(no subject)

[ashes_for_sorrow]

•You•

Your Name: Birdy
OOC LJ: shirhan_blade
Contact/AIM: shirhan blade

•Character•

Character Name: Ai Haibara/Sherry/Shiho Miyano
Canon: Detective Conan, as canon as I'm capable of managing when canon has timeline problems.
Age: Actual age 21, current apparent age is eight.
Background: Shiho was the younger of two daughters born into the Black Organization. Their parents died in an accident when they were still very young; it's highly likely that it was an "accident", but neither of the girls knew their parents well enough for it to have much of an impact in terms of "loss of family" ...
Although the basic lesson in paranoia sank in young, for Shiho, at least.
They were both incredibly bright, to the point of fairly extreme levels of "gifted", although Akemi's grasp of other people's intentions and causality was sometimes a little shaky. Akemi was more outwardly active, and less skilled with handling secrets, and was funneled into field work; Shiho picked up complex subjects at an impressive rate, and took to the sciences. While there was no expense spared on her education, it was very carefully controlled - up until college, much of it was correspondence based, with little to no contact with any peers. Her precocious tendencies were encouraged, and she didn't even realize that her childhood was skipped over. She had a diploma early, and started taking college classes young; she didn't actually get any time out of the proverbial box until she'd entered graduate work, and even then, it was carefully controlled and monitored.
She picked up a specialty in biochemistry, and was doing advanced research in her mid-teens. Her main research was in attempts at altering cellular metabolism and aging to cheat time and death; she wasn't having much success. She dabbled in other things, inventing quite a few unusual poisons and drugs.
The main thread of research backfired spectacularly, resulting in a toxin that would completely stop cellular metabolism and cause them to start breaking down, dissolving itself in the process. While useless for the original purpose, it was a big breakthrough for assassinations and dirty deals, so the Organization encouraged her to run with the Apotoxin in that form, refining it to be more lethal and leave less trace. For the most part, it was scarily effective, although there was an odd incident during animal test phases where it glitched back to its original intent somewhat - turning one of the mice back to a young age instead of killing it. During the course of this, she managed to end up in the upper tiers of the Organization, under the code name of Sherry.
As it started turning into human testing, the full impact of what she was working on started to sink in; around this time, her sister also ended up in a relationship with another field agent. That agent turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, who ended up being found out and surviving to make it back to the FBI. They were both well aware of the cutthroat nature of the organization, to different extents, and with mutual discomfort with their situation, they started working on finding a way out.
During this time, the Apotoxin entered into field trials, and an instance occured where it was used to get rid of someone that disappeared - but showed signs of still being alive, if in hiding. Being the one that had developed the poison, Sherry was sent out with a team of other operatives to investigate, going so far as going through the teenage detective's home more than once. On the first such investigation just after his disappearance, nothing stuck out as an explanation for where he was or how he'd survived; after suspicions rose that he really was still alive, they went out again. While going through drawers, Sherry tripped over something of a telling clue given odd events in the animal trials, as a number of his childhood clothes had gone missing.
Their attempts at some kind of plotting were noticed, and Akemi tried to cut a bargain with the higher ups; they set her up with a suicide mission robbery, and if she could pull it off, her and her sister would be allowed to go. Of course, they never intended to honor this bargain; Akemi succeeded in the robbery, but expecting some treachery, had hidden the money and left clues for it to be recovered by legal authorities. She still showed up to the pre-arranged meeting, alone and short on backup. She was killed, and not long after, Sherry was locked in her own lab awaiting execution, handcuffed to a pipe in a maintenance room.
It was as much a fit of half-suicidal perversity as anything that she took one of the doses of her own poison; while she had some idea that it was possible for the side effect that had left Shinichi alive to kick in on her, she was also well aware that it was basically playing Russian roulette with only one chamber not loaded. Still, luck was on her side, and suddenly being an eight year old meant the handcuffs slipped off easily; she escaped the destruction of the lab, and stumbled off into the rain without much direction. She ended up returning to the area of Shinichi's home, under some stressed half-reasoning that she was going to need help avoiding and striking back at the Organization if she was going to live, and that if he'd been hit by the same side effect, he'd probably be one of the few people she could turn to without too much fear of being turned on or sold out. She was found passed out in an alleyway by his neighbor and friend, Professor Agasa, who took her in; Agasa figured out who she was, and offered her a place to stay, even helping set her up as a transfer student at the same elementary school Shinichi - now going under the alias of Conan Edogawa - was attending. After some discussion, the class had a new student, by the name of Ai Haibara.
Ai was quickly adopted by the pack of children that'd rallied around Conan as an amateur detective's club; she got caught up in one of their cases, and went along with it. In the aftermath of that, she was sent home alone with Conan, and took the chance to tip Shinichi off to her real identity (while scaring the shit out of him at the time; she has a perverse and mildly sadistic sense of humor). While the heart attack was not appreciated and he wasn't entirely trusting at first, nor comfortable with having someone who'd admittedly killed people in cold blood in the past hanging around, her presence was accepted as both a large potential lead on the organization and as his only real hope of being restored to his normal age.
The paranoia never really settled, as it was impossible to forget that the Organization was still looking for them to kill them, but she managed to settle into the routine of school somewhat more comfortably than Conan even, taking it as the childhood she'd never had. While there were some close brushes, including an incident where she'd had to take advantage of a one-shot short-term reversal of the age-regression to keep some of their more dangerous assassins from knowing she was a child now, they mostly managed to avoid being found out...
Well, besides Vermouth, one of the more intelligent and unpredictable agents of the Organization, and the likelihood that an FBI agent and colleague of her sister's boyfriend had at least strong suspicions as to Conan and Ai's real identities.
She's been helping out now and then with the cases the kids and Conan get wrapped up in, studying possible ways to reverse the Apotoxin's side effect, and mostly just enjoying the chance to have a life of her own in between bouts of paranoia and panic-attack inducing events. While she knows they'll need to go up against the Organization and certainly knows a good deal more than she's told Conan, she's also been more inclined to be secretive and avoid talking about it much, less out of mistrust of him, and more out of fear for him and the others - since she essentially only knows enough to give him enough rope to hang himself, and has seen firsthand that he has a tendency to recklessly charge in when he's suddenly given information. For now, the entire situation is a very slow waiting game, with both sides trying to find enough information on the other to strike.

