Do you know what home feels like? For the longest time, Nanao thought she knew. Home was a shoebox apartment in the barracks, a seven to five work schedule, and people she cared about, but kept at arms length. A little empty, a little distant - but that was okay! She wasn't lonely all the time.

Just when it mattered, really. It was fine.
( Read more... )

video//

{Route, meet Blodwen, Nanao's Yamask. She'll float back from the camera a little and wave, before she picks up a piece of paper. When she turns it around, it shows a little crayon drawing. She looks very proud of her work.}

text//

Hello there! I wanted to know if any one had any advice on drawing their trainer! She's at work right now, but please don't tell her I used her poke gear! I'm not meant to use it! Bye!

{Pokemon and humans alike are welcome to respond - pokemon Blodwen will talk to, and humans she can text.}

HMD post yada yada

Player
Name: Myki
Personal Journal: hashtag
E-mail: hideousfeels@gmail.com
AIM/Plurk/Etc.: chezmyki
Timezone: GMT+10 (Queensland)
Current Characters in Route: N/A

Character
Name: Nanao Ise
Series: Bleach
Timeline: Chapter 587!
Canon Resource Links: Nanao's page on the bleach wiki, and Wikipedia's page on the manga itself.

Personality:
Compared to other characters, Nanao Ise is somewhat of an enigma. She doesn't appear often in canon (despite apparently being one of Kubo's favourites to draw?), and when she does it's often only for a page or two. However, from these brief appearances, we can draw a fairly complete picture of the First Division's co-Lieutenant.

Chronologically speaking, the first appearance Nanao has is in the Turn Back the Pendulum arc (which takes place a full century before the manga proper) as a very young child. Here, despite being a small child, she is wearing a Shinigami's uniform. This means that she's already attended the Academy for the requisite six years and graduated while being younger than most other attendees, who resemble teens and young adults. She's also carrying a massive hardbound book, and is asking after the current Lieutenant of the Eighth Division, Lisa Yadoumaru. She's close to the older Shinigami, and reads with her on the first of every month.
Nanao as a child is also incredibly polite. She addresses everyone with their proper honorifics, all of the time. She's also rather shy - which isn't surprising. The Gotei 13 - of which the Eighth Division is a part - prizes physical strength and valour in battle above pretty much all else. When you're small, you're beneath the notice of a lot of people.

We don't know how long it took for her to become the next Lieutenant of the Eighth, but when we next see her during the Invasion of Soul Society by Ichigo & co., Lisa has vanished along with a handful of Captains and Lieutenants and Nanao is now the very highly competent Lieutenant to Captain Shunsui Kyouraku, one of the oldest in all of Soul Society.

The Invasion of Soul Society arc introduces Nanao tossing flower petals for her Captain's grand entrance into his fight with Chad. She then lobs the basket at his head due to his continued teasing. She then moves away for the fight proper, but when she receives the message that Aizen has been murdered, she rushes back to the battle. After relaying the message, she notes that Chad - although defeated - is not dead yet, and offers to off him. Although she may not want to do it, she feels it is a necessary evil in order to protect Soul Society. Kyouraku stops her, telling her that she shouldn't get her hands dirty with such things, and tells her to take Chad to the Fourth Division. From here on, she's fairly scarce - until the penultimate battle of the arc, where she follows Captains Kyouraku and Jyuushirou Ukitake into a fight against the Captain-Commander of Soul Society, Yamamoto.

This has been widely acknowledged as a bad move, as all three of those men are over two thousand years old, with Yamamoto likely being even older than that (dude was bald when Shunsui was still knee-high to a grasshopper). Needless to say, Nanao gets squashed flat and suffocated by Yamamoto's reiatsu, and has to be removed from the battlefield by her Captain.

Still incapacitated, she witnesses Aizen's betrayal and subsequent escape of Soul Society from a distance. Post-betrayal, she reaches out to Hinamori Momo (Lieutenant of the Fifth Division), who was brutally cut down during the fighting by her ex-Captain. Nanao is noted to have taken books to Hinamori whilst the younger woman was recovering in the Fourth - a callback to the relationship she once shared with Lisa.

