"It is a common misconception that one does not need to know geography, after all, why bother? Can't children name every Great Ninja Country? I'm sure that if you asked a civilian brat kicking a ball of rags they would only hesitate for a second before shooting it like a bag of peas at you," tutor Karlee, a familiar face to Mana from her unfortunate clash with Sekita, began elaborating in front of a map large enough to fit all sixty-four of the settlements in the edge between the woods of the Fire Country and the deserts of the Wind Country alone.
Tutor Karlee was a unique teacher since she managed to maintain a grasp over an audience and not necessarily because of the fact that she managed to pour the subject she was teaching in an attractive manner nor was it because of the remarkable devotion to learning it from the side of the recruits. To be truthful, Mana couldn't really pinpoint a single reason. She suspected that the youthful and exotic appearance of the tanned-skinned woman, her rich make-up, and lacking in substance clothing had something to do with attracting a part of the audience.
Even if titillation played no part in the natural draw of the woman toward what she spoke of, she just looked weird enough with her giant stone headdress and almost antique accessories and decorations to attract attention even if she was talking about geography and tried hammering down the fundamentals of rivers, lakes, and settlements present around the world in the three months that the recruits had to learn it all before her subject intertwined with that of tutor Takuro in a more detailed geopolitics course.
"M-Mana…" a muzzled whisper came from Damisan's side. Mana turned to her side, curious as to what it might have been to prompt Damisan to call out to her during a tense moment of the lecture. "C-Could you maybe… Take notes for me?"
Mana blinked a couple of times before the full-picture took hold of her mind and she realized that Damisan had no arms and only stood on one prosthetic leg at the moment after detonating three of his vital prosthetics in the clash against Shogito's gang during the war games. She wasn't sure how long it would take for him to put a set of new ones together.
"Ummm… Sure, sorry, I just sort of assumed that you'd have a new set of prosthetics by the time I got out of the ward," Mana blushed in embarrassment as she reached out over Endo's hawkish stare and slipped Damisan's notes closer to her so that she could record it in his notebook and then copy it at her leisure afterward. She did, after all, possess the luxury of both arms.
"No biggie. I guess it's hard to tell if I've got my prosthetics fixed or not when I'm always cloaked all over, huh? Thanks a bunch!" Damisan nodded with what Mana felt like was a rich smile underneath the holed tin bucket that he wore for a masking accessory to hide his face. For someone who lacked the limbs to do much of anything and was severely disfigured, Damisan sounded like someone who was just lent some pocket change to buy some dango from the vendor down the street as a treat.
"Yo, Skaven! How about joining our gang?" Shige-H extended yet another invitation after the class was over, scouting out the loner from a massive group of recruits.
"Oh, wow… You know what, I think my answer hasn't changed since yesterday and the last fifteen thousand times you asked," Skaven raised his fist up in dismissal without interacting much with the troublesome gang or even looking at any one of its members once. Mana had to hand it to Shige-H, the woman could track that young man from a crowd with incredible precision and perception.
"Hey, Mana," Endo moved up to Mana to where they could almost touch their shoulders which only failed to make the magician nauseous because she needed some time for the belching instinct to build up though the stimulus had been more than fueled with this gesture. "The freak asked you to write for him for almost two hours straight and you did it. Why?"
"Is that why you were so constipated the whole time through? It's because I care and want to help," Mana replied coldly. Endo might have been the first non-Kirigakure native whom Mana set out hating from the get-go as opposed to the person in question needing to put in a drastic amount of work to earn the magician's ire.
"I see. That feels counterproductive and seems like something that would get you killed, also it isn't something I expected to see from you in particular," Endo pondered out loud to himself. He had a habit of offending everyone around him with a casual tone as if he was just telling them a shortcut to the library. "Is that why you supply me with notes as well? Even though we're fated enemies…"
"Fated enemies?" Mana mumbled out. "I don't like you at all, which is a new experience for me, but we're not enemies. We're in the same gang, apparently…"
"Ah, I see, yes, it was short-sighted of me to miss the band aspect. It makes more sense now why you'd engage in this charity work. It is your way of being useful, I suppose," Endo stroked his chin deep in thought.
