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(her face was lost in the canopy)
Created on 2009-05-27 21:28:47 (#20321837), last updated 2009-07-05
186 comments received, 142 comments posted
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Basic Info| Name: | Tokiko Mima |
|---|---|
| Website: | Project Daisychain |
Bio(slaves to our destiny)
(I recall a melody)
Name: Tokiko "Key" MimaFandom: Key the Metal Idol
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Species: Human, but Key is under the impression that she is a robot
Sexual Orientation: Unknown
Origin: Outsider from the Mamio Valley in Japan's countryside circa the 1990s.
Wiki Entry: http://daisychainrpg.pbworks.com/Tokiko-%22Key%22-Mima
Fan Soundtrack: Metamorphosis
Appearance: Key, usually seen in long, thin dresses and not much else, is a very underweight girl, so much so that she is anemic and prone to falling unconscious should she exert herself too much or even remain standing up for too long. Her physical characteristics, however, vary depending on the situation. Usually, Key seems to be colored all over in only various shades of gray; her complexion is waxy and pasty like that of an ill person's, her eyes are a metallic purple in appearance and largely unfocused on much of anything, and her short, unruly hair is a very drab light brown, almost gray, in color. However, when Key is driven into her "human" state, she undergoes a metamorphosis that transforms her eyes and hair into a deep, rich brown and her skin to rosy and healthy.
Personality: Key would have been a normal human girl, but the side effect of a experimental procedure done by her scientist grandfather, Murao Mima, and his young assistant, Wakagi Tomoyo, many years ago when she was still a young child left her with an inability to feel or express any emotions at all, turning her into, basically, a walking talking robot. As Dr. Mima was fascinated by dolls and automatons and kept a large homemade collection of them in their house constantly, Key began to believe that she herself was also a robot that Dr. Mima had created, albeit a far more advanced robot than the others in the house. Dr. Mima, for his own reasons, allowed Key to grow up believing this about herself. Key herself is, as one would expect, very robotic; she is blunt to the point of callousness without intending it, speaks in the third person almost constantly, is unable to grasp double meanings in a conversation and takes everything said at face value, and can be very gullible. With little ability to read into nonverbal communication, poor social skills, a habit of not making eye contact with those she talks to, and some peculiar language quirks, Key can and often does come off as somewhat autistic. Although Key desires to be social and have friends, her odd ways of acting wind up getting her teased and largely ignored by those around her. Key's one friend throughout school was a girl named Sakura Kuriyagawa, and when she dropped out to travel to Tokyo and live on her own, it left Key very depressed and with no way to express or understand the sad feelings within herself. Indeed, Key's inability to feel reaches so far inside her that she has never outwardly expressed any emotion at all, even when those around her that she loves suffer or die. When Key's "creator" and grandfather died, Key couldn't even find it within herself to appear saddened, although she knew she was very, very sad about it on some deep-down level.
However, all of these cold, robotic traits are only part of Key's "robot" persona. When the mysterious transformation occurs in Key, it turns her into a young woman filled to the brim with emotion and life. The human Key is the definition of empathy, being easily moved to tears and even physical pain by the suffering of others around her, even those she doesn't know too well. She is fiercely protective of those who might be in danger and more so when the person happens to be one she cares for, and she will not hesitate to smite whatever it is that is endangering the person any way she can. The fact that the human Key is actually a powerful psychic certainly lends to this cause, but Key's outbursts of humanity and power are almost always short-lived, and any usage of her power always throws her right back into her frozen robot persona with no memories of what occurred or what she did while she was "human."
