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Aircraft Design Company- Matsura's Planes Are Always Fastest!

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Character Sheet
  • Informational


    • ​
    Stress
    0​
    Office Stress
    0​
    XP
    5​

    Matsura Asuka
    Head Designer for Ohara Airworks
    Age 24 (Legally 25)
    Year 12 AF (After Flight)

    Design Stats
    Aerodynamics Engineering - +2
    Structural Engineering - +2
    Chemical Engineering - +1
    Mechanical Engineering - +1
    Ballistics Engineering - +1
    Electrical Engineering - 0

    Personal/Political Stats
    Social Skills - 0
    Politics Skills - 0
    Importance - 2
    Income - 1
    Investments - Ohara

    Resources
    Power - 0
    Wealth - 2

    Designs
    Type 1 Series - Military Variation (Designated T1M1)
    Type 2 Racer (World Speed Record October 1910-April 1911, 180kph)
    Model 2 Scout (Designated T1M2)
    Navy Scout Prototype (Drowned Rat)
    Dive Bomber B1M1 "Duck"
    Machine Gun Carrier R1A "Dragonfly" (World Speed Record May-July 1911, 200kph)
    Naval Rescue Water-Landing Supply Plane NR1M0 "Dolphin" (World speed record 240kph)
    Rhino Demon Train Hunter
    The world's first airliner
    The world's first pulsejet airplane

    Assets
    Slide Rule
    Computator (1 Reroll per Routine)

    Languages
    Albian
    Gallian

    Familiar Vices
    Drinking
    Prostitutes
    Dancing

    Family Life
    - Engaged to Arita Yachi, formerly the leading Ace in the Imperial Army. Designated #1 Cutest Army Boy, he's having some serious problems with PTSD right now.
    - Taking a second try at dating Mikami Kiho, ex-dockerwork from the south.

    Upgrades
    - 3 XP to upgrade a stat.

    Ohara Airworks
    Start Up, Imperial Capital, Akitsukuni

    Owner
    - Mr. Ohara, Rich. Aircraft Enthusiast. Business guy.

    Engineers

    Kibe Koume, 26, Office Manager
    Tiny & angry, Kibe went to school in Albia, picking up the language, the religion, and a fuckload of swear words. Speaks Albian.
    Mechanical +2, Ballistics +1
    Office Manager: If Kibe is not assigned to a team, the Office Stress is reduced by 1.

    Sakane Jun, 26, Second Team Leader
    A soured patriot, Sakane is married and has a young child being raised gender-neutrally. His two brothers who fought in the war.
    Structural +2, Aerodynamics +1
    Team Leader: If there are any additional projects, Sakane will lead them.
    Joinery: Sakane has training in the traditional Akitsukuni carpentry art of joinery, creating complex self-supporting joints with no fasteners or glue. When working with non-monocoque wooden spars or ribs, +1 Structural.

    Tezuka Kenji, ???
    A stoner with occasional flashes of insight. Nobody really knows what he does, but he's probably useful?
    Aerodynamics +2, Chemical +1
    Flashes of Brilliance: Each natural 10 rolled by any team Tezuka is assigned to gives +1 forward to the next research roll.

    Hasegawa Morio, 26
    A hopeless nerd with a photography habit, mostly on account of developing his own film, Hasegawa seems to do nothing but work and stack card houses, but somehow has an incredible attractive boyfriend. Speaks Gallian.
    Chemical +2, Ballistic +1
    Silent Workhorse: Hasegawa can work on two different projects at once for no cost to Office Stress, providing they use different stats.

    Kawamura Yosai, 25.
    Serially successful womanizer and incredibly attractive, Kawamura doesn't seem to have much of a personality outside of seducing women. Well, except for that time he seduced Asuka, which nobody talks about. Speaks Dyske.
    Structural +2, Electrical +1, Social +1
    Easily Distracted: If Kawamura is working on the same team as a female or non-binary employee, the team is at -1d10.

