Taiki Shuttle Royal Decree App

[kentuckyprettyderby]

Character Name & Pronouns: Taiki Shuttle (she/her)
Character Age: Umamusume age is weird, but she’s essentially in her late teen-equivalent. 18 to 20, somewhere in there.
Canon: Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Basically I’m sort of combining her Career Mode from the mobile game with her small appearances from the anime, much as Kosh did with Gold Ship
Canon Point: After winning Uma of the Year, so basically the end of her Career Mode, only it happens probably like…somewhere during season 2-3 of Pretty Derby.

History: An umamusume born and raised in Kentucky, but who was accepted into the prestigious Tracen Academy for horsegirls in Japan. As part of an umamusume’s education at Tracen, she’s expected to find a Trainer to agree to work with her, either on a one-on-one basis or as part of a team. Taiki’s skill at sprints and short-distance racing landed her a spot on the prestigious Team Rigel as their primary sprinter/pace chaser.

Not content to rest with being part of one of Tracen’s most prestigious teams, Taiki set her sights higher, on being named Uma of the Year, a prestigious award for up and coming horsegirls. While the award had never been given to a sprinter before, Taiki was undeterred and decided she would be the first. In this, she succeeded, becoming the first sprinter to ever win the coveted Uma of the Year award, and adding to Team Rigel’s prestige. This all, uh, happened just off-screen in the Pretty Derby anime (my girl gets shafted so hard).

Personality: A bubbly, exuberant ball of energy, Taiki is endlessly optimistic and empathetic to others. When she sets her mind to a goal, she will do her utmost to achieve it, and won’t let roadblocks in her way get her down or deter her. When told a sprinter like her had never won the Uma of the Year award, her response wasn’t to give up on her dream but assert that in that case, she’d be the first, a promise she was able to make good on through hard work and perseverance.

Though loyal to her teammates in Rigel, she also likes to help out and support other umas, as she helped Special Week, from the rival Team Spica, by running a sprint against her as part of Spe’s training. Taiki won, though not without Special Week giving her a fight, and the Spica horsegirl was able to use the lesson she learned from racing Taiki to improve her own career. She also gets along very well with the other members of Team Spica, especially Twilight Suzuka, a former member of Rigel herself.

Taiki’s biggest fault is that she gets lonely very easily and this is the one thing that can get her mood down fast. Part of it is having to move to Japan by herself and leave her family back in Kentucky, and part of it is her own nature. Taiki just does not like being left on her own. She tries to combat this as best she can by holding parties for other American-born umas at Tracen, usually with lots of barbecue being served, or having watch parties of her favourite Westerns. She owns all of them. All of them.

Abilities:
Horse Power, Literally: Horse girls are capable of the kind of physical strength towards the higher end of what real life horses can manage, we regularly see them pulling tires off earthmovers to train, which weigh in the 12000+ lb/5443kg+ neighborhood. They also have the endurance, speed, and general directional hearing a horse has. They're not super powered, but they've got a leg up on humans.

As a sprinter, Taiki is very fast and her dash is noted to be among the best, with very few able to challenge her, like her former teammate Twilight Suzuka. But as a sprinter, she lacks endurance and while training to win Uma of the Year did help her improve on this, she still tends to lose steam quickly on races longer than a mile unless she hits The Zone. Taiki also has yet to hit her Peak, which generally signals a downturn in an uma’s racing career or heralds their imminent retirement from the Twinkle Series and graduation to the Dream Series.

Doing It Cowgirl-Style: Thanks to being raised on a farm in Kentucky (and as part of her overall “gimmick”), Taiki knows actual cowgirl shit. In addition to having worked with cows and likely other kinds of farm animals, she also knows other traditional Western skills like lassoing and trickshooting. That gun she has in her racing getup isn’t ornamental or a toy, it is an actual fucking revolver and she knows how to use it, though only for sporting events and good old fashioned revolver-twirling. She’s also seen Every Western Ever and grills some of the best barbecue you’ve ever tasted.