Akiyama Rina Profile


Character Name: Akiyama Rina
Age: 21
Birthday: April 18th
Rank outside ANBU: Special Jounin
Affiliated with which ANBU branch: Hunter - field ops
Registration Number: 10927

Physical Appearance

Height: 5' 6 1/2" (169 cm)
Weight: 118 lb (53.5 kg)
Blood Type: B negative

Hair: Light almond-brown, almost closer to white-blonde--though she'd never call it that. She wears it feathered about her face, just brushing her shoulders, and at that length it has enough curl to provide a bit of a bounce. It's fine and silky-soft, and generally well-enough maintained. She uses generic shinobi unscented shampoo, and a subtle pine-scented conditioner when she feels like it.

Eyes: A warm faded brown-gray, almost light enough to match her hair. Her eyelashes are also light in color, giving her a bit of an innocent look. That sometimes suits her perfectly, and other times not at all.

Skin: Fair and smooth, with slight rosy undertones. She blushes easily, but not often.

Facial Features: Her bone structure is defined but not overly sharp, a slightly snub nose and a mildly heart-shaped face. Her lips are naturally pink, gently rounded and expressive.

Other Physical Traits: She is quite slender, but does have some feminine curves. Enough to unambiguously require a bra, anyway. Her hands are long-fingered and deft, and her slender limbs carry a decent covering of lean muscle.

Handedness: True ambidextrous, though she uses her right most of the time by default.

Voice: Mid-range with an appealing hint of breathy roughness, honest and unforced but undoubtedly sensual. She rarely raises her voice, but can be surprisingly firm when she wants to be.

Identifying Marks: Pierced ears. ANBU tattoo. A thin scar in the center of her right eyebrow, from splitting it open on the corner of a table when she was a toddler; it's barely noticeable, but there's a narrow horizontal line where the hair doesn't grow.

Usual Clothing: Generally very casual, matching her attitude. She knows she's attractive, but doesn't flaunt it; she doesn't have any desire to "catch" bed-partners. She'll take the ones that fall into her path--if she even notices them--or maybe she'll wink at someone who catches her eye, but she doesn't feel any need to dress to impress. She wears what she likes.

Generally that translates into comfortable clothes in soft fabrics and gentle colors, with styles she enjoys but that don't get in her way. Tops with a hint of girliness--a small ruffle accentuating narrow shoulders, a sleeve gathered and flaring slightly at the wrist, a touch of delicate lace about a wide neckline--are usually paired with practical pants (never jeans) and no-nonsense sandals. She loves long, swishy skirts, when she can get over the paranoia of having that much fabric tangling about her legs. Sometimes it's not worth the trouble.

ANBU Mask: A fierce-eyed wolf, depicted in stark, sloping lines of tan and gray.

Living Situation: ANBU headquarters Apt. 321.

Ninja Skills

Fighting Style:

Her main focus is fuuinjutsu: the sealing arts. The rest of her techniques work as support for that specialty.

There are two essential difficulties of using fuuinjutsu in battle: the time it takes to draw the seal, and the necessity to guide the enemy within the array's range of effect (usually on top of the seal itself). Though working with a partner is the best way to address these issues, she can manage on her own by using special ninjutsu to draw the seals very quickly, followed by a repertoire of minor but cleverly-applied ninjutsu and genjutsu to maneuver the enemy where she needs them.

She is a surprisingly capable physical fighter, considering her more mental specialty, but her style is a defensive one, relying heavily on weapons and ingenuity. Because of her civilian heritage, she will always be at a disadvantage in the amount of chakra--and thus the strength and speed--that she can bring to bear in a straight taijutsu fight.

Her chakra elements are earth and water.

Preferred Weapons: Most often, thick black ink, seasoned with no little amount of her own blood (and a few other select ingredients, the specifics of which are a trade secret). The hip flask she uses as an ink-container has seals engraved into the metal to keep the liquid ink fresh, but for complex seals she prefers to mix the ink just before using it from one of a variety of specially-procured pressed ink sticks. When in Konoha she grinds her ink on an antique inkstone that her father inherited from his father, but in the field she carries one that has a little less sentimental value (and is not quite so heavy).

When involved in an out-and-out battle, her weapon of choice is the sai, a three pronged dagger-like weapon best suited for defense and disarming the opponent. The central prong of the sai is approximately two feet long and rounded, coming to a sharp point at the tip; the two side prongs are also sharp but much shorter, used to catch and hold the opponent's weapon. She usually carries four on field missions, stored in seals painted on black strips of fabric sewn to her uniform. Two are on the undersides of her arms, two down the sides of her thighs, and all are accessible at a moment's notice.

