Name: Namiashi Raidou (Namiashi: “Walking Pace”. Raidou: “Following Blindly.”)
Age: 23 at ANBU Trials
Birthday: August 28th, Sandaime Year 10
Rank: Special Jounin
Service: ANBU Field Ops; Captain, ANBU Team 6
Registration Number: 009717
Physical Appearance
Height: 6’0″
Weight: 185lbs
Blood Type: AB
Hair: thick and straight, a warm reddish-brown.
Eyes: dark and slightly narrow, with dark eyelashes. His eyebrows have a slight tilt to them that gives him an air of semi-permanent annoyance.
Skin: tanned light brown, with an all-over scattershot of general scars. He’s prone to dry hands and hangnails, which would be less of a problem if he ever remembered to moisturize. His scars have a slight tendency to be hypertrophic.
Facial Features: Raidou is blessed with classically handsome features: a strong, square jaw, straight nose, and even smile. He’s got a touch of early crow’s feet and the beginnings of faint lines bracketing the corners of his mouth, but his face is lively and expressive.
Other Physical Traits: tall, broad-shouldered and solidly muscled. Exceptionally fit. His hands are wide and strong, with long blunt fingers and a good grip: perfect for forming seals and cracking skulls together.
Handedness: right-handed.
Voice: a rich, deep baritone, slightly smoky. He’s a surprisingly decent singer.
Identifying Marks: ANBU tattoo on his left biceps, and two steel rings he wears on the third and fourth fingers of his right hand.
Usual Clothing: on duty Raidou can always be found in his jounin uniform or ANBU armour. Off duty he prefers slightly loose, comfortable clothes in muted colours — jeans and t-shirts, usually, with boots and sometimes a hoodie. He also has a dark leather jacket that he likes. In hot weather, he’ll wear tank-tops, shorts and flipflops.
ANBU Mask: plain white with a single red crescent moon cutting across one eye.
Living Situation: Raidou’s one of the rare veterans who stays on-site at ANBU HQ. He’s got a slightly bigger room with a bathroom attached, and it’s decent enough. It also prevents his moms from visiting unexpectedly, which they would do all the timeif he lived in the village proper.
Skills
Fighting Style: Raidou’s speciality is taijutsu and weaponry, specifically kenjutsu. With his long reach, quick reflexes and physical strength, he makes a frightening opponent. He’s adept enough at ninjutsu to hold his own, but genjutsu isn’t his thing. It’s the reason he’ll never make full jounin. Chakra natures: Earth and Water. Sensory range: 100 m.
Preferred Weapons: kunai, shuriken, tags, his own hands and feet, and his black-bladed sword (Kokutou. Lit: ‘Black Blade’), which is poison-edged.
Special Jutsu: None.
Service Record: Graduated age 10, Chuunin at 13, Special Jounin at 19. Joined ANBU at 20. Raidou gained a lot of his combat experience deployed on the front lines of the Third Ninja War, and during the Kyuubi disaster.
Personality
General Personality Traits: ‘Complicated’ is a good word for it. Raidou is what you get when the rock meets the hard place. He’s straightforward, brusque, ironic to the point of cynicism, with a sharp temper. He’s also cheerfully evasive about his personal life, protective of his privacy, and disinclined to let anyone push him around.
Naturally a rule-lover and environmentally a bit of a rebel, he follows the one-hundred shinobi codes of conduct in spirit, if not to the letter. He’s smart, a little mouthy, and not too worried about getting in trouble. The job is the important thing, and he knows when he’s done it well.
He’s also a little bit of a masochist. It comes with the skillset — he can take a harder punch, run a faster mile, stay on his feet longer than most anyone else, and he’s proud of it. He has a well-deserved reputation as a survivor. There’s been more than one mission when he’s been the only one to walk, limp, or drag himself home with a few more sets of dogtags tied around his wrist.
Quirks: He is very, very well-educated in feminism and social issues, and sometimes it clashes a bit with the all-military world he serves in. He has zero patience for dudebros.
Sexual Orientation: Fluid.
Gifts/Talents: Raidou will not back down. He will get up, and get up, and get up long after the point when a sensible shinobi would’ve given up and died. If you axed both of his legs off at the knees he would still get up, then he would beat you to death with his shins.
Flaws: ‘stubborn asshole’ is the term used most often. He has more than a lick of temper and no tolerance for incompetence, which can make him hard to get along with. Some days he’s just a thundery cloud of poor judgement and pissiness. He tends not to cope well when he doesn’t get enough sleep.
