A little girl in a pink dress was swinging on a rocky cliff side, staring off at the sunset as the sun plunged into the water, coloring it foamy and red, as if the blazing star in the sky was melting into the sea and spilling its innards into the ocean before inevitably slurping them back up and being reborn in the morning. The girl slowed down her swinging by stopping her kicking and, when it felt safe, dug the heels of her sandals into the gravely dirt, filling them with gravel.
While stopping her swinging, the girl turned back to glare behind her, allured by the noise of adult voices picking up. It could have been any number of things that got them talking, but little Wayna thought she knew the one thing that was the most likely perpetrator of Mom and Dad getting loud. Even her tiny heart was racing with excitement. Shaking out the gravel from her sandals felt like a nuisance more than anything. After shaking the gravel and pebbles from her sandals, little Wayna promptly kicked her feet back into them and dashed toward the little house on the cliffside.
"Hey! There she is!?" Wayna's brother spread his arms far and wide, leaning down to hug his little sister as she jumped into his embrace. Her brother's gotten taller and bulked up since she last saw him. He also shaved his head for some reason. Wayna didn't think it suited him. Then again, maybe they made ninja shave their hair in Kumogakure? "How's my favorite little sister doing?"
"I'm your only sister, silly!" Wayna stomped her foot down with a childish giggle.
"Those two things aren't mutually exclusive," Wayna's brother shook his finger at her, acting like he was imparting some grand big brother wisdom. "So, what were you up to while I was gone?"
"Not much," Wayna's mother pressed her hands to her hips. "Collecting rocks and wasting time."
"You should relax and rest someday. The Lightning Country wasteland has too many rocks for any one person to collect," Wayna's brother ran his hand across the girl's flowing and long brown strawberry blond hair. Even though he messed up the hair that little Wayna's mother meticulously arranged that very morning, Wayna didn't mind looking like she had bed hair for the rest of the day, as long as she could feel the touch of the brother she'd missed so much.
"You wanna see!?" Wayna put her hands together, pumping them full of naïve hope that her brother had time to hang out with her and see all the cool and glittery rocks she'd collected. Frankly, she'd just listen to him talk about his time in Kumogakure, working as a ninja. Anything to get to spend some more time before he inevitably leaves back to the village.
"Leave your brother alone, girl," Wayna's father nudged the child out of his way, approaching his son and patting his shoulder. "Your brother's helping out the family, working hard, and putting his head on the line every day. It's about time that you did something useful and contributed too. Maybe instead of gathering rocks and swinging on that old thing, you should get to know that neighbors' kid Ishiro some better?"
"Wow, I can't wait coming back home one day and seeing dad having married his twelve-years-old daughter off to one of the few four houses in this barren settlement!" Wayna's brother pressed his hands to his waist, giving his father a stinky eye before handing him a stack of ryo bills, his payment from the last few missions.
"We all contribute however we can. I try to squeeze whatever this rocky, barren wasteland's worth, your mother's taking care of the home and keeping us fed. You're putting your life on the line for people you don't know, just for all four of us to make a decent living. I'm glad that in that you, at least, take more from your mother's side. With how much use I've been, I may as well hope to find a gemstone in the wasteland too," the depressed farmer took his hat off and hung it up, wiping the sweat off his brow with a hefty sigh.
"Cheer up," Wayna's brother winked at the little rascal. "It won't always be like this. Ishiro's not a bad guy, but don't break your neck trying to stick your head up his ass just yet. I've heard that high-ranking ninja get paid enough to buy an entire household or a patch of land in the village. With any luck, I'll settle all of you in Kumogakure before you get old enough to feel bad about only having four potential dates."
"Will you be staying long?" little Wayna looked up with an expression that reflected she already suspected the answer.
"Sorry, lil' sis," Wayna's brother chuckled, stroking her hair again with a smile. "I've got more missions, so I'm leaving at dawn. My team will wait for me at the village gate, so I should make it to the village by seven."
"Figures…!" Wayna blew her cheeks out in discontent.
"I wouldn't hold my breath," Wayna's mother sighed, sitting down to some knitting. "Even if you have the money, it's not like they'll look at us too kindly in the village. We'll stand out almost immediately with our skin color and our country bumpkin talk."
