Konayuki Itezora

[sunshineapps]

Name: Konayuki Itezora
Canon: Katanagatari
Character Journal: snowchild
Gender: Female
Age: 10
Birthday: May 28th
Village Affiliation: Ice Country citizenship, technically. (No official papers due to Ice's lacking a Daimyo or Hidden Village)
Rank: Civilian

Canon History: heeere you go
Canon Abilities/Powers:

- Wilderness Skills: Even as a child member of a hunter-gather clan, by now she's been taught most of the survival skills necessary to fend for herself alone on a snowstorm-plagued mountaintop for over a month. Which she does rather well. She can hunt and fish, gather plants, and preserve what she catches; she can make wooden frames, baskets and mats and weave patterns to a degree.

- Fighting: she's agile and has excellent reflexes, but she had no weapons training whatsoever. In terms of battle, she's an absolute amateur. This is mitigated somewhat by the next section:

- Strength: the Itezora in general are highly resistant to the elements and superhumanly strong. This includes durability and is therefore a physical trait of her entire clan rather than a supernatural ability. Even though she's the weakest of all the clan members, her strength is honestly ridiculous. Her limit (ie the heaviest weight she could feasibly lift off the ground, stagger with for a step and then set down) would be around three or four tons, or the equivalent weight of a small jet, and that's as a ten-year-old. She can take blows and falls that would injure a normal human without so much as a scratch, but she isn't invulnerable and serious cuts or stabs with supernatural cutting power will injure her just as much as the next person.

- Soutou Kanazuchi: an ancestral weapon of the Itezora clan and one of the 12 Deviant Blades of the renegade swordsmith Shikizaki Kiki, created with weight as its focus and unbelievably heavy because of that.

Appearance: Konayuki is, essentially, a tiny sasquatch. A mountain child of the highest calibre. She's pale, barely three foot tall, not including her spikes of ponytail, and her hair is fluffy, curled, silver and reaches the ground. Like most of her clan, she has heart-shaped markings dyed into her hair and clothes with natural pinks, yellows and indigos, and her hair is darker at the ends from dust and the general grime of being an active ten-year-old. Her eyes are an opalescent pink with blue and pale highlights, another trait of the Itezora's chakra saturation, and she's missing one of her front baby teeth.

Personality: As you can expect from her isolated upbringing, Konayuki is exceptionally sheltered and her experience narrow. Whilst, okay, she's fully capable of surviving in a snowy, near-lethal wilderness on her own, she is very much a child in other respects. She was too young to be involved in the spiritual and cultural life of her clan, and only knows what she picked up through her daily life and what she saw about the village. She wasn't involved in trading or economics, but she can treat hides and prepare food stores. Basically, she's bright enough to have observed a great deal, but she still lacks the context behind a lot of what she saw and will never now have the chance to find out. She takes a lot for granted - when she first encounters outsiders, she's honestly surprised that they have any kind of business with her clan, and again when she realises that the Itezora's strength isn't the norm. Her strength is, to her, ineffectual and childish set against the overwhelming power of the adults. In fact, she was the weakest even amongst the children; the switch to being one of the strongest people around will confuse her.

She's playful and carefree and very much a boisterous, energetic ten-year-old, and her tough body and strength mean she rarely needs to be careful when it comes to her adventures. She has no real sense of danger thanks to this - even the total annihilation of her clan was so sudden, unexpected and violent that she hasn't processed it in terms of her own mortality. The Itezora were the apex predator of an area considered almost uninhabitable for hundreds of years, and only the freak introduction of a desperate genjutsu user with no regards for human life was enough to wipe them out. And even then, Konayuki remains, young and healthy, and accidents are something that happen to other people. Want to spar? Want to attack her? Sure, she doesn't mind playing.

You'd expect someone raised in a village on a windy, freezing mountaintop to be thick-skinned physically, but Konayuki is also surprisingly mature about her emotional pain. Having lost her entire clan and her village only days before she ran into Kakashi, she's nevertheless managed to make herself a rudimentary home in a storage cave some distance from the village site, and has clearly gone out hunting every day to build up her food stores. She understands what it means to be alone, even if she lacks the maturity or information to make the decision to leave the mountain, which would have been the better option in terms of her wellbeing. To leave would be to abandon her people, whereas even if she's desperately lonely by herself there, she can at least speak to the spirits of the other Itezora when she's close to their graves. It takes the introduction and sudden loss of another human being to prompt her to make the journey down into a population centre.

Her bonds with her home and her family meant everything to her, though her pain is that of loneliness rather than grief - she believes that everyone has returned to spirit forms and watches over her, of course, but that doesn't mean she doesn't miss the physical presence and warm voices of her family. The comfort she takes isn't enough to counteract the separation and the loss of contact that a child - or any human - needs. It's made worse by the highly communal society the Itezora lived in; even without blood relations she cheerfully refers to people as her brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, grandmother and grandfather. Whilst part of this is due to standard Japanese pronouns for older people than oneself, Konayuki uses them firmly and explicitly to assuage her loss, adopting new people quickly and carelessly at the first sign of friendliness. She is eminently trusting, and her desperate loneliness have increased that by several orders of magnitude.

