"It's alright. The way we have the camera positioned, no one can see you. We'll be altering your voice, too. It's perfectly safe." And yet, even in that dim light, he could tell that the shinobi sitting in the chair by the window trembled all over. His guest couldn't be much older than twenty.
"If you think anyplace is safe, then you're even stupider than you look." His accent was strong: carrying more than mere undertones from the Land of Wind. "There's no such thing as safe once your face is printed in a Bingo Book, and I am. They bumped me up a notch after I defected from Sunagakure."
A nervous laugh left his throat as he touched the book with his gloved hands, stroking his photograph. "It's three years old," he admitted. "No one's gotten a good look at me since I was seventeen. A lot can change in three years, especially in a place like Kemurigouken."
Tadashī was one of the very few people who could claim to be a Kemurigouken native. As a result, he knew all the monikers the city carried: the Land No One's Originally From, Coffin House Central, the Expatriate Purgatory, Corruption's Cocoon. Each one was more apt than the last.
"People come into this place in all kinds of forms," Tadashī's guest continued. "Yet those who really make it out here always take the same path, don't they? I know I did." The giggle that crawled out of his throat was high-pitched and manic as he stroked his face with a trembling hand. "I poured my entire savings into an implant and it's made all the difference."
"What are you doing now?" Tadashī inquired, pushing the camera closer. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
Tadashī was met with the shinobi's leg tapping the camera lens with his toe. Several weird appendages slithered out of his trouser leg: undulating and engorged. Each overly-flexible abomination was pink, throbbing, and wriggled about like greedy, flayed baby hands. "Stop pointing that fucking thing at me," the man warned. "You're making me uneasy."
…
The next person in the interview chair was an older man with enough white in his moss-colored hair to resemble frost on a dying garden. Even indoors, he chose to keep the hood of his parka up.
"You're sure you aren't warm in here?" Tadashī asked. "I can always crank the thermostat down to make you more comfortable." Though he knew why the hood stayed up. What he saw, the camera couldn't. Thank the heavens for tripods, or people would watch the film shake as he did!
The light shone around the old man: a sunlit corona, a crown of eye-shattering thorns burning into retinas with their unwanted radiance. The more it blackened out his horrible face, the better. "Don't worry yourself over me, young man. I moved here during the First Great War and have no intention of returning home. Home was too unstable, so I made a new one within your city's walled village."
Tadashī once more cringed. "That disgusting place? The Hidden Smog is where we dump our garbage ninjas! You're a–"
"Gang leader? Indeed, I am. And at one time, I was an honored Captain of the Guard. And yet…" The man shook his head. "What is one to do when your tiny little village sits perilously close to Iwagakure?"
"Where was home?" Tadashī asked.
"Numachigakure no Sato, within the Land of Estuaries," the man answered. He continued twisting a piece of wire into one of his long, thick braids. "It's small enough. You may have missed us entirely on your list of villages."
"Allow me to put this in perspective, sir. I interviewed an Akane girl from Koyamagakure. The Hidden Marsh is four times the size of the Hidden Knolls and I know about them. Your village–"
Then it came: the wry laugh of lamentation. "What an unfortunate creature that Akane must be! I've heard horror stories about her village. Numachigakure wasn't a bad place to live: so long as you praised Lord Takai just as loudly and sincerely as your neighbors…and never stopped to think about what would happen if the dam burst."
His hands, scarred and mangled as they were, reached toward the camera in an almost loving, beckoning embrace. Those hands said come hither, though Tadashī wanted to do the exact opposite. "As soon as Iwagakure started their Explosive Corps, they needed a place to test their bombs outside their city limits. The Land of Estuaries is a poor adjacent country. We may have avoided the first Great War, but we had no strong allies. It wasn't like we could put up much of a fight, right?"
Why did he expect Tadashī to nod his head as though he knew how war felt? He didn't. The Land of Smoke had never seen war, so Tadashī remained embarrassingly oblivious to that sort of hardship. Despite being forty-four years old, he had yet to step foot outside his city. There was never any reason to do so before.