"It ain't like it used to be in the village, Mom," Wayna's brother placed a reassuring hand on the woman's shoulder, earning his mother affectionately pressing her cheek to it and brushing it against the back of her son's hand, just to memorize the tender feeling of touching his warm and firm hand and the scent of his body odor. "They're more accepting toward people nowadays. They've even got pale-skinned ninja working in the village. Just because our skin's a twinge brighter than the village folks won't keep us out anymore."
"I'll believe it when I see it," Wayna's father grumbled, collapsing in the swinging chair in the middle of the room.
Wayna stood by the swing, attached to a rotten and dry tree growing at the cliff side and letting her see the sunset in the ocean. By now, she was both too old to swing on it and not feel embarrassed by being such a child, and tall enough to fear for the integrity of that old tree if she were to place her matured rear on the swings again. Then again, maybe her father would like it if Wayna swung herself off the cliff and splattered down on the rocks.
Fewer mouths to feed.
A stream of pleasant memories overflowed through Wayna's mind, filling her head with delightful nonsense, like the phantom whiff of her brother's sweat and the flash of his smile. Everything felt so hopeful back then, even though things were just as dire. Just like before, there were only four households in the entire settlement, living at least fourteen kilometers apart from one another. Nothing to do and nothing to farm. Moreover, it's been three entire months since Wayna last saw her brother.
Just when Wayna thought she'd be walking home, accompanied by complete silence and the torment of being left alone with her own thoughts, her parents' voices picked up again, making Wayna pick up her pace, pick up her dress so that she could daintily tip-tap back home. How nostalgic! It was just like that time in her childhood when she was watching the sunset by the swings and her brother came home with the first pay to share with his family.
However, instead of her brother, there was a broad-shouldered and fit young man of around Wayna's age. He was dressed in simple farmer's clothes, although covered with holes from hard work collecting scrap and valuables in the wasteland and farmwork that was as grueling in these barren parts as it was unrewarding. The brown-eyed and spiky-black-haired man turned to greet Wayna upon entry with a polite smile.
"Ishiro?" Wayna did her best not to look disappointed, but expecting to see her brother finally having come home and seeing her neighbor instead, even though the two were childhood friends and occasionally played together, when one of them wasn't lazy enough to cover the distance between their households, was the epitome of disappointment.
"That'll be Ishiro-san soon enough," the grumpy voice of Wayna's father announced. "Ishiro's father died some weeks ago. The boy can't handle maintaining his household anymore, so even though you're an airheaded bride with a dowry of a bundle of rocks, we're merging our households."
"I'll tear down the house and sell the materials over in the village. Wood is quite expensive there, so I should have enough money to get us all off the ground and keep our family fed for a while," Ishiro elaborated. "It breaks my heart to dismantle the house my ancestors built and my family owned for generations, but… What other choice do I have? The few cattle I had died of the stone plague, so the meat's spoiled."
"That's so awful…" Wayna whimpered, pressing her knuckle to her chest before running up to Ishiro and comforting her childhood friend she'd seen less and less through the years since he started picking up the slack around his family household. "I'm so sorry. I wish… I wish I could be of any use."
"You'll be of only use you can be, if you take Ishiro as your husband," Wayna's father scratched his neck, suspecting that this would escalate into a fight and he already had too many figurative battle scars from quarrels with the girl's mother to count. "Your mother's getting too old to take care of the house, and four caregiver hands are better than two wrinkly and brittle ones. Besides, pooling our mouths together, then, you two will probably have kids of your own eventually… It'll be hard, but honest, work."
"I… I understand," Wayna brushed her right elbow with her left hand, turning away. She didn't particularly feel excited about the prospect of living her life tending to the home and her family. Even though Ishiro was certainly not a bad young man, as her brother told her those few years ago, and the two were on friendly terms, and Wayna's spent her entire life wasting it, as her father put it, collecting rocks and dreaming of just magically finding a priceless gemstone one day, Wayna suspected her life as a mother and wife not differing greatly from collecting rocks.
Just like her mother before her, Wayna would spend her whole life taking care of her children and tending to the home, making food out of leftover scraps and surviving another day through colorful imagination of new ways to make something usable out of them. Survival in these parts came with ever greater degradation of one's standards as to what one considered food and dignified living. Even though her father would undoubtedly be satisfied, Wayna wouldn't feel useful existing that way. A phantom life meant a phantom existence. Just like the spectral nature of her living, the use that Wayna would make of it would be just as intangible.