    Koide Hatsu, 24.
    One of the few female graduates of an Akitsukuni engineering school, Koide is brilliant and incredibly driven, but her first job at Akibara was both humiliating and exposed her to an abusive coworker. Her father is a rich businessman with factories in Joseon, and she's engaged to Ken from Castles of Steel. Speaks Joseon.
    Mechanical +2, Structural +1
    No Sleep: If you let her, Koide will work herself to death. She can work a second project for no Office Stress, but all her stats will be reduced to 1 for the routine.

    Kobayashi Ayao, ???
    Disowned heiress of the Kobayashi family, all Kobayashi wanted was a career and to be a modern woman. For her trouble, a cousin threw acid on her, scarring her face, neck, much of her torso, and her left arm. Despite appearing serene and above it all, she's actually an avowed communist activist and baseball player.
    Aerodynamics +2, Social +2

    Adachi Ren, 24
    Adachi learned chemistry from her father, one of the most famous chemical engineers in the country, rather than through formal schooling. She's married, has a kid, and takes spirituality very seriously. Yes, you did the math right, she had Yuki when she was 17. It's 1912, folks.
    Chemical +2, Electrical +1
    Young Mother: Adachi will cause double Office Stress if she has to work multiple tasks.

    Uyeno Sei, Ballistics Engineer, 31.
    The oldest member of the crew, this is Uyeno's second career. Her first was as an officer in the Imperial Navy with specialized technical training: her very promising career was cut short by her transition. Her work in a naval arsenal on machine-guns landed her the job here. Briefly dated Satomi (the age range is a bit creepy but again, 1912), she's missing a piece of her ear and is deaf on that side, from an exploding cannon. Recently returned from Varnmark from experimental surgery, she's known for her skill navigating gendered bureaucracy.
    Ballistic +3

    Mi Kyung-Jae, 23
    A recent graduate of the Imperial College of Heijo, Mi is from the recently annexed territory of Joseon. For those keeping track at home, that means he's a Korean national living in Imperial Japan in 1912. We haven't seen much of his personality because he's rightfully terrified of everything around him. He has a specialty in endurance engine design and modification. Speaks Joseon.
    Mechanical +1, Chemical +1
    Endurance Engines: Mi has an excellent understanding of metallurgy and tolerances. Any engine he works on gains +1 Reliability if a 16+ is rolled.
    Pulsejet Wizard: Mi is now one of the world's leading experts on the pulsejet engine. He can be given his own project to custom-craft pulsejet engines, and he gives +1 to any pulsejet-related project.
    Joseon National: Mi does not have security clearance to work on any top-secret projects.

    Miyoshi Shigeri, 23.
    A non-binary person and admirer of Asuka's work, they were in an support role in the Army before joining the company.
    Structural +1, Mechanical +1, Aerodynamic +1
    Mechanic: Miyoshi has some experience repairing and refurbishing aircraft. They get +1 if assigned on the clean-up phase.


    Other Employees
    - Ohara Satomi, 22, Mr. Ohara's niece and the company test pilot, Ohara is a general lesbian disaster. She's good at flying planes, driving cars, and kissing girls. She's bad at being patient, being respectable, and sticking to literally anyones conceptions of gender roles. Deeply in lesbians with Coralie D'Amboise.
    - Fujkikawa Sotatsu, old, modelmaker. He's an old man and toymaker and we don't see much of him because he locks himself in his workshop a lot. He's friends with Kawamura?

    Assets
    - Engine Test Rig (Allows engine tweaking and optimization.
    - Wind Tunnel (+1 Aerodynamics)
    - Rapid Prototype Lab (+1 Clean Up)
    Expanded Cast

    Akitsukuni Industry
    - Homura Mohoko: Head Engine Designer for Kobayashi. First female engineer in the country. A lot of sex appeal.
    - Okumura: Head of Akibara aircraft design.
    - Yamanaka Hajime: Kobayashi engineer. Young and eager.
    - Igarashi Masazumi: Kobayashi engineer. Reserved and experienced.
    - Admiral Akibara Toru: Imperial Navy Admiral. Maximum nepotism. Maximum douchebag.
    - Lt.Cmnd Akibara Shinzo: The above's son. A hottie but very forward.



