Murray Murder [solo, nk, mission]

mission:

Isaribi hated how now and then, space and time would just sort of warp. It wasn't like the kind of thing that physicists could describe (not that she'd know what they could and couldn't describe in the first place), but she was pretty sure this kind of thing was not too dissimilar to what had happened in the more deep parts of winter last year. That time, on the bridge, she'd experienced a deep sort of confusion, looking up at a dimensional distortion that felt like it was about to fucking birth something. It was like a giant purple pimple, within which something was attempting to eclose. Isaribi was reminded of an insect emerging from its cocoon, the imago becoming something greater. The church's entomologists were something else, really, they were. All Isaribi had to do with the field was a fucking bug collection she had had when she was a kid, and that wasn't really organized like the good ones were, mostly because of course she could not fucking write. In recent days, she'd heard of the real good ones in the village, from some kid from the next block over who had gotten praise from the unseen university by virtue of having a scholar level bug collection. Honestly, good for her. It was the little miracles like that that made life worth living.

At first, Isaribi thought that this dimension might be a dream. She'd had dream like this before, no doubt spurred on by the trauma that came with using her eyes, and the mechanics of her dimensional jutsu. Dreams of other worlds, other places that, if she could only hold onto them, would become pathways that her Kamui could take her to, as easily as walking from one house to another. She knew that such an ability was actually within her reach, but not to reach the worlds of dreams. It stood to reason that if she had a jutsu like this, then surely there must be others, other people with techniques that connected them to worlds beyond, and though her visual prowess, she could walk those pathways too. It was kind of like someone had trailblazed those connections for her, the idea of which was fucking hilarious to her because these pathways were ones that only she could make, only she could see, and only she could use. Though she wasn't sure how useful they would be, she was sure that there was a good use case for this portion of her jutsu.

Her own game plan in combat was something of a vague spaghetti right now. Oh sure, each part of it worked on its own pretty well. On on hand, you had your slew of genjutsu. Now that, that was something Isaribi could be really proud of. She was still the best genjutsu user she knew, and though one might not expect that to mean much, for someone like her who had met many chakra users in the underworld and among the Hoshigakure shinobi, it did mean more than all that. Was there someone outside of the village who was better than her? Oh, for fucking sure. If there was one thing Isaribi had learned in her time here out in the cold and the silent wasteland, it was that the world was actually really big. It might not be all interesting, but it was very large. In a world like that, there was always a bigger fish. Hell, she didn't doubt that Ayato was hiding a genjutsu expert up his sleeve (one that wasn't her), just waiting for her to fuck up so he could sic them on her.

If genjutsu didn't work, she had a backup. A lot of her jutsu, specifically the ones that qualified her as a sensory shinobi were actually pretty scary and debilitating. And, of course, that wasn't even talking about the ones that gave her enhanced stealth. She could just imagine it now, using jutsu like that to remove all traces of her presence, then engaging at two hundred meters or more, stalking a target as they moved around, then going in for the kill. People were always vulnerable when surprised, after all; it was AFTER they had been surprised that they got real dangerous. Some people adapted quickly, and those were the ones to watch out for. Catch someone off balance, expose their defenses for the rote, boring lines that they were, and show them just how creative you could be. That was kind of what these sensory jutsu were all about, really, gaining an advantage so one-sided that it could be called unfair. Ethics? Honor? That was for people who could afford it, and as that one guy she knew once said, having those things was expensive indeed. She, on the other hand, didn't throw those things out the window purely for the sake of it, or for enjoyment. The world pushed her to resorting to necessity because she simply did not have any better options.

Lastly, there was the time and space fuckery, stuff that she suspected had gotten her into this messed up situation in the first place. Oh, they were powerful jutsu. She'd only had the opportunity to use Kamui's various functions a few times in her life, but from what she could tell, they were shockingly powerful techniques. A spatial distortion of varying size that could just blow matter and energy into a whole different universe? That was something that just kind of broke physics. And that other universe... well, it was something to behold. Layer upon layer of folded space, giving her the impression of one of those older art paintings at the museum. With those eyes that blazed red, she could cause her own body to just sort of meld into the other dimension, letting her move through things (or letting things move through her). There were other, more minor jutsu, but those were the important ones, right along with those weird shuriken that her susano'o had that could also warp stuff into another world. Now those, she had never had the opportunity to test out.