Personality: Haibara is a large mass of contradictions, and it shows that she was raised within a very secretive, dangerous, and cutthroat organized crime outfit. She's been far too pointedly aware of the worst of human nature from a very young age; while she was theoretically insulated by being tutored as a scientist and kept as something "too valuable to threaten", she was too sharp not to catch that the protected status could vanish very easily and with very little warning. For most of her life, the only person that was close to her was her sister, and even that was as much letters and phone calls most of the time as anything; she's used to a sort of sheltered isolation that could be vulnerability just as easily as safety as it is. Moreover, her sense of identity is something that's a bit odd; she recognizes "Miyano Shiho" as her "real name", but it was only ever used by her sister and by correspondence teachers and people in the company buildings not close enough to actually know what was going on - there'd be a slight delay on her responding to "Shiho", while "Sherry" would be immediate recognition. Basically, "Miyano Shiho" only ever registered as almost more of a fake, front identity than anything, while "Sherry" was more of a "real" identity than her birth name.
She has a sense of pride and can have a sharp temper, as well as a very bladed sense of retribution; she's very confident in her skills, and far too aware that, when pushed, caving and panicking or running is showing weakness and asking to get used or killed. Her sense of humor tends toward the sarcastic and mildly sadistic, playing head games and leaving people wondering just how safe they are around her and just what she's up to; it's become one of her defense mechanisms, a way to give people the impression that she's not safe to take advantage of or mess with, and that habit sticks even with people she likes. When pressed and cornered enough, or an opportunity presents itself, she's very capable of lashing out in self-defense or for the sake of survival, and has the potential to be extremely cold-bloodedly calm about it.
At the same time, her sense of "fight or flight" internally is heavily weighted toward flight; she's NOT a field operative or anyone meant to deal with direct confrontations and she knows it. The sadistic sense of humor, implied threats, and head games are mostly meant to leave people too wary to even try, and when she's faced with a clear, direct, threat that isn't intimidated by veiled indirect promises of horrible things, no matter how calmly or coolly she seems to be handling it, there's always an undercurrent of panic and awareness of just how fragile she really is. If there isn't a clear way for her to defend herself or escape presented, it can be quite visible, and as much as she'll clamp a lid on outward behavioral manifestations fast, she does panic at times, even to the point of not necessarily thinking rationally without someone dragging her out of it. She has a fatalistic streak as well; while she does, on some level, want to believe things will work out alright, her money is usually on the more pessimistic outcome. While this tends to mean, with her current situation and how much she's continually under threat, that there's a constant undertone of the threatened sense to her mentality, she manages to keep it under control for the most part as "Prepare for the worst and do everything in power to avoid or prevent it", but even while she's clawing for every chance she can get to make things come out alright, she doesn't place high odds on her own survival. This means she gets easily frustrated and agitated by others connected to her situation doing things that register as "taking stupid risks"; she's estimating things as "one small slip means we all die", so every time Shinichi goes and does something reckless, it's a heart attack and a few more gray hairs while she bunkers down fully expecting there to be lethal fallout for a while afterwards.
She's also never lived a normal life - she's well aware of some societal conventions, and is perfectly capable of feminine preening and adult social niceties, but she's also becoming more and more aware just how isolated she was, and has been taking her second childhood with a mixed reaction. On the one hand, it's a chance to have the kind of life she was never allowed; she adapted to it with relatively little frustration at "Oh god I'm a kid again and nobody takes me seriously" because she was never allowed a childhood, and she's too busy appreciating the little things she never got to do to be overly frustrated with what she can't do as a child. On the other hand, she's also even more focused on enjoying having a semblance of a normal life, because she's pointedly aware she could die tomorrow with no warning. She's grown very attached to her new life, and will do whatever she can to protect it - granted that her current perception of "what she can do" is mostly being the survival instinct and voice of reason everyone else seems to lack, standing back and trying to plan so that they get through it alive.
