Side Story: Rat Catching

[AtlannianSpy]

Nagisa Kanazawa & Tsubaki Uchiha​

Nagisa sat cross legged in the middle of her living room. Spread out underneath her was a dull, brown cloth that was actually a cloak and arranged around her were all manner of weapons and tools. It was time for an inventory check, everything was going to be disassembled; carefully checked for signs of wear, rust or nicks; repaired if necessary; oiled; reassembled and overall made ready for action. Nagisa always did this before a mission if she could, but not infrequently something came up so suddenly that she wouldn’t have time so it was important to do it regularly as well.

"Unlike a person, all you need to do to be sure of a tool’s loyalty is care for it,” The old man would say with a snigger whenever she complained as a child about the fiddly, repetitive work. "And unlike a person, a tool isn’t stupid enough not to betray you if you neglect them. They’re simple like that,"

Tools were definitely simple. Nagisa’s inventory checks had grown steadily more time consuming as she’d added more weaponry to her arsenal over time, but that work had grown linearly, predictably. It was work her fingers knew by heart, just more of it. Missions, other people, that kind of work kept growing more complicated exponentially in ways Nagisa couldn’t anticipate, each new variable getting tangled in with the others like lengths of thread. Compared to all that, these familiar tasks were almost comforting in a meditative sort of way.

A small, white snake stuck its head out from the air vent near the ceiling. A few, curious flicks of its tongue as it watched Nagisa work. The serpent finally emerged completely, dropping to the floor. A puff of smoke before it landed, a kunoichi silently touching down.

Nagisa tensed and snatched up one of the kunais she’d been working on, then she recognised the woman and forced herself to relax. “Oh wait, you’re Yuuki’s sister...Tsubaki,” Nagisa managed after a moment. “Umm… what are you doing in my apartment?” her tone was studiously casual but Nagisa was slightly irritated. None of her traps had gone off so that meant there was a vulnerability she hadn’t considered. It would take a whole afternoon to come up with and implement a new configuration and it would have to be done before her idiot sensei tried anything.

Tsubaki smirked slightly, “your reaction time’s certainly on point.” She stood, tucking her hands in her pockets, “Take it all the traps are from Nobushige pulling his usual shit? Don’t worry, I won’t tell.” She reached back into a pouch, withdrawing an envelope and holding it out to Nagisa. “Anyway, I’m here because you’re coming with me on a mission.”

“I still can’t figure out how he got up the laundry chute that one time,” Nagisa muttered distractedly, taking the envelope and opening it to scan through the contents. “The timing is pretty good I guess, I’ll be done with this stuff and ready to move out in a few minutes,” Nagisa commented offhandedly. The mission seemed straightforward enough, it was a matter of infiltrating a compound and securing intelligence related to the high level members of an important drug cartel.

Tsubaki seemed to be at least as good as Nobushige at that kind of thing, the last time they had been on a mission together Nagisa had been barely aware of her presence and just now...Well just now was still bugging her. Other than that and the fact that she used to be Nobushige’s squadmate and still kept up some kind of relationship with him, Nagisa didn’t know much about Tsubaki. Yuuki didn’t like talking about his family all that much. What kind of person was his sister?

“From what I’ve heard you’ve even caught a few of his clones. Quite the feat.” Tsubaki looked over the tools spread out on the floor, giving a short nod. “I can work with that, and I’ll answer any questions about the target on our way there. Any questions before I leave?”

“So these people are drug dealers?” Nagisa frowned at the letter she’d been given. “What else do we know about them exactly?”

“Drug lords might be a more appropriate term. The Shinezumi seem to have connections all over the the five nations, but they mainly operate in the Land of Fire. Well known for their… creative executions of anyone that crosses them.”

"well then," Nagisa said, satisfied with her gear she began sealing item by item back into her gloves, finishing with the cloak. “I guess we better not get caught,”

KageYuuki

 

[AtlannianSpy]

Hotaru Hagano & Daisuke Uzumaki

A Curious Interlude

​

Daisuke pulled off the long gloves and heavy apron with a sigh. While the experiment hadn’t yielded much information, the autopsy had. The Senju’s body had adapted somewhat to the implanted sharingan, subtly changing the foreign eye. Despite that, the sharingan still seemed taxing for the host. He looked over at his young assistant and the eye he’d tasked her with dissecting and studying. “Anything of interest?”

