Collaborative post with @Anders.
Location: Amegakure Genin Academy; Graduation Ceremony | Time: 9:15 A.M.
Interactions: Team Miyako | Furaribi Akane | Shiru Metsumi
“
You puny ant, I knew you could stick it to these softies!” Subaru Furaribi glowered, wait no, beamed from ear to ear rather scarily down at his son. His hair was tightly kept in ponytail, though a few rebellious strands kept bouncing into his vision, annoying the man visibly as he stated down at Akane with glossy eyes. The towering Furaribi dropped a heavy hand upon his son’s head releasing a loud reverberated thud throughout the nearby location, an echo.
Akane maintained his indifferent expression he typically had towards his father, squinted eyes to match the nicks and burns along his face. The boy’s eyes veered to Ichika whom was also thankfully there at the graduation, only thankfully because she worked at this day and hour, and that’s typically more important the to clan than some ceremony. “Subaru, should we reward him? He’s been working hard. He hasn’t broken any bones in the past few months.” The frail woman seemed to quietly mention this, as if not to arise suspicion in her son.
Akane remained silent, he expected his father to continue with hi- “
Yes! Woman, what kind of father do you take me for?” Subaru had no awareness or volume control, announcing charismatically was the usual but Akane guessed that this was his father’s way of showing excitement that didn’t seem, weak.
“Of course, dear, express to him what you have in mind.” Ichika quietly goaded Subaru, a bemused smile painted across her tired face. She stood comfortably close to the red-haired giant of a man, like a mouse next to an elephant. Subaru cleared his throat and removed his large right hand from Akane’s head returning it to the hoist of his belt. His chest is puffed out as he withdrew a large intake of oxygen, and then releasing it in a low grumble. His face became stern, the features of his face tightening with his expression. “
As soon as we go home, boy. I’ll be giving you my share of ashes.. and you know big of a deal that is.”
Akane widened his eyes, golden irises aimed solid on Subaru’s face with a mixture of confusion and excitement. “
Really, why?” He asked as he paced closer to his mother, hands sinking into each pocket and shifting his weight in preparation for his father’s words. The towering Furaribi instead flashed his teeth at his son, crossing his arms at his chest and snapping an eye shut to wink at him. “
Can’t have you being shown up by two girls can we? Make the satchel last and I’m sure your sensei will fear you yet, boy! Fires below, I’m excited for you! Once you get home we are sparring!”
Over the hubbub of the crowd of muttering Genin and clansmen, the two heard a high, chiming voice calling out in their direction, rapidly growing in intensity and proximity.
"Akaaaaaaaane~!" Out from the crowd wriggled a
familiar, slender, dark-haired figure wearing a sleek, silky-black kimono, clutching an opened, lilac parasol in one hand to ward off the rain. Shiru Metsumi, the eldest daughter of the Shiru clan's main family, had been a close friend of Akane's since early childhood - when Subaru had unexpectedly encouraged him to stick close to her. She had never attended the Genin academy, as the reclusive and solitary Shiru clan preferred to homeschool all of their Shinobi, and she had only come to the academy in order to pass the Genin exam and of course to attend the graduation ceremony - and so many of the other Genin surrounding them were giving her confused, unfamiliar looks as she shoved and squirmed her way past all of them.
Akane and Subaru quickly veered their sights to the girl in a synchronization almost supernatural. Akane seemed bothered by the Shiru girl’s outburst, though Subaru on the other hand welcomes the girls bombastic timing. “Ahhh! The little Shiru girl, not surprising that you graduated alongside my little shit of a son.” The Furaribi Giant barked, a sinister smirk aimed down towards the much smaller girl. “How’s your parents, I haven’t spoken to them in a few days?” His words were friendly, oddly lacking his typical hostility as he leaned down towards the girl, reaching his hand into his red facial hair to scratch his chin in genuine curiosity.
"They're fine! They're here too, mother was a bit - oh, here, hold this please Ojii-san!" She thrust the opened parasol into Subaru's face for him to hold abruptly before then turning to Akane and engulfing him in her arms in a gleeful hug. "Did you hear the Amekage Akane?!?" She said excited, pulling back while still clutching his shoulders with her hands, eyes beaming brightly at him. "We're on the same team! What were the chances of that? I was really afraid we would never see each other again!"
