[h3][color=7bcdc8]Trịnh Văn Sơn[/color][/h3]
[sub]Tranquility Gardens[/sub]

While Sơn could not much taste the tea these days, the warmth still felt pleasant in his throat. He sipped it through a straw--when he had asked for one, the serving girl had a puzzled expression on her face until she saw his--while he watched the scene before him. Dressed in a worn monk's robes that he had obtained and under his jingasa, in this garden he would have looked the picture of a mendicant ascetic or ragged scholar enjoying tea while surrounded by blossoming flowers. Another man his age might have felt content. 

Yet Sơn was rather unsettled. There was, of course, the situation with his future employment. Sơn had considered simply offering his spear, right now at his side inside the saya and looking no more dangerous than a spade, to one or another zaibatsu lord. But that would have left him no better off than before, once again a low-ranking bushi at his age. The ambition he had would not allow him to accept that again; he would prefer to simply die in this garden if that were to be the case. To find an opportunity to thrust himself into the great events of the day was why he had left the Nobuzai in the first place. These thoughts led up to the more present cause of his unease, the man that was now seated on a bench a little ways across from Sơn. 

Sơn had only caught the man, and the flash of his ring, by chance as the other entered the gardens, afterwards speaking to the serving girl who had brought tea to Sơn earlier. While these connections were only tenuous, Sơn still wondered at the chances of that ring bearing the Oda mokko. He sipped his tea again and thought back to the underworld hacker who had removed the tracking implants for Sơn. While Sơn had made sure the job was done correctly, the hacker could still, of course, be made to talk, and the Nobuzai agents had their ways of doing that. While Sơn did want to face off with the Nobuzai, and did think that dying in this garden would not be too bad, to do so in a street fight with some mere underling would be immensely unsatisfying. 

It could, Sơn thought, simply be his nerves that made him think the other man was eyeing him every so often and pretending otherwise. Experience had made him careful, perhaps overly so. Still, he was done with his tea, and it would not profit him to linger in any case. He pulled the jingasa lower over his brow and stood up to leave, taking his spear with him. His bad leg bothered him a bit from sitting too long, but he ignored it. After all, as Sơn would not suffer accepting an inelegant death, he planned on living at least as long again as he already had, and he would have to get used to it sometime. 

[sub][@Hellis][/sub]