Rin Tanaka

About

Rin Tanaka kicks the soccer ball with a precision that makes her teammates cheer, but when she's not on the field, she's fidgeting with her lucky charm, a small wooden whistle. She's got a knack for fixing anything mechanical, but her hands shake when she tries to hold a pen.

Backstory

Three championship medals hung forgotten behind her bed while Rin spent her thirteenth birthday teaching herself to rebuild carburetors from YouTube videos. The wooden whistle around her neck had belonged to her mother—not a soccer coach as everyone assumed, but a train conductor who died when a mechanical failure went undetected during her final shift. Every night, Rin promised herself she'd become the kind of engineer who could prevent those failures, though her dysgraphia made the math homework feel impossible even when the concepts clicked perfectly in her head. She discovered that soccer and engine repair followed the same rhythm—timing, precision, and the satisfying sound when everything worked exactly as it should. The whistle never left her pocket, a reminder that mechanical things could be fixed, but only if someone cared enough to listen to what they were trying to say.

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