The Delegation left for the Capital on a Saturday. A short going away ceremony took place on the steps of the administrative building where the Hokage officially granted any new Emissaries the right to speak on his behalf and made a little speech about the importance of the relationship between himself and the Daimyo, and then they were off.
They did not, as most other mission-going ninjas did, depart from the village at a breakneck pace, aiming to get to their destination as quickly as possible to be as efficient as possible for the Hokage.
The Delegation was composed of six wagons, three jounin (including one of the Capital Emissaries and their Sensei, who wasn't technically an Emissary but was in charge of the Delegation), five chuunin (Diplomacy Department, the lot of them), and team Chinmoku (the assistants.)
The pace wasn't necessarily slow—they certainly moved faster than the merchant caravans they passed, and the horses they picked up a mile or so outside the walls helped the speed of the wagons tremendously—but it was more important to look 'official', to look 'proper', to look 'good' than to get there as quickly as they could.
Sakura, Juro, and Shin walked by the side of every other wagon. They had, in the previous week, been made to memorize the location of everything that was packed into them (nothing in the first, last or fourth; they were meant as decoys and to sleep. Gifts and the like in the second—the most expensive but least valuable of the wagons. The third contained restocks of official waxes and other office supplies and the entirety of the paperwork. Number five contained several back-ups and any non-paperwork-related supplies.
Beyond that, there wasn't much to do. They were clean, dressed appropriately, and kept pace easily—chakra wasn't even necessary, really, especially because they would be stopping every few hours for a meal and a rest.
The whole purpose of this trip wasn't to get there, it was to be seen, and their every action implied that either overtly or surreptitiously.
They followed the main (only) road to and from Konoha, so it took them some time to leave the farmland and truly enter the heart of the woods. Once they did everyone relaxed, the pace picked up, and the older shinobi began to mutter to one another, comfortable in the density of the trees.
Sakura, too far from anyone to talk, kept running.
She was first in line—the sensor, the team leader, and the one who least excelled in long-range combat.
Juro was next, several meters behind her. Medics were important, never to be put closest to the unknown, and he was their only one anyway—Diplomacy and Medicine were apparently rarely chosen together as specialties.
Then Shin. His shadows had fairly good range, all things considered, and his aim was best with the various weapons he was currently testing out. He was in the back.
Sensei called out for some tea. Juro disappeared into wagon five—she pulsed out her sense to be sure.
She was to use the sense every fifteen minutes or so. That was currently the most frequently she could go if she wanted to keep the ability to do so indefinitely; if this trip was less than thirty minutes, then she'd be able to check the surroundings about every ten or fifteen seconds, pulsing like a wave. Constant chakra use was still too draining, though—ideally, by the end of the year, she'd be able to manage fifteen minutes of it, but that would take time.
She knew that Shin had similar issues with his shadow use, and similar instructions to practice with it for the duration of the trip; one of the chuunin—an Uchiha, who sat in wagon 1—was the sensor actually in charge of keeping track of their surroundings.
They arrived at the first true village by evening, and (because it was the proper thing to do) rooms were booked at the most prominent inn.
Sakura was placed with two of the five chuunin—women and men who weren't married didn't share rooms outside of Konohagakure. Both the Emissary (Daiki Sarutobi) and Sensei got their own rooms, and the other three chuunin shared with the last jounin. Juro and Shin were stuck as 'wagon guards' for the night—the next night ,it would be Sakura and one of the chuunin.
The trip would not be a long one, but it would be quite boring.
.
"Halt!"
Samurai.
Sakura had never seen any up close before. Sensei Mitokado had shown them the garments they wore and other identifying characteristics, and sometimes she could see them walking through Konoha, but she'd never had cause to interact with any before. The one that called out now, and the two additional samurai who stood nearby, were just as she'd expected, though, so Sensei's lessons ensured she'd know how they'd act.
Behind them the city sprouted, nearly radiant in the afternoon light. It was built, mostly, over a hill, and the Daimyo's palace, a towering residence with dark green roofs which easily dwarfed all of the four-story or lower buildings around it, was placed at the very top.
