In the past week the citizens of Kirigakure got to experience enough excitement to last a lifetime. Conflict and strife brought right to their doorstep! First the Water Lord barricaded the ports, followed by his sudden departure and the equally sudden announcement that one of their own, Gushiken Ren, betrayed the village and killed dozens. Penguins and otters and all manner of upsetting reptile summons flooded the streets, curfews enforced only to be as quickly withdrawn as the Water Lord’s blockade, and ninja of all ages darted back and forth across so many rooftops that a shortage in roofing tiles had sprung up amidst all the chaos.
On top of all of that the firebombing of a little clinic on the outskirts of the village hardly seemed noteworthy. Especially because the morning after, news of Kakatsyuki Endo’s scandal broke completely loose.
“No, no, there’s nothing left- I only got this job a few days ago, I appreciate your patience with us- sir? Sir?” A frazzled looking man adjusted his glasses as he pinched his nose. Hearing nothing but a dial tone he hesitantly put the phone back on its hook. It started ringing immediately.
“Hello? Yes, this is- no, sir, it’s not. He hasn’t been seen since the Mizukage- yes, I know everybody knows, I’m just trying to- no, we don’t have anything left. We think Endo took off with every spare available along with some really important medical supplies, he cleaned the freezers out and disappeared as soon as Maya found out- please, sir, calm down, there isn’t another supervisor- because I am the new department head! Hello? Are you still there?”
With an exasperated sigh he leaned back and closed his eyes while leaving his phone off the hook. Then, after a few deep breaths in the office that reeked of cigarette smoke, he put the phone back. It rang instantly.
“No, sir. No.” He stood up and moved towards the window that overlooked the rest of the Kirigakure Research Institute. The offices just outside his own were even more frantic, with a skeleton crew running back and forth to answer phones and radios while also digging through a horribly disorganized filing system. “Those charges were dropped. I’m not- this isn’t the jail, the Mizukage pardoned me because Endo’s testimony was- no, sir, I’m not a criminal. You can call the MLEA if you want, they’re just going to- oh, cool, yeah, hang up on me, that’s a new one.”
“Sir!” Jolting from the jump scare, the man’s glasses almost flew off his face. He readjusted his ponytail to try and recover some composure as he faced the intern who burst into the former office of Kakatsyuki Endo. “The specialist from the Medical Corps is here. She’s, uh, she’s a bit looney, I think she released a bunch of spiders-”
“Yeah, no, great, thanks for telling me.” Taking another nauseating inhale and deciding he couldn’t be in that wretched office anymore, the man tugged on a weathered looking lab coat and stepped out into the fray. “How is the Jellyfish? Is he up yet?”
“We, uh, we think he might have gotten drunk last night so we didn’t want to-”
“Excellent, write that down as ‘recovering well’. I’ll give him a quick once over and we’ll see if we can’t get him out of here so we can use the room again-” He stopped mid sentence, his jaw partially open and half forming his next words before he changed course. “What was that about spiders?”
Deep in the bowels of the Institute, where the rooms were filled more with junk than technology, the noise wasn’t quite as bad. A smooth console housing a massive computational device dominated one side of a spacious room near the back. The rest of the walls were lined with locked cabinets holding expired medical supplies and rolled scrolls. A wash basin attached to a filtered water supply sat next to one large, thick window, which pointed out at a concrete wall. It was a window that existed purely to ventilate the room, but some sunlight was better than nothing.
And on a single medical cot tucked away amongst cardboard boxes full of office supplies, Gushiken Ren tried to get over his hangover. Several small pads attached to his head connected to a large, bulky medical device via several wires, frustrating his attempts to scratch himself. His fingertips brushed through the fuzz on his recently shaved head. The new stitches there were much smaller than the previous ones, but still hard to ignore. When he picked at his face, he kept forgetting it was covered with bandages. He couldn’t really pick at the other side- Ren now sported a large black eye and bruised cheek. Bandages adorned the majority of his body with the more serious areas of injury inscribed with complicated shinobi symbols and seals. It was a very ‘kitchen sink’ approach to healing- traditional medicine, cutting edge medicine, and shinobi sorcery all thrown at him at once to try and see what stuck.
And a little bit of liquor, that was Gushiken Ren’s contribution to self medication. After all, being tense wasn’t going to help him heal, was it?
Ren grunted as he dipped down low and then exploded back up, feeling the sore muscles in his shoulders and back protest. He grit his teeth and dipped again. After a few stretches he went right into his normal routine. First a hand-stand, then some push-ups, then some manly grunting. The last part was mostly for himself. After getting walloped in back to back fights, Ren needed to appear as gruff and tough as ever. Self-esteem was important to train too!
His single bloodshot eye shot towards the door as someone in medical scrubs came in without knocking. They both looked equally surprised at seeing each other.
“You’re making good progress!” A few minutes later, after checking Ren’s vitals, the attendant was already ready to leave. “In a few months you might be able to look at getting most of those scars restored. We’re short supplies so we’ve been ordered to not perform any cosmetic surgeries-”
“I just need to get back to fighting shape,” Ren grunted, voice cracking a bit as his dry throat protested. He bent over at the waist and came to a stand like a gymnast might. He fished around in his pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes, flicked one into his mouth, and lit it.
