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"The eternal light soars overhead, the rising sun bringing Revolution! Dawn on a new day, dawn on a new world! Re-Align, Wings of Reason!"
"Beneath darkened wings, we ride the winds of change! In the endless night, the despair of Revolution rises upon you! Re-Align, Wings of Reason!"
"From all corners, the lesser machinations gather here! Regardless of form, they also strive for perfection! Come together and carve your future!"
"The heavenly wings that carry our answer, the divine light shining the path to our brightest future! True Alignment!"
"The machines of war will fuel both sides, and the greed will only grow more lies."
Name: Catherine Koukai
Age: 20
Race: Human
Allegiance: Ryuusei
Deck Name: Unlimited Unearth
Deck Type: Scraps
Deck Master: None
Numbers: None
Personality: A motivated and methodical woman, following where logic and reason take her. She tends to favor following plans and processes as often as possible, as opposed to adapting to what others force on her. Naturally, she despises the world around her, a world lacking true logic. Living in a world of wrongs and chaos, she sees little reason not to rebel. She lashes out against blind ignorance and hate, wishing for a wiser world. On occasion, she may abandon her logic in favor of pursuing a specific goal or result, choosing to follow a “Passion” as opposed to “Reason”. For the most part, however, she will strictly follow her beliefs and reasoning, trusting herself to little else.
Her deck of choice acts to represent her methodical nature. Her deck is a machine, and machines can be operated to perfection and fixed of impurities. This outlook extends past her deck alone, however, reaching into her duels, her life, and even the world around her. She firmly believes that any problem can be fixed with the right knowledge and execution, and that any life can achieve their own perfection. And to her, perfection reflects the goals of the revolution- resisting the human’s true nature, but staying free to themselves. If a human could achieve the proper knowledge, take the proper actions, then they, too, could achieve perfection, despite any contradiction.
Aside from her strong logical beliefs, Catherine can actually come off as fairly friendly towards anyone she doesn’t outright despise. She’ll constantly refer to people as “my friend” or similar, whether she actually knows them well or not. She doesn’t seek anything beyond platonic, friendly relationships, and avoids any larger commitment to any individual. With her friendly demeanor, she does try to help the ones close to her as best she can, staying fiercely loyal to those she looks up to, not just due to her personality, but to follow her beliefs even further too.
- LONG BIO OH MY GOD:
- Catherine is of English birth, hailing from England. She lived, however, in the lower classes, suffering with the rest of those forsaken to the slums. For a world where everyone was supposed to be “Entirely free” and “Liberated”, Catherine was forced to experience a live of misery and submission, always under the foot of those that stood above her, in the higher classes. Born into a family that could not support her, raised to do nothing but follow orders, she found her life increasingly difficult to accept. Some day she would make her own choices and choose her own path. Some day these things would happen. They had to, right? That was the way the world worked, wasn’t it? Work hard enough and you can reach any goal. Right?
Catherine would discover how wrong this was to the world in time, and when this realization would finally hit her, it would be soul crushing, almost too much for her to handle. But this was a day yet far off. She still had her whole childhood ahead of her. So she would put all the free time she had, which was quite a large amount due to her lack proper education, either teaching herself what she could from any source she could get or tinkering with spare parts and other mechanisms she found laying about. A broken duel disk here, perhaps some other machine there. Mostly, it was to keep her mind away from reality. An outlet, an escape from the hell she lived in. Catherine would not realize her own inner turmoil until late into her life, but they were always there. She couldn’t stand living in the world she was stuck in. She couldn’t bear existing in a world of chaos. So she drowned herself into her machinations, into her mechanics and schematics, her plans and processes. She would spend hours working away, putting things back together and building new things from scratch. The way things fit together, the way all the pieces had purpose and reason, the way that she could take a pile of junk and turn it into almost anything gave her satisfaction. She kept telling herself “I’m like one of these pieces. Eventually I’ll find my place in the world too.”
She might have been right, had she been born under any better circumstances. The world will normally try to file out its habitants into some form of natural order. But for Catherine, her place had already been decided by the world. She was the bottom of the barrel, the lowest rung on the ladder of society. She couldn’t have realized it at her young age, but she was already doing the job the world wanted her to do- being the outlet for the misguided and misplaced negativity of others. She was meant to act as scapegoat, as a beating post for others. And so she would, never understanding that her thoughts of one day being truly free, escaping the tragedies of her birth, would not come to pass at the world’s own hands.
