Ace!

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Ace! Sept 14, 2015 10:30:16 GMT

Post by ace on Sept 14, 2015 10:30:16 GMT

Ace!

'I'll break you to pieces.'

The Postman || female || irrelevant || 99, looks 17

APPEARANCE

A gaze which could beat nails is not the best trigger for messing with people, and Ace knows it too well not to appreciate it. Burning at several degrees between absolute zero, her eyes are of a deep, glassy black, like a suspension of active carbon in ice. Her hair is anthracite-colored, long enough to pass her chin and so soft it would put chinchillas to shame. It is usually shoved under a blue cap with a visor and the gaudy golden wings on the side marking the Postmaster General. But what people tend to remember even more is Ace’s smile, a trademark grin that could split a razor sideways, radiating confidence and danger from every fiber.

As for Ace’s stature, she could be best described as “the quintessential bookworm”. She has a light built, with bony joints and thin limbs, feet which are made for stumbling rather than walking and hands with long, slender fingers. Only when she starts jogging, does she reveal that the slow pace was to blame for her former lack of grace. While she may be a doll regarding looks, related to motion she seems a marionette. Albeit of average height, Ace has the uncertain movements of someone who had grown too tall, too quick. She sure looks as weak as hell, but somewhere in those stick-like arms and legs are muscles which can swing a bat around, punch, kick and throw 100 mph fastballs.

Blue mailbag caught over her shoulder, small ragged backpack with the handle of a baseball bat stemming from it, attitude – you couldn’t mistake Ace for anybody else. Her usual outfit is the usual hakama-and-haori combo common in the Rukon District, with several changes. First of all, the garments are cut at the elbows and shoulders, as the normal version feels stiflingly warm to the girl raised in the land of winter. Secondly, although ragged, dusty and slightly patched, the fabric maintains the kind of stubborn high-quality that aims to outlive its owner. Not in the least, the outfit has been dyed to match with her hat – royal blue -, a spot of color that tends to stand out among the grays-and-browns of outer districts clothing. While otherwise simple, the outfit also presents an impressive amount of pockets, filled with anything from burnt wooden shards to tinder to liquorice. Instead of the Shinigami waraji sandals, the girl wears a sturdy pair of frilled moccasin boots.

Her manner of speech often raises eyebrows due to Ace’s newfound tendency to refer to herself in the third person (in Rukongai, ‘new’ can mean decades).

PERSONALITY

Positives
+ Self-reliant: Ace is able to comfortably survive in the wilderness on her own, following a philosophy in which help is a proper thing to offer, but unnecessary to receive. Having lived through difficult times in her life, the girl also developed a certain emotional resilience.

+ Driven: When she sets her mind on something, she’s able to punch her way through mountains with her eyes alone.

+ Caring: Ace may injure and kill, but her heart is still in the right place. Although she has only contempt for weak enemies, the girl is surprisingly protective towards those whose weakness she considers natural (such as children, old or disabled people). It may not be so obvious at first because of her unwillingness to break character, as well as overall lack of emotional intelligence, but her actions usually speak louder than her words.

+ Of integrity: Once the girl gives her word, the word of the Postmaster General, she’ll never go back on it, no matter what happens to her. It’s only a facet of her natural stubbornness. For it would be kind of a psychological suicide. Despite an unhealthy dose of violence and some rumors of drug consumption (running around in circles for a whole day can make people assume the craziest of things), this quality of staying true to her word has helped Ace build a relatively positive reputation in the area. She’s someone you can count on. Furthermore, same as with help offered, help received is also calculated in terms of a debt which has to be paid off.

Negatives
- Lone wolf: She feels caged in cities or other human agglomerations. God forbid her from having to work in a team; because, let’s face it, she’s not exactly socially smart.

- Addict: Ace uses mainly two drugs – running, and baseball. They serve the main purpose a drug is supposed to serve, which is burning your life to a crisp until there’s nothing but it left. An insane focus, some may call it. She can run for hours - in fact sometimes does little else during the day. As for baseball, the fact that Ace’s powers have developed to mimic it is connected to the shift in her perspective from fights as hurtful events to fights as thrilling games. It’s not necessarily the risk of killing or being killed which makes Ace feel so, but the exhilarating feeling of doing something you’re good at, of striving to be better. When it’s her turn to ‘play’, her unsettling eyes can see nothing else. She looks so strange sometimes, that many people whisper of her being ‘special’.