The attendant made a face Ren had seen hundreds of times before, and began to say the line he’d heard just as many. “You shouldn’t be--”
“Ah-ah-ah,” Ren said, firmly pointing at the no smoking sign. It had been defaced to claim that smoking was, in fact, allowed, and signed with a skull symbol.
“Nicotine slows down the body’s healing processes, you know.” The assistant sighed and leaned back. His Kirigakure headband poked out from under his doctor’s robe, hanging around his neck like a stethoscope. “That’s why everyone calls you a mad dog, I guess. Well, that and killing your own country men.”
“Mmm,” Ren said, glaring at his reflection in the glare of the window. He did look like a monster, after all. “Aren’t you supposed to put down mad dogs, not enable them?”
“Not my place to say, sir.”
Ren looked the man over as he dragged on his cigarette. The operator was tall, broad shouldered, and handsome in his age. “Wouldn’t be hard to slip poison into those pain pills. Maybe you’d be doing the village a service.”
The operator sighed and rubbed his temple with one hand. “Are you just trying to goad me into getting you more booze? You already got everything that was Endo’s office, I very much doubt there’s a drop left in the building.”
Ren also exhaled a long sigh and shook his head, then flicked his half-smoked cigarette towards the operator. “Fine. I’ll play nice.”
True to his claims, the operator snatched the cigarette out of the air with prime precision, between two index fingers, and with a second flick, sent the thing straight to an empty metal canister. He clapped the lid over it to let the tobacco burn itself out. “Maybe if you’d played nice with those MLEA there’d be a few less funerals happening this week.”
The swordsman crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not paid to think twice about a mission. I do my job. Just like you’re doing now.”
“No judgment from me, sir. Not everyone in the building thinks the same way, though.”
“Shinobi live, fight, and die. Saving me is just going to result in even more corpses. Doesn’t matter how far removed you think you’re shinobi work, everyone plays a part. Mine’s just...more intimate.”
The operator raised his hands to dismiss the topic. “And not even a spike on the heart monitor. It’s true, then. The Jellyfish is a cold blooded bastard.”
A disheveled head of hair poked in through the door, which had been left open to try and air out the smoke smell. “Oh, that’s him?” A clipboard poked into view as well, which was quickly violated with an ink pen. “Perfect, I’ll bump him up on the schedule- I’m not bothering you am I?” Before the attendant to Ren could answer the man was already stepping into the room. “Great. Could you go and answer phones for a while? They could really use the help in the main office.”
“Ah, Jailbird Tsuoko has come to visit. If you just let me finish up here-"
The man visibly cringed and clutched at his clipboard as the attendant began wrapping up some wires. "That's the worst nickname yet. All my charges were dropped, why can't anyone-"
"Just yanking your chain, boss." With a wave the attendant departed, leaving the two men alone in the cluttered room. "Have at him."
After closing the door and verifying the lock was in place, fa weight seemingly lifted off the man's shoulders. He straightened his coat, adjusted his glasses, then turned and held out his hand to Ren in anticipation of a handshake. "We haven't been formally introduced yet. I'm Tsuoko Imanishi, acting department head for the- oh my God!" He recoiled and winced. "You look terrible up close! I thought- they said- oh, jeez, I'm sorry, that was rude of me."
"Uh, okay, wrong foot to get off on. Hey! How about a little fun fact. Kakatsyuki Endo accused me of all kinds of stuff too, so we’re like, falsely accused buddies! I mean, uh-” He glanced over his shoulder.
“I was in prison, but whatever rumors they’re spreading, they’re totally not true. I've been assured the false records will be wiped and I’m still a qualified medical professional and- you know what, nevermind. How's the eye?”
"Eye looks good." Ren slumped back onto the single cot, knocking over a few glass bottles in the process. He let his shoulders hang. "Kinda hard to judge exactly how far away somebody is. Depth perception and all."
He glared at the man. "When I kill the Flame - and maybe Endo too - you think you could, you know..."
He made a popping noise and gestured at his right eye socket. "If I keep one of 'em in one piece?"
“Er, yeah, maybe!” Imanshi gave a very noncommittal shrug. “Normally we have freezers full of the things from people who donate their bodies to Kirigakure- but Endo kinda...” He waved his pen around in the air as if doing so might conjure some eyeballs out of thin air. “In hindsight it might have been a mistake to let a corpse manipulator have full access to all of our village's spare body parts. But hey, I was in prison, so not my fault it happened!”
“I’m gonna be honest though, I don’t quite understand why the Mizukage thinks you’re the best man for taking down Konkaji Senmitsu.” Imanshi bit his lip, then shook his head and went back to his clipboard. “She has everyone on high alert because she thinks the Water Lord might come back and retry his blockade during all this chaos, so maybe we can’t spare the jounin manpower, but still...you don’t have like, a secret demon animal inside you or anything, do you? Like a mutant jellyfish? Actually, don’t tell me. She’s probably not letting any of us know because if Senmitsu finds out, maybe he can counter it. Forget I said anything! I have complete faith in you!”
