Morihana Sakura

Sakura is an extremely fickle girl. Her interests and attentions change like the seasons, going from paying attention to one thing to being distracted by even the most mundane of occurrences. Because of this, she is extremely unreliable when it comes to completing certain tasks. Or...any tasks at all really. It is a grave mistake to give Sakura a job to do, as it is very likely it just won't get done. There are few things she appears consistently interested in: the first being flowers. She loves flowers of all kinds and even maintains her own garden, taking care that none of her buds go untended.

Her second interest is much more gruesome: battle. More specifically the act of killing therein. She takes great pleasure in taking a life, and will most often play with her “prey”, drawing out their torment or even giving them a false sense of hope that they might escape before killing them. Though this is what makes her an exemplary assassin, getting her to complete a job that doesn’t have a prospect of battle or death is a fool’s errand.

Much like her interests, her loyalties and feelings towards others can be changed quickly as well. If someone falls out of her favor, appears weak too often, or simply annoys Sakura too much she is likely to leave them behind without a second thought. When her trust is truly earned, usually through a feat of great power or by proving they care for her, Sakura is a fierce and steadfast ally. Though these are few and far in between for the little assassin.

Despite her moods and attention shifting often, Sakura always displays a friendly or cheery demeanor. For all intents and purposes, she appears as a small girl with a bright smile perpetually painting her face and not a malicious killer, and often leads others to feel at ease around her when they shouldn’t. While she is almost always bright and bubbly outwardly, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel other emotions, they are just veiled in her smile when she does let them come to the surface.

Those who have experience with her, or with people who hide their true feelings behind sweet words and saccharine smiles, will notice the slight difference in her features when emotion takes her. When angry, her smiles take on a sharp edge, showing more teeth than necessary. When saddened, though this rarely happens, they waver ever so slightly at the edges. When taken by a bloodlust, her smile and eyes become more manic than joyful, giving a glimpse at the dangers behind her careful facade.

To go along with the air of innocence she carries, Sakura is also overly affectionate with others. She gives hugs, cuddles, kisses on the cheek and other displays of physical affection freely to those who are open to receiving them, and even to those who aren’t. This extends not only to people she knows, but strangers and even those she is antagonistic towards or are antagonistic towards her. The girl knows few boundaries and will often invade personal spaces without a care. She also knows fully this is capable of making people uncomfortable, and takes more pleasure in doing so when it does.

Sakura does her best to come across as innocent and sweet, but there is little she can do about her inherently sarcastic nature. It slips free no matter how much acting she puts forth, so rather than repress it she has learned to express it in such a way where her remarks seem genuine. Her cheery affect is enough to make others think she doesn't have a mean bone in her body, making it all the more satisfying that she  is capable of whispering insults that sound like compliments, fiction that sounds like fact and lies that appear to be truth.

✿Flowers: While it is in-keeping with the persona she has adopted, Sakura's love for flowers is a strange outlier in her otherwise bloodthirsty outlook on the world. But love them she does, and actually keeps a garden in impeccable condition. Though it can be noted that she uses the bodies of some of her victims as fertilizer.
✿Fighting: Created to be a weapon of war, some could argue that Sakura's conditioning took a little too well. She has a love for fighting that goes beyond obsession, though it is during a fight where she finds herself in her element.
✿Bloodshed: Though one might think that bloodshed and fighting go hand in hand, Sakura isn't of the same mind. Bloodshed covers that which doesn't always come from fighting: she a child-like joy in murder and torture, anything where she enacts suffering and pain on a victim.

✿Pacifists: If there's one thing Sakura can't suffer, it is those who refuse to fight. Anyone who is incapable of fighting, whether for themselves or others or something they believe in or want to protect, Sakura views them as nothing more than livestock to be slaughtered and fed to her voracious appetite for blood.
✿Men: Though she doesn't show it in any significant change to her smiling persona, Sakura has a deep-seated dislike for men, and even some especially masculine women. She is colder to them in general, and when fighting them tends to be much more vicious, a feat in and of itself.

