Home
Search
Register
Log in
The author of this message was banned from the forum - See the message
Uchiha MadaraCitizenSurvived 2021You've completed the Christmas Event of 2021 and qualified for the last reward, by partisan you are awarded this fancy badge!- Stat Page : [url=statpage]Stat Page[/url]
Ryo : 0
Mission Name: Smelter's Blues
Rank:D-Rank
Type:Augmentation Farming
Character Requirements:None
Mission Location:Wherever one might find a smelter
Word Count Requirements:1000
Challenges:N/A
Repeatable?Yes, over and over, by the same people
NPC?No
Reward:1,000 Ryo, 3AP, 1x Aluminum
Task: Aluminum has been a commodity for a thousand years. However, recent techniques allows one to extract aluminum in it's purest form, and create an isolated metal out of it. It's not easy, and aluminum is just as precious as silver. Just slightly more useful. Assist your local smelter in isolating and extracting aluminum, and they may just give you some for yourself.
https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t43517-smelter-s-blues
Madara was on a newer mission, right on the border for once. It was a nice chance since she had been sent out of the village a large number of times in the recent past. Well, she was going to go there later. For now, she had a commitment to make. She’d promised her friend that she would go meet up with him. Her friend wanted to teach her how to use a shield, specifically, he wanted to teach her how to use one while spinning to eject deflect projectiles. He also wanted to teach her how to attack with a shield. That was all well and good, but Madara was so stupid and unskilled with a shield that she didn’t even know how to hold it.
She floundered for a couple minutes trying to grab it on the wrong end because nothing in her brain had common sense enough to flip it around and hold it by the handle. Well, that was what she got for not ever using a shield before. One might think that the brain could give someone the competent ability to hold it properly, but even that was almost impossible for her mind to grasp. She gripped the hand holdy spot of the shield and had difficulty holding it up too. The tiny muscles that powered her arm weren’t used to lifting the metal shield and doing so used up a lot of her physical power.
Madara wore the shield to the mission and brought her friend with her. She wasn’t going to miss out on money just because she had promised to hang out. The mission seemed pretty laid back anyways. She went to the smelter and asked what she could do to help.
“Help? I guess that is what I asked for. You need to go pick these chemicals up for me.” He handed Madara a list of stuff, “bring that back and the actual smelting is pretty straight forward. But you don’t care about that anyway do you?” He grumbled, clearly upset that he had to pay for someone to go get ingredients for him. He didn’t have a choice though. He was old, sickly, and needed as much help as he could get.
Madara took the list of chemicals then bowed. She was just a kid compared to him, the old man didn’t have to be so mean. So she and her friend walked along and her friend finally blurted out, “What in the world is wrong with you,” asked her friend who watched Madara flounder with the shield as they walked. It really was out of place for Madara to be carrying such a thing
“It’s too hard to move in this armor,” Madara said. In truth she hadn’t moved more than a couple miles since she got into the armor that her friend had brought for her to practice with. But it was too large, too heavy to move in. Madara had put it on just to be nice and polite, but in the end it was worse than having nothing on if she couldn’t move properly.
“You just made it a mile in that armor and now you tell me it’s too heavy? Get it off then.” The friend looked worried. He ran over to help take her helm off then helped lift her out of the heavy material.
“Thank you for that,” said Madara. She walked over to the shield and picked it up with considerably less effort this time. “Now, let’s see if you can teach me by the time we get to the chemical shop.”
“We’re already there,” the friend said. He pointed and Madara turned her head.
“Wow, we are. Hold on then.” She went in and bought some chemicals and held them in her free hand which held a basket. She then walked back out and headed on her way to the smelter’s shop.
“Are you crazy? I’m not teaching you like that. Your shield is a good defense but you still need armor or else you’re going to get crushed by debris and stray arrows and blows. Either use it all or use none of it, that’s my stance. And how are we going to train if you’re holding all those chemicals? Spill one and you’re going to burn your fucking skin.”
Madara nodded, satisfied with what she had already learned about shields. “what more do I really need, other than to know how to hold one,” she thought, “it’s not like I carry one around with me in the open.” This experience could only have been profitable if she was a guard or something, especially since Madara was already practicing with the blade on occasion. She would only have worried about a shield if she had known that he was going to take on a job that required him to be attacked and not be able to dodge. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Madara left her friend once they made the quick trip and the smelter was angry. He was pissed that Madara had taken so long, but then he still needed her help so he sighed. Madara went over and used her strength to lift up the huge pot of bubling metal that was no doubt the aluminum. It was a tedious process, requiring her to use her hand dexterity to work multiple tools at once under the smelter’s command. It took much longer than she would have liked and she got pretty sweaty, but in the end the metal was poured, the aluminum extracted, and the chemicals used to their fullest extent.
If only that was it. Madara had to go back out to fetch more chemicals a total of three more times. She thought that just the one batch was tedious enough but apparently it was just one of four that needed to be completed. Madara groaned and her muscles ached from all the labor but she had to perservere. She thought of all the stuff she could buy with a thousand ryo and stuck to her guts. At the end of the day, the smelter looked pleased, for once, and gladly handed off a piece of the day’s work for her own use. It wasn’t the best quality by far of what they created, more like scrap, but this was a D rank mission so Madara was going to have to deal with what she got.
Madara’s friend had long since abandoned her during her long day so she had to wait till the next day to bug him to finish teaching her. She met him at the training grounds and thought that she would prefer to pair up with a talented guard with rare strategic skills that she did not have instead of learning how to use defensive weapons. That would take years to learn, years she didn’t have. She looked over at the friend and saw that he had sighed, saddened to see that Madara still didn’t think shields were useful. Did he think Madara so worthless she could not manage without a defensive tool? Seeing as though Madara hadn’t drawn suspicion to her physical abilities, she decided that she wasn’t that bad. “I’ll keep being sassy, keep jabbing him. Then he won’t expect a thing out of me,” Madara thought.
