Aki Hanaori
She/Her
20 years old
Violent
59 kg
Personality
Impulsive, short-fused and impatient. Pretty much like a firework, her opinion on things depend how she woke up that morning, whether it'd be loud or eerily quiet. She's spoiled and bratty beyond measures and sees the entire world existing to cater for her wants and needs. She's not afraid to get down and violent, not because of a killer impulse but moreso knowing that someone out there would eventually find her helpless and-slash-or cute to help her and get her out of that sticky situation.
Aki is also loud in every sense of the word. Opinionated, easily bored and constitutionally incapable of letting a silence sit. Twenty years of getting her way on nearly everything left her with the confident assumption that she'll keep getting it, and when reality disagrees, she doesn't handle it gracefully. She sulks, she argues, she needles people until they cave just to make her stop.
Underneath it all, is someone who's spent her whole life being the afterthought in a house obsessed with two other daughters. She was given everything but attention that meant anything, and it left her hungry for it in a way she'd never admit out loud. She picks fights partly because conflict is the fastest way to make people look at her. She shows off with a gun, with a firework or with a blade because being impressive is easier than being noticed for anything quieter. She'd rather be the loudest person in the room than risk being invisible in it.
She's impulsive to a fault. Aki decides fast, acts faster, and thinks about consenquences only after they've already arrived. She gets restless with routine, chafes at being told what to do and chases whatever feels exciting in the moment without much of a plan for what comes after. It makes her fun in short doses and a liability in long ones.
Her humor is dark, quick and often badly-timed. The kind of deflection that lets her treat genuinely terrifying situations like a joke so she doesn't have to sit with how scared she actually is.
Appearance
Aki stands at a compact 5'2, the shortest of the 3 sisters by a noticeable margin. Something she's sensitive about and will absolutely start a fight over if anyone brings it up. It doesn't stop her from carrying herself like she takes up more space than she does. She leans into a room shoulder-first, chin up like height was never really the point.
She has a long, straight, jet-black hair that falls loose past her shoulders, usually left unstyled and a little messy. She can't be bothered with the upkeep her sisters put into their appearance and honestly, likes the "didn't try" look better anyway. Her features are soft and youthful, round-cheeked in a way similar to a hamster especially when she eats, with heavy-lidded, half-amused eyes that give her a perpetual look of being unimpressed by whatever's infront of her. Right up until something actually excites her, at which point her whole face lights up fast and unguarded.
Background
Aki was born in 1975 in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, the youngest of the 3 Hanaori daughters. By the time she arrived, the household was already built. Yumi was the disappointment, Yuri was the achievement. Her parents worn down by years of managing their daughter's failure and pumping the other with every ounce of ambition. They had very little left to spend on the third, so they didn't spend it. Aki grew up in the gaps of what her sisters left behind. Too young to be roped into the old rivalry, too convenient to ignore.
Where Yuri had a schedule dictated to the hour and Yumi had a list of broken promises, Aki had neither. Nannies, maids and butlers indulged her. Household staff catered to her every whims. Her mother, flushed with the success of Kurenai, treated her youngest daughter with everything she asked as a guilt-free way to prove she wasn't as strict a parent as she'd been with the first two. Her father, distracted by his own reputation and increasinggly checked out of daily parenting by the time Aki was school-aged, rarely said no and during those times that he did, Aki already learned how to easily turn a no to a yes. Nobody wants a pampered girl throwing tantrums at the highest screech of her voice, afterall.
The one interest that held her focus longer than a TV show was fireworks. As a child, she was taken to the summer Hanabi festivals along the Sumida River. While other kids are either enjoying or screaming at the booming noise, Aki was enthralled by the engineering of it. The idea that someone had built something whose entire purpose was to bloom once and vanish beautifully. Her mother, always eager for an easy way to dote on her, used a Kurenai sponsorship connection to arrange for a semi-retired traditional fireworks craftsman to take Aki on as an unofficial apprentice. It wasn't a path Aki was pushed into but was one of the only things she ever chased on her own.
She was a spoiled, inconsistent student in every other subject, but she showed up for those lessons. Over several years, she picked up the old craftsman's practical vocabulary: how a shell is layered and packed, how timing and fuse work decide whether an effect blooms early, late or not at all. How to read the difference between a stable build and one that's about to go wrong. None if it was formal chemistry, the tradition is handed down through apprenticeship, feel and repitition, not textbooks. It also gave Aki an intuitive, hands-on understanding of combustion, structure and timing that most people never touch. It was a hobby that suited her pefectly. Loud, showy, a little dangerous and something she got tbe the best in the family at.
Before the rifts came, Yumi 'forced' her to visit US and their sister, Yuri. Less confident with her 'broken' english than her actual skills and socializing, she was threatened her peaceful and Yumi-less life into its own chaos if she didn't come - so she did. When the rifts came and the sisters were forced to become self-sufficient outside of Knox County, her hobby stopped being decorative. Materials and purpose changed and Aki adapted the same instincts of packing, timing, structure and controlled reactions toward cruder, more practical ends of signaling, distraction and clearing a path. She's not a chemist and she'd bristle at being called one but she's one who spent her childhood obsessed with things that go bang, and the end of the world simply gave that obsession a job to do.
Though as they spent more than a year together in solitude after being stuck in Yuri's apartment, Aki didn't grow up trained for violence. She grew up trained for nothing, which was its own problem once the world stopped being safe. Her sisters both understood, without needing to discuss it, that they couldn't afford a third sibling who froze. Yumi took point on firearms, a hobby that started, of all places, at a tournament in Texas. A fling with a man she met at the table turned into a few weeks of range trips between hands of poker and something about it stuck with her long after the fling didn't. Yuri brought the clinical side to hand-to-hand, ears of anatomy, physiology, and lab work meant she knew exactly where the human body was efficient to disable and exactly how much force it actually took to do it. Knowledge she translated directly into how Aki was taught to move and strike. Being the baby of the family, Aki resented the drilling even as she absorbed it. Hated how they have scavenge for food and how she has to be silent most of the times. She was a natural in short, explosive bursts which made her a decent shot and a dangerous brawler in equal measure, the kind of fighter who could end a confrontation fast or escalate one unnecessarily depending on her mood. It's the same impulsiveness that sent her off on a solo expedition at the end of March without telling either sister where she was going.
Ten days later, she still wasn't back... And there was a horse.
