Aoko Aozaki

Aoko Aozaki (蒼崎青子), also known as Miss Blue (ミス・ブルー) and Teacher (先生), is a magician and an important character in the Nasuverse.

Background
Aoko is a member of the Aozaki family. When she was young, Aoko's grandfather, the third generation head chose to raise Touko as his successor while Aoko lived with her parents. She isn't afraid at all of her grandfather, who is labelled a monster, and only thinks of the great mage who called up Magic as "a terrible old man who's lived for a long time through questionable means". However, when the two girls were 18 and 16 respectively, he suddenly changed the position of successor to Aoko. She has a very bad relationship with her sister, Touko Aozaki, who often steals money from the Mage's Association by using Aoko's name.

Appearance
Aoko shows a very beautiful physical appearance with a white skin and the combination of brown hair with blue eyes. Usually she uses at home a light blue sweatshirt and gray jeans or a casual-red dress with an under-black shirt and pants with a pair of boots. While out, she often uses her school uniform or her brown coat with a chess style of scarf on her neck over the uniform.

Just after she fast-forwarded her own time, Aoko appeared with her red hair, wearing a white shirt, blue jeans pulled at the knees and a pair of brown shoes.

Personality
She is shown to have a bright cheerful personality that reacts very strongly to careless actions. But, as a teenager in Mahoyo, Aoko shows an aggressive personality at the beginning until she develops some care towards the others beyond Alice, such as when she and Soujuurou become friends.

Despite the fact that she and Touko are sisters, Aoko shows great hostility towards her, to the point that she dislikes Runes because Touko use a Rune-based Thaumaturgy. However, she is considered irresponsible by Touko for using the power of Magic without thinking about the consequences.

Aoko values special places with precious memories and living things, regardless of if they are humans, animals or even plants; to the point where she used the Fifth Magic against Touko just after the temporary death of Soujuurou. She has passed on the "value of life" to Shiki Tohno.

She doesn't like her name because it sounds like Blue (青), so Shiki decides to call her "Teacher". Aoko was good at nothing but destroying things.

Development
Aoko first chronologically appears in Mahou Tsukai no Yoru as the main character. While it is one of Kinoko Nasu's earlier works, it has only recently been released publicly. It was released in visual novel format, and it details Aoko's high school years and her friendship with Alice Kuonji and Soujuurou Shizuki.

Her first appearance in a Type-Moon work is during the prologue of Tsukihime

Mahou Tsukai no Yoru
When she had reached a certain age, it was revealed to Aoko that there would be a time when she would have to make a decision between the normal life style and the correct path for her, in other words, being a witch. That was more than a year and a half ago before the events in Mahoyo.

She is a high school student who has just begun to learn sorcery after moving into an old mansion on top of a hill where the one who teaches sorcery to her lives, Alice. They spent two years together under the same roof. Aoko tries to live two completely different life styles, during the school she is a simple student, and during the rest of time, she's an apprentice sorcerer, but Alice had told her more than once that this was a half-hearted approach. She makes services like repairing things with sorcery in the mansion, one of her repairs was Alice’s watchtower, but got destroyed after some time.

Aoko often practices in the park with the assistance of Alice, because of its perfect leylines. Despite her training being at the park and being a student, she says that the modern world had plenty of good ways for her and Alice to hide in plain sight.

Tsukihime
Aoko was roaming around the country, where she meets Shiki Tohno eight years before the events of the story take place. She encounters him after he runs out of the hospital where he was admitted due to the stress of nobody believing the existence of the lines shown by the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. She comforts him, and upon Shiki's proud demonstration of the ability, she reprimands him and tells him to value living things. She helps him deal with the ability by giving him a pair of glasses, stolen from Touko and made indestructible by her own abilities, that seal the effect of his eyes as long as they are worn.

During the events of Tsukihime, Arcueid is able to tell the nature of the glasses upon seeing them, and she attempts to destroy them. She asks Shiki if Aoko happens to be around, commenting "it's probably safer not to deal with Blue in the first place." Aoko appears before Shiki again after an undetermined amount of time during Eclipse, the epilogue of Tsukihime, much like their original meeting.

Melty Blood
She has an active role in the Melty Blood series. After the defeat of Night of Wallachia, she comes to the city and attempts to make a familiar for her own use out of remnants of Wallachia and an unused part of Len. This causes yet another series of events as White Len uses the abilities of TATARI. Aoko is thought of as the main cause of the events of the arcade mode routes in Melty Blood Re-ACT, while that White Len is the main villain in the game. She acts as a non-playable final boss for each storyline. During the events of the game, it left Shiki unconscious in the middle of the way and while White Len is defeated by Len, Aoko met whit Arcueid and defeated it, giving the Magus its 'first loss' at the end of Melty Blood Re-ACT and getting with the tutelage of White Len, since Aoko had no time to form a contract with his creation throughout the period that White Len was created for her. She later appears as a playable character in Melty Blood Act Cadenza and in Melty Blood Actress Again.

