"What's this with the what Mana says?" Chogen's look soured. He looked just about ready to jump in at the gate guards, fists swinging. "Did you guys cook them books?"
"No way! We've served the village for years without ever as much as looking the other direction, to even suggest this is outrageous!" one of the two gate guards passionately objected inspiring similar passion in the second one who looked a tad bit more confused initially.
"What kind of items have been found to be smuggled, Chogen-san?" Mana turned at the giant before the situation could turn from awkward and tense into something violent and truly bitter. Some more information was in order before anyone could accuse these two, a proud part of the core that protected the village gate with anything.
"A bunch of supplementary tools. Punching bags, training tools and the like. Bags upon bags of them Chakra Induction Paper sheets." Chogen grumped out, crossing his arms over his mountainous chest. Even when the Akimichi stood in a defused from any hints of impending violence stance he still petrified the two poor gate guards that could not stop glancing at the giant every couple of seconds.
"In that case, I do not think the smugglers were working with the gate guards." Mana sighed.
"Why nots?" Chogen raised an eyebrow while his eyes remained intensely squinted and turned at the direction of the two gate guards that breathed easier now that the conversation turned this direction.
"Konoha does not have the strongest military and is not the richest country in natural resources but one area this village can take great pride in is the size of its population and the sense of the Will of Fire in their hearts. It would take the need for transfer of items of much greater significance for a smuggler to even attempt to bribe or recruit a Konoha villager, let alone a gate guard." Mana shrugged her shoulders.
"Alright, you're off them hooks fer now." Chogen pressed and twisted his lips, suggesting some intense concentration and thought transpiring in his noggin.
"That does, however, make the job much more difficult…" Mana admitted. If she had no shred of decency seeped into her bones perhaps there would have been some merit in considering just accusing these gate guards and wrapping the investigation up. That seemed probable of what the likes of the Allied Ninja would do…
The scariest prospect was that nobody would likely find out anything. Even with the extensive probabilities of mind scanning and torture, one would not simply dismiss all charges of treason just because no shred of it can be found in one's mind. Minds and memories could have been altered just as simply as they could have been read. One's life could have been ruined just like that… Then one had to deal with the society that was way too trigger happy to call people traitors and criminals for the smallest of excuses.
It could not have been any different when each village lived in isolation, surrounded by broad and chakra radiating walls and shaking in worry that one of these days whatever complex protection strategies they have put together may not have been enough to protect the village from becoming a smoldering wasteland surrounded by the untouched natural landscape.
"You're right. If them gate guards didn't do nothing who did and why?" Chogen scratched his chin while making the same exaggerated thinking face again.
"Are the people with the smuggled supplies still in custody? I've done a little bit of training in the Intelligence Division so we may find something out from them, it's a really long shot but…" Mana moved her little shoulders in a self-doubting and awkward manner. Chogen stood there completely static for a moment as if her suggestion had broken him before making a firm face and nodding.
Telling the emotions of this Akimichi was immensely difficult because his eyes were so narrow that they may as well have been closed. One could not have gotten a single hint of emotion out of him had the man not been so expressive otherwise with the other muscles of his face and thick cheeks.
The Police Force Headquarters were inside the Uchiha District. Long before the Village Protection ninja and his assisting companion entered the large housing area filled with sophisticated and beyond expensive homes entirely comprised of classical oriental architecture the concentration of Uchiha in the crowd was beginning to multiply exponentially.
"This place is all with the mansions and the fancy things…" Chogen sighed in exasperation. "Them Uchihas must make a whole lot of them moneys with their eyes and their strength and status."
"I must say, when I was a little girl I had to once in a while pass this place or enter it to buy something..." Mana noted before being interrupted halfway by her companion.
"Hattori's Shuriken Shop is still the best in town, isn't it?" Chogen grinned, correctly pinpointing one of few reasons someone would normally venture into the district. "Nothing special about it, no special properties, doesn't explode with them acids in the enemy's face and the like but… It's just damn well made. The man knows his shuriken."
"Indeed." Mana smiled. "In any case, whenever I walked into this place I felt out of place almost immediately. The Uchiha staring with their cool and pitch black eyes just felt… Intimidating. In a lot of different ways than it would feel scary to enter a dark alleyway, mind you, it just felt like a parent with extremely high expectations of you staring at you with disappointment."
"Yeah, I can see them stares with them eyes skewering me right now what with them vitriols and the like," Chogen noted, nodding his massive lump of a head with a serious face. It did not appear like the man was at all intimidated by the occasional, judgmental stare-down by an Uchiha, why would he be, truly? He himself was quite a physical marvel that appeared more than capable enough to cause trouble for any of these Uchiha. Still, moderate discomfort in the face of such a man made the infamous judgment of the Uchiha only that much more impressive.
