Midnight Syndicate Application

[losthersheep]

PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Ashley.
ARE YOU 18 OR OLDER?: Yes
CONTACT: ashleywr @ plurk
CURRENT CHARACTERS: Nonon and Kanaya.

CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Mami Tomoe (AU)
CANON: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

CANON POINT: Post The Different Story, post her time in Afterliving.
CHARACTER AGE: 16
HISTORY: Wiki

The Different Story takes Mami through a different timeline than the one see in the show, or the one in Rebellion. She first meets Kyouko and takes her under her wing, as Kyouko is enamored with Mami, and wants to be her student. They form a bond they both consider to be something like family, or perhaps closer than that. When Kyouko’s parents die Kyouko moves on from Mami’s town and her tutelage after fighting with her over their philosophical differences, deciding to work on her own. It is then Mami meets Madoka and Sayaka.

In this version she grows closer to Sayaka, taking her own as her pupil too. Her relationship with Madoka is not as strong, not quite like Mami’s feelings for Kyouko and Sayaka, her two pupils that she fights with and protects, whose ideals at one point match her own.

After Mami is hurt in a fight with a witch, and Kyouko has to come save Mami, Sayaka blames herself, and tells Mami that she wishes to leave her too. The shock of both her pupils wanting to leave her strikes Mami to her very core. When Sayaka goes hunting for witches alone, Mami chases after her. It’s there that she admits all her faults to Sayaka. She explains that she’s not the girl anyone thinks her as. She is lonely and desperate to be loved. She protects other people because it seems like the right thing to do to make other people love her. Mami explains how terrible a person she is, all hoping that Sayaka might love her still. At that point, Sayaka’s egg hatches, and she becomes a witch.

Planning to kill herself fighting against Sayaka’s witch form, Mami is stopped by Kyouko, and they fight again. Kyouko wins, and she promises to save Sayaka and come back for Mami, who has used all her magic. Kyouko explains her feelings to Mami, keeping her from becoming a witch, finally giving her some amount of hope. She pretends to cleanse Mami’s soul gem, but it’s an illusion, and Kyouko dies in her fight with Sayaka’s witch.

At that point, when Homura explains that she is a time traveller, that she used to be friends with Mami, and that Kyouko and Sayaka are both dead, Mami begs Homura to kill her. She refuses, and so after Homura leaves, Mami kills herself, destroying her gem.

After that, she found herself in the afterlife (in the Afterliving game). She met all of her friends again, but they had different memories than she did. She explained who she was to Sayaka, how she was not the person that Sayaka thought she was either, retreading that conversation with her again. She grew closer to Madoka, a girl who hadn’t ever become a magical girl in her timeline. And she learned more about Homura’s powers, about how she had become a god herself, and trapped Madoka as well.

But she has not yet come to terms with her feelings for Kyouko, or Sayaka, or the intense guilt she feels over betraying and failing both of her students. She hasn’t told anyone she killed herself. In the end of Afterliving she simply just accepted that she was dead, and that she deserved to be.

PERSONALITY: To most people who know Mami, they see her as a dependable, bright and feminine girl. She even makes friends with girls in her class easily, seeing how she has to turn down her classmates to go and fight Witches from time to time. But deep down she’s anything but.

When we first meet her she is unlike most magical girls; Mami decides to go after Witch’s familiars, unwilling to let them run free and kill innocent people. Fighting the familiars causes her to use up her magical energy which will kill her if she doesn’t actually defeat a witch. This gets some people to look down on her, but Mami doesn’t show a problem with it externally, having already decided to do her best to protect everyone in her town. Even when she helps a group of newbie magical girls, she offers to split the Grief Seed, the object that helps them refill their magical energy, which surprises them. Where most magical girls end up being selfish, Mami is unique in that she cares about other people.

The problem however is not that she really cares about the other magical girls, so much as she wants them to care about her. Since she contracted and lost her old life, Mami has settled into a pit of loneliness. Her wish, decided upon after getting into a car accident, was that she wanted to keep living. She didn’t think about her mother or her father who were also in the car. She was brought back to life but her parents were still dead, something she blamed on herself. Since then she has changed her personality, trying to do whatever she can to make friends, wanting to not have to feel lonely for at least a little while.

Eventually, she met Kyouko, another magical girl, and the two hit it off. Kyouko asked Mami to be her senpai and teach her to fight and learn new magic. They grew closer, spending all their time together, Mami even was invited to dinner with Kyouko’s family, and slowly started to think she didn’t have to be alone anymore. However, Kyouko told Mami that she didn’t see her as a friend, something that hurt Mami a lot, even though Kyouko was trying to say that she saw her like a sister or something more. Mami felt betrayed by Kyouko, which was only made worse once Kyouko decided to break off their partnership altogether, when her father killed himself and the rest of Kyouko’s family.