Other appearances
Aoko Aozaki appears in Fate/Extra as an alternate version of Aoko. Aoko has a minor role in Carnival Phantasm where she is parodied as having reared Shiki into growing up to become her lover with a plan based off of from.

Abilities
The Aozaki family has been losing its Magic Circuits over the years, and by the time of Aoko's parents, their Magic Circuits were essentially nonexistent. While it was thought that their family was doomed to end that generation, Touko's birth brought hope, as the number of Circuits she was born with was within the top of the entire history of their bloodline. Aoko is considered to be a formally inferior magus to Touko, and she was not as fortunate as her sister in the aspect of Magic Circuits. She was born with an extremely average number of circuits and prana capacity, and her style of magecraft is also considered to be average.

Despite her shortcomings compared to her sister, she has managed to make use of her abilities to the fullest through her own natural talents. While the Aozaki family has circuits of the highest quality that may help make up for their low numbers, Aoko is especially talented in that area. Aoko's specialty is her remarkably skilled utilization of mystic energy, which is about a hundred times more efficient than the average magus, allowing her to perform wonders with very little energy. During the time of Mahou Tsukai no Yoru, she was a complete novice isolated from magecraft up until two years beforehand. She could not compare to Alice's talent and lifetime of experience, not even worthy of her notice under normal circumstances.

Comparing skills in magecraft, Alice would emerge victorious ten out of ten times, but a fight to the death is something else entirely. Alice is not a magus suited for combat, while Aoko is a destroyer specialized in fighting. Aoko, in terms of pure magic energy, even surpasses Alice. While smaller than those of Alice, her circuits have extraordinary rotational speed, structural durability, quality of output, and fuel efficiency. If she attempts to utilize advanced spell expressions, they will be no better than average, but she surpassed Alice with just two years of practice in the area of using simple magecraft expressions for only causing magic energy to flow. Utilizing genius intuition and responsiveness, her spell executions, while not so much as powerful, are frighteningly "quick."

After becoming older and more experienced, either through her Magic or actual aging, her speed increases to become faster than that of blood flowing, evidenced by the look and sound of the energy within her body. Simply the act of activating her Magic Circuits generates sound, and while magecraft making sound is common, noise from the circuits themselves is unheard of even within the Mage's Association. Though she has the low grade, single function circuits found in mediocre magi and generates a much lower level of prana than someone like Touko, her speed allows her to easily surpasses Touko in direct firepower even when she is not seriously fighting. She displays optimized self-control, a trait of those who have great experience in battle.

Her efficiency is comparable to "a car that can run one thousand kilometers on a single liter of gasoline." Due to this, she is extremely destructive despite her naturally low capabilities, earning her titles such as Magic Gunner (マジックガンナー) and Human Missile Launcher (人間ミサイルランチャー). She is listed as one of the few living beings capable of fighting directly with Servants. She is noted as being unable to beat Caster in a serious battle of magecraft, but it is unknown if the analysis also includes the use of Magic. She is also capable of fighting with Arcueid Brunestud to the extent where Arcueid wishes to avoid her if all possible. There is no mistake that she would have become a genius sharpshooter had she not been born into the Aozaki family.

Fifth Magic
Aoko is a Magician capable of utilizing Magic Blue (魔法・青), the Fifth Magic (第五魔法), making her the only person in the current world capable of performing its miracles. Compared to the others, like the Third Magic that has existed for over a millennium, Michael Roa Valdamjong calls it "just a thirty year old level Magic." He still considers it to be a one of a kind rarity that deserves some respect. She is apparently using a system to hold onto her human form according to Wallachia, and he goes as far to call her a monster even though he himself is a Dead Apostle Ancestor. While Aoko tries to refute him, saying that only the other four Magicians fit that description and that she is a full-fledged human, he sticks with his original analysis.

Its exact domain is uncertain, but it has roots in time travel. Her usage of it is limited to localized individual time travel, but Touko cannot believe that is the true nature of the Magic. While she is unsure if Aoko has arrived at the very depths of its nature, she is certain that it is not so simple a miracle. She uses it to make herself into the "completed Aoko Aozaki" of ten years later, but it is only a side effect of the Magic. The concept of time travel falls under the Second Magic because the revising of records and rewriting of events falls under the operation of parallel worlds in other worlds. It makes no sense for such an ability to now be called the Fifth Magic, but Touko decides further speculation is none of her business.

