P L A Y E R;
NAME: bii
AGE: 32
PLAYER JOURNAL: biichan
TIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT: obiisama
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Thorne, Byerly

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Maria Ushiromiya
CANON: Umineko no naku koro ni/Umineko: When They Cry
POINT IN CANON: post-EP8 (that is to say that the actual timeline she really lived through was the one from Ange’s world, but that her spirit experienced some aspects of the Meta-World as an afterlife.)
AGE: forever 9
APPEARANCE: Family conference outfit and every day outfit
CANON HISTORY: There’s a wiki but it’s not the best when it comes to Maria, so I’ll supplement it a little.

Maria Ushiromiya was born the daughter of Rosa Ushiromiya and her unnamed lover, who abandoned Rosa at some point in her pregnancy, leaving Rosa deeply shamed both in her own eyes and in the eyes of her family. Maria knows nothing of her father, except a single glimpse of a photograph that Rosa later denied even owning. Because of this and because of something a priest that came to her school once told her, Maria decided she must be the result of a virgin birth. This led to Maria to becoming quite interested in the occult and soon she’d become an expert on the supernatural, reading the Lesser Key of Solomon while she was still in elementary school.

Rosa was, quite frankly, a terrible mother. When she wasn’t neglecting Maria--leaving her home alone for hours, sometimes even days on end--she was spoiling her to make up for it. She also beat Maria, slapping her around at the slightest provocation. Maria responded to this by mentally separating the kind Mama who indulged her and spoiled her with the evil Black Witch who tormented her. Even some of Rosa’s indulgences were suspect. One year she promised Maria a homemade stuffed animal for her birthday, but she neglected to actually make it and just picked up a cheap stuffed lion for her anyway, claiming it was homemade. Maria loved the lion, however, and named it Sakutaro.

As Maria got older, she befriended the mysterious witch Beatrice, who lived on the island of Rokkenjima, where Maria’s grandfather had his mansion. She and Beatrice had a lot of fun doing magic together. Amazingly enough, Maria knew more about the occult than Beatrice did! She taught Beatrice all she knew about the demonology. Beatrice also invented a new form for Sakutaro to assume when Maria played with him, one of a little boy in a lion costume. Together they formed a group of witches called Mariage Sorciere. At one point, Maria’s younger cousin Ange was also a member, but she was excommunicated when she denied the existence of magic.

One day Maria went out with Sakutaro to get food from the convenience store while Rosa was gone. She wasn’t supposed to take Sakutaro outside the house, but she was lonely. On her way back, Maria lost the key to the house. She got taken to the police station, where the police looked after her until Rosa could come and get her. When Rosa came, she was furious. She beat Maria extra badly and then murdered Sakutaro by ripping him to pieces. After that, Maria’s active fantasy life became more violent and less sweet.

Beatrice, similarly miserable by the way her life had turned, began to construct a plan to create a Schrodinger’s box situation that would allow her to pass through death into an afterlife of infinite possibilities known as the Golden Land, through the mass murder of everyone on the Island of Rokkenjima over that year’s family conference. However, she also wanted to give the Ushiromiya family a fighting chance to avoid their fate. Beatrice enlisted Maria to help her by delivering a message to everyone, telling them unless they solved the mystery of the puzzle known as the witch’s epitaph that night, everyone on Rokkenjima would die.

And eventually everyone did die.

Maria died that night, at the hands of culprit of the Rokkenjima Massacre, but in some form her spirit did live on metaphysically and metafictionally over the next dozen years in the Golden Land, playing and replaying the days of the family conference, as the world outside struggled to figure who, indeed, was the true culprit of it all.

CANON PERSONALITY:

Okay. So probably the most important thing about Maria is that she views reality in a way that really doesn’t coincide with most people--she is a true believer in magic and witches and ritual--and that can lead to communication troubles between her and everyone else, unless they’re very special people like Beatrice who take the time to learn her language. For instance, in canon a younger Maria had a hard time with basic hygiene skills like remembering to brush her teeth and hands until Beatrice reframe them as cleansing and purification rituals. Most people, however, don’t even try. They just ignore her babbling about witches and magic and this leads them to ignore Maria when she’s trying to tell them something important--just something framed in her viewpoint.