Abilities: Key the robot is physically weak and about as useless as someone can get, offering nothing of value other than the absolute basics of companionship, which is really not too much different than sitting in the same room as a heavily sedated child. Key the human, on the other hand, is a massively powerful psychic capable of amazing superhuman feats. She has within her the power to heal the sick, to levitate and destroy objects in a single breath of air, and even manipulate the boundaries of space and time should her powers grow strong enough. To transform Key the robot into Key the human girl at all, though, requires something interesting and very difficult to find, and that is the love and hearts of a massive amount of people. Key's numb robot persona was created when the geist, a tangible version of the power of the human will and spirit that appears as a pink gelatinous substance, of her deceased mother, Toyoko Mima, was injected into her body in order to keep military researcher and wealthy madman Ajo Jinsaku from getting his hands on any of it. Toyoko's geist was powerful enough to equal that of the geist of 30,000 normal people, having become massively concentrated as it was passed down from generation upon generation of women in that family. That much geist being introduced to Key's body so unnaturally locked Key's psychic human side away, transforming her into the useless robotic personality. The spell could only be broken by Key forming a connection with a massive amount of people - 30,000 people, to be exact - which would transform the geist inside her from having stifling, numbing properties into what it truly is, which is the potential for Key's superhuman abilities. Unfortunately, this property of the geist is its own weakness. If smaller clusters of people place their faith and trust in Key, she might come out of her robotic trance for a small while, but it is only temporary, and before long, she will fall back into the robot persona without any memories of what happened while she was the human girl or even any memories that she became human at all. Since there are nowhere near 30,000 people left in the destroyed Manhattan, Key will never be able to achieve her full potential and will be forever limited to short bursts of humanity and random examples of power, and such a thing will only occur in certain situations where all the necessary factors for the temporary metamorphosis - meaning someone in danger and a large group of people believing in her specifically to overcome the danger - are present.
History: It was before the start of World War II that the brilliant Dr. Murao Mima traveled to Mamio Valley after being convinced by a colleague to visit. Dr. Mima was a scientist who was way ahead of his time, making incredible progress in the field of machines and robotics but never quite managing the breakthrough that he was dreaming of. It seemed that he would never achieve his dream of crafting a fully human-appearing robot - that is, until he saw the youthful Tomiko Mima in Mamio Valley, a 15-year-old girl who was controlling a wooden ceremonial puppet into dancing with her using the will of her mind alone. The villagers of Mamio Valley had always known of Tomiko's special gift and simply assumed it to be a gift from the gods, but Dr. Mima was immediately smitten with both Tomiko's extraordinary power and what it could possibly mean for his research and his work. After confronting Tomiko with a gift of his own masterfully crafted wooden doll, suddenly begging for her hand in marriage, and, shockingly enough, receiving a 'yes' for an answer, the two of them left the countryside valley for Dr. Mima's own home, and it was there that the experiments to try and understand Tomiko's psychic powers began. The experiments went on for years with Dr. Mima growing no closer to achieving his goal of figuring out exactly why Tomiko had her powers or why they worked the way they did, and all the while, Tomiko was growing less and less healthy, and her powers were beginning to fail her. Out of fear for her safety, Dr. Mima called off the experiments. At some point Dr. Mima and Tomiko were forced to move away from their home and go back to Mamio Valley after World War II threatened their lives, and when Tomiko returned to her native town, it somehow rejuvenated her health and psychic strength. It was as though her powers fed off of the love and attention of the villagers. Furthermore, Tomiko became pregnant and had their first and only child, Toyoko Mima, who displayed psychic powers as an infant girl that were even more powerful than her mother's. With renewed interest, Dr. Mima began his experiments again in Mamio Valley, desperately trying to figure out why Toyoko's powers were stronger than that of her mother's and how.
