Difference between revisions of "Eien/History"

Eien was born on Port Island in February of 1992. Her parents, Akira and Kasumi, had high hopes for their daughter, as from an early age she demonstrated a remarkable and active inquisitiveness about the world around her.

At eight years of age she went on a camping trip with several other families. Sitting around the campfire one night, the adults told kaidan -- traditional ghost stories, many of which date back to the Edo period -- and Eien was so terrified by them that her parents were forced to leave the trip early and bring her home...though her nightmares didn't stop. In an effort to give her a way to deal with her nightmares, her father told her that he would take her to the library to take out books about kaidan, because the most frightening thing about the unknown is that it IS unknown, and the more familiar one becomes with something, the less scary it will be.

He would regret his approach. Her interests, previously roaming and all-encompassing, suddenly narrowed to supernatural subjects almost exclusively, broadening gradually to include the occult: magic and all manner of esoteric, hidden knowledge. As she buried her nose in strange books and babbled excitedly, incomprehensibly, about astrological significances and pagan holidays, all her parents could do was look at one another uneasily and hope that it was only a passing phase.

It wasn't. In 2007, at the age of 16, Eien discovered a piece of paper tucked into a book about occult rituals, on which were written instructions for a specific ritual that would summon a powerful spirit to come to her aid. Of course, she couldn't resist; two weeks later, staying at a friend's house near a plot of undeveloped land, the girls went into the woods at three in the morning and performed the ritual according to the page: it had required three days of fasting to prepare, and she was already light-headed when they tromped into the woods.

At the culmination of the chant, Eien collapsed...and met Philemon.

It wasn't more than a month later that she woke up in the middle of the night in the Dark Hour to go to the kitchen and get herself a glass of water, and realized that the world she could see through her kitchen window was...wrong, somehow. Baffled, she went outside -- and was almost immediately attacked by Shadows.

That is when Hekate manifested for the first time. In the middle of fighting the Shadows, Mitsuru Kirijo, Ran Itoh, and Akihiko Sanada, patrolling the dark hour, heard the scuffle and helped to defend Eien. In other circumstances, they might have tried to recruit her after the battle was over...but SEES was still reeling from the loss of Shinjiro Aragaki, and the group wasn't any longer readily taking on new members. It was Mitsuru Kirijo who gave her a quick explanation as to what had just happened to her -- about the Dark Hour, and about her persona. She never had deep involvement with SEES in the years that followed, but she did occasionally see Mitsuru and Ran, always with the impression that they were checking up on her, to see if she was still alright.

She always was.

Gaining a persona did nothing to deter Eien's interest in the supernatural, of course, though by this time her parents had succeeded in encouraging her to devote herself to a mundane and practical course of education. By day she studied the sciences at Gekkoukan High, particularly biology, chemistry, and criminology, and worked part-time as a clerk and barista in a small bookshop and cafe; by night she read ever-and-increasingly more esoteric volumes, some of which her parents would likely have disowned her even for looking at.

To say nothing of what they would have done to her if they'd known that, at eighteen, she summoned a demon, and made a deal with it.