Application: Sol Raveh

[peacefulwinter]

Okay... time to get back on the horse. I think this is ready...! Winter's heading for sol_raveh when all the paperwork's done.

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Player Name: MaxSalsa
Contact: MaxSalsa
Referred by: Jeni
Other characters: Nooope.

Character Name: Winter Tsukuyomi (AU), reincarnation of Rikka Hishikawa (OU)
Series: Dokidoki Precure
Game transferring from: Save the Earth (savetheearth) and its sequel Raise the Earth
Canon Point in previous game: Post-canon, and post-death; characters are reincarnated from their canon selves.

Summary/History: The Precure Wiki is notoriously bad, so I'm going to link the history (and I suppose personality) section of an old application for Rikka instead. Winter herself was actually apped with significantly less history than this, being from a much earlier canon point at the time; StE, by its nature, automatically updates characters to the latest possible canon, and Winter has memories and regains from all the way through the series (see powers section below).

Changes in character from previous game: This is going to be Winter's history section; it'll start with her pre-game history, and then her game data. Grab some popcorn, this is going to take a bit. If you need a TL;DR version, Winter actually has two YouTube videos ICly that summarize about a third to half of it. They're linked most of the way down this section.

Winter Adamas was born in a tiny little town in the midwest United States called Branfield. The state doesn't matter, the region doesn't matter; it's unimportant. The town itself is unimportant. Nothing of note happened; the days flowed together, only being able to tell one from the next by the special at the diner and the date on the newspaper her father, Rick, wrote for. Her mother worked about an hour away, at a hospital of some renown, where she ran the pediatric ward; that was a little less dull, but April had to leave early and get home late, so she didn't see her daughter that much. The days just kept dragging on, time marching forward. Winter's one form of escape was books. Since she was little, her parents read to her when they could, and she worked her way up from picture books on to more complex things, reading on her own after a while because what she had was fun to her. Of course, she chewed through everything in the house fairly quickly, left wanting for anything more than newspapers.

When the grant came in to build a library, Winter was seven. And you would think that she'd been told Christmas was coming early and twice a year for the rest of her life. Every day after school, she'd walk down to the Branfield Town Library, and sat in a too-large armchair with a stack of books. She started with the simple stuff, and worked her way up to the YA section within a year or two. Reading let her go places she couldn't visit from her little town, and it helped her imagination and her knowledge balloon; somewhere along the way, she discovered the letters were getting blurry, and came back from the optometrist with a pair of reading glasses. That was a counterpoint to her school life; she liked it well enough, given that teachers were like books that could answer your questions, but she became a little distant from her peers, spending too much time with her nose between pages, and deemed a little too idealistic. That suited her fine; time spent with the other kids was time not spent reading, after all.

When she hit middle school, Winter was already reading through novels at a dizzying pace, and working into high-school textbooks to keep herself sharp. She was amazingly intelligent, but lacking in social skills; she couldn't carry a conversation to save her life, and her self-confidence started to nosedive. It was around this time she started to develop what would be a trademark stutter, but if she didn't talk to people, it wouldn't be a problem, right? She was respected for her knowledge, and was trusted to have solutions when everyone else got stuck, but the rest of the time she was quietly left in the corner.

High school would probably have been more of the same, except Winter's mother announced she'd gotten a job at a big university hospital in some other place. Locke City, New Jersey, she'd called it. Winter promptly went to the library and, after a minute, found Locke to have an even larger library, satisfying her condition to move. It was a few weeks later that they started to settle in, in a fairly new home on the more affluent side of town; over the next couple years, Winter's appetite for learning shifted a little bit toward psychology, to understand how to act around people, and why she responded to things the way she did. It made a little bit of a difference, but not enough to have true friends at her new school right away. Still, the days got better, and she worked harder, pushing to make the student council and gain popularity that way. And finally, at the end of her junior year, she won a position as president, valid for the upcoming year. But as she accepted the position with a huge smile, something seemed to shake loose in her head, and she found herself with a memory that wasn't hers: two girls, one with pink hair and one with blue; the former asking the latter to run for student council to help her out. What did it all mean...? (This brings Winter to her starting state in Save the Earth; StE ran at a 1:1 time scale on the actual Earth calendar.)

It turned out to mean... something. Something big. That memory - a pulse, they called it, on the network she found herself connected to all of a sudden - was from someone who lived long ago, in another time and place, and that person was connected to her. It took Winter some time to make heads or tails of it all, during which time school let out for the summer, and she found herself looking for ways to pass the time, some of that involving the people she'd met on the network. Surprising herself, she started to make connections that she could only call friendships, and she was delighted. The Numbered - what the group on the network, consisting only of those who'd seen pulses like her, called themselves - gathered information, and got into trouble more than once or twice between them. The world, an old man had told them in a cave on the outskirts of town, was in danger, and in its moment of need it reached out to them and granted them power. It might have been hard to manifest, and certainly didn't come with an instruction manual, but it was power all the same.

For Winter, that power initially manifest in a blue plushie big enough to be held in her arms: Raquel. Initially nothing more than a supernaturally warm toy, Raquel rapidly regained the ability to speak, introducing himself as a fairy from the Trump Kingdom that helped the Precure, magical girls who fought evil. Of course, that evil wasn't necessarily here, but she'd take it. In the months that followed, Raquel would become able to fly, and then to turn into a curious cell phone. She didn't pretend to understand - most Numbered powers tended to be well within the realm of fiction rather than reality, Winter found - but she was happy for him.

But during that time, weird incidents began. A murder behind a police station. A mysterious substance in the water that made Numbered break into uncontrollable giggle fits, but only Numbered. An aurora in the sky over her otherwise normal city. None of it made sense, but it was all connected, clearly. It had to be; everything connected via the Numbered. The incidents started the day the network went live. Some things only affected them, while others affected everyone except them. She tried to lead a normal life around everything; while she'd made friends, she still didn't really comprehend the best way to handle herself with them, and not everyone had the patience to let her fumble for the right response.

October 2013. The first major incident came to a head, as pink marble statues of snakes began to slither through the abandoned Dead District, very obviously connected to the various mishaps around the city. While investigating, all the pieces clicked together through another pulse, and in a rush of power and memory, Winter had disappeared, Cure Diamond appearing in her place: she'd transformed! Giddy with power and purpose, she proceeded to attempt to blast the snakes into pieces, and had more than a little success, though there were concerns about what that success would mean. Smaller missions were run over the next month or so, gathering further information, and the snake statues were traced to a single man, a David Proud that lived and worked in Locke City. He was located underground, beneath a building owned by Thunder Corporation, a local business with suspicious ties to Numbered business, and shared some information he had, though it wasn't much.

