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Applications Two
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Sei "Seizaburo Kamiya" Tominaga | Kaze Hikaru | Reserved
Contact Info:
Other Characters Played: None.
Preferred Apartment: None.
Character Name: Sei Tominaga, though she goes by Seizaburo Kamiya and has been passing herself off as a boy for a couple of years.
Canon: Kaze Hikaru
Canon Point: Right after her return from the special mission to investigate Ryoma Sakamoto, but before she has been informed that Hijikata is moving her from the first troop to the third troop because he feels like Okita is getting too attached (end of volume 20).
Background/History: Kaze Hikaru on wikipedia; Sei Tominaga on the Kaze Hikaru wiki. Neither article is very detailed past what you'd read on the back of the first volume (except for the wikia article which talks about some things from before Sei was born), so I'll make an attempt at briefly summarizing what has happened to Sei up until her canon point. Feel free to ignore it if you feel the links give you enough to work with!
Sei's father, who was a western-style doctor from Edo who moved to Kyoto five years previously, and her older brother are killed by samurai from the Choshu clan; she survives thanks to intervention by Souji Okita, who has recently arrived in Kyoto along with the others who will become members of the Mibu Roshigumi. The Choshu set fire to the house and Sei suffers burns, but lives and swears revenge. In 1863, she disguises herself as a boy - going so far as to shave her head into a masculine hairstyle - and attempts to enlist in the Mibu Roshigumi under the name of Seizaburo Kamiya (Kamiya being her mother's maiden name; Seizaburo being a boyish version of her name used as a nickname for her by her older brother). Though she possesses little in terms of technique, she catches the eye of Okita and Toshizo Hijikata because of how light she is on her feet (as she manages not to dodge every strike thrown her way until she faces off against Heisuke Toudou). After it is revealed that "he" is only fifteen, a combination of approval from Kamo Serizawa and her own quick talking prompts Hijikata to allow Seizaburo Kamiya to join the troop. Sei, as Seizaburo, intends to use her membership with the Roshigumi as a way to take her revenge against the men who killed her father, as they were bound to come across the Choshu at some point in the course of their duties.
However, after her first night with them, she is disillusioned by how some of the men (cough, Harada, cough, Serizawa, cough, Nagakura...) act when not on active duty, and she attempts to escape. While doing this she runs into a spy from Choshu who was also attempting to escape, but the pair of them are discovered by Okita, who kills the spy; Sei realizes that much of the behavior she found so distasteful was an act to catch the spy off-guard, but because she
is fucking stubbornhad committed to leaving, attempts to fight Okita and escape. Of course she fails, but their fight is cut short when Okita accidentally cuts open her top and realizes she's a girlbecause her crossdressing was convincing enough for everyone to believe it until they saw boob, take notes, Chizuru Yukimura. After hearing her out, Okita decides that he will overlook the fact that she is a girl, because "no girl would go so far as to shave her head for revenge" - his way of saying that he will accept her as a man and allow her to continue with the troop if she so wishes. And so Sei casts her lot with the Mibu Roshigumi.She begins to get to know the members of the Mibu Roshigumi and meets Hajime Saitou, who in addition to being a friend of her brother Yuuma's, also bears a striking resemblance to him in terms of appearance, voice, and mannerisms - to the point that she initially mistakes him for her brother even though he is dead. She becomes acquainted with the day-to-day workings of the troop and works to hone her skills, often discovering that she still has quite a bit to learn, not just in terms of swordsmanship but also in terms of how the world works and why her comrades live the way they do. She also meets Akesato, who now works as a prostitute in Shimabara but was once called Satono and once was involved with Sei's brother, Yuuma.
Serizawa believes that "Seizaburo" has fallen in love with Akesato, and to help him "be a man" insists that "he" come along to Osaka while investigating rumors that people are using the Mibu Roshigumi's name to extort money from merchants, so that Serizawa can take "him" along to the red-light district in Osaka and help "him" get more experience. The experience Sei gets is not what is expected - in Osaka she encounters the man who was responsible for the deaths of her father and her brother, and has the chance to take her revenge. However, because she has learned that he has a wife and a child on the way, she allows him to live but says that he must repent and support his family - though he kills himself instead for the sake of his samurai honor. After this, she tries to leave the Roshigumi (...again) but after speaking to Saitou, she realizes that she wants to protect Okita (Sei you sweet summer child he doesn't need your protection) and decides to return to Kyoto with them.
