<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/9/9b/Img025_-_avatar.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Tengu<br/><strong>Location</strong>: Meeting Hall<br/><strong>Tag</strong>: Everyone<br/><hr/>Tengu sat on the edge of his seat in the back row, middle and center. Or rather he was hunched on his seat, his clawed and highly dexterous toes gripping the outermost edge of it. His sense of balance and the gravity that governed it was near perfect and had always been. All through his years he had indirectly inspired classmates to try the same thing, with the inevitable results of bruised chins, broken noses and bitten tongues. People had asked him how he did it, to which he could only answer that he did. It was no different than being perched on the branch of a tree. It was like asking a bird how it could sit on lines. Almost literally. They don't know how, they just do.<br/><br/>That certainly freed up his mind to focus on other stuff. His yellow eyes darted around the room, seemingly with some sort of intelligent design, some sort of thought through intent much like one views an owl that scouts for prey. In a way, the similarities were striking in that he had in common with an owl that his intent were not as intelligent that it would seem. He was just thinking about what to have for lunch. Seafood ramen or just some bread? That was the question that he was wrapping his brain power around. Had any of the teachers that had taught him over the years gleaned this they would hardly have been surprised. The boy was a flunk. He was just about worthless on all accounts linked to the art of the shinobi except on a few accounts.<br/><br/>But on those accounts he was pretty much already above the Chunin line, if not beyond. He was a master survivalist, a high ranking stealth artist and none on the island had yet to best him when it came to archery. But when it came to all other things that make up a ninja he barely even cut the line for the lower tiers. He had early on been banned from using anything sharper than a spoon in kenjutsu class, having caused himself and others more injuries than his targets. His chakra control was heinous and anything related to it failed spectacularly. But even so, he worked hard. He work inhumanly hard. Not one of the teachers had actually noticed the fervor he applied to reaching those D's to allow him to apply for the Chunin exam. To them it was a low bar. To Tengu it was a glorious achievement, hundreds if not thousands of hours poured into becoming below average where he had always been called a flunky before. And he went through it all with enthusiasm and a smile on his face. It had made him look like the stupid fool but then again, he had never really cared about how others perceived him.<br/><br/>He listened halfheartedly to the speech Dao gave. It was pretty much the same inspirational thing that he always spouted out before giving Tengu a mixed angry and disappointed glare. He cleaned out his ears with clawed fingers and pushed the beak-like sun visor higher upon his feathered head so that he could get a clearer look of the crowd when Dao began calling up the teams. It was a lot of people to go through and he managed to decide on seafood ramen and cleaning his claws before his own was called up. Temujin, Riko and Tengu. He became a bit paler. He had never met any of them personally, but he damned well knew of them. The mysterious and quite one-armed swords-woman and the loudmouth putz. Had the gods not been cruel enough to poor Tengu? Had he not cleared his trials and travails with gusto and a smile? Did the teachers want to punish him? He grasped his head in his clawed hands and forced his forehead painfully down into the back of the seat in front of him three times.<br/><br/>"WHAT THE HELL!" He threw his head back and cried out as if it was because of said self-inflicted injury. The Cripple was scary. She spelled doom and sociopath wherever she turned up. Not to mention she probably was the closest to the sort of grades he had. And then the stealth-inept idiot who couldn't sneak her way out of a deaf-dumb-and-blind ward. He felt like he had been crammed into the short bus and left to rot in the back. "Why, Dao... why?"