#karanozo

Nozomi can turn into a black cat and back at will. (shoutout to @ash-imagines for this headcanon! Go check them out, they're very talented!)

With that being said, I also headcanon Nozomi to be a witch. (y'know how black cats are associated with magic and witches...) Maybe a witch that focuses on flower magic, since in the movie she's seems to be around sakura a lot.

Nozomi's family is wealthy to a certain degree. (this is based on the movie, where she visits her old house, which is very large. Also, she gets a hospital room by the sea! Idk if indicates wealth or anything...)

Personally I feel like she got sick and was very close to death, but eventually she got better, albeit it took a long time. (Maybe the witch headcanon has something to do with her getting better...?)

I feel that Nozomi would end up being Karamatsu's girlfriend, (also based on @ash-imagines and their prompt about how a relationship between Nozomi and Karamatsu would go) but would also be Choromatsu and ichimatsu's friend. (she interacted with Choro in high school, and she can turn into a cat... Ichi would LOVE that.)

Nozomi reads a lot in her spare time as a hobby. She would also play the piano. (first one is based off of @laurzvahll's drawing of Nozomi and Kara together! Check them out too! Can't remember how I thought up Nozomi playing the piano tho...)

Here's where i, myself, went on Pinterest and tried to find stuff that I think would look cute on Nozomi www, I was aiming for a balance between camp and cute/fun. Like Grimm's Brothers or Moomin fashion, but make it the type of outfit you'd see in Tokyo.

✨ Here's some of the fits I thought kind of fit that description ✨

From the more normal ones:

To more conceptual ones:

To things that are just honest to god weird and too much and FUN

Karamatsu is maybe a bit surprised but believer on self-expression through fashion that he is, he jumps at the opportunity to enable this lol. Him and Nozomi end up spending literal hours in which he explains how he deconstructs an outfit that he wants to try to recreate, explains his strategies when it comes to thrift shopping and modifying garments so they fit his vision, etc.

I can see Nozomi getting increasingly excited the more she learns, to the point where they agree to go shopping the next day. Cue a make-over montage (it's really just a closet renewal project but you get the feeling I'm going for lol) that has bubbly y2k pop music in the background and focuses on those two trying stuff on and off in several dressing rooms, shopping for buttons and patches and maybe even plushies, getting lost in the streets of Harajuku, pausing for tea and maybe to have fun with a purikura photo booth, etc.

It's a whole thing of course, it takes them several days, they're both so busy with this project you'd almost think they got a job lol.

Next time Nozomi stops by the Matsuno's, Totty goes to answer the door and is greeted by Nozomi wearing a coat made of cookie monsters plushies and Kermit boots to match.

It'd be a very soft friendship, where Nozomi encourages Karako to try all the things she feels too self conscious to try (magic sports and magical chorus being the main ones), and in turn Karako happily helps Nozomi with odd little quests, like helping her talk to someone new, finding odd books in parts of the library they shouldn't be in, tailing rare magical creatures (like bird watching, but make it AU relevant) which usually lands them in weird places and leads to even weirder adventures.

During one of those adventures trying to find a lake monster or something equally rare, they accidentally run into a mischievous Kappa. Nozomi's first impulse is to simply ask him if he could help them find it, to which the Kappa tells them to ask his Destiny Oracle. The Kappa unrolls the parchment in front of Nozomi and tells her that if she writes her name and asks a question, the paper will tell her when that event will happen, if it's in her destiny to happen.

Nozomi only gets as far as to write her name, when the paper provides a date. The Kappa laughs and sinks back into the lake, leaving the girls with a paper with a date that's about 10 years away. Karako gets a bad feeling, and grabs Nozomi to drag her back to the school, weird paper in her other hand.

Back at the school they learn from a trusted teacher that the Destiny Oracle only serves one purpose: to disclose the date of death of a given human. It's not 100% accurate, since sometimes people die earlier, but they never outlive the date on the paper.

Obviously no one wants to be burdened with the knowledge of their expiry date. Nozomi takes it quite hard, and Karako quickly finds that nothing she says can cheer her up. Logically. She doesn't even believe half of the things she's telling her after all.

So she recruits Ichiko so she'll help her try to find a loophole, which really ends up coming (accidentally) from Osoko who, upon learning the whole story, comments "well... that's human life to you. can't live forever"

Human lives. Human lives. The Destiny Oracle only works on humans, according to the teachers and all the reference books. So if Nozomi wasn't a human anymore, wouldn't that buy her some time?

Ichiko is quick to say, hold on a second, that's an assumption on your part — pretty much everything in the school's library is written from the POV of humans, by and for human witches, what if the author simply doesn't know the true scope of the oracle's power? But Karako is out of options, which means that so is Nozomi, so isn't it worth a shot?

Cue Karako running to Nozomi's room and hurriedly (and ever so slightly hysterically) explaining the likely loophole she's found. And she knows, she knows she's suggesting something insanely dangerous, forbidden, quite likely taboo, I mean, changing the nature of someone's soul? That's only ever been done by wizards who wished to defy nature, which is... Well. What Karako is ready to help Nozomi with, if she wants it too.

