Katsuragi Yako (桂木 弥子) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
itaidakimasu) wrote2014-08-09 08:23 pm
itaidakimasu) wrote2014-08-09 08:23 pm
Entry tags:
.Inugami App
Player Information
Name/Alias: Shana
Player Journal:shanatic
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
shanatic @ plurk | detectiveyako @ aim
Timezone: EST
HMD: HMD
Character Information
Name/Alias: Yako Katsuragi
Fandom: Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro (manga)
Canonpoint: Chapter 201, after Neuro leaves the Human World but pre-timeskip
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Physical Description:
http://www.mangaforever.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/nogami-neuro-bunko-2.jpg
She has one notable scar, one her left shoulder where XI launched a tree limb at her and grazed her with a spray of blood. It will be erased and replaced with her required tattoo.
History:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majin_Tantei_Nōgami_Neuro
But there’s more information about Yako herself here: http://nougamineuro.wikia.com/wiki/Yako_Katsuragi
Personality:
Yako is a very sweet and empathetic person, having sympathized with and comforted murderers numerous times. She often wants to think the best of people, and it can be said that she is too nice for her own good. She has a history of bending to the will of others, generally because the individual who imposed his will on her for a long span of time was an emphatically abusive demon. However, she can still be quite stubborn when she sets her mind on something.
She makes friends easily, often inspires loyalty in others, and tries her hardest not to be a burden. She has an amazing appetite, and eats ridiculously large amounts of food. It is possible that this is a result of a blend of a fast metabolism and an eating disorder, as she has stated before that she eats when she "feels happy or upset. Despite her overall cheerful demeanor and the major steps of healing she has taken since the incidents, Yako is still depressed over the death of her father and several of her friends. Her father's death, while often narratively overshadowed by the convoluted murder mysteries she is dragged into, still pervades her personal life. Euro gave her closure by finding the culprit behind her father's murder—one of the very policemen investigating the crime—but months later, even just the sight of that 'culprit' (in fact Sai, in disguise) is enough to emotionally disturb Yako to the point of fainting. The loss of Sasazuka and Honjou, even later in the story, were the proverbial final straws that left her broken and grieving for a brief period, where she shut out everybody, including her best friend and her classmates.
Much of her deep loyalty and concern for others seems ingrained from the start of the series, but a portion of it definitely has roots in the New Bloodline Arc of the manga, during those several friends died. She blames herself for not being perceptive enough or acting quickly enough to prevent those deaths. Fumio Hongou, a mathematical genius who had been a close friend, was revealed to have been working for Sicks (the leader of the New Bloodline, a 'race' with evil 'bred into their blood', likened to the evolutionary progression of horses) and had allowed him to run tests on his own beloved daughter. This was ultimately the death of her and the cause of an earlier arc in the manga where, at the end, Yako was forced to essentially euthanize an AI created by and based upon a brilliant doctor who had loved Hongou’s daughter but failed to save her. Hongou helped Sicks set a trap that nearly killed Yako and Neuro, and lead to the death of Sasazuka, a detective who was a dear friend of Yako's and who viewed her as a second sister.
To put this event in perspective, Sasazuka's family had been killed by Sicks, and used as an example for Sai, Sicks’s shape-shifting, serial killer clone, to follow with his later murders. Because of this, during college he sank into the criminal underworld to find their killer and when it is revealed that Sicks is the culprit, he chooses to revert to that criminal mentality and sets a deadly trap. While most of Sicks associates and bodyguards die, he survives and kills Sasazuka after allowing Eleven (the brainwashed, female form of Sai) to scan his memories. Yako berates herself violently over not seeing the change in him, convinced that she could have saved him somehow. After his death she confronts Hongou, who tells her of his admiration and connection to Sicks, before injecting a deadly fluid into his neck and jumping off a bridge, killing himself right before her eyes. Unsurprisingly, this leaves a rather large emotional scar on Yako.
Her faith in others is soon restored when she is comforted by Aya, one of the criminals she had previously exposed, who broke out of prison just to do so. She finds a document from Hongou in the house he left her before taking his life. It contains a note apologizing, saying that "he couldn't betray that man in life, but could do so in death" and contained vital information on the New Bloodline. This series of events ultimately strengthens her resolve to help and save people, as well as her belief that almost everyone has some spark of goodness in them, no matter what their circumstance.
