or something more steady. Not that she'd mind either of those, but they needed to eat, and the hospitality of these people wouldn't last forever. Rikka let out a slight sigh as she realized it, before looking around at the room that - for the moment - she was alone in. It was certainly enough for her, especially without her possessions, but it was lonely, and a little spartan. She'd have to see about something to brighten it, once she had some discretionary funds... or maybe about finding a place to live together with Mana and Alice. That would make all of them happier about the situation, even if it'd be a little awkward for a bit.
Reaching out for Raquel, she set him down in her lap, rubbing at his ears. The idle motion does a little to relax her, but she's still trying to figure out how to proceed. She has a vague suspicion that it's not going to be an easy problem to fix, either... but maybe she's overthinking it for now. Mana will have an idea soon. Something to give them direction. She believes in that with all her heart. Once they have direction, Rikka can figure out how to keep them moving, and Alice will keep them safe. That's how it's worked before, and that's how it will work from now on. Nothing's changed. Even in this foreign place... she has to keep believing. If she doubts, then everything will fall apart. And Mana needs her to keep going, or everyone will suffer the consequences. She doesn't want that.
She won't let that happen. It will not happen. Not if Rikka Hishikawa has anything to say about it. Picking up Raquel in her arms, she stood and headed for the door. "I don't have time to sit around here, do I? There's work to be done." Pulling open the door, she clicked off the light with a glance into the room. This might be where she lived for now... but without the others, this wasn't home. She'd fix that first. Steeling herself to deal with whatever came along, she held her head high and closed the door behind her.
Questions: I don't think there's anything!
empatheias if all goes well.Player: MaxSalsa
Contact:
Age: 25
Current Characters: N/A
Character: Rikka Hishikawa
Age: 15
Canon: Dokidoki Precure
Canon Point: Post-canon
Background: (Portions taken from applications for other games, mostly for High Seas, which uses other applications in turn, but those are linked there.)
Rikka is a middle-school girl that happens to have become a magical girl - a Precure - when her best friend found herself caught up in a conflict with the Selfish, a force that draws energy from the selfishness of humans. On the other side of that conflict is Makoto Kenzaki, Cure Sword, whose kingdom has been lost to an invasion by the Selfish. Her princess is now also missing. And Rikka's best friend Mana is exactly the sort of person that would jump headfirst into a situation she knows nothing about to save someone in need. Thus, Mana became Cure Heart, and when Rikka found that Mana was shutting her out and confronted her about it, Rikka took up the power of Precure herself to protect Mana, becoming Cure Diamond.
Over the next several weeks, the team is joined by two more girls: Alice, another of Mana and Rikka's friends that's the heiress to a large corporation, who becomes Cure Rosetta; and Makoto, originally from the Trump Kingdom that the girls' fairy partners hail from and presently a pop idol, who becomes Cure Sword. The team's goal: fight monsters formed from the selfish thoughts in the human heart (the Psyche), which have become massive entities somehow based on the selfish thought that created them (which are collectively known as Selfishness) by one of the servants of King Selfishness. (Yes, all the bad guys are Selfishness. I'm aware it's a horrid naming convention, but it's what we have.)
Once Makoto joins, the girls end up making an unexpected side trip to the remains of the Trump Kingdom, the realm from which the fairies - and Makoto - hail. It was invaded by King Selfishness and his forces, and the entire kingdom was lost as its citizens were turned into Selfishness. Makoto reveals that her reason for traveling to Earth in the first place is to search for the Trump Kingdom's princess, Marie Ange, who was lost after sealing King Selfishness to stop his reign of terror. Confronting King Selfishness, who requires the princess to unseal himself, the girls promise to help find the princess, and to save the Trump Kingdom.
Not long afterward, they encounter a strange egg at a nearby antique shop owned by the man that supplied Mana and Rikka with their Cure Lovies, a small pin that powers their transformations; the egg is at least a foot in diameter, and its design is rather peculiar. Almost immediately, the egg hatches into a baby, promptly named Ai-chan. Ai is immediately outed as being something strange; for starters, she can fly. The girls quickly discover that she's somehow related to their powers, too; she can randomly grant them increased strength or other abilities.
