Absolutely Disgraceful! (Mission/Solo)

Mission:

A haunted mansion? Really?

Talk about stupid. Truly, civilians were useless, and blue collar workers even more so. All their bravado and masculinity (usually), and the moment there's the sound of something resembling laughing children, they shit their pants and come with their tails tucked between the legs and pay the fucking ninja to deal with their issues. Like a bunch of six-year-olds running to mommy, the absolute cowards. In her opinion, this was an absolute waste of resources and human effort all in the name of acquiescing to some bullshit superstition.

If this mansion is such a goddamn issue, why don't the people just move somewhere else? By the gods, it's not as though real estate in Kumogakure's in some kind of bubble. She demolished an entire apartment building the other day, after all, and if that says anything, it'll be that the real estate market is shrinking in Lightning Country! Especially with how many buildings are apparently getting demolished around Kumogakure specifically: either there's been some shift in the economy that she didn't see (unlikely, she keeps tabs on the stocks and market rates like a goddamn hawk), or people have been emigrating out of the nation. Which brings her back to her original point: why not just move away from the mansion to some other part of Lightning Country?

Oh, but they'll think that the deserted neighborhoods are haunted too, the bunch of pillocks. Absolutely disgraceful, this mission. ...She wasn't miffed because she drew the short stick and had to do it solo. She wasn't! Why in the world would she be scared of haunted mansions? Well, not haunted. She just said that. Normal, abandoned mansions with whatever mundane phenomena that makes people scared: there, she described it sufficiently well.

Truly, why should she be scared? She was a fully grown woman with the power of the gods through the simple application of chakra. She could walk up walls and create great geyser explosions of water, she could teleport anything from here and there. She was, by civilian standards, supernatural and a miracle worker. Whatever issue they were having, she wasn't going to fall prey to.

Oh, she was here.

...God, but it looked scary. Aesthetically, she meant. Rationally, it looked like a mansion. With, uh, darkened walls. And red-tinted windows? And were those spider webs? Baruga absolutely did not jump backwards when lightning crackled through the sky and thunder roared, and she'd do well to remind you of that fact very time. Okay, so it seemed fairly scary by conventional standards.

But you know what was actually scary? Debt. Taxes. Loans. The existential crisis of being a living money-printer, which is what her goddamn name meant! "Ryo insatsu": honestly, who even thought of that? Every day where she worried someone in this village would figure out her abilities, and then she'd be swamped with all the attention she got from her father's inner circles and personal court. Or, worse, assholes who thought they could steal her liver or kidneys or brain or whatnot and try to implant them into themselves so that they could get a hold on the clan bank. It had been proven an endless amount of times in history that that's not how her bloodline limit worked, goddamn it, but they'd try it anyways! Freaks! Implant-obsessed, undeserving freaks! Shinobi truly didn't have any dignity!

Now all riled up and thoroughly over her initial fear, Baruga harrumphed and stormed into the haunted mansion, kicking the wooden double doors open and letting her heels clack on the dusty velvet carpet of the main room. Then, she yelped when the door slammed itself shut behind her, before angrily throwing up two middle fingers at the aforementioned doors, stalking away from them with a glare.

With a huff, Baruga vaguely heard the sound of something moaning: or, perhaps, was it crying? She couldn't tell, but it was just a scary noise, and she was busy repeating a mantra about shitty civilians and how none of this was real. Unfortunately for her, she was also a fair-skinned conventionally attractive young woman, so following standard horror movie practices, she cautiously begun to approach the source of the sound rather than high-tailing out of there.

Each step she took up the master staircase creaked, and she winced with every time the wood groaned underneath her weight. She wasn't fat, she knew that much: no, shut up, she wasn't! But the fact was, she could proabbly have alerted something just by entering, let alone taking footsteps into this godforsaken building. Still, she had to press onwards. It was her mission, and missions meant that shern had certain obligations, and most importantly of all, it meant that she had to complete it to get money! Cash! Revenue!

And then, as she put her hands on a doorknob leading to the source of the noise, a tarantula dropped from the ceiling onto her hand and started crawling up her arm. The sensation of fur and and several legs scuttling were enough to make Baruga screech like a banshee and do a full body convulsion, rapidly panicking and attempting to swipe the spider off of her bare skin.

Once it was off, Baruga let out another set of screams, albeit more indignant than scared, this time.

"Bitch! Oh, bitch! You little bitch! You baby back rib bitch! Ugh!"

With that, she kicked open the wooden door this time, not wanting to risk having another spider fall on her. Now speed walking through the mansion, Baruga did her best to avoid getting creeped out by everything.

Which was somewhat tough, given how absolutely horrid this place was from the inside. Honestly, dust everywhere, mold on the walls and ceiling, a goddamn tree sticking through one of the broken windows and growing into the house. The thunderstorm from earlier had picked up, so there was rain pouring into the house, and the wallpaper was peeling off, and OH, GOOD HEAVENS, there's that godforsaken thunder again!