In between life or death situations, she's almost weirdly content with things people would normally take for granted - normal school days, getting drug out playing tag, slipping off to go out to the movies. She fails hard at being a normal child, but tends to not be very self-conscious about it; she can do some damn good acting when she wants to, but mostly seems to not realize that her normal behavior isn't normal childhood behavior. Of course, given that people around her are already used to Conan's occasionally freakish behavior, she has some insulation, particularly since her behavior is a constant state; she doesn't sharply shift, and most people read her as simply being a very quiet, introverted, precociously gifted child.
There is an undercurrent of frustration with her own helplessness and state of constant risk, plus how much she stands to lose because of the actions of others. If she's pushed enough, it's entirely possible for that to snap into something where the panic-state shifts from fatalistic fear to a very active "goddamnit no more" cornered-animal lashing out, all the more potentially terrifying/amazing because she's had it drilled into her so thoroughly to filter anything she acts on through at least a sense of self-control and planning. The only thing she has going for her in a confrontation is her mind, and she's well aware of it, which tends to interject itself over any temptations to act violently.
Also, she does form strong attachments to people. These attachments form slowly, although they can be helped along by things like "My survival is dependent on this person", and there's not very many - she's still incredibly wary, and tends to parse most people as potential threats before anything else. The situation she's used to means that her typical reaction to people is to first be watching out for what they could do to harm her or what they could take advantage of, and then worry about getting familiar enough to tell how likely they are to do anything; even with people she has a favorable connection to, she'll often err on the side of caution perhaps a little too much. (See also her reactions to Ran - she gets along with Ran and likes Ran in her warily distant way, but her first assumption is that if Ran knew what was going on, Ran would be a high risk of giving things away or possibly doing something stupid.) She's very used to even the closest people to her being somewhat distant, and is at a bit of a loss how to handle having people close to her that are actually there consistently; this means she's incredibly uncommunicative, prone to either dodging subjects of her own feelings or veiling it in head games, and being more prone to hanging nearby being quiet and going along with whatever's going on from the background. She honestly doesn't have a grasp of what she's supposed to do with "having friends" still, and the fact that three of her closest friends are also young children where telling them anything would probably traumatize them and definitely put them in a huge amount of danger puts even more of a damper on that. Even with Shinichi, who would be more capable of following things and is already aware of it all, she's prone to keeping her actual thoughts and feelings hidden; the only person that's really made any progress on getting her to open up is Agasa, and that's less out of trying and more out of being constantly present and quietly supportive (Nevermind that he knew who she was before Shinichi did, and trusted her to be around him without warning him) - she trusts Agasa not to repeat things, say more than he should, react badly, or do anything rash with whatever she says.
She does have a conscience for what's been done with her work, although it was something she doesn't even seem to have entirely expected until it started gnawing on her; she'd grown up in such a sociopathically guiltless environment that she worked on the poison without a second thought until it actually started being used, at which point her conscience started asserting itself. Said conscience is another of the things she's grown aware of but doesn't seem entirely sure how to handle, although she's better at acting on it than she is at "having friends". At the same time, she's still used to making it KNOWN that she's acting on a conscience being "a sign of weakness", and is prone to reflexively downplaying or redirecting comment on it; most of the times she's clearly said anything about it has more been a backlash reaction to Shinichi's discomfort with her than anything - "I'm tired of you calling me a murderer" - which was, itself, probably tied just as much to getting pushed into the special emotional "do something or go crazy" state because of having the person who her survival hinged on very clearly disliking her, even if that passed for the most part from active uncomfortable mistrust into more "friendly" razzing and snarking afterwards.

