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PLAYER INFO.
✖ Handle: NOISE
✖ Contact: DatAss on Plurk or WutWasThatNoise on AIM
✖ Are You Over 16: Yessir
✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: N/A

PLAYER INFO.
✖ Character Name: Jacobs, Shinobu (Her real name is Scarlet, but she never refers to herself as such and the name is only found by obtaining a collectible item)
✖ Canon: No More Heroes 2, after she leaves Travis' apartment.
✖ Character Appearance: Huge picture here!
✖ Character Age: 21
✖ Pick A Number: 8. Or 88. Or 888. Hell, give me 80 if all of those are taken, JUST GIVE ME THOSE EIGHTS.

✖ Canon Setting: Perhaps on first glance, the world of No More Heroes wouldn't seem much different from your typical modern Earth settling (circa 2010); the town of Santa Destroy doesn't look too much different from an ordinary, smaller town in the U.S. However, once a person gets a glimpse inside the UAA. -- the United Assassins Association, an organization that ranks assassins, with the only way of advancing is through killing the members higher ranked than you (usually in elaborate battles) -- then the world of No More Heroes gets a whole lot more bizarre. And a whole lot more dangerous.

It's not entirely clear as to why the organization even exists in the first place or if the higher ranked members even get any benefits (aside from having access to higher paying assassination jobs). Why all of the assassins (from a huge variety of backgrounds, I might add) join in the first place seem to have a variety of reasons, across the board. Travis first joined as he was promised his parents' killer (and to sleep with Sylvia) and later joined to face the person who killed his best friend. Shinobu joined in hopes that she might come across her father's killer. Many others seem to join just for the power trip, the ability to take on strong opponents, or just for the money it offers. The funny thing is, is that if the scene where Sylvia recruited Travis into the ranks of the UAA was similar to all of the other assassins (promising them whatever they wanted in exchange for killing anyone that's higher ranked than them), it will probably prove to be incredibly nostalgic for Shinobu to be recruited in almost the same manner by the CDC. But moving on, a common theme in the game is that once a person enters the ranks, it's very hard for them to give up their more violent tendencies and leave (one big plot point in the second game is that some assassins are awestruck by Travis who gets to the top of the ranks in the first place... only to leave it all behind).

As I noted earlier, the assassins come from all sorts of backgrounds; at the top of my head, I can think of a mail delivery man who cosplays as a cult film character (...who is later turned into two different cyborgs), a woman who is both a model and in the army, a ghost of a child, an old lady, a Russian astronaut, a college football player (and his cheerleaders), a big machine... thing, some rich kid that turns into a parade float, and when Shinobu first appeared, she was just a high school student. With that information alone, it might be easy to tell that when it comes to the assassination fights, a person can never know what to expect. A fight like Holly Summer's might be somewhat simplistic and only involve land mines and shovels, or maybe a fight like Charlie Macdonald's will involve summoning giant fucking robots to fight in the city. Then there's the other people have had powers like punching a dragon out of your fist, having the ability to fire lasers out of their crotch, or being able to summon an attack from a space station to fire a huge laser at you. The point is, to stay alive in the ranks, an assassin should be prepared to take on anything, because not all assassins are going to be honorable enough to stand by as you gawk at them.

Another thing to note is that while the first game pulls a twist and states that the UAA is a scam made up by Sylvia (in forcing Travis to pay ridiculous sums of money to fight in each ranked battle), it would seem that the organization is real afterward. For one, a man bursts into Travis' house while he's taking a dump (no, really) in order to try to usurp his number one position in the organization. Even if that man (and everyone else) was scammed as well, the fact still remains that every assassin seems to take it very seriously (Shinobu kills a classroom full of students just to keep her secret of being an assassin from escaping the room, while Death Metal and Alice Twilight give monologues about how weary they are living the assassin life) and probably weren't just hired by Sylvia just to scam one person.

Though the first game kind of makes it seem that all of this only seems to take place in a town in California, Shinobu states that she spent some time abroad in Asia to become the assassin champion there, so it can probably be assumed that there's organizations like the UAA in multiple different regions throughout the Earth (and hell, probably space too, considering this is a Suda51 game). It only gets more disturbing when there's one girl in the second game who talks about how she won a "National Student Assassination" championship, so there's even a good chance that they're starting them young now. However, there's no further insight given about it, so I can't explain how it works or what grades of students were involved.

Basically? Suda51 tends to throw all of the noodles at the wall -- most likely for the sole purpose of adding the weirdest stuff possible -- and not a whole lot actually makes sense.