And Nozomi is scared, because she only has 10 years left, because the alternative is gambling with her soul, because she wishes she hadn't known what she now knows... But then again, what are the chances that they'll succeed? That two highschool girls will find a ritual that powerful in the first place? She looks at Karako's half hopeful, half desperate eyes, and decides that trying to keep her options open is a good use of her time for more. At least until the shock passes. At least until she can think of something better to do with her ten years.

The twist is, of course, that they do find something that looks like it may work. The moment they learn about Animagus (<- there's a link there that explains some stuff that helps the plot move along), Ichiko hyperfixates on it... for obvious reasons. She researches extensively the proper way to perform the Animagus ritual (which is complicated and needs to meet a whole bunch of precise criteria), and in doing so finds a lot of cases that detail all the things that can go wrong. As they often do, since it's a complex spell and all.

One of the things that can go wrong is that the nature of the soul of the person can be fundamentally altered. By the looks of it, it often happened either because the wizards messed with the potion by adding extra herbs or animal parts, or by making a mistake when reciting the charging spell, "Amato Animo Animato Animagus" (My love brings me life, I am obliged to become an animal wizard).

(When Ichiko catches the glint of interest in Karako's eyes, she promptly regrets infodumping about this sort of subject on her lol. Because the way the cogs started moving in that head of her are glaringly OBVIOUS, and no trying to backpedal, no trying to get her to promise not to do anything stupid seems to be enough to undo the damage. Serves her right for trying to cheer her up, or at least distract her, with something unrelated to Nozomi...)

Karako brings that information to Nozomi and they brainstorm around it for a few weeks. There's two things they can agree on: 1. For the modification to the Animagus ritual to have a higher chance of working, they should alter both the potion AND the chant, and 2. They must be altered in such a way that portrays, as clearly as possible, what their objective is. Which is to change the nature of Nozomi's soul, but preserve as much of Nozomi's essence as possible.

Nozomi suggests adding some Bakeneko fur, since that way they'd doubly ensure that she's able to switch from being human to being an animal. For the spell, Karako comes up with a simple adjustment: "Amato Animo Animato Anima", anima meaning "soul" in latin, so the spell now says I am to become an animal soul at the end.

By the time they're able to perform the ritual, which must be done under very, very specific circumstances (thunderstorm) 5 years have passed. I think that by now it's very obvious to the other sextuplets what Karako is doing, but she and Nozomi are also in so deep that it's pointless to try to stop them.

The ritual succeeds in that Nozomi does transform in a green-eyed cat by the end of it, and when she transforms back and tries to use the Destiny Oracle again, it simply replies "I can't tell", meaning that her soul probably DID change.

The ritual slightly backfires in that Nozomi starts behaving more like a Bakaneko, being drawn to mountains and wandering through them for hours at a time, avoiding humans and holy places, etc. Her human form also starts looking less human and more like an spectre that mixes human and cat features at random. But her soul, her kindness is still there, and when she talks with Karako late at night they can connect like they did all those years ago in the academy.

And that poses a huge problem, because Nozomi and Karako had promised that if they managed to buy Nozomi more time, they both would go to college and enrol in an undergrad in Magical Creatures together (definitely inspired by her love for creatures. and also, she just thinks dragos are cool lol). Nozomi can't get caught though, since what they did definitely counts as some sort of forbidden magic -- Nozomi's soul as of now is probably that of a type of chimera that's part human and part youkai, after all. As far as anyone knows she's probably immortal, and the youkai part is DEFINITELY growing more dominant with each day, a process that they should probably try to halt anyway.

As it turns out, after hours spent researching (this time with Choroko's extra aid too), they find that there's apparently only one way to turn an animal soul more human, and that is to make a contract so it becomes a witch's familiar. The souls would become entwined after that: the link would normally allow the familiar's soul enough humanity to be able to communicate and help their witch, the soul-link would mean that they'll always be aware of each other even while apart, and both magic's would become stronger.

Cue Karako becoming an anxious, flustered mess for days on end, because that sounds really intimate? that sounds super intimate, doesn't it? we're talking soul-linking here! and she's 100% giving this all sorts of meanings and shades that go beyond the strictly platonic because, okay, maybe it started that way, but she's now realising that maybe the affection that she has for Nozomi acquired some romantic shades along the way.

When she eventually manages to get herself together, enough to track down Nozomi in some mountain, and explain what they can do to keep their promise, and ask her to "agree to be her companion and entwine her soul with hers, ah, but strictly as friends if that's what she wants! she knows it sounds very romantic after all but it doesn't have to be like that, it's just weird in this instance since they've known each other for so long and Nozomi is Nozomi, not a random animal sprite, wait she's getting off track, let her try again--"

Nozomi's answer ends up being just a honest laugh, because Karako flustering herself and giving her thoughts away is a very Karako move of her, and honestly Nozomi already had a feeling that their bond had changed a bit, ever so slightly over the years. Or at least, she was aware of how her feelings morphed, and she had a hunch that it was the same for Karako, she just never dared to ask her directly since there were time concerns, and then "would she be accepting of someone that's now wholly human?" concerns.

All things considered, getting laughed at by the girl that had Karako being a willing accomplice in dark magic practices, all because she had a throughly uncool yet very candid moment, is... not the worst outcome. Far from it, really. It's enough to give Karako enough courage to grasp Nozomi's hand in hers, kneel down, and state while looking up at her, "I'm serious. I'll have you, if you'll have me".