Strengths and Weaknesses:
- Incredibly immature for her age due to slow aging and delayed maturity of her clan, with absolutely no experience interacting with anyone outside of that.
- Heavy abandonment issues, and is desperately afraid of loss or loneliness, as a result of the recent disaster.
- Very trusting, but conversely has less of an idea of the value of life, and whilst she won't knowingly injure someone for no reason, if surprised, she can and will cripple unthinkingly, and won't realise that she's done wrong. i.e. she doesn't understand the impact of her actions on others.
- Physically resilient and good at concealing her true feelings.
- Has enough raw power to make up for her complete lack of training in a pinch.
- Doesn't understand that power, and can't control it.
- Polite, cute and likeable. Eager to please.

Sunshine Abilities/Powers: As a member of the Itezora, Konayuki has a great deal of chakra, but nearly all of it is saturated directly into her body to give it its unnatural resilience and power in much the same manner as Hoshigaki Kisame. Unlike him, though, her stock of mouldable chakra is much smaller due to lack of use or training. Her initial nature release is the water type combined with the Yin/nature type, which has given her clan excellent resistance to temperature and weather as well as allowing for the development of their innate physical prowess, but developing any kind of active technique rather than the passive abilities of the Itezora will take as much time as any young prospective shinobi, if not longer because of her late start.

Similarly to shinobi from the Land of Snow, the Itezora (for whom 'the snow is a part of them') tend towards ice-like abilities that aren't actually part of any bloodline limit, hence her bunshins will likely be made of snow. Historically, her clan have had an alliance with the clan of Ninja Snow Rabbits, but with her the only surviving member, that alliance will be on hold until she can re-establish a contract with Boss Rabbit [うさま] in the Land of Ice.

Equipment more than power, but she comes equipped with an ancestral sword called Soutou Kanazuchi (双刀「鎚」, or 'Hammer' the Twinblade) that was created using ninja forging techniques to be the heaviest sword ever created. This absurd weapon was owned by the son of her clan's leader, but has since passed to Konayuki as a keepsake and important cultural relic. It should be noted that she isn't trained in the use of a sword whatsoever.

Sunshine History: Her essential history hasn't changed much, but since the wiki isn't particularly detailed, I'll say more about it.

First, some information about her clan in general. The Itezora were a tremendously insular hunter-gatherer clan who lived at the peak of Mount Odori in the Land of Ice, as remote and inhospitable a place as is possible to travel without leaving the mainland. Insular enough that no one knows of their culture, ninjutsu or spiritual practices; the only information available is that they are rumoured to have be 'descended from giants' and possess an unknown sword granted by a legendary weaponsmith. The Itezora care just about enough that their children know to call outsiders 'ground-dwellers', and keep to themselves otherwise. Furthermore, due to the overwhelming vitality of the entire clan, they are all long-lived and - until they encounter assassination-type genjutsu - have no predators or enemies; they allow their young extraordinarily long childhoods in relation to other societies around them, and don't expect clan members to learn responsibilities or adult tasks until their mid- to late-teens.

Konayuki is one of the youngest members of the Itezora. Only ten years old in a clan of chakra giants and the weakest of them besides, she was babied and allowed to roam freely around the dangerous wilderness of Mount Odori. Her life was one of a hunter-gatherer, with relatively little exposure to the outside world and its people and politics beyond the occasional familial dispute, summer fishing expedition or the annual journey to Kanna for trading and news.

Everything changed when the fire nation attacked a nukenin came in search of the clan's ancestral weapon. As a genjutsu specialist, the foreign shinobi caught the clan by surprise, and obliterated them down to the last elder and child in his search for Soutou Kanazuchi using forbidden illusion-based assassination techniques that the clan's physical prowess could do nothing against. Konayuki survived only because she was out playing at the time, and she returned to a bloodbath. The sword the nukenin had sought remained at the centre of the carnage, because it was too heavy for him to carry, but every structure in the village had been destroyed as the bespelled Itezora had rampaged.

In a daze, Konayuki had gathered what bodies remained and buried them at the entrance to the village, and then spent the next few days performing what rites she could remember and making a nearby storage cave habitable. By the time a Konoha jounin arrived in search of the rogue shinobi a few days later, she was established and moderately resigned to her new life, but the appearance of a living person after a week of emptiness jolted her out of that stasis. She realised, hopelessly, that she wouldn't be able to bear living alone after he left, and tried to stall his departure for as long as she could.

This fortunately led to Kakashi being able to ambush the nukenin when he returned to retrieve Soutou Kanazuchi, and with her clan avenged and the danger over, he promised to return to retrieve her once he'd processed at least some of the relevant paperwork. After all, as a nomad from Ice, she might as well not have existed for all the proof there was of her clan. He left, and she waited all of four days before getting impatient and insecure and following him down into the lands below. She took a large piece of the mountain stone with her, of course, so her clan's spirits could share in her life, her journey and any home she might find, and luckily for her and for those who might attack her, she got to Fire Country without too much incident beyond a number of passing encounters.

Prose sample: Test drive here and backstory here

Missive Sample: [ A letter left at the newly-erected gravestone for the Itezora. ]

Everyone!

Konayuki here! I hope you are all watching me and the journey from the mountain was not too hard. I was really careful with the stone and uncles said it would be alright to write something on it so maybe you are more comfortable now. I have to go and have a photograph taken for my new documents, so I wrote this instead.

Thank you for raising me for ten years. Even if I live here now instead of the mountain, I will never forget you. I will talk to you every day! week and work hard so everyone knows what a wonderful clan you were.

That reminds me! I can come here whenever I want. Isn't that great? So I will see you again soon.