Federico drains the swamp

Having successfully managed to get some idea of how the technique worked, Federico decided that he should go ahead and try to gain some more knowledge about how this technique worked. He realized that this technique may become more useful in the future as well. He decided to start again, by going back to this stupid cutting rocks and reforming them. This was all because Federico did not have any sort of ability to use water abilities. He would eventually think about what he could do about that, and after a lot of practicing, he would quickly get bored, and proceed to jump back out of practicing, and go to the bar again. He really liked beer, and wine was not bad, but he also heard about distilled alchohols, also known as liquors. He decided that he wanted to try drinking some.

He found out that apparently, most villages do not allow these alchohols as these are very strong, and often not regulated well. This meant that many people would easily overdrink these, and then get drunk, or sometimes die of alchohol poisoning.

After a bunch of drinks, he would fall off the chair, and proceed to throw up. This was a bit after his third drink. He did not know that alcohol was very highly concentrated inside this kind of beverage, and would be so alcoholic, that he might have died should he not have been able to survive this with his health. Either way, he would be lying on the ground after having barfed again, and would look up to see the bartender looking at Federico. He did not look like he was happy, but he didn’t look like he was about to kick federico out either. He would look at Federico and ask, “Are you ok?” Federico would say, “I think so, I feel better now.” What is with those liquors? They seemed so strong, I easily drink way more than this of beer and wine.”

Federico did not know that liquors were concentrated alchohol. These were made by distileries, which evaporate the alchohol from whatever makes them, and then would capture that alcohol, and release it into a beverage to make it more alcoholic.

The bartender would say to Federico, “Liquors are actually very alcoholic beverages, as we concentrate the alcohol in the drinks. We normally allow you to drink maybe 2 or 3 ounces as most, but you drank about 21 before you fell over drunk and threw up.”

Well, that was what caused him to fall over drunk, Federico asked, “How much alcohol is in those things?”

The bartender found this funny, but he would reply in a calm manner with a straight face. “Well, apparently, in beer, we have like 19 parts non alcohol stuff, and 1 part alcohol. In Wine, it is more like 1 part alcohol, and 10 parts non alcohol, in liquor, it is like 2 parts non alcohol and 1 part alcohol.”

Federico quickly realized how much he drank. He learned for next time, not to drink that much of liquor, else this could easily happen again or worse. Federico knew for next time. After that, he would proceed to go and get up, and order a bunch of water. The bar owners seemed ok with what happened afterwards, so Federico never got kicked out, but he was warned that often, people who do what Federico did would get kicked out. Thank god that Federico was not still drunk at the end of that mess. HE himself decided that it was a good idea to go and get some rest before he would try to go back to training his techniques. He would proceed to and get some food at the nearby ramen shop. He hoped for that to happen anyway, as that was really not going to happen today for some reason.

As he would walk into the ramen bar, he would look around and see that there was a fight in the place. It seemed as if someone was trying to steal money from the other one, and the two were fighting. The people behind the counter were trying to pretend that this fight was not happening, as they decided by then, that it was a pretty terrible time to try to break the fight up. Federico would also see another person crying at one of the tables for some reason. Finally, he would see yelling from inside the kitchen, and see a large fire show up behind the counter. It was not an explosion, and the fire did not set anything else ablaze, but this did definitely startle Federico.

He would eventually make it to the front, and would ask for some basic ramen in beef soup. He hoped he would get some quiet, but it seemed that was not possible. One person on the other side of the room started screaming and crying, and convulsing for no apparent reason. Federico would look, and see that there was nothing over there anyway, so it seemed like the man was clearly not well. Federico would quickly try to get out, except by the time he would get close to the door, someone would say, “HEY YOU BEAN POLE, GET OVER HERE AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN YOU COWARD!”