It is not too long after this incident that Serizawa meets a woman named Oume, and while watching him struggle to come to grips with his feelings for her, Sei starts to really respect Serizawa for the first time. Unfortunately, his extravagances continue after Oume comes to live with him, and after the Mibu Roshigumi is given the name "Shinsengumi," the order to assassinate him - in order to protect the good name of the Aizu clan and the shogunate - is given. Sei is initially unaware of this order, but discovers it (and that Okita played a part in it) after encountering Okita on his way back from the assassination. This time, she does not try and run away from the Shinsengumi, but tries to figure out what it means to be a true bushi. Not too long after this, she is faced with a dilemma when one of the other troop members is sentenced to seppuku and attempts to escape; she almost lets him go, but catches up with him and executes him for violating the bushido.
There are a lot of things that happen from there, and Sei learns many lessons from various members of the Shinsengumi - most often from Okita and Saitou. The next major historical event that Sei is involved with is the Ikedaya affair, during which Okita is felled and Sei, in a blind rage, blocks a strike with her hachigane before killing some of the other combatants. After this, she is instructed to take Okita back to headquarters and she stays there until he wakes up, at which point she returns to the Ikedaya to help with the rest of the raid.
(...brief, I said, and we haven't even gotten to the end of volume six yet I am so sorry. I'm going to summarize like crazy starting from now because no one wants to read this much and should you need clarification or expansion on anything I can definitely do that.)
As time goes on, Yamanami becomes involved with Akesato, who has been helping Sei keep up with her disguise by allowing her to visit on a "three-day indulgence" once a month to hide her period from the men in the Shinsengumi. Yamanami, being honest, can't bring himself to go around seeing "Seizaburo Kamiya's lover" behind his back, and to try and keep him from confronting Sei, Akesato tells Yamanami that "Seizaburo" is actually a girl. Of course, Yamanami freaks the fuck out, but Akesato convinces him to keep it a secret; he does insist on having Sei wear chainmail under her uniform as extra protection, but this works to Sei's advantage because it helps to hide her feminine figure. There is also a reorganization of the troop and Sei becomes Yamanami's page (look okay now all we need is for another crossdresser to become Kondou's page and she, Chizuru, and Sei can be a matched set).
A man named Kashitarou Itou joins the Shinsengumi to varying reactions from the men. Sei is not overly fond of him, as he is far too touchy-feely for her liking, and she, Okita, and Yamanami devise ways to keep Sei out of his reach. There is a fiasco where Itou is to move into Yamanami's room, but at the last minute Hijikata transfers Sei into the first troop, to be under Okita's direct command. At that point Yamanami and Itou begin to room together and Yamanami becomes caught between a rock and a hard place when Kondou and Itou both try to get him to convince the other that their views are the correct ones.
This situation escalates when a friend of Itou's is executed and Itou blames the shogunate for it. Yamanami, who at this point has begun to see some of the points Itou is trying to make, realizes that he cannot change Kondou's mind and instead chooses to leave the troop, give Akesato's family the money to free her from her servitude in Shimabara, and then allows Okita to bring him back to commit seppuku. Sei is devastated by this, as she and Yamanami had grown incredibly close.
Not long after this, the Shinsengumi's headquarters moves to the Nishi Honganji temple. Sei, who is starting to look more and more womanly as she gets older, struggles to keep her gender a secret; she finds help in the form of Ryojun Matsumoto, a doctor who had been a friend of her father's. When he comes to do an medical inspection of the Shinsengumi, he tells everyone that "Seizaburo Kamiya" is suffering from a rare disease called feminitis, which changes a man's body into that of a woman's. Between his word and the fact that he cited "western research" (which was really just him making things up), everyone comes to believe it because none of them would ever expect a respected physician to lie for the sake of a girl.
