Murray Kidnapping?? [Mission, Solo, NK]

Mission:

"Alright", Isaribi muttered to herself, as she trekked along a rocky ridge, "you gotta admit, 'Ureshii' is a bullshit name for people with big egos." Maybe she didn't actually believe this, but she was just venting to open air, at this point. It wasn't like her name was any more special, her father having seen it on some kind of old fashioned warship. Yeah, okay, so her parents had been quirky fuckers, god rest their souls, but come on. Ureshii? For real? Whoever thought this one up was really full of it, for sure, and that person seemed to have been this Father Time who had been the one to contract this mission in the first place. It was probably just a pseudonym, right? When Isaribi had been in the Jaws, she had borne witness to a variety of funny names that stood to represent shady figures in the underworld. Why, there had been this one fellow, a potent intellectual through and through (or at least, that was his character that he played up around the others), who had dressed in a black and white costume and everything. At first, everyone thought that he might have been some kind of theatre kid, but the resources he brought to bear were well beyond the means of some impoverished performer who did tricks and japes for the well to do. In the aftermath of his downfall, Isaribi had had a good look around his old base of operations. A giant underground bunker, complete with barracks, for fuck's sake. Vaults that had once held... something, or someone maybe, and banks upon banks of information and resources. Who had brought this guy down, they would perhaps never know, though she had her money set on the shinobi. This guy had been the relative of a councilmember, with his hands deep in the pockets and the business of the civilian government and the courts thereof. Isaribi knew about the courts, in the sense that they were weak enough to be cowed into submission. Some sort of event, years prior, had caused them to make a decision that ran contrary to the rule of law, though records were suspiciously scant on what event that might have been, or who might have intimidated them. Certainly, it was nobody she knew, none of them held that kind of influence. That kind of player hadn't turned up again, at least, not for a while. Someone who singlehandedly could just push over everything that people believed in? In a sense, Isaribi admired that kind of person, even if the outcome of that event had been largely negative for the village. The old ones had told her that power attracted power, and that it should not be sought out as such, but surely, for that kind of purpose, power was the only real solution. Sometimes, you had to bring a loaded gun to a poker table in order to assure a win. That was just how life was, sometimes, and when DECISION TIME rolled around, you had to make the hard choice and keep moving onward, no matter what.

She suspected that whoever had done such a thing to the courts was related to the effacement of the missing kage on the kage monument. Something that the village as an institution was so ashamed of, that it could not stand to show it to its own people. Would knowledge of this person somehow put things in jeopardy? Would knowing who this was empower her to set her enemies off balance and gain an advantage? For that, she was willing to resort to extreme methods. Advantages against enemies like these was something she could not afford to ignore, not at this stage in her planning. Who was this person, and what had they done? Asking Ayato or any of the people around him such as Natsuki would probably be a grave error, and she doubted many other people even knew. Some of the older shinobi? That soyboy in the white uniform came to mind immediately. Yes, that sounded good. When she got back to the village, if she was that guy again, she would ply him for information. Sure, he was a NOVA member, but that didn't mean shit. All NOVA was was something designated by the kage, yet another ephemeral boundary that relied on her belief to be real. Under all that pretense, he was just another human being, just a fucking boy incapable of growing facial hair. Come to think of it, that described a lot of the men in Hoshi. At first, she thought it might be some kind of secret movement behind the scenes that worked only on men, but hearing her prisonmate talk about her uncle soon dragged Isaribi out of conspiratorial mindsets like that one. People who believed in that kind of shit typically had some kind of deep hurt or trauma in their lives, and in their pain, sought out a simple, all encompassing narrative that described the world and made sense of their pain without having to work through it like normal people did. As far as she was concerned, that shit was not for her. No, in the end, it was probably just a sign that the village had changed while she was gone in the most minor ways, while remaining the same (or worsened) in the ways that truly mattered, in the ways that affected the lives of human beings. It was probably the hardest thing about being in prison: getting out. She felt so cut off from the world, so alienated from her work and from the people around her. Baliquis giving her a hand and offering her a smile of kindness was, she had to admit, a miracle. Though Isaribi found the idea of a higher power to be quite laughable, she had to admit that she had been very lucky. It hadn't been a moment of decision making on her part, so she felt free enough to think about what would have happened had she not accepted the offer of help that night. No doubt, she'd be homeless right now, and three times as bitter as she was right now. Would she have attempted something rash? Something that, when compared with her current plan, was shoddily made and full of holes? Probably.

