“ let everything happen to you: beauty & terror. just keep going. no feeling is final. ”
🦋 SUMIRE KOBAYASHI . . . . . . 25 years old . cis woman . she/hers . pansexual .
hometown: hesperia, california.
time in ennora: since 2022.
occupation: art forger/local nuisance.
neighborhood: small pines.
(+) original, charismatic, brilliant, creative, bold. (-) tricky, selfish, impatient, argumentative, noncommittal.
[ more stats. / fashion. / musings. / aes. / visage. / miscellaneous. / thread history. / connections. / self-paras. / headcanons. / other muses. ]
TRIGGER WARNINGS:
cancer.
classism.
death.
drug use.
grief.
manipulation.
murder.
objectification
poverty.
self-destructiveness.
smoking.
theft.
violence.
i.
hesperia, less than two hours away from los angeles, is a dusty and unglamorous locale devoid of culture... chock full of people prioritizing affordability over richness of experience and who are content to spend most of their money on chain restaurants, mom & pop shops, mid-range boutiques, the movies... just all sorts of non-transformative, generic commercial shit that can simultaneously distract and remind them of the drab nature of their livelihoods.
... this brand of criticism looked funny coming from sumire, who was already singled out by her peers due to her unconventional aesthetic expression and uniquely elvish looks, which compounded the fact that she was poorer than all of them—having grown up in a house that would get continually dilapidated as her emotionally and situationally negligent father simply grifted and charred his lungs with expensive cigars.
her childhood bedroom was her sanctuary and her studio. there were always about five stations littered with pretty things meant to make other pretty things... garments made from scrap fabric and ugly thrifted clothes, easels with acrylic paint that probably induced some brain damage when she had to shut her windows at night while they were drying, delicate butterfly wings pinned on tables while she attempted to replicate their lustre, texture, and finish with existing materials for a corset top... even her walls were her canvases, although many unfinished projects eventually bled into each other.
through charm, evasion, and theft (though not so much the last one, she prefers sleeker methods of operationality), she got everything she needed to distract herself from her otherwise bland and non-stimulating surroundings: drugs, supplies, cash. there were others like her, artistic and thirsty for something more sublime, and she half-stuck to them... but her risky behavior and unyielding nature scared them off, since artistic didn't always mean brave (and similarly and unapologetically selfish).
for that reason, half of her company also tended to be people with illicit skillsets, and she's done anything but kick that habit since.
ii.
her father passed away from lung and liver cancer when she was sixteen. after that, she wrote to the email a sculptor once passing through the area gave her, and subsequently packed her bags for portugal.
she soon betrays this new mentorship. because although the woman was kind and masterful at her craft, two things broke the case for compatibility—sumire's desire to paint (even if she was a jack-of-all-crafts, and therefore still valued having a sculpting skillset in her arsenal), and the didactic moralizing she'd be subjected to at any given moment.
sumire moves on after her feral eccentricity gets her noticed and socially adopted by some local rich kids. her inclusion was definitely fetishistic and rife with an undercurrent of envy, but she was barely bothered by the inauthentic nature of these bonds (not like they were that kind to each other, anyway).
because it gave her an opportunity to study this social network and eventually entrench herself even further into it, after having noticed her unique combination of shiftiness and prodigious artistic talent. eventually, some patron offers her an opportunity: to get involved in his black market mess and help him break into forged artwork.
iii.
it's now been seven years since then, and sumire spent time in a gorgeous place in manhattan from when she was nineteen to twenty-one years old. she's seen two people die in front of her and has fled for her life several times. but still, she's not a fugitive, there isn't a warrant out for her arrest, and the authorities don't have a way of tracing her works back to her—unless one of two people snitch. she's wealthy, keeps herself busy, and is keeping a lot of law enforcement agencies on their toes.
sumire doesn't settle. she passes through... and ennora is no different. still, despite it being one of the calmest places she's been in about a decade, she appreciates it a lot more as a quaint backdrop to her chaotic life than she did hesperia. it's a small town actually meant for living, not a predatorily capitalistic desert preying on low-income people's boredom. plus, it's close enough to nyc, where she travels to multiple times a month for business... which generally consists of commissions, better opportunities for adventure, and the occasional emergency.
it'll do for now.
