"So, Mana, you feel like calling it now?" Kiyomi looked at the magician, leaning over to her side.
The question pulled her out from deep inside her thoughts. That in itself took a moment for Mana to recover from. After having realized that she left her friend hanging on a thread awkwardly, Mana smiled and shrugged, her face irradiated apologetic innocence as she did.
"Sorry, maybe Hokage-sensei actually wants to take my place?" Mana glared at the team leader again, she was well aware that Hanasaku had opted to not involve herself in the game of her students, instead choosing to preside over it, but she had secretly hoped that seeing Meiko and Kiyomi in their usual antics would cheer the woman up and help her get in the mood.
"Nah, the only thing I'm up for is a visit to the Shushu-ya. You guys may be emancipated but I'm not dragging a bunch of teens into a pub to get wasted", Hanasaku chuckled, pressing her fists against her sides and spreading her arms out in an almost heroic pose. Only Chestnut Hanasaku could speak about wanting to get a drink in a heroic pose.
"You wouldn't happen to have a date with someone, sensei, would you?" Kiyomi poked Hanasaku's back with an elbow. The Yamanaka did have a point, due to its mostly adult-focused clientele, Shushu-ya was a popular dating spot, particularly for couples who were well past the first date stage.
"What are you talking about!?" Hanasaku chuckled throwing a lazy smack, aimed across Kiyomi's back. Wisely enough, the Yamanaka dodged it just in time. After spending so much time with the woman, Kiyomi was a fair judge of how unpredictable the strength of the Sannin was.
"It's Meiko's turn, in that case. I guess it's Yakiniku-Q for us", Mana sighed while looked at Meiko who was just grinning with a dumb face while watching Kiyomi and Hanasaku talk about the team mentor's secrets.
"How do you know that?" Meiko objected before pouting and blowing out her cheeks as she was deep in thought, trying to prove Mana wrong by coming up with a superior alternate place to spend her allotted time in. After a short while, the blacksmith folded her hand and breathed out a heavy cloud of dust, air and frustration, one she had held pressed inside her lungs for quite some time. "Fine… It's Yakininku-Q".
The trio that accompanied Meiko laughed out together. Mana found her eyes warmly growing fond of the time she was spending with her friends. She loved by how easily she had read Meiko, why would she not? After all, the two things that the redhead loved most of all were constructing and eating and she had not done that last one in quite a while. Most ninja could be without food for an extreme amount of time, Meiko was just of the kind that chose not to be.
Yakiniku-Q was decently crowded, as usual. Mana exhaled in frustration after remembering the smells of meat, all the exotic sauces and spices from all around the world being prepared in the widest array of ways, the aroma of flowers, cooked vegetables, and smoky cheese circulating in the air and softly caressing one's nose with a lover's touch. Now the only thing pulling on her nostrils was the nihility of stuffy air inside, a costly, yet the least so, price for her improved sensory abilities.
It was at empty moments of lowness like this that Mana enjoyed recalling the fact that she was by far nowhere near to being a food consumption aficionado, she just liked preparing it. What actually did aid her in pushing away the vile price she had paid for power was seeing Meiko drooling all over her flashy circus tuxedo and continuously tumbling over her large boots and losing her cylinder in the process while she made her way to the table.
"Ewww! What's that?" Meiko shriveled when observing the sticky crawfish in Mana's plate, the poor thing looked like a zombified yet still remarkably fishy version of itself. Looking quite dead with pale and empty white eyes but retaining its dark, lake-green color while its shell appeared to behave more like a dry potato and crumble upon the first poke of one's utensil.
"It's shellfish prepared in the acid of the slugs of the Shikkotsu Forest." Mana smiled before she raised the exceptionally dead carcass of the crawfish and slurped the oozy remains from inside its crumbly shell, leaving the remains to collapse into dust that, Mana knew from bitter experience from her youth, tasted like wet sand.
"Is it good? It looks really atrocious, which means it must be good!" Meiko sobbed like a child looking at Mana gulping the slimy mass down her throat and closing her eyes to appreciate the taste. Despite it sliding down her throat rather heavily, the delicacy was a long requiem of what Mana once used to taste when consuming it.
"It is. I consider the acid of ninja slugs to be the best marinate solution." Mana grinned. It was a deceitful smile, the painfully absent sense of smell also came with an unpleasant side effect of robbing the magician of more than two-thirds of her taste reception. Things tasted severely different to her from that day on, only the most profound tastes ever registered on her scale whereas everything she used to love as a child and young teen tasted like cardboard.