- Non-distributive attention: The inescapable dark side of manic focus. If one’s brain is completely concentrated on something, no wonder they don’t notice trivial stuff like galloping horses, falling meteorites and burning buildings. While paying attention to your opponent in a fight is usually advantageous, Ace’s crazy level of focus makes her very weak against surprise attacks or multiple enemies. Also – she tends to get lost very easily.

- Socially awkward: What at first may be perceived as either shyness or snobbism can quickly become a solid wall of “mess with me and I’ll shove this bat through your cranium”. Her oddities, such as Ace staring at people and often talking about herself in the third person, don’t really help. Not that it would be desired – Ace learned how to avoid human contact at a time when humanity completely disgusted her, and it can’t be said that she changed too much since then. She has very firm opinions about humanity. Put simply, there are two kinds of people in the world: selfish bastards who only care about themselves, and dead people. Dead people may be breathing, walking, laughing – but that doesn’t change the fact that they are dead. As such, Ace prefers to count herself among the selfish bastards and expects all things living to do too. Even though she helps people quite a lot, it is obviously for ‘selfish reasons’. Or so she says. Gaining the trust of such a contradictory female is probably worse than was facing the red tape of the Inquisition. Sincerely, she’d rather kill you than trust you.

- Merciless: While she does not normally hate people because of preconceived ideas, there are some exceptions to the rule. The most significant refers to those who prey on the weak. Their very existence bruises a nerve deep in Ace’s cranium, and she cannot stand watching them in action. The sentence carried out varies, depending on the gravity of the crime, the intent and intelligence put into it, and excusable circumstances. But it will always be executed with a deadly and methodic calm, which is actually what fury becomes when it’s pure enough to crystallize. Normally it would mean just beating the heck out of them, but death is not unheard of. She is not beyond messing with Shinigami, if Shinigami cause trouble in ‘her’ Rukongai.

HISTORY

1. There are no penguins in Alaska
She was born among the endless rattle of the train wheels, joining the whistles of the locomotives with her own shrill cries. Anchorage, 1914. In the frozen north of the American continent, the heart of what would become Alaska’s largest city was starting to beat, and that heart was the railway. Our protagonist’s father was an engineer who sketched its future with a bubble level and a slide ruler, travelling for weeks through the wilderness to study the terrain; he whistled jazz. Her mother was a housewife, a Lady who wouldn’t back off from hitting with a frying pan or shooting with a rifle, should the situation arise. She had won a fortune in San-Fran by card-counting under a name that was no longer hers, and had been in hiding ever since. Now known as Ginny Evans, she shared with her husband Steve a boundless affection for the small bundle whom she’d brought into the world on a long Alaskan night. For obscure parental reasons, they named their baby girl ‘Acacia’.

Acacia Evans grew to be as prickly of a person as her name promised. The youngest and only girl among five siblings, she soon learned to box with one hand while clutching her hair with the other, to prevent it being used as a handle. She had a kind heart and a bit of a temper, often found running around with seemingly inexhaustible energy, causing mischief and playing ‘Westmen and Redskins’ with her brothers, often braiding bald-eagle feathers in her hair in the role of Winnetou or finger-shooting as Old Shatterhand. There was no one that could’ve forced Acacia – most commonly known as ‘Ace’ – to play the damsel in distress. Most often, she just ran. She ran until she stepped beyond exhaustion, and into a strange state of freedom of the mind; she ran until she forgot herself, she ran until her shoes wore off, she ran until she collapsed, crying, laughing, happy.

Their mother said that Alaska was a magical land like nowhere on Earth. It certainly offered Ace a magical childhood. Under the ethereal curtain of the Northern Lights or the burning blue of the summer, through silent old forests and gardens in which the plentiful light made vegetables grew to storybook proportions, she ran and lived every day to the fullest. She talked to old men, forgotten there since the age of the goldrush, and went on treasure hunts. She knew how to set traps and how to fish with a nail and a stick. But Ace’s favorite game, the game that would come to dominate her life, was something that she discovered later, in the first week of school, after she’d broken Will Wilkinson’s nose for something he’d said about her mother.

