Kozai Senju

Name: Kozai Senju
Nickname: Storm Shelter
Age: 52
Gender: Male

Height: 5’11”
Weight: 130 lbs.
Appearance:
Despite the fact that he's an old war dog, Kozai looks actually a bit older than even that due to the scruff of facial hair that he barely tries to maintain. A wiry fellow with a somewhat sallow complexion, Kozai stands a little taller than his fellow mountain folk. Dark, dull, wiry and easily swept hair frames the top of his head, while his bear frames the bottom. His lean form easily supports and hides a rather impressive set of well trained muscles beneath his skin, which itself has a few interesting and significant features all on its own, of course. Despite the fact that he's an old war dog, Kozai looks actually a bit older than even that due to the scruff of facial hair that he barely tries to maintain. A wiry fellow with a somewhat sallow complexion, Kozai stands a little taller than his fellow mountain folk. Dark, dull, wiry and easily swept hair frames the top of his head, while his bear frames the bottom. His lean form easily supports and hides a rather impressive set of well trained muscles beneath his skin, which itself has a few interesting and significant features all on its own, of course.

While he has received healing for multiple wounds in the past, leaving him with a few significant scars, there are a few among them that come to bear. A rather thin, but long one that stretches from the top of his right shoulder all the way to the middle-left side of his back frequently gives him pain and seeps when he's under stress. There's another one that he takes moderate care to hide (when he's sober) that traverses the length of his left thigh. It's somewhat thicker than the one previously mentioned.

Normally, he wears his standard uniform, whether day or night.


Village: Kumogakure
Character Rank: Jonin
Character Tier: S-3
Clan: Senju (1000 Skills)
Element: Lightning
Bijuu Roll: -

Personality: Kozai is a rather grizzled old man, though he doesn’t always look the part, with a grumpy personality and a pessimistic outlook on life. He fails to understand the good in many people, believing them to be corrupt, evil and self-serving at heart. To his own detriment, he believes that not even he is exempt from this pile of humanity, as he is also somewhat self-serving, though only to a small extent. In short, he's lost faith in humanity for quite some time, especially the younger generation. It's in his opinion that the youth of today (despite being one himself not so long ago) are inefficient, unruly, disrespectful, and overall not a good thing for the village. In other words, he's the "get off my lawn, damn kids" kind of guy. To this extent, he's not really popular among the villagers and the ninja around him, but he doesn't care about that. He's done "his bit" for them, and whether they're grateful or not for it isn't up to him, so he doesn't put out the effort to be kind or popular.
In combat, he's not the kind to give into instinct, but neither is he the kind to plan everything out in advance. Sure, he works on a plan throughout the entire fight, but it's fluid and adaptable, and builds up slowly, kind of like a glacier. The sort of "glacial thinking" makes him more of a specialist in drawn out close quarters fights, which he excels in and used to love. Now, however, the passion has gone out of him, replaced by a pleasant passion for cheap liquor and the occasional woman. He's had thoughts about dragging himself out of retirement, but is rather scared (secretly, of course) of embarrassing himself in front of the new generation that he despises so much, so he's currently indecisive.
Character History: There's not much to say about Kozai's early life in Kumo. As a Senju, he was naturally talented, so his success was pretty much expected from the beginning. The standards for him were already high, so he didn't really shock anyone through his progress, which bothered him a little. Kozai, as a burgeoning adolescent, wanted to shock people and leave his mark on the village (and if possible, the world). At this point in his life, he was naive, though he thought he was hot shit and knew everything there was to know about the world, and war, and humanity, and so on and so forth.

At some point, he began to become fascinated, not with ninjutsu in general, but with the origin of certain clans' special techniques. It was common knowledge in his circles, of course, that bloodlines were genetic in nature. Naturally, they could be transplanted as well, but that varied due to host compatability. His concern, therefore, was with the host itself. How could he create a perfect host for implanting all kinds of stuff? It was more like a kid playing with building blocks at that point than an adult, but perhaps that was for the best. The sleepless nights spent dreaming up hypothetical gene sequences while on missions, he would realize later, were the best days of his life.

As he grew older, he sort of calmed down. He trained harder rather than played around in the med ninja area, and started to grow his power bit by bit. Decades passed, and through many repeated skirmishes (and even a war, which we won't really go into here), he gathered experience enough to be considered one of those veterans of the village. The war had taught him many things, and given him... resources of all sorts to play around with. To the victor be the spoils, so they say.

Since he was one of the strongest operatives available (and the fact that he was actually available at the time), he was sent to a small city in the west of the country to familiarize himself with a certain clan there that had been on watch for about twenty years. Considering its rather obscure status before that, the administration thought it necessary to have someone of Kozai's talents there to gather information and do something about the clan if it got out of hand. Naturally, because these were confidential orders, he had no choice but to obey. It's not like rebellion was ever in his mind, anyway, but his mental state had already started to deteriorate slightly.

Alright, sure, so maybe a bit of time among the "rustics" would help him sort things out better. He packed his bags and headed off, hoping that the fresh air would allow him to clear his head. As it turned out, it did seem to help things a bit. Kozai wasn't really allergic to anything in particular, so his experience out there in the small city was going great. Even his insertion mission was going quite well.

He'd befriended a group of teenagers from the clan, all talented shinobi in their own right. For what reason he liked sticking around them, he had no idea. Certainly, they stayed close to him because they looked up to him. His strength, his experience, and his gruff sort of friendliness had a "grandpa" charm all of its own. But why did he feel a bizarre sort of affection for them? Surely, he thought to himself at the time, this can't be what they called "paternal instinct", right? The thought was absolutely incredulous to him, but he couldn't ignore the possibility that he was becoming attached to the very people that he was supposed to be spying on.

So, naturally, when the orders came that the entire clan had to go, he took five whole seconds of hesitation to himself. Coming to the realization that he couldn't possibly make this decision on his own, he reached up and shut off his own perceptual consciousness, allowing a sort of "p-zombie" dummy plug to make the decision for him, something he'd only done once before in his lifetime. "Kozai" decided that the best course of action was to follow his orders, and the entire clan complex went up in a pillar of energy that night, vaporized with a pulse of sheer power.

As for the kids, the ones who he'd called his friends, he cut them all down with ease. Talent is nothing when compared to hard work, and hard work is nothing when it comes to experience and preparation. Sure, they were prepared as well, but he'd been planning out this contingency for months on end, all while smiling at them and telling them old war stories. He returned home, unaware that the fear that had been building up for years on end would now begin to grip at his heart.

Approved