✖ Character History: Right here!
✖ Character Personality:
In the first game, the characteristics of Shinobu all almost seem to contradict each other, but in the sort of way that makes sense for an assassin like her -- or rather, it's a pretty common theme for the assassins in No More Heroes to be more complicated than how they first appear. However, from the first to the second game, her mannerisms seem to change slightly, which I'll be explaining in this section.

In the first game, Shinobu almost comes off as a calm and detached person. She doesn't seem to mind much when Travis challenges her to a rankings match (which is essentially a fight to the death) and then doesn't even seem to care when she slays everyone else in her classroom just for the misfortune of overhearing the conversation. But on their walk to the fighting location, you soon learn that there's a little more to her than that; she laments the fact that it's hard to live a normal life while being an assassin at the same time. It's obvious that she's not used to people questioning who she kills, as she quickly suspects that Travis is "fucking" with her for asking about why she killed those students in the first place -- to her, it was merely a necessary thing to do, in her line of business.

However, when they get ready to fight and Travis pulls out his beam katana, her personality does almost a complete 180. While she was calm before, she became seething mad, accusing Travis of slicing her father in half and swearing that she would end his life in battle and wastes no time in making the first move in battle. To me, this shows that even if she is normally calm and collected, in her every day life, there's a ticking time bomb of a personality she actually is hiding beneath the surface -- it's likely that the reason she got into the assassin business in the first place was just the hope of running into the person who killed her father. And even if all she knows is that the killer wielded the same kind of weapon that Travis had, that alone was enough to send her into a blind rage. She was presumably pretty young when her father was murdered (as she was still in high school when the fight in the first game took place), so that kind of incident probably screwed her up a little, mentally-wise.

The most important trait shown in the first game, though, is Shinobu is extremely cocky. While she is infuriatingly hard to get a hit on, in her boss battle, one of the few times she leaves herself open for attack is when she stops to taunt you... constantly. So while there IS a certain anger she carries in the first game, her overconfidence is probably what influences her to act as calm as she normally does -- how can one look better than another if you act like a lunatic all of the time?  As her father was a "master" and instructor of some kind of skill (probably having to do with swords), perhaps he also instilled some of this own personality onto her -- he WAS a master after all, and one would have to be incredibly patient to be a good instructor.

After she's defeated (and has her hand cut off), she shows that she has a huge sense of pride and honor as she begs Travis to end her life, because she lost the match. Which is pretty huge, because of how driven she seems to be to find her father's killer. When Travis refuses -- because of how young she was, at the time -- she throws a tantrum because she feels he's already dishonored her enough, but is otherwise too incapacitated to do much else.

Then, almost at the very end of the game, she makes a surprise appearance to help Travis defeat his half-sister, Jeane. They don't make it 100% clear as to why she did this, but perhaps she was repaying him for not killing her in their rankings match (as it's an expected thing to do in all rankings matches) or perhaps the fact that Travis was also looking to avenge his parents' deaths was something that resonated with her own vendetta. Or maybe it was a little of both, regardless, she leaves right after she helps him, so it can only be left to speculation.

Regardless, her admiration for Travis grows so much that she straight up states in the second game that her only desire was to become as strong as him, to the point where she went to Asia and became the champion assassin of the entire continent. To his chagrin, she now calls him "master" and doesn't seem to give a shit when he tells her not to call him that, which only further exasperates him. In addition to that, her devotion is so deep that she has a habit of saying "moe" a lot (something Travis can also be heard saying), even though she doesn't know what it actually means. In fights with Million Gunman and New Destroyman, Shinobu even states to both of them that they're not worth facing her "master" and have to face her instead (in reaction, the both (three?) of them don't really respond to her obvious infatuation, apart from being really offended that they weren't facing Travis instead). So even though Shinobu has a hard time connecting with people (judging off the first game, where she seems to want to keep any information about her as unspoken as possible), if she does admire someone, she takes it to hardcore fangirl levels.

Because of this intense devotion, Shinobu also develops a huge crush on Travis and shows that when she has those kinds of feelings, she does not fuck around. Within one day of being reunited with him, she tries to make out with him twice, even when he was obviously not into it at all. Because she referred to him as "master" numerous times, it doesn't sit right with him to take advantage of a "student", even if he wanted no part of that kind of a relationship in the first place. So basically, because of her intense devotion, she kind of screwed herself out of the romantic pursuit she was after. The incident was likely humiliating enough (because she was all over him, when she's normally more on the stoic side, he compares the situation to a porno, AND the fact that he sort of blows her off to talk to another woman she really didn't like at all) that she would be more inclined to keep any other romantic feelings she developed for anyone else to herself. While the idea of pursuing a relationship with another assassin that she shared a common bond with might have been appealing in a lifestyle where she has to hide what she does for a living, it's doubtful that she'd want to act so wildly out of character again.

