Hoshikage Kouyou
| “ | Nifty voice tricks may be cool at parties, but its a good beat and compelling vocals that keep her FLACs on the playlists. | ” |
| —Michelle Delacroix, Musician's Aid Society | ||
Hoshikage Kouyou is the lead singer for the pop/rock group Sunshine Galaxy. She's slightly taller than average for a Japanese woman, quite beautiful even at thirtymumble, and dyes her hair to be reddish brown with brighter streaks and highlights.
A former "May-December" idol singer who got shuffled off to low budget hentai VA after the industry chewed her up and spat her out, Kouyou-san took up smoking from the stress of having lifelong musical dreams crushed, and proved to be one of the highly susceptible fraction of a percent who get a rapid onset and quickly developing throat cancer. With the option of "no voice," "death," or "space and the 'wave," option #3 was an easy pick when Minmay, Myung, and Mylene, plus their VAs, were all among her favorites.
Her first big concert in Fenspace was at SerenityCon. Even a decade later, she doesn't like to talk about it; "It was very frightening, and since the Convention had to be continued by interwave I didn't get to finish the live concert... it was a rough beginning for Sunshine Galaxy," is her usual comment.
As a fan, she specializes in recording new music that makes wavetech work, so the owners don't go nuts from having to listen to the same damn thing all the time. The fact that her music is just plain good now that she's using her own material instead of generic industry pabulum, and that some of her customers are BNFs with their own following,[1] gives her the wider audience needed to make a career of it. (She has, however, refused all offers of an SES Valkyrie, citing a lack of Zentreadi, Protodeviln, or Vajra that would require such measures, and a tendency to motion sickness that makes flying in anything a misery.)
Kouyou's own backup group is called Sunshine Galaxy, but she's the only real permanent member, the rest being whoever happens to be hired for that session or gel for a particular song at Musician's Aid Society jam sessions, kind of like Steely Dan. Her usual style is pop with occasional forays into harder rock and metal or ballads power and traditional, and the odd mambo or dance track voice over 'rap.' Working with people to get at the essentials of what their wavetech likes and creating something new around them is an intellectual and artistic challenge she revels in, that she is usually successful in satisfying such musical quirks and even reconciling two sets to get devices made by different people to work together is a testament to her ability.
Notable Mundane Attributes
She speaks Japanese, English, Russian, and Spanish well and can get by in French and Brazillian Portugese. Most of her songs are in the first three.
'Wavium Ability
Kouyou-san has a voicebox that lets her play with tractor/pressor focused gravity waves and force bubbles. It only works if she's singing, or at least "screaming musically" like a heavy metal vocalist, though.
She often uses this ability as a literal sonic amplifier (instead of a microphone and speakers) by directly vibrating the air, which also has the benefit of appearing to transmit sound across vacuum by shaking the air at the far side, making her the All-Solar champion at throwing her voice.
Peppermint oil is the primary quirk of her new larynx; if she doesn't consume some after using her voice a lot it feels achy, and will eventually start sounding creaky and mechanical. For Kouyou (who has already lost two vocal careers and her original throat), there is no greater horror.
Her SES vest is a bit less bulky than the Macross 7 version, and amplifies her abilities enough to exert over five tons of force or make a force bubble that is airtight and bulletproof. Her range with the vest is a few thousand feet, possibly as much as a mile with a tightly directed 'beam;' her range is halved without the vest. If not for her motion sickness she could probably manage at least short duration flight, though she can work through it in an emergency or professional necessity.
(The fen who like to stand with the heads inside the speakers at concerts love this - all they have to do is sit in one of the designated SES zones and their /whole body/ is inside, and in fact acting as part of, the speakers. Though specifically offered for the enjoyment of normally deaf people, the option is always open... and thanks to the handwavium safety factor it doesn't even raise the number of deaf people.)
Measurements with fine gravitic sensors have determined that Kouyou is actually producing the sound this way whenever she speaks, making the above trick "throwing her voice" in literal fact. For this and other obvious reasons, she prefers calling the ability "happiness creation" rather than "gravity control." She's not out to bring anybody down.
Given her voice-throwing trick she can shatter any wineglass she can visualize the location of, with sound or plain force.
She can also lift with her voice. She uses the levitation trick as a training exercise, though, and can in fact stage a bitchin' puppet ballet or fight scene, though the more items involved the less control over each one. Animating a puppet with mobile arms and legs takes ten "impulses," one push and one pull each for the body and each limb to control their position. Her unassisted mass limit is five pounds. Making a force field is three elements, a strong, planar but omnidirectional negative gravity field to push things away from the theoretical 'wall of force' and two bounding layers of mildly positive gravitation to make it diminish much faster than the normal distance squared, so it's not just another pressor beam tossing stuff wildly away... it's strong enough to contain atmospheric pressure and the air gets turned back every time it tries to expand and escape.
Kouyou has to put conscious effort into affecting more than the air actually passing through her throat, so she doesn't accidentally levitate or break anything.
Quirks
As has already been mentioned, Hoshikage-san has a tendency to motion sickness that makes flying in anything a misery.
She's not some super-demanding diva, having dealt with a couple of them during her idol career she knows no one likes having to. At the same time, anyone who interrupts her quiet private time had better have a very good reason, and when the show is over there will be a cool shower and hot chocolate with a drop of genuine peppermint oil or there will be blood. Generally though, she's an upbeat person who's not hard to get along with.
She practices Tai Chi Chu'an, but only to stay fit and limber for her dance routines.
Fandoms
Macross
Known Associates
Kouyou-san is president of the Marsbase Sara chapter of the Musician's Aid Society. She's affiliated with the Gearheads through the Macross connection.
Suddenly, ninjas! And that's just her Hidden Asteroid roadies fending off the real attackers...!
Trivia
She's one of the "regulars" at the Clark Savage, Jr. Memorial Stadium and Music Complex on Deimos.
Notes
- ↑ Wave Convoy, who has to have the various Transformers or Brave Series themes on constant loop in one of his subprocessors, is particularly grateful for her help here.
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