Eating no longer felt like an enjoyable experience, as little of it as Mana did, it was more a mandatory ritual of self-preservation that brought the magician no pleasure whatsoever. At least when she tasted something as vile-smelling and exotic as shellfish prepared in this special solution she could feel remnants of what the food would have tasted like had she retained her senses intact.
"Wow, Mana, I never took you for a savant of food…" Kiyomi looked at Mana with concern. The magician pushed the plate off her side suggesting that this one crawfish was as much as she could handle. Meiko looked at Mana's emptied plate, with only the dust of the crumbled crawfish shell residing in it and whined out.
"I want it!"
Sensing opportunity for profit, the waitress appeared by Meiko's side almost immediately. Mana had to give Yakiniku-Q credit, this time the establishment was far better equipped and staffed to handle Meiko's legendary appetite and capricious eating tendencies.
"I want that! That molten crawfish thing!" Meiko declared by shooting her fist up into the sky.
"It will cost you, ma'am, we are getting our shellfish and marinate solution from the Shushu-ya and preparing them or reselling them here." The waitress nodded her head, warning Meiko that what she was about to order was quite expensive and to be eaten in smaller quantities.
"I'll have to agree, don't overdo it. The taste is also quite overpowering so, even if you manage to stuff it all down after the multiple helpings of barbecue you've had, your appetite will fade away after the first few contacts of your tongue with the goopy flesh of the shellfish." Mana seconded.
"Whatever, I want all of it! Mana makes it sound so appetizing!" Meiko pouted her lips, smacking the table with surprising restraint as the thing did not as much as flip over, let alone break, as was usually the state of affairs with Chestnut Hanasaku or her more physically gifted student.
"Very well…" the waitress sighed before disappearing gracefully, dancing around the crowded tables like a swan before reaching the kitchen.
"That's not what I meant at all!" Mana objected, barely managing to keep down her instinct to erupt into laughter as Meiko once again completely took her warning the wrong way. "The acid of the ninja slugs is very potent, the most powerful slugs can melt away even B-Rank ninja in mere milliseconds with the solution, it is also overflowing with chakra stored in the slime of their fat bodies. Granted, the solution used here is not the offensive type acid but a largely neutralized mixture but…"
"Ugh, stop it Mana! I can't take it. I wanna try it even more now!" Meiko pressed her large hand against Mana's face, shutting not just Mana's mouth but covering over two thirds of her face.
"This can only end in disaster." Kiyomi shook her head.
While the magician seconded the worries of her high-blooded friend, she had to admit that she would enjoy future visits to Yakiniku-Q after finding out that they were making Shushu-ya's more exotic menu items available in their menus as well, albeit with a bonus to the price as greasy as their barbecue. Shushu-ya had a reputation as an adult-oriented restaurant which lead to kids that enjoyed liquor sweets or the more exotic recipes that Shushu-ya offered having difficulties treating themselves.
"Ugh, I wish I had not eaten so much of it… The taste was so authoritative and the dish was so stuffing!" Meiko shrieked out before lavishly sprawling out in the seat making Kiyomi turn aside before realizing that Meiko's newly redefined boundaries of personal space were much to her liking, after which case, she playfully acted offended but began moving in closer to her friend bit by bit.
"There…" the waitress provided the check with a devilish smile.
"I don't suppose Mana's preferred activity of the evening is washing the dishes for a thousand years." Chestnut Hanasaku tsked after looking at the cost of what the great red-haired demon of consumption had just devoured.
"For this price, I'd have to do missions for my entire lifetime and then my grandchildren would still be indebted…" Mana exclaimed in shock after glaring at the small sheet of paper that was now by far the largest roadblock in her team's path.
"Meiko, you gorgeous idiot!" Kiyomi smacked the blacksmith at the back of her head before rubbing and dragging the sharper parts of her fist all over Meiko's scalp but the redhead refused to defend herself from this righteous punishment. "After we pay this up, I won't be able to look at a plate for my entire life! We are genin, we may end up having to wash dishes for the next foreseeable year! We're so dead!"
Mana rubbed her forehead. This felt like the time that she had to do something. She could recall once spending her time during a training holiday at the Yakiniku-Q outside tables after Tanshu-sensei had left for the Kage Summit but before she had found out the terrible outcome of it. She knew that one of the waitresses that worked here was a fan of her shows. She did not know what to do with the two clashing facts of the debt and the tremendous love for magic that the staff of Yakiniku-Q had but… Something had to be done.
If nothing else worked, well, nothing quite united parting friends like mandatory menial labor.
"Ma'am, we have a big problem with…" Mana started talking, she was far too embarrassed to admit the problem and the surrounding noises of people interacting casually collided into a cacophony that completely muzzled her speech.
