L5R 3rd Edition - Mirumoto Chieko

Mirumoto Chieko is a daughter of a long line of Mirumoto duelists. From birth, it was intended that she would join her brother in the Mirumoto Bushi School to train as a elite duelist... but fate intervened. Six months before she entered school, an accident severed the tendons across the palm of her left hand. Despite the best efforts of her aunt, a shugenja healer, the wound refused to heal cleanly. The fingers drew close together and Chieko permanently lost most of the mobility in her left hand; only under strong external pressure, with great pain to Chieko, could her fingers be drawn apart and out from her palm. There was no chance that she'd ever be able to study the two handed Mirumoto style. Her parents were crushed and Chieko withdrew nearly completely from the world, refusing to speak for almost a month. It was only the patient efforts of her brother and aunt that drew her back. Although her parents nearly disowned her, her brother vowed to teach her the sword as well as she could learn with one hand, and it was her aunt who, after several weeks of playing silent strategy games in an effort to engage her depressed neice, that hit upon the idea of sending Cheiko to the Kitsuki Courtier School to apply her keen intelligence as a magistrate.

Chieko is a slim and wiry young woman with dark hair that she ties back with leather thongs embroidered in green and gold. She favors robes shaded in dark green, simply embroidered along the edges with golden thread. She has a vivid gold and green tattoo of a dragon that snakes around and down her right forearm; the dragon roars on the the back of her right hand. She often adjusts the arms of her robes such that the dragon is visible. In contrast, however, she goes subtly out of her way to avoid attention paid to her left hand, often burying it within her sleeve, or shielding it behind her. Only her brother knows that on the palm of her left hand is another tattoo, an angular abstraction of the dragon's head from her right hand, as it was he that forced and held her fingers apart during the tattooing process (the artist died soon after).

Chieko longs to join the justicars, a unit of Kitsuki magistrates that trains alongside Mirumoto duelists to be able to track down and duel fugitives on behalf of the Emerald Champion. She believes that doing so is the only way to bring her parents to respect her despite her disability. As a perfectly capable... one-handed... swordswoman, her goal is not unattainable, but she has so far had no luck convincing authorities of her position. Her brother has promised to work what influence he has or may develop on the Mirumoto end of things, and her aunt has many Kitsuki contacts that she has sent letters to, but Chieko believes strongly that it will only be through her own effort and excellence that her dream will truly come to pass. As a result, she has a very strong sense of duty to her superiors; it will only be through superior service to their goals that she will be able to accomplish her own. Thus, despite the fact that her loyalty on the inside is to her own dream, her external affect is dedicatedly loyal to her superiors.

Chieko is extremely close to her brother, Mirumoto Koshi. Nearly every free moment of her time in childhood, as well as all breaks in school, were spent in his company, and they often disappear together into the ravines near their ancestral home, training against each others' swords. His own left palm bears the same abstract dragon head that adorns his sister's. She trusts her brother with her life and secrets, but trusts her aunt, Mirumoto Ashiko, with her public face and future. She consults with her aunt in all matters, and trusts her implicitly. Her relationship with her parents, however, is rocky. Although they treat her with civility, it is the sort of pitying civility one pays to a cripple, for every time they look at her, they see a failure of their family; they cannot even imagine marrying her off, as they would feel as if they were cursing the groom with a dreadful burden. Chieko knows this and tends to avoid her parents as a result.

Although Chieko has great respect for the kami as a morally guiding force, the failure of magic to heal her injury has made her cynical about the ability of the kami to intervene in daily matters. She tends to trust more to what she herself can percieve or act upon (this attitude has been nurtured by the Kitsuki school). Bushido, on the other hand, is extremely important to her, both because she aspires to be as perfect a bushi as can be, given the situation, for the sake of her parents, and because she has been deeply instilled with the tenets of proper bushido conduct at her school. While her pragmatic intelligence understands that rules may be bent or looked away from occasionally, people had better be able to convince her that doing so is actually pragmatically best. And she is not easy to convince.

Chieko is fiercely loyal to the Dragon clan. In particular, she idolizes the Mirumoto Bushi, but she has come to respect her Kitsuki classmates and sensei nearly as much. She strives to be the best combination of the two that she can possibly be. She sees herself as something of an ideal protector of the Dragon: able to martial both law and sword on her clan's behalf. She has been trained to view all evidence in the world equally and fully before making decisions, and as such has few preconcieved notions about other clans or schools (other than seeing the Mirumoto Bushi as better than all!); even among the Kitsuki, Cheiko is lauded for her impartiality. Derogatory attitudes towards people with disabilities, however, infuriate her, and people who display such earn both an immediate outburst as well as a permanent black mark against them in Chieko's mental tally book.

Chieko loves her wakizashi beyond all other physical possessions. Were someone to look closely, they would see that it is not exactly matched to her katana, for the two are in fact not of a set. Instead, she carries the wakizashi of her brother's daisho, as he carries hers. The two sets of daisho were gifted to the siblings by their aunt, who pointedly left the room immediately after blessing them to always carry each other's honor alongside them as they traveled their unexpectedly divergent paths. At the other end of the scale of affection, however, is her attitude towards discussions or displays of direct filial piety. Being around her own parents, or anyone else and their parents, is extremely uncomfortable for a woman with such conflicted attitudes towards her own family. Nothing else sets her quite as much on edge.

Chieko's greatest strength is her dedication to her goals. She views every small task as a integral building block towards her ultimate dream of renewing her parents' faith in her, and thus undertakes each one with as much seriousness as can be mustered. Conversely, it is this very dedication to her dream that is her greatest weakness, as her focus on the Kitsuki School as a scaffold to the Mirumoto School blinds her somewhat to its virtues (and much more to other schools' uses or good points).

Chieko believes utterly in egalitarianism of law. She would never think to treat a samurai better because he was a samurai, nor a peasant worse because he was a peasant, if something should objectively apply to both equally. This belief is vital to her, for it is only if she believes that people's roles and titles do not restrict or grant exclusive privledges that she can justify her own drive to spill outside the edges of her proscribed path as a Kitsuki Courtier.

Were I to give Chieko any advice, it would be to appreciate her own gifts and her own personality rather than continually striving for someone else's predetermined idea of excellence.