Osamu was born with twelve siblings. Of these twelve, two have died of old age, three were hospitalized for most of their lives because of abnormally slow healing rates, one had become a barely moving ball of chitin, one is physically barely one year of age, and four were born too deformed. To date, Osamu is the only one of these thirteen siblings that has been deemed successful, and that only marginally.
The Okumo clan is known for its genetic experimentation; these experiments are what have defined the Okumo and their symbiosis and genetic combination with arachnids (many of which are also genetically engineered), and Osamu was just one of many genetic experiments. In his case there was an intention to breed the best traits of two vastly different members of the Okumo clan.
Osamu’s father, a hunter, had an abnormally short lifespan, aging physically more than three times as fast as a normal human, but was also blessed with a tireless and sleepless metabolism and a powerful chitin exoskeleton that only grew thicker each time he was wounded. This combination of traits also slowed him down over the years as his chitin exoskeleton grew too thick, but he remained in service. His spiders shared the same traits as he did, allowing for heavily armored warriors to develop and live among his companions, his spiders individually died off only a couple of weeks after birth which made the training and use of these warrior spiders minimal.
Osamu’s mother, a nester, aged too slowly and healed too slowly to be of much use in combat, but the spiders she grew inside her body were extremely well controlled and had a high degree of genetic mutation over generations. The variety of webs and divisions of labor among her spiders allowed her to develop some of the most complex web spinning techniques. She is said to be a hidden treasure of the Okumo clan because of the fairy-tale like combination of her nearly timeless beauty and extraordinary frailty. Her spiders also shared her curses of long life-spans and frailty, making it so that they could not breed quickly enough to make full use of their genetic divergence. They also died easily from damage or overexertion and could not replenish their numbers quickly.
The files on Osamu’s siblings are sealed, just as Osamu’s own file is sealed. What is contained in that file is Osamu, fully quantified and annotated. He was made in a laboratory environment, a test-tube baby. Before birth, his term would have been normal if it had not been intentionally and successfully prolonged to roughly double the normal length. His fetus was implanted and connected through ninjutsu to eggs from both his mother’s spiders and his father’s spiders. Of these, one particular species disappeared three fourths of the way through his development. This species was his mother’s “control spider”, and was thought to be the source of his mother’s elegant and masterful control of her own spiders. This control spider was deemed so important that it was again implanted and combined best as it could be to his mostly developed fetus.
For the first year after his birth, Osamu was the most hopeful of his siblings. The major problems with his siblings were already being studied, but Osamu himself was a successful combination of the traits and metabolisms of his parents, generating spiders that were living long enough to be useful and able to breed quickly enough to regenerate lost numbers when needed. He also carried a great number of different species of spider inside his body and slight genetic variation and mutation was being recorded among these. Osamu was to be raised and trained by the Okumo clan to be both a masterful hunter and an expert nester.
Before the age of two, Osamu began to manifest his own problems. The control spiders of his mother had apparently disappeared. The other species of spider in Osamu’s body began to fight with one another. Within another year Osamu was on life support, most of the variant species within Osamu’s body had been wiped out, and those that remained were nearly constantly interrupted in performing the duties necessary to Osamu’s symbiotic existence. This disarray caused irreparable damage to Osamu’s organs and removed him from eligibility for being a hunter-type. Over the following years the Okumo clan tried in vain to stabilize and salvage what was left of Osamu, keeping him alive via life support. Eventually the project was declared a waste of valuable resources and Osamu was given over to the Kirigakure academy, his family very much expecting him to die before graduation.
It was during his time at the academy that Osamu’s body stabilized. Somehow order had been restored. The spider species inside Osamu’s body had united on Osamu’s death bed. The largest of them, deemed warriors, kept the population of each species of spider in check and maintained their own numbers by fighting with one another, which in turn caused the victors to grow larger and stronger just as had happened with Osamu’s father’s spiders. The damaged organs of Osamu’s body were supported in their functions by spiders that might be able to replace the organs themselves, though no experiments have been conducted in this area. The belief of the researchers in the stabilization of Osamu’s body that the spiders had responded to the laboratory’s use of life support by deciding they no longer needed to perform their symbiotic duties and with the disconnection of the life support they once again realized the need for them and found a way to sustain their much needed host body.
While Osamu was not going to die of sickness and organ failure due to the newfound collaboration of the spiders, he was still not through the academy. He suffered a great many wounds in the academy, and only about half of these healed with a mix of chitin and skin. This caused Osamu’s skin to darken and harden. He eventually developed a system of self injury when he could, where he focused on injuring the parts of him which had the lightest skin. After injuring and reinjuring himself Osamu would eventually darken the parts of his skin that had coincidentally remained softer before. In addition, Osamu lost spiders constantly in the academy training since he relied on them heavily due to his body’s weakness. So he needed to replenish their numbers, which required a large amount of feeding. Osamu’s body responded to this by making him somewhat restless. While he was not as tireless as his father, he did not sleep at night but rather went into restful periods of food harvesting where large numbers of spiders left him to find what they could for food.
Before the academy’s final trial, Osamu prepared a large number of spiders in preparation. He did not know the nature of the final test, but knew that it would be difficult. Meanwhile the academy’s teachers had learned of Osamu’s late night food raiding and had gone about sealing away any edibles and poisoning the ground surrounding the academy to drive away insects. Lacking any other food and in need of sustenance to support the newly bred population, Osamu’s spiders devoured Osamu’s training partner in the middle of the night. Osamu did not feel strongly one way or the other about this, since Osamu’s training partner was one of the stronger students of that class and had not needed Osamu’s help, thus he had not respected Osamu’s sickliness and Osamu had been only bullied or ignored by the other boy. The next day Osamu was declared a graduate, though he earned no small amount of ill-will for having destroyed one of the academies more promising students in a way that many thought was not in the spirit of the bloody rites of combat.
After graduation Osamu was social at first, still convinced that the Okumo clan considered him a failure and thinking that he would need to find his own way in the village of Kirigakure. He could not escape his scientific nature, though, and was found conducting experiments and observation more than anything else. At the age of fourteen he was formally inducted into clan business and involved in a number of research projects. He withdrew from general society and primarily worked on these projects and not much else, though his spiders could still be seen now and again working in tandem to bring back various items of food to their nest. Osamu found his growth spurt in his fourteenth year and grew to be over six feet tall before the age of sixteen. He has just finished a great deal of research into the nature of inter-spider communication and particularly in relation to Okumo long-distance communication lines. Now he is returning to Kirigakure society now that the war with Konoha is wrapping up and his skills are not currently in use by the Okumo clan.
Kirigakure
Male