Religion and Philosophy: culturally Shinto/Buddhist. His bio-mom is devout, his other mother isn’t; Raidou is quasi-religious.
Likes and Loves: when Raidou isn’t eating healthily, training rigorously, or running solid missions, he’s getting his downtime in beer, bars, and back-alleys. When he’s not doing that, he reads, occasionally watches TV, cooks for pleasure, and hangs out with fellow hunters.
Dislikes and Hates: poor time-keeping, screw-up partners, crappy intel.
Fears: getting blindsided by genjutsu and not even realizing. He’s also a wee bit claustrophobic.
Dreams and Ambitions: in his lighter moments, Raidou occasionally entertains a vision of getting out of ANBU with all his limbs attached, finding a nice partner, and settling down to raise the tribe of kids his moms keep hounding him for. In his realistic moments he aspires to be a Hokage’s Guard. Most likely he’s going to wind up a name on a rock and a big damn hero, but not before he has to be.
Relationships
Family: Raidou has two moms, one biological (civilian) and one adopted (ninja), and all of their extended family. A lot of people don’t get it, but he’s fine with the arrangement.
Friends: a motley collection.
Lovers: he’s had a few longer relationships, and several shorter ones, but nothing that’s stuck.
Hero: is it cheesy to say his moms? Because it’s his moms.
Enemies: none personal
Personal History
Raidou’s mom, Ume, fell in love with the girl next door when Raidou was three years old, which was a little awkward for everyone involved (except for Raidou, who thought Shun was awesome). There was an untidy divorce and Raidou’s dad got himself massacred on the war’s killing fields a few months later, which didn’t do much to lesson the awkward.
Raidou doesn’t really remember his dad, though he does have a few pictures, but he loves his moms. Ume is a short, round, cheerful civilian woman with a talent for killing their vegetable garden. She teaches a kindergarten class four days a week and is absolutely vicious to anyone who looks sideways at her family. Shun (“The Interloper”), is a tall, curveless chuunin-sensei who also teaches, though in her case it’s pre-genin kids at the academy. She’s a little quieter, a little more thoughtful and serious, but kind, with a talent for finding the secret aches in a person and soothing them. She’s also missing her left leg below the knee; an exploding tag took it off in the war.
For the first few years, Raidou was a regular kid: noisy, demanding, inquisitive, and prone to scraped knees and falling-out-of-trees issues. He didn’t show a speck of chakra. Ume didn’t mind. She was fine with raising a regular kid—she knew regular kids—but Shun was a little disappointed.
On his fourth birthday, Raidou didn’t get the puppy he wanted, and raised hell.
He also raised a small fleet of pebbles.
The following year, he joined the academy. He was an uneven student: decent enough at ninjutsu, outstanding at taijutsu, terrible at genjutsu. Despite Shun’s patient coaching, he remained terrible at genjutsu. He’s still terrible at genjutsu. But he found his niche in all things physical: weapons, tags, traps, unarmed combat—if it involved hands, he was good at it.
It was Ume that encouraged him to follow other pursuits, too: cooking, music, reading for pleasure. The joy of terrible television.
(He still watches daytime television.)
He graduated at ten and built a solid career, first as the shield of his genin team, then as one of the heaviest hitters of his chuunin squad. He was a jack-of-all-trades during the war, running messages, supporting medical squads, hunkering down on the front lines—whatever was needed. He learned a lot, picked up some interesting scars, lost teammates, worried his moms.
But the war ended, and after seven years in it Raidou wasn’t dead, so there was that.
Post-war, there was the Fox, which sucked. After the Fox, Raidou worked helping the village rebuild. He got good enough at house-fixing that there’s a second career waiting for him, if he ever screws up being a shinobi.
When the Village was getting back on its feet, Raidou was a little at a loose end. He was a good chuunin; he had the makings to be a great jounin, except for the genjutsu issue. Special-jounin was a little bit of a second prize, but there was no shame, Shun explained, in taking the thing you were good at and running with it.
She didn’t expect Raidou to take that and run it all the way to ANBU, but she was happy for him, once she got over the worry.
Ume cried and hit him, because that was how she showed concern. Raidou had to bend all the way down to hug her, and she cried more. On his first day of ANBU, he arrived with a cake she’d baked, and explicit instructions to share it. It wasn’t much different from the academy.
He enjoys the hell out of ANBU, and plans to stay as long as they’ll let him.
He still visits his moms every Sunday he’s home.