Is it a coping mechanism? Almost certainly. Maria’s home life is extremely awful and she’s locked into a wretchedly co-dependent relationship with her mother, whose abuse and neglect she makes excuses for because--Beatrice aside--they are really the only people each other has. Faced with an awful reality, why wouldn’t Maria dive straight into fantasy?

Also, although one has to be careful when diagnosing fictional characters, I think it’s safe to say that Maria isn’t at all neurotypical. It’s not just her unique view of reality either. For one thing, she recognizes people not by any identifying physical characteristics, but by how they act at a certain time. This has allowed her to recognize ‘Mama’ (Rosa when she’s being kind) and ‘The Black Witch’ (Rosa when she’s being abusive) as two different people, the second of which sometimes possesses the first. This also allows her to recognize Beatrice as Beatrice no matter what form she’s in. She also engages in repetitive behavior, most notably her chanting of the charm ‘uu-uu.’ On the other hand, her propensity to talk in third person is really just her being immature and cutesy, mimicking a somewhat younger child’s speech patterns (and is something she’ll be soon growing out of.)

Despite communication issues, Maria’s actually very intelligent, especially when it comes to fields that interest her. How many nine year olds can you say have read the Lesser Keys of Solomon? But at the same time, if she doesn’t find something useful or interesting she doesn’t bother to learn it, resulting in Maria having much poorer grades than she ought to.

She’s creative too--wildly creative in fact. As already noted, she has a very active fantasy life. She’s given all her toys very distinct personalities and helped Beatrice create many of the details of the Golden Land. She also collaborated a good deal with Beatrice on the character and appearance of most of her furniture.

She’s loyal, very loyal, even unto death. Most notably, she was the only person in the family proper that Beatrice brought into her schemes prior to the final family conference. It can be hard to win her trust--for one thing, you have to at some point sincerely avow your belief in magic and witches--but once given it endures. (This can be to her detriment, as she’s given that loyalty to Rosa as well.)

She likes to show off and boss people around whenever she gets the chance--which is not often, given how much she’s ignored--and she will absolutely attempt to place herself in a position of authority. Part of her Occult Expert schtick is this--although she really and truly does love the occult, she also takes great pleasure in the fact that she does know more than all the older people around. She likes knowing more than other people. Although part of why she helped Beatrice in her schemes was her undying loyalty to her friend, the pleasure she got on being in on Beatrice’s schemes when everyone else was running around confused also probably helped.

Maria has a tendency to creep people out with her chilling ‘kihihi’ laugh, her occult obsession, and her witchly tendency towards trollfaces. She can be hard to engage when she drops into full occult mode. But when she puts those things aside and allows herself to be a little girl again, she’s very cheerful and enthusiastic. Underneath it all, Maria’s actually a sweet and earnest little girl who wants nothing more than for everyone to have fun.

She really, really loves television.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: So! If possible, I’d like to veteran Maria for the last two Jaunts before the app period: Questing Country and Lightning Age. Not only that, but Bix is also apping a veteran, Elphaba, and we’re hoping to give them previous CR from this. (If Bix doesn’t end up apping Elphaba, we can handwave that Maria’s interactions with her in QC were with an NPC instead and that she had her own reasons for staying clear of people in the fishbowl.)

Maria would have arrived during the darkpark liminal space, the entirety of which she spent playing on the handy playground provided for her. Since the part of the playground where she ended up in upon being snatched up by the trumps was rather quiet, she didn’t really meet anyone in the process and wasn’t told exactly what was happening to her. But given that the playground seemed fun, she wasn’t really bothered.

