Points: 7/712
Perks: Heirloom [0/110] - Heirloom [0/110] -
Sunakimi Satori
S-rank Nukenin - The Black Rabbit of Kumogakure
Appearance || Personality || History
| Satori is 19 years old and stands at a lithe 6' 6" and 175 lbs. His dark brown hair falls just past his ears in the sides and back, and hangs just past his eyebrows in the front. His eyes are silver blue. He has a slim, boney build with skin the color of pale sand. Satori wears a white robe with a dark navy skirt. The collar of the robe has an inch wide hem the same color as the skirt, which closes partway down his chest, exposing his collarbone. The skirt hangs to his ankles and has dark cream colored horizontal stripes which are spaced about three inches apart. He wears a pair of white tabi and black wood sandals with two 3-inch tall slats that span the entire width of the sole, spaced 2 inches apart. Over his robe he wears a dark brown silk kimono, embroidered with gold-thread filigree and lotus blooms. There's also a crescent moon embroidered on the left-front of the kimono, over Satori's chest, in the same gold thread. The kimono has a two inch wide shawl collar which runs the full length of the fabric. The most distinctive part of Satori's wardrobe is his rabbit mask. The mask covers the top half of his face and wraps to the back of his head. It has painted a darker shade of navy than his skirt, and appears black in certain lighting. On the left side of the mask, just behind Satori's temple, he has fixed a decorative three loop knot and lotus flower. |
| Satori has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and spends the majority of his free time self-educating, a habit which stems in part from his tendency to trust books more than people. He reads any and every book that he can get his hands on. The young shinobi is greatly interested in the human mind and human behavior and reads psychology and sociology texts often. He often has a great interest in legends, fables, and historical texts. He supplements his reading with people watching, seeing it as a great way to gain insight on human behavior. His habits of studying people often make him seem cold and calculating. Because of his extensive studies, Satori feels that he is exceptionally skilled at picking apart the desires, motivations, and intents of other people. Satori’s incessant studying has made him rather unpersonable and he is often described as being rude, cold, and awkward. During his years as the Enchougenma Jinchuuriki, Satori took on aspects of the Genma such as habitual dishonesty and paranoia. If there's anything good to be said about his loss of the beast, it's that these things no longer pervasively effect him. Satori has a great deal of hobbies. While he was taught these things by his grandfather, Sumi, to instill in him a sense of modesty, the older he gets he tends to see himself as better than others because of his varied skill base. He tends a small vegetable garden, cooks good meals for himself, and stitches most of his own clothing. He typically resorts to buying things only if he is pressed for time. This has given him an incredible fondness for creating things: he makes simple instruments and figurines from wood, writes poetry, and practices origami, among other things. Both Satori’s fighting and life styles require him to be as free from tension as possible, and so he quite often practices yoga and meditation. He believes that relaxation is one of very few worthwhile indulgences and can often be found sunbathing in the park or quietly watching stars from a rooftop. While he loves to relax, Satori is by no means lazy. He takes his crafting and his duties very seriously and does his best to avoid distraction. Satori’s grandfather has ingrained him with a great appreciation for life, no matter how small. He feels that everything with life has the purpose, the desire, and the right to that life, whether it be a blade of grass, a small insect, or a human. This does not mean that he is above killing, just that he refrains from it without good reason. He believes that the balance of nature can be a very fragile one and to tamper with it should require a great deal of thought. He thinks that life is something to be cherished at length but mourned briefly; it's better to honor life through continuation than to dwell on the lost. Even though Satori sees himself as very self-controlled and independent, these aspects of his personality are often pushed to unhealthy extremes. He’s often very anxious and self-conscious (he would assert that he’s “self-aware”). He pretends not to but is often very concerned with what other people, particularly those that he cares about or has great respect for, think of him. He’s aware of these issues and attempts to counterbalance his anxieties with meditation. Being the host of the Enchougenma had a very negative impact on Satori’s self-esteem, something that he has not, and may not, fully recover from. Hyeonmu is a very insecure creature and has alway felt like a reject among the other great beasts. This insecurity leaks over into Satori’s consciousness, both passively and actively, which gave him a near constant feeling of inadequacy. This caused Satori’s anxiety issues to grow much worse, leaving him rather on edge and reclusive. When losing the Enchougenma, these things reached a peak, causing Satori to lose all self-worth. However, instead of admitting this to anyone, he simply adopted a morose and aloof demeanor and outlook on life. While he would one day love to return to his home in Kumo, he secretly fears that he will never again be good enough. |