Even though Mami had an air of a ‘champion of justice’ she never really wanted that. She wanted to help people because she thought it would make her less lonely. When it started to scare Sayaka, that she couldn’t keep up with Mami, Mami broke down, saying that she’d give up that side of her and become selfish, if Sayaka would just stay with her. That’s all she ever wanted, someone to be with her, to keep her from being alone.

As seen in multiple timelines, Mami’s mental state is a little fragile. At one time, when she hears about the truth of magical girls, that they become the witches when their Gem runs out of energy, she broke down, murdering Kyouko, the girl who had been closest to her at one point. In The Different Story she ended up committing suicide by destroying her own gem, unable to handle the fact that because of her Sayaka and Kyouko had died. She simply is the type to put on a smile, even while things are breaking down around her. She is scared to let people know the truth, thinking it will push potential friends away from her.

When it comes to her friends, Mami is known as a very generous girl. She invites her classmates and other magical girls over to her lavish home, always serving tea and homemade snacks, more than most can ever wish to eat. And even when they are full she offers more. She thinks that being a proper host is important, wanting to do what she can to make people like her. At the same time, she is fiercely protective of them. Mami does not hesitate to put her own life on the line to protect the other girls she’s come close to. In her mind, if she were to die protecting someone, she would likely find herself able to die without regret.

Mami would often rather solve her problems with people by talking it out, only resorting to violence when she has run out of all other options. In the Rebellion movie, she realizes that Homura has taken Bebe, her friend/pet, and chases her down to make her explain why she is planning on killing Bebe. When Homura insists, Mami fights the other magical girl. It’s the same in The Different Story timeline, she fights Kyouko, simply because she wants to die because she believes it’s her fault that Sayaka was turned into a witch.

Secretly, Mami’s self-worth is very low. She is constantly worried that she is going to let down the people who depend on her, especially since she often ends up as a sort of mentor to younger girls. She is bad with that sort of pressure, seeing how she wants to die thinking it’s her fault that Sayaka, one of her kouhais, ends up as a witch. In her AU, this is taken to an even grander scale. Everything she does now is with a facade. She feels deep pain inside of her that she cannot shake. Her friends died because she was not strong enough, because she was too desperate for her own salvation. Her despair was strong enough that she killed herself, seeing no other options available to her.

Outwardly, Mami is a very polite girl, and is often trying to make the girls who look up to her better people. With Kyouko she constantly tries to point out her bad manners, like telling her to slow down when she eats, or telling her to make up with others so that they all can enjoy a fun meal together. Though she can use that facade at other times, smiling when she calls out Kyouko’s double standards, even as Mami herself is trying to go and kill herself.

Mami is a fantastic cook, though her ability to limit herself when she does is poor. She will spend hours cooking cakes and desserts just when one person is coming over the next day. In general, she likes being a hostess, refilling people’s drinks and listening to their problems. If she could have a life where she could simply be around her friends, and listen to them talk and laugh, she’d be able to finally be happy. She’s also studious, creating a multiple reference notebooks full of her experiences with magic as a magical girl, that she had written to help her pupils learn magic.

At first, in her time at Afterliving, Mami learned to go back to her old ways. To meet new people and pretend she isn’t a monster that she feels she is deep down. Her own selfish ways led her to despair, and to her friends’ deaths. But in a slight way... she’s recovering. She is realizing she loves Kyouko and Sayaka... the both of them. And wants to see them happy now, trying to forget about her own problems. She is dead after all, and accepts that... but that doesn’t mean she can’t make them happy, or other people around her happy either.

Something Mami learned while in Afterliving was the fact that magic was not all the same. She spent some time with Rin Tohsaka learning about the differences in her magic, and how it worked. There was no downside as she knew, and it gave her some hope of the future. She wants to learn more about it, as it gives her some thought that maybe not all magic is as terrible as the magic the Incubator’s given powers are.

Things between Homura and Mami grew even worse than they ever had been. Some part of Mami, the desperate lonely part, had started with the intention of trying to see if they could become friends again. Homura knew the most about the afterlife than any of the other magical girls, and she was who they went to for answers. It had started well, until at one point Homura explained what she was to Mami, that she had somehow stolen away a god’s powers, Madoka’s powers, and created a new world for her to live in. She asked Mami to kill her, just like Mami had asked her to do before, thinking that if she died then things would return to how Homura wanted them to be. But Mami couldn’t do that. She thought Homura a monster, something less than human. Where Mami hated a lot about herself, her time with Sayaka in Afterliving was teaching her to that Mami didn’t have to hate herself so much, that Sayaka wanted to still be with her, and share her burden.

Because of that, Mami decided to protect Madoka from Homura. Just like before, when she tried to keep Madoka from rashly making a decision to become a magical girl, Mami tried to steer Homura away from Madoka. Mami grew to pity the person Homura had become, as a reflection of her own self-hatred. And as things were getting better between her and Sayaka, her pupil had been turned into an NPC, a lifeless shell of her personality that barely recognized Mami.

