Sheet:Fuyuko Yuuhi

Background

Fuyuko Yuuhi is currently the assistant manager of Human Resources (NOT Inhuman Resources, thanks) at Obsidian, and of course, she knows very well the company's true nature; she couldn't exactly provide effective human resources training, counseling, and memos on effective energy theft, interacting with the public, Do's & Don'ts on threatening your colleages, and when not to murder your superior for a promotion if she didn't. Fuyuko has worked at Obsidian for the last two years, working her way into her position, and for the most part, her job is exactly what a human resources professional for the average evil corporation would be. It's just that she also uses her office time to work on her side job - in her opinion, her actual job - that of an Arbiter, chosen by Balance to ensure that there are those found, trained, and readied on both sides of the thus-far endless conflict between "good" and "evil". Fuyuko didn't accept the job out of any particular passion or belief in the cause, however - she took the job because she wanted to keep whatever fragment of her magic she could and the memories that magic encompassed. Likewise, she doesn't have any particular passion for her work at Obsidian either; the resources at Obsidian are merely her best means of finding, recruiting, and training those children she's tasked with finding.

Let's go back in time. Let's step away from the present, see what came before it.

Both the second and only child of a wealthy family, Fuyuko grew up wanting for nothing but the love of said family. Poor little rich girl, right? Well, sometimes that's life. Sometimes you have all the food, clothes, and items you need, and none of the freedom. Sometimes your childhood is filled with being shuttled from place to place on someone else's schedule, every milestone and achievement measured against a standard you can't compete with, and you live with it. How can you be both the second child and the only child? Oh, easy. When your sister, eight years your elder, dies six months before you're born, and suddenly everything you are is a monument to what another girl could have, would have, should have been. Fuyuko grew up constantly drowning in the shadow of her parents' grief, and their resentment that she lived where her sister had died. As a result, she was a withdrawn and quiet child, preferring to go about her business, and ask forgiveness rather than permission - where some might have tried to go beyond, to prove they deserved their parents' love, Fuyuko was possessed of enough stubborn self-worth to understand that her parents would never be satisfied with her, and that this was not her fault. She wasn't cynical, though. She believed good things could happen, that happiness was real, that life meant more than what she had.

She was twelve years old when she was chosen to be more than a mere rich girl.

Flash forward.

In 2016, Fuyuko was one of a mere double handful of magical girls protecting all of Tokyo. As Lacuna, she and her partner Stellar were the Lux Tenebrae, chosen by Aurora to maintain the balance of the world - she with her powers of darkness and Stellar with powers of light. They were a team and had been for years by the time it all went wrong. She had allied with other magical teens, but for the majority of her career, the one she relied on was Stellar - Kyouka Redacted. It was her and Kyouka, gifted with Aurora's power, best friends, two halves of a whole, but it wasn't just the two of them in each other's world. There was also Chihiro, and most of all, there was Kaito, who Fuyuko was madly in love with. They stopped the apocalypse, a time or two. They saved the city, the country, the world. No one knew. No one but their small, desperate cohort, would ever know.

Kaito died to save the world, and no one knew. No one thanked him. Only a handful of people grieved him. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. It wasn't enough. Kaito had given his life for these people, and the scales weren't balanced. Him for them, it wasn't a fair deal. Deranged by the loss, Fuyuko struck out in the only way that made sense to her, at the time. She murdered Aurora, the mascot-creature who had given she and Kyouka their powers, and stole from him the twelve gems of darkness that represented their nascent kouhai, the future generations that, thanks to her, would never come into existence. With that power and her own, she tried to murder as many of the people he had died for as she could.

Kyouka stopped her. Stellar, stopped her. Fuyuko had known wielding thirteen gems was too much power for a mere mortal, but she had been willing to die for her revenge, to wipe away the people that Kaito had died for, and she'd been willing to kill the other half of her too, if that was what it took. But she couldn't.

For the remaining year and a half of her magical girl career, Fuyuko and Kyouka were blood enemies, clashing countless times in their race to the end. They were among the last standing from their cohort of heroes, and are now, the last two who remember their deeds, heroic and not. When Fuyuko wasn't fighting with Kyouka or trying to rain horror down on the city that had taken the boy she loved, she tried to dissaude other magical teens from following in his footsteps, encouraged them to instead use their power for themselves, because in the end they would be the only ones who cared or remembered what they'd done. It wasn't just that the people they bled for would never know their names - it was that they would never know there had been a person to bleed for them at all.

It could have, should have, ended, when Fuyuko was eighteen and the Fade began to set in, to wisp away her power, to fuzz her memories. It didn't.

Before Fuyuko could forget that there had ever been Lacuna - before Fuyuko could delve into Dark Energy, to ensure she never forgot that there had been Kaito - there was Balance. A deal was offered. A deal was accepted. An Arbiter was born.

Back in the present, Fuyuko has - accepted, her grief. Time rends all wounds to scars, ebbs the worst of the sting from memory. Fuyuko is glad, these days, that Kyouka kept her from massacring all those people. If absolutely forced, she would admit that she was mad in those days, lost to herself. She won't say she was wrong, though - unreasonable, yes, unthinking, yes, wild in her grief, yes, but her longest, bitterest argument with Kyouka is over the fact that her counterpart won't admit that her feelings were understandable, valid, even if her actions were wrong. In the last eighteen months of her career as a Magical Girl, she did things she feels she cannot walk away from, cannot recover from, and believes herself invariably damned. She stays on bad side for those reasons. That, and well. Where there is light, there is darkness. Where there is evil, there is good. Where there is war, there are two sides. Kyouka is on the heroes side. Fuyuko is for the villains.

