Edie Masuda Sheridan

Edie Masuda Sheridan is a student in Class 1-A.

Appearance
Being of mixed race, Edie has features of both heritages. She has blonde hair, amber eyes, and a soft complexion. Her body is healthy and in shape, though slightly edging to underweight thanks to her physicality. She wears her hair in a long ponytail tied in a ribbon, complemented with a French braid around the side and back of her head and shoulder-length sidelocks. She likes to vary her outfits depending on her mood, though unless necessary, she would stick to wearing one outfit the whole day. Though that means she often stays in her school uniform, she will dress more casually on off-days: usually a souvenir T-shirt from her travels, comfortable pants and casual shoes. In cooler weather she also wears a hooded sweatshirt, while with the Sun out she sports her father's old Royal Navy baseball cap. She also has her outfits for her activities, and will change accordingly - uwagi and hakama for naginata, light running clothes and trainers for running, breeches and boots for riding. Unless forbidden, she will always be seen outside wearing her scarf, which is patterned in the tartan of Clan Mackenzie and also bears the clan’s crest.

Personality
Edie is a charismatic, somewhat energetic young lady who enjoys learning, particularly in the field of humanities and social science. She is very polite, approachable and empathetic, and maintains a semblance of formalness to her actions, but knows when and how to interact with others. She is rather social, but likes to keep a close circle of friends with whom she can hang out with often, even if their interests are not necessarily shared. Her favourite subject as school is history, and she can commonly be found reading a book on one historical topic or another. She does not like to talk much about it unless the situation calls for it, however, and she also has interests in other fields of humanities like geography and psychology. She is also very compassionate with a sense of civic duty, and has done volunteer work for NGOs in several disadvantaged communities in junior high. She is also a pacifist in heart and mind: she learned meditation and mindfulness from a young age, and will never hesitate to intervene and break up altercations between her friends.

She loves travelling, and indeed is very well-travelled overseas, having visited all continents including Antarctica, and has always returned with appreciation for the cultures and traditions for those lands. She learns very quickly, thanks to a strong retention of learnt knowledge. She remembers all but the most irrelevant details of her life, and the power of her memory is such that she can recall every detail of her mother’s ryokan’s signature kaiseki ryori, and with the right state of mind can prepare it herself to perfection.

She is quite physically active, and her main physical hobbies are naginatajutsu, cross-country running and horse riding. She is an active naginata practitioner owning a naginata passed down from her mother as part of a family tradition to pass it to the last woman in the family, has run marathons and cross-country races, and is a well-rounded performer in all major English riding disciplines with her own horse, Valiant. Despite the amount of time that these activities eat up, she is still able to balance her work, social life and activities, and even manage at least 6 hours of sleep, and that’s on a work-heavy day. At home, she likes to work or read a good book with a hot cup of black tea, preferably Darjeeling, and works hard with occasional breaks to ensure she is as productive as possible.

Backstory
The fourth child of a retired British Royal Navy officer and a Japanese ryokan okami, Edie Masuda Sheridan has a rich and storied family history. From her father, she is descended from the Scottish Clan Mackenzie and is also distantly related to the British Royal Family through lineage that can be traced to the House of Hesse. From her mother, she is descended from the Taira and Oda clans, which makes her a distant relative of the Japanese Imperial Family, and the inn which her branch of the family operates in the city of Nikko has been in business since the Meiji Restoration and the end of the Boshin War. The stories her parents would tell of their heritage and her grandparents would tell of their wartime experiences at family gatherings would later spark her interest in history.

Edie herself was born in 2000 in Nikko, the junior of two brothers and a sister. Of note is that the brothers are British citizens by birth since they were born in the UK, while she and her sister are considered Japanese as they were born there and cannot hold dual citizenship according to Japanese law. The older sister has since been working in the inn and is close with the mother’s side of the family, the older of the two brothers has stayed in the UK as a citizen to follow her father’s side’s military tradition and join the Royal Air Force, and the younger of the two is finishing his secondary studies at an international school in Tokyo before taking a gap year for an internship.

