Faris NyanNyan

Faris NyanNyan (フェイリス・ニャンニャン, Feirisu NyanNyan), real name Rumiho Akiha (秋葉 留未穂, Akiha Rumiho) is the daughter of Yukitaka Akiha and Chikane Akiha, a part-time employee and owner of the maid café MayQueen+Nyan², the same maid café that Mayuri Shiina works at, where she is the most popular waitress and she is a second year student at Kanaria Private Academy. She is a fan of the singer FES who is a major character in Steins;Gate 's predecessor Chaos;Head.

Appearance
Faris is a very short girl with long pink hair who prefers tying her hair into two drilled pigtails rather than leaving it down and pink eyes.

She is usually seen wearing her work uniform, a maid outfit with a headdress, an apron with a ribbon at the back, and black leggings with black shoes. She also has a red ribbon around her neck and on the sides of the headdress. She wears a wristband that is black with white frills to go along with the frills on her skirt.

Her casual outfit consists of an amber dress and a black tiara. As usual, she ties her hair into two braids.

Personality
Being the waitress and owner of a moe café, Faris always adds the Japanese word "nya" (English: "meow") to her speech to boost her "moe-ness". She has the ability to see into people's hearts just by looking into their eyes, which she calls the "Cheshire Break". Rumiho portrays herself as ditzy and foolish to go along with the persona she created, 'Faris NyanNyan', but she is actually quite perceptive, intelligent, and incredibly self-conscious ー she is always considering what impact her actions have on other people and what their interactions with her mean. This goes along with "Cheshire Break", her propensity to 'read between the lines' and glimpse the true motives behind other people's actions. Because she distrusts other people ー because she does not want to be left alone, Rumiho has become adept at uncovering the lies that everyone tells. Even so, Faris is still childish and cutesy at heart, but she exaggerates her playful nature when she is playing 'Faris NyanNyan'.

She likes to play along with Okabe's delusions and comes up with scenarios herself. Faris is one of the few people who does not think of Okabe as "weird". That being said, Okabe often has a hard time keeping up with her, as she often goes further into his delusions then he prepared for, forcing him to improvise to keep up.

Her true personality is of a childish and self-conscious girl who really misses her father and longs for intimate interactions with those close to her. She does not often show her darker, more complex side to others, and instead hides behind exaggerated and simplified personas such as 'Faris NyanNyan'; this is one of the reasons she gets along so well with Rintaro Okabe. In addition to raising her likeability, this facade allows her to disengage emotionally from potentially troublesome situations and protect herself from getting hurt. Another attribute to her true personality is that she is often manipulative towards others when she wants her way, an example of this behaviour is when she tricks Okabeinto helping her win a RaiNet tournament.

She tells very few people about her heritage, out of fear that they will treat her differently. The lab members are among her only friends that she trusts enough to show her true self, 'Rumiho' to. Aside from her close friends, the only person she confides in is Kuroki, her butler. She is not able to have a very close relationship with her mother because she is often overseas and only comes back for short periods of time. Because she had very few people to confide in from a young age, Faris has become quite a lonesome (but also independent) person, longing for and sometimes clinging to any semblance of intimate company she can salvage.

In Nae's route in Linear Bounded Phenogram, a few years after certain events led the world to steadily fall down the path to a dystopian world ruled by SERN, Rumiho seems to have overcome the majority of her fears regarding lies and abandonment. Instead of painting all lies as a bad thing, she accepts that white lies, secrets, and roundaboutness have their place in every healthy relationship, just as bluntness, straightforwardness, and honesty are important components. Her friendship with Okabe and company seems to have greatly helped her with being able to more effectively cope with her loneliness.

Background
Rumiho comes from a wealthy family that owns much of Akihabara - she even has her own butler, Kuroki. As a child, Rumiho dreamed of one day opening her own maid café. She begged her father constantly, to no avail, though exactly why he would not let her is never made clear. Ten years before the beginning of the story, to celebrate her eighth birthday, she had her father make a promise to drop work and join the party, but he ultimately cancelled because of a business trip. This made Rumiho really upset and she took it out on him, that she accused him of loving his job more than he loved her and told him she wished he was dead. Grief-stricken, her father decided to take an early flight back, and, in a painful case of irony, died in a plane crash. With her father gone, Faris was free to establish her maid café, but she always felt deep grief over his death, especially since the last thing they did was fight.

On some Alpha worldlines, her father survived and she went on to participate in RaiNet AccessBattlers matches and tournaments due to her free time. On this worldline, she met Okabe and Mayuri when they had to step in for a match that Daru could not attend and who both subsequently lost against Faris. After the match she gave them tips for getting better and they became friends.

Faris' Ending
Okabe sends another D-Mail to Faris's father, hoping it will keep him from dying along with Mayuri. After the D-Mail is sent, his timeline is severely altered. The laboratory never existed and he never met Mayuri, Daru or Kurisu. In this new past, Okabe was a participant in the RaiNet AccessBattlers game, where he met, partnered with, and became lovers with Faris. Realizing that without the laboratory, he has no way to change the current timeline, Okabe decides to accept this new past and start a new life with Faris by his side.

Quotes

 * "In order to protect your important friends they wouldn't tell the truth...or tell white lies. Being able to make friends like that...that is a very happy thing." - Speaking to Nae in Linear Bounded Phenogram.
 * "That scar will one day become a scab and flowers will bloom. Even within Nae's heart, they'll probably grow. Until then you should face the wound while thinking of the loneliness of being left behind. At the same time, you should be thankful for each day." - Speaking to Nae in Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram.

Trivia

 * The electronic district of Tokyo was owned by her family, hence the name "Akihabara".
 * Lab Member 007. She joined in Episode 9, recruited by Rintaro Okabe because she wanted to make a D-Mail to avoid her father's death.
 * In the side story following Faris in Linear Bounded Phenogram, it is noteworthy that while she refers to Okabe as 'Kyouma' without an honorific, in her mind she thinks of him as 'Okabe-san'.
 * In her Chuunibyou universe, she possesses a power so-called "Cheshire Break" which enables her to read other people's minds through facial expressions, eye movements, and gestures. Which she uses in her RaiNet tournaments on the previous worldline.
 * NyanNyan is Japanese for "Meow Meow".

Etymology

 * The name Rumiho means "detain, fasten, halt, stop" (留, ru), "un-, not yet, hitherto, still, even now, sign of the ram, 1-3PM, eighth sign of Chinese zodiac" (未, mi) and "grain" (穂, ho).
 * Rumiho's surname Akiha means "autumn" (秋, aki) and "leaf, plane, lobe, needle, blade, spear, counter for flat things, fragment, piece" (葉, ha).

Alias

 * The name Faris (Feirisu, Feyris) is a Japanese rendering of the Latin fēlis, meaning "cat."