ChildhoodShow Satori is the only child of Yasei Inkari, a well-respected (if unextraordinary) Kumogakure chuunin, and Ran, a sickly citizen with no surname. This discrepancy in social value created a great deal of tension within the larger Yasei family as they did not agree with Inkari's decision, seeing Ran as nothing more than "common." Even after the pair had married, the Yasei family refused to allow Ran to take the family surname. They did, however, see it fit for their child to take the name so long as he pursued a life as a shinobi. Satori had a great deal of love and admiration for his father and the work that he did, and wanted very much to be accepted into the Yasei family. In his childhood naivete, Satori believed that earning the respect of the Yasei family for himself would also earn it for his mother, and bring a calm to his stormy family life. Sadly, Satori's father was killed while on assignment the year before Satori was set to begin his studies at the academy. His mother, whose sickness grew much worse in the months following Inkari's death, felt it appropriate to relinquish Satori's guardianship to her father, Sumi, and the two of them moved into his home. Sumi's lifestyle and philosophy often caused tension within Satori's new home. Sumi always stressed to Satori the importance of not falling to the arrogance of the Yasei family: to see his service as a humble and necessary one, not as a demarcation of status. Satori spurned this advice in his childhood as he saw it as an attempt to muddy the memory of his father and the family, both of which Satori held in very high esteem. Satori also viewed Sumi's carefree demeanor and art focused life as lazy and unproductive, foil to how he viewed his future life as a shinobi, which was centered on work ethic and improvement. It wasn't long after moving in with Sumi that Ran succame to her illness, leaving Satori an orphan and in the custody of his grandfather. With her death, Satori came to rely on his fantasy future as a Kumogakure shinobi and of attaining the Yasei surname. He became obsessive for some months, reading every book on ninjutsu that he could find. He became particularly interested in the ancient entities known as Genma, chakra phantoms of enormous power, and the Jinchuuriki, the legendary shinobi who had managed to claim their power as their own. This spurred within him a childish and delusional desire to become a legend in his own right, something that he felt would be facilitated by his induction into his father's family. He registered for the academy with a high chest and high hopes, expecting a large and ceremonious welcome from his family, which would allow him to escape his undesirable life with Sumi. But on the day of his official induction to the academy, nothing. He waited days, nothing. Months passed before he received any word at all, which came in the form of a simple letter from the family stating that he now had permission to change his name. No ceremony, no invitation to live with the family, no handshake. In fact, the letter was not even signed by anyone from the Yasei family. Satori fell into a nearly desolate depression. All of these hopes and dreams that he had put so much stock into had turned out false. The Sand KingShow This lasted for some time before Sumi pulled Satori aside, took him outside to the small tea garden that the old man maintained at the backside of his house. He sat the young student down at a table. On the table rested a variety of objects: an empty planting pot, a small bowl of seeds, a jar of sand, a glass of water, a small bag of dirt, and the urn that held his mother's ashes. "Have you ever heard the story of Sunakimi?" Sumi asked him. Satori responded simply, with a short and gruff "No." "Ah," he said "it's a story I think you should hear. "Many countless years ago, long before I was born, long before the village was here, long before the time of shinobi. Long, in fact, before these mountains stood, this land was nothing but flat plains lands. A single man moved to the flats with dreams of starting a farm. He didn't dream of anything grand, simply to provide for himself and for the family that he hoped to start." Sumi opened the bag of dirt and began working it with his hands to loosen it up. "I don't know what this has to do with anything," Satori said. The old man ignored him and continued the story. "But just a few weeks before his yield, a great storm came and washed away all of his crops. The man headed back to town with what little money he had left to buy supplies to repair his home and begin planting new crops. It was there that he met the woman he would marry, and the two of them lived happily for a few years on the man's small farm. That is, until the great storm came again, and washed away his crops. But this time, the great storm also took the man's wife, leaving him alone to raise their children." Sumi undid the lid of the urn and poured the ashes of his daughter in with the dirt and began to knead them together with his hands. Satori, a stubborn child who, in his deification of the Yasei family, would not allow himself to speak up for the remains of his mother. Even though he felt immediate anger, he blamed her for the nameless life he lived, and said nothing. "And so the man vowed to never again let the great storm wash his life away. Not far from his home, just a few hours walk, was a small desert area. He would walk there every evening