She wouldn't be much more useful than she was collecting and storing rocks in handbaskets, however, it would help to lie to herself about being more useful better. It was only her brother who was ever truly useful in this family, yet… Why did he suddenly forget about them? Why hasn't he come home in months? Maybe he found a good-looking and sassy wife of his own and started a new family. If so, even if it broke her heart to be left behind and forgotten and doomed to a ghastly existence until the end of her days, Wayna hoped that, at the very least, her brother and his newfound family could be happy.
"Ishiro-san, when you head to the village to sell the materials, could you please ask around for what happened to our brother?" Wayna asked.
"Umm… Well… Yes, of course! I'd be happy to!" Ishiro looked stumped, expecting Wayna to thrash around and passionately oppose the prospect of marriage, having lived a carefree life for so long and refusing to acknowledge the reality of the world in which one had to be useful to justify their own existence. Even Wayna's father stared at his daughter with a dropped jaw, never having expected in a thousand years for her to accept the shackles of marriage and wifely duties so leisurely.
Ishiro came back from Kumogakure carrying potato sacks of ryo bills, food, and various useful household materials he bought from the village. Wayna's father moved aside, letting the young man drag the sacks of money and valuables inside and leave them indoors while the exhausted youth stumbled to the table and dropped by it, sweaty and panting. Mother couldn't have served him soup soon enough.
"That'll do," Wayna's father nodded with a sigh, observing what the young man had dragged across the wasteland all this way between the village and their household. "I'm surprised nobody tried robbing you walking all this way. That's a lot of goods you've bartered for."
"It'd have been no use. They'd have taken over all this load for themselves in the middle of the wasteland. May as well drag it to their hideout all by themselves too… This stuff's not worth the workload, let me tell you what…" Ishiro replied, babbling through a full mouth of food. Wayna cupped her cheeks in between her hands, almost afraid to ask what she wanted to know the most. "Oh…" Ishiro suddenly got silent.
Wayna's father and mother shared wary looks. Wayna looked down at the table where some manner of crawly tried finding a lick of moisture from Ishiro's bowl to hog all for itself. Tears began dripping from Wayna's cheeks, attracting the insect's attention even more than the spills from the bowl of soup did. Ishiro's silence and hesitation to tell what he found out in the village told more than an extensive explanation could have.
Wayna turned back to glare at a shabby wooden house that was far away on the horizon and could only be made out from the rocky hill she climbed in the nocturnal shroud because she knew it was there and knew to look for it. It hurt to walk away from the only life she'd ever known; it hurt to know that her father and mother would curse her and that even Ishiro would have no respect for the family he'd become a part of. It hurt knowing that she's become the villain of the story of her family.
Given the fact she was leaving to seek for a way to truly be useful for her family, and her brother disappeared without a trace, never returning from a mission alongside his whole team, at least there wasn't a long legacy of her family left to fling curses at her. There were no other girls Ishiro could marry in the barren settlement, meaning that the only life Wayna's ever known wouldn't outlast her by that long. The tree and the swings, the little house in the rocky wasteland, the barren settlement full of old folks too tired to dream of a better life and too hungry to complain about the one they had… It would all go away in time. Only the sunset would remain. The sunset would outlast the memories of it in Wayna's mind, but no matter how gorgeous and brilliant it was, it would never match the sweetness of hearing her brother's voice and her family household come to life to welcome him home…
A dark-skinned secretary with sky-blue hair and eye-raking, snow-white lipstick looked up and stared straight into Wayna's eyes. The stern look of a woman who knew exactly where she was and what she wanted from life tended to crush the spirit of someone who lacked that assurance in life. Wayna became flustered for a second, leaving it up to the woman with a sky-blue ponytail to tap her long fingernails at the table and raise her trimmed eyebrows.
"What's your business with the Kumogakure Administration?" asked the secretary sitting behind the table that Wayna randomly selected out of the bunch of identical-looking tables stacked with piles of paperwork.
"Umm… I would like to… I would like to become a ninja," Wayna Nunnon declared.
This unexpected proclamation seemed to have broken the stern and seemingly assured secretary, as she just blinked a couple of times while looking right at Wayna. The two women shared looks with Wayna, trying to convince both this very confused secretary and herself that this was truly the path she wanted for herself.
"Ma'am, I know this might sound improper, but… How old are you?" the secretary weaved her hands together, trying to come up with a polite way to rebuke this weirdo country bumpkin who walked up out of nowhere and decided to waste both their time. "Before you answer, I'll go ahead and make a wild assumption you're not in the range of 4-6 years old."
"Well, no…" Wayna scratched her neck, looking away.
