Hinoko

In her youth Hinoko stands fairly short, with blue eyes and long hair of a light brown shade. For duty she pulls on the regular Konoha gear, flak jacket included, and hides her features behind a cat-themed Anbu mask bearing three whisker strokes down each cheek and three more lines running along its top. By adulthood she has cropped that long hair short.

A tomboy at heart, Hinoko gravitates to anything that strikes her as cool and shuns the girly, which is why she buries her given name under the alias Soku and flies into a rage whenever someone uses it. For all that toughness, romance makes her swoon, as when she gushed over Shikamaru making his move on Temari, and her chatter is peppered with teen-girl tics, a 'like' up front and a 'you know' at the end. More troubling to Shikamaru and Rō is her attraction to Gengo's belief that shinobi rather than the daimyō or common folk ought to rule; the idea keeps its pull on her even far from his Enlightened Ones. She frets, too, that peacetime will rob her of any chance to prove herself, having been too young for the Fourth Shinobi World War.

That the Anbu recruited her before she had even finished at the Academy speaks to Hinoko's talent, and dreaming up a jutsu of her own marks her as clever besides. The technique in question, her Chakra Needle, launches thin spikes of chakra from her fingertips; she can fire a barrage of them in quick succession, land hits at long range, and steer each one after it leaves her hand. Depending on her intent, a needle might numb a foe, kill outright, or flood the target with energy. The tantō on her hip, a likely product of Anbu drilling, hints she can handle a blade as well. Her signature proved its worth against Gengo, whose tongue she pinned so the manipulator would never speak again, and she drew on her stealth work when Shikamaru dispatched her and Rō into Iwagakure to uncover why the Fourth Tsuchikage had pressed the Five Kage Summit for the Leaf's secret intelligence.