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“
You are weak, from the moment you could only use your life as an excuse for committing crimes, you insulted that very life. You didn’t notice, you were afraid of noticing, and you went around destroying everything that could make you notice, but you have also crushed your ability to ever gather respect. Even if you managed to reach the position of Level 5.
„
~ Misaki Shokuhou
Misaki Shokuhou, also known as Mental Out and the Queen of Tokiwadai, is a major protagonist of the A Certain Magical Index franchise.
She is one of Academy City's Level 5 espers, ranked number five, and the strongest telepath in Academy City. She is also a student of Tokiwadai Middle School and the leader of its largest faction. Being the second Level 5 to attend Tokiwadai, she often comes into conflict with Mikoto Misaka and has a connection to Touma Kamijou (before he lost his memories).
She is voiced by Azumi Asakura in the Japanese version and formerly Teri Rogers and currently Mikaela Krantz in the English dub.
Misaki Shokuhou is a beautiful young girl who has long golden hair and matching eyes. She has a rather buxom figure which makes her look older than she is. It's revealed that she was flat-chested similar to Mikoto when she was younger. Her most notable characteristic is the stars in her pupils with Mikoto once calling it "Shoujo manga eyes". According to her, she was born this way. Additionally, the same stars appear in the eyes of those who she is controlling.
She wears the Tokiwadai Middle School school uniform, sporting a pair of white gloves and stockings which are both adorned with laces. She's almost always carrying a white shoulder bag with a star adorned in the middle, which is where she keeps her remotes.
Personality[]
Misaki Shokuhou displays a rather playful, charming and mischievous demeanor, which is only emphasized by her stylish appearance. Unlike Mikoto, Misaki is more feminine and tends to do random poses akin to a manga character. However, Misaki is also quite arrogant and full of herself, due to her popularity in Tokiwadai and her status as a Level 5. She's also passive aggressive and will usually start conflict with people by insulting them in such a manner, as shown by her rivalry with Mikoto.
Underneath her cheerful and frivolous exterior, Misaki is extremely paranoid and distrustful, being unable to fully trust anyone whose mind she cannot read, which is what partly causes her rivalry with Mikoto due to her EM field making her immune to Misaki's powers. Because of her paranoia, Misaki can be very cunning, ruthless, and manipulative, often relying on her wits and telepathic to outwit or deceive others. Her mistrusting nature is so great that she would rather not appear in public but instead brainwash one of her followers or any random person to act as her proxy. She also prefers to work alone, only teaming up with others like Mikoto or Seria Kumokawa when absolutely necessary, and can be rather vengeful when provoked.
Despite her ruthlessness, Misaki has ultimately proven to be a kind, noble and compassionate person. While she won't hesitate to use her powers on others, she always make sure to take good care of those under her mind control. This extends to members of her clique and even to her enemies. She is also aware of the psychological damage her powers can inflict and tries to keep it in check. Misaki is shown to genuinely care for her clique and prioritizes their safety above her own and will not control without their consent. She will also do everything she can to keep her followers out of harm's way. Despite her paranoia, Misaki has shown to have actual friendships with her childhood friend Dolly and her second-in-command Junko. In addition to this, while she would rather work alone, she is perfectly fine with working together with Touma Kamijou due to her romantic feelings towards him, despite his Imagine Breaker rendering her incapable of reading his mind. In fact, he may be the only person she fully trusts.
Furthermore, Misaki has a sweet tooth, enjoying candy and chocolates. Due to her reliance on her intellect and esper ability, Misaki is severely unathletic and is terribly out of shape due to skipping P.E. constantly with her powers. She struggles to keep pace with a lightly jogging Mikoto, wheezing and panting from even light physical exertion. She's also never succeeded in performing a sit-up. She will often make up excuse for this, such as her breast weighing her down.
Background[]
When she was younger, Misaki was a subject of the Clone Dolly first research laboratory. It's revealed that Shokuhou Misaki and Ayu of the third laboratory were found by Tree Diagram to both have the possibility of reaching Level 5, possessing abilities with a near-identical basic theory and scope, though they would plateau at Level 3 under the standard curriculum. The higher-ups decided to prune one and focus on developing the other. Following the Parameter List, they chose to focus on Shokuhou Misaki, with Mitsuari Ayu being kept as a back-up in the event of her death. Her researchers soon begun to train Misaki's powers for the Exterior Project, using her powers to brainwash people like Makuwa to think melons are apples. Part of this project was the development of Exterior, a giant brain that could replicate her powers with much higher potency, with significantly increased reach and number of people that can be controlled at one time, and to allow anybody to use Mental Out for themselves. For that project, part of her cerebral cortex was taken from her to create Exterior.
During the project, she was asked to brainwash a girl that is known as Dolly, which the scientist required for data, into thinking she is her friend that left her after discovering the machines implanted on Dolly's person. Misaki somehow acquiesces and begins pretending as Dolly's friend. This ultimately ends in tragedy when it is revealed that Dolly's condition is steadily deteriorating even with Academy City's powerful medical technology, and by the time the two have become close Dolly falls ill and dies shortly after—supposedly a foregone conclusion and necessary to the Exterior project. A crestfallen Misaki soon turns against the facility and its researchers, exerting her influence and control over everybody involved in the project. She learns that the Clone Dolly Workshop is related to the Exterior project, and also that the scientists are to dispose of her once Exterior is completed. By the time she enters Tokiwadai Middle School, Misaki has effectively hidden Exterior and its capabilities completely, though later had help from people apparently loyal to her to maintain it. By the way she speaks to Seria she seems to have a bit of rivalry between them though it is unknown how this developed, though one possibility is because of Touma.
