Murray Christmas [Mission, IO, NK]

Mission:

Isaribi was no stranger to delivery work. Why, it was practically the stuff she'd done when she first got into the Jaws to begin with. Illegal goods could be made in any bumpkin's garage, but it was moving them from place to place that was the hard part. Transport, covert transport, was important. Get busted by the shinobi or by whatever forces the other factions could muster, and you could lose hours if not days of work, and thousands of ryo in labor. So, good runners were practically a commodity as far as the criminal world was concerned. Good drivers, too, though Isaribi despised the practice. Those kinds of vehicles had really just made the village a worse place, as far as she was concerned.

Doing transport for a mythical figure of dubious... well, dubious existence? Now, that was a different matter entirely. Still, it was the item on the checklist, and Isaribi intended to get it done. As far as she was concerned, this winter shithole land was a place of business, and that was something she could understand well enough. Here she was, deep in unknown territory, cloaked by chakra. It was an unfortunately familiar sensation. At least out here, though, there were no oppressive authorities looking for people like her. It was going to make the job a hell of a lot easier. There were many considerations, when hiding from other sensory ninja. Having a superior jutsu set of your own, decoys, and other resources like that were all something that you had to think about, depending on what you were trying to move. Out here, though, the only thing she was limited by was how much she could carry at once.

That being said, how much she could carry at a time turned out to be, well, not very much at all. She had her missing arm back, but she was never as strong as, say, your average taijutsu user to begin with. Well, she had learned early on to be inventive, to get creative in her method of attacking a problem. And out here, that went doubly so. For a few brief seconds, Isaribi cast her eyes about, until she found what she was looking for: a homestead. Not one of the destinations that had been described to her, but fuck it. It probably had what she needed to get this task done with faster.

As she approached the homestead, she noticed that the lights were off, but that smoke was drifting up from the chimney. Well, fuck 'em. She put any encroaching guilt out of her mind and crept closer, while maintaining a stealthy demeanor, and located her target: a stable. With a simple glance and an exertion of chakra, the mule therein fell under her power in an instant, and she felt its feeble mind fall into her clutches. Now this kind of power, this was something she had to be careful with. She knew full well that she could use this against more intelligent beasts, like summons and the like, and that doing so was bound to piss people off.

She hooked up a bobsled to the mule, and dumped her cargo on it. She felt the load off her arms like a sigh of relief, and with a mental command, she got the mule underway. The rest of this first stretch of the trip was quite easy. With a beast of burden doing all the heavy lifting for her, Isaribi could pretty much just glare at the shitty scenery and rest up. For the most part, these deliveries were drop-offs to houses who didn't look like they'd welcome her if she knocked, so she just left them on front doorsteps and on porches, then waltzed the fuck off with the donkey.

It took a while until Isaribi noticed that something was very, very wrong. At first, she thought the mule was flagging a little, but that fresh sheen of unusual sweat was a little alarming. When its heart fucking exploded and it collapsed, she knew she had fucked up, and fucked up bad. The genjutsu she used could compel lesser beings to obey her, but it couldn't read their fucking minds. Well, waste not, want not. Isaribi started skinning and butchering the mule. Not the best meat (she'd rather have had a dog or something like that), but it was survival food, out here in this frigid fuckhole of a country.

She buried whatever was left after the fact, and continued on, hitching herself up and moving at a much slower rate. It didn't seem appropriate to summon Kishibe to perform this particular task, and none of the other houses she'd come across way out here didn't have any animals capable of pulling this for her. Well, that was fine. She'd find something, eventually. Maybe there'd be some wild reindeer or moose (meese?) out here, and with another nice, tidy genjutsu, she'd have another one of Santa's little helpers to drag this crap for her.

[WC 834]

