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[h1][b][u]Iburi Kodo[/u][/b][/h1]

Kodo woke, as was his routine, at the crack of dawn. To say that he woke with the call of a rooster would be both untrue about roosters -- who usually preferred to crow all night and day, sunrise or not -- and the Iburi, who would sooner fall on their swords en masse than allow such unwashed creatures into their carefully manicured, walled-off compund. All the same, Kodo awoke at dawn, emerging from the grip of sleep and into consciousness just early enough to witness the final moments of blue-grey night secede into daybreak's pale yellow. Thunder softly rolled in the distance, and this along with the chill in the air and the soft pitter-patter of rain on the roof shingles informed him of the day's persistent grey weather.

Dawn was the time Kodo was his most natural self, if that meant his [i]least[/i] monklike. His white hair resembled a pale tumbleweed more than anything, while his clothes had become disheveled and loose. This was not the steelfaced monk his peers had come to know, but a shaggy-haired boy of thirteen, rubbing sand from his eyes and ascertaining his day's schedule. Most immediately, he thought, [i]it was raining[/i]. His mother's hearth would require firewood and the means for it to be lit before he left, and so it was then and there that Kodo decided his morning would be [i]rushed[/i]. Or at least, rushed for his standards.

Kodo rolled to his side and heaved himself off of the floor, standing up, turning, and bowing his head to the humble sage shrine at the southernmost corner of the room. In lieu of a statue or carving, Kodo's shrine had only a poster depiction of the sage tacked carefully to the wall at each corner, above a short, wide drawer. He walked over to it, wincing on the cold tiles of the floor as he left his mat, and opened the drawer's single door, procuring a matchbox and a stick of incense. He opened the box, striking a match on its side and lighting the incense, carefully waving it in the air so as to extinguish it. He recalled the words of Elder Hachi, who taught him the importance of waving incense to extinguish its fire, as opposed to blowing on it and insulting the sage with one's breath. Kodo bowed his head once more and placed the incense in a small clay bowl before he turned to leave his room, taking the matches with him. First and foremost, his mother needed a fire. 

Kodo's home was not large -- After his father's disappearance, it was the elderly clan matriarch Hideyo Iburi who decided that his mother Aina would move from the home that had been given to her nephew [i]Satoshi[/i], intended for a [i]family[/i], to a smaller two-room cottage in the compound. For Kodo, this meant that the hallway from his room had three doors; The front door, the back door, and the door immediately across his, to his mother's room. He turned left, to the back door, exiting the house to grab a quartered log from the small cord of wood leaning on the wall. He looked over his garden for a moment, ignoring the soft rain on his head and at his feet. The rain would be good for his beans, which needed a good shower, but may simultaneously drown his Taro, which had begun to yellow at the leaves. He could have found a small tent for the Taro, though this day was more important than a day for gardening. It was the day he would become a [i]Genin[/i], and achieve the first stepping stone on his path home to the temple.

Kodo went back into the house, wiping his feet on a small straw mat and turning left to his mother's room. She was a still protrusion on the mat, her breathing invisible under the layers of thick blankets. At the opposite end of the room was a small fireplace, not unlike a small square cave built into the wall. Kodo placed the logs in a neat stack, gathering together some of the unburned tinder within the cinders of the fireplace together and lighting the pile with a match. He stoked the fire carefully with short breathes, until satisfiedly standing up and turning to his sleeping mother once more. At the table by her bedside was a small piece of parchment, which had not been there before. He and his mother would communicate back and forth through notes at times if he could not be around during her short hours of wakefulness, and this was one such note. He quietly paced to the table and picked it up, squinting to read his mother's feint handwriting in the light of the fireplace.

[i]Congratulations on your first day as a Genin!
I am so proud of you, son.
I will brew us a congratulatory pot of tea when you come home.
Love, Mom[/i]

Kodo smiled, and tucked the paper into his shirt.

His morning routine started with grooming -- Gathering water from the short iron pump in the garden, and carrying it back to the warm comfort of his home from the crisp morning air with a measured patience, carefully making sure that the water did not spill even [i]in[/i] the rain. He walked slower to the door than he was capable of going, though that was in many ways the [i]point[/i] of his lessons as a young monk. To expose yourself to the elements for a few moments longer to keep your bathing water unspilled was precisely the sort of lesson ingrained in Kodo's mind as a boy.

He brought the bucket to the fireplace in [i]his[/i] room, procuring an additional log from the cord on his way in and lighting it once more, placing the metal bucket to hang on a metal rod in the hearth. While waiting for the water to warm up, he was brought to the next part of his "rushed" morning; Prayer. Kodo sat cross-legged on his mat, arching his back straight and cupping his hands together, faced towards his shrine. He sat in this meditative posture for some moments before beginning his morning prayers in earnest. He would pray for his mother's health, and then pray for the health of the elders back at the temple. He would pray for peace throughout the nations, bountiful crops in each farm, and for the souls of all those who died the previous night. He would pray for each of the classmates whose names he knew, and then each of the Jonin. He would pray for the rabbit who frequented his garden, for the noodle vendor who would wave to him in the morning, and for the monks he fondly remembered. Then, he would pray for himself. By then, his bathwater had reached a reasonable temperature. He stood up, bowing to the shrine [i]again[/i] and walking once more to the drawer, bringing back the matchbox and procuring a small razor.

Kodo left the door approximately an hour after waking up, having started a fire for his mother, prayed, taken a bath, [i]shaved[/i], exercised, and dressed himself. He wore the most formal of his clothes -- a grey-on-white geta and pair of slacks -- and left the Iburi compound before most of its inhabitants had awoken. Though the compound was a fair walk from the academy grounds, Kodo rarely [i]walked[/i] there. Instead, he arrived early enough to be one of the first in attending, apparating from a cloud of thin gray smoke in front of the academy walls. He preferred to not enter buildings in his smoke form, as it seemed to him an unspoken breach of privacy.