Yako sticks to her morals; if something strikes her as wrong or unfair, she’ll do her best to change it. During a period when Neuro left her deeply in debt, Yako was given the opportunity to reach a high-paying job or to save a child from being flattened by a truck. She didn't even think twice about throwing away her chance at repayment or her own physical safety, and acted to save the child immediately. After the timeskip, she actually becomes as much a 'negotiator' as a detective, and the final chapter showcases her talking down a terrorist group with hostages by connecting with them, ending in a peaceful resolution where the hostages are released and their captors are willingly taken into custody. She’s incredibly loyal to those who win her respect and friendship. She makes sure to look after and help those precious to her, in any way she can, and often puts herself in harm’s way to take others out of it, as shown when she risks her own life to save that child, despite being on a rapidly shrinking timetable to repay a debt to Neuro.
Despite the facade of complacency Yako sometimes projects, she has an incredible amount of backbone when properly riled. Multiple times, such as with HAL or with Sai, Yako is written off as a mere 'puppet' for Neuro, a smoke screen to keep eyes off of him. They aren't exactly wrong about the camouflage aspect of the partnership, not really, but Yako isn't merely cowed into submission by Neuro; at a particularly stressful part of her life, fast on the heels of two brutal deaths of people close to her, Yako lashes out in anger and tells Neuro that she wishes they had never met, and the two part ways. When she realizes that she didn't mean it thanks to Aya, she firmed up her resolve, did some detective work on her own, and returned to Neuro fully willing to accept any punishment or admonishment he might dole out—no matter how brutal or humiliating.
Once she has her mind set on something, Yako rarely gives up. Similar to her resolve in returning to Neuro, Yako displayed a similar stubborn resolve during the HAL case, where she forced herself to thoroughly research the creator of HAL, Harukawa, in order to find a clue about a password needed to take down the AI's defenses. Even if it meant combing through boxes and boxes of information about Harukawa's life and even taking a trip out to an abandoned facility he once worked at, Yako made up her mind and barreled through it, eventually coming to understand the reason he made HAL in the first place—a woman, dead for years, whose name was the password. She is intuitive, often able to discern what people truly feel after talking with them for a while, but still very much capable of being blindsided by a particularly crafty or seemingly innocent person. Though initially she merely wishes to repay him for solving her father's mystery and fears his constant threats, through the series her motives deviate more and more. She begins to see Neuro as a friend, and through that, feels the urge to help him in whatever ways she can. She's an extremely protective person at heart, and usually thinks of others, especially those in pain, before herself.
At least, before food enters the equation.
Yako's appetite is often used as a comical gag; the stereotypical shock value of a tiny girl taking in enough food to fill up a pack of burly men. But it's something that does ripple out into her life. Food is constantly on her mind. Her hunger, and the moments when it's featured, reveal a different side of Yako. It makes her seem more human, and less saintly. She is a girl who will go on and on about the similarities between shrimp and insects to 'unintentionally' get her disgusted friend's food. A girl whose only motivation to get into an elite school was the high class lunches it provided. She doesn't do these things out of malice, or some repressed and oddly transmitted desire to control others instead of vice versa. Instead, her gluttony sometimes takes the place of true ambition or even common sense, though much less often than earlier in the series. Yako, as stated before, has more than just a physical dependency on food; it's an emotional support for her, and one that she leans on heavily. It is referenced that her constitution is a product of her mother's destructive culinary skills, and therefore shows that her reliance on food—good food, made by somebody less inclined to obliviously poison people than her mother—started at a young age, and grew to be a part of her. Because of this, most times she doesn't think too much of her ravenous appetite unless somebody else brings it up through their fear, disgust, or her unwanted moniker of the 'piggish detective'. It is second nature for her to pursue food first, above all; an unintentionally conditioned response, only strengthened by her use of it as a source of comfort following the tragedy in her life.