From her birth, Sakura was told that she was nothing. That it was her destiny to give her life for others, and the only difference she would ever make was furthering the agendas of others. She floated in a state of acceptance of this for longer than she cared to admit before she rejected it with a dark vehemence. She has decided to write a new destiny for herself: to carve her name into the annals of history in the bloodiest manner possible.

Sakura doesn't fear things that scare normal people, like death or heights or spiders. Rather she fears what would become of herself if she lost her purpose, if the rage within her that fueled all of her actions, that drives her to spill blood wantonly, suddenly vanished. She fears returning to the meaninglessness of her previous existence, she fears becoming the person she vowed never to be again.

Sakura is a petite girl, appearing rather delicate and doll-like due to her height and build. Her skin has a pink tinge about it that is almost like an unnatural glow, her flesh almost glinting in the light as though made of polished porcelain. She has long, thick chocolate brown hair that she often keeps pulled into two round buns on either side of her head, decorated through and through with flowers.

Her eyes are large and round, and shaded a pink similar to that of the flowers she is named after. They can be described as “doe-y”, adding to the air of innocence that she carries at all times. Her facial features are similarly cutesy, with a button nose and rose petal-like lips. Her two most notable features, by virtue of being her most outlandish, are her pointed ears and two horns that extend from her forehead, curved ever so slightly to the back of her head.

Sakura is a great fan of flowers, and this is evident in her choice of attire. She favors robes and kimono that have distinct flower motifs. Sakura doesn’t always wear robes, though all of her clothing possesses some form of flower theme.

Momotaro never knew his parents. His mother was a worker from a red light district who was foolish enough to carry the progeny of one of their patrons to full term, and was paid for her troubles in death. He was brought into the world with absolutely no one to take care of him, and as a child in such a situation he was given into the care of an orphanage.

The orphanage was headed by an elderly woman by the name of Morihana Katen, who was overly severe and militarian. She drilled into the children from their entrance into the orphanage, which was for many from birth, that they were the dregs of society and would most likely be worth nothing more than what they could do for others.

Katen told the girls they would make either subservient wives and broodmares or bed warmers for men, or rarely women, of ill repute. To the boys, she told them they would be lucky to be soldiers who died honorably in battle, but most would end up farmers. Though how they got there, whether they went directly to the fields or took a detour through military service, was up for debate.

Momotaro took to these teachings and grew up a rather depressed child, though he found joy in things he shouldn’t have. Girl’s toys and flowers and even clothes. He didn’t truly feel comfortable with the things other young boys were, though he didn’t think anything of it. That was, until Katen found him one day, playing at arranging flowers with the other little girls.

Screaming of perversion and devilry, Katen beat him ceaselessly and imparted upon him another lesson: boys didn’t play in girl’s things. After that, what little light he could find in his life had died out, and he went through life more monotonously than before.

When he turned fourteen, it was revealed to him, though indirectly, the reason for the orphanage’s operation: to supply subjects for the experimentations of the Morihana family that no one would miss. Not all the children of the orphanage were selected, but Momotaro was one of the unlucky few. Though he found that he didn’t mind, after all furthering the experiments of the family would fulfill the only thing he was ever told he’d be good for.

The experiments were pure suffering, like torment distilled into a poultice and poured down his throat. He lost himself during it, not only mentally but physically as well. The experiments changed him, made him what others would view as a monster, with long horns and pointed ears, but Momotaro could only see a beauty when he looked in the mirror.

The beauty was so far removed from who he used to be, and she wasn’t a boy either. She was a girl, plain as day and delicate as a flower. Momotaro had died when they put him under the knife and changed him with spellwork, giving birth to Sakura. And Sakura was nothing like Momotaro.

When they began to train her to kill with impunity, Sakura took to the lessons like a fish to water. They had used various magics to change her, and these magics granted her abilities unlike any other kid in her batch. She bested them almost effortlessly, asserting herself as the break-out success of the experiments they had conducted.

Sakura was among a handful to survive not only the experimentation but years of training and drills to become weapons unlike any other, but she was by far the best out of any of the others. Though they were all given permission to leave and pledge their loyalty to the Morihana family.