A Token gamble

With an intense focus Rin began to cycle her chakra, slowly at first, cautious not to disturb the construct, this was an incredibly delicate process after all, She wasn't just trying to break the technique, quite the opposite, she wanted to get inside the construct, to be able to break it down into its composite parts and reverse engineer something similar, well no that wasn't strictly true, she didn't just want to reverse engineer the technique, she wanted to understand the principles it worked upon. With that in mind she couldn't do something as simple as just start picking at the technique with her chakra, first she had do slowly aclimate the technique to the controled flow of her chakra around it
wc: 122

Focusing back in on her vision of the chains, Kira began to look outside of herself, examining the chains that bound the rest of the world, perhaps she could find some hint amongst those chains as to how her own small links of reality had begun to break and fracture. Looking around at the world around her, at first she could not find any examples of broken chains around her, glancing back out at the surrounding lands there was little to be seen, trees dotted the landscape, but none of those showed any change to the natural laws, even looking at the looming form of the towering casino she, at first, couldn't notice anything awry; indeed chains covered the massive form of the building just as they covered her, and she couldn't see any cracks at all in the chains that wrapped around the tower... that was until she realized, for all the chains that surrounded the towering building there were gaps, not gaps of one or two smaller links, but rather places where, as she followed the links of larger chains, she would have expected the larger chains to be, were instead simply gaps in space. It took her a moment to realize what that meant, her mind freezing at the scope of something severing not just a small link in the chains of the world, but rather utterly removing entire macro chains from existence. The Removal of the chains was in fact so thorough and complete that she couldn't even tell what the removed chains had been related too
wc: 261

Slowly, ever so slowly, she began to surround the construct in her chakra, wrapping it in layers and layers of chakra far denser than the energy it normally flowed through. She took her time, ensuring the change was slow, subtle, making sure the construct wasn't disturbed before the time was right, until, finally, eventually, the chakra around the construct became too thick, too dense for it to continue it's flowing, winding, meandering path through her meridians. Once that was done, once the construct had been immobilized and rendered incapable of escape, then she could begin the true work, she allowed her chakra to tighten around the small mote of energy, allowed it to thicken even further, and yet she was careful to ensure that the construct was never harmed, never under any undue pressure, for she was not trying to break the chakra construct, no instead once her chakra had gathered, an incredible amount of energy collected around the construct, she began to release her hold on the energy. She allowed that chakra which, through her will, had been held so densely packed together that it was almost a solid, to begin spreading out, she released the chakra to return to its more natural state, all but one small section of the bundle of chakra she had created. The exterior of that ball of chakra she held tight control over, ensuring it was rigid and impassable, making sure that even her own chakra could not move through the fortified walls of the container she had created. 

She breathed in again, the distracting scents and sounds of the casino carried to her on the wind, threatening to break her concentration for a moment, but she ignored them, pulling her focus back to the task at hand. Releasing the breath she had been holding she allowed her body to relax, the chakra within her network stimulated by the mental state began to spread out; diffusing across barriers and seeking to spread out into every part of her body. She had learn 't this trick from a wanderer from a distant land across the sea, a wandering herbalist though one who's control of their chakra... or Ki as he had called it, had made it clear he was no mere wandering apothecary. 

All things sought balance, it was the natural order of things to seek balance, the pool of water sought to fill every gap within a cup, leaving a perfectly balanced surface above. Rocks and dirt sought to reach the lowest point, filling in canyons and holes as time went on, the wind flowed and howled searching for the place it belonged. Man and beast alike could struggle against that balance, could build walls and dam's to control where the water could flow. But even then it could not stop the water seeking balance within those confines.

This technique was based upon the same principles, she had created a dam around the construct, and now, with her will released, the chakra began to settle, spreading out and seeking balance wherever it could. It pushed against her walls, a slight tugging sensation as the pressure equalized, but there was already plenty of chakra outside of the walls, no the chakra had a better avenue. It began to seep into the chakra construct, began to bleed ever so slowly across the barriers that made up the construct's form, the construct after all had not been designed to stop the flow of chakra like the fortified walls of chakra that surrounded it had. 

Rin felt her chakra beginning to bleed into the construct, and as it did so she moved her consciousness to follow along the trail of chakra. The chakra was, after all, her, a part of her soul according to some scholars, she moved her spiritual sight along the webs of chakra, flowing into the construct and began to examine it in detail... or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that she finally began to see. For what other way could one describe such an experience, to go blind your entire life, ignorant of the beauty and possibilities the world offered, only to have that same blindness swept away without warning. That was what Rin felt like as she observed the complexities of the construct's inner workings. It took her completely by surprise, she, at first had no idea what she was looking at and had to tap into codex's memories and abilities to even begin processing the sight before her.

