Profile (under construction -personality section still only half finished)

[esper_cyborg]

Series/Fandom: Blue Sonnet
Character's Name: Sonnet Barje
Character's Sex: Female
Character's Age: 18
Canon point: I generally play her from the end of episode 3, where she's already undergone some significant character development but her powers haven't quite hit DBZ-esque levels yet.
Abilities: Sonnet was born an esper, meaning that her powers include telepathy (it isn't ambient; the way it's shown to work is that she can hear the surface-level thoughts of others - that is, what they're doing the mental equivalent of coherently speaking - when she listens carefully [episode 2], though she can also shield people's presence from being detected by other telepaths [episode 3] and she can detect other espers at a distance - however, given the way her canon's most powerful telepath's abilities work, while Sonnet can hear their thoughts, her powers don't allow non-telepaths to hear hers) and powerful telekinesis (in the first episode of the series, she uses it to flip a tank). She can't directly mind-control people, but if she has to, she can use telekinesis to puppeteer their bodies (episode 2). Also, she's shown to be able to stun people at a distance with what is described as an "electric shock" (episodes 2 and 3), though it's unclear whether this is another aspect of her telekinesis or if it falls under the next section.

She was also rebuilt as a combat cyborg, which gave her super strength (again, she flips a tank with it), the ability to run at upwards of 150mph (episode 2), and a cool built-in facial debris screen (every episode). She also has modifications to her eyes to allow her to zoom in on distant targets without external hardware (episode 1).

To see how all of that comes together, view the first battle scene of the anime.

Also, her abilities of note other than her powers include being fluent in English, Japanese, French, German, Russian, and Chinese, having a solid grasp of post-calculus mathematics, and being able to play the piano at a professional level. While some of this is due to already being formidably intelligent before she was rebuilt as a cyborg, the modifications made to her brain mean that she probably has a literal photographic memory as well.

Background: All the information we get on her early life is in (WARNING: NWS, triggers for rape) the anime's opening sequence, and it differs substantially from her background in the manga, so the information in Wikipedia largely doesn't apply (however, I'm using its information on her native city and her age when her powers began manifesting). Also, I play her with some slight headcanon expansions to her background prior to her cyborgization. With those, her pre-canon background is as follows.

Sonnet grew up in the slums of New York, to parents who, at the best of times, never gave a shit, and at the worst, were abusive - mostly toward each other, but occasionally to her as well. Her powers began to manifest when she was 13 years old, leading to her being accused of witchcraft, or possession; it also proved to be the breaking point for Sonnet's mother, who left her and Sonnet's father when Sonnet was 14, and never looked back.

Though Sonnet's father despised and resented her, he was only occasionally emotionally abusive, and largely tried to ignore her existence. However, that changed when one night, on her way home from the store, she was ambushed and gang-raped. When her father found out, he accused her of being a shameless slut and enjoying every moment of it, and he began selling her body so that he could put her "shamelessness" to some use.

By then, she had largely managed to suppress her powers. However, they reemerged with a vengeance one night, when one of her "clients" tried to murder her. She used her telekinesis to kill him in self defense, and she then went after her father. She hadn't decided whether she just wanted to confront him, or whether she was out for revenge; however, the fact that she still didn't have conscious control over her powers made the decision for her. They reacted instead to her rage and despair, and she ended up killing him as well.

The news stories surrounding the incident attracted the attention of Dr. Joseph Merikus, a New York-based researcher and one of the world's foremost biomechanical engineering and genetics experts. Once he met with Sonnet and determined that she was indeed an esper, he convinced her to become part of his research. Over the next three years, she was rebuilt as a cyborg and trained not only as the ultimate weapon, but as a spy as well, and she gained complete and perfect control over her powers.

