Kanda Shao

[Kanda Shao]

The Basics

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Name: Kanda Zhen Shao
Nicknames: Zhen (depending on who is addressing her.)
Age: 28
Orientation: Lesbian
Desired Rank/Job: Chem & Physics teacher at Hammel
Powers: Thermal Manipulation. Kanda is able to psychically manipulate the temperature of the area around her. Using her power, she can cool or heat the air in a room, inanimate objects, liquids, anything in her range. Though she has the ability to bring things to boiling point/melting point, if she does so, she begins to suffer hypothermia/heat exhaustion. As such, it’s a power to only be used in a small area or for short bursts of time. She can cool down an entire classroom by a few degrees for an hour with few ill effects, or the air around herself for a little longer. However, if she tries this over a wider area she’ll find herself experiencing dizziness, then fatigue, she may suffer temperature extremes in her own body and eventually, she’ll lose consciousness.

Her power often causes her to be either dangerously hot or dangerously cold, as, after using it, her body cannot properly regulate its own temperature. Other side-effects include vertigo after extended use, migraines, and exhaustion.
Play By: Gemma Pranita

The Details

Hair Color: Brown
Eye Color: Brown
Any Piercings? One in each earlobe.
Any Tattoos? Nope. She’s been thinking about it though.
Any Scars? Just the regular little scars you pick up in childhood, nothing serious.
General Appearance:
Standing at five feet and eight inches, Kanda is neither tiny nor imposing. Her long, wavy brown hair is only ever tied up during practical classes or when exercising. Otherwise, she likes to have it down. She doesn’t believe in make-up - or so she says. Occasionally she finds that a bit of mascara and lip gloss is what she needs to feel perky and beautiful, but that’s it. She doesn’t wear make-up to impress, she wears it to make herself feel better about how she looks. Most of the time, however, she feels perfectly fine in her own skin, and doesn’t see why she should cover up her natural beauty. That, and she often can’t be bothered. She does take very good care of her hair, though. Especially after three incidents involving candles.

She tends to dress casually, preferring comfort and practicality, though she tries to be as neat as she can. She can’t exactly storm around Hammel looking entirely unpresentable. She does, however, find it a waste of time and energy to squeeze herself into a prim, proper suit to teach. Especially nice looking suits that can get ruined by experiments gone wrong. At least if one of her cheap shirts gets bleached she can just replace it. She doesn’t fall into any real style category; she just wears what she likes. Sometimes she likes a white cotton top, other times she’ll favour a lacy dress. It depends on her mood, and the time of year, of course. And, more importantly, whether she’s working or not.


Personality:
Vivacious and brash, Kanda loves to be active and really does care about community. She loves to help out where she can and delights in seeing good things come from projects she’s worked hard on. Almost always smiling, she hates to see people upset and will often poke her nose in where it’s not wanted. She doesn’t mean any harm by it; she just wants to help. She is generous and loves to give. Though she isn’t religious, she loves giving gifts so much that she cannot wait for the next gift-giving occasion to come around. She gets on well with most types of people and is very, very friendly. Even if the person she’s trying to win round is a total grump. But more often than not, those encounters usually end with Kanda storming off in a huff.

She reckons that students probably see her as strict, but it’s for their own good. That’s not to say that she’s one of those shrill teachers who loses it at the slightest whisper, but she won’t stand for disrespectful behaviour, be it to herself or to other students in her class. She’s protective of the students, mainly because she’s always been the protector. As the big sister and scary best friend, she would always be there to protect those who needed her. And then there’s the fact that Hammel helped her out when she was in trouble, and she feels that she should give back to the Hammel community and try to always be there when people need her. Her door is always open for the students, and the staff as well.

When it comes to exercise, she is very disciplined, due to her karate training. Other than in her academic life, it’s possibly the only time she’s really controlled. Much like other people winding down by reading a book or watching TV, because it’s so different to the way she is usually, it’s almost like a form of escapism.

