Nemuri Kayama

The hair announced her: dark purple, thick and spiky, layered at wildly uneven lengths with the longest strands past her waist, the chin-length bangs split three ways and one slicing diagonally between her eyes. She was tall and curvaceous. Her sky blue eyes tilted downward under long lashes, a small beauty mark sat beneath the left one, and her nails stayed painted red. As a U.A. student she kept the hair at her chin and wore pink rectangular glasses, and her costume then was the more scandalous of the two: chest plates, undergarments, a whip on a brown belt, and an unbuttoned green trench coat.

The adult version borrowed wholesale from dominatrix iconography. A breastless black leather leotard cut like a corset sat above a white bodysuit thin enough to read as flesh-colored in the manga, its center strip studded with red gemstones. Light purple garter stockings clipped to a burgundy belt ringed in gold studs, and she wore black stiletto knee-boots, a small red mask, handcuffs on both wrists, and usually a flogger. The bodysuit was made deliberately flimsy so she could rip it open at will, a material problem she admitted in an interview she was still solving within costume regulations. Undercover work got its own wardrobe: hunting Trigger dealers at mixers as the blond "Kaori," she wore a cable-knit sweater in light blue over lavender-diamond leggings, with an extremely brief leotard hidden beneath.

Flirtatious, perverted, playful, and liable to turn serious without warning, Nemuri did not take interruptions or insults well, and jokes about her age landed worst of all. The R-Rated bit was a persona she ran on purpose, and it stopped cleanly at the classroom door and the referee's stand. What genuinely moved her was uncorrupted youth. When Mashirao Ojiro and Nirengeki Shoda asked to withdraw from the Sports Festival on principle, she accepted with real enthusiasm, and the English dub line about their naivety turning her on misrepresents what was plainly admiration for their integrity.

Underneath the bawdiness she was articulate and perceptive. She explained on camera why some Heroes wear so little, since exposed skin is what certain Quirks need, and acknowledged that her own student costume was single-handedly responsible for the regulations that followed. Mt. Lady countered that Nemuri just liked the attention, which her constant posing did nothing to disprove.

Off duty she could set all of it aside, presenting as an ordinary woman and a thoughtful, almost motherly one, looking after Pop Step and finding sympathy for Hina despite what each had done. After the Sky Egg Bombing she calmed one of the kids, covering her costume with a Captain Celebrity hoodie to do it. For all the vanity, she took the front line in the Paranormal Liberation War and believed in her students the way All Might and Shota Aizawa did. Dying, she told Momo Yaoyorozu that 1-A and 1-B had to sedate Gigantomachia if force alone failed, pushed them to do it even where the law forbade it, and trusted the call to them.

Somnambulist released a sleep-inducing scent from her exposed skin, and a single breath of it was enough. It worked noticeably better on men than on women, and the law's limits on bare skin were the reason her suit was built to shred. Her gear was all Quirk delivery disguised as theme: the whips and feather fans picked up traces of the aroma and threw it wherever she aimed, which made her a nightmare for anyone fighting close without a breathing apparatus. She named the ultimate move Sleepy Hollow.

Tormenting opponents was both her pleasure and her only real vulnerability. Minoru Mineta exploited it in the First Term Final Exam, fleeing in visible terror to draw her out, then trapping her in place and walking through the gate, and she told him outright that she had a sadistic streak. She was harder to fool elsewhere: she clocked Hitoshi Shinso replaying his first Joint Training round in his head to find improvements, and as a spy she worked that mixer under the cover of a college student and identified Hina as the one dosing men's drinks.

She taught modern art history at U.A., fought at the U.S.J., presided over the Sports Festival, and joined the Villa Raid Team when the Paranormal Liberation War began. She was killed during the Gunga Mountain Villa raid. The School Briefs novels fill in what the main story does not: she helped raise Eri, taught her to draw until the girl called her Miss Art, read her bedtime stories, and lent her a childhood kimono for Shichi-Go-San. The last of those books shows her at a hanami picnic late at night with the rest of the faculty, weeks before her death.