To be fair, Isaribi was not dressed perfectly for this job, either. Sure, she was all bundled up, but she didn't have the gear or the snowshoes that you would normally expect people going on this kind of mission should have. Like many things, this bothered her and soured her mood. Imagine how much faster she could be done with this if she had just been mindful enough to bring the right equipment. Stupid, so fucking stupid. Her father had always taught her to bring the right tools for the job, at the same time as he derided her for being so fucking inattentive. Well, it seemed like the two things were congruous, after all. Isaribi just learned the lesson far, FAR too late. Her mother, too, had warned her about this. About listening to them, about learning before life taught her the hard lessons. Well, that lesson had been wasted, too; wasted on years of harsh imprisonment.  Years of rotting away, first cooling down from her lambent rage, then meditating on her own regrets and all of the sage advice that she had simply failed to listen to. Sure, this age was a brand new age, a new day: HER day. That still didn't mean that every piece of advice from those who came before was something to be ignored. Yes, all too often, the unfulfilled desires of the older generation made burdens of themselves on the young. Isaribi remembered seeing a fine work of street art, one of the few in Hoshigakure that had yet to be erased (outside of the theater district, that was). It was one of those little toys, the daruma dolls that populated tourist traps and shoddy stores (or perhaps, more appropriately, the mantlepieces of the elderly. These were little dolls made of clay, often round and painted with the faces of bearded men. What was most important about them, however, was the eyes. This was something Isaribi had been taught about since she was a young child, and something she would likely never forget. The eyes of a daruma doll were its whole purpose, one might say. First, the owner made a wish: something that they desired, or more likely, a goal that they sought to achieve. After that, they would color in one of the eyes in jet black paint, as sort of a weird pact with a god that in all likelihood, did not exist. Until the time that the goal or wish was fulfilled, the other eye would remain blank, while the first was painted in with that black spot. That loathsome black spot remained, even as the owner's life wore on, unfulfilling and uninspired. Too often years would pass, and the dreams and wishes of yesteryear faded into nothing, or were crushed by circumstance or error, or just plain bad luck. The council or the church or the shinobi or just the world at large flattened the aspirations that every one of them carried with them, and ground them into dust.

And what was left after this? Naught but that black spot, in the eye of the daruma. Too often, Isaribi had seen that even as people died, their daruma were burned (even if the deceased had been merely buried rather than cremated), as it was the superstation that the incomplete doll would become a harbor for evil spirits. Isaribi had her own superstitions, but she wasn't stupid enough to believe something like that. But every superstition came from somewhere, did they not? This one was no different. The unfulfilled grudges and dreams of the old weighed down on the young, in turn crushing their dreams, and the cycle repeated again and again, with no way of escape. With their advice and the gift of their experience in turn came a slough of outdated expectations, old standards, and defunct morals. This was probably why that artwork left Isaribi such an impression, for it was of a daruma doll of titanic proportions, in the act of crashing into the planet. Was there no better representation of generational trauma than this, the literal symbol of the frustrated efforts of the people who had gone before her? In her experience, limited as it might be thus far, there was certainly not.

When she was young, she had an uncle who talked from time to time about his dreams that had fallen through. He'd tried so much in his life, which on its own was pretty admirable. Where she lived, there wasn't much to do in one's free time but get into trouble and bullshit around. Opportunities outside her neighborhood were more often than not set up to favor poorer people less, no doubt to the great glee of the council. Yet, despite all of that, her uncle had tried so many things. Photography, journalism, so on and so forth, his set of talents had been something to envy. However, it seemed that he was never meant to succeed, and that all his hard work to make his dreams come true was, in the end, simply waste heat. Only later did she find out that he was just one of several, several who proved to those around them (and more importantly, those younger than them) that the village and the world they lived in was unkind to those who dared to hope, who dared to see a future beyond the position that the council had already decided for them. Now, THAT, that was a lesson that they did not soon forget. It was stories like those, passed down from one generation to another, that spun together to form the tapestry of their lives, a tapestry largely made up of tragedy and misfortune. Was there joy to be found in that life? Certainly, but the very idea that a better life was possible frustrated Isaribi greatly. All of that anger and drive and raw want for better all squashed together to form a vague irritation at everybody and everything, even if they really didn't deserve it at all.      

Speaking of being dressed for the weather, however, Isaribi couldn't help but notice the fucking heels that Baliquis was in. What were those?? The idea that she could be out here in shoes like that was fucking absurd, Isaribi almost burst out laughing. Maybe she shouldn't have held back. Maybe she should have just been honest with her friend, like a normal person, but she held back, more out of hesitation and timidity than out of propriety and manners. But dear god, what the rich would do to look good. Heels in a country filled with snow! The very idea was fucking insane.