It was rare that her bouts of social interaction turned out so well. However this scenario made sense to her. She was being trained by a friend, and she was a backtalking newbie who didn’t show enough appreciation. The only thing she had to worry about was her sudden lack in skill level. It looked like she was expected to be someone on par with a chuunin in terms of combat prowess. It was clear now that she was much too weak. She needed an excuse.
“I did extra training yesterday and stayed up all night,” she told the downtrodden friend. “The party, oh it was sublime. You would have loved it.”
“Todays’ our training day you were out partying?” fumed the friend, “well that explains why you’re so weak. Anyway you have to at least do something today. We already came all the way out here and I’m not going home without a good workout.”
Madara looked relieved. Not because she had to do some work, but because her excuse was going well. It wasn’t easy just having things work out for the people that knew her.
“Let’s do some drills. You should at least be able to do those. I’ll throw these pinecones at you and you block with the shield. Ready go!” He started to run in a circle and throw pinecones at Madara. He started fast at first but he slowed own considerably to match Madara’s true skill level. There was no point in pelleting her with pinecones and hurting her when she was already tired. The pinecones were soft, and barely hurt when they made contact with Madara’s frame.
Madara whirled around with the shield in hand. She wasn’t fast enough to turn to block, namely due to her poor acrobatics. She could try though! She spun in circles, attempting to block the pinecones with the shield. Sometimes she succeeded, by pure random, while other times she failed, because she was skillless. It was a good workout for her core endurance and also it worked on her reaction time to stop and start spinning again. When she finally couldn’t take anymore, she threw the shield off of the hand that held it and took a break. She was sweating, tired, and her head was spinning from all the… spinning.
“This is as good a spot as any to stop,” Madara said.
Flashback: Circa Age 13
Madara woke this fine morning groggily. She felt hungry again even though she had eaten a tasty squirrel last night. She told herself it was tasty but she was no cook. It had burnt on the outside and she wanted to use some of the money she had stolen a few weeks ago to go back into town and buy some more food. She needed to get better at hunting so she could be fully self sufficient. She washed herself off in a nearby pond then thought of what she actually wanted to do today. There was no way she was going to actually go practice hunting, that was boring. She’d met a nice man the other day in town and said she’d come back to meet at the same time today. What if she could convince him to buy her food for her?
The thought a free meal pleased her so that’s what she would work towards. She hopped from her crappy bedding arrangement and skipped through the forest to get back to the village. As she skipped she heeded the warnings she had heard of the day before. It had only been a day but she felt a real trust with whatever feeling was guiding her through the forest.
Lost in her joyous thoughts, Madara stumbled over a root that the feelings hadn’t warned her of. Of course, the root was out of place so it wouldn’t be something she would know of. Still, she was able to find her footing quickly after tripping which was very uncharacteristic of her. As soon as she put her foot on the ground she expected to crash to the ground but instead her foot made contact with very sturdy ground.
Madara, suspicious of what was going on, intentionally tripped on another root and found that her foot found sturdy ground once again. Now she put two and two together. Something fishy was going on here, even if she didn’t know exactly what it was. She was going to have to ask ‘that’ woman about it next day when they were set to meet up again. She felt like she was getting better at using chakra to stabilize herself, but it was only a guess.
Eventually Madara ended up in the village again. It was a windy day, even she noticed that. Shops had packed up all the stuff that could fly away but the table from the previous day was still set up. Madara sat down and looked around to see if that man was going to come back. As if on cue, the man introduced as a familiar NPC approached her and took a seat opposite of her.
“Didn’t think you’d come back in all this wind!” he told her with a smile while clutching his clothes tight to his body.
Now Madara noticed that her clothes weren’t nearly at risk of flapping around as his were. She smiled when she realized that the wind was probably protecting her just as the earth had earlier. Whatever connection she had to the elements, she liked it. She thought to herself, wondering if perhaps this one was curious for more dubious reasons than just curiosity.
“Would you mind buying me food today?” Madara asked while batting her eyelashes innocently.
“No coin today?” the prior stranger asked. “I’d like to know a little bit more about you first.”
“What’s to tell? I live in the forest and I’m hungry. I’ve got no parents to feed me.” Madara acted sad, poorly. She wasn’t sad even if it was the truth.
“You remind me of my daughter. I don’t think I could rightfully deny you a meal if you’ve no parents.” the man waved over a waitress who brought over some seafood. Then they ate. He slipped a hand inside his vest a pulled a small iron flask with water in it and washed down his last bite of squid to give himself another quick moment to think of his response without seeming like he was stalling. Twisting the cap on the flask he slipped it back in his vest and turned his attention back to Madara as he pulled a pipe from his pack and grabbed a box of small wooden matches from one of his pockets and lit it, putting the patch out he set it on the table next to his skewer sticks and took a pull from the smoke blowing it up and away from himself and the young lady across from him.
“So I asked you about foreigners yesterday. Seen any around?” he asked.
Madara thought for a moment. "I know a little bit, not many of them around this town though. As for specific names, I'm afraid it's not ringing any bells."
Madara figured she'd play it defensive for now and see what happened before she started to push back for information, but maybe a little jab wouldn't hurt, test the waters so to speak. Normally she wouldn't do this in front of a stranger... but she figured it'd be a small price to pay to see where this man was coming from. She had to be at least a little courteous after having tricked him into feeding her.
She reached up and ran her fingers through her hair and untied a bow in her hair, pulling it from underneath her long hair she pulled it off her head, revealing the inside of the bow. She took both ends of the fabric in her hand and worked them absent mindedly in her hair again to pass the time.
“Tell me how did you get that hair band if you are willing to discuss it that is.” If he was right then it was more than just a piece of cloth.
Madara sighed inwardly, she hated giving information about herself in an interrogative environment. “This is why I distanced myself from people” she thought to himself. She looked around the area, noticing all the people milling this way and that in the windy day. She doubted a confrontation would start here so she decided to drop the act.