Even codex's understanding, specialized for research and sensory applications, was completely stumped at the effects it was seeing. It took them both working in tandem to even begin to understand the vagaries and complexities of the chakra construct before her. The inside of the construct was absolutely covered in runes, formulae and arrays of power that bore similarities to many of the funjutsu arrays that Rin had studied in the past, but of a level of complexity that was well beyond her abilities. The array's shifted and turned, the flows of chakra within the construct swirling and morphing into other, more complex shapes, more complex formulae. She caught glimpses here, and there, of array's she knew, techniques or concepts she recognized, but they were always covered by layers upon layers of ever changing arrays. She could, without a doubt, say with absolute confidence, only one thing about what she saw, and that was that she was utterly, undeniably, incalculably out of her depth. There was, despite her specialization in the arts of genjutsu, and indeed codex's own specialisation with the sealing arts, not a single useful thing she could discern from these arrays. 

The sections codex recognised it fed back to her, data of broken power arrays, collection techniques that seemed to feed small amounts of chakra into... something that simply didn't exist, the very core of the arrays, something that, from what their combine understanding could glean, was responsible for filtering input points from every other array within the construct, and then some hundreds of thousand more arrays that, from what they could tell simply didn't exist. None of it made even the smallest hint of sense

WC: 1028

Shaking her head at the sheer scale of it all kira turned her attention back to the real world... or rather, the plane of the world that most people focused on. She wasn't entirely sure what it was that had triggered such a breakthrough of her abilities. She couldn't tell the nature of the power or what it stemmed from, but she could now see an aspect of the world that... quite frankly, should be impossible for her, perhaps even should be impossible for anyone. Within all of the books that she had read, all of the time she had spent pouring over her grandfather's texts, the myriad of novel and unique ideas she had explored, the reports of scholars, sailors, travelers, ninjas and a million other types of individuals, she could not recall a single instance of something like this. She very well could be going mad, a half dozen years surrounded by nothing but animate corpses did do wonders to one's mind after all. But it could also be that she had, somehow, garnered a glimps within the realms that only a saint would normally tread. That would make some sense after all, the winter wonderland she had first met auron and cid within had been strange, she couldn't exactly put her finger on it at the time, but as she had been given time to ruminate upon her experiences there she had slowly come to realise that the strange figure of myth and legend, santa claus, sandy claws, the red giant, the jolly rancher, and perhaps the most important title of all, Saint Nicholas, had been responsible for many reality defying feats of space and time.

The man had warped the very fabric of space and time in ways that defied everything she knew on the topic, conjuring multiple unwilling, or at least unconsenting, individuals across an indeterminate distance, more than that upon closer examination of the maps she had been able to get her hands on the town they had first woken up within had not been on a single map. Was it possible the town was simply too small and unimportant to be worth recording on the maps she had aquired? yes that was a possibility, but it seemed unlikely that the township hadn't appeared upon a single one of the myriad maps she had gotten her hands on, furthermore it was even less likely that those same maps hadn't shown even a single location who's landmark's lined up with what she had witnessed within the township itself. She could, at this point, only Theorize but it seemed possible the land had been a construct, a dimension as the masters of space and time called it. the more logical conclusion would simply be that it was some odd dream, were it not for the fact that she had met Auron and cid in real life, not just that but both of them had shared her experience and recollection of the events within that winter wonderland. Thus the only conclusion she could reasonably draw was that for all the absurdity of the situation, the events had indeed happened, and they had happened in a land which, according to all conventional knowledge and wisdom, simply didn't exist.

With that in mind Kira had only one rational left, one theory, for it was still a theory, that remained. She could, at the end of the metaphorical day, only conclude that the legendary red giant was capable of creating a dimension for his own ends; an impressive feat, though not one that was beyond the bounds of possibility for a true master of space and time, no the conclusion was more than that for he had not just created a dimension for his own ends but had managed to conjure or summon a myriad of people from this plane of existence to his own dimension with neither any direct interaction with them, a token to summon them by, or as it seemed, any connection or intention to summon them in the first place.

With that conclusion made she could glimpse similarities between what she had experienced then and what she was experiencing now, standing here on the steps of a tower that defied all logic she could see how the foundational rules of the world bent and warped. They changed in a different way from how the one who went by the name of saint nick had done, and indeed they were independent enough that, were it not for a myriad of other connections influencing her subconscious in the direction, she may never have drawn the connection. Yet both these figures, Nick and Valentine, went by the title of Saint, both these individuals were figures of distant legend, persisting throughout culture and story for centuries, dating all the way back to the last cataclysm, and Kira could only assume stretching back past that time. 

