Ayano Tateyama
Aliases: none
Gender: female
Pronouns: she/her
Birthday: Nov 22
First appeared: July 2014
Relationship Status: single
Canon: Kagerou Project
Species: Human
Leadership positions: None
Guild Membership: Caretaker guild
Brief Overview
Ayano is a member of the Starfall Collective and a prominent member of the Caretakers guild. She prefers to think that she came from somewhere else--likely as a disembodied soul from her afterlife.
Early Life
Warning: this section contains mentions of suicide.
Ayano was born to her parents Kenjirou and Ayaka. She was always a very cheerful girl and befriended Shintaro Kisaragi.
When Ayano was in middle school, her parents adopted three children as foster kids: Kido, Kano and Seto. All three had unnaturally red eyes. Ayano was a naturally nurturing and caring person, and wanting them to feel included and special, asked the three of them to form the Mekakushi Dan, a team of superheroes. As she put it, 'red is the color of heroes'. She acted as any older sister would towards them.
At some point, while Ayano was still in middle school, her mother died in a landslide accident; her father was crushed, and so was she and her three siblings. Ayano tried to be cheerful and optimistic even in the face of her family's tragedy.
In her last year of middle school, Ayano discovered notes on something called 'the legend of Medusa' in her father's office. The notes had the same title as a book her parents used to read her. She realized that it was no myth and the Medusa was real, and her father was looking for a power that could help him bring back his wife, who had died on August 15th; due to some phenomenon, those who died on that day did not truly die, but they are trapped in the Heat Haze. The Medusa's powers were divided into individual snakes. Ayano realized that all her foster siblings possessed these powers. After searching more, she realized that at some point her father had come into possession of the snake, and was looking to use her younger siblings to achieve his goal of opening a portal to the heat haze and bringing back his wife--at the cost of her siblings.
Now in high school, she attempted to reason with her father, but realized that he was possessed by his own snake who would accomplish her father's goal at any cost, including sacrificing her siblings and anyone else they needed to gather; realizing that she couldn't stop him normally, she hatched a plan to enter the heat haze permanently and gain a snake herself, thus preventing her father from being able to gather all the snakes and sacrifice anyone. To that end, she jumped from the school roof and was swallowed by the heat haze, gaining the snake of retaining eyes, which allows her to awaken memories of other timelines in others.
System Life
Ayano is known as the big sister of the collective. She has done a lot of work with those needing emotional support and is always there to lend an ear or a shoulder to cry on, and has a bunk bed in her room specifically so that anyone who needs to stay with her overnight can do so and has someone to talk to. She is friendly with most everyone and enjoys spending time with other members of the Caretaker guild as well as with Shintaro.