But she learned. She continued to educate herself on all she could, and gain as much knowledge as possible. This wasn’t too hard of a task. People threw out or tossed aside random textbooks or scrapped newspapers all the time. Education wasn’t worth much of anything in the world of the common outlaw or the homeless. From reading to writing to engineering to philosophy, Catherine would accept any knowledge, any education she could get her hands on. If she picked up a book about space, she’d read it. If she found a catalog of furniture or services laying in the street, she’d read that. If she found an article on myths or rumors of the world, she’s even read those nonsensical scraps. From all of this varied knowledge and trivia, her range of understanding would expand greatly, though she was still a mechanic at heart. She could consider herself a jack of all trades, though master of none. She was okay at a lot of things, decent with most anything she put her mind to. Perhaps she was a little more skilled with technology and engineering than others, but she hardly noticed at first. In her eyes, all options were open to her. She could take her skills in any direction, go anywhere in the world, she thought. “Maybe now I can find out my place in the world. Maybe I can start moving up.”
And still, she was wrong. The rest of her childhood would not pass quickly. Her parents, barely able to support her, were getting worse off every day. Money was not easily obtained in the lower classes, and her parents were forced to work themselves to exhaustion to support their daughter. Even Catherine had to help out her family, finally putting her strongest skills to use. Fixing peoples’ duel disks or repairing people’s cars, improving and upgrading all the technology and machinery she could, just to put food on the table. She worked endlessly and developed her engineering skills as best she could, as often as she could. But, no matter how many things she repaired, no matter how hard she or her parents worked, they would always come up a little shorter than the last time. Desperate as they were, this fate would seem inevitable. They had to take whatever amounts they could get, and people took advantage of it. Catherine’s repairs began lowering in price steadily, and then rapidly, until she was working for as little as a few cents per job. Her parents suffered the same misfortunes, constantly earning less and less at their own jobs. The family of three, stuck in the slums of the world, would soon find themselves on their last legs with nothing to support them, and a pit of despair just a short fall away. They had nowhere to turn, but nowhere to stay. They were stranded. They were lost. They were alone. They were trapped.
Time was growing short, and both Catherine and her family were in danger of going under at any moment. First, it was “If we don’t make this much, we’ll go hungry tonight.” Then it was “If we don’t make this much, we’ll be out of food for a week.” And finally, it came to “If we can’t get anything, anything at all, we’re done for.” Catherine’s family was losing hope, and so was she. But she just couldn’t understand it. All her life, the world had told her she had a place in life. She thought this meant she could reach the middle classes of the world. She thought this meant she could achieve her own goals, pursue her own endeavors. But here she was, starving to death, without ever having a chance to avoid her fate. She didn’t understand why this was happening to her and her family. She couldn’t understand why it was happening. She wanted the world to answer her, as she thought it had before. She wanted to world to tell her she still had a chance. “I just want a chance to make things right again. I just want us to live.” She prayed, to whatever god above she could think of.
Her prayer was never answered.
She continued to suffer. Her family continued to suffer. The world around her would blur each day as hunger tore into her, the growls of her stomach practically devouring her from the inside. She found it difficult to focus. Difficult to keep working. They all did. Their skills dulled as did their minds, and they began refusing jobs. They just couldn’t keep going. They had finally lost it all. They were drowning in despair and had no way out. They were breaking down with no fix. Catherine could barely keep herself up, and had trouble just getting out of bed each morning. And so, the family that tried so hard to listen to the world, to follow the natural order, turned to their only remaining option, crime. Theft, robbery, burglary, taking anything that would help them survive, anything they could get their hands on without getting caught. They knew it was wrong and they knew it went against what they believed in, but they knew they had no choice. The parents had to feed themselves and their daughter, and the daughter had to make sure she was well enough to keep learning and keep working. Every time they stole, every time they cornered someone and held them up for anything they might have, their hearts tore inside. None of them wanted this. None of them wanted the chaos and disorder they were bringing with them. But with pangs of hunger serving as constant reminder of what was at stake, they couldn’t help but continue on with their life of crime. They had no choice but to keep stealing, no choice but to keep eating whatever they could get.
Life would become even harder for them, now with the world angry at their actions, even if they didn’t know who they were. Catherine and her family understood the reality of their situation, though. Catherine, especially, was finally beginning to understand her own situation. Her whole life she had spent thinking “Eventually I’ll fit somewhere, like a puzzle piece.” Her whole life she had clung to this belief, taking it to heart with her everywhere she went. But now, she understood. She finally realized the truth.
This was her place in life. This was where she fit.
Just like a puzzle piece.
If the middle class was lucky enough to be edge pieces, pieces who could tell from birth that they were important, that they knew where they would end up, then the highest class must be corner pieces. Pieces who knew exactly what they were from day one. No room for doubt, no room for questions. Everything laid out for them from the start, everything going perfectly for them. They were the world’s first choice. They were the world’s foundation. But then, if those were the middle and higher classes, then that leaves Catherine’s world. The lower class. The middle pieces. Confusing misfits, not connecting with anything else. Just a jumbled mess with no direction, a cluster of random colors and shapes with no pattern, no rhyme or reason to them. It wasn’t that the world hadn’t placed them yet. The world already had. The world had just placed them back in the box. Back inside the “Never to be used” pile, in favor of the prettier, more clearly-fitting edge and corner pieces. “I’m a middle piece.” Catherine began telling herself. “The world doesn’t need me, the world doesn’t want me.”
