Name: Hashigaki, Honome
Age:19
Physical Description:
Mental Description:
Honome is a soft-spoken girl who usually doesn’t like to pry nor wheedle her way into conversations, and is more likely to let the other person speak than speak herself, she prefers to give conversational queues with her body rather than her words. If she finds herself in a particularly remote area, away from the crowd, then she will open up with the right person, but other than that, she usually has a downcast look while she listens not only to the person in front of her but to her surroundings. For this, she can be easily mistaken to be an airhead by those around her, and usually needs to be prompted to actually respond unless being directly asked a question or spoken to. She finds solace in going out into the wilderness and listening to the sounds away from Kumogakure no Sato. The further she gets, however, the more nervous, as she is afraid that she will never make her way back to her family. She usually takes a friend, and would love to take a lover into the surrounding wilderness and get lost, doing nothing but listening to the symphony of nature around them.History:
Hashigaki, Honome was born to a loving Hashigaki couple who doted on their daughter, along with their servant within Kumogakure no Sato. They, being Chuunin themselves, had a stake in making sure that their daughter was brought up to be a kunoichi of the village hidden in the clouds. When she turned 9, she was given a test for her general aptitude with ninja tools which, despite her blindness, she was quite adept in. Her shortcoming was anything beyond the range of about 10 meters, and moving targets. Her parents promised the academy professor that she would get better with their tutelage, but the teacher just held up a hand, asking that Honome continue with her test. The next one was whether or not she was able to at least gather and display her chakra in a ‘moldable’ form. Her father had practiced many, many times with her, but even the basics of chakra control were beyond her.
The other tests she barely passed, but the teacher, at the end of the test took her parents into a separate room, closing the sliding door to gain some privacy from the small blind girl that had, after the test, rested on her knees in the zen garden and had delighted in the feel of pebbles beneath her fingertips, hearing the smooth, rounded stones beneath each one clicking rhythmically against one another. Her father’s voice raised to the point where, even if they had solid walls, she could have heard him, “What do you mean never be able to be a kunoichi!? Get out of my house!” He stormed up to her, the wooden sandals that he slipped into after reaching the porch clacking against the wood in his rage-filled footfalls. Honome closed her ears, letting her hair fall over her sightless eyes as she was scruffed by her father, “Why couldn’t you do better?” He shouted, tossing her to the ground roughly, the stones that had felt so cool, comforting, and soft beneath her fingers now bruised her pale skin as she gathered herself from the toss.
Pain exploded from the side of her face, sending fireworks into the darkness of her sightless eyes and a rush of the taste of blood into her mouth. She spat, the spatter of something, blood? Hit the stones as she heard the sound of skin on skin and a struggle, a harsh slap, and then the stunned silence between her parents.
“M-m-mama?” She felt her lip tremble, clutching her kimono so that it stayed shut as her obi loosened from the blow and she stood up.
“Go inside.” She heard her mother’s voice, a knife in the cool air of autumn and a quick rustle of fabric, followed by the heavy wooden clack of her father’s sandals against the wood of the porch, and then the slamming of the sliding wooden door.
“Honome?” Her mother’s hand touched her left cheek, the one that was still sore and she flinched away from it, “Oh, oh my baby, come here.” She curled into her mother’s lap, pulling at her larger kimono, the child wept.
For the next six years tensions were high between her mother and her father, and eventually her father sued for a divorce from her mothers’ family, which caused a stir within the social circles of the Hashigaki clan.
It was the year that she packed up her things, clinging to her mother’s dress and walking through the streets, that her mother and her both were shamed by her father, who had no sooner seen them walk out the door as he went to the Hashigaki clan head to proposition for another marriage.
As she felt the wood of the sandals ring out against the uneven cobblestone street she felt the first surge of chakra that she had felt in her whole life. It hit her chest, her core like an arrow through her viscerae, spread like honeyed warmth throughout her limbs, and she mumbled “Ah, so there you are friend.”
At her maternal grandparent’s home, she honed her chakra like her father had taught her all those years ago, and by the next year, on her sixteenth birthday, she was escorted to the academy for another trial, after the chakra suppression devices had been dealt with.
This time, she showed an aptitude not only for chakra control, but for chakra in general, and produced a stunning display of disciplined shots. There were still some things lacking, such as aiming at non-static targets, but that was what she was there to study.
Three painstaking years later, She graduated the academy, just barely getting a passing grade, and being told that if she wanted to hone her skills, she should stay out of combat if at all possible. Her ability with the healing arts, her tactile intelligence and her ability to memorize literature from hearing it once were what carried her through the academy.
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