    Character Families
    - Matsura(?) Mizuko: Asuka's sister. Was paralyzed in an accident in Asuka's first flight. Lives Elsewhere and is married now. Can't forgive Asuka, even though she's tried.
    - Adachi Motoki: Adachi's husband, an accountant. Legally blind.
    - Adachi Yuki: Adachi's 7 year old daughter and wannabe pilot. Very adorable.
    - Yachi's Brother: Exists.
    - Sakane's Wife: Exists. Drives him a bit crazy, but he loves her.
    - Yachi's Brother's Wife: Exists. Is statistically likely to be pregnant.
    - Lt. Coralie D'Amboise: Gallian pilot in exile. Satomi's girlfriend. 25. Accomplished bisexual duelist. She flew in the war for a single day, and for her troubles got a hole blown in her cheek and had her left arm paralyzed.

    Akisukuni Army & Ex-Army
    - Lt. Torio Tanaka: Yachi's former observer as an enlisted man. Was jumped up to fly Ducks and lost a leg on his first mission. A trained painter, married to Torio Saya.
    - Captain Amari Shiro: A Dragonfly pilot who ended up flying as Yachi's partner. Kind of delightfully twinky. They sorta slept together at one point, which wasn't great. He lost his previous boyfriend in the April Offensive and turned his plane into a shrine. He was shot in the gut and is still recovering.
    - Major Izuhara: Logistics officer, Imperial Army, this bespectled officer stood up to the Caspian Crown Prince and accidentally kicked off the Akitsikuni-Caspian War. The guilt was so much that, after almost a year of running Army procurement, he shot himself in a phone both.
    - Captain Nakai Sekien: Army scout pilot. First person to drop a bomb from an airplane, later head of the Duck Squadrons.
    - Captain Teshima: A Desk pilot that fought with Yachi. Lost an arm in the process, took over for Major Izuhara after his death. Seems cheery despite it all.
    - Captain Nashio: A real piece of shit dude and probably a rapist, he's also a war hero as the second-highest scoring ace on the Akitsukuni side. He was a young shitty kid in way over his head but it's no excuse.
    - Lt. Kinjo: Kind of a dumb lump and Nashio's friend, one of the desk pilots. Dead at 19.
    - Lt. Okazaki: Yachi's friend from before the war and pilot, he died in a spin in his dragonfly. His death probably hit Yachi the hardest.

    Westerners
    - Rose & Antoinette Sears: Pioneers of flight. Sisters. Black in 1910s not!America. Yikes.
    - Timina Guasti: Famous aircraft designer from Otrusia. Likes big planes and green.
    - Prince Protasov Vasilyevich: Crown Prince of Great Caspia. Real dick. You gotta hand it to him though, a decent flier.
    - Count von Zeppelin: Invented rigid airships. Runs a successful airline business. Damned impressive.
    - Bennhold: Aircraft Engineer. Experimenting with metal aircraft.
    - Aileen Middlemiss: Albian reporter for the Artimis Times. Well meaning and oblivious.
    Available Tech
    • Materials: Wood, Duralumin, Molded Wood, Wood & Silk Composite, etc
    • All engine mounts
    • All wing types
    • Basic reinforcement
    • Wing warping and ailerons
    • Basic water radiators
    • Flying Wings
    • Semi-Monocoque design (requires at least half the slots have frame pieces)
    • Valved pulsejets
    • Basic weapon mounts and turrets
    Tech not Yet Developed
    • Custom engines
    • Monocoque construction
    • Cantilever Wings and associated tech
    • V and T tails
    • Tailless designs
    • Aluminum and titanium
    • Cellulose surfacing
    • Any kind of radar
    • Weapon accessability mods
    • Interruptor gear
    • Geared propellers
    • And Maybe Other Stuff
    Akitsukuni
    Island Nation

    Government
    Constitutional Monarchy
    - The democratic portions of the government are dubiously legitimate.
    - The head of state is the Empress of Akitsukuni. She gives her blessing to newly formed governments.
    - The Navy and a small number of families have undue influence on politics.