Baruga's not scared of thunder, she was scared of the implication. More accurately, she was surprised. Not scared! Shut up! In any case, she had to move on. There were holsters for candles there, but they were all empty or melted down to the base. The wax from the once-candles were just disgusting, black globs on the floor, marred by dirt and leaves and whatever mold seemed to be growing around the edges.

Now that she thought about it, this place was more of a health hazard than an actual haunted house. At least haunted houses were somewhat clean given the ghosts and poltergeists who were far too fond of their previous property to let it fall to waste. This place was just a violation of everything that was acceptable in any form of building. Even the abandoned apartment complex that she destroyed before was nicer than this: Kumogakure's dry season in an urban setting was far more gentle to that building than the elements were to this one.

Whoever though it was a good idea to create property in such a wooded area clearly didn't realize how awful upkeep was. You put a house in Lightning Country and you don't settle for the beautiful plateaus and astounding mountain ranges that were prime real estate locations to build upon? What were you, brainless or simply too pretentious for your own good? Did you think you would have a lovely stroll through the forest where the chakra-infused direwolves were likely to roam, or perhaps you were hoping to raise some children around the soothing aura of nature to later feed them to the bears? Why did you think this was a good idea? Bitch?

Now that she was thinking hard about how awful this place was, her fear was further replaced by accumulating annoyance and indignity. The thunder stopped bothering her as much as it did, because she was too busy being bothered by the shitty logistics of this place. Oh, sure, there was a local village that likely thrived off the mansion once upon a time, but that would require the estate to be self-sustaining, which meant that in Lightning Country's rough terrain and unforgiving climate, options were limited in terms of what you could cultivate. In truth, if you wished to be as opulent as the mansion seemed to indicate, that would have to include several imported goods.

And how would you get those imported goods in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, hm? Baruga scoffed and brushed off yet another spider off her shoulder as she turned the corner and started making her way to the third floor. You get someone to deliver them. And yet, in this location, so far divorced from any preestablished trade route or, really, route in general, there was unlikely to be anyone who would be willing to part from the conventional trading roads. After all, if you want to get from Point A to Point B, you take as few detours as possible in order to instead pursue as many stops that would provide the most profit.

And given this place's location, it was an absolute shitfest to deliver to. You could either end your trade line here, or make your way to shining Kumogakure, where the ninja are strong and the Iron Bank shits gold. And then you can hire ninja to go to whichever coast you might need. Here? You'd be lucky to hire a fucking hoof trimmer, let alone any form of protection or any type of boon to your further travel.

And what material goods would you get from this place? What, the usual fare of what a mansion could grow in Kumogakure's evergreen forests? From what she'd seen, this place didn't even invest in a greenhouse: no, they had a goddamn pool! A POOL?! In Kumogakure? What a fucking rat bitch who made this place. Likely new money, the absolute dunce, who didn't know how to spend a goddamn dime without suddenly coming into several thousand ryo of deficit.

No wonder this place was abandoned: who the hell would want this real estate? There were no material goods to be had, no capital to be invested upon, the farms were so laughably mediocre. More and more, her hatred of new money bourgeoisie grew. And so the local village was self-sustaining, and so the goddamn peons could get by fine, but if you wanted to maintain your wealth past supporting the goddamn hovels that dotted the land that this place once rented out, then this entire estate was a prime example of what not to do.

And —

"Oh, you have a silvered toilet? You're fucking with me, aren't you, ghost? You absolute imbecile of a money-waster, I could walk into a brothel with a ryo to my name and I'd still have more fucking brain than you!"

Baruga angrily grabbed the top container of the overtly expensive toilet and sent it flying into the bathtub in the bathroom she'd just walked into, shattering both pieces of porcelain. She stomped away from the absolute disgrace of a room and started angrily opening doors, still chasing the source of the suspect sounds she had originally encountered.

Then, at the door at the end of the hall, Baruga absolutely decimated it by kicking it open, finding... two young adults. About her age, maybe older, and entirely civilian in nature.

"I told you, Tadashi, we can't keep up this ruse! I-I only know Academy level genjutsu, and —"

"C'mon, just a bit longer! We gotta get the last of these bricks to Gumo, and that means that nobody can suspect —"

"YOU."

The two drug traffickers whipped their heads to the kunoichi who had just barged into their center of operations, and immediately, the genjutsu user attempted an amateurish technique on her.

"RELEASE."

With a burst of chakra, the incensed Baruga immediately dismissed the technique. Then, in her absolute rage at the waste of resources that this entire mansion reflected, she defenestrated the trafficker named "Tadashi" and then beat the genjutsu user to within an inch of their life with her bare fists.

---

WC: 2017
Claims (in conjunction with this mission thread):
— 4000 Ryo from 1 C-rank + 200 Genin Pay
— +20 AP
— +20 Stats (+16 to Vigor; Vigor Maxed; +4 to Speed)
— 2017 to S-Rank Summon (Ieyasu) (3018/4000)

Apologies for the word fluff: I posted the mission 3 minutes before I got the warning on the other one.

Goona say this one was a bit better, but still the fluff to actual performances ratio is a bit off.

Approved for mission rewards.

Please make notes on your stat page.