Despite Touko being a vastly superior magus, Aoko was chosen to inherit the Magic instead of her. Though Touko boasts one of the greatest Magic Circuits in the world, the Fifth Magic does not require such a thing, and it can be said that Aoko's pureness is more suited to it. The secret of the Fifth Magic lies in "advancing civilization", fitting how Alice represents Medieval Civilization and Aoko represents Consumption Civilization. It also holds the answer as to why she is called the "newest" magician.

She is familiar with Zelretch and the Second Magic to some extent, as she is able to classify Neco-Arc existing in the world of Melty Blood as his doing.

Activation
English= "Hear me, Lord of Creation" "I tell thee" "In my name representing order (blue), I tell thee" (not sane) "All is right" (five timeless words) "The order has fallen" Japanese= 「――聴け、万物の霊長」 「―――告げる」「 秩序 ( あお ) を示す我が 銘 ( な ) において告げる」 「―― 全ては ( not． ) 、 正しく ( SANE ) 」「―― 秩序は ( five ) 、 ここに崩れ落ちた ( timeless words ) 」

During the first activation of the Magic, she focuses on her right arm's Magic Crest, and chants one spell, a "farewell said with deep emotion", the magic words of the color of blue, for "rewinding the time of a certain someone’s happiness." Her voice echos across the area, causing cracks to run across the space itself and a creaking sound to echo throughout the surrounding landscape like that of a collapsing cathedral. Stopping time to shut away the light, she submerges herself in her own darkness, to the vast canal of stars where everything other than herself has died out. She manipulates Soujuurou's time, first the five minutes in which his death occurred and then borrowing ten years of his time for herself.

She unintentionally sees a new memory, likely the result of exchanging time while using someone else as a medium. While it is crucial to unify the scattered consciousness travelling backward to zero, she hears a noise that is familiar despite being her first time hearing it, caused by that which is an absolute rule to Soujuurou, his memories of disgusted whispering directed at the source of the noise and the one passively listening to that voice. It is not part of her journey, but an obstacle from the outside. The effect of winding back time is the decision not to accept no. She takes his best time, his all too meaningless life, and erases the noise with a greater force.

The noise tears away, and a different noise rings in her ears, that of an innocent mind heeding to the decision and an insincere life led by affirmation. She, who had been going to the future, stops, and changes her path on impulse. While what is important hasn't changed, she has had it with what of his past she has seen. She doesn't know if it was the source of the voice, he who was listening to it, herself who was letting it happen, or whoever did it to him. She opens her eyes without finding an answer, releasing what she drew forth. What she saw and what happened no longer remains in her memories, and there is only the rage causing her heart to race left over.

She opens the lid of the Magic while urged on by something she doesn't understand, causing a dramatic change in the area. The snow around her feet disappears, and green earth shows through. It is not from the effect of snow melting, but rather that it is rewritten to a different landscape. As if to criticize the it, all the factors come to erase her actions. Her discharging power won't tolerate her, and as if to say that the miracle will destroy the world, the world moves to eliminate her to protect itself. She burns with pain throughout the cells in her body, but it is all the same as the pain and isolation of reaching the Root in flesh and blood. She already overcame such torment many times since inheriting the Magic.

Vying with the nature of the universe, she shouts voiceless shouting. The burden scorches her retinae and nerves, and beyond it, she sees light. Remembering what she came back for, desperately wanting to save Soujuurou, she reaches the true nature of Magic. The correcting voice tells her to stop and the red shadow rears its fangs to demonstrate the futility of it all. Aoko decides it has nothing to do with her. The idea behind the duty of Magicians and the extinction of humanity pale in comparison to the reason she moves her fingers, saving him.

She causes a blue tornado to swirl up, and begins her swindling of the world. Time turns back, shifting the landscape through a variety of seasons, as the primal scene is rewritten. The end result is a field of rippling white flowers, whiter than snow, that erode the world, and as she declares, the Fifth Magic shows itself in that time and that region only. The secluded snowed-in clearing is transformed into a sea of white flowers in an instant, and the previously cold wind becomes warm in the field. Only the surrounding bare trees and the school house show that it is the same world as before.

It is a spring field that is free of impurity and grief, where the acts of man have been expunged. There is only the solitude of the buzzing of insects and the whisper of the night. It is where there was nothing, but also where nothing was needed, that which had been Soujuurou's best time. It by itself does not show the true potential of the Magic. Touko acknowledges it as somewhat impressive, but comments that it is still child's play compared to Alice Kuonji's Flat Snark. It is a large scale spell, but the surrounding mana is no different than it was beforehand. The true scale is shown through the state of her body and that of Soujuurou.

