Chapter Two

The next morning, Shadow rose out of bed and stretched as she turned off the annoying chakra powered clock and trudged to her closet. She had never been a morning person no matter how early she had trained herself to wake up. As she walked to her closet she tripped on her other foot and fell head first into the back of her closet.

"Aw, oww." She moaned as she rubbed her forehead. She was usually fairly balanced, but every so often she somehow found the uncanny ability to trip on herself and in the process hit her head. Hard.

After picking herself up and brushing herself off, berating herself mentally for making herself feel even stupider than usual, she picked her normal uniform; a blue dress that ended at mid-thigh with short sleeves sagging just around her shoulders. Matching blue shorts were worn just underneath and fishnet stockings were pulled just barely past mid-thigh with knee high boots that had openings for her toes were quickly shoved on. She tied her headband around her waist, grabbed her bag, and walked into the main room of her small one floor home.

Her house was, in one word, simple. It had only five tiny rooms total, the full white main room with the door leading outside, the tiny kitchen to the right, her room that was full with only the essentials, a bathroom, and a small guest room where she usually worked on papers. There was also another small bed situated in a corner of the main room for when she was too tired to even crawl into her own room, but usually it was just there if she ever had company, if ever. It was more of a sofa than anything…

She never bothered to use her drawers for anything but paper work, since her bag was bottomless and had no limit to items, hence the name "eternal bag." It was a rare item she had acquired from an important mission as an ANBU, and had found it quite useful ever since. Any owner of the bag could store their chakra through it for later use, and the bag slowly used a small portion of said chakra to transport the items packed in to a separate area where the items lie and since Shadow had an unexplainably large pool of chakra, the bag worked out perfectly. She reached a hand into her bag to pull out the small black bands she wore around her wrists and slipped them on.

As she headed out the door with food, money, and clothes she took a deep breath, smelling the crisp morning air in the Leaf village, and sighing. Might as well take a few deep breaths before I leave this place for a while.

She smiled to herself as she thought back to her encounter with Sakura the previous day. Apparently she had made it her mission to make Shadow, 'smile' a genuine smile, and she had also gathered other girls in the village who had decided to 'help', as far as she understood. In one way, Shadow saw it as a sweet action and she appreciated it, but in another she found them annoying and considered moving out of the village just to escape them.

After staring at her map of the Land of Fire and figuring out which way she was supposed to travel, she turned left, and headed out of the village.

By mid-morning Shadow was just about one-third of the journey done, and she was glad that she had figured out how to use her 'telekinesis' to travel around with. When she was younger, she always wondered what to do with it and by seventeen she had finally figured out how to control it. It was another one of those unfortunate things she had to live with herself, though at the moment, did not have a known cause.

As she neared a small river she sighed to herself, and had already begun to take her clothes off. Ever since she was able to swim, she loved water because another thing she had found out she could do, was the ability to control it freely. It was an odd advantage, but naturally it had its disadvantages too. Whenever she was near large bodies of water, she always felt the urge to jump in and whenever she resisted she got strange itches and felt mentally ill.

After taking off her outer clothes she was left in her wrappings that formed underclothes and jumped in; then she floated watching the clouds pass when she heard a twig snap by. Alert now, she got up into a water fighting position, glad that she had stopped near a stream. She looked around her, looking for the source of the sound when something walked out from behind a tree.

A puppet? She thought, curiosity beginning to shape.

It was a very ugly puppet. It was dirty and had three eyes, with very messy hair and some tattered dirty black rags that could've counted as a cape or, even more unimaginable, clothes. It looked to be about four feet tall and stood in front of the trees silently, with its coal black eyes staring at her blankly.

Shadow relaxed her stance only slightly; still watching the puppet warily. "Humph... You seem to be a long way from home Mr. Puppet because I don't seem to have recalled seeing any stalls or shops on my way here," Shadow said sarcastically. The puppet stared at her; then suddenly a kunai shot out from its mouth!

Shadow ducked just in time, not bothering to look behind her as she heard the thunk! of the weapon embedding itself into a tree.

"Stupid thing... So you're here for a fight huh? Fine then, I'm ready when you are," she said darkly, almost tauntingly. A sardonic smile passed her lips and almost as if on cue the puppet shot several more kunai blades.

Shadow moved her right arm high into the air and as she did so a sheet of water from the river followed; almost as if the water were an extension of herself. She allowed the kunai to be caught into the water, and then flung them back at the attacker. As the kunai flew toward it she advanced out of the water and onto the sandy banks of the water. Her feet sunk into the sand gently and she began to move closer towards her enemy.

The puppet jumped, and Shadow swore she could've heard an almost mechanical whirring inside as it did so. It began to fling poison smoke bombs at Shadow; by instinct she had rolled out of the way but as she did so though she hadn't noticed a second puppet come out from her right side, ramming her into a tree.

"Ungh!" she yelled as she impacted the tree painfully, she felt the warm liquid drip out from the corner of her mouth. Great. I'm bleeding. She thought angrily. She studied the new puppet, which was larger than the last. It too shared the same baggy hair and three black eyes, but unlike the other one this one had small horns reaching towards the sky. She stumbled to her knees Shadow caught sight of something silver and glowing coming out of the huge puppets backs.

Someone must be controlling this thing. She thought. That's it! I need to cut the strings! Cut the strings cut the strings! She thought frantically.

She cart wheeled and dodged various weapons that were flung at her until she reached her bag, grabbed her special fans quickly, and jumped onto the puppet. It bucked wildly, trying to throw her off but she held on tightly and quickly scrambled down to its legs, reaching the glowing strings and swiftly cutting all four in one fluid motion. The puppet stopped, its body tensing, and it shuddered, then fell, crashing down right on top of Shadow.

Edited: August 7, 2012