Kanda is also very strong-willed, sometimes to the point of being fiercely stubborn. It can get her into trouble sometimes, but she doesn’t care, as long as it’s for a good cause. Sometimes that cause is herself, and she is absolutely fine with being called selfish if that’s what it takes. Sometimes she is even petulant and can gripe and moan and stomp until she gets her own way. In some cases she doesn’t even realise she’s doing it, but that doesn’t mean she’ll necessarily stop if someone points it out. If her being selfish ends up directly or indirectly hurting people, guilt will eventually prevail, and her sense of love for the community will rise again. And she won’t stop apologising ever.

Very quick-tempered, she finds herself having to force herself to stop and focus before dealing with particularly irksome students. Otherwise she could do something stupidly impulsive and that’s the last thing she needs. Massively opinionated, she really hates it when people don’t listen to her and it grates on her when people are ignorant, willfully or otherwise. It bothers her when people don’t do their research and sometimes takes it upon herself to educate them. Maybe even by force. Hell, if you could literally whack some sense and knowledge into people, she’d be the one with the heaviest encyclopaedia.

Your Vices

Likes:
+ Teaching. Or else she wouldn’t be doing it.
+ The Hammel Institute. She spent a good chunk of her teenage years there after having to learn at the Chinese school.
+ Learning. In the sciences, there’s pretty much something new popping up every day, and that’s always exciting.
+ Being the strong one. Because she’s such a show-off
+ Comedy. Especially when music is involved.
+ Martial arts. She’s always loved it; it’s kind of like violent dancing.
+ Memes. She just loves the internet. She has trollface earrings. Yes really. Er, I mean ‘ya rly’.
+ Taking baths. Cool in summer and hot in winter <3
+ Video games. She always wins.
+ Her yellow toy rabbit
+ Chemistry jokes.
+ Giving gifts.
Dislikes:
- Religion. Her upbringing was not very religious but she still really dislikes religion in all forms.
- People who can’t do some bloody research. It doesn’t even take that much nowadays.
- People who push their viewpoints down everyone’s throats.
- Coffee. It makes her migraines worse.
- Being made to feel guilty, whether she deserves it or not.
- Most newspapers. Especially the sensationalist types.
- Dressing up formally. It’s okay in little doses but she doesn’t think it’s good for an everyday kind of thing.
- Not being able to have what she wants.
- Lazy students. She’s not sure whether lazy and intelligent is worse than just plain lazy.
- Her father. A bit. Maybe.
Strengths:
> Makes friends easily; she is very welcoming and warm.
> Loyal to the end
> A very capable fighter. only mess with her if you want a body part broken off. She’s a fifth dan black belt karateka, a first dan black belt in judo and practices taekwondo and Shuai jiao. She’s working on developing her own styles, one for artistic purposes and the other for self-defence.
Weaknesses:
> Has a bit of a temper, meaning that, even if she’s really trying not to, she still might snap and do something stupid on impulse.
> Holds grudges like crazy, so much that they start to take their toll on her.
> Curious to the point of being nosy, and fails to understand why taking too much of an interest in other people’s personal business is a bad thing.
Fears:
> Losing her job.
> Her family judging her for her decisions.
Secret:
She really does resent the fact that her father went back to Thailand without her, despite what she tells people.

Family Ties

Father:
Sunan Kukrit, 50, unknown
Mother:
Jun Li Shao, 47, beautician
Siblings:
Mali Xiu Shao, 25, nurse
Any Other Important People:
None.

History

Jun Li Shao’s family were very new to Australia. Having managed to get out of Tianjin, China, the Shao family hoped that there would be much more opportunity in Sydney for their only child. A slight, delicate girl, Jun managed to find work in a small curiosity shop. It was here that she met Sunan Kukrit, a Thai-born man who delivered stock. It was only Sunan who had moved to Australia in search of a better life, rather than the whole family, but Jun felt as though she could really relate to his story. They fell quickly in love, and married soon after. After a year together, Jun and Sunan rejoiced in the birth of their first child, a little girl.