Having a friend felt good, really good. It helped to have people to cling together with, when times were rough. Isaribi had heard haunting stories from those who came into prison toward the second half of her time there, people who had spoken of how their folks had stood up for them, even when the arrival of the mysterious librarian of the archives had come to the village. Now that, that was an event Isaribi wished she had been on the outside to see. Even in the depths of solitary confinement, she, too, had felt the impact of what had happened on that fateful day. Some debate was had over whether the entity that had appeared at the front gates was the librarian or not, but the fact that the Archives had popped up so quickly after it had most people in the prison putting two and two together. They were almost certainly linked. That day had sent a chill through the entire prison, literally, as what she would later learn was a giant, white skeleton of raw willpower screamed its rage at Hoshigakure across the mid-morning air, sending a frigid wave of intent through the village, even down to where she was contained with the others.

To add some context, even though groups like the Jaws were, ultimately, terrorist groups, they were still an aspect of humanity. Produced by humanity due to conditions imposed on humans by other humans, for the sake of humans. Every criminal act, every mistake, every compromise in morality, that was human as well. In error, in love, in hatred, in cruelty, and most of all, in compassion, everything that she knew and did was human. Even the rage that used to boil in her soul, even that was human; an overriding hatred that the young possessed that she has simply failed to channel; an anger that the young Isa, ignorant as she was, had no way to deal with in a healthy manner. That, too, was human, was it not? The inability of a person to deal with their own overpowering emotions, simply not having the set of tools required to relieve the pressure in the valves, as it were, that was something that a lot of people had to deal with in their time. This was a thought that Isaribi wanted to come back to later, but she felt that it was extremely important.

Either way, what they all felt that day was something else. Something cold, something uncaring, something that only cared about prey and hunting that prey. Despite that, it had none of the warmth of animals, none of the cyclical essence of nature. You couldn't really even say that it was cruel. Rather than the threat or promise of a hunt, it was simply the inevitability of death. The terrifying, inescapable knowledge that something had come, and you were next in its path. That thing that had appeared at the gates that day, that was inimical to humanity. People were well known to defy fate, this was something that had been reinforced in multiple cultures throughout history. The idea that individuals were authors of their own stories, that they had a chance to shift the world on their own without having any exceptional qualities, now that was something that even she was familiar with. The arrival of that thing in the village, though, that to them felt like fate reasserting itself. It was like the universe was telling them that no matter how often they flipped a coin, it was going to land on one of two sides, whether they liked it or not.

In the following years, information kept trickling in. New prisoners brought in new stories, and what they knew enriched what the rest of them had already confirmed. Over the course of that time, a figure popped up over and over again. Setting up the archives, leading a team, then vanishing for a couple of years only to return and start making genuine moves in the underworld. It was the drama of the times, way better than anything that turned up on the newspaper. One big brass guy who got brought in told stories in hushed whispers of six masked figures who emerged from the Archives at night, to sweep across the city and consort with demons. Though Isaribi was pretty sure the occult wasn't a thing, if she could call on firebirds to do her bidding, surely whoever these people were could call on demons, or on beings that looked to the pious people of Hoshi like demons, that resembled them closely enough. It frustrated her that just by doing what he would probably do anyway, this guy in the library was pushing everybody off balance. With but a casual wave of his hands, he had inverted the entire order of the village's criminal elements. It was truly inhuman.

By the time she had gotten out of prison, some of the stories had had time to stew. People a couple of neighborhoods over talked in no uncertain terms about the time the librarian himself had come to visit their place, and how he had fucked with their well. In the aftermath, people had investigated the water to see what he had done, and they had found nothing. No poison, no deadly microbes, just normal plain water, just as it had been before. Nobody went to the shinobi or to the police, because nobody who was anybody talked about this shit to the shinobi or the police. The ones who did were simply not anybody, not anymore. Maybe he had pretended to fuck with the water, just to keep the gang in that area on their toes, or to distract them from something important. Now that, that was a move that Isa could respect. Having the kind of presence to just make waves wherever you moved, no matter how small the movement itself, that was something she aspired to. Now getting to that point, that was the hard part. She couldn't have imagined what kind of hardship the librarian had gone through to get there.