"Wakizashi Meiko's table, right?" The woman sighed in unease. The feeling in the woman's eyes was not horror, it was more akin to slight irritation, almost like this was not the first time that Meiko caused the establishment logistical and financial issues. The fact that the woman knew Meiko's name only added to that assessment. "The price of the Shikkotsu shellfish is too much?"
Mana's lips turned to the side, the child in her chest kept trying to pull at her strings and try to lie, wriggle about and deny any responsibility. Luckily, Mana had paid her inner child no mind for the longest time now.
"Uhm… Yes, unfortunately. Even if one of us was allowed home to get more money, I doubt that any of us, even Hokage-sensei, would be able to get this much money. I'm not sure if you know but… I do magic shows downtown, maybe I could perform here to attract more customers or give your restaurant exclusive rights to ads or something?" Mana rubbed the back of her head, ruffling her wild black hair erratically.
"I'm… Really not the person you'd need to talk to about this sort of thing, I'm just serving here", the waitress appeared to be getting just as uneasy. This was a good sign, even if she was not important enough, Mana's suggestion was alluring enough, which meant her brand was strong enough, for the woman to not dismiss the opportunity outright.
"Ladies, I have accidentally overhead your conversation." A formally dressed, tall and well-aged man stepped in. "I may have a solution that will satisfy both of you."
Mana did not like this. If this man was just a kind soul, he had no idea what type of sum he is walking into, that will just make this situation less and less stable. If he was rich enough to cover Team Hokage's debt, he'd likely ask for something just as heavy in return. An unfitting outcome to the Team Hokage's last ride together.
"Are you planning to cover Sorceress-san's debt?" The waitress sighed in ease. She clearly liked this development, her eyes also appeared to be familiar with the man as they looked at him with similar closeness as the woman looked at Meiko with. This one must have been a regular in this place, but to what end?
"Well… Not really but… In a manner of speech, I suppose." The man countered. Mana knew that face, that subtle twisting tongue, it was the tongue of a man who had something to hide. She had met enough of those in the years she's worked as a ninja, most of her co-workers were just this type of people, it was a trait of occupational excellence so it really could not have been helped.
"Wait a second, Sir, do you work for Hanada Katsuo?" Mana stepped in. The last thing she wanted was to be somehow indebted to that vile man again after cutting all ties with him so effectively.
"Ummm… Well, this is not the correct question, in a manner of speech, I, of course, do. But… In this case, it isn't quite relevant as to why I am here." The man began wriggling again, like a worm. And yet… His stature, his speech and tone were oddly not worm-like, Mana could read that the man was being very foreclosing and merely caught by a barrage of wrong questions. In that case…
"Before I ask you to explain yourself, please tell me one thing. You do not have ties with the mysterious nukenin who is, for some reason, interested in me and may be related to the disappearances around the village?"
"That one I can shut down very firmly. I do not know what you are talking about, my business is strictly related to other legal and physical persons residing their interests solely inside the walls of Konohagakure." The man looked relieved to have finally gotten the chance to speak clearly, without revealing things he could not reveal or otherwise incriminating himself.
"Ugh… I'm wasting my work hours here. Could you please explain if you're paying for Sorceress-san, or not?" The frustrated waitress tapped her foot impatiently.
"Oh, well… Technically, she will be paying the debt herself but… Oh… Just… Forward the debt to this account please." The incredibly well-spoken old timer handed the young waitress a sheet of paper.
"Sir, are you aware that forwarding transactions will be charged with an…" the woman tried informing the man of some extra payments but the man just gently silenced her.
"Yes, please, you will find that the debt and whatever service tax you apply will not even scratch the surface of this account. I apologize for interrupting, but you said you were in a hurry to settle this matter, young ma'am." The man explained.
"Whatever…" the waitress just waved the sheet of paper above her head before disappearing into the kitchen.
"What was that all about, whose account was that?" Mana raised a curious eyebrow.
"Oh, excuse me, young lady, I am merely a manager of finances for a specific client I cannot disclose the identity of. I believe this case to be within both my liberty at controlling my client's finances and my duty to work for her best interests. As of the owner of this account, you will come to know the answer to that question in due time." The man smiled before bowing his head, almost like he implied some moderate amount of subordination to Mana. This gesture confused the magician a little.
"Well, I suppose I am lucky that you like barbecue as much as you do and happened to overhear this conversation." Mana looked at the man with a sharp glare. Her tone was slow but distrustful. She was being courteous with the man as well as grateful but his secrecy rubbed her off in all the wrong ways, even if it appeared to be duty-bound and professional type secrecy, not a conspiracy-type malicious one.