The young Furaribi’s eyes rolled, exhuming a large sigh as the girl taller than he, spouted her high energy words at the rather exhausted boy. “The odds were stacked against us. We got a member of my mother’s clan in our midst too. Stacked against us. Pa’s rather happy about it though, it seems.” Akane slowly peeked up towards his father, whom was chuckling down at the girl and shaking a conscious head. “You runts, the sooner you start working together the faster you’ll be helping out the village. Though I know someone doesn’t really care about that, I know you will Little Shiru.” Subaru turned serious for a moment, a cheerful smile slimming down to a flattened expression with a fixation turning towards Metsumi’s family. He kept himself in character however, quickly looking down and firmly grasping the parasol like a twig. “You two discuss what you must, me and Ichika will be speaking with the Kizan fellow in your class. His mother asked us to give him some lessons.” He offered the two a friendly nodded, winking once again to his son before pacing off with a slower Ichika behind him.
Metsumi, who had been listening attentively to Subaru - if with veiled politeness - rapidly turned back to Akane and confirmed his darkest fears. "You said our other teammate was from Ichika's clan? That's amazing! The Yuganori make the
very best dresses! Maybe we can get free clothes from them!" She was practically jumping up and down with excitement as she began to pull Akane by the neck of his shirt towards the academy gateway through the crowd of bemused onlookers. However, she then abruptly stopped in place with a faintly confused expression as she looked all around them, before realization struck her face.
"Wait a minute. Your father stole my parasol!" She exclaimed, turning dramatically and pointing a finger at Akane, having it alight scant centimeters away from his nose - giving him a perfect view of the unfathomably complex lines and sigils of the intricate seal borne upon her palm. The lines almost seemed to squirm and writhe, and almost consciously hurt to look at. "Do you know what this means?!?" She declared, the question clearly both exigent yet rhetorical in nature. It no longer mattered how Akane actually answered, Metsumi already had some notion in her head and was just going to pretend that was what he had said after the fact.
”What does it mean, Metsu?” Akane unapologetically asked, eyes squinting with visible agitation as he had a finger waggled in his face. He had seen the seal marks on her hands before, they were curious, but today was a long day and he was already soaked from the rain. A trait that he had inherited from his father was a short temper, and god forbid this girl eat away at Akane’s shortened fuse even more. Or she would feel his wrath once again. He could feel the knot in his stomach welling up once again, he clenched his fist and swished his tongue around within his mouth.
"It means that in addition to going out to celebrate us being on the same team, we also need to
go shopping so I can get a new umbrella!" Metsumi squealed, turning again and continuing to drag him back towards the gate. "Oh, this is going to be great! We should splurge on something nice, maybe ice cream and dim sum, perhaps some shrimp, restock on explosive tags, maybe get some obi in matching colors-oh! I can have my headband sewn into a
sash-" She chattered on.
“Or we can just get the dim sum. And then go home and relax before our genin careers take effect entirely.” Akane retorted almost aggressively, taking a few steps back and lifting his right hand adjust the Amegakure band upon his arm, fiddling with the new accessory annoyed with it at the moment. “Do you know anything about our sensei, I’ve ever even heard of the person? I can’t even recall her name, probably some nobody.” He sneered with a flash of pristine whitened teeth, aggressive sights staring back towards Metsumi for a moment. He was a young wolf who had just joined a new pack, and one of the she-wolves was already totting him around like an accessory.
Metsumi stopped in her tracks again to pause, her gaze becoming faintly distant for a moment. "The Amekage said our sensei was Kazami Miyako, and that we were team three!" She declared after a moment. "I have also never seen or heard of her before! But I bet my parents would know! They know everyone, even if it's only because they see a lot of the reports the Amekage keeps on everyone! Want to go ask them?" It was one of the few times Metsumi had actually bothered to
ask whether Akane wanted to do something, and as was always the case, it pertained to speaking or interacting with her parents. Akane was not sure what the issue there was; he had been around them with Metsumi plenty of times and them seemed alright, as far as parents went. They did not even beat her at all and they clearly doted on her terribly, so what was even the problem?