“But, uh, man...” His glasses slid down his nose as he flipped through the papers. “What we were asked to prioritize is...not very encouraging. We’re supposed to maximize your...electrolytes? Before getting your eyesight back? And there’s a specialist coming in who deals with long distance...nah, that can’t be right, I must have gotten the wrong file.” Imanshi sighed and clicked his pen nervously. “Maybe its-”
”Oy, Chaingang Imanshi!” From outside the room came the boisterous shouting of someone who clearly wasn’t an office worker. “Buncha widows are here asking if we still have the bodies of their husbands! What do I tell them, since Endo turned those cadavers into-”
A long hiss came from Imanshi as he sucked air through his teeth so that he didn’t have to hear the end of the sentence. “Damn it. Just, uh, take it easy today, a few more tests and you’ll be free to report back to duty. We're supposed to make sure you're able to use ninjutsu perfectly, so maybe practice that a bit and let us know how you feel. And I brought a gift!" With a flourish he pulled out a binder from under his labcoat and plopped it like a prize atop one of the nearby machines. "Detailed autopsies from everybody we've recovered that we suspect Senmitsu was responsible for. I don't know what you might need it for but Maya wrote a very all capital letters memo that we should give it to you. Endo apparently took some good notes. Anyway, I’ll be back later for...” His eyes narrowed and his frown deepened. “Where the hell am I going to find a multimeter?” He gave the most tepid of waves as he slipped out the door, leaving the room back to its incessant electrical hum.
“Took all the spares, huh...” Ren shifted off the bed and shuffled his tired legs over to the binder. He flipped it open as he absently pulled another cigarette from his pocket and lit it.
“Mostly just cutting and stabbing, like anyone else.” He took a long drag as he flipped the page. “Except for...”
He scratched the tip of his head with his cigarette between his forefingers as he slipped through the pages quickly, folding the corners of pages that matched his thought. Then he took another thoughtful drag. “Crushed limbs like they had fallen from the sky, swords and shields dented and shattered.”
The bandages on his face kept him from thoughtfully picking at his imaginary beard. The cleanest he’d ever been shaven, purely for medical reasons. Instead he just plucked at the wrappings. Ren’s mind drifted back to his encounter with Senmitsu. The Konkaji’s shooting star technique now almost hit him twice, like something massive had erupted out of the sky and slammed down into the ground with all the force of being shot from a cannon. The wound in his chest where Ren narrowly avoided getting blown up by merging with the metal of the blade was not a repeatable tactic. Senmitsu could dematerialize his weapons at will, and Ren didn’t want to think about how his raiton technique would respond to getting turned into molten slag.
So something else, then. He pushed the filter of his cigarette between his lips and then used both hands to make his way through the dossiers one after another, rapidly. He furrowed his brow, like he was just on the edge of what was possible with his brain power – a cool chill slunk up his spine as he --
“Nope, I got nothin’.” He tossed the binder back down on the machine and stretched his arms out over his head, pausing once he heard something snap and he felt a jolt of pain run down his shoulder. Plotting was useless if he couldn’t get his body right.
He stuck his head out of the door to the hallway and peered both ways down. Equipment cluttered the halls and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The lights overhead flickered and then, with a sudden surge failed entirely. Distantly, he heard someone shouting and the distinct sound of a generator failing to engage. The computer behind him, attached to some secondary circuit, was still buzzing and beeping away.
“Oy!” He called. He felt a little trapped, attached to the machine. “If that’s the Flame, tell ‘em I’m not here!”
As if in response something tumbled out at the end of the hallway. What looked like a full garbage bag rolled out into the hall. Its contents spilled out with a clattering not unlike when Ren knocked his empty booze bottles over. But, moments later, a pair of spindly arms reached out from within the mass and snatched up the scattered trash like a child scooping up their dropped textbooks. When the matted head of hair turned towards Ren the true form of the creature became apparent.
It almost looked like a dead body at first, with a pale face criss-crossed in black patterned veins. It wore a stained, dark shrine maiden uniform, easily mistake as a garbage bag at a distance. The creature rose up and coughed and Ren immediately put two and two together- it wasn’t some monster created by the corpse-manipulating traitor Endo after all. Rather it was just a girl!
But the way she lurched around in it certainly made the mistake understandable. The girl turned and her heavy eyes recognized Ren, then her maw opened up into an excited black smile. Her teeth weren’t rotten- rather it seemed as though it was a cosmetic, of some sort? Rather than say anything she let out a grunt, or perhaps a belch, and then began to shamble her way towards the bandaged man like a raccoon approaching an undefended bowl of cat food.
“Guh.” She stopped halfway down the hall with a little half chuckle of disbelief, then turned her tattooed face up at the chuunin. “Guhuh. You’re him? The survivor?” Every word came out in an almost cackle, like at any moment she might burst into upsetting laughter. “I’m- they call me Chichibu Mone, heh, heh. I’m here to-”
”Bloody hell, who threw the breaker for the freezer?!”
Mone’s head bent at an odd angle to glance down the hall, then her odd lurching picked up the pace as she darted forwards to enter Ren’s room “Guhohoho, some people can’t appreciate a favor. Hey, let me in.” After some fussing around, she pulled a small amber bottle out from her robes that was stoppered with a cork. She wiggled it enticingly, or at least as much as someone in her condition could manage.
“Your prescription. 80 proof, single malt. Most people choose to drink it after I do the procedure, but that’s up to you, ha. Ha. One question before we begin. Can you- can you tell me about it?” One of her eyes looked up expectantly, while the other looked off wildly in some other direction. "Tell me what you felt when you were about to die, geh, gehehehe."
“Procedure? You?”