Special Jutsu:

Doton: Tenkoku no Jutsu (Engraving Technique): Earth-type. This technique uses earth-elemental chakra to engrave seal patterns into a variety of surfaces. The amount of chakra required depends on the distance from the user and the hardness of the material being engraved. This is a very control-intensive technique, requiring the user to visualize in its entirety the seal pattern to be drawn, and to guide the chakra precisely along the often complex paths of the seal.

Suiton: Sumi Ame no Jutsu (Ink Rain Technique): Water-type. Similar to the Tenkoku no Jutsu, this technique is used to trace seals quickly. Instead of etching away a material to generate the seal pattern, however, the user manipulates a volume of ink with chakra, drawing out the seals by controlling where the ink falls. If ink is not available, blood can be used instead, with an effect that is many times more powerful yet often dangerously unpredictable.

These two techniques have mostly the same effects, but their relative utility varies depending on the terrain, what materials she has available, and the circumstances of the fight. In the desert she'd probably use the first, for example, while against an Earth-type ninjutsu user she'd choose the second.

Service Record: Rina graduated from the Academy at age twelve, later than usual for wartime but not uncommon for a child from a civilian family. She was placed in a genin team with teammates Matsunori Takeo, a ninja-wire specialist and the team strategist; Yamada Kenichi, a rock-solid taijutsu specialist with a deft sense of humor and a warm heart; and sensei Hanazaki Toshiro, a self-described "common man" with no particular specialty besides staying alive. She became a chuunin at 14, one year before the end of the war, and joined village seal ops when she was 16, just after the Kyuubi attack. She was promoted to special jounin at 18 due to her expertise in fuuinjutsu, and at age 21 she joined ANBU field ops as a Hunter, close to a year ago.

War Record: She served with her genin team from age 12 - 14, ostensibly as support and backup along inactive fronts--though it being a shinobi war, those fronts rarely stayed inactive for long. Her sensei held out as best he could against the rising pressure to promote as many young ninja as possible, but finally towards the end of the war Konoha's need became too great; he field-promoted them all to chuunin when Rina was 14. They remained together as a chuunin team, and spent the last year of the war along fronts that were all-too-decidedly active.

Personality

General Personality Traits: Inquisitive to a fault, easygoing, maybe a little bit naive on the personal-interaction front. Friendly, without much of that edge of suspicion and distance found in most ninja. Somewhat vague and easily distracted until something catches her interest, at which point she latches on and won't let go. Able to keep secrets by virtue of being the kind of person you would never expect to be able to keep secrets.

Quirks: Her everyday handwriting is beautiful, and fast. She has an extremely high tolerance for both alcohol and spicy foods, belying her delicate appearance. She crafts jewelery as a hobby, when she has any time, and sings in the shower.

Sexual Orientation: Attracted to both men and women, possibly with a slight preference for women--because they're prettier. Open to almost anything so long as it's consensual, and very casual about the whole thing. Really--what's the fuss?

Gifts/Talents: A near-perfect memory for details she thinks are important. A sometimes frightening capability to focus on one thing to the complete and utter exclusion of everything else. A willingness to completely ignore the way things have always been done, if she thinks she can do them better--and a remarkable flexibility of mind meaning when she thinks that, she's often right. She doesn't tend to break rules, per se, but all unspoken traditions are fair game to be entirely ignored.

Flaws: A mind like a sieve for details she thinks are unimportant. Like, occasionally, the names of people she doesn't like. The birthdays of people she does like. Various holidays, occasions, and sometimes people's marital status. Remembering lunch is always a hard one.

She's very good at reading books; reading people, not so much. It's not that she can't, exactly, just that she often forgets to pay attention. Many of the subtler nuances of interpersonal interaction go right over her head when she's focused on something else.

Things she hasn't seen or experienced first-hand are just a little bit unreal to her. She has a very hard time emotionally connecting with abstractions.

Religion and Philosophy: She'd love to believe sometimes, when things are difficult, but she just can't buy into it at a visceral level. It doesn't make sense to her; she can't put her faith in something she can't see, can't touch, can't experience herself.

In addition to the usual Shinto/Buddhism mix prevalent in society, she has a more-than-passing familiarity with Zen Buddhism, since it is nearly inseparable from the finer points of the art of calligraphy.