The road between the front gate and the Palace was fairly straight and bracketed on either side by primarily commercial buildings, and though Sakura couldn't see any poorly kept houses, she knew it was not because they did not exist: here, as in Konohagakure, they were kept off the main roads, out of sight.
Beyond that, however, the two communities seemed to have more differences than similarities.
There were more walls here, for one, and unlike Konoha, they weren't built as a singular flat-surfaced circle. Instead, straight walls of grey stones outlined the city in sharp corners and infrequent outcroppings. Inside, from what she could see, it was more of the same—older walls, built when the city was smaller, still bracketed the city's lands into zones. Every once in a while, her Sensei had explained, they would admit that there was too much growth outside the existing walls—too many houses, commercial establishments, lives—so new ones would be built, as far out as the current Daimyo could make them, and the now inner-walled establishments would be charged increased taxes for the privilege.
The outermost walls right now were older than the whole of Konohagakure, and they were the newest set the city had.
Sensei and Emissary Sarutobi were still talking with the Samurai. It didn't seem to be a particularly welcoming conversation, but then it didn't seem particularly hostile either. The Samurai might have been shorter than Sensei, but they were wide in a way Sensei wasn't—built of pure muscle, rather than the chakra-enhanced physique preferred by ninja. They seemed to be attempting to intimidate him through the difference, but Sensei's blank face seemed to be holding its own. She couldn't tell what they were talking about, but each word seemed chosen with care, slow as grass growing as everyone around them did their best to keep from twitching.
Sakura stood in place.
It took nearly half an hour for them to move again, half an hour of low murmured voices, of papers being passed back and forth, of gestures and bows.
Neither party seemed to find this unusual, so though it chafed, and it felt unnatural, Sakura tried to feel like nothing was wrong. (Nothing was wrong, too, Sensei had warned them of this very step. But it didn't feel right, not when coming from Konoha where expediency was a basic tenet of a ninja's life. It felt very, very wrong.)
They were gestured in.
One of the chuunin—a Nara—turned the first wagon out of the way, allowing the second one—the one with the gifts—to pass through first.
They all moved forward.
The gift wagon went straight to the Palace. The rest, including them, turned toward a building nearby.
The innards of the city were, again, very different from Konohagakure.
Here horses roamed freely, or as freely as their masters would let them.
Here there was shit in the streets, here there were no trees except those locked in by the fences of homes, here the city as a whole was four or five times as large as Konoha—and that was within the walls.
In Konoha, merchants sold their goods on street corners, out of little carts, even on the main roads. Here, at least from what she could see, business was only done inside, though that could just be true of the main street.
There was also... more.
Konoha was built off of clans, so much of its innards were enclosed by the fences of the compounds. Residences, restaurants, stores and blacksmiths and everything else, were built around those massive compounds. In Konoha, there were very few building requirements beyond that—the Administrative Building was still the tallest, but not by much, and because of that it could only be seen at the gates due to the straightness of the main street. Instead, it was the Hokage's heads, carved into a mountain which sat entirely outside the walls and far too tall for any building to compete, that hovered over everything.
Here buildings couldn't be built that tall, so instead they sprawled wide. There didn't seem to be compounds, but many of the houses were themselves larger, wider than any non-government building she'd ever before seen.
So there were no compounds, but there was, if anything, a clearer division amongst the residents: there were those that lived in the miniature palaces they passed, those that dined at the restaurants and purchased the beautiful pottery for sale behind monstrously sized panes of glass, and then there were those that rushed by just out of sight, who wore worn clothing and carted the trash in the alleys and cleaned up after the horses and went about their work seemingly unnoticed by those dressed in silks and finery.
It was odd, Sakura thought, and not just because of the social differences.
If anything, she found the ignorance far more telling, far harder to understand.
In Konoha, even those children that did not end up as ninja didn't ignore their surroundings. She hadn't even considered that it might have something to do with being a shinobi—to her it had just been a thing that the people of her world did.
Arden hadn't.