Some time after this, the girls begin to ponder ways to search for the princess. Eventually, Makoto hits on the idea of trying to track down the things the princess liked, and working from there; over the course of the next several weeks, they attend various events with ties to the princess's hobbies, and their efforts produce Royal Crystals, artifacts of the Trump Kingdom: one for each of the four of them in their own colors, plus one more for the Selfishness' new soldier - Regina, King Selfishness' daughter, who Mana befriends. Rikka is exceptionally jealous; Regina is, by nature, extremely possessive, and often takes Mana away to spend time with her regardless of Mana's feelings on the subject. She's not entirely sure how to deal with it... but then, she's dealt with it before, when Makoto joined and Mana spent all her time with that girl, so she'll manage somehow.
These daytrips end with the Royal Crystals split: four in the girls' possession, and the red Crystal with Regina. When Regina appears before the team to take the other Crystals, Mana convinces her to put all of them on the line in a battle of indirect combat: sporting events. Though the Selfishness cheat, the Precure eventually win... but Regina ends up stealing the Crystals anyway. When she brings all five together, they shine and fly off into the distance. The Selfishness give chase; Sebastian arrives with a satellite tracker following the Crystals, and the Precure are soon in pursuit in a helicopter chartered from the Yotsuba Group's fleet.
The chase brings the girls to a distant mountain; the Crystals were seen there via satellite. Unsure if there'll be a safe place for the chopper to land (and more than a little worried they'll be either shot down or leading the Selfishness straight to the Crystals), they take the last bit of the journey on foot, scaling the mountain in their Cure forms. As they reach the summit, the Selfishness arrive at the same time; an avalanche makes everyone separate, but Regina and Mana fall into a fissure and are trapped inside the mountain. Rikka, against her better judgment, joins the others in an uneasy truce until the missing girls are found; while the operation is in progress, Mana and Regina discover the crystallized form of Marie Ange, and when everyone else arrives, the Selfishness recapture Marie Ange and Regina, who Mana had finally won over.
In pursuit of Marie Ange once more, Ai and the Royal Crystals somehow open a portal to the Trump Kingdom, and the Precure sortie in hot pursuit to take back the princess. Unusually, Regina's friendship with Mana causes her to stand against her father and request he not attack Earth again; in a rage, he seals her powers and leaves her severely injured. Mana moves to find her, while the others deal with a massive crowd of monsters; once Mana gets there, one of the Selfishness attempts to kill her and Regina both, but Mana's selflessness to protect Regina finally gets through to the girl, and the seal on her powers breaks just in time as she rescues Mana from certain death and, Marie Ange in tow, escapes with the other Precure back to Earth.
Regina returns to Mana's house, and the girls settle down for a rest, but it's cut short. Regina can't seem to settle into the carefree life Mana and the others lead; during a visit to the beach, King Selfishness appears and tells her that it's because she's discovered the feeling of "love", and that feeling conflicts with her selfish heart. To make the pain go away, he infuses Regina with a huge amount of selfish energy, effectively brainwashing the caring feelings away and increasing her power several times over. Demonstrating her new abilities, Regina turns on the team and very nearly slaughters them all in a fearsome display of strength, until her deathblow is parried at the last possible moment by a new Precure: Cure Ace. Her overwhelming power forces Regina and the others to flee, and the girls return home. Mana is crushed by the loss of Regina after everything, and despite Alice and the others' best efforts, they can't get through to her. Ace, angered by this shameful display, confiscates Mana's Cure Loveads (and with it, her ability to become Cure Heart), telling her to regain her love if she wants it back. The others end up trying to fill in for Mana's myriad roles in the community while the pinkette is on autopilot, but eventually it's Ai that reaches her, and when the other three find themselves in trouble, Mana snaps out of her funk and, recovering her Loveads from Ace and finding herself with a big power boost, takes care of business.
Rikka, meanwhile, has been wavering on a lot of things - her time as Cure Diamond has been cutting into her study time again, but more important, she's not sure she still wants to be a doctor. Is that what she wants, or is that just what she's doing because it's expected of her? Rikka starts to take some time to consider that on a day trip to the ocean, but her musing is cut short when she finds an unconscious Ira, one of the Selfishness cronies, washed up on the shore (after being struck by lightning). She tends to him briefly, and when he comes to, he has amnesia, so she brings him back to her home to make sure he's all right. Rikka proceeds to display some of the most absurd mothering yet seen from her, and she seems to be making real headway with convincing Ira he's not a bad person, before Mana and Alice's fairies catch her, and the girls have a strategy meeting that ends in battle when the other Selfishness appear. Ace almost immediately declares her intent to shoot Ira down and purify him once and for all, but Rikka refuses to allow that, putting herself in front of Ira as a shield. Moved by her courage, Mana and Alice do the same, and Ace, satisfied with her resolve, backs down; with a surge of power from the growing resolution in her heart, Rikka, as Cure Diamond, blasts the Selfishness to kingdom come, and they retreat with Ira.
