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▓█▬♦ H A I R ♦▬
Kohaku’s hair is the deep, inky black not entirely uncommon to the people of Nippon, though there is a slight dark violet sheen to it, like one will find in particularly rich calligraphy ink. The length is quite generous, and if left unbound, her hair will easily reach the back of her knees, though it is trimmed neatly to blunt ends all around. There are shorter pieces making up her bangs, and a few framing pieces along the sides of her face, colloquially referred to as the "hime" cut. It’s quite thick, but pin straight from root to tip, making it smoother than it is coarse, the texture almost slightly feathery at the ends. If she ties it up at all, it’s usually just into an informal topknot, as a man might wear.

▬♦ E Y E S ♦▬
Though at first glance black, Kohaku’s eyes have the same hint of violet as her hair, and in fact, the hue is merely a very dark version of the color purple, perhaps akin to an amethyst with smoky undertones. They are bright, with a sort of keen glitter about them that suggests intelligence. There isn’t much emotion to be read in them, though, not unless Kohaku desires it. By default, she seems to be quite guarded, and that extends to the expressions her eyes make as well. Her lashes are especially long, lending them a sort of half-hidden concealment.

▬♦ F L A W S ♦▬
To look upon Kohaku is not by any means to see perfection. In terms of physical flaws, she possesses quite a few, mostly in the form of scarring. Never an adept combatant, she earned more than her fair share of wounds attempting to become one, and the natural result of this was a number of scars. None of them are particularly visible—it was well-established that to mar her face would hinder her usefulness—but some of them are quite ugly, albeit hidden under clothing. Of particular note is a nasty-looking pair roughly corresponding to the angle of her shoulderblades, but longer, stretching from just under her deltoids to nearly the small of her back.

▬♦ S T A T U R E ♦▬ 5'7" || 115 lbs.

▬♦ P H Y S I Q U E ♦▬
Kohaku is considerably lighter than she looks. This is because her bones are not as dense as those belonging to humans and other demons of like sizing, though they are not as hollow as they are in her yōkai form. Her outwards appearance is that of a woman neither especially slender nor at all slothful—rather, she has the vigor of youth on her side and a surprising amount of muscle mass for a woman, especially in her legs and torso, which thickens her thighs a bit and gives her a robust, but certainly not portly, form. She is trim everywhere, with her thinnest point being just about where it should be, at her waist. She is notable for being quite tall for basically anyone, but especially so for a woman, considering the day and age. She does not quite tower, but this does lend her a certain kind of dignified authority, and she moves with a type of elegance that makes her appear to float rather than walk.

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█▓▬♦ A M O R O U SxV I E W ♦▬
For Kohaku, anyone and everything is a card to be dealt, a possible move in the game she’s playing. To call it a game, however, is to misunderstand how seriously she takes it. Seriously, enough, in fact, that she thinks of herself as a piece like any other, albeit a central one. Her eventual marriage, her chastity, and so on are all things too valuable in bargaining to be simply given away for such a fickle reason as emotion. She will keep them until it is most useful to bargain them away for her purposes, and then she will relinquish them without regret. Love is something she decided to leave behind, to never seek, quite a number of years ago now.

▬♦ D I S P O S I T I O N ♦▬
A peculiar mix of the straightforward and the occluded, is Kohaku. She is, first and foremost, ambitious. She seeks power and the means to keep it, and in most cases, she is relatively up-front about this. She doesn’t see it as a secret, in any real sense of the word, though anything more specific than that becomes less clear. Power she wants, but to what end? For what purpose will she seek to outdo everyone else trying to gain or maintain a grip on their corner of the country? These things are not so immediately obvious, not even, perhaps, to the people that know her best.

What is evident is that those people, the ones she has allowed close enough to be considered in her inner circle, generally describe her with reverence to others, some kind of mixture of awe, fear, and genuine respect and admiration. One never hears of discontentment in her ranks, sparse as they currently are, nor indeed of mutiny or disloyalty at all. To hear her people tell it, Ito-hime is the epitome of grace and guile both, an intelligent, cunning woman who nevertheless maintains an easy shroud of elegance and delicacy, settled about her shoulders like the mantle she was always meant to wear.

