Nagato

[sunshinehistory]

Country/Village: Rain, Amegakure
Rank: God of Ame (Ruler of both Village and Country)
Age at Game Start: 34
Birthday: September 19th

Appearance

Nagato is a man that stands at 5'9" and has incredibly pale skin. He doesn't tan, essentially ever, and has a lighter build, slender from years of not taking care of himself enough. His hair is chin length and a deep crimson, and when he dips his head it essentially hides his face. His eyes, on the other hand, are a silvery purple almost, and have concentric rings from the pupils out of sight beyond the edges of his eyelids. He's moderately pretty, and definitely does not show his age, looking far younger than his mid thirties would imply. A last point is that he always wears several pairs of black earrings made from his rods when away from his special control seat created for his paths. This is so that he always has contact with his Deva path.

Abilities/Powers

Taijutsu		Ninjutsu		Genjutsu		Fuinjutsu		Weapons		Fitness		Speed		Stamina		Intelligence		Hand Seals		TOTAL
8.5		10.0		9.0		9.0		9.0		8.5		8		9.5		9.5		9.5		90.5
Offensive	4.0	Chakra Control	5.0	Detection	4.0	Creation	5.0	Range	5.0	Dexterity	4.0	Body Speed	8.0	Physical	4.5	Tactical Ability	5.0	Hand speed	5.0
Defensive	4.5	Jutsu Strength	5.0	Usage	5.0	Removal	4.0	Melee	4.0	Strength	4.5			Chakra	5.0	Emotional Control	4.5	Seal Recognition	4.5

Ninjutsu:
- He has perfect control of his chakra. He can change how it feels to others, and as an Uzumaki he seems to have come into the sort of endurance that few other family lines ever seem to achieve. Along these lines is also a very keen ability to sense the chakra of others, leaving him able to identify people long before they reach him.
- His most favored ability was the one that allowed him to distribute his other abilities among different bodies so that they could each fight, under his split attention and control, using separate styles and skills. He calls these bodies his paths.
- He has the ability to absorb the chakra of others. He has a path devoted to this called the Preta Path, though he rarely uses this path any longer outside battle.
- He has a mastered control over the summoning technique, in two variants. One, summoning animals in the way of summon creatures, and the other being able to summon specific people he knows to himself when he wishes. The former was a skill mostly shown by way of the Animal Path, who also is mostly retired save battle.
- He can change parts of his body into weapons at will, some of which could even be very elaborately put together in spite of having come out of his body. This is the skill given to the Asura Path. This is another path who has been mostly put away.
- He can summon the King of Hell, which his Naraka Path could use revive and restore the other bodies given time to on top of it's interrogation abilities. This is another path rarely used outside battle.
- He has the ability to get into the thoughts of others, though this is only shown in the most extreme of contexts, resulting in the death of the other party. This skill is associated with the Human Path, who is put away unless needed for interrogation purposes.
- He can use any element as presented, be it fire, water, electricity, or even the ability to manipulate gravity in a radius around his person to attract or repel things to and from himself. This last ability in particular he gifted to his Deva Path. His Deva Path it is very unlikely he will ever actually retire in any fashion, even to aid his own chakra reserves.

- He has partial control over the weather, and in Ame he can sense people using the raindrops as an extension of his senses if he expends the chakra.
- He can heal. It's clumsy, and usually involves simply dumping chakra on people, but he's more than capable of doing so.
- If willing to sacrifice a chunk of his chakra, he can also revive the dead.

Fuuinjutsu
- He has a proficiency with seals. Multiple elaborate seals, often with very impressive, and typically complicated, results are shown to have originated with him. One of these is the seal used to create replicas of the people he's guarding against with seals alone, making them fight themselves.
- Another variant of this is for someone to send copies of themselves out, with a portion of their chakra, in a living body that was not theirs, but would have superior usability than a normal clone jutsu due to having a living base. This particular jutsu is one he has refrained from using since opening Ame to outsiders.

Genjutsu:
- His skill with genjutsu is impressive, allowing him to go into the minds of others to build mental defenses for them, or to crash through them on his own as needed.
- He can do astro-projections, which are related to his mind reading skill, so when he's not ripping out a person's soul to find things out in battle, he can be very gentle about mind contact though it isn't exactly a genjutsu he's using.

Physical:
- He is very sturdy, able to take considerable damage and keep going, while recovering very quickly. More than once it's shown where he takes minimal to no damage when anyone else would have been badly hurt. This is more true of his Paths than him personal before his revival however.
- He's very hand to hand proficient. He has been shown to hold his own against some of the truly beastly characters in the series, being incredibly hard to take down when using either armed or unarmed combat. Part of this is likely due to his speed, which is impressive, giving him the ability to calmly move through battle as though unaffected.
- His vision is far better than normal, and if using a technique that gives him multiple bodies he can see using all of them at once.


Personality

Nagato has a brilliant mind, able to learn things quickly and piece together how they should go. In many ways, his ability to coordinate the notorious missing nin under his command is a testament to how others viewed and accepted this. His battle tactics are often flawless, and his choice of who should do what is often well thought out with little room for error, and it is irrefutable fact that the success of most missions can be directly attributed to him sending the right people to the right places, or planning well in advance in case of a crisis. That is not to say that he never makes snap judgements. While for many people, and in many situations, this would not be seen as a bad thing, Nagato's snap decisions have a way of turning around and beating him over the head years later in a manner that practically screams 'you made a horrific mistake'. His approach to Jiraiya's teachings was one such failing. His early insistence to not fight caused him to snap in uncontrolled berserker rages until he had it under control, something that caused him in no small amounts of grief and pain as the years wore on.