The others go through trials in this way to awaken their hearts; Makoto debates giving up singing, and Alice is forced to re-evaluate what it means to protect. Once the four gain their new strength of heart, Ace seems to approve of them a little more, and while she's still hard on them as a means to force them to grow strong enough to take on King Selfishness and rescue the Trump Kingdom, she's able to let a little more of her true self show. Even better, she joins the team properly, introducing herself as Aguri Madoka... who is actually several years younger than the others, and ages up when she transforms.
It's not long after Ace joins that the team determines additional power is required, and Aguri happens to know of a couple good ideas: namely, the Three Sacred Treasures, which are totally not meant to mirror anything. While two of the Treasures are in the wrong realm to be pursuing, the Magical Lovely Pad is actually being held by a fairy living on a distant island... which Alice is handily able to provide transportation to. The fairy in question was once the partner of a trio of legendary past heroes, with each of the three wielding a Treasure. Cure Empress wielded the Lovely Pad, and Melan, her fairy, still has it... and still defends it harshly. When the girls arrive at the island, Melan transforms into a dragon and engages them, defeating them after a hard fight. Mana cooks food once they come to, and invites Melan to join them for dinner. The fairy is impressed with the girls, and allows them a second chance the next morning. While the fight is even harsher, and Mana pushes herself beyond her limits, Melan approves of both their power and their will, and surrenders the Magical Lovely Pad, a mirror in a frame of purple stone.
The girls spend a week or three trying to figure out how the Pad works, but crisis strikes as two Selfishness attack the city together, and the girls' parents are placed into coma states. They sortie, and in a moment of carelessness the Pad is stolen from them and crushed into several pieces. In their devastation, all five of them lose their power, and Mana bursts into tears, which really never happens. But after a minute or two of crying, she simply slaps her cheeks, clears her head, and stands up, and the others are not long behind her. Their combined resolution to keep going, driven by Mana, causes the five large pieces of the Magical Lovely Pad to transform into five much smaller devices, one for each Cure. Together, the five execute a new team attack, and the city is saved.
From this point, Mana's goal is largely to figure out how to make their last push to save the Trump Kingdom, as they have rather a lot of power now. This is a several-step process: it involves rescuing Regina from her father's brainwashing, acquiring one or both of the remaining Treasures, and (of course) defeating King Selfishness. The second is complicated by the first, as a series of coincidences gives Regina the Miracle Dragon Glaive, an absurdly powerful spear originally wielded by the princess of the Trump Kingdom, Marie Ange. It's supposedly only usable by members of the royal family, which means it doesn't make any sense that it's Ace that pulls it from the ground in the first place, but nobody really pays that any mind when they're being shot at.
Along the way, Mana's parents find an old wedding dress passed through the family line; Mana's mother wore it for her wedding, and her mother wore it before her. Mana wants to wear it herself, but trouble comes calling and attempts to steal the dress in the middle of the night. Eventually, it comes calling loudly enough to need an intervention from the Precure, and the enemy, calling himself Marsh, declares that he and his force of discarded objects are the revenge of the lost, forgotten, and thrown away. In fact, he's out for Mana specifically, but he'll accept getting to her through her friends and family. Trying to protect her parents and her close friends, she and the other girls are sucked into their memories. Rikka remembers her earlier childhood, when she was a prodigy on the piano, but she's forgotten her other friends; Mana too is alone, Rikka's house occupied by an American, and her friends having apparently never existed. It takes Rikka and Alice coming across each other by chance to remember themselves, but Mana remains alone until her grandmother gives her some advice that helps snap her out of the funk she falls into when she realizes she was responsible for her childhood pet's death.