    Economy
    Developing Mixed Market
    - Most industry is controlled by a small number of wealthy, family-owned companies.
    - The state provides most contracts to industry. Consumer good market is anemic.
    - Exports are few, mostly cultural.
    - Imports are raw minerals, food, oil, and expertise.
    - Currently suffering an economic crash after the last war.

    Politics
    The Diet is currently ruled by a Constitutional Nationalist government. It has a system of nonlocal proportional representation, with representatives appointed by the party in accordance to their share of the vote.
    - Constitutional Nationalists: 50%
    - Purity Club: 9%
    - New Independents: 26%
    - Fairness Association: 11%
    - United Communist League: 2%
    - Monarchists: 1%
    - Assorted Fringe Parties: 5%

    Demographics
    Akitsukuni is mostly very ethnically homogeneous. Around 5% of the population are various minorities, most from nearby countries. Roughly .1% are westerners here for business or in advisory positions.
    - Population: 55 Million
    - Religion: Mostly Kodo. Roughly 2% of the population follows western religions.
    - Wealth: Most wealth is concentrated in the top 5% of the country. Nearly 20% of the population lives in conditions indistinguishable from peasantry.
    - Urbanization: Heavily urbanized for a small economy: 35% and rapidly growing.

    Military
    At Peace
    - Imperial Akitsukuni Navy (IAN): The 6th largest in the world, and the most experienced.
    - Imperial Akitsukuni Army (IAA): 150,000 highly experienced soldiers, and a considerable reserve.

    Aspects
    - Poor Resources: Aluminum costs +1.
    - Damn Akitsukuni Engines!: Engines have -1 Reliability.



    The Main Character Of This Quest Is Nonbinary And Uses They/Them Pronouns.

    I Am Putting This Here Because The Next Person To Misgender Them Is Getting Yeeted Into The Trash

    Also here's the Gayaverse TV Tropes page, because why not.​
     
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  • Informational
    • Ah okay thanks i was thinking back to when we toured the factory museum and contemplating who in the world Mr. Ohara would fit the dolphin in there when I said wait a minute what plane are we building right now
     
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    [X] Introduce yourself neutrally. (Because you already have somebody)

    No desire to get into a clusterfuck, but she seems nice.
     
    [X] Introduce yourself neutrally. (Because you already have somebody)
     
    [X] Introduce yourself and express interest.

    Either answer is fine, but I'm going for this because I think it'll help us manage our stress and thus let us make better planes.
     
    [X] Introduce yourself neutrally. (Because you already have somebody)

    [ ] Some well meaning office manager trying to adapt to a mostly female workforce when addressing them.
     
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    [X] Introduce yourself and express interest.

    Because we've been drinking and having a good time and we actually are interested, prior to boyfriend concerns.
     
    let's write a ton of words about gender presentation
  • Informational
    • ancusohm said:
    ... Huh, I suppose that could make for a snippet vote. Something about Akitsukuni beauty norms and how they interact with sexuality. I'll work on the phrasing and post in the proper format after the moratorium ends.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I think this is something better answered with an out of character post, and interestingly, it's something that @Artificial Girl and I discussed a lot when we started really digging into the worldbuilding for Castles of Steel, and we've been playing with since.

    Basically, Akitsukuni has the opposite culture associations homosexuality that we do, without the association with gender inversion stuff that our own understanding went through. Rather, they sort of look at it (or rather, have recently, historically looked at it) as gay men being so masculine that they don't have a place for women, and lesbians as so feminine that they prefer the company of other women. Modern Akitsukuni sexual psychologists trained in the Western tradition have been proposing all sorts of nonsense about homosexuality being a form of gendered narcissism.

    So this kinda bleeds into the culture of presentation, right? If you're a gay dude there's a stereotype of presenting extra masculine, working on your body and doing something physical or martial as a career, but it's pretty like... not an expectation? There's a lot of jokes about the army and navy being gay as fuck (some things don't change...) but it's not really derogatory, just a sort of crude, funny observation. That said, it's not something that stands out a lot? Gay dudes in Akitsukuni don't really signal super hard, because there's not really any shame in being a little forward about it or asking other men about their preferences, and there's sort of a low-level assumption in Akitsukuni that most everyone is at least potentially bi, everyone experiments, and that's totally okay so long as it happens in private.