"They do not seem to stare at me all that much though… This must be one of those things that I misremember or exaggerate because of how intense it felt to me as a child." The ends of Mana's lips peaked a little bit dyeing her face in what resembled the subtlest of smiles.
"Why would they stare at ya? You look enough like an Uchiha to fool anyone for a little while what with yer black hair and the like…" Chogen teased the magician.
The unpleasant history between the Uchiha and the Yamanaka, although a bit of yesterday's news, appeared to make both Mana and Chogen a bit uncomfortable. One of them was very good friends with an important figurehead of the clan whereas the other belonged to a clan forever bound to the Yamanaka with alliances as old as the clans themselves. Both of them looked determined to spend as little time in the district as possible.
"I don't think we're gettin' anything from the perps, what with their fear and devotion and scorn to the servants of the law and the like but…" Chogen breathed in deep, gesturing for the magician to enter the Police Force building first.
"Can't hurt to try," Mana replied.
"'Xactly…" Chogen mumbled as if munching on a mouthful of seaweed while speaking.
"Village Protection, this is my hired aide. We'd like to talk with the small-fry you caught, what the ones with the smuggled supplies and the like." Chogen spoke to the first Uchiha pushing pencils by a table who promptly stood up, bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment and respect to the Village Protection ninja and lead the duo to a nearby cubicle.
"Hoju-san, these two are from Village Protection, they want to speak with the criminals with the smuggled supplies." The office worker bowed his head in the direction of the busy-looking Uchiha with a buzz cut and turned back to Chogen and Mana. "This is Hoju-san, he is the Police Force ninja responsible for that case, although, it appears that he will only be handling the part of the case that falls under our care. We're leaving the allegedly smuggled goods to you."
With that brief introduction and respectful fulfillment of Chogen's request, the Police Force ninja withdrew himself from the matter, returning to his table. Hoju, on the other hand, jumped up in enthusiasm and completely surrendered all of his attention to the Village Protection ninja.
"Hey, it's pretty exciting to meet you Village Protection guys!" the Police Force ninja made Mana question her imagined stereotypes of how an Uchiha behaved for he defied every single image she had built up from her own personal experiences of Uchiha being as cool and removed from everything around them as it was imaginable and then some. "Hey, I know you, you're Village Protection too?"
"No, I am just assisting the Village Protection with some cases as my mission objective." Mana shook her head politely.
"Cool. We've questioned the perps but they didn't budge, well, not any more than they usually do at this point." Hoju shrugged. Mana felt a little baffled by this simple and frail-looking Police Force officer so she extended her sensory a little bit, letting it flow in a merely singular direction like a river and wrap around the Police Force officer to feel him out. His chakra signature seemed quite normal and just about what one would imagine a ninja of average rank would have, it was entirely possible that Mana had a larger signature and greater resources than this man but he was not weak nor could he have been hiding a greater peak under this much of the signature being exposed.
"No surprise, smugglers are a notoriously nasty lot to deal with what with their laws and their mean-streaks and violence and the like." Chogen nodded affirming the limited success of the Police Force interrogation to himself.
"They're not really the important kind we'd drag to the Intelligence Division to question properly, you know. This smuggling angle sounds interesting, maybe it'll get us somewhere. If this peeps out the right way, they may just make it to the Intelligence Division, you know?" Hoju tapped his loosened fist at Chogen's chest playfully but the giant looked hesitant to share the enthusiasm of his Police Force colleague.
By the time that Hoju stopped postponing the main attraction by showing Chogen all the records of the cases he had handled, Mana had assumed that one of the criminals captured would be brought into the interrogation room. Seeing the metallic colored walls and the general dullness of the place that was meant to wear on one's senses made rather stressful memories from Shukuba flash past Mana's eyes.
"If you don't mind, I would kindly take the first turn to interrogate the perp, what with my size and experience and the like," Chogen asked. Mana tried questioning Chogen's idea with a confused glare but her eyes could not meet anything but the squinted eyelids of her cold partner.
"Do we mind!? Please, Sir, show us your ways." Hoju bowed his upper body a pair of time while waving his hands as if they were cloth dangling to dry in the wind. While Chogen confidently walked into the interrogation room, Hoju gestured for Mana to enter a nearby observation room.
"This is just like in your shows, you've got a stage you can watch people do magic from." Hoju laughed out hard enough to force his face to prune up like he had just eaten a lemon whole. "Although I guess you don't share your stage with scumbags like these."
"I'd rather not speak of the criminals this way." Mana closed her eyes out of discomfort. She was well aware of how unpopular her position of not engaging in any scapegoating of the criminal element was amongst both ninja and civilians alike. "I do not know the story of this man, I do not know if he did whatever he did…"
"Illegal trade of smuggled goods." Hoju was quick to fill in the magician's blanks.
