"Hashigaki Tetsu, good to meet you." The boy leaned back, his arm resting against the counter as a shark-like grin crept up upon his face. "You and I are the same, you see?- One coffee, black." The boy caught the figure of a barista approaching him, preemptively interrupting himself after casually pointing between his eyes and his apparent clansmen's. "Well, that's not exactly true though, is it? You're quite the talented singer, Mame Midori talks about you all the time. She may be your more well-established rival in the industry, but she's also a big fan." Of the tools at a shinobi's disposal, begging for your life was about as old a technique as they came, and not far removed from that was the subtle art of trying to convince your enemy that they were fighting on the wrong side. It was no surprise that tools like these, forged in the fires of desperation and stupidity, garnered very little respect in the ninja world, to the point that most brutes would just as soon do away with language altogether as an option in their toolkit, seeing it as a sign of weakness in battle; a prelude to begging, and failure. Language, though, was a weapon, it was as useful as the person wielding it, and as versatile.
"I don't have your talent and artistry, perhaps, but maybe I understand the music industry a little better than you do." The boy crossed his legs, resting his cheek against his fist as he pretended to look into the man's two golden eyes, studying his response. "It's funny, right? But what purpose did you think housing idol groups in our militarized village served?" He couldn't be sure, of course, if Shizuka had heard of Midori, one of the stars of another idol group in the village, this one an all-girl squad, I-B-H8-N, but he figured that since the currency these groups dealt in was stardom, it wasn't too unlikely a thing to bet on. That Tetsu knew, intimately, one of the members of the industry that the boy should harbor some amount of jealousy for, that he should feel jealous because this girl was doing better than Shizuka was, for the moment, and that the shinobi was there, not as an admirer, but because he had been urged to meet the singer, were all lies, truths, and half-truths designed to set the tone of the discussion. In battle, one might think of this as using a technique neither for attack nor defense, but rather to exert control over the environment. All claims uttered with one intention in mind, to prop Tetsu up to a position that the boy had no right occupying.
"That must be a crass way of phrasing it, now that I think about it," The boy laughed, feigning some bashfulness at his clumsy wording, "You'll have to excuse my coarseness. Us shinobi have had some time to get acclimatized to the idea that autonomy is in short supply in a place like this. You've found your freedom a bit suspicious in a shinobi village too, I'm sure, so I'm curious to hear what explanation you've come up with for it." The boy maintained his polite smile, giving his most sincere effort to emanate a tone of empathetic curiosity, both in how he spoke as well as his relaxed body language. While dreamers, like Shizuka, basked in the spotlight, Tetsu was nothing more than a cog in the machine, merely a messenger sent from on high to update the man as to the nature of his actual situation.
Of course, Shizuka came from a powerful family in the village, and, now that the boy was undoubtedly starting to feel a little bit of dread for what Tetsu had laid on his lap, there really was only one response that the shinobi was expecting. Shizuka would politely excuse himself and get up to leave, and Tetsu was waiting for the moment like a telemarketer following a script.
As he waited, he was grateful to see that his coffee had arrived, and confused at the inclusion of a bowl of soup, but it wasn't exactly an unpleasant surprise. "To the homeless..." The waitress said with a blank expression on her face, before picking up a small note on her tray to refresh her memory, "A warm meal from the one who passed." Tetsu maintained his smile, but his eyebrows would start falling, almost imperceptibly, as he realized his meeting was being sabotaged, and while his smile started off as fake, what crept into it was a mix of admiration, humor, fury, and disdain for the amateur effort.
That the girl sent him coffee and soup was her first mistake. The boy thought nothing of his infraction at the time, and he would have forgotten it, but this insult didn't leave a breadcrumb trail back to his assailant so much as a whole loaf. "Excuse me for a moment, Shizuka" Tetsu patted the singer's knee before walking over toward the girl who had lost her soup a moment earlier. Without initially speaking to her, the boy reached into the girl's bag to pull out the mission scroll that was exposed for the world to see. He opened it, "Irie Arie. You passed your..." He read the scroll, looking for the mission ranking (although he could have guessed pretty reliably what the girl had meant by her age), "Genin exam then, is that right? Congratulations. I myself am a Chuunin, why don't you come with me?" Who was she though? Tetsu didn't exactly not recognize her at all, but it was pretty close. Someone who knew he was homeless, which didn't narrow the list down quite enough to be meaningful, and ultimately he was drawing a complete blank as he tried to match the name to the face.
The boy walked back to his seat, now needing to watch both parties as they inevitably tried to escape his charm. Great, he'd be stretching himself just a little thin here. It would be tough to dress the girl down in the company of someone who already undoubtedly didn't think many kind thoughts of him, and to keep them both on a metaphorically tight leash, but by golly he was going to do his best. "It's understandable that you'd mistake someone coming back from a mission as being homeless, since I'm sure I had been beaten halfway to pieces," Tetsu obviously had no idea how much that lie would have matched the girl's perspective, but it didn't matter, and neither did whether or not she had followed him over, since his speech was being delivered to the whole cafe, rather than the girl alone, "But do you think it shows very good moral character to try to embarrass someone for being less fortunate than you are?" He obviously had no intention of letting the girl interrupt him with answers to his questions, and would continue promptly, "Or maybe you'll say that sending a man wearing a suit and in a business meeting a message announcing him as homeless was done as an act of generosity, in which case I'm not sure which is more deficient; your morality or intelligence, but neither must have been tested in your exam, I'm sure." Now, obviously, Tetsu had no business taking the moral high road in this situation, but it wasn't as if those words were designed to convince this Airi kid of anything; the audience was all that mattered here.
"Since you hadn't delivered the soup to me in person, do you think I might be safe in including cowardice among those deficiencies? And since you stayed in the cafe after delivering a note that insinuated that I should know who you are, and since we already know that you didn't want to confront me directly, might I not also include a poor grasp of strategy to that list? How about insubordination? I suppose my ultimate question is, though," It wasn't enough, if it hadn't been obvious up to this point, for Tetsu to merely break the poor girl's spirit; he would make this unknown enemy of his grimly regret ever trying to wound his pride, as this was the most vulnerable part of the boy, "On what qualities, exactly, were you marked in this exam of yours?" He paused briefly to let her start crying, "And since we've established that you're clearly not fit to be a Genin, I'm sure you'll agree that collecting mission rewards under this false pretense would be entirely inappropriate." He tore the scroll in two in front of the girl, before turning back to Shizuka and tossing the pieces over his shoulders.
"Excuse me, that was ugly, I know," He finally addressed Shizuka with, "But it's better that someone like this learn these things now rather than later."
[OOC: joining with my NPC Shizuka]