    The general trend for the fashion for most single straight girls in Akitsukuni in the past few years (clarifying that we mean women in urban areas who have the luxury of going out of their way to achieve A Look) is to try to play up being cute and approachable, nonthreatening and all that, sort of a reaction to fears about Westernization creating a generation of unloveable, coldly professional women. Things have changed on this front way, way faster than it did in IRL Japan, for the simple reason that half the Western advisors arriving in the country are women, in contrast to the weirdly lopsided social change of IRL Japan (with men changing from robes to suits in a generation, but women dressing and participating in socially pretty much unchanged from Perry to MacArthur). Young women can spend hours putting their hair up in a traditionally feminine way, but getting parts of it undone in just such a way that it looks endearingly casual, achieving that difficult makeup-free makeup look, and fashion pre-war was trending towards a simplification of traditional clothing for women with the slow intrusion of Western elements. Aiko in Castles of Steel, despite being what we might call a political lesbian of sorts, currently presents a decent example of this, especially in her experimentation with Western hairstyles and fashions. Kibe too.

    By contrast, lesbians generally aim for what we'd probably call high femme, classy, stern, and often kinda retro, which includes a lot of like, overtly elaborate hairstyles and makeup. Because being forward is a lot harder for women in Akitsukuni, even among other women, signaling is used more sharply: the bracelets, colour combinations, makeup, lipstick, the signals changing season to season and geographically. Thirdly, there's pressure for lesbians who don't want to end up with men to pursue careers very seriously so they never need anyone else's paycheck. This has created a weird confluence, because actual coldly professional women have started adopting this high femme aesthetic as well to signal "I am focusing on my career now, excuse me", which then creates ever more subtle methods of signalling which are increasingly appropriated etc etc. Society has lumped all these professional women and their general look of tight hair and made-up faces as so-called "New Class" women brought up in Castles of Steel. At your company, Kobayashi is a really good example of that kind of person: she's straight, but has no time or inclination for relationships (admittedly, this is compounded by her origins). Haruna from Castles of Steel also rocks this presentation in the rare times she's out of uniform.

    The war, of course, is mucking all this up. It's all in flux right now, and who knows what fashion and presentation will look like coming out the other side? Koide bounced between nerd-too-busy-studying-to-fashion to the casual-cute look and who is currently heading in a more New Class direction, for example.

    Finally, we know a lot about nonbinary expression already, but the general rule of trying to aim for that neutral middle holds. Because of relatively small numbers and, frankly, kinda flying under the radar, there's not a lot of socially ingrained rules short of be identifiable behind this expression. Generally speaking, hair that is long-ish but loose in some configuration is a standby and has been for a very long time.

    THAT SAID

    There are still people who are non gender conforming under these rules too, and we know a couple of them. Satomi is actually a really excellent example in that she's as close to a butch lesbian Akitsukuni really gets, having a sort of boyish aesthetics with her short, loose hair and 24/7 jumpsuits. She faces a lot of shit about this from a lot of people, and a lot of people presume she must be nonbinary or a trans boy scared to commit. Satomi gets away and has a job because she's got rich parents, a doting uncle, and because she's now considered one of the best pilots in the country, but she's a little bit of a constant embarrassment. As always, there are people who don't fit the mold, whatever that mold looks like, and the mold is changing as we speak.

    So, basically, Satomi reads to us as super a lesbian (in large part because she was first written before this stuff was nailed down) but Haruna is a much better representation of Archetypical Akitsukuni Lesbian than Satomi is. Peeps from Akitsukuni would look at Valentina from Mahan, an actual butch lesbian, and go, oh, somebody needs to tell that trans man that he doesn't just have to crossdress.
     
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  • Informational
    • I continue to really love how the culture is accepting but in a very different way from a western sensibility, and isn't just like "now but more progressive" as some writers make progressive societies.
     
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