Powers: Well, "stupidly intelligent" certainly applies to her, although she actually has that funny "sense of caution" thing the assorted detectives she deals with lack - if anything, she may've gotten smacked with enough of it for the lot of them. She's very observant, and can be very good at reasoning and investigation when she wants to be; while she usually leaves the brunt of it to Conan and the others, she's shown that she can mostly keep up when she wants to focus on it. She's also a genius scientist, with her focus in biochemistry and pharmaceuticals; nothing she makes will exactly be a sudden miracle, and the path is as fraught with small errors and testing as any scientific field, but she's already had a few very unusual breakthroughs, and the Apotoxin itself has the potential to be a cure for aging if it can be reworked back to its original purpose and she can figure out why she and Shinichi didn't die from it. She's been picking up bits and pieces of other scientific fields, here and there from former colleagues before she became Haibara, and from the Professor, helping him maintain and work on his inventions.
Other than that, she's a perfectly normal human, and in the body of an eight year old girl, no less. She knows her way around firearms and is an excellent shot, although recoil on most guns would land her on her ass right now, but other than that, her preferred method of self defense is trickery, evasion, and finding someone else to hide behind. As much as she's capable of little lashing-out things, and comprehends self defense with sharp objects via Pointy End Goes In Other Person, if she were to end up in a fight with anyone with even a shred of experience or clue what they were doing, she'd lose - most of her instincts in a fight are geared towards "get the other person to let go, and get away". She is quick and decently agile, but small and pickupable, and not nearly as athletic as most of her peers. She's well aware of her limitations, and prefers to avoid ending up in situations where she'd get called on them.