Likes and Loves: Soft, pastel colors. Delicate things. Her little sister and brother; they're the ones who make the abstraction of "village" real to her. Her father and mother both; she just wishes they still loved each other. Her stepmother, too, which is kind of strange when she thinks about it. Usually she doesn't.

Dislikes and Hates: People touching her calligraphy equipment. People touching her weaponry. People bothering her when she's in the middle of thinking about something.

She doesn't usually hold grudges, but anyone who messes with her family is in for some serious payback. Her "family" can occasionally take on a somewhat broad definition, and it certainly includes her stepmother, at this point. That makes it a little bit confusing.

Fears: She has recurring nightmares in which she wakes up in the morning and can no longer read any of her seal scrolls--the text is all meaningless squiggles, and the placement just looks random. Every time, she wakes up in a cold sweat.

Other than that, things like blindness, permanent disability, probably death is in there somewhere. She doesn't think about it all that much.

Dreams and Ambitions:

To become the first master seal-artist in the history of Konoha not to leave. Yondaime's heroics definitely count as leaving, in her book.

To someday find the great Jiraiya-sama of the Sannin, and convince him to teach her. (And quite possibly to find out if he's as good in bed--or as bad, depending on whom you talk to--as the rumors say.)

To develop a seal that will instantly and accurately fill out a mission report, no further input required. (Okay, only half-seriously, but the "half" is still there...)

Relationships

Family:

Rina's father Akiyama Kazuo is a master calligrapher, famous throughout Fire Country and beyond for his inspired art. Almost twenty-three years ago, he came to Konoha searching for scrolls to indulge his side fascination with the obscure branch of the shinobi arts, fuuinjutsu: the art of seals. Certainly no ninja himself, he'd been for years collecting what information he could find that hadn't been snapped up and restricted by the shinobi establishment; that all added up to no small number of minor works, general treatises, and overlooked antiques. In a small used bookstore just off of Canal Street, he found more than enough scrolls and commentaries to fascinate him for weeks--and in the cheerful bespectacled proprietress, he found someone he thought could fascinate him for the rest of his life. After a brief but intense courtship, Hanatari Mihane became an Akiyama, and one notorious wanderer finally put down roots.

In due time, the happy couple was blessed with three children: Rina, her brother Takuya three years later, and her sister Mikari three years after that. Kazuo stayed mostly at home while the children were very young, helping a blissful but overworked Mihane in the bookshop. As the children got older, though, he started to travel again, giving guest lectures and accompanying shows of his art.

That was when he ran into trouble. Trouble by the name of Takeshima Shiori, a special jounin with an expertise in guard missions and an infectious smile as brilliant as her fiery red hair. They met when she led the guard on his caravan traveling into the depths of Wind Country, and after that trip neither of them were able to look back. They both tried their best to keep their interactions confined to his travels, but one warm spring night he packed up his calligraphy supplies and as much of his clothing as he could carry, and told his wife he was leaving. They got a divorce as soon as he could put together the paperwork. Rina was eight years old.

Rina's father still lives with Shiori now, in an apartment clear across town, but they never got married. Shiori knows better than to ask something like that from a man like him, and if she has to tolerate his roving nature, well, he accepts her occasional indiscretions with aplomb. It works for them, which is more than can be said for many couples.

These days, Rina and Shiori have a reasonably close relationship, something of a mix between an older-sibling and a parental bond, formed through Shiori's clever gift of weaponry and training on Rina's ninth birthday. It works fine for Rina, so long as she doesn't think about it too hard. She and her father, however, are thick as thieves; she still goes to him whenever she gets stuck on a seal design.

Rina's brother Takuya grew up with a heavy dose of the family's passion for books, and a fascination with history; he has been accepted to continue his studies with the scholars based at Fire Temple, starting in the fall. Her sister Mikari managed to soak up all the savvy in the family, and currently helps her mother in the bookshop, keeping their finances above water.

Friends: Shiranui Genma: they met during the long and drawn-out aftermath of Genma's unwilling stay in Earth Country, when Rina served as a seal consultant to the doctor supervising his case. Also, a wide variety of ANBU operatives she's worked with in the past, Intel and Hunter, internal and field agents alike. She still has some friends back in the village seal division, but they try to keep quiet about it--she's not in particularly good standing there anymore.

Lovers: The idea of monogamy is generally beyond her--she's never been able to keep her focus from straying--but she's drifted in and out of a lot of beds, men and women alike. She doesn't ever plan to stick with just one person--she knows she's like her father in more than just her favorite brand of calligraphy brushes.

