Chapter 11: Busted
After a thorough search of the campsite, Billy, Jinx and Kamakura found themselves with nine clues in the shape of nine narrow strips of paper of varying lengths, each inscribed with one or two words. The trio laid them out face up on the ground and kneeled around them.
"Well, we obviously have to put them in order. I wish we knew how many there are, though," Kamakura mused, scratching his head. "What if we missed one?"
Billy cocked his head and his eye widened a bit. "I think that's all of them," he said. "Look!"
He picked up two of the shorter strips of paper, lined them up next to each other with a small gap in between, laid a longer one a bit below them, and repeated the pattern twice more with the remaining six strips. Jinx and Kamakura's eyes widened: the arrangement clearly formed the symbol of the Arashikage.
"Uh," Kamakura said. "They must have seen the symbol on the masters' arms and decided to use it."
"I think you're right," Jinx said. "It can't be a coincidence that all the lengths match up like that." She turned to Billy. "And don't you say it proves Tommy and Snake Eyes are actually behind all this."
"No," Billy said, shrugging. "If there is a Glaive, I could see them using the masters' tattoos as a clue for us. It's not even as nuts as setting up these trials in the first place."
Kamakura shot him an annoyed look. "Nobody is saying that they're sane."
"Boys. Focus."
The two apprentices turned their attention back to the clues. Along with Jinx, they started re-arranging the strips of paper, trying to form a sentence that made sense. Billy batted their hands away after a minute and lined the papers up, again forming the Arashikage symbol, but this time in an order that revealed the instructions:
'Tomorrow morning, look for this symbol down the river, near the village.'
"I was trying to do that," Kamakura muttered.
"Then I was messing you both up," Jinx quickly said to try and avoid an argument. She got up and stretched. "Well, looks like we have the rest of the day free. Katas, both of you."
Billy got up and started warming up. Kamakura hesitated, thinking that there had to be some better use of their time.
"Should we go get some supplies?" he suggested. "We may hear about The Glaive while we're in town."
Billy tutted. "Anything not to work, isn't it? Why did you even start ninja training if you don't want to train?"
"You may be so behind that you still desperately need to practice your katas all the time, but I'm not!" Kamakura said, his upper lip curling up in a snarl. "I just think we should put our time to better use!"
Billy snorted loudly. "Oh, really? Know them enough not to practice, do you? Funny how even Snake Eyes still does them. I guess HE likes to waste his time? Oh, no, wait. I know what it is. I am SO sorry, Sean, I honestly simply didn't realize you had perfect body memory, like Sensei. Although he still does his katas too," he mused, pretending to be thinking very hard. "Says he can always improve his speed. But you're way too good already to bother with that, aren't you?"
Kamakura's eyes narrowed. He felt the blood rush to his face but forced himself to remain calm.
"I know I still need to practice! I just don't think my own personal development should be my highest priority right now! Our masters are in danger! Or have you forgotten already?"
Billy sagged and groaned. "They're not in…"
"It'd be a waste of time to go to the village now when we already know we'll be close to it tomorrow morning," Jinx said, cutting him off. "And as long as we're doing what we've been told, the masters should be fine. So! There's no reason to go off on a wild goose chase in the village; there's no way The Glaive is going to be that easy to find anyway. Katas," she repeated in a stern tone. "Now."
Billy went back to his warm-ups without another word and Kamakura dutifully started his. Jinx started her own daily routine as well and when she was done, instructed the boys to practice with throwing weapons while she fixed some lunch. She wasn't much of a cook at all, but she'd tasted Billy's cooking in San Francisco once and it had been one time too many. As for Sean, she had seen him fix himself snacks in the evenings and was determined never to try anything he might prepare. She sighed wistfully as she got some meat, vegetables and noodles out, reflecting that if Tommy and Snake Eyes were indeed playing them, she'd get Billy and Kamakura to help her make a meal and then force the masters to eat it as punishment. After all, if Billy was right, her cousin and Snake Eyes had gone to great lengths to help them learn to work together, so it was only fitting that they grant their wish and use teamwork to mildly poison them both.
Lunch out of the way, much to the relief of all concerned, Jinx gave the apprentices some down time. She didn't give an explanation so as not to appear to be making things easy on Kamakura, but her intent was to allow the young red head to hit the books Snake Eyes had given him to study.
Sean took the hint and immediately fetched said books. He settled with them in the shade of a tree and set to work. Billy cocked his head, obviously thinking.
Jinx snickered. "Not used to having free time, are you?"
"Just thinking…" Billy replied without looking at her, sounding deep in thoughts. He didn't appear to have actually registered what she had said at all. He turned to her. "Do you still have the two notes from The Glaive? And the nine clues?"
Jinx pulled the pieces of paper from her pocket. "What are you hoping to find in them?" she asked, holding them out to him. "We already agreed the handwriting could be anybody's."