It was around this time that Japanese soldier and scientist Ajo Jinsaku became aware of Dr. Mima's renewed interest in experiments with psychic powers. While Dr. Mima and Tomiko had lived and worked in Tokyo, Ajo had approached them both with promises of hearty compensation for any information Dr. Mima could give him from his tests and experiments with his wife; Dr. Mima, at the time, thought nothing of it and complied, sending all of his research Ajo's way. However, as time passed and Toyoko was born, Ajo became more demanding and pushy for information - information that, frankly, Dr. Mima was not willing to give anymore. Fifteen years after Toyoko was born, Tomiko passed away at 30, her life drained away from her husband's experiments. Toyoko was furious at her father for what he had done, but in her anger, she became sick and threw up something pink and gelatinous - the geist, or very life force, of her mother, which had gone inside of her when Tomiko died, the stuff that was the cause and source of the women's psychic powers. Although all human beings have geist within them, the geist inside of Toyoko was so great that it gifted her with superhuman abilities. Even though Dr. Mima had thus finally found what he was looking for all along and could use this for his robots, or PPORs, he was too devastated and filled with guilt to continue any further. He shut down his experiments entirely, wanting to simply live a peaceful, quiet life in Mamio Valley with his daughter.
Unfortunately, Ajo, who was no longer a soldier but was now a very rich and powerful man directly because of Mima's research, would have none of it.
Ajo's visits became more frequent and threatening, demanding Mima for further data; he became so violent about it that people in the village began to get hurt. Around this time, Toyoko, perhaps experiencing a premonition of what the future would bring, intentionally became pregnant with an unknown man's child and gave birth to a daughter she later died protecting from a fire set by Ajo's henchmen. This child was named Tokiko Mima. Ajo's and Mima's attentions immediately shifted to the newborn girl, expectant that Tokiko would show the same stronger psychic abilities that her late mother did - but Key never displayed any show of psychic power, much to Ajo's anger and the heartbroken Dr. Mima's great relief. He'd lost both his wife and his daughter, and his granddaughter Tokiko was all he had left of the women he loved and held dear. He couldn't bear to lose her too. But luckily for him, Tokiko was not psychic, and thus Ajo lost interest in stalking and harassing Tokiko with his company and employees as he had Toyoko.
The problems of the remaining Mima family would have been over then had it not been for two factors. One, Toyoko somehow expelled a tremendous amount of geist from her body when she died, filling Dr. Mima's lab with enough geist for 30,000 normal people.
Two, a young Tokiko displayed psychic potential for the first time when she saved herself and Dr. Mima from a caving-in building by levitating the pieces of falling debris in midair. Dr. Mima was terrified for Tokiko's life. If Ajo found out that Tokiko was psychic at all, he would come for her and take her away, and if Ajo found out that Toyoko had expelled that much geist - a substance that Ajo Heavy Industries, his company, was processing into a substance called 'gel' and using in their PPOR experiments - they would come for it too. People would be killed, and Tokiko's life was in a huge amount of danger.
With no options left, Dr. Mima did the unthinkable. With the help of his assistant Wakagi, he injected all of Toyoko's geist into Tokiko's body, thus getting rid of the geist and smashing down Tokiko's psychic powers seemingly forever all in one blow. Unfortunately, there was an unseen side effect, and that was that when Tokiko woke up from the procedure, she could no longer feel any sort of emotions. Dr. Mima's choice had turned her into a living robot girl, one who began to call herself not Tokiko anymore, but 'Key.'
That final error in his judgment destroyed poor Dr. Mima. He retreated entirely into himself, refusing to research for anyone or anything anymore, instead living out his live quietly with Key, a perpetually weak and sickly child thanks to the procedure, in Mamio Valley as a man who simply created robotic toys for his household and who never told Key anything about her psychic powers. Key herself eventually began to believe that she, too, was one of the robot toys that Dr. Mima created; for her own safety and so she wouldn't begin to look into what had happened in the past, Dr. Mima not only allowed Key to grow up believing this but fed directly into the delusion by pretending to give her "upgrades" to her body every year on her birthday to "simulate aging," when in reality he would only render her unconscious for large periods of time and allow her body to grow on its own.
Key's classmates regarded her as a bizarre autistic girl with strange delusions of being a robot. Despite Key's desire to make friends, only one person in the entire school wanted anything to do with her, a girl of similar age named Sakura Kuriyagawa. However, Sakura dropped out of school at some point to move to Tokyo and try and make it on her own, leaving Key alone and lonely.