Despite Ren’s misgivings, he snatched the bottle from her. He quickly strode across the room as he investigated the bottle. The girl’s monstrous appearance wasn’t actually that terrifying up close. Her face wasn’t actually a pulsating mass of veins- she just had some really upsetting tattoos, that looked particularly ghoulish when in dingy lighting. “What are you some kinda -”
He flinched as a flash of memory washed over him. The mountain, the eclipse. He pulled on the cork with his teeth and eyed the young woman up and down. She was short and...spindly. Like a spider wearing human flesh. Ren knew he wasn’t in much position to judge.
“I've been close to death plenty of times. My own and others.” He sniffed at the contents of the bottle and his eye fluttered. “Hey, this is legit. Aren’t you too young to be buying booze?”
"Medicine", Mone quickly corrected him, stifling her upsetting chuckles.
The liquid swirled in the container as he rolled it around. “This last time it was like all the pain was far away, and I felt real...sad about the people I let down. Swore to myself that if I lived, I’d start helping out more. You know, around the village. The broken families. Everyone’s losing everyone, so the least the living can do is look out for each other.”
“Maybe. I haven’t decided yet. It kinda runs contrary to this whole...”
A wide armed gesture at the room as the lights started to flicker back on and the electrical hum returned to the room. “Angry swordsman thing I’ve got going on. What was this about a procedure?”
He tilted the bottom of the bottle to the ceiling, and quaffed the contents in one solid drag.
The vigorous sound of moving furniture punctuated every silence in Ren’s testimony. Mone stopped and listened, her head cocked to the side so the noise could get through her tangles of hair. Other than the occasional gurgle or croak she remained quite attentive. When she finally did sit down it was behind a table she pulled up, a feat perhaps only impressive given her apparent lack of physique.
“Thank you for sharing, such a pleasant experience, geheh. I wish you many more.” From within Mone's swaddling she pulled out several opaque glass jars with indecipherable labels scribbles on them. She laid them carefully in a row, then when everything seemed to be in order she took out a surprisingly mundane looking shot glass. “My specialty is...let’s call it long distance medicine.” With practiced fingers she unscrewed the lid off a dull metal flask and poured a pungent clear liquid into the glass. Then from within her hair she pulled out a pair of plain bone needles, then popped the top of one of her other jars. “If the stars align, I could restart your heart from hundreds of miles away.” Using the needles like chopsticks, she held up a squirming, live centipede, which apparently wasn’t taking its removal very kindly.
“Not that it would do you much good to have your heart restarted if you were already dying of blood loss, guhuhu. Tricky business, healing patients you can’t see. Well, I suppose you can’t see much at all with just that one eye anyway, fuheheh.”
With a plop Mone dropped the centipede into the shot glass, which immediately blackened and began to froth. As if she was making coffee she idly stirred the glass with one needle.
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“You might not even be compatible, so don't worry.” Mone stopped stirring and squinted at her glass, then looked up with her one good eye at Ren’s one good eye. “Remote medicine is complicated even for the best doctors. I’m neither the best, nor... really a doctor (guhoho), so we’ll be taking some shortcuts.” She dipped one painted fingernail into the liquid and tasted it, scrunching her face up in displeasure.
“We’ll start off easy." She took the shot glass and held it up to the sunlight coming through the window. Inside, the faint twitches of life still could be seen stirring within. She set the glass down then patted on the table opposite of her. "Use a genjutsu on me. One that's potent, that has some meaning to you. That way I'll be able to recall the...flavor of your mind, if you get me.”
“Oh, great.”
Ren rubbed his palm against the top of his forehead, as if massaging the point would relieve some great headache that he felt wrapping his skull. The Mizukage Maya must have been yanking on his chain. Even if the leader of Kirigakure took him seriously, this must have been punishment for Ren’s audacity. Dealing with homeopathic remedies and hedge sorcery seemed a small price to pay for all the high quality care he had received until now. Apparently even the kitchen sink wasn’t enough.
He thought back to Esumi’s words prior to her betrayal. Medical ninja couldn’t just slap you on the ass and regrow lost bits. If Maya wanted to throw everything at the wall to see what stuck, to get him on the right path to being prepared for the Flame, well then, he would have to do his best to take it in stride. Still, he worried his lips together in a fine line as he involuntarily felt his throat seize at the thought of imbibing centipede stew.
The empty bottle of her brew rolled around between his fingers as he inspected the room’s reflection in the curve of the glass.
Medical ninjutsu was occult, arcane, and more importantly involved a ton of math and anatomy study that was completely beyond his ability. As he thought about it, bug soup and creepy witches weren’t much different than the sigils and glowing palms he was used to. Less...polished, maybe, but Ren didn’t consider himself a very polished shinobi in the first place. In a way, this whole scenario was starting to feel familiar.
Grungy, dirty, incompatible with polite society. Ren cracked into a smile as he looked up at the girl.
“I got it.”
With a flash of giddy glee, he propelled the empty glass vial to the ground, formed a few hand seals at Mone. Even with a few teeth missing, his grin seemed full, like a harlequin.
“Did you hear the one about the broken glass?”
He gestured at the shattered bottle on the floor. “Well, nevermind. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Shiiru Ninpou: Manzai (Force Art: Duo Act): Reserves 10, Power 10, Tactics 8
The target finds the user hilarious for the duration. If the user tells a joke and the target laughs at it, nothing else happens. If the target attempts to perform an action before laughing at the joke, or holds in their laughter, the duration of this technique does not decrease. When the technique is over the target will be very aware they were under a genjutsu, and will be immune from this technique for the rest of the thread. Discrete.