With her position in the Shinsengumi secure, Sei goes about her life as a member of the troop. She trains, she goes to Osaka to help with a situation where Sanjuro Tani was tarnishing the name of the Shinsengumi by being too harsh, and she gets further and further involved with the Shinsengumi's affairs. This comes to a head when Okita has her dress up as a woman in order to take a photograph because it might become a keepsake for one of them in the future; Hijikata finds this photograph and is inspired to have "Seizaburo" dress as a woman to gather information on Ryoma Sakamoto, who they have received word about indicating that he is an assassin. She infiltrates an inn he is said to be staying at using an alias, going by the name Sei Matsumoto, and comes to the conclusion that while he does have something to do with the government, he is not an assassin. It is then that she returns to the Shinsengumi and begins living as Seizaburo Kamiya again.
The date of this "special mission" isn't given in the manga (at least, not that I recall; I would have to double-check next time I had access to the books, because the scans online are not complete), but it is likely that historically this is taking place in either late 1865 or early 1866, as Tani's death (said to have happened in 1866) and Itou's defection (in 1867) have not yet occurred.
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Sei is a person who has a tendency to take things to extremes. When she puts herself into something, she puts herself into it wholeheartedly. For example, when she decided to seek revenge on the man who was responsible for the deaths of her father and her older brother, it wasn't enough for her to try and contribute funds to track him down and have someone else take care of him - she felt she had to avenge her family with her own two hands. And rather than confront him as a woman, she confronted him as a man, going so far as to shave her own head, learn to live as a boy, and enlist in the Mibu Roshigumi in order to do so. She is certainly not the kind of person to do anything halfway. If she's going to do something, she's going to do it to the very best of her abilities and heaven help anyone who tries to get in her way.
She is most definitely hotheaded and impulsive, something that anyone who is close to her notes. Okita despairs over her tendency to rush headlong into things and get in over her head, and though she has matured some over time, some things never change. One of them is Sei's willingness to involve herself with things that don't necessarily concern her. We see this in her interactions with pretty much everyone - she directly involves herself with Serizawa's attempts to woo Oume, makes up her mind that Hijikata's book of haiku must belong to a troop member named Tachibana who turns out to be a Choshu spy and tries to kill her when she corners him to return it, follows Kondou to some of his meetings after she grows suspicious of his motives during them and then starts making him medicine and healthy snacks to help with his stomach problems, gets involved with Saitou and Yukiya when she thinks there's something going on between them... the list goes on and on. She is the type of person that, when she gets to know someone, has trouble simply letting them be, which in many cases gets her into heaps of trouble.
She has a temper and she is not so good at hiding her feelings - people describe her as an open book for a reason. She is not so good at disguising it when she dislikes someone, though she has gotten notably better at it during her years with the Shinsengumi; still, there are often times when someone says that someone she doesn't like is likable, and she responds with something along the lines of "What's to like about that no-good, two-faced, piss-poor excuse for a bushi?!" She makes up her mind about others very easily, often going off first impressions.
But it is not impossible for her to learn. She's the type of person who is capable of learning something every day, and who actively seeks out things to learn. Spending time with the Shinsengumi has taught her a lot about what it is that makes a samurai; she has often moved past her first impressions of someone and come to respect them once she is taught why they do the things that they do (Serizawa, and to some extent Hijikata, though she very often butts heads with him - and Okita once says that this is because they are "so similar" in that they're both incredibly stubborn).
Though she tries very hard to bury her feelings and become an ideal samurai, Sei often has difficulty doing so. She insists that she is a man, that she is bushi, and that she is not a girl; still, she is very attached to her identity as a girl and isn't quite able to give it up, either - she knows that she is a girl, but has chosen to be a girl walking a man's path in order to be close to the person she cares about most. She has strong feelings for Okita, who saved her life and then gave her life meaning by allowing her to seek her revenge and teaching her the true meaning of the bushido; she is often at her strongest when she is doing things for his sake. As time passes, she becomes even stronger when she is doing things for the sake of the Shinsengumi as a whole, and not only for Okita, though her feelings for him have grown stronger and stronger. Something happening to him is enough to set her off (a survivor of the Ikedaya refers to her as a "flower-like demon" and then as a "god of death" when recalling her actions after she believed that Okita had been killed), and the threat of something happening to the Shinsengumi puts her very much on the defensive.