with two empty buckets and return with two buckets full of sand. He would dump both buckets of sand at the edge of his farmland. After a week, he had a pile of sand big enough to stand on. After a month, a pile of sand big enough to lie down on. After a year, he had a pile of sand big enough to plant crops on. After a few more years, the great storm came again and washed away his home. His children survived, but they were angered by their father's insistence on a clearly unlivable land, and they abandoned him in the rain. But when the sun came, the man's crops stood tall and proud atop his hill of sand. The storm waters had not been deep enough to wash them away." Sumi dumped the jar of sand into his dirt and began to mix it in with his hands. "So the man continued every day to bring two buckets of sand and expand his growing land. After a few years, he sold a small portion of his property to another family, as it was more land than he needed to support himself. He showed the man the trick of the sand, and together, every day, they hauled four buckets of sand to add to the hill. After some months, another family moved to the land, another family helped him move the sand. And then another, and then another, and before long, the man found himself in a small town surrounded by heaping mounds of sand and tall and healthy crops. While the storm had taken his family from him, through sheer force of will he was able to defy the storm and build a new family. As the man grew old, he grew happy. As the man grew old, as did the mountains around him. By the time the man died the mountains of sand had hardened to mountains of stone, so far above the storm plains that they poked through the clouds and the rains no longer fell on him, so far above that he could no longer see the shambles of his old home below." Sumi poured the mixture of dirt, sand, and ash into the flower pot. "Those mountains, of course, are these mountains." Sumi smiled at the boy, smoothing the top of the soil with his hands before using his thumb to make a small hole. "And while we've all forgotten the man's real name, we've not forgotten how hard he worked, or how he had created something from nothing." Sumi placed a single hibiscus seed in the hole. "We remember him as Sunakimi. Do you know what that name means?" Satori, by this point, had begun to cry. Something about the story opened him, made him realize just how much he missed his mother. "The Sand King," he said. "That's correct," said Sumi. "He started with nothing but an empty field and two buckets of sand. But we don't remember him as the man with an empty field and two buckets of sand. We remember him as a King." The old man smoothed the dirt over the hole, covering the seed, and pushed the planting pot towards Satori. Satori wiped his eyes and removed the seed. He used his hands to gather some of the soil into a small mound in the center of the pot before replanting it. He then poured the jar of water around the mound, leaving the seed undisturbed. He watched as the moisture crept up the soil until it completely covered the dirt. Within a few weeks of watering the pot this way, after some time, a small hibiscus sprout began to grow and Sumi taught him the art and patience of tending plants. What started with a single hibiscus tree turned into Satori gradually accepting what he saw as his grandfather's "lazy" lifestyle. While he spent his days studying and training to become a shinobi, he spent his evenings learning to grow, learning to tend, to craft, to write. Due to his split responsibilities, Satori was never the best student but was far from the worst and graduated near the top of his class. The day he completed his academy training, the day he finally achieved his dream of becoming a shinobi, was the day he took the name Sunakimi. Chuunin ExamShow His genin years gave Satori the sense of community he had never received from the Yasei family. He was approached by his academy instructor, a chuunin, who offered to guide and mentor him along with another student from his academy group. The three of them met regularly to practice and train on "core" skills while his instructor arranged sessions with higher ranking or more specialized shinobi for particular fields of interest. While Satori's general skill level was nothing of particular note, the instructor found himself impressed on a regular basis with the genin's dedication. When it came time for his Chuunin exam, Satori was paired with a Chuunin proctor and assigned a mission: it was his job to escort a tradesman through a mountain range known for harboring a decent number of never-do-wells and bandits. As this particular merchant happened to be transporting some rather expensive spices on this journey, he found it worth his money to hire a shinobi bodyguard. And, of course, the trade cart was attacked by a pair of scruff looking thieves looking to make off with the trader's goods and sell them in town. The two men were hardly any older than Satori, each of them brandishing swords clearly not tailored to them. Probably stolen from a trade cart. After assessing to two, Satori was rather confident that he could dispatch them with little trouble, and so he stated very forwardly that he though so and gave the pair a chance to retreat. They didn't take the opportunity and engaged the young genin. At the time, Satori wielded two katanas, and the thieves were not prepared to deal with his erratic fighting style. While it wasn't as easy as he had thought it would be to beat them down enough