Peony Michiko

"'At this point, Haven is all I've got.'"Team:  HMLK (Pronounced “Hemlock”)

Age: 17

Gender: Female

Race: Faunus (Falcon)

Height: 5’9”

Weight: 144 lbs

Hair: Black

Eyes: Maroon

Appearance:
Peony is a rather unassuming girl of heavily Asiatic features that mend together to form the image of quiet grace. She has smooth, almond shaped eyes with warm, maroon pupils that are often kept downcast. Her jet black hair goes down to between her shoulder blades and, although a little coarse, has a healthy shine. She has a small nose and a mouth to match, well accustom to shy smiles. Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose are dotted with tiny freckles, just barely visible under the warm color of her skin. Her figure is rather boyish with the usual curvature nowhere to be found. Her arms and legs are long and slim but not awkwardly so. Her muscular composition is that of a long distance runner as well as firm arms springing from hours of practice with the bow. Her posture good, but she naturally seems to shrink up and avoid notice.

Peony maintains a very functional sense of style born from a lot of time spent away from civilization. She wears a deer skin vest of brown-orange hide with long sleeves that turns to fine tassels at the fore arm before another layer underneath continues before tasseling out at the wrist. The jacket follows the layered-with-tassel pattern down from the waist in three equally spaced parts that go down to the mid thy. It also features three layered shoulder pads and a small collar. The jacket is belted above the waist with a five inch strip of deer hide. Underneath the jacket, she wears an orange blouse and on her legs wears a pair of remarkably deep blue jeans. She never wears makeup and lets her hair hang loosely at her back. Her Haven uniform is worn to crisp perfection and her weapon is hung casually on her back.

Peony’s faunus feature comes in the form of a small patch of plumage that grows from her neck. Fearing the consequences of how others might look down upon her, she regularly (and painfully) plucks out the feathers or at least hides them beneath her hair. In a rather morbid fashion, Peony often wears a small hair tie by her left ear that incorporates her very own brown and black feathers.

Personality:
In case you haven’t already guessed, Peony is pretty shy. She doesn’t particularly avoid people or other social situations, she just doesn’t talk much and kind of tends to disappear when you’re not looking directly at her. Sometimes this can be an advantage, but mostly it just leads to smaller, more select groups of friends. When it comes to friends, Peony absolutely loves hers. She loves them with every fiber of her being but also keeps it pretty casual. Generally speaking, Peony is a somewhat “passive friend”: she shows up when you invite her and hangs out with you but doesn’t really talk that much. She often likes to study or read while just nearby her friends, no talking necessary, proximity is all she needs. Otherwise, Peony is pretty stereotypically someone who you would describe as bookish. She studies almost 24/7 reads a lot and stands academically at the top of the class. As a side note, she is a skilled pianist and can reasonably play a number of other instruments including the violin and flute.

Peony is a deep, calculating thinker who takes a lot of time to consider the moral consequence of her actions. She has a number of rather potent dislikes that largely include the loud and the intolerant. The former comes just from the nature of quite people to dislike their opposites. The latter comes largely on the part of her faunus heritage and the associated discrimination. While Peony often remains silent in the presence of people who seem to embody her distastes she will often save her words just until she has formulated the perfect, scathing response to be delivered in a calmly devastating tone. The one thing that Peony is remarkably lacking is trust issues of any kind. As a result of her semblance she never worries about who she should or should not trust. She takes your words at their base value and acts accordingly. Generally, she tends to be very honest, but that only makes it easier to conceal the big secrets.

Weapons and Abilities:
Peony’s weapon is simple, silent and effective. She uses a hand-and-a-half sword with a blade of around three feet in length. At a range, the sword folds open to become a classic longbow of about six and a half feet from tip to tip when bent. The design of the bow gives it great range and power, enough to penetrate thin armor at up to one hundred yards. The arrows used are tipped with finely barbed arrows of a strong allow intent of deep penetration. Peony will occasionally use broader tipped hunting arrows, particularly against weaker Grimm. Almost all off Peony’s arrows have Dust of some form or another mixed in. While fire is her primary, designed to explode on impact (or preferably after penetration), ice and thunder are also personal favorites. Peony can fire at a rate of around seven or eight arrows in a minute if she wants to maintain accuracy and avoid fatigue, but she can greatly increase the rate should the situation call. While the bow is her primary, Peony is equally skilled with her blade and combines moderate speed and power in her style. She is a fighter with a lot of speed and endurance but only of moderate strength and low defense.

