Open Every Artist Has a Beginning...

[Ryuu Nozomi]

It is morning in Kumogakure, and the mountain winds are sharp enough to cut the fog from the valley. In the shadow of the Colosseum there are whisps of clouds just barely caught between the steel scaffolding and jagged slopes beyond. Sunlight gleams across the arena's great obsidian walls and the ancient stone pathways allure visitors with the occasional glimmer of gold.

Here, beneath the statue of the legendary Raikage himself, lies the path for the greatest stage this village has to offer, the Colosseum. The stone beneath the statue is worn by the many years and many passing warriors who flock to train within this place. Even the walls hum faintly with residual chakra, a promise that effort here will echo a thousand times over. The arena is quiet between tournaments, but Shinbatsu's Path is never truly still. The clang of training weapons, the thud of impact dummies, and the hiss of elemental jutsu fill the air. Teams of genin, chuunin, and wandering academy hopefuls push themselves beneath the statue's smirking gaze.

There, amongst them, stands Ryuu Nozomi. She wears the standard Kumo training uniform; a tailored training vest, fingerless gloves, and a utility belt filled with her custom clay capsules. Her messy dark blonde hair is tied up and away into a side ponytail, crooked like it always is, a nest of chaotic curls.

She doesn’t blend in at all. Not just because she has mouths in her hands, but because she isn’t sparring. Not yet anyway.

She stands still near the edge of the courtyard while watching a group of older students run through a drill together. Her dark blue eyes don’t blink, and her mouth doesn’t move but both on her palms twitch ever so slightly.

A clay capsule dangles from her belt, and she forces it to tap against her leg with every idle shift of her bodyweight. She even rubs it between her fingers every now and then, like a nervous tick.

She blends enough to attract minimal attention and moves undisturbed through the training halls. A smile lining her lips as her eyes dart around in a dance to mentally capture everything.

As she continues to watch, this genin trio run a triangle maneuver of sorts, flanking and trapping an enemy between two lightning users and a taijutsu specialist. Nozomi notates the delay in the rear guard’s rotation. There was hesitation, even if just a moment. Her gaze shifts to a chuunin running solo drills. They have wide arcing attacks with a high center of gravity. Strong attacks, likely deadly, but much too flashy.

All the while she fills a small notebook, pages filled with tight and precise writing. Her left hand holds it open while her right taps the edge of a clay bird against the paper, like a conductor waiting for the cue. She begins to whisper her analytics as the bird dips its beak into the ink pot she provides when necessary. When she completes her notation, she tucks the notebook away and stands.

She assumes no one watches her as she walks to the far edge of the courtyard. The corner she chooses is shadowed by one of the massive supporting arches of the Colosseum. It is half-used, dust-caked and the nearby training dummies are cracked. She thinks to herself that it's perfect.

She draws out a capsule, feeds it into the palm-mouth of her left hand. It grinds with satisfaction, and she allows her right hand to join in.

Minutes pass as the sounds of others fade to background noise and Nozomi creates. She takes her time and begins with a bird. At first glance it seemed sleek like a hawk, but looking further it was obviously flawed with narrow-jagged wings and a thin belly. She places it upon her shoulder, no less proud of her work.

The second was a fox, the third a beetle, and the fourth a snake.

One by one she places them in a careful manner to form a wide circle with four clear sightlines toward the center. There, she marks the spot with a broken kunai

She runs her hand over the clay fox, fingers twitching.

The key to battle is to overwhelm. To find a way to strike from every direction in continued unexpected bursts to break through your opponent’s defense. Her traps will become the definition of beauty as each creation will become a play without words.

She sketches a wide spiral into the dirt, carefully measuring the spacing between each detonation point as she continues to feed her mouth-hands. Another capsule means more shaping and a second clay serpent winds its way from her fingers with its mouth agape.

From the side of the grounds, a group of genin glance over, catching sight of her arrangement. One points at her, they’re curious even though none approach, and Nozomi pays them no mind.

This isn't meant to be a show. It is just a rehearsal.

She raises two fingers and the fox trembles without detonating. She then waits a moment before triggering the bird. It shivers, rises six feet into the air, darts forward a few more feet and explodes in a burst of bright brilliant light. The burst is enough to blind but not hot enough to maim. It scatters flecks of glowing dust that fall in a spiral.