There is, however, also something distant about her, something that sets her apart even from those at her side. In order to be the most effective strategist she can be, she keeps herself removed as much as possible from the emotional entanglements that come naturally to most people. This is not to say she isn’t disposed to care about others—quite the opposite, in fact—but the tendency does not manifest in her the way it does in others. She cannot and will not show favor to one person over another, unless there is something to be gained from it.

Such a singleminded pursuit of power and influence might well put people off, were she not at once so sharp and also so charming. She is well-educated in many subject areas, including those that are traditionally male, and more than that, she has a sort of intent focus that makes it seem as though whatever is currently the object of her attention has command of her every faculty until it is heard and understood. She makes, to say the least, a very good listener, and an excellent partner in conversation, if one goes in for that sort of thing.

And yet, it can be very difficult to get a read on who Kohaku Ito really is. She doesn’t willingly volunteer information about herself, nor about her ideals or specific goals, and especially not about her feelings. Her thoughts are opaque to those around her, and many an enemy has found themselves completely blindsided by her sudden action against them. She knows more of anyone than anyone knows of her, and this is her greatest strength.

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▬♦ Q U I R K S ♦▬
Double Identity ● Kohaku lives two distinct lives—one as a rather ordinary woman on the street, so to speak, a person who generally goes beneath the notice of others, but finds herself a fly on the wall for any number of interesting conversations. Usually, she poses as a shrine maiden, as this was her mother’s occupation. The rest of the time, she is the Itohime, the sole surviving child of Hagaku Ito, lord of the Tohoku region. Technically, this means the land and all of the wealth and power contained therein is at her disposal, but for the most part, she rules it through a puppet retainer, giving her more freedom to move about, and to portray her political self as a mere pawn in someone else’s gambit.

Self-Reference ● Strangely for someone with ambitions as stark as hers, Kohaku uses a very humble first person pronoun, sessha, when referring to herself. It means, roughly, “this unworthy one.”

Blank Expression ● From a very young age, Kohaku was trained in maintaining a cool, calm façade, regardless of what she was feeling inside. Because of this, she habitually keeps her face blank, devoid of any hint as to what her emotions might be, extending even to the most expressive part of the average face—the eyes.

Humor ● One might expect someone like Kohaku to have a dry sense of humor if any at all, but in truth the things she finds most amusing are usually the most unsophisticated—pratfalls and faceplants, that sort of thing. The more awkward and silly, the more amusing she finds them. She keeps this well under wraps, however.

▬♦ C A P A B I L I T Y ♦▬
Swordsmanship ● Actually, if she’s being honest, Kohaku is a rather poor swordsperson. She learned how to fight with one, but she was never much better than average, no matter how long she spent training at it. Fortunately, she has other talents, but she carries her father’s sword anyway, mostly for the reminder it gives her.

Espionage ● Charismatic, intelligent, and subtle, Kohaku makes an excellent spy, capable of blending in or standing out as she desires, slipping from one disguise to the next in order to maintain her cover. She can conduct an interrogation without the other party being aware that they are interrogated at all.

Willpower ● It is exceptionally difficult to move her, either by the supernatural means of suggestion, invasive telepathy, or mind control, or by the more ordinary kinds of manipulation and intimidation. She her will is stronger than steel, and her heart braver than her face would suggest.

▬♦ N A T U R A LxA P T I T U D E ♦▬
Tao/Buddhist Magic ● What she lacks in physical combat ability, Kohaku more than makes up for in other ways. From her mother, she inherited the ability to manipulate chi to a wide range of ends, primarily through the means of sacred talismans. Healing, offense, consecration, purification, cursebreaking and hex-laying—these are all within her repertoire. From her father, she inherited a massive chi pool—making her a highly-adept ranged combatant.

