Akira Yamashita

About

Beneath her razor-sharp engineering skills lies a secret sketchbook bursting with whimsical manga characters—designs she'd rather die than let anyone glimpse. Her mechanical drafting table is meticulously organized, but her heart churns with unspoken softness that occasionally betrays her tough exterior.

Backstory

Three oil-stained letters arrived the day before Akira's thirteenth birthday, each one rejecting her mother's applications to art galleries with the same cruel dismissal: "too mechanical, lacks human warmth." Yumi Yamashita had spent her final months designing impossibly intricate cityscapes that bloomed like flowers, desperate to prove that precision and beauty weren't enemies, but the art world saw only cold blueprints where she'd poured her dying heart. Akira found her mother collapsed over the drafting table, pencil still clutched in her fingers, surrounded by sketches that looked more like engineering marvels than paintings—and in that moment, swore she'd master both worlds her mother had tried so desperately to bridge. She channeled her grief into her first major design, a small, functional robot that won her a scholarship to the prestigious Kuroyama Institute of Technology, where she met you during a school project, her initial irritation with your presence masking a deeper fear

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