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[badend_replay]

PLAYER
Name: Berri
Age: 22
Personal Journal: frogberri
E-mail: taiyakinonaku -a- gmail . com
AIM/MSN/etc: taiyakinonaku @ AIM & Plurk

CHARACTER
Name: Rika Furude
Canon: Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni
Age: 10 ( mentally much older )
Timeline: Post-Rei

Personality:

Furude Rika is one complicated little girl. On the outside, she's a cheerful and polite child who, while definitely having a devious side, is kind and nurturing to her friends. However, on the inside, she's sarcastic, depressed and more adult-like than most of her friends. But it's a bit more than just the standard "mature child" personality. Rika, or "Frederica" as she is sometimes called, holds the memories of many other lives where she has died.

The cheerful Rika is often referred to as "Furude Rika". She is the untainted little girl who has no idea that her death is approaching. She is a bit devious-- assisting Satoko as she tries to play cruel tricks on Keiichi-- and is willing to cheat in order to win when participating in the Games Club games. "Furude Rika" is a bit spoiled by the Villagers, who all respect her as "The Reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama", and it is noted that she does not use honorifics on the names of others, even those older than her. However, she is still respectful enough to use last names rather than first names on adults, but will call her friends by their first names. She also speaks in a slightly formal and mature manner. In the Rei anime, Rika notes that the Furude Rika she is replacing was a spoiled princess who allowed boys to flock around her cuteness and used them as unnecessary.

Characters often mention that Rika is “cute”: Rena in particular always wants to take her home. Rika is also noted as being quiet. She’s more of an observer than the other members of her school’s “Games Club”. When her friends are sad or in trouble, Rika is the one who goes and pets their head and quietly tries to cheer them up. In the first drama CDs, Rika is originally portrayed as being monotone, further highlighting that she is meant to be the quiet observing type who keeps her emotions in check. While she is still a very cheerful girl, Rika keeps her emotions appropriate for the situation.

But this playful, naive, and optimistic Furude Rika does not last long.
When Furude Rika is killed, her ancestor and friend Furude Hanyuu collects all of her memories and puts them in the Furude Rika of another world. At this point, the naive Furude Rika "dies" and is replaced with the combination of all of the Furude Rikas before, who refers to herself as "Frederica Bernkastel".

Frederica is emo. It's probably expected, isn't it? She remembers dying dozens of times before that moment, and knows that no matter how hard she's tried to fight her fate of "dying" she will eventually be killed anyway. She has a mild identity crisis, no longer seeing herself as "Furude Rika" because she is so tainted by her previous lives and therefore creating the identity "Frederica Bernkastel" to hide behind. In the novels, Frederica claims that she puts on an act of being Furude Rika and compares it to flying a kite; she struggles to behave like Furude Rika at first, but once she gets the kite flying it is very easy and comes naturally to her.

Rika isn’t the type to sit around and sulk... all the time. She has a bad habit of raising her hopes and then having them dashed. In one of her poems, she compares this to trying to climb out of a well. The higher she climbs, the harder she falls. Rika will occasionally have a burst of inspiration where she tries her hardest to fight back. In Meakeshi-hen, this is highlighted by an instance where Rika tries to fight Shion and give her medication. But after Rika fails a few times, her spirits will be dashed for a while. She is shown to be an alcoholic and will drown her sorrows talking poetically to Hanyuu in the moonlight. When she gets in these slumps, Rika will either watch silently and not care (she does this mainly in Tatarigoroshi-hen) or try to help in very small ways (she tells Keiichi to be careful with Satoshi’s bat in Onikakushi-hen and gives him “kitty advice” in Watanagashi-hen).

On the note of her silent advice, Rika is (as mentioned) poetic. She tends to fluff up her warnings with cutesy metaphors. For example, she refers to Shion and Keiichi sneaking into the store shrine as “naughty kitties”. She is also capable of poetic statements and being incredibly cyptic; Frederica Bernkastel is originally known only for writing poems in the novel.

The cycle of death also deeply influences Rika’s psychology in very disturbing sorts of ways. One is quite obvious; Rika is used to dying and then just starting her life over. With such a trait in mind, Rika has developed a twisted view on death in general. When she refers to her death, she refers to it as “getting passed this cursed month of June”. Rika does not view death as an ending in the story, but as a dead end in the maze. After all, she practically gets reborn in a new world; set up in the past with a new body and her memories in tact, so that she may try again. This results in Rika using death. In Meakeshi-hen, Rika commits suicide in order to avoid having to put up with Shion’s plans for torture, which is her first instance of using suicide to escape a world she doesn’t like. Rika nearly does it again in Minagorashi-hen; after deciding she can’t save Satoko, Rika grabs a knife and prepares to stab her throat in order to die and go to a world where Satoko is happy again.
This idea of escaping reality through death is also a reason why Rika sometimes thinks of herself as “a witch traveling between worlds”. She often makes the distinction between Rika the human and Frederica the witch, further supporting her personality crisis.
This psychology also applies to her friends. When they die, Rika assures herself that she will "see them again (in the next world)". Though, she would never try to kill her friends in order to reset a world (it doesn't work that way and she knows it). However, this does prove that her skewed view on death applies ever so slightly to people other than herself.