This place was like another birthing place for another dimensional entity, and Isaribi didn't like that. Humans, now those she could deal with. Human were not easy to understand, but there were certain parts of them that were, and those were the parts that she worked with in the field. Bits and pieces that she could move around and press in order to pressure someone into defeat without backing them into a corner. Humans were kind of like dogs or like rats in that respect, where if you pushed them too far they would resort to extreme measures, writhing and striking out at anything in an effort to get free. People will bite, after all, when they were driven that far. Isaribi had felt that herself, during her capture. Though she didn't like to think about it all that much, she remembered a little of how she had felt at the time, what it had felt like to be cornered, to be as a beast chased by hunters into a clearing from which there was no escape. And hell, she had just been a fucking kid too. That, coupled with the pain of losing a whole fucking arm, now that had made for an experience that she was loathe to recall of her own free will.

Though Isaribi had had no formal shinobi training in the academy, she had had a chance to review a lot of the material that they used in there when she got out of prison. Shortly after she got out, she figured that it would be a damn good idea to check out that kind of thing, and had visited the library. Sure, she couldn't read, but the manuals contained a lot of very nice pictures and diagrams that she could look at, and all that did was confirm that academy training was for a different kind of person than she was. Unlike many in her conditions, she wasn't some kind of weird anti-intellectual who rejected the idea of academics. Book learning was, as far as she could tell, a good thing for the world, and people who looked down on it usually had something they wanted to sell you, or some other agenda in mind. Either way, it wasn't for her. Illiteracy aside, she didn't have as much free time as she would have liked. Maybe once she moved up in the ranks and got some actual status under her belt, she would have the time to pursue the information that she wanted to find.

Not being able to read didn't really bother her, but the reactions to it did. People who looked down on her as some kind of street rat who was just too stupid to learn how their scribbles worked pissed her off. She was smart enough to work out the routes that she needed to run in order to get her goods where they needed to go. She was more than smart enough to tell (with the help of the sharingan, sure) just by looking, what would get people to hesitate in a fight so she could slip a kunai between their ribs. And she was definitely smart enough to make her way in the world without learning to read, though the commands from her kage weren't a thing she could ignore. One way or another she was going to learn to read, and she didn't really appreciate it when people made judgements on her character about it. To be clear, she wasn't upset that people made fun of her illiteracy, it was that they implied that it somehow made her lesser.

Yes, even after all those years in prison, she still had kind of a temper. It was something she should think about more. No longer was there that nimbus of rage that she had from yesteryear, but it seemed that it had been compressed down into an irritability that flared up every now and then. That was how a lot of things had gone, while on the inside. Every extreme was just sort of pressed down, squeezed into an unhappy medium by the passage of time, and the terrifying insanity of solitude. She had seen people break quickly under that, and though she had lasted it out and come out mostly okay, she could not deny that the prospect of being confined like that again was something that made her feel like there were little claws of ice all over her body. This time, she could put words to that kind of feeling: fear. A raw, furious fear that strangled every other emotion it came into contact with and replaced them all with a urge to run and evade the threat, even if in this case, that threat was just the idea of being separated from people for that long.

Fear was the kind of thing that could paralyze the mind. As Isaribi worked her way across the monotone landscape of the foreign dimension, she gradually began to shed that state of mind. Bit by bit, that terror fell away from her soul as she just sort of allowed herself the time to process it. Not applicable in combat, sure, but she wasn't fighting anybody right about now. Now she could allow herself the space that she needed. Self care was one of her primary rules when it came to the shinobi lifestyle, and as far as she was concerned, little else got done without it. If you didn't have the right state of mind to carry out a mission in the first place, how could you possibly hope to succeed? First, make sure that everything in your personal life was in order so that you could achieve what you wanted to with no regrets. Isaribi wasn't the kind of person to say "make sure your ream is clean before you clean someone else's", as that had all kinds of weird connotations, and a very unfortunate application to the real world. It was all too easy for the old to try and give that advice to the young as a way to stop them from changing the world for the better.