“The coloration is... unusual,” Hotaru replied, without looking up from the microscope she was bent over. “As far as I know most sharingan are a bright red, this one is darker and there are tinges of purple. It doesn’t appear to be the result of postmortem degradation either, the eye looks healthy enough otherwise,”

“The body of a Senju seems to be the only vessel that causes this change in the Sharingan,” Daisuke mused, his brows knit in thought. “But coloration also seems to be the only real change… how vexing.”

“Hmm,” Hotaru frowned and looked back at her own notes. “The mechanism behind the change in coloration for the sharingan is a special kind of chakra that’s released when the subject feels strong emotions correct? So a tentative early hypothesis is that the senju body somehow responds differently to that chakra. But if you introduce foreign material to a body and there’s some kind of atypical reaction then that’s almost always a sign of the body rejecting the transplant. That doesn’t appear to be the case here though,”

Puzzling over the strange phenomenon, Hotaru was more relaxed than she had been in weeks. It was nice to simply devote all of her attention to a research problem to be investigated and interrogated, it let her turn her attention away from other, more troubling problems for a brief time. Daisuke was also the most fun to be around when he was elbows deep in research, he was more relaxed and indulgent of Hotaru’s endless curiosity and it was fascinating simply to watch him at work. Hotaru doubted that there was another mind like his in the world right now, that was why she was even here in the first place.

“Not quite, the creation of the sharingan relies on intense emotions, but the color always ends up the same uniform red. Only Uchiha seem to release this chakra,” Daisuke’s eyes were closed as he mulled over the information. “This reaction to the Senju also appears reliant on the sharingan reaching full maturation.” He made an idle gesture towards the body still on the table, “that one had the sharingan for over a year. It wasn’t until the final tomoe appeared that the color changed.”

“Well that’s bizarre,” Hotaru said, tilting her head as if a different angle would provide some new insight into the eye laid out before her. “You would expect to see any kind of changes immediately, not after a year… It’s almost as if the Senju’s body...recognizes the sharingan otherwise why would it respond differently to an immature and mature one?”

“A distinct possibility,” Daisuke gave a low hum, “It does lend credence to the Bijuu’s story, that the two clans are directly connected to the Sage of Six Paths.”

“That seems like a reasonable explanation, given what we know,” Hotaru said, ignoring a small thrill that ran through her. The sage of six paths… what kind of power might they be grasping blindly towards here? “There are no accounts of either clan migrating towards each other and yet they competed and warred as far back as any records can account for. So a common ancestor is not improbable at all. Still, to conclusively peg that ancestor as the sage would require more research and it doesn’t tell us what phenomenon we’re looking at right now.”

“Precisely. It is, however, the only lead we have at the moment.” Daisuke lightly drummed his fingers against the countertop, skimming over Hotaru’s notes. “What we’re seeing may very well be the first steps towards the sage’s doujutsu, the rinnegan.”

“The first steps perhaps, but the transformation never progressed beyond the change in pigmentation,” Hotaru said. It didn’t seem as though further dissection would provide any more answers so she moved to put the eye back in its container and initiate the busywork of sterilizing her instruments. “It feels like we’re missing something from one side of the equation. Either the host wasn’t suitable or this particular sharginan was inadequate...”

“Using Senju with or without wood release hasn’t made any noticeable difference in the end result.” Daisuke sighed, falling silent in thought for a long moment. “Perhaps… there is one other form the sharingan may take, the Mangekyou. But it’s incredibly rare.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing so I can’t be certain,” Hotaru said slowly. “On the other hand if we’ve eliminated all other variables then that’s the conclusion we’re left with,”

“I’ll need to think on this. Once you’ve finished here, seek out Junnichi. You’ve met, yes? He’ll be heading into the Land of Fire on some business. You should accompany him, it’ll be a good learning experience.”

Hotaru smiled.”That happens to be my favorite kind of experience, however did you know?”

 

[KageYuuki]

Nagisa Kanazawa and Tsubaki Uchiha​

The two kunoichi made good time through the Land of Fire countryside, Neither of them were inclined towards idle chatter and moreso than talking Nagisa found herself observing Tsubaki, watching how she moved and where she looked. In any case they needed to arrive at their first destination at a certain time, so the trip was rather hurried.

Hizoka village was a gambling town about a day’s journey from the larger city of Shichen where the Shinezumi group had their main power base their operations here were small-scale and less profitable so if a pair of grunts were to die and be replaced with imposters their home branch would be unlikely to notice. That line of thinking had lead Tsubaki and Nagisa to be standing outside of a dingy gambling hall, from which raucous shouts and occasional thumps and crashes emanated out.

