"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we don't usually allow foreigners to carry large weapons around the village, least of all unescorted. You understand." [break][break] Ai was unmoving, only half-facing her interlocutor. At her left side, the bustling city, an orchestra of surfaces, of voices; to her right, the guardsman and his chagrin, the rustling of his garments where he shrugged his big shoulders. There was pity in his tone, as there often was when people dealt with Ai. [break][break] In truth, the woman was a touch afraid. Nobody had much reason to harm her here, surely, but her blade, besides being of sentimental import, also served as her only really protection against the possibility, and she had no real desire to be chaperoned, to have her experience of this new place guided by the insistence of some other party. Now that she had finally reached her first village - a true bazaar of human activity - she was both nervous and eager; she had not witnessed one in over a decade. [break][break] So there, snagged on the threshold, she paused a long while before eventually reaching behind her back to untie her scabbard's fastenings from her black dress, high and low. The woman presented her most prized possession with both palms. [break][break] "Pray take best care of it," she asked in the quiet, breathy way she had. [break][break] "Of course, ma'am. I understand the value of a sword." [break][break] If that reassured Ai she did not show it, merely making to turn away and resume her journey when she was halted a second time. [break][break] "Hold up! We might have an escort for you after all. You there, Genin boy. What was your name, sorry? This young lady is new to the village and needs help getting around. Would you be so kind?" [break][break] Proverbially pulled to a stop, Ai stood straight and contemplated the indicated character sidelong without expression. If she was aggravated by this development, she also did not show it.
The ramparts of Iwagakure’s gates were well defended, standing the testament of a village that could not be invaded. Towers and rows of reinforced wall built from the mountainsides that surrounded them, patrolled with diligence.
That’s a lot of hungry guards.
Itaru had finished the rounds around the walls, his mission of the day the trivial but important duty of making sure everyone on post got a bento. He had just dropped the last batch off at the main gate, only to hear someone calling for him.
He squinted, an eye partially unwrapped on his forearm catching sight of the guard and a woman around his age behind him as he was pacing away. He stopped in his tracks and turned about. There was a bit of pain concealed in his movements, but one that he had grown accustomed to.
He spoke in a moderato tone with good annunciation. Not quite bored, perhaps a bit more distracted than anything.
“I’m Itaru Tokoro,” he answered with a bow. “I will do as you ask, sir.”
He adjusted the bandages on his arms, rustling them around and tightening them to make sure that none of his extra features were exposed. Many found them to be unnerving to say the least. He was wearing his typical olive-green kimono with simple geta on his feet, a light sweat on his forehead from the day’s hustle and bustle. As he moved closer to approach, he noticed that the silverette’s eyes were covered. He stopped for a moment. Was he supposed to? Lead her by the arm? He shook his head at the thought.
“Hello there miss,” he said. “Did you need um… just let me know if you need help. Is there something or someone you came here to visit?”
Had they really taken her walking stick away? Gate guards were assholes.
Ai might not have turned towards the Genin boy, but he had her full attention as he approached and as he spoke. Despite the guard's title his voice carried a more or less fully mature resonance, so Ai guessed he must have been hovering around early adulthood, the same as herself. He played with gauze coverings on his arms, playing over peculiar bumps there. [break][break] "Hello there miss," Itaru greeted, having shaken his short-cropped head shortly before he spoke. There was a trace of uncertainty in the way he spoke to her, but Ai was accustomed to this regard from strangers and it filtered easily into her subconsciousness. With unfortunate timing from her demanding curiosity, the silverette lifted her hand just as her guardian finished asking his question, one finger raised in space, conceivably as though to shush him - but Ai also did not notice this. [break][break] Her senses spang to life, modeling the surrounding space with clarity that would have far exceeded even the liberal estimate of any acquaintance, sharply individuating each form that dotted the place with tremendous detail. The lumps on the boy's arms were many, illuminated by each beat of blood through his veins and by their own... movement. Slugs? No; they were far too agitated, too quick in their occasional rolling. [break][break] Rather than set off, Ai turned her faceless regard on him fully, black strips of cloth where her own eyes ought to've been. [break][break] "Are those... eyes?" she flatly asked.