This philosophy has gotten her into trouble in the past.

Hero: The Yondaime Hokage. Her goal in life is to be just like him. Only not exactly. Because she's really not cut out to be a Hokage. But--everything except for that.

She realizes she might have a bit of a complex about him. Just a little. And your problem with that is?

Enemies: One in particular, and unfortunately for her, he's high-placed. Turns out, it's never a good idea to sleep with the head of the division you're working in--and to stop sleeping with him is even worse.

Who knew?

Personal History:

Rina's earliest memory was of sitting perfectly still and silent, watching the interplay of light and shadow over thick rice paper as her father meditated, copying sutra over and over in the ancient seal script. She could sit there for hours, watching transfixed as he created entire worlds in rich black over off-white, mysterious characters blooming their way across the page. Those afternoons became so much a part of her that the first time her father put put a brush in her hand--as he tells the story, anyway--she wrote out the entire Heart Sutra herself, start to finish and letter-perfect.

(When in refined company, he leaves out the part about how she wrote it on the wall.)

Rina's mother was less than pleased about her choice of writing surfaces, but Kazuo was just delighted that his eldest daughter was showing an interest in calligraphy. He was even more delighted when later, he managed to persuade his wife to let him send six-year-old Rina to the Ninja Academy, vicariously fulfilling his long-discarded dream of learning the shinobi calligraphic art of fuuinjutsu.

For her part, Rina was more than happy to go to the Academy. She told her parents that it was because she wanted to protect the village and her little brother and sister--which was, of course, entirely true. But if pressed now, years later, she'd have to admit that the thought of having access to the ninja-restricted section of the Konoha library had a not insignificant effect on her decision. Even at that young age, growing up in a bookshop had instilled in her a soul-deep love of knowledge, a love only matched by her absolute adoration of her father.

When Kazuo left them two years later, Rina was shattered. Her little brother and sister were too young to quite understand, and her mother had been half-expecting it for a while, but Rina had managed to, with child-like innocence, ignore all the numerous signs that things were not well. Kazuo had initially attempted to make a clean break, thinking it would be better for everyone involved, but Rina wouldn't let it stand: she went out and searched. In the end, Kazuo had to give in and arrange periodic visits with the children.

Rina continued to helplessly adore her father, because she couldn't imagine doing anything else. Her relationship with Shiori, though, got off to quite a rocky start, to say the least. Initially, Rina attempted to ignore Shiori as much as she could when she visited her father, and acted as snippy as only a young girl can. On Rina's ninth birthday, however, Shiori launched a grand plan to gain her affections: she gave Rina a gift of four sai, complete with a promise to teach her how to use them.

Rina tried hard to refuse the lessons and maintain her anger, but it was a difficult thing to be a civilian kid in the Academy competing with all the clan kids who got extra training from their parents every night. Eventually she allowed herself to be coaxed into theraputic sessions of "hit me as hard as you can with those knives," into which Shiori gradually began to sneak bits of actual training. By the time Rina realized what was happening, it was too late--her love of learning (and of hitting things with weapons!) had taken over, and she couldn't go back.

Even considering her extra training with Shiori, though, it didn't quite make up for growing up in an entirely civilian family for so many years. Low on both chakra and general ninja know-how, Rina didn't graduate from the Academy until she was twelve years old. At the same time as she was mastering her ninja basics and preliminary weapons-work, however, she delved neck-deep into the art of fuuinjutsu, sparked as much by her own love of the logic and beauty of it as by her father's prompting.

It was the middle of the war, so no one cared about one Academy student's private interest in sealing techniques, a specialty usually taught master-to-apprentice over the course of years. But as no masters could spare the time to teach her, she did what she could on her own, with the extensive documentation available in the Konoha library and her father's own private collection. By the time she graduated from the academy, she had not only a solid weapons speciality, but also a thorough and instinctive understanding of the basics of seal-work, picked up from brute intuition, knowledge of chakra and calligraphy, and a fair amount of enthusiastic trial and error.

It wasn't the most traditional of educations in the subject, but she got by; it brought her genin team back from the brink of disaster more than a few times. Her sensei and both teammates were good, strong ninja, from clans but not bloodlines, skilled but not specialists, destined for long patrol missions or--in wartime--the devastating chaos of the lines. On paper the four of them were a solid group, dedicated to the service of their village, the kind of all-rounder team that made up the meat of the Konoha ninja army.

The kind of team the war chewed up and swallowed by the dozens. Before breakfast.

