[Name:] Haruko Jester
[Nicknames:] The Fool (Fool), Jester
[Age:] 17
[Gender:] Female
[Species:] Human; Awakened
[Description:] Haruko is half Japanese, and takes after her Asian side rather than her Caucasian lineage. She wears her thick, shiny black hair short, hugging her head to curve under her chin ever so slightly, stopping at the nape of her neck in the back and settling into uneven bangs over her forehead that she often ties back with a strip of cloth that she has as a sorry excuse for a bandanna. Her skin is naturally rather pale, but given plenty of time outdoors she will tan very quickly and much darker than her usual skin tone.
Haruko's eyes are a pleasant almond shape, and are a pearly gray in color that varies in shade from a soft dove hue to deep, thunderstorm color. They are fringed by thin black lashes that are made rather hard to see by the way her eyelids fold. She has fairly high cheek bones, which complement the other angles of her face.Her heart-shaped face's features are in very solid control of the mind behind them. Despite Haruko's impulsive character, every muscle that twitches, every line that forms, Haruko meant it to be there. It is thus very hard to read her unless she wants you to. She has mastered every possible way to wrinkle her button nose, exactly which angles emphasize which characteristics in her softly angular jaw, how to make her usually rather thin mouth look full and pouty with the right expression.
Miss Jester is a short young woman, standing at a very modest height of 5'2. Despite this, she almost never wears heels as she sees them as impractical and stupid. Her shape is slim but athletic. She has thin limbs, but the little amount of muscle her body carries is honed and trained to its fullest potential from years of gymnastics and martial arts. Haruko isn't very curvy at all; her bust is, like her height, rather modest, around a 32 B, though that is a very recent development that was all too slow in the coming (though Haruko personally considers "boobs a pain in the ass" in her own words.) Her hips are narrow, like her waist, and lead down to muscular legs, good joints (knees, etc) sculpted ankles and size 3 feet.
Haruko is an oddity where clothing comes in. She sees no reason to dress modestly, as long as all the essentials are covered, and can thus often be seen in tank tops, short shorts, the like. She highly dislikes anything that inhibits her movement though, so if she wears it, there's no question that she can to a front handspring or climb a mountain in it. She likes sneakers in lewd colors, and the higher the top on the shoe the better. Arm warmers and fingerless gloves, the like, are often observed on Haruko's upper appendages. She likes makeup but never wears it. Her face remains free of glasses or braces; she had to have a few teeth pulled to space things out, but other than that her teeth are quite healthy and well-positioned in her mouth.
[Personality:] On first meeting Haruko, were it not for her less than womanly appearance, it would be very easy to mistake her for being older than she is. When interacting with people she doesn't know, Haruko will go into a very neutral, mature state that she will hold until she maps out the nature of the person's character; whether they have any authority over her, if they are serious or the kind of person she can joke around with, if she likes them or doesn't, all those kinds of things. Once she has decided what a person is like, at least as far as she is concerned, she will begin to sport a more definitive character. Sometimes this process takes a few minutes, other times it's less than a second.
One aspect of Haruko's character that follows her everywhere is her blanket thick skin. Though the seventeen-year-old will make a show of being pissed off (usually a comical scene, if it's nothing major) very little that others have to say will hurt her. Haruko is very self-confident, and though she knows her flaws, she's comfortable with them for the most part, and thus anything somebody might have to say badly about her is either a lie or old news.
Haruko's super objective in life is to have fun. She loves and hates people. Always the advocate of the strange and amusing, as that's what she is herself, meeting quirky and odd people on the street always makes her day. However, there are a lot of prejudiced, stupid, or just jackassish people in the world, and whenever Haruko meets them, she makes it her business to talk them down, especially in the case of those with undue prejudices. The way she sees it, there are so many things you could hate about a person, if you're going to be hateful, so why waste it on things that a person can't help, like their race or religious choice or sexual preference or whatever?
Haruko doesn't often display it very openly when she's just having a good time, but she can be extremely articulate when it comes to arguments, very good at shutting down another person's rhetoric. Haruko's anger can go one of two ways. She will either become extremely angry, inarticulate, and prone to hurting things, be they inanimate objects or people. Or, she can breathe, and focus her anger into a very small piece of her and make it much bigger. For example, her voice. Haruko tends to curse excessively when angered, and though the cursing will be intertwined with very logical, inteligent thought, it gets people's attention. Haruko's words are often a very direct outlet of her anger.