Again, that wasn't to say that pain made them strong. But it was without a doubt that experiencing that kind of pain changed a person. It not only caused them to seek out others, but also offered a lesson. After all, was that not pain's primary function in the body? When you burned your hand on a stove, the reflexes in the body traveled from the hand to the spine, and then from the spine back to the hand, causing it to jerk away from the heat, a reaction that bypassed the brain entirely, and served as a definitive miracle of biology. What was even more interesting, however, was the signal that the pain receptors sent to the brain, a function that many of her genjutsu interacted with. But the brain's neurons changed around in response to stimuli, forming pathways that were familiar, that signals could travel along with the least resistance. In this way, humans learned that pain was a punishment for them, a punishment to teach them that performing actions that harmed the physical body were typically a bad thing. The pain and the emotions associated with them were a sort of dangersense that helped people to avoid things that they normally would not be able to.

It was a little different for emotional trauma. Isaribi remembered what it was like to not have the proper outlets and channels for her emotions, and how out of control she felt of her life. The slightest thing would set her off, and the right series of provocations could send her over the edge or incapacitate her entirely. Frankly, it was fucking embarrassing, now that she thought about it more. Inwardly, she cringed at the thought of who she was before she went to prison, and learned the hard way how to vent her frustrations to the outside world, much like what she was doing now. It was like sympathetic embarrassment toward someone else, the way you pitied someone for their misfortune and empathized in their pain, but that other person was just her from the past. But in the end, she had come out of those iron gates all the better for it. Could things have gone better? Could she have listened to others and learned her lessons earlier? Could she have been much happier now than she actually was? Oh, for fucking sure. But at the end of all of it, she had a DECISION TIME to resolve, and the only thing you could do was keep walking forward.

It was humanity's ability to feel that pain and to cope with it that gave them a quiet, internal strength. The pain didn't make them strong, it was developing a system or a set of actions to process it, bit by bit. In the end, trauma changed a person, for better or for worse, but people could work through it and still come out of it okay, like a clay vessel that had been bent out of shape and then back into shape, more or less. She remembered a quote from an extremely old story, told by mouth in alleyways and by the hearthsides of the poor: strength we have, that you do not. We deal with so much pain, in our lives. That was something she liked to keep in mind. Though she couldn't remember much of the story now, she did remember that it was one she loved, and that it was one of the anchors that kept her grounded and sympathetic to the people who lived where she had grown up. Now that she was older, she felt that she had a responsibility to give back, and to give to the young ones who might have been going what she had been going through.

She wanted to show them that other ways were possible, that one didn't have to suffer alone. To all the young people, dying of thirst, burning up from a passion that they could not name or a discontent that they could not label, she wanted to give them water. Not the mind-numbing opiate that the church offered, nor the addiction to that rage that the gangs would give them. There was a way out! There was always a fucking way out, and if there wasn't, you had to put your hands into the fucking dirt and make one. Bit by bit, person by person, she wanted to give back to the people who had surrounded her when she was a child, who had helped to shape her and give her the tools that she now thought about to make her who she was. They were one of her few advantages in this world, after all. They were the lenses by which she could observe the world, a template she could use to make sense of the madness and conflict that was constantly surrounding her.

She had often heard of those possessed by tailed demons, beasts that came from the time of legends and granted great power at great cost to those who were possessed. That kind of person, she greatly looked forward to fighting. No doubt, they would be emotionally vulnerable, and would be easy to manipulate. Again, she recalled the words: strength we have, that you do not. Those who had been raised in sheltered environments, those who had been compromised by demons, those who were simply not mature enough, they all had a critical weakness. All she had to do was by hook or by crook to find that weakness, and exploit it. Locate the wound and stick a knife in it, and wrench that motherfucker. Throw salt in it. Do what you had to in order to win, and save yourself and the people you loved. She didn't relish the idea, didn't enjoy the thought of preying on someone's vulnerabilities for her own ends, but if it came down to a fight, she was going to bring everything to her side in order to come out of it alive. She didn't really think of herself as having that many advantages to begin with, after all.

