Kozai Uzumaki [rework]

Name: Kozai Uzumaki
Nickname: Witch
Age: 17
Gender: Female

Height: 4’9”
Weight: 90 lbs
Appearance: Kozai is a diminutive girl, looking about three or four years younger than she actually is. With an underdeveloped body and height, she has difficulty looking most people of her age in the eyes without craning upwards to see. With red hair that's only just moving out of the childish tawny color she had in years prior and bright blue eyes, she's the iconic aryan youth, although she SHOULD have been on her way into womanhood by now. She prefers to wear more formal clothing, but sized down somewhat, making her look a little ridiculous on occasion. For such a purpose, she does have sets of casual clothes handy, though she feels ever so slightly exposed while wearing them.
Outside of this, she keeps a clean hygiene and a straight posture, showing no signs (whether she would like to or not) of her actual age. She keeps her hair somewhat short, though not TOO short, still showing off her seeming cheerful girlishness. It's well brushed, which isn't saying much since there isn't much length to take care of in the first place. A practical shinobi's consideration, one might say, to keep hair out of the grasp of enemies who might use it to gain an advantage.
Over the course of the past few years, she's accumulated a few scars on her body, the product of missions that didn't go as she had planned it. A harsh lesson in the realities of the field. There are a few smaller ones on her left upper forearm, which are easy enough to hide. However, the primarily large ones are on her back. Seven oddly four pointed star shaped scars are placed at various spots on her back, ranging in size from covering a shoulder blade to a whole quadrant of her back. Although, to be fair, her torso is rather small to begin with.


Land: Ame
Character Rank: A
Clan: Uzumaki
Element: N/A

Personality: Outwardly, Kozai plays the role of the small girl that she appears to be. She eats plenty of sweets and stares out at the world around her with eyes of purity and wonder. While she asks plenty of questions, she rarely tends to listen to the answers, being (apparently) somewhat airheaded and ditzy. This false side of her has a very strong sense of justice and righteousness, and seems to be appalled at such gross wrongdoings as war and human experimentation and breaches of ethics. One thing that sticks through this blanket of falsehood is a tendency to have a great loyalty to village, kage, and clan.

The true Kozai, of course, is different. She's resentful about how she appears to everyone else, but that's not something that can be helped. She has a very bitter and cynical outlook on life, seeing wars as inevitable results of human nature that can only be profited from, and breaches of "ethics" as only natural. Clearly, the girl isn't really capable of feeling the empathy that many human beings do in most situations. Institutions like marriage only exist to further economic gain and increase the standing of one's family in the village. She pursues these ends with focus and determination that is little seen in someone of her stature.

Over the years, she's only grown more and more direct in her approach, especially in the field. Imprisonment and punishment, in her eyes, only breeds dissent. To her, there are only three real solutions to problem people. Subversion, which is least likely to work, hobbling, which is entertaining in and of itself, and death, which is an absolute certainty. If an individual is dead, than the threat it poses to the village is instantly reduced to zero, and to Kozai, that's what matters in the end.


Character History: Kozai was born into the prominent Uzumaki family, and was treated well growing up. Although she lived a life of comfort, however, the family was frequently taken up into political intrigue and hardships, so Kozai got a small taste of what the real world was like as she began to think for herself. The cruelty of other people, even the ruthless measures she sometimes saw her parents take (though they tried to hide it from her observant eyes) shocked her at first, but gradually it began to shape her character, turning her into someone jaded and bitter with the world already at a young age.

Her parents weren't stupid either, however, and while she was able to hide her pessimistic worldview (knowing that it would make her unhappy parents even more unhappy), she wasn't able to hide her growing talent for various types of jutsu. They resolved that as soon as she was old enough, they'd put her, their only child, into the academy with as much backing as they could give her. To Kozai, of course, this all had an ulterior motive (so she thought, though there was actually none other than love). From her point of view, they were trying to put as many assets under her belt as they could, so that she could be a marketable asset to the clan and family. Successful shinobi were always good for the clan, and a well known ninja could easily wed another, given the appropriate arrangements. Matrimony for honor or money was not a bad goal in her mind, so she cooperated with her parents' plans.

It was during her formative years in the academy that she realized that she had powers that far exceeded those of the studious upstarts around her. She decided to seek private tutelage and press on with her studies independent of her classmates. It was also around this time that she found out about her developmental problem. She stopped growing early and still had yet to flower and bloom. While this wasn't much of a big deal to her parents (which she found odd), it crushed her. It meant that she was no longer a marketable potential wife for the forseeable future, and had little hope of bringing in a large fortune into her household. Still, she was slowly honing some pretty deadly skills, and could certainly hope to see success in that field within the next few years.

This wasn't immediately evident. Her physical size and apparent weakness held her back a fair bit, and it upset her to no end. To someone who had planned out her whole life for the next few years, the concept of "the unexpected" hit her like a truck. Still, she figured it out quickly enough. She wasn't the most adaptable or the most flexible being in the world, but she could bend just enough to allow new possibilities into her mostly rigid worldview, and this she did, to her great benefit. Due to her toil and hard work, she passed through the academy and the first few years of her genin journeymanship easily enough.

Toward the end, though, she began to become complacent, something that she had always despised. Of course, as most of these things tend to go, she didn't realize she was slipping until it was too late. On a mission, she was attacked by a rogue shinobi who had been hiding in the village undetected, and he succeeded in dealing a pretty serious injury to her arm. The medical ninja got there early enough to repair the injury, but too late to prevent scar tissue... and too late to save the mushy remains of the rogue ninja who had hurt her.

From that point onward, Kozai dedicated herself to an idea of absolute domestic security. Come what may, any threat from the outside would be wiped out under her hand, if she had a say in it. As a result, she began to take greater and greater ownership of domestic security outcomes, which meant that she went more out of her way to eliminate potential threats to the livelihoods of the normal folk in Ame. This was looked favorably upon, and her efforts were rewarded in time.

As one of the youngest jonin in the village later on, she undertook this mission that earned her the scars on her back, the result of her having to use medical skills to isolate a huge amount of energy damage that was coming her way, in a last ditch effort to protect a section of the village's residential section. This last point was something that she tried to keep hidden, but the information ended up getting out anyway. Recognition was all very well in good in moderation, but Kozai was afraid of being transferred to different duties. It's in that limbo of apprehension that we find her now.