"The Kumogakure Ninja Academy only accepts applicants in that age range, because the Ninja Academy doesn't only shape a person into becoming a ninja, it shapes who they are as a person, and an adult is already done forming their worldview and their personality. That worldview might be incompatible with being a ninja, and, besides that, adults also learn to lie, meaning that they can trick the village officials if those worldviews truly are incompatible with those of a Kumogakure ninja," the secretary explained. "There are adult prospective operative courses, but people enlisting there do not get the village grants and aren't part of the social programs available to children, meaning that you'd have to pay for your tuition."
"Oh, I… I see…" Wayna turned around, dipping her chin and realizing that she's abandoned the only life she's ever known just to bump into an impassable wall in the shape of a tall and slender woman in a long, black dress and a flashy hairdo and make-up. With her head still feeling hazy and buzzing like a beehive before a gruesome hornet invasion, Wayna wandered off into the street.
Loud grunts and cheerful noises were coming from the Academy training grounds. Because of the influx of nostalgic memories, as dreamy as they were useless to her in this situation, washing her away, Wayna headed for the training grounds. To her surprise, she didn't find children practicing ninjutsu there, for the Academy students were studying indoors at the time, leaving the Academy training grounds open. Inside, there was a group of various people of different ages, wearing padded clothing ranging from official Kumogakure flak jackets to some random sheet and dirty laundry padding and staking across the solid stone, chasing a chunky plastic ball around.
Wayna winced from the deafening bang when one player, carrying the ball in their armpit, crashed into another skater, leaving both of them down on the ground, writhing and licking their wounds while the game stopped and those playing began laughing it up. Still carried ahead by this dreamy haze and an influx of warm childhood memories, Wayna approached the group.
"Are you guys… Ninja?" she wondered.
"Ninja? Nah… Though some of us have flunked the Academy, so there are peeps amongst us who have some training," one of the thickly armored players raised their arm, answering Wayna's question.
"We're playing Skate Ball while the Academy students aren't using the training ground. It's a lot safer than playing on the plateaus. We've had a few guys fall off 'em and die, then again, no one's hasslin' us about playing there, so… I guess each place has its advantages and disadvantages," another blockhead skate-baller explained.
"Skate Ball?" Wayna muttered, scanning the place to draw in as many details about this strange and incredibly physical game as she could.
"Yeah, this guy from Snow Country brought it here, I think they play it in some parts of Land of Water too, at least where it gets cold enough… I still think it's cool to skate on solid stone too, but you need to learn to imbue your skates with chakra or get those really expensive ones… Wanna try? We're always short on players. It's a really physical game, so lots of newbies quit immediately, but if it gets you–it really gets you. Besides, what else are you gonna do for fun?" a brawly woman, as broad of shoulders as most farmer men Wayna had met in her life, slipped her skates off and handed them to the elegant countryside blonde to try. "Bit of a warning, if you get into it, you might need to do something about that hair of yours. It'll really get in the way."
Even though the brawly, self-made athlete meant it as a joke, the question of what other life Wayna had and what choice she truly had in the matter anymore struck a deep chord with the young woman. With newfound flame in her eyes, Wayna grabbed the skates and slipped her feet inside. Her legs were wobbly, as she could hardly imagine standing on her own without assistance, just steel skate blades on solid, polished rock.
"Nice, tell you what, if you can score a goal today, I'll give you those skates. It'll be my chance to buy new ones," the bulky woman laughed out, looking excited about this quiet newbie joining their delinquent ranks as a prospective skate-baller.
"Come on, Jonna, she needs padding, or she'll get herself killed!" someone objected from the sides, but Wayna didn't care. Step by grueling step, she let go of her support and listened to the shriek of steel slicing into the stone beneath her feet.
"Heh, look at her go!" the burly woman laughed out. "Alright, if you avoid breaking anything today, I'll give you my armor pads too. It'll give me an excuse to get some new ones!"
Here, in this group of delinquents playing their beloved, absolutely insane, and violent game, skating on solid stone, tackling and wrestling with each other for the sake of their game, Wayna found a new home and a new life. While she was fumbling over herself, jumping and rolling over aggressive players trying to take her down, Wayna thought to herself how ridiculous it was that after seeking to be useful to someone her entire life, as if it was necessary to earn her right to live, Wayna found her true calling just wasting her time, burning away her life and shortening her lifespan with every tackle and every fall.
What a curious thing life was!