Appearance: I R Lazy.

•Samples•

Third Person Sample: It was a quiet weekend morning, and she'd gotten perfectly comfortable with a book; it actually took a minute to notice that the Professor was being ... well, usually, with the routine, he'd go check the mail, come back in, and be poking her about breakfast by now. Instead, he'd come in with the mail, and just stopped quietly.
She was just about to pad in and ask when there was a perturbed "...Ai-chan?" from by the door.
That definitely got her attention; she wandered in, already suspicious.
Agasa was holding a package - a plain box, no markings besides a computer-printed address label with that house and their address, the return address from a temporary box.
It was addressed to her.
"You got a package." He was plainly confused; it wasn't exactly secret that "Haibara Ai" lived there, and that he was taking care of her, but she didn't get much mail. Even when the other kids decided to get her cards or something, it was usually delivered in person.
Well, it hadn't blown up yet; she peered up at it, motioning for him to set it on the ground where she could get into it.
Agasa set it on the ground, and she stared at it, finally shrugging and opening the tape with a house key. She didn't lift the flaps until she'd had a chance to examine them for signs of any mechanism attached to them, just in case.
And as soon as it was open, she froze.
There were two things in the box.
One was a small bouquet of flowers, very carefully wrapped, with padding; the box obviously hadn't been actually delivered by the mailman, it had to've been left there by whoever had packed it. Not that there was much question who that was; she'd seen that mix of flowers several times before, left in random unattended beakers in her lab back when she was Sherry.
Not coincidentally, the other object in the box was a bottle of sherry wine.
She stumbled back with a shriek, although she didn't quite process that yes, she HAD done that out loud; for a couple minutes, she was frozen, staring at the box as if there'd been a poisonous snake in it. There was part of her, a little animal instinct part, that dearly wanted to run upstairs, hide under the bed or in a dresser, huddle into a ball and not come out for a few hours; and a more fatalistic part that half expected a fatal bullet from some window somewhere any moment now. The more sane survival instinct stopped either of them from being acted on or taking over, and was battering them back down to work on some kind of more coherent reaction.
Then there was a knock at the door, and this time instinct and a more directly prickly sense of menace propelled her to grab the box and haul it behind a short bookshelf while the Professor ambled over to the door, glancing back to make sure she'd gotten it out of sight before he answered.
Of course, with her luck, it would be Subaru - their unwanted next door neighbor. She stayed mostly hidden, flattened behind the bookcase, listening; he'd heard the scream, was checking if everything was alright - the Professor was laughing and dismissing it, "A spider startled Ai-chan" - "Ah, if it's only that then, but let me know if you need help with anything" - thanking him, "of course we will", "I should be getting back to my work, it's a rather delicate invention"...and he finally left.
She flumped down next to the box, arms folded around her legs, back to the bookcase, scowling. Gin had to at least strongly suspect, or he wouldn't have done something like this...


First Person Sample: My Golden Week by Haibara Ai Or, how I'm going to get sent to the counsellor, or at least get some very uncomfortable looks from the teacher

For my Golden Week, I got to go to an onsen resort in the mountains with Conan-kun and Mouri-jiisan and Ran-neesan. It was very nice out and very sunny, with very nice weather, although it was a little hot out. The spring was in a very pretty forest, with many, many trees and birds. The first day was nice and quiet and peaceful and relaxing. And of course you know that's not going to last.
And then Conan-kun found another dead body after breakfast, and there were police everywhere. It was a little scary, but dead bodies aren't that scary after the fifth or sixth or twentieth, or hundredth one, and police are a little scary but make it easier because they're there to help. Or at least they're convenient to hide behind, and if the killer does get any bright ideas, they're bigger targets and usually doing a nice job drawing attention anyway. Conan-kun wasn't afraid at all, and was finding things to help the police; one of them said he was smart and had good ideas, and I found a couple things that helped too. I really shouldn't have spoken up on that, but dear god, their grasp of toxicology was appalling! You would think that random inexplicable bruises and internal bleeding for no reason would be a little distinctive of an anticoagulant, and he was already on penicillin for a cold which probably aggravated it by further interfering with platelet aggregation, but the looks on their faces, you'd think the guy really HAD been killed by the ghost that was supposed to've been murdered in the spring centuries ago! It's not that hard to grasp that it's not a haunting, and oh look, one of the suspects was on a high strength of WARFARIN, an anticoagulant... They helped Mouri-ojiisan how people don't notice that trick when he pulls it I'll never know, you'd think it's a little suspicious for someone who is apparently comatose and utterly immobile to be speaking in a disembodied voice find the killer. They had tried to scare people into thinking that it was a ghost, but had used their own medication to poison him. I learned that ghosts aren't real, and medication can be very dangerous. Want to die inexplicably and unexpectedly? Make an enemy of a pharmacist. I'm still amazed how often people don't think about what common household chemicals could do to them, nevermind medications that get taken for granted.
It was very interesting and exciting actually after about the fiftieth time it gets a little routine, although it is entertaining to watch, and it was nice when it was solved and things went back to being peaceful. At least this time the murder happened at the BEGINNING of the week and got itself over with so I could actually ENJOY my vacation.