Still, she is very much a girl. She laughs and she cries - her motto is "I have to get all my tears out now so that when I'm older, I can serve the shogunate" - and she is incredibly kind when she can be, though she has learned that mercy isn't something she can show when a job needs to be done. She is a very friendly person and a hard worker, often taking some of the worst jobs upon herself - not only to prove that she can do them, but also to spare the others from having to do them. Those around her often refer to her as kind, if a little nosy, and this is an apt description of her.
She has said - and demonstrated - many times that it is the Shinsengumi that gives her a reason to live, especially now that all of her relatives are dead. The Shinsengumi has, essentially, become her new family, and there are very few things that are more important to her than it. Actually, there is only one living person who she values above the Shinsengumi, and that is Okita. However, she has told herself that his happiness comes first, and that her happiness comes not in looking at him and being with him as a man and a woman, but in standing at his side and staring straight ahead so that they can carve out a path for the organization that they both care so much about.
Abilities/Powers: Sei possesses no supernatural abilities; everything she can do comes from years of studying and practice.
As a doctor's daughter, Sei has a decent amount of medical knowledge, because she spent quite a while assisting him with patients in his clinic. She knows how to bandage wounds and mix medicines, and is pretty good at using symptoms to identify what is ailing someone. She has continued her medical studies within the Shinsengumi, and has since become adept at treating wounds, stomachaches, and dizziness. There was also a brief period of time when she studied nutrition and dieting, and she has a tendency to put her knowledge into practice so that she doesn't forget it whenever she can.
She is a rank-and-file soldier in the Shinsengumi, but as a member of the first troop, her skill with the sword is considerable. While she would not be able to defeat Okita (or most of the other Shinsengumi captains), she is shown to be able to hold her own against him while sparring (though the real thing would likely be much different). She is noted to be light and quick on her feet, and has had special training from both Okita and Saitou to develop a style of swordplay that is most suited to her, so at times her moves are rather unconventional. She also uses a hand-slot string, altered so that it can fit on her katana, to increase the power of her blows. Her stamina is comparable to that of other soldiers, and she has made a point of training so that she can keep up with the people around her.
Also apparently crossdressing is one of her skills, as she has lived among men for 2-3 years and only two people have found out so far. And one of them is dead.
Items/Weapons: Her daito, her shoto, and her hachigane from the Ikedaya affair.
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Sample Entry Two: This is not the first time Sei has found herself somewhere she didn't recognize. This also is not the first time she has found herself waking up among many other people, though only five other beds is a little strange. Usually there are more.
This is, however, the first time she's woken up on a bed before. The mattress is different from what she usually sleeps on, and it is strange enough that she can't help but frown and examine it before getting to her feet. "Where am I...?" The words come out in a murmur as she presses a hand onto the mattress experimentally, and then furrows her brow when she feels it give way. "It's so... squishy," She observes, and then she feels a little foolish for thinking out loud.
Luckily Okita isn't here to hear that - he would never let her hear the end of it. And then her blood runs cold and she carefully looks around the room as that sinks in.
Okita isn't here.
Neither is Saitou, or any of the members of the first troop.
There is no one she recognizes here.
"This can't be right!"
This time the words are a furious muttering. The others have to be around here somewhere. Just because they aren't in this room doesn't mean they're nowhere to be found, so she grabs for her swords - thankfully they're here - and snags her hachigane, which she only pauses for a moment to secure before running out.
Step one of finding yourself in an unfamiliar place was to make it familiar as soon as possible, after all. Whatever's going on here, Sei won't let herself lose to anyone.
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Your application is in the queue and will be processed on October 25th.
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-> ACCEPTED