The moment the dust hits the spiral pattern a click can be heard as the first serpent had already moved into position. A hiss and a small pop.
Not a full detonation, but her equivalent of a jab.
She drops to one knee, checking the reaction delay...
Three seconds too long, much too long, noted for the future!
On cue, the fox explodes late into a burst of wind, the beetle isn’t far behind popping into confetti-style shrapnel to follow the wind. The second serpent had time to make its way directly under the target in a final explosion that would ring loud enough to perhaps garner some attention.
She runs this drill again, and again, and again, and again.
Bird flash, dusty snake into windy fox n beetle, and the final big’n’bang!

Okay, now it’s time she thought and muttered out loud in a triumphant way,

“Time for phase three!”

The kunai in the center bursts upward, propelled by an underground capsule she planted when no one was watching. It arcs in a beautiful streak that trails this blue fire and embeds into the obsidian wall behind her in a flash of light, heat, and a minor shockwave.

She exhales in the sheer beauty of it. Though still not enough to bring her to tears.

It worked, her palms relax and then… she starts again.

This time, she moves faster. Smaller traps with closer spacing and varied timing to increase unpredictability. It is like a language being spoken without grammar, like a poem you only understand right before the last word is read.

“It’s such a beautiful crescendo just at the climax of it all.”

The smile upon her lips would be broader now despite her being rather tired. Grabbing her pack, she would walk over towards a more comfortable shaded area where she could breathe easier, eat some training bars, and allow all her mouths to drink lots of water.


WC: 1212 - Marked for Training

 

[Uzu]

[Entering as Kumogakure NPC - Ous Notori]

Training. Oh, training. How it made the muscles weary, the mind soft, and the neck tense. Lightly tanned hands tightly gripped a pull up bar, arms attached straining to lift the body below to rise the male’s chin over the metal finish line. His hair was dark and wavy, cut short so that it could be styled into something nice but, at the moment, was drenched in sweat and scruffed. Veins on the man’s neck were clearly bulging as he grunted and huffed, slowly pulling his head over the bar up to just his eyes before his arms simply told him “nope.”

Notori’s hands slipped, and his body fell to the dusty ground causing a small plume of dirt to rise up and over some of the other shinobi also trying to work out. Immediately a handful of them grabbed water bottles, snacks, whatever they could find that wasn’t weighted enough to be considered deadly, and thew them at Notori. He simply laid there, allowing the various trash and bottles crash against him as he stared up at the grey sky. How did it get this bad?

Well, lets rewind a little.

Ous Notori was originally a spy, and not a very good one either. He originally was a member of the Main Branch, basic military training, and showed no signs of being…well, “good,” at anything. What talent he did have, was bing a remarkable honey pot. What he lacked in actual skills Notori made up for in looks and charm. In fact, he was pretty certain he had just rizzed his way through multiple interviews to get the role he had. And by the kami, was it a sweet gig. The Lightning Country had a tendency to have women leaders, and allegedly there wasn’t a woman alive he couldn’t seduce. Time and time again he had proved this as his one actual reliable ability, but then everything came crashing down when he decided to put himself before his country.

An inner rebellion to the entire Kumogakure system had been in the works. Unknowingly, Notori had been a conspirator in this by passing along letters between people for a lot, lot, of yen. More than he had ever been paid for as a spy. Just like his regular checks, it all went to lavish things. An apartment over looking the mountain pass. High grade imported food from Fire. One of those new fangled cars that he never got to drive; top of the line! Yet, eventually all karma comes to collect, and Notori got his real bad. Once the rebellion started, and was quickly stomped out by the Sennin, they began to clean house and someone squealed loud and hard that he was a major messenger between leaders; because no body would suspect some low-grade ninja who was only good at seduction.

Prison was only a year long before he got released on good behavior, but that year was…rough. Because he was technically a chakra-capable shinobi, he got put in with real killers. Most of his year was spent almost entirely hiding, and staying low to the ground to keep people capable of ripping steel from getting their hands on him. Didn’t help either that he was the reason at least a sixth of the prison population was in there; with their mouthy ex-spouses being a majority of why. Yet a year of not working did its job. He fell out of the basic training regiment that kept his slim figure muscular…so now he was just, thin. The following year being out and jobless didn’t help either. Gone was the good paychecks, and basic income was all he was allowed. No one wanted a nobody shinobi for merc work, and he was blacklisted from military service.

So why was he here? Trying to get gains? Pad his resume. Get cut again, start working his old job of seduction, and blackmail his way right back into the military. Though as he laid there in the trash heap of everyone’s gym junk, he wondered if it was actually possible for someone as old as he was getting, (which was late thirties,) to even be a shinobi again.

