Utahime Chikage

## General Information

### ☯**Personality**

Utahime's personality is a bit all over the place. For the most part, she firmly believes in being the best villain she can be, because she's a youkai, and youkai are supposed to cause trouble, be generally evil, and so on and so forth. Though she can be a bit childish, she'll prefer to mock, tease, and terrify others over anything that could reasonably be considered "acceptable social behavior".

As such, she has no friends, and lives completely on her lonesome. Which is complete fine, after all, do villains even need friends? She has had her doubts as of late in regards to whether it's worth it to continue being evil, but to completely throw away any reputation she has gained is tantamount to suicide for her. It's either be all evil, all the way, or don't even try existing.

### ☯**Appearance**

Utahime has a variety of forms and illusionary disguises, but generally speaking, she wears a loose black dress wrapped in a bunch of purple ribbons that serve as bindings to keep that dress not-so-loose. Otherwise, she has rather long purple hair, fairly piercing purple eyes, and a set of wings somewhat more like crow wings, but with a slight purple tint. Not much else is notable about her beyond her claws, which are fairly long and are nearly as sharp as daggers.

## Backstory

Utahime was born from a rather freak accident where a human mistook her for some form of shadowy beast (really just a regular bird trying to find food in the middle of the night). Though this on its own shouldn't really have done much, that human went back to his village and spread his story, and combined with the threat of another mysterious night sparrow who had plagued the town, enough fear had spread in that bird's name to form a young night sparrow. Utahime has lived most of her life being tutored in the ways of youkai by a much older night sparrow (the one who had plagued that village, as it so turns out), who by now has disappeared from Gensokyo for some unknown reason. While for the most part, her tutelage was about the idea of youkai opposing humans and living off of both killing and scaring them, she didn't get her belief in being a "villain" until much later, once the spell card rules in Gensokyo were established. She had briefly gone on a rampage across Gensokyo in the past around the time that the Great Hakurei Barrier was put up, since that was around the same time when her tutor had disappeared, but by now she's completely mellowed out and focuses more on building her reputation as a villain among youkai, especially since, by now, everyone sees her as a villain for having gone on such a rampage, so why not foster that idea and let it turn into infamy?

## Relationships

As of now, Utahime has no real relationships with anyone in Gensokyo, if only because no one would ever want to know someone like her. She technically had a relationship with her tutor that was almost akin to love (as much as youkai can express love), but since he has disappeared, she's completely on her own.

## Abilities

Night sparrows, for the most part, have the ability to inflict night blindness with their songs, and Utahime is no exception. However, she takes the idea of "night" in night sparrow even further, and possesses the ability to directly manipulate shadows and illusions. Her most basic powers involve creating illusionary copies of herself or disguises that allow her to disguise herself as a human if need be, although this illusion can be seen past easily if one has good spiritual attunement or otherwise ability to see things for what they really are. Similarly, her illusionary abilities can be used to throw her voice elsewhere, and can otherwise make a fully functioning illusionary double with any sort of appearance she wants (more than this, and it becomes difficult to maintain the illusion). With this power, she usually walks the Human Village as a human called "Saya", who proclaims to be a "Shadowmaiden" simply traveling the land to make the best use of her powers.

Alongside this, she can move into shadows and travel between them as if they were pools of water. This requires her to enter a shadow big enough to fit her, but once inside the "world of shadows" on the other side, she can fit into any adjacent shadow of any size, and even bring people in with her. While others don't have the same level of control as she does, anyone can attempt to move about the shadow world as she does once they're inside, but they cannot enter willingly as she can, only exit back into the physical world. Any shadow of any size can be traveled between in this way, but at the same speed as in the physical world, so the process isn't instant, and she cannot jump to shadows that aren't connected by other shadows. In order to do this, she has to reenter the physical world, then jump into the next shadow.

## Spell Cards and Danmaku

Utahime utterly despises danmaku and the spell card system, but will make use of it if need be. Her danmaku is relatively simple, focusing mostly on darkened bolts of shadow that are hard to see at night. She would rather get up close and personal with her claws before making use of danmaku, but at the least she attempts to use danmaku and doesn't outright ignore the spell card rules (even if she rather would).

 Darkness Sign "Spear of N'gai"
 Hidden Song "Silent Melody"
 Apocrypha "Abyssal Advent"
 Kageshiro "Dark Princess's Private Chamber"
 Dark Sparrow's Bloody Shadow (Last Word/Survival)