Name: Sarutobi Asuma
Age: 20 at Hikouto Coup
Birthday: October 18, Sandaime Year 13
Rank: Jounin
Service: Currently working himself back into active jounin status.
Ninja ID: 010829
Physical Appearance
Height: 6’3”
Weight: 200 lbs
Blood Type: O
Hair: Dark brown, close enough to black that there’s little difference except in very bright light. Short enough to get away with hand-combing, but long enough to make it obvious he’s getting away with hand-combing.
Eyes: Brown, the pupil ringed with a golden sunburst. Ever since the attempted coup of the Daiymo, perpetually exhausted; he hasn’t been sleeping well, for all that he’s constantly trying to sleep.
Skin: No different from any other career ninja – some color where the sun hits, not where it doesn’t, and scars whether you like ‘em or not. Hands are callused from years of taijutsu and, more recently, his tekko.
Facial Features: As he’s finished up his transition into puberty, his resemblance to his father – when the Sandaime was younger, at least – has gotten rather obvious. Same eyes, same nose, same expressive mouth – put them next to each and they’d have passed as brothers. Perpetual cigarette. Has opted on growing out a beard rather than being clean-shaven, but keeps it neat and short. No mustache – you have any idea how stained that gets when you drink as much coffee as a ninja does?
Other Physical Traits: Tall, well-muscled but not as broad as he could be – he’s built for speed but comes with a hell of a punch. Will almost certainly put on more weight once he grows out of the teen-boy-that’s-constantly-starving phase of his life. Not too interested in posture, which tends to hide his true height.
Handedness: Ambidextrous in most everything that does not involve a pen; left-handed otherwise.
Voice: Baritone. Already developing the burr of a pack-a-day smoker.
Identifying Marks: ANBU tattoo on left upper arm. Assorted scars from his career – surprisingly, nothing that really stands out as unusual.
Usual Clothing: Whatever passes the smell test, at least outside uniform – the epitome of a single bachelor. Awesome leather jacket of awesome that has sadly been retired due to it accumulating more holes than fabric; has his eye out for a new one. Outside his beard he honestly doesn’t think that much about his appearance.
Living Situation: Since his return from the capital of Fire Country, he’s been staying in a spare room at his sister’s house. He plans to make that housing situation as temporary as possible. Is literally living out of a duffel bag at the moment; he has next to no personal possessions not directly related to his work.
Skills
Fighting Style: Taijutsu and ninjutsu. When it comes to working in a team he’s primarily a brawler, generally the first to wade into a fight in order to soften the targets up for the next wave of fighters. Solo, however, he has a ridiculous bag of ninjutsu to choose from, covering most of the elemental range. He can do short- and long-range, and is much speedier than he has any right to be, especially considering how long he can drag his feet before he gets the laundry done.
Preferred Weapons: Hands, kunai, and most recently a modified set of bladed tekko that were a gift from one of his late Twelve companions. Bittersweet memories on that one.
Special Jutsu: His primary affinity is for wind, secondary for fire, which also happen to be his two favorite elements jutsu-wise. His skill with earth jutsu is also quite good, but water and particularly lightning are elements he could definitely use work on.
What has become his signature is the heian, wherein he channels chakra through the special metal in his tekko in order to increase its edge or its length. As the chakra itself is nearly invisible, opponents often think they’ve avoided his blows only to find themselves missing a finger, a limb, or at least a large quantity of blood. He is capable of extending the length of the chakra-blade to as long as a sword, saving him the redundancy of multiple weapons, and also of sharpening the edge until it can even cut steel, though he saves that for special occasions – it’s a lot of chakra to waste on a potentially long fight.
Weaknesses: Genjutsu, to his annoyance. While he’s relatively effective at detecting, dispersing, and casting low-level genjutsu, the more upper-level jutsu are beyond him. Tends to be unnecessarily reckless on solo missions; works best with the needs of a group to ground him.
Service Record: Entered the Academy at 5, graduated at 10; a decent student, although it was clear he had little patience for extended bookwork. Chuunin at 12. Was frequently used as a messenger during the war, due to his speed, but he also saw extensive action at the front-lines of the battle. Promoted to jounin in the wake of the Kyuubi’s attack and the death of both parents, at seventeen. Took and passed the ANBU trials at 18, working Hunter or Field ops division as needed, until he was selected for the Daimyo’s Twelve a little under a year later. This lasted for just over a year, until a coup was staged by half the Twelve to replace the Daimyo and current Hokage. Asuma was the only one of the Twelve who survived, successfully preventing the coup from succeeding but losing a close-knit team and warriors he looked up to in the process. After jumping at the first chance to return to Konoha, he’s been rattling around without any clear plans for his future. Maybe he can find his way back into ANBU…
Personality
General Personality Traits: Extensive experience with being an obnoxious, mouthy little shit; however, the time he spent with the Twelve has, to a large extent, forced him to grow up and re-evaluate his external personality. In that respect he’s mellowed out considerably since he left, and is now far more prone to thinking over both his words and his actions before he executes them. His patience and ability to deal with bullshit without blowing up has likewise grown considerably. Manners and the importance of actually using them have finally penetrated. He even remembers to keep his elbows off the table at dinner now. Well, most of the time.
To those who didn’t know him before he was selected for the Twelve, he’s a quiet, relatively well-mannered ninja who could stand to socialize more and smoke less. To those who did, he’s clearly a plant with an very, very good cloaking genjutsu. In reality he’s still working through the trauma of having to kill (and watch be killed) friends and mentors he’d once thought were closer than family, and doesn’t have much mental energy to multitask outside that on a bad day. On a good day he can be pretty damn funny, as well as an unrepentant flirt.
Quirks: For the love of everything holy, do NOT dog-ear any books he might lend you. That’s a killing offense.