Exchanging time
The main focus of her first activation is to revive Soujuurou. Complete resurrection is something that cannot be done even with Magic, and simply restoring his body through healing would not be enough to bring back a dead person. Without a way to bring him back directly, she tries to avert his death rather than restore his life. She avoids any large-scale manipulation, either from lack of ability or hesitation, and settles for an exchange between the two of them instead. He is returned to as he was before death, his body looking completely as it was before being sliced in half.

She utilizes two miracles in manipulating his time, the first being that she rewinds the five minutes encompassing his death and moves them elsewhere. During this intervention of time, she borrows ten years worth of his time to bring her future self. This act gives Aoko years of training and experience, and it effectively revives Soujuurou by moving the time elsewhere. Having jumped in time for five minutes, he no longer exists on that time axis. Someone from the far future searching for him would be unable to find him there.

Aoko takes ten years of Soujuurou's time to add to herself. Individual time manipulation is easier when working with parts that were forgotten, so she borrows time during his childhood. She only shows a slight change in appearance, but Touko understands after realizing that Aoko's gestures no longer match her age. The change inside her is great enough to warrant worry, but she does not have the time to analyze the situation before being overwhelmed by Aoko's newly obtained speed and power.

Touko realizes Aoko's expression, the stable running of her circuits, and even her breathing have changed completely. She comes to believe that time is being manipulated, as she could not have simply amplified her circuits to reach her strength. Even if Aoko were to attach external means of prana, only her total capacity and amount of useable spells would increase rather than her overall power. It would normally be impossible to change her talent as a magus or the purity of her Magic Circuits, but she is evidently greater than Touko as a magus.

Fast-forwarding her own time allowed her go from an apprentice to adept in an instant. She is an Aoko with twenty-seven years of time, seventeen of her own and ten of Soujuurou. She can make it so she does not exist within the time axis, using repeated instances of time travel by the second to avoid attacks completely. She either sends impacting attacks to a different time, or she wears thousands of "herself" over herself. It can avoid both numerous and powerful attacks. It has a high energy output that cannot continue for long, but she manages to easily outlast Touko's prediction of her energy reserves.

Despite having taken Soujuurou's time, it does not affect him overtly. Their ages have not changed, so it is not his physical self she has manipulated. It is rather his internal time that has been taken, resulting in her seeing some of his memories during the activation. Despite being in familiar scenery within the white flowers, it feels like the first time he has seen it, only feeling slightly strange to him. Aoko, on the other hand, will feel nostalgia from viewing the area. His memories are jumbled, but he can still recall recent events. He can recall questions asked during the darkness of his death, though he does not remember having died, due to having had some fragments left that intersected with Aoko's time.

He will be unable to remember until she is done using the time and it is returned. Alice will be the only one able to remember the brief interval of the scenery due to the end of the exchange of time leaving the few minutes lost from his and Aoko's memories. Utilizing another person as a medium means that it is not a change in only Aoko. Aoko travelling back in time by herself would allow for the contradictions to become her own experience, but the exchange is proper time travel that will leave the contradiction properly corrected. Aoko's nostalgia and Soujuurou's unfamiliarity will be corrected at the end of the Magic to be as if they had never existed.

Burden
The Fifth is not the operation of parallel worlds, so it does not rewrite the world itself. That means the time she exchanges must be handled uniquely if she wishes to make the changes permanent, such as in the case with resurrecting Soujuurou. The ten years borrowed from him will be returned, so a one-sided exchange like that will leave the total mass of time in the current time axis unchanged. Winding back only "Soujuurou's five minutes" would normally mean that he would return to being a corpse after the Magic expires, as time travel carried out without changing the world cannot change the past. She has to either truly resurrect him, or take those actually existing five minutes and place them somewhere far away.

Time travel requires a massive quantity of energy, requiring mystic power to bring in things that don't exist in the current world, and likewise causing tremendous energy to be lost when something is made to be "no longer here." Utilizing time travel to move even such a small amount of time would necessitate balancing out the heat that had been there beforehand. Aoko left it in the far, far future, meaning that the debt incurred in the present has been left in the future. Even the idea of a time paradox is more humane, as such an enormous, thoughtless consumption of heat must not be allowed.

