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lacnunga · 8 years ago

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here’s some Aburame shit, uh, i cant promise quality but you know, you should never have let me begin

Long ago, the Aburame were a huge clan – they kept to themselves, isolating themselves from the clan battles around them. They roamed, never putting down roots in one place. Until the day the Aburame heiress made friends with the bijuu Chomei. When the Aburames were cowardly attacked in the dark of night, Chomei came to their defence, preventing the clan being wiped out. The clan, in gratitude, devoted themselves to the bijuu, whom they see as a god, a living kami. They followed where Chomei led, from country to country, until they came to Wind Country. One day, Chomei disappeared, captured and tied to a jinchuuriki. The Aburame were left floundering, until Shirozu Aburame discovered what he called ‘the gift of chomei’, the kikaichu, a chakra-feeding insect found living in the oasis the Aburames had set up beside. After a lot of experimentation and research, Shirozu found that the kikaichu could work together with the human body. A lot of adult Aburames volunteered, wanting to take on the subjects of the family god. A lot of Aburames died, but those that survived, their children seemed to take to the introduction of the kikaichu like ducks to water. It turns out that children are the ideal hosts for kikaichu – it became tradition that a child, around three or four years old, would receive a kikaichu from their Aburame parent, and another Aburame from the clan (the other Aburame would be something akin to a god-parent) and their hive would be descendant from them.

When the Hidden Villages were established, the Aburame were refused membership of Sunagakure, since they were considered unloyal and untrustworthy, being secretive and a roaming clan without long term family in Wind Country. They were ejected from Wind Country and were instead offered membership to Konohagakure, which they accepted, in part because of the abundance of insect species in Fire Country. They knew their nomad lifestyle would no longer work now that each country had its own ninja village.

At a young age, an Aburame had their hive introduced to the body. The kikaichu alter a person’s body permanently; the way their chakra circulates, the distribution of nutrients etc. Being a desert-bred species, the kikaichu leech a lot of body-heat from their hosts, causing the Aburame to don many layers to feel warm in the colder fire country weather. An Aburame typically has a lower blood-pressure than normal. The kikaichu also enhance certain senses – the sense of touch, meaning Aburames generally avoid prolonged body contact due to high senseitivity, sense of taste, leading to an Aburame characteristic being a bland diet, and enhanced eyesight – Aburame children are encouraged to wear darkened glasses from a young age; even at this level, the kikaichu-enhanced eyesight can put a lot of strain on the eyes and the brain.

At the start of puberty, an Aburame’s body goes haywire. The sudden flash of hormones confuse the kikaichu and often drive them to sudden bursts of energy. During puberty, chakra grows and changes too – the kikaichu grow more hungry during this period and draw more chakra from the tenketsu points, often times resulting in mid-level fevers in children ages 10-11, though it’s very rarely severe. Some more symptoms are lethargy, long periods of sleep, high touch/taste sensitivity. At this point, an Aburame is instructed on emotional control – the kikaichu are a wild-card at that time, and react to even slight emotional changes. 1-2 months of isolation in the Aburame compound are normal, in order to train a young Aburame to tightly control their emotions and kikaichu in order to avoid accidentally attacking others when, for example, angry or scared.

Around this time, another painful change takes place. The eyes, along with the abdomen, are the areas of the body with the more delicate, and tightly woven, chakra points. Slight mutations of tenketsu and chakra networks, result in dojutsu. However, the amount and density of the chakra flowing around, over and through the eyes, make the tissue indistinguishable from the chakra to the kikaichu; at this time, the insects will swarm and, in taking large amounts of chakra from the tenketsu points, will also as a by-product consume the eye-tissue, removing the eyeballs. This process will take on average one-two weeks to complete. Occasionally, the kikaichu will not do a complete job and the Aburame will have to undergo surgery to remove the remains of the eyeballs to prevent infection or chronic pain and complications. However, the Aburame is not left blind – using tight control, an Aburame can (eventually instinctively) encourage kikaichu to attack to the end of the severed optic nerve, feeding the human brain the view from the kikaichuu’s own eyes. This replaces their normal human sight.

This leads to its own problems though – the kikaichu have an incredibly detailed and wide visual range, including colours and details that the human brain is not equipped to process. This leads to visual and mental stress – this is where the Aburame glasses come into play. As children, the shades are simply lightly coloured glass to get the child accustomed to wearing them; upon the removal of the eyes however, the glass is replaced with specially treated lenses that filter out excess colours and details, allowing the Aburame better-than-normal but not harmful sight.

While an Aburame goes through a very painful and turbulent puberty, they are left with incredibly power in the form of their hive, and a better sense of taste, touch and sight than their companions.

Another weakness of the Aburame is the dependency upon their hive; a byproduct of creating a symbiotic relationship with the kikaichu is that a large presence is required to keep the body smoothly running. The removal of half a hive can cause slight unrest in the body – the host will feel like they have the beginning of a cold, their reactions will be slower and they will feel an increase in hunger and thirst. Remove two-thirds of the hive and the host will develop a fever, trembling in the limbs, disorientation and so forth. Anything more severe than the loss of 80% of the hive will result in extreme pain as the large amounts of chakra usually consumed by the kikaichu rage through the body, causing parts to shut down or malfunction (like an overloaded circuit, blowing connections with too much power). The body will shortly go into shock and there is a high possibility that the host will die.