"Also, just so we're straight, I'm not giving you my notes. I'm giving them to Shige-H. It's just so that she happens to hand them to you before giving them back to me," Mana beamed a flare at the asshole, hoping he'd pick up on it though it seemed like his skin was so thick that he only comprehended hatred when it came at a degree similar to something akin to a blood feud.
"Shige-H-san, your show at the war games last week was amazing!" a bunch of faces Mana didn't know surrounded Shige-H, babbling praise without end with a sprinkle of requests to join the gang or questions when she'd be looking for new faces for her team.
"Has this been a thing?" Mana wondered, pointing at Shige-H and the wave of recruits washing the gang leader away and storming her with questions the influx of which was visibly beginning to make her head dizzy.
"Yep!" Tomi nodded her head, pouting her lips. "She won't even show up to my tea parties. Mana, will you bring your rabbits along? I don't have many rabbit friends so your rabbits are most of those that I have!"
"I will, though, maybe in the evening. Now I've got some reading up to do or else we'll start falling behind of our stellar reputation," Mana answered the lovely teen with a warm smile. Tomi pouted her lips and blew out her cheeks, sticking out her tongue and turning away from the magician. By now Mana had spent enough time around the kid to know that it was just a mood swing and that she'll be doing Mana's hair by the evening and singing songs in the dorm room.
"Cheer up, brat, unlike being a mascot or a one-man freak show of the gang which comes naturally to you guys, Mana needs to work hard to serve her role. None of us want her outliving her usefulness, do we?" Endo crossed his arms, turning to little Tomi as if he was mentoring her. Frankly, Tomi didn't even seem to pick up on the fact that she was being insulted to her face as she just blew out her lips as if Endo just blew her mind and taught her something new here.
"Hey, if you need help working with those prosthetic limbs, maybe I can help?" Mana wondered, stepping in closer to Damisan to try and distract him from having been called a freak to his face twice when he was already plenty sensitive about his appearance and impairment.
"Oh? Do you have a background in engineering or puppetry?" Damisan wondered. It didn't sound like he was dismissing Mana's suggestion or being rude, his tone made the bucket-head sound genuinely curious.
"Well, no… But my father had plenty and I used to help him tinker with tools when his arms got injured. I'm good with following instructions since the smallest mistake made him frustrated and the pain of his trauma already left him with plenty of that to start out with. I can't say I've picked up a thing or two from him but my hands are as precise as they get for that sort of work so I can offer them whenever you need them," Mana smiled.
"Hot damn, thanks! I will really need someone's help with that. Rebuilding your prosthetics from scratch is not something you think about when you turn them into missiles and try blowing people up, I'll tell you that for free!" Damisan became pumped, he'd have put up his fists to assist him with his enthusiastic nod but given how he lacked the limbs needed for it, he just bowed his upper body without his hands. Laughter spread from behind.
"That looked so freaky, like a lunging snake or a worm or something…" Endo snickered after regaining control over his fit.
"Can you just shut up for one second and maybe stop harassing Damisan?" Mana growled, she didn't recognize the pent up aggression but she stepped out of line to get all up in the face of the taller young man and beam spite at him from below.
"What do you care? It's not like you can see his tears from under the bucket anyway…" Endo hissed out. The worst part of all was that he didn't intend to go anywhere which left Mana no options but to turn and walk away. She didn't want to just abandon her crew after she already spent the last four days away from them in which, apparently, they've built up quite the reputation of their own, having pummeled a bunch of upperclassmen before the entire assemblage of recruits, even though ultimately they didn't win, but Endo's behavior made her want to either do something she didn't want to do or retreat as far away from the temptation of forsaking her life's creed as possible.
"Sorry, sorry guys, we're not recruiting. Well… To be more exact, our ranks are reserved for the original roster of the crew, and not all of us are yet completely on board with this project of mine. M-Mana, where are you going?!" Shige-H yelled out to Mana's back as the magician rushed up the stairs so that everything that made her want to howl in wrath disappeared from her view.
