“Itaru Tokuro,” a voice called from behind him. With his extra eyes wrapped up he was surprised with the sudden interruption of his stretching routine. It was someone that he was not familiar with. They were a plain faced shinobi with a red bandana on and a blackened chest plate over standard issue gear. “Naoko will not be able to attend training today, you are to train with Junko, the leader of platoon 2.”
There was no pause, as soon as the message was delivered the man turned and started to move away. Itaru reached his hand forward and grunted to try to stop him, but it was to no avail.
Itaru had heard of Junko, but had never seen her in person. He began moving around the area of the track looking a bit lost. He spotted some trees nearby and decided to make his way to them to take advantage of the shade.
He sat down and leaned his back against the nearest one he found, not realizing the person he was waiting for was in the branches above while he started drawing formulas for study into a patch of earth barren of grass with a small twig.
Itaru took a deep breath in, and let out a sigh. His posture relaxed a bit.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said as he let his arms back out in front of him and took a more natural stance. The eyes glanced around in many directions, seeking anything out of the ordinary and occasionally fixating back on the kunoichi.
The ducks that he had been feeding began to waddle away, having decided that the human had lost their attention and that there wasn’t any more food to be had today. He gave them a subtle wave.
“It isn’t an experimental thing,” Itaru said. Then as he thought about it a small laugh erupted from his gut. “Well, actually it sort of is. The kekkei genkai I inherited here typically kills those unfortunate enough to inherit it. I owe my survival to experimental injections after all.”
He looked away. Fixing his glasses.
“Sorry, oversharing I know,” he said. “Bad habit.”
Itaru’s eyes would lock onto the verdant haired kunoichi as she approached, but he still spun around to look at her with his own original eyes.
“Leeches!?” he asked as he forgot his inhibition and began patting all around his body. The eyes would begin darting back and forth looking for the insects. His face looked horrified for a moment until a grim realization came over him, and his lips sank into a downward curve. “No, they aren’t leeches. They are my eyes, I’m sorry!”
He moved past her and made his way over to his off-green undershirt and picked it up, pulling it up and over his head. After getting it back on, his arms were still exposed, as were the eyes on his legs. He tried his best to place his arms behind his back as well as one leg in front of the other in an awkward way that spelled out his discomfort with his own condition.
“I thought maybe I was far enough away from the village that no one would come out here,” he explained.
Itaru stood on the shore of a mountainside lake, still technically within the boundaries of the village’s training areas but on the more remote side. It wasn’t really a training area in and of itself, but it was a place that some people would travel out to visit for the closest thing to a nice day at the beach one could find short of descending the landscape to the north to the rocky coasts. For Itaru it was his first time spotting the tarn, so he wasn’t aware that it was somewhat popular when it happened to be empty when he arrived. The day was bright and warmer than usual, around lunchtime. The smell of clay deposits and still water filled the air.
He was bare of shirt and wearing a pair of shorts that were still dripping wet after a bit of a swim. The added annoyance of having to force shut so many eyes made it hard for him to tolerate the water for very long. It only took a couple of thrusts for one or two eyes to accidently open up and get flooded with the murky lake water, it was enough to remind him why he hated swimming.
His chest, back, and arms were covered in eyes that moved around observing the world all around him as he spent some time sharing his lunch with some ducks that made their home here. He had a peach that he was cutting little pieces from with a shuriken as the waterfowl stood in wait for a competition between each other to get the slivers he threw their way.
He caught sight of someone passing by the tarn with an eye right below the back of his neck. Several others turned that way, but he didn’t give any physical reaction other than a few other eyes desperately searching for his upper garb to hide his eyes beneath, but it was too far to get to without drawing attention to himself.
“Sir!” Itaru said, throwing himself to the ground in a respectful bow to the tsuchikage. He was clearly shaking from the adrenaline of being in the man’s presence, as well as from the frantic rush he took to get to the tower.
“Rain shinobi, I estimate nearly a platoon sized element. Another platoon sized group of shinobi from various other lands: Cloud and... I think I saw a few Sound shinobi. They s-seemed to be investigating the same thing our team was. But… there is more. The strange creature we encountered summoned a legion of beasts just like it, and it could speak. The jounin of platoon one, and one our chunin remain on site at the quarry.”
His stray eyes found a map on the wall. He dared to approach it and pointed at the approximate location that it was in relation to the village.
He let out a brief sigh. He had managed to keep it together so far, but he was just as scared of stuttering too much and pissing the kage off as much as he was of speaking to him at all. His people were depending on him, he couldn’t risk being starstruck.
Itaru returned the bow to Akihitio and Hitomi. He seemed to receive the formalities well, and his lip curled slightly to match the kunoichi’s as his sea green eyes moved back and forth between his new peers. He moved his wrapped left hand up to the back of his head.
“Treat you well? I think I can manage that,” he said with a soft voice and a light chuckle. “I am indeed Itaru Tokoro, it is nice to meet you both. I must say I am relieved that we are all older.”
He looked over at the house, and then back to them. He turned and began walking towards it casually, climbing up a set of three stone steps leading to a wooden deck. His footsteps tapped against it, seemingly not overly worried about being detected. He slid open the shoji door, and a musky smell washed over his nostrils.