Isaribi knew that even the idea of looking good, of beauty, was something built around the already ephemeral structures of society and material conditions. Every part of where and how people lived affected what they wore. In the olden days, so it was said, before there was even a Hoshigakure, there was a long, winding road that carried traders from one country to another through the badlands of Haven Country. The people who resided there prior to that had been nomadic tribes, who moved from badlands to steppe and back, depending on where the food went. According to those eggheads at the museum and in the library, finding out about how they lived had been pretty difficult. Only recently, they had discovered several deep pits, full of old, broken crap that apparently told the bigheads how people lived ages and ages ago. It was, kind of interesting? Even if Isaribi didn't really understand all of it, and most likely never would, especially with her inability to read. Not as much of a big deal as it probably should have been. Anyway, these pits, so they said, had been found only a few hundred feet away from a far older and more famous excavation that had occurred maybe fourteen years prior. If it hadn't been for a remarkable set of random circumstances, the smart fellows would have completely missed the pits, and so have lost track entirely of generations of a unique people who had lived here in ages past. Just like individual lives, it seemed like the lives of civilizations, too, could simply slip in and out of the world without any notice at all. Either way, they had been nomads who had moved around, chasing meat. Barred on one side by the wall (both literal and metaphorical) of another, more urban civilization, and on the other by a brutally tall mountain range, they lived what seemed to be a sustainable lifestyle here, within this bowl of a country. At some point, however, advances in conditions in surrounding countries caused traders to start pathing a way through from one side of the country to the other, in a bid to sell goods that were normally worth less at home to a wider, international exotic market who would pay more for them, or who had more interesting materials to trade for. For example, certain types of wood to the south of haven were more prized to get in the north, even though those kinds of trees were quite common in the south. With the lack of an extremely direct aquatic route (e.g. a river) through that axis of Haven, traders had to go overland, and over the course of decades upon decades, a defined route formed, which eventually turned into a road. The people native to the area reacted better than many would have at the time, and gradually began to settle down, forming more stable nodes along the route itself, and commerce prospered, turning those little nodes into hamlets. In time, those hamlets became villages, then towns and cities, eventually leading to Hoshigakure, which was only a village in name. In terms of clothing, there were elements of what people had worn there before, parts of outfits that were meant to deal with badlands, and the steppes as well. So too, though, were there pieces from the north and the south, and depending on which had dominance in the area at the time, so too did the fashion of the people change. Nowadays, of course, things were different, as Isaribi had been made painfully aware after her release from prison. Now, with the fast industrialization of the village, clothing became less and less of a practical matter and more about personal statements. No longer did people need to dress to fit the functions of their profession on a day to day basis, but could instead make their clothing an expression of themselves (though Isaribi still didn't quite understand what that meant, either). Easier access to everything changed the clothes themselves, too. Different kinds of dye, new kinds of fabric, so on and so forth. As a matter of fact, Isaribi had heard this wacky story about one of those same materials. About ninety years ago, some egghead had been mucking about, and would probably be right at home in the library today. Somehow, he had simply accidentally come up with this fiber that he had drawn out from a vial of liquid, and which could be stretched and stretched until it locked into place as a sort of thread. By such a method could thread and therefore cloth be artificially produced, and the feel and texture of it had become quite popular at the time. Nowadays, though that craze had ended, the stuff was still widely used, and not just in clothing either. It was only later discovered, of course, that the stuff was derived from toluene, and the big shortages on the oil that toluene was derived from probably played a role in its gradual decline from universal popularity. Other industries had to really rush to catch up with the speed of production that the new cloth had attained, and it would be decades before they had devised their own methods. During that time, the cloth had enriched the people who produced it (or more importantly, the people who owned the person who invented it), making them a foundationally rich family in Hoshigakure.  

Anyway, it was time to press on.

"Sure, why the hell not, if you can keep up in those fucking ridiculous shoes." Yeah, Isaribi had just decided to be blunt, in the end. She didn't need to laugh out loud in order to convey derision at the hilarious choice of shoes (and a little jealousy at not having at least tried any of her own). With that, she hitched herself up, waited to see if Baliquis would follow suit, and pressed onward. There was no time to waste, here, and the sooner things got done with, the better things would be. She remembered hearing a prisonmate talk about a little idiom she'd gotten from her old man, who'd lived in the colder steppes for a while, something along the lines of "better to do it than live with the fear of doing it", or something like that. At the time, Isaribi had dismissed it as bullshit and tripe and all that, but it rang at least a little true now. It sounded cheesy as fuck, as things from the old usually were, but there was a message somewhere in there about being decisive. For the rich like Baliquis, life was full of options. Money was the blood of the world, and the veins it trickled through were as the paths that people made. Where it flowed, people prospered, and gained more freedom to do as they pleased, but where it was lacking, Humans, their creations and ideas shriveled and died. Sometimes, when you didn't have resources or when you didn't know the right people in the right places, there were no easy choices, and that was when you came to DECISION TIME. A time when you had to pick between two terrible options, and where picking none meant death or worse. Choose one, and then never look back, NEVER. Take regrets, so she had resolved to herself, and crush them underneath her heel, because she could not go on thinking about what could have been, if she had chosen the other path. That process, started in prison and then repeated over and over again throughout the years? That was what DECISION TIME meant to her. Choose, then look straight forward, even if it meant changing yourself into a worse person than you had before. See the line between point A and point B, and draw a line through it, even if it meant drawing that line through other people, because sometimes there was NO OTHER CHOICE.