"One wrong move," the old man groaned. "One angry ninja determined enough to end it all. One crazy enough bomber. That's all it would take to end our entire village's way of life. The dam that kept us alive for this long and made our village possible could tumble down at any given moment and flood the masses. I didn't want to live in constant fear of drowning or of the despot in charge; so I abandoned everything and moved here."
"The last man I interviewed said he spent all he had on transplants and augmentations." Tadashī eagerly leaned toward his guest. "Did you?" He wanted to see. Talking to these people was just like going to a freak show…minus the guilt and shame of having to pay for a ticket.
The old man stood, though he found it difficult to do so without supporting himself against the chair. "No," he confessed, though his hands reached for the edges of his hood. When the fabric came down to his shoulders, Tadashī nearly threw up. "But a medical ninja out here realized I possessed something valuable and wanted it for himself. Look at me, Tadashī-san. Look at what he did to me."
He couldn't. The camera dropped to the floor and all it picked up in the blackness was the wet and unwelcome sound of a man vomiting.
…
Next was a woman. She didn't mind having her face visible for the camera. Tadashī thought her to be a princely thing with strong, sturdy, handsome features. He quite liked the way she'd scraped her gray-and-brown hair away from her face with a pair of twin buns, though one strand stuck out and refused to stay down. Her eyes were piercing, though: a stark cobalt blue embellished by crow's feet and dark circles.
She cast judgment with every glance she gave him: a sly old hawk waiting for a mouse to make its stupid, stupid move. "I'm only here because you have information I need," she admitted. "I've heard countless people in Kemurigouken blather on about the black market medics, but one name above all others keeps coming up."
Tadashī knew the name, but he wished he didn't. "Uzumaki Shigeru?" The woman's smile only grew. "Why on earth would you want to find that guy?"
"Tadashī…" the woman growled with a warning to her tone. "I thought you said these interviews would be non-judgmental. Isn't it enough to know that I have my reasons?"
"No." He may have wanted the truth, but something about his current guest made him feel as though she'd kill him in a heartbeat if he disrespected her. The woman proceeded to unfasten one of the big brass buttons on her jade-colored ensemble. Tadashī caught sight of three ugly incision marks before she made it to the second button. "Did Shigeru do that to you?"
"No, but he'll need to do more," the woman replied as the second button unfastened. "I was always held in high regard back at home, at least to my face. I protected our borders, kept the wars away, and ensured our tiny town would grow into something grand. I only found out years later—once it was far too late—that I'd been gradually poisoned."
Then went another button. By now, Tadashī no longer wished to look. Sitting before him wasn't some pretty young thing with a nimble, nymph-like figure. This bitch had to be at least forty, maybe more.
"I started noticing a numb tingling in my hands and feet. They were constantly falling asleep and didn't move as nimbly as they used to. Blood transfusions helped, but…" But she still massaged her hands. "I then realized my body didn't heal from wounds as quickly as it used to. Even simple cuts could take a day or two to scab over and it didn't take much for me to bruise or bleed.
"I developed a cough that refused to go away. My blood pressure rose. I noticed my skin and the whites of my eyes were turning yellow. I'm not a medic, but I know enough to recognize what liver failure looks like. I was constantly getting sick and…"
It clearly angered her. The way her nails dug into the fabric of the armchair, scratching clean through the leather, caused her listener to wince. "Ma'am, that chair is–"
"You think I care about your stupid chair?" she hissed before regaining her composure. "The powers that be wanted me gone and needed to make it look like a natural death. They're good at that.
"I'd become a hero to our people. They loved me, but love can turn dangerous. They talked, starting to wonder if I could replace our leader. I had to be taken out of the equation and dealt with before I became too powerful. They nearly succeeded, too; but the joke's on them. I've turned to the black market to restore my failing health, and that journey finally took me here. And, rest assured, I will make myself whole again."
"And when you do…" Tadashī muttered, trying to hold back a scream. "…what do you plan to do?"
The woman didn't answer him. She just gave him the most terrifying smile he'd ever seen.
