I've found it.

In my two years of work- obsession, honestly- I've been searching for the perfect collection of birds to base my… ambition on. I'm working out the patterns, and I'd rather just use the feathers of actual birds to base my seal-patches on. No need to reinvent the wheel.

I've discarded most of the smaller birds I can get my hands on- sparrows and finches are too… small. They don't fly the way I want them to- they're perfectly nice birds, just, their feather's aren't… what I want. Hummingbirds are much too small, but the one I found out in the sheep-glade is special, somehow; it has interesting things going on with it's shoulders and it's wing-muscles, and the ability to hover is something- I might not exactly desire it, but I won't turn it away. It'd be useful for a safety measure, at the very least. I can't make them not hum, though- not in their base state, which is annoying. I thought a hawk would be what I wanted, but the peregrine falcon is only half right- it's got the high speed I want, and the internal mechanics to make high speed flights non-lethal. The patterning on it's feathers, however, is something I very much admire- I think that's something I can keep.

It's what I found last week that's gotten me so excited- a raven, approximately the same size as my falcon. I've already made the humming undersuit- it keeps me from falling, even though the first time I ever tried to use it, it… didn't work.

I kind of… had to jump off a cliff to make it work.

And it works.

The humming sound it made when it activated was not terribly loud- but it's louder than I wanted it to be. There are Iga seals for silence- they modify easily into the hummingbird seals. Once they do, it's not hard to make a hawk's overcoat.

I black out the first time I use the overcoat- thankfully, the undersuit kept me from taking a permanent dirt nap. That's when I made the mask- well. Masks.

I think I burned through like- seventy? Seventy-five? Different iterations of my Karasu Tengu mask. There's a pattern for Tengu masks of various kinds in the clan library- Karasu Tengu was one of them. Some of them didn't slow the air enough for me to breathe- some of them didn't filter the air right.

I've woken up in ANBU-san's arms so many times- I don't know why they haven't tried to stop me yet. They have carried me home though. Mostly, they stay away- try not to laugh when I jump off of rocks and belly-flop into the dirt.

I'll show them.

I'll show them all.

I've finished my raven-y additions to my overcoat. It's big, and blue, and kind of fluffy with padding- but I know I'll grow out of that.

I'm going to fly. The Three as my witness, I am going to fly. Maybe then I'll be able to…

And that's it that's the first arc let's see where we can fucking go with this.