#outofwhitechapel

And I almost didn't too, if I recall correctly. But in the end, here I am.

I'm eternally grateful that the mods gave me this opportunity to be a part of this RP. It led to me being able to keep touch with some good friends I'd made, as well as make some new friends, and even meet some people I'd admired from afar for a while before hand. All in all the experience has been fantastic.

I never expected Akemi to become a likable character- she was supposed to be annoyingly talkative, actually. But then there she went making friendships and being in a canon ship! I still can't believe me trying to make a dumb joke about dragging Jaz out of Narnia transferred into being a legitimate ship. And I couldn't be happier about it, because it's such a great ship too. I also never expected to become both a killer and a victim in the same game. Still a bit upset that I never got to execute Akemi but, ah well. It's almost a blessing that she didn't get executed so early, since then we wouldn't have gotten the ship... rip...

I'm glad I got to make so many good friends out of this experience. Most of you that I knew from ASP became some of my closest friends over the course of this game, even if I wasn't particularly close with you guys during ASP. I felt comfort knowing that you guys would be there to talk to if I needed it. And some of you that I'd just met became good friends too, and I'm glad we all got the chance to RP and have fun together.

It's getting to the time where I'll be signing off of Akemi's blog, probably forever. It's a sad thought to hear myself think, but even if I use her again I probably won't be on this blog ever again. If you couldn't find the password to her journal (http://rippergirldiaries.tumblr.com), it was 925, and you can look through her diary entries (although there hasn't been one since chapter six, obviously). The password was a reference to the day of the premiere of the last episode of Strawberry Panic!, the manga the password was hidden in. Why Strawberry Panic! and not another book? Well why does it matter. It's not relevant. Also I just read Strawberry Panic! when I wrote her room out so.

What else is left to say... well, as far as my first real RP experience goes, Astral was a good way to start out and shake off ASP's less than satisfactory system. I'm excited to apply to B&B, in which my hopeful is my 8-bit musician Akihiro, aaaand I'll be part of the mod squad when AC2 rolls around! (i wont let you forget again lexi) When the time comes for that maybe I'll show you guys my character for that too, ehehe! 

Last but not least... thank you again. Thank you all so much for letting me have such a good experience with this group. And I hope I wasn't too annoying or anything.

If you ever want to talk about predespair headcanons, hit me up on Skype! And if you want to talk about post-game relationships/opinions you can also hmu on Skype or send some kinda funky symbol I guess? I think that's what the DA3 kiddos are doing so

I'd say it's time to say goodbye... but it's not really goodbye at all, is it?

It's more like...

While I was writing Akemi's app, I was still unsure of the kind of character I actually wanted her to be, save for the accent. I decided to give her some personality traits I thought she would probably have once she really became a muse- self-confident, a perfectionist, outgoing, happy, positive... while I kept some of those things for a while, eventually they began to melt away to the character I made her in the game. 

After I was accepted, I really began to figure out who Akemi was as a character. I gave her a better motivation behind studying Ripperology than "it seemed cool"- she craves justice. The amount of times the word "justice" appeared in Akemi's trial posts was a bit uncanny, even I didn't realize I was doing it at first. Her mother is a cold case detective, and so from a young age Akemi learned that eventually the bad guy always has to get caught eventually; her mother taught her that all bad people would be brought to justice. So growing up with that etched into her mind, and then finding out about Jack the Ripper, who has gone uncaught for over a century... she had to find out more. She wanted to give the victims the justice they deserved. She put in immense research into the topic, taking out every library book, searching every website, trying to find something that could be the breakthrough evidence to really catch the killer. She researched people who lived in London at the time, who were visiting London at the time, and with only the little information known about these dead people she still managed to come up with a few solid suspects added to the lists. 

I also made her... well, a little less self-confident. I was once a big fan of the book series Maximum Ride, and I really enjoyed the concept of the Voice. In Akemi's character, after she killed Valentina she developed a "voice" of sorts, that berated her for things she previously probably wouldn't think twice about. I didn't do it as a reference, but more as a coping device for her. Even though she didn't know she killed Valentina, her subconscious had the general idea of it and produced that voice as a way of telling her that she's become the exact kind of person she was trained to hate- a killer who has not been brought to justice.

