Atoli

Out Of Character Information
Name: Awe | [awestriker]
Age: 21
Time zone: -7 GMT (i.e. Mountain Time Zone)
Contact: AIM: awestrikernova, awestriker, awestrikernova@gmail.com
Anything we should know?: I'm out of animated GIFs.

In Character Information
Name: Atoli (Chigusa Kusaka)
Series: .hack//G.U.
Canon Standing: End of Volume 1
Age: 16
Birthday & Astrology Sign: April 5th / Aries
Arcana: The Moon

Personality:
Atoli is, almost to a fault, extremely idealistic. She believes that words can resolve just about every personal dispute, that killing another player of an MMO in an unsanctioned environment is wrong (and she has qualms about doing so even with sanction, i.e. in the Arena), and that even coming to blows in real life is going too far. For her, the VR landscape of The World R:2 is not just a game, and she frequently revisits areas because they look nice. She tries her best to be cheerful, happy, and friendly in everything she does, causing many people she comes into contact with to label her as "annoying", but even so is still rather timid. She loves animals, especially birds, and in fact owns three pet birds.

However, she is also a girl crippled by severe self-worth issues and also lacks true foundation of her belief, which she inherited from others. Constantly a target of bullying in real life (more on that in her backstory), she is at her core a depressed teenage girl that needs to be loved. But she is very, very good at shoving that out of the way.

For the most part, Atoli is a very sociable person, but in a large group she tends to single out lonely-looking people. She states in an email to Haseo that one of the reasons she joined the guild Moon Tree is so that everyone could feel the way she did then - happy that they met someone and became good friends with them. While it usually takes her a while to break someone's shell, partly because she has one of her own, she sometimes tries to guess at the identity behind it - for instance, she pins the real-life Haseo as polite and courteous after seeing him run his guild shop.

She is also very non-competitive in general, which is largely attributed to a quest she entered during her first few days in The World. The quest's objective was just "clear the area the fastest", and Atoli being Atoli she stopped to look at everything and came in dead last. Everyone laughed at her. And then she stopped competing in things - not just events, but shows of power, shows of luck... she just wants to be there, in a way. Of course, that changed when she joined Haseo's Arena team and actually won something, much to her elation, but she doesn't feel like she's up to competing in something alone just yet.

To most people though, she is Atoli, hanger-on to Sakaki. If he calls for her, she's there. Immediately. No one in the real world or The World is more important to her. Anything he says, she lives by, if she wasn't already. (For now.) And if she needs help with something, he is always one of the first people she contacts.

Haseo, though, is another person that's special to her. As a famous PKK, "the Terror of Death", and as a person, he is in many ways Atoli's opposite. Constantly scrambling for more power, and with a definite goal in mind, his demeanor seems to be at odds with hers. But she's okay with that, and even has a small amount of romantic affection for him, because there are a lot of things that Haseo has that Atoli does not - fame and success, despite being a job class most The World players agree is underpowered and not worth it. If he can overcome that stigma, that label of worthlessness, why can't she?

However, Haseo and Sakaki don't get along very well either, and often her loyalty to her superior comes into conflict with her friendship with Haseo.

Backstory:

Chigusa Kusaka's life has been rather troubled.

Ever since middle school, she met opposition from all sides. Her parents despised her for her attitude, as they believed that girls should be quiet, contrary to her upfront, loud nature. Her classmates refused to be friends with her for not being like them, to the point of frequent hostility (ah, teenage girls, why are you so mean?). Trying to appease one group incurred the wrath of the other. Nothing she could do would resolve the situation, but that didn't stop her from trying. She got a piercing and designer clothing. Her parents refused to let her wear them. She couldn't restrain her nature, and her failing grades only served to make the resentment of her parents worse.

Nothing she did helped the situation in any way, and she began contemplating suicide.

It was on a suicide website that she met someone going by the name of "Sakaki", who was able to convince her to join The World. This, effectively, saved her life. By so doing, Atoli gained an almost fanatical devotion to him (although she still needs to work on fear and surprise). Upon meeting Haseo later, she decided to fix his... er... attitude and considers herself one of his friends.

One of the first things she does is invite her to one of her favorite areas. After clearing it, Atoli hears an unusual sound and insists they investigate. Haseo and Atoli stumble upon a glowing sigil engraved into the back of the area's temple, which transports them to a unique area otherwise known as a Lost Ground. A glowing amoeba monster, not normally present in The World's code, attacks them. Atoli faints, but Haseo is saved by another player, Kuhn, who reveals to Haseo that the entity is a form of AIDA (Artificially Intelligent Data Anomaly).

Haseo eventually asked her to join his Arena team in a bid to knock out the Demon Palace Emperor, Endrance. She refused at first, but later warmed up to the idea and joined up, partially thanks to another player, Saku, baiting Haseo into a trap. Her twin sister Bo then promptly turned around and telling Atoli about it, and in response she messaged Sakaki and they went and saved him. Thanks to her help, and that of Silabus, a mutual friend of theirs, Haseo dethrones Endrance and becomes Demon Palace Emperor.

Not too long after that, though, she found out about Shino.

Shino was another The World character with almost the same design as Atoli's. Deluding herself into thinking that Haseo only paid attention to her because of this similarity, she runs off looking for Haseo's primary enemy Tri-Edge and leaves the normal space of The World. Finding herself in a blank white space occupied only by a set of coin-op lockers, she is attacked by an AIDA and falls unconscious. Haseo and Kuhn save her at that moment.

