Kagari Shiina

Kagari Shiina (椎名 かがり, Shiina Kagari) is one of the characters of Steins;Gate 0. She is a war orphan and the adopted daughter of Mayuri Shiina in 2036 in the Beta Attractor Field. She was stranded in the year 1998 after having run away from Suzuha, who she had time travelled with to stop the Y2K problem.

Appearance
Kagari is a pale-skinned girl with long red hair, blue eyes and slender build. Although her similarities with Kurisu Makise are initially noted by Rintaro Okabe, there is no known connection between the two.

Personality
As a child, Kagari deeply cares for and idolizes Mayuri. Her most prized possession is an Upa Keychain Mayuri left to her. After being forced to use the time machine, her biggest fear was that changing the world line would result in her never meeting Mayuri. As a result of her brainwashing, she prioritizes Leskinen's orders almost instinctively. She hears his voice in her head almost constantly, believing it to be "the Voice of God", and the only thing that is able to convince her to oppose these orders is Mayuri. In the Recursive Mother Goose ending the voice disappears entirely.

When she has amnesia, she is a kind, meek woman. After regaining her memories, her affection for Mayuri returns, but even though she cannot remember anything past age 10, she acts her age. Despite that she still refers to Mayuri as "Mommy". She shows signs of PTSD, sometimes suddenly screaming and begging her mother to save her.

As Kurisu's memories begin to overlap with Kagari's, she becomes increasingly worried about disappearing. She starts panicking at the prospect that "Kagari" would be replaced by Kurisu. That being said, she still wanted to know more about Kurisu, asking Okabe to take her to where he met her.

After her experimentation and "training" at the hands of Stratfo, Kagari is shown to be ruthless, calculating, and cold, keeping Moeka at death's door many months in order to assure her loyalty and killing those who get in her way. However, this breaks away when Mayuri is involved. She is incredibly unstable, jumping between her admiration for Mayuri and the orders given to her by the "Voice of God". She desperately wants Mayuri to treat her as she did in the future, and upon seeing Mayuri injured, she enters a berserk rage with the intent of slaughtering whoever is responsible.

In the Vega and Altair route, Kagari acknowledges that she fell in love with Itaru Hashida while posing as Yuki.

Background
Due to the death of her parents during World War III in the Beta Attractor Field, Kagari became an orphan at a very young age. Since the registers of her family had been lost during the war, her true name was lost. She first met Mayuri Shiina during the year 2028 as she was working at a children's orphanage, and was given custody of the girl.

As the connection between the two grew, Mayuri went to eventually adopt Kagari in the year 2032, becoming her new mother and giving her her new name.

However, during the time Kagari spent in the orphanage, she was a victim of numerous experiments lead by Alexis Leskinen, who was trying to test Amadeus' capabilities as military weaponry, under the pretense that she was being treated of PTSD.

In the year 2036, Kagari was forced to travel back to the past alongside Suzuha to escape an incoming attack. However, after they stopped in 1998 to stop the Y2K problem in 2000, Kagari's fear to lose her mother due to the world line change caused her brainwashing to activate, resulting in her attacking Suzuha and running away. After that, she went on to contact Alexis Leskinen of that time and explained details about the future to him. She was then taken by Stratfo to further experiment with her and was given the codename "K6205", a reference to Mozart's The Magic Flute. Before escaping, she was kept in a building close to Tokyo and seemingly missed Mayuri so dearly that she scribbled a whole room with "Mommy" and "I miss you", in what appears to be blood. At one point on at least one world line, she escaped and met a young Okabe at a train station, giving him the inspiration for Hououin Kyouma and teaching him a song. However, she was recaptured and this event was forgotten.

Trivia

 * As with other elements of Steins;Gate 0, Kagari was first introduced in the Epigraph Trilogy.
 * The song that Kagari teaches Okabe was taught to her by Mayuri who learned it from Yuki who learned it from Okabe's mother who learned it from a younger Okabe himself and who then learned it from Kagari from the past. This creates a situation resembling a causal loop with the song seemingly not having a proper origin.
 * While it resembles a causal loop, those do not exist in Steins;Gate due to how time travel is explained in the series. The song's true origin is most likely a prior Beta world line that was overwritten after Kagari time-travelled.
 * One of the possible origins for the song is the music box gifted to Maho during the Vega and Altair branch of the Visual Novel.
 * Kagari has been assigned the lab number 010.
 * Kagari is somewhat claustrophobic, being unable to stay in confined spaces for long periods of time.
 * Kagari only appears to replace Yuki in the Vega and Altair ending as they remain as separate characters in nearly every other ending.
 * The Gehenna Stigma ending is the only ending where it is left ambiguous as she dies off screen, so her face is never seen.
 * It is Kagari posing as Yuki who was with Okabe and Fubuki in the SDF van on the USSR world line (1.382733β).

Etymology

 * The name Kagari was given to her by Mayuri Shiina - a reference to "kagaribi（篝火?)", meaning bonfire -, with the wish that Kagari would be a shining light to everyone no matter how dark the world line was.
 * Mayuri's surname Shiina means “chinquapin, mallet, spine” (椎, shii) and “name, noted, distinguished, reputation” (名, na).

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Kagari Shiina