Federico would not be happy about having to deal with this annoying problem, as he was really not in the mood for a fight, but since apparently, he would need to fight this person just like he did before, Federico would sigh as he would get up, raising his fists getting ready to fight whoever the hell this strange person was. Federico would proceed to turn on earth spear again, as this was the best technique he knew at the moment, since swamp of the underworld was not possible. He would proceed to look at the man, and the man would grab a chair, and throw it at Federico. Federico would attempt to catch the chair, but would fail as the chair would hit Federico in the head. Federico would fall over and barely dodge the man as he would throw another chair at Federico. Federico would proceed to dodge that, and would grab a table and start using a shield. Federico would proceed to grab a chair and start throwing them back as the man would draw a knife. For some reason, this chair was easily cut by the knife. Federico would think about it, and he would grab another of these chairs, and would continue to fight as the man would keep defending against all the chairs by using his knife that would cut them apart. Federico would soon run out of chairs, and the man would himself charge. As he would try to stab Federico, Federico would proceed to kick the man in the crotch, as the man attempted to stab Federico. Federico would escape the stab, but the man would stagger backwards, and would fall over, and just barely managed to dodge a table that Federico attempted to slam down on the man. Federico would see that, and would continue trying to slam the table down on the man.

Federico managed to continue to chase the man around, as the man would try to get away from federico. He would start getting close, when Federico would eventually manage to slam the table on the man. He would conitinue to stomp on top of the table to proceed to beat the man up. After all that fighting, Federico would proceed to walk away as the man would not have much money after searching the man.

Federico finally managed to get back to working on his technique. After all this annoying problem, Federico would manage to finally manage to get back to learning the technique. He would proceed to start by tryying to soften the rocks, and after a lot of attempts, he would finally manage to get to a satisfactory point. He would eventually manage to be able to make these rocks become soft, now he would move on to the next part of the technique. He realized that he needed to figure out how to aim the technique, so that it would be able to get the desired target. He would proceed to try to imagine the swamp forming centered under various objects, and expanding the swamp from a center point. This was difficult as there were actually not very many ways to do it, since he had to imagine there was actually something that was not visible from Federico’s perspective. He thought about it, and thought that perhaps, what he needed to do was to accept that this point was visible, and do more approximations. This would soon yield a new problem, as this would now start allowing a larger margin of error, that started making the technique more and more innacurate. Federico would go back to the drawing board and think about what he was going to do to aim, when he thought of going and imagining the circle around the area, and not worry about the center..

After a bunch of attempts, it became clear that this would not work. He managed to make his starting point for all attempts at the technique unclear, and allthough the techniques would be appearing within a normal area, the technique attempts in that area were showing up literally all over the place. This was not working, so Federico had to think of another method of doing this. He would realize that there was this interesting method, where he would just imagine the whole place the swamp would be in, and would proceed to just imagine the middle of that on the ground. He would not worry about whether there was anything there, since the ground should still be there. Federico would proceed to practice this a bunch until he would get a consistent aim with the swamp. He would be able to get this very consistently, so at least that was done.

Federico would proceed to move onto the next part. He would decide he needs to figure out how to get the swamp to pull down stuff. This was a bit of a problem as often, these techniques were really quite hard to use since they killed. That meant that whenever someone practice this on any sort of living creature, this would kill them. Federico would decide that he would go and practice on some trees. This would probably kill them, but at least unlike animals, the trees did not feel pain. Federico would proceed to practice this by trying to use the boar and tiger hand seals, to proceed to go and try to make the swamp. This was still not very good, as the ground was becoming like mud, but the problem was that he was just making mud, he was not able to make any sort of mud that pulled things down.

Federico would realize that he needed to use his chakra to manipulate the mud so that he would pull down the targets. He would have to watch the swamp all the time however, as he did not know how to try to make the swamp pull stuff down automatically. He found that it was actually very difficult to do this since it was actually really hard after checking through the various reading material he could find, and it was not actually clear how to try to make the swamp automatically pull down stuff. Federico would decide that in the end, he had to make the swamp try to pull everything down, and proceed to make the thing pull everything that touches the rock down, and pretty much always pull everything down. After all that, Federico would eventually find that he had to put a lot more chakra into it. He was not enjoying how expensive it was to use his stamina due to the number of action points it used. Federico would test his technique again, this time, doing it under a tree. He quickly made a small mental note that he would not need to be able to do this too often or he will destroy the forest.

After a lot of attempts, Federico would proceed to destroy the tree, although the tree would be falling down at a really slow pace, so slow, that Federico joked to himself that there was already a new replacement tree due to how long that took. It took in total, about 2 and a half hours of doing this.

Federico decided to go and get some rest, although it was really really tiring, he had enough energy to go back to the ramen place. Federico would go back to that place where he had that mess earlier in the day.

