Sayuri Ròs Ualas

Ualas

21

21

5’8

150 lbs.

Sayuri is of Scottish-Japanese descent and her mixed heritage is immediately obvious at first glance even to a casual observer. Standing at 5’8, she is a fair bit taller than the average woman in Japan. Overall her body is lean and compact, but her curvy profile is more reminiscent of her Scottish aunts rather than her Japanese mother. Her shoulders are slightly broader and, along with her entire body, are quite muscular. Her muscles lack sharp definition due primarily to a large appetite and healthy diet. She trains daily to stay strong and agile, like her parents taught her. Her face is heart-shaped with high round cheekbones, a pert slightly curved nose and a small full-lipped mouth that is the delicate shade of pink roses. Slender eyebrows curve gracefully over large, slightly up-turned almond-shaped eyes that are an unexpected grey color. Her right eyebrow is pierced and she typically wears a simple barbell earring in it.

Her skin is soft and smooth with a somewhat ruddy color, making her look perpetually flushed or blushing when she is neither. Her left forearm is badly scarred as though flames had reached out, wrapped around it and refused to let go. On her right shoulder, she usually draws a random kanji – changing it daily to suit her mood. Her hair appears dark brown, but when the light hits it just right it lightens to a warm chocolate color. She keeps it in a long, choppy layered cut. At its greatest length it comes down to just above mid-back while at its shortest it is just above her eyebrows. Her hair is usually parted on the right side of her face, with her bangs are swept off to the other side. As for her clothes, she wears whatever feels comfortable at the time. She doesn’t really do the whole fashionable thing, preferring tattered short-sleeve tees and comfortable jeans to…well, just about anything. If you happen to see her on the streets, she usually wears a light-blue hoody-vest over her shirt and is never seen without an iPod strapped to one arm and large green headphones either over her ears or hanging from her neck. Her iPod is primarily filled with instrumental music from around the world, though she usually picks either Celtic or Japanese music to listen to. She typically carries a small green backpack around with her. The last little detail is a simple pendant necklace she wears. A rounded triangular blue sapphire set in a gold mount hangs from a slender gold chain. It was a gift from her father to her mother and all she has left to remember her mother by.

• Tea
  
• Her family and friends
  
• Instrumental music

• Disrespectful people
  
• Bullying
  
• Bland food

• Proud
  
• Highly introverted/shy
  
• Finds it difficult to trust others

• Incredibly loyal
  
• Highly perceptive/observant
  
• Analytical

To put it shortly, Sayuri is a quiet, highly observant and analytical individual. She’s unlikely to strike up a casual conversation with a stranger, preferring instead to study the world and people around her before speaking or acting. She is intensely curious about the world around her, ready to seek out an adventure if it will teach her something new or learn a new skill just for the sake of learning it. Being almost painfully introverted and shy, she has a difficult time making friends because she is reluctant to reach out to others. People in turn are often reluctant to approach her as well. She doesn’t exactly look intimidating, but she tends to hold herself rather stiffly. Her expression doesn’t help much either, appearing as a cross between mischievous, calculating and aloof. But one close look into her eyes and you can see how lonely and alone she feels. If you can manage to breach her emotional defenses, however, you are unlikely to find a more true or constant friend. She will stand by her friends through thick and thin, whether it’s as a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic ear or that girl who will pound your numbskull ex into the concrete for you.

On that final note about numbskull exes and concrete, you will find that Sayuri has a rather low tolerance for other people’s crap. If you disrespect her family, her friends, or her, she will tell you in no uncertain terms that you will want to retract that statement immediately. And if you refuse, she will not hesitate to take what remains of your hind end and hand it to you in the form of a steaming slice of humble pie. If she sees you mistreating someone else for no apparent reason, she will feel the urge to beat the ever-living crap out of you – and most of the time she’ll make a damn good attempt at it. Again, she doesn’t look intimidating but you shouldn’t let that fool you. Behind the quiet demeanor is a well-trained fighter with firm beliefs on what is right and wrong that she will readily defend.

