Iwaki Mayumi

Iwaki Mayumi is Science's gift to sciencekind.

Appearance
Mayumi is a model student who clearly takes pride in her appearance. She is rarely seen out of uniform, and her socks are always at the same height.

Personality
Mayumi has been called naïve, provincial, studious, driven, cheerful, and cripplingly honest (and even insensitive, blunt, and callous, depending on how much the truth hurt). She comes from a line of plain-spoken country folk and takes after her father especially, to whom "tact" means usually not telling random passers-by what you think of them. This causes a certain amount of friction with everyone she comes in contact with, so at each stage of education she winds up with only a few friends, who tolerate her because she's always willing to share her knowledge, but certainly don't invite her to their get-togethers.

Since Mayumi is less interested in people and their doings than the natural world anyway, this doesn't bother her particularly.

Background
Iwaki Mayumi is the only child of a poor farming family living in a small, rural village in Fukui prefecture. Much of Japan's countryside has been ravaged by urbanization, as the youth move to the cities in search of a better life, and Fukui is no different; the town's school had been closed, for lack of students, so each morning and afternoon she rode two and a half miles to get to and from the nearest bus stop that served the next town over, where they still had a school. As it happened, there were only four children anything like her age within a mile of where she lived, and her parents were on bad terms with the parents of the other three, and that was that for her social life.

Thus unencumbered, Mayumi spent every weekend roaming the mountains and fields near her village and learning everything the old farmers and farmers' wives knew about the land, the trees that grew from it, and the animals that lived on it.

Thanks to her natural smarts, she nevertheless excelled at her elementary school, and read every book in its small library at least once — even the ones for middle schoolers and high schoolers — and near the end of her sixth year, a kindly teacher made a special trip to the family home to convince her parents that she deserved a chance to try out for the new Esper programs in Academy City. They balked at first (Think of the cost! and How could we send our only daughter so far from home?), but gave in when Mayumi herself voiced support.

So she applied to several Academy City middle schools, and was accepted at each, and in the end attended the one that offered a full scholarship and dorms to boot. There she discovered that she had power over "barrier fields", of all things, which her elementary science education had unaccountably failed to mention. Fascinated by the implications, she threw herself joyfully into a study of physics, and along the way joined the archery club (which turned out to be pretty fun in itself, even discounting the hands-on experience with ballistic trajectories it gave her).

She graduated from there with very high grades and fairly high level, and now begins her first year at a certain high school.