She is also incredibly persuasive, generally knowing what buttons need to be pushed with people to bring them around to her side or point of view, or to help clear their consciences. Yako uses this characteristic many times over the course of the manga, most notably to turn enemies into allies. She was able to understand the trauma driving Higuchi—namely, that he felt responsible for driving his own parents to suicide by cutting them off from a video game they were obsessed with—and was able to absolve him of some of that guilt, to the point where she managed to break past the brainwashing HAL had put him through. In Aya's case, she correctly deduced that Aya had been the one to kill two of her own dearest people, and wanted to be apprehended for the crimes; this served as a beginning for a deep friendship (maintained even while Aya is imprisoned) that later was crucial for Yako at a dark time in her life. But perhaps her relationship with Godai is the best example: he was originally one of the loansharks Neuro kicked out of their office after eating a mystery there, but had been kept around as a 'handyman' of sorts through various means of demonic abuse. he originally disliked Yako, claiming at one point that she was just as much of a monster as the demon, but after a few conversations between cases, shared suffering at the hands of Neuro, and an arc where he 'left' their office for another job, his feelings shift to something more amicable, and he helps them against his new employers. He claims that of the two of them, Neuro is the one that attacks from the outside, but Yako is the ones that gets under their target's skin and 'attacks' from the inside.
Neuro influences her heavily, and his constant urging for her to continue to evolve no matter what pays off. Through him, she learns to strive to improve herself, and eventually finds her own drive to succeed. The bond between her and the demon is as complex and intriguing as the plot that shapes and surrounds it. Notably, she met Neuro in the wake of having the primary male influence in her life ripped away. While Neuro is not, in any sense, a ‘replacement father’, he eventually filled the void left by losing one of the key figures in her life, and in turn became a key figure himself. At first forged out of obligation, the connection between them chained Yako to Neuro (at times literally) until she felt she had repaid him for solving the mystery of her father’s murder, and then reinforced with threats and vicious abuse, it took some time before true affection and trust began to develop.
However, eventually it did; from the beginning, Neuro sought to polish Yako from a “dust rag to a silk cloth” to paraphrase a quote from the manga, forcing her into situations that would allow her to “evolve” as a person and an investigator. He used her to compensate for his one glaring area of incomprehension: the human mind and heart. She was uniquely suited for this, and his reliance on her allowed and encouraged (through both positive and negative reinforcement) her to grow towards that ideal “evolved” state. Either due to her empathetic nature, or perhaps some form of Stockholm’s Syndrome (likely both, to varying degrees) Neuro became one of Yako’s trusted and precious people.
Abilities:
It's debatable whether it is an actual ability or not, but Yako's body is shown to be incredibly resilient, easily absorbing blows and taking falls that would kill, cripple, or grievously injure others. Her healing rate appears to be accelerated as well; she's never seen to have a wound for more than a day. However, as these can also be chalked up to being overstatements for the sake of humor, despite being present in nearly every single chapter, I’m more than willing to let the Mods decide whether or not to count them as actual 'abilities'.
She also has a large appetite, and an incredible constitution. Her stomach can apparently negate weak drugs and poisons. During a chapter where she and Neuro go to a gym during the New Bloodline arc, Yako is shown to have amazing physical abilities when under duress, moving at high speeds and undergoing great strain when properly motivated (i.e. under threat of grievous bodily harm from Neuro).
In the mental area, Yako is shown to have an aptitude for psychology and discerning the motivations of others. She is shown to attend an elite school, indicating that she can be a good student when she bothers to buckle down and apply herself, though she states that she only chose it because of the delicious lunches it provided.
Samples
Dialogue: Test Drive
Exposition/Introspection:
Yako dragged her fingers over the delicate curve of her shoulder, continuing on until her fingers were fanned over her throat. She stared at the mirror and slid her hand back, curling her hand over the patch branded skin there almost protectively. This place had taken her clothes, which she didn't particularly care about, her cell-phone, which she only cared about because akin was attached, but this?
This was too much. Too intimate.
There should have been a different mark there, just past her joint; a wicked-looking band of scar tissue, just a little wider than two of her fingers at the middle and tapering off into fragmented points, courtesy of a tree-limb launched at her by Eleven, at the end. Instead, the skin was unbroken and unmarred, save for two numbers. She traced over them idly, eyes never straying from the mirror. It would be a lie to say that she wasn't apprehensive—honestly, there was a pulsing cherry-pit of fear at the bottom of her stomach, even now. But her time with Neuro had changed her, dubiously for the better.
More than afraid, she was interested, despite herself. This place was so strange, so... so unnatural. She didn't crave mysteries like her partner did, but after actively working as a detective without him for a few months, she had developed an honest interest of her own. She was interested, and scared, and a little bit angry. Her body was the only resource she had left, and whoever or whatever had abducted her had altered it.