…
"I didn't even think people remembered the Musubime Clan," his next guest confessed. He buried his face in his hands, trying his best to calm himself down. It was to no avail, though. He'd probably never feel safe again. "But they did. Once people with kekkei genkai were no longer wanted in the Land of Water, we were given two options: move to the Land of Estuaries or move to the Land of Whirlpools. We dared not make anything remotely close to a fuss, but…"
He kept twisting a long and ragged piece of dark blue hair around an ebony finger. It snapped off, leaving a disembodied navy clump in the man's hand. "Someone told the Mugen Tribe where we were going before we ever made it there. Have you ever heard of them?"
Tadashī sighed. "Yes, but the people watching this documentary might not. Will you elaborate for them? Don't you feel the people need to know?"
"They're a trafficking ring," the man snapped. "The worst of the worst. The Mugen stalk vulnerable clans and hit us when we're at our weakest. They'll then give us a demand: surrender and become theirs to do with as they please or feel the consequences.
"I made a mistake." Another clump came out and the more upset he became, the thicker his real accent came out. "I thought we could handle them. I told my brothers and sisters to join me in battle against those monsters. What did we have to lose? We had a kekkei genkai and those bastards didn't."
"What does the Musubime Clan do? I'm sorry to interrupt, but–"
"I saw the Sand ninja you interviewed earlier this afternoon. I recognized him. That little shit augmented himself with Musubime parts." He rolled up his sleeve to show his bare, nearly inky black skin. Like pale pink worms, throbbing and wriggling appendages slid out of his taut flesh. "We were capable of extending our arteries, veins, and nerves. Our tissues worm their way through our victims' flesh: sapping away at their chakra as we control them from the inside like sad little meat puppets."
But it truly was disgusting to watch.
"We took about two dozen Mugen between the sixty remaining Musubime, but we were outmatched. As strong as our tissue may be, we can bleed out and die when it's severed. Only my sister Jagaimo and I survived…but they have a habit of sparing clan heads, you see. Jagaimo got away, but they put me in their human zoo. Then they had me fight other clan heads to the death for their own personal amusement.
"The Musubime are not a well-known clan, nor have we ever been. When I had an opportunity to run for it, I came here. Kemurigouken has a city population alone of 40 million. I thought a man could hide in obscurity out here and make a new life for himself. I…I thought I'd be safe…"
…
"…I wasn't. And it's alright, Tadashī-san. You're free to show my face to the camera. And should it offend people…" Tadashī expected an apology, considering his guest wore a mask. It never came. All that left instead was a morose laugh. "Then good. They should be offended. Maybe seeing somebody who survived a harvest will deter them from enabling this fucked up practice to continue."
The mask came off and despite all his years of sensitivity training, Tadashī shrieked like a startled woman. The man's face was horribly marred. Two empty sockets where his eyes once were accusingly glared in the direction of the camera. Half an ear was gone. Considering how ragged the tear marks appeared, Tadashī had a sneaking suspicion the ear had been chewed off rather than surgically amputated. This poor bastard was nothing but a living, breathing wall of agony.
"I had the kerryūgan once."
'I see…' If Tadashī remembered his clans correctly, then that meant his guest was from the Chinoike Clan. Those people were so rare that the black market referred to them as 'unicorns.' "I thought your clan was rendered extinct. They were lost to the history books."
"Does it even matter at this point?" the man snapped. "My eyes were ripped out of my sockets—without anesthesia, I might add! We EMBRACE that kind of culture in your filthy city! For the right price, you can buy anyone or anything! We ENCOURAGE it and it makes me SICK! There are hundreds, maybe thousands, just like me in this place and I hate it! I hate it so MUCH! But tell me something. Do you have enough footage of our suffering to prove your point?"
"I think so. I really think so…"
"Good for you," the man hissed sarcastically. "I look forward to hearing your film and all these other testimonies. This madness needs to stop and the world needs to know what goes on here. There's only one small problem."
"Hm?"
"There's no way the Daimyo would permit you to go any further with this project. How do you plan to make this film, Tadashī, when you know how illegal it is?"