Nanao is present during the Arrancar arc, and helps to search for information pertaining to Aizen's master plan regarding the Hougyoku alongside Shunsui, Ukitake, and Ukitake's two Third Seats. She points out some data that is unrelated to the Hougyoku. By doing this, they find out that Aizen is trying to make a copy of the Ouken that grants access to the Soul King's palace. How would Aizen do this? By obliterating Karakura Town, and the 100,000 souls that live there.

Yeah.

To stop this, the Shinigami construct an exact replica (!!) of Karakura Town out beyond the Rukongai, ensuring that when Aizen attempts to enter Karakura Town, he will instead be drawn to the fake version, where a group of Captains and Vice-Captains will attempt to stop him.

Nanao is literally the only Vice-Captain not mentioned or referenced in the Fake Karakura Town arc. Even Sasakibe (Vice-Captain of the First Division) is mentioned, although not seen. This has led many to believe that she was given orders to stay behind and lead Seireitei - and in the very unlikely event of every other Captain/Lieutenant dying - to possibly become the new head of the Gotei 13.

This is not as outlandish as it sounds, given that every Captain/Lieutenant is either in Hueco Mundo or Fake Karakura Town. One is the place where all the Hollows live, and the other one contains Aizen, his co-traitors, and his Quirky Miniboss Squad.

The next time we see Nanao in the manga is when the Quincy Army launches an full-out assault on Soul Society. She does not fight on-page during the initial assault, although we do see her running to a window.

During said assault, a lot of stuff goes down. Many fans yelled at their computer screens. Here is a precis:
- Lieutenant of the First dies before the battle proper
- Shunsui loses an eye
- Kira Izuru (Lieutenant of the Third Division) may or may not be dead
- Zaraki Kenpachi (Captain of the Twelfth) gets beaten to a pulp
- Byakuya Kuchiki (Captain of the Sixth) gets beaten to a pulp
- Rukia Kuchiki gets beaten to a pulp
- Renji Abarai gets beaten to a pulp
- Yamamoto is killed to death
- Six Bankai are stolen (?!)
- Oh, and half of Seireitei's fighting force is wiped out. There were roughly 12,000 shinigami before the assault. Afterwards, there were barely more than 6,000.

So. After this, everyone is feeling very battered and bruised. After all, the Quincy are the traditional enemies of the Shinigami. Where the Shinigami are dead souls, Quincy are living humans, and whereas Shinigami cleanse souls, Quincy destroy them completely, which upsets the balance between the worlds. The Quincy are meant to stay in the Living World, not find a way into the Spiritual Realm and then break into Seireitei (which is shielded by a barrier specifically designed to keep out literally anything with some measure of Reiryoku).

Nanao, while not injured in the fighting, has a Captain who lost an eye - not blinded, the eye itself was shot out and destroyed - and is trying her very darndest to carry on as normal. That's when Kyouraku receives a letter stating that he is to become the new Captain-Commander of the Gotei 13. When he tells her that he's leaving... The look on her face is devastating. Her world was just rocked to the core by the Quincy - but she still had her Captain. The two of them define the Eighth, and now he's leaving?

Turns out she's also leaving the Eighth, and gets one hell of a promotion to co-Lieutenant of the First Division.

The Quincy do come back, determined to finish what they started, by overwriting Seireitei with their own rather creepy-looking city. A blonde model by the name of Jugram Haschwalth (what the hell, Kubo) comes to see if he can decapitate Seireitei's command structure, and is met with Quincy-proof kidou that Nanao came up with in the short weeks since the previous attack.

Unfortunately she's the only one who can use it, resulting in one heck of an 'oh crap' moment. After that, Jugram leaves, and Shunsui and Nanao oversee the battle. Why? Because the Captain-Commander isn't meant to fight on the front lines. And neither is his Lieutenant.