Another one of her prisonmates had had some uncle or something like that (the term "uncle" was more often than not used to designate an older fellow, anyway, related or not), an old fat fucker who had been out of his mind. The guy, it was said, had had some kind of issue with something in his body (her prisonmate had said "pyloric valve", but what that meant, Isaribi had no fucking clue), and this health issue had, over the years, caused his temperament to change. At first, Isaribi had thought she meant that he became more of an asshole, but that wasn't quite it either. This disorder wasn't painful, per se, but rather just kind of vaguely bothersome, and so too did the man become... vaguely bothersome. His valve locked up, and his personality gradually changed into what Isaribi thought of as eccentric. At least, that was how it was described to her. The dude would attend theatre district performances, just to lambast and laugh at them. A waste of money, if you asked Isaribi's opinion, but this uncle character was the very picture of someone gripped by delusion. At the same time, he believed that the universe was crushing him with some kind of nonsensical divine will, but at the same time believe he was chosen. Chosen, of course, by some kind of fate that he was destined for. Now that, that was something that Isaribi wished people would just do away with entirely. Having those kinds of people around was bad enough, but on top of that, she had to deal with these clans of shinobi (including her own) that had their own narratives that they imposed on history to explain why actually, they were the best in the world.

Worst of all, now she had to deal with the fucking church, a whole institution built around some kind of fervent belief in the specialness of divine will. A divine that will that, of course, promised an eternal afterlife as a reward for fighting an equally eternal enemy. Bullshit, if you asked her. Anything that asked people to suffer as much as they did for just the chance at some kind of vague "paradise" that might not even exist was her enemy, no matter how dressed up in the trappings of holiness it was. Why didn't they just improve things for other people? Oh to be sure, they had their little charities, but those only served to render local businesses obsolete in the face of a more divinely blessed alternative. They could have used their vast power to make real change in the village, and perhaps even in the country as a whole, but instead, they just profited off the suffering of the masses. It didn't help that where she lived, membership and participation in the faith was just sort of taken for granted. It was part of the culture, a succor for the needy and a balm to the hurting. Were you dying of thirst, angry and in pain? Just go to the church, and through the blind, bland methods of asceticism, they would make you whole. Bah. All that meant to Isaribi is that the church made people complacent, made them accepting of their suffering. And that was something that, even after years of cooling off in a prison, she could never accept. Everything in her screamed at her to stand in defiance of that smothering faith, to push herself and others to work, no, to fight for something better in the years to come.

To be honest, it wasn't like Isaribi believed that pain made people strong. That was an adolescent, childish belief from people who saw older gang members (or in the cases of weirdos, older shinobi) and looked at them with admiration, believing that their pain somehow gave them power. No, she was ignorant, but she wasn't as dumb to believe in all that. Rather, she understood that pain was a weakness. It broke people down, and made them slower and less capable. In the face of that pain, people could harden and feel less, becoming more and more detached from the world, but more often than not, people formed groups around each other; groups of pain that they shared in common. Through that shared vulnerability, they found common purpose, and united together to repel institutions that would have pulverized them individually. This was the philosophy that had been commonly discussed (funnily enough) shortly after the Archives had been founded in Hoshigakure. Isaribi remembered seeing a few of those pink flower pamphlets filter into the prison, and though she and many others couldn't read them, they flocked around the ones who could, who described to the rest of the prisoners in great detail, what the scholars assembled there wanted to discuss, and this union of shared weakness had been on of the theories presented.