to force them to retreat, Satori escaped with hardly any injuries at all, the only one of note being a pair of cuts on his face which left a large X shaped scar. After dispatching the bandits, the trade cart proceeded to town without incident. The SealingShow It wasn't long after his promotion to Chuunin that Satori received a strange message directly from the Raikage's office, telling him to report to the tomb of the first Raikage. When he arrived he was greeted by a man named Ote Syaoran, a kind and light-hearted man who asked the young man if he knew anything of the ancient entities known as Genma- and before he had even been asked the next question he knew what it would be. Satori had been chosen as the next Jinchuuriki of Kumogakure no Sato. Satori was, of course, flattered. Honored. Thrilled. But also terrified. The question was not, in fact, a question at all, but an order passed down direct from the Raikage. He was not allowed to say no- not that he would have, of course, but sometimes the illusion of free will can offer some comfort. The Jounin in the room lead him to a sealing ceremony that quickly turned into a power struggle between the phantom and the shinobi- which one could convince the Chuunin to do what they wanted? In the end, however, Satori's control won out and the beast was successfully sealed. It wasn't long after this that Satori's grandfather passed, naturally and peacefully. Satori gave his grandfather the same rite that the two of them had given Satori's mother. Just as his grandfather had intended, Satori could not help but draw comparisons between his own losses and the those of the fabled Sand King. He vowed to his grandfather, to himself, that this beast would be his blessing. It would be his two buckets of sand on which he would build higher the mountains of Kumogakure no Sato. Post WarShow Shortly after participating in a pivotal battle of the Kumogakure war effort, Satori became incredibly ill. It was initially assumed to be a late manifestation of the illness that took his mother's life, but closer evaluation revealed that his body had begun to reject the Enchougenma, likely in result to the stresses of Kumo’s war efforts and his first instance of taking a human life. There were two choices: either let the Enchougenma eat his body from the inside before eventually giving out, unleashing the beast and killing Satori, or perform a controlled extraction, returning the beast safely to the jar and possibly saving Satori's life. The choice, of course, was no choice at all. Satori was taken back to the tomb of the first Raikage, where the Genma was extracted to await a new potential host. This caused Satori to lose sight of himself for quite some time. He lost both of his parents while very young, and his grandfather just a few prior. He had never had a real name, his general social awkwardness and dedication to the Genma excluded him from being too deeply involved in the social circles of Kumo. The Enchougenma was his life, and that too had been taken from him. He felt as though the storm had managed to finally topple mountains. For some time, Satori withdrew into a deep and persistent depression. After being released from the hospital he spent most of his days in bed. He didn't read, he didn't create, he didn't train. Until the day that Satori stepped onto his back porch for a smoke, where he found that the hibiscus plants which he had planted in the ashes of his mother and grandfather had died. He realized that while he wasted away in bed, he had let himself fall short of his personal responsibilities. In that moment he realized that he had let himself become defined not on his own merits, but on the fact that he had been chosen to carry the Enchougenma. He had forgotten about his accomplishments prior to the sealing, his skills and his crafts. He realized that he was not chosen simply for his compatibility, but for his potential. The loss of the former did not erase the latter. After the loss of the Genma, Satori became restricted to his taijutsu and basic ninjutsu. He had spent his young adult years throwing himself into mastering the skills provided to him by the Enchougenma. While still officially a Chuunin in rank, his loss nearly all of his ninjutsu left him with a skillset on par with many of the Genin in the village. So he started from the bottom. He signed on for every low-ranking mission he was accepted for, until he was again trusted enough to leave the village. A simple caravan escort, protecting a shipment of goods from Kumo to a small outlying village. His presence was mostly meant as a deterrent to any bandits or missing-nin. Once goods were delivered, Satori simply disappeared. He made his way to the outer edges of Lightning Country, with a promise to himself that he would return to Kumogakure once he felt confident in his ability to once again serve the village with power and promise. Officially, he would have been marked as a Nukenin. And while he did not wear his Hitai-ate for the sake of anonymity, he did not scar the Kumogakure symbol as was accustomed. He spent a number of years traveling in relative solitude, something which the awkward young man found relieving when compared to the social nature of life in the village. He mostly passed himself off as a drifting ronin, while practicing his ninjutsu in solitude to avoid raising suspicion to his true origin. He donned a mask, clothing more typical of samurai than of shinobi. He sustained himself on odd jobs as he traveled from village to village. |