▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Alex
CONTACT: PM doreimi
OVER 18? Yes!
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: None!

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Reimi Sugimoto
CANON: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable
CANON POINT: Vol. 47, Ch. 439: Goodbye Morioh! Golden Hearts

AGE: Physically 16, though she's technically lived an additional 15-16 years as a ghost, so she's got maturity considerably beyond her years. I'd like to age her up to 18 physically for the purposes of Prisma!

BACKGROUND:

▶ Reimi on the JJBA Wiki
▶ Arnold, Reimi's dog, on the JJBA Wiki
▶ Ghosts in the JJBA Universe
▶ Diamond Is Unbreakable, chapter summaries on the JJBA Wiki

PERSONALITY:

Reimi Sugimoto is an ordinary girl with an extraordinary backstory; that's the simplest way of summing it up. The main conflict of Diamond Is Unbreakable is found in the presence of a serial killer in the town of Morioh, a small suburban town. For more than a decade, this serial killer has been brutally murdering adolescent girls and stealing their hands to take as trophies, destroying their bodies afterward to eliminate any trace that might lead to someone deducing his identity. Now, in the present day of 1999, the heroes of Diamond is Unbreakable set out to bring that serial killer to justice once and for all, and make the town of Morioh safe again.

Reimi is, as she calls herself, a revenant — a ghost that has refused to pass on to the afterlife, and remains instead in the realm of the living until such time as her grudge is satisfied with justice, and she can be at peace. What makes Reimi somewhat unique, however, is that she reserves her vengeful feelings for only one person: Kira Yoshikage, the man responsible for murdering her dog, her entire family, and eventually herself. Though for most of the series, Reimi is unaware of the identity of her murderer because she never saw his face or learned it before she died, her drive to see justice be done and protect other girls like her from falling victim to his serial killing habits causes her to remain on earth as a ghost in the hopes of contacting someone who can find him, or at least in the hopes of warning them of the threat he poses to her hometown.

In fact, to most people, Reimi is the exact opposite of vengeful or cruel; when Rohan and Koichi first discover the phantom alleyway where she remains trapped in the world of the living, they have no idea that she's a ghost because she appears to them as any other average teenage girl — friendly, a little flirty, and perfectly willing to tease them about mundane things like their future love lives or their less-than-savory personality traits. In fact, after she scares them with the story of her murder (which she initially claims is "just a ghost story"), they automatically assume that she's out to hurt them and thus they flee from her — a mistake she corrects with more than a little chagrin. She's practically insulted that they've leapt to the conclusion that they're going to have to fight her simply because she's a ghost, and reminds them that she's done absolutely nothing to hurt them, and in fact is perfectly willing to help them find the way out of her alley once she's finished telling them her story.

Though she is undeniably a minor character and something of a plot device in the context of Part 4, Reimi does still pull her weight as a character in the scenes where she does appear. Her drive to see Kira brought to justice is clearly demonstrated in the fact that she actively takes steps to try to warn people about him and track his movements, even for the fifteen-some years she remains in isolation in her alley before Rohan and Koichi stumble across her. She can advance a short distance out of the alley onto the main street it connects to, and does so on occasion to read the newspapers in a nearby convenience store and keep track of other murders in Morioh that fit with Kira's pattern of killing. She is insightful and clever, and is in fact the person who first suggests that Rohan and the group should investigate the man whose identity Kira is currently using as an alias in the latter half of the series, having examined a series of photos that Rohan took of possible suspects and found a connection between two people featured in them that ended up correctly leading to Kira himself.

Outside of her quest to avenge her murder, though, Reimi is a fairly average girl in her mid-teens. When Rohan uses his Stand, Heaven's Door, on her, he is able to read parts of her life story and reveals a handful of embarrassingly normal life facts and experiences, including her measurements and the fact that she let the first boy she ever kissed "use his tongue". She is frequently depicted as smiling or with an open, friendly expression, and engages in simple teenage pleasures like painting her nails or telling pocky horoscopes to predict people's romantic relationships. She clearly derives pleasure from teasing Koichi and Rohan, and has the sort of feisty, outgoing personality that makes her unafraid to speak her mind and give as good as she gets when she thinks she's been insulted or slighted. Though when the chips are down, Reimi displays an undeniable sense of maturity and levelheadedness, in her leisure time she is spunky, outgoing, and generally a fun and pleasant person to be around.