"It’s a fabric from a trader around here although I'm sure you know that. I might have taken it without paying.” Madara didn’t think she could hide this fact. Some girl living in the woods would not have the money to buy a nice hair piece like this.
If the middle aged man was surprised he did not show it. There was something different about Madara. “you took it? How did you manage that?” Well it seemed idle his question was carefully worded. Depending on her answer then the next time they meet they would be enemies. He had a vested interest in keeping thieves out of the forest, even if they were small time thieves. Small thieves ended up growing into big time ones.
Madara raised an eyebrow slightly at his question. She didn’t pick up on his hidden motive and answered truthfully. “Someone was passing by and I snatched it before they noticed. I thought it was pretty and I wanted it.”
The man was nodding well listening to his guest. “As much as I dislike it I don’t your situation changing any time soon. I hope that you can find a job so you don’t have to steal. You should be paying for things, even small things like that hair band.” He leaned back thinking perhaps he would be able to help Madara find her way.
Madara relaxed a bit, glad to see that he had not held her actions against her. “My parents wanted to control me once and I left them. Doing work is not fun at all!” Madara chuckled slightly at herself, figuring she could never really separate herself from it all as he had tried. At least she had the opportunity to relax for these last couple years unhindered.
“Well I’ll tell you what will happen if you get caught,” the man told her, “if you get caught you will get punished severely. If you steal something valuable enough, they will send killers after you. You might think you’re cute but it won’t save you forever. I have half a mind to tell on you just to make sure you get your act together.”
“You grown ups are all the same!” Madara shouted, flipping over the few uneaten pieces of food over in a fit. She ran as fast as she could back to the forest. She wasn’t going to go back there anytime soon. She’d pack up and move in case the man kept his word. She wasn’t done living freely yet. How could she give up this freedom when she was just starting to learn about the world around her?
The next day…
Madara tossed a small rock up and down, catching it in a rhythm that could not be heard by anyone else by her. She had skipped over some unpleasant memories after she had met with a man yesterday who warned her about her lifestyle. To her, they had gotten into a huge fight, and she now had to leave before someone came looking for her to punish her for stealing. Madara had kept an eye on that stranger who had sort of threw himself into his work for the entire day. Madara thought that she was in the clear for now at least. Though it was no time to get complacent. She had to have a plan if he told on her and people came after her.
She was worrying a tad too much for the crime she had committed. She’d stolen some ribbon for her hair and she thought the guard would come after her. Her childlike mind didn’t want to realize that she was probably not going to get hanged for such a small crime. She couldn’t take her mind off of these worries though so she turned to jutsu. Unlike ninjutsu which was a very vague sort of skillset, she knew that transformation had the ability to let her hide in a different form. The person who taught her had the ability to shapeshift so she probably could too.
“How did she do it again?” she wondered. It would have made a lot more sense for her to wait another week until their meeting but she was impatient. She called from memory the things called that her teacher had done to transform. But what did she need for it? Well, she knew the first step was getting a picture in her head. It didn’t matter what the form was, as far as she knew. She took her stick and lazily walked around until she came up with a plan. She absent mindedly chased after a mouse to pass some time.
The mouse died quickly then Madara retrieved it. The dead mouse body before her looked too scrawny to be eaten so she wouldn’t even bother cooking it. She started digging into it and tried to think back to which parts of the mouse that she needed. Well a mouse wasn’t exactly long haired like her. Then she sat there and focused on the mouse’s splayed out body. She thought of how simple things would be if she could just turn into a mouse and escape if someone came looking for her. She sat and meditated for the better end of the entire day until she finally fell asleep. She didn’t know when it would be done, but her plan was to focus on the mouse until she turned into it. Unfortunately, the transformation jutsu didn’t let her turn into an animal, for whatever stupid reason. She could, however, dream about being an animal.
“Huh?” she thought as she dreamed. Everything looked different. Nothing actually looked visible at all. She got up and noticed that she was as small as the rock that was next to her… and she didn’t have hands. “I’m a mouse!” she squeaked even though no language came out. She was so excited and scared all rolled into one rush of emotions. She ran around in excitement but found that she could barely keep herself walking properly. She tripped and fell over her own tiny paws and was introduced to a much more powerful sense of smell than she was usually used to.
Madara ran around for a couple bits then she heard something. A low growl. Every instinct in her body told her there was danger so she darted under some cover and used her senses to identify what was coming. It looked like a fox in her blurry vision. It pounced, but not at Madara. It was digging next to a tree, exactly where Madara had left the original bloody mouse body. The fox held the mouse in its mouth and then started eating it.
“I’m next,” Madara thought fearfully. She wanted to turn back into a human but she didn’t know how. “Just focus on your form, that’s what you did with the mouse!” she thought. She let out some concerned squeaks against her better judgement and focused. And focused, and focused. Bits passed and she felt herself change but it was the slowest process she ever experienced. She couldn’t believe that she had actually turned into a mouse without even realizing it before.
The fox had become wise that it was not alone. It had eaten the mouse and now it saw Madara turning. It watched curiously, because something didn’t seem right. Its prey looked more like a trap than a free meal so it kept its distance. It could smell human too which was never a good sign for a smaller animal. Madara was fortunate that it didn’t decide to attack. Ten minutes passed and finally she turned back into her normal form and cried from all the emotional turmoil she had just gone through. She didn’t think she ever wanted to become a mouse again, ever. But a fox?
Madara turned her vision to the fox who was still watching her curiously. Madara reached for her stick… but then the fox sprinted away before she could get a hit in. “Drat” she said angrily. She would have much rather become a fox, if she could ever catch one. There were a lot of animals in the forest and she didn’t know very many that could catch a fox. Unlike a mouse… why did she pick a stupid little mouse again?