”Or we can just meet her in person ourselves and save the surprise for ourselves? But if you want to ask your parents, you go right ahead.” Akane clicked his tongue, glancing back towards his own folks before stopping his march abruptly and spinning on his heels. “Better yet, why not just find out beforehand for ourselves. Let’s spy on her, or you could dig up some info from your family archives.” Akane showed genuine excitement in his words, his steps quickly accelerating towards Metsumi as he made a stance at her left. “And then we can come to her with information and blow her mind, and then we are on top.”
"Asura and Indra,
yes!" Metsumi's quivering voice redoubled upon itself. "Forget the dim sum, let's go out and just get everything we'll be needing to discover
everything there is to know about her..."
Akane and Metsumi then spent the better part of the week up until the arrival of their sensei's messenger birds, canvasing the entirety of Amegakure trying to unveil the hidden details of what, to them, appeared to be their Sensei's extraordinarily boring and uninteresting life as revealed by examining copies of her records obtained through connection of Metsumi's parents to the Secure Archives Library. The extent of their adventures in this short breadth of time do not bear repeating in great detail, with nearly everyone involved other than the two themselves bearing immense regret and shame over what transpired. Not exhaustively inclusive of this series of events were several fist-fights with eight-year old children, the attempted ritual sacrifice of a silver-furred cat, blackmailing a night-club owner, burning down a haunted outhouse, the kidnapping of a pet rock, and a staged assassination attempt by way of lavishly undercooked pork laced with laxatives and anabolic steroids.
The conclusion of the two Genin upon the closure of these affairs was either that their sensei was the single most skilled, discrete, and subtle Kunoichi to have ever lived, exceeding even S-Ranked Missing Nin in sheer ability as far as deception andconcealment went, or else she was the single least interesting Jōnin in Amegakure's employ.
Having returned home in disappointment, Metsumi had returned to her private rooms on the fifth day of the week. She slept, woke up grogily the next morning bound hand-and-foot, in a completely different room with no exits, and blearily sleep-worked her way through the exceedingly clever Fūinjutsu trap fire-drill scenario that the clan's shinobi were regularly put through as children.
Each scenario was devised from scratch by the family's group of elders in accordance with their evaluation of a student or Genin's skill - but, given the expertise and specialization of the Shiru clan, most of the scenarios they devised would haveconfounded and resulted in severe embarrassment of most A-Rank Shinobi. The various Fūinjutsu-themed traps and exercises were designed in order to test familiarty with sealing theory and technique as opposed to any kind of physical obstacle or trap that could be overcome with strength or chakra. The punishment Genjutsu triggered by failure would have left most of the village Shinobi panicking from the perception that they had been covered head to toe in permnanetly adhered snails.
Today's exercise was an exploration on manipulating, bending, and reworking the function of an existing seal without breaking it. Predicated upon simple principles of overlapping seals and the infamous eight-trigram sealing method, Metsumi burnt a series of chakra mandalas upon a concentric labyrinth seal that had been physically engraved upon a sheet of tempered steel, imbalancing rings of the overall seal's construction without disrupting its function, while simultaneously balancing the flow of chakra in a new manner. Since the original seal was engraved in solid metal the original structure could not be altered in any way unless she had access to tools other than a nightgown and two lengths of braided wire cord, and a single mistake would cause the seal to destabilize and release the punishment Genjutsu stored within it. After completing the final circuit in the labyrinthe Metsumi saw that the final structure contained an odd number of sequences, but required an even number to unlock. The practical solution would have been to physically alter the original seal or else to utilize a method requiring more chakra than she actually had at the moment, she she instead cheated her way past the quandry by utilizing the simple principle that two odds make an even, running the flow of chakra through the palm-seal on her right hand. The sheet of metal slid sideways into the wall, permitting her to pass.