For once, she was right. For once, she wanted to be wrong instead. For once, she truly understood the world around her.
For the first time in her life, Catherine felt herself falling into true despair. She felt herself surrounded by reality. Unable to ignore it or distract herself from it any longer, without the option to go back to her tinkering and feign ignorance, Catherine had no choice but to face her life. Both she and her family were the world’s rejects, the world’s unwanted baggage. The world had betrayed her, abandoned her, and left her to die. And if the whole world had turned its back on her, then there was no way, she thought, that she could ever change her life. Resigned to her fate, she would spend her remaining, dwindling days with her family as much as she could. Even if they could swipe enough food to survive day after day, even if they could avoid getting caught long enough to get away and move to a different part of the slums, the family knew that it wouldn’t last. Eventually they wouldn’t be able to continue. Eventually they’d run out. They always did, and this would be no exception.
And once again, they were right. Catherine was right. It lasted them a few years longer, Catherine spending her early teen years this way, while her parents prolonged the inevitable as long as possible.
One day, that inevitable finally came. Once day, death appeared on their doorstep and came for them. But instead of leaving with three lives, death would only steal away two that day. Catherine’s parents died on that day, killed by one of the men they had stolen from. The man appeared before them, weapon in hand, waving it at them angrily, demanding a return of what they stole. Of course, they couldn’t return it. They would die if they did. So the man decided his own form of compensation and forced it onto them. If they couldn’t return what they stole, if they were to get away with robbing this man, then he would get away with stealing all that and more back from them. He approached them, ready to kill them at any moment. Catherine’s parents, knowing what was coming, accepted their fate. But before they did, they pleaded with the man. They begged him to leave Catherine alone, to just kill them and leave. The man would have none of it. Leave Catherine alive, sure. Leave her alive and with nothing. This man would steal everything Catherine had left. “You took everything I had left. It’s only natural I take everything from you in return.” In a few swift moments, the man was gone, and Catherine’s parents lay dead at her feet. Catherine could only barely comprehend what had just happened.
She screamed.
Clutching her head, she screamed. She cried out in pain, and fell to the ground, curling up and laying there, tears streaming from her face. She was finally alone, finally left with no way of surviving. Her parents’ killer had taken almost everything from her, save for a few dirty scraps of food and, as she would discover, a pile of cards her father used to use. Her father had dueled his way into small amounts of money and food before. Of course, it was always a gamble, but he was good enough at it to bring home more than he left with most of the time. Wiping away her tears, Catherine took this pile of cards, this heap of the scraps of humanity, and claimed them as her own. This deck of cards would represent her new hope. Her new possibility for life. If she could just win, and keep winning, she could live. “Maybe this is another rule of this cruel world.” She would ponder. “Maybe only the strong ones get to life. Like survival of the fittest. Like a jungle full of wild animals.”
This was the day Catherine began to see the world for what it was. She had always known it to be orderless and chaotic, but now she saw it in a new light. The world was not full of human beings, it was full of wild animals. Animals who acted on their instincts, animals who wronged others without second thought, just for their own greed. Animals that called themselves human, that did human things and wore human clothing. Human, yes, but not humane in the slightest. Free, maybe, but ensnared by the vices of the world, consumed by greed and desire. Catherine was disgusted. She was horrified. She had been living in this world the entire time, and had been blind to the truth. She would finally understand, and she would despise the world around her even more. She had always hated the world. But now, she loathed it.
And so Catherine would fight. With an old, but still functional, duel disk and her deck of scrapped cards, she would fight. To fight her way back to her old life. To fight for her own survival. To fight for some way to change the world around her. This was her new drive, this was her new motivation. This was her new purpose, her new logic, her new reason. Just like the machines she had worked on as a child, this was another mechanism with pieces missing. This was another set of turning gears and whirling parts. A puzzle that she had to figure out, a riddle with some hidden solution. Resolved in both heart and mind, she would decide her own purpose, her own direction in life. If the world had betrayed her, then it was only natural she would rebel against the world too. She would work towards a Revolution.
“A world blind to itself, a world missing the vital pieces to make it run properly. Order, restraint, and acceptance. I can find those pieces, I can put them back in their proper places. The world is just another machine for me to fix, the toughest one yet.”
With these words echoing in her mind, she continued on. She would fight and win and survive. But this was no longer a battle for her to survive in. It was a battle for her to win. She had everything to gain, and only her hope and her life to lose. She was finally resolved to change this world, to decide her own place in the puzzle. If she was a middle piece in a puzzle full of edges and corners, then she would redefine the borders of the puzzle itself. She would cut out the borders and spread the puzzle further. There was room in this puzzle for all the pieces of life, she knew, and she would make them all fit. She would change the world. She would bring about a Revolution.