The young man took the two sheets and the nine little strips. "Maybe," he said. He walked off to sit on the opposite side of the camp from Kamakura and started examining the various notes, flipping back and forth between them and holding them up to the sunlight. Jinx let him to it and went to get one of her own study books.
She wasn't even two pages in when Billy called out.
"Jinx? Kamakura? Can you come here for a minute, please? I want to show you something."
Any politeness imparted to the request by the wording was ruined by the intolerably smug tone with which it was said. Jinx automatically braced herself, both for an explosion on Sean's part and for Billy to present them with what he probably thought was an iron-clad proof that there was no Glaive and which would probably turn out to be as flimsy as his previous arguments.
"Don't you sound proud of yourself," Sean sneered without getting up, somewhat trumping her prediction. "What is it? Figured out what all those squiggly lines were?"
"I read the clues," the brunette reminded him, still sounding extremely happy with himself. "Just come over, will you? I'm trying to put your minds at ease."
Jinx sighed; there was nothing to be gained by refusing to even hear the young man out. She got up and walked over, imitated with obvious ill will by Kamakura.
Billy smiled in anticipated victory. He kneeled down and laid the eleven pieces of paper on the ground in front of him, one next to the other. Jinx and Kamakura sat down cross-legged and obligingly looked at them.
Their younger brother cleared his throat. "These five clues are written in the same hand," he said, pointing at five of the nine strips of paper, "but not the other four. A second person wrote them, I'm sure of it. You can see the difference, can't you?"
Kamakura and Jinx looked from one set of clues to the other before nodding; the four notes Billy had not pointed at were indeed written in a different hand, even though both writers had used an impersonal print.
Billy pointed at the pieces written by the second writer. "Now these four look pretty normal. But these five… look at this one, that's the one that made me look closer."
He pointed at one of the longer clues, on which were written the words 'the village'. "See how the E's both have a slight slant on the vertical line?" he said. "They also have a very slightly shorter middle horizontal line."
"Just barely," Kamakura said, picking up the piece for a closer look. "Besides, are you trying to say it was written by a sloppy writer? That would just rule OUT Sensei."
"The key word there was 'both'," Billy said, grinning. "I checked the longer notes, and sure enough, every single E has the exact same quirks. I put some of them over one another and then aligned them to the sunlight to see through the paper, and they all match exactly."
Jinx's eyes had widened as Billy was speaking. She grabbed some notes, lined them up to the sunlight, and aligned them to superpose pairs of G's. "The G's are perfectly consistent too," she growled after checking a few. "I'm going to kill him."
"I also checked the A's, the S's and the N's," Billy said, buffing his nails. "Are you following, Kamakura?"
"Nobody writes that consistently," Sean said, checking some letters himself. "This must actually be a computer font. But why does that prove…"
"It's not a computer font," Billy said. "The ink flow was not as consistent as the writing, see?" He pointed out a few spots where the ink was slightly thicker or thinner.
"There ARE people who write that consistently;" Jinx said in response to Kamakura's comment, "anyone with perfect body memory. Once they've learned how to write a particular symbol, they'll unconsciously do it the exact same way every single time afterward because their muscle memory will repeat the exact same minute movements that they memorized. For anyone else, yeah, it'd be impossible. Tommy writes like this, I've seen it. In all three systems… of course it'd be the same way for romaji. I'm so used to it, I never even thought of it."
Kamakura's eyes were wide too by that point. "That… but… Sensei wouldn't… would he?"
"There's something I haven't told you, too," Jinx said in a low voice. She looked at Billy. "I didn't want to give more fuel to your theory because I thought it had to be a coincidence. It's not like origami is a particularly rare hobby in Japan." She sighed. "Teachers back home sometimes give busy work to students they feel need to cool down a bit, or just to keep them busy when they can't teach them or don't want to. I looked disgruntled about it once, so I was sent running around the compound ten times while carrying weight."
"So you traded whatever the busywork was for a hard workout?" Kamakura said. "That doesn't sound like a bad deal."
Jinx smiled indulgently. "It's a winding run and the compound is big; it took all day. When I was done, the teacher laughed at me and told me even my cousin had had the sense not to complain about the assignments he received, even the insanely long origami project he'd once given him. And then he sent me off to go do the task he had first given me. "
"That would have added fuel to my 'theory' all right," Billy said, scowling at her. "That insanely long origami project, it had to be the dragon; I've never seen him make anything else with paper. Have you?"
She shook her head. "Had to be," she agreed. Her eyes suddenly widened and she sighed. "Definitely the dragon," she said in a groan, pinching the bridge of her nose. "How did I forget this? One of the older students told me once she liked his dragon…I had no idea was she was talking about at the time and later, I figured she used 'dragon' to mean something else. Stop laughing or I swear I'm telling Sean about the talk with your mom and Tommy."
Billy immediately sobered up and treated her to a hurt puppy look.
