Mitty Mitshoku

PERSONALITY

Pride; that's Mitty's thing. She's spent years carefully cultivating a tough girl persona for the sake of her pride, and good luck to anyone who tries to peel it back. On a good day, her automatic response to most things is irritation, and she gets a bit of a kick out of intimidating others. But don't be fooled; while she'd have you believe she's the type to swing a barbed bat, that couldn't be further from the truth.

She's bitter dark chocolate with a sweet gooey centre. She wears cute pastel socks under tough black boots. She doesn't even get angry, not really; it's just that her aloof attitude comes across as a special kind of pissed off. It's a façade, and it's one she hates. There's a disconnect there, between who she is and how she's perceived, and it's a big source of her angst. She's actually very sweet, the 'I have a unicorn from a kids' franchise as my chat icon and I want to make my friends happy' kind of sweet, and even though she wishes she could convey that, she's too embarrassed to try. Besides, no one will call you weak if you look like you're one misstep away from punching them.

TRIVIA

• She loves baking sweet treats and taking them to the cafe she works at.
• She wants to be a professional writer some day.
• Her room is filled with plushies of her favourite character from Cherry Moon, a unicorn named Vanilla. She's also her chat icon.
• Her character in the Vistian MMO Legends Online is a wolf fighter.

STORY

Mitty grew up in a Nemonian town with her parents. She was the perfect little girl, never questioning why her family always seemed to have an issue with money, why her father was often yelled at by her mother for playing 'games', not even why her mother seemed to be out of the house more than in it. There were enough lights at the end of the many tunnels of her childhood that everyone in the family could look past it--until it reared its ugly head again, of course.

Too young to realise what was going on, she blamed herself for her parents' bad marriage. She did not see that her father had a gambling problem, or that her mother was seeing someone else. All she saw was her parents fighting and assumed she was the cause, because they gave no other explanation. She carried that burden on her shoulders even after she found out the truth; guilt's a tough thing to shake once it's ingrained. She blamed herself for being bullied, for her poor performance at school, for being generally unlovable. She sought solace in books, becoming especially attached to the fantasy series Cherry Moon, which she is still a big fan of today.

By high school she'd gotten sick of the bullying and feeling like a burden on her parents, and 'toughened up', adopting the intimidating persona she's now unable to detach herself from. It became a coping mechanism; it kept the bullies away, and then, eventually, it kept everyone away. By that point, she'd grown to prefer the solitude. She got used to pushing anyone away, to living independently... and by university, she realised how lonely she was as a result. With only her degree to work towards and one close friend from an online game, she ploughed through the first two years of university alone, pretending she was okay.

And then she met Alexis.

TALES FROM VISTUS

Sugar and Spice
"I want to be uncomfortable, for your sake."

Alexis and Mitty are third year students at Haldwell University. Alexis is a lonely, jaded girl who just wants friends. Mitty is a reserved, standoffish girl who struggles with expressing herself. One day, the two of them are paired up to critique each other's work for the semester. Now forced to spend time together thanks to this assignment, will the two learn to become friends, or will both their grades and their relationship crash and burn?