Sexual Orientation: More or less straight, but usually isn’t opposed to other flavors
Gifts/Talents: Smarter than he lets on. Has a real talent for strategy, for examining multiple courses of actions and evaluating the different paths he, his teammates, and his enemies may take. Imaginative – has so far discovered 253 legitimate ways to avoid doing laundry.
Flaws: (He has flaws?) Difficulty applying his talent for strategy to life off the battlefield – particularly when he should keep his mouth shut. This has improved considerably over the past year, but could still use some work.
Religion and Philosophy: Chiriku tried pretty hard to convert him to Buddhism, but it didn’t really work; doesn’t really put much thought or care into gods that aren’t actively trying to kill him.
Likes and Loves: Full-flavor cigarettes. Yakiniku. Good books. Cloud watching on a nice day. Shogi, go, mahjong and other brain games. The wilderness surrounding Konoha.
Dislikes and Hates: Menthol cigarettes. Has been convinced that vegetables can be both edible and delicious, except for asparagus; asparagus is evil. Unnecessary rudeness. Not fond of comparison to his father, even when it’s positive; he’ll obviously never measure up to that standard. Iwa-nin and Kumo-nin.
Fears: Growing close to another person, only to be forced to kill them.
Dreams and Ambitions: Never really had any, outside being good at his job and not letting any mistakes get his teammates killed. Until recently, he thought maybe he’d like to be the commander of the Twelve at some point. Not so much anymore.
Relationships
Family: His parents, the Sandaime and his wife, are both dead, courtesy of the Kyuubi. He has one older sister, by ten years, whom he’s never had much of a relationship with – she was already out of the house by the time he was old enough to hold a conversation. Even when he was young he wasn’t that close to his extended family; after the death of his parents, any contact he’s had with them has dropped to virtually nothing. His genin team, ANBU, and the Twelve have been the closest thing to family for him for a long time. Of the three, only ANBU is left.
Friends: Due to the aforementioned issues with learning when to shut the hell up, his close friendships generally depend on the other person being thick-skinned and able to give as good as they get. Prior to the Twelve, probably the person who best fits this description is Genma, who went through the ANBU Trials at the same time and served as a rookie with him on the same team. Genma is one of the few who knows that Asuma actually did sign the contract with Enma, but due to his mouth has been restricted to only summoning tiny, albeit poisonous monkeys. This has led to inside jokes about how Asuma lets Genma milk his monkeys. (Don’t ask.)
Lovers: Not known for long-term relationships, particularly not sexual ones. Friends who also hook up occasionally are the best, but even those he wouldn’t consider ‘lovers’. Knows better than to sleep with teammates, but some rules are meant to be broken.
Hero: Sarutobi Sasuke, maybe, when he was young, and the first and second Hokage. The kind of heroes every ninja-to-be usually has. After being invited to serve as one of the Twelve, Kazuma – an amazing ninja with incredible skills who was actually human and reachable. But that only lasts about a year. Asuma’s a little tired of heroes right now.
Enemies: Asuma is, generally speaking, an exceptionally laid-back guy, capable of casually getting along with almost everyone (as long as they can handle his mouth). So, outside someone succeeding in making him hate them, the only real enemies he has are the enemies of Konoha.
Personal History
Asuma was born relatively late in the Sandaime’s life, unexpected but not unwelcome, and from the first day proceeded to annoy the hell out of everyone.
Despite his parent’s best attempts to reign him in, Asuma was a wild child, with a strong stubborn streak that had him breaking rules left and right with little regard for the consequences. Behaving properly was very low on his list of priorities; he didn’t particularly care if his actions reflected poorly on his father. He was, after all, still a young child. What was the point of being young if you couldn’t get away with breaking stuff now and then?
At five he was shoveled off to the academy, probably much to his mother’s relief, and from there his sometimes manic energy was successfully funneled into the war effort. He graduated at ten near the top of his class, primarily in taijutsu and ninjutsu, and with his shiny new hite-ate and genin-team, went off to break more useful things. Like enemy-nin heads. At twelve he earned a battle-ground promotion to chuunin and a warning to seriously start doing something about that mouth, because he’d never make jounin if he couldn’t learn when to keep it shut, no matter who his father was.
He must have succeeded, because he was pretty sure his promotion to jounin, mere days after the Sandaime’s death, wasn’t done out of pity.
Eventually he drifted into the ANBU Trials, like many talented and eager kids did as soon as they were old enough. He actually passed, and had his sometimes abrasive personality further tempered by the strict rules and regulations of the elite ninja squad. Asuma loved the atmosphere and discipline of ANBU, despite his historic disregard for authority, finding the close-knit group probably the closest thing he’d ever call family. In fact, he strongly considered declining the invitation to serve as one of the Daimyo’s Twelve precisely because it would require him to leave this new family. Eventually, however, he decided to accept, and left barely a month before he reached his one-year anniversary of passing the Trials.
It was within the Twelve, though, that he really flourished — it was challenging work, physically, mentally, and sometimes even emotionally, but the group bonded like brothers (and sister) under the guidance and leadership of Kazuma, who had been in the Twelve the longest. Asuma bonded particularly closely with Chiriku, a warrior monk from the Fire Temples, and looked up to Kazuma with the same awe and idolization he’d once had for the Hokage of old.
It was, therefore, exceptionally tragic when the group splintered over political ideals, forced into their own small civil war over Kazuma’s desires to depose the Daimyo and Yondaime and unite both the civilian and ninja worlds under one leader. Asuma, Chiriku, and four others chose to oppose Kazuma, but in the end only Asuma managed to survive the bloody battle that followed.
The only family left to him now was ANBU, back where he’d left it just over a year before. As long as he could convince the powers that be that he wasn’t too fractured to survive it again, that is.