Baseball.

2. Like a man
She was good at it. No, she was too good. The pitcher’s mound was her insurmountable castle; from its heights, she would disarm the batters with her cocky grin and mercilessly strike them out. The school physical education teacher had a hunch that this might be a talent beyond her grasp. As a pitcher, she was a chaotic prodigy who focused on fastballs. As a batter, she was decent; weak, but calculating. When she managed to get into the opposing pitcher’s mind, she broke them. She made the local junior team years before the average. There was no girl’s team in Anchorage, Alaska. That didn’t bother Ace. She was tough, she loved baseball, and, unbeknownst to her, her brothers who taunted her to no end about lost games had made in clear to the team that anyone picking on their sister is a dead man.

She went on to lose games and to win games; more of the latter. Her talent matured. She lived for baseball, like she lived for running. She would have skipped school for practice if possible – it didn’t interest her much except, for some reason, the maths classes. Like her mother, Ace could multiply three-digit numbers like other people tied their shoelaces. Although people didn’t understand her when she tried to explain, this was connected to her calculating play in baseball. Her parents were naturally uneasy about their daughter’s choices. Sport was a healthy past-time, but the lil’ angel was putting too much heart into it. However, they were wise enough to remember how wealthy, renown and utterly miserable they would have been, had they listened to their own parents.

Acacia Evans was seventeen when her team went on a tournament in the USA. In their first game, the heat that she wasn’t used to killed her. Sweat trickled in her eyes. As she threw baseball after baseball with reckless abandon, the girl kept the score to zero; but, she realized with a shiver down her spine, her teammates weren’t scoring either. She clung on long after what she would imagined possible.

In the fifth inning, she collapsed with heatstroke.

When she woke up in the coolness of the dugout, right after they’d won the game, there was a stranger offering her a glass of water and asking whether she’d like to play pro.

It seemed like a dream. Like she’d always done, Ace ran grinning straight into it without caring for the details. She signed the contract soon after that. Who cared that the newspapers were roaring with condescending columns, elbowing for space with the horrified reactions of countless ‘proper ladies’?

When they told her that she’d be playing against the Yankees, against two of her childhood heroes, Ace was so happy that she ran for a whole day around the training field.

And then the big day came.

She shook hands with her legends.

She struck them out.

The same day, her contract was voided. The same day, her hero said that women have no place in baseball, as the sport is too strenuous for their delicate build. Heartbroken, Ace lingered around in the independent baseball leagues for a while, but she soon grew tired of their gaudy lifestyle, grew tired of a country which was nothing like her home, so noisy and dirty, with buildings like cockroaches huddling in stinky cities.

She went back to Alaska, and couldn’t touch a baseball again for the rest of her life.

3. Life reset button, level up!
With an incomplete education, but too much common-sense to be a wife, there were few job opportunities for Acacia Evans. Now, she ran to forget. She became a postman, which in the endless forests and frosts of Alaska was equivalent to a self-reliant explorer. She would walk, ski, canoe dozens and hundreds of kilometers to the most isolated hamlet, bringing with a smile not only paper, but a connection to the world. In exchange, she would be kindly treated with warm food and a bed. Like her father before her had helped build the land’s circulatory system of transport, she was maintaining its nervous system by allowing information to fly.

The scar in her heart had started to heal. She was happy.

Ace didn’t even realize when she died. In Rukongai, she remembered everything, apart from this event. Perhaps the snow had fallen earlier that autumn – perhaps its shroud had covered her tired body that was never to wake up. Perhaps she’d fallen through the ice. Perhaps a moose had broken her spine – those things could be brutal. Perhaps it was better that she couldn’t remember. Whichever way, it took weeks for her to believe that she had really passed on, and was not sinking in a fantasy while in an asylum due to obscure psychological reasons.

Without being much aware, she sculpted herself a baseball bat from a tree branch. Ace didn’t understand why, but it made her feel content with herself. Life in District 67 wasn’t easy. Not once, she saw herself forced to use her new bat against aggressors. She grew hungry all the time. Luckily, her life on Earth had left her with plenty of skills for surviving in the wilderness. And her life in Rukongai had gifted her with several more…such as strangely accurate reflexes and summoning baseball-shaped orbs of light…

However, it grew tiring to be on guard all the time. That’s when the Shinigami found her.