Then, Madara woke up. She realized that she had just had a dream, a weird dream about turning into a mouse. It only made her angry because she couldn’t turn into an animal. Perhaps there would be a way to turn into an animal in the future… but not today.
She now realized how hungry she was after having spent the whole day working on this dumb plan. She made a quick trip to the pond but realized that she was going to have to do some serious hunting soon or she’d starve. Or she was going to have to spend the last of her money in the village and hope it’d last. She chose to wait for the night and avoid hunting in poor visibility. Back to her camp she went where she cozied up against a tree after starting a small fire.
She tossed a stone into the air and caught the stone in the palm of her hand and smiled as she recalled some fond memories, but felt heaviness in her chest as her memories crept closer and closer to the time when she felt so lost. She would not relive that memory voluntarily, but it would be just as difficult recalling how much she hated her old life. Unwillingly, a memory began to surface and she closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to distract herself from it, but it was too late......
The next day Madara didn’t have much to do so she went around to the town center and started looking around at all the shop stalls. She ended up speaking to someone who was selling a very impressive silk which glistened in the sunlight like something she’d never seen before. It was interesting to the woman who was usually not impressed by things like this, at least in this mundane place. Still, she couldn’t help but trace a finger along the fabric and enjoy the feel of it. “How did you obtain such a fine material?” she asked the shop keeper without meeting his eye. The fabric was far too interesting to take her eye off of. She wanted it, she needed it.
The man’s eyes grew dark as if he was taken over by some sort of demonic spirit. The memories of what he had to do to obtain the material were far too gruesome to share with a woman he’d just met. “Let’s just say I had to go into the depths of a very dangerous mountain. In there there is a massive maze of fog and brush and blackness. You don’t find the spiders that make this silk, they will be the ones that will find you.” He gulped and started forming beads of sweat on his brow. He didn’t want to tell the woman but he couldn’t help it. It was part of his act, you see. He had gone through great dangers to obtain the silk but it hadn’t been quite as bad as he let on. He went for the sympathy card and if Madara was willing to pay the premium he would make off with a killing. He didn’t think that she had much money to her name but if he could clean her out he would be happy as a butterfly.
Madara kicked a pebble on the ground in front of her which bounced off of the stall and collided right with her shin. It was a very unpleasant experience that added to the stress she felt at the very moment. She dug her hands into her pockets to try digging out all the money she had on her but then she realized that she was under some kind of trickery. She kept her hands deep in her pockets and decided that they would stay there just so she wouldn’t feel compelled to touch the silk again. Her hands were pretty clean but now they felt like they had some kind of grainy filth to them. Something didn’t add up. “If you went through all that mess why are you here of all places? Surely you’d be better off selling to some kind of lord or king or whathaveyou. Seems like a waste to flaunt these wares in front of the regular ol’ masses.”
Curses, she had decided to press the issue. That was no Bueno for a salesman. Now he had to dig into his memory and try fabricating an even grander story and an excuse. He did it all in stride though and only paused for a moment. He said that, “my vessel to the islands does not depart for several weeks. So I thought, why not spend some time among the masses? You never know when a very wealthy noble will happen by or a young woman who would be willing to pay dearly for enough silk to accentuate an outfit. What do you say dearie? Are you one of the ones that I would’ve expected to approach my stall?” He gave her a smirk and then couldn’t help but wonder what her age was. “You are a grown woman right? You look like you could be younger than I thought.”
Madara looked up curiously, meeting the man’s eyes for the first time. Fire burned within her. She calmed down quickly though upon realizing that he was trying to compliment her, even if he was doing it pretty badly. “Nevermind my age, let’s just agree that I’m an adult and go from there. My last birthday was fairly miserable anyways. I had to train all day and there was nobody to celebrate with but my sensei who’s an old fart and not worth the time of day. All he did was pat me on the shoulder and announce to trees that I was older now.”
Ooof, the salesman thought as he realized he took the conversation for a turn to the worse. He decided that it couldn’t get worse so he went on, “oh, I thought that you just couldn’t be much younger than me.”
“Are you joking?” Madara shouted, “you look to be at least sixty!” She then slammed her fists on his stall. She wanted to smash it but had the manners not to. She usually wasn’t like this. She tried to be a nice gal and all but this wouldn’t do. He was insulting her to his face!
“Let’s cut the shit shall we?” he asked, “everything has a numerical value associated with it otherwise referred to as the price. Are you buying? If not please kindly fuck off.” He waved her away. He didn’t need this brat hanging around any longer anyways. “I didn’t spend all those years slaving way to obtain this precious silk so some poor bastard can try sweet talking her way into a discount.”
“Precious silk eh?” Madara asked, “this doesn’t look all that special. Above average, sure but not the best in the world.”
“Alright you’ve convinced me,” the shopkeeper shouted for all the hear. “If you go on a little quest for me I may impart some of my silk unto you. Delve into a special cave I know of and if you can claim the treasure inside I’ll trade you some of my silk. Is that a deal?”
Madara had to blink because it’d happened so quickly. “What? You wanted me to leave and now you want to trade? You’ve got to be the most bipolar salesman I’ve ever met.”
“Well, that’s the job. If you were easier to get along with I would’ve just offered it to you but you’ve got some sass to you that your parents never beat out of you. Now get going or else I’m seriously going to go get guards to escort you out.”
Madara fumed and stormed away. She wanted to just blow this whole place up but she didn’t think that was very feasible while calling herself a good person. She didn’t wander too far though. Soon enough she came across someone she knew. His name was Joseph and the area looked like it’d gone through some sort of fight recently. There was way too much collateral damage. Yep, she knew in her heart Joseph was involved somehow. She waved over to him and shouted, “what did you get yourself into this time?”
