Temari

[sunshinehistory]

Country/Village: Wind, Sunagakure
Rank: Jounin, Village Ambassador
Age at Game Start: 18
Birthday: August 23rd

Appearance

Standing at only 5’4” tall, Temari is all hard lines and serious presence. She doesn’t look like a stiff breeze couldn’t blow her over as some of the other ninja she knows do. If anything she looks almost immobile by anything less than a force of god. She exudes a presence in the way that some of her peers give off none to those that don’t know her she can come off as threatening and dangerous. She is plain in looks but the way she carries herself and how each motion isn’t wasted calls for people to pay attention.

Unlike many of the other teen ninja her outfits change regularly depending on the role she is playing shifting from a shortened black kimono with slits up the sides and a low neck, to a purple, red, and black number with fishnets and shin and arm guards and green cape. Her hair is ever styled in four blond pigtails and short bangs parted to rest near her temples so her hitai-ate is easy to spot when she wears it on her forehead. She has striking teal eyes making her look even more the picture of her mother, just a harder version of the woman.

Abilities/Powers

Physically speaking Temari is something of a surprise. While her scores don’t show her as much of a challenge, Temari has surprisingly quick reflexes and is more than capable of handling a hand to hand altercation. For such fights she’ll make use of her giant fan as a club and bludgeon her opponent if she is unable to remain at a distance. She is deceptively strong as anyone who does manage to get into a taijutsu fight with her will be quick to find out. She would have to be in order to whips around her tessen as she does in a close quarters fight.

Ninjutsu:
She’s quite strong in her ninjutsu using her wind release in conjunction with her giant metal fan. Naturally, a wind user Temari capable of creating cyclones of wind in a fight or deflecting a weapons that are coming her way. She uses her wind to keep her opponents at bay having a preference for long ranged combat to close. As part of this Temari has a very specific way of communicating just how screwed her opponent is, her fan is marked with three circles that she reveals in sequence. Once all three are revealed, she is capable of manipulating the wind to slicing at her opponents and utterly ruining any chance they have of a victory. Her talent to manipulate the winds has lead to her being named the best wind user in the five great shinobi nations.

Genjutsu:
She isn’t particularly skilled in genjutsu either from never being taught more than the basics or never having a need to know how to use it, however; she has shown that she is capable of deflecting genjutsu inducing sound attacks when she fought Tayuya and subsequently saved Shikamaru in canon fights.

Summoning:
As an added bonus to her already well-known wind release techniques Temari has a summoning contract with the weasel Kamatari. Together they are nearly unstoppable as Kamatari is typically used to do large area damage and simultaneously weaken the target and then Temari will finish them off if they aren’t crushed by a falling tree through mere happenstance first.

Temari’s summoning contract with Kamatari is new. Instead of making the contract prior to her Chunin exams, she only made the contract in the last nine months, feeling that now would be a prudent time to make one having been jounin for long enough. They are still learning to work together when she does summon the weasel. However, this has left her a great deal of room for her to become even more proficient in her wind release techniques when solo and adding Kamatari is only going to make her more deadly.

Tactics:
Mentally, Temari is actually quite intelligent easily assessing the reach of Shikamaru’s shadows in canon, but she doesn’t have a tendency to allow her arrogance get the better of her as was the case in that fight. She is quick to assess most situations and act accordingly looking for weaknesses and holes in her opponent’s defense. She’d much rather take advantage of the sources of information available to her in a fight than waste time that could be used more effectively doing something that could change the outcome.

Personality

At her core Temari is a deeply caring woman for those she is close to. She doesn’t always show it due to how she was raised. Her family means a great deal to her but the distance at which her father kept her and her siblings as she was growing up, combined with the village’s preference for individual merit over familial has helped mold her to emulate her father’s distance to a certain degree. She is close to her brother Kankuro but she keeps her emotions locked up quite frequently which involves her keeping her brothers at a distance a good deal, she has softened some in the last few years, but not enough for people to wonder if she places her family above the village. A great deal of whom she is and what she feels is kept under lock and key, preferring to keep her focus on the big picture rather than the little stuff. She is almost always seen wearing an expression of impassiveness, showing very little or only what is necessary.

To those that don’t know her, Temari comes off as demanding and blunt. She doesn’t make friends easily, nor is she particularly concerned with other people’s tender feelings. She isn’t afraid to speak her mind, voicing her opinions without much of a problem and more than ready to defend them if needed. If a person can’t deal with her they should be able to figure it out very quickly. She is very much aware of what she wants and has no qualms with making that known to those around her. Further she does put on an air of arrogance when meeting new people, amused when others get offended. On the flip side she does recognize when her opinions would be unwelcome and will hold back from voicing them. This has more to do with her concern for the well-being of her village and her training as a shinobi than her consideration for the other person or persons. The fact remains that in some situations speaking against a directive just isn’t wise no matter how strongly she feels towards it.

