Matsuri Morita (Rocket Girls)

NAME:
Matsuri Morita

ALIAS:
None

UNIVERSE:
Rocket Girls

AGE:
17

GENDER:
Female

ETHNICITY:
Japanese/Melanesian

APPEARANCE:

Height: 157cm
Weight: 38.5 kg
Build: Moderate
Hair Color and Style: Black, very long
Eye Color: Grey
Skin (or other) Tone: Dark
Common Clothing and Accessories: Casual clothes or SSA Spacesuit, has worn a grass skirt on some occasions.



FACTION:
SSA

POSITION:
Astronaut

The "Real You"

PERSONALITY:

Matsuri is an extremely cheerful and friendly person with an optimistic attitude. This can sometimes hide the fact that she is also extremely intelligent, to the point where she was able to qualify as an astronaut in a relatively short period of time despite lacking previous formal education. She was trained to take up her mother’s place as a tribal shaman and is deeply superstitious, often worrying about evil spirits messing with her half sister Yukari’s flights. Her sense of propriety is somewhat different from many of the people she works with and has sometimes led to her Yukari experiencing some major culture shock.

LIKES:
• Condiments, particularly ketchup and mayonnaise
• Durians
• Aerotrim Training (Yes, this means she finds being stuck inside a human sized gyroscope fun)
• Talismans
• Watching “fireworks”

DISLIKES:
• Poisonous snakes
• Evil spirits

SKILLS:
• Spacecraft piloting
• Wilderness survival
• Anything atheletic
• Very quick learner
• Hypnosis

FEARS:
• Evil spirits
• Failing to properly protect Akane and Yukari


POWERS:

She appears to be able to hypnotise people and also has some knowledge of charms and talismans that may or may not actually do anything.

Where'd you come from?

RELATIVES

Toto (Mother): Alive
Hiroshi Morita (Father): Alive
Yukari Morita (Half sister): Alive

HISTORY

Matsuri is a member of the Taliho tribe on Maltide, one of the Solomon Islands. Her mother was Toto, a tribal shaman, and her father was Hiroshi Morita, a Japanese man who somehow ended up living among the Taliho. The Taliho apparently had a tradition of bringing outsiders into their tribe to prevent inbreeding, but the addition of a computer sales engineer was probably somewhat unusual.

Matsuri’s early experiences with the Solomon Space Association’s rockets tended to involve watching them explode. (The Taliho referred to these ill fated rockets as “fireworks.”) However she would soon be drawn into a deeper involvement with the rockets when her younger half sister Yukari made an appearance. The extremely petite Yukari had been recruited by the SSA in an attempt to lighten the payload of their rockets enough so that they could get a person into space using a weak but proven rocket design rather than their new but explosion prone one. Yukari and Matsuri met when the former was dropped into the jungle for solo survival training. Matsuri helped lead Yukari back to the SSA’s base and was promptly recruited as Yukari’s backup due to her similarly small stature.

While she had some difficulties learning to be an astronaut due to her lack of a formal education, Matsuri proved to have the intelligence necessary to overcome her late start. During the SSA’s first manned flight she initially served in the back up astronaut’s traditional role of communicating with the flight crew, however dangerous snags in the mission saw her launched into orbit to rescue Yukari, whose capsule’s heat shield had been damaged by a debris strike. She would eventually fly as Yukari’s co-pilot on the experimental two person flight that ended in an unplanned landing in Nellis Academy’s pond, although she would return to back up duty during the Orpheus mission due to the lack of a ready three person capsule and the need to accommodate Akane as a mission specialist for that particular mission.

SAMPLE

“Hey, Matsuri, wait up!”

Stopping near the top of the slope they’d been climbing, Matsuri turned to look back at Yukari as her elder sister struggled up towards her. Matsuri was always having to stop and wait for Yukari when the two of them travelled in a jungle environment. Yukari was getting better at it as she spent more time on Maltide, but her movements were still very slow and inefficient compared to Matsuri, who moved with the ease of one who was long accustomed to such an environment.

Normally that wouldn’t be much of an issue, as Matsuri was a very patient person. However normally when the two girls were travelling in a jungle it was on Maltide, not some unknown island swarming with soldiers. Matsuri couldn’t really understand why Yukari was so worried about the soldiers. They didn’t strike her as being any more hostile than the SSA’s security personnel back on Maltide. But Yukari seemed to think they were trouble, so Matsuri was doing her best to avoid them.

“Hoi, Yukari, you’re almost there!”Matsuri yelled in an encouraging tone.

“Not so loud!” Yukari yelped back, a panicked expression on her face. Matsuri shrugged and waited for her sister to catch up, resting the improvised spear she was carrying against her shoulder. The weapon was a simple one, made by attaching the knife in her survival kit to a convenient branch she’d found. Unlike Yukari Matsuri did not carry a gun. She didn’t feel the need to. Kurosu had wanted to teach her to use one, claiming that she’d be “ten times deadlier if she knew how to use a gun” but director Nasuda had declared it would be a waste, claiming that they were “training her to be an astronaut, not a command-oh.” Matsuri wasn’t really sure what a command-oh was. Maybe she ought to ask Yukari.

Yukari panted her way to the top of the rise and the two continued their journey. They’d travelled for perhaps fifteen minutes when Matsuri heard something and dropped into a crouch, throwing out a hand to signal Yukari to stop.

“I hear someone,” she informed her sister. The two of them crouched there waiting as a man in a camouflate uniform came into view. He seemed to be searching the area. He didn’t seem hostile to Matsuri.

“I’m going to go talk to him,” she informed Yukari. Yukari’s eyes widened.

“You can’t!” she protested.

“Why not?” Matsuri asked.

“He’s got a gun!”

“So do you,” Matsuri pointed out.

“That’s different!”

“How so?”

“I’m carrying one for self defence!”

“And he isn’t?”

“We don’t know if we can trust him.”

“I’ll be fine, Yukari,” Matsuri told her sister. “If he proves to be a bad man, I’ll just make it so he can’t see us.”

Matsuri took advantage of Yukari’s open mouthed disbelief to slip away and quietly approach the man. She got within a few feet of him before he realised she was there and spun around, trying to unsling the rifle on his back.

“Hi!” Matsuri chirped, a big smile on her face. The man looked at her for a moment, then tried to look away and found her couldn’t. For some reason he wasn’t able to stop looking at Matsuri’s eyes. Matsuri continued to smile.

“I want you to tell me about yourself,” she told the man in a calm, soothing tone of voice. “I want to know if you’re a bad man like Yukari says you are.”

As if in a trance, the man began to speak, telling Matsuri everything she wanted to know. A short distance away, Yukari reactivated the safety on her pistol and put it back in its holster, wondering just how the heck her sister was able to do that.