Life continued on normally for her for a little while longer until one day while at school, Key was informed that Dr. Mima had died.
Key didn't seem to react on a surface level, being unable to, but ran all the way home immediately, meeting Dr. Mima's assistant Wakagi at the door of her home and seeing that it was true - Dr. Mima was dead, and in his last moments, he'd recorded an audio cassette for her to listen to with a very important message on it. The message told Key a number of lies, one being that Dr. Mima's death had been an accident when, in reality, Ajo and his muscle Sergei, or codename "D," had shown up at the Mima residence and tried to beat the information of where Toyoko's powerful geist was out of him, ultimately failing and leaving Dr. Mima for dead in his own home.
The second lie told to Key over the cassette was that she herself was going to die soon. Without Dr. Mima's body replacements for her, Key's internal battery would eventually run out, and she would shut down forever. However, this lie lead into the one important truth Dr. Mima had for his granddaughter, and that was that Key could turn herself from robot to human forever if she were to go out into the world and win the hearts and minds of a tremendous amount of people. If Key could make 30,000 friends, Toyoko's stifling geist inside her would be reversed, and Key would be turned into a real human girl for good.
With her mission in mind, Key immediately left for Tokyo, a place with more than enough people for her to befriend. However, Key hadn't thought any of this through very well and had walked into Tokyo in the dead of night, alone and vulnerable, and so she was nearly kidnapped almost immediately, first by two scuzzy thugs, and then by Tamari Seiichi, the owner of a porn studio called V&A who immediately tried to coerce and force Key into producing a pornographic film of her own, saying that she would easily be able to make 30,000 friends this way.
It was then that Sakura Kuriyagawa herself reappeared on the scene, as she was just so happening to deliver a pizza to that exact address and found Key inside the place. Pulling her out, she made a run for it with Key in tow, racing the two of them all the way back to her small apartment and bolting them inside. Sakura was seemingly thrilled to see Key again after all these years of being separated, but in reality began to feel a claustrophobic sense of anxiety now that the needy, useless Key was back in her life and depending on her so heavily now, as Sakura had offered to house Key for the time being despite having to work three jobs herself just to pay for her apartment. With another mouth to feed, Sakura put on a happy face for Key's sake but, deep down, felt resentment towards the girl and her quirky way of behaving - and now this bizarre impossible quest of hers to make 30,000 friends.
It was around here that Key's first flirtation with humanity occurred. Tamari wouldn't leave Key, Sakura, and Sakura's strong yet oblivious love interest, Shuichi Tataki, alone, wanting Sakura now to star in one of his adult videos. Tamari and his assistant followed the group of them to a restaraunt in secret when suddenly two massive PPORs, both controlled by the direct willpower of D, sprang up from out of nowhere, killing Tamari's assistant in one blow and nearly killing Tamari in their mysterious search for Key herself. Tamari was nearly thrown from the rooftop of the restaurant and was only saved when he snagged onto Key and almost pulled her over to certain death along with him. With a tremendous group of people looking on and shouting words of encouragement to Key, with all eyes focused on her, the transformation took place and Key, for a few vital moments, became a powerful human girl. She threw Tamari back onto the rooftop to safety, then levitated into the sky and, with one blow of her breath, exploded the attacking PPORs before turning back into her robot persona and being saved from falling herself and being taken back to Sakura's home by Wakagi, who had appeared seemingly out of thin air. Upon waking up, Key, now a robot again, couldn't recall any of the incident or what she had done.
Sakura was, understandably, immensely disturbed by what had happened. In an attempt to at least be a good friend and gain something from the relationship at the same time, Sakura suggested that Key start thinking of ways to make that many friends in terms of jobs that would also help pay for the apartment. After extensive and mostly fruitless thinking (and a peculiar encounter at the front door of Sakura's home with a man named Janome trying to sell her a strange religion), Key saw Miho Utsuse, the famous pop idol, on the television one sleepless and fateful night and resolved to somehow become an idol singer herself.
