Ai Nakajima

Ai Nakajima is a member of Pastel Project.

## Background

Ai Nakajima was born on February 14th to her parents, Sakura and Botan, in a small town in the South of Hokkaido prefecture. Having tried for years, Ai's parents were already nearing middle age when Sakura became pregnant with their "miracle child", taking the news as though the gods themselves had answered their prayers. Once she was born, it's possible that there wasn't a more doted upon or loved child on the entire island, and certainly not on the family farm, where her paternal grandparents, aunt and uncle were the proverbial village helping to raise a child.

Ai grew up a happy, inquisitive child, especially enamored with the animals she grew up around. Though she was always shy around new people at first, Ai had never met an animal she wasn't excited to make friends with, gathering a collection of birds, foxes, and even once an aodashi that slithered its way onto the farm which would all stop by regularly for the scraps of food Ai regularly "borrowed" from the kitchen to feed them. Though she never had many other human friends besides her family and the numerous younger cousins living on the family property, Ai was happy with her life, often thinking how she was practically a movie princess despite her humble surroundings. Things changed though when Ai was nearly thirteen, when her parents' truck was caught in a torrential rainstorm on their way home from selling the farm's goods in the nearest town with her aunt and uncle. Through a series of events the truck found itself sliding off the side of a narrow bridge into a flooded lake, a whole generation of the Nakajima family erased in an instant.

Ai was devastated for a time, retreating into the small room she shared with her girl cousins, now finding herself more and more responsible for daily life on the farm. Though she tried her best to keep smiling for the sake of her cousins and grandparents, it was tough knowing that she wasn't enough to keep their business going, even though she was taking on roles more and more like a surrogate mother every day. After less than a year of watching Ai fall behind in her studies and acting less and less like the cheerful child they had known, her grandparents sent her off to a school in Tokyo so that she wouldn't have to sacrifice her life to raise the other grandchildren in her aunt's absence. Finding herself first at Katsura All-Girls Preparatory Academy for her final year of middle school, Ai flourished at the institution's arts track, receiving wonderful marks for her blossoming vocal talents, her work with a canvas, and even her designs of stage costumes - though her habit of incorporating less than subtle animal motifs into her designs did make more than one teacher question if she really had the breadth of imagination to succeed beyond the middle school level. It was here at Katsura that Ai met her first new friend — a tall, brazen girl in her choir classes named Mariya — and became fast friends and roommates, Mariya always being willing to egg on Ai's more eclectic art experiments and Ai being subjected to untold tests of Mariya's neverending vocal arrangements. This is also how, through Mariya's urging, Ai became a talent at her father's Starsphere agency, learning how to present herself to the world, shedding some of the less refined habits she'd kept from her time on the farm, and taking on small modeling jobs.

This is how things went for several years, from Katsura on into Kinmokusei, with neither girl having much in the way of aspirations beyond eventual entry into their respective fields of focus — even becoming a minor artist of note or productive graphic designer, Ai reasoned, had to be pretty good for an orphan farm girl from Hokkaido — until the day Ai got ahold of some cheap tickets to a local concert for her and her friend Kohaku. While Kohaku was completely dazzled by the show the idol put on that night, Ai was more enamoured by the friend of a friend of a friend she briefly met once the concert was over — a certain pink-haired up-and-coming idol who was preparing to debut in a new idol group. Learning everything she could about the newly founded Interlunium, and even becoming the president of a certain idol's fan club, Ai's status as practically the first Lunula (a name she put much hard thought and consideration into) was fueled by a determination she hadn't felt since she was a small child trying to befriend every animal on the entire farm. Ai is determined to get her dream girl's attention anyway possible — even if she has to pester her friends into becoming idols themselves to do it.

## Other Data

Ai attends Kinmokusei All-Girls Private Academy.

She features in an issue of the 4koma: 22.

Her Blood type is O+.