More and more she wondered if she needed this at all. Yeah, she promised. She promised that she'd give people a chance again, do her best and become more like her old self, someone who hadn't seen giant, possible sentient germs floating around in the gut of a living prison and membranes that swallowed people up only to send them plummeting for what felt to them like an eternity. Someone hadn't seen people being treated like mere dogs, sniffers for trouble, or glorified cart-haulers.
Are things truly all that different on the outside? Damisan was a man dealt one of the poorer hands that life had to offer, from what little snippets Mana caught of the Wind Country native talking, he was born with all of his natural limbs and completely scar-free. And yet he was treated like a dog or something less than that even with Jigoku seemingly a whole dimension away from them. Reading. Maybe that would get her thoughts away from it all and focus them on something more productive than lamenting over things she had no control over nor things she could change.
Mana peeked into the room. It was odd that it was so dim, all except for a single, intense beacon illuminating Damisan's workbench. How could everyone still be out at this late time? Mana had indulged her reading habits a bit too long for the collective good, steering off toward things she had little to no need of reading about at that moment as they were entirely unrelated to her studies. The off-topic book that Mana had borrowed was, in fact, mostly filled with things she knew of yet that repetition of knowledge on genjutsu that she had ample of made Mana feel safer and more confident in herself when just calming everything around her and letting the same-old enthrall her. Lull her.
"Damisan?" Mana muttered, she didn't expect to see a pair of heads turning at her and not just Damisan himself. A young lady of silver hair and dark-grey eyes turned to Mana alongside Damisan. Hers was a face that Mana had seen around the mass of recruits flooding the halls during lectures though the young lady didn't do anything to stand out enough for Mana to remember her or find out her name.
The friend of Damisan's was tall yet fail in body build. Certainly, more attractive visually than Mana and outside the league of even a dreamy young man. Damisan looked to Mana for a second but then turned to his friend again with an impatient look. As Mana's eyes ran down the body of this new acquaintance, she noticed a few steel pieces in the gentle hands of this young woman, frozen as she answered Mana's bewildered look with something firmer. Something more challenging flickered in her eyes. Inevitable.
"Ion, if you could please connect those two and shield the sensitive seal and the inner parts from corrosion, that would be neat…" Damisan urged his newly met friend who just turned back and flicked his bucket with a love-flick before connecting the two pieces she held with the total outer shell of the arm prosthetic on Damisan's worktable.
"Well, it seems like Ion-san has you covered here," Mana observed.
"Oh, yeah, she has no idea what she's doing by her own admittance, but she's been a great help!" Damisan turned back to Mana, revealing to the magician that a new painting decorated the front of his bucket, one of an attractive female face that seemed remarkably similar to Ion's own though with a different color scheme to its features.
"Did you see Tomi? I promised her that I'd call up Usubingu and Usuvilme again for her tea party…" Mana scratched her neck, not feeling sleepy whatsoever and, frankly, feeling like a fifth wheel in whatever was going on in the dorm room.
"Oh? Tomi left with the others to the gym. There's music there and everybody's hanging out. Damisan wants to come too and he will dance with the best of them when we complete him the other foot to jig with," Ion nudged the focused shinobi with her elbow as he pondered on what bit of his arm to complete next.
"I am honestly baffled by Ion's assistance in helping me participate in that dance. If anything, dancing with me is a health hazard as if I step on your foot – it'll shatter most of your bones there," Damisan moved his eyes away from work to look at Ion again.
Mana couldn't help but smirk, realizing that Damisan had company that was beginning to approach the intimate territory. Quietly she slipped out of the room after tossing her book-holding bag onto her bed so that the two could finish their work in peace. Mana would have liked to assist Damisan and keep her promise though it was her overindulgence and dislike of being around people that kept her from doing it in time and so someone else had to step up.
Still, Mana was nothing if not happy for Damisan. The second merriest person around right after the bucket-head himself.
