Yumi was born from my Overwatch obsession sometime in the early years of the game. As evidenced in my Hanzo Shimada shrine elsewhere on the site, I became obsessed after watching the Dragons short introducing the Shimada brothers as characters and from then I needed to make a character to be with Hanzo. She started out as a Miko, a shrine maiden.

(This was long before Kioko had even been hinted at and when she showed up I was super hyped, I do wish they would fix her character timeline though because it doesn't make sense.)

She is young in comparison to Hanzo's canonical age, age gaps have always been something I enjoyed writing romantically as I have always had a thing for older men from when I was a teenager and it's a carry over from that taste. Though in many of the spinoff AUs that we have done with these characters (more on those later) their ages are made closer, usually by making Hanzo younger.

The first story written with her was in the canon Overwatch world, where she cared for the temple on the Shimada Castle grounds.

From there, after years of service and in a very Mary Sue fashion, she is at the temple during Hanzo's yearly visit to the grounds, but this is after he has learned his brother is alive. And through conversation and companionship Yumi becomes a sort of student of Hanzo's. As a Miko within the semi-magical world of Overwatch (there are spirit dragons for goodness' sake) Yumi has a connection with the Kami of the elements of air, water, earth and fire. She is eventually bestowed with the Dragon of the East Wind, that of fire, bearing the name Kokoro, the Heart Flame.

To put it into Overwatch terms, Yumi is a support character with an archer build. She has speed boosts through the air kami, healing through the water kami and extra jump height and climbing through the kami of the earth. Her Ultimate is using Kokoro and the other kami all at once as a sort of joint damaging and healing attack, firing arrows in quick succession toward enemies while offering bonuses to teammates within a certain distance of her. It was a fun thought exercise to come up with her abilities.

But where Yumi really shines, I think, is in AU of a more peaceful persuasion. It started with your typical Tea Shop AU where she owned a teashop with her best friend and none of the terrible things that happened in Overwatch occurred and so it is current hundreds of pages of slice of life with a healthy mixture of smut. There are others, Yakuza, DnD fantasy taking place in my own world and one or two others, she is simply the character I place in whatever genre is inspiring me the most. But Tea Shop is definitely our current longest running story, currently about 16 chapters each chapter I would say an average of 75 pages on the doc. Plus various notes another things.

Yumi is also, like her best friend Tiffany (another OC), a gigantic and proud pervert. Yumi is primarily the character I write to explore kink and polyamory. Yumi is part of a polycule made up of herself, her best friend Tiffany (her first lover in college), Hanzo, Jesse Mccree (or Cole Cassidy as he now called but all of our stories are written with his original name and we haven't changed it because we don't post them anywhere anyway), Hana Song, and Lúcio Correia dos Santos primarily, with other characters joining in for fun or pairing off when it suits the story. She's highly into Shibari and other forms of bondage, Hanzo and Tiffany are her primary kink practicing partners but everyone gets involved sometimes. The primary couples are Yumi/Hanzo, Tiff/Jesse and Hana/Lucio with switching and grouping pretty commonly practiced. The polyamory started as an experiment in the canon universe story and when we went into the Tea Shop AU we just went absolutely balls to the wall in that regard and it has been super fun for us.