Most of what Haruko does is big and exaggerated. It's part of who she is. But she isn't emotional. She isn't easliy upset, and her feelings are often very black and white. It makes things much easier for her. When she does feel something very strong, she feels it, takes the time she needs, then deals and tucks it away. This way of dealing with things has allowed her to not dwell on things that she can't change, and when revisiting things that caused her great emotional stress or uproar in her mind, they don't affect her much. This has given her a disconcerting habit of answering questions very matter-of-factly and without emotion where others would show a little more...something. For example, if asked about her mother, she'll tell you that Rose died of cancer when she was half a year old without batting an eye. Once it's in the past, it just isn't a big deal to Haruko anymore.
Haruko spent the first sixteen years of her life living in Berkeley, California, and spent quite a lot of time hopping around Telegraph and Shattuck, or just taking the bart over to San Francisco, so her weirdness spectrum is much different than a lot of people's. Most often, if someone is being stared at for their clothes or their hair or something they're saying, Haruko would just blink and say, "what?" because she's probably seen something weirder. Or, if she hasn't, she'll most likely embrace it. "Normal is for people who are too scared to be different or for people who just don't know any better." That's her creed.
Haruko loves all things circus-y. She has honed her skills in rope climbing, juggling (she can juggle almost anything at this point), and the gymnastics part of circus arts. This has caused her to pick up a sort of persona around the people she knows (or doesn't know) that was half adopted, half given. The fact that her last name is Jester (by coincidence) helps. Some people call her The Fool, others just Jester. Few people call her Haruko these days except for her father, who she doesn't speak to much. Haruko also loves to be slick. Slick in the sense of what people would have called siick around sixty years ago, that is. Hats are one of Haruko's favorite things, in particular fedoras, bowlers, and top hats. She knows all the hat tricks, and thinks she would have made a better man than most men in the '20s. She also likes card games, and is very good at poker, as well as most games that require concentration and reflexes.
Haruko doesn't like to classify herself as one kind of person or another. She likes to surprise people, but doesn't go against who she is to do so. It's fairly easy for her to move among social groups, but almost everyone she hangs out with ends up being a few cookies short of a batch, rather like her. Though she's seen things, she doesn't know anything about the other species. For all she knows she's just starting to go a little more loopy than before.
[Occupation:] Ice cream parlor clerk/street performer
[Extra:] {My intention was to have Haruko start her existence on this forum as already Awakened, but I haven't seen any amendments made to the Human application to suit this, and haven't seen any Awakened applications to use as an example. Was it maybeb the admins' intention to have all Awakened folks start the game out as Sleepers?}
[Parents:]
Samuel Jester- {father}{living} - Sam and Haruko have a less than peachy relationship, but they put up with each other when they have to, and Haruko does appreciate that he did a pretty good job raising her even after her mother died.
Rose Hyuuga-Jester- {mother}{deceased} - Rose died of cancer when Haruko was only a few months old.
[Siblings:] N/A
[Other Members:]
Uncle Edwin- {mother's side}{deceased} - committed suicide shortly after Rose's death.
Uncle Nathan- {father's side}{living} - Haruko has a better relationship with her uncle than with her father. She goes to him for advice when she needs it.
Jii-chan- {mother's side}{living} - Haruko's maternal grandfather. Lives in Michigan. Haruko doesn't often see him, and hasn't since she was about twelve.
Baa-chan- {mother's side}{deceased} - Haruko's maternal grandmother. Haruko is named after her. Died in her sleep before Haruko was born.
[History:] Haruko "The Fool" Jester was born some seventeen years and four months ago in Berkeley, California. Haruko's mother, Rose, died when Haruko was only around eight months old of breast cancer. The tumor progressed unnoticed for much longer than it should have by Rose because she thought that it was a clogged milk duct. By the time they identified it for what it was, doctors did as much as they could for her, but she died. Her father worked as a chemistry professor at Cal, and enlisted the help of various babysitters, though he stopped hiring them when Haruko was around seven, deciding that she was old enough to start staying at home alone. Haruko thus learned to take care of herself from an early age, and has retained that independence as she has grown. In fact, she got so used to her father's long hours of absence and the fact that during that time she was able to break the rules he had laid down for her that she found herself waiting for him to leave so that she could go back to what she liked better.