An explosion rattled his depresso. Noto sat up quickly, maneuvered into a roll, and got back onto his feet to scan the training grounds…for a quick exit. Yet his eyes were distracted, because instead of the usual bombs that a shinobi was trained for he discovered instead fireworks. They were the works of a child. Someone using clay to create small explosions over and over, with a crescendo of a larger one at the end. After the second round of explosives, Notori just found himself mesmerized by the sheer audacity and skill of someone easily half his age if not younger. Others had also stopped their basic training to watch in small wonder at the explosive festival.

Once the girl had stopped to rehydrate, the ex-spy felt like a spell had been broken. He had never thought of explosions as anything but a tool for subterfuge, but here someone was making it into what he could only describe as “art.” The animals needed more work to look more like what they were mimicking, but there was an undeniable style to what she was doing.

“Huh,” was all he could say before turning to pick up his black shirt from the ground and dust it off before donning it back over his bare chest. For the first time in years, Notori felt a curiosity towards a new endevor. What if instead of seduction, blackmail, and the usual crap he was used to…he instead built a team of specialists? People who were really good at a single skill that he could call upon for a specific task? It was another spy-minded ideal but one he had fragently ignored most of his life as his looks and luck carried him. Now he had to actually work, he needed another approach. ‘Sides that, never hurt to know someone good with a bomb, and better even to get on their good side in case she ever became crazy for whatever reason. Ironic choice of thought considered he was unwittingly approaching a Ryuu.

“Hey! Small child! With the clay snake! Yes, you! …that was, uh, quite the show! Do you pre-load with confetti or, is that part of the critters? Cuz, honestly, I think you could do better with glitter.”

Ous Notori wasn’t great at talking to kids.

 

[Ryuu Nozomi]

The water tasted like iron and earth, leading her to think she did not screw on the cap properly. Nozomi leaned against a half-toppled training dummy with knees drawn to her chest and water bottle tipped toward the mouth on her left palm. The tongue lapped rhythmically at the stream while her true lips pursed thoughtfully. Her face was glazed in sweat, but not from physical exertion. Rather, her mind had been racing, frenzied and precise. Just like the sweat worked up by a conductor flicking his dancing baton at the speed of lightning.

She was exhausted from counting out every beat, each ounce of clay and precise ripple of chakra. The ending was a little late as the serpent's detonation lagged nearly a full half-second behind the fox. That would not do, not for a perfectionist like Nozomi. Still… it had been beautiful, not perfect, but beautiful.

She let out a soft hum, a single note exhale that might’ve been mistaken for satisfaction until the clay beetle on her knee shuddered and popped with a soft fizz. Nozomi didn’t think too hard on it as her right hand simply reached down and crumbled the remnants between its jaws, re-chewing the flawed piece.

At this moment is where someone called out, “Hey! Small child! With the clay snake!”

She froze as her entire body stiffened like a deer in the woods that caught the scent of a predator. Her right eye twitched once, annoyed, before she slowly lifted her gaze. There stood a man slick with sweat, a bit underfed, and much older than anyone she usually bothered speaking to unless they were a teacher. He wore fatigue like it was a second skin, draped in irony and dust. His face was somewhere between charming and scruffy, but his voice was the real offense to her. He’s much too loud, too casual, too... uninvited.

“Yes, you!” he said again. “That was, uh, quite the show! Do you pre-load with confetti or, is that part of the critters? Cuz, honestly, I think you could do better with glitter.”

Nozomi blinked once, and then twice even. What an awful suggestion.
She stood slowly. Her hand-mouths finished chewing the revised beetle and spat it delicately into her palm. With a practiced grace, she tucked the tiny creature into a compartment on her belt and dusted off her vest, keeping eyes locked on the man the entire time. Her expression was unreadable. It wasn’t cold, just indecipherable, like a puzzle without a box to show what it’s meant to be.
She stepped forward, once, twice, then thrice, and suddenly, she was much closer than expected.

“Glitter,” she repeated quietly, tilting her head.

“You want me to... add glitter to my munitions?”

She seemed to savor the word, not in delight, but in a horrified curiosity of sorts. She had a look on her face as if he'd asked her to paint a canvas with vinegar or wear shoes made of cockroaches.

“I suppose... if you wanted to blind someone and humiliate them in the same moment, glitter could serve some purpose.”

Another pause, and then she smiled. Not a warm smile or a childish grin. It was more of a twisted half-smirk, a look that was sharp, amused, and entirely inappropriate for her age.

“No,” she said with quiet finality, “Confetti-like dust is intentional. Small particles are more accurate, and I prefer precision.”