Phoenix Tears ● The Hō-ō is a phoenixlike creature, and has the capability to produce tears that act as a nearly universal remedy—to poisons, hexes, injuries, and even things like memory loss. They are highly coveted as the key to immortality, though whether this is true or not is hard to say. The tears must be produced from actual grief or sadness, however; those tears that come from false feeling will lack the properties that the genuine ones have.

Transformation ● Like many yōkai, Kohaku can transform. Unlike others, she can no longer access her fully demonic form, only the intermediate one. Even this one is missing a very important component: her wings. Her hair will gain several strands of five-hued plumage, and her tail is positively magnificent, layered in shimmering feathers, but she bears only scars where once there were wings. Such a state enhances her magic, but she generally refuses to transform, for the shame of being unwhole.

Aerokinesis ● While many Hō-ō use fire, Kohaku’s primary kinetic talent is the manipulation of the air. Rather intuitive, for a creature of the sky, even a permanently-grounded one.

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█▓▬♦ R E M I N I S C E N C E ♦▬
Kohaku, humbly named, began her life as the child of only a mother, her father nowhere to be found. The woman who gave birth to her was a shrine maiden—perhaps minus the “maiden” part, at least by that point. Nevertheless, she was a priestess of skill and power both, well-renowned in the countryside for her skill with exorcism, purification, and the breaking of curses. For the first ten years of her life, Kohaku lived with her mother, walking at the hem of her hakama and learning her trade. The young girl was a gifted practitioner of holy magic, and it was not long before she was performing such deeds herself, causing rather a stir in the areas to which they traveled. A woman independent enough to travel on her own was extraordinary enough—a little girl gifted enough to do high-level temple magic was something else entirely.

She remembers those years with affection and warmth, when she chooses to think of them at all. At about ten years old, she was moved to her father’s household, and he was much more important than she had ever suspected, being in fact the demon lord of Tohoku, the large region immediately to the north of Kanto. It is mostly countryside, lacking any cities of the size of Edo or Kyoto, but it is rich in resources and as a result, the Ito family is one of the wealthiest in Nippon, though they’re less ostentatious about it than others might be.

Her father was a hard man, but she was his only heir, as his son had died in battle some years before, the reason for her summons to his castle in the first place. Why he didn’t simply have more children, she neither knows nor cares. She was made his heir, at least long enough to marry her off to whomever he really wanted running his land in the future, she supposes. She was trained in all the things he believed she should know, and some things he believed she should not, but though she was positively exceptional with magic and politics, she was a poor swordsman, barely average after another ten years of instruction with the best swordsmen he could find.

It was during this time that she was first introduced to her father’s allies—the Yakuza of Edo. At first, she got along with many of them, and perhaps there are still a few that she would enjoy keeping company with. She was especially companionable with Yōichirō himself, at least for a time. The details of their falling-out are difficult to come by, but they seem to be bound up with the events of her father’s death. Clearly, Hagaku had not been planning on leaving the world in such an abrupt manner, for though Kohaku was engaged, her father did not leave a will, and thus, the marriage was hers to control as she wished, and she immediately cancelled the arrangement, killed her father’s second-in-command, the only one who might have had a legitimate claim on the power that is now hers.

After a period of tumult in her house, she brought everything into line with deft political maneuvering, strategic executions (though there were very few), and internal restructuring. She now sits at the undisputed head of the house of Ito, and those who have proven themselves most loyal and capable have earned the positions they deserve. Her house thus trimmed is smaller than it used to be, but still wealthy, and though her status is diminished, she intends to get it back—and much more than that. She has installed a figurehead in the castle in Tohoku, one of her best and brightest, and taken but a few of the others, to get a feel for the landscape elsewhere in the country, to see where she might make inroads and alliances, and where a timely assassination might provide such an opening. For this purpose, she disguises herself as a simple shrine maiden, as her mother was, and her bodyguards as monks or priests. Given her knowledge on the subject, they pass quite well as precisely that.

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