Personality

Fuyuko is a cynical and at times melancholy person, with few personal friends and fewer personal connections. She cut off contact with her family years ago, and has been content to leave a void where familial bonds might belong. It's not so much that she's unfriendly as she is introverted, and she often feels somewhat estranged from the realities of other people - being one of very few adults aware of magic who isn't a maniacal supervillain will do that to you. She's very aware of being a relic of a bygone era, despite the fact that she's only twenty-three years old, and she watches the current explosion of magic with an almost baffled bitterness - with so many magical people, so many threats, so many heroes responding to the threats, she sometimes can only marvel at how different her life would be, if this had been her experience as a Magical Girl. If, instead of the all of ten of them who had existed for much of her career, there had been the seemingly endless number of heroes crawling out of the woodwork to fight the forces of absolute fuckery that are trying to end the world now.

Still that isn't all there is to Fuyuko, either. She's still a person, after all, you can't be all gloom and doom at all hours. She views her job at Obsidian and the accompanying fat paycheck as the second best thing to come out of her deal with Balance, and she likes to splurge on food, on nice clothes, on little luxuries. You've got to enjoy the ride while it lasts - that's what her time as a magical girl taught her. That's what she regrets, about it all - spending her time fighting for a city that's already forgotten she ever existed, that took all the blood and life Kaito had to offer without blinking, instead of using her magic to her own benefit, making more memories, enjoying her life, their life. She was an almost optimist in her youth, and she's a committed cynic at the ripe old age of 23, and as such she's committed to live free, die hard, have all the fun you want to have. When she's not on the clock, she does what she wants.

The closest relationship she has left is with Kyouka, her partner in heroics, the hero to her villain, the counterweight to her soul. They get together for drinks every now and then (by the fourth or fifth drink, they're raging and shouting at each other, ever at odds on philosophy, but she neer turns down the next invite), call each other now and again.

The other thing in her life are her students, if they can be called that - her counselees, perhaps? The magical kids she finds for Balance, and mentors up, trains up, and sends out, anyway. Despite herself, she ends up caring about them, wanting the best for them. She's mentored a Puella or three, though none have lived long, the odd Device user (her heart always pangs), and every loss has fueled her anger at this whole stupid conflict - she's committed to it, though, because she'd rather do this than forget. She'd rather help damn a thousand kids to this endless war than lose a single memory of Kaito.

Focus

Arbiters are servants of a powerful cosmic entity known as Balance. Balance's agenda is to ensure that neither the Light nor the Dark ever fully wins the Eternal Struggle. It does this by empowering retired magical fighters on both sides and instructing them to mentor the next generation. All Arbiters are former magical girls and boys who have aged out of their original powerset. As an Arbiter, they are given new powers which are largely defensive in nature and can only be used to train or protect those they are guiding. Arbiter powers are generally not offensive, though they can instruct others on how to be. Arbiters are also very astute at sensing and detecting magic, which is how they find new magical fighters to mentor in the first place. Balance does not require Arbiters to be True Neutral, but rather empowers equal numbers of Light and Dark arbiters with the assumption they will largely equal each other's influence and promote the continued war.

Style

If anything can be said to be the unifying 'style' of Arbiters, it is that they all have powers which are almost exclusively defensive or informational. They cannot attack unless in the very last extremes of defense. Their powers tend to consist of being able to sense magic, creating barriers or shields, and being able to teleport or shadowstep or blink, various flavors of magical transportation. There is no common 'look', but rather each Arbiter tends to have a visual style reminiscent of their previous life as a magical fighter, though with adjustments made to show experience and maturity, but this varies from case to case.

In henshin, Fuyuko looks like a creature of the night, her dress dark and monochrome. The black dress features a ruffled skirt, white folds peeking from the hem and hugs her slender form. Beneath her skirts flash in white-and-purple striped leggings, her feet clad in surprisingly study-looking calf-high black boots. Her hair is as dark as the night - when she was a Magical Girl it streamed behind her in a long ponytail, but as an adult, she's cut her hair to a chin length bob. Her skin is pale, a stark contrast to her clothing and hair, but her eyes are dark.

Powers

Fuyuko once had the power of darkness, conceptualized as the void of space, inky darkness that would float like liquid around her hands, hardening into the shape of blades expanding from her hands when she fought. Anything she 'slashed' at with these blades wouldn't be sliced or cut, but simply vanish, disappeared into the void. Many a monster found themselves simply rendered into two or more peieces after a slash of her inky void of space. She still has the power of darkness, but her offensive abilities have been cut away, trapped inside of herself. It's a bit like being on a leash - she knows she has more power, but it's not hers, anymore. Sealed away, as far from her reach as the actual stars in space.

What power Fuyuko actually has left is entirely defensive in nature - she can defend herself with inky black shields, peppered with distant white lights, that simply vanish into the darkness anything thrown at her (to an extent - she can only tank so much before her powers of darkness aren't able to swallow anymore and she gets hit. She can spread her darkness like a liquid shield rising up from her hands, or catch things she shouldn't be able too, like a blade, so long as her hands are sheathed in darkness first.

If her charges are in danger and call for her aid, Fuyuko can summon forth her offensive abilities to defend - but her charges MUST call for her, and her abilities MUST be needed to defend them. When called, she can also teleport to the side of the one who called her. Kyouka uses business cards, and Fuyuko uses customized pens, under the logic that everyone should have a pen on them at all times. Also, they can write on Kyouka's business cards with them, which amuses her.

Fuyuko can sense magic by sound - there's a unique sound associated with magic that she alone can hear, which also helps her identify dark energy vs other sorts of magic, and give her a vague idea of the 'strength' of magic she can encounter. Those lightly tainted or not yet awakened have softer, quieter sounds, while those very powerful have an almost orchaestral presence. Those especially at odds with themselves often sound dischordant; this can give her headaches and frustration.