She squatted down before the man, grabbing a charcoal stick from her pouch and dragging another pattern into the dirt at her feet. The pattern was made up of concentric spirals, overlapping triangles, and branching channels that flicked outward like veins. Her hand-mouths began to twitch again. She began to speak to him of how her plans are thought out, even though he may not understand,

“This phase's design calls for misdirection. Fragments come first; fast, chaotic, and disorienting. Then flash, wind, pressure, and finally, heat. Enough to burn but not kill. A warning.”

She looked up again as if the shadow on the ground was causing distraction from her drawing, “You interrupted my rehearsal.”

Notori might’ve expected the bite of sarcasm or passive aggression after his comments. However, the tone was completely earnest, almost clinical. She wasn’t scolding him, rather she was simply informing him. Still, there was something about his presence that suggested he shouldn’t simply be ignored. So, she deflected, continuing the conversation but steering it away from her.

“You were training badly,” she claimed with a child’s bluntness.

“Your form is all wrong when doing pull-ups. You’re keeping your shoulders too tight and that adjusts all your effort into the neck. The point is to work your core, and you’re not doing that.”

Then her brow would furrow as she asked, “Also... why were people throwing trash at you?”

Nozomi stood now, brushing her hands against her thighs, smearing a faint trail of dust and blackened powder across her training pants. Her eyes flicked to him attempting to read his face like it was a scroll she had every right to study.

“You don’t look like a Jounin, and I know you’re not a teacher. You don’t walk like an assassin or a soldier. Who are you and what do you want?”

She nodded to herself as if to confirm she was correct for being assertive in her questioning. She was not judgmental and was curious about what remarks he might make from here forward.

Nozomi stepped around him once, walking a lazy circle, sizing him up with the amused focus of a hawk studying a shiny rat. This would be a strange interaction at best, it would look to a passerby as if the child was attempting to intimidate the adult. Her hand crept to her belt, not in aggression, but out of habit. Always ready to feed the mouths.

A breeze kicked up between the pillars. It swept through the half-ruined dummy field like a ghost of old tournaments past. From overhead, the Raikage statue loomed in silence, as if watching the strange conversation unfold with ancient indifference. Eventually, Nozomi would stop pacing and stood in front of him again.

“I have a feeling that you were thinking something when you saw my setup. That’s why you came to talk to me, isn’t it? Were you inspired by what you saw, or afraid?”

The question hung there like a kunai suspended in air, a thing both glittering and dangerous.

 

[Uzu]

The old spy realized his mistake immediately. The look on her face showed a step of intellect far higher than his own. He knew that look. She, was measuring him. Manipulation was a tactic Notori was well versed in that bordered on the despicable, and because of that he knew full well which kind of people he could, and could not, trick.

This girl, was not one of the former.

Her sudden closeness caused the man’s muscles to twitch. A delayed reaction that should have been immediate. He felt the jerk in his gut from the reflexive jolt of chakra that flew to his feet and made him back up suddenly; far, far more than he had intended. What little reputation he might have had was lost in that moment to the only peers he cared about impressing. A child, had just made him back step. Were it not been for the burst of chakra from his feet defining some previous skill, there would have been a good chance he would have been mistaken for having low chakra control. A citizen. With the sudden distance now between them, he heard Nozomi declare his idea foolish.

Though she wasn’t exactly mean about it. More, morbidly inquisitive and then dismissive of any tactic it could have brought to the table. The idea of adding glitter to her design made no sense for the deployment aside from humiliation. As she moved closer again with a charcoal stick, the kid then began to draw out an intricate design in the ground to prove her point; since she couldn’t just drag a whiteboard around everywhere. Notori felt his brain twist looking at it. Some of it made sense, but the rest of it felt like…personal artistic license?

The man understood bombs and that they went boom. He knew how to make basic explosive material, rig them, and set them off; but it was all very 1:1 from a book. What she had drawn out before him felt like this kid took the same book and started writing notes in the margins. She had questions. Ideas. He just simply took things as they were, and for granted.

“You were training badly.”

The words shocked him. Moved his brain back to the situation at hand and that was he, this fool of an ex-shinobi, had approached a real life genius. In the attempt to make a connection he could later tap down the line for an explosive expert, he had:

Made a fool of himself.
Potentially made yet another enemy.
Outed for being weak.

Her advice to fix the bad form came nearly as sharp, if not more so, than the chide - because it was good advice. More questions berated him and Notori felt his body cringing. Oh, there was so many ways to answer all of those questions, but the last ones just simply cut to him being there at all. That he even bothered to walk up was an oddity at even the best of times, save for a man who couldn’t pull his own weight among other superhumans.