This place reminded her of one of the more boring parts of Hoshigakure: the railyards. Sure, there were no buildings in this super hell of a dimension, but there was a sort of a gravelly ground that reminded her of the ground in the yards. With no small amount of fondness, she recalled that many in one of the neighborhoods across town had people who worked there, and that they actually got a pretty good deal out of it. If there was one thing about Hoshigakure, it was that even if public transportation was being fucking gutted every year, trains were still kind of the lifeblood of Hoshigakure. When you thought about it, it made sense, didn't it? The big things carried everything that Hoshi needed in from other areas. In a badland and steppe environment like Haven, there were resources plenty, including oil, but there were a variety of things that one couldn't get from that area alone, and this was a whole village, here. Isaribi wasn't the kind of person who was able to keep tabs on all of that, but she knew that managing the city was so much that her understanding collapsed under the weight of the logistics required to keep Hoshi afloat.

It was actually one of the obstacles to her plan. If she was going to go through with it, her skill with mathematics needed to get a boost as well as her ability to read. It pained her to have to slow things down now to improve herself, but knowing exactly what role she wanted to occupy in the grand scheme of things made her understand that she would have to deal with the logistics of the village at one point or another. It was unavoidable, and the sooner she got it done, the sooner she would no longer have to live with the fear of doing it. Still, it felt about as hard as dragging a deer out of the path of an oncoming cart. The sensation was similar to that which pressed down on her every time she woke up and tried to get out of bed. At one point, she had just chalked it up to something chemical in her body, but that was just denial. The problem was in her mind. It was like chains of ice hanging across her shoulders and chest, weighing her down while she waited for the inevitable to happen.

Now that, that was something that she truly hated. She hated it with all the passion that she used to be able to muster as a child. Feeling helpless, like she wasn't able to do anything, like she wasn't able to effect some kind of change on her situation. She hated feeling like prey, as weird as it sounded. It was weird because, well, did she feel like she was entitled to be a hunter? What made her so goddamn special, that she thought she could be the one to change the world in the manner that she wanted to? No, there was nothing that made her inherently better than anybody else, but she was the only her in the world. She was the only person with her unique perspective on the world, and she was the only person with her singular mix of experiences and outlook on those experiences. She wasn't special in the grand scheme of things, but to herself, to what she could see and hear around her, she knew that she could make a difference. For that, she didn't need to be better than anybody else, she didn't even need to be amazing. She just needed to be enough, and that was all.

It wasn't that she didn't care about her own life. Life was precious, something to be treasured, and even she did not except herself from that. But in the end, it all came down to a big decision, didn't it? If a choice ever came, where she would have to choose between making that positive difference in the world, or saving her own life, which would she choose? The fact that it took her a while to arrive at the conclusion that she had worried her. Did she not have enough resolve for what she wanted to do? The fear like ice seized up on her insides again, causing her to almost stumble in her trek across this alien landscape. If she hesitated at the wrong time, it could mean the end of everything. Not just for her either, but for people who knew her. For Baliquis, for her friends in prison, and even for the people she had grown up with. Public perception of the folks from where she grew up would drop, and she would plunge them into an even deeper hell than they had been in in the first place.

Well, that was life, wasn't it? No matter what, you had to keep going. Even if failure and heartbreak were certainties (which, in a sense, they were not), you had to keep pressing on. Because, beyond the next corner, there could be that opportunity that you had been waiting for for so long. After all, if she had given up on that fateful night, she would never have met a friend or had a house right now. More than that, though, even if there was nothing in your future, even if the cold never relented or the night never ended, at least the pain and the feelings that you had toward the world were real, and the very act of living legitimized their existence in the world. The voice of those who had no future were the ones that keened the loudest at times, and though their names vanished into history, the effects of those who had not succeeded in life were still left to confirm that indeed, they had lived once. As she had thought about before, life was precious, and she, as a simple woman, would never ever be someone to deny that.