December dawned bitter cold, in more ways than one; early in December, increased police presence at the high school peaked in a morning raid, positioned as a drug raid but with timing and targets too suspicious to match. Standing up for her friends and fellows, putting a little trust in the small power theoretically vested in her as an affronted student council member, Winter was surprised to find herself in cuffs instead, hauled off to jail for the evening. A sympathetic Numbered officer released her the next morning, but she'd spent that whole miserable night regretting her entire existence. As she walked out of the station the next morning, feeling a little better after a conversation she'd had overnight, she'd gotten maybe a few blocks before finding herself uncomfortably close to the epicenter of a fairly powerful earthquake. With nowhere to run, and the street under her cracking in moments, she tried to escape but only managed to break her ankle. When everything died down, she called for help, and was carried to the hospital, where she found herself with a cast and a medical scooter. This injury wasn't enough to keep someone foolhardy like Winter from fighting at least once, of course, but she'd never been called sensible, just smart.

Both of those things fell by the wayside a few days later, as Winter was called into a special session of the student council and summarily dismissed from her position. That began a black two weeks for the girl, as she drifted listlessly from place to place, putting on a cheery face when someone needed something but largely stewing in what felt to her like a betrayal of herself and everything she stood for - that was something she aimed for, something her Other achieved; wasn't she good enough? It took Jasmine, a network friend and a classmate's sister, throwing her a huge surprise party to finally snap her out of it and get her back to her usual cheer. Around then, Winter had a discussion with another girl, someone else whose Other was a Precure, about what they should call themselves. They settled on a team name: the All Stars Precure. Ironically, their roster included more than just Precure, and included a boy of all things, but they didn't really mind. It was a team united with one cause, and that was enough.

As the new year opened, Winter found herself starting to get closer to a couple of her friends. One, Banagher, linked by pulses to a mobile suit pilot; she felt something in her heart for him, but even as close as they were - as close as she wanted to be; she knew what that feeling meant, somehow - she knew she couldn't drag him down by attaching herself to him. No matter how much good he did her, how much he stabilized her and helped her find herself, she couldn't do that. They stayed close, but with her mind pushing those feelings aside, she ended up starting to latch on to someone else. Lily Tsukuyomi was someone she met immediately before her dismissal from the student council, leading her to push that relationship aside for a little bit while she got over herself. That meant, as the new year opened, she was starting to reach out and connect with people again, feeling less like a societal reject and more human again. Lily was someone to connect to, but also someone with a shared history - she, too, was linked to a Precure. Making matters worse, Jasmine, Lily's sister and the girl that had put on the party for her birthday a few weeks ago, was also part of that history... but as an enemy of the Precure. What did that mean for them?

Over the next month, Winter spent time working through Lily's questions, and the two of them grew closer, helping to stabilize Winter further. Along the way, she spent more time helping Jasmine sift through memories of being on the other side of the coin. It was creepy, she'd decided early on, to consider that two mortal enemies in their past life were otherwise happy sisters in this one. And that meant she needed to support the both of them so that didn't come to pass again. At the end of January, events exploded again with a strategy meeting to discuss approaching the apparent alien hiding in a farmhouse on the outside of Locke City. That meeting ended in another attack by snake statues, and as soon as she got news, Winter was on the way - Jasmine in tow - to rescue Lily and the others.

Valentine's Day dawned like any other day, and got strange fairly quickly, as the rumor mill delivered information to Winter about a girl hanging out near a particular locker and and looking torn between approaching and dying of embarrassment. Pressing the issue, Winter found Lily to be the girl in question, hovering next to her locker, and her urge to question becomes an urge to rescue, which in turn becomes a fairly awkward but reasonably heartfelt confession Winter finds herself accepting with a fairly large dose of awkwardness herself. Somewhere in the crowd that had gathered to watch fairytale magic happening live in a stairwell, Jasmine apparently hadn't agreed, and had rather visibly fled the scene, leaving a mildly bitter taste to be settled shortly after. That had, upon confrontation, turned out to be the wrong guess entirely: Jasmine had been worried she'd lose the people she'd come to depend on, and it took only a few moments to set things straight. Winter rapidly began to attach herself to Lily almost immediately thereafter, almost instinctively, and it became commonplace for the two of them to swap insecurities and lean on each other whenever a new pulse brought unpleasant memories.

March 9th, 2014. Despite their attempts, despite their wishes otherwise, everything came to a head. The alien in the farmhouse emerged, and was dispatched, but that heralded the coming of Wise Snake: a massive, moving snake, made of the same pink marble the little ones were composed of, occupying more than a city block, and having emerged in the center of Locke City's business district. If it wasn't stopped, the city would be forfeit, as every thrash of its tail took out a skyscraper here and three houses there. Almost immediately, the All Stars headed into battle, along with the rest of the Numbered with any helpful abilities whatsoever. They arrived to find the military having little success in even fazing the thing; the marble surface shrugged off small arms fire, and was only mildly inconvenienced by anti-armor and tank rounds. Despite herself, though, Winter had to go. This was her duty... this was what she had her power for, right?

The battle was hard-fought, and the city paid a heavy price, buildings all over being damaged and leveled. But through it all, one young woman stepped up, pushing her fear and uncertainty aside to perform her role. To take charge of something she could do to help. Perhaps something only she could do. She became the leader of the All Stars Precure that day, by majority vote if not in name, and she led them into battle without a second thought. Despite being blown through at least one building, and finding herself on what she thought had to be the last of her reserves at least once, the beast was slain, crumbling to pieces before disappearing into nothing. The retreat was suitably low-key; exhausted and mentally drained, the girls worked their way back to more or less safe locations, though Winter managed to make a huge mistake by running out of energy and losing her transformation - returning to a fairly recognizable form - live on national news. Pushing it out of her mind for the moment, taking solace in having kept casualties to a minimum, she called it a night.