[exit]
5368 wordcount
3000/4000 wc towards 2nd tomoe sharingan https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t45573-sharingan-v7#356179
(1000 wc learned here
2300/6000 wc towards 3rd tomoe sharingan
+1 chakra
+30 vigor
+22 speed
+1,000 Ryo
+, 3AP,
+1x Aluminum
Rank:D-Rank
Type:Augmentation Farming
Character Requirements:None
Mission Location:Wherever one might find a smelter
Word Count Requirements:1000
Challenges:N/A
Repeatable?Yes, over and over, by the same people
NPC?No
Reward:1,000 Ryo, 3AP, 1x Aluminum
Task: Aluminum has been a commodity for a thousand years. However, recent techniques allows one to extract aluminum in it's purest form, and create an isolated metal out of it. It's not easy, and aluminum is just as precious as silver. Just slightly more useful. Assist your local smelter in isolating and extracting aluminum, and they may just give you some for yourself.
https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t43517-smelter-s-blues
Madara was on a newer mission, right on the border for once. It was a nice chance since she had been sent out of the village a large number of times in the recent past. Well, she was going to go there later. For now, she had a commitment to make. She’d promised her friend that she would go meet up with him. Her friend wanted to teach her how to use a shield, specifically, he wanted to teach her how to use one while spinning to eject deflect projectiles. He also wanted to teach her how to attack with a shield. That was all well and good, but Madara was so stupid and unskilled with a shield that she didn’t even know how to hold it.
She floundered for a couple minutes trying to grab it on the wrong end because nothing in her brain had common sense enough to flip it around and hold it by the handle. Well, that was what she got for not ever using a shield before. One might think that the brain could give someone the competent ability to hold it properly, but even that was almost impossible for her mind to grasp. She gripped the hand holdy spot of the shield and had difficulty holding it up too. The tiny muscles that powered her arm weren’t used to lifting the metal shield and doing so used up a lot of her physical power.
Madara wore the shield to the mission and brought her friend with her. She wasn’t going to miss out on money just because she had promised to hang out. The mission seemed pretty laid back anyways. She went to the smelter and asked what she could do to help.
“Help? I guess that is what I asked for. You need to go pick these chemicals up for me.” He handed Madara a list of stuff, “bring that back and the actual smelting is pretty straight forward. But you don’t care about that anyway do you?” He grumbled, clearly upset that he had to pay for someone to go get ingredients for him. He didn’t have a choice though. He was old, sickly, and needed as much help as he could get.
Madara took the list of chemicals then bowed. She was just a kid compared to him, the old man didn’t have to be so mean. So she and her friend walked along and her friend finally blurted out, “What in the world is wrong with you,” asked her friend who watched Madara flounder with the shield as they walked. It really was out of place for Madara to be carrying such a thing
“It’s too hard to move in this armor,” Madara said. In truth she hadn’t moved more than a couple miles since she got into the armor that her friend had brought for her to practice with. But it was too large, too heavy to move in. Madara had put it on just to be nice and polite, but in the end it was worse than having nothing on if she couldn’t move properly.
“You just made it a mile in that armor and now you tell me it’s too heavy? Get it off then.” The friend looked worried. He ran over to help take her helm off then helped lift her out of the heavy material.
“Thank you for that,” said Madara. She walked over to the shield and picked it up with considerably less effort this time. “Now, let’s see if you can teach me by the time we get to the chemical shop.”
“We’re already there,” the friend said. He pointed and Madara turned her head.
“Wow, we are. Hold on then.” She went in and bought some chemicals and held them in her free hand which held a basket. She then walked back out and headed on her way to the smelter’s shop.
“Are you crazy? I’m not teaching you like that. Your shield is a good defense but you still need armor or else you’re going to get crushed by debris and stray arrows and blows. Either use it all or use none of it, that’s my stance. And how are we going to train if you’re holding all those chemicals? Spill one and you’re going to burn your fucking skin.”
Madara nodded, satisfied with what she had already learned about shields. “what more do I really need, other than to know how to hold one,” she thought, “it’s not like I carry one around with me in the open.” This experience could only have been profitable if she was a guard or something, especially since Madara was already practicing with the blade on occasion. She would only have worried about a shield if she had known that he was going to take on a job that required him to be attacked and not be able to dodge. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Madara left her friend once they made the quick trip and the smelter was angry. He was pissed that Madara had taken so long, but then he still needed her help so he sighed. Madara went over and used her strength to lift up the huge pot of bubling metal that was no doubt the aluminum. It was a tedious process, requiring her to use her hand dexterity to work multiple tools at once under the smelter’s command. It took much longer than she would have liked and she got pretty sweaty, but in the end the metal was poured, the aluminum extracted, and the chemicals used to their fullest extent.
If only that was it. Madara had to go back out to fetch more chemicals a total of three more times. She thought that just the one batch was tedious enough but apparently it was just one of four that needed to be completed. Madara groaned and her muscles ached from all the labor but she had to perservere. She thought of all the stuff she could buy with a thousand ryo and stuck to her guts. At the end of the day, the smelter looked pleased, for once, and gladly handed off a piece of the day’s work for her own use. It wasn’t the best quality by far of what they created, more like scrap, but this was a D rank mission so Madara was going to have to deal with what she got.
Madara’s friend had long since abandoned her during her long day so she had to wait till the next day to bug him to finish teaching her. She met him at the training grounds and thought that she would prefer to pair up with a talented guard with rare strategic skills that she did not have instead of learning how to use defensive weapons. That would take years to learn, years she didn’t have. She looked over at the friend and saw that he had sighed, saddened to see that Madara still didn’t think shields were useful. Did he think Madara so worthless she could not manage without a defensive tool? Seeing as though Madara hadn’t drawn suspicion to her physical abilities, she decided that she wasn’t that bad. “I’ll keep being sassy, keep jabbing him. Then he won’t expect a thing out of me,” Madara thought.
It was rare that her bouts of social interaction turned out so well. However this scenario made sense to her. She was being trained by a friend, and she was a backtalking newbie who didn’t show enough appreciation. The only thing she had to worry about was her sudden lack in skill level. It looked like she was expected to be someone on par with a chuunin in terms of combat prowess. It was clear now that she was much too weak. She needed an excuse.
