Mana's body was moving all on its own. Even if the more rational half of her commanded she stopped rushing ahead to certain death, her thighs kept on pumping speed and pushing her onward to the edge of the golden globe in seconds. The magician stopped by a lever and what appeared as a complicated system of clockwork and gears.
A lone, square platform attached to some sort of iron conveyor belt by an opening in the decorated golden planetoid rotating around many others just like it stood tall and flaunted her opening to slip out. Mana bit her lip, wondering how to proceed onward. For whatever reason, as proven when she couldn't see their assailant coming earlier, she couldn't sense the chakra of those Sky Clan ninja. The only sources of chakra that were clear to her at the moment were the civilian engineers and architects and the enigmatic Chaser.
"You've strayed from your workshop, Earth Clan," an authoritative grumble behind her made Mana's heart sink to her heels. She could never get used to being completely oblivious to any attempts at sneaking up to her. Still, she couldn't see a single trace of anyone living when she entered this area. How could this Sky Clan ninja just pop into plain view like nobody's business?
When Mana turned around to face her obstacle, the rows of teeth ground in her mouth from the grave offense of being snuck up on like a child like that. It would have been unforgivable to a ninja of her level and yet this denizen of the skies did it without breaking a sweat. She'd make it her life's purpose to pay this Sky Clan ninja back by slipping away from his grasp just as easily if Mana had any faith left in her ability to handle these opponents.
A towering goliath of assembled obsidian stone decorated the Sky Clan's arms and legs. He wore a sleeveless white tunic with oriental patterns of tomoe and lotus symbols, lines of traditional embroidery to provide framing and order to the artistic chaos. The brute's face had been paler than that of a deadman with golden eyes of diamond-shaped irises gleaming at Mana with a fiery flare. The man's black hair had been sifted into three braids, two falling on his sides and shoulders, with the thickest one resting on his back. A draconic, horn-like bone protrusion decorated the forehead and crown of the Sky Clan ninja. It had a third eye with an ocular technique Mana had never seen before, wandering about in its center like a jewel to the natural crown of horns.
"I'm not an engineer or an architect. I'm a ninja from Earth," Mana declared with undue pride, setting the confusion straight.
"Then you've strayed even further…" the goliath sighed, closing his eyes. When they opened, Mana couldn't keep a gasp contained. As much as she was readying herself for a dash aside beforehand, the moment that light of his natural ocular shimmer left the man's eyes, her body began turning to stone from the bottom up. "Before I leave you here petrified as a warning to those that would wander too far from their homes, I'm interested in how you've escaped Mushen. Even if he is quite weak, he should be light years ahead from the level of the likes of you."
"We came from a different time, a different… Universe…" Mana tried resisting the petrification. Physically at first. Once she realized that this sort of resistance threatened to make her fumble and shatter into billions of minute pieces, she began attempting more spiritual methods of combating it. Seeing this petrification as a sort of invader jutsu in her body–a lot like how genjutsu had an opponent's chakra invading one's system and causing grievous changes within a body.
Mana noticed the petrification halting down to a crawl but ceasing it, let alone reversing it, had been just a naïve, childish dream.
"Interesting. You can control things that affect your body. You must be in touch with both your body and your spirit. Most Earth Clan ninja just want to lift the biggest boulders and do the biggest booms. You better don't waste your time though, unless you wish your story to be wasted too. It gets a tad boring here, so I promise to commit your story to memory. You've earned that much," the half-mountain Sky Clan encouraged Mana to stop her pitiful resistance and to keep talking with a gesture of his hand.
"We've scoured the world looking for ways to travel to the Moon, to save the engineers and architects you've kidnapped. Then we realized that our world was too immersed in pushing weaponry and military ahead to develop ways of taking us where we wanted to go, so we went to different worlds. Worlds that know peace and where the Earth Clan and the last survivor of the Sky Clan are friends. Even that world saw the bridge between the Earth and the Moon… Destroyed… So…" Mana closed her eyes and felt terror creeping into her lungs as they began petrifying from the bottom up. She had to choose her last words carefully and something told her that begging for her life wouldn't quite move this mountain.
"So, then what happened?" the Sky Clan giant squatted down, placing his stony hand over Mana's head and lightly pushing it upward so that he could look into the teary eyes of the young woman as she struggled for air and against the unmatched terror of half of her lungs turning to stone and moving upward.
"We had to go… To a different place in time… When the portal hadn't been destroyed yet…" Mana tried to produce a hook that may have prompted the Sky Clan ninja to reverse his technique so that he could hear the rest of the story. This was the only handful of hair she had to pull on to yank herself out of this mess. No air… No air to tell him about the Sands of Time, about Zahhak and about the Colossus of the Covenant, about the card games played along the way and alliances formed, about the perilous trip through time. All that was too complicated. Too many words that required too much air.