Then Maria ended up in Questing Country as an Infiltrator: the very young Champion of Witches, who was being taught by the previous Champion of Witches, now Oracle of Tomes: a gorgon named Elphaba. In the Waking World, Maria’s Infiltrator-self was still a young human of nine, but in had been raised by her lawyer single father instead of Rosa. Due to her very young age and inexperience, Maria didn’t actually take an active part in the Valence Quest, preferring to focus on her Champion lessons with Elphaba. Her spirit animal was Sakutaro, now a completely animate stuffed lion.

When the jaunt was over and Elphaba wanted to avoid the rest of the Travelers, Maria also mostly avoided them out of a sense of loyalty, although she did go to fetch food for herself and her friend. During the fishbowl theatre liminal, she spent a lot of time exploding the sea life to get candy. During the rat pinball maze she ended up getting sucked into the ball mazes and lost a couple times.

For the Lightning Age jaunt, Maria ended up Infiltrated again as one of Grisha’s Wolves’ Children, who’d been adopted into the pack after one of her fellow children had seen her Infiltrator-self’s mother beat her badly. She was a remarkably sinister and bloody-minded child and quite eager to do whatever the Wolf wanted. (Bear has okayed this.)

In the following campground liminal, she’d have gone off to find some of the other Wolve’s Children, and on the way finally getting the explanation of how Traveling works from one of the longer term Travelers. Which brings us to where she’d be now.

Maria doesn’t seem too bothered by Traveling. She mostly sees it as a prolonged game of pretend. She also seems to think liminal space is part of Beatrice’s Golden Land or perhaps vice-versa. She does actually talk in the first person when she Infiltrates, although she drops back into cutesy third-person speech in between during liminals. She’ll eventually be growing into talking more and more in the first person as herself.

ABILITIES: Hoo boy. Okay, here’s the thing. Because of the complicated nature of Umineko as a canon, magic exists in three ways: as sleight of hand, illusions, and trickery; as real, true magic; and as a metaphor for the creation of fiction. This matters, because Maria Ushiromiya is a witch. In fact, she’s the Witch of Origins.

As the Witch of Origins, Maria possesses the ability to give birth to ones from the endless sea of zeroes. She’s what one would call a Creator Witch. In the meta-world, this means she can create something from nothing. She can make furniture (created people), locations, magic artifacts, the works. What this actually means in the ‘real’ world, however, is just that Maria is hella imaginative and is great coming up with her own original characters and concepts and settings.

To replicate what Maria is capable of in the meta-world, you could probably give her Liminal Manipulation I, though I won’t insist. Luckily, she’s still a little girl, so there’s limits to what she can create if only because she’s still lacking the attention span for creations truly large in scope and scale.
INVENTORY; Her party outfit for the final family conference, a purse containing her magical paraphernalia, and her rose. Originally, she also had candy, but by now she’s eaten it all.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Umineko is a canon that encompasses various levels of reality and contains various AUs. There’s the events as they ‘really happened,’ there’s the various ‘game boards’ which are symbolic of what might have happened during the final family conference, and there’s the meta-world, which is a metafictional narrative where the various characters act as if they are self-aware of at least some level of their fictionality if only in context of the ‘game boards.’ The way I’m playing Maria is ultimately based on her having lived and died in the ‘real world’ and having the memories of that, but also remembering her time in the meta-world as a sort of afterlife where she’s eternally nine. Ryukishi07 himself has endorsed this interpretation of canon.

As for starting skills as a veteran, I’d like for her to have picked up Spirit Animal/Familiar in Questing Country, and Object Portal and Hammerspace along the way.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: I’ve previously played Maria a lot in an AU PSL called Endless June, which is based on the other When They Cry sound novel: Higurashi. Maria’s ‘voice’ is pretty consistent however, however, so I feel like it would be okay to use one. Anyway, this long single-thread log has both cute Maria and creepy Maria in it. (Warning: canon-typical violence and character death.) I also have some test drive threads.
PROSE SAMPLE: As above, a thread from the Higurashi AU PSL I’ve been playing her in. (Warning: canon-typical violence and character death.)