Over the next few days and weeks, she began to connect with friends that had been injured in the attack, and start to take in the state of the world. The world, mostly in the dark on the Numbered before now, started to sit up and take notice. And not all of that notice was positive; Wise Snake was a very high-profile, very costly incident. Aliens - in an honest-to-god flying saucer - landed in Locke City, and began to network with both Numbered and local authorities. Just as Winter started to ponder how to proceed, the world changed again, as the same pink aurora shined over Las Vegas, Nevada, heralding a new port of call for Numbered shenanigans. Almost immediately, Winter made a decision: they had to go. Working things out with the school that fairly clearly didn't really like her, she managed to pitch it as a leadership-slash-independent-study project, and with a new Chevy Tahoe given as an early graduation present by her parents, Winter started to plan for the road trip of a lifetime.

Five days. That doesn't seem like a long time, but when all your memories of being a superpowered, reincarnated badass magical girl are pushed out of your mind and replaced with dull fuzz that seems almost unreal, it's fairly jarring. Still, Winter manages to get her team to Vegas by early April, where they set up shop in a provided set of rooms by someone looking to capitalize on free press by putting up Numbered. The trip is initially not unlike a much-needed vacation, Winter's father using his presence as chaperone to needle Lily a little, and Winter started to relax despite herself. While a new Echo barrier meant new Numbered, and new hazards to go with them, part of her believed this trip would end in less stress and less tragedy.

That was, mostly, because said tragedy was back-loaded. A mysterious murder in Vegas in the middle of May set the girls off on an investigation that didn't wind up discovering a whole lot, and Winter found herself even more unsettled a week later when their investigation turned up a vermini-possessed dog. That animal proceeded to attack in a moment of shock, leaving Lily badly wounded, and galvanizing Winter to fight... well, once Lily was taken care of, at least. She rapidly finds herself in a dark mood as a result, given that injury is more or less her fault, and it's compounded with finding that one of her closest friends, Banagher, has dropped off the network in the interim - he's forgotten everything. It takes some time, and some reassurance, to bring her back to anything like normal, and by the time that comes, graduation is at hand, and she has to get the team home to walk the stage and collect relevant diplomas. Incensed at the idea that the whole trip was more or less for nothing - they didn't collect enough information, and she got Lily hurt in the process - she rounded up the team and they all made the trip back to Locke.

Upon their return, Winter took keeping Lily safe rather seriously... perhaps a little too seriously, given she ended up staying at the Tsukuyomi home for a few weeks (and not shying away from meeting Lily's father, Rentarou), and stuck to her girlfriend like she was attached to her side. That was fine, since it allowed them to prepare for college to start in a few short months; late in June, the girls discussed moving into a place together, and started to make plans. One of the effects of Wise Snake's attack was that property values citywide dropped like a rock, especially near the emergence point, so finding a place was easy enough. But one specific pulse gave Winter a lot of pause around then: a note from Mana, her Other's best friend, implying very strongly that there was at least a strong one-sided affection, with a memory that suggested it was two-sided but the two never really told each other. Winter's strongest fear, at the time, was that a pulse would overwrite her personality - or worse, that Mana would be reincarnated into a Numbered, causing that overwrite, and breaking the girls up because destiny was a weird thing. It took some doing for Lily to drive enough faith into Winter's skull to make her get over herself, but that particular worry would lay in the back of Winter's mind for a long, long time.

By that time, August has rolled around, and a combination of Winter's and Lily's parents have negotiated a loan on a house near the Locke City business district, agreeing between them to pay the rent for a few months while the girls get themselves on their feet. They move in that first week, and Winter feels herself starting to relax in a way she hadn't before. Having something like this that was all her own, that was all on her... it was nice. Taking a break from that cheer, she helped to steal something that would become a mainstay for the Numbered: Thunder's highly confidential and highly important Project Jump, a large device that turned out to be a teleporter, connecting the Echo barriers for quick travel. Going to aid another group in an emergency - or running away, in the same - became almost trivial.

Toward the middle of the month, in the interest of improving the Numbered's collective image, Winter appeared on a locally-taped television program, where several reincarnates introduced themselves on camera, explaining a little bit about what made them tick. Before she could consider how well it worked, though, she and the others were invited to a meeting of a cult in Vegas, calling themselves the Children of the Shell, worshipping a being that seemed to be a cross between crab and lobster. It seemed shady, but there was a definite sense of connection to everything, so Winter and Lily went... and were largely unsurprised when something went wrong toward the end - an earthquake, leading Winter to lead an impromptu rescue effort when the cultists found themselves unable to escape on their own. This was worryingly close to the end of the pattern Locke had set: vermini, strange happenings and violence, a powered group operating in the barrier (in Locke, that was the Blood Keys, a group with ties to the local mafia; in Vegas, the Children of the Shell), an earthquake... and then everything going to hell. Given the shorter time scale in Vegas, Winter knew things would be coming to a head soon.

September brought a new trial: Locke City's mafia announced more or less open war against the Numbered they saw as a plague on the city, to begin after a (short) grace period to allow interested parties to run away. Quietly, Winter picked up Lily and her own parents, Rentarou being out of town for work, and they again made the trip to Vegas, the young woman unwilling to leave her parents to suffer under the oppression she was sure would be left behind. The days were quiet for a short time, until Lily brought out a new item she'd recovered from a pulse: the Heartcatch Mirage, a jewelry box that also happened to be a rather powerful magical item. If she could only figure out the right combination of buttons to make it do something-

Lily accidentally found the right sequence of buttons, and she and Winter were both sucked - separately - into the Mirage. Winter found herself dumped into a darkened high school, transformed, with caustic notes scrawled on a bulletin board behind her, and a manifestation of herself - perhaps her fears, her concerns, or more generally just her darkness - with a close approximation of her powers that wanted to end her. Cure Diamond fought back, and over a long several minutes, started to recognize what she was being told; started to understand what her power needed to mean. And when she found herself holding a weapon to the other Diamond's throat, and the other nodded, she found herself released into her own world, from a regal statue of herself that had definitely not been there before. It'd been a trial, it was explained to her later, and with the Mirage's blessing, she'd be stronger in battle. How she'd be stronger would have to be seen later, but hey, extra power can't be a bad thing, right?