Family: Tormod Ualas (54), Ayame Takahashi (51 at time of death), Hamish Sora and Seamus Umi (fraternal twins; 29), Kenji Scott (24), Angus Mamoru (20), Hiro Gawain (pronounced “Gavin”; 17), Colin Kazuhiko (12 at time of death).

Tormod Ualas moved to Tokyo in the summer of his fourteenth year. His father, Bran, was the head of Ualas Enterprises – an American-based company that built and sold a variety of domestic goods – and the man was looking to open a new branch in Japan to expand UE into the Asian market. Tormod wasn’t exactly pleased about this new state of affairs, but he had refrained from his whining for one reason – martial arts. For as long as he could remember, he had loved martial arts. What better place to indulge that passion than in the Far East which possessed such a multitude of styles? Bran let the boy travel across Japan and the Asian mainland to watch various competitions, so long as Tormod kept up his grades and studied the Japanese language carefully. The boy happily obliged. Two years passed without incident until the summer Tormod turned 16. That was the summer he witnessed a small Japanese girl obliterate her opponents in a junior wushu competition. Her style of fighting was unlike anything he’d seen thus far and he was instantly fascinated by this Takahashi Ayame.

He was unable to track her down after the final match, but as fate would have it he stumbled across her one day in Shibuya, Tokyo. Being a rather straight-forward kind of guy, Tormod immediately approached Ayame and introduced himself. She was initially wary of him, with his semi-broken Japanese and obviously foreign appearance, but his enthusiasm for martial arts coupled with his desire to learn from her softened her up a bit. She explained that she followed a philosophy known as Jeet Kune Do (JKD). Her father owned a dojo in one of the cities of Western Tokyo and it was there she had learned the style that Tormod was so enamored with. They parted that day, Ayame certain that Tormod would not actually seek out her father’s dojo and Tormod determined to begin his study of JKD. After a lot of wheedling and negotiating with his father, Tormod finally sought out the little Takahashi dojo in Naruki City. It was quite a commute, but it was worth it to finally step foot in the dojo and meet with Ayame’s father Takahashi Hayato. Tormod’s training soon began and he somehow managed to juggle school, training, and traveling to watch competitions while becoming one of Takahashi’s top students. Within four years, he was skilled enough to start sparring with Ayame – one of only three others in the dojo who were about their age and could make the same claim.

Sometime after they began, Tormod heard Ayame humming a tune that he was quite familiar with. It was by a Celtic instrumental band – one that Tormod was quite fond of. He asked her if she liked the band and she said it was one of her favorites. They fell into a discussion about classical and instrumental music, which led them to many other topics of discussion. The two found they had a surprising amount of common interests beyond just martial arts and they began meeting outside of the dojo to indulge in those interests together. At first, it was just a strong solid friendship developing between them. But the more time they spent together, the more interested in each other they became. Before they realized it, they had fallen in love with one another and Tormod – being the ever straight-forward and determined individual he was – asked Hayato if he could marry Ayame. It took a lot of negotiating to convince Hayato that Tormod was in earnest and the elderly man reluctantly consented – he really had no real reason to say no beyond the fact that Tormod was not Japanese. The now-grown Tormod was industrious, a quick learner, and already had a secure and lucrative job within his father’s company. Bran was also not particularly pleased by the arrangement, but gave his blessing as well on the condition that Tormod would take over the management of Ualas Enterprises’ Asia division. The young man agreed and in their 23rd year, Ayame and Tormod married in a unique wedding ceremony that fused Celtic and Shinto traditions in a surprisingly natural way. They settled in Naruki City and two years later, the couple had their first children – a set of fraternal twin boys. The older boy was named Hamish Sora while the younger was named Seamus Umi. Five years later, Kenji Scott joined the hellacious team that was the Ualas twins. When Ayame became pregnant a third time, she swore it would be the last if it was another boy. Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint – Sayuri Ròs was born next, ensuring that her younger brothers Angus Mamoru, Hiro Gawain and Colin Kazuhiko would all be born eventually.