Akemi's backstory changed a bit too; nothing from the app became different, but I did add some things. Her original backstory is quite bland- the only notable event is her father's death when she was two. So I decided, why not add something to it? Most people will say that psychologically to deal with a father being out of the picture, girls will date a lot of men to fill the void. However, I thought- Akemi is now being raised by her mother, who is a cop, and her older sister, who goes on to become a rich and famous fashion designer who owns her own company. Independent women. Growing up in a household with only women essentially made her more comfortable around girls than boys. But there's still something missing there with the death of her father... so essentially, I gave her a long string of relationships.

It starts when she's fourteen and has her first and only boyfriend, who I believe I named Ryuusuke. They dated for a little while in middle school, but Akemi found herself unhappy with the relationship, like it was emptier than it should have been. He broke it off with her because she was becoming more and more distant, not even wanting to talk to him. She went through a lot of self-realization during her relationship with Ryuusuke, and apparently they still talk sometimes. She "owes him everything", meaning that he helped her realize what she really wanted.

In the same year she started dating her first girlfriend. She was an exchange student who had moved around a lot. She was originally from Russia, but moved all over Europe due to her father's work, and was living at the time in France. She did the exchange program to force her family to stay in one place for an entire school year. Her name was Natalya, although she was nicknamed Natasha; she's actually based off of Natasha Kryly, my SHSL Skydiver/Magical Girl. Akemi started out by teaching her Japanese, and Natasha showed her all of her favorite magical girl anime. Akemi had seen a little before, but Natasha really hooked her on it; Akemi's older sister Haruko took their requests to make them custom magical girl outfits, which both of them still own. Natasha broke off the relationship at the end of the school year, when she moved back to France.

Akemi became very focused on her talent after that. She was majorly on the Internet, and through the Internet met a Japanese-American girl named Kaneko, with whom she shared an online relationship for a few months. Akemi's hat, a signature item of hers, was actually a birthday gift she received from Kaneko. It didn't last very long; Kaneko was unhappy with the distance and broke it off.

(tw: abusive relationship)

After that, she stayed with a friend in Tokyo for a while. While there she met a girl named Masuyo, who was a sweet lolita. She wasn't a famous model or anything, but Akemi thought her style was just fantastic. Now, Masuyo's original form as my SHSL Sweet Lolita is very nice, but the incarnation of her in Akemi's life is... not. I never got into the nitty gritty details of Akemi and Masuyo's relationship, but it was terrifyingly awful and abusive. Masuyo was very manipulative to Akemi, and she was more of a puppetmaster than a girlfriend. Still, somehow, Masuyo was the one to break it off with her after Akemi distanced herself from the relationship.

Her final pre-Hope's Peak relationship is admittedly the one I made the most important. For 6 months while her house was undergoing repairs (her sister lodged at her university and her mother stayed with her grandparents), Akemi decided she would take the opportunity to live further away, so she stayed in Kanazawa with a friend of her older sister, a novelist named Shigure Harudori. Shigure had a younger cousin who lived with her as well, the young and rather prominent poetess Hazuki Harudori. Hazuki and Akemi were about the same age at the time. Hazuki was "traditionally beautiful", with very pale skin, straight black hair, and eyes a striking shade of purple (mmm anime colors). The Harudoris wore yukatas and kimonos almost exclusively, in fact. They ate traditional meals, all cooked on their own, and even wrote in calligraphic handwriting. She felt like she was "living with geisha". Hazuki was a very forward girl, and only a couple of weeks into Akemi's stay she asked her out, to which Akemi actually said yes. For the entire trip (save the weeks at the start) the two were a couple, and grew very very close during that time. They almost never left each other's side, not for school or to go out and hardly ever to even walk around; the only times they were separate were when they really, really had to be. Their relationship was very, very serious; Akemi had thought she'd finally found someone she really wanted to be with. However, that was not to be. Hazuki was accepted to Hope's Peak Academy a full year before Akemi was, and now that Akemi's house was fully repaired she had to move back to Osaka. They would be separate all the time, since Hope's Peak was a boarding school; the letters they sent back and forth for a long time did not satisfy Hazuki enough, so in her final letter she told Akemi they were better off going their separate ways. Akemi, of course, was distraught after this; she became despondent for a while, and she swore that she would never find someone that she loved like she did Hazuki.