Regardless, this side of her would probably be very rare to come out, as her main focus will definitely be on completing her missions, so she can find the man who killed her father. In a conversation with Sylvia, it's revealed that the reason she kills two assassins for Travis in the second game isn't just because of how she feels about him, but also because of a promise Sylvia made to her. It's never explicitly revealed, but it probably has to do with some sort of information about her father's killer, which implies that three years later, she's still highly driven by her original motive shown in the first game. Even when she obviously despises Sylvia, Shinobu's willing to follow her orders (and performs them efficiently) just because whatever Sylvia promised was important enough to her. Though it doesn't mean she'll be entirely compliant either.

One thing that definitely hasn't changed much is that Shinobu's ego is still a little out of control -- though not as bad as it was in the first game. She tells Sylvia that she's grown confident, "but not overconfident". But if you listen to her in the stages that you control Shinobu, she still has a habit of taunting her opponents after every single combo she does (to the point where it actually gives enemies a chance to strike). Her taunts usually have something to do with how her enemies aren't as cool (or have "no moe") or how they obviously have the hots for her, but regardless, it's doubtful that she's grown out of this as much as she thinks she has. Though compared to how she was in the first game, she has at least learned a little humility -- after one of the guys who make up New Destroyman sneaks up on her from behind and rips off her bionic arm, she laments afterward on how she shouldn't have fell for that move. So even if she does think she's the shit -- because assassins who doubt themselves will only get so far -- Shinobu can at least admit when she fucks up... even if it's just to herself, as opposed to other people.

Overall, from the first game, she seems to have calmed down a lot. Even with how many times Million Gunman and New Destroyman throw taunts at her (and even really disgusting, misogynistic remarks from the latter), she never seems to be really bothered by anything. Not once, in the entirety of the second game, do you see her go in a chaotic rage, and she seems to be adapting more of the exterior characteristics she showed in the first game. She's obviously become a more focused and worldly assassin in the three years that have passed. Even when Travis rejects her romantic advances, the most she shows is a pointed glare before walking out the door, even when she obviously seemed disappointed and a little upset through her facial expressions. The point is, for whatever reason, the rage she displays in the first game isn't seen at all in the second game. Maybe the three years that passed was actually enough for her to mature, to see that the way she flew off the handle in the first game was detrimental to her ability to win assassination battles -- she did almost die in the first game because of it.

Also, while Shinobu is a person who will absolutely call another out on their bullshit (really, she spends the almost entire conversation with Sylvia snarking at her), she's seems to be pretty civil with most people she talks with, judging by a conversation she has with a random person she runs into at a grave site and the fact that she was by the grave site in the first place just to leave flowers at someone's grave (though her relationship to the person in question is never explained; the two were never shown together onscreen).

✖ Character Powers:
KATANA SKILLS
-Gentōken -- Shinobu can charge up her sword to unleash a red blast of energy that can attack enemies from long distances.
-Apparently has enough strength to decapitate enemies.
-Somehow, she's also capable of blocking gunfire with her blade.

AGILITY
-Can jump very high and flip over a person’s head.
-Seems to be very good at parkour, able to kick herself off of a building while in air gracefully.
-Shinobu can also do a diving attack with her katana.
-She can somehow lodge her sword into a person and spin on the handle to drill it in more. I don't even know, it makes no goddamned sense. The point is, she's stupidly good with the agility thing.

BIONIC ARM
-It's not clearly explained what exactly it's capable of, in canon, but she ripped a guy's robotic appendage off with ease, seemingly using no effort at all. So it's likely that it enhances her strength in her right arm.
-But it can also be ripped off fairly easily if someone also has some sort of enhanced strength.
-In addition to this, it seems like it has the ability to negate electricity -- Destroyman attempted to shock her through a handshake, but it didn't seem to have any effect on her. ("Was this supposed to 'spark'? Lame.")

ALSO CLEARLY IMPORTANT TO NOTE
-Her scarf is like always flowing behind her, as if she constantly has a wind machine in front of her. This is god tier level shit right there. Also, she can fight in high heels.

CHARACTER SAMPLES.
✖ Third Person POV:

[Perhaps if Shinobu were in her more typical state of mind, she would have immediately noticed the shady looking figure -- clad in a high collared storm jacket, leaving his eyes as the only visible facial feature -- leaned against a wall outside of the No More Heroes Motel*. Or maybe she didn't notice, because everyone was a little shady in Santa Destroy. Either way, the CDC agent gives the slightest indication of exasperation, breaking his cool facade while shouting after the woman who walked past him.]