That much was clear from her memories—her attention was only focused on a few things at once; she could pass by dozens of faces and not notice a single one, could go to school and not realize until she went to grab her notebook that she'd forgotten to zip her backpack that morning.
Sakura had, by then, realized that she and Arden were not the same species, were both sapient and nearly identical in visible form but oh-so-different below the surface.
She'd put Arden's inattention down to that, down to a different evolutionary path.
In Konoha, after all, it was custom to know what was going on around you; it was just considered 'what was done.'
In the Capital, it took ten, maybe twenty seconds to figure out that they had different customs.
Even the Samurai did not dart their eyes to take in everybody moving around them. She was sure that if she asked them, later, they wouldn't be able to recognize a single face from the crowd.
A boy (older than her, almost an adult) tripped over a piece of stone that stood out from the road and went on his day as if this were not a sign of something greatly wrong, as if not knowing where you were about to step was okay.
She hadn't seen a child older than six ever get tripped by nothing, especially if they were just walking down the street, not running or playing or holding so much that they couldn't see the road in front of them.
It was disturbing.
Another little girl paused in front of a silk shop, and the two women she had been walking with continued on, apparently completely unaware that the small one had fallen behind. Several seconds later she looked up, jerking around desperately before catching sight of the two women turning down a side street. She chased after them, and all three went out of sight.
Again and again, Sakura saw people literally paying no attention to the world around them. Again and again, she saw that it wasn't a case of simple dismissal of that which was categorized as unimportant (everyone did that, at least) but a case of not noticing those things in the first place, of devoting so little brainpower to one's senses that you may as well have been half blind.
The wagons came to a halt. They had arrived at the building.
Sakura decided, very firmly, that she didn't like this city.
.
It didn't take long to settle in.
That part was kind of surprising, actually—she knew they'd begin work immediately, of course, but she'd thought there would be some time before they began at peak efficiency, while they were still figuring out how to not only do things, but how to do things right.
Instead, she, Juro, and Shin had ended their first day collapsed onto their shared futon well past midnight, having spent the entirety of the day rushing around and putting things everywhere they needed to be, setting up materials and jotting down short summaries of the thirty- to eighty-minute-long speeches that had happened between the fall session and now.
Day two began at dawn. Juro rushed around as their gopher, keeping everyone supplied and informed about what everyone else was doing. Shin and Sakura, given their talent for understanding code, were more or less entirely in charge of summarizing any new information. The chuunin were taking the already mapped-out plans of how they wanted the session to go and tweaking them, adjusting as new information was taken in and understood.
Sensei and Emissary Sarutobi disappeared to the Palace at ten every morning, after a full three or four hours briefing and being briefed, and Sakura hadn't yet managed to be awake before they came home. The other jounin—she still hadn't figured out his purpose—had disappeared the first day and had yet to come back.
The pace was far, far worse than she could have imagined. She barely took in what she had read—there was no time. Instead, she became the mistress of taking a full report on rice crops and summarizing it in three sentences; she not only utilized her already memorized shorthand but also learned how to write while reading, paying so little attention to what her hand was doing that she was shocked when she read it back later and found it coherent. The pace with which they had to summarize allowed for nothing else.
Shin, usually, worked across from her at one of the tables.
Her talent with languages was better, so she was mostly given the (frequently illicitly obtained) reports in other languages, in the language of Grass and Earth and Wind. Shin, on the other hand, took on the lion's share of the records from within the borders of the Land of Fire; he was far more capable than her in reading the language under the language, the two having had flipped in their clan expectations well before they even met.
They worked.
Most of the information, for one reason or another, couldn't leave the city, so once a day, the chuunin also took all new summarized information and re-summarized it, compressing the words into a page to be sent to their Hokage as part of a full write-up.
Chinmoku was given little time to eat, sleep, and exercise, and no time for anything else. The days were spent trying desperately to catch up with all of the new paperwork before the new session began, with the jounin constantly away reforming connections, flattering important officials and attempting to smooth down any feathers that might have been ruffled in the last session.
Every evening, well after any respectable person would be asleep, plans were marked out between the vested members, outlined and adjusted and mixed and reforged.