Thus, Reimi is an ordinary girl with a very extraordinary set of traits and values. At just sixteen years old, her thirst to see justice for her murder be done causes her to remain on earth as a ghost rather than passing on to the afterlife, and she uses that time seeking to protect others from the threat that she knows still remains on her hometown's streets. She can be unbelievably mature when the situation calls for it, yet friendly and kind in her more relaxed moments. She has all the traits of a good babysitter and cares deeply about others, and at times is all but fearless in her attempts to protect them. Yet despite her compassion, she is still capable of ruthlessness in the name of justice; in short, Reimi has the capacity to be hard when she needs to be but gentle when she wants to be, and usually prefers the latter.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

As a ghost, Reimi canonically is only visible to Stand users and/or people with a "strong supernatural presence"; the ghost alley where she resides for fifteen years, likewise, can only be found and entered by Stand users because of its supernatural nature as a "purgatory" on the boundary line between life and death. Her abilities as a Jojos ghost appear to be limited to phasing in and out of tangibility, never experiencing the effects of aging or physical development, and being theoretically immortal by virtue of the fact that she is, well, already dead. Whether or not she can sustain physical injuries as a ghost is inconclusive; she does, however, retain the injuries she received during her murder, as does Arnold. However, given that she'll be alive in Prismatica, all of this is somewhat moot.

If possible, I'd like her to simply appear a little off to anyone who might be supernaturally perceptive, and potentially retain her ability to alternate between tangibility and intangibility — which would maintain something of her ghostly nature while still allowing her to be alive for the purposes of Prisma!

As far as her skillset goes, Reimi is fairly average; unlike most characters from her canon, she is not a Stand user, so her range of skills is mostly limited to a typical Japanese schoolgirl's education, a general range of interests, and evidently the patience of a saint and caretaker capacity of five of them, given that she manages to competently babysit a young Rohan Kishibe.

INVENTORY:

▶ A box of pocky
▶ Another box of pocky
▶ A third box of pocky
▶ A set of nail polish
▶ A violin
▶ Her golden retriever, Arnold (who will preferably not have his throat cut and perpetually bleeding, because I assume he will be returned to life, too).

MOONBLESSING: Cordis!

▶ SAMPLES

It's been a long time since Reimi set foot outside of her alley in Morioh — sixteen long years, to be a little more exact.

The truth is, she'd never really thought about what might happen once she saw justice be served on her murderer. Maybe that seems strange, with all the time she'd had to do nothing but think about it, but the thing about being dead is that you sort of give up on notions of the future, because there isn't really a whole lot of "and then after that" available to you to begin with. So she'd never really tried to work out what she'd do, once the evil in her hometown was snuffed out and she was freed of the grudge that kept her waiting between life and death for so long. She'd sort of just assumed she'd go to heaven, take Arnold with her, maybe see her parents again; one way or another, she'd write the final chapter of her story, place the last period, and close the book once and for all.

She couldn't possibly have anticipated what has happened. Maybe no one could have.

But what has happened is, a version of Josuke's nephew — one dressed all in black, like a student not that much older than she is, really — came to Morioh, and told her to come out of the alley, and then told her to keep walking even beyond the point where usually she'd begin to fade away, and something about what he'd done or what he'd said or what he'd decided must've changed that rule of her existence, because she'd done as he'd said and when she'd kept on walking, she hadn't been forced to stop.

He'd said it wasn't justice, what had happened to her. She agrees with that much, in a way; seeing her murderer brought to justice is nice and all, but it doesn't take back the part about her murder in and of itself, and it doesn't give her back the whole rest of her life that was stolen away from her on that awful night all those years ago.

