Bleach | Advent Soul

[Hitomi]

:Name:: Shiomati Hitomi

Surname Shiomati (alternately spelled Siomati or Shiomachi, depending on the Romanization) means “waiting for the tide's flow� or “waiting for an opportunity�; name Hitomi means “pupil of the eye� and was given because of her pale blue eyes

:Gender:: Female

:Race:: Spirit

:Age:: Died around 22 and maintains that appearance

:Physical Description::
Hitomi is fairly diminutive in stature, only standing 5'3�, with a light build and just a touch of feminine curve. She has significant core and leg strength and flexibility, (or did while she still had a lower body,) as her hobbies in life were horseback riding and Tae Kwon Do. She is arian and her complexion tends to the pale end of the spectrum; she usually burns in the sun before she tans.

Her face is oval, with generally average features, and she usually wears no makeup. Her lips are neither thin nor full, having a rounded Cupid's bow and subtle pigmentation. Her cheekbones are high but not pronounced; her chin is round but feminine. It is her evenly set, almond-shaped eyes which dominate her features, not by overwhelming size but with their unusual color – palest grey-blue iris with a stark ring of navy. A halo of feathery blonde hair frames her face, wispy and flyaway on a typical day, but she styles it into coarse spiky chunks for a night out. Her small ears are pierced, and her right ear sports a tiny diamond through the cartilage; she likes jewelry for special occasions, but rarely puts that much effort into her appearance.

Hitomi has very few marks on her porcelain skin. She has a smattering of freckles on her forearms and small brown birthmarks on her left ankle and next to her bellybutton. She has no significant scars, just a few pale tracings on her hands and wrists from handling rank felines in her duties as a vet's assistant.

:Personality::
Before her death, Hitomi was never one to sit still for any length of time. She was always doing things, learning things, trying to get the most out of every moment. A pragmatist, her pleasure came from activities, rather than relationships, and her favorite feeling was the satisfaction of a job well done. When working toward a goal, others' feelings mattered little, and she could be quite rude if she thought someone was in her way. She enjoyed her life, but when she slowed down enough to reflect, found herself lonely and sometimes depressive because she lacked true friends. Perhaps her love for animals was rooted in the fact that she could go away, leave for an undisclosed amount of time, and when she returned, she was always met with the same happy greeting.

As might be expected, her death was a very traumatic experience, and Hitomi was tied to the real world by her guilt for never letting any of the people who loved her get close. Isolated from everything she had ever valued, her senses reached out, slowly developing over a period of three years the ability to sense others' soul power in her lonely desperation. Ironically, because of her physical isolation and lack of guidance in her spiritual development, her reiatsu sense became so strong that she cannot get close to anyone with significant power without being overwhelmed.

Hitomi is now in a precarious emotional state; she could easily be swayed by a friendly face, charged with any task if it means she can give her trust to someone, anyone. At the same time, her severe and long-term depression could lead to violent anger if she is disappointed or irrational, immobilizing fear if she is overpowered.

:Clothing::
For Hitomi, clothing has always been a necessary evil; she is as happy in torn-up jeans with dirt up to the knees as in a sleek ball gown, if not happier. Her clothes are usually broken up into “uniforms�:

Day clothes – a white or neutral colored T-shirt sometimes sporting a rock band's name or school emblem, boot-cut jeans tight in all the right places, and scuffed white tennis shoes or sandals.

Barn clothes - typically jeans or riding tights/breeches, a tank top or T-shirt in warm weather or dark-colored hoodie in cold, paddock boots with suede half-chaps, and a velvet helmet with a black nylon cover.

Fightin' clothes – a white T-shirt under a white dobok, white pants with ample room for splits or kicks to the head, and a second-degree black belt with her name and school in Korean with faded gold thread.

Night clothes – tight black slacks (or jeans!), and the occasional flirty short skirt, a sleek and stretchy V- or cowl-neck in shades of red or blue, and sexy peep-toe heels. This set got a fair bit of use back in college, but since graduation hasn't made it out of the closet.

:Country/time:: Born in 1981, a modern American

:Background Information::
Hitomi was adopted at birth by an immigrant Japanese couple and grew up an only child in the American midwest. Her genetics are completely unknown, but Hitomi never really cared about that; her true parents were the ones who raised her, the loving and permissive mother, and father who gave her everything she wanted. At the same time, Hitomi was not terribly close to her family, preferring to spend time her free time at the stable where she took riding lessons or in her room reading or working on extra-credit assignments.