“I did extra training yesterday and stayed up all night,” she told the downtrodden friend. “The party, oh it was sublime. You would have loved it.”
“Todays’ our training day you were out partying?” fumed the friend, “well that explains why you’re so weak. Anyway you have to at least do something today. We already came all the way out here and I’m not going home without a good workout.”
Madara looked relieved. Not because she had to do some work, but because her excuse was going well. It wasn’t easy just having things work out for the people that knew her.
“Let’s do some drills. You should at least be able to do those. I’ll throw these pinecones at you and you block with the shield. Ready go!” He started to run in a circle and throw pinecones at Madara. He started fast at first but he slowed own considerably to match Madara’s true skill level. There was no point in pelleting her with pinecones and hurting her when she was already tired. The pinecones were soft, and barely hurt when they made contact with Madara’s frame.
Madara whirled around with the shield in hand. She wasn’t fast enough to turn to block, namely due to her poor acrobatics. She could try though! She spun in circles, attempting to block the pinecones with the shield. Sometimes she succeeded, by pure random, while other times she failed, because she was skillless. It was a good workout for her core endurance and also it worked on her reaction time to stop and start spinning again. When she finally couldn’t take anymore, she threw the shield off of the hand that held it and took a break. She was sweating, tired, and her head was spinning from all the… spinning.
“This is as good a spot as any to stop,” Madara said.
Flashback: Circa Age 13
Madara woke this fine morning groggily. She felt hungry again even though she had eaten a tasty squirrel last night. She told herself it was tasty but she was no cook. It had burnt on the outside and she wanted to use some of the money she had stolen a few weeks ago to go back into town and buy some more food. She needed to get better at hunting so she could be fully self sufficient. She washed herself off in a nearby pond then thought of what she actually wanted to do today. There was no way she was going to actually go practice hunting, that was boring. She’d met a nice man the other day in town and said she’d come back to meet at the same time today. What if she could convince him to buy her food for her?
The thought a free meal pleased her so that’s what she would work towards. She hopped from her crappy bedding arrangement and skipped through the forest to get back to the village. As she skipped she heeded the warnings she had heard of the day before. It had only been a day but she felt a real trust with whatever feeling was guiding her through the forest.
Lost in her joyous thoughts, Madara stumbled over a root that the feelings hadn’t warned her of. Of course, the root was out of place so it wouldn’t be something she would know of. Still, she was able to find her footing quickly after tripping which was very uncharacteristic of her. As soon as she put her foot on the ground she expected to crash to the ground but instead her foot made contact with very sturdy ground.
Madara, suspicious of what was going on, intentionally tripped on another root and found that her foot found sturdy ground once again. Now she put two and two together. Something fishy was going on here, even if she didn’t know exactly what it was. She was going to have to ask ‘that’ woman about it next day when they were set to meet up again. She felt like she was getting better at using chakra to stabilize herself, but it was only a guess.
Eventually Madara ended up in the village again. It was a windy day, even she noticed that. Shops had packed up all the stuff that could fly away but the table from the previous day was still set up. Madara sat down and looked around to see if that man was going to come back. As if on cue, the man introduced as a familiar NPC approached her and took a seat opposite of her.
“Didn’t think you’d come back in all this wind!” he told her with a smile while clutching his clothes tight to his body.
Now Madara noticed that her clothes weren’t nearly at risk of flapping around as his were. She smiled when she realized that the wind was probably protecting her just as the earth had earlier. Whatever connection she had to the elements, she liked it. She thought to herself, wondering if perhaps this one was curious for more dubious reasons than just curiosity.
“Would you mind buying me food today?” Madara asked while batting her eyelashes innocently.
“No coin today?” the prior stranger asked. “I’d like to know a little bit more about you first.”
“What’s to tell? I live in the forest and I’m hungry. I’ve got no parents to feed me.” Madara acted sad, poorly. She wasn’t sad even if it was the truth.
“You remind me of my daughter. I don’t think I could rightfully deny you a meal if you’ve no parents.” the man waved over a waitress who brought over some seafood. Then they ate. He slipped a hand inside his vest a pulled a small iron flask with water in it and washed down his last bite of squid to give himself another quick moment to think of his response without seeming like he was stalling. Twisting the cap on the flask he slipped it back in his vest and turned his attention back to Madara as he pulled a pipe from his pack and grabbed a box of small wooden matches from one of his pockets and lit it, putting the patch out he set it on the table next to his skewer sticks and took a pull from the smoke blowing it up and away from himself and the young lady across from him.
“So I asked you about foreigners yesterday. Seen any around?” he asked.
Madara thought for a moment. "I know a little bit, not many of them around this town though. As for specific names, I'm afraid it's not ringing any bells."
Madara figured she'd play it defensive for now and see what happened before she started to push back for information, but maybe a little jab wouldn't hurt, test the waters so to speak. Normally she wouldn't do this in front of a stranger... but she figured it'd be a small price to pay to see where this man was coming from. She had to be at least a little courteous after having tricked him into feeding her.
She reached up and ran her fingers through her hair and untied a bow in her hair, pulling it from underneath her long hair she pulled it off her head, revealing the inside of the bow. She took both ends of the fabric in her hand and worked them absent mindedly in her hair again to pass the time.
“Tell me how did you get that hair band if you are willing to discuss it that is.” If he was right then it was more than just a piece of cloth.
Madara sighed inwardly, she hated giving information about herself in an interrogative environment. “This is why I distanced myself from people” she thought to himself. She looked around the area, noticing all the people milling this way and that in the windy day. She doubted a confrontation would start here so she decided to drop the act.
"It’s a fabric from a trader around here although I'm sure you know that. I might have taken it without paying.” Madara didn’t think she could hide this fact. Some girl living in the woods would not have the money to buy a nice hair piece like this.