And boy, would she need it. It was only a week or two later that Refined Shell made its way above-ground, much as Wise Snake had. Part of the seismic activity had been Las Vegas rising off the ground, finding itself atop a new mountain (the Lonely Mountain from Lord of the Rings), and becoming colloqually known as the Mountain of Sin. And atop that mountain, on the Strip, a massive crab-lobster emerged and began to raise hell, much as Wise Snake had. In the battle that followed, Winter got to experience a new level of power as Super Cure Diamond, the promised blessing turning out to be a powerup that boosted her further, along with granting her wings. This fight was again complicated and costly, but this second monster was defeated like the last one, and the girls assumed they'd be able to to rest now, despite the damage to Las Vegas not unlike what Wise Snake had wrought. That things would be fine for a while.

When the pink lights shined over Füssen, a short distance from Neuschwanstein Castle, Winter rapidly found herself proven wrong. But given the pattern, they had to keep moving. She had to cut off the next tragedy, however she could. And at the announcement that the city's mayor had provided them space to stay during their investigation, Winter and Lily went. A small reception dinner was held a couple nights later, which was mercifully quiet, though the girls left early, preferring to spend the downtime between themselves. They'd need their rest; along with the barrier going up, a massive tower stretching to the heavens (one of the three Orbital Elevators from Gundam 00) had suddenly appeared, and an expedition had been organized to take a group inside to explore. Wearing a tiny mirror pinned to her jacket that she'd rigged up to be a network "camera", the girls worked their way through the structure, finding some of the known aliens at its upper level, casually munching on a supply of Happy Meals while apparently plotting... something. The girls reported their presence, but generally didn't find a whole lot in the way of information.

A few days later, Winter found a questionable decision coming back to haunt her; previously, one of her friends had found her father murdered in a mafia hit before her eyes, the friend in question being shot herself and nearly killed. So Winter had promised some kind of support when Raye wanted to take the fight back to them, as cover if nothing else. That promise was called in when Raye found a group of thugs to press for information... which included cutting one of them down in cold blood, and gravely injuring the remainder. Winter quickly realized that, while she'd thought herself prepared for what she'd known would happen, she wasn't. She wasn't at all. And that knocked her right off-balance for the better part of a month.

When the girls got their feet under them, they began to do research into what they'd seen on the Elevator, and Lily made a discovery: the aliens had collected their children's meals in some ten different languages. The Numbered had access to McDonald's in exactly two. Did that mean they could leave the barriers...? Something was off, and between the two of them, they passed out the gathered information. But Winter wasn't really feeling terribly social; it'd been just about a year since the raid on the high school that had completely crashed her mood and her immediate aspirations at the time. Lily worked to snap her out of the funk, and she quickly recovered enough to do something crazy: call in to a radio show in Locke City with one of the Numbered as a guest, discussing a recent arson case at a Numbered-own business (his own). Winter quickly garnered a lot of interest, and accidentally did a lot of work to help push opinions back into the positive side of the scale.

An attack was launched by the Numbered against the mafia in Locke City early in December; Winter was there as part of an overwatch and information team. Really, doing battle like that didn't quite mesh with the whole magical girl love-and-justice thing, so she just stood back, making sure nothing too unpleasant was on the way in. Unfortunately, among the mafia defenders was the man that had murdered Raye's rather, six weeks prior; Raye, understandably, went off and pressed the fight. But her powers went haywire, and all of a sudden, Raye has perhaps become a larger threat. The Precure were meant to fight monsters, sure, but this was their monster. How did you take the shot when you knew you were shooting at an ally...? Raye knocking Jasmine through a wall decided them, and Diamond and Moonlight opened up with their full power - which proved not to be enough either. In an instant, they were knocked clear, and Jasmine found herself with a sword through her torso. That would have been enough to kill any normal person several times over, and likely enough to mortally wound even Winter herself; only Jasmine's unusual resilience kept her clinging to life, and any thought of continuing to fight disappeared in the moment. They manged to get Jasmine out and to safety, where she was told she shouldn't have made it in the first place, but would recover.

December 12th, 2014. One year since Winter had first spoken to Lily on the Network; and Lily had indeed taken quite a shine to her. Their relationship had only grown over the last twelve months, and to put a cap on it, a date expanded into something much more, a bright spot they needed after the recent battle. Winter had honestly not expected to be proposed to, hadn't even thought it was on the radar given her many insecurities, not that it had stopped her from saying yes as emphatically as she could manage. After a brief pop into a newly-opened barrier in Lapland, Finland, she returned to Las Vegas to meet with her parents... given Lily had done something with a very, very large impact on Winter's life, it was probably time to make sure there wouldn't actually be any obstacles to the union. Reactions varied; Rick had bought into an office betting pool on how long it would take even before this, while April approved almost immediately once Lily could work up the will to get the words out. Eventual marriage now blessed, Winter was on cloud nine for her nineteenth birthday, where she got a chance to see her friends and generally just relax for a few days.

Two weeks into the new year, Winter and Lily are contacted with work from a European organization watching out for Numbered-related incidents: children are disappearing from Lapland, apparently kidnapped by monsters looking vaguely like men in Santa outfits that hadn't bathed in a while and seemed feral, the group led by something masquerading as the Grinch. The original investigation didn't turn up a significant amount of intelligence, but the case was quickly broken open by two Numbered children going and getting themselves kidnapped of their own accord at the end of the month. Winter saw red; as soon as they'd shared a location, she simply gathered her friends and directed everyone through a portal generated by the Heartcatch Mirage, dumping them just outside the building the children were being held in. Her anger yielded to confusion during the operation at the appearance of another Precure, but that confusion was her downfall; rescuing both the new Cure and her partner forced Winter to dive in front of something, and a wicked carve was taken out of her, from her back around and down to her stomach. The children were rescued, but with Winter fading fast from blood loss, she had to bail on the operation early, very quickly requiring treatment. Lily took her to April, and after a very tense couple of days, Winter pulled through, spending a full month recovering, even with her supernatural resilience to damage and recovery speed.