The first thing to draw the eye was a tatami mat that had been clawed open, with flakes of rice straw strewn all over the flooring. At the other end was a stairwell with a railing that had turned into a scratching post, as well as droppings that littered the floor around the home.
In the leftmost side was a kitchen with a sink that had several dishes stacked up inside of it. Several cupboards beneath the sink and lining the walls were ajar, one was fully opened and several baking pans had fallen out onto the floor. Near the kitchen was a little dining table with a bowl of mango that had gone rancid and was buzzing with gnats.
There was a ticking sound of a clock hanging on the wall near an office desk on the opposite end of the room, it was adorned with cartoonish cat eyes and ears, with a tail acting like a pendulum. The desk itself had several tins of cat food on it that were opened up but picked completely clean of even a scrap of food.
A small white maneki-neko figurine sat waving next to a photograph of a rather frail looking old woman sitting on a couch surrounded by felines. Sitting on her lap was a particularly husky looking long haired grey cat with a grumpy look on its face and a white ribbon clipped to the top of its head.
“I think I saw something moving in the window upstairs,” Itaru said, glancing back over his shoulder as he moved to enter the room. He stopped though, peering around the room and looking for signs of life beyond the insects in the dining room.
simplicity
Last Edit: Oct 7, 2021 20:06:44 GMT by Itaru Tokoro
Early morning sun. A cloudless sky. Tepid mountain wind.
Itaru wore a burgundy open chested gi with their sleeves removed, and his entire upper body including arms were wrapped in bandages beneath it. He was a bit scrawny for a ninja, and of an average height. He was walking down a street with uneven cobbled stones that made a satisfying knock against the heels of his geta. He held a scroll in his hand, his personal first mission in this platoon.
The first one since he was cleared for duty again after all those years.
It was a simple mission. An old lady named Miss Kitagawa passed away a few weeks ago, and her home was infested with felines. A first team of genin already went through and cleared them out, but they didn’t do a good job and one particularly crafty cat evaded capture. Whenever Miss Kitagawa’s nephew tried to move her belongings out of the home, the cat violently attacked him. They had to trap the feral feline. Pretty standard really.
He was curious about what the other genin on the team were like. He had yet to meet them. He rounded the corner to find an old and beaten down neighborhood of the village where some of the retired folk that served the village as merchants lived. The houses were all two stories and taller than they were wide in a circular culvasack that had a simple fountain in the middle. An old woman sat on a pillow on her porch watching the day go by, but beyond that he didn’t see any activity.
He buried his nose in the scroll, looking at the map to figure out which house it was. It looked like it was the house to the right of center. It had a notice posted on the shoji door and weeds had overgrown the flower beds outside, a particularly long vine trailing up towards a second story window. His eyes caught the movement of a shadow in the second story window for a brief moment, but he turned as he heard the sound of footsteps approaching him from behind.
The gate guards told him to go report directly to the kage about the situation. It was an honor, but a terrifying one. He understood why, going through a proper debriefing on something time sensitive like this wasn’t an option. Still, he had used nearly every ounce of his chakra performing flickers and was running on pure adrenaline.
His chest was still barren, the eyes littering his flesh in no particular pattern peering all around and seeing the eyes that watched him moving with utmost urgency.
Sawako got the task of alerting platoons to standby. Itaru’s task seemed the harder of the two, but he knew the way to the tower better than he did of where to find platoon leaders. He burst through the doors of the kage tower. One of the more well rested shinobi of the village had already alerted the tower he was coming.
As he got in front of the receptionist office he practically slammed himself onto one knee and gave them a bow.
“I-I am Itaru Tokoro of platoon one, I have critical intelligence of a major enemy incursion!” he shouted to the receptionist. If they would lead him to the kage’s office, he would follow and give a proper but shaky salute to the pillar of the village.
simplicity
Last Edit: Oct 3, 2021 18:17:55 GMT by Itaru Tokoro
He knew that pain was a risk, but he had a strategy to overcome it using wrist locks and illusions to disarm his foes. He prepared to defend his choice- but the last sentence she spoke left him pausing at the moment he was about to speak, stopping his breath and making him withdraw a bit.
“I figured that they assigned you because they were worried about it…” he said, twiddling his thumbs. He took a deep breath and decided to tell her. “This kekkei genkai begins as cancerous tumors that cover the body, and without extensive medical treatment, most don’t survive the transition.”
He decided to bring it back around and tie both conversations into a neat bow, one really determined the other. “I guess that’s why I don’t mind taking the risk. If an opponent underestimates my tolerance for pain, it can only be a weapon for me. I spent most of my early teenage years getting well acquainted with it.”
The air hung silent again. The last sip of tea went down luke warm.