Justice can't give her life back to her, but from the looks of it, Jotaro Kujo can — and that's precisely what he'd offered her.

But he'd also offered her time to think about it — to be sure it was what she really wanted, to be sure that whatever she said wasn't the product of a hasty impulse decision. So then she'd been free of the alley, but with nowhere to go while she tried to decide, and one thing had led to another until eventually she was on Rohan's doorstep.

In a certain way, he's the only thing that's left for her in the world anymore. And it's a little bit mortifying to be the dependent in this scenario, asking for the charity of a place to stay and some companionship while she tries to decide what to do about Jotaro's offer, but still, she's here and it's a lot better than it might otherwise be.

So that's how she spends her days, now. Rohan has a massive house — gorgeous, opulent, and far too big for just one person. Even with her and Arnold staying over, there's plenty of space for the three of them. Rohan still has all the time and space in the world to retreat and work on his manga, and in the meantime she keeps herself occupied just reveling in an existence that consists of more sights and sounds than just the same old alley, the same old mailbox, the same old sky.

And she's thinking, always thinking. She's been dead for sixteen years, which is how long she'd been alive before her untimely demise. She's half and half, right down the middle, so that's no help in deciding which one she'd rather be. Does she really want to be a living, breathing girl again? Where would she go? What would she do? Her life was snuffed out sixteen years ago, in more than just the physical sense. The world moved on without her, closed up the gaps she'd left behind her with scar tissue, and she'd stayed the same.

But does she really want to go to heaven? Leave this? Abandon the chance for a second chance?

That's what she's thinking about this afternoon. Truth be told, she hasn't stopped thinking about it since the offer was made in the first place.

What's funny — not in the ha-ha way, but in the off-kilter kind of way — about being around Rohan is that, the thing that tends to bother her the most isn't his attitude. Ask anyone else they know, Josuke or Okuyasu or whoever, and they'd probably think she's crazy to think something like that. But it's not that Rohan's abrasive attitude isn't bothersome, objectively; it's just that there's something that bothers her more, and it's this:

Most of the time, it's still all but impossible for her to look at this grown young man and not see the little boy she remembers babysitting.

That's something she works hard to keep to herself. Nobody who's full-grown deserves to be constantly regarded as though they're a toddler, and Rohan is so independent in and of himself that he'd take it even worse still. But a lot of the time, she just can't help it; he is and will always be one of her most vivid memories, that last glimpse of him upset and bewildered on the lawn after she'd thrown him out the window and stayed behind to die.

But when it comes to his art — when he sees something and suddenly has to drop everything and draw it, when every bit of his passion for his art and his skill at his craft immediately rushes to the forefront — that's the exception to the rule. It's never hard to see Rohan as an adult when he's drawing, and maybe that's because seeing him in these moments is synonymous with seeing him at his finest.

"Hold still. As still as you can," he instructs her, while his pen flies over the opened page of his sketchbook. "That distant, contemplative look on your face is perfect."

It's hard to stay still when you've been told to stay still, obviously. But she tries hard not to flinch or fidget, doing everything she can to stay relaxed so she doesn't get overwhelmed with sudden awareness (and self-consciousness) of what all of her limbs are doing.

"Oh, perfect, huh," she replies, even as the conversation threatens to animate her into moving around and ruining whatever he's drawing. "Hey, are you going to put me in your manga, then? I hope I get to be somebody cool, if you do. You wouldn't give me a crummy part, would you?"

It's lighthearted, easy teasing. It's a valiant attempt at disguising how it actually feels to know she's the subject of one of his sketches at the moment, because she's seen his drawings and everything he puts down on paper is beautiful, and so if he's drawing her then by extension, rendered by his fingers she'll be beautiful, too.

"Mm! You know, maybe I should make a living off of this, if I'm really perfect and everything," she continues, the wordplay deliberate. Make a living — what a thing for a ghost to say.

He doesn't reply, doesn't rise to the bait. And so she simply continues to hold still until he's through, lost in thought and always drifting back to wondering if she really deserves the opportunity to even try and have a life at all, after sixteen years left behind.