At the start of February, something changed in Neuschwanstein Castle: copies of several numbered, doppelgangers, started to appear. They shared their originals' powers, leading Winter's doppelganger to plot violence and destruction to entertain herself. Winter begins what damage control she can, given she's still laid up. That's put on hold as March opens, and one of the doppelgangers of a Numbered specializing in physical combat appears at her hotel room door with intent to murder her. Lily hauls her out a window several hundred feet off the ground, and when they escape it's on a vector straight to Locke City. She continues to recover there, taking up swimming at her mother's advice to get her strength back up. It's making a difference by the end of the month, when the doppelgangers announce an attack on the Heart Tree, the source of Lily's power, and by extension a large part of Winter's. Taking the bait they didn't really have a choice but to accept, the All Stars assembled at the Heart Tree, and battle broke out, the doppelganger of Lily's sister deciding that she needed to be the only power among them. The fight was hard, but Lily managed to defeat Jasmine's doppelganger, though the entire assembled group - both of them - got a harsh reality check when Lily's purification ability, meant to remove the evil from an enemy and return them to their good state... found nothing good left, and simply wiped the doppelganger from existance. Not feeling the battle anymore, the doppelgangers retreated, and the All Stars left shortly thereafter to ponder what had just happened.

Having come to a conclusion, Winter and Lily's doppelgangers - now calling themselves Summer and Rose, respectively - came to visit their originals in early April; all involved parties were recognizing that, around the world, all the remaining barriers, plus several more that started to open in rapid succession, had events coming to a head. That could only spell trouble for the future, and the four girls agreed to an uneasy truce until the coming attack was repelled. As the pieces came together, Winter hopped onto her laptop, and recorded to YouTube a long plea to the world. Part explanation, part hypothesis, she asked for help, understanding, and the will to live on: something would be coming, soon, and it would fall to the Numbered to save the Earth. A fellow Numbered translated the message into languages understood worldwide, pushed it out, overrode television streams, made sure she was heard. Having pulsed back a crate of small items called Miracle Bouquet Lights, which civilians had used to give Rikka's team of Precure more power in a time of crisis, she traveled between the barriers to pass them out and show the flag, to reassure people that everything would be fine. That the Precure, and the Numbered as a whole, were looking out for them. Someone would be on the case. Everything would be okay.

April 30th, 2014. Observers of the movements of the stars are suddenly finding objects in the way: flying saucers, looking a lot like the one in Locke City. Aliens. For the first day, they're contained in high Earth orbit, largely by a massive snake that the moon unfolded into: the last Animal, the last guardian of the Echo barriers. Winter's foretold attack had come, and rather than a sense of accomplishment for being able to get people moving, she felt only despair. The next day, the first ships made landfall, starting in the places they'd already defeated the local defenders - the Animals. Wise Snake in Locke, Refined Shell in Vegas, those places were struck first. Vegas fell in hours, reduced to slag within days. Dozens of Numbered, and their doppelgangers, brought enough power to level cities against the Enemy in Locke City, one of the first ships landing amid an explosion some one hundred feet from her front door, and barely fought them to a losing standstill. Friends, family, a whole city - a world - that had trusted her; she had to fight, but Winter just didn't have the power. It was all she could do to keep her team moving, to keep her family safe. For each single warrior they defeated, there were three more; the Invasion was at hand, and they were giving ground.

And then, a glimmer of hope. The aliens on the ground, the ones that had been scouting the planet and making preparations for the Invasion at hand, suddenly seemed to have a change of heart as their ticket off-world - their spaceship - was destroyed. They spread information through their contacts. One, through those that would do damage: Raye, Lily, others. One, through those seeking diplomacy. One, through those that could bring the alien technology to bear themselves. Between the Numbered, the information spread, and on the third day, a group of some eighteen Numbered were attempting a tactical insertion deep into orbit - into the enemy flagship, and through it their homeworld. Reaching the commander, they found... a boy. The Boy, his subordinates identified him as. A being with the power of creation, and the power of destruction to match. One that had become frustrated with his inability to simply wish Earth out of existance as he had many worlds - universes - before it, and had sent an army to do what he could not. Those that had given them the information to get here, had given them the key to negotiations: Earth didn't conform to his thoughts, to his understanding, and so he sought to remove it, without trying to gain that understanding.

The strike team reached him, then, in separate small groups of ones and twos. And each got through, each worked to convince him. Winter and Lily spoke of their attachment, of what they knew about people and about the world. Others spoke of what they knew, what they understood, what was different. And somewhere, the Boy found acceptance. Those that had traveled to the homeworld were returned, with a last well-wish to return to their families and ensure their safety, and the Boy left, taking the aliens with him. New Animals sprung forth from the Numbered to take the place of those they had defeated. And at the last, the barriers went down; the Numbered were free to travel, free to go where they wished without fear of losing themselves. It was over. The price paid was immense, the death toll in the millions and climbing, but it could be controlled from there. That didn't stop certain people from despairing, of course, certain people from raging against the Numbered and the tragedies that were seen as their fault.

The house in the business district, where Winter had spent the last eight months with her precious person and learning for herself what she could aspire to, was where she made what she suspected would be her last broadcast. She spoke of the invasion, of their fight, of the destruction at hand. Of why this had happened. Of her sorrow at the losses humanity had suffered. And then of her hope for the future, that they could rebuild, they could protect, and they could raise the Earth anew. Suiting actions to words, she signed off, spent one afternoon restoring her strength, and took to the newly-open skies, her mission clear in her mind through everything. That was her duty, right? Together with Lily, to keep her home safe. Nothing more, nothing less. (Winter's YouTube videos exist ICly as posts to the game community, and function as summaries of the last six months of plot and the Invasion; they can be found here and here. This is the end of Save the Earth; between this point and when Raise the Earth started a few months later, an additional year of in-game time has passed, though additional world-building happens during this time.)

Public sentiment for the Numbered spiraled out of control into the negative over the next several weeks; why hadn't they stopped this sooner? Why did so many have to die? Winter, for her own part, felt like a heel, even knowing there wasn't a lot to be done at the time. This was around the time the Numbered made the group decision that they needed a new place to call home, and that eventually led to the settlement of a tiny village in the forests of New Zealand: Shepherd's Haven. It was isolated and self-sufficent for most things; power was generated from within the village, internet was slow if available at all, it farmed its own produce and dairy products. The nearest village was 20 minutes away by car or magical girl, the nearest source for medicine or other complex products. No phones, no cell towers. Walls and a gate. A truly isolated, relatively safe home, and one where Winter found herself putting down new roots. Her house was built with her own hands, her strength letting her lift walls and beams into place. She was enough of an icon by now that she became something of a face for Shepherd's Haven, and she didn't really mind it that much. It wasn't necessarily home - that was her little house in the business district, from which she'd had to flee, but she told herself every day she'd be back - but it was a place she could settle down and feel safe.