She splayed her fingers over the too-smooth skin once more, obscuring the numbers. She finally looked away from the mirror and fixed her blouse, checking the time on her new phone. Class would be starting soon; she would need to hurry if she wanted to stock up on snacks ahead of time.
Name/Alias: Shana
Player Journal:
shanaticContact:
Timezone: EST
HMD: HMD
Character Information
Name/Alias: Yako Katsuragi
Fandom: Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro (manga)
Canonpoint: Chapter 201, after Neuro leaves the Human World but pre-timeskip
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Physical Description:
http://www.mangaforever.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/nogami-neuro-bunko-2.jpg
She has one notable scar, one her left shoulder where XI launched a tree limb at her and grazed her with a spray of blood. It will be erased and replaced with her required tattoo.
History:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majin_Tantei_Nōgami_Neuro
But there’s more information about Yako herself here: http://nougamineuro.wikia.com/wiki/Yako_Katsuragi
Personality:
Yako is a very sweet and empathetic person, having sympathized with and comforted murderers numerous times. She often wants to think the best of people, and it can be said that she is too nice for her own good. She has a history of bending to the will of others, generally because the individual who imposed his will on her for a long span of time was an emphatically abusive demon. However, she can still be quite stubborn when she sets her mind on something.
She makes friends easily, often inspires loyalty in others, and tries her hardest not to be a burden. She has an amazing appetite, and eats ridiculously large amounts of food. It is possible that this is a result of a blend of a fast metabolism and an eating disorder, as she has stated before that she eats when she "feels happy or upset. Despite her overall cheerful demeanor and the major steps of healing she has taken since the incidents, Yako is still depressed over the death of her father and several of her friends. Her father's death, while often narratively overshadowed by the convoluted murder mysteries she is dragged into, still pervades her personal life. Euro gave her closure by finding the culprit behind her father's murder—one of the very policemen investigating the crime—but months later, even just the sight of that 'culprit' (in fact Sai, in disguise) is enough to emotionally disturb Yako to the point of fainting. The loss of Sasazuka and Honjou, even later in the story, were the proverbial final straws that left her broken and grieving for a brief period, where she shut out everybody, including her best friend and her classmates.
Much of her deep loyalty and concern for others seems ingrained from the start of the series, but a portion of it definitely has roots in the New Bloodline Arc of the manga, during those several friends died. She blames herself for not being perceptive enough or acting quickly enough to prevent those deaths. Fumio Hongou, a mathematical genius who had been a close friend, was revealed to have been working for Sicks (the leader of the New Bloodline, a 'race' with evil 'bred into their blood', likened to the evolutionary progression of horses) and had allowed him to run tests on his own beloved daughter. This was ultimately the death of her and the cause of an earlier arc in the manga where, at the end, Yako was forced to essentially euthanize an AI created by and based upon a brilliant doctor who had loved Hongou’s daughter but failed to save her. Hongou helped Sicks set a trap that nearly killed Yako and Neuro, and lead to the death of Sasazuka, a detective who was a dear friend of Yako's and who viewed her as a second sister.
To put this event in perspective, Sasazuka's family had been killed by Sicks, and used as an example for Sai, Sicks’s shape-shifting, serial killer clone, to follow with his later murders. Because of this, during college he sank into the criminal underworld to find their killer and when it is revealed that Sicks is the culprit, he chooses to revert to that criminal mentality and sets a deadly trap. While most of Sicks associates and bodyguards die, he survives and kills Sasazuka after allowing Eleven (the brainwashed, female form of Sai) to scan his memories. Yako berates herself violently over not seeing the change in him, convinced that she could have saved him somehow. After his death she confronts Hongou, who tells her of his admiration and connection to Sicks, before injecting a deadly fluid into his neck and jumping off a bridge, killing himself right before her eyes. Unsurprisingly, this leaves a rather large emotional scar on Yako.
Her faith in others is soon restored when she is comforted by Aya, one of the criminals she had previously exposed, who broke out of prison just to do so. She finds a document from Hongou in the house he left her before taking his life. It contains a note apologizing, saying that "he couldn't betray that man in life, but could do so in death" and contained vital information on the New Bloodline. This series of events ultimately strengthens her resolve to help and save people, as well as her belief that almost everyone has some spark of goodness in them, no matter what their circumstance.