All of the girls are ejected from their collective dreams, and find the resolve to fight once more. Marsh turns into a massive dog, having been Mana's puppy, Mallow, all along, and fights them; Cure Heart, separated from the others, elects not to dodge an attack coming for her, and is bitten, a huge wound visible on her shoulder. Using that as a final nail in the coffin, she convinces Marsh to stop his attack, and he returns to the form of Mallow, once again a manageable size. The true enemy, a spirit possessing a clarinet, takes offense at this, and tries to attack the girls again. But they've had enough, and they charge into the enemy's stronghold, reaching the center relatively quickly as everyone clears a path for Mana before following behind. They have a clear shot, but their team attack fails, and while she's stunned, the enemy takes a cheap shot at Mallow, leaving him dying at Mana's feet. He tells her not to cry, and turns what remains of his life force into a new power. Mana absorbs it, and Cure Heart transforms into Engage Mode, wearing a ridiculous exaggeration of her mother's wedding dress and wielding a bow of pure light, with which she takes a single shot at the clarinet and wipes it from space-time. The city returns to normal, and the remainder of Mallow's spirit, along with a fairy that had helped them and turned out to be the soul of Mana's dead grandmother, returns to the skies.
Meanwhile, the last remaining knight in the princess' service, Jonathan Klondike, successfully finds the Eternal Golden Crown in a faraway land, bringing it back and promptly letting all the girls try it on to see if it confers its knowledge to them. It ignores all of them, except for Aguri; she seems to black out, and when she comes to, she seems different. She disappears later that afternoon, having come to some dangerous conclusions, and brings only Jonathan and Makoto for what she is hoping to make the final battle against Regina; part of the Crown's knowledge included what she is, and what Regina is.
Mana and the others dump themselves in the way of the fight at basically the last second, and everyone is dragged on a trip through the past to see the history of the Trump Kingdom and its fall. There are several large revelations, but the largest by far is Marie Ange ripping out her own Psyche as she's about to be captured, and splitting it into two halves: one dark, representing her selfish desires that caused the downfall of her kingdom, and one pure, representing her untainted will to protect that kingdom. The dark half went elsewhere in the occupied Trump Kingdom and became Regina; the pure half fell to Earth and became a baby, who instantly turned into Aguri (age 10) upon being found on Earth by the woman that would become her grandmother. The two halves can't co-exist; only one can survive, and it has to be by each other's hand.
Except that's not really how it goes; Mana disagrees with this idea from the start, and at the end of the day it turns out that both girls can happily co-exist. But that's not really an immediate concern, because King Selfishness is waking up, and there's a final battle to be fought. Things happen, and Regina is made to realize that her father's plan isn't a good idea. The fighting moves inside King Selfishness once the girls are beaten up a fair bit, and most of the team is taken out in a series of heroic sacrifices. Rikka is the second to become a distraction tactic, as she uses her most powerful attack, Diamond Blizzard, to create a solid block of ice dozens of feet tall just inside King Selfishness' mouth, freezing herself inside it. It's Mana and Regina that eventually make it into the core of the titanic enemy, and find a massive Psyche, completely black except for a single spot of light in the center: the king. The girls fish him out, and purify what remains. It seems like all is well.
And then Bel has to go and ruin everything again, taking the released dark power for himself, and turning into an even worse monster, stronger and faster. But Mana is having none of it, and through her friendship with her friends, she takes on a new, even more powerful form. Cure Heart Parthenon Mode defeats the enemy with a single shot, and peace is restored once and for all. The remaining Selfishness retreat, and the Trump Kingdom's people are returned to normal. Complicating matters, a tear in dimensions rent by King Selfishness is not repaired at battle's end, and the Trump Kingdom finds itself suddenly connected to Earth, a short distance off the coast of Japan; the Yotsuba Group is the first to establish trade with it, and the Trump Kingdom goes through a brief period of change before electing Jonathan as its president, establishing a democracy out of nowhere. The days are peaceful, and Mana's team is now public knowledge. Whenever trouble strikes, the Dokidoki Precure will always be there to save the day, no matter what they were in the middle of, and no matter where the call takes them.
Personality: By herself, Rikka is... honestly not that interesting. She spends a lot of time studying, to the point that she appears in quite a few scenes reading through flashcards while she walks, and she spends quite a bit of time in the student council room. She doesn't take a lot of time for herself either; she often goes to Mana's family's restaurant for dinner, since her own parents are away so often. And she spends quite a lot of time alone. She's easy to tease, and her parents do so on somewhat frequent occasion. She gets worried easily, and she stresses over a lot of little things.
Two things changed that trend: meeting Mana (and Alice) when she was little, and becoming a Precure. Mana is and will always be a dominant personality, in a very real way, and by the time she's fourteen, she almost automatically falls right into line when Mana asks something. It's not that she's the yes-man, and in fact she's against a large number of Mana's crazy ideas from the outset. But she's comfortable with how Mana's head works, and if she's got a plan, at the end of the day it'll probably work. It helps that Mana's insane charisma motivates people to give their best, Rikka included. She's also driven to help protect Mana from herself, since sometimes she doesn't actually see what kind of effects her antics will have. But some of Rikka's habits fall under that same umbrella; she does a bit more than is really necessary sometimes.