Even outside this idyllic life, time marched on. Lily wrote a book on their collective experiences, released in 2016 to skepticism, wonder, and a lot of buzz; the residual royalties meant the girls would be set for some time, not that they had a high cost of living in a village where everything had to be done with your own hands; that did mean a book tour, though, separating the girls from time to time. That suited Winter fine; it meant she had time to travel on her own and do things her partner probably wouldn't have approved of in the name of humanitarian work. She went far and wide, aiding reconstruction efforts in places hit by the Invasion and beyond, calming unrest, and generally doing good as best she was able. And while it wasn't the summer wedding she'd hoped for, she was wed to her precious partner, taking Lily's name. By July of 2016, Winter Tsukuyomi thought her place in the world was pretty well established.

Then, it all began again. What Winter thought would be a routine rescue mission on a cruise ship in international waters became something much more when Summer (uninvited but present of her own accord) discovered curious slime stuck in the engine, which quickly changed shape into... drawings of something that Lily quickly recognized, which gave her a pulse. They hadn't gotten pulses from randomly finding things, not in a year and a half. Something was wrong, and a cold feeling took root in Winter's stomach. Wandering aimlessly through Gateway City, a new and sprawling metropolis that had very quickly sprouted in the midwest, she came across another blob that resolved itself into a convincing copy of Cheryl, Mana's fairy partner, even if this one was inanimate and didn't speak to her. By that evening, Cheryl had returned to slime and Winter had returned to listing through the city, though a sighting of what could only be a magical girl - one she didn't recognize, which was patently impossible when all the ones she knew of either didn't have their pulses anymore or were on her team - streaked across the rooftops. After a short and playful chase, where Winter found her cheer and her drive returning to her after the events of the day, the girl introduced herself as Cure Twinkle - not one of Lily's, and not one of hers; another new team? How many was this now? Five? Six? - before running off.

A few days later, in her Shepherd's Haven home, she'd gone out for something and found herself face to face with an ethereal copy of what could only be her Other's best friend: Mana. Everything kept trying very, very hard to remind her of that person that didn't exist here, and she felt the old doubts resurfacing again. What if Mana did appear here, and a pulse reshaped her personality? Her desires? She was married now. She didn't want anything to separate her from Lily, but could a pulse make that change? It took more time than it probably should have to convince her that, no, it probably couldn't, and Winter eventually pushed it to the back of her mind.

September rolled around with another harsh reminder of the past: pink marble snake statues, dangerously similar to the ones they'd fought three years ago, wandering Locke City once more. Proud, their original sculptor, was long dead, so where had these come from? It was Thunder, the megacorporation that had continued to operate in Locke even through questions and criticism, that captured the snakes and resolved the threat, but they'd used that announcement to push back against the Numbered in a convincing press release. Where were the Numbered now? The people that had said they'd protect the city were nowhere to be seen, and it'd falled to big business to do it for them. Hand forced, Winter released another YouTube video somewhere between a condemnation and a rise to their bait: while she wasn't necessarily happy about it, she announced her imminent return to Locke City.

Of course, finally being back home to a place where she knew everything down to which spots of carpet were stiffer than the rest was a huge weight lifted off her soul, and she began to relax again despite herself. Thunder remained a threat, but it was one she was willing to deal with. That attitude carried her into October, when she suddenly found herself called to battle in an usual way: not via a network post, but via Raquel, sensing the movement of darkness for the first time in this life. Suiting up, she found Lily fighting a Desertrian, her team's enemies during her Other's original life. It was easy enough to dispatch, but somehow, Winter felt more like a Precure than she ever had; letting her heart drive her, throwing out the attacks against the things they were really meant to be used on, fighting at the edge of safety against something that could only be explained by magic. It made her heart race, and it made her feel alive. Of course, that she'd saved Lily from the thing certainly helped. This would turn out not to be the only Precure monster she'd fight during the month; it was almost like someone was making them, rather than them simply appearing as a result of pulses and shenanigans.

Her heart raced for a completely different reason a couple days later, when she found a girl on her doorstep more or less unannounced. Having read Lily's book and seen the news reports, that girl had tracked them down to their home to ask a few questions. The problem being... she was also the reincarnation of Mana Aida, Rikka's teammate. The one person Winter wasn't sure she wanted to meet. After a tense few seconds, though, nothing changed - her personality didn't suddenly swing, there wasn't anything new. Just a girl standing there looking horribly confused, and Winter feeling like a heel for being worried about it all this time. More than almost anything else, though, she'd just been looking for a friend, and once she'd gotten over herself, Winter decided it couldn't be a terrible plan.

The middle of the month brought a charity event run by a new corporation looking to swing the Numbered to its side: Factor Industries. Being at more or less cross odds to Thunder, putting the event in Locke seemed a good enough way to drive conversation. They'd been looking for personalities to speak, and Winter, figuring it'd been long enough that she needed to make herself heard, gave a short speech about doing the right thing in a world where reincarnation was more than a pipe dream. There was a brief incident with Molly's guardian; the girl had snuck away from home to attend the charity event, which turned messy when she hadn't actually told her aunt she was Numbered... which turned out to be because her aunt hated the Numbered for the Invasion. After an emotional argument, Winter got her to back down, but it struck a nerve or two in the process.

(Raise the Earth closed at this point. Given RtE runs on a real-time calendar, by default Winter will come from the current date, but there won't be new events in her history past end-game.)

Personality: (See the link in the history section for Rikka's canon personality; I'll only be talking about Winter here.)

Winter is initially, in contrast to Rikka, a study in what you get when you start with a character who needs friends to have direction in life, and then she doesn't make any. Not meeting someone like Mana relatively early in life, let alone through a chance meeting that changes the shape of her future, causes her to drift a lot - when she arrives in Locke City, despite it being a fresh start and armed with theoretical knowledge, she just doesn't have the force of personality to make herself heard, or to gather interest. It takes getting her Numbers, and becoming part of something larger where she can't sit back and live her days the same as always, for her to start to change. It was a slow blossoming; one or two people that she reached out to, almost by accident, who ended up being people she connected to on a regular basis, who slowly turned into actual friends. She started to take (small, at first) risks, and do things to set herself apart. She owes Toushirou and Bakura more than she'll let herself say; having someone that takes her at face value but pushes back and makes her think was a big help to get her started.