Itaru felt himself sink, slouching and slacking his jaw at the question. He looked at the finger she had extended upwards, but didn’t make the connection to it being some form of sensory ability. He was no expert in the subject matter, his own unique senses a natural gift (or curse) of his.
“Oh, so you’ve noticed already huh? You must be more perceptive than you seem,” Itaru said, rubbing the back of his head and ruffling his hair. Further investigation from Ai would show that there were eyes beyond just his arms, spanning much of his torso and each of his extremities. They were all moving about unguided as they were kept hidden from the light.
“Don’t worry, I’m not a monster or anything, just an otherwise normal person who has a bunch of eyes,” he explained. There were more people than he could count who had found his kekkei genkai unnerving, disgusting, or horrifying. He was immediately defensive about it when it came up. “It’s kind of funny really, my original pair needs glasses to see and it’d be easier just to use the others…”
Best to disarm any potential fear with a little light humor about it. Still he adjusted his glasses to better see her. He looked at the blindfold, and seemed to be lost in thought about the stranger.
The young woman observed, unsmiling, as the boy explained himself, one fragment of her attention on the resonance of his words and the other on the wet crawl of his many cloaked eyeballs. She had most certainly never encountered anyone of his constitution before. "I'm not a monster of anything," Itaru was hurried with his assurances, plainly practiced at them. [break][break] As he was speaking, the wanderer's sightless eyes turned away from him. She had been called a monster before when others had accused her of playing some trick, that her black cloth must be transparent, only for them to snatch it from her and find empty ravaged valleys where her own eyeballs ought to've been. The silverette felt a temptation to bitterness spark in her gut, that he was so glutted for the sense that she had had cruelly, agonizingly robbed from her, and that he would go so far as to make light of it. [break][break] And then she let it fall away. [break][break] In the absence of that dark feeling, she could smile an amused smile. "You have enough for both of us, then." A joke settled in place of all of it, a rare thing to come from the girl, but its arrival felt as natural to her as the steps she set off with up into the village proper, and stayed with her for quite some time as she allowed her attention to capture all sorts of phenomena that occurred around her.
Itaru’s mouth dropped open ever so slightly for a moment, followed be a short bellow of laughter that he brought his fist up to. It got a bit worse, so he tucked his mouth under his shirt until he got something together. It took him a few moments to regain his composure.
“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting that,” he said followed by a relieved sigh. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Pretty disorienting at times, being able to see in every direction. I’d offer you some of my spares if I could.”
To the village those extra eyes of his were a weapon they had invested in. The only reason he was allowed back, really.
Finally, he noticed the held hand and put two and two together after a brief squint. “But you probably know what I mean, using sensory ninjutsu that way I imagine is probably even more disorienting. You should conserve your chakra for a while, you won’t miss anything too exciting.”
He hadn’t guessed exactly right but was in the ballpark.
Regardless of compliance or not he gestured with his neck and turned around to start walk towards the village. He'd offer a raised arm to tether to subtly for a few moments, but didn't really expect she'd need it. He wasn’t sure exactly where the person wanted to be taken, but he assumed the market must have been the best place to lead her to. That was what most strangers came into town for, anyways.
Perhaps though, with her condition, she was a patient of Lord Tschikage’s team just like he was… but he didn’t recognize her from his time in the hospital. She hadn’t given a destination, and he often found the questions people didn’t answer to be intriguing.