Kanda wasn’t properly named for three weeks after her birth. Her parents still were undecided on how to name her, and each parent had names special to them from their own countries. In the end, she was given the first name Kanda, meaning ‘beloved’ in Thai, and the middle name Zhen, meaning ‘precious’ in Chinese. While her parents had little money, they spoiled her as much as they were able. Usually it meant buying the cheapest toys they could find, many of them old and ragged, but even as she aged, Kanda never once complained. One of her very first toys picked out by her mother was a little yellow rabbit, which she still keeps out on her dresser and takes with her whenever she moves.

Just a couple of years after Kanda, the Kukrits had another little girl: Mali. Kanda was then involved in the new baby’s feeding and dressing and changing, as Jun believed this would ensure that there was no animosity between them. It’s unclear whether it was because of this that Kanda became so close with her little sister, but whatever the case, Jun was (and still is) relieved that her daughters got on so well. Kanda immediately took to the leadership role, and took to alerting her parents whenever any sort of perceived danger appeared near the baby.

Since was very short growing up, her mother worried that she would end up bullied in school. As a result, from a very early age she was sent to learn karate. Being allowed to hit and kick things and be praised for doing so, Kanda was delighted to go and excelled in the classes. In her teen years she would go on to dabble in taekwondo as well, and while at uni she would study judo.

Her mother’s fears turned out to be unfounded. At school, Kanda was quite popular, but then, she was a bit of a show-off, too. She was most popular with the boys, as she would display any new moves she’d learned at her karate class. Her best friend for all of her school life, Mark Fisher, was put into her karate class in order to get him to stand up for himself. Though she used to protect him, when he was eventually able to speak up against his bullies, she couldn’t have been prouder, as though she taught him all on her own.

In her school classes, she was fairly bright but easily distracted. The alphabet was cool and everything, but if a magpie appeared outside you just couldn’t win her attention back. This improved as she aged and began finding joy in the sciences, especially chemistry and physics.

When she was seven, her father began to complain of homesickness, and demanded that the family move to Thailand. Jun was less than pleased. Her home was in Australia, it was all her children had ever known. Quarrels lasted for months, and eventually the two decided it would be better to separate. Even though Sunan kept in touch always, Kanda took it hard. She didn’t want to go all the way to Thailand to live - and she spoke Thai very poorly - but she didn’t want her father to leave. She’d always thought they were one big happy family. It affected her so much that she was only too happy to start using her mother’s surname, Shao.

Though she never really got over the event, she spent a lot of time studying, as though trying to drown everything out. Other kids started copying her homework... and getting told off for it, but had the teachers not been so eagle-eyed they might have shared in her high marks. She struggled a little in the languages, but she figured that as long as she was understandable when she write, it really didn’t matter whether she knew why the author used one specific word over all the other words.

In the years after their father left, the girls encouraged their mother to look into courses, as she was beginning to feel useless and lonely, and often complained about needing a hobby. It was Mali who suggested that their 'beautiful mother' become a beautician, and Kanda who proudly helped her mother to find the perfect course.

When she was twelve, she started noticing girls, which was odd, since she’d always been told that you were supposed to notice boys when you were in high school. As such, she told her friends that she definitely liked that Cameron guy that everyone else liked, while actually being more interested in his older sister, Katie. There was just one problem. Katie was dating the slowest boy in Kanda’s class. Chrissy Ward had been continually held back and definitely wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he wasn’t a mean kid. He was slow, but not stupid. That didn’t stop 12-year-old Kanda scribbling in her diary about how much she wanted to punch his stupid ugly face. Yes, she was jealous, and she knew it. And she couldn’t say anything about it to anyone, either, because then they’d tease her and she’d have to rip their arms off. For months, she was interested in Katie on and off, and always felt kind of miserable when she realised that she and Chrissy were still together. The last time she ever saw Katie, she was out on the football pitch during lunch announcing her engagement to her boyfriend of eight months. At the age of fourteen.

Even though teenagers always talked about staying together long enough to get married and it never actually happened, something in Kanda just snapped, but she didn’t have the opportunity to act upon her violent urges. The bell had already sounded, so she sat in class glaring at the back of Chrissy’s head. I wish he’d just burn up and explode, she remembers thinking.