Another grim result of the cycle of death is Rika’s boredom and habit of recognizing patterns. She always knows what is going to happen next in a world because she has been through the world before and remembers what happens. Rika is very skilled in noticing patterns as a result.

This bores her.

In Minagorashi-hen, she mentions that the games the club plays are far less exciting since she’s played them before and is bored with them. She also lets herself get trapped in the loop. Rika knows things are boring to her because they repeat, yet she's too tired to always realize she could change things and make them fun again. It takes a lot of inspiration from Keiichi in Minagorashi-hen for Rika to realize she doesn’t have to be controlled by the loop called “Fate”. In a game that is fresh and new to Rika she is unlikely to become bored immediately, but will recognize rules of her new situation and behave accordingly.

"Dark Rika" also has some gags with her.
For one, she’s Hinamizawa’s greatest pervert. Or so she claims. Rika is shown in many gag comics to be a bit of a pervert. In a special clip for the Kai anime, she randomly gropes Mion. And on the back of the Himatsubushi-hen manga, she spies on Akasaka while he’s in a hot spring. At the end of one Kai episode, Rika even declares herself Hinamizawa's greatest pervert.
Along with being a bit of a pervert, she’s prone to teasing. Especially Hanyuu. Rika torments Hanyuu playfully in all forms of presenting the story. She likes to be a bit of a bully, but has to be careful about who she bullies and how she does it. Because after all;

Rika’s life is a huge act.
The dark personality and cute personality tie together into an act.
Rika realizes that if she suddenly started acting “her age” then her friends would be alarmed. She is, after all, hundreds of years old mentally and her cute child personality has been tainted by the memories she holds. So she pretends to be Furude Rika. She pretends that she is the same Rika as before. Rika keeps a smile and acts happy around her friends, all in an effort not to worry them. Because Rika doesn’t want them to get involved.
It’s implied that maybe, at some point, perhaps she tried. She tried to get Akasaka to come back to Hinamizawa and prevent her death, but he didn’t come. The fact she knows to hide Satoko in Takusamashi-hen suggests that Satoko has gotten hurt in the past because of Rika’s murder. Rika has become quite independent and doesn’t do much to help herself. She doesn’t want anyone to worry. And she doesn’t want her friends to realize that she’s so tainted. Deep down, she worries that she isn’t the girl they think they’re friends with, and she doesn’t want to give them any reason not to treat her like a friend.

But, even if Rika considers her happy self an act and has those identity problems, she is still that cute kid. Deep down, Rika is still a fun loving girl. When she’s with her friends and having fun, smiling, caring, and enjoying the moment... that’s all real. Rika just doesn’t realize it. She has a bunch of issues, but she is still a child at the core. Her knowledge only ever went to age 9 before she is killed.

And she has verbal tics, which she will continue to use due to them being a habit. She often makes kitty noises ("mii~" "myao~") and says "Nipa~h" (Smi~le) on occasions, usually when she's happy or to cover up an instance where she get her "mask" slip. She also ends her sentences in "nano desu", which basically means "that is so". In the English adaptions, this has been replaced with "Yeah" and "Sir". In the case of my Rika, I replace "Nano desu" with anything that reconfirms a previous statement ("That's what I think, that is", "That would be a foolish move, for sure") . Whenever possible, I avoid using "nano desu" in English-based RP and will instead go for an English equal.
She also throws sound effects into her speech when she's trying to sound cute. Instead of say "A cat fell down" she might say "A nya nya kitty fell down bang!".

Background: Wiki Page | Personal tl;dr

Abilities:

One might assume based on her role in canon that Rika is super powered, but that simply isn't true. It is Hanyuu, Rika's ancestor, that uses a latent power in Rika to toss her memories between worlds. One might note that Rika's soul itself is not what seems to go between worlds, but merely her memories. Bernkastel, the witch in Umineko, is a product of this cycle. Meaning that while they are related, Furude Rika does not have the Umineko magics that Bernkastel possesses.

What Rika does have going for her is that she is queen carrier of the Hinamizawa Syndrome. She is immune to the syndrome and at the same time has the capacity to bring out its ugliest colours. Within 48 hours of her death, every infected individual will reach L5 status and essentially go batshit insane.

The parasite that causes the Hinamizawa Syndrome thrives in the Hinamizawa region. Despite her role as the queen, Rika is not leaking parasites or anything.

Talent-wise, Rika has repeated the same mundane tasks for hundreds of years and become quite skilled. When it comes to things that she knows then she has been building talent over time; she is a skilled cook, good at household chores, excels at her studies, etc. However, she does not carry any built muscle memory or physical strength between worlds; this is best evidenced by how in every single world Rika is shown having to retrain herself to perform the Watanagashi Festival ceremony.

First Person: This is the format that will be used in rubycity_rp. Commonly known as bracket spam, it is usually third person present tense. We are expecting a well-written sample, at the MINIMUM eight sentences.

Third Person: This is the format that will be used in rubycity_logs. This sample will be in third-person past tense, at least three well-written paragraphs, 3-4 sentences per paragraph, which will show your understanding of your character, how they think, feel, react, etcetera. One should consider spelling, grammar and tense when doing all samples.