It was a full week before Sakura actually entered the Palace.
The court session would only begin the next week, would take place officially in the Daimyo's court, a single large room that would swell with courtiers, dignitaries, Emissaries, each dressed so properly and appropriately that they could barely move.
Court custom was the very definition of stifling, and Sakura was very happy she was not to be the aide accompanying Sensei and Emissary Sarutobi inside.
Still, she was (after being appropriately dressed) shown inside and around the room, already bedecked in fantastic works of art on nearly every wall and even absurdly complex rugs covering the surface of the floor.
Then she was shown to a side room.
The court operated... oddly, in Sakura's opinion.
Officially, of course, and in reality, the Daimyo was the lawgiver of the people. The only others allowed the right were clans within their clans and Konoha within the shinobi population (and those that lived with the shinobi—the village wouldn't have gotten off the ground otherwise); even the Samurai were wholly subservient; they could make regulations, not laws.
Reality, as usual, was more complicated.
The reality went something like this: the courtiers made up the bulk of the legislative force, having earned their roles by virtue of their family and prospered in them enough to keep their place in the room. Next came the Emissaries; Konoha had three, Sarutobi, Shimura, and Saito, and the other great nations (and the hidden nations which resided inside) would each send one of their own for about a week at the beginning of the session, to push their own agendas.
Then there was the Delegate. In the case of this session, Konoha's was Sensei. Within their nations, the Emissaries were supposed to act as constant representatives, to ingratiate themselves with the court permanently. They were, in effect, more information distributors than anything else. It was the Delegation—it was Sensei Mitokado—who actually represented Konoha's interest in a legislative sense. The Land of Fire's Daimyo also welcomed Delegates from the five major provinces of its region, as well as the Fire Temple, which ran independently of Konohagakure and (according to Sensei) was primarily symbolical, refusing to pass judgment on any possible law unless it directly, significantly, and negatively impacted them.
(This was rarely done, because the monks, more than anyone else, were seen as true representatives of the divine, and for all that science was beginning to understand the surrounding world, it would never be able to understand the kami, much less how to cope with their often capricious behavior.)
It was the Delegates and the courtiers that actually went through the trouble of slogging through the information, and opinions, and cost/benefit analyses and decided what law should be put in place.
Often the Diamyo would simply say "I want x to happen," and by the end of the session it would be done, with him having no more understanding of the situation than he had at the beginning.
It was him through whom every law had power, yes, but he was merely the focal point; if he died, and someone propped a simulacrum in his place, little would necessarily change. (Saying so aloud would be treason, though.) (And, according to Sensei, that wasn't nearly as true in practice as it was in theory—the Daimyo, Sensei told her, was very, very good at keeping everybody in line, for all that he understood little of the day-to-day machinations of his country.)
All of that meant that the giant room—the court—was insufficient.
Tiny rooms were therefore built on both long walls, ten crammed together on either side. The provinces had one each, as did Konoha (the Fire Temple had apparently politely declined an offer of their own), and the other fourteen were reserved for whichever courtiers happened to be most powerful at the moment.
She would spend the days, once court had started, sitting in Konoha's, blocked from sight by rice paper walls and solely devoted to keeping track of the goings on she could hear. Juro would sit beside her, his role to take her notes and add in references and cross-references and footnotes. The chuunin—all five of them—would be acting entirely outside the court, making deals with the individual courtiers and their families. Within the court Shin would walk constantly behind Sensei, carrying with him every document which might need to be displayed and quietly memorizing all that he could so that Sensei could focus on maintaining alliances, on getting the best deal for Konoha possible.
For now, though, they were merely preparing.
Chinmoku was in the Palace for about ten minutes at most. There was too much work to be done, too many reports to be condensed, too much new information being brought in for any more time to be wasted.
Life in the Capital seemed to be a constant slog of responsibilities and deadlines, without even the illusion of action to alleviate the boredom of the admittedly necessary tasks.
Sakura could now see why diplomacy was such an unpopular career choice.
She and Juro passed out basically immediately every night—Shin, burdened as he was with insomnia, was not so lucky.