Hey!

[After just having her advances spurned by Travis, and having it rubbed even further by him talking to the woman she despised the most immediately afterward, the last thing Shinobu wanted to do was to engage in small talk with some stranger. However, she only rolls her eyes before turning around to face the agent.]

If you're looking to hook up, I'm not interested.

[She begins to turn around again, assuming that's the only reason a person would obnoxiously call after her on the street; she just wasn't in the mood to deal with this right now. The man tilts his head, letting out a short, impatient breath before continuing.]

I'm not interested in you that way. And judging off your choice of men, I'm probably above your standards anyw-

[Usually, she'd just shrug off a comment like that, but Shinobu was not in a good mood. Instead, her eyes narrow spitefully at him, placing an arm at a hip. He was right, but she didn't want to hear any of that right now.]

Let me guess, you're one of those "nice gu-

[Knowing where this conversation was going (and not liking it one bit), the agent cuts Shinobu off as well, his tone suddenly becoming more serious.]

Look, I've come from an agency -- the Cosmic Development Contractors -- and we want you to join. You obviously have the skills for it... what do you say?

[Shinobu quirks at eyebrow in response, looking dumbfounded for just a couple of seconds before her lips curl up in amusement.]

Wait... you're going to try to compete with the UAA?

[Because she wasn't sure what the "Cosmic Development" part of the title had to do with anything, but assassination contracts was a thing she was very used to. God, she wishes she could see the look on Sylvia's face if her precious money-making scheme was challenged by another person in town -- it'd serve her right, really. In spite of how shitty she was feeling, she looks to the agent, expecting the punchline to come at any time now.]

What? [The agent blinks a couple of time, but quickly regains his composure.] No. Our aim isn't specific people -- it's entire planets. You've already conquered the region of Asia -- wouldn't taking your skills to face entire planets at a time be a good way to face stronger opponents?

[As creepy as the guy originally came off as, Shinobu had to admit that he had a point -- she did go to Asia to face off against stronger opponents and even the couple of assassins she faced in the reformed UAA were below her level of strength now. Maybe she really did need to go to another planet to face a new set of challenges.

However, Shinobu wasn't a complete idiot like Travis was -- she was going to need a whole lot more convincing to go along with some odd guy she met on the street to outer space, of all places. And hell, even the whole going to outer space deal sounded more than a little fishy to even someone like her.]

And tell me why I'd want to join an organization like that in the first place? No offense, but you kinda sound like you're full of crap.

[Behind the collar, the man gave a wry smile; he had to admit that he thought he would have her hooked by now, but there was absolutely no way she was going to be able to resist his next offer.]

How about this? If you complete your contract, we can give you the man you're so desperately searching for.

[Startled, Shinobu's face tenses while her eyes widen -- just how much did this man know about her anyway? But there was a good chance that he was all smoke and mirrors; this kind of thing would be incredibly easy to bluff on.]

Wh-what are you talking about?

[The agent purposefully leaves a few moments of dramatic silence before going on.] The man who killed your father. Just how many times has that UAA woman twiddled her thumb on bringing the goods to you anyway? 

[He crosses his arms confidently, going on.] You do some favors for us and we'll do you the biggest favor you could ever ask for.

[Even if she was really sick of having Sylvia toy with her -- and everybody really -- Shinobu reluctantly admits to herself that he did have one hell of a point. Even if she delivered the killer of Travis' parents, who was to say that she'd do the same for her? Apparently, Sylvia and Travis were so in love with each other (the very thought made her want to gag) and it was no secret that there was absolutely no love lost between her and Sylvia -- there was absolutely a good chance that she was manipulating her. Again.

So while she still had her doubts about this CDC thing, the sad truth of it all was that she probably had a better chance of getting the vengeance she so desired through this organization, rather than follow the wild goose chase she had been on for the last three years.]

Fine. [A smug grin forms on her face as she dramatically brushes her scarf behind her.] Where do I sign up? This better be worth it.







*No, this isn't me being lazy, that's what they actually call it in game.

CHARACTER ITEMS.
✖ Pick a Team: Red

✖ Mission Freebie: The man who killed her father (who is never explicitly stated in canon and considering a sequel hasn't been announced since the release of the game, four years ago, I don't know if the person will ever actually be stated)
✖ Personal Item or Weapon: Jacobs' Ladder, her katana.

✖ Character Inventory:

-A very gothic lolita dress
-Lace tights and gloves
-Super fashionable scarf
-A prosthetic for her right forearm
-Jacob's Ladder
-A harness with a scabbard for her katana attached