Yako sticks to her morals; if something strikes her as wrong or unfair, she’ll do her best to change it. During a period when Neuro left her deeply in debt, Yako was given the opportunity to reach a high-paying job or to save a child from being flattened by a truck. She didn't even think twice about throwing away her chance at repayment or her own physical safety, and acted to save the child immediately. After the timeskip, she actually becomes as much a 'negotiator' as a detective, and the final chapter showcases her talking down a terrorist group with hostages by connecting with them, ending in a peaceful resolution where the hostages are released and their captors are willingly taken into custody. She’s incredibly loyal to those who win her respect and friendship. She makes sure to look after and help those precious to her, in any way she can, and often puts herself in harm’s way to take others out of it, as shown when she risks her own life to save that child, despite being on a rapidly shrinking timetable to repay a debt to Neuro.
Despite the facade of complacency Yako sometimes projects, she has an incredible amount of backbone when properly riled. Multiple times, such as with HAL or with Sai, Yako is written off as a mere 'puppet' for Neuro, a smoke screen to keep eyes off of him. They aren't exactly wrong about the camouflage aspect of the partnership, not really, but Yako isn't merely cowed into submission by Neuro; at a particularly stressful part of her life, fast on the heels of two brutal deaths of people close to her, Yako lashes out in anger and tells Neuro that she wishes they had never met, and the two part ways. When she realizes that she didn't mean it thanks to Aya, she firmed up her resolve, did some detective work on her own, and returned to Neuro fully willing to accept any punishment or admonishment he might dole out—no matter how brutal or humiliating.
Once she has her mind set on something, Yako rarely gives up. Similar to her resolve in returning to Neuro, Yako displayed a similar stubborn resolve during the HAL case, where she forced herself to thoroughly research the creator of HAL, Harukawa, in order to find a clue about a password needed to take down the AI's defenses. Even if it meant combing through boxes and boxes of information about Harukawa's life and even taking a trip out to an abandoned facility he once worked at, Yako made up her mind and barreled through it, eventually coming to understand the reason he made HAL in the first place—a woman, dead for years, whose name was the password. She is intuitive, often able to discern what people truly feel after talking with them for a while, but still very much capable of being blindsided by a particularly crafty or seemingly innocent person. Though initially she merely wishes to repay him for solving her father's mystery and fears his constant threats, through the series her motives deviate more and more. She begins to see Neuro as a friend, and through that, feels the urge to help him in whatever ways she can. She's an extremely protective person at heart, and usually thinks of others, especially those in pain, before herself.
At least, before food enters the equation.
Yako's appetite is often used as a comical gag; the stereotypical shock value of a tiny girl taking in enough food to fill up a pack of burly men. But it's something that does ripple out into her life. Food is constantly on her mind. Her hunger, and the moments when it's featured, reveal a different side of Yako. It makes her seem more human, and less saintly. She is a girl who will go on and on about the similarities between shrimp and insects to 'unintentionally' get her disgusted friend's food. A girl whose only motivation to get into an elite school was the high class lunches it provided. She doesn't do these things out of malice, or some repressed and oddly transmitted desire to control others instead of vice versa. Instead, her gluttony sometimes takes the place of true ambition or even common sense, though much less often than earlier in the series. Yako, as stated before, has more than just a physical dependency on food; it's an emotional support for her, and one that she leans on heavily. It is referenced that her constitution is a product of her mother's destructive culinary skills, and therefore shows that her reliance on food—good food, made by somebody less inclined to obliviously poison people than her mother—started at a young age, and grew to be a part of her. Because of this, most times she doesn't think too much of her ravenous appetite unless somebody else brings it up through their fear, disgust, or her unwanted moniker of the 'piggish detective'. It is second nature for her to pursue food first, above all; an unintentionally conditioned response, only strengthened by her use of it as a source of comfort following the tragedy in her life.
She is also incredibly persuasive, generally knowing what buttons need to be pushed with people to bring them around to her side or point of view, or to help clear their consciences. Yako uses this characteristic many times over the course of the manga, most notably to turn enemies into allies. She was able to understand the trauma driving Higuchi—namely, that he felt responsible for driving his own parents to suicide by cutting them off from a video game they were obsessed with—and was able to absolve him of some of that guilt, to the point where she managed to break past the brainwashing HAL had put him through. In Aya's case, she correctly deduced that Aya had been the one to kill two of her own dearest people, and wanted to be apprehended for the crimes; this served as a beginning for a deep friendship (maintained even while Aya is imprisoned) that later was crucial for Yako at a dark time in her life. But perhaps her relationship with Godai is the best example: he was originally one of the loansharks Neuro kicked out of their office after eating a mystery there, but had been kept around as a 'handyman' of sorts through various means of demonic abuse. he originally disliked Yako, claiming at one point that she was just as much of a monster as the demon, but after a few conversations between cases, shared suffering at the hands of Neuro, and an arc where he 'left' their office for another job, his feelings shift to something more amicable, and he helps them against his new employers. He claims that of the two of them, Neuro is the one that attacks from the outside, but Yako is the ones that gets under their target's skin and 'attacks' from the inside.