If the middle aged man was surprised he did not show it. There was something different about Madara. “you took it? How did you manage that?” Well it seemed idle his question was carefully worded. Depending on her answer then the next time they meet they would be enemies. He had a vested interest in keeping thieves out of the forest, even if they were small time thieves. Small thieves ended up growing into big time ones.
Madara raised an eyebrow slightly at his question. She didn’t pick up on his hidden motive and answered truthfully. “Someone was passing by and I snatched it before they noticed. I thought it was pretty and I wanted it.”
The man was nodding well listening to his guest. “As much as I dislike it I don’t your situation changing any time soon. I hope that you can find a job so you don’t have to steal. You should be paying for things, even small things like that hair band.” He leaned back thinking perhaps he would be able to help Madara find her way.
Madara relaxed a bit, glad to see that he had not held her actions against her. “My parents wanted to control me once and I left them. Doing work is not fun at all!” Madara chuckled slightly at herself, figuring she could never really separate herself from it all as he had tried. At least she had the opportunity to relax for these last couple years unhindered.
“Well I’ll tell you what will happen if you get caught,” the man told her, “if you get caught you will get punished severely. If you steal something valuable enough, they will send killers after you. You might think you’re cute but it won’t save you forever. I have half a mind to tell on you just to make sure you get your act together.”
“You grown ups are all the same!” Madara shouted, flipping over the few uneaten pieces of food over in a fit. She ran as fast as she could back to the forest. She wasn’t going to go back there anytime soon. She’d pack up and move in case the man kept his word. She wasn’t done living freely yet. How could she give up this freedom when she was just starting to learn about the world around her?
The next day…
Madara tossed a small rock up and down, catching it in a rhythm that could not be heard by anyone else by her. She had skipped over some unpleasant memories after she had met with a man yesterday who warned her about her lifestyle. To her, they had gotten into a huge fight, and she now had to leave before someone came looking for her to punish her for stealing. Madara had kept an eye on that stranger who had sort of threw himself into his work for the entire day. Madara thought that she was in the clear for now at least. Though it was no time to get complacent. She had to have a plan if he told on her and people came after her.
She was worrying a tad too much for the crime she had committed. She’d stolen some ribbon for her hair and she thought the guard would come after her. Her childlike mind didn’t want to realize that she was probably not going to get hanged for such a small crime. She couldn’t take her mind off of these worries though so she turned to jutsu. Unlike ninjutsu which was a very vague sort of skillset, she knew that transformation had the ability to let her hide in a different form. The person who taught her had the ability to shapeshift so she probably could too.
“How did she do it again?” she wondered. It would have made a lot more sense for her to wait another week until their meeting but she was impatient. She called from memory the things called that her teacher had done to transform. But what did she need for it? Well, she knew the first step was getting a picture in her head. It didn’t matter what the form was, as far as she knew. She took her stick and lazily walked around until she came up with a plan. She absent mindedly chased after a mouse to pass some time.
The mouse died quickly then Madara retrieved it. The dead mouse body before her looked too scrawny to be eaten so she wouldn’t even bother cooking it. She started digging into it and tried to think back to which parts of the mouse that she needed. Well a mouse wasn’t exactly long haired like her. Then she sat there and focused on the mouse’s splayed out body. She thought of how simple things would be if she could just turn into a mouse and escape if someone came looking for her. She sat and meditated for the better end of the entire day until she finally fell asleep. She didn’t know when it would be done, but her plan was to focus on the mouse until she turned into it. Unfortunately, the transformation jutsu didn’t let her turn into an animal, for whatever stupid reason. She could, however, dream about being an animal.
“Huh?” she thought as she dreamed. Everything looked different. Nothing actually looked visible at all. She got up and noticed that she was as small as the rock that was next to her… and she didn’t have hands. “I’m a mouse!” she squeaked even though no language came out. She was so excited and scared all rolled into one rush of emotions. She ran around in excitement but found that she could barely keep herself walking properly. She tripped and fell over her own tiny paws and was introduced to a much more powerful sense of smell than she was usually used to.
Madara ran around for a couple bits then she heard something. A low growl. Every instinct in her body told her there was danger so she darted under some cover and used her senses to identify what was coming. It looked like a fox in her blurry vision. It pounced, but not at Madara. It was digging next to a tree, exactly where Madara had left the original bloody mouse body. The fox held the mouse in its mouth and then started eating it.
“I’m next,” Madara thought fearfully. She wanted to turn back into a human but she didn’t know how. “Just focus on your form, that’s what you did with the mouse!” she thought. She let out some concerned squeaks against her better judgement and focused. And focused, and focused. Bits passed and she felt herself change but it was the slowest process she ever experienced. She couldn’t believe that she had actually turned into a mouse without even realizing it before.
The fox had become wise that it was not alone. It had eaten the mouse and now it saw Madara turning. It watched curiously, because something didn’t seem right. Its prey looked more like a trap than a free meal so it kept its distance. It could smell human too which was never a good sign for a smaller animal. Madara was fortunate that it didn’t decide to attack. Ten minutes passed and finally she turned back into her normal form and cried from all the emotional turmoil she had just gone through. She didn’t think she ever wanted to become a mouse again, ever. But a fox?
Madara turned her vision to the fox who was still watching her curiously. Madara reached for her stick… but then the fox sprinted away before she could get a hit in. “Drat” she said angrily. She would have much rather become a fox, if she could ever catch one. There were a lot of animals in the forest and she didn’t know very many that could catch a fox. Unlike a mouse… why did she pick a stupid little mouse again?
Then, Madara woke up. She realized that she had just had a dream, a weird dream about turning into a mouse. It only made her angry because she couldn’t turn into an animal. Perhaps there would be a way to turn into an animal in the future… but not today.
