Yūko Shionji

Yūko Shionji (紫苑寺 有子 Shionji Yūko), also known as Alice, is a mysterious girl who lives on the third floor over the Hanamaru ramen shop. She acts as the leader of the NEET Detective Team, and aside from her "occupation" and her status as a NEET Detective, very little else is known about her.

Appearance
Yūko is a very beautiful white-skinned short young girl with knee-length black hair that has square bangs hanging over her eyebrows and big blue eyes.

She is regularly seen inside the apartment space she occupies, wearing bear-patterned pajamas, a pair of shorts and white thigh-high socks. However, at the rare occasion that she is needed to go outside, she prepares a black gothic lolita dress; meanwhile, when she is invited as a witness to important ceremonies of the Hirasaka Group, she wears a black kimono.

Personality
For some reason, Yūko likes to be called a "NEET Detective", probably a distinction between the sometimes-derrogatory term "NEET" and the profession of a detective. Meanwhile, Yūko's tendency to stay most of the time inside can also make her a hikikomori.

Yūko's diet is based basically on Dr. Pepper and low-carbohydrate meals, including a specialized spring onion ramen without any noodles she orders from Hanamaru. Since she does not go out of her room except for special reasons, the other members of the NEET Detective Team bring her food, a role eventually taken by Narumi Fujishima when he informally joins the group. She also suffers from severe insomnia, although whether it is caused by or is an effect of her inherently weak composition is uncertain.

Generally, Yūko is an intelligent girl who is able to manage an entire workstation made of dozens of CPUs linked together and utilize it for information gathering. She is usually snarky and blunt when it comes to pointing out a person's weakness, but can be equally caring, although she is a bit shy when showing this side of her. Also, following the virtue of being a detective, she maintains an impartial ground in investigating cases, putting herself as merely "the speaker to the dead".

Although she has been together with the NEET Detective Team for a long time even before Narumi joined, Alice remains a mystery even to her fellow members.

She seems to have romantic feelings for Narumi for in episode 5 she blushed when Narumi told him that he does care for her and starts acting shy, and when she was typing on her keyboard, and Narumi visits her saying that he wants to see her, she blushed and slows her typing down, she also almost confessed in episode 8, though she is not jealous at Ayaka Shinozaki, when Narumi thinks of her as an Angel in episode 12

Plot
Yūko is the brain of the NEET Detective Team and gathers all the information to solve the cases on her laptop without stepping out of her bed.

Etymology

 * The name Yūko means "exist" (有) (yū) and "child" (子) (ko).
 * Yūko's nickname "Alice" comes from one of the kun'yomi for 有, "ari" and one of the on'yomi for 子, "su".
 * Yūko's surname Shionji means "purple, violet" (紫) (shi), "garden" (苑) (on) and "temple" (寺) (ji).

Trivia

 * Yūko appears to be 14 or 15 years of age, maybe even 12, but her real age remains a mystery.
 * Yūko was used as inspiration for the Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory character Erika Mishima. Both characters share the same voice actor in Yui Ogura.