“I was thinking that…ah, okay look. Ya caught me. I’m kinda, sorta…between jobs. To be real with you I was impressed at your ability to continue exploding things like that for your age and though, ‘Hey, you know what you should do? Restart the old network again.’ You’d be surprised that in a world full of people who can heave fireballs from their lungs, not a lot of them are good with pin-point precision explosions. Knowing someone in the game helps down the road, they say. I saw your talent and figured, maybe if I could get to be friends with ya, I could convince a favor someday.
“Clearly, I overestimated my own intelligence, and underestimated yours. So, let me come clean,” he crouched down to her level and offered a hand. It was smooth, uncalloused, and clearly the hand of a person who avoided hard work like the plague. There was nothing confident from Notori whatsoever save maybe a weird charm in his sudden blunt honesty,
“Ous Notori, ex-spy and most generously hated on by haters. I want to build a network of friends who can help me out when I run across something I can’t deal with. Explosions, they can solve some of those things.”

He had conveniently left out why people threw trash at him.

 

[Ryuu Nozomi]

Nozomi’s eyes remained fixed on the hand he had extended, her gaze trailing from the work-shy palm up to the faint lines at his wrist. It was not the sort of hand she associated with people who shaped the world in chakra. No old burns from unchecked heat, no lines from the scars of lightning, and no purse of the lips from someone who had nearly drowned. Most importantly, no calluses from hours of combat training and molding the body into compliance. The hand was… ornamental in nature. She would imagine that a handshake from it might be like pressing one’s palm against paper. A harmless thing that is entirely unsuited to the weight it was intended to deliver.

She did not take it.

Instead, she leaned back slightly, shifting her weight so her right hip rested against her hand in an almost sassy way. Even her arms crossed in further assessment of the man. Her gaze swept over him once more, this time not as an idle habit, but as a craftsman might inspect a flawed casting. The twitch in his muscles earlier, the involuntary burst of chakra to his feet, the awkward excess in his retreat, all things she catalogued. Her mind was already mapping the ways such instincts might be exploited, then set the blueprint aside for later use. That wasn’t the task at hand. The task was to determine whether this stranger had any place in her work, or whether he was another drifting face to be remembered only as a ghost in her memories.

Nozomi stooped, the tips of her mouth-hands brushing the dirt, and gathered the charcoal stick she had dropped earlier. Her fingers twitched as she rolled it between them, as if weighing whether it would be used to draw, or as something to snap in half to punctuate a point in the future. She didn’t look up when she spoke.

“You came here for yourself,” she said, her voice even, each word clean and precise like an incision.

“Not for the art and not for the craft. Do you know the discipline it takes to make something work exactly where and how you intend?”

She dragged a dark line through the diagram she’d drawn earlier, cutting through the neat spirals and crossing over the calculated choke points.

“A network of favors is not the same as a network of skill. Yet, they can be transferable. What favors could you possibly offer me in exchange for my skill, even now, let alone in the future?"

She gestured back at the scattered remains of her earlier work. The faint craters in the dirt, the fine ash from clay bodies destroyed in perfect unison, and the scent of scorched mineral. Her feet carried her to the nearest burnt spot in the colosseum training ground. Kneeling, she sifted a pinch of ash between her fingers, watching the powder drift away on the mountain wind. Nozomi then rose, dusting her fingers on the leg of her trousers. The faint scrape of grit on fabric was the only sound for a moment as her eyes flicked to his extended hand once more, but rather than take it, she walked past him.

Her shoulder brushed the edge of his shadow as she moved to her supply pile. With a squat, she opened her traveler's backpack and the canvas within. Tools and shallow trays of clay sat in wait to be refined. She plucked a piece from the nearest tray and quickly molded it to be a small beetle. Yet it had no trigger, no seal, no chakra embedded within it. She held it up simply between thumb and forefinger.

"This... is inert. No more dangerous than the clay I would play with as a toddler. You could carry it for weeks and think it was harmless until someone with the skill turns it into something else entirely."

She rotated it briefly between her fingers before setting it back down in the tray. Then, in calculated fashion, her words would turn to form a point.

"Networks are like that. They look harmless, without seals or triggers, until one day it has turned into something else entirely."

She returned to the diagram on the ground, crouching low enough that hair brushed against her knees. With quick, sure strokes, she redrew one of the intersecting lines she had earlier struck through.

“If you want me in your… network, then you will have to understand that you don’t just collect pieces. You learn each one with detail, you know exactly where it fits, and you don't use them unless you're willing to lose them."

She didn’t look at him as she added, “Oh... and you don’t recruit with glitter.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. It wasn't a smile, but also not mockery. Just a simple faint acknowledgment of the earlier absurdity that had already been weighed and dismissed.