When she was entering high school her family returned to native Japan and Hitomi moved with them, surviving two polite but friendless years in a country where she could understand only half the language. She dated the shy (nerdy, but not completely unattractive) head of class, stringing him along for help with her homework. As a junior she “dropped out� and tested for an American GED, scoring the equivalent of a 3.89 GPA and returning to the States to go straight on to an undergraduate program in journalism. She graduated in six years after changing her major twice, ending up with a pre-med degree and accepted to a prestigious veterinary program.

Hitomi had a tremendous amount of fun in college, but also worked her tail off. She took up Tae Kwon Do in her second semester, taking advantage of free classes taught at the rec center. Between that, riding four times a week with the equestrian team, and classes, she had very little time for the obligatory experimentation with sex, drugs, and drinking. Somehow she managed. Keeping busy kept her from missing her parents too badly. She had always been an independent kid, but attending college in a country so far from her adoptive family was still hard, and she returned to Japan each summer and winter vacation.

Two months after graduation, she was working part-time for a vet clinic in Yumekoto's Nishi-Ku district, living alone in a small apartment a couple miles away from her parents' home. As she was walking the three blocks back from the little grocery down the street, she looked up in time to spot a peregrine falcon swooping down from one of the taller complexes to snatch a pigeon out of the sky. A moment later, the building next to her exploded.

The incident that claimed her life was officially named an industrial accident, a gas leak and faulty wiring, but in truth was the result of a desperate battle between a hollow and a death god. The unknown shinigami's powerful attack had hit the hollow from above, half-burying the demon in the rubble as an underground tunnel collapsed out from under it. In the throes of its agony, the creature unknowingly severed the chain that bound Hitomi's soul to her body, and one of its recklessly thrashing tentacles entombed her soul beneath five meters of earth and rock before the shinigami's sword ended it.

Hitomi was aware of none of this, only that one moment she was looking up at a spectacle of nature's cruelty, and the next all went dark. And it stayed dark. She was closed in a small space, pitch black and silent except for the rattle of chains. She raged and fought, trying to claw her way out of the stone coffin, but strong links bound her and the walls of her tomb were impenetrable. After a while, she realized she didn't need to breathe, she didn't need to eat or drink, she was dead and she was alone. She reflected on her life and mourned herself, mourned all the things she'd never done and all the things she wished she hadn't, but eventually even that mattered little, nothing mattered, and this black hole and her chains were all there was left.

Months passed, years passed, and Hitomi's consciousness began to reach out, seeking contact with other souls with increasing intensity. She became less and less aware of the metal that bound her in her cocoon, or perhaps the chains themselves were what had become less substantial, the subtle grind of corrosion becoming a familiar sound. She started to become aware of a new kind of consciousness, an awareness of the living things above her that she had never had in life, a sense of knowing that there were people... souls... out there, still living, still working toward their goals. She listened to the hum of those souls, learning to differentiate them one from another, fine tuning her ability to sense reiatsu without ever knowing what it was. She would sense a stronger pulse from one of those souls and she remembered what it was to feel pain, the pressure of it beating at her temples as she lay on the cold stone floor of her crypt. She began to hunger for the taste of life and the activity that she had forgotten she desired.

Then she felt something different again, something warm and beckoning, something like the faded memory of sunlight, and her muscles remembered how to stand. Her lungs filled with the stale air and it was delicious to her atrophied senses. The chains fell away from the body she realized she still possessed, their weight dropping from the bracket over her chest as the rusted links broke away, and Hitomi remembered her name. She began to walk toward that beautiful and seductive warmth, the hard volcanic earth no longer able to hold her, and she opened herself to the possibilities of living again.

:Self Defense Method::
From Tae Kwon Do, she is proficient with both hands and feet, knows her way around a sword and bo staff, and is surprisingly quick with a knife, but nothing physically super-human.

Her ability to sense reiatsu is a limited and double-edged sword. For her, sensing souls is like looking up at the stars; the closer and more powerful the reiatsu, the brighter it appears. Too strong or too close, and she is blinded by it and unable to sense anything else. However, this ability can allow her to locate or avoid whoever she wants, and in certain circumstances let her know when reiatsu is being gathered for a powerful attack, giving her a possible advantage.

[trislash]

Done and done! I commend you for making a Spirit, since we're a little low on them right now, and also for going through the rules before you wrote this (which clearly shows)!

App APPROVED.
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the cake is a lie
the cake is a lie
the cake is a lie
the cake is a lie