"Hey, you're Mana, right?" a voice from behind her made Mana jump up. She hadn't been focusing on her sensory as she would have been had she been outdoors or traveling somewhere as there was nothing unnatural in sensing chakra around the dorms of the hive-shaped HQ building in the evening. It was just a handful of guys coming back from the social event in the gym, it looked like.
"Yeah, Konoha's Sorceress to some, witch to others…" Mana sighed, wondering just how would these guys end up biting her. The brawl with Shogito's crew ended up putting her on the spotlight more than anything before and when one shed the spotlight on the magician, it was just one "Hey, wait a second…" away from her entire reputation of a ruthless bully of old, beloved monks being out in the light alongside it.
"You're a really amazing genjutsu specialist!" the young man noted. "So quick and effortless, wanna train with our group sometime? We're not like an official, big deal thing like your gang but…"
"Oh, you're a genjutsu specialist too?" Mana wondered.
"Yeah! I've only perfected one technique of my own though, wanna see?" the genjutsu user with long, black hair, splitting out into two separate ponytails smacked the sides of his fists together like they were two mallets smashing something in-between.
Mana blanked out, for a moment it seemed like she was standing around the gym, the lighting was dim though bright, neon lights flashed everywhere and loud music banged to fuel rhythmic movement alongside the present recruits. Her gang was there, Tomi jumped around in circles, holding hands with a ninja otter while a ninja koala hung frightened on Tomi's back as a living backpack, Endo was standing grumpy in the corner, tapping his foot though looking entirely unaware of the fact that his body betrayed his enjoyment of the music.
Shige-H was robbing the stage somewhere further in the center of the flashing lights. As usual, she demanded everyone's attention though as much because of the gang she was in charge of as the actual skill of her moves. Damisan danced too, though his movements were subtler, he still did his best not to slip anything artificial out from under his cloak or to juggle his bucket too much to reveal his face.
Ion was rubbing her back against Damisan, like an alluring shaman inviting storm clouds and rain into a drought-ridden land. Mana blinked a few times in rapid succession and realized that she was still standing in the same hallway that she was in previously, in the company of the handful of guys that left the social gathering at the gym already.
"See? It makes you jump to a point in your future. I call it Genjutsu: Leaper! Something about the name just fits the concept of skipping people through time," the twin-ponytail young man snickered.
"That was temporal manipulation," Mana uttered. "I could never fully grasp the concept. We should definitely train together sometime. The jutsu was basic but I'd like to trade our knowledge for mutual benefit."
"Basic?" the genjutsu user looked utterly crushed.
"Don't get me wrong, you've still excelled in an area I struggle in. Though you're calling up images from the target's mind to "solidify" the illusion of the temporal leap, right?" Mana didn't really need to ask that, she knew that was the case as it was with her own Polymorph Jutsu which took the thought of the animal closest to the target's mind and made them think of themselves as that creature.
"Y-Yeah…" the young man scratched the back of his neck, looking a bit baffled by how easily Mana had dissected his signature illusion, one of his own making no less.
"Wait, won't your gang get mad, or something?" a young man with slick, wheat-colored hair and a red and black sleeveless bodysuit wondered. "We don't want no beef with you guys or anything…"
"I have a feeling that I might "outlive my usefulness" with those guys soon, so to speak…" Mana's mood turned somber as she had to turn away to the window and look at the flashing pink lights from the gym. Suddenly she didn't want to go dancing or socializing anymore though it wasn't like she could go back to her room either. "Say, maybe you guys are up for some sparring right now? I'm sure we could find a staffer by the gym to authorize it and watch over us…"
"Whoa, you're a real go-getter, huh?" a dark-skinned recruit from Kumogakure whistled. "Now I'm pumped up to see you kick Garikan down a few steps, we've gotta do it!"
Pummel or get pummeled, at least Mana could get her mind away from feeling unwelcome around members of her own gang for once. If one could do that while learning a new thing or two, that was a late-night well-spent.