Sakura did want to help Key, but eventually, Key's idiosyncrasies, uselessness, the fact that the girl was being followed around now by bizarre gray robots in tan trench coats, and now weird powers and transformations all got to her. Sakura threw her friend out of her apartment, wanting nothing more to do with the weirdness that followed Key around wherever she went. With nowhere else to go, Key showed up on the doorstep of Janome, or Prince Snake-Eye, as he called himself in his religion, the Church of the Golden Snake Savior. Janome had been present in the crowd when Key had transformed and saved Tamari, and now he wanted Key to use her incredible powers for his benefit, in order to make his cult look even better to its followers. Two of the members there had a sick child who was dying from a huge, inoperable hole in one of his internal organs, and Janome begged Key to use her powers to heal the child.
Although Key the robot had no idea what Janome was talking about and didn't think she could do what he was asking her to do, with the entire cult pleading with their god and praying at Key's feet, the collective attention of the Janome's people metamorphosed Key into the human girl once again. She was able to fully heal the dying boy with one kiss, though doing so put a massive strain on her own body and made her violently ill, so much so that she fell unconscious and returned to her robot mental state almost instantly.
Out of nowhere, D burst into the chapel and began to kill people, desperate to get his hands on Key now that he'd seen what she could do and return her to Ajo. Wakagi, who'd been tracking Key with a device that could read and pinpoint the location of her geist output, managed to get into the room and fight off D, saving Key and the rest of Janome's followers. Once again, after regaining consciousness, Key remembered nothing of either the episode or her display of power.
After hearing about what had happened, Sakura felt horribly guilty about throwing Key out on the street and into the hands of such weird people and offered to take her back into her apartment, an offer Key accepted her friend's offer of renewed hospitality with both thanks and an apology for bothering Sakura so much in the first place. To help her out further, and to help ease her own guilty conscience, Sakura became determined to help Key gain 30,000 friends and thus put together a two-person agency, "Production Key," with herself as the main manager in order to get Key work as a singer, actor, dancer - something. Unfortunately, Key the robot didn't really have a lick of talent about her, and each audition ended in failure until she attended one dance audition where a certain Hikaru Tsurugi, prodigy of all arts and media and a worker for Production Minos, the studio that shot Miho Utsuse herself to stardom, saw Key transform into a brief glimmer of her human self under all the stress she'd been putting herself under. Curious about what he saw that day at the audition, Tsurugi met with Production Key - meaning Sakura and Key in nice suits - at a later date where Key blurted out to him in a matter-of-fact tone that she was a robot seeking out 30,000 friends in order to change into a human. Utterly fascinated by what seemed like a fantastic delusion on Key's part, Tsurugi demanded to work with Key, wanted to crack that hard robot exterior and mold the soft insides into a smash hit idol. Such a thing would be the challenge of the century for a mad genius like Tsurugi, and their one-on-one training began, training which bordered on emotionally abusive as Tsurugi struggled and screamed in an effort to make Key feel - and succeeded, forcing Key into shedding tears.
As a reward, Tsurugi complied with one request Key had made, which was to see Miho Utsuse live at her latest concert. Driving her there, Tsurugi and Key met up with Sakura and Shuichi, who had also come to see Miho live.
Key had seen Miho live once before and was captivated by the performer but quickly fell into a hallucination in which Miho was reaching up from the stage at her. When Key tried to give the hallucination of Miho one of the roses she'd brought with her, a real rose shot onstage like a bullet and impaled the real singing Miho right through the chest, similar to how a rose had impaled the head of one of the PPORs that attacked Tamari in their search for Key back at the restaurant. The concert was ruined. Miho was mysteriously torn off the stage by mechanics, and the entire production was canceled. Shuichi, the president of the Miho fanclub, found this whole affair extremely bizarre, as nothing about it even appeared in the newspapers the next day.