Trigger: Telling a joke.
”Urgh.” Making the same face as she tasted her concoction, Mone physically recoiled at the joke. Even so she let out distinctly different, more razor sharp cackle whenever she paused to take a breath. “I hate it, kekeke, so it’s perfect. Glass puns, what a pane. Hold on a second.”
Mone’s spindly fingers snatched up the centipede shot glass. Before the echoes of her chortling even had time to settle, she downed the entire thing in one noisy gulp. When she finished she let out a very distressing sputter, like gears being spun in the wrong direction. “Rotten piss, that’s just as bad. Fingers crossed it's strong enough to make your humor less appealing.” Wiping some black froth off her mouth she dug around some more in her belongings and pulled out something that looked like a cat hairball. ”Antidote in case the centipede toxin sends me into a seizure again. One these days I’ll just have to learn kai, but in the meantime isn’t it nice to have a home remedy?”
Face still contorted, Mone reached out, touched another jar, hesitated, then switched to another one with a fresher looking label. “I’ll explain the last part of the process and you can decide if you want to go through with it. “ She opened the lid, gave whatever was inside a bewildered look and a sniff, then shook her head and closed it. “I’ll medically induce a high-stress state in you. Think like...the worst hangover you've ever had. It's important because...” She picked up a jar, gave it a vigorous shake, peeked inside, then closed it again in disgust. “The honest answer is because people like to lie to me. I ask for a personal item of emotional value and they give me a damn feather their grandpa found or some shit, guh. Especially with shinobi, who all like to roleplay as cold hardass bastards, 'sentimental' objects are hard to come by. I’ve learned that if we just make a personal item when we’re performing the ritu- the procedure, the results are a lot more consistent, fuehuehue.”
“Ah, this might work.” With an air of satisfaction she plucked a jar with an unhappy face drawn on its label and opened it up. “I try to get some background on my patients but in your case I didn’t have much time. They call you the Jellyfish, don’t they? Jyukuku, Is that like, your spirit animal, or just a bully's nickname for you that stuck?”
"No, when I was a kid I got called slurs people don't like to use any more."
Ren picked at his exposed ear with a pinkie and glared at his reflection in the window.
"I got assigned to a vessel where the other guy had a nickname - Ripple Shark and I felt left out. I picked up raiton from a buddy, and when I was training it I couldn't get a good zap outta anything."
He looked at the edge of his pinkie as if he could gleam something from his ear wax. "Anyway, people say jellyfish toxin feels like being shocked. I don't know. I've been shocked plenty, and I've been stung plenty, and I wouldn't say they're anything the same. It suits me fine, though. Makes people underestimate me, and doesn't carry any gravitas. You ever been swimming and the current brings a school of jellyfish on you? You don't even realize it and then -"
He snapped his finger, singing his earwax flying to an unseen corner of the room.
"Next thing you know, you're covered in piss and crying in a hole somewhere. Anyway, we used to be Ripple Shark and Jellyfish. Back on the old crew, anyway. Just me and the cat now."
Try as she might, Mone couldn’t help but stifle her chittering laughter even when Ren wasn’t actively making a joke. Her work only resumed once he finished, as she needed the time to digest every one of his words.
“We all end up in a hole eventually, gekeh. Unless you’re buried at sea. Then you end up in a shark, or maybe one of these.” After cleaning her needles by wiping them on her sleeve, she opened her chosen jar, and fished out what looked like a long coiled blue shoelace from within it. Like a master chef plating an avant-garde dish she delicately piled almost a foot of the string-like material onto the metal lid in the middle of the table. Mone fussed with it a bit as if trying to get just the right amount on the lid before depositing the rest back.
“Harvested these beauties off the beach just this week. That blockade caused all manner of animals to wash ashore- some kind of noise was driving them off, I reckon.” She set her needles aside and pushed her chair back so she could get eye-level with the table. “With your body weight and build...twenty-seven, twenty-eight...yeah, this should be enough. Man O’ Wars, the fishermen here call ‘em. A finally got the proper preservation technique down so even this dead body is still toxic.” Her eyes looked up at Ren expectantly. “Not only can it kill you dead, it’ll hurt the whole time you’re dying. A superb source of stress, gyuhehe.”
“The venom isn't that toxic; it's your own immune reaction to it that does the actual killing. Isn’t that great? It’s like you’re killing yourself.” The glistening blue tentacle began to slide off the lid, and Mone very quickly snatched up her chopsticks to keep it balanced. “Hasn’t done me in the few times I tested it, as long as I treat it fast enough. Got a real dick twisting bite when it starts burning though, made me see stars both times.”
“I wager you know this, but jellyfish kill more people than sharks.” Finally Mone sat up and crossed her arms. “Ain’t no shame in backing out. Here’s the whole deal: get stung, I work my magic, and your next brush with death will be a tiny bit more in your favor.” Mone’s bad eye fell towards the window, where the tropical sun outside still shone through.
“Or I can light some candles and say a prayer and collect my paycheck either way, guhohohoho. Nice thing about spiritualism, I got a great excuse when it fails. ‘Will of the gods’, gekek! What a scam.”
Ren crouched next to the table to get on an eye-line with the mass of pickled tentacles. He narrowed his eye and glanced up at the witch as she offered him the chance to back out. There was a steady, pregnant pause between them.