She crossed over the ridge and headed down towards the cabin. According to the intel, the infant was here. Isaribi still didn't like the name, but it was such a superficial detail. The intel all looked good, too, even better than the stuff she got from the shinobi in Hoshigakure. Of course, she never really believe that someone who called themselves Father Time would foist bad info onto her. Come to think of it, all of her interactions with the major players in this area of the world had been largely positive. Perform difficult tasks, get large rewards, and everything surrounding that was done with the utmost professionalism. Isaribi really liked that about them. The more time she spent here, the more she thought about making some moves out here herself. That was, of course, until she remembered with some regret that she was now part of the shinobi force, as a real chunin this time, and was no longer a criminal. The restrictions that that put on her made her fucking squirm sometimes. In truth, she bucked at them. She felt like she should at least be able to pursue these lucrative ventures on her own, regardless of their legality, if they weren't in the village. It was kind of like a second job, when you really thought about it, but that Ayato fellow demanded absolute loyalty. In that sense, he really did remind her of a mob boss, which given the nature of what he was leading, did not surprise her in the slightest.

Yeah, she had given plenty of thought to police being a gang before, but they had nothing on the shinobi. The shinobi thought that they fucking owned the place, and gave little to no regard for the other institutions of the village. They had clearly bowled over the civilian government, in one way or another. What had happened to Queen Tehniyat? No matter now beneficial her disappearance had been for Isaribi's future plans, it was still worrying what had passed there while Isaribi had been incarcerated. She could be dead, for all she knew. Either she was dead, or she had been secreted away to another place, to return when some player had found the right time for her to do so, and that was very concerning. The idea that somebody had a royal hidden in their back pocket was something Isaribi wanted to look into when she got back to Hoshi.

The shinobi had their own gang boss in the form of the kage. A giant rat who wrote all of the rules, who put out hits that had legitimacy in the form of missions, and who was egotistical enough to engrave their face on a mountain? Yeah, that sounded like a gang boss to her, through and through. He had his own inner circle, the fucking masters, whose identities she was determined to uncover. The sooner she knew who they were, the sooner she could start using that information to her advantage. As someone in prison had said, you can confirm the existence of a phenomenon if you can observe it. If you can observe it, you can interfere with it, and if you can interfere with it, you can control it. Just having that information on hand seemed like it would come in handy. The shinobi also had enforcers, in the form of the NOVA. She still didn't know as much about them as she would have liked, but if she could make it into that group, she figured her access to information would become that much easier. Then, there were the troops on the ground, the grunt soldiers... just like her right now.

Isaribi still had a criminals mind and mindset, though. To her, the law was just a series of light suggestions, backed up by lethal force. As long as she respected the force and not the words in front of them, she knew she would be fine. And as far as respect went, that didn't mean that she avoided it at all costs. It just meant that she had to watch her ass when she was going to make a move in that damned village. She swore to god, one day she would use her Kamui and just leave. Not permanently, of course, she had her loyalties and her roots, but to just like, take a break from all the thinking and all the fear and chaos of Hoshi. To her, that village was a hell where most humans stewed like vegetables in a cooking pot, ready for consumption by the systems and structures that towered over them, like chefs in a fucking kitchen. Maybe not the best metaphor, but the it was the one that came to mind. She didn't need to use words like a knife when she was just thinking about whatever random shit she wanted to think about.

With that kind of mindset came a plan of action. Get in, do a job, and get out. With this job, she didn't have to worry about not leaving a trace. In fact, she thought to herself, leaving a trace was kind of the whole point. The idea was to change the village with her actions, and by doing what nobody else had the gall to do, level the playing field even a little bit. By doing so, she hoped to open up the opportunities for the young and poor that she had not had simply by nature of being in the same circumstances that they were now. Without someone willing to shake up the status quo, what chance did most of them have? Many of them would spend their entire lives within the bounds of that benighted neighborhood, locked in the the conditions that they were born under. They would live there, and many would die there, their lives simply ending, frozen in place by old photographs that showed them simply living as they were before some equally unfortunate soul or some disgusting policeman or shinobi put an end to them.

