[Character Information]
Personality:Most people would say that Aki never grew up, and all of those people would be dead wrong. To be accurate, she simply decided at some point to grow down, and as a result the woman became the energetic, cheerful, irresponsible person that she is today. To sum her up with that sentence alone probably wouldn’t be the best thing, however, so let us delve in deeper.
Aki is not a person who lets measly little things like “life” get in the way of what she wants. She makes her choices based on what is best for her, the reality of the situation or the law be damned. Now, this does not necessarily mean that she always breaks the law: the young woman is far too lazy to be running from the authorities every waking moment. But if she happens to be on her way out of a village already, well…what’s a little broken law between friends if she
really wanted that thing in the window?
On that note, the young woman also has a very drifty personality, to match her wandering nature. She does not get attached to things with anything resembling ease, which gives her the dual ability to appear somewhat uncaring but also to keep a level head in situations. This is not to say that she does not
care, however; Aki can get pretty passionate about a cause. It simply is also the case that she has no trouble leaving it behind when she has to.
Coupling that with her lazy sort of cheer, and Aki’s arrival in a new village is usually quite an experience, a short-lived burst of fun which is normally within the confines of the law. However, the young woman is also laidback and lazy, leading to a perpetual tendency of hers to oversleep and arrive late to most things, and to be incredibly nonchalant about the entire fiasco upon her arrival. You know those clichés where a character is very lazy, but also gets their ass in gear when real danger comes up? I will shamelessly say that that’s Aki: she has almost a sixth sense for danger, and can usually stop being lazy just long enough to keep herself and her income intact.
I mention her income because this girl has a thing for money. She loves to earn it, she loves to spend it, she loves to gamble it away – easy come easy go, right? She is no luckier or unluckier than your normal gambler, but she certainly doesn’t have a problem: she can quit anytime she wants to. Just like alcohol, or really good food – it isn’t a vice if you can quit. So basically, yes, Aki is a partier and a firecracker, loud and energetic, and you can get hurt if you stand too close, but she’ll also burn herself out if allowed…at least until the next excuse she gets to throw herself into fun.
Background:If one were to want a quick example of how rough this girl had her younger years, consider: she could field-strip an assault rifle blindfolded by the age of nine, without having any formal training, ninja or otherwise. Aki spent most of her youth in the slums of Ame village, in an orphanage for most of her very young years. A plain old band of brigands had killed her parents, and the girl, still but a few months old at the time, was hidden in the wreckage until miraculously recovered by a passing do-gooder. Aki was put into an orphanage in a part of the Rain Village that very rarely saw the sun for all the industry around, and life was pretty hard.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this girl was not adopted by anyone. After some five years or sitting around and not really doing anything, the institute was visited by one of Ame’s youth gangs, looking to ‘adopt’ people. Many people, Aki included, were seduced into the idea – there were very few grown-ups, they all had cool clothes, and everything was pretty nice in general, or so they claimed.
This gang, like many of the other ones that had developed in the poorer parts of the village, was full of kids committing petty crimes to survive. It was really a force for good in the world, apart from the firefights that rival gangs would get into. For the better part of three years she served as both an equipment handler and a distraction for most jobs, very rarely having to actually get into battle…though she did, from time to time. This is, after all, a world where a seven-year-old can be considered the strongest ninja in the village – surely not too much of a stretch to assume that gangs of similarly aged children could be out there gunning about.
By the time she was nine Aki graduated to fulltime fighter, getting to carry around one of those nice guns and protecting her fellow brothers and sisters – the gang was more of a family than just a bunch of pals. They looked out for each other, celebrated birthdays and mourned funerals, recruited new people into the fold…sure, their “turf” was only a few blocks, but life was relatively good!
Well, apart from the part where they lived in constant danger, the sleeping with one eye open, and the extreme paranoia that filtered through every facet of life…other than that everything was great!
Now, one may wonder why the gang was so full of young people…well, naturally, many of the older children were in ninja training, which took away their ability to actually participate in the group. So too was it with Aki: when she became twelve years old she entered the Academy to start some awesome training, kick some names and take some ass. So she dramatically entered into the Academy…
…and for about two years she found herself faced with something alien: utter and complete failure. None of those crazy things they were talking about really made any sense to her, that Ninjutsu and Genjutsu stuff. Try as she might to learn the arts, they just weren’t clicking in her head, at least not as well as those other things - the guns and the proximity mines and all of those familiar toys of her childhood.
Still, she stuck with the ninja training for those two years, always trying her best but not really making much progress. When the time came that the rest of her class graduated, she was left behind as expected, and it was then that she dramatically chose not to attend classes anymore – she would remain as she had been, a gang queen, shooting people up and keeping turf for herself.
It turned out to be a pretty good idea – a lot of the people she knew when she was younger supported her, and ninja training actually gave her pretty impressive hand-to-hand abilities and agility. She was the undisputed leader of a gang of sub-twelve-year-olds, and life was good…she gained some notoriety, but nothing really major, since the vast majority of her charges went onto the Academy when they could, leaving her with a perpetual squad of greenhorns under her.
This bothered Aki, and when she turned sixteen, after two years of owning the place, she decided to move onto bigger things herself, leaving the village to seek out fame and fortune on her own and offering her ninja-like skills to those in need…and more often, to those with the most money. Four years later finds her with still the same basic job, that of a wandering mercenary…though she seems to have been classified as one of Ame’s Missing-Nin for some reason, which can be problematic at times. She manages pretty well despite that, however – she might not officially be a shinobi but she can still mess up any of those Hunter-Nin.
Maeda Aki