"I am afraid you misunderstand, young lady, this establishment merely hosts another one of my clients whose finances I manage. This was no suspicious accident that I overhead this conversation, so please, rest your mind at ease." The man tried to calm Mana down. "You may return to your very hasty friends now if you wish."
"Well, anyway, thank you, Sir for the… I'm not sure if I should call it a favor or just doing your job. I hope I find out whose account it was soon then. I can't stand mysteries." Mana managed to both be grateful and warn the man all at the same time. The magician almost felt proud of how much subtext she managed to stuff into just one handful of dull toned sentences.
"Oh, it's just my duty, young lady. For your sake, I hope you don't find that out for a long time to come. Have the best of what's left of this day." The manager of the finances of the mysterious someone nodded their head letting Mana just nod in gratitude again and return to her confused team.
"It was really kind of that guy to pay off our debt!" Meiko whistled into the air as the girls wandered the village streets that have already begun to grow dim.
"Gee, I wonder whose fault it was that we got into that pickle, to begin with?" Kiyomi squinted at Meiko's side, the redhead just laughed with innocence and apology in her eyes, yet her extended palms tried shaking off any remnants of responsibility.
"I blame Mana, personally. Her description was what hyped me to try it!" Meiko joked.
"Is everything okay, Mana?" Hanasaku leaned up to Mana's side, noticing that the magician was walking rather quiet and tuned out of the conversation.
"It's just… With the Chuunin Exams, I have come to forget just how many questions the world around me made me ask. So many secrets all around me, so many people doing so many things for reasons that are a mystery to me and I don't like it." Mana replied, still feeling a bit suspicious of what happened in Yakiniku-Q.
"Hmph, you're just like one of my brothers. I could never understand them, really. Meiko, on the other hand, I get perfectly – both of us don't care who is doing what and for what reasons. If we don't like them – we pound them. Things we don't understand don't worry us, but people like you are much different. Things you don't understand are things that make you worry the most." Hanasaku rubbed Mana's head, messing the magician's hair but Mana did not mind. This was the first time that the woman ever treated her like an equal student of hers to the rest of the Team Hokage. Perhaps there was no better time for that than Team Hokage's last day together.
"Tanshu-sensei was like that?" Mana wondered.
"Oh, not Little Bro. Misu of the Vapor was like that. Always bothered what other people knew, what other people were thinking. Always working in the shadows so that his family and friends could live easy and did not need to worry about those things." Hanasaku recalled.
This revelation shocked Mana to the core. The magician's nose sunk down to the ground and tears started accumulating in the girl's eyes. Being able to relate to the killer of her mentor was not something she ever hoped to achieve. Seeing the magician's distress and how Mana tried to hide her tears, Hanasaku stopped without as much as a warning.
"Well, it's been a fun and busy day. I'm afraid we'll have to cut it short." She said.
"What? But Mana still didn't have a turn!" Meiko objected. "She was the one that pulled us out of trouble in Yakiniku-Q, it's so unfair!"
"Mana… What's wrong?" Kiyomi saw Mana's tears despite her attempts to hide them away to the best of her ability. The magician was never the best at hiding and sneaking things behind people's backs, this made her success as a ninja all the more surprising.
"It's… Nothing, I just really did not look forward to saying goodbye." Mana made something up. Then again, she was not lying that badly. Had her eyes been dry by the time they parted ways, they would have surely been running in rivers once that time came.
"I see. We aren't walking separate paths forever, you know. We'll just be working separately for a while until we can catch up to your rank, that's it." Kiyomi tried easing the pain of separation a bit more.
Mana's feet could no longer feel the ground beneath her feet after the magician tried wiping the tears out of her eyes she noticed that the strong pressure around her arms did not let her do even that much. Meiko had hugged her and lifted her up and off the ground.
"If someone, at any point, makes you cry like this. You tell us. We'll kick their ass for sure!" Mana could somewhat make out Meiko's smile through the tears.
"Well. I guess we're off then. Shit, I think Hanasaku-sensei just did this to get to spend more time in Shushu-ya." Kiyomi spoke, her voice was shaking too. She tried to be the big sister but it was clear that her eyes were about to water too.
The girls bumped their fists against each other before separating and walking their separate ways. This entire day Mana felt like she was not a part of the Team Hokage family, Meiko and Kiyomi just seemed to be so close, tied by more bonds than just casual friendship and kinship of comrades. Chestnut Hanasaku will probably never completely trust Mana but…
Only walking away from a true family ever hurt this much!