Isaribi cloaked herself in that stealth jutsu as she descended towards the cabin. It was a remote little place that reminded her of an outhouse but much bigger (bad comparison, again, but fuck making up a better one). With this, she could pass in and out without any of the hired thugs seeing her. She was working on a technique that would let her cloak more than just her appearance, but that would take time. In the meantime, she could just teleport if she got into any serious trouble, or use genjutsu if things got bad enough that she had to get in a scrap. With a whistle, she could call up some pretty nifty illusions, but more important than that was the effect that those illusions could have on someone. Pain, suffering, and finally sleep and the nightmares that came with it were all very important. To slowly lower her opponents into a hell, and then to cut off their awareness was pretty much part of her primary game plan when it came to fights, and she kind of liked it. Not because she got to make people feel pain, she wasn't that kind of person, but because simply put, it worked. A lot of people, in particular the poorly trained kind, were not really trained to fight against genjutsu, and to her delight, neither were a lot of shinobi, but that was something to think about another day.

Slipping past the first line of big fuckers, she noticed that they didn't seem like the kind of guys who looked up. To be fair, that was part of humans' assorted list of weaknesses: looking up to search for danger. Oh sure, they looked left and right and had a balanced set of senses, but for some reason people were just not trained to look up. This could help her. In a matter of seconds, she had a viable exit strategy. Now that she had access to a wider variety of allies, she could leverage that to help her in this situation. That being said, she wondered who had hired these guys to begin with. Who benefitted from a random annoying kid being kidnapped and kept isolated in a place like this? A field of white, surrounding a cabin not unlike a shed? It just didn't make any sense to her, and that was almost enough to push her off balance, but not today.

Isaribi looked around the cabin for a way to get in without alerting anybody. Harder than she thought, now that she was up close. Everything was boarded up tight, and locked three ways to Sunday. For a second, she considered putting strain on her eyes to simply phase right through the wall, grab the kid, and get the fuck out of there, but when she looked up (ironically), she found the solution to her problems. Of course! When in the land of winter wonder, you did as the winter wonders did. Quietly, she ascended the facade of the cabin to the roof, where she had a look around. Goddamn, but there were a whole lot of those big fellas wandering around. She could imagine that they would predict a head on assault, but from whom, she had no idea. Santa and his elves? Not likely. Oh well, she couldn't really worry about it now. She crawled down the chimney. To be honest, the grime and filth didn't really bother her. She'd been up to her neck in worse before, and lived in worse before too. Keeping clean while poor was important beyond belief, but in hard times you had to make hard choices and accept hard conditions too.

Once inside, she found the kid, who was barely waking up. Goddamn, but this Ureshii child was kind of a bright and sunny type, too. Isaribi liked babies, but was kind of helpless and clumsy around them. So, she resorted to the "spirit catches you and you fall down" type of solution and gave the kid something nice to drink before settling her back to sleep. No point in having Ureshii make any pointless noise at this juncture. Causing inconvenience for herself was something she knew was the sign of a job poorly done, and sloppiness was not on the menu for today. With that, she scooped up the kid in a sling, and clumsily performed a series of handseals, touching her hand to the floor of the cabin and invoking a summoning ritual. With a little poof noise, there stood Ryura, great among the firebirds at Isaribi's disposal. With this, they would be able to get the fuck out quickly enough. With a nod and a telepathic message, she hopped onto the bird's back, baby in tow, and they took off, going directly through the roof of the cabin. Below her, she could hear the shouts and exclamations of the big fellers as they reacted to a noise that they took too long to identify the source of. Of course, her plan had gone off without a hitch, though Isaribi had a suspicion that her luck would only hold up for so long. Once she got back to Hoshi, the chaos and machinations of other people and the big players would keep her on her toes once again. For now, though, she could finally enjoy a ride on the back of a great big firebird, and make sure that the charge she was tasked to return was safe and whole.



[WC 5005
Mission complete!!?!!
Claiming mission rewards:
12000 ryo
60 AP
2500 tickets
1 d4 blank dice roll

5000 WC
5000 WC for https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t54259-de-sterrenacht
100 AP
EXIT]

Approved