For much of his life, efficiency and doing things with no waste is a very large factor in his planning, and it shows in the way that Ame, once a ruin, finally prospered under his meticulous guidance. He would do many things to to reach his goals, and he will never be called someone who lacks determination because of it. He's stubborn, after all, and once a choice is made, unless someone comes along who can speak to him a certain way, there really isn't any knocking him off his path. It's why Ame flourished, but it's also why he stuck to his guns when he was doing it wrong on a world scale.

And finally, is Nagato's big heart. He loves people. Even when he was deep into grief it wasn't driven by hate, but by pain, not a small part of which being fueled by his empathy with those around him, in a country that had been ravaged. It makes him strive to be better, more powerful, and he does his very best to never let those under his care suffer in any way that he can stop. People are never given duties beyond what he feels their abilities are, and he trusts them, showing that even in the worst stages of his life, he cannot let go of his wish to have faith in others. It has its downside as well of course. He never lets go of anyone, or anything, he loses. He holds tightly to the memory of his parent's deaths, he still mourns the loss of his dog, and he locked the world out of Ame in grief for his dearest friend. They were all the things, the pains, that fueled his persona named Pain. He let them consume him, reveled in them, because he thought that they were the only way that he would be able to come out the other side, dragging the world kicking and screaming behind him if need be.

Nagato can be swayed by those who know how to reach out to his vision of the world, but only if they first show him something he already agrees with and don't trigger off the defensive tactic that tends to be a wildly glaring 'you understand nothing'. Of course, another facet of this stubbornness and desire to see the world a certain way means he misses what's right in front of him. For a long time, after all, he ignored Konan's concern, and it took an outsider to beat some sense into him, be that verbally or not.

Of course, there's also the fact the man believes himself a god, but there is definitely no swaying him out of that opinion.

History

Nagato had wanted peace ever since he was a small child. He saw terrible things that no child should see, and his first kill came at a very young age as he was overwhelmed with the grief and rage of seeing his parents die right in front of him. Things didn't really get better for him after that point, as he was, for a span of time thereafter, alone while he wandered Ame, his health declining as he took in the war torn landscape of his country, which only became more dangerous with each passing day.

Such sights weren't enough to destroy his soft heart though, and even while his own health was faltering, he still found the generosity to take in a dog, Chibi, who he fed more than half the portion of any food he got, because the idea of being alone again was too much. This, in turn, led to him being found by the one person who would stay with him for the rest of his life, Konan, who rescued him from starving to death and brought him to Yahiko. Yahiko, who was his in turn his greatest inspiration for the majority of his life. How quickly he claimed these two as family says a lot about how great his capacity for love was, and how deep his loneliness, though adults would not get such an unwary reception, and events, specifically the death of the dog that had so sustained him, made him close himself to this small circle for much of his life. This only changed, letting him open up, once Kushina literally battered her way through inside the physical fortress that was the village of Ame to see him several years later.

Jiriaya, a man he first learned from as a sensei, and later avoided while pretending that he didn't actually exist, hiding under the facade of Pein, taught him some of the greatest lessons of his life, many of which he held close to his chest in all the wrong ways for nearly a decade. He learned from this man that how one grows up is dependent on their experiences, and that for there to be peace there must first be understanding. Sadly, his interpretation of this concept became twisted, turned into a philosophy of making others feel his pain after Yahiko, someone he had sworn to follow and support, killed himself using Nagato's hands.

Yahiko had created Akatsuki in the name of peace, to protect those in his country and to spread the good will among his fellows. Yes, they would bring down their enemies, but this was not the reason. It was just a consequence of doing what needed doing. When Yahiko died, this was twisted and the reason, while the same, was approached the exact opposite way of anything that Yahiko would have ever wanted.

It was during this part of his life that Nagato took on the very name of Pein, his grief and anger at Konoha, the source of almost every loss in his life, driving him to turn against every nation surrounding his beloved and war torn Ame, closing off the borders and making sure that no one could get inside to threaten his people. He became a revered and unseen god to his country, taking care of them, watching over them, and making sure that none would pass his borders without permission. Those who tried were either absorbed into the missing-nin faction of Akatsuki under contract, killed, or turned roughly away. He cared for his original, Ame born Akatsuki members with the same diligence, and while he had jutsu that would use dead bodies, he was never anything less than respectful in his approach to the dead. He still loved, even while being smothered under unrelenting grief and an icy, dispassionate rage, and it wasn't until Kushina blunt force beat her way in that any of this changed.

Kushina was a voice of, well, definitely not reason. She was loud, demanding, and above all... persistent. It took her years, but still the woman managed to get inside first the borders of the country, then to see his Deva path, the first he'd ever made and the one he still treasured most. However, Uzumaki blood, it seems, will out, and as Nagato had never actually seen anyone else of his hair color, he had to see if he remembered the color of his own correctly, to see if it was some trick of the light that made it look just the same.

That day, Kushina started the process that took two years to conclude, which finally made Ame open its borders for the first time in years. In the years since, Nagato has slowly started to come out more and more under his own power, using his own face. The Deva path is never far from him, always there, and the name Pein is still used with the reverence it always was, but Nagato has gotten healthier in using his Paths less, the strain no longer draining him dry and letting him recover as nothing else would. He still rarely leaves his country, and the rain still falls as it ever did... but it's a better sort of rain.