She begged Homura to help her, but she didn’t have the ability to, or to Mami, she didn’t care to try because Sayaka was not Madoka. Homura explained that she had no reason to help Mami, because Mami had tried to kill Homura in one timeline. The story was a blow to Mami’s fragile ego. While still reeling from that, Kyouko turned into an NPC as well. Before she could find Homura and make good on trying to kill her, things came to a head, and the person in charge of the afterlife reset things, bringing people back to where they were supposed to be.

It left a deep scar on Mami, losing her friends once again, in a place where they had already once died. She didn’t want to believe that she was that person though. She wanted to believe that she was the person that she was, that she would have never killed her friends. She had the opportunity to kill Kyouko at one point and didn’t take it, and she didn’t kill Homura either. She believed that somehow there were other timelines, but she was Mami, and she didn’t want to accept the blame from decisions she didn’t make, ones that she wanted to strongly to believe that she herself wouldn’t have made. She just tried to reject the bad parts of herself, unhealthy as it may be.

It also left Mami scared, but it taught her to cherish the time she had left with her friends. She didn’t want to have to fight anymore, like some people were, against the person who ran the afterlife. She wanted to fit in, to live there as long as she could with Kyouko and Sayaka, and Madoka too.

Mami was always a stickler for education and the rules, so it made sense to her to continue going to school, while other people planned strategies to shutdown the computerized afterlife. Mami however opened a maid cafe right outside the school, wanting to make a place where people could come and see people in pretty clothes, and forget the problems in the afterlife. That’s all she wanted was a new quiet home she could live with her friends, and try to understand the feelings she had for them, as well as the new people she met. She accepted being dead, and the opportunities it gave her.

In that way, Mami sees the days she has as precious now. Her thoughts on being under the Maeve, strangeness with sex aside, as a boon. Especially if she will have Kyouko and Sayaka with her. She wants to try to forgive herself, as Sayaka in Afterliving tried to get her to do. But she will also likely work with the Maeve as a loyal servant, so long as they don’t try to bring about any despair to her friends, or people she cares about. She’s still selfish, and her own happiness is still something she thinks about.

ABILITIES:

Mami is a magical girl, with a number of powers that make her different from most humans. She made a contract with Kyubey, ending her life as a normal girl. Her life is now dependent on her Soul Gem, which if destroyed will kill her. If her body takes damage she can heal and regenerate as long as her Gem still has energy left. If not, she will also die. The Gem also gives her superhuman abilities like increased durability and powerful jumps. Like other magical girls she has the ability to summon weapons, which in her case are rifled muskets. Using the energy from her Gem she can create rifles from nothing, firing them without even needing to hold them. She can create them at different sizes, from a giant cannon to a small pistol, for whatever Mami needs. Her other ability is to create magical ribbons that can be used for whatever she needs, like holding down an opponent or creating nets and other things.

In Afterliving she had lost her connection to her magic, no longer thinking of herself as magical girl, just a dead girl. But there was still some connection, one that could have been built up if she spent more time there, meaning she is still actually a magical girl deep down, her powers somehow sealed.

But she will be coming in with her Soul Gem again, hopefully under some excuse that it was an inexplicable, undividable part of Mami’s existence that needs to be with her. Though, at the same time, I’d love for her witch to hold on to it for her? If only so Mami can’t be tempted to kill herself again.

SINS & VIRTUES:

Gluttony - While Mami is the type of girl who often feeds her friends with desserts and sweets until they explode, that is not what her real sin for Gluttony is. No, she is simply selfish. Her wish when she was in that car accident was to wish that she did not die. She didn’t think of her parents at all, who ended up dead while she lived. In the same way, her entire “life” as a magical girl was in the pursuit of someone to love her. She tried to befriend other magical girls just so someone would like her, because she didn’t like herself. She took on Kyouko as a pupil and then Sayaka, selfishlessly because she wanted those girls to love her. In her mind, so long as someone loves her she could find some amount of happiness, and she didn’t care if she put herself in harm’s way, or hurt other people.

Her only true sin seems to be gluttony. She doesn’t lust after anyone, other than for their love, and gluttony exemplifies that feeling in her much better. She is not greedy, she does not need more than one person in her life, to make her happy. Mami is not slothful, she knows that she should help everyone, even if it’s for selfish reasons. She does not show Envy for anyone or anything, and any Pride she might have is mild, and is in her student’s strength, not her own.

Wrath could be the only other sin, seeing how she often speaks with her actions, fighting Kyouko twice when she refuses to listen to reason. But her resolve is weak, and she never intended to actually kill the other girl.

Seeing how she eventually killed herself, any of her virtues seems to be written out. She may have chastity or diligence, but that would mean she is ever honest or is the type not to give up... but she is clearly neither.

SAMPLES
http://graveyardshift.dreamwidth.org/25356.html?thread=6012940#cmt6012940

http://afterliving.dreamwidth.org/71414.html?thread=7626742#cmt7626742