Neuro influences her heavily, and his constant urging for her to continue to evolve no matter what pays off. Through him, she learns to strive to improve herself, and eventually finds her own drive to succeed. The bond between her and the demon is as complex and intriguing as the plot that shapes and surrounds it. Notably, she met Neuro in the wake of having the primary male influence in her life ripped away. While Neuro is not, in any sense, a ‘replacement father’, he eventually filled the void left by losing one of the key figures in her life, and in turn became a key figure himself. At first forged out of obligation, the connection between them chained Yako to Neuro (at times literally) until she felt she had repaid him for solving the mystery of her father’s murder, and then reinforced with threats and vicious abuse, it took some time before true affection and trust began to develop.
However, eventually it did; from the beginning, Neuro sought to polish Yako from a “dust rag to a silk cloth” to paraphrase a quote from the manga, forcing her into situations that would allow her to “evolve” as a person and an investigator. He used her to compensate for his one glaring area of incomprehension: the human mind and heart. She was uniquely suited for this, and his reliance on her allowed and encouraged (through both positive and negative reinforcement) her to grow towards that ideal “evolved” state. Either due to her empathetic nature, or perhaps some form of Stockholm’s Syndrome (likely both, to varying degrees) Neuro became one of Yako’s trusted and precious people.
Abilities:
It's debatable whether it is an actual ability or not, but Yako's body is shown to be incredibly resilient, easily absorbing blows and taking falls that would kill, cripple, or grievously injure others. Her healing rate appears to be accelerated as well; she's never seen to have a wound for more than a day. However, as these can also be chalked up to being overstatements for the sake of humor, despite being present in nearly every single chapter, I’m more than willing to let the Mods decide whether or not to count them as actual 'abilities'.
She also has a large appetite, and an incredible constitution. Her stomach can apparently negate weak drugs and poisons. During a chapter where she and Neuro go to a gym during the New Bloodline arc, Yako is shown to have amazing physical abilities when under duress, moving at high speeds and undergoing great strain when properly motivated (i.e. under threat of grievous bodily harm from Neuro).
In the mental area, Yako is shown to have an aptitude for psychology and discerning the motivations of others. She is shown to attend an elite school, indicating that she can be a good student when she bothers to buckle down and apply herself, though she states that she only chose it because of the delicious lunches it provided.
Samples
Dialogue: Test Drive
Exposition/Introspection:
Yako dragged her fingers over the delicate curve of her shoulder, continuing on until her fingers were fanned over her throat. She stared at the mirror and slid her hand back, curling her hand over the patch branded skin there almost protectively. This place had taken her clothes, which she didn't particularly care about, her cell-phone, which she only cared about because akin was attached, but this?
This was too much. Too intimate.
There should have been a different mark there, just past her joint; a wicked-looking band of scar tissue, just a little wider than two of her fingers at the middle and tapering off into fragmented points, courtesy of a tree-limb launched at her by Eleven, at the end. Instead, the skin was unbroken and unmarred, save for two numbers. She traced over them idly, eyes never straying from the mirror. It would be a lie to say that she wasn't apprehensive—honestly, there was a pulsing cherry-pit of fear at the bottom of her stomach, even now. But her time with Neuro had changed her, dubiously for the better.
More than afraid, she was interested, despite herself. This place was so strange, so... so unnatural. She didn't crave mysteries like her partner did, but after actively working as a detective without him for a few months, she had developed an honest interest of her own. She was interested, and scared, and a little bit angry. Her body was the only resource she had left, and whoever or whatever had abducted her had altered it.
She splayed her fingers over the too-smooth skin once more, obscuring the numbers. She finally looked away from the mirror and fixed her blouse, checking the time on her new phone. Class would be starting soon; she would need to hurry if she wanted to stock up on snacks ahead of time.