Shortly after her 18th birthday, she was unveiled to TALON (that's the clip from the beginning of episode 1 I included in her Abilities section), the defense and biotechnology firm that had sponsored Dr. Merikus's work for many years. They immediately sent her to Japan to identify and capture another esper, codenamed the "Red Fang" - one that had been genetically engineered by TALON's scientists. She was suspected to be living in Tokyo, under the name Lan Komatsuzaki; Sonnet posed as a foreign exchange student at Lan's school to assess her powers and determine whether she was indeed the Red Fang. She approached the mission with the attitude that, in order to carry out her objectives, any tactics were acceptable, so long as they didn't risk blowing her cover; to her, Tokyo was a battlefield, just like any other, and she expected that Lan would put up a fight before being captured.

Not long after she began her mission, Dr. Merikus joined her in Tokyo, so as to be immediately on hand to resume research on the Red Fang when she was captured - and, in the meantime, to "supervise" Sonnet's mission (that is, gloat about her successes to TALON's board of directors and flaunt her superiority over every weapon TALON had to offer). And, while there was initially much for him to gloat about, Sonnet also suffered a minor breakdown in the field that indirectly jeopardized the mission.

Having grown up around the worst of human nature, Sonnet initially had no problems with using violence in trying to draw out the Red Fang, even if it resulted in injuries to civilians; however, as she spent more time around Lan and her classmates, she began to realize that her assessment of the situation had been completely wrong. When Lan's classmates chased off some bullies who had been attempting to shake Sonnet down - and, when she asked why, told her that they helped her because she was "one of them" - she realized just how wrong she had been.

Before, killing had meant little to her because experience had taught her that people were inherently cruel, indifferent to the suffering of others, and hiding some vice or crime or other inevitably destructive ugliness. However, finding out that that wasn't what most of the world was like - that there were more people out there who were kind and capable of taking an interest in the welfare of even someone they barely knew without any ulterior motives - had a dramatic effect on her. In the longer term, she began to actively try to minimize unnecessary casualties associated with the mission to recapture Lan. In the short term, however, suddenly rediscovering the capacity for emotion she'd kept buried for so many years somehow caused a fault in one of the cybernetically rebuilt sections of her brain (science works in strange ways in early '90s anime).

Although Dr. Merikus was able to repair the damage quickly, the incident led to one of the school nurses discovering that Sonnet was a cyborg. Dr. Merikus ordered Sonnet to kill her to maintain the secrecy of the mission, and for the first time, Sonnet objected to killing someone who wasn't a direct threat; however, she still followed her orders.

The next time she was in the field, she was more proactive in keeping innocents from being killed. TALON's forces finally caught up to Lan and her guardian at the home of a formerly preeminent researcher on psychic phenomena, Dr. Onagara. Sonnet psychically shielded the assault team to allow them to move into place undetected and stunned Lan with an "electric shock" so that she and her guardian could be captured without the situation turning violent. Afterward, the head of the assault team decided the best course of action would be to leave no witnesses alive; while Sonnet was unable to prevent them from killing Dr. Onagara, she was able to save his assistant and five-year-old granddaughter by using her powers to render them both unconscious and stop the bullets just under their skin. It's also likely that she knew Dr. Onagara's daughter, also a powerful telepath, was hiding in the house, but she didn't reveal her presence.

With the "Red Fang" taken back into TALON's possession, she set off with Dr. Merikus to one of their secret laboratory complexes for what was planned to be the initial phases of creating an army of esper super-soldiers.

Personality: [incomplete] On the outside, Sonnet usually seems perfectly composed and personable; however, her non-childhood in the slums of New York has left her with a sense of never really fitting in, of being virtually alone against the world, and a deeply competitive spirit, as she feels constantly challenged to prove her worth.

Already a mercenary in the employ of a corporation that plans to create a line of esper super-soldiers, she's almost unnaturally disciplined and focused for someone so young, and will go to almost any ends to achieve her goal - however, she hates having to kill innocents just for happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and outright refuses to kill children (or stand by and let someone else do it, for that matter).

The only person she's truly loyal to is the scientist who took her from the slums and rebuilt her as a combat cyborg, Dr. Merikus; however, as little kindness as she's experienced in her life, she's easily moved by it.