This time, it seemed like he would have a relatively easy time there. Federico would continue to stay there and eat, since it wasn’t too hard. After eating, Federico would proceed to get his food, and then leave and go right back to training his little swampy technique.

He realized that there was a little bit more to do for the technique, this time being trying to pull stuff down within good time. He would proceed to practice this on another tree.
Federico would realize that he would need to pretty much have to make the swamp disappear at the bottom and become ground again, and then make more of the swamp, to proceed to make a circular current within the swamp to allow all parts at the top, to be pulling stuff down. Federico would try this, and the tree would go down quite quickly. This was quite easy, although he found that he needed a way to try to adjust the size of the swamp. He realized he just needed to decide the size that he would want to use for the swamp, then he would proceed to practice this technique for a little while. After that, he decided that he probably needed to make sure that he was not worrying too much about how much money he needed. He would decide that he was really unable to find a way to practice this in battle. He decided that he would probably get a quiet night, and go get some sleep, although he decided that he wanted to try doing this in a few places where there would not be any sort of way to try to see what limitations he could have on this technique. He wondered if this technique was possible on a building. He thought about it, but he decided he was really not sure. He would go to an abandoned building, and would proceed to do the boar and tiger hand seals, and would proceed to do a swamp of the underworld, although he soon found that the metal roof of the building was not going to work since was not earth.

Federico decided that he would now see what materials he could use for this technique. He would go look around for an empty concrete building, and after a really long walk around, he would eventually manage to find the building, although he would end up finding a small one, that seemed to be empty, perhaps the place was condemned for being torn down. Either way, Federico would surface walk his way to the top of the building, and would try doing the swamp technique again, and would find that he could use this little technique up there, to find that the concrete was actually usable for the swamp technique.

Federico would also try making a few doton rocks, and would proceed to try to turn that into swamp. He would find out that the technique was actually pretty easily able to do this, even when Federico was trying to make the rock grow. He was not sure what would happen for another person’s earth techniques. He didn’t really have any sort of way to find out for the moment, since ninja were not readily available to train with here in tornado country.

Eventually, after a long bunch of work, Federico would proceed to practice this a few times, and while practicing this on a tree, an elephant would accidentally walk into the swamp. Since it was a very big elephant, Federico was somewhat worried that the elephant would drown in the mud, but much to his surprise, the elephant managed to escape. Needless to say, Federico immediately turned around, and started running as quickly as he could. The elephant was not happy, and could easily crush Federico into some sort of puree. After about 10 minutes of running, and a lot of noises coming from behind the elephant, Federico would eventually manage to lose the elephant, and eventually manage to get back to his apartment. He realized that the swamp was not infinitely strong, and that it could only hold down so much. It was good information to know even if he was not sure when he would next need to use it.

Either way, Federico was pretty happy and done with this technique, as he wanted to start doing another one. For the moment though, he needed to go and get some rest. First however, he would go to the bar one more time, this time being more careful about what he was doing. He would come in, and order a few small beer, and would sit down. For once, he did not see any sort of strange things happening there. It seemed as if the only thing that happened was that there were not many people there anymore. He looked around, and suddenly realized that there was barely anybody there. He looked, and saw that it was actually in the afternoon, so he realized that the people who were coming there were not the drunk night club people that he saw before, who kept getting into fights. These were normal people. After a little bit more of this, Federico would look go to the library and see if there were any sort of techniques that he could learn while he was there. He thought that perhaps, he might not want to learn yet another A rank technique, because they were really a lot of work to do, and took a lot of time. He also still had yet to improve his physical fitness. Finally, he realized that he might perhaps need to make a bit more money soon, he was about 2 weeks away from the rent payments, and he wanted to have more than 3 months of rent payments to have on hand.

As he would go into the library, he would find out that there were some new and kind of strange books called, Make Out Tactics, Make Out Paradise, and Make Out Extravaganza, oh and, Make Out Madness. Federico did not know what make out meant, so he went to the dictionary, and would look for make out.

He was a little surprised that libraries were willing to carry this kind of book, the man who wrote these books was really quite a pervert. Federico wondered how anybody would read this kind of stuff, he thought that people were a little less strange, than reading books about, well, make out stuff. After that, he would sit down and think about what techniques he would learn next.

(exit, 3252 words, +16 stats, and learning Swamp)

Approved