Though her upbringing has been strict and steeped in tradition, Edie has had the most leeway out of her siblings to decide her own path. After several years dabbling in different subjects, she settled on humanities and social sciences, particularly history, which she took a keen interest in due to her family stories. Around this time, she started to experience visions of alternate realities in her sleep. At first it was merely smaller changes replaying the day’s events somewhat differently, but as she proceeded through her elementary and junior high years, she began to see radically altered histories. She once discovered one in which Japan was invaded and colonised by an evil expansionist empire using giant mecha. Another had a former British Prime Minister disappear after being discovered to be a KGB spy, plunging the United Kingdom into chaos in the immediate aftermath. Still another had a world where the Black Death wiped out Europe’s population, leading to a polarised world between China and Islam. There were many, but every time she encountered them, one thing was certain. She would always be suddenly thrust into the role of a person in that world, sometimes noteworthy, sometimes not. She would gradually learn of what led to the chain of events, and be guided to act in certain ways. And she would always wake up in the morning after suddenly being killed or seriously injured in that world.

She never feared sleeping as the visions started to increase in frequency, but rather wanted to learn more. However, the vagueness of details besides her knowledge of those worlds just made her all the more curious, and not knowing what it meant, she later discovered Senki Academy after browsing online for answers, having taken note of many of those worlds in a diary. After informing her parents about her situation, they eventually agreed to enrol her in the academy, concerned at her well-being and hopeful that she could find herself and answers. And so began the next stage of her life in Kaneshima...

Powers and abilities
Alternate Universe Exploration

An ability discovered in the midst of her youth, this ability’s origin is still as unknown and vague as anything else. All Edie knows is that it is a window into parallel universes and alternate histories that, whether they indeed exist or not, puts her into various roles as an unwilling participant in the ongoings of that timeline. However, various hints in a few of the timelines have suggested that this is a prelude to her gradually being able to control access to the timelines at her own will, and possibly even to physically enter them as herself. Only time will tell as to how this develops.

Walking encyclopedia

Edie’s learning and memorising acumen has been honed over years of inquisitive hard work, and her ability to remember so much information, useful or not, has enabled her to score consistently high, if not top marks at school. Though much of the information is practical, everyday knowledge as taught by her parents and at school, there is still a wide variety that she retains, from historical knowledge she gains from her personal reading to family recipes of Western and Japanese cuisines to nearly all of the experiences that have influenced her or her personality in some way in her short life.

Physical ability

While not superhuman, Edie’s athleticism is exceedingly great for a girl her age, though it’s not enough to get her into the Olympics given the breadth of the activities, and she’s more or less hit her peak anyway and is more focused on maintaining it. Individually this makes her a great athlete, but team sports are more of a challenge for her. Her specialties are running (both short and long distance), aikido and equestrian (all English disciplines). She has considered taking up swimming, shooting and fencing to complement running and riding and be a pentathlete, but ultimately decided not to since it would be too much on her and her already busy schedule, even if she stopped taking aikido.

The Pragmatic Traditionalist

Though she upholds honour and tradition, Edie has a sound tactical and strategic mind in her particular strengths of athletics, academics and naginata that has not only allowed her to hone herself but also to incorporate aspects of other arts and strategies to deliver the best results, alleviating her weaknesses while making the most of her strengths. For instance, she has found ways to integrate elements of other martial arts like aikido, judo, kendo and taekwondo into her use of naginata, to counteract the weaknesses of the weapon to make it much more effective at close-range defense, and also taught herself to use it as a mounted weapon on horseback. Of course, the weaknesses haven't been eliminated, merely mitigated, and even so not all have been covered, leaving her methods with some more to be desired.

Trivia
Her first, and only, known friend is Tomomi Hayaguchi.

Her dorm number is 601, the backwards spelling of Tomomi's room number, 106.

She keeps a notebook that documents every alternate universe that appears to her.

She has some old-fashioned tastes; for instance she has a multimedia audio player rebuilt from a record player, she has a small collection of LPs, she likes literary classics, and her speech bears traces of British upper-class vernacular. This stems mostly from her love of history.

She has a broad collection of books from many historical and cultural backgrounds which are fiction and non-fiction, and in her spare time will never be seen without at least one.

Some, though not all, of the worlds Edie has explored are based off worlds from popular culture.

Her name is pronounced "E-D", not "Eddie", as she will firmly remind you.

She is played by "bonniecanuck".