A week or two after Tsubaki's last sighting of Kami-sama's angel, the rain simply stops. The skies remain grey and dingy, though no rain falls. The ever-present patter of rain in the roof of her apartment suddenly ceases, like a sixth sense Tsubaki had never been consciously aware of. The humidity sits in the air, thick as algae, clogging Tsubaki's throat each time she steps from her apartment.
At first it feels like something of a novelty, but when an entire week passes and the skies remain clear and sunny, Tsubaki begins to feel uneasy.
With the sun comes many things the rain had concealed: black rot growing in the alleyways, blood in the streets that no longer washes away overnight. The light reaches for everything, clawing with the hands of an angry child, and even Tsubaki finds herself craving the anonymity of her warm, shapeless cloaks.
After the rain stops, the temperature rises a little more every day. For a week, the entire city is blanketed in a fog so thick that Tsubaki's clothes become damp with it every time she leaves her apartment, until that too burns up in the heat. The fields surrounding Ame begin to flatten and thicken, until Tsubaki is finally able to walk across them without her boots being sucked into the mud, the road before her flat and solid for the first time in her memory.
At first, all she can say is that it's unpleasant. Amegakure has almost always been unpleasant, she supposes, but at least she'd gotten used to the old sort of unpleasantness, the way that one grows used to old scars and chipped teeth.
Still, Tsubaki cannot help but find a few bright spots in the new, strange Amegakure. The state of public transportation improves dramatically, and with the sudden wealth of sunlight, she's able to periodically switch off the lights in her apartment to let her plants sit along her windows. For the first few weeks, the warmer weather means that people are more willing to leave their homes to shop, and she has more customers to greet in her shop.
For a very brief period of time, Amegakure is - for the first time in Tsubaki's memory - social.
Until it isn't.
Not everyone appreciates their spat of dry weather. After several weeks with no rain, malcontents begin to form crowds in the street, orderly yet menacing to look at. They wear their rebreathers and rain cloaks in the dreadful heat, while they raise their arms and cry up to the clouds about forgiveness and mercy.
The rain will not return, they say, until it has been earned back with sweat and tears.
There are shouts in the night, and loud pleas from anyone unlucky enough to be caught trying to leave the city by their roving patrols.
To flee Kami-sama's kingdom is another kind of blasphemy, and what cannot be earned with sweat and tears must be earned with blood.
When they begin to pass through her neighborhood, Tsubaki grimaces and pulls the blinds in her apartment. She avoids her balcony. She knows better than to leave the apartment when they're out in the streets, but they're stubborn bastards, and they refuse to leave.
This had all been so much easier, Tsubaki thinks, when Itachi had been around.
.
.
.
The full repercussions of the sudden change in weather aren't obvious until the end of summer. For weeks, any remaining moisture is sucked straight out of the air, until Tsubaki's hands grow red and cracked, and she's forced to trim the edges of her aloe to soothe sunburns on her shoulders and the tops of her feet.
One day Tsubaki turns on the faucet in her kitchen and no water comes out. She stands there for several seconds until her pipes kick, and the faucet spews dark brown liquid into her sink.
Tsubaki sighs, and wonders whether the plumbing is any better where Itachi is, then curses him, just in case that it is.
The markets become a little sparser, until even Tsubaki is grimacing when she sees how high the prices for fresh produce have risen. She raises her own prices to keep pace with her rising costs, but while medicine will always have a market, cosmetics and cooking herbs decidedly will not.
And luxury goods come at a price.
While other stores condense their inventory down to bare essentials, Tsubaki tentatively continues business as usual, as if the entire country were not crumbling to bits around her.
She attempts to cultivate and prune her customers the same way she might trim the errant branches on a tomato plant: strategically, and with surgical precision. She consults her books of herbal remedies and creates several products that sell very well: herbal mixtures to leech the bitterness from water, to stave off tiredness. To reduce stomach pangs, especially those from hunger, or eating contaminated food.
They don't sell well, but it's enough for her to at least keep her bills paid, and her stomach satisfied, if not full.
Weeks later, she wakes up in the morning to find the streets completely emptied of cloaked zealots. Instead, shinobi with Ame headbands and fresh uniforms come through the streets, leaving bright yellow signs posted every half-block or so.
Tsubaki overhears enough chatter from outside to glean that they're notices of some sort about some kind of public announcement to take place that afternoon.
When the fuss on the street grows too loud to ignore, Tsubaki slips out of her apartment to join the dozens of other neighborhood residents lined up to read them, though she remains on her apartment steps under the awning to avoid the sun. Even so, her skin prickles in the shade, irritated by the mere proximity to sunshine.
Around noon, the shinobi part and a woman walks between their ranks before taking her place on a platform they've set up. She speaks without any visible sort of enhancement, though her voice projects through the neighborhood.
Some kind of jutsu, Tsubaki thinks with a crinkle of her nose.
"Order has come back to Amegakure!" the woman announces. "We have brought order back to you!"
Her statement lingers for several long moments. Eventually, some brave soul shuffles to the front of the crowd. "Who's we?" he calls out.
The woman's smile doesn't so much as twitch. She never bares her teeth, though when she opens her mouth to speak, Tsubaki can see they're all bright white and immaculate.
"I am here on behalf of the Trustees of Amegakure, who have agreed to maintain Amegakure in Kami-sama's absence." The woman's eyes are startlingly blue, in a way that makes it hard not to stare. "And when He returns," the woman says, with a strange quirk of her lips, "Amegakure will return to its glory."
What follows is a long and detailed debriefing on various legal and administrative matters. The Trustees immediately enact several new laws, all of which are announced in similar fashion, many of which apply to former shinobi and can thus be ignored by Tsubaki.
The Trustees also appoint ministers - a mix of civilian business owners and shinobi, as best Tsubaki can tell from the list of names - to oversee village affairs, though Tsubaki is too divorced from it to say anything of the men appointed or to guess whether they'll have any tangible impact.
Politics was, admittedly, one of the few things that was neither Itachi's business nor hers.
More pertinent to her own business, the Trustees enact even more restrictive limitations for those seeking to leave the city and establish an evening curfew.
Despite these annoyances, though, life goes on. For Tsubaki - and for all the other citizens of Ame who'd just like to get on with their lives, she supposes - conditions marginally improve. The streets are cleared out, and the cloak-wearing zealots are carted off to somewhere they'll be a little less disruptive. Or, at least, they're intimidated enough by the presence of shinobi that they stop assembling so dramatically.
Whichever it is, it's a marked improvement, and Tsubaki isn't the least bit sad to see them go.