“Seems like a lot of effort for a tiny bit more in my favor.”
...but the reality was that he was eating up luck like a starving child the past few days. Even as bits of his body were falling off and he was experiencing disability and pain. Honestly he was lucky to still be sucking on air. Better off than the MLEA on the research rig, better off than Razorfin Dazai. If there was something called fate, a real thing that could be measured, then his stash was getting thinner every day. Ren let out a sigh that shook between dismissive and a hiss, and he yanked over a chair from the nearby console. It scrambled against the floor with a clatter of metal legs against the stone, loud enough to drown out any grousing Ren was muttering under his breath.
He sat the chair back first against the table and straddled it, using the top of the back of a chair as a fulcrum to rest his bicep against as he started to cut away the bandages on his left arm. The kunai appeared in his right hand with a dexterous flip, spinning by the ring around his middle finger before he took it to his bandages. The imported kunais cut better than the Kirigakure issued ones, and it seemed like a waste to dull the edge of his contraband on just slicing cloth. Even so he clenched his teeth as he worked, carefully sawing through the cloth, revealing the medicinal ointments and shiny-wounded flesh underneath.
“This is my good arm, my sword arm,” He said as he worked. “Right arm’s still missing a lot of flesh. Doubt even all the medical staff here could save me from...”
His eye moved errantly from his work to the tentacles and he lost focus, blade suddenly sliding quickly down his arm and cutting several wraps of the bandages at once, leaving a thin-red line that blossomed into a cloudy mist of blood underneath the gel-like ointment. He cursed and peeled away the bandage like a stinking cast. The smell of his injured, unwashed flesh and the ointments, herbs, and sweat that had gone into healing him flooded out into the room.
“Well, fuck it, probably the only excitement I’ve seen all day anyway.”
He gingerly picked one of the pickled tentacles with the tip of his knife and drug it across the table to rest on his exposed flesh. He flinched at the contact, and then his eye softened.
“Well, that’s actually not that bad.”
By the time he had the forth tentacle on, however, he was sweating and the muscle underneath the flesh of his arm was completely cramped and taught. He hadn’t spoken again, jaw firmly set.
A much more genuine though still abnormal laughter came from Mone as she rose from her seat. “Try and dissociate if you can. It won’t help with the pain, but it makes my job easier, guhoho.” With surprising swiftness given her appearance Mone floated to one side of the room to flick the lights off. Moments later she was drawing the curtains over the large window, plunging the room into almost darkness.
Then a bright light stabbed through the room, which faded into a dull yellow as Mone held the match up to a simply white emergency candle. “Wouldn’t want to you to get distracted and lose immersion, gyeh. If you can still hear me, here’s what will happen next.”
She placed the candle in the middle of the table next to the jars, then poked with one jagged bitten fingernail beside it. “I’m going to leave the room. Usually, poison containment requires physical contact. I’ll be performing it- attempting to perform it, from outside. If it works, we’ll both know. If it doesn’t-” From the darkness on her side of the table she scooted something across the table. It was the small hairball-like wad from earlier. “Consume this. It won’t stop the pain but it will prevent your heart from stopping, which will save me from having to resuscitate you. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you chickened out if you do, kekehekekehe!”
“Trying to get angry might help too! Think some nasty thoughts about me if you want, or anyone who gets your blood boiling!” Moments later Mone was already at the door and beginning to fade away. Rather than say anything else, she left, leaving only the lingering sound of her cackling chuckle outside in the hall as she departed.
Ren swore he could still see her in the room after she walked away, that grinning skull paint on her face, glowing in the yellow light from the candle. The image snuck around the room, in his own reflection in the glare of the windows, crossing over the matte-black of his iron kunai. He fished out another tentacle and clenched his teeth as he let it fall into his arm. The toxin was unreal at how quickly it seared him, as if the organs were scalding hot wires. He could see through the wounds on his flesh the welts and irritation practically bubbling up.
He couldn’t think straight. Nausea kicked him in the gut like a mule, an intense twisting hard and heavy lump of sick that boiled in his stomach. Whatever concoction she gave him, that alleged 80 proof, was putting in its best to work to find its way back up his throat. He could feel it sprinkling the back of his mouth as he clenched his teeth down. A practiced drunk and hangover expert Ren felt confident in his ability to hold on. But he could tell he was on the verge of losing it. Maybe vomiting would feel better, take some of the edge off.
A hiss escaped between his teeth as Ren realized his lungs refused to let go of his last breath. Focusing on holding down the drink and getting lost in the sheer pain it was becoming harder to maintain basic body functions. He sucked in air and the coolness of it felt bitter compared to how hot his head felt, how dangerously close to vomiting he felt. The mix of sensations in his lungs and on his tongue almost felt like bliss. That girl’s skull-motif was laughing at him, he was sure of it, in the darkness of his lost eye. Just out of his periphery, the new edge of his vision, she was hiding and chuckling at his weakness, assuredly.
The willpower to take another tentacle made Ren feel acutely aware of how easily, in comparison, he had stabbed himself in the past. It was almost laughable. He’d hurt himself a dozen times, anything was better than this, but her crude jeering about him chickening out did more than it honestly should have.
How dare she – imply he wasn’t tough shit?
Ren’s vision faltered. The skull laughed, geheh, guohoho, gyeh-heh…
“Bwahahahahahahahaha!"