Generally speaking, she’s confident in herself and her abilities and she wears that confidence openly for all to see. When she speaks she holds an expectation that others will listen and more often than not they do. She holds others to high standards (though not necessarily to the same height as others) to perform and work with her. You know she likes you when she makes gentle (which for Temari is actually about as gentle as a club to the head) nags to continue progressing and growing.

Don’t make the mistake however of thinking that Temari is a soft individual at all. She was raised to be ruthless on the battlefield, unless it is in the parameters of a mission she doesn’t hold back when dealing damage. It is for the betterment of the village that she be ruthless and if necessary cruel in the eyes of the captives taken. Ironically, Temari holds no real love for war. Conflict is okay, conflict is a necessary part of life and she understands that but she is not a strong supporter of war simply to make war. A war of convictions, a war for survival she is quicker to support and even then she will question if there isn’t a better way to solve the issues without a great loss of life. She isn’t a tree-hugging hippie and she is quite rough and dark in comparison to shinobi from some of the more well off villages, but she does have a preference for a universal calm with the occasional bout of necessary squabbling.

Intelligent, Temari rivals some of the most brilliant shinobi of the other villages. She learns quickly when placed in a new situation and formulates plans around the information. In a fight this comes in especially handy as she studies the patterns of movement of her opponents and the extent of the techniques in order to make judgment calls on how to attack and just how much risk she can afford. She isn’t a big fan of stupid risk. Instead she much prefers make use of the resources at her disposal if there are any, or figure it out on her own if there aren’t. This has worked out very well for her in the past.

Her intelligence and dislike for pointless conflict is one of the reasons she makes such a good diplomat. She might be blunt, but her directness doesn’t leave much question to what she’s after. She’s plenty capable of discretion and she will use it if she deems it necessary, primarily as a tactic to feel out how the other party will react to her particular style. She is committed to making contracts that will benefit Suna and she will sometimes tone down her less desirable personality traits to ensure those contracts can be made. But it must be deemed a necessity first.

History

Temari’s life doesn’t vary a great deal from canon until about four years before game start when she enters the chunin exams. The Kazekage never made a deal with Orochimaru to attack Konoha during the chunin exams when his children were entered. This would have been especially hard since that particular exam was in Sunagakure that year. As such the Kazekage remains alive and well with Gaara still a regular shinobi instead of becoming Kazekage in his place.

Her relationship with her father is still fairly complicated. She has a hefty number of issues with his distance while she was a child as well as his reputation getting in the way of her making friends as a child. Okay that last part wasn’t entirely his fault but it didn’t help any. But the fact that he wasn’t killed by Orochimaru when she was 15 has translated into her maintaining a level of ruthlessness that most ninja of other villages probably wouldn’t find all that appealing. When in a fight she is a take no prisoners sort of person unless it is strictly ordered that she should.

As part of the change in the timeline, the Suna exam marks when Temari was promoted to chunin for her skillful demonstration of wind release chakra over the course of the final matches. It is the time in between her academy graduation and promotion that are filled with her remaining out of the usual genin mission pools and shadowing her father through his duties to learn various diplomacy skills needed to maintain relationships with the other shinobi villages. When she wasn’t shadowing the Kazekage, she received private instruction from Baki to help hone her tessen abilities and her taijutsu skills. In the end her promotion seems to work out quite well for all involved as well as her team moved on and up from there without much problem.

The following two years were spent running a variety of missions and training, nearly half of which are diplomatic missions overseen by an active ambassador in a kind of apprenticeship. She’s grown even more skilled in her wind release techniques with her ninjutsu becoming even more formidable than before. It would be until two years after her promotion to chunin that Baki would make the recommendation that she be promoted to jounin. The testing was difficult and left her drained as one might expect but she passed.

At first she was sent out primarily on diplomatic missions having shown a knack for putting what she’s learned and observed into practice prior to her promotion. In the last eighteen months she’s been moved to primary ambassador to Konoha and has worked tirelessly alongside the other villages to make the recent chunin exams go off without much of hitch and dealt a great deal with the security arrangements for the participants of her village as well as for her father.

Since becoming an ambassador, Temari very rarely has the opportunity to take on combat missions, but when she does she savors them. Because of the added difficulty involved with jounin missions, Temari sought out a summoning contract in the last eight months or so and eventually made one with Kamatari whose wind affinity only strengthens the power of her own wind attacks.