☆ Name: Tenko Higeki | 悲劇点呼
☆ Age: Thirteen.
☆ Physical Description: Straw yellow hair, dulled slightly by the gloomy climate and leading into nearly white roots. Not quite allowed to unfurl to her shoulders, the tresses of her hair are pulled back into a hairband and covered otherwise beneath a blue-and-white cap; permitting only a stark cluster to jut through the back in a ponytail. Unnecessarily sharp, calculating blue eyes, muddied only by a haze of polite disinterest - a telltale guarded look, one might venture. She subtly boasts a thin, hard line for a mouth; which then guide eyes towards high, pointed cheeks bones, a fragility further expressed by the rest of her lithe form; the makings of adolescent muscle beneath her appropriately tanned skin, as if trained & molded rather than born into physical prowess. Her vest is customized - clinging tight and bulky to her frame with only solid, opaque colors like dark blues and blacks - and flares into a high collar, a perfect place for her to nestle her chin and hide the lower half of any expression. Similarly fashioned cargo pants cover her calves down to her knees, ending in the open-toed sandals of typical ninja footwear. Her arms stay close to her body, either in her pockets or dangling at her sides; never more than a flick of her wrist from the holsters of her various ninja tools. Thin fingers lead to surprisingly calloused pads, another hint towards the struggle of her development. Various low-maintenance scars littered across her visage, small scratches and burns that began to blend into their own callouses.
All qualities of a true ninja, she'd say.
☆ Mental Description: There's a gentleness buried deep in her gaze she's long since thrown away; it's not that she didn't place value on kindness, or friendship, or what other caricatures you'd define your atypical "antihero" by - it simply wasn't conducive to her goals to be anything less than hardened. This perspective went straight from her thoughts to her presentation, allowing a line of similarity to be drawn by how her physical state reflected her mental one; a soft girl with thin skin, yet desensitized to and staring mutely through the toll her various training regimes have taken on her - those scattered nicks and bruises. With aspirations that involved throwing herself into her work as a shinobi she had no choice but to fashion her way into the setting; no complaint have been uttered by her lips, no matter how flushed they became, in years. Dedicated was a very apt term to describe our straw-haired ninja.
This was simply the surface, however, as any fixation on manual evolution would culminate. She very much had those feelings within her heart, aching at her ribs, that fell away from her delusions of duty and strenuous effort to uphold such. She liked the feeling of pressing her face into the grass to breathe in its scent, the smell of rain that had yet fully formed more than a few wayward drops, the taste of simple foods she could binge on until various greases dripped down her chin - guilty little pleasures she didn't indulge as often as she wished she could. With this, she wasn't cold; she found no pleasure in being needlessly mean and kept up with common polite niceties, she just simply approached the business of being a shinobi as one - that is to say, this was a job and her foremost drive was to do it to the best of her abilities. If someone was lagging behind, unable to keep up with the various responsibilities, she wouldn't chide, berate or belittle them - she'd just take pains to make sure she didn't become like them. There was a kindhearted girl under what could only be perceived as the gravel she pulled up around herself; there were, however, very few scenarios where that could shine through.
No one but herself was her responsibility - and nor was she anyone else's.
Her opinion on apples couldn't quite be pegged as enjoyment nor fear - somewhere in the middle, a chaotic and muddied mess of emotions that led to a near-total avoidance.
☆ History: It's not that sad of a tale. A notion of tragedy implies any course of these events were unexpected or particularly shocking; the truth, then, might be the saddest part of all. None of this was, ultimately.
A farmer's daughter in a small village within Kaminari no Kuni, Tenko didn't have what you'd call a "rough life" - she lived in relative peace with her father, her mother having died in childbirth and leaving her as an only child. Tenko was never blamed for this unfortunate occurrence and they made a good life for themselves on their farm. Her father, in all his good grace, treated his daughter like a princess to the best of the means afforded him - she had respectable clothes from the local tailor, good food borne from his own hard work and what schooling their village managed together. This pampering led not to arrogance - as Tenko never had to toil away and work up a sweat - but a peculiar soft, quiet kindness. With her dad taking care of her so totally she was allowed a relatively lavish lifestyle, giving way to a heightened perspective of the world from the time she'd spend observing & learning those around her. It was to her credit that she used her time in such a way as opposed to letting her comfort get to her head - restlessness bore empathy, not hubris.
That compassion allowed her only so much time before she almost demanded to be allowed her hand in her father's affairs, where he eventually relented enough to permit her the task of collecting what apples were ripe from their small orchid for selling and trading. She made a routine of it, waking up as the sun began to find its crook in the sky above the trees where she'd gather her fruit into small, straw baskets. There were only so many yet the task couldn't be completed by her atrophied muscles - from lack of strain - on any singular day, steering her towards the market a multitude of times in a short span. She made friends with the other villagers and shopkeeps, soon finding a happiness that had been muted - if not complacent - up until this point in her life. Watching, yet not acting - but no longer! Numerous enjoyable conversations became the light of her days, both with those she had gotten to know better among the stalls of the marketplace and even with her own father; she always had that brightness within her, and all it had taken was a little more time spent interacting with the world to really bring it to the surface.
Less time spent viewing the world from her bedroom's window also meant exposing herself to its dangers, however, and that "danger" made itself known when she was approached by a caravan one day while passing out her apples. Her limbs were aching something fierce - the exercise of harvesting apples and walking the short-odd way to the village center (and back) was all that she got, and the trees weren't always bearing enough to validate a trip. This led to days where she returned to her quiet lifestyle, adding atop the simply small amount of exertion ever asked from her to build a notably fragile creature. She remembered this ache clearly, only - along with the sound of a single fruit thumping against the dusty ground, dropped next to her foot - because this was arguably the single most titular moment of her existence thusfar.
She was so young when she was taken - but with an age bar as low as eight, what did you expect for ninja indoctrinated into a military lifestyle? The CPSS, she later learned they were called, had "sniffed her out"; now this was her life, aged father and farm left far behind. She was instructed to forget these none-too-longer-relevant details as she now had a higher duty to adhere too - that to her village, Hidden in the Clouds. It was so abrupt, so much suddenly sheared away, what was she to argue? The whiplash was intense. It was a stroke of luck for her abductors and their system that she had grown into that kindness of hers; she didn't fight back, didn't kick and scream and throw up any fuss that could confine her to the trope of "problematic" - she simply shut down. Bit by bit, year by year of the vigorous training provided for her, the [Girl She Used to Be] receded into the [Girl She Had to Be] until the village was left with what it had now.
The perfect shinobi, a blank slate of obedience with no clearer aspirations than to protect and serve that which was now hers - something she wouldn't be giving up again.
It wasn't a happy ending, nor is it yet an ending at all, but it permeated the same grey neutrality her life had been thrust into. Just because you couldn't quite have the "good" didn't mean you were stuck with only "bad" - if you believed really hard, suspended your disbelief and hid within your own heart, you could stomach just about anything thrown at you.
