Chapter 1: Mistakes Were Made [solo,nk]

"It takes you a long time to become young." Kozai snapped his anthology shut and sighed. As true as it was, he didn't want to admit it. Innocence was not a stage that he wanted to move back to at all. In the end, he believed that once he had stepped out of ignorance, to move back into it was the worst thing one could do. In that case, he should press ahead, even if he knew he was about to fall over the precipice and into the end. Well, enough reflection, he thought, as he stretched and groaned sleepily. He had been feeling pretty lethargic lately...
He took out the scroll again. Time compression... it would have to do for now. He needed to compress the time between chakra usage and actual effect. This would probably be his hardest task, as the rest was just a plethora of effects that derived from that. In the back of his mind, Kozai even wondered if he could assimilate organic matter. That is, the arm in his lab coat, which was actually not in his lab coat, but at this moment was lying on his desk along with his kage hat. The hat was unwieldy, but Kozai didn't care, as he did not always have to wear it.
He would pulse his chakra in little blurbs, timing them perfectly to compress the time between the activation and the effect. It was tough work, and beads of sweat began to form on his brow. It was like playing a really fast tocatta on a piano. The more you pounded away at the keys, the more your fingers began to hurt, and you just keep having to play on and on, the fast and strong beat filling the room around- well, that was weird. Kozai knew how to play musical instruments, being an academic, but he didn't like a tocatta. It was a bit too difficult for his kind of thing. A nice waltz, a mazurka in a minor key... as he was about to sink off into a reverie, the scroll began to sink into his bubbling flesh. Ah.... there we go. The scroll was absorbed all the way into his body, which gave Kozai some relief. However... Kozai curse and shook his arm. It wouldn't come out! Well, this was a problem. A problem he would have to tackle the next day.

[WC 400,
200 ryo,
another 400 WC toward malleable physiology]

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