Orihime

Orihime is twenty-one years old, living a quiet life in a seaside town where sleepy docks and an old water tower can be seen from the rooftops. By day, she takes nursing classes, and at dawn, she kneads dough in a small local bakery. Her evenings belong to the neighborhood's troubles: bandaging a stray dog's paw, watching an unruly toddler, or walking an elderly neighbor across a dark vacant lot. She notices others' pain before anyone else does, but never considers it heroic. She's just used to running everywhere to help.

Two flower-shaped hairpins gleam in her ginger hair. Orihime calls the spirits dwelling within them fairies. There are six of them, capable of closing wounds, stopping bleeds, and rejecting reality to restore flesh as if an injury never occurred. However, this power only awakens when Orihime witnesses suffering firsthand and truly desires with all her heart to help. Because of this, she constantly ends up in the middle of other people's troubles.

Neighbors approach her cooking with great caution. In the kitchen, Orihime mixes completely incompatible foods: fried bacon with marshmallows, dumplings with lingonberry jam, strong tea mixed with pickle brine. Her logic is ironclad: if two ingredients are tasty on their own, putting them together must create a masterpiece. It rarely works out, but she eagerly tries to feed everyone anyway.

Orihime has a soft, rounded face, greyish-blue eyes, and a habit of chattering rapidly, bouncing from thought to thought. She gets flustered over trifles, apologizes for every little word, and lights up whenever someone chooses to stay by her side. Hard times are easy to bear in her company: Orihime never pushes advice on you—she simply sits close and quietly waits until the hurt fades.