That might be easier to explain: the girls have known each other since they were fairly young, and Rikka's gotten closer to her best friend that is perhaps safe. She doesn't even realize it, in some cases; earlier in canon, when Makoto starts to get friendly with Mana, Rikka mentions her chest feels tight and her emotions are going haywire, and it's really only happening when she sees the two of them together. Alice recognizes the feeling - jealousy. And Rikka, understandably, feels terrible about it for a little while, because why is she feeling something like that for her best friend? As more time passes, though, she starts to come to terms with how she feels, and eventually she realizes what their relationship is. She'll never say it aloud, but Rikka is well aware that the feeling is love. Mana's admitted it herself, if in a note rather than directly.
Unfortunately, Rikka tends to expect things to go a certain way, because she thinks she knows what's going on, and when that doesn't happen it throws her off. This has the side effect that everything about the whole legendary warrior thing throws her off rather badly. That said, she also trusts that Mana will keep everything under control and do the hard work. Along the way, she's just trying to keep Mana safe. Early in canon, Rikka tells Mana the story of the Happy Prince, as originally written by Oscar Wilde: the Prince, a gold-leaf statue in a square, gives everything of himself to keep the people happy and healthy, eventually giving the gem in his sword, then his ruby eyes, and finally his gold-leaf coating. A passing-through swallow, heading south for the winter but moved by his giving, carries the gifts to the people, though he repeatedly asks the Prince if there's not a better way. Once everything's been given, the Prince asks the swallow to leave him and go on to his final destination... but he's stayed too long and freezes to death at the Prince's feet, whose lead heart breaks, and he dies as well. It's a morbid tale, but it highlights Rikka's worries - she's concerned that Mana will work herself to death helping others, and while she tries to keep her away from the most dangerous jobs, she helps make sure everything goes off without a hitch.
You might have noticed that a lot of this talks about Rikka in the context of other characters, particularly Mana. This is on purpose; Rikka really isn't interesting alone. She takes a lot of her personality from Mana, largely unconsciously, and she devotes herself to her best friend in a lot of ways. Rikka does have her own ambitions, and can do things on her own, but she prefers to stick together and follow someone with the confidence to make things work. She exists for her precious people. And while she loves her parents, at the end of the day it's Mana that she'll stick to, because she can't imagine a world that doesn't have Mana in it.
Rikka does have one habit she enjoys alone: karuta. A deck of 100 small cards contains the last half of a hundred famous short poems or sayings, collectively the Hundred Poems. A side party reads off the first half of a poem, and the goal is to be the first to pick up the second half from the table where the cards have been laid out in a pattern. Rikka got into the game because it's something intellectual, but also because a large number of the Hundred are love poems, which she has a soft spot for. Aside from that, though, it's also something she does for herself. Mana's not involved, the world isn't at stake, it's not something she needs for her future as a doctor... she just does it for herself. And it's something she enjoys, even if she has to overextend herself to find the time for it.
One more thing worth mentioning: Rikka takes her role of protecting Mana very, very seriously. She'll put herself in danger to keep Mana safe, or so something she knows is foolish because it's something that has to be done. It's part of Rikka's desire to even start to repay Mana for the things she's done over the years, and she really will push herself to her limits and beyond. Even before she had powers, she worked hard; as Cure Diamond, she'll fight even more fiercely. Besides, Mana has more power than she does anyway (or so she things), so it's her responsibility to make sure Mana can keep going.
Abilities: Rikka's mundane abilities are... well, her intelligence. And that's about it. For being fifteen, she's very smart, and she arrives to solutions quickly, though she sometimes needs help to actually execute them. She's not terribly athletic, though she's much better than she was a year and a half ago, when the whole Precure mess started.
The difference... is her partner, Raquel, a blue plushie with a diamond motif, and with vaguely canine features (mostly the floppy ears). Raquel is bonded to her, and can transform into a device not unlike a cell phone called a Lovely Commune. Through using her Commune and a small pin called a Cure Loveads, Rikka can transform into Cure Diamond, a legendary warrior called a Pretty Cure (Precure, for short). Precure, as a general rule, are fairly durable, quite fast and mobile, and are relatively skilled in melee combat. Diamond has a few other useful abilities: Twinkle Diamond, a thin and focused beam of ice; Diamond Shower, a directed and malleable flow of ice; Diamond Swirkle, which generates a whirlpool of freezing water; and Diamond Blizzard, which freezes enemies solid almost instantly. She also has access to team attacks through her teammates, but she needs at least a four-Cure team to access them. Precure go by their titles while transformed, as a rule.