Sean raised an eyebrow and made a mental note to eventually weasel the full details out of Jinx; judging from Billy's reaction and what he knew of Storm Shadow, it promised to be very satisfyingly embarrassing for his sword brother.
He looked down, thinking. It was rather difficult by now to argue against Billy's theory. And truth be told, he COULD picture Jinx's cousin planning this and talking Snake Eyes into it; not only was Tommy Arashikage a very devious man, he could talk people's ears off. Maybe that was even what Billy had meant when he'd mentioned a running commentary; maybe he hadn't been poking fun at Snake Eyes but at his own Sensei. Yet another mark of disrespect... the boy really was a hopeless case.
But then, Kamakura regularly had lessons with the Young Master, most notably archery and seeing ear, and he could attest himself that the ex Cobra did indeed provide, as his apprentice had put it, a pretty constant running commentary. The man believed in multi tasking and habitually gave philosophy and history lessons at the very same time they were training in something else. Even though he didn't spend a whole lot of time with Storm Shadow, Sean was treated at least weekly to some obscure statement, oftentimes even more nonsensical than the one from the previous night concerning letting go of people who aren't gone. His eyebrows shot up as a process of thoughts association caused one particular Storm Shadow-ism to come back to mind.
"If you can fold a beautiful dragon but nothing else, you're no master," he said.
Jinx blinked at him. Billy's eye was wide. Kamakura cleared his throat. "It was longer when he said it, but I can't remember the rest. I think it was mostly a bunch more adjectives? Oh, and he said what you were instead… I think a one-trick pony or something like that. He was telling me that I shouldn't neglect archery just because I was good with swords."
"Tommy said that to you?" Jinx asked, putting the emphasis on her cousin's name.
Sean nodded. "Kind of cinches it, doesn't it?" he said with a sigh. "I just remembered it. He says stuff like that a lot."
Billy chuckled. Sean's eyes narrowed at him. "You're laughing at your own…?"
"Don't answer that," Jinx cut him off, shooting Billy a warning look.
Billy turned his glare to her. "Why not?"
The kunoichi acquired a slightly scary smile. "Because I want you two to start at the beginning. I promise you we'll get back to Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes for this, but the last thing I want is for them to come up with a plan B. And you know they will if this one fails."
"It's already failed," Billy pointed out. "We figured them out after doing just one challenge."
"Are you saying you want us to pretend we're still clueless?" Kamakura asked.
Jinx shrugged. "Nah. For all we know, they're spying on us right now. But I'm afraid you're quite wrong, young William; the objective was never to make us complete ten challenges. And besides, we still will; I'm guessing the masters will refuse to let them go to waste. But for now, you two are spending the rest of the day, and the night if necessary, talking this out. I'll play mediator if absolutely necessary."
"I start," Kamakura immediately declared.
Billy rolled his eye. "So, start," he said. He turned to Jinx. "We get to plan something fun after this, right?"
Mindbender landed his craft carefully and clambered out as regally as he could. His efforts were wasted: the blasted mercenary, leaning casually in the doorway of the local police station, still laughed at him. The scientist turned towards Firefly and glowered.
"I do apologize, Doctor," the mercenary said in a tone that conveyed no regret at all, "but you actually came here in a trouble bubble? These things don't even need a self destruct button; self-destruct is their default and only mode."
"I'm in exile, Firefly," Mindbender growled. "I was forced to flee, and I took what I could. This unit is in better condition than any of the helicopters we escaped with."
"I'll believe that," Firefly chuckled. "Come, step in my office." He opened the door for his client and invited him inside with a sweep of his arm.
Mindbender walked inside the station, followed by the other man, and both sat down at the reception desk.
"Do you have him yet?" Mindbender asked right away. "You didn't kill him, did you?"
Firefly rolled his eyes. "Of course I killed him," he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "It is my fondest dream to set every remaining member of the clan on a vendetta against me. The deal was for capturing him, Mindbender," he continued, all traces of sarcasm gone. "He stays alive. And no, I don't have him yet. My traps are set and I expect him to spring them sometimes tomorrow."
"I have no desire to change our agreement; he is more useful to me alive than dead. Do you want to know what I'm up to?" he asked.
Firefly shrugged. "Not particularly," he said, waving his hand dismissingly. "Some kind of genetic experiment."
Mindbender nodded, satisfied. Firefly having no interest in his plans and dismissing them as mere experiments suited him perfectly: it made it that much less likely that the mercenary would find out exactly what those plans were and decide to warn the Commander that Cobra would soon be ruled by a brand new Emperor.
Author's Notes
No, no, don't run! Please trust me on this! I have plans for Serpentor, and I think they're good plans, honest!
Thanks for reading, and sorry for the long time between updates. I honestly thought it'd be faster this time, but real life stuff is going on; bad stuff that put my desire to write below zero for a while.
Motivation is still up and down, and will be for a good long while. I apologize in advance if updates continue to be slow. I'll try to make them closer together, but I can't promise anything.