Because Haruko's father wasn't often around to give Haruko rides anywhere, and few of her friends lived near enough to walk, Haruko often wouldn't spend much time with her friends at school on the weekends and such. This made her very bored, and Haruko spent a lot of her time climbing everything that would support her weight (and quite a few tree branches that wouldn't, inspired by her black cat Sumi.) When Haruko was around ten, she would start leaving the house to explore the city while her father was at work during the day, and developed her own functional set of street smarts. She spent a decent amount of time people-watching on Telegraph, and got to know all the regular hobos of Telegraph. She found her secret (though admittedly entirely public) community more of a family than her father, because people who had no relation to her whatsoever wound up knowing her better--and being confided in by her more--than he did. Not to mention that while her father supported her in the gymnastics lessons he paid for, he did not like her more undignified tendencies, since it had been very hard to earn respect among the community of professors he surfed with a name like Jester.
Any and all other adults in her life who she had met and come to know were, obviously, very relaxed about what she did with her time. Haruko was like a tiny adult to them--while they taught her things and helped her learn, they had no jurisdiction over her. Haruko became very used to being able to come and go as she pleased, and as she got older and her father started to want to keep more track of her, this became more and more trouble to get around. More and more often Haruko had to tell complex lies to maintain her lifestyle. This didn't bother her much, as she got good at it very quickly, but still, it was a lot of trouble. Furthermore, as she finally started getting into her teenage years (though she'd felt like a teenager for a long time coming), she started seeking more diligently time with school friends. Hardly any of her friends from elementary school had she stayed in contact with, and was determined for that not to be so with her friends from middle school. However, finding scheduled time with them that her father actually knew about was difficult, as he was the kind of man who wanted everything planned at least two days in advance--and that just didn't work a lot of the time. So, she was more driven to have her father believe that when he was out, she was home, not roaming the streets or going to whoever's house she felt like.
It definitely helped that she maintained an A average in all her classes. Haruko wasn't especially challenged in most of her classes, so it was an easy A, but she made sure her father didn't know that, because if he got involved, she'd actually have to work for a change, which she didn't like the idea of. Everything was going the way that Haruko herself had orchestrated it--right under her dad's nose--which made her thoroughly convinced that for all Dad's degrees and pressed suits and papers getting published and hardcore chemistry classes, she was the one who'd come out on top in life; she was the smarter one in the long run. She didn't get along with him very well either. He often saw Rose in Haruko, which pained him, but he also couldn't seem to accept that though she was intelligent, she just wasn't interested in science. Haruko liked to write about people, about fantastical things that happened to ordinary people, how ordinary things became fantastical to the people who loved them. Cynical, sharp, different stories and the occasional poem. Her dad just didn't get it, and her increasingly eccentric nature exasturbated the chafing of their characters in the house. They started talking less and less, until all they really said to each other was what absolutely had to be said.
And then, the Great Rift. Sam received an offer for a very short-term position in UC Santa Cruz during the summer, and brought Haruko with him. She was extremely displeased with this, but found things to do there, comforting herself that she'd be back in her beloved Bay Area soon. She was about to go into sophomore year in highschool, everything would work out. Except then UC Santa Cruz made a more permanent school year offer, offering him immediate tenure that Berkeley just hadn't been able to give him yet. He took it without even consulting Haruko, and when he told her they were moving permanently, not even going back to get their things, they had a rather large falling out.
A very, very large falling out. Haruko declared that her father was dead to her now, to which he responded that this didn't seem like it would make much of a difference. Haruko tried to change her dad's mind, but it didn't work. Haruko steeled herself for sophomore year, and swore to herself that thes second she graduated from highschool she'd go back where she belonged and go to Berkeley for her bachelor's. Haruko avoided her dad as much as she could, and still does.
Haruko's a junior now, and has found a place for herself in Santa Cruz. She's even settling down a little. But you know Haruko--very used to coming and going as she pleases. Which means she can't be nailed down, which means that something'll change soon. What it will be, time will only tell.