“Got a name?” he asked.
simplicity
Last Edit: Sept 21, 2021 7:04:35 GMT by Itaru Tokoro
Being that she could more or less hear most everything at all times - hushed conversations that others assumed were private, for example - Ai had become accustomed to not fully understanding all that transpired about her and, moreso than that, had become profoundly inured to the idea that there were many imperfections in the world, great and small, that simply needst not be corrected. Itaru could believe the rudimentary hand-sign she had briefly displayed represented a great expenditure, could assume she was utilizing some jutsu she did not even bother to guess at, could claim that the place he lived in was somehow objectively mundane and that there was little about it that warranted most rapt attention, and she would simply challenge him on none of these counts. [break][break] It was not sort of implied reprimand that her smile soon faded; that was simply how she was. When the wanderer set off at a modest pace, she might not have interjected anywhere, but she did absorb the chatter in her surroundings: how a gate guard behind her casually regaled a time when he had caught a man hiding amidst a merchant's cargo, only for it to turn out that he was playing a harmless practical joke; how a housewife gossiped that she suspected her husband of having an affair on the second story of a nearby building; how rats scurried in this cellar, but not that one; how here the talk was quotidian, yet there it had grown positively existential; how there was much nervousness everywhere and yet much optimism at the same time. [break][break] Especially without her blade, peripherall Ai did not seem all that imposing, yet those who chanced to look her way - see the unsmiling woman with her black-clad countenance - oft stepped out of her way either out of alarm or consideration, meaning she did not too often have to adjust her course even in relatively well-populated streets. Ahead down the main street, besides greater human density there was also much babble of money, of commodities, and Ai understood she was heading towards a market. [break][break] "Got a name?" her companion inquired, already more casually than when he had first come upon her. [break][break] Ai stopped in her tracks and slowly swiveled her head this way and then that. "Yes: of my choosing. Call me Ai." Her head tilted low to the left. [break][break] "Where is the heart of this place?" she asked - that, or merely chanced to wonder it aloud.
Itaru stopped along with Ai, a wrapping on his arm had come loose enough that an eye was exposed, so he watched her speak without turning to face her. While he listened, he uncovered a few more eyes on his other arm and started looking around for his teammates. He often felt like they were spying on him.
“Mm, that’d be the Tsuchikage's Tower, Ai,” Itaru explained as he continued forward. “We probably shouldn’t go too close to it, I’m not sure if they’d want guests without an appointment in that part of the village.”
The smell of various foods permeated the air around the market. A lot of spices from fresh curries and the smell of baked goods. There were stands with fruit brought in from the jungles Bonchi no Kuni which gave the area a slight hint of fermentation as there was more supply than demand. To Itaru the sounds of the market were taken for granted, all a blend of noises of hustle and bustle that he couldn’t pick much up out of. His eyes moved around seeking out things of interest.
“This may as well be the true heart of the village though, from a certain standpoint,” he mused. “So, no particular destination then just here to explore?”
As he spoke one of his eyes slid over to a back alley where he noticed some sort of a commotion between a group of men standing in a circle. It looked like they were kicking something, but he couldn’t discern what was going on exactly with so many things in the way of his field of vision. He tilted his head curiously.