She's fairly carefree about things; little things annoy her or get her down a little, but she bounces back readily. When she's in a good mood, it's hard to stop her. She does tend to fret about larger stuff; she got nervous for a long time before things like speeches or anywhere she needed to take charge. (She has always had a certain vanity about her hair that can set her off.) But that's something she couldn't keep doing as she went through life as Cure Diamond: there just wasn't time in the day to worry. It became a little bit polarizing to her personality, leaving behind the dual images of a persona that would stand up to anything with a smile, and one a little cracked but trying her hardest to keep going. As she's grown, Winter finds herself hitting higher highs and lower lows, though Lily is helping to temper the latter.

That's something worth mentioning too: Winter's relationships that are her most substantial are the ones where she lets her guard down enough to let someone truly see her for who she is. Banagher, almost accidentally, helped her to open up simply by seeing who she was when she still kept her defenses slammed way up, and by being willing to coax her feelings out of her when she clammed up. When Banagher fell back to the sidelines and couldn't join Winter on her whirlwind tour, it ended up being Lily that kept pulling Winter out of her shell. Winter's initial stutter wasn't a speech impediment, not truly: it was a lack of confidence that kept her from getting her words out. It started to fade over time and trust from her most important people, and by the time Refined Shell was defeated, it was almost completely gone. It took her about that long to notice, too, but by the time she did, she kept soaring, letting her precious people carry her heart higher and higher. The courage and the will to do things like outing herself on national television, giving a surprisingly invasive radio interview, and eventually making herself an extremely public face of the Numbered... those things came from the trust and the love of her important people. Others contributed, of course, from a surprise party that pulled her back to her feet in a moment of personal crisis, to decoding teenage snark into thinly-veiled concern. Winter's friends are all unique in how they express both cheer and concern, and she's gotten used to them, doing her best to understand and complement each of them.

Even in the beginning, Winter had that charisma that drove her by endgame. It was present on occasion during her tenure on student council, it came up on the network when she was backed into a corner far enough, and on at least once occasion, anger drove her to let her words take over rather than her fists, if a little more caustically than usual. On at least one occasion, her frustration with both Lily and Banagher bubbled over, and she managed to throw impressive and heartfelt words at them, often with her stutter taking a backseat through sheer worry. She felt bad about it later, of course, but often that was enough to get someone thinking, and that was all she needed.

That anger has also turned out to be a problem in combat; when someone important to Winter is badly wounded, or someone pushes her buttons in just the wrong way, she's occasionably liable to snap, driving herself into an impressive fury that tends to leave someone either repenting or hurting. It's in her rages that she tends to reach further than she even knows she can with her powers, but it's also when she's at her most volatile. Her emotions run high, and if something else happens while she's already in a black mood, she just keeps spiraling, occasionally needing someone to hold her back. It was bad enough that at one point that she turned her back on Moonlight to chase something that had hurt her despite said Cure bleeding out behind her; she couldn't see rescue as the more important option beyond a blind need to hurt that, she can recognize afterward when it happens, is very unlike her and is more than a little scary.

Even discounting when she files off the wall, she has a very strong protective streak, which spent some time as a self-destructive habit before being reined in. For some time, she was willing to sacrifice herself if it meant saving someone else, and that habit made a lot of trouble for both herself and her friends. It's been hugged out of her over time, but she still has a very powerful reflex to jump into the defense of her friends and even of strangers on the street. Asked about it, she'll tell you it's nothing more or less than her duty and honor as a Precure, but beyond that, it's a personal belief that those who can, should. She believes she was given her powers, was linked to Rikka in the first place, so she could help people. And that drove Winter a long distance, pushing herself every day to find that next step, to do the right thing. It's a strong force keeping her moral compass balanced after all the death and darkness she's experienced in the last four years. And while it's her duty, it's also something she takes a lot of pride in, coming home in a good mood at a job well done.

That doesn't mean she has to be out front all the time; Winter knows how to stand back and support her friends when she isn't the right girl for the job. She's run command and control more than once, intending to attempt to coordinate at least her team through the entire Invasion if someone else with better equipment hadn't stepped up to do it himself. And she's capable of a more delicate touch, whether that's diplomacy or not taking the offensive. Even when it's life or death, she still has the clarity to determine whether she needs to be striking with lethal force or just trying to subdue (or escape). That said, if she can give up something material to keep people safe, that's fine, too. Even before Lily became a source of income that meant she had more options, she was the sort that would drop her wallet if it would stop an attack, that was okay letting something damage a possession if it meant not hurting a person.

Over the years, she's become an open, friendly, if still bookish woman. She still has a scary vocabulary when she wants to use it, having grown up with books for friends, but she knows how to let that go and tone herself down. Around her friends, she tends to relax a little, settling for whatever words bubble to the surface and not really worrying about how she sounds until she does something silly (and sometimes not even then). She can be playful, especially with her friends, and she's learned to laugh a little more. Winter knows she's a celebrity, between television appearances, giant monster attacks, and now Lily's bestselling book, and some part of her thrives at that attention, while another part forces her to reach even loftier heights to satisfy those fans. She makes connections quickly, but the experience of losing friends whose pulses disappeared - which often meant forgetting some of what made Winter who she was - has made her a little slower to form lasting bonds. Still, she isn't averse to making those connections, and she tries hard not to hold grudges, though she is definitely still human and has a long memory, if joined by a long fuse.

Anyone who's watched a Precure show will probably be boggling at some of this; this doesn't sound blue, it sounds pink. Being a children's show based around merchandise, characterization is sometimes simple, and Precure as a franchise is a great demonstrator of this. A Cure's color tends to describe their personality in broad strokes: pinks are leaders, blues are the brains of the operation, yellows are protectors at heart, purples are stoic with deep scars but deeper hearts, and more beyond these. Rikka is very much a blue: mildly tsundere, a strong intelligence, okay at leading but willing to take a back seat, capable of strong bonds (especially with their pink). But part of the problem is that Winter's never had a pink to take cues from. She was the only Precure among the Numbered for months, and in a way, that forced her to step up for herself and take on the traits of a leader. Even before having teammates, Winter was someone that pushed herself to stand tall and proud, and once Annie, Kari, Russel, Luci, Lily, Jasmine, and the rest of her teammates began to trickle in, they needed someone to give them orders. Someone with experience, someone that could stand up to the pressure. Absent a proper leader that could make it work, and with her charisma attracting them, it fell to Winter to become that leader, and she valiantly spearhead the charge into battle. Many of the typical pink traits followed on from there: a strong work ethic, belief in people's inherent goodness, and a frankly terrifying drive to keep going forward despite all odds. At least one of the All Stars has joked before about Winter needing pink contacts to look the part she plays, but at the end of the day, Winter is comfortable with who she's become. She is not Rikka. She doesn't want to be. Rikka Hishikawa is dead, and while her soul lives on through Winter, Winter maintains she is her own person. Nothing else will take what makes Winter special away. Not Rikka, and not the aliens, and not anyone else.