At some point during her time in the first laboratory, Shokuhou approached Junko Hokaze, a subject of Clone Dolly's third lab, and discovered that Junko suffered painful headaches every day due to her power. Misaki used her power to sync with Junko's mind and relieve the headaches, despite the risk to herself if Junko were to lose control. She advised Junko to stop trying everything by herself and said that she owed her one.
Due to the events involving Dolly and the Exterior Project, Misaki became weary and depressed to the point of wanting to use her powers on herself to remove what she called, "heavy thoughts".
Powers and Abilities[]
Powers[]
Mental Out: Misaki's Level 5 esper power, which allows her to alter the human mind by manipulating the moisture, blood and cerebrospinal fluid of the brain to produce various mental phenomena. These applications include telepathy, mind control, reading other people's thoughts and memories, changing a person's personality by means of brainwashing, revelation of feelings, memory erasure, willpower destruction, illusions, inserting emotions, etc. Due to the many uses of her power, Misaki channels Mental Out's power through several remote controls. While she is able to use Mental Out without the remotes, it will be more difficult to use it. It's revealed that Mental Out isn't limited to manipulating body fluids, as it enables Misaki to manipulate the fluids and moisture of her surroundings. Mental Out is unable to work on non-human creatures like animals or machines and is ineffective on electrokinetic espers like Mikoto Misaka.
Telepathy: Using Mental Out, Misaki is able to read people's minds and project her own thoughts into the minds of others.
Mind Control: Misaki's most notable use of Mental Out allows her to brainwash people and take control of their minds. Anyone under Mental Out's control displays the same starry eyes as Misaki. She is normally able to takeover up to ten people at once but if she limits her control to giving them simple commands, she can control people in the triple digits. Using her powers, she was able to give pre-set commands to each student of all five schools in the School Garden and is able to switch between them constantly if she needs to.
Memory Alteration: Along with her ability to read minds, Misaki is able to manipulate and modify people's memories. She's also capable of removing the memories of others by touching them. She can even erase her own memories if she wanted.
Mental Blocks: Misaki can apply mental blocks on herself to prevent her ability from being used against her, although these blocks only works while she is conscious.
Concept Switching: Misaki is able to use Mental Out to swap out concepts, like the concept of a limiter release code and self-destruct code in people's minds, as she used it on herself in order to trick Gensei Kihara.
Psychometry: Misaki can also use a form of Psychometry to read residual information left in objects by touching them after taking out her gloves.
Augmentation: Misaki can boost the fighting capabilities of a target of her choice by manipulating their mind. She does that by causing effects such as no pain, regulated breathing, emergency consumption of the body’s water and fat reserves, elimination of the physical restrictions brought on by fear, cutting the muscles’ limiters, repeated experiences of success, expanded processing power for the senses, temporary memory enhancements, increased memory analysis, as well as the enhanced strength, slow motion, out of body experience, and life flashing before your eyes experienced during a near-death experience.
Categories: Misaki has classified some of her more common commands in preset categories to facilitate their repeated use when using her remotes. Some of the categories she has used in the series are:
Category 005: Locates a mental ‘bomb’ set in the indicated individual.
Category 011: The indicated individual must answer accurately to all questions.
Category 030: Leaves the indicated individual unconscious for twenty-four hours.
Category 044: Extracts the past twenty-four hours'/year’s memories from the object Misaki Shokuhou touches with her bare right hand.
Category 061: Sensory Misidentification. It allows Misaki to trick the target's senses. It was used to trick Touma's brain into thinking his right arm still existed past the elbow when his right hand was cut off, temporarily preventing the manifestation of the mysterious power that would normally occur.
Category 081: Can make the targeted individual believe that Misaki Shokuhou is their target and that she is the person standing next to them, or can designate Misaki Shokuhou as the target's "Direct Superior A".
Category 109: The target recognizes Misaki Shokuhou as their ally and immediately eliminates anyone who attacks her.
Category 220: The target becomes afraid of sailor uniforms and wants to eliminate said uniforms if any get near them.
Category 330: Prevents the indicated individual from detecting the passage of time for sixty minutes.
Category 401: Returns the indicated individual’s mind to its state just before a mental ‘bomb’ activated.
Category 433: Pain Shutoff. Used to reduce pain experienced by the body.
Unknown Categories: Misaki has demonstrated many application of her ability with unknown Categories. Those include making everyone around her ignore her, making others incapable of perceiving her and making others perceive a target of her choice as naked.
Other Powers: While Mental Out's ability to manipulate moisture is mainly designated to the mind, it is possible to utilize this power in different ways. Similar to Ayu Mitsuari, Misaki can lose control of her ability and cause an explosive phenomenon similar to freeze-drying that creates a territory that can cause any living being besides her within it to crumble like dried paper mache as it drains them of moisture. During her battle with Mashiro Iori, Misaki managed to take control of Iori's water balls and later froze the entire hallway to protect herself and her classmates.
Liquid-Proof Railgun: A combination attack which uses Misaki's power over liquids and Misaka's Railgun and Anti-Art Attachment. Using her ability to precisely manipulate liquids, Misaki coats Misaka's coin in a thin liquid lattice designed to melt in a specific way. When the coin is fired, the coating would protect the coin from being burned up by the friction while the explosive evaporation would add extra power to shot's acceleration effectively creating a railgun shot with limitless distance and power. The attack was so powerful it was able to annihilate the Windowless Building, a feat originally thought impossible.
Abilities[]
Genius-Level Intellect: As a level 5 esper, Misaki is incredibly intelligent and her calculation skills surpass that of a supercomputer.