simplicity
Last Edit: Sept 21, 2021 17:28:23 GMT by Itaru Tokoro
While she listened, Ai allowed her escort to travel a little ways ahead of her. Itaru's first answer was the Kage tower; the seat of power. It made sense: Through to that locus many questions arrived, and from it many a terraforming decree surged outward. Still, that lofty unilaterality was not the only answer. The Kage Tower, Ai thought, was more like a brain. [break][break] Something trivial about Itaru's speech reached Ai and she frowned hidden brows. "There is much caution here," she remarked, low and mostly to herself. [break][break] Where they both were was the most precipitous edge of the village market itself, a great mass of people out of which stragglers perpetually trickled, now having to work their way around where Ai stood paused in the center of the road. She was growing hungry, it was true, having traveled quite a ways that day on only a meagre breakfast, but her coin purse was light also, and from all that she overheard, the food on offer was served with a generous helping of surcharge. Ai would have to find employment of some kind before she inevitably moved on from Iwagakure. [break][break] Here, too, was a valid answer: A place where many individuals frequented, a channel through which the country's - even to some extent the world's - materiality flowed, where much sensation and joy occurred; but it was noisome, egotistical, temporal, not like that organ which silently, peaceably beat at the truest center. The market, Ai thought, was more like a throat. [break][break] "So, no particular destination then just here to explore?" Itaru asked. [break][break] The girl's head, having floated around, canted this way and that, settled back down to more or less stare forth at him. "I am here to see," she responded. Immediately thereafter, it canted to the right along with the Genin's. [break][break] In the alleyway, two boys stood over a slightly more diminutive one. One of those who stood occasionally punctuated his speech by laying into his victim with a kick, even as his companion cringed slightly each time. "I told you to stay...! away from her!" he was yelling whilst the other child sobbed. Without explaining herself, Ai turned perpendicular to the crowd to enter the laneway; felt the coolness of shadow fall across her; witnessed the exact moment that one boy then the other saw her from the spin of their heads and the brief arrhythmia in their chest. "Hey! Who are you? Get lost, lady, this is none o' your business!" [break][break] Ai stood unsmiling for a long moment in which nobody seemed to know what else to say. Eventually, she hissed. [break][break] "Stop."
Itaru had tunneled in on the situation and despite his peripheral vision he didn’t realize that Ai was stepping towards the boys in the alleyway until she was already a good number of paces ahead of him.
He tried to halt her in vain before realizing she was making a line for the same trouble that he had detected, but he found himself stalled by a passing crowd of businessmen who had oily mustaches and smelled of cheap cologne. He stepped back and moved to go around them, but the girl in the black dress was already speaking to the children.
Itaru pulled his headband out and fastened it to his forehead, approaching the group as Ai told them to stop. He walked up behind her and then moved ahead.
“Beat it,” he said to the punks.
“Hmph, you’re a nobody,” the loudest of them said with an accompanying chortle. “Look at that Daiki, it’s your future self. A flunky adult genin,” he said before getting in another kick. The victim could only whimper.
Itaru grew red in the face and grit his teeth and clutched his fist. He wanted to punch the kid in the mouth, but he really couldn’t afford a suspension of pay. His medical debts were not going to pay themselves.
“More than you’ll ever be if you don’t get out of here,” Itaru warned. The wrappings on his forearms fell as he held his fists up, and the wrappings on them fell to reveal several eyes.
“Eww, let’s get out of here,” the quieter of them said. The other nodded, and spit on Daiki as they began slinking off further own the opposite side of the alleyway.
Itaru looked over at the sobbing kid. He wasn’t good at calming people down or being comforting. He then glanced over at Ai, feeling awkward as the kid remained in a fetal position.
simplicity
Last Edit: Sept 24, 2021 22:14:52 GMT by Itaru Tokoro
It took only the revelation of Itaru's writhing slugs to convince the bullies to scarper. Ai observed them leave without a word. She had felt all of it reverberate through her mind: The scathing remark, the spiteful kick, the pace of Itaru's heartbeat quicken as he had been insulted. There was one thing all of Ai's training had never managed to convey to her: [break][break] Why in the world people chose to be cruel. [break][break] The boy named Daiki lay sobbing against the alley wall, a bundle of dripping and rasping as his body was racked with sobs; he sought to hide his shame from the world around with protective arms, though that was no use against the wanderer. She crouched down to him, her fingers delicately alighting, splayed, on the stone floor; the other hand touched his shoulder. He recoiled and cried out in spite as if she had meant to damage him. Her hand remained hovering there. [break][break] "Dear warrior," she murmured, "your foes are vanquished." So close to her, Daiki's pause was practically Ai's own. "Now show us your head; hold it high." [break][break] "What do you mean!" he exclaimed, indignant beneath his muffling arms. "I didn't do anything!" [break][break] "We did nothing, child. It was you who endured." [break][break] Whether or not the boy quite understood was unclear, but he did at least peek out his brown eyes out of curiosity. His hair, parted in the middle which Ai knew not to be red was disheveled and his lip was badly swollen on the right side. The vision of the eyeless woman and the too-many-eyed man over her shoulder seemed to be far less frightening to him than the one that had just left. Ai was even smiling. [break][break] Her black-gloved hand gently touched his shoulder a second time. "Come now. Lift yourself. We are here to protect you. I promise, you are safe with us." [break][break] Slowly, his eyes still on the ground, Daiki sat up; scrunched himself into a ball there, also. And then he cried. Leaning forward onto her knees, the young woman hugged him. This time, he did not resist. He only cried all the harder. [break][break] "We will take you home. Will we not, O fellow warrior?" With just the slightest leftward cant of her head, she spoke to Itaru.