After she got out, Isaribi had heard stories about things that had happened in alignment with this theory. A century ago, a group of theater performers who hadn't been allowed to express themselves as they liked were at risk of losing everything in a village dominated by the church. Over the course of several months, however, they found themselves allied with a union of mining workers. Miners and theater kids? Not a friendship that Isaribi would have found likely, and yet there it was, engraved into history. The more she thought about it, too, the more it made sense. They had common enemies, after all: the civilian police. These were the kinds of people who beat and killed miners for work stoppages, and more often than not, did the same or even worse to the theater players for even less of a reason. God, the fucking civilian police. Isaribi used to be part of a gang, yes, but the Jaws weren't as old as all that. The police, though... prior to the arrival of the shinobi, they might as well have been the biggest gang in the city. The only difference between them and the gangs formed by people in her neighborhood was the legitimacy that the council gave to their use of violence. Legitimacy that, when you thought about it, was immaterial. Yet, that legitimacy, powered by the universal belief in its validity, empowered the civilian police to enact atrocities upon people all across the village. Yet, with the combination of the miners' stolid attitude and the theatre performers' inventiveness, they somehow pushed through and made real change in the village. Now that, that was something that Isaribi truly admired.

Speaking of the power of faith in the legitimacy of authority, didn't that apply to so much of life? Color was a consensus, and so too were things like  bond of family, or the very idea of money (that which, as mentioned earlier, made society flow). To say that society was, then, built on a pile of lies was childish and pedantic, but there was something to the idea for sure. The idea that most of the things that people believed to be solid fact were in fact social constructs was interesting to her, even if she didn't quite have the vocabulary to understand why. This, of course, extended to royalty as well. What exactly made a queen, well, the queen? Was it something special in her blood? Some kind of particle? Maybe unique chakra, or something that? No, it was merely the belief of the people that a family was somehow special, was somehow BETTER than the rest of them. That ephemeral belief turned into real power, genuine might that could impact and hurt hundreds of not thousands of people. Isaribi had heard of old stories where the gods were empowered by human belief and defeated by the lack of it. Again, mostly bullshit that contained a kernel truth. The massive, governing structures that pressed down on Hoshigakure were things that only held power because people believed in the foundations behind that power. If there was a way to upset that, or better yet, if she could think of some way to subvert it, then would those structures not burn to the ground? Would she not be able to bring about what she was planning, now?

At this point, Isaribi really hoped Baliquis was keeping up, and even more, that this silence did not bother her. She didn't feel comfortable holding conversation in deep snowfall like this, even with the warmth provided by the movement of pulling the sled and delivering presents. It would probably be laborious work, even with two of them. Once she got her hands on larger summons, she'd just use them to deliver these in a much faster, much more relaxing way. Now, there was real authority. Not some bullshit that relied on people's tacit acceptance to gain legitimacy, but inexplicable, mystical power engraved by blood to seal it. Human beings couldn't be bound by that kind of power, but Isaribi could probably think of ways to manipulate how they perceived legitimacy, and how easily they accepted it. After all, was she not someone who specialized in the mind?

With breaths puffing like steam in the cold air, Isaribi delivered the last set of presents, then looked at the sled in exhaustion. What a shitty night, filled with introspection and sober thoughts.

"Alright, fuck this shit, I'm headed inside for the night." Honestly, fuck Santa Claus, and his errands too. With her level of exhaustion, Isaribi didn't even notice that Baliquis had addressed her as "Isa" when they had met up. Such a level of casual greeting was something she would have noticed under less stressful circumstances, but at a time like this, it just sort of passed her by...      

[WC 4045,
TWC 5129 between both of us
Mission complete!

Claiming mission rewards:
12000 ryo
60 AP
2500 event tickets
1x Blank Dice (d4) roll

WC rewards,
2500 toward https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t54335-nightscape at A rank
another 96 AP for not using max stat discount
EXIT]

Isaribi Uchiha wrote:
[WC 4045,
TWC 5129 between both of us
Mission complete!

Claiming mission rewards:
12000 ryo
60 AP
2500 event tickets
1x Blank Dice (d4) roll

WC rewards,
2500 toward https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t54335-nightscape at A rank
2500 toward https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t54770-twilight-sphere-revamp at A rank
another 102 AP for not using max stat discount
EXIT]

Hi - by my calculation you have accrued 4, 879 WC so you won't be able to claim both of the techniques you have requested, please make the relevant amendments. Likewise, please amend the AP gain for not using the max stat discount to factor in your TWC.

Thank you.

Isaribi Uchiha wrote:
[WC 4045,
TWC 5129 between both of us
Mission complete!

Claiming mission rewards:
12000 ryo
60 AP
2500 event tickets
1x Blank Dice (d4) roll

Mission claims are approved.

Good point. Edited

Isaribi Uchiha wrote:
WC rewards,
2500 toward https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t54335-nightscape at A rank
another 96 AP for not using max stat discount

Approved.

Approved