Peony’s aura manifests itself as a dark red-orange and incurs no particular benefits although Peony is very skilled in focusing and controlling the energy it provides. Peony’s semblance is one of zero practical combat application but comes quite in handy in her daily life. Peony’s semblance is Confessional and it acts largely as a lie detector. Given that the concepts of truth and deception are plastered with grey area, Peony’s semblance splits every word she hears spoken into one of two categories, that which the speaker believes to be true, and that which they believe false. This semblance also provides the benefit of telling Peony exactly which parts of a statement are false. The downsides are rather obvious, it doesn’t cover word play, half-truths, or misinformation on the part of the speaker. This can also lead to issues when Peony know when people are lying to her, even if the lies are meant to protect her.

Peony also happens to possess two other abilities of note, neither of which arise from her semblance. First, as a result of her faunus heritage, Peony possess absolutely unbelievable eyesight of slightly higher than 20/10 vision. Her second ability came from many years of study and intense practice: Hypnosis. This skill is very delicate and can only be performed in controlled circumstances. Rather than the traditional “mind control” hypnosis Peony practices a version much more similar to therapeutic hypnosis, making people more susceptible to suggestion as well as being able to block out certain memories.

Backstory:
Peony was raised in a lower middle class Atlesian family of loving parents. They worked hard to offer their daughter every opportunity, spending their meager wages to get Peony the best primary education they could. Peony was very happy and exceled, quickly surpassing the other students in her school before moving to the next level up. As she reached higher and higher levels the tuition fees, even for an elementary education began to climb. The profits of her parents little music shop struggled to keep pace and eventually, for their daughter, Peony’s parents took up new ways to make money; darker ways to make money.

While this slippery slope got steeper and steeper, Peony’s life was only on the rise. She had the best grades of any student, but for ambiguous reasons she kept hitting glass ceilings. As a smart child it didn’t take her long to figure out why. This especially came when Peony began to play piano competitively. Raised in a musical household she was of the skill protégé level and climbing. Despite her talents she was barred from entering in a number of prestigious competitions. Even in the competitions she did enter many seemed to end as a close second to sub-par, human competition. Peony’s resentment of the “better” race slowly grew, and the ceaseless assaults from the other children on her person didn’t help either.

The breaking point came when she was ten. Peony’s parents, failing to hold their end of the bargain on some dark deals had to be… dealt with. A little fire in the family shop, nothing to say it wasn’t accidental, left Peony without home or family. She went to the only people who would take her, the kind, the loving, the charitable, White Fang.

Her membership was simple at first, they were a surrogate family of which Peony was yet another part. She helped in the rallies and protests, she took part in every boycott and helped however she could. Being an organization of lowly means The White Fang couldn’t afford to keep Peony in the same schools, but they could give her a different kind of education, from the way of the word to the way of the sword. Bit by bit she got sucked in. She may not have been strong, but she had brains and planning skills like no other. She was instrumental in organizing raids, intelligence gathering operations, or goods handoffs. Always, Peony did whatever she could to help.

As she discovered her semblance and some of her other useful talents, Peony got moved to one of the most brutal jobs the White Fang had to offer: interrogation. She largely refrained from the bloodier abuses, but nonetheless did what she had to do. Like most everything else she tried, Peony was good at her new job.

However, all of this is but a distant memory for Peony. In fact, it’s no memory at all. What brought an end to her time in the White Fang is unknown, but Peony cut all ties she shared with her former family. As a cherry on top, a coup de grace, Peony used her skills to preform self-hypnosis, to wipe, or at least block off, her memories of the group. All she left herself with was a scattering of mostly harmless memories and the many skills that had long ago been carved into her brain.

Waking up in a strange hotel room, in a foreign city, with few memories but your name and date of birth can be confusing. It can be even more confusing for find yourself with a note in your own handwriting that says only “Get to Haven. Don’t be late for the first day of school.” And most confusing of all, is finding an oddly familiar weapon and an acceptance letter to one of the four Hunter academies sitting by the door.

In keeping with her own advice, Peony arrived for her first day at Haven on time and utterly clueless. Fortunately, she was able to work things out and ended up surviving the entrance ceremony, barely. She was paired up by sheer bad luck with another girl by the name of Roisin Sove. Her partner turned out to be just over five feet of loud, racist, insufferable, rich blonde. It’s a miracle they didn’t wind up killing each other. Luckily, the rest of her team, HMLK, was a godsend. Her leader seemed at least kind and reasonable and her last teammate, York Henry, might as well have crapped fairy dust and pissed rainbows. In the end, things would work themselves out nicely for dear, amnesiac, Peony.

Trivia
Peony is a blossoming flower of bright pinks and purples.

Michiko means child of grace

Official color is orange.