"Out of need or if he did it for the kicks. In the first case he himself is a victim of circumstance almost as much as the village from which he stole the spotlight, in the second, he merely needs an attitude adjustment and a change of perspective." Mana replied.
"Right… Well… I'm more of a subscribed to the good old good guys, bad guys approach…" Hoju nodded awkwardly filling the observational room with silence since none of the people in the room wanted to argue too much. Perhaps Mana would have been foolish enough to try and argue her case but what was transpiring inside the interrogation room was of much greater importance to her.
Chogen started slow and steady, walking around and asking simple questions. He asked the man his name before checking the file supplied to him, just to establish if the man was lying or not. Even though Mana could not see the file from her position, she thought the beginning of the interrogation was too genius for someone as simple-minded as she initially perceived Chogen to be.
The Akimichi proceeded to press on, he applied longer pauses after each question, he used those brief intermissions to compare the behavior of the simpler criminal element to the profile he was drawing in his head of his behavior. The Village Protection ninja was dancing like a master in that room.
"Perhaps you were more right than you thought." Mana grinned, pleasantly surprised by the fact she was deceived by Chogen's intelligence merely because of the odd way he spoke in and his buff build. "Chogen-san is truly amazing."
"What are you talking about? He hadn't pounded the guy once…" Hoju sighed. "That's the most engaging part of an interrogation."
"If beating people up worked so well, the Police Force would not be the bottom tier of our justice system." Mana managed to both retort to the Police Force ninja and do it quickly enough to give her some more time to examine the ongoing interrogation.
It only now dawned on the girl what exactly it was Chogen was doing. Mana was baffled that this strongman had danced around her strategically and outpaced her by a good handful of minutes.
"There he goes…" Hoju moved closer to the glowing sealing barrier separating the observational room from the interrogation room. The barrier lit up and reduced its hazy transparency once the Police Force ninja moved in closer. "How long do you think it'll take for the fists to start swinging?"
"Not at all. If Chogen punched this poor man in there, he'd make him cover the walls and the interrogated would be such a poor recipient of taking in all of the impact force that the entire Police Force building would topple down." Mana shook her head.
Hoju just sighed in disappointment once he saw Chogen's growing passion and desperation in the interrogation room fade away into submission while the hunched over Akimichi giant dragged his enormous feet out of the interrogation room and joined the two in the observational room.
"Man, you really didn't do too well…" Hoju scratched the back of his head. "Did you try smacking his head into the table? Usually helps…"
"Thanks for the chance, Chogen-san." Mana ignored Hoju's remark almost entirely.
"Huh?" Hoju blinked a pair of times in confusion as to what the magician was talking about.
"I figured our chances of getting anything at all were slim enough, you could use any advantage you could get so I went in there first." Chogen rubbed the back of his head before nodding the noggin a pair of times in defeat.
"You mean Chogen-san knew he wouldn't get anything? Why did he bother then?" Hoju pointed at the giant in complete bafflement.
"You are right to treat an interrogation as you would a battle," Mana affirmed before practicing her hand seals and checking her chakra flow, accelerating it and halting it on her call a pair of times. "But you are wrong on how you do it. Just because the two are ideally similar does not mean you bring the tools of one onto another. It means you think similarly."
"Yeah well… You're like… Twelve or something so…" Hoju crossed his arms on his chest before quickly bouncing up to Chogen and butting his elbow into the big man as an attempt to get some encouragement to his jest.
"You are a great Police Force ninja, Hoju-san, I know that. But you will never become anything more if you dismiss new experiences with jests and try to be a Police Force ninja in everything that's not Police Force matters." Chogen replied with an emotionless glare right down at Hoju, which made the man sweat a little.
"Chogen-san entered the fight knowing he'd lose but by doing that he gave me a look at the enemy. How he tells, how he hides, during moments of stress the true size of his chakra signature would have peeked out for just a moment if he was suppressing it, even through the suppression seals placed on him. We may have had just a symbolic chance before but Chogen-san may have very well doubled that chance." Mana nodded in gratitude for her Village Protection superior and, after finally preparing herself and calming down, went off to succeed him in the interrogation room.
"Did they finally get some on-call entertainment here while we wait? What service!" The criminal was quick to mock Mana. He wanted her riled up just like Chogen was at the end of his line. Angry people are scary, especially ones like Chogen, ones that can snap one's neck by blinking harder but, if one accepts they have nothing to threaten you with, it becomes a shield no amount of anger can overcome. Quite the opposite, seeing the enemy tap into these blazing resources and burning themselves up invites jolly which only sustains you while the enemy burns themselves up.
No, Mana would not get angry, that was because internally she had accepted failure as not only a possibility but as quite a probable outcome. Once one did not fear failure, it became easier to not get angry over the lack of success. Chogen paved the way for this, it was about time Mana walked that path.