Powers/Abilities: Because of how Save the Earth's regains work, Winter doesn't have one-to-one parity with Rikka; she's missing some of Rikka's powers (mostly team abilities, and support skills for the baby fairy she doesn't have) and a number of memories. Without access to a certain energy from her homeworld, she won't be able to generate new Echoes while she's in Sol Raveh, so her skillset is locked down unless she uses this game's regains to fish for Echoes she feels like she needs (not that she'll find any). Winter's info post from Save the Earth is here; it includes a list of Echoes, which are her regains, and a summary of powers she has access to. A short version of those powers will be included here for convenience, but the full list of what she has access to is accessible there.

Winter's primary power of note, and the one that's made her something of an international celebrity, is her ability to transform into the light of wisdom, Cure Diamond. Becoming Cure Diamond requires the relevant Cure Loveads, a small pin specific to her, and her Lovely Commune, a form her fairy partner Raquel can take. While transformed, Diamond is significantly stronger, faster, and more resilient; Precure has been likened to Dragon Ball Z for girls, and a Precure's powerset seems to match well enough. Precure are generally well-suited to physical and even melee combat, but they possess magical attacks as well, often in the form of finishing moves. It's not uncommon for someone to be driven through a wall, slammed into the ground at enough force to leave a small crater, and so on. Diamond isn't immediately recognizable as Winter, though when you already know there's a limited number of people that could possibly be the magical girl you're looking at, the connection isn't as hard to make as usual.

With her level of power, most of Cure Diamond's powerful abilities slide down the scale to become more normal attacks, though she still doesn't have the stamina to spam them all day. Most of them are triggered by slotting a Loveads into a compatible piece of equipment: either the Commune, her Love Heart Arrow that looks rather a lot like a folding crossbow, or her Magical Lovely Pad that may as well be a magical iPad. Twinkle Diamond is a line of icy energy fired from her fingertip; Diamond Shower is a small storm of ice that can be directed and can be made to do things other than lethal force. Diamond Swirkle is a whirlpool on demand that leaves enemies either damp or frozen, and then Diamond Blizzard comes in two forms. The former is a stronger version of Diamond Shower, calling ice quickly and powerfully to hand, and able to shift into a wide icy beam instead; the latter is a sacrifice move where Diamond traps herself in a massive diamond of ice and snaps up everything nearby in the process. All of Diamond's abilities are, of course, ice-natured, but all of them also possess a strong purifying force as well. This means they generally do less damage when she's shooting things that aren't evil or malevolent. Diamond's ice has limited persistence unless she's purposely dumping power into it for that, and may or may not be safe to eat. It doesn't melt before disappearing, so she can't use her abilities to provide water, though the ice is itself pure and clean.

Together with her partner, Cure Moonlight, and any other Precure from her own timeline that may be present, Winter can shift into a more powerful form through the magic of the Heartcatch Mirage, a jewelry box that happens to also be a legendary artifact. When the team transforms again, they attain Super Silhouette forms, Winter herself becoming Super Cure Diamond. Super Diamond has a visibly different costume, in addition to pearlescent, heart-shaped wings on her back giving her magical flight. Her strength is increased even further in this form, and she gains access to several new team attacks; these include the Heartcatch Orchestra, which summons an aspect of a giant Precure to drive enemies into the ground with a single massive fist, and the Infinity Silhouette, which is actually another form where the girls combine together into one being the size of a small moon with the stars reflected in her eyes. The latter is not likely to see any use here, though.

Aside from her Precure form, Winter is fairly normal; a small portion of her strength and speed as Diamond translate into her civilian form, but none of the magic does. She's intelligent, and has grown into a surprising charisma. She has some skill with modern technology, but has only theoretical knowledge of anything older. She knows her way around YouTube. And, of course, if someone's being threatened, she's always up for a fight.

Items on your character:
- A cell phone and a Kindle (the book kind, not the tablet kind, that's stupid); it won't take Winter long to realize she's disconnected from the StE Numbered network.
- House and mail keys to both her homes, along with a heavier key to the Shepherd's Haven town hall.
- Late-fall "casual" clothing: a light blouse, a long blue skirt that falls past her calves, and light but sturdy shoes.
- A pair of glasses, with thin red frames; she normally wears contacts, but that likely won't be feasible here.
- A wallet, with credit cards, cash from various nations, identification, a couple pictures, and her passport.
- A small supply of Loveads: beyond the Cure Loveads that lets her transform, the Twinkle Diamond Loveads that triggers her base finisher, the Diamond Shower Loveads that powers that ability and Diamond Blizzard, and the Diamond Swirkle Loveads that powers the last.
- A handful of the remaining Miracle Bouquet Lights; almost certainly not enough to be worth anything, but they make Winter feel better.
- Winter can summon her Love Heart Arrow and Magical Lovely Pad at will; these are her personal, unique items and are stored in magical subspace when not in use, coalescing when needed. The former is used for finishing moves, including team abilities; the latter is a support item with a teleportation ability that is relatively simple to use.
- Raquel, Winter's fairy partner; Raquel is fully powered. Together with her Cure Loveads, Raquel is Winter's transformation device into Cure Diamond. Raquel will probably spend most of his time in Commune form, where he looks not unlike a cell phone. He can speak both in his plushie form and Commune form; he communicates in this color to help set him apart. Despite being a magical creature, Raquel does need sleep. Raquel's ability to shift into a human form will be locked in Sol Raveh.
- Notable item not available: Winter won't be able to summon the Heartcatch Mirage - not only is it not "hers", but it's too far away and too powerful. That also cuts off her teleportation and Super Cure Diamond, in turn cutting off flight and some of her most crazy abilities.