[Character Name] Karin Shindou
[Age] 21
[Gender] Female
[Sexual Orientation] Heterosexual

[Eye Color] Brown.
[Hair Color] Black, short.
[Height] 5'5" (165 cms).
[Other] Average height, slim build.
[Clothing] Feminine and rather impractical, favoring short skirts and sandals (with or without heels). A well-presented young woman, Karin spends a lot of time on her appearance: she doesn't like being seen without make-up, going out with unbrushed hair would be absolutely unthinkable, and most of her money goes toward her wardrobe. She usually dresses in blues, greens and greys.

[Background]
Japanese-American. An only child. Karin spent her childhood and teens in San Jose. Her father works as a dentist; her mother is a librarian, though she stopped working after Karin was born and returned to work after she began attending grade school. A friendly and quietly popular girl, she had an unexceptional childhood and early adolescence. A tendency toward clumsiness and fondness for math and science made her briefly unpopular in junior high, and saw her making a pact with her best friend Jessica just before her freshman year that high school was going to be different.
Karin started swimming to improve her co-ordination and spent the summer diligently making over her wardrobe and learning how to dress and do her hair, something her parents didn't really approve of. Though she made a shaky start she found her feet after getting her first boyfriend, and though the relationship didn't last the boost to her confidence saw Karin making social strides. Her grades suffered accordingly, but she knuckled down when it came to her SATs and managed to get into UCLA as a Physics undergrad, moving into dorms in Los Angeles and quickly making a new circle of friends to go out and have fun with, though none of them have replaced Jessica in her affections. She now works in a coffee shop, spends most of her money on clothes and outings, and studies just enough to maintain her distinctly average GPA. She takes advantage of having family in Japan to spend part of her summers in Tokyo, and is thinking of training as a teacher once she finishes college.

[Personality]
Fun-loving and carefree, Karin often comes across as rather shallow. She doesn't have a lot of time for the more serious side of life and sees no point in burying herself in books if she's not going to get graded afterward. She has the interests and preoccupations of many young women her age - her appearance, her love life, going out and having fun - and doesn't spend too much of her time worrying about the future. She can be overdramatic, and her lack of any real exposure to crueler realities have left her with a tendency to overreact to minor upsets, but she is at heart naively optimistic about the future, believing that whatever happens things will probably work themselves out in the end, so why worry?
Though she's outgoing, adventurous and considered fun to be around, Karin is popular for a very simple reason: for all her flightiness and flair for melodrama, she is at heart a genuine, caring, exceptionally loyal young woman who thinks the world of her friends. While she can be oblivious she's never intentionally cruel, and for all her tendency to go to pieces in a crisis she's a loyal friend who can be relied on when times get tough and, though she's easily moved to tears, she's hard to anger and simply doesn't have it in her to hold a grudge for very long. She's also a lot more practical than she at first appears - for all her fun-loving nature, Karin is perfectly capable of knuckling under and getting on with an unpleasant task when there's really no way around it, and can be counted on to stick by her friends no matter what.

[Specialties/Abilities]
Karin doesn't think she has any talents, apart from the ability to drive and an unfortunate tendency to be good at physics that she keeps extremely quiet about because she doesn't want to look like a nerd. She's been fond of space since she was a child, and knows a lot more than she's prepared to let on about space. She's also good at sewing and hand-makes some of her clothing, but she doesn't let on about that either because she doesn't want people to think she's too poor or too cheap to buy 'proper' clothes. She's been swimming to stay in shape since she was fourteen, and had a summer job as a lifeguard when she was in high school. She knows just enough Japanese to talk and write to her mother's parents in Kodaira.

[Affection]
Karin is heterosexual, though she's capable of being physically affectionate to her female friends so long as it's understood it's strictly nonsexual. She's friendly toward new acquaintances and openly flirtatious to men she's taken a shine to, something that seems to happen quite a lot. Though Karin's no commitment-phobe she's not looking to settle down with anyone just yet. She's demonstrative toward her boyfriends, though she's not really comfortable with public displays of affection that go beyond kisses, hugging or hand-holding. In private, however - well, nobody's looking there, are they?

[Fighting]
She cannot fight at all. Karin's options in a dangerous situation are limited to 'run', 'hide', or 'run and hide'... unless 'screaming hysterically' counts, that is.