There was just the tiny matter of Rina's budding specialty--never enough to make a huge difference, but a much-needed element of surprise that turned the tide in more than a few crucial battles--to distinguish them from the rest of the shinobi rank and file. They never ran out of explosive notes--always in short supply during those years--and the ones they had exploded larger, hotter, with on-request billowing smoke effects or a loud, painful bang. They had remote-control detonators, once she figured out the trick of it, and equipment sealing scrolls aplenty. Given enough time to prepare, she could capture and hold an enemy for several seconds--that number steadily increasing over the years--which was practically an eternity on the shinobi battle-clock.

And when they needed her to pull a miracle out of her scroll-pouch and stoppered bottle of ink--well, oftentimes she did.

Backed by her sensei's solid support and her teammates' strength and ingenuity, it was enough to get them through the war. Afterwards--a chuunin team by then--they stuck together running missions during the overwhelming chaos of reconstruction. During that time, Rina continued to refine her fuuinjutsu knowledge, attempting to gather up the nerve to ask the newly-inducted Yondaime to take her on as an apprentice--her dream ever since she inked her very first exploding tag.

Then came the Kyuubi attack. All the official fuuinjutsu specialists were within the village frantically helping the Fourth Hokage with his research--which was why she was the only one around to see the seals on the North Gate falter and start to fail. Her insane, miraculously non-fatal single-handed patch job, when word got around, was enough to earn her a recruiting visit from the Konoha Seal Corps--though her teammate Kenichi died buying her the time to complete it. Because her team was broken and the Yondaime was dead, she accepted the seal division's offer.

Immediately, the seal division realized what they had: an experienced seal-crafter with a solid intuition and an excellent grasp of both basic and advanced concepts. The usual progression for a new recruit involved a one- to two-year training period and then a gradual rise through the ranks, copying basic blueprints for years before being allowed to do actual research. Rina's rise, compared to that, was meteoric. She graduated from basic training after just a few months, and was doing her own seal research and design shortly after that.

The seal divison offices offered excellent opportunities to meet all the various types of ninja who actually used seals in the real world, and sometimes Rina's involved discussions with them evolved into either officially orchestrated or--more often--informal mini-apprenticeships. It was during one of those apprenticeships, assisting hand-specialist doctor Ito Rokusaburo with seal preparation in return for learning about medical seals, that she encountered Shiranui Genma--at one of the worst times in his life. During his long recovery, they became good friends, and her work on his case (along with Ito-sensei's enthusiastic recommendation) was one of the main contributors to Rina's promotion to special jounin.

And yet, somehow, even with all this, she still found herself getting restless. Though her research was enough to earn her numerous accolades, she'd always done her best work in the field, when presented with an urgent problem--imminent death--and no time at all in which to solve it.

So, she began to take more and more field missions. It earned her a reputation as something of a bizarrity among her colleagues--many of whom took the opportunity presented by their set-for-life desk jobs to let their physical regimen--and their waistlines--sag. But there was significant demand for the few seal-specialists willing to go out into the field, so she was kept quite busy.

Because she worked so well with them, she was often called in as a consultant by the ANBU internals, or as an outside specialist to assist on Black Ops field missions. She became quite a fixture at ANBU HQ, though many of her friends she knew only by code names and the designs on their masks. Still, though she enjoyed working with the ANBU, she had no plans to ever join their ranks; she was quite happy with her work in the village seal division, and her projects were flowering nicely. Despite her eccentricities, she was well-liked by most of her colleagues, and admired by more of them than she'd suspect.

That all changed after the acrimonious breakup of something she hadn't even realized was a relationship in the first place. With the director of the division, no less, who turned out to be as vindictive in his reprisal as he had been glowing in his praise. In the aftermath of her precipitous drop from star researcher to shunned nobody, a transfer suddenly started to look pretty good.

She would claim the reason she chose ANBU was that her family needed the extra money. Which is certainly true; you run a rare-books shop because you like rare books, not because it's a lucrative career. But really, she applied to ANBU because she lives--just a little bit--for the excitement. And nothing sparks your creativity like knowing that you'll die right now if you can't come up with a miracle.

She currently doesn't have any plans to leave ANBU before she's old and crotchety and can't hold her brush anymore--though if nothing else, her past has taught her that people's plans have a habit of changing. But she figures she'll be there until death or boredom takes her away--whichever comes first.

Special Notes:

She is likely to sleep around with a complete lack of shame, unconsciously put her foot in her mouth on a regular basis, and very probably cause more than a few explosions (interpersonal or otherwise).