Thoughts were becoming tougher and tougher to string together and come by. Mana felt the becoming of being "dumb as a brick" creeping up to her, except she'd be even less refined than a brick. Just a statue of bland stone. The thought of being described as anything bland made what was left of Mana burn up with boiling blood.
"Do you… Want to see a magic trick?" she muttered before the stony layer began drawing over her face and the eyes.
A feeling of weightlessness took over before gravity socked Mana's knees with a wallop. A layer of stone shattered aside with her collapsing on her knees, drenched in sweat. The Sky Clan goliath sat on his rear and shoved his fist under his cheek.
"A magic trick? What do you mean?" he wondered. "If I ever have to tell anyone your story, they won't understand this "magic" you're talking about. What is it?"
"I thought you guys were watching on us…" Mana crossed her arms and blew out her cheeks. "Seriously, you don't know what magic is? You've never spied on me performing even once?"
"Oh, you're some kind of entertainer? Like a jester? The responsibility of guarding the engineers and architects from escaping and keeping them safe from the Chaser is one of the greatest ones the Sky Clan faces. But it's also boring. Nobody tries to escape, and the Chaser doesn't seem to care about a handful of Earth Clansmen too much. Tell me your jokes and dance around like the fool that you are. I'll extend your life for as long as you can entertain me," the Sky Clansman declared, pointing his finger as a warning to Mana.
Mana waved her hand, slipping out a pair of cards that she then pinched and pulled out from the deck, touching with their backs so that when she flipped her hand, she revealed the different card from the one she showed previously.
"I've got two cards, a joker and a ten of hearts," Mana showed to the initially bemused Sky Clan giant. He leaned down to stare at the cards, almost pitying the Earth Clan woman before him for trying to entertain him with a measly pair of cheap plastic such as those two cards. "I'll slip my hand like this, split the cards… Can you tell me which card I'm holding behind my back now?"
"The ten of hearts, you're hiding the ten of hearts, clearly. You've just shown me which hand you've had the joker in. This isn't very funny, you know…" the Sky Clan ninja scratched his chin before Mana pulled out the hand from behind her back to show him the joker that she hid and then flipped the hand in front of him, holding the ten of hearts.
"I'm not a joker, just like I'm not a jester, as you've described me. In fact, I'd much more rather describe myself as a ten of hearts, because I enjoy inspiring as much love and happiness as possible and a ten is the highest number of hearts in a deck," Mana bowed while showing off both cards one last time and slipping them both back in her sleeves.
"This is… Ridiculous. How did you do that?" the Sky Clan ninja scratched his head.
"I can tell you're new to this, so I'll only tell you once–a performer doesn't tell her secrets. It's a tool of the trade, plus it kills the magic," Mana shrugged. She didn't have to work too hard to produce a cocky smirk as deep down the fact that someone who could turn people and objects to stone with just the rays of light shining from his three eyes would be stumped by a simple two-card switcheroo trick made a person grin.
"Another! You can turn to stone once I can figure out the secret behind this "magic" you do. Look me in the eye when you do the next trick. I need to catch your dojutsu in action. Was it the Sharingan? No… Genjutsu doesn't affect us, not even those produced by the Sharingan…" the Sky Clan ninja scratched his chin, rolling on his stony buttocks in impatience.
"This next one is a lot like the last one, in principle, just to make it easier for you to figure out. Though, because I don't like rehashing old tricks, I'll switch things up just a little," Mana eased into the next trick by producing a single silver ryo coin in front of the stumped Sky Clan ninja who kept a tight glare with all three of his eyes focused on the magician just so he misses nothing.
Mana dabbed her index and thumb on the lower edge of the coin, gently waggling in the air before flicking her left hand and showing the coin on the right, having vanished and reappeared in between the thumb and index of her left hand. The Sky Clan grabbed his head with both of his obsidian hands, rolling back and nearly toppling on his back.
"This… How did you do that? Your speed is like that of a moving glacier, your eyes are just… Normal human eyes! Do you possess some sort of mater-transformation ability like Seikuwo does? No! What am I saying? There's no way a mere Earth Clan child of dirt and puddle could possess a divine ability of the head of the Sky Clan…" the Sky Clan ninja seemed to lose his mind over the fact that Mana had gently tucked the coin back in her hand while producing a different one in her left hand.
He was getting stumped by the most elementary of magic tricks, the like that Mana just started out with back when nobody truly knew what magic even was because Mana was just discovering it herself. Back when it was just weird and goofy stuff to do on a cardboard box to entertain the passing by audience and make them smile, distract them from their gloom and dreary if just for one tiny second.
"This will be the last trick… Say, what's your name?" Mana was about to address her most infantile audience member yet also the most engaging as nobody had ever brought her back to the roots of why she picked stage magic up like this in a while, before realizing she didn't know his name.