She now realized how hungry she was after having spent the whole day working on this dumb plan. She made a quick trip to the pond but realized that she was going to have to do some serious hunting soon or she’d starve. Or she was going to have to spend the last of her money in the village and hope it’d last. She chose to wait for the night and avoid hunting in poor visibility. Back to her camp she went where she cozied up against a tree after starting a small fire.
She tossed a stone into the air and caught the stone in the palm of her hand and smiled as she recalled some fond memories, but felt heaviness in her chest as her memories crept closer and closer to the time when she felt so lost. She would not relive that memory voluntarily, but it would be just as difficult recalling how much she hated her old life. Unwillingly, a memory began to surface and she closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to distract herself from it, but it was too late......
The next day Madara didn’t have much to do so she went around to the town center and started looking around at all the shop stalls. She ended up speaking to someone who was selling a very impressive silk which glistened in the sunlight like something she’d never seen before. It was interesting to the woman who was usually not impressed by things like this, at least in this mundane place. Still, she couldn’t help but trace a finger along the fabric and enjoy the feel of it. “How did you obtain such a fine material?” she asked the shop keeper without meeting his eye. The fabric was far too interesting to take her eye off of. She wanted it, she needed it.
The man’s eyes grew dark as if he was taken over by some sort of demonic spirit. The memories of what he had to do to obtain the material were far too gruesome to share with a woman he’d just met. “Let’s just say I had to go into the depths of a very dangerous mountain. In there there is a massive maze of fog and brush and blackness. You don’t find the spiders that make this silk, they will be the ones that will find you.” He gulped and started forming beads of sweat on his brow. He didn’t want to tell the woman but he couldn’t help it. It was part of his act, you see. He had gone through great dangers to obtain the silk but it hadn’t been quite as bad as he let on. He went for the sympathy card and if Madara was willing to pay the premium he would make off with a killing. He didn’t think that she had much money to her name but if he could clean her out he would be happy as a butterfly.
Madara kicked a pebble on the ground in front of her which bounced off of the stall and collided right with her shin. It was a very unpleasant experience that added to the stress she felt at the very moment. She dug her hands into her pockets to try digging out all the money she had on her but then she realized that she was under some kind of trickery. She kept her hands deep in her pockets and decided that they would stay there just so she wouldn’t feel compelled to touch the silk again. Her hands were pretty clean but now they felt like they had some kind of grainy filth to them. Something didn’t add up. “If you went through all that mess why are you here of all places? Surely you’d be better off selling to some kind of lord or king or whathaveyou. Seems like a waste to flaunt these wares in front of the regular ol’ masses.”
Curses, she had decided to press the issue. That was no Bueno for a salesman. Now he had to dig into his memory and try fabricating an even grander story and an excuse. He did it all in stride though and only paused for a moment. He said that, “my vessel to the islands does not depart for several weeks. So I thought, why not spend some time among the masses? You never know when a very wealthy noble will happen by or a young woman who would be willing to pay dearly for enough silk to accentuate an outfit. What do you say dearie? Are you one of the ones that I would’ve expected to approach my stall?” He gave her a smirk and then couldn’t help but wonder what her age was. “You are a grown woman right? You look like you could be younger than I thought.”
Madara looked up curiously, meeting the man’s eyes for the first time. Fire burned within her. She calmed down quickly though upon realizing that he was trying to compliment her, even if he was doing it pretty badly. “Nevermind my age, let’s just agree that I’m an adult and go from there. My last birthday was fairly miserable anyways. I had to train all day and there was nobody to celebrate with but my sensei who’s an old fart and not worth the time of day. All he did was pat me on the shoulder and announce to trees that I was older now.”
Ooof, the salesman thought as he realized he took the conversation for a turn to the worse. He decided that it couldn’t get worse so he went on, “oh, I thought that you just couldn’t be much younger than me.”
“Are you joking?” Madara shouted, “you look to be at least sixty!” She then slammed her fists on his stall. She wanted to smash it but had the manners not to. She usually wasn’t like this. She tried to be a nice gal and all but this wouldn’t do. He was insulting her to his face!
“Let’s cut the shit shall we?” he asked, “everything has a numerical value associated with it otherwise referred to as the price. Are you buying? If not please kindly fuck off.” He waved her away. He didn’t need this brat hanging around any longer anyways. “I didn’t spend all those years slaving way to obtain this precious silk so some poor bastard can try sweet talking her way into a discount.”
“Precious silk eh?” Madara asked, “this doesn’t look all that special. Above average, sure but not the best in the world.”
“Alright you’ve convinced me,” the shopkeeper shouted for all the hear. “If you go on a little quest for me I may impart some of my silk unto you. Delve into a special cave I know of and if you can claim the treasure inside I’ll trade you some of my silk. Is that a deal?”
Madara had to blink because it’d happened so quickly. “What? You wanted me to leave and now you want to trade? You’ve got to be the most bipolar salesman I’ve ever met.”
“Well, that’s the job. If you were easier to get along with I would’ve just offered it to you but you’ve got some sass to you that your parents never beat out of you. Now get going or else I’m seriously going to go get guards to escort you out.”
Madara fumed and stormed away. She wanted to just blow this whole place up but she didn’t think that was very feasible while calling herself a good person. She didn’t wander too far though. Soon enough she came across someone she knew. His name was Joseph and the area looked like it’d gone through some sort of fight recently. There was way too much collateral damage. Yep, she knew in her heart Joseph was involved somehow. She waved over to him and shouted, “what did you get yourself into this time?”
[exit]
5368 wordcount
3000/4000 wc towards 2nd tomoe sharingan https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t45573-sharingan-v7#356179
(1000 wc learned here
2300/6000 wc towards 3rd tomoe sharingan
+1 chakra
+30 vigor
+22 speed
+1,000 Ryo
+, 3AP,
+1x Aluminum
FuJounin
- Stat Page : Fu's Fat Stats
Familiar : Archie the Bear 
Village : Hoshigakure
Ryo : 176650
Approved
Permissions in this forum:
You cannot reply to topics in this forum