Except she didn’t expect it to actually happen.

Well, he didn’t explode, thankfully, but he did faint quite suddenly. Immediately, Kanda stood up in shock, wondering if her look alone had killed him. It was only a phrase; she didn’t think looks could actually kill! Her influence over his body temperature had ended the minute she became worried about him, but his core temperature remained dangerously high. She was ordered to stand back and give him air, but she just kept gibbering on about how this was all her fault because she wanted him to burn. Later that week, while she was still trying to piece together what happened, a recruiter from Yǒufú de rén arrived and told her that she was a meta. While she didn’t really understand, it didn’t matter to the recruiter, who said that she would be made to go either way. While Australians usually were made to go to the Swiss meta school, Kocher, Kanda was targeted by Yǒufú de rén because of her heritage. Her mother accepted that she should go to learn to control her power, and in a week she was at the Chinese meta school.

It was absolute hell.

She would often write to her mother and her sister, telling them how much she hated it, how they wanted everyone to have military training, how she was essentially being trained up as a weapon. After hurting Chrissy like that, she didn’t want to do that to another person again. The only bright part of learning there was Shuai jiao training; a Chinese form of wrestling which she enjoyed because of its ties to the martial arts she loved so much. Still, it wasn’t enough to make her want to stay and be raised to hurt people.

Mali, seeing how much her sister resented the move and being precocious as she was, decided to look up other meta schools. Discovering Hammel, she begged her mother to contact them; maybe they could help. They could even move to Pilot Ridge to be close to her - for once, Mali wanted to be the protector. It didn’t take much for Jun to relent, and so they made the move.

It was a big struggle trying to get Kanda out of China. She had great potential with her power and they wanted to try to push her to her limit, but she was also stubborn and strong-willed and claimed that she didn’t want to learn. Eventually, Hammel prevailed, and the Australian girl was settled into Hammel after just a year at Yǒufú de rén.

She was suspicious of Hammel at first, though she considered it the lesser of two evils. For all she knew it was just a sugar-coated version of the Chinese school and they would have her doing all sorts of evil deeds. She even skipped certain classes because she assumed them to be propaganda.

Then she attended science classes, and her paranoia just dissolved. Well, it wasn’t quite as easy as that, but she was enamoured by the science classes. Her talents in chemistry and physics were even encouraged and rewarded!

Soon enough, she began to actually enjoy life at Hammel, and did well in nearly all of her classes. She actually had friends around whom she felt she could be herself, and she embraced her sexuality after so long trying to hide it. Her mother had been disappointed, to say the least, but over time, she has come to accept her daughter for who she is. Her sister didn’t really care, which she felt was a good result.

At the age of nineteen, she left Hammel with good control over her power, and for university, she decided she was going back to Australia to study chemistry and physics, making a secret promise to herself that, once that was over, she’d go back to Hammel and study to become a teacher. It had given her so much and shown her that there was opportunity for her, and she always knew that she’d want to give something back.

University went as well as could be expected. There, she studied chemistry and physics and took judo classes. She had friends and lovers and too much whiskey (not while studying, though). She burnt her hair with candles and stressed over tests and spent years expanding her knowledge. While she’s never been a religious person, it was during her time at uni that she decided for certain that she was atheist. She didn’t think it had to be a massive part of her life, however, and continued to focus on her studies. After gaining her degrees in Australia, she went back to Vermont to train as a teacher. Finally, after receiving her qualification that made her an official, bona fide teacher, she is returning to Hammel with the hope that she can keep her promise to herself and give a little something back to the school that made her who she is.

Roleplay Example

This is not the roleplay sample you’re looking for.

You might want to try Mitya and snoop around Michael.

What About You?

Name: Not Lilac. Ever.
Age: 22. Or am I?
Experience: since the beginning of time
How Did You Find Us? I was originally looking for my glasses.
Ready To Play? Hang on, let me find the dice...

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[Dryope *]

Accepted

Another brilliant app. I think you know what to do by now.

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