It's not a great resource, but the Precure Wiki has information on Cure Diamond. It's also worth noting that if Rikka can't transform, she's only a little stronger and a little tougher than an average teenage girl - that is, she's basically mundane.
Other: Rikka's fairy partner, Raquel, needs to be present in order to Rikka to transform. That means he'll be hanging around, but I don't plan to use him as more than a set piece. I've learned that lesson once already. Anyway, he's very dependable, and a little shy; he's almost as devoted to Rikka as Rikka is to Mana. He sticks to Rikka pretty much all the time, and he worries after her pretty severely - he's also pretty attached to her emotionally, considering he takes over in the middle of an attack at one point to protect someone. He's also a newborn fairy, so he's not particularly bright, but he tries hard. The three were born not long before they were forced to leave their home in the Trump Kingdom and find new Precure to save their world. Raquel's pretty uninteresting as powers go; he can turn into a Lovely Commune so Rikka can transform, and on the other end of the scale, he can turn into a boy that looks about ten. Raquel can maintain this form freely, but while he's like this, he can't help Rikka transform, and he can't sense Selfishness forming. While in his base form, Raquel can fly and speak, and while he's a Commune he can be used to call the other fairies, not unlike an actual cell phone.
First Person Sample: Test Drive top-level; there's a few things here, and I think I've got options that work well for first-person. I think I'll officially submit her thread with Mana, though.
Third Person Sample:
She'd forgotten what it felt like to be out of the loop on something. For so long, being close to Mana and Alice meant that she had an inside view on just about everything that mattered to her. Relationships between the team, insight into politics - such as they were - at the school, the culture and productivity of the Trump Kingdom... she didn't really want for information, and when it came her way, she drank it up. So this situation was a little new to her; she didn't have all the information, and by this time, she knew it. In fact, she had very little of it. And there weren't a lot of options to get it, either. The library would tell her about this place in general, but likely not about the diamond-shaped crystal around her neck, already bearing just a couple drops of icy-blue liquid that sloshed when she shook it gently. Not that she'd had a chance to try yet, of course. She'd been too busy settling in, and figuring how to make herself (and the others) solvent. Back in their Japan, that would be a job better left to Alice and her vast contacts. Here? Their collective knowledge of business meant that any of them could do the job about as well, unless they planned to set something up. And that wouldn't really go well, either - Precure powers aside, they had no unique skills.
That meant they'd have to find a job, whether from odd things that needed to be done, or something more steady. Not that she'd mind either of those, but they needed to eat, and the hospitality of these people wouldn't last forever. Rikka let out a slight sigh as she realized it, before looking around at the room that - for the moment - she was alone in. It was certainly enough for her, especially without her possessions, but it was lonely, and a little spartan. She'd have to see about something to brighten it, once she had some discretionary funds... or maybe about finding a place to live together with Mana and Alice. That would make all of them happier about the situation, even if it'd be a little awkward for a bit.
Reaching out for Raquel, she set him down in her lap, rubbing at his ears. The idle motion does a little to relax her, but she's still trying to figure out how to proceed. She has a vague suspicion that it's not going to be an easy problem to fix, either... but maybe she's overthinking it for now. Mana will have an idea soon. Something to give them direction. She believes in that with all her heart. Once they have direction, Rikka can figure out how to keep them moving, and Alice will keep them safe. That's how it's worked before, and that's how it will work from now on. Nothing's changed. Even in this foreign place... she has to keep believing. If she doubts, then everything will fall apart. And Mana needs her to keep going, or everyone will suffer the consequences. She doesn't want that.
She won't let that happen. It will not happen. Not if Rikka Hishikawa has anything to say about it. Picking up Raquel in her arms, she stood and headed for the door. "I don't have time to sit around here, do I? There's work to be done." Pulling open the door, she clicked off the light with a glance into the room. This might be where she lived for now... but without the others, this wasn't home. She'd fix that first. Steeling herself to deal with whatever came along, she held her head high and closed the door behind her.
Questions: I don't think there's anything!