4. When in Rome, empty their pockets
She joined the Academy as swiftly as she had once joined the Major League; but this time, Ace kept her eyes open. They were taught – indoctrinated – about the danger posed by Hollows and about the Shinigami’s vital role in the cycle of life, but that’s not what Ace heard. What she head was a military from which there was no way out, in which people served until they died on duty. Nobody spoke of it, but nobody ever resigned.

They’d had a War on Earth, born in the same year as her, which killed sixteen million people in the time it took for Ace to tie her shoelaces.

The girl could not conceive a war that was infinite. She just understood that she wanted no place in it. She looked around, and saw countless other issues that were buried under silence. There was the fact that Rukongai was a heavily unequal society, in which the majority of its populace had no word in how it was lead; that all the technology remained in the R&D Division’s barracks and no ordinary citizens were encouraged to pursue science, as if being spiritually-average made them stupid; that a military government focused on providing safety was not in itself a bad thing, but that there was little sense in shielding from Hollows people whose quality of life, in the higher districts, amounted to torture, rape, pillage.

Ace was intelligent enough not to voice her concerns. This was a military, where people listened to orders and common sense was subversive.

One of her classmates spoke.

He finished the Academy remarkably fast. Then disappeared.

With a harmless smile on her face, Ace clutched her fists inside and swore that she’d get out. Even more, she’d force them to let her go. She was the class underperformer. Not a slacker – she struggled with homework for hours and days on end, and it was not rare to catch her fallen asleep in the library or burning the midnight oil in the training grounds.

Her swordmanship remained abysmal, her Kido inexistent. Hoho – her only saving grace. With Hakuda, she would twist her wrists and ankles almost as often as landing blows. Her zigzagging theory grades hugged the bottom line. It frustrated Ace how much thought she had to invest into appearing realistically stupid, how little time she could afford to spend dwelling on meaningful subjects like Rukongai history and geography. She was secretly fond of Kidou theory – it got her thinking that the ritualized chanting and traditional forms of the spells actually hid a much greater diversity that was undeservedly ignored.

She couldn’t afford a single mistake. A hopeless student would slip through the cracks where good students would be watched over. In many respects, she was working as much as the overachievers. It took tremendous calculations and immense willpower on her part to stifle her reflexes and go through with defenses that she knew would land her in the infirmary. It took all her strength to struggle with understanding that ‘north’ isn’t ‘up, in the mocking, roaring laughter of the class. More than anything, it was hell to internalize this pretense, to force those fake feelings to be as natural to her as breathing – but necessary, in a school in which teachers could read souls.

When her expulsion from the Shinigami Academy finally came, Ace ran until midnight. Her eyes had grown wider and her limbs had thinned to unhealthy stick-like proportions due to the chronic stress. It seemed surprising that she didn’t start a fire by crossing her ankles.

But now she was free.

5. I’ll do it my way
The stigma of having attended the Shinigami Academy was enough to draw outright hostility from the less reputable elements of the outer districts, and hopeless resentment from the rest. But Ace had been beaten down too many times to stay down. In her blue uniform, she would walk across mountain ranges, reach villages so remote they nearly peeled off the map, and enthusiastically proclaim the benefits of a postal service to fork-waving farmers. Then she went on. She was a force of nature, a grinning demon with a mailbag and a baseball bat. She was strong. Freed from the constraints of the Academy, Ace could finally start to properly develop her abilities. It wasn’t long before local yakuza bosses understood the potential of an independent messenger in the great scheme of things, before people started entrusting her with letters and verbal messages to relatives they hadn’t seen for centuries.

If Shinigami were the good guys, then she, with her socially-responsible, one-man revolution, surely must be the villain. Perhaps a one-man Post Office could do too little to bring order into a chaotic world, but it wasn’t a battle unless you started by losing.

