2nd years || 1st years || 3rd years || Kitashirayama Academy

[clenches fist] finally ... I finished them ... the 3rd yrs of SOUNDSCAPE! I've posted about them before, but since then some things have changed (I scrapped Alice's design and started from scratch as well as changed Rize's up a little), so a reintroduction was in order anyway.

from left to right, as always: the main centre, Kimura Rize; the student council president, Hanami Yuuko; the foreigner, Yukitaka Alice.

Rize is an energetic and easygoing girl who's been involved in more clubs than she can count. well, I say easygoing, but really, she's more lost than anything and wants to find something she truly enjoys and sees herself pursuing, so she keeps her options open and tries to be someone everyone can get along with. she finally ends up finding that "thing" in idol activities, but it took her one heck of a detour to get here. because of her athletic skills, charm, and club experience, she's the go-to centre for when nobody else wants to do it. she's childhood friends with Alice, but they hadn't seen each other since elementary school and have only reunited at the end of their second year, when Alice moved to Kitashirayama. Rize is at Kitashirayama with a scholarship (a dance scholarship in particular, since she won some awards with an old club in junior high), but her family is rather poor - not to the point of having to starve, but money is usually tight. that's one of the reasons she wants to find her way in life so soon; she wants to provide for her family without just going into whatever makes the most money and ending up miserable, something neither she nor her parents & siblings would ever want.

Yuuko is the ever-reliable student council president and a close friend of Kanae's - as well as a founding member of the idol club. despite her proper demeanour, she's very bad at saying no and tends to end up in situations she didn't plan for, having to improvise her way out of them ... that's how she somehow ended up devising the idea for the vocal club and making it a reality alongside Kanae. she likes to think of herself as strict and headstrong, but she's easily swayed by her friends or people in need, which can sometimes lead to her getting exploited a little by not-so-well-meaning students and even teachers. but hey, at least she is very good at organising and keeps a firm hold on the club's budget ... most of the time. at first she tried to be the voice of reason, and she still is, kind of, but as soon as Mariko joined (which is to say, as soon as the club got any members at all), she was both relieved and slightly bummed out that a first year had a more commanding presence than the literal student council president. but such is life ... and even if she doesn't say it a lot, at this point she hardly minds, as SOUNDSCAPE is so much more to her now than just a club - it's where she feels the most comfortable, which is quite a feat given her usually rather sceptical and somewhat jumpy attitude.

Alice is a half-English, half-Japanese piano prodigy and moved to London after elementary school, but she recently returned and transferred to Kitashirayama, as she wants to pursue a career in music and preferably study at a Japanese university. because of her unique background, general introvertedness, and a hefty dose of culture shock, she has a hard time connecting with others and usually ends up alone, but she loves her friends as well as children. the idol group, to her, was just a way of getting to know a different type of music at first, but she grew really attached to all of SOUNDSCAPE and idol songs in general (which she composes for the group alongside Mariko) and is now seriously considering becoming a composer for this industry, when she used to only be into classical music at first. it's not so much an issue in Japan, but back in London, people tended to assume she's younger than she is because of her youthful looks and, especially since she's more of an upper-class girl with lots of societal pressure from the world of her parents (a successful banker and an opera primadonna respectively), kind of looked down on her or treated her like a child, which is one of the reasons she first got into classical music at all - thinking more mature interests would make that stop. as one would expects, she gets along great with the even richer and fancier Hotaru, but her childhood friend Rize is someone she's secretly always admired for her attitude and freedom.