Spittle and vomit leaked from his mouth as he blew out his cheeks and urged his shaking, weak right arm to find another blue stinger to add to his increasingly wild pile on his exposed arm. The room grew dark. Darker than possible. His good eye began to dim and fade as the world became a hazy blur of agony.
Mere feet away, out in the hall, a small mob began to form.
“All the pests you let loose upstairs?”
”Pests? Please. They’re pestilence hunters. You can thank me when those arachnids solve your fruit fly problem, kyek.”
“And the graffiti you left in the bathroom?”
“Warding sigils to contain any disease spread by the flies, duh.”
“What possible explanation could you have for shorting the electrical breaker?!”
Mone held up her thin hands and rattled the bone accessories adorning it. ”That awful electrical noise was going to disrupt my ritual. Just like you all are doing right now.” Her bent form then fell to the floor, which she previously covered in completely unintelligible chalk lines and scribblings. The empty halls rang with the faint sound of distant phones being unanswered, but with half the staff now crowded in the hallway outside there was simply nobody available to answer them.
“Come on, Imanishi, use some of those skills you learned behind bars and...stick her with a shiv or something. This is unacceptable!”
The bespectacled Imanishi standing at the front of the crowd continued to nervously adjust his lab coat. “I don’t know how to make a- we can be a little patient, right? She said she was almost done.”
”No, I said he is almost done.” Without looking up from her work Mone flicked her freed hand around as if shooing away flies. ”I’ve been done for ages. Look, see?” Her other hand rose up and with a flourish showed off what could only be described as a wad of filthy bandages knotted off into something vaguely resembling a human. ”What a quaint little fetish this produced, but I vastly prefer it to those wretched little scrolls they taught us in school. Isn’t it darling? Oh-” She frowned. "Looks like I might have pulled out a bunch of nicotine too. Always a bit difficult to separate out poisons like that-"
Fell Medicine
Stage: 1
Condition: None
Description: Medical techniques may be done as a Black Miko ritual, instead of requiring hand seals or through more traditional modern medical methods. The functionality of the medical technique does not change otherwise. The Black Miko can perform any medical jutsu on a remote target by means of a more elaborate, time consuming ritual, so long as they have some physical part of the target’s body (such as hair or blood) with which to do so. This is an unreliable practice, and commonly those targeted might not be affected at all.
“Bloody hell, out of the way, I’m not missing my lunch break over this.” Mone let out a screeching squawk in protest as she was very easily pushed aside from the doorway. It was thrown open and light flooded into the dark room, followed by a series of audible sounds of disgust from those nearest the threshold. “Heavens above- it smells like a bad night at Kanitoshi in here!”
Ren’s eye fluttered back open.
Byouki no Fujikome - Disease Containment (Dokushite)
Requirements: Intelligence 3, Reserves 3
Description: By placing a hand on a patient and sending chakra through the whole body, a medic can isolate and contain vectors of disease. The medic raises their hand from the patient and glowing chakra pulls out of the patient, gathering the disease itself into a floating mass. The user then presses their hand into an open scroll, causing the extracted disease to float down into the page and seal it within. This leaves a symbol unique to the disease, which may or may not be recognizable by the medic. Once removed from the body, the patient is effectively cured of their disease, though any damage caused must still be treated normally. Any disease which would be curable via medication (including poisons) can be sealed this way.
When the pain of the toxins left Ren, his body didn’t know how to react. He slumped forward as all the twisted tension in his muscles relaxed at once, slammed his forehead onto the table, then fell off his backwards chair onto the ground. Some vomit might have been present too but his head reeled too much to tell. Other body fluids might be present as well- Ren wasn’t really in the mood to try and parse how badly his flesh betrayed him in the last few moments.
He did finally get enough oxygen to his brain to form a coherent thought. “Very elegant.” Ren pushed up off of the floor and looked down at his arm, still stinging from the cut of the kunai, still reeking of the smell of salty pickled sea creature and medical ointments. But there was no wild stinging, no trace of the poison. It was as if the breaker to his agony had been shut off.
Ren delicately ran his fingers over the wounds. The toxins spread out like electricity tracing a circuit, like lightning arching the sky. The tender flesh and sore muscles persisted, but the worst of the jellyfish sting vanished completely. He gaped, marveling at the experience. The witch worked. His lips split into a grin as he started to lift himself up off the ground. He stumbled a few times, both on the slippery vomit and due to fatigue in his limbs, but he made it standing and draped his sailing coat over his shoulders.
“I need a shower.” His own smell was starting to get to him. He felt the distinct urge for a cigarette, and maybe another one of those malts to push back the nausea in his stomach, but with only the lightning scars and his own slipping blade marks on his arm, he felt rejuvenated. Like a large, heavy, wet blanket had been pulled off of him.
He eyed the pickled tentacles tentatively – if he touched one, would the pain come back? Would she have to work her magic again? He decided not to let his curiosity get in the way of his own healing, and started to stumble out of the room.
“Oy, oy, oy, oy, oy!” He called out to the gaggle. He glanced up and down the hallway at the insane markings on the wall and let out a whistle. “Ya boy needs a shower, and this hallway needs cleaning. You call this a clinic?”
He pointed accusingly at Imanshi. “Hey! You’re in charge here, right? There’s fucking spiders all over the place, and someone shit and vomited all over my room! Don’t you have any decorum? Or did that stint in jail make you a wild animal?”