"Last trick? Fine, that seems fair. If I don't know how you do this next one, you can go home. Honestly, everyone needs to see this, so I'd like to know who you are and where you live. The Earth Clan might just stop pummeling each other to death and waging wars if they see this stuff and… Maybe we could use some of this "magic" too to forget about impending doom slumbering on our own home," the mountainous Sky Clan ninja replied but then crossed his arms, producing a grave amount of choking dust and a downfall of pebbles from the joints of his rubbing arms. "You'll only get my name if you succeed. However, if not–I'll just have to get my entertainment from watching you posing as a statue. Rocks aren't very entertaining, but I'll remember those quirky things you did with plastic and silver when I look at your statue."
"You're skipping an awful lot of beats for someone who's going 0-2, here," Mana beamed an enchanting smile while flexing her hands in front of the giant to capture his attention. With a flick of her index, the magician girl sent her top hat rolling off the back of her head. Turning around while in a dance-like motion, she scooped the hat out of thin air and waved it about for it to become the new focus of the goliath's attention. With both her hands in pockets, Mana blew downward, keeping the top hat afloat and just a few inches from her lips, as if levitating it.
"A-ha!" the goliath yelled out. "I know this one! You're using Wind Release currents to sustain the hat's flight–you're done for!"
With a transparent, static field around his hand, the Sky Clan ninja waved his hand under the top hat to absorb the ninjutsu technique Mana must have been using but his eyes gaped in shock when he couldn't take even a sip of chakra from it. There was no technique. By the time that the surprised Sky Clan ninja looked up to Mana, she was finished with the trick and placed her hat back on her head.
"Im… Possible. This is… So stupid. Useless and yet… So beautiful," the Sky Clan ninja muttered to himself. "Could the Earth Clan be capable of more than violence and war? How could they create something as marvelous and silly as this otherwise? My name is Ishikeru. You have been most pleasant to look at, Earth Clan, you can go home, as promised."
"Tell you what, Ishikeru-san, since you've been such a stand-up guy, being an absolute treat to entertain and since you've honored your word and didn't turn me into a statue with your gaze, how about I teach you that last trick so that the Sky Clan has a bit of magic to spread around too?" Mana winked her new acquaintance.
"N-No way! Really!?" Ishikeru gasped. "Please, tell me, I want to know how to make hats float a few centimeters under your lips for no productive reason, other than it looking really cool, too!"
"Well, you might need a hat for that first. I don't suppose that horny headdress comes off?" Mana wondered, knowing that it sounded like a longshot.
"Oh… Yeah, it does!" Ishikeru nodded with enthusiasm. His horned crown rumbled and spat stone and little rocks everywhere as the mountainous ninja lifted it off with one hand, producing a separate rocky headdress with a single, still-blinking, and still-looking eye.
"Now that is… Remarkable, to say the least," Mana raised her eyebrows, feeling her jaw loosen. "You guys might not need magic all that much, being able to do something as ridiculous as that."
"Don't chicken out now, magic-woman, show me how to do magic too!" Ishikeru clapped his hands together while still clasping his stone crown in one hand.
"My name is Nakotsumi Mana. I'm known by my stage name–Konoha's Sorceress back home too. You better not forget it. I'm holding you up to tuning into my show the next time you're spying on us! Ugh, explaining it to Mr. Hiro will be tough, he'll want to somehow monetize you guys, I bet…" Mana groaned before taking off her hand and flexing her free hand in front of her first and only student in the art of stage magic. "The secret to this trick, as with many others, is demanding attention from your opponent on one specific object. You use hand movements or your own uniform to distract them, while you set up, produce and execute the trick. Now, look what happens if I don't distract your eyes with my hand…"
"Ah!" Ishikeru pointed at Mana. "You've slipped your hand from your sleeve. It's been hiding behind your blazer and controlling the hat the whole time!"
"See? A magnetic stage presence and practice, proper setup is just as important as the secret of the trick itself," Mana bowed to her stupefied disciple, who began practicing his trick immediately. She had to hand it to him. For someone with actual rocky hands, it won't take him too long to pull something resembling this elementary and childish trick off.
"I almost don't want you to go home, Mana…" Ishikeru's lips wobbled with sadness. "Who's going to teach me magic? Who's going to help me become a better magic-doing-person? And then… We'll fly off to space and won't even be able to scout your magic shows either… There'll be an entire universe between us."
"First, it's called a "magician". Second, fortunately for you, Ishikeru-san, I'm not planning on going home just yet. And, hopefully, you won't need to leave anywhere so you can watch all the magic you want," Mana gave her newly met friend a charming thumb up with the cream of a wink on top.
"Huh, what do you mean?" Ishikeru leaned down to look Mana in the eyes on her level. "Where are you going?"
"I'm going to go for the greatest magificiation ever performed in this universe–before all of your eyes, I'll make the Chaser disappear from the Moon for you," Mana struck a flashy pose, stunning her companion with both her flair for theatrics and this impossible proclamation.