Haunted her family dojo for a long time in isolation, now abandoned by the living and left to overgrown ruin. She normally protects it from trespassers, but when Aoi shows up one day she let’s her hang around for the company. She still does her usual training, tho it’s more for the comforting routine than anything else. Over time, she starts finding the motivation to fix the grounds up a bit, finding that she still wants to use her knowledge to teach and help others become strong. Her dream is to help someone take her old title as strongest person alive.
She’s a bit standoffish and intimidating to newly met people, more out of awkwardness than malice due to her years of self isolated training. But after so much time spent with a hypersocial fish wife, she’s mostly gotten over that and has a much warmer, comforting social presence (except for with Hiro, but she’s mostly just playing it up bc she likes how easy he is to scare)
While on the search for a young Maki, Aoi came back with a lost kid that she thought was her, but sadly was not. This kid had no other family, so Aoi and Sakura took her in as their own, naming her Tenko.
Sakura became her daughter’s mentor, and ended up being the one to keep her out of trouble and channel her chaotic energy with martial arts while Aoi worked on her new bakery business.
AOI
Friendly water elemental that wound up in Sakura’s dojo pond on her travels, and liked it so much she never really went away.
Very social, if she sees folks she’ll come right up and say hello, decide they’re friends and they have very little say in it.
Maintains the large pond on the dojo grounds, filling it with all sorts of fish and aquatic life she finds or rescues, mostly different breeds of carp and amphibians.
Never put much focus on keeping a humanoid form, relying on her loose jacket to do most of the work when that’s necessary. Sakura just carries her in a bucket most of the time anyway, so she never felt the need. However, when Tenko came to them she found herself wanting to do things for her that were difficult with fins, and so she started working on it, eventually doing a pretty passable job..
Realizes hands can also make donuts!! Woah!! So she goes and opens her own bakery, a family business in a quaint village not far from the dojo. It often serves as a hub for their various friends to come pay visits, and they host an occasional holiday there.
Baby Tenko’s! She had alotta tantrums as a kid (some devolving into her going a bit demon mode) but watching her mom’s carp always calmed her down :’^)
After execution she’s sent to the deepest depths of the Dream Realm, busted up and her plating falling apart. Since she’s partially made with Dream magic, she starts to reflect her new hellish environment and her form becomes unstable over her time there. Don’t have a definitive design for this yet, but I imagine it’d be fluid and fluctuate anyway so WHATEVA have these concepts
While she is eventually retrieved and Chihiro repairs her, she still has visible cracks in her mask, and her right eye has trouble seeing outside of DR. We’re thinking of her joining up and assisting Makoto and others in protecting DR from being used negatively like that again, learning more from Chihiro and tinkering a bit herself on top of her other research.
I have been curdling over the idea that in our AU, Future Arc!Yasuhiro brings little Himiko along into the Dream Realm with him to go save Hiyoko (Adoptive daughter) and Mahiru (Beloved wife) whilst they’re still Remnants of Despair. Then in the anime it shows him fishing in the apocalypse so that’s like THE PREMISE for these.