Before her, the ground erupted. Isaribi stepped back, the crimson of the sharingan manifesting in her eyes as she gazed upon the thing emerging from the ground. Of course, this place would have some kind of lifeform inhabiting it. Only she would be so unlucky as to meet it on her way to find whatever this pinata thing was to beat the shit out of it, and now she was really going to pay for her lack of vigilance. Those thoughts vanished into the wind, of course, as she saw that it was in fact a giant living pinata that had busted its way out of the crust of this dimension to make roaring noises and gargle a little bit, despite its apparent lack of a functional mouth. Funny, that, but Isaribi wasn't a xeobiologist or whatever, so she just kind of didn't worry about it. Instead, she focused on the target in front of her. Again, she was reminded of the railyards as the gravel around it showered down, all red and yellow and brown. Beneath it was, well... Isaribi didn't really want to know what was down there, beneath the ground of a plane that probably had never seen a human like her before.

In size, it was reminiscent of a large freight engine. Kind of a weird thing to think of right now, she thought to herself, as she kneaded her chakra and prepared to engage in combat. Even though she was here, having finally found (or been found) by the thing that she'd been tasked with finding, she couldn't help but think that it would actually look kind of good hooked up to a long line of freight cars while it galloped across the badlands. With the willpower to stop on its own, it might even be better than whatever those ghouls who owned the trains were planning right now. Hell, if the shinobi wanted to make the village a better place instead of just stomping on people like her, they could actually try to help out using their summons. But of course, that last idea was really just a pipe dream. There was no way in hell she was going to persuade Ayato or anyone in his circle to lend their aid to civilian matters, not while the council still existed in a significant way. Why they bothered with civility politics and common decency bullshit, she could not imagine at all.

Now that, that was exhausting. It had real effects, too. She remembered seeing the pictures of the rail workers striking, to be treated like real people instead of labor animals. The motherfuckers who owned the companies sure made enough to treat the people who worked for them like humans with dignity, but that wasn't how they saw it. From their perspective, people like her really were just animals, who could be trained to do work and who they just had to placate or beat down as they saw fit in order to make them behave. It infuriated her. All that cruelty, and for what? More profits, that's what. Hoshigakure, just like any other city, thrived off of commerce, and that was probably why so many people tolerated the owners like that, because by enriching themselves, they could show off to the world that this village was one where business could be done. No doubt, they had some amount of control over the council as well. Everybody had their price, and she had no doubt that there were little cracks in every institution where money flowed through freely. Now, being a shinobi made good dough, but it was nothing like what being an owner could make, doing basically nothing.

In their efforts to cut costs, they had innovated more and more, until the business of trains had essentially been optimized. Once they had gained their corner on the market, of course, their lust and greed did not simply end. No, they started cutting corners to cut costs. First went the workers. No longer would there be a man to every car, but a man to every other car, pulling twice the work that they had before, but for the same pay. It wasn't long, then, until they had cut and cut until they had it down to the most essential two people per train, a conductor and an engineer, and that was it. Even now, she had heard rumors that the fat bastards were planning on cutting to just one, which would be disastrous for safety. Accidents had been on the rise ever since the cost cutting efforts had begun, and there was even more to it than she had first thought. Apparently, they had been pressuring the council to break the strikes that the workers had been engaging in, and like the ghouls they were, the council bent and broke under that pressure, passing policy that forced those men and women back to work, or face consequences.

No wonder the Jaws had such an easy time recruiting nowadays. It really did feel like the rest of the world was against them, so why should they play by the rules of the owners and the council? Maybe violence was the only real way out. Isaribi actually sort of agreed with this. Violence wasn't necessarily bad, though it was a lot of the time. Sometimes, it had real utility in pushing toward a better future. She figured if the outcome was good, then the violence was good too. The council, though, those old fuckers would get what was coming to them someday. If her plan was pulled off the way she wanted it to go, she fully intended to just neuter them ,and leave that institution as a vestigial branch of the village, to let them and everyone around them know that their authority was not material in the slightest, and could slip away through their fingers at any time. That was the whole point of the court games, was it not? And she intended to roll the dice.

