xxxxxname Shion Ikeda Bartolome
xxxxxnicknames Shin (sometimes, likes, close friends)
xxxxxpronouns she/her
xxxxxage and birthday twenty four
xxxxxsexuality bisexual
xxxxxoccupation ghost writer (and aspiring author)
xxxxxethnicity japanese-american (mother's side); filipina (father's side)
xxxxxhex #bbd4b4

for all her passion and fervor, she is quite the calming presence. she is a warm cabin in winter, somewhere safe to wander into, protection from the cold. she is mercurial in nature, but for all her general vacillation, her propensity for feeling like home withstands. her character is built upon foundations of empathy and understanding, and it shows in the ease with which she converses, and, especially, the ease with which others tend to find themselves conversing with her.

perhaps fitting of her role as an author, she characterises people quite well. she can intuitively break people down to their bare bones, both through her innate perception, and through her aforementioned comforting demeanour, which has a way of softening even the coarsest of exteriors, and lowering the highest of walls. she is also intelligent and creative, and this bleeds both into her talent for writing, and the plethora of sage advice she seems to always have tucked away.

her calmness can sometimes be misread as lackadaisicality, but it is not that she doesn't care about life's course, so much as she trusts in her own adaptability. she has her issues with the life that fate has dealt her, but she has found ways of mending herself, and coping, through her writing, her friendships, her fond memories and her fervent aspirations. and some therapy here and there- she isn't very good at asking for help, but professional help is something she is slowly opening up to.

to further counter the 'cool' perception others may be inclined to have of her, Shion is very quick to laugh. her humour is witty, and mischievous at times, but it is never mean-spirited, and even her intentional barbs tend to have a smoothed edge to avoid genuinely hurting any feelings beyond ego. on the other hand, her more casual jokes can be dry, and somewhat 'dad-ish' at times; a remnant of her father that never really left her. she is also quite sentimental, prone to hoarding random junk for the sake of a singular 'good' memory attached to an object, or tearing up at the 'wedding vow/proposal' videos that show up on her Facebook feed.

shion's love for reading and writing undoubtedly bloomed under her father's influence. having immigrated to the US (California, specifically) in his late teens, Lou Bartolome soon found his dream job teaching English at the local high school. as someone who adored literature more than anything else, his classroom became a place to share his passions, and, more importantly, provide somewhere for his students to explore their own. several years into his new life in the US, Lou met Shion's mother, Lucy Ikeda, through a mutual friend, and, as he used to say it, "fell head over heels in an instant". They married after five years of dating, and Shion was born only a month after their one-year wedding anniversary.

growing up, Shion understood and got along with her mother well enough, but she was always closest to her father. where her mother was reticent, he was expressive- emotion poured from him in a way that made Shion feel free to express herself in her entirety, without shame or fear of rejection. furthermore, her father and her bonded over a shared adoration of books. even before she herself could read, she would pore over the pages her father read to her from, trying and failing to intepret the letters on the page. her father was a storyteller, and every night, he would immerse her into a world beyond their California two-bedroom. By the time she could write, the tables were turning, and Lou was gushing over his daughter's talent, and joking about the mansion she would buy him with her money as a best-selling author one day. even after she grew out of being read stories before bedtime, Lou always seemed to know when she had had a rough day, and needed his stories again.

shion was seven when her little sister, Hana Bartolome, joined their family, sparking what would soon be revealed as the last, truly joyful moment of Shion's childhood. this became clear a year following Hana's birth, when Lou was diagnosed with testicular cancer. at first, it seemed a stoppable enemy, and shion wrote furiously about how her father would overcome this opponent, and save them all from the oncoming darkness. but try as she might, no victory ever manifested. the years passed, and soon her father's illness became impossible to ignore. it permeated through him, and through their home, and in the sixth year of the cancer's presence in their lives, Lou was become bedridden. Shion remembers little of that year beyond the time she spent at his bedside, reading what would be their last novel together (Virginia Woolfe's Mrs Dalloway.

the last memories she has of him are cradled between the pages of that book, a book that, for a time, she refused to finish. Lou passed away about three quarters through, after a six year battle, and a then-fourteen Shion spent the next several months adrift. she didn't read, because every time she picked up a book, all that she could think about was how much she would prefer it if it was Lou reading to her. And she certainly didn't touch Mrs Dalloway, because to finish that book felt too final- it was the final book she would ever read with her father, and she had no desire to complete it alone.

it was just less than a year later that, whilst moving the book, she unintentionally shook loose the bookmark, losing the page. her frantic trying to find the page came automatically (her father had always forbade corner-folding). her reading the first sentence of the chapter was similarly automatic, as it pulled her tentatively into a world she had spent the last eleven months neglecting. She finished the book that day, and, on the final page, found her father's final message to her written into the blank back pages. shion cried a lot that night, but so too did she heal somewhat. the ache was there, and always would be, and she would continue to cry again and again as the years went by. but her father, in all his generosity, had gifted her some closure.

shion spent the next several years of her life pursuing her dreams of becoming an author, and chipping away at the array of novel ideas she had built up in her mind. she ghostwrote her first novel at only nineteen, for a well-known author suffering writer's block, and moved into the Commune around the same time. her name quickly got around in the field, and her following gig was for an a-list celebrity's autobiography. the book became a New York Times Best-Seller, and Shion has ghost-written a couple of other books, which both accumulated similar degrees of success. now that she has found some stability, as well as some leeway in the industry, she is determined to publish her first novel, under her own name, and has been working tirelessly to make her and her father's dream a reality.