They have to wait and have faith that the other Captains/Lieutenants will defeat their enemies. And that is a very hard thing to do, when you can sense that more are dying by the minute.

However strong Nanao Ise was before the Quincy invaded, no matter how guarded, she is hurting now. Her entire world has been turned upside down, she's seen people she's known all her life be beaten down and killed, and she cannot do a single thing to help them. She's hurting, and she'd love to have a minute to sit down and just process what's going on, but she doesn't have the time. She's fought before, but this is incomparable to whatever she's seen in the past, and she doesn't know how to react to it, except to do her duty. Despite this, she can still put on a brave face in order to talk to other people - she'd prefer to keep her emotions private when around strangers. Sometimes, even among those she considers friends.

Strengths/Weaknesses:
+ A professional at paperwork
+ Excels at kidou (i.e. magic), and is able to come up with extremely complex spells in a very short period of time
+ Very knowledgable in a variety of subjects
+ Pretty good at managing people and situations
+ Physically fit
+ Can come up with a plan on the fly
+/- Military background
+/- She tends to mother hen those she's fond of, and can occasionally be blindsided by them and/or charge into dangerous situations to save them, putting herself in danger.
+/- Prefers to suppress her emotions regarding other people, meaning that she occasionally looses outbursts of feelings upon other people at occasionally inopportune times.
- Sometimes forgets that other people aren't necessarily on her level
- Not physically strong (in a manga were people fight primarily with swords, that's not good).
- Occasionally overestimates her own abilities, which results in her getting into dangerous situations
- Heavily reliant on her innate ability with kidou (magic) to get her out of trouble

Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Breeder
Starter: Yamask
Password: swedish fIIIISH

Samples
First Person Sample: {The camera wobbles for a moment as the feed begins, and then it focuses in on a woman as she kneels on the ground.}

I presume this is working-- {She looks off screen for a moment, smiling reassuringly.} Ssh, it's alright. Ahem. I apologise for that, but I have a broader question that the, ah, network may be able to answer for me.

{She brushes a lock of hair out of her face, and her serious gaze intensifies.} Upon checking the map, it seems that it takes approximately three days to reach Cherrygrove from New Bark Town. What is puzzling is that I am expected to make this trip with only a bento lunch and no water bottle. It seems like a bit of a design flaw, to be honest.

{The camera wobbles again, and there's a confused cry from offscreen.} Oh no, wait--

{the feed cuts out. pokemon 1, nanao 0}

Third Person Sample: No reiatsu meant no lazy pulses of energy down her spine, in her fingers. No reiatsu meant no kidou, no shunpou. Everything that she'd worked so hard for, gone in heartbeats. Nanao Ise sat against the wall of Mom's house (Mom? She couldn't remember her own mother's face, but she was sure that it hadn't been that woman.) and stared blankly down at her hands.

No matter how much she pulled at where the warm pressure had once been, nor how many times she muttered the incantations, the spells that had once spilt forth as easily as her own breath failed to materialise. She would not panic. She would not cry.

...but she was trapped here, stripped of her Zanpakutou and her reiatsu. A few hot tears leaked out of her eyes, and she scrubs them away in frustration. There was a war to be fought, and she had to protect Kyouraku-soutaichou - and she could not do that!

Yelling, she spins and drives her fist into a tree's trunk hard enough to split the skin on her knuckles. She swears, and clutches her hand to her chest - but the despair has lifted a little.

"That... wasn't one of my greatest decisions." Nanao slows her breathing. Looking up to the sky, she waits until her heartbeat slows down from the panicked, fearful hammering before looking down at her hand. Blood oozes from the grazes, and although it hurts to flex her fingers, it doesn't hurt in the way that broken bones do. She got lucky.

"Make a list, Nanao." She mutters, digging out a handkerchief to wrap around her hand. "Prioritise what you need to do, and do it. That's what you're good at." Don't stop to think back, or you'll lose momentum. One foot in front of the other, like so many times before.