Both figures wielded immense power and seemed to exist, at least sometimes, within a realm outside of her own. the implications were not clear, they were murky and muddy and left much to be desired, but still it was a series of correlations that screamed of some unidentified connection. With a deep sigh she strode towards the building that defied all laws of reality, she stepped forwards approaching the doorway, the glass spiral door that seemed to shift and shimmer ever so slightly under her new gaze. She felt some small twinge of fear of course, some worry and apprehension, the sense that something was viscerally wrong with the construction before her and that interacting with it would be a mistake... but she had also witnessed others step through unharmed, even now as her hand reached out for the doorway, prepped to push it open and step through she remembered those who had passed her by as she pondered the mysteries of the world chains that bound her. The thought was enough to shift her vision back to that layer of reality again, and what she saw was disconcerting.
wc: 1004

TWC check
Kira = 3042
Rin = 4622
TWC = 7704/15,500

it was then, just as she was almost entirely focused on the complex myriad of ever changing patterns, the absolute madness of the technique's constructing beginning to make some small vague semblance of sense to her already straining mind, that she was interrupted by the sensation of a piece of paper being slipped into her hand's, the rough, crisp texture of cheap paper, the individual fibers thick enough that she could feel them brushing against the skin of her fingertips, was enough to break her out of her reprieve from the physical world. Her focus distracted she felt a brief shuddering from the chakra construct as it began to react to the now uncontrolledly chakra seeping into it. A quick flick of a mental command and codex took control, keeping its attention within the spiritual realm as it continued to chip away working at the puzzle of the construct. Rin on the other hand, now returned to focusing on the present, glanced down at the paper now nestled within her hand. It was a curious thing, a small slip of paper no bigger than the nail of her index finger, the paper itself folded over and over until it had been shrunk to such a small size.

Folding the sheet out she began to read, a small thin stirp of paper with words written in an elegant and cursive script sat there, drawing her eye from fourish to flourish in a way that spoke of someone raised from birth within the eddies and whirls of society that insisted upon grace and perfection in all things. The words that were emblazoned on that paper in stark contrast to the cheap shoddy material that they had been printed upon and the content of those words even stranger still. "This is non-canon" the words proclaimed in big bold lettering. That was... odd to say the least, the word made some sense, scratching at memories of visitors from distant lands and techniques used by minor clans, their form and function modeled after weapons from across the vast ocean, but even with that hint of understanding of the word she still could not parse the meaning of the phrase. Of course the paper was not a canon, it made no sense to clarify that when the object was simply parchment and ink, there wasn't even any chakra within. Frowning a little Rin folded the paper out some more, glancing over the rest of the sheet.
WC: 410

Stepping into the building finally Kira bumped right into an incredibly shady looking individual who seemed to be trying to slip her a sheet of paper, not just any old sheet of paper however, for whatever reason her newly developed senses revealed something to her, as the material came into contact with her hand she felt her vision shift again, the chains of the world coming back into view for a moment as those very same chains that kept the world in check began to blacken and rot around the paper. She was no fool, even with this sense so new to her she recognized something malignant and no doubt cursed at the same time. Grabbing the man's hand in her own she quickly twisted it sharply backwards and around to bring the man to the floor as she forced the paper from his hand and the hood from his head. In an instant the room was filled with gasps from the surrounding individuals as the man's face was revealed. In an instant guards were surrounding them as one of them shouted "thats him, thats the mystery killer" In a blur of motion the man was bound and hogtied and both kira and the man were ushered into the back rooms where she was left waiting in an interview room

wc: 220

Kira waited patiently for someone to come explain to her what was going on; it took quite a while before to her surprise the guards brought in another woman; the two exchanged their names in a brief conversation before being met with the delighted floor manager. She wasn't all that fussed about the reward, she was here more for the novelty after all, so when the woman offered her a gamble to see what was in the two reward boxes she happily obliged, trading away the unusable black ace for something more worth while. To her absolute surprise when she unwrapped the prizes she found two identical "all expense paid'" holidays to "the wonderful winter wonderland" Kira groand somehow never able to get away from the place.

127 words

-1 black ace to Rin, Mission claims in next post

TWC check
Kira = 3389
Rin = 5764
TWC = 9153/15,500


Mission claims

Completed Missions:

Mission Rewards
Rewards: 20000 Ryo / 100 AP / 17 Chocolates / 3000 Casino Chips

Rewards: 20000 Ryo / 45 AP / 14 Chocolates / 1500 Casino Chips

Rank bonus 2000 ryo* 2


Final Rewards 44,000 Ryo /145AP/ 21 Chocolates/4500 Casino chips