Family Values [P, W/Yukihime]

Sun Dec 18, 2022 10:19 pm

The day wasn't terrible nor terrific, and once more, Baliquis had woken up after another nightmare about her sister. Izayumi was clearly tormenting her, and the reason for it she had yet to vocalize. Seeing the dead don't always mean hearing them, and perhaps her sister's soul was still mad about the fact that her children had joined her 'when they didn't need to.' This is a good argument for someone who cares about the well-being and good standing of children or people.

Baliquis couldn't be bothered to have two possible shinobi bastards running around with her sister's blood in their veins. It was best to keep the bloodline pure for all intents and purposes.

Baliquis got up and did the everyday things she did every day; she washed, brushed her hair, did some of her makeup, dressed, and attached the chain to her cloak. She was still on suspension, if you could call it that. Instead, the other elders were wary of her since her 'mental breakdown' and wanted her to stay away from duties for a while. Nothing made her feel so fucking useless that having to be told by people twice or thrice her age to step away from her own word. Nor as furious.

To Baliquis, she fucking did everything. She made this temple what it was internally. As she clenched her teeth to keep from breaking anything and starting their assumptions about her anew, she knew her worth in this fucking place. She knew that without her, there would not be a tranquility room. Without her, there would not be ninety percent of the charity programs in place. Without her, no housing developments for the less fortunate. Without her, they would rub two yen coins together, hoping for a miracle. Without her, they would be struggling in debt like before she got to her position. She spent hours, she spent the night by candlelight, she spent years fixing their fuck ups.

Now they were wary, and she was just barely contained her ire. She needed a distraction.

With how things were going, she needed more. She needed strength and power because they were already outpacing her. Yumi had been among them for years and been gone for years; who fucking knows what had happened to her teammates. Were they dead? Were they still in this village, walking among the people like the cryptoid creatures they were? Disgustingly blending in like every lie. She needed more to fend them off; she needed to be better prepared. She needed allies to make up for where she lacked and to get that she needed information- and then a thought occurred to her.

Her sister might be able to help. Ikazuchi Hozuki, her sister, now went by "Yukihime" in the Red Light District if she remembered correctly, and they hadn't spoken or talked in years, but… Bali could change that.

She was already changing so much; surely she could do the right thing and rekindle a friendship with her own sister? From what Bali remembered, her sister had been a ferocious defender of Bali and Yuki against their overbearing mother. A defender of their freedoms to the very point of being exiled from the off-sect religion they had hailed from and to the exile from the family. If Bali remembered, it wasn't long after that their mother submitted the twins to the church and the temple to be accepted in full force to their ranks. It had been held off and contested by Yukihime, or Yuki, Who was given her nickname by her cold demeanor and sharp retorts when she was furious.

They were both the same now. Both had been exiled. Both had forgone their family in a way, and Baliquis wondered if her sister was still such a strong person. There wasn't a better time to go and visit her because even with an escort of her assistant, Hana, Baliquis knew the religious woman would only follow her so far into the repulsive Red Light District. She needed the allies, and Yuki would have some information she could collect and add to her own knowledge and repertoire. Bali needed this to work in the worst way before she began to move fully- or at least more than she did- within the shinobi's witchcraft world. She reached out with her abilities to try and sense her two friends, and when she didn't, she decided she would need to take care of this on her own. So she opened a cabinet door and grabbed her cloak, pulling it off the hanger and putting it on to cover most of her clothing before closing it and turning around to leave her chambers via the wooden walkway outside of them. As she left the area, she ran into Hana, who seemed to be waiting for her in the tranquility room, "Not today." Baliquis informed her, and Hana blinked in surprise as her words caught in her throat, "I am leaving the grounds; wait here." Then came the expected reply from Hana:

"I've been told to escort you where you go," Hana said, and Bali smirked internally as she produced a black face mask and covered her mouth, looping the ear lops about her ears to keep the mask in place. "So…where are we going?" She asked in a hushed whisper, and Bali answered,

"To the Red Light District. I plan on visiting my sister if she is still there." Bali advised, and her assistant twitched in shock, and the color drained from her face, "It would be best and look best on you if you stayed here and said I got away somehow. No need to drag yourself over to somewhere unsavory." Her assistant visibly struggled with making decisions on such moral and ethical grounds before she advised in a hushed whisper,

"I…I can escort you to the entrance to the district… and say I lost track of you." Hana said, and Bali nodded in acceptance before they both left the temple grounds as Baliquis intended. Together.

Hana would make a great excuse and fall-taking woman when the time was right, but for today? She would be an excuse.

Baliquis had been worried about having to search every tea house in the Red Light District to find her own sister, but she had been approached by someone instead. They identified themself as “a friend of Ikazuchi” Since they knew her real name, Baliquis was more than willing to follow them and abandon Hana at the gates. She followed the person down a pathway between the well-maintained teahouses that led to their lesser-maintained backyards and along a cobblestone path to another footpath. The latter led to a set of descending stairs which led to a lower district and more tucked away Teahouses- but they ground her to one and opened the door, closing it behind them. “Shoes off, please.” Baliquis followed the direction and the ‘friend’ put them in a shoe cabinet before producing slippers, which she slid into, and the person led them down a hallway to a door, a sliding paper door at the end of the hallway. They opened it for her, and in the expansive room, her sister sat on the other side of the room, next to a window she was looking out of. In the reflection of the window’s glass, she locked eyes with the elder woman herself: Ikazuchi "Yukihime" Hozuki.

[ WC: 1,235 ]

Mon Jan 16, 2023 1:46 am

How long had it been? How long had she been here? It had been years, but how many? Had it been five? Had it been ten, had it been twelve? She couldn’t remember anymore. She couldn't place it on the timeline anymore. How utterly useless of her that she couldn't recount the weeks, the months, or the years but it may have been for the sole reason ‘it didn't matter.’