To put further to pen their various misdeeds, she remembered that they had been the ones to direct the riots a few years after she had been born. Something or another had occurred before the fateful arrival of that fiend, Denkiteki, and the people of her area and a few others nearby had been thrown into an uproar. In those days, she would have joined in as an expression of her fury, but now she looked back at that time and recognized it for what it was. Rioting like that was, again, not good or bad in and of itself, but a symptom of some deeper societal ill. Groups of people with a common interest rarely went that far unless there was a problem in the systems that surrounded them that drove them to be that angry. Was it each individual's fault for participating in the riots? That question was entirely irrelevant to her, she thought to herself, as she dodged out of the way of a descending pinata hoof. The question she was interested in was the underlying issue, and how to solve the problem at its root. It seemed kind of obvious to her that once you did that, the rioting would stop on a long term scale, but the council seemed to see things differently.

Instead of doing actual material analysis of the events around them, instead they used the only tool they knew how to understand well: violence. They deployed the civilian police, who even at that early time had been known for their brutality and their lack of care for human life. They were just there to protect the rich and their property, to be frank, and they did it quite well, quietly abducting and incarcerating riot leaders and prominent figures in the community who had spoken out against whatever injustice had occurred at the time. Subsequently, they had directed the riots, using tactical force to direct them into other neighborhoods who suffered from it, turning the poor on each other as the rich so often did, creating rivalries and gang tensions that even in her time were still going strong, taking the lives of the young day by day and year by hellish year, while the rich and the powerful sneered at them all like they were watching some kind of dogfight. That old hate threatened to swell up again, but Isaribi could deal with it now, especially with this pinata in front of her.

With a sharp whistle, she attempted to throw a few genjutsu on it, and to her shock, it fucking worked. The weird... being? bucked and caroused around as her control over its sense solidified, and she went about applying a stream of confusing and mixed signals to it, making it feel as if it had been moved several hundred meters into the air and was now falling. It being a dumb animal, of course, helped out a lot, as it wasn't able to tell the difference between this illusion and reality. In truth, however, against a human opponent this kind of thing would only really work once. After that, they would no doubt wise up to her game and start finding ways to throw off her genjutsu, or act in ways that ignored them entirely in favor of wide area attack strategies. Now that, that was the worst outcome for her. She had already devised ways to defeat opponents if they failed to throw off her control in time, but she needed more, especially if she was going to fight those idiots in the white uniforms, the soyjacks who dared to call themselves NOVA or whatever.

She exerted her will a little more, and caused the pinata monster some pain. With satisfaction, she watched as it collapsed to its knees, though the braying noise it was making was kind of unfortunate. Time to put an end to that, it was just an animal after all. Her control fully slipped in, and its mind fell directly into her grasp. This was a function of the sharingan genjutsu, a tool in her box that was easy to land on someone, and whose effects were devastating on the nonhuman even more than the humans the jutsu had been originally created for. Now, she could control what it did in every respect. Its anatomy was weird, to say the least, but in the end, animals were animals, even if they had been developed or grown on an alien dimension. She ordered it and it did, with lumbering, even steps that she forced it to perform despite its lingering pain. The only satisfaction in this was that she had done her job, and done it right, in spite of the difficulty and the long trip. At long last, this whole ordeal in the winter hellscape would be at an end, and she could go home for good.

With a mental command, she ordered it to kneel, and bow its head, which it did. She removed a blade from one of her pouches, and brought it down, decapitating the beast. It fell to the ground, and then promptly exploded. At first, Isaribi thought she was about to fucking die, and was about to begin the process of phasing out, but then realized that it was just candy. Human candy!? Whatever fine hell this was, she wanted out, and she wanted out now. As the candy fell to the ground, the landscape around her faded away, replaced by the wasteland of this snowy country. She slowly sank to a sitting position, thankful that finally, by her own efforts, she had done everything she wanted to here. While she could simply warp back to Hoshigakure, she was tired enough to just wait for transport to take the long way home.

[WC 5007

Mission complete!
Claiming mission rewards:
10,000 ryo
50 AP
2500 event tickets
1x Golden Ticket

WC rewards:
5000/5000 toward https://www.narutoroleplaygame.com/t48542-dustless-bewildering-cover-v7?highlight=dustless
100 AP
EXIT, CLOSED]