Ace	Core (will not kill)

VERSUS UNDERHAND PITCH (doujinshi) - Claes (probably) – ace

TEMPLATE EXCLUSIVELY FOR BSRP BY KAZ

Last Edit: Sept 14, 2015 11:39:59 GMT by ace

ace


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Ace! Sept 14, 2015 10:45:13 GMT

Post by ace on Sept 14, 2015 10:45:13 GMT

SKILLS

Name:
Class:
Tier:
Type:
Range:
Description:

ITEMS

*Survival kit
*Baseball bat
*Mail bag

REIATSU FEATURES

Rather than the usual flame- or aura-like appearance, the girl’s reiatsu has a particular way of manifesting itself, in the shape of spikes of spiritual energy. They grow longer and more defined with the increase in spiritual pressure, to the point of Ace starting to resemble a hedgehog. Their color is in the range of sky blues.

SPIRIT POWERS

RELEASE APPEARANCE

There’s a little quirk to the girl’s ability, in that it consists of a baseball bat and baseballs. The bat needs a physical support, and ‘summoning’ it actually refers to enforcing this physical support with spiritual particles. Simply put, it takes on a blue glow. Otherwise, it is of the shiny, soft white of ash wood, with a black cloth wrapped around the hilt for easier manipulation. It measures 22 ounces in weight and 32” in length. The projectiles are, normally, 100% reishi. They look like average baseballs, perhaps in the conception of a traditional MMORPG designer: translucent crystal orbs of a light blue, with electric white seams. They can appear in Ace’s palm, if she is not using the bat, or floating in the air otherwise (in a right position to be hit). Even without any special techniques, Ace is able to curve the trajectory of her projectiles slightly. However, using the bat for long-ranged combat decreases versatility, while increasing speed and strength.

This is not a Zanpakutou. There is no figment-of-imagination spirit involved, and no inner world.

SPIRIT ABILITIES

Name: Ace! homerun
Class: Release / Reiryoku techniques
Tier: IV
Type: Defensive/Offensive
Range: Medium (50m)
Description: "The Cero is zooming in towards her...Ace takes her stance, tightens her grip on the baseball bat, and...swings...YES! HOMERUN, ladies and gentlemen, the Cero was shot right back towards the Hollow!"
Ace can do that with theoretically any kind of spiritually-based projectile, limited of course by the gap between her and the opponent’s abilities. You see, her ability is altering the wavelength of spiritual particles. In this particular case, Ace changes the wavelength of spiritual particles which reinforce her bat, thus matching them with the ones of an incoming attack. Basically, her bat momentarily turns into a ‘mirror’ for a certain kind of reishi.
If the block succeeds by at least 1 advantage, the attack is redirected with the same power and additional effects it originally had. In an advantage-draw, the blast is redirected randomly.

Name: Ace! trick pitch/ The Jester
Class: Release/ Reiryoku techniques
Tier: IV
Type: Offensive
Range: Medium (50m)
Description: Since the beginnings of baseball, one of the pitchers' aims was to make the trajectory of the ball as unpredictable as possible for the guys in the opposing team. There are pitches which suddenly fall, move sideways, or even seem to rise. But Ace's trick pitch must be the first one in history who completely disregards common sense and passes through things.
It would probably be illegal in professional baseball, if anyone had been as paranoid as to imagine it. However, it's pretty useful in fighting. Basically, Ace modifies the wavelength of the baseball she is going to throw, in order to nullify the interaction between it and a target/barrier - just like light waves do not interact with radio waves. So the baseball simply passes through the target. For anything and anyone else though, the impact feels identical to one of Ace's very normal projectiles. Ouch. The target can be anything, as long as it’s made of spiritual particles - techniques, constructs, spiritual beings. Note that she can't distinguish between parts of the same body (unless they are additional appendages granted by a release or a technique, such as wings or tails). Also, because Spirit Weapons have a wavelength ‘fingerprint’ very similar to the one of their wielders, it’s impossible for this technique to bypass them while they are being held.
Drawbacks: Can only bypass techniques up to this technique’s tier plus 1. Bypassing high-tiered elements tends to be more taxing.

Name:
Class:
Tier:
Type:
Range:
Description:

MASTERIES
SPIRIT POWERS
Average

ACE BATTER/PITCHER (weapon skill)
Above average

HAND-TO-HAND
Beginner

REIRYOKU TECHNIQUES
Above average

Healing
Placeholder

SOUL RESILIENCE
Beginner

REIATSU CONTROL
Above average

ACE BASERUNNER(stepping)
Above average

Racial perk
To be discovered~

ITEM CREATION
~~MASTERY LEVEL~~