“I’m going to be leading a pair of Shinezumi to you, wherever you choose to hide,” Tsubaki said as she scanned the streets with crimson eyes. “Two men, you should be more than capable of killing them without harming the bait.” Her expression and tone were calm, giving the orders to kill without a second thought. “Do take care not to strike their faces, we’ll be needing them.” The jounin vanished without another word, wherever Nagisa hid, she’d be able to find her.

Nagisa set herself up in a nearby alley, disappearing underneath her concealing cloak technique once she was out of eyeshot. It probably wouldn’t be necessary against opponents like this, but she wasn’t one to leave things like that to chance. It definitely wasn’t because Tsubaki was kind of cool and Nagisa wanted to impress her. From her position Nagisa had a good view of the hall’s exterior but she couldn’t see inside it so for several minutes she waited with little idea of what was going on inside.

Nagisa was thinking, not for the first time, how handy it would be to be some kind of sensor type when Tsubaki reemerged, with two attractive women flanking her, with strangely vacant expressions. Hanging off either woman’s arm was a clearly infatuated man, both of whom were rather thuggish in terms of their dress and demeanor.

So that’s what she meant by bait Nagisa thought, as the three woman and two men subtly veered off at Tsubaki’s direction towards the alley Nagisa was staking out. Still invisible, Nagisa waited until the group passed by her position then fell in silently behind them, following along until they were out of sight of the main road.

“You know girls we- *hic we don’t have to do it in an alleyway,” one of the men slurred drunkenly, somehow eliciting a delighted giggle from his partner. “I know this grrreeeeaat hotel that-”

The man got no further because Nagisa raised her arm and activated a device in her puppet arm, summoning a blade of pure chakra that pierced through his throat as it materialised. The man’s partner received a more old-fashioned death, as Nagisa simply summoned a kunai into her hand and jammed it into his carotid artery. Dismissing both weapons to leave her hands free, Nagisa then yanked the collars of both men, pulling them off their feet to bleed out quietly on the ground.

“Hmmm, not bad,” Tsubaki mused, observing the bodies. “Relatively quick and quiet.” Both of the scantily clad women studied the bodies with a dazed expression, as if struggling to comprehend just what was lying at their feet. A few, quiet words from Tsubaki and they wandered away. Really, the kunoichi could have just paid them off to lure the Shinezumi into their trap. But there would be fewer questions this way.

Besides, blackout nights were nothing new for regulars here.

“I..yeah... Against people at this level everyone should be to do at least this much,” Nagisa said, shrugging and turning away to keep an eye on the entry to alleyway. Whatever Tsubaki wanted the faces for, it was probably not something civilians should be seeing. Besides this way it was easier to ignore the odd sense of satisfaction Tsubaki’s words had given her.

A few minutes had passed, what few townspeople wandering by not even giving the alley a glance. Perhaps it was known entering one so close to the hall was a poor choice. “Alright Nagisa, come here a moment.” Rough and masculine, the voice that spoke wasn’t Tsubaki’s.

Nagisa spun around quickly at the sound of the unfamiliar voice and then promptly let out a ‘What the fuck?”

One of the men she had rather thoroughly executed was standing up, beckoning her over to where there were still two lifeless corpses lying on the ground, one of them notably missing it’s face. It only took Nagisa a second to put the pieces together, Tsubaki had obviously used some kind of transformation technique, but Nagisa hadn’t been expecting the voice as well and the overall effect was… disconcerting.

“Right, uh...yeah.” Nagisa said, covering her surprise quickly and walking over.

Tsubaki chuckled, her voice returning to normal for the time being. “Don’t worry, it still creeps Nobushige out after all these years.” She knelt by the second corpse, beckoning Nagisa closer before beginning a series of handsigns. Finally, the disguised kunoichi held one hand over the face of the slain thug and the other over Nagisa’s.

Vanishing Facial Copy

The process felt markedly different from a regular transformation and Nagisa felt her stomach churn as a warm, flesh like substance was layered over her body, warping her face and even her build.

“Gah…” Nagisa said, in an unfamiliar, masculine voice as she took off her forehead protector and used it to examine her new features. “That is...something else,” she said, noting that the jutsu had even captured a raspy note in her new voice that sounded like it came from a long term smoking habit.

Sealing the corpses, Tsubaki stood. “Come on, they’re gonna be looking for volunteers to run a message to the main base.”