sunshinehistory

Country/Village: Fire, Konohagakure
Rank: Jounin
Age at Game Start: 34
Birthday: ??

Appearance

She is slightly below average height, with broad shoulders and a fairly solid build. She wears glasses and a comb with pearls in her hair, which she typically keeps braided in a tight braid that reaches the small of her back. She obviously has a variety of clothing for her various infiltration missions, but she tends to dress in blues when possible. Her nose is on the long side, with a few scars and bumps from having been broken a few times during the war. She has green eyes and dark hair.

Abilities/Powers

Genjutsu:
She is a Genjutsu specialist with only passable taijutsu skills. Her unique specialty is genjutsu that affects the subconscious mind, it is much more difficult for the enemy to detect when compared to regular genjutsu, but has two major drawbacks. The first is that it isn't capable of restraining an enemy's movements the way regular genjutsu is, and the second is that it usually requires a direct connection to the enemy to initiate (though not to maintain).

She has a special technique she has developed for infiltration that projects familiarity into the minds around her, so that people feel like they vaguely know here even if they aren't quite sure from where. Obviously this doesn't help her get into secure areas, but it helps keep people from spreading the word there is a stranger in the village (and is incredibly useful for getting past guard dogs trained to bark at 'strangers'). It has absolutely no effect on anyone who is ACTUALLY familiar with her, of course.

Taijutsu/Ninjutsu:
To mitigate the range weakness somewhat, she uses two chains infused with her chakra in battle, as well as developing several Water Style ninjutsu that are designed to use water as a conduit for her chakra.

Speaking of which, she is moderately competent with water style techniques, though mostly as a conjunction to her genjutsu skills rather than something she can rely on by itself. Her specialty is a technique that releases a small cloud of mist from her mouth (the size determined by how much chakra she is willing to spend) that is infused with her chakra and can be used as a medium for any of her "contact" genjutsu. She can also use her chakra to alter the mist to have the properties of one of the drugs whose composition she has memorized. It doesn't have the full effect, but is often enough to supplement her genjutsu. However, the composition changing requires intense concentration and familiarity with the substance, so there are only a few she can use quickly, and the cloud itself requires so much chakra she can only use it twice per day safely.

Summons:
She has a summoning contract with the owls and can summon a small owl for carrying messages. Once per month she can summon an owl large enough to carry her. (He only agrees to show up once a month, so if she tries for him more often than that, she gets the little one)

Personality

She is very curious, almost to the point of being nosy. Always wanting to know what everyone is up to and why. This...did not endear to others as a child. And though she has learned to make friends, it is still something she struggles with. It's not in her nature to form strong bonds quickly, so usually the other party has to initiate.

Similarly, she is very much reactive rather than active. She responds to situations with the most thought out action she can think of rather than taking action directly herself. This can cause her to be overly cautious and miss key opportunities. On the other hand, when something gives her a cause to act, she is capable of split second decisions.

She loves a good argument, and will sometimes go out of her way to be contrary just to get someone going. She can get quite heated, but doesn't really hold grudges. She is really good at putting emotional distance between herself and past events. Having seen so many people struggling with their emotional baggage, she tries to tie herself down with as little of her own as possible.

When it comes to her ethics, she has a fairly old school mentality. The village and the country come before personal concerns, but she takes the stance that if addressing a personal concern will make the ninja more effective at their duties, then by all means, they should do so. One worrying facet of her ethical outlook is that, after years of experiencing people's motivations, she doesn't really judge people, or view even the most vile threat as inherently bad. Quite the contrary, the more outrageous or "evil" the act, the more she is driven by curiosity to understand the motivation behind it. She doesn't often have the chance to indulge this curiosity, but it's a recurring issue that keeps building in strength.

She is very self-aware, mostly out of necessity, because she needs to know her own mind totally before mucking around in someone else's subconscious. She tries to find time every so often to, with a friend standing by for help, cast a genjutsu on herself that forces her to confront her own insecurities.

History

Annis was her mother's only child, born in the middle of the night and as feisty as a baby could be. Her early years were unremarkable, her father died during a mission, and then a few years later her mother remarried. She didn't bond quickly with her new stepfather, but then, she didn't seem to bond quickly with anyone. She had a lot of people she liked to play with, but she didn't make connections and friends as easily as her classmates.

During her years in the Academy, this trait continued to hold her back. The other kids would make friendships and drive each other to go farther and do better, but she would always just kind of be watching. Involved in the laughter without really being part of it. Eventually, everything changed when a new girl joined the class. Her name was Shara, and her exuberance was infectious. She quickly broke through Annis' shell until she knew what real friendship was.

When she was fourteen, war broke out and losses were heavy on all sides. Being a genjutsu specialist, her chakra control was excellent and she started learning medical abilities to help keep her allies alive. Though her memory and intelligence were more than up to the task of learning anatomy and physiology, and her chakra control razor sharp from years of genjutsu practice...she was never more than an average healer. She was fine as a field medic, which was a needed skill set, but she always wished she could do more.

As the war dragged on, she ended up noticing a building problem. Though her own unit (being infiltration specialists) saw little combat itself, she began to notice growing mental stress in those from other units that she was occasionally able to treat. And she saw that as the stress built and all the trauma of the war began to get to people, they would invariably begin to make mistakes...to die in situations that they should have been able to handle easily.

She felt a growing certainty that the real problem was that no matter how much someone healed the ninja body, the ninja mind was going untreated. Their training in suppressing their own emotions for the sake of the mission was causing all the horrors of war to fester beneath the surface, leading to mistakes, personality changes, and even sending some down dark roads.

So she began working on a solution, devoting all her free time to trying to find a way to combine genjustu, which controlled chakra in another's mind, and healing techniques. She studied with some of the healers from a clan that used mind connection abilities, who was at least willing to provide some guidance, although obviously he wouldn't reveal any of the direct secrets of his clan.

Over time, she managed to develop a set of techniques unique to her, that tapped into the subconscious mind rather than conscious perception as most genjutsu did. With these techniques she was able to enter the subconscious mind to heal festering mental trauma (or do things like extract information by observing the targets dreams, although information obtained with this method needs to be interpreted carefully). In time, she developed this technique into a signature style all her own, though it would be many years before it was fully refined.

Eventually, of course, the war ended and things went back to a more peaceful existence. Though her new techniques were still useful for mind healing for a time after the end of the war, eventually everything "useful" had been done and she was placed back on infiltration and information extraction missions. This meant, of course, that she spent little time in the village, often spending long months of observation in enemy territory.

Now, she has returned to the village for a well earned rest after spending six months in rural villages locating and removing an information network set up by bandits to locate plum targets.