The idea horrifies Touko, as does the idea of the mystic power used in cooling the exchanged heat. The state of either more or less heat threatens to cause the collapse of order. The distortion created by her Magic will eventually affect the entire quadrant. Dumping an even greater debt on the death of the universe hundreds of billions years in the future, on to the dead end awaiting humanity, is like the equivalent of dropping an asteroid on the planet. While Touko believes Aoko will crush the planet with her own weight, Aoko says she'll worry about it when the time comes and send it to the past the next time, so only it will be crushed by the distortion.

Touko is still horrified at the idea, saying that only humans will be fine with it. The present is established, but it should not be acceptable to erase the past. The total mass, the debt of the universe, needs to be handled properly. It doesn't matter if the universe is closed or still expanding because the increase in the amount of consumed heat will become uncontrollable. The end of indefinite expansion, indefinite consumption, and indefinite growth is not a future full of hope. It will be the nothing before creation, and the universe will eventually suffer heat death.

The Fifth will only help make that end more definite, but Aoko says she will take responsibility and do what she can while she lives. She has yet to actually think of such a course. While others don't like her existence due to the possibility of her having distorted the universe to a great deal, she personally claims to have never done anything that large. Dust of Osiris, calling her the "Attainer of the Fifth Law", believes that Aoko's very existence poses a great threat to her ritual, and she says that Aoko should have nothing to do with it because she is a traveler that will not be there to witness the end of the world.

Magecraft
Aoko's magic missiles are a simple spell expression of utilizing her circuits as the barrel of a gun to fire magic energy. This isn't like other spells that work through nature interference to cause wind, divide water, or accelerate aging. She possesses the imaginary kinetic energy that brings magic energy into actual existence, firing it as heat. The result is a destructive force equal to the amount of energy she can handle. The magic missiles utilized in Mahou Tsukai no Yoru are single actions, rudimentary magecraft not requiring incantations. She has three actions of magic missiles that act as her main weapons. The second is a magic missile that has the actions of reading her magic seal and using simplified incantation.

The style of thaumaturgy Aoko uses in battle during Melty Blood is called Starmine and Starbow (スターマイン、スターボゥ) that follows a system of magical processing, conversion, and output by numerology. It is based on the concept of images Aoko can visualize easily turned into spells that cause nature interference. She is apparently comfortable with imagining exploding fireworks and rotating stars, so all of her destructive spells are based upon those images. Spells that fall under Starmine's category are those whose energy has a fluid motion, while those that fall under Starbow's category are those whose energy has a fluctuating motion. Another Magecraft she is said to practice is called Notarikon, which is an ancient branch of the Kabbalah thaumaturgy system like Roa's Numerology. She personally finds his use of it to be too dull or orthodox, but says that her own use of the system makes her unable to truly comment on it.

She uses a High-Speed Aria to greatly increase the speed of her incantations during battle, and her particular method is referred to as Unlimited Rotation (アンリミテッド ローテーション). Simply chanting “Missiles, deploy" is enough to fire twenty bolts at once, deployed instantly and not requiring the spells to be loaded. “Slow!” quickly erases a number of Touko's runes due to the power of the single word being greater than the mystic power used by Touko to turn runes into form.

Touko's various runes are unable to stop her no matter the quality or quantity, as her outstanding reflexes and prediction act in synergy with the powerful force of the missiles she releases with both hands. Touko is amazed at the simplicity of her magecraft, commenting that even at her peak she is utterly hopeless in only being able to blow things apart. While runes are curses effective against people, her missiles are powerful projectiles that affect all things without discrimination.

She can be called a "melee-type" magus that generates Prana from her ribs, and by the time it passes through her limbs, the spell is already in a ritually complete form that is expelled in a way that makes both her arms and legs resemble rocket burners to those on the receiving end of the attack. The reason for the mixture of martial arts into her style of thaumaturgy is very like due to the influence of a certain male roommate that she had back in her high-school days.

Before obtaining power and experience, her kicks are enough to fell a tree. With age, she is able to rip through the atmosphere of an invisible wall of runes with a single kick, continue through it into the ceiling, and then smash it along with all of its runic protection. With the chant "Main, set”, a brief self-hypnosis suggestion, to break through copies of the original runes, many times more powerful than Touko's normal wears, each with a single kick.

Aoko's magecraft is something that "can't do anything but destroy", and even Nrvnqsr Chaos believes she is something that destroys order. He believes absorbing her into his Chaos wouldn't be worth it because of that. She does have some capability in other areas, such as somehow making Mystic Eye Killers glasses, stolen from Touko, indestructible to the point where Arcueid is unable to do anything to them. She is also able to turn remnants of the TATARI phenomenon into a familiar. She wished to use White Len as her own familiar, but they were too incompatible.