Sayuri’s childhood was largely unremarkable. From her parents, she gained an appreciation of instrumental music and a love of martial arts. From her older brothers, she learned to negotiate when possible and beat the living bajeezus out of them when they wouldn’t stop giving her grief. Her low tolerance for such treatment from anyone soon led to her schoolmates simply calling her Ualas, even the very few that she became close to. From her younger brothers, she gained a measure of patience and no small amount of compassionate affection. When the world seemed too big to handle, her family was always there to put things in perspective and she is deeply devoted to them.

The Ualas family split its time between their home in Naruki, visiting family in the United States and frequent vacations to the ancestral lands of the Ualas clan in Scotland. All of the children were taught English, Scots-Gaelic and Japanese simultaneously so that they would have a sense of their heritage on both sides of their family and also be able to converse with their relatives. The entire family also practiced Jeet Kune Do as a way of bonding. Ayame encouraged her children to take up meditations while Tormod happily taught anyone how to wield a Highland claymore, something his own father had taught him in his youth as a symbol of his Scottish heritage.

Perhaps the only remarkable part of Sayuri’s childhood – at least in her mind – was the spiritual awareness that she, the twins, and Colin possessed. From a young age, these four were able to see ghosts to at least some extent. If you trace Tormod’s genealogy back far enough, you would find that he is a very distant descendant of the once-widespread Quincy clan. His particular Ualas line would infrequently produce spiritually aware individuals as a result of this, though it was rare for one to see more than vague outlines of ghosts. The twins could see vague shapes and could not interact with them. But to Sayuri, the ghosts were as visible to her as another living human being and she frequently interacted with them – playing with them as “imaginary friends” when she was young and speaking with them (usually in private) as she grew older. Colin proved to be the most gifted of them, able to see not only ghosts but vague visions of Hollows and the Shinigami that fight them. Sayuri and her three gifted brothers inadvertently trained and developed their awareness with meditative techniques and by following the Jeet Kune Do philosophy their mother taught them – to constantly cast off what is useless. Sadly, this strong spiritual awareness would prove to have tragic consequences.

The family went on a picnic outing to the town of Karakura. They had picked the park, set up their picnic site and were enjoying a delightful lunch when there was a sudden disturbance not far from them. As the dust settled, Sayuri saw Colin running towards the figure of a small boy which was in turn running from something much larger. Though she did not realize it at the time, she was seeing the vague shape of a Hollow for the first time. She didn’t even bother to think about it – Colin was running straight for it and he was way too young to fighting something like that. She and the twins took off after him, but not before their mother had begun sprinting after her youngest son, calling out for him to stop. But the boy didn’t stop, too hell-bent on trying to save this other little boy from the danger that was as clear to him as the sky above. He succeeded in saving the other little boy – but at the cost of not only his own life, but Ayame’s as well when she tried to protect him from a threat she could neither see nor touch and therefore could not fight. This didn’t deter the twins or Sayuri from trying to leap into the fray. It only fueled their desire to protect their loved ones, though it was already too late. Their only reward for their efforts was for Hamish to be partially blinded and Seamus to be crippled before Shinigami finally arrived to dispatch the Hollow. The three wounded siblings were eventually treated at the Kurosaki Clinic, which was closest to the park the Ualas family had picnicked at. The explanation given to the clinic doctor was that there had been a terrible car accident that had already claimed the lives of Ayame and Colin. To this day, the rest of the family believes this version of events. Only the twins and Sayuri know the truth of things, though they maintain the car accident lie. But it is Sayuri who remembers the day most vividly – the final image of the Hollow being slain by several Shinigami is crystal clear. She lives with it every day, for she has seen both Hollows and Shinigami with increasing frequency ever since that day.

Three years have passed since that terrible day – each anniversary marked by a return to the park and a somber picnic. But not long ago, Sayuri convinced her oldest brothers to move to Karakura with her. She knows they all need closure and she knows that the answers to her questions are hidden somewhere in Karakura.

Colin Ualas

BG-2

Statistics
HAN: 1
REI: 3
HAK: 6
SEI: 1
BUK: 6
HOH: 6
Points Earned: 3
Total points: 23

Ellie

Colin Ualas