Note: Things will start getting a bit more intense after this chapter. We're starting to get to the stuff I'm more looking forward to, I think.
9
Clung to its flower
Butterfly sips silently
Its whole world is there
It was her third and final year in the academy. She'd flown through the courses, pushed to higher and higher advanced levels, and would be taking her exit exam at the end of the year. In the middle of a lecture about summoning, Inazuma raised her hand. Some of her classmates (most of them older than her) glared at her for breaking the teacher's monologue; they'd been getting away with dozing, faces pressed against their wooden desks. Many of them had been using their scarves as pillows, since it was late autumn and temperatures was getting quite cold outside, and the school never turned the heater up very high. Supposedly it built their character and resilience, but Inazuma's father swore that the Village treasury was just too cheap to spend money on heating.
"Yes, Miss Hachi?"
"Is it possible to summon people? For fighting, I mean."
The teacher, a grey-haired, retired shinobi, looked a little taken aback. No one had asked him such a question before. He set down the chalk that he'd been using to draw diagrams on the chalkboards.
"I suppose it is possible…" the teacher frowned, "though I've never heard of it used before, outside of ceremonial procedures like chuunin examinations. Usually a summoning contract is needed between animal summons and the summoner, but I've never heard of using human summons in battle. They're probably illegal. Who would want to be summoned when they were in the middle of something important just to be used in someone else's battle?"
"Oh, okay." The teacher went back to his lecture, and his students went back to sleeping. Inazuma frowned at her notebook. She'd long since figured out that Sasori was a rouge ninja of some sort, but had never really gotten much farther than that.
She had done a lot of extra studying in the library over the past years in an attempt to figure things out, but could never seem to find exactly what she was looking for, although she'd found a great deal of cool-looking jutsu. There was even an interesting zapping jutsu for those who were lightning-natured, which could be used to seize up opponents' muscles and nerves and made them incapable of moving the affected parts of their body. She'd taken notes on that one.
It was then, as she mulled over the possibilities of human summoning, among her sleeping classmates and droning teacher, she felt an odd tug just behind her heart.
And she disappeared in a puff of smoke.