This time, Key and Tsurugi arrived late, and Miho was no longer performing on stage but had been replaced with a redhaired singer in bondage gear, Beniko Kemori. After a bizarre bit of coaxing from Tsurugi, Key transformed again, leaping up onto the stage, and when the audience all began to scream at her to get down, Key transformed even further into a human and everything went to hell. The backup musicians all fell apart and crumpled. Beniko, who had been so full of life and song and motion, dissolved into jerking machinery and imploded in a burst of gel. The Beniko that had been on stage had been a robot all along, an android controlled offstage by the real Beniko.
The theater dissolved into panic with people pushing and shoving to get out and away from the chaos. Key collapsed once more onstage. Tsurugi was in a state of ecstatic mania, screaming that it had all been a success. Sakura was terrified, having no idea what it was she'd gotten herself into with offering shelter to this robotic girl that just killed a woman robot thing onstage.
Behind the scenes, many character working together figured out that the fact that Beniko onstage being a robot was directly the fault of the madman soldier scientist Ajo himself. Production Minos, the company that Tsurugi worked for, was a company owned by Ajo Heavy Industries directly and was, overall, and experiment to see how well they could pass off a robot as a flesh and blood human being. Not only had Beniko been a robot, but the Miho Utsuse that had been performing all those years had been an android as well, the real Miho being backstage and gravely sick from being forced to operate the robot constantly, as operating PPORs is a massive strain on one's own brain as well as geist supply, as the gel-driven PPORs can only be operated by the donor of their gel. The constant draining of geist to be made into gel from Miho was slowly killing her, but Ajo worked her nearly to death regardless, determined to push the limit for the sole purpose of seeing how far the envelope could be pushed in the first place. Tsurugi had worked with and even had an affair with the original Miho, but after a certain point, he never heard from her again. Assuming he'd been snubbed and unaware of what was truly going on, he wanted to take Key and mold her into something even greater than Miho as revenge.
But on a conscious level, Key the robot remained entirely unaware of all of this. All she wanted to do was become human herself through the power of all her friends, and when she woke up from her long coma that came on after the incident with the Beniko PPOR at the concert, a series of unfortunate misunderstandings and being in the wrong place at the wrong time deprived her of her most dear friend - Sakura. While she was out, Sakura had been chased down by a PPOR controlled by D, captured, and had every last ounce of geist drained from her body. By the time the crew found her, it was too late, and Sakura was only able to offer her childhood friend a few faint words of encouragement before dying in Key's arms. Despite being utterly crushed, Key was only able to express one outburst of sadness before locking down yet again, the human side of Key slowly realizing that feeling things was dangerous and, perhaps, wasn't worth achieving after all.
Key, Wakagi, and Shuichi, with the help of Prince Snake-Eye Janome, a reformed Tamari, and a dying, insane Tsurugi who'd also had most of his gel drained out after a torturous encounter with the Miho PPOR, all set out for the headquarters of Ajo Heavy Industries where a final Miho Utsuse concert was taking place. They would out the Miho PPOR for what it was, expose Ajo and D and their plot to drain human geist and use the produced gel for their own cold purposes, and finally allow Key to metamorphose into a human girl once and for all. Key, with her quickly emerging powers from the growing love and trust of the other's, manipulated the building's security system into allowing them in, though not before losing Tsurugi, the one person who forced her to feel, in an elevator accident on their way up. Key, quickly losing strength, tried to direct Wakagi to where they needed to go, but blacked out from weakness and reverted back to her robot self halfway through.
She didn't expect to wake up in Manhattan, fully locked back down into her robot self and utterly devoid of those she needed the most.
ConnectInterests (17):
becoming human, blowing up ppors, concerts, incoherent canon, lullabies, making friends, miho utsuse, production key, roses, sakura kuriyagawa, singing, standing, staring, staring some more, surprise badassery, tsurugi despite his abuse, way too much geist
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