The exercise, which would have driven most Jōnin to despair, involved principles that were so rote and ingrained in Metsumi that she was still not even halfway awake by the time she stumbled out of the concealed room's confines and fought her way through the cluster of small children from the branch families arguing and fighting with each other in the hallway as they started milling out of their own concealed rooms in turn.
Settling down on a long bench in the Shiru clan's communal family commonroom to await for breakfast to be served, still blearily blinking sleep from her eyes in the midst of chattering children and other older clan-members, Metsumi was broken out of her stupor when a clan footman rushed to immediately serve her with a glass of near-freezing chilled orange juice accompanied with steaming-hot catfish tempura with warm soy, and what appeared to be a pickled plum on the side for some strange reason, all served on a carved wooden cutting-board. Accompanying the promptly delivered breakfast was a note. The absence of any kind of envelope and needlessly complex wax seal complete with Fūinjutsu trap immediately signaled that the note was not from her parents or anybody else in the clan. Seeing the time written in the message, she then chokingly forced her way through the sumptuous meal (althogh she snubbed the inexplicably presented plum, letting one of her smaller siblings from a branch family claim it instead) and, now fully awakened, ran to her private rooms to get dressed. She threw on her training shorts and, remembering that the note had specified there would be a show and now knowing more about the Kazami clan now after a week's worth of shamelessly awful espionage than she had ever wanted to know, she then also threw on a long black haori with several internal pockets for discrete items and left her room running while still tying it up with a salmon-colored obi. Grabbing a brand new turquoise-colored parasol from near the entrance of the main family's house, she had more or less accounted for her appearance and rushed out through the raining streets of Amegakure towards the village outskirts where the Kazami theater was located.
Deciding that time was of the essence, she abandoned all pretense of propriety and used the Shunshin technique, hopping up and along the rooftops in order to reach her destination on time - though she stopped a block short of the theater and descended back down to ground-level, taking a moment to collect herself and unruffle her haori so as to appear she had been walking along calmly the whole way. She then strode out into the street, parasol in hand and opened despite the rain only misting lightly rather than being a full downpour, and approached the gated entrance of the theater where a figure that Metsumi instantly recognized as Kazami Miyako from her profile picture from her record, tapping her feet somewhat impatiently. Metsumi approached at the same time as Akane and Takashi, barely having time to register the third Genin's presence before they were all ushered inside.
The opening performance the Genin were forced to sit through was, to Metsumi, rather boorish and not to her taste - but, knowing full well that the performance itself might be part of some kind of test, she did her utmost to memorize every part of the scene as it played out, down to the colors and patternings of the fans used by Kazami and the other two women. The entire performance, she sat fully upright, seemingly wholly entranced by what was transpiring on-stage.
After the performance, the Genin were escorted to a library. Metsumi greeted both Akane and Takashi cheerfully in full the moment they were alone.
"I hope we can be friends Takashi-san! Almost everyone in my clan's main family has dresses made by the Yuganori, it's such a privilege to be able to work with somebody from such a distinctive clan of such shrewd and urbane vendors!" As compliments went, it was the very nicest way somebody could have complimented the Yuganori for being notorious crooks. Metsumi spent the remainder of the time until Miyako appeared once more to carefully inspect the surrounding library.
"As we eat, please - Metsumi. Start with yourself, let us get to know you. Tell me a few things about yourself... Hobbies, what do you wish to hone in on, your end goal..."
"Well..." Metsumi began, thinking carefully. "I suppose calligraphy was a hobby of mine, sort of? Everyone in my clan practices regularly though so I am not sure if that qualifies! Uhm...hm. I suppose I would like to get to know more about other cultures and their history, maybe? Since as a Kunoichi I might have to infiltrate them, disguising myself and posing as a local! Maybe I should take up a common trade as a hobby I can develop into cover later. Maybe dancing or singing or playing an instrument - like in your clan's shows, Sensei!" She declared brightly. As she spoke, she seized upon a bowl of the pork broth and some of the provided meat chunks, and use a pair of chop-sticks to mix in several clumps of rice.
Izurich
Abstract Proxy
Hyperdrive
DeadDrop
Punished GN
Amegakure no Sato
Raiton.