Itaru’s eyes cocked in the most peculiar way along his arms as Ai spoke, they were not expecting the change of prose, or for the one they were socketed in to be cast in such a heroic light. Itaru himself was grateful that the hues of his face were imperceptible to the blind. He couldn’t help but smile as well, though his nature always kept him from smiling fully.
“Of course,” Itaru agreed plainly. He watched the boy be embraced as he started to wrap his arms back up, tighter this time in hopes to keep the glaring sun above that had parted through the clouds out of them. He took a deep breath in, letting himself regain center. “Although the tsuchikage wants us to overcome weakness, a stone cannot become a mountain ov-”
His eyes watched the kid, whose hand started slipping lower down Ai’s back as she hugged him. There was an odd smile on his face behind the tears, which quickly faded back into snivels as he caught the pause in Itaru’s voice. Daiki then whimpered and tucked his head into her shoulder and sniveled.
“Hmm…” Itaru said, perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. “Sorry, I got distracted for a moment. Daiki!”
“Y-Yes?” the boy stammered.
“Let’s get you home,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“T-The narrows,” he replied.
“Eh, that’s the other side of town,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. They’d have to pass through the entirety of the market to get there. Then the narrows themselves were named because of how cramped they were up against one of the walls, it was going to be annoying. His stomach was starting to growl as well. “Maybe we can get some food with you, and then take you home. If that is okay with you, Miss Ai?”
Ai could feel the warm bundle nestled against her; feel his pain seep from him and into herself with every shudder and every sob. She did not exactly know why the young boy had been persecuted, only that his despair hinted that it was not the first time. Such things were of only minor import to the woman who held him: What mattered was that he was upset in the present moment, and that she could be of comfort to him. [break][break] Eventually, she retreated slowly from the redheaded child; coaxed him to his feet with one hand in his while Itaru spoke. The outsider heard her escort's stomach grumble its dissatisfaction; felt her own assent with a renewed sense of hollowness. No amount of enlightenment - at least not so much as she had attained - could pevent the body from hungering. [break][break] There was one small issue, and her expression was solemn as such - there was even a slight pout to it - when she faced her many-eyed host with the young boy by her side. "Itaru," she addressed, utilizing his name for the first time and speaking with a different tone, one that was higher in pitch and from which an inordinate number of stsraightforward words spilled: "I do not have very much money." It was true: enough to tide her over for a day or two before finding some form of employment, but only if she spared it, and only if she slept roughly. Not that either issue particularly bothered the ascetic ordinarily, but she certainly could not pay for some lavish meal, least of all for somebody else. [break][break] The dingy alleyway might have been a poor place for a conversation, but Ai could only really sense the grime and grot vaguely and the gloom by the coolness on her face which she had already plainly forgotten. She was, it seemed, fretting in her stoic, unmoving way. [break][break] "I had been hoping that I might find employment here; that in a city, there would be a large number of people seeking labourers. That, or that the institution of the village itself might be looking to hire outsiders for certain work. I can handle my sword, whenst it has my possession."
