Otonari Hibiku

Otonari Hibiku
Japanese	音鳴響句
Rōmaji	Otonari Hibiku
Personal Info
Status	Alive
Gender	Female
Professional Status
Classification	Esper
Occupation	2nd Year Student (Tokiwadai Middle School)
Affiliation	Tokiwadai Health Committee
Abilities
Ability	Mind Anaphylaxis (爆雷念話（マインドアナフィラキシー）, Bakurai Nenwa (Maindoanafirakishī)?)
Power Level	4
Media
Appears In	Novel
Debuts
Novel	Mental Out SS

Otonari Hibiku (音鳴響句, Otonari Hibiku^?) is a second-year student of Tokiwadai Middle School and a member of school's health committee, who appears in Toaru Kagaku no Mental Out: The Queen's Play.

Appearance

Otonari has shoulder-length, wavy red hair. As a Tokiwadai student, she wears the school's uniform.

Personality

Otonari is dedicted to what she believes to be her duty as a member of the health committee, as well as her method of stress relief through internal bleeding which believed would ease suffering, described by some others as a 'benevolent violence'. While acting indirectly without intentionally showing herself to her victims, she is willing to barge in and inflict this treatment upon people without permission based on her assumptions and will stubbornly try to 'help' those she deems to be suffering, harming them and those in her way in the process.

Background

Otonari's background is largely unknown, but she was in her second year and had a place on Tokiwadai's health committee late in the main story's first year.

Chronology

Toaru Kagaku no Mental Out: The Queen's Play

Main article: Toaru Kagaku no Mental Out: The Queen's Play

At some point prior to being among the second-year group assigned to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in their joint drama class, Otonari had been using her ability to cause internal bleeding in various students, in an effort to relieve their stress via blood loss ecstasy. The theory she was following was based on a biological interpretation of vampire stories of victims experiencing pleasure when their blood is drained, that if blood is rapidly removed without triggering a person's sense of pain, the process creates an illusion of feeling good. Willing victims had been leaving signs for her, with at least nine girls known to have fainted as a result and Judgment subsequently investigating the case. She had been interviewed as part of Judgment's investigations and had left something slip that only the perpetrator would know, but they hadn't connected it at the time.

The Sunday after the assignment, on learning about Shokuhou Misaki accompanying Kamijou Touma to help prepare for a male role and assuming that she would be stressed at wasting her weekend with an 'uncouth boy', Otonari decided to target her in a misguided attempt to 'help'. However, she mistakenly linked to Kobayashi Satori who had disguised herself as Shokuhou as an insisted precaution for Shokuhou's safety during the outing. While she managed to bring Kobayashi down via Mind Anaphylaxis, Kobayashi in turn brought her down by using her own Telepathy to flood Otonari's mind with verbalized surface-level thoughts of the many people with range. Though injured, Otonari put her remaining strength into one final attempt at Shokuhou, but her attack (and her spirit) was crushed by the oblivious Touma's Imagine Breaker, after which she fell unconscious.

Abilities

Otonari's ability is Level 4 Mind Anaphylaxis (爆雷念話（マインドアナフィラキシー）, Bakurai Nenwa (Maindoanafirakishī)^?), a variant of Telepathy. As implied by the name, Otonari manages her power by envisioning it in the form of an allergic reaction. Similar to how forcibly exposing someone with a severe allergy to the matching allergen can produce a lethal reaction, with a theoretical idea of an attack by implanting a fictional allergy inside a target before exposing them, Otonari's ability can mentally implant and induce a similarly damaging reaction.

In order to activate Mind Anaphylaxis's full attack, Otonari needs to carry out three steps. First, she must link to her target's mind. Otonari's telepathy links herself to others by "sharing their presence", and although she physically targets her ability, as long as she can sense a target's presence, she can achieve a link even if she cannot see her target. In the case of her attacks, this telepathic link is a forcibly established one-way link, and in the case with Shokuhou and Kobayashi, she was initially applying noise (using the wind direction value as an encryption key) to mask her thoughts, though this mask was removed once Kobayashi established a counter-link.

The second step after the link is established is the process of implanting a trauma or phobia into the target. While the full causes of phobias are not entirely known, they are said to be a mental overreaction resulting from mistaken accumulations of experiences (e.g. through pain, suffering and failure), and this learning process can be artificially applied through telepathy. Otonari does this by sending over 20,000 telepathic messages a second, transmitting a massive amount of compressed information into the target's brain where it sticks. In addition to giving a target a new phobia through this method, regardless of whatever phobias they already have or don't have, Otonari can apparently create fictional phobias not present in medical literature.

Finally, the trauma must be physically triggered from outside to damage their mind. In the case of Kobayashi Satori, Otonari implanted gynophobia that would be triggered by her own body.

Aside from her ability, Otonari has received Tokiwadai's training in basic self-defense techniques.