There are a couple of ways for a host to be saved in this situation; firstly, another Aburame donates part of their hive. While the introduction of foreign kikaichu is not normally recommended, since it can cause imbalances in the eco-system of an individual past puberty, in this case it might save their life, as the donated kikaichu drain the excess chakra. If no other Aburame is present, the other option is for another ninja to perform a similar function, either by using a jutsu or, in the worst cases, carefully bleeding the host – since chakra is inextricably linked with blood, the careful removal of the blood may drain some of the excess of chakra. This method is generally considered ineffective to save the host, as the amount of blood-loss required to stabilise a hive-less Aburame would usually kill them, though it has saved the life of an Aburame a few times before.

If alone, an Aburame may attempt to stabilise their own chakra by expelling as much chakra as possible – however, due to the instability of their internal flow, the host will be unable to gather enough control to perform a formalised jutsu, thus endangering anyone nearby by the explosive release. This technique can only really be performed alone, and at the risk of being found by enemies alerted by the wild chakra, especially since, if the technique works, the host will be left weakened and incapable of defending themselves.

The Aburame have a collective family connection – while there is a queen-line, being the heirs of the family, the Aburame collectively take care of children and consider anyone further removed than close family as ‘cousins’, no matter the actual relation. If an Aburame child loses all parents, there will always be someone willing to take them in and care for them as if they were their own. There is a great love and respect for the heirs of the family (not that this saves Shino from being teased and treated like a little brother by various older Aburames).

The Aburame are made up of hosts and kindred. Hosts are born Aburames, with their hives provided as children. Kindreds are those who married or dated into the Aburame family. Since it is very dangerous for grown adults to get their own hive, it’s discouraged, although a few kindred were insistent – some even survived the process, and then had their own kikaichu to donate to their child. The family’s view on polyamory is very positive – many of the children have three or four parents, and not all of different genders. Some children, due to chronic illness or various deficiencies, cannot host their own hive. But they aren’t shunned; usually they will still be involved in the family business in some ways.

The Aburame house is a widely sprawling thing, with wings spread in all directions. Around the house, gardens grow in various states of wilderness, filled with herbs, flowers and natural habitats for insect cultivation. Some of the herbs are given to the Konoha hospital, some of the flowers to the Yamanaka (Inoichi Yamanaka and Shino’s mother, Sonan, were good friends, often exchanging tips on caring for flowers and later, children. Shino and Ino were often put together to play as children and developed a tentative friendship, mostly because both were very clever bookworms). The queen-line have a separate garden that the heads and heirs tend to as a meditative practice, since it is believed that one can tell the character of an Aburame by the care they take of the garden (once, an Aburame head was usurped because he let the head garden die and it was seen as a sign by the elders that under him the Aburame would wither too). The compound is surrounded by a tall hedge, filled with spikes to prevent people climbing over it.

Inside, the house is very traditional with some modern conveniences. All through the warm months, the windows and doors are left open, and at night, fireflies collect under the ceiling. The walls of the house are decorated with framed illustrations, some by very talented members of the family, and some that were just sloppy splodges of paint with the wobbly characters for ‘mushi’ painted alongside. Never the less, the pictures went up with parental pride.

It is believed by the Aburame that crickets are the souls of the dead, and that the noises they make are messages for the living. So when a friend dies, an Aburame would sit and listen to the cricket sounds to try and hear if they left a last message for them. While they don’t like anyone squishing bugs, to kill a cricket is considered an evil deed.

For some reason, almost all Aburame hosts are easily forgotten, although it doesn’t seem to spread to kindreds.

Many Aburame children are scared of spiders and birds, the fiercest predators of insects, but most grow out of it, realising the cyclical nature of life. There are even a few Aburame who specialise in spider keeping and summoning, although they only feed them dead insects. Shino is one of the few who couldn’t get over their irrational bird phobia.

The Aburame don’t keep bees or wasps, less because they dislike them, and more out of respect for the dead who died fighting the Kamizuru clan.

Dead Aburame are buried in a traditional Buddhist ceremony. In addition, each Aburame member will ‘donate’ one of their on kikaichu to rest in the coffin. The kikaichu are cut off from their hosts chakra with a jutsu and die abruptly. They are then burned together with the body of the deceased, the urn with the ashes then going to the family grave at the back of the Aburame lands. If no body could be recovered, the same procedure would go on, but with the Aburame parent of the deceased putting forth a large amount of their own kikaichu to act as the family ‘blood’/’soul’ that would replace the body. The kikaichu then die in the same manner and are burned. After the family burial, the name is engraved on the Konoha memorial stone if they died in the line of duty. The close family members then go to the gardens to listen for crickets.

#aburame #shino aburame #shibi aburame #torune aburame #naruto #covers history biology traditions burials and odds and ends

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