Maho Kawashima
Appearence
Maho is a young japanese woman, probably in her early 30s. She has an emo look, with the adapted make up, black clothes, tattoos and piercings.
She will always be smiling and joking around, and will always give the most precise data.
Back story
She will be rejoiced at the idea to welcome the character, and make sure they get correctly integrated. She will be the one to talk about hanging out at the bar after work. Basically, the perfect employee.
However, all of this is a cover, a perfect “sad clown” persona: She is held in Pythia Solutions for as long as her father’s debt is repaid.
Her father, Hiromu Kawashima, brought shame to the family by investing an absurd amount of Pythia’s Solution into stocks, and loosing everything. While he said it felt doing this was the right thing to do, he got himself in a situation where Pythia didn’t want to let him loose because Hiromu knows lots of Pythia’s secrets, and wanted their money back. So they forced Hiromu into signing a contract, making him work until he pays the cost of the secrets that got aired. The numbers are around the 40 000 000 credits.
The threat, pressure, shame and anxiety made Hiromu sick and unable to work. So her daughter, Maho, decided she’ll work for Pythia in order to easen Pythia’s wrath on her sick father. Of course, this decision piles up on Hiromu’s mental state.
So, Maho’s is to be the best employee ever to quickly grind Pythia Solution’s ladder and reimburse her father as fast as possible. To do so, she needs everything to run perfectly.
Relationship with the character
The first third of the game, she will be the player’s most powerful ally: giving exact data, good context, jokes, etc.
At Pythia Solutions, she is the office QA, and will basically ensure that whatever the player submits is done correctly. While an empty task will block the file itself from being submitted, she will validate that the data the player selected isn’t too far off from something coherent. In the tutorial, the Zahirah and Emil will ask the player to insert a value that will completely be off, such as inserting “0000” as the passcode for an entrance while the actual passcode is provided. Zahirah will show up and ask the player to fix the problem, and Emil and Zahirah to stop this at once or consequences (playfully, with no real threat behind it). This will tell the player without her having to spell it out.
Empathic path
When the character will be able to start sabotaging and do so, she will slowly start to look less and less joyful, and more and more focus. She knows something is up, that the missions should not have failed, at least not with the data she provided.
From the 2nd third up to the late 3rd third, sabotaging will require even more discretion than before, because she will quickly flag any obvious tries you do.
Empty path
She has no reason not to trust you since you works as well as she does. She will keep her happy, funny and witty cover.