Editing Mahou Shoujo:Roanapur: Riri (section)

==Backstory==

YAMADA Riri acts so Japanese it's almost painful to watch; she dresses in cosplay-esque school uniforms, adds honorifics to people's names even when speaking English, and peppers random Japanese words in her speech. If she didn't look the part you'd guess she was an American anime fan trying desperately to get cred, but she's got all the right features and the accent to match. While she'd be a little weird, she'd fit in just fine in any prefectural middle school in Tokyo; just an ordinary Japanese girl.

Of course, she's not. While she was born in Japan, it was to a pair of Zainichi Koreans: descendants of peninsular natives dragged to the island when the Empire conquered them before World War II. While their predecessors had refrained from participating in the Repatriation process, Hyun-Ok's parent's, devoted members of the Japanese Communist Party, were lured by propaganda to move with their young daughter in one of the last waves to return to North Korea.

Unfortunately for the Lee family, after posing for a series of propaganda pictures, they were shuffled off to Camp 22: Haengyong Political Prison. With the press benefits gone, there was no more benefit to keeping 
untrustworthy former foreigners around, and so the family was locked away from where their outsider ways could corrupt the people. What followed was a decade of torturous existence in the worst of conditions, under constant threat of torture and death. 

When her mother starved and her father was shot, the threat of being sent to the kippumjyo "Pleasure Division" and the sense of nothing to lose (especially with the fall of the Soviet Union cutting aid to North Korea--a sure death sentence for many of her fellow prisoners in the famines to follow), Hyun-Ok made a desperate dash for freedom--and surprised herself by making it across the border into Russia. Forced to hide and live on the edge of society lest she be deported back to her death, she learned to the same skills she'd had to get out of the concentration camp to steal enough to survive, which eventually brought her to the attention of the Russian criminal establishment. Useful enough to not give up as an asset but problematic enough to not want to keep in the country, they shipped the young thief to Roanapur as a "contractor", and even set her up with doctored documents as a Japanese expatriate.

Of course, this places the newly-renamed Riri in a delicate position: Hotel Moscow could reveal her documents as a fake at any time, so they have her more or less by the short hairs for any request they make, but the more crimes she commits for them (and others), the less likely it is that she'll ever be able to find formal asylum anywhere that would protect her from the fate that would await her if deported. Fortunately, life in Roanapur agrees with Riri. Its criminal anarchy is like a paradise compared to the horrible world she grew up in, and even when work is scarce she never has to worry about starving. Thus, in spite of her situation, she's nothing but optimistic and cheerful. Even being recruited to fight Demons as a magical girl hasn't dented her enthusiasm; if anything, it's made her more forward looking.