What she doesn't know is that Sakaki is actually a 10-year-old boy with delusions of grandeur and world-conquering using her as a tool (she discovers this later, of course, but not until late in Volume 2). The real mystery about him isn't how he manages to channel Light Yagami so well, it's how he sounds like he's voiced by Crispin Freeman over the Internet.

Canon Powers:
Atoli is a Harvest Cleric, quintessential healing class. Not particularly skilled with offensive or debilitation magic, she instead ensures the continued well-being of other players. Her spell list is as follows:
Repth - restores a small amount of HP (100*) to a single target [Mind]
Rip Duk - cures poisoning on one target [Mind]
Rue Kruz - weak water-elemental attack [Water]
Rip Mumyn - cures sleep on one target [Mind]
Ul Repth - restores a medium-small amount of HP (200) to a single target [Mind]
Zan Rom - weak wind-elemental attack that quickly grounds flying enemies** [Wind]
Rip Maen - revives one unconscious ally with a small amount of HP (25%, will have the same limits as Recarm in Hinoto-Ri) [Mind]
La Repth - restores a small amount of HP (100) to the entire party [Mind]
Rip Maj - cures curse on one target [Mind]

She also knows Gan Bolg [Earth] and Vak Don [Fire], although these spells were learned from scrolls - clerics don't naturally learn them.

She also possesses the "Phase 2 Epitaph", although she is unaware of this (furthermore, at this canon point, it has been forcibly removed from her by an AIDA). The Epitaph allows her to summon Innis, the Mirage of Deceit, as an Avatar, although in Hinoto-Ri Innis will act as a Persona instead (see below).

*HP totals in G.U. easily go into the thousands at higher levels. Atoli's HP approaches 3000 at the maximum level of Vol.3 (Level 150).

**No enemies in G.U. nullify, block, or reflect wind, but flying enemies in Hinoto-Ri that do won't be affected by Zan Rom's anti-air property.

Canon Weapons|Items:
Harvest Clerics are restricted to using Staves in combat. While other equipment has no bearing on her appearance, she also wears robes. Furthermore, all of her equipment is customizable using certain materials. She currently owns materials that grant the following abilities:
Weapon attachments: [Has a chance to inflict Curse (SP drain)], [Has a chance to deal extra Water damage]
Armor attachments: [Increases max SP by 10%], [Same effect as the "Resist Water" passive skill]
Accessory attachments: [Reduces the cost of healing spells by 10%, but increases the cost of other spells by 5 points]

Attachment types are exclusive to the specified equipment type (e.g. weapon attachments are equippable on weapons only).

She later obtains a unique weapon called Dancing Haze, but that's for, well, later.

Canon Baggage:
Just inventory items. Steam Bikes exist in the world, but Atoli is never seen using one. However, since inconsequential NPCs are listed on bike mission leaderboards, it is safe to assume she has one and will thus be taking one with her anyway.

Persona
Starter Persona
[INNIS AVATAR]
THE MOON

LVL 1 | CURRENT LVL: 1
WEAK: Earth, Physical | REFLECTS: (if any) | ABSORBS: (if any) | BLOCKS: (list here) | RESISTS: Water, Wind

SKILLSET
▶ Dia (Slight single-target healing)
▶ Aqua (Slight single-target Water damage)
▶ Cleave (Slight single-target Physical damage)
▶ Garu (Slight single-target Wind damage)
▷ Recarm (Single-target revival with 50% HP)
▷ Power Slash (Medium single-target Physical damage)
▷ Diarama (Medium single-target healing)
▷ Haze of Treason (Inflicts medium Wind damage on all enemies and has a 30% chance of inflicting Confusion)
★ Data Drain (Halves one target's HP and inflicts a lot of status effects at once)

PASSIVE SKILLS
▶ Water Boost (Increase water damage output by 25%)
▷ Resist Mute (Reduce chance of succumbing to Silence)
▷ Dodge Physical (Double evasion against Physical attacks)

1st Person Example
[Atoli is out in the wilds of Capricorn, which has always been her favorite of the districts, and night is rapidly approaching.

The sunset is accompanied by a small flock of birds parting from a bush in the center of the video - this one felt special to her, and she wanted to keep the memory and share it with everyone. Her day was far from over, but now was a good time to take a break, having a picnic under the clear sky.]

But a few of those birds get closer to her, revealing that they're wearing masks. Their eyes glow fiercely, and their haunting calls blast in your ears.]

Huh? AAAAAAAAAH!!

[She screams, clearly not prepared for this battle. Is anyone willing to bail her out of another mess?]

3rd Person Example
This body both was, and was not, hers.

Since she had come across that white room in The World, Atoli had felt a lack of disconnect between her mind and her body. The M2D used for many VR applications was a marvel of modern technology, but it wasn't perfect. It could reproduce the appearance and the sounds of the other World, but not the feeling of the winds or the pain of being struck by a blow.

But everything she had experienced from that point on had been real. She had felt it.

It was almost too much. The World was, to her, just that - another world. There, she had an unshakable pillar, someone she knew would always support her, and she would support him in turn. She knew his name and his face and they would never leave her.

That person wasn't here.

It was only now that the full weight of that statement hit her.

That night, Atoli couldn't bring herself to sleep.