Somehow, Ren was feeling better than he had in weeks, despite it all.
A great deal of bustling and hustling and finger pointing followed, but when those fingers turned to Mone, the girl was gone. As were the various jars she left in the room prior, though she left the candle for ambiance.
“Everyone, everyone, relax, we’ll just- where are those genin interns? Leave the dirty work to them. Everyone else, just find a phone and do your best. I swear, this last hour has been nothing but chaos, you'd think the apocalypse was happening downtown or something.” Standing on his toes to shout out a few more commands over the crowd of heads, Imanishi beckoned Ren away and urged the chuunin to follow him down the hall.
When the sounds of the agitated office workers got dull enough Imanishi reached into his lab coat and pulled out an envelope, which he passed over to Ren. “My apologies, we don’t really have time to do a proper discharge. Your vitals looked...acceptable this morning, so you’re free to go now.” On the front of the envelope was the stamp and wax seal of the Mizukage’s office, along with what looked like a rather hastily written script addressing it to Ren on the front. “Usually they do scrolls but- you know what, I’ve been in prison for a year, and it’s none of my business. I was told to give this to you and, uh...”
At the end of the hallway was a bleak concrete dead end. There was, however, an emergency eye wash and chemical station there, which Imanishi sheepishly offered. “I’ve been instructed to amend our records to say you are off duty, in recovery, and under house arrest for the next two weeks. I don’t need to know anything else!”
“Ah!” Imanishi nearly jumped out of his own skin before turning to leave. “Your prescription as well, that the specialist left. If there’s a problem with her, don’t tell me, I don’t want to be responsible for it.” Fishing around in his pocket he pulled out a small brown bag similar to something that might be used to smoke tobacco. “Medicinal use only, but you know the drill there. Anyway! I’ve got fires to put out.” He turned tail and slinked off down the hall muttering something about timesheets and work orders before disappearing back into the dreary office setting.
A very small rolled up slip of black paper was tucked in alongside the bag, written in particularly unsettling but still legible script.
Do not open! Hex inside- destroy bag when remote medical attention is needed.
The message in the envelope, while certainly more formal, appeared no less ominous with how hastily the wax stamp seemed to have been placed upon it.
About an hour later, Gushiken Ren was making his way out of the clinic. He cleaned himself up and changed into his regular shinobi gear, which wasn’t much more than a large black jacket over the typical Mist shinobi-sailor outfit. He had re-wound the wire spool for his singular fishing hook-style kunai and rested it on his belt. Despite his misgivings of the apprentice blade, he slung it over his shoulder. He, after some urging from medical staff, adopted a simple black eyepatch to keep debris out of his socket. Ren looked the spitting image of a cliche pirate from a children’s book.
Surviving an attempted bombing by Endo, two attacks by the Flame, and fighting Razorfin Dazai, Ren felt the winds of luck shifting in his favor. Once he was far enough away from the research facility he reached into the inside of his boot and pulled a spare cigarette from a hidden pouch that was more traditionally used to hide infiltration tools. He sparked his lighter against the tip and took a deep inhale.
The clinic, aside from patching him up with that same magic energy that Esumi had used, had been really interested in his salt levels in his body. He had tried to tell them multiple times that he could literally melt down into salt water at any time, but they were more worried about his organic, unaltered form. Electrolytes this, electrophysiology that. Sparks rippled down his free hand as he urged his chakra coils alive. Raiton was his edge, of course they’d be interested. Raiton was also rare, at least in Water Country. Something a lot of people didn’t have any experience or talent with. Nobody else but him could pull the stunts he did- maybe being constantly dehydrated from long weekend booze binges made his body that much more used to it.
In no way had Ren’s body fully recovered. Yet he felt that electric tingle work its way up his veins, and the way it prickled his hair and tickled his teeth made him feel...new. Like emerging from an egg and getting his first breath of fresh air. He balled his fist up and felt a swell of something inside him. Was it...pride?
Ren pulled the envelope from his pocket and slid his thumb against the wax seal, smushing it to the side – it must have been stamped recently, and hadn’t had time to set – and pulled out the letter inside. He recognized the stationary immediately.
Normally, the top of these said something like Notice of Discipline or Pay Garnishments. Instead, Ren slid his tongue against the back of his sharp teeth and looked down the hill towards the coast.
> To Chuunin Gushiken Ren, the Jellyfish, Captain of the Gallant Steam:
>
> The ink in this message will disappear a few minutes after being exposed to air, so read it well. The Mizukage's personal investigation into Kakatsyuki Endo resulted in her uncovering a secret stronghold he maintained in a cove at the coordinates at the bottom of this letter. However in the investigation Kakatsyuki Endo and his loyal followers ambushed the Mizukage. The device you recovered was taken.
>
> Your services are requested. Arrive at the coordinates tomorrow at sunrise. You are being tasked with the assassination of both Kakatsyuki Endo and Konkaji Senmitsu, and the recovery of the detonator device. Come prepared.
>
> -Miru Ippu, Head of the Military
“Oy, oy, oy...” He muttered under his breath. The ink on the paper was already fading from exposure to sunlight, but he lit the end of the folded letter with his cigarette and let it catch fire anyway. He took a long inhale.
“So you really went for the heart, you weasel-rat-bastard. Now I got more than damn pride on the line...”