Prodigy Seki Hajime (a.k.a. 関 一)
Summary
Seki Hajime: The Prodigy. She learned to read, write, and speak Japanese at an astoundingly early age. From then on, she continued to baffle her tutors with a near-perfect memory and a voracious interest in how things around her worked. She couldn't be bothered with stuffy subjects like history or etiquette, but instead dove full-force into engineering and the sciences.
Her parents, a pair of middling nobles in Sakai, were at first happy to indulge her interests. Clearly, their daughter was a genius. Soon it seemed, however, that the minute they took their eyes off her, she had dismantled something around the house. The only thing to equal Hajime's acumen was her utter disinterest in obeying authority. Sometimes her flippancy bordered on misandry.
When she was thirteen years old, her parents forced her to train with a musician, in the hopes of curbing the boundless, chaotic energy of their daughter, or at least channeling it into a more elegant form. Hajime learned to play the biwa from a friendly monk, and picked it up quickly. There was an order in the tempo and notes that she appreciated, a certain mechanical satisfaction to a well-organized song. After the hundredth time of pointing this out, however, the poor monk was driven away as well.
The final straw came not long ago when a visiting minister from the Imperial Court came to the Seki house to show off his wonderful karakuri merchantmen. The strange, white-faced dolls were unlike anything Hajime had ever seen and, somehow, she managed to disable one long enough to completely dismantle it. Then another. Soon, she had turned to so much rubble all three of the karakuri merchants the minister had brought with him. In a fury of rage and shame, the lord gave Hajime's parents an ultimatum: exile the girl and strip her of her nobility, or else suffer it themselves.
Wordlessly, seeming none too much bothered, Hajime grabbed her latest invention (an enormous, steam-powered biwa capable of blasting sound waves through a stone wall) and started off for Yamato Province on foot or cart as was convenient. There, she knew from hearsay, her noble status meant little, and she could possibly even find a patron so she could focus on what was really important.
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