Hirika Mikori is, and always has been, small. She's not quite sure what it was. Maybe there was some strange peculiarity in her metabolism that meant she'd never put on height, or maybe she'd been subject to some strange stunting agent as a child, she'd never been sure. Hikari always joked that her sisters had always gotten all the benefits in the size-department, and that she'd been stuck with the leftovers, a joke that had only ever seemed more and more accurate with each and every passing year.

She's pretty easy to spot in a wide-open crowd, as long as you're explicitly looking down for her. Her soft, long red tops those two, brownish ears of hers, even if that's the only thing you might immediately see of her. She really is just a red panda woman in miniature, perfectly proportioned, but sized as though someone were trying to make a display model of her. Everything tends to look big in her hands, from a phone that fits her teeny palms a little more like a small tablet, her little notebook laptop that not only covers her lap, but completely hides her legs, hamburgers that always require both hands to grip, even if they're small...it's hard not to find things that remind you just how petite she actually is. ...Which is part of the problem.

Ever since she was a child, Hirika's had issues...fitting in. Her peers have always been notably taller than her, and these days, they're nearly double her height. She's found it difficult to make any more than a handful of good, close-knit friends who either don't see her size as a weird issue, or are more than supportive of it, and as a result, save for them, she's a little shy and withdrawn. It's hard to convince yourself to get out in the open when you're constantly standing in everyone's shadow, after all!

But still, she's making headway past these personal issues. For one, her familiarity with technology has given her an edge within social media, where her and her kind of geeky interests have let her thrive in an environment where her height simply does not matter. Having a supportive roommate has also been an incredible boon on helping her travel out to those specialty stores where she can actually get proper-fitting clothing at her size, or where she can always depend on them to keep the stepstools properly placed around the house. She's trying so very not to be the mousey little panda shut-in she worries she looks like, and fresh out of college, she finally feels like she has an opportunity to feel a little bigger. In her head, anyway.

Aaaand this adorable commish was drawn, of course, by Diety of Dooky (http://www.furaffinity.net/user/dietyofdooky)!

The concept behind Hirika is pretty simple: she's a tiny red panda that lives with large roommates, in a world not made for her tiny stature.

Cute.