“I’m sorry about your village,” he said with an empathetic inflection behind his voice that betrayed the two tones he had already revealed: stammering nervousness and dry monotone. He knew little about Sunagakure beyond the rumors everyone spread.
simplicity
Last Edit: Oct 2, 2021 0:12:59 GMT by Itaru Tokoro
The pursuit of illusion was coming closer to Itaru’s grasp, but it still eluded him in the understanding of it in its entirety. Days and weeks of straining his mind had left him with a constant headache and a lot of days spent sitting and meditating. He hadn’t been keeping up with his physical fitness the way that he should have, and it was important to him that he stay in good shape. He did eventually want to go back to training hard to improve his body, he couldn’t neglect it.
Naoko said there would be a special guest helping with physical fitness training. Itaru was expecting that he would be seeing Shoichi-sensei or maybe Higa. He was dressed in a sleeveless earthy green garb, his arms were wrapped up very tightly. He wore matching shorts that fell above his knees and wrappings that covered all but his kneecaps. On his head he wore a white sweatband that pulled his shaggy hair from his forehead.
The training area that he reported to was a circular track that had several small groups of shinobi were running together. In the center was a large obstacle course with logs to jump, poles to “monkey-bar” across, and ropes to climb high into the air. At the corners of each track there were free weights of various shapes and sizes. One other thing of note was that the track itself was made from smoothed stone, while around it was fine gravel over a layer of dirt. The obstacle courses were cushioned by sand, and the occasional shinobi falling or running through it would kick it up to make a small haze.
It was a good place to get a good all-around workout. Seeming to be the first person to show up. He was carrying a water bottle a little smaller than his forearm that he had already sipped down a quarter of the way on his walk. He stopped and balanced on one foot while pulling his other up to stretch while he scanned around for Naoko.
It would probably be easier to spot her and the guest if he unraveled his bandages so that he could see in multiple directions, but getting dust in his extra eyes was a real annoyance he didn’t want to deal with. Nor was the rude staring that he was all too aware of.
Itaru closed his eyes for a moment to contemplate the question. He was too tired to try to smooth over his response to sound less like a pipe dream or hero worship. His voice was firm as it spoke, in contrast to his stammering when surrounded before. Perhaps emboldened by the change in Naoko’s posture and taking a seat making things feel less formal for him.
“I want to be like the Tsuchikage,” Itaru said as he tapped a knuckle against his chin. His face was straight and he looked at Naoko with his murky green eyes without the usual hesitation. There was a pause for a few moments before he took another sip from his glass, relaxing himself again.
“Not exactly like him… but he is someone who overcame his limits and did things his own way. I owe my life to Lord Fourth, I want to become a weapon worthy of repaying his generosity.”
The need to pause caught back up with him and he hid his mouth behind the teacup as if it were a shield from having to speak more. After taking a moment to think he spoke once more.
“Taijutsu. Jiujitsu to be more specific, is the other thing I’ve been studying,” he told her. “To detect incoming enemies and defend platoon members so that they can practice ninjutsu freely is the role I intend to fill.”
He should have asked her something about herself, but he had rambled on about himself too much. Oh well.
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?”
With Higa’s departure and Naoko turning to tend to the burns of the unfortunate server, Itaru managed to ease up somewhat in his seat as he continued taking sips of his tea. It had a sweet bite, but a bitter aftertaste, which seemed to be pleasing to him. The steam of it fogged up his glasses, but with his other eyes already exposed he didn’t bother to take them off to clean.
He watched the chunin for a few moments as she took care of the server’s burn, observing the way the wound started to grow less severe with each passing moment. He closed his every eye, the sounds of an infirmary playing in his mind before he opened them again seconds later.
When she was finished he straightened his posture up in his chair and set his tea down on the table. There was less nervousness about him now, though it may have just been tiredness finally catching up to him in its entirety.
“I should have checked in with the platoon properly,” he said. “I wish the captain would have seen you had already corrected me, I’m sorry if I’ve caused you two any trouble.”
He didn’t pause, letting out a small huffed laugh that he cut short. He reached for his tea and brought it up to his lips, speaking again before taking another sip.
“I’ll try not to apologize so much, either. It’s a bad habit of mine.”
simplicity
Last Edit: Sept 30, 2021 23:49:30 GMT by Itaru Tokoro
Every one of the revealed eyes of Itaru Tokoro and his natural gaze shifted to look down and to the left as a wave of bashfulness mixed with a dash of unease crept over him.
“I will be more careful,” he promised softly under the breaths of their sensei’s laughter. When he finally looked again their jounin had departed, and Higa looked as if he were about to show himself out as well.
A man now wearing several layers of bandages around his burnt arm cautiously walked by, sitting down the cup of tea that he had ordered since they had arrived here. Itaru took it and quickly took a sip, scalding his tongue but not caring as the steam helped to relieve tension hiding at the back of his throat.
The pain finally caught up with him and he brought the cup down and gasped. He looked over to Higa, who seemed to be asking Naoko if she was heading out, he presumed. He moved his eyes back towards the kunoichi and spoke. “Thank you for any help you can provide, I don’t think I have much left in me for today though,” he admitted.
He took his seat again and resting the weight of his exhaustion was immediately soothing. It looked like he wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. He wasn’t even sure if he had it in him to walk, but he wasn’t going to burden anyone.
He’d be around if Naoko wanted to speak to him more, but seemed to expect she was going to leave with the other chunin.
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