Time was an irrelevant construct anyways.

Despite the fact that everything was so reliant on it that it was sickening. It was a sick riddle; What did you never have enough of, but you mourn its loss when it’s gone? Time.

She couldn’t tell anymore how long she had been here. There were no clocks and no calendars. She judged based on how things were outside her window or how the conditions in her chambers shifted. She could tell when the seasons changed because she watched the trees shift outside her window from the massive, corner apartment. She could tell when she needed more inks and more paper for her drawings of the things that kept her up; those strange constructs. She put their empty cases outside her door at night, and in the morning, there were new cases of charcoals, inks and pens, more rolls of canvas, and parchment. After a little while, she would hand some off to one of her aides and let them tuck it away.

It had been so long. These small changes in her life grew staler by the day, and it was all because of her- or instead, because of the hard work she had put in to get here. To get this mundane and perfectly working system to where it was.

Fifteen years ago, when she first stumbled into the district because she had no other training, she was as lost as any other new bird that came into the glittering and shimmering prison of the Red Light District. She started at the second rung from the floor on the ladder she had climbed to get to where she was now. She had been blessed with her mother’s beauty and her temper that only flared in hardship and was tempered with age like a blacksmith’s blade. She did as most women in this district did; she took on a new name- Yukihime - and traded the sole commodity she had to her name. Herself.

She traded her body to be trained as a courtesan. She traded her personality for the change to be molded into what she needed to be and what they wanted of her. She traded her time to entertain and lure in men who paid for her just to be there and entertain them, sing for them, and play instruments for them. When she began, it was only several hundred ryo to have her at a teahouse as she accompanied a mentor courtesan to learn her ways. Now, one could not get her to leave her domain without spending several hundred thousand ryo, as she deserved. At the farthest end of the district, in the more rundown teahouses- the ones that housed geisha and their premium competition, Courtesans- was where she started. Now? After fifteen years, she owned her own two-story, five-thousand-square-foot Teahouse, and she wanted the corner apartments, so she took them. She started here and was a servant to five different courtesans, all in the same teahouse as training demanded. Now? In this Teahouse alone, she had fifteen other courtesans working under her, and the household numbers sixty with maids and servants. Her meals were cooked, and she had someone else take care of chores she didn’t want to do now that she was in this position, so she had earned the ability to do whatever the fuck she wanted.

Yuki had owned her teahouse for five years now. She had saved and bought her own freedom but remained because she had nowhere to do…that’s what she liked to say and tell herself anyways. In truth, she remained because she was scared to be returned to an unfamiliar world that she knew nothing about, so she had bits and pieces of it come to her. In this world? She was one of the top Teahouse owners- second rung from the top of the ladder. Yuki was happy with how far she had come but had grown discontented. She had fleets of people outside her teahouse who were keeping an eye out on various things for her, and she had always told them to keep an eye out for any of her sisters or family member; however, they did not come often. Occasionally she would leave and spend time with her mother or her father at the family estate, but she had only started doing that once she had shifted her position title to Teahouse Owner. Once she had settled in and gotten her fleet of viciously loyal females under one roof. Women weren’t meant to room together, but Yuki didn’t give a shit about that because her mind was elsewhere.

For many years she had been plagued with images of strange devices and imagery in her mind- items that didn’t exist, but she could see ways to make them exist. She wanted to make them a reality, and she had tried sparingly over the years- asking a client here and there what they thought and finding herself becoming guarded and jaded at their unsupportiveness and their dismissive answers. She wanted someone to support her, but there was no way for Yukihime to safely make these strange drawings and designs a reality because if she did begin working on them? It would draw too much attention. However, she would need a blacksmithing company and lots of space to try making these visions of her actuality, however… Hoshigakure was a ninja village, and those types of things were left to shinobi, who could hone their chakra and craft to make such things happen.

Yuki was an embodiment of insecurities about her own flaws, Like the fact that she had such low chakra and such extreme difficulty with it. There was also the fact that she couldn’t read, and when she tried to, well, in retrospect, anytime she tried to do anything, she was overzealously and overambitiously pursuing it. In contrast, she did not have the freedom to pursue anything at all. Now she was an owner of this shop, and she had spent years just scribbling and taking care of the business needs. Those became second nature to her and when they became as natural as breathing then she poured more time into manifesting and bringing these strange designs to life.

She would need to leave the Red Light District somehow, but what would happen to the girls if she left now? She needed to find another shop owner, but she also needed other things- stability and income to make sure she could keep working n these strange symbols and patterns she saw even when she closed her eyes. How was she going even to start that journey? “Madame Yukihime.” Someone said from behind her, and she turned to look at them, “A woman matching your description of your sister has passed the District Gates.”

“Bring her here discreetly.” Yukihime answered, and they quickly bowed out and shut the door behind them. Within the hour, they had brought the other woman to her, and she locked eyes with her in the reflection of the window she watched the seasons change out of- It wasn’t Izayumi. It was Nozomi, the eldest of her twin sisters, but Yukihime turned towards her quizzically and asked, “Where is Izayumi?”

[ WC: 1275 ][ TWC: 1275 ]

Wed Mar 29, 2023 3:21 pm

[ exiting thread ][ TWC: 1235]

Claims:

+ 9 AP ( WC to AP )( possible: 24 AP pts)
368 WC towards claiming Storage pilfer (632/1000) to (1000/1000)(C-Rank)
(632 WC from here)
500 WC to claim Mist Servant Technique (D-Rank)
367 WC towards claiming Mass Shift (367 / 500) (D-Rank)