Now, as you all know Akemi was part of a ship in canon, with Jaz. Although after her break up with Hazuki she felt like she could never be in another relationship, she found herself becoming attracted to Jaz slowly throughout the first two chapters. Anyone who listens to her talk has her attention; most of her friends at home, if not all of them, could give less of a shit about her talent. Akemi is a very talkative girl, so they never let her get off on tangents; meeting someone who wanted her to talk was completely new to her. From Akemi's end, she felt like it would just be another relationship, another mark in the wall until things started to go sour in the base. Friends beginning to die, and all. She found herself caring a lot; even from the beginning she did (in chapter 2, the threat that someone she 'really cared about' could die), and by the time of her death she was certain that she was in love again, and that it was much different than what she had before. She wrote a letter to Hazuki, in case she ever got out and could send it, admitting that she was right about not finding someone she loved like she did her, because she found someone she loved more than that. 

This... got pretty long wow. Did I have anything else I wanted to add... well, some ending thoughts I guess.

I'm really glad I got to play Akemi. It's going to be pretty weird not rping her again, or at least not for a long time... who knows what the future holds for her, though! I'm probably not going to make her an indie; the indie community ignores me for the most part and I'd honestly really rather not deal with that. If I ever go back to my multimuse, I'll probably end up adding her in to that, but I think the group scene is more my tastes. I almost didn't get into Astral, and I'm glad the series of events transpired that allowed me to get in! It still bewilders me that people- and not just people, some people that I actually look up to and admire- liked Akemi's character. I still get a bit freaky that Doubt people actually followed Astral and talked about it like how we talk about Doubt. Like... there's the possibility that cool people like my OC and my writing??? Wow that's. I'm still shocked about it, honestly. Hell, I'm still shocked the people in Astral liked Akemi. It was a lot of fun developing Akemi's character even in the game, especially after what happened in the second trial and all. Recreating her emotions was pretty interesting!

My only regret is the inactivity in the deadblog. I really didn't get to do much until the last trial, because no one posted in the deadblog, and I am also partially and offender of this. If I get into B&B I really hope the deadblog is more active, and as are all the characters in the game! There's so many characters that I really would've loved to see more of that were very inactive. While I get that sometimes life gets in the way, it's still a little sad to have those characters go without much exposition.

With that, I wish the best for all of you from here on out! Good luck on your B&B apps, both old players and new hopefuls! Hopefully I'll be up there right alongside you!

Akemi sat up straight, jolted up by a sudden feeling of wooziness.

"Aah! I didn't fall asleep at the computer, mom! I swea- wait, huh?"

This was not her desk. When she woke up, she was not faced with her wall of pinned-up papers and packets worth of theories and analysis. This was a dark, unfamiliar classroom, and she sat at a cold, unfamiliar desk.

Nearly falling out of her seat, Akemi was startled by the unfamiliar location. Something felt very, very off.

She adjusted her beanie and walked toward the door, feeling like the room shifted with every step. Was that just the dizziness of waking up? She couldn't tell. The halls were only lit by dim emergency lights dotting the halls every few meters at equal points, and they seemed to stretch on forever in every direction. She walked left from the door she exited and found a sign. A cafeteria? Was this a school? What was going on? It could be some kind of natural disaster going on and she got knocked out in the room, or she fell asleep and school ended without her. Whatever it was, the cafeteria doors had light coming from underneath them, so she didn't hesitate to give them a try.

Opening the doors, she squinted in the bright light of the cafeteria. Oh, look at that. There were 25 other people there. Lovely. Well, making conversation can't hurt anyone.

"Ah, sorry! 'M'name's Akemi Sekai. 'M a Super High School Level Ripperologist. The title kinda speaks fer itself, but it means I study th’ Jack the Ripper murders 'n analyze them, comin’ up with theories and stuff and tryin’ ta solve it. Nice t' meetcha all!"